Scott Nicholson - The Echo

Then the flashlight was in his eyes and the professor knelt down to tend him. “Shhh,” the man said. “Stay down and don’t move.”

The Zapheads who’d been pounding down the stairs had stopped and were now waiting again. Campbell sensed other Zapheads massed behind the professor.

“What they did…to Pamela…” Campbell whispered.

“And what they’ll do to you if you don’t calm down.”

“Please don’t let them…” Campbell tried to sit up but the professor put a firm hand on his chest to pin him in place.

“They don’t want to hurt you,” the professor said, and the hissing Zapheads echoed a chorus of “ Hurchoo, hurchoo, hurchoo .”

Campbell giggled again, and he hoped he was dreaming. Or even dead. Yes, he’d take dead. That would be okay.

Because then the Zapheads couldn’t do to him what they’d done to Donnie and Arnoff. Well, they could , but he wouldn’t care.

Because behind the door he’d opened, he’d seen a group of Zapheads sitting on the floor like disciples around a sage. They were gathered before a rocking chair in which a man—Arnoff, Campbell now realized, although he would never have recognized him if not for the professor’s presence—was bound in thick ropes. Arnoff was still alive, because his eyes were wide open and animated with a scream that his mouth couldn’t make.

The penlight revealed that Arnoff’s tongue had been taken. His chin was caked with gore and coagulated blood. He might have been tied there for days.

Behind him, hanging upside down, was Pamela, her clothes removed, her body marbled with bruises. Her red hair dangled so that the tips brushed the floor. In that split-second, Campbell had seen she was mercifully dead.

Donnie, however, wasn’t so fortunate.

He lay facedown on the bed, his head facing the door and lifted back at such an extreme angle that his neck had to be broken. His voided bowels likely accounted for much of the room’s stench, as feces combined with the ordinary odor of death in a putrescent mélange.

Donnie’s hands were extended through the brass bedrails, fingers twisted in a dozen different directions, as if someone had meticulously broken and reset them over and over. Donnie’s eyes, like Arnoff’s, were open, but they were so glazed and dull with agony that he likely was beyond even screaming.

Campbell tried to imagine his own role in the Grand Guignol. Would they pull his ears from his head, or pick his freckles as if they were bugs?

The professor set the flashlight on the stairs so that illuminated both of them. Although his forehead was crinkled from strain and he appeared to have aged a decade in the weeks since Campbell had last seen him, the professor was unmarked and reasonably functional. His hands trembled as he checked Campbell’s leg for broken bones.

“You’re lucky,” the professor said, words barely audible above the incessant hissing of the Zapheads above and below. He put his fingers on Campbell’s eyelids and lifted them. “Doesn’t look like you have a concussion.”

“I don’t feel so lucky.”

“You’re not dead or maimed. They are accepting you.”

“That’s lucky ?”

“They sense that you won’t harm them.”

Campbell remembered what Wilma had said about not showing any fear. But he couldn’t help it. He still wanted to scream—and if he wasn’t in such pain, he would still fight his way past the Zapheads to the door. No sane human could be trapped with a houseful of destructive mutants and not be afraid.

Ah. Maybe “sane” is the operative word here.

“Why haven’t they killed you?” Campbell asked, shaking the lingering cobwebs from his skull, nearly recovered from the fall.

“They need me.”

“ Me me me ,” the Zapheads chanted. “ Me me me me me .”

The ones upstairs picked up the chorus. “ Me me me meeeeee .”

The professor smiled, though intense strain showed on his face. “They’ve learned a new word.”

“They can’t learn. They’re destructive killing machines.”

“ Sheens ,” one of the nearest Zapheads said. And a chorus of “ Sheens ” rippled through the house.

“We’ve all changed since the storms,” the professor said. “It’s time for acceptance.”

He finished examining Campbell and helped him sit up on the lowest step, then collected his flashlight. He waved it in the air and the Zapheads fell silent, although Campbell could hear their heavy breathing.

As if they were waiting.

Campbell still expected to be swarmed at any moment and have his limbs ripped from his body. He couldn’t shake the vision of Arnoff, Donnie and Pamela in the room upstairs. “Why did they let you live while they…did those things to the others?”

“They’re like children,” the professor said. “And I’ve been a teacher all my life.”

“Children don’t destroy for fun.”

“Yes, they do,” the professor said, putting a hand on Campbell’s arm to signal him not to raise his voice. “It’s perfectly natural. Children pull the wings off flies to see how they work. They pour soda down anthills. They eviscerate frogs and earthworms to see what’s inside.”

“ In ,” a Zaphead shouted. The crowd of them pushed forward, until one of them stood inside the cone of the flashlight’s beam. It was a woman of maybe thirty, attractive despite her wild and tangled mane of auburn hair, although her eyes sparked and glinted with a deranged excitement. “ In, in, in ,” she chattered.

“ In ,” came from three dozen throats.

“I want to come in!” Wilma wailed from outside the house.

The Zapheads all fell silent. An electric tension built, causing Campbell’s hair to stand up on his forearms.

“She’s becoming a problem,” the professor said.

“She said they wouldn’t let her in.”

“ Let her in ,” the auburn-haired Zaphead said.

Several Zapheads parroted her words, and then the chant spread up the stairs. Campbell covered his ears, unable to bear this stunning and sickening new discovery. He’d finally come to accept a world where the human race had been whittled down by the billions, and even accept a new natural order where many of those humans were savage killers.

At least that followed some sort of logic—a collapse of a society.

But here was a new and strange society that was actually rising . A mutant race apparently evolving to replace the old one.

Covering his ears didn’t help. The house thundered with the almost-jubilant vocalizing of the Zapheads. “ Let her in! Let her in! Let her in! ”

Wilma cackled with laughter, apparently at the back door now, because Campbell could hear her clearly. “I’m coming in, then!”

Campbell rose to protect her, feeling somehow responsible for her even though she’d lured him to this house of horrors. But the professor put a hand on his shoulder and restrained him.

“She’s insane,” Campbell said. “They’ll tear her to pieces like they did your friends.”

“It’s not your war, Campbell. Acceptance.”

Campbell broke free and started through the crowd of Zapheads. The stench of the house, the death it harbored, and the unwashed mutants made him dizzy and claustrophobic. He no longer cared if they killed him. He’d been surviving day by day based on some hope of a distant, better future, but now he saw that such an ideal was impossible.

His world was over.

There was a commotion in one of the hidden rooms, probably the kitchen. The hissing rose like steam whistling from a cracked radiator. Campbell pulled out his penlight, head throbbing, legs sore, and his throat parched with thirst and anxiety.