After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) Read online

  “Does the Constitution even exist anymore?”

  “I imagine the original copy is still squirreled away in D.C., unless the Zaps burned the city.”

  “But now there’s nothing to back it up. It’s just words.”

  “That’s all it ever was. And as long as one free man lives, so will the Constitution. As far as I know, the human race hasn’t surrendered yet.”

  “Glad to hear that, Lieutenant. And thanks. From all of us.”

  “What’s the deal with your buddy up there? He’s got murder in his eyes. And there’s more to it than a love triangle.”

  DeVontay ignored Hilyard’s use of the word “love.” That word was even more idealistic than the U.S. Constitution. “He’s just rattled like the rest of us. The difference is he doesn’t have a fallback plan. I’ve got Stephen—and yes, Rachel—to live for, Rachel has her grandfather, considering he’s still alive, you have your sense of duty, and the best he can hope for is to hang on the fringes of our little group.”

  “I’m a little uneasy over the way he’s gone crazy over that gun.”

  “He can handle it. He saved my life last night. If he really wanted me dead, he had his chance.”

  Hilyard nodded. “You know him better than I do, so I hope you’re right.”

  Campbell was just visible ahead, his form merging with the mist and becoming invisible for seconds at a time. DeVontay had the sense that they were on an island floating high above the Earth, and that any wrong step would send them over the edge. The horses didn’t seem troubled by the lack of visibility, although they were already laboring from the uphill grade. They’d be lucky to make it another day, assuming the group kept climbing rather than following the trail back down into the valley.

  “Over here,” came Campbell’s voice from the fog ahead.

  DeVontay rushed forward and grabbed Stephen by the hand. “Leave the horses. They’ll stay.”

  He, Hilyard, and the boy hurried up the trail to where Campbell waited, staring down at the ground.

  “It was right here,” Campbell said. “And I know she was dead, because I bashed her skull so hard her brains leaked.”

  They studied the muddy gouges in the ground, the dark spatters of blood on the leaves, and the disturbed foliage. “This is the place, all right,” DeVontay said. “But where are the bodies?”

  “Maybe they carried them off,” Campbell said. “I’ve seen them carrying their dead before. And not just Zapheads. Us, too.”

  “Like dolls,” Stephen said to DeVontay. “Like they did in Taylorsville, trying to make them look alive.”

  “We’re not going to end up like that.” DeVontay didn’t want to think of Rachel as a plaything.

  Hilyard walked twenty yards uphill, scanning the ground. He turned and said, “Did you come up this way when you were on duty, Campbell?”

  Campbell stood a little straighter, relishing the officer’s recognition of his contribution. “No, I stayed below the rocks. It was too dark to wander around.”

  Hilyard gave a nod. “I don’t know if it was her, but somebody went this way.”

  As they gathered around the tracks Hilyard had spotted, DeVontay said, “It’s probably her. The Zaps are traveling in packs now. I don’t think one would fly solo, especially out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Look,” Stephen said. He pointed to a clear print that seemed to mirror Rachel’s foot size and sneaker style.

  Hilyard checked the compass on his wristwatch. “She’s still moving northwest, then.”

  “Heading for her grandfather’s compound.”

  “But why did she leave us?” Campbell said. “She made a big deal about how we’d all be part of a community. Kumbaya for the doomsday crowd. And then she jumps ship in the middle of the night?”

  “Without any supplies,” DeVontay said. “The compound is still two days away, if the map is right.”

  “The only thing we can do is keep moving,” Hilyard said. “Stick with the plan. Maybe we’ll catch up to her.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Campbell said with evident eagerness. Hilyard was now the acknowledged leader, and that was fine with him. DeVontay carried the extra rifle they’d taken from the Zaphead, but Campbell was obviously a lot more militaristic than him. That was fine, too. DeVontay couldn’t shoot worth a damn, given his lack of depth perception.

  “Even if it’s not her tracks, we’d be better off having a secure location like this compound to regroup and get our bearings,” Hilyard said. “Sgt. Shipley’s bunch will be wandering around, too, and I don’t want to run into them out in the open.”

  “That okay with you, Stephen?” DeVontay asked the boy.

  “As long as it’s warm there,” he answered, wrapping his arms around his chest.

  DeVontay noticed for the first time that the air was chilly. In fact, he could see his breath. It billowed out and mixed with the fog. “We’ll burn every tree in the woods once we reach Franklin Wheeler’s place. For now, the best way to stay warm is to keep moving.”

  After an hour of walking, the sun broke through the cloud cover, although it was barely strong enough to burn away most of the fog. Campbell took point, staying just at the edge of visibility. As they gained elevation, the trees became thinner and more barren. Here the autumnal color had gone, and the landscape was gray and brown, accented by the occasional deep green of pine and rhododendron.

  Working from DeVontay’s map and Hilyard’s compass, they kept north as much as the terrain would let them. The only tracks they came upon belonged to deer, raccoons, and bear. Once they heard a thundering roar that sounded like heavy traffic, and then they came upon the tumbling creek and a high waterfall that must have dropped a hundred feet down a sheer rock face. The footing was treacherous, and one of the horses strained a leg muscle climbing the rocky slopes alongside the waterway.

  “This is goat country,” DeVontay said. “I don’t think we can take the horses any farther.”

  “We might need them for meat this winter,” Campbell said.

  “No,” Stephen exclaimed, throwing his arms around the neck of the injured one.

  “They’ll be better off on their own,” Hilyard said. “They can forage much better if they’re off the trail.”

  “Who’s going to carry our stuff?” Campbell said.

  “We’ll divide it up. Take the essentials and ditch the rest.”

  They unloaded the horses and crammed their backpacks with sleeping bags, food, ponchos, and first-aid supplies. Stephen reluctantly left his comic books—DeVontay had helped him assemble quite a run of vintage Spiderman issues in excellent condition—but kept a paperback copy of Watership Down. “Rachel is reading it to me,” he explained.

  Hilyard and Campbell divvied up the ammo, and DeVontay took on an extra burden of canned food to make up the difference.

  “I sure hope Grandpa Wheeler has a pantry,” Campbell said. “I don’t want to be eating roots and bark all winter.”

  “We’ll have time to prepare, if it comes to that,” Hilyard said. “The hard freezes won’t hit for another couple of weeks.”

  “The weather might be screwed up, for all we know,” Campbell said. “The electromagnetic radiation might have altered climate patterns. This professor I met predicted all kinds of changes that we wouldn’t even notice for a while. Because we’re all too busy surviving to worry about hot or cold, or whether the whales migrate, or if all the bees made it back to their hives.”

  “Like those four thousand nuclear power plants out there melting down right now?” Hilyard said. “The good news just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?”

  “And how about this?” Campbell said. “What if we get to this Milepost 291 and there’s no compound? We’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere, on the top of the world with winter coming, and all we have is a can of Beanie Weenies.”

  “There are always options,” Hilyard said. “No need to scare the boy.”

  “I’m not scared,” Stephen said, w
iping at one grimy cheek. “And the compound will be there. Rachel promised.”

  DeVontay was glad the boy remained optimistic, but he didn’t understand Stephen’s sudden loyalty to her. Maybe after they’d all reunited, he remembered how much care and attention she’d provided. Well, DeVontay missed her, too. Despite her strange behavior, the real Rachel was still inside her somewhere. He was determined to give her every chance.

  “We’re barely covering half a mile an hour,” Hilyard said. “By this map, we’re still probably five miles away, but we should be reaching the boundary of the national park soon. But that also means we’re closer to Shipley’s bunker.”

  “Do you think you can find it again if we need to?” Campbell said. “Like, maybe use it as a fallback plan. We can wave a white flag and see if they’ll take us in.”

  “Sure,” Hilyard said. “I can find it. But Shipley won’t take prisoners.”

  “Who said anything about becoming prisoners? I want to enlist.”

  “You’ll get plenty more chances to kill Zapheads,” DeVontay said. “Looks like they’ll be around for a while.”

  “Probably longer than us.” Campbell removed his glasses, propped his rifle across one arm, and rubbed the lenses clean with a shirt tail. “They don’t care about food, weather, pain, or death. The stuff we worry about the most.”

  “Or love,” DeVontay said, putting a hand on Stephen’s shoulder.

  “Like that’s ever made the world better.”

  DeVontay adjusted his pack, picked up a nylon bag that held a tent, and swatted the closest horse on the flank. “Thanks for the lift, ma’am, but now you’re being put out to pasture.”

  The group climbed a slippery stack of stones and followed the rocky bank of the creek. Stephen took a last look back. “They’re watching.”

  “They’ll head back down to the valley soon enough,” Hilyard said. “They’ll smell the grass and keep moving.”

  “Do you think Rachel came this way?” DeVontay asked.

  “Well, it’s the easiest route. I guess she could have swung around and looked for a highway, but according to your map, that’s at least twenty miles out of the way.”

  The creek grew smaller, fed by narrow tributaries that seeped out of the cracks in layers of stone. Another hour passed in silence, and DeVontay was wiped out. He could only imagine how fatigued Stephen was, but the boy didn’t utter a single complaint. The air grew even colder and dark clouds massed above the thinning canopy. There were no signs of either Zapheads or Shipley’s soldiers, and even the wildlife seemed to have abandoned the bleak landscape.

  DeVontay was just about to ask Hilyard for a pit stop when Campbell shouted at them from the point. The three of them broke into a run to catch up, Stephen slipping and nearly tumbling down a moss-covered ravine. DeVontay caught him by a strap on his backpack and yanked him to his feet. They came upon Campbell in a clearing, standing beside a locust fence post with a few strands of barbed wire curling from the wood.

  “Civilization,” Campbell said, pointing his rifle at a dented sign nailed to a tree.

  The sign read “National Park Service Property.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Go there,” the baby said, pumping a tiny fist toward the building ahead.

  Rosa Jiminez wondered if the others noticed the baby had learned a new word. She was afraid to mention anything to Marina, who was already nearly catatonic with worry. Cathy, though, couldn’t be happier, doting over her strange little son.

  “What’s that, honey?” she cooed, holding the child close under her chin, beaming down into its peculiar, sparkling eyes.

  A pudgy fist pump. “Go there now.”

  The voice was small and childlike, but somehow commanding. Marina glanced at Rosa, who gave a sad shake of her head. No, they couldn’t make a run for it, not yet. With Jorge almost certainly dead, she was responsible for their daughter, and she wasn’t sure she could feed and protect both of them.

  Cathy was young and strong, despite the handicap of the infant, and so far the four of them—Rosa couldn’t help including the infant as part of their team—had managed to find shelter, avoid detection, and maintain a steady food supply. Marina seemed healthy enough, although her teeth were bothering her. In After, dental hygiene was near the bottom of the priority list, somewhere below “Don’t get killed by Zapheads” and “Don’t get raped and murdered by survivors.”

  Besides, the infant possessed some kind of keen instinct that Rosa believed had helped them avoid danger. Never mind that Joey might have his own selfish motive for their survival.

  Who could know the thinking of a Zaphead? And it’s their world now, anyway. Far more of them than us.

  She was immediately ashamed by the thought. Jorge would not want her to suffer any weakness, not when Marina counted on Rosa. As long as she had breath, Rosa would do what was necessary.

  And what was necessary right now was to let the Zaphead child keep them safe.

  “He wants us to go to that building,” Rosa said. The two-story storefront featured glass that looked black in the sunshine. Protruding vinyl letters high on the brick façade heralded “Mabel’s” and a sign on the door read “Open— Come on in.”

  “Well, sure thing, honey,” Cathy said, kissing Joey on his tiny, smooth forehead. “You could use a nappy nap and probably a didey.”

  She turned the infant, hoisted him, and gave a sniff to his swaddled rear, then scrunched her nose in a stinky face. “Joey went poo poo. Didey for the boy.”

  Joey was barely three months old, born shortly before the end of the world. Despite his diapers, he was more advanced than a toddler years older. Joey spoke, but he didn’t cry. He took his mother’s breast, but he didn’t squirm. He rarely slept, but often looked around with those solemn dark eyes glinting orange-red sparks as if a volcano was exploding inside his skull.

  “Go there now go,” he insisted, punching the air to emphasize each word. He’d been directing them ever since they’d abandoned Franklin Wheeler’s compound. In fact, leaving seemed to have been the infant’s idea in the first place, and now Rosa could no longer remember why she thought leaving was such a great option. Even if she thought both her husband and Franklin Wheeler were dead, they had food and shelter there.

  They’d come upon the town that morning, although “town” might be a little too generous for the mobile home park, gas station, post office, used car lot, Baptist church, and McDonald’s that clustered around a two-lane intersection. According to the signpost on the highway, this was Siler Creek. Rosa had seen a number of such places in eastern Tennessee, and apparently the North Carolina side of the border contained the same type of rundown brick main street.

  Siler Creek featured another familiar element—it was dead.

  Silent cars jutted from ditches where they’d run off the road during the solar storms, while a refrigerator truck bearing Oscar Mayer meats had collided with a police car in the center of the intersection. A tow truck was jacked atop a fire hydrant, the water main long since drained dry. The drive-through line at McDonald’s was backed up in arc around the parking lot, and plenty of moldering corpses hunched over steering wheels just a few feet from their final Big Macs.

  “Baby need change of clothes,” Cathy said.

  “Go now go,” the baby shrilly repeated. He seemed visibly annoyed with his mother. Maybe her baby talk was beneath him.

  “We’d better…” Rosa didn’t want to say the rest of the words, but there was no way around them. “…do what he says.”

  Marina took Rosa’s hand and squeezed. Rosa gave her bravest false smile, and Marina smiled back. “Besides, it looks like rain.”

  Cathy wrapped the infant in a hug and headed down the street, navigating between cars until she reached the crumbled sidewalk. Rosa followed, Marina at her side. She glanced from the store windows to the vehicles, alert to any movement. She also kept her eyes open for a sporting goods store or pawn shop where she might secure a firearm. She’d left
her rifle at the house where they’d spent the previous night, having expended her last round in panicked shot at what turned out to be a white cotton nightgown billowing on a clothesline.

  Siler Creek looked like it had been well on the way to extinction even before the solar storms hit. The streets were riddled with potholes, the paint flaked from the Colonial-style houses on the surrounding hills, and some of the shops were boarded up, the warped plywood tagged with graffiti. Any survivors here might have already drifted on like tumbleweed, rolling to the next stop.

  “I don’t like this place, Momma,” Marina whispered, sounding younger than her nine years.

  “It’s okay, honey, we won’t stay long. See those black clouds moving in? We should wait out this storm.”

  Oh, that is humorous. Miss Rosa Maria Nunez Jiminez. Wait out the storm. When this storm never ends.

  “I don’t want to be here with the baby.” Marina said it with all the unease Rosa felt but couldn’t admit. Worse, Rosa was afraid the baby would hear them—or else sense their hostility and paranoia.

  “He’s just a little baby, honey,” Rosa said.

  “But babies don’t talk like that. And he’s a Zaphead. Mr. Wheeler said—”

  “Never mind what Mr. Wheeler said. We’re with the child now and we’ll take care of it. Remember in the Bible how Moses was put in a basket and floated down the river so he wouldn’t be killed? Maybe this baby is like that. Special to God.”

  “I thought God loved people more than anything else He put on the world.”

  A dog howled somewhere in the distance, an abrasive, tortured sound, and Rosa wondered if the animal had mutated. Then a shot boomed across the ridges and the howling ceased.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Joey wailed. Cathy was nearly to Mabel’s front door, and Rosa wondered if maybe they should take shelter in a different building. Not to lose the child, exactly, but just to put a little distance between them.

  But somebody around here had a gun, and maybe Joey knew that. Maybe Joey picked this building for a reason. Rosa would either have to trust the child or risk her own child’s life. No choice. No choice at all.