CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They’d covered perhaps three miles since leaving the roadside, and Stephen was still slumped over DeVontay’s shoulder, sound asleep. They’d been reluctant to stray out of sight of the interstate but also didn’t like being in the open. They’d descended from the hill into a suburban neighborhood, with silent cars in the driveway and menace in the shaded windows.
The bedroom community outside Charlotte looked beyond sleepy. It looked dead.
“You getting tired?” Rachel asked DeVontay.
“Not too bad,” he answered, although she imagined his muscles were screaming.
“Why don’t we rest a minute?”
“I want to put a little more distance between us and them Zapheads back there.”
“I think they’re oblivious,” Rachel said. “I doubt they’d be much interested in us.”
“Oh, they’re interested in bashing our brains out. You’ve seen ‘em.”
The gunshot boomed up from one of the houses ahead, shattering glass and reverberating across the valley. Stephen stirred in DeVontay’s arms, moaned a little, and pulled his doll close against one cheek as DeVontay knelt into a crouch.
Rachel hurried to a grimy white picket fence and scanned the street ahead. At first, she saw no movement. Then she saw a man in the yard of a brick ranch house. The man was slightly slumped, moving toward the house’s broken picture window with the prototypical confused steps.
Zaphead. But Zapheads don’t use guns.
“What is it?” DeVontay hissed in a whisper behind her.
“Trouble.”
“I figured that. The gunshot was a pretty decent clue.”
“Somebody might be trapped in that brick house,” she said, lifting her head so that she could see without exposing herself. “I see a Zaphead.”
“What’s a Zaphead?” Stephen asked in a drowsy voice.
“Never mind, little man,” DeVontay said.
“Is it like that guy in the hotel who kept beating on the doors?”
“Something like that.”
The Zaphead staggered toward the broken window, a tool in his hand. It looked like a rake with a broken handle. The Zaphead dragged it behind him like a shell-shocked gardener. He looked to be in his forties, overweight, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Two weeks ago, he probably had been standing over a barbecue grill, bitching about the Yankees’ starting rotation.
“He’s not one of the good guys,” Stephen said.
“No,” Rachel said, relieved that the boy was emerging from his earlier catatonia. “Probably not.”
“Wait here,” DeVontay said. “I’ll check it out.”
Rachel grabbed his forearm as he rose to slink around the back of the house. “You’re going to leave us here unarmed and defenseless?”
DeVontay looked at her and shook his head. “You and the Little Man here will be all right. You took care of yourself just fine before I came along, right?”
Yeah, but then all I had to worry about was myself.
“Okay, but don’t be gone long,” she said.
DeVontay looked like he wanted to offer her the gun but didn’t want to say that word in front of Stephen. Rachel waved him on his way, watching the Zaphead gardener climb into the shattered picture window. DeVontay slipped along a hedge of azaleas and was gone from view when Rachel saw the other Zapheads.
Two Zapheads emerged from the open garage, moving in tandem. One of them was an elderly woman in a floral housecoat, wispy white hair drifting in the breeze. A pink fuzzy slipper covered her right foot, and her left foot was bare, covered with thick blue veins. She shuffled like an Alzheimer’s escapee from a nursing home.
The other Zaphead was a young man with a feminine haircut and thin arms, wearing a striped sailing shirt. He resembled the pop star, Justin Bieber, but with a less-masculine jaw. Rachel nicknamed them Miss Daisy and the Bieb. It somehow made them less threatening.
“Are they going to get DeVontay?” Stephen asked, hugging his doll under his chin.
“No, DeVontay’s smart.”
“Are they going to get us?”
“No, they’re not getting us, either.”
“If they did, would they eat our guts like on TV?”
“No, these things don’t eat people.”
Although I’m not sure I can vouch for the Bieb. He’s slobbering a little.
“Will DeVontay get shot?” Stephen asked.
“He’ll stay out of sight until he figures out what’s going on. But there’s probably a good guy trapped in the house, and only good guys shoot guns.”
“I thought guns were bad.”
“Guns are dangerous, but sometimes you need them. And Zapheads don’t shoot…I mean…”
“What’s a Zaphead?”
Rachel peeked over the picket fence again. Miss Daisy was wobbly, taking two steps to the left for every step forward. The Bieb had passed her and made for the shattered window, stepping over the corpse. Rachel debated the possibility of throwing Stephen into shock against the necessity of education.
He needs to know the rules of After. Guns are now good. And Zapheads are bad.
She wiggled one of the pickets until it was loose, and then peeled it back to create a gap. “Take a look.”
Stephen put his face to the gap, and then held up the doll so it could take a gander, too. “See that, Miss Molly? That’s what bad people look like.”
Glass shattered, and someone shouted from inside the house. It was a man’s voice, yelling, “Get back.”
Then Rachel heard DeVontay shout, “Hey, man, I’m here to help—”
The gunshot boomed through the house, rattling the windows. Rachel’s heart clenched in her chest like a fist around barbed wire.
DeVontay?
She was ashamed that her first thought was a selfish one, that she’d be stuck alone, to care for Stephen. She pushed aside the thought and debated whether to rush into the house. The Bieb was climbing through the picture window, his legs kicking as he tried to drag his body inside the house.
Rachel looked around. There was a little utility shed behind the neighboring house, the door sagging open. “Come on,” she said, grabbing Stephen’s hand and pulling him through the forsythia hedge toward the shed.
“I’m scared,” Stephen said, and Rachel realized he was talking to the doll, not her.
They crossed the secluded lawn, with Rachel hoping no Zapheads were attracted by the commotion in the house. After making sure it was unoccupied, Rachel slung her backpack in the shed. The shed was cluttered with garden and carpentry tools, a ladder, a wheelbarrow, and milk crates full of wires, electrical outlets, and metal hardware. A stack of shelves held an array of paint cans, bags of potting soil and pesticides, and plastic sacks of herbicide. Through the light of a grimy window, Rachel saw something that might be useful.
She grabbed the can of Raid ant spray and put it in Stephen’s hand. “If anybody comes in, squirt that in their eyes. Okay?”
“You going to leave me?”
“Just for a sec. But I’ll lock the door behind me.”
“You’ll come back?” Stephen looked wildly around, perhaps comparing the shed to the hotel room where he’d been stuck with his mother’s corpse.
Rachel knelt before him, grabbed his shoulders, and looked him full in the face. “Do you believe in God, Stephen?”
He nodded. “Me and Mommy went to church.”
“God will watch out for you. Just pray and you won’t be alone.”
“But God made the Zapheads, didn’t He?”
“God makes everything.”
“Why? Why not just make good people?”
“I’ll be right back. I promise.”
Rachel scanned the wall. The sledge hammer was far too heavy, and the hoe’s long handle rendered it unwieldy. A broken pair of pruning shears leaned against the bench, one blade curving like a rusty eagle’s beak.
Could I hack somebody’s skull if I had to?
They wer
en’t people, not anymore. But could she be sure of that? Did Zapheads have souls? Even if they didn’t, did she have the right to kill them?
She closed the door, smiling back at Stephen’s worried, puppy-dog face. She hated leaving him alone, but until she knew what had happened to DeVontay, she couldn’t choose a course of action that might expose them both to danger.
By the time she reached the fence again, the Bieb had disappeared, probably inside the house by now. Miss Daisy was doing her peculiar Texas two-step, banging her scrawny shoulder into the screen door as if she had some memory of entrances but didn’t quite have a destination in mind.
Rachel checked the street for other Zapheads, recalling the group behavior of the ones back on the interstate. But apparently none had responded to the noise, or perhaps no more were in the vicinity. She decided to go behind the house and follow DeVontay’s route.
Clenching her fists so tightly that her fingers ached, she crept along the fence until she reached the back yard. A swing set and sandbox were surrounded by bright plastic toys, and two garbage cans were overturned near the fence. Rachel wondered if the children were dead inside the house, maybe facedown at the table, or maybe all tucked into their beds with prayers and bedtime stories.
She found an unlatched gate, probably the same one DeVontay had used, and she slipped into the back yard. A set of four wooden steps led to a screened-in porch, and she couldn’t see through the mesh. She listened for a moment but all she heard was a dull thumping that might be Miss Daisy.
Rachel hesitated, picturing Stephen in the gloomy shed, but that was wiped away by the fleeting image of him lying on the floor with blood leaking from his body.
Angry at herself, and refusing to acknowledge her fear, she sprinted across the yard and up the steps. She flung open the porch door and burst into the house, felling a little silly at being weaponless. Ahead was the kitchen, its door open. She stepped inside the house and had just a moment to register the mess—dinner that had once been underway, sliced onions on a cutting board, and spaghetti clinging to the stove—when the man grabbed her.