Rebirth Part 1

REBIRTH.

SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD.

01.

THE FIRST SNOWFLAKE AFTERTIME WAS LIKE NO snowflake that ever fell Before. Cass nearly missed it, kneeling on the matted dead kaysev plants, their woody stalks poking into her skin through the thick leggings she wore beneath her dress. Her eyes had been closed, but Randall had gone on too long, the way people do when they are trying to say something meaningful about someone they didn't know well. After a while Cass grew restless and began to look around, and there, not two feet away, the snowflake drifted past in a lazy swoop as though it had all the time in the world.

Cass licked her cracked lips, could almost feel how the flake would melt on her tongue. Until that moment she didn't realize she had actually doubted whether snow would ever return, much as she'd doubted whether rats or sparrows or acorns or moths would return. She wished she could nudge Ruthie, or even Smoke-she knelt between the two, in the place of honor up front-but a funeral was still a funeral, and so she stayed as still as a stone.

Maybe by the time they were finished, there would be more snowflakes. A flurry, a drift: the gunmetal sky looked grudging to Cass; there would be no storm today. Besides, the temperature would rise well above freezing by noon. These early snows never lasted long.

Next to her, Ruthie sneezed. Cass wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer. Ruthie had loved the snow when she was a baby. She was still a baby-three years and two months, according to the Box's calendar. The month and date were metal numerals hung from nails on a wooden pole, the kind people once nailed to houses and mailbox posts, back when people still lived in houses. Each morning, the first shift guard changed the numbers. Today, it read 11 * 17.

Smoke held Cass's hand, his strong fingers wrapped around hers, and she felt his blood running sure and strong under his skin, circulating through his body and making him strong and back to his heart again, and she said the silent prayer that was part of her breathing itself now, part of every exhale: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-for-making-him-mine. His touch, his closeness, that was what made her whole; he more than made up for every wrong man that had come along before. She closed her eyes and exhaled the prayer and waited for Randall to finish his rambling eulogy as the five other people in attendance fidgeted and sighed.

"And now Cass will say a few words."

So her turn had come, at last. Cass stood, nervous and hesitant. She gulped air as she took the few steps to the humble altar next to the fresh grave. Sieved earth was piled neatly. Gloria was in the ground, her body covered with six feet of rich Sierra mountain soil-Dor's grave diggers charged a premium for the full six, what with most folks settling for half that these days. Cass breathed out, then in once more, a rhythm she learned back in her early days in A.A., when she'd been torn between the paralyzing certainty that if she spoke during the meeting she would cry-and that if she didn't, she would never come back.

Back then, it had sometimes been all she could manage to say her name. Today she would have to say more. Not for those gathered here: besides Smoke and Ruthie, there was only Randall, standing at a respectful distance and twisting his handkerchief in a tight knot around his knuckles, and Paul, who never missed a funeral, and Greg, who'd spent some evenings with Gloria even after she was banned from working the comfort tents.

And then also Rae, who managed the comfort tents, and probably felt guilty about firing Gloria, since, when Gloria couldn't work, she couldn't buy anything to drink. And that was what killed her, in a way-after only a few days of forced sobriety she had drunk a bottle of Liquid-Plumr from the garbage hill slowly accumulating on the far side of the stadium's parking lot.

Cass gazed out on the others and swallowed back tears. Smoke had put on a clean shirt, not that you could see it under his heavy work coat. Ruthie wore a little red coat and matching hat that a raiding party had brought back last week. Everyone else was dressed in the usual layers of clothes splodged with stains, the heavy boots. No one looked directly at her, save Smoke. No one gathered here would care if Cass cried for Gloria, but it was important to her that she not be misunderstood, not now, not today.

She trailed her fingers along the scratched wooden top of the small table enlisted as an altar. Someone had brought it back from a night raid, a humble thing whose most appealing feature was that it was light and easy to carry. Cass thought it might-half a century ago-have been a telephone table, back when phones had to be plugged into the wall. On Sundays, Randall put a cloth on the little table, rested his Bible on top of that. He didn't lack for an audience. Cass didn't begrudge him his followers-nor did she begrudge them their hour of peace or solace or whatever it was they found in his words.

Still, today: no cloth, no Bible. It had fallen to Cass to plan the service. No one else offered, and Randall had come to stand in the door to their tent, hat in his hand, and asked Cass what would be right. Gloria had never spoken of God and Cass felt it would be presumptuous to impose Him on her now.

Cass shut her eyes for a moment and exhaled slowly. When she opened her eyes again, Ruthie was watching her expectently, lips parted in anticipation. For a child who didn't talk, Ruthie listened to others with great care, none more than her mother.

Cass produced a tiny smile for her daughter. She reached for the string around her neck and pulled from under her blouse the pendant she had made yesterday, and Ruthie did the same. They wore clothespins, the old-fashioned wooden kind, knotted to nylon cord. Cass held the clothespin as though it were a precious thing and considered it, turning it slowly this way and that.

"Gloria and I talked about clothespins once," Cass began, her voice rusty. "She told me about hanging clothes on a line."

Greg, dry-eyed and somber, nodded as though what Cass was telling was a story he'd heard a dozen times. That couldn't have been. Gloria made little sense when she talked; she dredged memories and unfurled them carelessly, moving in and out of time and sense. You didn't have a conversation with Gloria so much as an occasional glimpse into the ill-tended recesses of her mind. There was nothing there to hold on to.

She wondered what memories Gloria had shared with Greg, if they had talked at all. The comfort tents were places of shame; men and the occasional woman slipped in and out of them like shadows, bartering whatever they had for a grope in the dark, an awkward coupling, a muffled cry. Anything to forget the gone world for a while.

Those who worked in the tents usually had no other way to earn. That was the case with Gloria, who was too far gone to raid, to cook, to harvest, to mend or make things, or even offer knowledge that helped. But she had meant more than nothing to Greg.

"She told me about hanging clothes on a line," Cass said again. She cleared her throat. "And she...had someone, once. His name was Matthew."

Gloria had long, thick silvery hair. That, and her faded blue eyes, were the only clues to her long-ago beauty. She was lean and leathery. She'd broken a tooth and on the rare occasions when she was sober she was suddenly self-conscious and tried to hide the gap, barely moving her lips to speak. Her nails were ragged and dirty. Her clothes grew filthy and torn in the days before her death. The last time they spoke, Gloria had answered all of Cass's questions with noncommittal grunts and never once met her eyes. Ruthie had been afraid of her.

"She loved him," Cass concluded. Once, Gloria had loved. That would have to be enough. Cass had said all she knew-all that was important, anyway. Gloria never told her anything but his name; if he'd been a lover, a husband, a childhood friend, it didn't matter.

She bent to the earth, the rectangle of dirt raked carefully one way and then the other, crosshatched from the tines. She dug her fingers in and took a handful, then stood up and slowly sifted the earth back over the length of the grave.

She stood back as the others filed around the perimeter of the grave. They knelt and scooped their own handfuls of dirt, even Ruthie. The knees of her tights were smudged with dirt-another stain Cass would not be able to get out. She sighed. Each person shook their dirt back down onto the grave, and Cass wondered what words they said in their minds. Hers was goodbye-maybe everyone said goodbye.

The dirt was sprinkled and still they ringed the grave, waiting. Randall dug in his pocket. "Cass, perhaps you'd like to..."

He held out a plastic bag, gapping open; inside were dried kaysev beans, dull and brown. Cass looked at him sharply, but for once Randall stared back with a hint of challenge in his expression. Smoke squeezed her hand, shook his head. Smoke stayed far clear of Randall's Sunday-morning services. He had little to do with believers. He even did his occasional drinking at Rocket's-not German's, where believers tended to congregate.

Cass didn't want to take the beans. The funeral practice of sprinkling the grave with kaysev seed-it was based in the Bible, the passage in Matthew about the sower. It was a common practice, almost secular by now; a whole new culture of loss, its habits and practices as ingrained as if generations of ancestors had practiced them. It had only been eight months since the Air Force had rained kaysev down from the skies on their last flights, but eight months had been long enough to create new rituals. The plant was meant to feed the population; it had begun to feed their imaginations, as well.

Smoke saw everything through the filter of ideology and he was resolute, and Cass was inclined to agree with him, at least on this. Terrible memories of the Convent were too fresh, the mark its zealotry had left on Ruthie too deep.

God had not taken up residence across the street in the stadium-of that Cass was sure.

But unlike Smoke, she was not ready to declare Him absent. Still, He was an elusive, crafty cipher to Cass, and for now she meant to keep Him distant.

When Cass did not take the plastic bag from Randall's outstretched hand, the frowning man narrowed his eyes and upended it himself, the beans falling to the earth and rolling into the crevices and fissures in the earth. "He that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word," he intoned, his gaze never leaving Cass's face.

Then he stepped back from the grave, jamming the empty bag back into his pocket and brushing his hands together fastidiously. Everyone else followed him, retreating to the cleared area where the service had begun, shuffling slowly.

"And now we conclude our service for Gloria," Randall murmured, the wind snatching at his words and carrying them away, so that everyone leaned in closer to hear. Everyone, that is, but Cass, who picked up Ruthie and edged to the back of the small gathering while Randall raised his hands for a final benediction.

"Man, you are dust," he said, closing his eyes. "And to dust you shall return."

Not for the first time Cass considered that Randall was a fraud, cobbling together bits and pieces of faiths to suit himself.

What did it matter, though? Dead was still dead, and the rest of them were still here.

02.

CASS GLANCED BACK OVER HER SHOULDER AS THEY trailed the others back to the Box. The streets looked clear; there had been no Beater sightings for a couple of days. Randall moved among the graves, straightening the crosses and pulling weeds.

It wasn't much of a graveyard-the plot of land had once been a tiny park wedged between residential streets two blocks from the Box, but the trees that shaded it had died early enough in the Siege that someone had actually taken the trouble to cut them down to stumps and haul them away. Some of the graves were marked with crosses carved from wood, nailed together, finished to varying degrees. One small one was painted white, with tiny shells glued along the edges. Most of the crosses were raw, hastily made, not even sanded.

Some graves, like Gloria's, had no marker at all. For now, the dug and piled dirt marked its location, but it would not be long before the dirt would sink and level and no one would remember where she lay.

Had it been up to Cass, she would have left the few plants that sprouted this time of year. To her mind the reappearance of each plant Aftertime was a miracle in itself, and her garden in the Box had a small square marked out with stakes and twine for each native species she found on her walks. Firethorn, pepperweed, crupina. Each of them once assumed gone forever. Each-through what combination of God's will and hardiness and luck she had no idea-returned, pushing through the wasted crust of the forsaken earth.

Greg, Rae, Paul-once through the gates, they slipped off in different directions, not bothering with a goodbye, not even for Ruthie. Cass wasn't sure how much longer she could stay here in the Box, where gloom had settled and quashed her hopes that it was a place fit for raising her little girl. Before, people made an effort for a child, even one as silent and strange as Ruthie was now. Under the hat, her hair was as short as a boy's; in the Convent they had shaved all the children bald. But by spring Ruthie should have enough for a little pixie cut, something more girlie. Cass was self-conscious of her self-consciousness: surely survival was enough of a parlor trick; should children really have to do anything more?

There were no fat Gerber babies Aftertime. There were few babies at all. Starvation and the fever had taken so many, early on; the Beaters claimed many more. Cass knew firsthand how hard it was to look upon a child when your own was gone. But she had been given a second chance; she had gotten Ruthie back, and now she meant to cherish her. She would dress her in the prettiest things she could find. She would give her everything that the battered world could provide.

Ruthie's red coat was a gift from a quiet boy named Sam, who'd lost an eye in Yemen in the Rice Wars. He stopped by Cass and Smoke's tent after a raid and pulled it from his backpack, a soft, finely made woolen coat with carved shell buttons. He wouldn't trade for it, but he had accepted a cup of peppermint tea brewed from the last of Cass's herb garden before a hard freeze took all but the thyme and chervil. Sam wasn't a talker, but he loved Ruthie. He airplaned her squealing through the air, carried her around on his shoulders and let her crawl all over his long lanky legs. Cass suspected Sam had once had a little brother or sister, or perhaps a niece or nephew. Whoever the child was, they were long gone, leaving Sam with a few good moves and, perhaps, an empty place in his heart.

Underneath the coat, Ruthie wore a blue corduroy jumper and a pair of white tights. Her shoes were too small; she was growing fast these days. All the raiders knew to keep an eye out-size seven, twenty-four European-but you never knew what you'd find, and the only sure thing-the mall at the far edge of town-was still infested with Beaters.

It had been more than a month since Ruthie's things had been washed. Sometimes one of the Box merchants had detergent for trade, but it was expensive, and besides, Cass and Smoke had agreed they were going to try to switch to homegrown wherever possible. That meant using the oily kaysev soap made from the fat rendered from the beans. It wasn't terrible for washing one's body or hair, but it wasn't great for clothes. It didn't take stains all the way out and it didn't do much for the lingering odors of sweat and smoke.

It wasn't like anyone else cared. Smoke was always saying Cass should just let Ruthie wear sweatpants and T-shirts like Feo, the only other child in the Box. But Feo was practically feral, a sharp-toothed, long-haired boy of eight or nine who slipped quick-footed and cagey among the tents and merchant stands, stealing and boxing with his own shadow. Dor let Feo stay only because he'd become a sort of a mascot for the guards, who'd found him squatting with an unkempt, semiconscious old woman in a farmhouse past the edge of town back in October.

Cass felt protective of Feo, especially after the woman, his grandmother, died during her first night in the Box. But she didn't want her Ruthie becoming like him.

"I'm going to the trailer," Smoke said, as they reached the intersection in the dirt path that led to their tent. It had become his habit not to explain his dealings with Dor anymore, as their private meetings grew more and more frequent. He had become Dor's right-hand man in the months since he and Cass came to the Box, and Cass supposed that their daily interactions were necessary as Smoke learned more of the business and took over more and more of the daily operations of the security force. But Smoke also knew she resented these meetings, resented his alliance with Dor. Another couple might have talked it out. But Cass did not ask and Smoke did not volunteer.

She took Ruthie back to the tent. Inside, there was order. Cass had not been neat Before; she was neat now. Smoke had lined one wall of the tent with bookshelves bolted together; these held tattered books and empty glass jars and smooth stones. A dresser contained their clothes. The floor was covered with a beautiful rug, an ancient hand-woven thing that Dor said had once been worth many thousands of dollars. It was the one thing of luxurious beauty that Cass could stand to have in their home. Otherwise the things in their tent were plain, utilitarian and all chosen by her, because Smoke had understood that their choosing was healing for Cass, even before she understood it herself.

She slowly unbuttoned her parka then took off the dress she'd worn for the funeral and tugged on a wool sweater. She had wanted Smoke to see her in this dress, gotten only yesterday from a woman who'd arrived dragging a rolling suitcase stuffed with designer clothes and fine jewelry. It had cost Cass an airline bottle of Absolut and three 750mg Vicodin tablets. Cass hadn't touched a drop of alcohol in almost ten months and had resisted trading in it, but eventually she had to accept that booze and drugs were the Box's principal currency, so she and Smoke kept a stash locked in a safe bolted to a pole sunk in concrete in the ground under the tent floor.

The dress was knit of some synthetic fabric, cut on the bias and gathered at the low scoop neckline. It was a shade of deep aquamarine that reminded Cass of the ocean-specifically, of the water off Point Reyes where she'd once spent a long weekend before she got pregnant with Ruthie. She'd been with a lover-which one, she couldn't remember now-and he'd distracted her with expensive dinners and wine and blow, but it was the water she remembered best.

This dress was the color of misty mornings and rain-threatened twilights, of flotsam bobbing on waves before they broke on the shore. She had wanted to watch Smoke watching her in the dress, wanted to see his eyes widen and his lips part, wanted to watch him wanting her. Her body quickened at the thought, even now, when the moment was lost.

She took off the earrings Smoke gave her the week before and put them in the metal box where she kept all her little things, earrings and safety pins and buttons and needles and tacks. The earrings had come from a raid on one of the enormous homes on Festival Hill in what had been the rich part of town, a pair of diamond drops that would have cost more than a car Before. Aftertime was funny that way; it turned the value of everything upside down. Smoke had traded a Kershaw hunting knife with a black tungsten blade for the earrings and their owner had gone away satisfied.

After she got Ruthie changed into soft, warm clothes and tucked under her quilt for a nap, Cass poured water from a plastic pitcher into her pewter cup-engraved with a curly monogram with the letters TEC, spoils from the same luxurious neighborhood-and unwrapped a kaysev cake that had been spread with peanut butter. She ate her lunch mechanically and tried to concentrate her thoughts on Gloria. But her thoughts would not stay focused-they skittered like pebbles on a slide. Ruthie made soft mewling sounds in her sleep, and Cass listened and wished she could record them to play back later, the only way she could hear her daughter's voice.

Cass sat still and quiet and waited for Smoke. She was barely aware of the path of the sun through the sheer curtains at the tent windows, the crumbs of her lunch hardening on the plate, the condensation slowly gathering on the pitcher's clear plastic lid until a single drop fell with a soundless splash. Ruthie slept, and whispered, and moaned, the only sounds she ever made, the soundtrack of her nightmares, the leavings of her time in the Convent just across the road from the Box. Listening night after night was the price Cass paid for her carelessness, for having let her daughter be taken. She would listen every night until she died if that was what was owed.

But when the afternoon chill had settled into an ache in Cass's hands and feet and still Smoke had not returned, Ruthie twisted in her cozy bed and threw off the quilt and sat up, never waking: "Bird," she said, as clear as anything, fear in her sightless sleeping eyes, and when she lay back down, oblivious of her dream-talk, Cass turned in astonishment to see Smoke standing in the door of their tent wearing no expression at all, blood dripping from his fists.

03.

SMOKE WOULD NOT STOP TREMBLING AND WOULD not speak.

Cass swallowed her dread and searched him for grievous wounds, for bite marks. Finding none, she held him and kissed his brow and murmured over him and at last there was nothing else to do but take him out to the fire. Ruthie, who had forgotten her cryptic dream-talk, went placidly, carrying a stuffed dragon she had recently taken a shine to. Cass had looked at Smoke's palms and seen that the cuts were superficial, clean slices to the skin as though he'd held out his palms to be flayed. Already the bleeding had stopped, the wounds' edges going white; they bled again when Smoke forgot and flexed his fingers, but Cass allowed him to hold her hand and tried to ignore the stickiness between their flesh.

The fire pit was ringed in neck-high fencing. One of Dor's recent conscripts sat at the opening in a folding chair, feet up on a stump, clipboard in hand. His name was Utah, and you got the feeling he wanted you to ask him why. Cass did not ask. Utah's eyes were too hungry and his hair was braided and held with bits of leather and Cass was too exhausted by everything that had happened in the last year of her life to have time for people who still needed to be admired.

"Hey," Utah said, making a note on his clipboard. "All three of you, then?"

A stupid question, Cass thought, but she just nodded and led Smoke and Ruthie inside, where the dirt had been swept just that morning and stumps were set up all around the fire pit, which was six feet across easy and burning mostly clean, split firewood mixed with green wood. She and Smoke had privileges not afforded other visitors to the Box; among them, water and the baths and the fire were free. But they were marked on the tally nonetheless; Dor insisted on rigorous bookkeeping.

Only a few people sat around the fire. Most would wait as long as they could, coming in to warm themselves before bedding down, hoping their bodies would retain the memory of heat long enough to fall asleep and maybe even stay that way long enough to get some rest. Here, it was easy to believe Dor's prediction that by late winter firewood would become his most lucrative business. If only Cass could convince Smoke to go down mountain, to find a new place to be a family. There had to be somewhere warmer, more hospitable, somewhere that hope still lived.

Cass led Smoke to the far side of the fire ring, away from the others. She spread out a dish towel on a stump, pulled a set of nesting plastic dolls from her pocket, saved for occasions when she needed to keep Ruthie occupied. Ruthie smiled and carefully pried the largest doll's halves apart as Cass took both of Smoke's hands in hers.

"What," she begged, leaning close enough to breathe his breath, ready to hurt for him.

"I broke the railing," Smoke said, staring at his hands as though he was just noticing the cuts. "Outside of Dor's trailer. It was cheap shit, aluminum..."

Cass pictured it in her mind's eye, the trailer Dor used for his office and now, in the colder months, his home, as well. Construction steps led up to the door four feet above the ground, the trailer up on blocks. Its railing was flimsy, it was true, but to tear it apart would have taken strength-and rage.

"But why? What did he say to you?"

Only Dor, founder and leader of the Box, tight-lipped cold-eyed trader and enforcer of the peace, had the power to change events, to change the course of people's lives. Smoke looked at her bleakly, his sensuous mouth taut with dark emotion.

"The school burned," he said softly. "It was Rebuilders. They came to Silva and they burned it-gave the women and the children a choice. Join or die. The men, all of them...gone."

Cass's heart seized. The school, forty miles down mountain, had been the first shelter she'd come to after she was taken, after waking in a field in her own stink, crusted with healing sores, with no memory of how she got there. At the school she thought she would die; instead she met Smoke and she lived.

"Gone?" she echoed, the word thick on her lips.

"Throats slit to save the bullet, then burned inside the building. Cass...Nora stayed behind. She refused to go with them. And she died."

The hole in Cass's heart widened and cold seeped in.

Nora had been Smoke's lover, once. Before Cass came. Nora's dark hair brushed her shoulders, her gaunt cheeks were elegant. Nora had hated Cass on sight, had voted for her to be turned out to die because of the condition she was in when she'd arrived at the school. Now Nora was the dead one.

"They killed her..."

"She fought." There-finally, there was the anger, flashing in his eyes. "She took one down with her, Dor said."

Dor. Sammi-what about the girl? Dor's daughter, only fourteen, whom Cass had felt a bond with even though their time together was brief.

"They say Sammi survived," Smoke said, reading her thoughts. "At least, there's a girl her age, her description, who made it through. But not her mother. It happened two days ago-they've probably taken her down to Colima by now."

"The survivors-they're all prisoners?"

"That's what Dor said," Smoke said flatly. "That's what he told me. Rebuilders sent a message here. Their man came today. That's what...what we've been talking about."

The school was gone. The little community of shelterers crushed, splintered, burned, and the survivors led away like stolen cattle. The men... Cass shuddered to think of their bodies stacked and immolated.

She had only been at the school for one day, just long enough for them to judge, yet release her, long enough for Smoke to decide to throw in with her quest to reclaim Ruthie. He'd intended to go back, back to Nora, but that hadn't happened. Instead he'd come here, and somehow they'd become...what they were. Lovers. A couple, perhaps. More, certainly, than Cass had ever dared to hope for. She had slept in Smoke's arms nearly every night and been glad of it.

And on some of those nights Cass had thought of Nora and wished she didn't exist. Such a wish didn't feel like the same sort of sin as it might have been Before. Aftertime, the odds of living to the next day were stunted; you learned not to count on the future. You said goodbye knowing it might be the last time...and then, eventually, you simply stopped saying goodbye. Encounters meant both more and less when you knew you might not ever see someone again. The old world had ended, and new morals were needed to survive.

Deep in the night Cass would think of Nora and wish her to simply not be. She didn't want her to fall to the fever, didn't want the Beaters to find her, didn't want illness or infection or a burst appendix to take her. She just wished she could erase Nora from Smoke's past, rub her away so completely that not even a shadow remained, so she and Smoke could truly start anew together. Cass and Smoke and Ruthie, and that wish had been enough, and Cass had caught herself wondering a few times recently if a kind of happiness might actually be possible someday.

But the emotions on Smoke's face did not leave a place for her. There was fury in the hard set of his mouth, determination in the line between his eyebrows. In his chambray eyes, the flint-sparks of something Cass knew far too well: vengeance. She'd carried the thirst for vengeance with her long enough to know that it was consuming and heavy and left little room for any other burden. Sometimes it left no room for the breath in your chest, your dreams at night-it stole everything.

But still she waited. She had not spoken Nora's name aloud since they first came to the Box. If she didn't speak it now, maybe her memory would let him go. Maybe, in death, she'd release him. Cass didn't know if she believed in an afterlife, was still trying to decide if she believed in anything at all-but in this moment she begged a wish from Nora, dead Nora, ghost-or-angel Nora: Let me have him. He's no good to you now...just let me have him.

Chapter end