After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) Page 2

  “Anybody else armed?” the soldier called to the group. “If so, throw it down slow.”

  “No,” Campbell said, sullen and defeated. “All we have is our mouths.”

  “Good,” the soldier said. “Then keep ‘em shut.”

  As the man descended the granite promontory, Rachel’s homicidal rage returned.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DeVontay Jones didn’t like this.

  He didn’t like it at all.

  He’d been captured by a rogue Army platoon in Taylorsville and then imprisoned by a band of survivors in Stonewall, all while dodging Zapheads along the way. Now, just as they were approaching the promise of peace and a chance to settle down, along came another asshole with a gun.

  And Rachel…her eyes…

  He hadn’t wanted any explanations for her odd behavior. Campbell told him how the Zapheads inflicted a weird hands-on healing of her leg. Despite the strange glint in her eyes and the echolalia she’d exhibited, repeating phrases over and over, DeVontay preferred to believe she was in a state of shock. Nothing a little rest wouldn’t cure.

  She was in no shape to deal with this. And Campbell had been sullen and bitchy ever since they’d teamed up in the valley. Even Stephen seemed unstable, as if the trauma and anxiety had piled up on his little shoulders until he was ready to break.

  Once again, DeVontay would have to be the man.

  No matter how scared and exhausted he was.

  The soldier was close enough that DeVontay could see the single dark bar on his chest between the U.S. Army insignia and a faded rectangle where the name tape should have been. A lieutenant. Someone with experience who might be able to help them. Or a trigger-happy psycho pushed past the breaking point along with anyone else still unlucky enough to be breathing.

  “What do you want?” DeVontay asked. They didn’t have much food, and the gun lying on the ground had been their only weapon. The horses had some value, but in this rugged mountain terrain they were almost a liability. They didn’t have much to offer in hope of appeasement.

  Of course, the officer could want Rachel for recreation, the same reason those men in the Stonewall compound had kept their women locked away.

  The sun might have tossed the lid on our coffin, but we’re doing a damned good job of pounding in the nails. We’re all getting less human by the day.

  Rachel edged closer to the rifle on the ground, her fingers twitching. The lieutenant noticed and pointed his weapon at her. “Easy,” he said. “I don’t want to shoot.”

  “Because if you shoot, the Zaps will find you,” Campbell said. “They’re around here somewhere. I can just feel them.”

  “We haven’t seen any for two days,” DeVontay said, wondering why Campbell was trying to provoke the man.

  “They’re around, all right,” the lieutenant said. “But if you stay quiet, they won’t bother you.”

  “That’s why we aren’t carrying weapons,” DeVontay said. “They get stirred up if you fight them. But if you ignore them, they chill out.”

  “They’re anything but chill,” the lieutenant said. “Ask a couple of my buddies what they can do. Just don’t expect an answer, because they don’t have any tongues.”

  The lieutenant scooped up the rifle and checked the magazine. “M16A2. Probably from my unit.”

  “Were you battling Zapheads around here?” DeVontay asked, relieved that the solder seemed a little more relaxed and less threatening.

  “No,” the lieutenant said. “Each other.”

  “Great,” Campbell said. “Only a handful of us left, and we still haven’t figured out who the enemy is.”

  “So,” Rachel said to the officer. “Are you going to shoot us or what?”

  DeVontay didn’t like the way she was looking at the armed intruder. Were her eyes glittering? It was hard to tell with the sun drifting down through the quivering leaves. But Stephen drew back from her as if she smelled bad. The boy had remained silent throughout the standoff, his face pale.

  “That depends,” the lieutenant said.

  “If the Zapheads swarm us, you’re going to want another shooter,” DeVontay said.

  “I thought you said we could just close our eyes and they’d go away.”

  “Not if you’re acting like you’re ready for war. I think they can sense aggression, like a wild animal.”

  The lieutenant scanned the forest around them. “It’s not the Zapheads I’m worried about.”

  The moment his back was turned, Rachel leapt at him, a high-pitched clicking noise issuing from her throat. She caught him in the shoulder, knocking him off balance and sending the confiscated gun tumbling to the ground. DeVontay was startled, unable to move, but Campbell rushed forward as if he’d been expecting her to attack.

  “Get the gun,” Campbell grunted at DeVontay, but the soldier had already flung Rachel away and swung his own automatic rifle in her direction.

  “No!” DeVontay and Stephen yelled in unison.

  Rachel scrambled up from the mud and leaves of the forest floor. Before she could launch herself at the lieutenant again, DeVontay tackled her, bracing for a hail of bullets. He wasn’t even sure why he considered Rachel more dangerous than an armed man, but he hugged her with all his might. She struggled and kicked in his embrace, and they both tumbled to the ground.

  “Don’t hurt her,” Stephen yelled, jumping on DeVontay’s back. Even though the boy only weighed about eighty pounds, his knees drove the air from DeVontay’s lungs.

  “Stay down,” DeVontay whispered in Rachel’s ear, hoping to calm her. But she seemed beyond hearing, thrashing like a wild and wounded animal. DeVontay didn’t know how long he could restrain her, and he didn’t trust the lieutenant not to shoot.

  He rolled her so that she was on her belly, hoping his weight would pin her in place. Stephen climbed on his back, wrapping his thin arms around DeVontay’s neck and restricting his breath. DeVontay lost his balance, and she turned beneath him. Needles of pain lanced up his forearm.

  Holy hell, is she BITING me?

  He jerked his arm away from her face, warm blood staining his shirt sleeve. Her eyes were wide, and golden flecks shimmered there as if a fire was trying to erupt inside her skull. He didn’t want to hit her, but she clawed at his face and tried to bite him again.

  “Help me,” he shouted at Campbell, who was frozen in place. “Grab her arm.”

  The lieutenant shifted his rifle back and forth, unsure who was the biggest threat. DeVontay hoped the man didn’t decide to just kill them all and be done with it. But he was more worried about Rachel at the moment. She was scary as hell, her strength almost supernatural, as if she’d been possessed.

  “Stephen, grab her other arm,” DeVontay commanded, shrugging the boy from his shoulders.

  “Leave her alone,” the boy wailed, drumming his small fists against DeVontay’s shoulder blades.

  “We have to stop her so we can help her,” DeVontay said, as Campbell joined the fray. Together they managed to hold her so she was no longer attacking DeVontay, but she bucked and writhed underneath them, mewling and clicking noises pouring from her throat. Stephen finally realized DeVontay wasn’t trying to hurt her, and he sat on her legs so that she stopped kicking.

  DeVontay looked up at the lieutenant. “Okay, you’ve gotten a good look. You for us or against us?”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side but my own.”

  “You didn’t shoot us. So that puts you ahead of all the other people we’ve run into lately.”

  “This isn’t my fight.”

  “We need to tie her up,” Campbell said. “We can’t sit on her all day.”

  “You have anything in your pack?” DeVontay asked the lieutenant.

  “All my supplies are back at camp. I didn’t plan on playing rodeo cowboy.”

  “The horses. You got a knife? Cut the bridle into leather strips.”

  The lieutenant removed the magazine from the second weapon, slid it into a pocket of his BDU’s, and
walked to where Campbell had tethered his horse. He pulled a Ka-bar commando Bowie from a boot holster, the blade flashing in the sunlight. “Your horse might run off,” he said.

  “It’s tame,” DeVontay said. “Besides, it’s curious. We’re probably pretty damned amusing.”

  The horse had drawn as close as it could to the struggle and strained against the bit of leather running from one of the bridle’s iron rings to the trunk of a sapling. Its head was cocked as if watching them out of the corner of one eye.

  “Easy, boy.” The lieutenant drew the knife across the leather and then trimmed the bridle from the horse’s long brown face.

  Rachel gave a lunge beneath them, but she was unable to budge the three bodies atop her. The bite wound on DeVontay’s arm throbbed and, despite the coolness of the late-autumn air, sweat poured down his face. His glass eye felt like dirt had wedged around the socket. His ribs ached from the blow Stephen had landed, and his legs were sore stems of rubber.

  What I wouldn’t give for a hot tub right now. Just five minutes of the way things used to be.

  Unlike Rachel, he didn’t have any sort of religion to fall back on in troubled times. If times stayed this troubled, he might have plenty of opportunities to come up with one. Right now, the best he could do was utter a “Goddamn.”

  “She’s mellowing out,” Campbell said.

  DeVontay sensed that she’d relaxed but was unwilling to trust her. She might be playing possum, waiting for an opening. And those teeth—she’d definitely been the beneficiary of white suburban dental care. But her dentist, however much pride she may have taken in her work, was unlikely to have considered cannibalism as a possibility.

  The lieutenant parked his rifle in the crook of his arm and knelt over the group. They were all panting from exertion. The horse, now free to follow its own volition, poked its head over the lieutenant’s shoulder.

  “Tie her feet,” DeVontay said.

  The lieutenant gave a shake of his head as if to say, I don’t believe I’m getting dragged into this. But he complied, asking Stephen to move up a little so he could reach her ankles.

  “Not too tight,” Stephen said. “You’re digging into her skin.”

  “Got to be tight enough,” the lieutenant said. “You don’t want her kicking you in the goose-eggs.”

  Rachel closed her eyes, and DeVontay was relieved to be spared the sight of those chaotic storms. “How long has she been like this?” DeVontay whispered to Campbell.

  “Like I told you. Ever since the farmhouse. Those Zappers did something to her.”

  DeVontay didn’t want Stephen—or the lieutenant—to hear this, but he needed to know. “Is she turning into one of them?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen any other cases of spontaneous mutation, have you? As far as I can tell, the Zaps were formed in the first blast of the solar storms.”

  “But we don’t know what’s happening out there,” DeVontay said. “It’s not like we can tune into CNN.”

  “Our intel was that the mutations happened in the first wave of electromagnetic radiation,” the lieutenant said. “That’s why there were reports of riots and attacks even before the power went dark. The radiation escalated in waves over a couple of days, doing the rest of the damage.”

  “Damage? Is that what you call six billion dead?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

  Campbell moved to one side so the lieutenant could bind Rachel’s wrists together. Her flesh turned red against the leather, but by the amount of strength she’d exhibited, DeVontay didn’t want to take any chances. She grunted as the knot tightened. DeVontay sighed with relief and stood on trembling legs. Rachel was trussed up like a pig ready for the barbecue spit.

  “Sorry about this,” DeVontay said to her.

  She opened her eyes. The apology was not accepted.

  “Now what?” Campbell said to the others. “We carry her all the way to the top of the mountain?”

  “What’s wrong with her?” the lieutenant asked. He’d removed his sunglasses and his crewcut and gray eyes made him look a lot less evil. “She’s acting like those crazies in the city, right after the Big Zap.”

  “She might be infected,” DeVontay said.

  “Bullshit. These things aren’t zombies. I haven’t heard of any fresh ones turning. If anything, they’re dying off.”

  “Not as fast as we are. In the past two months, I’ve watched survivors blow each other to bits.”

  “So have I.” The lieutenant stroked the neck of the horse, which had remained in their company. The horse snorted in pleasure. “That’s why I’m out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “You going to tell us what happened to you?” Campbell said. “Since it looks like you’re joining us?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. Depends on what you do about her.” He nodded to Rachel.

  DeVontay wondered if the soldier wanted to put her down. That seemed to be how the military reacted to anything they couldn’t understand. Rachel was helpless at the moment, vulnerable, and he was torn between fear and protectiveness. They’d come a long way together, but was this the same woman he’d known before?

  Stephen didn’t suffer any doubts about Rachel. He bent over her, whispering soothing words.

  “Don’t get too close,” DeVontay said, the ache in his arm reminding him of her capabilities. “She might bite.”

  “She’s okay now,” the boy said. “See?”

  Rachel had stopped squirming and lay there looking up at them, breathing evenly. Her eyes held none of the strange sparks. They were wet with tears, and thin trails of them leaked down the sides of her face. Stephen shook her shoulder and said, “Tell them you’re okay.”

  “What happened?” she asked, lifting her arms and staring at the leather strap that girded them together. “Really, guys, this is creepy.”

  “You…” DeVontay didn’t know what to tell her. She wouldn’t believe the truth. He barely believed it himself. And he wasn’t sure if she had fully recovered from whatever seizure or violent fugue she’d experienced. She might be faking it for all he knew, just biding time until they freed her and she could attack them again.

  “You freaked out,” Campbell said. “You jumped these people. You bit DeVontay.”

  She shook her head from side to side, moaning “No.”

  “You don’t believe me, then why is there blood on your chin?”

  “Campbell, stop it,” DeVontay said, made uncomfortable by Rachel’s tears. “That’s not helping.”

  “You people make up your minds,” the lieutenant said. “It’ll be dark soon, and I don’t want to be standing around in the middle of the woods. All this commotion might have stirred up some Zapheads.”

  “Where’s your camp?” DeVontay hoped the lieutenant wouldn’t abandon them, especially without a weapon and ammunition. Firing a shot would only draw more of the mutants, but he wasn’t willing to leave himself helpless to defend Stephen.

  “So now you trust me?” the soldier said, wiping at the stubble on his chin.

  “We don’t have a choice,” DeVontay said.

  “Let me up from here,” Rachel said. “What’s wrong with you? All of you?”

  Stephen helped her sit up, giving her a hug. His eyes were moist with tears, and he sniffled. “Ray Ray,” he said, like a toddler. “Please don’t be scary anymore.”

  “I’m not scary. I was just…I felt something.”

  Felt something. DeVontay wondered if there were Zapheads around that had somehow influenced her behavior. In the valley, the glinting in her eyes had faded as they’d put distance between themselves and the Zapheads that were collecting bodies. And the radiance returned not long before the lieutenant had appeared. But how could DeVontay tell the others? He couldn’t abandon Rachel. They still needed her to find her grandfather’s compound.

  And what about your feelings for her?

  They’d kissed once, a fleeting and u
ntimely intimacy that neither of them was willing to push further. But under different circumstances…

  He wished he could separate his attraction for her from the immediate demands of survival, but what point was another day if it held nothing but breath and food and water? A man needed hope if he wanted to live instead of merely survive.

  “We have to do something with her,” DeVontay said.

  “My camp’s half a mile to the west,” the lieutenant said. “Just a lean-to, but there’s a rock shelf that provides some cover.”

  “Are you willing to take us on, at least for the night?” DeVontay asked. Stephen looked at the lieutenant with desperate, pleading eyes. Campbell was sullen and stone-faced. The horse was the only one of the group who expressed any excitement at the prospect of an adventure, vigorously twitching its tail as it nibbled on some ferns.

  “I haven’t made up my mind,” the lieutenant answered after a moment. “It’d be nice to have a sentry while I slept. But I need somebody I can trust. Right now, you guys barely seem to be able to handle a woman.”

  DeVontay didn’t know if the man was being deliberately sexist or if he was implying that Rachel was something more than just a woman. “We’ve handled lots of things.”

  “Oh, yeah? How many have you killed?”

  “People, or Zapheads?” Campbell cut in.

  “Either.”

  “We’ve all killed,” DeVontay said. “Even the boy.”

  DeVontay sold the lie with a cold stare. Stephen’s mouth opened in surprise but he didn’t say anything. Campbell nodded grimly.

  The lieutenant didn’t quite buy it, but he didn’t push the issue, either. Instead, he tossed the automatic weapon to DeVontay, although he kept the ammunition magazine. “All right, soldiers. You’re drafted. Now saddle up.”

  Wild West joke. Hilarious. “Can I borrow your knife, lieutenant?” DeVontay asked.

  “Call me Hilyard,” the lieutenant said, pulling the commando knife from his boot and holding it out by the tip. “I’m a civilian now, I suppose.”

  “Thanks, Hilyard. I’m DeVontay, that’s Campbell over there with the horse, and the boy’s named Stephen. That woman’s named Rachel.”