After the End (7 page)

She smiled. "Okay, player. I'm going over there now." She pointed to the shoe aisle, where Deb and Mrs. Scheider were finding good walking shoes to replace their high heels. Her smile disappeared as she reported to Ari what she'd learned on the phone. "By the way, my mom and dad in Ohio say this attack is happening there, too. There haven't been announcements on the news, just conjecture, and the government isn't giving and information."

Ari frowned. "There must be a battery powered radio somewhere in the building. I'll look for one."

Lila removed the hunting vest as she passed Hector, speaking in rapid Spanish into his cell phone. She tried to catch the gist of the conversation from his expression. With his thick brows knitted it was hard to tell if he was upset or relieved.

She reached the shoe aisle where Deb reached to the top shelf for a box. Several other shoe boxes littered the ground around her feet.

"How's it going?" Lila offered a little smile.

Deb shook her head. "Great. Not enough to be in the middle of a disaster, but I can't find a pair of shoes that fit." She lifted a white, gray and orange patterned tennis shoe from the tissue in the box and stared at it. "Did you talk to your family?"

Lila reiterated what she'd told Ari about the situation extending nationwide. "What about you? Did you reach your girlfriend?"

Deb's expression was as grim as Hector's. "No, but sometimes she turns her cell off when she's at work."

"God, this is a nightmare." Lila moved down to the six and half section and grabbed a pair of tennis shoes at random. "I keep thinking I'll wake up, that it couldn't possibly be real."

"Or we're being punked on a grand scale," Deb said dryly.

Mrs. Scheider came around the corner of the shelving unit wearing a pair of pristine white nurse shoes with her tan pant suit and pearls.

"Were you able to reach anyone, Mrs. Scheider?" Lila asked.

"My daughter in Connecticut. She and the children are all right. They've got some kind of shelter set up in the town hall, where everyone is gathering. Soldiers evacuated the houses and are on guard at the shelter. But Christine's husband is in the city and she can't reach him. The connection was terrible and part way through our conversation her phone went dead." Mrs. Scheider's mouth was tight, but her calm voice betrayed none of her worry. Cool under pressure. Lila admired that.

Deb sat on the floor to pull on the pair of shoes she'd selected. "My girlfriend, Julie works in a research and development lab. It's not far from here. I was going to meet her for lunch today." Her voice grew thick and she swallowed hard.

Lila knelt beside her and patted her back. "She's probably all right. Try not to worry." Her words were as useless as condolences to the bereaved, but she had to say something.

"I've got to get to her. I don't care what any of you say. I'm going." Deb tied her shoes with emphatic tugs of the laces.

"Putting yourself at risk won't help your friend," Mrs. Scheider said. "We must work from logic not emotion if we're going to get through this."

Lila frowned at her. Wise counsel wasn't what Deb needed at the moment. She settled onto the floor beside Deb to try on her own pair of shoes and changed the subject. "How long have you and Julie been together?"

"Five years. We had a commitment ceremony last fall. We're thinking about adopting."

"That's nice." Lila searched for something else to say. Small talk was beyond her at the moment, but she knew Deb needed the distraction. "A baby or an older child?"

Deb propped her arms on her knees and looked at Lila, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "Maybe a little girl about five or six. There are so many older children who need homes, but they come with a lot of baggage. I don't know if I'm ready to deal with that."

"Do you work?" Lila continued to ask questions, trying to ease Deb's tension and maybe her own.

"I have a small, home-based business so I could continue to work but be with the kid when she gets home from school."

Static blasted from a radio at the front checkout counter. Lila and Deb scrambled to their feet and went to join the others. Ari had found an old boombox and put in fresh batteries. He turned the dial slowly but nothing except crackling fuzz came through the speakers.

"The main power grid must've been destroyed by something." Joe rested his folded arms on the counter and cocked his head toward the radio.

The rest of them clustered shoulder to shoulder, concentrating on the slender thread that would connect them to the world outside. At last a broken transmission came from the speaker, a man's voice in short bursts interspersed with snow.

"Go back, go back! You got it." Hector waved his hand.

Ari fiddled with the tuner and the antenna sticking up from the boombox until the voice came in clearer, then he turned up the volume. The smooth delivery of a professional reporter was replaced by the shock of a terrified man.

"Reports coming out of Washington are conflicting. No official explanation for the phenomenon has been given. Indications are that events occurring throughout the United States may be facets of a widespread terrorist attack. Power outages, violent assaults and accounts of…cannibalism have been reported in all major cities. People are encouraged to stay indoors or find safe shelter until the crisis has been resolved. Military troops and transports are deployed nationwide. From Denver comes an unsubstantiated report of a skirmish between National Guardsmen and possibly unarmed civilians causing an unconfirmed number of casualties."

The reporter's voice was obliterated by static. Ari rotated the antenna, searching for the signal and caught more fragments of the news bulletin. "…at least fifty confirmed dead…witnesses described the attackers as 'zombies'…scientists claim the phenomenon might be… We interrupt this broadcast for a press briefing from the White House…"

"There! You got it. Stop moving the damn thing," Hector shouted.

But the announcer's voice almost immediately broke up again. Ari tried for several minutes to get the station back then stepped away from the radio with a curse. Joe took his place, scanning up and down the dial for another signal, but only static came from the radio.

"If we could find a battery-powered laptop with an air card for satellite reception, we'd have the whole internet for information," Derrick said. "All this stupid store's got is a couple of desktops in the offices in back. I checked. We need to get to an electronic store."

"No. I need to go find my girlfriend. I'm not waiting any more." Deb shouldered the rifle Ari had assigned her. In the camo-vest and pants she wore, she looked like an entirely different woman than the one Lila had first seen on the train. Her dark face was fierce, her jaw set and her eyes narrowed. She looked like a warrior ready for battle.

The others tried to convince her of the wisdom of staying with the group.

"I've got my family in Queens, my wife and my little girls. You think I don't want to get to them? But there ain't no way," Hector said.

"Because it's clear across the city and over the bridge. But Julie's only a few blocks away," Deb argued.

"We should find someone in authority. There must be patrolling police or even soldiers," Ann said. "There's probably someplace they're sending everyone to keep them safe."

"Like the Astrodome after Katrina? What a great idea," Deb scoffed.

Derrick loudly pressed for a trip to Best Buy, while Ronnie whined about wanting her mommy, the poor kid. The clamor of voices grew as everyone expressed an opinion about what they should do, where they should go or told about the loved ones they needed to reach. Their bickering voices rose above the continuing static of the radio.

Lila wanted to retreat someplace absolutely silent, wrap her arms around herself and rock until this bad dream was over. She looked at Ari, who'd walked away from the group to sit on the floor and lean against a shelving unit displaying fishing rods. Resting his arms on his knees, he closed his eyes. She studied his strong jaw, his full lips pressed grimly tight and the spatters of blood on his olive drab T-shirt. God, what he'd had to do to that thing in the subway and no one had even remembered to thank him for it.

She went over and sat beside him, offering a bottle of water from her tote bag. "Here."

He opened his eyes and accepted the bottle. "Thanks." He uncapped and drank deeply, his Adam's apple bobbing with each swallow.

A little flutter of heat in her belly made Lila look away. It was so wrong to be attracted to a stranger while her loved ones and maybe the entire world was in jeopardy. She gazed at the industrial green carpet on the floor. "So, how are you doing?"

"Fine. You?"

"Holding up." Unable to think of anything to say, she was glad to sit in silence for a few minutes. Finally, she spoke again. "Hey, thanks for what you did, killing that thing. It must've been hard."

He shrugged. "Had to be done."

"No one else was brave enough to do it. How long have you been in the army?"

His smile was a tight grimace. "Three months. I'm home on leave from BCT. I'm supposed to leave for Arizona next week for AIT."

Lila wrinkled her nose at all the military acronyms. "Why does all that mean?"

"Basic combat training is the same for everyone," he explained. "After that you go for advanced training in different places. At FortHuachuca I'd be learning intelligence gathering techniques."

Torture training?
Lila wondered but didn't ask.

Ari gave back the nearly empty bottle. "What about you? Where were you going when this happened?"

"Classes at NYU." She thought of her professors and other students and wondered what they were all doing. Had anyone made it to class today?

"What's your major?" he asked the obligatory question as if they were making small talk at some party.

"Undeclared. I'm in the Liberal Studies course at the College of Arts and Sciences. Pretty soon I'll have to decide on a field of study." Two years into the program and she still wasn't certain what that field would be.

Then she realized it probably didn't matter any more. Here she spoke of the future as if everything was normal, but they now lived in a world overrun by zombies. In a few brief moments, between taking a ride to school and the train coming to an abrupt halt, the world had changed, and along with it, her perception of how the universe worked. She'd believed life was life and death was death with little overlap besides an occasional near death experience. Now she would never be the same. None of them would be.

Lila looked at Ari and lowered her voice. "Are you scared? Cause you don't act scared."

A real smile flashed across his mouth and he gave a sharp bark of a laugh. "Am I scared? Good question."

* * * * *

Chapter Five

He was numb and his stomach felt sour and sick like the morning after a night of partying but without any of the fun of getting drunk. Was he scared? He was beyond it, running on pure adrenalin and instinct. Even as he'd demonstrated how to load and fire a rifle or searched for a radio or gathered supplies his brain had replayed killing the zombie over and over. He felt the jolt of the pole in his hands as it hit the thing's body, the yielding flesh when he tried to impale the neck and, worst of all, the sensation of sawing through flesh and bone with the too blunt edge of the metal shelf. Beyond afraid, beyond horrified, he was fucking traumatized.

"I've had better days," he said dryly.

Lila smiled, a little quirk of her lips that brought out a dimple in one cheek. "Yeah, me too. If you'd asked me earlier in the day, I would've said last night was about the worst experience I'd gone through in my life. This kind of puts it in perspective."

"Why, what happened last night?"

"I broke up with my boyfriend of two years, and I thought it would go better than it did. He's usually a calm guy, but he was upset to say the least." She shook her head and her bangs fell over her eyes. She absently pushed them back, a gesture he was becoming familiar with. Ari wanted offer her a barrette or something.

"Anyway, it was an ugly scene," she continued. "I was feeling pretty crappy about it on the train right before all hell broke loose."

"Hell on earth," he murmured, leaning his head back against the cool metal display rack and watching the others' faces as they argued. "Have to say, it's more fun fighting zombies in a video game than in real life."

"What you had to do must've been awful." A frown puckered her brows, and the strands of hair she'd pushed back fell forward again. He longed to brush them out of her eyes that were a deep shade of blue that almost bordered on purple.

"Yeah, well, we all might have to be ready to kill the way things are shaping up," he answered gruffly.

 "I don't even squash bugs when I find them indoors. I take them outside and let them go."

"These aren't bugs. They're not even really alive. I think you can feel justified in putting them out of their misery. If those bodies' real owners were still alive, they'd thank you for it."

"I suppose you're right." Lila smiled briefly and the dimple in her cheek flashed again. "Some brave new world, huh?"

She rested her chin on her drawn up knees, silent for a moment before she added, "I'm worried about my ex. It sounded like the hospital is overrun."

"My mom works there, too and I haven't been able to reach her. I know how Deb feels. I want to go to her, but I guess we're all stuck with each other for a while." Ari thought he could probably make it on his own if they all split up, but some of the others would be helpless. It wouldn't be right to ditch them.

"Guess so." Lila exhaled and started to climb to her feet. "And I guess we need to be a part of this." She nodded toward the escalating argument. "We're going to have to make some decisions and it's probably better if everyone's not yelling at each other—especially since they're all armed."

What he wouldn't give to be back at training camp with someone barking out orders all he had to do was follow. He followed Lila back toward the others.

"Hey," he said, and when everyone continued to loudly promote his or her own agenda, he repeated more sharply, "Hey! Listen."