Fractured: The Fracpocalypse Book 1

by D. S Mac

  “That’s where the storm will start.” The stranger let go of his gun and pointed towards Parliament. More guttural screaming resounded. Every few minutes, the noise seemed to edge closer, keeping them on edge.

  “Right, eyes open. Let’s get there before those things find us.” Drake had barely finished his sentence when the sound of a thousand footfalls pounded the ground behind them. The shrills of the creatures grew louder with excitement as they spotted their prey. “Fuck, they’re coming.” Drake raised his gun and aimed at the army sprinting towards them. He steadied himself, took in a breath, let out three-quarters of it, and let off several controlled shots. Three of the creatures roared in agony and fell to the ground in heaps. Creatures quickly filled the space left by their dead. The longer they stood there, the larger the creatures’ army increased. The ground shook with the sheer number.

  “There’s too many. Where the hell are they coming from?” Fergus had raised his gun and had still yet to fire off a shot. The stranger grabbed hold of both their shoulders and pulled them back.

  “You go! Get to the storm, find a blue fracture, and bloody jump. I’ll buy you some time.”

  “You’ll die. Why are you helping like this?” Fergus said as he hesitated before running off.

  “It’s more important you both live. Now GO!” With that, he pulled the RPG from his shoulder strap and shoved in a rocket . He looked around to Drake and Fergus, who had made a reasonable distance. “Better not fucking kill us, Drake.” He turned back, aimed down the iron sight, and with a hiss of smoke, he let loose a rocket.

  Chapter 10 - Storm

  Drake and Fergus were sprinting for their lives, the screams of the fractured creatures still latching onto their fear. They didn’t hold back from the run. Both of them hurtled down the street at full speed, dodging bricks, mortar, overturned and folded cars. The sound of an explosion rattled off behind them, jumbled with the agonised screams of the monsters. It was a miracle that this street was clear right up to the bridge. Not a single fallen building had blocked their path. If one had, it would have been damning.

  Fergus put everything he had into this, concentrating on his breathing and focusing on the run. He did not want to make Drake come back for him again. As he was in full sprint, something smashed into his side, sending him hard onto his left shoulder. Shrill screams filled his ears as it grabbed hold of him. He struggled and fought to break free. His shoulder felt like it had been smashed with a baseball bat. He was tiring fast from the grapple. He could feel and smell the acrid heat of a creature’s breath closing in on the side of his face. Fergus was about to give in to this fate when he was released. He fell back to his back as two shots pierced his ears.

  “You good, Ferg?” Drake held his smoking rifle with his right hand and dangled his left down to help Fergus up.

  “Shit, yeah, my shoulder’s done.” He rubbed it vigorously, hoping to brush off the damage.

  “Can you run still? We’ve got to go.” Another rocket blast ricocheted off their surroundings.

  “Aye, let’s go. I’m fine.” Fergus had now got back to his feet, retrieved his rifle, and they continued their sprint.

  They made it no more than a few meters down the road when two more creatures burst from their shadowy alleyways. Drake, without even thinking, raised his gun to his eye level and placed two shots through the thing’s face. Its head snapped back with a spray of blood, and it dropped to the ground.

  Fergus was a little clumsier. He took aim, fired a shot off, and completely missed. He had not expected the amount of recoil and was sent sprawling to his arse. As the creature snapped towards him with its foul teeth gnashing, Fergus realigned a shot, pushed harder with his shoulder, and fired. The bullet pierced the creature’s eyeball, and it collapsed into a bloody heap on the ground.

  Finally, they had reached the bridge, only one last push to go. All they needed to do was get across this in one piece, and they could find the fracture home, or as near as. They both slowed down when they stepped onto the bridge. Much like everything else, fracture storms had ripped through it. At first glance, however, it still looked structurally stable, but it was not worth the risk to rush. They proceeded slowly, moving around abandoned vehicles. A large truck looked like a fracture had opened up right in its centre. The cab and trailer had been folded back into each other along with a large chunk of the road, leaving a gaping hole in the bridge.

  They were halfway across when the bridge started to shake in rhythm violently. The wind seemed to pick up to gale-like forces in a matter of seconds. They planted their feet and centred their cores on holding themselves up in this strange phenomenon. As they continued to struggle along the bridge, a blinding flash discharged. As the gale grew stronger, threatening to take Drake and Fergus with it, Drake noticed something strange. The wind wasn’t blowing in one direction, but from the front and the side and behind him. It was all directed to one spot. The spot where the bridge’s crater was, the spot where the lorry’s cab had folded.

  “Shit! Ferg,” Drake shouted over the deafening noise. “Ferg! It’s a bloody fracture opening and not the good kind.”

  Even though they could barely hear a thing over the sound of rushing wind, Ferg nodded to show he understood. The gale picked up with an obscene amount of force. Fergus reached for the bridge’s railing as his feet and legs were swept into the air. He was left dangling there like a flag billowing atop a castle, clinging on for dear life. Drake wasn’t so lucky. The sudden change in force send him colliding back first into the cab, it knocked the wind out of him, but it did not relent. It was as if it were trying to pull him through the cab.

  With a loud and earth-shattering pop, the wind was interrupted. Drake took hold of that slight reprieve and bolted as far as he could along the bridge. Fergus flopped to the ground and turned his head to avoid smashing his nose in. He saw Drake running toward the end of the bridge and sprinted after him. They made it to the end when another blinding flash stopped them in their tracks. They turned to look as a beautiful fracture splintered open. The truck groaned and whined like metal grinding together, and within a second, it was completely folded in on itself as if in a car crusher and vanished into the fracture. The ground around it started to rumble from the pressure and shortly followed suit. Chunks of concrete and tarmac tore themselves apart and were vacuumed into the crack. Before they shared the same fate as the bridge, Drake and Fergus turned tail and ran into the eradicated central part of the Houses of Parliament.

  The next few moments were like a pure dose of hell. They had made it to the gutted building’s centre when more fractures started to erupt around them. Between the vacuum, the noise and the blinding flashes of light, they had no hope. Drake and Fergus stuck close together. They didn’t want to leave a man behind. When a fracture erupted a few meters to their right, they ran and stumbled as quickly as they could over ridiculously uneven ground to get as far away from it as possible. As soon as they made it to a safer part, another fracture would erupt. They spent several crazy minutes sprinting back and forth like some cruel game of human tennis away from the vacuuming cracks of hell. They knew that they could not keep this up. Even Drake was tiring. Legs became like lead balloons, swelling at every bit of effort.

  Another fracture burst open right behind them, they sprinted and sprinted, but this time the force of the vacuum had them pinned. They could no longer move forward. As the pressure increased, imminent death quite literally on the horizon, they both dove to the floor and latched on to debris. Drake had hold of some metal piping that was holding well, and Fergus had latched onto what looked like part of a railing from an old stairwell. Both of them were now being pulled with such force their bodies and legs were billowing, waving up and down. They both strained from the pressure, their faces swelling from the stress, their arms about to tear at any moment. Fergus started to slip to his fingertips.

  Drake looked back at the fracture and could see it palpitate from opaque to translucent and back again. The frac
ture started decreasing in size, and Drake knew it was closing as fast as it had appeared. Another blinding flash came from right behind it. Drake forced his eyes closed and waited for it to dissipate. As he opened them again, he could see Fergus in the worst possible situation. He had been forced onto one hand, which was slowly slipping away. Only a few fingertips held him against the railing. Drake looked back over to the fracture and was hit with a wall of hope. The fracture that had opened behind the other was pulsing with a bright blue light. The first fracture was decreasing in size drastically now and was only a few seconds away from closing. Drake had a crazy idea, but he was sure it would work. He shouted over to Fergus as loud as he could, “Ferg! Let go and grab me.”

  Fergus had heard something and looked over. The strain and fear on his face created an awful look in his eyes.

  “Ferg! LET GO!”

  Fergus couldn’t be sure if he’d heard Drake correctly; then he shouted it again. He knew it was bloody crazy, but he trusted Drake, and seeing as he could hold on no longer, he let go.

  Chapter 11 - Hope

  No one knew the true meaning of loneliness. Yeah, people had been lonely in the past. Either through self-destructive lifestyles, mental illness or in general. The loneliness Brendan felt was different. He was trapped in a hellish place, with no people, no technology, quite literally absolutely nothing. Stuck with nothing to do and zero interaction of any kind. Nothing pretty to look at or to distract him. All there was was a wasteland and mindless foul beings that wanted to kill him.

  He had moved from the floor after being attacked, but something had changed in him. It was like his mind had fractured. He didn’t feel like the Brendan he once was, nor did he feel like the strong-willed Brendan from his mind. He felt like nothing. He had, for all intents and purposes, given up. He wandered around like a zombie, still covered in blood and fragments of skin from the creature. His lab coat was so filthy that not even a morsel of it was still white. It was thick with orange dirt and blood. He no longer resembled the intelligent, thoughtful man he once was. Now he was a meal, a meal waiting to be eaten.

  He shuffled along the street, scraping each foot on the ruins of Earth. The gravelly scrape reverberated off buildings, each step adding to the irritating scuffle. Hunger and thirst had encircled every fibre of his being, his energy sapped from his arduous journey. As he strolled like a zombie, the ground shook, followed by an echoing boom. He wasn’t remotely concerned, didn’t even flinch, and carried on wandering.

  As his shuffling continued, so did the booming thuds. If Brendan had cared, he would have listened and realised that whatever was causing the booming rumbles was a large creature. The next sound that rang out certainly did pique his curiosity. A rather large explosion rattled the ground and buildings; dislodged pieces rattled away and smashed to the ground. For the first time in ages, he lifted his head, and on the horizon, smoke billowed up toward the electric orange sky.

  He knew that he did not have the energy or the willpower to investigate, so he carried on shuffling along the street. For what felt like hours, Brendan still walked, head bowed, shoulders slumped. All hope he had was lost, even the hope of dying. No creatures had seen him, nor had he seen any creatures for a long time. He started to feel like he was destined to walk the plains of hell forever alone. Then finally, like a prayer being answered, shrill screams filled the air and reverberated off the buildings. Tears formed at the corner of his sunken eyes because he finally had a way out. Brendan raised his head and picked up his pace. He wanted, no, needed to find those creatures. He needed this to end. It was no life for anyone, let alone a man who had devoted his life to the betterment of the world.

  The screams still resounded, much closer than before, and it sounded like a lot of creatures. Brendan knew he was heading in the right direction. Somehow he knew he had to walk towards Parliament, then cross the bridge away from it, and there he would find his peace.

  Several more thunderous explosions went off in succession not too far away. As he approached Parliament and glanced across the bridge, he saw several tails of smoke billowing into the sky. He broke into a stumbling kind of run, eager to get to the bridge, when he stopped dead in his tracks. Two men, the same two men, were walking towards him. They had made it halfway across the bridge when the wind picked up. Brendan saw them struggling to keep their footing when a blinding, brilliant white flash engulfed the area. He covered his eyes and almost lost his balance from the increasing force of the wind.

  When he was able to see again, an alluring and malevolent-looking fracture had opened up. It was pulsing and evil red, and the centre was a deep swirling black. Without any warning, the lorry next to the two men collapsed in on itself and vanished through the dark crack. He was so mesmerised by the fracture that he did not notice the two men had gone, nor did he catch the break in the wind a minute ago. Confused and completely bewildered, he looked everywhere. Did they get sucked through? Did they jump?

  Flashes of light and bursts of sudden gales were pulling Brendan all over the street, the pressure from the multiple gale-force winds yanking him from different sides. He pushed himself firmer to his feet and lower to the ground in a stoop and ran as fast as he could manage to the Parliament buildings. As he ran, the groaning of fractures could be heard from every direction. Large pieces of the building, road and cars were being launched all over the place. High-pitched metal scraping and loud crashes of debris came from every direction. He ran, hunched down with his hands over his head, and clambered over part of the obliterated building. The gale seemed to ease up here, and he was able to climb without cowering.

  His ascent was slow because he was so knackered, mentally and physically. As he reached the top, he could see the most beautiful and terrifying thing. Fractures were popping in and out of existence all over the centre of Parliament. The gale-force winds were all colliding, causing large chunks of everything to swirl around in a frenzy, dancing in the air, flitting between wind streams. Brendan was so utterly mesmerised by the beauty and the ferociousness that he hadn’t noticed the two men clinging on for their lives as they were caught up in a torrent that was threatening to send them to oblivion.

  Brendan searched for a way to help them. His tired brain threw out no helpful ideas. That was when he saw it crack into existence. A fracture pulsing a beautiful blue neon with its centre like a mirror, however not reflective. It had appeared right behind the corrupt black one. For some reason, he knew that that was a way out. Without even thinking, he ran for it. He bounded down an obelisk of destruction, carefully planting foot after foot. His escape was nearing. He was finally going to be free of this place.

  With mere metres to go, hands outstretched, he ran, ran faster than he ever had. Brendan stole a glance over to the two men as one of them let go. He flew without hesitation and, like a guided rocket, went straight towards the malevolent fracture. The other man snatched hold of his leg on the way, and they both soared towards their death.

  A sharp groan was emitted throughout the ruins. Another blinding flash went off like a flash-bang grenade. Brendan covered his eyes and felt serenity. The noise of all the streams of wind had ceased, a thousand objects fell from the air, crashing onto the ground, and then there was silence. Brendan uncovered his eyes only to see that everything had gone. The fractures no longer bombarded the area, the wind no longer ripped everything to its doom, and gaping craters were left throughout. Everything was once again quiet, and Brendan had lost his last chance home.

  Chapter 12 - Trap

  Outside the car, it was pissing it down. The wipers were on full power, and visibility was still the bare minimum. Through the windscreen, the driver could barely make out red tail lights from the cars in front. When they rapidly seemed to get closer, he braked hard, his seatbelt forced into his chest. He shook his head and glanced down at his Forrest Futures satnav. Every employed driver got given one to ensure that drivers made it to a pickup and drop-off on time. They were the cutting edge of satellite navigation
and updated in real time. Most things on cars these days were tracked, even down to predicting engine trouble and accidents before they occurred so that the navigation systems could reroute traffic instantly.

  The large fifteen-inch touchscreen flashed with a warning red and spoke in its robotic supposedly UK English voice. “Collision predicted in one minute on A-3-2-0-5. Suggested route, turn left onto Macduff Road.” Macduff road came into view about forty seconds later, the driver signalled, peered over his shoulder, which was pointless because he couldn’t see a damn thing, and turned left. As he pulled into Macduff Road, the loud crunch of metal as two cars collided echoed down the streets. “You will arrive at Forrest Futures on Sopwith Way in three minutes.”

  The driver pulled up to the entrance of the largest building in London. It was the only modern building in London that did not resemble a phallus. Reaching 250 metres and fifty-two stories, it was larger than One Canada Square, which was the only older building still standing. Council had replaced many of the older buildings in a massive building overhaul to modernise London. The project cost billions, but it did help bring more revenue from tourism.

  The driver pulled out a thermos filled with Yorkshire tea, filled his cup, and relaxed when the warm amber goodness slid down his throat. It had already been a long day taking the bigwigs from Forrest Futures to meetings, and he had been about to go home when the satnav had pinged up an urgent collection for none other than Dr Forrest himself. He’d let loose a heavy sigh because this was not a job he could turn down. The company had a reputation for firing staff over minor things. He’d accepted the position and made his way as quickly as he could to be there at 6.30 pm. He glanced over at the clock and saw that it was currently 6.26 pm. He always made it on time.