After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) (21 page)

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.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

“Which
way? Wanda asked.

But
Jorge couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t feel. If not for the stench that
was almost like a solid, grasping thing, he would have ascribed the horrifying
sight to a nightmare and expect to awaken screaming in bed next to Rosa. But his lungs couldn’t stir enough air to utter any sound, and all his dreams took
place in Mexico. He was dimly aware of Wanda tugging on his shirt sleeve,
dragging him back from his brief flight from sanity.

“We
either run or fight,” Wanda said. “But you don’t look like you’ll be worth a
darn at either.”

“Did…did
you know?” he managed.

“I
suspected they were up to something. So did you, even if you never pictured
this.
But
it wasn’t going to be pretty no matter what.”

The
mutants ringed the hill that he and Wanda had just left. A chain-link fence
stood between the stands and the parking lot beyond the field. The concrete
stands on the visitors’ side were empty, apparently waiting to be filled with
the freshly dead. The brick buildings of the school rose in the distance, their
refuge hopelessly far away.

Wanda
swept her shotgun back and forth, tracking the barrel across the horde of
Zapheads behind them. The weapon was worthless at that distance, and even if
she could shoot them, their numbers would absorb the pellets and just keep
coming like the tide.

“Come
on,” Jorge said, sprinting across the field.

His
fellow laborers on the Wilcox farm had been big football fans, which they
viewed mostly as excuses to drink on autumn weekends. He knew enough about the
sport to consider it utterly American—extreme violence broken by endless stretches
of plotting and scheming, all wrapped in the glossy sheen of corporate
advertising and nationalism. The player with the ball had the goal of running
to the far end of the field without getting knocked to the ground. That sounded
to Jorge like a worthwhile ambition.

Wanda
was right behind him, but the Zapheads didn’t accelerate. Instead, they
descended the hill to the bowl of the field as if the game was already over.
They were several dozen in number, young and old, moving with a solemn
persistence that was more disturbing than if they had been galloping and
howling. Jorge glanced up at the stands, half expecting the ghoulish crowd to
break into cheers. He just reached midfield when several groups of mutants
emerged from behind the opposite stands and swarmed toward him and Wanda.

“More
of the freaks,” Wanda said, wheezing and sucking for air.

“Up
there.” Jorge pointed to the stands full of dead people and split off toward
them.

“You
crazy? Run through that stinking mess?”

“By
the ticket booth. There’s an open gate. We can make it to the school.”

“Might
have bodies crammed to the rafters in there. Dead
kids
.”

“No
choice.”

They
reached an asphalt track that ringed the field and climbed a set of concrete
steps to reach the stands. Some of the bodies appeared mummified, as if the
blood had dried inside the skin, while others bulged with excrescence and rot.
They wore the clothes they had likely died in, although a few of them were
naked and glistening with decay. Jorge slipped and caught a metal rail with one
hand. As he pulled himself up, he nearly fell into a corpse at the end of a
row. Its eye sockets were two writhing pools of maggots. Flies buzzed in a
black fleet, cutting crazy loops in the air.

The
bodies leaned against one another, and here and there they were propped up with
posts and wire. Some had fallen forward, bent at an unnatural angle. One dead
woman held an infant, its little pink knit cap sodden with putrefaction. Small
children leaned against adults, all past aging now. A flock of ravens erupted
from the heads and shoulders of the dead, disturbed from their feeding. The
mass of bodies melded into a blur of green skin, black lips, slimy clothes, and
squirming insects.

Wanda
lagged behind, and Jorge thought she had fallen, too, but she waited at the
front row, facing the Zapheads that streamed across the field toward them.

“Hurry!”
he called, still ascending the steps, the cloying stink of rot thick in his
nostrils.

“Go
on,” she said with a wave. “Find your family. I’ll be okay.”

A
low chant drifted from the Zapheads, unintelligible sounds that hinted at a
rhythmic pattern. It was remarkably similar to the murmuring drone of the
American football crowds Jorge had seen on television. Jorge hesitated, not
wanting to abandon the woman after she’d taken a risk to help him. But she
stood there in a determined pose, her shotgun looking as useless as an umbrella
in a hurricane.

She
can catch up later. And they won’t kill her if she doesn’t fight.

He
was justifying his own selfish actions, but if he died here, or was captured,
then Rosa and Marina would be on their own. He fled to the top of the stands
without looking back, crossing the littered concourse to the ticket booth and
the open gate beside it. A white-haired woman in a sweatshirt that read “Go
Wildcats” hung from an electrical cable in the ticket booth. Before her sat a
metal cash box, the bills held in place with small rocks. Her collapsed mouth,
lacking any teeth, was a black maw erupting in a soundless scream.

Jorge
passed through the gate as the first shotgun blast echoed across the shallow
valley.

No
Zapheads stood between him and the closest classroom building. Pumpkin-yellow
school buses were parked along a fenced basketball court. Jorge briefly mulled
their potential as hiding places but decided he could too easily be trapped.
Two one-story wings branched off from the main school building, and Jorge
plotted his alternatives if the nearest door was locked. In the chaos
immediately following the solar storms, most schools immediately activated
lockdown drills, but staff members sometimes remained on site. Jorge hoped the
building wasn’t full of dead children. He wasn’t sure he could bear that.

Wanda’s
shotgun blasted again. Three shots left. But at least she was still alive.

The
door was locked. Jorge wiped the grimy film from the glass and peered inside.
No bodies, and no movement, just a clutter of open lockers, books, and papers
strewn along the tiled floor. A window to his left was open, a better option
than trying for another door.

Two
Zapheads appeared at the ticket booth, heading for the school. He crept to the
window, crouching low, and checked inside the room. Three rows of empty desks
faced a dry-erase board at the front of the class, where math problems were
scribbled in blue. Jorge could almost picture Marina sitting in a desk by the
window, surrounded by noisy, happy children totally oblivious to the potential
horrors of the world. He climbed through the window and rolled to the floor,
checking to make sure the Zapheads hadn’t seen or sensed him.

Another
shot thundered in the distance.
Two remaining.

He
went into the hall, his footsteps jarringly loud in the silence. The air was
stale and carried just a faint whiff of corruption, but this section of the
building was apparently clear of decomposition. Keeping to the shadows in the
gloomy corridor, he passed the open doors of several classrooms, all of them
unoccupied and dusty. He had no specific plan, but the deeper he penetrated the
building, the more likely he could evade detection.

Jorge
turned the corner and came upon a wider hallway. A door creaked open in one of
the off-shooting corridors, and a shaft of light flitted across the floor ahead
of him. He pressed back against a row of lockers, waiting, holding his breath.
The shadows of three figures shrank as their originators drew nearer. One very
distinctly said, “Old people here.”

Jorge
backtracked a few feet and pushed open the first door he reached. He slipped
inside and the door swung closed just as the voice repeated its odd phrase.
Jorge waited in near-total darkness, the only light admitted by a row of glass
bricks along the back wall. His eyes adjusted enough to see that he was in a
restroom, likely the women’s, judging by the lack of urinals. The three
Zapheads outside all spoke at once, although the phrases seemed to overlap and
make no sense. It certainly wasn’t conversation. Jorge was reminded of the
parrots in the pet store where he purchased pet food for Mr. Wilcox’s cats and
dogs. The brightly colored birds articulated words with no emotion or
intention, and Jorge couldn’t understand how anyone could live with such an
annoying creature in the house.

The
Zapheads stopped talking just after they passed the door. Jorge’s heart climbed
the ladder of his ribs and lodged in his throat. Then their voices came closer
until they were just outside the restroom.

Jorge
opened the door to the nearest stall and slipped inside, twisting the latch and
climbing onto the toilet seat. He slipped and almost plunged a foot down into
the stagnant water in the bowl, but he grabbed the top rim of the stall wall
and regained his balance. He pressed a palm against each wall to steady himself
just before the door swished open.

“Old
people,” one of them said as they entered, the words booming off the ceramic
tile and porcelain. The room grew brighter, as if they had switched on a small
flashlight, and then Jorge realized the luminance was cast by their eyes.

Jorge
was angry at himself for backing into a corner. He was cut off and didn’t even
have a window he could smash as an emergency exit. His only escape was through
the door. Which meant battling his way through the mutants.

If
I stay quiet, they will go away.

To
his horror, they came directly to the stall in which he was hiding. The
glinting sparks must have increased with their excitement or anger or whatever
sense guided them, because the floor around the toilet brightened noticeably.
One of them said, “Turn turn turn.”

The
door shook a moment, and then the silver latch turned and popped free.

Jorge’s
vision of a heroic dash for safety vanished. He could barely move, and he
worried that he would collapse and drop into the toilet. A final indignity for
the late, great human race.

“Old
people,” a teenaged girl said, expressionless, dark-haired, and dressed in a
dirty white sweater and blue skirt. Her knees were scabbed and scraped, one
sock rolled to her ankle. She might have been a student at Newton High School in her past life.

“Come
now,” said a man Jorge’s age who looked Hispanic, his black hair slicked back
in greasy strands. The sparks in his dark eyes jittered wildly as he spoke.
“Come now come.”

They’re
talking to me.

The
third mutant, a tall bearded man, stood behind the others with his head tilted
slightly, almost as if he were dozing. They didn’t project the slightest air of
menace. Jorge might as well have been a parent showing up for a P.T.A. meeting
and being directed to the library. But that didn’t make his pulse rate any slower,
and the social anxiety of mixing with Americans was nothing compared to the
chilling strangeness of his present company.

He
could smell them, a mix of metallic vapor and body odor. He wanted to scream,
but that might incite them.

What
if you act like they do? If they respond to violence with violence, maybe
they’ll ignore you if you pretend they don’t exist.

“No,”
he said.

The
Zapheads looked at one another. Although their faces remained expressionless,
their behavior changed and became a little more restless. As if they were
confused and not sure what had agitated them.

“Come
now come now,” the Hispanic Zaphead said.

He
stepped off the toilet, gripping the handicapped bar. “I have to go.”

“I
have to go,” repeated the bearded man.

“Come
go,” said the teenager, as if the words had no connection and she was jamming
them together through some automatic response.