After: Red Scare (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 5) Read Online Free Page B

don’t you?”
    DeVontay hadn’t seen her since Sgt. Shipley’s military unit had attacked Franklin Wheeler’s compound, and he suspected she’d been captured by Zapheads just as he had been. But in her case, she was fighting some kind of infection or mutation that was turning her into one of them .
    He was half afraid of seeing her again, because if she was fully a Zaphead now, he couldn’t bear to look into those glittering eyes. Not with the feelings he had for her—human feelings that couldn’t be invested in a violent freak that would happily pluck his lone good eye from his skull and crush it like a grape.
    “Yes, I want to see Rachel,” he said. “Something you said on the mountain, after your other carrier died…how Rachel was some kind of experiment?”
    Willow held up a small hand. “Energetic meridians. Think of it like a high-voltage form of acupuncture. We change the flow of electromagnetic energy through the body and improve its functioning. Rachel Wheeler was one of our first attempts at repairing tissue damage, and we were unsure of the outcome.”
    “You say ‘we.’ Were you there at the farmhouse she told me about, where the Zuh…”—he was about say “Zapheads” but caught himself—“where the New People healed an infected dog bite?”
    “I was there in a way,” the baby said, cherubic smile hinting at mischief. DeVontay was pretty sure the baby was mimicking his own expressions and emotions, and occasionally the two didn’t match up. Willow might be grinning while angry, or giggling when DeVontay changed her diapers. She was learning rapidly, although the adult Zapheads exhibited little behavioral change besides a lessening of homicidal rage.
    “You read their minds, you mean?” DeVontay asked. He’d never believed in telepathy, remote viewing, or clairvoyance, although his Aunt Eloise claimed to have a sixth sense that allowed her to see ghosts. But the solar storms had delivered new phenomena that, although caused by physics, could easily be considered supernatural. After all, if you couldn’t measure it and make sense of it through rigorous scientific observation, wasn’t magic just as much a possibility as anything else?
    “We don’t read minds,” Willow said, in her cooing little voice. “We are one mind.”
    “Then why aren’t these others as smart as you?” DeVontay waved a hand at the surrounding Zapheads.
    “Because I’m newer.”
    DeVontay had gotten used to conversing with a baby whose intelligence level was equal to his own, and probably greater. He could almost forget the infant was a mutant, but those bizarre eyes served as constant reminders. And the creeping army around him could turn into feral killers with the slightest provocation. But he sensed they were nearing their destination from the way Willow wriggled enthusiastically in his arms.
    The narrow roads gave way to wider streets, the stalled cars more frequent. Through the bare trees, he could make out the distant white dome of a courthouse, a tattered flag flapping atop it. The shredded cloth with the faded colors could hardly be more symbolic of the United States, an ideological and political division that now seemed as lost to the past as Sodom and Gomorrah.
    More buildings came into view, commercial sites with large glass windows, a car wash, a bank, a two-story apartment complex. The houses crowded each other, telephone poles were thick with lines and signal lights, and billboards promised sharp-dressed lawyers, the best prices on pre-owned cars, and bacon double cheeseburgers that threatened to topple over due to excessive meat. The comfort of familiarity would have cheered DeVontay if not for the deep, sickening silence that permeated the scene.
    The silence was pierced by a gunshot in the distance.
    Willow tensed in his embrace. The Zapheads stirred with unease as if some hidden switch had been flipped.
    “Is that your people shooting?” DeVontay asked her.
    “No guns. We want to take