After (Book 3): Milepost 291

by Nicholson, Scott

  DeVontay spent three days in the bay of a volunteer fire department, a rotted corpse in the office, the big red engines and pumpers already losing their shine. He’d raided the EMT truck and found some hand tools, and he slept in the truck’s cab at night, one arm around an ax handle. He used the ax to bust into a house, but it reeked like a mausoleum and he couldn’t bring himself to raid its kitchen or look for firearms.

  After ten days, the Zapheads had closed in again, no longer bothering to conceal themselves. He cracked once from the strain, yelling “Bring it on, you fucking Zappers,” but they maintained their distance, muttering “You fucking Zappers” back at him from a dozen voices. Once, finding Highway 321 again, he found his route blocked by a line of Zapheads standing shoulder to shoulder, half of them naked despite the cool autumn air, old men, children, young women.

  He waved the ax at them, threatening to hack his way past, but in the end, their placid faces and sparking eyes had frightened him too much and he’d altered his route. He was no longer heading northwest, but figured he could circle around once he eluded the Zapheads. It was two weeks before he realized they were herding him, like a wolf pack culling a sick deer.

  He’d come upon a little community on the banks of a river not far off Highway 321, with an auto repair shop, a Baptist church, a shabby convenience store with its gas pumps removed, and an outdoors outfitters featuring fishing gear, kayaks, and rental bicycles. A narrow, sagging sign by the road said in hand-painted letters, “WELCOME TO STONEWALL, POPULATION NOT NEAR ENOUGH.”A sodden, fly-blown body was splayed beneath the hood of a Buick, a mechanic whose brain had been short-circuited in the middle of changing out spark plugs.

  Two ravaged corpses on the church steps looked to have been victims of violent assault, and DeVontay figured they’d been killed by Zapheads while seeking sanctuary. Judging from the stench, more bodies lay behind the arched white doors. A few Victorian-style houses lined the gravel road, with more of them barely visible on the wooded hillsides.

  Now, he had to decide whether to hole up in Stonewall for a few days or somehow outmaneuver the Zapheads, who seemed to have swelled in number. He recognized a few that had been following him for days, but other faces were new, as if the Zapheads were swapping out reinforcements. And it finally sunk in that while he’d seen dozens of Zapheads, he’d yet to encounter another living human since parting from Rachel and Stephen.

  The door to the convenience store stood open. The body of an old man was propped on a stool behind the counter, so relaxed and natural that at first glance DeVontay thought the shopkeeper was alive, patiently waiting for the next customer. Then he saw the moist fungal splotches on the man’s livid and bloated flesh, and the rot of decomposition pierced his nostrils. The place had been ransacked, and much of the damage appeared to be destructive vandalism.

  Most of the snacks and candy were spoiled or stomped into moldering clumps, but he found a few cans of Vienna sausages, a long pack of stale peanuts, and some soggy Fruit Roll-Ups. He filled his pockets and then saw a box of Slim Jims. His chest squeezed in pain at the memory of Stephen’s growing fondness for the greasy snacks. He jammed a few sticks in his back pocket, figuring they contained enough preservatives to last until the next apocalypse, and was turning to leave when he saw the woman standing just inside the door.

  She was a Zaphead, with the trademark speckled eyes and filthy clothes. She’d lost a shoe somewhere, and her blouse was missing several buttons. She was maybe thirty, with wild tangles of brown hair, and her mouth was stained with some sort of dark, gummy substance.

  Jesus Henry Christ, are these things drinking BLOOD now? Or munching down on the flesh of dead people?

  DeVontay was upset at himself for letting his guard down. The Zapheads had been keeping their distance, and he’d assumed they had no interest in attacking him. Indeed, they barely seemed to acknowledge his existence at all, though they clearly kept track of his movements and cut him off whenever he sought a direction toward the mountains.

  He’d left the ax leaning against the counter, and he wondered if he would be able to reach it before the woman…did whatever she was going to do.

  In the dusty street outside he saw more of them approaching, unhurried and almost solemn. It was their creeping silence that was most unnerving—if only they screeched and howled, he could have dealt with them, swinging the ax into their skulls one by one until he dropped from exhaustion.

  He held out one of the snacks for the woman. “Go ahead,” he said. “Snap into a Slim Jim.”

  “Slim Jim?” she said, then repeated it with a different inflection, like a stoned hip-hop artist relishing the rhyme. “Slim Jim, Slim Jim, Slimmmm Jimmmm.”

  He made an underhanded toss. She repeated the motion as the snack bounced off her chest. Several Zapheads crowded the entrance, including an overweight man and a girl as dark as he was. Even if he reached the ax, he didn’t think he’d hew his way past them before other Zaps closed in. Beside the shattered glass of the reach-in drink cooler was a little hallway leading to the rest rooms. The hallway ended at a back door featuring an emergency bar.

  Won’t have to worry about setting off an alarm, at least. But will it open?

  He had little choice. He scooped up some little hard bricks of chewing gum and flung them at the woman, and then he fled down the hall. The back door opened with a kick. More Zapheads watched from the riverbank, but he didn’t wait to see what they’d do. He sprinted to the outfitter’s, wrestled with the door for a moment before realizing the weight of a corpse was causing resistance, and then shoved his way inside.

  One corner of the store held camping gear, and a long glass counter displayed several rows of hunting knives. He drove a boot into the front of the case, shattering the thick glass, and selected the largest blade he could find. He clipped its holster to his belt loop and searched among the merchandise for other weapons.

  Through the window he saw more Zapheads coming from the forest, closing in on the shop. He rummaged through the outdoor gear, grabbed a backpack from a peg on the wall, and stuffed it with a mess kit, first aid supplies, a compass, and some cans of Sterno. He saw no guns, but he collected a hunting bow from a display and shoved some arrows in his backpack, then slung the bow and backpack over one shoulder.

  It was when he spied the rows of kayaks in their skeletal metal berths that he got an idea.

  Pulling one from its rack, he tossed a paddle in the shell and dragged it to the door. The Zapheads had resumed their position surrounding him, although now they were at least a hundred feet away. Just enough distance if he moved fast enough…

  DeVontay dragged the kayak over the corpse in the doorway, tugging it by a short rope tethered to its helm. He clutched the knife handle in his other hand, although he left the weapon holstered. The river was barely fifty feet from the outfitter’s shop, and a timber-framed landing was built into the bank, featuring a stone-covered incline that led to the rippling water. He shoved the kayak into the current, nearly lost his balance while scrambling aboard, and then he worked the paddle toward deeper water.

  The river was maybe fifty yards across and only a few feet deep, but it quickly narrowed into a boulder-strewn, churning waterway. The water flowed downhill, of course, and would carry him away from his destination, but he wasn’t so sure he cared about Milepost 291 anymore. That had been Rachel’s hallowed destination, not his, and now that she was gone, the objective seemed foolish.

  Putting distance between him and his glittery-eyed stalkers was a more immediate goal. He propelled the kayak forward with long, powerful strokes, the bottom occasionally scraping on rocks. Zapheads came closer to the water to watch, and he fought a deep desire to laugh at them.

  “What’s wrong?” he shouted. “Don’t you know how to swim?”

  “Swim,” one of them said, a little girl who looked about Stephen’s age.

  “Swim,” said an older Zaphead, waving his arms in imitation of the paddle strokes. Others took up the cry
of “Swim” until it resonated like the cries of a crazed flock of birds. They came from the woods and from around the houses, dozens, maybe even hundreds.

  One waded into the river, then another, and ahead of him, DeVontay saw more of them entering the water. He stroked with aching muscles and frantic breath, sure they would tip over the kayak and pull him under.

  He didn’t want to put down the paddle and try shooting arrows at them. Because he only had one eye, he had poor depth perception. Rachel hadn’t realized what an awful shot he was with the rifle, and given the turbulence of the water, he needed both hands to keep the kayak straight.

  The bottom had deepened as the channel narrowed, and the Zapheads were soon up to their necks. They made no move to swim or paddle, and so were pushed off their feet by the current. The first one went under and didn’t come back up.

  More and more heads disappeared beneath the silvery-green water, and more Zapheads pressed their way into the water, like lemmings going over a cliff. When the young girl’s expressionless face vanished in the froth, a cold horror settled inside DeVontay’s sweating body. They were drowning.

  He soon quit watching, instead focusing on the rocks and eddies ahead, choosing which gaps and rapids seemed to offer the safest passage.

  He wondered if the river was large enough to hold all the Zapheads in the world, and if anyone—or any God—would mourn their extinction if such a lucky event came to pass.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Franklin Wheeler had been preparing for Doomsday for much of his adult life, but never in his wildest fantasies would he have planned for this scenario.

  No, in his dream of a post-collapse world, he would be sitting in his little cabin on the ridge, the woodstove crackling, a kettle of water atop it for his dandelion-root tea. He’d never really planned to live alone, but the others in his fantasy had always been slightly amorphous and faceless—however, he’d always hoped Rachel would be the one family member who would appreciate his foresight and preparation. Instead, he’d ended up with an unlikely group of strangers, a reluctant leader instead of a libertarian loner.

  Ah, hell with it, libertarians can’t really exist, because we all depend on one another. We’re all interconnected, one big hippie flower-power hallucination, or maybe God’s twisted little jigsaw puzzle.

  “How’s it going back there?” he called to Robertson and Shay. Robertson’s bandaged head made him look like a mummy, but his eyes were alert and he kept up with the rest of the group.

  “We’re good,” Shay answered for them. She’d taken Hayes’s field jacket as a trophy, although it was far too large for her and she had to roll up the sleeves. Her father had given her Hayes’ sidearm and holster. The belt had been too large for her slim waist, so she wore it over one shoulder like a bandolier. Franklin hoped her father had taught her about guns, because if they encountered one of Sarge’s patrols or a pack of pissed-off Zapheads, there wouldn’t be much time for target practice.

  Franklin and Jorge carried the AR-15s of the two dead soldiers, but neither was all that comfortable with the semiautomatic weapons. Franklin figured what they lacked in accuracy, they made up for in sheer firepower. Robertson stubbornly carried the shotgun, claiming it was a better choice for close fighting. Considering what it had done to Bandana Boy’s head, Franklin couldn’t disagree.

  They’d taken the packs from the two soldiers, filling them with the provisions Robertson had collected. Jorge had wanted to check the surrounding houses, but Robertson said they were already cleaned out. As they walked along the gravel road away from the last shots they’d heard, Franklin checked the angle of the afternoon sun to gauge their direction.

  “What’s the plan?” Jorge asked Franklin.

  “We’ll make a big sweep to the east and circle around to the parkway, then back to my compound. With luck, we’ll avoid Sarge’s troops.”

  Jorge’s eyes were dark and serious. “I can’t go back until I find my family.”

  “I know. I’m hoping we’ll see some sign of them.”

  “How many more of us are left?” Robertson asked. “You guys are the first people we’ve seen in weeks, and if the Army has only a few dozen troops near the parkway, then I’m guessing the Zapheads outnumber us a hundred to one.”

  “Yeah, but they haven’t figured out how to use guns yet,” Franklin said. “If we all got on the same team, we’d wipe them out in no time.”

  “And then we’d turn on each other,” Jorge said. “You think your military will grow tired of killing once they get a taste for it?”

  Another shot sounded in the distance, and the reverberation off the wooded slopes made its origin difficult to place. Franklin hoped they weren’t walking right into the middle of a Zaphead hunt. If they encountered an army patrol, they’d have to explain what happened to their two companions. And Sarge had specifically ordered them not to collect “prisoners,” so Robertson might be killed on the spot. And young Shay’s fate might end up the same as the one Bandana Boy and Hayes had planned for her.

  “That’s Grandfather Mountain,” Franklin said, pointing to the dark, angular profile to the west. “Sarge’s bunker is somewhere maybe half a mile from the base of it, and my compound is another mile north. We could make it before nightfall.”

  “And then what?” Jorge said. “They know where the compound is. Once they discover what happened to their friends, they would come for us.”

  “We’d be ready for them.”

  “Three against fifty?” Robertson said.

  “Four,” Shay said, hooking her thumbs into the belt and pushing so that the sidearm flopped in its holster.

  “Normally, I believe in ‘Live and let live,’ but I don’t think we have that option anymore,” Franklin said, ignoring the girl’s belligerent pose.

  “I can’t simply hide on a hill while my family is in danger,” Jorge said.

  Your family’s probably dead, amigo. But Franklin understood Jorge’s clinging to hope. He himself still believed Rachel was out there somewhere, despite all evidence suggesting otherwise. “Your family is just as likely to find their way back to the compound as you are to find them wandering around in the woods somewhere. I just hope to God they aren’t hanging around that woman and her Zap baby.”

  “Zap baby?” Robertson said.

  “This woman we rescued. We didn’t know it, but she had a baby that had been...” He glanced at Shay before he decided on the word. “…affected.”

  “Do you think that had something to do with why they left your camp? Sounds to me like that’s the safest place this side of the Mississippi, if you don’t count the military bunker.”

  “The bunker’s not safe,” Franklin said. “It might protect you from the evil all around you, but not the enemy within. But you’ve seen the way the Zaps are starting to congregate. In the beginning, they were random, solitary, and vicious. Now you hardly ever see one by itself.”

  “Franklin believes either the Zapheads were drawn to the compound because of the baby, or the mother for some reason thought she had to take the child to the Zapheads,” Jorge said.

  Franklin glanced around the woods, swiveling the barrel of his AR-15 back and forth. He didn’t like being out in the open, but the road allowed them to make better time. Sarge’s soldiers had lost whatever discipline they might have built during their service and were likely to choose the easiest route over stealth and concealment.

  The Zapheads, however, were another matter.

  The afternoon sun was sliding toward evening, and the birds fell silent as they passed. At times Franklin lost sight of Grandfather Mountain’s peak, but he kept his sense of direction enough to guide them east. The gravel road turned to asphalt, with driveways and houses becoming more frequent. If anyone saw them from behind curtained windows, no one called to them, and Franklin was in no mood for a door-to-door search. He’d seen enough corpses for one day.

  The group reached a bend where the road took a sharp slant downward, affording a view of
the valley below. While much of the vista was wooded, the pavement followed an undulating river, with open pastures lining both sides. Farmhouses were nestled here and there among the high weeds, the sun glinting off the tin roofs of barns and outbuildings.

  “Look,” Jorge said, pointing.

  “Smoke,” Shay said. “From that chimney.”

  Franklin shaded his eyes and scanned the valley. He’d refused to be fitted for glasses and hadn’t been to a doctor since they’d tried to put him on blood-pressure medicine a decade ago. Now he couldn’t help but feel weak and ancient.

  I can’t see and I can’t fight worth a damn, but at least I can offer experience. But maybe even experience is worthless when you’re dealing with something that’s never happened before.

  “Somebody’s got a fire going,” Robertson said. “And I’d bet a jar of jelly beans it’s not a Zaphead.”

  Jorge broke into a run and Franklin called after him. “Might be some of Sarge’s boys.”

  “And it might be Marina and Rosa,” he said, not slowing.

  After Jorge was out of sight, Franklin said, “He’s going in the wrong direction.”

  “What if it’s more survivors?’ Shay said. “We have to help them.”

  “Maybe they don’t need help. Maybe they’re just fine on their own.”

  Shay shot him an accusing glare. “Just like we were, right?”

  “Look, we can’t save the whole damned world. I’ve got a plan to get through the winter, and the compound can sustain half a dozen at most.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about overpopulation,” Robertson said. “Seems to me your compound loses more people than it gains.”

  “Shit,” Franklin said. He’d constructed the compound with the idea that he’d have companions, but he’d also been prepared to live alone if necessary. Now the idea of huddling in his little cabin while the snows piled up, with Zapheads walking through the land he once loved, make his guts twist.