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

the field. Although they were too far away to make identifications, he didn’t see anyone whose clothing matched Rosa’s or Marina’s.
    Then he spotted a line of figures moving along the street to the rear of the stadium. They didn’t walk with the stilted gait of the Zapheads, and one of them was child-sized. They were shaded in the late-afternoon sunlight, so he couldn’t make out any colors or distinguishing details, but he knew they were people.
    Real people, not New People.
    “Where you going?” Danny called after him.
    “To live free or die. Good luck”

CHAPTER SEVEN

    The tumbling tower of smoke in the distance served as a beacon for Franklin Wheeler.
    Newton was burning, and if the little town housed nothing but Zapheads, this would be a fine day in paradise. Unfortunately, he suspected some of his missing people were stuck in that particular patch of hell. He sighed, checked the magazine of his AR-15, and headed through the woods toward it.
    Only a few days ago, he was feeling pretty good about things, considering solar flares had wiped away the government, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and its leeching bunch of bankers, and the assholes in the mainstream media that polluted the brains of all those idiots too dumb to turn off their televisions. Sure, the geomagnetic storms had knocked out the power and most of the world’s electronics, but that wasn’t too surprising. The dumbasses in Congress had sat on a report warning about the dangers of electromagnetic pulses for over a decade, and even though the biggest fear was a warhead detonated in the atmosphere, the sun was a massive ticking time bomb that held ten million nuclear warheads.
    It was never a question of when . It was always if , and Franklin had been prepared.
    His remote compound in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina was fully equipped for this day. A garden, goats, a fresh water supply, solar panels, a storage system of batteries that was shielded against EMP, and a small cabin with a woodstove. He even had a shielded ham radio that was probably one of the only remaining forms of long-distance communication in the world, but the few people he’d made contact with in the early days of After had since gone dark.
    Seems the whole damned world is dark now. Even when the sun’s out.
    Because none of the scientific models had predicted Zapheads.
    In typical wasteful fashion, the government developed scenarios based on an imaginary zombie outbreak. But those responses were built on the expectation that zombies would eat human flesh and that the military would have its complete arsenal on hand. And nobody took them seriously, anyway. That was all comic-book bullshit.
    Besides, zombies were presumed to carry the remnants of humanity inside them. Zapheads were like humans with all the soul and feeling burned out of them, their intelligence jumbled as if all the wiring inside their skulls had melted together into one big mess of madness. They started as violent killers, rampaging through the cities and killing off what few survivors remained, but now they were something even worse—evolving and adapting creatures that applied cold logic to the planet’s hierarchy.
    Solitude had been part of the plan all along, but then Jorge Jiminez and his family wandered up through the woods, and the little compound had gotten crowded. Things took a turn for the worse when they rescued a young mother and then discovered her little baby had turned into one of the Zapheads. Jorge and Franklin had been captured by that wacko fascist Sgt. Shipley, but they had managed to escape. Jorge set off in search of his missing family while Franklin returned to the compound.
    He was prepared to spend the winter alone when, nearly four months after the end of the world, along came his granddaughter Rachel. He’d built the compound with her in mind, and she was one of the only people in the world who knew its location. But he realized something was off when he’d seen