After (36 page)

After. They are still holding each other in lust-clouded gazes. Then Eva's eyes flash and fix on something past the foot of the bed. Smith takes his hand from her mouth.

“Hope.” Eva breathes the girl's name, then works her mouth into a smile. “Honey, it's okay.”

Smith has let her wrists go, and Eva reaches her hand out to the staring girl.

Silent, watchful, Hope glances from Eva's face to Smith's. He blushes and shifts.

“Don't,” Eva says in a quiet voice, holding Smith to her, penning him between her knees. When Hope comes near, Eva takes her hand. Hope looks scared. Like she's near tears. Eva's smile gets bigger, warmer. “Were you afraid Avery was hurting me?”

Eva asks.

Hope looks from Eva's warm smile to Smith, who forces himself to meet her gaze. She turns back to Eva and gives a small nod.

“Well,” Eva says, stroking the girl's sleek copper tresses, laughter deepening her soft voice, “he wasn't. Avery and I were just,” she pauses, “playing together. Having fun together. Nothing for you to be scared about. Okay?”

Seeing Eva's big happy smile, and Avery's embarrassed grin, Hope gives in to a smile of her own, and nods her head.

“Why don't you go and see John and the baby? I'll come in a little bit. Okay?”

Hope casts a quick glance at Smith, then smiles at Eva and scampers off.

“You couldn't have let me, ahem, slip away, just a few inches away, for that conversation?” Smith asks.

“I didn't want her to think we were pretending anything with her. I wanted her to see us, as we were, that I was fine. Happy. Not like kids in a fight who fly apart to opposite sides of the hall when a teacher walks up.”

“I should have been more careful to lock the door,” he says.

“No. I think it's good she sees. She doesn't have school friends to talk to. No tawdry paperbacks to sneak and read. No internet. It shouldn't be some big mystery.

Don't you think?”

“Well, we don't want to traumatize her, do we?”

“Course not. And we won't, as long as we don't freak out like crazed Puritans when she gets curious.”

“Have you had a real talk with her?”

“No,” Eva sighs. “I need to. Keep meaning to. I just don't want it to be some big heavy thing. And I don't want to hide anything from her, but I don't want to scare her either. I'd like to see her start her sexual life eager and curious, not weighed down by all the baggage I grew up with.

“And at the same time, I don't pretend to myself that we can keep her a hundred percent safe. It's possible,” Eva locks into Smith's gaze, “someone could hurt her, someday. I want to say the right things to her, so she understands that her body is hers, that no one has a right to it, unless that's what she wants, but without burdening her with the shame, the embarrassment that comes out of making sex such a big deal. This all-important, precious thing. She should never feel dirty, feel like less, because of someone else's crime.”

A murky sadness wells up, darkens Smith's eyes. “What I did to you. I know I hurt you that way.”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“I wish I could undo that. Of all things, all my life, I wish I could undo making you feel...”

“Less than human.” She fills in the blank for him. “But, you know, what doesn't kill you, etcetera, etcetera. You're almost solely responsible for the monster I've become.”

“I'm glad. But it doesn't do much to relieve my guilt.”

“Good. I'm counting on your guilt, on how you refuse to forgive yourself, on the way you torture yourself daily with your penitence, to keep you in line.” Her teasing grin fades. For a moment she is bare and sad.

* * * *

When she leaves Smith, Eva finds Hope in her room.

“Hey, Sweetie.”

Hope answers her with her luminous smile.

“Can we talk for a minute?”

Hope nods. Gazes steadily at Eva, waiting.

“You were upset, seeing me and Avery. I don't want you to feel scared, if you see me like that with him. Or John. Or James. Probably it looks strange, but it's something...” Eva laughs, which makes Hope smile, and tries again. “Hope, did anyone ever explain to you about sex?”

Hope goes on gazing at Eva with a small, placid smile.

“You know I love John, right?”

Hope nods.

“And Avery, too?”

Another nod.

“Sometimes, with some kinds of love, people express it by kissing. By touching.

And doing what Avery and I were doing. And that's how we made Gareth. John and Avery and James and I.”

Hope gets up off the bed, and coaxes Eva up to her feet. Then she flips the covers up, baring the mattress with a white sheet fitted over it, and plunges under with one hand, burrowing until she's in up to her shoulder, and comes back with a thick book, its red leather binding worn and tattered. Holding her treasure under her arm, Hope takes Eva's hand and leads her to Eva's room. Sets her mysterious tome on the little table by the window. Pulls a stack of books from the nearby shelf, exhumes three small notebooks. Sets them on the table next to her one, heavy book. Then Hope looks at Eva, hands her the red book. Still holding her gaze, asking something with her eyes, Hope picks up Eva's journals.

“You want to trade?” Eva asks her.

Hope gives a nervous smile. Nods.

After a few moments, considering, Eva says in a quiet voice, “Most of what's there, it's me working through how I'd like things to be. It's my little manifesto, principles for living together, for keeping each other safe, and free, and cared for. But honey, those journals, there's some sad things in them. And some scary things. Things that happened here. Things about us, me and John and Avery. Are you sure you want to read them?”

Looking sure and serious, Hope gives another nod.

“Okay. You're getting to be pretty grown up. And I don't think keeping things past a secret is ever such a good idea. So you can read them.” Eva is still and quiet for a moment or two. “Hope. When you're reading, I want you to remember, these things that happened, things were different here, then. It wasn't like it is now. Bad things can always happen, and there's always some people who are dangerous. Mean. But now, we're all pretty safe. It's like the normal world. How it was before the dying. Will you remember that?”

Hope nods.

“Okay. If you read anything, and want me to explain more, just bring it to me and show me. All right?”

With one final nod, Hope is off with the journals, back to her own room. And Eva sits down at the table and lifts the cover of Hope's big red book. The first cream-hued page is covered edge-to-edge with a drawing, unmistakably Hope's, a figure caught in motion, blurred like a movement too quick for a camera's shutter speed, a woman, bleeding, dark brown-red smears at toes and fingertips and at the corners of her large mouth and rimming her moss-green eyes, wide, mad behind a hanging veil of copper hair. And at her feet, still, unblurred, the white, bruise- and blood-marked body of a man.

His profile, his nose so like Hope's he could be her twin, except for his ash-blond hair.

And crouching in the corner, a little girl with copper hair.

For a long time Eva stares at that first drawing, letting tears run down her face.

Finally she turns the page, witnesses what Hope has witnessed. Crazy people lighting cars on fire, all the cars, until whole streets seem to be lined with signal fires. Fires to light a path. The sick putting out their dead. Mass graves. People killing other people with guns and knives. Looting. Beatings. People jumping from tenth-floor windows.

Then, the empty city. Day. Night. Empty.

Except. There's one group, four men and a woman. From a distant perspective, through windows, these five eat and sleep and come outside. They recede into the distance. Disappear around a corner. Reappear with heavy bags, frame themselves in the window again, drink wine. Eat. And one window to the left, the woman and one of the men in bed. Him on top. Her on top. His face between her thighs. Him, sitting on the edge of the bed, her on her knees in front of him, her back to the window.

The weather turns. A new perspective, a different window in a different building—

brick, now, instead of wood, and a higher floor. As if Hope had followed, and again moved in across the street. To watch. Together, but apart. Did they ever know she was there?

And then, a rupture. A schism in the family in the window. One man beats another. The woman's lover is sprawled on the floor, unconscious or dead. The man who beat him holds the woman down, bent over the dining table where usually they all drink wine and eat dinner together. Then a second man comes. And the third.

The lover isn't dead. There are more pictures of the five of them sitting together.

Eating together. Now there are only small fights before the other men take the woman.

Sometimes it's just one of them. Sometimes it's all three. There are no more drawings of the lovers having sex.

* * * *

Gareth has fallen asleep in Smith's arms. They all give the baby a last look, a last kiss, and Smith sets him down in his crib. The three of them go on talking for a while.

About Hope's drawings, the clues they give. Patterns. Survivors. Ratios. About The Plan. Eva's plan. Finding others. Growing their little community. Saving the stranded.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Gathered around a heavy conference table—a simple rectangle assembled from thick oak planks—Eva, Smith and John are studying a map of the area, along with Diego and Evan.

“Pembroke. Trenton. Guthrie.” Smith taps his index finger against three points on the map. “That'll be it for the first recon. Information gathering and diplomacy only.

Excepting special circumstances.”

Evan and Diego have already been briefed on what scenarios qualify as ”special circumstances.”

“First sign of real trouble, get out and get back,” Smith says, driving the order home with a piercing look for Diego, then Evan.

“Yes, sir,” they come back, almost in unison.

Just after dawn, Diego and Evan set out with Washington and Jones, and just after sunset they return. Now it's seven around the big oak table. Jones is agitated, and the others bring an air of excitement with them into the room, but they reign themselves in. Tense, quiet, they let Diego make his report. Nothing in Pembroke. Signs of life in Trenton—garbage and human excrement in the streets, houses with furniture free of the accumulation of dust and cobwebs that have turned the interiors of uninhabited buildings dim and gray—but whoever has been eating from those recently-discarded cans and doing their business in the streets kept themselves well-hidden from Diego and the rest of the foursome. The soldiers had tacked up the pre-typed message at a spot that seemed well trodden.

Guthrie, though. Five men. Slow to come out, but curiosity seemed to have won out over fear, in the end. All of them under forty, Diego and the others figured. One old man had survived the dying, but had passed the year before. No women. At least, that's what they'd said. But it seemed odd that, hearing of Eva and Hope, five men who hadn't seen a woman since the dying showed nothing but suspicion toward the group of survivors at the nearby military base. But maybe they'd thought it was a trick of some kind. As planned, they'd arranged to return, to meet the little group again in three days'

time.

The Guthrie men had not suggested that Eva come, and the Fort Campbell men had not indicated she would. But that's the plan. On the appointed day, a different envoy sets out: Eva, Smith, Diego and Evan.

The Guthrie men are waiting for the emissaries at the spot Diego and the others had chosen as a site well suited to avoiding ambushes. No telling if five was really their number. The five smile and wave in greeting as the humvee rolls up, but they hang back, their postures stiff as Smith and the others emerge from the truck. When Eva steps down, it's as if there's a change in air pressure, in the direction of the wind. The rigid reserve of the five, the Guthrie men, softens. Their energy turns outward, all focused on her.

“I'm Eva,” she says, her smile broad, her voice easy. She goes and shakes hands with each of the five Guthrie men while Smith and the others watch, vigilant.

“Major Smith,” the eagle introduces himself when Eva has stepped back into the safety of the fold.

“You were crazy to bring her,” Bill, a squat, muscular man with dark hair and a trim beard says to Smith. “It's not safe for a woman, out in the open.”

“Even here, with all of us?” Smith asks.

“If you're smart, you'll keep her hidden away. Always. There's men—not from around here—combing the whole country for women. Willing to pay. Just as happy to fight and kill to get them, if the men won't give them up.”

“And they...” Eva doesn't manage to finish her question.

“Take 'em west and sell 'em. That's the rumor. Enjoying them along the way, no doubt.” It's hard to read his eyes, his voice, whether he's revolted or envious or numb.

“And here? You've seen them come? Take someone?” Eva asks.

“Not seen. Here in Guthrie, none of the women, none of the girls survived.”

The nine settle around a picnic table. Smith tells the tale of the base—the dying, the failed early forays out from the base, the arrivals of John and Jake and Eva and Hope and baby Gareth. The Guthrie men all fix their eyes on Eva, looking at her with new intensity as they hear of her pregnancy, of the birth of her son. There are omissions. Smith doesn't explain the paternal triad, and is silent on the darker dynamics in the history of the base.

The Guthrie men tell their tale in turn. The dying, the burying—first in individual graves, then in a mass grave when the dead outnumbered the living to the degree that burying them one by one was impossible—isn't much different from the story Smith has just told. Since the dying, they've stayed put, mostly because about a month in, a group of nine rough men had come charging through town, going building-by-building in search of the one thing scarce in a world where most everyone had died, leaving behind an eternal supply of canned food, not to mention flour and livestock and fruit trees: women. They'd tied the six Guthrie men up—the old guy was still alive, then—and turned every house and store and office building upside down in search of women, then disappeared when their hunt ended, no prey found, leaving their hostages to struggle free of their ties.