After The Apocalypse (Book 2): Church of Chaos

by Griffin, Gen

  My mother twitched twice more and then slumped dead on the ground.

  Seth turned back around to face me. He started to step towards me, one hand held out in a gesture of peace. The expression in his eyes was anything but cold. “Pilar, I'm sorry.”

  “Get away from me!” I spat the words at him. “You killed her!”

  “I had no choice. She was a zombie.”

  “I don't care. You didn't have to. She was in a cage. You could have let her live. She couldn't hurt us from inside there!” I flung myself against the ground and began sobbing in earnest.

  Chapter 19

  I laid on the ground and cried until Gauge and Lola came for us. Every time Seth tried to come towards me, I screamed at him that I hated him. I told Gauge the same thing, but with slightly less venom. Gauge muttered that we absolutely had to get out of the bunker regardless of what Seth had done. He picked me up against his chest and cradled me in his arms like a child, carrying me out of the dark hallway and into the sunlight.

  Back out in the fresh air, I struggled against him until he set me down. The dead guard was still lying on the ground outside the bunker door, indicating that no one had come by yet and noticed what Seth had done to him. I took that as both a good sign and a bad sign. Clearly, no one knew we'd been here. It was disconcerting to see that they weren't worried about guarding their lab. It made me wonder if we had discovered their plan too late. What if all the guards who were supposed to be here were in the Cube, injecting people with zombie serum?

  Gauge boosted me over the fence without a word. Back on the streets of Ra-Shet, we stayed off the main thoroughfares. It took the four of us nearly two hours to make our way back to the Underground.

  I was thirsty, exhausted and had no desire to speak to anyone by the time we reached safety. Seth and Gauge had spent the last hour arguing about whether or not they needed to go back to the compound and destroy it. Apparently, Gauge and Lola had located an office at the very back of the bunker. It had been full of documents that charted how long it took individuals to turn into full zombies after being injected with specific variations of the zombie serum. Drake's batch of serum had been one of the more successful attempts, with participants staying human for up to two months before symptoms appeared. No one mentioned how long it had taken my mother to turn into a flesh eating monster and I didn't ask.

  I felt numb as I made my way up to the small second story room where I'd slept last night. My clothes and hair smelled like rotting flesh. Unfortunately, the Underground didn't have private bathrooms. Lola had informed me last night that the nearest public bath house was roughly a quarter of a mile up the road. At the time, I hadn't wanted a shower that badly.

  I gathered up my small bag of clothes and made my way carefully down the hallway. I wanted to slip out of the Underground unnoticed, but as usual my luck failed me. Seth was standing in front of the front door.

  “Move.” I kept my head down and avoided looking at him as I reached for the doorknob.

  “Pilar, we need to talk. I know you're angry-.”

  “Angry?” My head snapped up and I met his eyes with as much fury as I could muster. “No, Seth. I'm not angry. I'm furious. I asked you to help me find my mother! Find her!”

  “We found her,” Seth looked stricken but I didn't care.

  “We found her and you killed her!” I practically screamed the words in his face. I knew that everyone in the Underground could probably hear us fighting but I was past caring. “You killed her!”

  “She was a zombie!” Seth argued.

  “So are you!”

  “No, I'm not.” Seth caught my wrists with his hands. He was much stronger than I was. “Pilar, she was suffering. She was rotting. I put her out of her misery. You can't leave someone to live in that condition. Whatever humanity had been in her was long gone. The qualities that made her your mother were gone. She was a mindless corpse with a hunger for flesh. If she still felt anything at all, it was pain.”

  “You never even gave her a chance,” I hissed at him. “You killed her before I ever even had the chance to talk to her. She had been turned the same way Drake was turned. Drake still talked. I could have talked to her. I could have made her realize that we were there to help her.”

  “She was beyond helping, Pi.” Seth's grip was starting to hurt my wrists. I yanked my arms loose from his hold.

  “You didn't even try to save her.”

  “She attacked us.”

  “Maybe she was scared!”

  “I was trying to protect you!” Seth yelled back at me. “Maybe I was scared that you were about to get your face ripped off by a zombie. She would have killed you.”

  “No.”

  “Wake up, Pi.” Seth leaned down so that he and I were nose to nose. “If you had tried to save her, she would have killed you. I saved your life when I ended hers.”

  “I didn't ask you to save my life.” I put both my hands in the center of his chest shoved him backwards as hard as I could. “You killed my mom and I'm never going to be able to forgive you. I don't care if you think you were doing me a favor. Its not your place to decide who lives and who dies.”

  He stumbled backwards away from the door. “Dammit Pilar.”

  “Go to hell, Seth.” I grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. Sunlight poured into the room. “Don't bother waiting around here for me. I'm not coming back. I never want to see you again as long as I live.”

  I stormed out of the Underground and into the busy city street. Everything I owned was tucked into the backpack that I'd slung over my shoulder. I still needed a shower and I had nowhere to go. Other than Seth and the people at the Underground, I knew exactly no one in the city of Ra-Shet.

  Being alone was slightly terrifying, but I had become a lot braver in the weeks since I'd first left the Cube with the Scavengers. This wasn't the first time I'd found myself alone in a strange place. I would be fine. I just needed to focus on one task at a time. I decided to stick with my original plan to head to the bath house.

  Thankfully, the bath house wasn't hard to find. It consisted of a large wooden building that straddled the corner of a semi-busy road. Thankfully, the middle of a weekday afternoon didn't appear to be a popular time to get a bath. I was able to slip inside and get into a shower stall without having to speak to any other human beings.

  I turned the water up as high and as hot as it would go and then used a small bar of soap that someone had left behind to wash my hair. I scrubbed my skin until it turned bright red. With bathing accomplished, I still couldn't bring myself to face the outside world. I sank down to my knees under the spray from the shower and tried to wrap my mind around the reality that my efforts to save my mother had resulted in her death.

  Chapter 20

  “Hey, you know there's a limit on how long you can stay in here, right?”

  I blinked, startled to see Lola standing in front of me wearing a tight blue mini dress and dark blue sparkly high heels. She'd pulled the canvas curtain back on the shower I was sitting in.

  “Oh. Sorry.” I had no idea how long I had been sitting on the bath house floor. The water that was pouring down on me from the shower head was still warm, but my hands were so pruned and wrinkled that I could barely move them. “Do you want this shower?”

  “No. I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said. “I know what you went through this morning with your mom had to have been horrible for you.” Lola shuddered visibly.

  “Horrible is an understatement.” I went to move my legs and realized that they'd gone completely numb. I tried to stand up and nearly fell to the ground.

  “Are you sure you're okay?” Lola started to reach for my arm and then hesitated.

  “I'll live. I'm just tired and my legs fell asleep.” I belatedly realized that I was completely naked. “Can you give me some privacy, please?”

  “Let me know if you need me.” Lola dropped the shower curtain back down and stepped away. “I'm just trying to help.”

>   It took me another couple of tries before I got my legs under me and supporting my weight. My feet and toes were tingling brutally as I made my way out of the shower and turned it off. I grabbed a towel off the provided rack and wrapped it around my body in hopes of maintaining some kind of belated sense of decency.

  Lola was sitting on a bench outside the shower. She had a shiny, shimmery bag sitting beside her. It looked like it cost more than Gauge's entire wardrobe.

  “You didn't have to come check up on me,” I told her. “How did you even find me?”

  “Seth asked me to come check on you. I told him I would. Besides, you're not the only person who needed a shower after this morning's little misadventure.” Lola poked the bag that was sitting beside her. “Where else is a girl going to go when she has zombie blood all over her skin?”

  “I just needed some privacy and this seemed like the best place to get it.” I dug into my bag of clothing and scowled at the contents. Other than the whimsical yellow dress that Seth had let me wear yesterday, everything in the bag was incredibly practical and functional. No fun colors or flowing skirts. No glitter. Nothing that said 'I'm a girl and I'm alive'.

  Mom had loved girly clothes and things. She'd always sewed sequins into my skirts and made bows for me out of scrap fabric when I had been a little girl.

  I closed my eyes and fought back yet another round of tears. I'd known that it was possible my mother would be dead when I found her, but it had never occurred to me that I might have to watch her die.

  “The bath house isn't the worst place to find privacy,” Lola commented. “It's quiet in here.”

  “It is,” I acknowledged. “Maybe too quiet. I think I must have fallen asleep.”

  “You looked like you were asleep when I opened the door.” She fussed with the hem of her incredibly short skirt. “Pilar, I know you're upset about your mother, but Seth did what he had to do.”

  “No,” I shook my head at her. “Seth did what he wanted to do. Seth always does what he wants to do.”

  “Your mother would have been incredibly dangerous if she'd ever managed to escape Bud's compound. We couldn't take that kind of risk. Think about all the innocent people living inside the city.”

  “If that were true, Seth would have killed all of the zombies we found in the compound. Not just my mom.”

  “Seth did kill every zombie we found in the compound.” Lola sat down on the bench next to my stuff. “He executed all of them.”

  “I don't remember him doing that.”

  “Do you remember him leaving the room while Gauge and I were trying to convince you to leave the compound without your mother's body?”

  I frowned. I did vaguely remember Seth disappearing. “I figured he was just running away so he didn't have to deal with me.”

  “Seth never runs away,” Lola said dismissively. “He went back into the first room we were in and decapitated the rest of the super-zombies.”

  “Were they all super-zombies?” I couldn't help asking even though I seriously doubted I wanted to know the answer.

  Lola shrugged. “The entire place was an experimental facility. Seth said we couldn't risk letting any of them live.”

  I shuddered. Looking for a distraction, I dumped the contents of my bag out onto the bench. The yellow dress had been wadded up into a crumpled, stained ball. I'd already tossed the clothes I'd worn today into the trash can because they were spotted and stained with the blood of two people who had once been important to me. The remaining clothing consisted of two long-sleeved t-shirts and two pairs of nondescript blue jeans. One t-shirt was black and the other was gray. I was willing to bet they would hide bloodstains well. I scowled down at them. “I don't want to wear either one of these.”

  “You can always go down to Boer's Dress Shoppe and buy something new,” Lola suggested. “They have a good clearance section if you're tight on money.”

  “Money. Right.” I remembered Seth saying he was putting a handful of coins in the side pocket of my backpack in case the two of us got separated and I needed something. I checked to see if they were still there. The coins jangled reassuringly as I shook my bag. “As much as I'd love to have a new dress, I don't have any money that I can afford to spend. I need to save the little I have for buying food and finding somewhere to stay.”

  “You're not coming back to the Underground?” Lola didn't look entirely surprised by the news.

  “I don't want to be around Seth right now,” I said. “My dad is somewhere in the city and I'm going to find him.”

  “I understand you're angry,” Lola said. “But Pilar-.”

  “Angry is an understatement.” I picked up the jeans and the gray t-shirt and pulled them on before turning back to face Lola. “And I know Seth sent you to check on me, but I don't need a babysitter. I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

  “You're really angry with him, aren't you?” She asked.

  “He murdered my mother.” I put my hands on my hips. “Would you forgive him if he murdered your mother?”

  Lola looked me up and down for a minute. I got the unexpected sensation that she was taking my measure. “I still haven't forgiven him for murdering Jeremiah.”

  I was too startled to know what to say. I felt my jaw drop open. “Seth murdered Jeremiah?”

  Lola eyed me for a moment longer. “We should talk somewhere a little more private. Have you eaten dinner yet?”

  I had to think about the question. I didn't feel hungry but it had been a long time since I had eaten. “Not yet. I don't know if I can bring myself to eat anything.”

  “You need to eat something. I know this amazing little cafe, if you want to join me?” Lola offered with a smile. “We can talk there.”

  I hesitated and then decided that I had nothing to lose by eating dinner with Lola. “We've never really had the chance to talk.”

  “No, we haven't,” Lola confirmed. “But I think we need to.”

  Chapter 21

  “How did a nice, innocent girl like you wind up involved with Seth Ra?” Lola eyed me curiously as we sat down at a small outdoor table that was positioned on the edge of the patio of the restaurant she had chosen for dinner.

  “It was an accident.” The air smelled heavily of cooked meat and spices. My stomach rumbled and I abruptly realized how long it had been since the last time I had eaten. I was starving. “And it makes for a long story.”

  “I'm not in any hurry to get back to the Underground,” Lola said dismissively as the waitress approached. Lola ordered an appetizer of chips and dip as well as drinks for the both of us. I didn't particularly care what type of food she ordered. Growing up in the Cube pretty much ensured that I was willing to eat almost anything.

  “I'm not going back to the Underground,” I said. “Ever.”

  “You said that,” Lola acknowledged. “I understand your feelings. Seth betrayed you pretty badly today.”

  “'Betrayed me' is an understatement,” I muttered. “He probably doesn't even understand why I'm mad at him.”

  “He knows that you didn't appreciate him killing your mother, zombie or not.”

  “I didn't say he didn't know. I said he didn't understand.” I sighed. “There is a huge difference between knowing that something is the wrong thing to do and understanding why you shouldn't do it. Seth is fully aware that he did the exact opposite of what I wanted him to do. He just isn't ever going to understand that, to me, it wasn't just a matter of seeing a zombie and killing it. Maybe she could have been saved.”

  “I doubt the possibility of a cure ever crossed Seth's mind.” Lola looked at me curiously as the waitress returned with the tortilla chips and set the basket in between us. “Do you really think the zombie virus could be curable?

  I took a deep breath. “If Bud Moon can modify the virus so that zombies still have human minds, then anything could be possible with enough time and research.”

  “So, you think we should stop killing zombies altogether?” Lola asked.
<
br />   “I didn't say that.”

  “I'm just asking,” Lola replied. “Because if one zombie could be cured, maybe all of them could be cured. If they're curable, maybe we shouldn't be killing them at all. Maybe we should try to save them. Keep them housed somewhere far away from the general population while we work on developing a cure.”

  “You think we should try to save all of them?” I couldn't imagine trying to safely house and contain thousands of zombies.

  “Wouldn't we have to?” Lola countered. “Every zombie out there used to be someone's loved one. You can't choose to save your mom but decide to let some other person's mom continue to rot, could you?”

  “I guess not,” I said somewhat reluctantly. “Maybe a cure isn't really feasible.”

  “If you can't cure the zombies, then you would never be safe around them.” Lola picked at the chips as our waitress reappeared carrying a pair of lemonades.

  “I don't think I'll ever feel truly safe again. Zombies or no zombies.” I picked up my first chip. The tortillas were still warm. I hadn't realized how truly hungry I was.

  “Because of Seth?” Lola dug into the chips.

  “Because of life.” I took a sip of my lemonade. “I don't even know where to start trying to explain. You have no idea how much I miss my mom. I just want to be able to talk to her one last time. I want her advice. I feel so lost and I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

  “Talk to me. Maybe I can help,” Lola said. “I'm not your mom, but I do have a lot of life experience. I give pretty good advice. Especially when it comes to dealing with boys who want to revolutionaries. Between Jeremiah, Seth and Gauge, I've been around this particular block a few times. Maybe I can help you make some decisions about what you want from your life.”

  “My first priority is finding my dad.” I picked up another handful of chips.

  “Your dad was sold through the meat market, Pilar. You aren't going to find him.” Lola's voice was gentle but the reality in her words was not.