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

  It might not turn out to be a peaceful rest, but at least they’d have plenty of caskets to choose from.

  As DeVontay kicked open the front door, Stephen scanned the street behind them. The center of the square was in chaos, with guns occasionally blasting and Franklin dispensing grenades from his rooftop vigil. “Looks like the Zaps are running wild. Just like the old days.”

  “If you cut off the head, the body dies,” DeVontay said.

  He eased Rachel onto a pew that ran against one wall of the front parlor, where she lay staring up at the ceiling. With all the blood covering her and the baby still hugged tightly to her chest, he couldn’t tell the extent of her injury. Her eyes were open, still blazing with that profane mutant fire, but she didn’t appear to be aware of her surroundings.

  He knelt beside her, took her hand, and whispered, “Rachel. Are you okay?”

  “You didn’t care about that when you shot me.”

  “You…I don’t see any wound.”

  “I healed myself. That’s what I do now.”

  “No way.” But DeVontay knew it was not only possible but that she had no reason to lie. He leaned closer, but he couldn’t see anything but blood and a tiny hole in the fabric of her jacket.

  She shifted so that she shielded Kokona with her shoulder, as if she was afraid he’d take the baby. “You knew Kokona was holding the whole tribe together.”

  “I had to do it. She was helpless without a carrier, and you couldn’t break free of her while she controlled you.”

  Rachel finally looked at him, full in the face so that her eyes nearly blinded him, and he could barely recognize her. “Who said I’ve escaped?”

  “You’re back with us,” DeVontay said, taking her hand even though it still cupped the baby’s broken body. “Where you’re supposed to be.”

  “I’m one of them,” Rachel said. “I can’t ever come back.”

  “Gosh, Rachel,” Stephen said, watching the street outside the window. “You don’t want to be a Zaphead, do you?”

  DeVontay withered under her glare as she said, “I never had that choice. You made it for me.”

  “Okay,” DeVontay said. “I thought it was for your own good. But I admit, I didn’t want to lose you. I’d rather have you as a Zaphead than not have you at all.”

  “I already told you, you don’t have me,” Rachel said, stroking the tufts of black, gooey hair on the undamaged side of Kokona’s head. “And quit saying ‘Zaphead.’ We’re New People.”

  Jesus, she’s really gone. DeVontay wondered if maybe he should have taken Stephen and fled Newton while they had the chance. He promised he’d stay by Rachel’s side until the end, but hadn’t it actually ended the day before, when Jorge’s wife shot and killed her in a delusional rage? Did pledging to love someone forever apply to mutant transformations and resurrections?

  Perhaps this was punishment for his vanity. He convinced himself he was acting on her behalf, but hadn’t it really been about his own need and weakness and lust?

  And here was a mutant capable of endlessly healing herself. She would no longer age. Could she bring herself back from the dead? What about other mutants, or was that solely the power of Kokona and the other babies? He studied the baby for any signs of reanimation, but she seemed just as still and lax as ever.

  “Somebody’s coming,” Stephen said.

  DeVontay reluctantly left Rachel’s side and joined him at the window. Two figures climbed over the barricade, one of them diminutive and spiderlike, the other decked out in military garb. A few seconds later, someone else clambered onto the roof of a Sprint van, and this one was easy to identify by the stooped posture and wild tuft of beard.

  Franklin.

  The old man had ditched the grenade launcher but was paying it forward with bursts of automatic fire from an M-16. He planted his feet wide and balanced as brass shell casings spit from the gunstock, glinting as they spun in the red-orange glow of sunset. Inside the barricade, the Zaphead hordes swarmed toward whatever target caught their attention, and a long wail of agony reminded them all that the battle was far from done. Amid the gunshots came the murmuring chant, “Kill her kill her kill her,” as if Kokona’s last message would be the one the mutants carried with them until the end of time.

  “We need weapons,” Stephen said. “We have to help them.”

  “No way we’re going back in there. But maybe somebody dropped a rifle in the street.”

  Stephen pointed. “Well, she’s got one.”

  DeVontay at last recognized the fleeing figures as Sierra and Marina. Sierra had lost her bandolier and her hair had worked loose into a wild blonde mane, but she otherwise looked unscathed. Marina limped a little, one of her tennis shoes missing, but she was gamely keeping up with the woman who held her by the arm.

  DeVontay stepped outside the door. “Over here!” he yelled down the street, waving his arm. He hoped that was the right move—any Zaphead in the area would turn on the sound like a two-hundred pound hornet whose nest had just been kicked.

  Sierra saw him and veered toward the funeral home, her rifle tucked across her forearm. Marina glanced back at the murmuring Zapheads in the center of town, tripping as she did and sprawling onto the pavement. Stephen pushed past DeVontay and out the door, sprinting for her and reaching her just as Sierra was helping her up.

  Little Man’s braver than I am.

  A Zaphead scaled the van beneath Franklin’s feet, and he drove a boot into its face to knock it from his perch. Two others scrambled up the side panels after leaping from the bed of a pick-up truck. Sierra dropped to one knee, aimed, and squeezed off several shots, and the two mutants dropped like bags of wet sand. Stephen helped Marina the rest of the way to the funeral home.

  Sierra stood and scanned the surrounding area, making sure the coast was clear, and shouted, “Come on, Franklin.”

  Franklin fired a few more rounds and then slid down the side of the van, rolling as he hit the ground. DeVontay could just imagine the man’s stream of cusswords as he awkwardly swayed to his feet and wobbled toward the funeral home.

  Sierra ran to help him, and by the time DeVontay was tending to Marina’s scraped knees and elbows, using bottled water and a box of tissues, the duo had joined them in the front parlor, Sierra taking up a post as sentry near the door.

  Franklin sagged into a chair and let Stephen take his weapon. “I swear to God, this is my last apocalypse. Way too old for this shit.”

  “How did you know we’d be here?” DeVontay asked.

  “It’s the only place we have in common besides the school, and that’s the last place anybody would want to be. If you weren’t here, I was going to take any survivors and head for the mountains. From what I can tell, this might be the last of us.”

  Marina’s eyes widened and her lip quivered. “My daddy?”

  Franklin rubbed his mouth as DeVontay squinted at him. “I don’t know what happened to him, honey, but I bet he can take care of himself. Your daddy’s a fighter. I know he loves you very much, and he’d want you to hang in there no matter what.”

  You lying bastard. But at least you’re good at it.

  “What about Brock and the others?” DeVontay asked Sierra.

  She shook her head. “Didn’t make it. Hilyard got taken down when he was trying to rescue the flag. Idiot.”

  “Thou shalt not worship graven images.” Franklin sat up with a groan. “Where’s Rachel?”

  “She’s right—”DeVontay turned, but there was only a bloody cushion on the pew where she had lain with Kokona. She couldn’t have gone outside. Where, then?

  Something thumped in the viewing room.

  Does she know about the dead babies?

  “Hold this to keep it clean,” DeVontay said to Marina, waiting until the girl pressed the soggy, red-stained tissue to a particularly nasty scuff on her left elbow. Stephen knelt before her like a miniature Prince Charming, slipping a rubber Croc on her bare foot that he’d scrounged up in a back room.
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  Franklin stood with a groan and followed DeVontay into the viewing room, sensing something was wrong. And there was.

  Rachel stood over the casket full of dead babies.

  She held up the lid with one arm, Kokona cradled in the other. Her back was to them as she flipped the lid all the way open and reached into the lining. She seemed to be arranging them, bending over and talking softly as if tucking them in for a nap.

  A tiny hand flopped over the rim of the casket, little fingers wriggling in the air.

  “What the hell?” Franklin said.

  DeVontay rushed forward to see what she was doing, but the sick knot in his stomach told him he already knew. He pulled Rachel away from the casket, but it was too late.

  The babies squirmed and cooed and giggled, their eyes casting a fuzzy halo of orange light around the casket. One of them, a little girl with pink skin and fine platinum curls, rolled over and crawled across two of the others, coming straight for DeVontay. One other baby, the mutilated one with the gory eye sockets that had been killed by Jorge, grinned toothlessly and waved his arms, except one of them ended in a stump just below the elbow.

  Rachel turned to DeVontay, her eyes as bright as summer suns. Kokona twitched in her arms, plopped her shattered head against Rachel’s chest, a thick drool of gray matter leaking down her chin as she said, “You were right, DeVontay. You are bloodthirsty.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “Here they come!” Sierra shouted from the front parlor.

  “We’ve got to boogie,” Franklin said. “We don’t have enough firepower to hold them off until dark.”

  In truth, Franklin wanted to be away from all of it—Newton, the hopeless struggle of the survivors, the Zapheads and their endless resurrections, even Rachel. They should have let her rest in peace, because death was the only way to escape After, and even that was no guarantee.

  “You summoned them, didn’t you?” DeVontay asked Kokona, revulsion and rage twisting his face, his glass eye sparkling with the reflection of Rachel’s stare. “You brought them to kill us.”

  Franklin didn’t care why the Zapheads were swarming over the barricades and heading for the funeral home. It didn’t matter. They were Zapheads. This was what they did, and would keep doing it, on and on, forever.

  Even after they finally wiped out the human race, they’d still swarm the planet’s surface, chasing down anything that walked or swam or flew, destroying all beautiful things in the path of their fury. Well, to hell with them. Let them have the place.

  He couldn’t look at Rachel anymore, not with those alien eyes and blank face, not while she played mother for that mutilated little creature that still seemed way too intelligent even with half her brains missing. Worst of all was the resemblance to her mother, with that slim Wheeler nose and a strong jawline like the one he hadn’t seen in the mirror for thirty years.

  He turned away from the writhing mass of little limbs in the casket and the tiny peeping voices that seemed to be saying, “Kill her kill her kill her.” If DeVontay wanted to stand here in the face of madness, let him. Franklin was done.

  Marina sat huddled near Stephen, staring at the floor. Franklin limped across the room, his ankle throbbing from his fall off the van, and leaned over Stephen’s shoulder at the window, plucking the rifle from him.

  “Hey,” Stephen said. “I need that.”

  Sierra gave Franklin a look, and then nodded at the gun, grimacing at some secret pain. “That mag’s half empty. You’ve got enough for a round of mercy kills if you want.”

  Franklin wasn’t going to shoot the boy and then commit suicide. Sure, their situation was nearly hopeless, but he valued independence and freedom way too much to take it from anyone, including himself. No, he had other ideas.

  “How many are out there?” Franklin said, peering through the curtains. Twilight spread its first thin sheet over the land, the sun offering a gray-red half-light as the day posted its final farewell.

  “Hard to tell, but I’m guessing twenty-five or thirty,” Sierra said. “More Zaps than bullets, I can promise you that.”

  Stephen backed away from the window and was about to enter the viewing room when Franklin grabbed his shoulder. “You don’t want to see this.”

  “Rachel?” the boy called.

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel called from the behind the wall. “I tried.”

  When Franklin returned to the viewing room, DeVontay was yelling at either Rachel or Kokona, but his rant was unhinged and incoherent.

  Hope the poor guy isn’t cracking up, but he should’ve known better than to fall in love at the end of the world.

  Franklin put the M-16 to his shoulder and pointed it at Rachel. “I’ve got about ten rounds left. Starting with you, then one baby at a time until there’s nobody left to bring any of you Zappers back from the dead. It ends here.”

  “You might think about it first, and what happens if we’re all dead,” Kokona said, and as hard as Franklin tried to avoid looking at the gruesome infant, her shrill, commanding voice demolished his resistance. “We’re only thing holding the tribe back.”

  The top of her skull still featured a glistening gap, but pieces of it had knitted themselves back together. Rachel must have fished out the shards of bone and smoothed them into place. She would never be whole again, but she didn’t seem to mind a bit.

  Rachel took a step toward Franklin. “Grampa, I didn’t mean for it to be like this. If only you knew what we really are, you’d understand.”

  Oh, I understand plenty. Because that “we” you’re talking about doesn’t include me or Stephen or DeVontay. No humans allowed.

  Could he do it? He’d killed plenty of mutants, a couple of Shipley’s soldiers, and even his friend Jorge. But Rachel was family.

  Flesh and blood.

  “I’ll do it right now if you don’t make the Zappers stop,” Franklin said.

  A baby’s doddering head appeared above the edge of the casket. “Kill her.”

  “Shut up, Brian,” Kokona said. “This is my carrier.”

  “She’s everybody’s carrier now,” Brian said.

  God damn, what I wouldn’t give right now for my grenade launcher. Hell, I’d even pledge allegiance to the flag AND the United States of America.

  “You going to stop them?” Franklin said to Kokona. “Do that ESP stuff and shut them down right now? Or do I blow the rest of your brains out?”

  “You wouldn’t hurt Rachel,” Kokona said.

  “I’m with the good guys. And that justifies whatever bad thing is necessary. I’m good to hell and back.”

  “Leave Rachel out of it,” DeVontay said, and Franklin was worried the troubled man might jump him.

  “Can’t. You heard the brat. She’s the carrier.”

  Kokona closed her eyes for a moment, and Franklin realized how dark the room had grown around them. “Okay,” the baby said in a hushed voice. “It’s done.”

  Franklin backed to the parlor entryway, where Stephen stood mute and wide-eyed with Marina beside him, and said, “See anything, Sierra?”

  “Nothing but a whole lot of dark.”

  “That’s good. If they were out there, little balls of fire would be dancing all over the place.”

  “What now?” DeVontay said.

  “If you kill us, you’re still in the same position,” Kokona said. “There are a hundred of us in Newton, and more on the way. They know you’re here. Even if I no longer control them, they’ll find you and destroy you.”

  “I want to control the New People,” Brian whined from the casket. Another baby’s high, wailing voice simply added “Kill her.”

  “Be quiet, Brian,” Kokona said. “I’m the one she’s carrying now.”

  Great. A mutant baby power struggle. Maybe they’re more like us than they want to admit.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Sierra said, walking into the room. She slumped in a chair near the casket, bathed in the light of the babies’ eyes. Her charcoal war paint was smeared
across her cheeks but failed to hide the paleness of her skin. She drew in a breath and winced, swaying and nearly tumbling from her chair.

  DeVontay stepped forward to help her but she waved him off. “Won’t do any good, handsome.” She clamped her rifle between her knees, its butt resting on the floor, and unbuttoned her uniform tunic just above the belly button. A thick bandage on her abdomen was crusted with dark blood and yellow pus.

  “Gut shot,” she said. “Septicemia always wins. With modern medical care, I’d be fifty-fifty. But now…probably go into shock by tomorrow, dead before the sun goes down again.”

  Franklin admired the woman for not taking herself out. She’d probably bandaged the wound herself, and then expended the last of her energy rescuing Marina. To hell with Hilyard and Brock. This woman deserved the Bronze Star if anybody did.

  But Franklin guessed what she was about to propose. It’s not something he would suggest, but he didn’t feel worthy of talking her out of it, either. He’d have done the same if he’d thought of it.

  “So here’s the deal,” Sierra said, speaking to Kokona but also eyeing Brian and the others in the casket. “You guys go ahead, and I’ll make sure Snow White and the eight or whatever dwarves keep up their end of the bargain. I’d imagine they’ll send their army after you the minute I fade, but maybe I can buy you a decent head start.”

  “No!” Marina said, dashing across the room to give Sierra a fierce hug that probably hurt. “I’m not leaving you.”

  Sierra stroked the girl’s hair and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. “Hey, it won’t be so bad.” She pulled a plastic vial from her pocket and struggled with the cap, and then smiled and passed it to Marina. “Can you open this for me, hon? Prove you’re not a child anymore.”

  Marina twisted the cap free and Sierra took it back from her, shaking a couple of brownish-pink pills into her sweaty palm. “Oxy. One of the fringe benefits of running the drug store.”

  She tossed the pills into her mouth and chewed noisily. “Ah. That’s the ticket. Well, you folks better get going. The dark will give you some cover, even if it slows you down a little. And it makes the Zaps easier to spot.”