Survivors

Survivors

An Aftertime Novella

Sophie Littlefield

DOING RIGHT ISN’T EASY IN A WORLD GONE SO WRONG

Cass Dollar outlasted the fall of civilization. But surviving Aftertime requires the kind of toughness that can conquer the violent landscape of California and still retain its humanity.

When a young boy and his dying grandmother are brought to the Box, the survivalist community where Cass takes shelter, she realizes that without her help he won’t be long for this unforgiving new world. But while the Box is a haven from the roaming marauders—and the flesh-hungry Beaters—it forbids children within its confines. The boy will be turned out to fend for himself. All that stands between him and the brutal wilderness is Cass’s protective instincts, and the stubborn resolve that’s gotten her this far Aftertime.

“Littlefield has a gift…page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing descriptions.”

—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review on
Aftertime

SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD
grew up in rural Missouri and attended college in Indiana. She worked in technology before having children, and was lucky enough to stay home with them while they were growing up. She writes mysteries and thrillers for kids and adults, and lives in Northern California.

Visit Sophie online at www.SophieLittlefield.com or follow
@SWLittlefield on Twitter.

Contents

Begin Reading  

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.

“It’s
policy.”
Faye’s voice carried over the gravel bed fronting the trailer where Dor made his home. Owner, proprietor, mayor, leader, foreman—whatever he was—Dor was the heart of the Box and the source of its power, and as he stood with arms folded across his chest, listening to the raiders make their case, he was something akin to Olympian as well. George and Three-High and Sam—Cass was surprised to see Sam there, because Sam was a quiet one and not given to opinions.

Faye and Smoke flanked Dor on either side. If you were new to the Box, if you had just arrived hoping to trade the last precious belongings you carried in a wheeled suitcase or a gym bag or a child’s backpack for a few nights of safety, a meal, a high—if you didn’t know better, you might read tension into this scene. You might suppose that Faye and Smoke and Dor meant to face down the others, who stood exhausted on their feet and stinking of sweat and fear, the perfume of every raid.

But it wasn’t like that, not really. Smoke was a good man and fair, given to contemplation, the first to listen and late with an opinion. When he did talk, he had a soft-spoken command that could quiet a gathering instantly, everyone straining to hear. When he was wrong he owned it, but that was not often. And he was Cass’s own, her heart’s solace.

Faye was quicker tempered, a fiery woman who threw fuel on her losses and grief each day by walking her solitary beat around the outside of the Box, her hand on the holster at her belt. Faye loved to kill Beaters, screaming out her rage at everything that had been taken from her as she gunned down and hacked at the creatures that had lost their humanity for a flesh hunger.

But she was ready to lend anyone a hand with any undertaking, and she was gentle with Ruthie.

The six of them all worked together, even Dor. They trained together, buried the dead and shared gate duty and got drunk on kaysev wine. They were each other’s family, their consolation. As members of Dor’s security detail, they possessed a fierce unity. Which wasn’t to say that they agreed on everything—far from it. But they had found a rhythm, a way to talk things out, and they always came to an accommodation of one sort or another. They would not fight among themselves when there was so much to fight outside the ten-foot-high chain-link walls.

“No kids,” Faye said pointedly, fixing her gaze on Dor. The policy she spoke of was his—as were all policies, even if they were rooted in public discussion. What Dor said became law, and the unspoken subtext was that if you didn’t like it, there was the wide-open world out there elsewhere for you to go and form your own opinions.

“There’s Ruthie,” Sam said quietly. Not arguing, not pleading, something in the middle. Cass couldn’t see his expression through his dark glasses, but she didn’t need to in order to know what he was asking. Moving slowly down the path because of her daughter’s weight in her arms, she stopped short of the cleared space, semihidden by the farthest row of tents. Until that moment she hadn’t been trying to hide her approach, but now she hesitated in the shadows, avoiding the wide pool of yellow light cast by the xenon bulb wired over the door of Dor’s trailer. He ran it off his own private generator, the perk of authority; his home alone was lit up bright every night as he dreamed his solitary dreams within.

Cass did not breathe, hearing her daughter’s name. The only child in the Box, Ruthie was tolerated only because she was swept in on the terrible wave of events that brought Cass and Smoke here a month ago. Ruthie had been stolen by the religious order living in the stadium across the street; Cass had snuck in and taken her back, in the process killing several of the order’s most dangerous leaders. Among Box citizens, Cass’s actions were counted a win, a miracle, a rare enough reason to celebrate—so when she brought Ruthie into the Box, not yet three years old, shaved bald and made silent as a stone, there had been rejoicing. For Ruthie, symbol of victory over a vile neighbor, exceptions had been made, and no one complained, not even Dor, who might have lamented the resulting loss of trade with the Convent. It helped that Ruthie was silent and shy, that she ate little and demanded nothing. It helped even more that Smoke was with her, and that he was so valuable to Dor.

But Feo had not come in triumph. He was merely one more spoil of a raid, an incidental that came at a significant cost since he would have to be fed and clothed and would require far more sustenance than Ruthie. And what of the old woman? There were few tasks left for the old, and this one looked too weak even to shell kaysev beans or fold clothes on the fence drying lines. A bad smell wafted from her, she had soiled herself not once but many times and though Cass didn’t doubt that the boy had done his best. A woman that far gone could not last long under the care of a once-upon-a-time orthopedist with a painkiller habit.

“Let us take him tonight,” Smoke suggested quietly. “Cass and I will find out what his story is. And then we can all talk again tomorrow, when we know more. Makes no sense to decide now. It’s getting dark and folks need to be getting to bed, and it’s not like either of them are going anywhere.”

If Faye objected, she kept it to herself.

Sam brought the boy out from the medical shed, dressed in a borrowed sweater that hung off his bony frame. Someone had combed his hair and washed his hands. When Sam said goodbye, he crouched down to look in Feo’s eyes, but the boy turned away and stared at a rusty nail that had been pounded flat against a post. His fingers ruffled the hem of the borrowed sweater so gently that he might have been petting a newborn chick.

He came with them without objection, though, when Smoke outlined the simple plan. He could see his grandmother in the morning. There would be food in the tent in case he was hungry. If he needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, Smoke would take him. He would not be left alone, not even for a minute.

Feo listened, and at the end of Smoke’s little speech he was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged.

“Okay.”

In the time it took to walk to their tent, Ruthie heavy and sleepy in Cass’s arms, they found out that he was almost nine. That the old woman was his father’s mother and spoke no English. He described what had happened to her by hooking a finger in the corner of his mouth and tugging it down, pulling at the skin under his eye. A stroke, then, though neither Smoke nor Cass said the word. When Smoke asked Feo how long she’d been that way he shrugged again, a gesture that Cass realized constituted the better part of his repertoire.

“I don’t know,” he said to the ground. “What day is today?”