This is the End 3: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (8 Book Collection)

by J. Thorn

  Then the hissing stopped. The line cut out. Dead. Jason toggled the disconnect switch on the receiver a few times, but knew before he did it that he would have no success in coaxing the phone into working. Then he noticed something.

  The computer. It was back on. And just as he noticed it, he caught something moving across the screen. Just the barest glimpse before it was gone, but it was enough. Enough to be sure that he had seen it. Enough to wish that he hadn't.

  It was Aaron. His boy's mouth was open in that same silent scream that his wife had worn when he had seen her image in the screen. But his son was gone in just an instant, and once again the computer flared and went dark.

  At the same instant, the lights in his office went out, leaving him in a black room, his only illumination the dim moonlight that had managed to penetrate the fog that had invaded Rising in the last few hours. The light was cold and lifeless, the pale shading of a corpse.

  The phone rang a moment later. It was Hatty. And her voice was, thank goodness, strong and clear, the line easily audible. "You better get here," she said without preamble. As she said it, a crash sounded on the line, as though someone had dropped an armful of glassware onto a tile floor.

  "Hatty? Where are you?" said Jason. "What-" And that was when the screaming began.

  "I'm at Doc Peabody's!" shouted Hatty. Behind her voice, the screams could still be heard clearly, a thunderous shouting that rivaled anything Jason had ever heard before in terms of sheer power and volume. "You better come quick!"

  "What is it?" shouted Jason. "What's going on?"

  At that moment, his computer screen flared. A single word appeared: "Hoer-Verde."

  "It's the boy's mother," responded Hatty, sounding as though she were struggling with something - or someone. "It's Sean's mother."

  In the background of the phone call, Jason could hear a sudden, awful, almost inhuman scream of pain and terror. Then he heard Amy-Lynn's voice, grown awful and deep: the voice from beyond Hell. "It's here!" she shrieked, her voice gravelly and shredded. "The monster is here!"

  The computer continued to flare as the woman spoke, the single word appearing over and over again.

  Hoer-Verde.

  Hoer-Verde.

  Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde. Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde Hoer-Verde....

  ***

  Jason pulled into the quaint two-story house that was both Doc Peabody's residence and his medical offices and was out of the truck and through the front door almost in a single movement. The sound of Amy-Lynn's scream resounded in his mind, and he couldn't shake the idea that every second lost meant a second closer to...

  (death)

  ...something truly awful. Something for which he had no words.

  He rushed into the front office area. It was deserted. Completely, spookily silent. "Doc?" he shouted. "Hatty?"

  "In here," came Doc's voice from nearby. Jason went through a sliding door and into a small, convivially-furnished waiting room. Modern art graced the walls right next to pictures of Donald and Goofy, Mickey and Bugs; and newspapers like Modern Housekeeping took their places beside Teen Beat and a host of other periodicals where just about any patient of any age could find something of interest.

  Hatty and Doc were sitting beside one another on a couch in the waiting room, looking at the closed door to Doc's examination room. Jason glanced at the door. All was still. Tomb silent.

  "She calm down?" he asked with a hopeful smile. When neither Hatty nor Doc moved to answer, he said, "Guys?"

  "She stopped screaming," whispered the doctor at last, after far too long a pause had elapsed for Jason's comfort.

  "That's great," said the sheriff. "That's good, right?" Another long moment, then, "Right?"

  Doc looked directly at Jason for the first time, and Jason was dismayed to see how the man looked: his eyes were bloodshot, his entire demeanor that of someone who has been broken in some small but critical fashion, whose world had suddenly and irrevocably taken a step to one side and would never return to its "normal" state ever again. "You don't understand," said Doc Peabody. "She shouldn't have ever started screaming. Not with the amount of tranquilizer in her."

  Jason fought down the urge to shiver, knowing that the room was warm enough and also knowing that any outward display of fear was likely to slow down the process of getting to the bottom of what was going on here.

  Jason looked pointedly at the closed door to the exam room. "She in there?"

  Hatty and Doc nodded, their heads moving in unison to the point that Jason had an insane urge to check the couch to see if they'd been wired to respond to the same remote control. "How is she?" he asked instead.

  "Don't know," said Hatty.

  "She was asleep, tranquilized, when she woke up and started screaming. I tried to get to her, but before I could get into the examination room, she just barricaded herself in there," said Doc. "We couldn't get to her. And then she just went...." The old man looked at his hands.

  "...Silent," finished Hatty for him.

  Doc nodded. "As death," he added.

  Jason went to the door. He rapped quietly on it with his knuckles. "Amy-Lynn?" he said through the door. "It's Sheriff Meeks. You okay?" No answer. Another quick rat-tat with the knuckles, an empty, dull sound that made Jason feel as though it were he being hit, a sturdy fist punching into him, knocking the air out of him, making it hard to breathe....

  "Amy-Lynn?" he tried again.

  Still no answer.

  He grabbed the doorknob. It turned, but when he tried to push the door open, there was no give. He grunted as he threw his shoulder into the door. Was it his imagination, or had the door given just a centimeter or two? He drew back and hit the door again.

  Slam. Slam. Slam.

  Each time, the door opened a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, then an inch at a time. Soon he had the door open far enough that he could make out what was blocking his entrance: looked like Amy-Lynn had picked up every bit of furniture, medical equipment, and anything else not bolted to the floor, and used it to create a makeshift blockade, a fortification clearly built with one purpose in mind: to keep anything and everything out of that room.

  "Amy-Lynn?" he called. No use getting a scalpel in the noggin for surprising her, he thought. "Amy-Lynn, it's Sheriff Meeks. I'm coming in. You're safe, I promise." He waited a moment, then grasped the doorjamb for leverage, fighting his way further into the room.

  He pushed and strained, then with one final grunt and the crash and clatter of falling medical equipment, he was at last standing in a wide open door.

  He took half a step, then stopped and stared, unmoving.

  Hatty and Doc came up behind him a moment later, and he could tell from the collective gasps he heard that they were as dumbfounded at what he was seeing as he was.

  "Impossible," whispered Doc.

  The room - a windowless place with only one way in and one way out - was empty. Someone had barricaded themselves from the inside of a room with no other egress.

  And subsequently disappeared.

  Then Jason noticed something even more disquieting: a digital clock on the wall. It was blurred, just like the one on the Rands' microwave; just like the one in little Sean Rand's bedroom.

  "The clocks," whispered Jason. "The dark. And you're all alone."

  Hatty shivered and looked around, then Jason heard her shriek and spun to face her. "What, Hatty?" he snapped, concern for his old teacher almost overpowering him in an instant.

  Hatty pointed to her left, down the dark hall that lay beyond the waiting and exam rooms. "What did you see?" Jason asked again.

  Hatty could barely speak, her voice sounding cracked and unsure. But at last she managed to get out the words. "I think...I think it was the boy, Sheriff. I think it was
little Sean."

  A moment later Jason was walking through the house, room to room, his Beretta in one hand, his flashlight in the other. He flicked on lights as he went from place to place, Doc and Hatty staying a few steps behind him at all times, both looking ready to bolt as rabbits in the fox coop.

  Top to bottom, bottom to top. No Sean, no Amy-Lynn.

  The last place he looked was back in the exam room once again. He looked at the impossibly empty room with the blurred clock, and the words came unbidden to his mind:

  "The dark. The clocks. Time slows down. And you're all alone."

  Sean Rand was gone. And now Amy-Lynn had disappeared as literally and completely as a magician's assistant.

  Who would be next?

  ***

  TWELVE

  ***

  The lights of the football field still blaze, but it is a cold light.

  No warmth for the denizens of Rising.

  All around town, doors are locked, windows are latched.

  Townsfolk draw drapes - dusty with lack of use - over their windows, shutting out the presence that more and more of them are starting to feel as the mist rolls over their houses and consumes them in its unnatural whiteness.

  No one wants to know what may be happening to them.

  People sit down to late dinners, but can't eat.

  They turn on the television, but reception is fuzzy.

  Many of them are at desks or tables. Writing feverishly.

  Outside, the mist has finished dripping off the mountains and is now oozing its way down the individual lanes and country roads that demark the boundaries of Rising.

  Wherever it goes, the mist swallows the light.

  A thing alive.

  The more the mist envelopes the town, the faster the people write, the more hurried and frightened their penmanship.

  Things are just getting started, each person knows in his or her heart.

  Just getting started.

  And about to get truly bad.

  ***

  THIRTEEN

  ***

  The lights from the high school stadium, which were a royal pain if you lived anywhere in a two-mile radius of the place and wanted to get a little sleep, were now the main source of illumination in Rising's dark streets. Jason used the light to carefully throw a pile of files on the seat of his truck, then looked at Hatty, who was getting ready to call it a night as well.

  "Late night," said Jason, nodding at the football lights.

  "Cheerleading practice," answered Hatty. Checking her watch, she added, "Should be through in a few hours." Then she shivered, and Jason could tell that she was still rattled from their experience at Doc Peabody's.

  "You going to be all right?" he asked.

  "What's going on here, Sheriff?" she asked by way of an answer.

  "I don't know," said Jason truthfully. Then he glanced at the numerous files on his seat. "But I'm going to find out."

  Hatty got in her car. "I hope you do, Sheriff. But any answer you find...I doubt you'll get it from your case files."

  Jason didn't want to share with her his own silent conviction of the same idea as true, so instead said merely, "We do what we can."

  Hatty nodded and drove off. Once she was gone, he looked at the files again and sighed, allowing the hopelessness he felt to show for a brief moment. Then he got in his truck and made the short drive to his home.

  His house was one of the small places just outside of Rising, at the base of the mountains that always loomed over the town. His back yard consisted of forest that went as far as he could see and beyond: government land that, as far as he could tell, was never going to be developed beyond carving out a dirt road or two for the convenience of the Bureau of Land Management surveyors that came out his way every three or four months to map some portion of the area before returning to whatever government office had spawned them in the first place.

  He pulled into his garage, closing the door behind him, and then went into his house.

  His house was nothing special, just a basic place that he had purchased when he moved back to Rising. A few bedrooms, one and a half baths, an office, a den. More than what he needed for himself, but not so big that it felt like he should have his family living there, thank God.

  Jason threw the files he had brought with him from the station onto a TV tray that sat by a recliner, and sat down. Soon he had the files open all over his lap, trying to find something in them that might lend a clue about what was happening in his town. He took notes as he worked, and every once in a while checked the notes to make sure that they still were what he had written, and hadn't changed into childish scrawl of nonsense words.

  Harappan. Hoer-Verde.

  His thoughts kept drifting to the words, and more and more it felt like they were some kind of a message. But what kind of message he could not even guess at.

  Jason sipped a cola, rubbed his eyes...and froze.

  A shadowed form stood in the hallway. The person was cloaked in darkness; no features could be seen.

  But it was a child.

  "Aaron?" Jason whispered, then shook his head. Not Aaron, it couldn't be his son, Aaron was dead and buried and gone forever. "Sean?" he said louder. "Sean Rand?"

  The figure didn't move, either to flee or to approach and walk into the pale ring of light that Jason's reading lamp cast. Jason gulped dryly, hoping against hope that this could somehow be the missing boy; could be the thing that Rising needed to set it right again.

  "Sean?" he said again, and began slowly moving files off his lap so he could move quickly.

  The figure moved, walking - still utterly hidden - into the kitchen.

  "Hey, wait," Jason shouted, and quickly followed. But by the time he got to the kitchen it was empty, the side door that led outside swinging shut with a low thud. He ran out after the child, and found himself in forest in only a few feet. His house was on the outskirts of town, well apart from any neighbors. The mist that was still making inroads on the town below had arrived here in full force, laying on the ground like an impenetrable blanket, writhing around his feet and legs like some alien being trying to slowly make its way to his face, where it could suffocate and eat him.

  The town looked darker than usual from his vantage point, though the football lights that attested to continuing cheerleading practice were easily visible, like banners above the mists.

  "Sean!" shouted Jason.

  A twig snapped in the trees, and he barreled off in that direction, only registering in the tiniest part of his mind that he had no gun; that he had left his service pistol behind in the house. He ran into the forest unthinkingly, his only thought the idea that if he could save Sean, even at this late period, that he could save the town, could reverse whatever strangeness had come to the sleepy town and make everything as it once was.

  In the forest, the mist clung to the trees like a disease, rolling in thicker and thicker all the time. Soon, Jason could barely see one tree from the next. All was shadow and dim white mist. Shadows flitted all around him, moving at the corners of his vision, disorienting him constantly. He felt like he was in the middle of a ghosts' ball, the only living - and therefore uninvited - person to stumble onto the place of their partying.

  "Sean!" he cried again, and spun around, feeling disorientation rise up within him and begin to take control of his normally tightly reined feelings. He couldn't see anything now. Not the football field, not Rising, not his own house, not even a single damned tree.

  Then there was a flash of black in the corner of his vision. Jason swiveled to face it; followed it. The shape flitted ahead of him, always moving, always just ahead, like the lingering edges of a nightmare better left forgotten.

  Then, at last, the shadow stopped. Jason caught up to it.

  And felt himself begin to breathe again, though he was not aware of the exact moment he had stopped.

  It was Sean!

  The little boy stood in bright blue pajamas, slump-shouldered, his back to
Jason so that his face was not visible. That was disturbing, but Jason pushed away any negative feelings. Here was the boy that could put things back together at Rising, he felt sure of it.

  "Sean?" he said again. "It's just me. Sheriff Meeks."

  He reached out to touch the boy. The figure shrunk away from his fingers, keeping its back turned at the same time.

  "Don't," said Sean.

  Jason's hand stopped in midmotion. A long, eerie moment passed.

  Then the boy spoke again. This time, however, his voice was different. Bubbling. Like he was speaking the words through a throat that had been viciously torn out.

  Like he was speaking words around blood.

  "It got me," said the boy.

  "What got you?"

  Another long moment. Then: "It got me."

  "Let me help you," pleaded Jason.

  "You can't. No one can."

  And the boy began to turn....

  "Because it's started," he said, and completed his turn. "Fear."

  Jason screamed. The face had been torn and destroyed by something out of this world, something for which he had no name. He was taken by a primal panic, a fear that went back to the days when people huddled in caves during thunderstorms and prayed for the gods to stop throwing fire at them. He stumbled backward, seized by an irresistible need to flee, to escape, to fly away from this place and this horrible specter that confronted him.

  Then he tripped, his boots slipping in the thick mud, and when he looked up, the boy was gone.

  Now, instead of Sean, a woman and a young boy stood in front of him.

  "Oh, God, please, no," he whispered.

  It was Elizabeth and Aaron, dressed as they were in the picture on his desk; as they had been dressed on that day, that fateful and horrible day of days when everything changed.

  Jason looked around, and saw that the forest was gone; disappeared. In its place, he was now standing on a city street. One that seemed familiar. He heard a tinkling laugh, and turned in time to see....

  His wife and son were disappearing around a nearby corner, laughing and practically dancing with joy as they ran from him. "Hide from Daddy!"