by Luke Kondor
OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE FROM HAWK & CLEAVER:
The Rot Series
Kondor & Willcocks
They Rot (Book 1)
They Remain (Book 2)
Keep My Bones (Bonus Story)*
Novels
Deeper than the Grave
The Hipster from Outer-Space (Book 1)
The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (Book 2)
Ten Tales of the Human Condition
Keep up-to-date at
WWW.HAWKANDCLEAVER.COM
*Available for FREE at www.hawkandcleaver.com/bunker
*
BOOK 2 OF ‘THE ROT’ SERIES
Copyright © 2017 by Hawk and Cleaver
First published in Great Britain in 2017
All rights reserved.
www.hawkandcleaver.com
ISBN-13: 978-1548224660
ISBN-10: 1548224669
All work remains the property of the respective authors and may be used by themselves or with their express permissions in any way that they deem appropriate with no limitations.
No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or print other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
FOR
SYLVIA
RIP
A special thanks to
Kelly Sheanon, Naomi Yehezkel, and Gemma Smart
And a special thank you to our Patrons over at
www.patreon.com/hawkandcleaver
J.M. Bryan // Nick Porter // Kayleigh Smith //
Duncan Muggleton // Larna Dennis // Kathy Robinson //
Jo Ann Wilkins // Jessie // Josh Curran // Sara Luciano //
Ian McEuen // Marcelle Liemant // Kate Mena //
Abraham C Kanter
~ PROLOGUE ~
~ 1 ~
~ 2 ~
~ 3 ~
~ 4 ~
~ 5 ~
~ 6 ~
~ 7 ~
~ 8 ~
~ 9 ~
~ 10 ~
~ 11 ~
~ 12 ~
~ 13 ~
~ 14 ~
~ 15 ~
~ 16 ~
~ 17 ~
~ 18 ~
~ 19 ~
~ 20 ~
~ 21 ~
~ 22 ~
~ 23 ~
~ 24 ~
~ 25 ~
~ 26 ~
~ 27 ~
~ 28 ~
~ 29 ~
~ 30 ~
~ 31 ~
~ 32 ~
~ 33 ~
~ 34 ~
~ 35 ~
~ 36 ~
~ 37 ~
Exclusive Bonus Story
~ PROLOGUE ~
The world turned and the sun rose. It reached out its warming arms and embraced the cold earth. The yellow rays finding their way through the cumulous clouds and giving new life to those on the ground.
Creatures of all kinds awoke. Humans in their tribes, colonies and townships. Birds in their nests with their young. Insects in the gaps between the broken ground and twigs. And with a frantic fervour, the thing moved.
It scurried across the floor, slicking a trail of clear slime as it went. Not quite a slug, far from some kind of serpent. A thing not of this world. Searching. Hunting.
The spore had lost its kin and set out on its journey. Its primary focus gene-deep. To multiply and move along the surface of this world and grow, spreading in different directions like roots of a tree, extending and reaching outwards from its birthplace as it latched from host to host.
There were no memories, as such. The spore was more machine than organism in its thought processes, but from its blackened physical makeup you wouldn’t think so. If it could think, it might remember with some alarm the flames that had come from the nozzle of the metal pipes. It might recall those of its brethren who had died underneath its burning glare before the spore had fled into the wilderness, honing its one true instinct: to survive.
Now, days had passed, and the spore understood the need to find new avenues of life. That it needed to find a place to reproduce. To reconnect. The search was frantic and all encompassing. Yet there was nothing. Not a thing to latch onto in this wasteland of countryside and grass. Through rivers and streams, the spore journeyed, exhausting itself further with each passing day.
It would’ve screamed for life if it had the facility to do so. But as the sun continued to rise, the thing continued to move through the dirt and leaves, all the while ignoring the insects which didn’t suit its preference. Crawling until the ground became smooth and cool.
The spore stopped in the shade of a nearby building. It had wandered into a derelict town. Terraced housing, commercial venues with boarded windows. And paths with—
A scent. Something.
The spore shuddered with anticipation.
There was life here. Ideal and ripe for the taking. Perhaps too far right to reach right now – the spore had been growing tired after all, taking damage from the steady increase in heat, the sun threatening to bake the thing on the floor.
But… the life, though… so close. Achievable from a fresh spore hatched from a cluster. A new birth might seek and attach to the host in less than a minute. Reaching in sticky fibres to brain matter and flourishing in the warm environment of blood pulsing through veins. The spore could already smell its flavours on the wind, spurring it on. Screaming out to it like a mother to its babe.
It clicked its fibres as it moved, dragging itself along until it blindly bumped into a something. A cool, yet tiny, shadow.
Not a creature, no. But a something.
The spore sniffed at the two forms lying in the middle of the road. A middle-aged woman, mouth frozen open in horror, long since decayed. Beside her, a baby, wrapped in its fabrics and sealed tight – cocooned in its place.
The spore climbed upon the body of the baby, the scent of live hosts tantalisingly close, yet just too far away for the spore to manage. It could already feel its life fading, feel the death kiss of the sun, the draining of its own beating pulse as the clock ticked and no nourishment came.
Survival. That’s all the spore knew.
And so it was going to have to find alternative means.
It crawled upon the baby’s face. Its slender white tentacles reached out from its black blob of a body, splitting into increasingly complex and fine fingers, grazing at the baby’s flesh. It threaded through where the eyes had once been, reached deep inside the cocoon and found, to its surprise, that deep down through the hard shell of leathered skin was life. A whisper of a heartbeat. Not much, but enough for the thing to make new life. It wormed its way inside and pressed its fibres into what remained of the child.
And as the sun now beamed its smile down onto the child, so too did the child reach upwards. Not quite alive, but alive enough. From there the spore found sustenance. From there it could hole up. From there it could wait.
And wait it did.
*
Hours later, there came life along the road. Two figures. One walking slightly in front of the other.
The first was a mute woman who went by the name of Faith – more as a joke to the universe than anything. She’d been an unfortunate soul. Not only had she lost half h
er tongue, but her ears had also been burned, leaving her partially deaf. She had blue ink etched into her face, and was holding a carbine assault rifle in her grasp – weapons pillaged from what remained of a pitiful little military outfit down on the coast.
By her side was a man by the name of Walker. An almost prophetic name given to him by his parents years before when buildings stood proud and the only gun he’d ever seen had been in a John Wayne movie.
His name shall be Walker, and he will spend most of his days doing just that.
The same blue ink on his face, drawn from his beard to the back of his bald head, reaching over and kissing that tree trunk neck of his. In his hands, he clutched a Colt M-series.
Both Faith and Walker were already feeling the excitement building like they were a pride of lions smelling the blood about to spill. The air of adrenaline so palpable you could almost hear it crackle on the tarmac roads. The clouds growing fuller and ashen every passing hour. There would be blood that day, sure, but the rain will wash it all away.
“Scout said this road would lead us to the eastern point of entry,” Walker said, stepping over a stray branch like he was prowling through the Serengeti.
Faith grunted as she scratched at her matted straw hair and prepped her rifle. There were others. Many others on all four corners. The plan was simple. She knew the drill. Flank the township from all four sides. Stay low, shoot, and loot. The meat on these townies’ bodies would sustain them for a good month or two, depending on how well they could preserve it.
She could already imagine the salty taste of flesh between her teeth.
“Lookie,” Walker said as he stepped over the burned remains of a woman. Her fingers welded to the handlebar of her stroller. Eyes long since pecked and taken by some scavenging animal. “Lots of ’em around ’ere. I reckon it must have been a red alert quarantine job.”
Faith walked further on and saw the dozens of bodies in the distance like dead ants on a hot day, boiled and blackened on the pavement. Amongst the mossy overgrowth and pile-ups of broken cars she could see more and more.
“Her baby’s in here, too. Awh. Always felt sorry for babies. Imagine being the poor runts born into this world without a clue of what life was like before,” Walker said, keeping his voice audible but little over a whisper. “Poor thing never got a chance to see what life was about to… well… what is this?”
Walker fell silent. Faith thought nothing of it. He’d probably spotted some grotesquery he hadn’t seen before (although let’s be honest, the chances of that were slim to none). The man had a love for the weird and wonderful ways in which people had left this planet. Walker had spent hours on a raid once looking at the way in which a lone traveller had tried to stab himself in the stomach with nothing more than a butter knife. But not before spraying the words, ‘Molon labe’, on a nearby fence in large black letters.
Walker had deduced that it was a Spartan saying. The poor dead guy – delicious, by the way – had tried to do away with himself like he was some sort of modern day King Leonidas. A proud death or some such. But, to Faith, he still looked a fool, sat there naked with a poxy piece of silverware in his stomach.
“Woah. Lookie, Faith. Get a load of this—”
Faith hardly heard Walker’s whisper before he was cut off. In the distance, she could see smoke flagging the sky. Evidence of the very people they had come to hunt. As if they were being summoned and welcomed into camp. ‘Hey! We got townies here. Follow the road to the T-junction, take a left, then cut our throats and lick us clean!’
Thud.
Behind her, Walker had fallen to the floor, struggling with the spore, no longer confined to the shell of its cocoon. His screams were muffled, barely audible to his half-deaf companion who smiled stupidly at the thin cotton-column of smoke, licking her lips with her phantom-tongue. In the last few days, she hadn’t eaten much other than the pickings of the bones of soldiers from somewhere down south. And their gristle was little more than fungus and marrow.
Faith’s stomach rumbled. “Come on,” she tried to say. Though it sounded more like “Wohm ohm.”
She turned to Walker, her hunger quickly turning to confused fear as she saw her companion. She barely had time to lift her rifle as Walker’s boots slapped and kicked the floor.
Thud thud thud.
He rose, and ran towards her, screeching something rotten. The corpse of the blackened baby he had been cooing over just a minute earlier had fixed itself to his face, stitching them together with white myelin fibres.
The rot… Holy hell and fury… the rot, the words screamed in her head, not entirely believing what she was seeing. But… it’s gone. It’s over. Walker…
She didn’t want to believe it. Flashes and memories of nighttime raids and creatures that ran until their legs collapsed flew through her head. Things of nightmares that Faith, nor any of her companions, had seen in several years now. A rotless world, taken care of by the military brutes who slaughtered the villages and sanitised the world in fire.
But now…
Faith tried to scream but little more than a pathetic moan escaped her lips as her tribe-brother jumped for her, fingers upon fingers like the frayed ends of a knot, undulating white threads, reaching for her mouth.
And the thing.
The thing that started it all had found its hosts. The process would begin anew. As was the circle of life.
As was the cycle of the rot.
~ 1 ~
Beacon Avenue, the main road running through the length of King’s Hill, disappeared into the distance ahead. There was a crack in the tarmac, as if the Earth itself had shrugged its shoulders and broken the skin. Through the jagged hole, green things grew. Grass. Moss. Some flowers. And right there, in the crack, with an arm bent backwards, snapped but hanging on with fine chalky fibres, were the greying remains of a man.
He wasn’t alone. Up ahead, on either side of the road were burnt-out cars, broken windows, and decaying corpses. What flesh remained on those old bones had long since dried into cotton and papier mâche. The smell of death lingered all around but the overcast skies and foggy atmosphere tempered it down somewhat. Making it something almost bearable.
Susie K placed her bow on the floor as she bent down. Her boot dug into the skin of her legs as she reached over the man’s corpse, past the points where the shirt looked to melt into the dead man’s flesh, as if the two had always been joined, and lifted the head.
Bone dust crackled as it puffed into the air revealing the skeletal face beneath. With her free hand, she reached into the cup of the eye sockets and pulled out one of the dirty little brown fungal things growing there. Not one, but two. About the size of thumbs. She inspected them closely. They were gritty. Some tiny insect crawled along one of the stems. Ignoring it she greedily she pressed them both into her shirt pocket to join the other little handful of goodies she’d foraged. It wasn’t exactly Jamie Oliver’s brand of cooking, but hell, boil them up, pop in some salt, and you’ve got yourself a nice mushroom broth.
Running a hand over her head, the short hair bristled and flicked a fine mist of rainwater into the air. The scar on her scalp fizzed at the touch. A buzzing reminder of battles passed.
Picking up the bow again she stood, looked up the road. A Tesco Express on her left. Long since emptied, even before they’d set up camp in King’s Hill. The pharmacy was next to that, raped and pillaged years ago. Of the good stuff anyway. Penicillin. Aspirin. Bandages, etc. All gone. By the time Susie and her cadré of travellers arrived, all they’d been left with were a few boxes of tampons and, oddly enough, a stack of soggy cash on the counter. At least £500’s worth. They would’ve left it there but Quinton wanted it.
Why?
A keepsake, perhaps?
Maybe he wanted a memory of the old world’s values. Maybe he wanted to pretend like he still had some unit of control of the world around him.
Or maybe he’s just a stupid fucking child.
She shook her head and wal
ked onwards, stepping over an open grate, and onto the pavement. A quick glance at the sun to gauge the time and she could already feel the pull of the camp behind her. The needs of her people. The questions that needed answering. The dramas that needed her delicate touch.
Just a little while longer, she thought to herself. Just to the end of the Avenue, where the road meets the football fields. The people will be fine. They don’t need you all the time. They can wipe their own arse. Blow their own noses.
Most of them anyway… she mused, thinking of her son.
A chuckle escaped her lips and the tension eased a little. Her shoulders relaxed and she sniffed up a deep breath of the afternoon air.
These little hunts were the only time she ever found peace and quiet. A little time for herself. A chance to step out of the choking responsibilities of leadership, and to do something just for her.
Some did yoga.
Some did pilates.
Susie Kendall liked to grab her longbow, head out, and find some food that wasn’t dried, from a tin, and wasn’t watery fucking porridge.
The road split off now. A fenced-off building called ‘The Discovery School’ sat in the middle of the fork. The left-hand road ventured further out of the town centre and into the Kent Weald. King’s Hill had a cache drop up there. A place where they traded with the others. The Hopefuls. But further afield than that? She didn’t know.
If ever there was a road that would lead her out of this camp and into the wilderness it was that one.
She turned right and stopped. Her breath caught in her throat. Standing next to those rusty school fences stood a creature. Nothing big. A tawny little critter – a rabbit. It sniffed the mossy ground around itself as if it were joining Susie in her daily food hunt. Both of them scavenging for what fresh scraps remained in this world.