Crucible: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 5) Read online

  “Hell if I know. Aliens would be nice for a change.”

  “Did you notice?”

  Franklin tapped the water with his sharpened pipe, stirring in the slime for a moment. “Notice what?”

  “No Zaps in there working the machines. No babies, nothing. It’s all running on automatic.”

  “What about those Zaps on the back wall? They’re alive.”

  “They’re strapped in, man. Like they’re getting their stuff drained out of them. And…oh shit.” Millwood let out a grunt of disgust.

  “Something worse?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “Only if you hate seeing people turned into hamburger.”

  Franklin crawled to the grid and pulled himself up, taking another full survey of the Zap factory of madness. Millwood pointed to the deep right corner of the facility. On an alloy platform sat a clear vat with a series of tubes running in and out of it. The vat was half full of ruby-colored blood. The icky substance churned and bubbled, with broken bits of bone clicking against the sides.

  “You sure that’s human?” Franklin asked.

  “Wait for it.”

  Franklin watched the roiling gore, despite all the distractions of mechanical frenzy throughout the facility. A dark shape tumbled up from the bottom, came briefly into view, and then sank again. It was unmistakably a leather boot.

  He instantly thought of K.C. and Squeak. Surely they were still in Winston-Salem, waiting for their return. She wouldn’t have been foolish enough to come looking for him.

  But what if they were captured and brought here?

  “That’s what they were going to do with us,” Millwood said. “Turn us into human gumbo.”

  “Could be anything in there. They could be breeding big rats for all we know, using them for raw material. That critter we met back there might have escaped from their lab.”

  “Maybe,” Millwood said. “But remember what DeVontay told us about Wilkesboro, all those machines that chopped up people to harvest their skin and organs. And what happened to the houses and cars and buildings go that used to be here? It looks like they’re mixing all the matter with the Zap sauce and cooking up their special metal friends.”

  “But that’s the same stuff the buildings and streets are made of.” Franklin looked up at the cracked concrete above him and where a strip of the alloy was exposed.

  Is this whole place full of our blood?

  No, there had to be more—the Zaps had been using the metal for years, refining its uses and advancing their technologies. But they’d always had telepathic control over their creations, including the drone-birds and their hand-held lasers. Could they have finally broken the final barrier and invented a malleable, durable material that was also sentient?

  Was this entire facility running itself? Was the city building itself?

  He let the appalling theory sink in for a moment, and then he shared it with Millwood.

  “No, man,” Millwood said. “That’s too far out there even for me.”

  “Think about it, when that fake Rachel took us up to the top of the tower. There were no visible mechanisms, no elevator cables, no electrical wires, nothing. And when those babies wanted to trap us, that big tube came right down out of the ceiling.”

  Millwood tugged his salt-and-pepper beard in contemplation. “So maybe the Zap babies are running the show. Not just the other Zaps, but the whole freaking carnival. If they can operate a drone-bird with their minds, why can’t they build a city?”

  “Looks like they’ve got plenty of raw material.” Franklin thought about how Zaps had collected bodies in the early days of their evolution. Perhaps they’d been working toward this goal all along.

  It’s not enough to just wipe us out. They want to build a temple with our bones.

  Franklin was more determined than ever to drive his sharpened lead stake through Kokona’s heart. He missed several chances to kill the baby over the years, always talking himself out of it for one reason or another. But now he could do it, no matter the consequences. Even if Rachel died because of it.

  Because nothing could be worse than this.

  “Pick a tunnel,” Franklin said, nodding to each side. “Let’s keep moving.”

  Millwood pointed his length of pipe to the left. “Looks like less crud flowing through that one. It’s got to come out somewhere.”

  Franklin headed into the slightly narrower tunnel, a round series of concrete pipes that was riddled with cracks. He had to stoop slightly and bow out his legs a little as he walked, but he was able to make decent time. He only managed a few steps before Millwood spoke behind him:

  “You don’t think DeVontay’s in that gumbo, do you?”

  “Maybe you’re stepping in him right now.”

  “You’re hilarious, you know that?”

  Franklin didn’t think so. He was pretty sure he’d never laugh again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “The best time to seize power is when people are afraid,” Col. David “Spanky” Munger said. “Even if you have to make them afraid first.”

  Gen. Arnold Alexander let out a heavy sigh. “I told you, this isn’t about power. This is about the people.”

  They sat at a wooden table in a bunker forty feet underground in the Luray Caverns of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The secret installation was located nearly a hundred miles west of Washington, D.C., built when Russian nuclear missiles were the expected source of doom. It had been occasionally upgraded over the years, including the installation of Faraday shielding that blocked the damaging effects of electromagnetic pulses. The expansive depot in the mountains salvaged one of the largest remaining military fleets in the world when the solar storms hit.

  Alexander suspected the Russians probably had some shielded bunkers to rival it, and perhaps China as well, and he was dead certain Israel was more prepared for the apocalypse than anyone. Due to the lingering interference, radio contact was limited. The Earth Zero Initiative had been cobbled together over remote transmissions years ago, and no one really knew if foreign governments were in as pitiful shape as the former United States now was.

  “We’ve secured the base so there will be no more of those nasty Zap attacks,” Munger said. “Our people have adjusted to new leadership, and we can slowly return to a normal life.”

  “There’s nothing normal about this, Spanky. Living in a hole in the ground, scraping by on a few solar panels, with fuel getting too old to burn. Our people have to travel farther and farther every day for supplies, but we don’t have the gasoline to get it done. And it’s going to be winter soon.”

  “But we’re safe,” Munger said.

  “Security isn’t liberty.” Alexander looked up at the New Pentagon flag on the wall, lovingly stitched by a woman who’d lost two kids during the Zap attack that had ushered in Murray’s removal from office.

  The flag featured a single white stripe and a single red stripe, with an uneven five-pointed star in the center. The concept was originally intended as an inspirational symbol that allowed citizens to imagine more stars joining the flag, but it was now just a sad little rag.

  “We have field units holding Harrisonburg and Winchester.” Munger pointed to the tabletop map as if Alexander hadn’t memorized the pathetic reach of their territory. “Plenty of goods there, if we can figure how to transport them. And in the spring we can try for Culpeper, and maybe by fall, the big prize.”

  “We’ll never get D.C. back,” Alexander said, absently rubbing the arm he’d broken during their last attack on the former capital. Even many months later, it still hadn’t returned to full strength. Approaching seventy, he just didn’t heal as fast as he once did.

  “Last aerial recon showed six of those domed cities surrounding it,” Munger said. “We can take those off the board if we can figure out what makes them tick.”

  “We’re down to two Bradleys, four APCs, two helicopters, one single-engine prop plane, and a G6 howitzer. Put them a
ll together with the available ordnance and you’d be lucky to knock out one dome. But that still depends on our fuel supply.”

  “The more turf we grab from the Zaps, the more opportunity we have to discover more JP-8 for the choppers. Even with the growth of the militia movement before the storms, it’s not the kind of stuff your average local-yokel patriot would stockpile. We found six hundred gallons a month ago, and with some stabilizer added, it’s good to go.”

  “That’s the first I’m hearing of this.” Alexander wondered if his attention had strayed too much from strategy and focused on babysitting the three-hundred-and-twenty-odd people who inhabited the stronghold.

  “Don’t worry, General,” Munger said. “Your officers are quite capable of distributing materiel where it can do the most good.”

  There was a knock at the door, and Alexander shouted “Come in” without rising.

  A young Indian woman came in wearing a sari, its colors welcome in the bleak gray concrete room. She saluted and said, “We’ve made radio contact with NORAD, General.”

  Alexander nearly knocked over his chair in his excitement. He had to hurry because transmissions rarely lasted more than a few minutes, often with intermittent failures that were made all the more frustrating because neither side could be sure how much of the conversation was conveyed. Munger followed him to the elevator shaft that served as their telecom room, where a plump woman sat working the dials on a primitive desktop model.

  Alexander took the headphones, once again cursing Ziminski, their former signal officer, for betraying him and fleeing with deposed president Abigail Murray. Ziminski might’ve been a long-haired dreamer, but the kid knew his signal-to-noise ratios.

  The static-drenched voice came through the headphones and the tiny desk speaker. “Hotel Quebec, this is NORAD, copy.”

  “This is Hotel Quebec, NORAD. Repeat, this is HQ, copy,” Alexander said into the desk microphone.

  “Is the channel secure, over?”

  The radio operator nodded at Alexander, and he said, “Roger that, as secure as possible, copy.”

  “Still on holding pattern for Operation Free Bird. Is MPOTUS available, over?”

  The cramped room’s occupant’s all looked at one another. “This is Acting POTUS General Arnold Alexander. I’m afraid the president is missing in action, Mike India Alpha, break…presumed deceased, over.”

  “Our condolences on hearing that, copy. Did she...” The signal trailed off into white noise. Ten seconds later, it returned. “…confirmation of status of Operation Free Bird, over?”

  “Say again, NORAD, say again, over.”

  “Proper authentication code is required to abort the mission. Without the code, the mission will execute on schedule, over.”

  Due to the loss of encryption technology, Earth Zero had made the transition back to old-school code words. Murray never informed Alexander of such a code for the nuclear strikes. He suspected she and Ziminski were the only ones who possessed that knowledge. For all his former loyalty and affection for her, he now realized she’d never fully trusted him.

  “Given her absence, we’ve declared a state of emergency, NORAD,” Alexander broadcast. “That means, by executive order, I am the Acting POTUS and I’m empowered to make decisions in her absence. And I am giving you a lawful order to stand down. I say again, stand the hell down on Operation Free Bird, did you copy that, over?”

  Another wave of hiss and static left Alexander unsure if the message had gone through. He waited another thirty seconds. The display lights on the various dials of the shortwave radio dimmed, and the operator informed him that the facility’s main battery array was drained.

  Although Luray’s solar panels still functioned as well as ever, the battery storage units had degraded over time. On overcast days and at night, the depot was without power. Alexander could only hope the clouds parted before the signal was broken.

  The breath and perspiration of the four people nauseated Alexander, as well as the greasy smoke from the oil lantern. He longed to be out in the field killing Zaps, an honorable endeavor. But if NORAD enacted Murray’s plan to unleash the entire functioning nuclear arsenal, then all wars were over for good.

  “I still think it’s a Russian bluff,” Munger said. “We haven’t heard from the other Earth Zero countries in months. I could see them sitting in their bunkers toasting vodka over the dumb Americans destroying themselves while they simply waited out the Zaps.”

  “The Zaps aren’t going away anytime soon,” Alexander said. “These domes are the ultimate defensive position. And our engineers confirm the domes are releasing toxins into the atmosphere and environment. Why do you think the mutants let us expand our territory? They know we’ll be dead soon enough, so there’s no need to fight.”

  “They’re doing it to kill the savage Zaps as well as us,” Munger said. “Too bad we couldn’t be allies with the savages instead of the Russians and Jews.”

  Alexander found Munger’s xenophobia repugnant. But Munger was also a strict disciplinarian who kept the chain of command intact under these trying circumstances. Munger was a necessary evil in a world where evil reigned.

  “If we don’t abort Free Bird, then borders don’t matter,” the old general said. “We get a quick end but the Russians stick around for a couple of miserable years dying of cancer and poisoning. I don’t see how that could be considered a win.”

  The radio crackled again and all eyes turned to it as if it were some holy relic. “…can’t abort without confirmation code, Hotel Quebec. I say again, NORAD cannot and will not abort without confirmation code. Copy.”

  Alexander keyed the mike and said, “I order you to stand down, soldier. Get me your CO on the line or I’ll walk to Colorado if I have to. And when I get there, I’ll rip your head off and shove that radio all the way down to your asshole. So do it now, damn it.”

  “…without confirmation code…”

  Static rose to a wall of noise and then trailed away to a whisper. The lights on the radio dimmed and went dark, leaving Alexander and the others in a room lit only by the stinking lantern. The operator adjusted dials for a few moments and then shook her head.

  “Maybe that means NORAD’s out of touch with Sandia and Minot,” Munger said. “NORAD alone doesn’t have enough nukes to exterminate the human race.”

  “Don’t forget the dozen warheads presumably still floating around with the USS North Carolina,” Alexander said of the only remaining nuclear submarine. “But they all have their orders, too, and if we can’t break them…”

  “We don’t have any idea how many of the missiles are operational. Without electronic guidance systems, then it’s going to be like shooting off bottle rockets. They could wind up anywhere, or nowhere at all.”

  “The number of targets has proliferated since the plan was developed,” Alexander said. “The Zaps are constructing domed cities faster than we can track them now. They brought a howitzer to a knife fight and we don’t even have a spoon.”

  “If we don’t know the code, then we’d better find the people who do.” Munger’s eyes, icy blue in the best of light, took on the determined aspect of battleship gray. “Murray and Ziminski.”

  “I don’t want to risk our aircraft,” Alexander said. “She’s almost certainly with the Twenty-Seventh that you abandoned in North Carolina.”

  Munger visibly chafed at the rebuke, especially since two females witnessed it. His lip nearly trembled as he said, “Give me a Humvee and five men. I’ll have her back to you in a week.”

  “It’s possible she’s set up an interim government there. Ziminski betrayed us, and others are likely loyal to her as well. But she obviously hasn’t made contact with NORAD since we…” Alexander glanced at the two women, knowing they would gossip despite their security clearances. “…since she defected.”

  “If it comes to a civil war, we’ll deal with that,” Munger said. “But with a small team, we can employ a snatch-and-grab ops, capture Murray and Ziminski,
and get out of there fast. Once she’s back with us, the Twenty-Seventh will be ours again.”

  “We don’t even know how much time we have,” Alexander said. “Murray never told me the operational deadline.”

  “Then I’d better get started, right?”

  Alexander gave a weary nod. “If you’re not back in a week, then I’ll assume you’re dead and I’ll order a full strike on the Twenty-Seventh. God, I hope it doesn’t come to that. There aren’t enough humans left to be killing each other when the Zaps are doing a pretty good job of it already.”

  Munger grinned with yellow teeth. “I’m motivated beyond the call of duty, sir. There’s a civilian there by the name of Franklin Wheeler who owes me.”

  “That survivalist wacko who commandeered your Humvee in Wilkesboro? You’re going to blame him for the failed mission?”

  Munger grew even angrier. “That mission succeeded. We suffered casualties, but the target was destroyed.”

  Alexander actually looked forward to Munger’s absence. All reports indicated the Zaps had destroyed the city themselves. Sure, the Army had accelerated the process, but Munger’s dangerous ego prevented him from accepting the truth. If the colonel returned from this mission, Alexander would have to deal with the Munger problem once and for all.

  “Get it done, but don’t make it personal,” Alexander said, giving a stiff salute. “Dismissed.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  When Wisp arrived in the lobby of the tower in the center of town, Kokona, Rachel, and DeVontay were waiting.

  Rachel rocked Kokona back and forth as she studied Wisp’s carrier. The genderless figure stared blankly ahead, its eyes smoldering but seemingly unfocused. Rachel wondered if the Zap had any awareness at all of its former state of existence—as a human and then as part of a great, interconnected tribe that operated almost as a single organism.

  Being a carrier was worse than being a slave, because of the constant demands of the baby and the mind control that was exerted over them. Rachel was a special case—having been transformed months after the solar storms, she had retained much of her identity. She was a human, at least in her own mind, despite her flashing eyes and extraordinary strength.