After: The Shock

by Scott Nicholson

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

   

  They’d gone about two miles along the highway, with Arnoff playing drill sergeant and urging the group forward, when they came across Pete’s bike.

  It was lying on the pavement, with no sign of Pete’s backpack. The bike was right at home among the surrounding vehicles, as forlorn and forgotten as any of them. Campbell leaned his own bike, which he’d been pushing since this morning, against a blue Nissan sedan. He glanced into the driver’s-side window and saw a gray-haired man with his head flopped back and mouth open. In death, his dentures had slipped and were perched along his swollen lower lip.

  “Doesn’t seem to be any sign of violence,” Arnoff said.

  “You shouldn’t have sent him ahead,” Pamela said. She fanned herself with a bandana, her makeup running with her sweat.

  “We needed a scout.”

  “We needed to stick together.”

  “Hush it, Pamela,” Donnie said. He stuck a plug of chewing tobacco into his mouth and mashed it together twice with his teeth, and then pushed the lump into his jaw with his tongue.

  “He might have abandoned his bicycle and continued on foot,” the professor said.

  “No, Pete’s way too lazy for that,” Campbell said. “If something was wrong with the bike, he would have sat on the bed of that pickup and waited.”

  “I don’t see no blood,” Donnie said. “So, he probably wasn’t attacked by a Zapper.”

  Arnoff picked up the bicycle and bounced it. “Tires still have air and it seems to be in working condition.”

  Donnie walked twenty feet up the highway, his rifle slung over his shoulder. “Nothing up the road.”

  Campbell cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Pete!”

  “Shut up, now,” Arnoff barked. “Do you want to draw every Zaphead for miles around?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “And it looks like he ran off and left you. Maybe he figured he liked his odds better on his own.”

  “In that case, you made a strategic blunder,” the professor said, “because if you sent him ahead as a sacrificial lamb, you lost an asset without getting anything in return.”

  “What do you mean, a ‘sacrificial lamb’?” Campbell said.

  “Canary in a coal mine,” the professor said. “A loss leader. Bait.”

  “He was point man,” Arnoff said. “He knew the risks.”

  “You’re crazy,” Campbell said. “This isn’t a war movie or a chess match. This is one of the survivors. He’s one of us.”

  “Don’t lose your cool, soldier,” Arnoff said. “Your friend might be sitting up there in the trees, snoozing in the shade. Like the professor said, it doesn’t look like the Zapheads attacked him. Besides, he could have locked himself in one of these cars if he thought he was in danger.”

  Campbell pounded his fist into the side of the Nissan. The body inside shifted slightly and the dentures fell into the corpse’s lap.

  “Don’t hurt yourself, honey,” Pamela said, rolling her eyes toward Arnoff. “You might need that fist later.”

  Donnie opened the rear door of a nearby van and the stench rolled over them like a solid wave. A fleet of flies boiled out, their green wings iridescent in the sun. Campbell buried his face into the crook of his elbow, using the sleeve of his shirt as an air filter. It didn’t help much.

  Campbell didn’t get close enough to count, but it looked like half a dozen people of his own age piled in the back of the van. They might have been taking a road trip. One girl’s face was turned toward him, and though her flesh was mottled and corrupted, he could tell she had once been attractive. Her fine blond hair had not yet lost its sheen.

  What a goddamned waste.

  Donnie reached into the mass of slumped bodies and pulled out a purple bong. “Looks like these hippies was having a pot party,” he said, standing strong in the face of the stench. “Guess they didn’t know their brains was getting fried for free.”

  “Don’t mess around in there,” Arnoff said. “You might get some diseases.”

  “Not likely,” the professor said. “If the bodies harbored infectious diseases, they usually die with the host. Some pathogens like HIV can survive for up to two weeks, but it still requires a direct transfer of bodily fluids. Cholera outbreaks after natural disasters are usually due to contaminated water. The biggest risk we face is gastroenteritis.”

  “You mean, the shits?” Donnie said, wiping the bong on his pants leg and looking into the bowl to see if held any marijuana.

  “Still, I wouldn’t put that to your mouth,” the professor added.

  “Donnie will put anything in his mouth,” Pamela said.

  “Yeah, and I’ve put a lot of your things—”

  “Shut up.” Arnoff raced forward and knocked the bong out of Donnie’s hands. “Unless it’s immediately necessary for our survival, it’s off limits. We’re carrying around enough dead weight as it is.”

  Campbell didn’t like the way Donnie and Arnoff were looking at him. “I don’t know why you recruited me and Pete, anyway. We were doing just fine on our own. And if we had stuck together, maybe he’d still be alive.”

  As soon as the words left his mouth, Campbell realized that was what he had been thinking: Pete was dead. But he didn’t quite believe it. Despite all the death around him, Pete seemed like a constant around which the madness of the world revolved. Cities could burn, mountains could melt into slag heaps, all the trees could wither, but Pete would be sitting there grinning stupidly and sipping a warm beer.

  Campbell tugged his bike away from the Nissan and mounted it as it rolled forward. He nearly slammed into the open van door, and Donnie jumped back to keep from getting struck by the handlebars. Campbell recovered his balance and pumped the pedals.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Arnoff shouted behind him, but Campbell was intent on maneuvering through the stalled vehicles—a dump truck here, an SUV with its airbags deployed there, a motorcycle spilled on its side with the leather-clad driver rotting in the heat. He half expected to hear a gunshot—Arnoff isn’t that crazy, is he?—and then realized he’d probably be dead before the percussion reached his ears.

  He pumped his legs hard to gain momentum for the next rise. He heard Arnoff’s little band arguing in the distance, punctuated with Pamela’s brittle feminine laughter.

  So, when society breaks down, we all turn into sociopaths. Guess we should have seen that one coming.

  Campbell topped the rise, breathing hard, and a cramp rippled through his right thigh. His backpack seemed to have doubled in weight, although it only held about ten pounds of bottled water, a blanket, and a few cans of food. He didn’t know how far he would go, but he was grateful for even a few minutes away from the group. He would soon turn around and pedal back, and he muttered at the irony of having turned into Arnoff’s new point man.

  Below him, the interstate ran in twin ribbons of speckled gray, sporting the usual clutter of stalled vehicles. A tractor-trailer was upended on its side, the cab mating with a mangled mini-van. Campbell marveled at the chaos and calamity he’d missed during the solar flares that had forever changed the world. To him, that moment had been marked by annoyance that the television screen had gone blank. Meanwhile, the rest of the world had had its plug yanked in the most horrible and permanent way.

  To the left, about two hundred yards off the asphalt, a giant scar in the trees marked the path of a downed jet airliner. Bits of frayed metal littered the raw dirt, and one full wing jutted at an angle into the sky like a massive sun dial. The nose and much of the fuselage had plowed through a row of houses, leaving sagging roofs and splintered siding in the wake. Swatches of color were scattered here and there in the wreckage.

  Luggage. And people.

  Campbell coasted down the hill, riding the hand brakes and weaving between the cars, trucks, and vans. In this section, the vehicles were in an orderly line, with few rear-end collisions, as if traffic had been moving slowly when the big el
ectromagnetic eraser had wiped out their engines. The stench of rotted bodies hung in the air, the putrefaction hastened by the greenhouse effect of the windows. Campbell did his best to avoid looking inside the vehicles, but curiosity suckered him in again and again.