Earth Zero: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 2) (19 page)

“I wish,” she said. “Sir.”

“We’re rolling back to camp. Load up.”

“What about my private?”

“We’ll take him back for burial.” The colonel motioned to the soldiers and they lifted Matthews by his shoulders and legs.

As Antonelli followed the procession to the rear of the truck, he said to Colleen, “You’re the only one left for me to kill.”

“Just do it slow. I guess love is not only blind, it’s stupid as hell.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The fried catfish was so good that Franklin had almost forgotten the apocalypse.

Aside from the candles and the lack of ice in his glass of bourbon, he might as well have been in millennial America, enjoying a fine meal with an attractive woman. K.C.’s squatter’s mansion was spacious and comfortable after years spent at his cramped mountain compound and the claustrophobic bunker. With dusk settling and a fire crackling, Franklin realized his willpower was another thing that had weakened over the years along with his muscles.

“I only make fires at night, when the smoke doesn’t show as much,” K.C. said. She was sipping gin splashed with bottled lemon juice.

She had an extensive liquor supply behind a glass bureau, but she said she only drank on special occasions because she couldn’t afford slow reflexes.

“So I reckon this is a special occasion?” he said, sitting beside her on the sofa and resting his stockinged feet on a coffee table that probably cost two thousand dollars. He felt oddly self-conscious about the hole in the big toe of his sock, possibly because of the meticulous care K.C. applied in outfitting her home.

“To old friends,” she said, toasting him.

As their glasses clinked, Franklin was reminded that she was a decade younger and still in her prime. A little past the peak of it, maybe, but nowhere near the downward slide Franklin was on. “Some older than others.”

“You’re still alive. Wisdom must have some value in the apocalypse.”

“I never would’ve put that line in my survivalist handbook. Sounds like a load of horseshit, because luck is way more valuable than wisdom. Besides, look at what you’ve done here. If anybody’s an expert, it’s you.”

“Nothing wrong with enjoying the finer things if you can afford them.” She giggled like a teenager.

Like she giggled during the Wings of Eagles retreat.

Franklin fought the rush of nostalgia. This was a different time. A different
world
. Thinking of Before would only weaken him. Only After mattered now. And making it through another night.

She’d given him a tour of her grounds and the gardening operation. Despite the lateness of the autumn, the greenhouse was verdant with squash, green beans, tomatoes, and peppers. Another plot outside featured humps of potatoes, rows of cabbages, and dark green clusters of collards and kale. The top of the fence featured a line of thin wire around the perimeter that was connected to a series of bells that alerted K.C. to intruders.

Franklin had to admit her set-up was a lot more thought-out than the one he’d spent half his life planning and constructing. Plus she slept in clean sheets instead of a ratty sleeping bag, and her wardrobe was cotton and silk. She was living like a one-percenter in a time when less than one percent of the human race was still alive. A lifestyle that had appalled him a decade ago now seemed like the most natural aspiration for a free person.

Maybe taking money out of the equation made it less of a sin in his eyes. Stealing from the working class to indulge in a lavish lifestyle was not the same thing as scavenging property nobody was using. It was kind of like collecting unwanted trash from a garbage can, when you thought about it.

“So what’s the end game?” Franklin asked. “You were just going to hang out here for the rest of your life, watering your flowers and reading all the classics in the library?”

Her face was solemn in the firelight, shadows suggesting the darkness she must have suffered. “I didn’t really think it through. I just lived one day and then the next. Early on, I was with a group, but a few of them went psycho and tried to weed out the weak. Then the Zaps weeded out the psychos, and it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Don’t you ever get lonely?”

“Do you?”

He thought of how he could’ve spent all his time with Rachel and the others in the bunker but instead preferred the solitude of his compound. They’d both made their choices. “We’re humans. Social animals. We need families and tribes.”

“That’s next-level stuff, Franklin. We can’t think of building a society while we’re under the gun like this. I don’t even know if the future’s worth dreaming about. It’s a Zap world and we’re just speed bumps on their evolutionary path.”

“So you just want to live a decadent life until they find you?” The liquor was sour in his stomach. He didn’t want to dull his senses. Survival instinct had honed him to a razor’s edge. In many ways, he was a better man now than when he’d been an opponent of big government, globalist bankers, and the military-industrialist complex.

The enemy was much more in focus these days.

“I just want to
live
.” K.C. put down her glass and went to the fireplace, where she poked at the crackling logs. “My brother turned Zap during the storms. He attacked me. I didn’t know what was happening, of course. All I knew was that his eyes were wrong. They looked like these flames, like they wanted to consume everything in the world, including me.”

“Did you…put him down?”

“No. I even tried to stop the cop that saved me. Later on, I understood, but at that moment, I thought my life was over, that nothing could possibly get worse.”

“And it did,” Franklin said.

“Do you believe in fate?” She stood with her back to him, silhouetted against the flames as she gazed into the fire.

“Do I think God created the universe just so He could eventually give Planet Earth to the Zaps? He let the slime crawl onto dry land and grow legs so that one day the sun could play a joke on the human race? That the whole point of everything was to kill us off? I don’t know if you mean ‘fate’ as in ‘predestination,’ or ‘fate’ as in ‘circumstances beyond our control leading to a random and horrible outcome’? Mostly, I don’t even know if there’s a difference.”

“I meant fate bringing you here,” she said, still not looking at him.

“You came to find me, in a way, and you did,” he said, knowing he could concoct something romantic and shallow like he’d done during their Wings of Eagles phase, but now he couldn’t stomach his own bullshit. “I can’t say there’s a particular reason for it.”

“Come with me,” she said, heading for the stairs.

Franklin swallowed hard. The upstairs hadn’t been part of the tour. Down here in the massive living room with the vaulted ceiling, or out in the expansive yard, they’d had plenty of personal space. It was easy to keep his distance and his cool. Up there…the rooms were probably smaller.

She was already out of sight, her footsteps hushed by the carpet. Franklin looked out the window to make sure the garage door was closed where Princess was stabled for the night. Then he checked the door locks, wondering if he should bring his rifle with him.

No, knowing K.C., she’s got a weapon at arm’s reach no matter where in the house you are.

He went up into darkness, and at the landing he expected to see a candle flickering beyond an open door in one of the rooms. But the entire floor was completely dark aside from aurora light leaking through a window at the end of the hall.

“Up here,” she called, and Franklin blindly followed the railing until he came to a narrow set of steps. He ascended, feeling the walls closing in.

The top floor was an attic, the ceiling forming a vee overhead so that he had to stay in the middle of the open room to avoid having to duck. K.C. sat on a bench at the end of the room, looking out the window at the valley below. Franklin took his time, not wanting to bump into the stored furniture and cardboard boxes of what was probably food. When he reached K.C., she said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

The night’s aurora was a brilliant magenta, with neon lemon ripples feathering the horizon. The aurora thickened and curved into a plume in the distance, like a tornado sucking color from the sky and twisting it into a column of dizzying light.

“What the hell?” Franklin said. He’d seen the lights before, but never in such stark relief against the starless night. Indeed, from this perspective, it appeared the ion tornado had sucked down all light sources from the heavens and funneled it down like a massive black hole.

“I don’t know what causes it, but it’s beautiful,” she said. “I’ve been to Alaska and seen the Northern lights—you know, from before—but they were nothing like this.”

He sat beside her, his throat thick. The lights were gorgeous, all right, but they also were unnatural, an affront to the constellations that had guided humans for centuries. They were a visible sign of the permanent changes to the world, the heavens themselves gone mad.

“How far away is that thing?” Franklin asked.

“A million miles,” K.C. said. “Although that’s probably Wilkesboro. I went through there about a year ago and saw way too many Zaps. Haven’t been back since.”

“If the Zaps are there, maybe that’s where Rachel and DeVontay went.”

“The Zaps have been collecting us,” K.C. said. “If they went to Wilkesboro, they’re dead by now.”

“So you stay here and they stay there? As long as the Zaps aren’t on your side of the tracks, you’re fine with it?”

“I’ve seen fires from this window. At points in the distance that could only be big cities. I keep expecting to see these colored columns of light in all of them now, lines of them spreading all the way out to the horizon. And how that would be so much prettier than the lights of skyscrapers and strip malls.”

“I’ve never been there, but Wilkesboro’s not even a big city. If it’s some kind of Zap capital, why wouldn’t they choose a place with more buildings and roads and room for their assemblies? I’ve seen how Zaps live, although that was years ago. I have no idea how they’ve structured themselves now.”

K.C. leaned her head on his shoulder and he had to fight to force himself to stay seated. “It’s theirs now. And it’s not so bad. In their world, I get to own a fancy house and lots of nice things. I could never have all this in
our
world.”

“You’ve been by yourself too long, K.C. You’ve lost your perspective.”

“Have I really? Are you the same man from that Wings of Eagles retreat? Haven’t we all changed? Who is to say this is all that bad, when you think about it? If the world had been so great before, we wouldn’t have sought out militia movements and would-be patriots and armchair revolutionaries.”

You got a point there. Trouble with all the people who want to take over the world is they’re usually a hundred times worse than the people they’re trying to replace.

“The difference is I didn’t want to overthrow the government just to put a bunch of mutant freaks in charge. I thought there was nobility in the reclusive life, but maybe it’s just selfishness. Sort of like the Buddhist monk who spends his life in a Tibetan monastery, meditating for peace in the world. When all is said and done, he didn’t do shit to change anything and only found peace for himself.”

“But maybe that’s enough.”

“Maybe. But I can’t do that. I’ve got people out there. My granddaughter and her boyfriend. People back on the mountain counting on me. Hell, in a way, maybe even the New Pentagon could use my help.”

K.C. took her head from Franklin’s shoulder and drew away. “New Pentagon?”

“What’s left of the government. There’s a president and an army and…well, I guess that’s as far as they’ve got. At any rate, they haven’t given up.”

“And Franklin Wheeler heeds the call to arms?” She started laughing, and this was no innocent teenager’s laugh, but the cackle of a tired and nearly defeated woman. “Dedicates his life to Mom, baseball, and apple pie after spending his entire life trying to tear down all those sacred institutions?”

All of sudden, Franklin missed having her head on his shoulder. He should’ve just put his arm around her and shut up. Sometimes he was just a fool.

Not sometimes. MOST of the time.

Shadows moved in the trees beyond the brick wall outside.

“What’s that?” he said.

“I don’t see anything but the column of lights.”

“Sometimes you have to turn away and study the darkness. That’s where the real truth is.”

“It’s not Zaps, or you’d see their eyes. Might be monsters or scavengers. Wild dogs or bobcats or raccoons. They can’t get in.”

“And we can’t get out, K.C. Don’t you see this is just another prison?”

She took his hand in the dark, where truths hid. “Life sentence with no parole. A front-row seat to the end of the world.”

He hadn’t kissed a woman in a long time. He’d forgotten how, but he made it up as he went along and soon figured it out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Rachel found the mobile army camp depressing.

Not for its unkempt soldiers gathered around small fires or sleeping under vinyl tarps draped over ropes slung between trees, or the scattered nature of the camp along a wooded slope above a clearing, but for its laughable lack of firepower.

She couldn’t believe this was all the force the acting government could muster against what was likely the biggest Zap outpost in the western half of North Carolina. As the helicopter descended just as dusk settled, she guessed there were maybe sixty or seventy troops in all.

When the chopper landed beside a second one, she was escorted, along with Bright Eyes, DeVontay, and Squeak, to a command post set beneath a natural rock ledge and flanked with timbers and sheets of graying canvas. Two adjutants glared at them as the chopper leader brought them inside.

“We’re not running a damn refugee camp here—” one of them said, then his eyes grew wide and he reached for his sidearm when he saw Bright Eyes.

“Easy,” the officer said. “We’ve got a spy, if you can believe it.”

“I don’t believe it. I’m seeing it, and I still don’t believe it.”

“You brought one back?” the other adjutant said as he huddled over a field radio, a set of headphones clamped to his ears. “Our orders are to kill on sight. Take no prisoners.”

“We’ll let the colonel have final say,” the officer said. He motioned Rachel and Bright Eyes to a row of five-gallon buckets. “Have a seat.” To DeVontay, he said, “Take the girl three tents down and get her something to eat.”

“I’m not leaving Rachel,” DeVontay said.

“You surrendered yourself to the care of New Pentagon,” the officer said. “That means you fall under our directives. We don’t have time here for second-guessing. One strike and you’re out.”

They both understand that “out” meant “dead.” Rachel nodded at him and smiled at Squeak. “Go on, you two. We’ll be along soon, don’t worry.”

DeVontay scowled, his dark face etched with exhaustion, but he took Squeak’s hand and left the command post. Rachel took a seat on one of the upturned buckets, and Bright Eyes did the same. The radio hissed and crackled, and the officer asked, “Picked up anything?”

The radio operator shot Rachel and the mutant an uneasy look and said, “Communiqué for the colonel.”

“When will he be back?”

“An hour ago.”

“Munger will be late for his own funeral, I swear.” The officer sat on a folding chair facing Rachel and said, “Okay, tell me what you know. But first, what’s your deal? Are you Zap, or human, or what?”

“She’s hot,” the younger adjutant said. “Except for those freaky eyes.”

“Stand down with that bullshit, corporal. You’ve got a wife back in Luray.”

“That I ain’t seen in three months.”

“I’m married myself,” Rachel said. She and DeVontay had never staged a formal ceremony, since preachers and magistrates were in short supply, but they were more committed than she could imagine any couple being. He’d stuck with her through the change and all the varying characteristics the mutations had inflicted.

“Don’t mind Willie,” the officer said. “He’s just behind the times. So why don’t you help enlighten us a little?”

“I was injured and captured by the Zaps in the first year after the storms,” she said. “Gangrene set in and I was dying, and then they revived me through an odd process I still can’t explain—some kind of energy healing. I managed to escape with another survivor’s help, but I retained a telepathic link with the Zaps.” She waved at her eyes. “And this.”

She didn’t want to tell the officer everything about her experiences. After all, they weren’t helpful, since the Zaps had changed so much in the ensuing years, and she couldn’t tell how much was subjective and personal and how much was a measurable biological change within her. She was about to continue when vehicle engines roared into the clearing and headlights swept across the post.

A curly-haired woman in a khaki uniform stuck her head inside and said, “Colonel’s here.”

The adjutants subtly straightened their shoulders as if bracing for formality, and even the officer sent a hand up to the collar of his shirt to see if it was buttoned all the way up. When the colonel entered, they all stood and saluted the wiry, elderly man.

He said, “At ease” and looked over his guests. He’d apparently been informed of their presence because he didn’t seem surprised or upset. “So you brought us some live ones,” Col. Munger said to the helicopter officer.

“Yes, sir,” the officer said, giving a brief account of their battle with the Zaps and Rachel’s testimony. All the while, the colonel stood with his head tilted back, peering down his nose as if appraising Rachel and Bright Eyes. She tried not to squirm under his cold gaze—if their eyes were like erupting suns, his were like dead planets a thousand light-years away.

When the report was finished, the colonel sent the officer and the younger adjutant away, leaving the radio operator, who turned his attention to scanning the airwaves for signals. The radio was hooked to a large battery, and Rachel assumed the unit was attached to a solar panel or portable wind turbine to provide alternating current like the one in the bunker. For all her makeshift impression of the camp, the soldiers appeared to have some limited functional technology.

We’re celebrating the miracle of wireless radio while Zaps use telepathy and plasma energy, and still we think we can defeat them. Humans are an arrogant bunch, if nothing else.

“So, Miss,” the Colonel said.

“Rachel,” she said. “Rachel Wheeler.”

“You’re some kind of half-breed, then?”

“I’m a human,” she said. “Born in Oregon, spent most of my childhood in North Carolina, and was working in Charlotte as school counselor when the solar storms came. Since my affliction—although I can’t really think of it as a bad thing, since it’s saved my life several times over—since it occurred four years ago, I’ve been here in the mountains with a small group of people.”

She wasn’t going to tell him about Kokona or the others in the bunker. She imagined Stephen and Marina were caring for Kokona as was their responsibility, and that Franklin might’ve even dropped by to visit if they contacted him via radio.

But Franklin might set out looking for them since they were already several days late. In fact, that would be just like him, to go off like a crazy old fool and ignore common sense.

“And they don’t have any problem with you being a…kind of freak?” the colonel asked.

“I’m human,” she said. That hadn’t always been the case, not fully, but she didn’t like this man. She wasn’t going to share the details of her internal journey. “I’m here to help because the Zaps must be defeated. I know that better than anyone.”

The colonel’s lips pressed together in what might have been a smile but projected as a wrinkled grimace. “And what of this one?” he said to Bright Eyes. “Can you speak, or do you two have some kind of ESP thing going on?”

“I am me,” Bright Eyes said. “I am no longer them.”

“You’re the first one I’ve ever heard that didn’t just repeat what all the other Zaps were saying, over and over and over. You freaks are pretty dumb to be building the kinds of things you build.”

The colonel took one of the handheld devices from his pocket. “What can you tell us about these?”

“The device is a standard-issue plasma projector,” Bright Eyes said.

“We’ve sent some of these to our labs at HQ, and nobody can figure out what they really do or how they work.” He pointed it at the Zap, then tapped at it and squeezed it in his palm. “See? Nothing happens.”

“It operates on an electron transference process, using the operator as a conduit,” Bright Eyes said. He showed no concern that the device might activate and pierce a smoking hole in his silver suit or dissolve his bones inside his flesh.

“Meaning what, in English?”

“Thoughts,” Rachel said. “They shoot the plasma beam by routing it from their central energy source through their minds. It’s an electromagnetic process channeling the ion overload in the atmosphere. All derived from the excess energy the sun has been pumping out.”

“And this central energy source. Is it that big silver bowl in the middle of Wilkesboro?”

Rachel sensed the colonel knew more than he was letting on. His years of experience had made him a master manipulator and he was pushing buttons to see which ones would give him the information he sought. He’d survived five years of the apocalypse just as she had, and no doubt had suffered plenty of trials of his own.

“Yes,” Bright Eyes answered, explaining how the plasma sink worked. The colonel listened with hooded eyes, mulling the implications of his opponent’s strength. The description of the 3-D printers was delivered without reservation or emotion, and the colonel visibly paled at the description of the slaughtering machines.

“That’s why we have to win,” Rachel said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“What about you?” he asked Bright Eyes. “Do you want to see your kind wiped out?”

“I don’t think in absolutes,” the mutant said, his expression unchanging and his eyes retaining their steady flickering. He was as impassive in his way as the colonel was. “When I was them, I understood you were a threat. Not in the beginning, of course. In those early days, we pitied you.”

“You mean the part where you were tearing us apart with your bare hands and burning our cities to the ground?” The colonel allowed a little anger to flare.

“We were primal then, mindless. When we developed our communal mind, we moved beyond that behavior and attempted to make peace. But your kind responded with violence.”

“You can hardly blame us,” the colonel said. “It was kill or be killed.”

“We’d evolved past violence, but then you taught it to us again. Our leaders—our infants—warned us that we should prepare for war. Now I believe it was the infants who sought war because, despite their extreme intelligence, they had no emotional maturity.”

“Blame the babies, huh?”

“They guide us, yet they also battle among themselves for dominance. Still, most of our focus was on evolving a higher mind. We constructed our plasma sinks, our alloys, and our technology instead of making war. And, of course, we needed to protect ourselves against the monsters this new world has made.”

“So I guess we should be grateful that you haven’t wiped us out already,” the colonel said. “We’re so beneath notice that it’s not worth the effort of stepping on us.”

“Surely you can see what a minor threat you pose to us,” Bright Eyes said. “But I am no longer one of us. I am me.”

“So you don’t care if we wipe out the Zaps, or if they wipe us out? It’s all the same to you, huh?”

“I am me,” the mutant answered, as if that was all the answer needed to any question.

“He saved our lives,” Rachel said. “He risked his own life for me and my friends, as well as your officer. That’s not typical for his kind.”

“So how do I know the two of you aren’t up to some kind of trick? You have to admit, it’s awfully convenient that you decided to give yourselves up just as we were planning a major assault.” He cocked a crooked eyebrow. “Almost like you could read our minds.”

“I don’t blame you for being suspicious,” Rachel said. “But you also don’t have a whole lot to lose. This war would already be over if the Zaps considered you a real threat.”

“So what are you offering, besides this info that we pretty much already had before you showed up?” the colonel said. “Why shouldn’t I take you out to the edge of the woods and shoot you right now?”

Rachel resented the man’s threat. She was well aware of her tenuous position. DeVontay and Squeak would probably be okay, unless the colonel deemed them traitors of some kind, but she’d long accepted one tenet of her unique genetic position: When you were a half-mutant, each side wanted to kill
all
of you.

“We can get you in,” Rachel said. “We can pick up on their thoughts and disrupt their communal connection. That’s intelligence straight from the source.”

She wasn’t all that confident in her own abilities, given the way the presence of the plasma sink had diminished her telepathic connection. But Bright Eyes had no such limitations. He even had the capacity to work in reverse, to provide a mental shield that might help disguise an attack.

“Sort of like psychic sabotage,” the colonel said. “You’re not the first Zap prisoners we’ve had, you know.”

“We’re not prisoners,” Rachel reminded him.

“Forgive me.” The colonel managed a smile that wasn’t entirely phony. “I sometimes forget we’re not back in the old world.”

“Colonel!” the radio operator interrupted, removing his headphones. “Transmission from HQ.”

The colonel called to someone outside the post, and two armed soldiers entered. “Take these two and lock them in the panel van. Put their friends with them. Get them something to eat if they want, but don’t let anyone talk to them.”

The soldiers pointed their rifles at Rachel and Bright Eyes. Rachel fumed at the hostile treatment, but the mutant maintained his equanimity.

“We’re here because we want to be,” Rachel said to the colonel. “I could’ve easily joined the other side. The side that’s probably going to win.”