After: Dying Light

AFTER:

DYING LIGHT

(Book #6 in the AFTER series)

By Scott Nicholson

A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

Copyright ©2015 by Scott Nicholson

Published by
Haunted Computer Books

Scott’s
Author Central page
at Amazon

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Other books in the After series:

After #0: First Light-
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK

After #1: The Shock-
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK

After #2: The Echo-
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK

After #3: Milepost 291-
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK

After #4: Whiteout-
Amazon US
Amazon UK

After #5: Red Scare-
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK

And the exciting new spinoff series ZAPHEADS

(with Joshua Simcox)

Zapheads #1: Bone and Cinder
-
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK

Zapheads #2: Scars and Ashes (Coming soon)

CHAPTER ONE

It couldn’t end like this.

Not after all they’d endured. A hundred and twenty miles on foot, scavenging for food and shelter in search of a legendary survival compound in the North Carolina Mountains.

Not after fighting through mutants, maniacs, and a military at war with everything that moved.

Not after surviving an infection that left Rachel Wheeler half Zaphead, then walking into the lion’s den to end the deadly conflict between humans and Zapheads.

Not after DeVontay Jones had given his heart to her when the universe around them screamed at the foolishness of such a hopeful act.

But the end could never be happy, because it was the end.

As he carried Rachel’s body through the streets of Newton, DeVontay was unwilling to accept the truth. Smoke from smoldering fires drifted across the bleak, gray skyline, competing with the sweet rot and metallic blood of the dead. The December air was brisk but he barely felt the chill. Dust clung to the dried tears on his face. Even though he could only cry with one eye, it had done double duty.

“Where are you taking her?” asked Franklin Wheeler, trailing a few steps behind.

As Rachel’s grandfather, Franklin had more right to Rachel’s burial care than DeVontay did, but she was still warm. DeVontay could convince himself that she wasn’t completely gone. As long as he didn’t let her go, she was still his.

“Someplace safe,” he replied, knowing the words were foolish.

The only safe place was in the grave, and even that might not spare Rachel from the Zapheads and their ambitions of mass revival.

One of Lt. Hilyard’s soldiers waved from the top of a building, flashing a hand signal that DeVontay couldn’t translate. A single gunshot cracked on the far side of town, and DeVontay realized the battle had all but ceased. The apocalypse hadn’t done a good enough job of killing—the survivors were intent on finishing the job the solar storms started.

Hilyard stood with one foot on the parapet of a two-story building, leaning against a brick chimney splotched with tar. He returned a hand gesture to the soldier that DeVontay took as an “All clear” signal.

“Did we win?” DeVontay asked.

“Won’t be any winners here,” Franklin said, glancing around at the corpses on the street. Most were Zapheads, but a few uniformed men were scattered among them, as well as a female member of the makeshift civilian militia led by Hilyard.

Although the Zapheads fought ferociously, the end result was a massacre. Their mutant rage was no match for automatic weaponry and grenade launchers. But DeVontay would waste no sympathy on them—they were to blame for Rachel’s death.

No, YOU are
.

He’d vowed to protect her and he had failed. He’d lost her when the Zapheads changed her so that she was half mutant, and they’d summoned her to Newton to further their takeover of the world. DeVontay’s fellow survivors refused to roll over, though, and their attack on the town caught the Zapheads by surprise.

But a victory here meant nothing. Zapheads still outnumbered humans a hundred to one across the globe, and they were evolving and adapting while the Earth’s former masters struggled to rebuild a workable society. And the worst enemy was not the Zapheads but themselves.

“What about the hospital?” Franklin asked.

“Full of Zapheads. That’s where the Zaps were taking bodies—ours and theirs.”

“If they’re all dead, what’s the problem?”

“I don’t want her around them.” DeVontay headed across the square where the street was less cluttered with vehicles and corpses. He would gladly carry her back to the mountains if he could and plant her in the silence of soft loam and sleeping stone.

A man sat on a concrete bench in the town square, beneath a bronze statue of a mounted cavalryman. He held the quivering, weeping form of a young girl.

“How is she?” Franklin asked the man.

“
Bueno
.” The man stared wide-eyed over her shoulder. DeVontay recognized hollow pain in the man’s eyes. Loss was cheap in a world where billions lay rotting away. And at least he had his daughter.

DeVontay’s shoulders ached from Rachel’s weight, as if death had tripled her gravitational pull. He considered resting on the bench beside the man, but he was afraid he’d never rise again.

Franklin introduced the pair as Jorge and Marina, but neither acknowledged DeVontay. The names were familiar, as DeVontay recalled Franklin’s tale of the family and how Jorge left the mountain compound in search of his wife and daughter. Jorge accomplished half of his mission, but DeVontay had a good idea how the rest turned out.

“And this is…Rachel,” Franklin added, gently touching the corpse’s hair with a trembling hand.

The man broke from his dark reverie with a hoarse bray of a laugh. “You found your granddaughter and I found my wife.”

“Guess wishes come true after all,” Franklin said, burying his emotions beneath his trademark cynicism.

“You brought her from the jail,
si
?”

“Yes, the Zapheads killed her.”

“Not Zapheads. It was my wife. She killed them all.”

“The Zapheads swarmed the jail—”

The girl yanked her face from where it was burrowed in her father’s chest and looked at them with wild, bleary eyes. “It was the babies. The babies made her do it.”

DeVontay didn’t want to hear any more of this madness. Rachel had been shot, and although Zapheads mimicked human behavior, he’d yet to see them use firearms. They let themselves be slaughtered when they could have collected any number of weapons over the last few months.

But the cause of her death didn’t matter. Just the fact of it.

He continued on his way, crossing between a truck and an SUV blocking the street. Ahead was a row of businesses with plate-glass storefronts—a candy store, a real-estate agency, a lawyer’s office, and a wedding shop whose display featured a mannequin bride in a flowing, ruffled white gown. DeVontay indulged a bizarre fantasy of dressing Rachel in it for the ceremony they would never have, and just as rapidly dismissed it as sick. The white would have been a lie, anyway—they’d managed a torrid and hasty coupling before the final battle but never reached the stage of pledging stupid promises of forever in a world already over.

Still, his heart gave an extra twist as he staggered past the mannequin and down the sidewalk. A bleeding mutant sprawled across the sidewalk, pools of red welling from great gaps in its back. A woman, judging by the thick, curly hair, someone who likely harbored her own dreams of matrimony and family before the solar storms erased them.

He hadn’t expected Franklin to follow him—or maybe he’d simply stopped thinking about others. So when the footsteps scuffed the concrete behind him, he spun into a defensive stance.

“Easy, DeVontay,” Franklin said, reading his mood. “We still have to care for the living, too.”

“You’re taking this well. I thought you loved her.”

Franklin’s gray eyes clouded. “I did. I
do
.”

“It’s done,” DeVontay answered. “I don’t care anymore. I don’t give a damn if we’re the last of the human race. Let the Zaps have it.”

“We survive,” Franklin said. “That’s what we do. Rachel would say as much if she was here.”

“Look around. What have we ever accomplished? A sad little stack of bricks full of rot and stains and violence and hurt. We think we deserve to last only because we’re aware of our own fragility, but our self-importance tricks us into thinking all of this—the sky, the air, and everything behind it—was made for us. God’s happy little playground, where His children applaud their own reflections because we were made in His image. Well, if this is His mirror, then God’s one sick son-of-a-bitch.”

The sidewalk slid beneath his feet, and at first he thought it was an earthquake, or maybe a burst of the small-grade explosives used by the soldiers during the attack. Then he realized it was not his body but his mind that shifted, as if his skull had cracked open like a bowl of butterflies.

He leaned against the passenger door of a sedan, nearly dropping Rachel. Franklin rushed forward to take her weight, and the passing of the burden was metaphorical as well as physical. Franklin cradled her with a strength that belied his sixty-odd years while DeVontay recovered.

“Where do you want her?” Franklin whispered after a moment.

DeVontay glanced down at the Zaphead corpse a dozen yards away. Did it really matter? Dead was dead.

At the end of the street, the row of adjoining businesses graduated into larger commercial sites with their own parking lots cluttered with silent vehicles. One structure exhibited a false solemnity, with an ordered colonnade shielding a drive leading to a wide front door, shrubbery not yet gone completely wild, and pristine black shutters flanking white-curtained windows. DeVontay almost laughed.

A funeral home.

Franklin saw it at the same time DeVontay did. “I think we could all use some rest.”

CHAPTER TWO

How do you take care of a baby?

Stephen didn’t know. He had a cousin, Bobby, who was only six months old when Stephen’s mother took them on a family visit. All Stephen remembered was a bunch of crying—red-faced wailing, really—until the baby either had his diaper changed or his mother’s boobie stuffed in his mouth to shut him up. Both of those choices were horrible, but tickling Bobby’s toes and saying “goo goo gah gah” sure hadn’t done the trick.

But Kokona wasn’t Bobby, who was probably long dead. Kokona had caramel-colored skin and wide, almond-shaped eyes that sparked and gleamed and glittered. Bobby was pale and pudgy and smelled of a weird combination of soap and toilets, while Kokona smelled outdoorsy, like fallen leaves and sunny flowers. Amid the dusty, gritty confines of the pawn shop, her freshness was even more evident.

With Bobby, you just had to keep guessing what was wrong. If the boobie or the diaper didn’t do the job, you blamed gas, or the room temperature, or loud noises, or any of the thousand exotic diseases babies developed, and then ruled them out one by one until the problem was solved. Such a process might take eighty years. Kokona, though, offered another option.

He could ask her.

“Do you need anything?” he whispered, even though the street outside was mostly quiet after the uproar of the last hour.

Kokona, lying in her nest of blankets, smiled up at him as if he was her big brother and poppa and momma all rolled into one, which was a little startling. “I’ll be hungry soon, but right now I am happy to be alive,” she said in her tiny, high, and weird-but-cute voice.

Stephen glanced around at the tools, jewelry, musical equipment, and other clutter that people had traded in for a fraction of its value. All the stuff looked sad and worthless to Stephen. He’d chosen the shop because it was tucked away from the main drag of Newton and featured iron bars in the windows, which suggested safety. The door had a heavy brass deadbolt that added to his sense of security, but now he felt more like a prisoner than a king in a fortified castle.

One thing for sure, there wasn’t much food in here. A cramped office in the back of the store held a little waist-high fridge, but Stephen didn’t want to step over the rotted old bald guy to open it and forage. Besides, the stink had likely seeped into any edible food in the room, and a carton of milk would’ve long since soured. He’d closed the office door facing a grim reality of After: it sure was hard to find a boobie when you needed one.

“What about Rachel?” he asked Kokona.

“She’s gone dark.”

“What does that mean?”

Kokona’s eyes dimmed and she looked past Stephen to the grimy window, where the afternoon sun painted a gray world. “She might be…old again. Not one of us.”

Stephen softly exhaled the breath he’d been holding. That was good news. If she was human, he could find her, and then find DeVontay, and they could go back to Franklin Wheeler’s compound and live happily ever—well, at least they’d be together. He’d gladly milk goats ten times a day if only they could all return there and be a family.

But if Rachel was no longer a Zaphead, then Kokona couldn’t help him find her. He’d have to wander the streets searching, and although Kokona would likely protect him from her fellow mutants, Sgt. Psycho Shipley’s storm troopers would gun him down on sight.

“But she might be something else?” Stephen hated to ask the question, but he needed to know all the options. That was the basic lesson Rachel and DeVontay had taught him during their five months of survival in the wake of the solar storms that killed his mother and billions of others.

Hope for the best and plan for the worst, and then expect something even crazier than the worst
.

Kokona understood. “I can heal her.”

“Even if the other babies are dead?”

“Maybe I can heal them, too.”

Stephen didn’t want to think about that kind of power. It sounded like something only Jesus should be able to do. He wasn’t sure he believed in Jesus as much as Rachel did, but he liked the idea better when it was in the pages of a book or something way up in the sky where you could ignore it if you wanted.

“How do we find her, then?” He didn’t like trusting his life to a creature that couldn’t even walk, and he couldn’t be sure if Kokona would betray him if given the chance. They were enemies, after all. Different tribes.

“I can lead you to the place where I last felt her thoughts. Where the babies died.”

“I don’t want to see that.”

“Are you going to stay here forever?”

Kokona was right. Stephen managed to make it to Newton on his own, holing up at night and hoofing it during the day, but he wouldn’t last long here—especially with a baby to tend. He looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was a rack of guns and rifles behind the counter, but they were all locked together with a cable. He knew how to shoot, but that kind of noise would attract not only Zapheads but Shipley as well. No, he needed something sneaky.

He prowled through the shelves of tools, discarding a large metal wrench, a double-bladed ax that was way too heavy, a weed trimmer that required batteries, and an Army surplus trenching tool that combined a small shovel with a short pick. He found a thin blade with a canvas sheath that looked like it was useful for weeding a garden and not much else, but it was light. He couldn’t picture himself attacking an armed grown-up with it, but just carrying a weapon gave him comfort and confidence.

He attached the sheath to his belt. There was a baseball cap on the counter. The bill was a little grungy, it bore a John Deere logo, and probably belonged to Baldie, but he adjusted the strap and snugged it down on top of his skull. The familiarity gave him a little comfort. He returned to Kokona.

“Have you thought about leaving me?” she said.

Stephen was surprised. “No way. I’m your carrier now.”

“I couldn’t stop you.”

“Maybe. I don’t know your powers or anything like that.”

“‘Powers? I don’t understand.”

“I’ve read a lot of comic books,” Stephen said. “X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Superman. A smart baby that can talk would fit right in as a superhero, except the action scenes would be a little weird.”

“I am not a hero. I’m just Kokona.”

Stephen looked through the bleary glass to the street outside. “Well, it would be cool if you could make a force field so nobody would shoot us.”

“Healing people is a kind of power, isn’t it? If you got shot, I could heal you.”

Stephen recalled the old woman who was with Kokona when they met. The woman’s ankle was shattered, and yet she’d protected the baby even when Sgt. Shipley and his evil sidekick Broyhill threatened to kill her. And after Broyhill stabbed her, Kokona did nothing to stop the bleeding.

So Kokona was either lying or she had some reason to let the woman suffer and die. Stephen now questioned his self-image as a white knight riding to the rescue of an innocent victim.

Maybe I didn’t even have a choice. Maybe she MADE me.

He returned to her side and knelt over her. Looking at those beautiful eyes that shone like miniature suns, he felt a chill instead of warmth. He should leave her. But without her, he’d probably never find Rachel.

“Looks clear outside,” he said, keeping his voice steady. Compared to the freaky mutant Zaphead python that tried to squeeze the life out of him the day before, Kokona was like a rag doll. He could handle her. “Ready to go?”

Kokona grinned with dark pink gums. “Whatever you say, Stephen.”

As he picked her up and balanced her weight against one shoulder, she said, “Don’t be afraid.”

He thought he’d hidden his fear. What if she could read his mind, like she apparently sensed the other Zapheads and Rachel? He didn’t know how to shut down or shield his thoughts. They didn’t teach that in comic books.

“I’m good,” he said. “My friend DeVontay said I was a brave little man.”

“Was he your carrier?”

“I walk on my own.” He said it more forcefully than he intended. “Come on. Let’s go find Rachel.”

And maybe the Zaphead nursery after that.

She wriggled in his grip and Stephen almost dropped her. He wondered if she’d sensed his anxiety. Smelled it. Like something rotten deep inside him.

He hauled her to the door and unlatched the deadbolt. He eased the door open, wincing as it emitted a squeak that seemed loud and jarring enough to wake the dead guy back in his office. He poked his head out and scanned both directions, as well as the windows of the nearby buildings and houses.

And Stephen realized he’d have to trust her with his life. “Which way?”

She waved a tiny hand toward the sun that was sinking fat and red into the smoky western horizon. “Go there go now.”