“DeVontay will see the smoke,” Stephen said.
“Sure,” Rachel said.
“And he’ll come see what caused it.”
“Yes,” she said, although it was more likely DeVontay would avoid the area, knowing the fire would attract Zapheads.
Assuming he’s still alive.
“We’ll be able to see him if he comes down the highway,” she said.
“Following the X-Men bread crumbs!”
She ruffled his hair, noting that it was greasy. “We’re going to have to find you some shampoo soon.”
“I’m not taking no bath.”
“That’s ‘any’ bath.”
“You don’t correct DeVontay when he doesn’t talk right.”
“DeVontay’s a grown man. You’re still a child.”
“A child who helped save your life.”
“Score,” she said. “You’ve got a point.”
Rachel looked around, wondering how long it would take for the fire to spread to the other stores and then the hill. The way the wind was blowing, it might reach the trees and then grow into a wildfire.
“We need to keep moving,” Rachel said.
Stephen shot her a dubious look. “Can you even walk?”
“Of course.”
“Your backpack’s down there.”
“Yes.”
“And we don’t got no…I mean, we don’t have a map.” Stephen hugged his own backpack as if she might claim it, along with his comic book collection.
“That’s okay. We’ll stop at houses along the way and find what we need. And we don’t need a map because we’re almost there.” She pointed to the undulating ridges that rose in the northwest. “The Blue Ridge Parkway runs across those mountains. If we just keep walking, we’re bound to hit it sooner or later. Then we can find Milepost 291 and rest a bit.”
She didn’t believe it would be that simple. Nothing in After had been easy. But all that remained was to do the next right thing, to trust in the vision that her grandfather Franklin Wheeler had imparted.
She could almost hear him now: “Freedom doesn’t come without sacrifice, Rachel.”
She stood, smiling at Stephen to hide her grimace. Her leg felt as if someone had ripped open the flesh with a circular saw, packed it full of battery acid, tied it shut with barbed wire, and then poured salted lemon juice on it before applying the tip of a blow torch to seal the wound.
Rachel took a tentative step and decided that she could endure it. Their progress would be slow, but she wasn’t ready to surrender yet.
The next step, and the next.
For Chelsea. For Stephen. For Grandpa.
Even for me.
“Rachel?”
She’d been so focused on whether her leg wouldn’t betray her that she hadn’t realized she’d left Stephen behind. She turned around to find him watching the Zapheads at the gas station.
One of them, standing near the overturned and blackened hull of the Toyota pickup, reached out a hand as if to touch the fire. His shirt sleeve burst into flames and then the yellow and orange heat licked along the length of his arm.
The Zaphead turned his palm up as if curious about the strange, flickering light. It caught the full fabric of his shirt, and then his beard and hair burst into flames. Soon he was ablaze from the torso up, immolated, but he didn’t beat at the fire or retreat from the heat.
It reminded Rachel of the famous photograph of the Buddhist monk who’d set himself on fire to protest persecution in Vietnam.
Except this Zaphead wasn’t protesting.
Neither did he flee.
Instead, he seemed entirely ambivalent about the blistering and popping of his flesh.
“He looks just like the Human Torch,” Stephen whispered.
She pulled on his arm. He’d seen far too much already.
The nearest Zaphead also reached out a hand to touch the burning creature, which then stepped forward into the larger conflagration. The second one looked at her palm and the smoke rising from scorched flesh, and then she followed. So did another.
All the gathered Zapheads then walked into the fire, one by one, approaching from all sides, their bodies outlined in dark silhouette for just a moment before vanishing into the roaring heart of hell.
“Come on,” Rachel said, nearly weeping, tugging Stephen so hard they both almost tumbled over.
Stephen finally relented and she led him up the slope, disguising her limp, as the fire crackled and spat with the discovery of new fuel. The petroleum smoke changed flavor, and Rachel nearly vomited.
It smelled like barbecue.
They didn’t scream.
God, why didn’t you at least let them scream?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Her name had been Kasey.
She didn’t know that her parents had both been attorneys—her father an intellectual properties expert who mostly worked with corporations, her mother a family lawyer and juvenile guardian ad litem who also volunteered with a non-profit legal defense agency that advocated for minority rights.
She no longer remembered that they had lived in Atlanta, and that they had been on a vacation that would take them across the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland before her farther traveled on to a conference in D.C.
Kasey had been looking forward to seeing the wild horses that strolled across the dunes. Her father had even bought a new tent and a kite, and he had promised to turn off his cell phone for three whole days.
She was eleven years old and about to enter the seventh grade, nervous because she was a little younger than her classmates. Plus Ashleigh Ostermueller had grown boobs over the summer, which meant Bradley Staley would probably like Ashleigh better than he liked Kasey.
It was Thursday and she had been sleeping in the backseat of the Nissan Pathfinder when the thing happened.
Her father must have sensed the electrical signals misfiring, no longer sending the appropriate messages from his brain to his heart. He had slowed the SUV and pulled over to the grass, looking beside him at his wife. She was already slumped against the glass when the vehicle rolled to a stop and didn’t respond to the last sentence he ever spoke.
Kasey wasn’t aware of it now, but she had awakened at the sound of her father’s voice, unbuckled her seatbelt, and became something different. If she had known she would lose her awakening sense of fashion, with increasingly frequent trips to Aeropostale and T.J. Maxx, she would have changed into different clothes. Kasey wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Hello Kitty T-shirt, because that was for kids, and she was almost a woman. Or at least a teenager.
But pride no longer bothered her, nor did fear, nor did seventh grade, Ashleigh Ostermueller, or the pungent stink of smoke in the breeze.
She didn’t understand the instinct that had compelled her to follow the ridge and find herself before a gate. The complexities of charged particles, the molecular structure of her budding body, and the delicate firing of her neurotransmitters were far beyond her. Even if she had attended college, she probably would have avoided molecular biology like the plague.
Unless, of course, Bradley Staley was taking the class.
She was aware of others behind her, following through the forest. Their hissing filled her senses and connected her in a way she would never have been able to describe in a paper for English class. But inside her skull, another word resonated over and over. “Who? Who? Who?”
The Kasey thing walked through the gate and the first thing that drew her attention was the goats. They bleated when they saw her, demanding hay from the little shed beside their pen.