Afterburn: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 1) Read online

  “Hey, we’re on the same side here,” Franklin said. “The best way to beat these shitterhawks is to figure them out. And I don’t see how getting killed by them gets us any closer to winning.”

  “It’s not your war.”

  “It’s everybody’s war,” Stephen said, shaking his head at Franklin as if rescuing the man was a bad idea. But Franklin had been ready to sit in the telecom room and watch them die until Stephen demanded they do something.

  Well, actually, that had been Marina. Stephen just went along with her. And the whole time, little brown Kokona just grinned and grinned.

  “Colleen’s out there. And my lieutenant. I owe them.”

  Franklin slid his shotgun from his shoulder and offered it as a token of support. “If you’re going out, this scattergun will be more effective than a rifle. Double-ought buckshot ought to knock some of the fuckers from the sky.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Stephen said, stepping toward the door.

  The boy was just showing off for Marina. Next to honor and duty and courage, whatever was going on in that hard noggin was a hundred times worse. But Franklin wasn’t Stephen’s boss, as the boy so often reminded him.

  “You promised DeVontay and Rachel you wouldn’t talk on the radio, and you promised them you wouldn’t go out of the bunker,” Franklin said. “What other promises have you broken?”

  “He’s doing what he thinks is best.” Marina came out of Kokona’s room, carrying her M4 carbine. Franklin was glad she’d left Kokona in the room. The captain would have a complete breakdown if he saw a Zap inside a bunker once occupied by the army.

  “How many people live here?” the captain asked, not even listening to his own question. He checked the shotgun to make sure a shell was loaded in the chamber, and turned to the door. “All right, open it.”

  As Stephen crowded behind the officer, Marina called him. “Don’t go out there.”

  Franklin expected a dramatic showdown as Stephen argued his obligation to help his fellow humans, but the boy surprised him.

  “I’m bored,” he said to her.

  Franklin couldn’t argue with that. He wrenched the restraining latch and swung the arm bar. Grabbing the metal handle welded on the back of the door, he leaned his weight against it and it groaned on its hinges like an arthritic giant waking from a century-long slumber. “Better get back to your room, Marina.”

  The captain eagerly gripped the edge of the door and forced the gap wider, then slipped through when the opening reached eighteen inches. Staccato gunfire, shouts, and muffled groans spilled from beyond it. Stephen gave a wave to Marina and said “Don’t worry, I’ll be back,” and then he agilely scooted out of the bunker.

  “You’re just going to let them go?” Marina asked Franklin.

  “Free men make their own decisions.”

  She hurried to the door just as he was swinging it shut again. “What about free women? Or don’t they count?”

  “You’re not going out there, little lady.”

  “Just like I figured, you viejo sorompo. You don’t like rules unless you’re the one making them.”

  “I’m not sure what you just called me, Marina, but you should learn respect for elders. It’ll help you get along in the world.”

  “I don’t live in your world. I don’t want to live like a cucaracha.” She elbowed past him, all five feet, three inches, and ninety-eight pounds of her.

  “All right, all right,” Franklin said. “I always heard Spanish people had hot tempers, but I figured it was just a racist stereotype.”

  “I’m angry because you’ll let Stephen die to save yourself.”

  Franklin sighed. “All right. Damn it, I hope I live to regret this. Give me your gun.”

  When Marina didn’t respond, he jerked the carbine from her hand. It was lighter and shorter than the M16s used by everyone else, offering less kick and more maneuverability, especially for someone as slight as Marina. “Loaded?”

  “Full clip.”

  Trained ‘em well. “Shut the door behind me and don’t open it come hell or high water.”

  As he forced his squishy belly through the narrow gap, Marina touched his arm. “Thank you, Franklin.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He popped outside like a cork sliding from a greasy bottleneck, dragging the M4 into position as he oriented himself. He waited until the door was closed—despite her stature, Marina was wiry strong—and then emerged from the protective alcove of rocks at the entrance.

  He didn’t know how many soldiers the captain commanded, but judging from the reduced gunfire, at least half of them were dead or disabled. He didn’t see Stephen, but the silvery shitterhawks still swooped and swerved among the treetops. Some of them dribbled blood from their metallic beaks. Franklin shot at a couple, but he might as well have been tossing rocks at hurricanes.

  Better find some of these troops and fight with them. And keep Stephen’s nose clean, because he won’t pass up a chance to play hero.

  He heard the captain yelling from the forest, and Franklin headed that way, assuming Stephen would stick with the combat vet. The trees likely limited the birds’ navigation, and the survivors must’ve realized their best bet was to dive for cover instead of fighting out in the open.

  Someone answered the captain from farther up the ridge, in the rocky outcroppings on the north side of the bunker. Such a vantage point likely offered both protection and a wide view of any possible attacks. The numbers of birds also seemed to have shrunk, meaning the humans weren’t the only ones suffering casualties.

  But only one side bleeds.

  Franklin came to his first corpse barely fifty feet from the bunker door. She was lying facedown, blood matting her hair, body pocked with puncture wounds. She was dressed in civilian clothes. Franklin’s stomach roiled as he imagined the woman watch the captain enter the bunker and make a run for the same shelter.

  Sorry, miss, even God wouldn’t let everybody on the ark.

  He stepped over her, wondering if she was the “Colleen” the captain had been so dismayed about. She didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon, so she might not even be part of the unit. Either way, her troubles were over now.

  “Franklin!” Stephen called, and he peered through the shifting, sun-dappled forest until he saw the boy. Stephen was amid a group of four soldiers who had formed a ring, using the thick trunks of oaks for concealment as they spat bullets into the sky. The captain was among them, the shotgun delivering a thunderous belch of pellets that knocked two of the shitterhawks to the forest floor.

  “Cover my ass,” Franklin said, dashing for them, bracing for a sharp jab to the back of his skull.

  If only the damned things would screech or chirp or caw, it wouldn’t be half as creepy.

  “Down,” someone shouted, and Franklin didn’t know who said to whom, but he pitched forward into an awkward roll. His bones jarred as he extended his elbows to protect his rifle and avoid shooting himself in the face. He sprawled awkwardly on his back and looked up to see one of the birds skim just a few feet over where he’d stood moments earlier.

  Franklin studied the underbelly of the bird as it zipped over him. The creepy little shitter even has feet. At least it didn’t dive-bomb me with cyberguano.

  The shotgun roared again and the bird teetered and then drifted sideways, slamming into a tree and dropping to the ground. As it skittered spastically in the dried leaves, Stephen ran to it and slammed the butt of his rifle against it again and again. “This one’s for my mom.”

  The bird shattered with a soft crunch, pieces of it flying. Stephen continued pounding it even as it sank into the mud, one clear miniature eye gazing up at its destroyer as if acknowledging defeat. Franklin had to yell at the teen to break him out of his blind rage.

  One of the soldiers leaned against a tree trunk, wiped sweat from his face, and swapped out his clip. Brass jackets lay scattered around him.

  Franklin took the man’s place and scanned the sky for a target.
r />   A fierce shriek ripped the air like a dropping warhead, rising in pitch as it drew closer.

  What now?

  A large shadow passed over a break in the canopy above, and the shriek swelled in intensity. Then the creator of the terrible sound came into view—a vulture, a real one. Or, at least, it had gray feathers and flapped its wings and bobbed its bald head. The rest of it…

  Son of a bitch is as big as a winged pig.

  “What the hell is that?” the captain said.

  “Dead,” Stephen said, raising his rifle.

  Franklin lunged forward and pushed his elbow to alter his aim. The single shot sailed across the mountains. “Wait a sec. Let’s see what happens.”

  The buzzard-thing flapped into a small squadron of the fake birds, dipping its hooked beak against one of them and snatching it from the air. Pieces glittered in the sun as they fell from the yellow vise of the death grip. The vulture opened its beak and let the ruins fall away, turning toward the next.

  It maneuvered even faster than the birds, and despite its ungainly size, it caught them easily, crushing them one by one. Throughout the attack, the buzzard maintained a high-pitched screeching.

  “It’s going after them,” the captain said.

  “Looks like they invaded its airspace, and it’s pissed,” Franklin said.

  “What is that thing?” Stephen asked.

  “I don’t know, but it looks like it’s on our side.”

  Then came more shrieks, rising like approaching police cars on a high-speed chase. Three more of the buzzards came over the ridge, folding their wings to ride the wind. The shooting died away as if the scattered troops all simultaneously realized what was happening. The three buzzards joined the fray, emitting skull-penetrating cries. In minutes, the silver birds were vanquished.

  The vultures then rose toward the clouds, lazily circling high above.

  “What now?” the captain asked.

  “I think they’re getting ready to eat.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “They’re not going to let us follow, so we’ll have to come up with another plan,” DeVontay said.

  Rachel agreed, but she was pretty sure Tara wouldn’t listen to reason. She couldn’t blame the woman. Rachel had risked her own life plenty of times for Stephen and Marina and even Kokona, and she could only imagine the huge responsibility and devotion a birth mother felt.

  “Either way, we need to keep up our strength,” Lars said, jabbing a hunting knife into the top of a rusted can whose label had long since deteriorated. They’d gathered around a coffee table to share their dinner. “As long as this isn’t creamed corn, I’m good.”

  After the Zap vanished with Squeak, the group attempted several times to follow, but each forward movement brought the birds from whatever treetops and parapets served as their perches. The birds hovered just above the road as if daring them to continue. One time, Tara nearly made a run through them anyway, and it took both DeVontay and Lars to restrain her.

  Eventually she accepted the loss, although the others assured her she’d get her daughter back, even if they had to find a new route to the nearest Zap city. They sought refuge in a house on a hill above town, far from the yellow cottage, as the sun slipped into early evening against the magenta-shrouded mountains.

  The house was secure enough, with high, small windows and a door that locked, and they even struck gold in the pantry, although the rodents and roaches had plundered the best offerings.

  Rachel wasn’t particularly hungry—she required little food since she’d become half Zap—but she took one of the unlabeled cans and opened it with her knife as Lars had done.

  “Pork and beans,” she said, smelling the sweet, oily sauce. “Classic.”

  “I got salmon,” DeVontay said, as if they couldn’t all tell from the odor.

  “Peas,” Lars said, draining the juice on the floor beside the couch where he sat. Beside him, Tara sat hunched forward with her hands on her knees, staring off into the far distance as if imagining whatever horrors the mutants might be inflicting on Squeak.

  “Here, you need to eat something,” DeVontay said to Tara, forking some of his pink fish onto a dusty plate they’d found in the kitchen cabinets. Lars rolled some peas beside them and, taking their cue, Rachel contributed some of her brown beans. Tara just shook her head.

  Rachel tried to distract the woman from her misery. “So, how did you guys get to Stonewall?”

  “She was here first,” Lars said, and then told the story of how he’d heard the commotion in the house and discovered the Zap. “It wasn’t doing anything at first, just kind of waiting, but when I reached for Tara, it attacked me. If she hadn’t grabbed my axe when she did—”

  “It wanted Squeak,” said Tara in a hollow voice. “And when you motioned toward me, it thought you wanted her, too.”

  “So why do they want a child when they could’ve taken one of you?” Rachel asked. “Is there something special about Squeak?”

  “She’s just a kid. A human.” Tara glowered resentfully at Rachel. “Not like you.”

  “How did you come to be…you know,” Lars said, waving his fork toward Rachel’s face. “Your eyes.”

  “I was bitten by a mutant dog. This was about six months after the storms. I was okay, but the wound got infected, and then the Zaps kind of herded me to this house where they held other people captive. Don’t know what was going on with you guys at the time, but this was during that period when the Zaps were trying to learn from our behaviors. They tried to cure the gangrene by transferring their energy to me.”

  “Sounds wild,” Lars said.

  “No wilder than anything else that’s happened since the world ended,” DeVontay said. “She was traveling with me and a boy, but I lost them. Took me a long time to find them again, and when I did, she was like this and…well, the real Rachel didn’t change a whole lot.”

  “How come the Zaps let you get away?” Tara asked her.

  Rachel wanted to comfort the woman, so she didn’t delve into the whole truth. “They thought I’d be like some kind of ambassador or teacher, help them understand human behavior. I saw an opportunity to communicate with them so we could all live in peace. Stupid, I know, but it didn’t work because I’m mostly human.”

  “And they didn’t kill you?”

  “When it came down to it, I chose my people,” Rachel said. And so far I continue to make that choice.

  Tara nodded. “I guess if you were really a Zap, you’d be with them.”

  “We’ve been staying at a place up in the mountains,” DeVontay said, keeping it deliberately vague. “We come down here every few months to scrounge for supplies.”

  Lars finished his plate and flung it across the living room like a Frisbee. “I came from the west. I was a web geek in Asheville when the shit hit. Lost people, hooked up with more people, lost them, too. That’s pretty much my whole story.”

  “Are you hooking up with us?” Tara asked.

  “That depends on if you want to get lost,” he answered. The joke didn’t take, so he added, “Hey, we’re going to get your daughter back. Don’t you worry about that. I lost mine, and I know how much it hurts.”

  “What about you, Tara?” Rachel asked. “There must be a reason the Zaps want your daughter. And where did she get that name?”

  Tara gave a mother’s smile of pride. “I was eight months pregnant when the storms hit. I was at the clinic in Greensboro for a check-up, and then the doctor and another patient got in a fight. At least that’s what I thought, until I saw the patient’s horrible, horrible eyes. Like yours, Rachel.”

  This woman doesn’t let go. I guess paranoia’s served her well, though, if she managed to keep a child alive in this mess.

  “I ran into the examining room and locked the door,” Tara continued. “I could hear the screams and crashing cars outside and I knew something was up. I looked out the window and saw the bodies everywhere. People were attacking each other, and most of them h
ad those same burning eyes. I’m not stupid, I’d seen zombie movies and X-Files and all that stuff. And I figured the best thing to do was nothing.”

  “You waited it out,” Lars said. “Brilliant. What about your…uh, husband or whatever?”

  “I was a single mom by choice,” Tara said. “I have no idea who or where the father is, so that wasn’t a problem. Little Squeak was all I had to worry about. I waited in that room for a week, peeing in a bedpan and eating the snacks in my purse. And when the contractions hit, I figured women had been doing it for thousands of years and it wasn’t rocket science.” She winced in memory. “I couldn’t risk painkillers, so I just bit the sheet for an hour and then I had a beautiful baby girl.”

  “You’re lucky she wasn’t a Zap or stillborn,” DeVontay said. “I heard about a few of those cases.”

  “The babies that turned Zap were mentally advanced,” Rachel said. “Last time I encountered them, these supergenius babies were leading the tribe, communicating telepathically, learning everything they could about the world and the human race.”

  “Not my little Squeak,” Tara said. “I didn’t want her to know any part of the past or what went on before, because we all saw how that turned out, didn’t we? I wouldn’t let her talk, and I never taught her to read. I kept her away from people and Zaps as much as I could, so I wouldn’t have to explain what was happening. It’s not a failure if there’s no successful thing to compare it to, right?”

  Was she this crazy before the apocalypse, or is this a side effect?

  Rachel and DeVontay shared a glance. Lars didn’t seem to notice how strange her attitude was. Maybe he adhered to the same philosophy.

  “I call her Squeak because we communicate that way,” Tara said. “I mean, I do talk to her, but she just makes little noises back.”

  Like she’s mute? Rachel’s school counselor background was nearly worthless in the new world, but she secretly seethed at this woman’s abuse of her child.