Read Online After: Red Scare (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 5) by Scott Nicholson - Free Book Online

in the trees beyond the creek, but he kept walking.
    “We won’t defeat the Zapheads through brute force. We’ll have to outsmart them.” Brock stopped where the walking path intersected a street. A pile-up of vehicles blocked the road. But something was off about the massive collision. For one thing, why would that many cars travel a side road like this at one time?
    Then Franklin realized the cars hadn’t smashed into each other at high speeds—they’d been rolled into place and arranged. The effort must have taken many hands and many hours.
    “What’s all this?” Franklin asked.
    “You know they collect bodies, right?” Sierra said.
    “Sure.” Franklin hoped they weren’t going to use him as bait.
    “They filled up the football stadium at the high school with them,” Brock said. “Propped them up like spectators, as if the Zapheads had some kind of crowd memory.”
    Franklin supposed there would be plenty more dead folks around before it was all over. They could fill the schools, the churches, and the shopping malls, everybody posed like they were going about their business as usual. In a way, nothing would change—zombies watching zombies rot away.
    “What do you think they’re going to do with all of them?” Sierra asked. He wondered if she knew what “rhetorical” meant.
    “Just guessing,” Franklin said, “I’d say they want their own Super Bowl. After all, that game, or maybe just the commercials, was the peak of Western civilization.”
    Brock sat on a fence post and propped his gun in the crook of his elbow, barrel up, as if he were posing for the cover of Soldier of Fortune magazine. “One of our people was captured by the Zaps. She escaped and made it back to camp. Said it was the babies that are running things. The fucking little rug rats.”
    Franklin recalled Cathy’s mutant baby and how he’d considered killing it while they were at his mountain compound. In the end, the thing had looked innocent, a victim of circumstance as much as any of them. And when its eyes were closed, you could hardly tell it from a human baby. Cathy’s motherly love had blinded her to the infant’s strangeness.
    But nothing about the infant had suggested intelligence or power.
    Of course, Rachel was in the same boat. She’d sought out the Zapheads because of her own mutation, driven by misguided compassion and a belief that she could help resolve the conflict between the two tribes. And, like a fool, Franklin had just let her walk right out.
    “I don’t get it,” Franklin said. “The Zapheads I’ve seen will kill and maim and destroy, but if you leave them alone, they practically slip into hibernation. It almost seems like we’d be better off ignoring them and just building a new society, relearning how to generate electricity and grow food and set up fair rules we can all live by.”
    “The babies are evolving much faster than the others,” Sierra said. “The theory is the wiring in their brains is agile and still forming connections, so the mutation is exponentially affecting them. Our source said there were maybe two dozen of them, and the Zaps captured a group of humans to teach them.”
    “That’s creepy as hell,” Franklin said. For the first time since Doomsday, he ached for a drink of liquor.
    A drink, hell. A quart bottle might do the job.
    “They’re using the high school as their base,” Brock said. “And from what she told us, the babies don’t want to kill us.”
    “Well, that’s mighty comforting,” Franklin said, glancing at the deepening bruise of sundown. “Guess we can all head back to our homes and warm beds now. Party’s over.”
    A spatter of gunfire came from up the road, maybe half a mile away. If Shipley’s soldiers were in retreat, they could be headed this way. Franklin didn’t want to be anywhere within bullet range of those psycho cowboys.
    “They don’t want to kill us,” Sierra repeated, leaning against a tree and resting Franklin’s rifle