Читать книгу: «Rebirth»

This Christmas, we’ve got some fabulous treats to give away! ENTER NOW for a chance to win £5000 by clicking the link below.

www.millsandboon.co.uk/ebookxmas

Praise for Sophie Littlefield’s
AFTERTIME

“Stephen King’s The Stand in a bra and panties…. The illegitimate love child of McCarthy’s The Road and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead…Aftertime is a highly palatable amalgam of post-apocalyptic fiction, romance, and horror. Hard-core fans of post-apocalyptic fiction will love Aftertime. Romance fans will embrace it. Aficionados of zombie fiction will be stunned.”

—Paul Goat Allen, BarnesandNoble.com

“Littlefield turns what could be just another zombie apocalypse into a thoughtful and entertaining exploration of many themes…. Littlefield has a gift for pacing, her adroit and detailed world-building going down easy amid page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing descriptions that bring every paragraph of this thriller to life.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The fresh, original world-building solidly supports the unfolding narrative and Littlefield’s compelling writing will keep readers turning pages late into the night to find out what happens next. Outstanding!”

—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick

“Wildly original… Sophie Littlefield’s Aftertime is a new generation of post-apocalyptic fiction: a unique journey into a horrifying world of zombies, zealots and avarice that examines the strength of one woman, the joy of acceptance and the power of love. A must read.”

—J.T. Ellison, author of Where All the Dead Lie

“I’m geeking out of my mind after reading Aftertime because I felt almost the same way reading it as I do watching The Walking Dead: Captivated. Aftertime is hands down the best zombie book I’ve read all year. Hide your wife, hide your kids, and hide your husbands ’cause they’re eating everybody out here.”

—All Things Urban Fantasy

“[A] gripping read; sympathetic characters operate in a detailed, realistically shattered echo of modern society, and the emotional journey is as harrowing and absorbing as the physical one.”

—Paperback Dolls

“Alternately creeped me the hell out and broke my heart repeatedly.”

—The Discriminating Fangirl

“Littlefield excels at keeping the momentum going and she knows how to inject a huge beating heart into any story, even one in which humanity is barely alive.”

—Pop Culture Nerd

Rebirth

Sophie Littlefield

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For M, searching for four-leaf clovers

Contents

Chapter 01

Chapter 02

Chapter 03

Chapter 04

Chapter 05

Chapter 06

Chapter 07

Chapter 08

Chapter 09

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

01

THE FIRST SNOWFLAKE AFTERTIME WAS LIKE NO snowflake that ever fell Before. Cass nearly missed it, kneeling on the matted dead kaysev plants, their woody stalks poking into her skin through the thick leggings she wore beneath her dress. Her eyes had been closed, but Randall had gone on too long, the way people do when they are trying to say something meaningful about someone they didn’t know well. After a while Cass grew restless and began to look around, and there, not two feet away, the snowflake drifted past in a lazy swoop as though it had all the time in the world.

Cass licked her cracked lips, could almost feel how the flake would melt on her tongue. Until that moment she didn’t realize she had actually doubted whether snow would ever return, much as she’d doubted whether rats or sparrows or acorns or moths would return. She wished she could nudge Ruthie, or even Smoke—she knelt between the two, in the place of honor up front—but a funeral was still a funeral, and so she stayed as still as a stone.

Maybe by the time they were finished, there would be more snowflakes. A flurry, a drift: the gunmetal sky looked grudging to Cass; there would be no storm today. Besides, the temperature would rise well above freezing by noon. These early snows never lasted long.

Next to her, Ruthie sneezed. Cass wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer. Ruthie had loved the snow when she was a baby. She was still a baby—three years and two months, according to the Box’s calendar. The month and date were metal numerals hung from nails on a wooden pole, the kind people once nailed to houses and mailbox posts, back when people still lived in houses. Each morning, the first shift guard changed the numbers. Today, it read 11 * 17.

Smoke held Cass’s hand, his strong fingers wrapped around hers, and she felt his blood running sure and strong under his skin, circulating through his body and making him strong and back to his heart again, and she said the silent prayer that was part of her breathing itself now, part of every exhale: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-for-making-him-mine. His touch, his closeness, that was what made her whole; he more than made up for every wrong man that had come along before. She closed her eyes and exhaled the prayer and waited for Randall to finish his rambling eulogy as the five other people in attendance fidgeted and sighed.

“And now Cass will say a few words.”

So her turn had come, at last. Cass stood, nervous and hesitant. She gulped air as she took the few steps to the humble altar next to the fresh grave. Sieved earth was piled neatly. Gloria was in the ground, her body covered with six feet of rich Sierra mountain soil—Dor’s grave diggers charged a premium for the full six, what with most folks settling for half that these days. Cass breathed out, then in once more, a rhythm she learned back in her early days in A.A., when she’d been torn between the paralyzing certainty that if she spoke during the meeting she would cry—and that if she didn’t, she would never come back.

Back then, it had sometimes been all she could manage to say her name. Today she would have to say more. Not for those gathered here: besides Smoke and Ruthie, there was only Randall, standing at a respectful distance and twisting his handkerchief in a tight knot around his knuckles, and Paul, who never missed a funeral, and Greg, who’d spent some evenings with Gloria even after she was banned from working the comfort tents.

And then also Rae, who managed the comfort tents, and probably felt guilty about firing Gloria, since, when Gloria couldn’t work, she couldn’t buy anything to drink. And that was what killed her, in a way—after only a few days of forced sobriety she had drunk a bottle of Liquid-Plumr from the garbage hill slowly accumulating on the far side of the stadium’s parking lot.

Cass gazed out on the others and swallowed back tears. Smoke had put on a clean shirt, not that you could see it under his heavy work coat. Ruthie wore a little red coat and matching hat that a raiding party had brought back last week. Everyone else was dressed in the usual layers of clothes splodged with stains, the heavy boots. No one looked directly at her, save Smoke. No one gathered here would care if Cass cried for Gloria, but it was important to her that she not be misunderstood, not now, not today.

She trailed her fingers along the scratched wooden top of the small table enlisted as an altar. Someone had brought it back from a night raid, a humble thing whose most appealing feature was that it was light and easy to carry. Cass thought it might—half a century ago—have been a telephone table, back when phones had to be plugged into the wall. On Sundays, Randall put a cloth on the little table, rested his Bible on top of that. He didn’t lack for an audience. Cass didn’t begrudge him his followers—nor did she begrudge them their hour of peace or solace or whatever it was they found in his words.

Still, today: no cloth, no Bible. It had fallen to Cass to plan the service. No one else offered, and Randall had come to stand in the door to their tent, hat in his hand, and asked Cass what would be right. Gloria had never spoken of God and Cass felt it would be presumptuous to impose Him on her now.

Cass shut her eyes for a moment and exhaled slowly. When she opened her eyes again, Ruthie was watching her expectently, lips parted in anticipation. For a child who didn’t talk, Ruthie listened to others with great care, none more than her mother.

Cass produced a tiny smile for her daughter. She reached for the string around her neck and pulled from under her blouse the pendant she had made yesterday, and Ruthie did the same. They wore clothespins, the old-fashioned wooden kind, knotted to nylon cord. Cass held the clothespin as though it were a precious thing and considered it, turning it slowly this way and that.

“Gloria and I talked about clothespins once,” Cass began, her voice rusty. “She told me about hanging clothes on a line.”

Greg, dry-eyed and somber, nodded as though what Cass was telling was a story he’d heard a dozen times. That couldn’t have been. Gloria made little sense when she talked; she dredged memories and unfurled them carelessly, moving in and out of time and sense. You didn’t have a conversation with Gloria so much as an occasional glimpse into the ill-tended recesses of her mind. There was nothing there to hold on to.

She wondered what memories Gloria had shared with Greg, if they had talked at all. The comfort tents were places of shame; men and the occasional woman slipped in and out of them like shadows, bartering whatever they had for a grope in the dark, an awkward coupling, a muffled cry. Anything to forget the gone world for a while.

Those who worked in the tents usually had no other way to earn. That was the case with Gloria, who was too far gone to raid, to cook, to harvest, to mend or make things, or even offer knowledge that helped. But she had meant more than nothing to Greg.

“She told me about hanging clothes on a line,” Cass said again. She cleared her throat. “And she…had someone, once. His name was Matthew.”

Gloria had long, thick silvery hair. That, and her faded blue eyes, were the only clues to her long-ago beauty. She was lean and leathery. She’d broken a tooth and on the rare occasions when she was sober she was suddenly self-conscious and tried to hide the gap, barely moving her lips to speak. Her nails were ragged and dirty. Her clothes grew filthy and torn in the days before her death. The last time they spoke, Gloria had answered all of Cass’s questions with noncommittal grunts and never once met her eyes. Ruthie had been afraid of her.

“She loved him,” Cass concluded. Once, Gloria had loved. That would have to be enough. Cass had said all she knew—all that was important, anyway. Gloria never told her anything but his name; if he’d been a lover, a husband, a childhood friend, it didn’t matter.

She bent to the earth, the rectangle of dirt raked carefully one way and then the other, crosshatched from the tines. She dug her fingers in and took a handful, then stood up and slowly sifted the earth back over the length of the grave.

She stood back as the others filed around the perimeter of the grave. They knelt and scooped their own handfuls of dirt, even Ruthie. The knees of her tights were smudged with dirt—another stain Cass would not be able to get out. She sighed. Each person shook their dirt back down onto the grave, and Cass wondered what words they said in their minds. Hers was goodbye—maybe everyone said goodbye.

The dirt was sprinkled and still they ringed the grave, waiting. Randall dug in his pocket. “Cass, perhaps you’d like to…”

He held out a plastic bag, gapping open; inside were dried kaysev beans, dull and brown. Cass looked at him sharply, but for once Randall stared back with a hint of challenge in his expression. Smoke squeezed her hand, shook his head. Smoke stayed far clear of Randall’s Sunday-morning services. He had little to do with believers. He even did his occasional drinking at Rocket’s—not German’s, where believers tended to congregate.

Cass didn’t want to take the beans. The funeral practice of sprinkling the grave with kaysev seed—it was based in the Bible, the passage in Matthew about the sower. It was a common practice, almost secular by now; a whole new culture of loss, its habits and practices as ingrained as if generations of ancestors had practiced them. It had only been eight months since the Air Force had rained kaysev down from the skies on their last flights, but eight months had been long enough to create new rituals. The plant was meant to feed the population; it had begun to feed their imaginations, as well.

Smoke saw everything through the filter of ideology and he was resolute, and Cass was inclined to agree with him, at least on this. Terrible memories of the Convent were too fresh, the mark its zealotry had left on Ruthie too deep.

God had not taken up residence across the street in the stadium—of that Cass was sure.

But unlike Smoke, she was not ready to declare Him absent. Still, He was an elusive, crafty cipher to Cass, and for now she meant to keep Him distant.

When Cass did not take the plastic bag from Randall’s outstretched hand, the frowning man narrowed his eyes and upended it himself, the beans falling to the earth and rolling into the crevices and fissures in the earth. “He that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word,” he intoned, his gaze never leaving Cass’s face.

Then he stepped back from the grave, jamming the empty bag back into his pocket and brushing his hands together fastidiously. Everyone else followed him, retreating to the cleared area where the service had begun, shuffling slowly.

“And now we conclude our service for Gloria,” Randall murmured, the wind snatching at his words and carrying them away, so that everyone leaned in closer to hear. Everyone, that is, but Cass, who picked up Ruthie and edged to the back of the small gathering while Randall raised his hands for a final benediction.

“Man, you are dust,” he said, closing his eyes. “And to dust you shall return.”

Not for the first time Cass considered that Randall was a fraud, cobbling together bits and pieces of faiths to suit himself.

What did it matter, though? Dead was still dead, and the rest of them were still here.

02

CASS GLANCED BACK OVER HER SHOULDER AS THEY trailed the others back to the Box. The streets looked clear; there had been no Beater sightings for a couple of days. Randall moved among the graves, straightening the crosses and pulling weeds.

It wasn’t much of a graveyard—the plot of land had once been a tiny park wedged between residential streets two blocks from the Box, but the trees that shaded it had died early enough in the Siege that someone had actually taken the trouble to cut them down to stumps and haul them away. Some of the graves were marked with crosses carved from wood, nailed together, finished to varying degrees. One small one was painted white, with tiny shells glued along the edges. Most of the crosses were raw, hastily made, not even sanded.

Some graves, like Gloria’s, had no marker at all. For now, the dug and piled dirt marked its location, but it would not be long before the dirt would sink and level and no one would remember where she lay.

Had it been up to Cass, she would have left the few plants that sprouted this time of year. To her mind the reappearance of each plant Aftertime was a miracle in itself, and her garden in the Box had a small square marked out with stakes and twine for each native species she found on her walks. Firethorn, pepperweed, crupina. Each of them once assumed gone forever. Each—through what combination of God’s will and hardiness and luck she had no idea—returned, pushing through the wasted crust of the forsaken earth.

Greg, Rae, Paul—once through the gates, they slipped off in different directions, not bothering with a goodbye, not even for Ruthie. Cass wasn’t sure how much longer she could stay here in the Box, where gloom had settled and quashed her hopes that it was a place fit for raising her little girl. Before, people made an effort for a child, even one as silent and strange as Ruthie was now. Under the hat, her hair was as short as a boy’s; in the Convent they had shaved all the children bald. But by spring Ruthie should have enough for a little pixie cut, something more girlie. Cass was self-conscious of her self-consciousness: surely survival was enough of a parlor trick; should children really have to do anything more?

There were no fat Gerber babies Aftertime. There were few babies at all. Starvation and the fever had taken so many, early on; the Beaters claimed many more. Cass knew firsthand how hard it was to look upon a child when your own was gone. But she had been given a second chance; she had gotten Ruthie back, and now she meant to cherish her. She would dress her in the prettiest things she could find. She would give her everything that the battered world could provide.

Ruthie’s red coat was a gift from a quiet boy named Sam, who’d lost an eye in Yemen in the Rice Wars. He stopped by Cass and Smoke’s tent after a raid and pulled it from his backpack, a soft, finely made woolen coat with carved shell buttons. He wouldn’t trade for it, but he had accepted a cup of peppermint tea brewed from the last of Cass’s herb garden before a hard freeze took all but the thyme and chervil. Sam wasn’t a talker, but he loved Ruthie. He airplaned her squealing through the air, carried her around on his shoulders and let her crawl all over his long lanky legs. Cass suspected Sam had once had a little brother or sister, or perhaps a niece or nephew. Whoever the child was, they were long gone, leaving Sam with a few good moves and, perhaps, an empty place in his heart.

Underneath the coat, Ruthie wore a blue corduroy jumper and a pair of white tights. Her shoes were too small; she was growing fast these days. All the raiders knew to keep an eye out—size seven, twenty-four European—but you never knew what you’d find, and the only sure thing—the mall at the far edge of town—was still infested with Beaters.

It had been more than a month since Ruthie’s things had been washed. Sometimes one of the Box merchants had detergent for trade, but it was expensive, and besides, Cass and Smoke had agreed they were going to try to switch to homegrown wherever possible. That meant using the oily kaysev soap made from the fat rendered from the beans. It wasn’t terrible for washing one’s body or hair, but it wasn’t great for clothes. It didn’t take stains all the way out and it didn’t do much for the lingering odors of sweat and smoke.

It wasn’t like anyone else cared. Smoke was always saying Cass should just let Ruthie wear sweatpants and T-shirts like Feo, the only other child in the Box. But Feo was practically feral, a sharp-toothed, long-haired boy of eight or nine who slipped quick-footed and cagey among the tents and merchant stands, stealing and boxing with his own shadow. Dor let Feo stay only because he’d become a sort of a mascot for the guards, who’d found him squatting with an unkempt, semiconscious old woman in a farmhouse past the edge of town back in October.

Cass felt protective of Feo, especially after the woman, his grandmother, died during her first night in the Box. But she didn’t want her Ruthie becoming like him.

“I’m going to the trailer,” Smoke said, as they reached the intersection in the dirt path that led to their tent. It had become his habit not to explain his dealings with Dor anymore, as their private meetings grew more and more frequent. He had become Dor’s right-hand man in the months since he and Cass came to the Box, and Cass supposed that their daily interactions were necessary as Smoke learned more of the business and took over more and more of the daily operations of the security force. But Smoke also knew she resented these meetings, resented his alliance with Dor. Another couple might have talked it out. But Cass did not ask and Smoke did not volunteer.

She took Ruthie back to the tent. Inside, there was order. Cass had not been neat Before; she was neat now. Smoke had lined one wall of the tent with bookshelves bolted together; these held tattered books and empty glass jars and smooth stones. A dresser contained their clothes. The floor was covered with a beautiful rug, an ancient hand-woven thing that Dor said had once been worth many thousands of dollars. It was the one thing of luxurious beauty that Cass could stand to have in their home. Otherwise the things in their tent were plain, utilitarian and all chosen by her, because Smoke had understood that their choosing was healing for Cass, even before she understood it herself.

She slowly unbuttoned her parka then took off the dress she’d worn for the funeral and tugged on a wool sweater. She had wanted Smoke to see her in this dress, gotten only yesterday from a woman who’d arrived dragging a rolling suitcase stuffed with designer clothes and fine jewelry. It had cost Cass an airline bottle of Absolut and three 750mg Vicodin tablets. Cass hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in almost ten months and had resisted trading in it, but eventually she had to accept that booze and drugs were the Box’s principal currency, so she and Smoke kept a stash locked in a safe bolted to a pole sunk in concrete in the ground under the tent floor.

The dress was knit of some synthetic fabric, cut on the bias and gathered at the low scoop neckline. It was a shade of deep aquamarine that reminded Cass of the ocean—specifically, of the water off Point Reyes where she’d once spent a long weekend before she got pregnant with Ruthie. She’d been with a lover—which one, she couldn’t remember now—and he’d distracted her with expensive dinners and wine and blow, but it was the water she remembered best.

This dress was the color of misty mornings and rain-threatened twilights, of flotsam bobbing on waves before they broke on the shore. She had wanted to watch Smoke watching her in the dress, wanted to see his eyes widen and his lips part, wanted to watch him wanting her. Her body quickened at the thought, even now, when the moment was lost.

She took off the earrings Smoke gave her the week before and put them in the metal box where she kept all her little things, earrings and safety pins and buttons and needles and tacks. The earrings had come from a raid on one of the enormous homes on Festival Hill in what had been the rich part of town, a pair of diamond drops that would have cost more than a car Before. Aftertime was funny that way; it turned the value of everything upside down. Smoke had traded a Kershaw hunting knife with a black tungsten blade for the earrings and their owner had gone away satisfied.

After she got Ruthie changed into soft, warm clothes and tucked under her quilt for a nap, Cass poured water from a plastic pitcher into her pewter cup—engraved with a curly monogram with the letters TEC, spoils from the same luxurious neighborhood—and unwrapped a kaysev cake that had been spread with peanut butter. She ate her lunch mechanically and tried to concentrate her thoughts on Gloria. But her thoughts would not stay focused—they skittered like pebbles on a slide. Ruthie made soft mewling sounds in her sleep, and Cass listened and wished she could record them to play back later, the only way she could hear her daughter’s voice.

Cass sat still and quiet and waited for Smoke. She was barely aware of the path of the sun through the sheer curtains at the tent windows, the crumbs of her lunch hardening on the plate, the condensation slowly gathering on the pitcher’s clear plastic lid until a single drop fell with a soundless splash. Ruthie slept, and whispered, and moaned, the only sounds she ever made, the soundtrack of her nightmares, the leavings of her time in the Convent just across the road from the Box. Listening night after night was the price Cass paid for her carelessness, for having let her daughter be taken. She would listen every night until she died if that was what was owed.

But when the afternoon chill had settled into an ache in Cass’s hands and feet and still Smoke had not returned, Ruthie twisted in her cozy bed and threw off the quilt and sat up, never waking:

“Bird,” she said, as clear as anything, fear in her sightless sleeping eyes, and when she lay back down, oblivious of her dream-talk, Cass turned in astonishment to see Smoke standing in the door of their tent wearing no expression at all, blood dripping from his fists.

03

SMOKE WOULD NOT STOP TREMBLING AND WOULD not speak.

Cass swallowed her dread and searched him for grievous wounds, for bite marks. Finding none, she held him and kissed his brow and murmured over him and at last there was nothing else to do but take him out to the fire. Ruthie, who had forgotten her cryptic dream-talk, went placidly, carrying a stuffed dragon she had recently taken a shine to. Cass had looked at Smoke’s palms and seen that the cuts were superficial, clean slices to the skin as though he’d held out his palms to be flayed. Already the bleeding had stopped, the wounds’ edges going white; they bled again when Smoke forgot and flexed his fingers, but Cass allowed him to hold her hand and tried to ignore the stickiness between their flesh.

The fire pit was ringed in neck-high fencing. One of Dor’s recent conscripts sat at the opening in a folding chair, feet up on a stump, clipboard in hand. His name was Utah, and you got the feeling he wanted you to ask him why. Cass did not ask. Utah’s eyes were too hungry and his hair was braided and held with bits of leather and Cass was too exhausted by everything that had happened in the last year of her life to have time for people who still needed to be admired.

“Hey,” Utah said, making a note on his clipboard. “All three of you, then?”

A stupid question, Cass thought, but she just nodded and led Smoke and Ruthie inside, where the dirt had been swept just that morning and stumps were set up all around the fire pit, which was six feet across easy and burning mostly clean, split firewood mixed with green wood. She and Smoke had privileges not afforded other visitors to the Box; among them, water and the baths and the fire were free. But they were marked on the tally nonetheless; Dor insisted on rigorous bookkeeping.

Only a few people sat around the fire. Most would wait as long as they could, coming in to warm themselves before bedding down, hoping their bodies would retain the memory of heat long enough to fall asleep and maybe even stay that way long enough to get some rest. Here, it was easy to believe Dor’s prediction that by late winter firewood would become his most lucrative business. If only Cass could convince Smoke to go down mountain, to find a new place to be a family. There had to be somewhere warmer, more hospitable, somewhere that hope still lived.

Cass led Smoke to the far side of the fire ring, away from the others. She spread out a dish towel on a stump, pulled a set of nesting plastic dolls from her pocket, saved for occasions when she needed to keep Ruthie occupied. Ruthie smiled and carefully pried the largest doll’s halves apart as Cass took both of Smoke’s hands in hers.

“What,” she begged, leaning close enough to breathe his breath, ready to hurt for him.

“I broke the railing,” Smoke said, staring at his hands as though he was just noticing the cuts. “Outside of Dor’s trailer. It was cheap shit, aluminum…”

Cass pictured it in her mind’s eye, the trailer Dor used for his office and now, in the colder months, his home, as well. Construction steps led up to the door four feet above the ground, the trailer up on blocks. Its railing was flimsy, it was true, but to tear it apart would have taken strength—and rage.

“But why? What did he say to you?”

Only Dor, founder and leader of the Box, tight-lipped cold-eyed trader and enforcer of the peace, had the power to change events, to change the course of people’s lives. Smoke looked at her bleakly, his sensuous mouth taut with dark emotion.

“The school burned,” he said softly. “It was Rebuilders. They came to Silva and they burned it—gave the women and the children a choice. Join or die. The men, all of them…gone.”

Cass’s heart seized. The school, forty miles down mountain, had been the first shelter she’d come to after she was taken, after waking in a field in her own stink, crusted with healing sores, with no memory of how she got there. At the school she thought she would die; instead she met Smoke and she lived.

“Gone?” she echoed, the word thick on her lips.

“Throats slit to save the bullet, then burned inside the building. Cass…Nora stayed behind. She refused to go with them. And she died.”

The hole in Cass’s heart widened and cold seeped in.

Nora had been Smoke’s lover, once. Before Cass came. Nora’s dark hair brushed her shoulders, her gaunt cheeks were elegant. Nora had hated Cass on sight, had voted for her to be turned out to die because of the condition she was in when she’d arrived at the school. Now Nora was the dead one.

“They killed her…”

“She fought.” There—finally, there was the anger, flashing in his eyes. “She took one down with her, Dor said.”

Dor. Sammi—what about the girl? Dor’s daughter, only fourteen, whom Cass had felt a bond with even though their time together was brief.

“They say Sammi survived,” Smoke said, reading her thoughts. “At least, there’s a girl her age, her description, who made it through. But not her mother. It happened two days ago—they’ve probably taken her down to Colima by now.”

“The survivors—they’re all prisoners?”

“That’s what Dor said,” Smoke said flatly. “That’s what he told me. Rebuilders sent a message here. Their man came today. That’s what…what we’ve been talking about.”

The school was gone. The little community of shelterers crushed, splintered, burned, and the survivors led away like stolen cattle. The men… Cass shuddered to think of their bodies stacked and immolated.

She had only been at the school for one day, just long enough for them to judge, yet release her, long enough for Smoke to decide to throw in with her quest to reclaim Ruthie. He’d intended to go back, back to Nora, but that hadn’t happened. Instead he’d come here, and somehow they’d become…what they were. Lovers. A couple, perhaps. More, certainly, than Cass had ever dared to hope for. She had slept in Smoke’s arms nearly every night and been glad of it.

And on some of those nights Cass had thought of Nora and wished she didn’t exist. Such a wish didn’t feel like the same sort of sin as it might have been Before. Aftertime, the odds of living to the next day were stunted; you learned not to count on the future. You said goodbye knowing it might be the last time…and then, eventually, you simply stopped saying goodbye. Encounters meant both more and less when you knew you might not ever see someone again. The old world had ended, and new morals were needed to survive.

Deep in the night Cass would think of Nora and wish her to simply not be. She didn’t want her to fall to the fever, didn’t want the Beaters to find her, didn’t want illness or infection or a burst appendix to take her. She just wished she could erase Nora from Smoke’s past, rub her away so completely that not even a shadow remained, so she and Smoke could truly start anew together. Cass and Smoke and Ruthie, and that wish had been enough, and Cass had caught herself wondering a few times recently if a kind of happiness might actually be possible someday.

But the emotions on Smoke’s face did not leave a place for her. There was fury in the hard set of his mouth, determination in the line between his eyebrows. In his chambray eyes, the flint-sparks of something Cass knew far too well: vengeance. She’d carried the thirst for vengeance with her long enough to know that it was consuming and heavy and left little room for any other burden. Sometimes it left no room for the breath in your chest, your dreams at night—it stole everything.

But still she waited. She had not spoken Nora’s name aloud since they first came to the Box. If she didn’t speak it now, maybe her memory would let him go. Maybe, in death, she’d release him. Cass didn’t know if she believed in an afterlife, was still trying to decide if she believed in anything at all—but in this moment she begged a wish from Nora, dead Nora, ghost-or-angel Nora:

Let me have him. He’s no good to you now…just let me have him.

Smoke brought his hands together, clasping hers tightly and raising them to his lips. He kissed them so softly it was like the brush of a feather, and his lips were as warm as his hands were cold.

And Cass knew she would not have her wish.

“I have to go.”

04

LAST NIGHT, SHE HAD GONE TO SLEEP HOLDING a stone, but when she woke up it was gone.

The thing that had interrupted Sammi’s dream was a sound, a wordless shout but not a voice she knew, and then something breaking. But when she woke it was quiet and she tried to hold on to her dream, which had been about Jed. Everything was about Jed now—even the things that really weren’t.

The sky had been orangey-pale through the windows high on the wall. A few feet away her mother slept with her arms wrapped tight around her pillow. She’d been doing that ever since Dad left, holding her pillow tight to her chest as though it might protect her from something. Her mother never moved when she slept, she lay still and elegant with her dark hair fanning the bed. Her mom was still hot for forty, especially for Aftertime—’cause face it, take away the BOTOX and the thermal reconditioning hair treatments and the eyelash extensions, and a lot of the moms at her old school probably didn’t look all that great anymore.

Getting away from that stupid school had been the one good thing to come out of the last year. Not that it made up for everything else, of course, but the Grosbeck Academy had been a forty-five-minute drive and it was a shitty little third-rate girls’ school anyway, but it was the only one her mom could find where she could spend twenty thousand bucks a year for the privilege, which she only did to screw over Sammi’s dad anyway. And so they were up at five-thirty every morning and half the time they blew a fuse running all their blow-dryers at the same time, and wasn’t that fucked-up considering they lived in the most expensive “cabin” on their side of the Sierras, six bedrooms and five custom bathrooms, three of which nobody ever used.

At least she’d had lots of friends at Grosbeck, but looking back she didn’t miss any of them. She hoped nothing bad had happened to them, of course, though she knew it probably had, but she couldn’t spend her time thinking about all the ways they might have died or she’d go crazy. “Just think about today,” Jed always said when she started to feel the bad stuff coming on. Jed was always saying stuff like that—maybe it was because he had two older brothers and parents who were both therapists. Maybe it was because he still had his whole family—he was one of the rare lucky ones who hadn’t lost anyone close yet. They had a room down the hall that used to be a conference room, and his mom was always walking around the courtyard, talking with people, holding their hands. Probably telling them to feel their feelings or something like that. Jed made fun of her, but you could tell he loved her.

And he loved Sammi. He had told her so, when he gave her the stone. It fit just right in her hand, and buried in its smooth gray surface was a vein of quartz in the shape of a heart. He’d found it near the creek, and he’d given her other things—books, a necklace, a thing of peanut M&M’s—but the stone was her favorite.

But where was it?

Sammi had sat up in the pale light of dawn and rooted through her covers, warm from sleep, keeping quiet so she wouldn’t wake her mom. Maybe she’d dreamed the shout, the sound of breaking glass. She ought to go back to sleep, wake up when it was really morning, help her mom in the kitchen before she went over to the child care room. Braid her hair before she saw Jed.

There—the stone had rolled off her mattress onto the carpet. Sammi cupped it in her hand and was pulling her covers back up over her shoulders when she realized that the light coming through the windows wasn’t dawn at all.

It was fire.

05

THERE WERE CLOCKS, THE OLD-FASHIONED KIND with triple-A batteries, if she had wanted to know the time. One of the self-appointed holy men passing through had nailed them to posts around the Box, for comfort he said, but Cass had trained herself not to notice them. Knowing the time seemed necessary to some people, but to Cass, such details seemed pointless, almost profane. The reality of their life was inescapable, just like the fine dust kicked up along the well-worn path around the perimeter of the Box, finding its way into the folds of their clothes and the creases at their knees and elbows and neck and, she imagined, coating their lungs with a fine red-brown grit. Pretending that the time mattered was like pretending you could escape the dust, that you could ever really be clean again. It was no good.

Smoke went for a walk and Cass knew by now that when he went for a walk she was not meant to follow, so instead she hitched Ruthie up in her arms and went looking for Dor. The sky was purpling dark near the horizon and the sun had slipped down behind the stadium across the street, and the smells of cooking wafted from the food stands, and people milled along the paths toward the dining area, a fifty-foot square in the dirt where picnic tables were arranged with precision, like everything that was Dor’s.

Dor was not in his trailer, which was unusual for this time of day. He routinely made himself available in the early evening, seeing anyone who came to meet with him. As often as not, he ate his dinner alone afterward. Sometimes you’d see two or three people lined up outside at the park bench that had been planted there for that purpose, like failing students come to beg their professor for a passing grade during office hours. Nine times out of ten it was folks wanting credit, even though Dor had never been known to grant it. One of the cheap cots up front—yeah, sure, if there was one free. And he generally turned a blind eye to the food merchants who set their leftovers out late at night for scavengers. But if you wanted anything else you had to trade something, and that was that.

Cass was curious about the conversations that took place in the trailer, but she and Dor were not close and she didn’t ask. Smoke didn’t tell her anything, either. Dor had become a noman’s-land between them in the two months that Smoke had worked directly for him. Cass had never suggested that Smoke find some other work—what else was there, after all?—and she had no quarrel with Dor over the guards patrolling the Box and keeping the roads into town clear of Beaters. If she’d been surprised that Dor had put Smoke in charge of the entire security team, she had to admit the decision had been inspired: everyone knew about the battle at the rock slide, and while Smoke played down his role, that almost gave the story more power. He’d killed a Rebuilder leader, and the Box was full of stories of the Rebuilders’ methods, their violent occupations of shelters, their killing of those who resisted.

Smoke did nothing to spread the stories, and in fact grew stone-faced and irritable whenever he heard people telling them. He had drawn inward since Cass met him, and while he was most comfortable with her and Ruthie and rarely joined the gatherings around the fire late at night, he seemed to be happy enough with the company of the other guards. He insisted he was only their scheduler, a facilitator, but everyone knew otherwise.

Cass didn’t object to the guns Smoke carried, though she made him lock all but one in their safe at night. She didn’t object to the long hours he spent training with the guards, target shooting and lifting weights and practicing some strange sort of martial arts with a guard named Joe, who had been awaiting trial at the Santa Rita jail until one day late in the Siege when the warden apparently opened the doors and let the lowest-security prisoners go free. She didn’t even mind the awkwardness between Smoke and Ruthie; she knew he was trying and that Ruthie would warm up to him in her own time.

The truth was that Cass didn’t know when the discord had started between them, the uneasiness. Things had been so good and they were still good, most of the time. They had the rhythm of a couple, the way they prepared a meal together, handing each other things without needing to speak. Laughter came easy when they walked in the evenings, swinging Ruthie between them.

But still. They didn’t discuss Dor or what the two men talked about in the long hours they spent together. Smoke stopped telling her what he saw when he went on the raiding parties and hunting down the Beaters, and their conversation usually centered on her gardens and Ruthie and gossip about the people in the Box, the customers who came and went and the other employees they counted as friends. He often seemed preoccupied, and she sometimes woke in the middle of the night to see him sitting outside their tent, tilted back in his camp chair, staring at the stars. They didn’t make love as often, and Cass thought she might miss that most of all, the moments of release when her mind emptied of everything but him, when every horror and loss in her life faded for a moment, a gift she’d never found the words to thank him for.

Now, she forced herself to admit that Dor might know Smoke better than she did. If anyone knew what had happened, what was in Smoke’s mind, it would be him. She tried the front gate next. Faye was there, and Charles, playing cards with one of the older guards who went by Three-High, except by his new girlfriend, who called him Dmitri. Feo sat on Three-High’s lap, chewing on a kaysev stalk that had been soaked in syrup until it was nearly fermented, the closest thing to dessert besides the pricey canned pudding or candy canes.

“Hey, Cass,” Faye said, giving her a slanted smile, more than she offered most people.

“Hey. You seen Dor?”

They shook their heads, Charles and Three-High not lifting their eyes from their cards. “He was meeting with some guy, came in from the west this morning. Jarhead type.”

“Don’t need no more of that,” Three-High said with conviction.

Cass nodded. The guards were jealously protective of their jobs, which most agreed were the best to be had. A guard job came with room and board, access to the comfort tents, a free ticket to the raiding parties with the understanding they got a split of the spoils. Plenty for trade, whatever you wanted, and Dor didn’t much care what you spent your off-hours doing, as long as you showed up sober for your shift and got the job done. Dor didn’t hire addicts; there wasn’t a single one in the crew that Cass could tell, and she had an eye for it. Hard drinkers, yes. But no pill-poppers, no meth cookers. Every one of them loved something more than a high; for most of them it was danger, adrenaline, shooting and fighting and killing Beaters. For some, it was a fierce devotion to the Box itself, a place Cass suspected was the closest thing to home, to family, that they had ever known.

Smoke hadn’t hired anyone new since Dor turned the operation over to him. He was looking for one more, someone to start on nights, but he’d told her it was important to get this one right, to pick someone who’d fit the crew. He said he was waiting for someone who had never been in the service. He gave a variety of reasons, but Cass was still waiting for the one that sounded like the truth.

Charles laid down a card with some authority. “This guy, he was big. Built, you know? And carrying. We took a Heckler & Koch MP5 and a clean little Walther off him.”

“They’re not there now.” Three-High jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the locker where everyone but the guards were required to check their weapons upon entering the Box. “I was in there half an hour ago, didn’t see ’em.”

Faye to set down her cards, eyebrow raised.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Shit, Faye, I—”

“Okay, okay,” Faye said. “Don’t cry or nothing. I just meant I didn’t see him come back out.”

“Probably day shift checked him out,” Charles suggested.

“Maybe.” Faye seemed skeptical. “But still, that would have been a short visit.”

So none of them knew the visitor had been a Rebuilder. Of course, if they had, word would have been all over the Box as soon as he’d come through the gates. The stranger must have saved that information for Dor, who’d either killed him or found a way for him to leave without drawing attention.

The former was unlikely, since the Rebuilders always had a plan—plans. If the man didn’t make it safely back to his rendezvous point, they’d return in larger numbers, make a show of force, demand a meeting. Or maybe they’d escalate straight to armed conflict, and either attempt to take prisoners, or simply burn the place down.

The peace between the Rebuilders and the Box was uneasy. No one liked it, except possibly Dor, who, as far as Cass could tell, was without loyalties to anyone but himself and his meticulously tracked empire. But everyone realized that the balance was a delicate one, and any provocation would end up with a lot of dead on both sides. The Box was recognized as neutral, and while the Rebuilders no doubt intended to take it someday, for now they would have a hard time outgunning Dor’s arsenal and security force.

Cass decided to keep the information to herself, at least until she knew what the hell was going on.

“Maybe we didn’t have whatever he was shopping for,” Three-High said, yawning. “Kinda thin stock these days.”

Feo, finished with his snack, wriggled off his lap and darted away without a word. It was his way; he was a restless boy, frequently affectionate, but easily bored. No one tried to get him to sit still, especially not his self-appointed guardians, who saw nothing wrong with his prowling and occasional thieving and who had made him a bed in a staff bunkhouse, where they could hear him if he cried out in his sleep.

“What are you talking about, the shed’s practically full. And we got a shitload of new stuff this morning from those guys from…where was it…Murphy’s?” Faye ticked items off on her fingers: “Tampons and toilet paper. Tea bags, olive oil, a couple dozen of those South Beach bars, liquid soap and detergent, all that shampoo. And an unopened bottle of Kahlúa and a case of Diet Canfield’s and twenty-two bottles of Coors Light.”

“That stuff tastes like piss,” Three-High said.

“You’d drink it, though—tell me you wouldn’t.”

“Hell, yes, I’d drink piss if it got me buzzed.”

The raiders had recently cleared a house where Beaters had been nesting on the far east side of town, and they’d come back with a good haul, but they’d lost a man in the raid. They missed a Beater who’d been sleeping in a powder room. It was weak and injured, bones showing through its flesh in several places and one foot twisted at an odd angle, and the others had probably left it behind when they moved on. It had taken only one bullet to kill, but not until it had clamped its festering jaw on Don Carson’s ankle.

It had cost a second bullet to take Don down.

The raiding was growing more dangerous. When Cass had first arrived in San Pedro in the summer, Dor’s people had cleared the town of nearly all the Beaters. The Order in the Convent paid well enough for live Beaters to use in their rituals that it was more worth Dor’s while to scour the streets for them. But trade with the Order had dried up, and as the weather turned cold, Beaters had begun stumbling their way south, apparently traveling by some instinct unknown to their human brethren. With their preference for more densely populated areas, Beaters were quick to nest once they reached San Pedro, and quick to hunt. Dor still kept the main roads clear, and the guards picked off any who came too close to the Box—but come in on any of the less-traveled paths and you were taking chances. The Beaters had learned to stay away from the stronghold, though they roamed just out of sight. You could sometimes hear their moans and nonsense jabber carried on the winds.

When they caught someone, you could hear the screaming, human and once-human.

Recently it seemed like they were getting bolder. Last week Cass had been trudging back from the bathroom shed at the first light of dawn, the Box still silent and asleep, when she heard a shout at the fence. For a second she hesitated, shivering at the chill snaking up under her nightgown, and then she’d loped silently along the fence toward the sound, the tongues of her undone boots flapping.

She reached the source of the commotion, across from the rental cots near the front of the Box, in time to see the worst of it. George, the guard on third shift, had been backed up against the wall of a two-story brick building that once housed a jewelry shop on the first floor and accountants’ offices on the second. Cass put it together immediately—she knew the guards sometimes smoked in the space where the stone steps met the wall of the building, where an overhang provided protection from rain and the curving staircase blocked the wind. They’d even dragged a chair there, and everyone used it to take breaks between laps around the Box.

Which was fine, unless you fell asleep.

George usually didn’t take the third shift. He was covering for Charles, who was laid up with food poisoning puking his guts out, and as the long uneventful night stretched toward dawn he’d taken a break. Maybe he’d just closed his eyes for a moment.

Long enough for the four Beaters to prowl down the streets and alleys from wherever they’d carved their nest and find their victim practically gift-wrapped, to seize upon their prize with shrieks of delight and hunger before George had time to reach for his gun or even the blade at his belt.

When Cass arrived, heart pounding in her throat, Faye and Three-High had left their posts at the front gate and run down the block, but it was too late. The first bite was enough to doom George, but the Beaters would not finish him here. After a few slobbering crowing nips they hoisted him between them, each holding an arm or a leg in their scabby festering fingers, to drag him back to their nest where they would feast undisturbed. First they would chew the skin off his back, his buttocks, his calves, kneeling on his arms and legs so he couldn’t move. Then they’d turn him and eat the other side, and as he weakened and his screams grew hoarse, they’d nibble at the harder-to-reach skin of his face, fingers and feet.

George knew what his fate could be. You could hear it in his screams. As Cass watched—others running toward the commotion, those who were already awake, those who heard the screams through their sleep and bolted out of bed—Faye and Three-High shot at the Beaters. And when George’s screaming abruptly stopped she knew they’d been aiming at him, too.

There were still entire neighborhoods waiting to be raided, but people were getting nervous. Beaters, disease, toxic waste, depression and anxiety—all these things stopped even the heartiest at times. Some of the raiders had begun refusing to go out at all, just one of the many things Cass knew Dor and Smoke discussed.

“Hey, any kid stuff in the haul?” Cass asked, thinking of Ruthie, her tight shoes.

“Yeah, but older,” Faye said. “You know, like that tween stuff. All the sparkly shit on the jeans. Hold on to it for Ruthie. She’ll love it in a few years.”

There was a sudden, awkward silence; it was an unwritten rule that you never talked about the future. Especially because it wasn’t clear how much longer Ruthie would be welcome in the Box. Dor had made an exception to his no-kids policy for her, and another for Feo, but his continued beneficence was a gamble. “Or, you know, get Gary to take in the seams for now,” Faye added.

“It’s the shoes, mostly,” Cass clarified. “I’d just like to get her some sneakers. Boots, too. I don’t care if they’re boys’, either. Keep your eye out?”

“You know we do, Cassie,” Three-High said kindly. Some of them, mostly the men, had taken to calling her Cassie. Cass didn’t like it, but she also didn’t want to tell them to stop. They meant well. “We’ll find her something in plenty of time. Gonna find her a sled, too, little snowsuit.”

“Thanks,” Cass said softly. “But Dor…so the last you saw him was…”

“Not since morning,” Faye said. “We see him, though, we’ll let him know you’re lookin’ for him, okay?”

It was the best she could do. Cass thanked them and wandered back toward her tent. Maybe Smoke would return before dinner; maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he was looking for her even now.