Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

She wasn’t going to waste any more opportunities. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. The chair rocked slightly with the motion.

“I’m looking for my daughter.”

“ARE YOU, NOW?” LYLE ENCOURAGED HER WITH a smile as he and Smoke passed the joint back and forth. “You have a little one?”

“She’s almost three. Her name is Ruthie. She was at the library when I was…when I had to leave.”

Lyle narrowed his eyes and waited, but Cass forced herself to take a breath and let it out slowly. Lyle probably thought she’d done something reckless while she was drunk, gotten expelled from the library. Well, let him think it. The truth would only make things worse-how likely was he to let her stay, if he knew what she was hiding under her shirt? If he knew what she had been? If he were to start imagining the things she couldn’t remember doing?

“And you think your little girl’s here in town?”

Cass nodded. “We were sheltering at the library. It was two months ago. Do you ever get over there?”

“Not so much inside the place. If I see raiding parties out, I’ll go along and lend a hand. Once in a while they’ve checked up on me and Travers over there, a few other stubborn assholes like us who insist on squatting. But I haven’t heard of any kids, really. And I’m sorry, I’m not sure I would have remembered if they were talking about it-I don’t know the first thing about kids.”

Cass tried to cover her disappointment. “That’s okay. I’ll know soon enough.”

Lyle nodded. “You’re welcome to stay with me as long as you want. I reckon you’re anxious to get moving again, especially now that you’re so close, but I’m guessing the rat bastards are going to be hanging around for a while, anyway. Usually they just fuck around during the day, but now and then, like tonight, a few of ’em’ll show up trying to trick me into coming out.”

“You think they’ve evolved that much…awareness?” Smoke said, waving away the joint, which was burned almost all the way down.

Lyle took a last big puff and stubbed the spent butt out on a jar lid before he answered. “Tough to say. They don’t seem any smarter than before. If anything they’ve lost all their, you know, whadda you want to call it, their language skills. You know how they used to say little odds and ends, almost make you think like they had something going on upstairs?”

He tapped his head for emphasis, a long coil of his brown hair springing out of the elastic.

“Yes…a few words at a time, little phrases…” Smoke said.

“Yeah, that. Well, they aren’t doing much of that anymore. Now it’s all this wailing and snorting and shit, like they’re a bunch of rutting pigs. Only pigs are probably a damn sight smarter than they are.”

“But their habits-” Smoke said carefully.

“They still look like a bunch of fucked-up retards on the dance floor when they walk, and you still see them doing all kinds of freaky shit like they’re trying to remember what it was like to be human. Like I saw this one out there with a doll, taking her dress off and putting it on again. Course then it pulled the doll’s hair out. Or just the other day, here comes a couple of ’em with a wheelbarrow. I’m not shit-tin’ you, they’ve got this thing loaded up with a bunch of bricks and a watering can and I don’t know what else kind of crap…and they’re trying to wheel it down the street, only they ain’t got any balance and it’s just dumpin’ shit out and then they stop and try to put it back in. Best entertainment I’ve had for weeks, I’ll tell ya, watching those two assclowns. Finally they just left the whole mess next door in my old neighbor Bess’s yard, right in the flower beds. Oh, that old bitch woulda loved that, I’ll tell you.”

Lyle chuckled, a deep satisfied sound that amazed Cass. He genuinely seemed amused by what was just one more chronicle of how horrifying the world had become. Cass wondered how he did it…surely a little weed wasn’t the only answer. If it was, she’d happily light up.

If she thought drinking would help, she’d go right back to it.

Only she knew better. Drinking had taken away her pain, for a while. But it hadn’t given her anything back but emptiness. And if she ever wanted emptiness that badly again, she’d just kill herself, hang herself from a light fixture in an abandoned house or slide a blade into the soft flesh of her wrist. It wasn’t like she’d be the first.

“But you said they’re stalking you, here,” Smoke said. “Like they keep track of which houses have squatters. They’re not just responding to catching a scent or seeing movement through the glass or…”

“Oh, for sure. Ain’t any doubt about that.”

“That’s no good,” Smoke said heavily.

“Hell, no, it ain’t. It’s fucked, is what it is.”

“So they’ve got some sort of memory. And planning. I mean even if it’s just rudimentary.”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. It’s like they’re all in on it, figuring out how they can work together. They’ll do anything if there’s a chance they can bring down a live citizen. They’ll bang their heads into a wall until they’re dead, long as the wall gives way even a little bit. And after one does it, the rest figure out if you bang on the wall long enough it’ll break, and then next time it’s all of ’em bangin’ their heads. They’re fuckin’ unstoppable.”

“Yeah, that’s a bit newish, but still different from, you know, waiting for you to come out.”

Lyle shrugged. “I figure waiting around probably feels about like head-banging to them. Sometimes I go up to the window upstairs and holler at them just to watch them get all pissed off. They’ll throw themselves at the house for a while, climb on top of each other trying to get to the top windows-the lower ones are all boarded up now. One time I pushed a dresser out the window on one of ’em, broke its skull clean in half.” He chuckled. “Good times…’Course I had to drag it away later myself.”

“How do you…” Cass gestured around the basement. The shelves were well stocked with supplies: cans and boxes of food, paper towels and toilet paper. “I mean, what do you, um-”

“What do I do all day?” Lyle chuckled, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. “Fair question. Well, I go out every single day. I don’t aim to let the fuckers keep me cooped up. I mean, I ain’t crazy, I usually go right after nightfall or right before dawn, you hardly ever see one of ’em out then. It’s about four blocks to the Horseshoe, so that’s a big feature of my day, ’cause I take four or five jugs with me.”

The Horseshoe was a branch of the Stanislaus River that wound through town. A walking path had been laid several years back, and young mothers with strollers brought stale bread for their kids to feed the ducks, Before. Cass had taken Ruthie there when she was a baby.

“So what else,” Lyle continued, ticking his activities off on his thick fingers. “Well, I go poking around in folks’ sheds and garages and whatnot, see if I can find anything useful. And I been digging a new latrine…over in Bess’s backyard, in fact. Dug it right next to those fuckin’ roses she was so damn nuts over. If I had a nickel for every time she came over here to bitch and moan about my tree dropping plums on her rosebushes…and she had a yappy little dog, too, but luckily she took it with her when she moved on down to the library. Though I suppose someone’s made dogburgers out of it by now.”

Cass exchanged a glance with Smoke. When she’d been at the library, there had been a no-pets policy. Bobby had been firm on that; resources were to go to humans. Anyone who didn’t like it could try their luck living on their own, outside, with their dog or cat.