After Life (21 page)

Chapter 9: New Plan

“Peter… Salvisa?” Donnie said, incredulous. It simply wasn’t possible that the old man standing in front of them was
the
Peter Salvisa. There was no way.

The man nodded, smiling. “That is my name,” he said, “though some just call me ‘The Out-Theres Guy.’ I’ll answer to either. I’ll even answer to ‘Old Man’ if your brain settles for naming me by what I look like.”

Slack-jawed, Donnie turned to Michelle, who was returning the same astonished look back at him. A few seconds later, Donnie blinked and turned back to the old man.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

The old man chuckled again. For someone who, even without zombies, couldn’t have counted on many more years of life, he certainly seemed to be in a jaunty mood; he had laughed more in their minute-long conversation than Donnie had in the past several days.

“Original plan,” he said, “was to get to Stamford, try to connect with the folks there. Zachary Lambert, Madison Crane, Lawrence Alvarez, someone there. Thought we needed to talk face-to-face. Phone wasn’t going to do it for me. Not this time.

“Of course,” he continued, letting out another almost-infuriating chuckle, “by the time I’d gotten on the road, gotten ‘Out-There.’” Another laugh. “It was too late, and I was halfway across godforsaken Massachusetts with nowhere to hole up. Needed to come up with a new plan. Then my goddamned car decided to up and die on me back in Bristol — right at the old ESPN headquarters. Twenty-odd years ago, I’d have treated the home of
SportsCenter
like some kind of goddamned Mecca, but that place was just a bunch of buildings with nothing for me, just like all the other damn buildings in New England.”

Salvisa had worked himself into a bit of a lather as he spoke, and he finally stopped for breath. Michelle had felt a surge of emotion run through her when he mentioned Madison, and she managed to push it back down. No one spoke for a moment, until Salvisa caught his breath and started again.

“I wonder whatever happened to Chris Berman.” He shook his head. “Then I made my new plan. Kept searching for a safe place,” he said. “Just a diamond sign. Found one, but the place was fucking barren. Didn’t have a speck of safety in it. Didn’t actually think it would be
that
hard to find sanctuary. You all know what I mean when I say safe place?” he asked, suddenly curious.

Both of them nodded. “We do,” Donnie said. “We worked in Stamford, Mr. Salvisa. Mr. Lambert was my boss. Miss Crane was hers.”

For the first time since they had met him, Salvisa seemed taken aback. He stepped back and squinted at the two of them. “Then why the hell aren’t the two of you there? Seems to me you’d be holed up as neat as anyone, comfy and sipping on a latte.”

Michelle turned away from the conversation. She knew they had to explain what had happened, but she also knew that she wasn’t going to be able to be the one to do it.

Donnie jumped in. “We could’ve been safe,” he said. He nodded to Michelle. “But her daughter’s in Hyannis, at Morgan College, and we’re trying to get to her.”

Salvisa looked to the both of them. Finally, he nodded. “Potentially good,” he said. “Most of you ‘experts’ would attest to the ‘save yourself first’ philosophy, but what are we if we don’t look out for family? Loved ones?”

Donnie felt himself smile. Salvisa, supposedly the world’s number-one zombie expert, agreed with him on the wisdom of pursuing reunion. The “potentially” was odd, but otherwise the conversation was reassuring.

“Perhaps, then,” Salvisa continued, suddenly seeming less eager to join, “I shouldn’t ride with you folks. Might be best if I tried to continue on to Stamford. Not too far away; maybe they and I can handle this ourselves.”

Donnie briefly considered letting the old man travel on, if only so he wouldn’t have to put up with that infernal chuckle anymore. But he stopped himself. “No,” he said. “You can go to Stamford if you want, Mr. Salvisa, but you’d be going for the supplies, for the building. Not for the people.”

Salvisa narrowed his eyes. “Why,” he said. There was no question in his voice.

“There’s no one left,” Donnie said, his voice falling almost to a whisper. “We were the last ones out.”

“And everyone else went…”

“There was no one left, sir,” Donnie repeated. “They’re dead. All dead.”

Salvisa leaned onto the hood of the car. He had been almost annoyingly energetic throughout the conversation, but this realization seemed to drain it from him. “Zachary Lambert?” he said. “Zach is…dead? That simply can’t be possible, son. It can’t.”

“It is, Mr. Salvisa. I promise you. I found his body. Bites to his wrist, his leg, bullet hole to the back of his head. The man was well and truly dead.”

Salvisa continued to shake his head. “And Lawrence? Madison? What of them?”

Donnie spared a glance at Michelle. She seemed to have shrunk with each mention of Stamford, and he was anxious to move on from the topic as quickly as he could. “There’s nothing left, Mr. Salvisa. Nothing. But we can’t very well hang out here convincing you. You are welcome to go with us — more than welcome, if that pack of yours has food and water in it. But we have to get going, and we have to get going
now
.”

Salvisa continued to stand in shock for a few seconds. Finally, he snapped his mouth shut from its hanging-open post and nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right. New plan: In the car. You can answer my questions while we drive. This, frankly, is a story that I must hear.”

Donnie shook his head. “No, Mr. Salvisa,” he said, making the man stop in surprise again. “We have
just
lived through that. We aren’t living through it again. Not now. Not yet. You are free to come with us if you want, ride with us as far as the car will take us. But you’ve gotten all the story on Stamford you’re getting any time soon. You’ll have to be content with the knowledge that there’s nothing left. Besides, what story can there really be? You can probably guess it all.”

Salvisa nodded again. He seemed to realize that, despite his knowledge, his experience, he wasn’t in control of this situation and wasn’t going to be. Michelle, having watched the whole conversation without a word, marveled at Donnie’s handling of it. She knew he had shut down the storytelling for her sake, and loved him for it, but the fact that he managed to wrest dominance away from the man who knew more about their current world than anyone said a lot about her traveling companion.

Donnie and Michelle climbed back into the car. As Salvisa trudged to join them, Donnie leaned to Michelle. “Who the hell is Lawrence Alvarez?” he asked.

Michelle nodded. The name had clicked in her brain when Salvisa said it, but it had taken her a minute to place it. “Used to work in Stamford,” she said. “Six, seven years back. Died of a heart attack.”

“And Salvisa thinks he’s still there? They never told him?”

Michelle shook her head. “There’s no way. You said he and Lambert were close. Not a chance Salvisa wouldn’t have heard about that.”

“So… what does that mean?”

“Donnie, he’s old. I mean, old. Man might not be all together.” Michelle had thought from the beginning that something seemed to be off about Salvisa, and he had done nothing since to assuage her. For their time together, she decided, she needed to keep a close eye on the old man that was joining them.

He climbed into the seat behind Michelle, and Donnie started driving again.

“What is our new plan, then?” Salvisa said after a few minutes. “Arrive in Hyannis and knock on the door?”

Neither of them answered him at first. Finally, Donnie spoke. “We don’t know,” he said. “‘Get there’ is all we know for now. If they’re inside, and we can confirm that, then we’ll find the closest safe place and hide too. Just so long as we know Stacy is okay.

“But if she’s not, if she’s on the run, then we need to get there to help. If we can. If we’re in time.”

Salvisa grunted some sort of old-man approval. They drove on in three-person silence for another few minutes. Then, off in the distance, just at the edge of the area the headlights could hit in the darkness, Michelle saw something ominous.

They were at the border of Connecticut and Rhode Island. And with the end of the state, that meant the end of what had once been a toll road. And that meant a toll plaza.

It was one of the biggest failings of the attempt to remake the country after 2010. Most interstates were converted into toll roads, in an effort to pull in some money from travelers, as the government was one of the biggest losers in the 2010 outbreak. But they didn’t account for people unwilling to even leave their houses when not absolutely necessary. The tolls cost more in upkeep than they brought in, and were scrapped in short order, leaving only morbid abandoned concrete structures to a bad idea spaced sporadically around the interstate.

Theoretically, coming across the toll plaza wasn’t such a bad thing. Of course, no one was there to take their money, and so Donnie could have passed through without stopping. But sometime since the return of the Z’s, someone had passed through the area. And they had left it in bad shape.

The toll plaza had been destroyed, leveled by an explosive, rendering it impassable. And stuck on one side, the same side as Donnie and Michelle, was a mass of zombies, at least twenty. It seemed clear to Michelle that someone had been pursued by these zombies and felled the toll plaza.

For those people, it was successful. For Michelle, Donnie, and Salvisa, though, it left them stuck on the same side as the undead. And, as the headlights fell on them, they seemed to realize they had a chance at a meal approaching, and the group at large started running toward the car.

Donnie slammed on the brakes. He had been scanning the area, searching for a way through or around the toll plaza as they approached, but none presented itself, and now Donnie realized he needed to get going in the
other
direction, find a more circuitous route around the plaza. And he needed to do it now.

He wrenched the car into reverse, retreating as quickly as he could. The car, of course, was faster than the zombies, but then, it had to be — the nearest exit from the interstate was a mile back, and there was nothing between them and that exit except for a mile-long chasing path.

When they had reversed enough to give Donnie the chance, he swung the car around and kicked it into drive, letting him look in front of them instead of behind, and started going once again, hoping against hope that they would make it to the exit before any zombies that had started chasing them earlier.

From the backseat, Salvisa let out a bitter chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” Donnie asked.

“Nothing, my boy,” Salvisa said. “Nothing at all. It just would appear that we need yet another new plan.”

Chapter 10: Make Sure You are Okay

“Sir?” said the boy in the backseat, the one who wasn’t Travis, after they had driven for nearly fifteen minutes. “Sir, where is my mom?”

The kid asked his question with the tone of one who knew the answer, who didn’t want the answer, but who needed the answer, if only to be sure so he could move forward.

Andy wanted nothing more in that moment than to throw open the car door and run off into the night, and he might have, had Celia not been mere inches in front of him.

Instead, he coughed once, cleared his throat, and opened his mouth to speak. Before he could get any words out, though, Lowensen piped up from his left.

“She didn’t make it,” he said. “We found a safe house, or what we thought was one, but there were zombies in there. She died.”

Nothing the teacher said was a lie, but Andy felt miserable hearing him say it. He wanted to pipe up, to tell the kid that he had been the one to kill his mother, and without any reason other than that he thought she
might
have been bitten, but he stayed silent.

So did the boy, nodding silently for a moment. He sat back in the seat, his eyes forward and unmoving. Again, Andy wanted to speak, if only to console him, but this time he was cut off by Stacy in the front seat.

“Your name’s Brandon, right?” she said. The kid let out a nod that Stacy couldn’t see. She continued anyway. “Your mom told me. She and I talked right before…you know. I was panicking, losing it. Still am, I guess. But she pulled me aside, talked to me.”

“What did she say?” he said, his tone suddenly hopeful. These were his mother’s last words.

“I was stuck on the fact that my mom might not be okay, might have died,” Stacy said. “And she kept telling me that, no matter what, my mom was fine. That didn’t make any sense to me — how could she know? But she explained. She wasn’t saying that my mom was alive, hiding out, going to survive this. She was just saying that she was fine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your mom meant that it didn’t
matter
what is going on, what has happened, with my mom. Because the only thing she would care about was that I was safe. She said that, even if my mom was dead, was a zombie, some part of her was out there, watching over me. And as long as I was okay, that part of her was okay.

“‘All a mother ever really wants is for her children to be okay,’ she told me,” Stacy said. “‘So if you want your mom to be okay, make sure you are okay.’ That’s what she said to me. And she was right. All a mother ever cares about is her child. Ever.”

Andy could tell that Stacy’s words didn’t make Brandon feel good, of course, but he could tell that, if nothing else, they steeled his resolve. He kept his eyes forward, but they were no longer vacant, unmoving. They were concentrating, readying themselves.

Andy, meanwhile, was surprised by Stacy’s newfound conviction. Only a few minutes earlier, she was devastated, hopeless, but she now spoke like a confident woman. Andy was confused as to how Amanda’s words alone had changed Stacy so much.

In the front seat, Celia wasn’t really taking in the conversation. She was trying her hardest to stop crying, a fight she had lost more than she had won over the past several hours. And, as Simon drove on and Celia realized she’d soon be back at Morgan College, she started losing again.

The school was the least appealing thing Celia could imagine seeing. The thing she had most looked forward to less than a day earlier, the thing that she had nearly skipped toward, was now terrifying. And Stacy’s comments about mothers didn’t help things, either — Celia didn’t even remember her own mother, and so the words that were comfort to Brandon worked more as a reminder of what Celia didn’t have, as opposed to the intended soothing feeling.

If she hadn’t had Stacy almost on her lap, crammed into the front seat of a 20-odd-year-old car with six other people, Celia might have vomited on the spot.

As it was, she forced back the bile. The tears though, fell fresh. And the occasional sniffle she heard coming from the students around her told her she wasn’t the only one who was upset about their return to the cursed school.

Celia looked left at Simon in the driver’s seat. Simon, with more reason to cry than anyone but Brandon, was steely-faced, driving along as though nothing had happened. How he managed to stay composed in light of everything that had happened so far, Celia didn’t know, but it helped her to see him remain stoic.

Simon pulled into the parking lot — the same one Celia felt like they had
just
left. On instinct, she turned her attention a bit farther up, trying to see what had become of the Porter boy and his mother. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell if they were there or not, but soon realized that it didn’t matter. They were obviously either zombies or dead, and neither status needed to be on her mind now. As it was, nothing showed itself on the darkened horizon — at least, nothing mobile. There were a number of flat, immobile bodies, ones that had been shot or eaten or otherwise destroyed in the earlier college events. The landscape around Morgan College was barren, devoid of motion or activity.

“Do you see his car?” Lowensen said from the backseat. For a second, Celia didn’t know what he meant. Then it clicked: the teacher was searching for Roger, Carla and the Stones’ car, the reason they had returned to Morgan College in the first place.

She turned her attention to the other cars in the lot, hoping one of them would jump out at her, but none did. She supposed that, if Roger had made it back to the school, he’d have more of an alert system in place than “Hope they recognize the car.” At the very least, she figured, he’d have found a way to keep the headlights going.

And so she, and the group at large, came to the realization that Roger wasn’t there. Whether that meant he was dead, a zombie, stranded, or on his way, no one could know.

“How long do we stay?” Stacy asked. Her head jerked over toward Simon as she asked the question, as though she were afraid of offending him with the question.

“Hard to say,” Celia’s dad said. “We took something of a direct route. Even if Roger’s car had enough gas to make it here, we’d likely have beaten him.”

“Ten minutes,” Simon said.

Andy was taken aback by this. Simon, he figured, would be the one who wanted to wait the longest. “Are you sure about that, son?” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot of danger here at the moment. Might be worth waiting a few extra minutes, on the off chance he can make it here on foot.”

“No,” Simon said. His tone was clear. “We give him ten minutes. If he found out I sat here, out in the open, for any longer than that, he’d kill me himself.”

An hour earlier, Andy would have been totally on board with the idea of not waiting around for anyone. After all, waiting in the open, he had found, was just about the best way to get bitten. But that was before he had already pointlessly killed one of their companions. He didn’t want to make a habit of it.

“It’s okay,” Andy said, trying to reassure Simon. “We can wait longer.”

“Ten minutes,” Simon said again. “Mr. Ehrens, that’s all we wait. I’m sure. I love my dad, but if we wait longer, then how long
do
we wait? What if he’s not here in twenty minutes? Forty-five? I mean, my dad is good at surviving. Maybe he makes it on his own, on foot, for hours. A day. Do we wait here that long? When do we decide he’s not coming and go? If we don’t set a deadline, and stick to it, we’ll never leave.”

Andy found himself nodding as the boy spoke. He was right. They couldn’t just wait ad infinitum.

Simon circled the lot, never stopping the car, never letting the passengers out of their cramped quarters. His head barely stopped moving, turning from front to right to left and back to front every second, never settling on a spot, never getting into a position where he could be surprised. Roger, Andy decided for what felt like the twentieth time, had trained his son well.

The minutes passed. For the first several, Celia kept her eyes on their surroundings, like the rest of them, searching for Roger’s car, or the man himself. After four or five, though, she turned her attention away from the outside world and toward the car’s dashboard clock.

They had gotten to Morgan College at 9:48. Celia watched the clock go from 9:56 to 9:57, and wondered if Simon would really stick to his ten-minute rule.

Knowing she had almost a minute before the clock would change again, Celia again allowed herself the chance to look outside the car. She didn’t look for Roger, though. Enough eyes were doing that. Instead, Celia kept her eyes trained on the shadowy forms that made up the three buildings of the college she had so looked forward to.

What had she been anticipating? Three barely erected buildings in a strange city with largely unprepared people she didn’t know? Celia was only just now realizing that the world she had spent 20 years dreaming of, the world her father had grown up in, the world before zombies, was not a world she would ever see. Instead, Celia acknowledged, she was in a different world, one that hadn’t been portrayed by William Shakespeare, by Jon Krakauer, by whoever it was that had written the Bible.

For as long as she could remember, Celia had idealized life at college, portraying it to herself as an Eden-like glimpse into the world of the 2000s — no zombies, no impending death, just a group of young people gathered in one place. Maybe, she had thought, she’d even get the chance to learn what hacky sack was.

But no. That wouldn’t be happening. She knew that now. All she was looking out at, while they circled the small Morgan College parking lot, was the nighttime remnants of a pipe dream, the remnants of a daydream that had become a nightmare. There were bodies in the darkness — none she could make out clearly, but she could tell they were there. Somewhere in that blackness, she knew, lay the body of that sunglasses-wearing kid, the one who had embodied her hopes of a carefree college life.

Now, that kid and his sunglasses embodied Celia’s dead dreams, the remnants of what she had hoped for and the truth she now lived, the truth that said the most she could ever hope for was a tortured existence at her father’s side, seeking to avoid death for a few more hours. That kiss she had shared with Simon felt like it was only a few minutes old and yet a hundred years ago, as she found it hard to imagine ever revisiting that moment, a brief moment that let her feel like she had when she first saw him on campus, like there was still a reason to be hopeful or optimistic.

Instead, Celia thought as she surveyed the small part of campus she could see from the car, there was no good reason for her to have
any
sense of optimism,
any
positive feeling. There was nothing in the world as Celia knew it that should make her feeling anything other than miserable or hopeless.

It was as she had this thought that she caught her first sight of movement on the grounds of Morgan College. Off in the distance, barely visible in the headlights, Celia saw the slow movements of a humanoid figure, walking along the path they had initially taken from the classroom. She saw it just as she glanced down at the dashboard clock, noticing that it flicked to 9:58. Celia found herself doing a double take to make sure she saw what she thought she saw.

“Time’s up,” Simon said, accelerating slightly. His voice sounded hoarse, more emotional than it had in several minutes. “He didn’t make it. We have to go.”

No one in the car spoke as Simon navigated his way to the exit. Just as he reached the main road, though — just as he hit the point of no return — Celia did speak.

“Wait,” she said, her eyes not moving from the figure on the horizon. “Just wait.”

“We can’t,” Simon said, though he sounded less sure than earlier. Whether this was because he was now speaking to Celia or because he was less secure in his convictions to abandon his father, Celia didn’t know. “We can’t wait here forever. We have to leave him. We have to go.”

“We don’t have to leave anyone,” she said, pointing at the figure that she could now make out clearly. It was clearly human, and moving as fast as it could toward them, toward the car. “Your dad is right there.”