Scott Nicholson - The Shock

“That’s M&M’s,” Rachel said.

“Whatever. Same principle.”

“No, it’s not. M&M’s has a hard shell so instead of smeary chocolate, it leaves artificial food coloring on your fingers.”

“Do you got to argue about everything?”

“No, only when you’re wrong. Oh, wait a minute. You’re wrong about everything.”

The boy’s blue eyes tracked back and forth, from one of them to the other. He had returned to the world a little, back from whatever private hell inside his head.

“Here,” she said, reaching out for the other peanut butter cup. She held it in her palm until the chocolate ran. Then she popped the candy into her mouth. It was so sweet that it made her teeth hurt.

She showed her palm to both of them. “See? A gooey mess.”

“That looks like poopie,” DeVontay said.

Rachel made a show of studying her palm as if making a scientific observation. “Hmm. You’re right, it does.”

She licked her palm, making sure to smear chocolate all over her lips. “Mmm. Tastes like poopie, too!”

DeVontay laughed, and the boy giggled. “Yuck!” the boy said, in a small, delighted voice.

“Hey, watch this,” DeVontay said. He dug his fingers into the skin beneath his left eye, then touched the glass orb and rolled it a little so that it appeared the eye was gazing far to the left.

Whoa, don’t freak the kid out. We’re trying to get him back to normal, not make him think you’re a Zaphead.

But the boy gazed with intense interest. DeVontay smiled, then lifted up the skin just beneath his eyebrow and rolled the glass eye into his fingers. He held it up like a marble. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

“Can I hold it?” the boy said.

“Sure. But only if you let me hold the doll for a minute.”

The boy nodded and made the trade. It was the first time Rachel had seen him without the doll since they’d rescued him. She decided to bring him all the way out. “What’s your name?”

“Stephen.”

“That’s a nice name.”

The boy shrugged, focused on the glass eye. He turned it so it caught the light. “How did you lose your eye?” he asked DeVontay, his lips pressed into a solemn line.

“Messing around. You know how kids are.”

“Mommy says if you play with sticks, you’ll poke your eye out.”

“She’s pretty smart,” DeVontay said.

Rachel noted he used present tense. He’s got a good instinct. Maybe he has more social experience than he lets on.

DeVontay stroked the doll’s kinky hair. “What’s her name?”

“Miss Molly.”

“That’s a pretty name,” Rachel said.

“Does it hurt?” the boy asked, passing the glass eye back to DeVontay.

“Not anymore. It’s just something you get used to. But it took a while.”

Rachel noticed his street grammar had softened, and his former aggressiveness was buried. “Just like this—this After —is something we’ll all have to get used to,” she said to Stephen.

The boy touched the bill of his cap. “Like not having football this year.”

“Probably not,” DeVontay said. “But the Panthers wouldn’t be no good anyway. The Eagles would have whooped them bad.”

As DeVontay plopped his glass eye back in place, Rachel scanned the road below. All those people rotting in the August heat.

“Mommy said only the wicked people changed,” Stephen said.

“Lots of people have died, Stephen,” Rachel said. “None of us are perfect, but most of us are good.”

“Then why did my mommy die? Does that mean she is wicked?”

DeVontay gave Rachel a look like: “I’m not touching this one.” He gave Stephen his doll back and the boy immediately clutched it to his chest, apparently lapsing back into his near-catatonic state. Rachel knew this might be their only chance to pull the boy out again.

“Your mommy wasn’t wicked,” Rachel said. “God just needed an extra angel in heaven, to make things ready for when the rest of us arrive.”

Crap. Maybe this wasn’t such a good direction . But they didn’t cover this in Counseling 101 .

“Then how come some people died and some just walk around being mean? Aren’t they wicked?”

“We don’t know that, honey. That’s why we need to stay away from everyone until we can figure out what is happening.”

“So, it’s just the three of us forever?”

“We’ll find others like us.”

“Other good people?”

Rachel wasn’t sure why she’d survived. She’d always felt special, but not in an arrogant way. Even from an early age, she’d always felt God made her for a reason, and made only one person like her in the whole world, and she was supposed to be Rachel all her life. She’d felt it even before her mother took her to Catholic services or her dad gave his grumbling rants that took her years to understand as atheism.

She wasn’t even sure if she’d ever accepted his atheism, because she couldn’t comprehend a world without purpose and order. After Chelsea’s death, Dad had shut off any pretense of faith, insisting that no merciful God would allow such a tragedy. She wondered what Dad would make of this apocalypse.

“Yes,” Rachel said, realizing the silence had stretched too long, filled by the twitter of birds and the soft flapping of leaves overhead. “Other good people.”

“Do you know where they are?”

DeVontay, studying the map again to avoid joining the discussion, pointed to the northwest and said, “Yeah, little man. They’re that way.”

“Is that way Mi’sippi?” Stephen asked. “My daddy’s in Mi’sippi.”

Rachel found herself nodding. Little white lies didn’t make her wicked, did it? “Yes, Mississippi’s that way.”

“I hope Daddy’s good. I don’t want him to be one of the mean people.”

Stephen’s eyes welled, and Rachel scooted over to hug him. He sagged into her arms and she patted his back. “With a boy like you, I’m sure he’s good. We’ll find him for you.”

She imagined an older, pudgier version of Stephen, a bloated corpse lying in bed or on a sidewalk or roasting in a car. Then she saw him staggering along the street, looking for something to attack. She pushed the vision away.

Please, God, give me strength. Show me Your purpose and help me be part of Your order . Even if I don’t understand it .

DeVontay folded the map backwards, so that it was lumpy and the corners uneven. He pushed it into his backpack, along with the leftover food. He pulled the pistol out, making sure Stephen wasn’t watching, and said, “Hey, we better get started if we got to walk all the way to Mi’sippi, right?”

Rachel brushed Stephen’s hair back from his freckled face and kissed his forehead. “You’re a good boy. And I don’t believe wicked people can hurt good people, do you?”

He shook his head no, bumping her cheek with the bill of his cap. She smiled and helped him to his feet. DeVontay had eased back into the shade until he was behind the tree. He tilted his head toward the highway.

Rachel saw four of them, coming up the pavement between the jumbled lines of cars. Their clothes didn’t look ragged, and they didn’t jerk and shake, but she knew they were Zapheads. Something about them was off. Maybe it was the way they peered in each vehicle as they passed, as if searching for any movement they could make still forever.

They were about three hundred yards away, and it was unlikely they would notice anyone on the slope above them. From Rachel’s observations, Zapheads had a suppressed sense of perception, as if they could only process information in their immediate vicinity. Maybe their focus on destruction was so all-consuming that they had no larger awareness of the world.