Time had passed—two months—since Cass was taken. In two months the people sheltering together at the school had become a real community, built on cooperation and friendship. And love, or at least lovemaking. Cass thought about the look that had passed between Smoke and Nora.
“Did she mind?” she asked abruptly. “You coming with me. Did Nora mind?”
Smoke said nothing for a moment, and Cass wondered if it was something she had no right to ask. Smoke had offered to accompany her, nothing more.
“Yes,” he finally said. “She minded very much.”
“But you came anyway.” A question more than a statement.
“Yes, I came anyway. And I understand that you want to know why. But I’m not sure I can tell you. I mean, I know what answers I ought to give—that it gives my life some meaning to be able to help you. Or that in Aftertime we have to think of the greater good, not the needs of individuals. Or even that we have so little of our humanity left that we need to take every opportunity we can to remind ourselves that we aren’t savages.”
“Those all work for me,” Cass said after a moment, trying to let him know that he was off the hook, that he didn’t owe her an answer.
“Well, thanks. But the truth is…I don’t love her. Nora. And maybe this was a convenient way to leave. I don’t know…I just don’t know.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried.”
“Yeah, well…some people say I think too much. They used to say it, anyway. Now…” Smoke trailed off, and they walked in silence.
He was the sort of man who went to places other people couldn’t follow, and it made her want to know more. “What did you do before? If it’s okay for me to ask.”
“Sure. Look, Cass—” he glanced at her, eyes flashing in the moonlight “—let’s get this straight, okay, seeing as neither of us knows what’s coming tonight or tomorrow or next week or next month. You can ask me anything you want. If I don’t want to tell you, I won’t. But I don’t see where some sort of notion of, of, I don’t know, propriety or whatever is going to help any of us now. And talking might help.”
Might help what? Cass wondered—help to pass the time, or keep her mind off the dangers and worries, or make her forget who and what she was and how she’d got that way? But she didn’t ask for clarity. “Deal,” she said.
“Okay, so…I was an executive coach.”
“A what?”
“I helped people figure out what was holding them back in the professional workplace.” Smoke’s voice carried some dark emotion. Regret, maybe. “And then I showed them how to change.”
“So you basically told other people how to do their jobs? And got paid for it?”
Smoke laughed bitterly. “I guess that’s one way to sum it up. On paper, my job was to guide people to be more effective in their work through an exploration of their skills and goals and challenges.” He looked away, into the night-black forest. “I was good at it. Too good.”
“How could you be too good?”
“I got a lot of my clients because they were struggling at work. They’d been put on performance review and were in danger of losing their jobs. I was like the career consultant of last resort. And looking back on it, a lot of them were probably in trouble for a reason. I should have let things play out the way they were meant to.”
“You mean, and let them get fired?”
“Not everyone’s suited for every job,” Smoke said through gritted teeth. “Sometimes people need to fail so they don’t fuck things up for others. Sometimes systems are designed so that people who should fail do fail.”
Cass was taken aback by his barely controlled anger. She knew she should stop, should leave the subject alone—but for some reason she longed to keep him talking.
“You went around rescuing their jobs for them. Just like you did at the church, the fire. You’re the rescuer. That can be your new job description.”
“Don’t make me better than I am, Cass,” Smoke snapped, and Cass knew that she had gone too far.
She felt herself flame with embarrassment as Smoke stalked ahead of her, his body tense. But after a few moments he waited for her to catch up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean— It’s just that I didn’t do anything much, no matter what they told you.”
“You got people out of the fire.”
“Nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. I was already there, it wasn’t any big deal to bring the others with me.”
Cass knew he was downplaying the event. She understood the impulse; being talked about got you noticed, and being noticed made you public, and then people expected you to reveal more and more of yourself.
She could respect Smoke’s desire for privacy. She knew well the need to keep to the shadows. So why did she want so much to know more?
11
THE ROAD INTO SILVA WOUND THROUGH MOSTLY unbuilt land, its cracked edges sloping into a rocky outcrop ping at the edge of the forest. The dead trees could not maintain their grip on the earth where the road carved its path, and their black roots bore clots of earth like hungry tumors. Pinecones from forgotten seasons lay crushed by cars that had long since stopped running.
They walked in silence.
Before, this land was shaded no matter what the season, the evergreens thick against the sky. Then the toxins had blanketed the land, and the trees shed their needles and withered in defeat, their xylem choked and strangled, their bark black and peeling. The sun bore down on the ravaged earth during the day; at night, as now, even the moonlight reached all the way to the earth, covering everything with a frisson of silver.
Here and there a cabin was set back among the few remaining trees, mostly hunting cabins built decades ago, before the Sierras were discovered by city types looking for vacation homes with easier drives than Tahoe. In some, curtains hung neatly in the windows, cheery ruffles and valences hinting at brisk, no-nonsense women with feather dusters and oil soap. In others, the panes were broken, and window boxes hung askew, spilling dirt and dead flowers to the indifferent ground.
When they rounded a bend and Cass saw the familiar glass shop that shared a parking lot with a fireplace and hot tub store, her pulse quickened. Now she knew exactly where she was. Around the next bend, small frame houses would give way to larger ones. And then the strip mall with the KFC and the Orchard Supply Hardware. Another half mile took you to the city offices, including the old town hall with the basement where Cass had attended hundreds of A.A. meetings.
A few blocks from that was the library.
Suddenly Cass wasn’t sure she was ready.
“You know where you are now,” Smoke said. “You all right?”
She swallowed hard, staring across the parking lot at the ruined businesses. There were cars in the lot, but their tires had been slashed, their windshields bashed in. It was shocking, the way nearly everything had ended up in ruins during the final weeks of the Siege. Some said America had been lucky: while the country struggled with outages and dwindling resources, Canberra reported they’d run out of potable water and Seoul’s citizens lay sightless and bleeding from their ears in the streets, victims of a last plague attack that no one bothered to claim. And still, across the U.S., citizens raged and rampaged. Brooklyn saw twelve thousand die in the East Water Riots. The senselessness of it amazed Cass—how a car that was of no use to anyone now that fuel was impossible to find was attacked and ravaged until it was a heap of steel and fiberglass, every part of it assaulted and broken.
But equally surprising was the care people took in other ways, the attention they gave the smallest or most unimportant details, gestures made all the more poignant because of the unlikelihood that anyone would ever appreciate them.
The glass shop’s windows were gone, the interior open to the elements, and even in the near darkness Cass could see desks overturned, computers lying on the floor. But next door, Groat Fireplace and Spa was shuttered up tight, the blinds drawn in the front door, the patio table and chairs stacked and covered.
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br /> And there was the neat pyramid of smooth stones piled in front of the door.
No one knew how the stone piles started, but before long everyone knew what they meant: there were dead inside. Bodies that had been left because of panic about contamination, or because they had reached a stage of decomposition that made it hard to move them easily, or simply because there wasn’t time—and now, with the threat of attack weighing heavy on every raiding party, there was never time—when citizens entered a house and found the dead, the piles of stones were a respectful gesture as well as giving notice to others who might come along. If the unlikely day ever came when it was possible to clear the buildings, to give the deceased a proper burial, then the stones could be returned to the fields and creeks and flower beds they came from.
Next to the pile of stones was a second form, difficult to make out in the moonlight. “What is that…?” Cass said, pointing.
“Oh, that—a pot, I think.”
“What, like a cooking pot?”
“Yes…I guess you didn’t— It’s a new thing, a way to tell people that there’s nothing left inside worth taking. No food, no provisions. The raiders started doing that as a way to show people when a house had been emptied of anything useful. It caught on fast.”
“But why a pot?”
Smoke shrugged. “Why anything? Why not a shoe or a lamp or…you know how it is. Nobody knows how these things start. Maybe a pot because it symbolizes a kitchen and food, and it’s mostly food that you want in a raid. Well, food and medicine I guess. Maybe just because they’re sturdy and will hold up to the elements. Does it matter?”
“So that means…someone’s been in there, looking for stuff. You guys?”
“I don’t know. Us, or the fire station people, or even some of the squatters.”
“Squatters?”
“It’s what they’re—what everyone’s calling people who stayed in houses.”
“Even if it was their own houses?”
“Yeah, I know, but that’s what they call them. Not in a shelter, you’re squatting.”
They passed the little clump of buildings and reached another bend in the road. Around the corner the road sloped down again and widened, sidewalks lining the street where the ranchers and foursquare houses were lined up neatly.
“Are there squatters here?” Cass asked, her stomach turning with unease. “In these houses?”
“Last time I came this way, yes, there were,” Smoke said. “We’ve mostly been going over toward Terryville when we go raiding. There’s a group sheltering there in the mall, but they’ve had a hard time with security. Our location’s good, I think—not so many Beaters since they like to stay in towns. The school’s just rural enough that we don’t see as many of them. At least, not until very recently.”
“Do you know which houses have people in them?” Cass asked.
Smoke looked along the row. They were walking in the middle of the street, their steps echoing slightly. “I wish I could tell you. Obviously, not the ones with the stone piles. And not like that.” He pointed at a house whose garage door had been crumpled inward by a pickup truck that was still parked there at an odd angle, back tires digging into the front lawn. A big picture window had been shattered and furniture and lamps were strewn across the front porch.
“Maybe…there,” he said, pointing at a square brick house that looked relatively unscathed, drapes drawn tight in all the windows.
Cass wondered if there were people inside, sleeping with blades next to the bed, guarding against attack, waiting for the sound of scratching at the door and windows, the moaning and frantic whining when a Beater caught the scent. She wondered what kind of person would prefer living with all that fear and uncertainty rather than sharing it with others in a shelter.
But Cass knew the answer. She knew exactly what kind of person would make such a choice—she would. Before Ruthie, before she had something she loved enough to keep on living, she would have dealt with evil by standing firm and alone against it. Even if—especially if—she knew it was a losing proposition, one that was sure to get her killed.
Cass wondered where the Beaters were nesting these days. Before she was taken, they had favored places that were open to the air but sheltered, like carports and stores with the front windows broken out. They slept a lot; it had seemed that they slept as much as half the day away, not that they ever seemed to achieve a very deep sleep.
There was a group from the library who spied on them at night. Miranda, before she was taken, had gone along a few times, taking enormous risks to watch a group that took over a service bay at a Big O Tires center. Cass never went along, but she listened to their reports, fascinated, along with everyone else.
Like newborn rats, they reported. A wriggling pile, night->blinded and restless. They slept touching, their scabbed and weeping limbs draped and entwined, almost like lovers. Some people thought they felt affection for each other, but Cass doubted it. She figured it was just familiarity—or, more likely, something even more base, an attraction based on the pathology of the disease. The Beaters’ senses had been sharpened drastically—they were able to sniff the scent of citizens from dozens of feet away—perhaps their sensitivity had been sharpened as well and there was some sort of comfort to be had among their own kind.
They shared their victims, too—there was that.
“Where do they nest, now?” Cass asked.
Smoke answered reluctantly. “Peace Lutheran, still, last time we were here. The Ace garden center. Those are the big ones, and there are smaller nests in other places, too. And they seem to be roving. One night here, one night there. On the move.”
Cass considered the implications. “That’s not good.”
“No, it’s pretty much fucked. No one knows why it’s happening, but everyone seems to agree that the disease is changing and developing. Or maybe it’s just that the first wave of infected is reaching a new stage of the disease. I mean, it makes sense. Every stage has been well-defined. Maybe this is just the outcome of whatever’s going on, you know, in their bodies.”
“You mean, like maybe they’ll stop eating flesh and develop a compulsion to follow each other into the sea, like lemmings?”
“Yeah. Right,” Smoke said, the beginnings of a wry smile emerging. “It doesn’t hurt to dream, I guess.”
They walked for a while without saying anything. The pack Cass had been given was surprisingly comfortable, the weight of the water bottles and provisions well distributed. Her borrowed clothes were clean and she liked the sensation of the washed fabrics against her skin—it had been so long since she had been comfortable.
Twice they heard the eerie crowing cries of Beaters far off in the distance, a roving gang of them out on a night wander. They seemed to be heading away, rather than drawing closer, but when Smoke took her hand she held on tightly until the night was silent again. Cass knew how lucky she’d been that her journey back had been through largely unpopulated country; Beaters generally preferred towns. Now that she was back in Silva, the things were all around. Most slept, waiting for dawn, but as Smoke had explained, some were restless enough to venture out even when they couldn’t see. Cass didn’t know what was worse: the thought of them night-blind and stumbling a few blocks away, or knowing that tucked away in the buildings they passed were their fetid, teeming nests.
Still, she felt like she could walk for hours, just as she had every night since she woke up, as she made her steady way back up through the foothills. On those nights, she had tried hard to empty her mind of anything but her goal— Ruthie—but occasionally she couldn’t help wondering how she’d gotten so far from home. Beaters took their victims straight to their nests. The idea that they had taken her thirty miles or more out of town was unimaginable. How would they have carried her all that way? When they took a victim, one of them would sling the victim over their shoulders and others would restrain the kicking feet, the grasping hands of the terrified victim. Occasionally they would knock the victim
unconscious, but that was rare. The supposition was that they were afraid they’d kill the person or stun them so badly that they weren’t alert for what came later.
It seemed to be important to the Beaters that people were awake for that.
“Hey,” Smoke said quietly, closing a hand on her arm, interrupting her thoughts. They were on another block like the last, lined with mature trees, small houses in various states of disrepair.
“What,” Cass whispered back. Immediately her senses were on high alert. She scanned the buildings quickly, trying desperately to see into the dark shadows.
“I heard something…I think. Over there, behind that house.”
“Behind? Or in? Because—”
And then Cass heard it, too.
12
A SHRILL, WHISTLING WAIL, NOT LOUD. IT WAS coming from the direction of a wood-shingled Cape Cod on the right side of the street, where the stick-puzzle forms of dead jasmine shrubs stood sentry in front of a lawn choked with kaysev. Cass searched wildly for the source of the sound, but saw only a limp and torn cardboard box blown by the wind against a car that had been driven up to the porch, its bumper resting on the paint-flaked wood. As she squinted she saw that a form hung from the half-open car door, but it was still and unnaturally bent, and even in the moonlight Cass could see the white of its skull through skin that had rotted away. An old kill, or a heart attack, a fever death, even an accident—Cass barely gave it a thought as the wailing grew louder. Then there was another sound, from the opposite direction, and Cass whipped her head back to the left and saw something that seized her with terror.
A pair of them. One had been a woman, Cass could see, because her shirt wasn’t buttoned and her large breasts swung free as she lurched toward them. She had no hair left, and her mouth was a ruined crusted slash where she had chewed her own lips to shreds. The other one might have been a woman or a man, impossible to tell from its too-large jeans and down vest trimmed with matted fur.
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