Survivors

summer gave way to autumn. If you shut your eyes you could almost believe it was last year, or the year before, or a year in your childhood when you rode your bike along mountain blacktop, and squirrels threw pinecones from tall branches and chattered, and you waded into cold streams to wash away the rich red dirt caked on your ankles. As a child, maybe you stood in a stream with the shock of the cold making you shriek and your friends called you chicken, they dared you to lie down on the current-smooth stones and let the icy water wash over, making a mermaid of you, your long hair splayed in wet and curling tendrils. You never guessed that the world would end before you were thirty, everything you ever knew, nations unleashing famine and war as an appetizer for a main course of the horrors that no one could have ever imagined. No people falling sick with the fever from blueleaf kaysev, pulling at their hair, picking at their skin, depleting themselves until the day they were human no more and existed only to hunt for uninfected flesh. You never dreamed that most of the people you knew would be dead or worse.

Cass pushed these thoughts away as she always pushed them away, and walked toward the far end of the Box. At the very back, in neat rows, were the blue-tarped comfort tents and the gray medical building. If there was irony in this arrangement, the prostitutes living next to the healers, it was lost on those who lived in the Box now. The whole compound had sprung up less than a year ago, but in even that short span of time its early days had grown hazy, its history apocryphal. The only man who had been there from the start was Dor and he wasn’t one to talk about the past. Some claimed to have been with him from the beginning, but Cass had her doubts about most of them.

Besides, the Box was a living organism, its configuration shifting daily with its changing population, tent stakes pulled up, cots overturned, brawls settled quickly by the guards leaving new welts in the earth. An oasis of life in a ruined land, it changed from one week to the next, strangers taking the place of travelers passing through, belongings bartered and trinkets displayed to entice browsers with something to trade.

Fronting the comfort tents was a well-tended path, edged with smooth stones and planted with patches of baby’s tears that Cass had cultivated in the cold frame Smoke had built for her. The tiny seedlings were sending down roots and starting to spread; after a winter of rains and nourishment drawn into patient, chilly roots, they would spread into gorgeous emerald-green masses this spring. Even though Cass’s mission was somewhat urgent, she paused with her flashlight to examine the plants, on her knees in the soil, passing her palm gently over their fringy tops, testing their narrow stems. She was pleased with what she found, and after a moment she got to her feet, satisfied.

She looked down at the dirt smudged on the knees of her canvas pants. No worse than the dirt that was already there, since she had worked in the gardens all day. And laundry day was still two days away.

Cass heard a moan coming through the open door of the medic’s cottage, not that moans in this section were something new. Yellow light spilled from the door and there were other voices, voices she recognized. She knocked once on the aluminum door, then pushed it aside and entered.

Hastings and Francie sat on stools pulled up on opposite sides of one of the two cots, where the old woman lay with a dingy white sheet pulled up to her chin. Francie, who had been a nurse’s assistant at Oakland Children’s Hospital, insisted on clean-as-possible linens and Dor obliged, paying someone to boil them. Hastings, the orthopedist, didn’t much care; he traded everything he earned for whatever painkillers were on offer. Cass was always surprised he could still be cajoled into coming to work, but that’s what Francie did, she was a cajoler and a nagger and, Cass suspected, a mother figure to Hastings, though an odd one with her storklike limbs and mannish haircut and curt ways.

“Oh,” Francie said, glancing up quickly and then back to the patch of arm that they were examining. They’d got the old woman out of her clothes and into one of the hospital gowns Francie had scavenged somewhere. “It’s you. I was afraid Sam was back.”

“Won’t let us alone,” Hastings grumbled. He seemed sober tonight, his hands steady as he squeezed and prodded gently. “Nothing’s broken, anyway. Someone took care of this old girl until recently. You get the story out of the kid?”

“Not yet,” Cass said. “Not really.” Because what was the story, at its heart: anyone could tell the basics-that the two had been alone in that house, that they had run out of food and water, that the boy had been forced to choose between leaving her side to look for more and staying in that broken place watching the days cycle past through the window, dawns and sunsets and his grandmother weakening and her slipping away from him.

The rest of the story-who had his family been, Before; did he play with his sister in a yard, did they have a dog, did his father take him fishing, could he skip a stone across a pond or slide into home or finish his homework in a neat hand-what could it help, now? Still, she supposed she also wanted to know it, if he would tell. But for now she came for news of his grandmother, in case he should demand it sometime in the night.

A bucket at the end of the bed held dirty water, rags bobbing on top, evidence that they’d attempted a sponge bath. The woman’s hair, though, was sodden with grease and flecked with bits of unidentifiable matter, matted to her head.

“You get her name?” Cass asked, getting a folding chair from its place along the wall. She helped, sometimes, if Hastings was too wasted, holding down limbs for setting and hands for stitching. She set the chair close to the bed.

“Nana,” Hastings snapped. “Unless you can get that kid to tell you more.”

“You should bring him in, too, you know,” Francie reminded her. “I’ve seen twelve cases of ringworm in the last week. I wouldn’t be surprised. And I should look at his teeth, all of that.”

“You sound like you plan on us keepin’ him,” Hastings said.

“He’s not a pet.”

Hastings shrugged.

“I’ll bring him tomorrow,” Cass promised. “Once Smoke and I get him fed and calmed down a little. Is that okay?”

Francie peered at her over her glasses, eyebrows raised, lips pursed, looking for a moment like a stern librarian, albeit one who was liberally inked with Aftertime tattoos, names of her lost twisted in a fanciful script along with trailing stems and leaves and the occasional rosebud up and down her arms and shoulders and across her collarbones. She reached a long, carefully manicured finger to the old woman’s forehead and tapped gently. The woman didn’t respond. Her head lolled on her neck as though no muscles at all surrounded it, and her face was as the boy had described: lax and drooping on one side. Cass closed one eye, trying to block off the frozen half of the old woman’s face, searching for clues in the other half as to what the woman once looked like, imagining a trip to the hairdresser for a wash and set, a lacy cardigan. Pink lipstick and a purse with a tortoiseshell handle. But even in the good half of the woman’s face, she could not make out who she used to be.

“If Beatriz makes it that long, you can try,” Hastings muttered as he gently untied the faded cotton gown so he could continue his exam.

“Beatriz?”

“Her idea,” Hastings said gruffly, jabbing a finger in Francie’s direction.

Francie shrugged, unperturbed. “Only until we find out her real one.”

Back in the tent, Smoke and Feo had returned. The boy sat gingerly on the edge of their bed, very straight, as if holding his breath. His long hair had been washed and hung in a dripping, glossy sheet, but he didn’t bother to wipe away the beads of water that trailed down his face, some settling in his long dark eyelashes before rolling down over his brown cheeks and solemn mouth to fall in his lap. He was dressed in what looked like a woman’s sweat suit and Cass made a mental note to tell the guys to find him something else-something a boy would like. At least the clothes were clean.

Smoke was turned away, lining up the things on their shelf. In the plastic box Cass saw that there was an extra toothbrush, a child’s stubby purple one. She and Smoke and nearly everyone else in the Box had switched to the ones cut from woody kaysev stems; people said they did a better job even than real toothbrushes.

The toothbrush was a special gift, something to remind the boy of Before, which had presumably been a better time for him. So, too, was the privacy Smoke gave him, pretending indifference as he tended to his housekeeping. Feo’s hungry eyes roved over the homey inside of the tent with its treasure trove of books and pictures cut from magazines and Ruthie’s toys, the silver candlesticks and the pretty rug and the stained-glass panels, the home they had made together. The family they had made together, a mother and daughter and the man who found them after they thought every good thing was gone.