After: Dying Light (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 6) Read online

“That might be the point, too.”

  Stephen gave him a quizzical look, and Franklin said, “Remember when Rachel would say ‘Expect the worst and then be ready for something even worse than that?’ Well, I’m the one who taught it to her.”

  “Why would they want to kill us?”

  “I don’t think they’re trying. I just think they don’t care. That’s why Hilyard sent us out last night. Hell, he probably sees me as a threat to his little empire.”

  “But you found me, so it was worth it.”

  Franklin affectionately rubbed the top of the boy’s head so that his ball cap wiggled. “Yeah. And we’ve got the babies, so we have what Kokona and the Zapheads want.”

  “Then Rachel will come for us?”

  “I hope so, son. But if they light that hospital, that’s going to draw Zapheads from miles around.”

  Two others joined the first man in siphoning gasoline, and they carried the jugs of fuel inside the emergency entrance. Half a minute later, they emerged, and Brock was with them. Soon smoke boiled out of the hospital, and the wind carried a stench of burned plastic and bad barbecue.

  “Let’s get out of here while they’re occupied,” Franklin said, taking up the front of the stretcher again. Stephen struggled to lift it, and Franklin knew the boy wouldn’t be able to go much farther. Although each baby was light, their combined weight was almost as much as Stephen’s. This was their last bargaining chip, the only thing that would keep Kokona from ordering the Zapheads to kill them all. That job would be pretty easy, especially given how Hilyard had divided his troops instead of solidifying their defensive positions.

  And Brock would gladly turn their last chance to ashes. Just more proof that Hilyard was going into “Alamo” mode, determined to make a last stand in Newton. Which made it all the more odd that Shipley had come down from his secure bunker to take him on.

  Those guys really don’t like each other.

  Nothing surprising there. The human race on the brink of extinction, and instead of working together to overcome the challenges, they face each other down like two gunslingers fighting over a ghost town.

  They kept rows of cars between them and Brock’s squad as they transported the eight little corpses. Neither of them had the stamina for a long trip. They could stash the babies in a car, or even go a few blocks into the suburbs and find a house, but neither of those options would be easy to defend if necessary.

  But the decision was made for them when someone clanged a metal pot three times in the stronghold. That must have been an arranged signal, because Brock gathered his militia and returned to the square, leaving the hospital to the inferno he’d started in its base.

  Franklin was about to announce another rest stop when a scattering of shots came from the other side of town.

  “Who’s that?” Stephen said.

  “Shipley probably ran into some Zapheads.”

  “I hope Rachel’s not with them.”

  “As soon as we find a safe place to stash our treasure, we’ll go look for her, okay?”

  “Sounds good. Mind if we trade places? I don’t want to look at them anymore.”

  “All right, partner, let’s put it down and do the switcheroo.”

  Stephen rubbed his shoulders, leaning against a car to relax a moment. Franklin scanned the skyline near the stronghold. He could see only one lookout. He and Stephen would be visible with binoculars, but only if anyone was looking for them. If Brock assumed the babies were still in the morgue, then he’d consider his mission accomplished.

  The hospital spewed a black column of smoke into the air, although no flames were visible through the windows. Despite the fabricated block structure, there was plenty of flammable material inside, so while it wouldn’t go up like a haystack, the fire would soon find enough fuel to crack glass and collapse ceilings.

  Franklin studied some of the babies. Despite the makeshift lamp, the morgue had been too dark to provide any details, and he’d scarcely looked at them in the carnage of the sheriff’s office because he’d been too consumed by Rachel’s death. A death that turned out to be temporary, but he couldn’t have known that at the time.

  Several of them had been shot, although the one with the mutilated eyes had been shredded by the grenade Jorge fired at his fleeing wife. But others appeared to have been strangled, judging from the ligature marks around their tiny necks.

  “I get killing Zapheads,” Stephen said. “Especially if they’re attacking you. But these babies couldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “They were calling the shots,” Franklin said. “They won’t kill you with their hands, but they can sure kill you with their minds. Like Kokona was trying to do to you.”

  “I don’t think she would have hurt me while she still needed me. And it was a little scary—well, bringing those dead Zappers back was a lot scary—but I didn’t really feel in danger. I know that sounds weird, but it was almost like she wouldn’t let any harm come to me while I was her carrier.”

  “Yeah, and plantation owners tried not to damage their slaves when they whipped them. Don’t go confusing a failure to hurt you with a desire to keep you safe.”

  “Maybe you had the right idea all along. Just hide from the world and let the world be whatever it wants to be.”

  Franklin studied the boy’s dirty, tired face. “Easy for me. I only have ten years left, maybe fifteen tops. You, though, you’re going to have to deal with this for decades.”

  “I can’t think that far ahead.”

  “Yeah, but the day-to-day adds up. And you won’t be able to hide. You’re going to need other people.”

  “I don’t want to live in a world where I’m going to be fighting Zaps the rest of my life, or running from crazy people with guns. I don’t mind the scrounging for food part—that’s kind of fun in a way, and there’s plenty enough just laying around to last for years. I don’t even miss TV that much anymore.”

  “You need family.” The wind shifted and drove smoke toward them. Franklin switched his rifle strap to his left shoulder and looked around. “If we go for the jail, they’ll see us, and if we go out much further we risk running into Shipley or Zaps.”

  “What are you going to do once we find a place? You just said we can’t do this alone.”

  Franklin wiped his coat sleeve across his mouth. “Make some kind of deal with the Zapheads.”

  “If it’s just the two of us, they can just swarm us and take the babies.”

  “That’s what I figure. We need the protection of Hilyard’s stronghold, but we can’t let him or Brock know about the babies. So we have to smuggle them in somehow, or else store them close enough that we can get to them when we need them.”

  DeVontay stepped from between two cars. “What about the funeral home? I hear it’s the best place to put dead people.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  They had learned.

  In the beginning, when the electromagnetic radiation scrambled their bodies and brains, they were raw, primitive creatures, with all emotion and empathy stripped away, reduced to lashing out at the confusing and hostile world around them.

  But through babies like Kokona, who quickly adapted to their surroundings and spread that knowledge to the other New People, they discovered a different path was possible—one of integration rather than destruction.

  They uniformly surrendered to this possibility, following the lead of the babies and what they were taught by humans like Rachel. It couldn’t rightly be called “trust,” for they had no concept of such a thing, but they saw a way forward in which they could thrive as a tribe, while letting humans survive as best they could in a world that was radically new and hostile to them, too.

  But ultimately humans revealed themselves incapable of changing their nature.

  And so must be destroyed.

  Rachel understood all this now, through Kokona.

  For all Rachel’s efforts in bridging the two tribes, in the end, one could transform but the other couldn’t.

>   As the New People encircled the town, Rachel could feel Kokona sending out a summons like a radio broadcast reaching multiple frequencies. They moved through a still and silent neighborhood, the sinking sun glinting off car windows. Somewhere a dog barked, a sound made all the more forlorn by its isolation.

  “There are more of us on the way,” Kokona said, glaring up with those commanding eyes. “Including some babies and their carriers.”

  “Then you don’t need me,” Rachel said.

  “Yes, I do. Hannibal needed his elephant, Napoleon needed his horse, Rommel needed his tank.”

  “You’d force me to help exterminate my own people? That would be—”

  “Would be what? Inhuman?” Kokona gave a gleeful laugh, reminding Rachel that, no matter how much she mutated, she could never fully join them. Although her sister Chelsea slid silently beneath the surface to be forever lost, Rachel would not allow it to happen to her.

  Kokona laughed again, as if she could sense Rachel’s defiance and found it amusing.

  They were part of a group of ten or so New People, heading toward the center of town. Some of the groups had already encountered resistance, and Rachel could feel the conflict building in Kokona’s mind—the tiny mutant was moving the groups around like a child prodigy playing chess, positioning them for a final checkmate.

  “I can’t wait to see the look on your people’s faces when they see we’ve learned how to use guns,” Kokona said. “Thank you for that.”

  Rachel wished she could drop the baby, or slam her against a wall, but she was helpless to do anything but trudge along behind the group of armed mutants. Despite the weapons they’d collected, they didn’t exhibit much familiarity with them, and Rachel hoped they would be ineffective.

  “Oh, come now, Rachel Wheeler,” Kokona said. “You know you want to kill them all.”

  “Kill them all!” shouted the group in unison.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone but you,” Rachel said.

  But she couldn’t toss away the baby and run. A type of physical magnetism seemed to bind them, but even stronger than that was the emotional and mental pull. It was a psychic gravity that caused agony if she tried to escape, although she soon discovered that she could seemingly let her thoughts operate on two wavelengths—the hive mind as controlled by Kokona, and the remnant of her human self that swam undetected beneath it. She couldn’t know for sure how deeply Kokona could probe into this second layer, but the chasm between the two layers grew stronger by the hour.

  She couldn’t help but believe this was a uniquely human gift that even the supreme intelligence of the baby couldn’t penetrate. It was a type of a faith forged in a new fire. No matter how powerful Kokona was, Rachel clung to one who had all power. It defied fantasy and memory and fact.

  She called it “God” but it didn’t need a name. It just was.

  And as long as she maintained that one true connection to her innermost self, she possessed the one thing that no telepathic mutant could take away: her soul.

  Kokona might have sensed turmoil, because her little caramel-colored face sagged into a frown, but a burst of gunfire disrupted whatever thoughts she pursued.

  Bullets raked around them, thunking off the sides of houses, breaking glass, and hammering cars like a hailstorm. Air hissed from a punctured tire. Several mutants dropped soundlessly to the ground, but Rachel could imagine their unformed screams.

  “Hide now,” Kokona yelled, and Rachel fled the street, ducking behind a freestanding garage. Part of her wanted to run toward the fusillade in a double-suicide mission, but Kokona’s control of her was too dominant. And the human layer wasn’t sure Kokona could revive her a second time.

  “Show me,” Kokona said, and Rachel poked her head around the corner of the garage, holding Kokona under her chin so the infant could view the street. The shots appeared to originate among a cluster of vehicles in the intersection ahead, as if the humans had been caught out in the open, not expecting an encounter from behind.

  Rachel took satisfaction in watching two more mutants fall down, their firearms tumbling to the pavement beside them. The mutants had no concept of self-preservation, and they charged toward the unseen snipers on Kokona’s silent command.

  One of the mutants, a tall male outfitted in an imitation of a soldier, lifted his rifle and gave an awkward jerk as the weapon discharged. He hadn’t aimed, and Rachel was relieved that this new evolution of violence looked ineffective. Yet knowing how quickly Kokona and the mutants adapted, she wouldn’t be surprised if they were expert shots within a day or two.

  “Only three of them,” Kokona said, looking up at the sky as she concentrated. “We can take them.”

  Rachel wasn’t sure if Kokona was intelligent enough to count the oncoming rounds and calculate their points of origin, but the mutants reacted as if they knew where to charge. Two of them brandished knives, either not realizing or caring that they were outgunned. One dropped dead, and behind them, another—a teen with baggy trousers and a ponytail wrapped in a strip of pink fabric—lifted a pistol and yanked at the trigger. No shots popped, and Rachel realized she must not know how to operate a safety.

  A scream pealed from the intersection, and Kokona giggled. “Your tribe doesn’t have eyes in the backs of their heads.”

  More mutants converged on the cluster of vehicles, and the gunfire diminished to a series of short bursts. A man bolted from behind a pick-up truck and ran across the yard of a weathered townhouse, and a mutant emerged from a brown scraggle of shrubs and took him down. The man groaned and shouted and Rachel struggled with a deep instinct to help him.

  Yet part of her was glad to watch the mutant pound on the man’s back with her fists while others of her tribe closed in with sticks and rocks and burning eyes. Within seconds, the man’s cries turned to shrieks, and Rachel could almost taste the blood in the air. Mutant arms rose and fell and grabbed and tore, and the man’s whimpers were the only sound besides the dull pummeling of meat and the rending of cloth.

  One of the mutants emerged from the swarm with the man’s rifle, instantly heading toward the intersection where the two other humans were busy dying under the cold ferocity of their attackers.

  “Go now,” Kokona said.

  Rachel returned to the street and joined the other mutants. As they passed the first dead mutant, Kokona silently forced Rachel to kneel beside it. Kokona laid her hands upon the corpse, and Rachel twitched with the energy conducting through both of them and into the lifeless mass of muscle and bone. The corpse jerked once, twice, and opened its eyes.

  Rachel couldn’t help but feel she’d lost a little of herself in the act of revival, drawn from her human side and given to this anonymous mutant. The radiance of her gaze before her seemed to diminish, like a flashlight whose batteries had been drained.

  “It’s a kind of love you can never understand,” Kokona said.

  She knew the love born of resurrection. Her faith was founded upon it. But whereas her spirituality promised redemption, this profane rebirth was designed to mock life and nature and hope.

  But she was weak in the face of it. And wasn’t her own existence now a mockery?

  As Kokona steered her toward the next target, they rounded the street corner and saw the hospital in the distance, columns of smoke twisting into the air and flames glimmering behind the windows.

  Kokona screeched in dismay, and the shrill cry reverberated through a thousand mutant skulls and then out through their throats and across their tongues.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “That’s not good,” DeVontay said.

  He’d seen Franklin and Stephen struggling with the stretcher while leaving the hospital, and he’d crept up after making sure Brock’s crew hadn’t spotted them. They’d carried the tiny corpses to the funeral home, veering several blocks out of the way even though they were all exhausted.

  While Stephen stood watch, he and Franklin enclosed the babies in the casket that formerly housed Rachel. No
w they gathered in the foyer of the funeral home. They needed a viable plan, but it sounded like the world was busy making other plans of its own. The gunfire around the perimeter of the town had expanded from a single source to scattered points in several directions.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Franklin said. “That’s probably coming from half a mile away. Hilyard wouldn’t send patrols out that far.”

  “It’s got to be Shipley,” Stephen said.

  “Unless he found some new recruits, that’s way too many guns in play.”

  “Maybe Shipley learned how to bring them back from the dead,” DeVontay said.

  Stephen shot him a look of horror as Franklin muttered, “That’s not funny.”

  “There’s one other possibility,” DeVontay said.

  “I’m not sure I want to hear this,” Franklin said, pushing aside the curtain with the barrel of his rifle. The street outside was empty, but they could see people taking up defensive positions along the rooftops a few blocks away.

  “Zapheads have learned to use guns.”

  “The worst got crazier,” Stephen said. Then, to Franklin, “Just like you said.”

  “I’m a crusty old pessimistic son-of-a-bitch, but I really hate it when I’m right,” Franklin said.

  “I could sense their hostility building through Kokona,” DeVontay said.

  “Me, too,” Stephen said. “We’re lucky. We’re probably the only carriers who survived.”

  “Well, we know they use weapons to smash people,” Franklin said. “And we’ve seen them with guns, although they carry them like clubs instead of aiming them. But if they’re getting smarter—”

  “Rachel knows how to shoot,” DeVontay said. “If they’re connected, then Kokona would have her knowledge. I suspect it’s way deeper than the bond she formed with Stephen or me.”

  “I don’t think she read my mind,” Stephen said. “But it was weird. Kind of like being in a fog and wanting to do everything she said. I mean, no way would I bring a Zaphead back to life if she didn’t make me.”