After: Dying Light (6 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kokona seemed to grow lighter in his arms rather than heavier.

DeVontay waited by the tractor trailer as planned, hiding in the shrubs bordering the porch of a house. But as the minutes stretched into perhaps an hour, he couldn’t afford to stay longer. Especially as gunshots popped sporadically closer.

The baby had shut her eyes while held in DeVontay’s embrace. In the darkness, he couldn’t see her, but parental instinct took over and he gently rocked her, even though he knew Zapheads didn’t really sleep. He even started humming “Rockabye Baby.”

At one point, he must have fallen asleep himself, because he jerked his head alert and realized he’d been talking to Rachel, in a sunny meadow at a farm where they’d spent a few peaceful weeks in autumn. In the dream, there was no apocalypse, but they’d been arguing over a pig. DeVontay wanted to butcher it, but Rachel wanted to keep it as a pet. Despite the grim nature of the dispute, they were both giggling playfully.

“You were calling her name,” Kokona said. Her wide eyes illuminated both their faces.

DeVontay was disoriented. “Whose?” he said, although he already knew.

“Rachel’s.”

“She wanted to help you. All of the New People.”

“I know. Partly to help you and the others, partly to help us. Partly to help herself.”

DeVontay realized Kokona might know more about Rachel than he did. After all, he didn’t have the advantage of a telepathic connection. He couldn’t help but feel the Zapheads had only half the story—Rachel’s human half would have remained hidden from them, beyond comprehension. “We need to learn to live together, or we all die.”

“Not all of us,” Kokona said.

Her words chilled him, and he realized his bones ached from midnight’s temperature drop. He shivered against the winter air.

“I’m cold,” she said, as if picking up on his thoughts.

DeVontay tugged and folded her blanket so that most of her body was covered except for her face. He couldn’t believe how naturally he accepted her ability to carry on a conversation.

Adapt or die. Maybe both.

“And I’m going to need a change soon,” she said.

“A change?” DeVontay asked.

She gave a shy grin. “I have to pee pee.”

“How about if I just…ummm…pull your pants down and let you do your thing?”

“I can’t stand, silly. I’m only a baby.”

“Okay, I’ll hold you, then.”

He laid her down on the blanket and carefully pulled down her little cotton pants. She wore white knitted booties that were gray with neglect. She had no diaper. He avoided looking at her bare bottom as he awkwardly held her over the grass. “Okay, make pee pee.”

“I’m not the first ‘Zaphead’ you’ve seen naked, am I?” She delivered the slang term for her tribe with a sneer, as if mocking a racist slur. Kokona seemed to enjoy his embarrassment.

“I don’t know—I mean, that’s not something we should talk about.”

“It’s okay. We’re just like you.”

“We’ve killed each other, we’ve worked to establish new societies, and we both think we’re special. So, yeah, we’re just alike.”

Except one of us can come back from the dead.

He felt her little ribs tense beneath his hands as liquid spattered against the ground. He was glad it was dark and that her eyes radiated away from him. “Do you believe we can live together?” she asked.

“I think so. It will take some work, but we can do it.”

“Rachel believed, it, too.”

“That’s why she was willing to risk everything. For your people as well as ours.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

DeVontay was about to ask how she knew, and then just sighed. “Will you bring her back?”

“I’m finished,” she said.

DeVontay wasn’t sure at first what she meant. Then he realized, and he laid her on the blanket again. “Sorry I don’t have anything to wipe you with it.”

“That’s okay. If I get diaper rash, I’m going to cry a lot, though.” She giggled again, and DeVontay almost forgot she was a powerful mutant baby that could talk. “When daylight comes, maybe you can find a drug store and get some Pampers and ointment.”

“So you’re okay with this?”

“You have me, don’t you? What am I going to do, run away? Scream for the police? Find a telephone and call in an Amber Alert?”

“How did you learn so much?”

“I had good teachers.” She sounded almost wistful, her eyes smoldering to a deeper shade of red.

“You’ll help Rachel. Won’t you? The way you helped your people in the parking lot?”

“Bring her back from the dead. It’s okay to say it. We don’t think death is any big deal.”

DeVontay swallowed. Assuming it would even work, he wasn’t sure how much Rachel’s body had deteriorated, or if she would have brain damage. The Zapheads seemed immune to death’s degradation, but Rachel was part human. The first of her kind.

“Will you?” He realized he sounded desperate, like a child pleading for a piece of candy.

“Yes, but there’s a price.”

Isn’t there always?

He pulled up her pants, swaddled her in the blanket again, and held her to his chest. “Whatever it is, it’s worth it.”

Kokona’s eyes burned with an intensity that he couldn’t look away from. “She’ll become one of us. All the way. Forever.”

DeVontay didn’t trust himself to speak. Who was he to make such a bargain? But there was only one possible answer. The selfish one. The
human
one. “Anything,” he whispered hoarsely. “Just bring her back to me.”

She gave a smile. Her skin looked so soft and flawless, he couldn’t help stroking her cheek. Her tufted hair was solid black and would have been thick and glossy if she had grown up. But of course, this is the way she would stay. Forever.

He was beginning to hate that word.

“I can’t wait for them any longer,” he said. No gunshots had sounded for a while, and he felt the battle had moved on. Nobody—Zaphead or otherwise—had appeared on the street, and the stillness of the middle of the night had descended on the area. It was as good a time as any to return to the stronghold.

And Rachel.

“You like Stephen,” Kokona said, as a fact, not a question.

“Yes, we grew close while surviving together. Rachel loves him, too.”

“Yet you left him back there where he might get shot.”

DeVontay didn’t like the veiled accusation. Something about Kokona’s expression made him think he was being tested. “Franklin can protect him.”

“You chose Rachel over the boy.”

DeVontay couldn’t fend off the burst of temper. He was exhausted and his nerves were raw. “I’d choose her over me, too. I’d gladly die so that Rachel can live.”

He stood on stiff legs and carried Kokona to the edge of the shrubs so he could study the surroundings. Still no movement anywhere. The coast was as clear as it was ever going to be, and he didn’t want Rachel to lay in that casket another second longer than necessary. No matter what she would be when she rose from it.

As he navigated the street and headed back toward Hilyard and the others, as best as he could determine the direction, he realized Kokona could have yelled out at any time to summon her mutant tribemates. Even with her tiny vocal chords, her voice could carry for hundreds of yards in the silent night.

“Will you take care of me?” she asked.

What kind of question was that? She was a helpless baby. And cute as hell. “Of course.”

Kokona smiled and cozied into his embrace. “Good. You’re my carrier now.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Uh-oh, SpaghettiO’s.” Franklin pressed the can of pasta into Stephen’s hands, along with a spoon.

“What does that mean?” Stephen asked in the dark.

“That TV commercial. Don’t you remember?”

“I barely remember TV, much less ‘Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs.”

For the millionth time since the end of the world, Franklin was reminded that he was getting as old as dinosaur dung.

Their path to the rendezvous point with DeVontay was cut off by a mass of Zapheads who filled the streets beyond the school. The mutants moved like waves in the dark, their bright eyes bobbing on the inhuman sea. Even though Shipley’s attack was over, they were agitated, cruising for the chance to destroy. Or maybe waiting for their dead to return.

Franklin and Stephen took refuge in a house on the northern side of the school, which afforded some concealment and time to scrounge for food. In the kitchen, with the aid of the night-vision gear, he found some plastic bottles of water, a big box of raisins, the canned pasta, and a sealed package of Oreos. Franklin wasn’t in the mood for cold tomato sauce, but he could just hear Rachel in his head, telling him to mind the boy’s nutrition.

They ate the meal in silence sitting in the living room, the only sound the smacking of lips and the spoon clinking against the can. Franklin was afraid to light a candle. The cookies were a little stale, but he ate three and Stephen consumed more sugar than he should, but Franklin thought about a condemned prisoner’s last meal and let the boy go for it.

He was grateful the mutants had collected most of the bodies in the town, but an unpleasant odor lingered in the house. Franklin was tempted to open some windows despite the winter chill.

“Won’t DeVontay wait for us?” Stephen asked after he was full. The boy huddled under some blankets on the sofa, unable to sleep despite Franklin’s urging. Franklin wanted to nod off himself but every time he closed his eyes, he pictured a mob pushing through the doorway.

“He can’t stay there all night,” Franklin said. “Too dangerous.”

“The Zapheads can find them no matter where they go.”

The boy spoke so quietly that Franklin wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What’s that?”

“Kokona can bring them to her with her mind.” Stephen described how he’d found Kokona and escaped Shipley and Broyhill, eventually ending up at the school where he’d helped Kokona bring Zapheads back to life. “She made me help. It was like I was powerless. Even worse, I
wanted
to help her.”

Franklin bit back a curse. Why didn’t he think of that? Or maybe DeVontay did suspect Kokona’s powers, which is why he’d insisted on taking the baby. DeVontay was protecting Stephen, or else he had secret motives of his own.

“Then we have to get back to the stronghold,” he said. “If Kokona reaches Hilyard and the others, the Zapheads will swarm them and there goes the little dream of a new human settlement in Doomsdayville.”

“Sgt. Shipley and his soldiers are still out there. If he finds us, he’ll kill us. He’s mad at me.”

“Me, too. Let him get in line. Plenty of Zapheads want to kill us first.” Franklin checked outside the window, and all he saw were a few glimmering ribbons of reflected light. For a wild moment, he thought about heading back to his mountain compound, taking Stephen with him. The two of them could make a good go of it, and Franklin could teach Stephen all the boy would need to know to survive on his own.

But Stephen wouldn’t want to survive on his own. What kind of future was that? Franklin had even abdicated his own isolationist desires in the face of grim reality—if they didn’t rebuild the world, the human race ended here. Millennia of evolution, adaptation, and migration would come to nothing, and alien archaeologists of the future would wonder what the hell happened here, assuming humans even left a lasting mark.

No, they were truly all in it together, no matter how far you ran. They were all clinging to the same soft marble suspended in a vast sea of uncaring universe, where even God needed an all-powerful telescope just to notice you existed, and if He so much as blinked at the wrong time, well, there went your entire history.

Like Rachel, DeVontay, Hilyard, Brock, and the others, he’d cast his lot here in Newton. Even Jorge, despite his personal tragedy, seemed to find comfort in raising his daughter among other humans. And they needed him. The fiercely idealistic individualism he’d clung to as a badge of honor now seemed like a sick stripe of selfishness.

What he wanted didn’t matter for shit. Who got what they wanted in this world, anyway?

Well, psychotic sociopaths usually turned out okay, and heaven knows, we got plenty of them to spare.

“We probably have a couple of more hours before light,” Franklin said. “We can circle around town to avoid the Zapheads, then figure out how to rejoin the others.”

“What about DeVontay?”

“He’s smart. He’ll be fine.”

Unless Kokona starts controlling him.

Franklin jammed a couple of the water bottles and the last of the raisins into his backpack. He heard Stephen moving in the dark, bumping into furniture. The boy was undoubtedly exhausted, but hopefully he could hang in there until they reached the stronghold. “Careful. Don’t break a leg, because I don’t want to carry you like a Zapper baby. The door’s over here.”

Outside, the scorched stench of the school and the rot of a stadium full of corpses gave the air a greasy thickness. The streets were quiet, the houses brooding, and a thin skin of frost lay on the grass and the windshields of cars along the street. Stephen gasped at a burst of movement, but it turned out to be a calico cat scurrying across the sidewalk to vanish in a drainage ditch.

Look out for the Zaphead mice, my little feline friend. I always figured cats and cockroaches would be the last things standing. Well, and maybe politicians.

With Stephen keeping close behind, Franklin headed toward what he thought was the east. A patchwork of clouds hid most of the stars, and even with goggles, the darkness slowed their progress. At least the Zapheads’ eyes would be easier to see in such conditions.

They must have walked half a mile, avoiding open lots and wide streets, instead sticking to alleys and tree-covered yards. Stephen tripped once, ripping the knee of his jeans and scraping his skin, but he gamely refused to stop and rest. The land assumed a mild incline, and they emerged from a stand of bare trees to see the ruins of the courthouse that dominated the town. This section of town featured two-story apartments and townhouses from what he could he tell, and their black hulks rose around them like forgotten castles.

“The stronghold is a few blocks below that,” Franklin said. “We can be there in maybe forty-five minutes.”

A groan behind them caused Franklin to swivel with his rifle leading the way, finger sliding to the trigger. Over the course of the journey he’d relaxed his guard a little, lulled into a false sense of security, but now the adrenaline surged through him. He was ready to kill in the space of one heartbeat.

“Duh—don’t shoot me,” came a strained voice some fifty feet away, muffled by its echo.

Franklin squinted into the darkness. Although he reasoned that the speaker wasn’t a threat or else Franklin would already be dead, he still stepped protectively in front of Stephen. “Who is it?”

“One of you.”

“One of you who? There’s lots of ‘yous’ running around out here.”

“A…human.”

Yeah. Obviously. You haven’t tried to tear my ears off the side of my head and your eyes aren’t glowing like the headlights of hell.

Franklin told Stephen to wait where he was and he stepped toward the voice, which originated from an apartment vestibule off the main street. Now he could make out the man’s form, sitting up against a low brick wall alongside a metal fence. His hair looked wet, and Franklin realized it was blood. He wore body armor and camouflage gear, but he had no weapon or helmet. One of his legs was twisted at an impossible angle, a sharp sliver of bone sticking out from a gash in his pants below his calf.

“Are you with Hilyard?” Franklin asked, although he didn’t recognize the man.

“I was, in the old days. Before the shit hit the fan.” The man tried to grin but it turned into a wince of pain. “You’re that dude…the hermit. Saw you at the bunker.”

“So you’re with Shipley.” Even though the soldier looked helpless and, indeed, headed for the buzzards’ breakfast, Franklin kept the muzzle of his rifle trained on him. “Looks like you got what you deserve.”

“I did what I had to do, after Hilyard deserted us,” the man wheezed.

“That’s not the way I heard it. Shipley led a mutiny and took command. And that’s what I saw while you assholes were holding me prisoner.”

“Shipley took command, all right, but
somebody
had to, once Hilyard went rogue. You got anything to drink?”

Franklin didn’t have much mercy to spare for the enemy, but a little show of humanity was a good last lesson for the man to take with him to the Pearly Gates. Taking care not to alter his aim, he eased his backpack from his shoulders and fished through it for one of the water bottles. He knelt and held it out, bracing for the man to lunge at him.

But the man merely reached with a weak, trembling hand and took the bottle, then struggled trying to twist the cap free. He was probably in his early twenties, barely old enough to raise a beard, but trauma had given him a wizened, taut visage that made him look like he was going on eighty.

The soldier chuckled darkly and said, “I was hoping for whiskey but I guess this will have to do.”

He finally managed a drink and the first swallow caused him to cough. Franklin stepped back to the street, keeping one eye on the wounded soldier, and called Stephen. When the boy arrived, Franklin said, “Just stay behind me, no matter what.”

Franklin knelt again in front of the soldier, whose eyes were now closed. A long open furrow of flesh ran from just beneath his jaw to the top of his scalp. For a moment, Franklin thought the man was dead, but he coughed and jerked alert. “Where…am…I?”

“Paradise.”

“Where’s that water?” The man still held the bottle but couldn’t feel it.

Franklin said, “Why would Hilyard go rogue?”

“We got…word from McLean, Virginia. The government bunkers outside D.C. The president died, but a handful of cabinet members made it out.”

“Word? How did you get word?” Franklin was so intrigued he forgot his caution.

“Shielded radio. Shortwave. Lots of bunkers were protected. They have combat gear, trucks, tanks, even some choppers and few single-engine planes. Not just there, but Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Maine, a few other places. And not small bunkers like ours, but goddamned caverns as big as the Superdome.”

Franklin wondered if the man was delirious, but the information jibed with his own paranoid beliefs: no matter what the catastrophe, the U.S. government would find a way to save its own ass. They didn’t extort all those trillions in tax dollars just to give it to the poor.

And if the man was lying, he had little to gain. He was dead either way, and this was quite an elaborate story to concoct in the final hours of his life. And, really, with his small, beady eyes and pinched forehead, the man didn’t look all that creative.

Franklin lifted the bottle so the man could take another sip. He could feel Stephen watching over his shoulder and saw no reason to make the boy look away. He’d already witnessed far worse in the last four months.

“What’s your name, son?” Franklin asked.

“Denny Fernandez.”

“Hell of a name, Denny. So, why didn’t Hilyard like this news from the government? He’s under their command.”

“Because he was already used to running the show. Once you get a taste of the throne, you don’t want to give it up.”

Power and ego corrupted people’s minds, but that didn’t match the behavior he’d witnessed in Hilyard. But of course, wasn’t that what was happening right now? Gathering as many people as he could, taking charge, and running things by his own rules? Franklin had gone along with it simply because Denny Fernandez here was right—somebody had to be in charge. But now he was reevaluating all of Hilyard’s actions since the officer had shown up at his compound with Rachel, DeVontay, and Stephen.

True, Hilyard fought Shipley’s troops, but if this man was telling the truth, then Hilyard was likely hungry to regain his bunker. Shipley was no saint, either, but the throne seemed to drive anyone who perched on it just a little batshit, whether the kingdom was a dozen square miles or an entire continent.

“The government,” Franklin said. “What’s their plan?”

“Orders are to secure…” The man’s voice grew fainter and he closed his eyes again. “My leg hurts like a son of a bitch. But I can’t really feel the rest of me. Just a little cold.”

“It’s winter, son.” Franklin looked up and the first blush of dawn tinged the ribbed clouds in the east. He pushed his goggles down beneath his chin so he could meet the dying man’s eyes. “But all things must pass.”

The man attempted to straighten up as if for parade inspection. “Orders are to secure any nearby towns and eliminate any mutant resistance, sir,” the soldier recited as if from some dim memory. His last sentence was spoken with the force of all his remaining energy. “Stand your ground, because the United States Cavalry rides again.”