Scott Nicholson - Milepost 291

“Like reiki, maybe? I’ve seen them wave their hands over people like they’re moving energy around. Sort of like acupuncture without the needles.”

“This woman never touched the flesh of her patient, but the injury would begin healing almost immediately. She even cured my carpal tunnel that way. I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to me.”

“But a muscle sprain is one thing. This was a life-threatening wound. And it healed in minutes.”

The professor frowned. “I’m just a teacher, not a philosopher.”

“Not all that long ago, you wanted to play surgeon,” Campbell said.

“We’ll just have to see how she does. We don’t know if her blood is poisoned from infection.”

“They wanted her to live. That’s what’s scary. We’ve been fighting them, killing them, hiding from them when they’ll let us. But when they had a chance to let one of us die, they invoked some sort of inner power to save her.”

“You’re overlooking something very important,” the professor said, glancing around at the Zapheads who milled aimlessly through the house.

“What, that they didn’t dig their fingers in her rotten bits and eat it like chili?”

“They acted together. Without speaking, or making any kind of signal that I could see.”

“They were copying you. The way you were rubbing your hand on her.”

“I think it was more than that.”

Campbell studied the strange, glittery-eyed mutants around him—his housemates, his new tribe, his jailers. Despite all the days he’d been forced to endure their presence, they seemed even more grotesque now than when they were wantonly destroying all things in their path.

Even creepier, he was losing his perception of what life had been like Before. He was losing all sense of normalcy and the great psychological security blanket of civilization, and this was becoming his reality .

“Don’t tell me these starry-eyed fucks are telepathic,” Campbell said.

“I am not sure that’s the right word for it,” the professor said. “You see how they copy our phonetics and tone. Clearly they don’t have a grasp of language, at least not human language. If they could truly read minds, they’d have already absorbed the sum of our knowledge and memories.”

“Damn, don’t tell me they know about that Penthouse magazine I accidentally left in my mom’s sewing room. Or the Zapheads I killed in Taylorsville.”

The professor’s face took on that vacant, rapt look again, as if falling back into his messiah complex—the spiritual leader of the strangely changed, the Christ of After.

“Or perhaps what we think we know is useless to them,” he said.

Stuff it in a psycho fortune cookie.

Rachel stirred, and Campbell knelt by her side. As for what he did next, he couldn’t be sure whether he was trying to comfort her or comfort himself.

But he wanted something solid in a wobbly, watery, illusory world.

He took her hand and held it, watching the blanket rise and fall with her breathing until the sound of her exhalation became a wind of hope, drowning out the mad mumbling of the Zaphead hordes.

The river widened and grew shallow, and DeVontay’s kayak scraped bottom.

He soon found himself spending more time climbing out of the boat and wading than he did paddling. But at least he’d left the Zapheads behind.

Much of the flood plain featured ragged grass meadows, with a few cows and horses foraging between autumnal tree lines. Houses were set here and there along the banks, built on stilts or higher out of the flood plain, and a narrow paved road meandered alongside the waterway. DeVontay imagined that was the route used by the bicyclists who rented from the outfitters. He wondered if he should have taken a bike instead of the kayak, but something about being out in the water made him feel safer.

Not likely a Zapper is going to pop up and drag me under like an alligator.

He thought about going ashore and checking out some of the houses, maybe finding a secure place to hole up for the night, but he was reluctant to risk encountering any more mutants. He had enough food to make it another day before he’d have to forage again. Mostly he was too disheartened to step over any more dead bodies or smell the stench of a society gone by.

The kayak bottom out on some slick stones, and he stepped into shallow water to free it. At least here in the open air he could almost fool himself into believing he was on a recreational outing. Just a man against nature, a dark-skinned Daniel Boone with a glass eye and a thirst for adventure.

What if the Zapheads ARE nature? What if they’re the way we were meant to be? Maybe they’re normal and I’M the freak.

Exhausted by the sheer demands of survival, he’d given little contemplation to the solar storms and the larger forces that had swept across the planet. Without Rachel and Stephen, he wasn’t sure how much longer he wanted to fight.

If only he—

“Hey, you!”

DeVontay, knee deep in water, nearly lost his grip on the kayak. He shielded his hand over his eyes to block the late-afternoon sun reflecting off the water.

“Who’s there?” he said. The voice had come from the far shore, which was thick with wiry vegetation and shadows.

“You’re not a Zaphead, are you?”

It was a man’s voice, and DeVontay could barely make out a form in the murk. “I’m talking, aren’t I? You ever heard a Zaphead talk?”

“Depends on what you mean by talking.”

DeVontay stood in the cold water, unsure of what to do. His feet were numb and the river ahead boiled with shallow rapids. Even if he wanted to, he wasn’t sure the kayak would skid to the deeper pool below them, where the current seemed to swallow its anger and grow still.

And, of course, the unseen man might have a gun.

“What do you want?” DeVontay said.

Two middle-aged men stepped out from the brush. They were dressed in camouflage fatigue pants and plaid shirts, but little else about them suggested they were military. One wore a bright orange baseball cap and the other’s face was nearly hidden behind a scraggly mass of curly hair and aviator sunglasses. Both wielded firearms, and their rifles were pointed in DeVontay’s direction.

“Come over here, boy,” said the man in the orange cap.

Shit, are these rednecks trying to pull a “Deliverance”? The first humans I’ve seen in two weeks, and they have to be racist assholes.

“Some Zapheads back that way, and I want to get as far away as I can.” DeVontay nodded upstream toward the little community. “You know what Zapheads are?”

The bearded one cackled and the man in the orange cap said, “Everybody knows what Zapheads are, or else they’re dead.”

“I don’t have a gun.”

The bearded man aimed his weapon at DeVontay. “Then you better get your ass over here, hadn’t you?”

DeVontay glanced at the bow and arrows in the shell of the kayak. Even if he reached them before getting shot, he would never nail both of the armed men from thirty yards away. He could also duck into the water and swim downstream, but he didn’t think he could hold his breath long enough to get out of range. That was assuming the rapids ahead were even deep enough to conceal him.

“What do you want?” DeVontay said, stalling for time.

DeVontay heard a crack, then a small splash in front of him, followed by the keening whine. The sounds occurred almost simultaneously, so it was only after a small puff of blue-gray smoke wended from the man’s rifle barrel that he realized a shot had been fired.

He raised his arms, releasing the kayak, which slid downstream and turned sideways before scudding down the rapids.