Instead, Jorge launched himself forward and rolled. The fisherman paused, the dish still held high, as if he also hesitated to kill. Jorge swung out one of his workman’s boots into the man’s kneecap. The leg folded but didn’t collapse.
The Zaphead hissed in pain, or perhaps rage, and swatted the dish downward as if Jorge were an oversize fly. Jorge raised his machete—just like Banderas would, he thought—and blocked the blow, although the impact drove the back edge of the blade precariously near his face.
On his back, Jorge raised both legs and drove the bottoms of his boots into the Zaphead’s stomach. A chuff of air was driven from the man’s abdomen as the kick lifted him off the RV’s roof and sent him, arms flailing, over the edge. The body struck pavement below with a soggy splat, while the dish clattered a few feet down the road.
Jorge didn’t bother to check the damage. Instead, he went to the young woman, whose face contorted between expressions of fear and gratitude. A tear ran down one grimy cheek. Up close, she looked even younger, maybe seventeen.
This could be Marina in a few years, he thought, even though this woman had reddish-gold hair instead of Marina’s dark Latina features.
“Come,” he said, holding out one hand. “We have a safe place.”
She stared at the gore-clotted machete blade. Jorge looked down at it and wiped it on the leg of his pants. “Only when necessary,” he said.
“Get and come on,” Franklin shouted from the bushes. “Else, I’m going to have to start killing these others.”
Jorge looked down the road. Two more Zapheads had emerged from the forest, although they didn’t move with any sort of speed or menace. Jorge was struck yet again with the notion that they appeared more curious than anything, as if they’d been dropped into an unwelcoming world without a road map.
That, I can understand, mis amigos.
“Come,” Jorge said, more gently this time. “My wife will help care for your child.”
She relaxed a little and peeled back a fold of her bundle. Jorge saw just the tiniest stretch of pink skin before she closed it again and tried to stand. She nearly lost her balance, and Jorge steadied her. The two Zapheads at the rear of the RV had backed away another 10 feet, staring up as if watching a scene on the stage of some theater of the absurd.
“Don’t shoot,” Jorge shouted at Franklin, who now stood by the stone fence, the rifled aimed at the nearest Zaphead. “I don’t think they will hurt us.”
“Then what was Captain Ahab up there doing? Playing badminton?”
“They’re confused.”
“Well, hell, they ain’t the only one.”
Jorge went down the ladder first, offering to carry the baby, but the woman violently shook her head. So Jorge climbed down and stood guard while she made a cautious, awkward descent.
“Go,” Jorge said to the Zapheads, motioning with his machete. “Salir.”
They merely stood with their intensely glittering gazes, although the two new Zapheads kept approaching. When the young mother reached the pavement, Jorge guided her toward Franklin and the trail back to the compound.
“Took you long enough,” Franklin said.
“That is how we do it south of the border, old man,” Jorge said.
“Well, don’t be taking no siestas until we make sure these things don’t follow us, sí?”
It wasn’t until they were halfway up the mountain that Jorge felt his stomach unclench, and he knelt and vomited in the leaves while Franklin stood sentinel.
He didn’t feel very much like Antonio Banderas now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Sure could use a GPS,” DeVontay said.
He squinted up at the sun, which was sinking toward the western horizon. They had left the little town behind, although its smoke still stained the air. Beyond it, the higher columns of diffuse gray marked the progress of Charlotte into the atmosphere. The clouds were like clumps of dirty wool riding high, uncertain currents.
Rachel sat in the shade of a sycamore, studying the street behind them. The images of the bodies strewn across the courthouse lawn still haunted her. Everywhere she looked, she hallucinated corpses into the shadows and crevices, arranged in horribly artful arrays.
Keep it together, Ray Ray. Stephen needs you.
The boy had grown more animated with every mile they’d walked. Leaving his doll with the dead girl had served to purge some of his melancholy. Rachel wondered if his current ease was even more worrisome than his near-catatonia. But there was no psychological handbook for diagnosing the emotional conditions of After. This was all new ground.
“That way,” Rachel said, pointing vaguely northwest. They had entered a rural area and houses were fewer and farther between, so they were less likely to encounter Zapheads. They’d been following a gravel road for the last five miles or so, encountering only a few abandoned vehicles. Rachel didn’t want to think about the bodies that might have been in them and whether they’d been removed and used as art.
“You sure?” DeVontay studied the ragged map in his hands. “I-77 runs north, and it’s back over that way.”
“We don’t want to follow the interstate,” Rachel said. “We need to stay away from population centers.”
“Where we will find food?”
“House to house,” Rachel said.
“Where will we sleep?”
“House to house.”
Stephen, who was digging in the ground with a stick, looked up. “Does that mean we can have any house we want?”
“Sure,” she said. “Our pick of the neighborhood. As long as no one is living there, I don’t think they’d mind if we used it.”
“I want a house with a swimming pool.” He swung his stick at a moth that was fluttering in a wobbly pattern around him.
“Don’t kill it,” she said.
“Why not?” he said with a pout, although he lowered his stick.
“Because life is sacred.”
“Then how come everybody’s dead?”
Rachel wanted to give an automatic answer, but all the options felt hollow: Because God willed it so? Because the universe is a powerful bitch? Because they were not worthy?
Instead, she settled on the lame response that made her feel painfully like an adult. “Because.”
DeVontay headed up the road, wiping the dust from his forehead with a kerchief, and then wrapping it around his head like Jimi Hendrix. “I bet that house up there has a pool,” he said. “Or maybe a fish pond.”
The two-story white farmhouse had a tin roof that glinted in the dying sun. The yard was fenced, and the surrounding property was broken into several pastures. A tractor was parked outside a red barn, and two spotted Jersey cows picked at the grass, ignoring them. The surrounding land sloped up to forest. A dusty Ford pickup sat in the driveway near the porch. Rachel could see a rifle in a rack through the rear window.
“I wanna fish!” Stephen said, running to catch up with DeVontay. Rachel shouldered her pack and followed them. The house offered good visibility and looked pretty secure, assuming a family of Zapheads wasn’t gathered around the kitchen table…
“Hello?” DeVontay called, cupping his hands. Only the wind answered.
DeVontay was checking out the truck by the time Rachel caught up. “Empty,” he said, although he gave Rachel a look that suggested it wasn’t.
“Stephen, come look at this,” Rachel said. She went to the apple tree in the side yard and pulled a branch low so Stephen could pluck a few of the ruby-red Macintosh apples. When she looked back, DeVontay was rummaging in the truck, emerging with the rifle in his hands before slamming the door shut.