Franklin looked past her restless form to Marina and Rosa huddled together under a blanket. He didn’t even really care that they were Mexicans. The future had no borders. They were fit and healthy, good stock for the cause. And his job was to help keep them strong and to teach them.
In case Rachel didn’t make it here.
No, not “in case”…just “until.”
Cathy moaned again and her eyes flickered open. The fire glittered in them momentarily, almost eerily like that of her mutated offspring’s. Then it struck him.
The sun in their eyes…that’s what it looks like. A hundred little suns in their eyes.
He wondered briefly if she had somehow mutated as well, as if the little creature’s bite marks on her breasts had passed its sick strain into her. But then she blinked and the illusion passed. She was just a frightened young woman, staring wide-eyed at him as if not knowing where she was.
“You were having a bad dream,” he whispered.
He reached out to her but she flinched away. He realized his hand was passing distressingly close to her naked breasts and he pulled away, grabbing the edge of the blanket to slide it over the smooth curve of her shoulder. He gave it a paternal pat as she snuggled down into the blanket.
“Thanks,” she replied, moving the infant so that its head was exposed. So it wouldn’t suffocate.
Franklin kept his eyes fixed on her face. “Who’s Joe”?
Her eyes darted as if she expected to see him in the fire-illuminated room. Then sadness settled over her. “My husband.”
Franklin nodded. He didn’t want to wake the other two, but he wanted to understand her—to understand how someone could betray their kind and harbor the enemy like this.
“Did he…die?” he asked.
“Yes, but not in the burn.” She kept her voice low to match his. “I was a nurse at the Asheville hospital. I was on maternity leave but they were already getting cases of inexplicable behavioral changes, just after the solar storm first reached Earth.”
He didn’t realize she was a nurse. Yes, the new order would need her. Assuming she didn’t waste her talent and skill keeping the wrong types alive.
“And it all happened so fast,” she said. “My husband—Joe—was a police officer. He learned before most people what was happening, so he came home and said we needed to get out of town. I wrapped up little Joey while he packed, and we got in his patrol car. We didn’t have a real plan, but already people were dropping dead, the highways were clogged, everything was going crazy. He thought the parkway would be safer, and we’d just turned on it when we found the road was blocked with wrecks. And then they started attacking us.”
“The Zapheads?”
She nodded. He expected the memory would repulse her and make her shove the infant from her chest, but instead she only cradled it more protectively. “My husband shot three of them, but then they dragged him out of the car and—”
Her voice broke, and even though she swallowed back her sob, it was forceful enough to cause the infant to stir. Franklin reached over its head and stroked the side of the woman’s cheek, her tears wetting the back of his hand.
“We all went through some trauma,” he said. “The end of the world is never easy for anybody.”
Her face clenched and a few more tears glistened on her lashes. “I grabbed Joey and ran. We spent one night in an empty car. I didn’t know where to go. So we just…”
Franklin swallowed hard. The two females in the other bed stirred, and the fire hissed and popped with heat. “When did you know about…the baby?”
“Baby?” She hugged the tiny Zaphead closer. “What about him?”
“That he was different.”
Her eyes grew soulful and happy. “He’s my special boy.”
“Are you…” Franklin didn’t know how to approach the problem. He’d never understood women in the best of times, and under circumstances such as these, he was hopeless.
Then the baby startled, waving its little fists in the air. It made a chuckling sound, as if something vibrated in its throat. Its face was still turned away from Franklin, but he studied it for the first time.
With its eyes closed, it looked just like a human infant—tufts of downy hair, skin nearly translucent, limbs soft and plump. But that disturbing chuckle was like something from an animal, not a human.
Cathy smiled. “He’s hungry.”
Franklin was appalled to realize the infant’s throaty noises were a cry for milk. And even more horrifying was when the young mother pulled back the blanket and brought the infant to one of her creamy breasts. The baby opened its mouth and latched on, and the chuckling died away into a contented purr.
Franklin turned away, trembling. He rose from the makeshift bed and went to the fire. He drove a metal poker into the embers to drown out the horrible moist sound of the suckling.
Maybe the new order wouldn’t play out exactly as he’d planned it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Campbell lurched and kicked as the hands squeezed his head.
Fingers pressed near his eye sockets and he went wild, bucking as the attacker climbed onto his back and tried to ride him to the ground. He swung his pistol around his side, driving the barrel into flesh. If he fired, the noise might bring the Zapheads back, and this attack seemed like a solitary act.
He collapsed his legs and rolled, hoping to throw off his attacker. He was rising to run when her voice hissed in his ear: “Stop or they’ll hear us.”
Campbell immediately relaxed his muscles and knelt against the forest floor. The woman pressed against him to whisper again, her breath ripe with garlic and wine. “You’re new to these parts, ain’t you?”
“Yeah.” His heartbeat slowed from a gallop to a full trot. “But I’m thinking of settling down. People are very friendly here.”
“Saw you come off the highway. What were you doing following those soldiers?”
“Those were the first people I’d seen in days. Living people, that is.”
“Well, I ain’t so sure those soldiers are human beings anymore. They’re acting like they rule the world.”
“With automatic weapons, I guess they do. Why did you jump me, anyway?”
“If I’d have hollered, they might have heard us.”
“But I could have shot you.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That was a possibility.”
Campbell bent and looked through the trees. No sign of movement. “Do you live around here?”
“Got a camper trailer back in the woods. Land’s been in the family for a century.”
“Is it safe?”
“Safe as anywhere. Soldiers haven’t found it yet, and I lay low so the Zappers don’t pay me no mind.”
He had a sense of her in the dark, a woman maybe 40, short and solid and tough. If she’d been seriously attacking him, he would have had a challenge fending her off. But he supposed anyone still left alive was tough in one way or another.
“They took the dead Zaphead,” Campbell said. “What will they do with it?”
“I don’t want to sit in the woods all night and jabber,” the woman said. “Come on.”
She reached out and found his hand in the dark. She tugged him with surprising strength in the direction opposite of the highway.
“I’m going back to the road,” he said. “It’s open so I can see any threats, and I can make better time.”
She didn’t release his hand. “Where you headed?”
“North. To the Blue Ridge Parkway. I heard there was a survival camp there.”
“There are survival camps all over the place. Them soldiers have one. And you could say mine is one, too. Now come on.’
He resisted, and she added, “Just for the night.”
Campbell considered his options. He hadn’t had real human contact in weeks, and now that he had an alternative, he wasn’t sure he could face a night of locking himself inside a stranded vehicle to sleep. “Okay.”