After: The Shock (13 page)

He
faced the man, daunted by those black lenses. The gloved hand held a slim,
silver pistol. Even if Jorge charged, he’d be lucky to raise the blade before
the man shot him.

“We
mean no harm,” Jorge said.

“We?
Changing your story on me?”

“Please,
señor
. My daughter is not well.”

“Your
daughter?”

“Yes.
My wife is with her. We stopped to rest on our way across the mountain. We’re
headed to the parkway.”

“Is
your wife sick, too?”

“No,
you don’t understand. My daughter doesn’t have the sun sickness—”

“Sun
sickness? Is that what you call it? You haven’t heard of the Zapheads?”

“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, even though the traveling would be easier on
the shoulder of the interstate. 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, and 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?”

“God
makes everything.”

“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.

Luggage.
And people.

Campbell
coasted down the hill,
riding the hand brakes and weaving between the cars, trucks, and vans. In this
section, the vehicles were in an orderly line, with few rear-end collisions, as
if traffic had been moving slowly when the big electromagnetic eraser had wiped
out their engines. The stench of rotted bodies hung in the air, the
putrefaction hastened by the greenhouse effect of the windows. Campbell did his best to avoid looking inside the vehicles, but curiosity suckered him in
again and again.

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.