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

  EARTH ZERO

  (Next #2)

  A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

  By Scott Nicholson

  Copyright ©2016 Scott Nicholson

  “One of the most thrilling writers working today. Miss him at your peril.” – Blake Crouch, Wayward Pines

  Look for the rest of the After books on Kindle:

  NEXT #1: AFTERBURN at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  NEXT #3: RADIOPHOBIA at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  AFTER #0: FIRST LIGHT (free) at Amazon US Amazon UK

  AFTER #1: THE SHOCK (free) at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  AFTER #2: THE ECHO at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  AFTER #3: MILEPOST 291 at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  AFTER #4: WHITEOUT at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  AFTER #5: RED SCARE at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  AFTER #6: DYING LIGHT at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  ZAPHEADS #1: BONE AND CINDER at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  ZAPHEADS #2: SCARS AND ASHES at Amazon US or Amazon UK

  ZAPHEADS #3: BLOOD AND FROST at Amazon US or Amazon UK

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Rachel Wheeler awoke in darkness so absolute that it seemed solid, like an obsidian ore squeezed miles beneath the earth’s surface.

  She endured a silent stretch of timeliness so profound she wondered if she was dead. But no god murmured a greeting of welcome, no hot flames licked at her soul, and no pinprick of shimmering light beckoned. In the apocalypse, even death wasn’t the end.

  “Rachel?”

  The watery syllables echoed so that she couldn’t tell their point of origin. She recognized the voice, but she didn’t recognize her own name. Dank air stirred around her face and she drew in a shallow breath that seeped like wax into her lungs.

  The voice called again, maybe ten feet away, maybe a hundred. “Rachel? Are you here?”

  DeVontay.

  And memories came back to her: encountering Zaps in Stonewall, meeting three human survivors, and rescuing a young girl who’d been taken by one of the mutants. She and the others holed up in a barn after sunset, only to find themselves surrounded by Zaps. The night erupted with the ear-splitting collapse of the barn, and then that absolute darkness rolled into this one…

  “I can’t see you,” DeVontay said. “Open your eyes.”

  She did and was startled by the soft glow emanating from them. The darkness had seemed so impervious that she’d accepted it as a permanent condition. She was definitely alive. But why couldn’t she feel her arms and legs?

  “I see you,” DeVontay said. “I’m over here.”

  Rachel tried to turn her head but was too weak. Around her she saw only bare walls of seamless metal curving into more darkness above. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out besides a soft hiss.

  “Okay, then,” DeVontay said. “I’ll try to come to you.”

  Enough sensation returned so that she could feel the cold, hard surface beneath her. As feeling returned to her limbs with a tingling warmth that was almost painful, she heard faint scuffing sounds punctuated with a series of clicks.

  Her mind conjured images of creeping rodents made hungry and terrible through mutation, sharp teeth gnashing and wiry whiskers quivering as they padded toward her on clawed feet. She wouldn’t even be able to scream as they swarmed and tore the meat from her bones—

  A sonorous rumble echoed off the metallic walls and she realized it was her own moans. So she had a voice after all, and the lungs to work it, even though the sound was involuntary.

  “Shh,” DeVontay said. “It’s okay. Are you hurt?”

  She couldn’t answer that question even if she wanted. Because she wasn’t sure where her body ended and the darkness began. She closed her eyes.

  “I can’t see,” DeVontay said.

  She wondered whether he’d been blinded in his remaining good eye, perhaps when the barn collapsed. Or did a bloated, pointy-faced rat pluck it out and chew it like a grape?

  “Open your eyes again,” he said, and she realized she controlled their shared darkness.

  When the lambent haze radiated once more from her face, a mutant gift imparted by the same Zaps who had tried to kill her, the scuffing grew in intensity. It was DeVontay, dragging himself toward her. She wondered why he couldn’t stand and walk.

  Maybe he’s as drained as you are.

  Rachel tried once more to speak, and this time she managed a croak. She turned her head and saw she was lying on a bare concrete floor. The walls were featureless, with no visible doors or windows, although the light from her shimmering, mutant-fired eyes only projected fifteen feet at most. Her fingers twitched and she trailed them along the rough, cool concrete. The surface was cracked and pitted, as if it was much older than the shiny walls.

  She wondered if this was how an animal felt when rousing itself from winter hibernation. Blood pushed its sluggish way through her veins, heart beating every couple of seconds. She forced her chest to draw deeply of the stale air and she exhaled loudly enough to reassure DeVontay that she was alive. Rachel barely felt his hands when he touched her.

  “Hey,” she said, her throat parched and rough with thirst.

  “You’re here,” DeVontay said. He crawled up alongside her. She tilted her head enough to illuminate his dark, comforting visage with its glass eye and bristling beard. They grinned at one another as if they’d gone on a honeymoon adventure rather than a five-year journey together through a post-apocalyptic hell. No matter what their situation, they were alive.

  For now.

  In the wake of the solar storms, she and DeVontay Jones had overcome starvation, hardship, and danger from both mutant Zaps and ruthless fellow survivors. Rachel had undergone a mysterious metabolic change after being captured by Zaps, developing new abilities that fluctuated between a useful gift and a maddening curse.

  The brilliant glittering of her eyes was just one of the strange traits she shared with the mutants. It came in handy when she traveled in the night, serving as a portable flashlight, but it also marked her as different from her fellow humans. And in a world where humans had lost their place at the top of the food chain, different was dangerous.

  This difference should’ve destroyed them as lovers, but it somehow brought them closer together, two misfits in a displaced race.

  DeVontay lay alongside her, embracing her until her pulse quickened enough to restore feeling in her extremities. He whispered comforting words to her, hiding his worry. Minutes passed, maybe even an hour, before she was strong enough to talk.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “Not bad,” he replied. “Just my ankle. Must’ve banged it up when the barn fell.”

  “It didn’t fall. The Zaps dropped it on us.”

  “But why did they take us out of the wreckage? And where are we?”

  She glanced about again, but all she saw were the gray walls. “Feels like we’re underground somewhere. Like a basement.”

  “Do you…you know, sense anything?”

  Another of the imparted traits was a sporadic telepathic connection with the mutants, but all signals were silent. “Nothing,” she said. “I think they know how to cut me off now. Changing their brainwaves like a radio shifting to a different frequency. That’s why I didn’t sense them surrounding us at the barn until it was too late.”

  “Well, they obviously didn’t want to kill us, or we’d already be dead. But no telling how long we’ve been here. No weapons, no food, no way to communicate with anyone else.”

  “I wonder what happened to the others.” The people with th
em in the barn were a rugged, wild-haired man named Lars Olsen, a gaunt young woman named Tara, and Tara’s mute daughter Squeak. After Squeak was seized by a Zap in Stonewall, the others had tracked down the mutant and killed it. Rachel suspected the Zaps’ telepathic abilities informed them of the violent death and led them to the barn.

  “The Zaps wanted Squeak, and they probably have her,” DeVontay said. “The other two might be dead, or they might be in here somewhere. Wherever we are.”

  Somewhat revitalized, Rachel rolled against DeVontay and flung an arm across his chest. “We better figure out where that is.”

  “Looks like some kind of metal building, like a Quonset hut or something. Can’t see all the way to the top, but the roof appears to curve together up there.”

  A thrumming sound so low it was almost subsonic caused a vibration beneath them. It suggested immense power, like a diesel engine or a roaring bonfire.

  DeVontay rolled to his knees with a groan and pulled Rachel into a sitting position. “Let’s get out of here before they finish the job. Whatever weapons the Zaps used to knock down that barn, they can probably do the same thing to this building.”

  “Maybe they’re watching us right now to see what we’ll do.” Rachel’s head swam as she tried to maintain balance. “Where does your leg hurt?”

  He guided her hand to his lower leg, where his trousers were torn and wet with blood. As she peeled down his sodden sock, he said, “Don’t use any of that Zap voodoo on me and turn me.”

  “I think I lost that power along with the telepathy,” Rachel said. She studied the gash in his ankle. “Looks like it’s just a flesh wound. No bone showing. It’s all about your tolerance for pain.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  She unbuttoned her jacket.

  “Now?” he said.

  “Keep dreaming.” She removed the jacket and flung it at him, shivering in her T-shirt. “Be a good Boy Scout and tear this into strips.”

  While DeVontay ripped the fabric into bandages, Rachel supported her weight against the wall and levered her body into a standing position. Her legs were rubbery but she was able to brace herself enough to take unsteady steps. She worked her way down the wall until she came to one end of the long room. A single corrugated metal door was the only way in or out. It had no hinges, and there was no visible chain drive or other mechanism to raise it.

  The low throbbing was louder at this end of the room, and when she pressed her palms against the door, it vibrated in sync with the noise and added to its resonance. She tried to jam her fingertips beneath the bottom rim of the door and lift it but gave up within seconds. Gazing up, she still couldn’t make out the peak of the ceiling as the glimmer from her eyes cast only a weak yellow smudge overhead.

  “Find anything?” DeVontay said, busy wrapping his ankle with the makeshift bandages.

  “A door with no handle.”

  “That doesn’t sound so good.”

  Rachel made her way along the opposite wall, searching for seams in the metallic material. The material yielded slightly under her touch but appeared impervious when she pounded it with the bottom of her fist. “This is the same stuff that the Zaps use for their uniforms,” she said.

  “You sure?” DeVontay cinched the last bandage and stood, testing his weight.

  Even in the poor light, Rachel could see the pain in his face, although he tried hard to hide it. “Same color, same texture,” she said. “Pretty amazing stuff. Like titanium silk.”

  “So that means they’ve imprisoned us for sure,” DeVontay said, limping to the far end of the room. Blood was already showing through his bandages. Rachel followed him, her strength returning the farther she got from the thrumming sound. The room was about fifty yards long and about a third as wide, and they soon came to a door the same as the one on the other end.

  “Two ways in, two ways out,” DeVontay said. “Got any ideas?”

  “Well, they don’t intend to keep us very long. No food, no water, no toilet.”

  “Either that or they’re lousy jailers,” DeVontay said.

  Rachel hammered the door with both fists. “Hello!”

  No answer, and the door barely budged. The rumble increased in intensity, and a loud creak came from overhead. They both peered up into the darkness, and a thin line of daylight streaked the length of the room. The gap widened by the second, revealing an azure sky with thin, high clouds. The silver curve of the roof was now visible, and Rachel couldn’t be sure if it was retracting or just melting back into itself.

  “What the hell?” DeVontay said. Soon the opening spanned the width of the chamber, cool autumn air flowing around them.

  Zaps lined the lip of the walls above them, rows and rows of uniformed mutants with those rounded haircuts and brightly sparking eyes that even full sun couldn’t diminish. The Zaps gazed silently down from twenty feet above, maybe three hundred of them in all, watching like medical students about to witness an autopsy.

  DeVontay and Rachel instinctively retreated to the center of the room, standing back to back as they studied the crowd. Most of the Zaps were pale and fair-skinned, although there were many races represented. They were nearly genderless in their sameness. A few children stood in front, as still and silent as the others.

  “What do they want?” Rachel whispered.

  “What does any crowd want?” DeVontay said. “Entertainment.”

  Hundreds of glittering eyes gazed down at them with maddening patience. Rachel felt as exposed as if she were nude, not that clothes likely changed the Zaps’ perception of their captives. She tried telepathy but all she detected was the churning of that low, distant engine.

  Then came a brittle clanking from one end of the room and a door lifted on an unseen track. Rachel grabbed DeVontay’s hand and pulled him toward the opening. “Let’s run for it.”

  DeVontay resisted her grip, and then put a restraining arm around her. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  The door raised inch by inch as the mute Zaps watched with no expression. Something bellowed beyond the door, causing the floor to tremble.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “So we hit them before they hit us?”

  High President Abigail Murray looked up from the tabletop map of North America that marked cities long dead, her words echoing off the hard masonry walls.

  A day would come when the map would be digitized on large screens in the war room, broken out by different interactive data sets and three-dimensional graphics, dotted with places the people had reclaimed. That distant day was what drove the president and her fellow survivors as they faced extinction.

  The rebirth of a nation and its accompanying technology would have to wait, though. For now, the game plan for winning back the world rested on a creased sheet of paper dotted with wooden chess pieces. The red and white pieces had belonged to George Washington and were rescued from the Smithsonian Institute in the immediate aftermath of the Big Zap.

  Murray didn’t know which dedicated public servant had paused in the panic of the solar storms to scavenge at the Smithsonian, but such sentimentality was rare. Most of those who didn’t drop dead from the bursts of plasma and electromagnetic radiation were too busy evading bloodthirsty Zaps to gather trinkets and mementos. Even the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had been left behind, burned when the mutants finished the job the British couldn’t accomplish in 1814.

  Oh well, we have new and better documents to replace them. Expressing the same sentiments as those fine documents but updated to fit the times. Updated to say what they should’ve said all along.

  “Attacking now is our best chance,” Brigadier General Arnold Alexander said, his craggy face glowering beneath an iron-gray crewcut. “Maybe our only chance.”

  Helen Schlagal, ranking director of the Department of Homeland Security, was the only other person in the room. At forty, she was more than a decade younger than Murray, but the stress of the apocalypse had added deep lines and wrinkles
that made her seem like a sour older sister. Under the weak electric lights of the subterranean chamber, her eyes were hooded by shadow.

  “We’ll have as many chances as we need, because we’ll never give up.” Murray doubted the general agreed with her assessment, but as long as she held the throne, his opinions didn’t matter. Still, she needed him, because he was a keystone of the old guard, and his rank and military experience gave comfort to the New Pentagon staffers. Alexander also lent Murray a certain legitimacy that she might not receive from purely civilian quarters. Civilization was a fragile structure in the best of times, and these were far from the best.

  “We should defend what we have,” Schlagal said in a grating voice that was pitched nearly as high as a whine. “We’re building something here, and we have food, water, and shelter. We have kids growing up. It’s not so bad here.”

  Murray scowled at the woman’s weakness. “So we just huddle in our caves and be grateful that the Zaps don’t even consider us as worthy of extermination?”

  “As long as we hide, we live.”

  “That’s not living,” Murray said. “That’s just dying slow.”

  “And don’t forget, it’s not just New Pentagon,” the general said. “There are pockets of resistance scattered around, small groups of survivors counting on the cavalry to ride in and rescue them. They might not even know we have a government, but they’re waiting on something.”

  “It’s called ‘hope.’ That’s what we’re fighting for.” Murray glared at Schlagal, who shook her head and stared down at the map. “Please continue, General.”

  “We’re mobilized on multiple fronts,” Alexander said. He pushed one of the worn chess pawns a couple of inches across the map. “We’ve got Eighth Division sweeping south into central North Carolina, Fourth heading for Charlotte, and Sixth moving on Atlanta. Air surveillance shows Atlanta is mostly gone, but there’s evidence of new construction.”

  Alexander slid a few black-and-white photographs across the table. Schlagal picked up one of them and studied it, acting interested. “Resolution’s not so good,” she said. “I can’t see much of anything.”