After Life (19 page)

Chapter 6: Nowhere to Hide

None of them spoke for a moment as they watched. Then, when they had all agreed the dead man wasn’t going to move, all four reacted differently.

Andy walked over to the man’s body, fishing the gun from his hand and rummaging through his pockets in search of any extra ammunition or other usable contents. Amanda turned on her heels and opened the door of the car nearest her, appearing to conduct a similar search there. Stacy, near to a building wall, took an unsteady step toward it, and ended up collapsing against it until she was in a fetal crouch, her head in her hands.

And Lowensen nearly sprinted as he turned to head back the way they had come.

“Where are you going, Lowensen?” Andy asked.

He stopped and looked back at Andy. “Where am I going?” the teacher asked with a laugh in his voice. “Cars. That’s all I know. I’d say it’s pretty safe our friend there didn’t take all of them out while he was in there, and I’d just as soon leave instead of hanging around waiting for them to follow him out the door. I’m going to get in something that moves a little faster than my feet. Don’t know where the hell I’m going, but I’m going there fast, I know that much.”

“Care to wait just a moment, while we…” Andy gave the teacher a sharp look, then over to Stacy, then back to the teacher, an exchange the girl never noticed. “…finish up here? Very least, the zombies can’t very well surprise us right now.”

The teacher picked up on the “catatonic girl” signals Andy was sending and nodded, though he didn’t return to the others, staying several feet away.

Andy and Amanda finished their respective searches. Andy came away with a gun that had only two shots left in it, Amanda empty-handed — Dead Leg, it seemed, hadn’t lied about his preparedness on his second chance at honesty.

With that finished, Andy circled Stacy — so as to leave himself facing the door to the safe house — and crouched at the girl’s side. She still had her head in her hands, still had her eyes closed, still didn’t seem cognizant of anything other than her own grief.

“We’ll find somewhere,” he said, in his best “fatherly” voice. “There are other safe houses, other people who were prepared. I made it seven months in 2010; we can surely make it more than seven hours.” He tried to laugh, to affect a light-hearted emotion as best he could.

Stacy didn’t respond for a moment, still sobbing into her own hands. Andy sat there, unsure how to continue to comfort her.

Despite himself, Andy had been rather disappointed when he had a daughter — he had always hoped for a son, and that hope had only grown during 2010, when Faith was the only female he had any prolonged contact with. He felt sure that any relationship he had with a son would have resembled the relationship he saw between the male Stones — educational, informative, close, but not always overly emotional. Andy had never been the most emotive of men, and he had always felt ill-equipped to guide his daughter through the world, which, he thought, might have explained why he didn’t have Celia as prepared as she might have been for the new zombie outbreak.

As a result, Andy didn’t know how to comfort or reassure Stacy, beyond what he had already said. So he merely crouched at her side, rubbing her shoulder and waiting for her to emerge from her grief, one eye on the girl and one eye on the door to the so-called safe place.

None did, at least before Stacy found it in herself to react. She raised her head at last, and raised her hands as well to wipe tears from her eyes. As she did, she seemed to remember the weapon in her hands. She stared at the gun briefly before recoiling and dropping it to the sidewalk. Her hands finally free, she returned to wiping her face.

“I’m not worried about us,” she said, emphasizing the “us” as she sniffed back some snot. She met Andy’s eyes for the briefest of moments. “I don’t really care how we end up. It’s my mom.”

She looked back down at the sidewalk she sat on then, wiping her eyes once more. Andy, not sure how to respond, continued to rub her shoulder. He looked up to Amanda, who was standing a few feet away, in hopes that she would be more able to relate to the girl, more able to “mother” her.

Amanda appeared to get the signal, joining them on the sidewalk.

“You can’t worry about that, sweetie,” she said, crouching next to Stacy, opposite Andy, between the girl and the door. “I’m sure your mom’s fine.”

Stacy laughed, a bitter, angry laugh that startled Andy. It made her sound much older than she was, and much more bitter.

“Why?” Stacy asked, the bitter tone staying. “Why in
hell
would she be okay?”

Amanda put her arm on Stacy’s shoulder and pulled her closer. At the same time, she gave Andy a look, one that had a clear “Give us a minute” meaning. Andy nodded, then rose from the sidewalk and joined Lowensen, still standing in the middle of the street and watching. He heard Amanda start speaking again at almost a whisper, much too quiet for Andy to overhear.

“She’s scared?” the teacher said.             

“Obviously.”

Lowensen nodded. “Should be. Her mother is dead.”

Andy shot Lowensen a stern look. “You don’t know that,” he said angrily.

“Maybe,” he said. “But who cares? If she’s alive, best bet is they’ll never see each other again.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? Mr. Ehrens, you lived through this once. You ever see anyone you knew again when it was over? Reconnect with old friends?”

“I did,” Andy said. “Matter of fact, Celia’s godfather was my college roommate. Found him online in 2014.”

The teacher nodded. “Took you, what, three, four years to find your daughter a godfather. Sounds to me like you didn’t reconnect with many people. And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy you found your friend. But you were, let’s say, 24, 25 in 2010. That age, that year, you probably had 500-some Facebook friends, minimum. Call it 500. Let’s say 80% died at the start. Still leaves you with 100 friends who holed up or became Out-Theres. Another, what, fifty, sixty, died over the course of 2010 — zombies got them, or they ran out of food, or they said fuck it and killed themselves. Still leaves you with 30 or 40 friends who, odds would say, survived. You listed one. Got any others?”

Andy glared at Lowensen, but ultimately shook his head. “No,” he said. He didn’t add that he had actually had north of 1,000 Facebook friends, but it was true nonetheless.

“And that’s even assuming they both survive this. Odds are good her mom’s dead, just as a result of lack of preparation. Government employee or not, I think we can agree from our experiences that preparation wasn’t exactly our strong suit. But let’s say she’s alive. Just for the sake of argument. There’s still the little worry of what happens to our darling Stacy there.”

“We’ll protect her.”

“We will? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll try, but most of our resources are going to have to be selfish, don’t you think? You’ve got to protect yourself, your daughter first. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but we’re hanging out on a sidewalk with no plan in front of us. I’m not ready to die myself, but I’m ready to admit I expect it.

“There’s just nowhere to hide,” he said, his voice tinged with a bitter chuckle.

Andy was fuming. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to punch Lowensen straight in the face, to beat him unconscious, if for no other reason than to let out Andy’s own frustrations. Truth be told, his free hand — the one that wasn’t holding his gun — was already clenched into a fist.

It wasn’t that Lowensen was wrong. He wasn’t. Andy knew that the best guess was that Stacy’s mom was already dead or that she and/or her daughter would die before all was said and done. But his casual demeanor in discussing the impossibility of their reconnecting was infuriating.

Andy stared down the teacher, hoping he’d at least crack a smile, something to show that he wasn’t going to be quite so nihilistic about the whole thing. For several seconds, they held a staring contest, with the teacher’s returned stare seeming blank.

The showdown was broken up, not by either man blinking, speaking or looking away, but by a scream from Stacy on the sidewalk.

Andy whirled back toward the sidewalk, confronted by a terrifying sight. Amanda, still leaning over Stacy in a maternal crouch, had been joined there by a zombie, presumably having emerged from the supposed safe house. The zombie was the reanimated corpse of an old woman, in her 70s at least, and looked to be struggling just to remain upright. It had bent down over the woman, and had its mouth on her shoulder.

Amanda jerked herself forward, wrenching her body away from the zombie’s bite. In doing so, she cleared enough room that Andy felt comfortable taking his shot, and he fired two bullets at the old zombie’s head. The first clipped the zombie’s neck, making it turn uncontrollably. The second, though, had true aim. It entered the zombie’s head through the left eye socket, causing the eyeball to explode in a small spray of blood. A second, larger spray hit the wall of the building behind. The zombie collapsed to the sidewalk and was still.

Stacy and Amanda scrambled away, struggling to come apart from one another as they climbed to their feet. Stacy was up first, and ran to Andy and Lowensen.

Andy waited until Stacy had gotten away from their companion. As soon as she was clear, he leveled his gun again, this time at Amanda’s head.

“I’m…!” Amanda said, but she couldn’t get any more out, as Andy fired again. This shot was as true as his previous one, and Amanda’s head rocked back as she died.

The three of them stared at the three dead bodies — Amanda, the ancient zombie and Dead Leg — for a few seconds. Finally, Stacy turned to Andy accusatorily.

“She was
fine
!” she screamed. “Why the
hell
did you shoot her?”

Andy looked back at the girl. “Someone who’s been bitten is never fine,” he said. “She was going to be a zombie. There’s no cure. I saved her from that.”

“She was
fine
!” the girl screamed again. “She wasn’t bitten!”

“What are you talking about?” Andy said. She had obviously been bitten, he thought, but the girl’s certain tone gave him a certain sense of dread nonetheless. “The zombie bit down on her shoulder.”

Stacy shook her head violently for five full seconds. “It didn’t bite,” she said. “No teeth. No teeth. She was fine. She was
fine
!”

Andy felt his insides drop. The zombie had been very old; it certainly was possible it had lost its teeth. He knew Cathy, their next-door neighbor from home, had lost all her teeth. She had dentures, but never wore them unless she was actively eating, under the thinking that it would be a lot harder, as a zombie, to infect the living without teeth.

Still, though, Amanda had been bitten. Hadn’t she?

As Stacy sobbed into the teacher’s shoulder, Andy moved to examine Amanda. Her head wound was obvious; Andy’s bullet had entered just above the right eye, ricocheting off the skull somewhere in there and exiting near the left ear. It had been a kill shot, no question. Human or zombie, Amanda was dead, and wasn’t getting up again.

But, as Andy’s search moved downward, his insides sank further. There was no blood on Amanda’s exposed skin, and nothing seeping through her clothes. He moved aside her shirt and bra strap and saw completely smooth, unbitten skin, exactly where the zombie’s mouth had been. There was some redness from the attempted bite, but there had been no penetration. No infection. He moved his examination a few feet to the right, where the still zombie lay, and he saw what he feared — a mouth full of toothless gums.

He had killed an uninfected human.

It was something Andy had never knowingly done before. He had killed many, dozens of zombies and already-infected people, in 2010 and earlier on this day. But he had never killed someone who had any kind of future; who wasn’t already doomed.

He had been comparing himself to the
Gilligan’s Island
castaways, to a maverick who just
needed
to be out among the zombies, shooting everything in sight. He had had every answer. And yet he had been the one to needlessly kill this woman, this mother.

For the first time since the zombies had reappeared, Andy dropped his gun, falling to his knees and burying his face in both of his hands. He didn’t cry, but he clenched his eyes and rocked back and forth as this realization spread over him. He had killed a human merely out of fear, out of an incorrect surety that he was doing the right thing.

As he sat, Andy’s mind brought him back to the girl in the dormitory at Morgan College, the one he had shot that had drawn his daughter’s complaint. Thinking back now, he couldn’t remember for certain whether she had actually had a bite or whether he had merely assumed the wound. She had been bitten, hadn’t she? Certainly she had to have been. But Andy was no longer positive.

He didn’t know how to react. He was terrified of opening his eyes, knowing that he would be confronted again with Amanda’s pointlessly lifeless body when he did, so he continued to rock, continued to mourn his stupid, pointless mistake.

Shoot first, ask questions later. That was what he had believed. What he had taught. And yet, that was the worst advice possible. Question
some
things. Killing the living? Is that really what he had done?