What Came After by Sam Winston Read Free Book Online

shadowy storeroom with pallets stacked along three walls and a long bare table in the middle. A couple of folding chairs. A single cot and an upturned shipping crate with a few things arranged on it. A heavy ashtray and cigarettes and an antique Zippo lighter. A water glass and some old magazines.
    “Have a seat. Both of you.” Pointing with the gun.
    Weller took the girl by her shoulder and directed her. They sat side by side at the table waiting for they didn’t know what. For whatever came next.
    “Hands on the table,” said the old man. “Up where I can see them.”
    Penny had to reach.
    The old man drifted toward the upended crate and picked up a cigarette and lit it. Took the ashtray and put it on the long table. Didn’t sit down but looked like he’d considered it. “I’m in the collections business,” he said.
    “Collecting what?”
    “I think you know.” Tendons standing out in his neck and a vein pulsing in his forehead in the scratchy lightbulb light. Drawing on his cigarette and blowing smoke and coughing and the smoke making Penny cough too. “I think you know what I’m after,” he said.
    “I don’t. I don’t know.”
    Chewing at his lip for a minute and then laughing in one small burst. “I’m after whatever pays the freight,” he said. “A little flexibility never hurt an old soldier like me.”
    He meant it. An old soldier. It was in his bearing and in his quickness and in his ease with the gun.
    Weller took in the room more closely. A bunker, steeped in the cold closeness of anything underground, jammed with enough supplies to last a school full of children a month or a single man the rest of his life. Everything packed solid, as if the contents themselves were meant as reinforcement. Pallet after pallet of canned and boxed food arranged floor to ceiling. Water in barrels. Cases labeled Survival Crackers, which he guessed meant hardtack. All of that plus piled up medical kits and tightly folded blankets and cardboard cartons printed with mysterious letters and numbers by some government office. Everything neat and square and sharp, policed as if someone important might be coming to inspect at any moment. Including the handful of personal belongings on the upended crate. Personal belongings. They stood out, like this was a prison cell or a barracks.
    He looked steadily at the old man and asked him straight. “Are you with Black Rose, or what?”
    The old man stiffened. Prideful in spite of himself. “You could say that.” He smiled just a quarter of an inch. Disappearing behind Weller’s back to hide it.
    “I didn’t know they were out here anymore.”
    “They’re not. But once you’re Black Rose, you’re always Black Rose.” Opening a locker or a cabinet back there. Fussing with something.
    “That’s what I’ve heard.” Half turning, as if maybe they’d found something to talk about and he could use it to his advantage.
    “Don’t get any ideas.”
    “I won’t.”
    “The girl either.”
    “She won’t.” She was sitting up against her father rockstill. Frozen like some prey animal intent on making itself invisible. Her hands still folded and her eyes bigger than they had ever been in all her short life. Weller wanted to put his hand on her shoulder or give her some other small comfort but he didn’t quite dare, and then he did it anyway.
    The old man left off what he was doing and came back around. He stood opposite them at the table and kept his cigarette between his teeth and poked one thick finger deep into the ashtray. Dug around. Separating things. Ash and butts from some other heavier objects that had sunken to the bottom. Little metallic pieces that made scraping noises against the glass. “I probably ought to keep these in a jar or something,” he said. “If I had a jar.” Pushing the ashtray forward so that Weller could see. A dozen or so little metal lozenges and cubes and bulbs, none of them more than a quarter of an inch long, most of them shiny