After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) (11 page)

“They can’t take a hint,” Franklin said. “This is
my
mountain.”

He fired again, and one of the female Zapheads lurched forward one faltering step, mouth open in surprise. The bullet had entered her abdomen, blowing a pink, stringy chunk of intestine out her back. Judging from her blue blazer and white blouse, she might have been a bank teller or sales executive, someone you wouldn’t expect to ever meet deep in the forest.

Now she was dead a second time—the solar storms had inflicted a first death on her soul, leaving only her body.

Still, she was a woman.

“You’re killing them in cold blood,” Jorge said.

“Good,” he said. “No need to break a sweat.”

“You’re not shooting those kids, are you?”

“They ain’t kids no more. If you’re a Zap, you’re a threat to the human race. A threat to freedom.”

The Zapheads still didn’t show any distress or excitement, although they took interest in their fallen comrades. Two of them lifted the naked man and settled him across their shoulders, while three female Zapheads lifted their dead sister. They weren’t strong enough to bore her aloft, but they managed to raise her enough to drag her along the trail, one summer sandal sliding off her foot.

The remaining Zapheads started up the slope toward the rhododendron thicket. They moved with an eerie grace, as if working their way through water. At forty yards, their glittering eyes were like electric jewels.

Jorge brought his weapon to bear, but only in anticipation of the soldiers discovering them and attacking. He wasn’t going to shoot unless he had no other choice.

Franklin, on the other hand…

Ku-paaak.

Another shot, another Zaphead tumbling over.

Jorge flung his weapon to the ground.

Franklin turned, nearly snarling in rage. Jorge wasn’t sure if the anger was directed at him or the Zapheads—the raw emotion seemed diffuse and directionless, a tsunami finally breaching a seawall.

“Pick it up,” Franklin said.

“I’m not killing unarmed people.”

“They’re not people, Goddammit. They’re
Zaps
.”

“I’m done.”

Franklin lunged toward him with a speed that belied his age. Jorge tried to avoid the charge but fell into the branches, feathers of bark raining down on his face. Franklin clutched him by the front of his shirt, his fist jammed hard into Jorge’s Adam’s apple.

The Zapheads suddenly hissed and began storming the slope, kicking mud and leaves into the air. Their grace gave way to a kinetic madness that mirrored Franklin’s rage. Jorge fought to suck air into his lungs. Franklin’s breath smelled of old onions, stale coffee, and a metallic tinge that came from somewhere deep in his organs.

“Guh…guh…,” Jorge grunted, pointing at the approaching Zapheads. But Franklin’s bulging eyes fixated on Jorge’s as if he was oblivious to everything but the adrenalin coursing through his veins. Jorge struggled to get his balance but one knee was jammed in the crotch of a twisted rhododendron. He couldn’t run and he couldn’t fend off the grizzled oldtimer.

The Zapheads fanned out as they approached, half a dozen of them flitting through the trees and dodging behind the boulders. The two kids spearheaded the charge. Jorge hadn’t noticed before that one of them was a girl—her lithe body was undeveloped and her shape hidden inside a baggy T-shirt. She was close enough that he recognized the emblem on it from a pencil box Marina had owned.

Hello Kitty.

Jorge twisted away from Franklin’s grip, a branch scratching his cheek.

“Fray…Franklin,” Jorge wheezed. This time a glimmer of recognition clouded the burning rage of Franklin’s irises. He blinked as if awakening from a restless nap and looked down at his hands.

“They’re coming,” Jorge said.

“Who?”

Jorge wondered if the old man had suffered a stroke. “Zaps.”

The man shoved Jorge and scrambled for his rifle. Jorge hung splayed in the branches for another moment before dropping onto the moist loam.

From his knees, Franklin hoisted his rifle into position and swiveled the barrel left and right. The Zapheads darted between the trees, hissing and chuckling.

Franklin squeezed off another shot and a bullet pinged off granite.

An answering shot echoed across the valley from the opposite ridge.

Soldiers. Damn the ornery old man.

Jorge couldn’t locate any of the Zapheads. Once they had swarmed the forest, they moved with a predatory agility. He’d see a flash of movement or flutter of cloth and by the time he focused, all was shadows and trees again. If not for their hissing, Jorge would have believed they had retreated deeper into the woods.

Franklin cussed under his breath. “Did they turn into ghosts?”

Another shot rang out from a distance and this time Jorge heard a bullet whistle through the treetops above. He crouched low and scrambled on his hands and knees until he was out of the thicket.

“Where you going?” Franklin said.

“To the compound.”

“You forgot your rifle.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Jorge took off along the slope, running parallel to the trail. Below, the three females had lifted the woman Franklin had shot and now conveyed their grisly cargo toward a mysterious destination. The naked old man’s body was gone, but the dead soldier still lay where he’d tumbled. The Zapheads had apparently lost interest in the human once they had some corpses of their own kind.

Franklin fired again and Jorge winced, half expecting a bullet in the back. But he didn’t turn around. Instead, he angled up the slope, pushing between the gray corrugated trunks of oak and poplar. He imagined movement from the edges of his vision, but his senses were reduced to his ragged breathing and the ache in his legs. He hoped the soldiers hadn’t circled around the ridgeline and taken position on high ground.

But there were only three of them…

He came to a fallen tree that had been split and scorched by lightning. Its branches held the trunk three feet off the ground and Jorge had to make a choice whether to scramble under it or climb over. Since he needed the rest anyway, he dropped to his knees and listened, sucking in the sweet forest air and straining to hear.

A volley of gunfire erupted in the distance, and Franklin returned fire. Jorge doubted if the old man had even spotted his targets. He’d probably just let loose to mark his territory. A squirrel chattered in a cluster of golden-brown leaves overhead, and Jorge savored the ordinary little notes of a bygone world.

But the past wasn’t dead yet. It was waiting back at the compound.

Hang on, Rosa. I will be there soon.

He scrambled under the fallen tree and rose to come face to face with a Zaphead.

She stared at him with those eerie, glittering eyes. Her face was blank but her mouth parted to let out a wet exhalation. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, thin arms protruding from the sleeves of the oversize T-shirt that reached to her knees. The expressionless Hello Kitty logo with its red bow filled the center of her shirt. She wore mismatched socks without shoes, and the wool was sodden and black with mud.

She was only a year or two older than Marina, maybe even had already started menstruating. Her hair hung in black strands that ended in loose, greasy curls.

Jorge took a slow step to his right as if to go around her. She matched it so that she remained three feet in front of him, blocking his path.

Jorge fought an urge to reason with her, to apologize for Franklin’s murderous outbreak.

The wet sound in her throat gained intensity, and he realized she was about to hiss. He spun and grabbed a shattered branch from the fallen tree, twisting it free with a splintered squeak. It was four feet long, laden with dead leaves. Even though it was unwieldy, he gripped it with both hands and reared back like a baseball batter.

But even as he aimed his blow, he couldn’t avoid her eyes. Even when her mouth parted into an
O
—projecting all the innocence of a soprano in a church choir—and emitted that nerve-gnawing hiss, he couldn’t swing his weapon into that angelic face.

The hiss was echoed across the woods as others of her kind heard and responded.

The glitter of her eyes intensified, as if the hiss ignited some sort of internal combustion deep in whatever passed for her soul. She didn’t flinch or in any way react to his threat. Jorge dropped the branch and held up his hands as if to show he wouldn’t harm her.

She abruptly fell silent. If she shut her eyes, he wouldn’t have known she was a strange mutant. She would just be another child, another person who required nurturing and guidance. Just another person for whom adults toiled to leave the world a better place.

Just…another…person.

Yet she stood between him and the people he loved, so she was the enemy. He took another step to the right. If she blocked his way again, he would have to bowl her over and keep running.

She stood where she was. Mouth open, eyes fixed on his face.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“
Who?”

At first, Jorge wasn’t sure he’d heard it. Had she spoken?

Impossible.

Maybe she is not one of them. She looks so…normal.

But her eyes were so strange, he couldn’t believe she hadn’t been affected somehow. Then she hissed high in her throat and he dismissed his illusion—his wish—that she was still human in any sense.

He took another step, then another, careful not to show hurry.

He couldn’t tell if the hissing of the others had stopped because his feet scuffed in the fallen leaves, drowning out any noise. But apparently none of them were near enough to attack him.

Three more steps, then five, and then he was running again, and soon he knew she could never catch him with those frail, short legs.

After a good sixty feet up, he risked a look back at her. She stood watching after him, her eyes like miniature suns.

Jorge wondered what had happened to her parents, and whether she was aware that she had changed. Instead of boy crushes and bubble-gum pop bands and makeup and braces, she was part of a new culture, a new way of life and half-life and unlife.

In her world, there was no longer Hello Kitty.

He couldn’t hope to understand, so he did the only thing he could. He churned his way toward the ridgeline, hoping he wouldn’t get lost on his way back to the place he now called home.

To the people he knew and loved.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“When’s DeVontay going to catch up?”

Stephen pulled off his Panthers cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Rachel had kept them moving, putting as much distance as possible between them and the Zapheads, even if it meant leaving DeVontay behind. Rachel tried not to think of him—she couldn’t summon the necessary faith to imagine him still alive.

Whenever she let her mind roam, she saw him lying on the ground dead, one eye closed while his glass eye stared up at the heavens. But she couldn’t show it.

“He’ll be along soon.” She scooted Stephen’s backpack up on his shoulders, even though his neck chafed from the straps.

“Yeah, just follow the bread crumbs,” the boy said.

Rachel smiled despite the grim mood. Every half mile, Stephen had ripped a page from a comic book and slid it beneath the windshield wiper of a car, taking care not to look inside. She recalled how Pete had given him a near-mint collection of classic Marvel comics and wondered what had happened to Pete in the weeks since they’d met him in Taylorsville. “Must hurt a lot to damage the comic books,” she said.

“Nah, it’s okay. It’s just the X-Men. I still have the Spidermans.”

“That’s good.”

He looked at her with dark circles under his eyes. “Can we rest?”

“Just one more mile.”

That could well be her new motto, in the face of all the other mantras and prayers she’d wiped from the chalkboard of her past.

Rachel looked back along the highway. The sinking sun glinted off bumpers and windshields. The eastern horizon was mostly clear of the haze from the burning cities, and as they had gone deeper into the Appalachian foothills, the towns were fewer and spread farther apart. Even the number of stranded vehicles had declined noticeably, although the sweetly fecund smell of corpses was inescapable.

Soon they’d be coming up on Lenoir, the last town on the map before the climb into the mountains. Rachel had selected a side route to circumvent the highway, figuring the downtown area was as dead as that of most small Southern towns, while the crowds had convened at Wal-Mart, Cracker Barrel, and Home Depot on the main strip. Local officials, either well-meaning or through naked personal greed, saw national chains as a way to put themselves on the map, throwing their own distinct brick-and-cobblestone identities into the great melting pot of American slime.

Not that any of it mattered now. Ambitions and corporate branding were equally useless.

Dead downtowns are just the way we like them these days.

“Keep moving, munchkin,” she said with false cheer, urging him forward between the silent vehicles. Stephen no longer had the least curiosity about the contents of the vehicles. After witnessing an endless array of corpses in various stages of decomposition, his usual reaction had become a halfhearted “Yuck.”

Rachel took his hand to help energize him, and she even managed a smile. With one wistful backward glance to ensure DeVontay wasn’t running to catch up, she guided him north up a long incline.

Ahead, an Exxon sign came into view above the trees, marking an exit. The gas station was less than a mile away and was likely surrounded by other businesses and perhaps a motel. It was as good a goal as any.

She flung her arm across Stephen’s chest to bring him to a sudden stop.

“What is it?” the boy asked. He was tired, hardly aware of his surroundings. Rachel was grateful, because the pavement ahead was littered with rotten clumps of body parts. A headless torso protruded from the driver’s side of a green Subaru wagon, one stump of an arm dangling. The corpse was black with rot, although red strings of meat trailed out from the wounds.