by Nick Cole
WYRD BOOK 2.5
By
Nick Cole
... Before the Lost Castle
After
The Dark Knight...
Just the other side of the end of the world...
Wind smashed Tim Ward in the face as he flew out the back of the slate gray Tarragon C-130 cargo transport, just moments before the lumbering aircraft would be riddled with 30mm ball ammunition from an attacking A-10 Warthog. Ward was jerked backward toward the fleeing aircraft as the static line pulled, then deployed his chute. The ground twisted, turned, and weaved side to side beneath his feet, and less than a moment later, the A-10 that had shot down the other two C-130s in the flight, streaked above and passed him as it closed in on its final target, the fleeing C-130 full of mercenaries.
“Forget it!” Ward shouted to himself, as he waited for the jet-wash from the attack plane’s engines to collapse his chute. The ground was racing up too fast to allow room for anything else to be considered. Tim Ward, just “Ward” to the other soldiers and mercenaries including Captain Braddock, the last man Ward ran past as he flung himself off the cargo deck and out the back of the doomed aircraft in an almost unconscious bid for survival, fixed his eyes on the horizon and tried to pick a landing zone quickly as he spiraled in toward the racing ground below.
A moment later, he nailed the improvised drop zone and did his parachute landing fall regardless of the fact that he was on the roof of a massive blocky building and being dragged toward its nearby edge and the five story fall beyond that.
That’s when he went blind.
Because that’s when everybody went blind. Not that Ward knew that, not then. Not that any of the blind knew it then. For each and every one of them, it was a singular experience. Being blind. Suddenly and without explanation. How could that be shared? Ask yourself.
It couldn’t be shared, and Ward’s blind fingers did the expert work of releasing himself from his chute as it dragged and scrapped its way toward the barely remembered edge of the high roof.
For the next twenty-four hours, Ward crawled along the rooftop until he found the door to the stairwell that led down into the interior of the building. A door into a darkness that didn’t matter, because everyone in the whole world was unexplainably blind. Or at least most everyone.
***
The unseen day that followed ended, and another one rose and broke over the dead streets of Santa Ana, California. Drifting ash mingled with the smell of distant smoke and fleshy decay. Tim Ward pushed himself up off the floor he’d been lying on.
He could see now.
He’d gone to sleep sometime in the night. Blindly asking his smartphone what time it was. Wondering how long the blindness would last if it was stress-induced. Listening to nothing as yesterday faded away forever and the night crawled along its track without being seen. Ward kept telling himself that not seeing again was not an option. He kept telling himself something opposite of the reality he found himself in. Opposite of the truth. But it was a soft dawn light he noticed first the next morning. Noticed and took for granted, then remembered like some bad dream forgotten that he’d not been able to see back before he’d slept.
Maybe stress had caused the blindness, was the answer he allowed himself. Maybe.
He rose, patting his cargo pockets and rubbing his face. He checked the rifle he’d blindly carried with him off the roof yesterday as he’d felt his way down along the stairwell until he’d found a door he could enter. He’d listened then because he’d been blind and that was the only sense he had left to know what was in front of him. He’d listened to nothing, waiting to find something in it. Then he’d heard the thump and the low moan in the hall. He knew it was one of the “zekes”. The infected. The living zombies that had washed over what remained of the world.
Tarragon SOP insisted the infected be identified as zekes.
He’d lain on the floor, blind, and listened to it moving closer and closer toward him in the darkness that was his own blindness. They were just sick people, he told himself. A viral outbreak turned global pandemic according to all the briefings they’d gotten back at the old base in the smothering depths of the Mojave furnace. That’s why Task Force 19 had been sent by Tarragon out to the SoCal operations area. Clear the infected, the “zekes”, off Objective “Iron Castle”.
Destroying the brain was the best way to deal with them.
He’d been involved in other clearing ops since the outbreak began. All of them run by the same merc outfit the mysterious Tarragon corporation had enfolded into its corporate operating structure. But those engagements had been at range, on full auto, hot brass expended in family-sized doses. In the darkness, and blind now, it was wetwork. Knife work. Work he’d been trained for in Force Recon.
He’d let go of his rifle and drawn out his combat knife from the sheath on his vest. He’d listened as the thing dragged and thumped its way down the wide linoleum hall toward him. He could hear the natural echo of the space enhance its steps all at once.
It was closing. It knew he was there.
Ward sensed he was in some kind of government office complex. The linoleum. The wide halls. The barely warm temperature and the smell of old paperwork, coffee, and dust. It smelled of all the government offices he’d ever been in as a member of the marines.
He’d rejected the option to fear. Rejected the fact that his mind wanted to tag the creature as evil and therefore somehow malevolent.
“There’s no evil. There’s no good,” he’d whispered in the almost silence as the thing approached him. “There just is.”
His own personal mantra. He’d had it for a long time. Since Iraq. Since Moss. That’s when he struck. Rising to his knees as the thing suddenly closed drooling and slurping, its papery moan rasping thickly. He grabbed its unseen body and felt a breast. Knowing where he had to go next, he drove the serrated blade for the head beyond and upwards.
Or where the head should be.
But it wasn’t.
He landed the blow in the upper chest, and the knife with its wicked serrated edge stuck and caught in the ribcage. He pushed the thing backward and fell with it, let go of the knife and removed the small punch-knife at his back. One of two. Protruding from his fist, he drove it into the skull, now that he was on top of the weakly thrashing creature and knew where to strike. Drove it repeatedly now that he knew where he was in relation to the thing that was once human, for whatever that was worth, which wasn’t much to Tim Ward.
He’d given up on humanity after Iraq. After Moss.
“I’m goin’ to Disneyland, buddy…”
There just is… and we dance to its tune, Ward reminded himself in the silence that followed.
Later, after retrieving his rifle, laughing as only a blind man can when he sightlessly searches for a line of sight weapon…
Later, he found the empty room and closed the door behind him. Without taking off his gear he’d tried to sleep.
***
That next morning, after his sight had returned, he left the government office building and entered the sickly orange-golden light of the day after the party that had been the end of everything. Or so it seemed. The feel of the air reminded Ward of a moment. A time when everything had changed and whatever was, was just the new now until the next step in the evolution of everything. The new reality.
“Yeah,” he muttered, and blew on the ejector port for the silenced SCAR-H as he inspected the grenade launcher underneath. “It’s that kinda day.”
Which was fine, because he’d been expecting the end of the world for a long time. Hadn’t been much of a world in the first place. If you�
�d asked him at that very moment what kind of world it was he’d lived in, that’s what he would have told you. It wasn’t much of a place.
He adjusted the ruck, spit a little chew onto a nearby car and headed down the center of the narrow street, weaving through unmoving corpses and wreckage without seeming end.
***
The corpses that still moved were far and few between. He’d encountered some, and those he could not avoid, he put down with a silent “hiss” from the SCAR. Later, as he moved west looking for the freeway, he heard large numbers of them moaning in the distance. Groaning in disharmony. He suspected there must be at least a football stadium-sized crowd of them somewhere nearby. And still later, he knew he was being hunted by others. The “New Kids on the Block”.
Lost in the maze of a commercial urban sprawl, he could hear their footsteps. These were quicker. Running almost. Panting like animals. Which made no sense, because the training they’d gotten from Tarragon said respiration for the zekes wasn’t possible.
Ward kept turning, trying to lose them within the warren of auto shops and tinted glass suppliers. He thought he knew where the freeway was, but every time he tried to take an alley or narrow path leading in that direction, the unseen others would drive him farther and farther away from it as they moved about ahead of him. His policy was to avoid at all costs and conserve ammo and wear and tear on the silencer. But it was like they, these others, knew that. Knew he wanted to exit the AO and that they were intent on keeping him there nonetheless. Herding him into a specific location for the kill.
“There’s just no brain function,” he reminded himself in a guttural whisper. “They’re animals.” He was leaning against a dumpster, catching his breath. The heat was stifling and the sky was clear in every direction. He drank water and waited, listening for them in the thick silence.
He could hear them, barely, to the east, scrabbling around, feet slapping against the pavement. And to the west was the chorus of moans. The football crowd going to the big game.
The first of the “New Kids”, as he’d begun to call the others, came at him direct and fast. “All Twenty-eight days like,” he muttered as he dropped the running monster at thirty yards with a silenced “hiss” from the rifle. It’d come out of a small side street as he’d turned onto a boulevard known as 4th. High old-school office buildings rose up along the narrow sides of the street.
The silenced rifle put down the mad savage with three quick puffs. The arm. The torso. The head. The thing stumbled, tripped, and finally face-planted.
New Kids, thought Ward. Fast movers. Cunning. It had waited until he’d come to the narrow high street and paused, assessing him. Like it had known he’d been studying the street for transit through the area. Absorbed almost. That’s when the thing had attacked. The slap of its one remaining running shoe had given it away as it tried to flank him. That’s when he’d put it down.
Now, traveling up the ruined street, he reflected that what he was seeing was merely evidence of evolution. The next leap. The “undead” things that had so recently come down hard on what some called civilization, in the form of a viral outbreak, were merely evolving from human to a new type of savage proto-human, transforming into a super-aggressive hunter-killer. This next step didn’t wait millennia to evolve, it had needed only a few weeks.
He wished then he’d brought his copy of Dawkins on the op to secure Iron Castle. He might’ve better understood what they were becoming. But then he thought about the mission. How could he have known things would have gone sideways so fast, and that they would be jumped by some government holdout A-10 attack jet and shot down over infected territory. Moving forward, he allowed himself to be less concerned, and instead more comforted by the larger scheme of things. Sure, he reasoned, the New Kids indicated they, original recipe humans like Ward, were all going to die pretty soon if the Tarragon briefings were right with their prediction model of a ninety-five percent world population infection. If the zekes were becoming much more aggressive, then all the bullets in the world weren’t going to put a dent in that number. All the bullets in the world would never be enough.
What’s comforting about that, he asked himself without saying a word, feeling an unreasonable peace as he stepped over the half-eaten corpse of a cop who’d been dragged from his battered and bloodstained cruiser. “Life goes on,” Ward answered, “even if it’s without us.”
To embrace reason, is to embrace that stark bit of truth.
That was when the mob came lumbering out at the far end of the street he was on. He couldn’t tell if they’d seen him, sensed him, or tracked him. But that they were where he wanted to go next was evident as they moved like some ancient herd into the intersection far down the street in front of him.
“Ha-Ooo!” screamed someone from high above.
Ward sighed, on the verge of a curse regarding the violation of noise discipline that had been drilled into him for the kind of work he’d done in the marines. For the kind of work that now meant survival and a new way of life in this new proto-human reality. This new undead normal.
“Ha-Ooo, down there!” the person called again from high above.
The herd at the end of the street turned at the shout.
Ward looked up to see the idiot making enough noise to bring a small army of post-human savage undead straight down upon him. Lucky, he thought, these weren’t the New Kids. The fast movers. The Twenty-eight days variety.
From the fourth floor of a turn-of-the-century brick building, an older man with wispy gray hair and a broad, florid face was beaming down at him with a massive smile.
“Ha-Ooo, my friend!”
He was wearing black.
“I’ve got a safe room up here! Do you want to come up?”
The dead-mob was already shuffle-stumbling down the street, falling over themselves to get to Ward.
“I’ll open the back door! Hurry!” the man yelled down, his voice booming and echoing off the narrow canyon walls of the old street and the yesterday buildings.
“Go around the back and I’ll open the alleyway door!” he called, before disappearing behind gauzy pink curtains that floated briefly in the hot, still air.
Ward clocked a small side alley between the buildings.
“Trap?” he wondered, and then realized he was out of thinking time and options. The herd was halfway down the street. He shrugged his shoulders to adjust his ruck and headed into the alley, suddenly feeling “all Iraq” again as he began to check blind corners and rooftops.
The zekes aren’t shooting at you, he tried to remind himself in an effort to control his rapid breathing.
He heard himself respond, “But, it ain’t all zekes, just yet.”
He found an old, battered metal door and as he approached, it swung wide open on a rusty whine. A whine the zekes would hear from blocks away.
The stranger was older, and taller and bigger than Tim. Wider. Wearing black. His face was florid in some places and gray in others. But his eyes twinkled in delight at the sight of the armed-to-the-teeth soldier.
“Come on in, my friend. It’s real safe in here.”
Ward slid past the barrel-chested old man into the tight darkness beyond. A few feet into the hallway, he noticed a lone uncovered light bulb humming weakly in the gloom.
Already, the sound of fists and breaking glass could be heard at the front of the building.
“Quick, up the stairwell,” muttered the older man. Ward smelled dust and sage and charcoal as the stranger slid past him to lead the way further into the building. They found a set of stairs and climbed short flights, turned down along a small bannister and climbed another set. All the while, the old man muttered about the relative safety of the building, adding an ominous “for now” snort as they reached the fourth floor.
A room at the end of the hall, guarded by a flimsy wooden door, was the “Safe Room” Ward had be
en promised. Below, the hammer-fist cacophony at the front doors and store windows, and the previously undetected back door, rose in a metallic tenor and wood-thumping bass chorus, accented by the soprano cries of breaking glass. No doubt drawing every one of the zekes in the local area, thought Ward, right down upon us. He wondered if the old stranger was aware that he’d probably just sealed their fate with his yelling, thus creating a trap for them to hide in for a little while until the surrounding dead broke through.
Instead, the man busied himself with finding a bottle of water he was sure he had for his new friend.
“This your place?” asked Ward.
“Oh yeah! Lived here for twenty-five… twenty-eight years now,” he said as he tossed the cabinets in the tiny kitchen for the promised water bottle. In time, he came up with a blue sports drink. “I’ll find that water,” he promised enthusiastically. “It’s here somewhere… I just know it. Make yourself comfortable… sit, sit…”
Downstairs, the sharp shriek of splitting wood could be heard. Some metal door began to groan in metallic pain.
“We don’t have much longer,” announced Ward bluntly.
This seemed to come as a total surprise to the old man. He stopped amid all his fumbling and searching through an apartment he’d claimed to live in for more than a quarter of a century.
“Ah! They’ve found the door they believe we’re behind, as it were. But... we don’t need any more time!” he announced, as though reminding Ward of some past conversation they’d already had. “We can get to the nearest evacuation center now that we’ve got all your guns!” His booming voice carried off through the apartment and beyond the thin plaster walls and almost non-existent door.
Ward raised his eyes.
“That’s all well and good, mister, but we ain’t gettin’ outta here back on that street. If you haven’t noticed, we’re well and truly surrounded, and gettin’ more so by then second. In other words, we’re trapped. And you shoutin’… that ain’t helpin’ matters.”
The old stranger looked chastised. Suddenly contrite as though he’d only just realized his constant bombastic enthusiasm might be working at cross-purposes to the whole “avoiding the undead hordes attracted to the sound of noise” aspect of this particular end of the world.