Radiophobia: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 3) Page 3

  What Kokona needs, Kokona gets.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Marina asked. In the immediate aftermath of the solar storms, Marina’s parents had fought the savage mutants in order to survive. She and her mother had been captured and forced to tend a group of Zap babies in a small town. That was her first experience as a carrier, and even though the mutants had now evolved into genderless, nearly-indistinguishable forms, she found their presence just as chilling.

  “We’re going to keep building a better world,” Kokona said. “I’ve missed this. When I joined you and Rachel, I wanted to escape from the others like me—the petty, vicious squabbling for power and control. As the other babies grew smarter, I knew they’d soon kill one another off until the only the strongest remained. I wouldn’t have been the strongest then. But now…now there’s no one left. Wilkesboro is mine.”

  “Why would you want such an awful place?”

  “Because it’s mine.”

  Marina studied the almond-brown face before her. Although she’d carried and tended the baby for years, the burden felt awkward and lumpy for the first time. She wasn’t sure she could continue caring for this creature, despite all the time she’d invested and the books she’d read aloud and the words she’d taught.

  “I can’t stay here,” Marina said.

  “You have to. You’re my carrier.”

  “No.” She shook her head and placed Kokona back on the desktop, where loose papers were piled beside the framed photograph of somebody’s wife and children. This had been someone else’s office and Wilkesboro had belonged to the people who’d lived here. She couldn’t be part of this destruction.

  “Come back,” Kokona said, but Marina was already hurrying toward the door.

  Before she could exit, Huynh snapped out of his stupor and moved to block it, brandishing his M16 before him. His mouth creased in an inscrutable smile that suggested he wouldn’t mind hurting her if necessary.

  She’d seen his murderous handiwork, but Marina wasn’t completely without weapons. She turned back to Kokona. “If you kill me, what becomes of you? Who will carry you? Everybody here is dead, and Zaps don’t know how to care.”

  The baby smiled. “Like I said. We all need each other. What are you going to do out there alone? With these wild beasts and creatures around, and you without a weapon.”

  “I’ll find Rachel, wherever she is. And the others.”

  “We’ll both find her. Just as soon as I gather my followers. There must be hundreds of them, scattered all around.”

  Marina eyed Huynh. The half-mutant soldier was only a couple of inches taller than her, but he was lean and muscular. Even without the rifle, she wouldn’t be able to fight her way past him.

  Her only hope was to wait for Rachel. Kokona might be lying, but Marina didn’t really have any choice.

  Or did she?

  She returned to Kokona and again embraced the child. Kokona gave a throaty hum of pleasure. Marina gently bounced the baby as she’d done hundreds of times over the years in the bunker, eliciting a delighted cooing sound. Marina glanced down at the streets below and the Zaps on the move toward the building. There were more of them now, maybe two dozen, and the first of them were entering the first floor.

  She could do it before Huynh reacted—drive one foot into the glass, send it shattering outward, and hurl Kokona to the pavement sixty feet below.

  But she made the mistake of looking down at Kokona’s chubby cheeks and into those beautiful, mesmerizing eyes.

  Yes. We need each other. We love each other.

  “We need Rachel, too,” Marina whispered, in an almost sing-song murmur.

  “Oh, yes,” the intelligent baby said. “We most certainly do.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “What’s wrong?” DeVontay asked.

  “Everything, as usual.” Rachel didn’t want to share her perceived contact with Kokona, especially since she wasn’t completely convinced it had happened. The strange pulsing of the plasma sink filled her with an unnerving queasiness, as if her atomic structure might decay at any moment.

  “Keep it down,” Antonelli said from his position just ahead of them.

  They were slinking through the streets, moving from car to car and house to house, moving ever closer to the center of town and the plasma sink. Antonelli had determined that Rachel and DeVontay had no knowledge of this section of the city and so was working from his memory of the landscape as seen from the helicopter. The task was made easier by the visible column of light, which dominated the skyline and cast a carnival gleam against the gathering afternoon clouds.

  Squeak stumbled wearily between Rachel and DeVontay, exhausted and dirty-faced. The poor child had gone through hell, losing her mother and enduring captivity by the Zaps. That didn’t even include all the horrors she’d witnessed since the apocalypse. As a former school counselor, Rachel imagined the girl would require years of therapy in order to have any hope of returning to normal.

  Rachel caught herself. “Normal.” According to the woman with glowing eyes whose physiology is plugged into the mutant collective.

  There would never be a “normal” again, and the sooner they all accepted that fact, the better. The military might think an attack on Wilkesboro would put humans back on top, but the Earth had changed at a basic biological level—subtle mutations ran among its animal and plant life that defied scientific explanation. Not that there were many scientists left to puzzle it out.

  Bright Eyes trailed after them, his expressionless face projecting the usual equanimity. He’d helped them escape from his fellow mutants, but Rachel was not yet convinced of his motives. Although Zap infants clearly exhibited an understanding of mortality and survival instinct, the older ones seemed to be indifferent to life or death. Rachel had come to accept him as an outlier, one whose mutation had taken a strange detour back toward the human he’d once been.

  Kelly brought up the rear, turning around to check behind them every ten or fifteen paces. The soldier was alert and energetic, somehow managing to monitor all of them while keeping an eye on her surroundings. While Antonelli didn’t trust them, Kelly seemed even more suspicious and paranoid, although Rachel suspected the woman was fiercely protective of the captain. Rachel felt the same way about DeVontay, and she would kill the two soldiers in the blink of an eye if they posed a serious danger to him.

  That’s why Kelly literally has a gun to your head.

  They left the industrial district of warehouses and storage lots, crossed a set of railroad tracks, and came to a rundown factory that had fabricated metal products such as shipping containers, barrels, and auto mufflers. Antonelli led them through the factory grounds, using the high brick buildings for concealment. At one point they came upon a line of human skeletons laid out as if for inspection. Rachel recalled the gruesome 3-D printers used by the Zaps and wondered if the mutants had discovered some sort of use for bones.

  Antonelli stopped the group, collected a handheld radio from Bright Eyes’ backpack, and tried to contact Col. Munger and the rest of the unit, which was advancing on Wilkesboro from the west. The receiver issued nothing but static. “Must be that damned plasma sink,” he said. “Screwing with it like it did the helicopter.”

  Something clanked and whirred inside one of the buildings, and Antonelli waved the group to duck low. He circled to a side door, motioning them to a row of shattered windows fifty feet ahead. Rachel kept close to DeVontay as she crept forward and peered into the building. Despite a large number of windows, the interior was shrouded in large swaths of darkness interrupted only by bands of gray shadow.

  Rachel recognized the hulking silhouettes. “Machines,” she whispered to Kelly.

  “What machines?”

  “The ones we told you about. The 3-D printers.”

  “Damn.” The soldier looked around, indecisive, nervous about being exposed out here on the grounds between buildings. Then she tilted her head toward Antonelli and issued an order: “Come on.
”

  Kelly jogged ahead without looking back. DeVontay looked at Rachel as if acknowledging, “This is our chance. We can run, or shoot her in the back, or…”

  But Bright Eyes was already in motion, following her, stooped from the burden of the weapons and supplies in his backpack. Rachel shrugged, took Squeak’s hand, and whispered, “Stay close to us, no matter what.”

  The girl nodded and they followed where the others had already disappeared around the corner. Antonelli, the grenade launcher slung awkwardly across his back, was pulling on a series of rusty iron bars that appeared to wedge the door in place. Bright Eyes wordlessly stepped beside him, gripped the bars, and twisted, causing them to wrench free with a groan. As the door swung open, Antonelli gave a curt grimace of acknowledgment.

  “You and Rachel,” he said to Bright Eyes. “Go first.”

  “Why them?” Kelly asked.

  Antonelli pointed to his eyes with two fingers. “Flashlights.”

  “Can we leave the girl out here with DeVontay?” Rachel asked.

  “No, we stick together. I need to keep an eye on everybody.”

  As Rachel stepped into the cool, dank interior of the building, Antonelli gripped her shoulder. “No shooting unless absolutely necessary. The Zaps probably heard the helicopter, so they know we’re somewhere in the area.”

  “They won’t be able to coordinate an attack,” Bright Eyes said. “Their leader is dead and Kokona hasn’t been able to institute full control yet.”

  “Maybe so, but we’re playing it safe until I get some confirmation.”

  The factory floor was largely an open space, but the existing machinery had been moved along the walls to make way for the Zap technology. Wrought-iron fencing and scrollwork were stacked in tangles, and irregular shapes of scrap iron with scalloped edges leaned against a series of shelves. Long rows of acetylene tanks stood near a work bench where welder’s masks and torches lay amid grimy rags.

  These printers were larger than the ones in the bank building where Rachel and DeVontay had nearly been killed. They were about Rachel’s height and constructed with shiny metal frames that housed an array of flexed arms and pincers. They appeared to be still under construction, since several panels were missing and a number of wires and diodes were exposed.

  “What do you make of it?” Antonelli asked.

  “This is more sophisticated than the others we told you about,” Rachel said. “The ones that made the drone-birds were maybe a fourth the size. And the one that harvested the…”

  Squeak’s plaintive face squinted up at Rachel, but she continued. “The flesh harvester was about half this big, but longer.”

  “Anything you want to tell us?” Antonelli asked Bright Eyes.

  “I’ve never been in this section,” the Zap said. “Based on the articulation of the arms and the raw material, I would guess it’s designed to create something large. Perhaps a conveyance craft of some kind.”

  Antonelli kicked at some of the soft metal fabric scattered around on the floor. “This is like that stuff your suit is made out of.”

  “A synthetic alloy,” Bright Eyes said, picking up an irregular scrap and attempting to rip it with his hands. He strained for a second before the material parted. “Not as durable as our suits.”

  Rachel moved deeper into the building, glad she was armed. The building smelled of scorched metal, old grease, and a musky, foul aroma that hinted at some sort of corruption. A creaking noise overhead drew her attention, but she saw nothing amid the supporting girders and joists. A steel lattice along the front of the building led up to a service catwalk for air handlers, light fixtures, and electrical conduits.

  “What are they making?” Kelly asked.

  “I don’t know, but at least there are no bodies or blood here,” DeVontay said. “That shit’s going to give me nightmares for years.”

  Rachel wondered what had happened to their traveling companion, Lars Olsen, whom they’d rescued from one of the harvesting machines. They’d lost him at a crossroads some ten miles outside the city limits where the military had captured them in a Zap raid.

  I hope you’re faring better than we are, Lars.

  As Rachel checked among the disconnected machinery, her mind wandered to her grandfather and Stephen. She hoped they’d returned to the bunker, but if they found it empty, Rachel guessed they’d turn around and head right back out, looking for everyone else. Especially after discovering the bodies of those soldiers, they would have to assume the worst.

  If Marina and Kokona were in Wilkesboro, then maybe Franklin would follow their trail. The column of light from the plasma sink was likely visible from a hundred miles away, which might arouse Franklin’s curiosity. But if he had Stephen with him, he was just as likely to retreat to his mountain compound to keep the teenager safe.

  “So how does this thing work?” Antonelli asked, driving the toe of his boot into one of the machines. “There’s no electricity, no battery, no internal power source that I can see.”

  “Same as the hand weapons,” Bright Eyes said. “The plasma sink serves as the energy source and it’s directed through our unified thoughts. Without a focus group, it’s useless.”

  “So who brings the group together and controls it?”

  “No one currently. When Rachel killed Geneva, all of us scattered.”

  “And Kokona wants to take over,” Antonelli said. “So if we’re going to hit them, we need to do it before she brings them all together.”

  “Kill the head and the body dies,” Kelly said from her post at the window where she was watching the property outside.

  “I’m going to kill the head and the body.”

  Rachel heard a soft rustling followed by a metallic clatter as a stack of junk fell over. The noise echoed off the building’s brick walls and seemed loud enough to wake the skeletons on the ground outside. The rustling grew louder, accompanied by clicking and scratching among the piles of junk. Rachel retreated to join the others, the shadows rushing forward to occupy the space her eyes had illuminated.

  “What’s that?” Antonelli said. “It can’t be Zaps. Too small.”

  “I don’t detect any presence of us,” Bright Eyes said.

  “There,” DeVontay said, pointing at a rusting jumble of metal.

  Two specks of red glowed with a strange intensity in the junk pile. They winked out but were almost instantly replaced by two more pairs. Sinister squeaks emerged from the behind the eyes. A ribbed rack of metal works fell over with an unnerving jangle.

  The first of them emerged with a wet, pointy nose that sniffed at the air, wiry whiskers twitching. It took Rachel a moment to recognize it as a rodent. Two gleaming yellow teeth dominated the sharp face, and a bulky, furry body wriggled forward from the scrap metal.

  Squeak emitted a muffled scream that she quickly swallowed when the creature looked in her direction.

  “What the hell…a fucking rat?” Antonelli said.

  But it was more than a rat.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It rose on its front legs, which were long and muscular, standing fully three feet tall. The back end of its body was hunched, its rear legs folded underneath, a gray rope of tail coiling and uncoiling like a sentient snake.

  Colleen Kelly was the first to react, raising her M16 and squeezing off a burst of three shots that thundered in the enclosed space. The target was a hundred feet away and took all three bullets in the chest. The red eyes glimmered and sparked and the rodent shuffled forward, pink tongue poking out beneath those terrible teeth.

  “Give it hell,” Antonelli said, ripping another burst at the rodent.

  Rachel aimed and fired, but when the second rodent came skittering out of the shadows, as big as a German shepherd, she grabbed Squeak by the arm and pulled her toward the exit.

  But she only made half a dozen steps before she stopped. Several of the mutant rodents filled the doorway, their prominent teeth projecting the illusion that they were grinning.

 
The gunfire was deafening. Rachel whirled around, looking for DeVontay. More of the rodents came out of the shadows, and DeVontay fired at the movement. One of the creatures crawled onto a workbench and leaped at Bright Eyes, who turned just in time to avoid the snapping jaws. Its sharp, hooked claws scraped at the fabric in a screeching, grating fury.

  “Up!” DeVontay yelled at Rachel, motioning toward the lattice that led to the catwalk.

  Rachel ran to it, half dragging Squeak, and then boosted the girl high in the air. “Climb!”

  The frightened girl froze in place, clinging to the thin strands of metal. Rachel clambered up alongside her and tugged her along. “Go, go, go. Don’t look down!”

  Rachel ignored her own advice and saw Bright Eyes fending off an attack, the rodent gnawing at the arm of his suit, trying to break through the metallic fabric. The other three people kept up their barrage, but the rodents seemed almost impervious to the bullets, even though their wounds spouted dribbles of thick blood.

  Rachel had ushered Squeak about ten feet off the floor when the first rodent tried to scramble up after them. DeVontay ran toward it and jammed his rifle muzzle against the thing’s skull, right between the cupped pink ears. He unleashed a long burst of rounds, and one of the rodent’s eyes popped out, dangling by a gruesome tendon. Even so damaged, the creature still clung to the lattice, claws grappling for purchase.

  The lattice was bolted to the wall, but the rodent’s vigorous shaking nearly threw Squeak to the concrete floor below. Rachel snatched the girl’s shirt just as she lost her balance, and even though she weighed only half as much as Rachel, she nearly yanked Rachel down with her. By the time they recovered and regained their grips, DeVontay had kicked the rodent to the floor and unloaded half a magazine into its head and chest.

  If it takes that much to kill them, we’re in real trouble.

  She pushed Squeak higher up the wall, the catwalk only twenty feet above them now. Bright Eyes fought off two of the massive rodents, saved only by the tough protective alloy of his suit. Kelly and Antonelli were nearly back to back, covering each other’s blind spot as they sprayed bullets into the teeming hordes. The rodents swarmed through the darkness of the millworks, dozens upon dozens of them, squealing, squirming, and scrabbling.