After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2)

by Scott Nicholson

  Franklin didn’t hesitate. He yanked the gate wide and lunged inside the compound, intending to slam it closed and then hurry to the cabin for a weapon.

  “Hey!” McCrone shouted, breaking from his spell. “Damn it—”

  Franklin drew the gate closed but he underestimated McCrone’s speed. The soldier jammed the rifle barrel in the gap and the gate slammed against it with a metallic clang, bouncing back open. Franklin reached for the gate to give it another try, but the gate opened to the outside, and McCrone was already on him, cussing and slapping at Franklin with his free hand.

  McCrone shoved him to the ground and stood over him. “You old bastard, I’ll string you up by your beard and let the crows eat you.”

  For good measure, McCrone drove a boot into Franklin’s ribs. Now inside the compound, he used the fading radiance of the flare to glance around the compound. “Not bad for a Doomsday wacko, Franklin.”

  “Go to hell.” Franklin was just about tired of this red-blooded all-American hero standing over him all the time. He was content to go ahead and get shot. At least he’d die a free man on his own turf, not cowering as a slave like the rest of the human race.

  Go to hell, all of you. Even freedom’s a burden after a while.

  But then he remembered Rachel, and his pledge to her. He’d built Wheelerville out of his own good intentions, but utopia was a luxury. In its way, his ideal was just as selfish and elitist as those of the international banking complex and military-industrial corporate powers that had corrupted the old world, buying and selling human dignity like it was just another commodity on the stock market.

  He rolled and staggered to his feet, determined to go down fighting. He wobbled as he faced McCrone, his legs like rubber and his rib burning as if a branding iron was jabbed against the bone.

  McCrone pointed the rifle at him, the last of the flare’s illumination furrowing his face with cruel shadows. The soldier no longer seemed boyish in the least. He was like ancient evil, the embodiment of naked arrogance. A perfect product and symbol of the government he served.

  “Do it, if you have the guts.” Franklin didn’t know if he was just being an ornery old goat or whether he’d actually swallowed his own belief in a better future, one where Rachel was more than just a symbol of hope, a day when he’d be worth a damn and—

  The faint hiss of air came just before McCrone’s skull erupted in a geyser of blood, bone, and gray gore.

  The ax blade withdrew, dragging one of McCrone’s ears with it. The soldier’s remaining eye was shocked wide, nearly popping from its socket in surprise, but then it was veiled by a cascade of blood as it blinked shut for the final time. The soldier dropped in a heap on top of the rifle.

  Jorge stepped from the shadows, gripping the ax like a pinch hitter digging into the batter’s box with two out in the ninth. He looked down at the corpse with all the dispassion of an overpaid All-Star as blood dripped from the blade.

  “Took you long enough,” Franklin said.

  “I was just waiting to see if you could sweet-talk your way out of getting shot,” Jorge said.

  Franklin bent and retrieved the rifle from beneath McCrone’s corpse. “After you turned tail and ran, I figured you wanted me dead one way or another.”

  “There was no need to shoot those innocent people.”

  Franklin eyed the way Jorge held the ax. The Mexican was still two swings from a strikeout. “They weren’t innocent. They were Zaps.”

  “And what did we gain? Are you going to kill every stranger in the world?”

  Franklin nodded at the soldier’s damaged skull. “Looks like you’re kicking in your share.”

  Jorge flung the ax away. “Rosa and Marina are gone.”

  “Damn.”

  “So are Cathy and…the baby.”

  Franklin didn’t think that word should apply to a Zaphead. “Any sign of a fight?”

  “No. They’re just gone.” Jorge pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. Now that the flare had faded, Franklin could only see Jorge in silhouette. “Marina wrote, ‘He’s mad.’”

  “Who’s the ‘he’? One of the soldiers, maybe?”

  “No,” Jorge said, his voice cold. “I think she meant the baby.”

  The chill in Jorge’s voice seeped into Franklin’s bones, and he felt old and tired and void of all the hope he’d pretended to harbor only moments before while facing death.

  In After, even the small things were worse than death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Campbell wiped the acidic bile from his mouth, spitting out tiny chunks of half-digested ham.

  He couldn’t make sense of what his eyes told him, and he didn’t plan on sticking around for a closer look. He’d rather take his chances breaking the cordon of Zapheads outside. Maybe the backyard would offer better opportunities. He leaned against the stair rail and headed down in the dark, but he’d only taken three steps when the hissing arose.

  They’re in the house.

  Behind him, the bedroom door creaked open—

  And so did the other two upstairs doors.

  How many are there?

  A beam of light arced across the downstairs hall. He heard voices amid the mad sibilance of the Zapheads—human voices.

  “Told you,” Wilma said, although her voice was muffled, as if she were standing on the back porch. “Told you he’d be afraid.”

  “Let me handle this,” a man answered—and Campbell recognized his voice.

  Or is it just another ghost in your head, like Pete?

  He giggled again, and the giddy delirium trickled from the crevices of his mind like ancient water squeezing from stone. The madness was building like floodwaters behind a dam, threatening to breach at any moment.

  The man called again. “Campbell? Is that you?”

  Campbell took another cautious step, hoping the stair didn’t creak with his weight. He made the mistake of glancing back along the landing, and the constellation of glittering eyes moved closer.

  In a panic, Campbell stumbled down the stairs, his mouth metallic with vomit, ears roaring. He didn’t care if they caught him, even killed him, as long as he didn’t end up like those in the bedroom.

  He sensed movement below, and the cone of light bounced around the house’s interior.

  “Stay calm, Campbell.”

  “They…do you know what they did?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “How come you’re still alive?” Campbell was now halfway down the stairs, the choice made for him. Zapheads congregated on the landing above, drawn from the tasks that had occupied them behind closed doors. Unlike the ones downstairs, though, these didn’t hiss; they merely stared in mute solemnity, their eyes sparking.

  Campbell took two more downward steps. The house was full of heightened tension, as if a thundercloud was about to deliver lightning. Between the greenish half-light leaking from the various windows and the bobbing flashlight beam below, Campbell felt like he was in some hellish carnival.

  “Listen to me,” the professor said, and now Campbell realized who was hanging upside down in the bedroom—Donnie, Arnoff, and Pamela. “Listen.”

  And the hissing shifted, in a slushy imitation of the professor. A dozen voices, maybe twenty: “Lishen. Lishen. Lishen.”

  Campbell screamed, and that broke whatever spell had restrained the Zapheads above. They poured across the landing, their feet thundering on the floorboards. Campbell hurtled down the stairs but lost his balance and tumbled, banging his knee and knocking his skull against the newel post. It was a glancing blow, just above his left ear, but his vision grew fuzzy and it felt as if his veins had been drained of blood and infused with molten lead.

  Then the flashlight was in his eyes and the professor knelt down to tend him. “Shhh,” the man said. “Stay down and don’t move.”

  The Zapheads who’d been pounding down the stairs had stopped and were now waiting again. Campbell sensed other Zapheads massed behind the professor.


  “What they did…to Pamela…” Campbell whispered.

  “And what they’ll do to you if you don’t calm down.”

  “Please don’t let them…” Campbell tried to sit up but the professor put a firm hand on his chest to pin him in place.

  “They don’t want to hurt you,” the professor said, and the hissing Zapheads echoed a chorus of “Hurchoo, hurchoo, hurchoo.”

  Campbell giggled again, and he hoped he was dreaming. Or even dead. Yes, he’d take dead. That would be okay.

  Because then the Zapheads couldn’t do to him what they’d done to Donnie and Arnoff. Well, they could, but he wouldn’t care.

  Because behind the door he’d opened, he’d seen a group of Zapheads sitting on the floor like disciples around a sage. They were gathered before a rocking chair in which a man—Arnoff, Campbell now realized, although he would never have recognized him if not for the professor’s presence—was bound in thick ropes. Arnoff was still alive, because his eyes were wide open and animated with a scream that his mouth couldn’t make.

  The penlight revealed that Arnoff’s tongue had been taken. His chin was caked with gore and coagulated blood. He might have been tied there for days.

  Behind him, hanging upside down, was Pamela, her clothes removed, her body marbled with bruises. Her red hair dangled so that the tips brushed the floor. In that split-second, Campbell had seen she was mercifully dead.

  Donnie, however, wasn’t so fortunate.

  He lay facedown on the bed, his head facing the door and lifted back at such an extreme angle that his neck had to be broken. His voided bowels likely accounted for much of the room’s stench, as feces combined with the ordinary odor of death in a putrescent mélange.

  Donnie’s hands were extended through the brass bedrails, fingers twisted in a dozen different directions, as if someone had meticulously broken and reset them over and over. Donnie’s eyes, like Arnoff’s, were open, but they were so glazed and dull with agony that he likely was beyond even screaming.

  Campbell tried to imagine his own role in the Grand Guignol. Would they pull his ears from his head, or pick his freckles as if they were bugs?

  The professor set the flashlight on the stairs so that illuminated both of them. Although his forehead was crinkled from strain and he appeared to have aged a decade in the weeks since Campbell had last seen him, the professor was unmarked and reasonably functional. His hands trembled as he checked Campbell’s leg for broken bones.

  “You’re lucky,” the professor said, words barely audible above the incessant hissing of the Zapheads above and below. He put his fingers on Campbell’s eyelids and lifted them. “Doesn’t look like you have a concussion.”

  “I don’t feel so lucky.”

  “You’re not dead or maimed. They are accepting you.”

  “That’s lucky?”

  “They sense that you won’t harm them.”

  Campbell remembered what Wilma had said about not showing any fear. But he couldn’t help it. He still wanted to scream—and if he wasn’t in such pain, he would still fight his way past the Zapheads to the door. No sane human could be trapped with a houseful of destructive mutants and not be afraid.

  Ah. Maybe “sane” is the operative word here.

  “Why haven’t they killed you?” Campbell asked, shaking the lingering cobwebs from his skull, nearly recovered from the fall.

  “They need me.”

  “Me me me,” the Zapheads chanted. “Me me me me me.”

  The ones upstairs picked up the chorus. “Me me me meeeeee.”

  The professor smiled, though intense strain showed on his face. “They’ve learned a new word.”

  “They can’t learn. They’re destructive killing machines.”

  “Sheens,” one of the nearest Zapheads said. And a chorus of “Sheens” rippled through the house.

  “We’ve all changed since the storms,” the professor said. “It’s time for acceptance.”

  He finished examining Campbell and helped him sit up on the lowest step, then collected his flashlight. He waved it in the air and the Zapheads fell silent, although Campbell could hear their heavy breathing.

  As if they were waiting.

  Campbell still expected to be swarmed at any moment and have his limbs ripped from his body. He couldn’t shake the vision of Arnoff, Donnie and Pamela in the room upstairs. “Why did they let you live while they…did those things to the others?”

  “They’re like children,” the professor said. “And I’ve been a teacher all my life.”

  “Children don’t destroy for fun.”

  “Yes, they do,” the professor said, putting a hand on Campbell’s arm to signal him not to raise his voice. “It’s perfectly natural. Children pull the wings off flies to see how they work. They pour soda down anthills. They eviscerate frogs and earthworms to see what’s inside.”

  “In,” a Zaphead shouted. The crowd of them pushed forward, until one of them stood inside the cone of the flashlight’s beam. It was a woman of maybe thirty, attractive despite her wild and tangled mane of auburn hair, although her eyes sparked and glinted with a deranged excitement. “In, in, in,” she chattered.

  “In,” came from three dozen throats.

  “I want to come in!” Wilma wailed from outside the house.

  The Zapheads all fell silent. An electric tension built, causing Campbell’s hair to stand up on his forearms.

  “She’s becoming a problem,” the professor said.

  “She said they wouldn’t let her in.”

  “Let her in,” the auburn-haired Zaphead said.

  Several Zapheads parroted her words, and then the chant spread up the stairs. Campbell covered his ears, unable to bear this stunning and sickening new discovery. He’d finally come to accept a world where the human race had been whittled down by the billions, and even accept a new natural order where many of those humans were savage killers.

  At least that followed some sort of logic—a collapse of a society.

  But here was a new and strange society that was actually rising. A mutant race apparently evolving to replace the old one.

  Covering his ears didn’t help. The house thundered with the almost-jubilant vocalizing of the Zapheads. “Let her in! Let her in! Let her in!”

  Wilma cackled with laughter, apparently at the back door now, because Campbell could hear her clearly. “I’m coming in, then!”

  Campbell rose to protect her, feeling somehow responsible for her even though she’d lured him to this house of horrors. But the professor put a hand on his shoulder and restrained him.

  “She’s insane,” Campbell said. “They’ll tear her to pieces like they did your friends.”

  “It’s not your war, Campbell. Acceptance.”

  Campbell broke free and started through the crowd of Zapheads. The stench of the house, the death it harbored, and the unwashed mutants made him dizzy and claustrophobic. He no longer cared if they killed him. He’d been surviving day by day based on some hope of a distant, better future, but now he saw that such an ideal was impossible.

  His world was over.

  There was a commotion in one of the hidden rooms, probably the kitchen. The hissing rose like steam whistling from a cracked radiator. Campbell pulled out his penlight, head throbbing, legs sore, and his throat parched with thirst and anxiety.

  The Zapheads had all turned away, congregating around Wilma, who laughed and screamed. “Give him back to me!”

  They closed on her, and she was crushed by the sheer numbers. Campbell didn’t want to touch any of the repulsive creatures, but they were turned away from him, blocking the exit. He worked his way down the hall as far as he could go, shining his penlight over the heads of the crowd.

  The beam settled on Wilma’s pocked, deranged face. The struggle with the Zapheads appeared to have aroused her to a state of bliss.

  “Stay out of it, Campbell,” the professor warned from somewhere behind him. The stairs thundered as the Zapheads desce
nded.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Campbell said to Wilma, nearly shouting over the hissing. She stopped struggling for a moment and looked toward the light, although she likely couldn’t see his face.

  “Breeder!” she said. “I wanted you for a breeder! This world needs breeders!”

  “Needs breeders!” one of the Zapheads shrieked.

  The phrase rippled through the house and amplified. “Needs breeders, needs breeders, needs breeders.”

  One of the Zapheads grabbed Campbell by the front of his shirt and gave a mighty tug, yanking him off-balance. The beam of his penlight darted wildly across the ceiling before slicing across the face of the Zaphead who held him. It was the auburn-haired woman.

  “Needs breeders!” she screeched in delight.

  “I’ll kill you, bitch,” Wilma shouted, slapping at the Zapheads around her.

  The Zapheads fed her words right back to her, along with the blows she was reining. “I’ll kill you, bitch! I’ll kill you bitch!”

  The house shook with shouts and blows and Wilma’s grunts.

  Then Campbell’s penlight was knocked from his hand and crushed underfoot as the crowd converged and rushed forward into the violent center of the kitchen. Campbell slunk away from them until his back was against the wall, and then he slid down into a fetal position and covered his head.

  That didn’t drown out Wilma’s screams.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “You’d have been better off getting some sleep,” Franklin said.

  He sat at the table, connecting the shortwave radio to the battery system. An oil lantern glowed beside him, its light low. Jorge paced the cabin, unable to sit, much less sleep.

  “I’m going, whether you come or not,” Jorge said. The old man had napped for several hours, during which time Jorge had searched the immediate perimeter of the compound. He’d also monitored the forest from the platform, afraid the military would discover Rosa and Marina before he did. Rosa was strong and resilient, but Jorge could imagine a hundred horrible possibilities—usually leading to an image of them being carried along a remote trail by silent Zapheads.