After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) (17 page)

Because behind the door he’d opened, he’d seen a group of Zapheads sitting on the floor like disciples around a sage. They were gathered before a rocking chair in which a man—Arnoff, Campbell now realized, although he would never have recognized him if not for the professor’s presence—was bound in thick ropes. Arnoff was still alive, because his eyes were wide open and animated with a scream that his mouth couldn’t make.

The penlight revealed that Arnoff’s tongue had been taken. His chin was caked with gore and coagulated blood. He might have been tied there for days.

Behind him, hanging upside down, was Pamela, her clothes removed, her body marbled with bruises. Her red hair dangled so that the tips brushed the floor. In that split-second, Campbell had seen she was mercifully dead.

Donnie, however, wasn’t so fortunate.

He lay facedown on the bed, his head facing the door and lifted back at such an extreme angle that his neck had to be broken. His voided bowels likely accounted for much of the room’s stench, as feces combined with the ordinary odor of death in a putrescent mélange.

Donnie’s hands were extended through the brass bedrails, fingers twisted in a dozen different directions, as if someone had meticulously broken and reset them over and over. Donnie’s eyes, like Arnoff’s, were open, but they were so glazed and dull with agony that he likely was beyond even screaming.

Campbell tried to imagine his own role in the Grand Guignol. Would they pull his ears from his head, or pick his freckles as if they were bugs?

The professor set the flashlight on the stairs so that illuminated both of them. Although his forehead was crinkled from strain and he appeared to have aged a decade in the weeks since Campbell had last seen him, the professor was unmarked and reasonably functional. His hands trembled as he checked Campbell’s leg for broken bones.

“You’re lucky,” the professor said, words barely audible above the incessant hissing of the Zapheads above and below. He put his fingers on Campbell’s eyelids and lifted them. “Doesn’t look like you have a concussion.”

“I don’t feel so lucky.”

“You’re not dead or maimed. They are accepting you.”

“That’s
lucky
?”

“They sense that you won’t harm them.”

Campbell remembered what Wilma had said about not showing any fear. But he couldn’t help it. He still wanted to scream—and if he wasn’t in such pain, he would still fight his way past the Zapheads to the door. No sane human could be trapped with a houseful of destructive mutants and not be afraid.

Ah. Maybe “sane” is the operative word here.

“Why haven’t they killed you?” Campbell asked, shaking the lingering cobwebs from his skull, nearly recovered from the fall.

“They need me.”

“
Me me me
,” the Zapheads chanted. “
Me me me me me
.”

The ones upstairs picked up the chorus. “
Me me me meeeeee
.”

The professor smiled, though intense strain showed on his face. “They’ve learned a new word.”

“They can’t learn. They’re destructive killing machines.”

“
Sheens
,” one of the nearest Zapheads said. And a chorus of “
Sheens
” rippled through the house.

“We’ve all changed since the storms,” the professor said. “It’s time for acceptance.”

He finished examining Campbell and helped him sit up on the lowest step, then collected his flashlight. He waved it in the air and the Zapheads fell silent, although Campbell could hear their heavy breathing.

As if they were waiting.

Campbell still expected to be swarmed at any moment and have his limbs ripped from his body. He couldn’t shake the vision of Arnoff, Donnie and Pamela in the room upstairs. “Why did they let you live while they…did those
things
to the others?”

“They’re like children,” the professor said. “And I’ve been a teacher all my life.”

“Children don’t destroy for fun.”

“Yes, they do,” the professor said, putting a hand on Campbell’s arm to signal him not to raise his voice. “It’s perfectly natural. Children pull the wings off flies to see how they work. They pour soda down anthills. They eviscerate frogs and earthworms to see what’s inside.”

“
In
,” a Zaphead shouted. The crowd of them pushed forward, until one of them stood inside the cone of the flashlight’s beam. It was a woman of maybe thirty, attractive despite her wild and tangled mane of auburn hair, although her eyes sparked and glinted with a deranged excitement. “
In, in, in
,” she chattered.

“
In
,” came from three dozen throats.

“I want to come in!” Wilma wailed from outside the house.

The Zapheads all fell silent. An electric tension built, causing Campbell’s hair to stand up on his forearms.

“She’s becoming a problem,” the professor said.

“She said they wouldn’t let her in.”

“
Let her in
,” the auburn-haired Zaphead said.

Several Zapheads parroted her words, and then the chant spread up the stairs. Campbell covered his ears, unable to bear this stunning and sickening new discovery. He’d finally come to accept a world where the human race had been whittled down by the billions, and even accept a new natural order where many of those humans were savage killers.

At least that followed some sort of logic—a collapse of a society.

But here was a new and strange society that was actually
rising
. A mutant race apparently evolving to replace the old one.

Covering his ears didn’t help. The house thundered with the almost-jubilant vocalizing of the Zapheads. “
Let her in! Let her in! Let her in!
”

Wilma cackled with laughter, apparently at the back door now, because Campbell could hear her clearly. “I’m coming in, then!”

Campbell rose to protect her, feeling somehow responsible for her even though she’d lured him to this house of horrors. But the professor put a hand on his shoulder and restrained him.

“She’s insane,” Campbell said. “They’ll tear her to pieces like they did your friends.”

“It’s not your war, Campbell. Acceptance.”

Campbell broke free and started through the crowd of Zapheads. The stench of the house, the death it harbored, and the unwashed mutants made him dizzy and claustrophobic. He no longer cared if they killed him. He’d been surviving day by day based on some hope of a distant, better future, but now he saw that such an ideal was impossible.

His world was over.

There was a commotion in one of the hidden rooms, probably the kitchen. The hissing rose like steam whistling from a cracked radiator. Campbell pulled out his penlight, head throbbing, legs sore, and his throat parched with thirst and anxiety.

The Zapheads had all turned away, congregating around Wilma, who laughed and screamed. “Give him back to me!”

They closed on her, and she was crushed by the sheer numbers. Campbell didn’t want to touch any of the repulsive creatures, but they were turned away from him, blocking the exit. He worked his way down the hall as far as he could go, shining his penlight over the heads of the crowd.

The beam settled on Wilma’s pocked, deranged face. The struggle with the Zapheads appeared to have aroused her to a state of bliss.

“Stay out of it, Campbell,” the professor warned from somewhere behind him. The stairs thundered as the Zapheads descended.

“Don’t be afraid,” Campbell said to Wilma, nearly shouting over the hissing. She stopped struggling for a moment and looked toward the light, although she likely couldn’t see his face.

“Breeder!” she said. “I wanted you for a breeder! This world
needs
breeders!”

“
Needs breeders
!” one of the Zapheads shrieked.

The phrase rippled through the house and amplified.
“Needs breeders, needs breeders, needs breeders.”

One of the Zapheads grabbed Campbell by the front of his shirt and gave a mighty tug, yanking him off-balance. The beam of his penlight darted wildly across the ceiling before slicing across the face of the Zaphead who held him. It was the auburn-haired woman.

“
Needs breeders
!” she screeched in delight.

“I’ll kill you, bitch,” Wilma shouted, slapping at the Zapheads around her.

The Zapheads fed her words right back to her, along with the blows she was reining. “
I’ll kill you, bitch! I’ll kill you bitch
!”

The house shook with shouts and blows and Wilma’s grunts.

Then Campbell’s penlight was knocked from his hand and crushed underfoot as the crowd converged and rushed forward into the violent center of the kitchen. Campbell slunk away from them until his back was against the wall, and then he slid down into a fetal position and covered his head.

That didn’t drown out Wilma’s screams.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“You’d have been better off getting some sleep,” Franklin said.

He sat at the table, connecting the shortwave radio to the battery system. An oil lantern glowed beside him, its light low. Jorge paced the cabin, unable to sit, much less sleep.

“I’m going, whether you come or not,” Jorge said. The old man had napped for several hours, during which time Jorge had searched the immediate perimeter of the compound. He’d also monitored the forest from the platform, afraid the military would discover Rosa and Marina before he did. Rosa was strong and resilient, but Jorge could imagine a hundred horrible possibilities—usually leading to an image of them being carried along a remote trail by silent Zapheads.

“Told you I’d come with you,” Franklin said. “But it never hurts to gather up a little information.”

Franklin scanned the frequencies as the speaker alternated between a high hum and sharp static. At one point a few broken words of Spanish spilled forth, but by the time Franklin zeroed in, the transmission was lost. “Damned charged particles in the atmosphere are messing with reception,” Franklin said. “The sun must be acting up again.”

Jorge froze in his pacing. “What does that mean?”

“‘Solar cycles’ means just that—cycles. The sun doesn’t just turn on and off like a tap. It’s always pushing out energy, but sometimes it erupts from deep inside and spews out big shitballs of radiation. The government knew those solar storms were trouble—they just didn’t want to panic the people.”

“How could they not warn us of the danger?”

“Well, the clues were there, and news reports told about the solar flares, but they mostly warned about the communication problems. But preppers who knew enough to read between the lines figured this was way bigger than anyone was letting on. I could just see that jug-eared moron in the White House saying, ‘We can’t have a public panic.’ I hope that son of bitch is rotting away in the Oval Office this very minute.”

“I don’t care about your president. I care about my family.”

“The wealthy elite and their government lapdogs kept the truth from us, so we wouldn’t have time to prepare. They didn’t cause the solar storms, but they sure didn’t boost our odds of survival. And now their foot soldiers are out there wiping out any remaining man that wants to be free. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the world’s bankers are holed up in their private luxury bunkers right now, or drifting out there in the ocean on their private yachts, with no power and no navigation systems.”

Jorge shook with rage and anxiety. “
Hijo de puta!
I hope they all drown in their own blood. But none of that matters now.”

“It’s the
only
thing that matters.” Franklin turned the dial, scanning the bandwidth one more time before shutting off the radio and disconnecting the power supply. “Zaps ain’t the biggest enemy out there. As long as these leeches are alive, none of us are safe.”

Jorge looked out the cabin door, where the green luminescence of the night’s aurora mixed with the first pale light of dawn. “Wait a moment,” Jorge said, as if finally comprehending Franklin’s words. “You said there were more sun storms?”

“Could be. We’ve probably been hit with waves of it over the past few weeks, but not enough to notice. That doesn’t mean there’s not another big one on the way, maybe even worse than the first batch. That’s the thing about Doomsday—if you read the literature, it’s usually not one thing that goes to hell. It’s lots of interconnected events and one fat trigger on a smoking gun.”

Jorge gathered Marina’s pack and began hurriedly stuffing it with food, a compass, cursing himself for his stupidity. In recent days, he’d become comfortable with the idea that the worst was over, that God’s trials had yielded their final judgment and now the rebirth began. But maybe God was just beginning to punish the sinners. “What can we do to protect ourselves from the radiation?”

More importantly, how can I protect Rosa and Marina?

“Well, probably sitting in a Faraday cage is a good move. I suspect that’s why so many of these soldiers are still running around when most everybody else got blasted to death or turned into Zaps.”

“But we don’t know when the sun storms will hit. We can’t live in cages.”

Franklin grinned with crooked teeth and tugged his beard. “Now you’re catching on.”

“Your government and your soldiers can battle over foolish ideals,” Jorge said. “If I die, I will die protecting my family.”

Franklin retrieved the bloody ax from its place leaning by the woodstove. “I hope we stay on the same side, Jorge. Because I’ve seen what happens when people get in your way. There’s a slumbering dragon in there. We need free men like you.”

When people get in the way.

Jorge thought of the Hello Kitty girl in the forest, and his hallucination that she’d spoken. Jorge hadn’t mentioned it to Franklin, lest the man think he was losing his mind. He needed Franklin to help him. Even though Franklin was driven by a personal mission, he had proven himself a survivor and he knew the territory.

Perhaps in a situation that had never before existed in the history of the world, experience didn’t matter. But until Jorge found his family, he would use every tool and weapon and resource he could find.