Scott Nicholson - The Shock

The man on the ground saw the Zapheads and pushed himself along the pavement on his back, trying to get his feet beneath him. The soldiers didn’t allow him to escape, though. The woman jumped knee-first on his chest while the other soldier urged her on. “Captain will love this one,” he said.

Rachel circled around the Volvo to get closer. The closest Zaphead rushed across the narrow grass border to the street. Three weeks ago, it might have been an insurance salesman out for a morning jog, but now it was a killing machine instead of a workout warrior.

“Get off me, you assholes,” the struggling young man on the asphalt said. “Here come some Zappers.”

The sadistic woman soldier chuckled again, and Rachel wondered if somehow she had been affected, too—that maybe the Zapheads were evolving and the surviving humans were degrading until they all would meet in a wordless, violent misunderstanding.

The jogger Zaphead closed the distance in the blink of an eye, leaping onto the male soldier’s back and driving a grunt from his lungs. They fell forward, the four of them tangled in a pile as the other two Zapheads moved in.

The female soldier rolled away and tried to free her weapon from her shoulder, but Bridget Jones was on her like a shark after a baby seal. Bridget Jones swung her garden stake and caught the soldier under the chin, the bone-shattering thwack audible to Rachel.

The shirtless Zaphead joined the first in assaulting the male soldier, while the captive scrambled free of the pile. Rachel could see the fear and determination in his eyes.

He’s a survivor.

Rachel stepped from behind the Volvo and raised her makeshift weapon. The guy must have thought she was a Zaphead, too, because he scrambled to his feet and started down the street before Rachel yelled, “This way!”

The guy ran toward her and Rachel passed him, heading for the Zapheads. Even though the soldiers were part of the group that had tried to kill her, Rachel couldn’t let them get mauled.

When it comes down to it, we’re still on the same side. Barely .

The female soldier had recovered enough to pull her knife from its hilt. The blade glistened in the sun for only a moment, and then she drove it into Bridget Jones’s abdomen. The Zaphead mouthed a wet uurk but continued to attack, even as a blossom of red spread across her formal white blouse.

Rachel struck the asphalt with the curved metal tip of her pruning shear. “Come and get it,” she yelled.

The two Zapheads clawing at the male soldier turned to Rachel, snarling, their eyes burning cold with some hidden hate.

Then they did something odd.

They looked at one another as if in telepathic communication, and the shirtless Zaphead tightened his grip on the soldier’s throat as the soldier flailed helplessly to reach his rifle. The other, the jogger Zaphead, shoved away from them and ran toward Rachel.

She barely had time to register the sudden change in tactics when the Zaphead was upon her. She swung the shear handle from its position near her hip, tentative and afraid to draw blood. The wooden part of the handle bounced off the Zaphead’s arm as if striking rubber, then the Zaphead grabbed her.

His breath stank like molded cheese as he closed rough hands around her throat. Up close, his eyes burned with a liquid malevolence, the roiling lava of a hidden volcano. She kicked at his shin, but he didn’t react to pain.

Rachel had never had any self-defense training. Aside from playing tackle football with the neighborhood boys in Seattle, she’d learned most of her moves from movies. But she discovered that it wasn’t as easy when your would-be killer wasn’t following the script.

Her throat was tight and sore, the pressure of his fingers constricting the blood to her head. Her vision swam as the Zaphead lifted her from the pavement, pulling her against him. Her arms were heavy and her grip loosened on the shear.

She heard a man yell “Back down, bitch,” and then the Zaphead shuddered from a blow to the head. The deathly clutch eased enough for Rachel to suck in a lungful of air and regain her balance.

The man who’d escaped the soldiers swung a fist at the Zaphead, but the Zaphead flinched away, apparently learning to dodge. But while its attention was diverted, Rachel whispered a prayer of apology and swung the handle of the pruning shear.

The metal tip gouged deep into the base of the Zaphead’s skull, opening a gap in the flesh and revealing a red weal of raw muscle and gristle. Blood spurted from the wound.

So they bleed just like we do .

“Hit him again,” the man said, dancing just beyond the outstretched arms of the Zaphead.

Rachel thought of the bruises she’d be wearing as a necklace for the next week, then swung the wooden handle overhead in a two-handed grip and brought the blunt end flush upon the top of the Zaphead’s skull, like the Biblical Samson standing knee-deep in Philistines swinging the bloodied jawbone of an ass.

The sickening crack pierced the sounds of grunts and screams as the other two Zapheads pummeled the soldiers. The concussed Zaphead staggered for a moment, then wheeled and looked at Rachel. The fire in its eyes gave way to a look of hurt confusion, and Rachel wondered whether she’d knocked some wiring loose in his brain—as if maybe she’d pounded some humanity back into him.

“Better hit him again,” the man said. “Don’t play around with these monsters.”

“Thou shalt not kill,” Rachel said.

The man looked at her and shook his head. Behind him, the female soldier drove her knife into the Bridget Jones Zaphead a second time, opening another bright gash in her torso. A bit of pink intestine bulged out of the cotton blouse, but the Zaphead didn’t seem to notice. She drove her small fist into the woman soldier’s face, shattering her nose and sending a tooth flying.

“Let’s get out of here,” the man said, grabbing Rachel’s hand and pulling her toward the yard of a nearby house. The gesture reminded her too much of DeVontay, and she pulled free.

“I have to stay,” she said. “I have friends here.”

The man’s face curdled in resentment, then he grabbed her weapon and shoved her back. “Thou shall not kill, maybe, but I, for sure, goddamned shall .”

The man swung the blade against the Zaphead’s temple, and this time, the guy went down like a jogger after a marathon. A shot rang out, and the shirtless Zaphead’s shoulder erupted in a glut of blood and gore, but still, it kept attacking.

“I don’t see any friends around here,” the man said to Rachel. “Come on.”

“This way,” Rachel said, pointing to the house where DeVontay was still being held.

“Fine,” he said. The rancid odor of old beer hung about him and his bloodshot eyes suggested either a lack of sleep or an abundance of alcohol.

Rachel broke into a run, the man right behind her, hanging onto the grisly, blood-coated pruning shear. When they reached the landscaped shrubbery, Rachel burst through and headed for the side yard, where a high wooden fence offered concealment. They ducked behind it just as another gunshot erupted, then another one.

“New around here?” the man said, wiping sweat from his greasy brow.

“Only since After,” she said.

“After?”

She shrugged, lifted her hands to indicate the world. “This end-of-the-world thing. Thanks for saving me back there. I’m Rachel.”

“Name’s Pete,” he said, between gasps of exhilaration. “Just a suggestion, but I’d ditch the Ten Commandments. At least five of them no longer apply.”

“That’s how I was raised. It’s not something you can turn on and off like a light switch.”

“Guess so. I wouldn’t know anything about that. One Sunday morning in the Catholic church gave me enough horrors of hell to last a lifetime.”