Ferine Apocalypse (Book 1): Collapse
Page 1
COLLAPSE
By John F Leonard
COLLAPSE
By John F Leonard
Copyright © 2015 by John F Leonard
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
John F Leonard
Visit my website at www.johnfleonard.com
For the three people that matter the most.
They know who they are ...hopefully they know how much they matter.
Contents
FALLING.
PART 1 ...IMMUNITY BURDENS.
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
PART 2 ...SURVIVAL DEMANDS
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
PART 3 ...SANCTUARY DREAMS.
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
PART 4 ...LIVING NEEDS.
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
STANDING
FALLING.
UK unprepared for mystery epidemic.
Concern continues to mount over the mystery sickness epidemic, commonly being called City Flu, as cases reach record numbers and large parts of the economy grind to a halt.
In little over two days, City Flu has quite literally swept the world in an unparalleled speed of outbreak. Symptoms include coughing, extreme weakness, nausea, sickness and unconsciousness. Other signs to look out for are paleness, skin discolouration, and swelling to hands and face.
“The spectrum of illness observed thus far is severe and inconsistent with seasonal infections,” a government spokesman said. “It is also fair to say that it is a strain that we are still working to identify and the onset of the illness has been unexpected and case numbers have risen at an extreme rate. We would advise people to take sensible health precautions and follow medical advice.”
In attempts to manage the impact of the outbreak, if exhibiting symptoms, the public is being advised to limit contact and self-medicate.
Hospitals are said to be under immense pressure as admissions soar to record levels...
Independent news article 25th May.
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The end of the world as we know it, the end of the ordinary world, arrived without herald, without indicators or warning signs.
With a speed that defied analysis or counter measure, civilisation was simply overwhelmed. A couple of days, and everything had changed.
Changed forever.
As is the way with things
The fall began with what appeared to be an historically recognisable event. A flu like pandemic that didn’t so much spread across the globe as enclose it like a fist snatching a child’s marble.
Swifter and more virulent than anything ever recorded, it was flu-like only in its initial symptoms. Weakness, nausea, vomiting, they were swirls of the matador’s cloak. Feints that masked something sharper, something more serious.
Shortly after the onset of infection, coma followed.
The illness took hold so rapidly and was so debilitating that within days the impact on normal life was catastrophic. Put simply, vast numbers of people became too ill to work and so things stopped working.
In a world where technological miracles grease the wheel of everyday existence, it’s all too easy to forget that things only work because there are people who make them work.
Infected or not, most people knew that normal life was slipping its gears, sliding into unknown territory. In their hearts, they understood something was going badly wrong.
A snippet of conversation, a tweet here or a post there, an uneasy sense of control sliding away, accelerating into the distance. In the jumble of day to day life, almost imperceptible pointers to the descent into disaster.
Some were worried by news reports that remained somehow vague yet concerning.
More were distressed by personal experiences that suggested something out of the ordinary.
A few were blissfully ignorant.
Perception of change is, after all, fundamentally personal. The realisation that something is amiss and then, before you know it, a new reality has taken hold.
The illness was never properly classified, identified or studied. Its effects were too fast to allow the normal processes to become operational. Misleadingly called ‘The City Flu’ by some in Britain, because cities were the places where the results manifested themselves most quickly and were therefore picked up first.
A misnomer. It was neither limited to cities or indeed flu.
Perhaps more accurately dubbed ‘The Sweeping Sickness’ in the USA, the infection seemingly emerged from nowhere and followed no known vector of contagion.
If indeed it was contagious.
Appearing virtually simultaneously, and most noticeably, in densely populated areas around the world, the speed of infection and huge numbers affected defied attempts at isolating and understanding the disease.
If indeed it was actually a disease.
The few individuals still operating in health agencies across the world had two reasons to feel anything other than despair. Firstly, whilst the infection rate was unprecedented and effects incapacitating, mortalities seemed relatively low given the monumental numbers involved. Secondly, whilst those affected were unconscious and unable to function, recovery remained a possibility.
They were grasping at straws of course. The scale of the collapse event rendered meaningful diagnosis or analysis impossible.
After an initial, incomprehensibly swift outbreak, a few unbelievable and devastating days, a small percentage of the population remained unaffected.
With incalculable numbers lying unconscious and incapable, and numerous dead, those lucky enough to be immune were left with the absurd and impossible task of attempting to come to terms with the situation.
They say that hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Hope was all the survivors had at that point. The hope that the collapsed would recover from their coma like state. The hope that this would in turn allow civilisation to be salvaged from the collapse.
Something unprecedented and unimaginable had occurred.
But hope lived on.
Recovery would signal a turning of the tide, a cause for optimism.
Recovery proved to be the start of the true nightmare.
PART 1 ...IMMUNITY BURDENS.
The end of life is an essentially difficult thing. How does any life end, species or individual, but with a desperate, gasping attempt at another breath, an innate desire to continue, a need to be.
The urge for being, the desire for presence, is surely the driving force for existence itself. The initiating spark that fosters evolution.
Perhaps that urge f
or continuance defines the immortal.
The desire, the willingness, and the adaptability to survive.
Dr Clarissa Chandra Ph.D. FIBMS.
The Mysteries of Mutability 2005 Edition.
Courtesy of Carburgh Publishing.
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You changed baby,
Didn’t know change was gonna come.
You loved me yesterday,
But yesterday’s gone.
Screaming Mike Hawkins and the Lamentations.
Change is Gonna Come, 1959.
Courtesy of Paladian Records.
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Chapter 1.
Sam Drives Too Fast
She rested her head on the steering wheel.
No thought really.
Just her head down, slight pressure between her eyebrows and her hairline, where the weight of her head rested on the leather.
Her hands still grasped the wheel.
She could have been praying.
She knew that she had to think clearly, make important decisions, make choices about what she should do, but right there and then her mind seemed occupied with the blood on her jeans. She hadn’t noticed the blood until that point. Well, not consciously noticed it, not properly registered it in a thinking way. It was dirty and horrible and unclean, it was just plain simple wrong.
Blood. Christ, blood. Oh God, I’ve got blood on my jeans.
Slowly leaning back against the seat, Sam Scott looked at her hands, and arms, and down again at herself. Dirt and blood just about everywhere and, looking up and adjusting the rear view mirror, she could see her face was the same.
Smeared and marked and cut.
And crying.
You can see the tracks of my tears just like the song said.
It was the little boy. The little boy. He’d pushed her over some sort of edge. The little boy was just too much.
A bridge too far, that small straw that broke this old camel’s back baby.
The little boy turning into some strange, unnaturally animated weight as she hit him, and then his head starring the windscreen and his body flying away over the top of the car, leaving the crazy-paved, dirty smeared screen behind him.
For her to look through.
Grubby and dirty and cracked like she was.
Smeared.
He’d had his back to her as she swung the car round the sharp bend in the road and she simply hadn’t stopped in time. Hadn’t seen him soon enough or reacted quickly enough.
Driving too fast.
Yes definitely driving too fast, but that was understandable surely? Wasn’t it?
Dear Lord, cut me some slack here, throw me a bone ...give me a fucking break. You can see everything can’t you? The tracks of my tears and tracks of my rubber on the road.
Everything that had happened. The craziness of the last few days, the madness of it. The sheer and utter lunacy of what she’d been through in the last few hours.
What she’d seen, things that she’d done.
What she’d had to do. There hadn’t been any choice that she could see.
She took a big breath and exhaled. Head back attempting to get a perspective on things, make the right decisions.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The swear words a mantra in her head, a mantra that said I’m okay, I can do this, everything will work out. A litany that meant I won’t give in.
She glanced at the blood caked frying pan sitting on the passenger seat.
The frying pan for Christ’s sake.
And ignored it.
Sam opened the door and got out of the car, climbed out like a tired old woman, and approached the back of the vehicle, stopped and looked at the boy’s body further down the road.
He’d be finished either way.
Whether he was right or ...wrong.
His head had crazed the windscreen and you couldn’t do that much damage without taking some damage as well.
Fatal damage.
Whether he was just a normal kid or ...whatever.
Walked further, closer, until finally she was close enough to see his face in detail. His distorted, protuberant face. Swollen yet shrunken and weirdly, enormously, veined.
Fluid spreading on the tarmac underneath his flattened hairless head, blood and something else, something dark and viscous and coagulated.
Wrong.
He was wrong. Not normal.
A disorientating mixture of relief and dismay. Horror and a feeling near to reprieve.
He was one of those things.
Not really knowing what that meant, not knowing what being one of those things actually was. He was still a little boy. You could tell by the clothes if nothing else.
A little dead boy.
That was when she heard the sound of running feet and, spinning around, saw lots of children, lots of those things, boys and girls, running towards her. They all looked wrong.
Sam was rooted for a moment, stilled by indecision overload and, if truth be told, disbelief overload. The little ones running up the road towards her were young, nine or ten perhaps. Even at a distance she could see that they wore filth stained clothing and as they drew closer she could discern a sound rising from them. An inhuman growling noise.
Mouths wide and feral looking.
Necks strained forward as if that would close the distance and reach her more quickly, like runners dipping too early, well before the tape at the end of some awful games day race.
Their hands half raised with fingers that looked too pointed. It was that, she would think afterwards, those hands, that finally shook off her paralysis and had her sprinting back to the car and throwing herself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door, frantically twisting the engine ignition key.
Their hands were like claws.
Thumps as they enveloped the car and launched themselves at it.
A terrible squeal-grinding sound as one of them pistoned its head at her side window, trying to get at her through the window, trying to bite her, its teeth scraping down the glass with a ghastly, horrible noise. Another one climbed on to the bonnet and she was staring at a face from a nightmare, distorted by the crazed window.
And the thing at her right, at her nearest window, hitting the glass again in desperation as it tried to connect with her. Thin and wasted looking face, yet paradoxically distended with thick, muscular bulges, like the bodily stuff underneath its skin had swelled and deformed and changed the outside.
The jaw that seemed to open too wide and be too big with teeth that seemed too large and sharp, and the hands that slammed around wildly with nails that appeared to be talons, scratching against metal and glass in feverish motion.
Scalp showing through long hair that was matted with muck, thick with encrustment and nonetheless wispy and thin. Hair that was fading and falling out.
This thing was a child, or rather had been a child. She could see an embroidered badge on the uniform polo shirt it wore and could see those same badges in the pack behind and all around it.
It wasn’t a child anymore and the rest weren’t children either.
It was a wild creature and it wanted to get to her, to attack with its teeth and claws. It wanted to kill her and to eat her. Those teeth and claws weren’t there for any other reason, they weren’t fucking ornamental. This thing that had been a defenceless child had turned into something with death grown into its mouth and death growing out of its fingers.
Ripping sound above her head and she saw taloned skeletal fingers puncturing the soft-top roof of her car. The roof of her retro-modern, kooky little car that was perfect for life as a hairdresser but, and it was becoming apparent in a rather alarming way, left a lot to be desired for life in a world populated by unimaginable monstrosity. That roof was being shredded by her attackers.
Thudding impact in front of her as the windscreen was hit again and began to disintegrate.
She screamed as a child size claw pushed through the fabric roof and brushed her hair as it frantically att
empted to grab at her.
Struggled to find first gear.
Frantic and desperate like a panicked kid on her first lesson.
After what seemed like an eternity her foot jammed down on the accelerator and the car jerked forward, throwing the thing on the bonnet against the windscreen. View obscured by that thing as the wheels bumped and thudded over the little bodies clustered around the front of the vehicle.
The motion felt horrendous even without sight. That almost soft up and down sensation of something heavy moving over something that was softer. Rising and settling in a way that guaranteed a terrible outcome.
The experience of that appalling, sickening sensation would stay etched on her mind forever. Not that there was time to contemplate it in any depth at that point.
She had driven free of the pack of child creatures but the momentum of doing so had propelled the one on the bonnet partially through the windshield and she was inches away from a snarling, whipping head. As she picked up speed it was being forced further into the vehicle and it would only be seconds before it was on her with unrestricted opportunity to use that distended, snapping jaw.
Afterwards, she would like to think that performing an emergency stop was an inspired move, a sign of her obstinate survival instinct and general ingenuity in the face of the unpredictable.
In reality it was her pure terror and disgust that triggered the response and brought the car to a shuddering, slewing halt and hurled the little monster skidding and tumbling across the asphalt and into the grass verge at the side of the road. Pure terror, she thought, was infinitely more effective than someone slapping their hand on the dashboard when you needed to execute emergency procedures in a car.
Driving examiners everywhere please take note.
Hysteria bubbled just below the surface. She knew that without any doubt. And she also knew that giving in to it right then would be the end of her.