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In seconds a cluster of the diseased loped out from behind the 7-Eleven across the street, lurching and babbling. Most started trying to climb on top of the car, moaning with hunger and frustration, but one held a large rock in his scabby hand. He beat the rock against the driver side window, persisting even when blood dripped from his arm, cawing excitedly, until the glass finally shattered.
The Beaters screamed as they dragged the driver, a middle-aged man dressed in a wrinkled button-down shirt and plaid shorts, from the car.
He screamed louder.
“Maybe,” Cass started. She had to steel herself for the lie she was about to tell. “Maybe he’s there still. In Sykes. There must be shelters there. Groups of people, like this …”
Sammi shrugged, an obvious effort to be brave. “Whatever.”
“I can try to find out, you know. When I get into town.”
“They won’t know. No one’s traveling between much anymore. I mean, besides you.”
“What were you doing outside this morning?” Cass asked gently.
Sammi looked at her hands; the nails were bitten. “I sneak out sometimes,” she said. “When the raiding parties go out at night. I hate it here, it’s like being in jail. And I always come back before it gets light out.”
“What about this morning?”
“I … kind of got turned around.”
“You were lost,” Cass clarified. “Sammi … you have to know how dangerous it is to be out there alone.”
“You were alone. How far have you walked, anyway?” Sammi demanded. “Since you, you know, woke up.”
“Look, Sammi … you can’t tell anyone what I’m telling you. About me being attacked.”
Sammi nodded solemnly. “I promise.”
“No, really. You can’t tell anyone.”
Sammi nodded again.
“And you have to stop going outside on your own.”
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 destroyed. Cass didn’t doubt that the bands of fake Beaters that Nora had mistaken her for were comprised of kids like these.
Sammi had already lost one parent. Cass prayed that the girl’s mother would stay safe.
Smoke brought plates piled with food and two plastic bottles filled with murky boiled water. There was a salad of kaysev greens dressed with oil and vinegar. There were also three blackened strips of jerky.
The aroma caused Cass to salivate, and she could practically taste the salty meat. Still, before accepting the plate, she asked: “Why?”
Smoke didn’t meet her gaze. “They want something in return,” he said. “News … there are a lot of people who won’t make the trip anymore. In the last couple of weeks it’s become a lot more dangerous. There’s been trouble, and not just from the Beaters.”
“What do you mean?”
Smoke made a dismissive gesture. “Long story. I’ll tell you about it on the road. But just folks with their own ideas about who ought to be running things.”
“What, you mean like who’s in charge here?” Cass saw a chance to ask something that she had been wondering. “Who is, anyway? You?”
“Not me,” Smoke said with finality. “We’re a collective here, we make decisions as a group. But look, like I said, it’s a long story. We’ll have time for it later, but now you should eat.”
“But …” Cass gestured at the plate. “What kind of stores do you have?”
Smoke shrugged, but his unconcern wasn’t convincing. “Quite a bit, actually. We still go raiding. Me, some of the others. There are still houses within a mile or two that haven’t been cleared yet. We only do one a night, take five or six of us and go.”
Cass nodded. She had come across some of these houses herself, even sheltered in them.
“What about the Wal-Mart?”
Smoke shook his head. “Beaters got there first. Nested all over it. There’s still a lot of canned food and other stuff in there but we can’t touch it.”
It was an older store, up Highway 161 outside the Silva town limits. It didn’t sell produce or meat, but that would actually be an advantage, since there would be no spoilage. And there would be medicine. Diapers, clothes, toiletries, processed foods. Winter coats and gloves. Boots.
“But we’re doing okay,” Smoke continued. “We got to the Village Market early on.”
Cass knew the place, a mom-and-pop grocery in a strip mall that stocked high-end gourmet stuff for weekenders and skiers. “Wasn’t it mostly cleared out back during the Siege?”
“Yeah, but we went back and finished the job. You know—people were panicking. Grabbing stuff. We’ve found things in houses … People will have a whole room full of bottled water, frozen dinners and shit they just left out when they couldn’t fit it in their freezers. Not that it mattered.”
Not after the power went out. Cass shook her head at the waste.
“We’ve got about five thousand cans. We’re trying to save the bottled water we have, and just rely on the creek. There’s some cereal, pasta, rice. Spices … not much meat, this is pretty much the end of it,” he said, pointing at the jerky. Cass noticed that his own plate held only salad and cold kaysev cakes. “Medicine … We got into the clinic, and there’s a woman here who was a doctor, a couple others, a nurse and a paramedic. So we have antibiotics, painkillers, bandages, like that.”
Cass chewed, trying to savor the salty jerky. She had never liked it Before, but now it tasted better than anything she’d ever eaten. “Do you think it’s true?” she asked after she took a sip from the bottle he’d brought. “Can you just live on kaysev? I mean, after …?”
After everything else is gone, she didn’t say. Because no matter how many stores they had managed to lay in here or anywhere else, the survivors would go through them eventually.
Smoke shrugged. “They certainly wanted us to believe that.”
Cass remembered the president’s prepared remarks, distributed to all the networks after he himself had gone to an undisclosed shelter. It was one of the final broadcasts before everything shut down. Paul Palmer, of KTXT, his hair looking like he’d done it himself, the part slightly askew, his eyes hollow and his voice wavering. It was a few days before the media disappeared forever—and only a matter of hours before the planes left air bases in Brunswick and Pensacola and Fort Worth and China Lake and Everett, loaded with their secret freight, tested and developed and grown in a dozen different locations across the U.S. Paul Palmer hadn’t even bothered to conceal the fact that he was reading from the teleprompter: “Full-spectrum nutritional mass,” he’d intoned. Code name K734IV, later shortened to K7 and then kaysev. Protein, calcium, vitamins, fiber.
“They could have been lying, though,” Cass said. “They obviously never tested it. I mean … if they had, they would have figured out about the blueleaf before they went and dumped seed over thousands of square miles.”
“Cass … you should know. Blueleaf’s only in California. At least, it was, unless it’s drifted.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Cass said, remembering Sammi’s story. “Only that’s just one more rumor. The only people who know are the pilots who dumped it, and even they don’t know what was in the seed mix.”
“No,” Smoke said quietly. “It’s true. Travis was the only base that went for it. Even China Lake turned it down, but they were doubling back over the same flight patterns as Travis so it didn’t matter.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Smoke was silent for a moment, not meeting her eyes. “Because I was working in Fairfield at the time. Practically right next door to Travis. I used to drink with some of those guys.”
“But—wouldn’t that be confidential? Why would they open up to some guy in a bar?”
Smoke’s face darkened and his mouth went tight. “It was more than just a bar conversation. We were … friends. And I guess they needed to talk, when they got back from taking the kaysev up. Those guys were career pilots—that’s what they knew. Who they were. They knew it was the last flight they were ever going to take. So yeah, they talked.”
Cass thought about what he was saying. It was tantalizing to think there was part of the world—part of the country, even—that was still free of Beaters. A place where people didn’t live in constant terror.
But there was something off about Smoke’s story, about the way he wouldn’t look at her, at the barely concealed emotion in his voice.
“How would the pilots know what they were flying?” she demanded. “I mean, the military’s never been known for transparency. I would think something like that would be—what do you call it?—need-to-know. Especially if there was disagreement about what exactly they were going to distribute.”
Smoke shrugged. “Look, I only told you because … well, I thought it might give you hope.”
Cass didn’t believe him, but she wasn’t ready to let the conversation drop. “Why are you still here? If you’re so sure blueleaf’s only in California?”
“It’s way too unstable to try to make it out of state now. That’s got to be a hundred miles, most of it over-mountain.”
“Sammi told me other people have done it.”
Smoke laughed bitterly. “Yeah? What she told you was that other people tried. I met that guy. The one she’s talking about. Tried to talk him out of it, but he was determined, was one of those new roaming prophet-preachers. I bet he didn’t make it twenty miles up the road on foot.”
I did, Cass thought darkly. She’d made it farther than that, alone, with nothing but her wits.
Although she’d had Ruthie to live for. Maybe that had bought her survival.
Smoke seemed to have lost any interest in the conversation. He reached for her plate and Cass didn’t stop him; she allowed him to scrape the last of her meal onto his own plate and collect her empty bottle.
“I’ll take care of the dishes,” he said. “I’ve packed for both of us. We’ll leave in an hour or so. There’s wash water in the courtyard, if you want it. Women use it after dinner, then the kids. Men wait until morning. This is your chance—they’re expecting you. They’ll have supplies for you.” He hesitated. “I told them you were shy. That you’d want to keep your undershirt on, your underwear.”
He was gone before Cass could object—or thank him.
08
CASS FOLLOWED THE SOUND OF LAUGHTER, staying to the long shadows under the eaves. She’d already decided that if either Sammi or her mother were in the courtyard, she’d retreat without showing herself. She’d done enough damage to the fragile network of relationships in the school.
