vague thought that if they lived until morning, she would have to come outside and examine them.
They were surrounded by grazing fields. Cattle ranches dotted the Sierra foothills on the other side, west of the mountains, when she had grown up. Stock herds of cows grazed their way on a rotation of the fields, gentle skittish beasts that produced new crops of calves every summer for Cass to admire on her runs out into the country. Now there was no evidence of the animals. They’d been felled early in the bioterror attacks-second only to pigs-so many and so quickly that troops had been diverted and later conscripted to haul and torch the carcasses. There were huge burn sites throughout California: smoke hung over the huge feedlot operations along I-5 for weeks as the meat burned. The barking of the dogs over the smell was never-ending. Until, eventually, it was truckloads of dogs and deer that joined the cattle-and, finally, the two-legged dead.
After a tense few minutes Dor was back, coming through the garage door which he had hauled up by hand.
“Drive it in here,” he called, and Cass slid awkwardly over the console to the driver’s seat. She turned the key in the ignition, a strange sensation after such a long time, and put her foot on the gas pedal. She checked the gauge: three-quarters full. Drove slowly up into the garage and turned it off again, Dor already pulling the steel door back down. The garage smelled slightly of rot, though it wasn’t overwhelming. Dor had his flashlight on, and while Cass unbuckled Ruthie from the back, he got a few things from the cargo area.
Inside, the house was cold but surprisingly tidy. The garage opened onto a kitchen whose cabinets hung open and empty-raiders had been here. A few Splenda packets spilled onto the counter and there were bottles of soy sauce and vinegar, sticky and nearly empty, but otherwise the food was all gone. Dishes were still stacked neatly, coffee cups hung from hooks and good crystal goblets were lined up with care on a bed of paper toweling. The rot smell was stronger at the refrigerator but there was nothing to be done about that; everyone knew never to crack a refrigerator door anymore. Someday nothing would remain inside but dried-up crumbs, but until then the fear of refrigerators was up there with basement doors.
Dor set the supplies down on the kitchen table: a bottle of water, a tight-wrapped square of spongy kaysev curd, a Tupperware container of almonds. One of the cans of fruit cocktail from the farmhouse. As he went systematically through the drawers and lower cabinets, an unshakable habit for anyone who’d served on a raiding party, Cass and Ruthie wandered through the house.
In the den an enormous television took up most of one wall; shelves on either side held houseplants that had dried to husks long ago, as well as trophies and photos in frames. Cass turned on her own hand-crank flashlight and saw that the trophies were from an adult softball league and most of the photographs were of several towheaded children. Grandchildren, Cass guessed. This didn’t feel like a house where little ones had lived. There were no toys on the floor, no high chairs in the kitchen.
There was a plaid sofa with knitted afghans folded neatly over the arms, a basket on the coffee table filled with skeins of blue and white yarn. A newspaper, neatly refolded, with a coffee cup skimmed with mold on top.
The living room was comfortable and ordinary, but Cass noticed that one of the armchairs had been dragged down the hall to block the last door. A raiders’s trick: when they found something too awful to abide looking, they blocked doors with furniture, a simple courtesy to those who came after. But the drag marks on the carpet were fresh-it was Dor, then, who was trying to protect her and Ruthie.
“We can use the guest bedroom tonight,” Dor said. “First door on the right. Bathroom’s on the left.”
Cass glanced back at the chair blocking what was apparently the master bedroom door, wondering what Dor was shielding her from seeing. It could be any of half a dozen familiar scenarios. The couple who lived here might have overdosed in their bed, that was the favorite for anyone who’d had the foresight to stockpile medication. Or the husband might have shot the wife and then turned the gun on himself. For those with no gun or drugs, things were messier; most people did a poor job of cutting their own wrists and took forever to die, leaving their beds soaked a bright red that slowly dried to dirt brown and earthen black if you found them much later.
There were other ways, and Cass knew she hadn’t seen them all. Perhaps Dor had seen more. Perhaps he’d seen enough that the horror in the bedroom didn’t bother him, but she doubted it.
14
“DON’T GO PAST THE CHAIR,” SHE SAID GENTLY to Ruthie, and Ruthie nodded solemnly, never letting go of Cass’s hand. “We’ll see what this room is like, okay?” The guest room was blessedly unexceptional. They were not the first to squat here; the linens had been stripped from the bed, though a few pillows and a puffy comforter had been left behind. The mattress was fairly clean and Cass spread out a few towels she found in the bathroom. The closet had been gone through, as well; anything useful, like coats and synthetic tops and pants had been taken, leaving wool skirts and ruffled blouses and tailored jackets, the off-season wardrobe of a churchgoing woman in her sixties. On the shelf above the clothing were photo boxes with neat labels: Family Christmas 2010-2013. Caymans Summer ’14. Jeanelle, Grades 1-5. The lady of the house had been old-fashioned, still printing copies of photos on reacetate; Cass hoped her memories brought the woman some comfort at the end, long after most people had lost all their photos with the blink of computers turning off for the last time.
They ate by the light of a candle that Dor found in one of the drawers and afterward Cass read to Ruthie from an old issue of
“Do you remember Mim’s pies?” Cass asked, a lump in her throat catching her off guard. The one thing Mim did better than anyone else, a thrilling exception to her indifference to housekeeping and even the general inadequacy of her mothering, was pies. Her pastry crust was the flakiest and most tender anywhere. Cass’s favorite had been her key lime, and once a year on Cass’s birthday Mim would grate the limes and squeeze them by hand and separate the eggs and flute the edges of the crust and set the pies out on the counter to cool and every year they were the most delicious thing Cass had ever tasted, right up until the year Byrn moved in and Mim forgot Cass’s birthday entirely.
But Ruthie only nodded solemnly. It wasn’t Cass’s habit to ask her daughter about the time she spent with Mim and Byrn, who had convinced the state people to forcibly remove Ruthie from Cass’s trailer when she relapsed. Those were days of shame and agony as she fought her way back to sobriety again, the hardest thing she had ever done.
“Did you like the apples?” Cass asked, forcing a smile, trying to cover up the tremor in her voice and hating that the old memories could still hurt so much. “With cinnamon and nutmeg?”
More nodding. After a few more recipe images, Cass gathered Ruthie into a hug and set the magazine aside and carried her to bed, tucking her under the puffy comforter. Ruthie held on to her hand tightly, but it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before she was asleep, and Cass kissed her forehead and went back out into the living room.
Dor had cleared the remains of their meal and was stretched out on the sofa reading an old issue of
“I put water out back,” he said. “Your toothbrush and stuff’s there, too.”
Cass took her time, skimping on the toothpaste to make it last and brushing out her hair, slathering the lanolin on her lips as well as she could and rubbing it into her hands. The smell wasn’t great but the California winter was dry and her skin was thirsty. She shivered in the cold, dampening a rag with the water Dor had left for her and rubbing it all over her face, feeling the grit from the open-air journey digging into her skin. She squatted around the corner to urinate, scanning the black road for movement, even in the silence of night unable to shake the feeling that things were lurking out in the fields, on the road. Waiting. She knew this was why they’d put the Jeep in the garage and drawn the drapes before lighting the candle: anyone-Beater or citizen-who passed by here would see nothing out of the ordinary. There wasn’t another building for half a mile; the odds of Beaters or squatters
