After Life | Book 2 | Life After Life Read online

  Celia — and everyone else — knew that door was broken, not going to latch, so she imagined Simon was simply going that way to investigate, to see if they were about to have company.

  The four of them left in the room stayed there for longer than Celia would have expected for Simon to just look outside. After several minutes, just long enough for Celia to start to feel like she needed to get up and check on him, the other door — the one Celia thought Simon had already checked and closed — opened and closed.

  “What was that?” Stacy asked.

  Michelle shook her head that she didn’t know, but Celia saw her lean forward as though she were about to get up. Celia too had no idea what it meant. Simon had been around front. Had one of the Army people returned? Were their guns about to be necessary again? Or would they come across Simon first?

  Instead, after a few more seconds, the cause of the noise appeared, and it was … Simon. He came back into the center of the building, looking sweaty, breathing heavily.

  “What were you doing?” Stacy asked.

  Simon drew to a stop as he got back to the group and took a couple breaths. Finally, he spoke. “I think … I think we can make it here. Back door is shut, and I didn’t see anyone — thing — out there. Closed the door as tight as I could, seems safe.

  “The front door’s still broken,” he went on, “but I went outside and moved one of the Army guys’ cars in front of it. I don’t really see how any Z’s would get through that.”

  “What about the back door we just heard?” Stacy asked.

  Simon shook his head, as though he were embarrassed. “Once I blocked the front door, I didn’t have a way back in,” he said quietly. “I ran around the building as fast as I could. But it’s latched now. I think we’re safe.”

  With that, Simon sat back down next to Celia, and put his hand right back on her arm, as though nothing had changed. Michelle watched him, squinting like she was trying to poke a hole in his plan. Finally, she shook her head and almost smiled. “You know what?” she said. “I think you’re right.”

  Celia, meanwhile, was just staring at Simon in awe. He had gone outside? By himself, and willingly? He had risked his own safety just to protect them, and if something had happened to him they might never have found out. It was dangerous, risky, and incredibly brave.

  Stacy, right next to Michelle, leaned against her stepmother, like she had just been waiting for the moment of Michelle’s declaration that Simon was right to relax. “Mich?” she said. “How did all this happen again?”

  Celia looked up at this. Her dad, she knew, had never really known how the zombies came to be. It was part of the reason he had been so nervous Celia’s whole life. But this woman, Michelle, worked in Stamford. It seemed unlikely she had any secret knowledge — especially knowledge that Stacy didn’t have herself — but if Stacy was going to ask, Celia was going to listen to the answer.

  Michelle rubbed Stacy’s shoulder absently, staring down at the pack she still held in her lap. She rubbed her hand across a blood splatter on the top of the pack for a moment, then shook her head. “It’s complicated,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Michelle sighed. Even without knowing her, Celia could tell she was having the internal debate, just like her father used to have, about how much she wanted to, and how much she could, tell. Finally, she shook her head again.

  “I guess there’s no sense hiding it from you all,” she said. “You deserve to know. I just found out. You know Peter Salvisa? The Out Theres website? We ran into him on the interstate. Told us everything. Things no one knew before that. Turns out he’s in charge of a group, they hate … technology. Too much technology, at least. In the 2000s, they started implanting nanorobotics in newborns. Come 2010, they started sending out a signal with the nanobots. It basically … reprogrammed the brain, it turned the people into zombies. Once it was in the body, in the brain, it replicated the signal throughout the body. Transmitted via bites, blood, saliva. Insidious little thing.

  “They thought it would break the world of its obsession with technology. When that didn’t happen after 2010, they started over. That’s why you four and a few others were fine, but most of your classmates turned. They were a little bit younger than you. In 2010, they turned the signal off when they felt it had run its course. This time, apparently, they’re just going to let it play itself out. There’s no one to turn it off.”

  It was like the air had left the room, like the last available oxygen had been taken with Michelle’s last pause. If the room had been quiet before, it was now dead. Celia wasn’t sure when she had last blinked, but she didn’t feel another coming any time soon.

  It took a full minute for anything to happen, and even then it was only Brandon adjusting to find a more comfortable position for his injured ankle. Finally Michelle stood up and walked away from the group, stopping some 15-20 feet away. No one watched her go, and she didn’t look back.

  Suddenly, Stacy stood up and ran to one of the side rooms, the ones Andy had been searching when he had stumbled across Vince. She threw a door shut behind her, and the next thing the group heard was the loud retching that indicated she was vomiting. Whether it was from her pregnancy or the new revelations — or both — Celia didn’t know, but she felt like she wasn’t far from that action herself. She also wasn’t sure if that had actually been a bathroom Stacy had gone to.

  Michelle took a few steps toward the room, but stopped and let Stacy finish in private. Simon and Brandon stayed still, watching, until Stacy came out a minute later, wiping her mouth. Her other arm was still around her waist, as though her baby were due any day now, when in fact she wasn’t even showing. Brandon and Simon couldn’t even have known she was pregnant.

  “But we’re safe here?” Stacy said when she got back to the group, as though nothing had happened. “One door’s closed, the other’s blocked. They can’t get in? There’s food here, we can stay forever now, right?”

  Michelle stayed quiet again, taking measure of everything. To Celia, it looked like she was running through a mental checklist of things that could happen to them in the Wal-Mart building. Celia was doing the same. And every time she did, she came to the same answer in her head — they were safe in the building as long as the food and water held out, and if what Vince had told them was any indication, that would be a while.

  No, Simon’s idea to barricade the door, no matter how risky it had been to him at the time, had been enough to keep the place safe. In all the commotion of the earlier battle between their own group, the Army group, and the zombies, nobody had even thought up such a simple solution as Simon’s, but now it was in place, and they could hide in the Wal-Mart building as long as they wanted to.

  Michelle, it seemed to Celia, was coming to the same conclusion. As she ran through her personal internal checklist, Celia could see her getting a little more confident, a little happier with their chances. Finally, having apparently finished her list, Michelle met the group’s gaze.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We can stay here. We’re safe here.”

  Just as the other kids — Stacy, Simon, and Brandon — let out relieved sighs, Celia spoke up, her first words since her father’s death.

  “No,” she said. “We have to leave.”

  Chapter Three: Turn It Off

  Since coming across Stacy and her group at the college, Michelle had spoken almost exclusively with her stepdaughter and the group’s recently deceased patriarch. The other kids, by and large, hadn’t said much of anything.

  This girl in particular, Celia, at least had an excuse for her silence. Her father’s body was still lying only a handful of yards away from the group. She was alone like all the others but Stacy. And she had only had a matter of minutes to come to terms with it.

  Michelle wasn’t surprised to see her express a desire to leave. Even if Michelle hadn’t had Stacy to go after, she wouldn’t have wanted to stay in Stamford with Madison’s body right there. It was only natural
for Celia to want to get away from that memory. Michelle started mentally making plans for how she’d move the father’s body out of the facility, to do her best to erase the memory of it as much as possible. Maybe then the girl would be okay with staying. Because Michelle certainly didn’t want to go anywhere, and she wasn’t about to send someone out on their own, either.

  For the time being, though, before she started moving the father’s body, her focus was going to be on talking the girl down.

  “Sweetie,” she said. “We are safe in here, and we can eat for however long we need to. That’s important. That’s what we need to do. We aren’t likely to find anything better out there. I know it’s hard, and I know your dad…”

  “My dad would have insisted we stay here,” Celia said. To Michelle’s surprise, she wasn’t being loud or sounding crazy. “He would have told me I couldn’t open that door no matter what happened.”

  “So then why…?”

  “How many people know what you just told us?” Celia asked. “That the people who hate technology are behind everything?”

  “How many?” Michelle repeated. “I … have no idea. He just …”

  “He told you. But you didn’t know before that, and you worked in Stamford, right? It wasn’t commonly known. So if we know it, we can’t ignore it, can we? You said there’s no one to turn it off. What if we turn it off?”

  Simon, the young man who appeared to have special interest in this girl, piped up. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Who knows how long it will take for everything to stop on its own? Wouldn’t the world be better off if we at least try to get up there and do it ourselves?”

  “I know it’s hell out there,” Celia added, as though she knew what Michelle was going to say next. “I know that, if we try to get to where that is, there’s a good chance we’ll die. But just getting here meant …” She stopped for a minute, choking on her words. “… meant some of us had to die. Imagine how many people are in the same boat, or are still running around out there. Maybe they don’t have a Wal-Mart to go to. If we can stop this before another ten, twenty people get infected, get killed, wouldn’t that be a win?”

  Michelle considered the words. Celia had a point. On the other hand, it was not an impressive group she found herself in. Michelle wasn’t even confident in her own hand in a zombie world — she never would have made it as far as she had without Donnie and, though she was loath to admit it, Salvisa — and now her group consisted of four inexperienced kids. To top it off, one of them was injured, and another was pregnant, and they had all suffered recent losses.

  On the other other hand, though, Michelle knew that Celia was likely right; there weren’t likely to be many people who knew the story of the Anti-Techs and who were close enough to Maine to realistically even consider getting there. What if these kids were right, and the only way they could be sure of any sort of safety in the world of the zombies was to end the world of the zombies? And, as Michelle looked from one student to another and her gaze was met with sure, confident faces that seemed determined to do what they were talking about, she found herself agreeing with them.

  “You have to know,” Michelle said, “I don’t know if Salvisa was all there. The man said some crazy things. Told us that the sunlight would kill you. ‘Death follows the day,’ he said. He apparently kept the grenades I used in his kitchen pantry. I asked him where he got it and he acted like it was a crazy question. ‘The pantry. Shelf below the peanut butter.’ Like that was logical. The old man was crazy. So even if we do this, I don’t know if what he told me is correct.”

  “But it might be,” Celia said. “Doesn’t that make it our responsibility to find out?”

  Michelle thought about it a little longer. “We … can do that,” she said at last, though she knew her voice wasn’t evoking the confidence she wished it to. “We can try. I know where Salvisa’s home is in Maine. We can move that way.

  “But,” she added a moment later, after the kids started squirming about like fifth-graders getting ready for a field trip, “you guys are brave, I know that. But this is not something to be excited about. This might be suicide.”

  Stacy nodded, and the four all settled down a bit. “I don’t know everything you guys have gone through in the last 24 hours,” Michelle went on. “It’s probably been hell. But it’s been hell in a small space. If we’re doing this, we’re going to be traveling in areas that I don’t know well, that as far as I know none of you know very well. It won’t be easy. It …”

  Michelle stopped. Yes, she had lived through 2010, and these kids hadn’t. Yes, she had had to kill Preston and his coworkers at the bridge. But these kids had, from what she had heard, been through a hell of a lot more just in those last 24 hours than Michelle had during the entirety of 2010. She wanted them to be ready, to be aware of the danger, but Michelle didn’t think she needed to be lecturing them. These were adults. Young adults, inexperienced adults, but adults.

  “Tell you what,” she started again. “None of us will be worth anything without rest. Simon made sure we are safe here. I don’t need to be your parents …” she stopped, eying Celia again, “… your bosses. But I would really suggest we all get some sleep. Just a few hours, and then we can go.”

  At the group’s assent, Michelle and Stacy grabbed a spot together in one of the side rooms. Brandon limped into a room of his own, staying there for only a few seconds before exiting again and choosing a spot against the wall just outside of Michelle and Stacy’s room. Celia and Simon, meanwhile, stayed in the big space. They both lay flat on the floor about a foot apart from one another, but their hands were clasped tightly between them.

  In their little room, Michelle lay in silence as Stacy, curled up against her, drifted off. Michelle knew she needed to sleep, but she wasn’t sure she could. She had just spent the last day doing everything in her power to get to her stepdaughter and to get to safety. She had done that. And now she was agreeing to go back outside, back into danger? And with Stacy and the other young people, who hadn’t lived through it already? Michelle knew the kids were brave, but she couldn’t help but wonder where bravery stopped and stupidity began.

  Chapter Four: Rearview Mirror

  Mickey Lewis had no idea if he’d ever see his home in Skowhegan, Maine, again. He hoped his son would, though he didn’t know if Jack would want to. Not with what had happened to young Adaline.

  Mickey had gotten a phone call from a woman claiming to be from Stamford the day before. Those calls came once every few months, if Peter Salvisa was off on an errand for too long and Zach Lambert couldn’t reach him. But this woman — Madison, Mickey thought she had said — was a relatively new voice. They had spoken before, he had spoken with her assistant before, but never anything significant. She had made this request sound unimportant, but wondered if Mickey would be able to go check on Salvisa.

  He had refused. He usually refused Lambert, unless the old guy was uncommonly persistent or offered Mickey some sort of under-the-table benefit for his time. This woman, who Mickey didn’t know well, and who didn’t sound like she was desperate, didn’t even move Mickey’s needle.

  Of course, within an hour of that call the world had gone to hell. Even if Mickey had agreed to the woman’s request, he wouldn’t have made it to Salvisa’s in the time he had, let alone been able to affect any sort of change. But he couldn’t help but hear that woman’s voice in his ear when he had stepped outside and seen his granddaughter Adie, teeth gnashing, eyes blanched white, charging at him.

  Mickey had taken great pains to cultivate a life of isolation for him and his family. Since Jack’s wife’s departure, there was only him, his son, and his granddaughter. They grew the food they needed on their little plot of land, limited though Maine’s growing season was, and Mickey and Jack were good enough hunters to get their necessary meat. Sure, they had to shop on very rare occasions and there were the occasional calls from Stamford, but by and large, Mickey, Jack, and Adaline were on their own, and they liked it that wa
y.

  Which is why Mickey was baffled by his granddaughter’s infection. Even after ending her existence with his sledgehammer, Mickey had taken the time to examine Adie’s body, to see where she had been infected, and how. But unless the wound had been hidden under the spot where the sledgehammer had hit her — and he was fairly certain it was not — Adie had appeared clean, without anything that should have caused her transformation.

  He and Jack had buried her, comfortable enough they would be able to see any threat approaching to risk the outdoor time. After that, they had gone inside and upstairs. Mickey had built his house himself after 2010, and had built it with only one access point on the main floor. There was the front door, the one they typically used, and that was it. No windows, no other doors, nothing. On the second floor, then, he had put in large windows, a deck, all the things that might normally have been on the ground floor. And there were two different points on that floor with retractable ladders, two different access points to the house that zombies couldn’t reach, and that Mickey and his family could escape from if the worst happened.

  It was up there, then, that Jack had fallen into silence. When he emerged, Mickey saw a different man there, different than the confident, good father and provider he had been before his daughter’s death.

  “Why, dad?” he asked. “What did we do — what did Adie do — to deserve this? We’ve done everything right, haven’t we?”

  Mickey hadn’t answered. There was no answer, he knew, that would appease Jack. And no answer he had anyway. He had been wondering the same things ever since he had come across Adie’s transformed body.

  So Mickey had sat in silence, which had led to Jack stewing more, which had led to more questions. Eventually, Jack worked himself into something of a lather.