By the time Franklin returned, now dressed in blue jeans and a wool sweater, Jorge had already plucked most of the larger feathers from the wings. He took the knife and dissected the carcass, splitting down the breastbone to the tail and letting the internal organs spill. He carefully collected the heart and liver, both of which were still warm. The gizzard was packed with crushed grain and a few tiny bits of gray gravel.
“Well, will you look at that,” Franklin said, apparently overcoming his squeamishness. “I guess you might call that her last supper.”
“The rocks help grind the food for them,” Jorge said. He knew most Americans had no hands-on relationship with the meat they consumed. Mr. Wilcox had been the same way. Meat was something that came in clear plastic wrap from the store, or else was seared and slapped between pieces of bread at McDonald’s. Their meat was a stranger to them.
Jorge used the tip of the knife to scrape the lungs away from the insides of the ribcage. After he severed the drumsticks just below the knee joints, he peeled away the skin as if removing a tight glove. Normally, he would dip the fowl in boiling water and pluck the feathers, but he figured a skinless bird would be a lean treat and more easily allow Franklin to forget it had once been a pet.
“Are you a man who doesn’t like killing?” Jorge asked Franklin, dangling the naked chicken so that any offal and juice could drain.
“I reckon I could kill if I had to,” Franklin answered. “Like that hawk there. Normally, I’d never shoot one. But when you come and mess with what’s mine, that’s when I fight back.”
Jorge told Franklin about the men he’d fought back at the Wilcox farm, and how the men had changed into something threatening and alien.
“No, they ain’t men no more,” Franklin said. “I heard on the shortwave radio they’re calling them ‘Zapheads.’”
“Well, if they come here, you might have to kill them.”
“If they come here, then they’re breaking the one law of this here compound,” Franklin said, sweeping an arm to indicate the garden, the animal pens, and the outbuildings. “And that law is to live and let live, respect the fences, and mind your own business.”
“It is good to be self-reliant,” Jorge said, proud he’d learned such a word in his studies with Rosa. “But there’s another law that applies.”
“Huh,” Franklin grunted. “What’s that?”
“We’re all in this together.” He held up the chicken. “And let us hope this isn’t our last supper.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two… three… four…
Campbell counted the Zapheads on the streets surrounding the church. After a fruitless search for Pete the night before, he’d broken into a Baptist church, found the stairs to the steeple, and locked himself in. From the ground, the eastern horizon had appeared to be lit by a single bonfire that had spread. But from a vantage point fifty feet in the air, Campbell had seen at least a dozen large fires, dotting the black landscape many miles into the distance.
Now, in the glare of daylight, the fires were largely hidden, although a thick gauze of haze lay over the world. A black circle of ash marked the house that Rachel had set afire last night. He’d traveled maybe a quarter of a mile in the darkness, but it had felt like a marathon of slogging through molasses. He was exhausted.
The church was at the edge of town, the short square streets lined with houses that gave way to roads that curved gently into wooded areas. The streets were remarkably free of corpses, leaving Campbell to wonder if someone had been on morgue duty. Cars and trucks were scattered across the asphalt, although the traffic here must have been light when the solar flares erupted. On the street outside the church was a school bus, its wheels on the sidewalk. Campbell was grateful the windows were darkened by the angle of the sun, so that he couldn’t see inside.
The Zapheads moved between the vehicles with as much indifference as water flowing around stones. Although they didn’t acknowledge one another in any way, they seemed aware of each other’s presence. The creepiest thing was, they were all heading east, back toward the largest of the fires.
Movement on a side street drew his attention away from the ambling, vacant-brained creatures. A figure burst out of the garage bay of a service station, head lowered, dragging his backpack behind him so that it bounced on the sidewalk. Campbell recognized the black T-shirt.
He stood and cupped his hands into a megaphone of flesh. “Pete!”
Pete didn’t look up, but the Zapheads froze in their tracks and tilted their heads up to the church steeple.
Holy shit.
Campbell ducked below the ledge of the steeple, wondering how well Zapheads could see. But after a moment, he realized he would lose Pete again, so he raised his head until he could peer over and track Pete’s route. Pete was farther up the sidewalk, passing a row of shops with broken windows, and making a mad dash before abruptly turning into a brick building that sported a green awning and a protruding wooden sign that Campbell couldn’t read.
Should be easy enough to find, assuming that he holds the fort.
But Campbell had a more pressing concern. The Zapheads had begun making their way toward the church, cutting across unkempt lawns and filthy parking lots.
A couple more emerged from nearby houses, the half-dozen effectively surrounding the church. They appeared to act in concert, although none of them grunted or signaled. It was their silence that was most disturbing—as if they were tapped into some massive hive mind that gave them instructions from afar.
Campbell mulled his options. As much as he loathed Arnoff, he wished the trigger-happy cowboy was up there with him, playing sniper and, one by one, picking off the Zapheads. He’d even take the soldiers, who probably didn’t care if innocent humans were caught in the crossfire as long as the “enemy” was wiped out. But concepts like innocence had no place in this new reality.
And, he had no weapon.
The nearest Zaphead was a man in a polyester business suit, the sleeves and cuffs a darker gray than the rest of the fabric. He still wore a necktie, although the knot was loosened halfway down his shirt. He wore eyeglasses that sat askew on his face, disturbing the rounded Asian symmetry of his face. His jet-black hair spiked out like greasy wires.
He was small-framed, so Campbell could knock him out of the way if necessary. But the Zaphead about fifty feet behind the Asian didn’t look so easy to handle. This one wore a mechanic’s coveralls, dark blotches spattered across the khaki cloth. Campbell couldn’t tell if the stains were oil or blood, and he didn’t want to look too closely. The mechanic was a few inches north of six feet, barrel-chested, and moving with the malevolent grace of an angry rhino.
The two Zapheads to his left were female, both middle-aged, full-boned, and thick-hipped. If it came down to it, Campbell would take his chances on the one in the yellow cardigan sweater. She looked a little more bookish, like a schoolteacher who’d been headed to the kitchen for a cup of tea when the thermonuclear madness of the sun had other ideas.
Closing in on the rear of the church was a skinny African-American guy in police blues and sunglasses. Although he had a gun strapped down in its side holster, he ignored it in favor of his thick black nightstick, which he swung from his hand like a batter determined to drive in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth. Campbell hoped his own skull wasn’t slated to become the baseball.