Scott Nicholson - Milepost 291

“I’m one hell of a doctor,” Campbell said.

Several voices pitched in by repeating “Doctor!” a few times before falling silent again. Rachel realized the room was full of Zapheads.

Not just the room—their slow movements continued outside it, a steady pacing like pilgrims with no destination.

But her dismay at their presence was muted by the shock of discovering her leg had healed. The skin on her calf was flawless, with not even a scab or crease to mark what had been a pustule-ridden volcano in her flesh.

“My jeans,” she said.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t look. Me and the professor have been tending you. And we had a little…help.”

“How long have I been out?” Rachel felt as if she’d drifted for days, and even with modern health care she doubted the wound would have completely closed up in less than a month.

“Since noon.”

“ Today? ”

Campbell exhaled a sigh. “Been a long day.”

The blood now pulsed slowly through her body and feeling returned. She was amazed to be pain free. Even her headache had vanished. Aside from a weakness that enervated her into lethargy, she felt better than she had in weeks.

Since Taylorsville, before we killed those Zapheads…

“Who else is here?” she said, trying to lift her head but soon giving up.

Campbell adjusted a musty throw pillow beneath her neck. She could barely make out his face in the gloom of dusk. His face cheeks bore dark stubble and he sported deep, violet half-moons of flesh beneath his eyes, but he smiled at her. “You and me and the professor. And about fifty Zapheads.”

“Why haven’t they killed us?”

“You’ll have to ask them that. But do it quietly, or they’ll be yelling back at you for hours.”

Rachel was struck by an itching sensation where her infected gash had been. At first she chalked it up to a sign of healing, but then the feeling expanded. The flesh below her knee was trembling, almost like it was being massaged. By many hands.

“You had a knife,” she said, almost accusing him. “Where is it?”

“Shh,” he said. “Keep your voice down or it will be like a monkey house asylum in here. The knife is under the couch cushion. You’re lying on it.”

“You were going to cut me.”

“No, no… I mean, the professor… we were afraid the gangrene was going to reach your heart. We… he … wanted to amputate.”

“Are you fucking crazy ?!?”

The room erupted with gleeful shrieks that thundered in the rooms beyond and reverberated on the floor above. “Fucking crazy! Fucking crazy! Fucking crazy!”

Rachel cupped her hands over her ears, but it was like the words were echoing inside the curved bone of her skull, over and over, becoming a nonsensical round of random syllables.

“Shh, shh,” Campbell hissed softly, stroking her hair. “It’s okay now.”

Even after the Zapheads died down, still engaged in their ceaseless patrol, Rachel heard the chorus in her head. Maybe the infection and fever had caused brain damage.

But brain-damaged people usually don’t contemplate brain damage . They think they’re normal.

“The professor thinks they’re learning from us,” Campbell said. “Imitating us. You didn’t meet him but he was with us back in Taylorsville. One of Arnoff’s gang.”

“Where are the rest of them?”

Campbell couldn’t meet her eyes. “They came here.”

“And the Zapheads attacked them?”

“It’s not like you think. The Zapheads have established this farmhouse as some kind of home base. There are more of them every day. They’re gathering into a tribe of sorts.”

It was almost dark now and all she could see of Campbell was the glint of his eyes behind his glasses. She couldn’t imagine spending the night in this house, not surrounded by all these Zapheads with their sinister motion and sudden outbursts. She was sure she’d go mad in her sleep, assuming she was even able to close her eyes.

But any nightmare would be more welcome than this disordered, topsy-turvy reality.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. I lost track of the days. But I’d guess two or three weeks.”

“And you didn’t run? Try to escape?”

He shook his head, the movement barely visible. “No point. You saw how they herded you. It’s their world now. We’re just…tolerated.”

“No,” she said. “I’m still going to Milepost 291 and…” She gasped and struggled to sit up, but exhaustion pressed down on her like a stack of sodden blankets. “Stephen!”

“The boy? When I didn’t see him with you, I assumed he’d—”

“He’s out there somewhere, and I’ve got to find him.” Her eyes were hot with welling tears, but she was unable to lift herself from the couch.

“Rachel?”

She rubbed at her face. For a moment she wondered who Rachel was. The name was familiar, but Before had been so very long ago.

Campbell shook her gently by the shoulder until she turned to him. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Your eyes.”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked away. “Nothing. Better get some rest.”

They’d marched maybe two miles, following the road that ran along the river.

The men escorting DeVontay spoke little, and his attempts to figure out their intentions were met with sullen smirks. DeVontay’s clothes had dried a little, but the October air had turned brisk. Now, with night coming on, the temperature veered toward freezing and the wind rattled the brittle leaves that clung desperately to the swaying trees.

DeVontay didn’t know the date—such measured slices of civilization now seemed as buried in history as pharaohs and hourglasses—but Halloween was probably approaching. And the whole world was dressed up as ghosts of the humans who had once ruled this planet.

They’d passed a number of houses along the way, some of them ransacked, others half burned with only skeletal timbers remaining, but the two men had shown little interesting in scavenging. Nor did they seem overly concerned about being attacked, which led DeVontay to believe their group had established a cordon in which they felt safe.

At one point, the man in the orange cap waved at one of the houses, and a man with a pair of binoculars strung around his neck leaned out of an upper window and called, “You boys didn’t get zapped while you were out, did you?”

“I hooked up with your old lady,” Orange Cap yelled back. “But it wasn’t much of a zap.”

“If you find her, you can have her. Last I saw, she was trying to mash me into the ground. All two hundred and fifty pounds of her.”

“Jeez, Larson, if you couldn’t outrun that, it’s a wonder you survived this long,” said the man in the sunglasses behind DeVontay.

“A minute at a time,” Larson responded. “Looks like you got us some fresh meat.”

“Speaking of old ladies…don’t be getting any ideas.”

DeVontay wasn’t sure what to make of the exchange, but he decided to keep his mouth shut. They walked past the house and then turned up a narrow gravel driveway that sloped up into the hills. DeVontay wondered how many other lookouts they’d passed along the way that he hadn’t noticed.

The driveway ran through a copse of pine trees that shielded most of the remaining daylight, and then the road expanded into a great circle of bare dirt, with tractors, rusty trucks on cinder blocks, and farm equipment stacked around in a haphazard array. The perimeter was ringed with chain-link fence, coils of rusted barb wire atop it.

Several industrial outbuildings stood in the clearing, dim lights flickering behind their glass windows. Flames from a series of torches bobbed and flapped on the compound’s perimeter, spewing oily diesel smoke. The shadow of a man sitting on a truck hood separated from the larger darkness and came toward them, carrying an oil lantern whose light played across DeVontay’s feet.