Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

After that, there was nothing but the twisting ribbon of the road, a pearly shimmer in the darkening evening. Eventually Smoke slowed the bike and eased over onto the shoulder. When they came to a stop he took care in settling the kickstand before he dismounted and offered Cass his hand. Her ears were still ringing from the steady roar of the road, but she allowed him to help her from the bike.

They were heading down, out of the mountains on the far side, the side that Cass rarely traveled. She did not know this road. Eventually it led to Yosemite, she was pretty sure, though she couldn’t picture the route in her mind.

Night brought its customary chill. The kaysev smell here was muted; there was clay dust in her nostrils, a not unpleasant smell she associated with endless hot afternoons running along sunbaked roads. Cass smoothed her shirt where the wind had whipped it around her waist. And as she looked around the road, she saw something astonishing, something that made her catch her breath.

“What,” Smoke said sharply. “What’s wrong?”

“No, no-it’s just-look,” she said, pointing to the tiny seedlings, a trio of them, that had caught her eye.

“Redwoods?” Smoke asked after a moment.

“I’m pretty sure those are sequoias. You know…the big ones.”

“Those are the first evergreens I’ve seen since…Before.”

Cass nodded, not trusting her voice to speak without catching. She’d thought they were gone forever.

Then she noticed something else.

“There was fire here.” Sure enough, the trees here were not just dead but charred black; it had been difficult to see in the twilight, and she hadn’t noticed. “It must have happened…well, if it happened right before, or during, the attacks…”

“What difference would that make?”

“When fire destroys a living tree, the cones fall and release their seeds. So if the timing was just right, it could have seeded right before the Siege, and then the seeds somehow survived, and…” This . She toed the road next to the seedlings for emphasis.

“That’s…” Smoke seemed at a loss for words, but he caught her hand in his and squeezed. “How do you know so much about plants?”

Cass shrugged, embarrassed. “I, um…I used to think I would, that I could study it. You know, botany…landscape design.” Before she realized that escaping Byrn’s late-night “accidental” encounters in the hallway, his hands on her thighs under the dinner table, meant getting out with no diploma and no college and no real plan other than flight.

For a long time, she thought she’d save up some money and go back, enroll at Anza State. Then one day she looked around her tiny, dirty apartment, high-heeled shoes abandoned by the door, empty cans stacked on the table, a stranger snoring in her bed, and realized she never would.

Cass tugged her hand back and changed the subject. “That was lucky. In…in the shed.”

“Luck? How about skill?” Smoke demanded, the corners of his mouth curving in a wry smile. “So says my shelf of dirt bike trophies from junior high.”

“I don’t think that’s a dirt bike,” Cass said, pointing to the shiny machine whose engine ticked and popped in the cool night.

“Little boys who ride dirt bikes grow up to ride big bikes. I had one at my place in Tahoe. Rode a lot on roads like this one.”

“Along with your waverunner and your snowmobile and your powerboat and all your other toys,” Cass said, trying for a light tone.

“Yeah, I had it all, didn’t I?” Smoke said. There it was again, the sadness, as he slipped an arm around her shoulders, and after hesitating for a moment she laid her cheek against his chest. He pulled her closer and rested his chin on the top of her head.

This is where he tells me it will all be okay, Cass thought. But he didn’t.

And Cass, who had never let any man stay much longer than the time it took him to put his pants back on, suddenly found herself wishing he would. She would take that lie.

Finally Smoke sighed, a deep intake of breath that Cass felt against her skin, and then pulled gently away from her. “We can be at the Convent before it’s completely dark, as long as we don’t run into anything…unexpected.”

“The roads have been clear,” Cass said, brushing imaginary specks from her sleeves, not meeting his eyes. It was true; there had been fewer junked cars, less debris, up this far.

“Not too populated this far in,” Smoke said. “Most of the log-jamming happened nearer the city. Works for me. Once we get close to San Pedro, we might hit a few more, though.”

“Well, we don’t really have much choice, right?” Cass asked. She waited until Smoke slung his long leg over the bike and then slid on behind him.

Already, she found that she had memorized the way they fit together. As they roared through the murky evening, the bike’s headlight tracing a golden path along the road, she imagined that they blended together into one dim shape in the descending dark.

THE REST OF THE TRIP TOOK LESS TIME THAN they expected. Someone had come along before them and cleared the way.

The fire had burned its way down-mountain, and the road wound through acres of forest studded with the blackened skeletons of trees. Everywhere, there were soft-fringed little evergreen seedlings, even occasionally in the cracks in the road where ordinarily only kaysev grew.

On a straight, gentle incline, Smoke slowed, coming to a stop with the bike balanced against his foot on the ground, and gestured toward the bank at the side of the road. Downed tree limbs and sections of trunk had been pushed out of the way. The trunk was massive, at least three feet across, a tree that had been uprooted during the fire and fallen across the road.

“Power saw,” Smoke said, pointing at a cylindrical section eight or ten feet long. “See the marks. And look at the road-they used a front loader or something.”

Cass squinted in the last of the evening light. Sure enough, there were broad, arcing scrapes in the pavement, sawdust and dirt and chipped asphalt dragged in broad swaths.

“But that could have been from ages ago.” Back when all the gas stations were shutting down and people were killing each other to siphon fuel from abandoned cars. As the Siege dragged on there were fewer and fewer cars on the road each day, as though the automobiles themselves were falling to a plague, until the very few people who still had gas were too afraid to drive because of the desperate gangs that swarmed cars and dragged drivers out to be beaten and left for dead in the streets.

Smoke shook his head. “Look at that. You can smell it. That’s a fresh cut.”

He was right, of course. The air carried a pleasant scent of pine, a smell that reminded Cass of Christmas, a holiday that she imagined no longer existed. For a moment she felt a surge of excitement.

“Maybe they’re close by,” she said. “Maybe we’ll catch up to them. If they have gas, cars, a tractor or whatever-”

“Cass, I’d lay odds it’s the Rebuilders. They’re the only ones capable of something like this, anymore. At least on this side of the border.”

Cass was silent a moment, absorbing his words. “You believe that? What Evangeline said…about the Rockies? You really think they’ve cut us off?”

“I don’t know. That’s where I’d do it, though. I mean, if I was trying to keep them out-quarantine-yeah, it’s the only place that makes sense. Start up north, Canadian border ought to be plenty far enough, no way Beaters have spread up through Oregon into Washington or Idaho yet, and besides, it’ll be getting cold up there in a month or so. I’d build a blockade down all the way to where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf.”