by Mark Tufo
Who am I kidding? Marina’s the smart one.
Actually, the little Zap infant Kokona was more intelligent than both of them put together, but Franklin refused to give the mutant any credit. He half expected to visit the bunker one day to find the door open and the baby gone, with Rachel and the others headless and half rotten. Rachel assured him Kokona was part of the family now and that time and distance had erased Kokona’s instinctive connection to the other mutants. But Franklin figured once a Zap, always a Zap.
That didn’t help him figure out Rachel’s constitution, but she was blood kin, so he was compelled to give her the benefit of a doubt. At least until proven otherwise.
A grating, squeaking sound came from the other side of the metal door, and a large flange revolved as the screw turned. The door had once featured electronic locks as well as a manual failsafe, but as the bunker’s battery arrays weakened, solar power alone couldn’t do the job. The remaining solar panels were strained to the limit just providing enough juice for the few cameras, lights, and occasional radio broadcasts.
Franklin waited until the door parted enough to allow his hand to slip inside, then he assisted its swivel as the hinges groaned. When the gap was wide enough to enter, Franklin slipped inside.
“Hello, kid,” Franklin said to Stephen while helping close and secure the door.
“I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Yeah, right, kid. Once you get a few chest hairs, let me know.” He patted the boy’s cheek.
“Too much information, Franklin,” Marina said, as if she’d never seen the boy naked in such intimate quarters.
“Hello, pap-paw,” Kokona said to Franklin, her eyes glinting in the bunker’s dim light.
“I ain’t your pap-paw, runt,” Franklin said. “Changed that diaper lately?”
“I don’t consume much, so I only eliminate solid wastes every four days,” Kokona said, squirming in Marina’s arms.
“Maybe that’s why you’re still a runt.” Franklin didn’t care if the taunts were cruel. He’d never been one to spare people’s feelings, and damned if he was going to do so for a freaky mutant whose tribe had taken over Franklin’s world. Besides, it was true—Kokona hadn’t grown an inch or gained a single pound in the four years she’d lived with Rachel.
“How was your journey over?” Stephen said, helping Franklin remove his backpack.
“Saw one of those raccoon thingies. You know, the kind with the long claws. But I took the fast way down a steep gulley and lost it. So if you’re wondering why the seat of my pants is black, that would be the reason.”
“Still too much information,” Marina said. She had grown since he’d last seen her and her body filled out the army fatigues she wore. Unlike Kokona, both Stephen and Marina were maturing into young adults, which meant trouble of one kind or another. Rachel considered them brother and sister, but Franklin had lived long enough to know that nature was more powerful than personal opinion. The teens weren’t blood relatives, so he didn’t see the harm in a potential romance, and he’d never agreed with most of the self-righteous moral standards of the pre-apocalyptic human race anyway.
Marina was Mexican and Stephen was American, but such a mixed union didn’t trouble him, either. Rachel and DeVontay had been in love ever since Doomsday threw them together, and that was fine, too. DeVontay’s devotion was apparent, and he’d risked his life several times to save her. As long as nobody was trying to hatch little Zaps, he was okay with anything.
But he was pretty sure Stephen and Marina weren’t fooling around while DeVontay and Rachel were away. Kokona never slept, and her senses were acute. Franklin wasn’t around her often enough to know how closely the infant minded everyone else’s business, but Franklin always suspected some kind of alien computer was constantly running and calculating behind those sparking eyes.
Stephen told Franklin the details of his radio chat with Capt. Antonelli and how he’d told the officer he was alone and waiting for them in a van on the parkway. “I’m not sure he believed it, though,” Stephen said.
“They’re going to be looking for this soon. Depending on how good their maps are, they will probably find it pretty fast.
“What about those gunshots and explosions last night?” Stephen said. “Was that them?”
“Most likely. Unless some other group is wandering around out there. Heading for the hills used to be a survival strategy, but I guess only lazy folks are left, because we haven’t seen anybody in at least a year.”
“I can assure you they weren’t Zaps,” Kokona said.
That provided no comfort to Franklin, because he didn’t trust her one bit. “Either way, we’re safe here. We can hold off half of an army if it comes to that.”
“What about Rachel and DeVontay?” Marina asked.
“They can take care of themselves,” Franklin said. “The worst thing we could do is go out and hunt for them.”
“They should be back this afternoon,” Stephen said. “Assuming nothing goes wrong.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” Franklin said.
Kokona spoke in her eerily childish voice. “Heightened sunspot activity, predatory species, human bandits, paranoid military, the usual risks of radiation and pollution, abrupt weather changes—”
“Cool it, Little Miss Sunshine,” Franklin said. “That was a rhetorical question. Do you know what ‘rhetorical’ means?”
“Which definition from which dictionary should I refer to?” Kokona said.
Marina cut in with a stream of Spanish that Franklin hoped was a scolding, and the infant replied right back, unfazed. They chattered for another twenty seconds in rapid Spanish while Franklin and Stephen looked at one another.
Finally, with a shake of his head, Franklin left the entryway for the depths of the bunker. He didn’t really feel much ownership of the place, but he was the ranking grown-up and that had to account for something. He was familiar with the layout from his time here, both as an involuntary guest of the original military unit and as a part-time patriarch of Rachel’s strange little tribe.
A string of tiny bulbs not much larger than Christmas-tree lights were strung above the hallway. The first tiny rooms were little more than cells used for bunks and storage, and the second room on the right had been decorated like a nursery, with cartoon animals bounding across its walls.
Even though Kokona never slept, she was apparently put down every night so the grown-ups could enjoy some privacy. Marina bunked across the hall from DeVontay and Rachel, and her room was fairly spartan, with none of the usual teen-girl frivolities like make-up and hair accessories and posters of shirtless teenybopper pop idols.
Farther on lay the telecom room, a munitions and equipment closet, and the cramped kitchen, which featured running water from an outdoor spring that was piped inside and flowed constantly. Some of that water was diverted into a small bathroom and shower beside the kitchen, although the bunker’s occupants often relieved themselves outside when possible.
The last space, which had once been the commander’s headquarters, was now Stephen’s room. The floor was strewn with books, comics, dirty clothes, pieces of machinery he’d taken apart, and empty tin cans. His informal survey complete, Franklin turned to Stephen and said, “Let’s check those monitors.”
The video gear was in the radio room, along with the power conversion system for the solar panels. Even though the military had installed the best equipment that taxpayer money could buy, it was failing bit by bit, and both the ventilation system and the solar panels were weak links in their defensive capability. For that matter, someone could discover and destroy the water source, or poison the spring that fed it. Bunkers might be impregnable to most forms of armed assault, but ingenuity might succeed where firepower failed.
Marina carried Kokona after them, and as Franklin tested the equipment, he was sure the little mutant was watching and learning. The Zap baby probably already knew more than Franklin did about the bunker’s ops.
&nbs
p; A chubby-cheeked little spy.
“This one’s going on the blink,” Stephen said, tapping a tiny gray monitor screen. “We keep it turned off so it doesn’t draw power.”
The three remaining monitors allowed for a nearly three-hundred-degree view of the bunker’s perimeter, so unless an intruder came from the north—the steep, rocky ridge from which Franklin had descended—then that person would be visible. Assuming someone was watching the screens at the time, that was.
“Batteries are down to about forty percent capacity,” Stephen said.
“Thirty-seven,” Kokona said.
“That’s ‘about forty,’” Stephen said.
“That margin of error is the equivalent of losing all electricity eight weeks sooner than expected,” Kokona said. “Accuracy matters when your life depends upon it.”
Franklin detected a dark rage in Stephen’s face, and he wondered how often the boy endured Kokona’s corrections and small sleights. Marina seemed perfectly at ease with the infant, even doting on it, and now she smiled contentedly as if she were the proud mother of an honor-roll student.
“I should’ve busted this radio a long time ago,” Franklin said.
“But we need it to connect with other humans,” Stephen said. “I don’t care what anybody says, we can’t just hide out here and wait for the world to finish ending. I’m glad I talked to the army. We need to get our shit together and go to war.”
Kokona pursed her pink little lips and said nothing about the antagonism directed toward her tribe. Franklin pointed at Stephen’s sidearm. “You been practicing with that thing?”
“A little. DeVontay doesn’t want us to waste ammo.”
“Marina’s a better shot than him,” Kokona said. Marina blushed slightly, darkening the burnt sienna color of her cheeks.
“What about you?” Franklin said to the baby. “How do you defend yourself?”
“By being vulnerable.” Kokona gave a grin that would have been endlessly adorable on a human baby, but matched with those coruscating eyes seemed more like an expression of utter disdain.
Chapter 195
Rachel was dismayed by how close the Zaps came before she sensed them.
She and DeVontay fled from the yellow house and headed up the road toward the parkway, but Rachel was disoriented by what seemed to be multiple telepathic signals.
They weren’t trying to communicate with her—indeed, she wasn’t even sure they detected her presence. The tide of overlapping words gave her the impression that she was eavesdropping on a shared communal transmission.
She was unable to successfully sort out any coherent sentences, and the phrases themselves didn’t provide much useful information.
“…coordinate metastasis…vector three two…assimilation…retrieval operative…”
“What do you hear?” DeVontay said, pulling her into the concealment of an overturned farm truck.
“Technobabble,” Rachel said. “Some of the syllables don’t even sound like English. More like verbal algorithms or matrices.”
“They know dozens of languages,” DeVontay said bitterly. “They drained enough human brains to gather them.”
“They’re already in Stonewall, but I can’t tell where.”
“So, make a run for it or just wait it out?”
“It depends on whether they know I’m here or not. But my guess is they’ve come for that dead Zap.”
“They’re sending out scouts for a reason,” DeVontay said. “Maybe they’re expanding their territory.”
“Why would they need to do that? They don’t reproduce and they don’t really need to harvest food, since they consume so little.”
DeVontay gave her a cold grin. “Unless they learned to bring the dead back to life. Then they’ve got a lot of new mouths to feed.”
In the year after the solar storms, the Zaps evolved through a stage where they collected dead with the intent of restoring them. Unless they had created some sort of storage system, they wouldn’t have much to work with besides skeletons and the occasional rotted corpse sealed in a closet or vehicle. Rachel didn’t want to picture an army of such creatures, wandering through the countryside conducting whatever mission the Zaps decreed.
“We should get back to the bunker,” Rachel said. “For all we know, those explosions last night brought the Zaps out to see what’s going on. I don’t want to get caught in the middle of a war again.”
“It might come to that, Rachel,” DeVontay said, lifting his head to scan the town through the truck windows. “And you’ll have to decide whose side you’re really on.”
That’s unfair. I’ve already chosen you and the others. Isn’t four years long enough to prove my commitment?
But part of her realized she had removed herself from choice. Aside from Kokona, she had no interaction with Zaps and stayed well away from any potential communication. Like faith, could loyalty really be considered true if it hadn’t been tested?
“I’m with you,” Rachel said.
“Then how come you saved that Zap last night?”
Before she could answer, the voices entered her head again.
“Do you hear that?” DeVontay said.
And she realized the voices were audible. The Zaps emerged from a curve in the road, three of them. Like the dead one in the cottage, these wore silvery suits and had a uniform, sexless appearance. They didn’t seem to carry any weapons, and they moved almost casually, with a liquid smoothness. They headed directly for the cottage.
“We’ll wait to see what they do,” DeVontay said. “Then we’ll make a run for it.”
But they never found out whether the Zaps were in Stonewall to retrieve their fallen companion. Before they reached the cottage, one of them stopped and lifted its tonsured head as if smelling or hearing something. Rachel gripped DeVontay’s forearm, afraid they sensed her.
Instead, there was a faint whirring in the air and one of the metallic birds swooped out of the forest and glided toward the outdoor outfitters’ shop.
“How many of those things do they have?” DeVontay asked.
Before Rachel could answer, a gunshot boomed in the quiet of the town. The Zaps broke into a fluid run in the direction of the shot.
“Humans,” Rachel said, unconsciously bringing her own rifle into firing position and aiming around the hood of the truck.
The metal bird hovered above the outfitters’ shop, cutting ever-tighter circles in the air as if homing in on a target. Its electronic eyes glinted bright green, the color of auroras. As the Zaps approached the shop, a side door flew open.
A gaunt man with wild, flowing hair and bushy beard burst from the building. He carried a pistol that he alternately pointed at the bird and the Zaps, although he didn’t fire, as if he was conserving limited ammunition. A broad axe was attached to his belt, the blades clotted with dark blood.
“I think we’ve found our killer,” DeVontay said. “And I’ll bet the Zaps know it.”
“We can’t let them take him,” Rachel said, standing up and moving into the open. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to protect the hairy man or prove to DeVontay she was willing to kill Zaps if necessary.
The Zaps were now only thirty feet from the man, closing the distance with stunning speed. The man fired at the nearest mutant, but he either missed or the bullet was resisted by the silver suit.
I hope I’m making the right choice.
Rachel sighted her M16, knowing the Zaps were out of her effective range but firing anyway. The burst of shots caused the Zaps to slow and look around uncertainly. The metal bird, though, didn’t hesitate. It looped in the air above the shop and dived right toward Rachel.
“Damn it, Rachel,” DeVontay said, popping up from concealment and firing at the bird. “This wasn’t our fight.”
The bird seemed to have some kind of guided intelligence, because it took evasive action. It veered behind a tree, and then rose over the tree’s crown, using the leaves as concealment. Then it swooped and approached
by circling around a car and came into the open again flying low and fast. It would be on them in seconds.
Rachel and DeVontay focused their firepower at the bird, and she lost track of the man and his Zap pursuers. One of their bullets must have clipped the bird, because it briefly tumbled in the air before righting itself and continuing its attack. Rachel didn’t know what kind of weaponry the bird employed, or if it simply used its stiff, streamlined beak to pierce its target. All she knew was she didn’t want to find out.
The bird was nearly on them when DeVontay lowered his rifle, grabbed the barrel with both hands, and swung the M16 like a baseball bat. The butt struck the bird flush on the head, and glittering pieces rained to the ground around them. The bird’s torso bounced in the high grass and lay intact, the wiry legs scrabbling for purchase.
“That wasn’t so tough,” DeVontay said.
It’s one thing to down a fake bird. It’s another to take on three Zaps.
The man from the shop fled toward the river, apparently thinking the current would offer some protection. DeVontay had told Rachel about the time he’d taken a canoe down the river and Zaps drowned themselves trying to catch him. Maybe this man had also learned the survival technique.
The three Zaps fanned out, still in pursuit. One ran around the back of the shop and two others followed the man through the scrub on the riverbank. Rachel tried to listen in on their communication, but she couldn’t pick up anything.
“Do we help or stay out of it?” Rachel asked.
“If he goes into the river with that axe on his belt, he’s probably going to drown before they get him. And they didn’t even care that you shot at them.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
DeVontay frowned and then cursed under his breath. “All right, let’s do it.”
DeVontay led the way, familiar with the town from his prior visits. Rachel followed close behind with her rifle low, one eye on the sky for more metal birds.