After: The Shock

AFTER:

THE SHOCK

(Book #1 in the AFTER
series)

A post-apocalyptic
thriller

By Scott Nicholson

Copyright ©2012 by Scott
Nicholson

Published by
Haunted Computer Books

Scott’s
Author Central page
at Amazon

CHAPTER
ONE

There
were three of them.

She’d
stopped naming them a week ago. It had been an amusing distraction for a
while—and the Good Lord only knew, she needed distractions—but then they’d all
started blending together, the Black-Eyed Susans, the Raisinheads and the Meat
Throats.

Now,
though, Rachel Wheeler couldn’t resist looking through the grimy drugstore
window as she waited, crouched in the litter of baby powder and cellophane.

Stumpy
.

The
one on the right, sitting on the sidewalk bench surrounded by a mountain of
bulging plastic bags, was missing his left arm just below the elbow. The wound
was swathed in a filthy towel strapped in place with duct tape, stained dark
brown at its blunt end.

Stumpy
was waiting for a bus that would never come. Rachel couldn’t tell if he was a
Zaphead. He might just be another of the schizophrenic homeless, one of the
underclass that hadn’t even noticed that the world had ended. Although gaunt,
he didn’t appear particularly motivated to kill, obsessed instead with swatting
away the flies that swirled around his stump.

He
was fifty feet away, and she could outrun him easy. All she had to do was run
as if her life depended on it. It wouldn’t be much of a challenge because her
life had depended on it for days.

A
hundred yards down the street, The Beard, the guy staggering back and forth,
was almost certainly a Zaphead. His expression was hidden by the unkempt hair,
but he was hunched and his fists were clenched, rage curling around whatever
strange energy burned inside of him.

Okay,
Beard, you’ve solved my little dilemma of whether I should head south or head
north.

The
mountains were her destination, and they lay to the northwest, but she wasn’t
willing to risk The Beard.

The
word “destination” sounded odd in her thoughts, because of the root “destiny.”
Such abstractions were laughable now, but laughter was the only weapon against
the fear that sapped the strength
from her legs. And she
needed her legs.

Oh,
yes, Lord, give me stumps for hands, but please don’t mess with my legs
.

In
this scary new world, in this After, you had to run, dragging your guilt and
fear and all the dark weight of Before.

Even
if she’d wanted to head south, where not even hope was an option, Chain Guy had
other ideas. He was moving through the smoky haze between a Volvo sedan
cattycornered in the intersection and an abandoned police car, its doors flung
open like the wings of a spastic, grounded bird as it perched with two wheels
on the curb.

Chain
Guy was dressed in a torn leather jacket, despite the late-August heat—and in Charlotte, the August heat grabbed your throat and scrubbed you with salt water—and he
carried a knapsack. Clearly, he was one of the higher-functioning lunatics. The
chain in his right hand trailed out on the asphalt behind him, its faint
clink
the sole soundtrack to a scene that had once featured rush-hour traffic.

She
ducked lower in the drugstore window, clutching her backpack more closely. The
pack was bulging, and she’d needed the dried foods she’d collected, but now,
the comfort items felt more like indulgences that would slow her down and maybe
get her killed.

Really,
toilet paper and tampons, Ray-Ray? Why not grab some hemorrhoid cream and
Viagra while you’re at it? You can’t beat these prices, so you might as well
stock up.

She
wondered if she should wait it out, to see whether The Beard and Chain Guy
squared off. Maybe while they were busy, she could slip out and head down a
perpendicular street. It was likely that one or two Zapheads would be on the
prowl, but she didn’t want to stay there until dark. The store’s front door was
smashed in, and other scavengers might show up for this unbeatable, once-in-a
lifetime, going-out-of-business sale.

The
sun was still high, but barely visible through the smoke that curled from the
downtown high rises. She suspected a bonfire was raging in the football
stadium, too—the wind carried the stench of charred meat.

Chain
Guy wrapped loops of his weapon around his forearm until he had a four-foot
length. He swung it back and forth, gradually picking up momentum until he was
whipping the chain in a circle over his head. He was still about forty yards
from The Beard, who still paced back and forth, apparently oblivious to the
coming storm.

As
the chain
whirred
like a slow helicopter blade, a dog bounded out from
behind the police cruiser, snarling and yapping. He was a German shepherd—lean,
dark and hungry. The dog made a beeline for Chain Guy, evidently smelling
something he didn’t like. But the dog must have sensed the reach of the chain,
because  he halted and lowered himself onto his forelegs, haunches reared
as if poised to attack.

Get
‘em, boy
,
Rachel silently cheered, thinking the distraction would give her an opening.
She squeezed the straps of her pack, testing the weight and calculating how
much it would hinder her speed.

The
dog’s lips peeled back as he growled. Chain Guy’s expression didn’t change. He
spun the chain faster, almost daring the dog as he headed for The Beard. The
shepherd danced forward a few feet and snapped, but Chain Guy kept walking, not
breaking stride. The dog apparently didn’t like being challenged, so he made a
run for Chain Guy’s ankles.

The
chain lashed out of its orbit and descended with stunning speed, the blow so
sudden that Rachel wasn’t even sure she’d seen it. Then came the
thwack
as
metal hit meat, the chain flaying the dog’s rib cage. It emitted one garbled
yelp of pain and collapsed. Chain Guy still wore that blank, businesslike
expression as he brought the chain around for another blow. This one took out a
leg and the shepherd crawled away like a broken spider.

The
sickening attack reminded Rachel they weren’t playing “Ring Around the Rosie”
here. It was dog eat dog. And, they definitely weren’t playing. If it came down
to it, she’d rather Chain Guy eat the dog than eat her.

If
Chain Guy looked to his left, he might have glimpsed her hiding behind the
shards of glass in the storefront. Her curiosity was slightly more compelling
than her fear, and every bit of information might mean the difference between
survival and its opposite. She wasn’t sure what the “opposite” was, but it was
worse than death.

Chain
Guy maintained his pace, but he let the chain slow again above his head. Stumpy
hadn’t moved from his bench, and The Beard still seemed intent on whatever
crack in the asphalt had consumed his entire attention for the past minute.

Or
Jesus. Jesus in the oil stain, the rainbow warrior, the light of wisdom
.

Rachel
bit her lip to keep from giggling.
Don’t lose it. Only crazy people lose it,
and you know what happens to crazy people.

Something
tumbled from the shelves behind her, near the prescription counter.

She
hadn’t checked the aisles after seeing the corpse of a child, although the
place had seemed dead. But “dead” had a new meaning now.

She
tensed, but didn’t bolt, because the real threat of Chain Guy outweighed the
imaginary threat spawned by a jar falling to the carpet. The Zapheads weren’t
known for subtlety, so there was zero chance of one of them creeping up on her.
No, a Zaphead would roll forward like a Cadillac out of hell, fueled by the
frenzy zapping and hissing in its brain.

Chain
Guy was busy bearing down on The Beard, so she crawled to the left a few feet
and peered around a display of Hallmark cards. A hand stretched out on the
floor beside the prescription counter, the fingers twitching.

Could
be a Zapper in the last throes of internal combustion.

The
hand curled once, twice, and then she recognized it as a beckoning motion. A
Zaphead wouldn’t beckon. It would go for what it wanted, not lure you closer.

Somebody—a
human—was down. And here came the litmus test of After: Did the old codes still
apply? Did she still have to love her neighbor? Did she have to treat everyone
as a child of God?

Maybe
God wouldn’t notice just this once. Maybe she could just sit right here near
the door and then make a run for it, gasping prayers.

Better
to ask for forgiveness than for permission, right?

However,
forgiveness probably wasn’t a question one wanted to ask of God. Not now, in
the After. Rachel tried to look away, she really did, but the hand made another
beckoning motion. It looked frail, the fingers knotty and thin. It was not the
kind of hand that would wrap around your throat and drag you screaming into the
darkness.

Outside,
the chain clanked against the asphalt, as if Chain Guy was working out the
kinks and getting ready for business.

The
hand gave one final gesture, this time just the index finger, motioning
Closer,
closer, closer
with an intensity that only silence could fully project.

Still,
she resisted the impulse to help, the love-thy-neighbor credo that had been
drummed into her from childhood, sitting bedside with her cancer-stricken
mother, volunteering at the Humane Society, joining the Wellspring Fellowship’s
Happy Helpers, and taking counseling classes at UNC-Charlotte. Little Ray-Ray
had been on track for a golden-rule life of selfless service. In the Before.

However,
she’d been sidetracked.

She
wasn’t even sure there was a track anymore, because the train had jumped off
into a dark, directionless territory.

Rachel
looked away from the hand and eyed the door. She could probably get twenty
yards down the sidewalk before Chain Guy broke his fixation and noticed her,
and maybe that would buy her enough of a jump on him. Her legs were young and
limber and strong, built by a cycling addiction. She could outrun him.

Probably.

“Huhhh…”

The
wheeze came from behind the prescription counter. She jerked around her neck,
and the hand now balled into a fist, as if tapping some last reserve of energy.
The whisper came again, weak and broken.

“Huhhh…help…”

Goddamn
you, God.

She
checked on Chain Guy, still closing in on The Beard, who swayed in obsessed
circles. Stumpy sat on the bench as if waiting to feed pigeons. It was just
another busy weekday in downtown Charlotte.

Just
another day in After.

“Help.”
The voice of the hand’s owner gained volume, and she hissed a “Shhh” in
response as she crawled down the aisle. The last thing she needed was for
Zapheads to show up, pissed off that they hadn’t been invited to the party.

She’d
long ago—well,
days
ago, but it had seemed like years—decided that it
was selfish to pray for survival and deliverance, but it was righteous to pray
for the strength to help others. She’d also promised to live for Chelsea, to spend all the years that had been taken from her little sister—taken by
Rachel.

But
she couldn’t think of that now, or she would become paralyzed, accepting her
fate.
Deserving
death. Deserving it because each breath was a selfish
act in a world where she had destroyed something beautiful.

As
Rachel drew closer, a rank, sour odor assailed her. She’d smelled her share of
corpses, with their heavy, sweet fecundity—decay had become so pervasive in
After that only a truly sharp odor had a chance of piercing it. Whatever lay
behind the counter had achieved that rare status.

The
arm pulled itself into the gap and she crawled faster, chafing her knees even
through the blue jeans she wore. Her backpack was off-balance, banging against
her right hip, and she had to navigate an obstacle course of stuffed animals,
jars of nutritional supplements, soft drinks, and other artifacts of a lost
culture.

It
was darker back here, removed from the sunlight, but not so dark that she had
to dig out her flashlight. She wasn’t sure she wanted a clear look, anyway,
because the sour odor suggested something had turned inside-out.

“Help,”
the man’s voice said again, and she answered, “Okay.”

God,
I’m trusting you here, and if you’re leading me to a horrible, painful death, I
swear I’ll never speak to you again.

Then
she reached the counter and felt concealed enough to rise into a crouch and
duck-walk the final ten feet around the counter. The man was curled on his side
in a fetal position, wearing a white coat that suggested he’d been the
pharmacist on duty at some point, back when duty mattered and pulled a weekly
paycheck. Resembling a lighter-skinned Gandhi, he was bald and old and wore
rounded glasses with wire frames. A pool of vomit explained the stink, and the
flies had already migrated from the child’s corpse to check out this new taste
sensation.

“You’re…one
of us,” he said.

“Yeah,”
she said, wishing she could summon that caregiver confidence expounded upon in
her counseling textbooks. “Are you hurt?”