Dor would find a humane solution-as humane as possible, anyway. She supposed that as soon as the old woman died, Dor would send the boy out with one of the guards to find a good shelter where children were welcome, even if that was ten miles away, thirty, whatever it took. The man was generous in his own way, though he preferred it not be widely known.
“Well,” she said, “why don’t I let the two of you finish your drink, and I’ll come back for Feo in a bit.”
“Okay,” the boy said quietly. Sam only nodded and put his glasses back on, and Cass turned away.
A little more time together was a small kindness. It was rare enough to be able to do anything at all for anyone anymore. Cass had learned to take such opportunities when they came.
Just as she reached her tent-she was barely through the door, Ruthie’s name on her lips-the alarm sounded. A series of bells strung around the Box, the effect was almost medieval, the clanging strident and urgent and echoing from all corners once the first peal struck.
Beaters. A dozen times since she and Smoke arrived, they had come close enough to the fences to pose an immediate threat, nearly always early in the morning, drawn out by the light of day. When the first rays of the sun reached the once-human things, they left the stinking nests where they slept sprawled and entwined together for warmth. They woke blinking and hungry, and stumbled to their feet to venture out into the wrecked streets, grunting and cawing, pushing at each other and picking at their scalps and their scabbed and decaying arms.
Mostly the Beaters stayed clear of the Box’s line of sight. They’d learned that the danger was too great, that the guards were all crack shots who could drop them even from a distance: the killing shot in the base of the spine or the head. So they waited for travelers, hiding clumsily behind the lean-to shacks and run-down cabins on the outskirts of town. Sometimes, too, in the alleyways or storefronts of the once-bustling city around them. Every week or so, some poor soul on his way to the Box would die horribly in the last half mile of his journey.
But once in a while, inexplicably, a cluster of them would risk approaching. Maybe they hoped for a break in the fence or to catch a guard unawares, or a citizen out for a walk. Maybe it was raw animal hunger. Dor did not forbid his employees and customers to come and go, but it always surprised Cass just how many did. Maybe the adrenaline rush of walking past the gates was just another kind of drug. Maybe it was an exercise in despair.
The alarm didn’t necessarily mean someone had been attacked, only that Beaters had been spotted nearby, and as Cass ran to the clearing along one side of the Box with everyone else, she prayed—
Not Smoke not Smoke not Smoke
People were already milling around, voices raised in fear, everyone asking each other where the disturbance was. When a shout went up from the west side, the crowd turned as one and swarmed toward the fence.
You would think people would stay in their tents, cover their ears and wait it out. By now, six months after the first Beaters appeared, everyone knew what an attack meant. It was nothing you’d ever want to see twice. And yet no one seemed able to look away. For Cass, who had the dubious distinction of being one of the only people ever to survive an attack-of being bitten and infected, and yet healed by some genetic crapshot-the memories were especially terrifying.
Not Smoke not Smoke, who’d been out there
She ran to the side of the crowd, dodging stragglers and slow movers, and sprinted past them all. Her lungs screamed for air and her boots pounded the hard-packed dirt, sending shocks through her body, but she reached the front and was among the first to reach the fence. Her momentum drove her into the chain link, and she grabbed the wire in her fists and pulled herself up a few feet to get a clear view down the block.
There. There. Eight of them, their excited crowing filling the air, their hair matted and their skin torn and crusted. They were dressed in rags; one of them had lost most of the skin of one arm and the bones showed through as it dangled uselessly. Another had had its face bashed in, its cheek and jaw a pulped mess, and still it clawed and shrieked.
They were stampeding after a screaming man, one of them having seized the tail of his jacket with a crabbed and bony hand. The man was desperately trying to shrug off the jacket, but either the zipper was stuck or his terror prevented him from unfastening it. As Cass watched, two of the other Beaters threw themselves on him and he went down, and then they were all upon him, trying to get a grip on his arms and legs as he thrashed on the ground. Cass saw blood bloom on his exposed hands as he beat them against the concrete, but it was no use: one of the creatures took his armpits and others each took a foot and they lifted him into the air, as the rest of them pushed and crowed, reaching with greedy hands. They meant to carry him back to their nest to feast, to tear the flesh from his body with their teeth while he was still alive.
It wasn’t Smoke, and despite her horror at the poor man’s fate, Cass sagged in relief. The victim had fair hair cut close, sagging camo pants. Not someone Cass knew. He had to be recently arrived, or a traveler who hoped to become a fellow citizen. He was screaming without cease, his voice distinct from the inhuman cries of the Beaters and their almost lascivious excitement, and then-abruptly-he stopped.
A shot. There had been a shot, and there followed two more, and the Beaters who had been carrying the doomed man dropped him, and one of them fell on top of him and rolled away, dead. Most of the others ran, tripping over each other and loping clumsily around the corner behind an apartment building, splattering blood further down the street. But one stayed behind, his savaged face dark with rage and hunger as he screamed and tugged at the victim’s pant leg, pulling the body along the street a few feet, until finally he too gave up and loped away.
Two men came sprinting from the side-Cass hadn’t noticed them, they must have been crouched along the fence-and this time it was Smoke, and Three-High with his long gray ponytail, and they ran crouched low and ready to shoot again. They reached the man and Smoke lifted him up over his shoulders and Three-High put one more bullet in one of the downed Beaters’ heads and it exploded on the asphalt like a water balloon filled with blood. Someone on the ground behind Cass vomited, and she whispered a guilty prayer of thanks that Smoke had been spared once again and stepped out of the sick woman’s way.
Feo must have bolted again when the commotion started. As Cass followed the crowd away from the fence she saw Sam tackle him, lifting him as though he weighed nothing and holding him tightly in his arms.
Cass caught up with Sam while the crowd surged past, on their way back to wherever they’d come from. The boy was trembling in Sam’s arms.
“Did he see?” she asked quietly.
“Yes, unfortunately. And Cass…he knew that guy. Before.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. When he saw the Beaters go after him, he started yelling ‘tío, tío’-I think that means ‘uncle.’”
“Aw, shit,” Cass whispered.
“Nanaaaaa,” the boy wailed, his voice muffled by Sam’s shirt.
After trying in vain to get him calmed down, Cass and Sam decided there was nothing for it but to take him to the clinic to see the old woman. When they arrived, Smoke and Three-High were standing outside, talking with Dor. Smoke was the first to see them coming and he jogged over to her and held her and understood how great her fear had been, and he whispered over and over that he was all right, everything would be all right.
When she pulled back and looked into his face she knew the truth. “You had to end him, didn’t you.”
“He’d been bitten.”
“Did you do it, or Three-High?”
Smoke looked away, and that was her answer. Smoke was strong that way-he knew that death was a mercy for an infected citizen, that otherwise the fever would begin within hours, and the victim would twitch and babble and pick at his own skin and his flesh hunger would grow. And so Smoke gave the gift of death: swift and sure.
Cass nodded, tears stinging her eyes.
But there would be time later to wonder how much another death had cost Smoke, whether it played upon his soul and poisoned his dreams. For now, there were the living to be tended.
She entered the cottage, the others following close behind. Feo knelt next to his grandmother’s bed, sobbing quietly. Sam crouched next to him, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Francie stood at the head of the bed, her arms folded, her face tired. When she saw Cass, she frowned and shook her head, and Cass knew the old woman was dead.
He’d lost everything, then. The last family he would ever know had died today.
Cass couldn’t bear it. She turned on Dor, her face tight with anguish, trying to find the right words. But Smoke put a hand around hers and stepped between them.
“The guy…the one outside the fence-that was his uncle,” he said quietly.
Dor nodded heavily, as though the worst news had lost the power to surprise him. For a moment, silhouetted in the sunlight streaming through the door, he looked all too human, his shoulders sagging and his hands hanging useless at his sides. “The boy can stay,” he said, and then left without another word.
Cass watched him go, her heart quickening, the possibilities flashing through her mind. But as they knelt on the bare wood floor, Feo burrowed into Sam’s arms, and Sam-barely more than a boy himself-held on.
So that’s how it was to be. In that moment the small idea that had been taking shape in Cass’s mind-her and Smoke and two children, a growing family-shifted and faded. Feo needed things she could not give. In Sam, the boy found something familiar, something he could hold on to. Who could say why-every citizen Aftertime had been altered by their own losses, their own devastations.
Smoke and Cass left quietly, hand in hand. Outside it was shaping up to be another warm autumn day. The air was fragrant with the smell of kaysev cakes frying on a griddle and they walked hand in hand back to the tent. Ruthie would wake soon, and they would take her to the clearing for breakfast, and it would be all right.
Later, Cass and Ruthie would go to the gardens to pick mint leaves. They would boil water and make a big batch of tea in the plastic pitcher, and Cass would add a few spoonfuls from her precious stash of sugar. They would carry the tea down to the officers’ quarters, and it would be a gift for mourning and new beginnings both.
Sophie Littlefield
SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD grew up in rural Missouri and attended college in Indiana. She worked in technology before having children, and was lucky enough to stay home with them while they were growing up. She writes mysteries and thrillers for kids and adults, and lives in Northern California.
Visit Sophie online at www.SophieLittlefield.com or follow @SWLittlefield on Twitter.
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