Sophie Littlefield: Survivors

Book 0 in the Aftertime series, 2011

An Aftertime Novella

At first glance, everyone thought he was a girl. It was the hair-so long and glossy that even disheveled and dirty and badly cut you wanted to touch it, brush it, braid it-and those beautiful wide brown eyes with the impossibly long fringe of lashes.

The presence of a child-Cass’s daughter, Ruthie, was the only other one, and she almost didn’t count, being barely three and not having the words to describe the world’s new horrors-this had a discomfiting effect on people.

And the old woman wasn’t dead, though she looked it. Her mouth was slack and flies buzzed around her eyes. It was Faye who carried her, walking in a crouching gait to minimize the jouncing, but still the old woman’s head and limbs swayed and joggled in the raider’s arms. Her hair was thin, her skin slack and pouchy.

Cass watched along with the others when they carried the two squatters in, nearly unconscious from dehydration and exhaustion. The boy had been keeping vigil next to his grandmother when they found him. At that point he was so weak and so tired that he didn’t hear the raiders come in, didn’t panic and bolt even when they came up the stairs. Even though it could have been anyone, human or inhuman, the boy hadn’t left the stinking befouled mattress where she lay.

Hastings used one of his few remaining saline bags and a precious needle on the grandmother, but, given the boy’s youth they took a chance, forcing him to sip water and nibble at kaysev cakes. A good gamble-within hours, his milky eyes cleared and his color returned and he plowed through the snack packs of crackers and nuts donated by the Box’s merchants. This really was the best treatment anyone could hope for Aftertime.

While this was going on, people wandered past the cinder-block medical cottage with greater frequency than usual, not lingering but flicking glances at the narrow windows set high in the rough walls before continuing on their way to the comfort tents or the merchant stalls or the worn walking path around the perimeter of the Box.

The Box was a haven for addicts, for people seeking oblivion, for shysters and sharks and whores. It was a place where you could buy anything that Aftertime grudgingly offered, except hope. What role could a boy of seven or eight have in such a place?

As the afternoon wore on, Cass worked in the raised garden beds with Ruthie playing nearby on a quilt spread over the earth. It was warm for late September-Indian summer, they used to call it-and people came out of the tents and sheds and milled around in the common areas, near enough that Cass could hear their voices, carried on the wind, and sense their collective restlessness, waiting for the spoils of the raid to be sorted and catalogued and distributed to the merchants. Waiting to barter and buy. Or, for those with nothing to trade, just to look, to wish, to covet. There was little enough in the way of entertainment to be found.

Cass remembered a book she’d read in elementary school, about a girl who lived in a long-ago Western frontier town next to a railroad. Twice a week the train would stop, and the townspeople would leave off what they were doing and come to watch the passengers who left the cars to stretch their legs, to catch a glimpse of the belongings they carried with them and imagine where they might be going, who they might meet at the other end of their journey. It was the girl’s only contact with the world outside the town, a notion that had stunned Cass. Cass, whose own father left for weeks at a time to travel the West Coast with his band, and sent her postcards from Canada and Oregon and Mexico. Someday, when she was old enough, Cass meant to go along with her daddy and see these things for herself.

Who could have guessed that, two decades later, she and everyone else would be as isolated as the little girl in the book?

There were a variety of distractions on offer, drugs and alcohol scavenged and raided and even manufactured from kaysev-and that made the sameness palatable for some, but Cass could not partake of the Box’s principal trade. She had had to give up drinking. She had her work in the gardens and she had her daughter and she had Smoke, and those had to be enough.

Still, she too was lured by the promise of a spectacle, no matter how familiar. Last week the raiders brought jars of Mucinex, stool softener, glucosamine and chondroitin-a treasure trove of geriatric unguents and salves. But since most of the elderly were dead-leveled by the fever, abandoned to the Beaters, dead from suicide and stroke and heart failure-these were met with jeers. Still, the raid on a convalescent home eight miles down the road had also yielded painkillers and sleep aids, several cases of Ensure, and a dizzying variety of prescription meds. These had been locked in a pharmacy whose complex security measures had apparently fended off everyone who’d attempted to loot the place before. But Dor’s men were well armed with crowbars and sledges and lock tools-not to mention unusual levels of training and testosterone or, in Faye’s case, just plain fearlessness.

Cass had spent the day digging invasive oxalis out of the gardens, reflecting on the irony that as the earth began to recover from the bioterror attacks that had decimated most of California’s plants, it was the weeds that were among the first to return; funny, since the toxins that had rained down on the crops during the Siege had been formulated by scientists who once worked in industrial weed abatement. Oxalis was quite pretty, as weeds went, with its shamrock-shaped leaves and tiny yellow flowers. It was also among the most difficult to control. Neglect an oxalis runner at your peril: it would send a taproot so far into the earth that pulling it carelessly meant that its root would snap and branch out and the plant would come back threefold.

Not as bad, still, as missing a root of the blueleaf kaysev.

Cass had an excellent angled weeding knife and a stirrup hoe that Smoke had found in a potting shed in the ritzy Festival Hill neighborhood a few miles off. She wore a tool apron tied around her waist, painter’s pants cut off midthigh in a nod to the unseasonably warm weather, her shears and a compact pruning saw hanging from the loops. But her favorite implement for weeding was an old stainless butter knife that Smoke had notched and bent for her-its blade slim enough to go deep in the earth, and its point dull enough to avoid slicing through the roots. Each time she grasped its familiar handle, it brought Smoke to mind, calming her restlessness.

Working the ruined earth helped pass the time while she waited for news. Everyone was moved by a child, of course-how could one not be? It was true that people with children avoided the Box-its culture was hardly family friendly. Still, survivors, traumatized or drunk or stoned though they might be, could not harden their hearts in the presence of little ones.

Feo-for that was his name, whispered from tent to tent-had the wide brown eyes that glinted gold in the firelight, and the glossy black-brown mop of hair that lay in abundant masses on his thin shoulders, that made many of the women in the Box twitch their fingers with grief-stained memories of braiding their own lost children’s hair.

Those women turned away, bent double by the agony of their memories. They took another hit or swallow or hoarded pill.

But Cass’s own child was safe, and as the afternoon shadows lengthened into evening, she began to wonder if she should be part of what was unfolding, if she ought to help. A mother who was not hobbled by grief-in the Box, she was the rarest of human resources. She wiped her hands and packed her tools, recited the compressed prayer of gratitude for her daughter’s safety that was a thousand words in a sigh, lifted Ruthie into her arms and went looking for the boy.