Free After: The Shock by Scott Nicholson Page A

could clearly hear the
Zaphead banging away above them.
    The
room next door was 202, and judging from the spacing of the doorways, it
appeared to be a suite as well. They paused before the laminated door,
listening, but the music had stopped. Rachel nudged DeVontay, and he slipped
the master key in the lock.
    The
tumblers clattered in their own loud music, and the banging upstairs stopped.
    “Shit,”
DeVontay hissed.
    Rachel
pushed him into the room. The curtains were parted, throwing a wash of gray
light across the carpet. Blankets were wadded over a hump on one of the beds,
and the air was rank with decay. A boy of about ten knelt on the floor, a doll
clutched to his chest. The doll was undressed, and the boy was twisting a knob
back and forth that protruded from the doll’s back.
    He
looked up at them with wide brown eyes, his face stricken with guilt. “It
broke.”
    Rachel
knelt and put her hands on his shoulders, trying not to weep. DeVontay peeled
back the blanket to verify what their noses had already told them.
    “Is
that your mother?” Rachel asked gently, afraid the boy might see her tears and
have his own breakdown.
    “She
didn’t wake up,” the boy said.
    “We
better get out of here,” DeVontay said. “I don’t think the guy upstairs is
going to wait for the elevator.”
    “Come
on,” Rachel said, taking the boy’s hand and pulling him toward the hall.
    The
boy gave one last look back at the figure on the bed, at a past that no longer
made sense to any of them, and allowed her to lead him into After.

 
     
    CHAPTER
EIGHT
     
    Marina was crying.
    Not
out loud, which would have disturbed him. They were safe, he was pretty sure of
that, as safe as anyone could be these days. But still Marina’s sniffling and
small grunts unsettled him. He couldn’t show it, though, not with Rosa about to shatter.
    Jorge
Jiminez let his face harden into a mask, the same expression he wore when the
boss man, Mr. Wilcox, ordered him to shovel llama manure into the flower
garden. Jorge liked the llamas, even though one would occasionally spit in his
face. He liked them a lot better than he liked Mr. Wilcox.
    He
even liked the poop better than he liked Mr. Wilcox.
    But
now the gringo was dead, and so were the sixteen llamas. Jorge had been
outside when the flash occurred, his wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over his
eyes. The llamas collapsed almost instantly, and so did Barkley, the loud
border collie that constantly pestered the animals. The chickens barely paused
in their scratching and pecking, though, so Jorge thought it must have been
some strange sort of gun, although he couldn’t figure out how a gun could kill
so many animals at once without making a sound.
    But
then his mind jumped immediately to Rosa and Marina, and he dropped his shovel
and bolted for the tiny mobile home at the back of the property, which was
tucked behind a thicket of Douglas firs so that it couldn’t be seen from Mr.
Wilcox’s house. His wife and child hadn’t noticed the flash of light. Rosa was
stitching a patch on the knee of a pair of jeans and Marina was sprawled on the
floor, coloring in her big book of princesses.
    That
had been over a week ago.
    They’d
moved into Mr. Wilcox’s house two days ago, and although Jorge instinctively
sensed it was safer, he wasn’t even sure what the danger was. After all,
everyone else seemed to be dead.
    “Maybe
we go to town to see,” Rosa said. She sat at the fine oak table, uncomfortable,
a glass of water perched in her hand as if she were afraid of leaving spots on
the finish.
    “I
told you, the truck doesn’t start,” he said, as if explaining to a child.
“Neither does the car, and neither does the motorcycle.”
    He
didn’t mean to say that last word with such anger. He didn’t mean to say it at
all. Such a word was bad luck in times like these.
    “What
if we walk?”
    “We
could do it in a day. Marina can’t walk that far, so we’d have to take turns
carrying