Aftermath

by Mark Lukens

  “Hold on,” Kate told Brooke. She punched the gas. The car had some pep to it, leaving the dozens of rippers behind.

  Kate drove to the edge of town and turned down a side road leading out of town. Kate still had her map folded up in her jacket pocket, and she would look at it when they had a chance to pull over somewhere. Right now, she just wanted to get away from this town, a town she didn’t even know the name of. Maybe Brooke would tell her the name eventually.

  But Kate wasn’t so sure she really wanted to know. She just wanted to get up into the mountains, to the smaller towns, to her family’s town.

  They saw a few rippers once they were beyond the town limits, but not too many. Kate found a home off of the side of the road and she backed up into the driveway with the motor still running. The car’s engine was so quiet she had to really listen to make sure the car was still running.

  “You keep watch for any rippers,” Kate told Brooke. “I need to look at the map for a minute and see where we are.”

  Brooke nodded, looking around with wide eyes, watching for the monsters.

  Kate looked down at the map in the gray light, using Brooke’s small flashlight to light up the page a little better. She saw where she’d been, the town she’d been in, and she traced the small road they’d driven out of the town. They weren’t as far out of the way of her route as she’d thought—a small stroke of luck. It looked like they could drive a mile or two down the road they’d been traveling, turn left onto another road, and then double back, catching the county road she’d been on when her SUV had run out of gas.

  Gas. That was going to be a problem. She could check the trunk to see if there was a gas can in there, but she highly doubted it. And even if she found a gas can, she still needed some kind of hose to suck the gas out of another car or truck, some kind of siphoning hose. There might have been something she could have used at the dollar store, but she hadn’t been thinking about that. She hadn’t planned that far ahead. She felt like she should be jotting things down, little survival reminders.

  They couldn’t worry about it now. This place seemed remote enough, but no place was truly safe. It was late, and it had to be close to sunset. She didn’t want to be driving around at night. She studied the map, finding an area that looked remote enough for them to look for a place to stop.

  “We need to find somewhere to stay the night,” Kate told Brooke as she studied the map.

  “The car?”

  “It’s too dangerous to stay in the car.”

  Brooke turned around and looked at the house at the end of the driveway.

  “This is still too close to town,” Kate said. She pointed at the map. “I think we need to find something somewhere in this area. But we need to hurry. It’s going to be dark in an hour or two.” And the overcast, rainy day wasn’t helping with the light.

  Kate refolded the map and stuffed it into her jacket pocket. She didn’t want to leave it in the car in case she and Brooke needed to make a run for it—she didn’t want to waste precious seconds looking for her map. The map was the most important item she owned right now.

  They drove down the narrow road, and eventually got to the county road, just like she’d routed on the map. The road climbed higher into the foothills, the woods becoming denser, the afternoon becoming darker, the rain getting a little heavier. But that was good. The more remote the area was, the less rippers they might encounter.

  Fifteen minutes later Brooke pointed out the windshield.

  Kate saw what she was pointing at—a small strip motel off the side of the road where it bent around the woods. The L-shaped building housed ten motel rooms, and there were only two vehicles parked at the far end of the motel. Both of them seemed abandoned. Some of the doors to the rooms were open. At the other end of the building was an office with a high, steep roof with the word MOTEL fixed to its side. The letters were made of metal and Kate guessed that they used to light up when the electricity was still on.

  A motel didn’t seem like the safest place, but it was nearly dark and Kate wasn’t sure how much farther she could drive in the dark. The motel was out in the middle of the woods, maybe there used to be some trails through the woods or a park nearby. They didn’t have much of a choice; they could at least pull into the parking area for a moment, see if any rippers came running out of the rooms.

  Kate kept the headlights off as she drove down along the strip motel, driving by slowly, watching the doors and windows of the rooms. Everything was dark beyond the doors and windows, no movement of any kind. She turned around and headed back to the office, which was at least fifty yards away from the strip of rooms.

  The back of the motel was a wall of woods climbing up a steep mountainside, a dark mass silhouetted against the gray sky, and the office was a little closer to the road. Kate drove behind the office and pulled the car out on the other side of it, so she could still see a little bit of the road. She left the car running, but rolled down the driver’s window so she could listen. She didn’t see any lights anywhere and she didn’t hear any sounds. She would have thought she’d see some rippers in the area, but she hadn’t seen any for the last thirty minutes. Maybe this motel had been picked clean and the rippers kept more to the towns and cities.

  Kate and Brooke remained in the car for thirty minutes, each of them eating a pack of crackers and then the snack cakes. Kate swallowed a multivitamin and convinced Brooke to swallow one. Kate hadn’t heard a sound or seen anything the whole time they’d been parked. She hated leaving the engine running the entire time, wasting the gas, but she wanted to be able to put the car in drive and pull away if anyone came running at them.

  It was almost dark now; it was time to make a decision.

  Kate took the lunchbox with them, saving the bottle of water for later, maybe tomorrow morning. Brooke wanted to take her drawing tablet and pencil—it was like she didn’t want to be anywhere without it.

  “You sure like to draw,” Kate said.

  Brooke didn’t answer.

  “What do you like to draw?”

  Brooke just shrugged.

  “Are you ever going to show me what you draw?”

  Brooke didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no, either.

  Kate opened her door and got out of the car. She tried the back door of the office, not expecting it to be unlocked. And it wasn’t. She hadn’t even considered the doors being locked. If they had to, they could stay in one of the motel rooms.

  “We have to go in through the front,” Kate whispered to Brooke.

  The walk down the side of the building seemed to take a while. The wind was blowing a little harder, but at least the rain had stopped for a few minutes. Kate watched the street as she moved toward the glass door of the motel. It wasn’t locked because it looked like someone had pried it open before.

  Maybe this was a bad idea.

  But doors were going to be broken, places were going to be looted. Nowhere was going to be safe. At least there was a back door to this place, a way to escape if they needed to.

  One more glance at the woods across the street, and then Kate opened the door and slipped inside, holding the door open for Brooke. They waited inside the lobby for a few seconds, still listening for any sounds.

  Kate hurried behind the counter, looking around, then she went through a doorway that led down a hall to a few small rooms: one was a bathroom; one was a laundry room with a washer, dryer, and a folding table; and one was an office.

  It was almost pitch-black in the rooms in the back, but there was enough light for Kate to pull some folded sheets and blankets off of a shelf and take them out to the lobby. She set up their “beds” on the floor right behind the counter of the front desk where they would be hidden from the windows and front door of the lobby.

  The best I can do, she told herself. It’s just for one night.

  Thirty minutes later it was dark. Brooke didn’t seem to mind; she seemed used to the dark now. Maybe spending a week down in those tunnels had gott
en her used to it. She tried talking to Brooke in a whisper, but the girl wasn’t saying much.

  “We’ll get some sleep,” Kate said. “Get up in the morning and keep on driving.”

  Moments later Brooke was sleeping.

  Kate lay on the floor with the blanket over her, listening to Brooke’s heavy breathing, still trying to pick up any strange sounds from outside. It had started to rain again and the drumming on the steep roof might mask any sly sounds out there. She was still nervous, still tense, and she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to fall asleep.

  Brooke’s drawing tablet was right next to her. Kate pulled it gently away and rolled over on her side, getting the small flashlight out. She opened the tablet and kept her hand over the front of the flashlight to get the barest of light from it.

  The drawings were amazing. There were only two of them, one of a man and one of a woman. Brooke had incredible skill, especially in the expressions on the faces. Kate wondered for a moment if Brooke had even done these drawings—maybe they’d been done by someone else and Brooke had kept the drawing tablet. But Kate had seen Brooke sketching in the tablet when they’d been in the tunnels. It was just hard to believe that she could draw like this.

  Kate closed the tablet and turned off the flashlight. She set the tablet next to Brooke again, and then she lay on her back, staring up into the darkness. She wondered if the man and woman Brooke had drawn were her parents. The man was older—he had gray in his hair and beard, and the woman seemed much younger, with short and spikey hair, a stern look on her face. Maybe not . . . maybe they were just people Brooke had known, or people she’d just made up to draw.

  Kate closed her eyes, drifting off to sleep without even being aware of it.

  And then the dreams came.

  CHAPTER 24

  Kate saw the man and his son in her dreams. And like the other dreams, it seemed like she could see and hear them, but they couldn’t see or hear her. She called out to them, but they kept walking down the road, both of them with backpacks on.

  A fog rolled in, obscuring everything. But out of that fog she saw the same man she’d seen in her dreams the last few nights, the skinny man with the tattoos, long hair, and beard. And then she saw the muscular man with the buzzed hair and intense eyes. Both men carried weapons; the scrawny man had a shotgun and the other man had a handgun with a long barrel.

  But neither one of them could hear her or see her.

  Kate looked around for Brooke, but she wasn’t there. Panic surged inside of Kate as she searched through the fog for Brooke. She couldn’t see any other people in the mist now, but she knew someone was there. Someone was coming.

  A moment later she saw a man and a woman traveling together, both of them materializing out of the fog. The man was tall with a pot belly. His hair and neatly-trimmed facial hair were completely gray, but his face still looked youthful and kind, his dark blue eyes soft. The woman he traveled with looked much harder. She was shorter than the man, but slim and compact, exuding a sense of power and strength. Her black hair was done in cornrows, her skin an olive complexion. Both of them had on backpacks like the others, and they carried weapons.

  And then, what seemed like only a few seconds later, the two of them were gone, disappearing into the fog. Kate stared at the wall of swirling mist in front of her, sure that she’d seen the man and the woman before, but she couldn’t remember from where.

  She wondered where the blind woman was.

  And where was Brooke?

  “Brooke!” Kate called out, turning in a slow circle and searching the mist. “Where are you?”

  Brooke didn’t answer, but someone did.

  Oh God, no.

  “Over here,” the Evil One whispered.

  The fog cleared suddenly and Kate saw that she was in the small town with the dead bodies everywhere, some of them hanging from light poles and front porches, others stretched over the roofs of cars, others staked to the ground or to the sides of wood buildings.

  “She’s over here,” the Evil One said from somewhere, his whispers seeming to float along the cold wind right to her ears.

  Kate looked around, but she couldn’t see where he was. “Brooke! Answer me, Brooke!”

  “You have to come find her,” the Evil One said. “You need to hurry.”

  Kate ran through the town, then turned down a side street. She didn’t know where she was going, but in the dream it seemed like she did, like she was following his voice through the maze of streets.

  And then she stopped.

  The Evil One stood at the other side of the street next to a child’s lemonade stand, words painted on the front of the stand in bright red paint: LEMONADE 10 CENTS. Below the words was the DA symbol.

  Where had she seen that symbol? She knew it from somewhere, a letter A with a D around it, resembling an anarchy symbol. It was almost coming to her.

  The Evil One was tall, dressed entirely in black. He had an executioner’s mask over his head, staring at her through the eyeholes, his eyes shining yellow in the gray light. Next to him on top of the lemonade stand was a metal serving dish, a big metal dome on top, like something from a cartoon. The man gestured at the metal dome over the serving plate with one gloved hand, saying nothing now.

  What was under the dome? Kate didn’t want to see what was under there. She had a feeling she already knew.

  The Evil One grabbed the handle at the top of the dome, ready to lift it up and reveal the main course.

  “Kate!”

  Kate turned at the sound of the voice—a female voice, but not Brooke’s. The blind woman stood right behind her, dressed all in white, a contrast to the Evil One. A glow of light surrounded her, pushing back the grayness all around her. But the blind woman didn’t look peaceful or happy right now; no, she looked frightened, her mouth drawn down into a frown.

  “You need to wake up now,” the blind woman said.

  Kate couldn’t understand for a moment. She needed to find Brooke; it was the only thing she could think about.

  The blind woman came closer to Kate, her face inches away from Kate’s face. But it wasn’t the blind woman’s face anymore. Now it was a longer and wider face. It was a man’s face, the nose bulbous and misshapen, cruel little eyes where the dark glasses used to be under a set of bushy eyebrows, a mouth pulled wide in a wicked grin with rotting teeth. On the man’s forehead was the DA symbol carved right into his skin.

  “Get up,” the man said, reaching out to touch her. And then he slapped her. “Get up right now!”

  CHAPTER 25

  Kate woke with a start, the side of her face stinging.

  It was no dream. The man was leaning over her, grinning at her, amused by her shock and fear. He stood back up to his full height and looked back over the front desk into the lobby, smiling at somebody Kate couldn’t see from where she lay on the floor. “I figured a little slap would get her up.”

  Kate stared at the man who was straddling her, his feet on either side of her body. She was groggy for a moment, and for just a second she thought she might still be dreaming, still trapped in that hell town where the Evil One ruled.

  The man turned back to her, his smile gone now. He reached down and grabbed fistfuls of her jacket, lifting her up from the floor like she was a ragdoll. Kate was on her feet before she knew it, wobbling as she stood, afraid her legs would give out and she would collapse.

  Where am I? Who is this man?

  But then it all came back to her. She and Brooke had left the small town after raiding the dollar store for anything they could find. She had driven the Toyota up into the woods, stopping at this strip motel, parking behind the office. They had slept on the floor behind the front desk.

  “Brooke,” Kate whispered. She looked down at the sheets and blankets. Brooke wasn’t there. Maybe she had heard the men coming. Maybe she had gotten away.

  Slap.

  Kate was rocked to the side by the strike, stumbling, almost tripping over the rumpled blankets and
falling.

  “I think she’s definitely awake now,” the man in front of her said, smiling again, the wrinkles on his forehead scrunching up the crusty symbol carved into his skin.

  Kate looked over at who the man was talking to. There was another man in the lobby. He was younger than the man who had slapped her, but just as dirty and grimy, his eyes just as dead and cold. He wore a baseball cap pulled down low, but Kate could see the symbol carved into his flesh. The man held Brooke’s hand tightly—she was standing right beside him, her eyes wide with terror.

  “Brooke!” Kate yelled, ready to rush out around the front desk.

  “Hold on a minute,” the man in front of her said, grabbing her arm. His breath and body odor were nauseating.

  Kate looked at the man, locking eyes with him for just a second, then looking back at Brooke and the man who held her hand. Behind them, beyond the lobby windows, a big black van was parked. On the side of the van in white paint was the DA symbol.

  She looked back at the man who was still gripping her arm hard. “Who are you guys?”

  “Shut up,” the man growled.

  Kate didn’t say anything. Even though the man claimed she was fully awake, she was still groggy. Two hard slaps probably hadn’t helped her fuzzy mind.

  How could she have slept through the men driving up in the van, and coming inside the lobby? Had she been that tired? A sudden guilt racked her as she met Brooke’s eyes. The little girl had trusted her, believing that she would protect her. But Brooke was probably wishing right now that she had stayed back in her town, hidden down in the tunnels.