Milepost 291

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Not looking good,” Franklin said, peering over the edge of the boulder on which he was laying.

He passed the binoculars to Jorge. They’d moved into the forest to avoid the open road, hoping to identify the source of the car fire. Black oily smoke still threaded into the sky, but it had thinned and the breeze carried the stink to the east. Franklin had seen three men in fatigues—Sarge’s soldiers, probably—cross the road beyond them, but he was more concerned about the silent figures trickling through the forest.

“What are Zaps doing here?” Robertson asked.

“Must have smelled the fire or heard the gunshots,” Franklin said. “They’re drawn to activity. I wouldn’t be surprised if the soldiers lured them here.”

“I can’t believe there’s so many of them,” Robertson said. “We hardly ever saw any before the troops rolled through. Two months of nothing, and now they’re everywhere.”

“Maybe there are more of them than anyone knew,” Jorge said.

“Or nobody’s left in the cities for them to kill,” Franklin said.

“Thanks, Mr. Optimistic,” Shay said, sitting on a rock with an oversize jacket draped around her shoulders.

“They’re not wandering around aimlessly,” Franklin said. “It’s like they’re searching for something.”

From the rocky overhang, Franklin counted at least a dozen Zapheads in the woods below them. They were unkempt, some of them half-naked, with tangled, greasy hair. They walked with a slight jerking motion between the trees, but they didn’t stagger. They were all headed in the same direction, toward the road and the burning cars, like penitents on a pilgrimage bound for some sacred shrine.

“So what do we do?” Robertson asked.

“Lay those guns on the ground, for one thing,” came a voice above them.

Franklin rolled onto his back and squinted against the sun. The silhouetted figure included the long barrel of a rifle. Another man stepped from behind a tree, his weapon leveled, and Franklin recognized them as the other two soldiers from their scouting mission.

“We thought you guys were dead,” Franklin said, with what he hoped was a tone of earnestness. His semiautomatic was laying on the rock beside him, and he just wasn’t skilled enough to sweep it up and cut them down like a movie hero. “We went looking for you.”

“Where are Jimbo and Hayes?” the silhouette asked. “The guys who were with you?”

“We…we got separated,” Franklin said.

“Then how did you end up with their rifles?”

Franklin couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer to that one. Jorge said, “They were killed by Zapheads.”

“Is that so?” said the second soldier, edging forward and kicking Jorge’s rifle away from him. Then he swung his barrel toward Robertson. “Don’t even think about going for that shotgun.”

The silhouette emerged from the sun’s backlighting and scowled down at Franklin. “I’d kill you right here but Sarge is going to want his pound of flesh, and I’m not dragging your fat ass back up the mountain.”

“What about the other two?” the second soldier asked his companion. “Girl’s pretty cute.”

“Leave ‘em for the Zaps. She wouldn’t last five minutes back at the bunker. Those assholes would tear her into a hundred pieces.”

Shay had transformed into the same shell-shocked condition she’d been in when Franklin had first encountered her. Robertson twitched restlessly but he made no move for his weapon. Franklin stood on weary legs. He was tired of all this bullshit. He wouldn’t mind if they just shot him now and saved him the trouble of getting tortured by Sarge.

Jorge, however, gave no sign of fear or panic. “Zapheads are all around us,” he said in a low voice. “If you shoot, they’ll swarm you.”

“We’ve got enough bullets for all of you,” the second soldier said. “Saves us the trouble of hunting them down.”

He leaned over to scoop up Robertson’s shotgun. Three roaring explosions echoed off the stones and tree trunks and smoke rose from the front of Shay’s jacket. Then her hand emerged from the inner folds, brandishing the pistol.

The second soldier cried out and tumbled off the rock ledge, his weapon clattering down the slope. The first soldier grunted in pain, a raw red breach in the flesh of his shoulder. But he managed to raise his semiautomatic and squeeze the trigger, stitching a line of bullets in front of him.

Shay sucked in her breath and dropped her pistol, clutching at a sudden bloom of blood on her throat. Robertson moaned her name and scooped her up as she fell, ignoring the two bullet wounds in his legs. Jorge was also hit, but he rolled toward his discarded weapon before the soldier could get a bead on him.

Franklin realized he had no chance to escape the next fusillade so he stepped backward and went off the ledge, falling ten feet before bouncing off a mossy stretch of stone pocked with scrub. An orange sunburst flooded the inside of his head as his skull bounced off rock. He rolled another five feet as a second hail of gunfire erupted, finally stopping his fall by jamming one leg into the branches of a tree.

His left shoulder and upper arm throbbed, and his head felt as if an army had goose-stepped on it during a long march. The pain brought a sudden tsunami of nausea. He spat and drew a deep, aching breath, wondering if he’d broken a rib. The shotgun fired on the ledge above him, and then a sudden silence descended. The bitter odor of gun smoke drifted down to him.

He tugged himself back up the ledge, gripping the stems of saplings and whatever crevices he could find in the stone. Robertson’s sob of “No, no, no” broke the hush, and somewhere a bird chirped, too smart or dumb to acknowledge the violence below. Dark spots swam before his eyes, and he closed them so he didn’t get dizzy and tumble down the ravine.

Jorge’s face appeared above him, reaching down with a trembling hand. Franklin grabbed it and Jorge encircled his wrist and dragged him back on the stone, the treetops careening wildly above him, the sunlit red and yellow leaves like the bottom of a kaleidoscope.

“Okay?” Jorge asked.

“I’ve had better days.”

Franklin turned his head and saw Robertson huddled over Shay, her limp head lolling in his embrace. Blood spattered both of them, and Robertson shook with sobs. At the edge of the rocks, both soldiers lay still.

“Is she…” Franklin whispered.

Jorge nodded, his face grave, and it was only then that Franklin saw the raw, jagged wound in Jorge’s side. Blood trickled from a gash in his shirt.

“If any more of them are around, they’ll have heard the shots,” Franklin said.

“I don’t think any of us is good for—what do they say in your crime movies?—a fast getaway.”

Franklin tilted his head toward Robertson. “I doubt if he’d leave her, anyway.”

“She got both of them. She saved our lives.”

Franklin could tell Jorge was thinking about his own daughter, and how it might have been her life lost to violence. Or maybe he had already accepted Marina was dead, even though he had yet to admit it to himself.

“Her dad trained her well.”

Robertson turned to them, bleary-eyed and mumbling incoherently. He kissed the top of Shay’s head and gently brushed the hair from her face. She was angelic in death, peaceful, all signs of trauma and horror fled forever. Franklin thought religion was a tool used for control, but he took a little comfort in the notion that she might be in a better place.

Wouldn’t be hard to find something better than this hell.

“Whyyyyy?” Robertson wailed.

It was a question Franklin had been asking for two months. Some of the nausea lifted, although his head still throbbed mightily. He reached up and touched a welt the size of a duck’s egg. He rolled onto his side, bracing for the pain as he attempted to stand and comfort Robertson.

Then he heard a faint sound, almost like the rush of wind building in intensity. But the leaves overhead were still.

“Where’s your rifle?” he asked Jorge, keeping his voice level.

The Zapheads came out of the trees, echoing Robertson’s plaintive “Whyyyyyy?” with a dozen or more voices.