Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  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.

  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.

  Both waved their hands, wobbling almost comically as they stumbled closer. Cass felt a scream rising in her own throat and tried to swallow it back, but she couldn’t help a terrified whimper.

  Smoke’s hand on her arm tightened until it hurt. “Quiet,” he whispered. “They’re tracking us by smell and sound only.”

  “We’ve got to run,” Cass whispered back. They were too close. On the right, the Beater whose moaning had first caught their attention appeared around the corner of the house. It lurched into the yard, knocking into a dead Japanese maple. The branches caught on its clothes and its wailing grew louder as it flailed at the tree, trying to disentangle a branch that had gotten hooked on its jacket.

  “If we run, they will, too,” Smoke said. “They’ll hear our footsteps, feel the vibrations in the ground. We can’t-”

  “Over here!” a hoarse voice bellowed from a couple of houses down the street. “I’m putting a ladder out the window, you got fifteen seconds and then I’m pulling it back up!”

  Smoke grabbed her hand and they ran. Cass looked wildly for the source of the voice, and saw something glint in the moonlight. There was a clattering of metal on wood and she spotted what was indeed a ladder flipping out the second-story window of a brick two-story several houses down on the left.

  Behind them the wailing grew louder and she could hear feet slapping against pavement like pounds of meat. The monsters were faster than she would have imagined; it was rare to see them go at a full run. They always seemed so unwieldy in their bodies, as though the disease had taken away their coordination, the connection between mind and muscles.

  From deeper in the neighborhood Cass heard the answering wails of Beaters awakened by the hunters’ frenzy. They would crawl blindly from their holes to join the chase, stepping on each other, tripping and lashing out in their fury. They’d slow each other down at first, but nothing would keep them away once blood was spilled, and their momentum would eventually be overwhelming.

  “Hurry!” the voice yelled unnecessarily, and as they crossed the yard, Cass felt Smoke’s hand at her back giving her a hard shove so that she nearly plowed into the ladder dangling against the side of the house.

  “Go,” Smoke urged, and Cass seized the ladder’s frame and pulled herself up to the first rung, feeling the burn of the effort in the muscles of her arms, the adrenaline surge through her body. But the Beaters’ huffing and moaning was close, so close, and as she shimmied her feet onto the bottom rung and hauled herself up, she couldn’t help turning to look.

  She nearly fell when she saw the half-naked womanthing with its breasts slapping against its chest as it stumble-ran blindly toward them, its mouth wide with fury, its night-blind eyes looking at nothing, its arms stretched out in front, grasping at empty air. Its companion stumbled on the curb and fell flat on the ground, facedown in the dead sod, and screamed with rage as it struggled to its feet. Coming fast from the other direction was the Beater who’d been lurking across the street; it was headed straight for a car that was parked in the house’s driveway, pumping its fists in time with its steps.

  Down the street came more of them, loping and staggering and waving their hands blindly in front of their sightless eyes as they followed the sounds of the others, greedily sniffing the air for the scent.

  “Don’t look!” Smoke yelled, shoving at her feet to urge her higher, and Cass sucked in her breath and climbed, hand over hand as fast as she could, but not before she saw that the first Beater was going to reach Smoke before he could follow her up the ladder, and the scream kept winding up in her chest. She could not watch them take him. She would not watch them take him. Especially because it was her fault, because he had-

  She heard a grunt and a dull thud as strong hands grabbed hers and yanked, causing her to lose her footing on the ladder, but she realized after a moment it didn’t matter because she was being pulled through the window, the top rung of the ladder scraping painfully against her ribs and hipbones, and she twisted desperately in her rescuer’s grip because even though she couldn’t bear to see Smoke taken she had to watch because
it was her fault and it would never have happened without her and she could do very little in this life, this ruined and fucked-up life, but she would pay what she owed, and right now she owed Smoke witness to his last moments.

  But Smoke was on the ladder.

  Smoke was on the ladder and he was climbing fast, skipping rungs, big hands grabbing hard, and behind him the first Beater was sprawled on the ground below the ladder, scrabbling to right itself like a beetle on its back, as its companion tripped and fell on top of it.

  Cass hit the floor and rolled and a second later Smoke landed beside her and a large dark shadowy form of a man hauled the ladder clumsily back through the window. She had to duck out of the way as the ladder’s full length was dragged into the room and dropped on the floor with a heavy clatter, and then the man put his hands to the window sash and slammed it down so hard the panes shook, and even then they could still hear the furious moaning of the Beaters below them.

  “That’ll fry their bacon,” the man said with a ghost of a chuckle.

  Cass turned frantically to Smoke, her pulse still rocketing, and put a hand to his chest, feeling the heat of his body through his cotton shirt. “You were-they almost-”

  “They didn’t,” Smoke said, covering her hand with his own and pressing it against him for a brief second before he deliberately separated himself from her grasp. “That’s what matters.”

  “I’ve had so many close calls I guess I don’t even hardly count anymore,” the big man said. There was a trace of the South in his voice, the rasp of someone who hadn’t spoken in a while-but there was energy and humor, too. Whoever their savior was, he was not a beaten man. “I think I musta got some sorta guardian angel in here with me or something.”

  “You saved us,” Smoke said.

  “Ah, it was a slow night, didn’t have anything better to do. Hell, they’re all slow nights, you know what I mean? I’m Lyle. Welcome to my place.”

  “I’m Smoke. This is Cass.”