Necrovirus: A Zombie Apocalypse

by James King

  “Oh fuck,” said Matt, and squeezed the break. Tyres howled, the vehicle swerved precariously, but its speed began to slow.

  “But won’t we be caught in the explosion?” Becky asked, her voice the sound of pure terror.

  “No,” Lewis replied, “I think we’re far enough away now to be out of from the main heat flash. We’ll get some of the blast wave, but as long as we stay in the car then I think we can ride it out. It’s our best hope.”

  Matt glanced at Lewis. He saw the look in the other man’s eyes, and knew in that instant that the soldier didn’t really believe a word he was saying. And why would he? Lewis wouldn’t really know anything about this missile, how powerful it was, or what the radius of its explosion would be. All they could do, Matt supposed, was increase their chances of survival – even if those chances were slim to none existent.

  At last the car was slowed, and Matt guided it to the side of the lane with trembling hands, his heart slamming in his chest. A nuclear explosion he suddenly thought we’re only a few miles away from a nuclear explosion... and terror, the like of which he had never known, burned through his heart, his mind, his soul. Even when he had confronted the living dead, even when he had looked into his own mother’s blank eyed, drooling face, Matt had never known such terror.

  The car was parked, Matt turned the engine off, and then he looked at Lewis. “Now what...?” he asked in a voice so small and trembling that it sounded like a child’s.

  “Everyone close your eyes and put your hands over your face,” Lewis said, “then bend down, crouch, so that your face is in the darkest place of the car. Do it now!”

  They did it, and not a second too soon. Matt closed his eyes, covered his face with his hands, and bent downward into the footwell of the car.

  A second ticked by.

  A single breath, jetting hot and shaky into the sweaty palms of his hands.

  And then, the light...

  For a moment, Matt thought that he had somehow opened his eyes, and gazed into the sky, perhaps straight into the sun. He saw strange, dark, floating shapes in front of his vision and, in a moment so unreal that he thought it must surely be a dream, he realised that the shapes were the bones of his hands, black skeleton hands that were held in a kind of perfect x-ray before him. Pain burned into his eyes, the kind of straining pain that you would get if you had glanced for too long into the full glare of the summer sun. He heard the others cry out in pain and terror, his own voice joining theirs. Then the light was gone, dimming, the skeleton hands disappearing, darkness descending, but the pain still burning through his eyes. He crouched, hands gripped to face, seeing darkness, paralysed with terror.

  With the light gone, there then came the sound. A deep, unearthly roar: vast, colossal, ground shaking, as though God had stamped His foot in anger. It seemed to go on and on, building, becoming more intense, its fury bellowed loud to the sky as though from the throat of a colossus. Someone was speaking. Matt could barely hear it over that terrible roaring. But at last, perhaps the roaring diminished, or perhaps he was able to tune in to what was being said. He heard Lewis’s voice.

  “Don’t open your eyes....” Lewis was chanting, though whether it was them or to himself, Matt wasn’t sure, “don’t open your eyes, don’t get out of the car, blast waves gonna come... don’t open your eyes...”

  ...while another voice, Bryan’s Matt thought it was, was chanting the Lord’s Prayer.

  And then the blast wave came. Sudden, monstrous, like a ferocious and manmade hurricane it thundered about them. Outside, Matt heard roaring sounds, snapping sounds, wrenching sounds, and in his mind’s eye he saw trees uprooted, hedges pulled up by their roots, houses, barns, fences and gate posts levelled, flattened, destroyed like so much matchwood before this all conquering nuclear wind. Then the car was in motion, the vehicle raised, seeming to float for a moment, and then crashed downward with bone-jarring force. Everyone within the car were thrown about like rag dolls, and now Matt did open his eyes, though only for a second. He saw the interior of the car, he saw Lewis flailing desperately in the passenger seat next to him, blood streaked across his face, he saw the windscreen, a spider web of cracks seething through it, and beyond the windscreen: carnage. Trees indeed uprooted, hedges flattened, foliage writhing in a kind of unnatural torment as mighty forces were brought to bear upon them. And dust: clouds of dust billowing hugely in the sky, like the mighty ramparts of some thundercloud that had at last come to destroy the world.

  Then Matt’s head connected with something very hard – the steering wheel perhaps, or maybe the gearstick - and darkness and unconsciousness claimed him.

  * * *

  “Matt... Matt... wake the fuck up now!”

  A hand slapped his face. He opened his eyes and gazed upward. His vision was bleary, strange halos hovered in front of his vision, as though he’d been peering into a very strong light, and it had left its tracery behind it. Where was he? At home in bed? Didn’t feel like it. Was that his mum calling him? Didn’t sound like her.

  “Matt!”

  Matt blinked. The halos diminished, and his vision came a little more into focus. He saw a man bending over him. Shaven headed, dressed in military garb. A name: Lewis.

  And then he remembered everything.

  He came to with a start, gazing wildly about. He had been lying slumped in the seat of his car. His entire body was a rage of pain. Lewis was crouched over him, bloodied but otherwise seemingly okay. He glanced into the back seat, uttering a sharp cry of pain as he did so, and there were Becky and Bryan, both pale faced and bloodied, but otherwise okay.

  “Fuck...” said Matt with a voice that was as weak as a drip of water, “...is it over...?”

  “If you mean the explosion, then yeah, it’s over. We caught the tail end of the blast wave, but we were far enough away to avoid the main event. Thank God...”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Not long, only about a minute. You feeling okay? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Three,” Matt replied, “and yeah, I’m okay – or about as okay as you can expect to be after almost being vaporised in a nuclear explosion.”

  Lewis offered a dark laugh.

  “I’m going out to see...” said Matt, scrabbling at the door handle.

  “Matt – mate, I wouldn’t.”

  “Fuck you Lewis, I’ve got to see.”

  Matt scrabbled some more at the door handle. For a moment it wouldn’t open, and he started to think that perhaps it had been warped somehow during the crash. But at last it shuddered open, and Matt staggered outward. His body screamed pain, and his head pulsed like a rotten tooth, but at least he had the energy to first crawl out of the car, and then stand. He looked about. The car had come to a kind of diagonal halt in the roadway. Debris was littered all around: trees, mangled hedges, wrecked fences, shattered posts. He gazed around, and saw that all the land around had been mostly levelled. A nearby copse of trees lay neatly upon the ground as though they had been flattened by some gigantic garden roller.

  Then he looked toward Alchester. And there it was: the mushroom cloud. Huge, monstrous, all grey smoke and livid pink as nuclear fire still raged within it. They said that you could see the face of the devil in a mushroom cloud. For a moment, Matt did see a face: evil, grinning, perhaps with a goatee beard and thin as a cadaver. Maybe even vampire-like. And then the face was gone, and it was just a cloud, boiling, hideous, grotesque in its violence. Alchester’s gone he thought, and a sudden sadness stabbed him like a lance.

  A sound behind him. He looked around, and there was Lewis, closely followed by Becky and Bryan.

  Lewis offered a low whistle, “I’ve handled some weaponry in my time as a soldier,” he said, “but I never thought I’d live to see this. My God, the deed is done. Protocol Zero has been signed, sealed, and delivered.”

  “It certainly has...” said Becky, her voice low and exhausted, “...it certainly bloody has...”

  “And yet...” said
Bryan – and now he stepped forward, passed Lewis, passed Matt, and he pointed toward the mushroom cloud, toward where Alchester once had been, “ – and yet... still they come. The harbingers of The Apocalypse...”

  Matt looked to where Bryan was pointing. At the base of the mushroom cloud was another, flatter, darker cloud that spread across the land like some huge and malefic fog bank. Fires raged within this cloud, vast and unimaginable in their size and intensity. And yet, at the base of this cloud, there was movement. Something seemed to be emerging. Matt squinted, unsure for a moment what he was seeing, unsure if he was even seeing anything. But then his vision adjusted, and he saw them: figures, walking out of the nuclear fire, figures staggering across the land, a crowd, an army, lurching forward while a low aurora of fire hovered about them.

  “No...” said Lewis, “...that’s not possible... nothing could survive that...”

  “Nothing...” Bryan echoed him, his voice remote, dreamy, “nothing at all – save for the harbingers of the Apocalypse.”

  And for the first time that day, Bryan didn’t sound crazy to Matt. Harbingers of The Apocalypse. That’s what these things were. Harbingers of the bloody Apocalypse, birthed in the nuclear fire, staggering across the scorched land of a world that was now lost to those who had once owned it.

  “Come on,” said Lewis, “back to the car. We’ve got to get out of here - if the damn vehicle still works.”

  They hurried back to the car, but Matt remained for a second, watching the roiling clouds, watching the raging fires, and watching those figures – those shining, glowing, impossible army of figures, distant but approaching. The harbingers of The Apocalypse... the harbingers of the bloody Apocalypse...”

  “Matt!” Lewis called, “come on, for fuck’s sake. We’ve got to get out!”

  Matt turned, hurried back to the car, and climbed in. He stuck the key in the ignition, convinced that it wouldn’t work, convinced that the engine would be damaged beyond repair. But, ironically enough, the engine caught at the first time of asking, and, after a moment of awkward manoeuvring, the car was back on the road, making it shaky, jouncing way across the wreckage that littered the tarmac like grotesque confetti after a wedding in hell. And so, at a steady forty miles an hour, they made their way onward down the lane - to find the living, if any still remained.

  Twenty Nine

  Major Hollis carefully placed the radio receiver back on the dashboard. Then he glanced across at Colonel Ronson. Ronson could see Hollis gazing at him out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t look around at the Major. Not just for now. For now he gazed steadily at the mushroom cloud that climbed into heavens some thirty miles away. He admired it. Its power, it rage, its fire, its beauty. To think that he should have a front row seat for this display! He hadn’t wanted to cover his eyes when the missile had descended and the flash had come. He had of course – self-preservation dictated – but he’d soon opened them again to see that fire. That beautiful fire: raging, swelling, growing, boiling upward to form the beautiful contours of the mushroom cloud. And now he sat, as though hypnotised. But Hollis was saying something, words echoing in the interior of the jeep. And their sense at last intruded upon Ronson’s understanding.

  “Sir – it hasn’t worked.”

  Ronson could at last tear his eyes away from the mushroom cloud. Hollis’s words had the power to make him do that. He gazed across at the Major.

  “What are you telling me, soldier?”

  “I’m sorry sir, but it hasn’t worked. Reports have come in of figures walking out of the fire - ,”

  Ronson uttered a scathing laugh, “walking out of a nuclear explosion? The reports are wrong, Major Hollis. Nothing walks out of that,” he gestured through the windscreen.

  “No sir. I believe they are correct. There have been five independent reports, and all from trusted military sources. Plus, there have been reports at other locations in the area of outbreaks of these – these infected. Sir – its spreading...”

  Ronson’s instinct was to dismiss what Hollis had just said, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. He remained silent. Something – almost some other force independent of himself – seemed to stay his tongue. Something that was lodged like an evil seed deep in the strata of his subconscious, told him that this was right. This was as it should be.

  “Sir...” Hollis was saying, his voice desperate, damning, “sir... we’ve done the wrong thing...”

  We’ve done the wrong thing... yes, Ronson supposed that Hollis was right about that. He was also wrong about it too. Because Ronson remembered the dreams... the beautiful dreams of fire and violence that had bloomed in his sleeping mind like strange exotic fauna - alien fauna. They had done the wrong thing, but they had done the right thing too. They had done the thing that these dreams had demanded, a knowledge that had been present in his mind for some time now, but which his harsh logic had kept at bay. Now it blossomed out, and seemed to seize his understanding. And he looked away from Hollis. He ignored the other man. He gazed, instead, toward the towering, monumental contours of the mushroom cloud. And a mad smile curved his lips.

  Thirty

  In Room Eighteen, it had been dreaming, but now it awoke. Its dreams had been of the old times, of aeons passed and millennia unguessed at. Good times, when the harvest of the ground of the universe had been ripe and its spores had settled and grown, converting life to death, and then living within that death, an eternal cycle: death and reanimation and reanimation and death. And those times would come again, on this interesting blue planet. The creatures that lived here were easy to control, their minds malleable, their wills easily broken. They lived for their dreams, and if you became their dreams then they would do your bidding. They would do it without question.

  A change: the planet’s temperature risen by a millionth of a degree. A vague trembling of air particles as the residue of some great power worked through them. It legs trembled at the sensation. Yes... yes, the explosion had occurred, just as had been ordained. The incubation heat would be perfect. These creatures, for all their faults, had seized the power of the stars. It could use that power for its own propagation. How convenient not to have to travel to a real star to lay its spores. It could do it right here on the planet’s surface – no years of wafting through the solar wind toward habitation. The spread would be instantaneous, reanimation as powerful and as voracious as the fire of the stars itself.

  Its children had been born.

  Its eyes glowed silver. Its mouth drooled venom as black as ink. Its legs gathered tight about it, as though in exaltation. And its icy evil laughter gripped the darkened air...

  Copyright © 2016 James King

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

  All characters appearing in the work are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental