After (Book 3): Milepost 291

by Nicholson, Scott

  He’d taught Rachel that a human being had to stand up for what was right and had to fight for the things worth fighting for, and he’d been all too ready to hide away and avoid the biggest war the human race had ever known—the battle for survival of the species.

  Robertson didn’t wait for Franklin’s response. “Come on, honey,” he said to Shay, adjusting his bandage and lowering the shotgun so that it rested across the crook of his elbow. He followed after Jorge.

  I’m probably going to live to regret this. On the bright side, I’m probably not going to live all that much longer anyway.

  He checked the clip on his AR-15 and fell in behind them, taking one last look around to make sure they had no unexpected company.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Not even a scar,” the professor whispered, staring down at Rachel’s bare leg.

  Campbell pressed a gentle hand against her forehead. “Her fever’s breaking, too.”

  The Zapheads, still almost reverently gathered around her, applied their palms to her body in imitation of Campbell’s action, touching her legs, abdomen, cheeks, and breasts. She stirred a little from her torpid state, her bare skin shrinking with goose pimples from the cool air.

  Campbell tugged the hem of the sheet from her upper thighs and spread it over her legs so she was completely covered except for her head. “We should get her more blankets. It’ll be dark soon, and nights are getting chilly. You might want to get some clothes on yourself.”

  “You watch her,” the professor said. “I’ll go upstairs and get one of the quilts.”

  “Not the one with the blood on it,” Campbell said.

  “We wrapped Pamela in that one, remember?”

  A number of the Zapheads followed the professor, mumbling and muttering, seemingly unaware they had just performed a miracle. Campbell wasn’t religious, but he was well aware of the prophecy of Jesus’ return. What if Jesus came back to Earth not as a single man, but as a whole tribe?

  No, there has to be a reasonable explanation.

  Although, he had to admit, that one was as reasonable as any other, under the circumstances.

  The Zapheads around him had remained calm since Rachel’s arrival. Campbell had noticed—and mentioned to the professor—that the Zapheads in general had become less aggressive over time. He didn’t know whether it was because they were used to the two humans in their midst or some change was still occurring in their neural systems. But he and the professor were still alive, kept almost as pets, and the Zapheads had healed Rachel.

  Not wanting the Zapheads to handle Rachel anymore, he forced himself to step away from the sofa. The Zapheads followed suit. Taking a page from the professor’s playbook, he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and clasped his hands together in prayer. When he opened his eyes ten seconds later, all the Zapheads had returned to kneeling on the floor.

  The Catholic Church would have killed for this kind of power. But maybe they did.

  Once the Zapheads settled back into their routine, with even their breathing hushed and steady, Campbell took the time to look over Rachel more carefully. He told himself it was because he wanted to verify she had no other wounds, but most of it was desperate desire for a human connection.

  She was even more attractive than he remembered. In Taylorsville, he’d mostly seen her in the dark or by the flickering light of huge, destructive bonfires. She’d obviously spent little time on personal hygiene—the sheer act of survival was a higher priority to survivors—but she had a natural tan complexion, thick lashes, curving lips, and a shapely form. Despite her greasy hair and dirt-scuffed face, she appeared almost radiant instead of green-tinged and near death. The recovery had taken less than an hour.

  When the professor returned, another sheet draped around his shoulders and a bundled blanket in his arms, the praying Zapheads emerged from their quiescent state. The ones that had followed the professor mingled with them and they moved around aimlessly, some leaving the living room and others bumping into walls.

  As they spread the blanket over Rachel, Campbell mumbled, “So, any theories?”

  The professor shook his head. “Unless you believe in voodoo, I’m guessing it’s something taking place at a quantum level. In the same way an intense magnetic pull can wipe out the data on a hard drive, maybe the Zapheads store up some kind of electrical energy they can distribute in a controlled way.”

  “Like human batteries?”

  “Something like that. There used to be a departmental secretary at UNC-Greensboro who could heal carpal tunnel and muscle sprains. She joked that she was a witch, but she was always secretive about it, afraid people really might think she was peculiar and ostracize her. She would rub her hands together and then wave one hand over the affected area as if she were tugging out invisible stitches.”

  “Like reiki, maybe? I’ve seen them wave their hands over people like they’re moving energy around. Sort of like acupuncture without the needles.”

  “This woman never touched the flesh of her patient, but the injury would begin healing almost immediately. She even cured my carpal tunnel that way. I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to me.”

  “But a muscle sprain is one thing. This was a life-threatening wound. And it healed in minutes.”

  The professor frowned. “I’m just a teacher, not a philosopher.”

  “Not all that long ago, you wanted to play surgeon,” Campbell said.

  “We’ll just have to see how she does. We don’t know if her blood is poisoned from infection.”

  “They wanted her to live. That’s what’s scary. We’ve been fighting them, killing them, hiding from them when they’ll let us. But when they had a chance to let one of us die, they invoked some sort of inner power to save her.”

  “You’re overlooking something very important,” the professor said, glancing around at the Zapheads who milled aimlessly through the house.

  “What, that they didn’t dig their fingers in her rotten bits and eat it like chili?”

  “They acted together. Without speaking, or making any kind of signal that I could see.”

  “They were copying you. The way you were rubbing your hand on her.”

  “I think it was more than that.”

  Campbell studied the strange, glittery-eyed mutants around him—his housemates, his new tribe, his jailers. Despite all the days he’d been forced to endure their presence, they seemed even more grotesque now than when they were wantonly destroying all things in their path.

  Even creepier, he was losing his perception of what life had been like Before. He was losing all sense of normalcy and the great psychological security blanket of civilization, and this was becoming his reality.

  “Don’t tell me these starry-eyed fucks are telepathic,” Campbell said.

  “I am not sure that’s the right word for it,” the professor said. “You see how they copy our phonetics and tone. Clearly they don’t have a grasp of language, at least not human language. If they could truly read minds, they’d have already absorbed the sum of our knowledge and memories.”

  “Damn, don’t tell me they know about that Penthouse magazine I accidentally left in my mom’s sewing room. Or the Zapheads I killed in Taylorsville.”

  The professor’s face took on that vacant, rapt look again, as if falling back into his messiah complex—the spiritual leader of the strangely changed, the Christ of After.

  “Or perhaps what we think we know is useless to them,” he said.

  Stuff it in a psycho fortune cookie.

  Rachel stirred, and Campbell knelt by her side. As for what he did next, he couldn’t be sure whether he was trying to comfort her or comfort himself.

  But he wanted something solid in a wobbly, watery, illusory world.

  He took her hand and held it, watching the blanket rise and fall with her breathing until the sound of her exhalation became a wind of hope, drowning out the mad mumbling of the Zaphead hordes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN


  The river widened and grew shallow, and DeVontay’s kayak scraped bottom.

  He soon found himself spending more time climbing out of the boat and wading than he did paddling. But at least he’d left the Zapheads behind.

  Much of the flood plain featured ragged grass meadows, with a few cows and horses foraging between autumnal tree lines. Houses were set here and there along the banks, built on stilts or higher out of the flood plain, and a narrow paved road meandered alongside the waterway. DeVontay imagined that was the route used by the bicyclists who rented from the outfitters. He wondered if he should have taken a bike instead of the kayak, but something about being out in the water made him feel safer.

  Not likely a Zapper is going to pop up and drag me under like an alligator.

  He thought about going ashore and checking out some of the houses, maybe finding a secure place to hole up for the night, but he was reluctant to risk encountering any more mutants. He had enough food to make it another day before he’d have to forage again. Mostly he was too disheartened to step over any more dead bodies or smell the stench of a society gone by.

  The kayak bottom out on some slick stones, and he stepped into shallow water to free it. At least here in the open air he could almost fool himself into believing he was on a recreational outing. Just a man against nature, a dark-skinned Daniel Boone with a glass eye and a thirst for adventure.

  What if the Zapheads ARE nature? What if they’re the way we were meant to be? Maybe they’re normal and I’M the freak.

  Exhausted by the sheer demands of survival, he’d given little contemplation to the solar storms and the larger forces that had swept across the planet. Without Rachel and Stephen, he wasn’t sure how much longer he wanted to fight.

  If only he—

  “Hey, you!”

  DeVontay, knee deep in water, nearly lost his grip on the kayak. He shielded his hand over his eyes to block the late-afternoon sun reflecting off the water.

  “Who’s there?” he said. The voice had come from the far shore, which was thick with wiry vegetation and shadows.

  “You’re not a Zaphead, are you?”

  It was a man’s voice, and DeVontay could barely make out a form in the murk. “I’m talking, aren’t I? You ever heard a Zaphead talk?”

  “Depends on what you mean by talking.”

  DeVontay stood in the cold water, unsure of what to do. His feet were numb and the river ahead boiled with shallow rapids. Even if he wanted to, he wasn’t sure the kayak would skid to the deeper pool below them, where the current seemed to swallow its anger and grow still.

  And, of course, the unseen man might have a gun.

  “What do you want?” DeVontay said.

  Two middle-aged men stepped out from the brush. They were dressed in camouflage fatigue pants and plaid shirts, but little else about them suggested they were military. One wore a bright orange baseball cap and the other’s face was nearly hidden behind a scraggly mass of curly hair and aviator sunglasses. Both wielded firearms, and their rifles were pointed in DeVontay’s direction.

  “Come over here, boy,” said the man in the orange cap.

  Shit, are these rednecks trying to pull a “Deliverance”? The first humans I’ve seen in two weeks, and they have to be racist assholes.

  “Some Zapheads back that way, and I want to get as far away as I can.” DeVontay nodded upstream toward the little community. “You know what Zapheads are?”

  The bearded one cackled and the man in the orange cap said, “Everybody knows what Zapheads are, or else they’re dead.”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  The bearded man aimed his weapon at DeVontay. “Then you better get your ass over here, hadn’t you?”

  DeVontay glanced at the bow and arrows in the shell of the kayak. Even if he reached them before getting shot, he would never nail both of the armed men from thirty yards away. He could also duck into the water and swim downstream, but he didn’t think he could hold his breath long enough to get out of range. That was assuming the rapids ahead were even deep enough to conceal him.

  “What do you want?” DeVontay said, stalling for time.

  DeVontay heard a crack, then a small splash in front of him, followed by the keening whine. The sounds occurred almost simultaneously, so it was only after a small puff of blue-gray smoke wended from the man’s rifle barrel that he realized a shot had been fired.

  He raised his arms, releasing the kayak, which slid downstream and turned sideways before scudding down the rapids.

  “Get over here or this river’s gonna be running red,” said Orange Cap.

  DeVontay slogged toward the bank, slipping once on the algae-coated stones and going to one knee. The rifle barrel tracked each step. By the time he reached the shore, he was soaked to the waist and chilled to the bone. Neither man made a move to help him out of the water, so he clawed his way up by grabbing fistfuls of slimy weeds.

  When he stood on trembling legs, DeVontay found the tip of a rifle barrel against his nose.

  “You normal?” asked the man with the sunglasses.

  DeVontay risked a little defiance. “Are you?”

  The man took off his sunglasses and shoved them in the pocket of his hunting vest, not lowering his weapon. “You traveling alone?”

  “Yeah. You’re the first people I’ve seen in two weeks.”

  “But I bet you seen a lot of Zaps.”

  “Upriver. Dozens of them.”

  “They’re ganging up,” said Orange Cap. DeVontay could now see that it bore a white T logo, for the University of Tennessee. “We were picking them off one at a time, a stray here and there, but lately, we’re trying to lay low.”

  “What do you want with me, then?” DeVontay asked, glancing down the river where his goods floated on the green surface. “You made me lose my supplies.”

  “You’re coming with us.”

  “Why?”

  “For one, because we said so,” said the bearded man. “For another, this is war, and you’re either with us or against us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  “We got a little gang together. A few locals, a few oddballs like you. People who don’t want to go down without a fight.”

  DeVontay unbuttoned his wet shirt. “I don’t want to fight. I want to run.”

  “Ain’t nowhere left to run to. It’s all Zap country now. From sea to shining sea.”

  How do you know? Got a satellite feed back at your camp? Or did the aliens beam it straight through your tinfoil skullcap?

  “I’d rather take my chances on my own,” DeVontay said. “Besides, they didn’t attack me when they had the chance. They just kind of…monitored me.”

  The bearded man plucked DeVontay’s knife from its holster and finally lowered his gun, but it was still pointed in DeVontay’s general direction. “Yeah, seems like they quit raging, burning, and murdering. But it feels like they’re up to something even creepier. Like they already know they’ve won.”

  DeVontay didn’t like the idea that Zapheads were exhibiting signs of intelligence and organization, however rudimentary. But that theory didn’t jibe with their filthy clothes, eerie silence, and lack of purpose.

  And were these two guys much better? Shooting at him, bossing him around?

  He moved his right hand to dig in his pocket, causing both men to raise their weapons to his chest. He held up his other hand, palm open. “Easy. I don’t have any weapons.”

  “Take ‘er slow,” warned Orange Cap.

  DeVontay pulled out a couple of Slim Jims, which were protected from the water by their plastic wrappings. “This is all I have left after you made me lose my kayak.”

  The bearded man turned and headed into the trees, motioning DeVontay to follow. “Better come with us then.”

  DeVontay glanced wistfully downstream, where the kayak’s bow bobbed just above the surface as it tumbled along the rapids.

  Should have taken a damned bike instead.

  The bearded man fel
l in behind DeVontay, and soon they were through the weeds and knotty trees and following the narrow road.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Franklin finally caught up with Robertson and his daughter Shay where they waited behind a big Ford delivery van. The van was axle-deep in a ditch along the road, and no doubt a rotted corpse was slumped over the wheel.

  “Where is he?” Franklin asked, trying to disguise his raspy panting.

  “Circling the house,” Robertson said. “I guess he’s checking it out.”

  “Finally getting some sense. Heroes don’t last long in After.”

  “We all have to be heroes now,” Shay said, and Franklin couldn’t tell if she was putting him on or not. Her generation was weaned on Facebook and texting, and Franklin wasn’t sure they could string more than six words together.

  Franklin peered around the van and studied the house whose chimney was leaking wood smoke. It was a one-story, brick ranch house. No movement in the yard, and the curtains were drawn. Two cars were parked out front and the garage door was open, but that meant nothing—the house’s original owners could have been preparing for a trip when the wave of cataclysmic solar flares swept across the planet.

  Only two other houses were in sight, but Franklin didn’t draw much comfort from the area’s lack of population density. Even though fewer people meant fewer Zapheads, Franklin figured any survivors would have headed for safer territory by now—even though Robertson and Shay had fared pretty well since the storms.

  Until the government happened.

  “See him?” Robertson asked, cradling the shotgun and poking his head up just enough to peer through the van’s windows.

  “I hope he’s not dumb enough to go up and knock,” Franklin said. “He might get a bullet in the throat.”

  “You don’t think his wife and kid are still alive, do you?”

  Franklin shook his head. “Doubt it. That little Zaphead baby was bad news. I knew it from the jump. I should have…”