The Echo

CHAPTER SIX

“Holy hell, Jonesy, you shot it.”

Crewcut swept the barrel of his weapon at the forest surrounding the trailer. “Quiet.”

Campbell, who had ducked at the report of the gun, crawled backwards away from the clearing, dragging his pack through the damp leaves. The sudden quiet was freighted with menace, as if the trees themselves were tensed for an attack. Campbell wanted to put some distance between he and the gunmen before they got trigger-happy in their panic.

“We were supposed to bring it to camp,” the scrawny soldier whined. “Sarge will be pissed.”

“Plenty more where that came from.”

“What’s out there? Is it them?”

Campbell held his breath and dropped to the ground, expecting bullets to rip overhead at any moment. Through the foliage, he saw Crewcut leave the vantage point of the porch and veer across the yard so he could check around the trailer. The gray air of dusk was leaden with expectation.

“Move out,” Crewcut said, waving his gun down the road in the direction they’d been heading before their pit stop.

The scrawny soldier, Zimmerman, hurried down the porch steps and dashed across the yard, leaping the prisoner’s corpse. Crewcut followed, his head on a swivel, peering intently into the dark trees. In moments, they had vanished down the dirt road. Campbell thought about following them, but he was pretty sure any overt movement would draw a hail of gunfire.

But staying in place also meant he was now alone in the forest with…

…whatever lay in the shadows.

Campbell waited another thirty seconds, his face pressed into the leaves, the odor of rich loam in his nostrils. The darkness was almost total now, except for the dim glow of the constant aurora, but he was reluctant to expose himself. What if the soldiers were just waiting for any sign of movement?

And then that movement came, about ten yards behind him. He froze, his palm tight around the butt of his pistol. Had the two soldiers somehow circled around behind him?

If I stay low, they won’t see me. Just me and the dark, right down here passing the time.

The foot passed inches from his nose, so close that even in the darkness he could make out the scuffed rubber of filthy sneakers. A muted sibilance marked the person’s passage. It wasn’t one of the soldiers, who were wearing combat boots.

Campbell’s breath caught, and so did his heartbeat.

Then the feet moved on and silence surrounded him. He kept his face in the dirt until he couldn’t bear it any longer. Lifting his head a few inches, he peered through the gloom to the clearing.

A crowd of silhouetted figures gathered around the Zaphead’s corpse. Campbell hadn’t seen so many gathered in one place since his escape from the church back in Taylorsville. But there, the Zapheads had been spread out, acting like a mob. Now they assembled with an intimate calm that was somehow far more frightening than when they were trying to tear him limb from limb.

They’re acting like they are aware of another. Like one big family.

About twenty of them stood beside the road, in ragged and filthy clothing. They ranged in age from an old man with tousled white hair to a girl of about seven who wore a Dora the Explorer pajama shift as if she’d been napping when the solar storms forever changed her. The Zapheads seemed to communicate without speaking, as several nearest the corpse bent in unison and gently lifted their fallen brethren. Creepiest of all was their eyes, with radiated tiny golden sparks.

The crowd parted as the corpse-carriers headed across the yard, and then the other Zapheads fell in behind them like a twilight funeral procession. Their absolute silence was so eerie that Campbell almost screamed aloud, just so his madness would reassure him of reality. Instead, he bit down hard on his lower lip as they filed past on a forest trail that had been carved by deer and raccoons but now guided far more surreal creatures.

The Zaphead in the lead of the procession, a bearded, glittering-eyed man who could have convincingly portrayed a prophet in an Old Testament epic, carried the corpse’s legs. As if mirroring the fierce power projected by his burning eyes, he was strong and steady, mouth expressionless.

The next two were young women, scantily clad, their skin like alabaster in the dusk. They bore the weight of the corpse’s trunk, which was peppered with ragged wet splotches from the gunshots. A dark-skinned teenaged boy held the head, cupping it reverently with both hands as if it were some sacred offering to the sky.

Although the trail meandered thirty yards away from him, with the procession soon blending into the onyx forest, Campbell was still afraid to move. If they spotted him, he wasn’t sure he had enough ammunition to fend them off. Arnoff had shown him how to slide the clip of bullets into the butt of the gun, but Campbell had no idea how many shots he had, and he only had one spare clip in his backpack, even if he had time to find it in the dark.

In the end, he decided to wait it out, even as the noises of night rose around him—insects, a distant owl, and the skittering of tiny paws across the leaves. He debated breaking into the trailer, checking it for food and supplies, and using it as a shelter until morning. But he couldn’t be sure if the Zapheads or soldiers would return.

At that moment, he felt forlorn and foolish for having struck out on his own rather than catching up with Arnoff’s group or Rachel and her friends. If Pete were alive, Campbell might have taken a different course. With a traveling companion, he’d had a sense of purpose, but now he was walking solely for the next step, breathing just to take the next breath, living for no other reason than to be alive.

Campbell pressed the pistol flat against his chest, taking comfort in its cold steel. One shot would do it. An end to the surreal madness, and a purpose at last in providing an easy meal for the foxes and opossums that never second-guessed their survival instinct.

“Do it, asshole,” he whispered. His breath plumed out before him in a moonlit mist, and he realized the night had turned cool. The sound of his own voice startled him back to his senses, and he angrily shoved the gun into his backpack and bundled it up, ready to move on.

Just keep moving. Like the yoga hippies and acidheads say, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

He checked the clearing once more. The Zapheads had left at least twenty minutes ago, but Campbell couldn’t trust his own sense of passing time. The trailer yard was bathed in muted moonlight and the greenish cast of the lingering aurora, a glistening puddle of thick blood the only sign of the disturbing encounter.

Go to the dirt road and backtrack to the highway. Then head north. Milepost 291. Milepost 291. Milepost 291.

He repeated “Milepost 291” under his breath like a mantra. It became his Shangri-la, a fantasy land of milk and honey and running hot water and television and full-service banking and cute babes in swimsuits on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He stood and pushed back the branches, heading between the trees in the dark.

He’d taken only seven steps before the hands descended over his face and pressed hard.