So instead of giving up, he worked his way toward the Blue Ridge Parkway and Milepost 291, even though it had become something of a mythical promised land. He walked days and hid nights, and even when he didn’t see any Zapheads, he sensed their presence, shapes moving just beyond the perimeter of his vision, soft scurrying like rodents, and occasional throaty vocalizations that might have been birds but were too strange to name.
DeVontay spent three days in the bay of a volunteer fire department, a rotted corpse in the office, the big red engines and pumpers already losing their shine. He’d raided the EMT truck and found some hand tools, and he slept in the truck’s cab at night, one arm around an ax handle. He used the ax to bust into a house, but it reeked like a mausoleum and he couldn’t bring himself to raid its kitchen or look for firearms.
After ten days, the Zapheads had closed in again, no longer bothering to conceal themselves. He cracked once from the strain, yelling “Bring it on, you fucking Zappers,” but they maintained their distance, muttering “You fucking Zappers” back at him from a dozen voices. Once, finding Highway 321 again, he found his route blocked by a line of Zapheads standing shoulder to shoulder, half of them naked despite the cool autumn air, old men, children, young women.
He waved the ax at them, threatening to hack his way past, but in the end, their placid faces and sparking eyes had frightened him too much and he’d altered his route. He was no longer heading northwest, but figured he could circle around once he eluded the Zapheads. It was two weeks before he realized they were herding him, like a wolf pack culling a sick deer.
He’d come upon a little community on the banks of a river not far off Highway 321, with an auto repair shop, a Baptist church, a shabby convenience store with its gas pumps removed, and an outdoors outfitters featuring fishing gear, kayaks, and rental bicycles. A narrow, sagging sign by the road said in hand-painted letters, “WELCOME TO STONEWALL, POPULATION NOT NEAR ENOUGH.”A sodden, fly-blown body was splayed beneath the hood of a Buick, a mechanic whose brain had been short-circuited in the middle of changing out spark plugs.
Two ravaged corpses on the church steps looked to have been victims of violent assault, and DeVontay figured they’d been killed by Zapheads while seeking sanctuary. Judging from the stench, more bodies lay behind the arched white doors. A few Victorian-style houses lined the gravel road, with more of them barely visible on the wooded hillsides.
Now, he had to decide whether to hole up in Stonewall for a few days or somehow outmaneuver the Zapheads, who seemed to have swelled in number. He recognized a few that had been following him for days, but other faces were new, as if the Zapheads were swapping out reinforcements. And it finally sunk in that while he’d seen dozens of Zapheads, he’d yet to encounter another living human since parting from Rachel and Stephen.
The door to the convenience store stood open. The body of an old man was propped on a stool behind the counter, so relaxed and natural that at first glance DeVontay thought the shopkeeper was alive, patiently waiting for the next customer. Then he saw the moist fungal splotches on the man’s livid and bloated flesh, and the rot of decomposition pierced his nostrils. The place had been ransacked, and much of the damage appeared to be destructive vandalism.
Most of the snacks and candy were spoiled or stomped into moldering clumps, but he found a few cans of Vienna sausages, a long pack of stale peanuts, and some soggy Fruit Roll-Ups. He filled his pockets and then saw a box of Slim Jims. His chest squeezed in pain at the memory of Stephen’s growing fondness for the greasy snacks. He jammed a few sticks in his back pocket, figuring they contained enough preservatives to last until the next apocalypse, and was turning to leave when he saw the woman standing just inside the door.
She was a Zaphead, with the trademark speckled eyes and filthy clothes. She’d lost a shoe somewhere, and her blouse was missing several buttons. She was maybe thirty, with wild tangles of brown hair, and her mouth was stained with some sort of dark, gummy substance.
Jesus Henry Christ, are these things drinking BLOOD now? Or munching down on the flesh of dead people?
DeVontay was upset at himself for letting his guard down. The Zapheads had been keeping their distance, and he’d assumed they had no interest in attacking him. Indeed, they barely seemed to acknowledge his existence at all, though they clearly kept track of his movements and cut him off whenever he sought a direction toward the mountains.
He’d left the ax leaning against the counter, and he wondered if he would be able to reach it before the woman…did whatever she was going to do.
In the dusty street outside he saw more of them approaching, unhurried and almost solemn. It was their creeping silence that was most unnerving—if only they screeched and howled, he could have dealt with them, swinging the ax into their skulls one by one until he dropped from exhaustion.
He held out one of the snacks for the woman. “Go ahead,” he said. “Snap into a Slim Jim.”
“Slim Jim?” she said, then repeated it with a different inflection, like a stoned hip-hop artist relishing the rhyme. “Slim Jim, Slim Jim, Slimmmm Jimmmm.”
He made an underhanded toss. She repeated the motion as the snack bounced off her chest. Several Zapheads crowded the entrance, including an overweight man and a girl as dark as he was. Even if he reached the ax, he didn’t think he’d hew his way past them before other Zaps closed in. Beside the shattered glass of the reach-in drink cooler was a little hallway leading to the rest rooms. The hallway ended at a back door featuring an emergency bar.
Won’t have to worry about setting off an alarm, at least. But will it open?
He had little choice. He scooped up some little hard bricks of chewing gum and flung them at the woman, and then he fled down the hall. The back door opened with a kick. More Zapheads watched from the riverbank, but he didn’t wait to see what they’d do. He sprinted to the outfitter’s, wrestled with the door for a moment before realizing the weight of a corpse was causing resistance, and then shoved his way inside.
One corner of the store held camping gear, and a long glass counter displayed several rows of hunting knives. He drove a boot into the front of the case, shattering the thick glass, and selected the largest blade he could find. He clipped its holster to his belt loop and searched among the merchandise for other weapons.
Through the window he saw more Zapheads coming from the forest, closing in on the shop. He rummaged through the outdoor gear, grabbed a backpack from a peg on the wall, and stuffed it with a mess kit, first aid supplies, a compass, and some cans of Sterno. He saw no guns, but he collected a hunting bow from a display and shoved some arrows in his backpack, then slung the bow and backpack over one shoulder.
It was when he spied the rows of kayaks in their skeletal metal berths that he got an idea.
Pulling one from its rack, he tossed a paddle in the shell and dragged it to the door. The Zapheads had resumed their position surrounding him, although now they were at least a hundred feet away. Just enough distance if he moved fast enough…
DeVontay dragged the kayak over the corpse in the doorway, tugging it by a short rope tethered to its helm. He clutched the knife handle in his other hand, although he left the weapon holstered. The river was barely fifty feet from the outfitter’s shop, and a timber-framed landing was built into the bank, featuring a stone-covered incline that led to the rippling water. He shoved the kayak into the current, nearly lost his balance while scrambling aboard, and then he worked the paddle toward deeper water.