Scott Nicholson - The Shock

Campbell didn’t like the way Donnie and Arnoff were looking at him. “I don’t know why you recruited me and Pete, anyway. We were doing just fine on our own. And if we had stuck together, maybe he’d still be alive.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, Campbell realized that was what he had been thinking: Pete was dead. But he didn’t quite believe it. Despite all the death around him, Pete seemed like a constant around which the madness of the world revolved. Cities could burn, mountains could melt into slag heaps, all the trees could wither, but Pete would be sitting there grinning stupidly and sipping a warm beer.

Campbell tugged his bike away from the Nissan and mounted it as it rolled forward. He nearly slammed into the open van door, and Donnie jumped back to keep from getting struck by the handlebars. Campbell recovered his balance and pumped the pedals.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Arnoff shouted behind him, but Campbell was intent on maneuvering through the stalled vehicles—a dump truck here, an SUV with its airbags deployed there, a motorcycle spilled on its side with the leather-clad driver rotting in the heat. He half expected to hear a gunshot— Arnoff isn’t that crazy, is he? —and then realized he’d probably be dead before the percussion reached his ears.

He pumped his legs hard to gain momentum for the next rise. He heard Arnoff’s little band arguing in the distance, punctuated with Pamela’s brittle feminine laughter.

So, when society breaks down, we all turn into sociopaths. Guess we should have seen that one coming.

Campbell topped the rise, breathing hard, and a cramp rippled through his right thigh. His backpack seemed to have doubled in weight, although it only held about ten pounds of bottled water, a blanket, and a few cans of food. He didn’t know how far he would go, but he was grateful for even a few minutes away from the group. He would soon turn around and pedal back, and he muttered at the irony of having turned into Arnoff’s new point man.

Below him, the interstate ran in twin ribbons of speckled gray, sporting the usual clutter of stalled vehicles. A tractor-trailer was upended on its side, the cab mating with a mangled mini-van. Campbell marveled at the chaos and calamity he’d missed during the solar flares that had forever changed the world. To him, that moment had been marked by annoyance that the television screen had gone blank. Meanwhile, the rest of the world had had its plug yanked in the most horrible and permanent way.

To the left, about two hundred yards off the asphalt, a giant scar in the trees marked the path of a downed jet airliner. Bits of frayed metal littered the raw dirt, and one full wing jutted at an angle into the sky like a massive sun dial. The nose and much of the fuselage had plowed through a row of houses, leaving sagging roofs and splintered siding in the wake. Swatches of color were scattered here and there in the wreckage.

Luggage. And people.

Campbell coasted down the hill, riding the hand brakes and weaving between the cars, trucks, and vans. In this section, the vehicles were in an orderly line, with few rear-end collisions, as if traffic had been moving slowly when the big electromagnetic eraser had wiped out their engines. The stench of rotted bodies hung in the air, the putrefaction hastened by the greenhouse effect of the windows. Campbell did his best to avoid looking inside the vehicles, but curiosity suckered him in again and again.

Part of it was his faint hope that maybe he’d see a survivor, injured and unable to escape. The other part was his coming to grips with the scale of the apocalypse.

If the professor’s right, and this is a worldwide deal, then I’m one of the last men on Earth.

And what the hell did I do to deserve it? Why am I upright and breathing while that poor lady with the blue hair at the wheel of the BMW is maggot food?

He swerved around a spare tire lying in the road and slowed the bike even more. Tools, clothing, and oil jugs were scattered on the road, and the trunks of several cars hung open. The back doors of a bread truck gaped wide, with plastic racks of molded bread spilled from the opening. A clutch of blackbirds flew away from the spoils. The flapping of their wings was the only sound in what should have been a rush-hour melee.

A man’s corpse flopped out of the driver’s side of a Toyota sedan. The passenger door was also open, and a woman sprawled dead on the pavement several feet from it.

Someone has moved those dead people.

Campbell stopped the bike and dismounted, looking at the nearby cars. The doors were open on about a dozen of them, the corpses inside apparently disturbed from their original positions. Most often, victims had died on the spot, collapsing wherever they happened to be. Many of the vehicles had endured collisions, although the loss of engine power had minimized much of the damage. A driver might flop over the steering wheel or loll back in the seat, but these people had been carelessly shoved out of the way of… what?

A survivor—maybe a group of survivors—might have prowled through the vehicles for food and supplies. That made sense. Campbell had done the same thing, except he’d not touched any corpses. Whoever had conducted this search had been disrespectful, almost to the point of obscenity. His unease was confirmed when he saw that a young woman’s blouse had been torn open, her pale breasts left exposed to the sun.

Zapheads?

No, the Zapheads he’d encountered wouldn’t have bothered with desecration, because they sought to inflict destruction on the living. To a Zaphead, the dead were no different than a tree or a car. They were inconveniences and obstacles, nothing more. Only a human—a human unaffected by the cataclysmic solar flares—could have indulged in such behavior as this.

A chill crept up Campbell’s neck, even though the morning sun was now high and hot in the August sky. He was mounting his bike, eager to return to Arnoff’s tribe, when he spied a blue backpack on the asphalt beside an empty child-restraint seat. Pete had a backpack just like that one.

Campbell ran to the backpack and peeled back the zipper on the pouch. He dug into the pocket and brought out a melted Snickers bar. The backpack smelled of beer and chocolate and stale sweat. It was Pete’s, all right.

Why would he toss his backpack here?

But maybe Pete hadn’t tossed his backpack to the pavement. Maybe it had been tossed for him.

Rachel wasn’t sure whether she’d blacked out or had been knocked unconscious.

The first vestiges of grayness brought no pain, only confusion. She remembered entering the house to look for DeVontay—

Stephen. How long have I been here? Wherever I am.

She rubbed her eyes and then realized it wasn’t her vision that was blurred. The room’s windows had been covered with sheets, blocking out most of the light. She was sitting on a hard wooden chair. Dim shapes stood around her at various intervals.

“Are you one of us?” a man said.

Rachel turned in his direction, unsure if the man was addressing her. He stood near the window, so she could barely make out his silhouette. He was tall and broad-shouldered, appearing to glance out the window and back again.

“Who is ‘us’?” Rachel said. She tried to stand and realized she was bound to the chair. That made no sense, because she didn’t feel any ropes. She wriggled her hands. They were so numb she could barely tell where they ended.

I must have been sitting here for a while. Real charmers, these guys.

“If you are one of us, you know what we are,” the man said.