Читать книгу Aftertime - Sophie Littlefield - Страница 9

THE GIRL WITH THE BLADE WAS NAMED SAMMI, but Cass didn’t find that out until later. As dawn broke, they left the road and traveled through the woods. By the time they got to the school, maybe a mile down, the sun was high in the sky. It was the clearest sky yet since Cass had returned, flawless blue, and as they rounded a sharp bend topped by a rock outcropping and what must have once been a beautiful stand of cypress, the school stood out in stark relief against the eye-searing blue.

It had been built in the last few years Before. The architect had gone in for broad stretches of stucco, a roof molded to look like cedar, vaguely Prairie-style window placement and overhanging eaves. The sign still announced, in iron letters against hewn stone, Copper Creek Middle School.

Cass knew this school. They’d built it halfway between Silva and Terryville. She had driven past it a hundred times, thinking about Ruthie going there someday.

She was close to home.

The girl hadn’t spoken a single word. Cass tapped the girl’s blade against her own thigh, loosening her grip on the wind-breaker she’d taken off and looped through the girl’s sleeves as a kind of makeshift harness before remembering the dangers and grabbing it even tighter. I’m sorry, she mouthed, but only because the girl couldn’t see. She led them across the parking lot with sure, quick steps, shoulders held high, and Cass couldn’t help but admire her courage.

For all the girl knew, Cass would have followed through with her threat and sliced her ear to ear. The blade was a good one, a two-edged straight stiletto with a small guard, the blade itself perhaps six inches long. Someone loved this girl. Someone had made sure she had a good weapon, had cared if she lived another day.

She pulled the girl tight against her and bit out the words, hating herself for saying them—and knowing they were lies. “When someone comes out, tell them I’ll kill you,” she murmured. “Tell them that first.”

The girl only nodded.

It made sense to choose a school, of course. The threats of Before seemed minor now. Everyone worried that deranged people would come into schools and steal the children away, harm them, kill them. Or that one of the students would bring a gun to school and take out his classmates. Yes, things like that had happened back then, just often enough to keep everyone vigilant, and the schools had been built with more and greater safety measures until, in the end, they were fortresses, reinforced and sealed and locked down.

In some ways it wasn’t so hard to stay safe, even now. A basic wall could keep Beaters away. A fence, even one that was only ten feet tall, like those that surrounded the school’s courtyard. As long as there were no citizens close by, nothing to attract the Beaters and drive them into a frenzy of flesh-lust, nearly any barrier at all would be enough to make them lose their focus and wander back to their fetid nestlike encampments.

They said—at least, near the end of Cass’s second life—that the Beaters were waning. Cass wasn’t so sure. It was true that they had formed larger and larger groups, nomadic little bands that took over neighborhoods and entire towns, so they weren’t appearing in sporadic places as much. They seemed to have flashes of longing for Before, just as everyone else did. You could see them sometimes, doing homely little things. It was like the bits of speech that sometimes bubbled from their lips, phrases that meant nothing, fragments that tumbled from whatever was left of their minds, dislodged from memory that had given way to the fever and the disease. Cass had seen one trying to ride a bicycle, and falling off when its jerky motions caused the wheel to spin and flip. It tried again and again and then suddenly lost interest and wandered away. Another time she had seen one at a clothesline, taking the pins off one by one and holding them in its ruined hand, then reattaching them.

Cass had known a woman who had been a social worker Before. Her name was Miranda. They had not been friends, exactly, but they had sheltered together in the library before a half-dozen Beaters came through a back door that had been left open one day and dragged her off.

Miranda had once worked with violent offenders, counseling them to look deep inside themselves to find the key to who they were before abuse and anger had changed them. She had been extraordinarily successful, the pride of the Anza County Correctional System’s Anger Replacement Therapy program. Miranda had believed that in those moments when the Beaters appeared to be connecting to a memory, miming some homely everyday task, there was a chance to remind them of who they had once been. That if you could reach them in that moment—if you could reconnect the splintered shards of memory—that you could reverse the process of the disease. That the afflicted would comprehend the horror of what they had become, and choose to come back.

Miranda had wanted to try it. It wouldn’t be so hard to capture just one, she had argued at one of the “town hall” meetings Bobby held every few days. Bobby was the de facto leader of the ragtag group of a few dozen people sheltering in the library. Miranda tried to recruit a few of the men: one who used to be a deputy sheriff, several hard-muscle types who’d worked in construction, and, of course, Bobby. They all listened to Miranda’s plan: capture a Beater, bring it back … restrain it, observe it. Wait until the right moment and then she, trained in the ways of the desperate, the outcast, would speak to it.

Bobby listened, but he could not contain his incredulity. “You think you’re, what, some kind of zombie whisperer? Because you got a few crack whores to give up their babies? Is that it, Miranda, you think a Beater’s like some guy beats his wife on payday?”

Miranda had argued back, passionately. But when the Beaters came for her that day, breaking in that forgotten back door while the kitchen detail was cleaning up from a lunch of kaysev shoots and canned apple pie filling, when Miranda had taken some trash to the back hall by herself, it wasn’t reasoned argument that issued from her lips. It was screaming, as raw and desperate as the screams of any of the others who were taken, screams that echoed in Cass’s mind on nights when sleep wouldn’t come.

The school, though … Cass guessed that they had not lost anyone that way here. In addition to the fences, brick walls surrounded the entire courtyard. The doors would be the type that shut automatically. Guards would be posted. They undoubtedly did all their harvesting and raiding at night. Maybe they even had a few flashlights, some batteries.

Why had they let this girl out on her own? It made no sense. Even though it should have still been safe—the Beaters rarely went hunting before the sun rose high in the sky—what adult, what parent, would allow a child to go out alone? Had she somehow gotten separated from others? Had some greater threat come along?

There was a sudden clang and the door to the school burst open and a woman ran out, wailing. Her flip-flops slapped against the pavement, and she stumbled at the kaysev-choked median that once kept the carpooling moms in orderly lines. A pair of men chased after her, trying to restrain her, but the woman shook them off. “Sammi!” she screamed, but Cass pulled the girl tight against her and held the blade to the soft skin under her chin.

“Stop there,” Cass yelled. And then she added the one thing that might convince them to do as she said. “I am not a Beater!”

She watched them look at her, watched the terror in the woman’s expression and the fury and determination in the men’s slowly tinge with doubt. She felt their gazes on her ragged skin, her scalp where the hair was only now growing back. She waited, holding her breath, until she saw that they knew.

Until they saw that her pupils were like anyone else’s, black and pronounced.

“I don’t want to hurt this girl,” she called, trying to keep her voice steady. “I don’t want any trouble. I am not a Beater and I can …” She had been about to say that she could explain her appearance, but that was a lie. She couldn’t explain, and no one else could either. “I can prove it, if you let me. I’m not asking to come in. I don’t want anything from you except to be allowed to continue into town.”

“Let the girl go,” one of the men said.

The woman sank down to her knees and extended her arms beseechingly. “Please,” she keened. “Please please please please please …”

And something shifted inside Cass. A memory of Ruthie being carried away, screaming, sent to live with Cass’s mother and the man she’d married. The man who’d made her life hell. She remembered her own pleas, how she had gone down on her knees just like the woman before her now, how she’d collapsed on the floor after the front door shut behind Mim and Byrn and the court people carrying her Ruthie away, how she’d cried into the sour-smelling carpet until she could barely breathe.

She released the girl then and watched her go to her mother, jogging across the pavement, but not before glancing back over her shoulder. A defiant glance, sparked with victory. The girl felt she’d won. Well, Cass certainly felt like she’d lost, so maybe that was fitting.

The mother gathered the girl up in her arms as though she wanted to meld her to herself, and Cass had to turn away. The men must have thought she was trying to leave, though, because an instant later she was knocked to the ground and she felt the weight of them crushing her into the gravel-pocked asphalt. The rough pavement smelled like tar and scraped against her cheek. The blade had fallen from her hand. No matter; these men were guards. They would have their own. And it would be a quick death, better than she deserved.

She waited, but after a moment the weight lifted and a strong hand grabbed hers, pulling her up roughly.

“Inside,” he said, and that was the first word she ever heard Smoke say.