After: Dying Light (4 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Interesting,” Kokona said.

Her eyes reflected in the window, joining with the light from the group of Zapheads behind Stephen to imbue the charred classroom with a dull glow. Stephen nearly screamed when he’d seen DeVontay get attacked, but Kokona had warned him to remain silent.

“Interesting,” said one of the Zapheads behind him, in a raspy whisper. The room stank of their strange body odor. It reminded Stephen of visiting a welding shop with his uncle, that aroma of sweat and hot metal mixed with a swampy rot.

Stephen watched as Franklin and DeVontay limped to safety, along with the man who helped rescue DeVontay. As joyous as Stephen was to discover DeVontay was still alive, the distance between them might as well be a million miles. Several packs of Zapheads milled around the grounds just outside the building, but they seemed more confused than menacing. Stephen suspected that was Kokona’s doing—as if she’d orchestrated the entire attack with her mind.

“You can put me down now.” Kokona’s small voice carried weight, as if she knew Stephen would obey.

Of course, Your Highness. You made me bring you here. You always get what you want.

And Stephen hated himself for his part in the ambush. He’d held Kokona on his lap as the two men entered the building, and two others—whom he hadn’t identified as DeVontay and Franklin until later—circled the school. He’d watched with a sick mix of fascination and horror as Zapheads crept up to the shed where the soldier stood guard. They had climbed the walls like thick-legged spiders and taken her before she could shout or fire a shot. Stephen turned away, but not before the mutants had yanked away pieces of her like wings from a fly.

Stephen settled Kokona on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, adjusting the blanket around her so she wouldn’t catch a chill. She stared up from that rounded face, exotic eyes strobing ribbons of light across his face. The comic books had it all wrong. The evil overlord wasn’t a knobby and gnarled monster from across the galaxy. It was a cute little Asian baby that commanded a willing, fearless, and determined army.

“As I suspected,” Kokona said. “Your people came for war.”

“No. Rachel left a safe place in the mountains because you and the other babies summoned her.” Stephen forced himself not to get angry because he was so scared he might start screaming. And he had a feeling the room full of Zapheads wouldn’t like that. “She turned her back on our world to help you. To help us live in peace.”

“Rachel Wheeler is a liar.”

“Well, you should know, since you’re the one who made her what she is.”

Kokona’s eyes dimmed to a smolder. “We weren’t ready for her. That wasn’t meant to happen. But once we saw that we could learn from her, we saw value in letting her live.”

“So you could read her mind all along?” Stephen balled his fists, but he jammed his hands into his pockets to hide the display of aggression. The nearest Zapheads shifted restlessly, a wet clicking sound in their throats.

“Not exactly. We had a connection. An understanding.”

“And now it’s gone.”

“Along with the other babies. They could be far away by now.”

His mouth went dry. “Or dead,” he whispered.

“If she betrayed us, she’ll be dead sooner or later.”

Stephen was no longer sure he could trust anything she said. For all he knew, she could be lying herself. Kokona might know where Rachel was and just didn’t want Stephen to find her.

She clearly exerted some kind of power over him; otherwise, why couldn’t he jab his thumbs into those glittering eyes and then squeeze her tiny, cocoa-colored throat until she died so hard even a million superfreak mutants couldn’t bring her back?

“It’s been long enough,” Kokona said. “We can go outside without being shot.”

Stephen took that as a command to lift the baby and carry her from the room. The Zapheads followed, twelve or fifteen of them, fat and thin, most of them adults but all of them bigger than Stephen. More had collected at the school, seeping from the dark in all directions. The gunfire had barely diminished their numbers. He guessed there were maybe a hundred mutants, silently walking the halls or standing in dark corners like sleeping statues.

The facility was much bigger than his old elementary school. When the two men had crept into the school, he’d heard them breaking glass and crunching their shoes on the crispy floor even from several halls away. The hiding Zapheads could have jumped them at any time, but like the ones lying out on the school grounds pretending to be dead, they just waited for Kokona’s silent command. As dark and creepy as it was inside the ghostly shell of the building, Stephen still dreaded going outside where all the bodies and stink were.

As Stephen carried Kokona down one hallway after another, Zapheads came out of classrooms and office to fall in with the crowd following behind. They made little sound besides a slight shuffle of feet and whisper of soiled clothes, although the smaller ones made occasional clicking noises. Soon they came to an exit and Stephen held his breath to brace for the carnage outside.

Kokona must have felt him stiffen. “Don’t worry. The danger’s gone.”

Meaning his friends. Humans were the danger.

He backed the smoke-stained door open to protect Kokona, and they came out under the stars. Bodies were heaped among the vehicles just as before, only now there were puddles of fluid around them like black oil.

Kokona ordered him to kneel by the nearest body. It was a woman, middle-aged and sprawled on her back. Her eyes were open but devoid of any spark of light or life. Her makeup was smeared and face dirty, and her white hair was a wiry snarl. In her old life, she could have been a teacher or administrator at this very school. A moist hole appeared high in her shoulder, and the top button had been sheared off her blouse. Blood coated her belly.

Kokona reached out her delicate hand and placed it on the woman’s face. Stephen felt it more than heard it—a humming like a transformer on a power line. His very bones vibrated on a subtle level, and his toes tingled. Kokona’s voice echoed inside his skull, but the bits of sound didn’t quite form words, but instead reeled like a carnival ride. Her mouth was closed, though, focused on whatever she was doing with her hand.

She’s inside my head.

He wondered if this was what Rachel experienced when she’d been altered by the mutants. A wave of dizziness struck him and he sat on the cold asphalt, his arms going limp. Kokona kicked and wriggled out of her blanket to maintain contact with the woman’s flesh. An aroma like baked ham filled the air, sweet and salty and greasy all at the same time.

Kokona pulled her hand away and the tension left Stephen’s body. She giggled and crawled back into Stephen’s lap. The little finger on the dead woman’s left hand twitched, and then all the fingers curled like a spider drawing back from a flame. Her eyes opened, and a miniature lightning bolt raced across one iris. Then came another and another, and soon both eyes roiled with flickering waves of red, orange, and yellow.

She writhed for a couple of seconds and twisted to one side, rolling to her hands and knees. She stood, unsteady for a moment, face blank, and then she merged with the crowd of mutants.

“Over there,” Kokona said, pointing to the next body about fifteen feet away.

Although his legs felt like Jell-O, Stephen found himself standing, the baby in his arms. Before he was aware of moving, he was already bending over the next dead Zaphead, a young man with a beard and mustache with the top half of his head blown away. Bits of bone and gray matter gleamed beneath Kokona’s radiating gaze.

“I don’t think there’s enough left of this one,” Kokona said.

Stephen was glad. Bad enough for Zapheads to come back from the dead without them leaking chunks from their shattered bodies. He wanted to vomit, but he hadn’t eaten in hours. And he couldn’t run, because Kokona owned him.

He tried to distance himself from the scene, turn it into make-believe so he wouldn’t go crazy. Maybe a comic book,
Slave of the Starry-Eyed Baby
or
Return of the Never Dead
. He wanted to laugh but his lungs held no air. Like Rachel, all he’d wanted to do was help, but he’d ended up losing himself in the process.

He obeyed as she ordered him to the next corpse. This one had a row of bullet wounds stitched up its leg, along its crotch and torso, and around the rib cage—eight or nine wounds in all. It was a teenager, not a whole lot bigger than Stephen, and he was struck by a disturbing thought.

That could be me. I could have been turned into a Zaphead during the solar storms and become part of this tribe. I could have been killed for the second time and then brought back to life yet again
.

But whatever sympathy he might have felt dissolved under Kokona’s command and he lowered her to the boy so she could touch his face. The bizarre ritual was repeated, and the electricity and confusion swirled through Stephen. He wondered if he was losing part of himself with each resurrection, as if he were the battery Kokona was drawing from in order to jolt another Zaphead back to life.

How long would he last until he was used up?

And this compulsion to serve Kokona—was it really that different from what he’d felt for Rachel and DeVontay, or even his own mother? Was this what love felt like, to give yourself until you were all gone?

He’d always imagined love was scary. It always looked like that in the movies and comic books.

And now he knew. It wasn’t even death that was terrible to consider, or even the return from death. It was this endless giving, this lack of will, this loss of self.

When the mutant boy’s eyes flicked open and filled with sparks, Kokona laughed and flung her hands together with delight. “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man, make me a cake as fast as you
cannnnnnnn
,” she squealed in her creepy little voice.

This was love.

He wanted to cry.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Holy hell,” Franklin whispered, peering through the night-vision goggles he held to his face.

“What is it?” DeVontay said, wrapping a torn curtain around his knee for support.

“I’m not sure, but we didn’t do a very good job of killing.”

They’d taken a position at the window of the second floor of a nearby house, deciding to watch the school for a while before returning to Hilyard and the others. Franklin was also curious whether Hilyard would send support after hearing the firefight. If his suspicions were correct, the lieutenant had already written them off as collateral damage.

But he’d deal with that later. Whether they reported back or decided to strike out on their own, they needed to know what they were up against. So when the mutants returned to their dead tribemates rather than chase the humans who’d unleashed the fatal bullets, Franklin assumed they’d collect the bodies as they usually did.

Instead, more Zapheads emerged from the school and they gathered around one of the fallen, and Franklin couldn’t be sure what was happening. It was almost like a memorial service. Except something wasn’t right.

“Give me those,” DeVontay said, ripping the goggles from Franklin’s grasp. He mashed them against his face for a moment, trying to focus. “Can’t see shit with only one eye.”

Jorge, who had taken Corporal Volker’s rifle, peered through the scope. “There’s a boy down there.”

“No surprise,” Franklin said. “Zapheads come in all shapes and sizes.”

“Take another look.”

Franklin took back the goggles and fitted them over the bridge of his nose. He squinted hard, wishing he wasn’t so old that his vision was failing along with everything else. “It’s a boy, all right. Holding something. A lump that might be a backpack or a sack of food or something.”

“What is unusual about the boy?” Jorge said. His voice had remained remarkably calm since he’d murdered his wife, which disturbed Franklin even more than a sobbing fit would have.

“Nothing. Just another Zaphead.”

“Look closer, my
gringo
friend. His eyes.”

“What is it?” DeVontay said.

“Damn.” Franklin drew in a sharp breath. “They’re not glowing. That’s not a Zapper.”

DeVontay jerked with a start, banging his forehead against the glass as he tried to get a better view. “He’s one of us?”

“Take a look,” Jorge said, passing Volker’s night-vision-equipped rifle to DeVontay. “Maybe this will work better.”

Franklin couldn’t make sense of what the boy was doing, bending over the dead Zaphead. With that big group of mutants gathered behind him, why didn’t he run? What was
wrong
with him?

“That’s a baby he’s holding,” DeVontay said.

“The ninth,” Franklin muttered under his breath.

And then the dead Zaphead—the woman near the school entrance he’d shot himself, nailing her twice—opened her eyes and moved, then slowly stood.

“She was dead,” Franklin said. “All the way.”

“I told you so,” Jorge said. “This is what they want to do.”

Franklin hadn’t really believed in all the miracle bullshit. Sure, he’d witnessed the strange powers of the mutants and heard stories of their healing. They’d certainly changed Rachel—saving her life while simultaneously condemning her to a mockery of humanity—and Jorge had described the Zapheads’ plan to revive all the dead humans they’d collected in Newton.

And now, even though he was witnessing it, he couldn’t accept it. God’s big prank on the human race had come full circle. Eternal life wasn’t a reward for a soul redeemed of sin. It was a parlor trick for monsters.

“We need that baby,” DeVontay said.

Franklin laughed. “And just how do we do that? Must be a hundred Zappers down there now.”

“A hundred-and-one,” DeVontay said. “It just brought another one back to life.”

“We should tell Lt. Hilyard and the others,” Jorge said. “We are only three. We have no chance.”

“Wait a sec,” DeVontay said, squinting through the scope. “That boy’s wearing a baseball cap.”

Franklin adjusted his goggles. “That can’t be Stephen.”

“His note said he was looking for Rachel. And if they turned him into a carrier, he won’t be able to run. I carried one of them. I know. You get to where you love them.”

“My wife was willing to sacrifice everything for her mutant baby,” Jorge said. “Even our daughter. They are evil.”

Franklin hoped Jorge wouldn’t suggest killing the boy, even assuming one of them was a good enough marksman to take him out. And he wasn’t eager to debate the nature of good and evil with a man who’d killed his wife in a fit of self-righteousness. But as Stephen helped the baby resurrect two more Zapheads, he knew the odds of human victory had shifted from one-in-a-million to zero.

Survival of the fittest, and we don’t have any evolutionary trait that can match that one. If anything, we’re getting worse as we go.

“We don’t have time to get reinforcements,” Franklin said. “We never considered that if the ninth baby could bring Rachel back to life, it could bring them
all
back to life. If that baby makes it downtown where all the dead Zapheads are, it’s over. We need to end this here.”

DeVontay stood so suddenly he dropped the rifle. “No. We need that baby alive. To save Rachel.”

Franklin turned from the window. “Look, I love her, too, but she wouldn’t risk all these innocent people.”

“Damn it, nobody’s innocent anymore, Franklin. And how do you know what she would want? You loved her as a reflection of yourself, somebody to carry on your ideals. You’re just as bad as all the politicians and oligarchs and royalty you claim to despise. Your little fiefdom, your rules.”

The goggles allowed him to see the twisted grimace on DeVontay’s face. “That’s wrong, son. I threw in with the crowd here. Joined the human race. I always did seem to side with the losers.”

“Rachel didn’t take sides. She saw the possibilities of a world where the mutants and us could live together and build a new world. And you want to take that chance away.”

“I didn’t make that decision.” Franklin jabbed a thumb beyond the window toward the parking lot, where yet another broken Zaphead lifted from a puddle of blood and rejoined its tribe. “They did.”

DeVontay closed his eyes, although the lid of the prosthetic one didn’t fully shut, giving him a sly, sinister aspect. He exhaled heavily. “We take the baby. And get Stephen back. Other than that, you can kill as many as you want.”

As if it matters. Unless we kill them all, including the baby.

“Okay,” Franklin said. “It’s worth a shot. And if the baby won’t help us, it’s dead. I don’t suppose it has the power to bring itself back from the dead.”

“The other eight didn’t.”

“What do you think, Jorge?” Franklin scanned the room behind DeVontay, realizing the Mexican hadn’t spoken in a while. “Jorge?”

DeVontay pointed out the window, where a man’s silhouette slipped down the street, the thin stick of his rifle barrel pointed at the sky. He was headed toward the school.

“Damn,” Franklin said, grabbing his backpack and shrugging his arms through the straps. “So much for making plans.”

DeVontay collected the rifle with the scope, grunting in pain as he stood.

“You going to make it, or do I have to carry you?” Franklin asked.

“I’ll get along fine. Anything besides having to smell your old-man body odor.”

Franklin led the way as they headed out of the room and down the stairs, DeVontay limping but otherwise gamely keeping up. Franklin had adjusted to the weird green view afforded by the goggles, but he still bumped his knee on a coffee table as they crossed the living room. Outside, the air had grown even chillier, and the only sound was a few insects in the trees.

“Hilyard still hasn’t sent anybody to check out the gunshots,” Franklin said.

“Or maybe he has, and they saw they’re outnumbered.”

“Well, we can’t wait now. Let’s do this.”

They both fell silent as they retraced their route back to the school. Jorge was nowhere to be seen, and Franklin was worried his friend would become a one-man vigilante squad intent on taking down as many mutants as he could. He secretly hoped Jorge would kill the baby. Now he was afraid of what Rachel would become if she returned, especially given DeVontay’s attitude. What if Rachel became fully mutant, gained her own powers, and decided it was time to rid the world of the vermin?

Once they covered the two blocks to the border of the school property, they angled near the football stadium to maintain the element of surprise rather than coming through the gap in the parking lot fence. Franklin expected to hear a burst of semiautomatic fire at any moment, along with Jorge’s wild ranting. The rot of corpses was far worse here, and even with the goggles limiting detail, he could make out the mass of bodies heaped in the stadium stands. A four-legged shadow slipped from the open mausoleum, dragging something from its jaws—a wild dog or other predator scrounging a late-night snack.

They kept to the shadows as they approached the parking lot from the rear, shielded by the school buses. The Zapheads moved as a unit, the crowd shuffling forward as Stephen and the baby repeated the same ritual over and over—bending down, touching a prone form, and two eyes sparking with renewal.

Even from this distance, the fear was plain on Stephen’s face. But in the glow of dozens of Zaphead eyes, something else was visible, too—an intense concentration, as if in wonder of the miracles he was helping to perform. The wispy-haired infant he held seemed delighted, patting her little hands together and giggling. A few of the Zapheads imitated her chuckles, making the tableau even more sinister.

“I don’t see Jorge,” DeVontay said, as they pressed behind a big Chevy Suburban with tinted windows and flat tires. The weird susurrations of the mutants allowed them to talk in hoarse whispers without being overhead.

“I hope he doesn’t go rogue before we figure out how to play this.”

“If he kills that baby, I’m killing
him
.”

Franklin didn’t doubt it. The baby had become the center of the universe, After’s new messiah. “Even if we could shoot worth a damn, we don’t have enough rounds to take all these Zappers down. So I guess it’s going to come down to using our brains.”

“That’s not very comforting.” DeVontay glanced around at the brittle, burned-out shell of the building and the row of school buses. “Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been acting like the baby is the key. But it looks like Stephen is part of the deal, too. The other babies were helpless without a human carrier, because the Zapheads don’t seem capable of caring for them. Why else would he be there?”

Franklin peered through the tinted windows. The boy and the Asian baby were busy bringing another Zaphead corpse back to life, meticulously working their way to the far end of the parking lot. “Yeah, they look like best buddies. Joined at the hip.”

“So, what if we cut the connection?”

It took Franklin a moment to understand. Or maybe he didn’t want to hear it, because the idea had been stirring in the back of his mind as well. “You want me to shoot the boy?”

The sudden pop high overhead jolted both of them, and their faces gleamed with a silvery brilliance as night vanished.