Rebirth

Cass sat still and quiet and waited for Smoke. She was barely aware of the path of the sun through the sheer curtains at the tent windows, the crumbs of her lunch hardening on the plate, the condensation slowly gathering on the pitcher’s clear plastic lid until a single drop fell with a soundless splash. Ruthie slept, and whispered, and moaned, the only sounds she ever made, the soundtrack of her nightmares, the leavings of her time in the Convent just across the road from the Box. Listening night after night was the price Cass paid for her carelessness, for having let her daughter be taken. She would listen every night until she died if that was what was owed.

But when the afternoon chill had settled into an ache in Cass’s hands and feet and still Smoke had not returned, Ruthie twisted in her cozy bed and threw off the quilt and sat up, never waking:

“Bird,” she said, as clear as anything, fear in her sightless sleeping eyes, and when she lay back down, oblivious of her dream-talk, Cass turned in astonishment to see Smoke standing in the door of their tent wearing no expression at all, blood dripping from his fists.

03

SMOKE WOULD NOT STOP TREMBLING AND WOULD not speak.

Cass swallowed her dread and searched him for grievous wounds, for bite marks. Finding none, she held him and kissed his brow and murmured over him and at last there was nothing else to do but take him out to the fire. Ruthie, who had forgotten her cryptic dream-talk, went placidly, carrying a stuffed dragon she had recently taken a shine to. Cass had looked at Smoke’s palms and seen that the cuts were superficial, clean slices to the skin as though he’d held out his palms to be flayed. Already the bleeding had stopped, the wounds’ edges going white; they bled again when Smoke forgot and flexed his fingers, but Cass allowed him to hold her hand and tried to ignore the stickiness between their flesh.

The fire pit was ringed in neck-high fencing. One of Dor’s recent conscripts sat at the opening in a folding chair, feet up on a stump, clipboard in hand. His name was Utah, and you got the feeling he wanted you to ask him why. Cass did not ask. Utah’s eyes were too hungry and his hair was braided and held with bits of leather and Cass was too exhausted by everything that had happened in the last year of her life to have time for people who still needed to be admired.

“Hey,” Utah said, making a note on his clipboard. “All three of you, then?”

A stupid question, Cass thought, but she just nodded and led Smoke and Ruthie inside, where the dirt had been swept just that morning and stumps were set up all around the fire pit, which was six feet across easy and burning mostly clean, split firewood mixed with green wood. She and Smoke had privileges not afforded other visitors to the Box; among them, water and the baths and the fire were free. But they were marked on the tally nonetheless; Dor insisted on rigorous bookkeeping.

Only a few people sat around the fire. Most would wait as long as they could, coming in to warm themselves before bedding down, hoping their bodies would retain the memory of heat long enough to fall asleep and maybe even stay that way long enough to get some rest. Here, it was easy to believe Dor’s prediction that by late winter firewood would become his most lucrative business. If only Cass could convince Smoke to go down mountain, to find a new place to be a family. There had to be somewhere warmer, more hospitable, somewhere that hope still lived.

Cass led Smoke to the far side of the fire ring, away from the others. She spread out a dish towel on a stump, pulled a set of nesting plastic dolls from her pocket, saved for occasions when she needed to keep Ruthie occupied. Ruthie smiled and carefully pried the largest doll’s halves apart as Cass took both of Smoke’s hands in hers.

“What,” she begged, leaning close enough to breathe his breath, ready to hurt for him.

“I broke the railing,” Smoke said, staring at his hands as though he was just noticing the cuts. “Outside of Dor’s trailer. It was cheap shit, aluminum…”

Cass pictured it in her mind’s eye, the trailer Dor used for his office and now, in the colder months, his home, as well. Construction steps led up to the door four feet above the ground, the trailer up on blocks. Its railing was flimsy, it was true, but to tear it apart would have taken strength—and rage.

“But why? What did he say to you?”

Only Dor, founder and leader of the Box, tight-lipped cold-eyed trader and enforcer of the peace, had the power to change events, to change the course of people’s lives. Smoke looked at her bleakly, his sensuous mouth taut with dark emotion.

“The school burned,” he said softly. “It was Rebuilders. They came to Silva and they burned it—gave the women and the children a choice. Join or die. The men, all of them…gone.”

Cass’s heart seized. The school, forty miles down mountain, had been the first shelter she’d come to after she was taken, after waking in a field in her own stink, crusted with healing sores, with no memory of how she got there. At the school she thought she would die; instead she met Smoke and she lived.

“Gone?” she echoed, the word thick on her lips.

“Throats slit to save the bullet, then burned inside the building. Cass…Nora stayed behind. She refused to go with them. And she died.”

The hole in Cass’s heart widened and cold seeped in.

Nora had been Smoke’s lover, once. Before Cass came. Nora’s dark hair brushed her shoulders, her gaunt cheeks were elegant. Nora had hated Cass on sight, had voted for her to be turned out to die because of the condition she was in when she’d arrived at the school. Now Nora was the dead one.

“They killed her…”

“She fought.” There—finally, there was the anger, flashing in his eyes. “She took one down with her, Dor said.”

Dor. Sammi—what about the girl? Dor’s daughter, only fourteen, whom Cass had felt a bond with even though their time together was brief.

“They say Sammi survived,” Smoke said, reading her thoughts. “At least, there’s a girl her age, her description, who made it through. But not her mother. It happened two days ago—they’ve probably taken her down to Colima by now.”

“The survivors—they’re all prisoners?”

“That’s what Dor said,” Smoke said flatly. “That’s what he told me. Rebuilders sent a message here. Their man came today. That’s what…what we’ve been talking about.”

The school was gone. The little community of shelterers crushed, splintered, burned, and the survivors led away like stolen cattle. The men… Cass shuddered to think of their bodies stacked and immolated.

She had only been at the school for one day, just long enough for them to judge, yet release her, long enough for Smoke to decide to throw in with her quest to reclaim Ruthie. He’d intended to go back, back to Nora, but that hadn’t happened. Instead he’d come here, and somehow they’d become…what they were. Lovers. A couple, perhaps. More, certainly, than Cass had ever dared to hope for. She had slept in Smoke’s arms nearly every night and been glad of it.

And on some of those nights Cass had thought of Nora and wished she didn’t exist. Such a wish didn’t feel like the same sort of sin as it might have been Before. Aftertime, the odds of living to the next day were stunted; you learned not to count on the future. You said goodbye knowing it might be the last time…and then, eventually, you simply stopped saying goodbye. Encounters meant both more and less when you knew you might not ever see someone again. The old world had ended, and new morals were needed to survive.

Deep in the night Cass would think of Nora and wish her to simply not be. She didn’t want her to fall to the fever, didn’t want the Beaters to find her, didn’t want illness or infection or a burst appendix to take her. She just wished she could erase Nora from Smoke’s past, rub her away so completely that not even a shadow remained, so she and Smoke could truly start anew together. Cass and Smoke and Ruthie, and that wish had been enough, and Cass had caught herself wondering a few times recently if a kind of happiness might actually be possible someday.

But the emotions on Smoke’s face did not leave a place for her. There was fury in the hard set of his mouth, determination in the line between his eyebrows. In his chambray eyes, the flint-sparks of something Cass knew far too well: vengeance. She’d carried the thirst for vengeance with her long enough to know that it was consuming and heavy and left little room for any other burden. Sometimes it left no room for the breath in your chest, your dreams at night—it stole everything.

But still she waited. She had not spoken Nora’s name aloud since they first came to the Box. If she didn’t speak it now, maybe her memory would let him go. Maybe, in death, she’d release him. Cass didn’t know if she believed in an afterlife, was still trying to decide if she believed in anything at all—but in this moment she begged a wish from Nora, dead Nora, ghost-or-angel Nora:

Let me have him. He’s no good to you now…just let me have him.

Smoke brought his hands together, clasping hers tightly and raising them to his lips. He kissed them so softly it was like the brush of a feather, and his lips were as warm as his hands were cold.

And Cass knew she would not have her wish.

“I have to go.”

04

LAST NIGHT, SHE HAD GONE TO SLEEP HOLDING a stone, but when she woke up it was gone.

The thing that had interrupted Sammi’s dream was a sound, a wordless shout but not a voice she knew, and then something breaking. But when she woke it was quiet and she tried to hold on to her dream, which had been about Jed. Everything was about Jed now—even the things that really weren’t.

The sky had been orangey-pale through the windows high on the wall. A few feet away her mother slept with her arms wrapped tight around her pillow. She’d been doing that ever since Dad left, holding her pillow tight to her chest as though it might protect her from something. Her mother never moved when she slept, she lay still and elegant with her dark hair fanning the bed. Her mom was still hot for forty, especially for Aftertime—’cause face it, take away the BOTOX and the thermal reconditioning hair treatments and the eyelash extensions, and a lot of the moms at her old school probably didn’t look all that great anymore.

Getting away from that stupid school had been the one good thing to come out of the last year. Not that it made up for everything else, of course, but the Grosbeck Academy had been a forty-five-minute drive and it was a shitty little third-rate girls’ school anyway, but it was the only one her mom could find where she could spend twenty thousand bucks a year for the privilege, which she only did to screw over Sammi’s dad anyway. And so they were up at five-thirty every morning and half the time they blew a fuse running all their blow-dryers at the same time, and wasn’t that fucked-up considering they lived in the most expensive “cabin” on their side of the Sierras, six bedrooms and five custom bathrooms, three of which nobody ever used.

At least she’d had lots of friends at Grosbeck, but looking back she didn’t miss any of them. She hoped nothing bad had happened to them, of course, though she knew it probably had, but she couldn’t spend her time thinking about all the ways they might have died or she’d go crazy. “Just think about today,” Jed always said when she started to feel the bad stuff coming on. Jed was always saying stuff like that—maybe it was because he had two older brothers and parents who were both therapists. Maybe it was because he still had his whole family—he was one of the rare lucky ones who hadn’t lost anyone close yet. They had a room down the hall that used to be a conference room, and his mom was always walking around the courtyard, talking with people, holding their hands. Probably telling them to feel their feelings or something like that. Jed made fun of her, but you could tell he loved her.

And he loved Sammi. He had told her so, when he gave her the stone. It fit just right in her hand, and buried in its smooth gray surface was a vein of quartz in the shape of a heart. He’d found it near the creek, and he’d given her other things—books, a necklace, a thing of peanut M&M’s—but the stone was her favorite.

But where was it?

Sammi had sat up in the pale light of dawn and rooted through her covers, warm from sleep, keeping quiet so she wouldn’t wake her mom. Maybe she’d dreamed the shout, the sound of breaking glass. She ought to go back to sleep, wake up when it was really morning, help her mom in the kitchen before she went over to the child care room. Braid her hair before she saw Jed.

There—the stone had rolled off her mattress onto the carpet. Sammi cupped it in her hand and was pulling her covers back up over her shoulders when she realized that the light coming through the windows wasn’t dawn at all.

It was fire.

05

THERE WERE CLOCKS, THE OLD-FASHIONED KIND with triple-A batteries, if she had wanted to know the time. One of the self-appointed holy men passing through had nailed them to posts around the Box, for comfort he said, but Cass had trained herself not to notice them. Knowing the time seemed necessary to some people, but to Cass, such details seemed pointless, almost profane. The reality of their life was inescapable, just like the fine dust kicked up along the well-worn path around the perimeter of the Box, finding its way into the folds of their clothes and the creases at their knees and elbows and neck and, she imagined, coating their lungs with a fine red-brown grit. Pretending that the time mattered was like pretending you could escape the dust, that you could ever really be clean again. It was no good.

Smoke went for a walk and Cass knew by now that when he went for a walk she was not meant to follow, so instead she hitched Ruthie up in her arms and went looking for Dor. The sky was purpling dark near the horizon and the sun had slipped down behind the stadium across the street, and the smells of cooking wafted from the food stands, and people milled along the paths toward the dining area, a fifty-foot square in the dirt where picnic tables were arranged with precision, like everything that was Dor’s.

Dor was not in his trailer, which was unusual for this time of day. He routinely made himself available in the early evening, seeing anyone who came to meet with him. As often as not, he ate his dinner alone afterward. Sometimes you’d see two or three people lined up outside at the park bench that had been planted there for that purpose, like failing students come to beg their professor for a passing grade during office hours. Nine times out of ten it was folks wanting credit, even though Dor had never been known to grant it. One of the cheap cots up front—yeah, sure, if there was one free. And he generally turned a blind eye to the food merchants who set their leftovers out late at night for scavengers. But if you wanted anything else you had to trade something, and that was that.

Cass was curious about the conversations that took place in the trailer, but she and Dor were not close and she didn’t ask. Smoke didn’t tell her anything, either. Dor had become a noman’s-land between them in the two months that Smoke had worked directly for him. Cass had never suggested that Smoke find some other work—what else was there, after all?—and she had no quarrel with Dor over the guards patrolling the Box and keeping the roads into town clear of Beaters. If she’d been surprised that Dor had put Smoke in charge of the entire security team, she had to admit the decision had been inspired: everyone knew about the battle at the rock slide, and while Smoke played down his role, that almost gave the story more power. He’d killed a Rebuilder leader, and the Box was full of stories of the Rebuilders’ methods, their violent occupations of shelters, their killing of those who resisted.

Smoke did nothing to spread the stories, and in fact grew stone-faced and irritable whenever he heard people telling them. He had drawn inward since Cass met him, and while he was most comfortable with her and Ruthie and rarely joined the gatherings around the fire late at night, he seemed to be happy enough with the company of the other guards. He insisted he was only their scheduler, a facilitator, but everyone knew otherwise.

Cass didn’t object to the guns Smoke carried, though she made him lock all but one in their safe at night. She didn’t object to the long hours he spent training with the guards, target shooting and lifting weights and practicing some strange sort of martial arts with a guard named Joe, who had been awaiting trial at the Santa Rita jail until one day late in the Siege when the warden apparently opened the doors and let the lowest-security prisoners go free. She didn’t even mind the awkwardness between Smoke and Ruthie; she knew he was trying and that Ruthie would warm up to him in her own time.

The truth was that Cass didn’t know when the discord had started between them, the uneasiness. Things had been so good and they were still good, most of the time. They had the rhythm of a couple, the way they prepared a meal together, handing each other things without needing to speak. Laughter came easy when they walked in the evenings, swinging Ruthie between them.

But still. They didn’t discuss Dor or what the two men talked about in the long hours they spent together. Smoke stopped telling her what he saw when he went on the raiding parties and hunting down the Beaters, and their conversation usually centered on her gardens and Ruthie and gossip about the people in the Box, the customers who came and went and the other employees they counted as friends. He often seemed preoccupied, and she sometimes woke in the middle of the night to see him sitting outside their tent, tilted back in his camp chair, staring at the stars. They didn’t make love as often, and Cass thought she might miss that most of all, the moments of release when her mind emptied of everything but him, when every horror and loss in her life faded for a moment, a gift she’d never found the words to thank him for.

Now, she forced herself to admit that Dor might know Smoke better than she did. If anyone knew what had happened, what was in Smoke’s mind, it would be him. She tried the front gate next. Faye was there, and Charles, playing cards with one of the older guards who went by Three-High, except by his new girlfriend, who called him Dmitri. Feo sat on Three-High’s lap, chewing on a kaysev stalk that had been soaked in syrup until it was nearly fermented, the closest thing to dessert besides the pricey canned pudding or candy canes.

“Hey, Cass,” Faye said, giving her a slanted smile, more than she offered most people.

“Hey. You seen Dor?”

They shook their heads, Charles and Three-High not lifting their eyes from their cards. “He was meeting with some guy, came in from the west this morning. Jarhead type.”

“Don’t need no more of that,” Three-High said with conviction.

Cass nodded. The guards were jealously protective of their jobs, which most agreed were the best to be had. A guard job came with room and board, access to the comfort tents, a free ticket to the raiding parties with the understanding they got a split of the spoils. Plenty for trade, whatever you wanted, and Dor didn’t much care what you spent your off-hours doing, as long as you showed up sober for your shift and got the job done. Dor didn’t hire addicts; there wasn’t a single one in the crew that Cass could tell, and she had an eye for it. Hard drinkers, yes. But no pill-poppers, no meth cookers. Every one of them loved something more than a high; for most of them it was danger, adrenaline, shooting and fighting and killing Beaters. For some, it was a fierce devotion to the Box itself, a place Cass suspected was the closest thing to home, to family, that they had ever known.

Smoke hadn’t hired anyone new since Dor turned the operation over to him. He was looking for one more, someone to start on nights, but he’d told her it was important to get this one right, to pick someone who’d fit the crew. He said he was waiting for someone who had never been in the service. He gave a variety of reasons, but Cass was still waiting for the one that sounded like the truth.

Charles laid down a card with some authority. “This guy, he was big. Built, you know? And carrying. We took a Heckler & Koch MP5 and a clean little Walther off him.”

“They’re not there now.” Three-High jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the locker where everyone but the guards were required to check their weapons upon entering the Box. “I was in there half an hour ago, didn’t see ’em.”

Faye to set down her cards, eyebrow raised.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Shit, Faye, I—”

“Okay, okay,” Faye said. “Don’t cry or nothing. I just meant I didn’t see him come back out.”

“Probably day shift checked him out,” Charles suggested.

“Maybe.” Faye seemed skeptical. “But still, that would have been a short visit.”

So none of them knew the visitor had been a Rebuilder. Of course, if they had, word would have been all over the Box as soon as he’d come through the gates. The stranger must have saved that information for Dor, who’d either killed him or found a way for him to leave without drawing attention.

The former was unlikely, since the Rebuilders always had a plan—plans. If the man didn’t make it safely back to his rendezvous point, they’d return in larger numbers, make a show of force, demand a meeting. Or maybe they’d escalate straight to armed conflict, and either attempt to take prisoners, or simply burn the place down.

The peace between the Rebuilders and the Box was uneasy. No one liked it, except possibly Dor, who, as far as Cass could tell, was without loyalties to anyone but himself and his meticulously tracked empire. But everyone realized that the balance was a delicate one, and any provocation would end up with a lot of dead on both sides. The Box was recognized as neutral, and while the Rebuilders no doubt intended to take it someday, for now they would have a hard time outgunning Dor’s arsenal and security force.

Cass decided to keep the information to herself, at least until she knew what the hell was going on.

“Maybe we didn’t have whatever he was shopping for,” Three-High said, yawning. “Kinda thin stock these days.”

Feo, finished with his snack, wriggled off his lap and darted away without a word. It was his way; he was a restless boy, frequently affectionate, but easily bored. No one tried to get him to sit still, especially not his self-appointed guardians, who saw nothing wrong with his prowling and occasional thieving and who had made him a bed in a staff bunkhouse, where they could hear him if he cried out in his sleep.

“What are you talking about, the shed’s practically full. And we got a shitload of new stuff this morning from those guys from…where was it…Murphy’s?” Faye ticked items off on her fingers: “Tampons and toilet paper. Tea bags, olive oil, a couple dozen of those South Beach bars, liquid soap and detergent, all that shampoo. And an unopened bottle of Kahlúa and a case of Diet Canfield’s and twenty-two bottles of Coors Light.”

“That stuff tastes like piss,” Three-High said.

“You’d drink it, though—tell me you wouldn’t.”

“Hell, yes, I’d drink piss if it got me buzzed.”

The raiders had recently cleared a house where Beaters had been nesting on the far east side of town, and they’d come back with a good haul, but they’d lost a man in the raid. They missed a Beater who’d been sleeping in a powder room. It was weak and injured, bones showing through its flesh in several places and one foot twisted at an odd angle, and the others had probably left it behind when they moved on. It had taken only one bullet to kill, but not until it had clamped its festering jaw on Don Carson’s ankle.

It had cost a second bullet to take Don down.

The raiding was growing more dangerous. When Cass had first arrived in San Pedro in the summer, Dor’s people had cleared the town of nearly all the Beaters. The Order in the Convent paid well enough for live Beaters to use in their rituals that it was more worth Dor’s while to scour the streets for them. But trade with the Order had dried up, and as the weather turned cold, Beaters had begun stumbling their way south, apparently traveling by some instinct unknown to their human brethren. With their preference for more densely populated areas, Beaters were quick to nest once they reached San Pedro, and quick to hunt. Dor still kept the main roads clear, and the guards picked off any who came too close to the Box—but come in on any of the less-traveled paths and you were taking chances. The Beaters had learned to stay away from the stronghold, though they roamed just out of sight. You could sometimes hear their moans and nonsense jabber carried on the winds.