by J. Thorn
“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 “meepmeep.” 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 anger, 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.”
“Harhar.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.”
“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 Halo 2 on the Xbox, and the next he’d been sitting in his dark apartment, wondering if his douchebag roomie had again forgotten to pay the power bill. He’d even knocked on Tommy’s bedroom door, which had swung open to reveal his roomie 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 Tommy.
Then he’d gone outside and learned that Tommy 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 smelled 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 c
reature’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.”