Crucible: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 5)

by Scott Nicholson

  Then she heard the squelch as Franklin’s weapon found its second target.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “I think we took a wrong turn,” Abigail Murray said.

  “I was going to tell you to go right at the last intersection, but I figured you’re the president,” K.C. said.

  “Being president doesn’t make you smart,” Murray said. “It just means you survived a specific process.”

  They’d been wading through the sewer tunnel for maybe fifteen minutes, but Murray had long since lost track of time. The dark water was two feet deep, the current moving faster. She was in the lead, holding the pistol in one hand and their final torch in the other.

  Behind her, Squeak fought against the current in water. Millwood was barely conscious, and K.C. had an arm around his waist, nearly dragging him along. Millwood insisted that they leave him back at the platform, and now Murray wondered if that would’ve been the right thing to do. But a man dying alone, in pain and darkness, was not something Murray could stomach.

  They spoke little, pausing at each intersection to discuss which way to go. Then they would listen for the throbbing that seemed to come from all directions at once. Each time, they ended up guessing on the best route, having long since lost their orientation. They couldn’t go much farther without running into an outlet or factory. The city wasn’t that big, even if navigating it underground was a difficult task.

  “The water should be receding, not getting deeper,” K.C. said. “We’re heading upstream, so there should be fewer sources flowing into it.”

  “Unless more water’s coming in,” Murray said.

  “But it doesn’t rain under the dome,” Squeak said. “So where does the water come from?”

  “Maybe it’s not water,” K.C. said, which chilled Murray more than the cool air did.

  They came to a corroded metal ladder that led up to an access in the ceiling, but the top was sealed with Zap alloy. K.C. propped Millwood on the rungs to rest a moment and shift her M16 strap to the opposite shoulder. Murray poked the torch in each direction, the wall of light stretching about twenty feet before being swallowed by the darkness.

  Something splashed ahead of them, and Murray guessed it was a new tributary spilling into the main shaft. She couldn’t take the torch by herself and explore it, though, without leaving the others in the dark. They could rest a moment and would reach it soon enough.

  “You want to climb out of the water and dry off, honey?” she asked Squeak.

  “I’d just get wet again,” she answered matter-of-factly.

  “What are you going to do once we’re out of here and far, far away from the Blue City?”

  “I want to build a tree house and find some dolls and have a tea party,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have some real boys and girls to play with?” Murray asked.

  “No, because they might turn into Zaps.”

  Millwood moaned and opened his eyes, and then muttered something unintelligible. Murray wished they could lift him completely out of the water, but he was too heavy. His bandaged arm was swollen, the exposed fingers turning blue. If he lived, the arm would have to be amputated.

  K.C. hopped a little out of the water. “Damn.”

  “What was that?” Murray asked.

  “Something brushed my leg.”

  “Monsters!” Squeak shrieked. “Monsters in the water.”

  “No, honey,” Murray said, falling back into the calm persuasion upon which she’d built a political career. “There can’t be any mons—”

  Millwood grunted and slipped down a little, his good arm hooked over one of the rusty rungs. Murray called his name, but his eyes didn’t open. He slid down a little more until water was up to his waist.

  “Millwood?” K.C. waded forward to catch him but then he was tugged down and submerged, bubbles frothing the water.

  His head bobbed briefly above the surface as they called his name, and then his arms thrashed as he tried to pull himself upright. The current had washed him five feet downstream already.

  “Something’s got him,” K.C. said, confirming Squeak’s fears and Murray’s greatest nightmare.

  Millwood vanished underwater. K.C. plunged her arms into the water again and again, desperately trying to keep her M16 dry as she hunted for him. Murray lifted Squeak onto the ladder and ordered her to climb all the way up, handed her the torch, and then she joined K.C. in the search. The water roiled and churned, turning darker.

  “I’ve got him!” K.C. said, pulling one of his hands into the air. Murray grabbed his arm, but realized she held the bandage. She was afraid to clamp down or pull.

  Then a thick, rubbery tentacle rose from the water where Millwood had gone under. It was gray-green and pocked with rows of reddish suckers. Squeak screamed again, and Murray fired her pistol at it. The shot missed, but the tentacle disappeared back under the water.

  “Help me,” K.C. said, digging in and leaning back, pulling on Millwood’s hand with both of hers. Murray, dreading going under any deeper, searched where his head should be. If they didn’t get him up soon, he was going to drown.

  But K.C. fell backwards with a splash, sitting in water up to her neck. She held Millwood’s hand, torn off just after the wrist. Strings of ligaments and thick purple veins dangled from it. Squeak wailed in a low steady siren of distress.

  Murray felt something coil around one calf and she kicked free. She nearly fired down into the water but she might hit her own foot. K.C. flung the hand downstream and struggled to her feet, water pouring from her clothes.

  “Forget Millwood,” Murray said. “Get moving.”

  “It’s safer on the ladder,” K.C. said.

  “But there’s not room for all of us, and we can’t split up. We’d never get out of here.”

  The tentacle snaked out of the water and swiped at K.C., knocking off her fedora and raking her hair. K.C. ducked down as it swiped again, seeming to struggle with something underwater. Then she came up with a hunting knife and drove the blade into the tentacle. Gruesome gelatin oozed from the wound, a translucent gray substance that plopped into the water and floated away.

  “Take that, squid-face,” K.C. bellowed as she sliced and chopped at the tentacle. It retracted and disappeared, but a second one took its place. She chopped it a couple of times before it, too, vanished. All was quiet for a moment aside from the lapping water. Just at the edge of the torchlight, Millwood’s corpse bobbed to the surface and then drifted into the darkness.

  “What was that thing?” Murray asked.

  “You don’t get out much, do you?” K.C. said.

  “I’ve spent the last five years in a cave pretending to be the leader of the free world,” Murray said.

  “Well, there are monsters, critters, creepy-crawlers, creatures, beastadons, slimers, and sneaky snakes. Take your pick.”

  Murray asked Squeak how she was holding up, and the girl just shook her head, face shadowed in the firelight. Murray wondered how any kid could survive this trauma that would plague them their whole lives, even if the human race did manage to survive. They would grow up damaged, and even if they were lucky enough to reproduce, their kids would likely be damaged as well.

  Nuclear annihilation will be a mercy kill. Any other outcome is just torture and cruelty.

  She tensed for any contact beneath the water, and even the moving current made her nearly jump with anxiety. Sigmund Freud would’ve had a field day with tunnels, darkness, and unseen monsters populating his devious dream analysis.

  But Murray was more determined than ever to escape from this hellhole and rejoin the troops stationed a hundred miles to the northwest. She would personally deliver the order to unleash the nukes, not only to destroy the Zaps but to exterminate every mutant aberration that dared spawn in the toxic wake of the apocalypse.

  Squeak clung to the top of the ladder, pressed up against the patch of alloy. K.C. hung just below her, the muzzle of her M16 swiveling slowly back and forth as s
he searched for movement in the water.

  “Stay there,” Murray said in an unnecessary command. She took the torch and waded upstream, thrusting the guttering flame before her to push back the darkness. Every ripple and sway of the current was an imagined tentacle or beak or set of teeth. The torch was little more than a smoldering clump of black ash, steam trailing as the last of its fuel burned away.

  She squinted into the gloom ahead of her in disbelief. A dorsal fin cleaved the surface of the sewage, heading straight for her. The fin was gray and blunted, but she had no way of telling if the creature was alive in the old sense of the word or was some horrible creation of the Zaps.

  A scream erupted behind her and she glanced back—as difficult as it was to tear her eyes away from the fin—to see the alloy swelling out in a bubble that forced Squeak down the ladder. The bubble had a fluid, elastic aspect that suggested it might pop. But the expansion served to better illuminate the area, even though K.C. had to climb down into the water.

  Murray turned back around just as a mighty tail whipped at the water, sending a shower of spray her way.

  The torch went out and Murray was lost in the gray murk with whatever waited beneath the surface.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DeVontay rolled the dead carrier off of him and gave it a kick.

  His felt for damage along his bloody face. His fingers reached the socket of his left eye and he discovered his glass prosthetic had become dislodged. He looked around on the alloy plain for it and noticed the metal had become softer, as if losing its constitution. The buildings appeared softer around the edges, their features fading. A blue-white haze hung over the slag, the tips of it feathered by the aurora.

  The lightning licking the curves of the dome grew dimmer, enhancing the vibrancy of the blue plasma against the night sky. The robots, dogs, and the metal monster were little more than glistening silver humps. The city was melting.

  He limped toward Rachel and Franklin, the alloy growing spongy under his boots. The two were in the ruins, surrounded by dead trees and dusty cars and broken houses. He called to them but they didn’t answer. He reached the city’s border and stepped off the alloy onto the ground, surprised to find it solid as ever.

  “Are you guys okay?”

  “It’s over,” Franklin said.

  Rachel sat beneath a tree, leaning against its rough gray bark. Her eyes were closed and her arms were folded across her chest. The two Zap babies lay bleeding at Franklin’s feet. Their skulls were not merely punctured, they were almost obliterated, with chunks of bone and baby teeth floating among the massive folds of butchered brains.

  Franklin held a makeshift spear whose tip was clotted with wet gore. “Sorry, DeVontay. It had to be done.”

  The implication dawned on DeVontay and nearly caused him to collapse, his heart twisted in broken glass and barbed wire. He knelt in front of Rachel and took her hands. They were warm, but he couldn’t tell if she was already gone.

  He whispered her name and her eyes opened, twin volcanoes that were already dimming to red embers. “Don’t leave me,” he sobbed, knowing it was a selfish and desperate plea when she was the one who had everything to lose.

  She tried to speak but appeared to be stunned. Whether that was due to Kokona’s sudden dispossession or the energy fading from within her soul, DeVontay couldn’t tell. Even though he’d prepared for this outcome for years, the reality of it was devastating beyond anything he could conceive.

  “I…it’s for the best, honey,” she whispered, and then she sighed like a winter wind nudging aside the last warmth of autumn.

  He crawled against her, curling his arms around her as if his body heat could serve as a battery that would revive her. Love was a transformative power, he’d learned that from Rachel, and he was willing to burn every bit of its fuel to keep her.

  “The babies are dead,” Franklin said. “We won. But we always knew this is how it would end.”

  DeVontay glared at the old man, tears from his remaining eye seeping down his cheek. “You killed your own flesh and blood! You heartless son of a bitch.”

  “She was dead anyway,” Franklin said. “Being Kokona’s slave and getting stuck under this goddamned bubble would have drained away her soul. The human part would slowly disappear and all she’d have left was the Zap.”

  “But it wasn’t your fucking call!”

  “You don’t think Rachel thought about it? She would’ve done it herself if she could.”

  DeVontay’s rage radiated in too many directions at once—Franklin, Kokona, the solar storms, and the human ego that sat like a poison seed in the minds of the Zap babies and swelled into an obscene evolutionary detour.

  But he pushed those thoughts away and focused on this woman in his embrace. If her flame was slowly extinguishing, he wanted to be here for her last moments.

  “Does it hurt, honey?” he murmured in her ear.

  “No, I don’t feel anything,” she whispered back. “And that makes it even scarier.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Just hold me.”

  “I told you, sweetie, I’m never letting go, no matter how crazy this ride gets.”

  “I love you,” Rachel said, with a little more force, and DeVontay indulged a surge of hope that she might revive from this dissipation.

  He’d harbored a secret fantasy that if this moment ever arrived, when her Zap half was finally exorcised one way or another, she would become fully human and no damage would linger. But that wasn’t going to happen. If anything, the Zap ingredients in the biological soup she’d become were potent and systemic, a host tolerating the annoying parasite of her humanity.

  “The city’s going,” Franklin said, speaking with a hollow detachment that disguised his own pain. “Without the babies to hold it together, it’s sliding back to whatever it was before they played God and fucked with physics.”

  DeVontay no longer cared what happened to the city, or indeed the entire world. Because his world was dying. The big apocalypse was nothing compared to this personal doomsday of the spirit, the dimming of the bleakest dusk. Love, the abstract ideal that stitched together a million pop songs and propped up a billion lies and liberated an entire universe, was in the end a personal affair.

  The bitch of it was that two people shared that personal affair. Rachel appeared to be unresponsive now, even when he gently shook her.

  DeVontay fought another surge of helpless rage. “The city can rot, for all I care.”

  “The dome might come down,” Franklin said. “We’ve still got people in here. And probably some more we don’t even know about. What about Squeak?”

  DeVontay wondered if Franklin really meant “What about K.C.?” Maybe the old man worried about his own personal loss. No, that was cruel, Franklin deeply loved Rachel. In a different way than DeVontay, and one he couldn’t understand since he had no descendants—

  Oh, Jesus. We’ll never get to have kids.

  Reproducing was one of their biggest and most absurd dreams, a topic both appalling and inspiring. They were afraid to risk the birth of a half-Zap infant, or perhaps a full Zap with all the supreme intelligence and tyrannical insanity of the other Zap babies on the planet. On the other hand, perhaps they could spawn a new kind, a child with all the best, noble qualities of humanity with the strength, brains, and adaptability of the mutants—a truly new and superior race.

  Such dreams were a different kind of arrogance. He would trade them all for just another uneventful day with her, scavenging abandoned houses, tidying up the bunker, and caring for Stephen, Marina, and the Kokona that had once seemed a strange but innocent orphan instead of the manipulative despot that eventually emerged.

  “We need to save the others,” Franklin said.

  “I’m not leaving her,” DeVontay said. “She’s still alive.”

  “I’d love nothing more than to give her a decent burial,” the heartbroken old man said, standing with his watch cap in his hands. “But we’v
e got people underground.”

  “You go on, then,” DeVontay said.

  “Might be safer down there if it all collapses. Those tunnels are bound to come out somewhere.”

  “I’m not taking Rachel into the dark to die, Franklin.” DeVontay scooted closer beside her and leaned against the tree, letting her weight rest on his chest. “I don’t mind going with her. All that’s waiting outside the dome is savage Zaps, monsters, and slow death by radiation poisoning. I don’t even want to see what’s next.”

  “That’s your call, son. Me, I need to keep fighting.” Franklin dropped to his knees beside them, using his spear as a cane to help lower himself. Dried blood caked his curly gray beard and a dark bruise splotched one side of his face. His lower lip was swollen, and he licked it before leaning in to kiss her on the forehead.

  He stroked her tangled chestnut mane and softly repeated her name over and over. “You were the only one who believed in me,” he said. “And I was always so proud that you stayed true to yourself. I love you.”

  DeVontay had never seen Franklin display such depth of emotion, and some of his hatred and anger of the man dissolved away. Franklin didn’t have the right to sacrifice Rachel in the cause of freedom, but now it didn’t matter. Nothing would bring Rachel back.

  Franklin staggered away without a word, trailing the tip of his metal spear behind him. The subsonic throbbing still continued, evidence that the city’s factories and mad engines were running. The plasma tubes were still busy harnessing and pumping the altered electromagnetic radiation, with all five of them still glowing blue. The city itself had further decayed, the buildings standing upright but their corners rounded. The central tower’s glass was clouded and sagged like melted wax.

  How much longer until the plasma sinks blow up? Will they keep running even after the dome collapses?

  At least the end would be quick. He’d much prefer to go out in a flash of light than to endure the slow collapse of the dome. DeVontay ached from his many wounds, exhaustion seeping deep into his muscles, but he didn’t want to fade like Rachel.