After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) (26 page)

Rachel
knew better than to argue with her grandfather. Much of his self-image was tied
up in protecting her, as if all his old revolutionary ideals had honed to a
single narrow mission. It was annoying but sweet. She nodded and kissed him on
the cheek. Unlike with DeVontay, she thought showing affection for Franklin set a good example.

Once
inside the cabin, Stephen parked himself by the tiny window, pressing his face
against the glass. “I won’t be able to see anything.”

“That’s
okay. Because nothing’s going to happen.” Rachel sat on a handmade chair by the
woodstove. “When you’re bored, you can come over here and get warm.”

“When
am I going to be old enough to carry a gun?”

“After
you’ve read all of Franklin’s books and taken safety lessons from Lt. Hilyard.”

“Rachel?”

“Hmm?”
Despite the anxiety, or perhaps because of it, she was suddenly drowsy.

“Your
eyes.”

“What
about them?”

“That
fire stuff. It’s back.”

That
sent electric jolts of adrenaline through her. She stood and paced the floor,
then stopped to check her reflection in the window. Sparks in her eyes.

Oh
God, they’re here
.

But
calling on God would do nothing for her now, not after she’d turned her face
away from the light. “It’s okay. I don’t feel any different.”

“You
said it made you violent.”

“I
won’t hurt you.” The split lengths of stove wood weighed maybe four pounds
each. Long and thin and splintery. As thick as a baseball bat. And about as
easy to swing.

“We
better tell Franklin,” Stephen said, drawing away from her.

“No.
We don’t want to bother him. He has enough to worry about.”

Like
me taking the ax and chopping him into bits while he’s asleep.

She
crossed the little room to the door and yanked it open. “Motherfucker,” she
whispered.

Stephen
grabbed her by the coat and tried to drag her back into the cabin, but she
shrugged him off and stepped outside. When he again attempted to restrain her,
she shoved him with both hands so that he flopped into the snow.

It
had grown darker just in the few minutes they’d been inside, and a wave of
indigo ink rolled slowly in from the east, the surrounding treetops invisible. Franklin hissed at her to stay inside, but she continued to the gate.

Go
now go.

She
didn’t belong here. She never had.

Franklin
almost caught her before she made it beyond the
fence. “Get back in here. You’ll get shot wandering around in the dark like
that.”

“I
have to find them.”

“DeVontay
and Kreutzman will be back any minute. You don’t want Kreutzman to think you’re
a deer, do you?”

She
didn’t turn around. “I know where they are.”

“Damn
it, Rachel, you can’t just go off on your own. We agreed to a sensible plan and
you’re going to screw everything up.”

“If
I don’t go to them, they’ll come here. And I love you too much for that.”

“What
are you talking abou—”

He
must have gotten a good look at her eyes then, because his mouth froze open.
She could even feel the heat in her pupils, like twin pits of hellfire. But
unlike the last time this happened, she maintained a distant memory of what
she’d been like before. As if she’d carried some of the human Rachel into this
transition.

And
she hated that Rachel.

“They
have DeVontay,” she said.

Franklin
had never looked so frail and broken down to her as
he did now, slumped and gray-skinned in the light reflected by the snow. But
acceptance was etched in the creases of his face. The world played by new rules
and his libertarian ambitions were as insignificant as the snowflakes that were
already doomed to become water and transpire into vapor.

“This
isn’t a fight you win with bullets, is it?” he asked.

“It’s
a fight we were born losing.” She dared to give him a hug. “I’ll come back if I
can, but if not, please promise not to come after me.”

“I
can’t make a promise like that. You’re my granddaughter. You’re our
future
.”

“If
I don’t go, we won’t have a future.”

Her
determination must have burned as brightly as her irises, because Franklin relented. “Okay. I’ll try to explain it to Hilyard and the boy.”

She
didn’t say anything else. She parted the camouflaged gate just enough so that
she could slip through, and then hurried into the woods before she surrendered
to the impulse to turn and scream at him:

“
Motherfucker
!”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR

DeVontay
wiped the blood from his brow and noticed that his glass eye had become
dislodged and popped free during the fight.

He rolled
to his knees, looking up at the Zapheads gathered around them. They seemed as
thick as the trees, watching with a similar silence.

Kreutman’s
face lay out of the water, but blood trailed from his nostrils to be carried
away by the creek. DeVontay wasn’t sure if the man was dead, and he didn’t
really care one way or another. Was two against a hundred any better odds than
one against a hundred?

No,
he was done just the same. By Kreutzman’s hand or by the ravaging hordes of
mutants, the mechanism of delivery didn’t matter. Time to get it over with.

He
closed his eye and waited.

Trickling
water, the whisper of snow dropping from branches, his heartbeat in his ears.

He
kept on sucking cold air into his lungs, exhaling, and repeating the process,
savoring the sweet silver of the air.

Ten
seconds or two minutes later, he glanced around. The Zapheads surrounded him
almost with reverence, waiting.

And
he realized that they would soon find Wheelerville if he didn’t somehow draw them
away. Lying there feeling morose and nihilistic accomplished nothing. If he
could serve a purpose and help Rachel, Stephen, and the others, then his loss
wouldn’t be a total waste. Hell, he’d already done that once and it had worked
out. Who cared if the Zapheads were smarter now?

He
rolled to his knees, pushing himself up with his good arm, ignoring the pain in
his shoulder.

“Okay,
people,” he said. “Come and get me.”

“Get
me!” said a woman of about fifty, wearing a soggy cardigan and an ankle-length dress
smeared with mud. “Get me!”

But
the Zapheads didn’t make any attempt to seize him. He stepped toward the
nearest one, the man holding Kreutzman’s rifle, and drove his fist into the
man’s chest. “Fight back. You know you want to.”

“You
know you want to,” the man said, looking down at his chest.

Then
a high, thin voice interrupted. “We want peace.”

A
woman stepped forward carrying a bundle, and DeVontay had drawn back his arm to
strike her when he noticed that her eyes held none of that peculiar lambency.
“You…you’re human?”

But
the woman said nothing. The high voice came from the bundle of blankets in her
arms. “She’s Old People like you. But she didn’t want to fight. And she is
still alive.”

DeVontay
reached out and parted the blankets. A round, dark-skinned face peered up him
with bright, intelligent eyes. “Hello,” the baby said.

She
couldn’t have been more than nine months old. DeVontay looked around at the
other Zapheads as if seeking an explanation, and then realized they would be no
help at all. He asked the human woman, “How?”

“They
learn,” the woman said.

“Why
don’t you ask
me
?” the baby said, blinking as a snowflake rested on her
nose and melted away.

Somehow,
this was even more horrible than a rampaging horde of mindless savages that
tore people to pieces, shattered windows, burned cities, and dismantled any
sign of the human race. This was the ultimate profanity, a final insult to
civilization. The Zapheads mocked their words, and now they managed to mock the
very progression of life itself.

“Okay,”
DeVontay said to the child. “How are you able to talk?”

“We
learn from your mistakes.” The first white edges of enamel were poking through
the nubby pink gums. “That’s why we still need you. Until we know all your
mistakes, you’re still useful.”

“Maybe
you’re the ones making a mistake.” DeVontay wondered if these Zapheads knew
about firearms. Even though they’d collected Kreutzman’s weapon, none of them
had lifted it into a shooting position.

Maybe
it’s time they learned how a pistol works.

He
wasn’t sure he could shoot the infant. But every part of him rejected this cute
little monstrosity. He couldn’t let such an abomination exist, not while even
one human remained.

He
slowly slid his fingers to the holster but found it empty.

“We
have your guns,” the baby said. “I’m not ready to be dead. We know how to heal
wounds, but we can’t fix death yet. Soon.”

DeVontay’s
head reeled, and he wasn’t sure whether he was concussed from his fight with
Kreutzman or if the entire Milky Way Galaxy had just tilted on its axis and
thrown gravity askew.

“Soon,”
echoed several of the surrounding Zapheads.

DeVontay
shook his head at the woman carrying the Zaphead. “This is wrong.”

“You’ll
see,” she said. “It’s better this way.” But she sounded as if she was reciting
from a script, almost devoid of emotion. Her hollow eyes gazed into the
shrouded forest.

Several
Zapheads dragged Kreutzman from the creek. DeVontay couldn’t tell if Kreutzman
was still breathing. As much as he hated the man, he was compassionate enough
to hope he was mercifully dead and beyond whatever strange surgeries the
Zapheads sought to inflict.

Rachel
had changed after one of their “healings.” The cure planted a cancer deep
inside, one that ate away at identity and personality and humanity. Better to
die than to transform into something so alien.

“Your
shoulder hurts,” the baby said, fumbling a chubby arm from the folds of the
blanket and reaching toward him. “May we treat you?”

“I’m
good,” DeVontay said. “But I’m too tired to fight anymore. And I don’t think I
have any mistakes to teach you.”

“Oh,
we didn’t come for you. We came for Rachel Wheeler.”

“WHEE-ler!
WHEE-ler! WHEE-ler!” the Zapheads chanted, before the name fell away into a
series of unintelligible grunts. The adult Zapheads appeared to have a
functioning memory span of mere seconds, while this awful child-thing displayed
a mature and hypersensitive awareness of the world around it.

DeVontay
couldn’t know what sort of senses the tiny mutant employed—the Zapheads had
always acted in concert, as if some hive mind operated somewhere deep inside
them, but if they were evolving and adapting, fine tuning the firing of their
synapses, maybe they’d developed some kind of telepathy or extrasensory
perception. DeVontay was neither a scientist nor a mystic, but he readily
admitted that the universe operated on far more complex wavelengths than he
could ever comprehend.

But
if the Zapheads already knew Rachel’s location, he had no hope of tricking
them. He wasn’t ready to accept they were smarter than he was.

“What
are you going to do with Rachel?” He would never have imagined himself talking
this way to an infant, but something about the fierce intelligence in those
wildly glimmering eyes made DeVontay feel like the child here. That chubby-cheeked
countenance was already imbued with a thousand years of knowledge and
experience.

“It’s
not what we’re going to do to Rachel,” the infant said. “It’s what she’s going
to do for us. All of us.”

“She’s
not one of you.”

“I
wouldn’t presume to know what she is if I were you.” The infant flashed a
toothless grin. “Although perhaps you can find out. Let us heal you.”

“I’m
not hurt,” DeVontay said, even though blood streamed down his face and soaked
his jacket, and his injured arm had slipped free of its sling and hung limp and
useless at his side.

“As
you wish. Rachel was our first, and that was an accident. We didn’t understand
at the time. Now we’ve learned.”

The
woman holding the baby shivered visibly, although the Zapheads seemed
impervious to the cold. Dusk had advanced as DeVontay confronted the mutant
infant and his bizarre tribe, and now he couldn’t see the rear ranks of
Zapheads except for their eyes. But he could sense them poised around him, the
air fraught with anticipation.

“What
if I leave now?” DeVontay said, knowing he shouldn’t have asked the question.
He should have acted instead, even if the odds were hopeless.