After: The Shock (25 page)

The
fisherman had scaled a few more rungs, but the two remaining Zapheads back
away, their eyes glittering like wet diamonds.

“Don’t
shoot!” Jorge shouted at Franklin, partly because he wasn’t sure they were a
danger and partly because he didn’t fully trust the old man’s aim.

The
fisherman continued his climb, moving faster as he figured out the rungs. He
was nearly to the top of the RV, where the woman sat in the middle of the roof,
hunched as if protecting her baby.

“Hold
on,” Jorge said to her, but she didn’t respond. Jorge ran to the rear of the RV
and began climbing after him. Jorge gave one machete chop at the man’s rubber
heel, but it lifted free just before the blade careened off metal.

The
fisherman stood in his tan vest, head lifted as if sniffing the breeze. He put
one hand on a small satellite dish to steady himself, then wriggled it back and
forth. The steel bar holding the dish gave a grating squeak and tore free. The
man lifted the dish like a weapon and turned to face Jorge, who was still three
rungs down the ladder.

A
shot rang out, whining over Jorge’s head. The Zaphead lifted the dish and Jorge
thought about dropping to the ground. But he didn’t think he could climb it
again before the mutated fisherman killed the woman and her baby.

Instead,
Jorge launched himself forward and rolled. The fisherman paused, the dish still
held high, as if he also hesitated to kill. Jorge swung out one of his
workman’s boots into the man’s kneecap. The leg folded but didn’t collapse.

The
Zaphead hissed in pain, or perhaps rage, and swatted the dish downward as if
Jorge were an oversize fly. Jorge raised his machete—
just like Banderas
would
, he thought—and blocked the blow, although the impact drove the back
edge of the blade precariously near his face.

On
his back, Jorge raised both legs and drove the bottoms of his boots into the Zaphead’s
stomach. A chuff of air was driven from the man’s abdomen as the kick lifted
him off the RV’s roof and sent him, arms flailing, over the edge. The body
struck pavement below with a soggy splat, while the dish clattered a few feet
down the road.

Jorge
didn’t bother to check the damage. Instead, he went to the young woman, whose
face contorted between expressions of fear and gratitude. A tear ran down one
grimy cheek. Up close, she looked even younger, maybe seventeen.

This
could be Marina in a few years
, he thought, even though this woman had
reddish-gold hair instead of Marina’s dark Latina features.

“Come,”
he said, holding out one hand. “We have a safe place.”

She
stared at the gore-clotted machete blade. Jorge looked down at it and wiped it
on the leg of his pants. “Only when necessary,” he said.

“Get
and come on,” Franklin shouted from the bushes. “Else, I’m going to have to
start killing these others.”

Jorge
looked down the road. Two more Zapheads had emerged from the forest, although
they didn’t move with any sort of speed or menace. Jorge was struck yet again
with the notion that they appeared more curious than anything, as if they’d
been dropped into an unwelcoming world without a road map.

That,
I can understand, mis amigos.

“Come,”
Jorge said, more gently this time. “My wife will help care for your child.”

She
relaxed a little and peeled back a fold of her bundle. Jorge saw just the
tiniest stretch of pink skin before she closed it again and tried to stand. She
nearly lost her balance, and Jorge steadied her. The two Zapheads at the rear
of the RV had backed away another 10 feet, staring up as if watching a scene on
the stage of some theater of the absurd.

“Don’t
shoot,” Jorge shouted at Franklin, who now stood by the stone fence, the rifled
aimed at the nearest Zaphead. “I don’t think they will hurt us.”

“Then
what was Captain Ahab up there doing? Playing badminton?”

“They’re
confused.”

“Well,
hell, they ain’t the only one.”

Jorge
went down the ladder first, offering to carry the baby, but the woman violently
shook her head. So Jorge climbed down and stood guard while she made a
cautious, awkward descent.

“Go,”
Jorge said to the Zapheads, motioning with his machete. “
Salir
.”

They
merely stood with their intensely glittering gazes, although the two new
Zapheads kept approaching. When the young mother reached the pavement, Jorge
guided her toward Franklin and the trail back to the compound.

“Took
you long enough,” Franklin said.

“That
is how we do it south of the border, old man,” Jorge said.

“Well,
don’t be taking no
siestas
until we make sure these things don’t follow
us,
sí
?”

It
wasn’t until they were halfway up the mountain that Jorge felt his stomach
unclench, and he knelt and vomited in the leaves while Franklin stood sentinel.

He
didn’t feel very much like Antonio Banderas now.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE

“Sure
could use a GPS,” DeVontay said.

He
squinted up at the sun, which was sinking toward the western horizon. They had
left the little town behind, although its smoke still stained the air. Beyond
it, the higher columns of diffuse gray marked the progress of Charlotte into
the atmosphere. The clouds were like clumps of dirty wool riding high,
uncertain currents.

Rachel
sat in the shade of a sycamore, studying the street behind them. The images of
the bodies strewn across the courthouse lawn still haunted her. Everywhere she
looked, she hallucinated corpses into the shadows and crevices, arranged in
horribly artful arrays.

Keep
it together, Ray Ray. Stephen needs you
.

The
boy had grown more animated with every mile they’d walked. Leaving his doll
with the dead girl had served to purge some of his melancholy. Rachel wondered
if his current ease was even more worrisome than his near-catatonia. But there
was no psychological handbook for diagnosing the emotional conditions of After.
This was all new ground.

“That
way,” Rachel said, pointing vaguely northwest. They had entered a rural area
and houses were fewer and farther between, so they were less likely to
encounter Zapheads. They’d been following a gravel road for the last five miles
or so, encountering only a few abandoned vehicles. Rachel didn’t want to think
about the bodies that might have been in them and whether they’d been removed
and used as art.

“You
sure?” DeVontay studied the ragged map in his hands. “I-77 runs north, and it’s
back over that way.”

“We
don’t want to follow the interstate,” Rachel said. “We need to stay away from
population centers.”

“Where
we will find food?”

“House
to house,” Rachel said.

“Where
will we sleep?”

“House
to house.”

Stephen,
who was digging in the ground with a stick, looked up. “Does that mean we can
have any house we want?”

“Sure,”
she said. “Our pick of the neighborhood. As long as no one is living there, I
don’t think they’d mind if we used it.”

“I
want a house with a swimming pool.” He swung his stick at a moth that was
fluttering in a wobbly pattern around him.

“Don’t
kill it,” she said.

“Why
not?” he said with a pout, although he lowered his stick.

“Because
life is sacred.”

“Then
how come everybody’s dead?”

Rachel
wanted to give an automatic answer, but all the options felt hollow:
Because
God willed it so? Because the universe is a powerful bitch? Because they were
not worthy?

Instead,
she settled on the lame response that made her feel painfully like an adult.
“Because.”

DeVontay
headed up the road, wiping the dust from his forehead with a kerchief, and then
wrapping it around his head like Jimi Hendrix. “I bet that house up there has a
pool,” he said. “Or maybe a fish pond.”

The
two-story white farmhouse had a tin roof that glinted in the dying sun. The
yard was fenced, and the surrounding property was broken into several pastures.
A tractor was parked outside a red barn, and two spotted Jersey cows picked at
the grass, ignoring them. The surrounding land sloped up to forest. A dusty
Ford pickup sat in the driveway near the porch. Rachel could see a rifle in a
rack through the rear window.

“I
wanna fish!” Stephen said, running to catch up with DeVontay. Rachel shouldered
her pack and followed them. The house offered good visibility and looked pretty
secure, assuming a family of Zapheads wasn’t gathered around the kitchen table…

“Hello?”
DeVontay called, cupping his hands. Only the wind answered.

DeVontay
was checking out the truck by the time Rachel caught up. “Empty,” he said,
although he gave Rachel a look that suggested it wasn’t.

“Stephen,
come look at this,” Rachel said. She went to the apple tree in the side yard
and pulled a branch low so Stephen could pluck a few of the ruby-red Macintosh
apples. When she looked back, DeVontay was rummaging in the truck, emerging
with the rifle in his hands before slamming the door shut.

“I’m
checking out the house,” he said. “Wait there until I get back.”

Rachel
led Stephen to the little garden that had been overtaken by weeds. The tomatoes
were mostly rotten and the cucumbers had yellowed, but the mustard and collard
greens were dark and healthy-looking. “Help me pick some,” she said, kneeling
in the dirt. She stuck a turnip green in her mouth and chewed, savoring its
vibrant bitterness.

“Gross,”
Stephen said.

“You
want to be strong like Spiderman, don’t you?”

“Your
teeth are green.” The boy glanced at the barn. “What’s in there?”

“Hay,”
she said. “Now, let’s pick. It will be good to have some fresh vitamins after
all that canned food.”

“Hay
tastes better than this,” he said, heading for the barn.

“Don’t
go in there alone,” she said, lifting the lower front of her shirt to form a
sack for the greens. She collected fistfuls of greens, waiting for Stephen to return.
She was so intent on her harvest that she didn’t realize for a moment that he’d
kept going.

He
was almost to the barn. “Stephen!” she called.

The
boy stood at the barn’s heavy wooden entrance, which was suspended by metal wheels
on a steel track. The door opening was about two feet wide, and thick darkness
waited beyond it. Rachel couldn’t imagine the boy would go in there, not after
all the horrors he’d endured.

The
boy took one look back, but he didn’t seem to notice Rachel. He cocked his head
as if hearing distant music, and then slipped inside the barn. Rachel dropped
the greens and hurried after him, the weariness and tension of the past days
hitting her in a wave and weakening her legs. A blister on her big toe screamed
in red electricity, but she pushed herself, thinking of her sister.

She
called him again. The word was like a thunderclap in the quiet pastoral
setting, birds falling silent in the nearby forest. She reached the door and
the dark air inside was almost a solid thing, rich with the dust of hay and
manure, and obsidian block framed by rough wooden planks and chicken wire.
Rachel didn’t want to touch that miserable darkness, much less enter it, but
Stephen was inside.

She’d
promised to take care of him.

She
stepped inside, calling his name, listening to the ticking of the hot tin roof.
She derided herself for growing overconfident. She should have taken the pistol
from DeVontay after he’d found the rifle. But the peace of the farm valley had
lulled her into a false complacency, allowing her to forget that this was After
and the rules had changed with one massive belch of the sun.

Stumbling
in the darkness, Rachel fought an urge to wait for DeVontay. She was pretty
sure no Zapheads were lurking in the barn, or they would have reacted to her
voice. Still, the deep shadows carried the weight of menace, like the held
breath of a stalker. Something wasn’t right here.

As
her eyes adjusted to the shafts of light leaking through the cracks and
windows, she was able to make out support posts and stalls, with tufts of
yellow hay littering the dirt floor. On the center beam, three shapes dangled
from ropes like old sacks of feed. Stephen stood silently, peering up at them.

“Oh
my Lord,” Rachel said, limping to the boy’s side. She tried to pull him away,
then cover his eyes, but he wriggled free.

“What
happened?” Stephen asked.

The
bodies were of a man and two young boys, obviously brothers. Their black
tongues protruded from their gaping mouths and their eyes bulged. Although
flies swarmed around them, they apparently had been dead no more than a day or
two.

“This
isn’t good, Stephen.”

“Did
they kill themselves?” Stephen’s voice was cold and vacant again, as if his
post-traumatic autism had seized control.

Rachel
thought it was likely the man hanged his own children before killing himself.
It didn’t look like the work of Zapheads. But she didn’t know which answer
would give Stephen the most comfort. Perhaps there was no comfort to be found
in death.

Perhaps.

Or
maybe the man had taken stock of After and made a decision based on love and
mercy. Despite the resources of the farm, the man may have seen no future that
didn’t end in a violent death. Maybe this was the man’s way of protecting his
family from Zapheads, killing his wife in the truck and then ushering his
offspring to an eternal peace instead of facing another day of living hell.

Perhaps
this had been the ultimate act of faith.

“I
don’t know what happened,” Rachel said, and in this, at least she avoided a
lie.

“I
want my mother,” Stephen said.

Rachel
hugged him. “I know you do, honey.”

“And
my dolly.”

“I
know. Why don’t we go into the farmhouse? I’ll bet these boys had some toys,
and I bet they wouldn’t mind if you played with them.”

“They’re
dead,” he said. He sneezed from the dust, then sniffled.

Rachel’s
eyes were hot with tears, but she wouldn’t allow herself to sob. “Let’s go,
honey.”

This
time, Stephen allowed himself to be led from the corrupt air of the barn and back
into the sunshine. Rachel glanced up at the high, uncertain clouds.

How
could you do this, God? What possible plan do You have for all this?

But
she couldn’t trust her own faith at the moment, because she was afraid it was
slipping away. The one certainty of her life, the power that had given her
comfort amid all the sorrow and hardship and added joy to every pleasure, was
now as ephemeral as the distant smoke. And without it, who
was
she?

DeVontay
was waiting on the porch when they reached the house, the rifle angled over one
shoulder. “All clear,” he said, almost giddy with relief. “Even some canned
food and a gas stove, so we can have us a home-cooked meal.”

Then
he noticed their faces and glanced around warily. “What’s up?”

Rachel
gave a wave back toward the barn. “We can stay in their house. They don’t need
it anymore.”

“Oh.
Well, come on in and let’s eat.” He held the door open for them, and Rachel
could read the question in his eyes:
Was it Zapheads?

“I
think we’re safe here,” Rachel said. Despite her subdued anxiety, she found
herself eager to escape in exploring the kitchen. “Why don’t you find a place
for Stephen while I cook some dinner?”

She
couldn’t shake the image of the limp, hanging bodies from her mind, nor the
widening gap in the center of her abandoned heart.