Aftertime Read Online Free PDF Page B

plates and cups. Blankets and clothing were folded and stacked. There were rows of paperbacks, vases of the few surviving wildflowers. Board games and puzzles were set out on tables and two separate card games were in full swing.
    Eight or nine kids—toddlers up to six-or seven-year-olds—played on carpet scraps arranged on the floor at one end of the cafeteria. Sammi was watching them, along with a boy about her age.
    Smoke led Cass into the large open space, and the adults’ conversations died. People set down their playing cards, the baskets of clothes they had been folding, the kaysev they had been separating and cleaning and preparing. They regarded Cass with open curiosity and, in some cases, suspicion and fear and hostility.
    Sammi’s mother was in a group of women who had been chatting as they washed and dried dishes. There was a tub of soapy water, another of clear, no doubt creek water that had been boiled. Cass had seen the blackened fire pit in the courtyard, the hearth built of rebar and steel beams and that fireproof plastic weave.
    “This is Cass,” Smoke said into the silence. “She’s a citizen, just like us.”
    “She’s not like us,” Sammi’s mother said, setting down her washrag. Her voice shook. “She tried to—”
    “It’s okay, Mom,” Sammi said. She put down the bucket of toys she’d been holding. A pretend zoo was laid out on the floor, and she and the boy had been helping the younger kids stack wooden blocks to make cages.
    “It’s not okay,” her mother hissed, but she stayed where she was. One of the other women laid a hand on her arm and said something that Cass couldn’t hear.
    “She only did what she had to,” Sammi added, glaring at her mother defiantly. “Besides, if you didn’t keep me cooped up in here like I was in jail—”
    “Don’t, Sammi,” the boy said quietly. “Not now.”
    “I’d rather take my chances out there,” Sammi said, pointing out the window at the street that ran alongside the building, beyond the iron fence. Cass saw abandoned cars, some with graffiti painted on the side. Several had crashed into each other, by accident or on purpose, crushed metal and broken glass surrounding doors that no one had bothered to close.
    Then she saw something else, something that struck white-hot fear in her heart. In the yard of a squat brick bun-galow across the street, a small clump of Beaters shuffled around a kiddie pool they’d managed to drag from some where. One was trying to sit in it. Two others were trying to turn it over. Another stood close to the house, staring into a large picture window and absently tugging at its ears.
    She wasn’t the only one to spot them. A few sharp gasps, a collective wave of fear that ran through the room.
    “They’ve started gathering here in the afternoon. Waiting…” Smoke sighed, running his hands through his hair. For a moment he looked a decade older than the thirty-five Cass had taken him for. “Sometimes a dozen of them. They wander off when the sun starts to get low. For now, anyway.”
    The Beaters had everyone’s attention. The argument between Sammi and her mother was forgotten. Cass took the opportunity to slip out of the room, Smoke following her without a word. She could not stay there, watching the Beaters, enduring the scrutiny of all those people.
    She would wait in the office, alone, until evening. After all, she’d become accustomed to her own company.
     
     
    Cass added it up in her head. A hundred seventy-five, maybe two hundred people left, between the library and the school and firehouse.… Silva’s population had been over four thousand before the famine and the riots and the suicides and the fever deaths. Before the Beaters began carrying the survivors away.
    As the sun sank down in the sky, Cass felt restless. She had been alone in the office for hours, waiting for night to come. No one had disturbed her. No one had even walked by the door. She stood up and stretched, easing her