before they caught up. She watched the whole time, willing the man forward with her entire being as the beasts knocked into each other and stumbled on the uneven ground and shoved at each other. They were so awkward, so ungainly, but their strength and speed were otherworldly.
In the end, two of them tripped each other and fell to the ground, snorting and snapping with fury as they beat at one another with clumsy fists.
But two surged ahead.
Cass pressed her face into the scratchy trunk of the tree and covered her ears with her hands, but she could hear the man’s terrified screams and the Beaters’ triumphant crowing as they carried their prey back down the road to wherever their nest was.
Sammi was watching her, light brown eyes wide and speculating. “Smoke’s going to take you, isn’t he?”
Cass nodded.
Sammi gave her a fragile shadow of a smile. “He’s good. He’s
“No.”
“He was living up at Calvary Episcopal. I mean, not like because it was a church, they were just using the church for shelter.”
“Yes, I remember, there were people living there when I was at the library.”
“And the Beaters came and they got one of them. Or, I don’t know, maybe more than one, I’m not sure. Only, they got this one guy’s wife, and he went nuts and tried to burn the place down. With everyone in it, you know, like a group suicide? They had this tank, natural gas or something. And he totally blew it up, you could see it all day, the sky was like black. You know, like…totally dark. He died, but Smoke-well, I don’t know what his name used to be, it was right when we all moved in here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“It was around the beginning of May. We saw the fire, we saw the sky go dark and all… Well, Smoke got a lot of the people out.”
“He rescued them?”
“Yeah, he got this whole family, Jed and-Jed’s that guy who was babysitting with me. He’s sixteen. His parents and his brothers and a bunch of other people, too. Smoke helped them get out. And when they came here his hair was burned but that was all. He smelled like smoke, but he wasn’t burned, and people said it was a miracle. I don’t know if it was really a miracle but…”
The girl seemed suddenly embarrassed.
Cass followed a stray impulse and covered the girl’s hand with her own. Sammi’s skin was warm and she could feel her strong pulse at her wrist.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe there’s still room for a miracle or two in the world.”
“Maybe,” Sammi said. She sounded like she thought Cass was going to need one.
07
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, SMOKE RETURNED. Sammi was long gone, not wanting to worry her mother any more than she already had. Cass’s heart went out to the girl; she’d once walked the same complicated tightrope of parental loyalty and teenage rebellion, the challenges of school and friends and her father’s absence. Aftertime, everything was turned upside down. Kids, with their more elastic notions of what was real, rebounded and adapted while the adults struggled.
Except for the ones who lost their families. Aftertime orphans did not fare well. They were responsible for much of the looting and destruction that happened now-the ones who managed to escape predators, whose movements were no longer tracked and monitored. They found each other somehow, their senses tuned to the same frequency of grief and anger, and formed gangs who roamed the streets with breathtaking indifference to the danger, destroying everything in their path-just as everything that they had loved had been destroyed. Cass didn’t doubt that the bands of fake Beaters that Nora had mistaken her for were comprised of kids like these.
Sammi had already lost one parent. Cass prayed that the girl’s mother would stay safe.
Smoke brought plates piled with food and two plastic bottles filled with murky boiled water. There was a salad of kaysev greens dressed with oil and vinegar. There were also three blackened strips of jerky.
The aroma caused Cass to salivate, and she could practically taste the salty meat. Still, before accepting the plate, she asked: “Why?”
Smoke didn’t meet her gaze. “They want something in return,” he said. “News…there are a lot of people who won’t make the trip anymore. In the last couple of weeks it’s become a lot more dangerous. There’s been trouble, and not just from the Beaters.”
“What do you mean?”
Smoke made a dismissive gesture. “Long story. I’ll tell you about it on the road. But just folks with their own ideas about who ought to be running things.”
“What, you mean like who’s in charge here?” Cass saw a chance to ask something that she had been wondering. “Who
“
“But…” Cass gestured at the plate. “What kind of stores do you have?”
Smoke shrugged, but his unconcern wasn’t convincing. “Quite a bit, actually. We still go raiding. Me, some of the others. There are still houses within a mile or two that haven’t been cleared yet. We only do one a night, take five or six of us and go.”
Cass nodded. She had come across some of these houses herself, even sheltered in them.
“What about the Wal-Mart?”
Smoke shook his head. “Beaters got there first. Nested all over it. There’s still a lot of canned food and other stuff in there but we can’t touch it.”
It was an older store, up Highway 161 outside the Silva town limits. It didn’t sell produce or meat, but that would actually be an advantage, since there would be no spoilage. And there would be medicine. Diapers, clothes, toiletries, processed foods. Winter coats and gloves. Boots.
“But we’re doing okay,” Smoke continued. “We got to the Village Market early on.”
Cass knew the place, a mom-and-pop grocery in a strip mall that stocked high-end gourmet stuff for weekenders and skiers. “Wasn’t it mostly cleared out back during the Siege?”
“Yeah, but we went back and finished the job. You know-people were panicking. Grabbing stuff. We’ve found things in houses… People will have a whole room full of bottled water, frozen dinners and shit they just left out when they couldn’t fit it in their freezers. Not that it mattered.”
Not after the power went out. Cass shook her head at the waste.
“We’ve got about five thousand cans. We’re trying to save the bottled water we have, and just rely on the creek. There’s some cereal, pasta, rice. Spices…not much meat, this is pretty much the end of it,” he said, pointing at the jerky. Cass noticed that his own plate held only salad and cold kaysev cakes. “Medicine… We got into the clinic, and there’s a woman here who was a doctor, a couple others, a nurse and a paramedic. So we have antibiotics, painkillers, bandages, like that.”
Cass chewed, trying to savor the salty jerky. She had never liked it Before, but now it tasted better than anything she’d ever eaten. “Do you think it’s true?” she asked after she took a sip from the bottle he’d brought. “Can you just live on kaysev? I mean, after…?”
After everything else is gone, she didn’t say. Because no matter how many stores they had managed to lay in here or anywhere else, the survivors would go through them eventually.
Smoke shrugged. “They certainly wanted us to believe that.”
Cass remembered the president’s prepared remarks, distributed to all the networks after he himself had gone to an undisclosed shelter. It was one of the final broadcasts before everything shut down. Paul Palmer, of KTXT, his hair looking like he’d done it himself, the part slightly askew, his eyes hollow and his voice wavering. It was a few days before the media disappeared forever-and only a matter of hours before the planes left air bases in Brunswick
