After (Book 3): Milepost 291

by Nicholson, Scott

  She was afraid to call out in case any Zapheads were nearby. Rachel wondered if the Zapheads could smell her—the infection in her leg, her sweat, the watermelon-scented shampoo she’d used by a creek in a futile attempt at normalcy. At least the Zapheads had quit yelling. Although the noise allowed her to track their locations and movements, she preferred the silence, even if the calm was only an illusion.

  A branch snapped somewhere ahead.

  She crouched low and leaned against a tree, peering into the darkness. She heard a soft female voice: “Do you see it?”

  That doesn’t sound like a Zaphead.

  Rachel waited, guessing the speaker was maybe fifty feet away. Another female said, “Over there.”

  The gunshot was like a thunderclap in the night calm of the forest and a whine overhead clipped through branches and leaves. Rachel instinctively ducked lower. In the brightness of the muzzle flash she’d made out a small collection of silhouettes among the tree trunks. Two adults and a child. One of the adults, the one not pointing the rifle, carried a bulky bundle.

  “Did you hit it?” said the first voice.

  Zapheads didn’t use guns, as far as she knew. And they didn’t speak in sentences.

  “Who’s there?” said one of the women.

  Definitely not a Zap.

  “Rachel,” she answered. “Don’t shoot. I’m…normal.”

  Which also didn’t sound like something a Zaphead would say, so she was probably safe. Still, she kept the tree between her and the rifle.

  “What are you doing out here in the dark?” asked the woman.

  “Looking for a boy. Have you seen him?”

  “You know what’s out here, don’t you?”

  “Zapheads.” Rachel walked toward the group. She sensed more than saw one of the women pull the child protectively close. She thought for a moment it might be Stephen, but this child was shorter, and Stephen would have called out. “They heard the shot. They’ll be coming.”

  As she drew closer, Rachel saw a soft radiance emanating from the bundle of blankets held by the woman. Rachel dug two of the glow sticks from her backpack and broke them, casting a circle of sickly green light that was barely bright enough to reveal the group. One of the women was probably early thirties, hugging a girl slightly older than Stephen. Judging by their similar straight black hair and nut-brown skin, Rachel judged them to be mother and daughter. It was this woman who held the rifle, its barrel now pointed at the sky but held with an easy confidence, as if the woman could bring it to bear in a heartbeat.

  The other woman hugged her bundle to her chest. She was Rachel’s age, maybe two years younger. She was blonde and dirty-faced, a long red scratch across one cheek. She looked scared and tired and brittle, as if a sudden wind might cause her to collapse in a heap of bones.

  “Do you have a camp?” Rachel asked the woman holding the rifle, who was obviously their leader.

  “We came from one,” the woman said. Her tone was neither welcoming nor threatening, as if she were feeling out Rachel’s potential for danger. “But we had to leave.”

  “We were about to bed down in a cave, but Stephen—he’s the little boy I’m looking for—saw a snake and ran. Now he’s lost.”

  “They have him now,” said the blonde woman carrying the bundle.

  “I haven’t seen any lately,” Rachel said, assuming she was referring to Zapheads.

  “They have him,” the woman repeated with cold conviction.

  “Well, then I’ll just have to get him back.”

  Rachel had no idea which way to go. She was also reluctant to leave the group of females. Besides Stephen, she hadn’t seen a human since they’d split with DeVontay two weeks ago. She didn’t want to think about him; he’d sacrificed himself to lure away Zapheads so she and Stephen could escape. He was probably dead, despite what she’d told Stephen.

  Stephen might be dead, too.

  No. She’d lost her sister and she wasn’t going to lose Stephen. “Where are you guys from?”

  “Up on the mountain,” said the woman with the rifle. She spoke clipped, clear English but her accent was Spanish.

  “That’s where I’m headed. As soon as I find Stephen.” Her leg was killing her, but Rachel didn’t dare sit down. She flicked the light among the surrounding trees, checking for the reflection of glittering eyes.

  “Milepost 291,” said the blonde woman.

  “What?” Rachel couldn’t believe it, even though the location couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty miles away.

  “A compound. We were holed up there, but…” The woman clasped the bundle more snugly to her chest. “Joey told us to leave.”

  The bundle wriggled and emitted a soft cry.

  A baby?

  But if this woman was telling Rachel the baby was talking to them, then perhaps they’d been affected by the solar storms. While billions had been killed and others mutated into becoming Zapheads, the intense electromagnetic field fluctuations could have caused a wide range of effects on the human brain. It wasn’t like anybody was studying this stuff in a lab, and she’d had little opportunity to observe them. She’d been too busy surviving.

  “This compound,” Rachel asked, scanning the forest around them once more. “Was Franklin Wheeler there?”

  “Mr. Wheeler,” said the woman with the rifle. “Yes. He saved us.”

  He survived!

  Rachel’s heart started pumping faster, and the pain in her leg surged in giant waves. And she realized that her hope had been only that—she expected him to be dead and the compound a fantasy land. “Can you show me how to get there?”

  “No!” shouted the woman with the baby. “Joey told us to leave. Bad things are happening.”

  A regular little Nostradamus there. That’s a pretty safe prediction.

  Rachel addressed the woman with the rifle, who now seemed like the sane one of the bunch. “Franklin’s my grandfather. I’m trying to find him.”

  “He wasn’t there when we left,” the little girl said. “The baby made us go.”

  “Go,” the baby said.

  Rachel wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. The bundle thrashed and a small arm poked out, pale fist balled in indignation. “Go,” the baby repeated.

  Judging from the size of the arm, the infant couldn’t have been more than six months old. No way should it be able to speak. Then the fingers splayed curled. The baby seemed to be waving them downhill into darkness.

  The haggard young mother stepped outside the yellow perimeter of the glow stick’s haze. The woman with the rifle nudged her daughter to follow.

  “Wait,” Rachel said. “That’s crazy. Babies can’t talk.”

  The mother turned, and the bundled shifted. In its folds was a scattering of small bright sparks.

  Its eyes.

  “You don’t understand,” the mother said.

  You’re right about that.

  The Spanish woman said, almost in apology, “We have to follow. You are welcome to come with us.”

  “Not without Stephen.”

  The woman nodded and glanced at her own daughter as if she understood. Her dark eyes were solemn but determined, and Rachel saw she would make whatever sacrifice was necessary in order to survive.

  “How far is the compound?” Rachel asked her.

  “I don’t know. Maybe fifteen or twenty miles. Top of the mountain.”

  “The Zapheads are here,” the mother said. “We have to go.”

  “Go,” the baby blurted. They did.

  As the group shuffled downhill, kicking up the scent of mud and pine, Rachel almost shouted after them. Instead, she shoved the glow sticks in her pocket and waited for her eyes to adjust to the faint haze of starlight leaking through the bare forest canopy. They’d come from her grandfather’s compound, and he was still alive. She figured her odds were better with Franklin Wheeler than with a group of delusional women who thought a baby was bossing them around.

  Or maybe she was growing del
irious herself. The infection in her leg might be poisoning her nervous system, slowing her reaction time and disrupting her senses. She didn’t like feeling helpless, but walking twenty more miles on her own was a demoralizing challenge. She listened until the group was lost in darkness, their footfalls faded, and then she continued up the slope in the direction Stephen had fled.

  “Rachelllll.”

  It was Stephen, somewhere in the darkness above. She almost yelled back but was afraid Zapheads might hear. Instead, she hobbled faster, stumbling over a damp, fallen log.

  Stephen didn’t sound panicky, although he must have been terribly frightened. He repeated her name, almost in a whisper.

  Coming, honey. Just hang on tight.

  She guided herself from trunk to trunk, judging distance by the branches overhead, which were like black bones etched against the gray sky. The only sound besides her feet in the muddy leaves was the wind whining through the forest.

  “Rachel,” he said again, and she saw his silhouette among a cluster of large boulders. She was surprised he’d venture near them after the encounter with the snake.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  She pulled the dimming glow sticks from her pocket and held them in the air.

  Only it wasn’t Stephen.

  It was a young girl, barely teen-aged, and her eyes glittered in the glare of the flashlight beam.

  “Rachel,” she said, perfectly imitating Stephen.

  Shadows separated themselves from the surrounding trees and walked toward her.

  “Rachel,” they said. “Rachel.”

  And their eyes winked and danced like a thousand radioactive fireflies.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Morning was probably the worst of it.

  Dreams had become a refuge for Campbell Grimes, and the sweetest ones were of all the mundane things that now seemed so rare and beautiful. They were already distant artifacts of a lost culture even though it had only been two months since the solar storms.

  Alien archaeologists of the future might one day make sense of the civilization that left behind little but a thin layer of poisoned plastic, but it was unlikely they would learn of Campbell’s drawings, addiction to Diet Coke and videogames, his casual obsession with Kate Upton, or his collegiate flirtation with Buddhism. The facts of his life weren’t his body-mass index and date of birth, but the wildly colorful fantasies and ideals that echoed in the boned curves of his skull.

  Upon awakening, a shutter was drawn down over the past and the hellish light of After dragged him into its spotlight. He’d been dreaming again of Catawba Lake where his family had spent their summers. He’d been upstairs in their waterfront home, looking down on the neighbor’s dock, where a new ski boat was tethered. But the boat was the least eye-catching of John Hampton’s treasures—his wife Tamara wore that crown. She lay sprawled on a lounge chair in her bikini, skin glistening like oiled amber, the wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses adding just enough concealment that Campbell could objectify her without feeling too creepy.

  He’d never masturbated during his little peep shows, but they’d given him an electric thrill all the same. And in his dream, she’d been flipping back a strand of golden hair that the lake breeze kept pushing across her face. The sun dappled the water, the ski boat bobbed, the muddy duckweed drifted, and her elegant arm lifted and nudged, lifted and nudged, fingers splayed, lips pursed, and she turned her head slightly and the sunglasses were aimed directly at the window where Campbell sat—

  He awoke with heart pounding, a guilty erection throbbing inside his trousers. He’d had no relief in After, and he certainly wasn’t going to toss one off lying here on the carpeted floor of the farmhouse, surrounded by Zapheads. They were lying all around him, some snoring lightly, others awake and waiting for him to rise and shine, a phrase they’d learned from the professor.

  Unlike the professor, Campbell had stopped sleeping in the bed because the Zapheads inevitably rolled into the sagging middle of the mattress during the night, creating a suffocating pile. He wasn’t even sure they actually slept in the usual sense—they might just have been imitating sleep as they imitated everything else.

  Another day in paradise.

  Dawn painted the windows yellow. From downstairs came the clatter of silverware and cookware. The house had no electricity, since the solar storms erased the power plants, but the stove ran off propane and there must have been gallons still stored in the tank. The home’s original owners had died at the dinner table during the apocalypse, and the Zapheads learned all about place settings from the grisly tableau.

  Campbell did not look forward to breakfast, because the corpses were still around the table, and the Zapheads grew violently agitated whenever Campbell or the professor tried to remove them.

  Campbell rose as silently as he could, but his activity was instantly imitated by three or four Zapheads, including a young girl in a sundress whose eyes burned like lava. Campbell had to urinate, and there was no chance for privacy, so he stepped over the rows of prone Zapheads until he reached the door.

  The professor rolled over in his sleep, unconsciously flinging an arm over a wild-haired male who must have been in his sixties. The Zap mirrored the movement, and they snuggled like an old married couple. Campbell fought down the bile that threatened to crawl up his throat. The professor had grown too comfortable here, accepting his fate.

  “Good morning,” said the little blonde girl, and the phrase was immediately repeated by the other Zaps, even some who were still lying on the floor. There must have been two dozen in the room, and the air was sour with their stench. The professor had yet to teach them about hygiene, changes of clothes, and even basic waste elimination.

  “Good morning,” Campbell said. Just as the Zapheads had become like intelligent mockingbirds, they also expected Campbell to echo their behavior. He didn’t want to risk disturbing them, because the rest of the professor’s group had been killed in fits of rage. Since then, Campbell had remained subdued, because he was afraid the Zapheads would interpret them incorrectly and erupt in sudden violence. He had no way of knowing how their scrambled wiring might interpret any action or sound.

  Campbell walked into the hall, his filthy socks muting his footsteps. Several Zapheads sat leaning against the wall just as they had been positioned at sunset. When he passed, they rose silently and followed him, along with the three Zapheads from the bedroom. The perverse parade continued down the stairs and out the back door. When Campbell unzipped his fly, all of the Zapheads imitated him. The females seemed startled to discover they didn’t have penises, but they urinated anyway, staining their clothes.

  Campbell gazed at the forest at the edge of the pasture, and beyond it to the swell of mountains in the northwest. He thought of Rachel Wheeler and the compound at Milepost 291 she’d portrayed as a promised land. She’d offered few details, but her fervor had been persuasive. Especially when compared to all the other alternatives.

  As he often did, he considered making a run for it, but Zapheads were already up and milling about in the knee-high grass surrounding the farmhouse. Only one cow remained, and the Zapheads were as fascinated by its behavior as they were with Campbell’s and the professor’s. The animal had grown used to their presence and chewed contentedly. Campbell wished he was as successful at ignoring them.

  Why couldn’t the Big Zap have given me Mad Cow Disease?

  He returned to the farmhouse, followed by the Zapheads. He held his palm over his face to suppress the smell of decomposing corpses inside. The Zapheads mimicked the movement, even though the odor didn’t seem to bother them. Perhaps they had no awareness of morality, and thus the corrupted rot carried no association with their own coming deaths.

  The professor was already sitting at the table. “Good morning,” he said, with surprisingly good cheer considering he sat among four corpses and a room full of deranged mutants.

  “Good morning,” Campbell said, and the farmhouse was filled with shouts of Zapheads re
peating the words. A broad-faced woman whose gray eyes glittering with iridescent golden flecks moved in front of him as he approached the table, screeching “Good morning good morning good morning.” The phrase echoed in a seemingly endless loop.

  “Fuck you,” Campbell said, and broad-faced woman segued from “Good morning” to “Fuck you” without taking a breath. As the chant rose around them, the professor grinned at Campbell and pulled out a chair for him. Campbell sat beside him and the room grew quiet. The silence spread throughout the house.

  Each plate on the table was swimming with pork-and-beans. The farmhouse’s human owners, propped up in chairs and decaying in grotesque shades of green and purple, had apparently stockpiled only one type of canned food. The chickens couldn’t lay enough eggs to feed the whole congregation of fifty or so Zapheads that inhabited the farm, and the early frosts had devastated the garden. Soon they would all need meat.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” Campbell said under his breath, so only the professor could hear. They’d learned that if they murmured, the Zapheads would also murmur and therefore not be able to hear the conversation.

  The professor lifted his plate and lapped at the sauce. By unspoken agreement, they avoided silverware because they didn’t want the Zapheads to all simultaneously brandish sharp implements.

  When those Zapheads who were close enough to the table also lifted plates and slurped, the professor said, “Not again. When are they going to learn some manners?”

  “Seriously. You may like having your own little group of lab monkeys to play with, but I’m going nuts.”

  The professor wiped the reddish-brown sauce from his lips with the back of his shirt sleeve. “If we can teach them how to hunt and gather, we’ll make it through the winter. They’re progressing. I’ve even observed some signs of initiative in a few of them.”

  “Great. Creative new ways to kill and maim survivors.”

  “We don’t even know how many survivors are left. For all we know, we’re the last two standing.”

  Campbell pushed his plate away even though he’d only eaten half his portion. A stringy-haired Zaphead across the table glared at him as if Campbell had committed a hideous sin. The Zaphead was about his father’s age, with dark stubble and dirt-filled wrinkles on his cheeks.