As the kneeling Franklin leveled the rifle for another shot, the brush parted beside them. A dark face stared out, eyes wide, mouth gaping to reveal yellowing teeth.
“¿Hola?” Jorge said, startled, thinking it was one of Franklin’s friends. Then he remembered that Franklin had no friends.
The woman pushed through the scrub pines and high weeds, moving fast. Franklin, getting ready to fire again, must not have noticed her. She was barely three steps from him. Jorge lifted his machete, hesitating.
What if it’s not one of them?
She spat a rasping hiss, lifting her right arm. Her hand clutched a jagged, mossy stone. Jorge shouted a warning.
Franklin turned, knocking the rifle barrel against her. She was heavy and solid, the metal thwacking off her flank. She swatted the gun away with ease and she lifted the rock again. Its weight caused her arm to tremble.
“Cut her down,’ Franklin said, his voice even.
“I…” Jorge looked at her, wondering if she had kids.
“It’s not human,” Franklin said. “Cut her!”
The rock descended and Franklin raised one forearm to block the blow. Jorge jumped forward and slung the machete at her wrist. The swing was high and the blade skidded off the stone with a metallic ping. One of her fingers popped into the air, streaming blood. She didn’t utter a sound.
She jammed the stone toward Franklin’s head. Franklin rolled away and Jorge gripped the machete handle with both hands and gave a roundhouse swing.
The blade bit into the back of the woman’s neck and the stone flew from her grasp, grazing Franklin’s cheek and thudding off his shoulder. Sickened, Jorge pulled the machete free of her flesh. The wound yawned open, showing white tendons and a chalky stitch of skull bone.
She emitted a red urk and collapsed. Franklin pawed at her, shoving at her round body, and Jorge realized the rifle was under her. He glanced back at the RV.
The woman was climbing a little access ladder on the back of the vehicle, struggling to keep her balance with one arm wrapped around her bundle. The four remaining Zapheads gathered around the RV, swatting at the air below her feet as if confused by the ladder.
“Go get her,” Franklin said, shoving at the dead Zaphead. “She is human. So is the baby.”
Jorge broke into a run, sweat beading his skin. He held the machete before him like Antonio Banderas as Zorro, although he hated Banderas because Rosa had called the actor “muy sexy.” Blood from the blade blew back against his cheek. A high-pitched, electric keening sang in his eardrums.
He leaped over the low stone wall, which was little more than a decorative border. The woman was now atop the RV, sitting and pushing herself backwards with her feet. A Zaphead dressed like a fisherman, right down to the knee-high rubber wading boots, put an experimental hand on the ladder, as if trying to divine its magic.
The nearest Zaphead turned when Jorge reached the shoulder of the road, and Jorge almost dropped his machete. He recognized the woman. She was the cashier at the farm supply store, a buxom, chain-smoking woman who always wore a field-green John Deere jacket. She had no jacket now, nor a shirt, and her breasts swung like sodden melons in the cups of her dirty bra.
Whenever Jorge bought a load of cracked corn, hay, or fertilizer for the Wilcox place, she’d averted her eyes as he filled out the bill of sale, careful to never make contact with the skin of his fingers. Now she had no problem looking at him: her eyes were like electric-blue drill bits boring into his skull.
“¿Señora?” He faltered but kept stumbling forward, hoping she would say something familiar so he wouldn’t have to cut her. Anything would do, even her side-of-the-mouth, “Back yer truck to the dock and the boys’ll load ‘er.”
But all she could do was hiss, and Jorge realized that was the source of his ringing ears. The others were hissing, too, like the chirrup of crickets in an endless night. But still, Jorge couldn’t strike her. She was a racist, one who almost certainly wished his kind would never cross the border, but she was a human being.
Wasn’t she?
But before he could decide, the top of her head exploded in a thunderclap of gunfire. Her head flew back, her breasts wobbled, and her knees folded as she collapsed on the pavement.
“Move, you jackass!” Franklin hollered. “They’re Zapheads, for Christ’s sake.”
The other Zapheads turned in his direction, although the fisherman had finally figured out how to lift his leg and place it on the bottom rung.
Four to go.
But Jorge realized he didn’t have to kill them. They weren’t acting aggressively, not like the ones back at the Wilcox place. Instead, they were eyeing him with wary interest, much like they had the ladder: as if he was something new and beyond their understanding. He didn’t want to risk it, though, so he chopped low and nicked a hefty wedge out of the calf of a young man in shorts and sandals. The man collapsed, the hiss from the back of his throat rising in pitch and volume.
Pain. So they feel it, despite what Franklin says.
The fisherman had scaled a few more rungs, but the two remaining Zapheads backed away, their eyes glittering like wet diamonds.
“Don’t shoot!” Jorge shouted at Franklin, partly because he wasn’t sure they were a danger and partly because he didn’t fully trust the old man’s aim.
The fisherman continued his climb, moving faster as he figured out the rungs. He was nearly to the top of the RV, where the woman sat in the middle of the roof, hunched as if protecting her baby.
“Hold on,” Jorge said to her, but she didn’t respond. Jorge ran to the rear of the RV and began climbing after him. Jorge gave one machete chop at the man’s rubber heel, but it lifted free just before the blade careened off metal.
The fisherman stood in his tan vest, head lifted as if sniffing the breeze. He put one hand on a small satellite dish to steady himself, then wriggled it back and forth. The steel bar holding the dish gave a grating squeak and tore free. The man lifted the dish like a weapon and turned to face Jorge, who was still three rungs down the ladder.
A shot rang out, whining over Jorge’s head. The Zaphead lifted the dish and Jorge thought about dropping to the ground. But he didn’t think he could climb it again before the mutated fisherman killed the woman and her baby.
Instead, Jorge launched himself forward and rolled. The fisherman paused, the dish still held high, as if he also hesitated to kill. Jorge swung out one of his workman’s boots into the man’s kneecap. The leg folded but didn’t collapse.
The Zaphead hissed in pain, or perhaps rage, and swatted the dish downward as if Jorge were an oversize fly. Jorge raised his machete—just like Banderas would, he thought—and blocked the blow, although the impact drove the back edge of the blade precariously near his face.
On his back, Jorge raised both legs and drove the bottoms of his boots into the Zaphead’s stomach. A chuff of air was driven from the man’s abdomen as the kick lifted him off the RV’s roof and sent him, arms flailing, over the edge. The body struck pavement below with a soggy splat, while the dish clattered a few feet down the road.
Jorge didn’t bother to check the damage. Instead, he went to the young woman, whose face contorted between expressions of fear and gratitude. A tear ran down one grimy cheek. Up close, she looked even younger, maybe seventeen.
This could be Marina in a few years, he thought, even though this woman had reddish-gold hair instead of Marina’s dark Latina features.
“Come,” he said, holding out one hand. “We have a safe place.”
She stared at the gore-clotted machete blade. Jorge looked down at it and wiped it on the leg of his pants. “Only when necessary,” he said.
“Get and come on,” Franklin shouted from the bushes. “Else, I’m going to have to start killing these others.”
Jorge looked down the road. Two more Zapheads had emerged from the forest, although they didn’t move with any sort of speed or menace. Jorge was struck yet again with the notion that they appeared mo
re curious than anything, as if they’d been dropped into an unwelcoming world without a road map.
That, I can understand, mis amigos.
“Come,” Jorge said, more gently this time. “My wife will help care for your child.”
She relaxed a little and peeled back a fold of her bundle. Jorge saw just the tiniest stretch of pink skin before she closed it again and tried to stand. She nearly lost her balance, and Jorge steadied her. The two Zapheads at the rear of the RV had backed away another 10 feet, staring up as if watching a scene on the stage of some theater of the absurd.
“Don’t shoot,” Jorge shouted at Franklin, who now stood by the stone fence, the rifled aimed at the nearest Zaphead. “I don’t think they will hurt us.”
“Then what was Captain Ahab up there doing? Playing badminton?”
“They’re confused.”
“Well, hell, they ain’t the only one.”
Jorge went down the ladder first, offering to carry the baby, but the woman violently shook her head. So Jorge climbed down and stood guard while she made a cautious, awkward descent.
“Go,” Jorge said to the Zapheads, motioning with his machete. “Salir.”
They merely stood with their intensely glittering gazes, although the two new Zapheads kept approaching. When the young mother reached the pavement, Jorge guided her toward Franklin and the trail back to the compound.
“Took you long enough,” Franklin said.
“That is how we do it south of the border, old man,” Jorge said.
“Well, don’t be taking no siestas until we make sure these things don’t follow us, sí?”
It wasn’t until they were halfway up the mountain that Jorge felt his stomach unclench, and he knelt and vomited in the leaves while Franklin stood sentinel.
He didn’t feel very much like Antonio Banderas now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Sure could use a GPS,” DeVontay said.
He squinted up at the sun, which was sinking toward the western horizon. They had left the little town behind, although its smoke still stained the air. Beyond it, the higher columns of diffuse gray marked the progress of Charlotte into the atmosphere. The clouds were like clumps of dirty wool riding high, uncertain currents.
Rachel sat in the shade of a sycamore, studying the street behind them. The images of the bodies strewn across the courthouse lawn still haunted her. Everywhere she looked, she hallucinated corpses into the shadows and crevices, arranged in horribly artful arrays.
Keep it together, Ray Ray. Stephen needs you.
The boy had grown more animated with every mile they’d walked. Leaving his doll with the dead girl had served to purge some of his melancholy. Rachel wondered if his current ease was even more worrisome than his near-catatonia. But there was no psychological handbook for diagnosing the emotional conditions of After. This was all new ground.
“That way,” Rachel said, pointing vaguely northwest. They had entered a rural area and houses were fewer and farther between, so they were less likely to encounter Zapheads. They’d been following a gravel road for the last five miles or so, encountering only a few abandoned vehicles. Rachel didn’t want to think about the bodies that might have been in them and whether they’d been removed and used as art.
“You sure?” DeVontay studied the ragged map in his hands. “I-77 runs north, and it’s back over that way.”
“We don’t want to follow the interstate,” Rachel said. “We need to stay away from population centers.”
“Where we will find food?”
“House to house,” Rachel said.
“Where will we sleep?”
“House to house.”
Stephen, who was digging in the ground with a stick, looked up. “Does that mean we can have any house we want?”
“Sure,” she said. “Our pick of the neighborhood. As long as no one is living there, I don’t think they’d mind if we used it.”
“I want a house with a swimming pool.” He swung his stick at a moth that was fluttering in a wobbly pattern around him.
“Don’t kill it,” she said.
“Why not?” he said with a pout, although he lowered his stick.
“Because life is sacred.”
“Then how come everybody’s dead?”
Rachel wanted to give an automatic answer, but all the options felt hollow: Because God willed it so? Because the universe is a powerful bitch? Because they were not worthy?
Instead, she settled on the lame response that made her feel painfully like an adult. “Because.”
DeVontay headed up the road, wiping the dust from his forehead with a kerchief, and then wrapping it around his head like Jimi Hendrix. “I bet that house up there has a pool,” he said. “Or maybe a fish pond.”
The two-story white farmhouse had a tin roof that glinted in the dying sun. The yard was fenced, and the surrounding property was broken into several pastures. A tractor was parked outside a red barn, and two spotted Jersey cows picked at the grass, ignoring them. The surrounding land sloped up to forest. A dusty Ford pickup sat in the driveway near the porch. Rachel could see a rifle in a rack through the rear window.
“I wanna fish!” Stephen said, running to catch up with DeVontay. Rachel shouldered her pack and followed them. The house offered good visibility and looked pretty secure, assuming a family of Zapheads wasn’t gathered around the kitchen table…
“Hello?” DeVontay called, cupping his hands. Only the wind answered.
DeVontay was checking out the truck by the time Rachel caught up. “Empty,” he said, although he gave Rachel a look that suggested it wasn’t.
“Stephen, come look at this,” Rachel said. She went to the apple tree in the side yard and pulled a branch low so Stephen could pluck a few of the ruby-red Macintosh apples. When she looked back, DeVontay was rummaging in the truck, emerging with the rifle in his hands before slamming the door shut.
“I’m checking out the house,” he said. “Wait there until I get back.”
Rachel led Stephen to the little garden that had been overtaken by weeds. The tomatoes were mostly rotten and the cucumbers had yellowed, but the mustard and collard greens were dark and healthy-looking. “Help me pick some,” she said, kneeling in the dirt. She stuck a turnip green in her mouth and chewed, savoring its vibrant bitterness.
“Gross,” Stephen said.
“You want to be strong like Spiderman, don’t you?”
“Your teeth are green.” The boy glanced at the barn. “What’s in there?”
“Hay,” she said. “Now, let’s pick. It will be good to have some fresh vitamins after all that canned food.”
“Hay tastes better than this,” he said, heading for the barn.
“Don’t go in there alone,” she said, lifting the lower front of her shirt to form a sack for the greens. She collected fistfuls of greens, waiting for Stephen to return. She was so intent on her harvest that she didn’t realize for a moment that he’d kept going.
He was almost to the barn. “Stephen!” she called.
The boy stood at the barn’s heavy wooden entrance, which was suspended by metal wheels on a steel track. The door opening was about two feet wide, and thick darkness waited beyond it. Rachel couldn’t imagine the boy would go in there, not after all the horrors he’d endured.
The boy took one look back, but he didn’t seem to notice Rachel. He cocked his head as if hearing distant music, and then slipped inside the barn. Rachel dropped the greens and hurried after him, the weariness and tension of the past days hitting her in a wave and weakening her legs. A blister on her big toe screamed in red electricity, but she pushed herself, thinking of her sister.
She called him again. The word was like a thunderclap in the quiet pastoral setting, birds falling silent in the nearby forest. She reached the door and the dark air inside was almost a solid thing, rich with the dust of hay and manure, and obsidian block framed by rough wooden planks and chicken wire. Rachel didn’t want to touch that miserab
le darkness, much less enter it, but Stephen was inside.
She’d promised to take care of him.
She stepped inside, calling his name, listening to the ticking of the hot tin roof. She derided herself for growing overconfident. She should have taken the pistol from DeVontay after he’d found the rifle. But the peace of the farm valley had lulled her into a false complacency, allowing her to forget that this was After and the rules had changed with one massive belch of the sun.
Stumbling in the darkness, Rachel fought an urge to wait for DeVontay. She was pretty sure no Zapheads were lurking in the barn, or they would have reacted to her voice. Still, the deep shadows carried the weight of menace, like the held breath of a stalker. Something wasn’t right here.
As her eyes adjusted to the shafts of light leaking through the cracks and windows, she was able to make out support posts and stalls, with tufts of yellow hay littering the dirt floor. On the center beam, three shapes dangled from ropes like old sacks of feed. Stephen stood silently, peering up at them.
“Oh my Lord,” Rachel said, limping to the boy’s side. She tried to pull him away, then cover his eyes, but he wriggled free.
“What happened?” Stephen asked.
The bodies were of a man and two young boys, obviously brothers. Their black tongues protruded from their gaping mouths and their eyes bulged. Although flies swarmed around them, they apparently had been dead no more than a day or two.
“This isn’t good, Stephen.”
“Did they kill themselves?” Stephen’s voice was cold and vacant again, as if his post-traumatic autism had seized control.
Rachel thought it was likely the man hanged his own children before killing himself. It didn’t look like the work of Zapheads. But she didn’t know which answer would give Stephen the most comfort. Perhaps there was no comfort to be found in death.
Perhaps.
Or maybe the man had taken stock of After and made a decision based on love and mercy. Despite the resources of the farm, the man may have seen no future that didn’t end in a violent death. Maybe this was the man’s way of protecting his family from Zapheads, killing his wife in the truck and then ushering his offspring to an eternal peace instead of facing another day of living hell.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 94