After The End

by Melissa Gibbo

  “I know. At least we got to make love once. Besides, I finally got laid, so that’s nice.”

  I pinched his arm before cupping his hand. As our fingers interlaced, I forced everything I yearned for into a tiny shoebox in the basement of my heart and hefted my responsibilities back onto my fragile shoulders. I thought of Cal’s face, etched with concern and sadness; then of Daemon’s, full of love and the knowledge that this was the closest we could be.

  “We have to get back to the real world now. Time to clean up my mess.”

  The elder vampire barged back into the room; Sunny trailing behind him, his blighted hope mirrored in her distressed glare.

  What new hell is this?

  “Are you seriously this stupid? You almost died.” Sunny stormed past Cal and stood so close I could taste the stewed tomatoes on her breath. “And you,” she pointed at Daemon “you keep your fangs and anything else that grows to yourself. We have a deal for survival, not screwing around.”

  “Uhhh, okay. I kinda think this is our business though. Squirrel and I already agreed that this was a one-time thing; I don’t want to hurt the woman I love.”

  He squeezed my hand and lowered his eyes.

  “I get it; you two are pissed. Daemon and I can handle this on our own. We appreciate the concern…”

  “You could’ve been killed. If you die at the hands of one of these two, none of the others will agree to keep donating and things will get real messy real fast. This fling was idiotic and selfish.”

  Caelinus stood like a statue, his eyes following the verbal volleys.

  I straightened up and pushed aside the guilt I felt.

  “We aren’t arguing that fact. I accept that it’s true. We’re going to keep our emotions in check and maintain the status quo here. So forget last night and let’s focus on today’s new pile of crap to deal with.”

  Three silent stares.

  “Has anyone been told anything or asked about me staying here last night?”

  Cal spoke haltingly, “Actually, no. We told the visitors that the camp was weighing our options and separated them to aid with the gardens and burning any Dead we found in the pits.”

  He looked past me, his diminished rebuke shrinking his stance. Sunny just shook her head and crossed her arms.

  “So the chewing out was for nothing? I’m fine, lesson learned. There isn’t an issue here.”

  Daemon beamed that our nocturnal activities had been without consequence. (Or possibly he was just excited to have lost his virginity.)

  “Just tell the others, I took ill and am in quarantine in the coffin cabin for a couple of days; it’s already our standard procedure. Then we set up the Q&A of the strangers for tonight before dinner. Cal puts the guys under one at a time, asks the questions we write up today, and we go from there. Problem solved.”

  Sunny tilted her head and raised an eyebrow.

  What the fuck now?

  I waited for the question to wind its way out of her.

  “Why should Cal ask one by one instead of just ask all five at once and have them nod or raise hands to signal a yes answer? It would be faster and let us handle any of the ones who fail without a struggle.”

  “Trust. We need them to trust us and we need everyone to trust that they will never be set up like that if Cal or Daemon ever need to Glamour them.”

  “But…” She started.

  “No.” I forced my aching body to hold my weight and stood. Daemon held my arm to steady me. “If any of these newcomers get to stay, our lives will depend on them; for that, we need trust. I want these dudes to know the answers their compatriots give and why we take any actions. They have to be willing to accept this camp as their community, otherwise they may opt to kill us while we sleep instead of sitting a guard shift.”

  Caelinus smiled and gave a small nod of approval. Wordlessly, he picked up a pen and paper and sat by the mussed bed. Daemon rose while his mentor scribbled some questions on the notepad

  “Coolies. No harm, no foul works for me. I’ll go deliver the messages before everyone starts cooking dinner.” He gave me a kiss on the cheek before disappearing.

  As I sat back on the bunk, Sunny remained stern-faced. After a minute, she threw her hands up and joined us to pen the big questions for Nova Nocte’s new entrance exam.

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, the residents of Nova Nocte — minus the younger kids — were assembled around the cooking fire. I sat on a bench with the Nurse and Sindbad, watching our five newcomers and trying to look vaguely sick as opposed to merely anemic and over-sexed. My light jacket hid the only visible bite marks without being as obvious as a turtleneck.

  Cal stood to my side; he held the crumpled list of questions as though it was a scroll announcing a new emperor. The small village was silent except for the occasional laughter of the children playing and the shuffling of chairs. I checked the clouds for any sign of Daemon before confirming that each sentry was in place and watching beyond the wall instead of the inquiry taking place within.

  “Okay, let’s get these interviews started so we can get on to dinner and sleep. Cal will be using his vamp abilities to put each new guy under individually. Then he will ask them the questions we agreed would be pertinent. Please do not interrupt the process, because it will make this whole thing take longer.”

  The elder vampire gave me a small nod and began. The first two dudes answered all of the questions so that no red flags were raised. The third guy, the one wielding a butcher knife taped to a broom handle, explained that he left his previous group during the first winter when they turned to eating their sick and recently deceased. He found Troy when he was half-starved and near delirious with hunger; it explained his dedication and obedience to the bowman. It was the fourth man who made the crowd antsy.

  “Have you ever forced anyone to engage in sexual acts or been arrested for doing so?” Cal asked nonchalantly.

  “Yes, I’ve been arrested for rape once, but I’ve taken women at least a dozen times.”

  The man smiled as though drifting in a fond memory while disgust oozed off everyone in the community like bad cologne. I caught Cal’s eye and gestured for him to draw out more information.

  “Elaborate on that.”

  The man’s eyes burned as his words poured out with a fervor.

  “I like it when the girls struggle. Mostly, I’d take them home and wrestle them down until they’d surrender; it doesn’t matter if they say ‘no’ because I know they really like it. On occasion, I would just find a lady so pretty and the setting was so perfect, I’d just grab them and toss them against a wall or behind a bush and … gururgghh…”

  His gushing of filth was halted by the knife jammed through the base of his skull and up through his open mouth. The predator slumped into a heap with the tip of the hunting knife still glistening in the firelight. Troy reached his crimson hand down and withdrew the weapon; it made a squelching noise as the serrated edge was pulled free. Bone flecks and gray matter clung to the blade. With a sneer, Troy wiped the gore and blood on his victim’s shirt, placed the knife in its sheath, and stood tall.

  “I’m ready to answer my questions.”

  CHAPTER 18 SEPTEMBER 17th-18th YEAR 1

  Troy and his remaining three comrades were already assimilating into our society. Their meager belongings sat by their new bunks in the main cabin until we could come up with more housing. Sunny and Bubba began the crew on survival training with partners as soon as they passed the Q&A session. The corpse of the fifth man was unceremoniously dumped in the burning field for disposal with the contents of our outhouses.

  It was easy to see why the men had followed Troy without question: he was the only one with any actual skills in fighting, hunting, or escaping fleshies. I’d fully recovered from my ‘illness’ within a day and a half after the interrogation. Chase, Sunny, and Cal had already assessed Troy’s abilities, insisting I put him into regular shifts while the other three newcomers were brought up to par.
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br />   Cal recommended we try to add a few crossbows to our arsenal as well, given how much simpler they are to become proficient with than the bows. I agreed; the amount of practice time we had to spend with the bows could be used for many other ventures. Only a handful of us were decent shots at any distance beyond twenty yards anyhow, even with the compound bows.

  Each meal with our freshmen residents yielded new information about the state of things beyond our solitary domain. Amongst tales of ravaged and pillaged strongholds of humans, they reported stories of half-starved vampires keeping humans alive in jail cells or chained together like cattle in the slaughterhouse. Troy spoke quietly about witnessing a couple of skirmishes between small bands of survivors and the Undead they crossed. I could tell he was choosing his words carefully.

  “They felt it was the human race against the world. This scraggly group just kept roaming from place to place, foraging for whatever they may be able to use; hiding from the Dead at night, and killing off the vampires during the day. It was like they thought all they had to do was kill everyone who wasn’t human anymore, and the world would go back to the way it was.

  Fast food would reappear and they wouldn’t struggle and everyone would get along fine.” He sighed and looked down. “Those guys were full of hope to the point of delusion. They didn’t even consider that the ammo might run out if they kept shooting.”

  The crossbowman shook his head as he finished. Our lunch of roasting possum crackled and burned, forgotten for a moment as we all processed what we heard. Silently, I wondered how this would affect the interactions we maintained with Caelinus and Daemon. I searched each face for any signs that the Pact could be weakening but found only blank expressions.

  Seth’s story changed those faces entirely. After the cooking meat was remembered and tended, the accountant-turned-spearman set down his bowl. He wiped his glasses on the hem of his shirt and cleared his throat.

  “Troy found me last winter after I ran away from my subdivision. I was barely conscious, having done nothing but run from my neighbors and those cursed souls who’d been turned by the infection. All I’d taken was my makeshift spear and a bottle of water. The water ran after an hour or two of running and I didn’t eat again until he found me three days later, barricaded against a handful of zombies in a hair salon. I nearly died to avoid what my neighbors were turning to.”

  While Seth paused to wipe his eyes, I found myself leaning closer. As Chase’s hand grazed past mine, I realized I wasn’t the only one who’d done so.

  “None of us were prepared for the outbreak or the mess that followed. Our suburb was pretty close, so a handful of us pooled our supplies and decided to band together until this whole ordeal blew over. We even had a little party like it was another hurricane come to wash over us; board the windows, get out the emergency kits, drink some booze, and wait.”

  He started to rock gently as his eyes glossed over with the wisps of memories.

  “It was a quick thing to line up the cars and suvs as a wall a few houses past our cul-de-sac entrance. Garden tools and household objects became weapons thanks to duct tape or whatever else we could find. That first month, all we did was keep saying we’d be rescued soon and do our best to destroy those corpses that came up to the vehicles or the brick wall protecting our families.”

  I looked at the others and recognized the same woeful look on their faces, while Seth cleared his throat and wiped at his nose. A tiny yellow bubble swelled and receded in his nostril as he spoke.

  “It was fine for a little while, but soon enough we went from rationing food and drinks to trying to catch bugs and strays. One of the guys said we should send out a party to loot the area for supplies.

  ‘The worst has to be over by now. The Army or the Red Cross or the CDC is probably just a mile or two away putting everything right again. You’ll see.’

  There were about two-dozen adults and seven or eight kids holed up there. Five of the men went out to search; two came back. They carried a couple of bags of canned food and juice boxes and were covered in blood. Their faces looked decades older.

  They just dropped the bags and sat on top of the improvised wall with some guns they’d picked up. Not a word about the other three even when the families cried and begged for an explanation. They just shrugged and stared down the street; those guys wore that vacant expression every minute since. We never learned what happened to the other three.”

  A couple of people slowly rose and excused themselves back to chores or rest. It was a too familiar story for many.

  “As the weeks went on, those two led others out to gather supplies more often, leaving the rest of us to fend off the zombies each day and for a short time, a vampire by night.”

  Seth paused. His mind seemed to come back to him as he awkwardly realized we were friends with two vampires.

  “Not to say all vampires are bad, just the one that kept attacking us. She would swoop down and grab us from the wall or sneak into one of the houses and take one of our folks while they slept.”

  I patted him on the forearm and gave a weak smile.

  This is the first time anyone here has said so much about the past. It’s bringing up so much pain; has it really been almost a year?

  “Anyways,” he continued “she didn’t kill anyone; she just drank from them and set them back in the cul-de-sac. Sometimes, some food would be sitting on the asphalt next to the victim. Scared the Hell out of everyone though. One day one of the ladies got a good look at her and recognized our attacker. The next morning, we burned her house down a couple of blocks away; never had another incident with the thing.

  The food stopped getting left behind after the fire. Our searches yielded less and less. Soon winter came and we had nothing left. The gardens and emergency kits were bare. Even the pets had ‘gone missing’ — thankfully, the children never knew the truth. The direness of our circumstances began to sink in. There was no rescue. No supplies. Just an endless stream of zombies and a small pile of bullets and kitchen utensils.”

  I sharpened my sword as the spearman spoke; I didn’t think I was going to be able to look at him and keep my composure for the next part.

  “One of the recently widowed had been pregnant when the outbreak came. The baby came early and seemed fine. The lady bled too much and passed away a few minutes after her son cried out. Poor boy didn’t even get a name or to see her smile. That’s when it began. One of the guys took the woman’s body close to the fire and stopped. Instead of burning the corpse like we’d been doing, he pulled out a knife.

  The rest of us rushed to stop him, but he just kept ranting about wasting our only chance to live and starving to death. One by one, people took their hands off him. The decision had been made.”

  Seth wept openly, his hands cupping his face as the tears and snot drizzled through his shaking fingers and onto the ground.

  “We ate her. God help me, we cooked that poor woman and devoured every bit of her. No one told the children that we were eating their neighbor, the nice lady who gave out caramel apples every Halloween and babysat them growing up. And two days later, when her innocent and nameless son died, we made him into stew.”

  Bubba puked into the cooking fire, creating a cloud of stench and sparks. A couple of other residents ran for the outhouse, likely for the same reason as the storyteller fell to his knees in the sand. It seemed Seth spoke to someone or something far away instead of us; it was a plea from a man condemned to his memories.

  “I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t eat the baby, or whoever would die next. The whole group talked about hunting other survivors for their rations and their flesh. I just couldn’t live like that. I’m sorry. I’m so, so very sorry…”

  His words of remorse trailed off as the guilt overwhelmed the man. Chase and I helped Seth to his feet; the Nurse followed as we laid him down on his cot and took his weapons, belt, and shoelaces away.

  We’d all seen the breakdowns before; the past could kill a person in the present easie
r than any gun. The Nurse stayed with Seth and by dinner, he said the spearman could return to his chores, but to watch him train for a day or two. I thought about the man’s tale and wondered if this was the same group of attackers pillaging the area.

  I guess it’s best not to find out.

  ***

  I hurried from my training with Seth towards my raid-planning meeting. The guy was becoming really good with the spear we gave him in place of his duct-taped weapon; he seemed to delight in learning the nuances of wielding it. I think just being able to provide food and protection gave Seth confidence. Watching him practice and hunt animals was like watching a drowning man figure out how to swim.

  During a lesson on spear-fishing, he confided in me that it was his desire to find a way to atone that drove him to become as useful as possible in Nova Nocte.

  “It’s my only opportunity to make my life count for something. If I can just keep these people safe and free of that kind of depraved existence, then maybe it will absolve a tiny bit of the guilt I feel. If not, then at least I’ll be too damned tired from all the hard work to think about it.”

  I watched him continue to practice his swordsmanship with Randolph; I would need to focus for the raid, it was going much further into town this time. And we had to bring back an extra vehicle.

  When I entered the Coffin Cabin, I found a whole lotta crazy gushing out of everyone. Cal and Daemon were arguing over who was going with me on the raid, both clearly watching their words with Troy in the room. Forrest was grumbling about not wanting “that damned cannibal” in the party. Sunny and Chase were holding a very quiet but fervent debate in a corner of the room while the Nurse and Sindbad listened and occasionally seemed to take the smiling husband’s side. The other two volunteers for the excursion sat on a bed trying to be invisible.

  Over the din, Sunny shouted,

  “Dammit, Chase you aren’t going on this raid; you will stay here with me. I’m pregnant and I’ll be damned if you aren’t going to be here to help me defend this fort! Squirrel and the others can pick up those supplies just fine without you.”