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

by Scott Nicholson

  “Have you seen any of them lately?”

  “No, but I haven’t been looking. You got any food?”

  “Some cans of beans, fish, and soup.” Jorge started to reach into his satchel.

  The gun barrel glinted with movement. “Uh-uh-uh. Don’t move so fast.”

  “I told you I didn’t have a gun.”

  “Just ease that bag off your shoulder and lay it there in the floor.”

  Jorge could barely hear her over the drumming rain. He obeyed and stood waiting, the chaff sticking to his neck and causing an itch. She shifted and then scooted a wooden ladder over the lip of the loft. She’d obviously climbed up and then pulled the ladder after her.

  “Smart,” he said.

  “What’s that?” she said, as she swung around to put a foot on the top rung and balanced her rifle in one hand.

  “The Zapheads have no way to get up there and grab you.”

  “Unless the bastards learned how to fly. The way they’re changing, I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  She descended the ladder with a grace that belied her bulk. One of Marina’s favorite movies was Disney’s “Fantasia,” and one segment featured hippopotamuses performing a ballet. Jorge was reminded of the animated dance as the woman perched on one foot in mid-air, grabbed the next rung with her free hand, and took another step down. At no time did the pump shotgun’s aim seem to waver from his chest.

  “What do you mean, ‘changing’?” he asked her. He and Franklin had arrived at the same conclusion, which was why Jorge traveled unarmed. Neither of them had been able to articulate the difference in Zaphead behavior, except that when they had stopped fighting back, the Zapheads ignored them. Considering that the woman’s gun seemed like an extra appendage on her body, she likely hadn’t reached the same conclusion.

  She bent over his bag and rooted through the contents, spilling cans on the straw-covered dirt floor. “They’re ganging up. And we’re just getting more and more scattered.”

  “Are they near here?”

  She didn’t answer, instead pulling out a gas lantern Jorge had found in a garage. “Well, well, well. Let there be light. You got any matches?”

  “There’s a lighter in the satchel.” Jorge relaxed a little as her attention shifted from her gun to the lantern. After lighting it, she twisted a knob and the flame leaped higher with a soft hiss mirroring that of the rainfall.

  With the shed illuminated, Jorge could make out a row of farm equipment, including riding lawn mowers, harrow discs, plows, fertilizer spreaders and hay balers—all equipment he had operated while working for Mr. Wilcox on a Tennessee farm. Sacks of grain were piled high on pallets, their corners worried free by rodents. The woman had apparently arranged bales of hay into a little hut where she slept in the loft. Judging by the litter on the floor, she’d been here a while.

  “You’re one of them there Hispanics, huh?” she said, squinting as if her eyesight was poor.

  “I’m from Mexico, but I am an American now.”

  “Countries don’t matter no more. There’s human country and there’s Zaphead country, and that’s all you need to know.” She picked up a can and read the label. “Pintos. I ain’t had a warm meal in I don’t know how long. Been afraid to build a campfire. Might burn the place down. And those Zappers sure do like fire.”

  She dug a can opener from his satchel and opened the can of beans, then pulled a Swiss army knife from the breast pocket of her baggy plaid shirt. Thumbing out a spoon from the multi-functional tool, she scooped up some beans and shoved them into her mouth, chewing noisily. She motioned with the utensil. “Sit down and eat.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me?”

  “Haven’t made up my mind yet. What’s your name?”

  “Jorge Jiminez.” He sat on the opposite side of the lantern from her, the door at his back. He still had the option of making a run for it, but he didn’t think she was as menacing as she pretended. Up close, her face looked broad and merry, her eyes bright enough to diminish the impact of the wrinkles around them. Her light-brown hair was streaked with gray and tied back in a ponytail.

  “I’m Wanda. Wanda Eisenstein.” She spoke around a mouthful of food, smacking her lips without any pretense of manners. “Took back my maiden name when my husband got zapped. Can’t really blame a gal for not wanting to be associated with something like that.”

  “I have a wife and child,” Jorge said. “I’m looking for them.”

  She punched a hole in the top of a can of beans and rolled it toward him, as if the supplies were hers and she was being hospitable toward a guest. “Better eat. Got to keep your strength up these days.”

  “I ate a couple of hours ago.”

  She cocked her head. “You hear that?”

  “Rain. And some hail.”

  “Thunder, too. It’s like June and January mashed together and got drunk. I bet that sun stuff messed up the weather just like it messed up people and animals and cars.”

  “And people were worried about global warming.” Jorge didn’t understand the science of it but he hadn’t evaded the arguments on the Wilcox farm, where the word “liberals” was pronounced with so much hatred that it was more than just a curse. Politics in America were so emotional, he’d almost preferred the sedate corruption of his home country.

  “People are dumbasses. They always worry about the wrong things.”

  “Many of them no longer have to worry.”

  “So when was the last time you saw your folks? They didn’t turn Zap, did they? I’d blow some steel pellets in their brains if they did that.”

  “No, they were fine. We were at a camp—” Jorge realized he wanted to protect Franklin’s secret, not that he ever imagined he’d wind up returning there. “We were in the mountains and got separated. Another woman was with them. She…she had a baby.”

  Wanda wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “Awful terrible, to raise a baby in this mess.”

  “The baby was infected. Changed by the sun.”

  “Oh, Lordy mercy.” She flung the empty can over her shoulder and it bounced off the wooden wall. She wiped her spoon on the leg of her jeans, folded up the knife, and returned it to her pocket. “You shoulda killed that thing on sight.”

  “It was her baby. It’s hard to explain. All I could wonder was that if it had been my Marina, what would I have done? I would have protected her with all my heart.”

  Wanda nodded. “I reckon. I never had no kids myself. My Joe was firing blanks all those years. Used to make me sad, but now I thank the Lord I didn’t bring anybody into the world to face all this.”

  She removed the shotgun from her lap and laid it aside, evidently trusting him now. The rain had eased so that it made a musical patter on the tin above. The storm had scrubbed the air clean, and the shed was almost cozy. Jorge allowed himself to relax, and fatigue seeped into his muscles as if a switch had been flipped.

  “So you’re wandering all over the place trying to find them, huh?” Wanda asked. “How long since you lost them?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Hate to say it, but they’re probably dead now.”

  Jorge nodded, pain stinging his eyes. That truth had danced around the back of his brain for days, but he refused to nourish it, hoping it would wither and fade in the dark. “I think the baby led them away,” he said, realizing how foolish it sounded. “Like it was commanding them.”

  She snorted a chuckle that held no humor. “They’re getting smarter, that’s for sure. But what’s that baby gonna do if they don’t obey? Squirt green poop out of its butt?”

  “Like you said, the Zapheads are gathering into groups. I haven’t seen any alone for days. There are usually at least three of them together, sometimes more.”

  “Oh, I can do you way better than that.” She belched with a sigh of satisfaction. “I can show you a whole gosh darn city of them.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “We’ve got to be getting close,” Lt. Hilyard said, checkin
g the compass on his wristwatch.

  DeVontay wasn’t sure about that. They’d found an old tool shed near the parkway where they’d passed most of a rainstorm, waiting for the weather to break, and then decided to go ahead and spend the night there. So they were at least a day behind Rachel now, assuming they were headed in the right direction. The trails broadened and became more developed and formal, and soon they found other signs of park maintenance, and two hours after sunrise they came upon the parkway itself.

  A ranger station near an overlook was abandoned, its windows smashed and the door kicked in, with papers strewn around. A vending machine lay on its side, and they collected handfuls of candy bars and packs of processed orange crackers. The restrooms were foul and flyblown, but DeVontay treated himself to a toilet seat after carefully wiping it down with paper towels. Hilyard found the keys to a park service truck and gave the ignition a try, but the engine didn’t yield so much as a hopeful click.

  Several vehicles parked at the overlook had corpses locked into their seats, their mildewed eye sockets afforded a permanent view of the ridges rolling toward the east like the gray waves of the ocean. Stephen and DeVontay sat at a picnic table to divvy up the snacks.

  “Maybe we should just start our own little compound,” Campbell said. “We could fix up that office, board the windows, and be able to see anybody coming a mile away. We’ve got enough ammo to protect ourselves.”

  “No good,” Hilyard said. “Shipley’s unit could come in with a grenade launcher and have the place smashed to toothpicks in thirty seconds. And we’d pretty much be beef stew.”

  “Not to mention how easily the Zapheads could surround it,” DeVontay said. “Sure, we could shoot them, but if they came in packs like we saw down in the valley, they’d eat all our bullets and keep coming.”

  “No Zaps up here,” Campbell said. “Haven’t seen any since the night Rachel left. Maybe they’re smart enough to head downhill where it’s warm while we’re getting colder by the hour. I say we wait it out.”

  “We have to find Rachel,” Stephen said. He’d taken off his backpack and was sitting on it, staring out across the mountains.

  “She’s probably dead, kid,” Campbell said. He leaned into the front window of one of the abandoned cars and waved at the corpse belted behind the steering wheel.

  “Don’t say that,” DeVontay said.

  “Well, it’s probably true. We’ve just been chasing dreams and smoke for weeks. Who’s to say this Wheelerville even exists?”

  “It’s something,” Hilyard said. “Better to be moving toward a goal than walking in circles or sitting around waiting for the vultures to drop.”

  Campbell shook his head in disgust. “Haven’t you guys forgotten what she is now?”

  “She’s Rachel,” Stephen said. “We have to help her like she helped us.”

  Campbell tried the door of the car and it opened with a creak. He buried his nose in the crook of his elbow to ward against the smell as he reached across the driver and checked the glove box. He came out with a pamphlet that he unfolded and quoted: “‘The Blue Ridge Parkway is America’s most-traveled scenic roadway, stretching for four-hundred-and-sixty-nine miles across rugged mountains and pastoral landscapes, providing recreational opportunities for all ages.’” He tossed the pamphlet into the driver’s putrefying lap and yelled into the back seat. “Hear that, kids? Fun for the whole family!”

  Stephen drew his arms around his body, knotting himself into a protective hunch and staring at the ground. The sight made DeVontay’s blood boil. He and Rachel had worked hard to bring the boy back from a state of near catatonia after they’d discovered him trapped in a hotel room with his dead mother, and Campbell was undoing their progress.

  But Campbell had already grown bored with his taunting of the corpses. He walked to the front of the car, where the concrete lip of the overlook gave way to a tumbling fall of boulders, briars, and scrub brush. The drop had to be at least three hundred feet, but Campbell perched on one leg, spread out both arms, and leaned forward as if flying. “I’m the king of the world!”

  DeVontay wanted to play out the rest of the movie Titanic and push the asshole over the edge. But that would only damage Stephen more. If DeVontay was selling the message of hope and unity, that meant working together, as much as Campbell was getting on his nerves.

  Hilyard, who leaned against the scenic attraction’s wooden sign—Thunder Ridge Overlook, Elevation 4,360 Feet—and studied the map, called Stephen’s name. The boy gave him a morose stare, but he sauntered over when Hilyard gave him a “Come here” nod.

  As Campbell checked the doors of a Honda C-RV, DeVontay joined the others. Hilyard passed the frayed map to Stephen and pointed to a spot on the wiggly blue line that marked the parkway’s track across the mountains of North Carolina. A bleary star of blue ink marked Rachel’s best guess of the Wheelerville compound’s location. “Here we are. Near Milepost 289. Two miles west and we reach our marker. See?”

  Stephen ran a dirty index finger along the blue line. “This way?”

  “Yeah.” Hilyard lifted his head to stare toward the southeast. “So, based on the map and the position of the sun, can you tell me which town down there is burning?”

  DeVontay was so absorbed in Campbell’s antics he’d scarcely had time to study the horizon. The haze that gave the Blue Ridge its name was barely evident, and he guessed the view stretched about two hundred miles. A thin thread of black smoke wended up from a pocket of hills in a distant valley.

  One benefit of the apocalypse is the pollution has cleared up a little. But I guess all that leaking nuclear radiation is taking its place.

  Stephen called out the town names on the map. “Siler Creek, Boone, Newton, Stonewall—that’s where those men locked us up, right, DeVontay?”

  “Yeah, but nobody traps Batman and Robin for long, do they?” DeVontay didn’t like to dredge up those horrible memories of the Zaphead attack and subsequent massacre—or the haunting image of the Zapheads carrying away the dead—but he was grateful to Hilyard for engaging the boy and drawing him out of his melancholy. The man possessed enough leadership skill to become a military officer without losing his heart along the way.

  “Pecks Mill,” the boy said with conviction. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “You are correct,” Hilyard said. “Give that man a Reese’s Cup.”

  As DeVontay fished out a candy bar, he asked Hilyard, “What do you think is burning?”

  “Might be that college. Evans-Lawson. Old stone buildings, probably wouldn’t be a bad place to fortify. Could be some survivors there, sending up a signal. Or…”

  DeVontay mentally filled in the words the man didn’t want Stephen to hear. Or Zapheads are turning it to ashes.

  “Charlotte,” Stephen said, reading from the map and pointing south. “That’s where you and Rachel came from.”

  “That’s right,” DeVontay said. “Hard to believe we’ve walked this far since August. Less than four months.”

  “It’s November already?” Stephen asked, counting the months on his fingers. “We missed Halloween.”

  DeVontay gave him an Almond Joy. “Trick or treat.”

  We didn’t need costumes this year. We already had plenty of monsters.

  Campbell rejoined them, carrying a plastic guitar case he’d salvaged from a vehicle. “Fender Strat. I’ve always wanted one of these.”

  “An electric guitar in a world without power?” DeVontay asked. “On the other hand, your path to the top of the pop charts should be pretty clear. Unless the Bieber Zaphead is at large.”

  “Just don’t play ‘Free Bird,’” Hilyard added, “or I’ll take one of those strings and hang you from a tree.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m strictly British rock,” Campbell said, breaking into a raucous but off-key chorus of The Who’s “My Generation.”

  “Keep it down, or every Zaphead within a hundred miles will be on us,” DeVontay said.

  “That’
s just it,” Campbell said. “There’s nothing up here. No Zapheads, no deer, no survivors, nothing. It’s like we reached the top of the world and the party’s already moved on.”

  “I wouldn’t relax too much,” Hilyard said, gazing at the rocky ridges above the road. “If we follow the parkway, we’ll be out in the open. Anybody watching from up there can pick us off.”

  “How good can your men shoot?” DeVontay asked.

  “They’re not my men anymore,” Hilyard said. “But let’s just say I wouldn’t bet your life on it. Mine, either.”

  “So you like my idea of staying here?” Campbell said. “We can beef up the ranger station and—”

  “That idea gets worse by the minute, with you threatening to give us a concert. Let’s move. Milepost 291 is less than two miles away. But stick to the shoulder closest to the ridge tops. The trees will give us some cover.”

  Hilyard led the way and the others fell in behind him, crossing the two-lane road and walking in knee-high grass. They’d gone barely a hundred yards when Campbell chucked the guitar into the ditch. “Thing’s getting heavy,” he said.

  They soon came upon a metal sign that read “Designated Scenic View. This sign funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior.”

  “Look at that,” DeVontay said. “They had to put up a sign to tell people to enjoy a road that didn’t have signs cluttering it up.”

  “Now that you look back at it, the human race was kind of screwed up,” Hilyard said. “Poisoning our food, breeding way past our planet’s capacity to feed us, and piling up enough weapons to kill ourselves a hundred times over.”

  “I read something that suggested we would never achieve interstellar space travel because, otherwise, some advanced civilization out there would have already reached us. The theory went that intelligent beings never made it past the stage where they could destroy themselves, as if extinction was the predetermined outcome of evolution.”

  “Maybe the universe doesn’t want us to get there,” Hilyard said. “We just had some help getting killed off.”