Sophie Littlefield - Survivors

“Still hungry?” Cass asked, nibbling at her kaysev cake and drinking the coffee that was now lukewarm.

Feo nodded, not looking up from his bowl, and Cass went to get him another.

When she came back he was gone.

They had managed to squeeze quite a lot into the Box, despite the fact that it was no larger than a football field and a half, an entire little town with commerce and public facilities and even a jail and an outdoor church. Nightly rental cots lined the fence near the front gate. Merchants sold food and drugs and alcohol and all manner of scavenged and raided merchandise out of stands cobbled together from dismantled buildings. In the center, a public area for dining and socializing had been decorated with plastic flags and pretty things-mirrors, silk flowers, children’s toys-hung from lines strung between the skeletons of trees. But the place was still a box, literally; a walled-off square with only one way out.

Cass didn’t panic, because where would Feo go? There was no way for him to escape into the dangers outside. Another irony: he couldn’t escape, but he could be forced out by their policies…

Still, Cass walked the paths between the tents and merchant stands, and the worn trail around the perimeter, with haste searching for a glimpse of him. She went first to the medic cottage, where Francie met her at the door with a frown-“She’s no better and probably worse”-so Cass told her that Feo might turn up and to be on the lookout.

Then she started crisscrossing the Box at random.

She found him on the stoop of the large prefab storage shed that Sam and George had made into their sleeping quarters and party room. They called it the “officers’ quarters” and it was where the guards did much of their drinking. Beds and personal space took up the back, and the rest was lined with shelves holding improvised weapons and a table with half a dozen chairs in the middle. An ornate antique painted-metal candelabrum hung over the table, which was speckled with wax that had dripped down. There was an ongoing poker game, a minifridge that was hooked up to a generator whenever the raiders brought back beer, and a library of skin magazines and Car and Driver s and Stephen King novels.

Sam and George were an odd pair-Sam young and quiet and almost obsessively neat, his bunk made up every morning, his clothes hung on hangers from pegs, and George fifteen years older and content to live in malodorous squalor-but they got along. This morning George was nowhere to be seen, probably off training in that damn alleyway, too.

Feo sat hunched on one side of the step, Smoke’s shirt newly rimed with dirt at the hem. He was drinking from a plastic bottle of cranberry-juice cocktail. With a straw, as unlikely a sight as any. Sam sprawled next to him, wearing his wraparound ski sunglasses and a ghost of a smile, in cowboy boots and jeans. When he saw Cass, he sat up straight and gave her a mock salute.

“Mornin’, Cass.”

“Good morning.”

“He only got one eye,” Feo said with hushed awe. His mouth was ringed with sticky pink. “He showed me.”

“That’s right,” Sam said, tapping the frayed patch beneath his pricey sunglasses, the patch that he never took off. Sam had lost an eye in the Yemen Rice War, likely treated by a field surgeon low on supplies and backup, like everything else in that fiasco of a war. Cass had never seen their handiwork, and the fact that Sam had showed the boy struck her as extraordinary. “I told him you got to watch where you’re goin’ around here, be careful not to walk into any knife-throwing competitions.”

“I could throw a knife,” Feo said. “I bet I could.”

“Yeah, buddy, I bet you could.” Sam took off his sunglasses and looked meaningfully at Cass. “I thought I’d give Feo a tour of the place here in a while.”

Cass saw how it was-it was written as plain as a sign in front of her face. The boy wanted a big brother, a favorite uncle, hell, maybe even a father. His instincts took him straight to Sam.

And Sam bloomed with the attention. It was almost heartbreaking to see, the way his good eye was bright with purpose, the barely concealed excitement under his facade of detachment and casual brio.

Cass had long felt that he-the youngest of the guards and the most introspective-was vulnerable. He still wore his unspoken losses on the outside, in his quietly deliberate way, as though it hurt him merely to move through life. He’s gone from fighting for a country that no longer existed to fighting for his existence. She’d worried about him turning to drugs like so many people did, in an attempt to erase the pain of loss and grief.

Which made it all the harder to say what needed to be said.

“Maybe, after Feo’s all settled in somewhere nice, he could come back for a visit with you guys,” she said carefully.

Sam dropped his gaze to the ground, chastened. He accepted the rebuke. They both knew that Dor’s rules were absolute. He was not a heartless leader, and Cass recognized that making the hardest choices was part of what made him a great one. Children had no place in what went on here. Someday soon, when Ruthie was a little older, there would be a reckoning even for her and Smoke.

Dor would find a humane solution-as humane as possible, anyway. She supposed that as soon as the old woman died, Dor would send the boy out with one of the guards to find a good shelter where children were welcome, even if that was ten miles away, thirty, whatever it took. The man was generous in his own way, though he preferred it not be widely known.

“Well,” she said, “why don’t I let the two of you finish your drink, and I’ll come back for Feo in a bit.”

“Okay,” the boy said quietly. Sam only nodded and put his glasses back on, and Cass turned away.

A little more time together was a small kindness. It was rare enough to be able to do anything at all for anyone anymore. Cass had learned to take such opportunities when they came.

Just as she reached her tent-she was barely through the door, Ruthie’s name on her lips-the alarm sounded. A series of bells strung around the Box, the effect was almost medieval, the clanging strident and urgent and echoing from all corners once the first peal struck.

Beaters . A dozen times since she and Smoke arrived, they had come close enough to the fences to pose an immediate threat, nearly always early in the morning, drawn out by the light of day. When the first rays of the sun reached the once-human things, they left the stinking nests where they slept sprawled and entwined together for warmth. They woke blinking and hungry, and stumbled to their feet to venture out into the wrecked streets, grunting and cawing, pushing at each other and picking at their scalps and their scabbed and decaying arms.

Mostly the Beaters stayed clear of the Box’s line of sight. They’d learned that the danger was too great, that the guards were all crack shots who could drop them even from a distance: the killing shot in the base of the spine or the head. So they waited for travelers, hiding clumsily behind the lean-to shacks and run-down cabins on the outskirts of town. Sometimes, too, in the alleyways or storefronts of the once-bustling city around them. Every week or so, some poor soul on his way to the Box would die horribly in the last half mile of his journey.

But once in a while, inexplicably, a cluster of them would risk approaching. Maybe they hoped for a break in the fence or to catch a guard unawares, or a citizen out for a walk. Maybe it was raw animal hunger. Dor did not forbid his employees and customers to come and go, but it always surprised Cass just how many did. Maybe the adrenaline rush of walking past the gates was just another kind of drug. Maybe it was an exercise in despair.