After Life Lessons (Book One)

by Laila Blake

  “Sorry...” she whispered, not sure what else to say. Her eyes wandered to Song, another boy who’d lost his father far too early.

  “It’s been a long time.” He licked his lips and considered for another moment. “I mean... I miss him, but, you know, I was eight. So what I got is an eight-year-old’s idea of what his dad was like.”

  “You’re a good person. He’d be proud,” she stated finally, not looking at him, hugging her knees tighter.

  Again, he moved his eyes from the road to look at her. She didn’t turn her gaze from the road ahead.

  “Am I?”

  “Of course,” she said quietly, but then felt guilty again. Had she said it because it had surprised her from a soldier? She didn’t know, and didn't want to examine her subconscious, her prejudices, too closely.

  “Thanks,” he said, honestly, smile quirking up in the corner of his lips. “I… thanks.”

  “You miss England?” he asked, after a moment, attention drawn to her tiny feet, clad in thick socks, propped on the dash, before he made himself look back at the road again.

  Emily considered this. “We were there the Christmas before... you know, everything went to hell. It’s pretty. There was snow, but not like here. Just a few flakes blowing about on the shore, nothing that stays. But...” she shrugged, eyeing Song. “It’s like… that was then. It's my parent’s country and all I could see there were people talking like my parents and wanting what they want. And when I was here... in New York, anyway, it seemed like everybody was like me, wanted what I wanted.”

  She fell silent, trying to remember the last time she’d said so many words in a row, like a real conversation.

  “What did you want?” On the surface, the question sounded casual enough, but Emily thought she heard something else, too, something she recognized: the sudden need for an exchange beyond the necessities of staying alive, of threats or assurances, and idle, awkward small talk.

  She studied his profile, hesitated.

  “I wanted... to be myself? That sounds sappy. I liked art and they didn’t really get that. They are nice people, really, just... not me. And I wanted to find out what’s out there you know? Where the people were who read, I dunno, Kant and Whitman, and who listened to something other than charts or oldies. People who didn’t scoff at the government funding art and theater.”

  His hand left the wheel again and scratched the back of his neck where his hair had grown too long.

  “I get it.” He squinted again, though the landscape hadn’t really changed. “Kinda the same for me, I guess. Step-dad wasn’t military, and, you know, was never really my dad. Never tried to be, didn’t want him to be.” He paused, stared hard into the distance before continuing. “Not a bad guy, really, but I was ten when my mom married him. Northerner,” he added, glancing at her with another small smile.

  “A Yankee?” she asked, lips curling into an almost cheeky grin.

  “Indeed.” He shook his head. “From Minnesota of all places. It was like having an alien for a dad. My brother and sisters all got the strangest accents.”

  She couldn’t help but chuckle. “Mine has to be stranger.”

  “You sound English,” he said, shaking his head. “Served with some British soldiers once, couple of them from London. You sound like 'em.”

  She snorted, “God, I hope not. I really must have a bad cold if my voice got that deep.”

  It was the first time he’d heard her make a joke and, with that, a real, full smile broke over his face.

  “I think you sound plenty like a girl,” he said, eyes crinkling at the corners with his grin.

  “Why thank you, kind sir, I appreciate that.” Emily, too, was smiling—for a heartbeat and then she licked her lips and felt a stab of guilt somewhere in the region of her stomach.

  The static in the air returned, and Aaron looked back at the road, a little confused. There was something about Emily that was like walking near a shelf full of glass, never quite sure of his next move, and he didn’t know, exactly, what to do about it, or what it meant.

  “If the sun keeps up, the roads’ll be clearer tomorrow,” he said, finally, an option for something other than anything personal, eyes trained on the road with a sort of fierceness that was hard to ignore.

  “I kind of half promised Song we might be out of the snow by the end of the day,” she said with a sheepish, smaller smile and bit her lip. “I can count myself lucky if he still believes anything I say...”

  “He believes everything you say.” Aaron looked over at her again with a steady gaze that he only broke to make sure they were still safe on the road. “Moms do that.”

  “Tell a lot of lies?” she asked back, leaning her cheek against the back of the seat. The fabric looked rough against her paper skin and she hugged herself tighter.

  “Plenty of people lie. Sometimes you gotta.” His voice was quieter than it had been a moment before. The silence moved in again, and it was several minutes before he spoke.

  “I was only a little older than him when I lost my dad,” he pointed out, not looking at her. “My mom didn't have a job before he died—car accident, happened outta nowhere—and we didn’t really have anything. She never let me know, though, not when I was little. Was only a few years ago that I found out how bad off we were for a while.”

  Emily was watching him, he could tell. She also was breathing funny, and he had the distinct impression that she was trying not to cry.

  “I don’t want him to grow up sad...” she whispered, a choked little sound that made his insides contract painfully.

  “You can’t control that for sure,” he said, evenly, even as his throat felt a little sticky. “But you can do your best. I think you are, for what it’s worth. You’re a good mom.”

  She looked down at her feet, wriggled her toes and pulled up her shoulders protectively.

  “He already lost one, a mom I mean... and a dad.” Aaron looked up, surprised out of his intense focus on the road, but Emily didn’t return his gaze. The snow seemed to hold her transfixed. “He’s my boyfriend’s son. Um, he died. I’m just… anyway, feels like the least I can do. It’s why I can’t be strict with him. His mom left him and then… I just can’t.”

  “What happened to his mom?” He wasn’t sure he was allowed to press, but it was a curious thing, he thought, someone abandoning their child.

  Emily shrugged. “She wasn’t really... I don’t know. I don't really talk about her because I can’t do it without getting angry and...” She shook her head, tried to smile. “I guess she knew that he had a good home with us or a better one at least, so she didn’t leave him with nothing.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Two.”

  Aaron flinched, but let her continue.

  Emily scratched her head. “For a while it was like a shared custody thing and then, one day she just didn’t come back.” She looked away, and very, very quietly added: “Part of me was glad. I felt like a terrible person.”

  “I don’t know that that’s terrible. I... I’d wager a guess that it’s better to have someone love you all the time than just when it's convenient.”

  Emily’s mouth fell open with a tiny pop. Then she licked her lips and nodded, her breath suddenly loud and wet.

  “Can we... stop in a bit? I need the loo...”

  “No,” Aaron said, without turning his head. He was focused on the movement he'd spied in the rear-view mirror, and before Emily could protest, he shook his head, inclining his chin towards the window.

  “You haven’t been watching.”

  He’d not brought it up, not with the first zombie, and not the second, but there was a third and fourth, and now it was difficult to concentrate on anything else.

  Emily stared first at him, then at the side-view mirror.

  “They are fast...” she exhaled.

  Rolling down the highway, Aaron was trying to avoid broken down cars and fallen trees, snow-choked drifts and holes in the road. They were slow, too slow
, and the creatures had little trouble keeping up. There was no question of stopping, of course, but he couldn't accelerate, either.

  “It's like they're hunting...” he muttered, focus completely on the road. They were nowhere near an established town, not really, so there shouldn't have been as many as there were. He'd counted five, now, in the last mile, and that meant, logically, there were more he wasn't seeing. There were always more, always unpredictable. Underestimate them once and you were dead meat.

  Emily clenched her hand around her thigh and glanced at Song still sleeping on the backseat.

  “Maybe it’s because we’re moving or... or making sounds,” she whispered. Aaron couldn't tell if she was worried about waking her boy, or whether the soft hush was her way of keeping her voice from cracking with fear, but he shook his head, distractedly.

  He had to come up with a strategy, some way out of this, but it was high stakes situations like these when his army training broke through and he felt paralyzed, waiting for an order, for someone else to take over and tell him what to do. There was a sense of shame in that, and one he wasn’t eager for the girl to notice.

  “Oh—hell, no.” Aaron jumped and stepped on the brake pedal. Around a bend, they'd come to a downed tree, large and crushed down by the snow, and the van rolled to a stop in front of it. It had to have fallen sometime during the last storm, as the roots were still caked in soil and snow had frozen in a thick sheet of ice over the trunk.

  A dizzying sensation of panic sunk through Emily’s body; she took a rattling breath.

  “There's no way we can move that,” she said still in that small voice, thin but steely.

  “Yeah.”

  Aaron was in shock, to be sure: months of driving this same road and he'd never come across anything blocking it so fully. Usually he could hop out and move whatever had tumbled into the road himself, but this enormous tree, glazed like a cake, wouldn't budge, not with ten of him to try and drag it out of the way—and apparently they were being hunted. It was a dizzying array of facts to keep combing over.

  “Shit.” His voice was barely audible, mostly just a breath, and he immediately looked over to the passenger side mirror. “They're coming up from behind.”

  The van could take some damage, obviously; hitting a few of them would only dent the panels, but many more than a few and it would just moor them down in gore.

  “No chance of getting around it?” she asked, and just because it was some kind of outside suggestion, he considered it again even though he'd instinctively eliminated that option almost immediately.

  There were at least ten of them, more maybe, behind the drifts, and Aaron's mind zipped along, sorting madly through their options. He had no way of assessing what lay under the snow to either side; there were more trees and underbrush and one wrong move and they'd be hopelessly stuck in a ditch by the side of the road. It was a process of elimination: they couldn't leave the car, they couldn't risk getting off the road, and the way back was growing thicker with zombies every second he hesitated.

  “Okay,” he said, after a minute. “You need to get in the back and cover up Song. And pull up the black case from behind the seat. Alright?”

  Emily nodded, immediately jumping into action. Awkwardly but efficiently, she climbed into the back, first reaching for the black case and handing it to him before she unclipped Song’s seatbelt and shook him gently.

  “Duck?” she asked. “I need you to sit on the floor for a bit okay? And cover your ears as hard as you can?”

  Song blinked up at her sleepily and she gathered him up in her good arm and put him on the floor between the seats. Even in that state, he threw a nervous glance at Aaron's face in the rear-view mirror, and Aaron tried for a tight, nervous smile before the boy hid his face in the crook of Emily's arm again.

  “As hard as you can,” she reminded him, moving his hands to his ears before she pushed him back, gently but firmly, and covered him in a thin blanket. Then she pushed herself over and onto the front seat again.

  “Give me one,” she demanded, nodding at the black case he'd just opened to find what he had leftover in weapons. He was short on ammo, as always, and he'd seen her handle that gun of hers—with shaking hands and no expertise. The recoil, too, would be hell on her sprain, but she had that look on her face—hard and determined—and he couldn't deny her the chance to defend her son.

  He checked the gun for shells and passed it over. It was a small piece, one he kept around to stick in his pocket. For himself, he kept a gun in the glove compartment and took another from the case. There was the shotgun in the back as well, but they were in close quarters and had the van to take the brunt of the attack.

  “We'll crack the windows,” he decided; they'd get better shots out the back doors, but that would leave them vulnerable. “Aim as well as you can. Just—hit them.”

  Nodding once, she rolled down her window; the cold breeze made her feel less dizzy, and when the first zombie came around her side, only the smallest squeal escaped her throat. She released a shot, then another. Both bullets found a target in the shambling body, but the creature kept coming at her. It was almost upon her when she hit its head. Her hand was shaking by then, but she had no time to check what Aaron was doing, all she could think of was Song and trying to aim better with the next one.

  Aaron was a good shot—excellent, really, and had a couple marksmanship badges because of it. He knocked the first zombie off its feet with one shot, though the next took two. He didn’t look over at Emily while he worked through his chamber but then he rolled both of their windows up.

  “Reload,” he instructed her, handing her a box of bullets from his rapidly-depleting stash. “We just gotta down enough to back up.”

  Another wordless nod. Emily was white as the snow outside, and her hands shook when she reloaded. She was watching Song in the rear-view mirror; the boy had pulled the blanket off his face and she tried to flash a smile at him. When she was done stuffing bullets in the chamber, she gave Aaron a nod and they both rolled down the windows once more. She felled two more zombies until she ran out of bullets and quickly rolled up the window again. The creatures were beginning to circle the car now, creating an opening in the back and beating against the thin walls—dull metallic sounds, pressing in on their eardrums. Song squealed Emily's name, and her eyes darted to Aaron.

  “Try it...” she breathed; they had to get out of there. “Now!”

  The zombies on the ground were still alive—if that's what you could call it—but not able to get up, and so he reloaded the gun, set it inside the center console and started the van again. The roar of the engine did seem to give the creatures pause, and he looked into the mirror once before shifting into reverse and slamming on the gas. They hit something with a nasty thump, but it gave, and he was able to turn the van to a degree.

  Now facing the side of the road, he cracked his window again and blew away the first zombie coming up around the side, then another that approached from the front. He hated wasting bullets on the ones just looking for a snack, when they needed to use them on the ones at the back, but he knew he had few other choices at hand.

  Emily was at the far side of the action as he swerved and while she reloaded, she didn't shoot or roll down the window. She could smell them, though, and each time the distinct odor coated her nostrils, it was like she was back that evening in New York again, just outside the sewers, where she'd been too slow getting out of that door. They'd been all over Sullivan and she'd been too late.

  Distracted and angry, she wiped a tear from her cheek.

  Another blast, and Aaron cast his gun back into the console and turned the van further. They were facing the other direction now, and though there were a couple zombies advancing, he knew the hood of the van could take it.

  “Duck,” he suggested, just in case the wind-shield wouldn't hold, and then he floored the gas pedal.

  They managed. Just about.

  The zombies he hit rolled off the hood, and th
en the road was clear and they sped away. He was mindful of the ice on the asphalt, but, all he had to do was follow their own tire track on the road, back in the direction they'd just traveled. It was a waste of gas and time, but at least he knew the terrain and could be certain there were no obstacles hiding under the snow.

  Emily hardly moved. Her gun lay on the floor at her feet, and her eyes were fixed on the side mirror, her hands tucked between her thighs to stop them trembling.

  They were a good several miles away when he slowed down, looking into the rear-view mirror to check on Song. “You okay back there, buddy?”

  Like before, he didn't answer—not Aaron, just stared at him with huge eyes.

  “Emmy...” he whined with some urgency, and that finally shook her out of her stupor. Shoving the gun further away with her foot, she turned to climb over the seat once more. This time, both her arms ached and even her good hand was useless as she landed hard on her knee.

  “Heeeey,” she cooed and drew him into her arms. “It’s okay, they’re all gone. It’s all okay.”

  Song curled against her chest with his little rattling breaths. Aaron cast a glance into the mirror at them, both white as sheets and clinging to one another. It only took him a moment to come up with his next plan.

  “We’re finding a place to stop,” he said, with a hint of a smile; his hands were shaking on the wheel.

  “Are you sure they can’t follow us?” she asked, swallowing hard. She was still petting Song, stroking his hair and holding onto him.

  Aaron shook his head; he couldn’t be sure, and he also couldn’t tell her that. “I think, you know, if we get somewhere, we’ll be okay.” He pushed his smile further on his lips, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Right, buddy?”

  Song eyed him over Emily's shoulder, and gave him the tiniest hint of a nod.

  “Okay,” she exhaled. “Okay. Come on, I’ll... I’ll help you get back up.”

  Song could mostly get himself up, but held onto her anyway. They both flopped onto the seat, and Aaron didn’t expect Emily to return to the front, despite the tight quarters of the van. He just narrowed his eyes against the deceptively bright and sunny day, and swept his gaze along the sides of the road, looking for shelter as he drove.