After: First Light

by Scott Nicholson

  Part of that warning was to involve rape and a savage beating, but Mackie had no intention of doing either, and he gambled that Krider would never know the difference.

  Mackie had been eager for the job and Krider had no problem giving it to him. An assignment near his old stomping grounds meant that Mackie might have an opportunity to see Ally again, and despite his earlier promise to keep a respectful distance, Mackie planned to make that opportunity a reality.

  And thanks to that fortuitous Facebook posting, Mackie knew that Ally would be spending a big chunk of her summer at Evans-Lawson.

  He never got the chance to find Julia Stone before the storms came, but that didn’t matter now. The sun had a longer reach than even Krider’s.

  Linzie still kept her distance but seemed more relaxed now. “How did you make it all the way here on a bike? Aren’t there more of those things out there?”

  “Some. But it seems people are mostly just dead now.” Mackie reached into his pocket and pulled out two more Vicodin. Chewed and swallowed.

  “Are you hurt?” Linzie eyed the gore painted on Mackie’s face and clothes.

  “Ran into a few of those things out there. But I’m fine.”

  “How did you know Ally would be here?”

  Mackie didn’t answer, though he saw no reason not to. A little Facebook stalking was hardly his greatest sin. “You were both here together when the storms came?” he asked.

  Linzie nodded. “I tried to leave a couple of times, but some of those things were roaming in the hall. Thought it made more sense to wait here for help.”

  Mackie’s eyes hardened. “You were just gonna leave her here?”

  “I wanted to find help. I wanted to see what the hell was going on. The power goes out, our phones stopped working. I see all these dead bodies out the window on the lawn, and then Ally—”

  Mackie held up his hand. “I get it. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s those storms that did this, right?”

  “I think so, yeah. I think that’s how it started.”

  “Is it like this everywhere?”

  “Everywhere that I’ve seen.”

  They both looked over at Ally. The Benadryl fog was continuing to lift, and she struggled frantically against the tape binding her hands and feet. An odd, guttural moan rumbled from her throat, but was choked off by the panties stuffed and taped inside her mouth.

  Mackie opened his backpack, rooted through crushed packages of potato chips and Lance crackers—the contents made soggy by a can of Diet Coke that ruptured while he was struggling with the Zapheads in the stairwell—and pulled out a syringe filled with clear liquid.

  “What’s that?” Linzie asked.

  “Morphine. After the storms, me and a few others raided a hospital nearby. I thought if I found Ally, but she wasn’t, y’know, herself, I could use this to keep her calm while we escaped.”

  “So, you were, what, just planning to carry her out of here on your back?”

  An epically shitty plan, Mackie agreed.

  He uncapped the syringe and moved toward Ally. “Well, the good news is I won’t have to do it alone. There’s two of us now.”

  After tapping the syringe and gently depressing the plunger to remove air bubbles, Mackie jabbed the needle dart-like into Ally’s arm.

  Her eyes gradually lost focus, and her motions became less spastic as the Morphine took effect.

  “Is that safe?” Linzie asked.

  “No idea. It’s a safe dose of morphine, but I have no idea if it will interact with the Benadryl you gave her. Can’t exactly Google that now. But if we wanna carry her out of here, I don’t think we have much choice.”

  “So what now? We try to leave?”

  Mackie sat beside Ally again. He drew his knees to his chest and let his head fall foreword.

  “In a second. I just...I just need to rest for a little bit.”

  Linzie sat on the lower bunk, where Mackie had been just a few moments before. “Did you get anything else while you were at the hospital?” she asked.

  “Some basic first-aid shit. Raided a vending machine, too.”

  “We have some food here,” Linzie said. “Some soups and chips. Ramen noodles, Chef Boyardee. I’ve tried feeding Ally a little bit, but I can’t get much in her. And, y’know, I don’t want her to choke.”

  Mackie hadn’t even thought to ask about when the last time Ally had eaten was. He felt a sudden rush of gratitude toward Linzie.

  “She talked about you some.”

  Mackie raised his head. “I can’t imagine she would’ve had much good to say.”

  “I could tell she cared about you. She was worried, I think. About the pills, the people you worked for.”

  Mackie nodded. “I met Ally my last year here, when she was still a freshman. I had moved here from Florida for college because I didn’t really have the grades for a state university, but I didn’t want to go the community college route. A private college like this was my only option.

  I saw some brochures, and liked the vibe of this place, the atmosphere. Thought I might enjoy living in the mountains. It was expensive, but my parents made it work.”

  “Was she your first girlfriend here?”

  “I had slept around a little before, but yeah, pretty much. I was a couple of months away from graduation, and all I could think about was how I didn’t really wanna go home. I’d lie in my room every night and all I could think about was the uncertainty...where do I go from here? What kind of job will I get? How do I be...significant. All the hell I really wanted to do was just stick around campus.

  And then I met Ally, and she gave me a reason to.”

  Ally’s restless motions had all but stopped now, the morphine working its soothing magic. She still appeared conscious, but Mackie hoped she’d fall asleep soon. He stood up, picked up the blanket from where it had landed when he threw it off Ally earlier, and draped it over again.

  “Ally told me you went back to Florida,” Linzie said.

  “I did, after a couple of years. Jobs here aren’t exactly plentiful, and my degree was pretty much useless. I tried to make it work for awhile, found little scraps of part time employment here and there. But it was all putting a strain on my relationship with Ally, and I was barely making enough to survive up here. I went home and starting working construction with an old friend of my dad’s.”

  “What about the pain meds? Ally made it sound like—”

  “Like I had a problem? Yeah, I think she was right.”

  “But you don’t seem like, y’know, a...junkie.”

  Mackie smiled. “It’s not like anyone ever found me lying passed out in puddles of my own piss and vomit, if that’s you mean. Doesn’t make the problem any less of a problem.”

  “So how did it happen?”

  Mackie took his seat beside Ally again. He let his hand dangle over her shin. Linzie recognized affection in the gesture.

  “How did I get hooked? Accident on the job. Relatively minor, but my doctor wrote a prescription for some low grade Vicodin. The problem was I kept taking it even after I stopped hurting.”

  “Doctors won’t prescribe that shit indefinitely. How did you get more after you ran out?”

  Mackie smiled again. “You know those people I worked for that Ally was so worried about? She wasn’t talking about my construction job.”

  “So, what, you started working for a drug dealer?”

  Mackie closed his eyes, leaned his head back. “I started working for a man named Lucas Krider. He was involved with drugs, meth and pills mostly, but not just that. Prostitution, too. Typical Dixie Mafia stuff.”

  Linzie’s eyes widened. “Dixie Mafia? That’s an actual thing?”

  “It’s a little different than what you see on TV, but yeah, it is.”

  “And that’s who you were getting the pills from?”

  Mackie sighed. He didn’t want to discuss this any further, b
ut was too exhausted to argue. He knew they needed to leave soon, but all he wanted to do was sit next to Ally and sleep.

  “I was getting the pills from a co-worker, a guy that ripped off a stash from some asshole in Krider’s crew. I wasn’t aware of any of that. But when Krider tracked us down, his plan was to kill us both and as many of our family members as his men could find. My shithead friend had stolen from him, and I was just as guilty because I was paying him for the pills he’d ripped off.”

  Mackie bit his lower lip hard, wished the Vicodin in his system could quench his memories of what had gone down in Tampa as easily as it could physical pain.

  “But then he decided to extend a little generosity. Krider was always looking to recruit young new talent, so he decided to give us one of us an opportunity to come work for him and make reparations. The other would die, along with his family.”

  The whole world had gone to shit outside, but if Linzie was aware of anything other than Mackie’s story, she gave no indication.

  “So he made us fight for that one open slot in his crew. He wanted to see who could earn it, who had the conviction. That’s the kind of shit he said. I was always a decent fighter, nothing special, but I could handle myself.

  But this other guy, he was a drunk and an addict and been for so many years at that point, he was pretty much useless. Could barely hold down his job with the construction crew. He was scared, and I just started whaling on him and I didn’t stop. All I could think about was my parents and my sister and Ally. Krider may not have gone after her, may never have even found out about her, but I just couldn’t—”

  He stopped, closed his eyes again. “I gave that guy a beating that impressed Krider, and then Krider had one of his men shoot him.”

  “Oh, God,” Linzie said.

  And from that moment on, Macklin Dailey found himself gainfully employed, performing the types of services that men of Lucas Krider’s stature rarely did with their own hands.

  “You’ve killed people,” Linzie said. Mackie couldn’t tell if she had phrased it as a statement or a question.

  “A few. But mostly it was beatings. Warnings. My job was to help Krider protect his territory.”

  As recompense for purchasing pain meds stolen from Krider, Mackie spent his first year performing these services for free, though Krider covered his living expenses. After the first year, Mackie was given a salary. Far more money than he had ever earned in his life.

  But the real salary was safety for his family. For Ally.

  A job with Krider wasn’t a job you could walk away from without expecting some serious blowback.

  “And you can live with that,” Linzie said. “With killing people.”

  Mackie remembered the night he spent puking his guts out after the first time, and the solid hour he spent in his car holding a pistol to his temple.

  He had come damn close to not living with it.

  “I can live with keeping the people I love safe. I’ve never enjoyed any of it. But if I refuse, I’m not the only one that ends up in a drainage ditch somewhere. This is self-defense and protection for my family. That’s how I have to look at it.”

  “Did Ally know?”

  “I didn’t tell her much. Part of that was to keep her safe, part of it was because I didn’t want her to know what I’d become. But she knew things weren’t right with me. She did some digging and eventually found out that I was involved with some bad people. The relationship didn’t last much longer after that.”

  In spite of the room’s humidity, Linzie wrapped her arms around herself as if huddling against the cold. “How come you never tried to kill Krider? You were probably close enough to him to do it.”

  “At the time, that wouldn’t have been an option. He always had people near him, and even if I could’ve made it past them, there were plenty more out there like Krider in the same network. There’s no place I could’ve hid from them all.

  But now, with all that’s happened, if I make it out of here, I’ll go back to Florida, and if he’s still alive, I’ll put a bullet in him. If he’s a Zaphead now, I’ll chain him in a basement somewhere and torture him until he dies of old age.”

  Linzie looked confused. “A Zaphead?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard them called. People that survived the storm but became like...her.” He nodded at Ally. The morphine had taken her someplace else, and now she looked more peaceful than Mackie had felt in years. He wasn’t sure how much longer it would last, but he had more of the drug if he needed it.

  Mackie pulled Ally close, felt the dampness of her hair soak into his neck.

  “We can go soon,” he said. “Not sure how many more Zapheads are close by, but I killed two from this floor on my way here. If we move fast, I think we can get out safely. I don’t much ammo left, but hopefully it’ll be enough.”

  Neither of them acknowledged just how it difficult it would be to leave while carrying a body between them. And even if either of them could think of a safe place to travel nearby, getting there wasn’t likely—not without a working car and with only one magazine of ammo left for Mackie’s Glock.

  Maybe Ally’s dorm was the safest place they could be right now.

  Mackie’s lids closed over his burning, aching eyes. Was he really this tired?

  A moment later, all was dark.