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

  “The temperature is moderate.”

  “No, I mean don’t do anything stupid.” DeVontay held out his hand for the device.

  “Giving you my only means of self-defense would be stupid.”

  DeVontay realized the mutant’s intelligence was no longer dependent on the communal mind he’d shared with the hundreds of Zaps in Wilkesboro. Perhaps that intelligence arose when he discovered his individual identity. For whatever reason, he was separate from his tribe. In a way, he was like Rachel, caught between two worlds, only without the emotional characteristics of his human half.

  But this was no time to mull the psychological vagaries of mutation. Right now, being different might lead to being dead.

  DeVontay looked into the Zap’s unlined face and into the flickering, golden eyes that exhibited no recognizable soul yet clearly burned with a strange kind of passion. “Okay, stay under here and don’t say a word.”

  “I’m not going to die.” Bright Eyes said it as a threat, not a fact.

  “None of us are going to die. Just be…just stay moderate.”

  DeVontay scooted some chairs around to conceal Bright Eyes underneath the booth table, knocking over a ketchup bottle that squirted a rancid stream of liquid across the floor. He crawled away just as he heard the door slam open. He stood, raising his hands, forcing himself to look scared. He found he didn’t have to act much.

  “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’m not armed.”

  The two soldiers led the way into the restaurant, swiveling the barrels of their rifles back and forth as if conducting a surveillance sweep. Through the window he could see the officer arguing with Rachel, pushing her away when she tried to enter. Squeak watched with wide, vacant eyes that suggesting she might slip into catatonia if things went bad.

  The soldiers rushed past DeVontay to the kitchen, then one of them veered away to check the restrooms. The officer finally gave up—apparently underestimating Rachel’s ferocious persistence—and she followed the officer inside while Squeak waited at the door.

  “Where is he?” the officer said.

  “I’m right here,” DeVontay said.

  “Don’t play games. Under Directive Seventeen, fraternizing with the enemy is punishable by death.”

  “What did you tell him, Rachel?”

  “The Zap can help them,” Rachel said. “We want to win the war, don’t we?”

  DeVontay glared at her, the huge sunglasses hiding her true feelings. If she had some sort of plan, he didn’t grasp it. He’d either have to trust her or assume she’d finally broken under the strain of her genetic contamination and the constant rigors of survival.

  “What will happen to him?” DeVontay asked the officer.

  “Your friend here said it’s smart and it’s turned against the others. That it knows how their weapons work.”

  “A useful asset,” Rachel said.

  From the kitchen came the sounds of clanging pans and breaking glass as the soldiers conducted their frantic search. Considering the violence and fury, DeVontay wasn’t sure they would know how to restrain themselves if they found Bright Eyes.

  “We need some guarantees,” DeVontay said.

  “I already told your lady friend we’d give her and the kid a ride back to base. There’s room for you, too.”

  “I don’t mean for the immediate future. I mean for after this is all over. You have to let him stay with us.”

  “That’s above my pay grade, mister.” He pointed his pistol at DeVontay. “It comes down to whether you’re with New Pentagon or against us. There’s no room on Earth Zero for Zap lovers.”

  Rachel, ignored and unseen by the officer, drew her Glock from behind her back, but DeVontay shook his head at her.

  “You won’t be the first civilian I’ve had to kill,” the officer said.

  The soldiers returned to the dining area and began kicking over tables. It was only a matter of time now.

  But just as DeVontay was turning toward Bright Eyes’ hiding place, the chopper’s mounted machine gun barked a thunderous cacophony.

  The officer ran to the front window and looked out at the parking lot. Rachel dashed to the door and grabbed Squeak, pulling her inside and dragging the child to a booth and pushing her down onto a bench seat. DeVontay ducked as glass shattered outside and bullets whanged off of parked cars.

  As the two soldiers took up positions near the storefront, the helicopter’s blades oscillated into a blur and the engines revved. The soldier in the cabin was mounted at the machine gun, and as the helicopter lifted a few feet off the pavement and turned, the gun sprayed the road to the east. The sun glinted off the silver suits of the approaching Zaps, who strolled in uneven rows of five or six abreast. There must’ve been dozens. Above them hovered a small flock of shiny birds with tiny red electronic eyes.

  “Zap birds,” the officer yelled, pocketing his shades. He motioned to the chopper pilot to lift off. As the blades whipped the air and shook the restaurant, one of the soldiers said, “They’re leaving without us!”

  “Can’t risk the chopper,” the officer said. “Knock this window out and cut loose.”

  One of the soldiers fired a short burst and the storefront window collapsed in thick shards of glass. The soldiers poured semiautomatic fire at the Zaps, joining the heavy volley from the Blackhawk’s gun. “Aim high,” the officer said, firing his pistol. “And make ‘em count.”

  The flock of birds took off in pursuit of the chopper as it faded into the western sky, although their flight paths were wobbly and erratic. “Those little fuckers will punch holes right through the cabin,” the officer shouted over the gunfire.

  DeVontay pulled Rachel to the floor beside Squeak. “You have to shoot.”

  She passed the Glock to DeVontay. “I can’t leave her. You do it.”

  As DeVontay took the pistol, he glanced at Bright Eyes, who still hunched in his hiding place as DeVontay had ordered. At least that was one problem out of the way, and DeVontay figured the other problems would kill them long before he’d have to deal with this one again.

  He fired a couple of rounds with the Glock, drawing a surprised glare from the officer, who nodded in approval. The Zaps were maybe two hundred feet away now and they made no move to take cover behind cars or trees. Five or six had fallen and the others stepped over the corpses without pausing.

  “Where’s the leader?” DeVontay yelled.

  “What leader?” the officer shouted back.

  DeVontay couldn’t believe the officer had so little field experience battling the mutants. Maybe he’d been engaged solely in hit-and-run raids and had never encountered them in force. “They’ve got a hive mind, but usually the commands come from a baby.”

  “The fuck you talking about?”

  “We’ve been to the city. They captured us and we escaped. Either you can strut your stripes or you can let us help you and your men get out of here alive.”

  The man sneered, his mustache twitching as if he’d smelled something fouler than rancid grease and rotted corpses, and said, “Spill it, then.”

  “Birds!” one of the soldiers shouted, tilting his muzzle to the sky and wildly spraying half a magazine.

  A sound like drops of fat rain ticked against the roof, and then one of the silvery darts blurred through the broken window and soared through the restaurant. It flew blindly, careening off the wall and knocking a sandwich advertisement from its hook before wheeling and gliding straight toward the officer. He raised his pistol but it was clear to DeVontay that neither of them could fire in time, even if they managed to track the quavering route of the sentient machine.

  The bird was mere feet from impact when DeVontay felt that familiar tickling and pulsing that was nearly paralyzing.

  The bird veered from its path and tumbled, the sleek wings that had made it so aerodynamic now serving as baffles that slowed its descent to the floor. The officer ran to the quivering form and stomped it with his boot, then looked up to see Bright Eyes pointing h
is device.

  The officer cursed and swung his pistol towards the mutant, but DeVontay knocked his elbow as he fired.

  “He saved you!” DeVontay shouted. “He’s one of us.”

  Bright Eyes lowered his device as Squeak shouted his name and Rachel embraced the child to prevent her from running to the mutant. The officer’s gaze flicked from DeVontay to the mutant and back again. “What the hell’s going on?”

  The soldiers’ attention and firepower were focused on the Zaps who were now eighty feet from the restaurant. “Almost here, Lieutenant, and they’re not slowing down.”

  “I told you, we’ve been there,” DeVontay said. “You can either trust us or die in a crappy fast-food restaurant in the middle of nowhere.”

  The officer wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve, his eyes blinking rapidly. “What’s the plan?”

  That was the tricky part. He didn’t really have one, but he’d bought them a little time.

  “They have no leader,” Bright Eyes said.

  The officer’s mouth fell open as if he had no idea mutants could talk. DeVontay wondered what sort of training the Army supplied, and then realized these men were likely plucked off the survivor scrap heap and dumped into combat boots.

  “He saved our lives, and he can save yours, too,” Rachel said, motioning Squeak to stay put. To Bright Eyes, she said, “So who’s guiding them?”

  “They are operating on automatic, like a computer reverting to its previous programming after a crash,” the Zap said. “Notice how the bird broke off from the flock and attacked individually? They’re not coordinated. The ones approaching outside haven’t used their devices. They aren’t sure of their goal.”

  “How do you know all this?” the officer said. “And don’t give me the ‘I’ve been there’ bullshit.”

  “Because we killed their leader,” DeVontay said. “You don’t have a monopoly on war.”

  The officer returned to the front of the store, where the solders methodically picked off Zaps. DeVontay joined him, sensing the man’s uneasiness over having a Zap at his back—a Zap with a killing device. The streets must have held thirty dead, but many of the shots reflected off the alloy uniforms.

  “You’re right,” the officer shouted to DeVontay and the others. “They’ve got those devices but they’re not shooting with them. They must want to kill us up close and personal like the good old days.”

  “Job’s half done,” one of the soldiers said, reloading the magazine of his assault rifle. “But I don’t know if we have enough ammo to finish it.”

  “What if we spread out and make a run for it?” Rachel asked. “If they’re having trouble settling on a target, we might confuse them enough to get away.”

  “We don’t know how many are out there,” the officer said. “I don’t know why these fuckers are moving so slow but usually they can run you down like a cat on a mouse.”

  “If they scatter, they will become even more dangerous,” Bright Eyes said. “They’re currently linked but without focus, and that limits their responses. The link is an advantage when they have a leader, but right now—”

  “They’re only as smart as the dumbest Zap,” the officer said, leveling his pistol and firing at a mutant and missing. “I get it. Kind of like a government committee.”

  A low rumbling shook the floor beneath them and DeVontay thought the Zaps had unleashed their plasma energy beams, but their devices still hung at their sides. Their blank faces and glinting eyes were just as strange as ever, yet as they were slaughtered, DeVontay almost felt sympathy for them despite the atrocities he’d witnessed in Wilkesboro.

  “Chopper!” one of the soldiers cried, and DeVontay realized the guy was a teenager barely hiding his panic.

  His announcement was followed by a barrage of high-caliber machine-gun fire. The rows of Zaps thinned dramatically, and now only a handful remained. Some of the fallen twitched and crawled brokenly, but not a sound came from their mouths. Then came a whooshing of air and an explosion ripped the pavement beneath them, knocking mutants against stranded vehicles and into the muddy ditches and spraying pebbles and shrapnel along the crossroads.

  As the helicopter descended and settled on the road outside the restaurant, a second missile fired from one of its ports, the percussive explosion shattering windows in the nearby stores. Only a few Zaps remained, and they wandered aimlessly and off balance.

  “Move out,” the officer said, waving to his troops as the chopper’s cabin door slid open. He looked at Bright Eyes, then at DeVontay and the others and said, “All of you.”

  “He saved your life,” DeVontay said. “He’s an asset and an ally. Not a prisoner. Or no deal.”

  The officer pursed his lips in thought. “Not my call, but I’ll put in a good word about what you guys did.”

  “Good enough,” DeVontay said.

  “That goes for all of us,” Rachel added, finally removing her dark, bulbous sunglasses. “Assets, not prisoners.”

  The officer shook his head as if he couldn’t handle any more surprises. “I thought I’d seen it all. What a clusterfuck.”

  He held out his hand and after a few seconds, DeVontay gave the man his Glock and took Bright Eyes’ device from him and surrendered it as well.

  The officer waved them toward the helicopter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Explosions,” Colleen said.

  “If they came from the Blackhawks we’ve been hearing, those would be Hellfire missiles,” Antonelli said. “See how the Zaps like some home cooking.”

  “That’s good,” Colleen said. “That means we’ve got a presence in the region.”

  She’d been cool toward him since leaving the bunker and enduring the animal attack. She clearly blamed him for risking their lives and abandoning the comfortable security of the bunker. She didn’t say anything in front of Private Matthews, who was shaken by the deaths of his comrades. But Antonelli could feel her resentful gaze burning in the back of his neck as he led them along the road.

  “Good and bad,” Antonelli said. “That wasn’t part of the plan. Maybe it means things have changed.”

  “You don’t know everything,” Colleen said.

  “That’s right. I know what my orders are and what our main objective is, but I’m basically just a piece on the chessboard.”

  “Maybe Wilkesboro’s become the objective,” Colleen said. “If those lights are caused by some kind of disturbance created by the Zaps, then it could be important.”

  “We’ll find out when we get there.” Antonelli scanned the surrounding forest and the houses that sat near the road, their silent windows like eyes watching their passage.

  They’d left the Blue Ridge Parkway and were descending east on a country two-lane which Antonelli believed led to Stonewall. His map showed only the major thoroughfares since he was supposed to follow the parkway all the way to Asheville. He’d lost track of the days but he wondered if the Fourth Division had already given up on his arrival.

  “Getting late,” Matthews called from the rear, where he spent much of his time looking over his shoulder. “Maybe we should find a place to bunk down.”

  “We need to cover as much ground as we can,” Antonelli said. “Best to do that while we can still see what’s coming.”

  Colleen stopped behind him and Antonelli didn’t notice for a good ten steps or so. When he turned, she was standing on the shoulder of the road, looking in the high grass. She knelt and came away with a swatch of white cloth.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Bandage. Like the one Huynh was wearing.” She held it up and let it dangle, revealing the rust-brown splotch in the center of it.

  Antonelli’s heart pumped with excitement. The bandage could’ve belonged to any number of people, but the bloodstain was relatively fresh. “It’s his.”

  Matthews caught up with them and saw it, too. “I didn’t trust that guy. He never cared much about learning English. That tells you something.”
<
br />   “Doesn’t matter what language he speaks now,” Antonelli said. “He’s going to be dead in all of them.”

  Something stirred in the woods ahead of them and Matthews turned, clenching his rifle so hard his knuckles were white.

  “Hold your fire,” Antonelli ordered. “Don’t give away our position.”

  As they took cover in the trees at the edge of the road, Antonelli resented the delay. They’d covered maybe twelve miles since leaving the bunker, and aside from the deadly encounter with the monsters, the journey had been uneventful. He regretted the loss of Randall but was more troubled by Stankowitz’s death—that hadn’t simply been an act of predators seeking a meal. The monstrous deer had murdered him with devious intent.

  When the animal emerged from the high weeds onto the road fifty yards ahead, Antonelli nearly shot it, unwilling to wait it out. Matthews broke from concealment and jogged toward it.

  “Psst,” Antonelli hissed in a whisper. “Get back here.”

  Matthews laughed and said with boyish delight, “It’s just a dog, Captain.”

  “I don’t like this,” Colleen said to Antonelli.

  Neither did he, but Matthews was already out in the open, exposed. The sun was touching the tops of the trees in the west and the shadows stretched across the pavement, making it difficult to discern what lurked among them.

  The dog was tan and lean, its ribs showing. It looked like a retriever of some kind, about knee high, its ears furry and droopy, eyes a welcome shade of black instead of flickering yellow. Despite the leather collar on its neck, the canine looked scruffy and feral. It drew back from Matthews’ approach, tensed and lowering itself into a crouch.

  “Here, boy,” the soldier said, holding out his hand.

  “Might be good to have a dog with us,” Colleen whispered. “It will detect danger before we do.”

  “I don’t want anything slowing us down,” the captain said. Something was wrong with this picture, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. A few families in New Pentagon had dogs and cats as pets, an attempt at holding on to the old way of life, but this was a war zone. Here, there were only allies and enemies.