After Life (17 page)

The body struggling in front of him, the man who hadn’t yet noticed the people pointing their guns at him, was none other than the dead-legged man from Morgan College in Hyannis.

“Hey!” Andy called, drawing his attention. He turned toward them, and froze, squinting as though he couldn’t believe the four people he was seeing were really there.

“What…?” he started, confused. “How did you…?” He stopped again and shook his head. “They aren’t safe!” he finally cried out, in obvious anguish, and sat back on the sidewalk, his back against the wall.

“What do you mean?” Amanda said. “Where is your family?”

At the mention of his family, Dead Leg wailed wordlessly, and Andy had a sinking feeling that his family was inside the supposed safe place, being anything but safe.

“They aren’t safe!” the man repeated. “Not safe! They were supposed to be safe!”

“Hey!” Andy said, stowing his gun and grabbing the man’s shoulders. “Hey! Calm down and tell me what happened.”

For two full minutes, the man was incapable of speech, just shaking his head and occasionally whispering, “Not safe.” Finally, though, he looked at the group around him.

“I got bitten,” he said, his voice dull.

Instinctively, Andy stepped back and pulled his gun back out.

“Don’t shoot!” the man wailed. “I know I’m done. But don’t shoot me. Let me do it myself. Please.” The man sounded desperate that they let him end his life himself, and so Andy did not pull his own trigger. Nonetheless, he stood a good ten feet away, and made sure his charges were even further.

“Tell me what happened,” Andy said again, hoping Dead Leg could get his story out while he was still capable.

“We didn’t have anything,” the man said, like it was preposterous to think otherwise. “Our house was
barren
. Couldn’t have made it three weeks, let alone three months. We left the school, we set straight out for a safe place. Set out looking for a yellow sign somewhere, anywhere. Turns out there aren’t any in Hyannis. None we could find, at least.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell
us
about the safe place?” Lowensen asked.

The man gave the teacher an icy look. “We weren’t supposed to be there,” he said. “I thought maybe a few of us, they’d let us in. But I bring 50-some people from a school? I might as well have locked the doors with us outside myself.”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, though. Try as we might, we couldn’t find a sign in Hyannis. So we tried Barnstable. Thought we’d get lucky.” He looked at the door he had just exited. “I guess we did,” he said with a bitter laugh. “Found
this
place.”

“So what happened?” Andy asked. “A zombie had gotten in?”

The man nodded. “Somehow. No living soul in that building. At first, we didn’t think there was a dead soul either. We get in there, there’s nothing in sight but floors and walls. Then my son’s roommate went into a bathroom. I heard a scream. Next thing I know, three come out of that bathroom. Two zombies and the boy. Three zombies. Before I can do so much as grab my gun, my boy gets bit.”

The man had to stop again as he told of his son’s death before going on again. “Another one comes out from the women’s room, grabs me. Doesn’t get a bite, but makes me drop my goddamn gun. My wife and I hole up in some side room, looked like a doctor’s office waiting room. We’re hiding in there, what, a half hour? Thought I had barricaded the door, but suddenly the whole lot of them just…broke the damn thing in. We couldn’t keep them out.”

By this point in the story, the man was breathing heavily, and Andy noticed he had broken out in a hellacious sweat that was the tell-tale sign of the fever taking hold. He knew the man didn’t have much longer.

“They forced their way in,” the man continued. “Tried to fight them off, but this damn leg… I couldn’t do it. They got my wife. I tried to get out, but damn things bit my arm.” As he spoke, the man rolled up his left shirt sleeve to show a bloody bite mark just below the elbow. “Made it to my gun, shot off the ones on my tail. But couldn’t save myself. Couldn’t save my family.”

The man fell into wordless sobs as he finished his story. Andy glanced at his charges. Amanda had tears streaming down her face. Barry stood emotionless, shell-shocked. Stacy had lowered her gun and was hugging her waist protectively, and Andy again worried that the girl couldn’t handle all of this.

After another moment, the man let out two pained breaths and continued. “Worst fucking part?” he said. “There’s no goddamn food in there. Nothing. ‘Safe place,’ my ass. Just as bad as the school. Might as well’ve been my house, all the good it woulda done. Whoever said we’d have somewhere to go didn’t know his head from his ass.”

At those words, Andy’s heart sunk again. He had been planning, once Dead Leg’s story ended and the man died, to continue into the safe place. The man had shot what sounded like three zombies, leaving some still in the building, but Andy thought his group could still take control and hole up there, especially if they were armed with the knowledge of the zombies and couldn’t be surprised. But if there was no food? No supplies? He didn’t know where they were going, but the “safe place” was no longer it.

“You did all you could,” Andy said, trying to console the man.

“All I could,” he said, not sounding at all consoled. “That’s what I told myself after 2010. Lost my family then, too. Seems like all I can do ain’t too goddamn much.” He looked at the four of them, tears flowing freely. “I wish you folks the best,” he said.

With that, the man with the dead leg pulled his gun out and raised it to his head.

“Wait!” Lowensen cried out.

The man glared at the teacher.

“What?” he asked coldly.

“The Wal-Mart,” Lowensen said. “Where is the Wal-Mart?”

“The Wal-Mart?” he repeated angrily. “Who gives a damn?” He started to pull the weapon back to his head.

“Please!” Lowensen pleaded. “Please. We don’t know where we’re going from here. We don’t have any recourse. We need to know where it is. It’s our only chance.”

The man glared back at the teacher. After a moment, his look softened, and he glanced at the others. Andy stared back expectantly, hoping he would be able to give them proper directions.

Finally, the man’s shoulders slumped, and he lowered his arm back to his side.

“I don’t know,” he said, breathing heavily. He was sweating profusely at this point, and his left arm now hung limp at his side, as obviously dead — for the time being — as the man’s leg. “Not exactly. Haven’t been there in 20-odd years. Best I can offer you is that it’s about five miles from the college. You remember turning left out of the lot? Right turn would’ve taken you toward town. Toward the Wal-Mart. It’s out on its own, easy to find.”

The man made a point to once again look at each of the people surrounding him, but it seemed he was done speaking. Without another word, he returned the weapon to his temple and pulled the trigger.

As Stacy and Amanda turned away, and Lowensen cried out, Andy watched as the left side of the man’s head exploded outward, spraying the building and sidewalk with blood and brain matter. At the same time, the man fell over, dead.

Andy watched for a moment, but it seemed the man had done the job right. His body didn’t rise again.

Chapter 3: No Way They Were Ever Going to Know

“You know what I’ve been wondering about?” Donnie asked after several minutes of silence.

Michelle started. They hadn’t encountered any further Z’s since the incident outside the church, and had been driving smoothly for something like a half-hour without any further scares.

“What’s that?” Michelle asked.

“Salvisa.”

“Peter Salvisa?”

“No,” Donnie said with a chuckle. “Salvisa, Kentucky. It’s the town my parents grew up in. Yes, Peter Salvisa.”

“What about him?”

“Where’d he go?” Donnie asked, turning serious again. “What, three, four hours before this whole thing started again, Lambert lost contact with him. He didn’t answer his phone, the Out-Theres site went down; it was like the man just disappeared.”

“Right before the zombies came back,” Michelle said slowly.

“Right before,” Donnie echoed. “Best I can tell, Lambert talked to Peter Salvisa every couple hours, morning, noon, night. Had a direct line. Damn guys probably sent each other Christmas cards. And then he up and shuts off right before this all happens?”

“Could have been a coincidence,” Michelle said. “Lambert and Madison,” the words caught in her throat for a second before she could continue. “…were talking about this. He said Salvisa probably blew an artery or drank himself to death. The man was 90-something, wasn’t he?”

“89, I think,” Donnie said. “And yeah, it could be a coincidence. But it’d be one hell of one, wouldn’t it? They talk all the time, then he disappears right when we actually
need
to talk to him?”

“Why do we need to talk to him?”

“Michelle, Salvisa knew more about the Z’s than everyone in our building combined. Made Lambert look like a 5-year-old with a Wiffle-ball bat. I wouldn’t have cared if he was 109, I would want to consult with him. I
want
to consult with him.

“And if it’s a coincidence,” he went on, “why did the Out-Theres go down? Wouldn’t the site keep running without him?”

“True,” Michelle said with a nod. “I don’t know, Donnie. Probably never will.”

Donnie nodded. It was true, his worries were groundless — the chances they’d find out what happened to Peter Salvisa were only slightly better than the chances Zachary Lambert and Madison Crane had been faking their deaths back in the office.

He lapsed back into silence as Michelle drove. He knew that, logically, there was no way they were ever going to know what had caused Salvisa’s sudden silence. But at the same time, he knew there was no way they could legitimately hope to get to Stacy, holed up somewhere in Hyannis, and yet here they were, driving toward Michelle’s stepdaughter as fast as the little church car would carry them.

That thought raised another, more worrisome one in Donnie’s mind, and he jerked his head up.

“Michelle,” he started, “how much gas do we have?”

Michelle gave out a bitter laugh. “I was wondering when you’d ask that,” she said. “Basically, I was wondering if we’d actually run
out
of gas before you asked.” She glanced down at her gauge for a moment and continued. “You won by, best estimate, five, ten miles? We’re real low.”

“What do we do when we run out?”

“Pray,” Michelle said. “We can hunt for a gas station or something, but I can’t say I’m optimistic. Our best bet, once this car is over with, is to keep going on foot, hope we find another car, some gas, something.

“Hey,” she added, trying to laugh, “maybe we can cut back to Stratford, see if there’s a direct flight out of Sikorski airport.”

Donnie feigned a small smile at the joke. He appreciated the effort, but the acknowledgement that they’d be walking within minutes had him clenching in all the wrong places. “Heck,” he said, trying his hardest to return the humor. “If we’re playing that game, let me bust out my GPS and have it take us right to the nearest Sunoco.”

The humor fell flat, though, and they lapsed into silence, until Donnie murmured, more to himself than to Michelle, “Guess we aren’t quite so high-tech these days.”

Minutes later, Michelle’s prediction turned out to be nearly spot-on, as the car wound to a halt on a small road that ran through a tiny town, small enough that she didn’t even know the name of it.

“Good little church car,” Michelle said, patting the steering wheel as she pulled the keys. “Thanks for the lift.”

Michelle removed her seat belt and climbed from the car. She had pulled her pack from the backseat and had it on her back before Donnie had set foot out of the car.

“Think we’ll be able to find another car?” he asked as he scrambled to catch up.

“Eventually?” Michelle said, her eyes forward. “Sure. There are cars everywhere. We stay alive long enough, we’ll find a car.”

There was enough behind Michelle’s words that Donnie didn’t push. Eventually? Stay alive long enough? Donnie didn’t see a lot of reason for optimism.

So he didn’t ask any more questions, simply retrieving his own pack and hurrying to catch up with Michelle, who had already started down the street.

They made it to the nearest street corner before Michelle stopped. Donnie, still catching up, saw her look both ways down the cross street.

“Aren’t you responsible,” he said. “Looking both ways before crossing the street.”

“Where do we go?” she said. “I was only walking straight because, you know,” she waved vaguely at the broken-out storefronts they had passed. “Buildings. So, where do we go? Ocean a mile to our right. Ahead is absolutely nowhere. Interstate’s a mile to the left, isn’t it? More crowded area, more gas stations, more cars, but more zombies, too. But...transportation. Maybe.” She lapsed into silence.

It only lasted a moment. “I say straight,” Michelle said. She wanted no part of a main thoroughfare, no matter the vehicular advantages it might hold. They wouldn’t drive very far if they were zombies.

“Really?” Donnie said, his focus now fixated to their left.

“Really,” she said firmly. “That, or right. I’m willing to see if we can find a boat to take us east if you want.”

Donnie immediately shook his head, and Michelle couldn’t argue. If she knew for a fact they could find a boat near the ocean, she’d have already led the way to the right. But if they couldn’t find a boat — and, considering her lack of boating expertise, any boat they
might
find would need some sort of autopilot — they’d be merely cornering themselves.

“Okay then,” she went on. “Straight ahead is my pick.”

Donnie didn’t speak for a moment, still looking in the general direction of the interstate that Michelle feared. Finally, he turned that direction and started to walk.

“Donnie?” Michelle said, standing still. “Donnie? What are you doing?”

“Michelle, we
have
to go left,” he said. “There aren’t many possibilities once we get to Hyannis. Either Stacy is boarded up at school or she’s not. If she is, the chances of us actually getting in to her are slim and none. If she’s not, odds are she’s dead. And if she’s not dead, she’s looking for a place to hole up
somewhere
in Cape Cod. Big area. So it’s at best one in, what, 10 we’ll ever even see her, ever even know what happens to her. Longer we take to get there, lower those chances get. Longer we take, more chances she dies or finds a hideout. You’ve got to get there as soon as you can, come hell or high water. That means we
have
to risk venturing into the zombies. Getting there late is the same as getting there never. We can’t
not
take the fastest possible route.”

For what felt like the twentieth time, Michelle’s heart went out to Donnie. For better or worse, he had committed himself to her cause. She nodded to him, and fell in step behind Donnie as they took the left-hand path.

“Slim and none,” Michelle murmured, echoing what Donnie had said. “What if we get there two minutes late, Donnie? What if I get there in time to see her turn into a zombie?”

Michelle’s voice went quiet, and Donnie could tell she was thinking of her discovery of Madison in that moment.

“Don’t worry about that, Michelle,” he said, trying his best to sound soothing. “You won’t have to watch. Worst-case scenario, absolute
worst
, if she’s a zombie? You won’t see it. We’ll never find her.” Michelle continued to walk toward the populated area, toward the interstate.

Donnie slumped his shoulders and followed along. “There’s just no way we’ll ever know.”