Aftertime (19 page)

THE PACKET OF TYLENOL BOUGHT THEM A
night in a two-man tent near the far side of the encampment, which everyone simply referred to as
the Box
.

Cass made one other trade with George after Smoke left to collect their supplies and find an unoccupied tent—a Balance Bar for an introduction to a woman named Gloria, who Faye assured her knew more about the Convent than anyone else in camp, having lived there until a week earlier. The only catch was that Gloria had passed out drunk a while before their arrival, and Faye advised Cass to wait until she woke up in the morning before trying to talk to her.

“Now she lives here? In…the Box?” Cass asked, drinking gratefully from the Nalgene water bottle Faye offered to share. Faye had loosened up once their business was done, and seemed glad for the company, producing a folding chair for Cass and inviting her to wait there for Smoke to return. Her shift was over, and they took their chairs out of the harsh glare of the spotlight wired to the gate to illuminate the entrance. Faye’s job had to be dull, sitting here at the gate, waiting for people to show up. After all, how many freewalkers could possibly arrive each day?

Faye laughed. “Honey, nobody lives here except us employees. And there ain’t none of us lookin’ to get rid of our jobs. For most folks it’s too expensive to spend more than a night or two here, so they just come around when they have something to trade.”

“But where do they go from here?”

Faye shrugged. “Where they came from, I guess.”

“But if there’s really no Beaters in San Pedro, then why—”

“Look around, Cass,” Faye said. She had offered Cass a camp chair and they were sitting behind her makeshift counter. The gates had been secured for the night, but Cass spotted guards patrolling both the perimeter of the Box and the stadium, moving quietly through the darkness. “What do you see?”

Cass looked. It was like a giant church camp—that was the thought that came to her mind. For a while, when her father was touring with his band in the summer and her mother was working long shifts over at County, they had sent her to one run by Saint Anne’s Episcopal. Kids were bused in from all over, and it didn’t take Cass long to figure out it was a camp for kids who didn’t want to be there but couldn’t afford anywhere else, run by people who talked a good game but didn’t really seem all that interested in whether or not the kids were having a good time. Cass remembered sitting at wood picnic tables in ninety-degree heat making crafts involving leaves and glue sticks, trying not to cry while the counselors taught them a song about Abraham and Sarah.

Here, people wandered aimlessly from the bonfire set up in the middle of the encampment to the barter tables, the little stands where they could trade for deodorant and salted peanuts and baby powder and rubbing alcohol. Open-air bars were set up under pop-up tents; a few were sturdier affairs behind plywood screens. The music never stopped, though it covered a dizzying range, from a haunting piano étude to a remarkably bad cover of “Sweet Child of Mine” by a tuneless girl band. Now some endless country song whose chorus rhymes relentlessly droned on. A few of the people around the fire seemed to be nodding off to sleep.

“I see a lot of people with nothing better to do,” she said.

Faye gave her a withering look. “Then you’re not looking very hard.”

“Save the damn riddles,” Cass said, exasperated. “I’ve been through a lot the last few days and I don’t feel like playing games.”

“Everyone here is wasted,” Faye said, drawing out the final word. “Out of their fucking minds.”

“Well, yeah, you sell hooch in paper cups,” Cass said. She’d been surprised and relieved earlier when, smelling the cheap wine on the women waiting to use the bathroom, she found that it hadn’t called out to her with the strength it once had, hadn’t made her insensible with yearning.

Faye snorted. “That’s nothing. They give that shit away for
free,
for the big spenders. The pill poppers, meth junkies—guarantee they’re lined up back behind Rockets right now, trading their last can of SpaghettiOs for 20mg of Ritalin or a couple of rocks.”

Oh.

Ohhh.
Idiot,
Cass chastised herself. Earlier the thought had danced through her mind, quickly enough that she hadn’t bothered to examine it carefully, namely that the Box didn’t make much sense. A few months into Aftertime, it was true that all the easy stuff was taken; grocery stores and hardware stores and sporting good stores had long ago been looted of all the valuable items, homes had been broken into and all the weapons and canned goods and medicine cleaned out. But for the brave—and at this point, almost every citizen who had managed to stay alive this long fell backward into that category to some extent—there was still more than enough to be found.

So it stood to reason that the Box’s allure would be something even more special.

As the Siege followed its tortuous path, each day bringing some new abomination, some crippling terror, alcohol and drugs were at an astonishing premium. More than a few people locked themselves in their houses and proceeded to get as drunk or stoned as they possibly could. Sometimes they were in search of the courage to shoot or hang themselves. Sometimes they were trying to drink themselves to death or overdose. Some were trying to tap into fantasies they’d held secret for a long time, from a time when society had a tighter grip on the psyche. Before long there was nothing left to get numb with.

Except clearly, the people running the Box had a hell of a stash.

Cass gripped the cheap metal frame of her chair, the plastic web cutting into her shoulder blades, overwhelmed by the thought of all these people who had survived so much, only to try to drown their pain with a temporary high. She hadn’t been around active users in a long time; the thought was a little overwhelming.

“You’re an addict,” Faye added, offhandedly.

Cass felt her face flush, but she forced herself to keep her expression neutral. “Was,” she corrected Faye. “
Was
.”

“Was, like, for how long?”

“Long enough.”

“Yeah,” Faye said, clearly skeptical. “So it’s some kind of accident you showed up here? There’s nowhere else in the central valley to score, and yet here you are—”

“Because I have to get in the Convent. I
have
to get in there. I have to find…someone.”

Faye’s expression didn’t change. “You want to find someone in
there
.”

“Yes.”

“Sister? Mother? Spinster aunt maybe? Your people Jesus folks?”

“Why, is that what the Convent is? Like, fundamenta lists?”

“I don’t know the details. I guess you can ask Gloria. She’s happy to talk, talks everyone’s fuckin’ ears off, when she’s not wasted. But, no, it’s not just a Jesus thing. It’s like, they worship the disease or something.”

“What?”

“Or like, it’s the antichrist and they vanquish it through prayer, something fucked up like that. I don’t know.” Faye shrugged. “For all I know they’re in there dancing naked under the moon.”

How could the woman not be more curious? The Convent was the closest thing to a real community that Cass had seen since the Siege. Other than the little groups in libraries and schools, no one had been able to band together in sufficient numbers to move beyond the demands of subsistence living.

“You two look cozy.” Smoke’s deep voice rumbled behind Cass. She twisted in her chair to see him holding a plastic bucket in one hand, white towels in the other.

“Okay, I think that’s my cue to shove off,” Faye said. “I’m sure I’ll see you around. Nice meeting you.”

Smoke waited until Faye disappeared down the main path through the tents, then offered Cass a hand. “How does a shower sound?”

“Like heaven.”

She let Smoke pull her out of her chair, and peeked into the bucket. There were washcloths along with the rest of the toiletries. “What did that cost?”

Smoke gave her a sly grin. “They’ve got a thriving skin trade going here,” he said, pointing to the end of the Box farthest from the stadium. It was lit only by a sparkling string of Christmas lights that wound from tent to tent. “In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s what the blue tents are for. I just, you know, stopped by and gave the ladies a taste of what they wanted, and they showered me with earthly goods.”

“Ha. Ha.” Cass smiled at his joke, despite herself. “God, I’m stupid. I thought those were first aid tents.”

“Not stupid, only naive. Or maybe it’s wishful thinking, that you can start a civilization on free trade and have it grow toward an ideal, only I doubt that ever works. I mean, look at the history of any major civilization…”

“I don’t think I’m up for a history lesson right now,” Cass said softly, though it occurred to her that history was bound to be lost in a generation or two, with no one to preserve and teach it. If any humans even survived that long. “Besides, it’s not just the, you know, blue tent thing. I didn’t get that the whole currency here is based on drugs. I just feel like an idiot.”

“Well, not the
entire
trade, maybe. I got this stuff, and a couple decent single-malts and a bowl of pretzels that weren’t completely stale.”

Cass whistled. “Not to nag, but how are we affording this? You didn’t trade away our blades, did you?”

“Nah. I, uh, put the bike up to secure a loan.”

“The
bike?
”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s not like we could make much use of it without fuel. Besides, I can get it back. They’ve got every angle covered. It’s like a pawn shop—they just charge you a holding fee.”

Cass shook her head. It wasn’t for her to say, really. She knew that the bike, the supplies, the gun—these had all been given to Smoke because of his record with the Rebuilders. She had no claim on them.

“You coming?” he said softly. “I paid for two. Can’t really use the second one myself.”

Cass slipped her hand into the crook of his arm and they walked down a path lit by yellow light from a dozen Coleman lanterns hung on poles. They passed people talking softly in the entrances of tents, or bent over bongs and pipes and bottles.

A man lurched into the path from between two tents with a cut-off grunt. He had almost recovered his footing when a second man tackled him and took him down, yelling. The smell of alcohol and sweat came off the pair as they tumbled and rolled. One was trying to stab the other with a butter knife, but he was too drunk to do any real damage and the knife fell to the ground.

Cass was about to grab it to prevent further trouble when a third man shoved her out of the way. He was dressed in a black t-shirt and cargo shorts and a small receiver on his belt broadcast static and voices. His belt also held a sap, a gun and handcuffs, but he ended the scuffle instantly without using any of them by pulling the closer man off the other, yanking his arms behind his back and up, then pinning him to the ground with a knee. The other man whimpered and curled up into a ball, but another guard arrived and dragged him roughly to his feet. The would-be fighters were hustled off, the guards mumbling apologies to Cass and Smoke, and the incident was over moments after it started.

“Wow,” Cass said. “That’s…impressive.”

“Protecting their investment, more like,” Smoke said. “Part of what people pay for here is a sense of security. They’ve got a drunk tank, over at the back corner. Just a big locked pen with a few guys passed out in it.”

“This kind of feels like the Wild West. Like you could get away with a lot, as long as you don’t disturb the peace.”

Smoke shrugged. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, as long as you don’t hurt other people…I mean, who really cares? It’s not like a thousand little rules are really going to turn this into some sort of model society.”

Cass didn’t answer. At first, as the rule of law gave way to the rules of self-preservation, there had been an unfamiliar sense of freedom, an untethering from the obligations and habits of Before. But that freedom was only an illusion, at least here, where a man who might or might not be Sammi’s father ruled with one hand while he offered temptation with the other. Maybe it was inevitable this sort of order would impose itself, even Aftertime.

Cass remembered the helpless anger everyone felt at the government as the Siege wore on, as one by one the threads connecting communities were broken and people were catapulted into chaos. At the time, everyone had wished for someone or something new to take charge, to make things right and tell them what to do.

Now, a few months later, someone had. Several someones. Only the choices didn’t look good. There were the Rebuilders. The Box, with its promises of numbness and pleasure. Hundreds of smaller communities with God-knows-what going on behind closed walls. And then whatever the Convent offered.

Cass wasn’t optimistic about finding anything more than a different brand of crazy inside the stadium, but if Ruthie was there, that’s where she was going.

Later, in the tent, Cass busied herself with unrolling the flaps that served as a door and snapping them shut. Only a slim band of lantern light entered at the bottom, though not enough to cast any light on the interior of the tent, so Cass undressed in the dark. Her skin was soft and warm from the showers—an outdoor affair that ran from a heated reservoir and felt better than almost anything she’d experienced in recent memory.

Anything, that is, except for the night in Lyle’s guest room. Only Cass wasn’t sure if that was even in the same realm. The sensations of that night were enmeshed so completely with emotion that it was impossible to know how much of what she felt came from Smoke’s touch and how much was the momentum of her own needs and fears, tumbled together in a firestorm of ecstasy.

And now she was about to lie down with him for the second time. Cass knelt on the air mattress, felt it shift beneath her weight. She ran her hands along the blankets and sheets, which were not nearly as finely made or as clean as Lyle’s, and when her hands found Smoke’s he took them and wrapped them firmly in his own and pulled her toward him without hesitation.