After Days (The After Days Trilogy) (21 page)

They were. Mark had been hit by a round from the personnel carrier’s cannon as well. He was gravely injured and his left arm seemed to barely be hanging on by a few threads of tendon and skin. He was unconscious, the bleeding wasn't as bad as I would have thought, and both Luke and Sonny explained that the auto-cannon probably had tracer rounds mixed in, which may have partially cauterized Mark's wound on its way through.

John had not been hit by gunfire, but was in a bad way as well. The falling supplies had crashed right on top of him and his leg had been caught under a large bin of canned food. It was clear the shin bone in his right leg was broken, I'm no doctor, but even I know that a person’s leg is not supposed to have an extra bend between the knee and the ankle.

             
We laid John and Mark out on a training mat that we pulled from the truck. Brooke and Samara tended to them while Luke and I climbed into the truck and covered Karen with a sheet we had found in the garage. We gently lifted her up and out of the truck, and I heard the other girls crying as they watched us carrying her. Sonny walked with us as we carried Karen out through the side door of the garage and to a small stand of trees behind the gas station. When we got to the trees, we paused.

             
“There,” Sonny said, nodding his head toward an oak tree on our left. The earth had eroded away from the base of the trunk, leaving a cavity underneath framed by exposed roots. “That'll make a good cairn for poor Karen.”

             
“Better than we're likely to get, given our current situation,” I replied with a nod of my head.

We carried her over there and placed her inside, it was tight, and it took us a long time to maneuver her into the cavity
but we finally managed to arrange her body in a half-way respectable fashion. When we were done, both Luke and I sat back on our heels, catching our breath.

             
“She's with Arthur again,” Sonny said. “Hopefully both of them will be happier for it.”

             
I grunted a non-committal reply; my doubts about the existence of God had also led me to question the notion of an afterlife. When Brooke had asked me recently if I thought I'd see God or go to Heaven when I died, I had said, somewhat bitterly, that I might, but wouldn't count on it.

             
Death is strange in this new world. Before the Infection we had such a fear of it, it was always hidden and behind the scenes. We talked about it only in neutral terms, ‘he passed away’ or she had ‘gone to a better place’. We sent our dead away to be prettied up, made to look better than they had when they were alive, just so that when the funeral came around everybody could remember a perfect image of their loved one.

Then we locked them away in a little box underground or burned them to a small pile of ashes and hid them away, where they could be forgotten most of the time, only to be remembered on rare occasions or special dates. But now, in this new world, death is ever present, and it is everywhere. The reminders of death are impossible to avoid, just like death itself.

The thing that surprises me is how quickly we all became used to it. Even then, while Sonny, Luke and I laid Karen to rest beneath the oak tree, I knew I had become numb to the idea of death. It was simply a fact of life and would continue to be so. I had no illusions that it would ever be otherwise again…at least not for a long time. I was suddenly angry again, I didn’t want to be used to death, didn’t want to get to the point where it meant nothing.

             
“We should get back to the others,” Sonny said.

“No, wait…get the others Luke, I think we should stop to say a few words for Karen.”

The day was still gray, and the temperature seemed to be hovering just above freezing. Even though there was no sign of the thick fog that had made the morning’s drive such a pain, the clouds looked ready to begin dumping more snow on us at any time. Within a few minutes we were all gathered around the makeshift grave. The girls were weeping before I even started to speak.

“We’re here to say goodbye to Karen, and also Arthur, who we weren’t able to bring with us. They were both…great. And I can say personally, and I think also on behalf of Brooke, Ben and Luke, that they both made us feel welcome at the academy. I don’t know what waits for them on their final journey, but I hope they find peace wherever it is….that’s all I guess. Thanks.”

We started to shuffle away and I saw Indigo suddenly run off towards a patch of scrappy looking yellow flowers that were growing through the cracked pavement. I waited while the others went into the garage.

She retrieved a handful and went back to Karen’s resting place, gently placing them on the blanket. She gave me a sad smile as she stood and came towards me. We didn’t say anything; both of us knew there was nothing to say. We walked a few feet in silence, and then her hand found mine. My heart nearly stopped, but I told myself it was just one human comforting another, even as I hoped it was a sign of something more.

After the injured and dead had been removed from the truck, we re-entered the garage, pulled the doors closed and started repacking it again. When we were nearly done, I walked out through a side door a little way into the overgrown yard and examined the grey sky, listening for the sounds of helicopters or vehicles. Sonny emerged from the garage, joining me. He was looking better, and I marveled at his powers of recovery – it was less than 24 hours since he’d been shot.

              “That could be trouble,” I said to Sonny, looking at the overcast sky. “If it snows and the Chinese army is looking for us, it'll be easy to follow our trail in fresh snow.”

             
“Yeah, it could create a problem,” Sonny replied. “And they will be after us for sure, but there's no reason to worry about it. We’ve got enough things to worry about that we can control, or at least influence. Weather isn't one of them. Nor are the Chinese.”

             
“I guess that makes sense,” I said. “Come on, let's get back and see how the last of the repacking is going.”

We headed back into the garage in silence, lost in our thoughts. I can’t speak for Sonny, but I was thinking about what he had said, about only worrying over the things we could control, and my mind had gone straight to the problem of who would be coming with us.

Mark was in a bad way, and it wasn’t a stretch to think that we might be bringing him out to lie next to Karen before the day was through. He was still unconscious when we got back inside but Samara reported that his heartbeat was strong. Still, he was in no condition to travel, him and John both, in fact.

I knew that I was soon going to have to make a decision
, one way or another, that I didn't want to make. But I had all afternoon to think it over, so I decided to put it off. It suddenly dawned on me that it was strange that I was thinking like that. Like I was in charge. The one making all the decisions. Yes, I had been voted leader while Sonny was indisposed, but it seemed that even now that he was back on his feet, albeit sore and limited physically, he was deferring to me. I decided not to think too deeply about it, but it seemed as though a natural transition was taking place.

             
“We got everything back in place and shifted it around a bit so maybe it'll be sturdier, boss,” Luke said, coming up to me. “Indigo brushed all the broken glass out of the cab too.”

             
“Good,” I replied. “I'm hoping that Sonny can drive so I can ride in the back for a while.”

             
“You and me both, bro,” Luke said, following me to the main doors.

I pulled them open just an inch or so and crouched to look at the gas station through the narrow gap.

Glancing at him I could see that he looked just as exhausted as I felt. It was the stress and the constant shots of adrenalin I think. They left us feeling drained after they’d worn off, and we'd already been through that cycle multiple times just within this one morning. He also looked dirty and scrappy, his ginger colored and patchy adolescent beard didn’t help in that respect.

“Man, you need a shave and a shower…” I joked.

“Stuff that, when we leave this place I plan on curling up in a sleeping bag on a mat in the back of the truck and sleeping. Just sleeping. And you oughtta talk by the way!”

My hands went to my own face and felt the light fuzz of my own boy beard before lightly running over the wound on my cheek. It had crusted over and thankfully didn’t hurt apart from a slight throb. I must have looked a sight, but what can I say? Priorities tend to change when you are in the middle of an apocalypse and running for your life. 

              “You can get some sleep now, if you want,” I told him. “I was going to see if you wanted to come with me to check out the gas station for any supplies, but I can take Ben or Indigo with me instead.”

             
“I doubt that we'll find much there,” he said, eying the station. “That place looks like it has been closed since well before the current mess started, but I'll go with you. Ben is busy worrying about his sister's ankle and Indigo is already sleeping in the back of the truck.”

             
“Alright, you and me then,” I said, rising to my feet. I patted the pocket that had the revolver in it, feeling its welcome weight. “You might want to grab a gun…just in case…”

             
“Nah, I have sworn off firearms, I’ll get my crossbow. Be right back,” he said, and headed back toward the truck.

I fought the urge to argue with him, knowing that if it came to a confrontation with military, the crossbow would be of limited value. He returned a moment later holding the weapon loosely in his hand. The way he carried it called up images in my mind of old time movies like Robin Hood, except in those, it always seemed to be the bad guys that had the crossbows. This time they would be carrying semi-automatics.

“Let's go, man,” Luke said, pushing the door open and breezing past me with a self-confident air about him. I shook my head and smiled to myself, he would have fit right in with a group of medieval outlaws. I pulled the door closed and followed him across the gravel expanse between the garage and the station, maybe ten yards across at most, and with every step I worried that a Chinese patrol would come rolling down the road.

18

We made it to the station without incident. The windows were boarded over and the door was locked with a chain and padlock.

             
We continued around the far side of the building, there was another door about half way down the wall, this one unchained; a faded picture of male and female stick figures was stenciled on the outside. The door was locked, but Luke put his shoulder against it with a quick thump and it popped right open.

Inside was a simple bathroom with a single toilet, and a cracked porcelain sink beneath a grimy stainless steel mirror. An empty paper towel holder gaped open over an empty wastebasket. There was no door leading further into the station.

             
“I always hated those gas stations where the bathrooms were on the outside,” Luke said with a hint of disgust in his voice. “But you know what I hated more than that?”

             
“What?”

             
“When fast food restaurants did the same thing. You remember the Hefty Burger back in Fort Carter? They were set up that way.”

             
“Yeah,” I replied, with a nod of my head. “A real pain in the ass.” If only little things like that were all we had to worry about.

“We need something to cut the padlock,” I said. “I'll wait by the doors, why don't you run and see if Sonny brought his bolt cutters.”

              “Good idea, chief,” Luke said. “He did, I helped him pack them up. Be back in a flash.”

He ran off toward the garage while I walked back around to the gas station’s front door. I heard the faint sound of a helicopter in the distance, back in the direction of the bridge where we had encountered
the Chinese, but I never saw it and it didn't seem to get any closer. Still, I was glad I had thought of checking for the bolt cutters rather than trying to shoot the lock; if they were searching for us in this direction and were close enough, a gunshot was a sure way to lead them right to us.

             
When Luke returned he cut through the padlock's bar and I yanked the chain out from between the pull handles. Other than the padlock and chain, the front door was unlocked.

I took another
glance around at the road in both directions. It seemed clear, but I wondered how much longer before we saw some sign of the Chinese. I pulled the door open and we slipped inside. It was dark. The boarded over windows only allowed narrow cracks of light to seep in around the edges. Luke pulled a small LED flashlight out of his coat pocket and tossed it to me before pulling another out for himself.

             
“I hope we're not draining the batteries down for nothing,” he said, shining his little light along the counter to the right of the door.

             
“What size do they take?” I asked him.

             
“What?”

             
“What size batteries do they use?”

             
“Double-A, I think,” he replied. “Why?”

             
“Here,” I reached down and picked up the unopened pack of double-A batteries that was lying by my foot and tossed it over to him. “Now we don't have to worry about it.”

             
“How long do you think those have been laying there?” he asked.

             
“Don't know, at least a year, maybe longer,” I said, as I shone my flashlight around the station’s interior. The place had been abandoned, but you could tell that when it closed down the owner hadn't gotten quite everything out. Various convenience store style sundries still sat on their racks, most of the bags of chips and nuts gnawed into by rats or mice.

             
“Hey look, they have a fishing section,” Luke said, walking over to where a batch of lures and bobbers were hanging. He grabbed a couple rolls of fine fishing line, and several packs of small hooks, shoving them all in his pocket.

             
“What are those for?” I asked.

             
“Medical supplies,” he responded. “I made sure to grab barbless hooks, those and the line together will allow us to stitch people up if need be.”

             
“Good idea,” I said, while grabbing a few small bottles of aspirin that were on a shelf near me. We were low on pain killers of any sort and I figured something was better than nothing. Mark was going to need them if he ever woke up, and John could probably already use some, he'd been awake and in agony when Luke and I had left.

“Too bad they don't have anything stronger than aspirin here,” I said, looking over to see what Luke was doing. His next sentence made me even more regretful we didn’t find any other pain relief.

              “Yeah, we’ll have to be careful giving those out though, aspirin is a blood thinner, so we won’t be able to give them to the wounded… I got three unopened cases of soda here,” he said. “I take back what I said about this place not being worth checking, it’s a gold mine.”

             
I went around behind the counter to see what I could find there, there were dozens of packs of cigarettes, and a few full cartons as well, but none of us smoked and this didn't seem like the ideal time to take up the habit, so I ignored them. The till on the register was open and it was empty of everything but a handful of pennies, which I left there. Coins were almost as useless as cigarettes. In a cupboard under the register I found a stack of porno magazines, which would have left me giddy six months before, but now were just junk to be tossed out of the way. Under them I found something much more valuable to us. A revolver. I whispered a triumphant “yes!”

“What did you find?” Luke asked.

I picked up the revolver from under the counter, stood up and placed it on the countertop to show Luke.

             
“There you go, man, the mother lode!” he said, beaming. He picked up the new weapon and examined it as I pulled my own out to compare the two. “Awesome, it’s a different make to yours, but it’s a .38 too, so it’ll use the same bullets. You can be the Two-Gun Kid, now.”

             
“Is that from some Old West video game?” I asked, sarcastically.

             
“Nope, he's a comic book character from the fifties and sixties,” Luke replied. “It was my dad's favorite comic.”

             
Replacing my revolver in the pocket of my parka, I checked the cylinder of the handgun I had just pulled from under the counter and found that it was empty of bullets. I checked it for rust and tested the action to make sure that it worked smoothly. It was fine and I fished six rounds out of my pocket and loaded it up before putting the safety on and slipping in into my belt. I decided to keep up my search behind the counter.
If this keeps up I'm going to need get a gun belt and some holsters
, I thought to myself.

I approached what appeared to be a fire safe built into the counter a few feet down from the register. The safe was unlocked and open a crack, which led me to believe that like the money in the till, any cash that had been in here was long gone, not that it would
do us any good anyway...American currency had become worth less than the paper it was printed on. I had no idea what the Chinese even called their money, but I figured it would soon become the currency of North America.

             
Knowing that there might be something more useful than money in there though, I reached down to open it. I caught a flurry of movement in my light beam and there was a cacophony of squeaks as I swung the safe door open.

A large brown rat leapt
at me and I stumbled backward, falling on my backside as I struggled to get away from it. It was as big as a cat and its squeaks became a hiss as it darted toward my legs. I kicked at it, missing badly, and watched as it darted past me and out from behind the counter.

             
“Are you okay, man?” Luke asked, glancing over from where he was standing by the almost empty drink coolers. He had a grin on his face.

             
“Yeah.”

I was
blushing, but happy that I hadn’t screamed- I would never have lived that down. “It was just kind of freaky, I've never really like rats.”

There was a shelf inside the safe. It contained a few old ledger books and some yellowed papers and scattered coins. I shuffled the papers out of the way and my eyes widened. I had uncovered a
box of .38 caliber ammo, hollow points, which I picked up and opened. It was about a third of the way full so I scooped out the bullets and added them to the ammo already in my pocket.

The bottom of the safe was a rat’s nest, literally, of bric-a-brac, chewed cardboard, small pi
eces of wood and plastic, paper and other unidentifiable stuff. I considered digging through it looking for anything of value but then decided that it was not going to be worth my time. Besides, there was no need to destroy the rat's home, if that is what it was, so I carefully closed the safe until it was only open a crack, just like I had found it.

             
Luke had wandered away from the coolers and was standing in front of some gauges and buttons set into a panel on the wall. I came out from behind the counter and walked over to join him. The panel was to control the three fuel pumps out in front of the station.

             
“I wonder if there's still some gas down in the tanks.” Luke said, as I wandered up beside him.

             
“I don't know, the gauges read empty, but that could be because there is no power reaching them.”

             
“That's what had me wondering, chief,” Luke said. “Be a shit fight to pump it out without power anyway, I guess.”

As he finished speaking we both caught the sound of tires crunching on the frozen gravel in front of the gas station. We clicked off our flashlights at the same time and scurried over to one of the boarded windows. Peeking through a crack, we could see that a Humvee had pulled into the lot, and we watched as four Chinese soldiers got out of the vehicle.

Adrenalin started coursing through my system. Three wore the trench coats that marked them as conscripts while the last was wearing urban camouflage, and carried a modern assault rifle like the one that I had left back in the cab of the truck. I could see that the driver was still in the Humvee. “Balls,” Luke cursed quietly. “What if they go and check out the garage?”

             
“If they do, we need to make sure that they can't report in,” I whispered back. “That means we have to take out the guy in the Hummer first.”

             
“That's not going to be easy,” Luke said. “Look again, there are
two
men in the Humvee.”

             
“Damn,” I said. Luke was right, I don't know how I missed it the first time, but there were two in the Humvee, the driver and a conscript. The conscript was standing, his upper half coming up through the vehicles roof as he manned a ring mounted machine gun.

             
“That's going to be hard to sneak up on,” Luke said. “If he sees us that thing will tear us a new one. Shit...”

The camouflaged soldier had waved two of the conscripts toward
s the garage behind the gas station and was leading the other one toward the front door, where we sat like sitting ducks.

Things were looking bad, and only got worse as we heard the sound of a helicopter in the distance. Luke had his crossbow up, focused on the door, eyes narrowed. I moved away from the boarded up window to crouch behind the end of the counter, a revolver in each hand. This two-gun kid was ready to go out in a blaze of glory, if need be. With a bit o
f luck we would take out the two coming to the door and then worry about the soldiers in the Humvee.

             
The sound of the chopper got louder, close enough that the building began to shake a little. It was clear the chopper was landing. We were cooked, well and truly. Luke risked a peek back out through the crack and lowered his crossbow. He waved me back over and I joined him to see that the soldiers we had been about to engage and the two that had been headed to the garage had turned to watch the helicopter land.

The camouflaged officer walked towards the
aircraft as dirt and debris started swirling in the yard of the gas station. The chopper set down about thirty feet behind the Hummer and the passenger door opened. A woman in a sleek black uniform jumped out with another similarly dressed male.

What happened next happened so quickly that it is still a blur even though I witnessed it firsthand. Ducking to avoid the rotors, the woman approached the officer from the Humvee. If he saw her take the pistol from the pocket of her black overcoat as he raised his hand in salute, he didn’t have a chance to react. She raised it and shot him through the face then walked forward with purposeful strides and shot the other soldier through the throat as he struggled to bring his weapon up.

Her companion had begun firing at the two who had been about to check the garage, he managed to wing one who fell to the ground screaming and clutching his thigh. The other turned and ran but another shot took him in the neck. He collapsed, dead before he hit the ground.