Read After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) Online

Authors: Scott Nicholson

Tags: #Stephen King, #Justin Cronin, #Paranormal, #Suspense, #walking dead, #Science Fiction, #Bentley Little, #Supernatural, #Brian Keene, #Dean Koontz, #Zombies, #Horror, #Joe Hill, #zombie, #After series, #post-apocalyptic, #world war Z, #Adventure, #Mystery, #dystopian, #technothriller, #J.L. Bourne, #action

After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) (3 page)

BOOK: After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2)
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He glanced up and just happened to gaze into the Pathfinder’s side mirror—

Movement.

In the forest that bordered the highway.

Heart lurching, Campbell rolled to the front of the vehicle, skinning his elbow on the asphalt.

Three men emerged from the trees, two of them in military garb, although they were slovenly and exhibited little training in their movements. They flanked a man in a filthy T-shirt whose hand were bound together in front of him. A ragged cloth was wrapped around the man’s head in a makeshift blindfold, blonde curls spilling out of the cracks.

“Don’t feel like walking no more,” said the soldier on the left. He dug in his pocket and came out with a cigarette.

The other soldier, who seemed to be doing most of the work of escorting their captive, said, “Sarge doesn’t care what you feel like.” But he stopped and let his comrade light the cigarette. The captive slumped, his head down as if resigned to whatever fate the soldiers had planned.

Campbell sized them up. The smoking soldier was in his mid-20s, lean, with a hawkish face and cruel eyes. A rifle was slung across his back. The soldier held the cigarette out to the prisoner, and then remembered the prisoner was blindfolded.

“Wanna smoke?” he sneered.

The captive twitched his head.

“Too bad.” The soldier took a deep puff of his cigarette, turning the tip bright orange, and then jabbed the cherry against the man’s forehead. The man dodged away, grimacing and hissing in pain, although the heat did little more than scorch his hair. The soldier’s laugh was like that of a horse with a busted larynx.

The other soldier, middle-aged and with a crewcut showing some gray, said, “Quit messing around. We need to get one of these back alive.”

One of these?
Campbell wondered.
Just how many people have they found, and what is happening to them?

“He’s just a Zaphead,” the scrawny soldier said. “He’s too dumb to feel pain.”

That didn’t make sense. The captive didn’t act like a Zaphead. And even if he were one of those whose behavior had been altered by the solar storm, why hadn’t the soldiers simply shot him?

“I’m going to make
you
feel some pain if you don’t stay in line,” Crewcut said. He sported a semiautomatic assault weapon that looked like it could turn butter into Swiss cheese.

The scrawny soldier delivered one half-hearted stroke of the cigarette, nearly singeing the captive’s cheek, before stepping away to relish his tobacco and stare into the west, where the sun had only just begun its descent into afternoon.

The captive opened his mouth for the first time and made thick, chuckling noises. Crewcut gave him a shove forward. “Don’t want to hear it.”

Campbell pressed back into the shadows as the two of them approached the highway. He considered his options. Crewcut appeared to be the most competent, so he should be the first one taken out. Then, while Campbell still had the element of surprise, he’d go for the smoker.

He looked at the pistol in his lap. Crewcut was a good forty yards away. Even if Campbell got lucky, he’d probably just wing his target and then have two soldiers gunning for him.

And even if he did pull off a miracle and fell them both, what then?

“Wait up,” the scrawny soldier shouted, tossing aside his cigarette and breaking into a sullen jog.

“I swear, Zimmerman, you’re as slow as my granny.”

“Your granny’s a Zaphead.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I banged your sister after she was dead. What ya think about that?”

The smoker howled in strained laughter. “So what? You got my sloppy seconds.”

“You’re a sicko,” Crewcut said. “I like that in a foxhole buddy.”

The smoker, having caught up to the other two, jabbed the blindfolded man in the back. The captive didn’t grunt, although Campbell could hear the air whooshing from his lungs.

Campbell couldn’t shoot now even if he wanted, because they were seventy yards away. But Campbell realized he didn’t want to hurt anyone. There had been enough suffering. He wasn’t sure he could even kill a Zaphead in self-defense.

And the Pete-voice inside his head said
Yeah, and you got so damn much to defend, don’t you? A box of Rice-a-roni, the San Francisco treat. A blister pack of Bics. A roadside First Aid kit. Three cans of Starkist tuna. A pack of stale Cheez-it crackers. Half a roll of toilet paper. Oh, yeah, that shit’s worth FIGHTIN’ for.

Campbell resisted answering the Pete-voice. That would be crossing the line into craziness, and Campbell wasn’t crazy.

That’s what they all say,
the Pete-voice said.

When Campbell was twelve, his dad had taken him to New York—the Carolina foothills giving way to West Virginia coal country, the working-class heart of Pennsylvania, and then into the unbroken urban sprawl of the Northeast. And at every gas station or fast food restaurant, his dad would warn before they got out of the car: “Careful, they’re crazy here.”

In his dad’s world, everywhere else was crazy except Lake James, North Carolina, where the fish were always biting and the women never were. His dad was named Norman, a normal name for a salt-of-the-earth guy, one whose friends called him “Norm.”

“When people call me Norman, I know they’re after money,” his dad always said.

To his shame, Campbell had barely thought of his family in the aftermath of the solar storms. Lake James had only been a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Chapel Hill, but in a world without cars, it might as well have been the far side of the moon.

When Campbell had left home to attend UNC, his father had packed up the Suburban and ferried his stuff to his dorm room, leaving him with one tidbit of advice: “Careful, they’re crazy here.”

And now time and circumstance—and an epic hissy fit of the sun—had proven his dad right. He wondered if Norm was still alive, sitting on his bass boat and knocking back Bud Lights while the world raged on around him.

Somehow, he couldn’t picture it. The idea of his father’s and mother’s deaths didn’t make him sad. Instead, it carved a hollow in his chest.

Campbell didn’t want to be alone with the Pete-voice anymore. He didn’t care how crazy the people of everywhere else were.

He raised his head over the hood of the Pathfinder. The three figures were walking along the shoulder of the road, just as Campbell had done. The skinny soldier lit another cigarette, bluish-gray smoke swirling around his head. Their blindfolded captive stumbled along between them, with Crewcut giving him a bruising nudge of encouragement once in a while.

Campbell looked behind him to make sure they weren’t being followed. As noisy as they’d been, any Zaphead for miles around could have heard them. But the soldiers didn’t seem restrained in the least. Perhaps they’d already dealt with their share of Zapheads and had faith in their weapons.

Campbell shoved the Glock into a zippered pouch of his backpack and hurried after the threesome, carefully dodging from car to car, working the highway while ducking low. He had to work twice as hard to cover the same amount of ground as the soldiers, but he kept them within sight.

That’s good hustle
, the Pete-voice said.

“Shut up.”

Campbell was horrified to realize he’d answered out loud.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

“Rinse it out, honey,” Rachel said.

Stephen looked at her with surprise. “There’s a whole box of them right out there,” he said, waving toward the surrounding clearing. Dusk had settled in a lavender cloak that darkened to an electric blue, as if the sun was going off to have a laugh on the far side of the globe, where other survivors might be huddled around greasy campfires.

“We need to care for what we have. This isn’t a time to be wasteful.”

DeVontay shook his head in resignation from the pilot’s seat. “Boy’s got all the plates he wants. We can stop in at the next Target and get us some gold-plated china if we want.”

Rachel wasn’t sure of her motives. She wanted to tell them that if they wanted a civilization, the minimal requirement was that they all act civilized. But perhaps it was simpler than that: focusing on small chores kept the bigger worries at bay.

And there are plenty of big worries to go around.

“Until we find your dad, we’re responsible for your behavior,” Rachel said. “And that means doing things you might not like.”

“My dad would tell me to throw it away.” Stephen looked down at his plastic plate. It wasn’t even that dirty; they’d eaten canned pork and beans and apples, and he’d licked up his tomato sauce. DeVontay would have been fine letting them all eat out of cans, but Rachel insisted on the routine of dinnerware.

“I’ll ask him when we find him,” she said, and DeVontay shook his head again, this time with a frown instead of a smirk. “Until then—”

“O-
kaaaay
,” Stephen said impatiently. “Wicked Witch of the West. Jeez.”

Rachel let out a cackle that reverberated in the cavity of the wrecked plane. “
Hee hee hee hee
. I’ll get you and your little dog,
too
!” She returned to her normal voice. “But you’re still going to clean your plate.”

Stephen poured some bottled water on his plate and started to wipe it with his shirt sleeve. Rachel didn’t even have to say anything. A scowl did the job. He dragged a T-shirt from the open suitcase beside him, wiped the dish carefully, and tossed the T-shirt back onto the pile.

DeVontay wiped his pocketknife on his trouser leg without comment and gazed through the plane’s window. Half of the windshield was missing, cool evening air funneling through from the gash where the nose had broken lose from the fuselage. Much of the instrument panel was intact, the radio handset dangling from its taut coil of cord. One of the pilot seats was missing, and DeVontay had taken the other one, building a fire with the help of tiny bottles of Scotch he’d plundered from the shattered galley. He twisted the cap from one and poured half the contents on the fire, and the flames turned blue and oily.

Rachel hadn’t asked about the bodies he’d encountered. She only knew that there must have been dozens. Even if the plane had tossed them like popcorn during the crash landing, surely a number of them must have followed the final instructions and buckled in. DeVontay was numb to it now, death just another traveling companion on the road to After. Rachel wasn’t sure if his grim equanimity was a necessary survival mechanism or yet more proof that any structure she imposed was just a sham.

She eyed the encroaching darkness that seemed to seep from the edge of the forest like a watery predator. “Are we safe here?” she asked, hating herself for saying it in front of the boy.

“Safe as anywhere.” DeVontay’s rifle was leaning behind him against the skewed wall of the pilot’s cabin. “We haven’t seen any Zappers for days.”

It was true. They hadn’t seen any survivors, either, and Rachel wondered if the solar storms had left lingering damage that upped the body count even weeks later. Right now the three of them could be changing, the microscopic synapses in their brains melting like burnt fuses, their impulse signals falling into darkness.

How would you know?
Rachel wondered.
One minute you’re walking and the next you’re walking braindead.

Stephen rubbed his eyes, red both from smoke and sleepiness. Rachel spread a plush brown jacket on the collapsed floor of the cabin and smoothed it. “We’ve put in some miles today,” she said to him. “Why don’t you hit the hay?”

Stephen opened his mouth to protest but yawned instead. “How much farther?”

“A long way,” DeVontay said. “But we’re closer now than we were this morning.”

Rachel understood the response on a metaphorical level. They might not have a bigger purpose—and she certainly didn’t, not since turning her back on the Lord that had seen her through easier times—but Rachel had convinced them that her grandfather’s mountain compound was the only desirable destination. Stephen believed they would leave from there and go on to find his father in Mississippi, but Rachel couldn’t see past the next day’s walk.

What happens after After?

“You’ll like the mountains,” she said, helping Stephen swaddle into the makeshift bedding.

“Sing me to sleep?” he said, drowsily, exhaustion seeming to hit him all at once.

DeVontay sensed their need for an intimate moment and retrieved his rifle. “I’ll go take a look around.”

He ducked through the jagged opening where the nose had torn free from the plane’s body, then slipped into the growing darkness. Rachel stroked Stephen’s brown hair. The bedtime routine had started a week ago, when Stephen announced that his mother used to sing to him. Since they’d left her in a hotel room where Stephen had been trapped with her corpse for three days, Rachel had taken on an ever-deepening mothering role.

But even that was colored with guilt. She’d been the “responsible one” when her younger sister Chelsea had drowned, and her whole life afterward had been about making amends. Rachel had trained to be a school counselor because she wasn’t Catholic enough to become a nun. Now there were no more schools, and the only person she could counsel was a ten-year-old boy who had seen his world shatter in the blink of an eye.

“What song would you like?”

Stephen snuggled into the jacket. He looked years younger, almost like a toddler with his thick lashes and pursed lips. “Beatles.”

That didn’t narrow it down much, but it was too late for the rousing fun of “Yellow Submarine.” And “Help!” would be a little too maudlin. She took a breath and began “Blackbird.”

She made it fine through the chorus, even though she wasn’t a great singer, choosing a low, sweet lilt. The tune itself was like a bird, sinking and then rising, testing the wind and finding its altitude. And on the final verse, her voice broke, sunken eyes learning to see. She managed to turn the stutter into a vocal embellishment and recover for the finale, wondering if this was the moment they’d been waiting for all their lives.

“Sing it again,” Stephen murmured, eyes closed.

BOOK: After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2)
6.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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