Salvisa’s.
Thinking about it now, it made sense, even if the thought had never really occurred to Mickey before. In 2010, people didn’t know where to go, what to do. It was a completely alien world. Survival for the Out Theres of 2010 meant holing up. It was all about finding a place to weather the storm. As the website had grown more popular in recent years, Mickey had felt his own interest in the thing fade. The stories had grown stale, the advice stagnant. “If they come back, hide,” they said. Maybe not in those words, but that message. Every once in a while there would be the interesting story of some tangential event or a cool narrative of someone who had an exciting Out Theres experience, but by and large you could sum up the stories with, “I was scared. I ran. I hid. That’s how I survived.”
In 2030? While the events were superficially similar, people were no longer strangers to this world. At least, the ones who had lived through 2010 weren’t. And while hiding out, staying as far from the reach of any Z’s as possible as always going to be the best call. Mickey himself was evidence that it was no longer the only reasonable call. People had somewhere to go.
He nudged Jack’s left arm. “Have you noticed the other people on the road?” he asked.
Jack nodded, just barely. “I was going to say something,” he said in a low voice. “What do you think about it?”
Mickey shrugged. “Have to assume it’s people doing the same thing we are. Peter’s address wasn’t public, but his hometown wasn’t exactly a secret. They want answers.”
“What’s going to happen when we get there?” Lara asked from the back. “It sounded like you guys weren’t even sure he’d be receptive to just you; what is he going to do with a hundred people at his door?”
Mickey was already wondering that. Salvisa was a crotchety old man. He didn’t like company when times were good and it was just Mickey. He had a feeling his attempts to get into the old man’s house were only getting more difficult.
“He’ll let us in,” Jack said with no nonsense in his voice.
“He will?” Lara said.
“How do you know?” Mickey asked.
Jack shrugged. “We have a truck. Truck beats wall. He won’t have a choice.”
Mickey glanced at Jack for signs he was kidding, but there were none. “You’re saying we drive through his wall if he won’t let us in?”
“I’m saying we drive through his wall. If you want to ask first, that’s up to you. If we just drive right in, I’m fine with that.”
“Jack, you have to settle down,” Mickey said. “We don’t know what Peter knows. We don’t know if he can help.”
“Either he can help us or he’s of no use,” Jack said back. “Either way, I don’t care about his precious walls.”
“Those walls are strong,” Mickey said. “This truck is old. I don’t even know if it would be up to the task. Peter was a paranoid man. He made sure his home was tough.”
Jack snorted. “If this truck won’t do the trick, I’m sure I can find one that will.”
Mickey frowned. He had always known his son to be quick-tempered, but the way he was talking was concerning nonetheless.
Mickey also worried about Salvisa’s shrine. His baseball fandom manifested in an ornate setup along one of his walls, a game-used bat of his favorite player on a rack above a shelf that held his baseball. Salvisa had a peculiar infatuation with the hidden-ball trick — when a player would fake as though he had thrown the ball back to the pitcher, wait for the baserunner to stray from the base, and tag him out. It was a tricky move, and it dated back to as long as they had played baseball. Salvisa liked the old-school tactic, the fact that it didn’t depend on the new statistical dives. It was a callback to an old era of the game.
“I just love the idea of hiding the most important thing in plain sight,” Salvisa loved to say. “The baseball is the center of attention on the baseball field. There’s no game without it. And these guys have made a game out of making you think that one thing, the single thing you need to just play your game, is somewhere else entirely, all while standing in the middle of a giant field with a hundred cameras trained on you. Deception. Make them look where you want them to, and you can do your thing off on the side.”
Before 2010, he had managed to track down balls used in hidden-ball tricks over the years, and the shelf under his bat held 10 of them. Mickey didn’t know much about baseball himself, but Salvisa showed him the collection on more than one occasion and Mickey at least appreciated the ingenuity. And it was hardly an actually important part of the equation, but if Jack were going to drive a truck through Salvisa’s wall, Mickey at least wanted to make sure it didn’t harm the collection.
Then again, Mickey didn’t want Jack to drive something through a wall at all. That was too impetuous, too aggressive. Mickey didn’t like his son talking that way.
Almost immediately, Mickey tried to brush it off. Jack had lost his only daughter barely a day earlier. Grief did strange things to people. He was allowed to react however that made him react. If it made him say things he might not say under normal circumstances, so be it. Mickey was still around to keep Jack in line. Talk was nothing. Mickey wouldn’t be driving his own truck through Peter Salvisa’s walls, so who cared what Jack said in the fire of emotion.
In the back, Lara didn’t appear to be so sure.
“You’re going to just drive through the man’s house?” she said with judgment in her voice.
“I’m going to do what I have to do to get answers,” Jack said. His voice was calm.
“You’re going to drive to the house of a man who runs a website and just assume he knows the truth, and you’re going to destroy his house on the off chance he does?”
Jack nodded, then stopped. “I guess I’ll probably let dad try knocking first,” he said. Lara exhaled in the back, but then Jack continued. “We might need the truck later if Salvisa doesn’t know anything. Plenty more walls that might need pushing.”
In the rearview, Mickey saw Lara shake her head. “I think you’re crazy,” she said.
That was a mistake. Jack finally showed some emotion in the conversation as he spun in his seat to face her, his eyes flashing. “And I think,” he said angrily, “that you’d be dead if it weren’t for my dad. And I think you didn’t just lose someone you care about. Because there isn’t someone you care about. You think we’re all living through a fucking video game, that this is just an adventure, that we’re tossing a golden ring into the fires of Mount Doom. This isn’t a goddamn game, little girl. This is real life, and I just lost my daughter, and I’m going to find out why. If that means I have to be an asshole to do that, I don’t care. Life has been an asshole to me. About time I turn it around.”
He stopped, almost out of breath after spitting those words at her. Finally, he turned back around in his seat to face forward and grumbled quietly. “Fucking Rover wants to tell me how to act when my daughter dies. Fucking child who has never loved anybody.”
With that, the truck lapsed into silence. After a minute, Lara shifted in the backseat, and Mickey realized she was crying. “I loved somebody,” she said softly, barely loud enough to hear in the front seat.
“What?” Jack asked without turning in his seat.
“I loved somebody,” Lara said a little more loudly.
“Sure you did,” Jack said. “You loved your mommy and your daddy. You had some sweetheart when you were 14. Now you’re 20, and you’re an ‘adventurer,’ and you’re just wandering from place to place.”
Lara shook her head. “I loved somebody,” she said a third time.
“Fine. You loved somebody,” Jack said. “Who?”
Lara looked behind her almost instinctively, as though she was going to see that person running behind the truck. “I loved somebody,” she said one more time. “And now he’s dead.”
Jack snorted. “That’s true of just about everybody in the world, honey.”
Mickey, though, was watching Lara in the rearview. She wasn’t j
ust bemoaning that a loved one had died. She had the appearance of a person whose loved one had died recently. A person for whom the wounds were still fresh. A person who she hadn’t had the proper chance to mourn.
“Sean?” he said.
Lara looked up and met Mickey’s eyes in the mirror. Hers were red with tears, but she nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Mickey said.
Jack, though, snorted again. “That old jagoff?” he said. “You said you’d only been there a day.”
“This time,” Lara said. “But I’ve traveled through a lot, and I’ve stayed with him every time. I wanted to be a Rover, to not have any connections with anyone. But I don’t know, he was so nice to me. And he needed me. Every time I’d stop by, he’d be down to his last bits of stale bread and wearing dirty old clothes. I would stay a day, sometimes even two, help him get straightened out. He’d take care of me and I’d take care of him. At first it was just so I could have a place to stay, but eventually… I don’t know. I know I started coming through more often, started thinking about staying longer. I really thought about just staying. Don’t know if I ever would have, but…”
She trailed off, and Mickey saw her drop her head into her hands. “It happens,” he said, shooting for soothing. “You can’t predict love, and you can’t predict how those feelings will come about. But you know what? This is good for you. I know it doesn’t feel that way, but it’s good to understand how it can feel. It makes you more empathetic. Honestly? It makes me like you more.”
Lara didn’t react. In the seat beside Mickey, though, Jack did. He didn’t quite laugh, didn’t quite snort again. It was tough to define the noise he made, except that Mickey understood it to be dismissive of both Lara’s claims and Mickey’s soothing response.
Lara was sad in the back seat, and Jack was angry in the front. The morale in the truck wasn’t at a high point. Which made it the perfect timing for Mickey to make the turn to the road up to Salvisa’s property. As he did, he realized he was not going to be parking right next to the outside perimeter fencing as he normally did. Mickey was going to be parking much further from the house, down near the end of the long driveway.
There were already far too many cars.
Chapter Ten: Screwed Up
It was quick. It was uncomfortable. It was … underwhelming, all things considered. Celia didn’t know what she had expected out of her first sexual encounter, but “on an old couch on the other side of a wall from zombies with a boy she’d known for two days and getting dressed again two minutes later” wasn’t really it.
Still, she and Simon had thoroughly checked one another for bites, and there were none. She had taken a shot at kissing him and it had gone well. And then suddenly, they had fallen onto the couch.
It wasn’t what Celia had expected, necessarily, but it had been all she wanted. Even amid the danger only a door away with the others waiting for them only a block or so down the road, they had ignored the world for a brief moment and just focused on themselves, and it was good.
It was probably stupid — they had left their weapons on the floor, had left themselves completely unprotected. But in the moment she hadn’t thought of the stupidity and wouldn’t have cared if she had.
Now they were getting dressed, and even in that, Celia felt a closeness. She had stripped down to her underwear more times in her life than she could count, stripped down further than that often enough that it was routine. But this was different. This wasn’t clinical, “check me for injuries” nakedness. This was intimacy, and it was intimacy at a level she had never experienced. There was a part of the simple fact of getting dressed next to each other that thrilled her as much as the sex had.
It felt almost ordinary, but the best kind of ordinary. She put her clothes back on while sneaking peeks at Simon doing the same, and she realized in short order that he was sneaking peeks back, far less subtly. It made her smile.
Then she stopped. She turned to Simon. “I have to, uh…” she started. Sex was one thing. Telling him she had to pee was another.
Simon looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “What?” he asked.
Celia could feel herself blushing. She coughed and said, “Did you see … do you think there’s a bathroom nearby?”
Simon’s face gave an “oh” look, and then he half-shrugged. “There’s got to be,” he said. “We can look.”
Celia nodded, and the two started to move down the hallway, deeper into the building. It was a short search — the second door on the right led to a public bathroom, a smaller version of the one Celia and Stacy had visited at the service area.
“You go ahead,” Simon said, sounding shy again. He pulled the door open for her. “I’ll wait out here and guard the door.”
Celia tripped entering the bathroom as she stumbled over a little flipdown doorstop. She stepped in and waited until the door closed behind her, then went to the sinks to try the automatic water again, but this time none of the sinks responded at all. She didn’t know if that meant water had stopped flowing everywhere or if she was just having bad luck, but she felt some disappointment nonetheless.
There were four stalls in the bathroom, and even with all four doors open and space at the bottom where she would see feet if they were occupied, Celia checked all four stalls just to make sure she was alone in the bathroom. There was a small janitorial closet at the far end, and she checked it as well, even though it was too small for a person to realistically be inside. Satisfied she was alone, Celia went into the second stall, closing it and locking it, then unlocking and locking again, just out of paranoia. Simon was watching the door, but she was taking no chances.
Moments later, Celia was picking her gun up from atop the toilet paper dispenser and pulling her pants up for the second time in only a few minutes. She holstered the gun and realized she was feeling surprisingly normal. Since Simon had come back in from the garage, it had been quiet. It had just been them. A bathroom break. It was the way things were supposed to be. Sure, there was danger not far away, and she was checking every door and hallway for Z’s, but she would always be doing that. This was as normal as her life was likely to get, and it was nice to have a moment of peace.
As Celia exited the bathroom, that feeling ended.
Where she expected to see Simon, Celia saw no one. And just down the hall, outside the little room with the keys, was a crowd of at least 10 Z’s.
The door to the little room was closed. The Z’s hadn’t noticed her yet, instead pounding at the big window, which at least told Celia where Simon must have been. How he went from standing guard outside the bathroom to taking cover in the little room was a mystery, but it didn’t matter — Simon was in trouble, and even if Celia didn’t care about him, her way out was blocked. But at the front of her mind was Simon.
Celia realized she had her gun out and at the ready. She didn’t even remember grabbing it, but there it was. As she took aim, a little voice in the back of her mind tried to tell Celia that this whole thing, shooting zombies, was still just insane. But there was no time to dwell on that, because she could see the first sign of a small crack in the window, and she knew Simon was running out of time.
Her first shot rang out. She wasn’t even sure she had been the one to pull the trigger, except for the kickback from the gun. It wasn’t perfect; the zombie it hit spun slightly as the bullet pierced the side of its neck. The shot didn’t stop it, but it did alert the group to Celia’s presence.
The four or five zombies at the back of the group, the ones who couldn’t even reach the window, turned to face Celia. They were almost all on the younger side, her age range, and other than the one she had just shot, she didn’t see any wounds on any of them. This place, she realized in the moment, must have been one of the communes she had heard about. Not many younger people moved out as they neared adulthood, but the ones that did had precious few places to go. A few cities had established areas for them, almost like group homes, where they could have a community without their famili
es. They weren’t popular or commonplace, but she knew enough of them existed, and the fact that these all appeared to be young people with no bites told her she had found one.
She realized all this as she fired again. She hit the same zombie a second time, and this one was successful, as it fell down and didn’t move again. She aimed again and shot another one. It fell, but she wasn’t sure it had been a finishing shot. Still, she kept going. It took her more bullets than it would have taken Simon or Erik or her father, but in time, the zombies that had turned to come for her were all downed, whether permanently or not.
Celia didn’t want to cross their paths, not knowing which were down and which were done, and it occurred to her that she could buy time with the downed zombies helping as an obstacle.
She fired another shot, not particularly caring what she hit, just wanting the attention of the other zombies. It did hit one of them, but barely enough to count. Nonetheless, it did the job, as the rest of the zombies turned toward her. That told her two things — that she had gotten their attention, and that Simon was hiding. If he had still been in plain sight, there wouldn’t have been much she could do to draw their attention short of grabbing one of their faces and turning it toward her.
The Z’s started in Celia’s direction. The first one tripped over a zombie she had already shot, but she knew it wouldn’t take them long to move past the obstacle. So Celia threw open the bathroom door and kicked down the doorstop, holding it open. She ran inside, about 10 feet in, and faced the door. In the second she had, she switched out the magazine, one of the things her dad had drilled into her head that she felt confident in doing quickly.
A funnel. The Z’s would chase her. They’d be easy to pick off in a small doorway, and each one would be more of an obstacle for the next. Just like her father had always taught her, make it as easy as possible on yourself. She didn’t know Simon’s situation, so as far as she was concerned she was on her own. And since she was basically trapped to begin with, being extra trapped in the bathroom didn’t really matter.
After Life | Book 2 | Life After Life Page 20