AFTER (3 page)

Sam sat there as the long shadows of evening fell, watching as things grew progressively worse. Around six-thirty, a minivan stopped in front of the video store with a violent sputter. Directly behind it, a Ram pickup truck blared its horn impatiently. Soon, the two drivers stood in the street facing one another. One looked to be a business man – a lawyer or an accountant – while the other was a redneck in oil-stained jeans and a Confederate flag t-shirt.

"Get this piece of shit
outta
my way!" snarled the lanky redneck.

"I – I can't," the other attempted to explain. "We've run out of gas."

"Well, you should have filled up before you ran out, you dumbass
sonuvabitch
!"

"I couldn't. The last place we stopped wanted fifty dollars a gallon. I don't have that kind of money. We've got a long way to drive."

"I don't give a damn where you're going, mister," growled the man. "You can go to hell, for all I care. Just push it
outta
the way so I can get by."

The accountant looked at him like he was crazy. "I can't push this thing…"

"Sure, you can. Just put your white-collar ass behind it." The redneck pulled a 9mm pistol from the hip pocket of his jeans and leveled it at the van driver. "Now get to pushing."

"You stupid bastard," snapped the accountant. "Why, don't you just go around…"

The crack of the pistol rang out and Sam watched as a dark circle the size of a dime appeared just above the accountant's right eye. The gunshot man seemed to stare at his murderer in puzzlement for a long moment, before falling flat on his face.

Almost instantly, a woman with short brown hair leapt out of the van, shrieking at the top of her lungs. She knelt beside her dead husband, pulling him to her, cradling his bloody head in her lap. In the van windows, the faces of two children – a boy and a girl – could be seen, full of shock and horror.

"Why?" the woman screamed. "Why did you shoot him?"

"He was an asshole," the man said with a shrug. "He should have done what I told him." Then he stuck the gun back in his pocket, climbed into the truck – which held a wife and child of his own – and, backing up, roared past the van and headed southward down the avenue.

Sam watched for a long time as the woman wept and wailed over the loss of her husband. After a while, the children left the van and joined her. Together, they sat around the dead man, at a total loss at what they should do next. People continued to move around them, either regarding them with pity or ignoring them completely.

Why isn't somebody helping them?
he wondered. Then, with shame,
Why aren't you helping them?

Sam finally decided that he could sit and observe no longer. He was scared to step off the sidewalk into the street – hell, he was scared shitless! – but he had to do something. He walked across the pavement and stood above the woman and her children for a long moment.

The woman peered up at him, her eyes dull and drained of emotion. "Yes?"

Sam didn't quite know what to say at first. "I – I'm sorry," he said. "About your husband."

"He didn't have to shoot him," she mumbled.

"No," said Sam. "It was uncalled for." He couldn't take his eyes off the woman. Her pale pink dress was saturated with drying blood. "Where were you headed?"

"Gulf Shores. John's parents live right there on the beach."

"That's a mighty long ways to go," said Sam. He looked toward the sky and saw that it was getting dark. Not knowing of anything better to do, he took his keychain from his overall pocket and wrestled one of the keys from the ring. He handed it to the woman. "
Here.
There's a little white house on Marigold Lane, a couple of blocks down. Green roof and a white picket fence out front. Ya'll stay there for as long as you want. The power's off, but there's canned food in the cellar; tomatoes, beans, preserves. You're welcome to them."

"Why are you doing this?" she asked, taking the brass key from him.

"Cause it's the decent thing to do, I reckon," said Sam. "Now, I'd go on and get these
young'uns
indoors… before it gets dark. No telling what sort of craziness could happen around nightfall."

"Yes… you're right," said the woman. She stood up, leaving her dead husband lying on the asphalt. "What about John?"

"I'll take care of him," Sam promised. "See that he gets a proper burial and all."

"I appreciate that," the woman said. Her hollow eyes stared at him for a moment. "My name is Angela. These are my children, Sarah and John Jr."

"Nice to meet y'all," he replied. "You can just call me Sam."

"Thank you, Sam," she said. Then she and the two children started down the sidewalk in the direction of Marigold Lane.

Sam watched, making sure the three reached the correct street. Satisfied that they were on the right path, he turned back and looked down at the dead accountant named John. The corpse stared back at him with glassy eyes. John was a big fella, overweight and well-fed. It would take some doing to move him.

"You and your damn promises," mumbled Sam.

The old man went back to the fix-it shop and found an old Radio Flyer wagon that had once belonged to his son. It wasn't one of those new-fangled bulky plastic ones, but one of the big all-metal deals with the rubber tires. Before he left the shop, Sam went to a gun cabinet in the corner. He took out a couple of guns that had been passed down in the Wheeler family for generations; a
hogleg
Colt .45 revolver and a Winchester '73 lever-action rifle… the kind Jimmy Stuart toted in that old western movie of the same name. He stuck the pistol in his overall pocket and laid the rifle in the bed of the wagon.

It took some doing, but he finally wrestled poor John into the wagon, leaving his arms and legs dangling over the sides. The excessive weight made the wagon hard to pull, but he managed to get the thing rolling. As he started down the sidewalk, heading for the little cemetery next to the Baptist church, those who walked the street on their long journey to nowhere seemed to pay him absolutely no attention, as though a man toting a corpse in a child's play wagon was the most common sight in the world.

Sam was a block from the church, when he got too close to the edge of the sidewalk. The left-hand wheels dropped off and the wagon pitched to the side. The body of John the Accountant tumbled into a drainage ditch. Sam saved the wagon from following, but knew there was no way in hell he could pull the man out. The ditch was a good four foot deep.

He stood there in indecision for a long moment, then walked across the street to the
Chestersons
' house. Their car was gone and, from the way the doors of the house and garage were left open, he figured that they had freaked out and took the refugee road with everyone else. The
Chestersons
had only lived in Watkins Glen for a couple of years and weren't natives of the town. They had no roots to hold them there like those who had lived there all their lives.

Sam went in the garage and rummaged around. He found a quarter gallon of lawn mower gasoline and some old newspaper. Taking both, he walked back to the ditch, tossed the papers on top of the body, then doused it with the gas. He searched his overall pockets until he found a book of matches that he kept with him out of habit, from when he smoked a few years back. Lighting one, he flung it at the fuel-sodden newspapers. It wasn't long before the drainage ditch became a funeral pyre.

"Decent burial, my ass," he said, spitting to the side. Then, pulling the wagon behind him, he walked back to the fix-it shop.

That night he dreamt of the boy.

Walking down a wooded pathway to their favorite fishing hole. Poles slung over their shoulders, egg salad sandwiches and raisin oatmeal cookies in a paper sack. Father and son, hand in hand. The boy's grasp was fidgety and self-conscious.

"Extra fingers just means you're more friendly when shaking hands," Sam told him.

The boy grinned up at him. Together, they went on their way, the warm sunlight on their faces.

At the fishing hole, they caught five little ones and a big one.

The next day the power went off.

Sam couldn't say he was surprised. Folks didn't exactly clamor to work the morning after Armageddon. Of course, some of the folks in town had generators. Sam had one hooked up in the back room, but only ran it a few minutes at a time each day. All he had was ten gallons of gasoline and he knew that wasn't going to last forever. Besides, the nearest source for fuel was the Exxon station a couple of miles out of town and word was that their tanks were completely tapped out due to the flow of refugees who had wandered down the highway during the past twenty-four hours.

Sam had powered up the generator long enough on the morning of July 6th to watch the news coverage of the Burn. It was a badly-edited, confusing mish-mash of emotional interviews and aerial footage of tremendous black holes where major cities had once been. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened or why or who had been responsible. The news anchors had lost their polished professionalism. The men looked exhausted and unshaven, while the women appeared to be wired-up, their normally perfect hair askew and their makeup hastily applied. Both genders looked as though they were in dire need of a hot shower and good night's sleep, which they obviously refused in favor of doing hour-by-hour coverage of the Burn.

That day, Sam sat out front of the fix-it shop and kept silent vigil as the parade of the scared and homeless continued down Maple Avenue. There weren't as many as the day before, just a few in vehicles and perhaps a couple hundred or so on foot. He noticed some of them looked sick and disoriented, ugly burns and weeping sores covering their exposed skin. He wondered if they had been caught close to Ground Zero when the bomb north of Birmingham had detonated.

There was some looting, but only of what was left in the Shop-Rite and the five and dime store. George
Pendergast
sat in the doorway of the True-Value with a twelve-gauge shotgun across his knees and a dour look that dared folks to just try something. Everyone who passed by was smart enough to leave him and his business alone. No one seemed concerned with the pet shop or Sam's fix-it shop, either. Food and gas seemed to be the most valuable commodities now and he and Millie had neither.

Later that evening, Sam went inside for the night. He powered up the generator and turned on the television. Nothing was on the air, not even a station signal. There was only a rushing bee swarm of static. He tried the radio. Half the stations were also gone. The other half had nothing but Emergency Broadcasting information, which played repetitively over and over again.

Funny thing, the internet was still up and working, though. Sam chuckled humorlessly as he sat at his old rolltop desk and browsed. Just went to show what was important in folks' lives these days. Out of curiosity, Sam
Googled
a certain subject, found the information he was looking for, and saved it on his hard drive, although he couldn't, for the life of him, figure what had possessed him to do so.

He turned off his generator and lay on his bed in the dark for a long time before falling to sleep. Last night, the sound of strangers milling in the street had echoed through his walls for a long time; walking, arguing, shouting. Tonight, Maple Avenue was strangely silent. The quiet didn't comfort him, however. If anything it filled him with a sense of deep dread he couldn't quite identify.

Something bad was about to happen. Something that would send the little town of Watkins Glen spiraling toward degradation and ruin. Sam could feel it in his arthritic bones like a dark and creeping cancer firmly taking hold.

Four days later, on July 10
^th
, Sam discovered that he had been right.

Around noon, the Devil rode down the center of Maple Avenue in a coal black Mustang.

The car was fresh off the sales lot. The itemized sales sticker was still on the rear left window and the dealership owner's brains were still splattered across the hood. The Ford was surrounded on both sides by a motley procession of tattooed men on Harleys and four-wheelers. Men who had done evil in their lifetime – robbery, rape, murder – and served hard time for it. Sam wasn't too savvy about such things, but it wasn't difficult to identify their bodily markings as homemade prison tattoos.

At the end of the line was a red Dodge Ram pickup driven by a chubby redneck wearing a Crimson Tide t-shirt and a green John Deere baseball cap. There was a large cage constructed of steel bars and chain-link fence in the bed. Inside the cage were three of the meanest and hungriest-looking Pit Bull Terriers that ever breathed life. They growled and barked, jumping at the sides of their makeshift pen and biting at the metal links with yellowed fangs.

Sam sat in his rocker, the Winchester lying across his knees, his face impassive, as they came from the south and braked to a halt directly in front of Millie's Pet Shop. The men stretched wearily and engaged the kickstands of their bikes. Dangerous eyes – devoid of mercy or conscious – surveyed the heart of Watkins Glen with mild interest. The black Mustang sat and idled for a moment or two, its powerful V-8 rumbling beneath the gore-splattered hood. Then the driver's door opened and a man stepped out.

The old man recognized him at once. Not many in the state of Alabama – or the world for that matter – was ignorant of the tall, muscular man with the shaved head, black mustache and goatee, and the elaborate tattoo of a snarling Rottweiler dog that covered his chest, and abdomen.