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

by Scott Nicholson

  It turned out she was even crazier that than. Revving the engine, she shot down the embankment on the far side of the highway, crashing and bouncing through scrub and rocks, plowing through a fence, and making an end run of the entire blockade. The Humvee climbed a hill parallel to an exit ramp, and only its high clearance allowed them to navigate the rugged terrain. They emerged over a low concrete wall into the rear lot of a gas station, whose metal weather canopy was swaying wildly from the earthquake. The top of the plasma column leaned precipitously, in danger of falling.

  “There!” Joanna said, waving a hand toward a side road that accessed a commercial area where hotels, restaurants, and retail shops stood shaking and spraying broken glass.

  Franklin strained to peer through the grimy window, and then realized there was nothing to see—the baby was guiding them to Finn. Asking directions was useless. For all the brilliance of the highly evolved beings, Zaps had no need for road maps.

  “Got it,” K.C. said, engaging in another bone-rattling, suicidal race across a two-lane, through a landscaping buffer, and into another parking lot, all while the plasma sink took on a violent coruscation as it began its final collapse. Franklin glanced out the passenger window, and they would’ve rolled right by if he hadn’t seen the three sets of glittering eyes inside the dark building—as well as one big, blue-white glowing orb.

  “Stop!” he shouted, pointing out the building to K.C. Rachel and the others had obviously taken refuge, even though from his experience at Wilkesboro and Winston-Salem, an explosion would level this entire area, and perhaps even beyond without a dome to constrain it.

  Franklin realized there was an extra set of Zap eyes—Rachel, Finn, and who?

  As K.C. barreled toward the building, the group saw them and came outside, with both Rachel and DeVontay holding Zap infants and Squeak between them. The earthquake eased even as several of the buildings collapsed, and the plasma sink’s pulsing slowed from its erratic approach toward meltdown.

  “Rachel has Carter!” Joanna said. “He’s alive!”

  Franklin wasn’t sure this was a good thing, but if it stopped Harrisonburg from blowing all to hell while they were still in it, he’d take that trade.

  “Well, Franklin,” K.C. said as the Humvee slowed. “Looks like we’ll have to open a nursery.”

  “Or a nuthouse.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Thirty-seven dead, sir,” reported a hollow-eyed corporal with scratches on her cheeks. “Another fifty-two injured.”

  “Thank you,” Gen. Alexander said, nodding absently in response. “Make sure the depot’s secure and seal off any cavern tributaries as best your can.”

  “Yes, sir.” The corporal hurried away through the chaos of the war zone, with the middleof the depot turned into an emergency hospital. A flatbed truck served as a surgical center, where the overmatched medic—a veterinarian in a former life—worked feverishly with a hacksaw and rolls of duct tape to conduct triage on the wounded. Though many civilians were stunned into silence, a few wails of anguish and groans of pain rose above the din. Squads of troops were busy carrying off Zap corpses that had been either killed by gunfire or ravaged by the strange robot creatures that had invaded the caverns.

  “Big mess, huh?” Sketch said. Alexander had made the teenager his adjutant, replacing Lt. Reeves. The kid had saved his life, after all, and perhaps Sketch’s fresh worldview would help his public relations. Sketch had refused a formal rank and promotion, claiming he couldn’t be “part of the Establishment,” but he’d accepted the role because it might impress a girl he had a crush on.

  “We’ll come back from this,” Alexander said.

  “Yeah. Seal off the caves, let the bombs fall, and wait it out. Guess we’ll be restoring that former glory, all right.”

  “I should’ve sent Munger to Colorado instead. With two weeks, he could’ve made it.”

  “Well, without that code, what would NORAD do? Listen to him? Or shoot him at the gates?”

  “Depends on who’s in charge now.” Alexander had known several of the officers installed there, and he couldn’t see them disobeying orders, even if it meant their own deaths. “I imagine there’s been some internal dispute over the legitimacy of Murray’s presidency and the chain of command. Some hardliners might’ve seized power.”

  As they walked through the depot and the terrorized, defeated people who scurried here and there with nowhere to flee, Alexander again felt the weight of his responsibilities. Mass suicide might be a mercy killing after all. For all his suspicion of Murray, she’d made a hard choice and stuck to her guns.

  They exited the depot, walking into the gray-green haze of the autumn afternoon. Here and there were distorted lumps of silvery slag where the robot wolves had melted down. His engineering team confirmed the metal appeared the have the same qualities of the material that scouts had retrieved from D.C. and Wilkesboro. Of course the Zaps had manufactured the creatures—humans couldn’t perform such a technological feat even if their civilization had not been knocked back to the Industrial Age. New Pentagon didn’t have the gear to properly analyze the material. Its bizarre properties were beyond the understanding of existing science.

  Outside, the camp was in standard defense mode, still on Red Alert but with fewer patrols roaming the woods. With the defection of Ziminski’s unit and the casualties of the last several months, troop strength was barely more than two hundred, and several squads were away on extended recon missions. If the Zaps hit with any kind of real force—not just a mindless stampede by a bunch of savages—then New Pentagon was in serious trouble.

  “So why do you think the robot dogs attacked the Zaps instead of us?” Sketch asked, as if reading Alexander’s mind. But the whole camp was wondering the same thing.

  “Assuming one of the infants controlled the robots, perhaps it was a mop-up operation,” he replied, as they looked down on the valley below. “The savages are just as much a threat as we are, because they’re unpredictable.”

  “Then why not wipe us both out at the same time?”

  “We don’t have any intel on that. The robots attacked Epperly’s unit outside D.C., so something changed over the last day or so. And we might never know why they melted down after all the savages were dead.”

  Sketch pointed to an access road two hundred yards below, where a crew was shoving a lump of the metal onto a canvas tarp. The soldiers wore gloves because of a fear of contamination. Alexander had ordered that all of the metal be loaded up and carried to a sinkhole miles away. “Too bad we couldn’t find a use for that,” the teen said. “Living metal, robots without microcircuitry, and a material that’s almost impermeable and heat-resistant. Imagine the technology we could—”

  “Imagine the weaponry,” Alexander said. “We’re a nation at war, and that’s the top priority.”

  But Alexander wasn’t moved by his own declaration. He was drained, light-headed, and sweating despite the November chill. Most of the fight had gone out of him when he’d recognized the sheer superiority the Zaps enjoyed in both technology and mobility.

  A thin column of smoke arose from perhaps a mile away, the signal flare exploding in a bright cascade of magnesium and nitrates.

  “That’s our forward guard,” Alexander said. “Something’s coming up the main highway.”

  He ordered everyone to battle stations, and piercing whistles spread the alarm to outlying sentry posts. Few of the troops had been able to rest since the Zap invasion, and Alexander feared that a similar assault would overrun their positions. He headed down the trail toward the motor pool, fighting dizziness and the nausea induced by the morphine shot he’d received. Sketch ran ahead of him. By the time Alexander reached the bottom of the path, Sketch had a Growler—the same one Epperly had used on his ill-fated mission—idling and ready.

  “You know the way?” Alexander said to him as three other soldiers piled in the back, one of them manning the mounted .50-caliber Browning machine gun.

&nbs
p; “There’s only one road, Chief.”

  The vehicle lurched and bucked as Sketch fought the wheel and pedals, obviously inexperienced at driving a motor vehicle. The dirt road leading from the camp to the highway was overgrown, and the Growler had to dodge several Zap corpses and mounds of metal in the road. They reached the sentry point in less than five minutes.

  When Alexander saw the Humvee parked before the improvised roadblock, he thought Munger had returned. But the colonel should’ve radioed him first. A surprise approach might’ve led to an accident if some scared and jumpy guard thought an attack was underway. Several of his troops stood in a semicircle around the vehicle, weapons at the ready.

  Must not be Munger, or they would’ve let him through.

  “Keep the M2 on that Humvee,” Alexander ordered the machine gunner as he exited, along with Sketch and the other two troops.

  He stepped around the roadblock, which was a thin utility pole suspended between two modified oil barrels filled with rocks and dirt. The Humvee could’ve easily rammed the barrier and driven to the camp. Alexander saw what looked like dried blood on the cracked windshield.

  “What’s the SITREP?” he asked the sergeant in charge of the post.

  “Armed occupants, believed to be civilians,” the sergeant reported without taking his gaze from the Humvee. “So far they’ve complied with all of our orders except throwing their weapons from the vehicle.”

  “There’s a bullet hole in the windshield that looks fresh,” Alexander said.

  “Yes, sir, we fired a warning shot before we could flag it to a stop.”

  “Why did you shoot? Did you think a Zap would bother using one of our vehicles? Or maybe a silver metal creature jumped in there and accidentally put it in gear?”

  “No, sir,” the chastened soldier said. “I thought it might be rogue—”

  “We need civilians,” Alexander said, peering into the vehicle’s shaded interior, trying to make out the occupants. “Civilians become soldiers. Soldiers win wars.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many are inside?”

  “I see some lights in there, Chief,” Sketch said. He was unarmed but showed no concern of being exposed to a possible firefight.

  “Might be Zaps after all,” the sergeant said. “Maybe with hostages or prisoners. That’s why I didn’t approach the vehicle.”

  Alexander rubbed his amputated arm, which had begun to itch as the morphine dulled the sharp edges of pain. “Stand ready to fire on my command.”

  The soldier returned to the ready position, joined by the other five. If anyone inside so much as lit a cigarette, the Humvee would receive a hundred rounds in half a minute. Alexander approached the driver’s side, one hand on the Beretta that was tucked inside his belt. The window was tinted and the daylight was murky, so he saw no more than a suggestion of the driver’s profile.

  A woman?

  But the lights Sketch observed now appeared to glow and glimmer in the cab and cargo area. Had the woman transported a bunch of Zaps to Luray? He glanced at the ID numbers on the fender—this was Munger’s Humvee, all right.

  When he was near enough, he took his hand away from his weapon and raised his palm to indicate a cease fire. When the window descended, a woman somewhere in her fifties nodded at him. She wore a battered fedora atop her head sporting jaunty feathers in its band, as if the apocalypse was some sort of merry garden party.

  “Can you validate my parking?” she said, smirking a little.

  “Who are you and where are you from?”

  A man near Alexander’s age leaned toward the window from the passenger seat. He had a full gray beard and fresh cuts and bruises on his wrinkled face. “We’re citizens of Earth Zero and we’re from all over the place,” he said.

  Alexander tried to peer into the cab without getting too close. “How many are with you?”

  “Depends on how you’re counting,” the driver said.

  “We need to know what we’re dealing with,’ Alexander said. “All people are welcome here, but you can understand the need for security precautions.”

  “Yeah,” the man said. “You never know when somebody might try to kill you. Or robots show up and totally spoil your day. Or Zaps decide to make sausage out of your innards.”

  “I’ll politely ask you to throw your all your weapons out of the vehicle,” the general said, not noticing that Sketch had approached from behind him until the teen was already at the driver’s-side door.

  “Hello, fellow citizens,” Sketch said, adopting a false hearty tone, like he was welcoming guests to a vacation resort. “I hope you brought some cheeseburgers, because I’m going to turn into the Jolly Green Giant if I eat any more of that shitty kale.”

  His and the driver’s voices lowered as they carried on an easy conversation. Exasperated, Alexander moved alongside the vehicle and nudged Sketch out of the way. He now recognized Franklin Wheeler from Munger’s description, and the human with the Zap eyes sitting behind him could only be Rachel. She was a shocking enough sight, but it was the three Zap babies that almost caused him to draw his Beretta and issue the order to fire.

  “Easy, Chief,” Sketch said. “They’ve come in peace. They want to do a treaty sort of deal.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  As the bizarre group entered the cavern via a side entrance and crossed a landing above the depot, DeVontay tried to imagine how the people who lived here viewed the new arrivals.

  These people had ever seen Zap babies, although surely they’d whispered fearful rumors about mysterious powers. The evidence of their strife was plain enough—they had suffered mightily and endured battles and deprivation and the loss of dignity, forced from the planet surface they’d once dominated and down into the cold, dark underground. Finn shared his empathy with him, even while he harbored his own distrust and the peculiar loathing that intelligent creatures always held for those that were different.

  Looking down on the blankets and tarps draped as makeshift tents, the garbage piled in heaps, and the grim and grimy faces of the people, DeVontay’s heart clenched in pity and dismay. Alexander had told the group three hundred people lived around the caverns, but DeVontay had a hard time believing this was the largest remaining stronghold of the human race. Surely Moscow or Beijing had managed a stronger resistance to the mutant takeover, but given their leaderships’ historic disdain for their own populations, maybe this truly was the best that was left.

  “They don’t like you,” Franklin said to Joanna as they were escorted along the concrete platform under armed guard.

  “They’ll get used to us,” Rachel said. “Once we stop the bombs, we can help them with other things. Food, electricity, and running water would go a long way toward proving our friendship.”

  “If you stop the bombs, we’ll throw a party for you,” Alexander said.

  The group had surrendered their weapons as a sign of good faith, although DeVontay worried that the soldiers might then immediately kill the infants, or at least seize them as prisoners. He suspected the teenager’s advocacy for them had gone a long way toward easing the general’s skepticism. Well, that and the chance of dodging nuclear annihilation.

  “I think they’re more freaked out by you than by the babies,” DeVontay said to Rachel. “You look almost normal, and then they see them weird glowing eyes.”

  “Ha. You’re one to talk. You and that metal eye of yours.”

  “It’s grown on me.” Which was true. He wasn’t even sure he could pull it out if he wanted, and he wondered once again if it was now sending microscopic wires deeper and deeper into his brain, exploring, probing, and insinuating itself into his neural circuitry. Would he even know he’d become something else? Would he feel any different if he were a robot?

  “Could I control you any more easily?” Finn said, mirroring his next thought. Finn smiled up from DeVontay’s embrace, enjoying his discomfort. “And, yes, this is a little bit like what Rachel experiences when we’re connected.”


  “Zaps!” someone in the depot shouted, and DeVontay looked at the people who’d emerged from their tents and the vehicles they’d converted into homes. Some of them were bandaged or propped on crude wooden crutches, half of them wearing an article or two of military gear.

  “We have the situation under control,” Alexander yelled, his voice reverberating to fill the depot. “They’ve surrendered, and we’re going to interrogate them.”

  “Kill ‘em!” shouted a hunched old woman who shook her fist at them. “Make them pay for all they blood they’ve spilled.”

  Others murmured their agreement, although none seemed inclined to form a lynch mob. Alexander had arranged a cordon of troops between the depot and the stairs leading up to the platform. There were enough armed guards on hand to give the impression of security. Little did these people know that the three infants were each almost as powerful as a nuclear missile, considering their command over metal and their harvesting of plasma.

  Alexander’s young assistant, who’d been introduced only as “Sketch,” joined Alexander in placating the crowd. “We have the promise of a new energy source, guys,” he said. “Soon we’ll be able to light the caverns, have heat and refrigeration, and eventually return to our houses on the outside.”

  “But what about all the monsters and beasts?” the hunched woman yelled, evidently so old that she no longer cared whom she might offend. She pointed a crooked, trembling finger at Rachel and Carter. “Who’s going to keep us safe from them?”

  “They’ll have to earn our trust,” Alexander said. “But as most of you know, we’re facing a grave and imminent threat. If we don’t stop Operation Free Bird by tomorrow, we’ll all be history anyway. A history that will never be written all the way to the end, and one that will surely be soon forgotten.”

  “Can I speak to them, General?” Franklin said.

  Alexander looked dubiously at the Zap baby in the old man’s arms, but Sketch nodded in approval. Alexander gave the okay, and Franklin stepped up to the rail and looked down on the assembly below.