eyelashes stood out against the delicately veined eyelids, long-fringed and black. Her hair looked badly cut, but not terrible; it was glossy and the same rich golden brown it had always been, the new growth at her crown nearly indistinguishable from the rest.
After taking a thorough survey of her face, she couldn’t put it off any longer-it was time to look at her back. She skimmed off her shirt and turned and oh God it was worse than she’d thought, worse than she’d imagined, worse than she’d seen on anyone who wasn’t already dead or dying. The pocked areas where chunks of flesh had been chewed off were red and angry and raw. Shreds of blackened, dead tissue were stuck to the crusty, shiny layers underneath. In some areas it looked like muscle was still exposed, though concentric layers of healing skin, as thin as tissue paper, skimmed over the wounds from the edges inward.
Thank God she’d hid herself from the women at the bath. What would they have done, if they knew? They had been so kind, especially the one who had washed her so tenderly, never knowing what lay under her shirt. If they saw, were forced to look at the evidence of the attack on her-especially after what she’d done to Sammi-even the most compassionate among them would be unlikely to show her any mercy.
Cass tried to force a memory from her mind, a night when she had gone on the raiding party from the library. She’d been at the library for a couple of weeks and was going stir-crazy, her only outdoor time in the courtyard where she stared at the same treetops, the same stretch of sky, day after day. So when the raiding party assembled after dark with their empty packs and bags, she put on her own knapsack and held her blade at the ready and went out with them into the night.
There was an air of forced joviality, whispered joking and brittle laughter. They went south, down past the high school, to a cul-de-sac of run-down seventies-era trilevels. One of the curious truths of Aftertime was that the most opulent homes didn’t yield the best spoils: it was the solidly middle class who were most likely to have Costco-sized stores of granola bars, Midol, hand sanitizer.
They found enough to fill their packs in the first few houses. They’d come back another night and make their way around the rest of the block. There was no rush; they were like summer-fat squirrels, hoarding for a winter that still seemed far-off. The others seemed to relax, now that they were headed home-until they passed the old ARCO and heard garbled pleas for help coming through the mini-mart’s shattered double doors.
It was not the voice of a Beater. “Help…please…help.” Cass couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was like a scream that was leaking air, agony enunciated with excruciating care.
“Walk on, Cass,” Bobby said softly, drawing her away from the others, his hand gentle but insistent at her back. Bobby was always so kind to her. He wanted to be with her. He said he was willing to wait until she was ready, but how could she ever be ready? Half a dozen times she had turned him down, and still he was trying to protect her. Didn’t he understand that she didn’t deserve him?
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered, backing away from him, from the concern in his eyes. She had to show him that she was not his, and though her heart hammered with fear, she walked straight over to the mini- mart, shining her flashlight in front of her.
There were none of the things inside, she knew, or they would have come loping and gnashing in pursuit the minute she and the others came close. But what she saw in the flashlight’s illumination was clearly a nest, befouled clothing and blankets mounded into a pile a dozen feet wide, the space made by pushing all the store’s racks and shelves to the side. The Beaters usually only left their nests during the day, when their tiny-pupiled eyes could absorb enough light to see, but for some reason these ones had gone hunting that night. The nest stink was powerful, and Cass knew any number of the things could be nearby, and she would have turned and run-except that on the nest lay one of their victims.
It was a man. She thought it was, anyway, but only because he still had his hair, which was buzzed short. He was naked, but the rest of his body held no clues to his gender, all of the skin having been eaten away. Under a basting of blood the flesh was flayed and ribboned and chewed, bone showing through in a few places, but mostly red muscles and sinew and nerves and tendons remained. The tough soles of his feet had been left whole, and his toes were undamaged, but even the flesh on top of his feet had been ripped away, the network of delicate bones showing through the gore.
His face had been left mostly intact, other than the cheeks, which had been chewed through. Facial skin was thin; maybe the Beaters found it tedious and had gone looking for another victim instead. At any rate the man’s eyes were wide with shock and his lips convulsed as he tried to speak. It took several attempts for him to put the syllables together:
“Kill…me…”
“No,” Cass whispered, her hand flying to her mouth. “No no no-”
A hand yanked at her elbow, and she stumbled as she tried to resist.
“Outside.” It was Bobby, and his expression, magnified in the tilting flashlight glow, was grim.
Cass nodded dumbly and backed out of the building, shoes crunching on the broken glass that littered the entrance, into the night where the others waited. One, a man in his fifties who had been a highway patrolman before, had his hands over his ears to shut out the tortured moans. Cass allowed herself to be led down the street, away from the ARCO, away from the Beater nest, away from the pulped matter that had once been human.
No one said anything. Bobby caught up with them a couple of blocks later. He fell into step next to Cass and stayed by her side until they were back at the library. Cass knew Bobby had killed the hopeless victim, but they never talked about it.
She had been a coward. Now, given the chance to do it again, she would have sliced the man’s throat without hesitation and held what remained of his hand while he bled out.
Was it courage, she wondered as she slowly put her shirt back on and buttoned it, or only loss that had numbed her? Or was it the effects of succumbing to and then beating the disease? Whatever the reason, she had changed. Her whole body had seemed warm since she first awoke. A matter of degrees, maybe-perhaps even fractions of a degree-but she would swear there was a difference. Her body was rebuilding itself relentlessly, her immune system hypervigilant against infection. The scabs on her arms had mostly healed. Now that she was clean and groomed she looked human enough that most people would think she was completely normal.
Cass ran her fingers through her hair, combing it as well as she could. She had been called beautiful by a lot of people, mostly men. Never Mim, who had reminded her often that she had inherited her father’s coloring, which she called coarse. He had Mediterranean blood, and like him, Cass’s skin darkened to olive, her hair in between brown and blond. Mim herself was pale as parchment and jealously guarded her skin, wearing big hats and sunscreen even for trips across town. There had been nothing Mim enjoyed more than reporting that she had run into some acquaintance whose crow’s feet and sunspots and blemishes had worsened. “Bet they wish they’d done what I did,” she’d smirk.
Mim was dead, of course. She died with her skin as flawless and unlined as ever at the age of sixty-one-but Cass supposed her storied beauty must have been marred by the red flush and frothing spittle that marked a blueleaf fever death.
At least she’d been spared the other. Dying from the initial fever meant you never had to worry about becoming a Beater.
Cass folded the used cloth and laid it on the edge of the tub and returned to the bedroom. Smoke had made the bed, but he was gone. A flicker of panic flashed through Cass before she heard talk coming from downstairs, and she picked up her backpack and followed the voices.
The men were sitting in a tidy kitchen splashed with sun streaming in the upper third of the windows. The bottom had been boarded up, and there was a flap of fabric-covered plywood on hinges at the top that could be lowered to block the sun completely. Raised, it let in sun but did not give a view to the outside.
Cass paused in the hall, listening.
“She has enough to worry about,” Smoke was saying.
“She needs to know before y’all just show up at the library,” Lyle said softly. “Them Rebuilders-they don’t take kindly to bein’ told no, as I guess you know as well as anyone.”
Smoke muttered something that Cass couldn’t hear.
“It don’t matter,” Lyle said. “You got to hear what I’m sayin’ here. That story’s made it all the way here, hell, it’s probably got around half the state. Rebuilders gaining ground every day-they aim to take over. Hell, they want the valley, the whole fuckin’ state…who knows. Folks are afraid. They want someone to believe in. And that’s you. Which is all good, but you got the girl with you now, and maybe you’re not the worst thing to happen to her, see? But she needs to know it ain’t gonna be easy.”
