by J. Thorn
“Zap? No, I know nothing of that. We only know it was the sun that killed people.”
Jorge was surprised to find himself near tears. Be strong. Rosa and Marina need you.
The man’s pistol dipped just a little, now directed at Jorge’s knees. “Your girl? How old is she?”
“Nine.”
“Damn.” The man slipped the pistol into one of his pockets. “All right, let’s go get her.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They’d covered perhaps three miles since leaving the roadside, and Stephen was still slumped over DeVontay’s shoulder, sound asleep. They’d been reluctant to stray out of sight of the interstate but also didn’t like being in the open. They’d descended from the hill into a suburban neighborhood, with silent cars in the driveway and menace in the shaded windows.
The bedroom community outside Charlotte looked beyond sleepy. It looked dead.
“You getting tired?” Rachel asked DeVontay.
“Not too bad,” he answered, although she imagined his muscles were screaming.
“Why don’t we rest a minute?”
“I want to put a little more distance between us and them Zapheads back there.”
“I think they’re oblivious,” Rachel said. “I doubt they’d be much interested in us.”
“Oh, they’re interested in bashing our brains out. You’ve seen ‘em.”
The gunshot boomed up from one of the houses ahead, shattering glass and reverberating across the valley. Stephen stirred in DeVontay’s arms, moaned a little, and pulled his doll close against one cheek as DeVontay knelt into a crouch.
Rachel hurried to a grimy white picket fence and scanned the street ahead. At first, she saw no movement. Then she saw a man in the yard of a brick ranch house. The man was slightly slumped, moving toward the house’s broken picture window with the prototypical confused steps.
Zaphead. But Zapheads don’t use guns.
“What is it?” DeVontay hissed in a whisper behind her.
“Trouble.”
“I figured that. The gunshot was a pretty decent clue.”
“Somebody might be trapped in that brick house,” she said, lifting her head so that she could see without exposing herself. “I see a Zaphead.”
“What’s a Zaphead?” Stephen asked in a drowsy voice.
“Never mind, little man,” DeVontay said.
“Is it like that guy in the hotel who kept beating on the doors?”
“Something like that.”
The Zaphead staggered toward the broken window, a tool in his hand. It looked like a rake with a broken handle. The Zaphead dragged it behind him like a shell-shocked gardener. He looked to be in his forties, overweight, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Two weeks ago, he probably had been standing over a barbecue grill, bitching about the Yankees’ starting rotation.
“He’s not one of the good guys,” Stephen said.
“No,” Rachel said, relieved that the boy was emerging from his earlier catatonia. “Probably not.”
“Wait here,” DeVontay said. “I’ll check it out.”
Rachel grabbed his forearm as he rose to slink around the back of the house. “You’re going to leave us here unarmed and defenseless?”
DeVontay looked at her and shook his head. “You and the Little Man here will be all right. You took care of yourself just fine before I came along, right?”
Yeah, but then all I had to worry about was myself.
“Okay, but don’t be gone long,” she said.
DeVontay looked like he wanted to offer her the gun but didn’t want to say that word in front of Stephen. Rachel waved him on his way, watching the Zaphead gardener climb into the shattered picture window. DeVontay slipped along a hedge of azaleas and was gone from view when Rachel saw the other Zapheads.
Two Zapheads emerged from the open garage, moving in tandem. One of them was an elderly woman in a floral housecoat, wispy white hair drifting in the breeze. A pink fuzzy slipper covered her right foot, and her left foot was bare, covered with thick blue veins. She shuffled like an Alzheimer’s escapee from a nursing home.
The other Zaphead was a young man with a feminine haircut and thin arms, wearing a striped sailing shirt. He resembled the pop star, Justin Bieber, but with a less-masculine jaw. Rachel nicknamed them Miss Daisy and the Bieb. It somehow made them less threatening.
“Are they going to get DeVontay?” Stephen asked, hugging his doll under his chin.
“No, DeVontay’s smart.”
“Are they going to get us?”
“No, they’re not getting us, either.”
“If they did, would they eat our guts like on TV?”
“No, these things don’t eat people.”
Although I’m not sure I can vouch for the Bieb. He’s slobbering a little.
“Will DeVontay get shot?” Stephen asked.
“He’ll stay out of sight until he figures out what’s going on. But there’s probably a good guy trapped in the house, and only good guys shoot guns.”
“I thought guns were bad.”
“Guns are dangerous, but sometimes you need them. And Zapheads don’t shoot…I mean…”
“What’s a Zaphead?”
Rachel peeked over the picket fence again. Miss Daisy was wobbly, taking two steps to the left for every step forward. The Bieb had passed her and made for the shattered window, stepping over the corpse. Rachel debated the possibility of throwing Stephen into shock against the necessity of education.
He needs to know the rules of After. Guns are now good. And Zapheads are bad.
She wiggled one of the pickets until it was loose, and then peeled it back to create a gap. “Take a look.”
Stephen put his face to the gap, and then held up the doll so it could take a gander, too. “See that, Miss Molly? That’s what bad people look like.”
Glass shattered, and someone shouted from inside the house. It was a man’s voice, yelling, “Get back.”
Then Rachel heard DeVontay shout, “Hey, man, I’m here to help—”
The gunshot boomed through the house, rattling the windows. Rachel’s heart clenched in her chest like a fist around barbed wire.
DeVontay?
She was ashamed that her first thought was a selfish one, that she’d be stuck alone, to care for Stephen. She pushed aside the thought and debated whether to rush into the house. The Bieb was climbing through the picture window, his legs kicking as he tried to drag his body inside the house.
Rachel looked around. There was a little utility shed behind the neighboring house, the door sagging open. “Come on,” she said, grabbing Stephen’s hand and pulling him through the forsythia hedge toward the shed.
“I’m scared,” Stephen said, and Rachel realized he was talking to the doll, not her.
They crossed the secluded lawn, with Rachel hoping no Zapheads were attracted by the commotion in the house. After making sure it was unoccupied, Rachel slung her backpack in the shed. The shed was cluttered with garden and carpentry tools, a ladder, a wheelbarrow, and milk crates full of wires, electrical outlets, and metal hardware. A stack of shelves held an array of paint cans, bags of potting soil and pesticides, and plastic sacks of herbicide. Through the light of a grimy window, Rachel saw something that might be useful.
She grabbed the can of Raid ant spray and put it in Stephen’s hand. “If anybody comes in, squirt that in their eyes. Okay?”
“You going to leave me?”
“Just for a sec. But I’ll lock the door behind me.”
“You’ll come back?” Stephen looked wildly around, perhaps comparing the shed to the hotel room where he’d been stuck with his mother’s corpse.
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?”
“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.