Aftermath

by Mark Lukens

  The envelope had been found upstairs in her mother’s closet, not in the kitchen or out in the open where it could have been lost or destroyed.

  Everywhere Kate looked in the house a memory came to life—both good and bad memories. She wanted all of her memories to be good, but they weren’t. She remembered arguments in every square inch of this home, standoffs between her family’s religion and her own beliefs, none of them willing to back down, none of them willing to give an inch.

  Kate couldn’t remember when her opposition to her family’s faith had begun, or what had triggered it. Her belief that there was no God and that her family’s faith was one big fairy tale seemed to have always been with her.

  Why couldn’t she have given in a little? Why couldn’t she have come back home to visit? Why wouldn’t she let them come see her? Why had she been so hateful? Why couldn’t she have forgiven them? She’d won. She had gotten away and become successful. Why wasn’t that enough? She’d shown them how strong she was, how smart she was.

  But she didn’t feel like a winner right now. She felt like she’d lost a lot along the way—she’d lost so much that she could never get back.

  Kate went upstairs to read the letter. She peeked into her brother’s room, then her sister’s room. Both of the rooms were a mess, trashed clothes everywhere. Her brother’s bed was flipped up against the wall. There was a spray of blood on the underside of the bed and on the wall. More bloodstains on the floor and among the clothes strewn around like rags.

  The bathroom was just as trashed. There was more blood. No bodies or half-eaten corpses, but there was the evidence of violence. Kate guessed that at least one of them had turned and then maybe attacked the others. But where were the bodies? The bones? Had they been dragged out of the house?

  She went down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. It was just as trashed, but there wasn’t as much blood. The bed was still on the floor, the mattress bare but free of bloodstains. She sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the envelope carefully.

  After pulling the one piece of paper out and unfolding it, Kate read the letter. Her mother had written the letter on fancy cream-colored paper. It was thick and the texture was a little rough, almost like the drawing paper in Brooke’s tablet.

  Kate,

  I don’t know why, but I have a feeling you’re reading this, that you found this letter. I knew you would eventually get here.

  I have to write quickly. I’m turning now. I can feel it. Your father turned already and we have already helped him move on. So many in town are turning, their souls leaving, their bodies left behind. So many, but I know you’ll be okay. I don’t know why, I just do.

  I’m so sorry we fought all these years. I’m sorry I was so stubborn, but I always loved you. I never stopped loving you one bit. I was secretly proud of you for leaving and living on your own. I wish I would have told you that.

  Please find it in your heart to forgive me. Dad wanted to come and visit you in the big city so many times. He wanted to surprise you. But I always resisted. Please don’t blame him, it was my decision. My fault we never came. I always believed a time would come when we would come to see you, or you would come back home to see us. But now it looks like that time has run out.

  Don’t you worry about me. God will protect us. He’s taking us now, taking us to Heaven where we belong. And one day I know I’ll see you there. So be strong, my beautiful daughter. Please know that I have always been proud of you and that I have always loved you.

  Mom

  Kate leaned back on the bed, crying. She rolled over on her side, drawing her legs up onto the bed. She brought the paper up to her nose. She swore she could smell her mother’s hair, the shampoo she used, the perfume she wore, the cooking smells clinging to the kitchen. It probably wasn’t real, but she could smell them. And she could hear her mother’s voice in the words on the paper, her southern twang, a twang that Kate had worked so hard to get rid of.

  “I’m sorry,” Kate whispered as she set the paper down beside her on the envelope, closing her eyes and still crying. She was so tired, and she just wanted all of this to be over. She just wanted to rest for a little while.

  CHAPTER 46

  Max and Petra secured the house as best they could with the daylight they had left. The house had no basement, but it had a large back porch and there was a massive free-standing garage in the back that looked more like a barn.

  Kate was still upstairs in her parents’ bedroom, reading her mother’s letter, Max supposed. He felt relatively safe since he still hadn’t heard a single ripper since they’d gotten to this town, not even on the road into this town.

  He and Petra went outside to check the garage, leaving Brooke curled up in an armchair with her drawing tablet. Tiger was busy exploring the living room and dining room, tentatively sniffing at everything and rubbing his flank against furniture.

  “It’s strange,” Max said when he and Petra were inside the garage. There was a smaller building farther into the backyard near the fields, but it looked like some kind of animal stable with chicken coops beside it. But there were no sounds of animals coming from those buildings. Maybe the chickens were still running around. Maybe they could catch one and kill it. Max’s stomach rumbled just thinking about it.

  “What’s strange?” Petra asked.

  “What you said before about there being no rippers in this town. We haven’t seen one in the last three hours. I haven’t even heard them calling to each other in the woods.”

  “Yeah,” Petra said as she opened up a toolbox on the counter. “Maybe they picked everything clean and moved on. All the animals that were here are gone now, and there’s definitely no food in the house.”

  Max thought of the herd of rippers they’d seen coming across the street into the trailer park as they were leaving. If they had waited a few more minutes before looking for another vehicle, they’d have been trapped in the clubhouse, overrun by the rippers. The thought sent an icepick of panic into his chest. He imagined large hordes of rippers roaming from town to town, destroying crops and devouring anything edible like a swarm of locust.

  He didn’t want to think about it anymore. He walked to the far corner of the gloomy barn and then stopped. “Look at this.”

  Petra rushed over to him. “What did you find?”

  Max picked up a cordless screw gun and pulled the trigger, the driver spinning. “There’s another battery here for it. There’s a stack of plywood over there, some scrap wood, two-by-fours. We can screw the wood over the windows; it will make a lot less noise than hammering nails.”

  “You’re the expert, Tim the Tool Man.”

  “I am,” Max said with a smile. “There’s a good amount of wood here.” He frowned, imagining the pieces cut, moving them around in his mind. He thought he could construct a removable barricade over the front and back doors. It would be a lot of work, but if they were going to stay here for a few days, then it would be worth it.

  Petra helped Max carry the wood and tools into the house, and then she went to work shoving furniture into corners and cleaning up as best she could. Brooke got up and helped Petra, holding the garbage bags open for her that she’d found in the garage, the thick industrial kind. Petra found pairs of gloves for them, gardening gloves for her and a pair of dishwashing gloves for Brooke. There probably wasn’t too much danger of being contaminated by the plague that had swept across America since they all seemed to be immune to whatever it was, but there were still other threats to worry about among the trash: bacteria, viruses, rodent droppings, insects.

  As they cleaned, Petra collected anything useful, but it wasn’t much. She used one of the cardboard boxes Max had brought in from the garage to hold anything she found, but so far she’d found only a few cooking utensils, some silverware, and not much else.

  “There’s nothing here,” Petra said in frustration. “We need to find some food soon. Some water.”

  “Water is going to be a big problem soon,” Max said.
He had boarded up two of the windows, attaching the pieces of plywood to the bottom of the window, leaving a few inches at the top so they could see out through the windows and shoot from there if they had to. The narrow opening at the top of the windows also let some daylight into the room. “I saw a few plastic buckets in the garage. We could set them outside and collect rainwater.”

  Petra nodded.

  “There’s a charcoal grill out back. We could boil the rainwater on it.”

  “If there’s charcoal,” Petra said.

  “We’ll use wood, then. And we’ll filter the water. See if you can find any coffee filters.”

  Petra didn’t look hopeful about that.

  “We’re going to need to check the other houses around here. Maybe some of them aren’t as cleaned out as this one is.”

  “I’m sure every house will be like this one.”

  “Maybe not. We have to try. Maybe there’s a locked basement or a room the rippers couldn’t get inside. I’m going to get a few tools together, some pry bars, hammers, and saws. Something we can use to break into houses and buildings.”

  Petra didn’t say anything. She stood in the middle of the dining room she and Brooke had just cleaned up. Brooke watched Petra.

  Max glanced at the steps that led upstairs. “Kate’s been up there a while.”

  “She’s sleeping,” Brooke said.

  Max looked at Brooke, surprised to hear her talking.

  “I went up there,” Brooke explained. “When you and Petra were outside.”

  Max nodded. He knew Kate needed some time alone after reading her mother’s letter. “That’s good,” he told Brooke. “She needs some rest. We all do.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Kate couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep on her parents’ bed. She woke with a start, looking around, forgetting for a moment where she was. At least it wasn’t dark yet, but she could tell from the golden light coming in through the windows that it was late in the afternoon. She’d forgotten how the setting sun on the mountaintops blasted this side of the home with a golden light at this time of day.

  She shivered and hugged herself. She was fully dressed and still had her hoodie on, but she was still cold. She wished they could start a fire in the fireplace, just to get a little warmth in her bones, but she knew it was out of the question. She couldn’t even imagine how things were going to be in the middle of winter.

  Where was her mother’s letter?

  She searched the bed for it, worried that she had rolled over on it in her sleep and crushed it. She couldn’t find it, and for a second she wondered if she had dreamed about the letter.

  But then she saw it on the floor, the letter tucked back inside the envelope. She picked it up and slipped it into her jacket pocket. She didn’t want to read the letter again, not right now anyway. Maybe she would read it again later. Right now she needed to get up and move around, get her blood circulating through her body.

  But she didn’t move. She just sat on the edge of the bed, listening. It was quiet downstairs. She wondered if Max, Petra, and Brooke were down there. She had a sudden fear that they had all left, that Max and Petra had taken Brooke and abandoned her. They’d gotten her home, and now they were on their way south.

  She got up from the bed. She wanted to rush down the hall to the stairs, but she made herself move cautiously—it was something she was always going to have to do now, always being cautious, always scared, always listening for threats. This was her new life now: insecurity, fear, the unknown.

  When she was in the hallway, she heard the sound of a voice from downstairs, a deep murmur. The sound reminded her of the Dragon’s voice in her dreams, and for just a split second she was lost in the gloomy hallway, unsure if this was a dream, fooled for a moment until the Dragon revealed himself, the dream reshaping and morphing into the desolate and destroyed town where he ruled. She panicked for just a moment in the space of seconds, frozen in mid-step, the top of the stairs in her view at the end of the hall.

  Then she heard Max chuckle.

  Kate breathed out a long sigh of relief and hurried down the stairs. Max, Petra, and Brooke had set up a camp in the middle of the living room. Most of the furniture had been pushed to the walls of the rooms, allowing wide open spaces in the middle of the floors, which had been swept clean of debris.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” Petra said with something resembling a smile on her face, like it had been so long and things had been so bad that she’d forgotten how to smile.

  The three of them sat around a centerpiece of canned goods, the last of the food they had left from the box Kate had taken from the Dark Angels’ van. They had one candle lit. Tiger sat beside Brooke, letting out a small meow in case someone wanted to share some of the canned food with him.

  “Come sit down and eat,” Max invited.

  Kate looked at the boarded-up windows and the pieces of two-by-fours attached to the front door. They’d done all of this while she’d been sleeping? She hadn’t even heard any of it. She must have been dead-to-the-world, and sleeping that deeply was disturbing to her. Sleeping that deeply could be dangerous now. She remembered how she’d been sleeping so heavily when the Dark Angels had entered the motel office. Somehow she needed to learn how to become a lighter sleeper, another defense mechanism she would need in this new world.

  Kate sat down between Brooke and Max.

  Max scooted over just a bit to give Kate more room. He gestured at the half-dozen opened cans, a few paper bowls with some of the food spooned out into them. “Take a little of each. We made a smorgasbord.”

  Brooke giggled, finding the word funny. “Smorgas . . .” She tried to pronounce the word, but erupted into a fit of giggles again.

  “Smorgasbord,” Max said. “It’s a real word.”

  “No, it’s not,” Brooke said, still laughing.

  “Yes, it is. Isn’t it, Kate?”

  Kate just smiled and nodded. She thought of mentioning that this was the last of their food, but why bother? They all knew it. And for just a moment it felt so good to see Brooke laughing.

  Max picked up his paper bowl and took the smallest bite of baked beans, like he was doing his best to make the meal last. “If you could have any food right now, what would it be?”

  “Ice cream,” Brooke said without hesitation.

  Kate’s stomach growled as she took a bite of the green bean and baked beans mixture in her bowl. Yes, ice cream would be tough to come by in this hellhole the world had become. None of them would probably ever taste ice cream again.

  “Fried chicken,” Petra said.

  “For me, it’s pizza,” Max said. “Supreme, deep-dish pizza. There was this place near us called Angelo’s. A little Italian restaurant that made the best pizza.”

  “Ooh, Italian,” Petra said. “Lasagna.”

  “Macaroni and cheese,” Brooke said.

  Max’s face brightened. “I bet we could make macaroni and cheese. If we found some elbow noodles and some cheese sauce in a can.”

  His recipe didn’t sound too appealing to Kate.

  “My mom used to make homemade pasta,” Kate said.

  Max’s eyebrows jumped up. “Yes, we could probably do that.”

  “I don’t remember how she made them,” Kate admitted. “My sister usually helped her with the cooking. Not me.” She glanced into the kitchen. “Her recipes might still be around here somewhere. She kept them in this tin box with index cards inside. And there was this booklet the church had made with old recipes inside, one from each member of the church.”

  “We’ll definitely have to look for that,” Max said. “We’ll have to learn how to cook like the old ways. We saw some chicken coops out back. Saw a few chickens darting around. Heard them clucking. Maybe we could catch one.”

  “Good luck with that,” Kate said.

  “Maybe Tiger could catch one for us,” Max said and nudged Brooke.

  She giggled again.

  Kate knew there were traps that could be mad
e to catch the chickens and other animals, but Kate couldn’t remember much about them. She’d done her best to shun her parents’ ways even at a young age. But she needed those ways now.

  She needed to think about something besides her family before the tears came again. Even though she had slept a few hours, she still felt exhausted. Maybe it was the crying that had made her so tired.

  “You haven’t heard any rippers?” Kate asked them.

  “Nope,” Max said. “Not a peep so far. We’re going to put this candle out as soon as it gets dark. Maybe try to sleep in watches tonight.”

  “You can take the first watch,” Petra told Kate.

  She nodded—it was fine with her.

  “Max said we could use the candle to heat up our food,” Brooke said, on the verge of giggling again.

  Kate smiled at Brooke. She had come out of her shell so much in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe she felt safer with Max and Petra around. Kate felt safer with the two of them around. Max seemed to have a buoyant, unsinkable personality, and like Max had said earlier, Petra seemed to have been waiting her whole life for something like this to happen.

  Kate finished the small amount of food in her bowl, choosing to ignore the taste of the cold beans. They each had one bottle of water, and then there would only be two bottles left. They needed to find more water soon.

  Max told Kate about his plans to check the homes down the street and to use buckets to collect any rainwater. She told them that the Bennetts were the closest neighbors, about half a mile down the street. And there was a family nearly across the street from the Bennetts, the Millers. And then the Fosters’ farm was a few more miles down the road. Yes, as soon as the sun came up they would check those homes, and hopefully they wouldn’t be as picked clean as her parents’ home was.

  CHAPTER 48