After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) Page 15

  “Look out!” Stephen shouted.

  Rachel looked forward just in time to see the pumps looming ten feet ahead. She yanked the wheel to the right but it was too late. The left front tire struck the raised concrete island, then the truck sheared against them, popping two of the pumps loose from the ground and opening a sluggish geyser of gasoline. One of the hoses jerked free and twisted in the air like an agitated rattlesnake, spitting petroleum venom.

  The impact flung Stephen forward, knocking his chin against the dashboard. Rachel jammed on the brake, the bite wound sending red rockets of pain up her leg. By the time she brought the pick-up to a halt, gas was spreading in a pool around the pumps.

  “Quick, get out!” she said, frantically releasing Stephen’s seatbelt. He held his jaw in pain, a trickle of blood at one corner of his mouth.

  But he kicked his door open and dragged his backpack with him, not willing to abandon his comic collection even if it meant Zapheads might catch him. Rachel grabbed her own pack and followed out the passenger’s side and away from the powerful gasoline fumes.

  Good thing the power’s off, or those pumps might have flooded the whole parking lot.

  And good thing none of that grinding metal caused a spark.

  “Nice driving,” Stephen said.

  “Next time get Jackie Chan.” She grabbed Stephen’s wrist and hobbled toward the station’s shop. Only when she reached the door did she realize the lack of power was now a negative instead of a positive.

  The door was automatic, opening via an electronic motion detector. And electricity was now the province of thunderclouds and nylon, not wires and switches.

  “We have to break in,” she said.

  “No way,’ Stephen said. “That glass is at least an inch thick. I think it’s bulletproof.”

  The Zapheads must have been drawn to the populated area—perhaps this had been their home and they were operating on some sort of lingering memory or instinct. But whatever the reason, they were agitated by this sudden disruption. They had probably wiped out all the survivors in the area weeks ago, and now two humans had upset their routine and revived their need to destroy.

  Because they were coming fast.

  “I won’t be able to outrun them,” she said, pointing to the soaked red bandage on her leg.

  “Sure, you can,” Stephen said, eyes wide with fright. “You’re Rachel.”

  “No,” she said. “You need to run. As fast as you can. And don’t look back.”

  Stephen was near tears. Rachel’s eyes were also stinging.

  It’s the gasoline. Yeah. Right.

  “I’ll distract them,” she said, pointing toward the McDonald’s restaurant. “I’ll go in there and get them to chase me while you run into the woods.”

  “We need a distraction?” Stephen said, rubbing at his eyes and sniffling. “Then start a fire. That’s what that guy did back at Taylorsville, remember?”

  Rachel recalled how the massive bonfires had attracted the Zapheads, creating a compelling, noisy, and colorful chaos that likely appealed to their sense of destruction. If devastation was their drug of choice, then Rachel could serve them up a hell of a happy hour.

  The question was how to do it without immolating both her and the boy. She’d seen enough “dumb redneck videos” on YouTube to know that playing with gasoline and matches wasn’t the smartest move in the world. But she didn’t have time to craft a clever fuse that would offer a reasonable safety barrier.

  Jackie Chan would already have this problem solved.

  She dug in her backpack, tossing out cans of food and bottled juice, wondering why she’d hoarded so much while they were still in a civilized area. But that was the uncertainty of Doomsday—it wasn’t Doomsdays, plural. It was all now.

  “Okay,” she said, drawing out a long wool scarf she’d filched from a department store. It was tan, accenting her chestnut eyes and dirty-blonde hair, and she’d grabbed it fantasizing about a future where fashion mattered. “Improvising here. Go dip this in the gasoline and be careful not to get it on your clothes.”

  Stephen dutifully ran toward the shallow pool of fuel. Rachel dug into a side pouch until she found her Bic lighter.

  Thank God for butane.

  She realized it was the first time she’d thanked God for anything in weeks. If those shambling, scurrying mockeries of humankind cascading toward them were part of some divine plan, then she was perfectly willing to exercise her free will to destroy them.

  Is killing only a sin if you know what you’re doing? Maybe these Zapheads are God’s truly blessed creatures, because they don’t suffer the pain of guilt. They’d nail Jesus to the cross and call it a favor, not a sacrifice they’d have to repay over centuries.

  “Hurry, Stephen!” she yelled.

  The nearest Zaphead was now about a hundred yards away. Two small bands of them approached from each direction of the side road, too, and Rachel realized for the first time that they now seemed to travel in groups, like pack animals.

  She’d had a vague sense that their behavior was changing, but she’d been too focused on daily survival to question it. Like most “Ah-ha” moments, this one came in such a rush that she had no time to process, only react.

  Stephen dragged the scarf back by holding the frayed threads of one end, inadvertently laying a thin trail of gasoline as he hurried away from the pumps.

  “Good job,” she said when he returned, taking the scarf from him and laying it on the pavement. “I’m going to start calling you ‘Chan Junior.’”

  “As long as you don’t call me ‘sweetie’ anymore.”

  “Sorry. Just a habit from my counseling days.”

  Which weren’t that long ago but were literally from another world, the world of Before. And those experiences hadn’t taught her one damn thing about setting a gas station on fire without blowing herself and a kid into a thousand pieces.

  “I can’t light this until you leave,” she said, thumbing the Bic. “You might have some gasoline on your clothes.”

  He sniffed his sleeve. “I don’t smell nothing.”

  “Start running,” she said. “Behind the station and up the hill.”

  “What if I get lost?”

  The Zapheads were now close enough that Rachel could hear their strange hissing—it sounded like the spitting heart of a giant winter fireplace. “I’ll be along real soon. I just want to make sure you’re safe before I light this.”

  Stephen nodded. “Maybe DeVontay will see the smoke.”

  “Maybe so. Now get.”

  She waited until he disappeared around the building, hoping more Zapheads weren’t descending from the surrounding hills. There was nothing she could do but hope.

  And set their world on fire.

  She flicked the Bic, lifted the frayed end of the scarf, and applied the flame. At first the fibers curled and shrank, and then fire spread along the length of fabric faster than she’d anticipated. She dropped the scarf and fled, wondering how big the explosion would be and how many steps she would get before—

  KA-WHUUUMP.

  Much of the force of the ignition blew straight into the air, lifting the metal canopy from the pump island. The windows in the front of the shop shattered inward, and the Toyota truck rolled over on its side, flames licking along the oily bottom of the engine. The force of the sudden combustion hit her in the small of the back like a fist. Rachel was thrown onto the ragged landscaping between the kerosene pump and dumpster, rolling in the sodden mulch and scratchy evergreens.

  Holy hell.

  She rose to her hands and knees, coughing and choking as black plumes of smoke roiled around the parking lot. She didn’t know how many pumps were yet to catch fire. She’d read somewhere—probably some wacky Web link her grandfather Franklin had emailed her—that gasoline stored in tanks beneath the surface couldn’t explode because of a lack of oxygen, but the tank openings would burn like giant flame-throwing Bic lighters until the fuel was depleted.

  R
achel didn’t plan on sticking around to test the theory. She scrambled to her feet and limped up the hill in the direction Stephen had gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Well,” Franklin said. “There are really only three possibilities.”

  Jorge barely listened to Franklin. He half suspected the old man’s paranoia had finally shifted from eccentricity to full-blown borderline schizophrenia. Under normal circumstances—if, say, Franklin was a fellow farmhand—Jorge would simply nod in noncommittal agreement and then avoid him whenever possible.

  But here in the Blue Ridge Mountains with the human race nearly extinct, Franklin’s deranged and peculiar genius might even be an asset.

  After all, there are no head doctors around to declare him a lunatic.

  Willard, one of the local farmhands who had been raised in the rural Tennessee Mountains, was fond of his Friday evenings, when he’d show up with a glass jar of clear homemade liquor. He’d sing off-key about old drunks outnumbering old doctors, mangling the words into incoherent chunks of wildcat wailing and blubbering.

  The last time Jorge had seen Willard, the old drunk was a crazed Zaphead who had attacked Jorge in a barn loft. And now Willard was beyond the need for doctors.

  Franklin passed his pair of binoculars to Jorge. “Look down yonder,” he said.

  They were sitting on a rocky outcropping, with a commanding view of the surrounding mountains and the deep valley trailing away to the foothills in the South. Jorge looked through the lenses in the direction Franklin had pointed. An oily column of smoke rose in the valley from beside a twisting gray ribbon of road.

  “Probably some Zappers having a weenie roast,” Franklin said.

  Jorge wasn’t that interested. Rosa and Marina wouldn’t have had time to reach the valley, even if they had managed to round up the horses they had turned into the wild. So the fire might as well have been on television for all he cared.

  “What are the three?” he asked.

  “What’s that?” Franklin took back the binoculars and scanned the valley again.

  “The three possibilities.”

  “Well, they could have been taken by the Zapheads. Or they could have been taken by the soldiers. Or they could have left on their own, for another reason.”

  “There was no sign of a struggle. Rosa would have fought.”

  “That’s what I figured. She seems a little feisty.”

  “She’s a good wife. And a good mother.”

  “Yeah. And Cathy…who the hell knows what kind of mother she is.”

  “But why would they leave? They had food, shelter, and security.”

  “You want to know my theory?” Franklin shifted to the left to survey the adjacent ridge. The trees at the peak had already lost their leaves and were gray-brown sticks mixed with stunted jack pines. The slopes still bore swatches of deep scarlet, pumpkin, and brilliant yellow where the autumn wind had yet to scrub the limbs clean.

  Jorge was afraid of Franklin’s theory, because it might confirm some of the dark worries he harbored deep inside. But every moment of uncertainty was another moment that his family was in danger.

  “You think it’s the baby?” Jorge said. He touched his pocket where the scrap of paper bore those waxy words: “He’s mad”

  “You seen the Zaps on the trail. Even when they attacked us, they weren’t real serious about it.”

  “You shot them. No wonder they attacked us.”

  Franklin lowered the binoculars and glared at him beneath iron-gray eyebrows. “Are you on their side now? Because this is us against them, and there are a lot more of thems than uses.”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side but my family’s,” Jorge said. The plume of smoke in the valley had grown large enough that it was now visible to the naked eye.

  “Well, I can respect that. But don’t go running off in the heat of battle next time. If we can’t trust each other, we don’t have a chance.”

  Jorge recognized both the immediate need for survival and the long-term idealism in the old man’s declaration. For all his paranoia, Franklin was ultimately an optimist—a man who had high hopes for his race’s potential but had been continually disappointed.

  “If the baby caused them to leave, where would they go?”

  Jorge hadn’t been as repulsed by the mutant infant as Franklin had been, but now he belatedly assigned sinister motives to its behavior. What had compelled its mother to risk her life to save it? Indeed, why had he and Franklin rescued them when they were pursued by other Zapheads? And why had Franklin even allowed the creature into the compound, given his own hatred of the Zapheads?

  But it’s just a child. A strange one, but an innocent child nevertheless.

  “She might have decided to take the young’un to them.” Franklin squinted up at the eastern horizon where the sun staked its claim on this side of the world. “Maybe Cathy got changed herself.”

  What if Marina and Rosa changed? Could I still love them? What if I’M changing?

  “You think people can still catch the sun sickness?” he asked.

  “I think you can be sick on your own.” Franklin stuffed his binoculars in his pack and shouldered his rifle. “We’d best get moving. I don’t want to lose these tracks.”

  In the forest, they had located three sets of footprints, one of them smaller than the others. The mud didn’t reveal a distinct direction, but it was the only clue they’d found. Franklin figured the group had followed the easiest path down the valley. Even though Rosa and the others might have had a head start of as a much as a full day, the infant would slow them down.

  As Jorge followed Franklin back to the trail, he wondered again why Rosa hadn’t left a sign or message. Secrecy wasn’t one of Rosa’s traits. But then, what man really knew a woman?

  Franklin took the trail in great strides, erect and alert, while Jorge often fell behind, ruminating on the horrible possibilities. His obsessive thinking was counterproductive, but he couldn’t seem to break free of the anxiety and depression. To further complicate matters, he had killed a man.

  Not a Zaphead—a man.

  Even though he considered the murder an act of self-defense, he had crossed into a moral territory he never knew existed. And no amount of rationalization could bring that young soldier back to life. They hadn’t even taken the time to give him a proper burial, instead dragging the corpse into the woods and covering it with leaves, where the scavengers would soon find a feast.

  Jorge was so fogged by his guilt that he nearly ran into Franklin when the old man stopped suddenly.

  “What is it?” Jorge said, as Franklin slowly raised his hands into the air.

  “Getting old, that’s what,” Franklin muttered. “Getting too goddamned old for this.”

  That’s when Jorge saw the men on each side of the trail, aiming semiautomatic weapons at them.

  Jorge considered going for his rifle, and then realized if Franklin hadn’t bothered to resist, their situation was indeed grim.

  “Well, well, well,” one of the soldiers said, stepping out of the concealment of the bushes. His khaki sleeves were rolled up to the three stripes displayed at his biceps. A half-smoked dead cigar was jammed in one corner of his mouth, and he spoke around it. “You must be the notorious Franklin Wheeler.”

  Franklin kept his arms raised. “I didn’t know I was notorious. I would prefer ‘legendary’ or maybe ‘visionary.’”

  “You can’t become a legend until you’re dead. But maybe I can help you with that.”

  Jorge mimicked Franklin by lifting his arms in the air, careful not to make any rapid movements. The two young soldiers behind the sergeant were nervous and wide-eyed, the tips of their weapons shaking as they pointed them at their new prisoners.

  The sergeant nodded at one of them, and the soldier stepped forward and seized Franklin’s rifle first, and then Jorge’s.

  “Who’s your buddy?” the sergeant asked Franklin. “One of your prepper militia?”

  “I got
out of the militia business,” Franklin said. “They tended to get their asses torched by the government.”

  “Now, Mr. Wheeler, I’d say we’re past all that, wouldn’t you?”

  Franklin grumbled as the soldier took his backpack and searched him for weapons. “You at war with the Zaps now?”

  “He’s clean, Sarge,” the soldier said to the sergeant. Jorge didn’t think the kid was any older than nineteen.

  “Check the Mexican,” the sergeant commanded.

  “I’m an American,” Jorge said, drawing a yellowed grin from Franklin. The soldier removed his pack and patted his sides and down his legs before stepping away and lowering his weapon again.

  “So, where are you fellows off to?” Sarge said, striking a wooden match against his belt and lighting his cigar. “Deer hunting?”

  “We’re looking for my wife and daughter,” Jorge said.

  “Are they Zaps?”

  “No, they’re Americans, too.”

  One of the soldiers laughed, and Sarge shot him a menacing scowl. “Okay, smartass. You’re trespassing in a militarized zone. Under the Patriot Act, you can be confined without trial on suspicion of terrorist activity.”

  “This ain’t no military zone,” Franklin said. “It’s a national park.”

  “It’s the birth of a new nation, Mr. Wheeler. New laws, new boundaries. You citizens don’t know it yet, but as soon as the war’s over, we’ll set things right.”

  “Christ,” Franklin said. “It’s only been six weeks since Doomsday and already the dictators and tyrants have climbed on the top of the heap like cockroaches at a garbage dump.”

  Jorge didn’t care about old or new laws. He was desperate to find Rosa and Marina, and every second wasted might lower the chances of finding them. “Have you seen three women and a baby?”

  The second soldier, a thin, Asian-looking man with his khaki cap turned around backwards, said in an accented voice, “I wish we’d have seen three women. I haven’t been laid since June.”