Aftertime. Sophie Littlefield

seen.

      06

      FOR A LONG MOMENT THEY STARED AT EACH other, Cass holding her breath, the girl’s eyes wide with surprise and curiosity—but no fear.

      “Can I come in?”

      “Of course,” Cass said.

      The girl slipped gracefully into a chair at the same table where Cass had drunk coffee hours earlier. She had washed and changed her clothes, and her hair had been combed and plaited neatly. The braids made her look even younger, but Cass could see that she was well into adolescence, maybe fourteen. That might explain her rebellion against her mother, but Cass figured it went further than that—there was a reckless spirit to her. A spirit not so different from her own.

      “So you really were attacked by Beaters,” the girl said. “What happened?”

      Cass winced. Telling Smoke had been hard enough, especially when he asked to see her scars. The look on his face—the horror, the pity—had been almost more than she could bear, but it was worse when he turned away from her. It had taken him a few minutes to get his composure back, and he’d remained cool and distant even when he promised to keep her secret.

      “I was …” Cass started to speak, found that her mouth was too dry. She licked her lips and cleared her throat, wished for water. “I was taken, yes. But, I, I woke up and I was … all right.”

      Sammi didn’t hide her skepticism. “What about those cuts? Did one of them do that to you or did you do it to yourself?”

      Cass had wondered the same thing a thousand times. The wound pattern held clues. The damage was all in places she could reach by herself, and it was safe to say she was the one who’d bitten and chewed herself.

      The wounds on her back were another matter. The Beaters always started with a person’s back, where the large uninterrupted stretch of flesh made their ravenous feeding easiest. Only after they chewed it away did they move to the backs of the legs, the buttocks—and eventually, when they had eaten away all they could, they turned their victim over and started on the front.

      She touched her stubbled hair. “I did this.”

      “So, you were one, for a while at least,” Sammi said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Did you eat the blueleaf?”

      Cass shook her head, but who could say with certainty? When the government dropped kaysev from planes all over the nation, its last act before it ceased to exist, the second strain had somehow gotten mixed in. Everyone had a theory about that: most thought the researchers made some sort of mistake, sending the wrong seed, but some people thought blueleaf had evolved on its own, that mutating cells had been heeding nothing more than the call of evolution. And some saw the hand of God in the appearance of the rogue leaves, whose edges were slightly pocked and tinged faintly blue—His punishment for the profligacy and faithlessness of the last decade.

      The blueleaf took root, an occasional low-growing and stunted patch among the healthy kaysev. At first no one noticed. By the time anyone made the connection, it was too late for the first wave of the infected.

      Detection wasn’t the only problem. The early stage of the disease didn’t hint at what the victim would ultimately become—it hid its curse in a cloak of sensual delirium.

      First came the fever, of course—and that felled thirty percent of the infected, mostly the very young and the old. But if you survived that, you felt so fucking good. Word quickly spread that when the fever leveled off, you experienced a high not unlike ecstasy. Your skin pigmentation deepened, an appealing effect when coupled with the feverish sheen. The irises of your eyes intensified—green turned jade, blue shone brilliant sapphire, brown sparked gold—but your pupils stopped dilating, and without bright light you could barely see.

      You ceased to care, as your mind started to take elaborate journeys on its own. The hallucinations were elaborate and often sexual. There were no terrors or suicidal impulses. You simply lay about, flushed and beautiful, sighing with pleasure.

      For a week or two. Until you started to pick at your skin and pull at your hair. Until your confusion deepened and your speech grew unintelligible, and your blood burned hot and you flayed your own skin and developed a taste for uninfected flesh.

      Cass had spotted a few blueleaf plants here and there as she followed the road up into the foothills. Citizens learned to kill the plant on sight, and they’d managed to drive the wretched thing nearly to extinction only a few months after they first appeared. Cass herself pulled the plants from the ground and trampled them whenever she saw them, even though her body had somehow rebuffed the disease.

      “My mom says blueleaf’s only here. That it’s not in the rest of the country.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “There’s been freewalkers through—some guy who had this ancient radio, like from the 1960s or something? There was something about it that it could get a signal even with all the power dead. And he said he talked to people in other states and they don’t have blueleaf. They have the kaysev but no one’s getting sick.”

      “That’s—that’s not possible. Everyone would leave California if that was true.”

      Sammi shrugged. “That’s what he was trying to do. He was going to walk all the way to Nevada. He just stayed one night. A couple people believed him, they went, too.”

      “Well.” Cass spoke carefully; she knew how fine the line was between hope and fantasy. “It would be nice. Maybe, once they get the Beaters under control …”

      “Yeah. I know it’s a long shot and all. I’m just sayin’.” She looked increasingly embarrassed, twisting her hair around nail-bitten fingers. “But I was just wondering. You know, how you got infected.”

      Cass took a deep breath. “I was attacked. I remember that. I don’t remember what came after, but—well, I’m hoping someone at the library will know.”

      “You think they might still have your little girl there. Your daughter.”

      Cass nodded, unable to speak.

      “I hope they do,” Sammi said fiercely. “My mom, she worries about me like all the time? She and my dad separated back in January and he moved up to Sykes and we don’t know if he, well, you know. I mean the last time we talked to him, he and this guy, this guy who had gas, you know, like a full tank or almost a full tank? My dad was going to have this guy bring him down, only the roads …”

      She stopped talking and swallowed and Cass spotted the hole in her bravery.

      The roads. They’d become nearly impassible in places, as gas ran out and gridlocked intensified, as wrecks piled up and people panicked and abandoned their cars and tried to make it back. A few did. Many others didn’t. And a few just stayed locked inside, terrified, until they starved or someone shot them for their fuel or one of the Beaters happened to remember what it was to open a door, the memory of the mechanical motion released from the recesses of its ruined mind, a small step to feed its larger need.

      A few days before she moved to the library, Cass had watched from her kitchen window as a car tried to navigate the debris-strewn street that ran along the front of the trailer park. Woodbine Avenue had once been one of the busiest streets in town, with two lanes in each direction, so it was a logical choice for someone trying to get through—or out of—town. But Cass hadn’t seen a car in days. No one had gas—and no one had anywhere to go. Rumor had it that the biggest cities had fallen first, and anyone who’d set out for Sacramento or San Francisco hadn’t been seen since.

      But Cass didn’t recognize this car, a blue Camry with a crumpled front bumper. When it slowed to a stop at the site of an accident that had blocked the road for weeks—a semi truck had overturned trying to make the tight turn, causing a pileup that no one had bothered to clear, the drivers abandoning their vehicles to search for shelter—Cass waited for the car to turn around and go back the way it had come.

      For