Radiophobia: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 3) Read online

  Colleen’s face was somber in the weak light, and the darkness surrounding them seemed metaphorical as well as actual. If not for her, Antonelli would gladly strap bombs to his abdomen and dive into the heart of the Zaps and blow as many of them to pieces as possible.

  Like many American soldiers, he’d never understood the suicidal mentality of Al-Qaeda and ISIS and how someone could place an abstract, ideological hatred above personal survival. Now, he had an inkling. Different circumstances, surely, since old human differences seemed so absurd now that the whole race was facing extinction together.

  Zaps didn’t ask which imaginary authority figure in the sky was the correct one. They erased you regardless.

  “You’re not going to die,” Bright Eyes said to the girl, and the others looked at him as if he were the only one with enough humanity to offer some comfort.

  “We’re going to destroy that thing and go home for ice cream and cake,” Colleen said, with a tender smile that might make her a good mother if she ever had the chance. Not with Antonelli as the sperm donor, certainly, but human survival would also require plenty of reproduction once the dirty work was done.

  He waved his grenade launcher toward the door and said to Millwood, “Open this thing and let’s get it over with.”

  Millwood shoved his shoulder against the door and twisted the knob, and it sagged outward with a rusty creak of hinges. The colored lights flooded in and the party started.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “There’s Rachel!” Marina exclaimed to Kokona.

  When she’d first seen the figure on the crowded street seventy-five feet below, she’d barely paid it any attention. The city around the building had been so filled with motion and activity that it was almost dizzying, and Marina had slipped off into fantasy, wondering where Stephen was and if he was thinking about her. When Kokona ordered Marina to carry her to the window, Marina complied in a kind of stupor, like a prisoner in the first week of a life sentence.

  With the sun setting and the plasma sink casting a disorienting series of reflections and shadows, the figures below were almost faceless and formless. They could’ve been crops in a field or computers on an assembly line. Their ranks were broken only by the dull cars and dusty piles of rubble. But like a futuristic game of “Where’s Waldo?”, one of the figures stood out from the others.

  No silver suit, and her eyes glow a different shade of yellow.

  Kokona smiled when Marina pointed out Rachel, as if she’d known it all along. “One big, happy family,” she said, with a childish glee that belied something in her face.

  Having helped care for and carry Kokona these last four years, Marina was a good judge of Kokona’s mysterious moods. But the baby had changed since the deaths in the bunker, and Marina wondered if she’d ever really known what the mutant infant was thinking. She was well aware that Franklin didn’t trust the baby and constantly urged Rachel to abandon it, but Rachel was steadfast in her protection and nurturing of the baby.

  Marina had followed that example as well, due to both her love for Rachel and her adoration of the beautiful infant. Now, though, she wasn’t sure how much of her affections were voluntary, especially since she wanted to toss the baby away and run far from this crazy Zap city.

  “Did you know she was here?” Marina asked, squeezing the baby so hard it should’ve cried in pain and fright, but instead wriggled with delight.

  “Not at first,” the baby answered. “But then I made her come to us.”

  “Won’t those…won’t the others hurt her?”

  “Only if I command them to do so.”

  Marina didn’t like the sound of that. Kokona’s killing of the soldiers in the bunker and the people they’d met in the camp on the way to Wilkesboro had been almost understandable—she was being threatened. But Kokona was right, they were family, no matter what.

  “What about the others? DeVontay, Franklin…” Her heart raced and her mouth was dry. “Stephen.”

  “They’re humans. They don’t matter.”

  Marina glanced at the door. Huynh stood at the same post he’d maintained all day, unmoving but alert. She’d never fight her way past him. She’d have to think her way out of this.

  “Why don’t you send Huynh down to get Rachel?” Marina asked.

  Kokona pursed her lips in thought, and then said, “I can just ask Rachel to come up here.”

  “She can hear your thoughts?” Marina didn’t believe Rachel would keep such an ability secret, but so many other things were no longer what they’d once seemed, either. Maybe she’d been in a daze since her parents died. Maybe none of this was real—even her feelings for Stephen.

  “She doesn’t just hear them, she becomes them.” Kokona turned her head toward the window. “Watch.”

  Rachel moved through the still and solemn crowd toward the building’s entrance. Broken glass glinted around her feet and the hum of the plasma sink rose a few decibels in pitch. With dusk just beginning to crawl in from the east and the first blush of aurora adding its nebulous green light to the sky, Marina had to struggle to remember what her life had been like before the solar storms, when crayons and books and mean boys in her Tennessee grade school were the most important things in the world.

  Her father, a Mexican who worked as a legal migrant on a farm, had been so proud of her English and insisted that she fit in with her American classmates. Her mother studied English each night with Marina, and Marina had drawn on those experiences while teaching Kokona from the many books they’d gathered from abandoned houses. And to think Kokona had been collecting all that knowledge only to use it one day to gain power and employ psychological terrorism…

  Marina wanted to bang on the glass and shout a warning down to Rachel, but the woman had already entered the building. The other mutants maintained their quiescent states, all staring up at Kokona as if awaiting her command.

  Marina glanced to the west, where the sun sank like a fat red balloon toward the mountains, the gathering clouds imbued with brilliant swaths of magenta, crimson, emerald green, and chrome yellow. The sunset threw shade on the faces of the ravaged buildings, and darkness swam along the alleys and streets at the edge of town.

  She was about to turn away from the window when she saw a bobbing orange light, too large and dull to be the eyes of a Zap. It only hung in the air for a moment and then it was gone, lost in the glare of the plasma sink. For some reason, Marina didn’t want Kokona to know about it, so she carried Kokona toward her blankets.

  “Rachel is coming?” Marina tried to cover her secret, masking her anxiety as excitement.

  “She’s climbing the stairs even now,” Kokona said. “We’re going to have so much fun together.”

  “What kind of fun?”

  “In the bunker, we played your games. Now it’s time to play mine.”

  “It’s not a game if you hurt people.”

  “I didn’t start the hurt, Marina. You saw what happened. How the army attacked us in Newton and killed all the babies—”

  “That was my mother! She went crazy and killed the babies. All but you.”

  Marina had never contemplated how Kokona continually emerged from dangerous situations when other Zaps had been wiped out. The baby had even joined a human family, which was the shrewdest survival move possible. Her ascendance to the leadership of this city hardly seemed an accident now, as if she’d been patiently waiting all this time for her competition to die off.

  “What do you think made her crazy?” Kokona asked. “Humans and their endless war. And then we’re living peacefully in the bunker and soldiers show up. They take over the bunker and lock me up as a prisoner. Me! A baby!”

  “So that makes it okay for you to kill us?” Marina realized for the first time that she’d openly acknowledged the difference between them—that for all the talk of “family,” they were on different sides of a battle for survival. Despite Rachel’s hope that one day Zaps and humans would learn how to coexist, the reality lay before Mar
ina—Kokona was amassing a mutant army with a strange energy source and Marina’s people were scattered and lost.

  Huynh broke from his slumbering state and opened the door that led to a hallway. By the time Rachel entered the disheveled office, the room was cast in a hazy, murky light, the vivid hues of dusk swimming through the air.

  Marina dropped Kokona on the desk among her blankets, drawing a grunt of disapproval, and dashed toward Rachel with her arms wide, calling her name.

  She hugged the woman—her combination foster mother and older sister—and reveled in the warmth and familiarity of one of the most important people in her life. She almost giggled with relief, asking a dozen questions at once—how she got here, where the others were, and what they should do next.

  When Rachel didn’t hug back, Marina pulled away and studied her face. It was difficult to tell due to her burning eyes, but Rachel appeared to be staring past Marina to Kokona. Huynh stepped behind her and forcibly removed her rifle, pulling her shoulder until the strap slipped down her arm.

  “Rachel?” Marina grabbed her by both arms and shook her.

  “I haven’t been training her all these years just so she could rescue you,” Kokona said in a high, giddy voice that somehow conveyed both perverse pleasure and chilling malevolence.

  “I’m here, Kokona,” Rachel said, as if Marina weren’t even in the room. “Just like you asked.”

  “I didn’t ask. I ordered.” The baby held up her chubby little arms, dressed in a dirty pink sleeper that was like a parody version of the silver suits worn by her army of Zaps.

  Rachel brushed past Marina and lifted Kokona to her chest, rocking and kissing the baby with so much emotion they both almost sobbed. Huynh returned to his post by the door, Rachel’s rifle now slung over his back. A dull murmur arose from below, and Marina recognized the singsong chant from earlier: “KO-kona, KO-kona, KO-kona!”

  “Who else is with you?” Kokona asked.

  “DeVontay…” Rachel appeared to struggle to remember. “Someone else?”

  Marina thought of the mysterious bobbing light she’d seen, and her heart leaped with a flicker of hope. DeVontay was out there, and he wouldn’t leave without Rachel. But what if Rachel betrayed him? What if she betrayed them all?

  “This is what we’ve been waiting for,” Kokona said. “We don’t need anyone else.”

  “Rachel, it’s me,” Marina said, grabbing Rachel from behind.

  Rachel twisted away and turned so that both she and Kokona were glaring at her. Marina was struck by the truth—they were both Zaps, and she was human. This was war, and they were enemies.

  “I have a new carrier now,” Kokona said. “A better carrier.”

  The baby’s eyes glowed with a sudden brilliance that mirrored the colors of the plasma sink. Huynh moved toward her from the door, lowering his rifle. As Marina froze in horror, he paused and his Asian features creased into a sinister, contorted mask. He grinned with crooked teeth, leaned the rifle against the wall, and reached down to his lower leg.

  He pulled out the long sharp knife that had already drawn plenty of human blood, and its blade gleamed with the shimmering reflection of a dozen unearthly colors.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Mothership must be coming in for a landing,” Millwood said. “That freaky beam’s like LSD on steroids.”

  The hippie’s garish assessment of the energy flowing from the plasma sink didn’t mean much to Antonelli, but one thing was sure, the thing was much larger than it had been this morning. From a block away, Antonelli could detect patterns in the flashing and blinking sparks that flowed up and down the chaotic column of light.

  From afar, the beam had appeared almost like a solid thing, but from here, its animated and fluid nature was evident. The big metallic bowl nested in the street seemed to be drawing electromagnetic energy from the sky and feeding it back in an altered, supercharged form.

  Whatever they’ve cooked up, aliens couldn’t have done it any better.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Colleen whispered, peering over his shoulder.

  “The target.” He wasn’t quite as confident as he made himself sound. Even with high-explosive rounds, the grenade launcher now seemed like a peashooter aimed at a dinosaur.

  “Now you know why I come here all the time,” Millwood said. “The best show in town.”

  They’d used back alleys and narrow service lanes to make their way closer, but now they waited behind a concrete highway barrier where road construction had once interrupted traffic. Pylons and erosion fences ringed a thirty-foot stretch of gravel and concrete, several deep ditches running through the work zone. A dump truck and back-hoe were parked where they’d died when the solar storms hit, their mammoth yellow bodies out of place among the many passenger vehicles stranded in the business district.

  The concrete barrier provided some concealment from the horde of Zaps gathered around the tallest building in the city. When the mutants started murmuring and then chanting, Millwood said, “Never heard that before. What are they saying?”

  “Kokona,” DeVontay said. He was huddled with an arm around the little girl, his back against the concrete. “They’re calling her name.”

  “You think she’s in there?” Antonelli asked.

  “We need a leader,” Bright Eyes said. “Without her, we are weak and vulnerable.”

  Antonelli wondered if the presence of his tribe would make the Zap revert. If Bright Eyes was a plant or a spy, he’d show himself soon. Colleen was under orders to kill the mutant—any of the others, really—at the first sign of betrayal. But so far the mutant had helped them, as if he wanted Antonelli to destroy the plasma sink and free him from whatever bond might still connect him with the other Zaps.

  There was some sort of triangular dynamic between Kokona, the plasma sink, and the rest of the Zaps. From what the others had told him, if Kokona remained here long enough, she would consolidate the tribe and continue developing their strange and potent technology. He’d witnessed the baby’s intelligence and cunning, as well as her bloodthirsty nature, and he was a believer.

  If she brought two hundred Zaps under her power, armed with those devious hand blasters and fleets of dive-bombing metal birds, she could wipe out Col. Munger’s entire division. And if she stayed here long enough to develop more weapons, larger aircraft, and new means of transportation, then Zaps could roll across the country wiping out the human race like a scythe cutting wet grain.

  And this is just one city of how many? What chance do we have if this is one of their disorganized outposts? Just imagine what’s going on in places where they have their shit together.

  But those other places weren’t his problem. Wilkesboro was.

  “We’re going to miss our chopper,” Colleen observed, glancing at the darkening sky.

  “Another reason to hit it and boogie,” Antonelli said. “I don’t want to be anywhere near here when Anderson launches the Hellfire strike.”

  “Then why are you bothering with grenades?” DeVontay said. “We could’ve skipped all this and we’d still have Rachel.”

  Antonelli didn’t know how to explain it to a civilian. Colleen understood, even though she’d only been in the army for four years. When you accepted your duty, you saw it through to the end, even when it was hopeless. Maybe especially then.

  “Like he said before, we have no idea what’s going to happen. The helicopter’s way more valuable than we are,” Colleen said, which Antonelli realized was as good a reason as any.

  “Assets.” DeVontay snorted in derision. “Waste your most disposable assets first.”

  “Those Zaps are acting like they’re at a heavy metal concert or something,” Millwood said. “Somebody’s in the window way up there.”

  Antonelli saw a silhouetted shape against the window, but it was difficult to discern amid the myriad of reflections rippling off the glass. If Kokona was up there, he might be able to reach her with the grenades, but it was a risk. As deeply as he
craved revenge, she was a secondary target—if he took out the plasma sink, she was neutralized.

  “I can get her,” DeVontay said, climbing over the concrete barrier. “Watch Squeak for me.”

  “Get back here!” Antonelli commanded.

  DeVontay glanced back, his glass eye shimmering with crazy patterns. “Shoot me if you want. I don’t give a damn.”

  Colleen actually aimed at him as he continued his slumped, cat-quick dart to a row of cars parallel-parked by the sidewalk. “Hold your fire,” Antonelli said to her, just as DeVontay probably figured he would. A shot would alert the Zaps, and even if they were fully attuned to their tiny new leader, they might instantly shift into attack mode.

  “Are you going to blast that thing or not?” Millwood said. “It’s getting louder.”

  The plasma sink emitted several frequencies that warbled and chirped like the chorus of an alien aviary. Antonelli wanted a closer shot, even though he was well within the launcher’s range. But he had to hurry, because DeVontay was bound to stir shit up.

  He was assessing the available concealment when Bright Eyes crawled over the concrete barrier and followed after DeVontay. Antonelli cursed his own impotence.

  “Want me to go after him?” Colleen asked.

  “Let him go. He can die with the rest of them.”

  “We’re stuck with—” Colleen realized the girl was listening, and she was already huddled into a helpless ball. Despite all of Antonelli’s tough talk about Directive 17, neither of them really wanted innocent blood on their hands. The mission came first, but Squeak would be a nuisance if they needed to retreat.

  “It’s cool,” Millwood said. “We get in one of those domes, we’ll be safe even if you cause one of those quantum shifts. But if we end up in a parallel universe, how will we ever know?”

  “We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” Antonelli said. “Where’s that dome?”