The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart

by Harrison, William Hale

  The climate was severe, with winter nights that lasted for three months. The sun set on November 29th, and didn’t rise again until January 13th. For over a month on either side of that, “daytime” was a dim twilight. Temperatures often dipped to eighty degrees below zero, with sixty mile per hour winds. Summer meant a brief spell of decent weather and clouds of voracious mosquitoes.

  No one came here for the ambiance.

  Early the following morning they heard intermittent gunfire from far away in the direction of the main complex. It waxed and waned and then died away altogether, and no help came. Around noon the wind shifted and they began smelling smoke, and as the hours passed the smell grew stronger. Finally Golovatyj whispered, “That fire must have reignited, and the wind is pushing it this way. We have to go.” He looked around at the others. “Find weapons. Anything heavy for crushing skulls. We may have to fight our way out of here.”

  They armed themselves as best they could and then snuck out the front door of the machine shop. A few at a time, they ran across the short open space to the nearest structure, one of the large repair sheds.

  Inside, they found an employee break room. A phone hung on the wall here, but it was dead too. The break room was equipped with a large capacity coffee machine, and plenty of coffee in the cabinet. They immediately set it brewing. And there were restrooms, thank God! A vending machine with candy bars, nuts and chips stood against the wall with another containing water and fruit drinks beside it. “Oh my God,” Dmitri said. “I’m in Heaven.” He patted his pockets. “Oh no... I have no money! Does anyone have any change?”

  Oleg, a tall string bean of a man from Company #1, stepped up with a huge pry bar. “Allow me,” he said. He put the end of the pry bar into the door of the snack machine and thrust it hard. With a snap, the door flew open. He had the drink machine open a few seconds later. “My treat,” he said. They all helped themselves, stuffing their mouths and pockets.

  When they’d eaten their fill, Golovatyj gathered them together. “Look,” he said. “There’s no one coming for us. I don’t even know if anyone knows we’re here. And we can’t stay. If the wind doesn’t shift again, this whole place will burn to the ground. We’ve got to move.”

  “What about the trucks? Can we get back to them?”

  “Maybe I can sneak over there and have a look. If the trucks are clear, that’ll be our best bet.”

  Natalya spoke up. “I have a better idea.” She was a tall good-looking brunette, a native of Talnakh, with a pair of doves tattooed on her neck. Under her coat, Golovatyj knew, she had tattoo sleeves up both arms. She stood next to a ladder that was bolted to the wall. On the ceiling above it, a trapdoor appeared to provide access to the roof. “If I can get up to the roof, I should be able to make my way across to the other end of the building where I’ll have a view of the trucks.”

  Golovatyj nodded and up she went.

  In five minutes she came back. “It’s no good,” she said. “There are at least a hundred that I could see. No way we can take on that many.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I’m not sure. It looks like they’re just standing there watching the warehouse burn. They seem fascinated by the fire, or maybe it’s the movement of the flames. Anyway, unless we can get them to go somewhere else, the trucks are out.”

  “We’ve got to think of a way to decoy them then. How close can we get to the trucks by the roofs?”

  “Maybe thirty meters from the nearest truck. There’s a gap of about three meters to the next building. If we could get across that, we’d be less than ten.”

  “There has to be something around here… Maybe a ladder?”

  Five minutes later, they handed an aluminum extension ladder up through the trapdoor and onto the roof. They all walked in a crouch to the edge of the building, careful to stay out of sight of the undead below. Natalya was right. There were easily a hundred of them milling around, mostly watching the flames. The warehouse was fully engulfed again. Its roof and two of its walls had collapsed, and a thick column of smoke swirled around and above it, pushed by a wind from the northeast. Already, a fire had started on the side of the old building next to it.

  “If that wind doesn’t change, that fire is going to take out this whole area,” Pavlo whispered.

  “Then it’s a good thing we’re going to be far away,” Golovatyj said. “Maybe it’ll take some of these bastards up with it.”

  “So what now, boss?”

  “Lay the ladder across to the other building. We’ll use it as bridge.”

  “What if they spot us?”

  “Well, at least we’re out of reach!”

  They laid the ladder across the gap, and one by one the team danced across it. The clatter and movement drew an instant reaction from the horde. They surged forward and filled the narrow gap between the buildings and milled around with their heads craned up and their mouths gaping open, jaws working. The old buildings were ten feet high, well out of the undeads’ reach, but the sight was horrifying. Golovatyj crossed last. Halfway across he made the mistake of looking down at the nightmarish mass of naked, blood-smeared Infected just a few feet below him, their eyes locked on him, and he missed his step. His foot shot through the gap between rungs and he went down on his face on the ladder. He hit hard on his chin and for a moment his head swam.

  A half dozen hands grabbed at his foot, and a couple of Infected leaped into the air trying to catch it in their jaws. He kicked the hands away and got his legs back under him and bear-crawled the last few feet to safety. Friendly hands grabbed him and he threw himself down on his back and looked up at the sky, shaken. Natalya knelt next to him and placed her hand on his chest. “You scared us,” she said quietly.

  “I scared me, too,” he said and got to his feet.

  “So what now?”

  He looked around, a plan forming in his head. Unfortunately there was no rooftop trapdoor to gain entrance to the building they were perched on, but no matter. “Oleg! Take your bar and make a hole. We need to get into the building below. And grab that ladder. We’re going to need it.”

  Cutting a hole in a roof to vent a fire was standard practice, and Oleg could have done it in his sleep. The roof’s surface consisted of fine gravel over multiple layers of felt and tar. Working quickly, Oleg had his pry bar under it in a couple of strokes. The others grabbed the edges and peeled it back until they exposed the entire plywood sheet underneath.

  Oleg worked the claw of his pry bar under the edge of the plywood and slowly levered it up. The rusty old nails let out a piercing squeal as they gave. The crew muscled the plywood away, exposing the roof joists, and under them another layer of plywood that formed the interior’s ceiling.

  “Let me,” Pavlo said. Pavlo was a big man too, almost as big as Golovatyj. Two years ago there’d been an explosion and fire at Smelter #6. Pavlo had thrown an unconscious worker over each shoulder and sprinted with them to safety as though he was carrying bags of groceries. The two injured workers were women, he recalled. After their recovery, they’d been very grateful to Pavlo, and were very expressive in the way they showed it.

  Now he knelt next to the hole and delivered a few hard kicks to the ceiling plywood, and it gave way on one side, swung down with a loud screech, and then the remaining nails gave out and the whole sheet fell to the floor with a crash. A scurrying noise from below alerted them, and three Infected stepped into the light.

  “Ladder!” said Golovatyj, and someone slid the ladder into the hole. One of the Infected tried to eat it, biting down hard on a metal rung. “Oleg, give me that pry bar.”

  “No way, boss. These are mine!” Oleg slid his leg over the ladder, pry bar in hand, and eased a few steps down, until he was just out of their reach. He looked up at the others. “Hold the ladder tight,” he said, and several hands gripped it securely. He wrapped one leg around it and sank down to a crouc
h, freeing both his hands. He drove the pry bar down into the first Infected’s skull like he was spearing a fish. Its feet staggered and sidestepped, its skull transfixed by the bar. Oleg churned the bar up and down a few times, and the thing dropped to floor.

  “Got you, you bastard!” he whispered.

  He switched his attention to the other two and quickly dispatched them. He peered around in the gloomy interior. There were a few windows on the far wall, but most of the building was dim. There was nothing moving that he could see, so he lowered himself to the floor and took a couple tentative steps. “It looks clear,” he said. The rest of the team climbed down.

  “All right,” Irina said. “The trucks are right outside, but there’s still a huge mob of Infected. I don’t fancy fighting my through them either. So what’s the plan, chief?”

  He sighed heavily and said, “Diversion. We need a diversion to get them as far away as we can. Then we can make a run for the trucks.” He looked around. “Give me that trash can lid.” He picked up a hammer off a tray of tools. “I’m going to make a lot of noise and draw them away.” He started for the ladder.

  Dmitri grabbed him. “Whoa!” he said. “Let’s think this out.”

  Golovatyj shrugged his hand off. “Nothing to think about. I’m going to use the ladder to cross the gap again, go to the far end of the other building and bang on this lid until I have every Infected in the area looking for dinner. Then I’ll run back and we’ll go for the trucks.”

  Natalya answered him. “No, hauling that ladder around is going to make too much noise. You’ll draw half of them back this way.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” he frowned.

  “Yes I do. Give me those and I’ll jump the gap, draw them away, and jump back again. Easy.”

  “I can’t let you do that. It’s too far!”

  She laughed. “My Cossack friend, you were not raised up here, so you do not remember, but I was a champion in track at high school in Talnakh. I hold the district record for women’s long jump: five point two meters. I can jump that gap without breaking my stride. Can you say the same?”

  “Well, probably, but…”

  “No, you can’t. If you’re not trained to jump you have no idea how to do it properly.” She put her hand on his cheek and smiled. “And you’re too handsome to end up as zombie chowder.” There were several catcalls at that, and Pavlo dug his elbow in Golovatyj’s ribs.

  Pavlo regarded his friend’s bald head, scarred and weathered face, and huge mustache. “She’s got you there, pretty boy.” There were general guffaws. Golovatyj reluctantly surrendered the lid and hammer.

  Natalya scampered up the ladder, and out of the hole. She looked back down. “Give me about five minutes to get them worked up, and be ready to move when I get back.” She disappeared from sight.

  Golovatyj climbed the ladder after her and stuck his head out. By the time he saw her she was already across the gap and making for the far end of the big machine shop. As he watched she strolled along the edge, banging on the lid and shouting, “Dinner! Dinnertime! Come see what Mother has for you!” After several minutes, she stopped, apparently satisfied. She headed back toward Golovatyj at a run. As she arrived at the gap, she planted her foot on the edge and leapt, her arms out at her side. Her grace took his breath away. She made it easily and came down running. He slid down the ladder ahead of her, and when she landed on the floor, she spun around and planted a quick kiss on his lips.

  “What was that for?” he smiled.

  “If you have to ask, you’re as dumb as you are big,” she answered.

  The team gathered around the door, weapons in hand. Pavlo opened it a crack. “Damn! There’s still at least thirty of them.”

  Golovatyj shrugged. “We have to go through them. Remember, not a sound.” He looked around. “Ready?”

  CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  May 4th

  Eric Hestrup, the Assistant Director in charge of the CIA’s Korean Mission Center, sat at his desk, a stack of report summaries in his hand. They were mostly intel from radio intercepts and phone conversations picked up from the Chinese side of the Korean border. Human intelligence in the Hermit Kingdom was normally scarce to none, and it was even worse now that they had expelled all foreigners. Even the Chinese got the heave-ho, something that had never happened before.

  A series of heavy spring storms had been rolling across the Korean Peninsula for a week now, preventing their satellites from getting so much as a peek. A high-pressure area easing down out of Mongolia indicated they’d soon experience several days of crisp clear weather. Can’t come too soon, he thought.

  The CIA created the Korean Mission Center in 2017 to help in the new round of negotiations over the Nork’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The new president intended to get them to cash in their nukes in return for security guarantees and economic assistance. Never happen, Hestrup thought. The current leader’s old man had starved an entire generation of his people to death getting those nuclear warheads. No way the kid was going to give them up. Still, ours not to reason why…

  His First Assistant, Janet Gustaphsen, stuck her head in his office. Janet was a brilliant, fox-faced woman with a keen instinct for digging nuggets of gold out of mountains of trash. “Knock knock,” she said.

  He waved her in. “Going over the latest summaries. Anything new?”

  “Clearing up at the Chinese border. Finally got a satellite feed going.” She stuck her head back out the door and addressed the admin at the desk in the outer chamber. “Bruce, bring up Number Three Feed please.” A huge monitor came to life on the wall opposite Hestrup’s desk, an 85” Samsung QLED 8K, that cost about the same as a small car. The detail was unbelievably crisp and clear.

  She picked up a remote from his desk, pressed a button and the image began to move. It was shot from about a 45-degree angle and showed what appeared to be a small village of about ten buildings. “This is Sangjung. It’s a little wide spot in the road about five miles from Tongrim, by the Chinese border. It was shot about…” she checked her watch, “thirty-seven minutes ago. Watch.”

  Three military trucks and a jeep pulled into the village from the top of the screen. A dozen soldiers poured out of two of the trucks and formed a half-circle perimeter around the village. An officer disembarked from the jeep and strode to the middle of the cluster of shabby buildings. From his posture he appeared to be shouting orders. People poured out of all the buildings into the open. Within a minute there were about eighty people, adults and children, in three rows facing him.

  “Which bird is this?”

  “One of Lockheed’s 71 series.” The new Lockheed Martin NROL-71 satellites utilized a 2.4-meter optical mirror, the same size as on the Hubble Telescope. The video appeared to have been taken with a high-resolution camera from about two hundred feet in the air, instead of the satellite’s two hundred kilometer orbit. The detail was so sharp you could clearly see the color of the stripes on the officer’s epaulets.

  At a command from the officer all the people held out their hands, palms up, even the children and toddlers. He walked down the line, inspecting each pair of hands. When he was almost at the end of the first row, he stepped back, drew his sidearm out of his holster and shot a woman in the head. She dropped to the ground. No one moved. Soldiers came running over, bayonets fixed on the end of their weapons. Six people near the fallen woman were separated from the rest at gunpoint and herded toward the trucks.

  “Life and death in the Hidden Kingdom,” Hestrup muttered.

  The video continued for another three minutes. Four more people were shot, including two children who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Twenty or more people were pulled out of the crowd. When the inspection ended, all of them were herded to the third truck and loaded aboard. The officer went back to his jeep, the soldiers mounted their trucks, and the four vehicles drove away. T
he entire operation had taken about five minutes.

  “Do we know where those people are being taken?” Hestrup asked.

  “Not yet. But wherever it is I know I wouldn’t want to go there.”

  McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey

  May 9th

  Karen Hanrahan stood gripping the chain link that formed her cell. It was more like a cage than a cell, really. The floor here was concrete and the cage’s walls and ceiling were all made of chain link fencing. The only items in the cell were a cot without a blanket and a five-gallon bucket with a few inches of a dark blue-green liquid in the bottom, which for the last three days had served as her toilet. Around her in the vast space of the otherwise empty hangar were hundreds of other cages containing hundreds of other people, one to a cage.

  The fencing allowed her a view of many of them. There were all types of people of all ages, from the elderly to little children who cried almost all the time, although these were rare, since most children didn’t survive their first contact with the Infected. Because everyone used a bucket for a toilet, the entire hangar stank of urine, feces and chemicals. Underneath it all hung a sour funky smell, tinged with vinegar.

  She could hear a constant murmuring of conversation from the cages around her, punctuated by shouting and sometimes by screaming. A woman two rows away sobbed hysterically and cried for someone named Justin, over and over. A man who had been brought in recently demanded a lawyer in a loud imperious voice, as though he was accustomed to being obeyed. Lots of people did that at first, but of course no lawyers ever came here. Most people sat quietly on their cots, or laid on them and stared at the hangar’s ceiling, high above them.