Aftertime (16 page)

THE STRANGER SLIPPED OUT AS QUIETLY AS HE’D
entered. Cass waited, listening hard. She heard his footsteps retreating down the hall, then nothing. She tested the door and found it unlocked.

But the thought that she would need to run away from the place that had meant safety to her just a short time ago seemed ludicrous. How was it possible to find enough to disagree about Aftertime that you could fight and kill over it?

The priorities were so stark. Live another day. Protect others, if you can. Eat and drink and sleep. Care for the children. Everything else—washing, learning, creating, loving—were luxuries rarely indulged…but they haunted people’s minds still. The dream of starting over ran deep.

At first, the rumors flew that the End Times had arrived. That the planet itself was dying. Defoliation would kill everyone on the planet in a matter of weeks—that was a popular theory for a while, until people figured out that not all of the plants were threatened. Then the kaysev seeds sprouted and the new panic was that it would choke out all other species and leach all the nutrients from the earth, but soon it became obvious that where kaysev grew, other plants that had survived the Siege returned and flourished.

Over and over the apocalypse theories were proved wrong. Earth did what She would; She chose life. If She was indifferent to the fate of humanity, She seemed unstoppable in her determination to restore health to Her forests and mountains and waters, as every new day seemed to bring a sprig or seedling of some species that was thought to be lost, or a flash of a silvery fish tail in the stream, or the sound of birdsong in the morning. And that’s when people started talking about a future, one in which the planet found a way to host the survivors.

Not everyone looked ahead, of course. There were those who gave up. Who believed it was only a matter of time before the Beaters prevailed or the blueleaf redoubled or the kaysev fell to winter frosts.

But the numbers of the hopeful were greater. Had been, anyway. People were hungry for leadership—that was why Bobby had risen so quickly and easily. No one opposed him; everyone was happy to defer to his natural ability to organize and encourage and parcel out tasks and resources and decide disputes.

But Bobby was dead.

They found his body on the rocks.

Cass’s heart contracted at the thought, and she leaned against the door frame, struggling under the weight of her guilt and the pain of yet another loss, when she heard the clatter.

It was muffled, but there was definitely the sound of crockery breaking on the floor, followed by cursing.

She didn’t wait. Her feet moved on their own; she flew down the hall past the conference room before her thoughts caught up, and by then it was too late to do anything but keep running. She took the corner fast. This was the worst of it, the place where she could be spotted by anyone looking in her direction. She heard the voices much more clearly now, as she flattened herself against the wall and slunk toward the door to the outside. When her fingers touched the metal bar of the door’s push mechanism, she took a chance and looked backward. Silhouetted against the light pouring into the hall from the door to the courtyard was her rescuer, holding a large plastic tub while several people knelt at his feet picking up broken dishes.

Cass took a deep breath and pushed against the door.

Before, it would have been electronically armed, but without electricity the security system was useless. Now the door had a bulky padlock, but it swung free, the arm looped through only one half of the device, and the door opened and Cass found herself in a pool of late-day sun that made her blink.

“I’m here. Come on,
now
.” Smoke’s voice, and then Smoke’s hand seized hers and pulled hard and she was running next to him, straining to keep up. Her eyes adjusted to the light and she saw that they were headed for the alley running behind the library and city hall, across the staff parking spaces and the bike rack, skirting a row of dead shrubs and abandoned cars.

Halfway down the alley was a low brick building with a flat roof, a restaurant of some kind. There was still a smell of rotting garbage that lingered even after all these months, and Cass—who had seen and smelled things a thousand times worse—found herself gagging on the smell as Smoke pulled her beneath an overhang of wood slats.

“Take this,” he said, handing her the pack that Elaine had taken from her. It was heavier than it had been the night before in the library.

“What’s in it?”

“Supplies. Rations. Weapons. You can look later. For now, we need to put as much distance between us and them as we can before they find out we’re gone. And that’s going to be just a few minutes, I can pretty much guarantee it.”

Cass pulled the pack onto her shoulders and shrugged it into place.

“Can you handle the weight?”

“Yes—” Cass broke off when she saw that Smoke was holding a compact handgun. “Where the hell did you get
that?
”

“Our…benefactors,” Smoke muttered. “I wasn’t expecting it. Wish I could say I was confident I could use it.”

“You don’t know how to shoot?”

“I’ve shot some. When I was a kid. Rifles, mostly, duck hunting with my uncles. I know enough not to shoot myself or you by accident, let’s put it that way.”

Cass thought about what the stranger had told her, that Smoke had killed three men. Tried to imagine him staring down the barrel. Pulling the trigger. Found that it wasn’t that much of a stretch. There was something about him, some dormant powerful fury, that she could sense lurking under the surface. To her surprise, it didn’t frighten her. It almost seemed…familiar, a bitter mix of regret and deadly determination.

Cass herself could handle a gun. She had learned to shoot her dad’s .22 on a series of clear, cold January mornings when she was ten. She’d shot magazine pages nailed to trees, her father clapping her on the back and laughing whenever she hit one.

“I don’t suppose you have another, do you?”

“Sorry,” Smoke said. “But would you rather be the one to carry it?”

Cass raised her eyebrows, surprised that he was willing to put his safety in her hands. “Um, no, that’s okay.”

“Okay, well.” Smoke faltered. “Anyway, I’m hoping we won’t need it. We’re only going about three-quarters of a mile.”

“To another shelter?”

“No. Look, Cass, the resistance has gotten pretty organized. They’ve got resources hidden all over the place up here. And they must be pretty keen on getting us out, because they’re giving us a motorcycle.”

“What?”

“I know, I know, I’ll believe it when we see it, but Herkim—the guy who came for you—he told me where to find it and says it’s gassed up and ready.”

“And all we have to do is get there before the Beaters get us. In daylight, in the middle of town.”

Smoke touched his hand to the small of her back. “It’s sunset,” he said gently. “That’s not nearly as bad.”

If it was a lie, it was a lie told to protect her. Cass thought about what the stranger had told her in the cell:
Smoke wouldn’t leave without you
. She watched him out of the corner of her eye as they hurried along the alley, dodging clumps of garbage and the desiccated remains of cats and rodents flattened by fleeing traffic and left to rot.

Why did he care about her?

Why would he risk his own safety to protect her?

They turned left, toward a water tower in the distance that rose up in the sky over a residential neighborhood. “We’re headed for a house near the edge of town. The bike’s in a

shed in the back. I’ve got an address.”

“And you know how to get there?”

“I memorized it. This way a quarter mile, right on Jackson, left on Tendrick Springs. Number 249. White house, green shutters.”

“Wow,” Cass said. “I don’t think I could remember my own birthday with everything…you know. Just, everything.”

They moved in silence. Cass stayed close to Smoke, bumping against him from time to time. She wasn’t used to looking to anyone else for reassurance. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it, but she also wasn’t about to question it, not now.

“When is it?” Smoke asked as they turned onto Jackson Road.

“When is what?”

“Your birthday.”

Cass didn’t say anything for a moment. It was January first; she had been the first baby born in Contra Costa County that year. But she hadn’t celebrated her birthday in years. Her mother always sent a card, signed—in her mother’s hand— “Mim and Byrn.” No “love,” nothing but their names.

She’d spent more than a few of her birthdays hung over. Or drunk by noon.

On her best days she told herself she would start celebrating again when she got Ruthie back. She would make a cake. They would wear hats made from sheets of newspaper.

“Is it a big secret or something?” Smoke asked. “Come on, why won’t you tell me?”

“January.”

“January what?”

“Does it really matter? I mean, do you think people are still going to be keeping track by then? Tell you what, if—if we’re still alive I’ll tell you the date then.”

What she meant was, if they were still together…not
together
together, because it was crazy to imagine such a thing, to give their brief acquaintance significance that it didn’t have; but if after Cass got Ruthie they ended up sheltering in the same place. Something like that.

“Deal,” Smoke said and slipped his hand around Cass’s and squeezed, letting go before she could react.

And the last of her mistrust of him slipped away.

Smoke had proved himself over and over. He’d believed in her innocence when she arrived at the school with her blade pressed to a child’s neck. He’d come with her, voluntarily, to the library. Now, his best course was to run in a different direction, to go where the Rebuilders wouldn’t pursue him, but he’d come with her anyway.

And there was the other night. In the cool, clean sheets at Lyle’s place. In the breeze that reminded her of Before.

But that didn’t count. That
couldn’t
count, and Cass pushed it from her mind, pushed the memory hard into a small corner where it would be protected and preserved. Still, that left last night when he’d faced down the Rebuilders without hesitation, and today when he’d waited for her to join him at the back door.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“For what?”

“For coming with me. For being here.”

Smoke shrugged. “I can’t go back to the school now—I don’t want to lead the Rebuilders there. No matter where I go, they’ll come after me, but if they think I’m with you, at least they’ll leave the school alone.”

Cass thought she understood. The people at the school had been strangers not long ago. But now, Aftertime, they were all he had.

“I hope they’re fine,” she said softly, thinking of Sammi and her mother, of the women at the bath trough, of the children playing with the plastic animals. Of Nora, with her intense dark eyes and choppy haircut.

Wondered if Smoke was thinking about her. Missing her. Wishing he could be with her.

She almost asked him, but then she didn’t. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. “So what do you know about the Convent?” she asked instead.

“I’d heard rumors about it, but Herkim filled me in,” Smoke said. “They started the Convent a few months ago. All women, no men allowed. Set it up in Foothill Stadium, of all places. Home of the Miners—you ever been there?”

Cass had. With her father, in fact, when she was eight years old. It was a ridiculously balmy Tuesday in May, when it seemed like it would never rain again, and every day would bring some new and splendid surprise, because her daddy was home from touring with his band and he wasn’t working at the construction sites like he usually did, and he wrote a note saying she was sick and she didn’t have to go to school. They didn’t tell her mother, who had gone off to work as usual, because it was sort of a surprise. And her daddy bought her a souvenir pennant and a second bag of peanuts just because she asked and the next week he was gone and she never saw him again.

“No.” Cass mumbled the lie. “Don’t think I have.”

“Well, it’s not the worst place in the world for a bunch of bat-shit crazy women to hole up, I guess. They’ve sealed off the entrances, got some system for figuring out who they let in and out, not that they’re coming out much, that’s for sure.”

“And they have Ruthie there?”

“That’s just what someone
said
. You got to be careful here, Cass. You can’t go believing everything you hear. Everyone who talks to you, you got to wonder what angle they’re working, what you could provide them with that they can’t get some other way.”

“But it was Elaine who said it. We were
friends
.”

“Okay,” Smoke said. “Sorry. I’m just trying—”

Something clattered behind them, metal on pavement, and Cass whirled around. Smoke turned, too, his hand tight around hers.

A block away, half a dozen clumsy forms stumbled around a cluster of trash cans, tripping and trying to disentangle themselves from each other. It was almost impossible to make out any details at this distance, now that the sun had slipped behind the horizon and evening had laid down its hazy blue gloom.

But the moans that started up when they found their footing and sniffed the air and scented Cass and Smoke—those were unmistakable.

The Beaters had found them.

CASS WATCHED THE THINGS SHOVE AND KICK
at each other with frustration as they got in each other’s way. One was knocked to the ground, where it howled in fury, rubbing a crabbed hand at its face, as the others stumbled toward Cass and Smoke.

Smoke raised the gun and fired. But the Beaters were too far away, and the gun kicked in his hand. He fired a second time, and a third, hitting nothing.

“Stop,” Cass yelled. “You only have a few more rounds.”

“In the pack—” Smoke seized her hand. He knew what she did: even if he made every shot, he couldn’t hit them all, and the odds of killing even one were pretty low. Besides, there wasn’t time to reload.

They ran, but Cass knew they could never outrun the Beaters. For a while, sure. Cass and Smoke were strong and fit, and adrenaline would give them a boost. But within a quarter mile their pace would drop and the Beaters’ speed would surge.

The maniacal frenzy of their hunger could not be tempered by any obstacle. They’d run across glass, across hot coals, across this terrible scorched earth that was the end of the world if it meant fresh, uninfected flesh. They were body eaters, after all, and that was all they lived for. They would close the gap, their voices raised in a horrifying chorus of grunts and moans, and Smoke—of course it would be Smoke, because he would put himself between her and them, there was no question in her mind now—Smoke would feel their grasping bone-hands on his clothes, his back, his arms as they took him down.

Long ago, before Ruthie, Cass had contemplated dying, wondering if it was true what they said, that in the final seconds you achieve a kind of peace. Like that guy in the Jack London story, slowly freezing to death, there would be a numbing, a lulling, a sense of complacency, rightness. Acceptance would be followed, she imagined, by something resembling an urge to have done with it. A drowning person would accept the water into their lungs. A person falling from a great height would reach out for the earth.

But there was nothing like that for victims of the Beaters. Because they knew what was coming and death was stretched out over a series of manic flashes, strips of flesh, bites into the skin. Cass knew.

So when Smoke seized her hand she ran hard. She flew like a stone rocketed over a great chasm. She pushed off with her feet and willed herself through the air, begging fate for another breath, another step, another second before hell burst upon them.

“White house,” Smoke yelled, urging her faster, harder than she thought she could go. Fear did that, working miracles on the laws of physics and gravity, driving people to do the impossible.

When they were abreast of the house she understood that it was the one, the one with the shed, the shed with the motorcycle and when they rounded the corner and Smoke plunged toward a dead shrub it took only a split second for her to realize that the shrub was a screen, a fake, and she tore into the branches with her hands, pulling, yanking, the dead twigs cutting and scraping her skin. The deadwood fell away and there it was, a sagging barn-shaped box of a shed—it was badly kept, paint peeling off the cheap wood in cracked strips, the lock hanging rusted and useless.

Smoke pulled her inside and slammed the door. Yellow light filtered through a stained and spiderwebbed window, illuminating shelves of buckets and jars and garden tools—and a motorcycle. It was there—it was really and truly there, an incongruously clean and shined-up thing, front wheel tilted sportily on the slab floor.

But behind her the door swung open on creaking hinges and she could hear, not far away at all, the screaming and grunting. “It won’t—they’ll be—” she protested, but Smoke was pushing at a long, low oblong box, trying to block the door with it, and Cass shut up and helped.

It was an old freezer, a heavy thing, but she and Smoke threw themselves into the task and bumped and scraped it along the floor, a hideous smell rising from it as the lid jostled and fell away. Meat roasts and chops packed in plastic, now moldering and rotten—the stench reaching into her nostrils. Spoils, the scraps that no raiders found, ruined when the electricity failed. Nausea rolled through Cass’s gut as the first of the Beaters threw itself against the door.

They were inches away, screaming out their rage and their hunger, and Cass leaped back. Smoke caught and held her, hard, his arms wrapped tight around her from the back. “Calm down now,” he ordered, his lips brushing her ear, and there was something in his voice that made her body follow his instructions even as her mind went nearly mad with fear. She
felt
her heart slow, her hands unclench.

Only then did Smoke release her and take the handlebars of the bike, kicking up the kickstand. The light glinted off keys that had been left in the ignition. He slid onto the seat with an ease that let Cass know it was far from the first time he’d been on a motorcycle. Turning the key he revved the engine hard.

“Behind me,” Smoke ordered and Cass threw a leg over the seat, slid her hands around his waist, buried her face in the soft cotton of his shirt.

And closed her eyes.

Because she was too frightened to see what he would do next. Whatever it was, they had one chance. Only one. She felt the reverberation of the bike’s powerful motor through Smoke’s body, through the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt, and she squeezed her eyes shut tighter and she whispered a prayer to whomever that was immediately stolen by the roar of the motor and the screaming and her own heart—

Ruthie
—

And then her entire body was jarred so hard that her teeth clashed in her head and the wind was knocked out of her lungs. The bike leaped ahead like an enraged animal loosed from its cage and slammed against the back wall of the shed, splintering it, Sheetrock bursting all around her. Something struck her ankle, knocking her foot loose, and she slid sideways on the seat and nearly fell off, scrambling to hang on to Smoke.

“Cass!” he yelled, as the motorcycle chewed through vines and fallen tree limbs toward the alley, spinning up gravel and dead leaves and dirt. “Hold
on!
”

And she did. His words again made her hold on for everything she was worth. Her hands clutched his waist hard enough to bruise, and she pulled herself back upright, her ankle banging painfully against metal, the heat of the engine blowing hard through the fabric of her pants. Her cheek stung and something warm slid slowly down her chin and she realized she was cut and bleeding.

She forced her eyes open and saw squat garages racing by. They followed the gravel alley to the end of the block where it opened onto a street, and Smoke took the corner expertly, angling so sharply that she had to clutch him tight to avoid spilling even as he accelerated into the turn and the motorcycle leaped onto smoother pavement.

A flash of movement caught her eye and Cass turned to look. A horde of them, more than she’d ever seen in one place before—there had to be over two dozen, jogging un-steadily down the street a block away. The ones in front paddled the air with their clutching fingers, eyes rolling in the ecstasy of the hunt. They followed the sound of the engine, turning and stumbling as the motorcycle powered on, and Cass pressed her face into Smoke’s shirt, into the plane between his shoulder blades, and breathed shallowly of his scent, his warmth.

For several blocks neither of them said anything. They passed cars abandoned at odd angles, crumpled into street signs and fire hydrants. There was junk in the streets—an overturned armchair, sodden clumps of clothes matted to the curbs. Squashed rats. A Barbie notebook, its shiny pink cover faded by the elements. A Little Tikes Cozy Coupe in a patch of kaysev, overturned, its wheels turned toward the sky.

Smoke navigated the obstacles with ease, and Cass knew that she had underestimated him. She’d thought him a deliberate man, because of the care he took for her safety, the way his large hands enveloped hers. She had not thought him capable of such quick reflexes, but as she slowly uncoiled from her terrified clutch, she noticed how he turned his wrist just so to make the motorcycle dip around a downed tree or an abandoned shoe, finding smooth stretches of pavement where he pushed the bike as hard as it would go, making it scream with exertion.

After the alley turned to neighborhood and the neighborhood thinned to a house here and there, Smoke finally pulled back on the gas and they hit a steady clip in the dying sun.
It’s nearly night,
Cass noted with surprise, because she had been too busy with her terror and her will to survive to notice the setting of the sun or the sweetening of the thick autumnal air.

It wasn’t just the gingery kaysev, either. There were other undercurrents that she couldn’t quite place. Evergreen, of course; she’d seen the seedlings, everyone had—but something else, too; something thick and waxy like a camellia or a New Guinea impatiens, extravagant even Before, unthinkable now.

But who was to say?

Who got to dictate, really, what died and what fought for a foothold and what thrived? Cass took the measure of the passing scenery. A kitschy cabin decor shop, the chain-saw-rendered black bears that once decorated the entrance now cracked and toppled. A sporting goods store where she’d once shopped the after-season sale, hoping to find a snowsuit that she could pack away for Ruthie’s next winter, coming out instead with a pair of fuzzy pink girls’ boots that would have been inexcusable if they hadn’t been so cheap.

After that, there was nothing but the twisting ribbon of the road, a pearly shimmer in the darkening evening. Eventually Smoke slowed the bike and eased over onto the shoulder. When they came to a stop he took care in settling the kickstand before he dismounted and offered Cass his hand. Her ears were still ringing from the steady roar of the road, but she allowed him to help her from the bike.

They were heading down, out of the mountains on the far side, the side that Cass rarely traveled. She did not know this road. Eventually it led to Yosemite, she was pretty sure, though she couldn’t picture the route in her mind.

Night brought its customary chill. The kaysev smell here was muted; there was clay dust in her nostrils, a not unpleasant smell she associated with endless hot afternoons running along sunbaked roads. Cass smoothed her shirt where the wind had whipped it around her waist. And as she looked around the road, she saw something astonishing, something that made her catch her breath.

“What,” Smoke said sharply. “What’s wrong?”

“No, no—it’s just—look,” she said, pointing to the tiny seedlings, a trio of them, that had caught her eye.

“Redwoods?” Smoke asked after a moment.

“I’m pretty sure those are sequoias. You know…the big ones.”

“Those are the first evergreens I’ve seen since…Before.”

Cass nodded, not trusting her voice to speak without catching. She’d thought they were gone forever.

Then she noticed something else.

“There was fire here.” Sure enough, the trees here were not just dead but charred black; it had been difficult to see in the twilight, and she hadn’t noticed. “It must have happened…well, if it happened right before, or during, the attacks…”

“What difference would that make?”

“When fire destroys a living tree, the cones fall and release their seeds. So if the timing was just right, it could have seeded right before the Siege, and then the seeds somehow survived, and…”
This
. She toed the road next to the seedlings for emphasis.

“That’s…” Smoke seemed at a loss for words, but he caught her hand in his and squeezed. “How do you know so much about plants?”

Cass shrugged, embarrassed. “I, um…I used to think I would, that I could study it. You know, botany…landscape design.” Before she realized that escaping Byrn’s late-night “accidental” encounters in the hallway, his hands on her thighs under the dinner table, meant getting out with no diploma and no college and no real plan other than flight.

For a long time, she thought she’d save up some money and go back, enroll at Anza State. Then one day she looked around her tiny, dirty apartment, high-heeled shoes abandoned by the door, empty cans stacked on the table, a stranger snoring in her bed, and realized she never would.

Cass tugged her hand back and changed the subject. “That was lucky. In…in the shed.”

“Luck? How about skill?” Smoke demanded, the corners of his mouth curving in a wry smile. “So says my shelf of dirt bike trophies from junior high.”

“I don’t think that’s a dirt bike,” Cass said, pointing to the shiny machine whose engine ticked and popped in the cool night.

“Little boys who ride dirt bikes grow up to ride big bikes. I had one at my place in Tahoe. Rode a lot on roads like this one.”

“Along with your waverunner and your snowmobile and your powerboat and all your other toys,” Cass said, trying for a light tone.

“Yeah, I had it all, didn’t I?” Smoke said. There it was again, the sadness, as he slipped an arm around her shoulders, and after hesitating for a moment she laid her cheek against his chest. He pulled her closer and rested his chin on the top of her head.

This is where he tells me it will all be okay,
Cass thought. But he didn’t.

And Cass, who had never let any man stay much longer than the time it took him to put his pants back on, suddenly found herself wishing he would. She would take that lie.

Finally Smoke sighed, a deep intake of breath that Cass felt against her skin, and then pulled gently away from her. “We can be at the Convent before it’s completely dark, as long as we don’t run into anything…unexpected.”

“The roads have been clear,” Cass said, brushing imaginary specks from her sleeves, not meeting his eyes. It was true; there had been fewer junked cars, less debris, up this far.

“Not too populated this far in,” Smoke said. “Most of the log-jamming happened nearer the city. Works for me. Once we get close to San Pedro, we might hit a few more, though.”

“Well, we don’t really have much choice, right?” Cass asked. She waited until Smoke slung his long leg over the bike and then slid on behind him.