After: The Shock

by Nicholson, Scott

  “I like to deal with facts, Pamela,” the professor said, lips pursing into a pout. “Eventually, we’re going to be living with four hundred Chernobyls. No one knows the effects of that kind of radiation exposure from multiple sources. You can’t really model that on a computer.”

  “Sorry, I left my iPad in my other pants,” Pamela said, causing Pete to snort into his beer.

  Campbell vaguely understood the danger of radiation, but it seemed as distant a threat as secondhand smoke or preservatives in Twinkies. Pamela was flaunting her charisma, which made the professor squirm a little on his fireside stump.

  The professor fumbled for cigarette. “All I’m saying is—”

  They were spared a lecture by the booming report of a gun somewhere off in the night. Pete flopped backward in surprise, dropping his beer, and the professor grabbed for the rifle leaning beside him.

  “Donnie!” Pamela shouted, heading in the direction of the shot.

  “Stay here,” the professor ordered, not that Campbell had any intention of wandering off into the dark, especially with Arnoff out there, armed and dangerous.

  After the professor and Pamela had both disappeared in the shadows, Pete said, “Man, what if the Zapheads come while everybody’s gone?”

  “Maybe we ought to split. We can get back to the road and find our bikes and be out of here before they get back.”

  “And then what? These people might be our best bet. At least they got some weaponry.”

  Campbell couldn’t offer a better alternative. Arnoff made him uneasy, but at least the group had established some basic order. And Campbell found that he missed order. He liked clocks and homework and responsibility and a schedule. Maybe such things were useless in the new world, but he could find substitutes by belonging to a group with a common purpose.

  And no common purpose was as compelling as survival.

  “Okay,” Campbell said. “Let’s give it a couple of days.”

  Pete opened another beer, and this time, Campbell joined him. Minutes later, Arnoff, the professor, and Pamela came back. Donnie had apparently been freaked out by a stray dog and shot it. Pamela found blankets for Pete and Campbell, who sacked out beside the fire. Campbell was just drowsing off when he saw Arnoff enter Pamela’s tent.

  He hoped Donnie wasn’t the jealous type. He didn’t want to wake up to the sound of more gunfire.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Rachel awoke, she thought she was in her grandmother’s house on Puget Sound. As a young child, she’d slept in a guest room facing the sea. In winter and spring, the Pacific sky was often gauzed with gray that penetrated every opening. No amount of electric light could push back the dismal gray.

  Rachel fought through the pillows to reach for the bedside lamp, but the table was in the wrong place. The only break in the darkness was a fat line of gray that appeared to be shrinking. She couldn’t shrug off the gravity fast enough to crawl toward it, and she was sure that the gap would close before she could climb through. Then she’d be trapped inside the darkness, and Grandma would never hear her screams.

  A hand gripped her elbow and she fought against it.

  “Easy there, Blondie,” said the man whose voice sounded like sand in honey.

  And she saw one wet eye catching the light, a miniature mirror of that vanishing grayness. It all came back—the solar flares, the ensuing chaos, the sudden deaths of billions of people, and a world in which Grandma would never again pile stuffed animals around her for comfort.

  “Is it tomorrow?” she asked.

  “It’s now, is all I know,” DeVontay said. “You talk in your sleep, did you know that?”

  Her mother had said something about it once, but when one slept alone, it was hardly the kind of thing to worry about. “What was I saying?”

  “Mostly gibberish, but you were saying a name. ‘Chelsea.’ Friend of yours? A sister?”

  She sat up, aware that she’d slept in her clothes. DeVontay eased back over to the far side of the bed, his eye now swallowed by the black. A moment later she heard the snick of his lighter and one of the candles burst to life. It had a faint lilac smell.

  When she knelt by the bed to say her morning prayers, he didn’t comment.

  “Has our little friend come back?” she asked, sitting up and smoothing some of the wrinkles from her clothes before realizing how absurd that was.

  “Brother’s been making the rounds. Door to door, all night long.”

  She tried to read his face in the candlelight, to see if he’d stayed awake all night watching over her like a creepy Robert Pattinson in a Twilight movie. She forced herself not to whine, although after nearly two weeks in After, she feared numbness more than distress. “What do you think he wants?”

  DeVontay, carrying his pistol, crossed the room to the thick line of gray, which had now brightened to a shade of mustard between the curtains. He peeked outside. “Who knows? Mighta been a guest who was checked in when the Big Zap hit and never checked out.”

  “Or maybe his wife’s behind one of these doors? Lying in bed and rotting?” The notion reminded her they were surrounded by dead people, not just in the Motel 6 but all around the Charlotte metro area and probably the world. The faint but putrid odor of decomposition assailed her and she crawled across the bed to the little bottle of hand sanitizer on the table beside DeVontay’s midnight snacks. The bottle was half empty, surrounded by Slim Jim wrappers, crumpled cellophane, an empty bottle of Sprite, and a pack of Goody’s headache powder.

  That’s what happens when you leave the grocery shopping to a man.

  “Don’t see nothing outside.” DeVontay parted the curtains to let more light into the room.

  “So?”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “It’s safe.”

  “And what’s your plan? Just stay here until room service decides to bring us breakfast?”

  “Where were you going before?” She had to pee but was too embarrassed to say anything.

  “Out of the city, away from them things.”

  “I meant before that. You know…before.”

  “Wasn’t going nowhere. I was already there. Had me a good job with a roofing company. When you got a job, no reason to go nowhere else.”

  His silhouette filled the window, his shoulders broad but thin, graceful like an athlete’s. His hair was cropped close, with narrow stripes of sideburns on each cheek. That fixed, hooded eye gave him a menacing aspect. Rachel wondered if she would ever have voluntarily take a seat next to him on a bus. “I guess we have a new job,” she said.

  “What’s this ‘we’ stuff? We need to talk about that.”

  The words shocked her. She had survived alone, for days and days, running, hiding, learning the rules of After, but she could feel herself wearing down, her options narrowing. “We’re alive. We’re human. And we can’t let them win.”

  He looked out the window and spoke with his back to her. “What if I decide you’re slowing me down? And what else you got to offer besides an extra set of eyes? You don’t even got a gun.”

  “I can find one,” she said, hating the desperation in her voice.

  He went to the kitchenette and opened the mini-fridge. “Damn. Looks like it’s junk food again.”

  She really had to pee now, and she felt herself squirming. The bathroom door was closed, and she hadn’t remembered them checking it. What if one of the Zapheads was inside? Or a dead body?

  “Okay, then,” Rachel said. “Go on. Pack up your shit and get out.”

  He faced her, his good eye widening with surprise. “What you doing cussing? I thought you were one of them goody-goody girls.”

  “‘Shit’ is not taking the Lord’s name in vain. You’re thinking of ‘goddamn,’ and I’m not calling you a goddamn asshole, even if you are one.”

  His lips pursed into a frown of contemplation and the silence was thick between them. Somewhere on the floor above, they heard the resident Zaphead banging on a door. DeVontay grinned,
showing broad teeth. “All right, so you got a little fire after all. Maybe we can make this thing work as a team until we find something better.”

  She hadn’t even imagined a “better.” It was nearly impossible to imagine “good.”

  “So, since that’s settled, what now?” she asked.

  “Maybe I ought to go up on the roof and take a look around.”

  “What if that guy gets you?”

  DeVontay waved the gun. “I got an answer.”

  Rachel didn’t want to be left alone. But she wasn’t about to let DeVontay know that. “Let’s just pack up and get out of here. We can go up on the highway and get a better look. I don’t want to risk getting caught in the stairwell. Plus, we don’t know how many more of those things are around. The others might not be as noisy as our little friend.”

  He nodded, apparently taking their partnership seriously. “Yeah, if it’s all clear on the road, I’d just as soon head north.”

  “Okay, you pack up and I…uh, have some personal business.” She didn’t want to ask him to check the bathroom. She was embarrassed enough as it was.

  Funny, it’s the end of the world and I still have something to be shy about.

  Rachel felt his one eye tracking her across the room. He chuckled. “What, you going to put on some make-up?”

  She frowned at him, gave the doorknob a vigorous twist, and peeked inside. It was dark, but at least no one jumped her.

  “Want a light?” DeVontay said.

  “No, I’ll just leave the door cracked a little.”

  “I already used it, so don’t mind the smell. I saved the flush for you.”

  “Thanks for sharing.” Inside, as her eyes adjusted, she poked with her foot to find the porcelain bowl. As she peeled her jeans down, she listened to the brooding hotel. The banging was several floors above, fixed in one place now, and she was relieved the Zaphead had stopped making the rounds. Maybe the guy had found his room.

  Then she heard something below that sound, thin, reedy, and barely piercing the unnatural silence. At first she thought DeVontay was whistling, but it was coming from her left—the room to the other side of their suite.

  “Do you hear that?” she whispered, startled by the echo in the tile-covered bathroom.

  “You say something?”

  “It’s music.”

  “Can’t be no music. The pulse blew out all electronics. Didn’t you hear the news?”

  She didn’t point out the contradiction. Instead, she listened more carefully as she wiped. The notes plinked with a metallic coldness, yet they varied in tone and rhythm. After she fastened her jeans, she felt along the sink counter until she found one of the plastic sanitary cups. She shucked the cellophane sheath and placed the mouth of the cup against the wall, then placed her ear against the cup’s bottom.

  She didn’t turn when the door swung open behind her and DeVontay called. “What you doing?”

  “Shhh.” When Rachel was nine, before the divorce, her father had given her a little music box with Walt Disney’s Barbie-fied version of Cinderella on top. By twisting the little brass key, she could make Cinderella spin around and around, never losing a slipper. The music box had issued the same sort of brassy tonality she now heard.

  “Somebody’s over there,” she said.

  “Ain’t nobody over there. They would have heard us and said something.”

  “Maybe they’re scared.”

  “And maybe it’s a Zaphead.”

  Rachel thought about banging on the wall and yelling, but if the person was scared, that wouldn’t help. “We need to open that door and check.”

  “The hell we do,” DeVontay said, his good eye narrowing in annoyance. “We already got a plan, and it don’t include saving the world.”

  “All right, then,” she said, pushing past him, not bothering to flush the toilet. “Give me the gun and you can wait here like a sissy.”

  “A sissy? Nobody calls nobody a ‘sissy’ anymore.”

  “Well, sorry I’m not up on my hood lingo, dude. Or homey. Or whatever gangsta thing you want to be called. But I’m not going anywhere until I see who’s in that room.”

  Rachel was surprised by her own anger, but she understood it. She’d felt so helpless watching everyone die from the pulse, or turn into Zapheads, or commit suicide, and finally, she had a chance to be useful.

  DeVontay exhaled a long sigh. “Okay, damnit. We get packed, check the room, and then we’re outta here.”

  She met his gaze and they stared at each other for a full ten seconds, neither willing to flinch. “Deal.”

  As he packed, he cussed under his breath. Rachel collected her backpack, checking the vial of Nembutal the druggist had given her. No, she wouldn’t surrender, not while someone else might need help.

  DeVontay drew his gun before flipping back the security bolt and opening the door. Rachel pressed close behind. Once in the hall, they could clearly hear the Zaphead banging away above them.

  The room next door was 202, and judging from the spacing of the doorways, it appeared to be a suite as well. They paused before the laminated door, listening, but the music had stopped. Rachel nudged DeVontay, and he slipped the master key in the lock.

  The tumblers clattered in their own loud music, and the banging upstairs stopped.

  “Shit,” DeVontay hissed.

  Rachel pushed him into the room. The curtains were parted, throwing a wash of gray light across the carpet. Blankets were wadded over a hump on one of the beds, and the air was rank with decay. A boy of about ten knelt on the floor, a doll clutched to his chest. The doll was undressed, and the boy was twisting a knob back and forth that protruded from the doll’s back.

  He looked up at them with wide brown eyes, his face stricken with guilt. “It broke.”

  Rachel knelt and put her hands on his shoulders, trying not to weep. DeVontay peeled back the blanket to verify what their noses had already told them.

  “Is that your mother?” Rachel asked gently, afraid the boy might see her tears and have his own breakdown.

  “She didn’t wake up,” the boy said.

  “We better get out of here,” DeVontay said. “I don’t think the guy upstairs is going to wait for the elevator.”

  “Come on,” Rachel said, taking the boy’s hand and pulling him toward the hall.

  The boy gave one last look back at the figure on the bed, at a past that no longer made sense to any of them, and allowed her to lead him into After.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Marina was crying.

  Not out loud, which would have disturbed him. They were safe, he was pretty sure of that, as safe as anyone could be these days. But still Marina’s sniffling and small grunts unsettled him. He couldn’t show it, though, not with Rosa about to shatter.

  Jorge Jiminez let his face harden into a mask, the same expression he wore when the boss man, Mr. Wilcox, ordered him to shovel llama manure into the flower garden. Jorge liked the llamas, even though one would occasionally spit in his face. He liked them a lot better than he liked Mr. Wilcox.

  He even liked the poop better than he liked Mr. Wilcox.

  But now the gringo was dead, and so were the sixteen llamas. Jorge had been outside when the flash occurred, his wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes. The llamas collapsed almost instantly, and so did Barkley, the loud border collie that constantly pestered the animals. The chickens barely paused in their scratching and pecking, though, so Jorge thought it must have been some strange sort of gun, although he couldn’t figure out how a gun could kill so many animals at once without making a sound.

  But then his mind jumped immediately to Rosa and Marina, and he dropped his shovel and bolted for the tiny mobile home at the back of the property, which was tucked behind a thicket of Douglas firs so that it couldn’t be seen from Mr. Wilcox’s house. His wife and child hadn’t noticed the flash of light. Rosa was stitching a patch on the knee of a pair of jeans and Marina was sprawled on the floor, coloring in her bi
g book of princesses.

  That had been over a week ago.

  They’d moved into Mr. Wilcox’s house two days ago, and although Jorge instinctively sensed it was safer, he wasn’t even sure what the danger was. After all, everyone else seemed to be dead.

  “Maybe we go to town to see,” Rosa said. She sat at the fine oak table, uncomfortable, a glass of water perched in her hand as if she were afraid of leaving spots on the finish.

  “I told you, the truck doesn’t start,” he said, as if explaining to a child. “Neither does the car, and neither does the motorcycle.”

  He didn’t mean to say that last word with such anger. He didn’t mean to say it at all. Such a word was bad luck in times like these.

  “What if we walk?”

  “We could do it in a day. Marina can’t walk that far, so we’d have to take turns carrying her.”

  “I can, too, walk that far,” Marina said, her voice was cracked and strained. “I’m not a baby.”

  Her English was very good, better than Rosa’s and almost as good as his. Jorge had taken classes at the community college because he knew he’d never see Baja, California, again. Even though the silver mines of La Paz had paid a fair wage of 200 pesos a day, the United States offered the kind of wealth a man needed to raise a family. Like many of his migrant countrymen, he’d planned to work for a year or two and return, but there was always a bill to be paid first, or paperwork, or some legal obstacle.

  Luckily, Mr. Wilcox offered employment year round. In the spring, there was gardening, and in the summer, the crew mowed grass at various gated subdivisions built by the boss man, and in fall, they cut hay and prepared for the Christmas tree harvest. In winter, Mr. Wilcox dispensed a list of repairs around the property, which Jorge had once heard him brag consisted of “nine hunnert acres of East Tennessee’s mountain heaven.” All year round was the task of shoveling of manure: chicken manure, llama manure, pig manure, horse manure, and, once when the septic tank was clogged, people manure.

  This week, there had been no shoveling. If one didn’t count the graves.