After: The Shock (6 page)

“Would
you have shot him?” she said. “If you had to?”

He
turned, the candlelight soft on his face. He looked young, barely a teen.
“Wouldn’t be the first.”

She
couldn’t tell if he was just talking tough or trying to reassure her. She
didn’t press. She wasn’t even sure she wanted him to shoot. Even though they
were Zapheads, they were still God’s creatures.

Do
you really believe that, Rachel? Why can’t they be Satan’s army? Or are you one
of those who only believe the convenient parts of the Bible?

She
shuddered. “I’m exhausted,” she said.

“King-size
bed.”

“Good.”
She sprawled on one side, then curled into a ball with the pillow pulled to her
stomach. “You can stay way over there.”

“I’m
eating first,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”

“Sorry,”
she murmured.

“Huh?”

“I
left your Doritos in the lobby.”

CHAPTER
SIX

Campbell
slobbered over the pork
and beans, which were heated in a tin can that had been resting in the embers.
The fire was large and crackled with intense energy, and it could have been the
primal fire, the first lightning strike that had forever changed the human
race. It sent giant fingers of light stippling against the surrounding trees,
creating a yellow wall against the black and unknown beyond.

There
were four in the group. Donnie, a scrawny guy in a camouflage cap who’d
challenged them when they’d entered the camp, had taken his turn at watch while
shouldering a mean-looking automatic rifle. A woman named Pam was evidently
asleep in one of the tents popped up in the clearing. The group must have
settled there for some days, because of the clothesline strung between two
trees and a stack of broken limbs piled nearby to feed the fire.

The
man who’d stuck the gun in Campbell’s back was named Arnoff. He’d collected
their guns after Donnie had demanded they drop them. Pete had been pissed at
first, but now he was nursing a beer and gazing into the flames as if he were
at a frat-house bonfire before the big homecoming football game.

Arnoff
sat across the fire from Campbell, tenderly cleaning a disassembled rifle. “You
boys made it all the way from Chapel Hill, huh?”

“We
had bicycles,” Campbell said.

Arnoff
nodded. “Yep. Saw you through the binocs.”

“That’s
why we didn’t shoot you,” said the bald, thin-faced man with huge black
spectacles that gave him the appearance of an insect. “We haven’t seen Zapheads
exhibit such coordinated behavior.”

“I
woulda shot you anyways,” Arnoff said. “Just for target practice. But the
professor here said we need to gather as much info as we could.”

“He’s
joking,” said the bald man, although Arnoff’s eyes held not the slightest hint
of mirth.

“How
long have you guys been together?” Campbell asked, eager to change the subject.
His stomach wasn’t doing too well with the beans and he already felt bloated
and gassy.

“I
teach earth sciences at Wake Forest—I mean, I
did
teach, back when I had
students,” the professor said, digging into his shirt pocket for a cigarette.
Absurdly, he still wore a tie, as if that one senseless symbol of civilization
guaranteed that all the pieces would eventually fit back together. “My colleagues
in the department were well aware of the approaching solar flares, which tend
to come in cycles. Indeed, it was national news, but like most science stories,
it was dumbed down for public consumption.”

“Yeah,
we saw that on Yahoo!,” Pete said. “They were talking about the worst solar
storm on record, sometime around the Civil War, but they said this one wouldn’t
be that bad.”

Arnoff
clacked
a bullet into the chamber of his rifle. “They never get it
straight. Goddamned media. Keep you so screwed you don’t know whether to sell
your stocks or buy ammunition.”

“The
1859 solar flare, the Carrington Event, disrupted telegraph communications and
burned some poles,” the professor said. “The aurora was spotted all over the
country and as far south as Mexico.”

“Those
freaky green and purple lights in the sky?” Pete asked. “That make you feel
like you’re on a bad acid trip?”

“Yes,
caused by charged particles. Other recent solar flares and sunspot events have
caused power outages, but no one could have expected anything like this.”

“You
mean Zapheads?” Campbell said.

“I
mean, ‘all of it.’ Congress had ordered some research and contingency plans in
the wake of massive solar disruptions, but that was mostly in the event of
satellite problems and the like. Anyone presenting these types of doomsday
scenarios would have been classified as Internet wackos and UFO conspiracy
theorists.”

“I
get the part where it knocked out power and electrical systems, even combustion
engines,” Arnoff said. “Sorta like short circuiting the whole world at once.
But I don’t understand what it did to people’s brains to turn them into
Zapheads. And I sure as hell don’t understand why some of us are more or less
still normal.”

“I
doubt we’ll ever have those answers now,” the professor said. “Assuming the
rest of the globe was affected like the United States, there’s no way to
undertake the necessary research.”

Arnoff
waved a hand. “Don’t get off on no lecture. Knowing won’t change the facts, and
the facts is there are a bunch of Zapheads out there wanting to kill us.”

“You
said they’ve changed,” Campbell said. “What did you mean?”

“They
seem to be adapting,” the professor said. “You might have noticed yourself, if
you’ve had repeated encounters. Just after the flares, the Zapheads”—his face
curdled as he uttered the name, as if he found it distasteful and
scientifically inaccurate—“engaged in violence at random, attacking any living
thing in their immediate vicinity. But we’ve observed them engaging in communal
activity, as if they are organizing.”

“That’s
why I almost shot you,” Arnoff said. “Where there’s one, there might be more.”

“Great,”
Pete said. “Nice to see us humans sticking together.”

Campbell
gave a small shake of
his head, trying to signal Pete to shut up. While Arnoff was a loose cannon, at
least he was a cannon—Campbell hadn’t felt this safe since the apocalypse had
started. He set the empty can of beans aside and licked the sauce from his
fork.

“How
many of us do you think are left?’ he asked the professor.

“It’s
difficult to estimate. I met Mr. Arnoff between Winston-Salem and Greensboro, traveling east on Interstate 40. He was headed for the coast, figuring he’d
find a little island and play Robinson Crusoe until things got sorted out.
Thirty miles from here, we found Pamela and Donnie four days ago, hiding in a
school bus. And now here are you two. It’s a small sample size, but I’d guess
maybe one person in a million was immune to the electromagnetic disruptions.”

“Holy
shit,” Pete said. “That’s sort of like winning the lottery.”

“Or
maybe losing, in this case,” Arnoff said. “I always thought the world was too
crowded, but I don’t like being outnumbered.”

“Which
was my next question,” Campbell said. “We met a few other survivors, but we’ve
seen a lot more Zapheads.”

He
told them about their encounter with the Zaphead in the van, and Pete
punctuated the story with sound effects to describe how they’d beat the woman
to death. He didn’t embellish too many of the details, although he came off
like the hero of the tale.

“Good
for you,” Arnoff said. “I never woulda figured you had it in you.”

“Maybe
we’re adapting, too,” the professor said, drawing on his cigarette. “Maybe the
need to kill will turn
us
into Zapheads. The lingering magnetic fluctuations
could be turning the kettle of our brains up to a boil as we speak.”

Campbell
didn’t like the idea
that his internal circuitry might even now be mutating into something
treacherous.

“Don’t
go getting all negative on me,” Arnoff said, leaning his rifle on a stump.
“Things are bad enough already. Let’s keep it on the sunny side.”

“Ironic,
given the fact that the sun is the cause of our problems,” the professor said.
He flicked his cigarette butt into the fire.

“So,
you guys have been walking?” Pete asked, slurring his words a little.

“I
had a horse I found in a stable,” Arnoff said. “It threw me when it stepped in
a pothole and broke an ankle. About broke my neck, too.”

“Let
me guess,” Pete said. “You had to shoot it, but you didn’t get too down about
it.”

Arnoff
glared at him, and Campbell made a surreptitious slashing motion across his
throat to signal Pete to cool it. “Some things just need to be put down,”
Arnoff said.

The
professor made a show of looking at his wristwatch, a nerdy wind-up model that
had outlasted the planet’s digital watches. “Donnie’s time is about up.”

Arnoff
stood and collected his rifle, walking to the nearest tent and lifting the
flap, revealing the mesh screen over the door. “Wake up, Pamela, it’s your
turn.”

“So,
what’s happening in the east?” the professor asked Campbell in a lower voice,
to keep the conversation private.

Campbell
shrugged. “A lot of
dead people. A lot of Zapheads. Stalled cars. Nothing working right.”

“Any
organization of emergency services?”

“Like,
cops and stuff? No, they were as dead as everybody else. Once in a while, we
saw people walking around off in the distance, but we were afraid to check them
out. We didn’t know whether they were Zapheads or not.”

“Perhaps
that was a good idea. I estimate the ratio of Zapheads to survivors is on the
order of ten to one.”

“I
just can’t believe it’s like this all over the goddamned world,” Pete said.
“It’s like the zombie movie from hell.”

“It’s
hopeless,” Campbell found himself saying. He had never given thought to the
concept of “hope.” That was a word for a Hallmark card when a relative was
undergoing chemotherapy, not a word that normal people worried about.

“We
have food and supplies,” the professor said, keeping his voice at the same
lecturing level as before. “If our bottled water runs out, we can filter water
from this creek and boil it. This is our second day here, and we could easily
last a week before making a foraging run into one of the nearby towns.”

“I
don’t see no advantage in staying here,” Arnoff grumbled from his position by
the tent. “How long before more of those Zapheads locate our camp?”

“That’s
for the group to decide,” the professor answered.

Campbell
had a feeling that
opinions were divided and, for the first time, felt tension between the
professor and Arnoff, whose eyes were like dark, wet beetles. And, Campbell wondered if he and Pete were now considered part of the group.

Safety
in numbers, unless those numbers start shooting at each other.

Arnoff
strode off into the trees at the dark perimeter of the camp. Campbell wasn’t
sure whether the man was scouting or taking a leak.

“What
about power?” Pete said. “These batteries won’t last forever.”

“Power
might end up being the thing that kills us,” the professor said. “The sun is
the biggest thermonuclear reactor in our corner of the universe.”

“All
this talk about green energy, there have got to be some wind turbines and solar
panels and stuff,” Campbell said. He’d known a guy named Terrence Flowers, a
big energy hippie, who had always drawn up elaborate plans for off-the-grid
sustainable systems. They could sure use Terrence now, unless he was a Zaphead.

“Most
such devices have electronic components in their converting systems, so they
are useless now. I suppose you could replace the damaged parts and they might
work, but we can’t just order parts online and have FedEx deliver to our door,
right? But the problem is even bigger than that. We could soon be looking at
four hundred Chernobyls.”

“The
hell?” Pete said, cracking another beer with an insolent hiss.

“There
are more than four hundred nuclear power plants in the world. They use water
circulated by electrical pumps to cool their reactor cores and spent fuel rods.
Without electricity, it doesn’t take long for them to melt down.”

“Wait,”
Pete said. “No damn way. The government wouldn’t allow that shit to happen.”

“Oh,
the nuclear plants have back-up systems.” The flames tossed shadows across the
professor’s impassive face, giving his words an even more sinister weight.
“Diesel generators and other electricity-dependent systems. But if the
geomagnetic storms wiped those out, too…”

“Like
that Japanese plant in the tsunami,” Campbell said.

“Yeah.”
The professor tossed his cigarette butt and it arced like a meteor into the
heart of the fire. “The core overheated because the back-up systems failed. The
plant was built to withstand a tsunami, and it did. The trouble was, the
back-up systems weren’t build to withstand it.”

“Jesus
Christ,” Pete said. “You mean we’re going to have to start worrying about giant
mutant lizards, too? Like Zapheads aren’t bad enough?”

“Oh,
no worries,” the professor said. “We’ll be dead long before anything has a
chance to mutate due to radiation.”

“Scaring
the children again, Professor?” came a woman’s voice from the opening of the
tent. The flap peeled back and a wild mane of red hair spilled forth. The mane
lifted and the tangles revealed a weathered but attractive face, a woman of
late middle age without the benefit of makeup but with a fierce sparkle in her
green eyes.

As
Pamela stood up in a rumpled terrycloth robe, a blanket draped around her,
Campbell was immediately captivated. She wasn’t beautiful, not by modern
Photoshop standards, but she projected a vexing allure. She was a little
younger than Campbell’s mother, slim but with a strong frame. Even Pete took
notice of her, rousing from his drunken stupor to grin at her.