After: The Shock
Page 15
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.