She shook him off with surprising strength and assaulted the door again. It rattled and a large shard of glass fell free. Campbell was afraid she’d cut herself to pieces and shatter her bones if she continued slamming against the door.
He called her name but she was oblivious. He could see her eyes reflected in the window, six billion stars winking and dying over and over again.
I can let her destroy herself or let her go.
He wedged his hand between her and the wood and grabbed the door handle. He twisted and yanked it backward, allowing fresh, cold air to pour in. But Rachel hurled herself again and the door slammed shut, the noise reverberating through the house. As she drew back once more, he tried again and this time managed to swing the door open while simultaneously lowering his shoulder and driving it into Rachel’s abdomen.
She was knocked off-balance but kept her feet, bumping into him so hard that he dropped to his knees. She shoved him aside and exited the house, fleeing into the night.
“Rachel!” he called after her, clasping his injured arm against his chest.
He heard her repeat “Rachel Rachel Rachel,” the sounds growing fainter with each second as she vanished into the forest.
Maybe her radiant eyes imparted night vision, but Campbell had no such characteristic. However, if he let her go now, he’d never see her again. And this might be his only chance to discover what strange force drew her into the night.
If I want to learn what makes Zapheads tick, I’d better roll with it.
He didn’t delude himself that he would be able to make any use of the knowledge. He didn’t anticipate sharing it with anyone. Even if he continued on to Milepost 291, the Zapheads were likely to keep changing as they had since the solar storms struck two months ago.
And what if he was one of the last survivors? What good would it do him to just keep living until his time ran out?
He grabbed the backpack he and Rachel had jammed with food and supplies, took a last look around the house and the warming glow of the fireplace, and then headed outside. The night wasn’t fully dark, since the moonlight painted a chrome swathe overhead.
A gap in the trees revealed mist in the valley below, like a thick, gray ocean that almost seemed solid enough to walk across. A mile or so away, a frothy red and orange swirl boiled underneath the fog, suggesting a distant fire.
Are the Zapheads destroying buildings again, like they did in the cities?
He moved as fast as he could in the direction Rachel had gone, adjusting the pack so the straps didn’t dig into his shoulders. Every thirty seconds, he would call Rachel’s name, and she would echo it. He tracked her using a clumsy game of “Marco Polo,” only instead of swimming in water, he clawed his way through the forest.
Rachel slowed enough for him to track her by her movements. She emerged from the forest onto a moonlit gravel road, heading downhill into the valley. He occasionally called to her, but she didn’t change pace or direction. A faint haze in the east suggested a hidden sun that would soon dawn on a world it had forever altered.
Campbell struggled to keep Rachel in sight. She walked with relentless precision, her feet skating over the gravel and mud and weeds as if powered by something outside her body. They passed more houses along the way, but Rachel took no notice of them, and Campbell only had the opportunity to give them cursory glances. No sign of life showed itself, and Campbell was sure he was the last soul in a Zaphead world.
But he hadn’t yet given up hope on Rachel. Perhaps this was a phase and she would soon burn through it like a fever destroying a virus, and he planned to be there when she returned to her senses. He could only imagine her gratitude toward him—that kind of loyalty was rare enough in Before, and nearly unfathomable in After, where humans practiced survival of the fittest even as they surrendered the top of the evolutionary chain.
The terrain leveled out somewhat and the mist burned away under the dawn, and they came to a paved road that ran along a river. The water was silver and green in the morning light, frothing where it tumbled over stones. The trees thinned as the land gave way to open pasture and meadow, farms and houses lining the waterway, vehicles stalled in the road or axle-deep in ditches, seat-belted corpses rotting inside them.
Invigorated with the false hope of a new day, Campbell burst into a jog until he caught up with Rachel. He spoke to her but she stared past him with wildly glittering eyes, focused on something outside his perception.
And then he saw the line of figures trailing out of the trees a few hundred yards down the road.
CHAPTER FORTY
The screams rang in DeVontay’s head hours after the horrible sounds were swallowed by the mist.
So much for my goddamned magic eye. Never saw that coming.
The horrors had merged into one slow-motion nightmare: the children lying bloody and still on the ground, Angelique shooting Kiki in the head, Zapheads swarming out of the darkness on all sides as Rooster’s men desperately tried to fight them off.
DeVontay broke from his paralysis long enough to grab Stephen, yank him to the ground, and cover him until the bullets stopped flying. Angelique shot two Zapheads at point-blank range and then she was buried under a squirming army of them, kicking and cussing and finally squealing. The Zapheads imitated her words until her shrieks gave way to the nasty wet sounds of violence. DeVontay could have sworn her tendons and bones popped as they ripped at her body.
He covered Stephen’s mouth so the boy wouldn’t cry out. He hoped the Zapheads were too busy with their hostile prey to notice the two of them, but he couldn’t count on the fog to conceal them all night. So he whispered in Stephen’s ear, instructing him to crawl slowly toward the woods. “Whatever you do, don’t look up, and don’t look at any of the dead people.”
And so they had wriggled through the carnage around them, at one point crossing over the body of a young girl who lay on her belly, a large red hole in the back of her white sweater. Stephen whimpered and went rigid, but DeVontay coaxed him forward until the violence was lost in the fog and darkness behind them. But they didn’t move fast enough to escape the sounds and smells.
They reached the trees and DeVontay wanted nothing more than to break into a crazed run. But he could hear footsteps churning the damp leaves of the forest floor and realized more Zapheads had responded to the sound of gunfire, pilgrims trudging the sacred path to a temple of gore.
The best—and worst—thing to do was to wait in hiding, pressed low in the filthy weeds and rotted logs and fragrant evergreens. Stephen appeared to be in shock, and DeVontay whispered to him to keep him calm. But the words of encouragement were so hollow he almost laughed out loud. The boy had witnessed the true condition of the world, and no words would ever erase the wide-eyed confusion of the children as they were gunned down.
“My fault,” Stephen whispered.
“No, it’s not.”
“I ran back to them. I shoulda—“
“No, Little Man. If you feel guilty, then I have to feel guilty. Because I brought Rooster to the group. He promised to take care of you all.”
And I guess he did, in his way.
“Do you think anybody got away?” Stephen whispered, with a heartbreaking hint of hope.
DeVontay fed the lie for both of them. “Maybe. James ran pretty fast, and I couldn’t see everything.”
“How long do we wait here?”
“Until they’re done.”
The actual slaughter and subsequent battle had lasted maybe three minutes, but the Zapheads continued to march through the trees. At one point, with dawn approaching, DeVontay risked lifting his head to look out at the meadow. Figures moved in the cold steam of morning, like field medics gathering the casualties of war after an assault.