Earth Zero: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 2) (5 page)

“Neither was fighting monsters and mutants. At midnight, get Tidewater to relieve you, post Andrews at the entrance, and stand down for some sleep.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

The captain hurried back to the telecom room, eager to get resolution on his next move. It was unoccupied, and Colleen had yet to sneak her bedding into the room. Antonelli studied the monitors, where dusk had settled on the landscape. Aside from the flickering of the aurora that made the forest seem to teem with movement, all was still.

Then he noticed the radio on the metal table. The little red power indicator was dark. He turned the unit around and saw the rear plate had been removed, and several circuits and fuses were missing. Wires protruded in a chaotic snarl. Someone had sabotaged it beyond repair.

Colleen.

CHAPTER SIX

“Maybe we shouldn’t be traveling at night,” Stephen said.

“It’s never really night when you have auroras,” Franklin said. “I like to think of it as an acidhead’s carnival.”

“What’s an acidhead?”

“I forget, the Sixties are like ancient history to you, and civilization blinked out before you received your proper cultural education. Let’s just say dropping acid made a lot of hippies think they were Zaps.”

Tonight the aurora was comprised of shimmering bands of lime and magenta as charged particles skated the atmosphere and formed wispy ghosts in the sky. Nests of white stars were visible beyond the veil, a hopeful sign that the universe kept on with its business despite what had happened to one particular planet in an unremarkable solar system. The land was suffused with a soft glow, and a low mist hung over the ground, adding to the magical tableau. If not for the deadly creatures lurking in the haze, this could have been a pleasant autumn nature hike.

They were eight miles from the bunker, walking a wooded path that wound through what had once been national park land along the Blue Ridge Parkway. They could’ve veered onto a gravel road lined with farms and abandoned houses, but the forest offered more concealment despite the possibility of predators. Neither of them was worried about Zaps. Despite the bird attack, Zaps had shown little interest in them until the Marines had landed.

Stephen, who usually blabbered on about everything from comic books to his big dreams of building an underground city, had been unusually quiet for the last mile or so, doing a poor job of scanning their surroundings for trouble.

“You thinking about Marina?” Franklin asked.

“No, why?” the boy answered, so swiftly that Franklin knew he’d hit the mark.

“You’ve spent a lot of time with her since you moved to the bunker.”

“I didn’t like leaving her, but she shouldn’t be out here where it’s dangerous.”

Franklin knew that was bullshit. Marina was a better shot than Stephen, had nearly as much physical endurance, and like anyone who’d survived this long, harbored a toughness and resiliency that was up to any challenge. “I don’t exactly trust this new government, but the captain has no reason to hurt her.”

“Kokona’s a different story, though.”

Franklin wasn’t sure how the boy felt about the mutant. Rachel was the glue that held their oddball family together, and Rachel had a bond with Kokona that surpassed human understanding. Franklin had doubts about the little Zap’s intentions. But he deferred to Rachel’s experience and intuition. Maybe when it came to Zaps, it took one to know one.

But Stephen had been with Rachel and DeVontay since shortly after the solar storms and had survived many challenges with them. No doubt his perspective was different from Franklin’s. Franklin could afford to be cynical; he’d had six decades of practice.

“The captain might do something, but it’s not our place to intervene,” Franklin said. “Whoever’s giving him orders—and I believe him when he says there’s still a functioning government—probably knows a whole lot more about the overall situation than we do.”

They came to a rocky promontory that offered a breathtaking view of the valley below. The river wound through it like a radioactive snake, its surface glittering with foam and reflected aurora. Overgrown pastures broke the uniform rows of trees, and here and there two-story houses and barns were visible, their tin roofs glinting under the sky. A mere five years ago, electric lights would have dotted the landscape with just enough density to impart a homey sense of comfort without seeming an unnatural intrusion.

Seems like a million years ago. If we ever have scientists again, I wonder what they will call this era.

“That doesn’t sound like you, Franklin,” Stephen said. “All that libertarian horseshit you shovel, I would think you’d see Kokona deserves the right to live as free as any of us. Come to think of it, why don’t Zaps have rights and liberties?”

“Because when you’re an illegal immigrant, you don’t get to make the rules,” Franklin said, annoyed at having his personal beliefs turned around on him. “They crashed the party and pissed in the punch bowl.”

“So you don’t think there’s any chance for a peaceful coexistence? We’ve been out of contact with them for so long, we have no idea what they’re like now. If they’re still evolving as fast as they were, they might have some new ideas on the rights of the individual.”

“All that ‘one mind’ stuff sounds like communism to me. Kokona always says ‘we’ like they’re all one organism. That’s hardly a celebration of individualism. That’s just a different kind of chains. Let’s get moving before you give me a headache.”

Stephen chuckled, and Franklin realized the boy had successfully shifted the conversation away from Marina. Which said plenty.

“We should reach Stonewall by morning if we make good time,” Franklin said.

“What if they’re not there?”

“Then we keep looking.”

The path led into a stand of poplar whose thinning canopy allowed the electric sky to cast dappled patterns on the carpet of leaves beneath their feet.

“You hear that?” Stephen whispered, swinging his rifle from his shoulder.

Franklin figured the boy’s hearing was far better than his own, but Stephen was also imaginative. A rustle of leaves might sound like the approaching steps of a prehistoric monster. Or maybe it wasn’t imagination, and there really was a monster.

“Which way?” Franklin whispered back.

Stephen pointed his weapon uphill to his left. Franklin peered into the stippled lines of gray and brown tree trunks, scanning for movement. They could retreat to the rocks and have more range if anything came out of the woods, but they’d also be cornered, with no retreat besides a hundred-foot drop into whatever the valley offered. Franklin waved Stephen downhill, and they made swift but stealthy tracks away from the sound.

Franklin didn’t hear much above his own heartbeat, and he spent most of the next few minutes twisting his neck to glance over his shoulder. He was thus occupied when he slammed into Stephen’s back, nearly discharging his M16.

“What?” Franklin asked.

“That,” Stephen said.

Franklin couldn’t tell what “that” was. Its bulky shape blocked the path ahead, as thick as a cow. Two stubs of horns protruded from the top of the silhouette, the head blunt and nearly square. Its odor was like wet fur and fish, underscored with a sour musk that must have been the creature’s spoor. Even though he couldn’t discern its features—a fact for which he was grateful—he figured if he aimed just above the middle of it he’d hit the heart.

But a shot would undoubtedly draw more predators. These monsters had no fear of humans. They’d begun appearing a couple of years after the storms, first as just little oddities like salamanders with teeth or birds twice as large as normal. But soon wholly new creatures walked the land, ones whose blueprints didn’t seem stamped by the eons of evolution.

The creature stood on four legs about fifty yards ahead, neck bent low as if grazing. The size of its upper body suggested it was slow. They could probably outrun it. But that wasn’t the kind of bet you wanted to make in the middle of an apocalyptic wilderness.

“Do it,” Stephen whispered.

If there was just one creature, it would be better to outmaneuver it if possible. Franklin wasn’t familiar with the terrain here on the lower slopes of the Blue Ridge, since he rarely made supply runs and preferred to raise his own food. The trees were slender and widely spaced, as if the roots had difficulty finding purchase in the rocky soil.

If they could make it to denser underbrush, the creature wouldn’t be able to follow. Stephen’s eagerness to take the fast way out showed a lack of experience that might get them both killed. Franklin didn’t have time to explain his strategy, so he just lowered his rifle a little and jerked his head to the side to indicate they should leave the path.

Maybe it hasn’t even seen us yet.

Stephen’s face puckered in defiance and he lifted his own weapon and aimed at the thing. Franklin let out a hiss of anger and pushed Stephen’s gun barrel. They struggled for a second, Franklin losing his balance and bumping into the boy. Stephen stepped backward and a branch snapped with a piercing, brittle sound. They both froze and gazed at the creature.

Oh, shit.

The creature lifted its head, the aurora pooling in its eyes and casting them as luminescent marbles. But that wasn’t the worst part. Two more sets of eyes came out of the trees behind it, the creatures sporting jagged racks of bone atop their heads. Franklin realized these things had once been deer, or at least had borrowed some of the genetic code of the ruminant mammals. He’d hunted deer for meat plenty of times, but now it looked like they were the hunters instead of the prey.

This time Franklin didn’t hesitate, because there was only one real strategy. He squeezed the trigger, popping off a series of short bursts. The one on the path reared and issued a squeal, kicking at the air with its front hooves. Two dark dots glistened moistly along its flank, but it didn’t drop.

The two other deviant deer-things lowered their antlers and charged, snorting and crashing through the brush. Stephen fired, but his aim was about as bad as Franklin’s. After half a dozen ineffective shots, he turned and dashed in the direction Franklin had originally indicated.

Franklin stood his ground and waited for the creatures to come fully into the light of the path. They were barely twenty yards away when Franklin heard a muted thunder. Then he saw them—a whole herd, pouring from the forest and thundering up the slope toward him, the forest alive with their movement.

He fled after Stephen, expecting to feel the sharp stab of those antlers in his spine at any second. His theory had been right—the vegetation slowed the predators a little, but they simply bulled their way through when grace failed. He lost sight of Stephen when he stumbled over a root and slammed against a charred oak trunk, nearly dropping his rifle. The deer surged toward him, the formerly peaceful night now awash with the destruction of their stampede.

Franklin was out of breath, his heart slamming against his rib cage as branches slapped at his face. Turning and firing would be useless, since he only had half a magazine left. Even if he made every shot count—a big if—they would stomp and gouge and gnaw him into human sausage. His only chance was the stupid plan he’d been so sure about only a minute before.

When you bet your life, you better make damn sure the odds are in your favor.

He dashed between two looming pillars of granite that jutted from the earth. He dared a glance behind him. His pursuers ascended a wide gulley where the trees were thinner, dark shapes rocking back and forth as their legs churned, mud and debris flying from their monstrous hooves.

Stephen shouted somewhere ahead of him, the sound quickly pushed away by the crashing of underbrush and the rattle of dry leaves as the wind shifted. Behind it was a low hiss of white noise that seemed to grow louder as Franklin ran. He thought it was his pulse rising, or his own breath boiling from his lungs, but as the ground grew rockier and soggier he recognized the sound as running water.

Franklin staggered through some low branches that clawed at his face. One of them tangled in his beard and yanked him off his feet, and he hung there for a moment, neck muscles screaming in pain. He regained his footing and jerked his beard with one hand, tearing away gray hair and twigs. One of the predators clattered up the face of a boulder behind him and Franklin turned toward it.

The deer-creature stood outlined against the hazy psychedelic sky, its eight-point horns jabbing the heavens. Its knobby forelegs led up to muscular thighs that clenched with rage. Its eyes glowed with a malevolence that seemed to draw on all the earth’s anger for human transgressions against nature, from poison to pollution to merciless extinction. Here was hell made whole, an organic fabrication of God’s secret nightmares.

Franklin had a clear shot at it, but he was paralyzed more by awe than fear. The stag’s hooves clicked against granite and a plume of moist fog tumbled from its flaring nostrils. The rubbery lips peeled back to reveal teeth far sharper than those needed for browsing leaves and grass. Then it leapt from its perch and sailed toward him like an avenging angel.

Franklin threw his elbow over his face and shoved his way into the underbrush, the wash of whitewater rising to a roar. Kicking at vines that threatened to peel his boots from his feet, he burst into a clearing to find Stephen looking over a precipice.

“I thought you were dead,” Stephen said.

“There’s still time for that,” Franklin said, sucking oxygen and crouching on shaky knees.

They were on a rocky outcropping that gave way to a churning waterway forty feet below. The force of the falls caused the rock to vibrate. The riverbed was far too wide to hurdle. To their left was a slippery, steep climb that promised certain death. To their right was a thicket of doghobble, sumac vines, and rhododendron that would snare them like flies on a spider’s web.

And behind them galloped the deer from hell.

Franklin peered over the ledge again. The current sluiced past them in white torrents, bottoming out in a dark, rippling pool whose depth was unfathomable from their vantage point.