Aftertime

It made sense to choose a school, of course. The threats of Before seemed minor now. Everyone worried that deranged people would come into schools and steal the children away, harm them, kill them. Or that one of the students would bring a gun to school and take out his classmates. Yes, things like that had happened back then, just often enough to keep everyone vigilant, and the schools had been built with more and greater safety measures until, in the end, they were fortresses, reinforced and sealed and locked down.

In some ways it wasn’t so hard to stay safe, even now. A basic wall could keep Beaters away. A fence, even one that was only ten feet tall, like those that surrounded the school’s courtyard. As long as there were no citizens close by, nothing to attract the Beaters and drive them into a frenzy of flesh-lust, nearly any barrier at all would be enough to make them lose their focus and wander back to their fetid nestlike encampments.

They said—at least, near the end of Cass’s second life—that the Beaters were waning. Cass wasn’t so sure. It was true that they had formed larger and larger groups, nomadic little bands that took over neighborhoods and entire towns, so they weren’t appearing in sporadic places as much. They seemed to have flashes of longing for Before, just as everyone else did. You could see them sometimes, doing homely little things. It was like the bits of speech that sometimes bubbled from their lips, phrases that meant nothing, fragments that tumbled from whatever was left of their minds, dislodged from memory that had given way to the fever and the disease. Cass had seen one trying to ride a bicycle, and falling off when its jerky motions caused the wheel to spin and flip. It tried again and again and then suddenly lost interest and wandered away. Another time she had seen one at a clothesline, taking the pins off one by one and holding them in its ruined hand, then reattaching them.

Cass had known a woman who had been a social worker Before. Her name was Miranda. They had not been friends, exactly, but they had sheltered together in the library before a half-dozen Beaters came through a back door that had been left open one day and dragged her off.

Miranda had once worked with violent offenders, counseling them to look deep inside themselves to find the key to who they were before abuse and anger had changed them. She had been extraordinarily successful, the pride of the Anza County Correctional System’s Anger Replacement Therapy program. Miranda had believed that in those moments when the Beaters appeared to be connecting to a memory, miming some homely everyday task, there was a chance to remind them of who they had once been. That if you could reach them in that moment—if you could reconnect the splintered shards of memory—that you could reverse the process of the disease. That the afflicted would comprehend the horror of what they had become, and choose to come back.

Miranda had wanted to try it. It wouldn’t be so hard to capture just one, she had argued at one of the “town hall” meetings Bobby held every few days. Bobby was the de facto leader of the ragtag group of a few dozen people sheltering in the library. Miranda tried to recruit a few of the men: one who used to be a deputy sheriff, several hard-muscle types who’d worked in construction, and, of course, Bobby. They all listened to Miranda’s plan: capture a Beater, bring it back … restrain it, observe it. Wait until the right moment and then she, trained in the ways of the desperate, the outcast, would speak to it.

Bobby listened, but he could not contain his incredulity. “You think you’re, what, some kind of zombie whisperer? Because you got a few crack whores to give up their babies? Is that it, Miranda, you think a Beater’s like some guy beats his wife on payday?”

Miranda had argued back, passionately. But when the Beaters came for her that day, breaking in that forgotten back door while the kitchen detail was cleaning up from a lunch of kaysev shoots and canned apple pie filling, when Miranda had taken some trash to the back hall by herself, it wasn’t reasoned argument that issued from her lips. It was screaming, as raw and desperate as the screams of any of the others who were taken, screams that echoed in Cass’s mind on nights when sleep wouldn’t come.

The school, though … Cass guessed that they had not lost anyone that way here. In addition to the fences, brick walls surrounded the entire courtyard. The doors would be the type that shut automatically. Guards would be posted. They undoubtedly did all their harvesting and raiding at night. Maybe they even had a few flashlights, some batteries.

Why had they let this girl out on her own? It made no sense. Even though it should have still been safe—the Beaters rarely went hunting before the sun rose high in the sky—what adult, what parent, would allow a child to go out alone? Had she somehow gotten separated from others? Had some greater threat come along?

There was a sudden clang and the door to the school burst open and a woman ran out, wailing. Her flip-flops slapped against the pavement, and she stumbled at the kaysev-choked median that once kept the carpooling moms in orderly lines. A pair of men chased after her, trying to restrain her, but the woman shook them off. “Sammi!” she screamed, but Cass pulled the girl tight against her and held the blade to the soft skin under her chin.

“Stop there,” Cass yelled. And then she added the one thing that might convince them to do as she said. “I am not a Beater!”

She watched them look at her, watched the terror in the woman’s expression and the fury and determination in the men’s slowly tinge with doubt. She felt their gazes on her ragged skin, her scalp where the hair was only now growing back. She waited, holding her breath, until she saw that they knew.

Until they saw that her pupils were like anyone else’s, black and pronounced.

“I don’t want to hurt this girl,” she called, trying to keep her voice steady. “I don’t want any trouble. I am not a Beater and I can …” She had been about to say that she could explain her appearance, but that was a lie. She couldn’t explain, and no one else could either. “I can prove it, if you let me. I’m not asking to come in. I don’t want anything from you except to be allowed to continue into town.”

“Let the girl go,” one of the men said.

The woman sank down to her knees and extended her arms beseechingly. “Please,” she keened. “Please please please please please …”

And something shifted inside Cass. A memory of Ruthie being carried away, screaming, sent to live with Cass’s mother and the man she’d married. The man who’d made her life hell. She remembered her own pleas, how she had gone down on her knees just like the woman before her now, how she’d collapsed on the floor after the front door shut behind Mim and Byrn and the court people carrying her Ruthie away, how she’d cried into the sour-smelling carpet until she could barely breathe.

She released the girl then and watched her go to her mother, jogging across the pavement, but not before glancing back over her shoulder. A defiant glance, sparked with victory. The girl felt she’d won. Well, Cass certainly felt like she’d lost, so maybe that was fitting.

The mother gathered the girl up in her arms as though she wanted to meld her to herself, and Cass had to turn away. The men must have thought she was trying to leave, though, because an instant later she was knocked to the ground and she felt the weight of them crushing her into the gravel-pocked asphalt. The rough pavement smelled like tar and scraped against her cheek. The blade had fallen from her hand. No matter; these men were guards. They would have their own. And it would be a quick death, better than she deserved.

She waited, but after a moment the weight lifted and a strong hand grabbed hers, pulling her up roughly.

“Inside,” he said, and that was the first word she ever heard Smoke say.

04

THEY HAD SET UP A KITCHEN OF SORTS IN THE school’s courtyard, and a small crew was cooking over a fire in a makeshift hearth. Ginger: the scent of sautéed kaysev was in the air. A group of children sat at a table taken from one of the classrooms, eating, and Cass saw that they’d made the kaysev into a sort of pancake. She’d seen that before, when people were figuring out different ways to prepare the plant. After so many weeks of eating it raw, the smell of the cakes—made with a flour ground from the dried beans—prompted a powerful hunger she didn’t know she was capable of anymore.

And there was another smell, one that made her doubt her senses. “Is that—”

“Coffee.” Her escort was a man of medium height, hard-muscled, with broad shoulders and powerful forearms. Sun-streaked brown hair fell into his chambray-blue eyes and he kept pushing it impatiently aside. His mouth was on the generous side, almost sensuous, but his expression was hard. “Once a week, on Sunday. It’s strong but you only get one cup.”

“You know what day it is?” Cass asked, surprised. Who kept track, anymore?

The man didn’t answer, but led her over to a door that stood open, propped with a stack of books. U.S. History, Cass read on the spines. Books, left out to the elements—who would abandon a book outside to be ruined?—but thoughts like that led straight to a spiral of despair.

Whenever something reminded her of Before, it was a quick trip back and it hit her hard. Like now: textbooks had been sacred, once. But books needed readers. And all the teachers were dead from hunger or disease or riots, or dragged off by the Beaters, or desperate, like Cass, just to survive. There was no one left to teach children like Ruthie.

Cass forced those thoughts from her mind as the man guided her into the hallway, his hand at her waist gentler now. Earlier, he’d been rough as he searched her, patting down the ragged and stinking canvas pants and athletic shirt that stuck to her, the same clothes she’d woken up in a couple of weeks earlier. He’d avoided touching her scabbed flesh, and stopped short of searching the folds and crevices of her body, for which she was grateful. He’d lingered at her hair, combing his fingers through its greasy, filthy length while he held the ends bunched in his fist. The stubble at the front had caused him to frown, but he’d said nothing.

It had hurt like hell when his hands moved along her back, and she’d ground her teeth to avoid crying out in pain. There, whole sections of flesh had been ripped from her body and it was taking much longer to heal than the scabs on her arms. An ordinary citizen would have succumbed to infection, blood loss, exposure. But somehow in the days after the things tore into her back, she had developed a freakishly powerful immune system and was healing. How she had recovered from the disease, she had no idea.

But thin layers of skin were slowly building from the scabbed edges. Smoke had not detected anything amiss in the ruined landscape of her back, and for that Cass was grateful. She didn’t want him to see.

Cass blinked as her eyes adjusted from the bright morning sun to the gloom of the interior. A single transom window lit the space; the other windows were covered by miniblinds. They were in what had been the school’s administrative office. The bulletin boards had been stripped bare except up at the top where a few ragged papers were still attached with pushpins. ARTCARVED—ORDER YOUR CLASS RING NOW one read. Another advertised $$CASH$$ FOR PRINTER CARTRIDGES.

A woman came around the corner and stopped short, staring at Cass with shock, processing her appearance.

“We found her outside,” the man said quickly. “She brought Sammi back.”

The woman merely nodded, but Cass could see the relief written plain on her face. A child had been missing. The people sheltering here had been waiting, knowing it was likely that their beautiful young girl would never return. None of them were new to loss now—by most estimates, three-quarters of the population was dead, victims of starvation and fever and suicide and Beaters. You learned to protect yourself. But the cost of steeling yourself against grief was that you had to steel yourself against joy, as well.

“You might as well have some,” the woman said, and only then did Cass notice that she carried a glass carafe of steaming black coffee. “Get her a cup, Smoke.”

The man called Smoke went into the hall, leaving the woman to stare openly at Cass. She was a lean woman with poorly cut hair, pieces of it jutting unevenly at her cheekbones. But she was clean—remarkably so. Her skin looked healthy and her eyes were clear. Cass found herself wondering if she was the man’s lover, and her gaze went to the woman’s fine small hands, the nails trimmed neatly. Her smooth pale legs under the plain denim shorts.

“I’m Nora,” the woman said.

Cass cleared her throat. Until this morning, she hadn’t spoken in many days, and she was out of practice. “I’m Cassandra. Cass.”

Smoke returned carrying a large blue mug. Nora poured from the carafe and Cass accepted the mug and held it near her lips, not sipping, the glazed porcelain almost too hot to bear. Her eyes fluttered closed as she inhaled as deeply as she could, and when she opened them, she saw that Smoke was staring at her with an expression that was part curiosity and part calculation, and no part fear.

She drank.

The taste brought back a sharp memory of the room in the basement where she attended a thousand A.A. meetings. The first time she accepted a cup of coffee only because everyone else was drinking it. She’d never liked it much, drank it only on the occasional morning when she needed a little extra lift to get going, but at that meeting she drank two cups and on the way home she bought a ten-cup model at Wal-Mart, along with two pounds of ground beans.

At work, she made the first pot at 5:30 a.m. when her shift started and the last—dozens of pots later—when whoever was on afternoons arrived at two o’clock.

This coffee was a little odd. It was like the kind her mother used to make before her father left, in an old tin percolator with green enamel flowers worn nearly away. For a moment Cass felt an intense ache for her mother—for who she’d been before she met Byrn, before she started insisting that Cass call her Mim. For the woman who’d once read to her at bedtime, who’d let Cass bury her face in the crook of her neck and breathe the soap and hair spray and perfume and sweat.

Slowly, not trusting her hand not to tremble, Cass lowered the mug to the table. “May I sit?”

“Yes, of course,” Nora said. She exchanged a look with Smoke as he pulled out a chair for her, and Cass was certain that these two were lovers. Only, troubled ones. You could see it in the way his gaze slid warily away.

Cass leaned over the mug and let the steam warm her face. “What’s today’s date?” she asked.

Nora blew out a little breath before she answered. “August twenty-sixth. It’s Sunday.”

August 26. So it had been almost two months since the end of what she’d come to think of as her second life.

She thought about that last day. Not the last moments, which she wouldn’t remember, but what came before.

She’d been sheltering in the library for a couple of months before she went to get Ruthie, determining that there was finally no one left to try to stop her. The first morning she had her baby back, they woke up together on the makeshift bed in Cass’s corner of the library, away from the others, tucked in a narrow corridor behind the periodicals, beneath a water fountain that hadn’t flowed in a month. Cass kept her space clean, her few possessions stacked and folded and arranged with care.

That day, she woke to the sweet scent of Ruthie’s hair, her small body tucked perfectly into her embrace, her head under Cass’s chin. She lay still, breathing happiness in and hope out, watching the sun cast strips of yellow light on the wall through the miniblinds. A week earlier, they’d lost Miranda, and Cass’s mood had faltered. But now that she had Ruthie, life seemed like a possibility once more.

“You going to explain that?” Nora said, not unkindly, pointing at Cass’s arms.

Cass folded them self-consciously. They hurt, but not as much as they had when she first regained consciousness, lying in an empty field. Then, she had been horrified at the way she looked, her wounds raw, the crusty scabs black in some places, leaking clear reddish fluid. Her back had been an agony of shredded flesh and it was still healing, but the wounds on her arms were almost completely healed, marking crisscross scars across her flesh.

“On the road,” she mumbled. “Things happen, you know. I fell … I ran into things.”

“No shit,” Nora said.

“Go easy,” Smoke murmured, a warning in his voice.

“Look at her,” Nora hissed, her voice low and angry. “We’ve seen that before. You know we have.”

Smoke shook his head. “It isn’t the same.”

“Only because you don’t want to see it!”

“The same as what?” Cass demanded.

Smoke looked at the table, wouldn’t meet her eyes. “There’s been a few kids—”

“Not just kids,” Nora interrupted.

“Mostly kids, teenagers, they cut themselves, they pull out their hair.”

“Why would anyone do that?” Cass asked, horrified.

“To look like Beaters,” Nora said. “To look like you. To mock the world. Or to come into settlements and everyone takes off screaming and then they help themselves to whatever they want—water, food, drugs, anything. That is, if they don’t get themselves shot first.”

“You think I—You’re fucking insane.” Cass’d been trying to hold on to her patience, but this—Nora’s implication that she had done this to herself on purpose—it was too much. “So where’s all my stuff, then? If I’ve been terrorizing citizens and stealing from them, where is it? I don’t have anything on me, nothing.”

“I don’t mean to—”

“Just let her tell her story.” Smoke glared at Nora, and after a long moment, the woman gave a faint shrug.

Cass took a breath, let it out slowly, considered how much she wanted to give away. These people could help her, or not. They could let her go, or not. Already she felt certain that they would. There was no cruelty in them, only caution, and who could blame them for that?

“The girl,” she hedged. “Sammi. Why was she out alone?”

“Why don’t you tell us about you first,” Nora said coldly, and this time she refused to acknowledge Smoke’s warning glance.

“All right.” Cass gathered her thoughts. “I lived in Silva. In Tenaya Estates. You know—the trailers.”

Smoke nodded. “I know the place.”

“I lived … alone. I worked at the QikGo off Lone Pine. Back in the spring, during the Siege, I stayed on for a while. I thought … I didn’t want to give up, I guess. But, you know, when they started coming into town more …”

She didn’t add that people stopped showing up at the A.A. meetings, until one day she was the only one in the room. That day, she knew she couldn’t live alone anymore.

“Anyway I went over to the library to shelter.” She dug her fingernails into the callus of her thumb, under the table where they couldn’t see. The next part was hard. “I was there the first time the Beaters came. When they took a friend of mine.”

And the second time.

She couldn’t bring herself to tell it. Not yet. “Are there still … is anyone still over there?”

“Yes, last time anyone was there, they were up to around fifty.” Smoke hesitated and Cass got the impression he wasn’t telling the truth—not all of it, anyway. “They got it reinforced. They haven’t lost anyone … not inside, anyway, in a while. We have eighty here. There’s a few dozen in the firehouse. And you know, you have your folks who are still trying to stay in their own places. More than you’d think, really.”

“Fewer every day,” Nora muttered.

“Not our place to judge,” Smoke said in a voice so low Cass was sure it was meant only for Nora.

“Do you talk to them … the people at the library?” she asked. Now that she was so close, fear bloomed in her heart.

“We did,” Smoke said. “Until … well, we had some trouble. A couple of weeks ago. Since then we’ve stayed local.”

“Seventeen days,” Nora said, with surprising bitterness.

Smoke nodded, acknowledging her point.

“What happened?”

“You don’t know?” The suspicion was back.

Cass looked from one to the other, mystified. “No, I don’t—I told you, I’ve been on my own since I woke up and—”

“Some people would just say that it’s awfully convenient that you can’t remember anything,” Nora said. “And that you just happen to show up after the Rebuilders set up camp over there.”

“Who are—”

“So now you want to accuse her of being a Rebuilder?” Smoke said. “Really, Nora? That’s a little paranoid, even for you.”

Nora scowled. “Freewalkers don’t threaten to kill children.”

“Everyone would have thought she was a—”

“Don’t say it,” Cass interrupted, resisting the urge to clap her hands over her ears. She couldn’t bear to hear the word, to hear the accusation, again. “Please. Look, why don’t I just leave now.”

“No one said anything about that,” Smoke said tiredly. “You’re safe here. Everyone’s just on edge. It’s been hard. Shit, no one needs to tell you that.”

For a moment no one spoke. Cass could feel Nora’s anger clogging the air still.

“All I want to know is how she’s managed not to be attacked,” she said, addressing Smoke alone. “Walking alone as long as she says she has—how does that happen?”

Cass glared back. “I’ve been lucky, I guess.”

“Lucky,” Nora repeated, spitting out the word as though it was poison.

“Listen to me. My daughter was there,” Cass snapped. “In the library. The second time we were attacked. We were outside. She wanted … to be outside.”

What Ruthie had really wanted was to pick dandelions, one of the few plants to survive the Siege. Cass had taught her to hold the blooms under her chin, so that the yellow reflected off her pale creamy skin. Oh, look, you must be made of butter, she teased Ruthie, peppering her sweet face with kisses. And then Ruthie would laugh and laugh and tickle Cass’s chin with bunches of dandelions wilting in her chubby little hands.

Ruthie wanted to pick dandelions, and they were hard to find at dusk, so it was barely twilight when Cass led her outside to the little patch of dead lawn in front of the library, after she looked carefully in every direction.

But not carefully enough. Because the Beaters were learning. And they had learned to hide. They hid behind a panel truck on two flat tires that had been abandoned half a block away … and they waited. And then they moved faster than Cass thought possible, awkward loping strides accompanied by their gurgling breathless moans, and Cass grabbed for Ruthie, who was tracing the path of a caterpillar with a stick and thought it was a game and danced out of the way and darted into the last glorious rays of sun as it slipped down the horizon—

The challenge drained from Nora’s face. “Don’t,” she begged.

Smoke placed a work-roughened hand over Nora’s and didn’t look at Cass.

“Nora,” he said heavily. “She, uh … her nephew. She was watching him.”

“I was supposed to be watching him,” Nora said hollowly. She pulled her hand away and stood, knocking over her chair. She backed out of the room, brushing against the coffeepot on the counter. It fell to the ground, shattering and splashing hot coffee, but she just turned and bolted down the hall.

“She’s …” Smoke said, watching her go. Then he turned back to Cass. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” Cass said, but the truth was that she did need it. Not the apology—but the way his voice softened when he spoke to her and the way his eyes narrowed with concern when he looked at her, taking in what had happened to her poor body and not turning away.

That. Most of all she needed that, the not turning away.

“Something did happen to me,” she found herself saying, the words tumbling out as though a trapdoor had been opened inside her. “Something bad.”