After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4)

by Scott Nicholson

  “You going to be responsible for her?”

  “I have been for a while.” DeVontay took the knife and knelt beside Rachel. “Are you okay now?”

  “Sure,” she said. “We’re going to Milepost 291, right? See, I remember.”

  “That’s right.” DeVontay gave a weary smile, relieved that her tears were drying up. He could handle mutant behavioral changes, but he couldn’t handle vulnerability. They had to be tough now. Or, at least pretend to be, for Stephen’s sake. “But we have to rest first.”

  “Just for the night. We need to get to my grandfather’s camp soon.”

  “Just for the night.” DeVontay sliced the leather strap from her legs and helped her to her feet. “I’m going to leave your hands tied for a little bit, just to make sure.”

  Her eyes narrowed, shooting hot anger at him, but he ignored her glare. Rage was better than sadness, as far as he was concerned. “I wouldn’t hurt you,” she said.

  “It’s not just me,” he said, nodding to Hilyard, who was already heading up the trail, moving between the cluster of large granite slabs and deeper into the forest. Stephen took Rachel by the elbow and guided her up the trail, and DeVontay followed, the knife thrust in his belt and the empty rifle on his shoulder.

  Campbell tried to capture the horse, but it danced away from him as if playing a mischievous game. “Okay, pal, you’re on your own.”

  By the time Campbell caught up to them, the horse had decided to follow, and the second horse was still tethered to its tree, nibbling on a patch of gray moss. DeVontay freed it, boosted Rachel astride its back, and then lifted Stephen up behind her. “It’s slow going now, but you may as well ride while you can.”

  The group followed Hilyard, whose footfalls scuffled leaves as he headed toward his camp.

  They didn’t notice the three Zapheads watching them from a dark crevice in the granite boulders.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lt. Hilyard’s camp was a thick stand of tree branches built against a sloping sheet of gray granite.

  Rachel sat before the campfire, her hands bound in front of her. The skin of her wrists had rubbed raw almost to the point of bleeding, but she wasn’t going to beg for release. The best thing now was to act normal, to pretend she was the same as she had been before.

  The trouble was she couldn’t quite remember what that was like.

  As evening approached and the shadows of the trees merged into one solid wall of darkness, the others gathered closely around the fire, welcoming its heat. With November, the nights grew long and cold, and the higher elevations made for a harsher climate. Rachel wondered if her grandfather had been unwise to build his survival compound in the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but he’d always insisted that being off the beaten path “will keep tourists away.”

  Are you out there, Grandpa? Are you still waiting for me like you said you would?

  Will you still love me if I’m a Zap—

  But she couldn’t finish that thought. She wasn’t a mutant. She felt perfectly normal.

  So she worked her fingers into the tin can of mealy substance—the lieutenant and DeVontay wouldn’t let her have a utensil—and shoved as much into her mouth as she could stomach. She wasn’t hungry, but she understood the need to keep her body nourished. DeVontay was standing watch near where the horses were tethered about fifty yards away. The others mostly ignored her, although Stephen occasionally glanced at her, wary and exhausted.

  “Aren’t you worried about the fire?” Campbell said to the lieutenant, finishing off his MRE. “Somebody might see the smoke.”

  “If you use dry wood, it’s not bad,” Hilyard said. “Even if someone noticed the smoke in the treetops, it would be nearly impossible to pinpoint the source. And it will burn out before dark.”

  The lieutenant held up his own can of military food and said, “Besides, this stuff is bad enough when it’s warm. You don’t want to go cold turkey.”

  Stephen peered down into his own can. “Is this turkey?”

  “Maybe vulture, if you’re lucky.” Seeing Stephen’s face curdle, he added, “Just kidding, son. That’s Grade-A American pork right there.”

  “Glad you had some food,” Campbell said. “We haven’t scored anything for two days.”

  “What are you people doing up this way? Seems like you’d stay in the valley and head south for the winter. If it’s good enough for the birds, it’s good enough for civilians.”

  “I don’t think the birds are flying south this year,” Campbell said. “The zap knocked out their directional instincts. I’ve seen geese flying in twos and threes, no pattern, and they don’t seem to know where they’re going. Last week, I saw a seagull. And we’re five hundred miles from the coast. I’ll bet other migratory animals are knocked off kilter as well. I saw a show on the Discovery Channel that said gray whales migrate up to 12,000 miles in a year. Bet they’re turning circles now.”

  “Makes sense. Most of what I know about EMP comes from nuclear weapons research they taught us at West Point. But they didn’t teach us a damn thing about Zapheads.”

  “What’s EMP?” Stephen asked, licking his spoon.

  “Electromagnetic pulse,” the lieutenant said. “A burst of energy. In our case, the sun is like a big nuclear bomb that decided to go off on its own.”

  “My mom told me about nuclear,” the boy said. “She said it was going to kill us all one day.”

  The boy stared morosely into the fire at the memory of his mother. Rachel’s heart lurched at the sight. She couldn’t comfort the boy. Not with her hands bound. Not when they were treating her like a prisoner. Or worse, like a wild animal.

  If she sat here long enough and behaved—like a human—then maybe they’d release her. That might take days. The tears had worked pretty well. Maybe more of those, if necessary. She surreptitiously wriggled her wrists to loosen the leather strap.

  “Your mother might be right,” Campbell said to Stephen. “I met this professor who said four thousand nuclear power plants are melting down.”

  “Yeah,” Hilyard said. “If the Zaps don’t get us, we can look forward to a slow death from cancer.”

  “That’s horrible,” Rachel said. “Don’t scare the boy any more than you already have.”

  “He needs to deal with reality,” Campbell said. “This isn’t a Boy Scout hike. This is survival of the fittest, and if you bury your head in the mud, you’re not going to make it.”

  Rachel smirked at him. “DeVontay wouldn’t say that.”

  Campbell’s jealousy flickered and shifted to anger as he jerked to his feet. “Well, your boyfriend hasn’t done such a good job of it. Where was he when you were dying of blood poisoning from that dog bite? Who saved you from the Zapheads at the farmhouse? Which one of us almost got Stephen killed down in the valley?”

  “Easy now,” Hilyard said. “We’re on the same team here.”

  At least for the moment. Rachel shot a cool glare at Campbell, and then motioned to Stephen with her head. “Come over here, honey.”

  The boy’s eyes brimmed with tears, and he sniffed wetly. “You…I don’t know who you are anymore.”

  “I’m Rachel. And I told you I’d be here for you all the way to Mi’ssippi where we’d find your dad.”

  Stephen flung his tin can into the fire, sending sparks wafting up in a wild dance. His lower lip trembled as he spoke. “My daddy’s dead. Quit lying.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Either dead, or he’s one of them. Just like you.”

  The rage flared but she suppressed it. Campbell and Hilyard watched her with narrowed eyes. “Stephen. Look at me.”

  He snorted some snot back up his nose and ignored her for a moment. But he must have considered the love and support that After would offer him on his own and decided Rachel was better than nothing. When he finally turned to her, she fought down a surge of victory.

  The boy is mine.

  But he looked past her, to the edge of the forest
, where DeVontay emerged carrying the rifle that Hilyard finally trusted them enough to load. “Did I miss the party?” he asked.

  “Plenty of fun left for all,” Hilyard said. “A laugh a minute.”

  “Your watch,” DeVontay said to Campbell, holding out the weapon. “There’s a big oak trunk scorched by lightning that makes a pretty good lookout perch.”

  Campbell snatched the rifle away and gave a mock salute. “Aye aye, Captain.” He glared at Rachel as he left the camp. “I wish I’d left you at the farmhouse. You’d be queen of the Zaps by now.”

  “What’s his problem?” DeVontay asked.

  “That he’s not you,” Rachel said.

  Stephen dashed to DeVontay and gave him a tight hug around the waist. DeVontay tugged the boy’s baseball cap and chuckled with false cheer. “Hey, Little Man. What’s got you so down?”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “We won’t be here long, but we need to rest. And Lt. Hilyard was nice enough to share his camp with us.”

  “That’s not what he means,” Rachel said. “He wants to go back to the way it was before.”

  That sounded reasonable. That sounded like the school counselor she’d been in her previous life. That sounded like something Rachel would say.

  “We might have scared him a little bit,” Hilyard said. “I’m sorry, son. I’m not used to children. I’m career Army. I forget what the civilian world’s like.”

  “I think we all have,” DeVontay said, giving Stephen a soothing stroke on the shoulders. “We’re going to make it, Little Man.”

  “I don’t want to go to Mi’ssippi no more,” Stephen said. “I don’t even remember what my dad looks like.”

  “We don’t have to worry about that right now,” DeVontay said. “First, we’re going to Milepost 291 and Rachel’s grandpa’s camp. We’ll be safe for a while. Then we can figure out where to go from there, okay?”

  The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and nodded. “Okay.”

  “Good,” DeVontay said. “So, did I miss dinner?”

  Hilyard dug into a canvas satchel and tossed him an MRE. “Caviar and foie gras.”

  “Good enough. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

  “DeVontay!” Stephen said, drawing a giggle from Rachel. The giggle almost got away from her, threatening to build into a wild cackle, but she swallowed it down.

  “Don’t worry, both of them are fine. But we may have to let them go if the terrain gets much steeper, okay? It’s cruel to walk them up those rocks.”

  Stephen nodded, following DeVontay back to the fire. As DeVontay sat on a large stone several feet from Rachel, she held up her bound wrists. “I’ve been a good girl. Think I can get time off for good behavior?”

  He leaned forward until his face was inches from hers, and she realized he was studying her eyes. She didn’t know if she could diminish the heat collecting there. The best she could do was smile. Humans smiled when they wanted to fool somebody. “How do I look?”

  “Like Rachel. No sparks.”

  His breath drifted across her cheek. If she bent forward, she could kiss him on the mouth. She remembered what that was like. And then he would do anything for her.

  His single eye fogged a little as if remembering, too, but he drew back as if conflicted. “We can’t keep you tied up forever. It’s cutting off your circulation.”

  “I’m fine now. I just snapped a little bit.” She shrugged. “Stress. The end of the world will do that to you.”

  DeVontay took her hands in his, his strong, dark fingers squeezing firmly. “I’m going to have to trust you. We need you, Rachel. Okay?”

  She nodded. Yes. Trust me.

  He drew the knife Hilyard had given him and drove the point under the leather strap, then snicked the blade upward and freed her. Blood made an agonizing rush into her constricted veins as her circulatory system pumped her hands back to life.

  “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I need to know what I’m getting into here,” Hilyard said to her. “Campbell said you were somehow infected by those Zapheads when they healed a wound on your leg?”

  “It’s not an infection. It’s…hard to describe.”

  “Might be some kind of shock thing. One of the cadets at WestPoint was struck by lightning during a foot drill. He survived, but he suffered heart arrhythmia and synesthesia, where he saw some letters and numerals as colors. Like ‘e’ would be yellow, so he could see patterns in words. They were going to make him a cryptologist but the condition faded a month or so later. Maybe the electromagnetic pulse did the same thing to these Zapheads.” He looked at Rachel. “And to you. If these mutants harbor some kind of strong electromagnetic field, they could have affected the way your body’s nervous system operates. Like when you put a magnet next to a computer disk and erase the information.”

  “You make them sound like machines,” Rachel said. “But I guess that’s better than monsters.”

  Hilyard patted the rifle resting across a log beside him. “As long as they’re not bulletproof, I don’t care what they are.”

  “She looks fine,” DeVontay said to him. “Whatever happened, it’s over now. We’ve got bigger worries than just Zaps. You said survivors attacked you.”

  “Yeah. We had a bunker up on the ridge, a secret installation that was shielded to survive a nuclear attack. When the first solar flares were reported, we were ordered to hole up. The top brass didn’t really expect anything serious. It was mostly just an excuse to test out the toys. Then we lost sat-comm and had to disconnect all of our equipment like we would during an EMP event. Only nobody suspected our bodies needed the protection more than our gear did.”

  “So the bastards knew,” DeVontay said. “The government knew days ahead of time that we were all in danger and didn’t say shit. But I bet they sure as hell took care of themselves.”

  “This is all top secret, not that it matters anymore. I don’t know how many other shielded bunkers like ours are scattered across the country. Or the world, for that matter. You better believe Russia has some, and the Chinese, and Israel.”

  “So there could be other survivors out there,” Rachel said. “Organized. Putting the pieces back together.”

  “In theory,” Hilyard said. “Didn’t go so well for us. I was commanding officer, and we were under orders to stay down for a month. We had plenty of food and supplies, chemical toilets, battery-powered electronics. We were in good shape. But guys got cabin fever. Didn’t know what was happening outside the door. And two weeks in, my staff sergeant staged a mutiny. He convinced the others that some sort of catastrophe had occurred and the government had collapsed. Chain of command went all to hell. A few of the privates supported me, but Sgt. Shipley figured mob rule was the answer. As long as he got to be head of the mob.”

  Stephen slumped against DeVontay and closed his eyes. He might have been napping, or just listening. The boy had turned to DeVontay as his protector since he and Rachel had become separated. She felt a sting of loss, but it was short-lived. Stephen would eventually come back around. Every child needed a mother.

  Even if that mother was like…whatever she was becoming.

  “How many were in your platoon?” DeVontay asked Hilyard.

  “Forty. When Sgt. Shipley opened the bunker door two weeks after the solar storms, I gathered the men who were loyal and pretended to go out on a recon mission. By then we’d figured out something was wrong, because we couldn’t raise anyone on the radio and all the electronic gear we’d left outside was fried, including our Humvees. My plan was to get off the mountain and reach a city, establish contact with headquarters, and have Shipley court-martialed. The trouble with that plan was that there were no more headquarters and no more cities. And Shipley had plans of his own.”

  “Civil war,” Rachel said.

  “It wasn’t war. It was murder. They ambushed us.”

  “Didn’t they know about the Zapheads?” DeVontay asked. “That we all needed to stick together?”<
br />
  “We found out pretty quick that a lot of people had died. All those travelers on the parkway were fried. Some of them had driven off the road, others must have coasted to a stop, sitting there stinking behind the wheel. There were a few collisions, but traffic must not have been too heavy that day. Then we found a few survivors. Only they weren’t people anymore.”

  “Monsters?” Rachel asked.

  “They attacked us. We had to defend ourselves. Shipley must have snapped, because he started ranting about how we were the last outpost of the human race and it was our duty to establish a new world order. He’d always been a little unconventional in his views, but I guess he’d just never had the opportunity to go all Stalin and Mao.”

  “And you were the only one that got away,” DeVontay said, a mild note of suspicion in his voice that Hilyard apparently didn’t register.

  “I’d guess some of the soldiers aren’t on board, but no way they’ll say anything now. Not after watching Shipley kill seven men. Besides, they’re safe at the bunker. It’s easy to defend, they have enough supplies to get through the winter, and nobody really knows what the world is like off the mountain. In the meantime, they’re sending out patrols to kill or capture whatever Zaps they can find.”

  “What about survivors like us?’ DeVontay asked. “Where do we fit in Sgt. Shipley’s New World Order?”

  “You’re civilians. That makes you low priority in his eyes. If you don’t have a useful purpose, you’re just a drain on resources.”

  “And you call the Zapheads monsters?” Rachel said. The circulation had returned to her fingers and the tingling, fiery ache had resolved into numb warmth. The ligature marks on her wrists cut deep red furrows in her flesh. The men shouldn’t have hurt her. But she couldn’t risk anger.

  Not yet.

  “We’d better put out this fire,” Hilyard said. “Dusk is settling in, and we need to figure out bedding and the sentry schedule. You folks hit the lean-to and settle in. The boy needs his sleep. I’ll go relieve Campbell for a while and let you folks work out the next watch.”