After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) Read online

  Now he heard that same chuckling, only it wasn’t from just a single throat; it sounded like it issued forth from a dozen or more.

  The two soldiers pointed their guns before them and spun in slow circles, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. But it was coming from all around them.

  “What is it?” the scrawny soldier said, his voice cracking a little in a nervousness he couldn’t fully suppress.

  “Nobody knows nothing.” Crewcut sounded calm, although he clacked a mechanism on his assault weapon. The prisoner now stood silently, head tilted back as if listening.

  A twig snapped somewhere to Campbell’s left. He hoped the soldiers didn’t panic and open fire. He slumped a little lower into the weeds, sliding his pistol from his backpack.

  The chuckling sound rose in pitch, a keening vibration that pierced the forest air. The contrast made Campbell realize just how deep the silence of the post-Doomsday world was—he had become accustomed to the absence of car engines, radio broadcasts, chainsaws, and police sirens. Now this sudden disruption of peace was almost shocking. He echoed Crewcut’s catch phrase: “Nobody knows nothing.”

  He’d had a very limited view of events since the solar storm—this new phase of evolution the woman Rachel had referred to as “After.” He’d adjusted to a perception of Zapheads as bloodthirsty, mindless killers and of fellow human survivors as desperate potential killers, all tossed into a stew of rotten bodies and failed technology.

  But if a wider change was underway, wouldn’t the military be the strongest organized force? Wouldn’t that rigid chain of command have a better chance of enduring in chaos, and wouldn’t those commanders have the most information about the current state of affairs?

  And isn’t that the reason I am following them? For answers?

  “Whoever you are, you better stay back,” the scrawny soldier shouted at the trees. “Or I’ll blow you to hell.”

  Crewcut snorted. “Even if they can hear, they sure as shit don’t listen.”

  The chuckling was almost a liquid hissing now, like moist air pouring from a dozen punctured tires. The soldiers slowly backed toward the porch of the mobile home, whether instinctively or through some sort of unspoken tactical ploy.

  They left their prisoner by the road, where he turned in slow circles, tilting his head left and right. He opened his mouth to speak, but only a string of blood trickled forth.

  Branches stirred behind Campbell, followed by the muted flutter of disturbed leaves on the forest floor. He rolled with his back against the trunk of an oak, the rough bark scouring him into a heightened sense of awareness.

  He breathed through his mouth in order to hear more clearly. Through the trees, the sky had turned an ashen gray with approaching dusk, and the blackness pooled among the base of the trees. Night was rising more than it was descending, crawling up from the hidden pores of the earth.

  If anything was moving in that blackness, Campbell had no hope of detecting it.

  A metallic thud vibrated from the clearing, followed by another. Crewcut, still deathly calm, said, “Quit banging. Nobody’s home, dumbass.”

  The scrawny soldier knocked twice more on the trailer door before slamming the door handle with the butt of his rifle. “Maybe we ought to make a run for it.”

  “We’ve got orders.”

  “Nobody ordered us to get killed.”

  Although Campbell could see nothing in the ebony ink of the forest, he could sense movement all around him. The trailer’s yard was spacious enough to catch the last ragged shreds of sunset. Crewcut, standing on the porch, raised his assault weapon.

  The hissing rose to a brittle crescendo, seemingly all around him.

  The dusk was torn by a staccato burst of three shots.

  The prisoner’s chest erupted in a bloom of red, and then he staggered forward two steps and collapsed.

  The hissing immediately gave way to an oppressive silence.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Holy hell, Jonesy, you shot it.”

  Crewcut swept the barrel of his weapon at the forest surrounding the trailer. “Quiet.”

  Campbell, who had ducked at the report of the gun, crawled backwards away from the clearing, dragging his pack through the damp leaves. The sudden quiet was freighted with menace, as if the trees themselves were tensed for an attack. Campbell wanted to put some distance between he and the gunmen before they got trigger-happy in their panic.

  “We were supposed to bring it to camp,” the scrawny soldier whined. “Sarge will be pissed.”

  “Plenty more where that came from.”

  “What’s out there? Is it them?”

  Campbell held his breath and dropped to the ground, expecting bullets to rip overhead at any moment. Through the foliage, he saw Crewcut leave the vantage point of the porch and veer across the yard so he could check around the trailer. The gray air of dusk was leaden with expectation.

  “Move out,” Crewcut said, waving his gun down the road in the direction they’d been heading before their pit stop.

  The scrawny soldier, Zimmerman, hurried down the porch steps and dashed across the yard, leaping the prisoner’s corpse. Crewcut followed, his head on a swivel, peering intently into the dark trees. In moments, they had vanished down the dirt road. Campbell thought about following them, but he was pretty sure any overt movement would draw a hail of gunfire.

  But staying in place also meant he was now alone in the forest with…

  …whatever lay in the shadows.

  Campbell waited another thirty seconds, his face pressed into the leaves, the odor of rich loam in his nostrils. The darkness was almost total now, except for the dim glow of the constant aurora, but he was reluctant to expose himself. What if the soldiers were just waiting for any sign of movement?

  And then that movement came, about ten yards behind him. He froze, his palm tight around the butt of his pistol. Had the two soldiers somehow circled around behind him?

  If I stay low, they won’t see me. Just me and the dark, right down here passing the time.

  The foot passed inches from his nose, so close that even in the darkness he could make out the scuffed rubber of filthy sneakers. A muted sibilance marked the person’s passage. It wasn’t one of the soldiers, who were wearing combat boots.

  Campbell’s breath caught, and so did his heartbeat.

  Then the feet moved on and silence surrounded him. He kept his face in the dirt until he couldn’t bear it any longer. Lifting his head a few inches, he peered through the gloom to the clearing.

  A crowd of silhouetted figures gathered around the Zaphead’s corpse. Campbell hadn’t seen so many gathered in one place since his escape from the church back in Taylorsville. But there, the Zapheads had been spread out, acting like a mob. Now they assembled with an intimate calm that was somehow far more frightening than when they were trying to tear him limb from limb.

  They’re acting like they are aware of another. Like one big family.

  About twenty of them stood beside the road, in ragged and filthy clothing. They ranged in age from an old man with tousled white hair to a girl of about seven who wore a Dora the Explorer pajama shift as if she’d been napping when the solar storms forever changed her. The Zapheads seemed to communicate without speaking, as several nearest the corpse bent in unison and gently lifted their fallen brethren. Creepiest of all was their eyes, with radiated tiny golden sparks.

  The crowd parted as the corpse-carriers headed across the yard, and then the other Zapheads fell in behind them like a twilight funeral procession. Their absolute silence was so eerie that Campbell almost screamed aloud, just so his madness would reassure him of reality. Instead, he bit down hard on his lower lip as they filed past on a forest trail that had been carved by deer and raccoons but now guided far more surreal creatures.

  The Zaphead in the lead of the procession, a bearded, glittering-eyed man who could have convincingly portrayed a prophet in an Old Testament epic, carried the corpse’s legs. As if mirro
ring the fierce power projected by his burning eyes, he was strong and steady, mouth expressionless.

  The next two were young women, scantily clad, their skin like alabaster in the dusk. They bore the weight of the corpse’s trunk, which was peppered with ragged wet splotches from the gunshots. A dark-skinned teenaged boy held the head, cupping it reverently with both hands as if it were some sacred offering to the sky.

  Although the trail meandered thirty yards away from him, with the procession soon blending into the onyx forest, Campbell was still afraid to move. If they spotted him, he wasn’t sure he had enough ammunition to fend them off. Arnoff had shown him how to slide the clip of bullets into the butt of the gun, but Campbell had no idea how many shots he had, and he only had one spare clip in his backpack, even if he had time to find it in the dark.

  In the end, he decided to wait it out, even as the noises of night rose around him—insects, a distant owl, and the skittering of tiny paws across the leaves. He debated breaking into the trailer, checking it for food and supplies, and using it as a shelter until morning. But he couldn’t be sure if the Zapheads or soldiers would return.

  At that moment, he felt forlorn and foolish for having struck out on his own rather than catching up with Arnoff’s group or Rachel and her friends. If Pete were alive, Campbell might have taken a different course. With a traveling companion, he’d had a sense of purpose, but now he was walking solely for the next step, breathing just to take the next breath, living for no other reason than to be alive.

  Campbell pressed the pistol flat against his chest, taking comfort in its cold steel. One shot would do it. An end to the surreal madness, and a purpose at last in providing an easy meal for the foxes and opossums that never second-guessed their survival instinct.

  “Do it, asshole,” he whispered. His breath plumed out before him in a moonlit mist, and he realized the night had turned cool. The sound of his own voice startled him back to his senses, and he angrily shoved the gun into his backpack and bundled it up, ready to move on.

  Just keep moving. Like the yoga hippies and acidheads say, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

  He checked the clearing once more. The Zapheads had left at least twenty minutes ago, but Campbell couldn’t trust his own sense of passing time. The trailer yard was bathed in muted moonlight and the greenish cast of the lingering aurora, a glistening puddle of thick blood the only sign of the disturbing encounter.

  Go to the dirt road and backtrack to the highway. Then head north. Milepost 291. Milepost 291. Milepost 291.

  He repeated “Milepost 291” under his breath like a mantra. It became his Shangri-la, a fantasy land of milk and honey and running hot water and television and full-service banking and cute babes in swimsuits on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He stood and pushed back the branches, heading between the trees in the dark.

  He’d taken only seven steps before the hands descended over his face and pressed hard.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Franklin Wheeler stared into the fire, poking the dying embers. Behind him, Rosa and Marina slept side by side on the floor, bundled in blankets. On the mattress curled Cathy and her mutant baby boy. She had the infant cradled against her bare breasts, as if the little monster demanded constant access to her human milk.

  Disgusting.

  Jorge was standing sentry in the platform, not trusting Franklin’s battery-operated alarm system. No one was around to stop Franklin from grabbing the infant and hauling it into the woods. Franklin could disconnect his alarms and pretend they had failed, that he had fallen asleep. The elements would soon take care of the remains, and Franklin could convince the others that the Zapheads had crept in and stolen the thing.

  The others might question the Zapheads’ behavior and whether they were sophisticated enough to carry out such a raid—as well as the glaring problem of why the Zapheads wouldn’t kill them all in their beds—but no one knew exactly how these things operated.

  Besides, would anyone be too upset if a creepy little Zap bit the dust? It wasn’t like they were in danger of going extinct.

  The mother snorted in her sleep and twitched as if having a bad dream. Franklin turned away and filled a pot to put on the woodstove. In the morning he’d want coffee, even though the beans were old and stale. Caffeine was another of those comforts from the old world he’d soon have to relinquish.

  But you can bet your ass the president and his world-banker buddies are sipping organic lattes in a luxury bunker right now.

  Franklin wondered if Rachel was still out there, and if she’d be brave and tough enough to trust him. Perhaps he should have abandoned his compound and went out in search of her. He could only imagine how horrible the conditions must be in the cities, even though he’d spent much of his adult life preparing for and envisioning the inevitable.

  But his highest function was here, operating the compound as a sane stronghold against whatever challenges the future held. He would wait here for his granddaughter, and he would survive for her. Because, to him, she was the future.

  Although a devout loner, he was at the core a family man, which was part of the reason he’d allowed Jorge’s brood into the compound. And there was strength in numbers. While many in the prepper network had toiled away with an isolationist mindset, Franklin understood that simply surviving wasn’t enough.

  At some point, after the nuclear holocaust or the viral epidemic or the worldwide civil war, people would have to live together. They would need to build communities and—at some unfortunate and messy point—construct a new social order.

  Growing pains.

  This whole game of human evolution brought with it eternal growing pains.

  And only the strong could fight for freedom.

  “Joe?” one of the women called from sleep. It was the mother, Cathy. She rolled over, nearly crushing the infant.

  And that gave Franklin another idea. He could smother the baby. One minute with a pillow should do the trick.

  Then he could tuck the corpse back under the mother and simply wait until morning. It would look like a case of nature taking its course. Why shouldn’t a Zaphead die in its sleep, anyway? Should anyone expect their bizarre biology to mirror that of living, breathing humans?

  “Joe?” the woman called again, and this time it was more of a frightened moan.

  Franklin held his hands to the open flame in the belly of the woodstove. The heat sharpened his senses.

  Goddammit, she’s one of us. A human. A woman.

  He crossed the narrow stretch of wooden floor and bent beside her, taking care not to look at the baby. In the firelight, her bare skin was golden, her blonde hair glistening with sweat.

  What if this was Rachel?

  Cathy was maybe a year or two older than Rachel. Different physically, a little heavier and with a milky complexion. But these were the women who’d be carrying on the race, the ones who would breed for the benefit of the new order. Could he afford to cast any of them out?

  And what if Rachel didn’t make it? Indeed, what if Cathy was one of the few women left outside the government bunkers?

  Franklin looked past her restless form to Marina and Rosa huddled together under a blanket. He didn’t even really care that they were Mexicans. The future had no borders. They were fit and healthy, good stock for the cause. And his job was to help keep them strong and to teach them.

  In case Rachel didn’t make it here.

  No, not “in case”…just “until.”

  Cathy moaned again and her eyes flickered open. The fire glittered in them momentarily, almost eerily like that of her mutated offspring’s. Then it struck him.

  The sun in their eyes…that’s what it looks like. A hundred little suns in their eyes.

  He wondered briefly if she had somehow mutated as well, as if the little creature’s bite marks on her breasts had passed its sick strain into her. But then she blinked and the illusion passed. She was just a frightened young woman, staring wide-eyed at him as if
not knowing where she was.

  “You were having a bad dream,” he whispered.

  He reached out to her but she flinched away. He realized his hand was passing distressingly close to her naked breasts and he pulled away, grabbing the edge of the blanket to slide it over the smooth curve of her shoulder. He gave it a paternal pat as she snuggled down into the blanket.

  “Thanks,” she replied, moving the infant so that its head was exposed. So it wouldn’t suffocate.

  Franklin kept his eyes fixed on her face. “Who’s Joe”?

  Her eyes darted as if she expected to see him in the fire-illuminated room. Then sadness settled over her. “My husband.”

  Franklin nodded. He didn’t want to wake the other two, but he wanted to understand her—to understand how someone could betray their kind and harbor the enemy like this.

  “Did he…die?” he asked.

  “Yes, but not in the burn.” She kept her voice low to match his. “I was a nurse at the Asheville hospital. I was on maternity leave but they were already getting cases of inexplicable behavioral changes, just after the solar storm first reached Earth.”

  He didn’t realize she was a nurse. Yes, the new order would need her. Assuming she didn’t waste her talent and skill keeping the wrong types alive.

  “And it all happened so fast,” she said. “My husband—Joe—was a police officer. He learned before most people what was happening, so he came home and said we needed to get out of town. I wrapped up little Joey while he packed, and we got in his patrol car. We didn’t have a real plan, but already people were dropping dead, the highways were clogged, everything was going crazy. He thought the parkway would be safer, and we’d just turned on it when we found the road was blocked with wrecks. And then they started attacking us.”