After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) (15 page)

One
benefit of the apocalypse is the pollution has cleared up a little. But I guess
all that leaking nuclear radiation is taking its place.

Stephen
called out the town names on the map. “Siler Creek, Boone, Newton,
Stonewall—that’s where those men locked us up, right, DeVontay?”

“Yeah,
but nobody traps Batman and Robin for long, do they?” DeVontay didn’t like to
dredge up those horrible memories of the Zaphead attack and subsequent
massacre—or the haunting image of the Zapheads carrying away the dead—but he
was grateful to Hilyard for engaging the boy and drawing him out of his
melancholy. The man possessed enough leadership skill to become a military
officer without losing his heart along the way.

“Pecks
Mill,” the boy said with conviction. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“You
are correct,” Hilyard said. “Give that man a Reese’s Cup.”

As
DeVontay fished out a candy bar, he asked Hilyard, “What do you think is
burning?”

“That’s
a college town. Evans-Lawson. Old stone buildings, probably wouldn’t be a bad
place to fortify. Could be some survivors there, sending up a signal. Or…”

DeVontay
mentally filled in the words the man didn’t want Stephen to hear.
Or
Zapheads are turning it to ashes.

“Charlotte,” Stephen said, reading from the map and pointing south. “That’s where you and
Rachel came from.”

“That’s
right,” DeVontay said. “Hard to believe we’ve walked this far since August.
Less than four months.”

“It’s
November already?” Stephen asked, counting the months on his fingers. “We
missed Halloween.”

DeVontay
gave him an Almond Joy. “Trick or treat.”

We
didn’t need costumes this year. We already had plenty of monsters.

Campbell
rejoined them, carrying a plastic guitar case he’d
salvaged from a vehicle. “Fender Strat. I’ve always wanted one of these.”

“An
electric guitar in a world without power?” DeVontay asked. “On the other hand,
your path to the top of the pop charts should be pretty clear. Unless the
Bieber Zaphead is at large.”

“Just
don’t play ‘Free Bird,’” Hilyard added, “or I’ll take one of those strings and
hang you from a tree.”

“Don’t
worry, I’m strictly British rock,” Campbell said, breaking into a raucous but
off-key chorus of The Who’s “My Generation.”

“Keep
it down, or every Zaphead within a hundred miles will be on us,” DeVontay said.

“That’s
just it,” Campbell said. “There’s nothing up here. No Zapheads, no deer, no
survivors, nothing. It’s like we reached the top of the world and the party’s
already moved on.”

“I
wouldn’t relax too much,” Hilyard said, gazing at the rocky ridges above the
road. “If we follow the parkway, we’ll be out in the open. Anybody watching
from up there can pick us off.”

“How
good can your men shoot?” DeVontay asked.

“They’re
not my men anymore,” Hilyard said. “But let’s just say I wouldn’t bet your life
on it. Mine, either.”

“So
you like my idea of staying here?” Campbell said. “We can beef up the ranger
station and—”

“That
idea gets worse by the minute, with you threatening to give us a concert. Let’s
move. Milepost 291 is less than two miles away. But stick to the shoulder
closest to the ridge tops. The trees will give us some cover.”

Hilyard
led the way and the others fell in behind him, crossing the two-lane road and
walking in knee-high grass. They’d gone barely a hundred yards when Campbell chucked the guitar into the ditch. “Thing’s getting heavy,” he said.

They
soon came upon a metal sign that read “
Designated Scenic View. This sign
funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior
.”

“Look
at that,” DeVontay said. “They had to put up a sign to tell people to enjoy a road
that didn’t have signs cluttering it up.”

“Now
that you look back at it, the human race was kind of screwed up,” Hilyard said.
“Poisoning our food, breeding way past our planet’s capacity to feed us, and
piling up enough weapons to kill ourselves a hundred times over.”

“I
read something that suggested we would never achieve interstellar space travel
because, otherwise, some advanced civilization out there would have already
reached us. The theory went that intelligent beings never made it past the stage
where they could destroy themselves, as if extinction was the predetermined
outcome of evolution.”

“Maybe
the universe doesn’t
want
us to get there,” Hilyard said. “We just had
some help getting killed off.”

They
went another mile without incident, passing a few vehicles along the way,
including two that had rolled off the road and upended below the bank. No one
bothered to check them out. DeVontay was happy with the snacks and bottled
water from the ranger station, and Wheelerville—if it existed—probably had a
food supply rich enough to get them all through the winter. As Campbell had just rediscovered, anything not absolutely essential to survival was dead
weight.

Shortly
after passing the concrete pylon marking Milepost 290, they came upon an RV in
the middle of the road.

“Easy,”
Hilyard said, motioning them to duck down among the weeds. “Looks like it’s
been occupied recently.”

“Should
we go into the woods and circle around it, just in case somebody’s in there?”
DeVontay asked.

“Looks
like it’s full of bullet holes,” Stephen said.

“Maybe
somebody got chased inside,” Campbell said. “Could be your soldier boys got
into a shootout.”

“If
Wheeler’s compound is near here, this counts as the neighborhood,” Hilyard
said. “Better to know if we’re in the bad part of town. You guys wait here and
watch my back.”

As
Hilyard slunk along the ditch line, Campbell asked DeVontay, “How long do we
let this jarhead run the show?”

“He’s
kept us alive so far, and he knows the territory better than we do.”

“Yeah,
but don’t you think he’d roll with his Army buddies the first chance he got? No
matter how nice he’s being to Stephen? That military brainwashing runs deep.
He’d sell us down the river in a heartbeat if it served the national interest.”

“We’re
not a nation anymore.”

“I like
him,” Stephen said, shooting Campbell an accusatory glare. “He’s brave and he
doesn’t whine and complain all the time.”

Hilyard
dashed across the road to the RV, hunching low. DeVontay gave a cursory scan of
the surrounding forest, but his attention was drawn back to the lieutenant.
Hilyard pressed his body against the side of the RV, rifle at the ready. He
slid along the length of the vehicle until he reached the door. He yanked it
open and shoved the barrel of his rifle inside.

Nothing.
DeVontay wasn’t sure if he was
relieved or not. The parkway was so bleak and lifeless that he might have even
welcomed a Zaphead attack.

Hilyard
entered the RV and after a moment, he returned and waved them forward. By the
time they got there, Hilyard had completed a sweep of the motorized home.

“Look
at this,” Hilyard said. “Baby clothes and diapers. Hell of a world to bring a
little one into.”

“Here’s
some dried blood,” Campbell said. “And holes in the roof. Looks like they held
a war here.”

“No
bodies, though,” DeVontay said.

“Maybe
the Zapheads hauled them all away. I can’t imagine any survivors taking the
time to perform a decent burial,” Campbell said.

“DeVontay
would,” Stephen said.

That
wasn’t exactly true. DeVontay had buried a few people along the way, but he’d
passed up numerous other chances. The whole enterprise seemed like a waste of
energy, and the notion of resting in eternal peace was laughable given the
chaos that reigned on solid ground.

“Looks
like nobody’s been here in a while,” Hilyard said, prowling through the
cabinets in the tiny kitchenette. “Food’s been raided, if they had any in the
first place.”

“I
say we get out of this sardine can,” Campbell said.

“Hey,
you’re the one that wanted to hunker down in the ranger station,” Hilyard said.
“This place is just as easy to secure.”

Campbell
stuck a finger in the ripped paneling where a slug
had torn through the metal exterior and penetrated the RV. “Against Zaps,
maybe, but not bullets.”

Stephen
picked up a blue plastic rattle from a cot. He shook it, and the noise was far
more depressing than joyful. He tossed it to the floor.

After
they returned to the road, Hilyard scanned the asphalt around the vehicle. He
bent and held up a little brass sleeve. “This isn’t military. Must have been
survivors.”

“Well,
they didn’t survive for long,” Campbell said, nervously eyeing the forest.

“Maybe
it was Franklin Wheeler and whoever is with him,” DeVontay said.

“Only
one way to find out.” Hilyard started down the parkway, this time walking the
double yellow lines that ran down the middle of the road. “We’re almost to
Milepost 291.”

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

The
secret to good sauerkraut was to squeeze out enough brine to submerge all the
leaves.

Franklin
Wheeler had made the fermented cabbage a staple of his food supply after
learning how simple it was to make and how long it kept. Over the years, he’d
hauled in several ten-pound sacks of salt as part of his preparations. Doctors
claimed all that pickled food was bad for the blood pressure, but not many of
them were exactly around at the moment to bitch at him.

Wouldn’t
be surprised if some German is mashing up a batch right now in a Bavarian cave.
Unless the Zapheads have already taken Europe.

He
sealed up a couple of Mason jars and tucked them away on a shelf in the root
cellar. He wasn’t sure how many years the sauerkraut would keep, but so far,
the longer he kept the food in the cellar, the better it tasted. He couldn’t
say the same for the pickled beets, since he had no vinegar. They’d turned into
a bitter red wine that might have offered some medicinal benefit but was just
as likely to poison him. If he wanted to get drunk, he’d piece together a still
and turn out some clear moonshine that would burn a blue flame both inside and
out.

But
times like these called for a clear head. Not that he’d ever been accused of
having such. No, he was the wacko libertarian, the armchair terrorist, the Dr.
Doom of the survivalist crowd. He was fringe long before Y2K, and about the
only positive to come out of being an early adopter was he’d quickly figured
out that the militia movements and the hardcore Constitutionalists were just
another power structure. No, a man was better off going his own way, not
defining himself by the value systems—or a lack of values—contrived by others.

A
side benefit of solitude was that he slipped off the government’s radar.
Posting Internet manifestos was a fool’s errand, anyway. Why, if you taught
everyone in the world to be self-reliant and survive whatever catastrophe was
going to deliver the hammer blow, then you’d been in exactly the same situation
when it was all over. A world with way too many people, most of them without
enough sense to piss a hole in snow.

Still,
the solar storms had done more than just clean out the gene pool. They spawned
an entirely new life form. Zapheads were human in shape and size and color, but
their operating systems had been wiped clean and rebooted. Even the government
couldn’t have concocted such an obscene clusterfuck. So this one was on God or
the universe, whichever way you wanted to assign the blame.

Franklin
stacked some apples and pears in a wooden bin next to
the potatoes. The spring that oozed ice-cold water up from the rocks ensured
that the root cellar maintained its refrigeration year round, and the cellar
was dug deep enough into the bank that even the deepest freeze wouldn’t damage
the crops. But Franklin had a suspicion the weather was clusterfucked, too,
because already the November temperature seemed to be running about ten degrees
cooler than usual.

He
latched the door on the cellar and checked his array of solar cells. A couple
of the batteries had already drained low and seemed to be weaker on the
recharge. He would have to augment the system with a wind turbine, assuming he
could find any parts down in the dead cities. With very little of the world’s
electronics shielded by Faraday cages when the storms swept the planet, he’d
likely have to put that project deep on the back burner.

He
gathered his rifle and considered climbing the lookout platform. The weapon was
an option of last resort. He and Jorge had discovered the Zapheads responded to
violence with violence of their own, and they had strength, numbers, and
determination on their side. And if he fired even a single shot, Sarge’s bunker
boys might be able to locate him. He’d been alone in the compound for weeks
since parting with Jorge, and he was starting to feel invisible. But
complacency wasn’t in the survivalist playbook.