After: First Light

by Scott Nicholson

CHAPTER TEN

  Rachel heard the screams as she clawed her way out of sleep.

  As usual, she’d been underwater in her restless dreams, probing the murky depths for something she could never find.

  Something banged against her apartment wall, and she thought the neighbors might be having one of their cozy little spats. But the screams were muffled and distant, coming from somewhere outside the apartment complex.

  And there were several, a chorus line of wailing, shrieking, and bellowing. A grinding metallic crash, punctuated with broken glass, brought her fully awake. Somewhere down the street, a car horn blared incessantly and then gave way to an abrupt silence that was much too deep for a weekday dawn in Charlotte.

  Rachel rolled into a robe and rose to the window, assuming an auto accident. She had to remove the box fan to get a good look. The street was a mess. Cars were jumbled in a chaotic array, with traffic completely stalled. A city transit bus had slewed to a stop in the intersection. Two service vans had collided, one of them spilling bundles of blue towels from its cargo bay. Steam rose from beneath the hood of a Toyota sedan, and the driver’s arm dangled from the window. The hand was deathly still.

  That’s when Rachel realized the only movement on the street was a woman in business suit running awkwardly between the stranded vehicles, one high-heel missing, hair trailing out behind her in tangles.

  No, there were others.

  Chasing the woman.

  The nearest was a man in a khaki uniform shirt with a cloth insignia on the shoulder, like some sort of delivery driver. He slapped against the side of the bus has if not seeing it and staggered for a moment before continuing after the screeching woman. As if drawn by her cries, a man in a scuffed leather jacket dodged between vehicles toward her. His pursuit was blocked by two cars that had collided bumper to bumper, and he scrambled over the hood of an Audi sedan, sending bits of broken glass winking to the street. They were both gaining on the woman, who was too frantic to remove her lone high heel. She hobble-clopped toward the storefront of an electronics repair shop, where an old woman was collapsed against the door.

  Then Rachel noticed the other bodies…at least four that she could see at a glance. She recognized a pink cardigan sweater she’d loaned to Mira, and then recognized the long dark hair splayed out around her head where Mira lay prone on the sidewalk near a bus stop.

  Call 9-1-1.

  Rachel reached for her cell phone on the nightstand, although surely the police already knew about an incident this big. But the phone was dead.

  Her grandfather had tried to teach her about firearms, but she had resisted, refusing to buy into the violence of the world. Now she wished she had a weapon. But she didn’t know whom to shoot. Or why.

  Rachel shoved the screen out of the window and yelled at the panicked woman, hoping to draw the attention of her attackers. But while the woman turned and looked up, the two men plunged ahead, closing the distance. They were on her in an instant and began tearing at her clothes and hair.

  A rape, in broad daylight?

  But that didn’t square with the carnage below, or the dead bodies. This was big. Way big.

  And she remembered the stories about solar flares. She squinted at the rim of flaming orange that burned like a promise across the city skyline.

  Rachel didn’t yet realize it, but she was witnessing the glimmer of a new dawn, a world where death claimed its throne and the few survivors could hardly count themselves as lucky. Because the survivors would be alive and nothing more, while others among them—those who’d been sparked into a cataclysmic upheaval of evolution—would be more than alive.

  This was the first light of After.

  Someone pounded on the door.