After Life | Book 1 | After Life Page 25

  Nonetheless, she couldn’t see how she had any choice. Michelle walked away from the car that held the only two people, other than her stepdaughter, that she knew in the world, and set out toward the roundabout.

  “Stacy,” she said as she walked. She would kill if she had to, if that was what it took to get to her stepdaughter. To the only part of Madison she had left. “Stacy.”

  Even in the darkness, in the moonlight, Michelle was sure she could see the silhouette of the bridge looming in the distance, almost 180 degrees across the roundabout from where she was.

  Chapter Four: There For One Another

  The classroom had already been quiet, as Andy and Simon whispered in the corner and the other males started the process of trying to sleep, but Stacy’s confession to Celia had all but sucked any volume from the room.

  Celia didn’t know how to react to her roommate’s revelation. It answered a couple of things Celia had been wondering about Stacy, such as why she had seemed inordinately concerned about her midsection and why the idea that a mother cares about her child’s welfare had done so much to calm her. But it raised many, many more—how far along was she? Who was the father? Did the school know about it? Did Stacy’s mother? If so, why had she let her go to school in the first place? And—and Celia found herself wondering more than all the other queries, despite herself—what was sex like? How experienced was Stacy?

  She asked none of these questions. As soon as Stacy had told Celia her secret, she had rolled onto her side, her back to Celia, and curled up as though she too were going to attempt sleep.

  Celia, though, had had any bit of sleepiness ripped from her. She supposed it was only fair, as she had obviously been the last one of the group to have gotten any sleep, but all she knew in that moment was that she was awake, and she didn’t foresee that condition changing any time soon.

  So, after pondering Stacy’s pregnancy for longer than she needed to, Celia turned her attention back to her father. The conversation with Simon had ended, and the boy had curled up in a corner of his own. There was no evidence that he was going to sleep or even attempt it. His eyes were open, staring at nothing, as he lay there.

  Celia looked to her father and noticed at last that Andy was looking back at her. He looked contemplative, as though he were considering her presence, and didn’t initially react to her returned gaze. He blinked out of his own mind, though, and motioned for Celia to join him near the classroom entrance.

  Celia nodded and climbed to her feet, stepping as quietly as she could to her father’s designated spot. He got there first, settling into a desk in the last row, one away from the aisle. Celia chose the aisle seat next to him.

  Neither of them spoke for a few minutes, letting the silence fill the room like the smell of an extinguished match. Celia had to admit, the silence didn’t bother her, not after the screaming, crying, moaning, and engine rumbling she had been hearing for hours now.

  Eventually, though, they had to speak.

  “Roger is dead by now,” Andy said, glancing down at his watch. His voice was barely above a whisper, just enough for Celia to hear, and clearly too quiet for Simon to even know he spoke, let alone make out his words.

  “Why did he leave?”

  Andy’s eyes misted over. He didn’t answer for a full five minutes as Celia looked at his profile. His eyes were trained on Simon in the corner, who still had given no thought to closing his eyes for anything longer than a blink. Finally, Andy shook his head and closed his eyes, shutting the boy out of his vision. “He had to,” he said. Andy didn’t elaborate, and Celia couldn’t bring herself to press, to find out more. Clearly, her father didn’t want to relive any more of Roger’s departure, just as he had so often refused to speak of his experiences in 2010 for any longer than was necessary.

  Suddenly, Celia sat up in her desk chair. She would let her father avoid the topic of Roger’s departure if he wanted because it was fresh, but there was something she needed to know. She had always wondered about it, but hadn’t been able to delve deep enough to find out. But now, facing their mortality and in the wake of Stacy’s confession, Celia knew she needed to press her father, to find out the truth.

  “Daddy,” she said, “I need you to tell me about my mother.”

  Andy didn’t move for a moment, his eyes still directed downward toward young Simon. For a few seconds, Celia wasn’t even sure his father had heard her. Eventually, though, he spoke, though his eyes never moved.

  “That’s fair,” he said, his voice still barely audible.

  That was all he said, though, for another minute or two. Finally, Celia coughed and spoke again. “Daddy….”

  “She died,” he said, as though Celia didn’t know that, and as though Celia hadn’t just spoken. He took a small breath but then started to speak quickly, as though, if he were going to tell the story, he wasn’t going to stop to consider it. “It was June 2, 2011. You were three days old. If you’d been born in 2009, she’d have been fine; the doctors could have helped. But in 2011? A post-zombie world? Health-care barely existed. We were lucky to have a former medical student there when you were born, let alone a surgeon for when it got complicated.

  “Do some math,” he went on. “Your birthday is May 30, 2011. The zombies of 2010 weren’t gone until September 5. There wasn’t even a nine-month window.” Celia started to blush, knowing what her father was going to say next. “That means that making you was the first thing she and I did once we knew we were safe. You were our first post-zombie act. There we were, in our latest… hideout, I guess, if you want to call it that. We had found this other couple, Oliver and Denise. They were on the run, same as us, after we lost Carl and Mike. We ended up in some old gas station. Somewhere in Ohio.

  “The place had been picked pretty clean, but there were stale cookies, old sodas, stuff like that. Enough that we could make it a little while, at the very least.

  “Didn’t matter to Oliver and Denise, though,” Andy smiled as he spoke. It seemed clear to Celia that he was no longer addressing his daughter, but was at last telling the story, so she let him continue. “Oh, they grabbed some food, but really they just snuck off. Back into the manager’s office or whatever it was. We barely saw them after that. They just stayed back there, and they went at it. Sex as often as their bodies would let them. I swear they were rabbits in there.

  “Faith and I could hear them, of course. Couldn’t not hear them. We blocked the doors, rationed the food, filled in the old Sudoku magazines, and listened to sex. They came out a couple times. Get more food, find a place to pee, that sort of thing, but then it was right back in there, locked down. Had to be a week, and they must have gone fifty times. Oliver certainly had stamina; I’ll give him that.

  “So, yeah, we listened. A week straight. And in all that, I never touched Faith. Not once. I’d hugged her, consoled her after we lost Mike and Carl, but other than that and the occasional bump or push, she and I were totally separate. Totally.

  “Then one day, eventually, Oliver and Denise were quiet. For longer than they had been the whole week, other than when they were sleeping, they were quiet. They must have known something, something we didn’t know. They were quiet, and right then was when there was a knock at the door to the outside.

  “Zombies don’t knock,” he said with the slightest of chuckles. “They don’t ring a doorbell or wait patiently to be let in. They push their way through. Through wood, steel, glass, whatever. But they don’t knock. So this was something else.

  “I had my gun drawn. You had to. Maybe it wasn’t a zombie, but maybe it was a human with zombies close behind. Maybe it was a human that had been bitten, was minutes away from being a zombie. Maybe it was a looter, like the Guardsmen back there, killing everyone to make sure he survived. Regardless, had to have my gun drawn.

  “Faith looked out through a hole we’d left. Said it was just a guy, Army or something. Looked safe. So I called out to him. Asked what he wanted.”

  Andy chuckled again. �
��‘Sir, this is Corporal Timothy Lankford,’ he said. ‘I am here to let you know that the threat has passed. They are gone.’ I’ll never forget him, never forget what he said.

  “We didn’t open the door. Didn’t even make a move. Just sat there in shock. Five minutes, ten, I don’t know. Nobody spoke. Oliver and Denise didn’t start back up. Finally, Lankford did speak. ‘Sir, I assure you this is the truth, and I assure you that it is safe. But I cannot wait here for you. Come out when you choose.’ And he left. I never met the man. Never even saw his face. He was just… gone.

  “We still didn’t talk. Far as I recall, didn’t even move. Just sat there. Then, like we had planned it, Faith turned to me. We both knew. Right there in the gas station.” Suddenly, he remembered that this was his daughter he was speaking to. Andy cleared his throat twice before continuing. “Anyway,” he said, “the craziest thing…. The first time I ever really touched Faith, the first time I ever treated her like a woman and not just another thing on the run, right at that moment, we heard Oliver and Denise. Heard them from the office. But this time, they weren’t starting up again.

  “No, this time when we heard them, they weren’t doing it again. This time, when we heard them, they were praying. Loud. I heard them saying God over and over. Of course, I’d heard them say God a hundred times, but this time they were actually talking to the man. Thanking him. Praising him. And there we were, responding in our own way. There we were, creating you.

  “Nine months later, your mom died. It was stupid. She should’ve been fine. She should’ve lived a full life, should’ve still been alive today.” Andy flinched, realizing that, if Faith were alive today, she’d be reliving the zombie experience. He didn’t like that thought. “Anyway, we didn’t love each other during 2010. Didn’t even know each other before the zombies. We were just… there for one another. When it ended, we were there for one another. Love didn’t come until later. Until we were tied together. By you.

  “Then again,” he said, growing thoughtful, “I don’t really know what love is. We were there for one another. Maybe that is what love is. Maybe, when we made you, we did love each other. I don’t know. At some point, I fell in love with your mother. I just don’t know when that point was.”

  Chapter Five: Roundabout

  Michelle was nearly on tiptoes as she crossed the roundabout and drew closer to the bridge. Even with the darkness and her relatively quiet shoes, she didn’t want to attract any more attention than necessary. Even if the guards failed to notice her, she could never be sure that there weren’t Z’s about.

  She slowed down further as she got in sight of the security booth at the bridge. There was some kind of candle or lantern burning in the booth, so she knew she had entered a Nick scenario, with guards who were dedicated to their jobs. Her weaponry was going to come into play.

  So Michelle made sure she was handily concealed behind a gas station, in a space where she could see the guard booth, but its tenants had precious little chance of seeing her.

  She wasn’t sure she was ready for this. Michelle had no combat experience. The basement of the Stamford facility was her first time firing her gun at a moving target. So the prospect of gunning down innocent people who, truth be told, were only trying to protect Michelle’s stepdaughter was unnerving to say the very least.

  Her eyes didn’t stray from the guard booth for several minutes. There were at least two guards, both sitting in the booth, not venturing outside. She didn’t know if this meant they were being lazy or they had another guard working sentry duty outside, but either way, it meant there was more than just a single person to deal with.

  The longer she sat, the more Michelle’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. Every minute or two, the guards in the booth seemed to have their attention diverted by something further up the bridge, out of her view. Each time, though, their attention was drawn toward whatever it was for only a handful of seconds. On the fourth or fifth time, Michelle deduced that what she was seeing was the guards looking at their third member, nearing the guard booth after a new pacing round.

  Michelle did some mental math and figured that, if she timed her assault right, she could be at the guard stand while the patrolling guard was a good fifty yards away. That, she figured, would at least let her take on only two guards, rather than three. Surprise, she hoped, would account for any further mismatch.

  That decided, Michelle needed to figure out her approach. There wasn’t much in the way of cover between her location and the booth, other than the darkness. She was about as far from the guard booth as she estimated the patrol would reach, meaning she needed to start moving when the guards’ attention was drawn to the patroller.

  As Michelle watched, the two guards appeared to discuss something. Both appeared care-free, engaged in a lighthearted conversation, belying the seriousness of their jobs and their situation.

  The two in the booth looked up simultaneously, which Michelle knew as her cue. But she didn’t move. She didn’t yet have the courage, and she knew that going up scared was the way to come back dead.

  No, Michelle needed some impetus to convince herself that she was going to do what it was she knew she had to do—to commit murder, plain and simple. And that wasn’t something she felt she could enter into just because her cue came.

  So Michelle waited. And watched. And as she did, she found herself growing angrier at the men she was spying on.

  They were laughing with one another. That much was true, no question. They were trading some kind of gag back and forth, making each other crack up, seemingly unaware of anything around them.

  But they couldn’t be unaware. They couldn’t possibly have not known what was going on—Michelle could see, between her and the shack, a couple of bodies lying flat. And she had passed a couple of others on her trek to this hiding spot. She wondered if any of those bodies belonged to the ones who had blown up the toll plaza. Clearly, the guards had been following their “shoot first, ask questions never” edict, and that meant they knew the situation.

  Michelle found herself hating the men in the guard booth. Her daughter was God knew where, in God knew what condition, on the other side of that bridge, and her so-called “protectors” were laughing over some joke.

  One of the men was sitting on some kind of desk chair. He was reclining, with his hands over his head and his feet propped on whatever sort of small desk they had in the booth. He looked to be about fifty, though his salt-and-pepper hair was the only age giveaway—the man appeared to be in excellent physical condition.

  His partner was a little worse for wear. He stood in the doorway, leaning toward the other man, his hands along the top of the doorjamb. He was a good forty pounds overweight and, though Michelle would have put him at mid-40s at most, he had far more wrinkles and age marks than the seated man.

  The two men looked away again, into the darkness that Michelle couldn’t decipher. She leaned onto the balls of her feet, gun at the ready, waiting for them to look back at one another again, which was her cue to make her move.

  When they did, though, she again stayed still. Michelle fell back onto her heels and sighed. She wasn’t sure how she was going to do this. There was a huge difference between being angry at the men for laughing and thinking they should be killed for it.

  Michelle thought of Stacy. The girl was so much like Madison—impulsive, determined, protective. Michelle hadn’t met Madison until Stacy was about 12, but she knew from Madison’s stories that Stacy was the product of Madison’s search for consolation at the end of 2010’s events. She had lost everyone and everything she knew, and when a young man in a similar state of grief had crossed her path, the two fell into each other. Even then, Madison had known she preferred the company of women, but she hadn’t had anywhere else to turn.

  By the time Madison knew she was pregnant, by the time she knew Stacy was coming, the young man was gone. Even if she knew the man well, it would have been difficult, in a post-zombie world, to find a single person, unless he w
as registered with the Out-Theres. As it was, Madison hadn’t even learned the man’s name, and so didn’t even bother to try to find him—Stacy was her daughter, and hers alone.

  Until Michelle.

  Madison’s wife and daughter bonded from the beginning; in fact, the relationship between those two had saved the one between Madison and Michelle more than once during the early going.

  The two, Madison and Michelle, had decided early on that they wouldn’t make their relationship known in the office, so when Madison left to take Stacy to Hyannis for school, Michelle, despite desperately wanting to accompany them, stayed behind.

  So Michelle hadn’t gotten to see her stepdaughter off, stuck with only a hug and a promise to visit as soon as she could get away without questions.

  As Michelle’s mind tried to bring an image of Stacy to the front, it suddenly hit on the face of another young girl—Lindsay Quinn’s daughter, the young zombie they had encountered downstairs in Stamford.

  Cape Cod was supposed to be protected. Everyone who entered the cape was vetted, and no one could go in or out once the zombies returned. These rules were in place because of the school, Stacy knew, to protect the kids, isolate them, since they were likely unable to do it for themselves.

  No one in, no one out.

  Complete isolation.

  Then again, hadn’t that been what Nick was for?

  Assuming the Stamford security guard had been honest—and Michelle saw no reason to doubt him—no zombie had managed to get inside the Stamford facility from the outside. And yet… Madison was dead. Lambert was dead. That little girl had been a zombie. Michelle had watched as Cal got bitten. Clearly the zombies had been inside.

  Spontaneous transformation. That was the only cause she had been able to think of in Stamford, and it was her only answer now.

  So then, what were these men doing? In Michelle’s eyes, they were keeping help from getting to the young people at Morgan College. They weren’t protecting them. In fact, they were leaving the kids far worse off than they might otherwise be.