After: The Shock

by Scott Nicholson

CHAPTER TEN

   

  “What road are we on?” DeVontay said, peering at the crumpled map.

  They sat in the shade of a large oak, careful not to touch the poison sumac that was already turning fierce red with the end of the summer. The boy had quickly grown tired and had asked for his mother once. But they kept moving, determined to get away from the population centers where Zaphead encounters were more likely.

  “That’s I-77,” Rachel said, pointing to the four-lane highway below them. They’d walked parallel to the road, staying in the vegetation even though the traveling was more difficult. Rachel didn’t trust the vehicles, especially since so many of them had tinted windows. On the crest of the slope, they were able to see movement in any direction.

  DeVontay squinted through the treetop at the rising sun. “Which way we headed?”

  “The sun rises in the east,” Rachel said. “I learned that in Girl Scouts.”

  DeVontay scowled, the expression almost comical because of his glass eye. “Wish I’d left you back at the hotel.”

  The boy stiffened and shuddered beside Rachel, and she shot DeVontay an angry glance and shook her head.

  We’re his parents now. We have to pretend everything’s going to be all right, just like real parents do.

  I failed Chelsea, but I won’t fail this boy.

  The boy’s blonde hair and freckles suggested a fair complexion that would sunburn easily. At their morning stop at a convenience store, she’d found him some sunscreen and made him put on a Carolina Panthers ball cap. She’d also collected some of the healthiest offerings she could find, including some apple juice she hoped hadn’t spoiled. DeVontay had collected the map, a pack of butane lighters, and half a box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

  Rachel fished a bottle of water from her backpack and held it out to the boy, who still clutched the naked doll to his chest. “Here, honey. I’ll bet you’re thirsty.”

  The boy shook his head. He’d barely spoken a dozen words all day. Rachel wondered if he was in shock. She hadn’t studied much basic health, but she knew shock tended to kill people before they had a chance to die from more horrible things.

  She put the water bottle by his sneakers and offered him a granola bar. He shook his head.

  “You gotta speak the language,” DeVontay said. He opened one of his Reese’s and held a cup of chocolate and peanut butter out to the boy. The boy’s mouth visibly watered and he licked his lips.

  “It’s okay.” Rachel gave an encouraging smile, hoping the boy didn’t crash from a sugar high while they were putting in some miles.

  The boy let the doll fall into his lap. He took the candy, which was soft from the heat. As he bit into it, DeVontay said, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”

  “That’s M&M’s,” Rachel said.

  “Whatever. Same principle.”

  “No, it’s not. M&M’s has a hard shell so instead of smeary chocolate, it leaves artificial food coloring on your fingers.”

  “Do you got to argue about everything?”

  “No, only when you’re wrong. Oh, wait a minute. You’re wrong about everything.”

  The boy’s blue eyes tracked back and forth, from one of them to the other. He had returned to the world a little, back from whatever private hell inside his head.

  “Here,” she said, reaching out for the other peanut butter cup. She held it in her palm until the chocolate ran. Then she popped the candy into her mouth. It was so sweet that it made her teeth hurt.

  She showed her palm to both of them. “See? A gooey mess.”

  “That looks like poopie,” DeVontay said.

  Rachel made a show of studying her palm as if making a scientific observation. “Hmm. You’re right, it does.”

  She licked her palm, making sure to smear chocolate all over her lips. “Mmm. Tastes like poopie, too!”

  DeVontay laughed, and the boy giggled. “Yuck!” the boy said, in a small, delighted voice.

  “Hey, watch this,” DeVontay said. He dug his fingers into the skin beneath his left eye, then touched the glass orb and rolled it a little so that it appeared the eye was gazing far to the left.

  Whoa, don’t freak the kid out. We’re trying to get him back to normal, not make him think you’re a Zaphead.

  But the boy gazed with intense interest. DeVontay smiled, then lifted up the skin just beneath his eyebrow and rolled the glass eye into his fingers. He held it up like a marble. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  “Can I hold it?” the boy said.

  “Sure. But only if you let me hold the doll for a minute.”

  The boy nodded and made the trade. It was the first time Rachel had seen him without the doll since they’d rescued him. She decided to bring him all the way out. “What’s your name?”

  “Stephen.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  The boy shrugged, focused on the glass eye. He turned it so it caught the light. “How did you lose your eye?” he asked DeVontay, his lips pressed into a solemn line.

  “Messing around. You know how kids are.”

  “Mommy says if you play with sticks, you’ll poke your eye out.”

  “She’s pretty smart,” DeVontay said.

  Rachel noted he used present tense. He’s got a good instinct. Maybe he has more social experience than he lets on.

  DeVontay stroked the doll’s kinky hair. “What’s her name?”

  “Miss Molly.”

  “That’s a pretty name,” Rachel said.

  “Does it hurt?” the boy asked, passing the glass eye back to DeVontay.

  “Not anymore. It’s just something you get used to. But it took a while.”

  Rachel noticed his street grammar had softened, and his former aggressiveness was buried. “Just like this—this After—is something we’ll all have to get used to,” she said to Stephen.

  The boy touched the bill of his cap. “Like not having football this year.”

  “Probably not,” DeVontay said. “But the Panthers wouldn’t be no good anyway. The Eagles would have whooped them bad.”

  As DeVontay plopped his glass eye back in place, Rachel scanned the road below. All those people rotting in the August heat.

  “Mommy said only the wicked people changed,” Stephen said.

  “Lots of people have died, Stephen,” Rachel said. “None of us are perfect, but most of us are good.”

  “Then why did my mommy die? Does that mean she is wicked?”

  DeVontay gave Rachel a look like: “I’m not touching this one.” He gave Stephen his doll back and the boy immediately clutched it to his chest, apparently lapsing back into his near-catatonic state. Rachel knew this might be their only chance to pull the boy out again.

  “Your mommy wasn’t wicked,” Rachel said. “God just needed an extra angel in heaven, to make things ready for when the rest of us arrive.”

  Crap. Maybe this wasn’t such a good direction. But they didn’t cover this in Counseling 101.

  “Then how come some people died and some just walk around being mean? Aren’t they wicked?”

  “We don’t know that, honey. That’s why we need to stay away from everyone until we can figure out what is happening.”

  “So, it’s just the three of us forever?”

  “We’ll find others like us.”

  “Other good people?”

  Rachel wasn’t sure why she’d survived. She’d always felt special, but not in an arrogant way. Even from an early age, she’d always felt God made her for a reason, and made only one person like her in the whole world, and she was supposed to be Rachel all her life. She’d felt it even before her mother took her to Catholic services or her dad gave his grumbling rants that took her years to understand as atheism.

  She wasn’t even sure if she’d ever accepted his atheism, because she couldn’t comprehend a world without purpose and order. After Chelsea’s death, Dad had shut off any pretense of faith, insisting that no merciful God would allow such a tragedy.
She wondered what Dad would make of this apocalypse.

  “Yes,” Rachel said, realizing the silence had stretched too long, filled by the twitter of birds and the soft flapping of leaves overhead. “Other good people.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  DeVontay, studying the map again to avoid joining the discussion, pointed to the northwest and said, “Yeah, little man. They’re that way.”

  “Is that way Mi’sippi?” Stephen asked. “My daddy’s in Mi’sippi.”

  Rachel found herself nodding. Little white lies didn’t make her wicked, did it? “Yes, Mississippi’s that way.”

  “I hope Daddy’s good. I don’t want him to be one of the mean people.”

  Stephen’s eyes welled, and Rachel scooted over to hug him. He sagged into her arms and she patted his back. “With a boy like you, I’m sure he’s good. We’ll find him for you.”

  She imagined an older, pudgier version of Stephen, a bloated corpse lying in bed or on a sidewalk or roasting in a car. Then she saw him staggering along the street, looking for something to attack. She pushed the vision away.

  Please, God, give me strength. Show me Your purpose and help me be part of Your order. Even if I don’t understand it.

  DeVontay folded the map backwards, so that it was lumpy and the corners uneven. He pushed it into his backpack, along with the leftover food. He pulled the pistol out, making sure Stephen wasn’t watching, and said, “Hey, we better get started if we got to walk all the way to Mi’sippi, right?”

  Rachel brushed Stephen’s hair back from his freckled face and kissed his forehead. “You’re a good boy. And I don’t believe wicked people can hurt good people, do you?”

  He shook his head no, bumping her cheek with the bill of his cap. She smiled and helped him to his feet. DeVontay had eased back into the shade until he was behind the tree. He tilted his head toward the highway.

  Rachel saw four of them, coming up the pavement between the jumbled lines of cars. Their clothes didn’t look ragged, and they didn’t jerk and shake, but she knew they were Zapheads. Something about them was off. Maybe it was the way they peered in each vehicle as they passed, as if searching for any movement they could make still forever.

  They were about three hundred yards away, and it was unlikely they would notice anyone on the slope above them. From Rachel’s observations, Zapheads had a suppressed sense of perception, as if they could only process information in their immediate vicinity. Maybe their focus on destruction was so all-consuming that they had no larger awareness of the world.

  Perhaps that is the definition of “wicked”: pure selfish destruction.

  “I need you to be very quiet, Stephen,” she said calmly, in her regular voice. “Can you do that for me?”

  He opened his mouth and caught himself, then nodded. He looked at DeVontay and saw the gun.

  “We’re going to Mississippi now,” she said.

  “I’ll be good,” Stephen whispered.

  “This way,” DeVontay said, waving them into the scrub vegetation that dotted the top of the slope. Rachel nudged Stephen toward DeVontay and collected their backpacks. On the highway below, one of the Zapheads pounded an iron bar against a car hood. The brutal thwack was an intrusion on the pastoral serenity of a few moments earlier, and Rachel was reminded that After was not paradise.

  It was a land where the wicked walked.

  When three of the four Zapheads disappeared from view behind a tractor-trailer rig, Rachel hurried into the bushes to join DeVontay and Stephen. Glass shattered below them, followed by a strange inhuman cry that might have been glee.

  They hurried without speaking, DeVontay beating back the branches and briars with the arm that held the gun, Stephen hunched low so that the bill of his cap hid his face, and Rachel repeatedly glancing behind her. They were still moving roughly parallel to the interstate, although they’d put more distance and vegetation between them and it. The morning coolness had given way to an intense heat that had burned away the dew, and the air held all the promise of an oven.

  After ten minutes, they could no longer hear the crazed vandalism, and DeVontay slowed a little, tucked his gun in his belt, and picked up Stephen. He must have noticed the dark circles of exhaustion under the boy’s eyes.

  “I know you’re big enough to walk, but I want you to rest so you can tell me bedtime stories,” DeVontay said.

  “Are you going to shoot the wicked people?” Stephen said, letting the doll nestle between them. It must have been uncomfortable for DeVontay, but he said nothing.

  “No wicked people are going to get you while we’re around, okay, little man?”

  “Okay.”

  Rachel peeled away Stephen’s backpack to help lighten DeVontay’s load. The act caused the doll to fall to the ground, and Stephen gave a bleat of alarm. She hurriedly collected it before he could scream and alert the Zapheads. They continued through the vegetation, which had thinned considerably and occasionally allowed them a view of the cluttered highway.

  After a few minutes, Stephen was asleep and DeVontay slowed to reduce the bouncing of his gait.

  “Did you see what I saw?” Rachel asked.

  “’fraid so. But tell me anyway, so it’s not my imagination.”

  “The Zapheads were moving in a group. They weren’t doing that before.”

  “Maybe it was random. They just happened to bump into each other and said, ‘Yo, muthas, let’s break some shit together, whaddya say?’”

  “Either way, I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like any of this. Things were bad enough without no wicked-ass gangbanger shit.”

  He’d reverted back to his street persona. She didn’t blame him. Maybe it was a useful survival mechanism, and they might need all such mechanisms they could find.

  “You were good back there,” she said. “With Stephen.”

  “So, I’m one of the good people for a change,” he said. “Don’t be getting used to it.”