“The more, the merrier,” Pete said, waving at the impressive array of bottles. “We got plenty for everybody. Zappers, survivors, and”—Pete gave a benevolent sweep of his non-drinking arm to indicate the corpses—“the stinking silent majority.”
Pete started to take another big gulp from his glass but Campbell caught his wrist, sloshing liquor onto both their arms. “Remember you told me to let you know if you ever hit bottom with your drinking?”
“I was probably drunk when I said that,” Pete said, bloodshot eyes narrowing. “You can’t hold people to stuff they say when they’re drunk. Otherwise, I’d have been married six times already.”
Pete laughed at his own miserable joke, but the sound was swallowed by the still, dusty space. Any mirth and merriment that might have soaked into the walls had long since evaporated, although the smell of booze, corrupted food, and bloated corpses did plenty to crowd the air.
Glass shattered somewhere near the front door, and Campbell swung around with the candlestick raised. “They found us.”
Pete didn’t seem to care. He drank straight from the bottle of Knob Creek, then wiped some of the liquor under his nose like a mortician applying menthol before digging in on the day shift.
“Get down,” Campbell said, snuffing the nearest candle. He crouched in the dark, discomfortingly near the legs of one of Pete’s dead clientele.
The front door swung open, flooding light into the bar. A figure was framed in silhouette, and Campbell wondered if Zapheads could see in the dark. Not that it mattered. Pete stood near the other candle, his face bright in the yellow circle of the flame.
Campbell tensed, waiting for the Zaphead to attack. Instead, the silhouette said, “Thought you might be in here.”
Arnoff!
CHAPTER THIRTY
From the camouflaged platform built into the branches of an oak tree, Jorge had a nearly panoramic view of the surrounding ridges and valleys. “Wheelerville,” as Franklin Wheeler called his tiny compound, wasn’t the highest point in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but it stood apart from the towering canopy of Mount Rogers and smaller mountains that bore craggy granite faces topped with pine stubble. A hawk flew over the gray belt of haze that wreathed the valley, and Jorge wondered if it was the same one that killed the chicken.
In the distance, the threads of smoke from the cities blended into a charcoal smudge on the horizon. The air carried only the faintest tinge of the acrid odor, though, as if the mountains scrubbed the prevailing wind clean as it pushed from the northwest. He didn’t know anyone in those cities, but he felt a loss, nonetheless. Marina might have gone to college there, or he and Rosa might have found some better type of work.
Tightening the focus on the binoculars, he swept his view to the parkway that threaded through the trees below. The same abandoned vehicles dotted the road, some of them plowing into the grassy shoulders as their drivers had died instantly. One wooden guardrail was uprooted and splintered where a truck had barreled through and gone off the edge. A camper lay on its side, coolers, mattresses and a rotted corpse spilled from its rear.
He was about to climb down when he saw movement on the road.
Probably a deer. With nothing to scare them, they can reclaim the land.
He sighted through the binoculars and saw a woman running up the slope of the road. She wasn’t moving very fast, and her cheeks were streaked with filth, hair tangled. She looked exhausted, like a horse that had been ridden across a desert. She carried a cloth bundle clasped to her chest.
She doesn’t move like one of them.
“Franklin?” he called.
Franklin came out of the house, where he’d been fidgeting with the radio. After lunch, Franklin said he “needed some bad news,” so he went to his desk while Rosa cleaned the dishes from the meal. Franklin squinted against the sun as he looked up at Jorge. “What’s up, besides you?”
“Someone on the road,” Jorge said. “A woman.”
“Hell fire,” Franklin said, scurrying to the tree and scaling the makeshift wooden handholds that were nailed to the tree. He moved with a swift grace that belied his age, scurrying up like an old mountain goat. He took the binoculars from Jorge and Jorge pointed out the direction.
“Huh,” Franklin said. “Looks like she’s alone.”
“She isn’t a… what do you call it?”
“Nah, she’s not a Zaphead. Just a scared woman.” He gave the binoculars back to Jorge and turned to climb back down.
“Shouldn’t we go get her?”
Franklin looked around the compound. “I set up Wheelerville for a dozen people to survive whatever came our way, short of nuclear holocaust. And you punched three of the tickets when you wandered through the woods with a sick girl. I’m expecting more company, and I don’t think we’ve got room to spare.”
“You can’t just leave her out there.”
Franklin squinted. “What are you? Some kind of Communist? That what they teach you south of the border?”
“She’s young and alone—”
“She’s survived this long, so she’s not made out of cardboard. I ain’t in the business of saving the world.”
Jorge tried to make sense of the contradiction. Franklin had helped his family, yet now was denying someone else in need. Jorge gazed through the binoculars, tracking the woman’s progress. Her jeans were worn at the knees, her brown hooded sweatshirt matted and grimy. She twisted her head, wild blonde hair whipping out as she glanced over her shoulder.
Something’s after her?
Jorge swiveled the binoculars down the road, where the pavement disappeared amid the shadow of massive trees. Three of them burst from the woods, and Jorge had no doubt of their intentions.
“Them!” Jorge said, pointing. “Those Z things. Chasing her.”
Franklin snatched the binoculars away and peered through them for a moment. “Damn. She might be carrying a baby.”
Then he lowered them and started scrambling down the tree. Halfway down, he looked up at Jorge and said, “You wanted to play hero, here’s your chance.”
By the time Jorge reached the ground, Franklin had already grabbed a rifle and backpack, tossing Jorge a belt that held his machete. Rosa called to them from the door of the house. “What is happening?”
“Lock the gate behind us,” Franklin ordered, with a calmness that contradicted his haste. “There’s a gun on the wall if you need it. We ought to be back in twenty minutes.”
“Jorge?” Rosa said, eyes wide.
“Lock the gate,” he said. “Keep Marina inside.”
Jorge followed Franklin out of the compound, ignoring Rosa’s calls. Soon, they were winding down a forest path that Jorge never would have noticed, much less been willing to navigate. Franklin trotted with a sure-footed gait, and Jorge had difficulty keeping up, even though he was three decades younger. He measured time not in minutes, but in the huge granite slabs that jutted from the ground, the rotted stumps and silvery creeks they hurdled, and the streaks of golden sunlight that broke through the branches to dapple the ground.
Jorge had become disoriented, losing any sense of the locations of both the compound and the road. He focused on Franklin’s back, the odors of mud, rotten leaves, and pine sap assailing him with each gasp of air. Then the trail widened and became a stretch of scrubby meadow, a couple of abandoned cars visible beyond a low stone fence.
“Keep low,” Franklin said, motioning down with one hand while steadying his rifle with the other.
“How much farther?” Jorge said, sliding his machete from its sheath.
Franklin crouched and lifted the butt of the rifle to his shoulder, sighting down the barrel. “About a million miles.”