Scott Nicholson - The Echo

Because they were coming fast.

“I won’t be able to outrun them,” she said, pointing to the soaked red bandage on her leg.

“Sure, you can,” Stephen said, eyes wide with fright. “You’re Rachel .”

“No,” she said. “You need to run. As fast as you can. And don’t look back.”

Stephen was near tears. Rachel’s eyes were also stinging.

It’s the gasoline. Yeah. Right.

“I’ll distract them,” she said, pointing toward the McDonald’s restaurant. “I’ll go in there and get them to chase me while you run into the woods.”

“We need a distraction ?” Stephen said, rubbing at his eyes and sniffling. “Then start a fire. That’s what that guy did back at Taylorsville, remember?”

Rachel recalled how the massive bonfires had attracted the Zapheads, creating a compelling, noisy, and colorful chaos that likely appealed to their sense of destruction. If devastation was their drug of choice, then Rachel could serve them up a hell of a happy hour.

The question was how to do it without immolating both her and the boy. She’d seen enough “dumb redneck videos” on YouTube to know that playing with gasoline and matches wasn’t the smartest move in the world. But she didn’t have time to craft a clever fuse that would offer a reasonable safety barrier.

Jackie Chan would already have this problem solved.

She dug in her backpack, tossing out cans of food and bottled juice, wondering why she’d hoarded so much while they were still in a civilized area. But that was the uncertainty of Doomsday—it wasn’t Dooms days , plural. It was all now.

“Okay,” she said, drawing out a long wool scarf she’d filched from a department store. It was tan, accenting her chestnut eyes and dirty-blonde hair, and she’d grabbed it fantasizing about a future where fashion mattered. “Improvising here. Go dip this in the gasoline and be careful not to get it on your clothes.”

Stephen dutifully ran toward the shallow pool of fuel. Rachel dug into a side pouch until she found her Bic lighter.

Thank God for butane.

She realized it was the first time she’d thanked God for anything in weeks. If those shambling, scurrying mockeries of humankind cascading toward them were part of some divine plan, then she was perfectly willing to exercise her free will to destroy them.

Is killing only a sin if you know what you’re doing? Maybe these Zapheads are God’s truly blessed creatures, because they don’t suffer the pain of guilt. They’d nail Jesus to the cross and call it a favor, not a sacrifice they’d have to repay over centuries.

“Hurry, Stephen!” she yelled.

The nearest Zaphead was now about a hundred yards away. Two small bands of them approached from each direction of the side road, too, and Rachel realized for the first time that they now seemed to travel in groups, like pack animals.

She’d had a vague sense that their behavior was changing, but she’d been too focused on daily survival to question it. Like most “Ah-ha” moments, this one came in such a rush that she had no time to process, only react.

Stephen dragged the scarf back by holding the frayed threads of one end, inadvertently laying a thin trail of gasoline as he hurried away from the pumps.

“Good job,” she said when he returned, taking the scarf from him and laying it on the pavement. “I’m going to start calling you ‘Chan Junior.’”

“As long as you don’t call me ‘sweetie’ anymore.”

“Sorry. Just a habit from my counseling days.”

Which weren’t that long ago but were literally from another world, the world of Before. And those experiences hadn’t taught her one damn thing about setting a gas station on fire without blowing herself and a kid into a thousand pieces.

“I can’t light this until you leave,” she said, thumbing the Bic. “You might have some gasoline on your clothes.”

He sniffed his sleeve. “I don’t smell nothing.”

“Start running,” she said. “Behind the station and up the hill.”

“What if I get lost?”

The Zapheads were now close enough that Rachel could hear their strange hissing—it sounded like the spitting heart of a giant winter fireplace. “I’ll be along real soon. I just want to make sure you’re safe before I light this.”

Stephen nodded. “Maybe DeVontay will see the smoke.”

“Maybe so. Now get.”

She waited until he disappeared around the building, hoping more Zapheads weren’t descending from the surrounding hills. There was nothing she could do but hope.

And set their world on fire.

She flicked the Bic, lifted the frayed end of the scarf, and applied the flame. At first the fibers curled and shrank, and then fire spread along the length of fabric faster than she’d anticipated. She dropped the scarf and fled, wondering how big the explosion would be and how many steps she would get before—

KA-WHUUUMP .

Much of the force of the ignition blew straight into the air, lifting the metal canopy from the pump island. The windows in the front of the shop shattered inward, and the Toyota truck rolled over on its side, flames licking along the oily bottom of the engine. The force of the sudden combustion hit her in the small of the back like a fist. Rachel was thrown onto the ragged landscaping between the kerosene pump and dumpster, rolling in the sodden mulch and scratchy evergreens.

Holy hell.

She rose to her hands and knees, coughing and choking as black plumes of smoke roiled around the parking lot. She didn’t know how many pumps were yet to catch fire. She’d read somewhere—probably some wacky Web link her grandfather Franklin had emailed her—that gasoline stored in tanks beneath the surface couldn’t explode because of a lack of oxygen, but the tank openings would burn like giant flame-throwing Bic lighters until the fuel was depleted.

Rachel didn’t plan on sticking around to test the theory. She scrambled to her feet and limped up the hill in the direction Stephen had gone.

“Well,” Franklin said. “There are really only three possibilities.”

Jorge barely listened to Franklin. He half suspected the old man’s paranoia had finally shifted from eccentricity to full-blown borderline schizophrenia. Under normal circumstances—if, say, Franklin was a fellow farmhand—Jorge would simply nod in noncommittal agreement and then avoid him whenever possible.

But here in the Blue Ridge Mountains with the human race nearly extinct, Franklin’s deranged and peculiar genius might even be an asset.

After all, there are no head doctors around to declare him a lunatic.

Willard, one of the local farmhands who had been raised in the rural Tennessee Mountains, was fond of his Friday evenings, when he’d show up with a glass jar of clear homemade liquor. He’d sing off-key about old drunks outnumbering old doctors, mangling the words into incoherent chunks of wildcat wailing and blubbering.

The last time Jorge had seen Willard, the old drunk was a crazed Zaphead who had attacked Jorge in a barn loft. And now Willard was beyond the need for doctors.

Franklin passed his pair of binoculars to Jorge. “Look down yonder,” he said.

They were sitting on a rocky outcropping, with a commanding view of the surrounding mountains and the deep valley trailing away to the foothills in the South. Jorge looked through the lenses in the direction Franklin had pointed. An oily column of smoke rose in the valley from beside a twisting gray ribbon of road.

“Probably some Zappers having a weenie roast,” Franklin said.

Jorge wasn’t that interested. Rosa and Marina wouldn’t have had time to reach the valley, even if they had managed to round up the horses they had turned into the wild. So the fire might as well have been on television for all he cared.