“Don’t make me use my Space Modulator on you.”
Pete lit his cigarette and scanned the nearest vehicles. He exhaled a rising wreath of smoke and dismounted, then rolled his bike past a black Lexus with a personalized plate that said “SKIN-DR.”
“Rich bitch,” Pete said.
Campbell had a bad feeling about the car, maybe because of the way the windows looked a little steamy, despite the dry air. “Leave it.”
“What are you so afraid of, dude?”
Afraid.
That was a good one. One minute he’d been playing Left 4 Dead on the Xbox, and the next he’d been sitting in his dark apartment, wondering if his stoner roomie had forgotten to pay the power bill again. He’d gone in Roy’s bedroom and found him sprawled on the bed, glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling. Campbell hadn’t dared touch him, because something had seemed wrong about him, and he grabbed his cell to dial 9-1-1, but his phone was as dead as Roy.
Then he’d gone outside and learned that Roy wasn’t the only one…
“Check it out, bro,” Campbell said, their little code for caution, a reminder that every decision had consequences. If nothing else, it was a cheap mockery of the notion of control.
Pete leaned his bike against the rear flank of the Lexus and went to the driver’s side door. Giving one last look around, probably due to the lingering tug of Old World morals, Pete yanked the door open. He immediately cupped his hand over his mouth, the cigarette still perched between his fingers.
“Ugh,” he said, his voice muffled. “Ripe one.”
Campbell didn’t bother looking. He was busy checking out the back seat, which was empty. “What did you expect?”
“I was hoping for Angelina Jolie in a see-through nightie.”
“Pervert.”
“I meant alive. I’m not that desperate…yet.”
“You could have hooked up with the chubby chick back at that camp.”
“Gypsy Rose? I’ll take a corpse over that mess any day.” Pete reached down beside the driver’s seat and flipped a latch. The trunk popped open.
Campbell had never known anyone who could afford a Lexus, so he was a little curious about what the trunk might contain. Since the Big Zap had caught people with their pants down, sometimes literally, it offered a snapshot of human civilization in the early twenty-first century. A cultural anthropologist might have noted the widespread worship of plastic electronics and gasoline-powered engines, but Marvin the Martian would have summed it up as, “Well, back to the old drawing board.”
The trunk of the Lexus was clean, carpeted, and empty, except for a leather briefcase. It featured a combination lock with a dial. Campbell gave the serrated metal wheels a few random turns, but the hasp stayed tight. He was about to close the trunk, realized there was no point, and heard a moist squishing in the car’s interior.
He hoped Pete wasn’t doing anything disgusting. His friend had gone through a brief desecration phase on the third day, placing corpses in humorous poses. In one memorable instance, he’d drawn a mustache and goatee on a little old lady who’d fallen down with her dead poodle’s leash still wrapped around one frail wrist.
“Doomsday score,” Pete said, lifting a purse.
“Charming. It matches your fashionable ensemble.” In truth, the bright lime-green vinyl clashed horribly with Pete’s plaid jacket and filthy red sweatpants.
Pete rummaged around in the purse and pulled out a make-up kit. “Maybe I can rub this junk on my face and look like one of them.”
“They look like one of us.”
“No, they don’t. They’re redder around the eyes and their skin is pale.”
“That’s racist, dude.”
Pete tossed the make-up kit to the pavement and continued scrounging. He came away with a wallet, an iPod, a spare set of keys, and a plastic package of tissues. He tapped futilely on the iPod’s dark glass screen. “Dead like everything else.”
“Good. I don’t think I could endure your Lady Gaga marathon.”
Pete hurled the iPod across the road, where it dinked off the side of a blue SUV. “What’s in the briefcase?”
Campbell hefted it. “Heavy. Like papers.”
“Or cocaine?”
“Yeah, right. All you think about is getting high.”
Pete made a show of looking around. “You got anything better to do? Besides, I think those Zapheads kind of lowered the bar on moral inhibition.”
“I don’t give a damn about coke, but you got my curiosity up.” About a hundred feet ahead, a plumbing van had coupled with a Toyota Prius in an obscene tangle of steel and plastic. Campbell could see the driver of the Prius slumped over the wheel, dark dots of dried blood stippling the windshield. The panel van had no windows in the rear, but Campbell was willing to bet it contained all sorts of tools, probably jumbled and scattered by the collision.
All he had to do was endure the smell of corpses for a moment, but that was getting easier by the day. The stench had become like a second skin, something worn instead of smelled. Carrboro had been the worst, in the immediate wake of the Big Zap, but even outside the city, death had sent its sweet musk into the sky as if to mark the territory it now ruled. And, in the absence of governments, law, and civilization, death was the only world order remaining.
Pete followed him to the van, still shucking items from the purse, calling out as he dropped them. “Hair clip…fingernail file…a little billfold with—”
Campbell looked back to see Pete stopped in the middle of the glittering asphalt, staring at the fold of vinyl in his hand. His friend’s abrupt silence was amplified by the desolation around them.
“Family pictures, man,” Pete whispered.
Campbell hadn’t thought of his family all day. Dad Brian, a financial advisor, a guy you could toss a football and drink beers with, a solid Republican who’d vote “liberal” if he was mad at the stock market. Mom Mary, like most every Mary in the world, pretty, pleasant, and Catholic-loyal, although she’d made relief mission trips to eight different countries. Little brother Ted, or Turdfinger, as Campbell used to call him, back before Ted hit his growth spurt and could kick his butt.
The Grimes family lived on Lake James, in the North Carolina foothills, with the 3,000-square-foot Swiss-style house and little speedboat dock that was expected of people in Dad’s circle. Campbell tried to picture the three of them out on the lake: Dad at the helm with his sun visor, shades, and tanned face, Mom perched loyally by the outboard motor and keeping an eye on Ted, who trailed behind them and cut his skis through the greenish-brown water.
But that other image—the one with them all slumped and rotting in front of the widescreen TV, flies dive-bombing their eyes—was the one that burned into his head.
“We’ll get there, Pete,” Campbell said, with a conviction he didn’t feel.
Pete flapped the little photo album. “Yeah, and then what? Don’t you think her family is sitting there with dinner on the table, waiting for Mom or Sis or Wife to walk through the door and bitch about the traffic?”
Pete’s drinking not only slowed them down and increased the danger of traveling by bicycle on cluttered roads, but it also made him prone to blubbering. And Campbell did not want any damned blubbering at the moment. The world had already thrown itself the biggest Pity Party of all time, and the clam dip had definitely gone bad.
“Let’s check this out and get moving,” Campbell said, eyeing the smoky horizon. “We have to find a safe place to crash before dark.”
Campbell hoped the rear door of the van was unlocked. He didn’t want to open the cab. Pete dropped the purse and said, “Hey, don’t you want to—”
–check it out, Bro?
But he was already swinging the door open and Marvin the Martian was definitely very angry indeed, because a blur of bulky movement exploded out of the shadows.
The impact stunned Campbell, and breath exploded from his lungs as he landed flat on the asphalt. The scrabbling creature standing over him s
melled like the ozone of an electrical short, spiced with sour perspiration, urine, and a primal aroma that didn’t have a name but was known by prey of every species.
He could dimly hear Pete yelling somewhere far away, and the creature’s long ropes of hair whipped in his face, blinding him as he tried to roll. A jolt of agony flared in his shoulder, and he kicked upward. The creature seemed to have eight arms, and all of them were searching for a hunk of meat.
Campbell punched upward and hit something soft, and he had the goofy image of his hand vanishing into the creature’s face, as if it were Marvin the Martian’s black gap of nothingness. Then it rained, and the rain was warm and heavy, and a muffled krunk repeated itself as someone were beating a damp drum in a distant jungle.
The creature slumped on top of him, and then its weight moved to the side, and there was Pete leaning over him, a massive pipe wrench clenched in his right fist. The head of the wrench was clotted with hair and gore.
Finally Pete’s inane shouting coalesced into language. “Crap, man! Oh, crap.”
Campbell touched his shoulder, where the Zaphead had exposed his flesh to the air. It wasn’t a deep bite, but electric fire radiated from it like a herpes sore from hell.
“She bit me,” he whimpered.
Pete gave the dead Zaphead a kick. “Man up, dude. You were attacked by a chick.”
Campbell rose to his hands and knees and looked at the creature that had attacked him. She was petite, about the size of his mother, with the same black hair. For one horrible moment, he thought it was his mother—her skull was so caved in that her features were unrecognizable.
By the time he’d risen staggering to his feet, Pete had pulled a clean towel and a roll of duct tape from the back of the van. “You can’t get through an apocalypse without duct tape,” Pete said, clamping the towel against Campbell’s wound.
He gripped the protruding tail of the tape with his teeth and reeled off a foot-long section. Campbell clamped his hand over the towel, holding it in place as Pete applied the patchwork. Blood had trickled down the front of his shirt, but most of the flow had been staunched.
“Think I’ll turn?” Campbell asked.
“These ain’t zombies,” Pete said. “Although it did get a little close to the throat. I’m giving you the heads-up now. If I see fangs sprouting out of your mouth, I’m punching a stake through your chest.”
“Point taken,” Campbell said, but the weak pun didn’t even elicit a grin. The wound throbbed but Campbell had full movement of his arm. He gave one last look at the woman, who appeared to be in her forties. Her lipstick was smeared, and a flap of Campbell’s skin was stuck between her teeth.
Pete gave her one final kick, and her body lay there like a sack of mud. “One down, a million to go.”
Campbell didn’t like to think about a million Zapheads crawling across the face of the earth, hiding in shadowy crevices and waiting for something to kill. Right now, he didn’t want to think of anything, much less whether his mom was somewhere out there jumping survivors.
Pete rummaged in the back of the van and came away with a fat screwdriver. “You risked your life to find out what’s in the briefcase, so we may as well have a look.”
He jimmied open the briefcase, banging it with the bloody wrench for emphasis. The lid popped open and loose cash fluttered out and settled on the highway. It looked to be tens and twenties, stacks of it.
“Whoopee, we’re rich,” Pete said, kicking the briefcase so that more bills lifted in the wind.
“You don’t need to save for the future.” Campbell patted the makeshift bandage. “You’ll have a future in medicine after this is all over.”
“Who said there was an ‘after’?” Pete said.
Campbell had no answer as they collected their bicycles and headed west.
CHAPTER THREE
Rachel didn’t want to wait for sundown.
While the vanishing daylight carried a greater risk of exposure, she couldn’t bear the thought of one of the Zapheads clutching at her in the dark.
Or a crowd of them creeping up on her while she dozed.
Chain Guy was far up the street. Stumpy had fallen from the bench, and Rachel couldn’t tell if he’d been beaten or not. He didn’t move, and still, the flies swarmed.
Maybe he died from the infection, or a heart attack, or sudden pneumonia. Something sanely senseless. Please, God, let somebody around here die by natural causes.
After a moment, she added, Except me.
The Beard was nowhere in sight, and Rachel decided Chain Guy was chasing him, which would take them both out of the picture. That sounded like wishful thinking, but wishful thinking had not changed anything during the past week, so she knew not to trust it.
The street was clear, at least as far as she could tell by sticking her head out the door. The shadows of light poles and trash cans lay long across the sidewalk, giving her directions. Metal clanged several streets away, like a body falling on the hood of a car or a boot being driven into a Dumpster. She wondered if one of the affected had caught a fresh victim. But there was no scream.
Had the survivors already adjusted past the point of screaming?
Were there any survivors left at all?
She didn’t like the thought of being alone, the last human in the universe, and the dead pharmacist’s little care package came to mind. But she loathed the pale, grim surrender that had been painted on his dying face. That was the coward’s way out, the path of the faithless. If such a time came, she trusted God would first give her permission.
Until then…
Rachel secured the backpack and stepped outside, clinging close to the brick, metal, and glass walls as she eased down the street. She paid absurd attention to each footstep, making sure the rubber soles of her sneakers didn’t scuff on the concrete. She didn’t know whether the Zapheads were driven to prey by superhuman senses of sight, smell, or hearing, but she figured the apocalypse was as good a time as any to hedge her bets.
She’d lived in Charlotte for two years, taking little time to learn the city. Her world had been largely confined to West Charlotte, where she interned as a school counselor for the Department of Social Services. Rachel knew the beltway and the exits for the larger shopping malls, the libraries, and the uptown area where she’d visited the Mint Museum, but little else. The high, gleaming finance centers were behind her, once busy with moneychangers and loan officers, but were now just seventy and eighty stories of stacked mausoleum crypts. The glass glinted red in the sunset, the towers of Babel gone silent, and small plumes of smoke curling from some of them.
She picked up her pace a little, more confident now that Chain Guy apparently hadn’t noticed her. Charlotte has to end at some point, and then you’ll hit the woods.
The block ended, and she glanced into one of the cars slanted across the intersection in the heart of a traffic jam. A woman’s head was tilted back, ponytail dangling over the seat. Behind her was a child’s safety seat. Rachel’s heart, already galloping, jumped a fence and missed a step.
What if it’s alive?
And the little devil on her shoulder whispered: It would be crying. Don’t stop.
Maybe it’s asleep, or scared, or—
Or dead. Maybe it’s dead, and you walk over there and peer in the glass and see its cute little blue face and then you scream, and then Chain Guy comes running with his steel whip, ready to play and play and play until your brains are sausage.
Shut the eff up.
I’m the devil. You can’t tell me what to do. And I see you’re using profanity, Rachel. That’s good. That’s very good.
Rachel said a quick prayer and forced herself toward the car, glancing up the street only once. That was the litmus test: If she saw Chain Guy, it was a sign from God that she should run for it. Otherwise, she had a moral duty to save a baby if she could.
As she reached for the handle of the back door, she wasn’t sure whether it was morality or loneliness that drove her.
With a baby to care for, she had less reason to think about the poison pills.
But she didn’t open the door. The safety seat was empty, a rumpled yellow blanket piled around it.
Rachel hoped the baby was off with Grandmother, playing patty cake or whining for her mom’s nipple, somewhere secure and far, far from the carnage of downtown Charlotte. She didn’t allow room for the Chain Guy’s discovery of the infant, or what those steel links might do to tender flesh. No, such things didn’t happen under God’s heaven.
And even if they did, she didn’t need to know about them. She didn’t want to know about them.
The sun sank lower, the shadows flattened fatter, and the distant noises clanged more cacophonous, building like tribal drums, only this tribe had been driven mad with one big celestial flash.
She hurried west, figuring the beltway was two miles away, and beyond that, a pine forest broke up the small satellite communities. For some reason, the forest was a more appealing option than the maze of alleys, buildings, and vehicles that could serve up a Zaphead at any second. At least in the woods, the hunt and the flight would feel more natural.
Two corpses lay just ahead, with a sodden aspect that suggested they’d been there since the flash, and she veered closer to the wall, preferring dubious concealment to the easier passage but a higher exposure of the street. A shopping cart blocked her way, and it held four bulging trash bags, a pair of curled and cracked leather shoes on its bottom wire shelf, and a plastic boom box in the child seat. It was a homeless person’s portable life, a legacy on crooked wheels.
She raised her hand, not wanting to smell the corpses, but her palm didn’t reach her nose.
Instead, a ring of fiery steel clamped around her forearm.
She gasped as she was yanked into a mildewed gap in the storefronts. She’d been so intent on ignoring the corpses that she hadn’t even noticed the narrow alley.
And now you’ll pay, Rachel. Now you’ll play the devil’s game, and dance with a creature from out of hell.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 74