After: Dying Light (9 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Franklin was headed for the funeral home, under the pretense of preparing his granddaughter for her burial, when DeVontay came out of the building and stood under the shade of the portico.

“I couldn’t wait any longer,” DeVontay said, but there was something wrong with his face. As if he was staring into dark water at the bottom of a well and his reflection was missing. “I couldn’t leave Rachel alone.”

“Me and Stephen got cut off by Zappers.”

DeVontay nodded. “So he made it, too. That’s good.”

That was when Franklin realized something was very wrong. Where was Kokona? Had DeVontay already
done
it? Why hadn’t he waited? “Did it work?”

DeVontay nodded again, a wooden gesture, like a ventriloquist’s dummy repeating a rehearsed move.

Franklin strode toward the door, heart jumping in an uneven rhythm. He was half afraid, half ecstatic. He’d accepted that he would take Rachel any way he could get her, as long as she was alive. Glittery eyes, killer impulse, even vegetative coma.

But when he pushed the door open and saw the casket angled off the bier, the bottom resting on the floor, the lid flung open. It was empty.

Franklin turned, the question already forming on his lips.

“Rachel took the baby and ran,” DeVontay said. “I couldn’t catch her. She was…fast.”

So she could walk
.
She came back from the dead. We really did it. We played God, and God help us.

Somehow the miracle lost its power because he hadn’t witnessed it. Intellectually he accepted it because he’d seen the revival of the Zapheads. Even now, he couldn’t think of her as a Zaphead. Until he saw it for himself, she was Rachel.

Back from the dead. A hell of a thing.

“Was she all there?” he asked, glancing up and down the street as if expecting her to come walking up. “Like, able to think and talk?”

“Sort of,” DeVontay said.

“Damn it, man, talk straight. Is she Rachel again or not?”

“Yeah. But she’s gone. She’s not one of us anymore.”

“Worse than before?”

“She acted like she didn’t know me.”

Seeing her as a half-mutant had been horrible enough, but at least she’d known the people around her. But even then, the pull of the Zapheads was stronger than anything the human world offered her. And her new tribe no longer had any interest in peaceful coexistence. If she was fully changed now, wouldn’t she be eager to exterminate all humans, even those she once loved?

“You should have waited for me,” Franklin said, although he wasn’t sure what he would have done. Sealed her in the casket? Killed her again?

“I was afraid of brain damage if it didn’t happen soon. But I should have known better. Kokona was so eager to help.”

“Why did Rachel take the baby?” Franklin twisted his beard so tightly that several wiry hairs broke loose between his fingers.

“The baby—she controls whoever carries her. I thought I was getting her to help because she didn’t want to die. But she’s the one who got what she wanted.”

Franklin wanted to slap the man out of his stupor. Just because he was moony-eyed in love didn’t mean he had to lose his senses. “Where are they going?”

DeVontay looked past the square to the big building beyond the jail. Only the top floors of the hospital were visible from here, windows gray and silver in the sun. “The other babies.”

“Why? The other babies are dead—holy shit. No.”

“Kokona wants to bring all the babies back.”

“That hospital’s full of Zappers. They could raise an army. How long ago did they leave?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“And you’ve just been standing here all this time?”

“They’ve won. It doesn’t matter anymore. Between what we saw last night, and with more Zapheads on the way from all over, we don’t have a chance.”

“Damn it, DeVontay, I’m going to kick your ass. Do you think Rachel would put up with you talking that way? Now, come on, let’s get over there and deal with it.”

DeVontay laughed. “What? You’re going to tell Hilyard and have him send in the storm troopers?”

“They plan to burn down the hospital. One big funeral pyre.”

“Maybe that’s for the best.”

“I don’t know you anymore, son.” Franklin headed back toward the stronghold. He didn’t know if a weapon would help, but he wanted to be ready for anything. He was breathing hard and his lungs were on fire by the time he reached the square, waving at the sentries so he wouldn’t be gunned down. Hilyard established an armory in the bank along with his command post, but Franklin had hidden his rifle upon returning to the stronghold that morning.

People moved along the streets, talking and smoking, while others sat in the sun and cleaned and reloaded their weapons. Franklin avoided interaction and kept his gaze on the ground, but Stephen’s voice froze him in place because he could tell immediately:
He knows.

The boy ran up to him and pounded him twice on the chest with the bottoms of his fists, but then seemed to gather himself. The pain was evident on his face, but also a cold resolve. “She’s dead and you didn’t tell me.”

Franklin got down on one arthritic knee so he could be near eye level. “She’s not dead, Stephen. Listen very carefully, and don’t do anything to draw attention. You can be cool, right, Little Man?”

“Don’t call me that.” Stephen delivered the venom in a steady tone but with plenty of suppressed anger.

“She’s alive, but she’s one of them now. Not like before. She’s—”

The boy’s mouth fell open. “
You resurrected her?
”

Franklin glanced around to see if anyone had overheard. To the others, it probably looked like an old man and a kid sharing sorrow over a tragedy. Nothing remarkable at all about that.

“DeVontay and Kokona did. But Rachel took the baby to the hospital, where all the dead Zaps are. I’m going to get her.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, Stephen, it’s not—”

“Don’t give me that bull dookie.
Nothing
is safe anymore. And what’s the worst that can happen? You let her get killed again? I think I can handle it. I’ve had lots of practice.”

Franklin nodded. “Okay. But she’s not Rachel anymore. She might not recognize us. She might even try to kill us.”

“Kokona will be controlling her. But we promised to help each other, didn’t we?”

“Yeah.” Franklin gave another look around. Someone had tied an American flag to the Confederate cavalry statue. Franklin wondered if the perpetrator appreciated the irony of the act. Probably not. “All right, let’s go. Keep your eyes straight ahead.”

“What about DeVontay?”

“He’s no good. Out of it.”

Stephen nodded. “All right.”

They walked side by side for several blocks, slipping through the barricaded street and heading toward the hospital. None of the sentries hailed them, and Franklin didn’t even look up to the rooftops to count them. Apparently Hilyard hadn’t imposed any restrictions on movement, much less a state of martial law.

When they reached the Jeep where Franklin had hidden his weapon, he asked Stephen if he wanted a gun.

“I had a knife but Kokona made me drop it,” Stephen said. “I would have killed her if I’d known what she had planned. I mean…I could have killed her if she
let
me.”

“I’m putting a bullet in her. Whether she wants me to or not.”

“Right in the head,” Stephen said. “Make those eyes go dark forever. And there won’t be anyone around to bring her back.”

They crossed the jail’s parking lot, which featured splotches of blood here and there among the vehicles. Franklin was surprised Hilyard hadn’t posted sentries at the hospital, but the lieutenant assumed Kokona was far away, organizing the mutants to attack. He probably didn’t believe Zapheads could actually return from the dead. Who could blame him?

They circled around to the back of the jail, approaching the hospital from the side rather than the emergency room entrance. The bay doors had been jammed open to make transportation of the dead easier. Two ambulances were parked near the entrance, which gave them cover as they made their way inside. The odor hit them right away, a fecund tide of stale, cool air.

Stretchers had been wheeled into the hallway and waiting room, and on these lay the bodies of dead humans, respectfully covered in sheets. Stains and dried blood blotched most of them, and here and there a mottled hand dangled off the side. The Zapheads, though, had been tossed willy-nilly on the tiled floor, some in piles, others propped up obscenely in waiting-room chairs.

“I don’t see any babies,” Stephen whispered.

Franklin waved the barrel of his rifle toward a set of swivel doors beside the admitting station. “Must be back there.”

“Where it’s dark.”

“Yep.”

Franklin thought about ordering the boy to wait here, but he couldn’t leave him with all these corpses. He eased open one of the doors, which led to a corridor that held a line of sick bays partitioned off with curtains. He’d have to prop the doors open to allow light because there were few windows on the first floor, and most were in patient rooms. He wheeled the nearest gurney against the door, and when he jammed it in place, he recognized the long black hair spilling from beneath one end of the lumpy, rumpled sheet. This was Rosa Jiminez, or what was left of her.

“Can’t be far,” Franklin said, waiting for Stephen to join him. They navigated the corridor, checking each bay as they passed, wary of every shadow.

As their eyes adjusted to the emergency ward’s dimness, Franklin noted a metallic, medicinal odor. The ward was a clutter of blankets, bandages, drip feeds, and diagnostic instruments. In the immediate wake of the solar storms, this place must have been a madhouse. The floor looked carpeted in spots, but it was actually patches of dried blood that had grown a fuzz of mold.

“Why would they put the babies back here?” Stephen asked.

“Don’t know,” Franklin said, although he was beginning to suspect the babies were not here. He wasn’t around during the clean-up, and he could just imagine Brock deciding to pile up the babies and burn them on the spot, or dump them in a creek somewhere.

The gloomy hospital was giving him the creeps, and he couldn’t take another lungful of the bad air. “Let’s get out of here.”

A screech and clatter, and suddenly they were in near darkness. The gurney containing Rosa’s body had rolled out of the way, allowing the doors to swing shut.

Except it wasn’t an accident.

Three sets of burning eyes hovered in the black.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The rules had changed.

And Jorge accepted that the stronghold in Newton would never be able to withstand the Zapheads for long, not when the mutants could summon new recruits from the ranks of their dead. And Franklin’s mountain compound would only be secure as long as no Zapheads ever discovered its location. The big cities would be worse, and even his yearning to head back to Mexico seemed more like suicidal folly than an actual plan.

If he only had himself to consider, he still might try to cross the country. But he had to think of Marina. And he could only imagine one place he’d felt secure since the solar storms: Shipley’s bunker.

So if betraying Hilyard was the only way to protect his daughter, he’d pay that price a hundred times over. Too bad Franklin and the others would have to die, too, but in the end they weren’t family. They weren’t blood. They were foreigners. When it came down to his daughter or the human race, there was no debate.

After leaving Marina at the drugstore in the care of Sierra, he returned to the bank where Hilyard had established headquarters. When he entered the office that now served as an armory, a college-aged man with a scruffy goatee and wire-rimmed eyeglasses was sitting in a chair by the door, flipping through a rumpled copy of
Sports Illustrated
. The man set the magazine aside and dispensed the kind of dark humor that so many adopted to deal with their terror. “Wonder if the Lakers will win it all this year.”

“My bet is on the Bulls.” Jorge didn’t know one basketball team from another, but he’d heard a fellow farmhand complaining about the Bulls.

“They haven’t been worth a damn since Jordan left,” the man said. “Maybe they can recruit some of these Zappers, though, and make a playoff run.”

“The Zapheads will all be dead by the time we’re done with them.”

“Ha, that’s the spirit. Kick ass and take names. I’ve already shot three of them myself. What about you?”

“I’ve killed a dozen.”

“That’s a lot of notches in the belt, my friend. I’m surprised the lieutenant hasn’t given you a promotion.”

“I haven’t joined his army.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but times have changed. I was on a camping trip with some buddies when things went haywire. We were hiking the Appalachian Trail one minute, and the next, the four people I was with just dropped dead. I was lucky, because I watched the highways and figured things out so I avoided the worst of it. When I found Brock’s group, man, I was so glad to not be alone anymore.”

Jorge stared at a framed print of a pastoral landscape, a flower-filled meadow bright with gold and green. “I had a family.”

“Holy shit,” the man said. “You’re the guy who greased his wife. That’s some heavy baggage, man.”

Jorge feigned a moment of sorrow, shuddering a sob while closing the door behind him as if he didn’t want anyone to witness his unmanly display. The guard looked away with embarrassment and picked up the magazine again.

Jorge eyed the assault rifles leaning against the wall. Piled on a desk were two dozen different handguns of all styles and sizes, magazines, and boxes of single bullets and plastic-coated shells. Five or six hunting knives with wicked-looking blades were jammed tip-first into the desk’s wooden surface. A wild array of other weapons were scattered around the room, stacked on shelves, or arranged across the couch cushions: sawed-off shotguns, compound bows, crossbows, a steel-handled bludgeon that resembled a medieval mace, and even a black-powder musket.

He crossed the room, sniffing audibly, to where the grenade launcher lay beside the ammunition and two crates of grenades. He touched the grenade launcher so the guard would know its meaning to him. “For me, this is personal.”

“Sure,” the guard said, picking his way around the emotional landmine. “I don’t blame you.”

“So many weapons.”

“Yeah, we’ve been scavenging the town, and that’s just from like a mile radius. Amazing what civilians keep in their houses. Some of this is military grade, and some of this is so illegal that even law enforcement and military are banned from using it. It’s like most of the population was hoarding and waiting for an excuse to cut loose, but they never got the chance.”

“As a friend of mine says, you can’t count on the government to save your bacon.”

“Got that right. Dog eat dog out there.”

Jose picked through a box of ammunition, looking for a magazine for his AR-15. He found two and stuffed them in his jacket pockets.

“Hey, man, you have to sign for those first,” the guard said, holding up a clipboard. “This isn’t personal, either. I just do what the boss tells me.”

Jorge picked up a Glock and tested its heft, as well as a metal cylinder lying beside it. The guard, evidently eager to change the subject, said, “A nine mil. Not a bad choice.”

Jorge lifted the cylinder. “What is this?”

The man rolled up his magazine and shoved it in his back pocket as he stood. “That’s a suppressor. What they call a ‘silencer’ in the movies, but it’s not really silent. You can get the same effect by shooting though an oil filter, a bundle of steel wool, or even a pillow in a pinch.”

“So if I wanted to shoot a Zaphead and not have his friends come running, this would be good?”

The guard took the pistol from him, grabbed the cylinder, and showed Jorge how to screw it on the threaded end of the barrel. “It will still make a little pop. The sweet trick is to use subsonic ammo.”

“What is that?”

“Heavier bullets with a slower velocity so they don’t break the sound barrier. You can hear them whizzing through the air almost like a fat insect. You lose a little power but in the right situation, it’s a good trade-off.”

“I’d like to try that sometime.”

The guard popped out the Glock’s magazine, thumbed the rounds from the spring-loaded sleeve, and loaded some rounds from a different box. He held the pistol out to Jorge, butt first. “A war hero like you, you deserve it. Just make sure you get a few blocks out of town first. Hilyard will chew me a new asshole if he finds out.”

“So this attachment is so quiet no one in town will hear me?”

“As quiet as a champagne cork.”

“Good.” Jorge lifted the Glock and shot the man between the eyes.

After the man collapsed, Jorge took an extra magazine for the Glock, and then grabbed a canvas satchel and shoved in as many grenades as he could fit. He jammed the Glock in his jacket pocket and collected the grenade launcher, already bonding with the familiarity of its cold steel and the memory of its firepower.

“You are correct,” he said to the corpse on the floor. “That was quiet.”

He exited the room after checking to make sure no one was in the bank’s lobby, collected his rifle where he’d left it beside the front door, and then walked onto the street as casually as he could.

He barely made it half a block before a burly man in a leather vest asked, “Hey, what are you doing with that launcher?”

“It’s okay,” Jorge said without pausing. “I signed for it.”

After two blocks, he found a fire escape and climbed two stories high, and then an access ladder allowed him to scale the final story to the roof. It wasn’t the tallest building in town, but it was centrally located and would allow him to kill in several different directions.

He settled into a sitting position at the parapet, where he could see the statue in the town square and the drug store cattycornered from the bank. If Marina stayed put, she would be safe enough until he could reach her. With Jorge’s help, Shipley should have control of the town by sunset. Jorge couldn’t provide a mutant baby as promised, but Shipley would gladly accept the gift of his enemy’s death.

Perhaps even Franklin’s as well.

Shipley’s men would be taking up position around the town, assuming they avoided Zaphead contact. Jorge opened the satchel, collected a forty-millimeter green grenade outfitted as a signal cartridge, and loaded it into the launcher to fire first, and then filled the rest of the cylinder with standard high-explosive cartridges. He laid out his other weapons and ammunition around him.

Then he leaned against the parapet to wait.