After: The Shock (2 page)

He
gave a pained smile, and a wet fleck of vomit appeared in the corner of his
mouth. “I hurt just fine, thanks.”

“Let
me help you.”

She
reached to check the pulse in his neck, but he shook his head. “No, don’t save
me. For the sake of…all that is holy…let me die.”

Great.
So he wants me to play Dr. Kevorkian here. Too bad.

She
touched his neck, and he didn’t resist. His carotid pulse was a weak flutter.
It was a wonder that he even had enough strength left to speak.

“Don’t
save me.” His face curdled with an emotion somewhere between anger and
defiance.

“Why
did you ask for help, then?”

He
rolled his eyes down to his other hand, the one that was curled into a fist
around something. “I wasn’t
asking
for help. I was
offering
it.”

His
reply startled her. He didn’t look like he was in a position to help anything
but the maggots. His breathing grew shallower.

“How
many are outside?” he asked.

“Two
or three,” she said. “I’m not sure about one of them.”

He
opened his hand, which held an orange prescription vial. “Nembutal,” he said. “The
easy way out.”

So,
he
was the one playing Dr. Kevorkian. She’d seen Nembutal in the animal
shelter, where it was used to end the suffering of sick pets. He let the vial
roll from his hand and he gave it a weak nudge along the floor, toward her.

“Antiemetics,
too,” he said.

“Huh?
What’s that?”

“Don’t
want to vomit it out before it has a chance to work.” His words were slurring
now. “I should take the old sawbones advice…of ‘Heal thyself’…to heart, huh?”

She
wondered how many of them he’d swallowed. Probably far more than enough, if he
knew his trade, and he had the look of experience. In a matter of such
importance, he’d be dead certain about the dosage levels.

“I’m
not ready to die,” she said.

“None
of us were,” he wheezed. His eyelids fluttered.

She
checked his pulse again, and she could barely detect the blood making its last
sluggish rounds through his circulatory system. At any second, he’d fall
unconscious, and then his brain would begin the slow process of turning off the
lights until the party was over.

“Do
you…want me to pray with you?” she said. She didn’t want to ask if he was
saved, because that seemed too judgmental for this most personal of moments.

“I’m…good,”
he said. He nudged the vial toward her. “Here. My final request.”

His
hand bore a wedding ring, and she wondered about his wife. Had he “helped” her
escape from After? Had he guided her into the next great uncertainty? Maybe
he’d even tricked her, grinding the pills into powder and spiking her sweet
iced tea.

Take
it. May as well let him die feeling helpful
.

“Thank
you.” She collected the vial and he grinned and closed his eyes. She slipped
the vial into a side pouch of her backpack. A moist whistle came from his
throat, and then he grew quiet.

Outside,
in the street, Chain Guy bellowed in that inhuman manner that meant he was
about to indulge in his Number One Priority, following his purpose, as did all
beings under God’s high heaven. Even Zapheads.

She
sat with the suicidal pharmacist for another minute until his pulse stopped,
and then crawled back to the front of the store.

CHAPTER
TWO

Marvin
the Martian is seriously underrated.

Campbell
Grimes had always admired the faceless little Looney Tunes alien. Everybody
loved Bugs Bunny. Bugs was a rabbit for all seasons, but just like Tweety Bird,
Sylvester, and Porky, Bugs occasionally came up on the short end. Wile E.
Coyote was admirable for his persistence and innovation, but that pencil-necked
Road Runner always turned the tables.

Campbell
despised the Road
Runner, because the cartoon bird reminded him of Sonny Stanton, the Worthy
Master of his Alpha Tau Omega chapter, back at the university. Stanton had a habit of sneaking up behind people and doing his nasally version of the Road
Runner’s “
meep meep
.” What Campbell wouldn’t have given for an Acme
Asshole Eradicator, patent pending.

Whereas,
Wile E. Coyote was a hopeless slave to his hunger, Marvin had a more refined
sense of the universal order. To the faceless little ant-creature with the
push-broom on top of his Roman helmet, destruction was merely an aesthetic
choice.

Now,
looking across the dead expanse of interstate and the hushed vehicles sprawled
along it like a child’s abandoned toys, Campbell figured it was a good time to
borrow one of Marvin’s taglines.

“Where’s
the
kaboom
?” he said, in a nasally cartoon voice.

“What?”
Pete asked, barely listening.

“I
would have expected more of a
kaboom
.”

“A
doomsday asteroid would have sold more tickets. The world ends not with a bang but
a whimper, right?”

“You’re
an English major. You’re really not going to be worth much of a damn at this
survival thing, are you?”

Pete
took a swig of warm Busch beer and pushed dark curls of hair away from his face.
“Hey, I’m here, but a lot of folks aren’t. I’d say that gives me major points.”

“Well,”
Campbell said. “You must have been wearing your tin-foil skullcap when the
zap came.”

Pete
took another swig and hurled the empty can onto the grass median, where it
bounced and came to rest in a sea of strewn clothes. “I’m not the one quoting
Marvin the Martian, dude.”

“Score.”

Campbell
booted down the
ten-speed’s kickstand and shook the dust from the sleeves of his leather
jacket. They’d had their pick of the rack at Triad Cycles, and while Pete had
gone for an off-road bike with knobby tires, Campbell had chosen a utility
model with a wire basket. It even had a small “Made in America” tag wired to the basket. Pete had needled him by calling him “Cheesy Rider,” but Campbell had a basket full of food and gear while Pete was stuck with whatever he could
fit in his backpack.

Which
was mostly beer at this point.

Campbell
’s body tingled from the
vibration of the ride. They’d logged twenty miles in the last three hours, slowed
by occasional traffic pile-ups that forced them to go off-road. They’d spent
the night in an abandoned VW van in a campground, afraid to build a fire. It
was their sixth day out of Chapel Hill, one week since everything had stopped,
and they were no closer to understanding what the hell was going on.

No
signs of intelligent life
, Campbell thought in his Marvin the Martian voice.
Which
isn’t necessarily a bad thing. No, not at all.

“Want
to search any of these cars?” Pete asked, punctuating the query with a deep
belch.

“My
basket is full.”

“Might
find something fresh. A pistol, beef jerky, more beer.”

“I
already have a gun.”

Pete
pointed at the revolver jammed in Campbell’s belt. “Aren’t you ready for an
upgrade?”

“It’s
enough.” Campbell had gone with the .38 because he liked to see the chamber. He
thought it would be easier to keep track of how many bullets he had left, in
the event he ever actually had to use it. Pete had adopted a Glock and seemed
to draw great satisfaction from the
clack
made by driving the clip home.
The guns had been courtesy of an outdoor supply shop that had been picked over
a little, but apparently the survivor count was so low that supply far exceeded
demand.

“What
if somebody’s alive in one of those cars?” Pete asked.

“Unlikely.”
Campbell scanned the interstate more carefully, bothered by the thought.

“Could
be somebody like us. One of the lucky ones.”

“Damned
if I’d call us ‘lucky.’”

“Maybe
we should have stayed at the university. If anybody can figure this thing out,
it would be our good old home-team researchers.”

“So
what if they did?” Campbell grew annoyed, on the edge of anger, and he didn’t
like it. Because that’s probably how
they
started out, when the wires
melted and the brain circuitry zapped. When
they
started becoming
them
.

“Maybe
they can come up with a vaccine or something.”

“This
isn’t a goddamned case of the clap, Pete. And how are you going to get the
crazies to cooperate? Blast them with your Explosive Space Modulator?”

“Jesus,
dude, what crawled up your ass and pitched a tent?”

“Sorry.”
Campbell punched the top of the sweaty helmet that rested between his legs.
“The end of the world…I thought I could handle it.”

Pete
rolled his bike forward a few inches. “It’s always easier in theory. Let’s give
that Lance truck a try.”

The
snack-food truck was parked on the shoulder parallel to the road, as if the
driver had been prepared for the sudden loss of power. It was an older model,
and Campbell suspected it had manual steering. Modern vehicles, dependent upon
computers, had locked up or gone haywire. Hondas, Kias, and Fords were crashed
or angled askew in the media. An SUV was upside down at the bottom of an
embankment, doors hanging open. A twisted motorcycle straddled the guardrail,
its occupant now a decaying lump of leather-encased flesh some twenty feet
away.

“I
don’t know,” Campbell said, feeling exposed and vulnerable. Or maybe it was the
sight of at least a dozen corpses that caused his uneasiness.

“Chickenshit.”

“We’ve
got food. Maybe we should just keep pedaling.”

“You
still worried about roving bands of Zapheads? We don’t have to fight over it.
There’s plenty for everybody.”

Pete
was letting the beer talk for him. He’d downed at least a six-pack so far
today, and the autumn warmth wasn’t sweating it out fast enough. Campbell understood his friend’s escapism, but personally, he preferred the survival buzz.

“Those
snack crackers are loaded with preservatives,” he said. “They’ll be around long
after all of us are gone.”

“
Har
har
. Campbell made a funny.” Pete dug into a side pouch of his backpack and
brought out a pack of Marlboro Lights. “The Surgeon General has determined the
end of the world is hazardous to your health.”

“Don’t
make me use my Space Modulator on you.”

Pete
lit his cigarette and scanned the nearest vehicles. He exhaled a rising wreath
of smoke and dismounted, then rolled his bike past a black Lexus with a
personalized plate that said “SKIN-DR.”

“Rich
bitch,” Pete said.

Campbell
had a bad feeling about
the car, maybe because of the way the windows looked a little steamy, despite
the dry air. “Leave it.”

“What
are you so afraid of, dude?”

Afraid.

That
was a good one. One minute he’d been playing Halo 2 on the Xbox, and the next he’d
been sitting in his dark apartment, wondering if his douchebag roomie had again
forgotten to pay the power bill. He’d even knocked on Tommy’s bedroom door,
which had swung open to reveal his roomie sprawled on the bed, glassy eyes
fixed on the ceiling. Campbell hadn’t dared touch him, because something had
seemed
wrong
about him, and he grabbed his cell to dial 9-1-1, but his
phone was as dead as Tommy.

Then
he’d gone outside and learned that Tommy wasn’t the only one…

“Check
it out, bro,” Campbell said, their little code for caution, a reminder that
every decision had consequences. If nothing else, it was a cheap mockery of the
notion of control.

Pete
leaned his bike against the rear flank of the Lexus and went to the driver’s
side door. Giving one last look around, probably due to the lingering tug of
Old World morals, Pete yanked the door open. He immediately cupped his hand
over his mouth, the cigarette still perched between his fingers.

“Ugh,”
he said, his voice muffled. “Ripe one.”

Campbell
didn’t bother looking.
He was busy checking out the back seat, which was empty. “What did you expect?”

“I
was hoping for Angelina Jolie in a see-through nightie.”

“Pervert.”

“I
meant
alive
. I’m not that desperate…yet.”

“You
could have hooked up with the chubby chick back at that camp.”

“Gypsy
Rose? I’ll take a corpse over that mess any day.” Pete reached down beside the
driver’s seat and flipped a latch. The trunk popped open.

Campbell
had never known anyone
who could afford a Lexus, so he was a little curious about what the trunk might
contain. Since the Big Zap had caught people with their pants down, sometimes
literally, it offered a snapshot of human civilization in the early
twenty-first century. A cultural anthropologist might have noted the widespread
worship of plastic electronics and gasoline-powered engines, but Marvin the
Martian would have summed it up as, “Well, back to the old drawing board.”

The
trunk of the Lexus was clean, carpeted, and empty, except for a leather
briefcase. It featured a combination lock with a dial. Campbell gave the
serrated metal wheels a few random turns, but the hasp stayed tight. He was
about to close the trunk, realized there was no point, and heard a moist
squishing in the car’s interior.

He
hoped Pete wasn’t doing anything disgusting. His friend had gone through a
brief desecration phase on the third day, placing corpses in humorous poses. In
one memorable instance, he’d drawn a mustache and goatee on a little old lady
who’d fallen down with her dead poodle’s leash still wrapped around one frail
wrist.

“Doomsday
score,” Pete said, lifting a purse.

“Charming.
It matches your fashionable ensemble.” In truth, the bright lime-green vinyl
clashed horribly with Pete’s plaid jacket and filthy red sweatpants.

Pete
rummaged around in the purse and pulled out a make-up kit. “Maybe I can rub
this junk on my face and look like one of them.”

“They
look like one of us.”

“No,
they don’t. They’re redder around the eyes and their skin is pale.”

“That’s
racist, dude.”

Pete
tossed the make-up kit to the pavement and continued scrounging. He came away
with a wallet, an iPod, a spare set of keys, and a plastic package of tissues.
He tapped futilely on the iPod’s dark glass screen. “Dead like everything
else.”

“Good.
I don’t think I could endure your Lady Gaga marathon.”

Pete
hurled the iPod across the road, where it
dinked
off the side of a blue
SUV. “What’s in the briefcase?”

Campbell
hefted it. “Heavy. Like
papers.”

“Or
cocaine?”

“Yeah,
right. All you think about is getting high.”

Pete
made a show of looking around. “You got anything better to do? Besides, I think
those Zapheads kind of lowered the bar on moral inhibition.”

“I
don’t give a damn about coke, but you got my curiosity up.” About a hundred
feet ahead, a plumbing van had coupled with a Toyota Prius in an obscene tangle
of steel and plastic. Campbell could see the driver of the Prius slumped over
the wheel, dark dots of dried blood stippling the windshield. The panel van had
no windows in the rear, but Campbell was willing to bet it contained all sorts
of tools, probably jumbled and scattered by the collision.

All
he had to do was endure the smell of corpses for a moment, but that was getting
easier by the day. The stench had become like a second skin, something worn instead
of smelled. Carrboro had been the worst, in the immediate wake of the Big Zap,
but even outside the city, death had sent its sweet musk into the sky as if to
mark the territory it now ruled. And, in the absence of governments, law, and
civilization, death was the only world order remaining.

Pete
followed him to the van, still shucking items from the purse, calling out as he
dropped them. “Hair clip…fingernail file…a little billfold with—”

Campbell
looked back to see Pete
stopped in the middle of the glittering asphalt, staring at the fold of vinyl
in his hand. His friend’s abrupt silence was amplified by the desolation around
them.