Survivors (3 page)

“Let me help?” She made it a question, and for a moment the boy froze, staring at her hand on the blue fabric, where she had taken care not to touch him, even through the comforter. After a moment he relaxed a little and Cass tugged and pulled and the comforter came free.

“You’ll be cold,” Cass said, and got a fleece-lined flannel shirt of Smoke’s from the bar hung from the roof support that served as a closet. They had nice hangers, sturdy wooden ones with gold-tone hooks that had come home from a raid, a present for Cass, a little joke between them—Smoke brought her silly luxuries, things it would have never occurred to her to buy for herself Before, even if she could have afforded them. “This will be much too large,” she added, holding it out for the boy to put his arms into the sleeves, “but I think we can make it work for now, and I know that Smoke won’t mind a bit.”

The boy looked dubious but he was already shivering in the morning chill so he allowed Cass to guide the shirt onto his thin body, buttoning the front and rolling up the sleeves. If Feo was sent away today, at least he would have this in addition to the sweater, a gift from someone who wished she could have done more.

“Now, as for your grandmother, they’re taking good care of her. We have a couple good doctors here—” only a little lie “—and medicine.” That was a worse lie, because Cass was pretty sure that none of the things they had in their stores could help what was wrong with the old woman. “But she needs to rest. A little later, I’ll go over there and find out when the doctors say we can visit.”

The boy considered this, his brow knitting and his deep brown eyes darkening further. He rocked forward, his elbows on his knees, and after a moment he sighed and looked Cass in the eye. “Okay. Can we eat now?”

Cass had watched with silent amusement as Feo worked his way through two bowls of what had become the Box’s standard breakfast fare, for those who could afford it—a rough cereal of dried kaysev beans, mixed with shredded wheat to extend it. One of the cooks had spooned some honey on top, winking at Cass.

They sat at the far end of one of the tables in the dining area, the buzz of the merchants and customers just getting started at this time of day. The others gave them their space, nodding or waving, but staying well away. By now everyone would know all there was to know about the boy, but they seemed to sense that he was skittish and shy. And there were those who preferred to be left alone with their hangovers, those who had lost their taste for hope.

“Still hungry?” Cass asked, nibbling at her kaysev cake and drinking the coffee that was now lukewarm.

Feo nodded, not looking up from his bowl, and Cass went to get him another.

When she came back he was gone.

They had managed to squeeze quite a lot into the Box, despite the fact that it was no larger than a football field and a half, an entire little town with commerce and public facilities and even a jail and an outdoor church. Nightly rental cots lined the fence near the front gate. Merchants sold food and drugs and alcohol and all manner of scavenged and raided merchandise out of stands cobbled together from dismantled buildings. In the center, a public area for dining and socializing had been decorated with plastic flags and pretty things—mirrors, silk flowers, children’s toys—hung from lines strung between the skeletons of trees. But the place was still a box, literally; a walled-off square with only one way out.

Cass didn’t panic, because where would Feo go? There was no way for him to escape into the dangers outside. Another irony: he couldn’t escape, but he could be forced out by their policies…

Still, Cass walked the paths between the tents and merchant stands, and the worn trail around the perimeter, with haste searching for a glimpse of him. She went first to the medic cottage, where Francie met her at the door with a frown—“She’s no better and probably worse”—so Cass told her that Feo might turn up and to be on the lookout.

Then she started crisscrossing the Box at random.

She found him on the stoop of the large prefab storage shed that Sam and George had made into their sleeping quarters and party room. They called it the “officers’ quarters” and it was where the guards did much of their drinking. Beds and personal space took up the back, and the rest was lined with shelves holding improvised weapons and a table with half a dozen chairs in the middle. An ornate antique painted-metal candelabrum hung over the table, which was speckled with wax that had dripped down. There was an ongoing poker game, a minifridge that was hooked up to a generator whenever the raiders brought back beer, and a library of skin magazines and
Car and Driver
s and Stephen King novels.

Sam and George were an odd pair—Sam young and quiet and almost obsessively neat, his bunk made up every morning, his clothes hung on hangers from pegs, and George fifteen years older and content to live in malodorous squalor—but they got along. This morning George was nowhere to be seen, probably off training in that damn alleyway, too.

Feo sat hunched on one side of the step, Smoke’s shirt newly rimed with dirt at the hem. He was drinking from a plastic bottle of cranberry-juice cocktail. With a
straw,
as unlikely a sight as any. Sam sprawled next to him, wearing his wraparound ski sunglasses and a ghost of a smile, in cowboy boots and jeans. When he saw Cass, he sat up straight and gave her a mock salute.

“Mornin’, Cass.”

“Good morning.”

“He only got one
eye,”
Feo said with hushed awe. His mouth was ringed with sticky pink. “He
showed
me.”

“That’s right,” Sam said, tapping the frayed patch beneath his pricey sunglasses, the patch that he never took off. Sam had lost an eye in the Yemen Rice War, likely treated by a field surgeon low on supplies and backup, like everything else in that fiasco of a war. Cass had never seen their handiwork, and the fact that Sam had showed the boy struck her as extraordinary. “I told him you got to watch where you’re goin’ around here, be careful not to walk into any knife-throwing competitions.”

“I could throw a knife,” Feo said. “I bet I could.”

“Yeah, buddy, I bet you could.” Sam took off his sunglasses and looked meaningfully at Cass. “I thought I’d give Feo a tour of the place here in a while.”

Cass saw how it was—it was written as plain as a sign in front of her face. The boy wanted a big brother, a favorite uncle, hell, maybe even a father. His instincts took him straight to Sam.

And Sam bloomed with the attention. It was almost heartbreaking to see, the way his good eye was bright with purpose, the barely concealed excitement under his facade of detachment and casual brio.

Cass had long felt that he—the youngest of the guards and the most introspective—was vulnerable. He still wore his unspoken losses on the outside, in his quietly deliberate way, as though it hurt him merely to move through life. He’s gone from fighting for a country that no longer existed to fighting for his existence. She’d worried about him turning to drugs like so many people did, in an attempt to erase the pain of loss and grief.

Which made it all the harder to say what needed to be said.

“Maybe, after Feo’s all settled in somewhere nice, he could come back for a visit with you guys,” she said carefully.

Sam dropped his gaze to the ground, chastened. He accepted the rebuke. They both knew that Dor’s rules were absolute. He was not a heartless leader, and Cass recognized that making the hardest choices was part of what made him a great one. Children had no place in what went on here. Someday soon, when Ruthie was a little older, there would be a reckoning even for her and Smoke.

Dor would find a humane solution—as humane as possible, anyway. She supposed that as soon as the old woman died, Dor would send the boy out with one of the guards to find a good shelter where children were welcome, even if that was ten miles away, thirty, whatever it took. The man was generous in his own way, though he preferred it not be widely known.

“Well,” she said, “why don’t I let the two of you finish your drink, and I’ll come back for Feo in a bit.”

“Okay,” the boy said quietly. Sam only nodded and put his glasses back on, and Cass turned away.

A little more time together was a small kindness. It was rare enough to be able to do anything at all for anyone anymore. Cass had learned to take such opportunities when they came.

Just as she reached her tent—she was barely through the door, Ruthie’s name on her lips—the alarm sounded. A series of bells strung around the Box, the effect was almost medieval, the clanging strident and urgent and echoing from all corners once the first peal struck.

Beaters
. A dozen times since she and Smoke arrived, they had come close enough to the fences to pose an immediate threat, nearly always early in the morning, drawn out by the light of day. When the first rays of the sun reached the once-human things, they left the stinking nests where they slept sprawled and entwined together for warmth. They woke blinking and hungry, and stumbled to their feet to venture out into the wrecked streets, grunting and cawing, pushing at each other and picking at their scalps and their scabbed and decaying arms.

Mostly the Beaters stayed clear of the Box’s line of sight. They’d learned that the danger was too great, that the guards were all crack shots who could drop them even from a distance: the killing shot in the base of the spine or the head. So they waited for travelers, hiding clumsily behind the lean-to shacks and run-down cabins on the outskirts of town. Sometimes, too, in the alleyways or storefronts of the once-bustling city around them. Every week or so, some poor soul on his way to the Box would die horribly in the last half mile of his journey.

But once in a while, inexplicably, a cluster of them would risk approaching. Maybe they hoped for a break in the fence or to catch a guard unawares, or a citizen out for a walk. Maybe it was raw animal hunger. Dor did not forbid his employees and customers to come and go, but it always surprised Cass just how many did. Maybe the adrenaline rush of walking past the gates was just another kind of drug. Maybe it was an exercise in despair.

The alarm didn’t necessarily mean someone had been attacked, only that Beaters had been spotted nearby, and as Cass ran to the clearing along one side of the Box with everyone else, she prayed—

Not Smoke not Smoke not Smoke

People were already milling around, voices raised in fear, everyone asking each other where the disturbance was. When a shout went up from the west side, the crowd turned as one and swarmed toward the fence.

You would think people would stay in their tents, cover their ears and wait it out. By now, six months after the first Beaters appeared, everyone knew what an attack meant. It was nothing you’d ever want to see twice. And yet no one seemed able to look away. For Cass, who had the dubious distinction of being one of the only people ever to survive an attack—of being bitten and infected, and yet healed by some genetic crapshot—the memories were especially terrifying.

Not Smoke not Smoke, who’d been out there

She ran to the side of the crowd, dodging stragglers and slow movers, and sprinted past them all. Her lungs screamed for air and her boots pounded the hard-packed dirt, sending shocks through her body, but she reached the front and was among the first to reach the fence. Her momentum drove her into the chain link, and she grabbed the wire in her fists and pulled herself up a few feet to get a clear view down the block.

There.
There
. Eight of them, their excited crowing filling the air, their hair matted and their skin torn and crusted. They were dressed in rags; one of them had lost most of the skin of one arm and the bones showed through as it dangled uselessly. Another had had its face bashed in, its cheek and jaw a pulped mess, and still it clawed and shrieked.

They were stampeding after a screaming man, one of them having seized the tail of his jacket with a crabbed and bony hand. The man was desperately trying to shrug off the jacket, but either the zipper was stuck or his terror prevented him from unfastening it. As Cass watched, two of the other Beaters threw themselves on him and he went down, and then they were all upon him, trying to get a grip on his arms and legs as he thrashed on the ground. Cass saw blood bloom on his exposed hands as he beat them against the concrete, but it was no use: one of the creatures took his armpits and others each took a foot and they lifted him into the air, as the rest of them pushed and crowed, reaching with greedy hands. They meant to carry him back to their nest to feast, to tear the flesh from his body with their teeth while he was still alive.

It wasn’t Smoke, and despite her horror at the poor man’s fate, Cass sagged in relief. The victim had fair hair cut close, sagging camo pants. Not someone Cass knew. He had to be recently arrived, or a traveler who hoped to become a fellow citizen. He was screaming without cease, his voice distinct from the inhuman cries of the Beaters and their almost lascivious excitement, and then—abruptly—he stopped.

A shot. There had been a shot, and there followed two more, and the Beaters who had been carrying the doomed man dropped him, and one of them fell on top of him and rolled away, dead. Most of the others ran, tripping over each other and loping clumsily around the corner behind an apartment building, splattering blood further down the street. But one stayed behind, his savaged face dark with rage and hunger as he screamed and tugged at the victim’s pant leg, pulling the body along the street a few feet, until finally he too gave up and loped away.

Two men came sprinting from the side—Cass hadn’t noticed them, they must have been crouched along the fence—and this time it
was
Smoke, and Three-High with his long gray ponytail, and they ran crouched low and ready to shoot again. They reached the man and Smoke lifted him up over his shoulders and Three-High put one more bullet in one of the downed Beaters’ heads and it exploded on the asphalt like a water balloon filled with blood. Someone on the ground behind Cass vomited, and she whispered a guilty prayer of thanks that Smoke had been spared once again and stepped out of the sick woman’s way.