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

by Scott Nicholson

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Do you trust them?” PFC Colleen Kelly asked Capt. Mark Antonelli.

  “I don’t know if it matters.” Antonelli watched on the monitor as Franklin and Stephen vanished into the forest, heading east. The sunlight slanted through the trees, sending their shadows before them like lean, stiff giants.

  Colleen had closed the door to the telecom room behind her as she’d entered, and her clean, healthy smell filled the cramped space. Antonelli forced himself to keep his distance, even though no one could see them. The affair was common knowledge among the troops, but he was obliged to maintain appearances. He was responsible for thirteen lives, and he’d damn well do a better job than he had with the twenty-five he’d lost in the last few days.

  “They saved our lives,” Kelly said.

  “Probably. But they’re more worried about their group than about our mission.”

  “I don’t blame them. You have to put on your game face, but the rest of us know this is a one-way trip.”

  “Really?” Antonelli had deceived himself about many things, but he refused to admit he’d overestimated her. Colleen’s resiliency and strength were even more attractive than her bright green eyes and flaming red hair. He wouldn’t have bedded her if she had been an air-brained parakeet, squawking and preening. Even as an escape from the stark reality of their looming extinction.

  Maybe you’re overestimating yourself, soldier.

  Kelly closed the distance between them, and Antonelli’s gaze shifted from her mesmerizing eyes to her full lips. “Come on, Mark. The Fourth might not even be there when we get to Asheville, and then what?”

  He kept his face a mask of stone. “What are you suggesting?”

  She raised her arms, palms up. “Stay here. We’ve got supplies, it’s safe, and we can buy some time to figure out what’s going on. The Zaps have obviously developed some freaky new ways to kill us, not to mention all the things crawling around out there waiting to munch us.”

  The idea had flitted at the edges of the captain’s thoughts, but he’d refused to allow it entry. And he’d have to come out hard against such talk. Under Directive 17, sedition and mutiny were punishable by immediate death, and Antonelli had sole power to make the decision.

  Judge, jury, and executioner. All you have to do to save the human race is to become inhuman.

  “Have the soldiers been talking about this?” he asked, glancing at the video monitors to see the first tinges of dusk licking at the horizon.

  “No, this is just me talking.” She took a step closer so that he could feel her breath on his stubbly cheek. “But I’m not just thinking about me. I’m thinking about us.”

  “It’s not my call,” he said. “I’m just following orders.”

  She moved with a suddenness that caught him off guard, slamming her fists into his chest. “Damn it, Mark, this isn’t Afghanistan. You’re career military and that’s your life, but I was a paralegal for a D.C. law firm. In my world, there are plenty of sides to every story and no single way to get to the job done.”

  “This isn’t your world anymore. It isn’t our world. We’ve lost it.”

  “And it’s your job to get it back, is that it?” Her eyes widened and her pupils were dark and large against the brilliant emeralds in her eyes. Her anger made her even more beautiful. “You’re going to singlehandedly turn back the sun and undo the shit that God and nature spewed down on us? You’re going to kill us all just so you can die with the proud belief that you did your duty to the end? You’re going to let me die for your honor?”

  Like the breaking of a heavy, raging storm cloud, her eyes gave way to tears and she collapsed against him. Reflexively he caught her and held her close, his chin resting on the top of her head as she shuddered with sobs.

  He’d cried a few times himself since the solar storms, but always in private, and never when he had a mission in front of him. He’d faced Doomsday with the same relentless resolve as he’d adopted while chasing Al-Qeada or ISIS or any of the ephemeral enemies of democracy that could erupt into a real and terrible force at any moment. But this current enemy was far more unimaginably strange and powerful.

  And this woman was incredibly warm in his arms.

  “It’s not my call,” he repeated, in a whisper this time. He was a coward for kicking the can down the road like that. “As soon as I hear from Field Command, we’re moving out. If they order us to stay, we stay.”

  She lifted her head from his shoulder, tears streaking her freckled cheeks. She studied his face for a moment and then gave up trying to read his buried feelings. “Can we just have one more night, then? You and me together like a man and a woman should? No shame, no hiding, no hurry?”

  “Okay,” Antonelli said. Anything to let her salvage a shred of self-respect, and anything to spare him a night alone with his guilt. “I’d like that.”

  He kissed her on the forehead and she squirmed away impatiently, then tilted her head until their lips touched, softly at first and then with a crushing desperation.

  His head swam and blood surged through him like molten lava. He tried to fight it off and then surrendered. Some dams were made to be broken.

  “We should spend the night in here, then,” he said when he finally pulled free.

  Colleen blinked her eyes dry and rubbed her cheeks with the insides of her wrists. “Okay. I’ll wait until the coast is clear and drag a bedroll in here.” She studied the dusty floor. “Barely enough room for two.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to stay squeezed together all night.”

  “That sounds like an order.”

  Yeah. We both know who’s in charge around here, don’t we? All I can do is kill us, but you know how to make us alive. If only for a little while.

  “We’ve been in here too long,” he said. “People might notice. I’m going to go check on our prisoner.”

  “What are you going to do with her?”

  “Whatever the brass says.”

  She looked furtively away, and Antonelli frowned. She was lousy at keeping secrets. “What?”

  “It’s about Tan.”

  “Private Huynh?” The soldier had been severely wounded in the leg during the assault of the dive-bombing metal birds, but Colleen had done a stellar job of patching him up. In less than forty-eight hours, the Vietnamese recruit had gone from facing an amputation and the likely onset of shock and gangrene to walking around with little more than a limp.

  “Marina—the girl—brought Kokona in to see him. I didn’t think anything of it, since they lived here and…well, I figured they wanted to help.”

  “So?” Antonelli felt a vague sense of unease. “Did they do anything?”

  “I don’t remember. I was so tired and depressed. I mean, we’d just come out of that slaughter and—”

  “Did they do anything?”

  She shook her head, hair brushing the shoulders of her camo shirt. “I don’t think so. She’s just a baby. It was just weird, you know.”

  “Weird enough that it’s been bothering you. Like it has something to do with Private Huynh’s recovery?”

  “It’s probably nothing. I just wanted to get it out there. We don’t know anything about the Zaps. And everything we thought we knew is turning out to be wrong.”

  Antonelli went to the door. “She’s a talking baby. I’ll just ask her.”

  “Is that why you let Franklin and the boy leave? So you could do what you need to do with the baby?”

  He checked the hall, saw Cpl. Tidewater standing guard inside the front door but looking the other way, and slipped out of the room. “Nobody will stop me from doing what needs to be done. Keep an ear on the radio.”

  Antonelli closed the door behind him, checked with Tidewater, and looked in on a few of the soldiers resting on their bunks. They were haggard and dirty, despite the refreshing food they’d discovered in the mess hall. Huynh was among them, lying back and staring at the concrete ceiling, his face blank. “At ease,” Antonell
i said before the soldiers rose to salute. Then he asked Huynh, “How are you feeling, Private?”

  Without meeting his eyes, Huynh said, “Like killing Zaps, Captain. Win war and go home.”

  “Damn right.” Antonelli had no idea what the man imagined “home” would look like. A hole in the ground? An abandoned house? A burned-out shell of an apartment complex? The notion of settling down to a normal life was so remote that Antonelli assigned it the same class of fantasy as obscene wealth and unconditional love.

  Huynh’s bandaged leg showed a brown splotch of dried blood but otherwise appeared functional and healthy. Antonelli didn’t know what a Zap infection would look like. Would the skin turn neon green and would his eyes flare like miniature volcanoes? Huynh’s eyes were nothing like Kokona’s. If anything, they were the black of bottomless wells that drained away to a place beyond memory.

  But weren’t all of them hollow by now? After losing the world and watching it change so that day by day humans had no place in it?

  “When do we roll, Captain?” asked one of the soldiers, a rodent-faced man who’d been an auto mechanic before the storms but was now pledged to give his life for the human race.

  “Soon. Rest up while you have the chance. Everybody get enough to eat?”

  “Wouldn’t mind some cherry pie, but otherwise, can’t complain.”

  The soldiers glanced at one another, and Antonelli wondered if they were sharing a joke about him and Colleen.

  You’re just paranoid. Either way, to hell with it.

  “After we blow the Zaps back to hell, I’ll bake you one myself,” he said as he left the room.

  He didn’t look into any of the other rooms, since the doors were closed. At the end of the hall, his XO, Lt. James Randall, sat in a chair reading a rumpled magazine. Antonelli waved at him to stay sitting and asked, “How’s the little freak doing?”

  “Just laying there, as far as I can tell. The girl came to see her but you said nobody in, nobody out.”

  Antonelli peered through the little glass window in the door. The room was dark except for the yellowish haze around the baby’s face. So those weird little eyes were open. What was she thinking about? Summoning her metal birds? Watching the soldiers die a slow and painful death when the other Zaps found the bunker? Or dreaming of a mother’s warm breast?

  Antonelli unholstered his sidearm and gave it to Randall. “Just in case.”

  Antonelli’s caution was almost silly since the baby couldn’t even lift the pistol, much less operate it. But he saw no need to take a chance. He had no idea of the depths of Kokona’s power. If she could control synthetic birds, maybe she could control him.

  “If I’m not out in five minutes, come in and kill her,” Antonelli added.

  She didn’t speak as he entered. She was bundled in blankets, with only her rounded Asian face showing. The room stank as if she’d soiled her diaper. Antonelli flicked on the lights to diminish the eerie spotlight of her stare.

  “So, Captain, do you have your orders?” she said, with that same maddening coyness that prevented any interpretation of her true thoughts. Antonelli didn’t even consider the possibility of her feelings. Mutant freaks didn’t have feelings. Only humans did. That’s why they were at war.

  “I just have a few questions for now,” he said, sitting on the opposite bunk. This had been the older girl’s room when the civilians had occupied the bunker, and any trace of its military origins were buried under pink and purple decorations scavenged from the houses of the dead.

  “Are you going to torture me? Burn me with cigarettes? Tear out my fingernails?”

  “Have you been watching American movies?” Her creepy little voice grated on his raw nerves.

  “I read a lot for an eighteen-month-old.”

  “What do you know about these metal birds that attacked us?”

  She giggled. “Birds of a feather flock together.”

  “Are any of your kind anywhere near the bunker?”

  “Do you mean babies or mutants?”

  “Which cities do they live in?”

  “We’re everywhere by now, and we’re going to keep it that way.”

  “Why do you want to kill us?”

  “Because you have guns and bombs and knives.”

  Antonelli was exasperated. He wanted to ask about Huynh but didn’t want the baby to know he suspected her of having mysterious powers. “If we promise to let you live, will you try to stop us or send the birds to attack us?”

  “As long as you leave Marina with me.”

  “To take care of you?”

  “To take care of her.”

  Antonelli stood, anxious to get away before he surrendered to the urge to wrap his hands around that tiny brown neck and wring the breath from it. He couldn’t kill the prisoner without orders, and now he regretted reporting her.

  But he would call now and try to raise HQ. Although radio contact was unreliable, maybe he’d get some direction. With luck, he’d be ordered to ship out for his rendezvous with the Fourth Division and that would be that. Life might not get better, but it would sure as hell get simpler.

  “Babysitting wasn’t in the job description when I enlisted,” Randall said as he returned Antonelli’s weapon.

  “Neither was fighting monsters and mutants. At midnight, get Tidewater to relieve you, post Andrews at the entrance, and stand down for some sleep.”

  “Aye-aye, Captain.”

  The captain hurried back to the telecom room, eager to get resolution on his next move. It was unoccupied, and Colleen had yet to sneak her bedding into the room. Antonelli studied the monitors, where dusk had settled on the landscape. Aside from the flickering of the aurora that made the forest seem to teem with movement, all was still.

  Then he noticed the radio on the metal table. The little red power indicator was dark. He turned the unit around and saw the rear plate had been removed, and several circuits and fuses were missing. Wires protruded in a chaotic snarl. Someone had sabotaged it beyond repair.

  Colleen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be traveling at night,” Stephen said.

  “It’s never really night when you have auroras,” Franklin said. “I like to think of it as an acidhead’s carnival.”

  “What’s an acidhead?”

  “I forget, the Sixties are like ancient history to you, and civilization blinked out before you received your proper cultural education. Let’s just say dropping acid made a lot of hippies think they were Zaps.”

  Tonight the aurora was comprised of shimmering bands of lime and magenta as charged particles skated the atmosphere and formed wispy ghosts in the sky. Nests of white stars were visible beyond the veil, a hopeful sign that the universe kept on with its business despite what had happened to one particular planet in an unremarkable solar system. The land was suffused with a soft glow, and a low mist hung over the ground, adding to the magical tableau. If not for the deadly creatures lurking in the haze, this could have been a pleasant autumn nature hike.

  They were eight miles from the bunker, walking a wooded path that wound through what had once been national park land along the Blue Ridge Parkway. They could’ve veered onto a gravel road lined with farms and abandoned houses, but the forest offered more concealment despite the possibility of predators. Neither of them was worried about Zaps. Despite the bird attack, Zaps had shown little interest in them until the Marines had landed.

  Stephen, who usually blabbered on about everything from comic books to his big dreams of building an underground city, had been unusually quiet for the last mile or so, doing a poor job of scanning their surroundings for trouble.

  “You thinking about Marina?” Franklin asked.

  “No, why?” the boy answered, so swiftly that Franklin knew he’d hit the mark.

  “You’ve spent a lot of time with her since you moved to the bunker.”

  “I didn’t like leaving her, but she shouldn’t be out here where it’s dangerous.”<
br />
  Franklin knew that was bullshit. Marina was a better shot than Stephen, had nearly as much physical endurance, and like anyone who’d survived this long, harbored a toughness and resiliency that was up to any challenge. “I don’t exactly trust this new government, but the captain has no reason to hurt her.”

  “Kokona’s a different story, though.”

  Franklin wasn’t sure how the boy felt about the mutant. Rachel was the glue that held their oddball family together, and Rachel had a bond with Kokona that surpassed human understanding. Franklin had doubts about the little Zap’s intentions. But he deferred to Rachel’s experience and intuition. Maybe when it came to Zaps, it took one to know one.

  But Stephen had been with Rachel and DeVontay since shortly after the solar storms and had survived many challenges with them. No doubt his perspective was different from Franklin’s. Franklin could afford to be cynical; he’d had six decades of practice.

  “The captain might do something, but it’s not our place to intervene,” Franklin said. “Whoever’s giving him orders—and I believe him when he says there’s still a functioning government—probably knows a whole lot more about the overall situation than we do.”

  They came to a rocky promontory that offered a breathtaking view of the valley below. The river wound through it like a radioactive snake, its surface glittering with foam and reflected aurora. Overgrown pastures broke the uniform rows of trees, and here and there two-story houses and barns were visible, their tin roofs glinting under the sky. A mere five years ago, electric lights would have dotted the landscape with just enough density to impart a homey sense of comfort without seeming an unnatural intrusion.

  Seems like a million years ago. If we ever have scientists again, I wonder what they will call this era.

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Franklin,” Stephen said. “All that libertarian horseshit you shovel, I would think you’d see Kokona deserves the right to live as free as any of us. Come to think of it, why don’t Zaps have rights and liberties?”

  “Because when you’re an illegal immigrant, you don’t get to make the rules,” Franklin said, annoyed at having his personal beliefs turned around on him. “They crashed the party and pissed in the punch bowl.”