After The Purge, AKA John Smith Box Set | Books 1-3

by Sisavath, Sam

  “Neither are we. You’re walking north, and so are we. Who says we have to go together?”

  He gave her a wry smile. That was one way to put it.

  “Yeah, okay,” Smith said, and turned back around and headed north.

  He walked, and they followed.

  Though not right away because they ran back to the makeshift camp and looted Peoples and, as it turned out, packs from the Accountant and Tall and Lanky, too. Peoples had confiscated both of his dead partners’ things after they no longer needed them.

  Smith kept going, but he slowed down enough that mother and son didn’t completely lose sight of him until they had grabbed all they could. The woman, whose name he still didn’t know, carried two of the packs while the boy did his best to shoulder one of them. Eventually, though, they started ditching items from the bags to lighten their load. Smith pictured a long, jagged line of supplies connecting them all the way back to the campfire, which had started to fade slowly into the background.

  He hadn’t wanted to stay at the camp for two reasons: Peoples’s faceless body being one, and the other was not wanting to press his luck when it came to ghouls. If he could spot the fire from two miles away, there was a very good chance others could as well.

  Smith didn’t like taking chances if he could avoid it. This was one of those times when he could, so he did.

  By the time the woman and Aaron had caught up to him again, she was only carrying one of the bags, and the boy was dragging his. Both of the remaining packs looked thinner than when Smith had seen them on the highway earlier yesterday, so he assumed they’d thrown away a healthy portion of the contents so they could keep up.

  He felt a little bad about that.

  Neither the woman nor the boy walked close enough to talk to him, which was fine with Smith. He could easily smell them back there, but it helped that the wind was at his back and carrying their scent. They were both sweating, and smelly, and every now and then he heard Aaron grunting and fumbling with his bag. But the kid was a trooper and never complained. Or if he did, Smith couldn’t hear them.

  They walked through the night for a good two hours before Smith took pity on mother and son—and maybe on himself, too, if he were being honest—and decided to check an outcrop of boulders along the fields to his right. He’d avoided the highway since leaving Peoples’s camp behind, mostly because walking around in the open, even at night, was a good way to get shot. You could never tell who or what was lying in wait out there. Like, for instance, three assholes with guns looking for prey.

  The rocks were hard and big enough that Smith decided to use them as a temporary shelter. There was also nothing within sight of them—not for miles in any direction. They’d left the prairie of grass and goldenrods behind and replaced them with gray, hard earth. He couldn’t see the paved highway from here, not even standing on the tallest boulder. With the distance and combination of night, he felt good about getting an interrupted night’s sleep.

  Of course, he’d felt the same under the elm tree, and that hadn’t worked out as he’d planned.

  Smith tossed his pack and leaned his rifle against a boulder when he realized he was alone. The woman and Aaron hadn’t joined him. He pulled out his poncho as he looked back at them, standing tentatively about twenty yards away.

  “Come on, then,” Smith said.

  That was all the invitation they needed, and mother and son walked over and claimed a spot across the outcrop from him. She opened her pack and took out a small blanket covered with what looked like a yellow sponge. Or a person in the form of a yellow sponge, complete with holes and a white hat on top.

  When she caught him staring, the woman said, “It’s not theirs. It’s Aaron’s. They took it from him. I just took it back.”

  Smith nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was thinking—maybe that ol’ Peoples had a soft side that he didn’t want people to know about. That sounded ridiculous now that he knew the truth.

  He was going to ask her “What else did Peoples and the others take from you and the boy?” but he had a feeling he already knew half of that answer. Or close enough to feel uncomfortable asking it.

  He said instead, “What’s your name?”

  “Mary,” she said, even as she put the blanket over Aaron, who had laid down on the ground.

  The boy yawned and rolled over onto his side, his back to Smith, while clutching the blanket. He had closed his eyes almost right away, and Smith wondered how long it’d been since he’d slept.

  “What’s yours?” Mary asked him.

  “Smith,” he said.

  “Just Smith?”

  “Just Smith is good enough.”

  “I guess.” She paused for a moment. Then, “That’s not your real name, is it?”

  “No,” he said, and tucked the poncho around his frame. It wasn’t too cold, but there was a slight chill in the air. His right hand was next to him, close enough to the holstered SIG that he could draw it without too much trouble.

  Mary sat next to her son and didn’t say anything else. She seemed preoccupied with scanning the darkness around them, as if she expected an attack any second now. After everything she’d been through, he couldn’t really blame her.

  But that didn’t mean he had to indulge in her paranoia. Peoples’s attack earlier had ruined Smith’s sleep, so he was more tired than he thought as he closed his eyes.

  “Thank you,” Mary said after a while.

  Smith opened his eyes back up. He wasn’t sure if he was surprised to hear her say that or if he was just glad they were getting it out of the way. Not that he wanted to hear it or anything. Smith had given up caring what other people thought of him, even ones that he might have saved from a fate worse than death. In his opinion, it just didn’t pay to have too much faith in humanity anymore, even if “humanity” tonight was a woman and her son.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, not because he thought he deserved her gratitude but because it was the best answer to nip this conversation in the bud so he could go back to trying to sleep.

  “Why are you so good at it?” Mary asked.

  I guess I’m not going back to sleep.

  He sat up and looked across at her. She was still wide awake, but the boy was snoring loudly next to her.

  “Why am I so good at what?” Smith said.

  “Killing. The way you shot that man back there… Why are you so good at it?”

  Smith stared at her for a moment, trying to decide if he should be insulted by her insinuation that he was good at “it.”

  The truth was, he was good at it. He was a natural, in fact. His mentor had said the same thing to him.

  “I don’t know,” Smith said. “I just am.”

  She nodded, apparently accepting his answer. He thought she would continue talking, trying to get to the real him, but maybe she knew, just as Smith did, that there was no “real” him.

  This was him. It’d always been. Just as it had with Peoples and his pals, The Purge had finally allowed the real him to come up for air.

  Smith pulled the poncho tighter around his body. “Get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

  He closed his eyes and spent the next few minutes listening to the crickets in the land around them. There were less of them out there, but only because they’d left the grassy fields behind. There were no other sounds of humanity beyond the outcrop, which was the important part.

  Mary, despite Smith’s encouragement, remained wide awake. He knew that because she kept moving around. Not loudly, but loud enough. He had a feeling she wasn’t going to close her eyes in peace for a while, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t.

  Five

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Smith is my real name.”

  “You already told me last night that it wasn’t.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  It took about ten seconds before she asked again. “So what’s your real name?”
>
  “John,” he said.

  “John Smith?”

  “That’s right.”

  “John Smith?”

  “It’s going to be the same answer even if you say it a third time.”

  “John Smith…” she said.

  “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

  She’d had that familiar and incredulous look on her face that he always got from people when he told them his name. Or the name he was going by these days. It always made him wonder what the poor bastard whose real name was John Smith had to suffer through daily. Surely there would be some John Smiths still around now, even after The Purge decimated the globe. Not that Smith had ever encountered one of them, but there had to be at least one, right?

  “So you’re not going to tell me,” she said.

  “I already told you, but you don’t believe me. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Your real name, for starters.”

  He sighed. “You shouldn’t ask questions if you have no interest in accepting the answer.”

  “Fine, then.”

  There wasn’t very much around them but flat land and more outcrops. The ground had gotten harder under his boots, with fewer stalks of grass and even fewer goldenrods anywhere to be seen. The emptiness might have convinced him he’d inadvertently gone backwards into Arizona or New Mexico if not for the constant chill in the air.

  Mary’s question wasn’t anything he hadn’t had to answer before.

  “So you’re just gonna walk around?” Gary, the old man who had taken Donna—Margo, now—in, had said to him when he informed the man of his intentions.

  “Pretty much,” Smith had said.

  “Like that guy from that TV show,” the old woman Gary was shacking up with, Natalie, had said.

  The truth was, they hadn’t been that old—the woman was in her fifties and the man was just creeping up on his sixties—but they were the oldest people he’d encountered since he ditched his uniform and started walking. They certainly weren’t old enough that he felt Margo was in danger of being left alone too soon.

  There was no guilt about leaving the kid with them, either. The way Smith saw it, he was giving both sides something they wanted: The couple would get a kid to take care of, and Margo would, essentially, have parents again. He hadn’t come to the decision easily, either. Smith and Margo had spent three days with Gary and Natalie before Smith made up his mind. If he’d detected even the slightest bit of crazy or danger from them, he wouldn’t have made the choice. But they were good people, and he liked to think he was an excellent judge of character.

  “What guy?” he had said to Natalie.

  “You know, from China?” she had said.

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “It’s an old TV show,” Gary had chimed it. “Was on for a few seasons then they canceled it. But I think they did a remake or some such later on.”

  “I don’t watch a lot of TV.”

  “His name was Kwai Chang Caine, and he went around the Old West fighting bad guys and righting wrongs.”

  “Righting wrongs? What does that even mean?”

  “You know, a crusader for justice?”

  “Like Batman?”

  “I guess. But he didn’t wear a mask or anything. He just had kung fu.”

  Smith had shaken his head. “Sorry, but that really doesn’t clear any of it up.”

  “Well, it was an old TV show, lost in the past with everything else, now,” Natalie had said, with that thoughtful and nostalgic shake of her head so common with older survivors.

  So Smith had left Margo (he guessed she would probably call it “abandoned her,” if he ever headed back that way and they crossed paths again) and never looked back. He didn’t know where he was going, just that he couldn’t stay.

  Or want to.

  They had been walking for almost the whole morning before Mary asked if they could take a break. Afternoon was peaking over some hills in the distance when they settled down on another outcrop of rocks. The trio of assholes had plenty of food in their packs, and Mary had wisely kept almost all of them while throwing away a lot of other things they didn’t need, including, according to her, bottles of booze.

  Sometime between when they woke up and started their morning walk, Mary had also thrown away one of the packs, but not before transferring all the valuables—food, water, and whatever else she kept in there and didn’t show him—onto the one remaining bag. Aaron still carried—or dragged, really—his half-full pack behind him, but not because he was tired and more because, well, he was bored out of his mind. Despite everything he’d been through, he looked surprisingly well-adjusted. Or maybe it was all an act, but Smith didn’t think so.

  Smith had plenty of food in his own pack, so he didn’t need to dip into mother and son’s. He took out the bag of deer jerky, a good-bye present from Gary, and chewed on it while Aaron ate some SPAM from a can and shared it with his mom. Mary didn’t look like she enjoyed the taste, but Aaron couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

  “Are we in Nebraska?” Mary asked after a while.

  “I don’t know,” Smith said. “Maybe.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see any signs?”

  “I try not to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He shrugged. How did you explain to someone that you didn’t care where you went just as long as you “went?” Most people couldn’t grasp the simple concept. Even Gary and Natalie had looked at him strangely when he told them.

  “You ever saw a TV show about a kung-fu guy in the Old West?” Smith asked Mary. “I think he was from China or something.”

  Mary shook her head. “No.”

  “What about you?” Smith asked the boy.

  Aaron glanced up at him just long enough to blink once or twice, before going back to eating his food.

  “He can’t talk,” Mary said.

  “What?” Smith said.

  “Aaron. He can’t talk. He’s never been able to talk.”

  Smith stared at her for a moment, trying to remember if he’d heard the boy talk since they came into his company. Except she was right; Aaron had never said a word. Smith had heard him grunting once or twice, but those weren’t words.

  Wow. How did I miss that?

  “Oh,” Smith said.

  “You didn’t notice before?” Mary asked. She was staring at him, maybe trying to decide if he was messing with her.

  Smith shook his head. “I didn’t notice, no.”

  If the boy heard their conversation, or understood it, he didn’t look up to let Smith know. Then again, he was too busy attacking the can of SPAM. If he wasn’t careful, he might gobble up the whole thing and leave nothing for his mom.

  “We don’t know why,” Mary said. “Tom and I—” She stopped suddenly, before continuing a few seconds later. “Tom is my husband. Was my husband.” She pursed a smile and looked away.

  Smith didn’t have to ask her what had happened to Tom. Probably the same thing that had happened to all the other members of their caravan when they ran into Peoples, the Accountant, and Tall and Lanky.

  He said instead, “But he’s your son.”

  Mary looked back at him. “Yes. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  “Why would I say he’s my son if he wasn’t?”

  “It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. Plenty of people call kids theirs when they aren’t. Not by blood, anyway. Was Tom really your husband?”

  “Yes. Why would I lie about that, too?”

  “Is there a piece of paper that makes it official? Did you guys get married in a church?”

  Mary opened her mouth to answer, but she stopped herself short and seemed to actually think about it for a moment.

  “I guess not,” she finally said. “I mean, there’s nothing official or anything.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Smith said. “Just like with the boy. If you say
he’s yours, then he’s yours. I was just curious.”

  Mary nodded and looked away again.

  Smith continued eating his jerky.

  “So that’s what you’re doing out here? Just…walking around like this Chinese guy?” she asked after a while.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Was he a good guy? The kung-fu guy?”

  “Apparently.”

  “I mean, he has to be, right?”

  Smith shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “Like you. You’re a hero, too.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You saved us.”

  “They tried to kill me. I was mad.”

  “That’s all?”

  He shrugged again. “That’s all it was to me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe what you—” Smith stopped short and lifted his head.

  “What is it?” Mary asked.

  Smith didn’t answer. He stood up and hurried to the edge of the outcrop and looked out and down the direction they’d come from.

  Men on horses, flying across the terrain.

  Now what?

  The riders were half a kilometer away, but closing in fast. If they didn’t already know where he, Mary, and Aaron were, then they did now, because Smith was pretty sure they could see him despite the distance. He had just stood up and revealed himself without realizing it. And out here, with nothing but open land and jutting gray boulders, he might as well put up a sign pointing straight down on his head.

  Smith also spotted something he hadn’t seen before, but now that he was standing on a slightly elevated plane, couldn’t miss. It was a long and very obvious jagged trail cutting across the landscape, and right to their current position.

  He glanced over at Aaron’s pack, covered in dust and dirt.

  Dammit. How’d I miss that before?

  The boy probably didn’t know he was doing it, anyway. He was just a kid, after all. Even if the riders hadn’t seen Smith—and he was pretty sure they already had—then they could have just followed Aaron’s very generous track all the way to them. Which was likely exactly what they were doing before now.