She frowned at him, gave the doorknob a vigorous twist, and peeked inside. It was dark, but at least no one jumped her.
“Want a light?” DeVontay said.
“No, I’ll just leave the door cracked a little.”
“I already used it, so don’t mind the smell. I saved the flush for you.”
“Thanks for sharing.” Inside, as her eyes adjusted, she poked with her foot to find the porcelain bowl. As she peeled her jeans down, she listened to the brooding hotel. The banging was several floors above, fixed in one place now, and she was relieved the Zaphead had stopped making the rounds. Maybe the guy had found his room.
Then she heard something below that sound, thin, reedy, and barely piercing the unnatural silence. At first she thought DeVontay was whistling, but it was coming from her left—the room to the other side of their suite.
“Do you hear that?” she whispered, startled by the echo in the tile-covered bathroom.
“You say something?”
“It’s music.”
“Can’t be no music. The pulse blew out all electronics. Didn’t you hear the news?”
She didn’t point out the contradiction. Instead, she listened more carefully as she wiped. The notes plinked with a metallic coldness, yet they varied in tone and rhythm. After she fastened her jeans, she felt along the sink counter until she found one of the plastic sanitary cups. She shucked the cellophane sheath and placed the mouth of the cup against the wall, then placed her ear against the cup’s bottom.
She didn’t turn when the door swung open behind her and DeVontay called. “What you doing?”
“Shhh.” When Rachel was nine, before the divorce, her father had given her a little music box with Walt Disney’s Barbie-fied version of Cinderella on top. By twisting the little brass key, she could make Cinderella spin around and around, never losing a slipper. The music box had issued the same sort of brassy tonality she now heard.
“Somebody’s over there,” she said.
“Ain’t nobody over there. They would have heard us and said something.”
“Maybe they’re scared.”
“And maybe it’s a Zaphead.”
Rachel thought about banging on the wall and yelling, but if the person was scared, that wouldn’t help. “We need to open that door and check.”
“The hell we do,” DeVontay said, his good eye narrowing in annoyance. “We already got a plan, and it don’t include saving the world.”
“All right, then,” she said, pushing past him, not bothering to flush the toilet. “Give me the gun and you can wait here like a sissy.”
“A sissy? Nobody calls nobody a ‘sissy’ anymore.”
“Well, sorry I’m not up on my hood lingo, dude. Or homey. Or whatever gangsta thing you want to be called. But I’m not going anywhere until I see who’s in that room.”
Rachel was surprised by her own anger, but she understood it. She’d felt so helpless watching everyone die from the pulse, or turn into Zapheads, or commit suicide, and finally, she had a chance to be useful.
DeVontay exhaled a long sigh. “Okay, damnit. We get packed, check the room, and then we’re outta here.”
She met his gaze and they stared at each other for a full ten seconds, neither willing to flinch. “Deal.”
As he packed, he cussed under his breath. Rachel collected her backpack, checking the vial of Nembutal the druggist had given her. No, she wouldn’t surrender, not while someone else might need help.
DeVontay drew his gun before flipping back the security bolt and opening the door. Rachel pressed close behind. Once in the hall, they could clearly hear the Zaphead banging away above them.
The room next door was 202, and judging from the spacing of the doorways, it appeared to be a suite as well. They paused before the laminated door, listening, but the music had stopped. Rachel nudged DeVontay, and he slipped the master key in the lock.
The tumblers clattered in their own loud music, and the banging upstairs stopped.
“Shit,” DeVontay hissed.
Rachel pushed him into the room. The curtains were parted, throwing a wash of gray light across the carpet. Blankets were wadded over a hump on one of the beds, and the air was rank with decay. A boy of about ten knelt on the floor, a doll clutched to his chest. The doll was undressed, and the boy was twisting a knob back and forth that protruded from the doll’s back.
He looked up at them with wide brown eyes, his face stricken with guilt. “It broke.”
Rachel knelt and put her hands on his shoulders, trying not to weep. DeVontay peeled back the blanket to verify what their noses had already told them.
“Is that your mother?” Rachel asked gently, afraid the boy might see her tears and have his own breakdown.
“She didn’t wake up,” the boy said.
“We better get out of here,” DeVontay said. “I don’t think the guy upstairs is going to wait for the elevator.”
“Come on,” Rachel said, taking the boy’s hand and pulling him toward the hall.
The boy gave one last look back at the figure on the bed, at a past that no longer made sense to any of them, and allowed her to lead him into After.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Marina was crying.
Not out loud, which would have disturbed him. They were safe, he was pretty sure of that, as safe as anyone could be these days. But still Marina’s sniffling and small grunts unsettled him. He couldn’t show it, though, not with Rosa about to shatter.
Jorge Jiminez let his face harden into a mask, the same expression he wore when the boss man, Mr. Wilcox, ordered him to shovel llama manure into the flower garden. Jorge liked the llamas, even though one would occasionally spit in his face. He liked them a lot better than he liked Mr. Wilcox.
He even liked the poop better than he liked Mr. Wilcox.
But now the gringo was dead, and so were the sixteen llamas. Jorge had been outside when the flash occurred, his wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes. The llamas collapsed almost instantly, and so did Barkley, the loud border collie that constantly pestered the animals. The chickens barely paused in their scratching and pecking, though, so Jorge thought it must have been some strange sort of gun, although he couldn’t figure out how a gun could kill so many animals at once without making a sound.
But then his mind jumped immediately to Rosa and Marina, and he dropped his shovel and bolted for the tiny mobile home at the back of the property, which was tucked behind a thicket of Douglas firs so that it couldn’t be seen from Mr. Wilcox’s house. His wife and child hadn’t noticed the flash of light. Rosa was stitching a patch on the knee of a pair of jeans and Marina was sprawled on the floor, coloring in her big book of princesses.
That had been over a week ago.
They’d moved into Mr. Wilcox’s house two days ago, and although Jorge instinctively sensed it was safer, he wasn’t even sure what the danger was. After all, everyone else seemed to be dead.
“Maybe we go to town to see,” Rosa said. She sat at the fine oak table, uncomfortable, a glass of water perched in her hand as if she were afraid of leaving spots on the finish.
“I told you, the truck doesn’t start,” he said, as if explaining to a child. “Neither does the car, and neither does the motorcycle.”
He didn’t mean to say that last word with such anger. He didn’t mean to say it at all. Such a word was bad luck in times like these.
“What if we walk?”
“We could do it in a day. Marina can’t walk that far, so we’d have to take turns carrying her.”
“I can, too, walk that far,” Marina said, her voice was cracked and strained. “I’m not a baby.”
Her English was very good, better than Rosa’s and almost as good as his. Jorge had taken classes at the community college because he knew he’d never see Baja, California, again. Even though the silver mines of La Paz had paid a fair wage of 200 pesos a day, the United States offered the kind of wealth a man needed to raise a family. Like many of his migrant countrymen, he’d planned to work for a year or two and return, but there was always a bill to be paid first, or paperwork, or some legal obstacle.