After Life | Book 1 | After Life Page 16

  “What’s up?” Andy asked Roger, as the older man and his son exited their vehicle.

  Roger shook his head. “Damned if I know where that Wal-Mart is. Passengers didn’t. I’m assuming you don’t. Not sure that’s exactly what we want to be aiming for.”

  Andy nodded. He was right; Roger didn’t have any greater Cape Cod navigational skills than Andy himself did.

  “What does that mean, Daddy?” Celia said. “Where do we go?”

  “Towns,” Stacy said. “Anywhere with a ‘Safe Place’ sign.”

  “‘Safe Place’?” Roger echoed.

  “My mom told me about them,” Stacy said. “It’s, like, a diamond-shaped yellow sign. Picture of a shadow person holding a smaller shadow person. Something like that.”

  The teacher finally stepped out of his seat in the vehicle. He poked his head above the roof of the car, resting his left arm on it and his right on the door.

  “Those signs?” he said. “They’re old, hon. Used to post them at McDonald’s and such. To show kids where they could go if they were lost or something. Not very helpful nowadays, I’d suppose.”

  This time, it was Stacy’s turn to shoot the teacher a withering look. “I’m not, like, guessing, Mr. Lowensen. It’s a government thing. They decided a few years back that it didn’t make sense to ID a place for lost kids when kids barely ever leave their house.”

  “So they re-appropriated it for another kind of ‘Safe Place’?” Andy said, impressed. “Clever.”

  Stacy nodded. “Yeah. They didn’t, like, publicize it, but the signs now mark government places, ones that are protected and secure in case of an outbreak.”

  “Never heard anything about that,” the teacher said.

  “Wouldn’t make any sense to tell everyone,” Andy said. “Then anyone who finds themselves out and lost would go there.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “If ten people show up?” Andy said. “Probably nothing. If ten thousand? Then one of two things happens: you let in the people you are supposed to—officials, scientists, I don’t know—and ten thousand others force their way in. Or you close out the ten thousand, and the five people who are supposed to get in don’t. You’ve got to make sure the people who should be there can be there. Same reason we never knew the truth about Area 51.”

  “Right,” Stacy said. “They figure people who know about them have a reason to know about them. So if we can find one of those Safe Place signs, there’s at least a chance they’ll let us in.”

  “Sounds like an idea, at least,” Andy said. He wasn’t sure how much of an idea it was, as it basically amounted to “go look for a yellow diamond sign in the world,” but it was a better idea than anything else he, or they, had.

  Andy opened the trunk of his car. Pushing aside a small case that carried his extra ammo, Andy pulled back a plastic container that held as many granola bars as he had been able to store. He removed a handful, passing them out to the group at large.

  Lowensen tore into his granola bar with vigor, showing he had been just as hungry as Andy and young Travis.

  Stacy continued talking between bites of her own granola bar. “I don’t really know where they are, but Mom said you could find them in most towns of any kind of size.” She looked down the street into Barnstable. “I have no idea if this is big enough.”

  “I don’t guess it can hurt to look,” Roger said.

  “I agree,” Andy said. He turned to the small town before him and considered the options. As he looked, without thinking about it, Andy walked forward a half-dozen or so steps, putting some distance between him and the rest of the group.

  Roger followed him and, once the two men were out of easy earshot, inquired of Andy, “So what are you thinking?”

  Andy didn’t answer for a moment, thinking back to 2010. There had been a time during that outbreak, not five days into it, when he had been on the run, trying to find a place to stay. He had been driving, searching, and had passed through what remained of Youngstown, Ohio. Terrified of stopping, slowing down for even a second, Andy sped through the city, never slowed down once, and stayed on the run for the entirety of the 2010 outbreak.

  Years later, Andy had met a man, Laron Bradshaw, who lived a couple of houses down from Celia and him. Bradshaw, it turned out, had found a place to hole up during 2010, hadn’t had any of the constant panic Andy had felt. Bradshaw’s biggest worry, he said, had been whether he’d run out of canned soda and have to resort to flavorless water.

  Andy, of course, had asked Bradshaw where he had found this magical safe place with no worries, and the man had told him that he had found it… in Youngstown, Ohio. Apparently, Bradshaw said, they had barricaded themselves inside some sort of convenience store on what he called “the main drag.” They had even—and this was the part that stuck with Andy—put out signs alerting passersby to the secure location.

  “We had plenty,” Bradshaw had said. “There were six of us in there, but we could have kept twenty safe. If they’d come to the door? We’d have let them in.”

  Of course, Andy never knew for sure if he had actually driven past a safe place, a secure location that would have kept them from most of the horrors they saw over the next few months. It was always possible he had merely been on a different road in Youngstown, that Bradshaw overstated the size and obviousness of the sign, that there really hadn’t been any way for Andy to have found that hideout.

  On the other hand, Andy knew that car travel, while safer, also meant faster movement, which meant the risk of missing something like a small, diamond-shaped yellow sign. And despite himself, and despite the obvious risks, Andy found himself almost itching to be on foot, carrying his gun, looking for zombies again. He felt like the castaways of Gilligan’s Island, who couldn’t make it in the real world and had to go back. Maybe, Andy thought briefly, shooting zombies was what he was supposed to do. It certainly suited him more than being a homebody.

  “I think,” he started, “that driving through the city is asking to miss something. Those signs aren’t exactly billboards. I think we need to explore on foot.”

  Roger nodded. “I can’t argue with you,” he said. He pulled out his gun as a reflex and looked down the street.

  “Not you,” Andy said. “You stay here.” At the man’s curious look, Andy went on. “I’m not even close to sure about this plan, Mr. Stone. And I’m not about to bring my daughter, your son, a whole group of children into a downtown area without any means of quick escape. They’re staying at the cars. And I need someone to stay with them. Lowensen? Carla? Neither one is in any shape to care for themselves in this world, let alone my daughter. The other woman with you, what’s her name?”

  “Amanda,” Roger said, nodding back to the athletic mother from his vehicle.

  “Right,” Andy continued. “Amanda. She seems like she’s capable enough, but I know I’d feel much safer if you stayed here.”

  Roger nodded again. “Very well,” he said, then turned back to look at their motley group. “Do you want to take anyone with you? A solo search seems… unwise.”

  Andy agreed with that. He didn’t think there was ever a reason in the world of zombies to go anywhere alone. “You’re right. I’ll need some company. But not my daughter. And not your son. Travis and Carla are both still rather shell-shocked from their incident with the Guardsmen, I’d say. I’m afraid I’ll need Stacy, in case I need to name-drop her and her mother if I find a place. And, much as it pains me to say it, I suppose I’ll need Lowensen. Just to have the warm body. I’ll bring Amanda as well. The more adults on my end, the better.”

  With that, the two men returned to the group at large.

  “Lowensen, Stacy, Amanda,” Andy said. “I’ll need the three of you. We’re heading into the city to search, and I’ll need the help.”

  Stacy and the athletic woman nodded, but Barry shrunk back briefly. When the gazes of the others in the group hit him, though, he nodded and put his brave face back on.

&n
bsp; “The rest of you,” Andy said with his authoritative voice, “Stay here. We need to search on foot, but if you see or hear anything that makes you uneasy, you go. Take the cars, pick us up if you can, but don’t put yourselves at risk. We aren’t important enough for that. No need to kill yourselves if we’re going to die regardless.”

  At those words, Andy saw the teacher make another false start, but he caught himself. Standing beside the other car, Amanda’s son looked terrified at the prospect, but his mother didn’t seem afraid.

  The four, weapons in hand, headed down the street into the city, Andy looking right, Stacy and Amanda looking left. Lowensen faced straight, looking like he was two seconds away from vomiting.

  They walked down the equivalent of about three blocks without incident. Once, Andy glanced behind them and saw that the group was watching their every move.

  “We need to turn,” Andy said. “Just to get six pairs of eyes off our backs.”

  “Is that wise?” Lowensen asked. “To leave the main road?”

  “They’re all main roads,” Andy said. “And I don’t see any reason why this road is more likely to have a safe house than any other.”

  As the two men argued, Stacy turned left, onto a decent-sized side street. Amanda and Andy, with no reason not to, followed suit, and the teacher hurried to keep up.

  “You really think they’ll have a safe place here?” Lowensen said. “Barnstable is hardly the capital of anything.”

  “Mom always told me,” Stacy said, her eyes still on the left-side sidewalk and storefronts, “that they tried to put safe houses in towns of any kind of reasonable size. Even if they were unmanned, she said, they put in resources, food and stuff, just in case, for important people who needed to be safe. So I don’t know if there’s a safe place in Barnstable, but I don’t know why there wouldn’t be.”

  “If we find one, then what?” Amanda asked. Her voice was deep, surprisingly authoritative. “We just make ourselves at home?”

  “If we can, that’s exactly what we do,” Andy said. “I can’t tell you how much I’d like to just make myself at home somewhere.”

  The three of them made it another handful of blocks down without incident. Up ahead, Andy noticed that the road they were on seemed to be leaving the city proper, and so he motioned for the four of them to turn right down another decent-sized road.

  He almost decided against the road when he saw two bodies lying face-down in the street. Both had large pools of blood around them, but other than that, Andy saw no reason for fear. These clearly were not bodies that were likely to rise again.

  “There!” Stacy said, once they were heading that direction.

  Andy followed the direction the girl was pointing. About fifty feet down, on the left, barely visible in the coming darkness, Andy saw the tell-tale small yellow sign they had been looking for, just behind three cars parked on the street—the only three cars that Andy had noticed in town. Almost smiling, he hurried to it as quickly as he could.

  The sign was mounted just to the left of a small door that looked like it would have been the innocuous entrance to an upstairs apartment. It had no storefront, no labeling, not even a buzzer. It was just a door, with nothing other than the small sign to set it apart. Andy liked that—any safe house would likely be designed to blend in as much as possible. Just before he got to it, though, Andy heard a terrifying sound. From somewhere inside the supposed “safe place,” three shots rang out.

  Andy stopped, frozen in place. Behind him, the others did the same. None of them was sure what to make of the gunshots, but Andy knew it wasn’t good. In short, he didn’t know what he was looking at, but he no longer thought it was a “safe place.”

  For almost a minute, the four stared at the door, no one moving. Just as Andy started to move toward it again, if only to investigate what had been doing the shooting, the small door was flung open and a man collapsed through the doorway.

  Andy held his gun out, ready to shoot who or whatever was in front of him, and watched as the body lay there for a moment. Finally, though, it struggled to its feet, facing 90 degrees away from there. It shuffled a foot or so, dragging one leg behind it, before Andy realized who he was looking at.

  The body struggling in front of him, the man who hadn’t yet noticed the people pointing their guns at him, was none other than the dead-legged man from Morgan College in Hyannis.

  “Hey!” Andy called, drawing his attention. He turned toward them, and froze, squinting as though he couldn’t believe the four people he was seeing were really there.

  “What…?” he started, confused. “How did you…?” He stopped again and shook his head. “They aren’t safe!” he finally cried out, in obvious anguish, and sat back on the sidewalk, his back against the wall.

  “What do you mean?” Amanda said. “Where is your family?”

  At the mention of his family, Dead Leg wailed wordlessly, and Andy had a sinking feeling that his family was inside the supposed safe place, being anything but safe.

  “They aren’t safe!” the man repeated. “Not safe! They were supposed to be safe!”

  “Hey!” Andy said, stowing his gun and grabbing the man’s shoulders. “Hey! Calm down and tell me what happened.”

  For two full minutes, the man was incapable of speech, just shaking his head and occasionally whispering, “Not safe.” Finally, though, he looked at the group around him.

  “I got bitten,” he said, his voice dull.

  Instinctively, Andy stepped back and pulled his gun back out.

  “Don’t shoot!” the man wailed. “I know I’m done. But don’t shoot me. Let me do it myself. Please.” The man sounded desperate that they let him end his life himself, and so Andy did not pull his own trigger. Nonetheless, he stood a good ten feet away, and made sure his charges were even further.

  “Tell me what happened,” Andy said again, hoping Dead Leg could get his story out while he was still capable.

  “We didn’t have anything,” the man said, like it was preposterous to think otherwise. “Our house was barren. Couldn’t have made it three weeks, let alone three months. We left the school, we set straight out for a safe place. Set out looking for a yellow sign somewhere, anywhere. Turns out there aren’t any in Hyannis. None we could find, at least.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell us about the safe place?” Lowensen asked.

  The man gave the teacher an icy look. “We weren’t supposed to be there,” he said. “I thought maybe a few of us, they’d let us in. But I bring 50-some people from a school? I might as well have locked the doors with us outside myself.”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, though. Try as we might, we couldn’t find a sign in Hyannis. So we tried Barnstable. Thought we’d get lucky.” He looked at the door he had just exited. “I guess we did,” he said with a bitter laugh. “Found this place.”

  “So what happened?” Andy asked. “A zombie had gotten in?”

  The man nodded. “Somehow. No living soul in that building. At first, we didn’t think there was a dead soul either. We get in there, there’s nothing in sight but floors and walls. Then my son’s roommate went into a bathroom. I heard a scream. Next thing I know, three come out of that bathroom. Two zombies and the boy. Three zombies. Before I can do so much as grab my gun, my boy gets bit.”

  The man had to stop again as he told of his son’s death before going on again. “Another one comes out from the women’s room, grabs me. Doesn’t get a bite, but makes me drop my goddamn gun. My wife and I hole up in some side room, looked like a doctor’s office waiting room. We’re hiding in there, what, a half hour? Thought I had barricaded the door, but suddenly the whole lot of them just… broke the damn thing in. We couldn’t keep them out.”

  By this point in the story, the man was breathing heavily, and Andy noticed he had broken out in a hellacious sweat that was the tell-tale sign of the fever taking hold. He knew the man didn’t have much longer.

  “They forced their way in,” t
he man continued. “Tried to fight them off, but this damn leg… I couldn’t do it. They got my wife. I tried to get out, but damn things bit my arm.” As he spoke, the man rolled up his left shirt sleeve to show a bloody bite mark just below the elbow. “Made it to my gun, shot off the ones on my tail. But couldn’t save myself. Couldn’t save my family.”

  The man fell into wordless sobs as he finished his story. Andy glanced at his charges. Amanda had tears streaming down her face. Barry stood emotionless, shell-shocked. Stacy had lowered her gun and was hugging her waist protectively, and Andy again worried that the girl couldn’t handle all of this.

  After another moment, the man let out two pained breaths and continued. “Worst fucking part?” he said. “There’s no goddamn food in there. Nothing. ‘Safe place,’ my ass. Just as bad as the school. Might as well’ve been my house, all the good it woulda done. Whoever said we’d have somewhere to go didn’t know his head from his ass.”

  At those words, Andy’s heart sunk again. He had been planning, once Dead Leg’s story ended and the man died, to continue into the safe place. The man had shot what sounded like three zombies, leaving some still in the building, but Andy thought his group could still take control and hole up there, especially if they were armed with the knowledge of the zombies and couldn’t be surprised. But if there was no food? No supplies? He didn’t know where they were going, but the “safe place” was no longer it.

  “You did all you could,” Andy said, trying to console the man.

  “All I could,” he said, not sounding at all consoled. “That’s what I told myself after 2010. Lost my family then, too. Seems like all I can do ain’t too goddamn much.” He looked at the four of them, tears flowing freely. “I wish you folks the best,” he said.

  With that, the man with the dead leg pulled his gun out and raised it to his head.

  “Wait!” Lowensen cried out.

  The man glared at the teacher.