Earth Zero: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 2) Page 13

  “You’re right,” he answered. “I don’t remember.”

  “Very convenient.” She sounded closer, as if she was descending the ridge.

  “I don’t remember much of anything that happened back then. These days my mind’s kinda on other things. Like not getting munched or zapped or shot by people.”

  “I kept up with you as best I could, on the Internet and all that. But you did a pretty dang good job of going dark.”

  Her cadence and Southern accent started to seem familiar. Maybe he did know this woman. And if so, odds were probably not so good that she held fond memories. She was closer now, but he couldn’t place her location.

  “You didn’t come to the mountains just to find me, did you?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. Last I heard on the rumor mill, you were building a compound up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I didn’t exactly stalk you, but it seemed like you had the right idea. So I built one of my own.”

  Holy Christ. K.C. Carr.

  Now he did remember, all of it. Three drunken nights bedding down together, sharing some chit chat about the government’s oppressive overreach and the Federal Reserve’s persistent theft from the working class—the typical pillow talk at such gatherings.

  K.C. had impressed him more than any of the other delusional assholes, who couldn’t build a productive society if you gave them a thousand bulldozers, a million acres of prime agricultural land, and a gold mine. But after a few intimate letters, he hadn’t made any effort to stay in touch over the years, wanting to distance himself from all self-anointed freedom fighters after the FBI and ATF took a little too much interest in him.

  And here she walks right back into my life. Well, hell. If I’m going to get shot, I’d just as soon have it done by her hand.

  He leaned his rifle against a tree. “I’m unarmed. I’m coming out.”

  Princess whinnied softly behind him, ears pinned back. Franklin wasn’t sure if that was a warning sign. Maybe leaving his rifle wasn’t such a good idea.

  He stepped out from the trees. He thought about raising his arms in surrender but that would make him look foolish. K.C. didn’t think much of fools.

  “K.C. Carr,” he said. “You always did get the upper hand.”

  She emerged from behind a Ford Explorer that sat on sunken tires along the road. She’d worked her way down the ridge and then outflanked him while he’d been reminiscing. So much for not looking like a fool.

  “You’re old,” she said. Her rifle wasn’t pointed at him but she looked quite capable of bringing it to bear in the blink of an eye. “And you put on a few pounds.”

  K.C. was stockier and had a few extra pounds of her own, and her dark hair was streaked with natural silver highlights and tied back in a ponytail. She wore a green nylon vest that didn’t do much to hide her voluptuous figure, and her jeans were patched as if they were a favorite pair that she refused to discard. She sported an American flag emblem on her battered brown fedora, and wire-framed glasses intensified the blue of her eyes. Looking into them brought back a stir of memories.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said. What were a few wrinkles around the mouth and eyes? Her essence was just as vibrant and forceful as it had been two decades ago. Her lips were pretty much the same ones he’d enjoyed kissing and watching move as she spoke.

  “I haven’t changed into a Zap, at least,” she said, walking toward him, glancing warily around with an alertness that she’d cultivated over the harsh years of survival.

  “Anybody with you?”

  “Remember what you used to say? ‘Only the loners make it.’ I didn’t like to hear that, but you were right.”

  “I was full of shit.”

  “You were smarter than the rest of those bozos,” K.C. said. “They were fighting the wrong enemy the whole time.”

  “Sitting around waiting for doomsday doesn’t make you all that smart, either.” He talked to her like they’d never parted. It was just that easy.

  “I don’t like being out here in the open like this.”

  “Well, I’d ask ‘Your place or mine?’ but mine is about thirty miles up the mountain.”

  K.C. sighed and shook her head as if not ready for this reunion but unable to deny it. “Get your gun and your horse and follow me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They were perhaps a mile out of Wilkesboro when the first bird swooped from the air.

  It wasn’t a metal bird—it was a hawk, descending with outstretched wings, gaping claws, and red eyes. DeVontay knew the pistol would be useless, and they scarcely had time to take cover. A logging truck lay on its side in the road, its wooden cargo spilled across the cracked asphalt like fat tiddlywinks. Rachel was already grabbing Squeak from Bright Eyes, pulling her under the rig, by the time DeVontay shouted a warning.

  Lars stood in defiance, holding his axe up like a shield, but he was still weak from his near-death experience and would have no chance of fending off the massive winged predator. DeVontay leveled the pistol even though he had little hope of hitting the swiftly moving target. Before he could fire, Bright Eyes said, “I will do it.”

  DeVontay thought at first the mutant wanted the gun, but instead Bright Eyes ran toward the hawk. The bird issued a grating and bone-chilling skreeeee as it attacked. With uncanny speed, Bright Eyes reached up and snatched the bird from the air, flinging it against the pavement and driving a silver boot onto its head. Bones crunched and feathers flew as the hawk flapped and flailed. Within seconds it lay still.

  “Damn,” Lars said. “No mercy.”

  “Why didn’t you use your blaster thing?” DeVontay said.

  The Zap looked at the device in its left hand as if he—they all silently and mutually assigned Bright Eyes to the male gender despite the sexless appearance—had forgotten. “We’re too far from the power source for me to activate it alone. Without multiple conduits, the waves are less effective.”

  From a distance, the column of energy pouring into the center of Wilkesboro was stunning. It looked as if the plasma sink was sucking the aurora out of the sky. Although the hum and tension in the air faded the farther they fled, it was still evident, and DeVontay blamed it for his exhaustion and lethargy.

  They hadn’t stopped in any houses or stores along the way, fearing unknown dangers and possible Zap pursuit. Rachel sat on a log to rest, with Squeak in her lap. She pulled a water bottle from her pack and let the child drink, then offered it to the others. Lars was the only one who took her up on it.

  “They will come for us soon,” Bright Eyes said. “Even without a leader, the others will want you for their machines.”

  “You turned away from your kind,” DeVontay said. Why did you help us?”

  “Because I became me. I was no longer us.”

  Sounds like one hell of an identity crisis. Maybe Rachel got in his head when she saved his life. Or maybe he remembers some of his life from before.

  DeVontay managed some sympathy for the mutant despite all the times the Zaps had tried to kill him and his friends. DeVontay’s own pre-Doomsday memories had taken on a dreamlike quality that made them almost painful to revisit. He could only imagine what the Zap must remember, especially when the thoughts had been shared by dozens or even hundreds of his kind. Bright Eyes likely had a difficult time parsing his own individual experiences from those of the collective.

  “We’re glad you’re on our side now,” Rachel said.

  DeVontay wasn’t quite as eager to trust the Zap, but he would rely on Rachel’s intuition on the matter. Although her own mutant characteristics seemed so much weaker lately, she was still the best barometer of their true intentions.

  “What do we do once we get away?” Lars said. “We can’t just let them build more of those machines. Who knows what they’ll invent in the future?”

  “We return to the bunker first,” DeVontay said, instinctively taking command even though he would defer to Rachel if needed. “We can’t do anything on our own, and until
we can regroup, get some weapons, and regain our strength, we’re at a big disadvantage.”

  “As soon as I’m strong enough, I’m going back there and smash that thing that tried to slice me like bologna,” Lars said. “After what it did to—”

  DeVontay shot him a one-eyed glare and Lars fell quiet, looking at Squeak with pity etched in his tired, dirty face.

  “We’ll need to get word to others,” Rachel said. “If we can alert the military without giving away our position in the bunker, maybe they can plan an attack. We know they’re active from the radio calls we’ve picked up.”

  “That might not be wise,” Bright Eyes said. “They are developing high-ionization beams that can destroy buildings. What you saw were the experimental models, the prototypes—in another part of town, they are fabricating a three-dimensional printer that can create products larger than this truck. The metal birds will soon be twice the size of that hawk, faster and more destructive. And they are building conveyance devices to transport their units around.”

  “Like a car?” Lars asked.

  “More like a boat. Only instead of water, it will float on air like birds, drawing on energy radiating from the plasma sink. I would guess the range will be a hundred miles or more.”

  Bright Eyes took Squeak from Rachel and held her against his silver-coated shoulder. “We should be going.”

  “Must be nice not to need any rest,” Lars said.

  “I’m dependent on an energy source as well,” Bright Eyes said. “Only mine is external instead of internal. I don’t derive it from food and liquid.”

  “Too bad,” DeVontay said. “You’ll never know the tasty joys of lizard meat.”

  “If we were protein consumers, I suspect our machines would be utilized for a different processing purpose,” Bright Eyes said.

  DeVontay didn’t want to think about the slices of animals and humans being served up in some sort of Zap banquet hall. Their design was terrible enough already—if the Zaps managed to animate the organic material they processed, what would stop them from going beyond making repairs to their kind? What if they eventually brought forth their own monstrous hybrids?

  As the group continued on its journey, DeVontay asked Bright Eyes, “How long have you had the plasma sink?”

  “Two years plus perhaps half a year. We—I mean, they—correlated the wavelength of communal thoughts with the frequencies of the electromagnetic waves emanating from the sun. Even though the solar wind is sporadic, the sunspot activity has created enough charge in the ionosphere to provide a reliable energy source. It also combined with the existing environmental toxins and radiation from your abandoned nuclear plants to create some…changes.”

  “What do you mean?” Lars asked.

  “The mutations in the animal world,” Bright Eyes said.

  “Wait,” Rachel exclaimed. “You mean those plasma sink things are responsible for making these monsters?”

  “It was an unexpected side effect,” Bright Eyes said.

  “‘Side effect’? Those things aren’t just a danger to humans. Zaps have been attacked, too. Like the feline thing that tried to kill you in Stonewall. Maybe your mutation is controlled and self-aware, but those creatures—they’re just pure killer instinct.”

  “We were pure instinct in the beginning,” Bright Eyes said. “And yet we evolved.”

  “Evolved into more efficient killers,” Lars said. “And what happens when these monsters become more cunning and start planning out strategies? Zaps are taking the top of the food chain from us, but how much longer before they’re on the bottom?”

  Squeak lifted her head from Bright Eyes’ shoulder. “What’s a ‘food chain’?”

  Nobody wanted to answer. Rachel eventually said, “It’s like the bird eats the worm and then the cat eats the bird. And when the cat dies, it’s part of the dirt that feeds the worm.”

  “Only now the cat gets eaten by a three-hundred-pound lizard,” Lars said, drawing a scolding glare from Rachel.

  DeVontay wanted to add, “And the lizard gets eaten by starving humans,” but decided there was no reason to dwell on the horrors of their world. Instead he said, “Maybe we should start checking some of these houses as we go. Speaking of food, we’re going to need some.”

  Lars patted his axe. “I’ll go on ahead and scout. I’m feeling a little better. It’s a great day to be alive.”

  “Stay out of trouble until you find guns,” DeVontay said. He couldn’t be sure, but he sensed the Norse wild man was glad to get away from Bright Eyes. Considering what the man had endured, DeVontay couldn’t really blame him.

  Lars picked up his pace and was soon out of sight. The trees around them still held about half of their leaves, the sun bathing the scarlet and ocher canopy and dappling the ground. Enough foliage remained to conceal any predators stalking them, and now that DeVontay understood their origins, he loathed them even more.

  Bad enough when it was just a twist of nature, a sick detour taken by the wheel of evolution, but to know the Zaps brought these monsters into being through their experiments made him rethink the true extent of their threat. He wasn’t sure the remnants of the military, whose strength he had only vague impressions of, could rival and defeat the Zaps and the weapons they were manufacturing.

  “How does that device thing work?” DeVontay asked Bright Eyes.

  “It destabilizes the electrons in the atomic structure of its target. The beam routes from our power source using the operator as a conduit, which is why it is more powerful when a number of them are combined in one attack. It’s not an entirely reliable weapon.”

  “That’s why I couldn’t use it,” Rachel said as they began walking again. “I guess I’m too human.”

  “You’re fortunate,” Bright Eyes said. “We believed humans to be inferior. That is why initially we had to respond to your violence with force of our own. Then we considered you a pest, an infestation that should be exterminated. Now I see those ideas came from our leaders.”

  “Your leaders kill each other,” DeVontay said. “We’ve seen it before. Geneva admitted it. For all your collective ideals and intellectual development, you’re still getting bossed around by a bunch of brats.”

  “From what I have learned, that is similar to your own human history,” Bright Eyes said. “Childish minds seeking immediate gratification.”

  “Ha, you should meet my friend Franklin. You two could have great conversation about it.”

  Bright Eyes stopped in the road. “So you would like me to come with you forever?”

  Squeak hugged him tightly, as if he’d become a surrogate for her lost mother. “You have to come,” she said.

  “Looks like you’re part of the family if you want to be,” Rachel said.

  “Should we tell him about Kokona?” DeVontay asked.

  “He’ll find out soon enough. I can’t wait to get back to the bunker. This is my last supply run for a long while.”

  They came to a crossroads featuring a gas station, a Bojangles restaurant, a masonry supply business, and a small strip mall of shops and offices. Abandoned and wrecked cars were common on the rural highway, but it seemed like this had been a busy destination center. Perhaps a hundred vehicles sat in the parking lots in various stages of corrosion, their windows blackened with grime. A row of tractor trailers were lined beside the station’s pumps, their drivers likely enjoying fried chicken and biscuits on the day the Earth changed for the worse.

  “Should we check it out?” DeVontay asked.

  “Winter’s coming,” Rachel said. “And this is a supply run, after all. We just took a little vacation along the way.”

  Several skeletons lay sprawled around the entrance to the gas station, the bones scattered as if scavengers had worked over the bodies. Even though the presence of death was a constant feature of their daily life, DeVontay shuddered at the thought of those victims, their families and loved ones, and even the lone people who’d suffered the indignity of dying among strangers.r />
  So much loss.

  He couldn’t say it was senseless or cruel—he’d long given up musing on the “Why?” At least these poor souls hadn’t been collected by the Zaps and hauled away for their massive resurrection project. Better to be eaten by vultures or dog-sized rodents.

  “You guys wait out here,” DeVontay said. “Bright Eyes can protect you with his blaster thing if he can get any juice out of it.”

  Rachel checked the cab of a pick-up truck, found it empty, and she took Squeak from Bright Eyes and placed her in the passenger seat. “Stay here and keep quiet,” she said, and then remembered the psychological abuse Tara had dished out in her overprotective zeal. “I mean, you can talk, but don’t play the radio too loud,” she joked.

  “You good?” DeVontay said, nodding at Bright Eyes.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Are you capable of defending them if necessary?”

  “I will protect them unto death.”

  He left Rachel rummaging in the pick-up’s tool chest. The stores appeared to have already been ransacked, but survivors in a hurry might overlook something useful. In the current supply-and-demand economy, the supply remained the same while a lot of the demand had died off.

  The gas station contained the usual trash and sugary snacks, although all chocolate and cakes were long gone, either nibbled by mice or taken by passersby. There were plenty of soft drinks, but the beer cooler was empty. DeVontay was reluctant to gather anything of dubious nutritional value, but he found a cardboard box behind the counter—the clerk had evidently been Zapped or carried away—and loaded it up with mints, Sprite, stale bags of potato chips and popcorn, and a lucky find of canned pork-and-beans. He brought the box to the truck and let Squeak take her pick.

  “Lars should be here,” Rachel said. “This is right on the road and you can’t miss it. There’s enough stuff here to keep you busy prowling for hours.”

  “Maybe he went off on a side road,” DeVontay said. “Unlikely to be any guns here, and that’s our biggest need at the moment. I’ll feel better when we have something besides this Glock and a Zap blaster that doesn’t work without other Zaps around.”