After Life | Book 1 | After Life Read online

  Celia had never learned auto maintenance. Neither, she thought, had her father, beyond the absolute basics. In fact, as best she could tell, the car still ran simply by the grace of God. But run it did. Her father didn’t get out of the house often, and generally didn’t go far. But when he did take any kind of road trip, the old Camry still hummed right along.

  After a few minutes, once Celia’s body heat had warmed the window to the point that the feeling was no longer soothing, she turned to face her father.

  Andy Ehrens was in his late 40s and, though his black hair was flecked with gray, he could have passed for much younger; some might have believed he was Celia’s older brother, rather than her father. He was thin, bordering on spindly, though he still looked healthy. His cheeks were red and slightly puffy, showing that he wasn’t malnourished, instead was in possession of a metabolism that hadn’t slowed with age.

  As he drove, his eyes—dark, beady little things that would have looked more at home in an evil doll—couldn’t sit still. They looked right and left at every intersection, every driveway, every stray leaf that fell from a tree. He had both hands gripped around the wheel, 10 and 2, so firmly despite the slow speed that his knuckles were whitening. Once, a feral cat jumped from a fence post to the ground, and Andy slammed the brakes so hard that Celia pitched forward in her seat, stopping only when her seat belt locked and held her in place.

  “Seriously, dad, I don’t think the cat is likely to come get you,” she said with an expert teenage roll of the eyes.

  “Just being careful,” he said as he tapped the gas and crept forward once again.

  “Careful, huh?” she echoed, her eyes still rolling. The word “careful” was not new to her, and it was maybe her least favorite one. “Seems like we’ve been careful for 20 years now.

  “Celia, you know the rules. Taking a risk just letting you move out for college.”

  “I can’t stay locked up forever, Dad. I mean, I think I’ve learned as much as I’m likely to from the three decent books you have in the house, right?”

  Andy let his eyes leave the street for the briefest of moments to look at his daughter, and doing so softened his resolve.

  Though she was right, and had read little of value beyond those three books, Celia, he knew, had an innate intelligence. Sure, Andy had three books of legitimate value—a Shakespearean anthology, the Bible, and that nonfiction account of the mid-’90s disastrous trek up Mount Everest that Andy could never remember the title of—to go with his collection of silly pulp fiction. They helped. But he thought it likely that her intelligence was more a result of her mother. She had been both beautiful and brilliant, and Andy’s daughter had inherited those traits. Andy himself kept mostly to his old mystery novels, which entertained him, but weren’t exactly the scholarly texts and high education Andy would like to have offered his daughter.

  Her hair was blonde, completely unlike her father’s, and flowed down nearly to her waist. Her clothes were earth-toned, a never-broken edict he had handed down to her at an early age. Don’t stand out, he had warned. Always be able to disappear. Camouflage. It’s the only way to stay safe. They were also comfortable, baggy but not too much so, layered, useful. No heels, no constricting tops. Clothes that would let you move, let you stay warm.

  The first few times Celia had been permitted out of the house growing up, she had seen some of the other children—the ones whose parents were still ill-prepared, Andy thought—in stylish, unwieldy clothes, and she had begged, begged him to let her adopt a similar style. He never had, and she had seemed to grow to live with it. Andy, though, dreaded what she might do when out from under his gaze, and that moment appeared only a day or so away.

  “Honey, I’m sorry you’ve had to live this way,” he said as she looked at him in frustration. “But you weren’t there. You—you think we did something. We didn’t beat those things. Whatever it was that made them start—it was what made them stop. I don’t know what it was, but I wouldn’t be here today but for the grace of God. So if I don’t know prevention, I’m going to practice precaution. If you can’t beat ‘em, hide from ‘em. It’s all we can do.”

  Celia nodded, though it looked to Andy like it was a dismissive one. He opened his mouth to speak further, then stopped. He did this a couple more times before he sighed deeply. He had never been able to make himself tell his daughter the whole story of his experiences during the outbreak. She knew he had been on the run, she knew that he had almost died, but she didn’t know the details. Now, though, he felt that he needed to tell her more. For the first time in her life, Celia was about to be spending significant time away from her father. That was scary enough, Andy figured, without worrying that Celia would brush off her father’s concerns as well.

  So he willed his mouth to voice the words he had never been able to before.

  “Tell me,” he started. “What do you feel you know about 2010?”

  Celia glanced over at her father. This was an unexpected question. He usually brushed off anything other than the bare minimum about his survival, even when she, as a child, had badgered him with questions for hours at a time.

  “I mean, I know some things,” she said. “I know you were stuck with some people at some points. There were Carl, and Mike, and Faith, and Oliver, and Denise, I think.”

  “You knew that?”

  Celia nodded again. “You sometimes talk in your sleep. You can get loud.”

  “You’ve never mentioned that.”

  “If you didn’t want to tell me that much, I wasn’t going to make you.”

  Andy smiled. “Go on.”

  “There was a dog, too,” she said.

  “Max.”

  “Okay, Max. Well, I know the zombies were around for something like seven months and change in 2010. And I know that they just stopped. They fell over without any warning, and they were gone, and we all started living like scared rabbits for the next 20 years.

  “Maybe that’s it, Dad,” she continued after a pause. “Maybe whatever it was is just gone. Maybe they’re never coming back. The government sure seems to think so. Why else would President Morgan be OK with re-opening the schools, the airports? The paranoia’s gotta go away eventually.” Celia picked up steam as she spoke. “We keep living like this and the zombies win anyway. You think any of us is likely to get married, have kids, the way we are now? Who do you think I’m going to marry? I know you, and I know Cathy next door. I kind of doubt either of you is going to be a good match. We’ve got to be out there because it doesn’t matter if the zombies come back at all, the way we’re living now—we’re gonna run low on humans eventually either way.”

  In many ways, Celia was right, and Andy knew it. That the general populace had realized they needed to get the youth back into education, back into socialization was the only reason they were doing it at all. There was simply no other choice.

  On the other hand, Celia painted an incomplete picture of 2010, and Andy knew he needed to fill in the holes in her knowledge.

  “You need to know,” he said, “that we don’t know they’re gone. Personally, I expect them every time I step outside. That might be paranoia, I know. But you need to know that they didn’t leave just once. I thought they were gone once, and they weren’t. Don’t ask me why. But the first time, they were running behind me, and there were what had to be dozens of them, and they just stopped dea— stopped in their tracks. I thought it was over. I didn’t know why, but I really thought that was the end of it, and I was grateful.”

  Celia turned to give her father her full attention as he said this. The few times she had hung out with members of her peer group, she had heard that this happened, but as her father had never confirmed it, she had half-convinced herself it was an urban legend, a boogeyman for a new era.

  As he continued, Andy gave a laugh. “I even took a nap. I actually went to sleep with one of them lying on the ground only a few yards away. I was just so tired. So tired. Hadn’t slept in—God, I don’t know, three,
four days, and any sleep then was just restless anyway. No real rest. So it felt good to close my eyes and not think I’m going to get woken up by snarling or gunfire.

  “Of course,” he continued with another atonal laugh that caught Celia by surprise, “I woke up to snarling and gunfire. Carl and his father had stumbled upon me. Lord knows how he knew I was alive lying there, but he shot one of them just as it was coming down on me. Saved my life. And like that, they were back. I didn’t—I don’t know why, I don’t know how, I don’t know any of it. Far as I can tell, no one does. Like I said, we didn’t beat them. Whatever caused it, that’s what beat them. So when they went away the next time, what should I do? Relax? Breathe deep? I can’t, honey. We isolate ourselves and hope for the best. But we knew the isolation couldn’t be forever.”

  Celia nodded. She still thought her father was overprotective—there was a big difference between being gone long enough for him to take a nap and being gone twenty years, she figured—but his habits at least made a little more sense after hearing that.

  “Eventually,” Andy went on, “we’d have to let you all back out there, back out into the world. So I’m sorry if you think I’m paranoid. But, sweetie, you weren’t there. We know what’s best for you. One day, maybe they’ll come back, and we want you prepared. So if that means isolating you for twenty years, preparing you for the possibility, leaving you less socialized than perhaps would be ideal—at least you’re alive. More than we can say for the five and a half billion that died in twenty-ten.”

  Celia let him drive on for a moment or so, then looked down at the floorboard. “Fine, Dad.”

  Andy drove on silently then. At a glance, the situation in the car looked the same as it had when they had first left—Celia gazing out the window, Andy driving wordlessly—but a closer examination revealed that Celia looked less dreamy, and Andy’s eyes were no longer darting about. They had softened, and he was staring off into space, just going through the motions of driving. Briefly, he let his grip on the steering wheel loosen, and blood flowed back into his fingers. Andy’s lips parted slightly, and his eyes watered over.

  “Carl,” he said, lost in his thoughts.

  Celia turned to him once again. This version of her father—more reflective, more emotional—was uncommon. Most of the time, Andy would get there when he was alone, and if Celia showed up unexpectedly, he’d snap out of it and brush away her concerns. Now, though, he seemed unlikely to blow it off.

  She waited for a moment, during which her father failed to continue. Just as she was about to ask him a question, though, he spoke again.

  “Carl,” he repeated. “Carl was just this guy, you know? Big hulk of a dude, some college sweatshirt. Gotten his arm beat up in some ruckus before we met, but he wasn’t bitten. Definitely wasn’t bitten. I checked. You had to check. People were hiding their bites all the time. Got to the point where you’d strip down as soon as you met someone, because you knew you’d have to. Carl’s shoulder was dislocated—bad, we couldn’t do much about that—but there wasn’t a real scratch on the man. I think he must’ve gotten it pulled out of socket when he was trying to save his mom. Told me she’d died just a few hours before he and I met.”

  Celia made noises to ask about Carl’s mom, but her father kept going before she could.

  “That’s all I knew about his mom. He wouldn’t tell me more. But he and his dad, Mike, were still around. Mike, Mike was old. Carl couldn’t have been more than 24, 25, but Mike had to be at least 70—maybe older. How a man that old had lived through the months of the attack without having been bitten or battening down the hatches somewhere is beyond me. Carl had to have been a superhero. Not a scratch on him, either. The two of them were as healthy as anyone I’d seen in weeks.

  “After Carl shot the one off me,” he went on, “we took off. Found shelter in a cabin where none of ‘em knew where we were.” Andy let out a light chuckle. “There was even food in there, you know? Lots of it. Canned stuff, too. We made it a while—me, and Carl, and Mike, and Max, and Faith…”

  “And Oliver and Denise?”

  “Oh, no,” Andy said. “They came later.” Andy laughed to himself as though he had told a little joke. “No, it was just us. Four humans and the dog. The dog, Max, he was just… there. Animals couldn’t get infected, but boy could they get eaten. Saw dogs and cats and all sorts being gnawed on. God, their cries. Yelps and growls and what-have-you. It was awful, hearing an animal get eaten alive. Worse than a human. Humans have a sound we’re used to. Movies and such. But you listen to a house cat getting eaten alive, that sound never leaves you.”

  Andy’s speech drifted off for a moment. Finally, he flinched, reliving the noises in his head, and continued. “But Max was just curled up in that cabin, comfy as you can imagine. Oh, he was hungry, no question, and when we found some dog food locked up in there, he was as loving as a dog could be. Faith loved that dog. We holed up there for a couple—weeks, I guess, though we had closed ourselves in so much that day and night were kind of a lost concept. I suppose it could’ve been only six or seven days; it might have been nineteen or twenty.

  “Virus’d been going for a long time by then, but we were still stupid. We saw that food, and we just went to town. First night I had three cans of Spam, two of Vienna sausages. Don’t know who the hell’s house that was, but they stocked up on food before,” he paused, “whatever happened to them. But Carl and Mike and Faith were the same way. We hadn’t learned yet. We were used to going to the store, going to Applebee’s, you know.” Celia didn’t know what Applebee’s was, but didn’t think it was an important enough detail to interrupt to ask. “Saving food, stockpiling didn’t really make sense to us. We got bored; we did what any red-blooded American did—we ate. And with the electricity gone, no TV, no computers, what did we have? A 50-card deck and a hundred cans of spam.

  “And the gun,” he added with a flinch. “Carl used two bullets getting that one off me. After that, we had to preserve. When we realized the food was already running low, we agreed we’d have to eat Max eventually. And we knew Mike would have to go next, if it came to that. He even offered. We hadn’t heard any sign of the Z’s in a while, but we sure as hell weren’t gonna go looking. Not ‘til we had to. No, we figured we’d stay in until they found us—and they always seemed to find you eventually. Bastards had some kind of Alive Radar.

  “We might not have had the world’s greatest plan, but it was all we had at the time. And you gotta do something, you know? But damned if that food didn’t run out a lot faster than I thought it would, even once we realized how fast we were going through it. And Carl started getting hungry.…” Andy trailed off again.

  Celia let him sit in silence for a few minutes before she tried to prod him further. “Dad…” she started.

  Andy jumped in his seat. He seemed to have forgotten she was there. “The point,” he said after another bit of silence, “is that they left twice. They came back once. Are you willing to bet your life they won’t do it again? I’m not.”

  He shut his mouth again, with a sense of finality this time. Celia had questions—about Max, about Faith, about Carl and Mike, about all of that. She had no memory of any of them, but she didn’t know who had died during the outbreak and who had simply not remained a part of her father’s life in the aftermath. She wanted to ask more questions, but she could tell that even relating this to her had taken effort, and she didn’t feel the need to press her luck just yet. There would be time for that.

  So, instead of badgering her father, Celia leaned her head back against the window and watched the scenery pass by, though the glass was no longer cool to the touch.

  Chapter Three: Crazy, Paranoid

  In Stamford, Connecticut, a lone man stood on the sidewalk just below a sign that said, “Checks cashed here.”

  The sign looked to be a lost cause, as the neon bulbs were all either burned out or burst, and so what could be made out looked more like “heck cahed her,” and even that was tough to see.
A bit to the right of the sign was another, smaller one. It was a yellow diamond, with the outline of a large human figure holding a smaller one, with the words “Safe Place” written below. The signs were mounted on the front of a tiny cement building wedged into a city block that, in the years before 2010, was likely a hub of activity in the northeastern city. These days, though, the block was run down, and the little building, with its wooden door and yellow sign, fit right in.

  The lone man, though, stood out. He was standing erect, his back to the neon sign, his head occasionally rotating right, then left, watching nothing.

  Streetlights and crosswalk lights up and down the block sat, inactive. There was no need for them to be on; no cars passed.

  He stood there silently as the moments, but no people, went by. Eventually, though, someone appeared. Madison Crane walked around the corner, striding with a purpose.

  Madison was in her mid- to late-40s, but in another era could easily have passed for at least a decade younger. Her brunette hair was cut short but fashionable. She wore a navy pantsuit that hugged her body tightly. On her feet, she wore flats. She carried no purse; presumably, any vital possessions were tucked somewhere in the tiny pockets of her suit.

  The man under the no-longer-neon sign saw her coming, but didn’t make a move.

  “Morning, Nick,” Madison said as she neared the door.

  “Ma’am,” Nick replied, sparing only the slightest head turn and nod toward her.

  Madison opened the door next to the Safe Place sign and entered the small concrete building.

  Inside, Madison entered onto a small platform that led to a downward staircase. The only thing on her level other than the door was a small phone with no keypad. Whatever it connected to, the connection was automatic. Madison passed the phone without a glance and descended into the earth. She took the steps briskly, unbuttoning the front of her suit jacket as she did so. By the time she had reached the bottom, she had pulled the jacket off and was already removing the gun from the waistband of her pants. Another man, Ben, exited a small guard’s room adjacent to the landing at the bottom of the stairs.