Milepost 291

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Franklin finally caught up with Robertson and his daughter Shay where they waited behind a big Ford delivery van. The van was axle-deep in a ditch along the road, and no doubt a rotted corpse was slumped over the wheel.

“Where is he?” Franklin asked, trying to disguise his raspy panting.

“Circling the house,” Robertson said. “I guess he’s checking it out.”

“Finally getting some sense. Heroes don’t last long in After.”

“We all have to be heroes now,” Shay said, and Franklin couldn’t tell if she was putting him on or not. Her generation was weaned on Facebook and texting, and Franklin wasn’t sure they could string more than six words together.

Franklin peered around the van and studied the house whose chimney was leaking wood smoke. It was a one-story, brick ranch house. No movement in the yard, and the curtains were drawn. Two cars were parked out front and the garage door was open, but that meant nothing—the house’s original owners could have been preparing for a trip when the wave of cataclysmic solar flares swept across the planet.

Only two other houses were in sight, but Franklin didn’t draw much comfort from the area’s lack of population density. Even though fewer people meant fewer Zapheads, Franklin figured any survivors would have headed for safer territory by now—even though Robertson and Shay had fared pretty well since the storms.

Until the government happened.

“See him?” Robertson asked, cradling the shotgun and poking his head up just enough to peer through the van’s windows.

“I hope he’s not dumb enough to go up and knock,” Franklin said. “He might get a bullet in the throat.”

“You don’t think his wife and kid are still alive, do you?”

Franklin shook his head. “Doubt it. That little Zaphead baby was bad news. I knew it from the jump. I should have…”

“Should have what?” Shay asked after a moment.

He looked at her big blue eyes. She still had enough innocence for all of them, despite what those pig-assed soldiers had tried to do to her. But she would learn.

“Should have stayed with them,” Franklin finished. No need to tell her about the hard choices that were now necessary. Soon she’d be making choices of her own.

Then he saw Jorge, coming out of the trees on the far side of the house. He glanced up and down the road and apparently saw Robertson through the glass. He stuck up a thumb in an “all-clear” sign.

Franklin didn’t trust Jorge’s reconnaissance. The Mexican had handled himself well in their few skirmishes and at Sarge’s bunker, but the worry over his family was making him desperate. And desperate people made mistakes.

“You guys stay here,” Franklin said. “No use all of us getting shot.”

“I can sneak up and peek in the windows,” Shay said, her improvised bandolier sliding down her shoulder.

“No,” Robertson snapped.

“So I guess we’re not all heroes?” she responded.

Franklin’s weariness and annoyance brimmed over. “That’s the cheapest goddamned word in the dictionary. It’s one of those words that idiots die over. Same as ‘honor,’ ‘duty,’ and ‘courage.’ If we can get one thing right in After, let’s make sure we clean out some of the bullshit that clogged up the start of the Twenty-First Century.”

“Well, excuuuse me,” Shay said. “Grampa Grumpypants must not have had enough prunes in his oatmeal this morning.”

“Shay,” Robertson said, although he sounded like he was about to laugh.

“You don’t know who’s in there,” Franklin said. “Maybe some more of Sarge’s soldiers, ready to finish what your friends up there started.”

That shut her up, and Franklin’s rush of triumph quickly faded to shame. In Before, the kid’s biggest concerns were probably girly-haired boy bands, boys, boyfriends, and fake boys on the Internet. Now she walked among wolves in human clothing and Zapheads in human clothing. And it was his duty to protect her as best he could.

Goddamn it, we’re never going to get rid of those bullshit words.

“We’ll wait,” Robertson said. “If you need to run, we’ll cover you.”

Shay pulled the pistol out of its holster. It looked huge in her slender fingers.

“You know how to aim that thing?”

“Just like a video game,” she said. “But if I accidentally shoot you in the leg, maybe it’s because I’m just a girl.”

Franklin grinned. Maybe he’d underestimated her, or she’d toughened up more quickly than he’d acknowledged. Anybody that had survived two months of After deserved a medal.

Honor. We can’t get rid of honor, either. Shit.

“Okay,” Franklin said, rising over the hood of the van enough to indicate to Jorge he’d circle the house from the nearest side. Jorge waved in response.

Franklin felt exposed on the open road. Even if the occupants of the house weren’t watching, Sarge’s patrols could be anywhere. They might even have discovered the bodies of their comrades and connected it to the absence of Franklin and Jorge.

He gave one glance back at the van. Shay had crawled underneath it and lurked by the back wheel, gripping the pistol with both hands, its butt resting on the rough gravel. Robertson’s shotgun wouldn’t have the range to contribute much firepower, but perhaps the noise would create a distraction.

Franklin crouched and jogged, keeping one finger locked against the trigger guard of his semi-automatic. Maybe he should have gotten Sarge to train them a little, like real soldiers. Then he’d feel a little braver about charging into the unknown.

Courage. I’ll be goddamned if that one isn’t going to stick around, too.

Then all Franklin could think about was the house ahead of him, and strange eyes that might be tracking him even now. The property had no fence, and besides a few scraggly apple trees, the yard offered no concealment. He wondered if they should just yell and see if anyone answered.

But, as had happened with Robertson and the girl, Jorge’s family could have been captured. They might already have been savaged by Sarge’s psychopaths, in which case Franklin needed to be the first one inside, because Jorge would be useless with rage.

And if Zapheads were waiting behind the closed door, then Franklin was eager to empty the clip of the AR-15. He figured he had at least twenty rounds left. Unless they were the Zaphead Brady Bunch, he could handle them.

Jorge closed in on the house in tandem with Franklin. They were maybe forty yards from the front door. With luck, it would be unlocked and they could slip inside owning the element of surprise. Otherwise, they might have to kick the door in and be ready for all hell to break loose.

“You sure you want to do this?” Franklin said in a loud whisper across the yard.

“You can wait by the cars,” Jorge replied, leaning against a tree. “This is my battle.”

“Don’t start that with me. We’re a team now, whether we like it or not.”

“I thought you were a loner, a survivalist.”

“It was fun while it lasted, but I’ve given up on peace and quiet.” He lifted the rifle a little. “No wonder these jarheads get addicted to danger.”

“Me first,” Jorge said. “If Marina and Rosa are in there, I want their lives to be in my hands, and no one else’s.”

“I thought you were Catholic. Aren’t you going to leave it up to God?”

Jorge pointed his rifle to the sinking afternoon sun. “We’ve seen God at work, and almost everyone was sent to hell. Now it’s our turn.”

Without waiting for Franklin’s response, Jorge silently charged the door. Franklin swept his rifle barrel from window to window, expecting a shattering of glass and a hail of gunfire at any moment. But the curtains remained closed, and Jorge reached the porch and pressed himself against the bricks to one side of the door.

Then he reached out with one brown hand and tried the door knob. He nodded at Franklin, and then it turned, and revealing a wedge of darkness as the door swung open. Jorge stepped inside, and Franklin made his move toward the house.

But before he could reach the door, Jorge burst back outside and fell to his knees, flinging his rifle away. He retched and coughed, and then vomited the canned food they’d eaten at Robertson’s outpost.

Evidently seeing there was no immediate danger, Robertson and Shay approached from the van, but Jorge waved them back. “No…for the love of God…”

Franklin hadn’t loved God for decades, so he had no hesitation. He stepped through the door that Jorge left open. His heart skipped a beat and then crammed three beats into one. He took several steps inside to verify what his mind refused to register.

The living room was arranged with half a dozen human corpses. Fresh corpses, judging by the wet blood that still coated their nude bodies.

They were propped in a mockery of a Sunday afternoon family tableau, three of them on a sofa facing the big flat-screen television. An old man sat in an E-Z chair with an open newspaper in his lap, the pages soggy and red. Two hunched-over children sat cross-legged on the floor, a pile of mutilated dolls between them. The hearth held a mound of glowing embers, suggesting the fire had been built sometime that day.

What kind of sick fuck…

“Zapheads,” Robertson said from the doorway behind him.

“I don’t think so,” Franklin said. “Unless Zaps learned how to write.”

He pointed to the television. Smeared in dark, congealing blood across its black face were the words “Milepost 291.”