After Life | Book 2 | Life After Life Page 10

  Chapter Five: Injury

  Nathan had stood about ten yards back from the truck with the gun trained on Mickey while, per instructions, Mickey had tied Jack’s hands to the emergency handle in the passenger seat. When the job was done, Nathan opened the back door, and jumped back like he had been kicked.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, alarmed.

  Mickey was surprised himself. He had almost forgotten the unconscious girl in the backseat. “I don’t know,” he said after a minute.

  Nathan whipped his head around. “What do you mean you don’t know? You took her?”

  “No,” Mickey said quickly. “Nothing like that. She was at a friend’s house, and his house was on fire. Tried to save him and couldn’t, but got her out. Hasn’t woken up yet, don’t know anything about her.”

  Nathan nodded, considering. He rolled his injured shoulder a couple times, wincing at the pain. Finally, he nodded more forcefully. “Tie her up too,” he said.

  “Go to hell,” Jack said from his seat. “She’s nobody. She’s nothing.”

  “Then why are you arguing with me? I don’t want to have to worry about her waking up and being a problem. If she stays asleep, then she stays asleep with her hands tied behind her back.”

  Mickey didn’t like the idea of tying her up any more than Jack did, but he didn’t see that arguing would get him much of anywhere. He nodded. “Okay.” Mickey hurried around the truck and tied the girl up loosely — it wasn’t likely to matter how tight her bindings were.

  Nathan nodded, then rubbed his shoulder with his other hand, the one holding the gun. “Never been shot before,” he said.

  “You still haven’t been shot much,” Jack said. “Barely grazed you.”

  “Try it sometime,” Nathan snapped back. “Hurts like a bitch. Damn thing feels hot.”

  “Quit whining and get in the damn truck.”

  Nathan complied, climbing in the seat behind Jack. Mickey climbed into the driver's seat. As he stepped into the truck, he quickly reached into the pocket of the door and pulled out his extendable baton. He didn’t really begrudge Nathan the need for a ride to the lake, but he wanted to at least have an option if the man grew more agitated. He put the baton in his lap on the left side, where Nathan couldn’t possibly see it.

  Jack noticed, though, and Mickey saw his son smile a little. He didn’t respond, starting the truck and continuing on the road.

  “So how’d you end up in this situation?” he asked Nathan once they were moving.

  “Had towed my car to a friend’s house to fix when this all went down again. Didn’t have any transport, couldn’t find anyone to help. Thought I’d hotwire a car. Turns out it’s not as easy as old movies seemed to think.” He stopped to rub his injured shoulder again. “Then those Z’s showed up. Then you guys did.”

  “And if we get you to the lake, everything will be fine?”

  Nathan looked at Mickey for a minute, then glanced at Jack and back. “If I let you go, will you be able to keep your kid there from coming back to get back at me? Can’t say I trust him much.”

  Mickey spared a glance at Jack and saw his son seething. Nathan was right to be suspicious, and Mickey wasn’t positive he was wrong about Jack wanting to turn back, but he couldn’t say as much. “We have somewhere we need to be,” he said. “You’re already delaying us. We aren’t going to slow down more just to get payback on a man we already shot once.”

  Nathan breathed out a small laugh. He leaned back in the seat as Mickey took the left that put them toward Great Moose, and he tilted his head back as though he were tired. After a few seconds, Mickey could see his eyes close in the rearview.

  Could Nathan be falling asleep? That would make Mickey’s life much easier, as he could just reach back and take the man’s gun. He might still take the man to the lake — he had a place to go, and Mickey didn’t want to just abandon anyone to the wilderness of a zombie world — but if Mickey had his gun he wouldn’t have to take him. Mickey didn’t like being forced to do anything.

  Before he could act on the thought, though, Mickey hit a little bump in the road, and it jarred Nathan up. He looked around quickly, confused, before remembering himself, then resumed rubbing his injured shoulder.

  It really hadn’t been much more than a graze. Mickey had suffered worse injuries working around the farm, and he hadn’t milked it half as much as Nathan was. But Nathan had the look of a man who hadn’t done a lot of manual labor in his life. He looked soft, and the fact that he thought he could hotwire a car based on 20-year-old movies and TV shows didn’t bode well for his overall savvy. Mickey wasn’t in the business of judging anyone’s pain tolerance, so while he thought Nathan was reacting too strongly to his injury, Mickey couldn’t know for sure.

  Nathan was leaning back in his seat again, rubbing his shoulder and making occasional pained sounds. Mickey, still wondering if he’d have the opportunity to take Nathan’s gun or use his own baton on the man, drove along. And Jack fidgeted with the ropes binding his arms as though he were going to get loose, even though Mickey, having been the one to tie them, knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere.

  Nathan’s eyes stayed open, but his arm fell to his lap, where the gun rested. He sat in a daze for a moment, and Mickey briefly wondered if he had fallen asleep with his eyes open. He wondered it more seriously when Nathan’s head fell forward for a moment.

  That lasted only seconds, though, before Nathan lifted his head back up, much more quickly. Mickey thought the man had just been jarred awake again, until Nathan started looking around.

  It was the eyes.

  Nathan’s eyes had blanched white and gray, no longer human. If those eyes had settled on the girl in the backseat first, there wouldn’t have been much Mickey could have done, but they instead found Jack. The zombie that had been Nathan lurched forward, battling its own girth and the headrest to get to Jack.

  “Lean forward!” Mickey said, hitting the brakes and grabbing the baton. From his seat, Jack couldn’t tell what the warning was for, but he complied, diving as far forward in the front seat as he could. At the same time, Mickey extended the baton and whipped it into the zombie’s head. The two collided, and the sickening sound of cracking skull reverberated inside the truck cab. The zombie fell backward, but it hadn’t been a finishing blow. When it started moving again, it had finally found the girl’s body, and started diving to its left.

  By this time, Mickey had gotten the truck stopped, and he could turn all the way around and finish the job he had started with his first attempt. He swung his baton into the zombie’s head three more times, until he saw it open up in back. The zombie collapsed onto the girl’s legs and was still.

  The movement, though, caused the girl to stir. She only moved a little at first, in the slow process of waking up. Finally, though, she opened her eyes.

  She couldn’t move her bound arms, and in an unfamiliar truck with a body lying on her lower half, her first reaction was natural: she started screaming.

  Chapter Six: Route

  The vehicle had grown quiet since leaving the bridge. Brandon was long gone. Celia had gotten back inside. Stacy drove along. Erik and Simon were in the back.

  Michelle wasn’t doing anything. Brandon had given up. He had killed himself once he knew both his parents were dead. One of Celia’s parents had killed his mother and one of Stacy’s had killed his father. His death had helped them get away from the zombies at the guard booth, but that was hollow consolation for the death of a young man who had no reason to die.

  Still, they were on their way now and the mass of zombies at the bridge hadn’t been repeated. The small groups they had come across had been easy to avoid, and Stacy had been able to drive smoothly for a while.

  Michelle started seeing signs that told her a decision needed to be made: Boston was looming.

  “Listen,” she said, “in about 15 minutes, we’re going to be getting in toward the city.”

  “What does that mean?” Celia asked from the
back.

  “It means we need to decide our route,” Michelle said. “Through the city would be a lot faster if everything goes well, but the city means more buildings, more zombies. More risk.”

  “Our route to where?” Erik asked. “I thought we were just leaving the Cape to find a new place to stay, since everything on Cape was a dud.”

  Michelle blanched. They hadn’t told Erik what their plan was, and the man shouldn’t be forced to do what they were doing just because he was in the car. “We’re going to Bucksport, Maine,” she said.

  “Maine?” he echoed. “Why Maine?”

  “Peter Salvisa’s home,” Celia said. “We’re going to put an end to all of this.”

  “An end to it?” Erik said. “An end to what? Zombies?”

  This led to several minutes of Michelle and Celia in turn explaining to Erik how they had found out about Salvisa’s work and how they had decided to go to Maine. Erik had nodded calmly along with the story, but his mouth stayed firmly shut and in a flat line.

  “You know what I don’t understand?” he said when they got near the end of the story. “Why he left his home. He was going to just, what, move into the Stamford facility when everything was done?”

  “I’m sure he had plans,” Michelle said. “But I also think the man was losing it. He thought a long-dead Stamford employee was still there. He passed through Bristol then ended up halfway across the other end of the state. The man was scared of the sunlight. I really think Salvisa was barely holding onto his mind. He probably just had the notion that he wanted to see Lambert and the group, and he went. Doubt his brain really worked it all out.”

  Erik shook his head. From his spot in the car, Simon spoke up at last. “Miss …,” he started, and trailed off, seeming to realize he didn’t know Michelle’s last name.

  “Just call me Michelle,” she said.

  He nodded. “Michelle,” he started again, and she could tell it felt weird to him to address an adult by the first name. “Even if it’s as easy as he said, just a switch to flip, we don’t know where the switch is in his house, if we even get there. Aren’t we doing this to save as many lives as possible? If we take the long way around, more and more people will die. We might as well have just waited in Hyannis. The faster we get there, the more lives we save.”

  Near Simon, Erik shook his head. “Driving through a city to get to some crazy man’s house, and try to figure out how to turn off some … beacon, just to hope the crazy man was right and it stops everything. I’m your passenger, but let me tell you guys, this seems … well, crazy. I think you need to reconsider this.”

  “That’s all we know,” Simon said to Erik’s comments. “I don’t know if we can do it. But if we are going to, let’s face it head on. We have to go fast. We have to go through Boston.”

  Celia started nodding in the backseat. “He’s right.”

  “Is he?” Erik said. “I think this whole thing is suicide. Listen,” he said, directly to Michelle this time, “we survived this before. We don’t need to be the ones to turn it off. We can find a new place to hole up. Let’s do that, and let things run their course. It’s just a matter of waiting it out.”

  It was that line that made the decision for Michelle. Because yes, she and Erik had survived things the first time. But they had done so largely because the switch had been flipped. It hadn’t run its course, Salvisa turned off the signal. And she remembered, near the end of 2010, when she didn’t know what she’d do next. If the switch hadn’t been flipped then, maybe she wouldn’t have made it through 2010, and maybe she wouldn’t be in position to do something about it now.

  Still, even in 2030, Boston was populated. It wasn’t as crowded as it had once been, but cities never die. That meant that going through Boston would be exposing their entire vehicle to a whole host of zombies. Exposing Stacy.

  The flip side of that was, as Simon said, speed. Getting to Salvisa’s more quickly meant the risk to the world, to all of them, and to Stacy would end sooner. And maybe that was worth it.

  “Go straight,” Michelle said, and she could hear Erik sigh in the back. “We’re going through Boston.”

  Chapter Seven: How Things Were Supposed To Be

  “We need to stop,” Stacy said a few minutes after they had stayed on course for Boston.

  “What?” Michelle said with an air of disapproval. “Why?”

  “Bathroom,” she said simply. A minute later, she added, “And fuel.”

  From the backseat, Celia leaned up and peeked over Stacy’s shoulder. She was right that they were running low, but they probably had a while yet before it was a real worry. On the other hand, Celia realized the tank they had might only get them to Boston, not all the way through, and based on what everyone was saying, they didn’t want to run out of gas in the middle of a big city.

  But bathroom? Stacy had sneaked off at the Wal-Mart at least twice, and she had done so at the school more than once as well. She had used the bathroom more since they had been together than everyone else in their group combined.

  It took Celia a minute. The pregnancy. She hadn’t ever had any real exposure to a pregnant woman, but once the thought struck her, she realized that it was only natural for Stacy to need the bathroom more than the rest of them.

  Michelle, Celia noticed, didn’t question the declaration. She just started looking out the window more intently in search of a place to stop. They passed a couple of old-looking gas stations — ones that weren’t impressive but appeared to at least be functional — but Michelle didn’t seem interested.

  “Up ahead on the left,” Erik said from beside Celia. He was pointing as the vehicle approached an exit. “There’s a gas station. Clean enough, looks to be operational. This exit.”

  “No,” Michelle said firmly. “I don’t want ‘maybe-works.’ I want ‘works.’”

  “How do you know there will even be one like that?” Celia asked.

  “There will be one,” Michelle said.

  They passed a couple more exits in silence. Celia noticed Stacy was squirming, but otherwise not much changed.

  Finally, on the right side, there was a smaller off-ramp, not really an exit. It had what looked like a gas station and a rest area, and Celia noticed a row of cars on the far side parked in a row, with one open space where it seemed like a car would go.

  “There,” Michelle said, pointing toward it.

  “How do you know that’s any better than the other gas stations?” Erik asked.

  “Trust me,” Michelle said.

  Stacy nodded. “I’m going to have to,” she said, squirming some more. She took the off-ramp and parked the vehicle at the first pump she could get to. She turned the Humvee off and jumped out, hurrying inside. At a look from Michelle, Celia followed behind her.

  Celia didn’t feel the same urges for relief as Stacy, but figured Michelle was right that someone should go with her, if only for protection while she was relatively helpless in the bathroom stall. The rest area was little more than a big, blank room with unappealing blue tile on the floor and going about waist-high up the wall all the way around. On one wall on the left was a bulletin board inside a glass case that held a big road map of Massachusetts. There were some long-abandoned vending machines opposite the bulletin board. Otherwise, the place was empty, though the door opposite where Stacy and Celia entered opened out to a little park area that at least looked cared for, if not exactly full for activity.

  Celia tracked Stacy’s path into the restroom. The room had no door, just a small hallway with a pair of turns set off from the building’s large foyer. Celia hustled in, not catching up with Stacy until her roommate had already reached her destination.

  “You okay?” Celia asked when she was in the restroom area.

  “I guess,” Stacy said dully. “If you want to feel 100%, I do not recommend pregnancy.”

  Celia laughed, hoping it came off as more sympathetic than mocking. She stood outside the bathroom stall in silence for a moment, trying
to pretend things were normal. Living as she had growing up, barely ever leaving her house, and only then under her father’s direct supervision, Celia had little experience with public restrooms. Many of the features resembled her bathroom at home, of course, but Celia was particularly enthralled by the sinks. She had heard of automatically activated sinks, but had never seen one. Celia moved toward the line of three sinks and moved her hand in toward the first one.

  Nothing. It didn’t respond to her movement at all. Celia felt herself deflate a little. It was a little thing, but she had been excited to see the water turn on automatically. It would have made things more normal. The water turning on was just something that was supposed to happen, and nothing that had happened lately was what was supposed to happen.

  Annoyed, Celia moved down to the second sink and waved her hand. Success, as the faucet sprang into action. It stayed on for only a couple seconds, but she wet her hands, splashing a little. It was exciting. This was how things were supposed to be. This was how life should have been at Morgan College, getting back to a normal she had never known.

  When the water turned off after those couple seconds, Celia moved to the automatic dryer. It was the same emotion; she had a small excited feeling, like things were going right. When her hands were dry, Celia felt that her spirits had lifted, even if only a small amount. It was the tiniest thing. And then suddenly, from outside the building, she heard gunshots. Unmistakable and close.

  “What was that?” Stacy asked from inside the stall.

  Celia barely stopped long enough to answer; she was already on her way out. “They had to shoot,” she said. “Wait here.”

  The initial gunshots had been followed by a few more. Celia ran back out through the bathroom door, into the small foyer of the service area, and out to the outside. She did it without knowing what she would see, who might be shooting at what, but she did it with her gun unholstered and in her hand.