After the Apocalypse Book 1 Resurrection: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller

by Warren Hately

  “He started it,” Einstein said and pointed at Lucas. Again the children tittered.

  “Fucking hell,” Tom muttered for added effect. “I hope all this revelry means you’re not going to have my kid riding your bicycle for the whole day. What’s it going to cost us?”

  “Generator takes three hours to charge,” Einstein said. “You come do the same again tomorrow, but no free breakfast then. Trade or something else. Got it?”

  “I think he’s meant to have . . . School or something.”

  “School?” The vendor made a face. “Tomorrow again, or no deal.”

  “Dad.”

  “I haven’t even reported in yet,” Tom said. “I can’t believe I’m even using that phrase. Feels like high school.”

  “Yeah,” Einstein chuckled. “The principal’s office is that way.”

  He pointed west of the First Gates, visible beyond the people short-cutting their way through the mostly-dormant Night Market, the growing crowds of The Mile beyond.

  “OK, these two are staying here with you,” Tom said. “The sister comes with the bargain.”

  “Ha!” Einstein said and happily scooped a ladle of oil onto the hotplate. “You throw your other daughter free in the deal?”

  “I’m not a daughter,” Lucas said and touched his overlong hair with a forlorn look.

  Tom only swapped knowing grins with Lilianna.

  “I think you misunderstand me,” he said to the vendor. “We three, we’re sort of a package deal, and she’s here in my stead. Got it?”

  Einstein gave Lila another look, a wry expression as he took in her girl-power pose and challenging smirk and not quite willing to meet her gaze.

  “As long as she keeps out of my way,” Einstein said. “If she takes off her shirt, I give her eggs tomorrow free.”

  “I was just starting to like you,” Tom said.

  “Hey, I’m trying to make a living here,” he said. “Literally. Nothing in the City comes free and everything’s for trade. You’ll see.”

  *

  THE OMINOUS TALK made it hard to leave the still-empty Night Market and his children behind, but the omelets were generous and delicious and far beyond anything they’d eaten in so long that it wasn’t in the slightest bit funny. Einstein’s no-filter banter was goodhearted for the most part, the native Cantonese speaker aware of the dystopian cliché he’d become, despite starting out in life as a high-end tailor. As he explained, most Citizens were more worried about their stomachs than the cut of their clothes, which the passing motley street life quickly attested.

  It didn’t feel right, but Tom had also worked out a strategy beyond breakfast. He didn’t like leaving them without weapons to defend themselves, but he didn’t like that anymore for himself either. He stalked away on the quickest exit from the market leaving admonitions in his wake and almost immediately crossing paths with a solid-looking brunette in an orange safety vest and a police officer’s peaked cap with its insignia still intact.

  “Hey, handsome, where you headed?” she asked and stepped into his path, one hand curled around the strap of a leather satchel crossing her frame. “No money for breakfast, honey?”

  Tom wasn’t sure he liked the woman’s playful yet sarcastic tone. He took his time answering, eyeing her up and drawing a deep breath in accord with his old abandoned training as he noticed the police nightstick on her belt.

  “Why do I see people carrying weapons when I don’t even have a can-opener to defend myself?”

  The pug-faced woman smiled. She was no beauty, but she had all her teeth still, which was saying something for the standards around the City from what Tom had seen so far.

  “There’s a lot of ways around problems here,” she said and took a step into his personal space on the pretense of motioning back at Lilianna and Luke.

  “They your kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I work for Treasury,” she said. “I could help you out if you’ve got your ration book on you.”

  “They gave you a cap,” Tom said.

  “Yeah,” the woman said. “I’m part of the Administration, you know?”

  “Not really,” Tom said. “ But I get the feeling I soon will.”

  “Clever boy.”

  “I’m a clever boy who’s late to school,” he said sans the requisite attempt at humor. “This is our first day. My children are hungry. I’m meant to report in for Foraging and I can only guess what that means.”

  “Like I said, I could help you out,” the woman said. “Call me Nancy.”

  “Nancy.”

  “You got your ration book?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “It’s a virgin. Go gentle with it.”

  He wasn’t into this at all, and hoped he was communicating that with his sarcasm and not just feeding whatever psychopathic thrill the woman might be gleaning from their exchange – though the latter looked increasingly likely as Nancy fought off a pugnacious grin and almost literally wiped the smile from her face. Gesturing off-handedly, she reached out for the booklet Tom held.

  “I can help you if you help me,” she said. “I need a man beaten . . . and I need a man in my bed. You look like you could be good for either.”

  Tom’s response was frozen. Nancy studied it.

  “Or maybe both?”

  Again Tom didn’t say anything. Nancy convinced herself he was just intimidated by a strong woman and started a slow, coquettish transit around him.

  “Give me your booklet,” she said.

  “You’re an official for the City?”

  “You said yourself I’ve got the hat to prove it,” Nancy replied with an unflattering smirk.

  “How does that go over, you trading your influence for personal favors?”

  The woman turned on him in an instant, unhandsome face cat-like as she snarled and made as if to throw away the booklet Tom hadn’t yet given her.

  “First day in the City’s a shitty time to make enemies, asshole,” she said.

  *

  THE DEPARTMENT OF Human Resources occupied the old Federation of Labor building. Its glass foyer had a sandbagged machine-gun nest and a half-dozen sentries. Only a block from The Mile, Tom was disturbed by how the brick building looked so unchanged from before the Emergency. The foyer as well as the street outside were preternaturally clear, as if some instinct kept the crowds at bay, and the concrete barriers flecked with old blood gave more solid evidence for that. Tom pondered the naivety of writers like Orwell, who played by gentleman’s rules compared to the bastardry of the present day.

  However, the soldiers seemed pretty relaxed as Tom approached. More respectfully-dressed men and women than him streamed in and out through the glass doors, barely attracting the sentries’ looks. Tom met one of the guards’ eyes and they traded code-rich, masculine nods as Tom unconsciously screwed up the side of his mouth in thought, entering the glass-and-brick monstrosity almost able to believe – once the armed guards were behind him – the apocalypse never happened.

  There was a queue of people like him, their errant homelessness undermining efforts to recover the foyer’s white-collar vibe. Three officers stood at counters. Three more sentries, one dressed like a Desert Storm trooper, stood to one side watching everything, but that wasn’t unusual in a Government office even before the fall of humankind.

  It took ten minutes for him to get a number, then he retreated to a corner of the lobby and tried not to suffocate in the waves of disorientation. Images, some of them from desperate times, shouted like old men with placards in the recesses of his thoughts, but showed only in Tom drying his eyes and allowing himself to slide from his squat until he was sitting on his ass on the bare corporate tiles, his back against the wall and Mr Desert Storm scanning him slowly before one of his colleagues interrupted his surveillance with a wisecrack.

  Tom looked at his wrist as if he expected to find a timepiece there, mindful of Lucas and Lila probably swapping shifts on Einstein’s stationary bicycle. The five minutes’ distanc
e between them was less than reassuring. He lifted a weary gaze and found himself staring at a wall-mounted clock reading a quarter past eight.

  And he realized it was accurate.

  The clocks were on time again.

  And that only made him feel worse.

  *

  A WOMAN WHO looked like a librarian called his number and Tom had to scramble to follow her past the bank of dead elevators and into a darkened hall. She paused once, turning to motion him onwards while managing a defeated smile. He followed the official across to the other side of the building lit by natural sunlight flooding in through giant glass panes lining a big open office space. A series of desks had ten more men and women of a similar bureaucratic cut, a pair of armed sentries at the back of the office, and three more newcomers like Tom. One of them – a dirty, long-bearded man of about twenty five – sat on an old office chair frantically scratching at his grimy wrists while a black woman in a business jacket repeatedly asked for him to please calm down.

  “Have a seat, please,” Tom’s handler said. “Your name?”

  “Tom Vanicek.”

  The woman walked to a row of desks holding a series of big plastic laundry baskets full of clipboards, sorting through them until she pulled the same folder filled in by Rose and Archie the day before.

  “Blue tag?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said and held it up. “How long is this thing on for? It isn’t necessary.”

  “Not for me to decide.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Jasmine.”

  Tom’s reply caught in his throat hearing the name, the same as the dead girl he’d fought so long and hard not to consider as another daughter and failed at it, just in time to watch her die.

  “Sit, please.”

  The woman led by example, the gray-blue desk between them. The anxious man twenty feet away let out a barking sob and his handler stood. The sentries closed in on them from out of the shadows. Jasmine cleared her throat to win Tom’s attention back.

  “We’ll get you squared away and into work as quickly as possible,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “It’s a lot for people to take in,” he said.

  The woman regarded him, cautious in her expression. She held the clipboard with lacquered fingertips and resembled in that moment a cartoon mouse pondering a nibble of cheese. The upset straggler continued louder and louder. The three other interviews in the room faltered, onlookers like statues filtered in the gray sunlight, and the bigger of the two security goons lifted the dirty man from his seat by one shoulder. At once, the traumatized man burst into flight, slapping at hands both real and imaginary as the sentries reared back, not actually lifting their guns as the survivor screeched wordlessly, running for the far corner of the room like the last of the world’s flightless birds. He hit the wall and nestled down among a trio of gigantic office floor vases long since emptied of dead foliage.

  “Please have a seat, Mr Vanicek.”

  Tom sat again, not conscious of having stood, the security officers ambling past them and the scar-faced male of the pair shooting Tom a reassuring wink.

  “Does this happen a lot?”

  “It doesn’t pay to be jumpy,” Jasmine said. “Are you feeling jumpy, Mr Vanicek?”

  “Would it do me any good if I were?”

  Tom motioned around.

  “I’m guessing there’s not much of a mental health system these days.”

  “We’ve only had a small amount of people come through with that kind of expertise,” the woman said in a small yet officious voice, eyes not meeting his. “All spare hands are needed just to keep basic services running. Are you volunteering some kind of experience in the field, Mr Vanicek? They have you down here for the Foragers.”

  Tom unwittingly grunted.

  “And they didn’t really tell me what that entailed.”

  “You’re college educated, Mr Vanicek.”

  Tom shrugged.

  “A moment ago you said, ‘Would it do me any good if I were’,” Jasmine said. “You didn’t say ‘was’. It might shock you to know, Mr Vanicek, there’s not many people these days with quite such good grammar.”

  “Except maybe for you,” Tom said and gave a slight smile.

  The plain-featured woman bowed as well, pleased with the remark. Her eyes stayed focused on her well-manicured fingers.

  “I was a writer, before . . . all this,” she said.

  “Not much use for writers now,” Tom said.

  “No.”

  “And that’s why you have me down as a Forager, Jasmine.”

  The woman bowed again, producing a pen and giving his form a tick. Foragers worked with a number of other departments systematically clearing map sectors and either returning or noting all findings for future collection. Jasmine initialed the paged on the clipboard, then scribbled out a note for Tom, forcing herself to slow down to keep her writing legible.

  “They said you’d explain the ration book,” Tom said.

  “Your unit leader will validate it each day you work,” she said.

  “Your system’s not exactly foolproof.”

  “Not actually my area.”

  “Where do I turn my ration book into . . . food I can feed my children?”

  “Ah yes,” Jasmine said and now dared a look at him. “Your children.”

  *

  IT WAS NEARLY midday before Tom was let out a side door into another street where more temporary housing had built itself around a line of old cars left to rust, even the bombed-out old sedans converted into shelter. He caught a glimpse of the main thoroughfare to his right and started back, thinking about his children at the Night Market and the news Lilianna wouldn’t want to hear.

  Almost at once, Tom’s thoughts were distracted by a shout clearly directed at him.

  A good-looking blonde man about his own age stood waving him towards a truck idling noisily in the street in front of the Human Resources building. A dozen more people were crowded in the truck’s wood-paneled back, two of them helping a woman in outdoors gear to join them from the street below.

  “I could do with a few extra hands,” the man yelled. “Three ticks for a day’s work. What do you say?”

  Tom drifted closer, though it meant walking the opposite way intended.

  “I just got assigned to Foraging.”

  “You can sign on with those guys any time,” the man replied with a handsome grin. “You’re fresh off the boat?”

  “I don’t remember a boat.”

  “Ha,” the man said. “I’m MacLaren. Daniel.”

  “Vanicek. Tom.”

  They shook hands.

  “One stamp is food for a day,” MacLaren said. “I’m offering three.”

  “I have two children.”

  “Good reason to hop on board then,” MacLaren said. “Get on without any more questions and I’ll make it four stamps. Just don’t tell the others.”

  MacLaren winked. His beard was carefully shaved. He was sinewy and lean in road worker’s pants and a hunting shirt, Kevlar vest over the top.

  “You’re expecting to be shot at,” Tom said. “This isn’t a question, but you could at least tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I run a crew,” he said. “Call ourselves the Reclaimers. Like the Foragers, only we keep to the City limits. Easier to call us that than the inter-departmental clusterfuck we’d otherwise be.”

  “You’re ex-military,” Tom said, which also wasn’t a question.

  MacLaren’s face lit up.

  “Hey Tom, I’d love to get to know you better too, but right now we’ve got work to do,” he said and turned back for the truck while giving Tom a firm pat on the ass.

  Tom was still re-orienting his understanding of their manly dynamic when he remembered his children.

  “The Night Market,” he called at MacLaren’s back. “We have to pick up two more passengers.”

  *

  WAITING BY THE cab, MacLaren’s handsome
demeanor couldn’t save Tom a waspish look as he returned from Einstein’s stall with Lila and Lucas in tow.

  “Kids?” the unit commander said. “No way.”

  “They’re not working, so you don’t have to pay extra,” Tom said. “They come with me. It’s our first day in the City and I’m not leaving them behind.”

  “Again,” Lucas said.

  “Hey,” Tom said and pitched his voice for privacy. “I came as soon as I could.”

  “Tom,” MacLaren said and motioned him over.

  “My kids stay with me,” Tom said to him. “If I have to stay here, so be it.”

  “Jeez, man, I don’t know why I’m doing this,” MacLaren said. “OK, get in the back. We’re running late.”

  Tom helped Lucas reach his sister’s hand and then hauled himself up after them. They were in close quarters with three women and seven or eight other men.

  The truck started shakily once again, departing the side of the market and continuing along the boundary wall, past the bike-repair shop and their past night’s lodgings, and after that the pedestrians thinned out a little and they were treated to an open-air tour of the next few blocks. The midday sun beat down hot enough to burn and Tom realized for the first time how much he was sweating. He peeled off his jacket, tutting at the torn sleeve, bundling the whole thing away in his pack and using the time on his knee to scout their fellow passengers, noting only one or two carried concealed weapons and none of them had guns.

  Lilianna started a conversation with the two younger women, part of the regular team doing this kind of work. Tom thought his daughter slightly star-struck by the two lean, tough-looking young women with their tool belts and grease-stained mechanics’ garb. He also noted some of the other male workers shoot covetous looks at Lilianna, and he moved himself and Lucas in closer to watch her back.

  The truck took a turn, starting down another north-south avenue, an old sign for Third Street eventually swinging into view, the ruin of an old Starbucks, then a curiously open area around St Mary’s Church sporting a gnarly-looking metal barricade.

  Further out from The Mile, the houses had a little more breathing space. Verges were turned over to vegetable production. The big street trees remained, but beyond their canopies, Tom spied rear gardens crammed with more impromptu structures, most, but not all turned over to food production. Cars were gone, and residents had transformed the curbs in myriad ways. Many homes had handmade signs out front offering items for sale or trade, or children sat beside lemonade stands selling everything from recycled aluminum foil to backyard tobacco. A few of the homes were wrecks, and more than one were burnt-out shells, though people were still living in them. Other shanty structures had flowered in their place, even in their ruins, and before the long avenue ended, the truck passed a neighborhood market and a weed-wracked parking lot with a dozen horses tethered in it. Tom’s children gasped.