Earth Zero: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 2) (7 page)

Rachel closed her eyes but that left DeVontay in the dark. She lay down beside him and listened to him finish the food, then said, “What do you think is happening at the bunker?”

“They were expecting us two days ago. I’ll bet they’re freaking out.”

“As long as they don’t come looking for us.”

“They’ll do as they were told,” DeVontay said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Stephen’s developing a stubborn streak. And if they got Franklin involved, all bets are off.”

“Then we better get out of here as soon as we can. They’ll never find us if they think we’re in Stonewall. And they’re risking their lives for nothing.”

DeVontay smashed his plate against the floor and fished through the pieces until he found the largest shard. It was triangular and six inches long. He collected a rag from the pile of clothes around them and cinched it into a makeshift knife handle. He slashed at the air.

“Not much, but it makes me feel better,” he said.

They were no closer to a solution for escaping than before, and eventually they drifted off to sleep, bundling the blankets under them as best they could. Rachel was dreaming of Marina and Kokona when something scratched and scraped at the door.

She half opened her eyes, expecting Geneva and another interrogation. But it wasn’t.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I should kill you,” Capt. Antonelli said.

“
But I didn’t do it
,” Colleen said.

“Keep your voice down. I don’t want this getting around the unit.”

Antonelli had waited until Colleen returned to the telecom room and kept his composure until she’d settled in. Then he’d locked the door and confronted her with the damaged equipment. Even as he accused her, he’d feverishly studied her face, hoping he was wrong but knowing he wasn’t.

“This isn’t a military tribunal,” Antonelli said. “This is me, making a decision for the good of my soldiers and the country. Under Directive Seventeen, I’m sworn to terminate any threat to the successful conquest of our enemies. Sabotage and treason hurt the whole human race, and I can’t abide that, despite my feelings for you.”

Colleen bowed her shaking head, exhibiting the same denial for the past hour. Antonelli was torn by a dozen emotions, and he was okay with anger and fear and betrayal. What scared him was the deep chill in his gut that disguised itself as duty, a remorseless place that commanded him to employ whatever means necessary to complete his mission.

But now he was confused about the real mission here. True, he had his orders specific to the defeat of the Zaps, but didn’t he have a higher law to follow? Hadn’t Colleen made him human in a way that fighting and dying for the human race never could?

Her eyes were bloodshot with tears, bewilderment joining the pain in her face. He hadn’t touched her at all, but she was battered nonetheless. “Think about it, Mark. Why would I cut off contact?”

“You wanted us to stay here. You wanted me to ignore orders. You thought I’d roll over and wag my tail, waiting for a belly rub. You actually thought I’d betray my country for you.”

“I…it was just a thought. A moment of weakness.” She glared at him, freckled face a passionate mask. “I’ve always supported you, even when you’re wrong.”

That caught him off guard and he had to force himself not to explode. “That’s because I’m the captain. Your superior officer.” He waved at the bedroll. “Whatever else we are, whatever else we do, that fact doesn’t change.”

“Funny, you seem to surrender every time I’m on top.”

He pointed at her, knowing the gesture was childish and rude. “That’s not fair, Colleen.”

“None of this is fair! We didn’t ask for the sun to fuck up the sky and turn our friends into flaming-eyed freaks. We didn’t ask for monsters to chase us like we’re walking sausages. We didn’t ask to go to war or else vanish from the face of the Earth.”

“What you said earlier—I’m a soldier. That’s all I’ve ever been. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“I understand completely. You’re cut off from receiving orders and being told what to do. Now you have to make your own decisions. That scares the hell out of you.”

Antonelli spun and raked his arm across the table, sweeping the radio parts to the floor. “I’m just scared I’ll kill you.”

“For the last time, I didn’t do this. If I’d really wanted us to stay here in the bunker, I’d have played you into believing it was the right thing to do. I’m a
woman
, Mark. For God’s sake, I hope you’ll at least give me that much credit.”

Antonelli looked down at his trembling hands. He could kill her if she was truly a threat to the human race. If duty demanded it. But where was the honor in stupidity?

He was mostly enraged because she was right. Traveling by foot another ninety miles was nothing but suicide, given nature’s chaotic rebellion. Even if the beastadons and wild bears and barrel-sized rattlesnakes didn’t get them, the Zaps now appeared to have an aerial fleet they could control from a distance.

Reaching Asheville and the Fourth Division might buy them a brief reprieve, but any strength in numbers would be more than offset by the extra attention they would draw from those that wished them dead.

If you stay here, would HQ ever even know? They’ll just assume you’ve been wiped out. Hell, they
expect
you to be wiped out.

He didn’t like his line of thought. He forced his mind to the problems at hand. If the others found out about Colleen’s sabotage, he’d have to kill her to maintain discipline. But what if the radio was merely malfunctioning instead of sabotaged?

Lt. Randall was the only one who knew the radio was operational. Antonelli could make up a story about how it shut down and Antonelli tried to fix it, but now the destruction was clearly evident. He could also just pretend he’d received orders, but subsequent field communications might blow his story wide open.

You could also just tell Randall what you’re doing. Give Randall the option of staying at the bunker with them or taking the rest of the unit to their rendezvous in Asheville.

Antonelli realized he’d already made his decision. He sank heavily into the chair, looming over Colleen, who sat on the floor with her back against the wall.

“So, are you going to kill me?” she asked in a low, calm voice.

“Of course not,” he said with a sigh. “I’m going to kill the baby.”

Colleen’s shoulders unclenched in relief. “Why do you need to kill her?”

“She can’t be here if we’re staying.”

“HQ told you to hold her as a prisoner.”

“So what? I’ve already mutinied. What are they going to do, send one of our last helicopters to hunt me down?”

“She’s just a baby.”

“She’s just a Zap. Don’t go all soft on me. They’ve killed your brother, your friends, your comrades. They took your world away. And they’ll kill
you
as soon as they get the chance.”

“What about the others?”

Mark gave a doubtful shake of his head. “They can go or they can stay. After that bird attack, I’m guessing they’d be happy to hole up here for a while. But I’m not making that decision for them. Not anymore.”

Colleen tried to hide the pleasure of victory, but it was bright in her eyes. “You’re still the captain. They’ll follow wherever you lead.”

“I can’t call myself an officer anymore.” He tugged at the captain’s bars on his lapel pin, the only insignia he wore. “I’m just a man now.”

Colleen cupped her palm over his knee. “That’s all you need to be.”

“We’ll have to deal with Franklin and the boy. If they make it back.”

“And the two others they went out to find. And the girl, Marina. We’ll be responsible for her now.”

“We’ll make it work. The thing is, now we have a fighting chance.”

“A chance for us,” Antonelli said. “But we’re screwing it for everybody else.”

“They’re already screwed, Mark. Take it all the way down the line. You’ve seen New Pentagon. What, six hundred people trying to take probably thirty thousand Zaps? And that’s just here in the Southern Atlantic region. Multiply that out by the whole country—or worse, the whole world—and you see we never had a chance.”

“But we’re not alone. Look what happened right here in the bunker. Five civilians living with a Zap, and they had it together enough to save us when the shit hit the fan. They’re dealing with this better than New Pentagon is. If there are more people like these left, maybe we can win this one day. Not by fighting, but by surviving.”

“Right,” Colleen said. “We’re not quitting, we’re just regrouping.”

She was trying to salvage some of his pride, but Antonelli didn’t need it. He was thinking about how to kill the baby. He supposed a single shot to the temple would do it. That would be another lie he could sell to the troops—that HQ had given him the order.

Not that anyone would question him. Somebody needed to pay for the slaughter of their comrades.

He glanced at the monitors, where the aurora had thinned and left most of the forest in shadows. Anything could be out there closing in on the bunker.

Am I doing the right thing?

Colleen grabbed his wrist with both hands and dragged him down to the bedroll. “You can figure it out in the morning.”

“Will you still love me if I can’t order you around?”

“You never ordered me. I did it all because I wanted to.”

“You’d be a fool to say anything else.” He felt amazingly light, so accustomed to the burden of command that it was part of his field pack, just more shit to carry. If Colleen had betrayed him, it was among the most merciful acts she could’ve committed.

As if reading his thoughts, she said, “I didn’t do it, you know.”

He nodded. “I know.”

He didn’t want to think about who
had
sabotaged the radio. He might not like the answer.

He lost himself in her eyes, his head swimming with a future that now seemed wildly uncertain. Just hours ago, he would’ve sworn his destiny was mapped out, a path marched by millions of soldiers before him. Now, though, he had no anchor connecting him to his past and the iron self-image he’d carefully constructed.

He wasn’t iron. He was molten, fluid, uncast, and as he wrapped himself in the forge of her embrace, he surrendered to whatever new shape he would become.

CHAPTER NINE

Tan Huynh perhaps had some revolutionary blood flowing through his veins.

His grandfather had been one of Ho Chi Minh’s foot soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army, and a generation before that his great-grandfather fought the French colonialists with the People’s Army. Those men didn’t consider themselves revolutionaries—they were freedom fighters opposing imperialists. It was only after the Huynh family’s immigration to the United States that he was forced to assess the intricacies of his cultural history.

His father was a visiting professor of philosophy and religion at Georgetown University, where his militaristic genealogy was little more than idle gossip at faculty cocktail parties. Huynh was in the process of learning English in a continuing education class at a local community college while working as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. His dream was to attend Georgetown and pursue a degree in economics. The dream was ripped from his hands on that August day five years ago when the sun rewrote human history into a tragic thriller with darkly comic elements.

On that day, Huynh was doling mung bean sprouts onto a plate of
luo han zai
when the screams erupted in the dining room. The room went dark, with the only light coming from the back door, which they left open so the thick smoke could dissipate. His partner at the grill was named Wei, a true Chinese, unlike the other assorted brownish people on the staff who merely satisfied the American demand for cultural appearances. Wei’s eyes widened as if he’d sliced his finger off with a chef’s knife, and then his body went slack and he pitched face-first into the deep-fat fryer.

Huynh shouted for help and tried to free his friend from the oily vat of egg rolls. When Wei flopped backward onto the floor, flinging hot grease from his hair, his face was puckered with large yellow blisters. By the time Huynh stretched him out on the dirty floor tiles, the man was clearly dead.

Huynh pushed open the swinging door that led from the kitchen to the serving area and saw two waitresses sprawled prone on the floor. Past the counter loaded with tea pitchers and bowls of crushed ice, the restaurant patrons shrieked and skittered across the room, upending tables and smashing the large aquarium near the cash register. It took Huynh half a minute to realize some of the people were chasing others and that most of the customers were slumped in their booths or collapsed on top of their
kung pao
chicken and Buddha’s Delight.

Being in the United States capital, his first thought was “Terrorism.” And terrorism meant that non-whites were the first to die when the government forces arrived. He grabbed a cleaver and retreated to the walk-in freezer, closing the door behind him even though he couldn’t lock it from the inside and the interior was blacker than the soot from a napalm drop. He shivered against a stack of frozen pork until he could stand it no longer—he guessed he’d been hiding for an hour, although his watch had stopped and it could have been only fifteen minutes.

When he emerged, the restaurant was empty aside from the plentiful dead. The plate-glass window was broken and the chaos had migrated to the streets, where car horns, gunshots, and screams built into a discordant symphony that grated his nerves. He spent the night in the kitchen, barricaded as best he could. The cutlery gave him little comfort—based on the glimpses he’d endured, he figured the rampaging killers were vigorously strong and immune to pain.

But why would terrorists bother killing with their bare hands when they could use explosives and automatic weapons for maximum carnage? And terrorism doesn’t explain Wei’s sudden death.

Perhaps nerve gas
.

The United States had used Sarin in Vietnam and Laos, and although officially the use was scrubbed from all military reports, the affected people had a long memory. That wouldn’t explain the power outages or why the entire surrounding blocks outside had been affected, though.

Huynh spent two weeks in the kitchen, a moist towel over his mouth to mute the stench of spoiled food, living on wilted vegetables and dried noodles and relieving himself in the mop bucket. He tried Wei’s cell phone after stashing his co-worker in the broom closet, but it was dead. Each day he expected authorities to arrive, perhaps firefighters or police rather than soldiers. He feared their arrival only slightly less than he yearned for it.

But when no rescue was forthcoming and his curiosity was greater than his fear—after all, he couldn’t reasonably expect to live the rest of his life on fortune cookies—Huynh ventured out the back door to find the world he knew forever changed. No lights, no cars, no phones, no people.

At least at first.

Then he saw people, or what
looked
like people. Something was wrong with them. For one thing, their eyes were bright and glowing like jewels backlit by fire.

For another, they were wild and frantic, smashing glass, starting fires, and destroying road signs, newspaper racks, mailboxes, and other symbols of civilization with a fervor that seemed driven by a force beyond them. The streets were littered with clothes, trash, and bodies. Motor vehicles were jumbled in scrap heaps of torn metal and fiberglass. Distant plumes of smoke suggested the destruction was widespread.

Huynh saw a woman dash from a clothing boutique, barefoot and wearing torn stockings beneath her stained skirt, apparently heading for a building across the street. Two of the flaming-eyed crazies took after her like wolves on a rabbit. Huynh’s instinct was to help her, but her cries brought more of them, until a dozen set upon her. They clawed and pounded until she was a still and hushed lump on the asphalt, blood spattering them all.

Feeling like a coward, he laid low for several more weeks, moving cautiously and only at night, when their glowing eyes made them easier to avoid. Huynh imagined this was how the Viet Cong felt when slipping through the Mekong Delta for an ambush. He met another survivor and they headed west, away from the city, and soon he was part of New Pentagon and enjoying the possibly false security of a large group.

Naturally, he enlisted once the revised government implemented a new social order. His poor English drew wary glances from the others, and he decided the best front he could adopt was one of rabid patriotism, wrapping himself under the revised flag. “Private Huynh” was a much safer identity than “Tan the Yellow Man.”

But as he came awake in a military bunker in the Blue Ridge Mountains that night, none of those events lingered in his memory. His only thought was “
Make war, go home
.”

There were three other soldiers bunking in his room. Two of them snored, and the third rolled over and farted. The lights were off, but Huynh could see just fine. There seemed to be a hazy glow emanating in front of his face that turned and shifted whenever he did.

He drew his K-Bar knife and sliced the throat of the farting man first. He wiped his blade on the blankets and then drove it into the chest of the man on the top bunk. The third man stirred at the sound, blinking as if to make sense of the scene, and he reached for his eyeglasses. Huynh slid the knife under the man’s chin and drove it upward, causing blood to squirt from the man’s nose as he gurgled and choked.

When the man quit struggling, Huynh exited the room. He carried his rifle as he was trained to do, although he wasn’t going to use it unless necessary. He instinctively understood the need for stealth as he continued his mission. Several of the doors were locked, including the room that contained the radio he had destroyed earlier. But he managed to kill four more enemies in one of the rooms.

When he reached the end of the hallway, he discovered Corporal Calvin Tidewater sitting in a chair outside a closed metal door.

“Yo, Tan Man, what up, dawg?” Tidewater was the only black man left alive in the unit, and during their tour of duty, the two of them shared an unspoken acknowledgment of their minority status. “That leg of your’n must be feeling better, you hoofing around in the middle of the night.”

Huynh had always felt that Tidewater considered himself to be superior, a better American, because of Huynh’s inept language skills. Not that such genetic delineation mattered now. “See baby,” Huynh said.

“The little freak? I ain’t supposed to let nobody in, but maybe if you got a cigarette, I can let you look.”

“No smoke. See baby.”

Tidewater must have realized something was odd about Huynh. He gestured toward the M16. “Why you locked and loaded? We safe in the bunker. That little baby ain’t no danger, I don’t care what the captain says. She just lays there and goes goo-goo-gah-gah and shit.”

“Japanese,” Huynh said.

“Maybe used to be, but now’s she’s
Zap
. Once you’re Zap, that’s all you ever was.”

Huynh’s father might have mused on the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Japan. While Japan had ravaged most of the Asian countries and fueled centuries-old enmity, the two countries largely shared a peace built upon mutually beneficial trade. During Hirohito’s rein of militarism and expansion in World War II, Japan had invaded Huynh’s native land but later repaid the injury with generous reparations. Friends before, friends still, bound forever by greed.

Huynh peered through the small glass window into the room. The baby grinned at him, her two front teeth set against prink gums.

“What about that smoke, Tan Man?” Tidewater said.

Huynh reached into the pocket of his camo cargo pants. He had never liked tobacco, but he valued his rations. Or, rather, his fellow soldiers valued them. He fished his last cigarette from a wrinkled pack and passed it to Tidewater, who stuck it in his mouth.

“Got a light?”

Without turning from the window, Huynh gave the sentry a pack of matches.

“Don’t you rat me out, hear?” Tidewater struck a match, twitched his nose against the sulfur, and applied the flame to his cigarette. “We only supposed to smoke in the mess.”

“Big mess,” Huynh said.

“Sure got that right, my man. One great big ol’ motherfuckin’ mess.” Tidewater exhaled a stream of gray smoke and peered through it. “Hey, what’s up with your eyes?”

“I see.”

“You see the baby?”

Huynh turned and drove the knife so hard into Tidewater’s temple that the corporal’s jaw involuntarily clenched and his teeth snipped the cigarette in two. As Tidewater sagged to the floor with fluttering eyelids, Huynh opened the door.

“We’ve been expecting you,” Kokona said.

“Make war, go home,” Huynh said, sheathing his bloody knife and reaching into the blankets for the infant.

“Indeed,” Kokona said.