Aftertime. Sophie Littlefield

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      This time Sammi didn’t react, didn’t meet her eyes.

      “Say it, Sammi, please. I know you don’t like being cooped up here, but just promise me you won’t go out alone.”

      Sammi rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay, I promise.”

      Cass sighed. “I don’t know how far I’ve walked, really. At first I didn’t … It was like I was sleeping and awake at the same time. I didn’t go very far for a while. I was stopping a lot … maybe that was a week. Until I felt right again. And even then …” Cass passed a hand over her eyes, rubbed the skin between her eyebrows. “Even then I didn’t cover a lot of distance. Because of trying to hide when it was light out. You know, to keep watch.”

      And at night, when the moon went behind a cloud, or the stars failed to light the sky, she couldn’t go very far at all, because she couldn’t see. Back in the library, she’d hoarded matches and two good flashlights and a cache of batteries. But she had none of that when she woke up. No pack, no food, no supplies, and she was wearing clothes she’d never seen before.

      How far did she travel every night: maybe a few miles? As close as she could figure it, Cass had started out about thirty-five miles down-mountain, maybe a little more since she had weaved back and forth to avoid going too close to the road. The Beaters didn’t leave the roads when they could help it; they liked to follow an easy path, and their stumbling, awkward gait did not lend itself to obstacles. On uneven terrain they stumbled and fell a lot.

      Still, if they’d caught her scent, a glimpse of her in the woods, nothing would stop them from coming after her, no matter how deep she ran, so she had tried to stay out of sight of the road. And roads eventually ran into towns, which she had to avoid more and more once she noticed, like Smoke had said, that the Beaters were clustering around the population centers of Before.

      One time, a few days after she woke up, she’d been dozing the afternoon away in the skeleton of a live oak tree. It was a hundred yards or so from the road, and upwind, so Cass figured it would be safe enough. Low in the foothills, the trees were sparse to begin with, and most had died; there was little in the way of cover.

      A sound broke nearby and she came awake instantly, her heart racing. She almost fell as she looked around for the source of the sound. Then she spotted the man who had walked directly below the tree, his footfalls cracking on broken branches. He was walking fast, a bulky pack on his shoulders, his gait sure and strong. A loner, Cass guessed, someone who—like Sammi—would rather take his chances outside than live cooped up in a shelter.

      Suddenly there was a second sound. Over on the road.

      Cass had been so focused on the man that she hadn’t seen them approach. Beaters—four of them, stumbling and crying out—and they’d heard him, too.

      Fear turned Cass’s blood cold.

      For a second, the man paused, looking around wildly. His eyes went wide and he began to run, faster than Cass had ever seen a man run. After a few dozen paces he shrugged the pack off his back, and it fell to the ground as the Beaters’ cries escalated into enraged screams. Unburdened, he ran even faster.

      But he wasn’t fast enough.

      It was dumb luck that he ran forward. If he had run perpendicular to the road, the Beaters would have come close enough to Cass’s tree to smell her. As it was, Cass guessed the man stayed ahead of them for a quarter mile before they caught up. She watched the whole time, willing the man forward with her entire being as the beasts knocked into each other and stumbled on the uneven ground and shoved at each other. They were so awkward, so ungainly, but their strength and speed were otherworldly.

      In the end, two of them tripped each other and fell to the ground, snorting and snapping with fury as they beat at one another with clumsy fists.

      But two surged ahead.

      Cass pressed her face into the scratchy trunk of the tree and covered her ears with her hands, but she could hear the man’s terrified screams and the Beaters’ triumphant crowing as they carried their prey back down the road to wherever their nest was.

      Sammi was watching her, light brown eyes wide and speculating. “Smoke’s going to take you, isn’t he?”

      Cass nodded.

      Sammi gave her a fragile shadow of a smile. “He’s good. He’s brave. You know how he got his name?”

      “No.”

      “He was living up at Calvary Episcopal. I mean, not like because it was a church, they were just using the church for shelter.”

      “Yes, I remember, there were people living there when I was at the library.”

      “And the Beaters came and they got one of them. Or, I don’t know, maybe more than one, I’m not sure. Only, they got this one guy’s wife, and he went nuts and tried to burn the place down. With everyone in it, you know, like a group suicide? They had this tank, natural gas or something. And he totally blew it up, you could see it all day, the sky was like black. You know, like … totally dark. He died, but Smoke—well, I don’t know what his name used to be, it was right when we all moved in here.”

      “How long ago was that?”

      “It was around the beginning of May. We saw the fire, we saw the sky go dark and all … Well, Smoke got a lot of the people out.”

      “He rescued them?”

      “Yeah, he got this whole family, Jed and—Jed’s that guy who was babysitting with me. He’s sixteen. His parents and his brothers and a bunch of other people, too. Smoke helped them get out. And when they came here his hair was burned but that was all. He smelled like smoke, but he wasn’t burned, and people said it was a miracle. I don’t know if it was really a miracle but …”

      The girl seemed suddenly embarrassed.

      Cass followed a stray impulse and covered the girl’s hand with her own. Sammi’s skin was warm and she could feel her strong pulse at her wrist.

      “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe there’s still room for a miracle or two in the world.”

      “Maybe,” Sammi said. She sounded like she thought Cass was going to need one.

      07

      LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, SMOKE RETURNED. Sammi was long gone, not wanting to worry her mother any more than she already had. Cass’s heart went out to the girl; she’d once walked the same complicated tightrope of parental loyalty and teenage rebellion, the challenges of school and friends and her father’s absence. Aftertime, everything was turned upside down. Kids, with their more elastic notions of what was real, rebounded and adapted while the adults struggled.

      Except for the ones who lost their families. Aftertime orphans did not fare well. They were responsible for much of the looting and destruction that happened now—the ones who managed to escape predators, whose movements were no longer tracked and monitored. They found each other somehow, their senses tuned to the same frequency of grief and anger, and formed gangs who roamed the streets with breathtaking indifference to the danger, destroying everything in their path—just as everything that they had loved had been СКАЧАТЬ