Earth Zero: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 2)

by Scott Nicholson

  Rachel looked around the room, hoping to find spare parts or scrap metal left over from the construction of the butchering machines. Even in the darkness she could tell that the builders of the assembly line had employed extraordinary efficiency. All the while, the carnage continued, the cat screeching as it was drawn into the living dissection of the meat factory.

  For all the desperation of the humans trapped in the adjoining room, the cat’s green eyes glinted with such misery and fear that Rachel seized the robotic arm that held it by the neck. The arm was the thickness of a broom handle but was incredibly strong. She yanked at it and the articulated joints resisted, still going about the job. Rachel braced both feet against the side of the machine and levered backward with all her weight.

  The arm snapped at a couple of joints and the callipered fingers flew open. The cat dropped to the floor on all fours and scurried from the room so fast that Rachel wasn’t even sure it had escaped. She lost her grip and tumbled, slamming into the stainless steel table. Sheaves of meat flopped down onto her and she batted it away, feeling its moist stickiness slide across her skin.

  “Rachel!” DeVontay ran toward her as the robotic arm waved spastically at the air, the other arms waiting to receive more raw materials to process.

  The Zap returned as DeVontay helped Rachel to her feet. The mutant lifted its arm and, for one horrifying moment, Rachel thought the device was aimed in her direction.

  The air pressure in the room changed and Rachel’s skin tingled. Then the locked door shattered into several large pieces. One chunk hung from the upper hinges and a triangular piece containing the knob stayed mated to the jamb. The wall around the door frame sported jagged cracks, plaster leaking from them. Aside from the rending of the wood and gypsum, the device hadn’t made a sound.

  The voices inside the room were now audible—a man and a woman. Rachel was sure it was the two people they’d met in Stonewall. The girl, Squeak, was practically a mute, but she was likely in there as well.

  Rachel and DeVontay dashed through the wreckage into another darkened, windowless room. Rachel’s radiant gaze swept over another row of the same kind of machines as in the previous room, although twice as large and with so many articulated robotic arms that they seemed like cybernetic octopi.

  “Get me out of here!” Lars Olsen screamed, whipping his long, dirty-blonde beard back and forth. Like his companion, he was nude, his gaunt figure as pale as a fish. He was restrained by one metallic arm at each of his four limbs, held aloft with his back several feet off the floor.

  Tara was held in a similar apparatus, but she was in motion. The arms were carrying her within reach of the next set of arms, which hovered over a rimmed chute wielding flashing scalpels. Tara wriggled and screamed as the machine coldly prepped her for slaughter.

  The room reeked of sweet coppery blood and rot, the floor slick with viscera. A wire basket of chipped bones lay beside the machine, and several bulging plastic vats were stained with flecks of gore. Other sets of empty restraining arms suggested these two weren’t the first guinea pigs.

  Human corpses in various stages of decomposition were laid out in a row like cordwood. The piles of their clothes and personal effects heaped beside them reminded DeVontay of documentary footage he’d seen of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

  My God, they’re cutting them up for scraps.

  Any empathy Rachel still held for the mutants faded in that chilling moment. She didn’t know how many humans had been carved up in this unholy abattoir, but there could be no co-existence now. This would be a war to death, one way or another.

  “Stop it!” Rachel yelled at the Zap, her words barely audible over Tara’s shrill cries.

  The Zap stared down at the device in its hand as if not recognizing it.

  “Blast that piece of shit back to the junkyard,” DeVontay said.

  “She will be killed if I do,” the Zap said. Rachel sensed its confusion but she had no compassion left.

  “Give it to me, then.” Rachel reached for the device as DeVontay tried to hold her back.

  “You don’t know what that will do to you,” it said.

  “Do you think she wants me to risk it?” Rachel nodded toward Tara, whose feet were mere inches from the descending blade. The woman seemed delirious and barely aware of their presence. All her attention was focused on the descending blades above her legs.

  “Blast the hell out of it,” Lars yelled, his voice crazed and cracked.

  “Do it,” DeVontay added. “Full speed and fuck it.”

  Rachel pointed it, searching its smooth surface for some type of switch or depression. Perhaps it worked like a touch-screen device, but she suspected the device was dependent upon energy routed through its Zap operator. There was seemingly a mental component to its operation, a telekinetic circuit to tap.

  Well, I’m still part Zap, aren’t I? Abracadabra. Fire. Shoot. Go boom boom.

  With each thought, she waved the device as if it were a magic wand that would spit out a stream of punishing hellfire to cleanse the world of evil.

  Nothing.

  DeVontay limped to the machine, but its arms were moving too fast for him to grab one of them. The blades whirred in the air like silver bees. Electronic eyes on both sides of the chute analyzed the task and calculated the angles of approach, a complex contraption that would’ve been a marvel of engineering in other circumstances.

  “Move away,” Rachel commanded as DeVontay crouched and tried to grab Tara around the waist from below. DeVontay ignored her and was carried toward the processing chute along with Tara.

  Rachel glanced around for Squeak, refusing to entertain the thought that the young girl—or rather, the pieces of her—resided in those slick barrels of offal.

  The first blade nicked the tip of Tara’s big toe, shearing off a piece of skin and peeling the digit down to a raw nub as if it were an overripe banana. Her agonized squeal seemed to shake the walls, adding to the buzz of energy in the air.

  DeVontay tried to twist her free of the mechanical arms, but they were firmly locked on Tara’s limbs. She arched her back in a desperate thrust and DeVontay lost his grip on her sweating body.

  Lars bellowed incomprehensible syllables and Rachel was sure that the Zaps around the plasma sink could hear them through the walls. She put both hands on the device and tapped wildly at it as if this was a television show and she could remotely change to a more pleasing channel.

  The blades whisked across Tara’s feet and legs so swiftly that Rachel wasn’t even sure if they were cutting. The air clotted with a fine red mist and Tara’s eyes bulged, mouth gaping but unable to utter a sound. DeVontay rolled away from the carnage, spattered with the woman’s blood.

  In her frustration, Rachel was ready to fling the little device at the murderous machine. She pirouetted and leveled it at the Zap. “Stop it or you’re dead, and I know you don’t want to die.”

  The Zap hung its head, eyes dimming to a dull orange glow. “I can’t. I’m not the one who built it.”

  The machine whittled at Tara as she slid onto the chute and was pulled into the dozen or so arms that plucked at the flayed parts, separating skin from flesh and sorting the harvest into various piles. The woman’s cries fell away to groans and then to whimpers before she mercifully fell unconscious or perhaps slipped into shock. Her torso sagged onto the chute as she surrendered to the slaughter.

  “Get me out of here,” Lars yelled, writhing against his restraints so frantically that Rachel thought his arms might be torn from their sockets.

  Rachel gave the device to the Zap. “At least put her out of her misery. If there’s any human still left inside you, you’ll do that much.”

  DeVontay had turned his efforts to Lars, beating at the imprisoning metal arms with his fists. Rachel joined him, glad to turn her back on Tara’s vivisection, even though the wet sounds of the busy blades were nearly unbearable.

  “Where’s Squeak?” Rachel asked Lars, who
se gaze kept flicking down the length of his prone body to the mutilation that he would soon undergo himself. He shook his head, damp hair stuck to his forehead, naked chest rapidly rising and falling.

  “Tell me,” Rachel repeated. “Was she—did she already go through?”

  “He’s out of it,” DeVontay said. “Guess God’s not a total psycho cruel son of a bitch after all.”

  The blades were now down to bone, chipping away at Tara’s cartilage with a hollow, wooden sound. There was a clatter as the amputated bones were kicked out into the wire basket. At least for Tara, the horror and pain was over.

  Poor woman. Five years of surviving the worst the universe has to offer, and this is your reward.

  Rachel’s faith, so strong in her youth and early adulthood, was now barely a distant memory. She no longer felt the presence of a higher power, a loving creator she could entrust with her life. All that was left was a cavity, the ache of its absence like a sweet tooth rotted away and leaving only the taste of bitterness.

  “Th-they—they took her,” Lars muttered.

  Rachel wasn’t even sure the man was aware of their presence anymore. She wished she had the man’s axe at that moment, the heavy weapon he’d carried like a shamanistic relic of his Norse roots. She would love to feel those brittle robotic arms cleave and fold under her raging blows.

  “Where did they take her, Lars?” DeVontay asked him, with all the calm of a bedside doctor whose patient was hopelessly terminal. He even cupped the man’s clenched hand and squeezed.

  “Dunno. Away. The baby.”

  “The baby Zap?”

  Lars craned his neck, trying to see the awful fate that was awaiting him. The mechanical arms moved him a few inches forward as if sentient enough to be impatient. Rachel dared a glance at the chute and saw a river of red rolling from the shiny surface in thick sheets. Apparently the mutants saw little value in the liquid derived from their livestock. Plenty more where that came from.

  The Zap waited by the door, still clutching the handheld device. Rachel wasn’t sure why the Zap had brought them here. Despite its apparent sense of self and identification with humans, it had done nothing to stop Tara’s death.

  Maybe it brought us because we’re next.

  She warily eyed the extraneous arms that dangled from overhead tracks on the opposite side of the room. She expected them to swoop in at any moment like metal pythons that would squeeze the breath from them both and hug them in a cold embrace until all hope vanished from their hearts.

  Suddenly the blades stopped their whirring and the arms transporting Lars froze in place. The machine’s whining dropped in frequency until it was little more than a soft whir, like an oscillating fan drafting a breeze from still summer air. The dull, low pulse of the plasma sink returned to fill the near-silence.

  “What now?” DeVontay asked.

  The air was still charged with energy but was also moist from the liquids and gases exuded by Tara’s corpse. The automated surgeons had nearly finished their grim autopsy. All that remained on the steel chute was a gleaming skull and a wrinkled rope of pink intestine.

  Rachel sensed them before she saw them.

  The figures came through the shattered doorway and fanned out to block any escape. Six Zaps, holding those mysterious weapons.

  A seventh mutant entered the room, carrying Geneva in its arms. With them was Squeak, who studied the bloody machine and its horrible contents with childlike curiosity.

  “We know how to take you apart,” Geneva said. “Maybe one day we’ll learn how to put you back together.”

  Rachel wanted nothing more than to wring the baby’s neck and toss her onto the autopsy table. “Humans aren’t the only ones who bleed.”

  Geneva batted her hands together with joy. “Oh, yes, most definitely. Just ask the other babies who wouldn’t let me have my toys. They can’t answer, though. I’ve taken their tongues.”

  Geneva’s wild cackle was a sharp contrast to the other Zaps, who stood with blank, stolid faces and smoldering eyes. If they had any opinion about their tiny leader, who was as deranged as any inbred emperor of ancient Rome, they didn’t show it.

  The girl appeared unharmed and blissfully ignorant of her mother’s fate. One small blessing, at least. But Rachel sensed the reprieve was only a short one.

  She met DeVontay’s gaze. She should’ve listened to him and escaped while they had the chance.

  So much for saving the world.

  The machine whirred back to life and the descending arms slid quietly along their tracks toward her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Franklin wasn’t sure how long he’d walked, but his feet were blistered and his legs cramping.

  He didn’t find a house until nearly dawn, and he’d broken in to discover that it had already been looted. Two bodies lay under a sheet in one of the bedrooms, tangled bones whose owners might have been engaged in lovemaking when the solar storms brought them to a premature release. He found no weapons, but the kitchen cabinets held a few cans of the stuff that even scavengers rejected: hominy, pickled beets, and mustard greens.

  Franklin sat on the couch so he had a good view of the road and the edge of the forest, then jimmied open the tops of the cans with a butcher knife and ate his fill. He was miserable over Stephen’s loss. It was possible the boy had been swept downstream ahead of him, but that would’ve only increased the odds of his drowning. Franklin hoped the boy had died instantly, maybe cracking his head on a submerged rock, rather than falling victim to one of the less savory options.

  As the aurora faded and the sun seized the dawn, Franklin oriented himself. Stonewall was due almost directly east of the bunker, and he couldn’t be more than an hour or two away. He lay down on the couch to rest his aching muscles for a moment, but before he realized it, he fell into a heavy nap.

  He awoke with a start, dreaming he was back at his compound. I should’ve stayed there and none of this would have happened.

  But that wasn’t true. The situation would’ve played out differently, sure, but probably for the worse. All of the bunker’s occupants might be dead, along with Capt. Antonelli’s unit. Even though Franklin was no fan of any government before or since the end of the world, he saw no reason to cheer the deaths of his fellow humans.

  If you look at it that way, Stephen would be dead no matter what I did.

  He pictured the young boy that Rachel had brought to the compound nearly five years ago, and how Franklin had imparted all the proper ideals needed to become a self-reliant and free-thinking person. The boy had grown but had been interrupted before he could become a man. What a waste.

  Franklin sat up, more sore than before he’d taken a rest break. He felt old as hell, too worn down for the job ahead. If life was fair, he would be dead and Stephen would be looking for Rachel and DeVontay. But life had repeatedly proven itself a massive fraud and cheat.

  Franklin went outside, scanning the sky for metal birds. A flock of crows wheeled to the west, looking purplish-black and normal beneath the sun. A few high clouds scudded across the blue ceiling above, carrying no threat of rain. In the distance was a faint, colorful haze like a smudge of neon rainbow. Franklin staggered off the porch and across the yard, working the tightness from his ligaments. He might as well check the outbuildings. Even though guns were unlikely, he might discover a useful hand weapon.

  The first structure was a garden shed, containing nothing but clay pots, rubber hoses, sacks of potting soil, and a crumbling pair of leather gloves. The second structure was a small barn, its rear door leading into a fenced pen and small pasture beyond. Before entering, Franklin noticed some manure on the ground. It was moist and green, fresh, in rounded clumps.

  Horse?

  He eased open the heavy wooden door, which creaked as the interior darkness shrank inch by inch. When he heard the animal snort, his guess was confirmed. He wasn’t much of an equestrian by nature, but Marina’s family had arrived at his compound by horseback shortly after the s
olar storms. They’d kept the animals a while before releasing them into the wild, and Franklin had mastered the basics of riding.

  The only question was whether this animal was a horse or a freaky-eyed four-horsed monster from the depths of hell.

  The animal whinnied, and it didn’t sound like a creature that was just waiting for some two-legged morsel to walk in for breakfast.

  The morning sun poured into the barn to reveal a beautiful chestnut mare, its flanks thick and healthy, black eyes clear. The pointed ears were inquisitively peeled back. The horse had no bridle girding her long head, but the only outward sign of wildness was the tangled tail and mane.

  “Easy, girl,” Franklin said, putting out his hand and slowly approaching. He wished he’d plucked some weeds in the yard, but the horse had easy access to the pasture. A large mound of hay had long since turned black with decay, and a pitchfork handle protruded from its depths.

  The horse snorted and whipped its head back and forth as if sizing up escape routes. Franklin didn’t want to be caught beneath eight hundred pounds of thundering animal, nor pinned against the barn wall in a solo stampede. But he also didn’t look forward to walking another ten or fifteen miles to Stonewall.

  “My name’s Franklin,” he said in a soothing voice. “And I’ve never hurt nobody that didn’t deserve it.”

  The horse scooted back two steps as Franklin took three steps forward. He could see the coiled tension in the mare’s body. He kept talking in a low voice, easing closer little by little.

  “How come you haven’t been munched by monsters yet, girl? You must be pretty smart, or else faster than the wind. Yeah, that’s right. It’s okay to be scared. That’s what keeps both of us alive.”

  He put out his hand again, keeping it below the horse’s face so it wouldn’t feel threatened. The horse backed to the edge of the barn, then turned and trotted in a circle, whinnying.

  Something stirred in the loft overhead, fluttering and thumping against the eaves. A shape swooped down and Franklin’s first thought was of the dive-bombing metal birds that had devastated Capt. Antonelli’s unit.