Life After War: Books 1-3

by Angela White

  As he stepped past her with the heater and their duffle bags, it occurred to Marc that she hadn’t jumped when he’d reached for her shirt, and his heart stirred. Things were changing.

  Half an hour later, they were passing through Matenea, Missouri, and Angela listened to the voices in her head as the wind pushed them along, little black balls of hail (acid balls) pinging off their roofs and hoods.

  “I think we should take cover.”

  “What’s...? Oh, shit! Stay on my ass!”

  Angela spotted the funnel cloud by following his line of sight and for a second, couldn’t move. The twister wasn’t very wide, but it was moving incredibly fast and closing in, like it had sensed the presence of humans and dropped out of the sky - just for them.

  “Come on!”

  His shout startled her, Dog’s piercing bark through the radio breaking her daze, and Angela hit the gas, heart pounding. It was a real tornado and moving their way!

  “Thought this only happened in the movies,” she whispered, scared as she caught up to Marc’s bumper, but the raw fury of something they had no chance of controlling was beautiful too, and Angela knew she would never forget it if they got away.

  Marc turned them into a large, mostly empty parking lot, speeding up. When he sent his Blazer crashing through the front glass windows of the theater, plastic and glass flying, she followed.

  Behind them, the tornado churned across the small city, smashing through anything in its way as it headed for the enemy: Man.

  “Get as far in as you can!”

  Angela swerved in next to him, lobby props tumbling, and they both ducked down as the tornado hit the theater.

  The building shuddered, and both Blazers lunged forward with the wind, bashing into the concession stand’s high wall. Glass sprayed as the display shelves caved in, large chunks of debris banging off them as the roar grew louder.

  A blast of straight-line winds swept through the cinema on the twister’s heels, grabbing and spinning Angela’s Blazer in dizzying circles before shoving it into a line of heavy arcade machines. Marc watched helplessly as the big games were sent flying into the air and each other from the hard impact, glass and coins erupting like tiny, silver volcanoes.

  Bouncing back with a jarring thud, her muddy Blazer slid the length of the lobby before coming to a tire-squealing halt just inches from his front bumper.

  A second later, it was over except for the rain, and Marc was scrambling over wet debris to open her door, help her out. “Are you hurt? Are you all right?”

  “I don’t remember asking for the tour,” she joked breathlessly, eyes wide, and he grinned at her.

  “Me either. You’re okay?”

  Angela trembled, a bit shook up, and didn’t tense when he surrounded her with his arms, just buried her head against his hard, comforting body and held on tight. She couldn’t stop herself from trembling.

  Marc rubbed her arms to warm her, knowing it was the shock of being woken so abruptly and forced to deal with the fury of their environment before she’d even had a cup of coffee that had shaken her, made her a bit vulnerable.

  “Dog, up. Sshhh... It’s okay, Honey.”

  Angela kept her arms locked around his waist as the wolf went to the roof of his 4x4. Marc held her close, watching the drumming rain continue as his body tried hard to ignore hers. It was still a perfect fit.

  “Are we safe here?”

  Marc recognized the moment. If she could ask him that, and be prepared to believe it, things really had changed. “I think so. I need to do a quick check.”

  Angela shivered when he stepped back, immediately feeling colder as he disappeared into the dim shadows. The wind blew her hair back, and her heart whispered this storm was headed northwest, toward her boy. She had to send Kenny another message, had to warn him again. Heart thumping, she gathered herself quickly, doing it before the fear could make her change her mind.

  Marc could feel the waves of energy humming through the cinema. Without knowing he could or that he was going to try, he stepped directly in front of her and closed his eyes, concentrating.

  He was blocked at first by a wall of crumbling mental bricks, but he sent his want ahead of him and it fell easily enough. Angela’s lashes fluttered, but she didn’t protest, and then he was in and frowning.

  “Where are you?” The man’s voice was loud, intimidating, and familiar somehow?

  “You have to take cover. Bad storms headed your way.”

  “One more time, Bitch! Where are you?”

  It was a struggle for Marc to remain silent, but he did.

  “A lot closer. How’s my boy?”

  “Happy with me. How close?”

  The barely-controlled anger was clear and Angela forced herself to stand, emboldened a little by Brady’s presence, “I’m coming for my son just as fast as I can.”

  “You’ll never get him back. Not unless you do what I say.”

  Searing rage filled Marc, but it was nothing compared to the fury coming off Angela in clouds of heat he could actually feel.

  “You won’t keep me from my boy, Kenny! That was the old world. Things have changed, and you’re the one who should be careful!” She sucked in a breath as he screamed obscenities, then overpowered him with her anger. The words blasted out in a furious snarl. “If anything happens to my boy because you didn’t listen, there won’t be a place on this fucking planet that you can hide from me!” she slammed the door before he could respond in kind.

  “He’s in a good mood,” Angela said with a shaky smile, forcing her demon back.

  Marc’s voice and eyes were hard. “I won’t let him hurt you or the boy. I’ll protect you. My word on it.”

  Angela turned away as her heart continued to thump. That was the first time in over a decade she had stood up to Kenny so openly. There would be a payment for it.

  “You can’t promise that. You think you know what you’re up against, but you don’t. He’s a violent, trained killer, and in the end, someone’s blood will spill.”

  “His, not yours,” Marc stated flatly and she shook her head, hating it that he was thinking of murder again.

  “Please don’t, Brady. It’s on my hands if you kill him, and it would destroy me as sure as losing my boy would. My freedom’s not worth another life. I need you to swear to me that you won’t.”

  “I can’t. You don’t deserve to be treated that way, and I won’t just sit by and watch.”

  “I’ll figure something out. For now, you think we can stay here until the storm’s gone?”

  He sighed at her obvious distraction, looking around as he ran a hand over neck-length black waves in frustration. Wasn’t he getting to her at all?

  “Sometimes too much.”

  He flinched guiltily, and she waved a hand. “Well?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s have a look around and we’ll decide.” Marc let it go, didn’t tell her he could make it look like an accident and not feel any guilt. He too, was a violent, trained killer.

  “Dog, in.” Marc closed the door behind the big animal, not wanting him to get distracted by things blowing in the heavy wind and run off into the storm.

  “Guns and light. Move out,” he ordered, thinking if he decided to handle her man that way, Angie would never know. He’d lock it up so tight, even he wouldn’t be able to access the memory.

  3

  A few minutes later they were on the upper balcony, the ghostly smell of popcorn and butter that still haunted the stale air, almost covered by the fishy rot blowing in through the broken glass doors with the rain.

  “Wanna watch a movie while we wait?”

  Angela smiled sadly. She hadn’t been to a movie since Charlie was a baby and kept herself from saying it only by looking at the poster for A Miracle on 34th Street, trading one pain for another. “You know how?”

  Marc listened harder, fighting the urge to find a room with a window. “Think so. Just have to find the generators, add some gas.”

  Angel
a was reading movie posters, ignoring the unease of her stomach. After the morning they'd had, that was to be expected. “Okay. How about The Shadows of Fate? I loved The Chronicles of Riddick.”

  Marc grinned, feeling unworthy of her beauty with his long hair and unshaven face. “You just like Vin Diesel.”

  Angela laughed at his joking accusation, eyes admiring his sexy goatee. It added to his image of an old west gunfighter. My own John Wayne, she thought, smiling. “It was a good story.”

  “It was crap with a lot of eye candy.”

  She turned away, grinning. “Not just for the eyes.”

  Marc stilled suddenly, looking over the destroyed lobby and dark, shadowy hallways where he thought maybe bodies should be, but weren’t. This would have made a good place to hole up, but until they’d hit it (literally) there hadn’t been… “You hear that?”

  She listened for a moment, hearing only the storm and things moving with the wind, then shook her head, “No. What?”

  He turned, shrugging. “Sounds like someone clearing snow with a metal shovel.”

  The image made her frown, and she pushed at the door in her mind, as her stomach dropped. They had made over a hundred miles in the last week, and she was tired. The door hadn’t opened on its own. Something was happening.

  “Up, I think. We should go up,” she whispered, eyes narrowing, ears open.

  BOHICA, Marc thought. Bend over. Here it comes again. “But Dog and the Blaz…”

  “No time.”

  Then they both heard it: that headache-causing sound of metal and stone meeting, but instead of a distant echo, it was loud and close. The vibrations rattled the walls and pounded through the floor under them.

  “Up?”

  Angela nodded, heading for the employee door to the right of the upstairs concession area. “We have to…”

  The grinding noise was suddenly deafening, and Marc grabbed her arm, shoved them both into the dark stairwell as the building around them moved, knocked forward on its foundation.

  A twenty foot wall of mud and debris slammed into the back of the movie theater like a bomb, blowing out walls and windows. The sound of it was like a tanker truck jackknifing, and the space immediately began filling with feet of sliding ooze. The entire back wall of the cinema crumbled under the onslaught, filling the rows of seats with thick, dark mud. The side walls held against the wall of mud, which slowed and then was finally stopped by something bigger than it was: the strip mall around the theater, which was more than a mile wide.

  Sludge continued to invade, flooding the theater and parking lot around it with ten feet of thick, lumpy glop that poured around. It gushed over counters and ticket booths, shoving the two vehicles against the glassless front doors and then out of them.

  Angela and Marc flipped on their penlights to see the dim stairwell and bowed-in door below them.

  “Is that mud?”

  Marc shined his light on the bottom of the door, where thick, blackish silt was gushing under and he waved a hand, looking upward. “Yeah. A slide.” He waved her up the steps. “That door’s not gonna ho….”

  CCrraack! Sswwwooosh!

  The door gave way, buckling under the weight of the sopping mud that began to flow into the dark hall from a doorway. The soggy dirt was almost up to the ceiling, and pale worms the size of pencils squirmed all over each other and the debris, trying to rebury themselves. It horrified Angela. It was normal that the smallest and fastest breeding animals would begin to change first; snakes, rats, worms, but the sight was enough to wake that steel in her spine.

  “Those are wrong. They shouldn’t be that big,” Angela stated with an odd tone to her voice, feet rooted to the spot as the desire to kill them flooded her. They were a future danger, an abomination. They needed to be handled.

  “Not by us, Honey,” Marc nudged her further up the steep, twisted stairs. “Keep going. It’ll take a full day to go back that way.”

  She turned reluctantly, and they moved to the roof’s exit door, but Marc pulled her back before she could step out, both of them listening for Dog in the light wind. “Wait. Check it out first. Always.”

  “Teach me how to do this.”

  He nodded, leaving his eyes on hers. She really would have made a good Marine, a strong fighter. “Stay no more than two feet away and step where I do. If I were to fall, you should come back here and start digging your way out with boards or whatever you can find.”

  Angela kept her head down at the thought of losing him, and her mind flew to her gifts. She’d do what she had to, no matter how forbidden it was.

  “The whole hillside’s gone.”

  They stood just outside the doorway, the rest of the roof cracked, crumbled, missing in places. The Show Me state gave them an awful view of missing homes, businesses, and roads that had been between the hill and the theater. Even the reeking turkey farm and rye field beside them was now a twenty foot high pile of uneven, treacherous mud and debris as far as they could see to the east. Small puffs of smoke and dust rose eerily in the early morning chill.

  “Look.” Angela pointed to a black corner, where thick, sloppy mud was still spilling around the front of the theater. “Is that a Blazer?”

  Marc sounded relieved. “Mud must have pushed ‘em out. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Angela smiled. “Think we already did. I hear Dog.”

  “Come on. Let’s get down from here before the whole mall collapses.”

  “We need rope.”

  “It’s in the Blazer with my bag.”

  Marc was reprimanding himself for leaving his kit when she pointed to the dead telephone wires. “Can we use those?”

  Marc frowned. “It’s the grip that’s hard. The poles and wires are sprayed with a flame retardant chemical that makes it slippery. We’ll have to braid a rope together.”

  He began fishing in his pockets. “We’ll hope the pole wasn’t loosened by the mudslide.” He cut the phone, cable, and electric wires, and quickly wove them together.

  “Will this work?”

  He shrugged. “We’re gonna find out. If it breaks, try to go limp.”

  Angela watched as he stood up, eyeing a dark patch of brackish mud that she was sure covered a deer that had been impaled by the thin branch of a walnut tree.

  Marc wrapped the braided cord around his fist, and then his waist.

  Angela scowled fearfully. “Is this the best we can...”

  “Hang on!”

  A second later she was tight against his body, feet in the air, and then they were dropping off the side of the building.

  “Semper Fi!”

  His shout gave her the courage to wrap her legs around him and keep her head up as the ground flew closer.

  Marc had swung them toward the pole, hoping to slow their descent. He put his feet straight out so that they slammed into the wood with a jerk that had their grip on each other tightening painfully.

  Legs holding them to the slippery pole, Marc’s eyes picked out a shallow-looking patch of mud and swung them for it just as the braided cord snapped under their weight, dropping them to the ground with a hard, wet thud.

  They landed with her on top, legs pinned around his waist, and she winced as the layer of mud shifted beneath them, putting more pressure on her knee.

  “You okay?”

  His eyes were closed, and she leaned closer, muddy hands feeling his pulse. “Brady?”

  Dazed, but aware she was getting upset, Marc opened his eyes and said the first thing that came to mind, “Never have I seen anything so beautiful.”

  Angela blushed, fighting the urge to lean down and kiss his pouty lips in relief. “If you say so. How about getting off my sore leg?”

  They were on their feet a second later, and he was reaching for her. “Let me see.”

  "I'm fine." Angela moved back, turning away as she slung mud from her hands. “Let’s see about Dog.”

  Marc followed her, frowning. Another side effect of her man or the life she’d h
ad? "Neither," his heart whispered. "She feels the attraction too. She’s not scared. She’s interested and feeling guilty about it." That made sense. Angie and loyalty went hand in hand.

  While Marc let the anxious wolf out, Dog eagerly rushing to check them both over, Angela took a minute to scan what was left of the town for people, for survivors. She still hoped they might be able to help if someone was stuck, or leave food, but there was only silence. Kirksville was a ghost town, and it made her think of the History Channel. All the bodies that had to be buried under that mile-long stretch of thick mud - would archeologists find them hundreds of years from now and try to figure out what had happened?

  “We got lucky.”

  Angela nodded, but didn’t say anything, sure it was more than luck. Fate had allowed both of them to survive again and again. Was it because it wanted something from them, something bigger than just their tiny lives?

  The two Blazers were mud-splattered, the glass on Marc’s side window cracked, but other than dents in the fender and bumper, both vehicles had held up despite being shoved through the glassless windows by a wall of mud. They climbed into driver’s seats with squelches, grimaces, and shared grins. They were alive and on the move. It had been a good day.

  As they drove, Angela’s mind was on her reaction to Marc reaching for her. She had wanted to step into his embrace! She was no longer able to ignore the closeness that was growing. He’d broken through her walls, and the old Angela was now wide awake and longing. They had traveled well together, even with the occasional awkward looks and searing tension that sometimes happened. He was still a good man. "Your man?" the Witch questioned and Angela was glad when Brady interrupted.

  “You okay back there?”

  She flashed her lights in response and saw he wanted to say something, but wouldn't. She’d been a fool not to call him all those years ago.

  “Ready to go till dark?”

  She smiled, picked up the mic, “And then some. You lead, I’ll follow.”

  “Copy that.”

  They had been traveling together for a month now. Five hundred miles of heartbreaking, gut wrenching, unbelievable horror, and Missouri was no different than Indiana, Virginia, or Ohio. Except that the ground here felt bad; smelled and looked worse. They had even seen their first mutation yesterday. Only a single ant, pitch black and the size of a baby’s shoe, all six of its eyes had watched them alertly as they went by.