After Life | Book 1 | After Life Read online

  Menendez nodded. “Very well,” he said. “I will pass your message along. And as I said, I will tell everyone to treat you peacefully. But I can make no promises. In this world, with these mindsets, emotions run high. But I assure you, I will do whatever I can to make sure they shoot the dead, and the dead only.”

  Andy considered the deal. It was the best he could hope for, he guessed. And, though he would never fully trust Menendez after Vince’s tale of the highway incident, it seemed the man was telling the truth in this moment.

  He returned Menendez’s nod, and the man lowered his arms at last and returned to his people. Vince started to follow, but a warning look from Andy held him there, and the man bowed his head and leaned back against the wall.

  For a moment, nothing happened, and Andy couldn’t make out the words of Menendez addressing his people inside the compound. Then, a noise came. But the noise wasn’t from the bowels of the building, wasn’t the return of Menendez to tell them that they could come in or that they were banished.

  The noise was the unmistakable sound of slowly shuffling footsteps, coming from somewhere in the hallway behind their group. That sound, Andy knew, meant that the first zombies had made it inside. Based on the fact that the steps were slow, barely moving, Andy figured they had to belong to one or both of the injured zombies, but he didn’t like the arrival regardless.

  He glanced behind him. His crew was growing ever more unreliable, as Simon was busy supporting Brandon’s weight, Michelle was despondent, and he wouldn’t entertain the idea of sending Stacy or—especially—Celia back to face the zombies. That left only Lowensen, who was already stationed at the rear. His eyes met Andy’s and, after a nod, he slumped his shoulders and turned to investigate their new company.

  “Menendez!” Andy called. “They are here. They’ve reached the inside. We’re coming in. Now!”

  It was a gamble, Andy knew, entering before being given the okay, but he didn’t want to engage in a firefight. Not yet, at least. So he motioned for Vince to head into the interior of the building.

  Vince, still looking scared, nodded and turned to make his way inside. For a second, nothing happened as Vince moved forward, and Andy started to follow him. Suddenly, though, he saw Vince’s shoulders go rigid from behind, then saw the man dive to his left as a gunshot rang out from the building interior.

  Vince cried out as he hit the ground, his right shoulder now bleeding from a grazing bullet wound.

  Andy froze. Once again, he didn’t know what to do next. And he knew he had only seconds to figure it out.

  Then the decision was made for him. Three men and a woman walked out from the small hallway, each with their weapons raised toward Andy. Immediately, Simon, Stacy and Michelle raised their guns back. With Lowensen still watching their rear, and Celia and Brandon keeping theirs lowered, the numbers were even for the moment.

  “What the hell is going on?” Andy said, trying to sound intimidating.

  “We discussed your deal,” the leading man said, and Andy suddenly recognized him as O’Reilly from the highway assault. The scar on the man’s cheek seemed, if anything, to have grown, and he spit the word “deal” as though he considered it an insult even to have to negotiate with Andy and his group. “And this is our response.” From behind O’Reilly, two others from the back walked up, dragging something with them. O’Reilly and his cronies separated, and the trailers flung forward their baggage—Menendez’s body, rendered lifeless by what looked like a knife across the neck.

  “We don’t take on any dead weight,” O’Reilly spat. “We watch out for our own. And you aren’t that.”

  “You’re the Army!” Stacy cried out. “Your job is to protect the people!”

  O’Reilly sneered at her. “Sweetheart,” he said, and Andy wanted to punch him all the more for the tone in his voice, “that stopped being our job sometime back in 2010. Might have rebounded a bit in the years since, but today, in a Z world? Our job is to survive. To protect our own. And fuck anyone who gets in the way.”

  “So, what, you’re going to shoot us where we stand?” Andy said. “And Vince? Menendez? They’re your ‘own.’”

  O’Reilly spared a glance down at Menendez’s body and scowled. “That son of a bitch stopped being one of our own the minute he told us to make room for you. Hell, he stopped being one of our own when he tried to stop me from shooting you people back on the road. Piece of shit went soft. My way, you’d all be zombie food back on the road, and we wouldn’t be in the shithole we’re in now.

  “And Vince,” he said, looking at his wounded compatriot on the ground, “well, he stopped being one of our own when he brought you here. That wasn’t a smart decision.

  “But are we going to kill you where you stand?” he said, turning back to Andy. “To my eyes, that seems a poor decision as well. No, I figure our best plan is to let you hang around out here, see if you can hold off those undead fuckers long enough for my people to get out of here. That seems like a smart decision.”

  Andy was seething. “You piece of shit,” he said. “You absolute piece of shit. You have no greater right to this building than anyone else.”

  O’Reilly nodded slowly, then turned to look behind him, where the rest of his people were. “Seems to me,” he said, “that the fact that there’s a few dozen of us in there with food and guns, with only a handful of you out here, would indicate that we are the ones to determine who has what right around here.”

  With that, O’Reilly nodded to his crew, and the six people returned to their isolation in the Wal-Mart’s inner sanctum.

  Again, Andy was left without an idea of what to do. In the back, he saw Lowensen inching backward, holding his gun at the ready. That meant, Andy figured, that the only ones yet inside were the two wounded zombies, the ones that, by themselves, could pose no real threat. Lowensen was waiting to fire until he had to, to delay alerting the other, more able zombies to the way inside.

  Andy looked at his group. Celia, standing only a couple feet from him, met his gaze, terrified, with tears in her eyes. The other kids—Simon, Brandon, Stacy—had bewildered, betrayed looks on their faces, looks that Andy understood. As far as he could tell, they had grown up with good people, and the evilness they were facing from humans, not zombies, was incomprehensible.

  As Andy struggled, and failed, to come up with an idea, his gaze fell onto Michelle. She alone was moving, having removed the heavy backpack from her back and set it on the ground. She was digging to the bottom of the pack, clearly looking for something in particular.

  “What are you doing?” Andy asked with some curiosity. Moving with such intent had to mean that she had come up with at least some kind of a plan, which was better than what Andy could say.

  Finally, Michelle found what she was searching for. She looked up, offering the slightest of pained smiles, coming through the tears that were still in her eyes, stuck there since Donnie’s death. She removed her hand from the pack and held it up for Andy to see.

  In it, she held a hand grenade.

  Chapter Nine: Inner Sanctum

  Michelle knew the grenade she held wouldn’t solve all of their problems, but she knew it would solve one of them—they would get at least some measure of revenge on the men and women inside the hideout.

  No one would be able to use the Wal-Mart as anything other than a brief stop, not unless the door was somehow repaired. Barricading the door would do the trick for a while, certainly, but no one stuck there for a long time would feel comfortable unless the door and the latch were actually repaired. And such repairs seemed unlikely any time soon. So Michelle had no qualms with blowing up even a small portion of the building.

  Andy, it seemed, agreed, as he returned Michelle’s rueful smile. “Not bad,” he said. He reached out his hand for the explosive, but Michelle shook her head back at him.

  “No,” she said. “I need to be the one to do this.” She stood up and moved to the small opening to where the troops were stationed. As she did, Vinc
e used his good arm to pull himself back toward them, back to the outside, where he had no choice but to remain.

  Michelle stood at the edge of the hall, holding the grenade in her right hand. It was her first time to hold a grenade with the intention of using it—in fact her first time holding one at all, unless carrying it in a pack on her back counted. Her compendium of hand-grenade knowledge stemmed almost entirely from movies, TV shows and cartoons, which had depicted the devices as square-patterned green ovals, basically football shape, that were easy to aim and throw with minimal concern.

  The only thing she recognized in the device she held now, though, was the olive drab color. The square pattern she had expected was absent, with the grenade in her hand merely two halves held together, not unlike a plastic Easter egg holding a Hershey’s Kiss. And it was much heavier than she had expected, though she didn’t know whether that increased weight was real or imagined. Either one was possible, as Michelle found her arm reluctant to hold the weapon any higher than it was right now, perched in her lap like nothing more than a crocheted pillow.

  She knew, though, that this wasn’t just a bauble she held in her hand. It was a weapon, and a weapon that she had to use, weight or no.

  She grasped the pin in her left hand and closed her eyes. She didn’t know whether to expect her mind to bring up Donnie’s face or Madison’s, but instead, Michelle saw nothing but Stacy behind her closed eyes.

  Regardless, she had no choice. Michelle removed the pin and, after waiting a couple of seconds, turned and flung the grenade as far down the hallway as she could.

  There was a brief commotion from the inside, and Michelle could hear voices from inside saying things like “What the fuck?!” and “Throw it back!”, but they either didn’t or couldn’t in time, because the next noise Michelle heard was the now-all-too-familiar sound of the grenade going off.

  It wasn’t a huge explosion, as she knew it wouldn’t be, but it did its job, as Michelle next heard the pained moans of the injured, and the cries of the ones who were now seeing dead bodies where people had been.

  Standing above her, Andy whipped into the open space of the hallway, his gun raised. He squinted briefly, then widened his eyes and lowered his gun slightly. He met Michelle’s gaze and nodded. “Nice toss,” he said, and motioned for her to see what he saw.

  Michelle left her pack on the ground and stepped into the opening to look around. She saw no more than three or four bodies—dead ones—but the mourners had either hurried away or been towed away by their compatriots. The only human forms Michelle saw were backsides, as the previous tenants of the inner sanctum fled for the opposite doorway, turning right for the undamaged doorway. She didn’t know if there were more of their Humvees on that side, but she didn’t doubt it.

  Within a handful of seconds, the only movement Michelle could see from the inside was a man lying on his side, his hands over his face, moaning in pain and rolling back and forth slightly.

  It took Michelle a moment, but it suddenly clicked to her that the man crying in agony in front of her was O’Reilly, the same man who had killed Philip and Meredith, the same man who had murdered Menendez and shot Vince, the same man who had rejected their truce and condemned them to, at the very least, a terrifying zombie battle, and perhaps death. Or worse.

  He wasn’t dead. He probably wasn’t dying. But he was hurt. The blast appeared to have thrown O’Reilly sideways into a wall, doing damage to his face and injuring his left arm in some way. The man was clutching at his left cheek with his right hand, and Michelle couldn’t tell from this distance if the red she was seeing was blood or mere impact marks and scrapes.

  The man was injured but, in a world of explosions, gunshots and bites, his injuries were minor to say the least. Nonetheless, he writhed in pain, and Michelle found herself enjoying his anguish. She snapped out of it though, remembering the threat to their rear, one that would likely have intensified in the past couple minutes, lured by the sound of the explosion and the noises the people made as they fled.

  The group moved in. Michelle and Andy kept on their toes for fear of any trailing members of the enemy group inside, but that caution appeared to be in vain, as O’Reilly remained the only living sign of the former threat inside.

  “What now?” Michelle said, her voice just above a whisper. She looked behind her as she asked. Simon was still helping Brandon along, though the boy was starting to put a little more weight on his ankle as he hobbled. Vince was trailing on Andy’s heels like a lost puppy, with Stacy and Celia just behind. And Lowensen brought up the rear, walking backward to guard against the oncoming zombies.

  In response to Michelle’s question, Andy shook his head, still scanning the room. “I’m not sure. By now, the healthy ones ought to have been on us, let alone the injured guys in front. They ought to have been on us by now,” he said. “Something’s up out there.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Michelle said. “What do you think it means?”

  “I’ll tell you what it means,” Lowensen piped up from the back. “When those assholes left, they made a shit-ton of noise in the hallway. Not sure if you guys could hear it from here, but the acoustics where I was in the corridor were ridiculous. I was peeking around the corner, hiding as much as I could, and all of a sudden you guys make an explosion in here. Could have used a warning on that, by the way.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “that got their attention real fast, and they started heading my way faster. Just as I was gonna have to shoot, though, I hear from the other end some woman call out. ‘Wait up,’ or something like that. Something that was stupid to say, and even stupider when you realize that the Z’s would hear it. They did, too. I guess they hadn’t spotted me yet, just following the noise, ‘cause the second they heard her, they turned that way. A couple others were loud on their way out, just bringing the zombies closer, faster.”

  As if on cue, gunshots rang out from up ahead, somewhere in the corridor where the Army people were making their escape. They were barely audible from the distance, but unmistakable nonetheless.

  Michelle knew Lowensen’s story was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the zombies were no longer directly on their tail, bearing down on them at any second, forcing them to stay so far on their toes they might as well be ballerinas. On the other, much less pleasing hand, the in-the-distance gunshots meant that the zombies were already drawing near the opposite side of the building and the small doorway opening on that side, which their small group could not yet hope to defend. Had the zombies continued to trail Lowensen, they would already be in a gunfight, but would have the advantage of position. Now, Michelle wasn’t sure they could hold tight at all, as the zombies were likely to appear in their field of vision at any minute.

  A glance with Andy showed that he felt close to the same way, and he raised his weapon back to its alert position, pointing toward the opposite side of the building in case any zombies made an appearance.

  Michelle crept forward, her own weapon raised as well. She drew to within a few feet of O’Reilly, who was now moaning quietly, his hand still holding the left side of his face as though it had melted off.

  “Shut up,” Michelle hissed down at the man. There was still the outside hope that the zombies would pass by the opening to the inner sanctum without regarding it, choosing instead to chase the fleeing Army people.

  O’Reilly ignored Michelle’s plea, getting louder at the realization that someone had come, theoretically, to check on him. “Please,” he gasped, “help me. I need help.”

  “Shut up!” Michelle hissed again. “Best help I can offer you right now is to be quiet so they don’t hear you in here.”

  O’Reilly burst out into sobs then. His hands moved away from his face, and Michelle saw the true impact the grenade blast had had on him. The man’s scar, which had been his dominant feature since the group had first seen him, was now masked by several other facial marks, his face dotted by shrapnel from the explosion. Only one was actively bleeding, but he had
been pockmarked by pieces of, Michelle guessed, metal, which would certainly leave further scars on his face.

  And the one spot that was bleeding, Michelle realized with some level of horror, was his left eye, the bridge between the two lengths of scar on the man’s face. Whatever shrapnel had hit the man—pieces of grenade, human bone, particulate matter around the explosion—some piece of it had pierced O’Reilly’s eye, rendering it little more than a bloody, useless hole in his head, one that had drawn the attention of his hands and, now, Michelle’s and Andy’s eyes, as both of them drew in their breath at the disgusting sight.

  “His eye,” was all Andy could say at the vision of O’Reilly’s face.

  “What do we do with him?” she asked.

  “Shoot me!” O’Reilly said, startling both of them. Though he was clearly alive, they seemed to have forgotten that O’Reilly had the power of speech, and his utilization of that power silenced them for a moment. Finally, he spoke again. “I’m not kidding, you motherfuckers. Shoot me now! I’m finished. Don’t want to try to make it in this world of Z’s without being able to see. I can’t see a fucking thing. Just be merciful. Shoot me.”

  Michelle considered his request briefly, before Andy piped up. “We aren’t going to shoot you, O’Reilly,” he said. “That’s what you and your people would do. But we aren’t that type. We choose life, and we choose to let you live, and see if you can live.”

  “Please,” O’Reilly said, his voice denigrating into little more than gasps. “Please. It would be a mercy killing. I’ll never make it.”

  “You say that,” Andy said. “But I’ve seen men come back from worse.”

  “You son of a bitch,” O’Reilly said, his voice hardening. His right hand moved south, down from his head toward his waist, where his holster sat, gun sitting like a baby kangaroo in its pouch. He fumbled with the snap on the holster before grasping at the gun.

  A gunshot came from behind Michelle and Andy, fired between the two of them. Immediately, O’Reilly, collapsed, motionless, the trickle of blood from his eye replaced by a spray of blood behind his head, caused by the bullet that had been fired.