Free After: The Echo (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 2) by Scott Nicholson Page A

and she wondered how much he’d seen.
    She hurried back to him. “Come on, we have to pack.”
    “Where’s DeVontay going?”
    “Looking for a better camping place.”
    “In the dark?”
    The boy was smart. And intelligence was a critical survival trait. Rachel didn’t know what the future held, but Stephen was part of it. Her desire to protect him was maybe nothing more than vanity. He was tough, or he wouldn’t have made it this far.
    “He’s trying to get the Zapheads to follow him.”
    “So we can get away?”
    “Yeah. So get packed. Hurry.”
    Rachel shoved some cans of food into her backpack, making sure she had water, the lighter, the map, and the hatchet. She checked a side pouch to make sure the two clips of ammo were there. The pistol was useless at long range, and despite DeVontay’s patient teaching, she still wasn’t much of a shot. But in close quarters, the gun would be better than the hatchet, especially if several Zapheads attacked at once.
    But she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Not that she put much stock in “hope” these days.
    “Got everything?” she asked, as Stephen pulled on his tennis shoes.
    “I don’t got nothing,” he said. He was even starting to talk like DeVontay.
    By the time they were crouched at the edge of the wreckage, sporting their jackets and backpacks—Stephen wearing his frayed Carolina Panthers cap—the first gleam of dawn touched the eastern sky with pink and orange, muting the aurora. Mist hung between the trees, hiding anything that might have moved among them. The water on the dying leaves made the autumnal canopy sparkle like a king’s ransom of gold and rubies.
    “Are we going to wait for DeVontay?” Stephen asked.
    “He wants us to go on.”
    They’d heard no shots or cries of alarm, which probably meant that DeVontay had not yet encountered the Zapheads. But they could be following him, as he’d planned. Rachel couldn’t begin to guess the motives of the mutants—after all, why hadn’t they attacked in the night, when the three of them were surrounded?
    “The highway’s over there,” Rachel said, pointed to the northwest where U.S. 321 wound inexorably up into the mountains. She then realized that DeVontay no longer had a map. Even if he escaped, he might never find his way to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
    She couldn’t help one more little white lie. “DeVontay will meet up with us there once he’s sure the Zapheads are gone.”
    “Won’t he get lost in the woods?”
    “Nah. He’s pretty smart for a city boy.”
    “Do you like him?”
    “Sure. He helped save our lives.”
    “Is that why you kissed him?” Stephen’s face was so earnest that Rachel almost grinned.
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t get any cooties.”
    “Are you guys going to get married?”
    “I don’t see any churches around here, do you?”
    Stephen shook his head. “Just woods. And dead people.”
    Rachel glanced at the crumpled body of the plane where many had lost their lives. Their horror had been brief—a few minutes from loss of power at 20,000 feet until devastating impact with the ground. While Stephen’s horror continued, a minute at a time, an uncertain day at a time, lost in the ashes of what civilization had once been.
    She took his hand. “Come on. DeVontay’s waiting.”
    They walked into the mist, Rachel carrying the pistol in one hand, the other gripping Stephen’s. She felt like an intruder in the forest. This place belonged to the beasts again.
    Her kind didn’t belong here.
    Her kind had its day under the sun, and now the new kind held sway.
    But until she was gone, this world would have to make room for her. She demanded it. She’d abdicated God’s will, and now all she had left was self-will.
    It would do.
    She squeezed the pistol’s grip more tightly, savoring its potency.
    Yes, it would do.

 
     
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    “Tracks,” Franklin said.
    He pointed off the forest trail where a thin stream trickled between