The Echo

CHAPTER FIVE

Campbell followed the soldiers for half a mile, slinking from vehicle to vehicle. Where the road was relatively clear, Campbell either climbed into the drainage ditch that ran along the road, used the concealment of the guardrail, or slipped through the roadside undergrowth.

The soldiers showed little concern over being followed or attacked. Either their experience or their weapons—or possibly both—made them brave. The skinny one had more of a twitching disposition, occasional stopping to check his bearings or light another cigarette. Crewcut kept a steady pace, prodding their prisoner along.

Campbell wasn’t even sure why he was following them. Perhaps it was merely a detour from despair. He harbored no fantasies of joining whatever coalition the solders belonged to, even if they would accept him into their ranks. He’d had his fill of groups: first Arnoff’s ragtag militia and then the cultish army from which Rachel and DeVontay had rescued that little boy, Stephen, back in Taylorsville. Campbell was sure one of those groups was responsible for Pete’s murder.

But he’d also become obsessed with the “Milepost 291” that Pete had talked about before his death. That was the site of a rumored military bunker on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Arnoff spoke of it as a utopia, a resort with hot showers, iced drinks, and all-you-could-eat buffets safe from the threat of Zapheads.

Campbell wasn’t ready to believe the government had planned for such an unpredictable event as a cataclysmic solar storm. He supposed the preparations weren’t all that different from surviving a nuclear attack.

He might not reach Milepost 291, but he’d encountered fewer people and Zapheads since heading north along U.S. 321. And following these soldiers had at least silenced the Pete-voice in his head.

After an hour, the soldiers stopped to rest, Crewcut climbing atop a white service van to survey his surroundings. The prisoner sagged over the hood of a car, face down, hands tied behind his back. The scrawny soldier opened the driver’s side door of a yellow sedan and pulled out the sagging, rotted corpse of what must have once been a young woman, judging by her sporty skirt and blouse.

The scrawny soldier hooted and spun her around as if dancing, even though he could barely support her weight. Her stiff yellow hair flopped over his shoulder, a barrette catching sunlight as she made a grotesque turn.

“Hey, honey, you’re my kind of woman,” the soldier drawled. “You don’t talk and you don’t say no.”

Campbell, peering through the guardrail, again considered shooting at the soldiers. Crewcut was a clear target, standing tall against the graying sky, and his partner was oblivious to danger, thrusting his hips obscenely against the corpse.

“I can just tell you been without a man for way too long,” the scrawny soldier shouted. He lifted up the dead woman’s skirt, revealing mottled blue skin.

“Hey, Jonesy, check it out,” he called to Crewcut.

“If that Zaphead gets away, your ass is grass and I’m the weed eater,” Crewcut answered.

“One hundred percent prime beef on the hoof.” The soldier gave the dead woman a slap on the rear. The sickening liquid sound curdled Campbell’s stomach, but despite his horror, he couldn’t look away.

Why doesn’t the prisoner run?

But Campbell knew why. It was a Zaphead.

Then why isn’t it attacking them?

Crewcut clambered down from the van. The scrawny soldier grew bored and gave his ghastly dance partner one last squeeze before dumping her. She collapsed like a bundle of wet laundry, making a sickening splat against the pavement.

“I never was one for letting ‘em down easy,” the soldier said.

Crewcut stepped over her without looking down. “Saddle up, Romeo, and don’t forget to wash your hands before dinner.”

“It’s not an infection. Brainstorm said—”

“And you’re going to take his word for it? Look around.”

Campbell ducked to avoid detection, wondering what he would do if they spotted him. Would he run? Shoot? Join them?

He suddenly felt foolish and exposed. His pulse pounded against his eardrums so hard that he barely heard the scrawny soldier answer.

“So? Just a bunch of wrecks and dead people.”

“And you think it’s all an accident?”

“Sure. The sun did it. Everybody knows that.”

“Nobody knows nothing. Remember that, and you might just make it to see the next sunrise.”

Crewcut clomped away and Campbell dared a peek. Crewcut collected his prisoner, who had scarcely moved since being deposited against the hood of the car, and shoved him forward. The scrawny soldier lit a cigarette and hurried after them. Campbell let them gain another fifty yards before he surreptitiously followed.

Dusk was settling against the foothills, shrouding the autumn canopy, when the soldiers left the highway and headed down a country lane. The vehicles had thinned out quite a bit by the time Campbell reached the detour. Fortunately, the forest was thick here, pines mixed with scrub locust and crabapple, as if the land had been farmed a generation ago and let back to nature.

A single-wide mobile home was perched just beside the lane, two ragged flags—the Confederate Stars and Bars above the Stars and Stripes—hanging from a pole by the front door. A junker hot rod sat in the front yard, its hood removed and the engine suspended from a chain wrapped around a wooden crossbeam. A kiddie-sized swimming pool contained a black soup of fallen leaves. The narrow yard was salted with trash, plastic bags and fast-food wrappers. Most of the old world’s packaging had outlasted the items contained inside, as well as the people who had once done the consuming.

The soldiers stopped near the trailer, and Campbell wondered if this was their camp. He’d expected more of them, a unit like the one outside Charlotte, but maybe these were the last survivors here. He saw no reason why military personnel would have better mathematical odds of surviving the solar storms than civilians.

Unless, as Crewcut had hinted, there was more going on than met the eye.

Campbell waited, crouched in the dark forest, waiting for them to continue. The blindfolded prisoner stiffened and jerked, nearly breaking free of Crewcut’s grip. The scrawny soldier was quick to drive the butt of his rifle into the prisoner’s back.

“Easy there, Zapper,” he said with a grunt. The prisoner still twitched with sudden agitation, tugging against his bonds.

“Hear that?” Crewcut said.

The scrawny soldier stood silent a moment and then shook his head. “Nope.”

“The thing that’s not right.”

Sounds like night to me.”

Campbell strained his ears, wondering if Crewcut had heard a barking dog, shouts for help, or maybe a distant scream.

“Listen beyond the noise,” Crewcut said.

“What are you, some kind of Zen master all of a sudden?” But the soldier grew quiet again, and this time Campbell heard it, too.

What he’d taken for insects was actually something else. Sure, there were crickets and night birds and flickering winged things, but also a different type of sound. It was odd but disturbingly familiar, and then Campbell remembered the Zaphead woman that had jumped from the back of a van and attacked him and Pete. He’d had to crush her skull, sickened by her resemblance to his mother.

Now he heard that same chuckling, only it wasn’t from just a single throat; it sounded like it issued forth from a dozen or more.

The two soldiers pointed their guns before them and spun in slow circles, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. But it was coming from all around them.

“What is it?” the scrawny soldier said, his voice cracking a little in a nervousness he couldn’t fully suppress.

“Nobody knows nothing.” Crewcut sounded calm, although he clacked a mechanism on his assault weapon. The prisoner now stood silently, head tilted back as if listening.

A twig snapped somewhere to Campbell’s left. He hoped the soldiers didn’t panic and open fire. He slumped a little lower into the weeds, sliding his pistol from his backpack.

The chuckling sound rose in pitch, a keening vibration that pierced the forest air. The contrast made Campbell realize just how deep the silence of the post-Doomsday world was—he had become accustomed to the absence of car engines, radio broadcasts, chainsaws, and police sirens. Now this sudden disruption of peace was almost shocking. He echoed Crewcut’s catch phrase: “Nobody knows nothing.”

He’d had a very limited view of events since the solar storm—this new phase of evolution the woman Rachel had referred to as “After.” He’d adjusted to a perception of Zapheads as bloodthirsty, mindless killers and of fellow human survivors as desperate potential killers, all tossed into a stew of rotten bodies and failed technology.

But if a wider change was underway, wouldn’t the military be the strongest organized force? Wouldn’t that rigid chain of command have a better chance of enduring in chaos, and wouldn’t those commanders have the most information about the current state of affairs?

And isn’t that the reason I am following them? For answers?

“Whoever you are, you better stay back,” the scrawny soldier shouted at the trees. “Or I’ll blow you to hell.”

Crewcut snorted. “Even if they can hear, they sure as shit don’t listen.”

The chuckling was almost a liquid hissing now, like moist air pouring from a dozen punctured tires. The soldiers slowly backed toward the porch of the mobile home, whether instinctively or through some sort of unspoken tactical ploy.

They left their prisoner by the road, where he turned in slow circles, tilting his head left and right. He opened his mouth to speak, but only a string of blood trickled forth.

Branches stirred behind Campbell, followed by the muted flutter of disturbed leaves on the forest floor. He rolled with his back against the trunk of an oak, the rough bark scouring him into a heightened sense of awareness.

He breathed through his mouth in order to hear more clearly. Through the trees, the sky had turned an ashen gray with approaching dusk, and the blackness pooled among the base of the trees. Night was rising more than it was descending, crawling up from the hidden pores of the earth.

If anything was moving in that blackness, Campbell had no hope of detecting it.

A metallic thud vibrated from the clearing, followed by another. Crewcut, still deathly calm, said, “Quit banging. Nobody’s home, dumbass.”

The scrawny soldier knocked twice more on the trailer door before slamming the door handle with the butt of his rifle. “Maybe we ought to make a run for it.”

“We’ve got orders.”

“Nobody ordered us to get killed.”

Although Campbell could see nothing in the ebony ink of the forest, he could sense movement all around him. The trailer’s yard was spacious enough to catch the last ragged shreds of sunset. Crewcut, standing on the porch, raised his assault weapon.

The hissing rose to a brittle crescendo, seemingly all around him.

The dusk was torn by a staccato burst of three shots.

The prisoner’s chest erupted in a bloom of red, and then he staggered forward two steps and collapsed.

The hissing immediately gave way to an oppressive silence.