At first, Campbell thought it was a farm family, the house’s occupants, trapped at a last supper by the sudden death served up by solar storms. But these corpses were fresher, less disintegrated than their human counterparts scattered across North Carolina and presumably the world. Most horrible of all, their eyes were peeled open, clots of darkness staring into a long nothing.
The closest corpse, mercifully facing the other way, was a young girl of maybe eight or nine, a blue bow in her blonde hair. At the head of the table was a paternal old man, the penlight glinting off his bald head and the pair of round spectacles perched delicately on the end of his nose. Lining each side of the table were men, women, and adolescents all sharing that same hollow-eyed gaze. One of the women had a toddler in her lap, a bib tucked under his plump, discolored chin.
Zaps. Goddamned creeping Zaps.
Unlike the Zapheads outside, who might even now be closing in before he had a chance to check the back door and windows, the assembled dead were all dressed in clean clothes, the men in jackets and clumsily knotted ties, the women in dresses and jewelry. They each had empty plates before them, with silverware and napkins laid out for a formal meal. But it was the centerpiece—the main course—that was most chilling of all.
Laid out on the table, hands folded neatly over his chest, was the Zaphead the soldiers had killed the evening before. He was naked, his hands covering the clotted smear of dried blood where he’d been shot through the heart. Someone had combed his hair and apparently washed the body. He’d been filthy while incarcerated by the soldiers, but here he had been tended like…
Campbell couldn’t complete the sickening thought and fought down a rising gorge of nausea. He couldn’t afford weakness, so he backed out of the room, reeling with the possibilities.
Did Wilma do this? She’s nutty enough about the Zaps to do such a thing.
But that was impossible, because they’d been together since the Zapheads had retrieved the corpse. He recalled her cryptic words: “I’m not welcome there anymore.”
“So, wonder what joys are waiting upstairs,” he whispered, mostly to hear his own voice and be reassured that he hadn’t, in fact, gone mad along with Wilma. Except he might be talking to the Pete-guy in his head, and that wasn’t a good sign. “Maybe one of those hillbilly orgies, a necrophilia wet dream.”
Something pounded on the front door. And again.
“Nobody home,” he said, giggling.
The pounded grew insistent, and then multiplied, a rain of wooden blows. Campbell covered his ears and fled to the end of the hall, climbing the stairs. The back door might be open, and the Zapheads would get in sooner or later anyway. None of that mattered. All he cared about was flight, movement, the illusion of escape.
During his Psych 101 class, he’d learned all about the house as a metaphor for consciousness and the mind. It made sense on every level—the dark basement where the bad things lurked in shadow, the ground floor of habit and routine and comfort, the stairs to measure spiritual and emotional ascension.
And the attic…
Which usually had only one narrow access door, easily blocked or defended.
“What do you think, Pete?” he said, reaching the second-floor landing and facing several doors. “Do we take Door Number Two with the all-expenses-paid trip to Paris, or do we stay practical and go for Door Number Three and the brand-new Buick Skylark?”
If Pete were alive, he’d want Door Number One, which likely contained dope, booze, and wasted teen-aged girls, with Death Cab for Cutie on the jambox and a carton of cigarettes on the coffee table.
If only, Petey. If only.
Campbell tried the nearest door. He could only endure one glance before he killed his penlight and vomited.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Franklin and McCrone reached the compound an hour after dark.
But “dark” was the wrong word, because the aurora cast a green radiance across the sky, like cheap mercury vapor streetlights above an empty parking lot. Although eerie, Franklin had come to enjoy the lack of pure darkness, although the star fields were cloudier and harder to follow.
He’d often wondered if the lingering aurora signaled that the solar radiation was still affecting the planet in ways no one could measure. Did birds still know how to fly south for the winter? Could bees find their way back to the colony? What about dolphins and whales and aquatic life that counted on subtle shifts in tide and temperature?
There weren’t many eggheads left to come up with answers. All their instruments and formulas hadn’t done a bit of good when Doomsday arrived.
He supposed humans hadn’t been the only living creatures affected by the radiation. But the chickens acted much the same as before. The goats—well, you could never tell with goats, because they were already peculiar as hell. Franklin had always enjoyed them, finding more in common with them than with his fellow humans. They were quirky, clever, and often downright ornery, which is why he kept them even though they ate more than they produced in milk.
Franklin stopped before the gate, winded from the long climb through the forest.
McCrone jabbed him in the spine with the tip of the rifle. “Where is it?”
“Right here.”
“Damn, oldtimer. All those years in the survival network must have paid off. We would have never found this place without satellite surveillance and GPS.”
“There used to be a thing called ‘American pride.’ Then the government made it a catch phrase to brainwash folks like you.”
“I told you, I didn’t enlist because I loved my country,” McCrone said. “I signed up because my unemployment ran out and your generation shipped all the jobs to China. Now get us in there. I’m tired.”
Franklin parted the nest of vines and dug for the gate latch. “Locked.”
“Right. And I don’t suppose you have the key. What a coincidence.”
“I got a key, all right. But it’s on the inside.”
“You locked yourself out of your own compound? I thought you preppers were supposed to be smart.” McCrone paced a few steps, feeling the fence himself, marveling at the natural camouflage Franklin had installed. “It’s only ten feet or so. Should be able to climb it easy enough.”
“Topped by barbed wire. Be careful you don’t catch the family jewels.”
“I’m not the one doing the climbing. You are.”
Franklin considered his options. He could climb over and then just leave the gate locked, but first he’d have to deactivate the alarm system. If the woods were crawling with soldiers and Zapheads, they’d zoom in soon enough. But once inside, he’d have the advantage. McCrone had both his rifles, but he still had two pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, several military-grade incendiary devices, and some hand weapons like knives and hatchets stored in a strongbox. He’d also be on his home turf. And if McCrone became impatient and climbed over the fence himself, Franklin would have the element of surprise.
But he was worried that none of the others had reacted to their approach. If Jorge had come back, he would know to be on high alert. And if Jorge hadn’t made it—if the Zaps or the equally brain-dead citizens of Army Nation got him—then Rosa or her daughter should have been on lookout.
Franklin had been uneasy leaving them there alone with that young woman, Cathy, and her Zap brat. He was pretty sure that the solar sickness wasn’t spread by human contact—or else the mom would have gone all mutant long ago, the way that thing gnawed at her milk glands—but maybe the evil was more insidious. Maybe its mere presence contaminated the compound, just the way all the older Zapheads had blighted the planet.