Nance squeezed the water from the cloth and folded it carefully, once, twice; then she pressed it into Cass’s hands, but before she let go, she gathered Cass’s smaller hands in her own large and capable ones and held them for a moment with a tenderness that brought tears to Cass’s eyes. Her sense of exposure deepened; while men had touched every inch of her body, sometimes without even knowing her name, and sometimes with the kind of careless fervor that left her bruised and battered, no woman had touched her since her own mother stopped bathing her since the age at which she was old enough to turn the taps herself. The image that flashed through her mind: her mother watching her impassively, smoking, as Cass struggled to let the water out the drain—she must have been all of nine, smarting from her father’s absence and shriveling from her mother’s indifference.
When she finally let go, Nance picked up her own towel and began drying off. Cass finished her washing, concentrating on the sensation of the warm water as it ran down her stomach, down her thighs and calves to puddle at the ground. When the others turned politely away, she washed between her legs, lathering and scrubbing as though she could wash away a decade’s shame with meager and inadequate supplies, rinsing the panties as well as she could with handfuls of murky bathwater, the synthetic fabric clinging to her skin and revealing the thick, dark patch of hair beneath.
“Smoke will come right back here after he walks with me,” Cass said, wanting to turn the attention away from herself. “I just need … “
But she didn’t need Smoke. She’d come this far on her own; surely she could manage to cross the last four miles of bare road before the outskirts of Silva, the handful of blocks to the library.
“You take him, girl,” Gail said, suddenly serious. “You let that man help you. You’ve been out of the towns, you don’t know what you’re up against.”
“I’ve seen Beaters,” Cass protested. “A few, anyway, on my way here.”
“It’s the people you need to worry about just as much nowadays,” Gail replied.
“You come through cities?” Nance demanded, ignoring Gail. “You seen their nests?”
Cass hesitated. The biggest town she’d passed was a half a dozen houses and a gas station clustered around a crossroads, Highway 161 intersecting a farm road that disappeared into dusty fields. But she hadn’t seen Beaters there, no evidence of a nest—no alcoves or storefronts littered with filthy clothing mounded in shallow rings, no piles of household castoffs hoarded for the haphazard, long-ago memories they held. No fetid stink of unwashed, ravaged bodies mingled in restless sleep, of torn flesh and leaking, damaged bodies seized upon and devoured and, finally, abandoned.
The few Beaters she’d seen had been small and restless roving teams, and if she’d wondered where they sheltered, she cast her doubts aside, plunged them into the unknowable so that she could take another step and another, so that she could salvage sufficient hope to continue on.
The others exchanged glances. “How many at a time?”
“Two … three.”
“And tell me, didn’t that strike you as strange?”
It had, of course, once the cloudiness had shaken itself loose from Cass’s mind and she was thinking more clearly. Since the Beaters had evolved, they had formed larger and larger packs, like a snowball rolled around a snowy field, picking up mass. They seemed to take comfort in their own kind. Occasionally, you’d even see them in a clumsy imitation of an embrace, patting each other or grooming the hard-to-reach tufts of hair at the back of their heads, even hugging. They didn’t ordinarily feed on each other after the initial flush of the disease—they hungered for uninfected flesh—but occasionally you’d see them nipping and tugging gently at each other with their teeth, almost the way puppies played, biting with their tiny milk teeth.
“I don’t know,” Cass said. All of it was strange. All of it was horrifying.
“Well, this is new, just the last few weeks. They’ve started going out a couple at a time, kind of poking around together like they have a plan. We—some of us—we think they’re scouting.”
A thrill of fear snaked along Cass’s spine, a sensation she had thought was lost to her. After the things she’d seen and suffered, she didn’t think she could be terrified again. “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“They’re on the lookout for opportunities. For us. They’ve started working on strategy.”
Whispered: “No.”
It was impossible. The Beaters were disorganized, stripped of their humanity, reduced to little more than animals motivated by an overwhelming need to feed. The spells of humanlike behavior were nothing but the debris left behind when the soul made a clumsy exit from the shell of a body that remained. To suggest they were evolving the ability to reason, to plan—that was as senseless as suggesting that a flock of ducks could orchestrate a diving attack.
“We’re not saying they’ve succeeded yet,” Nance said quickly. “I mean it’s not like they get very far before they get distracted or wander off or whatever. But the fact they’re coming out in small groups like that—and they hang out around the edges, across the streets all around the school—it’s got to mean something.”
“It might just be the evolution of the disease,” Cass ventured, grasping at possibilities. “You know … like, in the whole first population, as it progresses … “
There had been a lot of discussion of the evolution of the disease, when people first realized that the sick were turning into something else, something far worse. Before anyone called them Beaters, people repeated rumors that their brains were infected with a madness similar to syphilis. But back then, much as nineteenth-century syphilitics suffered from lesions and tumors and dementia before they died, Aftertime, people had initially thought that those who ate the blueleaf would eventually die once the fever escalated.
“Maybe,” Gail assented, an act of generosity. “Just, I want you to know what you’re up against. Smoke knows…. He’s been watching them.”
“He takes notes,” Nance added. “He keeps a journal. He used to be a teacher or something.”
“Well, we don’t know that,” Gail corrected her. “He doesn’t talk about himself much.”
“He said something about it once,” Nance insisted. “Teaching.”
Cass toweled off her damp body and thought about the man who had offered to freewalk with her to the library. Four miles of unnecessary risk. The overwhelming impression she got from Smoke was of … depth. Layers. He would not be an easy man to know.
There was the story he told about the air force pilots. She still didn’t think he was telling the whole truth. So … maybe he was a liar, or maybe he was just keeping parts of the truth to himself.
But he was brave. Or more precisely, he had a lack of concern for himself, and an abundance of concern for others. He had been the first to come at her when she and Sammi approached the school, and it had been his body crushing hers when he took her down. His arms had been hard-muscled. Despite her strength and fitness, she was smaller by several inches and thirty or forty pounds. He could have hurt her easily.
But he hadn’t even bruised her.
“What about Nora?” Cass found herself asking. “His … girlfriend?”
Gail made an exhalation of air through her teeth. “Is that the impression you got? Well,