After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4)

by Scott Nicholson

  “How long have they been here?” He’d never seen more than a handful of Zapheads at a time. To see this many at once was so numbing that he could barely comprehend their numbers.

  “Ever since Day One,” the stocky, middle-aged woman said. “I used to come down here and raid the grocery store, and they were easy to dodge in the early going. I was more worried about other folks like me. Desperate scavengers who didn’t know what in tarnation was going on.”

  “Didn’t the survivors band together?”

  Wanda gave him a cockeyed squint. “What planet have you been living on? You think people suddenly come around to teamwork and understanding once their backs are against the wall? When it’s dog eat dog, the big dog eats first.”

  “You lived here. You had friends here.”

  “I drove a delivery van for the Newton Times. Three editions a week, up before the birds every morning. I didn’t have friends.”

  “What about your family?”

  “My family? They’re like people I read about in a book a long time ago. Better to leave them there than to find out what happened to them.”

  “I’m going to find my family, even if I walk through hell and back.”

  Wanda nodded toward the street full of milling Zapheads. “Well, I reckon that counts as hell, so maybe you should just head on downtown. But I wouldn’t count on the ‘back’ part of that deal.”

  The air had a fresh-scrubbed cleanliness after the hard rain, although a faint whiff of decay lingered. Jorge wondered how many dead bodies lay in those houses and cars, and how many had been slaughtered by Zapheads. He understood Wanda’s reluctance to entrust her life to other survivors—Jorge’s initial instinct was to take his family as far away from populated areas as possible. But he wasn’t sure the end result would have changed much. With humans heavily outnumbered, gathering in groups would have just made them easier targets.

  Not targets. Prey.

  “They didn’t all gather right away,” Wanda continued. “First you’d see two or three at a time, and then half a dozen moving in a pack. No way that many of them turned here. They come from all around.”

  “Looks like they just walk back and forth.”

  “Oh, they’ve been working hard. Doing a little housekeeping.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Wanda waved her hand at the cluster of houses. “Collecting.”

  Jorge noticed that the Zapheads were moving much more purposefully than he’d assumed. What he’d taken as a pointless trudging up and down the streets now suggested a pattern. They traveled in lines almost like ants, occasionally bumping into one another and sometimes veering wildly off to the side, but always maintaining a single direction. They repeated monosyllabic clicks, moans, and grunts, bits of sound that wanted to be words. The combined effect was like the murmur of a crowd at a public gathering just before the main event—an air of anticipation.

  A group of three Zapheads came toward them, and Jorge crouched lower, although they weren’t looking along the skyline. All three were female, and their clothes were in relatively good shape—threadbare and dirty, but not hanging from their bodies in swaths of rags. They turned into the lawn of a small house that had toys strewn across the yard and a swing hanging from a tree branch by two rusted lengths of chain. There was no car in the driveway, which gave Jorge some hope that the house had been unoccupied when the solar storms struck. He couldn’t bear the thought of those children dropping dead on the scraggly lawn, or turning into Zapheads and scrambling to destroy anyone who might have survived unscathed.

  No bodies are lying in the streets. Even if scavengers had eaten them, bones would remain.

  The Zapheads ascended the three porch steps, clinging to the rail to maintain balance, and one of them walked into the door, bumping hard into it, and staggering backward as if surprised to discover it was solid.

  “Watch this,” Wanda whispered, laying her shotgun on the pebbled tar of the roof and folding her elbows across the parapet as if waiting to be entertained.

  A second Zaphead grabbed the doorknob. Instead of twisting it, the mutant yanked backward, losing her grip and falling into the one directly behind her. The first one bumped face-first into the door again, and the third one moved to the window and slid her hands over the glass as if expecting it to part like water. If the sight of the haggard creatures hadn’t been so chilling, Jorge would have been reminded of American slapstick comedy as they banged and clawed at the house’s entrances.

  Then they turned toward one another and huddled, appearing to have some kind of conversation with sounds instead of words. The second mutant grasped the doorknob again, wriggling it up and down. Then she turned the knob as if by accident and pushed it open. The three of them entered the house.

  “They’ve figured out doors,” Jorge said, wondering what else they had learned in the weeks since he’d observed their behavior.

  “Yeah, it takes them a while, but they can get into things now,” Wanda said. “I’ve seen them in cars, stores, churches, and even the police station. Sometimes they just smash the windows if that’s the only way in. But that’s why I quit coming in to town. Too risky, so I started raiding houses on the outskirts.”

  “Is that why you were staying in a barn? Because houses are no longer safe?”

  “Part of the reason. Keep watching.”

  The first Zaphead, a short gray-haired woman, came onto the porch dragging a bundled sheet. At first Jorge thought the Zaphead was gathering food, but the sheet bulged with ungainly swells. Then an arm flopped out from a fold in the fabric. The meat was slick with decomposition, but it was clearly a human limb. Jorge was hardened by the things he’d witnessed since August, but still his stomach churned and a bolt of acidic bile sluiced up his throat. He fought it back down, wishing he had a drink of water.

  The Zaphead knelt and unpeeled the sheet, revealing the corpse of a child maybe five or six years old. The body had decayed enough that Jorge couldn’t tell the gender, but the pajamas were a faded pink. The Zaphead scooped up the dead child and tucked it over her shoulder like a sack of chicken feed, retracing her route across the lawn and onto the street.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jorge said.

  “They’ve been gathering bodies all over town.” Wanda rolled into a sitting position, her back against the parapet as she looked out at the mountains on the opposite horizon. As if to cleanse her eyes of the sight they’d just endured.

  “I’ve seen them carry off the dead, but those were fresh ones. They also carry their own kind. I never dreamed they’d be gathering the older corpses. I don’t believe they’re eating them—I’m not sure they eat anything—but what are they doing with them?”

  “Never followed them to see. This is the first time I’ve been to town in three weeks. Since then, it looks like five hundred more of them have shown up.”

  Jorge was about to look away when the other two Zapheads came out of the house. They carried a body between them, one holding the feet and the other holding the wrists. This corpse was a little larger than the first, but still heartbreakingly small. The corpse’s head lolled down so that her long black hair brushed the ground. She was wearing eyeglasses that slipped off and fell to the ground. The Zaphead bearing the weight of the upper torso stepped on them with a bare foot, crushing them. The grisly ensemble continued down the street without pausing.

  “It’s not just the dead,” Wanda said, fishing a can of sardines out of a jacket pocket. She twisted the metal ring and reeled back the top, then tilted the can to her mouth and slurped at the juice. The strong odor of the oily fish triggered Jorge’s nausea again, and he put one hand over his mouth. Wanda pulled out a piece of fish, held it up above her mouth, and took it like a SeaWorld seal being rewarded for performing a trick.

  “Not just the dead?” Jorge’s head reeled just as much as his stomach. He’d come to accept the Zapheads as violent killers whose sole purpose was to destroy any living thing that crossed their paths, but here they were
acting communally and working toward some sort of unknown goal.

  “They’ve collected some live folks, too.”

  She was about to shove another sardine in her mouth, but Jorge grabbed her wrist. “Live folks?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes they walk them in, like prisoners. But sometimes they have to carry them. Because the people don’t want to go, of course.”

  “You’ve seen this and did nothing to stop it? To save those people?”

  Wanda shook from his grip and shoved the fish in her mouth, chewing with a loud smacking sound and speaking around her food. “Heroes don’t last long these days.”

  He wondered about the Zapheads’ range and how far they would carry bodies. It was possible Shay and Robertson—the daughter and father who had been killed while traveling with Jorge and Franklin—had ended up in Newton. Jorge was struck with a horrible thought. What if Rosa and Marina were here?

  He crawled across the roof to the metal ladder that provided access from the back of the building.

  “Where are you going?” Wanda called.

  “To find out where the bodies go.”

  Wanda jammed a final handful of fish into her mouth, licked her palm, and wiped the hand on her pants. She gathered her shotgun and said, “All right, then. Wait up. You need somebody that knows their way around town.”

  “I thought you were more interested in saving yourself.”

  “Oh, I will, if it comes to that. In the meantime, might as well amuse myself.”

  After they descended to the ground, Wanda ran her finger along the dusty window of an abandoned truck. She traced out a rough map of the town, featuring lines crisscrossed in a grid. “There’s only four main roads in and out, and they curve like crazy because of the hills.” She drew an X between two of the lines. “That’s the courthouse, that building with the dome. We’re here, three streets over.”

  “Has anyone fought the Zapheads here? An organized attack?”

  “I used to hear gunshots once in a while, but you remember what I said about heroes. Sure haven’t seen any Army or National Guard. The county jail is locked and bolted, and the hospital is full of Zapheads. There just ain’t anyplace left where a group could hole up and defend themselves.”

  “What about schools? Their cafeterias would have enough food for a small group of survivors.”

  “The elementary school burned down. The high school’s on the back end of town, on the other side of the courthouse. There’s a wastewater treatment plant by the river. It doesn’t have any windows and the property is fenced in. Heck, there’s even an animal shelter a mile out of town. Plenty of good places to barricade and make a go of it, assuming you had enough food.”

  “I made deliveries myself. In Mexico. You soon discover the best routes for everything. Since you drove these routes, you know all the shortcuts. Show me around, please. That is all I ask, and then you can leave.”

  “You sure about that? Can’t you picture your skinny little butt being dragged down the street by the freaks?”

  “I am looking for my family. Until I am sure they aren’t here, I stay. And once I know for sure, I go to the next town. And the next.”

  Wanda nodded and looked around the industrial lot. “Okay. I got nothing better to do for the rest of the day. And then I’m back to the sticks. But if we come across any food, I got dibs.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They crept out the gate and around the back alley, keeping to the side streets and moving from car to car, from garage to shed, and from Dumpster to alcove. They saw a few Zapheads moving in small groups, but they didn’t appear to be on the hunt. One group was carrying a collection of dead bodies, “housekeeping,” as Wanda called it. She pointed out the main landmarks of Newton, using the courthouse’s dome as the orienting hub.

  They gradually worked their way closer to the center of town. Jorge wondered if even the mere presence of Wanda’s gun would somehow give them away, as if the threat of violence was something Zapheads could sense. After all, the Zapheads had stopped attacking him and Franklin once they quit fighting back. If the mutants were truly interested in destroying the human race, they’d passed up a good opportunity to mark two more off the list.

  “There’s the hospital,” Wanda whispered. They’d taken cover behind a pickup truck, parked along a street where no Zapheads were evident. The hospital was an inelegant, boxy stack of bricks with metal framing around the windows, what Jorge understood to be mid-century construction. The sliding doors to the emergency room were parted, and an ambulance filled the bay just outside it. Jorge wondered whether the final patient had changed during the solar storms, or if the driver had collapsed for the final time at the wheel. Either way, the diagnosis was grim.

  “I don’t see anyone moving,” Jorge responded.

  “They cleaned it out last week. Took them a couple of days. I reckon it was filled with the first wave of people affected. You know, back when nobody knew what was going on.”

  Jorge wasn’t interested in a closer look. Without any activity, the structure offered little hope of finding Rosa and Marina. “Maybe we should follow them and see where they are taking the bodies. If they are holding any survivors captive, it seems those people would be in the same place.”

  “Assuming there’s any rhyme or reason to their shenanigans. For all we know, they might just like to play with dead things, like kids poking at roadkill with a stick.”

  Something clattered to the ground behind them, and they both turned. A metal sign announcing a real-estate sale had blown to the ground.

  “That was a little loud,” Wanda said.

  As if to support her statement, a cluster of four Zapheads came around the corner of the intersection, moving between cars and glancing around with those blazing eyes.

  “Gosh darn it to hell,” Wanda whispered.

  The Zapheads fanned out onto both sidewalks, murmuring as if to themselves. Since Jorge couldn’t be sure how they communicated, he didn’t think waiting it out was the best move. They could easily be cut off. And even though Jorge believed the Zapheads wouldn’t hurt them if they didn’t fight back, the theory weighed a little differently when the threat was closing in and multiplied by the dozens.

  “That way,” Wanda said, pointing toward the hospital and the narrow street beyond it.

  “Don’t shoot unless you have to,” Jorge said.

  “I only have five shells in the tube. That’s just enough to piss them off.”

  “How fast can you run?”

  She flashed him a yellowish grin. “As fast as it takes.”

  “Go.”

  She broke into an ungainly trot, slowed by the weight of her twelve-gauge. Jorge waited a beat, monitoring the Zapheads’ response. He half expected them to break into a graceful lope like a pack of feral wolves, but the nearest one stopped at the sight of her. The mutant was male, just a few inches over five feet, bald, and wearing the dirty blue uniform of a laborer. One foot was bare, and the other sported a leather boot with loose, frayed shoelaces trailing out behind.

  The mutant didn’t attempt to chase Wanda. Instead, he tilted his head back and quite clearly said, “Old People.”

  Not in any tone of alarm, but more as if stating a fact.

  The other Zapheads quickly mimicked it, and soon the call spread to other streets. No chance of outrunning them now, not with Zapheads all around.

  But he wasn’t going to abandon Wanda, not after she’d risked her life to help him. He broke from cover and dashed after her, trusting her knowledge of the town’s streets. She avoided the hospital parking lot, which was jammed with dusty vehicles but offered no long-term hiding places. She started back the way they had come, but then changed direction, and seconds later, Jorge saw Zapheads coming that way.

  A row of medical facilities, doctor’s offices, and clinics lined the adjacent street, and they looked as empty and lifeless as the hospital. At one point, Wanda looked back at him, but he waved her forward. He was already catching up to h
er, and he didn’t want to waste breath.

  The Zapheads didn’t appear to be in any hurry to capture them, and certainly their behavior was less aggressive than during Jorge’s previous encounters. They acted like they had all the time in the world and were secure in their strategic and numerical advantages, as well as their physical superiority. They reminded Jorge of the men on the Wilcox farm where he’d worked who would hunt deer in a group, knowing that even if they missed out on meat, they’d still have plenty of beer to drink afterward.

  Wanda headed up an embankment sparsely covered with trees, and Jorge saw an electronic sports scoreboard towering above the hill that read, “Newton High, Home of the Wildcats.”

  “The high school,” Wanda wheezed. “Maybe we can hide there.”

  The Zapheads had yet to ascend the embankment, but Jorge could hear them calling. Wanda motioned him forward. “We can get there faster by cutting through the football field.”

  The smell hit them almost like a tidal wave of raw sewage. As they topped the ridge, Jorge could see a metal-sided concession stand and the thin yellow arms of a set of goalposts. The grass on the field was knee high and fading to brown, and puddles of water stood here and there. But Jorge could care less about the decrepit field conditions, because of what filled the concrete stands:

  Several thousand dead people propped in stiff, awkward poses, bits of bone gleaming in the sun, rot glistening, all of them staring sightlessly at the field, unaware the season had been permanently cancelled.