Cass stepped into the kitchen. “Don’t you think I know that? When’s the last time anything was ever easy?”
“Mornin’, princess,” Lyle said, raising his glass of water in a mock toast. Cass saw that a glass had been poured for her as well, and she sat in the chair closest to Lyle, not looking at Smoke. She wasn’t ready to look at him yet. The sensations of the night before still lingered on her skin, but she could not afford to be distracted, not with the hardest part of the trip still ahead.
“Good morning,” she said, taking a drink from the glass. The water was cloudy, with tiny specks floating in it.
“I boiled it,” Lyle said, gesturing at the kitchen counter, on which plastic jugs full of water were lined up. “I get a fire going every few nights, haul up water from the creek and set in a big batch. I strain it, get it as clean as I can.”
“It’s delicious,” Cass lied. Really, it tasted like nothing. It
The nontaste of the liquid triggered a memory of a meeting one weeknight after she’d done a double shift at the QikGo.
Cass sat in the back of the meetings at first and participated as little as possible-until the day she couldn’t leave the church basement because she knew that if she did she would get so drunk she might never recover, that she would drink until the bottle fell from her fingers and she passed out. She wanted to drink until she was dead. She wanted to drink until
But she stayed.
The night Cass was thinking about, she had gone to the meeting after her double shift, too tired to do anything but go through the motions. She passed when it was her turn to speak. She moved her lips when everyone else did, but didn’t listen to anyone’s stories.
Until the end. They stood, they held hands, they said the words. “…take what you need and leave the rest.”
Just one sentence from the stupid thing they always repeated at the end of every meeting. She’d heard it dozens of times before; it meant nothing. Only it kept going through her head as the other people in the room talked and smiled and sniffled and hugged.
There was nothing in the room she needed. But when she left, she had what she needed. It was a puzzle like the ones she’d once liked to do, the riddles in her childhood. “I have no feet but I can run”…“I am as big as an elephant but as light as a feather”…
“Thank you,” she told Lyle. Then she forced herself to turn and look at Smoke, who was watching her warily, his expression guarded.
“Thank you,” she forced herself to repeat, though the words were like broken glass in her mouth.
They passed the day helping Lyle move furniture around. Lyle had left thin strips of windows exposed along the top, which let in enough light to see what they were doing. His back was hurting from the effort of hauling them into the window the night before, and he needed their help to set up the downstairs rooms in anticipation of the Beaters’ next escalation in cunning. They created barriers at all the points of entry into the house, putting china cupboards in front of the boarded windows, dismantling a dresser and nailing the pieces over the doors.
That left only the back door, which had no glass panes that could be broken. It had two sets of dead bolts, installed since the start of the Siege.
Twice as they worked, stumbling groups of afflicted came down the street. Their snorting and moaning could be heard even though the downstairs windows were shut tight. The second time, seven Beaters milled across the street at the house where Lyle’s friend Travers was presumably still living. When Cass went to the upstairs bathroom, she could see the Beaters shuffling around the front lawn, bumping into each other. A pair lay down in a bed of kaysev growing in front of an ornamental stone bench, one nibbling gently at the other’s arm. It took a moment for Cass to realize that the one being gnawed was lying still, only a twitch of its leg now and then convincing her it wasn’t dead.
“Do you have binoculars, Lyle?” Cass asked. Lyle looked ›up from the coffee table whose legs he was sawing off. He and Smoke were planning to brace it along the bottom of a large window in the dining room.
“That I do, missy, but are you sure there’s anything out there you want a closer look at?” he asked.
“I just-just for a quick look,” Cass said. She couldn’t bring herself to say that their moans had been traveling straight through her skin and making her thrum with anxiety; not knowing what they were up to was worse than the alternative.
Lyle merely nodded and went to the kitchen. He returned, polishing a compact pair on his t-shirt.
“Got these for hunting,” he said. “Damn shame my wife made me keep my guns locked up at the cabin or we could take a few potshots and scare those suckers off.”
Magnified, the Beaters looked even worse than the few Cass had seen on her journey. On those occasions she had watched from hiding spots behind shrubs or rocks. From a distance, they looked merely unkempt and wounded, their skin split and ragged, in various states of injury and flensing.
But up close, Cass could see the large patches of skin that had been chewed down to tendon and muscle and bone. One of the Beaters no longer seemed to have the use of one of its arms, which appeared to be missing several fingers and was gnawed nearly through at the elbow. It had also apparently chewed away most of its lips and its ears were crusted black knobs where it or something else had torn the flesh away.
“Oh, God…” Cass breathed. She moved the binoculars, her hands shaking, until she found the two of them on the ground and focused. The one who was being chewed on was, she saw now, twitching spasmodically, the remains of its chewed fingers jerking almost rhythmically. She moved the binoculars up its thin, t-shirt clad body until its head came into view. It, too, had suffered mutilation-its own work or that of others, impossible to know. Gouges in its neck and cheek were crusted with blood and its mouth was a gaping black hole. It was nearly bald and its head was covered with scabs.
But it wasn’t until Cass moved the binoculars to take in the one crouched next to it that she understood what was happening. The other Beater had chewed through a vein, or an artery-something big, anyway. It was bleeding out, nearly dead, so far gone as to be indifferent to its fate. Both their faces and shirtfronts were covered in blood.
The others had noticed what was going on in the flower bed and were lurching over and crouching down next to their dying companion, shoving each other out of the way.
“What’s going on?” Lyle demanded, and held out a hand for the binoculars. He looked only for a few seconds before lowering them.
“Oh,” he said heavily. “They’ll do that sometimes, nowadays, when they haven’t had any fresh…you know. When they haven’t caught anyone for a while.”
“The blood,” Cass said weakly.
“Yeah, well, they don’t prefer it, but in a pinch I guess they get desperate.”
Cass remembered the times, during the Siege, when she’d seen one of the Beaters who’d been cut with a blade when someone managed to get close enough during an attack.
Their own blood fascinated them. It stopped them in their tracks even if they were seconds away from snagging a victim, and they would let go of a person’s arm or t-shirt to stare at the blood as it ran from their bodies. They would pat at it like a child with finger paints, seemingly oblivious to pain, spreading it around on their clothing and skin. They would taste it and suck it off their fingers, but tentatively, not thirstily.
It was that fascination that sometimes saved people. It was the reason the children had been taught to use the
