The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers

by Michael R. Hicks

  Rachel knelt before him, grabbed his shoulders, and looked him full in the face. “Do you believe in God, Stephen?”

  He nodded. “Me and Mommy went to church.”

  “God will watch out for you. Just pray and you won’t be alone.”

  “But God made the Zapheads, didn’t He?”

  “God makes everything.”

  “Why? Why not just make good people?”

  “I’ll be right back. I promise.”

  Rachel scanned the wall. The sledge hammer was far too heavy, and the hoe’s long handle rendered it unwieldy. A broken pair of pruning shears leaned against the bench, one blade curving like a rusty eagle’s beak.

  Could I hack somebody’s skull if I had to?

  They weren’t people, not anymore. But could she be sure of that? Did Zapheads have souls? Even if they didn’t, did she have the right to kill them?

  She closed the door, smiling back at Stephen’s worried, puppy-dog face. She hated leaving him alone, but until she knew what had happened to DeVontay, she couldn’t choose a course of action that might expose them both to danger.

  By the time she reached the fence again, the Bieb had disappeared, probably inside the house by now. Miss Daisy was doing her peculiar Texas two-step, banging her scrawny shoulder into the screen door as if she had some memory of entrances but didn’t quite have a destination in mind.

  Rachel checked the street for other Zapheads, recalling the group behavior of the ones back on the interstate. But apparently none had responded to the noise, or perhaps no more were in the vicinity. She decided to go behind the house and follow DeVontay’s route.

  Clenching her fists so tightly that her fingers ached, she crept along the fence until she reached the back yard. A swing set and sandbox were surrounded by bright plastic toys, and two garbage cans were overturned near the fence. Rachel wondered if the children were dead inside the house, maybe facedown at the table, or maybe all tucked into their beds with prayers and bedtime stories.

  She found an unlatched gate, probably the same one DeVontay had used, and she slipped into the back yard. A set of four wooden steps led to a screened-in porch, and she couldn’t see through the mesh. She listened for a moment but all she heard was a dull thumping that might be Miss Daisy.

  Rachel hesitated, picturing Stephen in the gloomy shed, but that was wiped away by the fleeting image of him lying on the floor with blood leaking from his body.

  Angry at herself, and refusing to acknowledge her fear, she sprinted across the yard and up the steps. She flung open the porch door and burst into the house, felling a little silly at being weaponless. Ahead was the kitchen, its door open. She stepped inside the house and had just a moment to register the mess—dinner that had once been underway, sliced onions on a cutting board, and spaghetti clinging to the stove—when the man grabbed her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They’d gone about two miles along the highway, with Arnoff playing drill sergeant and urging the group forward, when they came across Pete’s bike.

  It was lying on the pavement, with no sign of Pete’s backpack. The bike was right at home among the surrounding vehicles, as forlorn and forgotten as any of them. Campbell leaned his own bike, which he’d been pushing since this morning, against a blue Nissan sedan. He glanced into the driver’s-side window and saw a gray-haired man with his head flopped back and mouth open. In death, his dentures had slipped and were perched along his swollen lower lip.

  “Doesn’t seem to be any sign of violence,” Arnoff said.

  “You shouldn’t have sent him ahead,” Pamela said. She fanned herself with a bandana, her makeup running with her sweat.

  “We needed a scout.”

  “We needed to stick together.”

  “Hush it, Pamela,” Donnie said. He stuck a plug of chewing tobacco into his mouth and mashed it together twice with his teeth, and then pushed the lump into his jaw with his tongue.

  “He might have abandoned his bicycle and continued on foot,” the professor said.

  “No, Pete’s way too lazy for that,” Campbell said. “If something was wrong with the bike, he would have sat on the bed of that pickup and waited.”

  “I don’t see no blood,” Donnie said. “So, he probably wasn’t attacked by a Zapper.”

  Arnoff picked up the bicycle and bounced it. “Tires still have air and it seems to be in working condition.”

  Donnie walked twenty feet up the highway, his rifle slung over his shoulder. “Nothing up the road.”

  Campbell cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Pete!”

  “Shut up, now,” Arnoff barked. “Do you want to draw every Zaphead for miles around?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “And it looks like he ran off and left you. Maybe he figured he liked his odds better on his own.”

  “In that case, you made a strategic blunder,” the professor said, “because if you sent him ahead as a sacrificial lamb, you lost an asset without getting anything in return.”

  “What do you mean, a ‘sacrificial lamb’?” Campbell said.

  “Canary in a coal mine,” the professor said. “A loss leader. Bait.”

  “He was point man,” Arnoff said. “He knew the risks.”

  “You’re crazy,” Campbell said. “This isn’t a war movie or a chess match. This is one of the survivors. He’s one of us.”

  “Don’t lose your cool, soldier,” Arnoff said. “Your friend might be sitting up there in the trees, snoozing in the shade. Like the professor said, it doesn’t look like the Zapheads attacked him. Besides, he could have locked himself in one of these cars if he thought he was in danger.”

  Campbell pounded his fist into the side of the Nissan. The body inside shifted slightly and the dentures fell into the corpse’s lap.

  “Don’t hurt yourself, honey,” Pamela said, rolling her eyes toward Arnoff. “You might need that fist later.”

  Donnie opened the rear door of a nearby van and the stench rolled over them like a solid wave. A fleet of flies boiled out, their green wings iridescent in the sun. Campbell buried his face into the crook of his elbow, using the sleeve of his shirt as an air filter. It didn’t help much.

  Campbell didn’t get close enough to count, but it looked like half a dozen people of his own age piled in the back of the van. They might have been taking a road trip. One girl’s face was turned toward him, and though her flesh was mottled and corrupted, he could tell she had once been attractive. Her fine blond hair had not yet lost its sheen.

  What a goddamned waste.

  Donnie reached into the mass of slumped bodies and pulled out a purple bong. “Looks like these hippies was having a pot party,” he said, standing strong in the face of the stench. “Guess they didn’t know their brains was getting fried for free.”

  “Don’t mess around in there,” Arnoff said. “You might get some diseases.”

  “Not likely,” the professor said. “If the bodies harbored infectious diseases, they usually die with the host. Some pathogens like HIV can survive for up to two weeks, but it still requires a direct transfer of bodily fluids. Cholera outbreaks after natural disasters are usually due to contaminated water. The biggest risk we face is gastroenteritis.”

  “You mean, the shits?” Donnie said, wiping the bong on his pants leg and looking into the bowl to see if held any marijuana.

  “Still, I wouldn’t put that to your mouth,” the professor added.

  “Donnie will put anything in his mouth,” Pamela said.

  “Yeah, and I’ve put a lot of your things—”

  “Shut up.” Arnoff raced forward and knocked the bong out of Donnie’s hands. “Unless it’s immediately necessary for our survival, it’s off limits. We’re carrying around enough dead weight as it is.”

  Campbell didn’t like the way Donnie and Arnoff were looking at him. “I don’t know why you recruited me and Pete, anyway. We were doing just fine on our own. And if we had stuck together, maybe he’d still be alive.
”

  As soon as the words left his mouth, Campbell realized that was what he had been thinking: Pete was dead. But he didn’t quite believe it. Despite all the death around him, Pete seemed like a constant around which the madness of the world revolved. Cities could burn, mountains could melt into slag heaps, all the trees could wither, but Pete would be sitting there grinning stupidly and sipping a warm beer.

  Campbell tugged his bike away from the Nissan and mounted it as it rolled forward. He nearly slammed into the open van door, and Donnie jumped back to keep from getting struck by the handlebars. Campbell recovered his balance and pumped the pedals.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Arnoff shouted behind him, but Campbell was intent on maneuvering through the stalled vehicles—a dump truck here, an SUV with its airbags deployed there, a motorcycle spilled on its side with the leather-clad driver rotting in the heat. He half expected to hear a gunshot—Arnoff isn’t that crazy, is he?—and then realized he’d probably be dead before the percussion reached his ears.

  He pumped his legs hard to gain momentum for the next rise. He heard Arnoff’s little band arguing in the distance, punctuated with Pamela’s brittle feminine laughter.

  So, when society breaks down, we all turn into sociopaths. Guess we should have seen that one coming.

  Campbell topped the rise, breathing hard, and a cramp rippled through his right thigh. His backpack seemed to have doubled in weight, although it only held about ten pounds of bottled water, a blanket, and a few cans of food. He didn’t know how far he would go, but he was grateful for even a few minutes away from the group. He would soon turn around and pedal back, and he muttered at the irony of having turned into Arnoff’s new point man.

  Below him, the interstate ran in twin ribbons of speckled gray, sporting the usual clutter of stalled vehicles. A tractor-trailer was upended on its side, the cab mating with a mangled mini-van. Campbell marveled at the chaos and calamity he’d missed during the solar flares that had forever changed the world. To him, that moment had been marked by annoyance that the television screen had gone blank. Meanwhile, the rest of the world had had its plug yanked in the most horrible and permanent way.

  To the left, about two hundred yards off the asphalt, a giant scar in the trees marked the path of a downed jet airliner. Bits of frayed metal littered the raw dirt, and one full wing jutted at an angle into the sky like a massive sun dial. The nose and much of the fuselage had plowed through a row of houses, leaving sagging roofs and splintered siding in the wake. Swatches of color were scattered here and there in the wreckage.

  Luggage. And people.

  Campbell coasted down the hill, riding the hand brakes and weaving between the cars, trucks, and vans. In this section, the vehicles were in an orderly line, with few rear-end collisions, as if traffic had been moving slowly when the big electromagnetic eraser had wiped out their engines. The stench of rotted bodies hung in the air, the putrefaction hastened by the greenhouse effect of the windows. Campbell did his best to avoid looking inside the vehicles, but curiosity suckered him in again and again.

  Part of it was his faint hope that maybe he’d see a survivor, injured and unable to escape. The other part was his coming to grips with the scale of the apocalypse.

  If the professor’s right, and this is a worldwide deal, then I’m one of the last men on Earth.

  And what the hell did I do to deserve it? Why am I upright and breathing while that poor lady with the blue hair at the wheel of the BMW is maggot food?

  He swerved around a spare tire lying in the road and slowed the bike even more. Tools, clothing, and oil jugs were scattered on the road, and the trunks of several cars hung open. The back doors of a bread truck gaped wide, with plastic racks of molded bread spilled from the opening. A clutch of blackbirds flew away from the spoils. The flapping of their wings was the only sound in what should have been a rush-hour melee.

  A man’s corpse flopped out of the driver’s side of a Toyota sedan. The passenger door was also open, and a woman sprawled dead on the pavement several feet from it.

  Someone has moved those dead people.

  Campbell stopped the bike and dismounted, looking at the nearby cars. The doors were open on about a dozen of them, the corpses inside apparently disturbed from their original positions. Most often, victims had died on the spot, collapsing wherever they happened to be. Many of the vehicles had endured collisions, although the loss of engine power had minimized much of the damage. A driver might flop over the steering wheel or loll back in the seat, but these people had been carelessly shoved out of the way of…what?

  A survivor—maybe a group of survivors—might have prowled through the vehicles for food and supplies. That made sense. Campbell had done the same thing, except he’d not touched any corpses. Whoever had conducted this search had been disrespectful, almost to the point of obscenity. His unease was confirmed when he saw that a young woman’s blouse had been torn open, her pale breasts left exposed to the sun.

  Zapheads?

  No, the Zapheads he’d encountered wouldn’t have bothered with desecration, because they sought to inflict destruction on the living. To a Zaphead, the dead were no different than a tree or a car. They were inconveniences and obstacles, nothing more. Only a human—a human unaffected by the cataclysmic solar flares—could have indulged in such behavior as this.

  A chill crept up Campbell’s neck, even though the morning sun was now high and hot in the August sky. He was mounting his bike, eager to return to Arnoff’s tribe, when he spied a blue backpack on the asphalt beside an empty child-restraint seat. Pete had a backpack just like that one.

  Campbell ran to the backpack and peeled back the zipper on the pouch. He dug into the pocket and brought out a melted Snickers bar. The backpack smelled of beer and chocolate and stale sweat. It was Pete’s, all right.

  Why would he toss his backpack here?

  But maybe Pete hadn’t tossed his backpack to the pavement. Maybe it had been tossed for him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Rachel wasn’t sure whether she’d blacked out or had been knocked unconscious.

  The first vestiges of grayness brought no pain, only confusion. She remembered entering the house to look for DeVontay—

  Stephen. How long have I been here? Wherever I am.

  She rubbed her eyes and then realized it wasn’t her vision that was blurred. The room’s windows had been covered with sheets, blocking out most of the light. She was sitting on a hard wooden chair. Dim shapes stood around her at various intervals.

  “Are you one of us?” a man said.

  Rachel turned in his direction, unsure if the man was addressing her. He stood near the window, so she could barely make out his silhouette. He was tall and broad-shouldered, appearing to glance out the window and back again.

  “Who is ‘us’?” Rachel said. She tried to stand and realized she was bound to the chair. That made no sense, because she didn’t feel any ropes. She wriggled her hands. They were so numb she could barely tell where they ended.

  I must have been sitting here for a while. Real charmers, these guys.

  “If you are one of us, you know what we are,” the man said.

  She nicknamed him The Captain, even though she was pretty sure he wasn’t a Zaphead. She peered at the shapes of men. Four that she could see, maybe more standing behind her. At least two of them appeared to have rifles.

  None of them looked like DeVontay.

  “We heard a shot,” she said. “We thought someone might need help.”

  “We?”

  “Me and DeVontay.”

  “The dark one,” the man said.

  Dark one? Well, I guess it could be worse. Could be calling him the N-word.

  She raised her voice. “Are you here, DeVontay?”

  A muffled moan came from somewhere inside the house. The Captain moved from his post by the window and crossed the room. The additional light gave definition to the edges and shapes. Rachel could make out a d
esktop computer, the dull rectangle of the window reflected in miniature on its blank screen. Loose papers were piled around it, and unkempt shelves were stuffed with books, board games, and ceramic cats. An exercise bike stood in the corner, a windbreaker dangling from one handlebar.

  Rachel turned her head, working blood flow back into her fingers. She couldn’t see them, but she sensed several more people standing behind her. The air in the room was stale, body odor mingling with dust. Someone smelled of tobacco, and the cloying corruption of rot lay under it all, the new base aroma of the planet.

  A hand gripped her shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, but not gentle, either. “You know what this is, correct?” The Captain said.

  She shook her head. “We were only trying to help. We saw the Zapheads coming for the house—”

  “Zapheads?”

  “Yeah. The crazy people. The ones who changed after the solar storms.”

  “We’ve all changed.”

  She couldn’t argue with that, and she had a feeling The Captain wasn’t in a mood for arguments anyway. “Yeah, but they’re the ones trying to bash our brains in.”

  “You may have noticed that we—that is, if you are one of us—are no different. Morally, you could make a case that ours is a greater sin, because we’re aware of our violent actions.”

  Whoa. This guy’s been out in the sun a little too long.

  “You’re aware you’re giving a morality lecture to a woman you’ve tied to a chair, right?”

  “Shall I gag her?” one of the shadowy figures to her left said. “Like we did with the other?”

  So DeVontay’s alive.

  “No,” The Captain said. “We need to find out if she is willing.”

  Willing? These guys can’t be rapists, or they would have done their business while I was unconscious. And it’s not like I can resist all that much right now.

  “Like I said, we heard a shot and saw some Zapheads headed for the house,” she said, doing her best to sound calm even though she wanted to scream. “We figured somebody was in trouble and came to help.”