Scott Nicholson: Milepost 291

The house featured a musty odor, as if it had been shut up for months, but rank fecal rot dominated the air.

Bandana Boy returned to the hall and motioned to Hayes, who followed him through a door. Franklin’s curiosity got the best of him and he had to see. What he discovered was Bandana Boy pointing into the toilet, and the aroma gave away its contents.

“Somebody’s been here,” whispered Hayes.

“Or maybe they were just caught with their pants down when the Big Zap came,” Franklin said. “Maybe a Zapper out there who forgot to wipe.”

“No,” Hayes said. “Too fresh. If it was that old, you wouldn’t be able to smell it.”

Bandana Boy pointed to the second floor above and Hayes nodded. “You guys stay close behind us,” Hayes said to Franklin. “Not that I give a damn, but Sarge has taken a liking to you.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular poster child of the apocalypse,” Franklin said.

Hayes didn’t remark on Jorge’s metal fireplace poker, but Bandana Boy stood erect and alert, eager to pull the trigger. “Okay,” Hayes said, waving them up the stairs. “Be ready for anything.”

Upstairs, Bandana Boy opened the first door on the right. There he found the “anything” of which Hayes had just spoken. He whistled and uttered a low, “Holy hell.”

Franklin couldn’t resist closing in behind Hayes for a look. The room was littered with cellophane food wrappers, tin cans, crushed plastic bottles, and a stench that made the downstairs bathroom refreshing. A bed pushed near the window was heaped with blankets. On the dresser beside it was a makeshift kitchen, with a Sterno burner, a blackened metal coffee pot, and an Igloo cooler.

Bandana Boy waded through the trash and looked around. “Got us a squatter.”

“No Zapper did this, that’s for sure,” Hayes said.

“Must have heard us coming and hid somewhere.”

Hayes poked the bundle of blankets with the tip of his rifle. “As much noise as you were making, no wonder.” He waved Bandana Boy out of the room. “Search it.”

“Why don’t you leave them be?” Franklin said. “They ain’t a threat to you.”

Hayes narrowed his eyes. “You heard Sarge. No prisoners.”

Bandana Boy pushed out the door between Franklin and Jorge, heading down the hall. He kicked open doors one by one, each time crouching and sweeping the barrel of his rifle in front of him. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he called like a child.

If this is the best of the best, it’s a wonder the U.S. military didn’t go to shit a decade ago.

Franklin turned to go downstairs, but Hayes blocked his way. “You’re on duty, Wheeler.”

Bandana Boy slammed open the last door at the end of the hall, pointed his rifle into the room, and said to Hayes, “Jackpot.”

They hadn’t hurt Rachel, but she didn’t dare risk provoking them.

The Zapheads had closed around her in the darkness, grabbing at her hair, pulling and squeezing her flesh. One of them touched the pulsing bite wound on her thigh and she yelped in pain, causing an eruption of mimicked yelps that sound like a pack of wolves. She couldn’t count them in the dark, but they numbered at least half a dozen. Their eyes swam like glints of fire thrown off a grinding wheel.

At full strength, she would have made a run for it. But she doubted she would have made it ten steps before they dragged her down and— then what?

The ones behind her nudged her forward, gently bumping her with their bodies. They were herding her. She soon realized they were guiding her downhill, ninety degrees from the way she’d come, although she couldn’t be sure in the darkness. She’d long since lost her way.

They fanned out around her, leaving her only one direction. She stepped, staggered, slid, and limped down the slope, all the while nearly surrounded by the Zapheads. Their eerie silence was broken only by the times they echoed her panting and gasping as exhaustion set in. She’d lost all sense of time as well, and when the blackness eased to gray, she saw that the forest had thinned to scrub vegetation.

Once she edged to one side, too weak and hurting to make a serious run for it, but the Zapheads closed ranks, their grim, blank faces made all the more horrible by the bright, animated forges of their eyes. She wondered what they would do if she stopped to retrieve the revolver from her backpack, but even if she succeeded in securing the weapon, she only had six shots, and now with the dawn light she could count eleven of them.

They were all ages, a cross-culture of former humans: a couple of teens like the girl who’d mimicked Stephen, three middle-aged women, a fierce-looking man in a ragged delivery uniform, an overweight young man whose balance and grace seemed almost uncanny, and a wiry old woman who looked like she could walk a thousand miles with neither bread nor water. A nude, dark-skinned man hovered close behind her, muscular as an athlete, his presence like obsidian tar. The others, besides their filthy and ragged clothing and their dancing eyes, were as ordinary as any customers she might have once found in a supermarket line.

Throughout the seemingly endless night, she worried about Stephen. Without his backpack, he had no basic supplies, charcoal-filtered water pump, or food. Was he out in the woods, lost and frantic in his solitude? Had Zapheads found him and taken him captive as well? Or had he met some other horrible fate in the wilderness?

As the sun burned away the lingering morning mist, the strange group emerged onto a mountain valley. The scrub gave way to a barbed-wire fence, and beyond that was knee-high golden grass that would have been cut and baled as hay weeks ago if the world hadn’t ended. Lower in the valley, a two-story white farmhouse and a tin-roofed barn stood among other small structures and a rectangle of dirt that had once been a garden. Small figures moved in the driveway and yard— people! —and she nearly called out for help.

But Rachel’s heart sank as she realized they moved with the same stilted yet oddly balletic movements as her escorts. Zapheads, dozens of them, milled around the house and barn. The Zapheads closed around her, forcing her against the fence. If she didn’t cross, they would crush her against the strands of barbed steel. She lifted the top strand and stretched her wounded leg in the gap above the middle strand, afraid to put any weight on it. Something broke loose beneath the bandage and a smelly, dark juice leaked from beneath the cloth.

She groaned in pain and revulsion. The Zaps around her immediately began groaning as well, their calls like the mooing of cattle in a slaughterhouse. Rachel forced herself through the opening and rolled to the ground, flattening the brittle, damp grass.

The Zapheads were on the other side of the fence. This was her chance.

Rachel bolted to the left, following the fence line even though the route was uphill, because the forest was nearer on that side. She didn’t have any plan besides putting distance between herself and the odd mutants. Her leg throbbed with each jarring step, and her heart hammered against the inside of her rib cage. The dewy grass soaked her jeans in seconds. She thought about peeling her backpack to shed weight, but if she reached the woods—when she escaped—she would need the food, blanket, first aid kit, tools, and weapon to survive.

At first the sound in her ears thundered in sync with her racing heartbeat, but then she realized the noise wasn’t in her head. She glanced to the left and the nude black Zaphead was running beside her, keeping pace on the other side of the fence. While Rachel was slowed by having to wade through tall grass, the Zaphead was totally oblivious to the branches and thorns on his side of the fence. The others trailed behind him, the sound of snapping vegetation reveling that they trailed them both by thirty or forty feet.