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 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.