Milepost 291

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Not even a scar,” the professor whispered, staring down at Rachel’s bare leg.

Campbell pressed a gentle hand against her forehead. “Her fever’s breaking, too.”

The Zapheads, still almost reverently gathered around her, applied their palms to her body in imitation of Campbell’s action, touching her legs, abdomen, cheeks, and breasts. She stirred a little from her torpid state, her bare skin shrinking with goose pimples from the cool air.

Campbell tugged the hem of the sheet from her upper thighs and spread it over her legs so she was completely covered except for her head. “We should get her more blankets. It’ll be dark soon, and nights are getting chilly. You might want to get some clothes on yourself.”

“You watch her,” the professor said. “I’ll go upstairs and get one of the quilts.”

“Not the one with the blood on it,” Campbell said.

“We wrapped Pamela in that one, remember?”

A number of the Zapheads followed the professor, mumbling and muttering, seemingly unaware they had just performed a miracle. Campbell wasn’t religious, but he was well aware of the prophecy of Jesus’ return. What if Jesus came back to Earth not as a single man, but as a whole tribe?

No, there has to be a reasonable explanation.

Although, he had to admit, that one was as reasonable as any other, under the circumstances.

The Zapheads around him had remained calm since Rachel’s arrival. Campbell had noticed—and mentioned to the professor—that the Zapheads in general had become less aggressive over time. He didn’t know whether it was because they were used to the two humans in their midst or some change was still occurring in their neural systems. But he and the professor were still alive, kept almost as pets, and the Zapheads had healed Rachel.

Not wanting the Zapheads to handle Rachel anymore, he forced himself to step away from the sofa. The Zapheads followed suit. Taking a page from the professor’s playbook, he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and clasped his hands together in prayer. When he opened his eyes ten seconds later, all the Zapheads had returned to kneeling on the floor.

The Catholic Church would have killed for this kind of power. But maybe they did.

Once the Zapheads settled back into their routine, with even their breathing hushed and steady, Campbell took the time to look over Rachel more carefully. He told himself it was because he wanted to verify she had no other wounds, but most of it was desperate desire for a human connection.

She was even more attractive than he remembered. In Taylorsville, he’d mostly seen her in the dark or by the flickering light of huge, destructive bonfires. She’d obviously spent little time on personal hygiene—the sheer act of survival was a higher priority to survivors—but she had a natural tan complexion, thick lashes, curving lips, and a shapely form. Despite her greasy hair and dirt-scuffed face, she appeared almost radiant instead of green-tinged and near death. The recovery had taken less than an hour.

When the professor returned, another sheet draped around his shoulders and a bundled blanket in his arms, the praying Zapheads emerged from their quiescent state. The ones that had followed the professor mingled with them and they moved around aimlessly, some leaving the living room and others bumping into walls.

As they spread the blanket over Rachel, Campbell mumbled, “So, any theories?”

The professor shook his head. “Unless you believe in voodoo, I’m guessing it’s something taking place at a quantum level. In the same way an intense magnetic pull can wipe out the data on a hard drive, maybe the Zapheads store up some kind of electrical energy they can distribute in a controlled way.”

“Like human batteries?”

“Something like that. There used to be a departmental secretary at UNC-Greensboro who could heal carpal tunnel and muscle sprains. She joked that she was a witch, but she was always secretive about it, afraid people really might think she was peculiar and ostracize her. She would rub her hands together and then wave one hand over the affected area as if she were tugging out invisible stitches.”

“Like reiki, maybe? I’ve seen them wave their hands over people like they’re moving energy around. Sort of like acupuncture without the needles.”

“This woman never touched the flesh of her patient, but the injury would begin healing almost immediately. She even cured my carpal tunnel that way. I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to me.”

“But a muscle sprain is one thing. This was a life-threatening wound. And it healed in minutes.”

The professor frowned. “I’m just a teacher, not a philosopher.”

“Not all that long ago, you wanted to play surgeon,” Campbell said.

“We’ll just have to see how she does. We don’t know if her blood is poisoned from infection.”

“They wanted her to live. That’s what’s scary. We’ve been fighting them, killing them, hiding from them when they’ll let us. But when they had a chance to let one of us die, they invoked some sort of inner power to save her.”

“You’re overlooking something very important,” the professor said, glancing around at the Zapheads who milled aimlessly through the house.

“What, that they didn’t dig their fingers in her rotten bits and eat it like chili?”

“They acted together. Without speaking, or making any kind of signal that I could see.”

“They were copying you. The way you were rubbing your hand on her.”

“I think it was more than that.”

Campbell studied the strange, glittery-eyed mutants around him—his housemates, his new tribe, his jailers. Despite all the days he’d been forced to endure their presence, they seemed even more grotesque now than when they were wantonly destroying all things in their path.

Even creepier, he was losing his perception of what life had been like Before. He was losing all sense of normalcy and the great psychological security blanket of civilization, and this was becoming his reality.

“Don’t tell me these starry-eyed fucks are telepathic,” Campbell said.

“I am not sure that’s the right word for it,” the professor said. “You see how they copy our phonetics and tone. Clearly they don’t have a grasp of language, at least not human language. If they could truly read minds, they’d have already absorbed the sum of our knowledge and memories.”

“Damn, don’t tell me they know about that Penthouse magazine I accidentally left in my mom’s sewing room. Or the Zapheads I killed in Taylorsville.”

The professor’s face took on that vacant, rapt look again, as if falling back into his messiah complex—the spiritual leader of the strangely changed, the Christ of After.

“Or perhaps what we think we know is useless to them,” he said.

Stuff it in a psycho fortune cookie.

Rachel stirred, and Campbell knelt by her side. As for what he did next, he couldn’t be sure whether he was trying to comfort her or comfort himself.

But he wanted something solid in a wobbly, watery, illusory world.

He took her hand and held it, watching the blanket rise and fall with her breathing until the sound of her exhalation became a wind of hope, drowning out the mad mumbling of the Zaphead hordes.