Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

Long ago, before Ruthie, Cass had contemplated dying, wondering if it was true what they said, that in the final seconds you achieve a kind of peace. Like that guy in the Jack London story, slowly freezing to death, there would be a numbing, a lulling, a sense of complacency, rightness. Acceptance would be followed, she imagined, by something resembling an urge to have done with it. A drowning person would accept the water into their lungs. A person falling from a great height would reach out for the earth.

But there was nothing like that for victims of the Beaters. Because they knew what was coming and death was stretched out over a series of manic flashes, strips of flesh, bites into the skin. Cass knew.

So when Smoke seized her hand she ran hard. She flew like a stone rocketed over a great chasm. She pushed off with her feet and willed herself through the air, begging fate for another breath, another step, another second before hell burst upon them.

“White house,” Smoke yelled, urging her faster, harder than she thought she could go. Fear did that, working miracles on the laws of physics and gravity, driving people to do the impossible.

When they were abreast of the house she understood that it was the one, the one with the shed, the shed with the motorcycle and when they rounded the corner and Smoke plunged toward a dead shrub it took only a split second for her to realize that the shrub was a screen, a fake, and she tore into the branches with her hands, pulling, yanking, the dead twigs cutting and scraping her skin. The deadwood fell away and there it was, a sagging barn-shaped box of a shed-it was badly kept, paint peeling off the cheap wood in cracked strips, the lock hanging rusted and useless.

Smoke pulled her inside and slammed the door. Yellow light filtered through a stained and spiderwebbed window, illuminating shelves of buckets and jars and garden tools-and a motorcycle. It was there-it was really and truly there, an incongruously clean and shined-up thing, front wheel tilted sportily on the slab floor.

But behind her the door swung open on creaking hinges and she could hear, not far away at all, the screaming and grunting. “It won’t-they’ll be-” she protested, but Smoke was pushing at a long, low oblong box, trying to block the door with it, and Cass shut up and helped.

It was an old freezer, a heavy thing, but she and Smoke threw themselves into the task and bumped and scraped it along the floor, a hideous smell rising from it as the lid jostled and fell away. Meat roasts and chops packed in plastic, now moldering and rotten-the stench reaching into her nostrils. Spoils, the scraps that no raiders found, ruined when the electricity failed. Nausea rolled through Cass’s gut as the first of the Beaters threw itself against the door.

They were inches away, screaming out their rage and their hunger, and Cass leaped back. Smoke caught and held her, hard, his arms wrapped tight around her from the back. “Calm down now,” he ordered, his lips brushing her ear, and there was something in his voice that made her body follow his instructions even as her mind went nearly mad with fear. She felt her heart slow, her hands unclench.

Only then did Smoke release her and take the handlebars of the bike, kicking up the kickstand. The light glinted off keys that had been left in the ignition. He slid onto the seat with an ease that let Cass know it was far from the first time he’d been on a motorcycle. Turning the key he revved the engine hard.

“Behind me,” Smoke ordered and Cass threw a leg over the seat, slid her hands around his waist, buried her face in the soft cotton of his shirt.

And closed her eyes.

Because she was too frightened to see what he would do next. Whatever it was, they had one chance. Only one. She felt the reverberation of the bike’s powerful motor through Smoke’s body, through the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt, and she squeezed her eyes shut tighter and she whispered a prayer to whomever that was immediately stolen by the roar of the motor and the screaming and her own heart-

Ruthie -

And then her entire body was jarred so hard that her teeth clashed in her head and the wind was knocked out of her lungs. The bike leaped ahead like an enraged animal loosed from its cage and slammed against the back wall of the shed, splintering it, Sheetrock bursting all around her. Something struck her ankle, knocking her foot loose, and she slid sideways on the seat and nearly fell off, scrambling to hang on to Smoke.

“Cass!” he yelled, as the motorcycle chewed through vines and fallen tree limbs toward the alley, spinning up gravel and dead leaves and dirt. “Hold on! ”

And she did. His words again made her hold on for everything she was worth. Her hands clutched his waist hard enough to bruise, and she pulled herself back upright, her ankle banging painfully against metal, the heat of the engine blowing hard through the fabric of her pants. Her cheek stung and something warm slid slowly down her chin and she realized she was cut and bleeding.

She forced her eyes open and saw squat garages racing by. They followed the gravel alley to the end of the block where it opened onto a street, and Smoke took the corner expertly, angling so sharply that she had to clutch him tight to avoid spilling even as he accelerated into the turn and the motorcycle leaped onto smoother pavement.

A flash of movement caught her eye and Cass turned to look. A horde of them, more than she’d ever seen in one place before-there had to be over two dozen, jogging un-steadily down the street a block away. The ones in front paddled the air with their clutching fingers, eyes rolling in the ecstasy of the hunt. They followed the sound of the engine, turning and stumbling as the motorcycle powered on, and Cass pressed her face into Smoke’s shirt, into the plane between his shoulder blades, and breathed shallowly of his scent, his warmth.

For several blocks neither of them said anything. They passed cars abandoned at odd angles, crumpled into street signs and fire hydrants. There was junk in the streets-an overturned armchair, sodden clumps of clothes matted to the curbs. Squashed rats. A Barbie notebook, its shiny pink cover faded by the elements. A Little Tikes Cozy Coupe in a patch of kaysev, overturned, its wheels turned toward the sky.

Smoke navigated the obstacles with ease, and Cass knew that she had underestimated him. She’d thought him a deliberate man, because of the care he took for her safety, the way his large hands enveloped hers. She had not thought him capable of such quick reflexes, but as she slowly uncoiled from her terrified clutch, she noticed how he turned his wrist just so to make the motorcycle dip around a downed tree or an abandoned shoe, finding smooth stretches of pavement where he pushed the bike as hard as it would go, making it scream with exertion.

After the alley turned to neighborhood and the neighborhood thinned to a house here and there, Smoke finally pulled back on the gas and they hit a steady clip in the dying sun. It’s nearly night, Cass noted with surprise, because she had been too busy with her terror and her will to survive to notice the setting of the sun or the sweetening of the thick autumnal air.

It wasn’t just the gingery kaysev, either. There were other undercurrents that she couldn’t quite place. Evergreen, of course; she’d seen the seedlings, everyone had-but something else, too; something thick and waxy like a camellia or a New Guinea impatiens, extravagant even Before, unthinkable now.

But who was to say?

Who got to dictate, really, what died and what fought for a foothold and what thrived? Cass took the measure of the passing scenery. A kitschy cabin decor shop, the chain-saw-rendered black bears that once decorated the entrance now cracked and toppled. A sporting goods store where she’d once shopped the after-season sale, hoping to find a snowsuit that she could pack away for Ruthie’s next winter, coming out instead with a pair of fuzzy pink girls’ boots that would have been inexcusable if they hadn’t been so cheap.