After: The Shock (22 page)

DeVontay
scowled. “Well, we all saw how that one turned out.”

“Yes,
but Grandpa Wheeler figured civilization had gotten too complex, that modern
systems would inevitably break down for one reason or another. Like a motor
that had too many moving parts and not enough oil. He also believes the world’s
governments were serving the will of the very wealthy. At some point we’d have
to learn to live outside the structure.”

“He
got that right.” DeVontay nudged Stephen. “Get your stuff together, Little Man.
We got some walking to do.”

Rachel
stuffed her supplies in the backpack, rediscovering the bottle of suicide pills
the pharmacist had given her. Why hadn’t she already gotten rid of them?

DeVontay
pulled out his pistol, opened the door a crack, and surveyed the street. “This
is as good a time as any. Unless you want to make the bed first?”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

Jorge
dreamed of great dragons, their green scales glittering in the sun as they
soared over a burning land. Dozens of them poured their flames upon the earth
from above. Their gaping, lipless mouths spat sparks and steam, and their
brittle cries were like thick sheets of glass sliding across gritty metal.

He
awoke in a sweat, not knowing where he was. The dragons faded from his mind’s
eye, but the shrieks continued.

He
fumbled one hand across the thin blankets until he found Rosa’s warm body, and
then rolled to where Marina still slept on the cot. He checked her forehead,
pleased to find it relatively cool.

The
front door to the cabin burst open, letting dawn rush in. Franklin Wheeler was
silhouetted in the opening, a shotgun in one hand, the other tugging up his
filthy flannel underwear.

“Goddamn
ya, leave my chickens alone,” the old man yelled.

Jorge
rose from the makeshift bedding and hurried outside. Franklin stood in the
yard, raising the shotgun to the sky as squawking hens raced for the cover of
the garden and trees. As Franklin aimed, Jorge squinted against the morning sun
and saw a hawk, its wings spread wide in a display of aerodynamic majesty. Its
breast was mottled, the tail feathers red, the sharp beak pointing into the
morning breeze.

The
shotgun belched out a thunderclap, pellets spraying the tops of trees. The hawk
lurched and faltered, a few feathers floating away from its body. The wings
curled in against the breast and the bird of prey dropped like a wet rock into
the forest beyond the compound.

“Got
the bastard,” Franklin said, pumping the shotgun and ejecting a smoking red
plastic shell to the dirt.

“A
red-tail hawk,” Jorge said. Red-tails were common in the mountain forests,
territorial and intelligent, and their keen vision served them up small rodents
and birds. Mr. Wilcox’s property had harbored several mating couples, and
although the farm didn’t feature chickens, Jorge had occasionally seen one of
the hawks swoop down and claim a jackrabbit from the Christmas tree fields.

“Is
everything okay?” Rosa called from the doorway, Marina wrapped in a blanket and
standing behind her.

“Just
killing a predator,” Franklin said, not realizing his words could have a double
meaning.

“Is
okay,” Jorge said, waving them back into the house.

The
hens were still unsettled, although most of them had found clefts in the weeds
where they crouched, clucking and fluttering their wings. One, however, lay in
a lump by a metal watering tub, one yellow leg poked awkwardly in the air.

Franklin
shouldered the weapon
and walked over to the dead bird. “I’m glad it’s a white one. I got three just
like it, so I didn’t bother giving them names.”

The
chicken’s head had been torn from its body, ruby-red giblets hanging from the
opening. Jorge looked around but he didn’t see the head. The hawk hadn’t been
carrying it, so it must have been planning to eat the bird on the spot until
its meal had been interrupted. The flies had already found the corpse.

“You
mind getting the shovel?” Franklin asked, scanning the sky as if expecting
another hawk to make a dessert run.

“Why?”
Jorge asked in return.

“To
bury it. Put it in the garden and the nutrients go back to the soil.”

“But
it’s in good shape,” Jorge said. “
Es sabroso
. Tasty.”

Franklin
shook his head. “I run a
no-kill operation here. The chickens give me eggs in trade for their room and
board.”

“It’s
dead anyway,” Jorge said. “You didn’t kill it.”

Franklin
’s face curdled as he
looked at the hen. He shook his head. “I don’t know if I could eat it. Almost
like eating one of the family.”

“Rosa
will cook it very nice,” Jorge said, knowing his English grammar was slightly
off but hoping Franklin wouldn’t notice.

“I…I
don’t think I could pluck it and clean it,” Franklin said.

“You
give me a sharp knife, the job is done.”

Franklin
nodded. “Guess there’s
not much use letting it go to waste. Like you said, dead is dead.”

Jorge’s
admiration for the man had taken a downward slide. All the defenses and food
storage and solar-energy panels meant nothing if Franklin wasn’t prepared to
make use of every resource. But Jorge also felt a surge of pride. He and his
family had something to contribute here. They could be part of this society and
culture, as small as it was.

As
Franklin went into the house, Jorge called to him, “Please tell Rosa to start a pot of water boiling.”

Jorge
lifted the hen, which was surprisingly light, given its bulk. Birds were
deceptive in size because of their feathers and hollow bones. This hen could
feed the four of them for at least two meals, assuming Franklin’s springhouse
did a proper job of cooling. Besides, the most unpleasant part of the
task—chopping off the head and taking the life—had already been delivered as a
gift courtesy of Mother Nature.

By
the time Franklin returned, now dressed in blue jeans and a wool sweater, Jorge
had already plucked most of the larger feathers from the wings. He took the
knife and dissected the carcass, splitting down the breastbone to the tail and
letting the internal organs spill. He carefully collected the heart and liver,
both of which were still warm. The gizzard was packed with crushed grain and a
few tiny bits of gray gravel.

“Well,
will you look at that,” Franklin said, apparently overcoming his squeamishness.
“I guess you might call that her last supper.”

“The
rocks help grind the food for them,” Jorge said. He knew most Americans had no
hands-on relationship with the meat they consumed. Mr. Wilcox had been the same
way. Meat was something that came in clear plastic wrap from the store, or else
was seared and slapped between pieces of bread at McDonald’s. Their meat was a
stranger to them.

Jorge
used the tip of the knife to scrape the lungs away from the insides of the
ribcage. After he severed the drumsticks just below the knee joints, he peeled
away the skin as if removing a tight glove. Normally, he would dip the fowl in
boiling water and pluck the feathers, but he figured a skinless bird would be a
lean treat and more easily allow Franklin to forget it had once been a pet.

“Are
you a man who doesn’t like killing?” Jorge asked Franklin, dangling the naked
chicken so that any offal and juice could drain.

“I
reckon I could kill if I had to,” Franklin answered. “Like that hawk there.
Normally, I’d never shoot one. But when you come and mess with what’s mine, that’s
when I fight back.”

Jorge
told Franklin about the men he’d fought back at the Wilcox farm, and how the
men had changed into something threatening and alien.

“No,
they ain’t men no more,” Franklin said. “I heard on the shortwave radio they’re
calling them ‘Zapheads.’”

“Well,
if they come here, you might have to kill them.”

“If
they come here, then they’re breaking the one law of this here compound,” Franklin said, sweeping an arm to indicate the garden, the animal pens, and the
outbuildings. “And that law is to live and let live, respect the fences, and
mind your own business.”

“It
is good to be self-reliant,” Jorge said, proud he’d learned such a word in his
studies with Rosa. “But there’s another law that applies.”

“Huh,”
Franklin grunted. “What’s that?”

“We’re
all in this together.” He held up the chicken. “And let us hope this isn’t our
last supper.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN

Two…three…four…

Campbell
counted the Zapheads on
the streets surrounding the church. After a fruitless search for Pete the night
before, he’d broken into a Baptist church, found the stairs to the steeple, and
locked himself in. From the ground, the eastern horizon had appeared to be lit
by a single bonfire that had spread. But from a vantage point fifty feet in the
air, Campbell had seen at least a dozen large fires, dotting the black
landscape many miles into the distance.

Now,
in the glare of daylight, the fires were largely hidden, although a thick gauze
of haze lay over the world. A black circle of ash marked the house that Rachel
had set afire last night. He’d traveled maybe a quarter of a mile in the
darkness, but it had felt like a marathon of slogging through molasses. He was
exhausted.

The
church was at the edge of town, the short square streets lined with houses that
gave way to roads that curved gently into wooded areas. The streets were
remarkably free of corpses, leaving Campbell to wonder if someone had been on
morgue duty. Cars and trucks were scattered across the asphalt, although the
traffic here must have been light when the solar flares erupted. On the street
outside the church was a school bus, its wheels on the sidewalk. Campbell was grateful the windows were darkened by the angle of the sun, so that he
couldn’t see inside.

The
Zapheads moved between the vehicles with as much indifference as water flowing
around stones. Although they didn’t acknowledge one another in any way, they
seemed aware of each other’s presence. The creepiest thing was, they were all
heading east, back toward the largest of the fires.

Movement
on a side street drew his attention away from the ambling, vacant-brained
creatures. A figure burst out of the garage bay of a service station, head
lowered, dragging his backpack behind him so that it bounced on the sidewalk. Campbell recognized the black T-shirt.

He
stood and cupped his hands into a megaphone of flesh. “Pete!”

Pete
didn’t look up, but the Zapheads froze in their tracks and tilted their heads
up to the church steeple.

Holy
shit.

Campbell
ducked below the ledge
of the steeple, wondering how well Zapheads could see. But after a moment, he
realized he would lose Pete again, so he raised his head until he could peer
over and track Pete’s route. Pete was farther up the sidewalk, passing a row of
shops with broken windows, and making a mad dash before abruptly turning into a
brick building that sported a green awning and a protruding wooden sign that Campbell couldn’t read.

Should
be easy enough to find, assuming that he holds the fort.

But
Campbell had a more pressing concern. The Zapheads had begun making their way
toward the church, cutting across unkempt lawns and filthy parking lots.

A
couple more emerged from nearby houses, the half-dozen effectively surrounding the
church. They appeared to act in concert, although none of them grunted or
signaled. It was their silence that was most disturbing—as if they were tapped
into some massive hive mind that gave them instructions from afar.

Campbell
mulled his options. As much
as he loathed Arnoff, he wished the trigger-happy cowboy was up there with him,
playing sniper and, one by one, picking off the Zapheads. He’d even take the
soldiers, who probably didn’t care if innocent humans were caught in the
crossfire as long as the “enemy” was wiped out. But concepts like innocence had
no place in this new reality.

And,
he had no weapon.

The
nearest Zaphead was a man in a polyester business suit, the sleeves and cuffs a
darker gray than the rest of the fabric. He still wore a necktie, although the
knot was loosened halfway down his shirt. He wore eyeglasses that sat askew on
his face, disturbing the rounded Asian symmetry of his face. His jet-black hair
spiked out like greasy wires.

He
was small-framed, so Campbell could knock him out of the way if necessary. But
the Zaphead about fifty feet behind the Asian didn’t look so easy to handle.
This one wore a mechanic’s coveralls, dark blotches spattered across the khaki
cloth. Campbell couldn’t tell if the stains were oil or blood, and he didn’t
want to look too closely. The mechanic was a few inches north of six feet,
barrel-chested, and moving with the malevolent grace of an angry rhino.

The
two Zapheads to his left were female, both middle-aged, full-boned, and
thick-hipped. If it came down to it, Campbell would take his chances on the one
in the yellow cardigan sweater. She looked a little more bookish, like a
schoolteacher who’d been headed to the kitchen for a cup of tea when the
thermonuclear madness of the sun had other ideas.

Closing
in on the rear of the church was a skinny African-American guy in police blues
and sunglasses. Although he had a gun strapped down in its side holster, he
ignored it in favor of his thick black nightstick, which he swung from his hand
like a batter determined to drive in the winning run in the bottom of the
ninth. Campbell hoped his own skull wasn’t slated to become the baseball.

The
final Zaphead—at least among the ones he could see—was a young boy of perhaps
fourteen, his forearms covered in tattoos, blond streaks now growing through
the blue dye of his hair. Campbell could easily imagine him on his skateboard,
weaving through traffic and flipping a bird at the cop. Now they were like the
best of buddies, happy campers on the winning team.

Except,
none of them looked happy. Their body language said they had a mission, a virus
to eradicate from their midst.

In
case he lived long enough to follow Pete, Campbell took one last survey of the
surroundings, scooped up his backpack and dashed down the dark, narrow stairs.
At the landing, he considered locking the front door and holing up, but he was
pretty sure the Zapheads could wait him out. After all, he only had a day’s
supply of food, and he wasn’t sure they even needed food or water.

Besides,
if they really wanted in, they could shatter any of the large, stained-glass
windows that featured stylized images of Christ with children, lambs, or
serious-eyed men in robes. But he didn’t want to leave via the front door,
because four of the Zapheads were closest. He hurried down the aisles of the
nave, toward the altar, hoping to find a side exit.

“Where
the hell do I go?” he implored of the large, brass-coated cross fastened on the
wall above the altar.

“Seek
and you shall find,” thundered a voice, so resonant and clear that Campbell thought it was a broadcast recording.

Finally
cracking. God’s talking back.

Then
Campbell rounded the front row and saw a man sitting in the pew, hunched
forward and clasping a hymnal. The man was balding, his white shirt sleeves rolled
to the elbow, his dark leather shoes spotted with gray.

“How
long…who…?” Campbell couldn’t believe the man was just sitting there while
civilization crumbled outside. But, he had to admit, the construction of the
church hushed most sounds from outside and was probably as peaceful a place as
any to die, outside of a well-stocked survival bunker.

“They’re
coming.” Campbell wondered if the man even knew about the Zapheads. His sunken eyes
and vacant, rapt smile gave the impression of a man whose cares were few.

Then
his eyes lit with a fierce passion. “But the day of the Lord will come like a
thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies
will be burned up and dissolved, and the Earth and the works that are done on
it will be exposed.”

“Uh…
some people out there are coming to kill us.” He wasn’t sure if “people” was
the right word, but he didn’t have time for a brief history of the end of the
world. He cast about for a weapon of any kind.

“The
Book of Peter,” the man said. “Do you know Peter?”

“Yeah.
He’s holed up a couple blocks away. Come with me. We have a better chance with
the two of us.”

The
man waved to the empty rows behind him. “I can’t leave my flock.”

“You
the preacher?” Campbell thought he heard something scraping against the church
door.

“I
am a servant.”

Campbell
’s frustration mounted.
He didn’t have time to deal with a madman. But he still clung to old notions of
camaraderie and civility, even if it meant those values were baggage. “Well,
you better serve yourself right now. Or you’re going to be dead.”

“And
the dead in Christ will rise first.”

Campbell
gave up. There was
banging at the main door, the noise made even more disturbing by its steady
rhythm and insistence.

Almost
like they’re not enraged, just stopping by for a visit to check on the
neighbors.

The
altar was about a foot higher than the nave floor, and was flanked by two tall
brass candlesticks that matched the cross. United States and North Carolina
flags stood on thick wooden poles on either side of the cross in an incongruous
mash-up of church and state that was particular to Southern Baptist churches. A
darkened set of stairs led down on one side of the altar. Despite the high windows,
the light was so weak that Campbell didn’t think he’d fare better by wandering
deeper into the bowels of the church.

Campbell
jumped onto the
platform and grabbed the state flag, attracted by the sharp wooden point on top
of the pole. It was about seven feet tall, and as he removed it from its heavy
base, he realized that it would be far too cumbersome to ward off an attacker.
He gripped one of the tall brass candle holders, knocking the stubby candle
from it as he gave it a test swing. It was about three feet in length and had a
satisfying heft.

“That’s
property of the Lord,” the preacher said, rising from the pew and dropping his
hymnal.

“I’ll
give it back when I’m done.” Campbell made one last attempt to get the preacher
to come with him, holding the candlestick aloft. “Side door, make a run for
it—I got your back.”

The
preacher turned toward the main entrance, where the pounding of many hands
continued. “All are welcome in the house of God.”

The
preacher clasped his hands and bowed in reverence as he started his slow trek
up the aisle. He murmured some sort of poetic prayer, but Campbell didn’t wait
around to see how the message played to his newfound congregation. Instead, he
descended the stairs into darkness.

On
the lower floor, a few small utility windows illuminated a narrow hall that
broke off into several meeting rooms. Campbell hoped he hadn’t backed himself
into a corner. He felt confident that he could fight his way past one or two
Zapheads, but he didn’t have any delusions about playing gladiator against a
crowd of them.

He
tried a door to his left. It opened onto a dim room that had probably been used
for Sunday School classes. The stench hit him like a sheet of ice. Bodies were
stacked in various positions on the floor, arranged in the shape of a cross. As
Campbell backed out of the room with his nose buried in the crook of his
elbow, he wondered if the preacher had laid out some sort of demented holy
tribute in a burst of apocalyptic fever.

Out
in the hall, he heard the preacher’s voice soaring into a rhapsodic welcome.

Why
haven’t the Zappers killed him yet?

Turning
a bend, he spotted a fire exit. As he kicked the release bar, gripping the
heavy candlestick, sunlight poured around him, and he was cravenly grateful
that the preacher had offered himself as a decoy.