After: The Shock

by Nicholson, Scott

  Were there any survivors left at all?

  She didn’t like the thought of being alone, the last human in the universe, and the dead pharmacist’s little care package came to mind. But she loathed the pale, grim surrender that had been painted on his dying face. That was the coward’s way out, the path of the faithless. If such a time came, she trusted God would first give her permission.

  Until then…

  Rachel secured the backpack and stepped outside, clinging close to the brick, metal, and glass walls as she eased down the street. She paid absurd attention to each footstep, making sure the rubber soles of her sneakers didn’t scuff on the concrete. She didn’t know whether the Zapheads were driven to prey by superhuman senses of sight, smell, or hearing, but she figured the apocalypse was as good a time as any to hedge her bets.

  She’d lived in Charlotte for two years, taking little time to learn the city. Her world had been largely confined to West Charlotte, where she interned as a counselor for the Department of Social Services. Rachel knew the beltway and the exits for the larger shopping malls, the libraries, and the uptown area where she’d visited the Mint Museum, but little else. The high, gleaming finance centers were behind her, once busy with moneychangers and loan officers, but were now just seventy and eighty stories of stacked mausoleum crypts. The glass glinted red in the sunset, the towers of Babel gone silent, and small plumes of smoke curling from some of them.

  She picked up her pace a little, more confident now that Chain Guy apparently hadn’t noticed her. Charlotte has to end at some point, and then you’ll hit the woods.

  The block ended, and she glanced into one of the cars slanted across the intersection in the heart of a traffic jam. A woman’s head was tilted back, ponytail dangling over the seat. Behind her was a child’s safety seat. Rachel’s heart, already galloping, jumped a fence and missed a step.

  What if it’s alive?

  And the little devil on her shoulder whispered: It would be crying. Don’t stop.

  Maybe it’s asleep, or scared, or—

  Or dead. Maybe it’s dead, and you walk over there and peer in the glass and see its cute little blue face and then you scream, and then Chain Guy comes running with his steel whip, ready to play and play and play until your brains are sausage.

  Shut the eff up.

  I’m the devil. You can’t tell me what to do. And I see you’re using profanity, Rachel. That’s good. That’s very good.

  Rachel said a quick prayer and forced herself toward the car, glancing up the street only once. That was the litmus test: If she saw Chain Guy, it was a sign from God that she should run for it. Otherwise, she had a moral duty to save a baby if she could.

  As she reached for the handle of the back door, she wasn’t sure whether it was morality or loneliness that drove her. With a baby to care for, she had less reason to think about the poison pills.

  But she didn’t open the door. The safety seat was empty, a rumpled yellow blanket piled around it.

  Rachel hoped the baby was off with Grandmother, playing patty cake or whining for her mom’s nipple, somewhere secure and far, far from the carnage of downtown Charlotte. She didn’t allow room for the Chain Guy’s discovery of the infant, or what those steel links might do to tender flesh. No, such things didn’t happen under God’s heaven.

  And even if they did, she didn’t need to know about them. She didn’t want to know about them.

  The sun sank lower, the shadows flattened fatter, and the distant noises clanged more cacophonous, building like tribal drums, only this tribe had been driven mad with one big celestial flash.

  She hurried west, figuring the beltway was two miles away, and beyond that, a pine forest broke up the small satellite communities. For some reason, the forest was a more appealing option than the maze of alleys, buildings, and vehicles that could serve up a Zaphead at any second. At least in the woods, the hunt and the flight would feel more natural.

  Two corpses lay just ahead, with a sodden aspect that suggested they’d been there since the flash, and she veered closer to the wall, preferring dubious concealment to the easier passage but a higher exposure of the street. A shopping cart blocked her way, and it held four bulging trash bags, a pair of curled and cracked leather shoes on its bottom wire shelf, and a plastic boom box in the child seat. It was a homeless person’s portable life, a legacy on crooked wheels.

  She raised her hand, not wanting to smell the corpses, but her palm didn’t reach her nose.

  Instead, a ring of fiery steel clamped around her forearm.

  She gasped as she was yanked into a mildewed gap in the storefronts. She’d been so intent on ignoring the corpses that she hadn’t even noticed the narrow alley.

  And now you’ll pay, Rachel. Now you’ll play the devil’s game, and dance with a creature from out of hell.

  And the bitch of it was, she couldn’t even scream. Her ribcage clamped around her lungs as tightly as the hand locked on her forearm, and one more tug from it cost her the remainder of her balance—then she was in its arms, and flailing, kicking, maybe even spitting, when she heard a grunt of pain.

  “Goddamn it, take it easy!” it said.

  Could Zapheads talk? She hadn’t heard one speak yet, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe their language of grunts, groans, and odd chuckling had served them sufficiently well so far.

  Rachel pulled back, but the grip remained, and she saw its dark face, one eye gleaming wide in the dim light, and then the contrast of its big white teeth, and she thought maybe she could scream after all, and then—

  “You’re not one of them,” he said. “Or you would have done bit me.”

  “Of course I’m not,” she said. “Any fool can see that.”

  “Who you calling a fool? I ain’t the one walking down the street plain as day.”

  “You’re not…affected?”

  “Affected? Is that what you call it when you want to bust open somebody’s skull and play piddly-pooh with their brains?”

  That uncanny eye was still fixed and unblinking in the ebony face, staring deep into her soul as if exposing every sick secret she’d ever harbored, every bad thing she’d ever done. Then she looked at his other eye, which blinked.

  “You think I’m one of them freaks?” he said, and she noticed for the first time that he held a pistol in his right hand, barrel tilted up by his shoulder as if he were ready to level and fire at any moment, in any direction.

  “I guess not, or I’d be dead.”

  “Damn right, you’d be dead. You might be dead anyway.”

  She glanced longingly at the street and the sunset that washed the pavement like the surface of a river, the cars like so many storm-swept boats, the corpses and trash like flotsam headed for a distant gray sea. “I think we’re all dead,” she said.

  “Don’t you got no gun?”

  She realized how vulnerable she was, to him and to the rest of the world. “I’m scared of guns.”

  “Well, I’m scared of those things more.”

  She studied his face, trying to read his expression, but the glass eye kept throwing her off. It gave the impression of coldness, which belied the rest of his expression. The mouth said “mean,” the slight pinch of forehead said “worried,” and the lifted eyebrows said “easy meat,” but his good eye confused the whole picture, because it was dark brown and teeming with so many human things.

  He gave a twisted smile. “What? You think I’m going to rape you?”

  “No, just—”

  “Kill you for whatever’s in your backpack?”

  She shrugged it off her shoulder a little. “You can have it.”

  “I don’t want your shit.”

  “What do you want? Prove how tough you are? Show your manly power? Why didn’t you just let me go on down the street?”

  He eased his grip on her forearm, but only a little. It was the below the point of inflicting pain, but still too tight for her to pull away. “I…just wanted to see if you was real.” />
  “I assure you, I am quite real. I may be the only real thing left in Charlotte.”

  His good eye blinked. “You talk funny.”

  “What? Now I have to apologize for being a middle-class white woman with an education?”

  His good eye grew as cold as his fake one. “Don’t pull that shit with me.”

  “Well, you’re trying to play some sort of half-assed stereotype, the bro’ from the ‘hood jumping the white bitch.” The cussing was foreign to her, and she hated herself for it, but she used anger as an excuse.

  He released her, and she shook the circulation back into her arm. “Go on,” he said, subdued, waving his gun back toward the street. “Git.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’d rather be out there with them murdering freaks than hanging with a nigga,” he said.

  “It’s not—”

  “It’s the eye, ain’t it?”

  His accusation caused her to inadvertently stare at it. She’d been glancing, she couldn’t help it, that shiny glass orb was a magnet. She’d heard of the “evil eye,” a belief in many cultures that an ill-intended gaze could bring malady or misfortune. Although she had a hard time attributing such qualities to an inert prosthetic, it seemed to radiate an unsettling power.

  A miniature sun casting its own solar flare…

  “No, it’s not—”

  “Just call a spade a spade and get done with it. We don’t got time for games.”

  “I…” She looked back at the street as the insane chuckling echoed down the concrete canyons.

  “Bastard Zappers give me the creeps,” he said, his finger tightening ever so slightly on the trigger. He didn’t seem to be aware of it.

  “It’s getting dark.”

  “What you going to do? You got a plan?”

  She shrugged. “Go west to the mountains.”

  “That’s not a plan, that’s a beer commercial.”

  “You have anything better?”

  He angled his head across the street, to what looked like apartments above a wig shop. “Hole up and lock down for the night, then figure it out. Like I been doing for a week.”

  “That’s not a plan, that’s making crap up as you go along.”

  He grinned for the first time, and it warmed his entire face. Even the glass eye took on a sparkle. “So far, so good.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I have some food, a flashlight, and stuff like that.”

  “You got it together,” he said. “I been faking that part, too.”

  She held out her hand, the fingers still tingling from the blood returning to her extremities. “Rachel Wheeler,” she said, realizing the use of her last name was awkward under the circumstances, as if they were business associates.

  He took her hand, gentle this time. “DeVontay. DeVontay Jones.”

  Then he grew solemn again, edging to the corner and peering out of the alley. He was tall, a few inches over six feet, and a little gangly. In the sunlight, she saw that he wore leather pants and a leather jacket, both of which bulged uncomfortably as if he wore several layers of clothing.

  As if he’s afraid of being bitten. But I’ve never seen the Zapheads bite anyone.

  “See anything?” she whispered.

  “Naw,” he said. She couldn’t place his accent, but it wasn’t Southern. And it wasn’t quite inner city. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, so maybe he’d moved to Charlotte for work.

  She didn’t seem to have much in common with him.

  Except whatever kept us from being killed or affected.

  Yeah.

  Except for that.

  The only thing left that mattered.

  He motioned with his free hand. “All clear. Hurry.”

  And then they were on the street, exposed to the dying sun and the creeping night and whatever chuckled in the far distance.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “It’s a fire,” Pete said.

  Campbell didn’t believe it. He’d insisted it was electric lights, maybe even automobiles moving beyond the dark trees, the wind causing them to flicker. Then the wind shifted, although there wasn’t much of it, and a faint trail of acrid wood smoke drifted past.

  “What should we do?”

  “Go in.”

  Pete was drunk. Shortly after the close encounter with the Zaphead in the plumbing van, they’d come across a Budweiser truck. Pete had filled his backpack with 12-ounce cans and even made some makeshift saddlebags with a tool satchel he’d taken from the van. He’d stopped his bike every two miles or so to bust open one of the warm beers and down it. Their pace had slowed considerably as the evening wore on, and Campbell had nearly pedaled headfirst into a jackknifed tractor trailer because he thought he’d seen someone move inside one of the stalled cars.

  But Pete wouldn’t let him check out the movement, coming back with, “Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?”

  And Campbell had buried his hope that maybe there were others like them, normal people, survivors who weren’t driven by a homicidal impulse. Now, with a campfire a hundred yards away in the dusk, they were faced with a choice, and Pete’s judgment was about three times over the legal limit.

  “What if it’s a bunch of Zapheads?” Campbell asked.

  Pete pulled the tab on a fresh brew, and it fwooshed and sprayed into the dusk. “Then we shoot the hell out of them.”

  “You say that like you’d enjoy it.”

  “Fuckers trying to wipe us out, man. This is about the survival of the species.”

  “I think they’re the same species we are. They’re human.”

  Pete wiped foam from his mouth with his sleeve. “Humans don’t jump on you and rip out a chunk of skin with their teeth. Unless they’re Mike Tyson or Jeffrey Dahmer.”

  The fire was in the forest beside the highway, set down a gentle slope. They’d passed a bridge about three hundred yards back, and a silvery creek slid beneath it, laughing and gurgling as if all was merry with the world. Survivors—human survivors—would likely follow evolutionary instinct and camp by the water.

  “Maybe we ought to keep going.”

  “What if it’s like that last camp?” Pete was starting to slur and his sibilants were mushy.

  “I didn’t trust them.”

  “You’re just mad because you didn’t tap ol’ Gypsy Rose.”

  “They were talking prophecies and wacko stuff.”

  “Well, maybe they were onto something.”

  Campbell wished they’d snagged some binoculars. Full dark was setting in, and they’d have to make a decision on where to sleep. They usually locked themselves in an empty car for the night, but Campbell always felt trapped and claustrophobic, and Pete’s drunken snores pushed away any chance of rest. One night they’d slept out in an open field, taking turns keeping watch. Campbell had jerked awake sometime long before dawn and found Pete had dozed off, leaving them ridiculously vulnerable.

  So, maybe the idea of sticking with a group was worth a little risk.

  “Okay,” Campbell said. “Let’s check it out.”

  Pete leaned his bike against the guardrail and drew his pistol from his jacket pocket. “Lock and load, my man.”

  Campbell drew his revolver. It didn’t have a safety switch, but he’d test-fired it twice on the day he’d found it in the sporting-goods shop. He hadn’t shot a gun since he was 12 and his grandfather had taken him squirrel hunting. The double action required a serious pull of the trigger, which meant the gun would be hard to fire accidentally, but also that he’d have to be serious if he wanted to shoot somebody.

  Some THING, I mean. These Zapheads aren’t “somebodies.”

  He flashed back to the face of the creature that had attacked him and shuddered at the brief illusion that it had been his mother.

  “Got your flashlight?” Campbell said.

  “I only got two hands.” Meaning that Pete wouldn’t put down his beer.

  Campbell fished in his wire basket until he found his flashlight, but h
e didn’t switch it on. The purple dusk revealed large, bruised clouds overhead, so the moon would be of little use. He looked up the highway toward the last hilltop they’d crested. Something moved there, a distant stick figure that soon blended with the shadows of stranded vehicles.

  Pete chugged his warm beer, then belched. “What you waiting for?”

  Campbell swung over the rail and started down the slope toward the campfire. The revolver was heavy in his hand, and he let his arm dangle so the barrel pointed at the ground. He used the flashlight for ballast as he descended. The slope leveled out at a ditch, and briars tore his khakis as he stumbled through the granite riprap.

  Above him, Pete stumbled and fell, cursing once before remembering they were supposed to be in stealth mode.

  “You okay?” Campbell whispered.

  “That better be the good guys or I’m going to be pissed,” he whispered back.

  Campbell switched on his flashlight, hooded it with his forearm, and illuminated a path for Pete, who kicked, stumbled, and staggered down the hill. Pete’s body odor overwhelmed the beery stench.

  Sweet. We’re all turning into animals.

  After crossing the ditch, they entered a thicket of scrub pine, thorns, and ragged rye. The elusive flickers of fire showed here and there through gaps in the trees, and as full dark settled in, the orange light took on the quality of a jewel forged from a mysterious source.

  Campbell’s hand sweated around the revolver’s grip, even though the air had turned cool and moist because of the nearby creek. He didn’t know where to point the gun, and he took each step gingerly, in fear of snapping twigs. Pete, however, had no such hesitation. The alcohol delivered a stupid brand of courage, and the semi-automatic topped it off with a bow. Pete soon took the lead, muttering under his breath.

  “Maybe they got some meat,” he said. “You smell that? Smells like barbecue.”

  Campbell rubbed the bite wound on his shoulder. No. I’m not going there. The Zapheads aren’t crazed cannibals or zombies. They’re just…

  Just WHAT?

  And then he did smell it, smoky and acrid and rich, and he had the image of stumbling into a nest of Zapheads, all gathered around the fire and roasting a child on a slim white sapling, fat dripping onto the hot stones and hissing to greasy steam.