After: Dying Light by Scott Nicholson

eyes, although the lid of the prosthetic one didn’t fully shut, giving him a sly, sinister aspect. He exhaled heavily. “We take the baby. And get Stephen back. Other than that, you can kill as many as you want.”
    As if it matters. Unless we kill them all, including the baby.
    “Okay,” Franklin said. “It’s worth a shot. And if the baby won’t help us, it’s dead. I don’t suppose it has the power to bring itself back from the dead.”
    “The other eight didn’t.”
    “What do you think, Jorge?” Franklin scanned the room behind DeVontay, realizing the Mexican hadn’t spoken in a while. “Jorge?”
    DeVontay pointed out the window, where a man’s silhouette slipped down the street, the thin stick of his rifle barrel pointed at the sky. He was headed toward the school.
    “Damn,” Franklin said, grabbing his backpack and shrugging his arms through the straps. “So much for making plans.”
    DeVontay collected the rifle with the scope, grunting in pain as he stood.
    “You going to make it, or do I have to carry you?” Franklin asked.
    “I’ll get along fine. Anything besides having to smell your old-man body odor.”
    Franklin led the way as they headed out of the room and down the stairs, DeVontay limping but otherwise gamely keeping up. Franklin had adjusted to the weird green view afforded by the goggles, but he still bumped his knee on a coffee table as they crossed the living room. Outside, the air had grown even chillier, and the only sound was a few insects in the trees.
    “Hilyard still hasn’t sent anybody to check out the gunshots,” Franklin said.
    “Or maybe he has, and they saw they’re outnumbered.”
    “Well, we can’t wait now. Let’s do this.”
    They both fell silent as they retraced their route back to the school. Jorge was nowhere to be seen, and Franklin was worried his friend would become a one-man vigilante squad intent on taking down as many mutants as he could. He secretly hoped Jorge would kill the baby. Now he was afraid of what Rachel would become if she returned, especially given DeVontay’s attitude. What if Rachel became fully mutant, gained her own powers, and decided it was time to rid the world of the vermin?
    Once they covered the two blocks to the border of the school property, they angled near the football stadium to maintain the element of surprise rather than coming through the gap in the parking lot fence. Franklin expected to hear a burst of semiautomatic fire at any moment, along with Jorge’s wild ranting. The rot of corpses was far worse here, and even with the goggles limiting detail, he could make out the mass of bodies heaped in the stadium stands. A four-legged shadow slipped from the open mausoleum, dragging something from its jaws—a wild dog or other predator scrounging a late-night snack.
    They kept to the shadows as they approached the parking lot from the rear, shielded by the school buses. The Zapheads moved as a unit, the crowd shuffling forward as Stephen and the baby repeated the same ritual over and over—bending down, touching a prone form, and two eyes sparking with renewal.
    Even from this distance, the fear was plain on Stephen’s face. But in the glow of dozens of Zaphead eyes, something else was visible, too—an intense concentration, as if in wonder of the miracles he was helping to perform. The wispy-haired infant he held seemed delighted, patting her little hands together and giggling. A few of the Zapheads imitated her chuckles, making the tableau even more sinister.
    “I don’t see Jorge,” DeVontay said, as they pressed behind a big Chevy Suburban with tinted windows and flat tires. The weird susurrations of the mutants allowed them to talk in hoarse whispers without being overhead.
    “I hope he doesn’t go rogue before we figure out how to play this.”
    “If he kills that baby, I’m killing him .”
    Franklin didn’t doubt it. The baby had become the center of the universe, After’s new messiah. “Even if