Earth Zero: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 2) Page 17

  Matthews knelt ten feet from the dog, which sniffed the air as if expecting danger. Colleen was right. Its instincts were likely much more refined than theirs.

  Why hadn’t it barked?

  Antonelli found himself tensing as Matthews eased closer to the animal, expecting it to leap at him or skitter away at any second. He was wound so tightly that when the shot rang out, he nearly pulled the trigger himself.

  Matthews stood with a surprised look on his face as the dog sprinted off into the trees. He turned to Antonelli, seeming to grin. Then his eyes rolled up and blood blossomed from the hole in his chest. He went limp and collapsed on the road, his rifle banging against the pavement.

  Colleen rose to rush toward him, but Antonelli restrained her. “No. Wait.”

  After a couple of minutes, a short bearded man in a leather jacket and jeans came into view, holding a rifle. He was soon joined by several others, two men and a woman, all dirty-faced and gaunt, the dog trotting among them and wagging its tail.

  They used the dog to lure him out.

  Antonelli held his fire as the rogue band of survivors plundered Matthews’ corpse. One of them made a joke to another about the rifle, and they seemed to argue over its possession for a moment until the apparent leader yelled at them.

  The woman dug through the backpack and removed Matthews’ jacket. When they’d taken what they wanted, they left the soldier bare-chested and lying on his back. The dog licked at the wound on his chest until the blood was gone, and then they packed up and headed back into the woods.

  “Do we go after them?” Colleen asked when the sound of their conversation faded.

  “We have no idea how big their gang is,” Antonelli said.

  “They killed one of your men.”

  “He disobeyed orders. That’s the price.”

  “I don’t know what’s happened to you. You get crazy for revenge after a Zap baby kills your soldiers, but you don’t care if people do it.”

  “Scavenger scum or not, they’re still numbers. They’re people who can kill Zaps. Matthews wasn’t any good anyway, not after all that happened.”

  “So how long until you throw me to the wolves?”

  He looked into her green eyes, wishing this was another place and another time, one where his duties were defined and his path clear. He’d sworn an oath to protect and defend his country unto death, and ever since that country had been lost, he’d been unmoored. He supposed that oath should now transfer to the preservation of the human race, but that was a murky proposition—it required him to respect those who had just killed a soldier under his command.

  If the killers had been Zaps, there would be no question of his revenge. But these humans were now part of the defense force, even if they likely didn’t see themselves that way. But who knows how many of their own kind these scumbags had killed in their desperate quest for survival?

  Dog eat dog. That’s what it comes down to in the end.

  “Come on,” he said. “We can get in another couple of miles before dark.”

  He’d gone twenty feet before he realized she hadn’t followed. “What is it?”

  “Leave me here. I’m done.”

  “That was an order.”

  “Quit the bullshit. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s nobody left to hide our relationship from. Now it’s just you and me. No more games or disguises.”

  “I was ready to stay in the bunker for you. Throw away everything I ever believed in. All for—”

  “And in the end you chose yourself, Mark. And look how many people have paid for that.”

  He wanted to slap her, but only because he couldn’t direct the blow at himself. It was the kind of senseless rage he loathed in other men—their ineptitude and impotence turned on the weakest immediate target.

  But he was stopped by a sound so familiar but unexpected that at first he assumed it was some new kind of monster, maybe a genetic cousin of the dinosaurs that once roamed the continent. The roar was subtle and constant, the kind that could chew trees and spit sawdust—or grind bones to make bread.

  As the sound moved down the valley toward them, Antonelli crawled to a tangle of wild rhododendron and peered through the waxy green leaves. The road wound alongside a creek between two steep slopes and followed the natural terrain. The roar built to a ground-shaking rumble by the time the transport truck rolled around the bend.

  Like most such military trucks, it was painted in a tan-and-gray camouflage pattern designed for the sandy landscapes of old oil enemies rather than the lush greenery of Asian jungles or European farms. The M926 spewed a dark plume of diesel smoke as it rolled down the incline. The truck was full of uniformed soldiers, one of them standing behind the cab and scanning the surrounding terrain with binoculars.

  Behind it was a Humvee with tinted windows, pulling a small trailer heaped with supplies. The government’s new flag flew from the antenna, its single red and white stripes flapping in the wind. A small-caliber machine gun was mounted on its roof.

  Antonelli couldn’t be sure, but he figured this mobile unit had broken off from the Sixth Division. When Antonelli had split from the division in Wytheville at the end of summer, it featured nearly half of New Pentagon’s remaining mechanized resources. The division was supposed to have been in Charlotte by now, where the Zaps had gathered en masse. This route was a good eighty miles out of the way.

  “What do we do?” Colleen asked over the growling engines.

  “Wave them down without getting shot,” he said.

  Matthews provided one final service as the truck slowed when it approached his body. Two men jumped out of the rear as the man with binoculars shouted orders. As the men checked the looted corpse, Antonelli cupped his hands and shouted, “Captain Antonelli, Third Battalion, Eighth Marines.”

  The two soldiers dropped into a crouch and raised their weapons, but the man with binoculars barked, “Hold your fire.”

  “We’re with the Earth Zero Initiative,” Antonelli said. “Heading to meet up with the Fourth Division.”

  “You’re way off course, Captain.”

  “I could say the same about you.”

  “How many in your unit?”

  “Just one. That man in the road was with us, but he was ambushed.”

  “Zaps?”

  “Civilians.”

  The man mumbled something Antonelli couldn’t make out, and then said, “Come out slow and let us see your hands.”

  Antonelli nodded at Colleen to follow, shouldered his rifle, and stepped out from the rhododendron with his arms wide and his palms open. Colleen did the same. The man from the transport truck climbed over the side and dropped to the pavement as the truck idled.

  The man with the binoculars had a colonel’s bird attached to his collar. When he removed his cap, Antonelli recognized him even from a distance: Spanky Munger, second-in-command to Gen. Alexander and head of the Sixth Division. Munger sported a cotton-white crew cut and deep creases in his face that betrayed the hard, glacial youth of his blue eyes. He was brass balls all the way, career Army and destined for a desk in the old Pentagon before the shit hit the fan and assigned him a new mission.

  They met at Matthews’ corpse, where the soldiers were checking his wound and making sure he was dead.

  “Captain,” Col. Munger said, shaking his hand with such strength that Antonelli’s cartilage crunched. “Been a while.”

  He nodded curtly at Colleen as she was introduced, openly dismissing her because of her gender. Antonelli then said, “Where’s the rest of the division?”

  “We split off at the state line. Got some intel that there was a big Zap base in the region. Chopper recon confirmed it.”

  Antonelli thought the unit was pretty puny given the size of the force when he’d left it in Wytheville. But his own ranks had been decimated, too, so he had no right to second-guess the losses of other commanders.

  “What about your unit?” Munger asked.

  “Long story, but basically
we were hit hard and suffered heavy casualties. We found Hilyard’s bunker and—”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. Got a transmission from HQ when the static was low. What happened to that Zap baby?”

  “That’s why we changed course. We have reason to believe she’s headed this way. Probably to the base you’re talking about.”

  “Doesn’t look like you’d be much good to the Fourth anyway.” To Colleen, Munger said, “Unless you got some nukes up your sleeve.”

  “I wish,” she said. “Sir.”

  “We’re rolling back to camp. Load up.”

  “What about my private?”

  “We’ll take him back for burial.” The colonel motioned to the soldiers and they lifted Matthews by his shoulders and legs.

  As Antonelli followed the procession to the rear of the truck, he said to Colleen, “You’re the only one left for me to kill.”

  “Just do it slow. I guess love is not only blind, it’s stupid as hell.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The fried catfish was so good that Franklin had almost forgotten the apocalypse.

  Aside from the candles and the lack of ice in his glass of bourbon, he might as well have been in millennial America, enjoying a fine meal with an attractive woman. K.C.’s squatter’s mansion was spacious and comfortable after years spent at his cramped mountain compound and the claustrophobic bunker. With dusk settling and a fire crackling, Franklin realized his willpower was another thing that had weakened over the years along with his muscles.

  “I only make fires at night, when the smoke doesn’t show as much,” K.C. said. She was sipping gin splashed with bottled lemon juice.

  She had an extensive liquor supply behind a glass bureau, but she said she only drank on special occasions because she couldn’t afford slow reflexes.

  “So I reckon this is a special occasion?” he said, sitting beside her on the sofa and resting his stockinged feet on a coffee table that probably cost two thousand dollars. He felt oddly self-conscious about the hole in the big toe of his sock, possibly because of the meticulous care K.C. applied in outfitting her home.

  “To old friends,” she said, toasting him.

  As their glasses clinked, Franklin was reminded that she was a decade younger and still in her prime. A little past the peak of it, maybe, but nowhere near the downward slide Franklin was on. “Some older than others.”

  “You’re still alive. Wisdom must have some value in the apocalypse.”

  “I never would’ve put that line in my survivalist handbook. Sounds like a load of horseshit, because luck is way more valuable than wisdom. Besides, look at what you’ve done here. If anybody’s an expert, it’s you.”

  “Nothing wrong with enjoying the finer things if you can afford them.” She giggled like a teenager.

  Like she giggled during the Wings of Eagles retreat.

  Franklin fought the rush of nostalgia. This was a different time. A different world. Thinking of Before would only weaken him. Only After mattered now. And making it through another night.

  She’d given him a tour of her grounds and the gardening operation. Despite the lateness of the autumn, the greenhouse was verdant with squash, green beans, tomatoes, and peppers. Another plot outside featured humps of potatoes, rows of cabbages, and dark green clusters of collards and kale. The top of the fence featured a line of thin wire around the perimeter that was connected to a series of bells that alerted K.C. to intruders.

  Franklin had to admit her set-up was a lot more thought-out than the one he’d spent half his life planning and constructing. Plus she slept in clean sheets instead of a ratty sleeping bag, and her wardrobe was cotton and silk. She was living like a one-percenter in a time when less than one percent of the human race was still alive. A lifestyle that had appalled him a decade ago now seemed like the most natural aspiration for a free person.

  Maybe taking money out of the equation made it less of a sin in his eyes. Stealing from the working class to indulge in a lavish lifestyle was not the same thing as scavenging property nobody was using. It was kind of like collecting unwanted trash from a garbage can, when you thought about it.

  “So what’s the end game?” Franklin asked. “You were just going to hang out here for the rest of your life, watering your flowers and reading all the classics in the library?”

  Her face was solemn in the firelight, shadows suggesting the darkness she must have suffered. “I didn’t really think it through. I just lived one day and then the next. Early on, I was with a group, but a few of them went psycho and tried to weed out the weak. Then the Zaps weeded out the psychos, and it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Don’t you ever get lonely?”

  “Do you?”

  He thought of how he could’ve spent all his time with Rachel and the others in the bunker but instead preferred the solitude of his compound. They’d both made their choices. “We’re humans. Social animals. We need families and tribes.”

  “That’s next-level stuff, Franklin. We can’t think of building a society while we’re under the gun like this. I don’t even know if the future’s worth dreaming about. It’s a Zap world and we’re just speed bumps on their evolutionary path.”

  “So you just want to live a decadent life until they find you?” The liquor was sour in his stomach. He didn’t want to dull his senses. Survival instinct had honed him to a razor’s edge. In many ways, he was a better man now than when he’d been an opponent of big government, globalist bankers, and the military-industrialist complex.

  The enemy was much more in focus these days.

  “I just want to live.” K.C. put down her glass and went to the fireplace, where she poked at the crackling logs. “My brother turned Zap during the storms. He attacked me. I didn’t know what was happening, of course. All I knew was that his eyes were wrong. They looked like these flames, like they wanted to consume everything in the world, including me.”

  “Did you…put him down?”

  “No. I even tried to stop the cop that saved me. Later on, I understood, but at that moment, I thought my life was over, that nothing could possibly get worse.”

  “And it did,” Franklin said.

  “Do you believe in fate?” She stood with her back to him, silhouetted against the flames as she gazed into the fire.

  “Do I think God created the universe just so He could eventually give Planet Earth to the Zaps? He let the slime crawl onto dry land and grow legs so that one day the sun could play a joke on the human race? That the whole point of everything was to kill us off? I don’t know if you mean ‘fate’ as in ‘predestination,’ or ‘fate’ as in ‘circumstances beyond our control leading to a random and horrible outcome’? Mostly, I don’t even know if there’s a difference.”

  “I meant fate bringing you here,” she said, still not looking at him.

  “You came to find me, in a way, and you did,” he said, knowing he could concoct something romantic and shallow like he’d done during their Wings of Eagles phase, but now he couldn’t stomach his own bullshit. “I can’t say there’s a particular reason for it.”

  “Come with me,” she said, heading for the stairs.

  Franklin swallowed hard. The upstairs hadn’t been part of the tour. Down here in the massive living room with the vaulted ceiling, or out in the expansive yard, they’d had plenty of personal space. It was easy to keep his distance and his cool. Up there…the rooms were probably smaller.

  She was already out of sight, her footsteps hushed by the carpet. Franklin looked out the window to make sure the garage door was closed where Princess was stabled for the night. Then he checked the door locks, wondering if he should bring his rifle with him.

  No, knowing K.C., she’s got a weapon at arm’s reach no matter where in the house you are.

  He went up into darkness, and at the landing he expected to see a candle flickering beyond an open door in one of the rooms. But the entire floor was completely dark aside from aurora light leaking th
rough a window at the end of the hall.

  “Up here,” she called, and Franklin blindly followed the railing until he came to a narrow set of steps. He ascended, feeling the walls closing in.

  The top floor was an attic, the ceiling forming a vee overhead so that he had to stay in the middle of the open room to avoid having to duck. K.C. sat on a bench at the end of the room, looking out the window at the valley below. Franklin took his time, not wanting to bump into the stored furniture and cardboard boxes of what was probably food. When he reached K.C., she said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The night’s aurora was a brilliant magenta, with neon lemon ripples feathering the horizon. The aurora thickened and curved into a plume in the distance, like a tornado sucking color from the sky and twisting it into a column of dizzying light.

  “What the hell?” Franklin said. He’d seen the lights before, but never in such stark relief against the starless night. Indeed, from this perspective, it appeared the ion tornado had sucked down all light sources from the heavens and funneled it down like a massive black hole.

  “I don’t know what causes it, but it’s beautiful,” she said. “I’ve been to Alaska and seen the Northern lights—you know, from before—but they were nothing like this.”

  He sat beside her, his throat thick. The lights were gorgeous, all right, but they also were unnatural, an affront to the constellations that had guided humans for centuries. They were a visible sign of the permanent changes to the world, the heavens themselves gone mad.

  “How far away is that thing?” Franklin asked.

  “A million miles,” K.C. said. “Although that’s probably Wilkesboro. I went through there about a year ago and saw way too many Zaps. Haven’t been back since.”

  “If the Zaps are there, maybe that’s where Rachel and DeVontay went.”

  “The Zaps have been collecting us,” K.C. said. “If they went to Wilkesboro, they’re dead by now.”

  “So you stay here and they stay there? As long as the Zaps aren’t on your side of the tracks, you’re fine with it?”