After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4)

by Scott Nicholson

  “What will we eat?”

  The Zapheads obviously wouldn’t let them stop at any of the houses or convenience stores along the highway, and Rosa was afraid to ask. But Cathy, whose blouse was open so that Joey could feed from one of her full breasts, said, “We’ll eat cake.”

  Joey stopped his suckling and pulled his lips away with a wet smack. “Patty cake!” he squealed with delight, before nuzzling back into his nursing.

  The sky shifted from pitch black to gray, suggesting morning. Ahead of them was a soft haze of light, and Rosa’s heart leapt with joy. Electricity! So civilization isn’t completely dead.

  “What are those lights, Momma?” Marina mumbled drowsily, leaning against Rosa as she limped forward.

  “It looks like a town, honey.”

  “Does that mean warm food? And milk?”

  “I hope so. We’ll have to see.”

  Joey popped free of his mother’s breast again to exclaim, “New people!”

  “New people,” the other Zapheads repeated.

  New people? That means…

  Now the road ended with the dark spires of buildings lining two horizons. It was a town, but much larger than Siler Creek, the metal awnings of several gas stations suggesting a center of commerce. As the buildings crowded closer together, and details emerged in the creeping dawn, the windows mirrored the glow they’d seen from a distance. And a chill slithered up from Rosa’s bowels into her chest.

  There wasn’t a single light source, juiced by the technological advancement of humans and recovered after a natural disaster. No, the glow was the collective brightness of hundreds of tiny lights.

  Sparking eyes.

  As thick as the countless stars on a clear night.

  Bodies crowded the street, swaying, milling, waiting for something.

  Waiting for them.

  “New people!” the crowd shouted, in voices shrill and low, gravelly and thin, male and female, young and old.

  Rosa nearly fainted. If not for Marina, she would have, but with her daughter’s weight resting against her, motherly duty goosed her into alertness. The cries of the Zapheads were bludgeoning after a night of silence and false peace. The discord continued for a full thirty seconds before fading away to a few mutters and mumbles.

  “New place,” Joey said to Cathy, loudly enough for Rosa and Marina to hear.

  “Good,” Cathy said. “Because it’s time for a new diaper.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The rain began falling just as they reached the high school.

  The storm blew in with the dawn, the clouds like twisted purple dishrags leaking their juice onto the world. The mob of Zapheads had closed around them, chattering and clicking, spewing ululations that were all the more terrible because they nearly resembled words. Rosa heard snatches that she was certain were Spanish, and she wondered if the first Zapheads in their group had passed along the language they had learned or if some other unfortunate Spaniard or Mexican had been captured.

  Marina clung to her, head buried in Rosa’s shirt, as they waded down Main Street through the horde of shabbily dressed—and in some cases scarcely dressed—mutants, whose eyes glinted like a series of flash fires on a burning oil slick. They hardly seemed to notice the rain, although the thick, cold drops soon had both Marina and her shivering.

  The Zapheads that had been with them in Siler Creek were nowhere around, the bodies they were carrying already taken from them. Rosa had the terrible thought that the mutants were using them for food, but she’d never seen any Zaphead eating, aside from Joey nursing at his mother’s breast. They weren’t flesh-consuming zombies, but they also didn’t seem to wither and weaken through lack of protein. Meanwhile, Marina was nearly to the point of collapse and Rosa’s own legs twitched in spasms of pain.

  Cathy ignored the maddening throng, intent on shielding Joey from the brunt of the storm. But the infant kicked and squirmed until his chubby arms and legs worked free of his swaddling, and his pink toes curled at the air. “Here now here!” he squealed with delight, his shrill voice penetrating the howling wind and the rattling of awnings and signposts as rain pounded car hoods and concrete.

  Rosa couldn’t help but feel they were being herded now. She’d seen several American movies on the Jewish holocaust, including the powerfully moving “Schindler’s List.” Although she was aware of the deep cultural chasm that would never allow her to relate to those horrors, she imagined this might be the same sense of foreboding experienced by those poor victims of the Nazi concentration camps. They staggered down the streets of the dirty gray town with the white-domed courthouse shining wetly on the hill.

  Rosa wondered if other survivors might be in the organic tide that pushed them forward, but in the chaos, she could do little more than cling to Marina and fight to keep her feet. The raving crowd appeared to part and let Cathy through, Joey waving them forward. “Here now here!” he shrieked again, clapping his little hands together. The chant was immediately echoed by the crowd until it lost meaning and Rosa began to hear it as “Now here here.”

  “Make it stop, Momma,” Marina cried, squeezing Rosa so hard her ribs were bruised.

  “It’ll be okay soon,” Rosa said, already hating herself for using that lie yet again. The Zapheads didn’t seem interested in hurting them, at least not intentionally. But some of them crowded close enough to bump into her, and they lacked a sense of their own strength. One little boy slapped her hard on the back and shouted, “Patty cake!”

  The street opened onto a soggy parking lot, with school buses lined on both sides. Rosa wondered if the corpses of any children were sitting silently in those seats, ready for a final ride. Then she saw the rectangular brick façade of the school, a fenced-in area for athletic fields behind it. A large wing featured windows set in a row maybe thirty feet off the ground, and Rosa figured it was the gymnasium. A double set of metal doors stood open, the darkness beyond them like the welcoming gaze of the world’s most secret demon. It was clear the Zapheads expected them all to enter the structure. Despite Rosa’s misgivings, at least the gym looked dry, and she needed to get Marina out of the bone-chilling rain.

  Cathy turned to them with a beaming grin, strands of wet blonde hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “What’s Joey saying?” Rosa asked.

  “He says go in.” She shrugged as if this was a party where somebody wanted to play charades or they would all turn into pumpkins at midnight. “The New People can’t hear him, so they’re just jabbering up a storm. But we better do as he says.”

  “How come he’s the boss?” Marina asked, nearly sobbing.

  Cathy gazed down at her son. “Because he’s special. Aren’t you, Little Boo Boo?” She touched the tip of his nose and wiggled it a little, and he actually giggled.

  “Special!” he agreed, slapping at the saturated blanket that kept him attached to his mother. “Kissy Boo Boo.”

  “Boo boo,” repeated the Zapheads, and soon the call spread to dozens and then hundreds, to mutants who must have been out of sight on different streets or around the perimeter of the school. Rosa wondered how many of them had gathered in this place, and how they were staying alive. And the biggest question, why?

  But questions could wait. Right now she just wanted to be away from that insane cacophony and the drilling rainfall. She clamped her palms over Marina’s ears and followed Cathy into the gym.

  The space was cavernous and almost completely dark, with an odor of dirty laundry, rotted food, and a faintly metallic tinge to the air. There were a few specks of light Rosa recognized as Zaphead eyes, although there couldn’t have been more than a dozen of the mutants in the building. Rain drummed against the roof in a musical rhythm, but above the roar rose a whispered sibilance, like an audience secretly gossiping while pretending to watch a play.

  “New People talk,” Joey said, and then Rosa realized what the sound was: conversation.

  “Other people, Momma,” Marin
a said, with evident relief. “Humans.”

  As bad as it is, at least we won’t have to face it alone. With that thought, she realized she’d stopped including Cathy as one of “them.” Cathy had slipped over the edge, a devoted mother to the point of losing touch with reality. In a way, Rosa envied her. Living in a strange fairy tale was much easier than struggling in a world that had changed so much it was no longer fit for human life.

  Although the double doors remained open, none of the Zapheads followed them in. Rosa wondered if this was some sort of sacred place to them. But Joey had entered, at his own insistence, and none of the Zapheads tried to stop him. The Zaphead with the severed hand stood at the door, still holding a rifle, and the Zaphead with the bloody military cap waited beside him.

  That’s what they are doing: waiting.

  Scraps and fragments of phrases came to Rosa, mostly in English, although a few were in Spanish as well as in one or two in languages she didn’t recognize. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she made out several small groups scattered about the spacious basketball court, whose lacquered wood caught the faint daylight leaking through the high windows. In each group was a pair of glittering orbs—belonging to a Zaphead.

  “They’re little babies, too,” Marina said. “The Zapheads brought people here to take care of their babies.”

  Marina sounded hopeful, as if humans might serve a useful purpose that would keep them alive. As with the Jews and the others persecuted in the Holocaust, if the captors could squeeze labor from them first, death could always wait a little while. It wasn’t like either the victims or the executioners were in much of a hurry, at least not in the beginning.

  But those adults gathered around each infant didn’t do much speaking. All the voices in the gym were high and thin, echoing off the cinder-block walls and the rolled-up rows of spectator seating. The phrases weren’t much different than those uttered by Joey: “Here now we are here,” “New People talk like Old,” and “Ve ahora ir aquí.” Almost nonsensical, yet suggesting serious intent. But the syllabic sequences were more complex, the articulation more elaborate, than anything Rosa had heard from the Zapheads.

  “The babies are all talking,” Cathy said.

  “We are not babies,” Joey said, with a chilling clarity that was all the more startling because of the childlike voice. He no longer twisted and contorted in his mother’s arms. Instead, he lay still and watched them with narrow eyes. Rosa could have sworn the mutant was sizing her up, judging her intelligence.

  “Of course you are, Boo,” Cathy said.

  “We are New People,” Joey insisted. “Gente nueva. De nouvelles personnes. Neue Leute.”

  Rosa recognized the Spanish, and the last two sounded like French and German. As far as she knew, Joey hadn’t heard either of those languages spoken since they’d met at Franklin Wheeler’s compound. But what sounded like scraps of those languages meandered into the various conversations around the gym. As if all the babies were learning them at the same time.

  In public school in Tennessee, Marina had been discouraged from speaking Spanish during classes. As a result, other children were deprived of the ability to learn a second language, at least until the educational system required it of them and quantified their ability to grasp it as a letter grade on a report card. But Zapheads had no such strictures, apparently. All the different words, phrases, and languages flowed into a seamless and seemingly random hubbub.

  “This is a wonderful,” Cathy said, apparently adopting the adjective as a one-size-fits-all acceptance of her personal experience. “Babies learning to talk.”

  “We are not learning,” Joey said. “We are already talking. We just don’t know what already we know.”

  “Then why are we here?” Rosa asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  “We are New People,” Joey said. “You are my people.”

  “But we are not Zap—we are not New People.”

  “Usted habla espańol.” The richly accented, well-enunciated sentence was utterly astonishing coming from that tiny mouth.

  “Si,” Marina said. Always an eager learner and bright student, she thought now she could help as a teacher. Her enthusiasm crushed Rosa’s spirit.

  “Tomamos su espańoly luego lo llevamos,” Joey said.

  “What did he say?” Marina asked Rosa. Although she was fluent in Spanish, she was actually better at English, since Jorge had frowned upon her use of Spanish around the house. He insisted that they be Americans, or at least his idea of what that meant. Now Rosa was grateful for the limitation, because she didn’t want Marina to know.

  But Joey must have understood her confusion, because he translated it into English for her: “We take your Spanish and then we take the rest of you.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The flapping of tin was like the cry of a rusty bird.

  With the wind whipping, slapping brown leaves from the trees, Jorge Jiminez had difficulty judging the direction of the sound. But with those black clouds boiling in, he’d need to find shelter soon. Since parting from Franklin Wheeler weeks ago, he’d holed up in abandoned houses at night, searching for Rosa and Marina during the day. Even though sunset was still hours away, he couldn’t afford to get wet. While he could probably find a change of clothes in a dusty closet, he wasn’t sure he could endure entering yet one more house where the corpses had set up permanent residence.

  He guessed he was at least ten miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway boundary, because the houses had become more frequent, most of them seasonal cabins perched precariously on steep slopes. The farmsteads offered better foraging because the cabins often held bare cupboards, even though they were less likely to be occupied by either the living or the dead—or that third kind known as the Zapheads.

  The creaking noise likely signaled an old outbuilding, probably a barn or tool shed. Since he had a satchel of canned goods, he could skip the risk of entering a house. Aside from the rogue military unit patrolling the area, other survivors could be barricaded with firearms, ready to blow away anything that moved. Franklin had been right about one thing: the human race was farther away from joining hands and singing “Give Peace a Chance” than it had ever been.

  So an outbuilding sounded good. He could use some rest, and the yellow blister on his big toe wouldn’t complain much, either. Every moment he wasn’t moving might be putting more distance between him and his wife and daughter. But he had no idea where they were—they could be a hundred yards away, or a hundred miles. He’d instinctively moved downhill, figuring they followed the path of least resistance. The valleys opened up before him, golden brown with autumn, although winter’s gray showed itself here and there like the hairs in an aging man’s beard.

  He didn’t even want to think of winter, or of Rosa and Marina fighting the harsh elements. Those left couldn’t afford to think of the future. There was only today. There was only now, and the hope of shelter.

  He stepped from the forest to discover a sagging stitch of fencing. Beyond the barbed wire was a hay field, the weeds towering over the grass, the prickly, purple knobs of thistles bending in the wind. His former boss would have been horrified at the condition of the field, sending his migrant labor out with tractors and weed-eaters to whip them into productivity. Jorge suspected the old asshole would have loved to whip his workers as well, but even white, rural Tennessee landowners had become victims of twenty-first century civility.

  Of course, Wilcox and the rest of the farm’s occupants had dropped dead with one massive stroke of the sun, leaving only Jorge and his family to pick up the pieces. But after surviving an attack by mutants, they sought the safety of the mountains, where they’d met Franklin. But that journey had left them divided, and now all that remained was…

  The shed.

  It could have once been a chicken coop, or perhaps a place to store silage and hay. It leaned to leeward as if the coming winter might be its last, its weathered plank siding warped and cracked. The structure offered dubious s
anctuary, but the first fat drops of rain decided it for Jorge. He navigated the fence and darted toward the shed, grateful it was too cold now for the copperheads and rattlers that had populated Wilcox’s fields.

  By the time he reached the sagging door and ripped free the bent sprig of wire that held it fastened, the heavens had let loose, drilling silver fusillades at the earth as if dispensing whatever retribution remained after the sun had vent its wrath. Jorge ducked inside to the hammering of hailstones against the tin roof, dust and chaff filling his nostrils and clinging to his sweat.

  The interior was dark, with only a couple of high openings illuminating a loft above. Jorge was shaking the water from his hair when the woman spoke over the rainfall.

  “Don’t move if you like your skull in one piece.”

  He glanced up to the loft, where a shadow separated itself from the larger darkness. A bolt of lightning photographed her: fortyish, a wide-brimmed straw hat topping a heart-shaped face, the gray-black rod of a shotgun barrel protruding before her.

  “I’m unarmed,” he said.

  “Like I believe that? You’d have to be crazy to wander around Zaphead country without some heavy ordnance.”

  “They only attack when provoked.” Jorge’s throat was dry with tension. He was tired of people pointing guns at him.

  “I must be provoking the holy hell out of them, then, because I’ve killed at least a dozen.” From her silhouette, Jorge judged her to be maybe five-two or five-three, probably a hundred and eighty pounds. Not frail in the least. Her words were disembodied in the disorienting half-light. “O’ course, some of them might have been humans. I didn’t ask.”

  “How do you know I’m human?”

  “Because you haven’t attacked me yet. And you’re talking. And you just barely got enough sense to come in out of the rain.”