Survivors by Sophie Littlefield Page A

kaysev—and that made the sameness palatable for some, but Cass could not partake of the Box’s principal trade. She had had to give up drinking. She had her work in the gardens and she had her daughter and she had Smoke, and those had to be enough.
    Still, she too was lured by the promise of a spectacle, no matter how familiar. Last week the raiders brought jars of Mucinex, stool softener, glucosamine and chondroitin—a treasure trove of geriatric unguents and salves. But since most of the elderly were dead—leveled by the fever, abandoned to the Beaters, dead from suicide and stroke and heart failure—these were met with jeers. Still, the raid on a convalescent home eight miles down the road had also yielded painkillers and sleep aids, several cases of Ensure, and a dizzying variety of prescription meds. These had been locked in a pharmacy whose complex security measures had apparently fended off everyone who’d attempted to loot the place before. But Dor’s men were well armed with crowbars and sledges and lock tools—not to mention unusual levels of training and testosterone or, in Faye’s case, just plain fearlessness.
    Cass had spent the day digging invasive oxalis out of the gardens, reflecting on the irony that as the earth began to recover from the bioterror attacks that had decimated most of California’s plants, it was the weeds that were among the first to return; funny, since the toxins that had rained down on the crops during the Siege had been formulated by scientists who once worked in industrial weed abatement. Oxalis was quite pretty, as weeds went, with its shamrock-shaped leaves and tiny yellow flowers. It was also among the most difficult to control. Neglect an oxalis runner at your peril: it would send a taproot so far into the earth that pulling it carelessly meant that its root would snap and branch out and the plant would come back threefold.
    Not as bad, still, as missing a root of the blueleaf kaysev.
    Cass had an excellent angled weeding knife and a stirrup hoe that Smoke had found in a potting shed in the ritzy Festival Hill neighborhood a few miles off. She wore a tool apron tied around her waist, painter’s pants cut off midthigh in a nod to the unseasonably warm weather, her shears and a compact pruning saw hanging from the loops. But her favorite implement for weeding was an old stainless butter knife that Smoke had notched and bent for her—its blade slim enough to go deep in the earth, and its point dull enough to avoid slicing through the roots. Each time she grasped its familiar handle, it brought Smoke to mind, calming her restlessness.
    Working the ruined earth helped pass the time while she waited for news. Everyone was moved by a child, of course—how could one not be? It was true that people with children avoided the Box—its culture was hardly family friendly. Still, survivors, traumatized or drunk or stoned though they might be, could not harden their hearts in the presence of little ones.
    Feo—for that was his name, whispered from tent to tent—had the wide brown eyes that glinted gold in the firelight, and the glossy black-brown mop of hair that lay in abundant masses on his thin shoulders, that made many of the women in the Box twitch their fingers with grief-stained memories of braiding their own lost children’s hair.
    Those women turned away, bent double by the agony of their memories. They took another hit or swallow or hoarded pill.
    But Cass’s own child was safe, and as the afternoon shadows lengthened into evening, she began to wonder if she should be part of what was unfolding, if she ought to help. A mother who was not hobbled by grief—in the Box, she was the rarest of human resources. She wiped her hands and packed her tools, recited the compressed prayer of gratitude for her daughter’s safety that was a thousand words in a sigh, lifted Ruthie into her arms and went looking for the boy.
    “It’s policy.” Faye’s voice carried over the gravel