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

pack totaled perhaps eighty or a hundred, although he’d rarely seen more than a dozen of them at a time.
    That’s a lot of Zapheads for a rescue and recovery mission.
    The Zapheads around them fanned out, heading toward the center of town. Others came out of side streets and from behind abandoned trucks, walking in several different directions. Most were dressed in shabby, dirty clothing, although a few were nearly nude despite the December chill. It took DeVontay a moment to realize these Zapheads were heading toward him rather than toward the gunshots and screams.
    Then a figure darted from the shadowed side of a pawn shop, a gun barrel projecting from its profile. One of the Zapheads on the nearby street issued a chuckling ululation, and the sound was repeated by several dozen voices. The figure turned and leveled the weapon, squeezing off a short burst that stitched a line of red dots across the Zaphead’s torso. The gun’s report was thunderous on the silent streets, and DeVontay ducked behind an SUV, clutching the baby next to his pounding heart.
    “See why we have to kill you?” Willow said in her high, squeaky voice that made the words all the more horrible. “You make us do it, every time.”
    Another scattering of shots was followed by a cry of “Nooooooooooo” that ended in a scream.
    Willow gave a toothless grin, eyes burning like twin furnaces of hell. “Yes.”
    “Killing is a necessary evil, but you seem to get a kick out of it,” DeVontay whispered. He even went so far as to wrap one hand around the baby’s soft throat.
    One squeeze.
    It wouldn’t change anything, but it would wipe away that grin.
    “See?” Willow said, still smiling up with those wet pink gums. “This is why we have to kill you.”
    If he choked the breath out of this little mutant bitch, the Zapheads would swarm him.
    He’d never see Rachel again.
    He pulled his hand away as the man’s screamed faded. By the time DeVontay rose and looked over the hood of the SUV, the Zapheads were busy collecting the pieces of their victim.

CHAPTER SIX

    The school grounds teemed with agitated Zapheads.
    As a farmhand in Tennessee, Jorge once had to eradicate a nest of hornets that had taken up residence in the wall of a barn. He doused the knothole that served as the nest’s front door with a toxic concoction of gasoline and pesticides. The hornets erupted from the knothole and, although many of them immediately dropped to the dirt, enough filled the air to sting Jorge three times across his face and neck. But some of the hornets strayed far enough in their rage to sting horses a quarter of a mile away.
    These Zapheads seemed to exhibit the same brand of unfocused response. Along with Franklin, he’d learned the mutants wouldn’t attack unless provoked, although their enforced captivity was a different sort of violence. Now, though, the Zapheads lashed out at any human captives who fled screaming across the parking lot.
    Most horrifying, those who carried Zaphead infants still clung to their tiny charges like protective mothers. Jorge didn’t understand the psychological bonds that formed through the caretaking, but he suspected the process wasn’t entirely voluntary.
    And he wondered whether, if it came down to it, Rosa would choose the Zaphead baby she carried over her own flesh-and-blood daughter.
    He was going to avoid that choice, one way or another.
    “Which way’s best?” Danny asked, panting beside him as they hid behind a bus and scouted the chaos. The man’s years of smoking had diminished his lung capacity, a definite downside when you had to run for your life.
    Jorge wasn’t making a strategic analysis of the Zapheads’ numbers. He was looking for his family. “The shooting has stopped, so the soldiers have either retreated or died.”
    “Pitiful, ain’t it? The world’s mightiest military and this is the best they can do when push comes to shove.”
    “I’ve seen more. I mentioned that bunker in the