After Life | Book 2 | Life After Life

by Kelley, Daniel

  Celia reached forward and handed Michelle her haul, a handful of energy bars. She started to climb back up front, then turned back and fished out a single bottle of water as well.

  Michelle helped distribute the bars, then looked down at the one she had ended up with. Coconut. It gave her flashbacks to the awful food she had had to endure during 2010, but she had eaten it then and she’d eat it now. She grimaced and opened the wrapper, taking a bite and frowning at the flavor.

  In the front seat, Stacy decided between the two bars she held, ultimately settling on what Michelle thought was an oatmeal chocolate chip one. The other bar — strawberries and cream — she held out to Simon. He glanced at the bar offered to him for a second, but then snapped his eyes back to the road. “No thanks,” he said.

  Stacy seemed surprised. She looked down at the two bars again. “Don’t like strawberries?” she asked. She switched the bars in her hands. “You can have this one.”

  “That’s okay,” Simon said. “You need the food more. I don’t want to run us out. I’ll be fine.”

  Michelle leaned forward, making her groan a little as she had to move her left leg to do so. “We should have plenty, Simon,” she said. “There should be enough bars back there to last us a few days.” She looked over to Celia for confirmation.

  “She’s right,” Celia said. “There were a bunch back there. We ought to be fine.” She took a sip of the bottle of water and passed it up to Stacy.

  Simon shook his head again. “You guys said ‘should’ and ‘ought’ inside of like three sentences,” he said. “I’m a little hungry, but only a little. I don’t want to eat until I either know we have enough, I know there will be more, or I’m so hungry I don’t have a choice.”

  Erik swallowed his bite. “Bad idea, son,” he said. “You need to keep your strength up.”

  Simon took the water bottle from Stacy, took a small drink, and handed it back toward Erik. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I don’t need a lot.”

  Celia looked down at her bar appraisingly. Michelle thought it looked like she was wondering if she really needed the food. Before Michelle could say something to encourage her to go ahead and eat, Celia shrugged and took another bite.

  Michelle thought back to the day before, just after Andy had died, when they were in the Wal-Mart in Hyannis and morosely eating the food they had there. Simon had eaten then, but if she recalled correctly, he didn’t take to the bars as readily as the others. He had given Celia the last quarter of one of his bars. When she had met up with the group outside the college, he had offered part of what he had to Stacy while she was mourning.

  Michelle knew he had to be hungry. Simon was forgoing food to offer it to others, or to keep it available for them. That was noble, but it was a bad decision. And she was afraid it came from the wrong place. If he truly wasn’t hungry, then fine, nobody had to eat. But if he was deciding to tough it out for the sake of someone else to have food, then he was weakening himself for no reason.

  “Simon,” Michelle said with force behind her voice, “if we had a buffet in front of us right now, would you eat?”

  Simon didn’t answer for a minute. Finally, through clenched teeth, he said, “I guess so.”

  “Then eat,” Michelle said. “Nobody is going to be helped by you making yourself too hungry. We have enough for you to have one piece of food. Nobody needs to be too proud to have some food.”

  Simon fell silent for another moment. “You’re right,” he said after a minute. Stacy offered him the bar back and he took it. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” Michelle said, as Simon took a bite.

  “No, there is,” he said. “Making decisions like that is how it starts. Everybody remembers the ‘all for one’ part of the saying, but no one thinks about the ‘one for all’ part. I forgot about it. I have to take care of myself. Thank you for reminding me.”

  Chapter Six: A Little Optimism

  Celia was very happy they had decided to eat. Just like when she was in the car with her father traipsing around Cape Cod, she had been famished, had wanted food, but didn’t feel like it was important enough for her to speak up. So she waited and felt her stomach squirm until Stacy spoke at which point Celia jumped to action to start getting food.

  And as she finished off her bar and took another sip of the water bottle that was being circulated around the group, Celia suddenly realized how stupid that was. She was her own person. She had just saved Simon, had shot zombies of her own accord. She wasn’t some child along for the ride. She was a full-fledged member of the group and didn’t need to shrink back and wait for someone else to speak up. The next time she was hungry, Celia vowed to say so. And she vowed to take the one with chocolate chips for herself.

  From the front seat, Stacy worked on her bar and started to speak between bites. “I was thinking,” she said, “about that question you were asking us, Mich. What we wanted to be when we grew up. You know what would be fun, if it is what I think it is?”

  “What’s that?” Michelle asked.

  “Tech stuff,” Stacy said. Her manners weren’t great, and she spit a little bit of the bar as she spoke, but she swallowed and continued. “Making those … apps? Those phone things?”

  “Yeah,” Michelle said.

  “The way you guys have talked about them, there was one for almost everything, right? It made the Anti-Tech people so mad, but if we get this turned off, then we’ll be able to really and truly start the world back up. ‘A phone in every pocket, a website for every occasion.’ That was what Morgan wanted, right? We can do that after all this.”

  “What made you think of that?” Michelle asked.

  “That walkie-talkie stuff,” Stacy said. She turned to look at Simon. “You guys had to, what, just sit there and talk into the walkie-talkie long enough to draw the Z’s away?”

  Simon squirmed a little. “Something like that.”

  “He sang,” Erik said. “I heard it as I was leaving.”

  Simon’s squirms increased. Celia could tell he was embarrassed by that. “You sang?” Stacy asked. “Really? What’d you sing?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Celia said. “Just something to distract them.”

  Stacy shrugged. “Either way,” she said. “That was just something you had to sit there and do. What if Erik could have just hit a button and played noise, music or whatever, and you guys wouldn’t have had to worry about that? Or what if we could just type in Salvisa’s address and drive there? We wouldn’t have been wandering back roads to get through Boston, maybe we wouldn’t have wrecked.

  “For that matter,” Stacy said, picking up steam, “phones would have been good in all of this. Just call someone who is near where Salvisa lives and tell them what to do. I know phones were supposed to be deactivated when the outbreak started, and maybe that’s for the best, but an emergency line or something? I don’t know, but I feel like if the Anti-Techs started this, tech would have been good to end it.”

  Celia found herself liking Stacy’s idea. She had grown up with stories, mostly from Cathy but a few from her dad too, about the sort of stuff they could do with technology back before 2010. Even the opportunity to read, to see more things than were just in her circle, was appealing enough. She had never really given that much thought to greater utility for the technology, using it to actually fix problems, but what Stacy described was the perfect way to use that stuff.

  “Could all that really happen?” Celia asked.

  Michelle nodded, but Stacy spoke next. “Yeah,” she said, popping the last bite of her bar into her mouth. “More than that, too. If I wanted to become a teacher, I could do that on there. Just make a video or whatever. You could live your entire life in those things.”

  Michelle finally spoke up. “She’s not wrong,” she said. “You could do a lot with phones. I’m not sure about ‘living your entire life’ that way, but she’s right that they would have come in handy the last couple days.”

  “You definitel
y wouldn’t want to live your entire life that way,” Erik said from the other side of Michelle, sounding a little bothered. “That’s what made the Anti-Techs so mad to begin with. People would play with their phone to go to bed, check their phone in the middle of the night, wake up with their phone. If you want that life again, you’ll have a whole new generation of Anti-Techs in no time.”

  Celia scowled at Erik’s downer attitude. “But they will be outed after this,” she said. “We wouldn’t make the same mistakes, let the same people screw the world up.”

  Erik half-shrugged. “I don’t think people meant to do that last time,” he said. “Technology can do some wonderful things, but we have to be careful.”

  Michelle looked at Erik with an unhappy look, like she too was annoyed he was being a depressing inclusion in the conversation. “Even if that might come about, they aren’t wrong about the rest of it,” she said. “An iPhone would have been a massive help in this. And you know as well as I do that you miss Pandora.”

  Erik half-shook his head, half-nodded. “Yeah,” he said begrudgingly. “I miss Drake and Jay-Z. But I’m not sure having easy, constant access to them back would be worth it if it meant people were going to cause a zombie apocalypse all over again.”

  “There’s got to be a middle ground,” Stacy said. “We’ve got to be able to have some technology without creating the next generation’s Peter Salvisa. Otherwise we’re just Amish.”

  “Isn’t that kind of why we were going to go back to school?” Celia said. “I mean, yeah, it was to get the young people out, socialize us, keep everybody from being permanent homebodies. But if we just go out, learn about zombies and, I don’t know, math for a couple years, and then go back home and avoid technology the rest of our lives, we aren’t actually accomplishing that much.”

  “I’m not arguing with you all,” Erik said, putting up his hands defensively. “I’m just saying it’s something to be careful about. The last thing we want to do here is save the world from the zombies only to ensure they come back again.”

  Celia nodded, and saw Stacy doing the same in the front seat. “Okay,” she said.

  “Either way,” Michelle said, “I like that you’re coming up with ideas, Stace. Developing apps is a really interesting way to go. You’d have to learn a whole lot to do it. Stuff I don’t know how to do. But I bet there’s a world of exploration to do in that.”

  “We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, either,” Simon said.

  “What do you mean?” Michelle asked.

  Simon motioned out in front of the car. It was getting dark, but just off on the horizon, there was a group of Z’s, about 20 of them, milling around on the interstate. It was the biggest group they had seen since getting this SUV, but they weren’t a threat. Simon just veered over into the opposite lane and drove around them before they could do much beyond lurch in the direction of the SUV, but they were there nonetheless.

  “We’re talking about what we’ll do when we end this,” Simon said. “But there’s a long way to go. We don’t even know what we’re going to do when we get to Salvisa’s.”

  Celia turned in her seat. A couple of the more capable Z’s from that group were doing their level best to keep up with the SUV. They were getting left behind rapidly, of course, but they were pursuing them all the same. She watched until the last one was out of sight as Simon went around a curve.

  “There’s nothing wrong with thinking down the road,” Michelle said. “The world has just been thinking about what to do today, tomorrow, for 20 years now. We learned to think that way in 2010, because nobody knew if there would be a day beyond tomorrow. But honestly, I like that Stacy is thinking about what will come next. A little optimism can be a wonderful thing. Reminds you of what you’re fighting for.”

  Simon nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  Coming out of the curve, the road hit a straight stretch. Simon was going fast, but the road was straight for so long that Celia started to wonder if the zombies would come back into view behind them. She turned to look back again. The road behind them felt like it stretched back miles, even if it was only a few hundred yards. She glanced back ahead of them, and saw that the interstate would crest a small rise in short order, and then she’d probably lose sight of the road behind them once again.

  Just as they went over that hill, Celia thought she saw the lead zombie. It could just as easily have been a trick of the eyes, especially in the dusk, but she really thought she saw a speck off in the distance come running around the curve. Just as quickly, it was gone behind the hill, and Celia knew she’d never see it again, but she also knew it would keep running after them as long as it could.

  Chapter Seven: Smiling Through It

  Mickey had spent time trying to talk Jack down from storming Salvisa’s front door, to no avail. Jack had gotten in the driver’s seat, so all Mickey could do was get in the passenger and try to talk. It was all Lara and Kim could do to just get in the back of the truck before Jack started moving.

  “Son, we need to have a plan,” Mickey said as Jack got back onto the road.

  “I have a plan,” Jack said. “Drive up to the door and make the man open it one way or another.”

  “That’s not a plan,” Mickey said. “That’s just words. It’s getting dark. If the man hasn’t come out yet, it’s because he doesn’t want to. Surely he knows people are outside. What do you do if Peter won’t open the door? Or if everybody tries to follow you in? Or…”

  “I don’t care, dad!” Jack said. “I'll figure it out. We don’t need to step back and talk through every last thing. We go up and knock. That’s the entire plan. If it doesn’t work, we try something else.”

  Jack shook his head, but Jack was already turning into Salvisa’s driveway, so he just faced forward. Jack had the truck’s brights on, and as he coursed up the driveway through the rows of vehicles that lined either side, people poked their heads out from beside cars and various places to see and winced in the lights. Salvisa’s driveway was a couple hundred yards long, and there had to be 50 vehicles lining it up and down. Campers, cars, trucks, vans. Even a couple motorcycles. Mickey saw the faces briefly, but there was one thing consistent about them — they were old. Lara was easily the youngest of anyone Mickey could see, but Jack might have been the second-youngest. These were people who had lived through 2010 and knew how to travel, but they were also people who didn’t have much left to live for. The people who had options stayed home. These were people who wanted answers like Jack and Mickey and didn’t have any reason not to pursue them.

  But beyond their age, the one thing Mickey thought they all had in common in the little glimpse he got was that they all shared the same look. Hope. From what Mickey could tell and what Kim had described, the people who had shown up to Salvisa’s so far had just shown up, parked in an orderly fashion, and waited, like fans waiting for the gates to open at a ballgame. There was no urgency beyond “get there,” and once they had gotten there, their motivation kind of petered out. Seeing Jack drive through them with what they had to believe was purpose gave them the notion that someone seemed to know what they were doing.

  It was then that Mickey changed his mind. Maybe Jack was right to march in without a plan. These people had been sitting back and hoping to come up with a plan for the better part of a day now and hadn’t yet done a thing. That Jack was ready and willing to actually act was different and it was significant. Jack might not have the right approach, but at least he had an approach.

  As they got closer, Mickey realized Salvisa’s property had changed since he had last been there. Of course, it had been more than a year. But Salvisa, it seemed, had grown more paranoid since then. His home was always fairly well fortified, with a strong wall and bars on the windows and a security system on the door. Mickey had always marveled at the height. Salvisa’s home was a single story, but easily taller than some two-story houses Mickey had visited. From the outside, it looked industrial as much as anything. The windows themselves were
high as well, above even eye level. But at some point since Mickey’s last visit, Peter had upped his fence game. The chain link surrounding the house had been mostly for show, like a suburban fence keeping the dog in the yard. But that was gone now and in its place was a new one about ten feet high, with barbed wire at the top. The fence sat about 15 feet outside of the house, like a moat. In front of Salvisa’s front door was a gate that appeared to be electronically controlled. There was a security screen a few feet outside of the gate with a small video screen on it and a number pad just to its right, then what looked like another little panel just outside the front door that had a plastic flap over it.

  The most striking thing, though, was that things were lit. There were lights on inside Salvisa’s house, and the video screen had a small light on it to indicate it was powered on. Electricity had been off in Maine since everything started, and they hadn’t seen any manmade lights other than headlights since then.

  Mickey knew Salvisa had his own generator and loads of fuel to keep it going, but even knowing that, seeing something powered on was strange. Mickey had been in New York during a massive blackout in 2003 that affected the entire northeast. After the sun went down, Mickey took a walk outside, and he was struck by how dark it was. It was New York. It wasn’t downtown Manhattan, but it was still New York, still the kind of place that had so many lights on at all times that people grew used to sleeping in a constant glow. And it was just dark. New York never got dark. It was surreal, like they had woken up in a ghost town.

  Seeing the lights on in Salvisa’s property was like the exact inverse of that. He had grown used to a lack of lights. They weren’t supposed to come on. Even knowing Salvisa’s paranoia, he hadn’t been mentally prepared for the lights.

  Jack squinted out the window, appraising the situation with frustration. “I thought you said people knocked,” he said angrily.