Scott Nicholson - The Echo

Rachel took a tentative step and decided that she could endure it. Their progress would be slow, but she wasn’t ready to surrender yet.

The next step, and the next.

For Chelsea. For Stephen. For Grandpa.

Even for me.

“Rachel?”

She’d been so focused on whether her leg wouldn’t betray her that she hadn’t realized she’d left Stephen behind. She turned around to find him watching the Zapheads at the gas station.

One of them, standing near the overturned and blackened hull of the Toyota pickup, reached out a hand as if to touch the fire. His shirt sleeve burst into flames and then the yellow and orange heat licked along the length of his arm.

The Zaphead turned his palm up as if curious about the strange, flickering light. It caught the full fabric of his shirt, and then his beard and hair burst into flames. Soon he was ablaze from the torso up, immolated, but he didn’t beat at the fire or retreat from the heat.

It reminded Rachel of the famous photograph of the Buddhist monk who’d set himself on fire to protest persecution in Vietnam.

Except this Zaphead wasn’t protesting.

Neither did he flee.

Instead, he seemed entirely ambivalent about the blistering and popping of his flesh.

“He looks just like the Human Torch,” Stephen whispered.

She pulled on his arm. He’d seen far too much already.

The nearest Zaphead also reached out a hand to touch the burning creature, which then stepped forward into the larger conflagration. The second one looked at her palm and the smoke rising from scorched flesh, and then she followed. So did another.

All the gathered Zapheads then walked into the fire, one by one, approaching from all sides, their bodies outlined in dark silhouette for just a moment before vanishing into the roaring heart of hell.

“Come on ,” Rachel said, nearly weeping, tugging Stephen so hard they both almost tumbled over.

Stephen finally relented and she led him up the slope, disguising her limp, as the fire crackled and spat with the discovery of new fuel. The petroleum smoke changed flavor, and Rachel nearly vomited.

It smelled like barbecue.

They didn’t scream.

God, why didn’t you at least let them scream?

Her name had been Kasey.

She didn’t know that her parents had both been attorneys—her father an intellectual properties expert who mostly worked with corporations, her mother a family lawyer and juvenile guardian ad litem who also volunteered with a non-profit legal defense agency that advocated for minority rights.

She no longer remembered that they had lived in Atlanta, and that they had been on a vacation that would take them across the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland before her farther traveled on to a conference in D.C.

Kasey had been looking forward to seeing the wild horses that strolled across the dunes. Her father had even bought a new tent and a kite, and he had promised to turn off his cell phone for three whole days.

She was eleven years old and about to enter the seventh grade, nervous because she was a little younger than her classmates. Plus Ashleigh Ostermueller had grown boobs over the summer, which meant Bradley Staley would probably like Ashleigh better than he liked Kasey.

It was Thursday and she had been sleeping in the backseat of the Nissan Pathfinder when the thing happened.

Her father must have sensed the electrical signals misfiring, no longer sending the appropriate messages from his brain to his heart. He had slowed the SUV and pulled over to the grass, looking beside him at his wife. She was already slumped against the glass when the vehicle rolled to a stop and didn’t respond to the last sentence he ever spoke.

Kasey wasn’t aware of it now, but she had awakened at the sound of her father’s voice, unbuckled her seatbelt, and became something different. If she had known she would lose her awakening sense of fashion, with increasingly frequent trips to Aeropostale and T.J. Maxx, she would have changed into different clothes. Kasey wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Hello Kitty T-shirt, because that was for kids, and she was almost a woman. Or at least a teenager.

But pride no longer bothered her, nor did fear, nor did seventh grade, Ashleigh Ostermueller, or the pungent stink of smoke in the breeze.

She didn’t understand the instinct that had compelled her to follow the ridge and find herself before a gate. The complexities of charged particles, the molecular structure of her budding body, and the delicate firing of her neurotransmitters were far beyond her. Even if she had attended college, she probably would have avoided molecular biology like the plague.

Unless, of course, Bradley Staley was taking the class.

She was aware of others behind her, following through the forest. Their hissing filled her senses and connected her in a way she would never have been able to describe in a paper for English class. But inside her skull, another word resonated over and over. “Who? Who? Who?”

The Kasey thing walked through the gate and the first thing that drew her attention was the goats. They bleated when they saw her, demanding hay from the little shed beside their pen.

She didn’t understand hunger. But she was drawn by the sound of their voices.

“ Bahhhhh ,” the nearest goat bleated.

The Kasey thing moved toward it. The old Kasey would have been embarrassed by her attitude, which was currently one of childlike wonder and innocent curiosity. The old Kasey had been busy learning to be cool, ignoring her parents, and manipulating the people around her to increase her social standing and—more importantly—damage the standing of her female competitors such as Ashleigh.

None of that mattered now, only this rich, new sound that resonated inside her head and drove out and replaced the repetitive “Who?”

She let the new sound sink into her throat and then she pressed her lips together and vibrated her larynx.

“ Bah .”

The others of her kind fanned out into the compound, not sure where they were or what they were, only that they were .

The thing that had been Kasey would have giggled at being called a “Zaphead.” Such a pejorative term was probably on the list of phrases that would earn a trip to the guidance counselor’s office and a lecture on the social evils of bullying.

The Kasey thing pressed her lips together again and exhaled, imitating the goat. “ Bah. ”

The other goats shoved against the fence, begging for hay, sounding almost like crying children. “ Bahhhhh! Bahhhhh! ”

The Kasey-thing repeated the simple phonetic, stretching out the sound by inhaling more air and expelling it. “ Bahhhhh! ”

The others of her kind stopped hissing and came closer to the pen. One of them said “ Bah .”

Then more of them joined in. “ Bahhh! Bahhh! Bahhh! ”

The old Kasey would have been horrified to find herself a part of the crowd. Fitting in was one thing, but being just like everyone else was lame.

This new Kasey, though, she didn’t care. Any more than she cared about Hello Kitty and the end of the world.

This new Kasey liked the sound, and liked the others voicing it as well, and soon the sound became a bigger sound repeated over and over and over.

“ Bahhh! Bahhh! Bahhh! ”

Over and over, ever After.