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But the four women clustered around the makeshift tub were strangers. The tub was really more of a giant trough composed of sections of white plastic pipe that had been capped off and propped up on a pair of sawhorses. It had been filled with water that steamed in the rapidly cooling evening. A small fire crackled in the hearth a few yards away, a neat stack of burning madrone branches giving off a spicy, pleasant smell. Several pots of different sizes simmered on the grate above, and Cass guessed they poured the boiling water into the tub to keep the communal bath warm, and to replace what sloshed and splashed out with their movements.
Two of the four women were naked except for plastic flip-flops, and one of them held a nearly new bar of soap. The naked women washed, passing the soap back and forth. One of the other women was undressing, hopping from foot to foot as she stripped off her clothes and tossed them into a pile. The fourth woman had put her clothes back on and was toweling her hair. She was telling some sort of story that had the others cracking up, but when they noticed Cass approaching they all went silent.
“I’m sorry,” Cass said. “I didn’t mean to … Smoke said I might be able to wash. Except … I, um … “
“We have extra towels,” the woman who was undressing said, offering a tentative smile. “I brought two. I wasn’t sure if you … It’s pretty casual. We keep the water hot for a couple of hours and people just show up whenever.”
“Some people, anyway,” one of the naked women said. She was a well-built girl in her early twenties who didn’t seem the least bit self-conscious about dragging her soapy washcloth up and over her wide thighs, her rounded stomach. “Some folks, I don’t think they’ve had a bath since they got here. They get kind of unfresh, you know what I’m sayin’?”
She gave Cass a friendly wink as her companion flicked her with her own washcloth. “Not everyone’s as comfortable strutting around buck naked as you,” she scolded, grinning. “Forgive Nance here. She’s got no manners.”
“I, um …” Cass said, swallowing. “Is it okay … Do you mind if I don’t … uh, if I keep …” She hugged herself tightly, battling her warring desires to keep the evidence of her attack hidden, and to wash her filthy body.
“It’s okay,” the first woman said gently, handing her a small towel and a folded washcloth. They weren’t terribly clean, but Cass took them gratefully. She set the towel on the ground and stripped out of her overshirt and pants before she could change her mind, keeping her eyes downcast, and then approached the trough wearing only the nylon tank and panties that she’d been wearing beneath her clothes all this time. There were only a few scars on the backs of her thighs, and they had healed to barely distinguishable discolorations, but the gouges on her back were still raw and obvious. She knew this from tracing them with her fingers—the undeniable evidence that she’d been torn at by Beaters.
But there was more to her discomfort. It had also been years since she had undressed in front of another woman, and she felt her skin burn with shame as the others watched her.
It was different with men. She’d been with so many; she’d stopped counting one weekend when, by Sunday, she couldn’t remember the name of the one she brought home Friday. She hadn’t been self-conscious—hadn’t been conscious of anything, really, other than the driving need. Not a hunger for the coupling itself, but a need to beat her pain and confusion into a thing that could be contained again, could be put away far enough in the depths of her heart that she could keep going. Keep living. To get to that place she had to use her body, to show and undress and flaunt it, all of which was done without a second thought.
But now she felt hot shame color her face as her nipples hardened under the tight shirt, exposed to the evening chill. She had no bra—what would these women think of that? Cass didn’t know what to make of it herself—on the day she woke up, when she stumbled to her feet and tried to work the kinks out of her mysteriously abused limbs—she’d gone to tug at her bra, a habit of decades, and found it wasn’t there.
Cass hooked her thumbs in her socks and pulled them off, tossing them on the pile. There was nothing more that she could take off.
“I’ll—why don’t I …?” the woman who had been telling a story said. She made a move toward Cass’s clothes pile and hesitated. She looked Cass in the eye and spoke slowly and clearly. She was old enough to be a grandmother—old enough to be Ruthie’s grandmother, anyway. She had several inches of silver roots, an expensive dye job now losing ground, what must have been a severe bob softening to a wispy cut around her chin. “I’m Sonja,” she said carefully. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take these things, bring you back clothes that are clean, that you can wear on your … That will be good for traveling.”
Cass made a sound in her throat, a rusty and ill-used sound that was meant to convey gratitude. Hot dampness pricked at her eyes and she found that her lips did not move well. But Sonja just nodded and swept up the mess of clothes, hugging them against her body as though they didn’t stink, as though Cass had chosen and treasured them, rather than the truth—that she couldn’t say who she’d taken them from and what she’d done to the person who wore them before.
Cass wanted to watch Sonja walk away, to watch the filthy and hated rags disappear, but she knew that if she did she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the bath, and the bath was a rare treat. She had not had or even allowed herself to dream of having such a thing in such a long time. There had been several moonlight splashes in the streams and creeks that crisscrossed the foothills, but the water never came up any farther than midankle, and no matter how Cass cupped her hands and splashed, she succeeded only in wetting her clothes and her skin, never cleansing them.
She approached the trough, the concrete cold and rough on her bare feet, focusing on the steam that rose into the evening air.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the woman who was undressing pause, her jeans folded in her hands. She had not yet spoken, and unlike the others, she had made no move to welcome Cass. Hostility came off her in waves. The others had somehow made their peace with Cass, with what she had done to Sammi—but this woman did not want her there.
Cass inhaled deeply of the steam. Someone had crumbled something aromatic into the water, bath beads or powder or something else that perfumed the air with lavender and created a thin layer of white bubbles. She longed to dip her fingertips into the water.
She was so filthy. She could barely abide herself, and she wanted desperately to wash even a little of her shame away.
Instead she forced herself to turn away from the water, toward the silent woman. “I’ll go, if you want me to,” she offered quietly.
But the woman—she was a handsome woman with a short, no-nonsense haircut and sharp cheekbones—picked up her shoes and socks and glared at Cass. “No, I’ll go,” she muttered, and stalked away.
“I’m sorry,” Cass said to the others, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I should—”
“Stay,” one of the women said. “I’m Gail. Trust me, you need this way worse than she does.”
Cass was grateful, but she stared down at her hands, crisscrossed with cuts from running into dead shrubs and trees, and from falling in the dark. The nails were black and broken, her wrists creased with dirt. Her own odor was strong enough that she caught sour whiffs when she moved; she could only imagine how she smelled to others. “If you don’t mind,” she said, suddenly near tears and more humbled than she had ever felt in her life. “I’d like to stay.”
“I was about done,” Gail said, flipping thick brown braids over her shoulders and stepping aside to make room. “But don’t worry, I’ll stick around and chat.”
She stepped closer, her smile slipping when her glance fell to the nearly healed wounds on Cass’s arms. When she looked in Cass’s eyes again, her curiosity was edged with sadness.
“Did you do that?” she asked, and for one heart-skipping moment Cass thought Gail knew, that she had guessed, about the attack, the Beaters, everything.
And then the truth hit her, bringing clarity, but no lessening of shame.
Gail thought she’d harmed herself.
And she wasn’t wrong. Not about the story, only about the details.
There were days … dark days, when the end of the evening approached with no relief in sight, no one to slip into the shadows with, no strong man to bend her over double until there was no room for her own regrets, nights when every shot she downed added to her screaming headache without ever bringing the blessed numb of forgetting. And on those nights, once or twice … or three or four times … she’d found that sharp thing, the shard of broken ashtray, the coiled end of the corkscrew, the dull knife a bartender cut limes with…. She found the thing and she traced the shape of her shame until she could finally focus on the pain and forget the rest.
So, yes. Once, she’d borne the road map of shame on her skin. And was this really so different, these marks made by her own hands, in a fever she didn’t remember?
She hung her head and blinked at the hot mist in her eyes. Immediately Gail put her hand, warm and comforting, on Cass’s wrist, in the small band of unmolested flesh between her hand and the first of the chewed places.
“I’m sorry,” Gail murmured. “Please, just … just forget I said anything. Past is past here, if you want it to be. Everyone gets to start again.”
Cass shivered, unable to speak.
“Well, look,” Nance said, interrupting the moment with deliberate cheer. “Look, we’re just glad you’re here. You’re the first new face we’ve had in … well, a while. I’ve been going nuts here with all these yokels.”
“Nance isn’t cut out for small-town living,” Gail said, withdrawing her hand after a final squeeze. The moment had passed, nothing more than milkweed on the breeze. “She’s way too upscale for the rest of us.”
“I’m from Oakland,” Nance said. “I just came up here to help my mother when things went bad. I never dreamed I’d get stuck here.”
“Nance isn’t much of a nature person,” Gail said. “She keeps wishing she’d wake up and there’d be room service.”
“I put in this shower last year,” Nance said. “In my condo? One of those rain shower ones? There were jets along the side, steam … “
“And I bet you never had any trouble finding someone to share it with you, right?” Gail said, winking at Cass. “Nance also doesn’t like the men here.”
Cass dipped her washcloth into the warm water, savoring the sensation of the water closing over her fingers, her hand, her wrist. Slowly, she trailed the cloth in an underwater figure eight. “I’ll ruin this water. It’ll be filthy when I’m done.”
Gail shrugged. “It wasn’t exactly crystal clear to start with. We just drag it up from the creek. We don’t bother to strain it or purify it when it’s just for washing.”
Nance wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, it smells a little like rotting fish. I don’t know what we’ll do when we run out of shower gel to hide the smell.”
“We’ll stink,” Gail said. “Just like we do now, only by then we’ll all be so used to it that it won’t matter.”
It was all the encouragement Cass needed. She submerged her arms up to her elbows, then lowered her face into the water and stayed under as long as her breath held out. She came up with the water dripping down her face and blinked it out of her eyes. “Ohhh,” she breathed.
“Tell you what,” Gail said. “I have a little shampoo left.”
“Oh, I couldn’t—” Cass said.
“Yeah, you can.” Gail reached into a plastic tote. “Put your hand out.”
Cass did as she was told and Gail squeezed out a dollop of creamy shampoo. It smelled like rosemary, and it was familiar; Cass had a bottle of it once, long ago. She held it up to her face and breathed as deeply as she could, trying to imprint the memory of the smell in her brain. Then she rubbed it onto her cropped hair and began to work it into her scalp, taking her time, making small circles.
The hair around her hairline was growing in soft and fine; Cass wondered if pulling it out had damaged the roots in some way. Before, when she was a teenager, she remembered her mother warning her that if she plucked her eyebrows too often the hair wouldn’t grow back. She had believed her mother. Before Byrn. When it was just the two of them, her mother taking such care in her mirror in the morning and before dates, Cass sitting on the edge of the tub to talk to her. She thought that might have been when her mother was happiest, when she was getting ready for a new man. Before there had been time for him to disappoint her or, in the end, to leave her. When it was all possibility, when Jack or David or Hunt was still new to her. “I have a good feeling about this one,” she would always say, winking at Cass as she slipped her blouse over her head, adjusting her breasts in her satiny bra, buttoning just enough buttons to give a hint of cleavage.
She always had a good feeling, before.
Even with Byrn.
Cass forced the thought from her mind. When the shampoo was exhausted, the dirt and grease in her hair overwhelming the lather, she lowered her head and let the water come up over her scalp and the back of her neck, down her shirt. She swept her hair through the water, rinsing out all the shampoo. Then she came up sputtering a second time, her hair plastered wet and warm against her shoulders.
Nance made a show of pretending to look into the trough. “Can’t even tell,” she said. “We’ll be able to wash all the kids and a few stray dogs in here, too.”
Gail made a face. “Our standards aren’t very high.”
“I’m … Thank you,” Cass murmured. She took the soap bottle Nance offered and squeezed a little onto the cloth and started scrubbing her body. She began with her shoulders and worked down her arms. She took the suds that gathered in her hands and rubbed them into the synthetic fabric of her tank top, doing her best to clean the fabric. She wished she could take it off, that she could stand here naked and scrub until she was finally clean. But this would have to do.
“Ain’t no big deal,” Nance said. “What you’re gonna owe us big for is taking the only good-lookin’ man we got with you. Here, give me that.”
She took the cloth from Cass and dabbed at the back of her neck, her shoulder blades, letting the water sluice down to soak the back of her shirt. The water stung when it came in contact with the torn flesh, and Cass worried that the fabric would cling tightly, transparently, to the canyons of her wounds, and she twisted away, pretending to soap her back as far as she could reach. Nance pulled away from her, mild hurt in her expression, and Cass wished she could explain, No, it’s not you, it’s me, that her own body was a horror she couldn’t shed, that Nance’s healing touch was a gift she hadn’t earned and couldn’t accept.
Nance squeezed the water from the cloth and folded it carefully, once, twice; then she pressed it into Cass’s hands, but before she let go, she gathered Cass’s smaller hands in her own large and capable ones and held them for a moment with a tenderness that brought tears to Cass’s eyes. Her sense of exposure deepened; while men had touched every inch of her body, sometimes without even knowing her name, and sometimes with the kind of careless fervor that left her bruised and battered, no woman had touched her since her own mother stopped bathing her since the age at which she was old enough to turn the taps herself. The image that flashed through her mind: her mother watching her impassively, smoking, as Cass struggled to let the water out the drain—she must have been all of nine, smarting from her father’s absence and shriveling from her mother’s indifference.
When she finally let go, Nance picked up her own towel and began drying off. Cass finished her washing, concentrating on the sensation of the warm water as it ran down her stomach, down her thighs and calves to puddle at the ground. When the others turned politely away, she washed between her legs, lathering and scrubbing as though she could wash away a decade’s shame with meager and inadequate supplies, rinsing the panties as well as she could with handfuls of murky bathwater, the synthetic fabric clinging to her skin and revealing the thick, dark patch of hair beneath.
“Smoke will come right back here after he walks with me,” Cass said, wanting to turn the attention away from herself. “I just need … “
But she didn’t need Smoke. She’d come this far on her own; surely she could manage to cross the last four miles of bare road before the outskirts of Silva, the handful of blocks to the library.
“You take him, girl,” Gail said, suddenly serious. “You let that man help you. You’ve been out of the towns, you don’t know what you’re up against.”
“I’ve seen Beaters,” Cass protested. “A few, anyway, on my way here.”
“It’s the people you need to worry about just as much nowadays,” Gail replied.
“You come through cities?” Nance demanded, ignoring Gail. “You seen their nests?”
Cass hesitated. The biggest town she’d passed was a half a dozen houses and a gas station clustered around a crossroads, Highway 161 intersecting a farm road that disappeared into dusty fields. But she hadn’t seen Beaters there, no evidence of a nest—no alcoves or storefronts littered with filthy clothing mounded in shallow rings, no piles of household castoffs hoarded for the haphazard, long-ago memories they held. No fetid stink of unwashed, ravaged bodies mingled in restless sleep, of torn flesh and leaking, damaged bodies seized upon and devoured and, finally, abandoned.
The few Beaters she’d seen had been small and restless roving teams, and if she’d wondered where they sheltered, she cast her doubts aside, plunged them into the unknowable so that she could take another step and another, so that she could salvage sufficient hope to continue on.
The others exchanged glances. “How many at a time?”
“Two … three.”
“And tell me, didn’t that strike you as strange?”
It had, of course, once the cloudiness had shaken itself loose from Cass’s mind and she was thinking more clearly. Since the Beaters had evolved, they had formed larger and larger packs, like a snowball rolled around a snowy field, picking up mass. They seemed to take comfort in their own kind. Occasionally, you’d even see them in a clumsy imitation of an embrace, patting each other or grooming the hard-to-reach tufts of hair at the back of their heads, even hugging. They didn’t ordinarily feed on each other after the initial flush of the disease—they hungered for uninfected flesh—but occasionally you’d see them nipping and tugging gently at each other with their teeth, almost the way puppies played, biting with their tiny milk teeth.
“I don’t know,” Cass said. All of it was strange. All of it was horrifying.
“Well, this is new, just the last few weeks. They’ve started going out a couple at a time, kind of poking around together like they have a plan. We—some of us—we think they’re scouting.”
A thrill of fear snaked along Cass’s spine, a sensation she had thought was lost to her. After the things she’d seen and suffered, she didn’t think she could be terrified again. “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“They’re on the lookout for opportunities. For us. They’ve started working on strategy.”
Whispered: “No.”
It was impossible. The Beaters were disorganized, stripped of their humanity, reduced to little more than animals motivated by an overwhelming need to feed. The spells of humanlike behavior were nothing but the debris left behind when the soul made a clumsy exit from the shell of a body that remained. To suggest they were evolving the ability to reason, to plan—that was as senseless as suggesting that a flock of ducks could orchestrate a diving attack.
“We’re not saying they’ve succeeded yet,” Nance said quickly. “I mean it’s not like they get very far before they get distracted or wander off or whatever. But the fact they’re coming out in small groups like that—and they hang out around the edges, across the streets all around the school—it’s got to mean something.”
“It might just be the evolution of the disease,” Cass ventured, grasping at possibilities. “You know … like, in the whole first population, as it progresses … “
There had been a lot of discussion of the evolution of the disease, when people first realized that the sick were turning into something else, something far worse. Before anyone called them Beaters, people repeated rumors that their brains were infected with a madness similar to syphilis. But back then, much as nineteenth-century syphilitics suffered from lesions and tumors and dementia before they died, Aftertime, people had initially thought that those who ate the blueleaf would eventually die once the fever escalated.
“Maybe,” Gail assented, an act of generosity. “Just, I want you to know what you’re up against. Smoke knows…. He’s been watching them.”
“He takes notes,” Nance added. “He keeps a journal. He used to be a teacher or something.”
“Well, we don’t know that,” Gail corrected her. “He doesn’t talk about himself much.”
“He said something about it once,” Nance insisted. “Teaching.”
Cass toweled off her damp body and thought about the man who had offered to freewalk with her to the library. Four miles of unnecessary risk. The overwhelming impression she got from Smoke was of … depth. Layers. He would not be an easy man to know.
There was the story he told about the air force pilots. She still didn’t think he was telling the whole truth. So … maybe he was a liar, or maybe he was just keeping parts of the truth to himself.
But he was brave. Or more precisely, he had a lack of concern for himself, and an abundance of concern for others. He had been the first to come at her when she and Sammi approached the school, and it had been his body crushing hers when he took her down. His arms had been hard-muscled. Despite her strength and fitness, she was smaller by several inches and thirty or forty pounds. He could have hurt her easily.
But he hadn’t even bruised her.
“What about Nora?” Cass found herself asking. “His … girlfriend?”
Gail made an exhalation of air through her teeth. “Is that the impression you got? Well, they’re … I don’t know what you’d call it.”
“They met here,” Nance said. “Nora, when she showed up she was a mess. Kept to herself. Wouldn’t let anyone close at first, after her nephew … once he was taken. Smoke got her talking again.”
“I mean I’m pretty sure they’re doing the nasty,” Gail said, flashing a grin that didn’t make it to her eyes. “Smoke’s hot, and there’s lots of women wouldn’t mind a little of that.”
Cass felt heat rising in her face. That wasn’t what she’d meant—not sex. Just the way they had been around each other, it suggested a relationship beyond the bond of people sheltering together in close quarters, and she’d been—
What, exactly? Curious? Envious, the voice inside her suggested. She didn’t like that answer, but it had the ring of truth. To have someone else to go through this with—what would that be like? To have someone to tell your fears to—your wishes—your regrets?
“People are funny,” Nance mused. “Some people, Aftertime, it’s like they’re dead inside, like they were already taken even though their bodies are still here. And other people just … I don’t know, it’s like they light up. Not in a good way, necessarily, mind you. But more like some sort of crazy energy that they rely on just to keep them going.”
“Yeah,” Gail agreed. “Some people get all manic. There’s been all kinds of hookups, you go looking for a flashlight or something and open a door and there’s people on the floor like, well, you know. And then next time you turn around they’re doing it with someone else.”
“Remember Scott and Meena …?” Nance said, and then the two of them were doubled over with laughter. Cass couldn’t help smiling along, their mirth was so infectious.
“What’s so funny?” Sonja had returned, carrying a stack of folded clothes, which she held out to Cass. “I had to guess at sizes, but I was trying for practical. Here, I’ll take your towels, I’m on wash tomorrow anyway.”
