After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

would have been fine letting them all eat out of cans, but Rachel insisted on the routine of dinnerware.
    “I’ll ask him when we find him,” she said, and DeVontay shook his head again, this time with a frown instead of a smirk. “Until then—”
    “O- kaaaay ,” Stephen said impatiently. “Wicked Witch of the West. Jeez.”
    Rachel let out a cackle that reverberated in the cavity of the wrecked plane. “ Hee hee hee hee . I’ll get you and your little dog, too !” She returned to her normal voice. “But you’re still going to clean your plate.”
    Stephen poured some bottled water on his plate and started to wipe it with his shirt sleeve. Rachel didn’t even have to say anything. A scowl did the job. He dragged a T-shirt from the open suitcase beside him, wiped the dish carefully, and tossed the T-shirt back onto the pile.
    DeVontay wiped his pocketknife on his trouser leg without comment and gazed through the plane’s window. Half of the windshield was missing, cool evening air funneling through from the gash where the nose had broken lose from the fuselage. Much of the instrument panel was intact, the radio handset dangling from its taut coil of cord. One of the pilot seats was missing, and DeVontay had taken the other one, building a fire with the help of tiny bottles of Scotch he’d plundered from the shattered galley. He twisted the cap from one and poured half the contents on the fire, and the flames turned blue and oily.
    Rachel hadn’t asked about the bodies he’d encountered. She only knew that there must have been dozens. Even if the plane had tossed them like popcorn during the crash landing, surely a number of them must have followed the final instructions and buckled in. DeVontay was numb to it now, death just another traveling companion on the road to After. Rachel wasn’t sure if his grim equanimity was a necessary survival mechanism or yet more proof that any structure she imposed was just a sham.
    She eyed the encroaching darkness that seemed to seep from the edge of the forest like a watery predator. “Are we safe here?” she asked, hating herself for saying it in front of the boy.
    “Safe as anywhere.” DeVontay’s rifle was leaning behind him against the skewed wall of the pilot’s cabin. “We haven’t seen any Zappers for days.”
    It was true. They hadn’t seen any survivors, either, and Rachel wondered if the solar storms had left lingering damage that upped the body count even weeks later. Right now the three of them could be changing, the microscopic synapses in their brains melting like burnt fuses, their impulse signals falling into darkness.
    How would you know? Rachel wondered. One minute you’re walking and the next you’re walking braindead.
    Stephen rubbed his eyes, red both from smoke and sleepiness. Rachel spread a plush brown jacket on the collapsed floor of the cabin and smoothed it. “We’ve put in some miles today,” she said to him. “Why don’t you hit the hay?”
    Stephen opened his mouth to protest but yawned instead. “How much farther?”
    “A long way,” DeVontay said. “But we’re closer now than we were this morning.”
    Rachel understood the response on a metaphorical level. They might not have a bigger purpose—and she certainly didn’t, not since turning her back on the Lord that had seen her through easier times—but Rachel had convinced them that her grandfather’s mountain compound was the only desirable destination. Stephen believed they would leave from there and go on to find his father in Mississippi, but Rachel couldn’t see past the next day’s walk.
    What happens after After?
    “You’ll like the mountains,” she said, helping Stephen swaddle into the makeshift bedding.
    “Sing me to sleep?” he said, drowsily, exhaustion seeming to hit him all at once.
    DeVontay sensed their need for an intimate moment and retrieved his rifle. “I’ll go take a look around.”
    He ducked through the jagged opening where the nose