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  Life After Life

  Three Furies Press, LLC, United States

  Copyright © 2020

  Cover credit: Rebekah Jonesy

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information contact

  Three Furies Press, LLC

  30 N Gould St

  Sheridan, WY 82801

  (509) 768-2249

  ISBN ebook: 978-1-950722-77-8

  ISBN print: 978-1-950722-78-5

  First Edition: May 2021

  Part 1: Plan for Survival

  Chapter One: The Right Answer

  Chapter Two: Stay Forever

  Chapter Three: Turn It Off

  Chapter Four: Rearview Mirror

  Chapter Five: Worse Problems

  Chapter Six: Half A Second

  Chapter Seven: Fog

  Chapter Eight: Calm

  Chapter Nine: Rational

  Chapter Ten: Decision

  Part 2: Regrets Only

  Chapter One: Mistakes

  Chapter Two: The Bridge

  Chapter Three: Part Friends

  Chapter Four: Something Else We Can Do

  Chapter Five: Injury

  Chapter Six: Route

  Chapter Seven: How Things Were Supposed To Be

  Chapter Eight: Rovers

  Chapter Nine: Humanity

  Chapter Ten: Ammunition

  Part 3: The Power of People

  Chapter One: One Good Plague

  Chapter Two: Selfish

  Chapter Three: Speed Bump

  Chapter Four: Terminal

  Chapter Five: Dreams

  Chapter Six: Traffic

  Chapter Seven: First Date

  Chapter Eight: Giving Up

  Chapter Nine: Somewhere To Go

  Chapter Ten: Screwed Up

  Part 4: Pride Goeth Before a Fall

  Chapter One: One Deadly Sin

  Chapter Two: Ain’t She Sweet

  Chapter Three: Abandoned

  Chapter Four: Milling Around

  Chapter Five: Food

  Chapter Six: A Little Optimism

  Chapter Seven: Smiling Through It

  Chapter Eight: Step One

  Chapter Nine: Survivor

  Chapter Ten: Believe

  Part 5: Life After Death

  Chapter One: A Boat Ride In The Apocalypse

  Chapter Two: Fault

  Chapter Three: The Switch

  Chapter Four: Death Trap

  Chapter Five: Sorry

  Chapter Six: Blood

  Chapter Seven: Imagination

  Chapter Eight: Any ideas?

  Chapter Nine: Giving Up

  Chapter Ten: Over

  About the Author

  From Three Furies Press:

  Life After Life

  Daniel Kelley

  Part 1: Plan for Survival

  Chapter One: The Right Answer

  2023

  The beach was empty despite the fact that it was a gorgeous day. It was sunny and 70-something degrees with a light breeze that kept everything comfortable. The waves lapped up on the white sand along the shoreline slowly, sounding like a giant seashell had been put up to the world’s ear.

  The only thing missing from the idyllic setting was people, as the beautiful day was being enjoyed by no one. The waves gently hit the shore over and over, each progressing further than the last as the tide rose. A seagull hopped along the shore in search of detritus, but flew away when the search proved futile.

  For a while, the setting remained unchanged, with the only difference being the rising water line. Finally, the sound of a rattling car motor on the approach rose above the sound of the waves. It grew closer until the car pulled to a stop on the gravel-and-dirt roadway just beyond the overgrown grassline.

  It was an aged Camry, beigeish, unremarkable, with two occupants. There was a middle-aged man in the front seat, his hands clenched at 10-and-2 and his knuckles white. In the back seat on the passenger side was an adolescent girl, maybe 13. She was sitting up in her seat and craning her neck to look over the dashboard, making her look years younger than she actually was.

  The girl had blonde hair pulled back in a ragged ponytail, with a pale blue tank top and loose-fitting shorts. In her left hand, she had a tight grip on a small bag with beach toys, suitable for children younger than her — colorful shovels and buckets, molded plastic shapes for sand castles, a little plastic purple rake. She had her right hand on the door handle even before the car pulled to a stop, and was jumping from the backseat before the man had managed to kill the engine. She started a quick trot through the grass before he, shaking his head, climbed out of the car himself and called to her.

  “Celia!” he called, drawing the girl to a halt. “Wait just a moment.”

  The man tossed his car keys into the seat and popped the trunk. Once back there, he pulled out a handgun which he tucked into a holster he wore on his jeans. He pushed aside a plastic container full to overflowing with meal-replacement bars and pulled forward another, smaller box. From that, he removed two coils of bright yellow rope and a college-ruled notebook.

  A handful of yards away, Celia watched, bouncing on her toes. Her body was still directed toward the beach, with only her head turned to monitor the man’s progress. When he had thrown the coils of rope over his arm and tucked the notepad under his other, she finally spoke up. “Come on, Dad,” she said, her voice pleading. “Hurry up!”

  Her father smiled and shook his head again, then closed the trunk. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to the beach.” Celia turned to run along again. “Not too fast!” her father cautioned. “I don’t want you more than 20 or 30 feet from me.”

  Celia stopped again, letting out as big a sigh as her adolescent self could muster. She started plodding along, her flip-flops dragging in the sand/grass mix. Suddenly, behind her, her father started trotting faster, moving quietly as he advanced on his daughter.

  In her sullenness, she didn’t hear him until he was almost to her. Celia turned just as her father reached out to her, when he lightly swatted her basket of toys and trotted past his daughter.

  “Race ya!” he said, laughing.

  Celia returned the laugh, then burst into a run to track her father down. He was clearly running at less than full speed, and she caught and passed him in a matter of a few feet.

  The two ran together all the way down to the sand, some 30 feet from the water. Celia stopped suddenly, staring out at the water with astonishment. Her father caught up a second later, and put his arm on his daughter’s shoulder, pulling her into a sideways mini-hug as she stared at the water.

  “It’s … it’s so …” she started, then stalled.

  “So what?”

  She broke her trance with the water and looked up at him. “Blue?” she said, her voice unsure. “I don’t know. It’s amazing!”

  Her father nodded. “It is,” he said. “When I was a kid, I used to love going to the ocean. It’s not like anything else. The lake back home? This puts that to shame.”

  “Then why have we never come here before?” Celia asked.

  That snapped her father out of his own trance. He pulled his arm down from Celia’s shoulder and started walking around thei
r area with purpose. He scanned the horizon, taking in all the nothingness around them. As he moved, Celia put down her toy bucket and pulled out a towel from the bottom, spilling her toys onto the sand. She unfolded the towel — it was little more than a bath towel, maybe big enough for each of them to sit on if they didn’t mind close quarters — and stretched it on a plot of sand near where they had stood. She moved the bucket onto one corner of the towel and gathered a few nearby rocks, placing them on the other corners.

  Almost immediately, the breeze moved the too-small rocks aside and blew the towel askew, so Celia sighed and laid it back out. This time, she defiantly placed the toy bucket in the middle, as though daring the wind to take the towel anywhere.

  The wind suitably shamed, she ran over to her father, who had gone some 20 feet away and was stretching one of the bits of rope from the water up toward the grassline. Celia pulled the notebook from under his arm and started flipping through the pages. When he had finished with that length of rope, the man moved about the same distance from the towel on the other side and marked out a similar space, turning their small area of beach into a near-square, about 40 feet on a side.

  “Now,” he said, turning back to his daughter. “Do you think you’re ready?”

  Celia’s head snapped up from the notebook. “Yeah,” she said.

  Celia’s father retrieved the pad from her grasp. With her at his heels, he led the way back to their blown-around towel as he flipped to a page. He pored over a handful of entries on the page before finding one that apparently suited him. “You’re at the beach,” he started, adopting a professorial, pop-quiz tone. “You are alone, and all you have is your beach toys. Suddenly, surfacing from the water, you see three zombies. They are not at their peak of health, but they are still zombies, and still moving fast enough that you can’t be sure you’ll make it to your car. What do you do?”

  At the mention of zombies in the water, Celia had turned to face the ocean, as though her father were narrating events as they were happening. She squinted toward the sea as he finished, then looked to her right and left, up and down the shoreline. Finally, something seemed to occur to her, and she smiled.

  “Can I back up the time a little?” she asked, reaching down to her bucket and pulling out a kid’s bright yellow shovel.

  “How do you mean?” her father asked.

  As an answer, Celia took her shovel down toward the water, about two-thirds of the way between her father and the advancing waves. She moved toward one of the ropes, stopping just shy of it. There, she knelt to the ground and quickly dug out a hole, a foot or so deep and a couple feet wide.

  With her hole dug, Celia moved a couple feet diagonally from it and dug another hole of virtually equal size. As her father watched with curiosity, she continued this pattern from one rope to the other, taking some twenty minutes. When she had finished, she had created a zig-zag line of holes all the way across their section of beach, a dividing line between them and the water.

  Celia returned to her father, looking confident. He, in turn, appeared to have figured out her gambit only a few minutes earlier, but simply nodded and said, “Explain.”

  Celia pointed toward her line of holes. “First thing I’d do at the beach, before any Z’s arrived,” she said, “is that. Z’s that come for me from the water will have to pass that line. If there are only three, there’s a good chance that trips them up for a minute, giving me time to get back to my car. Even if one makes it through upright, I’ve increased my chances.”

  Her father looked down at her line of holes as she spoke. Finally, he nodded his approval. “And if there are a dozen zombies?” he asked.

  The girl’s smile faded. “Twelve zombies coming out of the water all at once, when I didn’t know they were coming? How could that happen?”

  “I don’t know,” her father said matter-of-factly. “Do you feel confident enough that it couldn’t?”

  She shrugged and turned to look at her zig-zag line again. She looked down at the shovel still in her hand and then back to the line, as though she were wondering how many holes would be necessary to protect her from a larger assault. Finally seeming to decide that was fruitless, she rifled through her bucket for any other alternative.

  “I don’t have a gun?” she asked, though she knew the answer. “I’d always have a gun. Extra ammo in my pocket. Just like you always said.”

  Her father shook his head. “Not this time. Just your toys, and only a question mark of whether you’ll make it to your car.”

  Defeated, Celia sat on the little patch of towel that was still available to her after the wind. “I’m not sure,” she said with the tone of voice of one who wasn’t used to defeat. She looked down at the towel, playing with a frayed corner. “What’s the answer?”

  “No idea,” her father said. Surprised, Celia looked up at him. “Truth be told, I wasn’t sure what the answer was to my first question. Yours wasn’t bad at all.”

  “So, you just …”

  “You need to know,” he said, sitting down beside her on the towel, “that there isn’t always an answer. Sometimes, the Z’s come, and the best you can do is the best you can do. That situation, I’d probably hightail it to the car and hope. Carry the bucket, hope a smack from it would at least slow down the speedier Z’s, even if a plastic bucket like that wouldn’t kill any of them. But honestly? I’d run and hope.”

  “Then why’d you ask?” Celia asked with the annoyed tone of a teenager.

  “Just what I said,” her father replied. “You’re smart, Celia. Very smart. You’ll be able to figure out what to do in most situations. But I don’t want you cocky, thinking you’ll always think your way out of it. Sometimes there just isn’t an answer. You just run and hope.

  “But,” he added, kneeling by her side, “what is always the main goal in a world of Z’s?”

  “You run until you don’t have to run anymore,” Celia said.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means you find somewhere to be. As long as you’re out there, you can get caught. An impenetrable door never gets bitten.”

  Her father nodded. “That’s the right answer. You ever find yourself somewhere the zombies can’t enter, you stay there as long as you can. And Celia, if they return, I’ll always be with you. Until I’m not. One thing I learned in 2010 is that you can’t be sure of anything for a long time. People come and go. You protect who you can, but you be ready to move on if you must.”

  He stood up and looked down at the water, then at the line of holes his daughter had dug. Finally, the man looked to his left and right, beyond their rope enclosure. Seeming satisfied the beach was still theirs — still empty — he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, smiling at his daughter. “Test is over. Go play.”

  Chapter Two: Stay Forever

  2030

  Things had stagnated in the old Wal-Mart building in Hyannis. After they had finished their modest meals, it had gone silent in the large room in the center. Celia Ehrens sat on the edge of the group — Simon Stone, Stacy Crane, Michelle Rivers, Brandon, whose last name Celia realized she didn’t even know — with Simon’s hand never leaving her arm. She hadn’t spoken since her dad’s death.

  There’s a chasm, she realized, between knowing someone could be gone at any time in a zombie world as her dad had always stressed, and having it thrown in her face. And it wasn’t like her father had been bitten; his death had come at the hands of a selfish human. That only made things worse.

  Celia was staring at the scene where her father’s body still lay. But she wasn’t looking at his body; she was looking at Vince’s. Andy Ehrens had taught Celia how to survive in the world of zombies; how to find a place to stay, avoid Z’s, hide, all of that. And sure, he had taught her how to use a gun. But Celia hadn’t even managed to make herself use her weapon on a zombie until she had shot Vince.

  Had she flipped a switch with that shot? Would Celia now be able to shoot any zombies that crossed her path in t
he future? She really didn’t know. But she knew that when she shot Vince, he hadn’t posed any immediate threat to her. He had been stabbed, basically incapacitated. She wasn’t acting in self-defense; she was getting retribution. Warranted retribution, sure, but it was still just revenge.

  It wasn’t the most intimidating crew she had wound up with. Her father had led the group, but he was dead. Barry Lowensen had cast himself as a leader, and while he turned out to be a fraud, he had at least survived on the outside long enough in the first zombie outbreak 20 years earlier to be a source of knowledge. He was dead too. Michelle’s friend Donnie had died when they entered the Wal-Mart. Roger Stone hadn’t even made it that far.

  So they were down to five. Celia knew she had been well taught, but it was all words, and she knew she had hesitated more than once over the last day-plus. Brandon was an enigma. He had barely spoken the whole time. But he didn’t strike Celia as particularly capable. Stacy was smart and determined, but scared and — obviously the biggest deal — pregnant. Not very pregnant, not showing, but pregnant. Even if she were the most accomplished person possible for the world they found themselves in, her mindset wasn’t anywhere near to where it needed to be. Simon was taught at least as well as Celia, maybe better, but was still a stranger to this world. All four of them had lost a parent since everything started.

  And then there was Michelle, Stacy’s stepmom, the only one left who had lived through 2010 and had real hands-on experience to offer. She was fine, but she hardly seemed as take-charge or sure of herself as Celia’s dad had been. And even if she were, she only accounted for 20% of their crew. All in all, Celia was glad they didn’t have anywhere else they had to go.

  “Do you think there are any more coming?” Stacy asked Michelle, breaking Celia out of her trance. “Any more zombies that heard the commotion and moved this way?”

  Again, no one spoke for a moment. Suddenly, Simon jumped up, gun in hand, and hurried out of the inner sanctum, leaving the way the Camp Edwards soldiers and their families had earlier. Celia saw him turn toward the rear door. Seconds later, she heard a slam that indicated Simon had pulled that door shut. Just after that, he came hustling past the opening again, heading toward the front door.