After Days (The After Days Trilogy) (19 page)

It was said lightly, but I shuddered. The empty, fog shrouded streets were creepy, and my unease was compounded by Luke’s very visual remark. I think he sensed my discomfort. “Sorry, all this fog just reminded me of the game, that’s all.”

“Was it a good game?” I asked.

“It was pretty good, considering it was ancient and
the graphics were pretty poor,”

We sat unspeaking while the truck crept forward a couple of blocks; it seemed my pensive mood was contagious. There was a question in my mind, but I wasn’t about to raise it in our current situation. I was curious why we hadn’t seen any dead bodies in the streets, just a handful in snow covered cars.

I can only assume that it was because the virus, or whatever the hell it was, was pretty slow acting on an individual basis. If Alan and Eleanor were any guide, the infected adults had gotten ill twenty-four hours or so before they died. So it figured most of them would have died indoors, tucked up in bed as their children tried to care for them.

And the children? One had to assume that the younger ones were probably still locked inside with the dead parents, and that the older ones, like us, were holed up waiting for help, or wandering around trying to make their way in this new world. That, or they were already slaves to the Chinese.

A fresh wave of hatred for the Chinese government washed over me. About what they had done to the families of America. The children. All so that they could have room for their own exploding population and knock off the only other superpower. I made a silent promise to make them pay whenever and wherever I could.

I noticed a bright spot overhead where the sun was and I figured it was j
ust a matter of time before the thick cloying mist began to burn off. I found myself wondering if we’d make it out of Worcester before that happened.

“There were some good things about it, I guess,” Luke said, breaking the silence. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about the game again. He continued his previous conversation as though there hadn’t been a pause. “If you could get past the antiquated graphics, some of the quests and dialogue options were pretty fun.”

“Tell us about it.” I thought Luke’s prattling might be a good way to relieve some of the increasing tension in the cab of the truck; Indigo was sitting stiffly in her seat, obviously on edge.

“As best I can recall, you created some people to be your adventurers, and when the game started you were guardsmen of some kingdom or other, sent to investigate a mysterious fog.”

“Guardsman in a kingdom? I thought you said the fog transported you to a magical land in the game,” I said.

“I did
. But you sort of started in one as well; the mist moved you to a different magical land, because when the fog lifts after you go to investigate it, you are at a desert with Egyptian style monuments, rather than the European style medieval setting that the game starts out with.”

“Ah, I see,” I said, although in truth I wasn't really paying much attention. I was focused  on driving through the fog, but I found the sound of his voice comforting, and thought it might be having the same effect on Indigo.

“Well you start out by a hut where this old gypsy woman gives you some clues about where to start your quest to defeat the evil ruler of this desert land,” he said. “As you go, you fight monsters and gain levels making your characters more powerful until you finally throw down the ruler, who is the ancient undead mummy of the last pharaoh or something. Along the way you rescue some people, have to answer a sphinx’s riddle, and explore the catacombs beneath a temple of the god Set.”

“Sounds exciting,” I replied. “What was the name of the game?”

“Damned if I remember.”

“So it was more of an RPG style game?” Indigo asked. “Most of the games that you talk about are fighting games or shooters; I didn't know you liked role-playing games.”

“I'm an equal opportunity gamer,” Luke responded with a smile. “About the only games I actively avoid are dancing games.”

“Why? You'd be great at ‘Dance off Evolution’,” Indigo said with a smile of her own.

I couldn't tell if she was teasing him or not, but their playful banter was beginning to get on my nerves. I knew that I shouldn't have been bothered by it. Was I actually jealous of Luke because Indigo was not teasing me? I hated being teased about anything, always had... how messed up was it that not being teased was bothering me?

“You've obviously never seen me try to dance,” Luke said. “Any way, that's about all there was to the game, it wasn’t very layered so it didn't take me long to beat it, just a couple of days of playing over spring break a few years back.”

“I think this is Park Avenue coming up,” Indigo said. “The one that is crossing this street at an angle, get ready to make a sharp right turn.”

“I can see it,” I replied, peering through the soupy mist, seeing the vague outlines of an intersection.

I put some pressure on the gas and the truck lurched forward. I started to turn the wheel, but when we rounded the corner, I slammed on the brakes and the truck screeched to a halt. There were three motorcycles parked across Park Avenue, blocking the way. An instant later, hell broke loose as the staccato stutter of a sub machinegun erupted to our left.

16

I could hear the ping of the bull
ets impacting with my door, my mirror and window were shattered as we ducked down. The paper in the door seemed to hold up and we rode out the storm of bullets until they ceased. Risking a quick peek, I saw two Asian guys in leather jackets walking toward the truck from across the street. Both were busily reloading what looked to my untrained eye like machine pistols. It was like a scene from an action blockbuster.

“Keep your head down and light me one of those bombs, quick,” I said to Luke.

He did as I asked with no questions and as soon as it was in my hand I hurled it out through the driver’s window and it clattered to a hissing, spluttering stop a few feet in front of the gunmen. They both looked at it dumbly for a few seconds, probably trying to work out what it was before one turned and ran away.

The other was not so quick and was still within range when it went off. It was louder than I thought it would be. I took advantage of the confusion and gunned the engine
as I saw him drop to his knees screaming and holding his face, half his body covered in ink. The other one rushed over to him and began to help him to his feet as the truck rolled over one of the motorcycles with a crunch of twisting metal and breaking glass. I sped off down the street, driving way too fast considering the low visibility condition, and just hoped that there was nothing in our way.

We heard the rattle of machine guns behind us but I don’t think they hit us. Over the rush of cold wind through the windows, we heard the dull roar of motorcycles. Adrenali
n was coursing through my veins and my companions were gripping the dashboard. We were all very aware that the next few minutes were crucial; there would be no negotiating with the Tigers if they managed to disable the truck. 

“The Tigers are behind us,” Luke said unnecessarily, looking into the mirror on his side of the truck.

“How many of them?” I asked, holding back the urge for sarcasm at the obvious remark.

“Ah crap,” Indigo said, leaning toward Luke's side to see the mirror herself. She looked back to me, “all of them.”

“Yeah, there are a lot of them,” Luke said, racking the slide of the crossbow, a weapon that now suddenly seemed woefully inadequate. “And that's just those that are close enough to see through the fog.”

He swung himself around so that he was kneeling in the seat facing backwards, and leaned out the window. He tried to brace himself and bring the crossbow to bear on our pursuers but it wasn't working well. “I never realized how hard it was to shoot backwards
from a moving vehicle, I’ll just waste arrows if I try and fire on them,” he said, pulling back inside.

“We could throw some more bombs behind us,” Indigo suggested.

“Worth a shot,” Luke said, grabbing one of the ink bombs from under the seat and pulling his lighter back out of his pocket. “How long do you think I should cook it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But don't let it go off in here or we’re screwed, it's hard enough to see as it is.”

“I'll do my best.” He lit the fuse and waited until it was about half burned down and then tossed it out the window. “Damn it,” he said, after the bang sounded behind us. “They were passed it by the time it blew.”

“Try again,” Indigo said, she already had another ink bomb out and ready for him. “I know you’ll get it right this time.”

There it was again, that jealous twinge. She wasn’t teasing him, just encouraging him but it still made me knot up a little bit. Really, I’m doing this now? I thought, get over yourself Isaac. It doesn’t mean anything. “How close are they?” I asked.

“About a truck length back,” Luke replied.

“Let it burn down to a quarter of an inch and then drop it,” I said, thinking about how much time it had taken to blow with a half inch of fuse left when I’d thrown it at the gunmen. “Drop it, out your window, don’t throw it at them. Let them come to it.”

“Okay,”
he said, as he lit the next fuse.

He let it burn down a ways and then dropped it out the window. This time the bang was louder and accompanied by the sounds of screeching tires and scraping metal. “Oh yeah!” he said, glancing at us, he was positively beaming. “One of the bikes went into a slide and two others hit it, the rest have slowed right down and fallen back into the fog,” he reported excitedly
.

I kept the gas pedal down as far as I dared, only having to swerve once to avoid a car in the middle of the road, barely missing it as it appeared unexpectedly out of the fog. We could still hear the motorcycles following us, but they remained hidden in the roiling white emptiness behind the truck
. I asked Indigo how far it was until we reached the freeway.

“You’re bleeding Isaac,” she said.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding, from your cheek,” she watched as I reached up to my cheek, and felt… nothing. “Your other cheek.”

I put my hand to my other cheek, it was wet, wet and cold. It felt like I had ice on my cheek, and I realized that the wind whipping through my broken out window must have frozen the blood to my face. I felt a ragged line above the frozen blood, and almost instantly my cheek started aching. The adrenalin had let me forge ahead without even realizing I was hurt, but now that I knew, my cheek made sure I was feeling it. “I hope it’s not too bad,” I said.

“It looks like some flying glass cut you, probably when the window was shot in,” Indigo said. “I’ll look it over for you when we get a chance to stop for a while.”

“You could end up with a bad ass scar there, chief,” Luke said, looking across the cab at my wound. He almost sounded envious.

“I don’t really want a scar on my face, bad ass or otherwise,” I said.

“Man, I am kind of surprised to hear you say that, haven’t you figured out by now that we all have scars? Some of us on the outside, some on the inside, and some of us inside and out, but the one thing we all have in common is scar tissue.”

“Is that from a game?” Indigo asked him.

“Nope that one is mine,” Luke replied, grinning. He seemed proud of himself.

“Don’t worry Isaac, I think scars are sexy,” Indigo said, and I felt my cheeks start to burn. For a moment I wondered if a blush would be able to melt the frozen blood on my cheek. Maybe having a scar on my face wouldn’t be so bad after all. “Now slow down, we are almost to the freeway on-ramp.”

We had not been on the freeway long when the fog began to thin out rapidly, and before we knew it we were driving through a cloudy and frigid New England day. Checking his mirror frequently, Luke reported that the motorcycles were still following us, but had dropped back quite a ways.

“I hope those persistent bastards don’t chase us all the way to the safe haven,” Luke said, eyes locked on the mirror.

“I won’t lead them there, no matter what,” I replied. “Hopefully they give up well before we have to do anything drastic.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes, our light mood at our temporary reprieve from the Tigers suddenly dampened by what we were witnessing. The freeway was totally free of vehicles, but not through any stroke of luck. It looked like quite a few vehicles had been abandoned…or not… as people attempted to escape the city. It must have been an almighty gridlock. They were now piled and heaped in the gullies to the sides of the road, as if a petulant child had swept his toy cars off a track in a fit of rage.

That wasn’t the worst. There were bodies too. Some hanging out of cars, some half buried in the snowdrifts that were building on the wrecks. I glanced at Indigo and saw tears in her eyes as she took in the
horrible sight. I didn’t try to comfort her this time, I knew we would probably see plenty worse than this before we reached the safe haven.

I wondered why the Chinese had cleared the freeway
and guessed that they were clearing all the major roads between cities for their repopulation. It only made sense. Luke looked into his mirror.

“They’re still stalking us. I’m just glad their little convoy of motorbikes didn’t bring the Chinese army down on us,” he said. “Speaking of which, they’ve been awful quiet today, do you think they know we’re listening in?”

I glanced at the CB unit on the dashboard, and my stomach did a flip-flop as I saw that some of the bullets that had come through my window had torn through the side of it. “Radio got hit in the ambush,” I grunted. “We’ve been driving deaf for at least a half hour now, the whole damn Chinese army could be waiting around the next bend for all we know.”

“Shit,” Luke said, “oh well, it’s not like we have anybody that speaks Chinese up here anyway
, Brooke is in the back.”

“Gee, thanks Luke,” Indigo said, giving him a harsh glance and wiping tears from her eyes, “I’m sorry I’m so useless to you.”

“Hey now…sorry, I didn’t mean…” He looked mortified that she thought he was taking a swipe at her and I found myself taking a sort of perverse enjoyment out of his stammering.

“It’s okay, I like the company of the people up here right now,” I said, intervening and shooting Indigo a small smile. That was a mistake; the act of smiling caused my cheek to hurt more than it already did. Serves me right for trying to score a point off my friend.

“I hope the others are okay,” she said, her gaze dropping to the floor of the cab, and I remembered the sound of the nine-millimeter bullets slapping into the side of the cargo area.

“We can’t stop to check on them as long as the Tigers are stalking us,” I said. “Luke, grab your atlas, see if there is a way we can lose them up ahead.”

“Will do, man.”

He reached
under his seat, where he seemed to have stored everything but a kitchen sink, a few seconds later he was opening his atlas to Massachusetts. “Indigo, we got on here, right?” he asked, pointing to a spot on the map.

“Yeah, that’s the place,” she said.

“I think I see a way,” Luke said. “Take the next exit and turn left off the end of the ramp; that should put us on highway 12 and we can follow that up to 140 and take 140 back to I-190.”

“I’ve been that way before,” Indigo said. “It won’t take us that far out of the way.”

“Alright then, maybe we can lose them on the way.” I saw the exit coming up and slowed to take it, and as I did the motorbikes closed some of the distance between us.

Glancing back over my shoulder I saw that there seemed to be about eight bikes, some of them with two Tigers on them, but most with one. Ten or twelve Chinese gangbangers were not something we were equipped to fight it out with, not even if everybody in the back was still in good shape and ready to rumble. We just didn’t have the firepower; the Tigers would easily outgun us. My attention snapped back onto the ramp ahead of me and I pulled us off of the freeway.

The off ramp was forested on either side, but almost as soon as we turned onto highway 12, we passed an Ace Hardware and a grocery store. I would have liked to have stopped and looked for more supplies in both places, but with the Tigers on our ass that wasn’t an option. Continuing up the highway, we passed a CVS pharmacy and after that a couple of strip malls and an RV dealership as we left the outskirts of town. Worcester was finally in our rear view mirror, and according to Luke, so were the Red Tigers.

With the fog lifted I could open it up a little more, but I didn’t get above fifty or so, that seemed to be the speed
at which the truck began to protest by shaking and whining. I knew that there was no way that a rental truck was going to outrun the Tigers motorcycles, not for long, anyway.

“We need to get far enough ahead so we can find a place where there is a corner to hide the truck. Hopefully they will zoom on by and we can go the other way,” I said.

“I don’t know if that’s going to cut it,” Luke said. “These guys are hard core gangbangers, and they are not letting us out of their line of vision. I can’t believe that wasting a couple of them pissed them off this bad.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said. “You remember the guy I killed in the alley, back when we saved Indigo?”

“Seriously dude, you’re asking if I remember the guy that you machine-gunned down in front of me?”

“Yeah, well… he was…”

“What?” Luke and Indigo asked at the same time.

“The younger brother of Chen, the leader of the Tigers,” I said, not looking at them and keeping my eyes on the road.

“Really?” Luke asked.

“What’d I tell you,” I said. “If it wasn’t for bad luck…”

“Well I don’t care who he was, I am glad you did it,” Indigo said. “You guys are my knights in shining armor. Even if your shining armor is a bloody, stained parka,” she said to me. “And your lance is a crossbow,” she said, looking at Luke, who grinned.

“So what, are they going to hunt us to the ends of the earth now or what?” Luke asked.

“I hope not,” I replied. “But back at the parking garage I came face to face with him and he looked mad…no, more than mad, he looked psycho. I’m pretty sure he will keep coming after us until either he or me is dead. Since we left the interstate, have they shown any signs of giving up the chase?”