The impact stunned Campbell, and breath exploded from his lungs as he landed flat on the asphalt. The scrabbling creature standing over him smelled like the ozone of an electrical short, spiced with sour perspiration, urine, and a primal aroma that didn’t have a name but was known by prey of every species.
He could dimly hear Pete yelling somewhere far away, and the creature’s long ropes of hair whipped in his face, blinding him as he tried to roll. A jolt of agony flared in his shoulder, and he kicked upward. The creature seemed to have eight arms, and all of them were searching for a hunk of meat.
Campbell punched upward and hit something soft, and he had the goofy image of his hand vanishing into the creature’s face, as if it were Marvin the Martian’s black gap of nothingness. Then it rained, and the rain was warm and heavy, and a muffled krunk repeated itself as someone were beating a damp drum in a distant jungle.
The creature slumped on top of him, and then its weight moved to the side, and there was Pete leaning over him, a massive pipe wrench clenched in his right fist. The head of the wrench was clotted with hair and gore.
Finally Pete’s inane shouting coalesced into language. “Crap, man! Oh, crap.”
Campbell touched his shoulder, where the Zaphead had exposed his flesh to the air. It wasn’t a deep bite, but electric fire radiated from it like a herpes sore from hell.
“She bit me,” he whimpered.
Pete gave the dead Zaphead a kick. “Man up, dude. You were attacked by a chick.”
Campbell rose to his hands and knees and looked at the creature that had attacked him. She was petite, about the size of his mother, with the same black hair. For one horrible moment, he thought it was his mother—her skull was so caved in that her features were unrecognizable.
By the time he’d risen staggering to his feet, Pete had pulled a clean towel and a roll of duct tape from the back of the van. “You can’t get through an apocalypse without duct tape,” Pete said, clamping the towel against Campbell’s wound.
He gripped the protruding tail of the tape with his teeth and reeled off a foot-long section. Campbell clamped his hand over the towel, holding it in place as Pete applied the patchwork. Blood had trickled down the front of his shirt, but most of the flow had been staunched.
“Think I’ll turn?” Campbell asked.
“These ain’t zombies,” Pete said. “Although it did get a little close to the throat. I’m giving you the heads-up now. If I see fangs sprouting out of your mouth, I’m punching a stake through your chest.”
“Point taken,” Campbell said, but the weak pun didn’t even elicit a grin. The wound throbbed but Campbell had full movement of his arm. He gave one last look at the woman, who appeared to be in her forties. Her lipstick was smeared, and a flap of Campbell’s skin was stuck between her teeth.
Pete gave her one final kick, and her body lay there like a sack of mud. “One down, a million to go.”
Campbell didn’t like to think about a million Zapheads crawling across the face of the earth, hiding in shadowy crevices and waiting for something to kill. Right now, he didn’t want to think of anything, much less whether his mom was somewhere out there jumping survivors.
Pete rummaged in the back of the van and came away with a fat screwdriver. “You risked your life to find out what’s in the briefcase, so we may as well have a look.”
He jimmied open the briefcase, banging it with the bloody wrench for emphasis. The lid popped open and loose cash fluttered out and settled on the highway. It looked to be tens and twenties, stacks of it.
“Whoopee, we’re rich,” Pete said, kicking the briefcase so that more bills lifted in the wind.
“You don’t need to save for the future.” Campbell patted the makeshift bandage. “You’ll have a future in medicine after this is all over.”
“Who said there was an ‘after’?” Pete said.
Campbell had no answer as they collected their bicycles and headed west.
CHAPTER THREE
Rachel didn’t want to wait for sundown.
While the vanishing daylight carried a greater risk of exposure, she couldn’t bear the thought of one of the Zapheads clutching at her in the dark.
Or a crowd of them creeping up on her while she dozed.
Chain Guy was far up the street. Stumpy had fallen from the bench, and Rachel couldn’t tell if he’d been beaten or not. He didn’t move, and still, the flies swarmed.
Maybe he died from the infection, or a heart attack, or sudden pneumonia. Something sanely senseless. Please, God, let somebody around here die by natural causes.
After a moment, she added, Except me.
The Beard was nowhere in sight, and Rachel decided Chain Guy was chasing him, which would take them both out of the picture. That sounded like wishful thinking, but wishful thinking had not changed anything during the past week, so she knew not to trust it.
The street was clear, at least as far as she could tell by sticking her head out the door. The shadows of light poles and trash cans lay long across the sidewalk, giving her directions. Metal clanged several streets away, like a body falling on the hood of a car or a boot being driven into a Dumpster. She wondered if one of the affected had caught a fresh victim. But there was no scream.
Had the survivors already adjusted past the point of screaming?
Were there any survivors left at all?
She didn’t like the thought of being alone, the last human in the universe, and the dead pharmacist’s little care package came to mind. But she loathed the pale, grim surrender that had been painted on his dying face. That was the coward’s way out, the path of the faithless. If such a time came, she trusted God would first give her permission.
Until then…
Rachel secured the backpack and stepped outside, clinging close to the brick, metal, and glass walls as she eased down the street. She paid absurd attention to each footstep, making sure the rubber soles of her sneakers didn’t scuff on the concrete. She didn’t know whether the Zapheads were driven to prey by superhuman senses of sight, smell, or hearing, but she figured the apocalypse was as good a time as any to hedge her bets.
She’d lived in Charlotte for two years, taking little time to learn the city. Her world had been largely confined to West Charlotte, where she interned as a counselor for the Department of Social Services. Rachel knew the beltway and the exits for the larger shopping malls, the libraries, and the uptown area where she’d visited the Mint Museum, but little else. The high, gleaming finance centers were behind her, once busy with moneychangers and loan officers, but were now just seventy and eighty stories of stacked mausoleum crypts. The glass glinted red in the sunset, the towers of Babel gone silent, and small plumes of smoke curling from some of them.
She picked up her pace a little, more confident now that Chain Guy apparently hadn’t noticed her. Charlotte has to end at some point, and then you’ll hit the woods.
The block ended, and she glanced into one of the cars slanted across the intersection in the heart of a traffic jam. A woman’s head was tilted back, ponytail dangling over the seat. Behind her was a child’s safety seat. Rachel’s heart, already galloping, jumped a fence and missed a step.
What if it’s alive?
And the little devil on her shoulder whispered: It would be crying. Don’t stop.
Maybe it’s asleep, or scared, or—
Or dead. Maybe it’s dead, and you walk over there and peer in the glass and see its cute little blue face and then you scream, and then Chain Guy comes running with his steel whip, ready to play and play and play until your brains are sausage.