Afterburn: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 1) (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The bridge rose maybe forty feet above the water, its pillars mighty enough to support multiple lanes of traffic. The bordering forest was equally dense on both riverbanks, so DeVontay paddled to the side where Lars sat gasping and catching his breath.

“I guess…I need to say thanks,” he said to Rachel as she climbed out of the canoe onto shore. “Saving my life’s getting to be a habit, huh?”

“I’m not keeping score,” she said. “But I lost my sunglasses. Think you can handle it?”

The horrifying plunge seemed to have sobered him up. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Hey, there’s a path over here,” DeVontay called, and Rachel hoped it wasn’t a corridor for Godzilla beavers or some other mutant atrocity. Tara followed him, and Rachel helped Lars to his feet. His forearms bore a series of circular splotches from the suckers, and she hoped they weren’t the harbingers of a venomous swelling.

“Your pistol and DeVontay’s rifle are the only firearms we have left,” she said. “I hope we don’t run into an army.”

He held up his axe, which glistened with water and the viscous leakage from the tentacle. “Don’t worry. It’s my turn to save you. You might not keep score, but I do.”

Rachel followed with her machete, and shortly they were alongside the road, which looked silver under the aurora. They decided to wait beneath the pines just off the highway, since DeVontay figured they’d made good time and were well ahead of the Zap who had taken Squeak.

“What if it stopped, or else went in another direction?” Tara said, repeating her worry about the flimsy plan.

DeVontay was both patient and confident. “It will come. We’ve dealt with Zaps before. They don’t stay separated from their kind for long.

Except Kokona
. Thinking of the mutant infant led Rachel to wonder how the others in the bunker were faring. They were probably worried sick, since she and DeVontay should have been home that afternoon at the latest. Now it was likely near midnight.

If Stephen listens and does what we told him, they’ll be all right. But that’s a big if.

They’d only waited twenty minutes or so—Lars had dozed off sitting against a sticky tree trunk, but Tara was wired and anxious—when Rachel spotted the tiny twin specks of light in the distance. She nudged DeVontay, who rested against her with his eyes closed although his breathing didn’t indicate sleep.

When he saw what she was pointing at, he woke Lars. “Showtime.”

The lights grew larger as they moved closer, flickering yellow and orange and red, casting a halo against the darkness. Soon they could discern the Zap’s outline, as well as the angular burden in its arms. The glow of its eyes reflected off the silvery suit like molten metal.

They also
heard
it.

The sound rose and fell in a rhythmic pattern, and then Rachel realized it was speech. In the early post-Doomsday era, Zaps learned by imitation and echoing, but they likely knew so much more now, after five years of assimilating and sharing knowledge.

The voice carried a precise pitch, although the quality of the sound was hollow. It was a song, but oddly lacking in any musical or poetic quality. It hit all the right notes, but it had no
soul.

They all recognized the centuries-old lullaby:

Rock-a-bye baby

In the treetop

When the wind blows,

The cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks,

The cradle will fall.

Down will come baby,

Cradle and all.

It timed its steps to the rhythm of the song, and even rocked the listless Squeak back and forth in its arms in a mockery of motherhood. The little girl’s eyes were open, but she stared glassily off into the distance.

The Zap was perhaps forty yards from them now, coming up on the bridge, keeping a steady pace and showing no sign of exhaustion. After it finished the lullaby, it talked to the girl. “How are you, honey?”

The words were chilling because of their aloof blandness. But the girl responded, looking up at the blunt face with its ugly haircut and uttering a short burst of ululations—the “squeaks” for which her mother had named her.

She’s talking to it!

Tara nearly burst from their hiding place, whimpering in fear for her daughter. DeVontay held out an arm to block her. “It hasn’t hurt her,” he whispered.

The mutant then imitated her peculiar series of squeaks, which delighted the child. She even laughed a little, and the Zap’s passive face creased in a pathetic, almost frightening attempt at a smile.

As if it’s learning emotions on the fly.

Or at least learning to fake them.

In her old life, she’d known more than a few people who could fake their emotions. She’d been fooled by some of them, including a couple of men. Somehow the talent seemed like it should be reserved for humans only. It was a kind of lying, a kind of sin, and only a cruel God would allow that sin to be dishonored.

The Zap stopped walking and stood in the middle of the road, rocking the girl whose face looked beatific in the radiance of its eyes. It sang the first line of the lullaby again.

Then it repeated the word “Baby” very slowly.

Squeak uttered her throat-rattling sound and then said, “Buh.”

“Yes.
Baaaay-beeee
.”

“Bub,” the girl said.

“Babeeeee,” the Zap said.

“Baaaa.” Squeak paused a moment, biting her lip as if piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of air. “Bee!”

“Yes,” the Zap said. “Baby.”

“Baby,” the girl said, triumphantly.

Rachel realized with horror what was happening. The Zap was teaching the child to speak, a girl who’d been deprived of any real, human communication her entire life by a psychotically overprotective mother. Even more horrifying, the child was responding to the nurturing.

Tara couldn’t contain herself, as she must have recognized what was happening, too. She emitted a choking sound and ran from the forest into the road. “Squeak! Squeak!”

Both Squeak and the Zap watched her approach, the girl’s face scrunched in uncertainty. The Zap remained as impassive as ever.

“Damn it,” Lars said, sprinting after her, his axe swinging by his side.

“What should we do?” DeVontay asked.

“I don’t know, but I hope it doesn’t summon the birds.”

Tara reached the Zap and tried to rip Squeak from its arms. The Zap pulled back but made no violent moves toward the frantic mother.

“Buh!” the girl yelled, apparently hanging on to the word she’d just been taught as if it were a lifeline. “Baby!”

When Lars arrived with the axe, the Zap must have recognized the threat, because it released the girl who wobbled unsteadily on her feet but made no move toward her mother. Lars bellowed a Viking battle cry and stormed in, chopping at the Zap, which deflected the blows with its forearms.

Tara leapt into the fight, almost getting her arm severed by the wildly swing blade. She grabbed Squeak and dragged her away, crying and pleading. Squeak mostly seemed overwhelmed by the whole matter, as if the creature in the silver suit had been a fun friend who had slipped out of a fairy-tale book and taken her for a walk.

The Zap dodged Lars’s blade and came up underneath him, grabbing for a throat hidden under the unruly beard. With its other hand, the Zap caught Lars’s forearm and squeezed until the axe dropped.

“Shoot it,” Rachel said to DeVontay.

“I don’t know if—“

She plucked the M16 from his grip, knelt beneath the branches of the pine, and steadied the sights. She took a breath and exhaled, then gently caressed the trigger and felt the recoil. Three muffled pops punctuated Tara’s shouts.

The Zap’s head jerked, a great red dot at its temple, the far side of its face ruptured. The eyes smoldered and went dark. It gradually relaxed its grip on Lars and folded to the ground.

The girl let out a mournful yowl, and Tara nearly smothered the child, yelling “Hush,” only as a command and not a lullaby.

When Squeak couldn’t be consoled, Tara shook her and screeched, “Bad girl. You have to be quiet. Bad.”

DeVontay noticed the look on Rachel’s face. “What’s wrong?”

“I might have blown up the wrong head.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“If they’re not back by morning, we need to go after them,” Stephen said.

“DeVontay and Rachel can take care of themselves,” Franklin said.

“Under normal conditions.” Stephen tried not to make a smart-assed comment, because conditions hadn’t been anything close to normal for a long time. “But if the army’s out there on the move, and these bird-things are flying around, that might mean the Zaps are stirred up.

“We can’t leave Marina alone with these assholes,” Franklin said.

They were in Rachel and DeVontay’s room, one of the few spaces not currently occupied by soldiers. Stephen felt a little uncomfortable being in here, considering what lengths they all went to in respecting one another’s privacy. The walls were bare except for a few scenic nature photographs torn from magazines and taped into place. On the rear wall, Rachel had painted a window frame and a view looking out on a sun-splashed meadow full of perpetually blooming daisies, black-eyed susans, and bright blue bachelor’s buttons.

A gun rack in the corner spoke to the reality of this cozy little love nest.

“You’re probably right,” Stephen said. “That captain looks at Kokona like she’s the spawn of the devil. I think he even hates her more than you do.”

“Hey, now,” Franklin said. “I don’t really trust her, but I’m not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater. When it comes down to it, Rachel loves that child, and I trust Rachel, so that’s that. Family first.”

“Then let’s go after our family. We can be in Stonewall by afternoon if we hurry. Better yet, maybe we can get the captain to send a military escort.”

Franklin rubbed his crusty beard, found something solid there, and pulled it out and inspected it. Stephen thought he was going to eat it for a second, but the man flicked it to the concrete floor. “Not a bad idea. That reduces the chance that he’ll do something crazy while we’re away. But I still don’t like leaving Marina behind. It kind of feels like we’d be surrendering the bunker.”

“So?” Stephen said. “I know we’ve worked our asses off to turn this into a home, but what do we have, really? A hole in the ground.”

“A place where you can sleep at night without creepy critters gnawing your eyeballs out in your sleep. That counts for a lot in this world.”

“We can all move back to your compound. You’ve had that many people there before, and so far you haven’t been gobbled up, either.”

Franklin looked at the painted window and the two-dimensional promise it offered. “I’m used to the peace and quiet.”

“We could chip in with the garden and the livestock. We could produce more than we eat, and you’d have an extra set of eyes to watch your back. Plus, it’s not on the map, unlike this place. The army would never know it existed.”

“That’s the other thing. You heard the man. The army’s mobilizing, at least what’s left of it. This might be the last stand of the human race. You really want to sit that out?”

Stephen occasionally debated Franklin about the possible tactics they could employ against the mutants, usually while playing chess. The theories were wild and wholly uninformed, since they really knew nothing about the enemy and how the Zaps might’ve mutated over the years.

What did their civilization look like now? What was their behavior? How many were there? What kinds of weapons would it take to defeat them?

In the end, those had been intellectual exercises about as useful to their lives as the outcome of their chess games—checkmating the opponent’s king brought a moment of satisfaction and pride, but you immediately set up the pieces for the next game.

“If you really think we have a chance—the human race, I mean—then we should just offer the bunker to support the cause,” Stephen said. “And we should enlist if they’ll let us. I mean, you’re probably too old to be any use—”

“You just shut that fresh little pie-hole there, you runt. I’ve got more scalps on my belt than you got hairs on your chest, so don’t be counting me out of the fun.”

Stephen grinned. One sure way to get Franklin to go back on his own principles was to challenge his manhood. “You sure you could handle taking orders from the government?”

“Oh, hell, you’re right. They’d probably store my name on a list somewhere in New Pentagon, so that when all this is over they’ll have a place to send the tax bill.”

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that for a long, long time, old man,” Stephen said, relishing the idea more and more. There were uniforms in storage, although they’d mostly chosen to scavenge civilian clothes from the houses in the valleys below.

He pictured himself buttoned down and ramrod straight, a helmet on his head, maybe even some brass insignias on his chest. Marina might think he was hot.

But I can’t leave her behind. She’d have to join up, too. And where does that leave the others?

“I might even get a haircut,” Stephen said.

“If it gets a few inches off that shaggy, flea-ridden mop of yours, then that’s mission accomplished in itself.”

“I’m in,” Stephen said. “But I can’t make a final commitment until I discuss it with Rachel and DeVontay. Which means we have to find them.”

“All right,” Franklin said. “I’ll talk to the captain and see if he can spare a couple of men. Offer our support, make some plans, and do our part to make the world safe for democracy. Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m saying this.”

“One other thing,” Stephen said. “We need to cut a deal with him about Kokona. It’s weird enough to be declaring war on her people when we’ve been taking care of her all these years.”

“Yeah.” Franklin nodded thoughtfully. “Kinda like a bunch of white slave-owners signing the Declaration of Independence and then patting themselves on the back for being so noble.”

“Let’s win back the world first, and then we can worry about the paperwork.”

“Fine with me,” Franklin said. “You start packing, then get some sleep if you can find a bunk. I’ll deal with the captain.”

“Cool. Meet at the door at around six o’clock?”

“That’s oh-six-hundred to you, soldier. May as well start learning the lingo.”

Stephen snapped off a salute and they entered the hall. Stephen took a last look inside, and even its eight-by-ten perimeter seemed way too large without Rachel and DeVontay in it. He closed the door behind him, promising they would be sleeping here by this same time tomorrow.

Most of the doors were closed along the narrow hallway, although someone was clattering around in the mess area opening some pouches for a midnight snack. The telecom room was open, the flickering lights of the monitors spilling out onto the floor.

Then the light was interrupted by a silhouette. The captain rushed from the room and glanced toward the bunker’s entrance, then back at Franklin and Stephen.

“What’s wrong?” Franklin asked.

“Those parts on the desk,” Antonelli said. “From the bird. Did you take them?”

“Why would I do that?” Franklin asked.

“What about you?” Antonelli said to Stephen, eyes narrowing in suspicion.

Hmm, maybe I need to reconsider signing up under this clown.

“I don’t know nothing,” Stephen said.

“Well, they’re gone. All gone.”