Joey stiffened in Marina’s arms and his lip quivered as if he was about to cry. Rosa hurried to soothe him by stroking his soft little cheek. Joey’s volcanic eyes quickened with something like gratitude.
Don’t worry, little Joey. I won’t let him hurt you.
The women returned from the kitchen with some plates, utensils, and opened cans of food. They placed the food on the bar and the group unceremoniously gathered around, jabbing forks into green beans, salmon, and yams and loading up dusty plates. Father Casey interrupted them to say grace but they were all so hungry that he kept it short.
Rosa wondered if she should offer her breast to her new little Bryan. She’d fed the other Bryan—out of Jorge’s sight, of course—and although it had taken some time to produce milk, she was now plump enough that she was worried Jorge would notice. Not that they’d had any opportunity to make love under the circumstances.
She took Joey from Marina and spread her blanket out so he would be comfortable alongside Bryan.
“Is he warm enough?” Marina asked. “I can let him use my sweater.”
“I’m content,” Joey said. “You should eat. I don’t want you to get sick. I know how weak your people are.”
Rosa served Marina a plate of the cold food and they all ate in silence for a moment, Bryan watching them with curiosity, moving his mouth in imitation.
“It will be dark in an hour,” said Cathy, who had swapped out her bloody jacket for a hooded coat she’d found in the kitchen. “Are we going to stay here?”
“The mutants will be able to find us,” Father Casey said. “Because of these babies.”
“Through their thoughts,” Jorge said.
“That is correct,” little Bryan said. “All I sense now is chaos. But if I concentrate, I can summon the nearest New People to me.”
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” Wanda said. Rosa noticed she had laid a butcher knife beside her plate of food.
“There are three of us,” said Father Casey’s baby, whom he had laid on the floor at his feet. “If we all think louder, we can bring lots of us here.”
Jorge wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “That might be a good idea.”
Rosa didn’t like the way her husband’s eyes narrowed, although it was difficult to read his expression in the rapidly dimming room. She put a protective hand on Bryan.
“What you got in mind?” Wanda asked.
“Three small hostages,” Jorge said.
Horrified, Rosa hurled her fork to the floor and scooped up Bryan. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.
“What’s a ‘hostage’?” the baby asked. “Is that a Spanish word?”
“It means if the Zapheads try to stop us from leaving, we kill you and the other babies,” Jorge said.
“Ah.” The baby nodded. “That’s a clever idea.”
CHAPTER NINE
By the time they reached the high school, DeVontay was no longer sure whether he was a guest or a captive.
The Zapheads had lost any semblance of order, teeming through the streets in all directions at once. He’d come upon one more dead soldier, this one apparently climbing a tree to escape his pursuers. The soldier didn’t go down without a fight, though. Although the bodies had been removed, several large splotches of dark red marked the locations of the fallen. The soldier hung in a lower branch, eyes wide in shock, face swollen with the edema of death.
The fires had spread on the western side of the town, and the school building was a charred shell of blackened bricks. Flames ate their way up the slope to the century-old courthouse on the hill, and columns of smoke twisted into a massive black cloud that wreathed the town and veiled the sinking sun.
“You said you’d take me to Rachel,” DeVontay said to Willow, leaning against a utility pole and sliding into a sitting position.
“I never said that.”
DeVontay looked down at the baby in his arms. She didn’t seem the least bit bothered that her tribe was disrupted and facing destruction. If anything, she looked amused.
“Yes, you did,” he said. “Up in the mountains, when I was deciding whether or not to kill you.”
“You heard what you wanted to hear. What I actually said was ‘You want to see Rachel.’ That was an observation, not a promise.”
DeVontay wasn’t going to debate semantics with a ten-pound, mutant-eyed monster that was more intelligent than he was. He looked around for other Zapheads. Five others aimlessly walked the streets, paying no attention to them.
I can kill her right here. Or just leave her on the sidewalk, or stick her in one of these cars.
“You have a link with Rachel,” he said. “That’s why your people came to the mountains to get her. That’s how you were able to find her.”
“I have links with all of us,” Willow said. “But the signal is noisy right now.”
“Where is she?”
Willow giggled. “Hide and seek.”
DeVontay gave his most menacing scowl, which he hoped was made all the more sinister because of his missing glass eye. “I’ll drop you here and leave you for the fires.”
“And you’ll never find Rachel without me.”
An explosion rocked the far side of town, followed by a few pops that might have been gunshots. DeVontay wondered if Shipley was mounting a follow-up attack. An advance probe, sacrificing a few soldiers while others set fires to smoke out the enemy. Then a full-scale assault before dusk, while the Zapheads were in disarray.
“We need each other,” DeVontay said. “I’ll protect you from the soldiers and you’ll take me to Rachel.”
“A temporary alliance of convenience?”
“We have to start somewhere.” He was worried the surrounding Zapheads would revert to their violent ways and turn on him, but they wandered back and forth like they were lost.
As if reading his thoughts, Willow said, “The others like me, the New People, are organizing the tribe. We’re the leaders. We’re learning from your kind, which is why we wanted Rachel. Since she was the first of you to become like us, she can help us understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Why you fear us so much. Why you want to destroy us.”
DeVontay shook his head. “What did you expect us to do? We’re facing extinction.”
“Would that really be so bad? You had your time. From what I have learned, your kind was already destroying itself. Climate change, pollution, warfare, genocide. And we haven’t even begun to deal with the multiple nuclear power plants that are melting down.”
She had a point. Given the psychos banding into survivalist camps and Shipley’s fascist ambitions of ruling the world, DeVontay couldn’t make the case that humans offered a brighter future than the Zapheads. He just hated like hell to be caught in the middle.
“We can fix all that later,” he said. “Right now, let’s get to Rachel.”
“That way,” she said, pointing a tiny finger to an apartment complex a few hundred yards beyond the school. The buildings were in no immediate danger of fire, and the route looked as safe as any other. DeVontay still had a Plan B of slipping out of town under cover of darkness, but not until he’d done his best to rescue Rachel.
If she even needs or wants to be rescued.
“How far is it?” he asked.
“Around the corner. A shop beside the gas station. Go down the stairs around back.”
“Okay,” DeVontay said. “I’m going to cover your face with the blanket to filter out some of the smoke.”
Willow nodded, the fiery sparks in her eyes quieting to a dull glow. Just before he pulled a fold of cloth over her, she said, “I trust you.”
Great. Bad enough when other humans were counting on me. Now I’ve adopted a pain in the ass whose tribe wants to knock us off the top of the food chain.
“Wait a second,” DeVontay said. “You won’t be able to tell me where to go if you can’t see.”
“I don’t need to see,” Willow said, her words muffled. “I
know.”
DeVontay clutched the bundle to his chest and veered away from the school. The heat from the flames warmed his skin and hot air seared his lungs. A figure to his left sprinted through the open door of a house, and DeVontay was pretty sure it was a fellow survivor—the first living human he’d seen since arriving in Newton.
Maybe she knows where the others are.
He called after her but heard no response. A series of explosions ripped the outskirts half a mile away—grenade launchers, most likely. Franklin and Lt. Hilyard had told them about Shipley’s arsenal of death, and even a small Army unit could pack a big punch with them. Bullets could start flying at any moment, and DeVontay didn’t want to be out in the open when it started. Shipley’s crew wouldn’t care what they were aiming at. Any moving target was a good target.
“There’s one of us,” DeVontay said to Willow.
The hidden baby answered, “I’m not one of you, remember?”
DeVontay was reminded how quickly he’d accepted the existence of a hyper-intelligent infant that couldn’t take care of itself. This was the future of the world. And he was burying the old one with every step.
He ran toward the house after the woman.
“Where are you going?” Willow called, the blanket rippling as she struggled to peel it away from her face. “Rachel is the other way.”
“You’ve got your people and I’ve got mine,” DeVontay said.
He entered the dark house. “Hello?” he called.
“Get away,” a woman said. She sounded frightened, panicked, and likely on the edge of madness.
DeVontay couldn’t make out her face, but she was silhouetted against a back window, against which a distant fire cast a coruscating wash of orange and red.
“I won’t hurt you.”
“You have one of them.”
DeVontay realized she meant the baby. Willow’s eyes glowed with an eerie light that mirrored the flames outside, and they were bright enough to radiate through the blanket. She squirmed in his grasp.
“Where are the others?” DeVontay asked, holding his position.
“Everywhere…nowhere…I don’t know.” The woman calmed down a little. “Scattered now. Or dead.”
“So there are more of us around?” DeVontay hoped Willow would stay quiet so the woman wouldn’t panic. DeVontay’s eye adjusted to the dark and he could make out her middle-aged, lean face.
And the pistol in her hand.
“They forced most of us to go to the football stadium.” The woman let out a sob. “They had all these dead bodies piled up. Thousands and thousands of them. Like they were watching a game. And then the Zapheads started chanting ‘Wheeler, Wheeler, Wheeler.’ And this woman showed up, and then the shooting started.”
Rachel. She was here, just like Willow said.
“Easy,” DeVontay said. “There’s an Army unit up in the mountains, and they’ve attacked the town. You’re going to be free, but you have to stay off the streets until it’s over.”
“The Army’s not going to save you,” Willow said. “For every one of us they kill, a hundred more step in. We’re confused right now, but soon we will organize and solve this problem.”
The woman raised her pistol, arm wavering. “Make it shut up!”
DeVontay held up one palm in a “Stop” gesture. “She’s called ‘Willow.’ She can help us. Do you know what happened to the Wheeler woman?”
“I hope she’s dead. Because she’s one of them, too.”
Gunshots peppered the landscape. A series of muffled explosions boomed across town. Outside, Zapheads moved toward the sounds as if they’d finally regained their communal mind.
Willow’s right. The attack disrupted their unity, but they’re adapting and recovering. This might be the first time they’ve been hit this hard.
Which meant he’d have to find Rachel fast and get out of there. This woman was too far gone to be helpful. He couldn’t waste the time to help her, either.
It’s come to this. The Zapheads are more human than we are.
“I have to go now,” DeVontay said. “You just stay put like I said and keep your head down.”
“What happened to your eye? Did one of the Zapheads take it?”
DeVontay didn’t understand her for a moment. He was so used to having only one eye that he didn’t consider it noteworthy, and his glass eye was of a quality that the casual observer wouldn’t know it was a prosthetic. But with the socket empty, he must look shocking.
“I lost it as a child,” he said. “I’ve been with the Zapheads for two days now and they haven’t hurt me.”
“We’re the New People,” Willow said. “We reject your insulting name for us.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the woman wailed. “Shut the little freak up.”
DeVontay took a step backward toward the door. He wasn’t totally sure the Zapheads wouldn’t erupt into a murderous frenzy, but the street seemed a safer bet than this woman’s company. “She’s just a baby.”
“But the babies are the worst,” the woman said, face twisting, her eyes taking on a mad light. With her wild hair and leer, she might have been a witch out of some demonic fairy tale. But the gun was real. “The babies are the smart ones. Planning the takeover.”
“We’re not taking over anything,” Willow said. “You’re giving it to us.”
“Shh,” DeVontay said. In her straightforward innocence, Willow didn’t understand she was feeding the woman’s lunacy.
“They’re our extinction event,” the woman said. “The comet got the dinosaurs, and the Zapheads are going to get us. Except nobody will be around to write the history.”
“We’ll be around.” DeVontay didn’t believe it, but he hoped to soothe the woman.
“You’ll live as long as we let you,” Willow said.
The room erupted in a flash of light and percussion, wet and warm fluid spattering DeVontay, a line of silvery heat searing along the side of his rib cage.
The blanket held a mushy mass of soft red pulp where Willow’s head had been.
A broken cackle of laughter poured from the woman’s throat. DeVontay didn’t know how many rounds she had left, but she didn’t seem to be aiming anymore.
He laid Willow on the floor and touched the gash in his side. His fingers came away bloody but the bullet had skimmed instead of penetrated.
“Nobody will be around to write the history,” the woman repeated.
Humans write their histories in blood.
But DeVontay didn’t respond to her. Instead, he slipped out the door and took his chances with the swarming Zapheads.
CHAPTER TEN
Dusk was settling as Franklin followed Brock through a greenway running along a sluggish brown creek.
The public park had probably been the pride of Newton, with picnic tables, basketball courts, skateboard ramps, and swing sets, but now the grass was knee high and weeds sprouted up through the asphalt walking track. Franklin had seen photographs of Chernobyl taken forty years after the deadly nuclear accident, and Mother Nature quickly reclaimed the streets and parking lots with little effort, trees already rivaling the three-story buildings of the abandoned city. The solar flares were a disruption of a different sort, but Franklin found comfort in the notion that life would go on, no matter what forces tugged and tore at the world.
Probably be deer roaming this park by next year. Good hunting territory. Now, if I only had a goddamned gun.
But he wasn’t sure about the quality of meat anymore. Some of the animals in the forest around his compound had exhibited those strange, gleaming eyes and erratic behavior. Although animals didn’t die off to the same extent humans did, they were affected by the solar storms, too. Franklin was just glad his goats and chickens hadn’t turned on him, but goats were pretty weird even without mutations.
The woman behind him—Sierra, Brock had called her—carried Franklin’s rifle. Brock was no gentleman, putting the extra weight on the woman, but he seemed like the kind who got
what he wanted and never had to pay full price.
The smoke rising from Newton threw a haze across the horizon, painting the sunset blood red. “Looks like there won’t be much of Newton left by the time we get there,” Franklin said.
“Who said we’re going there?” Brock said without turning.
Franklin thought about adding, “Well, we’re getting closer with every step.” But he’d have better luck with Sierra. “How long have you guys been together?”
“We’re not together,” she said.
“Don’t start that,” Brock said. This was apparently a discussion they’d kicked around before.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Franklin said. “That’s none of my business. I meant, how long have you been in this group?”
“How do you know we’re in a group?” she answered. She’d obviously been studying at the Brock School of Conversation for a while.
“Everybody’s either in a group or dead.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m in a group. I just lost mine.”
“We’re putting something together,” Brock said. “If it works out, we’re taking it all back.”
“Sounds like we won’t get much help from the Army.” After the flurry of explosions half an hour ago, the shooting had diminished to an occasional distant burst. If Shipley was the one leading the charge, he wasn’t going in at full strength.
“The Army’s part of the problem, not part of the solution,” Brock said.
Jesus, is this guy a business major? Next thing you know he’ll be calling the apocalypse a “win win win, with plenty of upside potential.”
“What do you mean?” Franklin asked. He thought he saw movement in the trees beyond the creek, but he kept walking.
“We won’t defeat the Zapheads through brute force. We’ll have to outsmart them.” Brock stopped where the walking path intersected a street. A pile-up of vehicles blocked the road. But something was off about the massive collision. For one thing, why would that many cars travel a side road like this at one time?
Then Franklin realized the cars hadn’t smashed into each other at high speeds—they’d been rolled into place and arranged. The effort must have taken many hands and many hours.
After: Red Scare (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 5) Page 5
