Aftermath

by Mark Lukens

  Kate almost laughed again, but this time she didn’t have to try as hard to stifle it. What he’d said was more sad than funny. She stared at him, looking at his face. There was something familiar about it, but she couldn’t figure out where she could have seen him before.

  “He’ll talk your ear off if you let him,” Petra said from the floor beyond Max. She was still curled up on her side, her eyes still closed. “You were supposed to wake me up when it was morning, Max.”

  “Just letting you catch a few extra winks. I’ve just been having a fine conversation with our host.”

  “You mean someone to talk to besides Social Sally?” Petra asked.

  “Oh. You heard that part?”

  Petra didn’t answer. She sat up and stretched her arms.

  Kate saw that Petra was pretty short, shorter than she was, but she looked compact and strong. She was young, maybe not even thirty yet. Her skin was light brown and her hair was braided into cornrows. She wore a hoodie with some kind of leather vest underneath. She had a belt with a holster for a pistol, a sheath for a knife, and a few other pouches. She also had a larger bag with a shoulder strap that went across her body. She wore camouflage fatigue pants and combat boots.

  “Something wrong?” Petra asked Kate.

  Kate realized that she’d been staring at Petra for at least a full minute now. She recognized Petra, too—just like she recognized Max. She’d seen them somewhere before.

  But where?

  And then it hit her. “I’ve seen both of you before,” she blurted out.

  CHAPTER 32

  “What do you mean, you’ve seen us before?” Petra asked as she stood up, suddenly tense, wary again.

  Kate realized what she had blurted out, realized how it must have sounded to them. She looked at Max when she answered Petra’s question. “You’d never believe me. It’s going to sound crazy.”

  “Try me,” Petra said. It sounded like a threat.

  Kate looked back at Brooke—she was still asleep. She looked back at the two of them.

  “You got something to say,” Petra said, “then say it.”

  “Hold on, Petra,” Max said, holding up a big hand like he was trying to calm her down before she got agitated even more. “Let her talk. Give her time to explain.” He looked back at Kate with his soft brown eyes. “Go ahead. Whatever it is, it can’t be as crazy as what’s already happened.”

  Kate could tell that Max already believed her. No matter what she was about to tell him, he was already onboard with it. There was something about his expectant expression, like he was hoping that she could validate something for him.

  He’s seen something, too. He’s felt something.

  Okay. They wanted to know? Here it was: “I’ve seen you because Brooke has drawn your pictures before.”

  That stunned them into silence for a moment. Petra still looked tense, ready to fight, yet frozen, like she was waiting for more of an explanation. Max looked confused, but he still had that hopeful expression in his eyes.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Kate continued quickly. “But Brooke likes to draw. She’s a really good artist. She’s got this drawing tablet and she draws people. I saw you two in two of her drawings. I asked her who they were, but she never answered me. She’s been so traumatized. I figured the man and woman she was drawing had been her parents, but now . . . now I see that it’s you.”

  “This lady’s crazy,” Petra said. “We need to get going.”

  “Wait a minute,” Max said, but he was still looking at Kate. “Do you have these drawings?”

  Kate’s heart sank. She knew how this was going to sound. “No. We were at a motel before this place. We stayed the night there and Brooke brought her drawing tablet in with her. She wouldn’t go anywhere without it. But these two men broke in and tried to take us away. We got away when the rippers started coming, but we had to get in the car and go. We couldn’t go back for anything in the motel office where we’d been sleeping.”

  “Who were these men that tried to take you?” Petra asked.

  “I don’t know. But they both had this symbol carved into their foreheads—”

  “The letter D and the letter A,” Max said. “Kind of overlapping each other.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what it means.”

  “They call themselves Dark Angels,” Petra said. “I ran into someone who’d had a run-in with them.”

  “They said their leader was called the Dragon,” Kate said.

  That seemed to be new information to Petra and Max, but just the mention of the Dragon seemed to keep both of them on edge. Kate thought about telling them about how the man with the messed-up nose had told her that they’d been looking for her and Brooke, that the Dragon would never stop looking for them. But they probably already thought she was crazy, and she didn’t need to confirm it even more. Besides, she was sure they knew more than they were telling; she was sure they had some stuff that they didn’t want to say because it would sound just as crazy.

  “You don’t have the drawings?” Max said, frowning.

  “We had to leave them behind. We had to run.”

  “How did you get away from the Dark Angels?” Petra asked, not hiding her suspicion.

  Kate glanced back at Brooke. They had all been talking louder since Petra had gotten up, but their voices hadn’t woken Brooke up yet. She looked back at them. “They took us outside of the lobby, to their van. They took Brooke out there first. When the other guy was marching me toward the van, the other man was trying to force Brooke inside the van. But she fought back. She hit him, kicked him, she even bit him.”

  Petra nodded like she was suddenly impressed with this little girl.

  “And Brooke was screaming. She wouldn’t stop. The rippers were already close, in the woods. They were calling out from the trees. You know those screeching and yelling noises they make.”

  They both nodded; they knew those sounds well.

  “The men were panicking. It was my chance. There was trash and debris all over the parking lot. I saw a broken-off piece of wood, like from a piece of furniture. It had a sharp point at one end. I picked it up and stabbed it into the man’s neck, the one who had been walking me to the van.”

  “How did you stab him if he was walking you to the van?”

  “He moved in front of me. He was about to help the other guy get Brooke into the van. I was behind him then. I didn’t even think about it, I just stabbed him with the stick. Deep down into his neck. He dropped the gun that he had. It slid under the van. Brooke was under the van by then. She grabbed the gun.”

  “She shot them?” Max asked, amazed.

  “She shot the other one. I told her to run to the car. The other guy, the one I had stabbed, he was coming after me. But slow. I wasn’t sure if he was even going to fall down, but there was so much blood.”

  “And then the rippers came?” Petra asked.

  Kate nodded. “I grabbed one of the boxes from the back of their van and ran to the car. Brooke kept the gun. She’d gotten into the car and started it, had the doors open for me. The rippers were so close by then. If she hadn’t have done that, I don’t know if we would have made it.”

  “Those guys,” Max said, “the Dark Angels, they’re going around and scrounging up anything they can. They work in groups in different areas, but they all seem to be a part of the same group.”

  “How can they be this organized already?” Kate asked. “I mean, if they’re all immune, they can’t all have known each other.”

  “Something is bringing them together,” Max said, nodding knowingly, almost like he was trying to get Kate to say it out loud.

  The Dragon, Kate thought. That’s what’s bringing them together. That’s who’s holding them together. Then she thought of the blind woman she kept seeing in her dreams, the blind woman who told her there were others, the woman who told her to go west, to gather together. It was crazy, even crazier when spoken aloud, but there was no denying that something strange was
happening.

  “We need to get going,” Petra told Max.

  Kate looked at Petra, trying to gauge her. She knew the woman was still suspicious of her. And now that she had spouted off about Brooke drawing pictures of them when she had no way of knowing what they looked like, she was sure she looked like a crazy woman.

  Max got up to his feet, stretching. It looked like he was stiff from sitting in the same position all night.

  “Wait a minute,” Kate said. She looked back at Brooke, who was still sleeping. Kate gently pulled the drawing tablet out from under Brooke. She’d been drawing something yesterday afternoon before Kate had fallen asleep. Maybe she’d drawn another picture of Max and Petra. She opened the tablet, staring in shock as she flipped through the first few pages. Brooke hadn’t drawn any more pictures of Max and Petra, but she had drawn other things.

  CHAPTER 33

  “What is it?” Petra said, moving closer. “Let me see.”

  The shock still hadn’t worn off of Kate from what she’d seen inside the drawing tablet, but she handed it to Petra.

  Petra opened the tablet, flipping through the first five pages slowly—the five drawings Brooke had done so far.

  Max hurried over to Petra’s side as she flipped through the pages again.

  “Damn, she’s good,” Max said, and then he froze as recognition flooded his face. “Wait a minute. I’ve seen these people before.”

  Petra nodded in agreement. “Wait until you see the last two.”

  Max’s breath hitched a little as he stared at the tablet over Petra’s shoulder. She handed it to him so he could get a better look.

  Kate knew what Max was staring at. She’d only had a few seconds to look at each drawing, but they seemed to be etched into her memory now. All five drawings were sketches, some parts of the body not even filled in fully with detail, just the outline of a leg, the ghostly image of an arm, but all of the faces were detailed enough for Kate to recognize all of them. The first drawing was of the man and his son. The second drawing was of the man with the long hair, scraggly beard, and tattoos. He wore a backpack and held a shotgun in his hands, the weapon not drawn completely. The third drawing was of the muscular man with the buzzed hair and hard eyes. He was dressed in a hoodie and black gloves, holding a pistol with a silencer in one hand.

  But Petra was right; it was the last two that might really blow all of their minds. The fourth drawing was of the beautiful blind woman Kate had seen in her dreams, and the last drawing was of the shadowy man with the shining eyes. The drawings were contrasts of light and dark. Brooke seemed to have captured the glow around the blind woman, everything about her light: her clothing, her skin, her hair, everything except her dark glasses. And the shadowy man (who Kate was sure was the Dragon) seemed purposely vague, his face mostly shadows, although hard edges of cheekbones and his jaw were suggested. He was dressed in flowing black clothing, almost like robes, and his eyes burned brightly in his shadowed face. Another contrast: the dark eyes of the blind woman compared to the light eyes of the dark man.

  “This is the guy I told you about,” Max whispered to Petra. “The Dark One. The one I’ve seen in my dreams.”

  Petra didn’t say anything.

  “You’ve seen those people in your dreams?” Kate asked. “I have. I’ve seen all of them. Apparently Brooke has, too.”

  Max and Petra couldn’t deny it—the truth was on their faces.

  “You thought I was crazy,” Max told Petra.

  Petra nodded. “I’ve seen him, too.”

  Max looked shocked. “Why didn’t you say anything? You just let me ramble on about it and didn’t say anything?”

  She just shrugged, refusing to comment. Instead, she took the drawing tablet and flipped back to the fourth drawing. “This woman. She’s blind. I saw her in a few of my dreams. She talked to me in the dream. Told me to go south. She said there were others.”

  “Did you see those men?” Kate asked. “The father and his son?”

  Petra nodded.

  “And both of you have seen the Dragon,” Kate said.

  “That’s his name?” Max asked.

  “That’s what those Dark Angels called him when they were trying to take me and Brooke. They said the Dragon wanted us, that they were taking us to him. I don’t know if that person is the Dragon, but I’m pretty sure of it.”

  Petra handed the drawing tablet back to Max and walked away.

  “Where are you going?” he asked her.

  “Patrolling the area,” she said.

  “Don’t walk away from this,” Max told her, then he looked at Kate. “She doesn’t want to believe in any of this. I think it freaks her out. It’s too mystical for her. But I believe it’s true. I’ve always believed in this kind of stuff: psychics, telepathy, E.S.P. I believe we’re all linked together in some way, but most of us choose to ignore it. Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious.”

  Petra had reached the edge of the kitchen, but then she marched back to Max and Kate. “Yeah, maybe it’s true. Maybe we had dreams about the same people. So what?”

  “Because it means something,” Max said.

  “We’ve got rippers out there,” she said, pointing at one of the barricaded windows. “Gangs of thugs who would kill us for the box of food Kate has over there. We’ve got much bigger problems than some stupid dreams.”

  “That gang, those Dark Angels, they’re being sent to find us,” Max said. “The Dark One, or the Dragon, whatever he’s called, he’s sending them to find us.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You heard what Kate just said. The Dark Angels said they were sent to take her and Brooke to someone called the Dragon.”

  Petra eyed Kate suspiciously.

  “That man in our dreams is sending people after us,” Max continued. “It’s all connected through our dreams and their dreams, or through the subconscious, or suggestion, or whatever. That’s why they were so organized so quickly, they were all connected to the Dragon whether they even knew it or not.”

  “Why come after us?” Kate asked.

  “Because we must be connected, too,” Max said. “Maybe we don’t even realize it. Maybe it’s just in our dreams, something we can’t really understand, but something we know on an instinctual level.”

  Kate just nodded.

  “Why were you traveling west, Kate?” Max asked her.

  “I was going to find my family.”

  “But there was more, wasn’t there?”

  Kate nodded. “I saw the blind woman in my dreams. She told me to go west, to find the others. I’ve seen the others in my dreams, but they couldn’t see me or hear me. But the blind woman could see me. She talked to me, and I talked to her. She knew I was there in the dream. So did the Dragon.”

  “I know you want to find your family,” Max said. “The chances that all of them, or any of them, were immune to this plague are pretty small, but obviously worth the chance for you. But maybe you were also meant to travel west. To find Brooke. Maybe even for us to find each other.”

  “I’m not listening to this crap anymore,” Petra said. She started to walk away again.

  “We were going south,” Max said, “when Petra and I ran into each other. Yeah, we were going for warmer weather, but maybe it was suggested in our dreams and we couldn’t really remember it. Or we didn’t want to remember.” He said the last sentence loudly so Petra could hear him from the other side of the room.

  “So what do we do now?” Kate asked.

  “I say we travel together.”

  “Hold on,” Petra said, walking back to them, looking at Max. “Those two are only going to slow us down. They don’t have any skills. Hell, she just admitted that she doesn’t even know how to use a gun.”

  “They’ve managed to survive on their own so far. They’ve traveled over a hundred miles. Kate stabbed a Dark Angel with a stick, and Brooke shot one.”

  “This is a bad idea, Max.”

  “We’ll be stro
nger together,” Max said. He looked at Kate as something seemed to just occur to him. “Didn’t you say that Brooke drew some pictures of us before?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Just like those in the drawing tablet. Just as detailed. That’s why I recognized you as soon as it got light enough to see your faces.”

  Max just smiled and shook his head in amazement. “So she’s seen us in her dreams too. This means something.”

  CHAPTER 34

  After Brooke woke up, they ate a quick breakfast. They used food from Kate’s cardboard box. Even though Petra had claimed that she and Max had their own food, they didn’t have much left, just a few protein bars, three pieces of beef jerky, and the water Petra had left in the canteen she wore strapped across her torso.

  Brooke was picking at the fruit in her can of fruit cocktail. She wasn’t happy that Kate had taken her drawings while she was sleeping and showed them to Max and Petra, but she wasn’t too angry.

  “You’re an amazing artist,” Max said to Brooke, smiling at her. “How long have you been drawing like that?”

  Brooke shrugged. “I never drew before.”

  Max tilted his head and narrowed his eyes a little. “You’re kidding with me, right? Trying to be funny?”

  Brooke shook her head, her big blue eyes wide. “I never knew how to draw. Not like that.”

  Kate could already see Brooke warming up to Max, but Kate could tell that Max had a way of putting people at ease instantly. It had been part of his job as a real estate agent.

  “If you never drew before, what made you want to draw now?” Kate asked Brooke.

  Again, Brooke shrugged and looked down at the can of fruit cocktail in her hands. “I don’t know.”

  “Because you saw those people in your dreams?”

  Brooke looked right at Kate, staring at her.

  “You’ve seen the man and his son in your dreams, haven’t you?” Kate said to Brooke. “You saw Max and Petra. That’s why you drew them before when you were in the tunnels. And you’ve seen the blind woman, too.”