Empire's End - Time of Doors Season 1 Episode 4 (Book 3): Post Apocalypse EMP Survival - Dark Scifi Horror (Time of Doors Serial EMP Dark Fantasy Apocalyptic Book Series)

by Eddie Patin

Hannah was already far ahead of her. Her roommate was faster. Stronger.

  “Hannah, wait!”

  Kayleen’s shoe slipped on the slick surface of the gooey sidewalk, and she almost stumbled again, half-diving to the ground in a scramble to stay on her feet! And just as her head was down, a beam of red light flashed past her, exploding the window of an SUV parked on the street! When the beam of energy hit the glass, it splattered with a shower of crimson sparks and the sound of something sizzling in a hot skillet, and Kayleen yelped and turned away as bits of glass pelted her in the face!

  “Holy fuck!!” her roommate exclaimed from up ahead, and Kayleen realized that the girl had stopped, and was watching and waiting for her. “Come on, Kay-kay!”

  “I’m trying!” Kayleen shouted, struggling to get moving again. She felt a strong urge to keep her head down, but it slowed her flight from the soldiers to do it...

  “Come on, damn it! They’re right behind y—duck!!”

  Another sizzling beam of light snapped past Kayleen, just over her shoulder, zipping off into the misty open air in between the buildings up ahead.

  Screw staying down, she thought.

  Kayleen rose up and sprinted for her life, doing her best to avoid the clear and milky-white cords snaking across the ground, but mostly focused on going fast!

  She caught up to Hannah, who was frowning at her with eyes wide open, and the two of them made it past the church. They rushed across the street to the grocery store, a two-story brick building with windows of black glass, and a metal mesh sign over the corner entrance that, from their direction, only said ‘Pharmacy’. The entire building was covered in alien growths of various clear, white, and semi-transparent colors—tentacles reaching and spreading across all surfaces, weird plant pod-things growing in clusters, and the same corrugated tubes that were consistently coating the ground now...

  The girls slowed down, staring up at the otherworldly building looming over them in the white mist.

  “What the fuck...?!” Hannah said.

  That had to be it. Of course if the Safeway—wasn’t it??

  Kayleen risked a look back, and saw that the alien soldiers were still behind them, advancing with long legs covered in that weird, translucent armor plating that looked like frosted glass!

  There were more than three...

  “Oh my god—please be open!” Kayleen cried, leaping over the gutter onto the sidewalk, holding Hannah’s hand. They dashed past the brick column on the corner of the building, toward the automatic sliding glass doors...

  One door still stood, but the other was off the track, laying cast to the side on the pavement with long cracks running up the thick glass.

  And suddenly, they were inside...

  The linoleum floors were coated with a slimy sheen and thin, growing tendrils. Bags of charcoal were lined up against the first large window on the right on a stout shelf. There were multiple checkout stands barely lit from the thin light coming in from outside, flanked by overturned and chaotic rows of candy, gum, magazines, and other sundries. And aisles. Lots of aisles stretching into the darkness of the store interior, lit only from the weak light of the foggy outdoors pushing in through the tinted wall of windows on the east side of the store...

  “Now what?!” Hannah asked.

  “I ...” Kayleen paused and looked back at the doorway. They’d be there any second. “I don’t know! Let’s get more inside—let’s hide!!”

  Her roommate’s shoe squeaked on the slimy floor as Hannah ran further into the building. Kayleen followed, then immediately stopped when two alien soldiers appeared from in between two nearby grocery aisles!

  “Shit!” Hannah exclaimed, stopping between two checkout stations. “They’re here, too!”

  One of the armored creatures had a spear, and Kayleen easily saw the weapon more clearly now—an intricate metal shaft topped with a high-tech-looking blade of metal parts melding with a slick and wicked material that looked like glass, or ice. The other had a smooth and elegant white rifle, which it brought to bear immediately! In the darkness, Kayleen could see the hole on the end of the barrel glowing red, just like those beams of energy that narrowly missed her before...

  The aliens were definitely wearing some sort of armored suits, made from the same white-clear glass stuff—elegant and dangerous and beautiful. The faces of their strange, long helmets were perfectly smooth.

  “Come on!” Kayleen shouted, pivoting to run down a different aisle. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the almost-glowing forms of the soldiers from the street dashing into the store behind them.

  Shit.

  Hannah broke into a run after her, and Kayleen burst through two checkout stations into what used to be the produce section, now coated with slime—the many fruits and vegetables pulsating and white like spider eggs...

  She suddenly found herself crashing into the floor—something had caught her foot. Desperate to get to her feet, Kayleen fought a wave of nausea when she saw that her had had come unbound from the knit cap, and many of her curls pulled long lines of clear slime out of a pool on the floor.

  Kayleen felt Hannah’s free hand roughly pulling her to her feet.

  “Let’s go!!” her roommate shouted, looking back at their aggressors with eyes like a cornered animal.

  And when Kayleen looked at what tripped her, she felt her heart stop.

  It was a body—a woman with long red hair and a melted face, wearing the store uniform, splayed out on the floor. She was shot in the face. They had shot her in the face and melted her face off! The woman’s remaining eyeball, pale under the charred edges, stared at nothing...

  “Oh god...” Kayleen muttered, her knees weak.

  She tried to get moving, following along with Hannah’s pulling, but saw more bodies—scores of bodies, all mangled and deranged from hot energy weapons or split into pieces that confused and sickened her mind by the aliens’ blades. Most of the dead bodies wore work uniforms from the grocery store, but there was also an old couple—she assumed they were older because of their clothes, but their heads were missing—and what looked like the a couple of slender, miniature bodies that had to be children...

  There were more non-employees—Kayleen was sure of it—but she turned her head away from the carnage and tried to keep up with her roommate, stumbling along, reaching out to catch her balance on a tray of sick-looking cantaloupes.

  The alien soldiers pursued, but didn’t fire.

  Not yet.

  As the girls ran past the table of white slugs that used to be bananas, past an unlit, refrigerated display full of slime-covered juices and energy drinks, two more alien soldiers emerged from the opening between aisles just ahead of them—both armed with spears!

  “Fuck me!” Hannah shouted, grinding to a halt. Kayleen crashed into her roommate, and held onto her in fear. She looked around them—glanced with wide eyes at the armored alien soldiers approaching from behind, up ahead—all of their exits were blocked!

  “Oh God...” Kayleen groaned. She felt her arms and legs grow numb, and the girl suddenly felt like she was looking at everything through a tunnel, black and blurry around the edges...

  “Don’t you get any fucking closer, you oppressive bitches!!” Hannah suddenly cried out next to her. Kayleen looked up, but realized that she could only barely see her roommate through her dimming vision. “Fuck off! Fuck off, you fucking fucks!!”

  Straining to focus, Kayleen realized that she was looking at her pale hand, fingers spread out, on the floor. She was dimly aware of Hannah darting around her, legs splayed out in her purple pants, flashing her switchblade around in front of her. She saw her roommate’s face furious, the dark and thick lips frowning and shouting and sneering. Her eyes were full of fire, and her Mohawk fell to one side, weighed down by the slime in the air...

  “Hannah...” she groaned.

  “Come and get me, fuckers!” she was yelling. “Come and get me!”

  There was a bright flash of red light!
<
br />   Kayleen heard Hannah yelp, and then felt her roommate kick her. She was able to open her eyes a little wider. Disoriented, Kayleen gradually that she was on the floor, on her hands and knees, clear slimed squeezing between her fingers...

  Hannah was also on the floor, lying on her side, staring at Kayleen with wide, blue eyes and a surprised look on her face. Speckles of transparent alien gunk clung to the girl’s face like drops of morning dew.

  Kayleen was aware of glistening, armored legs approaching her, coated with plates of frosted glass...

  The world smashed apart on the back of her head, and Kayleen faded out of consciousness, trying to focus on several different-colored bottles kids’ juices, slippery with slime, stacked on the drink shelf in front of her face, a little bit above her head.

  Price with card, $.79, she thought, then everything drifted into the void...

  7 - Chad Murray

  Manhattan, NY

  “So...” Chad said, listening to the waves splash under them. A handful of massive ferries—water taxis—floated gently up and down next to them like large islands. “Can’t we just like grab a boat and use it to sail out of the city or something?”

  “Do you know how to sail?” Santos asked.

  “No. But it can’t be that hard...”

  Chad looked out over the several docks up ahead to the north, extending from the furthest-west street of the island—12th Avenue he thought. He looked behind him at the row of dozens of dark blue bicycles, and wished he could just break one free. He loved riding bikes, and that would be an easy way to get through the city...

  There were ... maybe a dozen concrete piers stretching into the river?

  “I don’t really see any sailboats anyway,” Santos said. He shifted his weight and his gun clicked and rattled as he readjusted it in his arms. “And one of those is obviously a Navy outpost of some kind. And another is that massive cruise ship...”

  “So what are those boats over there if they’re not sailboats?” Chad asked, pointing at the nearest, large boats to the north.

  “Yachts,” Santos said. “Don’t you know the difference between different kinds of boats?”

  “I’ve never really messed with them.”

  Santos sighed, looking out over the water. Chad saw the man’s eyes tracking a seagull for a moment.

  “You know,” the soldier said. “It’s already the afternoon. We might want to find somewhere to hole up for the night. One of those yachts or ferries might be a good place.”

  “Sleep on the water??” Chad asked.

  “But it’s dangerous. There’s a good chance that people are already in all of the boats—either the owners, or people doing what we’re doing.”

  “What are we doing?”

  Santos spit out over the edge. “Surviving.”

  “So you think the boat thing is a good idea?” Chad said.

  Santos shrugged. “It beats finding somewhere on the street. Or breaking into a house or something and getting shot at.”

  “What about the cruise ship?”

  Chad and the Geneva soldier stared at the brilliant goliath ship several blocks away for a while.

  The puppy squirmed in the crate at Chad’s side. He put the container down to rest his arm.

  It was hard to see fully, hidden mostly behind the huge aircraft carrier that was covered with jets and other planes, gleaming in the sunlight, but in the distance was a mountain of a vessel, as big as a skyscraper laying on its side it seemed—white, covered in windows, and a big “NCL” banner on a black glass ‘shark fin’ type thing at the rear-center. When Chad focused past the glare of the dozens of cars, trucks, and other vehicles parked on the roof structure of the pier in front of the massive ship, their windshields shining in the sun, he could barely make out the big, blue words, Norwegian Gem, on the side of what Chad assumed was the ship’s bridge.

  “I don’t think that’ll work,” Santos said. “It’s probably not like any other boat tethered to the dock. Probably has some sort of highly secure loading setup. Like, even if things weren’t falling to shit right now, you couldn’t just walk up to a cruise ship and night and go exploring on it, you know?”

  “Well I guess let’s go walk and see what we see, huh?”

  Chad grabbed Max’s crate and lifted it up again.

  “Okay,” Santos said, hefting his rifle.

  The two of them left the ferry docks, passing the blue bicycles, and stepping back into the gridlock of dead traffic that led them past a huge, brown UPS headquarters building of some kind, and walked north past large buildings with big, colorful billboards and painted window advertisements.

  Chad saw movement in a large side-panel van, and saw a clutch of children inside looking back out at him, pressing up against the driver’s side window. A haggard woman appeared from the depths of the vehicle and stared him down until they passed.

  There were still people here and there, and every time they heard rapid movement or some kind of action—like a group of people running down the street, or shouting voices as people argued or stole things from one another—Santos perked up like a lean sentinel, ready to kick some ass. The soldier’s eyes were lively, and his face was serious.

  The cameraman started to feel his man bun coming apart, the long hairs tickling his neck, so paused, putting Max’s crate on the hood of a dead car, to retighten and recapture his ponytail.

  “We need to find you a jacket,” Santos said. “It’s going to get cold when the sun goes down.”

  “Hopefully we’ll be inside somewhere by then.”

  “Yeah, well, we need to be prepared...”

  A few blocks up, they approached the pier housing the yachts they had seen from the ferry dock.

  “World Yacht,” Chad read from the huge blue and white sign. “Dinner and brunch cruises. Private parties.” He paused, his eyes going down to the guard station. “Pier 81.”

  “Huh,” Santos responded. “Probably all locked up.”

  There was a single-lane road leading out to the pier in between the various structures that separated the huge concrete wharf from the street.

  “We can walk out there and see,” Chad said.

  Santos paused, squinting his eyes, peering through the supports and poles and dumpsters and shipping containers. “Alright,” he said. “Just be quiet, and stay behind me...”

  Walking in through the single lane that squirmed through the middle of the structure, they found that there was a parking lot on the pier, with a dozen or so cars—most already with smashed windows and a some with their doors left open—and the handful of yachts seemed to be ... restaurants?

  “They’re not real boats?” Chad said.

  “A lobster place...” Santos said to himself. “I don’t know about the two down there,” he added, pointing with his rifle to the end of the pier.

  “Can’t we just sail away in one of these out of here?”

  Santos smirked and looked at him. “They don’t have any sails, Chad. They work with motors. They’re like ... floating houses now.”

  As Chad and Santos approached each boat, they found the first two—obviously restaurant ships—to be locked up tight. The lobster boat, showing three stories decked out with several windows, was somewhat accessible. One of the dark glass windows near the rear of the boat had been broken into.

  Chad approached the broken glass slowly, but froze when he heard low voices inside. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but heard someone scrape something on the floor in the darkness within, and knew that there were at least a couple of people in there...

  “Hello?” Chad said toward the broken window. “Who’s there??”

  Santos shushed him. “Shut up, dummy!”

  “What—why?!”

  “Things are different now! People are trying to survive and there are looters everywhere. You might get us shot!”

  “Fuck off!” a gruff voice shouted from inside. “Get lost!”

  “Yeah,” another voice said. “We�
�ve already claimed this boat!”

  Chad opened his mouth to respond to the people inside, but paused.

  “Come on,” Santos whispered.

  “It’s a restaurant boat,” Chad replied. “It’s probably got food and water. I’m thirsty! And starved!”

  “Let’s check the cars first,” Santos said.

  Chad followed the soldier back to the pier, and they started rifling through the various vehicles out there. It was easy—their windows were mostly all broken already, and several were unlocked and open. Chad’s shoes crunched on chunky, square pieces of shattered auto glass all over the concrete ground.

  There wasn’t much to pick through. It was amazing how much people had stolen already, not even a day into the EMP collapse!

  And as far as Chad knew, the monsters hadn’t even made it out here yet.

  These were all human problems...

  Between several vehicles, the two of them were able to put together a duffel bag for Santos and a small, green backpack for Chad. The cameraman kept a dull but effective fleece scarf, a tourist sweater that fit too large on his skinny frame, and they found three bottles of water and a container of unsalted peanuts in the back of a minivan.

  Before checking the other yachts, Chad and Santos sat on the hood of a big Ford truck and ate peanuts for a while, looking out over the river as it flowed to the south.

  The city was very quiet, although after being still for a while, it became evident that there were several people hiding out in the various boats on Pier 81.

  When Chad and Santos did get moving again, they checked the other ships docking at the pier, only to find each of them locked up tight. On one ship, they had to board it, stepping carefully from the solid concrete ground onto the swaying, blue deck. But after exploring the boat’s surface, they found that the doors leading to the control area, as well as down below, were both locked.

  “Maybe we should stay here,” Chad said, steadying himself against a large vent.

  “Out in the open?” Santos asked. “Better to find something else.”

  “The first night’s gonna be bad, I bet,” Chad said.