Life After

by Anderson, Jordan W.

  Copyright 2017 all rights reserved.

  A Jordan W. Anderson publication

  LIFE AFTER

  When Daniel Stone hears about a disease causing the dead to rise, he retreats to his remote hunting cabin on horseback in Northeast Tennessee. One day while hunting he comes across Anika a young woman doing her best to escape and survive, With dwindling resources the two team up and begin a journey to Nashville in an effort to find Anika's parents. Along the way they meet Will, a former U.S. Marine and the three of them work together to elude hoards of zombies and a gang of prisoners in a land with no law.

  For Nathan

  Life After

  Jordan Anderson

  CHAPTER 1

  The charcoal gray colored storm clouds rolled by as he sat atop a hill, his rifle in hand, watching. He tried to make shapes out of them as they passed. He remembered how his father had promised they would do that sometime when he was a child, but they never did.

  He noticed some movement in the brush at the base of the hill. It was pretty far down, but he could make out a definite rattling sound. Becoming alerted to the situation, he raised his rifle. Daniel Stone was a safe hunter. He never even placed his finger on the trigger and kept the safety on until he was positive of what he had in his sights. As he stared down the open sights, not knowing what was to appear, he was very surprised by what did. It was a quite disheveled, yet attractive young woman. Despite the distance, Dan could tell she seemed afraid.

  He was intrigued. Dan lowered his weapon and yelled to her. “Hello?” She didn’t seem to understand where the noise was coming from. “Hello!?” he said again, this time louder. She began to look around. She had heard him this time. “Up here!” He said. She then spotted him at the crest of the hill, his back against a massive poplar dressed in full camo and waiving one arm. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t respond. She just stared at him, as if she were waiting to see what he would do. “Is it my rifle that is scaring you?" he asked. "Here, I will put it down.” He laid it beside him, and began to descend the hill toward her slowly.

  She stayed put as he approached her. Getting closer, he noticed a few tears drip from her cheeks. “My name is Daniel. What is your name?” She didn’t answer. As he moved slowly toward her he noticed that she was trembling in fear, her breaths were shallow. She was wearing a slightly too small tattered sun dress. Her dark brown hair was matted and riddled with twigs and other debris from the forest floor.

  When he got within about two yards of her she backed away. Her tears had dried some now, but she was still very wary of him. Daniel spoke to her again smiling a warm wholesome smile. With charitable eyes he asked, “Would you like some food?” She nodded quickly. He reached into his pocket, and retrieved a piece of venison jerky. He always carried it with him when he was on the stand. He extended his arm, reaching it to her. She didn't move. Dan extended his arm furthering his reach. Quickly she ran and grabbed it from him running back to her original spot. She must have been starved. She gobbled the dehydrated meat like a feral animal. Dan stood in the same spot watching her. “Would you like some more?” he asked. “Yes” she meekly replied a crackle in her frail high, pitched voice. Dan was a bit surprised to hear her speak. He paused for a moment looking in her eyes before he reached into his pocket for another piece. He held it out. This time she took it from him but stayed closer. She looked so defeated. “Did someone hurt you?” he asked her. “I am sorry if someone did, but I am not going to.” She could sense the sincerity in his tone. Her already exhausted eyes began to well up with tears once again. He walked closer and took her hand. She let him, then suddenly clung to his neck sobbing into his chest. He held her there for a few minutes until she could compose herself. He felt so sorry for her. Who knows how long she had been out there.

  Dan retrieved his rifle from his stand before taking her back to his cabin, which nowadays was more like his home. It was a small one room log structure with little more than a fireplace in the way of amenities. She seemed uneasy about riding his horse, so they walked back and he led the black stallion in tow. On the way there neither she nor Dan spoke a word. He knew that something traumatic must have happened to her, and figured that to be enough to know for the moment. She would talk about it when she was ready.

  It began to storm about the time they arrived, and Dan sat out some bowls and cooking pots to catch the water. You never could have enough fresh water in his mind. He heated up some on the fire for her to bathe with. He hung blankets up in one corner of the room to allow her privacy and washed her dress for her in some of the fast accumulating rain water while she cleaned up. Naturally she finished before it could dry so he gave her one of his flannel shirts and a pair of long thermal underwear. They were much too big for her as Dan was a large young man, but they served the purpose. He noticed she was looking at him differently now, perhaps more trustingly, but he could still sense a caution about her.

  He cooked them a hot meal, a stew of his own recipe. It was a combination of deer meat, carrots and potatoes along with some select spices and seasoning. He had grown the vegetables in his own small garden. She seemed to enjoy her meal. She ate every bite, even drinking the broth left over. He made a bed for her in the floor next to the small army cot that he been sleeping on. She laid down and it took her only minutes to fall asleep. He watched her for a while. He wondered where she had come from. What had happened to her? His focus on the subject was broken by remembering he had forgotten to bring in the rest of the rain water.

  Dan quietly sneaked out onto his small wooden plank porch. The air smelled almost as if he were near a large body of water, kind of a fishy smell from the fresh precipitation. The weather had cleared now and night had fallen. Dan brought in the few pots and bowls of water and poured them all one by one into his water tank that he had made from an upside down gas tank he scavenged from an abandoned car. It had taken a little doing washing out all the residual gasoline, but it worked quite well. He had made a funnel to pour the water in the to, and used an old piece of pilfered garden hose along with a valve attached by two hefty zip ties as a spigot on the bottom. This mystery girl was so exhausted the sound of the sloshing water being poured into the tank didn't seem to faze her.

  Dan liked the way the air smelled outside. He decided he would sit out there for a while. He picked up his six string guitar and sat on the edge of his porch. He played quietly as he didn’t want to disturb her slumber, though it seemed pretty deep. He thumbed a few chords, but too many things were on his mind for him to think of a song he wanted to play. He wondered what had happened to his family since “The event” as they called it on the news before he came up here. They were miles away from him. There would have been no way he could have saved them. Maybe they had saved themselves. He liked to think that they did, and that one day he would be reunited with them. Ultimately, fate seemed to have placed it out of his hands. Dan had intended to bring them here with him, but when he reached exit 14 off Interstate 81, Lee Highway was blocked off by the military. There were large concrete pilons along with sand bags stacked all the way across. Two Humvees, the tops adorned with machine gunners sat on either side. There was no option but to turn around. He had been lucky he had a safe place to go. His family lived in a pretty rural area. Perhaps it hadn't really reached them. He knew his mother and grandmother had always canned vegetables and meats and they likely had several jars of food to last them. His mother lived next to a creek so water shouldn't have been a problem for her fiancé and herself. They were pretty resourceful people and he knew it was probably wishful thinking but he held out hope for them.

  He didn’t mind roughing it as he had been doing all his life. He had always been as avid hunter as his father was. Dan had lost his father when he was a teenager. He
had died of a heart attack when Dan was in the tenth grade. He was twenty-five now, and had grown strong. He had worked quite a few jobs, but had been frugal and saved his money. Recently before “The event” he had procured this cabin and land atop a secluded mountain in Northeast Tennessee. He had left his apartment in Nashville and drove out here when the city had been evacuated. He always did feel safer in nature than he did any city. The problem was there was rarely sustainable work anywhere else. They had just kept talking about this virus on the news. They were saying that there was “no foreseeable cure” and it worked very quickly. Some people would seem as if they had died and then, like in a bad sci-fi movie, they would come back to life, insatiably enraged. But wasn’t a movie. It was the real deal. That was what scared him the most. They had shown video of these people. They were terribly violent, and he could swear he saw suffering in their eyes mixed with that unquenchable yearning.

  He was pretty well equipped at his cabin. The only downfall was that he had no electricity. That meant no television or radio or any other means of outside contact. He had brought along his cell phone, though he was so far back in the boonies it was doubtful he would even get a signal of any kind. He tried to make it last when he first came up here but even with his conservative efforts the battery was now dead as a doornail. He figured he would stay up there for four or five months and then he would go back to see how things were. That time was growing near. He had been marking the days on a free calendar sent by a local hospital he had received in the mail just before he left. He hoped his truck would start when he got back to it. A friend of his living in the closest town of Hay City owned an auto body repair place and had been courteous enough to let him store his truck and trailer in the garage. He had ridden his horse named midnight up to the cabin from there. It was a long two day’s ride in the best of conditions.

  Thinking about going back made him think about the girl he had found today. Maybe she knew what had happened. Maybe, she could tell him the fate of the world. By the looks of her when he found her though, it seemed pretty grim. He hoped soon she would be willing to talk. He didn't want to pressure her but the curiosity was killing him. Dan began to yawn and decided it was time to go to bed. He brought his guitar inside, leaning it in the corner of the room. He stripped down to his long thermal underwear similar to the pair he had loaned her. He laid himself down on the creaky old Army cot and pulled a blanket over himself. He fell asleep watching her. After bathing she had proven to be even more attractive than he had originally thought. The rhythmic rise and fall of her chest lulled him to dreamland. He dreamt of her that night.

  CHAPTER 2

  The hard rain had returned that morning. The sound of it pounding in his cabin’s thin metal roof resonated through the shallow insulation so loudly that it awakened him. Dan looked at his solar powered swimmer’s watch his mother had gotten him for his twentieth birthday. It was 7:37 am. Even up here in the middle of nowhere Dan had never been much of what you would call an early riser. It was unusual for him to wake up earlier than about ten or eleven AM most days. Dan looked below him at the bed he had made for her. She was still sleeping soundly.

  He thought for a moment that he should maybe collect some more rain water. Then he quickly remembered that what he had caught the night before had filled up his makeshift water tank. He decided he would make breakfast. He rifled through his only cabinet beside his wood burning fireplace. He found a box of some oatmeal and a small amount of sugar in a paper sack. That would be a good start. Following the stovetop directions on the oatmeal box he poured some into a pot and guessed at the amount of water using a bowl he figured to hold about two cups.

  His fireplace made a wonderful place to cook. It had been made that way by his own design. The hearth jutted out about a foot into the room and was about knee high. Just above the bed of hot coals was a rack of steel grating that sat in two tracks cut out in the stone on either side. It could be slid in and out like a drawer from a small handle welded in the front. Dan liked this way of cooking. Primitivism somehow made things taste better to him. Though, he did wish he had some milk and butter for flavor. When he decided it had thickened enough he pulled it out and sat it on the hearth. He began to conservatively add the sugar. He wanted to save a bit for later but he wanted this batch to taste tolerable as well. Eventually he was satisfied and he put everything away. He cut a couple of slabs of fatback bacon into 6 strips, finishing off the block with his knife, and threw them onto the cooking grate to make some fat and protein to go along with the meal. He thought about waking her up so they could eat together, but decided that it would be more kind to just let her sleep. Dan went ahead and ate his meal. It was decent enough. He wasn’t a very picky eater.

  He waited a while for her to wake up, but she slept on. It was still early, so he decided to go check on his horse Midnight. He sat the food on the hearth close to the hot coals to keep it warm for her. He then set out on the short trek up the hill to the small clearing where Midnight was corralled. The vegetation up there was pretty plentiful and there was a bit of a sinkhole that created a small stagnant pond of water. The horse could drink it but there was no way a human could handle the bacteria and parasites bound to reside there. Midnight wasn’t at all difficult to maintain. He was a good horse as far as horses go. Dan did hate having to leave him out in the weather all the time though. He meant to build him a small stable, but never seemed to have the means after constructing his cabin. Then again he thought to himself, what do wild horses do when it rains? At least it kept him rinsed off and kept down some of the smell.

  It didn’t take him too long to have crested the hill. Sure enough, there stood Midnight. The rain had lessened to a drizzle, and the sun shone on the solid black beast in such a way that it illuminated all the small water particles making him gleam outlining the muscular contours of the beast’s body. He was a majestic and powerful horse. He and Daniel had become best friends. Midnight spotted him and trotted over to the fence, neighing in a way that seemed as if he were saying hello. “Hey buddy!” said Dan. “I’m sorry it rained on you so hard last night...and this morning. One of these days I am going to build you a barn.” Dan scratched him behind the ear as Midnight lowered his head. Dan had picked some of the longer grasses on the way up and they were hanging from his back pocket. The horse reached for them over Dan's shoulder forcing him to squat down to duck away. "Easy, pal!" Dan chucked as he backed far enough way to retrieve the treat. He fed them to Midnight. They were not much, but they helped to show the animal he cared. He used to give him carrots but Dan needed those too much for himself. The horse seemed to be ok. There was still a lot of uneaten grass in the clearing, and the rains had freshened up his water. It looked to be at least an inch deeper, if not more. After a few more scratches behind the ear Dan decided it was time to go back.

  When he returned to the cabin, he walked inside to find her eating the oatmeal. She sat it to the side as if she was afraid she wasn’t supposed to have it. “It’s okay.” Dan assured her. “I made that for you. I just went to check on my horse. Was it still warm? I sat it by the fire for you” She nodded yes to him. “Good” He replied. “Go ahead and eat the rest of it” She slowly pulled the bowl back in front of her and resumed eating. “I understand you don’t really trust me yet. I hope that you can in time. I know that I am just glad to see another person. I have been alone up here for the past few months… Do you remember my name?” She paused a moment before answering him. “Yes… Daniel.” “Yeah that’s right, but you can call me Dan. Could I ask yours?” She nodded. “Anika Edwards” She said so quietly it was almost a whisper “Well Anika it’s a pleasure to meet you. Now that we know each other’s names we can hopefully become friends. You are welcome to anything in my cabin all you have to do is ask.” “Thank you” she replied. “Oh, and it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about how you got up here, but I have been thinking, and I was wondering if you knew what happened with that virus that broke before they sent everyone ou
t of the city.” She shook her head no. “My parents told me to come up here to stay with my Memaw and Papaw when everyone was evacuated. Mom and Dad are both in the National Guard so they had to stay.” As she spoke her voice began to crack. “Papaw went to town to get some things. He said it had gotten really bad there. Some infected people had attacked him on the way home and he was scratched on his hand. It took longer for it to set in that way I guess. Memaw and I were taking care of him the best we could. He stayed in the bed for about a week. We first thought maybe he just has the flu, but he never got better. She was bring him some water when he turned on her. I was asleep in the other room, I heard her scream and came to help but she was gone." Anika paused for a moment and sobbed heartily before continuing. "He was...he was eating her! Then before I could put together what I was looking at he was coming for me too, so I just ran into the woods and didn’t stop. After a few days I realized there were things I could have taken, I just couldn’t go back in there with them like… that. I could have saved Memaw if I had just known.” Dan stared her with his jaw agape, a look of horror on his face. “My god that is terrible! You can't blame yourself for that. How long were you out there?” Dan asked “I don’t know, there was nothing to eat, just some blackberries and sometimes I would find a stream” she replied. “I am so sorry you had to go through that, It must be a miracle you survived.” Dan moved closer to her and she put her arms around his neck and rested her head on his shoulder.

  She sniffled as she tried to resist crying. “Let’s talk about something else. I don’t want you to have to think about that. I am sorry to have made you relive it. How old are you? He asked. “20” she said as she tried to dry her eyes. “I am in college…well I guess was in college, at Vanderbilt. I still lived with my parents” “I lived in Nashville too” said Dan “Is there anything you would like to ask me?” She took a beat as if to think about it then shrugged and shook her head no. "That's ok let me know if you change your mind. I was thinking of how I am staring to get low on supplies here and I want to see if anything has improved back in civilization. With the both of us here now we will need more of everything. It’s only a two or three day’s ride to the town where my truck and trailer is stored." Anika nodded in agreement.