The Shock

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There were three of them.

She’d stopped naming them a week ago. It had been an amusing distraction for a while—and the Good Lord only knew, she needed distractions—but then they’d all started blending together, the Black-Eyed Susans, the Raisinheads and the Meat Throats.

Now, though, Rachel Wheeler couldn’t resist looking through the grimy drugstore window as she waited, crouched in the litter of baby powder and cellophane.

Stumpy.

The one on the right, sitting on the sidewalk bench surrounded by a mountain of bulging plastic bags, was missing his left arm just below the elbow. The wound was swathed in a filthy towel strapped in place with duct tape, stained dark brown at its blunt end.

Stumpy was waiting for a bus that would never come. Rachel couldn’t tell if he was a Zaphead. He might just be another of the schizophrenic homeless, one of the underclass that hadn’t even noticed that the world had ended. Although gaunt, he didn’t appear particularly motivated to kill, obsessed instead with swatting away the flies that swirled around his stump.

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