Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

Ruthie was saved. Ruthie was saved. A prayer, a deal done-it took all the energy Cass had left and she stopped fighting. She lifted her voice to the God she long ago stopped daring to trust. Hold her safe in Your arms. Love her for me.

So that was done, and she closed her eyes and prayed for death and knew that instead she was headed for something far worse.

PAIN, AND A VOICE. PAIN ABOVE HER EYE, SHARP as the jagged edge of awake-and a voice she knew.

“Cassandra, please, don’t fight me, just let me-”

Cass rolled and her shin struck something hard and sharp. The pain made her squeeze her eyes shut and she pressed at her temples. She was lying on the floor, on carpet. The air smelled like dust. She patted around her, found the legs of furniture, opened her eyes and saw a frightened face, a woman kneeling close, hair hanging in her face. Sister Lily.

“Cassandra, you hit your head when you went down. I just want to help you get back up to the chair. I’ve got some cool water, I’d like you to take a drink now. The heat-”

“It wasn’t the heat,” Cass said. The words wobbled in her mouth. She tasted blood and touched her lip with her tongue. She’d bit her lip when she hit the table. “I was…remembering.”

She let Lily take her hand and help her up, a moment of dizziness passing when she settled back into the chair. The light outside seemed to have faded. Afternoon was passing by.

“That happens sometimes,” Lily said. She poured from a pitcher and put a glass in Cass’s hand, folded her fingers around it so it wouldn’t slip from her grip.

Cass drank. Lily talked, Cass listened, she drank more. The water didn’t go down easily; her throat felt tight, her gut uneasy. Ghosts of images skittered around her mind like trash on a windy day-Ruthie’s eyes wide with wonder, the Beaters’ grasping scabby hands, the silver swoosh on Bobby’s Nikes. It was as though, now that it had been loosed, the past had slipped through the crack Lily made with her kind words and her breathing exercises and now the seal was broken for good.

“…a tight schedule, what with dinner…”

Their wretched hands closed on her shins, her arms. Sebaceous, oozing flesh touching hers, wiry tendons closed tight as she was lifted, Bobby clutching Ruthie tight and running, running, running away, never knowing she’d already been infected.

“…tour of our home, just a quick one…”

Had he watched as she was carried off, had he handed Ruthie to the others and looked down at his own torn skin and bitten flesh? Had his heart broken as he realized what he would become, as he did what must be done, chasing his own death down the path that once wound through agapan-thus and lantana and birches along the river?

“Cassandra? Come on now, honey, let’s get up.”

Cass allowed Lily to help her gently from the chair. Lily was nice. And this was better; this would help her stop thinking, stop remembering.

“Let’s get up,” she echoed softly, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.

“That’s right. You’re going to feel better soon. You probably need some food, something to settle your stomach. How long has it been since you had a good meal?”

She continued talking without waiting for an answer, ushering Cass out of her office and past the stairwell the guards used, down the empty corridor that wound around and around the stadium. Cass watched the concrete walls go by. When they entered the stands, blinking in the late-afternoon sun, she looked down onto the field and half expected to see the Miners there, warming up in the afternoon sun.

The fake turf was still verdant, and the field markings were still present in places. But in what had once been the outfield, an enclosure as big as a suburban ranch house had been erected, white tent fabric stretched to make a roof over walls built from two-by-fours and plywood and steel braces.

At the other end of the field, dozens of tables were lined up in neat rows along with a variety of chairs-folding chairs, plastic outdoor chairs, a few aluminum chairs from patio sets. Walls of wire shelving, the kind used for garage storage, had been joined to make a larder. Women in long sleeved shirts and skirts that reached their ankles worked alone and in pairs, setting out dishes and stirring pots over cooking fires.

An entire long side of the field was lined with planters constructed from wood and filled with soil and, astonishingly, overflowing with a variety of plants. From far away, Cass couldn’t tell what they all were, but brightly colored flowers tumbled from the planters under small trees and hardy-looking shrubs. And-could those be pole beans? And squash, or melons, their tendrilous vines overhanging the planters and trailing on the ground.

The Order was cultivating plants she hadn’t seen since Before. Like the evergreen seedlings she and Smoke saw along the side of the road, these plants sprang from seeds and spores that had somehow survived the Siege.

Maybe the earth truly did want to be reborn.

Cass followed Lily down the stairs between the stands. Her legs still trembled, and she stepped slowly and carefully, afraid of falling again. Lily slowed her own pace to match, giving Cass an encouraging smile and touching her arm to steady her.

They passed small groups of women huddled together in the seats. “Praying,” Lily explained. “There’s not much else the stands are good for, other than exercise.”

She pointed to an unenthusiastic queue trudging slowly up the steps a dozen yards away. The women wore drab beige and gray clothes. Their leader was dressed in pale lavender. When they reached the top they turned and started down again.

Before, Cass occasionally ended her weekend desert runs in the high school stadium, sprinting up and down the stands, enjoying the way her footfalls caused the metal benches to shudder and creak. It felt dangerous, and once when she fell she gashed her shin badly, but there was something irresistible about hurtling up and down the stands until the breath burned in her throat, until her heartbeat was so strong she could feel it in every part of her body, and when she finally collapsed, lying on one of the sun-warmed metal benches and staring up at the sky, she had the rare satisfaction of being utterly spent.

If it wasn’t joy, it was as close as Cass ever got.

Once they were on the field, Lily led Cass toward the tables. The turf felt nice under her feet, springy and resilient, and as they drew nearer, she could smell the food being cooked and hear the conversation of the women. They worked at wooden counters propped on metal legs, chopping kaysev and what looked like new potatoes, sliding them into pots of water that others carried to a hearth above a crackling fire. Two women skinned a jackrabbit together, chatting as they peeled the pelt away from the meat, their knives flashing in the sun. Cass looked away, but not before she’d seen them lift the organs from the animal’s body.

Food, she told herself, it was only food. And besides, this meant that the rabbits had continued to multiply. Which meant that the animals were finding their way back, Aftertime, too.

The realization brought an emotion that felt suspiciously like hope, and Cass fought it, barely listening as Lily chatted on about the meal being prepared. There was no place for hope, not here, not yet. Not until she found Ruthie. Then-maybe-she would allow herself to start believing in the future again.

Cass tried to pretend interest in the things that Lily was showing her, to focus on the water spigot that extended from one of the dugouts. But she remembered how the players looked that day, broad shoulders in the white jerseys piped in silver, ornate red M s embroidered on the front. Where they had lined up to bat, a pair of women dispensed water to others who brought buckets and plastic bottles and large reservoirs on wheeled carts. Lily explained how they had tapped into the pipeline that ran from the Sierras all the way to San Francisco, and Cass accepted a dipper of water, letting it trail down her chin and into her neckline, cool against her skin.