Sophie Littlefield - Survivors

Cass opened her mouth to protest, to say that no, it was fine , fearing wounding the skinny boy’s feelings further, but Feo abruptly laughed, showing strong white teeth.

It was true, he smelled terrible, the odor lingering in the tent after the two left. Cass laid her hand gently on Ruthie’s face, feeling her soft skin, the regular pulse in the hollow of her jaw, before slipping out on her own errand, leaving one canvas flap rolled and tied to let in air.

Aftertime, parents lucky enough to still have surviving children took to sleeping with them sandwiched between them, one arm draped across the only precious thing they had left and the other curved around a trigger or blade. Beaters and marauders and all the other evils that invaded shelters made deep sleep a lost art. Fear pressed at your nostrils and lungs when you drifted off and was lying in wait when you startled awake. Dreams disappeared, and even the nightmares receded as one desperate day melted into the next.

But in the Box it was possible to sleep again. No Beater could scale the tall razor-topped fences; no outsider made it inside the front gates without surrendering his weapons. Those who drank or got high spent their restless nights and dead-limbed stupors in the cots that edged the front wall, or in the nightly rental tents, or slumped against the logs circling the bonfire. The innermost neighborhood of tents, the ones reinforced with posts and plywood and plastic tarps, were the domain of the Box’s permanent employees, and they looked out for each other. Someone was always awake, reading in front of his tent or walking the edge of that little neighborhood. No outsider stood a chance of getting in. Ruthie was perfectly safe, sleeping in the tent open to the star-dusted night. If she were to wake and cry or even whimper, Coral Anne in the next tent over would be at her side, holding her, shushing her, until Smoke or Cass returned.

Cass slipped between the tents, her feet sure and quick. It was a perfect September evening, warm and scented with the burnt-spice smell of flannel bush and wild sage, native species that had started to return as summer gave way to autumn. If you shut your eyes you could almost believe it was last year, or the year before, or a year in your childhood when you rode your bike along mountain blacktop, and squirrels threw pinecones from tall branches and chattered, and you waded into cold streams to wash away the rich red dirt caked on your ankles. As a child, maybe you stood in a stream with the shock of the cold making you shriek and your friends called you chicken, they dared you to lie down on the current-smooth stones and let the icy water wash over, making a mermaid of you, your long hair splayed in wet and curling tendrils. You never guessed that the world would end before you were thirty, everything you ever knew, nations unleashing famine and war as an appetizer for a main course of the horrors that no one could have ever imagined. No people falling sick with the fever from blueleaf kaysev, pulling at their hair, picking at their skin, depleting themselves until the day they were human no more and existed only to hunt for uninfected flesh. You never dreamed that most of the people you knew would be dead or worse.

Cass pushed these thoughts away as she always pushed them away, and walked toward the far end of the Box. At the very back, in neat rows, were the blue-tarped comfort tents and the gray medical building. If there was irony in this arrangement, the prostitutes living next to the healers, it was lost on those who lived in the Box now. The whole compound had sprung up less than a year ago, but in even that short span of time its early days had grown hazy, its history apocryphal. The only man who had been there from the start was Dor and he wasn’t one to talk about the past. Some claimed to have been with him from the beginning, but Cass had her doubts about most of them.

Besides, the Box was a living organism, its configuration shifting daily with its changing population, tent stakes pulled up, cots overturned, brawls settled quickly by the guards leaving new welts in the earth. An oasis of life in a ruined land, it changed from one week to the next, strangers taking the place of travelers passing through, belongings bartered and trinkets displayed to entice browsers with something to trade.

Fronting the comfort tents was a well-tended path, edged with smooth stones and planted with patches of baby’s tears that Cass had cultivated in the cold frame Smoke had built for her. The tiny seedlings were sending down roots and starting to spread; after a winter of rains and nourishment drawn into patient, chilly roots, they would spread into gorgeous emerald-green masses this spring. Even though Cass’s mission was somewhat urgent, she paused with her flashlight to examine the plants, on her knees in the soil, passing her palm gently over their fringy tops, testing their narrow stems. She was pleased with what she found, and after a moment she got to her feet, satisfied.

She looked down at the dirt smudged on the knees of her canvas pants. No worse than the dirt that was already there, since she had worked in the gardens all day. And laundry day was still two days away.

Cass heard a moan coming through the open door of the medic’s cottage, not that moans in this section were something new. Yellow light spilled from the door and there were other voices, voices she recognized. She knocked once on the aluminum door, then pushed it aside and entered.

Hastings and Francie sat on stools pulled up on opposite sides of one of the two cots, where the old woman lay with a dingy white sheet pulled up to her chin. Francie, who had been a nurse’s assistant at Oakland Children’s Hospital, insisted on clean-as-possible linens and Dor obliged, paying someone to boil them. Hastings, the orthopedist, didn’t much care; he traded everything he earned for whatever painkillers were on offer. Cass was always surprised he could still be cajoled into coming to work, but that’s what Francie did, she was a cajoler and a nagger and, Cass suspected, a mother figure to Hastings, though an odd one with her storklike limbs and mannish haircut and curt ways.

“Oh,” Francie said, glancing up quickly and then back to the patch of arm that they were examining. They’d got the old woman out of her clothes and into one of the hospital gowns Francie had scavenged somewhere. “It’s you. I was afraid Sam was back.”

“Won’t let us alone,” Hastings grumbled. He seemed sober tonight, his hands steady as he squeezed and prodded gently. “Nothing’s broken, anyway. Someone took care of this old girl until recently. You get the story out of the kid?”

“Not yet,” Cass said. “Not really.” Because what was the story, at its heart: anyone could tell the basics-that the two had been alone in that house, that they had run out of food and water, that the boy had been forced to choose between leaving her side to look for more and staying in that broken place watching the days cycle past through the window, dawns and sunsets and his grandmother weakening and her slipping away from him.

The rest of the story-who had his family been, Before; did he play with his sister in a yard, did they have a dog, did his father take him fishing, could he skip a stone across a pond or slide into home or finish his homework in a neat hand-what could it help, now? Still, she supposed she also wanted to know it, if he would tell. But for now she came for news of his grandmother, in case he should demand it sometime in the night.

A bucket at the end of the bed held dirty water, rags bobbing on top, evidence that they’d attempted a sponge bath. The woman’s hair, though, was sodden with grease and flecked with bits of unidentifiable matter, matted to her head.

“You get her name?” Cass asked, getting a folding chair from its place along the wall. She helped, sometimes, if Hastings was too wasted, holding down limbs for setting and hands for stitching. She set the chair close to the bed.