After: First Light (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 0)

by Nicholson, Scott

  Katherine had reluctantly raised the threat level to Class X. The Administration was sending some FEMA and Homeland Security officials down later today, and Chien had a feeling science would quickly fall slave to politics, just as it had done throughout the course of human history.

  As Chien punched his access code into the security keypad, he glanced around the dark parking lot. Half a dozen vehicles were in the lot at 5 a.m., twice the usual number. And yet the August surroundings looked much the same, the maples a brilliant green under the security lights, frogs and crickets wailing around the decorative pond in the landscaped entryway. But Chien could feel something in the air, a charging of the atmosphere, subtle like the coming of a storm.

  Dr. Doom was right, huh, Katherine?

  He entered the lobby, which was much dimmer than usual, and Chien realized the emergency lighting was on. Not a good sign.

  An even worse sign was slumped over the reception desk. Even in the poor light, Chien recognized Tamberlyn, the night security guard. His cap had fallen to the floor and one hand hung limply over the edge of the desk. Chien called his name, getting no response, and hurried across the tiles, his footfalls sounding much too loud in the glass-enclosed lobby. Tamberlyn’s face was pressed into a magazine, the pages splotched with his drool. Chien touched the man’s wrist to feel for a pulse, but the skin was already cool.

  Chien picked up the desk phone, but it was dead. He glanced over Tamberlyn’s body, seeing no sign of a struggle. It was unlikely that someone would rob the SDO lab, because the equipment was of such a specialized nature that it would be difficult to pawn, and astronomy wasn’t exactly a cash business. Even the data had little commercial value, because most of it was publicly available.

  Katherine!

  Chien hurried down the hallway, bypassing the elevators. He hit the stairwell, which was pitch dark except for the ambient glow of a few emergency lights. He stumbled going up, cursing as his kneecap knocked against concrete. Then he was on the second floor and approaching the SDO lab.

  The door was open. The lab was usually brightly lit, with lots of monitors, blinking lights, various digital meters, and personal computers. But only a few specks of light were visible, like fireflies against a midnight forest.

  “Katherine?” he whispered.

  Something moved to his left, followed by the squeak of chair rollers. He turned, and a sudden blur hit him in the chest, knocking the wind from his lungs and his glasses from his nose. He smelled Katherine’s perfume—a sensible discount brand with a French name he couldn’t recall—and beneath it an electric sweaty odor, like a June bug caught in a zapper.

  He shouted her name, then called her “Dr. Swain,” hoping to induce some glimmer of professional memory. He pushed at her, and then began punching, as her talon-like hands raked over his face. Her nails cut a searing line of agony across his forehead.

  She’s going for my eyes!

  He landed a fist against the side of her body, incongruously aware of the bulge of her breasts against him as she forced him to the floor. Katherine Swain wasn’t a large woman, but somehow she seemed to have embodied all the power of gravity. A suppressed chortle vibrated behind her ribs like some kind of wind-up toy. She reared up, giving him a chance to buck her off, but her face froze him into immobility.

  The firefly glints he had seen were not the remnants of the mechanical world he so loved. They were organic, an obscene inflection in her eyes. He could only stare and exhale as she clasped both her hands together into one fat fist and drove the flesh hammer down onto his throat.

  He spat out an urk as his larynx was crushed.

  Sucking for breath, he glanced wildly about the room, looking for a way out. But this time, science wouldn’t be his salvation.

  Dr. Doom was right.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Campbell Grimes thumbed the controls to reload his shotgun, descending a stalled escalator onto the subway platform.

  A zombie jumped from behind a pillar, decked out in gray coveralls like a maintenance worker. Campbell barely had time to blow the monster’s head off before two more jumped from the shadows.

  He fired—ka-blam blam—eliciting two explosive gouts of animated blood, followed by a scream and an inhuman cry deep in the subterranean cavern beneath the city. Left 4 Dead was one of the most popular video games ever, and despite playing it religiously for the last three years, Campbell was nowhere close to being tired of it. He liked his cooperative protagonists in the game better than most of his friends in the real world—at least he could always count on them to have his back. Campbell had little doubt he would be sitting in an old folks’ home one day and fighting through the same zombie hoards that magically never seemed to age or diminish.

  But old age wasn’t on the radar yet. At 25, he was still far from growing up, much less old.

  “Come on, come on,” he shouted at the screen. He flipped the controls to send his character onto the subway train, running between the empty benches with his shotgun leveled before him. Sensing a lull in the attack, he clacked another shell into his gun.

  A demonic howl arose from the car ahead. He raised the barrel and braced for more slaughter—and the screen went black.

  “The hell?” He clicked the game buttons for another ten seconds before realizing the system had lost power as well as the monitor.

  Looking around the cluttered living room of his Chapel Hill apartment, he wondered if Roy had forgotten to pay the power bill again. Roy was the kind of roommate who always had twenty bucks for a couple of twelve-packs, but never seemed to have a hundred bucks for any purpose. The idea of skipping the beer for a few days in order to pay the power bill would never cross Roy’s mind.

  Campbell wasn’t exactly Mr. Responsible himself, but he had a little pride. He worked as a delivery boy at Papa John’s Pizza to make ends meet, fooling himself that one day he would get a real career. But what was the point of honesty? Where had that ever gotten anyone?

  It wasn’t just the television and Xbox that had lost power. The little orange lights on the kitchen appliances were dead, too. Enough morning sunlight leaked between the curtains to glint off the crushed beer cans on the coffee table.

  “Roy?” he yelled.

  They each had private bedrooms in the old house that had been carved into apartments by an aspiring slumlord. It was twenty blocks from the University of North Carolina campus, which moved it from the rent zone of “rear entry with an ungreased jackhammer” to the slightly more palatable “full frontal assault.” Which was good, since Campbell had graduated two years ago and didn’t need proximity. Roy, on the other hand, was in the seventh year of his B.S. in Communications program. The problem was that Roy’s communication skills were even worse than Campbell’s, who talked more to virtual friends than the real people in his life.

  He called Roy’s name once more, then stood, banging his shin against the coffee table. He inched across the carpet, sliding on his socks so he wouldn’t bump into any other obstacles. The static electricity caused little blue sparks to dance around his toes. If Roy had been sitting there stoned, he would have offered a “Cool, dude,” his catch-all observation for anything that wasn’t “Lame, dude.” That communications degree was really going to take him places.

  “Roy, you got anybody in there?” he called through the door. Sometimes he slept with Marta, the Mexican girl whose age might have put Roy on the wrong side of statutory rape charges, but she dropped by only once a week. Campbell kept his nose out of such things unless Marta happened to have a “friend” who “was down for partying.” Which was every three months if Campbell was lucky. Not that he cared that much. Women were complicated; Left 4 Dead made linear sense.

  “Roy! Did you pay the power bill?”

  After pounding hard three times and getting no answer, Campbell tried the door. If Roy was gone from the apartment, he locked the door because he was dealing nickel bags of weed on the side. Not that Roy didn’t trust Campbell. Paranoia just came wi
th the territory.

  The handle turned, which meant Roy was snoozing through a hangover. Pete pushed the door open, bulldozing a pile of dirty clothes. The room smelled of old socks, cheap aftershave, the rusting metal of Roy’s weightlifting set, and a permanent booze/pot smell that blended into one tarry and potent smog.

  Campbell felt along the wall—widescreen TV, lift bench, dresser piled with bottles—until he reached the window. He wracked the curtains wide so that the sun streamed onto Roy’s bed.

  There, asshole, I hope that drives fishhooks into the backs of your eyeballs and yanks them out.

  Roy didn’t move. His face was turned toward Campbell, mouth hanging open, the tongue lolling in there like a fat, pink grub. Campbell kicked the bed. “Wakey wakey.”

  Roy quivered but didn’t awaken. This time Campbell wedged one bare foot on his roommate’s thigh and shoved. Roy rolled partway over, not even muttering his annoyance. Campbell leaned in and studied Roy’s pale face.

  Don’t look so hot. Like he’s been shooting heroin or something.

  Campbell leaned closer. A new kind of foul stench came from Roy’s mouth. But it wasn’t bad breath, because Roy wasn’t breathing.

  Damn damn damn.

  He pressed a finger to Roy’s neck like they did in the movies. He wasn’t sure what a pulse would feel like, but it didn’t matter, because he felt nothing.

  Shit shit shit. He’s dead.

  Campbell retreated to the living room, eyes now adjusted to the gloom. He fished his cell from his pocket. But should he call an ambulance? What about the drugs? Would Campbell get in trouble? Sure, he could blame everything on Roy, but a police search of the place would be a big hassle.

  In the end, he decided to make the call. Except his phone didn’t power up. It had been fully charged an hour ago, when his manager called to remind Campbell about his shift.

  No power, no phone. What the hell is going down?

  Campbell opened the apartment door. A man was sprawled on the sidewalk outside, huddled like a lump of clothes. A red Jeep wheeled wildly through the parking lot of the complex, shearing the bumpers of three vehicles before plowing into a Ford truck. The Jeep’s driver crashed headfirst through the windshield, hanging there like a trophy deer mounted on a red plate. Screams rang out from the surrounding streets.

  All hell was breaking loose, and Campbell did the only thing he could think of under the circumstances.

  He stepped back, slammed the apartment door, and locked it.

  And wondered how long it would take for the power to come back on, and how long before Roy started to stink for real.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Rachel heard the screams as she clawed her way out of sleep.

  As usual, she’d been underwater in her restless dreams, probing the murky depths for something she could never find.

  Something banged against her apartment wall, and she thought the neighbors might be having one of their cozy little spats. But the screams were muffled and distant, coming from somewhere outside the apartment complex.

  And there were several, a chorus line of wailing, shrieking, and bellowing. A grinding metallic crash, punctuated with broken glass, brought her fully awake. Somewhere down the street, a car horn blared incessantly and then gave way to an abrupt silence that was much too deep for a weekday dawn in Charlotte.

  Rachel rolled into a robe and rose to the window, assuming an auto accident. She had to remove the box fan to get a good look. The street was a mess. Cars were jumbled in a chaotic array, with traffic completely stalled. A city transit bus had slewed to a stop in the intersection. Two service vans had collided, one of them spilling bundles of blue towels from its cargo bay. Steam rose from beneath the hood of a Toyota sedan, and the driver’s arm dangled from the window. The hand was deathly still.

  That’s when Rachel realized the only movement on the street was a woman in business suit running awkwardly between the stranded vehicles, one high-heel missing, hair trailing out behind her in tangles.

  No, there were others.

  Chasing the woman.

  The nearest was a man in a khaki uniform shirt with a cloth insignia on the shoulder, like some sort of delivery driver. He slapped against the side of the bus as if not seeing it and staggered for a moment before continuing after the screeching woman. As if drawn by her cries, a man in a scuffed leather jacket dodged between vehicles toward her. His pursuit was blocked by two cars that had collided bumper to bumper, and he scrambled over the hood of an Audi sedan, sending bits of broken glass winking to the street. They were both gaining on the woman, who was too frantic to remove her lone high heel. She hobble-clopped toward the storefront of an electronics repair shop, where an old woman was collapsed against the door.

  Then Rachel noticed the other bodies…at least four that she could see at a glance. She recognized a pink cardigan sweater she’d loaned to Mira, and then recognized the long dark hair splayed out around her head where Mira lay prone on the sidewalk near a bus stop.

  Call 9-1-1.

  Rachel reached for her cell phone on the nightstand, although surely the police already knew about an incident this big. But the phone was dead.

  Her grandfather had tried to teach her about firearms, but she had resisted, refusing to buy into the violence of the world. Now she wished she had a weapon. But she didn’t know whom to shoot. Or why.

  Rachel shoved the screen out of the window and yelled at the panicked woman, hoping to draw the attention of her attackers. But while the woman turned and looked up, the two men plunged ahead, closing the distance. They were on her in an instant and began tearing at her clothes and hair.

  A rape, in broad daylight?

  But that didn’t square with the carnage below, or the dead bodies. This was big. Way big.

  And she remembered the stories about solar flares. She squinted at the rim of flaming orange that burned like a promise across the city skyline.

  Rachel didn’t yet realize it, but she was witnessing the glimmer of a new dawn, a world where death claimed its throne and the few survivors could hardly count themselves as lucky. Because the survivors would be alive and nothing more, while others among them—those who’d been sparked into a cataclysmic upheaval of evolution—would be more than alive.

  This was the first light of After.

  Someone pounded on the door.

  ***

  Scott Nicholson is the international bestselling author of more than 20 thrillers, including The Home, Disintegration, Liquid Fear, and Speed Dating with the Dead. His books have appeared in the Kindle Top 100 more than a dozen times in five different countries. Visit his website at www.hauntedcomputer.com or view his Amazon Author Central page. Sign up for the Tao of Boo newsletter for giveaways and free books: http://eepurl.com/tOE89.

  Look for the other books in the After post-apocalyptic series! If you read them and enjoy them, please consider writing a review so the series can grow.

  AFTER: THE SHOCK

  Book 1 in the post-apocalyptic series

  By Scott Nicholson

  A massive solar storm wipes out the earth’s technological infrastructure and kills billions. As the survivors struggle to adapt, they discover some among them have…changed. The first book in the After series.

  Learn more about it at Haunted Computer.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There were three of them.

  She’d stopped naming them a week ago. It had been an amusing distraction for a while—and the Good Lord only knew, she needed distractions—but then they’d all started blending together, the Black-Eyed Susans, the Raisinheads and the Meat Throats.

  Now, though, Rachel Wheeler couldn’t resist looking through the grimy drugstore window as she waited, crouched in the litter of baby powder and cellophane.

  Stumpy.

  The one on the right, sitting on the sidewalk bench surrounded by a mountain of bulging plastic bags, was missing his left arm just below the elbow. The wound was swathed in a filthy towel strapped
in place with duct tape, stained dark brown at its blunt end.

  Stumpy was waiting for a bus that would never come. Rachel couldn’t tell if he was a Zaphead. He might just be another of the schizophrenic homeless, one of the underclass that hadn’t even noticed that the world had ended. Although gaunt, he didn’t appear particularly motivated to kill, obsessed instead with swatting away the flies that swirled around his stump.

  He was fifty feet away, and she could outrun him easy. All she had to do was run as if her life depended on it. It wouldn’t be much of a challenge because her life had depended on it for days.

  A hundred yards down the street, The Beard, the guy staggering back and forth, was almost certainly a Zaphead. His expression was hidden by the unkempt hair, but he was hunched and his fists were clenched, rage curling around whatever strange energy burned inside of him.

  Okay, Beard, you’ve solved my little dilemma of whether I should head south or head north.

  The mountains were her destination, and they lay to the northwest, but she wasn’t willing to risk The Beard.

  The word “destination” sounded odd in her thoughts, because of the root “destiny.” Such abstractions were laughable now, but laughter was the only weapon against the fear that sapped the strength from her legs. And she needed her legs.

  Oh, yes, Lord, give me stumps for hands, but please don’t mess with my legs.

  In this scary new world, in this After, you had to run, dragging your guilt and fear and all the dark weight of Before.

  Learn more about After: The Shock at Haunted Computer, order a personally signed paper copy, or get the Kindle copy at Amazon US or Amazon UK.

  ***

  AFTER: THE ECHO

  Book 2 in the post-apocalytpic series

  By Scott Nicholson

  Six weeks after a massive solar storm wipes out billions, a small group of survivors must face a future that may have no room for them. A group of mutants called “Zapheads” are evolving to replace humans at the top of the food chain.