Bone And Cinder: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Zapheads Book 1) (16 page)

22.

“Who’s there?” Herrera bellowed.

The old man stumbled out of the shadowed edge of the forest, wheezing and reaching out with one filthy hand. His clothes were expensive but soiled and torn, and the few remaining hairs on his mostly naked pate danced at wild angles in the breeze.

“Zap,” Sayles shouted at Herrera, raising his weapon but hesitant to pull the trigger.  “Put him down.”

“No,” the old man croaked.  “I’m one of...a
human
.”

Herrera said, “Come sneaking up on me like that is not so smart.”

“I
told
you I heard something,” Kara said.

“They’re coming,” the old man said.  “Behind me.”

Mackie lowered Artiss to the ground, removed the knife with a wet
sloosh
.  Artiss pawed at Mackie’s face with limp fingers, desperately trying to suck air but only whistling.  Mackie raised the kitchen knife and punched it through Artiss’ chest again—one, two, three, four times.

By the second time, Artiss had gone completely still.  A sick tide rolled through Mackie, bringing a pleasure that he’d nearly forgotten.  Sure, he’d always told himself he only killed because he had to, but didn’t he really enjoy it?

Wasn’t the kick better than pills?

Better than sex?

Better than love?

A boot crashed into his side, jarring his ribs.

He fell from atop Artiss and—mindful of Sabbath in his backpack—shifted so that he landed on his left side rather than his back.

He was baking in the airless, blast-furnace heat wafting from the burning cottage, Artiss’ blood soaking his shirt.

“Nice job, asshole.”  Herrera stood over him.  “What was he talking about?”

“He cracked,” Mackie said, figuring it would end now.  But at least he’d shut up Artiss.  “Had this crazy scheme to get rid of Krider.”

“I’d kill you now, but I want Krider to hear this straight from your lips.”

“If we’re lucky enough to make it back to the student union.”

Herrera’s dark eyes narrowed. Kara, Meredith, and Jason moved closer to the crumbling cottage, to stay within the glow of the diminishing blaze.  Sayles helped the old man stagger to the rest of the group, none of them wanting to run into Zapheads in the dark.  McRae was gone, probably seizing the opportunity to save his own ass.

“How many Zaps?” Sayles asked the man.

The old man bent forward, his hands clamped to his knees.  “I tried...I tried to...keep them in...”

“Anybody gonna start making any sense around here?” Herrera shouted.  He gave the old man a shove and sent him crashing to his ass.  “Start talkin’,
abuelo
.”

It’s going to happen again
, Mackie thought as he tried to stand, the pain from Herrera’s boot searing his ribs. 
Just like Benny in the dining hall
.  And this old guy, Mackie had never even laid eyes on him before.  He looked like he’d been through the spin cycle of a cement mixer.

“I’m sorry,” the old man rasped.  “I tried...but the fire...they’re headed this way.”

“Everybody talkin’ in riddles up in here,” Herrera said.  “Time to cut some of the white noise.”

He dropped his rifle’s barrel down at an angle.  The bullets would shred the old man’s face and chest once Herrera squeezed the trigger.

Another distraction...just another few seconds when Herrera isn’t looking.  A chance to grab one of the guns on the ground and mow the piece of shit down...another kill, another high.  And this one will carry no moral shades of gray.

And the only cost is one old man’s life.

Mackie unshouldered the backpack, lowered it gently to the ground, and scooped up the fallen kitchen knife in the same motion.  He held the knife in front of him, tip forward, and charged Herrera.

Sayles called out a warning, but he made no move to stop Mackie.  Herrera swung his rifle in Mackie’s direction.

No chance he’d clear the distance before Herrera fired.

Stupid.

Not the way this was supposed to end.

Kara and Meredith shouted, and then a familiar voice rang out above the others.

Loud, commanding, infuriatingly familiar.

“Enough,” Krider said.  The raspy bark was authoritative enough to stop Mackie’s forward momentum and turn Herrera’s head.

He stood at the slope above the cottages, a 9mm pistol in one hand pointed at the ground.  The ribbons of fire painted his figure in shimmering bands of yellow, red, and black, and Mackie realized he’d been wrong in casting Herrera as Satan.  All others were no more than lesser demons in a land where Krider ruled.

There was a moment of deep silence, with only the muted cracking of the conflagration in the night.  The dark hills around them watched with wary eyes, ancient Appalachian stones waiting for the next cataclysm.

And then the blackness exploded around them, ebony silhouettes separating from deep shadows and shambling forward.

For a horrifying moment, Mackie thought that Krider had somehow
summoned
them, drawn the Zapheads from hell to do his bidding, a rabid, mindless army at his command.

But Krider swung his pistol and fired at a lean, glittering-eyed man ten feet to his left. The Zaphead’s skull burst like a rotten melon, and the gunshot propelled the others into action.

“Take ‘em out,” Herrera bellowed, releasing a burst from his automatic weapon. Half a dozen of the silent figures fell, but more emerged to take their place.

Mackie flung away his knife—he wasn’t planning on any hand-to-hand combat given these bad odds—and cast about for Artiss’ gun.  But Meredith already had it, and she fumbled with the mechanisms as if unfamiliar with its operations.

So much for U.S. military training.

A heavyset female landed on Jason’s back.  The kid screamed and flailed, but as husky as he was, there was too much weight bearing down on him, and just as both Mackie and Kara moved in to help, he stumbled sideways and toppled into the remnants of the burning cottage, the Zaphead still attached.

Jason and the Zaphead ricocheted from the flame-covered wall to the ground, ravaged timbers falling around them.  Fire jumped from the wood, blazed through the clothing Jason and the Zaphead wore, and traveled with them to the ground.

They became a shifting mass of flames and dark smoke, their hair sparking like Roman candles on the Fourth of the July.

Jason’s screams were pure animalistic torment, the pain and fire having wiped away any recognizable traces of the scared, lost, grieving sixteen-year-old Mackie had met in the woods.

The Zaphead, however, made no sounds.  Just continued to claw at that piece of skull she’d hooked into.

Kara let out a sick, agonized moan. She stood by herself, defenseless.

Herrera stopped firing long enough to watch the struggle.  There was amusement in his eyes, dancing with the flames reflected in them.

He had never seen Jason Hartsoe before, but seeing him burn was no more distressing than watching a television commercial with a gecko selling car insurance.

Jason was somehow still alive, his shrieks serving as musical score to the chaos around them.  Mackie’s heart twisted with each high note.  Somebody needed to put the kid out of his misery.

Good luck finding any human compassion in this bunch
.

Krider meticulously aimed and fired, sweeping the perimeter around him.  Herrera got busy again, as gleeful as a drunken redneck at a carnival shooting game, spraying the edge of the forest as if he were trimming trees.  Meredith had retreated with her weapon, on the far side of the cottage and away from the horror.  That left Sayles.

If Herrera had been entertained by Jason’s torment, Sayles was on the opposite end of the emotional wheel.  Yet he couldn’t look away, his eyes bright with the immolation of the cottage and the two roasting, wriggling masses of hot grease and bone.

And these are the people the government sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.  No wonder those wars never ended.

But those wars were kindergarten bratfests next to this Zaphead infestation.  This was the mother of all wars.

“Put him down,” Mackie yelled.

“I don’t...I can’t,” Sayles said, his voice raw from smoke and shock.

Mackie strode to him, reached for Sayles’ assault rifle.  The hot barrel of Krider’s 9mm pressed against his temple.

“Nope,” Krider said.  “Uh-Uh.”

Mackie and Krider shared a hard look.  Then something shifted in Krider’s features and he lowered the 9mm from Mackie’s temple.

Krider hurried over to the two burning bodies, shielding his face against the heat.  Jason still emitted animal sounds, but the screaming had turned to vapor.

He was somewhere beyond pain now, the flames having scorched his nerve endings to ash.

Krider fired a round into Jason’s skull.  The Zaphead was still alive, but barely moving, a low rattle vibrating in her throat.  Krider didn’t bother wasting a round on her.

“Satisfied?” Krider said to Mackie.

Herrera’s assault rifle fell silent, and he shouted, “All clear.”

“Get over here,” Krider ordered Meredith and Kara.

“Why didn’t you shoot?” Kara asked Meredith.

Meredith shook her head, and Mackie wondered if she’d been hoping the Zaps would take care of their Krider-and-Herrera problem.

Those demonic shits have nine lives, anyway.

That reminded Mackie of Sabbath, and he found her squirming and mewling inside the backpack.

“Better not be a gun in there,” Krider warned.

“You were lucky there weren’t more Zaps,” Mackie said.  “Next time you might need me.”

“I’m not sure I can trust you yet.”

Mackie gave an obvious and hard glance at Herrera, who was making a recon of the forest’s edge.  “Can you trust anybody?”

The reddish halo from the house fire had shrunk to a circle of around fifty yards, but the first light of dawn was seeping into the sky.  The little band closed ranks, peering into the forest for more Zapheads.  Bodies lay scattered in the weeds and shrubs, one gaunt woman tangled upright in a forsythia bush.  Doctors, lawyers, school kids, mothers, all their differences had zeroed out now.

A righteous massacre.

But how did Mackie know? He judged Zapheads through the lens of his own humanity, which was suspect at best. These mutants murdered without motive, and did that make them any worse than Mackie, who had killed with motives he’d bent to his own ends?

And if Zapheads were less than human, what did it say about his obsession with Allie, or the thing that Allie had become?

And then the second wave of Zapheads hit, as if the arrival of dawn had heralded their new era.

23.

“Better give me a weapon,” Mackie said to Krider.

“And get a bullet in the back?  How about this?  You get me out of this alive, and then we’ll talk deals.”

Mackie scooped up the kitchen knife and wiped Artiss’s blood on the leg of his trousers. “I’ll take my chances with the Zaps.”

These Zapheads were more discernible than the initial batch of attackers, as the morning sun pinked the high ridges to the east. Many were younger than those on campus, some of them pre-adolescents, their soundless approach made all the more creepy for it.  Their eyes glinted and they clawed the air in front of them as if wanting to tear apart the fabric of the world.

“Come on, Sayles,” Meredith shouted, aiming and firing, dropping a Zaphead on the lawn.  “Shoot.”

Sayles pointed his weapon at the swarm of Zapheads.  The barrel trembled as the man hesitated, likely overwhelmed by the horrifying tribe of silent, mutant children.  A teen girl with Asian features and stringy black hair reached him, pushing the muzzle out of her face and grabbing his throat.  Although she was barely half his size, she pulled him to the ground and pounded on him with her small fists.

Before Mackie could help him, a kid who couldn’t have been more than ten grabbed Mackie by the leg, nearly tripping him.  Teeth sank into his flesh just above his boot, and Mackie plunged the knife down into the mutant’s back.  The kid held on tight, warm blood soaking Mackie’s sock as he tried to kick free.

A shot rang out from nearby and the kid collapsed into a heap.  Meredith gave Mackie a nod, a thread of smoke curling from the tip of her rifle.

By the time Mackie stepped free of the warm corpse, Sayles was still and silent, his attacker’s hands clenched around his throat, the skin of his face a faint shade of blue.

“Get off him,” Mackie said, stomping the Asian’s spine.  Something cracked like a dry stick and the Zaphead’s legs went limp, but her hands maintained their tight grip.  By the time Mackie slit the mutant’s throat, Sayles was staring with bugged, glassy eyes at the heavens above.

You didn’t have what it takes to make it in After.  You were too human.

Around him shots rattled like popcorn, with Krider, Meredith, and Herrera knocking down Zapheads nearly as fast as they emerged from the forest.  The old man huddled sobbing on the ground, and a number of Zapheads walked past him down the slope.  They didn’t seem to be aware of him.

Several Zapheads circled around the right side of the cottage, closing in on Kara.  A few walked directly into the flames, the fire relishing the grease in their bodies.

But most of them were more interested in the humans surrounding the cottage than the flames that had drawn them from the woods.

A husky, balding male Zaphead crept up behind Meredith, dressed in a filthy blue mechanic’s uniform with a pocket label that said “Bobby.”  Mackie rushed over and sank the blade of his knife into the Zaphead’s left eyeball, applying sufficient force to puncture the brain.

Before he could remove the blade from the Bobby Zap’s skull, another was on him, clawing and biting.  This one was female, small and light, but her ferocity more than compensated for the height and weight disadvantage.  She moved like a mongoose, sleek and feral.

“Hold on!” Meredith swerved behind the Zaphead and wrapped her arms around its waist, attempting to pull it free from Mackie.  Twenty feet away, Kara struggled with a pair of Zapheads—two older females, one who looked disturbingly like her.

“I can handle this one.” Mackie elbowed his attacker in the nose, eliciting a moist crunch of cartilage.  “Help Kara.”

He should have taken her weapon but Krider was keeping a close eye on him.  At least she’d finally begun defending herself, unlike poor Sayles.  She dropped to one knee and squeezed off two shots, freeing Kara, who crawled toward a panel van parked in the street near the cottage.

The old man on the slope had finally earned some attention of his own from a pair of Zapheads—one a middle-aged male, the other a small female child—and he scurried from them down the slope on all fours. The activity sent the two Zapheads into attack mode, triggering whatever kill instincts they harbored in their mutated brains.

Several more Zapheads walked wide-eyed into the inferno of the burning cottage, as if they somehow knew peace and contentment was waiting for them on the other side of the flames.

So many of them.  Well over three dozen, at least.  Some older ones were among them now, probably townies from Pecks Mill.  A few carried heavy sticks they’d collected from the forest.  There was no coordinated attack on their part, just a raging focus on the humans that were mowing them down.

One moved toward Kara, and then it stopped, lifting its nose as if it had caught an appealing scent.

It turned toward Mackie’s backpack.

Sabbath.

Mackie ran over to the Zaphead and launched a kick into its solar plexus.  It landed hard on its back, and then Mackie was on it, his knee pinning it to the ground and his knife punching through its trachea.  This had been somebody’s son, brother, father...but now it was just a beast that needed to be taken down.

Kara was on her feet now, swinging wildly at the Zapheads chasing her.  The Zapheads responded to her aggression with hostility of their own and they swarmed her like fire ants on honey.

As she screamed, Meredith eyed down the barrel of her weapon, but taking a shot was too risky.

Mackie scooped up the backpack and swung his arms through the shoulder straps.  He raced to the mob tearing at Kara’s clothes and flesh and, with a series of fast, economical movements, drove the knife into the necks and backs of her attackers.

Krider’s training finally serves a purpose.

Kara crawled from the mass of writhing, dying bodies, blood soaking her torn clothing.  Mackie pulled her to her feet and checked her wounds.  Nothing fatal, but she needed some serious first aid.

“Glad you didn’t kill me now?” he asked.

“The jury’s still out.”

“Looks like Herrera and Krider are working their way back to the student union.”

“They’ve got it fortified now.  They could hold off a thousand Zapheads, as long as the ammo held out.”

“Meredith won’t leave us,” Mackie said.

“I wouldn’t count on it.  Her chances are better with Krider than us.”

Mackie eyed the tableau around them, a seemingly endless stream of Zapheads staggering out of the dark trees.  The fire found fresh fuel in the cottage, probably from an oil heater, and a pillar of smoke and flames billowed up with a
monstrous whoosh
.

“What’s the plan? Hole up in that van until this is over?”

“Without guns, we won’t make it anyway.”

He looked into her eyes and saw determination, fear, and defiance.  “You want to stick with Krider, too?  Knowing what they’ll do to you?”

“Beats getting ripped to shreds,” Kara said.

The old man crawled away from a few approaching Zapheads.  He was heading for the guns that Mackie had thrown out the cottage door earlier.  Herrera and Krider had retreated to a service road that led back to the main campus, Herrera spraying wildly but Krider being judicious with each shot.  Krider paused to change the clip in his handgun, neither of them paying much attention to Mackie now.

He’d have to beat the old man to the guns, but that shouldn’t be a problem.  The weapons were, however, dangerously close to the flames.

Still.  He’d never have a better opportunity.

Just before the old man reached the guns, three Zapheads swarmed him.  A child Zaphead tugged playfully at his pants leg while an adult hovered, trailing the old man’s movements in a way that suggested either predatory instinct or child-like curiosity.  Another mutant crawled on him, pulling a charred, steaming timber from the edge of the fire and striking the old man across the arm.

“Now!” Mackie shouted at Meredith.

She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded.

She lifted the assault rifle and aimed it at Krider.

The old man squealed in agony as the Zapheads tore at his face and hands.  Herrera turned just as the Zaphead with the timber brought it crashing down onto the old man’s skull, terminating his cries.  Herrera spied Meredith taking aim, and he touched Krider on the shoulder and pointed.

Mackie watched as Meredith slowly curled her finger around the trigger.

She has enough control over her emotions to resist the impulse to yank the trigger, which surely would’ve compromised her aim.

Her drill sergeant did good.

But instead of the sharp crack of gunpowder exploding, Mackie heard only a series of empty clicks.

No.

Meredith’s face fell.  She looked at the rifle in her hands as if she wasn’t quite sure what, exactly, she was holding.

Herrera smiled.  Krider’s face remained impassive.

Meredith cursed as Herrera lifted his rifle.  Mackie would take just as many rounds as Meredith.

Her mistake had just killed them both.

Though he would’ve made that same mistake himself if she hadn’t beaten him to it.

And then,
KU-WHOOOOSH.

A flaming metal cylinder exploded through the cottage roof and streaked into the sky like a rocket.

The hot water heater.

Mackie had heard of them over-pressurizing and shooting skyward, punching through floors and roofs.

Just one more absurdity to add to the long string of them he’d experienced in After.

The heater continued sailing higher...higher...like a rocket until its upward momentum ceased, and it began plummeting back toward the cottage.

Herrera cried out, “Shit!”, and he and Krider ran away from the cottage, but they made it only a short distance before the heater crashed back through the ceiling.  There was a loud
whump,
followed immediately by the sound of shattering glass.

Frayed ropes of flames showered outward from the cottage.