After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) (8 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Stephen screamed again and Rachel tore free of DeVontay’s grip. She stumbled through the aurora-limned cockpit, until she found him. He clung to her with his thin, frail arms.

“Shh, it’s going to be okay,”

“Huh-had a bad dream,” he blubbered. “They were t-talking to me...”

“Who?” she asked, her stomach tightening.

“I don’t know. They…they were in the woods.”

She stroked his hair, careful to keep the pistol out of his reach. If the Zapheads closed in, she’d have to decide whether to use the last two bullets on the boy and then herself. Except she couldn’t remember how many bullets the magazine held.

Why isn’t DeVontay shooting?

In the hush of the night, the cockpit seemed small and fragile against the vastness of the sky. They’d grown overconfident, sleeping more or less out in the open after so many nights spent in abandoned houses along the way. But Rachel had been sure the Zapheads were thinning out, perhaps even dropping dead from some lingering, invisible effects of the sun’s radiation.

Now here they were in a multitude, all around them. Rachel had suffered the ultimate arrogance—the belief that this After was meant for humans, and that it was up to humans to put the pieces back together.

Maybe, like the dinosaurs, they were merely short-term tenants, squatting on land the rightful owners had yet to claim. Placeholders in history.

“Where’s DeVontay?” Stephen asked, a little calmer now, his sobs giving way to occasional shudders.

Good question. He didn’t go OUT there, did he?

Even with the high aurora and faint moonlight, she couldn’t tell if DeVontay was still at his outpost at the edge of the cockpit. Their campsite was steeped in shadows, giving Rachel the sense that the metallic shell was in truth a mausoleum that still contained the echo of those who had died here.

This whole After was nothing but an echo, a hollow mockery of life. The ultimate indictment of an allegedly merciful God.

“Rachel?” DeVontay called from the darkness just outside the cockpit.

“Get in here,” she said.

“No. We need to figure out what they want. I’m going in the woods.”

“Damn you, don’t even think about it.” Rachel said it more loudly than she’d meant to, and she wondered if the Zapheads were listening. Did they have any comprehension of language, or was it just noise to them, an instinctive signal to close in and kill?

Stephen stiffened in fear beside her. “What’s happening?”

Rachel didn’t have time to conjure a suitable lie. “Something’s out there, but we’re safe in here.”

“Right, Little Man,” DeVontay said with false cheer. “Just like in your comic books. Back in a few.”

Rachel patted Stephen. “Wait here.” Then she scrambled across the cockpit into the moist air of night. Under the surreal swirls of the tainted atmosphere, DeVontay crossed the clearing, picking his way among the strewn wreckage. She called to him and hurried to catch up.

“You can’t leave that boy alone,” he said to her. “Get back in there.”

“Who made you boss?”

“This ain’t no time to go all femi-Nazi on me.” His good eye sparked with anger, while his glass eye reflected the green aurora, round and strange, a moon in an alien planet’s sky. “I’m going in. If they follow me, take the boy and get out of here.”

“And if they don’t follow you?”

“Then we’re all dead anyways.”

He started to turn but she grabbed his sleeve. “What if we get separated?”

“Then I’ll see you at Milepost 291.”

DeVontay took a step but she didn’t release him. Instead, she pulled herself into him. She meant to kiss his cheek but he turned, and their lips met. He was six inches taller, but they seemed to fit. His lips were full and warm and, even in the chaos and fear that pulsed through her veins, a different kind of excitement ignited.

Yet the kiss was also steadying, an eye in the hurricane, the sane center of a twirling universe gone mad. In the heavy silence of the autumn night, the contact was electric.

Zap.

After several skipped heartbeats, DeVontay pulled away. He smiled. “People’s looking.”

Rachel touched her mouth, embarrassed. There were no glittering eyes in the forest, no strange fireflies. Just the natural world.

“I…I’m sorry.”

“Then I hope you
stay
sorry. I’ll be back.”

He jogged toward the forest, rifle held before him, its barrel glinting with the faint light. Rachel scanned the trees once more, then looked at the forlorn shattered cockpit that gleamed like a monstrous egg under an alien sky. Stephen’s pale face appeared in the opening, and she wondered how much he’d seen.

She hurried back to him. “Come on, we have to pack.”

“Where’s DeVontay going?”

“Looking for a better camping place.”

“In the dark?”

The boy was smart. And intelligence was a critical survival trait. Rachel didn’t know what the future held, but Stephen was part of it. Her desire to protect him was maybe nothing more than vanity. He was tough, or he wouldn’t have made it this far.

“He’s trying to get the Zapheads to follow him.”

“So we can get away?”

“Yeah. So get packed. Hurry.”

Rachel shoved some cans of food into her backpack, making sure she had water, the lighter, the map, and the hatchet. She checked a side pouch to make sure the two clips of ammo were there. The pistol was useless at long range, and despite DeVontay’s patient teaching, she still wasn’t much of a shot. But in close quarters, the gun would be better than the hatchet, especially if several Zapheads attacked at once.

But she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Not that she put much stock in “hope” these days.

“Got everything?” she asked, as Stephen pulled on his tennis shoes.

“I don’t got nothing,” he said. He was even starting to talk like DeVontay.

By the time they were crouched at the edge of the wreckage, sporting their jackets and backpacks—Stephen wearing his frayed Carolina Panthers cap—the first gleam of dawn touched the eastern sky with pink and orange, muting the aurora. Mist hung between the trees, hiding anything that might have moved among them. The water on the dying leaves made the autumnal canopy sparkle like a king’s ransom of gold and rubies.

“Are we going to wait for DeVontay?” Stephen asked.

“He wants us to go on.”

They’d heard no shots or cries of alarm, which probably meant that DeVontay had not yet encountered the Zapheads. But they could be following him, as he’d planned. Rachel couldn’t begin to guess the motives of the mutants—after all, why hadn’t they attacked in the night, when the three of them were surrounded?

“The highway’s over there,” Rachel said, pointed to the northwest where U.S. 321 wound inexorably up into the mountains. She then realized that DeVontay no longer had a map. Even if he escaped, he might never find his way to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

She couldn’t help one more little white lie. “DeVontay will meet up with us there once he’s sure the Zapheads are gone.”

“Won’t he get lost in the woods?”

“Nah. He’s pretty smart for a city boy.”

“Do you like him?”

“Sure. He helped save our lives.”

“Is that why you kissed him?” Stephen’s face was so earnest that Rachel almost grinned.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t get any cooties.”

“Are you guys going to get married?”

“I don’t see any churches around here, do you?”

Stephen shook his head. “Just woods. And dead people.”

Rachel glanced at the crumpled body of the plane where many had lost their lives. Their horror had been brief—a few minutes from loss of power at 20,000 feet until devastating impact with the ground. While Stephen’s horror continued, a minute at a time, an uncertain day at a time, lost in the ashes of what civilization had once been.

She took his hand. “Come on. DeVontay’s waiting.”

They walked into the mist, Rachel carrying the pistol in one hand, the other gripping Stephen’s. She felt like an intruder in the forest. This place belonged to the beasts again.

Her kind didn’t belong here.

Her kind had its day under the sun, and now the new kind held sway.

But until she was gone, this world would have to make room for her. She demanded it. She’d abdicated God’s will, and now all she had left was self-will.

It would do.

She squeezed the pistol’s grip more tightly, savoring its potency.

Yes, it would do.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Tracks,” Franklin said.

He pointed off the forest trail where a thin stream trickled between moss-covered gray boulders. The black mud was pocked with footprints, a few of them holding water.

Jorge knelt and studied them. “Some are wearing boots or shoes and others are barefoot.”

“Give that man an Eagle Scout badge.” Franklin snapped a twig from a birch tree and chewed on the tip until it was frayed. Then he began brushing his teeth with it, savoring the minty flavor.

They were on the western side of the compound, half a mile below the ridge. Franklin had scouted the entire mountain several times during the construction of Wheelerville, mostly to ensure no fellow squatters or preppers were setting up camps nearby. Since the highway access was limited, it was a long hike into the depths of the national forest. Hippies sometimes spent weeks in the wilderness, especially in summer and autumn, but the steep, rocky terrain inhibited most of them. Those who had toughed it out never ventured up to the peak.

Franklin had decided on the reconnaissance mission because he wanted to know how many Zapheads were around. At least that’s what he told Jorge. In truth, he was still searching for the rumored secret military installation.

He was pretty sure they would be able to hold off a few Zapheads. But defending the compound against trained and armed soldiers would be far more challenging.

“They’re probably using this as a water source,” Franklin said. “Assuming Zapheads even drink water. We have no idea what their needs are.”

“The baby drinks,” Jorge noted.

Franklin didn’t want to be reminded of that blasphemous act. “One thing’s for sure, they’re moving in packs. These tracks are pretty fresh.”

“Should we follow the creek down?”

Franklin looked back at the animal path that meandered up the slope between the trees. He was tired. If they walked the creek until it reached the Elk River, they wouldn’t get back home before later afternoon.

“Think the women will be all right?” Franklin asked.

“Rosa is getting good with the rifle, and Marina is a sharp lookout. They will be fine.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Franklin sighed. “Okay, but keep your eyes open. I still think the Zapheads are after the baby.”

He and Jorge had had this discussion several times. Jorge didn’t believe the Zapheads were intelligent enough to track them all the way from the road to the top of the mountain, even if they’d understood what was going on. Franklin, though, never trusted conventional wisdom.

In big systems of chaos, the simplest answer was usually the right one. In his younger days, he’d concluded that the answer was the Illuminati, and then he’d come to believe that a small group of people—no matter how all-powerful and corrupt—would never be able to organize the behavior of billions of other people. Later he’d gone with the “foreign banker” theory, popular with the economic Doomsday crowd. That was a notch below the Illuminati in paranoia level and made a little more sense because greed was much more motivational than a desire to shape the future.

The wealthy elite had purchased most of the world’s governments long ago, leaving only the petulant tyrants in places like Iran and North Korea to resist them. And that was the source of Franklin’s fear of the military: even now, in a post-apocalyptic world, their imprinted marching orders would be to defend the elite.

Which made people like Franklin a threat, because he’d never kneel before the swine whose snouts had been buried so deeply in the trough.

“We’ll walk for an hour, and if we find nothing, we’ll head back,” Jorge said as a form of compromise.

Franklin didn’t like how the Mexican now seemed to be the one giving orders. This wasn’t a democracy. Franklin had built Wheelerville, and as far as he was concerned, he called the shots. He didn’t give a damn whether it was public land or not.

But he also didn’t want to be standing in the mud all day. Rosa was a talented cook, and she was probably fixing a stew or baking a pot pie of some kind. He’d put on several pounds since the Jiminez family had moved in with him. It wouldn’t hurt him to walk off a little of the extra fat, even though winter would soon be coming.

“All right, then,” Franklin said. “But watch your step. If you break a leg, I’m leaving you here for the coyotes.”

“Your hide’s too tough for them to chew through. You have nothing to worry about.”

Franklin had to chuckle at that one. Jorge and his family were hard workers, and he’d grown fond of them. Even the woman, Cathy, was a help in her way. If not for that little Zapper brat, the Wheelerville enclave would be just fine.

“How many of them you think are out there?” he asked Jorge, who was a good twenty feet ahead of him on the walk. Franklin resisted using his rifle as a crutch or cane. The footing was treacherous and they both had to concentrate on each step, or the wet leaves might skid out from under them and send them tumbling down the steep, rocky slope.

“I don’t know. If we’ve seen maybe a dozen out here in the middle of nowhere, there could be thousands in the cities.”

Franklin had been specifically wondering how many Zaphead babies there were, but the simplest answer was usually the right one. If there were thousands of Zapheads, then that meant hundreds of babies. He wondered how many of their mothers would let the little monsters gum their breasts. No doubt many of the mothers had died along with the mass of humanity.

But what if a Zaphead mom had a Zaphead baby? What if those things are out there breeding even now?