Rebirth by Sophie Littlefield Read Free Book Online

folded his chair carefully and leaned it against the wall, where Cass noticed twin marks in the paint. So, he left the chair in the same place each time. Glancing around the room she saw something she’d missed at first—there was no dust, no dirt. Dor kept this place clean. She wasn’t surprised—anyone could see from his office that he was a fastidious man. She wondered what that said about him, what flaws or virtues it bespoke, what history it maybe whitewashed, and then she put that out of her mind and followed him from the room, a place she suspected she had defiled for him merely by her presence there.

07
     
    THEY WALKED, EACH OF THEM KEEPING WATCH in the way every citizen had learned to keep watch. It was like breathing after a while: you were only aware of your own constant vigilance when you stopped. By now Cass doubted whether there was anyone alive in California who hadn’t seen a Beater. And seeing one, even once, was enough to change you forever.
    “You know about Rolph,” Dor said after a while.
    Cass nodded. Everyone knew about Rolph, a quiet man who’d arrived a few weeks back, traded everything in his meager pack for a bottle of cheap rum, drank it fast and stumbled out of the Box at dusk to piss on a wall across the street. For reasons no one would ever know, he wandered the wrong way; even drunk, his screams carried far into the Box half an hour later.
    “There’s going to be more like him. A lot more.”
    “Some people say it’s going to be better now that the days are getting shorter. You know, because there’s less daylight.”
    “Don’t believe it.”
    Cass didn’t, though she knew why people clung to that particular hope. In the early stages of the disease, right after the initial fever, the pupils began to shrink, and kept on shrinking until, by the time the thing that used to be human was chewing its own flesh off, those eyes let in only a tiny amount of light. Beaters were blind when the sun went down, clumsy at dawn and dusk. Even at high noon you’d sometimes see them staring up at the sky as though they were trying to absorb all the light they could, as though they couldn’t get enough, as though they would swallow down the entirety of the sun if they could.
    On a recent sleepless night, Cass’s restive mind had spun a dream-image of the sun sinking down to the earth. The great golden globe came to rest in a field, and the Beaters stopped what they were doing and ran toward it, throwing themselves at it—at its trillions of watts of light—swarming with the same fevered passion that they attacked the living.
    Their hunger was insatiable. A Beater feasting on its victim made sounds of such sensual release that they almost sounded sexual; a Beater denied would throw itself against walls and fences until it bled, unmindful of the pain in its longing and need. In Cass’s dream, the Beaters—all the Beaters in the world—raced toward the light, plunging into the million degrees of the fire, flaming and dying in the ecstasy of their need. They were incinerated to nothing, their bones burned to powder that floated away on brilliant flames, the sun flickering only for a moment before it blazed down again as it had for all time.
    If only.
    But even then it would not be over. Because as long as the blueleaf strain of kaysev grew, as long as some citizen somewhere mistook the furled and tinted leaves for the ordinary kaysev and ate it, more would be infected, and more would die.
    “Here’s what you have to understand, Cass,” Dor said. “People believe what they want to believe. They always have, and they always will. They want to believe the Beaters will go away. So the mind keeps coming up with ways. You’ve probably heard as many theories as I have.”
    She had: the Beaters would age out. They would turn on each other. The first hard freeze would kill them. They would go to the ocean, like lemmings, a plague of them following the summons of God.
    Still, Dor’s cynicism