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

by Scott Nicholson

  He came to an open plain that bordered an abandoned human neighborhood different from the one where he and DeVontay had emerged from underground. A number of the houses were intact, with cars parked in the driveways and grills and lawn furniture in their yards. If not for the desiccated trees and the shabby aspect, it could’ve passed for the old world in full swing, with kids waiting to burst out of the front doors while parents sipped coffee and whiskey in front of the television.

  The gunfire erupted again, and he headed into the neighborhood, crouching behind cars and fences as he moved toward the sound. Despite the tension, he found comfort in the manmade environment. But when figures darted and scurried along the streets, he realized something else had laid claim to this turf.

  The savage Zaps were lithe and agile, their eyes glinting as they prowled the houses and yards. Some of them were naked, their atrophied bodies nearly sexless. Others wore rags of varying size, some in shirts and some in shoes. A few were more or less fully dressed even five years after the storms, although even the most stylish among them would have been pitied during the heyday of American excess and plenty.

  He crouched behind an SUV with broken windows, studying the carnage. The savage Zaps must’ve found a way inside and now, with no robots to stop them, were making a full invasion. He couldn’t say for sure K.C. was in the neighborhood, but somebody was shooting, and the Zaps had little else to attack in the domed city.

  Franklin spied movement in an upper widow of a Victorian knock-off that had probably been the pride of some blue-collar laborer in the old days. Then a head revealed itself between the parted white curtains, and he recognized the fedora.

  K.C.!

  She slid her rifle barrel out the window and squeezed off a few rounds. A Zap flung out its arms and collapsed in the street, and several others turned and swarmed toward the house. Franklin was about to head that way when something hit the SUV with a dull thud.

  A Zap perched on the hood of the SUV, tensed on all fours, its distorted face rigid with rage. Its eyes were hot and yellow, the shredded remains of a summer dress draped around its thin neck. It raked long fingernails along the hood as if sharpening them for attack.

  When the mutant jumped, Franklin fired two rounds at it, but momentum brought it crashing down atop Franklin. The impact flung the pistol from his grip and drove the wind from him. As he struggled to extricate himself, he looked under the vehicle and saw the legs of more Zaps headed his way.

  He shoved the loathsome corpse aside and scrambled for the Glock. He only had three rounds left, and there were at least half a dozen coming. He opened the door to the SUV and slid into the front seat, figuring at least they wouldn’t be able to attack him all at once. He crawled to the passenger side and was drawing a bead when the M16 came into play again.

  Three of the Zaps dropped instantly, and another staggered forward a few more steps before collapsing. The nearest Zap to Franklin launched itself like a high diver going for water, but its aim was off and it slammed into the door of the SUV. Another ran a few more steps and leapt high in the air and hung against the vehicle’s chassis, reaching in with one curled hand to rake at Franklin’s face.

  Its fingers brushed his beard, nearly getting tangled in the unkempt hairs. Its odor was pungent and musky, a predator’s stench. This one was darker and larger than the others, powerful enough the shake the SUV on its shock absorbers. Franklin jabbed the pistol into the thing’s snarling face and sent a nine-millimeter slug into its skull, brains flying in a geyser to the street.

  “Franklin!” K.C. called from the open window.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Trying not to die. What about you?”

  “We gotta quit meeting like this.”

  “Well, make me an honest woman, then.” She waved him over. “You coming in or are you waiting for the next pack of Zaps to show up?”

  Franklin climbed out of the passenger side, stepping over the leaking corpses of the Zaps. One of them twitched and gibbered, but Franklin didn’t want to waste his last two bullets. He gave it a kick just for fun, and then jogged toward the house where K.C was holed up.

  She was waiting at the door when he arrived, and she pulled him in, looking past him to scan the street for trouble. She slammed the door and he found himself inside a normal living room with real furniture, rumpled magazines, a flatscreen TV, and a framed painting of Jesus Christ on the wall. After the weeks trapped in the Zap city, this was practically paradise.

  A bundle of plastic water bottles sat on the coffee table, evidently scavenged from the kitchen pantry. Franklin tore the lid off of one and drank deeply, water running down his chin and beard.

  “Where’s Squeak?” he asked, giving K.C. a quick kiss.

  “Upstairs,” she said. “Locked in a bathroom.”

  He started to turn away and head for the stairs, but she grabbed his shirt and yanked him into an embrace. “Is that all you got?”

  He gave her a less hurried kiss, but he had a hard time enjoying it, knowing Zaps prowled the yard. She released him and led him up the stairs.

  “How did you get here?” he asked.

  “We got separated from President Murray and finally decided to try the surface and get away from whatever hunted down there in the tunnels.”

  “And you ended up running right into a pack of Zaps. With your luck, remind me never to take you to Vegas.”

  “Hey, you’re lucky I’m a decent shot, or you might be getting your liver eaten right about now.”

  K.C. knocked on a door and called Squeak. The lock clicked and the door swung open, the blond girl’s wide-eyed face appearing in the crack. She smiled when she saw Franklin. “I knew you’d find us!”

  “That’s my brave girl,” Franklin said, wondering if he was creating a new family to replace Rachel’s. He wasn’t ready to think like that yet. Attachments just made the losses hurt worse.

  They entered a bedroom and K.C. took up her post by the window. Squeak sat on the bed where a coloring book and crayons were spread out across the blankets. K.C. rummaged in her rucksack and changed the magazine of her M16, and then tossed a full Glock magazine to Franklin.

  He reloaded and stuck the spare magazine with the final two rounds in a thigh pocket of his cargo pants. “I ran into Murray. She’s in a Zap factory sabotaging a plasma sink.”

  “Oh, no. Is she going to—” K.C. caught herself before she declared their forthcoming deaths to Squeak.

  “Any minute now,” Franklin said. “We’d be safer underground, but the access well is covered up now, since all the buildings are melting. I know another way down but it’s probably half a mile from here and we’d be exposed out there.”

  “So we stay here and wait?” She glanced over at Squeak. “Acting like a normal family?”

  “Nobody’s tried the dome since the city started dying,” Franklin said. “Maybe these Zaps walked right through the force field or metal glass or whatever that stuff is. I doubt if they parachuted in.”

  “We’d need a guinea pig,” K.C. said. “Unless we could capture a Zap and use it as a test subject.”

  “The dome perimeter is only a few hundred yards away, but it looks like this neighborhood only stretches a couple more blocks. That means we’d be out in the open for most of it.”

  Squeak paid them no attention, lost in a world of Disney princesses where no fiery-eyed mutants wanted to tear the meat off her tender cheeks. K.C. lowered her voice. “What about Rachel and DeVontay and anybody else who might still be alive?”

  “Rachel tried to save the world and all she got was dead,” Franklin said, hiding his pain with cold fury. “It took me a long time to find you again, and I’m not about to lose you now.”

  “What happened out there?”

  Franklin gave a hurried explanation, glossing over the fact the he’d sealed Rachel’s death with his own actions. Someday he would have to sit with that guilt for a long time, and until he dealt with it, the black cynicism an
d self-loathing would chew away at his guts from within. But that day wasn’t today.

  “Are you sure she’s dead?” K.C. asked.

  “She was fading fast. I couldn’t stick around and watch it.”

  “She’s half mutant. Who knows how she’s affected?”

  “She’s dead. We need to move on. We don’t know how long—”

  A wooden thumping from downstairs interrupted him. K.C. peeked out the window. “Company.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  DeVontay and Rachel emerged from the pipe and jumped down into the creek, climbing the bank and collapsing with exhaustion, steam rising from their wet clothes.

  DeVontay hadn’t seen the unfiltered sun in so long that it burned his good eye, and he kept it closed as his vision adjusted. He reached out and took Rachel’s hand, inhaling the unfiltered air. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said, in a way that sounded everything but fine.

  Taking her out of the city was a risk, but she was right: she couldn’t stay there forever. Further, she didn’t want to stay there, and he couldn’t force her to do so. Even if the world was just a bigger prison, she’d learned from Franklin that it was better to die free than to live inside somebody else’s dream.

  He would just have to accept it. Love wasn’t a multiple-choice quiz where you got to tick off the parts you liked. The grade was either “pass” or ‘fail.”

  “We can’t stay out in the open like this,” DeVontay said. “Lots of savage Zaps and creepy crawlers around. We need to find food, shelter, and weapons.”

  He sat up, feeling exposed in the burnt-out valley around the city. Clumps of grass and weeds had grown up through the blackened ground, life seeking to reassert a foothold in the dead zone. Seen from outside the dome, the Zap city had taken on a sad, remote aspect, a dream that had withered on a strange vine.

  “The city’s dying without anybody to keep it going,” he said, not sure if he was trying to make Rachel feel guilty or not.

  “So what?” Rachel said, still lying on her back, staring up at the high clouds and the wisps of aurora beyond them. “Lots of cities die. And new cities are built on top of them. People die and more people are born.”

  DeVontay wondered if she’d suffered some kind of bizarre post-partum depression due to Kokona’s absence. Instead of liberation, she expressed bitterness and resentment. The Zap baby’s hold on her must’ve been far stronger than either of them realized.

  He stood and pulled Rachel to her feet. “Let’s get out of here in case that thing explodes. Or worse, comes to life and assembles itself into some kind of robot freakzilla. We need to keep moving. I see some houses up on the hill.”

  The fresh air was welcome but was tinged with a faint chemical aroma as well as scorched ash. DeVontay wondered what kind of pollution and toxins were being pumped out of the city, both in the effluence traveling through the sewage tunnels and the gas venting from the plasma tubes atop the dome.

  If the Zaps had designed the city both as a shelter and a weapon—playing offense and defense against the human race at the same time—then they couldn’t afford to stick around and see if anyone else emerged from the dome.

  They headed for the wooded hills that surrounded the valley. Even though it was late autumn and the temperature was moderate, the trees were devoid of any colors but brown and gray. DeVontay expected at any moment that beasts or savage Zaps would swarm out of the woods and slaughter them. He was wary of menace from the skies as well, either from predators or any rogue drone-birds that might have escaped the dome.

  The ground underneath them was coated with brittle embers, gray-white ash, and stunted patches of new grass and weeds. Despite the Zap toxins, nature was determined to maintain a precarious foothold here. DeVontay took heart that life wasn’t as fragile as the Zaps believed and the world wasn’t yet ready to surrender.

  But who knows how many of these cities are scattered out across America? Or overseas? Without Rachel, we’d have had no chance here. And there’s only one Rachel.

  Walking beside her, he studied her grime-smeared cheeks, tangled hair, and strong chin. He could no longer view her objectively, but she was beautiful by any standard. Her strange, coruscating eyes somehow fit her face, a physical feature adapted to the brave new world in which they lived.

  “You’re something new,” he said, taking her hand in his without breaking pace. “I didn’t really accept that before. I always hoped the mutant part of you would just magically vanish one day, but now I think it’s right. It’s good.”

  She gave him a tired smile. “I never wanted this. I’d like to say God made me this way because He has a plan, but I can’t believe that. And I can’t blame science for creating a new biological niche to fill. I don’t even care about reasons anymore. This is how I am now.”

  “This is how we are,” DeVontay said. “We’re in this together.”

  She shook her head and gazed back at the dome. “If we’re in this together, we shouldn’t have left Franklin and the others.”

  “He betrayed you, Rachel. He thought his actions were justified, but it’s not his call. He can’t sacrifice you on the altar of some cranky libertarian philosophy.”

  Rachel pursed her lips in anger. “He’s my grandfather. He did exactly what I expected him to do. What you weren’t man enough to do, because you’re selfish.”

  She hurried ahead of him, and he jogged to catch up. “I want us to survive, have a family, maybe even start a whole new race if that’s what it takes.”

  “We’ve lost everybody,” Rachel replied, her words stinging DeVontay. “Stephen, Marina, Kokona, and now Franklin. We already had our chance and we blew it. What if I can’t leave the influence of the plasma? What if I’m chained here the rest of my life? What if I live to be two hundred years old and you leave me, too?”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Her mood swing was so abrupt and dark that DeVontay wondered if Kokona’s death had unleashed some lingering, subversive disorder. What if the depraved mutant had planted some sort of psychological time bomb in Rachel’s brain, just in case? Such secret sabotage would be perfectly in keeping with Kokona’s manipulative and destructive nature.

  But he found no way to propose such a possibility without sounded critical and paranoid himself. They reached the forest and DeVontay anxiously searched the shadows for any signs of movement.

  “Let’s wait here a little bit,” Rachel said, sagging down into a sitting position and leaning against a tree. “Maybe Franklin will escape.”

  DeVontay worried that she was losing energy fast. Her eyes seemed less vibrant than before, but the sunlight distorted his perception. He decided not to challenge her anymore but instead conducted a quick scouting mission. “Be right back,” he assured her.

  He’d only gone twenty yards or so when he heard a soft rumble in the distance. It sounded familiar but was so vague and ethereal he thought it was the wind. Then the noise swelled into a rhythmic and distinct throp throp throp.

  He sprinted back to Rachel. “Helicopter! A Blackhawk.”

  It emerged over the valley, camouflaged with a tan-and-gray pattern, scarred with large round holes in the fuselage. It circled the far side of the dome, keeping well away from the city, and when it neared them, DeVontay ran from the trees and waved his arms over his head. Even though he knew the pilot couldn’t hear him, he shouted so loudly his throat became raw.

  The young man in the passenger seat saw him and turned to the pilot, and then the helicopter made a slow, listing descent that revealed it wasn’t in top mechanical condition. The engine sputtered and coughed a little black smoke as the rotors and blades churned, ash and grit skirling into the air. When the chopper touched down, the young man jumped out and opened the bay hatch, waving them inside.

  Rachel was reluctant to leave Franklin, but DeVontay pulled her along, and soon they were loaded into the helicopter. The young man sat in the bay with them, a pistol in his hand as if he didn’t trust them. DeVontay rea
lized his wariness was due to Rachel’s Zap eyes.

  But Rachel recognized the pilot, Torgeson, and called a greeting. The pilot turned and gazed at her through his ever-present aviator shades.

  “She’s on our side,” Torgeson confirmed. “She’s the half-Zap we briefed you and the president on.”

  “Sorry,” the man yelled over the engine and rotor noise as he returned the pistol to its holster. “It pays to be paranoid these days.”

  “I don’t want to sit here too long,” Torgeson shouted, and the young man, who was in his mid-twenties, gave him a twirling hand signal to take off.

  “We’re waiting for somebody,” Rachel said.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow, I promise,” the young man said. He bore no insignia on his khaki sleeves but a set of twin silver bars was pinned to his shirt.

  Rachel introduced the two of them and said, “What are you doing here? I’ve seen the helicopter make a fly-by every week or so.”

  “I’m Capt. Adam Ziminski,” the young man said. “Ranking officer of the Twenty-Seventh Earth Initiative Division. We’re keeping track of the city, trying to figure out what’s going on. Also looking for survivors, including President Abigail Murray. Have you seen her?”

  Rachel and DeVontay exchanged a look. “I heard she was there, but I never met her,” DeVontay said.

  “This is a weird question, but what the hell happened to your eye?”

  “Oh, this?” DeVontay pointed to his new silvery prosthetic. “Grabbed me some Zap alloy and rolled it up like a chunk of Play-Doh.”

  Ziminski squinted at Rachel. “So you were in the city?”

  “Yeah.” She gave a brief account of her experiences, leaving out some of the stranger details such as her telepathic connection with Kokona. Ziminski shook his head in disbelief as she described how the Zaps manipulated the alloy while building structures and robots. She concluded by confirming that all the Zap babies were dead and no one was in control of the city.