The hand curled once, twice, and then she recognized it as a beckoning motion. A Zaphead wouldn’t beckon. It would go for what it wanted, not lure you closer.
Somebody—a human—was down. And here came the litmus test of After: Did the old codes still apply? Did she still have to love her neighbor? Did she have to treat everyone as a child of God?
Maybe God wouldn’t notice just this once. Maybe she could just sit right here near the door and then make a run for it, gasping prayers.
Better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, right?
However, forgiveness probably wasn’t a question one wanted to ask of God. Not now, in the After. Rachel tried to look away, she really did, but the hand made another beckoning motion. It looked frail, the fingers knotty and thin. It was not the kind of hand that would wrap around your throat and drag you screaming into the darkness.
Outside, the chain clanked against the asphalt, as if Chain Guy was working out the kinks and getting ready for business.
The hand gave one final gesture, this time just the index finger, motioning Closer, closer, closer with an intensity that only silence could fully project.
Still, she resisted the impulse to help, the love-thy-neighbor credo that had been drummed into her from childhood, sitting bedside with her cancer-stricken mother, volunteering at the Humane Society, joining the Wellspring Fellowship’s Happy Helpers, and taking counseling classes at UNC-Charlotte. Little Ray-Ray had been on track for a golden-rule life of selfless service. In the Before.
However, she’d been sidetracked.
She wasn’t even sure there was a track anymore, because the train had jumped off into a dark, directionless territory.
Rachel looked away from the hand and eyed the door. She could probably get twenty yards down the sidewalk before Chain Guy broke his fixation and noticed her, and maybe that would buy her enough of a jump on him. Her legs were young and limber and strong, built by a cycling addiction. She could outrun him.
Probably.
“Huhhh…”
The wheeze came from behind the prescription counter. She jerked around her neck, and the hand now balled into a fist, as if tapping some last reserve of energy. The whisper came again, weak and broken.
“Huhhh…help…”
Goddamn you, God.
She checked on Chain Guy, still closing in on The Beard, who swayed in obsessed circles. Stumpy sat on the bench as if waiting to feed pigeons. It was just another busy weekday in downtown Charlotte.
Just another day in After.
“Help.” The voice of the hand’s owner gained volume, and she hissed a “Shhh” in response as she crawled down the aisle. The last thing she needed was for Zapheads to show up, pissed off that they hadn’t been invited to the party.
She’d long ago—well, days ago, but it had seemed like years—decided that it was selfish to pray for survival and deliverance, but it was righteous to pray for the strength to help others. She’d also promised to live for Chelsea, to spend all the years that had been taken from her little sister—taken by Rachel.
But she couldn’t think of that now, or she would become paralyzed, accepting her fate. Deserving death. Deserving it because each breath was a selfish act in a world where she had destroyed something beautiful.
As Rachel drew closer, a rank, sour odor assailed her. She’d smelled her share of corpses, with their heavy, sweet fecundity—decay had become so pervasive in After that only a truly sharp odor had a chance of piercing it. Whatever lay behind the counter had achieved that rare status.
The arm pulled itself into the gap and she crawled faster, chafing her knees even through the blue jeans she wore. Her backpack was off-balance, banging against her right hip, and she had to navigate an obstacle course of stuffed animals, jars of nutritional supplements, soft drinks, and other artifacts of a lost culture.
It was darker back here, removed from the sunlight, but not so dark that she had to dig out her flashlight. She wasn’t sure she wanted a clear look, anyway, because the sour odor suggested something had turned inside-out.
“Help,” the man’s voice said again, and she answered, “Okay.”
God, I’m trusting you here, and if you’re leading me to a horrible, painful death, I swear I’ll never speak to you again.
Then she reached the counter and felt concealed enough to rise into a crouch and duck-walk the final ten feet around the counter. The man was curled on his side in a fetal position, wearing a white coat that suggested he’d been the pharmacist on duty at some point, back when duty mattered and pulled a weekly paycheck. Resembling a lighter-skinned Gandhi, he was bald and old and wore rounded glasses with wire frames. A pool of vomit explained the stink, and the flies had already migrated from the child’s corpse to check out this new taste sensation.
“You’re…one of us,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, wishing she could summon that caregiver confidence expounded upon in her counseling textbooks. “Are you hurt?”
He gave a pained smile, and a wet fleck of vomit appeared in the corner of his mouth. “I hurt just fine, thanks.”
“Let me help you.”
She reached to check the pulse in his neck, but he shook his head. “No, don’t save me. For the sake of…all that is holy…let me die.”
Great. So he wants me to play Dr. Kevorkian here. Too bad.
She touched his neck, and he didn’t resist. His carotid pulse was a weak flutter. It was a wonder that he even had enough strength left to speak.
“Don’t save me.” His face curdled with an emotion somewhere between anger and defiance.
“Why did you ask for help, then?”
He rolled his eyes down to his other hand, the one that was curled into a fist around something. “I wasn’t asking for help. I was offering it.”
His reply startled her. He didn’t look like he was in a position to help anything but the maggots. His breathing grew shallower.
“How many are outside?” he asked.
“Two or three,” she said. “I’m not sure about one of them.”
He opened his hand, which held an orange prescription vial. “Nembutal,” he said. “The easy way out.”
So, he was the one playing Dr. Kevorkian. She’d seen Nembutal in the animal shelter, where it was used to end the suffering of sick pets. He let the vial roll from his hand and he gave it a weak nudge along the floor, toward her.
“Antiemetics, too,” he said.
“Huh? What’s that?”
“Don’t want to vomit it out before it has a chance to work.” His words were slurring now. “I should take the old sawbones advice…of ‘Heal thyself’…to heart, huh?”
She wondered how many of them he’d swallowed. Probably far more than enough, if he knew his trade, and he had the look of experience. In a matter of such importance, he’d be dead certain about the dosage levels.
“I’m not ready to die,” she said.
“None of us were,” he wheezed. His eyelids fluttered.
She checked his pulse again, and she could barely detect the blood making its last sluggish rounds through his circulatory system. At any second, he’d fall unconscious, and then his brain would begin the slow process of turning off the lights until the party was over.
“Do you…want me to pray with you?” she said. She didn’t want to ask if he was saved, because that seemed too judgmental for this most personal of moments.
“I’m…good,” he said. He nudged the vial toward her. “Here. My final request.”
His hand bore a wedding ring, and she wondered about his wife. Had he “helped” her escape from After? Had he guided her into the next great uncertainty? Maybe he’d even tricked her, grinding the pills into powder and spiking her sweet iced tea.