After Life (8 page)

Chapter 12: Where Else Would I Have Gone?

The first thing Michelle saw when she got into the office was Lambert’s prone form, lying flat on the floor. She saw his legs sticking out from his white underwear, and his suit jacket draped across his head and giant torso. Seeping out from below the jacket — which looked to Michelle like Madison’s — was a pool of blood.

She and Donnie pushed the door until it was open all the way, and she glanced down at the pair of bodies that had been blocking it. Neither one was Madison’s.

Donnie stepped over to Lambert’s body and lifted the jacket. “Dead,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, dropping the jacket back in place.

Michelle nodded. She had already been sure of that, but she supposed it had been worth confirmation. She took another step into the room, and noticed two pairs of legs sticking out from behind her desk. Michelle gasped and felt her legs give out. She fell to her knees. From there, she could see that neither of these bodies was Madison, either, but that the creature that knelt over them, eating away at the neck of one, was.

Michelle cried out, a noise the zombie that had been Madison heard. It spun its head toward her, and Michelle saw what Madison’s eyes had become. They were bleached, soulless. Her face was streaked with blood, which appeared to still be flowing out of her mouth and down her cheeks.

The creature pulled itself up, favoring its right foot. It limped toward Michelle as quickly as it could. Michelle knew she should do something, pull her weapon or run, but she was frozen. This was Madison, after all.

She couldn’t respond. Couldn’t react.

Donnie, though, could. Within seconds, he fired off a shot, catching the zombie in the side of its head. It pitched sideways and fell face-first to the floor.

Michelle watched the body fall, watched it lie there, and still didn’t respond. She kept staring until she felt hands on her shoulders — Donnie had come up behind her. She flinched, startled by the sensation, then leaned back against him. She could feel herself welling up. She had known that Calvin was probably right — if Madison and Lambert were still in the office, that probably meant they were dead. It probably meant that Madison had been right, that Lambert had been infected, and Michelle hated him for that. But she hadn’t been able to actually talk herself into that truth. Here, though, was proof.

“Michelle,” Donnie said after a moment. “Michelle, we have to go. We can’t stay here.”

Michelle nodded and stood up slowly. She turned to leave, then stopped. “What was on her chest?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”             

“I… There was a piece of paper on her chest. It had something written on it. I didn’t see what it said. I have to read it.”

Donnie nodded. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and guided her to the body, where they together rolled the body over.

There, scrawled on a piece of paper that looked to be stapled directly to Madison’s chest, was one word, written in black marker: “Stacy.”

“Stacy?” Donnie asked. “Any idea what that means?”

Michelle mustered a tiny nod. She couldn’t have figured out anything else the note might have said. “Stacy,” she said. “Madison’s daughter.”

“Madison has a daughter?”

Michelle nodded again. “Dropped her off at Hyannis just the other day.”

“And she, what, wants you to get to her?”

“You didn’t need the note,” Michelle whispered to Madison. “You didn’t need the note. Where else would I have gone?” She knelt down and lifted Madison’s left hand, removing the ring from it.

“I never knew you two were this close,” Donnie said, helping Michelle up again.

She turned to him. The tears, which thus far had been stopped just at the edges of her eyes, finally flowed out. In her right hand, she showed Donnie Madison’s ring. With her left, she fished into her jacket pocket and pulled out the ring’s match.

“We were married,” she said.

Part 2:

The God Damned

Chapter 1: Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, Watch

The young man stepped out of the airport coughing. Despite his tan arms and floral-print shirt, his face was pale. He squinted as the sunlight hit his face, then dug into his chest pocket for a pair of sunglasses, which he donned between coughs.

He couldn’t have been older than his late teens, still a high schooler. His shaggy blond hair was stringy and wiry, looking like it hadn’t been washed in several days. His fingernails, too, carried dirt and grime around their edges, and his shirt and khaki shorts similarly lacked freshness.

Behind him, he pulled a small suitcase on wheels that looked to be near bursting. A small tag attached to the suitcase’s handle indicated his name was Donnie Neyer, and he had come from Queen Beatrix International Airport in Aruba.

He finally stepped up to the line for cabs and hailed the first one that approached. The cabbie, a bulky Pakistani with a thick mustache and a dark, stained shirt, scowled when he climbed out of the driver’s seat and saw the state of his passenger.

“You clean?” he asked with a suspicious eye. The young man coughed again, but nodded. The driver looked unconvinced, but finally shrugged and helped the kid load his wheelie bag into the trunk. They each climbed into the vehicle.

“1437 West 42
nd
,” the young man said between coughs. The cabbie programmed his GPS. Once the cab had pulled away from the airport, the kid leaned back as far as he could and put his arm over his head.

“No sleeping in the cab,” the cabbie said, his voice a tight staccato. The kid didn’t move at first, while the driver watched in the rearview. His head lolled to the side eventually, and the driver turned and yelled, “Hey! You drool on my interior, I’ll —” He stopped there, as the young passenger sat up and fell into yet another coughing fit.

The cabbie nodded. “Good. Cough means awake.” He turned his head back forward, repositioning a St. Christopher doll on his dashboard as he did so.

He kept driving, eventually reaching the downtown area. As he reached the red light at 36
th
, he glanced in his rearview again and, for a moment, couldn’t see the young man at all. He wheeled around and looked. The teen had fallen to his side, and was lying flat across the backseat

The cabbie banged on the glass partition that separated the two of them. The kid waved his arm weakly, showing he was still awake, but kept his head down.

The cabbie’s scowl remained. “Tell myself every year,” he muttered. “Never work Sunday after spring break. 2008, vomit. 2009, vomit. Every year. Hangovers ruin my car.” He looked back again and shouted, “I said no drool!”

Just as the man turned to face forward, the window to his left shattered, and two pairs of arms reached in.

“What the hell?!” the cabbie cried out, slapping at the arms. The young man in the back didn’t move — the glass partition had largely deadened the noise of the breaking glass, and he didn’t seem to have noticed.

The cab driver forced away the first thing reaching in at him, but in doing so the other one had the chance to grab him by the neck, and tore a hunk of skin from it by mouth. The driver cried out in a mixture of pain and anger and shoved away the biter. Finally free from the two attacking him, he leaned over to his glove compartment and yanked it open, pulling out a small pistol.

“Fucking junkies,” the cabbie said as he tended to his injury. Though it didn’t appear to be a mortal wound, it was still a bite to the neck. He put the gun in his left hand and used his right to angle the rearview to investigate his injury.

Seconds later, one of the two creatures climbed back up and reached in at the man again. The driver shoved it away from the vehicle and, leaning out the broken window, shot it twice in the chest.

The sound of the gunshot roused the young man in the backseat, and he sat up as quickly as his body would allow to see what was happening. The first thing he saw was the driver’s left arm yanked downward at the elbow. The driver cried out yet again as his humerus shattered. He yanked what was left of his arm back into the taxi, and the gun flew out of his hand and into the passenger seat.

The kid in the back, his eyes now wide, looked out on the scene around him. The creature that had taken the two bullets to the chest was lumbering back to its feet, seemingly unaffected by the gaping wounds it had suffered. A few yards behind it, on the sidewalk, an old lady was being attacked by a prepubescent boy. An adult woman was trying and failing to fend off what looked like a basketball player just out of the gym. A basketball was just bouncing off the curb and out into the street.

The young man opened the passenger-side rear door and scrambled out of the cab. This side of the vehicle was clear, and the kid looked wildly both ways for a safe direction. He started to go back the way they had come, then stopped, thinking to himself. He returned to the vehicle and opened the front door, reaching in and retrieving the driver’s gun. As he did, the driver lunged for the kid.

The driver’s eyes had become blanched, black and white, and he no longer seemed to be feeling the effects of either his neck injury or his arm. The young man leapt backward, staggering between a pair of vehicles parked at the curb, but he kept his grip on the gun. He stepped onto the sidewalk and heard a smattering of gunshots all around. The young man flinched with each one, his eyes wide and astonished.

Suddenly, a shot rang out at the street corner, just a handful of yards from where the young man stood. He wheeled and watched in horror as one woman stood over another. The upright woman was still holding a gun with a shaking arm, training it as best she could on the body on the ground, which had taken a bullet to the gut. It started to climb back to its feet, just as the one that had attacked the cab driver had done.

The young man leaned forward, vomiting on the sidewalk. He stepped a few feet back and did it again. As he righted himself, another shot was fired, this one much closer to him than the other.

He spun to his right, to the line of buildings and the source of the sound. He saw a man in full vestment, pointing a gun at the ground just behind the young man. He followed the angle of the shot and saw the form of the creature that had been shot by the cabbie lying motionless on the ground with an extra bullet hole, this one in the head.

“Inside, my son!” the priest cried, waving the young man into the church doors he stood in front of. The young man stared open-mouthed for a moment, so the priest repeated his plea. “Inside!”

The kid finally reacted, running into the church.

“Upstairs,” the priest said. “Upstairs should be safe.”

Gasping, the kid nodded. “Thank you, father,” he said.

The priest returned the nod and motioned toward a door a few feet away. “Yes. Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

The young man took a few steps toward the stairway door. As he did, he heard a gunshot from the front door. He turned back and saw that the priest had stepped back outside and fired again. “Come, come!” the priest cried. “Come inside!”

The young man kept staring. Almost absently, he crossed himself as he watched. Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.

2030

Donnie watched as Michelle knelt over Madison’s body. She had placed her gun on the floor beside her, and her hands were clasped in front of her. Her head was bowed, her eyes closed. She silently moved her mouth in between gasps for breath.

Behind her, Donnie stood, unmoving. His mouth hung barely open as he watched Michelle. Finally, she stood up, crossing herself as she did so. She turned to Donnie. “Did you want to…maybe…say something?”

Donnie kept looking at her for a moment without saying anything. Finally, he reacted. “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t believe in God.”

Chapter 2: Just Give Us the Façade

The classroom had sat in near-silence now for at least half an hour. Several of the students had taken to lying on the floor. Some — like Celia — even dozed.

“So what happens now, Dad?” Simon Stone asked. He and his father were both still leaning against the desk.

“Nothing,” Roger said, his eyes not breaking the gaze they had on a spot on the floor near Celia’s and Andy’s feet. “We’re fine. Those doors are shut tight and locked. We have food, power, people. The government has plans in place this time around. We just wait here until we hear the all-clear.”

“Is this what you did last time?” Simon asked. His father nodded, but didn’t say anything.

Andy listened to the exchange silently. He was watching Stacy, who paced back and forth in front of them. Andy wouldn’t say it to any of them, but he didn’t feel as secure in the classroom as he thought he would. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Part of it, Andy thought to himself, was that he didn’t know how to simply be calm and wait out a zombie attack. He somehow felt that he was supposed to be running somewhere, but that was ridiculous.

“What do you think, Mr. Ehrens?” Simon finally said. “Are we okay down here?”

Surprised, Andy looked over at the kid sharply, then smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. They were ready. This time.”

“Were they?” Stacy asked, stopping in her walk and looking at Andy accusingly. “You said the phone didn’t seem to have been hooked up. And I haven’t seen Mr. Lowensen or any other teachers. Do we know we were ready?”

Andy found himself concerned as well, if for no other reason than he could see no authority figures in the classroom with them. “I think so,” he said. “We already know some things are better. The …” Andy stopped short. He had had a realization, but didn’t want to scare the others.

Roger noticed him stopping short and gave him a quick look. The two made eye contact, then Andy waved Simon over to where he and Celia were. “Son,” he went on. “My daughter needs a pillow. Care to oblige for a few minutes?”

Simon jumped up, then sat back down on the desk. He then stood up again, more slowly this time. “Sure,” he said casually.

Andy smiled at the boy’s awkwardness and worked his arm out from behind Celia’s shoulder and held her head up until Simon slid in next to her. Then, he stood up. “Roger,” he said, turning to the other man. “Feel like going on a little reconnaissance with me?”

“Sure,” Roger said, obviously curious what Andy had thought of. The two men walked toward the door Lowensen had exited through earlier. Just before they left the room, Andy looked back toward the kids, where Stacy had resumed her pacing. Celia hadn’t stirred. Simon, he could see, sat with an uneasy grin on his face.

“Think they were a little behind schedule?” Roger asked as they stepped into the hallway. “Look at this place.”

Andy looked around. Roger was right; while the dormitories and the classroom all looked finished and modern, the hallway they were in was little more than a concrete hole. The exposed fluorescent lighting hung from the ceiling, shining every seven feet or so. Some twenty yards down the hall to the right of the men, there was a series of closed doors. Just beyond that, Andy’s view ended, as the hallway took a hard left turn.

“Stylish,” Andy said.             

“My wife,” Roger said without seeming to hear Andy’s response, “was an architect. After 2010, she was unemployed for quite a few years. Couldn’t get work anywhere. No one building anything.” As he walked, Roger started knocking on the doors and checking the handles on the left side. Andy echoed his motions on the right. Neither of them got a response, and all the doors were locked. “Then, a couple years ago I guess, calls started coming in. Job offers right and left. But they weren’t the same as before. Things like this. Minimal detail, more and more panic rooms and the like. No one cared about what was going on behind the scenes. ‘Just give us the façade,’ they said.”

“Then what?” Andy asked.

“What do you mean?”             

“Job offers came pouring in. What did she build?”

Roger reached the hallway’s left-hand turn and stopped. He looked back to where Andy was. “Nothing,” he said. “ALS. By the time the job offers came in, she could barely hold herself up. I had to read the letters out loud to her. Made her feel better to know she was wanted.”

Andy nodded. “Sorry.”

Roger returned the nod. “It’s okay,” he said, looking down at the concrete floor. “She died about a year ago. And, all things considered,” he waved in a general upward direction and finished, his voice barely above a whisper, “it’s just as well.” Then he stopped, seeming to remember something. “What did you think of that made you want to come back here?”

Andy nodded. He had reached the corner, around which he expected the cafeteria. He hadn’t seen anyone enter the classroom from that back door since they had gotten down there, and couldn’t remember any noise from the area, either.

“The cafeteria,” he said to Roger. “The people who went to eat.” He saw Roger’s footsteps slow for a second before he caught his pace.

The two men turned the corner. On the left, only a few feet down, there were a pair of swinging doors. All the other doors in the hallway before the turn, and everything beyond these two, were easily closed, easily locked doors, but these two were simple, with pale doors with metal panels where you would push to open and tempered glass windows that let clinical yellow light flow out.

That shaft of yellow light, though, was broken up by the hands.

As many hands as could fit in the two small rectangles were slapping at the tempered glass, hitting the windows with open palms. As if on instinct, Roger started to hurry to the doors, but Andy reached out his arm and stopped him.

“Those aren’t people,” Andy said to Roger’s curious look. The noise from the slapping at the door had just started, leading Andy to believe he and Roger had spoken loudly enough to draw attention to themselves. The doors were bulging outward slightly, like a balloon about to burst. Andy hurried toward the door himself, stopping a few feet shy, and stood on his toes to see through the windows. Indeed, he saw any number of the undead, and zero remaining humans.

“Why can’t they get out?” Roger said, creeping up behind Andy.

Andy knelt down and looked between the metal panels. There was something stuck between the handles of the door on that side. Andy tentatively tapped the doors and nodded, satisfied the barrier would hold. Then he stood up again and looked back through the windows.

“What are you looking for?” Roger asked.

Andy scanned the room for a minute, then nodded. “Do you remember when we first got here?” he asked. “There was a woman with her son outside, coaching him.”

Roger nodded. “If you’re trapped, sacrifice yourself,” he said, remembering. “You think that’s what happened?”

Andy pointed through the window. About 10 feet back, behind the biggest throng, he saw the woman’s heavyset son walking around mindlessly. In the back of the room, barely visible from his vantage point, he saw a corpse that had been eaten almost bare, recognizable only by the gaudy blue earring he could see lying next to its head.

“I’m sure,” he said.

“What do we do?”

“There’s nothing to do,” Andy said, moving past the room. “Maybe she was right, maybe she was wrong, but at this point there are only zombies behind that door. We can’t help them, and letting them out certainly isn’t the right answer.” He tried the next door down the hall, across from the cafeteria. “We just look for anyone else down here.”

Roger took a moment. He put his hand on the door to the cafeteria, only increasing the groans from the other side. “I’m sorry,” he said to the door before shaking his head and following Andy.

At the end of that hallway, Andy saw light poking out from inside a closed office. He could tell that Roger saw it as well, and both men picked up their paces as they approached it. As they drew near, Andy could hear some music playing inside.

Roger got there first and offered a tentative knock. When no response came, he tried again, harder. The music stopped seconds later, but still no one came to the door.

Andy stepped ahead of Roger and tried the door. It opened and the two men saw Barry Lowensen sitting at his desk. He was working feverishly at his computer and had a half-empty shaker of an amber liquid next to him.

“Web sites are going crazy,” Lowensen said without turning away from the screen. “Out-Theres is down, it seems, but every message board, every chat room is going crazy. Everyone’s just tap-tapping away.

“Don’t know why,” he continued, finally turning away from the screen. He looked up at the two men with an odd smile, though Andy noticed he failed to meet either man’s eye. “If it’s me, I stay as far away from the computer as I can get.” He looked back at his computer, then shrugged and almost laughed. “What’s up?”

“‘What’s up?’” Andy repeated.

“Yeah,” Lowensen said. “You guys have had the place locked down for a half-hour. What brings you here now?” He finished the drink in his glass.

“What…” Roger started. “Are we okay down here? We haven’t heard anything from you, the other teachers, administrators…” Lowensen offered them a smile, but Andy thought it looked forced. Lowensen’s eyes did not reflect the feelings of his mouth.

“How many of you made it?” Lowensen asked, ignoring Roger’s question. He then seemed to disregard his own question as well by standing up and turning toward his filing cabinet. He opened the top drawer and paused, looking inside. With what looked to Andy like unease, Lowensen reached in and pulled out a gun. With no holster, Lowensen tucked the weapon into the waistband of his pants. He turned and strode past the two men, out of the room and out into the hallway.

“It was about 40, 45 maybe,” Andy said as he spun around and followed Lowensen. The teacher was walking very quickly, his shoulders back, his head high. “Plus the people trapped in the cafeteria, but we can’t save them now.” Andy watched the teacher’s gait for signs of a reaction at hearing about people trapped, but he saw none.

Lowensen ignored the men as he walked, ignored the cafeteria as he passed it. Andy vaguely registered that he should have been sad himself, devastated even, by the tableau in the cafeteria, but he hadn’t been. A week ago, when he had accidentally hit a cat with his car, Andy had been sad for hours, but the return of the zombies had flipped a switch in him. He knew the sadness should be there, but it wasn’t.

Finally, the three of them reached the classroom. Lowensen pulled the door open for the other two, who passed through ahead of him. He started to follow, but stopped at the threshold. “Mr. Ehrens,” he said in a whisper, barely loud enough for Andy to hear.

“Mr. Lowensen?” Lowensen waved for Andy to follow him back out into the hallway. Andy came back out. Roger turned and saw, and started to follow, but Lowensen waved him back and shut the door, leaving Roger and everyone else inside.

Once they were alone, Andy watched the teacher crumble before him. He staggered back against the wall, then slid down until he was curled into a seated position. He buried his face into his hands and breathed deeply. When Lowensen looked up, Andy could see redness in both of his eyes.

“You know what to do,” Lowensen said, his voice still barely above a whisper. “You were out there last time, you know what to do. You know what to do. Didn’t want to tell anyone else without knowing if they know what to do. But you know what to do.”

“Lowensen?” Andy said, his nerves rising. “Lowensen, what are you talking about?”

“You
do
know what to do, don’t you?”

“What to do? We stay here. There’s food, locked doors. What is there to know?”

Lowensen had started shaking his head as soon as Andy mentioned food, and it grew more and more violent. “There’s no food. No food.”

Andy stood still. He narrowed his eyes, trying to determine if the teacher was pulling some crazy prank. Finally, he decided to believe him. “Explain.”

“We have food through the weekend, maybe a day or two beyond that,” he said. “The rest wasn’t going to be here until later on. Didn’t think we’d need backup stores
right away
. Thought enough to get us through a few days at a time would be enough at the start. And what food we
do
have is already in the cafeteria. We can go in, kill all the Z’s in there, for what? A week’s worth of provisions, considering the mouths to feed? There’s no food, Mr. Ehrens. No food.”

Andy felt his heart sink. After all the talk, all the supposed preparation of the past twenty years, people had apparently learned only how to talk of a plan. When it came to action, it seemed, humans hadn’t learned a thing. He felt his bile rising, and he reached down and pulled Lowensen up.

“Let’s go,” he said, pulling the teacher toward the classroom.

“Where are we going?” Lowensen said, sounding like a child who didn’t want to go to the dentist.

“Where are we going? Where do you think we’re going?” Andy pulled the teacher toward the classroom door again. “I’ll be damned if
I’m
going to be the one to tell these people you’ve condemned them to death.”

“What? No! I told you so you can come up with a way to help me fix this!”