Aftertime

05

SMOKE HELPED HER CUT HER HAIR.

He handed her the scissors, a pair of office shears that were too bulky and too dull to do a good job, even if she had a mirror, even if she knew what she was doing. He’d said it would give her less to explain to the others. Cass knew he was right. Still, when she made the first cut, the sight of her filthy and matted hair falling to the floor caused her to suck in her breath.

Her hair had been her best feature, once. Long and thick and shiny, dark blond burnished with gold, curving inward where it lay across her collarbones. She refused to cry as the hair fell away, but when she had cut as far as she could reach, and Smoke closed his large hand gently over hers and took the scissors away, she squeezed her eyes shut and mourned the loss of the last faint reminder of her beauty as he carefully trimmed the back.

Afterward, he gathered her hair with his hands and haphazardly piled it in a file box while Cass got control of herself. He carefully avoided looking her in the face and Cass knew that she was hard to look at, an ugly, hard-worn thing. She demanded that he take her to the library that night, and he agreed once Cass made it clear that she was going with or without him.

He tried to talk her into waiting a few days, when the full moon had waned. The Beaters had become bolder, he warned her, coming out on moonlit nights as well as mornings and early evenings. Gone were the days when they only ventured out in the middle of the day.

But Cass didn’t care. She’d been out every night since she woke up; she wasn’t going to stop now, not when she was so close to Ruthie.

Smoke took her to the cafeteria, which they had set up as a community room with toys and activities for the kids, and chairs and sofas arranged for conversation. Makeshift shelves held kitchen implements and plates and cups. Blankets and clothing were folded and stacked. There were rows of paperbacks, vases of the few surviving wildflowers. Board games and puzzles were set out on tables and two separate card games were in full swing.

Eight or nine kids—toddlers up to six- or seven-year-olds—played on carpet scraps arranged on the floor at one end of the cafeteria. Sammi was watching them, along with a boy about her age.

Smoke led Cass into the large open space, and the adults’ conversations died. People set down their playing cards, the baskets of clothes they had been folding, the kaysev they had been separating and cleaning and preparing. They regarded Cass with open curiosity and, in some cases, suspicion and fear and hostility.

Sammi’s mother was in a group of women who had been chatting as they washed and dried dishes. There was a tub of soapy water, another of clear, no doubt creek water that had been boiled. Cass had seen the blackened fire pit in the courtyard, the hearth built of rebar and steel beams and that fireproof plastic weave.

“This is Cass,” Smoke said into the silence. “She’s a citizen, just like us.”

“She’s not like us,” Sammi’s mother said, setting down her washrag. Her voice shook. “She tried to—”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Sammi said. She put down the bucket of toys she’d been holding. A pretend zoo was laid out on the floor, and she and the boy had been helping the younger kids stack wooden blocks to make cages.

“It’s not okay,” her mother hissed, but she stayed where she was. One of the other women laid a hand on her arm and said something that Cass couldn’t hear.

“She only did what she had to,” Sammi added, glaring at her mother defiantly. “Besides, if you didn’t keep me cooped up in here like I was in jail—”

“Don’t, Sammi,” the boy said quietly. “Not now.”

“I’d rather take my chances out there,” Sammi said, pointing out the window at the street that ran alongside the building, beyond the iron fence. Cass saw abandoned cars, some with graffiti painted on the side. Several had crashed into each other, by accident or on purpose, crushed metal and broken glass surrounding doors that no one had bothered to close.

Then she saw something else, something that struck white-hot fear in her heart. In the yard of a squat brick bungalow across the street, a small clump of Beaters shuffled around a kiddie pool they’d managed to drag from somewhere. One was trying to sit in it. Two others were trying to turn it over. Another stood close to the house, staring into a large picture window and absently tugging at its ears.

She wasn’t the only one to spot them. A few sharp gasps, a collective wave of fear that ran through the room.

“They’ve started gathering here in the afternoon. Waiting …” Smoke sighed, running his hands through his hair. For a moment he looked a decade older than the thirty-five Cass had taken him for. “Sometimes a dozen of them. They wander off when the sun starts to get low. For now, anyway.”

The Beaters had everyone’s attention. The argument between Sammi and her mother was forgotten. Cass took the opportunity to slip out of the room, Smoke following her without a word. She could not stay there, watching the Beaters, enduring the scrutiny of all those people.

She would wait in the office, alone, until evening. After all, she’d become accustomed to her own company.

Cass added it up in her head. A hundred seventy-five, maybe two hundred people left, between the library and the school and firehouse … Silva’s population had been over four thousand before the famine and the riots and the suicides and the fever deaths. Before the Beaters began carrying the survivors away.

As the sun sank down in the sky, Cass felt restless. She had been alone in the office for hours, waiting for night to come. No one had disturbed her. No one had even walked by the door. She stood up and stretched, easing her hip and thigh muscles. They were tight all the time now, from the walking.

When she regained consciousness all those days ago, she saw the Sierra foothills in the distance, the flat dry central valley all around her. She had been lying under a stand of creosote a few yards from the edge of a farm road, one she didn’t know. All those years living in Silva, ever since Mim and Byrn had moved there during Cass’s senior year of high school, she had never traveled far from the long, flat, straight stretch of Highway 161 that led up into the hills from the central valley. The few times she’d made the four-hour trip to San Francisco with friends, to see a concert or spend the night on someone’s friend’s couch getting high and drinking cheap wine, she’d barely noticed the chicken and cattle ranches flanking the highway, the clots of houses that passed for towns, the collapsing sheds and silos left over from more prosperous times.

She had been lying in a thicket of dead brown weeds. Kaysev had taken root in patches between the dead plants, and Cass had been curled up with her face in a soft clump, its gingery scent in her nostrils along with the other smells: the metal tang of crusted blood, the rotting spoils of her own breath, her body’s odor foul and acrid. Her mind had been clouded and troubled, both racing and stalled, somehow. She had no idea how she’d come to be lying, bruised and mangled, in the weeds, and she wondered if she was dead, because her last memory was praying for death when the Beaters closed their ruined fingers around her arms.

That was all she remembered, and it came to her through a dense tangle of lost and broken thoughts, so she understood that time had passed since that terrible moment. How much time, she had no idea.

The brown weeds made a stark pattern against the clear sky and Cass had wished she could just close her eyes and finish the job of dying.

But then she saw what had become of her flesh.

Stretching made the wounds on her back throb, and Cass pulled her shirt up and over her shoulders to let the room’s cool air reach them. Just for a moment, just to take away the constant ache for a little while. She leaned into the stretch, and tried not to think. Only to wait, for Smoke to come and get her and take her to what was next.

A sound at the door broke her concentration. Cass pulled her shirt down hastily, but it was too late.

It was the girl. Sammi. She had approached the room so quietly.

And she had seen.

06

FOR A LONG MOMENT THEY STARED AT EACH other, Cass holding her breath, the girl’s eyes wide with surprise and curiosity—but no fear.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course,” Cass said.

The girl slipped gracefully into a chair at the same table where Cass had drunk coffee hours earlier. She had washed and changed her clothes, and her hair had been combed and plaited neatly. The braids made her look even younger, but Cass could see that she was well into adolescence, maybe fourteen. That might explain her rebellion against her mother, but Cass figured it went further than that—there was a reckless spirit to her. A spirit not so different from her own.

“So you really were attacked by Beaters,” the girl said. “What happened?”

Cass winced. Telling Smoke had been hard enough, especially when he asked to see her scars. The look on his face—the horror, the pity—had been almost more than she could bear, but it was worse when he turned away from her. It had taken him a few minutes to get his composure back, and he’d remained cool and distant even when he promised to keep her secret.

“I was …” Cass started to speak, found that her mouth was too dry. She licked her lips and cleared her throat, wished for water. “I was taken, yes. But, I, I woke up and I was … all right.”

Sammi didn’t hide her skepticism. “What about those cuts? Did one of them do that to you or did you do it to yourself?”

Cass had wondered the same thing a thousand times. The wound pattern held clues. The damage was all in places she could reach by herself, and it was safe to say she was the one who’d bitten and chewed herself.

The wounds on her back were another matter. The Beaters always started with a person’s back, where the large uninterrupted stretch of flesh made their ravenous feeding easiest. Only after they chewed it away did they move to the backs of the legs, the buttocks—and eventually, when they had eaten away all they could, they turned their victim over and started on the front.

She touched her stubbled hair. “I did this.”

“So, you were one, for a while at least,” Sammi said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Did you eat the blueleaf?”

Cass shook her head, but who could say with certainty? When the government dropped kaysev from planes all over the nation, its last act before it ceased to exist, the second strain had somehow gotten mixed in. Everyone had a theory about that: most thought the researchers made some sort of mistake, sending the wrong seed, but some people thought blueleaf had evolved on its own, that mutating cells had been heeding nothing more than the call of evolution. And some saw the hand of God in the appearance of the rogue leaves, whose edges were slightly pocked and tinged faintly blue—His punishment for the profligacy and faithlessness of the last decade.

The blueleaf took root, an occasional low-growing and stunted patch among the healthy kaysev. At first no one noticed. By the time anyone made the connection, it was too late for the first wave of the infected.

Detection wasn’t the only problem. The early stage of the disease didn’t hint at what the victim would ultimately become—it hid its curse in a cloak of sensual delirium.

First came the fever, of course—and that felled thirty percent of the infected, mostly the very young and the old. But if you survived that, you felt so fucking good. Word quickly spread that when the fever leveled off, you experienced a high not unlike ecstasy. Your skin pigmentation deepened, an appealing effect when coupled with the feverish sheen. The irises of your eyes intensified—green turned jade, blue shone brilliant sapphire, brown sparked gold—but your pupils stopped dilating, and without bright light you could barely see.

You ceased to care, as your mind started to take elaborate journeys on its own. The hallucinations were elaborate and often sexual. There were no terrors or suicidal impulses. You simply lay about, flushed and beautiful, sighing with pleasure.

For a week or two. Until you started to pick at your skin and pull at your hair. Until your confusion deepened and your speech grew unintelligible, and your blood burned hot and you flayed your own skin and developed a taste for uninfected flesh.

Cass had spotted a few blueleaf plants here and there as she followed the road up into the foothills. Citizens learned to kill the plant on sight, and they’d managed to drive the wretched thing nearly to extinction only a few months after they first appeared. Cass herself pulled the plants from the ground and trampled them whenever she saw them, even though her body had somehow rebuffed the disease.

“My mom says blueleaf’s only here. That it’s not in the rest of the country.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s been freewalkers through—some guy who had this ancient radio, like from the 1960s or something? There was something about it that it could get a signal even with all the power dead. And he said he talked to people in other states and they don’t have blueleaf. They have the kaysev but no one’s getting sick.”

“That’s—that’s not possible. Everyone would leave California if that was true.”

Sammi shrugged. “That’s what he was trying to do. He was going to walk all the way to Nevada. He just stayed one night. A couple people believed him, they went, too.”

“Well.” Cass spoke carefully; she knew how fine the line was between hope and fantasy. “It would be nice. Maybe, once they get the Beaters under control …”

“Yeah. I know it’s a long shot and all. I’m just sayin’.” She looked increasingly embarrassed, twisting her hair around nail-bitten fingers. “But I was just wondering. You know, how you got infected.”

Cass took a deep breath. “I was attacked. I remember that. I don’t remember what came after, but—well, I’m hoping someone at the library will know.”

“You think they might still have your little girl there. Your daughter.”

Cass nodded, unable to speak.

“I hope they do,” Sammi said fiercely. “My mom, she worries about me like all the time? She and my dad separated back in January and he moved up to Sykes and we don’t know if he, well, you know. I mean the last time we talked to him, he and this guy, this guy who had gas, you know, like a full tank or almost a full tank? My dad was going to have this guy bring him down, only the roads …”

She stopped talking and swallowed and Cass spotted the hole in her bravery.

The roads. They’d become nearly impassible in places, as gas ran out and gridlocked intensified, as wrecks piled up and people panicked and abandoned their cars and tried to make it back. A few did. Many others didn’t. And a few just stayed locked inside, terrified, until they starved or someone shot them for their fuel or one of the Beaters happened to remember what it was to open a door, the memory of the mechanical motion released from the recesses of its ruined mind, a small step to feed its larger need.

A few days before she moved to the library, Cass had watched from her kitchen window as a car tried to navigate the debris-strewn street that ran along the front of the trailer park. Woodbine Avenue had once been one of the busiest streets in town, with two lanes in each direction, so it was a logical choice for someone trying to get through—or out of—town. But Cass hadn’t seen a car in days. No one had gas—and no one had anywhere to go. Rumor had it that the biggest cities had fallen first, and anyone who’d set out for Sacramento or San Francisco hadn’t been seen since.

But Cass didn’t recognize this car, a blue Camry with a crumpled front bumper. When it slowed to a stop at the site of an accident that had blocked the road for weeks—a semi truck had overturned trying to make the tight turn, causing a pileup that no one had bothered to clear, the drivers abandoning their vehicles to search for shelter—Cass waited for the car to turn around and go back the way it had come.

For some reason, this driver hesitated.

In seconds a cluster of the diseased loped out from behind the 7-Eleven across the street, lurching and babbling. Most started trying to climb on top of the car, moaning with hunger and frustration, but one held a large rock in his scabby hand. He beat the rock against the driver side window, persisting even when blood dripped from his arm, cawing excitedly, until the glass finally shattered.

The Beaters screamed as they dragged the driver, a middle-aged man dressed in a wrinkled button-down shirt and plaid shorts, from the car.

He screamed louder.

“Maybe,” Cass started. She had to steel herself for the lie she was about to tell. “Maybe he’s there still. In Sykes. There must be shelters there. Groups of people, like this …”

Sammi shrugged, an obvious effort to be brave. “Whatever.”

“I can try to find out, you know. When I get into town.”

“They won’t know. No one’s traveling between much anymore. I mean, besides you.”

“What were you doing outside this morning?” Cass asked gently.

Sammi looked at her hands; the nails were bitten. “I sneak out sometimes,” she said. “When the raiding parties go out at night. I hate it here, it’s like being in jail. And I always come back before it gets light out.”

“What about this morning?”

“I … kind of got turned around.”

“You were lost,” Cass clarified. “Sammi … you have to know how dangerous it is to be out there alone.”

“You were alone. How far have you walked, anyway?” Sammi demanded. “Since you, you know, woke up.”

“Look, Sammi … you can’t tell anyone what I’m telling you. About me being attacked.”

Sammi nodded solemnly. “I promise.”

“No, really. You can’t tell anyone.”

Sammi nodded again.

“And you have to stop going outside on your own.”

This time Sammi didn’t react, didn’t meet her eyes.

“Say it, Sammi, please. I know you don’t like being cooped up here, but just promise me you won’t go out alone.”

Sammi rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay, I promise.”

Cass sighed. “I don’t know how far I’ve walked, really. At first I didn’t … It was like I was sleeping and awake at the same time. I didn’t go very far for a while. I was stopping a lot … maybe that was a week. Until I felt right again. And even then …” Cass passed a hand over her eyes, rubbed the skin between her eyebrows. “Even then I didn’t cover a lot of distance. Because of trying to hide when it was light out. You know, to keep watch.”

And at night, when the moon went behind a cloud, or the stars failed to light the sky, she couldn’t go very far at all, because she couldn’t see. Back in the library, she’d hoarded matches and two good flashlights and a cache of batteries. But she had none of that when she woke up. No pack, no food, no supplies, and she was wearing clothes she’d never seen before.

How far did she travel every night: maybe a few miles? As close as she could figure it, Cass had started out about thirty-five miles down-mountain, maybe a little more since she had weaved back and forth to avoid going too close to the road. The Beaters didn’t leave the roads when they could help it; they liked to follow an easy path, and their stumbling, awkward gait did not lend itself to obstacles. On uneven terrain they stumbled and fell a lot.

Still, if they’d caught her scent, a glimpse of her in the woods, nothing would stop them from coming after her, no matter how deep she ran, so she had tried to stay out of sight of the road. And roads eventually ran into towns, which she had to avoid more and more once she noticed, like Smoke had said, that the Beaters were clustering around the population centers of Before.

One time, a few days after she woke up, she’d been dozing the afternoon away in the skeleton of a live oak tree. It was a hundred yards or so from the road, and upwind, so Cass figured it would be safe enough. Low in the foothills, the trees were sparse to begin with, and most had died; there was little in the way of cover.

A sound broke nearby and she came awake instantly, her heart racing. She almost fell as she looked around for the source of the sound. Then she spotted the man who had walked directly below the tree, his footfalls cracking on broken branches. He was walking fast, a bulky pack on his shoulders, his gait sure and strong. A loner, Cass guessed, someone who—like Sammi—would rather take his chances outside than live cooped up in a shelter.

Suddenly there was a second sound. Over on the road.

Cass had been so focused on the man that she hadn’t seen them approach. Beaters—four of them, stumbling and crying out—and they’d heard him, too.

Fear turned Cass’s blood cold.

For a second, the man paused, looking around wildly. His eyes went wide and he began to run, faster than Cass had ever seen a man run. After a few dozen paces he shrugged the pack off his back, and it fell to the ground as the Beaters’ cries escalated into enraged screams. Unburdened, he ran even faster.

But he wasn’t fast enough.

It was dumb luck that he ran forward. If he had run perpendicular to the road, the Beaters would have come close enough to Cass’s tree to smell her. As it was, Cass guessed the man stayed ahead of them for a quarter mile before they caught up. She watched the whole time, willing the man forward with her entire being as the beasts knocked into each other and stumbled on the uneven ground and shoved at each other. They were so awkward, so ungainly, but their strength and speed were otherworldly.

In the end, two of them tripped each other and fell to the ground, snorting and snapping with fury as they beat at one another with clumsy fists.

But two surged ahead.

Cass pressed her face into the scratchy trunk of the tree and covered her ears with her hands, but she could hear the man’s terrified screams and the Beaters’ triumphant crowing as they carried their prey back down the road to wherever their nest was.

Sammi was watching her, light brown eyes wide and speculating. “Smoke’s going to take you, isn’t he?”

Cass nodded.

Sammi gave her a fragile shadow of a smile. “He’s good. He’s brave. You know how he got his name?”

“No.”

“He was living up at Calvary Episcopal. I mean, not like because it was a church, they were just using the church for shelter.”

“Yes, I remember, there were people living there when I was at the library.”

“And the Beaters came and they got one of them. Or, I don’t know, maybe more than one, I’m not sure. Only, they got this one guy’s wife, and he went nuts and tried to burn the place down. With everyone in it, you know, like a group suicide? They had this tank, natural gas or something. And he totally blew it up, you could see it all day, the sky was like black. You know, like … totally dark. He died, but Smoke—well, I don’t know what his name used to be, it was right when we all moved in here.”

“How long ago was that?”

“It was around the beginning of May. We saw the fire, we saw the sky go dark and all … Well, Smoke got a lot of the people out.”