Ferine Apocalypse (Book 1): Collapse

by Leonard, John F.

  Tom was senior. None of your fucking riff-raff. A director of communications. A mover and shaker somebody.

  He’d left spin doctoring in his wake. In the past where it belonged.

  Professional political liar was one term that Tom liked. He remembered, with some fondness, reading that about himself in one of the worthless rags that masqueraded as a newspaper. Written by some little cunt fresh out of media college who didn’t yet have the common sense to know that publicly dissing Tom Crabtree wasn’t the wisest career move.

  Tome wielded power. Effectively unseen power, but power nevertheless. Influence at the cutting edges. If Tom said stand on one leg, the Prime Minister asked him which would be most effective, left or right?

  He’d met Andrew Stuyvesant when the then young man was first elected to parliament, long before he became Prime Minister.

  They formed a productive friendship. Tom recognised and bonded with something in the young champagne socialist that gelled with his own intellect-driven ambition.

  Poles apart in personality and background, he and Stuyvesant saw eye to eye when it came to the game of politics.

  As Stuyvesant ascended the greasy and perilous ladders of political power with the effortless ease of a particularly suave and charming monkey, Tom clung to his designer simian shirttails.

  That wasn’t entirely accurate, but it would do for the biography.

  They complemented each other.

  Tom was a dark asset, a counter-balance, to Andrew’s brilliant attraction.

  Whereas Andrew exerted an irresistible charisma, Tom barely contained a cold brutality. They were both persuasive in their own ways and both in possession of minds capable of seeing the salient details in big pictures.

  The difference was that people naturally liked Andrew, felt both comfortable and comforted by his proximity. More often than not, those same people felt an instinctive need to flee from Tom’s presence. Andrew enjoyed the limelight and Tom was happier skulking in the shadows. As a partnership it propelled them both higher than they could have hoped.

  And where was the Prime Minister now? Where was dear old Andrew Stuyvesant now?

  In China heading a heavyweight trade delegation. No contact. No calls. No emails. Not even a fucking second class letter or carrier-fucking-pigeon with a message tied to its skinny leg for that matter.

  Who knew? Tom certainly didn’t.

  And it didn’t matter one jot. Not one old doodle on a sticky post-it-through-the windows-note.

  Because Andrew was miles away and the old partnership was the least of his concerns at that moment.

  Not being dead was far more important.

  He finally succeeded in unlocking the door.

  It was an old, unused entrance to the Central Interim Management Complex.

  The shelter. The good old CIMC.

  The door was invisibly nondescript, hidden in an alleyway between old buildings that were listed and untouchable. Tom had discovered the entrance by accident years ago when researching something completely unrelated.

  Checked it out and then ensured he had access to the keys. When he’d decided to delay going underground, he’d already had this bolt-hole contingency in mind. By the time he knew he had to get here, the situation had changed beyond any anticipation.

  After the disastrous TV interview that he’d organised. That was enough even for him. Time for a tactical withdrawal, as the actress said to the baboon-balled bishop, and let the country fuck itself up for a while, without Tom’s trusty hand hovering around the tiller.

  God, the live interview. Only a small disaster given the global scale of the event, but galling for Tom nevertheless. The legendary presenter, Gavin Kovak, collapsing live on air for fuck’s sake. What a bag of christ-candied arse toffee that was. Tom had wanted to run screaming with frustrated fury from the wings and finish the job on the cantankerous bastard. Throttle out what life was left in him. Instead, he’d stood in infuriated silence until it became clear that, for tonight, the live entertainment was over. Maybe for a little while longer than just tonight.

  He returned to his office through eerie, near empty streets and then simply ...stalled.

  Just kind of ...stopped.

  Shut down.

  He remembered hoping that the woman he’d scrounged up as the government spokesperson was okay. Some junior minister or assistant, he couldn’t remember. Nice legs and a pretty face. Slight overbite. Sophie whatever her name was. He hoped that she’d gone to earth. Or was at least somewhere safe. She’d handled herself well despite the circumstances.

  But the new reality, the course of events ...it was just too ...too strange. Too fucking unreal.

  The empty streets, the empty Whitehall.

  It had ...well ...it had beguiled him.

  Temporarily cut the circuits, pulled his plugs, disconnected him from the network.

  He would never have admitted it, but Tom Crabtree had gone into a state of dazed demi-shock, a fugue in which the hours disappeared. A tiny wee dirty-bastard-you-are mini breakdown in truth.

  A banal, bastardy-buggering breakdown.

  Him, Tom Crabtree, not coping with the unexpected. Who would have thought it?

  Tom wouldn’t have, but then, exceptional times were bound to generate exceptional consequences. And it wasn’t permanent of course, just a temporary m-m-m-mental st-st-stutter. A short blast of cognisance constipation.

  He’d eventually wandered out on to a daylight street that was redolent with smoke.

  Not a London pea-souper fog-smoke like the old days, where you were lucky if you could see how many fingers were on the fucking hand in front of your face. No, not that long-dead, long-buried old bastard.

  Just grey white swirls and eddies in the air. The stuff of civilisation burning. Above tall buildings, he could see blacker smoke in the sky.

  And he had a taste in his mouth, smoke at the back of this throat. Acrid and poisonous, chemical organic and calamitous. How he thought cancer and impending death would taste.

  When he encountered his first monster, Tom’s normal disposition reasserted itself with a vengeance. Rage replaced the numb sense of detachment.

  As the filth-smeared figure ran at him, he rammed his Ipad mini into its snarling jaws. Didn’t even register that beneath the filth it had been dressed like he was. Besuited for business, ready to run the numbers and take the hard decisions old boy. No didn’t really see that, could only see the animal. The fearsome jaw and horrible teeth and straggles of hair nearly gone forever.

  The thing crunched through the beautifully crafted glass and metal instrument like it was so much flaky pastry. An electronic Danish you could say.

  Tom felt a familiar, old anger begin to boil within him. He’d given up allowing people to fuck with him around the age of seven and he had no intention of starting again at this stage of the game.

  As it ripped at him with deadly claws, his north of the border roots re-established themselves with a force akin to born again religious fervour.

  He drove two stiff little fingers into its eyeballs. Popped them like he’d pop any old intellectual balloon postulated by a political opponent.

  Backing away slightly, spewing swear words at a rate that would have put a severely afflicted Tourette’s sufferer to shame, and wiping fluid-sticky fingers on his jacket, he began to deliver vicious kicks to, first legs, and then head. Ignored the flares of pain in his foot as he kicked skin that felt like steel. Stomped and hammered until the focus of his frenzy started to become still.

  Panting and spluttering obscenities, he became aware of others in the periphery of vision.

  Others like this ...thing.

  Tom wasn’t a man used to feeling fear but he felt it then.

  A nerve tingling panicky sensation that thrilled through him with a sweatily disorientating flush. A tunnelling of the vision and a shortness of breath. He wasn’t used to feeling like events were out of his control, but that strange sensation seemed to be cropping up with an a
larming regularity these past few days.

  There were a lot of these things and they were coming his way. Coming his way really quite fucking quickly when you thought about it.

  They all had the same monstrous aspect to them.

  He didn’t ponder it for very long, he simply took to his heels and headed towards his destination, sparing enough time to deliver a final kick to the head of the Ipad crunching creature on the ground and bitterly muttering bastard as a less than fond fare-thee-well.

  Cursed his leather-souled business brogues as he went. He really needed his K-Swiss court shoes for this type of acceleration, these useless punch-patterned fuckers were as slick as shit on a skid pan when it came to running. He navigated away from the growing number of horribly veined, somehow skeletal people that were coming at him.

  At an age approaching fifty, Tom was as stick-thin as he had been at eighteen, partly through an interest in tennis, but mostly because being Tom Crabtree burned copious amounts of nervous energy.

  Atomic amounts of energy.

  Energy consumed purely by the force of his personality, calories expended by the requirements of simply being him. So he ran and dodged and did what he needed to do with an energy that belied his years and occupation.

  To be honest, the next period of time was a dim interlude in his mind. How he reached the door wasn’t clear. He knew he ran and fought at times.

  Killed probably.

  Well, yes. He must have killed.

  <><><>

  As he finally unlocked the door and saw an emergency-lit downward staircase ahead and a door to the right, his natural sense of self-preservation came to the fore.

  That ever so smart Tom Crabtree brain did one of those cerebral twists that had helped propel him to the top. A bit of lateral thinking fuelled by basic instinct, empowered by unflagging belief.

  Tom opted for the less obvious choice and shifted his always expedient ass over to the door on the right, ignoring the stairs.

  Open. The door was open.

  So good. That was so good. So freshly-scrubbed testicles good that he could have wept with joy.

  Not locked. That would have been so bad for him.

  Oh thank you my lord Jesus god, blessed art thy name, you ancient old beardy cock-sucker spin doctor high priest-cunt-leader of those who follow in your hippie-sandaled footsteps.

  <><><>

  Tom never had any intention of dooming the CIMC underground shelter. That he did so was simply a mistake borne of the desperate struggle to survive.

  He was definitely a survivor, there was no question about that.

  He was egotistical almost by necessity. You didn’t survive in his world without a chunky old ego. It was a necessary piece of equipment. And Tom had never felt the need for apology when necessity reared its often ugly head. You always did what you had to do. That was how life worked.

  He wasn’t irresponsible, or selfish for the sake of being selfish for that matter. But, if called to account, if he had ever been required to sit in judgement on himself, irresponsible and selfish is how he would have judged his own actions.

  Not that he would apologised even then.

  And the time of the judiciary was gone the way of the dinosaurs. Judges in wigs and archaic procedural contemplation had become things of the past.

  As his now inhuman pursuers burst through the open street door and followed some instinctive urge to go deeper into the shelter, Tom cowered off to one side in a tiny security room.

  Separated from death by scant inches of slowly warping rotten wood.

  Lying on a dusty floor, his leg extended, back against a desk, foot jammed below the lock plate.

  A mildewed and stinking place to be.

  Certainly not where he’d ever have wanted to end a dynamic and influential life.

  PART 2 ...SURVIVAL DEMANDS

  Mankind is perched precariously on the shoulder of a vast and vulnerable giant. The giant is our recorded past, our accumulated knowledge.

  Widely understood and accepted, we reference the fact ad infinitum but there is no genuine acknowledgement of the precipice. We dance with increasing abandon, throwing caution to the wind in our developmental intoxication, without heed for the huge depth below us.

  When we fall, the fall will be apocalyptic. Change, of an order unseen and undreamt of.

  The giant will fall and humanity will fall with it.

  Dr Clarissa Chandra Ph.D. FIBMS.

  The Mysteries of Mutability 2005 Edition.

  Courtesy of Carburgh Publishing.

  <><><>

  Hold on, hold on baby, it’s not all gone.

  Keep going, you just go on.

  Get up, get up, you know you can get up.

  Don’t cry baby, just hold on.

  Sammy Chung.

  Hold On, 1979.

  Courtesy of Funky Douglass Records.

  <><><>

  Chapter 1.

  Sam and the Dream Ending.

  Up until the final few days, Sam Scott would have said that she led a normal, if somewhat unexceptional life and that she was, all things considered, happy. She would certainly never have anticipated being sat, blood smeared and ragged, in a country layby, attempting to retain a fragile grasp on her sanity. Funny how encountering monsters that defied reality and killing children could upset your equilibrium.

  They used to be children. No way on earth that they could still be called children ...not unless you had a suite booked at the funny farm, where all the rooms were rubber rooms.

  In her early forties but younger looking, Sam was attractive in a way that turned heads. Married to a decent man and blessed with a beautiful son.

  She’d spent her adult life in the beauty business working mostly in big retail stores for a succession of glamorous brand names until, five years ago, she’d started up on her own as a mobile hairdresser and beautician. Best move she’d ever made. No corporate bullshit, you made your own rules and set your own standards.

  Life wasn’t perfect by any means. She had her unhappy moments alright, but overall she had plenty of reasons to be thankful for how her life was working out. She’d realised as she grew out of her teens and began to get a flavour of the real world, the world beyond that early naïve optimism that some young people are fortunate enough to carry beyond childhood, that perfection was an illusion.

  Being attractive and reasonably intelligent had numerous advantages, but what nobody told her was that neither of these undoubtedly beneficial attributes guaranteed being happy.

  She’d had to learn that for herself. True, she wasn’t usually stuck for a date but that didn’t mean that the guys who asked her out and the guys with whom she formed relationships were right for her. She’d actually been slightly astonished when she did eventually find a man who not only seemed to desire her but also genuinely respect her. That relationship had blossomed, rapidly flowered into marriage which, in turn, was quickly followed by the birth of their son.

  Their life as a family had seemed to simply happen.

  And with it came contentment. For Sam, it seemed that her happiness popped into existence like spontaneous human combustion. Whoosh, and she was suddenly enveloped, swathed in love without any warning and without understanding how it had happened. She would sometimes think that it was true what people said, life happened while you weren’t looking.

  And her life just rolled along after that. Not always easy, not necessarily scintillatingly exciting a lot of the time, but pretty good nonetheless.

  Until the Collapse.

  When the City Flu had hit, she and her husband John had been unaffected. But their fourteen year old son, Sean, had been struck down.

  Within a short period, his condition had deteriorated from worryingly unwell to unconscious. That she and John were both immune was a statistical anomaly, the unlikelihood of which Sam didn’t really have opportunity to ponder at the time. She would ponder it later, but by then it was too late to feel very much gratitude for the slice of lu
ck she’d been served. By then, it felt as if all the good luck had dripped out of the world, like blood drained from a carcass as it hung on bloody hooks. By then, it felt disproportionately cruel then that their son was part of the vast majority when they were not. Hardly logical, but logic runs a poor second where love is involved.

  Sam became increasingly fraught as the all-encompassing nature of the crisis revealed itself. News and information dried up like water spilled in the hot sun. Scant hours after the onset of the outbreak, a day or two at most it seemed, the media was largely non-existent. The little news that was there offered no help.

  The streets were almost entirely deserted.

  When she and John rang hospitals and doctors, calls were unanswered or went to message services.

  Neighbours didn’t answer their doors.

  Friends and family didn’t answer calls or emails.

  Sean’s condition became more concerning on the morning after his collapse. As they cleaned and tended him, they saw a disturbing physical change taking place.

  Disturbing? Let’s be honest, it was horrifying.

  His face and body seemed to be suffering from some type of subtle emaciation, but simultaneously displaying strangely swollen areas, the skin distending in tuberous shapes. Not surprising that he should lose weight, he wasn’t able to eat. Despite trying, they couldn’t make him swallow much water. But the weight loss, the shrinking, that was happening too quickly surely? Weight didn’t just disappear. And the strangely organic, striated, muscle-like lumps were ...very worrying.

  Worrying? Those swellings were more than worrying, they were something else and the something didn’t warrant thinking about.

  Sam was distressed and bewildered by another thing as well. She’d noticed that his nails appeared to be thickening.

  More than that, changing shape, becoming more prominent. Growing in length and growing deeper into his fingers.

  He has lovely nails, delicate and fine. He has a beautiful face and it’s being disfigured, she thinks, although she will never say this out loud. Never. He’s still her beautiful boy. Strong and smart and ...perfect.