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

by Nicholson, Scott

  “Hi,” he said. “Where’s Brock?”

  “Holding down the fort. Literally.”

  “He’s really taken to this military business, hasn’t he?”

  “Seems like one of those guys who just needs direction.” She shrugged. “As long as he’s happy, I guess the end of the world was worth it to him.”

  DeVontay dug into his food, welcoming the salty sweetness of the meat. He glanced out the window and saw that Hilyard had collected a new group of civilians, putting them through those same brisk paces. “What do you think of the lieutenant?”

  “We’re lucky to have him. We’ve got a sense of purpose now. We did okay before, but it’s so much better to have some organization and a plan.”

  “I’m not sure holing up in Newton is such a great plan. Not with Zapheads on the move.”

  “So what would you do if you were king?” Sierra toyed with her empty coffee cup.

  “Stick with Brock’s original plan. Take the fight to the Zapheads.” He didn’t really believe that, especially not now that such an attack would endanger Rachel, but he wanted Sierra to think he was bold.

  “I can understand your desire for revenge,” she said, glancing at Marina. “The loss is still fresh.”

  “It’s not that.” He tilted his head forward in a conspiratorial manner, unsure of how much Hilyard had told everyone. The officer had possibly withheld information to keep up morale. If his people thought the enemy was invincible, they’d be less likely to risk their lives for one another. “The longer we wait, the harder it’ll be to beat them.”

  “No way. We’ve got guns, ammo, food, shelter, and a decent defensive position. We’ve got the advantage now.”

  “We’re still outnumbered, even after yesterday’s massacre.”

  “I was on one of the scouting missions. We didn’t see anything, but we heard you guys had an encounter.” Sierra stroked Marina’s hair, and the girl looked up briefly and smiled.

  “Ran into maybe a hundred of them, but we fought our way out. And rescued Stephen. He came to the mountains with Rachel and me, and—”

  “He didn’t know Rachel was dead,” the girl said, not pausing with her drawing.

  DeVontay froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. “You told him?”

  “My momma’s dead.” She shook her head. “What do I care?”

  Sierra frowned in sympathy. “He was mad at first, but then he just kind of went blank. Like he wasn’t sure what to feel.”

  “Where did he go?”

  Marina put down her blue crayon and selected the green. “He went with Mr. Wheeler. I saw them out the window.”

  Franklin?

  He reached across the table and gripped Marina’s wrist to stop her drawing. She looked up with wide, wounded brown eyes. “Which way were they going?”

  Marina jabbed her crayon up the street. “Toward the jail where my momma died.” Her façade broke and tears welled in her eyes. Sierra stroked her hair and embraced her in a hug.

  The gesture reminded him of Rachel comforting Stephen, and it gave his heart a twist. He pushed his plate away. “Got to go.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Sierra said. “Somebody reported shots fired inside the hospital. Could be Shipley.”

  “I think I know who it is.” As DeVontay stood, he pointed at Sierra’s rifle. “Can I borrow this?”

  “What happened to yours?”

  “Lost it coming back from patrol last night.”

  “Why don’t you sign one out from the armory?” Sierra nodded across the street. “It’s over there in the bank building.”

  “No time.”

  She looked into his eyes, then realized one of them was artificial, and she focused on his good eye. “All right,” she said, digging into the knit handbag beside her. She pulled out an extra magazine, the metal sleeve packed with maybe twenty rounds.

  “You got eight rounds loaded. But in case you need more.” She slid the magazine across the table toward him.

  “Take care of Marina,” DeVontay said. “We need to protect our future.”

  “Take care of yourself. It’s not smart to go out there alone.”

  As he returned to the street, he wondered if Rachel was in the hospital with Kokona. What if they had encountered Shipley’s men? They would see her eyes and that would tell them all they needed to know.

  When he turned the corner, he went to the barricade of cars at the end of the block. A woman in a parka with a rifle slung over her shoulder was smoking a cigarette, sucking in smoke with a pained expression.

  “Hi,” DeVontay said. “Did you see an old man and a boy head this way maybe an hour ago?”

  “The bearded guy, Franklin Wheeler? Yeah, they were scavenging from what I can tell. Lord knows the man needs it, considering how awful his wardrobe is.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to check on them. I kind of adopted the boy, and that old man’s crazy.”

  “Oh, yeah. I was kind of wondering about that—why would somebody trust that crazy old coot with their kid?”

  DeVontay squeezed between two vehicles to head down the street, waving to the guard in thanks. “Remember my clothes,” he said. “I don’t want you to accidentally shoot me.”

  “Easy to remember,” she said. “Your fashion sense is about as awful as Franklin’s. But if you got flaming eyes—uh, I mean eye—then I put you down.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Someone fired a gun—not inside the hospital, but on the far side of town—and he wondered if Shipley’s men had encountered Zapheads.

  It was just as likely that someone got spooked on a scouting mission. DeVontay was ready for anything, his fingertip resting on the trigger guard. When the jail came into view, he fought off memories of the horrors he witnessed there. The babies were horrible enough, but discovering Rachel’s corpse was one of the most devastating moments of his life.

  Second only to watching her corpse walk out the door.

  He headed for the hospital, hoping Kokona couldn’t control Rachel as easily as the mutant baby had controlled him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “All better now?” Rachel patted the disposable Pampers that covered Kokona’s bottom. “Dry and comfy?”

  “All better,” Kokona said.

  Rachel smiled. She’d never really thought about having children of her own. Well, she’d thought about it, as something she’d probably do someday just because that’s just what people did. But she’d never actually considered the entirety of it—getting pregnant, carrying a fetus inside her, enduring the unimaginably painful stretching as life forced its way from a place smaller than itself, and then encountering the solid, undeniable fact of a creature that would win her endless devotion.

  “What are you thinking just now?” Kokona asked.

  Rachel wondered if this were some kind of test. Or maybe an admission that Kokona couldn’t read her mind. But she could feel Kokona inside her, almost as if Kokona were as much a part of her as a fetus would be. The other New People were there, too, like a murmuring crowd waiting for Rachel to step into its midst.

  “I was thinking that I enjoy taking care of you.” Rachel grabbed a stocking cap from its merchandizing hook, removed the price tag, and snugged it down on Kokona’s head. The cap was white and fuzzy, with long sheep ears dangling down the sides. “You’re so cute!”

  Kokona giggled and slapped at the sheep ears, tugging them with her little fingers. “That’s soft.”

  Rachel grabbed a hand mirror framed in pink plastic and turned so Kokona could see herself. The baby fell quiet and reached for her reflection, and Rachel understood this was her first real encounter with herself—that she might have an identity distinct from the rest of her tribe.

  “My eyes are like yours,” Kokona said. “I knew this as a fact but it’s different when you see it.”

  “You’re a chip off the old block, all right.”

  “Like mother, like daughter?”

  Rachel put the tip
of her finger on Kokona’s nose and pushed lightly. “I’m your carrier, silly. Not your mother.”

  Is it a fantasy, or does Kokona look disappointed? Does she have any memory of her real mother?

  Rachel finished dressing Kokona and laid her on a blanket as she collected a quilted diaper bag and filled it with items the baby would need. She adjusted the straps so she could wear it as a backpack. She was about to collect some food for herself out of habit and realized she wasn’t the least bit hungry. She slipped the diaper bag on her back and cuddled Kokona in her arms.

  Kokona looked up with those sizzling eyes, and in their fiery twin furnaces, Rachel detected—or imagined—a yearning. She sat on the cool floor and leaned back against the bundles of diapers. With the weight of the baby against her chest, she was consumed with a motherly desire to be able to feed Kokona from her own body. What more precious gift could she offer than her very self?

  “This is new,” Kokona said.

  “It’s new to me, too.” She wasn’t sure what Kokona meant, but the initial invasion of the other voices of her tribe had faded and she’d become more attuned to her own thoughts and memories. She wasn’t quite Rachel—she suspected there was no going back once that genie was out of the bottle—but her core was intact.

  “You’re different,” Kokona said. “We knew it when we changed you at the farmhouse. We wanted you to be like us, but you’re not. You’re the first—neither fully human nor fully New.”

  “I am one of you.” Rachel didn’t want Kokona to feel threatened. This baby still wielded immense power, and Rachel was unable to resist her desires. The bewilderment in the aftermath of her revival still circled her mind like swarms of ghosts. If she didn’t fight to anchor herself, she would be swept into them and vanish forever. But she had to hide that struggle from Kokona.

  “And this ‘God’ inside you?” Kokona asked. “We haven’t learned that.”

  Rachel had forgotten God. Or, more accurately, she knew the word but it carried no meaning or feeling. She understood it as an idea, not something she’d once felt as a powerful presence in her life. Perhaps that was another thing death took from her. “God is when all are one.”

  “So the New People are God?”

  “God loves no matter what.”

  “Does God love me?”

  “I suppose so. I mean, yes, of course. God loves all creation.”

  “Do you love me?”

  The question was so odd in the silence of the abandoned grocery store and coming from such tiny plum-colored lips that Rachel couldn’t comprehend it. “What made you think that?”

  “I learned it from you. But I don’t understand.”

  “We don’t love,” Rachel said. “We are New.”

  “But it’s in your head. I know you’re hiding things, but you can’t hide that. It’s too big.”

  There are other big things in my head. Can you see them or hear them or know them?

  Kokona’s expectant expression didn’t change. Rachel decided the baby was telling the truth. She wasn’t even sure if the baby was capable of lying, but she’d been taught by humans, so anything was possible.

  Was even love possible?

  “I feel you,” Rachel said. “I feel all of us. We’re all New People. That’s a form of love.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Do you love me?”

  “Love is when you do things for someone because you care for them. What if I only do things for you because I’m your carrier?”

  “Like putting this cap on me? I didn’t make you do that.”

  “Maybe you did, in a way. Because I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Because you wanted to be helpless.”

  Rachel shook her head and smiled at the child’s intuitive intelligence. “Then maybe that’s a kind of love.”

  “Do you love me as much as you loved Stephen?”

  The name jolted something loose deep inside her. “You didn’t tell me what happened to him.”

  Kokona winced, and Rachel realized she had shouted, her words echoing through the cavernous metal rafters of the store. “He was taken by one of the Old People. One of the humans.”

  More memories and faces emerged from the mist but they refused to solidify. They were facts, but they were also fantasies. Their presence disturbed her, but their vagueness disturbed her more.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll soon be able to make him New,” Kokona said. “After we bring back the babies.”

  “The babies? Where are they?”

  Kokona giggled. Her eyes glistened intensely, their radiation creating a soft globe of light around them in the dark interior. “Did you think I didn’t know? Your little game. Tricking me into hunger, coming here, talking to me of mothers and daughters.”

  Rachel tried to send a wall of fog over her mind to hide all the things inside that she had yet to sort out, but Kokona was already in there. Burning away the fog like a morning sun. “How—”

  “I learned from you. From humans.”

  “Then you know of love, too. You know why I want to save the people I loved.”

  Kokona’s face curdled in disgust. “You’re not New at all. You’re a thing that came after New. And you couldn’t leave your memories behind.”

  Rachel rolled to her knees, pushing Kokona toward the ground, repulsed by the twisted face and glittering eyes, made all the more terrible contrasted with the sheep-eared cap. “Go away go away,” Rachel said, setting the baby stomach-down on the grimy tiles.

  She rose and took off running.

  “Rachel Wheeler,” Kokona called in a commanding tone.

  Her name reverberated in Rachel’s head with a hundred voices. She stopped. What am I doing? I can’t leave her. I can’t leave THEM.

  She returned to the baby, bent down, and tenderly scooped her up.

  Kokona nodded in approval. “You’re my carrier.”

  The memories dissolved. “I am your carrier.”

  “This is why I brought you back. Because humans can hide their thoughts. You can’t.”

  Rachel kissed Kokona on the forehead. How had she not seen how beautiful the child was? How perfect. A new messiah for a new world. Who was Rachel Wheeler to question this miracle? “I love you.”

  “I know. We’re going to the hospital now. Go there go now.”

  “Go there go now.”

  Rachel headed down the aisle to the front of the store, and a dull, rhythmic thrumming arose. She passed through the checkout counters and the booming grew louder as she reached the entrance.

  Before she squeezed through the sliding doors, she heard them, and then saw them:

  Two hundred New People with radiant eyes, chanting “KOH-ko-nah, KOH-ko-nah, KOH-ko-nah.”

  Half of them bore firearms, while the rest, even the little ones, held knives, sections of metal pipe, heavy wooden sticks, short lengths of chain, and other stabbing or bludgeoning weapons.

  “Your dream of peace was a lie,” Kokona shouted over the rumbling. “But you’ve taught us what really matters. We’ve finally learned what we really need to know to survive.”

  Something inside Rachel tumbled and stirred in the fog. Faces formed—DeVontay, Stephen’s, Franklin’s, her dead sister Chelseas’s. But they were only memories, and memories weren’t facts.

  This was the fact.

  “Go there go now,” Kokona commanded.

  And Rachel did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Easy back there,” Franklin said, although the going was pretty difficult for him, too.

  They’d piled the baby corpses onto a stretcher—Stephen pausing once to throw up again—and hauled them out a side door that locked itself behind them, and now they were working their way around the squad of Hilyard’s soldiers and militia that filtered through the hospital. The morgue’s exit led to a loading dock and an enclosed pen for the hospital’s dumpsters, affording them concealment from anyone on the ground, although they would be visible to anyone looking down from windows on the buil
ding’s east side.

  Fortunately, the afternoon shadows made them more difficult to see. A service van and a semi-trailer gave them cover to reach an outlying clinic where the hospital’s parking lot met that of the jail.

  Franklin glanced through the rows of vehicles and saw several people fanning out around the building to search the grounds. Two of them—one in uniform and the other a plump woman with wild hair and sunglasses—stood at the entrance to the emergency room.

  Stephen struggled to keep up, although Franklin stooped low in order to take more of the weight in front. His back screamed with painful knots and his knees trembled with effort, but he was determined to get well away from the hospital before they rested.

  “Mr. Wheeler?” Stephen asked, in a shaky voice.

  Franklin glanced behind him but couldn’t see the boy. “What?”

  “We dropped one.”

  Franklin shook his head, whispered a cussword, and said, “Ease ‘er down.”

  They rested the stretcher on the pavement. Franklin picked up the baby that had fallen. A small red hole in its temple gave way to a jagged maw on the other side of its head. He couldn’t tell its gender, but the fact that it was still warm—as Rachel had been in repose—gave him the creeps. He half expected the damaged infant to open its eyes.

  “Look, Mr. Wheeler,” Stephen said, surveying the people around the hospital.

  Franklin nestled the baby into the pile, issued a quiet “Stay there,” and joined Stephen. A man in dark trousers and a hoodie knelt by a sedan near the emergency entrance, working a length of hose into the vehicle’s gas tank. Around him were several five-gallon fuel cans. He put the hose into his mouth, appeared to inhale a few times, and then pushed the end of the hose into the can, spraying a stream of bluish-gold liquid.

  “Siphoning gas,” Franklin said. “Brock said he’d burn it down, and I guess he meant it.”

  “But they would’ve burned the babies,” Stephen said.

  “That’s the point.”

  “And probably us if we were still in there.”