Книга - Rebirth

Rebirth
Sophie Littlefield


THE END OF THE WORLD WAS JUST THE BEGINNINGCivilization has fallen, leaving California an unforgiving, decimated place. But Cass Dollar beat terrible odds to get her missing daughter back—she and Ruthie will be happy. Yet with the first winter, Cass is reminded that happiness is fleeting in Aftertime.Ruthie retreats into silence. Flesh-eating Beaters still dominate the landscape. And Smoke, Cass’s lover and strength, departs on a quest for vengeance, one that may end him even if he returns. The survivalist community Cass has planted roots in is breaking apart, too. Its leader, Dor, implores Cass to help him recover his own lost daughter, taken by the totalitarian Rebuilders.And soon Cass finds herself thrust into the dark heart of an organization promising humanity’s rebirth—at all costs. Bound to two men blazing divergent paths across a savage land, Cass must overcome the darkness in her own savage, wounded heart, or lose those she loves forever.“Aftertime is a whole new kind of fierce.” —Laura Benedict, author of Isabella Moon







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Praise for Sophie Littlefield’s

AFTERTIME


“Stephen King’s The Stand in a bra and panties…. The illegitimate love child of McCarthy’s The Road and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead…Aftertime is a highly palatable amalgam of post-apocalyptic fiction, romance, and horror. Hard-core fans of post-apocalyptic fiction will love Aftertime. Romance fans will embrace it. Aficionados of zombie fiction will be stunned.”

—Paul Goat Allen, BarnesandNoble.com

“Littlefield turns what could be just another zombie apocalypse into a thoughtful and entertaining exploration of many themes…. Littlefield has a gift for pacing, her adroit and detailed world-building going down easy amid page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing descriptions that bring every paragraph of this thriller to life.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The fresh, original world-building solidly supports the unfolding narrative and Littlefield’s compelling writing will keep readers turning pages late into the night to find out what happens next. Outstanding!”

—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick

“Wildly original… Sophie Littlefield’s Aftertime is a new generation of post-apocalyptic fiction: a unique journey into a horrifying world of zombies, zealots and avarice that examines the strength of one woman, the joy of acceptance and the power of love. A must read.”

—J.T. Ellison, author of Where All the Dead Lie

“I’m geeking out of my mind after reading Aftertime because I felt almost the same way reading it as I do watching The Walking Dead: Captivated. Aftertime is hands down the best zombie book I’ve read all year. Hide your wife, hide your kids, and hide your husbands ’cause they’re eating everybody out here.”

—All Things Urban Fantasy

“[A] gripping read; sympathetic characters operate in a detailed, realistically shattered echo of modern society, and the emotional journey is as harrowing and absorbing as the physical one.”

—Paperback Dolls

“Alternately creeped me the hell out and broke my heart repeatedly.”

—The Discriminating Fangirl

“Littlefield excels at keeping the momentum going and she knows how to inject a huge beating heart into any story, even one in which humanity is barely alive.”

—Pop Culture Nerd





Rebirth










Sophie Littlefield







www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


For M, searching for four-leaf clovers




Contents


Chapter 01

Chapter 02

Chapter 03

Chapter 04

Chapter 05

Chapter 06

Chapter 07

Chapter 08

Chapter 09

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38




01


THE FIRST SNOWFLAKE AFTERTIME WAS LIKE NO snowflake that ever fell Before. Cass nearly missed it, kneeling on the matted dead kaysev plants, their woody stalks poking into her skin through the thick leggings she wore beneath her dress. Her eyes had been closed, but Randall had gone on too long, the way people do when they are trying to say something meaningful about someone they didn’t know well. After a while Cass grew restless and began to look around, and there, not two feet away, the snowflake drifted past in a lazy swoop as though it had all the time in the world.

Cass licked her cracked lips, could almost feel how the flake would melt on her tongue. Until that moment she didn’t realize she had actually doubted whether snow would ever return, much as she’d doubted whether rats or sparrows or acorns or moths would return. She wished she could nudge Ruthie, or even Smoke—she knelt between the two, in the place of honor up front—but a funeral was still a funeral, and so she stayed as still as a stone.

Maybe by the time they were finished, there would be more snowflakes. A flurry, a drift: the gunmetal sky looked grudging to Cass; there would be no storm today. Besides, the temperature would rise well above freezing by noon. These early snows never lasted long.

Next to her, Ruthie sneezed. Cass wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer. Ruthie had loved the snow when she was a baby. She was still a baby—three years and two months, according to the Box’s calendar. The month and date were metal numerals hung from nails on a wooden pole, the kind people once nailed to houses and mailbox posts, back when people still lived in houses. Each morning, the first shift guard changed the numbers. Today, it read 11 * 17.

Smoke held Cass’s hand, his strong fingers wrapped around hers, and she felt his blood running sure and strong under his skin, circulating through his body and making him strong and back to his heart again, and she said the silent prayer that was part of her breathing itself now, part of every exhale: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-for-making-him-mine. His touch, his closeness, that was what made her whole; he more than made up for every wrong man that had come along before. She closed her eyes and exhaled the prayer and waited for Randall to finish his rambling eulogy as the five other people in attendance fidgeted and sighed.

“And now Cass will say a few words.”

So her turn had come, at last. Cass stood, nervous and hesitant. She gulped air as she took the few steps to the humble altar next to the fresh grave. Sieved earth was piled neatly. Gloria was in the ground, her body covered with six feet of rich Sierra mountain soil—Dor’s grave diggers charged a premium for the full six, what with most folks settling for half that these days. Cass breathed out, then in once more, a rhythm she learned back in her early days in A.A., when she’d been torn between the paralyzing certainty that if she spoke during the meeting she would cry—and that if she didn’t, she would never come back.

Back then, it had sometimes been all she could manage to say her name. Today she would have to say more. Not for those gathered here: besides Smoke and Ruthie, there was only Randall, standing at a respectful distance and twisting his handkerchief in a tight knot around his knuckles, and Paul, who never missed a funeral, and Greg, who’d spent some evenings with Gloria even after she was banned from working the comfort tents.

And then also Rae, who managed the comfort tents, and probably felt guilty about firing Gloria, since, when Gloria couldn’t work, she couldn’t buy anything to drink. And that was what killed her, in a way—after only a few days of forced sobriety she had drunk a bottle of Liquid-Plumr from the garbage hill slowly accumulating on the far side of the stadium’s parking lot.

Cass gazed out on the others and swallowed back tears. Smoke had put on a clean shirt, not that you could see it under his heavy work coat. Ruthie wore a little red coat and matching hat that a raiding party had brought back last week. Everyone else was dressed in the usual layers of clothes splodged with stains, the heavy boots. No one looked directly at her, save Smoke. No one gathered here would care if Cass cried for Gloria, but it was important to her that she not be misunderstood, not now, not today.

She trailed her fingers along the scratched wooden top of the small table enlisted as an altar. Someone had brought it back from a night raid, a humble thing whose most appealing feature was that it was light and easy to carry. Cass thought it might—half a century ago—have been a telephone table, back when phones had to be plugged into the wall. On Sundays, Randall put a cloth on the little table, rested his Bible on top of that. He didn’t lack for an audience. Cass didn’t begrudge him his followers—nor did she begrudge them their hour of peace or solace or whatever it was they found in his words.

Still, today: no cloth, no Bible. It had fallen to Cass to plan the service. No one else offered, and Randall had come to stand in the door to their tent, hat in his hand, and asked Cass what would be right. Gloria had never spoken of God and Cass felt it would be presumptuous to impose Him on her now.

Cass shut her eyes for a moment and exhaled slowly. When she opened her eyes again, Ruthie was watching her expectently, lips parted in anticipation. For a child who didn’t talk, Ruthie listened to others with great care, none more than her mother.

Cass produced a tiny smile for her daughter. She reached for the string around her neck and pulled from under her blouse the pendant she had made yesterday, and Ruthie did the same. They wore clothespins, the old-fashioned wooden kind, knotted to nylon cord. Cass held the clothespin as though it were a precious thing and considered it, turning it slowly this way and that.

“Gloria and I talked about clothespins once,” Cass began, her voice rusty. “She told me about hanging clothes on a line.”

Greg, dry-eyed and somber, nodded as though what Cass was telling was a story he’d heard a dozen times. That couldn’t have been. Gloria made little sense when she talked; she dredged memories and unfurled them carelessly, moving in and out of time and sense. You didn’t have a conversation with Gloria so much as an occasional glimpse into the ill-tended recesses of her mind. There was nothing there to hold on to.

She wondered what memories Gloria had shared with Greg, if they had talked at all. The comfort tents were places of shame; men and the occasional woman slipped in and out of them like shadows, bartering whatever they had for a grope in the dark, an awkward coupling, a muffled cry. Anything to forget the gone world for a while.

Those who worked in the tents usually had no other way to earn. That was the case with Gloria, who was too far gone to raid, to cook, to harvest, to mend or make things, or even offer knowledge that helped. But she had meant more than nothing to Greg.

“She told me about hanging clothes on a line,” Cass said again. She cleared her throat. “And she…had someone, once. His name was Matthew.”

Gloria had long, thick silvery hair. That, and her faded blue eyes, were the only clues to her long-ago beauty. She was lean and leathery. She’d broken a tooth and on the rare occasions when she was sober she was suddenly self-conscious and tried to hide the gap, barely moving her lips to speak. Her nails were ragged and dirty. Her clothes grew filthy and torn in the days before her death. The last time they spoke, Gloria had answered all of Cass’s questions with noncommittal grunts and never once met her eyes. Ruthie had been afraid of her.

“She loved him,” Cass concluded. Once, Gloria had loved. That would have to be enough. Cass had said all she knew—all that was important, anyway. Gloria never told her anything but his name; if he’d been a lover, a husband, a childhood friend, it didn’t matter.

She bent to the earth, the rectangle of dirt raked carefully one way and then the other, crosshatched from the tines. She dug her fingers in and took a handful, then stood up and slowly sifted the earth back over the length of the grave.

She stood back as the others filed around the perimeter of the grave. They knelt and scooped their own handfuls of dirt, even Ruthie. The knees of her tights were smudged with dirt—another stain Cass would not be able to get out. She sighed. Each person shook their dirt back down onto the grave, and Cass wondered what words they said in their minds. Hers was goodbye—maybe everyone said goodbye.

The dirt was sprinkled and still they ringed the grave, waiting. Randall dug in his pocket. “Cass, perhaps you’d like to…”

He held out a plastic bag, gapping open; inside were dried kaysev beans, dull and brown. Cass looked at him sharply, but for once Randall stared back with a hint of challenge in his expression. Smoke squeezed her hand, shook his head. Smoke stayed far clear of Randall’s Sunday-morning services. He had little to do with believers. He even did his occasional drinking at Rocket’s—not German’s, where believers tended to congregate.

Cass didn’t want to take the beans. The funeral practice of sprinkling the grave with kaysev seed—it was based in the Bible, the passage in Matthew about the sower. It was a common practice, almost secular by now; a whole new culture of loss, its habits and practices as ingrained as if generations of ancestors had practiced them. It had only been eight months since the Air Force had rained kaysev down from the skies on their last flights, but eight months had been long enough to create new rituals. The plant was meant to feed the population; it had begun to feed their imaginations, as well.

Smoke saw everything through the filter of ideology and he was resolute, and Cass was inclined to agree with him, at least on this. Terrible memories of the Convent were too fresh, the mark its zealotry had left on Ruthie too deep.

God had not taken up residence across the street in the stadium—of that Cass was sure.

But unlike Smoke, she was not ready to declare Him absent. Still, He was an elusive, crafty cipher to Cass, and for now she meant to keep Him distant.

When Cass did not take the plastic bag from Randall’s outstretched hand, the frowning man narrowed his eyes and upended it himself, the beans falling to the earth and rolling into the crevices and fissures in the earth. “He that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word,” he intoned, his gaze never leaving Cass’s face.

Then he stepped back from the grave, jamming the empty bag back into his pocket and brushing his hands together fastidiously. Everyone else followed him, retreating to the cleared area where the service had begun, shuffling slowly.

“And now we conclude our service for Gloria,” Randall murmured, the wind snatching at his words and carrying them away, so that everyone leaned in closer to hear. Everyone, that is, but Cass, who picked up Ruthie and edged to the back of the small gathering while Randall raised his hands for a final benediction.

“Man, you are dust,” he said, closing his eyes. “And to dust you shall return.”

Not for the first time Cass considered that Randall was a fraud, cobbling together bits and pieces of faiths to suit himself.

What did it matter, though? Dead was still dead, and the rest of them were still here.




02


CASS GLANCED BACK OVER HER SHOULDER AS THEY trailed the others back to the Box. The streets looked clear; there had been no Beater sightings for a couple of days. Randall moved among the graves, straightening the crosses and pulling weeds.

It wasn’t much of a graveyard—the plot of land had once been a tiny park wedged between residential streets two blocks from the Box, but the trees that shaded it had died early enough in the Siege that someone had actually taken the trouble to cut them down to stumps and haul them away. Some of the graves were marked with crosses carved from wood, nailed together, finished to varying degrees. One small one was painted white, with tiny shells glued along the edges. Most of the crosses were raw, hastily made, not even sanded.

Some graves, like Gloria’s, had no marker at all. For now, the dug and piled dirt marked its location, but it would not be long before the dirt would sink and level and no one would remember where she lay.

Had it been up to Cass, she would have left the few plants that sprouted this time of year. To her mind the reappearance of each plant Aftertime was a miracle in itself, and her garden in the Box had a small square marked out with stakes and twine for each native species she found on her walks. Firethorn, pepperweed, crupina. Each of them once assumed gone forever. Each—through what combination of God’s will and hardiness and luck she had no idea—returned, pushing through the wasted crust of the forsaken earth.

Greg, Rae, Paul—once through the gates, they slipped off in different directions, not bothering with a goodbye, not even for Ruthie. Cass wasn’t sure how much longer she could stay here in the Box, where gloom had settled and quashed her hopes that it was a place fit for raising her little girl. Before, people made an effort for a child, even one as silent and strange as Ruthie was now. Under the hat, her hair was as short as a boy’s; in the Convent they had shaved all the children bald. But by spring Ruthie should have enough for a little pixie cut, something more girlie. Cass was self-conscious of her self-consciousness: surely survival was enough of a parlor trick; should children really have to do anything more?

There were no fat Gerber babies Aftertime. There were few babies at all. Starvation and the fever had taken so many, early on; the Beaters claimed many more. Cass knew firsthand how hard it was to look upon a child when your own was gone. But she had been given a second chance; she had gotten Ruthie back, and now she meant to cherish her. She would dress her in the prettiest things she could find. She would give her everything that the battered world could provide.

Ruthie’s red coat was a gift from a quiet boy named Sam, who’d lost an eye in Yemen in the Rice Wars. He stopped by Cass and Smoke’s tent after a raid and pulled it from his backpack, a soft, finely made woolen coat with carved shell buttons. He wouldn’t trade for it, but he had accepted a cup of peppermint tea brewed from the last of Cass’s herb garden before a hard freeze took all but the thyme and chervil. Sam wasn’t a talker, but he loved Ruthie. He airplaned her squealing through the air, carried her around on his shoulders and let her crawl all over his long lanky legs. Cass suspected Sam had once had a little brother or sister, or perhaps a niece or nephew. Whoever the child was, they were long gone, leaving Sam with a few good moves and, perhaps, an empty place in his heart.

Underneath the coat, Ruthie wore a blue corduroy jumper and a pair of white tights. Her shoes were too small; she was growing fast these days. All the raiders knew to keep an eye out—size seven, twenty-four European—but you never knew what you’d find, and the only sure thing—the mall at the far edge of town—was still infested with Beaters.

It had been more than a month since Ruthie’s things had been washed. Sometimes one of the Box merchants had detergent for trade, but it was expensive, and besides, Cass and Smoke had agreed they were going to try to switch to homegrown wherever possible. That meant using the oily kaysev soap made from the fat rendered from the beans. It wasn’t terrible for washing one’s body or hair, but it wasn’t great for clothes. It didn’t take stains all the way out and it didn’t do much for the lingering odors of sweat and smoke.

It wasn’t like anyone else cared. Smoke was always saying Cass should just let Ruthie wear sweatpants and T-shirts like Feo, the only other child in the Box. But Feo was practically feral, a sharp-toothed, long-haired boy of eight or nine who slipped quick-footed and cagey among the tents and merchant stands, stealing and boxing with his own shadow. Dor let Feo stay only because he’d become a sort of a mascot for the guards, who’d found him squatting with an unkempt, semiconscious old woman in a farmhouse past the edge of town back in October.

Cass felt protective of Feo, especially after the woman, his grandmother, died during her first night in the Box. But she didn’t want her Ruthie becoming like him.

“I’m going to the trailer,” Smoke said, as they reached the intersection in the dirt path that led to their tent. It had become his habit not to explain his dealings with Dor anymore, as their private meetings grew more and more frequent. He had become Dor’s right-hand man in the months since he and Cass came to the Box, and Cass supposed that their daily interactions were necessary as Smoke learned more of the business and took over more and more of the daily operations of the security force. But Smoke also knew she resented these meetings, resented his alliance with Dor. Another couple might have talked it out. But Cass did not ask and Smoke did not volunteer.

She took Ruthie back to the tent. Inside, there was order. Cass had not been neat Before; she was neat now. Smoke had lined one wall of the tent with bookshelves bolted together; these held tattered books and empty glass jars and smooth stones. A dresser contained their clothes. The floor was covered with a beautiful rug, an ancient hand-woven thing that Dor said had once been worth many thousands of dollars. It was the one thing of luxurious beauty that Cass could stand to have in their home. Otherwise the things in their tent were plain, utilitarian and all chosen by her, because Smoke had understood that their choosing was healing for Cass, even before she understood it herself.

She slowly unbuttoned her parka then took off the dress she’d worn for the funeral and tugged on a wool sweater. She had wanted Smoke to see her in this dress, gotten only yesterday from a woman who’d arrived dragging a rolling suitcase stuffed with designer clothes and fine jewelry. It had cost Cass an airline bottle of Absolut and three 750mg Vicodin tablets. Cass hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in almost ten months and had resisted trading in it, but eventually she had to accept that booze and drugs were the Box’s principal currency, so she and Smoke kept a stash locked in a safe bolted to a pole sunk in concrete in the ground under the tent floor.

The dress was knit of some synthetic fabric, cut on the bias and gathered at the low scoop neckline. It was a shade of deep aquamarine that reminded Cass of the ocean—specifically, of the water off Point Reyes where she’d once spent a long weekend before she got pregnant with Ruthie. She’d been with a lover—which one, she couldn’t remember now—and he’d distracted her with expensive dinners and wine and blow, but it was the water she remembered best.

This dress was the color of misty mornings and rain-threatened twilights, of flotsam bobbing on waves before they broke on the shore. She had wanted to watch Smoke watching her in the dress, wanted to see his eyes widen and his lips part, wanted to watch him wanting her. Her body quickened at the thought, even now, when the moment was lost.

She took off the earrings Smoke gave her the week before and put them in the metal box where she kept all her little things, earrings and safety pins and buttons and needles and tacks. The earrings had come from a raid on one of the enormous homes on Festival Hill in what had been the rich part of town, a pair of diamond drops that would have cost more than a car Before. Aftertime was funny that way; it turned the value of everything upside down. Smoke had traded a Kershaw hunting knife with a black tungsten blade for the earrings and their owner had gone away satisfied.

After she got Ruthie changed into soft, warm clothes and tucked under her quilt for a nap, Cass poured water from a plastic pitcher into her pewter cup—engraved with a curly monogram with the letters TEC, spoils from the same luxurious neighborhood—and unwrapped a kaysev cake that had been spread with peanut butter. She ate her lunch mechanically and tried to concentrate her thoughts on Gloria. But her thoughts would not stay focused—they skittered like pebbles on a slide. Ruthie made soft mewling sounds in her sleep, and Cass listened and wished she could record them to play back later, the only way she could hear her daughter’s voice.

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.

When they caught someone, you could hear the screaming, human and once-human.

Recently it seemed like they were getting bolder. Last week Cass had been trudging back from the bathroom shed at the first light of dawn, the Box still silent and asleep, when she heard a shout at the fence. For a second she hesitated, shivering at the chill snaking up under her nightgown, and then she’d loped silently along the fence toward the sound, the tongues of her undone boots flapping.

She reached the source of the commotion, across from the rental cots near the front of the Box, in time to see the worst of it. George, the guard on third shift, had been backed up against the wall of a two-story brick building that once housed a jewelry shop on the first floor and accountants’ offices on the second. Cass put it together immediately—she knew the guards sometimes smoked in the space where the stone steps met the wall of the building, where an overhang provided protection from rain and the curving staircase blocked the wind. They’d even dragged a chair there, and everyone used it to take breaks between laps around the Box.

Which was fine, unless you fell asleep.

George usually didn’t take the third shift. He was covering for Charles, who was laid up with food poisoning puking his guts out, and as the long uneventful night stretched toward dawn he’d taken a break. Maybe he’d just closed his eyes for a moment.

Long enough for the four Beaters to prowl down the streets and alleys from wherever they’d carved their nest and find their victim practically gift-wrapped, to seize upon their prize with shrieks of delight and hunger before George had time to reach for his gun or even the blade at his belt.

When Cass arrived, heart pounding in her throat, Faye and Three-High had left their posts at the front gate and run down the block, but it was too late. The first bite was enough to doom George, but the Beaters would not finish him here. After a few slobbering crowing nips they hoisted him between them, each holding an arm or a leg in their scabby festering fingers, to drag him back to their nest where they would feast undisturbed. First they would chew the skin off his back, his buttocks, his calves, kneeling on his arms and legs so he couldn’t move. Then they’d turn him and eat the other side, and as he weakened and his screams grew hoarse, they’d nibble at the harder-to-reach skin of his face, fingers and feet.

George knew what his fate could be. You could hear it in his screams. As Cass watched—others running toward the commotion, those who were already awake, those who heard the screams through their sleep and bolted out of bed—Faye and Three-High shot at the Beaters. And when George’s screaming abruptly stopped she knew they’d been aiming at him, too.

There were still entire neighborhoods waiting to be raided, but people were getting nervous. Beaters, disease, toxic waste, depression and anxiety—all these things stopped even the heartiest at times. Some of the raiders had begun refusing to go out at all, just one of the many things Cass knew Dor and Smoke discussed.

“Hey, any kid stuff in the haul?” Cass asked, thinking of Ruthie, her tight shoes.

“Yeah, but older,” Faye said. “You know, like that tween stuff. All the sparkly shit on the jeans. Hold on to it for Ruthie. She’ll love it in a few years.”

There was a sudden, awkward silence; it was an unwritten rule that you never talked about the future. Especially because it wasn’t clear how much longer Ruthie would be welcome in the Box. Dor had made an exception to his no-kids policy for her, and another for Feo, but his continued beneficence was a gamble. “Or, you know, get Gary to take in the seams for now,” Faye added.

“It’s the shoes, mostly,” Cass clarified. “I’d just like to get her some sneakers. Boots, too. I don’t care if they’re boys’, either. Keep your eye out?”

“You know we do, Cassie,” Three-High said kindly. Some of them, mostly the men, had taken to calling her Cassie. Cass didn’t like it, but she also didn’t want to tell them to stop. They meant well. “We’ll find her something in plenty of time. Gonna find her a sled, too, little snowsuit.”

“Thanks,” Cass said softly. “But Dor…so the last you saw him was…”

“Not since morning,” Faye said. “We see him, though, we’ll let him know you’re lookin’ for him, okay?”

It was the best she could do. Cass thanked them and wandered back toward her tent. Maybe Smoke would return before dinner; maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he was looking for her even now.




06


SHE TOOK THE LONG WAY, SUDDENLY IN NO MOOD to talk to anyone else, weaving along the back of the tents where people hung their washing. When a slender shadow flashed in front of her from between two tents, her heart skipped, startled.

“I seen you comin’.”

Feo had slipped from a space so narrow that it could not possibly have sheltered him, so it was as though he appeared from thin air, but that was how he always moved through the compound. In one hand he held a sticky, damp candy wrapper; his mouth was ringed with blue powder. She’d barely noticed him earlier, so intent was she on finding Dor; now, she looked him over more carefully. He was dressed in a hoodie meant for a much larger child. The sleeves completely covered his free hand and the hem hung halfway to his knees. Across the front was a design of skulls and flowers, a sword piercing the skull’s empty eye sockets. Feo’s sweats were pink and his sneakers had been slit at the toes to make more room; Ruthie wasn’t the only child who needed new shoes for winter.

But his hair had been cut with care, the front grazing his eye in a stylishly asymmetric slant, the back shaved up with a design of stripes. “You’ve been to see Vincent, haven’t you?” Cass said, dredging up a smile for Feo, the best she could do.

“He done this for me. All I had to do was dust off his stuff,” Feo said proudly, running blue-tinged fingers through his thick black bangs.

Cass nodded. “It looks great.”

Feo pointed behind him, along the perimeter of the Box where the chain-link fence topped with razor wire stretched the length of two city blocks. “I seen Dor, too. He went out the back. He’s smoking.”

Cass caught her breath, careful not to let her anxiety show. She would bet Feo had been waiting for her, not wanting to share even this small confidence in front of the others. He did not often speak when people were gathered, though she’d managed to coax half a dozen conversations from him in private.

“Thanks,” she said softly, feathering his hair lightly with her fingertips. Experience had taught her that Feo could only bear the smallest of intimacies yet. He allowed the men to roughhouse with him, squirming and laughing in their arms, but she glimpsed him lurking where women gathered, the look of longing in his eyes painful to see. It would take time, that was all. At least, that was the story she told herself.

“Thanks, Feo,” she repeated. “Smoking’s bad.”

She knew she wasn’t the only one who told him that. Funny how protective they were of the boy, what with men even hiding their bottles and cigarettes when Feo was around. He flashed her a quick smile before he dashed back between the tents and disappeared.

The path around the inside perimeter of the fence was well-worn, the earth hard packed and smooth. Newcomers often walked it deep in the night when they had trouble sleeping, and the strung-out and far-gone paced like fevered wraiths at all hours of the day. Mealtimes were the only times that the path emptied, and Cass encountered no one else as she hurried in the direction the boy had pointed.

The break in the fence, hidden behind a thicket of dead snowberry shrubs at the back of the Box, wasn’t exactly a secret—but only the permanent residents of the Box knew about it, and only the most fit could use it. It was Beater-proof—the break was only in the razor wire, where two sections had come loose at a joint, leaving the ends to hang down, and it was only a couple feet wide. Climbing the chain-link was more trouble than it was worth, even for someone as strong as Dor, when you could walk to the front gate in a matter of minutes.

Unless you weren’t in the mood to talk to anyone. She didn’t know Dor well but she recognized in him, one loner to another, the need for silence enough to hear yourself think.

Cass reached the break and considered for a moment. Across the street, the storefronts facing the Box had long ago been stripped of anything useful, their windows shattered and the glass swept away. Dor insisted that the streets directly abutting the Box be kept clean; trash pickup was among the new recruits’ jobs, and despite their grumbling there was a sense of pride among the maintenance staff.

She knew where Dor would go. Smoke had shared this confidence with her. In their long talks into the night, he told her about the men and women he worked with, their habits, small details of their lives. He admired Cass’s ability to see through people to the emotions underneath. Cass didn’t ever tell him that sometimes she wished she could stop; he relied on her to be his divining rod, his translator.

Smoke was bewildered by Dor’s habit of wandering so far off-site unarmed, but Cass thought she understood. Solitude was as short in supply as medicine or fresh produce, but for some, just as desperately missed. Time to oneself—even when it came with great risk—somehow made it possible to sort through your tangled thoughts, to remember who you used to be, Before. And to understand who you had become Aftertime. In the din and commotion of the Box, Cass sometimes felt that she would slowly fade, edges first, until she was lost.

Two blocks in, where the stores gave way to apartments and small houses, a yellow brick building ringed a small courtyard with overturned benches and dead gardens. A studio apartment on the second floor looked west toward the mountains and the setting sun, and it was here that Dor came to sit occasionally, in a chair pulled up to the window. It wasn’t safe—there was no exit if Beaters found their way up the stairs, save a drop out the window to the ground, one that Beaters wouldn’t hesitate to follow.

Cass might have regretted disturbing his peace—if she had any choice, and if it were anyone else. Instead, she scrambled up and over the fence, the wire cutting painfully into her palms and the impact of jumping to the ground jarring her legs. She jogged down the street, scanning for flashes of movement as she went. She had her blade at hand—she never went anywhere without it—but it would do little good if she encountered more than one.

The sun had slipped behind the building, casting its courtyard in shadow. The earth was cracked and scabbed despite the recent rains; patches of kaysev, leaf-dead and spindly, caught debris in their rigid stems. A foam cup, a plastic bag, a diaper, dried and desiccated.

The building’s door had disappeared months ago, and inside, the litter hinted at stories of desperation. A torn suitcase spilled matted clothing across the tiled entry, and a stroller was overturned in the corner, its colorful fabric fuzzed with mold.

Cass took the stone steps two at a time, hand over hand on the banister, moving as stealthily as she was able—Cass had the sensation that if she didn’t catch Dor unawares he would simply disappear, would magic himself away to somewhere else entirely. He had that way about him, an elusiveness, and when she rounded the top of the stairs and found herself staring through the wide-flung door into the room Dor had made his own, the sight of him—broad back and hints of a dark, tanned neck, inky black hair reaching almost to his shoulders, motionless in a canvas director’s chair, the rest of the room stark and empty—it only underscored the sense that he was illusory.

Dor heard her and leaped from his chair, going down on one knee with the blade in his hand like an extension of his body, eyes flashing black and bright, and the surreal notion of him grew stronger still.

But then he said her name, and his voice was flat, almost disappointed. He stood slowly, lowering his blade hand, and the mythological strangeness of him began to evaporate. The scar across his forehead was almost invisible in the gloom and his expression was unreadable. The loops of silver that pierced the cartilage of each ear weren’t noticeable, and the coal-black kaysev tattoos running up both arms were covered by his canvas coat. He almost looked like an ordinary man. “What do you want?”

“I’m sorry about Sammi.”

Dor barely acknowledged her words. A faint lift of his chin, that was all. She knew he had decided long ago that his daughter would be safer sheltering at the school than here in the Box with him. Few people knew about Sammi: her very existence was something that could be used against him. So long as his foes believed he cared for nothing and no one, he was invulnerable.

Dor never spoke of her, and neither, by tacit agreement, had Smoke or Cass. If the Rebuilders discovered that they had Dor’s daughter, the entire balance of power shifted, and the Box could be theirs for the price of a single life. Getting her back was key to keeping all of them safe. But Cass knew that Dor wasn’t thinking about strategy now, that his mind was filled only with Sammi, with his fears for her and his rage at her abductors.

Cass pressed on. “Smoke says he’s going.”

“I told him not to,” Dor said, then added in a tone only fractionally less cold, “if that matters to you.”

“And yet he’s going anyway.”

“You want him to stay.”

Cass shrugged. Of course she did…what did he think? She was a woman with a child; Smoke was more than just a body in the night—he was also a layer of safety. It should have gone without saying.

“You think he should stay.” The same question in different words, or something else entirely? Dor did not invite her farther into the room, and she was aware of the space between them, of the still air that was even colder, if that were possible, than outdoors.

“Of course he should stay,” she snapped. She needed him. But what she said instead was: “What can he accomplish? Even if he finds them, if he tracks them down, they’re not going to be alone. They’re not going to be unprepared—”

“Don’t underestimate him,” Dor interrupted. “If I were a betting man, I’d bet on him.”

It was the rock slide, of course. The legend. Three Rebuilders dead, and Smoke untouched, not a hair on his head lost, while the two who fought at his side were dead. It almost didn’t matter that it was true. Cass had heard the story retold a dozen times over a dozen late-night fires and sometimes it was twice that number dead, and sometimes Smoke took a bullet and kept on fighting, and once he had sliced off their ears as trophies and wore them on a cord around his neck.

“He’s just a man,” Cass said bitterly. “Lucky once. No one’s lucky twice, not Aftertime.”

For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Dor bent and folded his chair carefully and leaned it against the wall, where Cass noticed twin marks in the paint. So, he left the chair in the same place each time. Glancing around the room she saw something she’d missed at first—there was no dust, no dirt. Dor kept this place clean. She wasn’t surprised—anyone could see from his office that he was a fastidious man. She wondered what that said about him, what flaws or virtues it bespoke, what history it maybe whitewashed, and then she put that out of her mind and followed him from the room, a place she suspected she had defiled for him merely by her presence there.




07


THEY WALKED, EACH OF THEM KEEPING WATCH in the way every citizen had learned to keep watch. It was like breathing after a while: you were only aware of your own constant vigilance when you stopped. By now Cass doubted whether there was anyone alive in California who hadn’t seen a Beater. And seeing one, even once, was enough to change you forever.

“You know about Rolph,” Dor said after a while.

Cass nodded. Everyone knew about Rolph, a quiet man who’d arrived a few weeks back, traded everything in his meager pack for a bottle of cheap rum, drank it fast and stumbled out of the Box at dusk to piss on a wall across the street. For reasons no one would ever know, he wandered the wrong way; even drunk, his screams carried far into the Box half an hour later.

“There’s going to be more like him. A lot more.”

“Some people say it’s going to be better now that the days are getting shorter. You know, because there’s less daylight.”

“Don’t believe it.”

Cass didn’t, though she knew why people clung to that particular hope. In the early stages of the disease, right after the initial fever, the pupils began to shrink, and kept on shrinking until, by the time the thing that used to be human was chewing its own flesh off, those eyes let in only a tiny amount of light. Beaters were blind when the sun went down, clumsy at dawn and dusk. Even at high noon you’d sometimes see them staring up at the sky as though they were trying to absorb all the light they could, as though they couldn’t get enough, as though they would swallow down the entirety of the sun if they could.

On a recent sleepless night, Cass’s restive mind had spun a dream-image of the sun sinking down to the earth. The great golden globe came to rest in a field, and the Beaters stopped what they were doing and ran toward it, throwing themselves at it—at its trillions of watts of light—swarming with the same fevered passion that they attacked the living.

Their hunger was insatiable. A Beater feasting on its victim made sounds of such sensual release that they almost sounded sexual; a Beater denied would throw itself against walls and fences until it bled, unmindful of the pain in its longing and need. In Cass’s dream, the Beaters—all the Beaters in the world—raced toward the light, plunging into the million degrees of the fire, flaming and dying in the ecstasy of their need. They were incinerated to nothing, their bones burned to powder that floated away on brilliant flames, the sun flickering only for a moment before it blazed down again as it had for all time.

If only.

But even then it would not be over. Because as long as the blueleaf strain of kaysev grew, as long as some citizen somewhere mistook the furled and tinted leaves for the ordinary kaysev and ate it, more would be infected, and more would die.

“Here’s what you have to understand, Cass,” Dor said. “People believe what they want to believe. They always have, and they always will. They want to believe the Beaters will go away. So the mind keeps coming up with ways. You’ve probably heard as many theories as I have.”

She had: the Beaters would age out. They would turn on each other. The first hard freeze would kill them. They would go to the ocean, like lemmings, a plague of them following the summons of God.

Still, Dor’s cynicism rankled. Cass had little hope, but she had the decency to pretend, for others’ sakes. She couldn’t help thinking that he, of all people—a leader, a benefactor even, if a reluctant one—ought to do the same. People listened to him. People cared what he thought.

“People say crazy things, yeah, but isn’t it just as irrational to always expect the worst?” she challenged him.

“Come on,” Dor muttered, “you don’t really think that.”

A moment later, though, he stopped, putting a hand on her arm, turning her so she had to look up at him. “Cass.”

In the twilight Dor’s eyes looked even darker. He was half a foot taller than she was, and her gaze fell to his throat, his collarbones, to the twisted fronds of the tattoo that wound around his arms and shoulders and almost met under the hollow of his throat. In this moment he seemed returned to that larger-than-life, invulnerable avatar. He was so close that she imagined she breathed the same air he did, and—trick of the moment—her lungs seemed to expand, to want to drink in more. From where the errant impulse came, she had no idea. Something visceral and instinctive, nothing more than a sensory trigger. She stepped back, trying to get away from the marked air.

She had come for Smoke. She had come to ask Dor to change Smoke’s mind.

But Dor pulled her closer, his fingers closing tight around her arm. “There are things you need to know. Things are going to get worse before they get better—if they ever get better, which seems unlikely.”

“I know,” Cass whispered fiercely. “I’ve seen what’s left of the stores. I see what the travelers bring. I know that all the easy raids are long gone. And…”

She didn’t say the last: that there were fewer travelers and more Beaters all the time. People blamed it on all kinds of things: people were waiting out winter before they ventured out; or they had heard that the Convent had locked down; or they were afraid of Rebuilder parties; or they had gone in the other direction, to the bigger cities. The blueleaf, which had appeared to be on the wane, had merely been hibernating, and those not trained to look for the subtly shaded leaves could too easily mistake it for its benign cousin.

The words slipped out before she could stop herself: “How could you let Smoke go out into that?”

Dor shocked her by laughing, a short, bitter sound. “Woman, do you think I control what your man does? You think I control what any man does? Far as I know, it’s still free will around here.”

Cass recoiled, wrenching her arm free. “He does what you ask him.”

“I never asked him to go after anyone. And definitely not that crew. I’m not in the vengeance business, sister. Only business I’m in is my own.”

“But you could ask him to stay—”

“It’s not my place.” Just like that the laughter was gone, his expression stony. “Not my place, or anyone else’s. He’s a grown man who set his way, and paid his accounts through already.”

“You could—influence him. That’s all I’m asking.”

“No,” he said emphatically. “You think that’s what you want, Cass, but you don’t. Not really. You start trying to change someone, you lose them. Smoke’s doing what he has to do. What he needs to do. You get in the way of that, he’ll just resent you, until the day it builds up in him so strong he goes anyway and with a bitter taste in his mouth. He’ll blame you. You don’t need that.”

Cass forced herself to breathe, blinked away the threat of tears. “Ruthie needs him,” she whispered. “I need him.”

“No.” Dor shook his head. “You don’t. You’ve come this far without him. Survived things no one else survived. Done things most people would say are impossible.”

His gaze flicked across her face, lingering on her eyes, which she knew were different since she’d survived the fever—brighter, greener. Smoke wouldn’t have told him her terrible secret, that she’d been attacked and lived—would he? Dor’s tone was almost admiring, which gave her pause. The man had never had any use for her…had he? From the moment they met there had been wariness between them, distrust and dislike.

“You don’t need him,” Dor repeated. “And believing you do is giving your strength away. I don’t have to tell you that between your girl and yourself, you don’t have any extra to spare.”

He hesitated, then reached for her hand. He squeezed it once, roughly, then slid his hand up her arm to let it rest on her shoulder. The gesture was awkward—she could sense that Dor meant it to be a comfort. But it was not. It was something both more and less, something needful, and he must have felt it too because he jerked his hand away as though the touch burned him.

“Stay in the Box,” he muttered, turning away. “Don’t worry about trade. Everything’s covered. In the spring when your garden comes up you’ll be producing enough to share. I’ll set it all up. I’ll make sure you have what you need.”

“You’re leaving, too,” Cass said, realization dawning on her. “You’re going to Colima. You’re going to look for Sammi.”

Of course—she should have known it from the moment Smoke told her what happened at the library. Cass herself had risked everything to find Ruthie, so why did the notion of Dor doing the same for his daughter fill her with such bleak hopelessness? And when Dor nodded, jaw set hard, it seemed as though the air got even colder.

“You won’t be alone. Cass, I’ll tell Faye. I’ll tell Charles. They’ll look after you. I’ll send word if I can, and so will Smoke. We’ll both be back…you need to have more faith in him. He beat them once already—there’s no reason he can’t do it again. He’s well armed and well trained.”

“Your training,” Cass said bitterly. “Your guns.”

As if that made Dor responsible.

A disproportionate number of the citizens who’d survived this long had done so because they had a strong desire for self-preservation along with the skills to back it up. Skills that came from time spent in law enforcement, or in the service or jail or a gang. Dor’s forces were all ex-something—ex-cop, ex-Marine, ex-Norteño…all except for Smoke.

Smoke had told Cass only that he’d been an executive coach Before, and didn’t elaborate in the months they’d been together, always deflecting her questions, turning the conversation elsewhere. Cass hadn’t pushed; she wasn’t ready to tell him everything about her own past, so she hardly felt entitled to demand the same from him.

Smoke’s background may have been inauspicious for survival, much less commanding Box security, but he had some penchant for enduring—plus the legend of the rock slide, which was enough to earn the respect of the others. He’d been a decent shot before joining their ranks; now he was excellent. He’d been fit; now he was hard-muscled and lean. When Smoke slipped out of the tent before dawn to shoot at cans or practice strikes with Joe or put his body through ever-harder workouts, Cass tried to tell herself, He is doing this for us, for our little family, and ignore the fact that he was turning from someone she hadn’t known long into someone she didn’t know well.

“Look, Cass.” Dor looked as though he was going to reach for her again and Cass shrank away from him. “He asked me not to say anything. He’s leaving tonight. He’s… He didn’t want to have to say goodbye.”

Cass made a sound in her throat. Smoke wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t leave without telling her—would he? Smoke, who’d grown more silent with every passing week, whose mind drifted a thousand miles away. Who reached for her less and less often in the night.

“He didn’t want to hurt you more than he had to. I don’t—if he…he just didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Well, it’s a little late for that, isn’t it? He knew damn well he was hurting me—us—he just wasn’t brave enough to stick around and watch.”

She didn’t bother to mask her bitterness, biting her lip hard to keep her angry tears from spilling. She expected Dor to turn away from her, that having tried to mollify her, he would consider his duty done and return his attentions to his own problems, his own imminent journey.

But Dor did not look away, and Cass, whose despair made her want to hit and kick and scream, forced herself instead to think of Ruthie. She thought of her baby and took deep breaths and dug her fingers into her palms until it hurt, until she could speak without her voice breaking.

“It’s time to go back,” she said.

Dor scanned the distant hills, the streets to the right and left. They both listened; there were no moans, no faint cries, no snuffling or snorting. Only the wind, dispirited and damp, made its way down the street, identified by the signpost at the corner of the sidewalk as Oleander Lane. The sign still stood, all that was left of the oleanders that had died the first time a missile containing a biological agent microencapsulated on a warhead built on specs stolen from at least three separate countries came hurtling into the airspace above California at thirteen hundred miles per hour and struck a patch of earth in the central valley, taking out every edible crop for hundreds of miles and quite a few more that were good for nothing but looking pretty.



Even though Dor had warned her that Smoke was leaving, the stillness of the tent reached into Cass’s throat and stole her breath so that she had to grab the edge of the dresser to keep from collapsing. The evidence of Smoke’s absence was subtle but, for one who knew this small space as well as she did, unmistakable. His pack was missing from the bedpost there. His coat—there. He kept his shoes, both the boots and the lightweight hikers, lined up under the foot of the bed, but only the hikers remained.

The photograph of the three of them—the Polaroid Smoke had bought with four cans of chili—was missing from its frame. Cass stared at the frame, an ornate gilt one from a raid—it now held only the stock image of two random dark-haired little girls, laughing as they went down a slide.

Smoke hadn’t even bothered to take the old picture out. The little girls who were long gone now, dead from fever or starvation. Or perhaps they had been victims of the Beaters, their flesh flensed from their bones, left to rot in some garden or forgotten back room. Or the evil of humanity in cold times reached up and took them. Suddenly she was so angry she had to hurt something, had to break something, if only to release a little of the fury from her body. Smoke had left Cass a picture of loss, a reminder of the anonymous grief all around. She picked up the frame—heavy, expensive—and threw it on the ground. But it bounced on the soft rug and didn’t break, so she seized the heavy pewter cup from the table and slammed it into the frame’s glass, splintering and breaking and crushing, sending the shards flying. Cass brought the cup down again and again until she’d smashed dents in the wood and bloodied her fingers, and then she lay down with her face in the carpet and sobbed. She didn’t bother to muffle the sound; people cried here every day. Crying was nothing to anyone who might hear. Her pain was nothing to them. She cried until her throat was raw and her eyes swollen and then she lay still, and when she lifted her head the tent was nearly dark and she lit a candle and spent a long time picking bits of glass from the rug before she left to collect Ruthie from Coral Anne, to fetch her baby because it was going to be just the two of them again in the world, alone for always.



But the morning awoke in her a new resolve. Without Smoke, she had to focus on Ruthie, on creating the best possible world for her daughter from the ruins she’d been given to work with. With Smoke beside her, Cass had been able to make a home of the Box, a family from its battered and motley residents. But now that he was gone, the place’s shortcomings were stark and untenable. The atmosphere of desperation, the leering old men and twitchy hopped-up scavengers. The fact that the only other child here was a shadow-boy, a damaged, elusive little hustler. How much longer would they be welcome here?

Ruthie stirred against her, dream-restless. Cass lay still, reluctant to disturb Ruthie as her resolve took shape. There was no joy to it; her purpose was doleful and raw, but it was better than being empty.

She waited for Ruthie to wake up, considering her new intention, watching the sun color the sky pale blue through the tent’s open window. Yesterday’s bone-deep chill was a memory, practically an impossibility. She was warm under blankets, Ruthie even warmer, her sweet face pressed against the soft cotton of Cass’s sleep shirt. She thought about her plan and it took shape and grew until it seemed to Cass impossible that any other would do.

Ruthie woke and smiled when she discovered that she was in her mama’s bed. She had not spoken again since yesterday’s dream, and Cass wondered if she might have imagined it. But no: Ruthie had said bird. Cass doubted she meant the sparrows that pecked for bits in the dining area. The little brown birds were unremarkable, but other species were coming back. Maybe Ruthie had spotted a redbird or a hawk—something more noteworthy, anyway, than the flock of tiny scavengers.

“Good morning, sugar-sweet,” Cass whispered and covered Ruthie’s forehead and nose with kisses while her daughter laughed without making a sound, her shoulders shaking.

Then it was a matter of choosing their warmest, sturdiest clothes before the two of them went to find Dor to tell him they were going with him.




08


“I MEAN TO GO ALONE,” HE SAID. CASS HAD FOUND him in his trailer, sitting at his desk with a steaming travel mug of coffee, morning sunlight slanting off the tidy surfaces of the cramped space, staring at a spreadsheet on the monitor that was nearly always on. Dor powered his computer with the compact generator that hummed beneath the trailer, and Smoke said he kept digital inventories, as well as some sort of forecasting software and other programs Smoke could only guess at.

Dor had offered her a chair, and Cass had taken it, grateful to be off her feet, Ruthie heavy and dozing in her arms. He’d been pro forma friendly until she’d stated her intentions.

“I can help you. I can give you a reason to be there, in the Rebuilder settlement. One they won’t question.”

“And what’s that?” Dor didn’t bother to mask his skepticism.

“I’m an outlier,” Cass said, pulling up her sleeves to reveal the faint scars still on her forearms. “I was bitten and taken by the Beaters. And I recovered. And the Rebuilders know it. They want me for my immunity.”

After staring at her with a preternatural calm for what felt like forever, Dor spoke softly, like a man who’d just had confirmation that his lover was stepping out on him. “It was your green eyes…yours and Ruthie’s. I’ve never seen eyes like that, so deep and bright.”

Deeply pigmented irises: a distinctive mark of the recovered. In her time in the compound, Cass had caught Dor staring at her a few times, and felt her skin burn at his scrutiny, though he always looked away so quickly that she wondered if she might have imagined it.

Cass often found herself doubting so many of her own perceptions. So much was lost to her damaged memory. And the rest of her that did remember certainly didn’t want to. But now she filled Dor in on the details, leaving out only the existence of Nora.

Almost four months ago, Cass had woken, disoriented and badly scarred from a Beater attack she could not remember, in a field far from any shelter. She had wandered for weeks, walking at night to avoid the cannibals, hiding during the day, her confusion slowly dissipating, until a young girl had attacked her, thinking she was a Beater. But Cass got her blade away and used her as a hostage to gain entry to the school where the girl and her mother sheltered.

The young girl was Sammi. Long before Cass ever glimpsed Dor’s tall brooding form, his inky, depthless eyes, she had made a promise she never expected to have to keep: to find Sammi’s father and tell him his daughter was safe. She had done at least that, and she counted on him to remember that favor now, when she needed him.

Smoke had been at the school, and he had volunteered to escort Cass to the Silva public library several miles away, the last place Cass had lived before the attack. At the time, she didn’t understand how she had recovered, but her only focus was finding her daughter. Discovering that Ruthie had been sent away from the library to the Convent in San Pedro had devastated Cass, but a more immediate problem was that the library had become a Rebuilder stronghold. Its leader, Evangeline, had learned that Cass was an outlier. She said there were a few other outliers like herself, but that they didn’t have enough research subjects yet; the Rebuilders were working on a vaccine and they needed Cass for research and study.

Cass suspected there was more to the story. Evangeline had planned to send Smoke to their detention center in Colima as punishment for his part in the rock slide battle. She didn’t bother to mask her hatred for Smoke, and she barely bothered to conceal her antipathy for Cass despite promising her safety. When one of the men in the shelter helped Cass and Smoke escape, Cass was sure she’d escaped imprisonment in the Rebuilder headquarters, and possibly worse.

“So you know, even if no one there recognizes you from the Box, you’ll be at a disadvantage,” Cass argued, searching Dor’s grim expression for any sign he might acquiesce. “You’ll be just another recruit, with hardly any more status than the people they convert by force from the shelters. I might be able to get more privileges. More access.”

For another long moment Dor said nothing. He didn’t look away, and Cass felt like he was calculating odds and dangers she could only guess at, as though he ran spreadsheets through his mind even when he wasn’t staring at his screens, always focusing on a bottom line that even the end of the world could not erase for him.

“It would be better if we knew exactly what your immunity is worth to them,” Dor finally said, and Cass allowed herself a tiny sigh of relief. It had worked—she had given him something he could understand, a problem presented in the language he was most comfortable with: she could be bartered.

“Yes.”

“And Ruthie…”

“She’s an outlier, too.” Cass didn’t think she could bear to tell him that story—the one before the Convent—of Ruthie being bitten, of the kindness of the woman who nursed her back to health during Cass’s lost months and fever days. “But Evangeline doesn’t know. She doesn’t know about her at all. No one told her, even when Smoke and I were locked up in the library.”

“So how are you going to explain showing up in Colima with her?”

Cass had prepared an answer for that, but she found that it was harder than she anticipated to get the words out. She took a deep breath and rushed through the rest. “We have to say Ruthie’s yours. That she’s your daughter. We have to say that you and I are…you know. Together. All of us. That we met on the road after I left the library, and we’ve been together ever since.”

Dor’s expression barely changed. There was a darkening of his eyes, perhaps, a slight downward pull at the corners of his mouth.

“And why would you be willing to do all of this for me? The risk goes up with every lie you tell.”

“You have it all wrong,” Cass said quietly. “I’m not doing any of this for you. You’re just our ticket to leave San Pedro. I’m not coming with you so much as leaving here. Because there’s nothing left for us here. Ruthie needs to live where there are other children, other…families. And the Box is dying—I can see that.”

Dor nodded as though her answer made perfect sense. “As long as your expectations are realistic. I mean, there is going to be less for everyone, everywhere, and no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to be able to outrun that fact. You’re stuck here, in what’s left of the West. Those lunatics trying to hold the Rockies—they shoot on sight, so that’s not an option.”

“I never said I wanted to go East.” The blueleaf fever that spawned Beaters after the Siege had been limited to California at first, the only state to have spread the mutant seed along with the kaysev that was meant as manna to save and nourish survivors. In a panic that the Beaters would spread across the continent, an increasingly organized army had claimed a boundary along the Rockies, and no traveler who ventured there returned to tell about it. Perhaps because of the barrier, the East had come to symbolize salvation for some.

Cass was not tempted. She would take her chances here, in the ragged remains of California. Somewhere, there had to be a place for her and Ruthie.

“You sound like you’ve lost hope,” she accused.

He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not without hope. I’m just limiting it to me and mine. There will be enough for me and for the people I care about in this lifetime, if I’m strategic about it. It’s not my job to worry about everyone else or any other time.”

“And who exactly do you care about?” Cass tried and failed to mask her anger. She was uncomfortably conscious of her hypocrisy, but she didn’t admit that she had had the very same sort of thoughts herself: Let there be enough for Ruthie—let everyone else starve.

“Sammi. I care about Sammi. And I care about my people. When I’m with them, anyway.” He looked away, his gaze troubled and unreadable.

“What do you mean?” Cass waited, but she could sense Dor pulling away, following the spiral of his thoughts to a bitter place. She couldn’t let him. She had to keep him here, feeling what she was feeling, if there was any chance for her to convince him to take her and Ruthie with him. “Tell me…please.”

For a moment Dor said nothing, straightening the stack of papers on the desk until it was perfectly uniform.

“As long as I’m with them I care, but I don’t know how I’ll feel when I’m away. Faye, Joe, Three-High, Feo—all of them, they…mean something to me.” He glanced at her and then quickly away. “Even Gloria. You may not believe me, but I was really sorry when she died. But three years ago I had an assistant—her name was Melissa. She kept my calendar, brought me coffee. Slept with me sometimes. I know that sounds bad, and I’m not asking for your approval—but Melissa and I were good for each other. I think I might have been closer to her than I was to my wife, at the time.”

Cass murmured encouragement. She was always surprised when people assumed that she’d judge them. Cass didn’t feel qualified to judge anyone after the things she’d done, the straits she’d found herself in.

“I don’t know where she is now, of course—but honestly, even before this year we’d lost touch. I mean, I sincerely hope she found happiness, but it never seemed like something worth pursuing. And there’ve been others. My ex-wife’s family, I cared about them, once. Considered her brother to be like my own for a while. Couple guys I went to college with. My uncle Zed, when I was growing up and my old man wasn’t around much. All these people…”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing the skin as though it hurt. “I’m not trying to be…anything, really. Not cruel or cold. But all these people, they meant something to me, and now they’re gone, and I’d be lying if I said I spent time worrying about them other than the odd thought that comes along. Who can say why? What I’m trying to tell you, Cass—I’m not a person who keeps people close. Those feelings don’t stick to me, not the way they do for other people. But still. I love my daughter. I love Sammi.”

Cass heard the pain in Dor’s voice, and believed him. She guessed that he was one of those men who had only started learning to love when his daughter was born, and was still a beginner in many ways. Was it possible that was as far as he was ever meant to get? If the Siege had never happened, Dor would have continued on indefinitely, trading and dealing, building his financial empire, people coming and going from his life with little thought or consequence.

But Cass had seen Dor in his solitary room. Seen the humble folding chair, stored carefully against the wall. The window from which he watched the world. His exile did not feel chosen, to Cass, but more like a cast-off coat one wears to keep from freezing to death, ill-fitting and unfamiliar.

“I want you to know that,” he murmured, not meeting her eyes. “If you’re really determined to come with me. You can’t expect to mean anything to me. You say there’s nothing for you here. Maybe, maybe not…you’ve made some friends. You have your work, your garden. Safety for Ruthie. I know you probably believe…that you owe something to someone. Other people helped you get Ruthie back, so now maybe you think you have to settle some sort of cosmic debt, that you have to help me get Sammi. But you don’t. I don’t need you. And I won’t thank you. And I won’t care about you. I mean it, Cass—I’ll never care about you.”

Cass nodded and turned away from him. “That’s the way I want it,” she said with as much conviction as she could muster, and wondered which of them was telling the greater lie.

She asked him one favor—to tell no one she and Ruthie were going. She didn’t want to go through explanations and goodbyes. Cass knew this was cowardice, but she also knew she had only so much strength for the journey, and she was not about to start spending it before they even left.

They would leave in the morning. Dor was gathering his security team late in the evening to make plans for running the Box in his absence. By now they must have noticed that Smoke was gone; the Box was not a big place, and it was his habit to check in at the gate late in the afternoon and again after dinner. Cass wondered if anyone would really expect him to return. The probability that fate would turn in his favor, that he would be able to locate the band of Rebuilders who’d burned the school, that he’d take out enough of them to satisfy the blood-longing he carried and survive—these were not favorable odds, and surely they would all know it.

Dor would tell them that he would return soon, also. This, they might believe. People in the Box—both employees and customers—tended to consider him larger than life. In part, this was due to his elusiveness, the way you rarely saw him in the busy paths or eating areas or market stands, but often glimpsed him at the back of gatherings, at twilight or dawn, coming and going from errands he never explained. He met with them one-on-one and in small groups, and his power went unquestioned, but he stayed out of the din and hubbub of the Box for the most part, rarely partaking in the card games and never, that anyone knew, the comfort tents.

Dor was well regarded and even liked by his employees. Certainly he had their loyalty. But Cass suspected that few, other than Smoke, really knew him. In fact, she was pretty sure that few of them even knew he had a daughter, since he never talked about Sammi and had paid his scouts well to check in on the library occasionally and keep their reports confidential.

Dor had proved astonishingly good at procuring things. He traded shrewdly and paid close attention to the needs and desires of his clientele, and when there was a need, he went to great lengths to see it met. When his stores of liquor dipped, he hand-selected a couple of enterprising guys, friends from Before, and turned them into winemakers. He set them up with a yeast starter, knowing that the arms he traded for it were worth far less than the alcohol they’d eventually produce. In an abandoned San Pedro microbrewery he found them carboys and vinyl hose and air locks, and they were teaching themselves to make fairly palatable wine from kaysev.

He’d found marijuana seeds so that Cass could start cultivating them in her garden. Cass was happy to have the challenge and she’d brushed off Smoke’s worries that a recovering alcoholic shouldn’t work in the drug business: to her, the tiny seedlings were just another plant, another tiny miracle, evidence of life’s return.

Dor had even found an old-fashioned four-sided leather strop somewhere, and paid Vincent to sharpen his straight razor with it twice a week so he could indulge his single vanity, a regular and close shave.

All of this added up to an unspoken belief that somehow Dor was immune to ordinary dangers and limitations, and if he announced that it was to the Rebuilders’ stronghold he was trekking, people would assume he had trading in mind. No one would expect him to fail, despite the Rebuilders’ reputation for brutality and one-sided negotiation techniques. Dor was crafty and he was wily, and people would assume he would trade well and come back richer.

No one would know that what he really meant to trade for was his daughter.

Cass had her doubts. Smoke had told her that the arsenal was scrupulously guarded and locked down. There were hidden, off-site stores, but he and Dor continually worried that their supply of ammunition was low, and travelers barely brought weapons to trade anymore. There was talk of trying to forge makeshift bullets, but Dor had yet to find the materials they would need.

So Dor would not be able to trade weapons for Sammi. Also, the Rebuilders were rumored to be drug-and alcohol-free, by mandate of their leaders, and though Cass knew that there would always be a black market for a high, Dor would not be able to make an open trade for his daughter. In fact, any dealing they did would have to be illicit, because no one ever left the Rebuilders once they had joined. And there was no way to visit their headquarters other than by pledging loyalty. It was dangerous, circular logic that the Rebuilders employed in defense of their recruiting practices—once a citizen experienced the security they offered, there would be no reason to leave. And if anyone tried? Well, that was proof that they were imbalanced and guilty of threatening the cohesion of the new society. Guilty of sedition, to be precise. And that was a crime the Rebuilders would not brook.

All of this, Cass suspected, added up to be sufficient reason for Dor to accept her offer to accompany him. That—and Cass was not entirely convinced he meant to return to the Box. She knew that he and Smoke had been discussing the possibility that life in Aftertime was about to get several orders worse. Beaters, driven into town by hunger and cold, were growing more desperate and aggressive—and more cunning—so dispiriting losses would continue to mount. Stores were getting thin, raids deadlier, the weather inhospitable. The Box’s bounty would be depleted before spring as trades became scarcer and meaner. Smoke had confided his fears that frequent fights would break out, that the loose system of justice would have to become more rigid, that the chain-link drunk tank in the corner of the Box might have to be upgraded into a true jail. Danger and fear would grow inside the Box’s borders until eventually the dangers within would just be of a different kind than the ones outside.

Cass had been Dor’s observer as long and as attentively as anyone save Smoke. Their unspoken animosity was a thorn that always stung, whether she glimpsed him watching her, hands in pockets, as she tended her garden or whether he stopped by their tent in the evening after dinner and asked with exaggerated courtesy if he might borrow Smoke for a few minutes, minutes that inevitably turned into hours of discussion to which she was not privy. Cass told herself that she resented Dor for taking Smoke’s time away from her, but she knew that Smoke went willingly and that he needed the intense focus of his job. She just didn’t know why, and it was convenient and easy to blame Dor…but now that she was entering into her own bargain with the man, it was time for truth only, even—especially—with herself.

Dor was leaving the Box for Sammi. He would likely go elsewhere once he found her, because staying here under deteriorating conditions ran counter to continuing to survive, and survival was something of a religion to Dor, something he did with perhaps more conviction than anyone else Cass knew. When she came here with Smoke, nearly three months back, the Box was perhaps the safest place in all of the Sierras, maybe even all of California. But now was different. Maybe the North would be better, as the Beaters migrated South. Maybe somewhere rural was safer, a farmhouse or a barn set far from the road. Maybe, for all Cass knew, Dor was considering attempting to cross the Rockies, despite his talk.

But Dor wouldn’t tell his employees anything. If there were plans forming and breaking in his mind, he would keep them to himself as he sketched his possible futures and packed for the trip.

Cass would have liked to say goodbye to Faye, and maybe Coral Anne, but she didn’t trust herself not to break down. Friends: it was ironic that it was only now, when the world she’d known had suffered horror upon horror, only weeks from her thirty-first birthday, that she finally had any to call her own. Faye, with her acerbic wit and moments of surprising compassion. Coral Anne, whose generosity ran as deep as her Texas drawl. Only now did Cass realize how much she would miss them. If she got word that Smoke had returned—if by some miracle he managed to outlast his mission of vengeance—maybe she and Ruthie would come back here and resume their life, if the Box were still viable.

Cass paused in her packing for a moment and considered the possibility, giving herself a few seconds, a miserly ration of hope. She could return with Sammi and Dor, and Smoke would be ready to settle down for good, his thirst for blood finally sated. He would set about insulating their tent; she would make stews from the rutabaga and onions she grew in the garden, and rabbits and muskrats trapped and traded. They would play cards with Coral Anne and that couple who had arrived from Livermore, the ones who hung their tent with colorful flags they’d brought with them all this way. Maybe other families with children would come—and she would convince Dor to let them stay. Sammi would help watch Ruthie; she would teach her to play cat’s cradle and in the spring they would plant zinnias and coneflowers together.

When her seconds were past, Cass took the dream and crumpled it, tossed it from her mind like it was nothing, a senseless fancy. Her pack was prepared: a couple of changes for Ruthie, extra socks and underwear for her. A tube of lanolin and one of Neosporin, taken from the safe, among their dearest possessions.

Also in the safe was a letter Smoke had given her last month. It was written on fine stationery that bore the name Whittier P. Marsstin engraved in block letters. Smoke had carefully crossed off the name on each page—all three of them—and written in the careful script of someone mindful of economy, someone who chose each word with care. They were words of love and yet he never used the word love, promises made without ever using the word promise.

Cass had practically memorized the letter, but she left it in the safe and locked it before snuffing out her candle. As she got into the bed, shivering, and enclosed Ruthie’s warm body in the safety of her arms, she imagined the words of the letter already fading from her mind, and soon the sentences and paragraphs and finally Smoke’s entire meaning would be as lost to her as the man himself.




09


SAMMI RODE IN THE BACK OF THE TRUCK WITH the others, pretending to sleep, too afraid to speak. The men who rode back there with them—when did they sleep? Because every time Sammi opened her eyes, their eyes were there, too, dark and unreadable as they waited and watched while the rest of them huddled together for warmth.

Her mother was dead. Jed was dead. Everyone who resisted—even a little—dead, dead, dead. The only reason Sammi was alive was because her mother’s last words were Go with them, Sammi—her name was still on her lips when she’d gone down, blood pouring from the slice in her neck.

Jed had earned a bullet. He’d pretended to go along, helping his brothers support their parents as they were herded up into the truck, holding them up by their arms so they wouldn’t stumble. Stumbling got you killed—at least, that was what had happened to Mrs. Levenson, who didn’t have time to get her cane when the Rebuilders burst into the burning school. She tried to keep up but she kept twisting her hip and falling, making little “oof” sounds when she landed on the ground, and the third time one of the Rebuilders had hit her on the head with his black stick and she twitched and lay still, making no sound at all. Sammi had seen the Rebuilder—a woman, how could a woman do such a thing?—wind up for the swing, and Sammi had played softball, so she knew, from the way the woman brought the stick back and around and down with a crack everyone could hear, that the force must have crushed poor Mrs. Levenson’s skull.

And that was before they were even loaded on the truck.

There had been sixteen of them, in the end. Sixteen alive and thirty-four dead or dying in the burning school. Sammi was numb with horror as the truck ground out of the parking lot and onto Highway 161. Two of the Rebuilders, both men, both young, rode in the back with them. The one with his back to the cab and another who sat on a box, flipping a blade and catching it. It was the same blade he had used on Sammi’s mom and on the others, too, the ones who tried to keep the Rebuilders out of the common room.

An older man drove, and then there was the woman—the woman who had killed Mrs. Levenson. The guard who stared at her, the one with a tiny triangle of beard and a cap with a cartoon picture of a dog embroidered on it—he had made her sit near him and Sammi wondered with a sickening feeling if it was so he could look at her. Because he just kept looking at her. Jed and his family had been made to sit on the other side of the truck bed, and Jed mouthed words at her whenever the guy on the box wasn’t looking, he said I love you and other things Sammi could not understand, and after a while her vision blurred with tears and she couldn’t see his mouth forming words. In between were the rest of the survivors. Arthur. Mr. Jayaraman. Terry and her kids. The ones who were too old, too young, or too cowardly to fight or who, like Jed’s brothers, had someone to protect.

Her mother had died trying to protect Sammi. They hadn’t even wasted a bullet on her death; they’d dropped her to the ground like a sack of garbage and stepped around the pooling blood as though it was distasteful. Her mother’s body was left behind in the burning building; Sammi hoped it burned all the way, to the bones—and that the bones burned, too. She didn’t want the birds to get to her mother’s body; she’d seen what the birds could do, the big black ones that had showed up a week ago and feasted on the carcass of a fat raccoon the raiders had caught and left out in the courtyard for skinning. Better that her mother disappear from earth as Sammi wished she herself could disappear.

Through the long night in the truck, Sammi shivered and wished she’d been killed, too. But she kept hearing her mother’s last words. Go with them. Well, she had, and she regretted it. Even in the dark she sensed the man staring at her. She knew what he wanted to do. She wished she’d done it with Jed first, because at least then Jed would have always been her first. They had talked about it, and Sammi had finally decided she wanted to and Jed had got some condoms. They just hadn’t gotten around to it. They were waiting for a night when they could be alone.

Sammi cried and felt the cold seep deeper inside her and stared at the stars. Sometimes she thought the stars were the most beautiful thing left, maybe the only beautiful thing left in the world. There were so many, it was almost like a thick and sparkling sauce had been spilled across the sky, and Sammi wondered if somewhere out there was a planet whose inhabitants hadn’t messed it up, hadn’t created their own monsters and poisons to kill themselves off.

She found her dad’s star, and almost didn’t say the words. She’d gotten used to the idea that he was dead; her mother said that it was better that way, that wishing for him to be alive was just pretending, and they didn’t have the luxury of pretending anymore; but until this night she had kept her promise. Every night she found her dad’s star and touched her nose with her fingers the way he taught her as far back as she could remember. “Who do I love best?” he used to ask and she would touch her nose with her finger because that meant Me! You love me!—but that wasn’t even the real part of it.

The real part was the star and the thing they said together. Before he left, even though Sammi was fourteen and too old for it, he would always take a break from his study and come find her, and it didn’t matter if she was watching TV, he would wait for a commercial; or if she was texting or painting her nails, whatever it was, he would wait and then they would go out on the deck and he would find the star and they would say it together. Just another way of saying I love you; she knew that now, but when she was little she had decided it had to be the same every time and so it was.

The night her dad left, his SUV packed with his stuff in the driveway, he hugged her hard and pointed to the sky and said the thing. “Never forget,” he said and kissed her nose, her forehead, and then he added, “Okay?” in a way that sounded so sad and tentative that Sammi promised after all even though she was so angry she had been planning to refuse.

Tonight she almost broke her promise because he’d left her and died, and now her mom had died and she was alone, and if that wasn’t his fault, well, she didn’t exactly know who else to blame. So she wasn’t going to say it.

But there the star was, as bright and yellow as it had ever been, and the man stared and she couldn’t see Jed and she wished she was dead…but she whispered the words:

“Star bright, you and me always.”

A few minutes later they stopped the truck so everyone could pee and the man with the beard, the one who stared, jumped to the ground and took them to the side of the road one at a time while the knife man watched everyone else, and when it was Jed’s turn, all three brothers jumped up and attacked the guard who’d killed her mother and broke his neck before the old man and the woman shot them. The Rebuilders wrapped the body of the dead guard in a tarp and lashed it to the top of the cab. They left Jed and his brothers lying facedown on the ground. And the rest of the way Jed’s mother screamed and Sammi was silent and knew she’d never keep any promise again.




10


DOR SCALED THE FENCE ONE LAST TIME, HIS movements quick and practiced, the calluses on his hands almost numb to the wire cutting his flesh. It was important that no one see him go. People would read things into his departure, and that could lead to trouble—looting and fighting, the kinds of things that happened when too many people shared too small a space with no one in charge. If all went well, there would be a general announcement, tomorrow, when Faye and Three-High and Joe and Sam and the rest could control the message, when they could reassure everyone that nothing was wrong, that Dor would soon be back.

He dropped to the ground and melted into the darkness quickly and quietly, and if anyone had been nearby watching they would have had a hard time guessing who had slipped past them in the moonlight.

The meeting had gone well enough. Lying to his team had become both easier and harder as the weeks had turned into months and this thing he started in the spring had grown into the community it was now, in the middle of November, two seasons and thousands of trades later.

The way Dor figured, every trade changed the Box in some small and fundamental way, shifting people’s personal equations of need and loss and rebalancing the entire community’s measures of hope and satiety. He believed that he was doing good, perhaps the most good it was possible to do in these times. But he had also never felt more alone. The more he was respected, the more he was admired, the further away—the more incomprehensible—other people seemed. And being in their midst didn’t help. Paradoxically, the only thing that helped was utter solitude.

He had never shared these thoughts. No, they had formed and refined in private, up in the quiet of the apartment building, as he watched the sun set over the Sierras, the one view that—in the moments when the blazing red light at the horizon obscured the silhouette of the naked dead trees—still looked like Before. He loved to let the burning last rays of daylight blind him, loved the warmth on his face, and most of all he loved forgetting—even for a moment—that he was responsible for so much. He had never meant to let people rely on him, to look up to him the way they had.

At first it was the old instinct that drove him, to buy cheap and sell dear, to work the deal—and yes, perhaps, on occasion the sleight of hand, the scam—to chase the excitement of being the fastest, shrewdest, richest. Before, his clients were never the point—the deal itself was all he cared about. In the columns of numbers were wide-open spaces, races to be run, scrimmages to be played out. His investments quivered and bobbed like skittish ponies, and so what if it was all artificial, he loved the game. Dor played his clients’ money like a conductor coaxing a tremulous crescendo from a woodwind section, relying on instinct as much as skill, chasing the high that came from nailing the trade, so much sweeter when he’d gambled big.

But the currency of the Box had somehow gotten away from him, so that in between the small comforts and cheap highs he dealt favors and forgiveness and loans and compassion. All of it anonymously, with only his most trusted employees acting as his agents, and it came at a cost: Dor had to be ever vigilant, aware of everything going on in every corner. He couldn’t afford to slip; he had to stay strong and resolute to lead and shape the Box because, aside from him, there was no steadying standard for society. There was no system, as there had been Before, to self-regulate.

Dor had a final errand to run, but it wasn’t to the apartment. He’d said goodbye to that place earlier, and if his thoughts had been truncated by Cass’s unexpected arrival, that was all right. An unaccustomed lapse in vigilance, the cause of which did not bear considering—worry for Sammi, no doubt, when he could afford no worry.

When he returned—if he returned—there would be time to mark any deterioration of his little community and repair what he could. He supposed that it would take some time to mend things with Sammi, as well. Teenagers were moody—hell, even before the Siege Sammi’d shown signs of pushing him away, and she’d been acting up at school. Last year she was passed over for varsity softball and suspended over something she supposedly wrote in the margins of an Algebra test.

Was he to blame? Jessica would have had him think so; but she blamed him for everything. Never mind that she kept the beautiful home in the mountains, the cars and clothes and club memberships. It wasn’t enough. The dissatisfied look he’d seen on her face since before Sammi was born—it was there, etched deeper than ever. He hadn’t made her happy. If he was honest, it had been years since he’d even tried.

Ever since the divorce, Dor was the absent parent, the weekend visitor, the bringer of gifts and the merchant of affections, bargaining for his daughter’s attentions. He wasn’t the first man to make that bitter trade, and he accepted it as his due, for leaving them. He’d tried to appease Jessica by padding her support checks, paying the lawn service ahead, covering her insurance for the year. He’d learned to manage his ex-wife and daughter as well as could be expected, and now that Jessica was gone he would learn to manage Sammi again, once they were safe. Maybe the Box wouldn’t be such a bad place for them to get their footing…for a few days she would be a novelty, but his staff were loyal, and they would pick up on his cues and accept her and…hell, maybe she and Cass would form a friendship, maybe Sammi could help her in the garden. Maybe Cass could tutor her, if they could round up some textbooks. It wouldn’t have to be Cass, of course; Coral Anne had taught third grade, or James—he’d coached girls’ softball in high school. Well. Those were details. And Dor knew better than to start focusing on details when the job at hand was still the big picture.

Big picture: things in Colima would go one of three ways. Easily, in which case they would soon be back here. Disastrously, in which case he would die, and presumably others as well, since failure was only an option after exhausting every other one. Or—and this was, of course, the most likely possibility—with difficulty and complications, starting over somewhere new if they got to start over at all. Each deviation from the plan, each small misstep or change of direction, would spiral outward in increasing magnitude, exacting changes he could not predict. A minor glitch could change the course of the entire operation, and this was what seized at Dor’s calm, what impelled him out into the night when he should be resting up for tomorrow.

He walked quickly along the dark street, arcing his flashlight beam expertly, his strides long and sure. He had no particular destination in mind; he purposefully emptied his mind of as much as he could and waited to be drawn by some small signal. Dor did not believe in the supernatural, in psychic energy or parapsychology or anything like that, but he acknowledged that there was a level at which events eluded the senses that he, a human, possessed. On top of that, he believed that God, the One who seemed to have turned away from this ravaged planet, kept an inattentive eye on His creation; He might return at any time.

Dor stayed on the sidewalks, passing landmarks he knew well. The moon was high and round and supplemented the light from his flashlight. There was the Laundromat with its hulking black shapes of washers and dryers silent and still through the broken windows. The Law Offices of Burris and Zieve, the sign curiously intact, gold letters inked on glass. The alley that led to a tiny restaurant where he had once taken a date, the finest restaurant in Silva, Spanish cuisine served on mismatched Limoges by pretty Portuguese sisters…they’d lit candles in iron holders in the alley and decorated it with pots of geraniums and ivy. His date had ordered flan; she’d also given wicked head. Dor didn’t remember anything else about her. Now the alley was choked with dead leaves and roof shingles, shell casings and a crushed bicycle.

Dor looked away.

They kept the close-in streets clean—picking up trash every week or so—but the farther one got from the Box the more the streets resembled the world at large, deteriorating like the set of one of those old Westerns, a ghost town. Dor walked west on Brookside, aiming more or less toward the boat dealership at the corner of Third and Industry; once he got there he would turn right and make a wide loop back to the front of the Box, where he’d enter without bothering to scale the fence. He didn’t care who knew he’d been out wandering, as long as they didn’t follow. The whole walk would take about forty-five minutes and might settle him enough to sleep, if he was lucky. On another night, he might have taken one of his private stash of Nembutals, if it got especially bad. But with what lay ahead he needed to keep his thoughts clear.

A sound off to his right put him instantly on alert. His gun was in hand in seconds, his feet planted and ready to run. It was true that most people didn’t stand a chance in the face of Beaters’ pursuit, but Dor wasn’t most people…most people didn’t train with an army sniper and members of the Coast Guard, the highway patrol and the Norteños. Dor had survived more attacks than he could count on one hand, and he refused to stop his nighttime wandering even with the knowledge that nests lay hidden every few blocks. Beaters usually stayed put at night, their vision compromised by their malfunctioning irises, which let in only a tiny amount of light; they spent the dark hours piled and entwined in their nests of fetid rags, four and five of them at a time shuddering and moaning in their sleep, writhing and slapping at each other as their fevered minds dreamed their horrific dreams.

This sound, as he stood still as stone and listened, was not a Beater’s sound. They whistled and snuffled and moaned and cried, but this was more shrill, almost a cawing. Dor walked toward it silently, a trick he’d mastered.

Around a corner past the old doughnut shop the sounds grew louder and there, in the tiled entrance of an accountant’s office, was a jerking mass of ink-black shapes. A Beater nest. And those were bodies, two of them—that was a foot there, and another, one naked and the other still wearing a boot. There was little flesh on a foot and sometimes a Beater would not bother picking it clean if it was sated. It would leave the body in the nest after tearing the flesh from the poor person’s back and buttocks and arms, the soft skin of the stomach and thighs, until later, until it was hungry again. Then, it might return to chew the tougher and leaner bits from the wrists and the face and ankles.

That’s what had happened here, Dor figured, to the pair of travelers who’d made it almost to the Box. They’d been felled in their last mile by a band of the monsters who’d dragged them to their nest and then, for reasons unknown, left them there half-ravaged while they went back out into the night.

He looked closer, squinting at the shuddering pile. There, crowding the bodies and feasting on the organs, were birds like nothing Dor had ever seen, enormous black carrion birds resembling freakish outsized crows, wings quivering and flapping in ecstasy as they feasted.

Dor watched in silence and queasy astonishment. He had seen a few varieties of birds around the Box, but nothing like this. There were people who greeted the arrival of every newly returned species with celebration. Cass was like that with her plants, and Smoke and the others took delight in bringing her seedlings and roots for her gardens, or packets of seed raided from hardware stores. Word of any animal sightings spread quickly; in the past month alone people had found small striped snakes and potato bugs and lizards, and there were even rumors of a dog who’d made a few appearances at the edge of town, skittish and scared.

But these birds had to be two feet long. Their folded black wings would be as wide as a woman’s outstretched arms. And they were hungry. He watched one tug at an intestine, unspooling a grisly length as it stepped backward and then the others fell upon the strand and ate.

Dor picked up a stone from the street and threw it, his aim sure and deadly. The stone struck one of the birds’ heads and it fell over, its wings and claws drawn up in death. The others squawked furiously and skittered backward, flapping and jumping, one or two flying up to the second floor windows.

In the inadequate light of the moon and stars, Dor could not see much of the scene before him. He shone his flashlight beam on the bodies and wished he hadn’t.

Dor had seen even more than most. He’d trained himself never to look away, to remain dispassionate in the face of horror and ruin. He’d been a baggerman, loading bodies on trucks when there was still gas to be had; he’d joined the crew that stacked and burned the dead. By then he’d moved out of the Silva house and into a friend’s vacant cabin up in Sykes, and there were no more client accounts to play with and no reliable power for his laptop, and he needed to find a way to stay busy. When they quit collecting the dead, he was among the first raiding parties, the ones who brought supplies to hospitals and nursing homes, until the hospitals and nursing homes were nothing but mausoleums themselves.

He’d waited too long. He should have gone back to Silva while he still could, but in their last phone conversation, Jessica had told him to stay away. “Sammi’s already lost you once,” Jessica said. “She can’t lose you again. I’m telling her you’ll stay there, where you’re safe. Don’t make a liar out of me, Doran. Please.”

He’d listened to Jessica and stayed. He threw himself into helping anyone in Sykes who asked, and when the weak and vulnerable had finally all died and there was nowhere else to volunteer, he set out for San Pedro, where he’d heard about a cult taking up residence in the Miners stadium. By then he’d already decided to become a trader. He talked a guy named Nolan from an A-frame down the road into coming with him, and they loaded down a shopping cart with loot from a dozen empty cabins, liquor and candy bars and sanitary pads and antifreeze and boxes of Band-Aids. They pushed the cart the few miles to Sykes in the middle of the night, a flashlight wired to the front of the cart, though they never switched it on, preferring to take their chances in the dark. Nolan had served in the Gulf, and he knew a few tricks for sheltering, which came in handy when they got to San Pedro and spent their first few nights in a little stucco house before they found the empty lot that would become the Box. Dor still thought of Nolan every time he passed that little house.

The house where he’d come back from the creek carrying a bucket of water one morning shortly after they’d arrived and found nothing left of Nolan but the piss stain on the side of the wall where the Beaters had found him.

That was a devastating sight, worse in some ways than the many dead he later saw during scavenging missions, desiccated skeletons lying in beds and slumped at tables and many, many who still hung where they’d rigged their own death ropes. He’d found the bodies of children in their mothers’ arms with holes in their skulls, and he’d smelled every taint of rot, of bodies trapped in cars and flooded basements and burned buildings. But he’d gotten through it.

He’d seen what the Beaters did, and euthanized a dozen victims who’d been unlucky enough to live through an attack. He steeled himself, and he shot them with a steady hand and a merciful heart and still was able to eat and sleep and make love afterward.

But now he looked upon two travelers who’d made it within a few blocks of safety only to be ravaged not once but twice, the remains abandoned by the Beaters only to be fought over by a species God or Nature had been careless or indifferent enough to allow to return, and Dor wondered if the balance had finally tipped to the other side, if all their work and vigilance and will to live would mean nothing, in the end, if each day or week would bring a new horror from the skies and the water and the land, and he would die as all the others had, without his daughter, without anything, and Dor turned and vomited on the street and the birds returned to their meal of carrion.




11


CASS DRESSED RUTHIE IN RED OVERALLS MEANT for a boy, with a truck appliquéd on the front. Underneath, two shirts. Over them, a parka with a soft band of fake fur edging the hood. Mittens on a cord looped through the jacket’s sleeves, and her too-tight boots were pulled on over long socks. Ruthie was too hot, but the pack was full to bursting with clothes and supplies and there was no room to stuff anything more inside.

Dor came for them in the first light of morning, before Cass expected him and she was glad, because she left the tent without having time to look around one last time. The pack on her shoulders was heavy but she was strong, her work in the garden turning her shoulders and arms sinewy and sunbrown, and though it was a poor substitute for the long runs through the foothills she’d once loved, she ran around the perimeter of the Box in the early morning when almost no one else was awake.

She was as fit as she had ever been—sober for nearly a year, her body free of any trace of the alcohol with which she had punished herself for so long. The kaysev diet seemed to do her good. The natural immunity that was the disease’s legacy kept her eyes and sinuses clear and her digestion regular. Her hair continued to grow at an astounding rate, and her nails were strong and hard and had to be trimmed constantly. Ruthie, too, was thriving, despite her silence—she’d grown an inch according to the pencil line Cass had drawn at the start of October on the bookshelf, and her molars had come in. Despite the occasionally restless night, Ruthie ate well and played energetically and these days she smiled more than she frowned.

When the curtains over the door lifted and Dor stood in the doorway silhouetted against the pale light of dawn, Cass stood, ready to go. Ruthie stared up at Dor with her usual frank appraisal. Despite the cold, Dor was dressed only in a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and he held his parka over his arm. He had not cut his hair since Cass had first seen him, and it had grown in streaked with gray among the black and now it grazed his shoulders, the ends ragged and wet from his shower. The half dozen silver loops piercing the cartilage of his ears glinted in the light of her Coleman lantern, the use of which—with its hoarded batteries—was a special-day indulgence.

“Show me your blade,” Dor commanded in a voice rusty from sleep, regarding her with an expression that suggested he was still making his mind up about the wisdom of bringing her along.

Cass’s hand went automatically to her belt, which concealed a Bowen narrow double-edged blade. It too had been a gift from Smoke, traded for in a good-natured bidding war with a few of the guards. She held it out by the silver handle, its smooth curve familiar in her hand.

Dor nodded. “That will do.”

Cass replaced it. “What if it hadn’t?” she asked. “What if you didn’t like it?”

Dor bent on one knee, and she couldn’t read his expression. He held out a hand to Ruthie, and to Cass’s surprise, her daughter slipped her hand into his and followed him from the tent.

“I would have given you mine.”



Joaquin, the early-shift guard, mumbled a sleepy greeting and opened the gate for Dor, looking at Cass and Ruthie curiously but asking no questions. They’d encountered no one else on the walk from Cass’s tent, though she knew that outside the Box two more guards patrolled, on the lookout for Beaters roused by the dawn’s light. Somewhere in the cheap cots that lined the front wall, someone moaned in their sleep, visited by some terror or regret as the buzz from the night before wore off. Elsewhere someone coughed. These were sounds one grew used to, living in quarters as close as these.

Cass had not spent a night outside the Box since escaping from the Convent with Ruthie. She stared up at the darkened stadium across the street, a string of Christmas lights drooping from the upper tier the only illumination other than a faint glow from within. Somewhere inside, in the skyboxes where the highest members of the Order lived, Mother Cora slept the sound sleep of the devout, of someone confident that there was not only a higher power but a plan in which she played a vital role. Even her disastrous mistakes could not shake her convictions: Mother Cora had been wrong about the Beaters. She had been convinced they could be healed by prayer, a theological misjudgment that came with a very high price.

Convent trade with the Box had been sharply curtailed since Cass left, with only a few furtive exchanges for cigarettes and the occasional cheap bottle of home brew. No new acolytes had been accepted; hopeful travelers were turned away at the heavily guarded and shuttered entrance—and no one had left—or been allowed to leave. Dor seemed indifferent; he had no special contempt for the Order, but he didn’t seem inclined to worry about their future, either, and his employees took their cues from him in this as in so many other things.

Cass turned away from the stadium; there was nothing there to mourn or miss. The flame of zealotry had burned out, and presumably their only prayer now was survival, as it was everywhere.

“How far?”

“Corner of Third and Dubost. Think she’ll let me carry her?”

Cass had been about to pick Ruthie up herself when Dor swung her daughter up and over his head, resting her over his shoulders as though she weighed nothing. Ruthie’s eyes widened with surprise and she dug her fingers into Dor’s hair, holding on tightly. Dor winced but didn’t complain, even as she pulled tighter.

Ruthie looked for a moment as though she might cry, but she set her mouth in a tight line and no sound escaped her. Dor walked slowly, taking care not to bounce her and after a moment she relaxed. She watched the scenery go by, her head turning this way and that, and Cass remembered that Ruthie had seen very little of the world outside. Once she relaxed and stopped gripping his hair so tightly, Dor closed his big hands around her chubby calves and moved a little faster.

Cass tried not to stare at them. Smoke, who had no children of his own, no nieces or nephews, who had lived a businessman’s life of motels and airports and restaurant meals, had been finding his way slowly around Ruthie. Cass knew that he cared about her daughter, but he treated Ruthie with great care as though she was fragile, as though he would inadvertently, permanently damage her. He never carried her, though he would wait patiently for her when they walked through the Box. He played with her, setting up elaborate stage sets with the many toys the raiders brought back for her, but he never roughhoused. There was something about Ruthie’s silence that made him treat her with exaggerated care, as though muteness was evidence of delicacy or a tendency to injury, and when they played together he chose her Playmobil characters or crayons or board books. Ruthie never seemed to mind. She had become a serious child who did not seem to miss running and tumbling and climbing trees.

But Dor handled her differently. Dor did not treat her as if she were breakable; he was easy with her. Of course, he had experience. Sammi had been little once.

Cass tried to imagine Dor with Sammi, long ago. She guessed he was far from a perfect father, given his brooding intensity, the long hours he now spent locked in his trailer and his need for seclusion. But he was more than she had ever been able to provide for Ruthie, who could never know her father because Cass had no idea who he was. Just one of the many drunk-blurred strangers from one of the stumble-home nights of those dark days. Not father material—certainly not father material; he wasn’t even real to Cass, who knew intellectually that he probably wasn’t even alive anymore, and couldn’t bring herself to care.

She wondered what Dor had been like back then, when Sammi was little. The tattoos, the earrings, the hardcore training regimen that left him hard-muscled and lean—these were all things acquired Aftertime, as was his facility with weapons and combat. That much she knew from Smoke. But from watching him she had learned more: he adapted to his surroundings with ease, if not passion. He was sensitive to the smallest changes in supply, in demand. He applied this to the commerce of human temperament as well as to goods and services. Running the Box required nimble reflexes, unflinching readiness, cruel precision. Shows of strength and, occasionally, violence.

Before, Dor had made his living on the internet and Cass wondered if Dor had once looked like every other Silicon Valley bean shuffler, soft in the middle and pale from too many indoor hours. It wasn’t an image easily reconciled with the man she walked beside now.

After a couple of blocks Cass saw a light ahead, a flashlight casting a cone of dirty yellow onto the pavement. When they drew closer she saw that it was Joe, Smoke’s sparring partner, and that behind him was a Jeep Wrangler, canvas missing, roll bars rusty. It was far from new and it was not clean, and it had a long dent creasing the driver’s side, but it had not been there the last time Cass passed this street corner and she knew it was to be their ride to Colima.

A car. She drew a little closer to Dor, her boots crushing gravel. When was the last time she’d ridden in a car? Smoke and she had taken a motorcycle the forty miles from Silva to San Pedro, but before that it had been since the Siege. Even before the holiday biostrikes, riots had broken out in cities all across America; driving anywhere close to the center of towns, or past utilities or government buildings had been a calculated risk. The last of the long-haul truckers to attempt their routes found themselves hijacked by the desperate, organized highway pirates and sometimes just by bands of suburban dads made bold by their numbers and their children’s complaints of hunger. So the long-haul truckers became hoarders. Schools had mostly closed before then anyway; there were no soccer games for the soccer moms to drive to. Store shelves were sparse; bands stopped touring; movie theaters had nothing new to show and mall parking lots were empty.

Once buildings started burning, and the bodies of unlucky elected officials were found nailed to city halls and hung from highway overpasses, the network of roads and highways was stricken with the kind of chaos it was impossible to recover from. Some tried to flee the cities; others packed everything they could into their cars and tried to get to urban centers, where they figured the food stores would be distributed by…someone. The result was gridlock, accidents, blocked roads; gas stations ran out of fuel; drivers shot each other; cars were jacked by roving bands of teenagers. Things stopped moving.

“No car seat,” Dor said, swinging Ruthie to the ground. “Sorry.” He took off his pack, opened the passenger door and set it on the floor under the backseat, then held out his hand for Cass’s. She handed it over and circled the Jeep, peering into the cargo area.

There was a cardboard box, labeled Dole Certified Organic Bananas, butting up against six one-gallon jugs filled with water and three two-gallon drums. Probably gasoline. Inside the box were plastic bags of food: roasted kaysev beans and hard cakes, cold fried rabbit, fringe-topped celery root from her own garden, harvested before its time and nestled in rags. She felt her face grow warm; Dor must have picked it in the predawn hours; it was undisturbed the day before when she made a last check on the garden.





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