Half Life: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 6)

by Scott Nicholson

  “Don’t shoot,” Rachel ordered Munger, possibly talking to DeVontay at the same time.

  The colonel aimed his revolver at her, fifteen feet away, an easy, dead-center shot for a trained marksman. “You filthy Zap. You just had to bring another one of those creepy little tyrants into my world, didn’t you? Well, it will just make killing you a lot easier.”

  “You don’t want to do that, Munger,” Franklin rasped, his throat dry and his head woozy.

  “Don’t worry,” Munger said. “You’re next. I’ve got enough bullets for all of you.”

  “And I’ve got a full clip for you,” DeVontay said.

  Without shifting his aim from Rachel, he turned and looked at DeVontay with surprise. “I thought you…”

  “You thought wrong.”

  “We have a chance to stop the nuclear strike, Colonel,” Rachel said.

  “So you have the abort code?” Munger said, not lowering his revolver. “These liars almost got you killed.”

  “I don’t have the code,” Rachel said. “Captain Ziminski does.”

  “This asshole killed Ziminski,” DeVontay said. “It’s all over.”

  Rachel and Finn looked at one another, and despite the grim prognosis, Franklin couldn’t help but admire his granddaughter. He’d become used to her mutant strangeness. He’d always thought he was teaching her how to live free and meet the world on her own terms, but in reality she’d been his teacher. He could die proud. He just never thought dying would hurt so damned much.

  “This is Finn,” Rachel said. “He’s going to help me connect with other Zap babies. We have a chance to change course here.”

  The colonel’s lips curled in a sneer of disgust. “We?”

  “You’re not very subtle, Colonel,” the Zap baby said. “War’s in your heart. You don’t know any other way.”

  “Until every last one of you Zaps are dead, then I don’t need another way.”

  “We’re all dead soon enough.” Franklin blinked the blood from his eyes and felt along the ground for his watch cap. He placed it atop his throbbing head, feeling better just from its accustomed weight. He tried to stand but dark splotches swam before his eyes.

  At least K.C. and Squeak are away from this madness. Let them enjoy their last hours together.

  “So what are we doing here?” Munger asked.

  “One last chance,” Rachel said. To DeVontay, she said, “Put down your gun, honey. We need the colonel alive if we’re going to pull this off.”

  “Not until he drops his,” DeVontay said.

  “I can make more robots if necessary,” the baby said to the colonel. “If you’d rather die now instead of later.”

  The dome that had been so bright moments before now faded back to its previous blue glow, the lightning still crawling along its surface. For a moment, Franklin saw not the silver rows of blocks but a strange green landscape, and then the image shifted and dissolved as if floating on water. He blinked again and said, “Give it up, Munger.”

  Munger lowered the pistol but kept it close to his hip. He said to Rachel, “What kind of chance are you talking about?”

  “We’ll need as many Zap babies as we can gather. And we’ll have to bring them to whoever’s making the decisions on the nuclear strikes.”

  “That’s an Earth Zero initiative,” Munger said. “Even if we had the codes, we’d be lucky to even get through to NORAD. At least two other countries, and maybe four, are also committed to unleashing their arsenals. This is the kind of genie that’s not so easy to stuff back in the bottle.”

  “President Murray’s dead,” Franklin said. “And if Ziminski’s dead, I guess that means somebody back at your headquarters is in charge.”

  “I heard him talk with General Alexander on the radio,” Rachel said. “He’s in charge now, right?”

  Munger nodded. He glanced at DeVontay, who still had his weapon aimed. “The general took over when Murray…she failed us. She failed our people, making us weak and vulnerable. We had to seize power for our survival.”

  “Well, you’ve done a crappy job of protecting them,” Franklin said, rising to one knee and swallowing a groan as he recovered his balance. Rachel carried Finn to Franklin’s side and helped him up. He leaned against her, not feeling the least bit of shame for his frailty.

  “The general was against Operation Free Bird. He felt Murray was bullied into it by the Earth Zero initiative. A bunch of globalists who probably had their own motives for wanting us to destroy ourselves. Do you really think the Russians are going to fire all their nukes when they can just wait until we’re a smoking ruin and then have the world all to themselves?”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a world,” Franklin said.

  “At least the Zaps would be gone.” Munger glowered at Finn with real hatred in his tortured features.

  “It’s possible our domed cities would repel your attacks,” Finn said. “We may be able to stay in our cities until the radiation breaks down to an acceptable level. So we would still win in the end.”

  “Then why do you care if we blow ourselves to hell and back?” Munger said.

  “This is the world we were created in,” Finn said. “We started out violent—yes, I will confess that sin—because we didn’t know any better. That’s how the solar storms made us. But eventually we discovered that we had choices in how we lived and behaved.”

  “And still you killed us by the hundreds.”

  “You were a threat. We had to defend ourselves.”

  DeVontay walked to one of the heaps of jagged metal, careful to keep his rifle pointed in Munger’s direction. He kicked at the wreckage and shook his head. “You could’ve made as many robots as you wanted,” he said to Finn. “You could’ve built a thousand cities and brought them all to life.”

  “That was our insurance,” the mutant said in his high-pitched voice. “We knew of your nuclear weapons and other forms of destruction such as poison gas. And we weren’t sure of the long-term effects of our own toxins. Yes, we were certain our waste would eventually kill all you humans, but we didn’t know what it would do to us. For every action we took, we maintained the knowledge that we were originally human, no matter how much we evolved.”

  “So you created your own science?” Franklin asked. “Brought this metal to life that you control with your minds?”

  Munger shook his head as if considering the futility of fighting an army that could constantly replenish its ranks. He finally tossed his revolver to the ground in defeat.

  “We made weapons, true,” Finn said. “But our ultimate aim was to create a legacy, something that would last even if we happened to go extinct along with you. The metal has consciousness and—”

  “And a soul,” Rachel said. “I’ve seen it in the robots’ behavior.”

  “All I see is a lot of corpses and scrap iron,” Munger said.

  “The war can end now, Colonel,” Finn said.

  “So your end game was that we all die and this metal stuff gets to rule the planet,” Munger said.

  “He’s offering it to us,” DeVontay said. “I can sense what the metal feels. Not like Rachel and her ESP, but there’s something…I don’t want to get too woo-woo metaphysical here, but Rachel’s right when she said it has soul.”

  “A shared resource,” Finn said. “We can teach your engineers about our plasma sink and the process of converting plasma into organic metal.”

  “But you used human flesh and blood in that process,” Franklin said, recalling the gruesome vats he’d seen in several Zap factories and the monstrous machines that had spun thread from the raw material of humans.

  Finn closed his eyes in shame. “We just didn’t think you were anything more than animals. Similar to how humans exploited cows and chickens and fish. You were a resource that we utilized.”

  “See, that’s where we have a problem,” Munger said. “That’s not the kind of thing we can just forget about.”

  “Nor can we forget the way you slaughtered our ki
nd,” Finn said. “But we won’t be asking anyone to forget—assuming I can even convince my tribe mates to make peace. We approach the past with honesty and not pretend we didn’t want to wipe out one another. And we move forward from there.”

  Franklin felt a little better, although his lip was bleeding and one eye was nearly swollen shut. He remained leaning on Rachel, though, sneaking peeks at Finn’s mysterious face and those raging storms in his eyes. “I’ve never been one for government,” Franklin said. “But if we can at least have a powwow, maybe we can die a little happier.”

  “The general ordered me to bring you back to headquarters,” Munger said to Rachel. “But that was when he thought you knew the code.”

  “So why don’t we show up anyway?” Rachel smiled. “At least that will get me in the door.”

  “He won’t meet with any Zap babies, I promise you. He has a clear vision of the future. He plans to restore this country to what it was before the solar storms.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Franklin said. “Just restoring the power grid would take decades, and we’d need that before we even dreamed of any other technologies.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Finn said, swatting his hand toward the dome. “It already exists.”

  “Organic metal,” DeVontay said. “Plasma sinks. An endless energy source and a material that can shape itself into anything it wants.”

  It was a wild idea, but Franklin could almost see it working. The one part he couldn’t picture was Zaps and humans walking hand in hand through a sunlit meadow, singing “Kumbayai” while robots danced and threw flowers.

  “What do you say, Colonel?” Rachel asked. “Is it worth a try?”

  “General Alexander ordered me to bring you back to Luray Caverns. I always complete my missions. So let’s roll.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Gen. Alexander awoke in total darkness.

  Disoriented and feverish, he found himself leaning forward, his head resting on a flat surface. He shifted slightly and banged the stump of his amputated arm against something hard—he’d forgotten the limb was gone, despite the tickling, burning sensation of the wound. He sat up carefully, his head swimming. He extended his good arm and groped along the surface in front of him until he reached the torn and creased paper.

  He was in the command center. But where was Reeves, and why were the lights off?

  Alexander tried to picture the room in his mind. It was fifty feet by fifty feet, and the door would be about a dozen steps to his right. No problem, he could handle that. Just as soon as the dizziness passed.

  Lt. Reeves is going to pay for this. She knows how much I hate it down here.

  There was no sound aside from his labored breathing. The weight of the mountain above and millions of tons of stone around him were almost palpable. He collected the Beretta, but since he had no holster, he jammed the pistol inside his beltline near his right hip. He scooted back his chair, the scuffing noise reverberating off the cinder-block walls.

  Alexander made his way to the corner of the table by pressing his legs against the edge. When he was confident he wouldn’t pass out, he made a direct line toward where the door should be.

  Aside from the table, the room was bare of furnishings. Much of the useless computers, communications equipment, and telemetry controls had been moved into storage, even though two of the walls were still covered by large, blank display monitors. So he didn’t worry about tripping over anything. There was no light switch—the lights were all connected via a single strand to the battery array. The batteries were fed by the solar panels on the top of the ridge, and even if foul weather had set in, enough power should be stored to keep the low-wattage bulbs glowing for days.

  Alexander was surprised to find the door locked. The steel door featured a simple but durable push-button handle so it could be locked from either inside or outside. Reeves must’ve deliberately locked it behind her when she left, which was dangerous. What if Alexander had fallen into a coma, or suffered some sort of medical problem and couldn’t reach the door? There were no keys that he knew of. He suspected Murray had tossed them so no one would be tempted to use the command center as their personal quarters.

  He opened the door and found the hallway was equally dark. No illumination revealed the doorway of the radio room and the stairwell was hidden in complete blackness. All the bulbs must be out, which likely meant a problem with the conversion system. He wondered if the failure extended to the entire facility, including the depot.

  “Sketch?” he called, though there was no reason for the teenager to hang around the radio room if the equipment was dead. Receiving no answer, he called louder. “Anybody here?”

  He was alone in the subterranean level. He was surprised Reeves would leave him down here without a guard.

  He had no idea how much time had elapsed while he drowsed. He’d worn a wind-up wristwatch on the arm that had been amputated and had subsequently moved it to his right wrist. He’d set the watch based on solar position and approximate time of year, but of course had no way of knowing how accurate it was.

  True time was relative, but at least the watch gave them all a marker for their new reality. But he couldn’t see its face. It could be the middle of the night for all he knew.

  Alexander’s only recourse was to climb the stairs. He could wait for power to be restored, but he’d been away too long as it was. His staff might think his health was worse, and he should put in an appearance for the sake of morale. And if the Zaps and those metallic creatures were massing for an attack, he needed to check on the defenses and review battle plans.

  He admonished himself for passing out. Even though he was old and injured, he represented the future of the United States. Everyone had to sacrifice. None could afford to be weak. The weak died and were pushed aside, like those people the savage Zap had killed in the depot.

  As he took short steps down the hallway, sliding the soles of his boots, he listened for noises above. Maybe Reeves was stationed at the access door and had posted guards along the landing. She would’ve assumed the command center was the safest place for him. But why didn’t she send a medic to check on him?

  He was nearly where he guessed the stairs should be when his foot hit something soft and heavy. He shoved with the toe of his boot but it didn’t move. Alexander knelt and reached down and his hand touched wetness. He slid his fingers into a tangled mass of matted hair and a shredded furrow of moist material. Now he smelled it, too—musky and sweet and corrupt.

  He ran his hand along the body’s ravaged bulk to confirm it was Reeves and not Sketch. He stood and drew the Beretta.

  Something scurried above him.

  “Who’s there?” His weak voice was like a whisper inside the massive cavern complex.

  The two tiny specks of light were wavering so that Alexander assumed they were a trick of his own eyes, the first sign of approaching dizziness. They floated high above him, then grew larger and became twin flickering fires.

  Zap coming down the stairs!

  He raised the Beretta and backed away. A scuttling sound deeper in the hallway stopped him. He spun, wondering how many rounds were in the Beretta. A standard magazine held fifteen, but he had no idea how many had been fired.

  Two more sets of eyes, these much closer and brighter. And behind them another, and then another.

  He fired, aiming at the center of each set of eyes. Distance was almost impossible to judge in the darkness, but he figured he had maybe twenty seconds before they were on him. Bare feet slapped on the metal stairs as they descended—at least several pairs of them. Savage Zaps had flooded the command center.

  The nearest set of eyes smoldered and went dark, and the next darted toward the floor like a pair of shooting stars. His ears rang from the percussion and the smoke was bitter in his nostrils. Alexander had made a mistake—more of the bloodthirsty creatures poured from the depths of the hallway, where deep fissures in the stone must have allowed them access. He shoul
d’ve fought his way up the stairs and tried to escape via the main entrance.

  Even as weak as he was, he decided to try for it. He fired once more, hearing hissing gasps as the Zaps tumbled into one another, and then he fled for the stairs. He’d forgotten Reeves in the chaos and tripped over her body, landing on his blood-soaked stump and banging his knuckles so hard he almost lost his pistol.

  The general growled in pain and rage and scrambled to his feet. He almost blacked out, and had a split-second to consider the cost of surrender. Zaps took no prisoners—they would peel his face from his skull and claw out his entrails, using his meat to decorate the very place where he’d sought to rebuild a nation.

  He made it up four or five steps before the first Zap plummeted down the circular staircase, dinging musical notes like a xylophone as it tumbled. The creature slammed into him, banging his spine against the metal railing. Its rank odor was overpowering—rancid sweat, scorched rust, and rot—and it seemed to have half a dozen raking and clutching talons.

  Its eyes were bright enough to illuminate them both, and the thing’s face bore only the smallest vestiges of its human origin. Crusty sores pocked the openings of the nostrils, the sharp cheeks were crisscrossed with multiple scars, and the mouth contained the jagged remains of filthy teeth.

  Alexander only had seconds before the rest of the pack closed in, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. He swung the Beretta with all his strength, driving its butt into the monster’s temple with a pleasing crunch. He poked his stump into the thing’s chest despite the agony, using it as a wedge to gain some maneuvering room. He punched the thing’s hissing, snarling head again and then swept the pistol barrel under the scraggly-haired chin.

  He blew the Zap’s head up into darkness.

  Blood poured down his chest.

  Alexander let the corpse fall as he slid along the railing. He turned to prepare for the next wave of attackers. The many dancing, sparking eyes were like the constellations of a nightmare galaxy.

  The hissing Zaps surged forward in a shadowy tide.