Afterburn: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 1) Read online

  “Sweet,” Stephen said, feigning enthusiasm. “It’s going to be nice to see a human face again. Where’s your unit now?”

  “On the parkway, making a sweep to the west. We have to check out a military installation first. See what happened to our boys. Keep breathing in the meantime. Over and out.”

  “Dang it,” Stephen said to Marina and Kokona. “Franklin said this was a secret bunker.”

  “If your government still exists, there aren’t any secrets anymore,” Kokona said.

  “At least we know they’re on the way,” Stephen said, trying to salvage some good news from the conversation.

  “What good does that do us?” Marina said. “Franklin’s not here and Rachel and DeVontay won’t be back until the day after tomorrow.”

  “We can go out and do some scouting,” Stephen said. “Figure out where they are.”

  “That’s an even worse idea than talking on the radio. I mean, that’s tops on the ‘What not to do while the grown-ups are gone’ list.”

  “We can defend the bunker,” Kokona said. “That’s what the guns are for, right?”

  “You seriously want us to take on our own military?” Stephen asked.

  “The alternative is for me to call on my people,” Kokona said, and even though she grinned toothlessly, Stephen couldn’t tell whether her cuteness disguised some deep malevolence.

  “Even if you wanted to go, it’s dark,” Marina said.

  “All that means is the surveillance cams won’t help,” Stephen said. He got up from his chair at the radio desk.

  “Where are you going?” Marina said.

  “To lock and load.”

  As he left the room, Marina picked up Kokona, who said, “This isn’t going to end well, is it?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lars Olsen felt like he’d been running for weeks.

  His legs were like sacks of wet cement, his lungs burned, and his head weighed fifty pounds. Adding to the burden was the sick dread that he was the last human left in the world.

  As he dodged through the trees, clambered over fences, and ducked around cars, a mantra rolled through his brain like a broken locomotive: Mutants, monsters, murderers, oh my. Mutants, monsters, murderers, oh my.

  The mutants had been part of the nightmare from the very beginning. Lars was a freelance web builder and graphic designer in Asheville when the solar storms swept over the planet. Lars had seen blog posts and tech articles warning about the threats, which mostly warned of interruptions to satellite broadcasts. The Internet offered a few wild conspiracy theories, too, as it always did, but Lars had no interest in going down that rabbit hole.

  And when the power browned out, he chalked it up to Asheville’s aging infrastructure instead of the solar activity. Asheville was one of the more progressive cities in North Carolina, with thriving gay and pagan communities, but its construction was largely left over from the middle of the last century. The disruption led to other problems, and then came the reports of random violence.

  The media was no help, suggesting the murder spree was the work of opportunistic looters they dubbed “Zapheads,” although no matter how many experts they brought in to describe the crowd psychology behind it, nobody could serve up a reasonable explanation.

  Still, the urban chaos was largely remote from Lars’s life, since he lived in the outskirts and worked from home. His wife taught at the same charter school his daughter attended, so they were safe, too. Then came that Wednesday in late August when everything changed.

  He was right in the middle of a major redesign for an upscale real estate agency when the electricity blinked out completely. The work was backed up, so he was more annoyed than worried. A car horn blared outside, followed by a crash of metal and glass. He went to the window of his upstairs office, which looked out on the street.

  Two cars had collided head-on, and one driver crawled from his vehicle, blood pouring from his scalp. The other was slumped over a sagging air bag. Lars’s first instinct was to fish out his cell phone and dial 9-1-1, but the phone had no signal. He ran downstairs—little did he know at the time how much running was to become such a constant part of his life—and outside to help the strangers. It was an impulsive, utterly human act.

  He soon learned that human acts could get you killed.

  The first thing that struck him was the lack of traffic. Even though his was a quiet suburban street, three or four cars were usually traversing its narrow lanes. But nothing moved except the groaning driver, who scrabbled on hands and knees in wobbly circles, painting the pavement with his blood.

  A couple of cars were angled to a standstill against the sidewalk, and a panel van had hopped the curb and knocked over a fire hydrant. Water slooshed out of the water main and swept down the gutter in silver runnels.

  The traffic signals at both ends of the block were out, and none of the houses exhibited any signs of life. Then he saw his neighbor, Annie Hodges, collapsed across her boxwood hedge, a pair of trimmers dangling from one gloved hand. She wasn’t moving. Neither was the driver in the air-bagged sedan. Lars hurried across the lawn to check on Annie. It took only seconds to see that she was dead.

  She was in her thirties, a jogger, healthy and wholesome. A heart attack made no sense, and he saw no signs of injury. Then the man crawling in the street issued a strange, rattling hiss. Lars turned to him, wondering if he should call for help. But something about the neighborhood filled him with a nameless fear—it was too still and dead. No lawn mowers, no bicyclists, no postal carriers or UPS drivers or stay-at-home mothers pushing baby carriages.

  The only movement was the driver with the bleeding scalp, who now knelt with his face to the sky. Lars headed toward the man, cautious, his analytical mind clicking through plausible reasons for what was happening. But the list kept ending in random impressions that didn’t add up.

  He called to the man, who made no response. When Lars reached down to help, the man looked at him. It was the eyes that immediately told Lars that something was wrong—not just something, but everything. Those eyes were like furnaces, boiling with yellow and red, made all the more terrible by the blood pouring down the man’s face. The man reached up with an arm that was so twisted it must’ve been severely broken, but his fingers closed on Lars’s T-shirt and yanked him close, mouth opening to bite him.

  All the evidence yielded a firm solution: Run.

  He ran to his Honda, which had the keys in the ignition because it was that kind of neighborhood. The car didn’t start, didn’t even click or turn over, and by the time he gave up, the fiery-eyed man was pounding on the window. Lars rolled out the passenger side and sprinted down the sidewalk.

  He didn’t stop running until he reached the school. The playground was littered with bodies, but there were also screams and shrieks as some children attacked others. Lars ran to his wife’s classroom, knocking over a couple of children in the hall whose eyes didn’t look right, but before he could enter, he saw his daughter.

  Annelise stood in the doorway, blood staining the floral print of her summer dress, hands caked with gore. He said her name, like a question, not quite believing it was her. Her ice-blue Scandinavian eyes were gone, replaced by twin hells.

  And beyond the door, just inside the room, a stocking-sheathed leg stretched across the floor tiles. Beside the foot was one of his wife’s wedge sandals. Spotted with red.

  He bellowed in rage, panic, fear, and a sorrow so deep he couldn’t give it a name. Before he could decide what to do, more children gathered in the doorway. All of them with those horrifying eyes.

  Run.

  He knew he was a coward, but he couldn’t help it. His wife was dead and that thing couldn’t have been his daughter.

  So he ran until he finally figured out what had happened. Mostly by finding others, piecing together the failure of the power grid, the piles of bodies, and the strange actions of those not-quite-human creatures. In those early days, running was interspersed with hiding and praying and o
ccasionally killing. That was the “mutant” part of his “Mutants, monsters, murderers, oh my” mantra.

  The monsters came sometime during the second year, when Lars joined a small group of survivors that planned to head for Atlanta, figuring the Centers for Disease Control would have some kind of answer. They hadn’t even made it fifty miles from Asheville when disaster struck. Since Zaps had apparently banded together in large cities and were rarely seen anymore, the group felt safe traveling in the open to make better time. Besides, all of them were armed with the best civilian firepower on the planet.

  But as they crossed a bridge one April morning, when the mists hung heavy over the river valley, a deep roar resonated in the distance. As the group debated the source of the noise, it came again, this time much closer. Before they could decide on a course of action, the decision was made for them—one of their number was seized and yanked over the side of the bridge with a great splashing and squealing.

  The motion was so swift and sinuous that Lars only got a glimpse of the massive limb. It was a slick, suckered tentacle. Several people opened fire, no doubt hitting the poor woman who was plucked from the human world and dragged into a horror show. Lars didn’t stick around to find out what swam below the bridge. Once again, he fled, this time back to Asheville.

  He kept mostly to himself after that, figuring the predators that roamed the countryside were more likely to prey on a herd—and by then he thought of humans as little more than the world’s livestock. Even though the Zaps remained a remote threat, those new creatures of tooth and claw and wing and beak were constant and immediate danger.

  A quiet scouting mission could end in some flapping monstrosity soaring down from above and sending talons deep into flesh. A restless night’s sleep could end with a cold-blooded boa coiling around your warmth and squeezing away your final breath. A trip to the creek to replenish water supplies could end with fingers severed by a finned, bubble-eyed phantasm.

  What he couldn’t kill, he ran from. But solitude proved to be even worse than the risk of playing bait, and he eventually sought out other survivors again. They were few and far between. He found a slightly crazed woman who reminded him a little of his late wife, and he took what comfort he could while helping her stay fed and sheltered and unconsumed.

  They took up residence in a bank, sleeping in a ransacked vault at night, using the piles of bills as bedding. Lars’s dirty-blonde beard grew down to his chest, and he took to carrying a double-bladed ax like some ancient Viking explorer.

  They found others and soon moved to Memorial Mission Hospital, which sat on the hill and allowed them to monitor much of the city. They cleared one wing of bodies, sanitized it as best they could, and slept on operating tables and railed beds. Their group grew to a dozen, and Lars’s surrogate wife grew fat with child, much to his horror.

  But when winter came and great frosted and furry beasts padded silently across the snow, food grew short. When another group took refuge in the hospital, they all talked of reclaiming the world in the spring even as they grew thin and pale and weak amid January’s cruelty.

  And so it came that one night, Lars stirred awake to see a silhouette in his room, revealed only by the moonlight reflected off of snow. A blade glinted above him, and he rolled away just as the blow struck the woman beside him. Lars reached under his pillow where he kept a Glock.

  As she gurgled and spat blood, he discovered more people filled the room, searching for his hidden stash of canned food. He emptied his clip before he could even identify them, and amid the stench of gunpowder and steaming guts, he dressed and searched the rest of the wing.

  All of them were dead.

  Humans were murderers.

  There was no hope, no reprieve, no salvation.

  There was only running.

  His feet conveyed him along I-40 and its stream of stranded vehicles, into rest stops and roadside diners, along forest footpaths and rutted dirt roads that were already in the process of vanishing and returning to nature. He hid whenever he saw other people, although such occasions grew rarer and rarer.

  He became cunning at evading the creatures that roamed the land, fighting them only when necessary, and then only the small ones. Some of them, if they looked particularly mammalian, he would butcher and roast over flames, wondering if the meat would poison him.

  Or change him.

  But no change could be worse than what the world had already inflicted upon him. His mutation was complete, his evolution present in the taut strength of his legs and the scars on his hands, his wildness in sync with the unnatural things that flitted and swam and skittered all around him.

  Which led him to this dark night. Lars didn’t know the month, although autumn’s sweet secret decay was in the air, and he didn’t know the year because he’d long since stopped counting. He could barely remember his wife’s name, or the giddy highs of the dot-com boom, or the taste of strawberry milkshake. But through it all, he could never forget Annelise and those scalding cauldrons in her face. And that was the thing he most wanted to forget.

  He was weary of running, but hidden claws clicked on the pavement far behind him. So he fell into the meditative lull of his mantra, knowing he’d soon need to find a secure place to spend those scant, restless hours that passed as sleep.

  Mutants, monsters, murderers, oh my. Mutants, monsters, murderers, oh my.

  He likely would have missed the sign even if it had been daylight, but in the gloom the letters were invisible. In his days as a graphic designer, he would have smirked at the clumsy typography and the town’s feeble attempt at marketing whatever appealing attributes it offered the newcomer or traveler.

  Tonight, he ran right by it, but even if he had read the sign, he would have thought it a lie.

  It said: Welcome to Stonewall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Capt. Mark Antonelli didn’t like this recon mission one damned bit.

  He knew it was necessary, but this wasn’t his call. He was following orders, and somebody up the chain of command had a better view of things. Never mind that his superiors were huddled around a sandbox in a secure bunker that was so large it could rightly be called a resort while he and his men slept in the mud with one eye open.

  This had been the lot of soldiers throughout history, from Sumerian spearmen to Roman legionnaires to Napolean’s grenadiers. He’d served tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the former world, and he knew the drill. The duty was to die. The only thing that changed was the face of the enemy. But no enemy had ever been as strange as the Zaps.

  As much as Antonelli wanted to charge whatever ramparts the Zaps had constructed in their city strongholds, he understood the patient wisdom of strategy. And that meant trusting those with the shoulder braids, chest medals, and brandy snifters in New Pentagon. Directive 17 had reorganized the remnants of the military into a single force. After years of skirmishes and probing and planning, the push would come soon enough.

  And it would be all or nothing.

  “Do you believe that kid?” his XO, Lt. Randall, said as he stirred a tin can of hash heated over a campfire just enough to make the grease ooze from whatever animal had supplied the contents.

  “Not sure it matters.” Antonelli drank from his canteen, swished the stale water around his mouth, and spat. “I doubt if he knows anything that can help us.”

  The fire cast long, flickering shadows against the boulders and trees surrounding them. The unit was bivouacked a hundred yards off the parkway in a hollow between two rocky knolls. From one granite promontory, Antonelli enjoyed a spectacular sunset view of the rolling ridges, and dusk brought the aurora above and not a single manmade light below. Now the troops were spread out in groups of four or five, establishing a protective perimeter with constant foot patrols.

  Thirty-eight soldiers in all, four of them women, and only ten of them from his Camp Lejeune division. The rest were Army, Navy, and even a jet mechanic, as well as a couple of raw recruits they’d found holed up
in a farmhouse a week before.

  “Anybody that’s lived this long must know a thing or two,” Randall said.

  “Or else got really lucky.”

  “A good-luck charm wouldn’t hurt.” Randall smacked his shiny lips. “These mountains got monsters even Hollywood couldn’t dream up.”

  Antonelli was annoyed at Randall’s mention of past things. Nostalgia was worse than useless—it was dangerous. Those who fantasized about restoring the old world were unsuited for the grim task of carving out an entirely new society, one that would have no room for entertainment or idleness. For the rest of their lives, whether that turned out to be hours or decades, they would never know true security.

  Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the same state as the human race of the Terrorist Age. The only difference is the ragheads got blasted by the same God that burned the Christians.

  “We can handle the monsters,” Antonelli said. “It’s the Zaps that’ll be the challenge.”

  “Why’s that, Captain?”

  “Monsters just want to eat. Zaps want to thrive.”

  “Come on. What do we really know about the muties anymore? Do you really believe the Commander-in-Chief is telling the truth?”

  Antonelli frowned and glanced over at the nearest tent, wondering if those soldiers were asleep and out of earshot. “That’s awfully close to treason, Lieutenant.”

  “You’re putting all of our lives in her hands. Maybe even the future of our kind.”

  “Somebody’s got to call the shots.”

  “If she’s even in charge anymore. The kind of games they play in D.C., a coup wouldn’t be a surprise. And we’d be the last to know.”

  Abigail Murray had been Secretary of State when the catastrophe struck, and if Antonelli could believe the rumors, she ascended to the top by virtue of being fourth in the line of presidential succession. The president had turned into a gibbering Zap that was eagerly terminated by a Congressman of the opposition party, the vice president had been aboard Air Force Two and crashed into the Atlantic, and the Speaker of the House and Senate pro tem had both died instantly. Murray was a divisive lightning rod in peacetime, and Antonelli imagined she was even more combustible with her newfound power.