What Came After Read Free Page A

Goddamn it. The town couldn’t be that big. He’d find him.
     
    *
     
    Peter had woken up alone and explored the house and gotten hungry. There were familiar cans on the kitchen shelves but no way to get them open that he could find. Boxes and bags with familiar labels but no way to reconstitute what was inside them. No way that he trusted. He’d been brought up suspicious and it served him well. Looking at the faucet and picturing drinking the water from it raw and imagining the kinds of things that would happen next. Horrible things. Things he’d seen by torchlight the night before. Worse things if worse things were possible.
    There was still food in the cooler in the back of the SUV but he wasn’t sure which direction the highway was. He was disoriented because they’d come to the house in the dark, and he didn’t want to get lost. So he set out straight down the street that fronted the house, figuring he’d come to the end of it and then decide what next. Be methodical. Ask somebody if somebody showed up. Or else he could just keep turning the same direction at every corner he came to, as if he were in that maze he’d read about with the torches burning and the thing that was half-man and half-bull chasing after you in the dark. That maze in the story. You couldn’t get lost if you kept turning the same way. You could only get out.
    The town was bigger than he’d thought. Maybe more than a town. The street he was on didn’t seem to end, running on and on through cross street after cross street, the houses along it taking on variations he hadn’t expected. Brokenbacked lean-tos and rusted sheetmetal sheds and tumbledown duplexes leaning into each other, half against half. A couple of tall brick buildings that looked like apartments but were empty. Commercial buildings too. Vacant storefronts. Blackfronted offices with the windows knocked out, and the terrifying mouths of underground parking garages. He kept going. People were waking up in the houses and cooking and talking to one another in a hundred different voices. Men were coming out front doors and coming out shed doors and coming out underneath moldy sheets of blue plastic nailed up over holes in plywood walls, entering into the day. Looking at him the same way they’d look at any boy.
    He walked on. Up a long hill with a grassy yard gone to dirt along one side of it and a big mansion sitting up on the hill past the yard, stranded there like it was beached. Rotting down to a cage of bone. He kept walking until he saw the gray rooftops of a ruined city in the distance, and then he stopped and turned back. Whatever fields and woodlands stood along the highway weren’t in this direction. He went all the way back to the house where he’d started and past it. Keeping pace with more men walking. Men coming out of houses and gathering in little groups to pause and talk and smoke and walk on together. The farms must be this way. He was learning.
    He walked past a corner lot with an old service station set back in it and sounds of work coming from inside. He drifted across the broken pavement. Drew near. Looked in through the one raised overhead door with the words Mechanic On Duty! painted across the lintel and saw a man at work. A welding helmet on his head and a leather apron going from his shoulders to his knees. Greasy coveralls underneath that, workboots scarred and cut raw, and big ruddy leather gloves insulated against anything. The man was hunched over a Franklin stove salvaged from someplace. It glowed around its edges with a red light and it gleamed blue inside. He had one of the double doors open and he was pushing something inside of it around on a grate over the blue flame. Tapping at it. Turning it and studying it through the welding helmet and lifting it out with tongs. Kicking the door shut and hollering at somebody behind him in the shadows to stay clear and aligning the hot thing he’d taken from the Franklin stove on the flat top of a big