After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) Read online

  Stephen lowered the binoculars and rubbed the foggy lenses on his coat. “Do you think the Zapheads are evil?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think people can decide such things. Only God.”

  “But if God made them, and God has a divine plan like you said, then they’re supposed to be just the way they are, even if it means they want to kill us. God put sharks in the ocean and they eat people.”

  Rachel had dwelt a lot less on theology since the solar storms. She’d made a half-hearted effort to inspire Stephen, hoping the idea of a loving God would provide comfort and strength. But Stephen now seemed more interested in spiritual matters than Rachel did.

  Zapheads have no use for a god. They don’t care about right or wrong, good or evil. Like nature, they simply ARE.

  And why should I believe in God if He’s willing to let me become a Zaphead?

  “Maybe the Zapheads are like the people in Fahrenheit 451,” Stephen said. “They’re burning the cities because they want to erase the past.”

  Stephen had devoured the Ray Bradbury classic that posited a future where books were outlawed and firemen burned books instead of saving buildings. He declared it “probably almost as good” as Animal Farm. By the time he worked his way through Franklin’s library, he would be one of the smartest little boys in the world. Franklin challenged him with themes and ideas from the books, and Stephen was bright enough to apply those lessons to their current bleak situation.

  “I’m not sure they know or care about the past,” she said. “Maybe they just act on instinct.”

  Stephen lowered his voice. “What’s it like?”

  “What’s what like?”

  “When you act like a Zaphead. When your eyes glow and stuff. How do you feel?”

  Her instinct—her human instinct—was to lie. But she had a responsibility here, didn’t she? If she wanted the group to understand the mutants, she was in some ways an ambassador for their kind. She wondered if the Zapheads would be as welcoming, or if they would burn her for her human traits. A Halfling Joan of Arc.

  “You ever had one of those dreams where something’s chasing you but you can’t see what is, and you run and run and you’re not getting anywhere?”

  “Yeah, and you wake up tired.” Stephen peered through the binoculars again and scanned the woods.

  “Like that, except you also…you want to hurt people.”

  “Oh. Is that the real reason you ran away from us?”

  It’s impossible to fool a child. “Yeah, but I was wrong. The farther away from the Zapheads I got, the less those kinds of thoughts came to me.” She put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a hug. “That’s why I’m better off sticking with you guys. You remind me of who I am and what’s really important.”

  “DeVontay will be glad to hear that.”

  She tried to keep the worry out of her voice. The two men were supposed to return an hour ago. She didn’t want to think of them lost in the dark. “Well, as soon as he gets back, you can tell him.”

  Stephen let the binoculars drop to his chest and pointed. “There they are!”

  He cupped his hands to yell but Rachel grabbed his wrist. “Wait. We have to be sure. Did you see their faces?”

  “No, but there’s two of them.”

  She squinted into the gloaming, looking for shadows to separate from the larger blackness. “Why don’t you climb down and tell Franklin and the lieutenant?”

  “Maybe they got a deer.”

  “You like deer better than Slim Jims now, don’t you?”

  “I’m getting used to not having store stuff. But maybe we can go visit some towns sometime.”

  That was something DeVontay had suggested, but Franklin favored waiting for spring. Even if they raided remote cabins, they probably wouldn’t find much usable food. Not many items were worth carrying for miles. Occasionally someone returned from a scouting trip with a few cans or bottles, and the group celebrated the arrival of those treats like a holiday. Maybe the men had wandered far afield in search of such processed treasures and lost track of time.

  Stephen wielded the binoculars again. “That’s weird. They didn’t come any closer. They’re heading toward the big rocks.”

  “Let me see.”

  Stephen wrestled the strap from around his neck and passed the glasses to Rachel. She focused in the direction he pointed and saw immediately that the two men weren’t DeVontay and Kreutzman. They both carried rifles and DeVontay had taken a pistol.

  She whispered, “Hurry, go tell the others. Code Yellow.”

  “Zapheads?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Stephen hurried to the wooden foot pegs and scuttled down like an agile monkey. He dashed to the cabin, which was revealed only by a soft amber rectangle where firelight leaked from a window. Rachel hadn’t brought a weapon with her, mostly because she didn’t fully trust herself. Fortunately the two intruders didn’t seem to know the whereabouts of the compound and their current course would take them farther away with each step.

  Rachel rubbed her hands together, hoping friction would generate some heat inside the knit wool mittens. I wish DeVontay was here to warm me up.

  What if DeVontay and Kreutzman had encountered these men? DeVontay could be out there bleeding his life away. She hadn’t heard any gunshots, but the mountain terrain could swallow noise or exaggerate its origins, especially with muffling layers of snow draping all surfaces.

  The door to the cabin opened and Rachel climbed down to meet the others. Franklin and Hilyard were armed, and Stephen waited in the doorway. “Which way did they go?” Franklin asked her.

  She pointed west. “They missed us.”

  “They might circle back. Did you see any others?”

  “No, but I didn’t really look. It wasn’t Zapheads or…I would have seen their eyes.”

  “Could be Shipley’s bunch on patrol,” Hilyard said. “Or it might be some hunters who’ve wandered off the beaten path. We’re not the only ones who head for high ground when things go to pieces.”

  “Maybe we should just lay low and let them go on past and get lost in the dark,” Franklin said. “We’re not at full strength.”

  “It’s often a good idea to avoid a fight,” Hilyard said. “But I’d like to go out and take a look anyway, just in case there are more. If Shipley’s men surrounded the compound while there was just the four of us, it could get ugly fast.”

  “He could burn us out with grenade launchers anyway,” Franklin said.

  “Yeah, but he has no idea what we have. With your reputation, I don’t think anyone would be surprised if you had a couple of nukes wrapped in tin foil and squirreled away somewhere.”

  “In the old days I could have scored some Napalm and TNT, but I was too liberal for the patriots and too constitutional for the radicals.” Franklin patted his rifle. “Now all I have is Bessie here. Good enough to take care of business.”

  “So I’m supposed to stay here with Stephen and keep the home fires burning?” Rachel asked.

  Franklin gave her an affectionate look, his beard and wild hair like that of some fantastic wizard. The dusk made his features seem even sharper. “We’re old. You guys are the future. That makes you more important than us.”

  “Whatever happened to your old saying that everybody was equal, even assholes and astronauts?”

  “All of you should stay,” Hilyard said. “I’m trained for this. And if those are my men out there, I want to give them a chance to surrender before I shoot them.”

  “Fine,” Franklin said. “But I’ll be up on the platform if you need backup. And like you said, better to avoid a fight if possible. Rachel, take Stephen inside and wait.”

  Rachel knew better than to argue with her grandfather. Much of his self-image was tied up in protecting her, as if all his old revolutionary ideals had honed to a single narrow mission. It was annoying but sweet. She nodded and kissed him on the cheek. Unlike with DeVontay, she thought showing affection for Fran
klin set a good example.

  Once inside the cabin, Stephen parked himself by the tiny window, pressing his face against the glass. “I won’t be able to see anything.”

  “That’s okay. Because nothing’s going to happen.” Rachel sat on a handmade chair by the woodstove. “When you’re bored, you can come over here and get warm.”

  “When am I going to be old enough to carry a gun?”

  “After you’ve read all of Franklin’s books and taken safety lessons from Lt. Hilyard.”

  “Rachel?”

  “Hmm?” Despite the anxiety, or perhaps because of it, she was suddenly drowsy.

  “Your eyes.”

  “What about them?”

  “That fire stuff. It’s back.”

  That sent electric jolts of adrenaline through her. She stood and paced the floor, then stopped to check her reflection in the window. Sparks in her eyes.

  Oh God, they’re here.

  But calling on God would do nothing for her now, not after she’d turned her face away from the light. “It’s okay. I don’t feel any different.”

  “You said it made you violent.”

  “I won’t hurt you.” The split lengths of stove wood weighed maybe four pounds each. Long and thin and splintery. As thick as a baseball bat. And about as easy to swing.

  “We better tell Franklin,” Stephen said, drawing away from her.

  “No. We don’t want to bother him. He has enough to worry about.”

  Like me taking the ax and chopping him into bits while he’s asleep.

  She crossed the little room to the door and yanked it open. “Motherfucker,” she whispered.

  Stephen grabbed her by the coat and tried to drag her back into the cabin, but she shrugged him off and stepped outside. When he again attempted to restrain her, she shoved him with both hands so that he flopped into the snow.

  It had grown darker just in the few minutes they’d been inside, and a wave of indigo ink rolled slowly in from the east, the surrounding treetops invisible. Franklin hissed at her to stay inside, but she continued to the gate.

  Go now go.

  She didn’t belong here. She never had.

  Franklin almost caught her before she made it beyond the fence. “Get back in here. You’ll get shot wandering around in the dark like that.”

  “I have to find them.”

  “DeVontay and Kreutzman will be back any minute. You don’t want Kreutzman to think you’re a deer, do you?”

  She didn’t turn around. “I know where they are.”

  “Damn it, Rachel, you can’t just go off on your own. We agreed to a sensible plan and you’re going to screw everything up.”

  “If I don’t go to them, they’ll come here. And I love you too much for that.”

  “What are you talking abou—”

  He must have gotten a good look at her eyes then, because his mouth froze open. She could even feel the heat in her pupils, like twin pits of hellfire. But unlike the last time this happened, she maintained a distant memory of what she’d been like before. As if she’d carried some of the human Rachel into this transition.

  And she hated that Rachel.

  “They have DeVontay,” she said.

  Franklin had never looked so frail and broken down to her as he did now, slumped and gray-skinned in the light reflected by the snow. But acceptance was etched in the creases of his face. The world played by new rules and his libertarian ambitions were as insignificant as the snowflakes that were already doomed to become water and transpire into vapor.

  “This isn’t a fight you win with bullets, is it?” he asked.

  “It’s a fight we were born losing.” She dared to give him a hug. “I’ll come back if I can, but if not, please promise not to come after me.”

  “I can’t make a promise like that. You’re my granddaughter. You’re our future.”

  “If I don’t go, we won’t have a future.”

  Her determination must have burned as brightly as her irises, because Franklin relented. “Okay. I’ll try to explain it to Hilyard and the boy.”

  She didn’t say anything else. She parted the camouflaged gate just enough so that she could slip through, and then hurried into the woods before she surrendered to the impulse to turn and scream at him:

  “Motherfucker!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  DeVontay wiped the blood from his brow and noticed that his glass eye had become dislodged and popped free during the fight.

  He rolled to his knees, looking up at the Zapheads gathered around them. They seemed as thick as the trees, watching with a similar silence.

  Kreutman’s face lay out of the water, but blood trailed from his nostrils to be carried away by the creek. DeVontay wasn’t sure if the man was dead, and he didn’t really care one way or another. Was two against a hundred any better odds than one against a hundred?

  No, he was done just the same. By Kreutzman’s hand or by the ravaging hordes of mutants, the mechanism of delivery didn’t matter. Time to get it over with.

  He closed his eye and waited.

  Trickling water, the whisper of snow dropping from branches, his heartbeat in his ears.

  He kept on sucking cold air into his lungs, exhaling, and repeating the process, savoring the sweet silver of the air.

  Ten seconds or two minutes later, he glanced around. The Zapheads surrounded him almost with reverence, waiting.

  And he realized that they would soon find Wheelerville if he didn’t somehow draw them away. Lying there feeling morose and nihilistic accomplished nothing. If he could serve a purpose and help Rachel, Stephen, and the others, then his loss wouldn’t be a total waste. Hell, he’d already done that once and it had worked out. Who cared if the Zapheads were smarter now?

  He rolled to his knees, pushing himself up with his good arm, ignoring the pain in his shoulder.

  “Okay, people,” he said. “Come and get me.”

  “Get me!” said a woman of about fifty, wearing a soggy cardigan and an ankle-length dress smeared with mud. “Get me!”

  But the Zapheads didn’t make any attempt to seize him. He stepped toward the nearest one, the man holding Kreutzman’s rifle, and drove his fist into the man’s chest. “Fight back. You know you want to.”

  “You know you want to,” the man said, looking down at his chest.

  Then a high, thin voice interrupted. “We want peace.”

  A woman stepped forward carrying a bundle, and DeVontay had drawn back his arm to strike her when he noticed that her eyes held none of that peculiar lambency. “You…you’re human?”

  But the woman said nothing. The high voice came from the bundle of blankets in her arms. “She’s Old People like you. But she didn’t want to fight. And she is still alive.”

  DeVontay reached out and parted the blankets. A round, dark-skinned face peered up him with bright, intelligent eyes. “Hello,” the baby said.

  She couldn’t have been more than nine months old. DeVontay looked around at the other Zapheads as if seeking an explanation, and then realized they would be no help at all. He asked the human woman, “How?”

  “They learn,” the woman said.

  “Why don’t you ask me?” the baby said, blinking as a snowflake rested on her nose and melted away.

  Somehow, this was even more horrible than a rampaging horde of mindless savages that tore people to pieces, shattered windows, burned cities, and dismantled any sign of the human race. This was the ultimate profanity, a final insult to civilization. The Zapheads mocked their words, and now they managed to mock the very progression of life itself.

  “Okay,” DeVontay said to the child. “How are you able to talk?”

  “We learn from your mistakes.” The first white edges of enamel were poking through the nubby pink gums. “That’s why we still need you. Until we know all your mistakes, you’re still useful.”

  “Maybe you’re the ones making a mistake.” DeVontay wondered if these Zapheads knew about firearms. Even t
hough they’d collected Kreutzman’s weapon, none of them had lifted it into a shooting position.

  Maybe it’s time they learned how a pistol works.

  He wasn’t sure he could shoot the infant. But every part of him rejected this cute little monstrosity. He couldn’t let such an abomination exist, not while even one human remained.

  He slowly slid his fingers to the holster but found it empty.

  “We have your guns,” the baby said. “I’m not ready to be dead. We know how to heal wounds, but we can’t fix death yet. Soon.”

  DeVontay’s head reeled, and he wasn’t sure whether he was concussed from his fight with Kreutzman or if the entire Milky Way Galaxy had just tilted on its axis and thrown gravity askew.

  “Soon,” echoed several of the surrounding Zapheads.

  DeVontay shook his head at the woman carrying the Zaphead. “This is wrong.”

  “You’ll see,” she said. “It’s better this way.” But she sounded as if she was reciting from a script, almost devoid of emotion. Her hollow eyes gazed into the shrouded forest.

  Several Zapheads dragged Kreutzman from the creek. DeVontay couldn’t tell if Kreutzman was still breathing. As much as he hated the man, he was compassionate enough to hope he was mercifully dead and beyond whatever strange surgeries the Zapheads sought to inflict.

  Rachel had changed after one of their “healings.” The cure planted a cancer deep inside, one that ate away at identity and personality and humanity. Better to die than to transform into something so alien.

  “Your shoulder hurts,” the baby said, fumbling a chubby arm from the folds of the blanket and reaching toward him. “May we treat you?”

  “I’m good,” DeVontay said. “But I’m too tired to fight anymore. And I don’t think I have any mistakes to teach you.”

  “Oh, we didn’t come for you. We came for Rachel Wheeler.”

  “WHEE-ler! WHEE-ler! WHEE-ler!” the Zapheads chanted, before the name fell away into a series of unintelligible grunts. The adult Zapheads appeared to have a functioning memory span of mere seconds, while this awful child-thing displayed a mature and hypersensitive awareness of the world around it.