After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) (12 page)

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people.

“No,”
Joey shrieked. “You come. Go now go.”

He
waved his hand down the road. The other Zapheads fell into a chant: “
Go now
go, go now go
.”

Marina
began mouthing the words, too, slack-faced and
blank-eyed.

Rosa
dropped the revolver and headed for the group. She
wasn’t sure what would happen—the Grateful Dead teenager might want revenge,
the Zapheads could swarm her and rip her limbs from her torso, or Joey might
urge them to beat her to death with their rifles.

They
haven’t hurt Cathy or Marina yet. If the Zapheads wanted to kill all humans,
they’d be dead, too
.

Rosa
was unwilling to contemplate the reasons the Zapheads
wanted them alive. Maybe Joey felt some loyalty to her. Or they felt threatened
by the soldiers and not the others. Or maybe they needed more bait.

Whatever
the reason, Rosa didn’t want her daughter joining their chants. Rosa wasn’t like Cathy—she wouldn’t raise a Zaphead child.

“Marina,” Rosa called again, approaching warily. She expected Marina to break into a run
toward her, but the girl stood in place, swaying back and forth in a catatonic
state. By the time Rosa strode between the first rank of Zapheads, she’d
forgotten about her own possible death. All she wanted was for Marina to move, to speak, to
blink.

As
she hugged Marina, her daughter yielded to the embrace and whispered a soft
“Momma.” At least she was still partly here.

Rosa
looked over her shoulder at the Zapheads surrounding
them. They watched with interest, as if not understanding the meaning of an
embrace. The Grateful Dead girl with the bleeding face lifted her arms a little
as if wanting a hug, but ended up staring down at her palms.

“Go
now go,” Joey said, flailing one little hand into a wave.

He
was motioning to the far end of town, away from the McDonald’s restaurant.
Cathy gave her infant an affectionate stroke on the cheek, and asked, “Go this
way, sugar bunches?”

“Sugar
bunches!” the Zaphead in the bloody military cap said. The Grateful Dead girl
added, “Go now go!”

The
Zaphead with the reattached hand led the way, and the rest of them followed.
Cathy trailed a little behind them, and then turned to Rosa and Marina. “Well?
You guys coming or not?”

Rosa
wasn’t sure if they had a choice. Joey bore an odd
look of pleasure, his eyes sparking with fiery delight. That mockery of human
expression was almost more terrible than his petulant anger at the “old people”
who had tried to kill his mutant brethren. She recalled a Bible verse of the
wolf living with the lamb and the calf lying down with the lion.
And a child
shall lead them
.

Her
priest had explained the context of the verse as God’s promise of eventual
peace and harmony, not a literal future where children guided adults. But her
priest couldn’t have foreseen a day like this. Such a prophecy would have
seemed profane heresy.

Nevertheless,
she followed, hugging Marina so close that they both staggered awkwardly. The
first Zapheads had stopped in the street ahead, and Rosa wondered if they had
changed their mind about killing them. Then she saw the bodies. The Zapheads
lifted the two dead soldiers and the body of their elderly comrade, half
dragging and half hauling them away.

The
town of Siler Creek had never hosted such a bizarre parade. No fire trucks or
flags, no cheerleaders waving pompoms, no smiling politicians. Just a
collection of the living and dead walking through a ghost town where blank
windows served as the audience.

The
sun was sinking over the tops of the far buildings and the ridges beyond,
throwing long shadows that made the scene even more sinister. The clouds had
thickened, tinted pink and purple by dusk, and the air carried dampness
redolent of autumnal decay. Combined with the faint rot of corpses clinging to
the interior of her nasal passages, Rosa was pretty sure this was what the end
of the world smelled like.

“What
are they going to do with the dead people, Momma?” Marina whispered.

Rosa
was relieved she had shown a sign of awareness, even
if the question was so grisly. Considering the body hung on the mannequin rack
in the thrift store and the dead people propped up in McDonald’s, she had a
good idea, but all she could say was “I don’t know.”

“Will
they hurt us?”

“No,
honey. Joey will protect us.”

Cathy
turned and smiled at them as if they were embarking on the Yellowbrick Road,
headed for a great adventure and off to see the Wizard. Rosa had seen that
movie while she was still learning English, so she missed a lot of the nuances
that Marina grasped right away. But she understood the journey was more
important than the destination, because the journey was where the Tin Woodsman
got his heart, the Cowardly Lion got his courage, and the Scarecrow got his
brains. She also knew there was magic in the words “There’s no place like
home,” although Camalú might as well be a fantasy movie set for all the reality
it held for her now. Magic had given way to hopelessness.

As
they trudged out of town, two of the Zapheads slowed and circled behind them,
as if to ensure Rosa and Marina wouldn’t lag or flee. They walked in silence as
night fell, following a two-lane highway punctuated with occasional abandoned
vehicles and multi-car pile-ups. Enough of the moon filtered through the cloud
cover to illuminate the pavement like a ribbon of oil, but it was the light cast
by the eyes of the Zapheads that guided them forward. They passed road signs,
but Rosa was never close enough to a Zaphead for its radiance to reveal the
reflective letters.

The
Zapheads never stopped to rest, and as the three humans in their midst grew weary
and slowed, they adjusted their pace. The ones carrying the dead bodies never
changed their grips or traded off their burdens, seemingly tireless. If
anything, they grew stronger the farther they walked.

Or
the closer we’re getting to the rest of them
, Rosa thought.
Because they somehow feed off one another’s energy.

Aside
from comforting Marina, she had little to distract her, and she passed the time
dwelling on two subjects: whether Jorge was still alive and how the Zapheads
functioned. She would need to understand their behavior before she could hope
to save Marina. An opportunity might arise for them to escape, and perhaps
night was the best time to try, but Rosa remained reluctant to risk Marina’s life yet. Until she was confident she could outsmart and outmaneuver the mutants,
they would stay close and learn.

This
was just like when she’d arrived in the United States with her husband—entering
an alien, hostile world. Only this world could kill with one cry from an
infant’s tiny lips.

“I
can’t go any more, Momma,” Marina said. “I’m hungry.”

“It’s
not much farther,” Rosa said. The encouragement was automatic and meaningless.
For all she knew, the Zapheads would march them until they reached the sea, and
then drive them beyond the shore into deep water.

“What
will we eat?”

The
Zapheads obviously wouldn’t let them stop at any of the houses or convenience
stores along the highway, and Rosa was afraid to ask. But Cathy, whose blouse
was open so that Joey could feed from one of her full breasts, said, “We’ll eat
cake.”

Joey
stopped his suckling and pulled his lips away with a wet smack. “Patty cake!”
he squealed with delight, before nuzzling back into his nursing.

The
sky shifted from pitch black to gray, suggesting morning. Ahead of them was a
soft haze of light, and Rosa’s heart leapt with joy.
Electricity! So
civilization isn’t completely dead.

“What
are those lights, Momma?” Marina mumbled drowsily, leaning against Rosa as she limped forward.

“It
looks like a town, honey.”

“Does
that mean warm food? And milk?”

“I
hope so. We’ll have to see.”

Joey
popped free of his mother’s breast again to exclaim, “New people!”

“New
people,” the other Zapheads repeated.

New
people? That means…

Now
the road ended with the dark spires of buildings lining two horizons. It was a
town, but much larger than Siler Creek, the metal awnings of several gas
stations suggesting a center of commerce. As the buildings crowded closer
together, and details emerged in the creeping dawn, the windows mirrored the
glow they’d seen from a distance. And a chill slithered up from Rosa’s bowels into her chest.

There
wasn’t a single light source, juiced by the technological advancement of humans
and recovered after a natural disaster. No, the glow was the collective
brightness of hundreds of tiny lights.

Sparking
eyes.

As
thick as the countless stars on a clear night.

Bodies
crowded the street, swaying, milling, waiting for something.

Waiting
for
them
.

“New
people!” the crowd shouted, in voices shrill and low, gravelly and thin, male
and female, young and old.

Rosa
nearly fainted. If not for Marina, she would have,
but with her daughter’s weight resting against her, motherly duty goosed her
into alertness. The cries of the Zapheads were bludgeoning after a night of
silence and false peace. The discord continued for a full thirty seconds before
fading away to a few mutters and mumbles.

“New
place,” Joey said to Cathy, loudly enough for Rosa and Marina to hear.

“Good,”
Cathy said. “Because it’s time for a new diaper.”

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

The
rain began falling just as they reached the high school.

The
storm blew in with the dawn, the clouds like twisted purple dishrags leaking
their juice onto the world. The mob of Zapheads had closed around them,
chattering and clicking, spewing ululations that were all the more terrible
because they nearly resembled words. Rosa heard snatches that she was certain
were Spanish, and she wondered if the first Zapheads in their group had passed
along the language they had learned or if some other unfortunate Spaniard or
Mexican had been captured.

Marina
clung to her, head buried in Rosa’s shirt, as they waded down Main Street
through the horde of shabbily dressed—and in some cases scarcely
dressed—mutants, whose eyes glinted like a series of flash fires on a burning
oil slick. They hardly seemed to notice the rain, although the thick, cold
drops soon had both Marina and her shivering.

The
Zapheads that had been with them in Siler Creek were nowhere around, the bodies
they were carrying already taken from them. Rosa had the terrible thought that
the mutants were using them for food, but she’d never seen any Zaphead eating,
aside from Joey nursing at his mother’s breast. They weren’t flesh-consuming
zombies, but they also didn’t seem to wither and weaken through lack of
protein. Meanwhile, Marina was nearly to the point of collapse and Rosa’s own legs twitched in spasms of pain.

Cathy
ignored the maddening throng, intent on shielding Joey from the brunt of the
storm. But the infant kicked and squirmed until his chubby arms and legs worked
free of his swaddling, and his pink toes curled at the air. “Here now here!” he
squealed with delight, his shrill voice penetrating the howling wind and the
rattling of awnings and signposts as rain pounded car hoods and concrete.

Rosa
couldn’t help but feel they were being herded now.
She’d seen several American movies on the Jewish holocaust, including the
powerfully moving “Schindler’s List.” Although she was aware of the deep cultural
chasm that would never allow her to relate to those horrors, she imagined this
might be the same sense of foreboding experienced by those poor victims of the
Nazi concentration camps. They staggered down the streets of the dirty gray
town with the white-domed courthouse shining wetly on the hill.

Rosa
wondered if other survivors might be in the organic tide that pushed them
forward, but in the chaos, she could do little more than cling to Marina and fight to keep her feet. The raving crowd appeared to part and let Cathy
through, Joey waving them forward. “Here now here!” he shrieked again, clapping
his little hands together. The chant was immediately echoed by the crowd until
it lost meaning and Rosa began to hear it as “Now here here.”

“Make
it stop, Momma,” Marina cried, squeezing Rosa so hard her ribs were bruised.

“It’ll
be okay soon,” Rosa said, already hating herself for using that lie yet again.
The Zapheads didn’t seem interested in hurting them, at least not
intentionally. But some of them crowded close enough to bump into her, and they
lacked a sense of their own strength. One little boy slapped her hard on the
back and shouted, “Patty cake!”

The
street opened onto a soggy parking lot, with school buses lined on both sides. Rosa wondered if the corpses of any children were sitting silently in those seats, ready
for a final ride. Then she saw the rectangular brick façade of the school, a
fenced-in area for athletic fields behind it. A large wing featured windows set
in a row maybe thirty feet off the ground, and Rosa figured it was the
gymnasium. A double set of metal doors stood open, the darkness beyond them
like the welcoming gaze of the world’s most secret demon. It was clear the
Zapheads expected them all to enter the structure. Despite Rosa’s misgivings,
at least the gym looked dry, and she needed to get Marina out of the
bone-chilling rain.