by Mark Tufo
But only one side bleeds.
Franklin came to his first corpse barely fifty feet from the bunker door. She was lying facedown, blood matting her hair, body pocked with puncture wounds. She was dressed in civilian clothes. Franklin’s stomach roiled as he imagined the woman watch the captain enter the bunker and make a run for the same shelter.
Sorry, miss, even God wouldn’t let everybody on the ark.
He stepped over her, wondering if she was the “Colleen” the captain had been so dismayed about. She didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon, so she might not even be part of the unit. Either way, her troubles were over now.
“Franklin!” Stephen called, and he peered through the shifting, sun-dappled forest until he saw the boy. Stephen was amid a group of four soldiers who had formed a ring, using the thick trunks of oaks for concealment as they spat bullets into the sky. The captain was among them, the shotgun delivering a thunderous belch of pellets that knocked two of the shitterhawks to the forest floor.
“Cover my ass,” Franklin said, dashing for them, bracing for a sharp jab to the back of his skull.
If only the damned things would screech or chirp or caw, it wouldn’t be half as creepy.
“Down,” someone shouted, and Franklin didn’t know who said to whom, but he pitched forward into an awkward roll. His bones jarred as he extended his elbows to protect his rifle and avoid shooting himself in the face. He sprawled awkwardly on his back and looked up to see one of the birds skim just a few feet over where he’d stood moments earlier.
Franklin studied the underbelly of the bird as it zipped over him. The creepy little shitter even has feet. At least it didn’t dive-bomb me with cyberguano.
The shotgun roared again and the bird teetered and then drifted sideways, slamming into a tree and dropping to the ground. As it skittered spastically in the dried leaves, Stephen ran to it and slammed the butt of his rifle against it again and again. “This one’s for my mom.”
The bird shattered with a soft crunch, pieces of it flying. Stephen continued pounding it even as it sank into the mud, one clear miniature eye gazing up at its destroyer as if acknowledging defeat. Franklin had to yell at the teen to break him out of his blind rage.
One of the soldiers leaned against a tree trunk, wiped sweat from his face, and swapped out his clip. Brass jackets lay scattered around him.
Franklin took the man’s place and scanned the sky for a target.
A fierce shriek ripped the air like a dropping warhead, rising in pitch as it drew closer.
What now?
A large shadow passed over a break in the canopy above, and the shriek swelled in intensity. Then the creator of the terrible sound came into view—a vulture, a real one. Or, at least, it had gray feathers and flapped its wings and bobbed its bald head. The rest of it…
Son of a bitch is as big as a winged pig.
“What the hell is that?” the captain said.
“Dead,” Stephen said, raising his rifle.
Franklin lunged forward and pushed his elbow to alter his aim. The single shot sailed across the mountains. “Wait a sec. Let’s see what happens.”
The buzzard-thing flapped into a small squadron of the fake birds, dipping its hooked beak against one of them and snatching it from the air. Pieces glittered in the sun as they fell from the yellow vise of the death grip. The vulture opened its beak and let the ruins fall away, turning toward the next.
It maneuvered even faster than the birds, and despite its ungainly size, it caught them easily, crushing them one by one. Throughout the attack, the buzzard maintained a high-pitched screeching.
“It’s going after them,” the captain said.
“Looks like they invaded its airspace, and it’s pissed,” Franklin said.
“What is that thing?” Stephen asked.
“I don’t know, but it looks like it’s on our side.”
Then came more shrieks, rising like approaching police cars on a high-speed chase. Three more of the buzzards came over the ridge, folding their wings to ride the wind. The shooting died away as if the scattered troops all simultaneously realized what was happening. The three buzzards joined the fray, emitting skull-penetrating cries. In minutes, the silver birds were vanquished.
The vultures then rose toward the clouds, lazily circling high above.
“What now?” the captain asked.
“I think they’re getting ready to eat.”
Chapter 201
“They’re not going to let us follow, so we’ll have to come up with another plan,” DeVontay said.
Rachel agreed, but she was pretty sure Tara wouldn’t listen to reason. She couldn’t blame the woman. Rachel had risked her own life plenty of times for Stephen and Marina and even Kokona, and she could only imagine the huge responsibility and devotion a birth mother felt.
“Either way, we need to keep up our strength,” Lars said, jabbing a hunting knife into the top of a rusted can whose label had long since deteriorated. They’d gathered around a coffee table to share their dinner. “As long as this isn’t creamed corn, I’m good.”
After the Zap vanished with Squeak, the group attempted several times to follow, but each forward movement brought the birds from whatever treetops and parapets served as their perches. The birds hovered just above the road as if daring them to continue. One time, Tara nearly made a run through them anyway, and it took both DeVontay and Lars to restrain her.
Eventually she accepted the loss, although the others assured her she’d get her daughter back, even if they had to find a new route to the nearest Zap city. They sought refuge in a house on a hill above town, far from the yellow cottage, as the sun slipped into early evening against the magenta-shrouded mountains.
The house was secure enough, with high, small windows and a door that locked, and they even struck gold in the pantry, although the rodents and roaches had plundered the best offerings.
Rachel wasn’t particularly hungry—she required little food since she’d become half Zap—but she took one of the unlabeled cans and opened it with her knife as Lars had done.
“Pork and beans,” she said, smelling the sweet, oily sauce. “Classic.”
“I got salmon,” DeVontay said, as if they couldn’t all tell from the odor.
“Peas,” Lars said, draining the juice on the floor beside the couch where he sat. Beside him, Tara sat hunched forward with her hands on her knees, staring off into the far distance as if imagining whatever horrors the mutants might be inflicting on Squeak.
“Here, you need to eat something,” DeVontay said to Tara, forking some of his pink fish onto a dusty plate they’d found in the kitchen cabinets. Lars rolled some peas beside them and, taking their cue, Rachel contributed some of her brown beans. Tara just shook her head.
Rachel tried to distract the woman from her misery. “So, how did you guys get to Stonewall?”
“She was here first,” Lars said, and then told the story of how he’d heard the commotion in the house and discovered the Zap. “It wasn’t doing anything at first, just kind of waiting, but when I reached for Tara, it attacked me. If she hadn’t grabbed my axe when she did—”
“It wanted Squeak,” said Tara in a hollow voice. “And when you motioned toward me, it thought you wanted her, too.”
“So why do they want a child when they could’ve taken one of you?” Rachel asked. “Is there something special about Squeak?”
“She’s just a kid. A human.” Tara glowered resentfully at Rachel. “Not like you.”
“How did you come to be…you know,” Lars said, waving his fork toward Rachel’s face. “Your eyes.”
“I was bitten by a mutant dog. This was about six months after the storms. I was okay, but the wound got infected, and then the Zaps kind of herded me to this house where they held other people captive. Don’t know what was going on with you guys at the time, but this was during that period when the Zaps were trying to learn from our behaviors. They tried to cure the gangrene by transferring their energy t
o me.”
“Sounds wild,” Lars said.
“No wilder than anything else that’s happened since the world ended,” DeVontay said. “She was traveling with me and a boy, but I lost them. Took me a long time to find them again, and when I did, she was like this and…well, the real Rachel didn’t change a whole lot.”
“How come the Zaps let you get away?” Tara asked her.
Rachel wanted to comfort the woman, so she didn’t delve into the whole truth. “They thought I’d be like some kind of ambassador or teacher, help them understand human behavior. I saw an opportunity to communicate with them so we could all live in peace. Stupid, I know, but it didn’t work because I’m mostly human.”
“And they didn’t kill you?”
“When it came down to it, I chose my people,” Rachel said. And so far I continue to make that choice.
Tara nodded. “I guess if you were really a Zap, you’d be with them.”
“We’ve been staying at a place up in the mountains,” DeVontay said, keeping it deliberately vague. “We come down here every few months to scrounge for supplies.”
Lars finished his plate and flung it across the living room like a Frisbee. “I came from the west. I was a web geek in Asheville when the shit hit. Lost people, hooked up with more people, lost them, too. That’s pretty much my whole story.”
“Are you hooking up with us?” Tara asked.
“That depends on if you want to get lost,” he answered. The joke didn’t take, so he added, “Hey, we’re going to get your daughter back. Don’t you worry about that. I lost mine, and I know how much it hurts.”
“What about you, Tara?” Rachel asked. “There must be a reason the Zaps want your daughter. And where did she get that name?”
Tara gave a mother’s smile of pride. “I was eight months pregnant when the storms hit. I was at the clinic in Greensboro for a check-up, and then the doctor and another patient got in a fight. At least that’s what I thought, until I saw the patient’s horrible, horrible eyes. Like yours, Rachel.”
This woman doesn’t let go. I guess paranoia’s served her well, though, if she managed to keep a child alive in this mess.
“I ran into the examining room and locked the door,” Tara continued. “I could hear the screams and crashing cars outside and I knew something was up. I looked out the window and saw the bodies everywhere. People were attacking each other, and most of them had those same burning eyes. I’m not stupid, I’d seen zombie movies and X-Files and all that stuff. And I figured the best thing to do was nothing.”
“You waited it out,” Lars said. “Brilliant. What about your…uh, husband or whatever?”
“I was a single mom by choice,” Tara said. “I have no idea who or where the father is, so that wasn’t a problem. Little Squeak was all I had to worry about. I waited in that room for a week, peeing in a bedpan and eating the snacks in my purse. And when the contractions hit, I figured women had been doing it for thousands of years and it wasn’t rocket science.” She winced in memory. “I couldn’t risk painkillers, so I just bit the sheet for an hour and then I had a beautiful baby girl.”
“You’re lucky she wasn’t a Zap or stillborn,” DeVontay said. “I heard about a few of those cases.”
“The babies that turned Zap were mentally advanced,” Rachel said. “Last time I encountered them, these supergenius babies were leading the tribe, communicating telepathically, learning everything they could about the world and the human race.”
“Not my little Squeak,” Tara said. “I didn’t want her to know any part of the past or what went on before, because we all saw how that turned out, didn’t we? I wouldn’t let her talk, and I never taught her to read. I kept her away from people and Zaps as much as I could, so I wouldn’t have to explain what was happening. It’s not a failure if there’s no successful thing to compare it to, right?”
Was she this crazy before the apocalypse, or is this a side effect?
Rachel and DeVontay shared a glance. Lars didn’t seem to notice how strange her attitude was. Maybe he adhered to the same philosophy.
“I call her Squeak because we communicate that way,” Tara said. “I mean, I do talk to her, but she just makes little noises back.”
Like she’s mute? Rachel’s school counselor background was nearly worthless in the new world, but she secretly seethed at this woman’s abuse of her child.
“You might be onto something with this ‘baby’ angle,” Lars said. “Maybe they want all the babies in the world or something. Turn them into geniuses.” When he saw Tara tense, he hastened to add, “Hey, hey, hey, that means they’re not going to hurt her. They’ll treat her well until we can find her.”
DeVontay finished his food and licked his fork clean, then went to the window with his rifle. “All clear, from what I can see. No birds.”
“What are those things, anyway?” Lars asked.
“We knocked one down,” Rachel said. “It’s kind of like a drone made to look like a bird, but it acts like it has a mind of its own. It’s made out of the same kind of weird polymer or plastic as the Zap suits. The one we knocked down managed to repair itself and take off, like it carried a 3-D printer, if you remember those.”
“Where it carves something out of plastic using a computer program?” Lars asked.
“Yeah,” DeVontay said. “If all these birds are able to fix themselves, how can we ever fight them?”
“If the Zaps are manufacturing now, they must have some sort of power source,” Lars said. “And an infrastructure.”
“We know they congregate in towns,” Rachel said. “When I was trying to communicate with them, they had gathered in Newton, which is about thirty miles from here. They used a school as their headquarters and held some human captives to teach and care for their babies. They were organized, almost hive-like, but they showed no capacity to invent or produce things.”
“Except death,” Tara said. “They produced plenty of that. Cornered the market, at least until these monsters came on the scene.”
“I’ve got a theory about that,” Lars said. “I think the planet suffered a fundamental breakdown during the solar storms and the effects are still manifesting. People have always tracked the sun’s cycles and patterns and tried to match it up with other natural phenomenon. Some used it to explain economics and that heightened solar activity stimulated growth. Others linked the solar cycles to human behavior.”
“I’d say that sounds like astrology or New Age crap,” DeVontay said. “Except we already know that the sun can affect us, because it’s nearly wiped us out.”
“I designed a website for a book publisher whose catalog contained all of that kooky stuff, aliens and Atlantis and time travelers. I admit, I spent a lot of time down those rabbit holes. There was one Russian dude, name of Chizhevsky, who correlated wars and revolutions throughout history with peaks in sunspot activity. Stalin kicked his ass into a labor camp over it, but his work eventually was accepted by mainstream Russian scientists. He did a lot of work on how geomagnetic forces affect biology and the movement of blood and all that—seeing the sun as changing life at the most basic levels. If the solar storms tore down the world, maybe they’re building back something we can barely recognize.”
“The solar activity could have wiped us clean and rewritten our DNA,” Rachel said. She’d swapped numerous theories with Franklin, DeVontay, and the others, and she wasn’t sure there was a scientific explanation for all that had happened. “But radiation, pollution, whatever rays are coming through our damaged magnetosphere, who knows? Maybe ‘aliens’ is as simple an answer as any.”
“Or the devil,” Tara said, causing the other three to fall silent.
DeVontay cleared his throat and checked the window of the adjoining wall while Lars idly tapped the blade of his axe with his fingers. Finally, Rachel said, “Good and evil don’t exist anymore. That died with the human race. Do you think Zaps care about whatever resurrection myth we believed before they came along?”
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“Of course they wouldn’t care. They’re a blasphemy, and look at those birds they build. More blasphemy, trying to play God.”
Rachel had suppressed and then relinquished her faith over the course of her trials and tribulations. Perhaps her spirituality had always been weak, and she was annoyed that this woman still clung to some of the uglier parts of faith—particularly its dependence upon a fall guy.
Most proselytizers could be defeated by turning their own logic against them.
“Do you think God punished you by taking Squeak away?” Rachel asked.
“Maybe,” Tara said. “I’ve sinned, but always out of love.”
Ha, the other escape clause. I did wrong, but for the right reasons.
“So if God is punishing you, don’t you think it would make Him unhappy if you tried to get your daughter back?”
“Rachel,” DeVontay said in a cautioning tone, as if Rachel was the evil one for debating a mentally unstable woman.
“I see what you’re doing,” Tara said to her.
“Excuse me, folks,” Lars said, standing abruptly. “I have to take a leak.”
“Don’t forget your axe,” DeVontay said.
“What am I doing?” Rachel asked Tara.
“Talking me into letting them keep my baby.” Tara shook her head. “I knew you were one of them.”
“We’ll get her back,” Rachel said. “Only it won’t happen because it’s God will, or that somebody prayed hard enough, or somebody sacrificed an animal and muttered a bunch of chants over the blood. It’ll come because we make a plan and work together.”
“You really mean that?” Tara asked, her eyes welling with tears.
Rachel felt sorry for taunting and arguing with her. Maybe Rachel still held a grudge from their fight in the outfitters’ shop. Either way, if she wanted to be part of the human race, she would have to make sacrifices of her own.
“Yes, I mean it. But you need to eat so you’ll be able to handle whatever it takes to get the job done. Okay?”
Tara nodded with gratitude, the tears making grimy tracks on her cheeks. As the woman scooped up a mouthful of fish, Rachel put a comforting hand on her shoulder and then joined DeVontay by the window.
