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

your guns away. We don’t want to kill you. We want to correct you.”
    “But you took them in the mountains and used them against the soldiers.”
    “An eye for an eye,” she said, staring at the wrinkled and withered flesh of his empty socket, from where his glass prosthetic had fallen in the forest.
    “So you’ve discovered humor.”
    “Only black comedy. I have no grasp of satire yet.”
    Her vocabulary has grown so much in two days. Like she’s learning words from Zapheads who aren’t here.
    But her command of grammar wasn’t as disturbing as her arrogance. Could it even be called arrogance if it was wholly innocent? Willow wasn’t passing judgment. She was sharing facts as she knew them.
    Perhaps Willow and her kind weren’t so intelligent after all, if they presumed humans needed correction. Even if humans did, they wouldn’t tolerate being told so, much less endure it without a fight.
    “If you’re not shooting them, then someone’s killing your kind,” DeVontay said, not sure whether he should be glad or not. Rachel might get caught in the crossfire.
    He might, as well. When people were Zaphead-hunting, standing in a crowd of Zapheads probably wasn’t the best deal.
    Willow shook her head, eyes sparking with mirth. “Death is an inconvenience. But we’ll learn how to repair it soon.”
    “Like you repaired Rachel? By making all of us like you?”
    “Do you have something better to be?” The baby didn’t understand his anger. “We only kill when we must. You kill because you can.”
    “I seem to recall your kind doing a hell of a lot of killing only a few months ago. And those dead soldiers you’re hauling around might have a different opinion, too.”
    The shots became more frequent, but they were clearly not from a major assault. DeVontay guessed they were the handiwork of a few gunmen at best.
    “We came for Rachel,” Willow said. “We didn’t seek conflict.”
    “You didn’t turn away from it, either. You’re no better than us.”
    Willow pouted. “Would you heal us if you had the chance? Would you collect our dead?”
    DeVontay fought an urge to drop the baby onto the asphalt and grind a boot into its skull until it stopped squeaking. “How come you use human carriers, then? These zombie-brained relatives of yours don’t know how to care for you, right? Haven’t you taught them to change diapers and wipe your ass and give you their breasts? Or is it because they just don’t care, when you get right down to it? They walk and breathe and kill and collect, but they are just going through the motions. There’s no purpose to any of it.”
    “Maybe not yet. We have faith that there will be a purpose one day.”
    DeVontay snorted in derision. “Faith? What could you possibly believe in that you can’t see?”
    The baby wriggled in his arms, grunting a little, and DeVontay realized he was squeezing the infant a little too tightly. But he had a hard time thinking of her as a person now. This was a machine. Sure, it wore flesh and had the warmth of pumping blood, but her words and emotions were borrowed things.
    Stolen things. Stolen from human beings, just as they were stealing the world, bit by bit.
    A scream echoed across the concrete in the distance, somewhere near the courthouse.
    Zapheads don’t scream.
    “Did you bring other humans here?” DeVontay asked Willow, wondering whether she was capable of lying.
    “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” she said in a lilting, sing-songy voice.
    Of course they did. Why do you think you’d be the only one? How many Zaphead babies must there be?
    DeVontay grew more excited and increased his pace, despite the nearness of the gunshots. If he could find Rachel and meet up with some other survivors, they could form a plan that—
    “Come now come fast,” Willow called out to the other Zapheads, and the chant worked its way from one to another until it passed out of DeVontay’s hearing. He guessed the