“We just have to be quick and clean.”
Campbell didn’t see how a makeshift surgery with kitchenware could be either of those things. The professor’s eyes glowed with a confident serenity that did nothing to soothe Campbell’s anxiety. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be in the room when the Zapheads witnessed the carnage, but he couldn’t abandon Rachel. Somebody had to hold her down.
“You sure we have to do this?” Campbell said. “Can’t we wait and see if it gets better.”
“She wouldn’t make it to sunrise tomorrow,” the professor said, totally comfortable with his nudity as he stood like some cult leader preparing for a ritual sacrifice.
“Okay, then. Let’s get this over with.”
Campbell splashed vodka over the open wound and around the area where the professor intended to make the first incision. Rachel moaned at the sting of pain but didn’t fully awaken. He wondered if he should pour a little in her mouth, and then decided no amount of alcohol could dull the pain ahead.
The professor massaged the area around the wound, causing glistening, yellowish pus to break and run. A few of the supplicant Zapheads grew restless and several pairs of eyes opened, their strange glittering increasing Campbell’s anxiety.
“Hurry,” Campbell said, although he wasn’t sure how you could rush the nightmare to come.
“I need to determine where the flesh is healthy,” the professor said.
“If you don’t start cutting, you’re soon going to have about twenty eager little helpers. And unlike you, I don’t think they studied biology in college. They studied on the dead people upstairs, maybe, but Rachel’s still in one piece.”
“Let’s do it.” The professor slipped the butcher knife from the couch cushions, still rubbing the infected area with his left hand. The blade seemed ridiculously unsuited for the task, and Campbell wondered once again if the professor had gone absolutely mad from his confinement.
Campbell had never felt so helpless. He didn’t know enough to challenge the professor’s decision—hell, he’d barely been a C student in science—but Rachel undoubtedly was headed for a horrible death if they did nothing. But before the professor could bring the blade to bear, the nearest Zaphead unclasped her hands and laid them on Rachel’s injured leg. The Zaphead beside her followed suit, and the others nearest the sofa shifted forward and reached out their own hands.
They rubbed her skin in imitation of the professor’s massaging motion, and Rachel’s flesh quivered with the attention. More pus ran free, now tinged pink with blood. The Zapheads were no longer praying, instead gathering closer and closer to the sofa.
Campbell felt trapped by the crowd, but he refused to release Rachel’s wrists. He was atop her torso, applying enough weight to hold her down without crushing her, and Rachel’s uneven, labored breath whisked past his ear.
“For God’s sake, put the knife away,” Campbell hissed at the professor.
The Zapheads crowded in so that the professor had difficulty keeping a hand near the wound. More Zapheads reached in, rubbing and stroking her bare leg with all the fervency they’d recently expressed in their mockery of prayer. They muttered in unison, but those weren’t words issuing from their throats. The sounds melded and flattened out into a single sonic vibration, almost like the mantra of meditating monks.
Campbell pushed at the nearest hands, almost in tears. How long before they began digging into the wound and tugging bits of rotten meat away?
“Give me the knife!” Campbell yelled at the professor, who had backed away from the bizarre scene. Campbell planned to launch himself into the pack and chop, slice, and hew his way back to sanity, although he was aware the violence would be met with a like response.
But before the professor could react, Campbell saw something even more utterly remarkable and strangely horrific—the flesh at the edges of Rachel’s wound turned from greenish-red to bright pink, and the pustules began to dry and shrink. The fecund, spoiled aroma of the wound dissipated. As the many hands stroked and smoothed, the wound began to close.
The Zapheads were healing her with their touch.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wonder if this is how runaway slaves felt.
DeVontay Jones had been on the run for weeks, ever since he’d lured away the Zapheads that had been closing in on their camp. The ploy allowed Rachel and little Stephen to escape, but he wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision. Abandoning them might have left them more vulnerable, and splitting up might have lowered each of their chances for survival.
But he hadn’t been thinking much of his own survival, not as he’d raced through the woods, noisily kicking up dry leaves and snapping branches to draw the attention of his pursuers. He’d barely been able to make out their forms in the darkness. If not for the glittering of their eyes, he wouldn’t have known they’d followed him, because they moved as silently as sharks in the ocean of the night.
At times he was sure they would all rush him and tear him to pieces, but only minutes later he’d just as deeply believed they had given up pursuit. The rifle had provided little comfort. The pairs of eyes seemed to greatly outnumber his supply of bullets. So he kept moving, sweaty and breathless in the October night, until he’d led the Zapheads miles away from Rachel and Stephen.
He’d wondered if the strange, luminous quality of the Zapheads’ eyes gave them enhanced night vision. Maybe they’d mutated into highly efficient killing machines, although their reluctance to attack him didn’t seem to fit the bloodthirsty behavior they’d exhibited in the immediate aftermath of the solar storms.
When dawn broke, there’d been no sign of them, although he circled round and found multiple sets of footprints. Still, he’d been afraid to backtrack to the camp, in case Rachel had disobeyed his command to flee. In the end, he’d kept moving, planning to circle around the forest heading northwest until he found a paved road that would lead him on to Milepost 291.
A day after parting with Rachel and Stephen, he’d heard a great explosion in the distance, followed by a plume of black, oily smoke rising over the distant gray ridges. DeVontay had worked his way toward it, following a creek that soon swelled into a rushing river, but the passage was slow amid the boulders and lush vegetation on the stream banks. He’d often had to wade in the icy water, and once he’d slipped and soaked his clothes and gear. Worse, he’d lost his grip on the rifle and it had been swept away in the churning rapids.
Defenseless, he’d made his way to the site of the fire, discovering the scorched shell of a gas station and a number of desiccated corpses in the ruins. He also saw the pages from comic books torn out and stuffed under windshield wipers, a message from Stephen meant to show that he and Rachel had made it this far.
But his heart sank when he found Rachel’s blackened backpack among the charcoal and ashes. He was sure they’d both died there, probably fighting off a Zaphead attack. Rachel might even have deliberately started the fire to save them from whatever horrible fate the Zapheads would have rendered.
DeVontay had been savagely dejected—not only had he developed a deep attraction to Rachel, he’d grown to revel in his role of protector. For the first time in his life, he’d found a true purpose, one that he’d fully committed himself to and one which seemed greater than himself. To lose that purpose—even in a world already hopelessly lost forever—seemed more than any man should have to bear.
As a child growing up in South Philly, he’d fought his way through his teens. In the city of Rocky and the Liberty Bell, you didn’t back down. When he wouldn’t join the neighborhood gang, he endured a set of brass knuckles to the eye, turning it to jelly. Even after he was fitted with a glass prosthetic, he still refused to abandon the streets. Most of the kids who had attacked him wound up dead or in jail.