Directive 17: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

by Nicholson, Scott

  “I told you, I’m human,” Rachel said.

  “Maybe. You’re not one of those weird robot types, and you’re not a savage predator. Those are the only two types I’ve seen. You’re something different, which is the only reason I didn’t kill you already.”

  “I don’t talk like a Zap, do I?” Rachel said.

  “Neither do I,” Kokona telepathed with a giggle.

  “No. Another reason you’re here. They used to just make weird croaking noises in their throats, and I thought that was bad enough, but then they started talking. Mimicking sounds and words but without knowing the meanings. And now they all talk at once, in that weird monotone, like a Satanic chant or something. Almost enough to make you believe in the devil, but then you’d have to believe in God.”

  “I believe in God,” Rachel said, surprising even herself. She’d been devout in the old days, a time when many Christians professed a gleeful anticipation of Doomsday. But when it finally arrived, the screams of the faithful were indistinguishable from those of the damned.

  “You only believe in ME,” Kokona silently scolded.

  Goldberg laughed. “Well, you sure as hell aren’t like any Zap I’ve encountered before. If not for your eyes, you could almost pass.”

  A man entered the room from the dark mouth of a tunnel. “Night watch says the storm’s blown over.”

  “Good,” Goldberg said. “We’ll send out a patrol at dawn. Get a closer look at the Blue City.”

  After the man ducked back into the corridor, his footfalls echoing as they faded, Goldberg tossed his empty can into the corner of the room and belched. “And you’re going with us,” he said to Rachel.

  “Why?”

  “Canary in the coal mine. I figure something will happen if you get close to the Zaps. They’ll yell at you, or your eyes will glow brighter, or some weird power source will kick in and give them away.” He leaned forward and tapped his temple. “Because I think they do it with their minds.”

  “See how silly?” Kokona said. “How could you want to go back to them when you could be one of us?”

  “I don’t understand,” Rachel said, although she did, or at least had seen the Zaps’ power in action. Kokona had manipulated an entire Zap city into destroying itself in order to vanquish a human army, triggering a massive explosion. But Kokona’s willing sacrifice of her fellow Zaps was more than just an act of survival—the baby had seen it as a way to solidify her individual power, as if the Zaps were a threat to her as well.

  And Rachel was just as much a pawn on Kokona’s chessboard, one that would be tossed aside when the move became necessary.

  “Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.” Kokona snuggled against Rachel’s breast. “I would never do that. I LOVE you.”

  “I don’t expect you to tell me everything,” Goldberg said. “Not yet, anyway. But we’ve got plenty of time.”

  “That’s what he thinks,” Kokona said.

  Rachel pulled Kokona away from her chest and held the baby out to Trudy. “Want to hold her?”

  Trudy’s eyes widened until white circumscribed the irises. Her mouth opened in a crazed grin, revealing yellowed teeth. She crawled forward like a starving dog after a raw steak.

  Goldberg was equally surprised, but he didn’t intervene as Trudy took Kokona, the baby mentally screaming at Rachel the whole time. As soon as Kokona was out of her grasp, Rachel experienced a fleeting sense of freedom and relief—Kokona’s control wasn’t absolute after all.

  “That’s what YOU think,” Kokona said.

  “Johnny,” Trudy murmured with joy that bordered on rapture as she rocked the mutant child. “My sweet little Johnny.”

  “Don’t say that,” Goldberg said.

  Trudy looked at him, wounded. “We’ve got our Johnny back.”

  Goldberg was suddenly angry. “That’s not Johnny. He’s gone.”

  “But he’s ours.”

  “We both lost him, but I’m the only one who let him go.”

  He stood and stomped to the mouth of the tunnel, where he slouched down and closed his eyes as if falling asleep. At last Rachel understood the bond between them and why Goldberg tolerated the deranged woman’s company.

  As Trudy cradled the baby, cooing with pleasure, Rachel closed her own eyes. She couldn’t resist a final, vengeful taunt at Kokona:

  “Goodnight, Johnny.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Blackhawk helicopter landed at dawn just outside the main entrance to New Pentagon in Virginia, its churning blades ripping brittle brown leaves from the surrounding trees.

  High President Abigail Murray ducked against turbulent airstream, squinting into the cockpit. The chopper was pocked and coated with gray dust, its engine sputtering as the wheels settled on a bare patch of ground in the center of the clearing. The Blackhawk had barely made the journey from outside Wilkesboro, North Carolina, three hundred miles to the south. It was one of only two Blackhawks remaining in what had once been the mightiest standing army in the world.

  Murray grimaced. Stop revisiting ancient history. The United States is a myth. We’re part of the Earth Zero Initiative now.

  Beside her, Gen. Arnold Alexander stood tall and stoic, unfazed by the buffeting wind. A cotton sling braced his left arm, and he saluted with his right as the co-pilot’s door opened. If Alexander harbored any hopelessness after the army’s destruction at Wilkesboro, he kept it masked, but the deep creases around his eyes revealed his stress and exhaustion.

  Col. David Munger exited the helicopter as the engine died. He shouted something over the creaking rotors and Murray shook her head to indicate she hadn’t heard. But two of her soldiers were already running to the side door of the passenger cabin. Munger helped them open the cabin door and a man whose head was half-hidden by bloody bandages flopped out of the helicopter. The soldiers caught him and pulled him free, and he staggered between them on wobbly legs.

  Gen. Alexander barked orders at the sentries near the cave entrance, and four armed guards joined in removing the wounded from the Blackhawk. Murray followed them, looking inside the cabin at the five casualties sprawled there, some badly burned and one young man missing half his leg. His face was pale from shock, and when Murray took his hand, his skin was cool and clammy.

  “Welcome home, son,” she said.

  His eyelids fluttered and lifted, and he gazed blearily at her. “Missus President?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, forcing a smile instead of the horror and shame she felt.

  “Did we win?”

  “We will,” she said. “You can count on that.”

  His eyes closed and she doubted they would ever open again. He was gently lifted from the chopper and carried into their base at Luray Caverns, which was probably as good a place to die as any. The pilot and an elderly civilian headed for the fuel bladder to refill the chopper. A small fleet of equipment had been stored in an underground depot shielded from electromagnetic damage, but most of it had since been lost, broken down, or destroyed by Zaps.

  “Is this all that’s left?” Murray asked the colonel.

  “We have forty-eight able-bodied troops bivouacked off Seventy-Seven near the border,” Munger said, speaking more to Alexander than her. He resented her position of power, and not just because she was female and he was old-school. To his mind, she’d achieved the leadership of the free world by Machiavellian manipulation and not because she was Secretary of State when the solar storms killed the President, Vice-President, and most of the Cabinet.

  “So we lost two hundred and fifteen people,” Arnold said.

  “They’re waiting for orders, sir.” This time, Munger didn’t even pretend to include Murray in the conversation.

  But she refused to be bullied. “Do they have any transportation?”

  “A couple of trucks, a Bradley, and a Humvee. We’re mobile enough to make it back here to base.”

  “Then we’re mobile enough to attack,” Murray said.

  “Abigail,” Alexander said, breaching
protocol by using her first name. Their friendship was strained due to the invasion of the caverns by rampaging Zaps and the collapse of the government they’d cobbled together in the wake of the apocalypse. But they still shared a determination to carve out a place in this hostile world, even though extinction of the human race seemed inevitable.

  “It’s our only chance,” Murray said. “If we retreat, we’re likely to lose any advantage we’ve gained. The detonation that destroyed Wilkesboro seems to have wiped out the Zaps, too. It’s ours for the taking.”

  “There’s nothing left to take,” Munger said with a sneer. Murray allowed the insubordination to pass because the other soldiers were out of earshot. She understood his anger and frustration. After all, he’d rolled in with the strongest division of the U.S. Army and had gotten his ass kicked.

  Alexander glanced at the ridges above the cavern opening. Even though sentries were posted along the slopes, people were no longer safe outside the dank, cool limestone tunnels that snaked beneath the Shenandoah Mountains. Of course, they were no longer safe inside them, either.

  “We don’t know what kind of power the Zaps unleashed,” Alexander said to Murray. “We’ve got radiation levels consistent with a nuclear weapon of a few kilotons, but there seem to be different kinds of isotopes involved. We don’t have any way to analyze the fallout, so we’re just flying blind here. Given the new technologies the Zaps have developed, we can’t be sure we’d understand the dangers even if we could measure the effects. We don’t even know what to look for.”

  “They’re not aliens,” Murray said. “Zaps used to be us, remember? They can’t change the laws of physics.”

  “If you were on the front lines, you’d have a different outlook,” Munger said.

  “NORAD could’ve launched some of our nukes,” Murray said. “We haven’t had contact with them and they were supposed to await my orders—”

  “Nobody listens to you anymore,” Munger said.

  Murray waited for Alexander to put the officer in line, but the general said, “The fallout doesn’t have the typical signature. Even without sophisticated equipment, that’s easy enough to detect. The background radiation we’re measuring here is up in the last few days, and the fallout from Wilkesboro—if indeed it was caused by a nuclear weapon—would blow toward the Atlantic on the jet stream. Something else is going on. Something systemic.”

  A muffled gunshot echoed from somewhere inside the caverns—obviously not too far from the mouth, or they wouldn’t have heard it. Murray reacted faster than either of the trained military men, sprinting toward their subterranean outpost on weary legs.

  She was fifty-three but felt a hundred as her lungs burned with each breath. Another shot rang out and was followed by a burst of automatic-weapons fire by the time she entered the limestone cathedral where most of the civilians lived.

  A squad of soldiers scurried out of a side tunnel and into the cathedral, where old women pulled children into the makeshift tented city as if the thin canvas walls would provide safety. As the soldiers exited darkness, they turned and fired into the tunnel behind them as if being pursued by some nameless, terrible beast. But they knew the enemy as well as Murray did, and it had a name—Zaps.

  The inhabited section of the cavern wasn’t fully dark. Strings of low-wattage bulb were powered by a solar array, and several small campfires cast long amber shadows along the rock walls. The smoky dimness only made the place resemble a Milton vision of hell, especially as screams erupted and half-naked, glittering-eyed savages poured from the dark cracks of the world.

  Murray bent and scooped up a young boy, dragging him toward a crevice in the rocks where he’d be out of the line of fire. “Stay here!” she hissed over the clatter of gunfire.

  Two Zaps leapt from a high ledge thirty feet from Murray and landed on a female soldier who swung her M16 wildly as she tried to defend herself. She sprayed a burst of bullets that ripped through a section of tents, unaware she was taking down some of her own with friendly fire. The Zaps wrangled her to the ground, clawing and tearing at her body, sibilant clicks rising from their throats.

  One of her comrades joined the fray, jabbing at the mutants with a K-Bar knife. A Zap rose and raked its filthy fingers at the new threat, and in the sudden intense glow of the Zaps’ eyes, Murray could see how horrified and frightened the soldier was. Like most of the army, he was probably a former civilian who’d never imagined battling for his life, much less being enlisted in a war for human survival.

  Our weakness is their greatest weapon.

  Murray glanced at the hidden boy to make sure he obeyed, and then she bellowed a roar of defiance as she charged. She had no weapon, although she was proficient with small arms, but her response was not just a defensive maneuver. The remaining survivors at New Pentagon whispered about her competency in the wake of the mutant invasion a few days ago, and she had to show courage and leadership.

  Even if it killed her.

  Murray was only partially aware of the chaos reigning around her—screams, shots, the flight of the helpless—as she reached the first Zap. Its hands were clutched around the woman’s throat, squeezing so hard that there were purple indentions in the flesh. The Zap yanked the woman’s head up and down, driving her skull against the rock floor. Murray dove at the Zap, which was so intent on inflicting carnage that it didn’t see her assault.

  Something crunched in her shoulder as she rammed into the Zap. She was overwhelmed by the creature’s odor—like rancid meat and ozone and reptilian urine. She was short but heavyset, and her low center of gravity gave her the momentum to knock the Zap off the injured woman.

  The Zap let out an eerie, high-pitched ululation just at the range of hearing, which caused the other Zap to turn toward Murray. The second soldier took advantage of the opening to drive his knife deep into the Zap’s back, and the mutant writhed and twitched as it flailed to remove the weapon.

  “Shoot it,” Murray yelled, waving at the woman’s fallen rifle, but the other Zap reacted before the soldier could.

  It scrabbled up on bare feet, face rigid, only the barest sign of its former humanity still remaining. She couldn’t tell if the Zap had once been male or female—any breasts or genital appendages had atrophied away—but it was utterly loathsome.

  The eyes sparked and glinted, twin hells inside the larger hell, as it launched itself at her. It didn’t care about pain and had no knowledge of death, which made it the most dangerous kind of enemy.

  The late-stage human race had lived in fear of radical terrorists, but those killers were bound by ideology and ultimately acted on human motives. Nature had created the most ruthless kind of terrorist—one whose sole purpose was to mindlessly destroy everything in its path.

  But Murray cared nothing for the philosophical aspects of Nature’s cruelty. All she knew was that the curving, cracked fingernails reached for her face and the remaining scraps of clothing hanging from the creature’s sour body were caked with dried blood and filth.

  Rising to her knees, she rolled away, landing on the woman she was trying to rescue. The woman made no sound or reaction upon impact and was most likely dead. But Murray still acted protectively—she rocked onto her back and raised her legs, and as the creature landed, she drove her boots forward with all her strength. Once again her compact size helped, using leverage to fling the Zap into the air and away from her.

  By then the soldier had recovered the M16 and delivered a three-round burst into the creature. It gibbered and screeched for a moment and then fell still, dark fluid oozing from the holes in its torso.

  Murray knelt and futilely searched the woman’s neck for a pulse. Her cheek was shredded with four long furrows of raw meat, splotches of bruises already turning purple along her face. The back of her scalp was bloody. She was barely twenty and would never grow older.

  Murray let loose a roar of rage and looked around for an outlet. Alexander had organized a small squad that performed a sweep of the area, wiping out the l
ast of the strange assailants. Zaps had invaded a number of the tents, and some of them now lay collapsed in lumpy piles. Blood spattered the fabric here and there in the patterns of a crazy Pollock nightmare.

  The last Zap scrambled up a sheer limestone wall like a spider monkey, its wiry, naked form slipping among the shadows of stalactites. At least a dozen soldiers fired, along with Alexander and Munger, but it skittered into a black fissure and vanished. The screams fell away to whimpers and groans of pain. Murray’s ears rang from the volleys, and the bitter aroma of gunpowder and blood hung in the still air.

  Murray hurried to the rock formation where she’d left the little boy. She shuddered with relief when she found him huddled with his arms crossed. “You’re safe now,” she whispered, voice rasping.

  He looked up at her with wide brown eyes. “My mom said you promised.”

  She wasn’t sure she heard, so she knelt beside him. “Promised what?”

  “That they’d never get us in here. That we’d be safe.”

  How could Murray explain that leaders sometimes had to lie? How could she tell him that promises were made to be broken? How could she convince him that blind faith was a patriotic duty? That was the unwritten agreement between adults throughout her entire political career, both before and after the apocalypse.

  But she had no words that could fool a child. The broken bodies and wailing mothers all around them were far bigger truths than she could hide.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Franklin didn’t like Millwood one little bit.

  It didn’t help that his body felt like one big bruise or that the monster-bug’s round black eyes kept boring into his memory. But mostly he was agitated because Marina kept asking him about Stephen Henderson, the teenager that had lived with her, Rachel, DeVontay, and Kokona in the bunker for four years.

  His joy at seeing Marina again instantly took a dark turn, so he focused his smoldering anger on Millwood as DeVontay introduced Colleen Kelly and Squeak while K.C. introduced herself as “Franklin’s squeeze.”