Ferine Apocalypse (Book 1): Collapse

by Leonard, John F.

  The rest of their random group assembled behind them and the exit beckoned, calling them on, calling them on down the road.

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  The group moved quickly and quietly, and with purpose. Despite that, those two terribly damaged things still saw them. Registered the survivors as soon as they emerged from the hotel.

  Stared and gauged, and then began to move in their direction. Low growling from corded throats alternating with a spirant hissing that sliced through the air like nails being scraped across glass. Hobbled and hurt as they were, those creatures still managed a dragging but implacable progress as they closed on the group.

  As they lurched nearer, the hot dread that was becoming all too familiar boiled up in Joe’s stomach. Despite Pearcey having said he’d deal with them, the open proximity of those things, the naked nearness of them without even the pretence of a barrier, sent a ripple of fiery sickness into his guts. A visceral aversion to them, a need to either run away or attack and destroy.

  Stick with the scarpering, Joester, it’s what you do best, you cowardy clown. A drink is what you need old fella. A quick bit of run-rabbit-run and then a wee nip to take the edge off. Doesn’t have to be a full on fucking tilt at it, just a little suck at the nipple, a quick squirt of something fermented and high enough in alcohol by volume to stop the shakes and sharpen your skittish mind.

  He had the machete in his good hand.

  Sebastian’s blade.

  Sitting in the darkened foyer of Adi’s London flat seemed an eternity ago, another lifetime. How long had it been, a few days?

  The gun was in his pocket, untested and unused. Steven’s gun? Yeah, Steven. Miriam’s friend Steven. Fat, dumpy disappeared Miriam and dead and unburied Steven, lying in the car park of the Happy Trooper.

  Pink Lemonade girl still at the door of a gastro pub that would never close, a permanently approachable meet and greet, rotting away until only the bones would remain. The Trooper was another lifetime ago, could have happened in a different century to another Joe.

  The road is long isn’t brotherless Joe? The road behind you stretches back littered with your fucking disasters doesn’t it? How much road is left ahead do you think?

  Pearcey, true to his word, limped out beyond the vehicles, knife held by his side. Joe heard but didn’t see, his attention was on Pearcey, the low snick of car doors being opened and the clunk of them being hurriedly closed. Dimly heard his own whispered imprecations to get it done, just get it done Pearcey, let’s get out, let’s get on down the road.

  Those two Jacks, they picked up speed somehow ...or maybe Pearcey moved too far towards them.

  Maybe Pearcey misjudged it.

  Irrespective of how or why, Joe saw the man’s knife shimmer in the sullen morning light and the first splash of thick blood as the wicked knife hammered through a sinewed temple. Saw Pearcey thrown off balance and stagger-hop fall as the second one arrived and flailed at him.

  Joe heard the pounding of running feet behind him as he stood transfixed by the open door of the Renegade. Turned, machete rising and unready, to see a swathe of creatures approaching.

  Despaired then.

  Felt hope drain away like dirtied dishwater down the drain. There were too many, all around their stranded little group.

  Ohhh Jesus, saints preserve us in aspic, there were too many.

  Saw the boy calmly sliding past him again, a replay of the scene at the dream house. Silky-sure motion, the boy moving in front of him, blocking his view. And the flashing hook of metal, smooth pirouettes and creatures being sliced and despatched.

  But there were too many. Too many for the kid to cope with. Joe ran and swung the machete, crunched bone and saw fluid fly, reeled and swung again, staggered and swung once more. Scoring hits and clearing ground. Pain rippling down his wounded arm, a stickily wet reminder of the thinness of the line they now straddled, the line between life and death.

  Ahh Joey-Joe, there’s hope for you yet, ya useless fecking ijit. Show some backbone and maybe God will show mercy on your miserable soul.

  The kid went down. Bowled over as one of them broadsided him, the blade skimming away. Elliot, grappling desperately as the creature latched on, its jaws furiously snapping, claws scrabbling to gain purchase on its prey.

  And then it all became a blur, too much happening at once. The rumble of the Range Rover’s engine filling the air as Joe started a futile run towards Elliot.

  Don’t leave us, don’t just fucking-well drive away for Christ’s sake, a prayer running through his head.

  A snatched image of himself reflected in the windows of the hotel dining room and the images of more of those things approaching from his right, things he could see when he turned his gaze that way. At least three of them that were near enough to be immediate problems, two arrowing at the fallen kid, the other one aimed at him. He wouldn’t make it to the kid before that one intercepted him.

  It had all gone to shit in seconds. Just a few seconds, where it all conspired against you. But wasn’t that his life in a nutshell? Rolling along as happy as a hapless little pig-in-shit and up pops the wolf and begins blowing your houses down. And all too often that wolf was wearing a mask of your own face.

  As he fought to force down that infuriating sense of injustice and to stave off the blinding panic that would freeze him where he stood, Joe pulled out the gun.

  The untested gun that he’d taken from a dead man’s hand. Before he had time to take a bead on the nearest creature and hope that the gun would fire, the Range Rover roared past him, ploughing into the two creatures approaching Elliot. Spinning one away to thump into the window of the hotel restaurant, glass seeming to shimmer and ripple before shattering in a jagged cacophony of sound.

  Bumping up and over the second one, crunching it under the outsized tires of the four-by-four, dragging and smearing it along the ground in sprays of thick maroon.

  The hollow crack of Pearcey’s gun, loud in the heavy quiet of the pewter morning. The thing on Elliot flipping off him, blown backwards by the blast, Pearcey on one knee a few feet away, the gun grasped in both hands, his face rictussed in concentration and pain.

  Pearcey swivelling awkwardly to bring that gun to bear on Joe and the bowel-loosening sight of him squeezing the trigger again. The growl at Joe’s right shoulder turning to a mewling shriek as the bullet hit the creature that had been there, close enough to leap at him.

  “Get to your car,” Pearcey shouted as he pulled Elliot to his feet and shoved him in the direction of the Renegade.

  The kid running at the vehicle, jinking to his right and dipping to retrieve his weapon, still getting there ahead of Joe, inside before Joe’s trembling hand could grasp the driver’s door handle.

  Dear God, the kid was light on his feet.

  And then Joe was twisting the wheel to follow the Range Rover as it moved past them towards the way out, Pearcey still closing the door as he fell into the passenger seat next to Caroline.

  Joe, hands shaky and unsure, injured arm sending out flaring bolts of pain, breath rasping in and out of his chest, gunned the engine and followed as more of monsters appeared. Trying to allow a safe distance between them and the car ahead but also to take advantage of the bigger vehicle’s bulk as it hammered through the things that had suddenly filled the exit gateway.

  Stunned by what had just happened, stunned to still be alive and stunned at Elliot’s escape. The shrill desire for a cigarette beginning its nagging wail at the back of his mind. The need for a drink thrumming along his nerves, sub-audible but undeniable, an under-the-skin-itch that wanted to be scratched.

  Not now, Joey-boy. But soon maybe. Once you’ve kept your promise.

  The Range Rover bulled forward and then seemed to disappear as it turned right into what looked like a leaf shrouded dead end. He hoped to God they knew where they were going, that this was the lane that would lead to their goal. He dry-swallowed and followed without pause.

  A thin ribbon of pot-holed tarmac
, eroding with age and wear, walls of old greenery rising on either side of it. The lane snaking this way and that, so the vehicle in front kept popping from view. A serpentine maze, an endless convolution that ate time and shredded Joe’s nerves until the claustrophobic green walls thinned out, replaced with open fields, framed by sporadic trees and bushes.

  They’d outrun their pursuers, for now at least, and the fields looked quiet and empty. The Range Rover slowed its pace as it negotiated the confines of the road. In places it was tight, the lane only wide enough for one vehicle, and Joe had a vision of turning a corner to find the lead car crumpled into some obstruction ...or rounding a bend and crumpling him and the kid into the stalled Range Rover.

  “Put your seatbelt on. You alright?” He asked Elliot.

  “Yeah, just about. More cuts and bruises. It was a close call though. Really...close, you know.” Elliot replied as he pulled the belt across himself.

  Joe nodded but didn’t trust himself to say more. Not for a few moments. Instead, he scanned the lane, a meandering strip of rotting blacktop, scanned the fields, steely greens and browns under the storm heavy sky.

  Fingers locked rigid on the wheel, neck stiff with tension.

  It didn’t stop. It just didn’t let up. The pressure of surviving, it kept on and on and didn’t stop pressing down on you, an immense and shifting gravity. And it wasn’t about to, not for Elliot and him anyway. Not until they’d settled the business about the kid’s brother. Maybe for the others it would, if everything panned out with this Black Hills place. If that was all hunky-dory, those good people were a short way shy of some sort of sanctuary. And he really thought it might pan out.

  Pearcey was bona-fide, a battle-forged piece of work who wouldn’t go chasing after white elephants. And Julian, scared and reserved as he was, that fella struck Joe as too genuinely clever to be pitching at mirages.

  Having second thoughts Joey-Joey, jellyfish-Joey? Has the wobbly old spine been weakened by that last little encounter? Want to run for those black hills and ditch the boy and his hopeless quest? Ditch brother Georgie as you’ve ditched everyone else along the oh-so-fucking-long way.

  A little further on and they came upon their first obstacle. A car on its roof, partly blocking the lane. An ancient Citroen saloon that had been tired and t-cut within an inch of the breakers yard long before it had hit the low wall on this lane and flipped over.

  Metal drag marks and skid-shed rubber along the lane, glass glistening on pitted tarmac.

  Lightning strobed the sky and Joe’s foot reflexed on the brake in surprise, jerking their belts as he stopped well short of the four wheel drive in front of them. Beyond that the dull wreck blocking their path.

  Thunder rolled in the distance and he tried to remember daddy Byrne’s old equation about seeing that awesome light and feeling that deep boom resonate in your bones, and how far away that put the storm. Not that it mattered, the storm would do whatever it was going to do and no amount of musing on his behalf would alter that. The blocked road was the priority.

  “Just swell. Just fucking goody-good greatly-great,” Joe muttered under his breath.

  “Jumped up Jesus on the ghost train, what next?”

  Elliot was silent. They sat for a moment and considered the situation.

  There didn’t seem to be any immediate threat but there was plenty of evidence that a danger had existed here not so long ago. The remains of two corpses. One body by the upside down dented wing of the car, and the remains of another strewn along the nearby wall. At least Joe thought it was two corpses, hard to tell for sure when they’d been ripped apart and partially consumed. There was lots of drying blood and bits of body, stuff that, strictly speaking, belonged inside a skin rather than on the outside of it. He was reasonably sure he could see a severed arm, the hand at the end of it upturned in supplication to the remorseless sky.

  His mind jittered back to the Happy Trooper and Pink Lemonade. The no doubt once appealing Pink Lemonade, lying there in perpetual welcome. He could feel her voice somewhere in his head, getting ready to spark up and begin its sincerely smiling spiel.

  If he got closer to the mess that was spread like a spilled abattoir bin around the Citroen, would he see ants crawling busily in the blood?

  You betcha Joe. The ants, they’re all over us dead guys like a rash. They just lurve da sticky wetness. Can’t get enough of it. And you know what? We don’t mind! Not once we’ve been chewed up and spat out. We’re always here with a cheery greeting, roadside restaurant or impromptu pit stop, we’re here for the weary traveller.

  Soon the rain would come down and wash it all away. But that wasn’t right, was it, that wasn’t what would really happen.

  The rain, it would just wash away the signs, make it less obvious. Nothing could cleanse this, clear it completely. The Lane People would always be here, same as Pink Lemonade would always be there at the not-so-happy Trooper. Just like Mr Kenright and whatever he’d left upstairs at his happy home cum store would always be there. Good old Mr Kenright gently twisting on the end of his belt until rot reduced him to the floor where he could endlessly stare upwards at his hell.

  Just like the Lane People, poor souls swirling round this crash site. They’d always be here and if Joe got closer he’d be able to smell them, inhale what was left of them. The parts of them that remained would conjure another inglorious story for him, slip the seeds into his head where they’d take root and unfold like some poisonous flower.

  “What are we gonna do Joe?”

  Thank God for Elliot, his realness. His immediateness.

  Thank God for the useless walkie talkie hissing senselessly in the drinks holder at his side. So much for that idea, but thank you for the mundane reality of its failure.

  Thank God for the diversion of Pearcey awkwardly clambering from the car ahead and limping over to inspect the wreck, hand raised in a holding gesture. Julian getting out and joining him. Both of them standing there in the louring light.

  Just standing there for the longest time, and then moving away from the wreck towards the wall and standing again.

  Paused, absorbed in something Joe couldn’t see.

  He didn’t want to do it, but he grasped the machete and got out, telling Elliot to stay in the Renegade.

  It felt exposed, that was the first thing that struck him. Not as vivid, but the overpass all over again. Out there in the open, the security of the car, however false, disappeared. As soon as he leaned back on the door to quietly close it, the sense of being cocooned evaporated, gone like it had never been there.

  He wanted to light a cigarette and get his bearings. Instead, he looked around and walked over to Pearcey and Julian, walked as fast as he could, the machete twitching in his hand.

  Twitching, or is it maybe shaking Joey-boy? Shaking because the hand holding it is shaking?

  It might have been the quality of the light, or it might have been in his head, but the scene took on a surreal quality for Joe. They were stopped on a country road in the English midlands, but he had the feeling that he’d stepped into an abstract landscape. It felt like nowhere and could have been anywhere, a sky shot with every shade of grey and the pewter-washed green on all sides. He hadn’t seen it from the Renegade, but there was a driveway, a barely visible house at the end of it. The merest hint of old red brick and chipped black roof tile, both tinged dark by light that seemed to come from the end of time. Pearcey and Julian stood a little way up the driveway, staring ahead at something on the ground. Joe stopped short of the entrance, he didn’t want to go in there, wanted to shuffle back to the car and lock himself inside, because he could already see too much from where he was.

  Even this close, he heard the hissing, not loud but cutting through the heavy air, an insidious noise that belonged inside a nightmare. It just added to the atmosphere of unreality that seemed to shadow his eyes and clog his nose and ears.

  He understood why Pearcey and Julian were standing there, immobilised by what they were w
itnessing.

  The thing on the ground was small.

  Tiny really.

  It had once been a baby, surely no older than twelve months, before the mysterious cataclysmic infection. Before the collapse.

  Joe hadn’t wanted to consider anyone this young, this small, surviving the infection.

  But it occurred to you, didn’t it Joe-Joe? Artless fucking dodger that you are. You pushed the thought away because, like so much else, you didn’t have the stomach for it. Well guess what? Here it is, your quaint old sensibilities are more worthless than fucking paper money nowadays boyo.

  Joe hadn’t wanted to think of the possibility that a baby, a helpless human infant, could be changed. That was too much wasn’t it? The very existence of this thing appalled him, appalled him on a fundamental level.

  That wasn’t all of it though, it didn’t end there.

  Its legs had been shredded.

  Close to where the tiny creature mewled and hissed, there were tyre tracks in the mud of the drive and Joe was pretty sure that he could see something mashed into the imprint of the track.

  Those are baby monster legs Joe-boy. You can bet your useless bottom dollar on that. Mud and baby monster leg all mashed down and mushed up into a nasty little mess. Yummy-yum. Whether they meant to do it or not, somebody drove over little baby monster. Except they didn’t quite do the full job, they just crippled it.

  The hideous little creature hissed again, and then continued gnawing at a glistening lump of something that was more bone than meat. It was surrounded by the wet remains of an animal. Difficult to tell what the animal had been, but the clumps of fur and the size of bones suggested something big. Something like a biggish dog.

  How about this story board Joe-boy? Little Baby Monster was lying there in the mud and blood, hardly able to move, legs nothing more than a squished memory. Perhaps trying to drag itself, not making much progress, and then it got lucky. Mr Doggy happened along. Perhaps it was even Mr Pet Doggy. Whatever, Mr Doggy made a big mistake and got too close to Baby Monster, got within range of those not so itty-bitty baby monster jaws and claws.