What good would it do to survive if the world he believes in is gone forever? What kind of man could he possibly be?
She even doubted her own motives. She was afraid, yes—she’d been so frightened for years that her rib cage was squeezing her heart like a giant fist. And Mark was a warrior, a protector, a fighter. Was her love truly born of attraction, or was it desperation?
Colleen wanted him. But she couldn’t pull him into the opposite bunk and indulge her escape while Huynh lay here dying. That would be a blasphemous mockery. Mark would be horrified at the thought, although he’d likely be tempted as well.
Eve’s apple tastes even sweeter when it’s dangled over a cliff.
But she would be strong. For both of them.
“Help me wrap his leg,” Colleen said. “It’s already infected, but clean bandages can’t hurt.”
Mark nodded. “You’re the doc.”
She was engaging in the task purely to fight her own sense of helplessness. It was busy work but something she could handle given the available resources. She would even apply more betadine.
But when she peeled back the blanket, she gasped as ice filled her lungs.
“What is it?” Mark asked, bending over her shoulder.
“That.” She pointed to the long, serrated gash that ran up Huynh’s bare shin, a knotted volcano of raw meat puckering in the center.
“You’ve done a good job of patching it up,” Mark said. “Did you stitch it?”
“I’ve not done anything. It’s closing up.”
Mark squinted in the poor light. “The blood’s drying. And that clear stuff, the pus…there’s hardly any of it left.”
“Kokona,” Colleen whispered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“We need to get back to Eagle One,” DeVontay said.
“I don’t know,” Lars said. “This place seems kind of safe.”
They’d chosen a barn not far off the road, which offered little protection at first glance. But it was surrounded by knee-high pasture where the first saplings were just beginning to reclaim the turf for the forest. From the upper floor, they would be able to see any approaching threats from a distance.
The meadow undulated in the breeze like a frothy sea, the aurora casting an eerie glow across the landscape. Mist hung in patches at the edge of the woods like ghosts serving as silent witnesses. Rachel wasn’t so eager to wade into that floral sea after the monstrous encounter in the river, but she didn’t want to stay on the open road all night, either, especially given the rumbles and low growls that issued from the far woods.
“He’s right,” Rachel said. “We can’t risk traveling at night. Since the Zap is dead, the birds likely won’t be able to track us, but we’re too vulnerable to all the beasties roaming the night.”
Rachel wanted to add that Tara and Squeak would slow their progress, especially given the young girl’s inconsolable state and her mother’s unstable parenting techniques. But Tara was likely to take any criticism as persecution, possibly even driving her away. And then Squeak would be in even worse danger.
“What about you, Tara?” Lars asked, as if this was a euthanasia board where everyone got to vote on their own method of suicide.
“I just want to get her away from all of this,” Tara said, hugging Squeak even more tightly, if that were possible. The girl looked stricken, peering out from her mother’s crushing love like a drowning victim sinking slowly underwater.
“Fine,” DeVontay said. “It’s not that long until dawn anyway. We can make it back to Stonewall tomorrow and spend the night there. We’ll be back at the bunker in two days.”
“I’ll take point,” Rachel said. She’d given DeVontay his M16, but the machete gave her confidence. She stepped off the road and hopped the mucky ditch, then threaded through the barbed wire fence that ran parallel to the road.
She hacked at the weeds as she headed for the barn fifty yards away, but soon her arm grew tired and she stomped her way through the meadow. Her pants, already wet from the river plunge, had no hope of drying given the thick dew that coated the seed heads and leaves. The others trudged behind her, step by weary step, Tara maintaining her constant warnings to her whimpering daughter.
They were halfway to the barn when Lars gave a cry of alarm and the M16 spat a burst of bullets. Squeak’s scream rose in the night like a soprano delivering an operatic aria, a quivering note that served as a climax before a final curtain fell.
Rachel spun, her machete already raised overhead, as the great dark weight tumbled at DeVontay’s feet. The pale, coarse-haired creature lay in a curved lump, its triangular ears rising from a wrinkled face that ended in a slimy snout. The cavernous nostrils twitched twice and then fell still, blowing a fine spray of blood.
“What the hell is that?” Lars said.
“Looks like a wild pig,” DeVontay said, nudging the animal with the barrel of his gun.
Lars stood over the broad, wrinkled neck with his axe. “Mmm, bacon.”
“Yeah, right,” Rachel said. “If you want to risk turning into the human version of whatever that thing is, be my guest. Unless it comes out of a can, I’m staying a vegetarian.”
“Shame to waste good meat,” Lars said.
“Well, I’m not standing out here butchering it,” DeVontay said. “I could feast on a rack of ribs, but I’m with Rachel.”
“All this noise,” Tara said. “They’ll be coming.”
“Come on,” Rachel said. “We’re almost there.”
She continued the slog, eyeing the shifting surface of the meadow for disturbances. The wild pig hadn’t made a sound during its charge, which worried Rachel. Living in a world where they were just a minor part of the food chain was bad enough, but if their predators adapted into cunning stalkers, their odds of survival shrank by the day.
We’re afraid to eat them, but they don’t seem to have the same concerns.
They reached the barn without incident, and Rachel and Lars explored it while the others waited outside the heavy wooden door. The interior was nearly pitch black, but Rachel’s natural flashlights allowed for a thorough search. The bottom floor was mostly matted straw and dried manure, with chicken feathers clinging to cobwebs in the floor joists. The pens were abandoned, and the windows held no glass but were all covered with thick-gauged chicken wire that would keep out winged intruders.
After Lars gave the all-clear, they entered, secured the door and barred it with a fallen locust beam, and then ascended a narrow set of stairs to the loft. Bales of hay were stacked in precise rows along the length of the barn, gray with age, dust and chaff stirring under their feet as they walked. The windows up here were screened as well, and DeVontay kept watch while the others pulled apart bales and created a large scratchy but soft nest.
“We’re safe now, honey,” Tara said.
“Baaaay…beeee,” the girl said.
“No!” the woman barked, so sharply that it sent icy needles up Rachel’s spine. “No words.”
The girl fell back to her faint squeaking sounds from which her nickname had derived, and soon they trailed off to low whimpers and then silence. Lars settled in near them and drowsed with his axe in his lap, and soon Tara, too, succumbed to exhaustion.
Rachel joined DeVontay at his sentry post. “What are we going to do about her?”
“I keep hoping some jowly-assed monster squirrel is going to snatch her up and bury her for winter.”
“Do we really want to take these people back to Eagle One? How will they mesh with the rest of the group?”
Well, we can’t stay in the bunker forever. We’re traveling farther and farther to find food, and that’s getting more dangerous every time.”
“Any place we go is likely to be closer to the Zap cities,” Rachel said.
DeVontay’s glass eye gleamed exotically with the reflected aurora, making him look like a wizard.
Or a half-Zap.
“Why are we so worried about that?” DeVontay said. “They left us alon
e for the most part. We’ve killed some now, so that might stir them up, but maybe they don’t even care. We’re not really a threat to them. They probably look at us like insects—irritating little gnats to swat if we get too close, but otherwise paying no nevermind.”
“I wish I could help,” Rachel said. “I mean, it’s nice that the mutant stuff is fading, but some of those abilities came in handy. Now I only sense them as a distant little buzz.”
“A hive of insects,” DeVontay said. “Nice comparison. We got the birds and the bees here, singing happy little nature songs.”
Rachel looked out at the distant black mountains and the bands of shades that played across the slopes and valleys. She pictured Stephen and Marina sleeping in their rooms—hopefully far apart—while Kokona laid in her crib, eyes open and contemplating, learning while the world turned to face the treacherous sun again.
“We still don’t know why the Zaps came to Stonewall after all these years,” Rachel said. “Or why one of them captured the girl.”
“I hate to say it,” DeVontay said. “But I know you’re thinking it already: what if they were trying to save Squeak from her mother? From what Lars said about running into that first one, the Zap only attacked him when he moved in the direction the girl was hiding. He didn’t even know she was there, but the Zap apparently did.”
“I don’t know, honey. That sounds an awful lot like projection.”
“That some kind of psychobabble counselor speak?”
“We’re projecting human behaviors onto Zaps, when they appear to have entirely different social codes. They don’t even seem to have emotions as we know them, so why would they engage in a compassionate act?”
“Some compassion, huh? That silver space cadet was all ready to sic his little birds on us.”
“But it didn’t. It let us live.”
“Well, we can play it two ways. We can get back to the bunker and make it through the winter, and then find a new home. Or we can put together a scouting expedition and see what the Zaps are up to these days.”
“We can’t leave the kids behind.”
“We take them with us,” DeVontay said. “We’ll need Kokona to communicate with them, especially if you lost your mutant mojo.”
Rachel peered out to the mist, which seemed to drift apart and then sew itself together. It seemed like a living creature, another new beast on the face of the Earth demanding elbow room and a place at the table.
The mist broke into smaller, individually designed silhouettes that took on solidity under the watery green light.
It wasn’t mist.
The Zaps stepped from the forest, wading silently through the grass and scrub toward the barn. They came in long, unbroken phalanxes, all with those one-piece uniforms and rounded haircuts, eyes burning like radioactive fog lamps in the night.
“No,” DeVontay said. “God, no. Please tell me I fell asleep and I’m having the worst dream of my life.”
Rachel sprinted to the opposite wall and looked out the window there. Just as many, just as ominously persistent in their approach.
“Dozens of them,” Rachel said.
“Hundreds.” DeVontay racked the charging handle on his rifle. “And I’ve got maybe half a magazine left.”
Lars called out groggily. “What the hell’s the ruckus?”
“Nothing,” DeVontay said. “Just a little company showing up without an invite.”
Lars rolled to his feet, shucking loose straw from his clothes and hair, and went to the nearest window. He pressed his forehead against the wire. “Mutants, monsters, murderers, oh my.”
Rachel hadn’t received the slightest warning of their approach, but now a tiny tingle of energy flitted through the base of her skull. The signal hummed in her brain and her eyes radiated so intensely they nearly illuminated the entire loft.
The telekinetic force built until Rachel thought her head would explode, and she realized how human she’d become in the last few years of bunker life. They were powerful enough to block and withhold her mutant abilities. They’d grown stronger while she weakened.
Her most critical survival skill, and she’d let it erode. She’d closed that door, but now it was getting hammered wide and the enemy was storming the threshold.
“We’re here.”
“Do you hear something?” Lars said.
“What’s that in their hands?” DeVontay asked.
Rachel couldn’t tell, even in the glow of their eyes that combined into a ground-level aurora. The objects were shiny, small, and rectangular, barely the size of cell phones.
Tara was awake now, clutching Squeak in her arms. She scrambled back into the loose hay as if she could hide there until the apocalypse was over.
“They…they’re talking to me,” Rachel said.
Lars shook his axe at her and looked at DeVontay as if for agreement. “See? I told you Zaps are bad news, even if she doesn’t have that stupid silver suit. She led them here.”
“You don’t know nothing, Wild Man,” DeVontay said, his rifle ready to employ in any direction. “Chill out.”
“You know why we’re here.”
The voice was a single voice, but also a multitude, as if ten thousand voices had been compressed into a single series of sounds. She tried to “talk” back but she was useless against their pulsing and intrusive waves.
Then their combined voice took air, loud enough to vibrate the warped wooden walls of the barn and rattle the tin roof:
Rock-a-bye baby,
In the treetop…
“Just like that Zap we killed!” Lars exclaimed.
The simple tune and melodic poetry would have been soothing coming from a mother’s lips, but that grotesque chorus made the lullaby a mockery of all human history, memory, and ambition.
When the wind blows,
The cradle will rock…
The barn seemed to tremble under their feet, wood groaning and nails popping.
When the bough breaks,
The baby will fall…
“They’re tearing it down!” DeVontay yelled.
Lars ran for the stairs, but Rachel’s instinct was to help Tara and Squeak, even though her head roared with a white-hot pain that threatened to erase all thoughts.
Down will come baby,
Cradle and all.
As the first support beams splintered and crashed down around her, Rachel dove to cover the mother and her child, hoping the hay would cushion the collapse. Metal screeched and screamed as it tore loose from the rafters and crumpled like foil. The last she saw of DeVontay was his lone good eye widening in panic and desperation as he ran toward her, shattered boards flying around him in the chaos of destruction.
And then down came a darkness that swallowed the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Stephen was dreaming of baseball, standing in left field with those short itchy pants and the sun in his eyes, alone with the odors of cut grass and leather and bubble gum, people in the stands yelling, cheering, booing, the chubby coach in the windbreaker standing beside the dugout clapping his hands in encouragement.
Then came the dink of the aluminum bat striking the ball and it rising in the air and coming down, growing larger and larger as he moved under it, and it was too big for his glove, then too big for the field, and then too big for the sky, a fat white globe that kept expanding until—
Boomp boomp boomp.
Stephen sat up, not sure where he was, wrapped in such absolute darkness that he thought he’d gone blind.
“They’re here,” came Kokona’s small, mirthful voice, and then she must have opened her eyes because Stephen could see he’d fallen asleep in Marina’s room. Marina rose up sleepily in the opposite bunk, Kokona bundled in a blanket by her side.
“Open up!” the captain bellowed from outside the door.
Disoriented, Stephen reached for his rifle, thinking the bunker must be under attack from some new threat. He’d taken off his shirt and the ventilated air was cool on his
skin, and he felt a little embarrassed that Marina saw him half-naked.
“What do they want?” Marina asked, frightened, hugging Kokona protectively.
“Must be big, if they’re raising that much hell.”
“It’s a small thing,” Kokona said. “They want me.”
The banging continued, echoing in the small room and driving nails of pain into Stephen’s skull. He strode to the door and yelled, “Jeez, take it easy. We hear you, man.”
“Open the door,” the captain said, calmer now.
“Maybe I will, after you tell me what you want.”
“It’s official military business.”
Stephen hadn’t officially enlisted yet, and he and Franklin hadn’t even told the captain of their intentions to join up. So “military business” didn’t mean a damn thing to him at the moment. “We invited you here to save your ass. That doesn’t mean you own the place.”
“This isn’t about you, Stephen. Open the door. Now.”
“Not until you tell me what’s going on.” Stephen glanced back at Marina, who had retreated to the corner of her bed, both arms around Kokona as if a strong wind might tear her from Marina’s grasp and whisk her away. Her pretty face was lined with panic, muscles taut.
Kokona, though, just grinned like a little brown cherub, eyes full of delight and fire. “Let him in,” Kokona said. “This will be fun.”
Stephen shook his head. The captain hammered the door again.
“It’s okay, Stephen,” Kokona said. “I can handle him. I can handle all of them.”
Stephen looked at Marina, who gave a reluctant nod of agreement. “It’s not like we have anywhere to run,” she said.
Stephen unlocked the door and stepped aside, and Capt. Antonelli stormed in with two other soldiers, all heavily armed. He went directly to Kokona.
“Under New Pentagon Directive 17 and the authority of the Earth Zero Initiative, I am taking you into custody as a prisoner of war,” the captain said to the baby, who giggled as if the officer was a bulb-nosed, mop-haired clown at a birthday party.
Afterburn: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 1) Page 19
