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

by Scott Nicholson

  The volunteer tending to Hardwick’s facial cut grew solemn and serious. Hardwick winced as a wet cloth touched her wound, but she continued. “The general was lying on the ground, his legs moving, so we were loading him up when the blast or ray or whatever it was struck again. And that’s where the rest of my crew went. I fell and heard the bones in my arm snap, but I didn’t black out.”

  “Anyone still in the field?”

  Hardwick shook her head, looking down. “Don’t know for sure. I don’t think so. When I got off the ground, I made a sweep, and I swear, the closer to that column of light I got, the stronger I felt that little tickle of electricity. Whatever that ray is, it’s coming from whatever they’re doing. Like they were sucking down the sky and smashing it into some kind of silent killer beam. The chopper started shaking and I was afraid it would disintegrate and drop out of the sky, so I headed back.”

  She peered up at Murray with such a look of misery that Murray patted her good arm. “You did the right thing, Warrant Officer.”

  “I lost the chopper and probably some of our guys.”

  “You didn’t kill them. That was the Zaps, and don’t you forget it. They’re the enemy. They’re the cause of all this. Okay?”

  Hardwick pursed her lips and nodded. Murray returned to check on the general, who was now awake and trying to sit up, ignoring the concerned requests of his caretakers. “Madame President,” Gen. Alexander said when he saw her, deep pouches under his eyes. “I regret to inform you that the mission failed. No survivors.”

  “We haven’t even started this war yet,” she said. “The Zaps are going to learn the hard way who really owns this damned planet. Gather in the ops room at oh six hundred.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She turned to see Schlagal in the gray haze of dawn, helping the crews remove ammunition and cargo from the wreckage. Murray went to request her attendance at an emergency cabinet meeting.

  Directive 18 was at hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When the van door opened, DeVontay blinked at the pink light of sunrise, cumulus clouds ridged with purple and gray drifting to the south.

  Rachel was already awake, and Bright Eyes had no need for sleep. Squeak was still curled up in a pile of blankets, her face smooth and unworried.

  “We’re moving out,” said the soldier who’d opened the door. Behind him came shouts and the rattle of activity.

  “To where?” DeVontay asked.

  “Ask the colonel. I just follow orders.”

  DeVontay woke Squeak, who seemed dazed, and gave her a drink from a water bottle. They climbed out of the van to find the camp in a frenzy of activity as soldiers packed their gear and loaded it into trucks. The chopper that had delivered them to the camp fired up its engines and lifted off, whipping red and yellow leaves from the treetops. The October morning was chilly and their breath was visible, but already the sun was burning away the frost.

  The soldier marched them through the bustle of activity to the command post. DeVontay’s initial estimate of the camp’s size now seemed small—there were a number of tents tucked under trees along the slope, as well as several more transport trucks. The soldiers stared at them, obviously not used to seeing Zaps up close.

  When they were ushered inside, the colonel put down the radio mike and turned to them without a greeting. He motioned to a man standing to one side of the entrance. “This is Captain Antonelli. He’ll be your liaison and it’s his job to keep you alive as long as necessary.”

  The captain looked at Bright Eyes with open revulsion. Then he studied Rachel with hostile curiosity. “You’re from the bunker at the Blue Ridge Parkway? Near Milepost 291?”

  “How did you know?” Rachel asked.

  “We seized it for the government,” Antonelli said. “Franklin Wheeler described you two. Didn’t tell me you were half Zap, though.”

  “Where is he? Are they all safe?”

  “I don’t know. He took off with the boy to look for you.”

  “How long ago?” DeVontay asked.

  “You have your orders, Captain,” Col. Munger said, waving them outside as the radio crackled and a transmission came through. DeVontay picked up the words “high casualties inflicted by unknown weapon” before they were escorted outside by the guard.

  “We promised the colonel we would help,” Rachel said to Antonelli. “We’re on your side here. So why can’t we help each other?”

  “We were attacked,” Antonelli said. “I lost two-thirds of my unit, but Franklin saved the rest of us by inviting us into the bunker. The next day they went to Stonewall to find you. They never came back. And then some of my troops were slaughtered—”

  “Inside the bunker?” DeVontay said. “That place is nearly impenetrable.”

  “One of my men…” The captain pointed at Rachel’s eyes. “He went like you, I guess. Part Zap. He must’ve done it.”

  “What about the baby and the girl?”

  “He took them. I mean, I think it was the baby—I told all of this to the colonel. She’s an evil little bitch. She was behind the attack that killed my people. We have reason to believe she’s heading for Wilkesboro.”

  “Kokona’s harmless!” Rachel said.

  “You would say that, wouldn’t you? Tell that to my dead soldiers.”

  “You’d better not let her reach Wilkesboro,” Bright Eyes said.

  Antonelli was stunned, as if he didn’t expect the Zap to be capable of comprehensible speech. “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t have a leader. They can be defeated now. But if she unites them…”

  Antonelli considered this. The troops were already moving out, marching to the road in twos and threes or piling into the backs of the trucks. “You say she has a telepathic ability that all mutants will respond to?”

  “If they are in proximity. The range depends upon the available energy. Around Wilkesboro, I would estimate that’s about a twenty-mile radius.”

  “So that would mean you could pick up on her if you were close enough?”

  “Almost definitely,” Bright Eyes said. “She might detect my betrayal and somehow block me from reception. But I would likely locate her before she could sever the communication.”

  Antonelli glared at Rachel. “And you? Do you have any of that Zap ESP?”

  Rachel put her arm around Squeak’s shoulder and pulled the girl close. “Not really. I get a kind of tingle, but I’ve been away from them too long. I’m mostly human now.”

  The colonel came out of the command post, securing his cap firmly atop his head as if ready for business. “You ready to roll, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir. They say they can lead us to the Zap baby.”

  “I can’t risk the whole operation on that, Captain. Take them along with your private and try to infiltrate the town. The chopper’s going to drop you as close to downtown as it can get. If you can take out the baby, do it. Otherwise, we roll as planned. We’ve got reports of these energy sources in several cities and we’re trying to hit them all at once in a coordinated assault.”

  “Yes, sir.” Antonelli saluted and the colonel headed down the hill with his adjutant following, the radio strapped against his back.

  “What about the girl?” DeVontay asked Antonelli. “She can’t be in the middle of a fight.”

  “I can’t let you go,” Antonelli said. “I figure Rachel here is less likely to betray me if you’re the collateral damage. I don’t know how Zaps think, but if she’s got any human left in her, she won’t risk her boyfriend and an innocent child.”

  “Yet you would risk an innocent child?”

  “I didn’t invent war, Mr. Jones. I just fight them. And win them, if possible.”

  The chopper returned from whatever morning mission it had undertaken, and as it settled in the clearing, most of the camp was already abandoned. Aside from the litter and smoldering heaps of campfires, it was difficult to believe that several hundred people had camped there.

  “P
rivate Kelly!” Antonelli called, and a red-headed woman in a white T-shirt with an unbuttoned camouflage shirt headed their way.

  “Do I have to ride in the helicopter again?” Squeak asked.

  “It looks like it, honey,” Rachel said. “We’re going back to town.”

  “Can we find my mommy?”

  DeVontay and Rachel exchanged a look that only Bright Eyes caught.

  So many people to find. And some of them might not be around anymore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Deep underground beneath Luray Caverns, High President Murray took a breath of the bunker’s stale air before she continued.

  “We’ve got confirmed sightings of these columns in D.C., Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Atlanta, Wilkesboro, and Richmond. No doubt there are more. We’re checking with our radio network and feeding all that information back to NORAD, where there are still a few operating computer systems.”

  “If what we saw in D.C. is any indication, we can’t beat them with conventional tactics,” Gen. Alexander said. He looked as if he’d aged a decade during the couple of days in the field. “Especially given our shortage of troops and firepower. If we even had a tank division and a bomber squadron, maybe we’d have a chance.”

  “You’re talking all that just to take back one city,” Schlagal said. “There might be a hundred of these across the country. Maybe they’re all over the globe.”

  “If we get telecom with Israel and London again, we can confirm that,” Murray said. “And with luck, the Kremlin and Beijing. If these are the destination centers and the accumulation points for the Zaps, then at least we’d have most of them in one place. That’s better than having them scattered everywhere.”

  “We’re the ones that are scattered everywhere,” Schlagal said. “The few of us that are left, I mean.”

  Murray shook her head. “Well, that might be our edge, our evolutionary advantage. The last extinction event created the Zaps and pushed them to the top of the food chain. Maybe it’s time to create another extinction event. This time it’s one we control.”

  “Directive Eighteen is the ultimate end game,” Alexander said. “We’re not desperate yet.”

  “We’ve been desperate for five years, Arnold.” Seeing a look of genuine agony cross his face that he couldn’t hide despite his stoicism, Murray added, “How’s your shoulder?”

  “Just fine, considering a piece of shrapnel as big as a golf ball dug into it. I’ll live. Apparently only long enough to die in a nuclear holocaust, though.”

  The steel-lined chamber was part of a small complex where heavy equipment and vehicles were stored, shielded from the effects of severe electromagnetic pulses. Although the main intention was to provide for a functioning government in the event of nuclear war, it also blocked the extreme solar wind that had swept over the planet and still fluctuated in sporadic bursts that could threaten their exposed equipment at any time. Radio communications were still spotty, and Murray’s fear was that all contact might be lost at any time.

  No, your greatest fear is what you know you have to do.

  Unspoken among the three of them was the knowledge that this bunker might grant them a reprieve from radioactive fallout. But that would only be temporary—there was no hiding from a nuclear world.

  “We still don’t know what we’re up against,” Schlagal said. “Maybe the mutants are bored with us. Now that we’re no longer a threat, maybe they’ll leave us to our caves and compounds.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” Alexander said. “And I think they haven’t come after us because they’ve been busy preparing. After what they did to us in D.C., I think they’re ready now.”

  “That’s what we have to decide,” Murray said. “I know it’s my decision, but I won’t order it unless you two are both on board.”

  “You know my reservations,” Schlagal said. “We’re already at low-level radiation exposure due to the nuclear plant meltdowns. Unleashing forty nuclear warheads would probably triple it. And that’s just generalized exposure, the kind that gives you cancer in six months or two years. Those near the blast zones would be at great risk of immediate death and localized fallout.”

  “The point is immediate death,” Arnold said. “For the Zaps. We don’t even know how they will react to radiation exposure, so our best hope is to get them with the destructive force of the blast.”

  “This is where it requires the entire Earth Zero Initiative,” Murray said. “Even if we manage to wipe out their nests in this country, what stops the Zaps from coming up from Mexico or eventually migrating over from Europe? As rapidly as they seem to be developing their new technologies, they’ll likely have planes and ships soon. We’ve already seen what they can do with those guided metal birds—what if they started making those at hundred times the scale and outfitted them with weapons? It would make our drone attacks look like water balloons. If they can create weapons of mass destruction ten times faster than the human race did, what will they unleash in a year or two?”

  “It’s a gamble,” Schlagal said. “You’re betting we’re near the tipping point, that we’re the ones facing extinction.”

  “No,” Alexander said. “Directive Eighteen wasn’t dreamed up by a poet. It was an agreement by all the major governments we could contact. If it looks like we have no chance, then we shut down the party.”

  “And the last one leaving turns out the lights,” Schlagal said.

  “I’m not asking for a final decision today,” Murray said. “We’re waiting for NORAD to collect the inventory of Zap cities. In the meantime, we’ll conduct our conventional strikes as planned.”

  “We’re hitting Atlanta, Charlotte, and Wilkesboro today,” Alexander said. “With two of our best divisions. If they can’t make a dent, then it’s ‘go’ time.”

  “Helen?” Murray asked.

  “You told me to support your decision, even if you’re wrong. You’re wrong, but you’re the president.”

  “As president, I want to fry those sons of bitches back to the heart of the sun,” Murray said. “But as a person, I just want to curl into a ball, sleep for twenty years, and dream that we’d never have to use poison as a tonic.”

  “Try not to think of all those children getting cancer, not to mention any mutations you’re raining down on a world that’s already veered into a whole new biological mode,” Schlagal said. “No telling what monsters might wander out of your nuclear soup.”

  “You’re a comfort to me in troubled times, Helen,” Murray said.

  “I wouldn’t want to die by anyone else’s hand, Abigail,” Schlagal replied.

  Alexander touched his wounded shoulder. “That’s as close to unanimous as it’s going to get. If necessary, the human race becomes its own extinction event.”

  “It somehow feels like the path we were on all along,” Murray said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  As Kokona nestled in Marina’s arms at the highest remaining point in Wilkesboro, some six stories off the ground in an office that smelled of melted plastic and scorched metal, she experienced a strange moment of peace.

  Life before the bunker had been thrilling, largely because of the newness of her condition and the rapid growth of her intellect. That was mirrored by the communal experience of sharing the evolution of her entire tribe, a promising genetic addition to the world. But that utopian ideal wasn’t universal among them.

  Defectors or aberrations were easily dealt with among the adults. They tended to cull themselves. But the problem was with the other babies—all of them brilliant and willful and ultimately helpless because of their physical limitations. They could only achieve their aims through manipulation.

  Kokona had hated sharing power with the other infants. That was much of the reason she had agreed to go with Rachel and live among humans. She had yet to develop the necessary cunning to seize the control she sought. Years in the bunker spent building her ideas and developing her talents had been well spent. But now she was ready.

>   And so was Wilkesboro, apparently. From scanning the minds of the Zaps here, she’d learned that her predecessor Geneva had once ruled as part of a triumvirate but had killed the other two babies. No, Geneva hadn’t personally administered the killing blows, but as Huynh had shown, there were always certain willing and pliable parties around to do the dirty work.

  “What do you think of the city?” Kokona asked Marina.

  “H-how long are we going to stay?”

  “As long as we need to.”

  “I miss Rachel and DeVontay,” Marina said. “And Stephen.”

  “Perhaps we’ll see them soon,” Kokona said. “It appears all of heaven and earth flows here.”

  And possibly hell, if one believes in theological layers of sin and punishment and reward. And if one believes, so shall others.

  Huynh would serve as her bodyguard, at least until she could reassemble the several hundred mutants who had scattered after Geneva’s death. She mentally summoned them even as she carried on her conversation with Marina.

  Marina provided a tenderness and comfort that a Zap caretaker could never match.

  Kokona had a half-Zap protector, a human nurturer, and, soon, a Zap army.

  She had the best of both worlds.

  Too bad one of the worlds must die.

  THE END

  ***

  Next #3: Radiophobia

  When mutants develop technology that threatens the dwindling human race, the last survivors fight to regain control of their world.

  Rachel Wheeler and her friends are dropped into the enemy stronghold of Wilkesboro as part of a desperate military operation. Their mission is to disrupt a new energy source that will give the mutants unlimited power. Little do they know that the remnants of the central government have launched nuclear strikes on all major mutant colonies, and they will be caught in the fallout.