Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

Mim was dead, of course. She died with her skin as flawless and unlined as ever at the age of sixty-one-but Cass supposed her storied beauty must have been marred by the red flush and frothing spittle that marked a blueleaf fever death.

At least she’d been spared the other. Dying from the initial fever meant you never had to worry about becoming a Beater.

Cass folded the used cloth and laid it on the edge of the tub and returned to the bedroom. Smoke had made the bed, but he was gone. A flicker of panic flashed through Cass before she heard talk coming from downstairs, and she picked up her backpack and followed the voices.

The men were sitting in a tidy kitchen splashed with sun streaming in the upper third of the windows. The bottom had been boarded up, and there was a flap of fabric-covered plywood on hinges at the top that could be lowered to block the sun completely. Raised, it let in sun but did not give a view to the outside.

Cass paused in the hall, listening.

“She has enough to worry about,” Smoke was saying.

“She needs to know before y’all just show up at the library,” Lyle said softly. “Them Rebuilders-they don’t take kindly to bein’ told no, as I guess you know as well as anyone.”

Smoke muttered something that Cass couldn’t hear.

“It don’t matter,” Lyle said. “You got to hear what I’m sayin’ here. That story’s made it all the way here, hell, it’s probably got around half the state. Rebuilders gaining ground every day-they aim to take over. Hell, they want the valley, the whole fuckin’ state…who knows. Folks are afraid. They want someone to believe in. And that’s you. Which is all good, but you got the girl with you now, and maybe you’re not the worst thing to happen to her, see? But she needs to know it ain’t gonna be easy.”

Cass stepped into the kitchen. “Don’t you think I know that? When’s the last time anything was ever easy?”

“Mornin’, princess,” Lyle said, raising his glass of water in a mock toast. Cass saw that a glass had been poured for her as well, and she sat in the chair closest to Lyle, not looking at Smoke. She wasn’t ready to look at him yet. The sensations of the night before still lingered on her skin, but she could not afford to be distracted, not with the hardest part of the trip still ahead.

“Good morning,” she said, taking a drink from the glass. The water was cloudy, with tiny specks floating in it.

“I boiled it,” Lyle said, gesturing at the kitchen counter, on which plastic jugs full of water were lined up. “I get a fire going every few nights, haul up water from the creek and set in a big batch. I strain it, get it as clean as I can.”

“It’s delicious,” Cass lied. Really, it tasted like nothing. It was nothing, nothing but sustenance. Even if it was swimming in bacteria her body would take from it what it needed ›and leave the rest. She just had to maintain, survive.

The nontaste of the liquid triggered a memory of a meeting one weeknight after she’d done a double shift at the QikGo.

Cass sat in the back of the meetings at first and participated as little as possible-until the day she couldn’t leave the church basement because she knew that if she did she would get so drunk she might never recover, that she would drink until the bottle fell from her fingers and she passed out. She wanted to drink until she was dead. She wanted to drink until everything was dead, so instead she sat silent but trembling through the lunchtime meeting, and then stayed in the room crying and sweating until the first person came back for the five o’clock meeting. By then she was lying on the carpet next to the wall, her face pressed against the dirty rubber baseboards, and it took two people to help her into a chair.

But she stayed.

The night Cass was thinking about, she had gone to the meeting after her double shift, too tired to do anything but go through the motions. She passed when it was her turn to speak. She moved her lips when everyone else did, but didn’t listen to anyone’s stories.

Until the end. They stood, they held hands, they said the words. “…take what you need and leave the rest.”

Take what you need and leave the rest .

Just one sentence from the stupid thing they always repeated at the end of every meeting. She’d heard it dozens of times before; it meant nothing. Only it kept going through her head as the other people in the room talked and smiled and sniffled and hugged.

What do I need? she had asked herself. It wasn’t the stories. Not the burnt coffee or supermarket cookies or the company of these other people, not the chanting or the hand-holding or the hugs, which she had trained herself not to feel, not the manuals and books and pamphlets and tokens.

There was nothing in the room she needed. But when she left, she had what she needed. It was a puzzle like the ones she’d once liked to do, the riddles in her childhood. “I have no feet but I can run”…“I am as big as an elephant but as light as a feather”…

There is nothing here that I need…

What do I need?

“Thank you,” she told Lyle. Then she forced herself to turn and look at Smoke, who was watching her warily, his expression guarded.

“Thank you,” she forced herself to repeat, though the words were like broken glass in her mouth.

They passed the day helping Lyle move furniture around. Lyle had left thin strips of windows exposed along the top, which let in enough light to see what they were doing. His back was hurting from the effort of hauling them into the window the night before, and he needed their help to set up the downstairs rooms in anticipation of the Beaters’ next escalation in cunning. They created barriers at all the points of entry into the house, putting china cupboards in front of the boarded windows, dismantling a dresser and nailing the pieces over the doors.

That left only the back door, which had no glass panes that could be broken. It had two sets of dead bolts, installed since the start of the Siege.

Twice as they worked, stumbling groups of afflicted came down the street. Their snorting and moaning could be heard even though the downstairs windows were shut tight. The second time, seven Beaters milled across the street at the house where Lyle’s friend Travers was presumably still living. When Cass went to the upstairs bathroom, she could see the Beaters shuffling around the front lawn, bumping into each other. A pair lay down in a bed of kaysev growing in front of an ornamental stone bench, one nibbling gently at the other’s arm. It took a moment for Cass to realize that the one being gnawed was lying still, only a twitch of its leg now and then convincing her it wasn’t dead.

“Do you have binoculars, Lyle?” Cass asked. Lyle looked ›up from the coffee table whose legs he was sawing off. He and Smoke were planning to brace it along the bottom of a large window in the dining room.

“That I do, missy, but are you sure there’s anything out there you want a closer look at?” he asked.

“I just-just for a quick look,” Cass said. She couldn’t bring herself to say that their moans had been traveling straight through her skin and making her thrum with anxiety; not knowing what they were up to was worse than the alternative.

Lyle merely nodded and went to the kitchen. He returned, polishing a compact pair on his t-shirt.

“Got these for hunting,” he said. “Damn shame my wife made me keep my guns locked up at the cabin or we could take a few potshots and scare those suckers off.”

Magnified, the Beaters looked even worse than the few Cass had seen on her journey. On those occasions she had watched from hiding spots behind shrubs or rocks. From a distance, they looked merely unkempt and wounded, their skin split and ragged, in various states of injury and flensing.