“Where did you go?” she asked. She sounded hurt.
“I just … it’s a long story,” Mickey said, with an answer that didn’t seem to satisfy either of them. “My son circling the house again?”
She was pouting, but she nodded. “That one guy went with him,” she said. “McVay? They’ve been inspecting the back for a few minutes now.”
Celia watched Mickey take that in. She thought he seemed almost relieved his son wasn’t there in that moment, though she didn’t know why that would be. But with that established, Mickey raised his arms like he was holding sermon. Kim stood behind him, and the group that had been murmuring fell silent as they appeared to await whatever Mickey was going to announce.
“Our goal has changed,” Mickey said. He looked like he was about to tell everyone the whole story Celia and her group knew, but then he appeared to think better of it. “We have been wanting to go in peacefully, not disturb Peter. That clearly isn’t working. So we’re going to use force.” Mickey pointed to a couple of the larger vehicles nearby. “Anybody willing to use their RV as a battering ram?’
Nobody spoke. Celia wasn’t surprised, because it’s not crazy to think someone wouldn’t want to destroy their vehicle just in hopes of destroying a house, but she was disappointed. She also didn’t care that they didn’t volunteer. She hadn’t been the one to step up, especially not with her words, but she wasn’t interested in the passive approach. She stepped up next to Mickey.
“I think we should say this a different way,” she said, as loudly as she could. A commanding voice didn’t come naturally to her, but she remembered her father. Andy had never been any kind of alpha male in his day-to-day life, to the point that Celia had started to wonder how he had ever really survived 2010. But then at Morgan College he had seemingly adopted an entirely new persona, bred entirely of his new role as the most knowledgeable and capable person, and he had taken charge. And Michelle, when she had joined them, had seemed content to let Andy or her friend Donnie take the lead, but then after they had died, she had become their de facto leader.
Now, with Celia’s father dead and with Michelle unable to be the leader she had been, Celia felt it was her turn to take charge of the situation: youth, inexperience, and new arrival status be damned. It had worked when she and Simon had been trapped in the commune.
“No one wants to use their car as a battering ram,” Celia said, projecting her voice. She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. “I get that. But someone is going to have to make that sacrifice. We’ll find you another car to go back home if that’s what it takes. If no one volunteers, we’ll start going car to car to find something big and intact enough to do the job. That’s happening. A volunteer would be better, but it’s not necessarily the only way to do it.”
“And who are you?” someone said, a male voice in the crowd Celia couldn’t even locate. It was a deep, booming voice, someone who wouldn’t have had to work to project his voice the way Celia had to. Nonetheless, he hadn’t done so, and he had been there who knew how long without taking the initiative, and even now he was standing behind others and questioning her from relative safety.
“Celia,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. Unless you have a reason for what I said to not be what we do, then all I am is a person talking to you. I’m open to a better approach, but my understanding is some of you have been here for hours so far and haven’t come up with one. I have one.” She stopped for a moment and looked around the area, waiting to see if someone else wanted to challenge her. “Sounds like no one else does. So we’re doing that. Anyone want to volunteer their car?”
Again, silence. There were a few coughs and squirms around the area, but for the most part, people just watched. Celia heard Mickey behind her scoff with some frustration.
“Fine, we can just use my truck,” Mickey said. “I think it will get the job done.”
Celia shook her head. “All due respect,” she said, “I don’t want to try something we ‘think’ can get the job done. There are some big RVs here. Those will do the trick. We just start checking them.” She turned back to the group. We’re going to check the doors to your RVs. If you locked them, if you have the keys, and you won’t let us get in, well, there’s not much I can do about that, but it’s such a crappy thing to do at this point. We all traveled here for one reason, and to stop us from accomplishing our goal now just because you want to protect a 20-year-old vehicle is dumb. But I’m willing to bet that not every RV has done that. One of them will be something we can use.” She nodded to Mickey and Kim, and then to Simon, who had moved forward in the circle to get closer to Celia as she spoke. “We’ll find it.”
Still, the others stood there, increasing Celia’s frustration by the minute. After a few more seconds of waiting for action, Celia shrugged and started to make her way to the closest RV to her left. Simon moved to follow. There were two RVs in that general direction. Mickey moved down the middle to an RV on that side that had another parked almost right next to it, and Kim went toward the right, where there were three more.
Simon got to Celia as she neared the first RV. Some of the big group followed behind her as though she were a golfer on the back nine at Augusta, but they did so in respectful silence and from a respectful distance. It was all strange to Celia, these people who had taken the initiative to go seek answers from a 3s to, apparently, Mickey, and now to Celia. There was a frustrating subset of these people who just wanted their answers given to them and for whatever reason thought merely getting to the place where they wanted the answers to be would be enough. Celia had seen it at the college with the people who just wanted Barry Lowensen to give them answers, and when they failed, they couldn’t think for themselves and instead looked to her father.
Celia mostly expected someone to step forward and say something as she tried the first RV, announcing that it was theirs and either giving reluctant permission to use it or fighting against Celia’s new goal. But no one said anything, so she shrugged and tried the door.
Locked. That explained why no one had come forward. Even if the person whose RV it was was in the small group following her, they knew they had the trump card in the locked door. They could stay quiet, maintain deniability, and still have their RV safe.
Frustrated, Celia started to move to the second RV down the line. It was one she didn’t even want to have to use. It was bigger than Mickey’s truck, but she probably would have preferred the truck anyway given the state of the RV. If she had to guess, this had been someone’s emergency backup vehicle, not even something they wanted to use, and it had been all they were left with. It was rusted through in more than one place, had what looked like a much smaller’s car spare tire on its right front wheel, poorly fit to the extent that the entire vehicle looked to be leaning slightly forward and right. The windshield was spider-webbing badly, with the passenger’s side nearly impossible to see through and even the driver’s side marred by several lines.
This was a mixed blessing, Celia thought. It increased the chances that whoever owned the vehicle wouldn’t care much if they tried to use it as a battering ram, but she worried the RV wouldn’t fare well in the attempt. Still, she was determined to try.
“I like you as the boss,” Simon said quietly, only loud enough for Celia to hear, as she got near the vehicle. “You’re good at being in charge.”
Celia smiled. She hadn’t felt like she had been good at it, but Simon’s affirmation was nice. “Thanks,” she said. “Not that it worked on them.”
“I think it worked fine,” he said. “They were never going to do something themselves. But you told them what needed to be done and you’re doing it. Sometimes that’s enough. You do it long enough, they’ll start to follow because that’s what they do.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah,” Simon said, still speaking low. “Your dad was the same way. He didn’t try to convince people to follow him, or try to explain why he was the one who needed to be in charge. He just saw wh
at needed to be done, said that, and started doing it. People naturally followed him because he was usually right about stuff. And even when he wasn’t, like choosing to go to that Army camp, he made so much sense in doing it that no one could really fault him. He was a natural leader in a way that didn’t seem very leader-y, I guess. You have that too. It’s cool.”
Celia smiled. She felt like Simon was being too nice to her about things, but she didn’t mind, and she liked the compliment. She got to the second RV and tried the driver’s door, still not sure if she even wanted it to be successful. But the door opened easily. It didn’t even feel like it latched well.
She gave Simon a “here goes nothing” look and climbed into the driver’s seat. The RV key, clearly a duplicate and clearly old, sat in the center console, so Celia settled in, put the key in the ignition, and turned it.
The RV sputtered. It sounded like a comedy stereotype of a car trying to start, with whirrs and coughs and sad noises. But it didn’t come to life. Celia tried three times, and attracted the attention of the masses that had followed Mickey and Kim, but the RV never did much beyond cough at her. Maybe whoever had driven it there had a special trick for getting it started, and if all else failed Celia would try that again, but she didn’t trust the vehicle that much regardless, so she didn’t mind that it didn’t start.
She climbed back out. Simon gave her a “what now?” look, so she shrugged and said, loudly enough for everyone near them to hear, “I think we could probably start it if we worked at it, but that thing is a death trap. I’d rather see what the others come up with before trying to fix this.”
As if on cue, something deep within the RV rattled at the exhaustion of having tried to start. The group around Celia and Simon, apparently disappointed at no action to speak of, dissipated, with some wandering over to where Mickey was about to try the second of his available RVs, some heading back up near Salvisa’s house, and others just wandering off to their own activities.
Celia and Simon went with the ones going up near the house. As they got up there, two men — she figured they had to be Mickey’s son that he had mentioned and the other man, McVay — came around the side of Salvisa’s house on the same side Celia was, with one of them angrily banging on Salvisa’s walls and windows every few steps. He looked to be coming unglued from frustration, and Celia thought he was going to hurt his fist from the way he would pound ineffectually at the wall.
It was the other man, though, who reacted most strongly when they rounded the corner. On the far end of the house, Kim had struck out on the first two RVs she had tried, and was now walking to a third one, maybe the biggest one of all of them, which was visible even in the relative darkness and was sticking out several feet from the others. It was a full camper, with a grand side door and enough space for a large family to live in comfortably. And the man saw her walking toward it and hurried back to the group of the others.
“What’s she doing?” he asked, pointing toward Kim.
“We’re going to break down Salvisa’s walls,” Simon said. “Trying the RVs to see if we can get one to do the trick, since nobody volunteered.”
“But … you need permission for that.”
Nobody responded to the man. In what seemed to be almost a panic, he watched Kim get up next to the vehicle. Celia couldn’t figure out what his apparent fears were, but something had this man a mix of scared and angry that did not sit well with her. At the last second, he took a few running steps toward Kim and yelled “Don’t…!”
But it was too late. Visible clearly even as far away as the others were, Kim opened the rear side door of the camper and fell backward as it was pushed even harder against her. Almost immediately, she was set upon by the first zombie out the door of the camper. And many more came streaming out behind it.
Chapter Five: Sorry
Mickey hadn’t had any luck at the two campers he had tried. The first was locked, and the second had no keys. He asked some of the people who had trailed behind him again to please volunteer, help, but they all seemed like scared rabbits.
So he had been heading back to the front to join the others when Kim had her bad luck. McVay had shouted at her to stop, but to no avail, and Kim’s screams as the first zombie, an overweight woman in her late 50s with dried blood caked down her right side, fell upon her and took a bite out of her shoulder, were the loudest thing Mickey had heard since the gunshot that Erik had used to kill the man earlier.
After that it was chaos. Some people sprinted to their cars, others huddled in the group at the top. Some got their guns out and went after the zombies leaving the camper, some got their guns out but stayed unmoving, and some appeared to have forgotten they even had guns to begin with. Lara was at the head of the driveway, looking panicked. The injured woman, Michelle, and her daughter had hobbled to the area as well. The other kids who had arrived with the Stamford woman had their guns out immediately, as did Jack — though he barely ever put his away.
Mickey got back to the group at the head of the driveway just as McVay stopped shouting and dropped his head. The man who had seemed so jovial and happy when Mickey arrived suddenly had the light drained from him.
Mickey grabbed McVay’s arm and spun him around. “What the hell happened?” he shouted into the man’s face. “What the hell did you do?”
McVay’s shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry,” he said in a voice that was barely audible among the commotion and gunshots as the zombies started making their way out of the vehicle. “I came for answers. I wanted to figure out what happened to them. To my family. To my friends. To my wife. I wanted to see if there was a way to cure them.”
It hit Mickey at once. McVay had trapped zombies he cared about in his camper to come to Salvisa’s property, not just to understand what had happened to them, but to try to fix it. There were stories he had read, not from anybody he knew, of people who had kept the zombies of loved ones in cages, in sheds, in closets, or on chains throughout 2010 in hopes of fixing their illness and getting the people they loved back. It didn’t work for a single person, and as often as not it led to the surviving person getting killed too, but hope, like the zombies, refused to die.
McVay, it seemed, had made the same stupid decision. His mission had involved bringing zombies to a bunch of unaware people and not telling them anything about it. Mickey realized that made sense, because if McVay had mentioned having zombies in the camper even once before that moment, the first thing Mickey and Jack would have done was to go shoot every last one of them, and Mickey thought — or at least hoped — that several others there would have had the same reaction. McVay’s mistake wasn’t in the hiding of the zombies, it was in the otherworldly stupid decision to bring them there in the first place.
And the problem would no doubt be compounded in a hurry, as some zombies being there and out in the open and attacking would certainly lead to more coming. The young man who had warned that they needed to be ready for zombies back at the other driveway had been proven correct.
“You absolute idiot,” Mickey said. “How the hell could you bring them here?”
“I told you I suffered loss,” McVay said.
“And you didn’t even lock the doors?”
McVay shook his head. “Z’s can’t open doors. I didn’t think people would be trying to get in. When my grandson was bit, I had to shoot him myself. I vowed I wouldn’t shoot another. They’re still people.”
“The hell they are,” Jack said, furious. He had stormed into the middle of the group and heard what Mickey and McVay were discussing.
“They’re people!” McVay said again. “I slept next to my wife for 35 years. That’s still her. She’s not gone. She can’t be gone.”
“She’s gone,” Jack said. With that, he raised his gun and shot McVay in the side of the head. The man fell to the side, dead immediately. The ones who were still standing up at the front with this group all jumped in shock — they hadn’t been the ones firing shots so far.
“What the he
ll?” Michelle asked.
Jack almost shrugged. “He brought them here. He’s the reason we have them to worry about now. He’s the reason people are dying. We don’t need someone around here like that.”
“You can’t just kill someone!” Lara cried out.
Jack nodded. “Clearly I can,” he said. “I never made a promise to anyone that I would do anything for them. I’m here for answers to my questions, and anyone making that harder is of no use to me.”
No one responded to that, but there was clearly plenty of shock at Jack’s actions around the group. As for Mickey, he still couldn’t believe what he had seen. Jack had been on edge since the outbreak had returned, since Adie had died, sure. He had in fact been on edge ever Candace had disappeared. But Mickey never saw this coming. His son had just killed a man for being stupid and reckless, yes, but not evil. McVay deserved to pay for his actions, but not with his life.
“Son,” Mickey said in a soothing voice, “maybe you want to step back and…”
“And what, Dad?” Jack said, his eyes flashing, his hand still on his gun. Behind him, Michelle had her own gun out, and Mickey could tell she was no longer looking at the zombies, but at Jack.
“What? I’m supposed to just relax and hope we get in there to see the old man before the zombies get us? We’re getting closer to dead all the time, and we don’t even know if he’s in there! For all we know we’re knocking on an abandoned house, and now we have to fight for our lives for the privilege to do so? I’m done, Dad. I’m done being nice, I’m done coddling, I’m just done.”
“No you aren’t,” Mickey said. “You still have a life to live. When this is all over, you can start over. You can find…”
“I’m. Done,” Jack said again, no bargain in his voice. “We’re finding the answers out. I’m not playing anymore.”
Mickey didn’t know what was going on back at the camper where the zombies had appeared. Something in the back of his brain told him the noise had died down somewhat, so maybe that meant the others had some success fighting them off, but he no longer cared that much. The only thing he had left in the world — his son — was there in front of him, but he felt like he was losing him all the same.
After Life | Book 2 | Life After Life Page 31