But isn’t that what is happening anyway, to all of us, all the time? We’re all headed for it. We just maintain plausible deniability. We know we’re dying, but just not today. We all want to go to heaven, but not right now. Rinse and repeat as needed.
Stephen continued toward the plane, transfixed as if it was the first time he’d seen one up close, or maybe just enjoying a boyish fascination with destruction. Rachel tugged at his shirt sleeve, but he shook free and moved closer. A small circle of scorched grass surrounded the rear of the plane, but the hull was relatively intact. Luggage lay scattered around the wreckage, one bag torn open to reveal a vivid red dress, another with the heads of golf clubs poking from one end.
Rachel saw no movement behind the rounded rectangular windows, and she didn’t want Stephen exposed to the stench of several dozen decomposing bodies. Even in the shade, the plane’s interior had probably topped a hundred degrees, roasting the bodies trapped inside.
“Wanna see,” Stephen said.
“Let DeVontay check it out first,” Rachel said.
DeVontay lowered his eyebrows, his glass eye glinting drily in the sunlight. “Gee, thanks.”
“Hey, you’re the man of the family,” she said.
They hadn’t discussed their odd relationship, but they’d become a family in perhaps the truest sense of the word. Nothing the bible would recognize, certainly, but they’d faced tribulations together that even the Old Testament plagues couldn’t rival. They were bound by mutual survival.
DeVontay headed toward the wreckage, rifle at the ready. Stephen started after him, but Rachel reached out and snagged his shirt, this time keeping a grip. “Not so fast, fearless scout.”
DeVontay peered through one of the rounded port windows, then walked around to the front where the nose of the plane had torn loose from the body. Rachel knelt over a green suitcase that had busted open in the crash. A tag around the handle revealed the baggage had been through Atlanta. Rachel briefly considered the privacy of the suitcase’s owner. Did she have the right to prowl in someone’s personal history?
She glanced over at the plane. Beyond it, in the weeds, a sodden stretch of cloth ended in a twisted nub. At the end of the nub, a leather shoe pointed up at the treetops.
If that were me, I’d want someone to use whatever I could offer.
As she opened the case, Stephen joined her and dug into the clothes, books, and a little zippered bag of makeup. Stephen pulled out a pair of panties and his face curdled in disgust before he flung them away. “Yuck.”
His reaction was so much that of an ordinary boy—a boy from Before—that Rachel almost smiled. But smiling seemed like sacrilege at this scene of such slaughter.
She found a long-sleeved blouse in a shade of subdued rose. She held it up over the grimy flannel shirt she’d been wearing since they’d left the farmhouse. It looked close to her size. “What do you think?” she asked Stephen.
He shrugged. “I guess it’s pretty, if you like that kind of thing.”
She wadded it up and tossed it back in the suitcase. “You’re right. No use looking pretty these days.”
Stephen picked up the blouse and held it out to her. His big brown eyes were wide and hopeful—like maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to pretend things hadn’t changed so much. “It’s pretty. Like something my mom would wear.”
This time she did smile. “Okay,” she said, lifting one arm and giving an exaggerated sniff of her armpit. “Guess this one is getting a little stinky.”
DeVontay emerged from the devastated fuselage, his rifle slung casually over his shoulder. “All clear,” he said. “I think we got us a roof for the night.”
A jolt of horror shot through Rachel. He didn’t expect them to sleep among all those bodies, did he?
DeVontay pointed to the plan’s nose, which was cracked like an egg and sheared upward. “Empty,” he said.
Rachel started to repack the suitcase, and then realized how ridiculous her instinct was. She tucked the blouse under her arm. “Five-star accommodations?”
DeVontay glanced up at the sinking sun. “I don’t like stars. Especially that one.”
Stephen, apparently taking the adult cue that it was okay to prowl through the luggage, ran over to a satchel and unzipped it, throwing clothes and papers into the air. He fell silent and still, staring down into the mess.
Rachel and DeVontay shared a glance, and DeVontay frowned and shook his head. “Go on. Do your counselor thing.”
“Aye-yay, Captain.”
Rachel went over to Stephen and saw the baby doll nestled in the satchel’s contents. Stephen had outgrown his attachment to his baby doll Miss Molly, leaving it with the corpse of a girl to comfort her on her journey to the beyond. But now the loss of his mother showed on his face, a mute, hollow kind of pain.
“Come on,” she said, taking him by the shoulder and guiding him to the nose of the plane where they would camp for the night. She’d soon be gathering clothes to bundle into makeshift beds, and then starting a campfire to heat a few cans of Campbell’s soup with crackers. DeVontay was busy clearing wreckage from the tilted nose of the plane.
They’d sleep surrounded by the dead.
Just another ordinary day in After.
As Rachel comforted Stephen, she didn’t notice the movement in the surrounding forest, or the eyes that watched them settle in for the night.
CHAPTER TWO
“Need to kill it,” Franklin said.
Jorge didn’t like the way the old man was gripping his rifle, as if he couldn’t decide whether to shoot or hurl the weapon to the forest below. They were perched on a platform twenty feet off the floor of Franklin’s mountain compound, a two-acre, fenced-in patch of claimed wilderness he jokingly called Wheelerville.
Ever since Franklin had welcomed Jorge and his wife Rosa and helped tend his daughter Marina back to health, Jorge had been looking for a way to thank the man. But Franklin was more interested in contribution than gratitude. Jorge had worked hard to tend the man’s garden and livestock, and Franklin seemed pleased with the help.
But after Jorge had rescued the woman and her baby and brought them back to the compound, they’d discovered the baby had been affected by the massive solar storms that had wiped out the world’s infrastructure.
The baby was a Zaphead, the colorful name conjured by the media for those whose personalities had been altered by the first waves of electromagnetic radiation. But soon the waves had grown more intense, until the talking heads on the television were replaced by static and then darkness, as electricity failed and car engines fell quiet and people died by the millions.
And now Franklin wanted to kill more.
“It is only a child,” Jorge said.
“I don’t like it in the compound.” The old man spat off the platform, watching his saliva arc into the golden leaves below. “It’s going to draw more of them.”
“They haven’t attacked us yet.” When Jorge and Franklin rescued the young woman, the Zapheads had been chasing her. But now Jorge wasn’t sure whether the others had wanted to kill the woman or whether they’d wanted to take her infant.
“They’re out there. Watching. Waiting.”
“Do you think they are intelligent enough to wait? The Zapheads”—Jorge was still uncomfortable using that term, because it could just as easily be “spic” or “beaner” in another situation—“that attacked me were like mindless killers, hardly aware of what they were doing.”
“They’re acting weird, all right. Can’t trust ‘em. I liked them better when they were crazy. At least then, a fellow knew what was what.”