The gunshot boomed through the house, rattling the windows. Rachel’s heart clenched in her chest like a fist around barbed wire.
DeVontay?
She was ashamed that her first thought was a selfish one, that she’d be stuck alone, to care for Stephen. She pushed aside the thought and debated whether to rush into the house. The Bieb was climbing through the picture window, his legs kicking as he tried to drag his body inside the house.
Rachel looked around. There was a little utility shed behind the neighboring house, the door sagging open. “Come on,” she said, grabbing Stephen’s hand and pulling him through the forsythia hedge toward the shed.
“I’m scared,” Stephen said, and Rachel realized he was talking to the doll, not her.
They crossed the secluded lawn, with Rachel hoping no Zapheads were attracted by the commotion in the house. After making sure it was unoccupied, Rachel slung her backpack in the shed. The shed was cluttered with garden and carpentry tools, a ladder, a wheelbarrow, and milk crates full of wires, electrical outlets, and metal hardware. A stack of shelves held an array of paint cans, bags of potting soil and pesticides, and plastic sacks of herbicide. Through the light of a grimy window, Rachel saw something that might be useful.
She grabbed the can of Raid ant spray and put it in Stephen’s hand. “If anybody comes in, squirt that in their eyes. Okay?”
“You going to leave me?”
“Just for a sec. But I’ll lock the door behind me.”
“You’ll come back?” Stephen looked wildly around, perhaps comparing the shed to the hotel room where he’d been stuck with his mother’s corpse.
Rachel knelt before him, grabbed his shoulders, and looked him full in the face. “Do you believe in God, Stephen?”
He nodded. “Me and Mommy went to church.”
“God will watch out for you. Just pray and you won’t be alone.”
“But God made the Zapheads, didn’t He?”
“God makes everything.”
“Why? Why not just make good people?”
“I’ll be right back. I promise.”
Rachel scanned the wall. The sledge hammer was far too heavy, and the hoe’s long handle rendered it unwieldy. A broken pair of pruning shears leaned against the bench, one blade curving like a rusty eagle’s beak.
Could I hack somebody’s skull if I had to?
They weren’t people, not anymore. But could she be sure of that? Did Zapheads have souls? Even if they didn’t, did she have the right to kill them?
She closed the door, smiling back at Stephen’s worried, puppy-dog face. She hated leaving him alone, but until she knew what had happened to DeVontay, she couldn’t choose a course of action that might expose them both to danger.
By the time she reached the fence again, the Bieb had disappeared, probably inside the house by now. Miss Daisy was doing her peculiar Texas two-step, banging her scrawny shoulder into the screen door as if she had some memory of entrances but didn’t quite have a destination in mind.
Rachel checked the street for other Zapheads, recalling the group behavior of the ones back on the interstate. But apparently none had responded to the noise, or perhaps no more were in the vicinity. She decided to go behind the house and follow DeVontay’s route.
Clenching her fists so tightly that her fingers ached, she crept along the fence until she reached the back yard. A swing set and sandbox were surrounded by bright plastic toys, and two garbage cans were overturned near the fence. Rachel wondered if the children were dead inside the house, maybe facedown at the table, or maybe all tucked into their beds with prayers and bedtime stories.
She found an unlatched gate, probably the same one DeVontay had used, and she slipped into the back yard. A set of four wooden steps led to a screened-in porch, and she couldn’t see through the mesh. She listened for a moment but all she heard was a dull thumping that might be Miss Daisy.
Rachel hesitated, picturing Stephen in the gloomy shed, but that was wiped away by the fleeting image of him lying on the floor with blood leaking from his body.
Angry at herself, and refusing to acknowledge her fear, she sprinted across the yard and up the steps. She flung open the porch door and burst into the house, felling a little silly at being weaponless. Ahead was the kitchen, its door open. She stepped inside the house and had just a moment to register the mess—dinner that had once been underway, sliced onions on a cutting board, and spaghetti clinging to the stove—when the man grabbed her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They’d gone about two miles along the highway, with Arnoff playing drill sergeant and urging the group forward, when they came across Pete’s bike.
It was lying on the pavement, with no sign of Pete’s backpack. The bike was right at home among the surrounding vehicles, as forlorn and forgotten as any of them. Campbell leaned his own bike, which he’d been pushing since this morning, against a blue Nissan sedan. He glanced into the driver’s-side window and saw a gray-haired man with his head flopped back and mouth open. In death, his dentures had slipped and were perched along his swollen lower lip.
“Doesn’t seem to be any sign of violence,” Arnoff said.
“You shouldn’t have sent him ahead,” Pamela said. She fanned herself with a bandana, her makeup running with her sweat.
“We needed a scout.”
“We needed to stick together.”
“Hush it, Pamela,” Donnie said. He stuck a plug of chewing tobacco into his mouth and mashed it together twice with his teeth, and then pushed the lump into his jaw with his tongue.
“He might have abandoned his bicycle and continued on foot,” the professor said.
“No, Pete’s way too lazy for that,” Campbell said. “If something was wrong with the bike, he would have sat on the bed of that pickup and waited.”
“I don’t see no blood,” Donnie said. “So, he probably wasn’t attacked by a Zapper.”
Arnoff picked up the bicycle and bounced it. “Tires still have air and it seems to be in working condition.”
Donnie walked twenty feet up the highway, his rifle slung over his shoulder. “Nothing up the road.”
Campbell cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Pete!”
“Shut up, now,” Arnoff barked. “Do you want to draw every Zaphead for miles around?”
“He’s my friend.”
“And it looks like he ran off and left you. Maybe he figured he liked his odds better on his own.”
“In that case, you made a strategic blunder,” the professor said, “because if you sent him ahead as a sacrificial lamb, you lost an asset without getting anything in return.”
“What do you mean, a ‘sacrificial lamb’?” Campbell said.
“Canary in a coal mine,” the professor said. “A loss leader. Bait.”
“He was point man,” Arnoff said. “He knew the risks.”
“You’re crazy,” Campbell said. “This isn’t a war movie or a chess match. This is one of the survivors. He’s one of us.”
“Don’t lose your cool, soldier,” Arnoff said. “Your friend might be sitting up there in the trees, snoozing in the shade. Like the professor said, it doesn’t look like the Zapheads attacked him. Besides, he could have locked himself in one of these cars if he thought he was in danger.”
Campbell pounded his fist into the side of the Nissan. The body inside shifted slightly and the dentures fell into the corpse’s lap.
“Don’t hurt yourself, honey,” Pamela said, rolling her eyes toward Arnoff. “You might need that fist later.”
Donnie opened the rear door of a nearby van and the stench rolled over them like a solid wave. A fleet of flies boiled out, their green wings iridescent in the sun. Campbell buried his face into the crook of his elbow, using the sleeve of his shirt as an air filter. It didn’t help much.