The remaining Zap showed no response to the loss of its companion, although it turned its head toward the sky as if summoning the birds. The flock assembled into formation and dove.
Instead of shifting their aim to the birds, they fired at the Zap. Their heavier firepower seemed to do the job that Lar’s Glock couldn’t, and the Zap staggered backward. When it collapsed, Lars saw a scattered series of rips in the silver suit, red liquid glistening from the wounds.
Just like the one we de-skulled in the house. For all they’ve changed, they still bleed like humans.
Lars didn’t want to think about what would happen if they evolved beyond the need for blood. Maybe they would just make facsimiles of themselves as they had done with the birds. A million marching machines striving for ultimate efficiency, eradicating all obstacles.
The birds stalled in their descent like planes with sputtering engines. They wheeled in the air far from their targets and then drifted to the bare branches of a weeping willow. They roosted for a moment, and then rose in unison and headed south, their gleaming bodies quickly lost against the white clouds.
One of the humans—the black man—was yelling something, but Lars couldn’t hear him over the wash of current. The other, smaller one with the chestnut hair hung back, changed her clip with practiced precision, then swept her rifle barrel around like she was ready to take on the whole world if necessary.
Lars eyed the other shore, wondering if he’d be better off leaving this town and these people. He’d done just fine on his own, and in his experience, making friends, acquaintances, or enemies usually ended up with the same result—death and soul-crushing despair. The slow decay of solitude almost seemed preferable.
But these people had guns, and he’d already risked his life to save others. The sacrifice had revived in him a brief flicker of humanity, and he couldn’t surrender yet. The Zaps had stolen most of their attributes and sought to improve upon them, but humans had yet to cede the trait called “hope.” As long as that still existed, the world was still worth fighting for.
He made his way toward the people on the bank, fighting against the current. Something tugged at one of his pants legs, and he kicked weakly. He couldn’t defend himself against submerged assailants. The best he could do was to remain a moving target.
The faster, the better.
He pulled his axe from its double loops of leather and used it as ballast, dipping it into the water to hook rocks and drag himself forward. When the water was knee-deep, he blew the collected liquid from his nose and stood. The black man held out his arm to help him, although the man was smart enough to stand ankle-deep so his boots offered some protection.
Lars fell forward and grabbed the man’s hand just as his pants were tugged again. The man leaned back and pulled him the last few feet onto the bank, where they both lay panting.
“You’re crazy as hell,” the man said.
“No crazier than you guys.”
The woman leaned the butt of her rifle against her hip and let the barrel angle up to the side as if posing for a magazine cover. She was thirtyish and attractive, but her face had a hard edge as if hope in her had been all but vanquished. The he saw her eyes.
The man must have sensed Lars’s tension, or maybe it was the way Lars squeezed his axe handle. “Don’t worry. She’s one of us.”
She tilted her rifle down until it pointed at the dead Zap. “I did that for you. Any questions?”
Lars had a thousand of them, but a muddy riverbank in the high noon of Doomsday wasn’t the time and place for them. But he did have one: “That third Zap. Where is it?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” the man said, rolling to his feet. “I’m DeVontay, and that’s Rachel.”
“Lars,” he replied, again taking the man’s hand and letting him help.
As Lars stood, water dripping from his clothes, DeVontay pointed at his pants. “Good thing you weren’t wearing skinny jeans.”
Lars’ baggy cargo pants had two large gashes in them, with exposed pale skin showing. There was a nick just below his shin, a thin trickle of blood leaking down. “I guess it’s a good thing I got out of there before they smelled the blood.”
“When did you figure out the river thing?” Rachel asked.
“Three years ago. A pack of Zaps chased us back in Asheville, and we crossed a river to get away. They didn’t follow us for some reason, so I figured they hate water.”
“You said ‘us.’ How many are with you?”
“None of that crowd’s left alive, as far as I know. Things went bad and I high-tailed it out of there.” Lars didn’t want to detail his experiences of hope and betrayal. He was sure they’d gone through their own. He also wasn’t going to let them know about Tara and Squeak until he knew he could trust them.
They risked their lives to save yours, and you still don’t trust them? So you’re THAT guy, huh?
“That dead Zap in town. That was you?” DeVontay asked.
Lars lovingly tapped his axe blade. “Yep,” he lied.
“You might be useful. We haven’t encountered Zaps in years, and it sounds like we could benefit from your education.”
“And I guess I could benefit from your rifles, since I lost my Glock in the river.”
“We’d better find that other Zap before it summons the birds,” Rachel said, turning away and heading back up the path.
DeVontay saw her torn backpack and said, “Looks like somebody else had a close shave.”
“You’ll see,” she said, disappearing into the thicket.
DeVontay shook his head and motioned for Lars to follow her. Lars checked the sky and saw only a normal—well, an apparently normal, since that adjective was as near extinction as the human race—flock of sparrows flapping into the wind toward the west.
The two men lingered over the supersized canine that lay disemboweled along the path. DeVontay knelt and poked at the corpse and then plucked a swatch of fabric from its jaws. It matched the gray canvas of Rachel’s backpack.
“She could’ve died, and I didn’t even hear,” DeVontay said.
“Looks like she can take care of herself,” Lars noted.
DeVontay turned the animal’s head. “You’re not getting my glass eye, you son of a bitch,” he said to the dead animal, letting its head drop into the mud with a thump.
Rachel was already on the road and heading back into town by the time Lars and DeVontay emerged from the thicket. DeVontay called for her to wait, and when she ignored him, DeVontay muttered, “Hard-headed woman.”
“The best kind,” Lars said. In truth, that was the only kind that could survive under these conditions. Aside from the Zap in her eyes, she behaved like a human, and this one-eyed, bearded black dude seemed to get along with her okay.
But he didn’t like the direction she was headed. He’d left Tara and Squeak in the outfitters’ shop when the Zaps came, and if they had listened to him, they were still hiding in the dusty corner behind a counter full of fishing gear and lifejackets.
He didn’t know Tara much at all, but considering the way she’d cleaved that Zap’s skull, she might have a hard-headed streak of her own. Harder than the Zap’s anyway.
If Rachel and DeVontay forayed into the heart of town again, that might draw more Zaps and their fine fake-feathered friends. And one of the mutant freaks was still unaccounted for.
“Lars,” DeVontay said. “With a name like that, I’m guessing you’re not from around here.”
“Norwegian. That’s why I’m so white I can hide in a basket of laundry. But I’ve been in the U.S. since I was a kid, so I’ve lost the accent.”
“I have the opposite problem. Dark enough for midnight but still got the gangsta style. How did you end up here?”
Lars didn’t know whether DeVontay meant “here” as in “Stonewall,” or “here” as in the wild post-apocalyptic landscape. Rachel was coming distressingly close to the outfitters’ shop, and he wondered again about her glittering eye
s. If she had some sort of telepathic sense, he’d never know. She could be leading them into a trap.
Never mind that she’d just killed a Zap and damaged their birds. Zaps would sacrifice for the good of their kind. Death to them wasn’t the end; it was the means to an end.
“Maybe we should get out of here,” Lars said. “No telling where that last Zap is hiding.”
“What’s the hurry? We can handle one of them. Besides, we need to find some more food, and maybe a firearm to go with that axe of yours. In case you haven’t noticed, the Middle Ages are over.”
“So what’s this, a New Dark Age?”
“Depends on which side you’re on, I guess. Zaps seem to be getting along just fine. Manufacturing those freaky-assed birdy things and those overgrown bullet-resistant sleepers. Who knows what else they’re cooking up?”
“And those hairstyles. Like something out of Dr. Seuss’s worst nightmare,” Lars said. Rachel was actually going into the shop. Like she knew Tara and Squeak were hiding there. What was her game?
“We’d better catch up,” Lars said, breaking into a jog, holding his axe so its handle didn’t bang against his thigh.
Soft thunder rolled across the hills, thunder that wasn’t caused by the atmospheric pressure increase and air expansion of lightning.
An unnatural thunder.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Stephen should’ve been glad Franklin was here, but he wasn’t glad at all.
He liked the old man, and Franklin had certainly imparted a lot of survivalist knowledge, but Stephen kind of liked being boss of the bunker. Whenever DeVontay and Rachel were away, Stephen was able to show off a little. Even though he admired Marina, among his other feelings for her, he was a year older than she was.
And he was, like, forever older than Kokona, who never aged. Both of them were smarter than Stephen, true, but he was bigger and he understood the bunker’s operating systems better than anyone. He’d even learned things that he never shared with the others, although he occasionally felt a little guilty over his selfishness.
Although he’d largely abandoned his childhood love of comic books, he still saw himself as something of a superhero. The post-modern, damaged kind, not the flawless and indestructible benefactors of a race they didn’t quite belong to.
You don’t get much more post-modern than this, Little Man.
So when Franklin sat at the little table in the telecom room, Stephen felt like a seafaring admiral whose helm had been seized by a pirate. So what if Stephen had screwed up by answering that radio call the day before? That didn’t mean he was stupid all the time.
“You going to make contact?” Stephen asked, knowing Franklin would never allow Stephen to put out a call, but the wispy-haired old codger would do whatever he pleased without a care for the consequences.
If there was one underlined passage in the Gospel According to Franklin Wheeler, it was “To thine own self be true, but everybody else is lying to themselves.”
Franklin fixed his ice-blue, bloodshot eyes on Stephen. “Doesn’t really matter. They’re coming anyway. The question is whether we should batten down the hatches or get the hell out of Dodge.”
“But this is our home. We can’t leave.”
“Even if you had a property deed, do you think these assholes would honor it? You burn the hell out of the planet, zap it back to the Stone Age, and sprinkle deformed monsters all around, and still the government’s gonna be the government. The more things change, the more things remain the same.”
“We can hold them off.” Stephen hoped he didn’t sound as whiny as he felt.
“We don’t even know how many of them there are. Might be a handful, might be a platoon, might even be a division.” Franklin tapped the wooden butt of his Colt Anaconda on the table and opened the cylinder. “As long as there are less than seven of them medal-polishing bastards, I got us covered.”
Stephen had taken target practice with the old man, and therefore figured the U.S. military had little to worry about. The pistol packed plenty of kick, but unless some soldier happened to grab the barrel and put it against his temple, Franklin was likely to miss.
Stephen was proud to be an M16 man. No muss, no fuss, plenty of room for accidents. Plus there were boxes and boxes of ammo clips in storage, at least a dozen. True, they could only slide open narrow portals in the door for firing, meaning anyone not standing right in front of the door was out of range, but on the other hand, bullets couldn’t hurt Eagle One, either.
He told Franklin as much, but the old man just scratched at whatever tiny vermin lived in his beard and said, “Plenty of ways to get rid of us if it comes to that.”
“Like what?” Stephen glanced at the security monitors, but they were as boring as always.
“They can cut off our water and power, block our air vents, and then just sit back and leave us gasping in the dark until we’re so hungry we’re eating each other’s livers. Kind of like what the Nazis did to the Russians in Leningrad.”
Stephen had only made it through the fourth grade—one of the few fringe benefits of the end of the world—but he’d seen a show on the History Channel about that. “But the Nazis didn’t win.”
“The point is, everybody lost,” Franklin said, irritated at being challenged. “Same thing could happen here.
“One problem with that plan,” Stephen said, thinking of the simple but fragile systems that delivered their solar power and water. “If they have to wait us out, we’re still safe inside here, at least for a while, and they’re out there, with the creepy critters and the Zaps. And even if they hang around for however long it takes, they still can’t get in unless we open the door.”
The secret electronic keypad had been one of the bunker’s first technological failures, leaving only the manual override to gain entry. But if the three-inch-thick steel door was bolted from the inside, it would take a bulldozer to open it.
“And if they can’t get in, then what’s the point of even coming here?” Stephen concluded.
“Well, there’s a problem with your problem, Little Man,” Franklin said, using DeVontay’s nickname for Stephen, a term that was rapidly becoming a joke instead of a nod of support. “We don’t know what kind of explosives they carry. Hell, they could have tanks. I’ve seen helicopters, and I know they have mortars and grenade launchers, and I’d bet a jar of yard gold that those high-handed parasites in D.C. stockpiled every toy known to military science. As long as the taxpayers were dumb enough to fund the very weapons that would one day be used against them, can you really blame them?”
Stephen tried to control his temper, because Franklin would just snort and say he was “full of piss and vinegar,” but he couldn’t help it. “What if they were actually trying to defend us? What if they thought something like this could happen and somebody needed to have their shit together?”
He hoped Marina didn’t hear the outburst. She was in Kokona’s room, but he didn’t know if the door was closed. The bunker did a great job of muffling sound, although the acoustics were tricky because of the metal doors and ventilation system.
Franklin gave a bemused grin, eyeing the circular row of bullet caps before him. “I reckon you’re too young to remember the world from before. Young enough to be ignorant of it, anyway. But we were moving toward more centralized authoritarian control, not the utopian peace and prosperity that they were marketing. Every new restriction was packaged in the name of freedom and wrapped in a red, white, and blue ribbon, and if that didn’t sell, then ‘In God You Better Goddamned Trust or Else.’ Slogans, bullshit, and bait-and-switch con games.”
“So what?” Stephen asked. “Where did it get them? What difference does it make now?”
Franklin flicked his wrist and snapped the revolver cylinder shut with a loud click. “It’s never been about survival of the fittest. The name of the game is to protect the shield. Whatever team you’re rooting for, there’s some rich asshole in a luxury skybox who’s raking in the ticket sales no
matter who wins. And assholes don’t give up the skybox unless you break out the guillotines and pitchforks.”
“I guess your—whatyamacallit, your word-image thing—”
“Metaphor. You been keeping up with your reading?”
Stephen ignored the teasing. “Well, let them have their D.C. bunker and all their toys. If they’re not going to hit back at the Zaps, then they’re prisoners just like us. All the power and money and bombs in the world won’t do them a bit of good if they have to crap in a bucket in the corner of a concrete room.”
“They got chemical toilets, son. And, no doubt, servants to scrub it out for them. Hell, half of them cockroaches have been chomping at the bit to bring slavery back. This is their once-in-a-lifetime chance.”
Stephen leaned his forehead against the cool concrete wall of the bunker, as if drawing patience from the timeless Appalachian soil beyond it. He spoke so quietly that his words were barely audible over the whispering vents. “What if we’re all on the same side? Would you rather be free in a world ruled by mutants, or just a piece of the machine with humans back in charge?”
“I’d rather be free either way,” Franklin said. “But do you really think this can go on?”
Stephen jerked his head and glared at Franklin. “What do you mean?”
“Kokona. Rachel. What do you think those powers that wannabe will do when they find out we’re fraternizing with the enemy?”
“We’re not—they’re part of the—” Stephen almost said “family,” but he didn’t want Marina to be part of the family. He didn’t want parents, either, and he sure didn’t need Kokona around to correct him and remind him that no matter how much he studied, he’d still be just a human and never good enough. Finally, he added, “They’re not real Zaps anymore.”
“I’m not worried about Rachel, although I probably should be. She’s blood kin, and that makes you blind to their faults. But Kokona...sometimes I wonder what’s going on behind those little volcanoes of her eyes.”
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