Rebirth

by Sophie Littlefield

  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 inciner
ated 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.