After Days (The After Days Trilogy) (8 page)

I awoke just before nightfall, when the dogs came back. We could hear them growling and snarling as they scratched at the garage door. That night we were more secure in the safety of our shelter and the rest of my group, including Luke, even managed to get to sleep despite the dogs yammering at the door.

I couldn’t however, and was awake until well after midnight with the .38 in my hand, listening to the dogs. Luke awoke in those early hours and took my gun, telling me to sleep. I didn’t protest, I was pretty exhausted by then.

             
Once again the dogs were gone before first light. We had a quick breakfast of cold beans and were ready to go within a half hour of the sun cresting the horizon. We hit the road, riding carefully to avoid patches of black ice. Sometime before midday it began snowing again, this time harder, and when we stopped to have lunch in a clear spot under some trees, I worried that we would not be able to make it too much further on our bicycles.

             
“Where are we?” I asked Luke, who'd spent most of our lunch stop studying the map of Massachusetts in his atlas.

             
“Based on the last crossroad's name, I am guessing that we are someplace right about here,” he said, jabbing at a spot on the map with his finger. It didn't look that far on the map. “We're probably five or six miles from Worcester,” he continued. “Should make it there in another hour and a half, maybe a bit longer if the weather keeps being a dick.”

             
“Now might be a good time to discuss what we do when we get there,” Brooke said. “Worcester's a city and there are bound to be Chinese patrols there.”

             
“I know I'd prefer to go around it, but that might not be possible given the weather,” I said.

             
“Going around would take us too far out of the way,” Luke chimed in. “A stealth run through it has to be the best way. It would save us time and distance.”

             
“Both paths are risky,” Ben said. “But given the weather, especially, I would think we should be striving to reach the haven as soon as possible. If that means dodging Chinese patrols then so be it. I think we should wait and make a go of it after dark.”

             
Luke nodded. “It would be easier to avoid the patrols that way.”

             
“Let's get up to the outskirts of town and make our decision then,” I replied. Going through seemed like the best course of action to me, and I could see the reasoning behind making the crossing at night, but I found the thought of traveling through the cold, dark night unsettling. I looked around at the snow falling beyond the trees that we were lunching under. “We should get back on it.”

             
“The dogs are back,” Sarah said, tugging on my sleeve and pointing down the road the way we had come.

             
“Everybody on their bikes, let’s go. Now!” I said.

My bicycle tire slipped
in the slushy covering that was beginning to form over the road for the first few turns of my pedals, but then it caught and the bike shot forward. Glancing back, I could see the others behind me. This time, rather than keeping their distance, the dogs started barking and gave chase.

              We rode as fast as we could under the circumstances, our bikes slipping and skidding on the icy road, but it was clear that we weren’t going to outrun them. We would run out of steam long before the desperate canines did – either that or one of us would end up skidding off the road and end up at the mercy of the pack. I looked around for some way out and spotted a large house ahead. It wasn't set as far back from the road as most of the other houses, and the short gravel driveway was mostly clear of snow and slush.
Please don't be locked
, the thought shot through my head so fast that I hardly had time to register it. I pointed to the house while shouting back at the others.

             
“There! Just dump the bikes in the yard,” I yelled. “Get up on the porch!” I angled off onto the driveway and jumped off the bike before it had stopped. I hit the ground running and slipped in a patch of snow, nearly doing the splits before catching myself. I felt a pang in my inner thigh, but the adrenalin running through me masked the pain at that moment. I scrambled up onto the porch, relieved to see that the others were all right there with me, the adrenalin of fear powering them all, even Sarah. Ben rushed to the door and I turned and scrambled to pull my gun from my pocket as the dogs charged across the lawn.

It was Luke that saved us from what may have been a disaster. With a guttural roar he jumped off the porch grabbing the shotgun from Ben’s basket and then charged at the oncoming pack, screaming unintelligibly. The sight of the crazy human was enough to cause some of t
he dogs to pull up and fall as they slid comically to a stop in the mud. Three kept coming. He fired his shotgun at the pit-bull that was leading the charge and it was flipped violently backwards by the blast. The rest of the dogs scattered, frightened by the loud blast and the yelping of their pack mate. Luke paused and watched as the dogs ran off and then racked the slide of the shotgun to load another round. He stepped up to the pit-bull. It was still thrashing on the ground and yelping. “Look away everybody,” he yelled.

I know the warning was mainly for the girls, but I also looked away and towards the door as Ben tried to jimmy it open. We all jumped as a second blast rang out and the agonized yips were abruptly cut off. When it was done I turned around with my revolver in hand as Luke pulled a blanket out of one of the packs and covered the dead dog.

              Luke ran back to us on the porch and we both kept watch with our guns ready. The dogs were reforming into a pack out on the road as Ben finally gave up trying to jimmy the door and attempted to ram it open with his shoulder. Sarah began tugging at the elbow of his parka. He shrugged her off to give the door another ineffectual bump with his shoulder. She didn’t give up and gave him another tug. It was then I noticed that she was holding a key. She had found it under the doormat while I was watching the dogs. Ben, looking sheepish and rubbing his shoulder, mumbled thanks and took the key. With my adrenalin running high, I had to suppress a crazy, inappropriate (given what had just happened with the dog) giggle.

Luke and I stood guard as the rest piled inside. The dogs still milled aimlessly, sniffing the air in our direction but hadn’t worked up the courage to come back f
or more. I motioned Luke inside and never taking my eyes off the pack, I stepped in behind him. 

             
The house was cold, and of course lacking in power and running water. There was no sign that anybody had been here for a while, and the moldering remains of a Christmas meal were in the refrigerator. Luke started to go up the stairs but encountered a horrible smell about halfway up so we decided to stay on the ground floor. No one wished to find out what was up there; we had enough of an idea. One thing the place did have going for it was a big fireplace with a dozen or so logs sitting next to it in the living room.

             
“Can we have a fire Isaac, please?” Sarah asked.

             
“Tonight, maybe, when the smoke won't be as noticeable,” I replied. “If no one else objects.”

             
“Sounds good to me, man,” Luke said. “I feel like it’s been ages since I've been really warm.”

             
“I'm going to see if there is any edible food left in this place,” Ben said, moving toward the doorway to the kitchen. “Maybe a pantry with some canned goods.”

             
“I'll help you,” his sister said, and followed him from the room.

             
“Should we get our stuff from the bikes?” Luke asked.

             
“The dogs are still out there, waiting,” I replied, looking out the window and watching the pack slowly creeping and sniffing around the lawn. When they got to their fallen pack mate, one of them, the Alsatian, sniffed at the dead pit-bull and then bit into its leg. A mutt tried to bite it as well and the big dog released the leg and snapped at it with a snarl. Realising there was food on offer, the rest of the dogs closed in and proceeded to fight and scrabble over the dead pit-bull. I closed the curtains, feeling sick.

“Hopefully they don't get into our stu
ff,” I said, not telling them what I’d just witnessed.

             
The twins found a stack of tinned food which included several cans of Irish stew and baked beans, in the kitchen cupboards. We all agreed that the tins of stew would make an excellent supper that night; frankly we were all sick of baked beans and knew they would be better cold than other foods while travelling, so we put them in our supplies.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon searching through the ground floor looking for anything that would prove useful on our trip. Very little of what we found was actually
suitable, although Sarah did uncover a box of small candy canes that we all eagerly tore into. Ben discovered an old boom box style radio with working batteries in the kitchen and we turned it on. Running it through the FM dial we expected to hear only static. We were shocked when we heard a couple of the stations broadcasting again.

             
Our rising hopes came down hard though when we realized that the stations were broadcasting in Chinese. Brooke, who had taken Mandarin in school for a year, said one was broadcasting in Mandarin and the other in what she thought was Cantonese. She could make out some of the words in the Mandarin broadcast, although one year of prep school Mandarin doesn’t really equate to any sort of proficiency in the language.

Both broadcasts just seemed to be repeating the same message over and over again, and seemed to be aimed at Chinese Americans. Checking the AM stations we again discovered the coded message about the safe haven, although it was now on a different frequency. Smart. It renewed my hopes that if we did find this place, it seemed organized and obviously the people there were thinking. To my untrained ears the
series of beeps sounded exactly the same as before, meaning that the message hadn’t changed, so after a while we shut it off.

             
“We should take the batteries when we leave, who can say when we'll come across more with juice in them,” Luke said, and everyone nodded in agreement.

By then it was getting dark, so we decided to go ahead and light the fire. I wanted to wait until it was fully dark, but the others were impatient and the look of longing on Sarah's face made my heart ache. Looking back, it is as if we somehow knew that this was to be her last night and that we would do whatever she wanted because... anyway, where was I... oh yeah. We lit the fire just as dusk fell.

              As the stew simmered over the fire, Sarah pulled out some old board games that she had found under the sofa in the living room. “We should play one,” she said.

             
“What have you got there?” Luke asked.

             
“Let’s see, Backgammon, Monopoly, Trouble and…Chinese Checkers,” she said, reading off the boxes. We were all thinking it, but as usual, it was Luke who made the move. He picked up the Chinese checkers box.

“Screw the Chinese!”

He tossed it onto the fire. We all watched silently as the flames licked around the edge of the worn box before it caught alight and burned. It was a futile gesture of defiance, but somehow it made me feel better, and I could tell from the faces of the others that they felt the same.

“So I guess it'll have to be Monopoly… or Trouble, if one of us sits out,” Brooke said.

              “If you guys want to play Trouble, go ahead,” I said. “I can watch the beans.”

             
“No,” Sarah shook her head. “We all have to play. Let’s play Monopoly.”

             
So that's what we did. As I said, there was something that prevented us from saying no to her that night. We let Sarah be the banker, and even though I am sure all of us saw her 'find' a few extra $500 bills when her money ran low, nobody said anything. We played and talked and laughed and had fun, truly enjoying ourselves for the first time since we had all come together. For a brief time we managed to forget the horrors of the previous few weeks and simply be kids.

             
The stew was delicious after days of cold food and we all slept well that night, warm and comfortable in front of the fire. I wished that we could have stayed there a few more days, or even permanently, but I knew that was not going to be possible. Luke and I had determined that we were going to have move on the next morning and travel hard before we found a place to hole up for a few hours before a night time dash across Worcester.

I hoped that the dead pit-bull had provided the pack with enough food so that they would lose interest in us, otherwise our passage through the city would be even more dangerous.
The next morning I stopped putting so much faith in hope, because of course it hadn’t been enough. The dogs had gotten into our stuff during the night and had torn our baskets apart looking for more food.

7

              I was in the kitchen gathering a few cans of creamed corn to take with us on the road when it happened. I heard screaming coming from the front of the house. I rushed toward the living room, pulling my revolver from my pocket as I ran. The sound of snarling and snapping dogs mingled with the shrieking. I saw that the front door was open and Sarah was surrounded by dogs on the lawn about halfway to where we'd left the bikes laying. Luke was already on the porch with the shotgun in his hands, but I could tell that he was hesitant to shoot for fear of hitting Sarah.

             
I brought the .38 up and pulled the trigger, it jumped in my hand as the report rang out. My aim was purposefully over the heads of the dogs and Sarah in an attempt to scare them away; it didn’t work. Some of the dogs shrank away but others continued tearing at her. Her bloodcurdling screams were muffled as she had been pushed down into the snow by their assault.

At the sound of my revolvers report, Luke's hesitation broke
and he too leveled his gun, aiming at one of the dogs furthest away from Sarah. He squeezed the trigger and the shotgun boomed. The black Alsatian pitched over and laid twitching in the snow.

The pack took more notice of us then, with all but one, a heavy American bulldog, forgetting Sarah for the moment and approaching the porch with their hackles raised, growling. The bulldog continued ripping at her shoulder as she screamed in agony. As soon as I felt
that the lead dog, a skeletal and ugly Doberman, was far enough away from Sarah, I shot it in the head with the revolver.

             
From behind me there was a shout and Ben rushed among the dogs. He swung the poker from the fireplace like a mad man, shouting at the dogs using all sorts of British curse terms that I probably would have found humorous in other circumstances.

The dogs yelped and gave ground before him
, but not quickly enough. Ben brought the bar of the poker down hard upon the muscled back of the bulldog and it squealed, turning to snarl at its attacker. He swung again, collecting it in the side of its thick skull and it ran off yelping as he bent to pick Sarah up, hoisting her small bleeding form over his shoulder.

He ran toward the porch with her and had almost made it when a second emaciated Doberman sank its teeth into the backside of his ski pants. Ben screamed in agony and dropped Sarah onto the steps, while swinging behind him with the poker in a furious attempt to dislodge the dog’s jaw.

              Luke and I stepped forward at the same time, I grabbed Sarah under the arms and heaved her up onto the porch before dragging her inside, while Luke placed the shotgun against the Doberman's chest and pulled the trigger. The four remaining dogs scattered, and I heard Luke firing off more shots at them as they ran.

             
Laying Sarah in front of the fireplace, I looked her over. She had stopped screaming and seemed to be unconscious. Her right arm was mangled and she had multiple bites on her other arm and on both legs. I could tell that she was bleeding badly, and even as a fifteen year old with no medical training, I knew that was not a good thing. Luke came in helping Ben over to us; Ben was limping a little, and white fluff protruded from his ski pants. He seemed to be more angry than hurt. A pale Brooke stood in the kitchen doorway looking stunned.

             
“Is she okay?” Luke asked.

             
“No... Does she look okay?” I snapped. “What the hell was she doing out there?”

             
“She went out to get something from her bike basket, I told her not to go, but she went anyway.”

             
“We...
I
…said that we'd protect her,” I said, rage and anguish fighting for control of my emotions. Looking back now, I realize it was the first time that I had felt those things since the death of my parents and sister. “Brooke, go to the bathroom, see if there are some clean towels, we need to try to stop the bleeding.”

             
“I am sorry I couldn't get to her faster, Isaac,” Ben said, sitting awkwardly on a living room chair with one half of his butt raised. “If I'd been faster maybe...”

             
“No, no blame is going to be passed around here today,” I said. “We all need to look out for each other, but on the other hand we also all need to be responsible for ourselves.”

             
“Fuck!” It was the first time I had ever heard Luke use an obscenity harder than ‘crap’ and in it I heard his anguish, rage and maybe even regret.

              We did what we could to staunch the bleeding and I made the call to build a fire in the fireplace to keep her warm. While it was dangerous to light a fire in the day, it seemed important to keep her comfortable. Brooke sat with Sarah's head in her lap in front of the fire, while Luke and I pressed towels to the bites. Brooke had also found some peroxide in the bathroom, and we splashed some of that on the wounds to try to keep them from getting infected. By noon I could no longer discern any breath coming from Sarah's nostrils. Her face was as peaceful and calm as I’d ever seen it.

             
“At least she's stopped bleeding,” Brooke said. “Maybe now she can start getting better.”

             
Luke, his face serious, looked at me and shook his head. He didn’t need to say the words.  I had read a book once, a long time ago or so it seems now, that had one line that stuck in my mind. '
The dead don't bleed.
' I let Brooke continue to hold Sarah's head while I went over to her brother.

             
Ben was standing by the front window, leaning against the wall looking out at the bloody snow and dead dogs scattered over the ground. “How are you doing?”

             
“I must say that I've been better,” Ben said with a grimace. “But after looking it over in the bathroom mirror, the bite on my bum isn't nearly as bad as it feels. I might be limping for a couple of days, but I'll live. Lucky I had jeans on under my snow pants, his teeth didn’t break the skin, but it’s pretty bruised.” He looked at me, perhaps sensing that I wasn’t only there to check up on him. “What about Sarah?”

             
“She's gone,” I said quietly, “Brooke doesn't realize it yet, but I think she died about ten minutes ago.”

             
“Damn it,” Ben said, shaking his head. He looked like he wanted to cry but had no more tears to spill. “Poor Sarah…you want me to talk to Brooke?”

             
“If you could, I just don't know what to say.”

             
He nodded and pushed himself back from the wall. “I can't say I know what to say either,” he said and started limping to where his sister sat by the fireplace, still clinging to Sarah and smoothing down her hair.

             
I walked out onto the front porch, hand on the revolver in my pocket in case the dogs had returned. I didn't know what to do. Should we try to bury Sarah? Just leave her body behind? I walked down the porch steps and gave the cold body of the Doberman a kick to the side. I felt tears on my cheeks, and this time rage won out, my foot lashed out again and again kicking the dead dog over and over as I let out a muttered string of obscenities. Finally I sat down on the steps breathing heavily, the tears still flowing down my cheeks.

             
“Isaac?” Luke was calling for me from the door way. “Isaac, I think we need to get out of here.” I stood up and turned to look at him and as I did so I heard it too, the faint rumble of a helicopter in the distance. I looked up to see the smoke from the fireplace rising white against the slate gray sky.

             
“Quick, let's grab what we can and go,” I said. “We'll have to go on foot, staying in the trees.” Luckily much of the land on either side of the road we'd followed to this point had been lightly forested.

             
“What about Sarah?” he asked, as I ran to the bikes and started pulling out anything useful and light enough to carry on foot.

             
“We'll have to leave her here,” I said, although the very thought of it pained me. “We can’t take her with us and we don't have any time to bury her…”

             
“No. We can’t leave her like that,” he said defiantly. I paused and looked at him and he elaborated. “Why don’t we set the house alight, cremate her so she isn’t eaten by animals or rotting like the people upstairs. It might also distract the helicopter.”             

             
“Yes, yes all right, do it quick while I get the others out.”

We had run around like maniacs gathering what belongings we could as quickly as possible. Luke stopped for a moment to place a sheet over Sarah’s body and surprised me yet again when he leaned over and kissed her shrouded forehead. That was what amounted to her funeral and as the hum of the chopper blades got louder, Luke put a match to the kerosene he had poured over the sitting room floor and furniture
and we ran out of the house.

A few minutes later we
were watching as the chopper circled the burning house. The old timber building had burned quickly and as we hid in the cover of the trees watching the oily smoke rise into the grey sky, Brooke’s wracking sobs were the only sound that interrupted the heavy chop, chop, chop of the helicopter blades. That day started out horribly and only got worse from there.