After the Fall Read online

  After the Fall

  When the world ends, what’s left to care about?

  Taylor Stone is no hero. She has three simple rules for life after the plague: Keep moving. Keep to yourself. Don’t get involved. The plague took a particular joy in killing the women of the world, making it that much harder for the few who survived. The only thing that matters since she escaped from a small farm outside of Pittsburgh is the truth waiting at the end of her journey home. The rest of the world, or what’s left of it, can go straight to Hell as far as she’s concerned.

  When a group of survivors offers her food and shelter, she is more than happy to spend a few days, take what she needs, and get out, like she always does. But in a place called Burninghead Farm, despite all her rules and plans, Taylor finds a group of people who have more to offer than the basics of survival. Most of all, there is Kate, a woman who makes Taylor realize love is still alive and makes her dream of a future she thought was no longer possible. If only Taylor can find the courage to fight for it.

  It turns out that the end of the world isn’t about the end of the world at all, but about what happens after.

  Chapter One

  I feel the vibration in the air before I hear the rumbling. I slide the bat out from the makeshift scabbard with practiced ease and slip it down to my side. The bat’s name is Mugsy, at least if you are on friendly terms with it. If you’re not, then it is simply a bar of chipped aluminum coming at your head, and its name isn’t of any particular importance to you.

  For the last three months, as I have marched and slogged and pounded my way toward home, Mugsy has been my protector, my savior, and my best friend. Mugsy is comfortable in my hand, familiar and powerful and…safe. Safety isn’t something you take for granted anymore, and I never take Mugsy for granted.

  A gun would be better. Guns have become popular again, not that they had ever been particularly unpopular before. This new world has more in common with the Wild West than with the twenty-first century, at least if Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp had owned semiautomatics. Everyone seems to have one, and I know that bringing a bat to a gunfight is a little like throwing a snowball at a forest fire, but still...I have a thing about guns. The muzzle flash igniting the pitch-black night, the sonic boom ringing in my ears, the acrid tang of gunpowder filling my nostrils. Yet all I see is a body falling in the woods, and all I hear is the strangled cry of a boy who died trying to save me.

  “Well, Mugs,” I say, looking down at the scratched and scarred maroon paint, “you ready?”

  Mugsy winks at me. Yes, Mugsy is a girl, and she doesn’t so much wink at me as reflect sunlight into my eyes, but I know that no matter what is about to crest the hill in front of us, we will be okay. We have come too far, seen too much, and are too close to our goal.

  The lie sounds much better than the truth. These days, it always does.

  Diesel chokes the air as the flatbed rises before me. Three silhouettes crowd the cab. I tighten my hand around Mugsy’s rubber grip and spread my feet apart a little wider, which gives me a more balanced stance. Apart from that, though, you wouldn’t notice any outward change in my demeanor. I learned early on not to give away too much. A threatening posture seldom serves any purpose but to make my ass a target for a thorough kicking, and I have found that my newly svelte frame deceives strangers into believing I’m not dangerous. It’s an advantage I can use. Although I don’t know the driver’s or his traveling companions’ intentions, I know full well what they could be, and that is enough to make the hairs on my body stand up and salute. I have met both good and bad on this terrible journey, and heard of worse and better. I figure I have a fifty-fifty shot of getting out of this unscarred and alive. I can’t really ask for better odds than that.

  The truck slows, and it is all I can do to keep my left hand from gripping Mugsy below my right. My mouth is a desert. My senses are sharper, heightened. I have been here before.

  The truck stops, suffocating the mild September day. No doors open, no voices call out. Sunlight glints off the windshield, keeping me from seeing the faces of my would-be attackers or saviors. Then a shout, and a blur racing toward me. I bend my knees and tense, squinting to make out what it is that’s about to try and do me in.

  It skids to a stop in front of me, sizing me up with a swift head-cock. I stay still, not wanting to provoke the small-yet-powerful mutt, waiting for it to make up its mind about me. Then it is grinning up at me and rolls over onto its back, begging for a tummy rub. His tongue—I can tell the dog is a he now—is lolling out of the side of his mouth as he waits patiently. I start to reach down, but the familiar crack of a shotgun being chambered stops me dead. “Stop right there!” a gruff voice booms from behind the gun’s barrel. The dog stops panting, looking up at me uncertainly. He is full of questions he can’t possibly articulate.

  “Rusty, come back here!” a woman shrieks. I don’t know what threat she thinks I pose, but I don’t blame the woman for being scared. Every stranger is a threat, an unknown force full of unknown intentions. I have more reason to be scared than she, however, what with the shotgun pointed at my chest and half a dozen people standing with clenched fists in a semicircle near the truck. I hadn’t even noticed them.

  So much for my heightened senses.

  “Margie, let me handle this,” the man behind the shotgun says. His eyes never leave me.

  I look down again at the dog, who has exchanged confusion for fear. The people are yelling, which is never good. I lift both hands up in the air in the universal sign for “don’t shoot my sorry ass” but keep my eyes on the dog.

  “You better get back over there with your family,” I say softly. “We wouldn’t want them to get upset with you, now would we?”

  The dog rolls to his feet, looking over to his humans and then back up at me. He swipes my hand once with his tongue, and then happily trots back to the truck. I turn my attention fully to the gun and the limited future I seem to have left.

  “What’s your business here?” the man shouts.

  I look across the motley crew before me and start to think the man means me no real harm. Sure, he might kill me, but any man traveling with a woman, a dog, two teenage boys, and a grandfatherly type can’t possibly intend the kinds of things I am afraid a group in a truck intends.

  I decide to be honest with him. Mugsy will back me up if my judgment is wrong, or I will be dead.

  “Walking, sir,” I say. “Trying to get home.”

  He eyes me, like he’s heard my story a time or two only to find out the hard way it’s all a lie.

  “Where’s home?”

  “Illinois.”

  “Where you coming from?”

  “Washington, DC.”

  He falls silent, sizing me up. There is little left of Washington, and he knows it. Everybody knows it. Some people say DC is where the whole nightmare started, and maybe they’re right. Lab rats in a maze. That’s what it felt like, knowing the whole world was watching us to see what would happen. But soon there were others, other cities, other people. Eventually, everything just shut down. People fled, looking for God-only-knew what. Hope? Salvation? But there was none to be found, not for us, not for anyone.

  Those of us who stayed watched the city crumble, figuratively at first, with the feds deserting us to set up command posts at undisclosed locations, leaving a vacuum of power and order and a great, seeping vulnerability. Then the metaphor went literal on us, because as with most vulnerabilities, someone figured out a way to exploit it. But I had left by then.

  We’ll never know for sure, I don’t think, how it all started or why no one could stop it. There’s no twenty-four-hour cable news to show us what happened, no Internet to feed us every scrap of information, relevant or not. Who cares now
, anyway? The plague came, it took, and eventually it passed, leaving one hell of a messed-up world behind. Those of us who survived lived through every terrible second of it. No recap is needed or desired.

  “The last refugees from Washington came through two months ago,” he says. “When did you head out?”

  “Five months, three days, a few hours. Give or take.”

  Another pause.

  “You’ve been traveling all this time?” he asks. His words hold less accusation now. He’s starting to put it together. But I’m still staring at a gun. I take a long, deep breath, trying to calm my nerves.

  Just the short truth. No need for the long. Nothing there but pain.

  “Yes, sir,” I say. “I left just before the city went white. Waited too long, I guess, but I had friends there. Then it was time to go.”

  The man behind the gun prods me. “And you left?”

  The rest of the story comes with practiced ease. “I made it maybe one hundred fifty miles before the gas ran out. I waited for more in Pennsylvania, but it never came. So I started walking. Now I’m here.”

  He does the math in his head. I don’t make him ask the question.

  “I had some…trouble.”

  The pieces all seem to fall into place. He nods curtly. He’s heard the stories, maybe had his own experiences. He glances over at the woman he called Margie and closes his eyes, perhaps against the images I imagine are now ruining his mind. When he turns back to me, his face has softened and his eyes are shimmering.

  I appreciate the empathy, but I will not be pitied.

  “But I’ve got Mugsy with me now,” I say with a mirthless laugh, slapping the bat against the palm of my hand, “and we won’t tolerate trouble like that again.”

  The shotgun falls away. Concerned murmurs pass among the group, but a single glance back from him silences any dissension. The decision has been made.

  “Can we offer you a ride?” he asks. “We’ve got a place not too far from here, some food, water, the basics. You’re welcome to join us.”

  It could be a trap. Of course it could. The lowering of the gun, the softening of his voice, the confusion that flits between the others could all be an elaborate put-on designed to lure me in. I’ve met those kinds of people, the ones that set you up only to knock you down hard. But I’ve also met enough of the other kind to have a pretty good sense of which is which. So I nod, my stomach throwing a parade at the mention of food. He hands his shotgun off to one of the boys, who I realize will be watching me carefully even if the man has decided I am okay.

  “Make room in the back, boys,” he calls out as they load back into the truck. “Name’s Buck, by the way.”

  “Taylor,” I say. “Taylor Stone.”

  Chapter Two

  The air was still, like it always seemed to be since the plague. It could be suffocating at times, the stillness of it all. At least that was how Duncan felt about it. Some days, it was like the whole planet was conspiring to choke him with its stillness, and Duncan had to fight just to keep breathing. Other days, it was a peaceful refuge, for with the stillness came the quiet. A soothing, consuming blanket full of quiet. He liked those days better than the ones where the earth was trying to kill him.

  Duncan sunk his shovel back into the dirt, sending fine particles up into the stillness. He watched them hang for a moment before they lazily drifted back down. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  He was covered in dirt, more of a mud, really, as it mixed with his sweat. He wiped his brow with his forearm, smiling at the dark streak he could feel imprinting onto his skin. The dirt did not bother him. It made him feel useful, and Duncan liked feeling useful. It gave him something to focus on besides the stillness.

  He glanced over his shoulder, watching the others sink the post into the ground, burying it deep. The men he was working with respected his work ethic. It was important to Duncan that these men respected him, even if they refused to accept him as a man. As one of them. To them, despite all the work he had put in since he had gotten here, Duncan was still just some local kid that Buck had taken in a couple of months ago.

  He looked farther down the line of freshly cemented posts that they had been laying for close to a week. They had accomplished a lot in seven days, and he was proud. Only a few more posts to go, then they could start laying the crossbeams that would serve as the bracing for the heavy steel sheets that would make up the wall that would surround the entire property. The wall was important, and he was happy to be a part of its construction. Duncan figured they would have the wall finished in about two months, though he really did not know for sure. He had never helped build a fortress before.

  The first snow should still be at least ten weeks off, just enough time to finish the wall, but the weather being what it was here, it could come sooner. If they were going to finish the wall before winter, they would need the snow to hold off and the ground to stay thawed. After that, Duncan was not sure what he would be doing, but he was not worried. There would be something to do, some new project for him to focus his attention on. There always was.

  Duncan turned back to his digging, easing the dry dirt out of the hole and onto the pile beside it. He worked methodically, taking a moment after every third shovelful of earth to take a deep breath and rest. It was not particularly warm, but the midday sun beat down hard and heavy, making Duncan feel like an egg on the hood of a ’69 Chevy. He could almost hear himself sizzle. So he worked short breaks into his work, although he liked to think of them more as pauses than breaks. Breaks implied laziness, while pauses were sensible, designed to prevent toppling over from heatstroke. Something his daddy had taught him when he was a kid.

  Kid. Pfft. I ain’t no kid. Not anymore.

  He may have been only sixteen, but there was no way in hell or heaven he was still a kid. The plague had seen to that. When his parents had gotten sick, he had taken on every chore, every responsibility, everything that could or needed to be done. It had been too much, really, but he had done it because it needed doing. Then they were gone, and he was alone. But he had survived, and now he was here doing a man’s work. He might still have a bit of a reckless streak, still have a touch of a wild side, still be a tad impulsive, and still crack a ridiculously disgusting joke from time to time, but these things were just traces of the boy he had been, not childish imperfections in the man he had become. Not in his mind, anyway.

  It was during one of his pauses that Duncan felt an interruption in the stillness. He saw the plume of dust from the road to the north, the telltale sign of an approaching vehicle. The dust rolled over itself, closer and closer until he could make out the unmistakable sight of Buck’s flatbed coming home.

  Home. Such a funny word. A few months ago, he could not have imagined thinking of any place other than his folks’ house as home, but now Burninghead Farm was his home, and he would do everything in his power to protect it.

  “Buck’s back,” Tony called out from behind him. No more words were needed. Duncan and the rest of the men started packing up their tools and loaded them into the pickup. The gear stowed, they piled into the truck and headed toward the house to await what Buck had brought.

  Chapter Three

  I sit on the back edge of the flatbed, my feet dangling above the road rushing beneath us. The others have tucked in near the back of the cab, putting a large stack of heavy metal sheets between themselves and the new girl with the bat strapped to her back. Only the dog is brave enough to come near me. He is hunkered down next to me, fast asleep. I laugh to myself. There are a lot of things in this brave new world to fear, and I’m not even close to being at the top of the list, but they don’t seem to know that. I don’t mind, really. Their fear means a wide berth, and that suits me just fine. I like the space, if not the quiet.

  I used to crave the quiet. I sought it out, needing the freedom I found in it. Freedom to think, freedom to not think, freedom to breathe and rest and contemplate and, sometimes, freedom to just be. My head used to get no
isy, polluted with the day-to-day and the what-ifs and the might-have-beens and the should-bes to the point that I needed the quiet like I needed oxygen. Without it, my brain would have imploded from the pressure. The quiet saved me.

  But that was then, and now I hate the quiet like little else. Now it brings me chaos instead of peace, pain instead of relief. The quiet no longer saves me.

  The truck turns, and I read the name above the gates as we pass through them. Burninghead Farm.

  Buck Burninghead? That’s unfortunate.

  I don’t know if this farm belongs to Buck, but it feels right. Not that it matters. Burninghead Farm is simply another stop on my journey, a brief pause to let me rest and gather my strength and then get the hell out. Buck is willing to give, and I am more than happy to take what his farm has to offer and then leave it behind. I am a john after a night of indecency, but it isn’t the first time. And there will certainly be no money left on any nightstand.

  That’s Rule Number Three. No, not the money thing. Rule Number Three is Don’t Get Involved.

  People fall into two categories since the plague: helpful and not helpful. The usual distinctions you used to make about people, like good and bad, are largely irrelevant to the question of whether you are going to survive another day. Everyone has the capacity for evil when pushed to their limits, and trying to decide who’s good and who’s bad is rather pointless, considering that everyone has been pushed way too far.

  It is much easier to simply decide whether someone is helpful or not. All you need to do is figure out what you need at any given point, whether the person has what you need, and whether they are willing to give it. That last one doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out, either. The gun pointed at your face or the fist slamming into your jaw are pretty good indications that someone doesn’t feel like sharing.

  Yeah, Rule Number Three is pretty simple.

  There are three rules in all.

  Rule Number One: Keep Moving.