After: Dying Light (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 6)

by Nicholson, Scott

  “Was he your carrier?”

  “I walk on my own.” He said it more forcefully than he intended. “Come on. Let’s go find Rachel.”

  And maybe the Zaphead nursery after that.

  She wriggled in his grip and Stephen almost dropped her. He wondered if she’d sensed his anxiety. Smelled it. Like something rotten deep inside him.

  He hauled her to the door and unlatched the deadbolt. He eased the door open, wincing as it emitted a squeak that seemed loud and jarring enough to wake the dead guy back in his office. He poked his head out and scanned both directions, as well as the windows of the nearby buildings and houses.

  And Stephen realized he’d have to trust her with his life. “Which way?”

  She waved a tiny hand toward the sun that was sinking fat and red into the smoky western horizon. “Go there go now.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Franklin was used to losing Rachel.

  He’d lost her the first time in a shopping mall when she was six years old. He was at the newsstand kiosk talking with the proprietor about Middle East policy and Rachel was right there beside him, thumbing through a copy of Ranger Rick. But somewhere in the middle of Franklin’s rant about shadow enemies in the sand, he glanced down and she was gone. He waded through the milling people who seemed to be in no hurry to get nowhere, frantically searching Toys R Us, the Sugar Shack candy store, and even Old Navy.

  He was about to take that final emasculating step—contacting mall security and dealing with rent-a-cops who would probably grill him as if he were a murder suspect—when he found her in the foyer, where a scary-looking bald clown was twisting balloons into animals.

  The second time he lost her was when he turned his back on the world, slipping first into the militia movement and then opting for the solitude of his mountain compound. Although he managed to maintain some contact via the Internet, he’d missed her transition to adulthood.

  He’d lost her the third time when the solar storms wiped civilization off the map. Even though he hoped she would survive and join him at his compound, the odds weren’t great and he’d figured her among the billions dead.

  Then she’d turned up at Wheelerville, except she was half mutant due to a transformation after the Zapheads healed her severe dog bite. And the mutant half won out, compelling her to come to Newton to help the Zapheads communicate with the humans they sought to replace as the world’s rulers.

  So death, despite its finality, wasn’t a crippling blow to Franklin. He’d killed her off by degrees in his mind and heart, just as he’d walled away the rest of his feelings. Jorge’s family, Lt. Hilyard, DeVontay, Stephen, and the other survivors brought him back to the human race, but he almost resented the contact now. Because emotions were painful, and love and friendship couldn’t last in the face of time’s ceaseless erosion.

  As he left the funeral home where Rachel rested in a casket lined with polyester batting, he closed the lid on her image and focused on the small clusters of survivors gathering near the town square.

  Lt. Hilyard gave him a grim nod as he joined the group. Brock and Sierra, the leaders of the ragtag civilian militia that helped Hilyard’s troops defeat the Zapheads and drive off Sgt. Shipley’s squad, eyed Franklin warily as if he might erupt in a fit of wild rage. Jorge still sat sullen-faced on the bench, Marina on his lap. Hilyard had appropriated the lethal grenade launcher Jorge used to kill his wife.

  “Six dead,” Brock reported to Hilyard, as if he were a junior officer instead of a frat boy with an AR-15.

  “I lost two of my soldiers,” Hilyard said, “so I’m down to eight. We have enough to hold the town unless Shipley drums up some reinforcements.”

  “What about the Zappers?” Franklin said. “Even if we cleaned up the town, there are probably more in the outskirts. And if the babies can sense each other, then maybe some other Zap tribes know what happened here.”

  “The babies know,” Jorge said in a hollow voice.

  “Mommy wanted them to change me,” Marina said in a quivering voice. “Into one of them.”

  Jorge squeezed her tightly and she pressed her face against his shoulder as if she could burrow her way out of After. Her vulnerability tugged at Franklin and caused him to wonder about Stephen.

  The boy’s surely dead. If the Zapheads didn’t get him, the winter did.

  He shook away the thought. Best to focus on the living now.

  “What do you think, Lieutenant?” Franklin asked. Even though Brock’s militia assigned Franklin lofty status as a notorious outcast, Franklin deferred to Hilyard. Not only was the man a trained military leader, but Franklin didn’t want responsibility for anyone’s safety. Everyone he touched seemed to die or go over the edge.

  “The downtown’s easy enough to defend and the fires are about out,” the craggy-faced Army officer said. “We can post a few lookouts on the rooftops, push some cars to barricade the streets, and sweep the rest of the town to clear out any strays. Probably enough food and supplies to buy us time to regroup and settle on a long-term plan.”

  “What about all these bodies?” Brock asked.

  “Stack ‘em in the hospital like the Zaps were doing.”

  “Except the Zaps wanted to bring them back to life,” Franklin said. “According to Rachel.”

  “They can heal wounds,” Jorge said. “I’ve seen that. But I can’t believe in resurrection.”

  Franklin was about to offer a mocking bit of religious cynicism, but he froze with his mouth gaping open.

  Resurrection?

  Rachel?

  No. It was too insane. Even though the solar storms had twisted science like a cosmic pretzel, sparking a mutant race with strange powers, death was a barrier that no power could breach.

  Still, he couldn’t turn his mind away from the idea.

  Hilyard barked out some orders to Brock and Sierra and flashed some hand signals to a soldier on a distant rooftop.

  Franklin paid no attention to their strategizing. “Jorge, can I ask Marina something?”

  Jorge’s dark brow furrowed. “She’s not doing well.”

  You killed her mother. I don’t think you’re doing so well, either. “This is important.”

  Jorge stroked her long black hair and kissed her temple. “Can you talk with Mr. Wheeler? Remember how he helped us when we left the farm. Just for a minute, and then we’ll find a quiet place to rest.”

  “What’s going to happen to Mommy?” the girl asked, her nose clogged from weeping.

  “Don’t you worry about her,” Hilyard said. “My men will make sure she has a nice resting place, too.”

  Franklin doubted that. Jorge’s grenade had cut Rosa into pieces, as well as the mutant infant she carried. Their bodies were out of sight, concealed by the concrete jail facility and its cluttered parking lot. Just more meat cooling in the December sundown, waiting for maggots and vultures to clean up the mess now that no Zapheads were around to collect the bodies.

  Franklin knelt beside the girl so he could speak softly. “The Zaphead babies. Were they all in the jail?”

  Marina wiped at her eyes. “Not all of them. They said they were waiting for one more.”

  “And that baby was in Newton?”

  “Yes. It was in the school with the rest of the babies, but people took them when those soldiers started shooting.”

  “There were nine at the school,” Jorge added. “All of them could speak and read, and they were learning about us.”

  Only seven babies lay in the carnage of the sheriff’s office, along with the gunshot victims found in the jail cells. Franklin didn’t know what kind of hell had erupted in there, but Rosa was at the center of it. Counting the baby she’d fled with, that made eight tiny victims.

  He recalled Rachel’s final words: “The ninth.”

  She was telling them to find the last baby.

  But why? Surely she didn’t think the baby could save her. Or bring her back to life.

  She was part mutant, though, so sh
e knew more about their mysterious workings than anyone.

  Maybe she wanted Franklin and DeVontay to protect the baby and allow it to finish the mission she’d undertaken herself—to bridge the humans and Zapheads so they could learn to coexist. Franklin wanted no part of that job. He’d given up on the human race long before the solar storms exposed the frailty of his kind, and he’d be damned if he’d stick around to watch mutants run the show.

  Rachel was a healer, a school counselor with deep religious faith, and she was relentlessly optimistic. It wasn’t fair that she was dead and Franklin still breathed the gritty air in a world he rejected at every turn.

  But life wasn’t fair. That was God’s greatest joke—giving humans just enough brains to imagine themselves special while setting up the universe as a random roulette wheel that tilted wildly as it spun.

  “You all don’t really believe the Zaps were planning to bring everybody back to life?” Brock said. “I know they stacked up the dead like bowling trophies and Barbie dolls, but why do they want these rotten, stinking, bloated things anyway?”

  “You haven’t been paying attention,” Hilyard said. “Have you ever looked at a dead Zaphead? I mean, really looked at it?”

  Brock thrust out his chin in defiance. “Dead is dead, man.”

  “They don’t decompose,” the lieutenant continued. “Just like they don’t seem to age.”

  “None of the babies at the school learned to walk,” Jorge said. “They developed mentally but not physically.”

  “Whatever happened during the solar storms, it changed them at a biological level,” Franklin said. “A thousand scientists soaking up taxpayer dollars could figure it out eventually, but right now all we have is our eyeballs. And it looks to me like a new kind of science.”

  “This last baby,” Hilyard said. “If it’s still in town, we need to find it. Maybe it can tell us about any other Zapheads in the area. If the babies are their leaders, we can’t let any of them escape.”

  “But it needs a human to take care of it,” Jorge said, glancing past the jail to the site where he’d murdered his wife. “It won’t be alone.”

  “Survival of the fittest,” Franklin said. “It’s time to choose sides.”

  He headed back to the funeral home. Did he dare play God and try to bring Rachel back to life?

  He wasn’t sure how DeVontay would react, and he wasn’t even sure of his own motives, but Rachel would want him to try.

  The ninth.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The shadows grew long on the street ahead of Stephen as the sun hit the distant mountaintops. His arms ached from carrying Kokona, but he didn’t dare complain. The buildings and houses had thinned out, which was weird. He thought Rachel was downtown, and they seemed to be heading out of town.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” he asked, careful not to sound concerned.

  “We have to go the long way so we don’t run into the military men,” Kokona said. “They would kill both of us.”

  “Maybe they all got killed already.”

  “Not all of them. Most of the bullets were for New People.”

  She didn’t seem angry about the massacre of her tribe. But Zapheads never seemed to care whether they lived or died.

  They passed a big white house with a bare oak tree in the yard and a dusty minivan in the driveway. A bicycle lay on its side in the brown grass, silver streamers on the handlebars. Stephen wished he could mount it and pedal away, back to the summers of his Charlotte childhood where he had a mom and a best friend named Alex and a turtle named Ned. Except he was still in his childhood.

  And he realized that for the rest of his life, even if he made it to a hundred, he would be stuck in After. In a world with mutant talking babies, crazy soldiers, and no video games. If not for Rachel and DeVontay, as well as Franklin Wheeler, he would have no reason to go on.

  “You said the babies were in the jail,” Stephen said.

  “With Rachel,” Kokona said, her voice sounded small and hesitant. “We’ll be there soon.”

  Stephen tried to picture the geography from his mountaintop view of the town two days ago, but all he could recall was the courthouse in the center of town. If he could find the domed white building, or at least spot the flagpole with its tattered stars-and-stripes, he would feel better about his situation. Newton was so small it didn’t even have a Walmart. How could anyone find their way around without a Walmart?

  Dark was fast approaching, and they’d have to find a place to spend the night soon. “Do you even need to sleep?” he asked the baby.

  “I don’t have to, but I can. I close my eyes and remember what I’ve learned.”

  “Do you hear the others of your kind? Like, in your head?”

  “It’s not like hearing, exactly. I feel them.”

  Stephen thought of the comic-book characters he knew. Professor X, the leader of the X-Men, was a genius who could read minds and control others. He used his powers for peace but often got drawn into violence despite his best intentions. He didn’t think Kokona had that kind of telepathy. She certainly hadn’t read his mind as far as he could tell.

  “Maybe it’s like bees or ants,” Stephen said. “Where the whole hive thinks with the same mind.”

  “No. Because the babies are smarter. If we all thought alike, the bigger ones would be smart, too.”

  “I guess so. People aren’t like that. We let grown-ups run things.”

  “From what I can tell, that wasn’t working so well,” Kokona said.

  “It’s not working so well now, either.”

  “We’ll figure it out.” She smiled up at him as if they had all the time in the world.

  The street narrowed and now there were no more stores, just houses. Vehicles were less frequent, too, many of them parked in gravel drives. He didn’t see any bodies, and he was glad. After all that shooting and Zapheads on the attack, the streets should be littered with the dead.

  “I’ll need to eat and sleep soon,” Stephen said.

  “One of these houses might be safe. I don’t think anyone’s around.”

  Stephen switched arms so Kokona’s weight moved to his left shoulder. She now felt like a wet sack of beans. He wondered if he’d have to change her diaper. That would be icky. He’d changed his cousin Bobby’s diaper once, and it was gross.

  “I wish I could sense my people like you can sense yours,” he said.

  “Then you could tell the bad ones from the good ones,” Kokona said.

  “Except for my friends, all of them are bad.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  Her eyes glimmered. “Really?”

  “Well, ten and almost a half.”

  “So you won’t be a grown-up for a long time.”

  “Neither will you.”

  “I won’t grow any bigger. Just smarter.”

  Stephen thought that was really weird. Comic-book weird. “You mean I’ll have to carry you forever?”

  “You or somebody else.”

  Stephen didn’t want to think too much about that. “I’m tired, Kokona.”

  She waved her arm down the street, to a low, gray concrete building that had a metal door and two small windows like eyes. “Go there.”

  The building was a little out of place among all the houses, and it looked like some kind of small factory. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to find food in it, and the inside would be dark. He’d rather rest out in the open, maybe in a garage or on a patio, even though the air was growing colder. And for food, you couldn’t beat a convenience store—Slim Jims and Snickers bars really kept the wheels turning.

  “Looks kind of spooky,” Stephen said.

  “It’s safer than a house. A person can’t fit through the windows, and nobody can bust through that door.”

  Stephen was used to the high, precise voice of the little baby, but her intelligence was still shocking. She seemed to be getting smarter by the minute, even though Stephen h
adn’t taught her anything. She was learning on the fly.

  If she’s this smart by herself, what would happen if a bunch of these babies got together?

  He knew what would happen: they’d figure things out and take over. Even though Kokona was cute and helpless, he couldn’t forget what the Zapheads had done to his friends and how many times they scared the heck out of him. When it came right down to it, she was the enemy.

  Rachel said Jesus loved his enemies. You had to turn the other cheek and forgive them. But if you turned your cheek to a Zaphead, it might rip the meat out with its fingernails and then pluck out your teeth one by one like daisy petals.

  One thing for sure, he couldn’t carry Kokona much further. He headed for the building, keeping an eye on the houses lining each side of the street. The town was quiet, with just a few ribbons of orange from distant fires shimmering against the clouds. The gunshots had ceased, which made it even harder to judge his location. Despite the calm, Stephen felt vulnerable wielding nothing but a knife.

  When they reached the building, Stephen found the door slightly ajar, cool air drifting from it. He could barely make out the letters on the metal sign above the door: MORELAND CHEMICALS. A sign below it featured several colored circles designed to let firefighters know about hazardous materials on site.

  “Might be polluted in there,” Stephen said.

  “Are you afraid of becoming a mutant?”

  Stephen took that as a dare, so he shoved the door open with his foot and entered without checking the interior. Kokona’s eyes were bright enough to illuminate the entrance, and Stephen could make out rows of barrels and shelves lined with boxes and plastic jugs. A blocky, oily-smelling fork lift sat in the middle of the open concrete floor. The place stank of chemicals, and Stephen wondered how he could possibly fall asleep here.

  A soft glow emanated from the back of the building, and he thought a loading bay door might be open. Then the glow broke into pieces and moved, like fireflies in summer twilight. Something scuffed and shuffled, causing Stephen’s ribs to clench with anxiety.

  Zapheads.