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

had scarcely moved since being deposited against the hood of the car, and shoved him forward. The scrawny soldier lit a cigarette and hurried after them. Campbell let them gain another fifty yards before he surreptitiously followed.
    Dusk was settling against the foothills, shrouding the autumn canopy, when the soldiers left the highway and headed down a country lane. The vehicles had thinned out quite a bit by the time Campbell reached the detour. Fortunately, the forest was thick here, pines mixed with scrub locust and crabapple, as if the land had been farmed a generation ago and let back to nature.
    A single-wide mobile home was perched just beside the lane, two ragged flags—the Confederate Stars and Bars above the Stars and Stripes—hanging from a pole by the front door. A junker hot rod sat in the front yard, its hood removed and the engine suspended from a chain wrapped around a wooden crossbeam. A kiddie-sized swimming pool contained a black soup of fallen leaves. The narrow yard was salted with trash, plastic bags and fast-food wrappers. Most of the old world’s packaging had outlasted the items contained inside, as well as the people who had once done the consuming.
    The soldiers stopped near the trailer, and Campbell wondered if this was their camp. He’d expected more of them, a unit like the one outside Charlotte, but maybe these were the last survivors here. He saw no reason why military personnel would have better mathematical odds of surviving the solar storms than civilians.
    Unless, as Crewcut had hinted, there was more going on than met the eye.
    Campbell waited, crouched in the dark forest, waiting for them to continue. The blindfolded prisoner stiffened and jerked, nearly breaking free of Crewcut’s grip. The scrawny soldier was quick to drive the butt of his rifle into the prisoner’s back.
    “Easy there, Zapper,” he said with a grunt. The prisoner still twitched with sudden agitation, tugging against his bonds.
    “Hear that?” Crewcut said.
    The scrawny soldier stood silent a moment and then shook his head. “Nope.”
    “The thing that’s not right.”
    Sounds like night to me.”
    Campbell strained his ears, wondering if Crewcut had heard a barking dog, shouts for help, or maybe a distant scream.
    “Listen beyond the noise,” Crewcut said.
    “What are you, some kind of Zen master all of a sudden?” But the soldier grew quiet again, and this time Campbell heard it, too.
    What he’d taken for insects was actually something else. Sure, there were crickets and night birds and flickering winged things, but also a different type of sound. It was odd but disturbingly familiar, and then Campbell remembered the Zaphead woman that had jumped from the back of a van and attacked him and Pete. He’d had to crush her skull, sickened by her resemblance to his mother.
    Now he heard that same chuckling, only it wasn’t from just a single throat; it sounded like it issued forth from a dozen or more.
    The two soldiers pointed their guns before them and spun in slow circles, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. But it was coming from all around them.
    “What is it?” the scrawny soldier said, his voice cracking a little in a nervousness he couldn’t fully suppress.
    “Nobody knows nothing.” Crewcut sounded calm, although he clacked a mechanism on his assault weapon. The prisoner now stood silently, head tilted back as if listening.
    A twig snapped somewhere to Campbell’s left. He hoped the soldiers didn’t panic and open fire. He slumped a little lower into the weeds, sliding his pistol from his backpack.
    The chuckling sound rose in pitch, a keening vibration that pierced the forest air. The contrast made Campbell realize just how deep the silence of the post-Doomsday world was—he had become accustomed to the absence of car engines, radio broadcasts, chainsaws, and police sirens. Now this sudden disruption of peace was almost shocking. He echoed Crewcut’s catch phrase: “Nobody