by Eddie Patin
The four of them ran down into the mess of disabled cars and trucks and crouched low, looking back at the horde through smoky and cracked windows through the dim, crimson air.
“It worked!” White exclaimed. “I can’t believe it! We got away!”
Harvey watched as scores of zombies milled around the parking lot, several on fire, and more wandered into the jets of gasoline flames all the time. It was like a troop of ants that had been thrown off of their trail. And it wouldn’t be too hard to lose any random creatures that delved into the traffic around them—there were so many cars and other vehicles, it should be easy to stay hidden...
“Let’s continue to the west,” Becker said.
They did.
“That was a good idea, Becker,” Harvey said after a while.
The sergeant looked back at Harvey with a mixture on his face of disdain and the desire to take the compliment, but only nodded. The big man changed his magazine, sticking the old one back into a pouch on his vest, partially empty.
“How far now?” Mendez asked.
“Paradise,” Harvey replied, moving low behind the cover of the cars. “One big block...”
Eventually, the screaming on Swenson in between Flamingo and north of the apartments died down. The denizens of the city of sin taking part in the mass stampeding escape from the complex were all dead or dying. Harvey listened to their helpless howls of pain from up north, hidden in little private corners of their own personal hells, obviously being tortured by the demons.
A shudder passed through Harvey’s chest, and he tried not to imagine what was going on up there. Taking a quick look through a dingy window, Harvey saw the silhouettes of many zombies, the pin-point lights of their molten eyes glowing fiercely in the dark red landscape as they wandered, slowly, seeming to even go into standby, as if they were a bunch of robots, shutting down for a while with no tasks to tend to for the moment. Hulking shadows of goat demons stalked the road between cars, searching for hiding survivors...
Whenever a human was flushed out of hiding, all of the demons around them swarmed in a sudden frenzy! It never lasted more than a few moments.
Oddly enough, the hundred or more abomination creatures did not stay with the group of goat demons and zombies. They kept going, moving and rolling and slithering down the road like a living carpet of flesh and teeth and fingers and hideous, searching eyes. The monstrosities moved like a swarm of beetles to the south, crossing Flamingo as a collective, cutting off the team’s path to the west.
So Officers Harvey, Becker, White, and Mendez all hunkered down to wait for a while—at least until the abominations were well past them.
Harvey had pulled out his magazines to consolidate the little ammo he had remaining. After making sure that his Glock had a full mag, and his backup mag was down a little, he had thirty-three rounds in total, including the one in the chamber.
Not good.
The gun shop he was leading them to wasn’t very far ahead, and he and his team would really need it...
Harvey saw the others doing the same thing—all sitting around fairly close together and checking their ammo, quiet and grim, waiting out the slithering, squelching sea of pus and flesh that crossed the street ahead. It looked like Becker had paired himself down to one extra rifle magazine, plus whatever was in his carbine. Mendez and White both still had a fair bit of extra shells between them, aside from what was in their mag tubes, and Harvey watched them split up what remained, stashing their extra 12 gauge ammo into easy-access areas on their gear—dump pouches and such.
Harvey downed half of an energy drink. The sand was making his throat dry. He followed it up with a couple of shots of whiskey from his back pocket, which made him feel a lot better...
Officer White frequently grabbed at his wounded arm, frantic like he was being stung by insects! His face was pale and distraught, and it looked like the man was about to cry. Whatever was in that weird snake-arrow that struck his bicep must have been some nasty stuff...
In time, Harvey was alarmed to see something new in this new world of demons and undead.
Watching through the windows of a bus, he beheld a creature that he hadn’t seen before, wandering around the scene of the slaughter. It was a fairly large demon, taller than the goat creatures, but still considerably smaller than the giant he killed farther up the street.
The monster was a strange, graceful thing that reminded Harvey of a mix between a hellish toad and a crane, carefully stepping through the carnage with long, thin legs, topped with a stout and bulbous body and a frog-like head with no neck, huge jowls, and a long tongue that lashed at the bodies like a tentacle when it wasn’t lolling around aimlessly. Two toad-like eyes extended on meaty stalks on either side of its head. The creature was repulsive, and once Harvey could make out what it was doing, he reviled it even more, struggling against an ocean of nausea trying to bubble up from his stomach...
Using long, muscular arms, the new demon, standing around ten feet tall, carried a huge, bulging bag on its back, like an alien Santa from a perverse universe. The bottom of the bag was soaked through with a dark red fluid—probably blood. As it traversed the dead, it would reach down, pick up a mangled and bloody victim, then, it would lift up the poor soul in front of its toady face to scrutinize the body. Using its tongue, the depraved monster would then strip it of its clothes, as if the tongue was full of tiny hooks and could grip things like sandpaper, then suck on the victim’s body, slurping its entrails and probably its entire digestive tract through the belly, just like Harvey could suck the juice and seeds out of a ripe tomato!
Then, the gutless body would go into the bag...
Harvey watched with morbid horror as the large demon, collecting the dead and guzzling their intestines, moved through the street, body to body. Then, he saw the shadow of another doing the same farther away, and then a third...
He eventually had to look away.
The other officers watching with the same magnetic revulsion...
“Well,” Harvey said, struggling to keep his stomach together, “now we know where the bodies are going.”
Officer Mendez sat, holding his shotgun with wide eyes, watching the feast and collection of the dead. Harvey could see the man’s bright yellow duty shirt rising and falling with massive, rapid breaths...
He was freaking out.
Becker was watching Harvey, as if trying to figure out what was going on in the Metro Stalker’s head. Harvey looked pointedly at the sergeant, then nodded toward Mendez. Becker looked.
“Mendez,” the sergeant said. “Calm down, officer. You’re getting un-centered.”
“Un-centered?!” Mendez asked a little too loudly. Harvey winced, his eyes darting up to the crossing swarm of body-part abominations. The man gave a high-pitched chuckle that promised a hint of madness. “How could we be getting un-centered? Here? Maybe I’m just ... finally getting centered for real! We’re gonna die! We’re gonna be killed by those terrible things, and have those other terrible things suck our guts out and make us into those terrible things over there!” He pointed at the abominations.
“We’re gonna make it,” Becker said.
“Speak for yourself, Sarge,” Mendez responded with wide eyes. “I’m just on borrowed time right now. We’re in Hell, and we’re all fucking toast! And we don’t even have a plan—we don’t have a chance. I need to get home to Lupe and my kids before they’re tortured to death by fucking demons...”
“Keep it together,” Becker warned. “And don’t go batshit on us out here, you get me? We’ve got a plan. We’re almost there, too. Keep your shit together, officer!”
“Mendez, you live in fucking North Vegas,” White said suddenly. “How are you going to get home??”
Mendez’s eyes widened, and he blanched.
“Shut up, White!” Becker snapped, then looked around at all of them. “Everyone keep it together!” he said. “We’re almost at the gun shop. Once we resupply, our survivability will go way up, and w
e can figure out—”
“Where are we going after that, anyway?” Harvey asked. “What’s your plan, Becker?”
The sergeant glared back at him. “I’m ... I’m getting there, Swanson! First things, first...”
Harvey watched the collector demons scoop up bodies and slurp up their guts. Flying demons circled the skies above them, but thankfully, never came down—at least not while they were waiting there. The goat demons and zombies began to congregate again and eventually started wandering as a group to the north.
Once the masses of abominations were long gone, almost a block further to the south on Swenson, Harvey and the others continued west.
They passed an abandoned burger joint to the north, and another apartment complex on the south. The residential block here, too, was decorated with flagpoles and colorful pennants, fluttering in the hellish wind, completely unaware that the building was no longer taking applications. After a strip mall and some sort of ‘atomic testing museum and research’ place (Harvey had never been there, either personally or on a call), they were starting to get a very good view of the Las Vegas Strip up ahead. The tall and varied casinos and hotels a few blocks to the west were either dark hulking shadows against the crimson sky and swirling void, or, some casino buildings here and there were actually on fire, lighting up the areas around them with orange and yellow glow as flames raged and licked and swam over the surfaces of the huge structures! As far as Harvey could tell, none of the casino buildings had collapsed yet. Being surrounded by demons and in the absence of emergency services, Harvey assumed that all of those buildings would burn down eventually, with no way to put out or control the fires.
Ironically, after such thoughts, the next building Harvey noticed as they passed under the swaying green street sign declaring that the next intersection was “Palos Verde” was a fire department. It was the administration building anyway, with large steeple-like rooftops and beautiful accents of reflective glass that followed the angular features, now mostly smashed in and stitched with gunfire. It was also ironic that, with these features, the building looked a lot like a church, because there were several humans crucified on the exterior of the building, hanging dead with spikes punched through their wrists and feet, pinning them up onto the stucco walls like bugs. The victims’ blood ran down the coral-colored walls under their bound feet like sweat stains...
“Fuck...” Harvey muttered.
“Holy shit!” Mendez exclaimed. “This is so fucked up! What the fuck are we gonna do??”
“Can it!” Becker said, keeping his eyes forward. “We keep going...”
Just past the blasphemed building, the team reached the first casino, as well as a nice, hole-in-the-wall pasta joint across the street that Harvey’s bitch wife used to make him take her to frequently. They walked past the Silver Sevens parking garage first. Harvey watched the huge advertisements on the wall, now washed in crimson light from the weird sky, and laughed to himself.
Prime Rib, $9.99.
Most Parley Cards! Best Payouts!
“What the fuck are you laughing about, killer?!” Becker demanded.
Harvey looked back to the street. “Nothing, Becker,” he said. “It’s just a little funny is all.”
“The fuck it is...” the sergeant muttered.
A huge, orange glow permeated the sky around the edge of the parking structure, and as they continued west, the team stared in awe at the massive casino surrounded by palm trees on the corner of Flamingo and Paradise Road.
It was on fire...
The whole building was in raging flames, and once they were walking past the front of it, they could see that the blaze was gradually transitioning onto the parking garage as well. The fact that everything was made of stucco must have slowed the fire down some, but everything would burn once the inferno became hot enough ... eventually.
Harvey took another large drought from a bottle in the purse slung onto his back, and tried to stay alert. Even though it had only been ... a few hours? ... since he was released from his cell in the basement of the precinct, the man was exhausted. He was sure that humping around that M60 didn’t help much, but Harvey was a big guy. He could take it.
After hiding between cars in front of the burning casino to let another small army of ghouls and goat demons pass them by, the team crossed the huge, ten-lane-wide intersection to the corner where Harvey remembered the gun store was tucked away into a strip mall behind the Chinese restaurant there.
The giant horse and lion statues in front of the restaurant almost made Harvey raise his pistol in alarm, appearing more threatening and quick suddenly in the dim, crimson sky. Once they walked around the PF Changs, and crossed the lot full of abandoned cars with shattered windows, they approached Paradise Arms & Ammo—a decent-sized firearm store with a bright white and yellow sign and vertical security bars on all of the windows.
Harvey’s shoe crunched through the remains of a glass bottle in the red sand underfoot, and he looked over the store, stopping.
“Here we are,” he said, scanning the area around them once more to stay alert.
The double-glass doors were broken, but covered up with steel shutters, locked up tight. In fact, everything looked like it was locked up tight, with the exception of one window at the edge of the shop, where the vertical security bars had been wrenched off of the top of the window frame where it was bolted in, and bent down by something very strong, leaving about half of the broken window open and leading into the darkness of the store...
“It’s all locked up!” White exclaimed.
“Of course it is...” Becker muttered, looking over the building. His eyes glances up at the flat roof, then down to the dark hole in the window where the bars were pried away...
Screams suddenly rang out from inside—a man and a woman! The male’s voice was ragged and broken, crying and making animalistic sounds of fear and pain, as if being tortured. The woman was screaming and sobbing.
Harvey ran up to the intact windows to look inside, but the glass was dark and covered with posters and advertisements showing the logos and various artwork of a variety of firearm brands and manufacturers.
“Maybe the owners came here when things turned to shit and locked themselves inside,” Harvey said.
“Yeah...” Becker said, the wheels in his head obviously turning.
The man screamed again, high-pitched and full of terror, the sound eventually winding down to a long, pathetic whine. Harvey listened to the woman sob...
“Well if that’s true, then we’ve gotta help them!” Harvey said. “Look! The window’s open over there!”
“Yeah, let’s go!” Officer Mendez added. “They’re obviously having a blast in there, right?!”
“We’ve got to get in one way or another,” Becker said, looking at the hole; the wrenched and violently-bent metal bars. “Swanson,” he said, shooting a glare at Harvey. “You go. Check it out.”
“What?!” Harvey replied. “Let’s all go!”
“Too risky,” Becker said. “You go alone and scout it out, then open the door from inside for the rest of us here.”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Becker?! We can all fit through that! Let’s go through together!”
“No,” Becker replied. “It’s a one-man job. I’m not going to risk the whole team...”
Harvey scoffed. “What whole team?!” He stared at the hole and fumed. The whiskey in his back pocket called to him, but he shook his head and looked back at the sergeant. “Then give me your rifle...”
“You already have my Glock! Get it done, Swanson!”
The man inside screamed again, long and insane! The woman sobbed loudly.
“You hear that shit, man?!” Harvey snapped. “That’s some crazy shit happening in there! Who knows how many demons are in there, or if it’s some nasty new shit we haven’t even seen yet...?!”
“I’m sure you can handle it, killer...” Becker said with a wry smile.
Harvey looked at the dark, broken
window surrounded by twisted metal.
“Fuck me,” he said, stalking toward the bent-out bars. “Fuck all you guys!” he shouted back.
Putting his gun in his belt again, Harvey climbed up onto the bent iron bars with ease. If he could hear screams and cries like that from out here, and he knew he was partially deaf by now from the gunfire, then things had to be pretty apeshit in there...
He looked back at the team. They stared back at him. Becker nodded toward the window.
Fuck.
Pulling his Glock and grabbing his extra magazine with his other hand, Harvey looked into the darkness of the store’s interior before taking a step down, then another, onto a table in a back stock room.
With that, hoping that he would be ready for whatever dreadful shit was inside, Harvey disappeared into the darkness of the wrecked window...
Want to know what happens next??
Continue to Season 1, Episode 5!
“Ruin Prevails” – Season 1, Episode 5 (Book 5)
"The skill and imagination that went into this series is amazing! Dreadful and haunting, Ruin Prevails will entertain all of your monster itches!"
They try to survive. But RUIN PREVAILS...
In just a few crazy days, the total collapse of society in the United States of America has left all of our characters scraping and struggling to endure, losing everything important to them. On top of that, the myriad of monsters and inter-dimensional beings from other planets and planes of existence has made survivors' organization and community almost nonexistent, and the dwindling population of the country is turning on itself when not running for their lives!
Staying in one piece for Harvey, Arthur, and the children Tommy and Jody seems impossible, while Megan and Chad desperately try to escape the worsening situations around them. As for Kayleen? Well, everything is completely different now for the girl who has bonded with the mysterious and eldritch force known as the Weave. But when the characters' meager goals are blocked at every turn, is there any hope at all to surviving the horror of the Time of Doors??