Jorge glanced through a window set in the double doors of the main entrance. Several Zapheads crossed the parking lot, heading toward the football stadium. Although the chants had stopped, cries and screams rose from the bowl of the valley. Jorge hoped none of those anguished sounds came from Rosa or Marina.
But if he wanted to find them, all he had to do was follow the screams.
And fight his way through an agitated mob of Zapheads.
“Ready?” Jorge asked.
Danny glanced back at the shadowy forms approaching through the smoke. “Live free or die, right?”
“So I have heard.” Jorge kicked open the door and tumbled into the bright sunlight.
CHAPTER FIVE
DeVontay Jones wondered if he was the last man on Earth.
He’d carried the Zaphead baby—who informed him her name was Willow—for nearly two days, accompanied by a tribe of Zapheads who moved silently through the forest unless Willow called to them. Then they repeated her words from one to another until all of the Zapheads had heard them.
DeVontay’s cheeks and fingers were numb from the winter cold, but he wasn’t exhausted despite the long march down from the mountains. They had stopped several times to let DeVontay rest and eat, although they required no sleep themselves and only the barest of food. Once they’d reached the formerly populated outskirts, the Zapheads searched the houses, occasionally collecting dead bodies which they now hauled with them. In addition, they’d collected the corpses of the Zapheads killed in their battle with Army soldiers in the mountains.
The Zapheads apparently trusted him with the baby, and considering he’d had his opportunities to kill her, he wondered if maybe their trust disguised something else—a knowledge that DeVontay was somehow one of them. Acceptance was the ultimate surrender, after all.
“What will you do with all the dead people?” DeVontay asked.
“We will make them new once we learn how,” Willow said.
“And I’m supposed to just carry you around until you’re old enough to walk?”
The baby gave a toothless grin. “You have a purpose.”
“I’m not sure I want the job.”
“You want to see Rachel, don’t you?”
DeVontay hadn’t seen her since Sgt. Shipley’s military unit had attacked Franklin Wheeler’s compound, and he suspected she’d been captured by Zapheads just as he had been. But in her case, she was fighting some kind of infection or mutation that was turning her into one of them.
He was half afraid of seeing her again, because if she was fully a Zaphead now, he couldn’t bear to look into those glittering eyes. Not with the feelings he had for her—human feelings that couldn’t be invested in a violent freak that would happily pluck his lone good eye from his skull and crush it like a grape.
“Yes, I want to see Rachel,” he said. “Something you said on the mountain, after your other carrier died…how Rachel was some kind of experiment?”
Willow held up a small hand. “Energetic meridians. Think of it like a high-voltage form of acupuncture. We change the flow of electromagnetic energy through the body and improve its functioning. Rachel Wheeler was one of our first attempts at repairing tissue damage, and we were unsure of the outcome.”
“You say ‘we.’ Were you there at the farmhouse she told me about, where the Zuh…”—he was about say “Zapheads” but caught himself—“where the New People healed an infected dog bite?”
“I was there in a way,” the baby said, cherubic smile hinting at mischief. DeVontay was pretty sure the baby was mimicking his own expressions and emotions, and occasionally the two didn’t match up. Willow might be grinning while angry, or giggling when DeVontay changed her diapers. She was learning rapidly, although the adult Zapheads exhibited little behavioral change besides a lessening of homicidal rage.
“You read their minds, you mean?” DeVontay asked. He’d never believed in telepathy, remote viewing, or clairvoyance, although his Aunt Eloise claimed to have a sixth sense that allowed her to see ghosts. But the solar storms had delivered new phenomena that, although caused by physics, could easily be considered supernatural. After all, if you couldn’t measure it and make sense of it through rigorous scientific observation, wasn’t magic just as much a possibility as anything else?
“We don’t read minds,” Willow said, in her cooing little voice. “We are one mind.”
“Then why aren’t these others as smart as you?” DeVontay waved a hand at the surrounding Zapheads.
“Because I’m newer.”
DeVontay had gotten used to conversing with a baby whose intelligence level was equal to his own, and probably greater. He could almost forget the infant was a mutant, but those bizarre eyes served as constant reminders. And the creeping army around him could turn into feral killers with the slightest provocation. But he sensed they were nearing their destination from the way Willow wriggled enthusiastically in his arms.
The narrow roads gave way to wider streets, the stalled cars more frequent. Through the bare trees, he could make out the distant white dome of a courthouse, a tattered flag flapping atop it. The shredded cloth with the faded colors could hardly be more symbolic of the United States, an ideological and political division that now seemed as lost to the past as Sodom and Gomorrah.
More buildings came into view, commercial sites with large glass windows, a car wash, a bank, a two-story apartment complex. The houses crowded each other, telephone poles were thick with lines and signal lights, and billboards promised sharp-dressed lawyers, the best prices on pre-owned cars, and bacon double cheeseburgers that threatened to topple over due to excessive meat. The comfort of familiarity would have cheered DeVontay if not for the deep, sickening silence that permeated the scene.
The silence was pierced by a gunshot in the distance.
Willow tensed in his embrace. The Zapheads stirred with unease as if some hidden switch had been flipped.
“Is that your people shooting?” DeVontay asked her.
“No guns. We want to take your guns away. We don’t want to kill you. We want to correct you.”
“But you took them in the mountains and used them against the soldiers.”
“An eye for an eye,” she said, staring at the wrinkled and withered flesh of his empty socket, from where his glass prosthetic had fallen in the forest.
“So you’ve discovered humor.”
“Only black comedy. I have no grasp of satire yet.”
Her vocabulary has grown so much in two days. Like she’s learning words from Zapheads who aren’t here.
But her command of grammar wasn’t as disturbing as her arrogance. Could it even be called arrogance if it was wholly innocent? Willow wasn’t passing judgment. She was sharing facts as she knew them.
Perhaps Willow and her kind weren’t so intelligent after all, if they presumed humans needed correction. Even if humans did, they wouldn’t tolerate being told so, much less endure it without a fight.
“If you’re not shooting them, then someone’s killing your kind,” DeVontay said, not sure whether he should be glad or not. Rachel might get caught in the crossfire.
He might, as well. When people were Zaphead-hunting, standing in a crowd of Zapheads probably wasn’t the best deal.
Willow shook her head, eyes sparking with mirth. “Death is an inconvenience. But we’ll learn how to repair it soon.”
“Like you repaired Rachel? By making all of us like you?”
“Do you have something better to be?” The baby didn’t understand his anger. “We only kill when we must. You kill because you can.”
“I seem to recall your kind doing a hell of a lot of killing only a few months ago. And those dead soldiers you’re hauling around might have a different opinion, too.”
The shots became more frequent, but they were clearly not from a major assault. DeVontay guessed they were the handiwork of a few gunmen at best.
“We came for Rachel,” Willow said. “We didn’t seek conflict.”
“You didn’t turn away from it, either. You’re no better than us.”
Willow pouted. “Would you heal us if you had the chance? Would you collect our dead?”
DeVontay fought an urge to drop the baby onto the asphalt and grind a boot into its skull until it stopped squeaking. “How come you use human carriers, then? These zombie-brained relatives of yours don’t know how to care for you, right? Haven’t you taught them to change diapers and wipe your ass and give you their breasts? Or is it because they just don’t care, when you get right down to it? They walk and breathe and kill and collect, but they are just going through the motions. There’s no purpose to any of it.”
“Maybe not yet. We have faith that there will be a purpose one day.”
DeVontay snorted in derision. “Faith? What could you possibly believe in that you can’t see?”
The baby wriggled in his arms, grunting a little, and DeVontay realized he was squeezing the infant a little too tightly. But he had a hard time thinking of her as a person now. This was a machine. Sure, it wore flesh and had the warmth of pumping blood, but her words and emotions were borrowed things.
Stolen things. Stolen from human beings, just as they were stealing the world, bit by bit.
A scream echoed across the concrete in the distance, somewhere near the courthouse.
Zapheads don’t scream.
“Did you bring other humans here?” DeVontay asked Willow, wondering whether she was capable of lying.
“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” she said in a lilting, sing-songy voice.
Of course they did. Why do you think you’d be the only one? How many Zaphead babies must there be?
DeVontay grew more excited and increased his pace, despite the nearness of the gunshots. If he could find Rachel and meet up with some other survivors, they could form a plan that—
“Come now come fast,” Willow called out to the other Zapheads, and the chant worked its way from one to another until it passed out of DeVontay’s hearing. He guessed the pack totaled perhaps eighty or a hundred, although he’d rarely seen more than a dozen of them at a time.
That’s a lot of Zapheads for a rescue and recovery mission.
The Zapheads around them fanned out, heading toward the center of town. Others came out of side streets and from behind abandoned trucks, walking in several different directions. Most were dressed in shabby, dirty clothing, although a few were nearly nude despite the December chill. It took DeVontay a moment to realize these Zapheads were heading toward him rather than toward the gunshots and screams.
Then a figure darted from the shadowed side of a pawn shop, a gun barrel projecting from its profile. One of the Zapheads on the nearby street issued a chuckling ululation, and the sound was repeated by several dozen voices. The figure turned and leveled the weapon, squeezing off a short burst that stitched a line of red dots across the Zaphead’s torso. The gun’s report was thunderous on the silent streets, and DeVontay ducked behind an SUV, clutching the baby next to his pounding heart.
“See why we have to kill you?” Willow said in her high, squeaky voice that made the words all the more horrible. “You make us do it, every time.”
Another scattering of shots was followed by a cry of “Nooooooooooo” that ended in a scream.
Willow gave a toothless grin, eyes burning like twin furnaces of hell. “Yes.”
“Killing is a necessary evil, but you seem to get a kick out of it,” DeVontay whispered. He even went so far as to wrap one hand around the baby’s soft throat.
One squeeze.
It wouldn’t change anything, but it would wipe away that grin.
“See?” Willow said, still smiling up with those wet pink gums. “This is why we have to kill you.”
If he choked the breath out of this little mutant bitch, the Zapheads would swarm him.
He’d never see Rachel again.
He pulled his hand away as the man’s screamed faded. By the time DeVontay rose and looked over the hood of the SUV, the Zapheads were busy collecting the pieces of their victim.
CHAPTER SIX
The school grounds teemed with agitated Zapheads.
As a farmhand in Tennessee, Jorge once had to eradicate a nest of hornets that had taken up residence in the wall of a barn. He doused the knothole that served as the nest’s front door with a toxic concoction of gasoline and pesticides. The hornets erupted from the knothole and, although many of them immediately dropped to the dirt, enough filled the air to sting Jorge three times across his face and neck. But some of the hornets strayed far enough in their rage to sting horses a quarter of a mile away.
These Zapheads seemed to exhibit the same brand of unfocused response. Along with Franklin, he’d learned the mutants wouldn’t attack unless provoked, although their enforced captivity was a different sort of violence. Now, though, the Zapheads lashed out at any human captives who fled screaming across the parking lot.
Most horrifying, those who carried Zaphead infants still clung to their tiny charges like protective mothers. Jorge didn’t understand the psychological bonds that formed through the caretaking, but he suspected the process wasn’t entirely voluntary.
And he wondered whether, if it came down to it, Rosa would choose the Zaphead baby she carried over her own flesh-and-blood daughter.
He was going to avoid that choice, one way or another.
“Which way’s best?” Danny asked, panting beside him as they hid behind a bus and scouted the chaos. The man’s years of smoking had diminished his lung capacity, a definite downside when you had to run for your life.
Jorge wasn’t making a strategic analysis of the Zapheads’ numbers. He was looking for his family. “The shooting has stopped, so the soldiers have either retreated or died.”
“Pitiful, ain’t it? The world’s mightiest military and this is the best they can do when push comes to shove.”
“I’ve seen more. I mentioned that bunker in the mountains and a large unit with grenade launchers and heavy machine guns. Their leader, Sgt. Shipley, could deliver some serious damage if he wished.”
“That’s not doing us any good right now, is it?” Danny choked up on the baseball bat, eyes darting around. “If we could just get all these guys to revolt right now, we’d be in business.”
“We’d be dead within minutes.”
The parking lot was littered with bodies, and many of them were Zapheads, judging by their ragged clothing. Jorge saw a fallen form in a blue jacket, the same color as Rosa’s, and his stomach tightened. He bolted from cover, running to the body while glancing around for Marina.
“Hey!” Danny shouted after him, but Jorge barely heard him over the shouts. A column of thick smoke drifted from the school building, adding to the confusion, and the air was thick with the fumes of burning plastic and wood. But that didn’t mask the stench of the thousands of bodies piled in the Zapheads’ open mausoleum.
Jorge bumped into a Zaphead that spun and clutched wildly at him. Jorge ducked and drove a boot into the Zaphead’s knee and knocked it to the ground. As he stepped away, one hand caught him by the ankle, and he stomped hard with his free foot. Bones crunched underneath his leather sole and the fingers lost their grip.
As the Zaphead grappled for him again, he drove his makeshift spear into the mutant’s belly and left it planted there like a flag on territory he’d just claimed for country and king.
When Jorge reached the form in the blue coat, he saw right away that it wasn’t Rosa. It was a dark-haired woman, a survivor instead of a mutant, but much older than his wife. This woman had been one of the more maternal ones of their group, soothing the other women and encouraging the children. While she hadn’t been assigned a Zaphead infant of her own, the mutants must have sensed her powerful place in the group.
They’d let her live, for a while.
Then he noticed the hole in her jacket, and the dark red fluid welling up from the fabric. She’d been shot by the soldiers
.
Maybe Sgt. Shipley thinks we’ve willingly joined the Zapheads. He’s just insane enough to kill us all.
Something thudded to the pavement twenty feet away, and he turned to see Danny flinging blood from his baseball bat. A teen-aged Zaphead girl lay at his feet, her head smashed open.
“Grand slam,” Danny said with a gap-toothed grin.
A shot sounded farther away, in the outskirts of town to the west. The battle must have shifted that way, unless the few troops scattered when the Zapheads made their counterattack.
The Zapheads in the parking lot headed in the direction of the shot, apparently not noticing or caring that he and Danny had just attacked two of their kind. Jorge approached the stadium, dread still hanging heavily on his heart. It was clear the original attack had taken place here, as two dozen bodies were sprawled around the concourse and ticket booth. Most of them were Zapheads, but several humans were dead as well.
One elderly man groaned and reached up to Jorge for help. “Please,” the man croaked, their eyes meeting for a moment.
Jorge shook his head and continued into the stadium.
“Damn, that’s cold,” Danny said, bending to help the man.
Jorge didn’t care. The humans brought to Newton by the Zapheads had never organized to rebel or even attempt to improve their conditions. Like Rosa, most had eased into a numb acceptance of their situation. They’d rather be well-fed slaves than scavenging, desperate survivors. It made Jorge admire Franklin’s willful independence all the more. If there was any American value worth adopting, it was a willingness to fight and die for freedom.
More bodies dotted the football field and the metal stands. The cloying odor of decayed flesh made it hard to breathe, as if the air was thick with tiny particles of death. Most of the fresher bodies appeared to be in the stands on the far side of the field. Although they were too far away to make identifications, he didn’t see anyone whose clothing matched Rosa’s or Marina’s.
After: Red Scare (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 5) Page 3