Directive 17: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 4) Read online

  Still, the occupants were probably human. But were they good humans or bad humans?

  If this is all that’s left of the military, we got our asses kicked bad.

  Flagging down the vehicle was worth the risk. Maybe DeVontay could catch a ride. Even if there was no room for the others, he’d have a better chance of catching up with Rachel.

  He had to make a decision now or the vehicle would drive right past. Even if he sprinted to the side of the road, they might not see him. And they might not stop even if they did.

  He quickly kissed Marina and Squeak on the tops of their heads, snuffed the candle, and slipped out the front door. He locked it behind him before dashing into the rain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Are we going to make it?” Franklin Wheeler asked from the passenger seat of the Humvee.

  “I hope so. I don’t want to get stuck walking, considering what’s out there looking for breakfast.” K.C. Carr wrestled with the steering wheel, peering through the grimy, rain-spattered windshield.

  Highway 421 was largely passable between stranded vehicles, with only occasional forays onto the soggy shoulders of the road, but dark shapes flitted amid the surrounding forest in the wet mist. Franklin wondered whether the engine noise and headlights attracted the creatures or scared them away, but stopping in order to test his theory didn’t sound like an inviting option.

  The Humvee might’ve been one of the few functioning motor vehicles in the post-apocalyptic world, but Franklin considered it a contrary piece of government shit. The engine sputtered and coughed, likely from the deterioration of the diesel in the tank. Diesel had a useful lifespan of a year or so under normal conditions. Five years after solar storms rearranged the planet, things were far from normal.

  The government might’ve neglected its equipment, but it didn’t skimp on the supplies. Nothing but the best when the American taxpayer was footing the bill. A jug of fuel stabilizer sat in the back of the Humvee along with some rope, half-full ammo cans, a tool chest, gas masks, MRE packets, and some ragged wool blankets. A jerry can of treated diesel was strapped to the rear door, enough to get them halfway to the coast. But even if the vehicle didn’t break down, Franklin suspected their journey was going to be short.

  “The bed would feel real nice right about now,” K.C. said.

  “Sure would.” Franklin wasn’t rising to that bait. When Franklin commandeered the Humvee after the Army’s failed attack on Wilkesboro, they’d returned to K.C.’s fortified estate in Stonewall. It was secure, comfortable, and almost relaxing, and Franklin found himself lulled by the domestic pleasures that K.C. offered. Yet in the end, he couldn’t get Rachel and the others out of his mind—despite all his treasured independence, a sense of responsibility weighed on him.

  “We’ll be back soon enough,” Franklin said as a peace offering. K.C. was reluctant to hit the road again, especially since they now had a vehicle that would make life in Stonewall even more comfortable. Franklin preferred to leave her safe behind her gated home, but she insisted on accompanying him.

  He glanced over at her, and his heart gave a little lurch. He was growing fond of her, and that made him uneasy. He knocked his rifle against his knee so the pain would distract him from his musings.

  “I haven’t seen the bluish light in a few hours,” K.C. said.

  “Can’t see anything through this damn storm.”

  “How do we know if we’re going the right way?”

  “This is the only major highway heading east in this part of the state. If anything’s on the move, it would come this way.”

  “Does that go for monsters, too?”

  “Just keep that foot on the pedal, honey.” He glanced out the side window, but mostly he saw blurry sheets of silver raindrops against the night. A hulking shape veered toward them from the weed-choked shoulder but was quickly left behind. K.C. was only doing about thirty, as fast as she could go and still be able to dodge any dead vehicles on the dark road. Apparently that was a good bit faster than the things that chased them.

  “What do you think is causing the blue light?” K.C. said.

  “I’m afraid to guess. Could be some kind of plasma sink, like Wilkesboro, but those radiated columns of light. Zaps might’ve cooked up something even worse.”

  “This rain must be dragging down some fallout. Maybe we should put on the gas masks.”

  “You can’t kiss with nuclear lips.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “What the bumper-sticker hippies used to say, ‘You can’t hug with nuclear arms.’ Only this is lips. Oh, hell with it, I’m tired.”

  “Bed,” K.C. said a bit too dreamily.

  “You want me to take the wheel?”

  “No. Last time you nearly drove us up the back of a dump truck. I’ll take my chances.”

  Franklin squinted through the water-blurred windshield and pointed to the oncoming two-lane. “What’s that?”

  K.C. slowed to twenty miles an hour. “I don’t see anything except rain and more rain.”

  “Looked like a light.”

  “You got to give me more than that. This is La La Land. Was it blue, green, or candy-cane?”

  “A normal light.”

  “What could possibly be normal out here? No electricity, no flashlights, and most likely no other cars.”

  “Like maybe a candle. Just a flicker and then it was gone.”

  “A candle? In this weather? You sure it wasn’t some freaky monster eyes?”

  “Stop!” he screamed, much louder than he intended, his voice carrying over the wash of water beneath the tires. K.C. reacted without panic, releasing the accelerator and tapping the brake instead of locking up and launching into an uncontrollable skid.

  Still, the vehicle slewed sideways and might have flipped if not for its wide wheel base. The figure that had flagged them down now stood in the headlights, veiled by the downpour.

  Franklin saw a rifle and dark, wet hands, although the vinyl poncho hid the figure’s face. Would he be able to see the glowing eyes if this were a Zap?

  Franklin knew he should shoot first and ask questions later, but this was the first person they’d seen leaving Stonewall. That meant someone had managed to survive in the heart of Zap country, and such a person would be valuable. Franklin ignored K.C.’s shout as he jumped out of the passenger door.

  He was soaked in seconds, the rain drilling off the top of watchman’s cap and sluicing down the back of his neck. Despite the late autumn, the water was warm, heated by the turbulent poisons of Zap alchemy. “Show your face!” he yelled, knowing the figure was blinded and couldn’t see him.

  When the poncho’s hood peeled back, Franklin blinked to clear the water from his eyes. Couldn’t be. Then again, why not? Who else would dare a voyage into the heart of mutant hell?

  “DeVontay?” he said, involuntarily tightening his trigger finger.

  “Who the hell—Franklin Wheeler!” DeVontay broke into a wide grin, white teeth against dark skin, the Humvee’s headlights glinting off his glass eye.

  Franklin had a thousand questions, debating whether to give the man a hug, but then remembered that hungry things roamed the land. And visibility was so poor that he—

  DeVontay’s rifle fired before Franklin even realized the man had moved. Then a dark wall slammed into him, driving his breath away, and he tumbled to the pavement. His ears rang with the rumble of the engine, a dull pain rising like ice water in his veins. He was dimly aware of his rifle laying several feet away in a puddle gilded by the headlights.

  Claws raked inches from his face and he tried to roll away as another burst of gunfire erupted. K.C. shouted from what seemed like a great distance and then she was shooting, too. Something roared like a fleshy freight train. Franklin squirmed onto his back and looked up at a creature stitched from the diseased mind of an alien god.

  Two massive, serrated pincers curved from each side of its twitching mouth. The plated face was like that of a beetle, sli
ck with a radioactive sheen, but the insectoid features were spiced with tufts of wiry hair. Cold black eyes seemed to grow bigger as the massive head dipped toward him, bottomless holes that would drag him into a suffocating silence where even memory was forever lost.

  “Fuck you, Beetlejuice,” Franklin said, kicking out with one boot. The blow connected, but it had so little effect that the creature’s sibilant chuffing might well have been a laugh.

  But simultaneous rounds of gunfire specked the thing’s hard shell, kicking out shrapnel and breaking loose glistening pieces of wing. A viscous lime-colored fluid oozed from one of the wounds, spattering Franklin’s face. He wiped it away, expecting it to burn through his skin like acid. Some of it brushed across his lips, bitter and foul, and he rubbed water from his beard to flush the taste.

  Shit, am I going to turn Zap like Rachel?

  That was a fate worse than death. But he might not have a choice in the matter, as the beetle jowls jabbed at him. He twisted to the side just as one of the pincers sliced his jacket and punched against the asphalt. The pincer snapped like a dry stick, organic twigs skittering along the wet road like tiddlywinks.

  DeVontay was close enough now to jam his rifle into the creature’s abdomen and release a hot volley into the contaminated guts. As the creature gave a final squeaking sigh and collapsed, K.C. knelt to help Franklin to his feet.

  “You old fool, you nearly got yourself killed,” she said, her anger hiding her immense relief. “Took me twenty years to find you again. You’re not getting off the hook so easy this time.”

  Franklin shouted at DeVontay to keep an eye out for more attacks. He bit back the agony that flared in his hip, and the back of his left hand burned where the rough pavement had scraped it raw. He limped to his rifle and scooped it up, and only then did he get a full look at the thing that had tried to maul him.

  The beetle-creature was easily the size of sports car, its shiny plated body segmented into head, thorax, and abdomen. But it was not just an overgrown insect. The hard-ridged mouth sported jagged teeth that were like black ten-penny nails. The spindly legs ended in padded knobs of flesh that mimicked the paws of a mammal, although the claws curled six inches long, cracked and yellow.

  “What kind of hole did that crawl out of?” DeVontay said.

  “You’ve not seen one before?” Franklin figured DeVontay had been in the area for days. No telling what other surprises might be waiting in the storm-shaken dark.

  “If I knew something like that was walking around, you think I’d be out here?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” K.C. said, glancing nervously around. “Why don’t you two catch up inside the Humvee?”

  Franklin had told her all about his makeshift adopted family, so she must’ve recognized DeVontay by name. He had to give her credit—she was cool in an emergency, the kind of woman you needed in the apocalypse.

  Thoughts like that will get you married, you old fool.

  Despite his aching bones, he managed to climb into the vehicle within seconds. DeVontay clambered in after him and slammed the door closed. Franklin made quick introductions, too tired to be polite.

  “I thought you were dead,” DeVontay said to him, water trickling from his poncho.

  “I thought I was, too. Any sign of Rachel?”

  DeVontay shook his head and pointed up the road. “Not since Wilkesboro. But she’s still alive, as far as I know. We’re going after her. We’re holed up in a farmhouse just up that driveway.”

  “‘We’?” K.C. said, taking the Humvee out of neutral and revving the engine. “How many more of you are there?”

  “Not nearly enough.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mole people.

  As a teenager, Rachel had seen a few low-budget science fiction movies in which portions of the human race, for whatever reason, had been forced underground and adapted to a life of darkness. She’d been rightly amused while at the same time contemplating all the myriad physical and psychological changes one would have to endure.

  Of course, she’d never fully contemplated that such revolutionary upheavals would happen in her own life, and here she was: a mutant barely clinging to her humanity, captive of a village of the damned.

  Goldberg’s band occupied a series of basements connected via wide utility tunnels that apparently extended through several blocks of Winston-Salem. While the subterranean infrastructure seemed sturdy enough, she could almost feel the palpable weight of rubble above her—glass and steel and concrete designed by architectures to last for centuries, now just rubble on its slow crawl to dust.

  “Your eyes,” said Trudy from across the cramped room, her tone a mixture of rapt wonder and unhinged madness. She kept her distance from Rachel and Kokona, but only because Goldberg growled warnings at her. The small room featured cinder-block walls and cardboard boxes were stacked to the ceiling. A kerosene lamp oozed greasy light across the damp floor.

  Goldberg sat cross-legged between them, eating cold canned beans with a metal spoon. He’d removed his hood and goggles, revealing bushy eyebrows to match his mottled beard and eyes that were gray and bloodshot. His cheeks were pocked with tiny scars and creases that made his age difficult to guess—Rachel figured him for anywhere between forty and fifty.

  “Yeah,” Goldberg said, speaking as he chewed the beans. “What about your eyes?”

  He’d offered Rachel some food but she declined. She was capable of eating, but ever since Kokona’s energetic healing as she lay near death, she had little appetite. She found her strength and endurance were greater than ever, which was another symptom of the change.

  She didn’t know how much of the truth to share. Goldberg clearly saw her as a resource, a means to gain information and perhaps use her and Kokona against the Zaps. Her best hope was to convince him she was human, but that lie was already given away by her face. “Like I said, I was captured. I had an infection and they healed it. And when I recovered, I was like this.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “I…found her.”

  “I want to find a baby,” Trudy said.

  Goldberg lowered his voice, conspiratorial even though Trudy was within earshot. “She lost her kid. In the early days. She’s been like this ever since.”

  Empathy. These people she equated with blind, burrowing moles cared for one another. Trudy was clearly a burden and yet Goldberg and the others allowed her to be part of their ragtag band. And if Rachel wanted to pass as human, she should show compassion, too, even if she barely felt it.

  “That’s so terrible,” she said, with as much emotion as she could muster, remembering her own losses.

  Kokona, who still pretended to be asleep, silently said, “Good. I wish they were all dead.”

  Kokona had no memory of her short life before the solar storms caused her mutation. Even though she hadn’t aged physically, she possessed the knowledge and wisdom of centuries, stolen from her human teachers and built upon by her fellow Zaps. Despite the gigantic evolutionary leap, Zaps had no empathy for the billions that died or the remaining vermin that must be exterminated.

  Of course they had no empathy—if they did, they wouldn’t be Zaps.

  “False equivalence,” Kokona chided, but Rachel was in no mood for an intellectual debate with a nine-month-old brat.

  “How long have you been here?” Rachel asked Goldberg, meaning the subterranean basement system.

  “We were in Florida when the shit hit the fan. There were six of us then. Had a couple of horses and hooked them up to a utility trailer. We rolled up I-95 as best we could.”

  “Lots of traffic jams.” Trudy’s gaze was riveted on Kokona’s bundled form. “I looked in the cars for babies but they were all dead.”

  “Now, Trudy,” Goldberg said with forced patience. “We’re past all that now. Thinking about the future, remember?”

  “Delilah had a baby, so why can’t I?”

  “Delilah made a mistake,” Goldberg said, his face darkening. “We’re
past that, too.”

  This band had faced its own struggles over the past five years. While Rachel had spent much of that time hidden away in a military bunker, these people had traveled and faced unknowable dangers. And yet they’d adapted and survived. Rachel felt a surge of hope and pride—traits her human self deeply cherished that had been subsumed by her present hybrid state.

  “You have more than six now,” Rachel said.

  “We lost some along the way,” Goldberg said, scraping at the bottom of the tin can with his spoon. “Monsters got a few. But we met others that joined us. Then we ran into a whole army of Zaps.”

  He studied Rachel’s face for a reaction, but Rachel maintained a bland, curious expression. Kokona giggled and teased but Rachel ignored the baby’s push into her skull. She asked a neutral question. “Where?”

  “Near Savannah. We thought we could find a boat, maybe get to an island. But they swarmed the city like rats. That was in their rager stage, not like now, when they’re wearing silver suits and stuff. Back then they’d yank your arms off and beat you over the head with them.”

  “I know,” Rachel said, thinking of the carnage she’d witnessed over the years. “My friends and I went through that phase, too.”

  “We barely got out of there. Only four of us made it. Bastards even killed our horses. So we cut inland on foot and kept mostly to the woods. We ran into packs of Zaps once in a while, but we either avoided them or fought them off. We discovered other survivors, too, usually in groups of three or four. Some joined us but others stayed where they were, figuring if they made it so far, they must be doing something right. But the only thing going right for them was luck.”

  “I should’ve stayed in Georgia,” Trudy mumbled.

  Goldberg ignored her. “So here’s something you Zaps better get straight. You might’ve won some battles, but the war is far from over. All kinds of people scattered across this great land, and they’ll never give in.”