After (Book 3): Milepost 291

by Nicholson, Scott

  DeVontay jogged the rest of the way to the loading bay, calling Stephen’s name when he was close. When Stephen poked his head out of the gap beneath the door, DeVontay said, “Tell everybody to come on.”

  Kids began crawling out of the gap and onto the loading dock, Stephen among them. “What took you so long?” Stephen asked.

  DeVontay handed him a couple of Slim Jims. “Had some friends over for a cookout.”

  Cool!” he said, starting to rip open the cellophane.

  “Not yet,” DeVontay said. “We’ll eat once we’re safe.”

  The fire wasn’t visible from the back of the slaughterhouse, but its glimmering caused shadows to dance along the fence line. The petroleum stench filled the air as smoke drifted around the building. Some of the kids coughed, and DeVontay wondered what would happen if the group encountered a pack of Zapheads on their way out. Would they be able to remain calm as DeVontay had done? Or would they panic and throw the Zapheads into a murderous frenzy?

  When Kiki and Carole came outside with the last of the children, Kiki said to him, “Try the fence again?”

  “It’s dark now. We should be able to sneak out.” DeVontay glanced from one round-faced child to the next. Even in the bad light, he could see how wide-eyed and vulnerable they all were. He grew more determined than ever to get them all out of there alive.

  “You first, Little Man,” DeVontay said to Stephen, pointing up the slope to the gap in the fence.

  “What about that other kid who went through and got grabbed by the Zappers?”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  He could tell by his large, brimming eyes and quivering lower lip that Stephen was frightened, but the boy wasn’t going to show it. He just nodded. Kiki cradled the youngest toddler, and DeVontay bent forward to peer at it. The tiny face gazed up at him with curiosity.

  “Everybody ready?” he said.

  “Yes, we are,” Kiki said firmly, taking a child by the hand. Carole did the same.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s all follow Stephen. Keep quiet, keep together, and no looking back.”

  DeVontay fell in behind Stephen, the bundle of goodies swaying back and forth on his shoulders. Kiki encouraged the children forward, shushing James when he made a remark about kicking some Zaphead butt. As they emerged from the concealment of the slaughterhouse, DeVontay resisted the urge to look at the conflagration. His shadow in the firelight stretched ten feet long and gangly ahead of him.

  In only a couple of minutes, they reached the fence, and only then did DeVontay look back. The group of Zapheads were larger, some of them still entering via the main gate. They were in various states of undress, the light of the flames coruscating across their bodies in waves. They might have been acolytes of some bizarre cult, gathering to worship the primitive transformation of matter to energy, with no knowledge of its science, serving mute witness to its awesome destructive power.

  “Go on,” DeVontay said, rolling back the cut section of fence so the children could slip through the gap. “Careful and don’t scrape yourself on the jagged wire.”

  Stephen again led the way, with Kiki the last to go through. DeVontay shoved his bundle though the gap before following. The dark, cold forest awaited them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  As darkness fell, Franklin wanted to find a house in which he could hole up for the night, but he realized he was near the boundary of the national park where homes were scarce.

  That was a welcome sign, even though he might have to catch some shut-eye on the ground. He was hungry, but exhaustion was a bigger problem at the moment. He’d refreshed himself from the cold, clear springs that oozed from between granite boulders, water driven by incredible pressure from the depths of the ancient earth. As he’d ascended in elevation, the trees had grown thinner and barer, already succumbing to winter.

  Once, he’d heard two men talking in the distance, and he’d pressed himself into a mossy cleft behind a rotted stump until the voices faded, then waited an extra half an hour just to be sure. They were most likely members of Sarge’s platoon—although it was possible other survivors had headed for high ground in the wake of the solar storms and subsequent collapse. He wasn’t willing to take that chance.

  Just before sunset, gunfire had erupted somewhere in the mountains around him. He couldn’t pinpoint the location due to the echoes across the valley, but it was miles away from him and lasted less than a minute. He followed a muddy animal path, keeping Grandfather Mountain’s dark profile to his left as he climbed. Soon the path widened, and by the time the sun’s light had all but diminished, he realized he was on one of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s hiking trails.

  Night travel was safe enough, since the stars and moon offered just enough light to distinguish the deeper blackness of the forest from the open trail. He kept alert for any noise or sudden flash of light, although many creatures seemed to move through the treetops and scurry across the hidden carpet of fallen leaves. After perhaps an hour, he carefully felt his way a few feet into the forest and lay down in what felt like a grove of ferns. Removing his jacket, he rolled it into a pillow and rested. Even though he shivered, he was grateful that the October air was too cold for mosquitoes.

  He must have dozed for some time, although he had no way of judging how long. The night had shifted into a deeper, more mysterious mode, a time that still belonged to nature and was hostile to man. The insects hissed louder and bolder, the night predators clawed bark and rattled branches, and the creeks gurgled with a liquid menace. Franklin slipped into his jacket and found his way back to the trail, some of the weariness banished despite the damp ache in his bones.

  He came upon some deer, a buck and two white-tailed does, and the animals didn’t bolt at his scent. The buck’s antlers had five or six points, a testament to age and strength, and it stared at Franklin as if daring him to come closer. Its eyes may have been tainted with solar sickness, or it might have just been reflecting the moon. Either way, Franklin waited until the small herd moved on before he continued.

  Once, he came to a bend in the trail that opened into a vast expanse of mountain and sky, the quarter moon wedged above the craggy face of Grandfather Mountain. Mist hung like the smoke of primeval fires, veiling the canopy and wrapping shrouds around the rocky, gray peaks. It was a world that seemed to have completely forgotten the existence of human beings—indeed, a world that had never even known of their presence. Even as a longtime outdoor enthusiast, Franklin was humbled by the vast magic and beauty that made him feel simultaneously insignificant yet unequivocally distinct.

  He wasn’t a religious man, although he’d pursued various spiritual paths in his youth before cynicism had driven him to become a survivalist. Now, imagining he might be the only living soul in the universe, he wondered if God approved of him, and whether he deserved any special dispensation. He’d never considered whether building a survivalist compound was a selfish act—he’d always told himself he was protecting the future of his family. But like the ascetic whose life of meditation hidden away in a Himalayan cave did little to make the world a better place, maybe Franklin’s idealism amounted to little more than intellectual masturbation, a monument in service to his ego.

  It disturbed him to consider his years of work to be so meaningless, yet he couldn’t deny the essential truth. If his heart seized and he fell dead that moment, the compound might sit idle until some future doomsday reduced it to volcanic slag or the march of decades wore it down to black dirt. But he diverted himself from self-pity. He’d long considered that the trait of fools.

  “I’m doing it for Rachel,” he said to the silent sky. “She’s still alive.”

  Satisfied that he’d reached some sort of accord with whatever higher power might be listening, he continued up the trail.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Rachel heard her name as if across a vast gulf.

  But it wasn’t until Campbell shook her awake that she realized she’d been asleep.r />
  “Rachel,” Campbell said. “Are you okay?”

  The question again irritated her. For all his explanation of how her echolalia was a Zaphead trait, he sure seemed to repeat that same phrase a lot.

  “I was dreaming,” she said. “I can’t remember what, but I’d rather be there than here.”

  “You were calling out. I was worried about you.”

  The fire had burned low into a pile of deep red embers, giving the room a golden hue. Sometime in the night, Campbell had snuggled up against her back, spooning her with his arm around her waist. She had to admit, even through the blankets, his body heat was nice.

  I must still be human after all. What a relief.

  “Looks like I didn’t turn into a raging maniac and eat your liver in the night,” she said.

  “So far, so good.” Apparently encouraged that she hadn’t wriggled away from his embrace, he scooted closer so that his face was near the back of her neck. His warm breath tickled her.

  “So what was I calling out?” she asked, still drowsy.

  “You were just saying ‘Why why why’ over and over again.”

  “It was just a dream. Random brain sludge trying to form patterns.”

  “But it might be important. If you have the least bit of Zaphead inside you, everything could be a clue.”

  “Yes, Dr.—hey, you never told me your last name.”

  “Grimes.”

  “That’s some name.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject.”

  “I didn’t like the other one.”

  “Look, even if we make it to your grandfather’s compound, at some point we’re going to have to deal with the Zaps. I don’t know if that means going for the military option or just co-existing, but the one luxury we won’t have is pretending they don’t exist.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they have a built-in burnout in their brain circuitry. An expiration date. We wake up on a Monday and they’re all dead.”

  “And where do you fit into that? Do you become only half-dead?”

  She rolled up on one elbow so that she faced him. “I just remembered the dream. We were…me and a bunch of people…were looking at this girl who was maybe fifteen. She had a couple of gaping holes in her chest, and her skin was pale and marbled. She was obviously dead. And we—”

  “Who is this ‘we’?”

  “I don’t know. Just all of us. Anyway, we started tearing this girl open, just dug our fingers into the wounds and peeling back. Trying to see what was inside her. Because we couldn’t figure out why she died.”

  “Jesus. That’s what happened to the people at the farmhouse before I got there. The professor said the Zaps just took them apart like they were trying to make sense out of them. Like a kid pulling the legs off a granddaddy long-legs spider.”

  Rachel shook her head. She didn’t want to remember any more. Because she was pretty sure the “we” with her in the dream were strangers. Zapheads. And the girl had been so young.

  Worse, she hadn’t been the only one. There were piles of corpses, laid out in rows, dozens, maybe hundreds, in a big field. Some were long dead and rotted, like those who had died instantly in the solar storms while trapped inside their homes or vehicles. Others, like the teenaged girl, appeared freshly dead.

  Still others showed signs of mutation—the filthy clothes and greasy, tangled hair common to Zapheads—and their bodies commingled in the same piles. The dream hadn’t offered the sense of scent, but Rachel had the impression of an overpowering odor of death and corruption rising from the charnel field.

  She fought her way out of the blankets, pulling away from Campbell.

  “Hey!” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “I have to be with them.”

  “I thought we were heading for Milepost 291.”

  “No. This is…hard to explain.”

  That strange tingle emanated through her body again, and she turned away so that Campbell couldn’t see her eyes. Because she knew they would be sparking like crazy. They almost cast their own light before her.

  “Rachel, come back!”

  She was nearly to the door when Campbell caught up with her. He wrapped his arms around her, dragging her back to the bed. She kicked and struggled, but he was too strong.

  “Let me go,” she cried. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand you’re having weird thoughts, and the worst thing you can do is go running off in the middle of the night with no destination in mind.”

  “Who says I have no destination?”

  “You don’t even know where we are.”

  “I know how to get there,” she said. It wasn’t far, and the psychic pull was like a beacon in the night—all she had to do was tune out her other senses and she could follow it. But she had no way to explain the signal to Campbell. Or even to herself, really. But she didn’t need explanations, because the tug was a compulsion, a force that hinted it could tear her apart bone by bone if she didn’t heed it.

  She wrestled with him but he refused to release her. “Calm down,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere until you start making sense.”

  “No! I’m one of them, not one of you.”

  “That’s not true. You’re Rachel. What you were saying earlier—”

  She elbowed him in the ribs and he flung her onto the sofa. She landed hard, nearly snapping her neck, and he jumped on her before she could scramble away. The sofa tilted over and banged against the floor, causing them to roll toward the kitchen. Rachel clawed at his face, drawing blood, and his sudden violence set off something inside her. Strength and rage surged through her, and she saw him not as a person but a black silhouette whose outline shimmered with the most hellish of fires.

  “Your eyes!” the silhouette said, and she couldn’t help repeating the phrase as it overwhelmed her senses. Her rage intensified—now she wanted to smash the source of the noise, to wipe out its never-ending resonance.

  She grabbed a kitchen chair and swung it wildly at the top of the silhouette, where the flames were brightest.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, easy!” it said, jumping back and only angering her more.

  She raised the chair over her head and was about to bring it crashing down when the flames around the silhouette eased into a darker hue, their intensity fading. The silhouette was unmoving, the black of its form merging to cobalt blue.

  “Easy, Rachel,” it said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Rachel.

  She recognized the word and tried to say it. Then she said it three times.

  “Yes, that’s right. That’s your name.”

  Now the flames around the silhouette vanished altogether, and the cobalt blue took on shades of detail.

  Only a man, not a monster.

  She recognized him. Then she remembered his name. “Campbell?”

  He nodded. He stood with his palms up, arms held apart to show he was no threat. “Sorry I threw you down. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I became one of them.”

  “But you’re back now.”

  “No. Not all the way. I don’t think I’ll ever be all the way back.”

  That scared her more than she could say.

  “Are you okay?” he asked yet again, helpless.

  “No, I’m not.” He came to her and she welcomed his embrace.

  She wondered if Zapheads could cry. At least she was still human enough to do that. It might be her last human act, but she was going to try her damnedest to flush every little glint and spark out of her eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The progress was slow, but DeVontay wouldn’t let the group stop until they’d put the compound at least half a mile behind them.

  After leading them through the forest for a while, he decided it would be safer to travel in the open rather than stumble through the dark trees. After consulting Kiki, the group headed downhill in the direction of the river road, although DeVontay planned to stay well away from Stonewall
. Some of the children were nearly at the breaking point due to fear and exhaustion, but promises of food and rest kept them moving.

  They emerged from the forest onto a rise of meadow that was part of a farm property. A house and a few outbuildings stood near the road, the river beyond them sparkling like a silver ribbon in the moonlight. The low mist lay across it and seeped up the banks so that the opposite shore was hidden. They wouldn’t be able to see anyone coming from a distance, but DeVontay reasoned the group would also be difficult to see.

  “Okay, let’s eat.” He dropped the bundle and was busy spreading the blanket over the high weeds while Kiki and the others gathered around. The blanket wasn’t large enough to hold all of them, but Kiki set the youngest children on it as others dug through the food.

  “Sweet!” James howled. “Scored me a Reese’s Cup.”

  “Hush,” Kiki said. “Someone might hear us.”

  Stephen stood away from the blanket with the “big kids,” chewing a Slim Jim. Carole opened a bottle of juice and had the kids pass it around. DeVontay waited until all the children had selected something before he snapped the tab on a can of Vienna sausages and ate them with his fingers.

  “Those stink,” Kiki said, helping the toddler with a strip of gelled fruit.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t have time to find any caviar, anchovies, or pickled okra,” DeVontay said. “What are you eating?”

  “An apple. A girl needs to watch her figure.”

  “Maybe you can put together the ‘Running for Your Life Workout Plan’ after all this is over.”

  “Like this will ever be over.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a pessimist. Not after all the sacrifices you’ve made for the children. You have to believe they have some sort of future for you to act the way you do.”

  She shook her head. “You just do the thing that needs to be done right now. That’s all.”

  “Surely you had your chances to escape. Or do what Angelique did and play your way into Rooster’s good graces.”