CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
They kept to the shadowed side of the street, moving fast. Rachel led the way, hoping she was headed north. DeVontay seemed to be even less of a Boy Scout than she was, so he didn’t question her judgment. Or maybe he was keeping his eyes in the side alleys, worried less about the destination than the journey.
They’d gone at least ten blocks without seeing any signs of life—if such a word was even appropriate under the circumstances. Birds flapped in the eaves of the buildings and the canopy of trees, and Rachel heard a hound dog baying in the distance once, but mostly, the town was just a still life of abandoned cars and silent storefronts. The stench of death emanated from inside many of the buildings, so they didn’t bother with a door-to-door search for survivors. Calling out for them was risky as well, since the noise might attract Zapheads.
The streets were remarkably free of corpses, given the density of the population, but once they came upon a shrunken man with a stringy white beard, leaning against a brick wall with his arms tucked under his knees. In the old days, he might have passed for a homeless man, rags tied around his ankles.
“Hey, Pops?” DeVontay whispered, afraid to touch him.
The man didn’t move so they kept going. Stephen’s expression didn’t change, which saddened Rachel. A boy shouldn’t be hardened to the point of numbness. His days should be filled with bubble gum, comic books and video games instead of death.
The street signs were just as ordinary as ever, a mute testament to places gone by: Hayward Street, Depot Street, Old Bristol Turnpike. They passed a bridal shop, the front window filled with headless and armless mannequins, impossibly anorexic, displaying flowing white dresses. Rachel’s breath caught at the sight. She’d never be a bride now, not like that.
“Yuck,” Stephen said, bored by the window shopping. He walked to the edge of the street and bent to play with the trash that had collected in the rain gutter.
DeVontay pressed close behind her. “That man back there…you notice something funny?”
“Just another somebody that didn’t make it,” she said.
“He’s fresh. Not dark and bloated.”
Rachel glanced at Stephen, appreciating the relatively healthy glow of his skin compared to the putrefaction all around them. “Just because you survive the solar flares doesn’t mean you don’t have to die someday.”
“But he wasn’t beat up, from what I could see. Just curled up like he was waiting for it.”
Rachel again thought of the pills the pharmacist had given her. Not everyone had a spiritual or moral aversion to suicide. For some, suicide might look like an elevator to the Pearly Gates.
“There are lots of ways to die,” she said. “He was old. Maybe he had a heart attack. Or couldn’t get his medicine.”
“Don’t nobody die from natural causes anymore.”
“Okay, then. Maybe he had a bullet hole in his back. Shot by the military.”
“No puddle of blood around him.”
Annoyed, Rachel checked the reflection in the storefront glass and saw Stephen walking into the street. She called to him, but he kept going, dragging Miss Molly by the hair as if he’d forgotten he was carrying a doll. DeVontay took off running after him, and Rachel broke free of her paralysis and followed.
When they caught up with Stephen, they were able to see the town square, a fifty-foot courthouse with a cracked concrete façade and a dome top surrounded by oak trees whose leaves were darkening with autumn. The courthouse lawn was a wide public commons crisscrossed with walkways, punctuated with a bronze statue of some Revolutionary War hero gone green with patina and pigeon poop. The idyllic small-town postcard was marred by wrought-iron benches that bore a tableau of corpses. More corpses were slumped on the courthouse steps, which was as crowded as if district court was holding a brief recess to allow a smoke break for the accused.
“Lots of them,” Stephen said, enthralled and not at all horrified.
There had to be a few dozen, including some children, although they didn’t seem to be grouped as family units. Indeed, at first, Rachel thought they might have been arranged that way, like a photo shoot for a modern auteur of the grotesque.
“More fresh ones,” DeVontay said, and Rachel realized what had been disturbing her more than the sheer number of dead: they, like the old man leaning against the brick wall, were not yet in advanced stages of decomposition.
“Do you think…?” She didn’t want to continue while Stephen was within earshot, but DeVontay filled in the blanks for her.
“Yeah,” he said. “These are Zapheads. They’re dying.”
Rachel wasn’t sure whether she should be cheered by the news. The Zapheads had been trying to kill her for weeks, sure. But they’d just been following their instincts. And if all Zapheads died, then the world would become that much lonelier. Even more devoid of what had once walked the Earth as a collective humanity.
They followed Stephen to the closest bench, where a girl of about six lay curled on her side. Her pink dress was mussed and her stockings torn, but otherwise, she might have been sleeping.
“She was put there like that,” DeVontay said. “She didn’t die in that position.”
Stephen knelt and spoke to her. “Hey, are you okay?”
Rachel stood behind Stephen and put a hand on each of his shoulders. “She’s with the Lord now, Stephen.”
Stephen looked around the commons. “Which one of them is the Lord?”
“The one up in heaven,” Rachel said, although she looked around to make sure Jesus Christ wasn’t among them at that very minute. After all, if He was planning a return trip to Earth, then Taylorsville, North Carolina, was just a good a spot as any.
Of course, she was also aware that such thoughts could well be the beginning of madness. The great visionaries and prophets of the Old Testament were on the borderline of textbook schizophrenia, with their burning bushes, wheels of fire in the sky, and voices telling them to kill their own children.
“This is creepy as hell,” DeVontay said. “You think these are Zapheads?”
“They understand,” she said, keeping her voice down. If any of them were merely sleeping, she didn’t want to wake them.
“Understand what? Did you get into some happy juice somewhere? Popped into the liquor store while I wasn’t looking?”
“They understand that the world has changed,” she said. “They’re aware.”
“You talking about these same Zapheads that have been trying to kills us for the last two weeks?”
“They’re taking care of their dead,” she said. “It’s the last shred and act of humanity, to honor the dead.” She had the sudden horrifying thought that perhaps these were all victims of a mass suicide, that a group of Zapheads realized something had gone wrong in their heads and they’d chugged the cyanide Kool-Aid, rather than surrender to their baser natures, their killer instincts.
Such an action would have taken higher-order functioning, communication, and socialization, none of which were traits that the Zapheads had displayed so far.
But what do you really know about them? You’ve been too busy running and hiding—and surviving—to really pay attention.
“They don’t look so scary now,” Stephen said.
“Their troubles are over.” Rachel almost added, They’re the lucky ones, but the journey wasn’t over yet. If there was one thing she still believed, it was that God had put her here for a reason.
Even if God was now the architect of greatest mass murder in history, she still believed. Still.
“Let’s get out of here before somebody comes to add to the pile,” DeVontay said.
“Come on, Stephen,” Rachel said.
“Just a second.” The boy went over the bench where the little girl was sleeping. Without touching her, he gently laid Miss Molly in the crook of her arm. Stephen practically skipped back over to Rachel’s side, taking her hand.
“Now she won’t get lonely,” he said, smiling up at her.
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Rachel thought of her sister decomposing inside a fiberglass casket in a Seattle cemetery. Beside her pale corpse, Rachel had placed under one stiff, cool arm her sister’s stuffed panda, Farley, a copy of her favorite book, The Princess Bride, and a photograph of the Earth taken by the Hubble telescope. Rachel had prayed her sister wasn’t lonely, either. In whatever After she now knew.
DeVontay led them back to the street, the pistol still dangling near his hip. A few gunshots popped in the distance, and the breeze carried the acrid brusque of smoke, but otherwise, the place was as peaceful as any small-town Sunday afternoon.
As they passed the bridal shop again, Rachel thought she saw movement inside. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look too closely, either.