And that was what Lara and her ilk missed in their assessment of life after 2010. It might not have been their fault — they didn’t know what it was like to live in a world of dreams — but it was true nonetheless. Living without dreaming is a monotonous slog. Mickey guessed that was why they weren’t so scared of Z’s. It was action. The generations before Jack’s lived through major wars, nuclear threats, reasons to be on edge. Jack’s generation hadn’t lived through that, and that generation was when depression and suicide proliferated. Maybe, Mickey thought, generations need real fear. He hoped not, but it made some sense.
Mickey thought about all this as he, Jack, and Lara passed the sign to enter Etna. That Subway sign had been the second-to-last easily recognizable pre-outbreak sign, because the last sign still stood proudly on the road into Etna. It was a billboard advertisement for a charity poker tournament they had planned — “Ante up for Etna” — after a storm that winter had destroyed a part of the school. The sign was a bit faded but otherwise was in remarkable shape considering all of its brethren were long since gone.
The fact that the sign had held up all these years never really made sense. It was cheaply made, probably a favor by the billboard owner to the people putting on the event. It stood largely on its own out in a field that hadn’t held much else beyond cows, once upon a time. In 2030, it held weeds and dilapidated fences just about as far as the eye could see in any direction. The sign, about 20 feet high, looked like a forgotten piece of set dressing from a different play than the one that was being put on now. But whether it was blocked just enough from the sun, used some heavy-duty paint, or some other random happenstance, the sign was still legible, even as recently as the last time Mickey had passed by it. And on the rare occasion he passed by the sign with Jack alongside him, he liked to point it out to his son and reminisce a bit on what a world was like that had dreams, aspirations, even if it was just the dream of winning a small-town charity poker tournament.
So, as the truck drew near to where the sign was located, Mickey got ready to nudge his son, to share a silly moment that was rare these days.
“Hey,” Mickey said, affecting a light tone as he reached the curve that preceded the Ante Up billboard. He didn’t get to continue from that, though, as he rounded the curve and saw the sign, but saw more with it.
There was a car at the base of the billboard. It was smashed — the driver had driven headlong into the pole. What had happened next Mickey had to guess, but it seemed pretty clear. The driver had to have been surprised by a group of zombies on the road and crashed in an effort to avoid them. From there, the occupants of the car had fled the car and, with no shelter in sight, made the only escape they could — up. The ladder that came down from the billboard was higher than a person could normally reach, but from standing on the hood of the car, the two managed to reach the ladder and pull themselves up. They climbed to the top of the billboard, and that was where Mickey saw the two — a man and a woman, both athletic-looking and in their 50s or 60s — sitting in fear, looking down at the twenty or so zombies that surrounded the base of the billboard.
“That sucks,” Jack said as he took the scene in. Mickey thought he said it with almost a sense of humor in his voice and he was fairly sure if he had asked his son, Jack would have said to drive off and leave them, but Mickey didn’t have the heart.
He pulled the truck to a stop. “We have to help them,” he said, and despite what he thought was a rolling of the eyes from his son, he left the vehicle. Jack followed, if slowly. Even Lara got out of the truck.
Mickey was a good shot. A very good one, if he didn’t mind bragging. And Jack, much younger, in much better shape, was a better one. The two of them against twenty Z’s wasn’t an easy fight per se, but they worked through the group in not much time at all.
Mickey took a few steps toward the wrecked car. He wasn’t excited about adding these two to his growing group, so his first instinct was to see if their car was salvageable. Before he got very far, though, the woman on the billboard yelled down.
“Behind you!” she cried, pointing to the road Mickey had just traveled in on. He spun on his heels and saw a few more Z’s coming in behind them. This was a smaller group, seven or eight, and Mickey soon realized he was taking them out all on his own.
After the last zombie went down, he turned to Jack, planning to ask where his son was as a helper on that group. Before he could get a question out, though, Mickey was surprised to see Jack did have his gun raised, and was pointing it straight at Lara, who was only a few steps away from the vehicle.
“What are you doing?” Mickey asked, holstering his gun and hurrying toward the two at odds.
Lara had her hands raised in the air, and there were fresh tears on her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she said in a trembling voice. “He pulled the gun on me.”
“Jack?” Mickey asked. “What’s going on?”
Jack blinked fiercely at Lara over the barrel of his gun. “Her,” he said, almost spitting as he nodded toward Lara, as though Mickey wouldn’t have known who he meant otherwise. “She was … she was going to take the truck, dad. She was going to drive off and leave us.”
“Me?” Lara said in a squeaking voice. “No! I wouldn’t … I wasn’t going to do that. I was just standing here.”
Mickey raised his hands, trying to calm Jack down. “Son,” he said. “She couldn’t. I have the keys.” He pulled the keys out of his pocket and held them up. “As soon as we had a stranger with us that I wasn’t sure if I could trust, I started taking the keys with us. She couldn’t take the truck even if she wanted to.”
“And I didn’t!” Lara chirped. “I wouldn’t!”
Jack eased up his grip on the gun. He looked at Mickey slightly, and at his father’s encouraging nod, he lowered his gun. He continued looking at Lara angrily, but Mickey was comfortable that was all Jack was going to do.
“He’s crazy,” Mickey heard Lara whisper under her breath once it was clear she was safe. He shot her an angry look. He wasn’t sure what Lara had been doing that made Jack think she was moving against them, but he also wasn’t sure he liked her deeming him crazy only seconds afterward.
Regardless, Mickey moved to the wrecked car again. As he did, Jack started moving from Z to Z, making sure none of them moved again. He fired his gun once at one that was trying to crawl.
It didn’t take Mickey much time to realize the car was done for, however, with every last lick of radiator fluid now sitting below the car and the pole having forced its way nearly a foot into the hood. The car might move again, but not under its own power.
Mickey sighed. Maybe these people had a destination not far away. Maybe he could drive them a mile and drop them off. Maybe they wouldn’t be extra chattel for him to ferry across Maine. He hoped that was the case. He didn’t like a full carload.
“Thank you!” the woman cried. Mickey looked up at the billboard and was surprised to realize that neither of them had made the first move to climb down.
This was strange. The threat was gone, as far as Mickey knew. He turned all the way around slowly, looking near and far for any further signs of threat, but he, Jack and Lara were the only things moving since Jack’s last gunshot.
“You can come down,” Mickey called up to them. It was just far enough that he had to raise his voice, but not much. “It’s safe now.”
“Are you sure?” the woman asked. She sounded hesitant, and Mickey wondered if they were afraid of Z’s approaching from behind the billboard, out of their sight.
“Of course,” Mickey said. “I wouldn’t have my weapon put away.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said back. Mickey started to feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “I just … I need to know we’re safe.”
Mickey felt like he was starting to understand what she was saying. “Why do you think you wouldn’t be safe?”
“We…” she said, before the man spoke up, angrily.
“Look,” he said, standi
ng up and looking down from the billboard. “We are stuck up here. Didn’t have the chance to get our guns from the car before they were on us. Now, we just need you to assure us you aren’t going to shoot us when we come down. Can you guarantee us that?”
Mickey looked down and shook his head softly, but before he could speak up, Jack did. “Jesus Christ, we just saved your lives, why do you think we’d turn around and kill you? Hadn’t met our daily quota?”
“No,” Mickey said. He pointed at the lowest rung of the ladder to head up the billboard, where there was a damp dark red handprint. “No, they know we wouldn’t kill them normally. But they also know that they’ve been bitten. One of them at least.”
Jack looked at the bloody handprint. From above, the man spoke again, this time sounding dejected. “That’s right,” he said. He raised his right wrist, which Mickey noticed for the first time was wrapped in what looked like his sock, and he had already bled through it. Mickey stared up at the woman, and while he couldn’t identify an obvious wound on her, she looked pale and sad. That could easily have been fear and worry for her companion, but it also could have been the symptoms of infection.
“We can’t promise you anything,” Mickey said.
“You can let us come down!” the man said, his anger back. “We don’t have much further to travel. We just need to get one thing done. Then who cares if we live or die.”
“You can come down after we are gone,” Mickey turned to walk back to his truck. “No sense in trying to shoot you up there. But I’m not going to let you anywhere near us.”
“We’ll die here!” the man yelled at him. “The car’s smashed, there won’t be another for a mile. I’m already hurting here.”
“You’ll die wherever you are,” Mickey said. “If you want to climb down, I’ll do you the favor of making sure you never kill anyone else, but absent that, I’m afraid you are on your own.”
“Son of a bitch,” the man yelled. “I just need to travel another 30 miles. I just need to get to Peter Salvisa’s.”
“Salvisa’s?” Mickey said, surprised. “Why Salvisa’s?”
“Our granddaughter,” the man said. The woman next to him had started openly weeping. “She died when this all started back. And I just can’t take it anymore. I need to know what the hell, how the hell this happened. I need to get to Salvisa. If anyone can explain this world, it has to be him, right? I need to know. I need to get there and see what answers he can give me. After that, I don’t even care anymore.”
Mickey was shocked. The man’s story couldn’t have mirrored his own much more if the man were actually named Mickey as well. But that didn’t mean Mickey had to make bad decisions.
“Do you even know where Salvisa lives?” Mickey asked.
The man looked down. “Not exactly,” he said. “I know the general area. But I can find it.”
Mickey shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said as he opened the door to the truck. “I really am. But if you come down before we’re gone, I won’t have a choice. If it makes you feel any better, we’re doing the same thing, for the same reason. And I know exactly where Peter lives. Friend of mine. Maybe you’ll never know your answer, but rest assured that someone is still going after the answers even if you can’t.”
The man shook his head. “Not good enough,” he said, though he sounded like he was accepting his fate.
“It’s all I can offer you,” Mickey said. Lara and Jack were in the truck, and Mickey closed the door, shouting to the man through the open window. “I’ll do my best to finish your mission. I’ll do my best to get the answers you can’t.”
With that, Mickey turned the truck back on and drove down the road. He thought he heard the man say something else as he left, but he didn’t know what it was and he never would.
Chapter Six: Traffic
Michelle knew her luck had been too good from a driving perspective, and that came due not long after they had gotten back on the road. The route they had traveled in on had gotten small enough that Michelle wasn’t even comfortable calling it a road anymore. By the time she turned onto a side street, she figured she was only driving in an alley.
That was frustrating but not altogether surprising. What was surprising was the cars. Those cars they had seen careening about the streets of Boston appeared to be joined by others. Every few blocks, Michelle would spy a car a block over, or see one pass on an overpass off in the distance, or hear tires squeal somewhere. There were cars. It wasn’t traffic in the pre-2010 sense. It wasn’t even traffic in the pre-outbreak 2030 sense. But cars were on the road. Even more interesting, Michelle thought after a while of observation, was that the majority of them seemed to be going in generally the same direction she was.
She didn’t talk about this with her passengers because she didn’t know what to say. Any of them who were looking around would have noticed at least some of the cars as well, but if they did, they were silent on the subject.
Michelle tried to think of other conversation topics, to distract her if nothing else, but there wasn’t much light she could think of.
And then Michelle remembered the thing that had brought the kids together in the first place, the reason they were in New England.
“We’ve got some time,” she said as she navigated her side street in hopes of finding a more main thoroughfare. “Why don’t you guys tell me what you were going to school for?”
“What do you mean?” Celia asked.
It was then that Michelle realized that the whole concept of school had really changed. When Michelle’s sister Kellee had gone to college, she had spent weeks agonizing over a major, taking aptitude tests, and shadowing professionals. She had consulted her counselor, argued with their parents, and changed her mind a thousand times. In the end, Kellee had decided to study biology in college with an eye toward becoming a pharmacist — a decision that lasted exactly one semester when she changed to an early elementary education major. Kellee would have been a great teacher if the world had lasted long enough to allow it.
But Michelle remembered the days leading up to Stacy’s departure for college. She was excited about going to school, excited about meeting new people. But there was no stressing over a course schedule, no career track in mind. They were just going to go. Michelle didn’t even know what Stacy wanted to be when she grew up.
“Well, what did you think you’d do after school?” she asked. “Morgan’s whole idea, you know? ‘A phone in every pocket, a website for every occasion.’ That wasn’t just a rallying cry. The point was to get the world up and going again. No more hiding out in homes for a generation. Jobs, cities. Society. When I was a kid, people always asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. You know, a scientist, or a police officer, or a singer.”
Singer. Michelle stopped for a second. She had been a decent musician in her own right, singing in the chorus, playing French horn. She had wanted to be the drum major of her high school band as a senior, if her senior year had ever come around.
But there hadn’t been room for musicians after 2010. A few surviving singers had attempted some internet song releases after surviving, and they did nothing. Radio stations were silent. The internet was for rebuilding, not streaming. A few artists tried and failed, and after that few others even bothered trying. Michelle had little doubt there were artists of all types putting together outstanding work in their homes, but that was basically where it stopped. They just created for themselves. That thought made Michelle sad.
“Anyway,” she went on, “what is it you wanted to be? What is it you were hoping to be able to do with your lives?”
The car stayed silent for a minute. Finally, from the back, barely above a whisper, Simon spoke.
“I wanted to be an architect,” he said. He said it with clear nervousness, like he was worried about being judged for his aspirations. “Like my mom.”
“That’s great,” Michelle said. “Definitely something we’ll need.”
Stacy cleared her throat. “I always
thought it’d be fun to teach,” she said dully. She was looking out the window, not seeming engaged in the conversation, but at least she was talking. “If these schools do well, you know, they’d have to open others, and they’d need people at them. They’d need teachers. Lots of them.” She almost shrugged. “Guess not now, though.”
Michelle didn’t like that line of thought, even if she thought Stacy would make a great teacher. So she moved on quickly. “What about you, Celia?”
Celia stirred in the back seat. She had been leaning against Simon’s left arm, their hands clasped in her lap, and Michelle wasn’t even positive she had been paying close attention. She didn’t speak for a minute. Michelle got the impression she didn’t really have an answer. “All my dad ever really taught me was how to survive,” she said. “How to keep going when there were zombies. At home, we never did much. Read a little. There was an old lady next door I’d talk to. We’d garden and stuff. But I never really thought about what would be next.”
Michelle nodded. “Well, you can now,” she said. “We get this done, and you can figure out anything in the world to do.”
In the rearview, Michelle saw Celia nod, but it was half-hearted, absent, not much more engaged than Stacy was. Michelle shot a look to Erik, hoping he’d help carry the conversation, but he didn’t seem to be any more attentive than the girls.
“What sort of architecture did your mom do?” Michelle asked Simon, who at least seemed ready for the conversation.
“Had been commercial,” Simon said. “She had designed, like, shopping centers and stuff. My dad drove me by one in … I think the city had been called Little Rock, that had been hers. My dad said she was one of the best. You know, before.”
Michelle nodded. Her mom had hated those shopping centers — the ones that made it easy to get into but then an impossible labyrinthine puzzle to get out of — but they had been ubiquitous before 2010. These days, they were little more than overgrown testaments to the days that were, concrete ghosts haunting nobody, since nobody visited them anymore. But architecture as a general goal? Simon had his eyes trained on something that would definitely be needed.
After Life | Book 2 | Life After Life Page 16