Scott Nicholson - Milepost 291

The end of the world had taught Rachel Wheeler many lessons, but the most recent one was this:

Running for your life was a bitch when you only had one leg.

She tightened the moist, stained bandana that kept the worst of the leaking to a minimum, then hobbled forward another ten feet. The wild dog that had bitten her could have inflicted any number of infections, but it wasn’t like she could hobble into the ER and have modern medicine deal with it. In After, there were no insurance plans.

She leaned against a tree, its rough bark rubbing her spine as she sneaked a look down the forested slope. The Blue Ridge Mountains were sheathed in October’s mellow gold, but the leaves were steadily raining down in the breeze as the forest braced for winter’s sleep.

She couldn’t see them, but she could hear them. Their footfalls were heavy in the crisp leaves, as if the Zapheads had no awareness of the noise they were making. Stephen was higher up the ridge, making better time than she was, but the boy had stopped to wait for her.

Little dude better start listening if he wants to make it out of this alive.

But she could understand his hesitation. Without her, he’d be all alone, lost in the woods with no food, no destination, and no way to fend off the Zaps. They’d made it two weeks since the gas-station explosion, hoping DeVontay Jones would catch up to them. But now Stephen believed he was dead, and Rachel’s little motivational speeches were becoming more hollow and halfhearted by the hour.

Not that it would be a problem for much longer, because this was looking like her final hour.

They’d not seen a Zaphead for two days, ever since leaving the highway and taking the Old Turnpike Road, a winding dotted line on the map that promised few houses and even fewer murderous mutants. The bite wound on Rachel’s left calf had gotten steadily worse, passing from mere red irritation to a festering purple mess. The stuff coming out of it now was more pus than blood, and although she’d packed it with antibiotic ointment she’d found in an abandoned farmhouse, the infection had now caused a mild fever.

And a fiery volcano of agony with each step.

She’d lost the pistol DeVontay had given her, but she’d found another in the house they’d slept in two nights before. It was heavy and shiny and had probably never been fired. The bullets in the revolver’s chamber were fatter than what she was used to, so she assumed it would pack a hefty kick. But she hadn’t had a chance for target practice.

Until now.

She fished it from her pack and leaned more heavily against the tree, taking some of the weight off her injured leg. If she fired the gun, Zapheads would come from miles around. The weapon was a last resort. Five down, and the last bullet for herself.

No. She’d never kill herself. She’d already faced that demon. And she’d promised to live for Chelsea, the younger sister she’d lost to drowning. Stephen was counting on her, too.

And DeVontay’s out there somewhere…

“Rachel!” came an insistent whisper.

She squinted through the trees above for Stephen. Finally she spotted him in a golden copse of poplar saplings, his brown jacket blending in with the fall foliage. “I told you to keep moving.”

“I got scared.”

“Grandpa Wheeler’s camp can’t be too far. Find the parkway and walk until you see Milepost 291.”

He scanned the woods below, his face pale. “What if they’re on the parkway?”

He meant the Zapheads. They didn’t talk of them much, Rachel reinforcing the idyllic life they’d have once they reached the Wheeler Compound, and Stephen only too eager to buy into the fantasy after the horrible death of his mother.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I’m coming.”

She gave one last glance down the slope. Branches moved, and then a figure shambled out into the open. It was partially nude, long hair and grime rendering it sexless. It didn’t seem to be moving toward them, but that didn’t mean anything. Zapheads had senses that operated beyond the human plane, like a cat’s range of night vision or a dog’s sense of smell. Rachel had wondered if Zapheads were telepathic, but she’d been too frightened to test the theory. But she was positive they were changing—becoming something different with each passing day.

She slipped her revolver back into the pack, not letting Stephen see it. She left the pack open in case she needed to retrieve the weapon quickly. The Zaphead was at least a hundred yards away, already lost among the thick gray trunks of poplar and birch, as she took a step and grimaced at the pain. Her lips twitched upward into a faint smile so that Stephen wouldn’t worry.

“Coming,” she repeated.

Stephen turned back uphill and started walking. His green backpack was perched high on his shoulders, the weight adjusted for balance. The boy had toughened up considerably since his first days with Rachel. Of course, DeVontay deserved a great deal of the credit for that, but she was proud nonetheless. These days, you counted whatever small victories you could.

Rachel kept moving, only limping when Stephen wasn’t looking, and soon they moved among large gray boulders pocked with moss. There were fewer trees here, the rocky soil making a graveyard of the ridge line. Juice leaked from Rachel’s wound and dripped down her leg, soaking her wool sock. She could smell it—a rancid, sweet stench that both sickened and scared her.

They didn’t talk, Stephen keeping a brisk pace and not letting her lag too far behind. His backpack bobbed as he marched onward, and he didn’t slow until the ridge leveled off. A second wave of mountains rose beyond them to the northwest, grayer from lack of leaves, the evening’s shadow already passing across their faces.

A few tin roofs were visible among the trees of the surrounding hillsides, and the little town of Black Rock lay fifteen miles off their path. There, she would be able to find antibiotics and proper dressing for her wounds, but she didn’t want to detour that far from the direct path to Milepost 291.

“Can we stop a sec?” Rachel asked with a gasp, unable to fully hide the whine in her voice. She realized she’d subconsciously passed the baton of leadership to Stephen. Considering he was only ten, that was a little pathetic.

Stephen studied her and nodded. She bit back a groan as she sat on a rock and straightened her injured leg.

“What do we do when it gets dark?” he asked.

“We can crawl into some of these big rocks, like over there where there’s a cleft.”

“It’ll be cold.”

The sun gilded the clouds and poured red lava over the tops of the mountains as it set in the west. This was all the sun’s fault in the first place—starting with its heating of the primordial soup, sparking the bacterial activity that led to evolution, and then capping off the job by spitting its toxic solar flares across the sky. Those rays had sent their electromagnetic currents into the brains of living creatures, disrupting the wiring and killing billions. Those deaths had been merciful compared to what had happened to the Zapheads, but the few survivors had it even worse—vastly outnumbered, their world shattered, and their future offering little hope.

“Maybe cold isn’t so bad,” she said.

At least half an hour of daylight remained, but Rachel needed to take the weight off her leg. She stooped and picked up a fallen limb, testing its strength. It bent under her weight but didn’t snap. The makeshift crutch could stand to be a little shorter, but if she broke it, the noise might alert the Zapheads that shambled through the forest. So she tucked the thicker end inside her elbow and angled it against her shoulder and spider-walked forward.