Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

“Maybe…there,” he said, pointing at a square brick house that looked relatively unscathed, drapes drawn tight in all the windows.

Cass wondered if there were people inside, sleeping with blades next to the bed, guarding against attack, waiting for the sound of scratching at the door and windows, the moaning and frantic whining when a Beater caught the scent. She wondered what kind of person would prefer living with all that fear and uncertainty rather than sharing it with others in a shelter.

But Cass knew the answer. She knew exactly what kind of person would make such a choice- she would. Before Ruthie, before she had something she loved enough to keep on living, she would have dealt with evil by standing firm and alone against it. Even if- especially if-she knew it was a losing proposition, one that was sure to get her killed.

Cass wondered where the Beaters were nesting these days. Before she was taken, they had favored places that were open to the air but sheltered, like carports and stores with the front windows broken out. They slept a lot; it had seemed that they slept as much as half the day away, not that they ever seemed to achieve a very deep sleep.

There was a group from the library who spied on them at night. Miranda, before she was taken, had gone along a few times, taking enormous risks to watch a group that took over a service bay at a Big O Tires center. Cass never went along, but she listened to their reports, fascinated, along with everyone else.

Like newborn rats, they reported. A wriggling pile, night-›blinded and restless. They slept touching, their scabbed and weeping limbs draped and entwined, almost like lovers. Some people thought they felt affection for each other, but Cass doubted it. She figured it was just familiarity-or, more likely, something even more base, an attraction based on the pathology of the disease. The Beaters’ senses had been sharpened drastically-they were able to sniff the scent of citizens from dozens of feet away-perhaps their sensitivity had been sharpened as well and there was some sort of comfort to be had among their own kind.

They shared their victims, too-there was that.

“Where do they nest, now?” Cass asked.

Smoke answered reluctantly. “Peace Lutheran, still, last time we were here. The Ace garden center. Those are the big ones, and there are smaller nests in other places, too. And they seem to be roving. One night here, one night there. On the move.”

Cass considered the implications. “That’s not good.”

“No, it’s pretty much fucked. No one knows why it’s happening, but everyone seems to agree that the disease is changing and developing. Or maybe it’s just that the first wave of infected is reaching a new stage of the disease. I mean, it makes sense. Every stage has been well-defined. Maybe this is just the outcome of whatever’s going on, you know, in their bodies.”

“You mean, like maybe they’ll stop eating flesh and develop a compulsion to follow each other into the sea, like lemmings?”

“Yeah. Right,” Smoke said, the beginnings of a wry smile emerging. “It doesn’t hurt to dream, I guess.”

They walked for a while without saying anything. The pack Cass had been given was surprisingly comfortable, the weight of the water bottles and provisions well distributed. Her borrowed clothes were clean and she liked the sensation of the washed fabrics against her skin-it had been so long since she had been comfortable.

Twice they heard the eerie crowing cries of Beaters far off in the distance, a roving gang of them out on a night wander. They seemed to be heading away, rather than drawing closer, but when Smoke took her hand she held on tightly until the night was silent again. Cass knew how lucky she’d been that her journey back had been through largely unpopulated country; Beaters generally preferred towns. Now that she was back in Silva, the things were all around. Most slept, waiting for dawn, but as Smoke had explained, some were restless enough to venture out even when they couldn’t see. Cass didn’t know what was worse: the thought of them night-blind and stumbling a few blocks away, or knowing that tucked away in the buildings they passed were their fetid, teeming nests.

Still, she felt like she could walk for hours, just as she had every night since she woke up, as she made her steady way back up through the foothills. On those nights, she had tried hard to empty her mind of anything but her goal- Ruthie-but occasionally she couldn’t help wondering how she’d gotten so far from home. Beaters took their victims straight to their nests. The idea that they had taken her thirty miles or more out of town was unimaginable. How would they have carried her all that way? When they took a victim, one of them would sling the victim over their shoulders and others would restrain the kicking feet, the grasping hands of the terrified victim. Occasionally they would knock the victim unconscious, but that was rare. The supposition was that they were afraid they’d kill the person or stun them so badly that they weren’t alert for what came later.

It seemed to be important to the Beaters that people were awake for that.

“Hey,” Smoke said quietly, closing a hand on her arm, interrupting her thoughts. They were on another block like the last, lined with mature trees, small houses in various states of disrepair.

“What,” Cass whispered back. Immediately her senses were on high alert. She scanned the buildings quickly, trying desperately to see into the dark shadows.

“I heard something…I think. Over there, behind that house.”

“ Behind? Or in? Because-”

And then Cass heard it, too.

A SHRILL, WHISTLING WAIL, NOT LOUD. IT WAS coming from the direction of a wood-shingled Cape Cod on the right side of the street, where the stick-puzzle forms of dead jasmine shrubs stood sentry in front of a lawn choked with kaysev. Cass searched wildly for the source of the sound, but saw only a limp and torn cardboard box blown by the wind against a car that had been driven up to the porch, its bumper resting on the paint-flaked wood. As she squinted she saw that a form hung from the half-open car door, but it was still and unnaturally bent, and even in the moonlight Cass could see the white of its skull through skin that had rotted away. An old kill, or a heart attack, a fever death, even an accident-Cass barely gave it a thought as the wailing grew louder. Then there was another sound, from the opposite direction, and Cass whipped her head back to the left and saw something that seized her with terror.

A pair of them. One had been a woman, Cass could see, because her shirt wasn’t buttoned and her large breasts swung free as she lurched toward them. She had no hair left, and her mouth was a ruined crusted slash where she had chewed her own lips to shreds. The other one might have been a woman or a man, impossible to tell from its too-large jeans and down vest trimmed with matted fur.

Both waved their hands, wobbling almost comically as they stumbled closer. Cass felt a scream rising in her own throat and tried to swallow it back, but she couldn’t help a terrified whimper.

Smoke’s hand on her arm tightened until it hurt. “Quiet,” he whispered. “They’re tracking us by smell and sound only.”

“We’ve got to run,” Cass whispered back. They were too close. On the right, the Beater whose moaning had first caught their attention appeared around the corner of the house. It lurched into the yard, knocking into a dead Japanese maple. The branches caught on its clothes and its wailing grew louder as it flailed at the tree, trying to disentangle a branch that had gotten hooked on its jacket.

“If we run, they will, too,” Smoke said. “They’ll hear our footsteps, feel the vibrations in the ground. We can’t-”