After Life

by Daniel Kelley

  The young man leaned forward, vomiting on the sidewalk. He stepped a few feet back and did it again. As he righted himself, another shot was fired, this one much closer to him than the other.

  He spun to his right, to the line of buildings and the source of the sound. He saw a man in full vestment, pointing a gun at the ground just behind the young man. He followed the angle of the shot and saw the form of the creature that had been shot by the cabbie lying motionless on the ground with an extra bullet hole, this one in the head.

  “Inside, my son!” the priest cried, waving the young man into the church doors he stood in front of. The young man stared open-mouthed for a moment, so the priest repeated his plea. “Inside!”

  The kid finally reacted, running into the church.

  “Upstairs,” the priest said. “Upstairs should be safe.”

  Gasping, the kid nodded. “Thank you, father,” he said.

  The priest returned the nod and motioned toward a door a few feet away. “Yes. Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

  The young man took a few steps toward the stairway door. As he did, he heard a gunshot from the front door. He turned back and saw that the priest had stepped back outside and fired again. “Come, come!” the priest cried. “Come inside!”

  The young man kept staring. Almost absently, he crossed himself as he watched. Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.

  2030

  Donnie watched as Michelle knelt over Madison’s body. She had placed her gun on the floor beside her, and her hands were clasped in front of her. Her head was bowed, her eyes closed. She silently moved her mouth in between gasps for breath.

  Behind her, Donnie stood, unmoving. His mouth hung barely open as he watched Michelle. Finally, she stood up, crossing herself as she did so. She turned to Donnie. “Did you want to…maybe…say something?”

  Donnie kept looking at her for a moment without saying anything. Finally, he reacted. “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t believe in God.”

  Chapter 2: Just Give Us the Façade

  The classroom had sat in near-silence now for at least half an hour. Several of the students had taken to lying on the floor. Some — like Celia — even dozed.

  “So what happens now, Dad?” Simon Stone asked. He and his father were both still leaning against the desk.

  “Nothing,” Roger said, his eyes not breaking the gaze they had on a spot on the floor near Celia’s and Andy’s feet. “We’re fine. Those doors are shut tight and locked. We have food, power, people. The government has plans in place this time around. We just wait here until we hear the all-clear.”

  “Is this what you did last time?” Simon asked. His father nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  Andy listened to the exchange silently. He was watching Stacy, who paced back and forth in front of them. Andy wouldn’t say it to any of them, but he didn’t feel as secure in the classroom as he thought he would. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Part of it, Andy thought to himself, was that he didn’t know how to simply be calm and wait out a zombie attack. He somehow felt that he was supposed to be running somewhere, but that was ridiculous.

  “What do you think, Mr. Ehrens?” Simon finally said. “Are we okay down here?”

  Surprised, Andy looked over at the kid sharply, then smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. They were ready. This time.”

  “Were they?” Stacy asked, stopping in her walk and looking at Andy accusingly. “You said the phone didn’t seem to have been hooked up. And I haven’t seen Mr. Lowensen or any other teachers. Do we know we were ready?”

  Andy found himself concerned as well, if for no other reason than he could see no authority figures in the classroom with them. “I think so,” he said. “We already know some things are better. The …” Andy stopped short. He had had a realization, but didn’t want to scare the others.

  Roger noticed him stopping short and gave him a quick look. The two made eye contact, then Andy waved Simon over to where he and Celia were. “Son,” he went on. “My daughter needs a pillow. Care to oblige for a few minutes?”

  Simon jumped up, then sat back down on the desk. He then stood up again, more slowly this time. “Sure,” he said casually.

  Andy smiled at the boy’s awkwardness and worked his arm out from behind Celia’s shoulder and held her head up until Simon slid in next to her. Then, he stood up. “Roger,” he said, turning to the other man. “Feel like going on a little reconnaissance with me?”

  “Sure,” Roger said, obviously curious what Andy had thought of. The two men walked toward the door Lowensen had exited through earlier. Just before they left the room, Andy looked back toward the kids, where Stacy had resumed her pacing. Celia hadn’t stirred. Simon, he could see, sat with an uneasy grin on his face.

  “Think they were a little behind schedule?” Roger asked as they stepped into the hallway. “Look at this place.”

  Andy looked around. Roger was right; while the dormitories and the classroom all looked finished and modern, the hallway they were in was little more than a concrete hole. The exposed fluorescent lighting hung from the ceiling, shining every seven feet or so. Some twenty yards down the hall to the right of the men, there was a series of closed doors. Just beyond that, Andy’s view ended, as the hallway took a hard left turn.

  “Stylish,” Andy said.

  “My wife,” Roger said without seeming to hear Andy’s response, “was an architect. After 2010, she was unemployed for quite a few years. Couldn’t get work anywhere. No one building anything.” As he walked, Roger started knocking on the doors and checking the handles on the left side. Andy echoed his motions on the right. Neither of them got a response, and all the doors were locked. “Then, a couple years ago I guess, calls started coming in. Job offers right and left. But they weren’t the same as before. Things like this. Minimal detail, more and more panic rooms and the like. No one cared about what was going on behind the scenes. ‘Just give us the façade,’ they said.”

  “Then what?” Andy asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Job offers came pouring in. What did she build?”

  Roger reached the hallway’s left-hand turn and stopped. He looked back to where Andy was. “Nothing,” he said. “ALS. By the time the job offers came in, she could barely hold herself up. I had to read the letters out loud to her. Made her feel better to know she was wanted.”

  Andy nodded. “Sorry.”

  Roger returned the nod. “It’s okay,” he said, looking down at the concrete floor. “She died about a year ago. And, all things considered,” he waved in a general upward direction and finished, his voice barely above a whisper, “it’s just as well.” Then he stopped, seeming to remember something. “What did you think of that made you want to come back here?”

  Andy nodded. He had reached the corner, around which he expected the cafeteria. He hadn’t seen anyone enter the classroom from that back door since they had gotten down there, and couldn’t remember any noise from the area, either.

  “The cafeteria,” he said to Roger. “The people who went to eat.” He saw Roger’s footsteps slow for a second before he caught his pace.

  The two men turned the corner. On the left, only a few feet down, there were a pair of swinging doors. All the other doors in the hallway before the turn, and everything beyond these two, were easily closed, easily locked doors, but these two were simple, with pale doors with metal panels where you would push to open and tempered glass windows that let clinical yellow light flow out.

  That shaft of yellow light, though, was broken up by the hands.

  As many hands as could fit in the two small rectangles were slapping at the tempered glass, hitting the windows with open palms. As if on instinct, Roger started to hurry to the doors, but Andy reached out his arm and stopped him.

  “Those aren’t people,” Andy said to Roger’s curious look. The noise from the slapping at the door had just started, leading Andy to believe he and Roger had spoken loudly enough to draw attention to th
emselves. The doors were bulging outward slightly, like a balloon about to burst. Andy hurried toward the door himself, stopping a few feet shy, and stood on his toes to see through the windows. Indeed, he saw any number of the undead, and zero remaining humans.

  “Why can’t they get out?” Roger said, creeping up behind Andy.

  Andy knelt down and looked between the metal panels. There was something stuck between the handles of the door on that side. Andy tentatively tapped the doors and nodded, satisfied the barrier would hold. Then he stood up again and looked back through the windows.

  “What are you looking for?” Roger asked.

  Andy scanned the room for a minute, then nodded. “Do you remember when we first got here?” he asked. “There was a woman with her son outside, coaching him.”

  Roger nodded. “If you’re trapped, sacrifice yourself,” he said, remembering. “You think that’s what happened?”

  Andy pointed through the window. About 10 feet back, behind the biggest throng, he saw the woman’s heavyset son walking around mindlessly. In the back of the room, barely visible from his vantage point, he saw a corpse that had been eaten almost bare, recognizable only by the gaudy blue earring he could see lying next to its head.

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  “What do we do?”

  “There’s nothing to do,” Andy said, moving past the room. “Maybe she was right, maybe she was wrong, but at this point there are only zombies behind that door. We can’t help them, and letting them out certainly isn’t the right answer.” He tried the next door down the hall, across from the cafeteria. “We just look for anyone else down here.”

  Roger took a moment. He put his hand on the door to the cafeteria, only increasing the groans from the other side. “I’m sorry,” he said to the door before shaking his head and following Andy.

  At the end of that hallway, Andy saw light poking out from inside a closed office. He could tell that Roger saw it as well, and both men picked up their paces as they approached it. As they drew near, Andy could hear some music playing inside.

  Roger got there first and offered a tentative knock. When no response came, he tried again, harder. The music stopped seconds later, but still no one came to the door.

  Andy stepped ahead of Roger and tried the door. It opened and the two men saw Barry Lowensen sitting at his desk. He was working feverishly at his computer and had a half-empty shaker of an amber liquid next to him.

  “Web sites are going crazy,” Lowensen said without turning away from the screen. “Out-Theres is down, it seems, but every message board, every chat room is going crazy. Everyone’s just tap-tapping away.

  “Don’t know why,” he continued, finally turning away from the screen. He looked up at the two men with an odd smile, though Andy noticed he failed to meet either man’s eye. “If it’s me, I stay as far away from the computer as I can get.” He looked back at his computer, then shrugged and almost laughed. “What’s up?”

  “‘What’s up?’” Andy repeated.

  “Yeah,” Lowensen said. “You guys have had the place locked down for a half-hour. What brings you here now?” He finished the drink in his glass.

  “What…” Roger started. “Are we okay down here? We haven’t heard anything from you, the other teachers, administrators…” Lowensen offered them a smile, but Andy thought it looked forced. Lowensen’s eyes did not reflect the feelings of his mouth.

  “How many of you made it?” Lowensen asked, ignoring Roger’s question. He then seemed to disregard his own question as well by standing up and turning toward his filing cabinet. He opened the top drawer and paused, looking inside. With what looked to Andy like unease, Lowensen reached in and pulled out a gun. With no holster, Lowensen tucked the weapon into the waistband of his pants. He turned and strode past the two men, out of the room and out into the hallway.

  “It was about 40, 45 maybe,” Andy said as he spun around and followed Lowensen. The teacher was walking very quickly, his shoulders back, his head high. “Plus the people trapped in the cafeteria, but we can’t save them now.” Andy watched the teacher’s gait for signs of a reaction at hearing about people trapped, but he saw none.

  Lowensen ignored the men as he walked, ignored the cafeteria as he passed it. Andy vaguely registered that he should have been sad himself, devastated even, by the tableau in the cafeteria, but he hadn’t been. A week ago, when he had accidentally hit a cat with his car, Andy had been sad for hours, but the return of the zombies had flipped a switch in him. He knew the sadness should be there, but it wasn’t.

  Finally, the three of them reached the classroom. Lowensen pulled the door open for the other two, who passed through ahead of him. He started to follow, but stopped at the threshold. “Mr. Ehrens,” he said in a whisper, barely loud enough for Andy to hear.

  “Mr. Lowensen?” Lowensen waved for Andy to follow him back out into the hallway. Andy came back out. Roger turned and saw, and started to follow, but Lowensen waved him back and shut the door, leaving Roger and everyone else inside.

  Once they were alone, Andy watched the teacher crumble before him. He staggered back against the wall, then slid down until he was curled into a seated position. He buried his face into his hands and breathed deeply. When Lowensen looked up, Andy could see redness in both of his eyes.

  “You know what to do,” Lowensen said, his voice still barely above a whisper. “You were out there last time, you know what to do. You know what to do. Didn’t want to tell anyone else without knowing if they know what to do. But you know what to do.”

  “Lowensen?” Andy said, his nerves rising. “Lowensen, what are you talking about?”

  “You do know what to do, don’t you?”

  “What to do? We stay here. There’s food, locked doors. What is there to know?”

  Lowensen had started shaking his head as soon as Andy mentioned food, and it grew more and more violent. “There’s no food. No food.”

  Andy stood still. He narrowed his eyes, trying to determine if the teacher was pulling some crazy prank. Finally, he decided to believe him. “Explain.”

  “We have food through the weekend, maybe a day or two beyond that,” he said. “The rest wasn’t going to be here until later on. Didn’t think we’d need backup stores right away. Thought enough to get us through a few days at a time would be enough at the start. And what food we do have is already in the cafeteria. We can go in, kill all the Z’s in there, for what? A week’s worth of provisions, considering the mouths to feed? There’s no food, Mr. Ehrens. No food.”

  Andy felt his heart sink. After all the talk, all the supposed preparation of the past twenty years, people had apparently learned only how to talk of a plan. When it came to action, it seemed, humans hadn’t learned a thing. He felt his bile rising, and he reached down and pulled Lowensen up.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pulling the teacher toward the classroom.

  “Where are we going?” Lowensen said, sounding like a child who didn’t want to go to the dentist.

  “Where are we going? Where do you think we’re going?” Andy pulled the teacher toward the classroom door again. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the one to tell these people you’ve condemned them to death.”

  “What? No! I told you so you can come up with a way to help me fix this!”

  Andy stopped just short of the door. He grabbed Lowensen by the lapels on his blazer and spun him around, pinning him against the door. “‘Fix this’?” Andy said. “‘Fix’ it? Let me tell you something, Lowensen. There is no ‘fixing’ this.

  “What I said is true: you’ve condemned most of these people to death. Forty-some people in that classroom, and my most optimistic estimate, thanks to you and your lack of planning, is that we’ll lose three-quarters. And that is only because there are a few of us who know what we’re doing this time. You son of a bitch, every one that dies is your fault. You want to start fixing this? You get your ass in there and start explaining to them how you killed them.”


  Andy let go of Lowensen, and the man slid down to a crouch and gasped for air. “There’s no other way?” he asked pitifully after a few moments.

  Andy snorted. “Other way? What, you think I keep a year’s worth of food for forty in my other pocket? How the hell did you live through twenty-ten?”

  Lowensen looked up. At first, he looked like he wanted to fight Andy, to argue with him. Finally, he looked back down at the concrete floor. “My dad,” he said. “My brother. A group. Literally never fired a single bullet myself.”

  Andy scowled at the teacher a moment, then narrowed his eyes at him and asked, “Never fired a bullet yourself? What about your story earlier? The Z with the clump of dirt on its head?”

  Lowensen shook his head again. “Wasn’t my story. Read about it on the Out-Theres site. Thought it’d sound more impressive if it sounded like I did it myself. But Mr. Ehrens, I’ve really never done this myself. My dad. My brother. I was lucky.”

  “Lucky?” Andy said, trying and failing to keep himself from getting too angry. He lifted the teacher back to his feet and opened the door to the classroom, forcing Lowensen to enter ahead of him. “You weren’t lucky. You were goddamned blessed.”

  Chapter 3: Dead Ma n’s Pockets

  “What do we do?” Donnie asked. Michelle hadn’t said anything in at least ten minutes.

  It took Donnie repeating the question, with her name, twice more, before she looked up from Madison’s body’s side. When she did, it was obvious to Donnie that she had been crying, though he could no longer see the tears in her eyes.

  She stood up, tucking her hair behind her left ear as she did so. “That’s easy,” she said. “At least for me. I have to get to Hyannis.”

  Donnie nodded. “Michelle,” he started, but she cut him off.

  “Donnie, you don’t have to come with me. I wouldn’t expect you to. I wouldn’t even want you to, because it probably means you’re dead. But I have to get to Stacy. I have to. Madison died asking me to do this. I can’t not do it.”