Free Survivors by Sophie Littlefield

At first glance, everyone thought he was a girl. It was the hair—so long and glossy that even disheveled and dirty and badly cut you wanted to touch it, brush it, braid it—and those beautiful wide brown eyes with the impossibly long fringe of lashes.
    The presence of a child—Cass’s daughter, Ruthie, was the only other one, and she almost didn’t count, being barely three and not having the words to describe the world’s new horrors—this had a discomfiting effect on people.
    And the old woman wasn’t dead, though she looked it. Her mouth was slack and flies buzzed around her eyes. It was Faye who carried her, walking in a crouching gait to minimize the jouncing, but still the old woman’s head and limbs swayed and joggled in the raider’s arms. Her hair was thin, her skin slack and pouchy.
    Cass watched along with the others when they carried the two squatters in, nearly unconscious from dehydration and exhaustion. The boy had been keeping vigil next to his grandmother when they found him. At that point he was so weak and so tired that he didn’t hear the raiders come in, didn’t panic and bolt even when they came up the stairs. Even though it could have been anyone, human or inhuman, the boy hadn’t left the stinking befouled mattress where she lay.
    Hastings used one of his few remaining saline bags and a precious needle on the grandmother, but, given the boy’s youth they took a chance, forcing him to sip water and nibble at kaysev cakes. A good gamble—within hours, his milky eyes cleared and his color returned and he plowed through the snack packs of crackers and nuts donated by the Box’s merchants. This really was the best treatment anyone could hope for Aftertime.
    While this was going on, people wandered past the cinder-block medical cottage with greater frequency than usual, not lingering but flicking glances at the narrow windows set high in the rough walls before continuing on their way to the comfort tents or the merchant stalls or the worn walking path around the perimeter of the Box.
    The Box was a haven for addicts, for people seeking oblivion, for shysters and sharks and whores. It was a place where you could buy anything that Aftertime grudgingly offered, except hope. What role could a boy of seven or eight have in such a place?
    As the afternoon wore on, Cass worked in the raised garden beds with Ruthie playing nearby on a quilt spread over the earth. It was warm for late September—Indian summer, they used to call it—and people came out of the tents and sheds and milled around in the common areas, near enough that Cass could hear their voices, carried on the wind, and sense their collective restlessness, waiting for the spoils of the raid to be sorted and catalogued and distributed to the merchants. Waiting to barter and buy. Or, for those with nothing to trade, just to look, to wish, to covet. There was little enough in the way of entertainment to be found.
    Cass remembered a book she’d read in elementary school, about a girl who lived in a long-ago Western frontier town next to a railroad. Twice a week the train would stop, and the townspeople would leave off what they were doing and come to watch the passengers who left the cars to stretch their legs, to catch a glimpse of the belongings they carried with them and imagine where they might be going, who they might meet at the other end of their journey. It was the girl’s only contact with the world outside the town, a notion that had stunned Cass. Cass, whose own father left for weeks at a time to travel the West Coast with his band, and sent her postcards from Canada and Oregon and Mexico. Someday, when she was old enough, Cass meant to go along with her daddy and see these things for herself.
    Who could have guessed that, two decades later, she and everyone else would be as isolated as the little girl in the book?
    There were a variety of distractions on offer, drugs and alcohol scavenged and raided and even manufactured from