As the chain whirred like a slow helicopter blade, a dog bounded out from behind the police cruiser, snarling and yapping. He was a German shepherd—lean, dark and hungry. The dog made a beeline for Chain Guy, evidently smelling something he didn’t like. But the dog must have sensed the reach of the chain, because he halted and lowered himself onto his forelegs, haunches reared as if poised to attack.
Get ‘em, boy, Rachel silently cheered, thinking the distraction would give her an opening. She squeezed the straps of her pack, testing the weight and calculating how much it would hinder her speed.
The dog’s lips peeled back as he growled. Chain Guy’s expression didn’t change. He spun the chain faster, almost daring the dog as he headed for The Beard. The shepherd danced forward a few feet and snapped, but Chain Guy kept walking, not breaking stride. The dog apparently didn’t like being challenged, so he made a run for Chain Guy’s ankles.
The chain lashed out of its orbit and descended with stunning speed, the blow so sudden that Rachel wasn’t even sure she’d seen it. Then came the thwack as metal hit meat, the chain flaying the dog’s rib cage. It emitted one garbled yelp of pain and collapsed. Chain Guy still wore that blank, businesslike expression as he brought the chain around for another blow. This one took out a leg and the shepherd crawled away like a broken spider.
The sickening attack reminded Rachel they weren’t playing “Ring Around the Rosie” here. It was dog eat dog. And, they definitely weren’t playing. If it came down to it, she’d rather Chain Guy eat the dog than eat her.
If Chain Guy looked to his left, he might have glimpsed her hiding behind the shards of glass in the storefront. Her curiosity was slightly more compelling than her fear, and every bit of information might mean the difference between survival and its opposite. She wasn’t sure what the “opposite” was, but it was worse than death.
Chain Guy maintained his pace, but he let the chain slow again above his head. Stumpy hadn’t moved from his bench, and The Beard still seemed intent on whatever crack in the asphalt had consumed his entire attention for the past minute.
Or Jesus. Jesus in the oil stain, the rainbow warrior, the light of wisdom.
Rachel bit her lip to keep from giggling. Don’t lose it. Only crazy people lose it, and you know what happens to crazy people.
Something tumbled from the shelves behind her, near the prescription counter.
She hadn’t checked the aisles after seeing the corpse of a child, although the place had seemed dead. But “dead” had a new meaning now.
She tensed, but didn’t bolt, because the real threat of Chain Guy outweighed the imaginary threat spawned by a jar falling to the carpet. The Zapheads weren’t known for subtlety, so there was zero chance of one of them creeping up on her. No, a Zaphead would roll forward like a Cadillac out of hell, fueled by the frenzy zapping and hissing in its brain.
Chain Guy was busy bearing down on The Beard, so she crawled to the left a few feet and peered around a display of Hallmark cards. A hand stretched out on the floor beside the prescription counter, the fingers twitching.
Could be a Zapper in the last throes of internal combustion.
The hand curled once, twice, and then she recognized it as a beckoning motion. A Zaphead wouldn’t beckon. It would go for what it wanted, not lure you closer.
Somebody—a human—was down. And here came the litmus test of After: Did the old codes still apply? Did she still have to love her neighbor? Did she have to treat everyone as a child of God?
Maybe God wouldn’t notice just this once. Maybe she could just sit right here near the door and then make a run for it, gasping prayers.
Better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, right?
However, forgiveness probably wasn’t a question one wanted to ask of God. Not now, in the After. Rachel tried to look away, she really did, but the hand made another beckoning motion. It looked frail, the fingers knotty and thin. It was not the kind of hand that would wrap around your throat and drag you screaming into the darkness.
Outside, the chain clanked against the asphalt, as if Chain Guy was working out the kinks and getting ready for business.
The hand gave one final gesture, this time just the index finger, motioning Closer, closer, closer with an intensity that only silence could fully project.
Still, she resisted the impulse to help, the love-thy-neighbor credo that had been drummed into her from childhood, sitting bedside with her cancer-stricken mother, volunteering at the Humane Society, joining the Wellspring Fellowship’s Happy Helpers, and taking counseling classes at UNC-Charlotte. Little Ray-Ray had been on track for a golden-rule life of selfless service. In the Before.
However, she’d been sidetracked.
She wasn’t even sure there was a track anymore, because the train had jumped off into a dark, directionless territory.
Rachel looked away from the hand and eyed the door. She could probably get twenty yards down the sidewalk before Chain Guy broke his fixation and noticed her, and maybe that would buy her enough of a jump on him. Her legs were young and limber and strong, built by a cycling addiction. She could outrun him.
Probably.
“Huhhh…”
The wheeze came from behind the prescription counter. She jerked around her neck, and the hand now balled into a fist, as if tapping some last reserve of energy. The whisper came again, weak and broken.
“Huhhh…help…”
Goddamn you, God.
She checked on Chain Guy, still closing in on The Beard, who swayed in obsessed circles. Stumpy sat on the bench as if waiting to feed pigeons. It was just another busy weekday in downtown Charlotte.
Just another day in After.
“Help.” The voice of the hand’s owner gained volume, and she hissed a “Shhh” in response as she crawled down the aisle. The last thing she needed was for Zapheads to show up, pissed off that they hadn’t been invited to the party.
She’d long ago—well, days ago, but it had seemed like years—decided that it was selfish to pray for survival and deliverance, but it was righteous to pray for the strength to help others. She’d also promised to live for Chelsea, to spend all the years that had been taken from her little sister—taken by Rachel.
But she couldn’t think of that now, or she would become paralyzed, accepting her fate. Deserving death. Deserving it because each breath was a selfish act in a world where she had destroyed something beautiful.
As Rachel drew closer, a rank, sour odor assailed her. She’d smelled her share of corpses, with their heavy, sweet fecundity—decay had become so pervasive in After that only a truly sharp odor had a chance of piercing it. Whatever lay behind the counter had achieved that rare status.
The arm pulled itself into the gap and she crawled faster, chafing her knees even through the blue jeans she wore. Her backpack was off-balance, banging against her right hip, and she had to navigate an obstacle course of stuffed animals, jars of nutritional supplements, soft drinks, and other artifacts of a lost culture.
It was darker back here, removed from the sunlight, but not so dark that she had to dig out her flashlight. She wasn’t sure she wanted a clear look, anyway, because the sour odor suggested something had turned inside-out.
“Help,” the man’s voice said again, and she answered, “Okay.”
God, I’m trusting you here, and if you’re leading me to a horrible, painful death, I swear I’ll never speak to you again.
Then she reached the counter and felt concealed enough to rise into a crouch and duck-walk the final ten feet around the counter. The man was curled on his side in a fetal position, wearing a white coat that suggested he’d been the pharmacist on duty at some point, back when duty mattered and pulled a weekly paycheck. Resembling a lighter-skinned Gandhi, he was bald and old and wore rounded glasses with wire frames. A pool of vomit explained the stink, and the flies had already migrated from the child’s corpse to check out this new taste sensation.
“You’re…one of us
,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, wishing she could summon that caregiver confidence expounded upon in her counseling textbooks. “Are you hurt?”
He gave a pained smile, and a wet fleck of vomit appeared in the corner of his mouth. “I hurt just fine, thanks.”
“Let me help you.”
She reached to check the pulse in his neck, but he shook his head. “No, don’t save me. For the sake of…all that is holy…let me die.”
Great. So he wants me to play Dr. Kevorkian here. Too bad.
She touched his neck, and he didn’t resist. His carotid pulse was a weak flutter. It was a wonder that he even had enough strength left to speak.
“Don’t save me.” His face curdled with an emotion somewhere between anger and defiance.
“Why did you ask for help, then?”
He rolled his eyes down to his other hand, the one that was curled into a fist around something. “I wasn’t asking for help. I was offering it.”
His reply startled her. He didn’t look like he was in a position to help anything but the maggots. His breathing grew shallower.
“How many are outside?” he asked.
“Two or three,” she said. “I’m not sure about one of them.”
He opened his hand, which held an orange prescription vial. “Nembutal,” he said. “The easy way out.”
So, he was the one playing Dr. Kevorkian. She’d seen Nembutal in the animal shelter, where it was used to end the suffering of sick pets. He let the vial roll from his hand and he gave it a weak nudge along the floor, toward her.
“Antiemetics, too,” he said.
“Huh? What’s that?”
“Don’t want to vomit it out before it has a chance to work.” His words were slurring now. “I should take the old sawbones advice…of ‘Heal thyself’…to heart, huh?”
She wondered how many of them he’d swallowed. Probably far more than enough, if he knew his trade, and he had the look of experience. In a matter of such importance, he’d be dead certain about the dosage levels.
“I’m not ready to die,” she said.
“None of us were,” he wheezed. His eyelids fluttered.
She checked his pulse again, and she could barely detect the blood making its last sluggish rounds through his circulatory system. At any second, he’d fall unconscious, and then his brain would begin the slow process of turning off the lights until the party was over.
“Do you…want me to pray with you?” she said. She didn’t want to ask if he was saved, because that seemed too judgmental for this most personal of moments.
“I’m…good,” he said. He nudged the vial toward her. “Here. My final request.”
His hand bore a wedding ring, and she wondered about his wife. Had he “helped” her escape from After? Had he guided her into the next great uncertainty? Maybe he’d even tricked her, grinding the pills into powder and spiking her sweet iced tea.
Take it. May as well let him die feeling helpful.
“Thank you.” She collected the vial and he grinned and closed his eyes. She slipped the vial into a side pouch of her backpack. A moist whistle came from his throat, and then he grew quiet.
Outside, in the street, Chain Guy bellowed in that inhuman manner that meant he was about to indulge in his Number One Priority, following his purpose, as did all beings under God’s high heaven. Even Zapheads.
She sat with the suicidal pharmacist for another minute until his pulse stopped, and then crawled back to the front of the store.
CHAPTER TWO
Marvin the Martian is seriously underrated.
Campbell Grimes had always admired the faceless little Looney Tunes alien. Everybody loved Bugs Bunny. Bugs was a rabbit for all seasons, but just like Tweety Bird, Sylvester, and Porky, Bugs occasionally came up on the short end. Wile E. Coyote was admirable for his persistence and innovation, but that pencil-necked Road Runner always turned the tables.
Campbell despised the Road Runner, because the cartoon bird reminded him of Sonny Stanton, the Worthy Master of his Alpha Tau Omega chapter, back at the university. Stanton had a habit of sneaking up behind people and doing his nasally version of the Road Runner’s “meep meep.” What Campbell wouldn’t have given for an Acme Asshole Eradicator, patent pending.
Whereas, Wile E. Coyote was a hopeless slave to his hunger, Marvin had a more refined sense of the universal order. To the faceless little ant-creature with the push-broom on top of his Roman helmet, destruction was merely an aesthetic choice.
Now, looking across the dead expanse of interstate and the hushed vehicles sprawled along it like a child’s abandoned toys, Campbell figured it was a good time to borrow one of Marvin’s taglines.
“Where’s the kaboom?” he said, in a nasally cartoon voice.
“What?” Pete asked, barely listening.
“I would have expected more of a kaboom.”
“A doomsday asteroid would have sold more tickets. The world ends not with a bang but a whimper, right?”
“You’re an English major. You’re really not going to be worth much of a damn at this survival thing, are you?”
Pete took a swig of warm Busch beer and pushed dark curls of hair away from his face. “Hey, I’m here, but a lot of folks aren’t. I’d say that gives me major points.”
“Well,” Campbell said. “You must have been wearing your tin-foil skullcap when the zap came.”
Pete took another swig and hurled the empty can onto the grass median, where it bounced and came to rest in a sea of strewn clothes. “I’m not the one quoting Marvin the Martian, dude.”
“Score.”
Campbell booted down the ten-speed’s kickstand and shook the dust from the sleeves of his leather jacket. They’d had their pick of the rack at Triad Cycles, and while Pete had gone for an off-road bike with knobby tires, Campbell had chosen a utility model with a wire basket. It even had a small “Made in America” tag wired to the basket. Pete had needled him by calling him “Cheesy Rider,” but Campbell had a basket full of food and gear while Pete was stuck with whatever he could fit in his backpack.
Which was mostly beer at this point.
Campbell’s body tingled from the vibration of the ride. They’d logged twenty miles in the last three hours, slowed by occasional traffic pile-ups that forced them to go off-road. They’d spent the night in an abandoned VW van in a campground, afraid to build a fire. It was their sixth day out of Chapel Hill, one week since everything had stopped, and they were no closer to understanding what the hell was going on.
No signs of intelligent life, Campbell thought in his Marvin the Martian voice. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. No, not at all.
“Want to search any of these cars?” Pete asked, punctuating the query with a deep belch.
“My basket is full.”
“Might find something fresh. A pistol, beef jerky, more beer.”
“I already have a gun.”
Pete pointed at the revolver jammed in Campbell’s belt. “Aren’t you ready for an upgrade?”
“It’s enough.” Campbell had gone with the .38 because he liked to see the chamber. He thought it would be easier to keep track of how many bullets he had left, in the event he ever actually had to use it. Pete had adopted a Glock and seemed to draw great satisfaction from the clack made by driving the clip home. The guns had been courtesy of an outdoor supply shop that had been picked over a little, but apparently the survivor count was so low that supply far exceeded demand.
“What if somebody’s alive in one of those cars?” Pete asked.
“Unlikely.” Campbell scanned the interstate more carefully, bothered by the thought.
“Could be somebody like us. One of the lucky ones.”
“Damned if I’d call us ‘lucky.’”
“Maybe we should have stayed at the university. If anybody can figure this thing out, it would be our good old home-team researchers.”
“So what if they did?” Campbell grew annoyed, on the edge of an
ger, and he didn’t like it. Because that’s probably how they started out, when the wires melted and the brain circuitry zapped. When they started becoming them.
“Maybe they can come up with a vaccine or something.”
“This isn’t a goddamned case of the clap, Pete. And how are you going to get the crazies to cooperate? Blast them with your Explosive Space Modulator?”
“Jesus, dude, what crawled up your ass and pitched a tent?”
“Sorry.” Campbell punched the top of the sweaty helmet that rested between his legs. “The end of the world…I thought I could handle it.”
Pete rolled his bike forward a few inches. “It’s always easier in theory. Let’s give that Lance truck a try.”
The snack-food truck was parked on the shoulder parallel to the road, as if the driver had been prepared for the sudden loss of power. It was an older model, and Campbell suspected it had manual steering. Modern vehicles, dependent upon computers, had locked up or gone haywire. Hondas, Kias, and Fords were crashed or angled askew in the median. An SUV was upside down at the bottom of an embankment, doors hanging open. A twisted motorcycle straddled the guardrail, its occupant now a decaying lump of leather-encased flesh some twenty feet away.
“I don’t know,” Campbell said, feeling exposed and vulnerable. Or maybe it was the sight of at least a dozen corpses that caused his uneasiness.
“Chickenshit.”
“We’ve got food. Maybe we should just keep pedaling.”
“You still worried about roving bands of Zapheads? We don’t have to fight over it. There’s plenty for everybody.”
Pete was letting the beer talk for him. He’d downed at least a six-pack so far today, and the autumn warmth wasn’t sweating it out fast enough. Campbell understood his friend’s escapism, but personally, he preferred the survival buzz.
“Those snack crackers are loaded with preservatives,” he said. “They’ll be around long after all of us are gone.”
“Har har. Campbell made a funny.” Pete dug into a side pouch of his backpack and brought out a pack of Marlboro Lights. “The Surgeon General has determined the end of the world is hazardous to your health.”
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 73