The End Time Saga Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Greene, Daniel

  Where he grew up in Michigan, it was fall; where he lived in Virginia it was the end of summer; here, on this mountain road, it was cold. The wind stung his skin, pricking goose bumps to pop up all over his exposed arms. Where are my clothes? Only a grungy tank-top covered his torso and boxer briefs on his lower half.

  Steele crossed his arms over his chest. His skin was cool to the touch and his tank top was filthy. He ran his fingers over a small piece of metal that lay on his chest, stuck to his chest hair. It was in the rough shape of a hammer. An old necklace with a long history. He rubbed the metal and felt stickiness in between his fingers. Blood? He lifted his head. No shirt, no pants. Wait. No gun. My duty weapon. Where is my SIG?

  Footsteps padded on the cement, feet scrapped along the gravelly surface, dragging along. Hazy figures in his vision became clearer. Small forms grew larger. Despite Steele’s throbbing brain, memories came back to him in a mad rush. He groaned as severe pain threatened to split his skull.

  The world had taken a hundred-and-eighty-degree dive for the worse only weeks prior. The government had drawn a two seven off-suit and had played everyone like it had a royal flush. The virus had called their bluff; the government failed to halt the unknown disease and it spread rampantly among the human population. The virus, some sort of variant of Monkeypox, killed everyone infected, and in turn brought the dead back to life with only one purpose: to infect and feed on the living.

  Steele rose a hand to his head. His heart punished his cranium with every beat. His fingertips ran across crusted blood that had dried into his matted-down blond hair.

  “Oww,” he growled. Panic welled inside him as he gingerly felt the long gash that ran across his scalp starting from his widow’s peak to the back of his skull. Oh my God. I am fucked up.

  “How did this happen?” he mumbled to himself. His refuge, the Mount Eden Emergency Operations Facility, had fallen under a horde of dead flesh from the District of Columbia. His group had escaped on a McCone airport mobile lounge west into West Virginia. Appalachian Mountains. But where are Gwen, Mauser, and Joseph? Heavy moaning drew his dazed attention.

  The calls of the infected were followed by footsteps that grew louder. Their footsteps were the sound of bare feet dragging behind broken bodies. He sat upright. The world around him spun faster, causing his stomach to turn like an all-night bender. His head demanded he lay back down, but he forced himself to sit. A concussion.

  An infected woman walked down the shoulder of the road, stumbling with the slope.

  The woman, now a monster, had been a relatively good-looking thirty-year-old woman when she was alive. Now, pale gray skin stretched over her face and her hair hung in an unkept, stringy damp mess stuck to her neck. Her lips and the skin around her mouth were gone, exposing bloody black gums and teeth. Her ripped long-sleeved shirt revealed a bare breast and stomach, and her jeans were stained and torn.

  Her stench was horrid, forcing him to retreat backwards on his elbows like a crab. Unable to keep her feet on the rough terrain, she tumbled down the shoulder face first into the ditch. Falling did not stop her, and she ripped off her fingernails as she clawed the rugged gravel, hauling her lifeless body behind her. Her tenacity was an inhuman desire for flesh.

  His hands grasped desperately for anything to fight the fiend. A stick or a rock to fight with but dead leaves crinkled in his hopeless hands and turned to dust between his fingers.

  “Aaaaaahh,” she moaned, as she clawed through the rock-filled grass.

  Fuck. He threw a kick at her face. His uncoordinated sock-clad foot slid off the side of her head. Her head turned with his foot and her teeth chomped viciously near his toes.

  “Get back,” he tried to say. His words came out jumbled and thick, like his mouth was full of wool.

  The weight was there. He hadn’t noticed it at first. It was a pressure near his hip. Metal pushed down into his skin as if it tried to brand him. The grating weight of his spring-operated blade was wedged inside the waistband of his boxer briefs.

  The knife twanged as he ripped it free, the clip releasing its hold on the waistband. He frantically pressed the silver button, and the blade reluctantly slung out. A mere fraction of a second passed in slow motion.

  Her ruined dirt-caked hands clawed up his body. The woman’s teeth clacked closed and she opened her mouth wide. With his free hand, he pulled her hair up, his grasp slipping with grease and grime. Her jaw worked, spit flying from mouth, death for him her only desire. Punching his arm out, he thrust the knife into the infected woman’s eye.

  Black blood spurted from her milky-white eye and ran down her face like gooey mascara. Her body quivered a bit then relaxed, all fight gone from her. He pulled his knife free and lay back down, exhausted. His lungs burnt like he sucked in fire instead of air.

  Heavy-laden footsteps thumped across the pavement. More infected. A pack or more was on their way. They were honed in on his living presence. Gritting his teeth, he willed himself upward, using a nearby white pine to bear his weight.

  They moaned as they marched past. From his view below the roadway, the heads and shoulders of the infected bobbed unnaturally as they walked. I can’t fight. Too many. He moved behind the tree, and let the living dead pass. Where are my friends?

  He waited and seconds turned to minutes as he tried to hold his breath. Peering from behind his thin tree, he made sure they were gone and stepped up onto the two-laner. He gripped his knife, shoulders hunkering down in a fighting stance.

  His steps were short and calculated as if he navigated ice. A big circular blood stain smeared the center of the two lanes. Before the outbreak, Steele would have thought someone hit a deer, but in the world’s current state he knew someone had died there. Steele looked for the victim, fearing whom he might find. Please let it not be them. Scanning the surroundings warily, the trees shuddered. The wind howled through rocks and branches alike.

  Trees, blood, and the infected were the only clues he had about his comrades. He bent down shakily, his muscles only working in fits and starts. He ran his bloodied fingers over the stain. Anybody except her. The blood stain streaked to the other side of the concrete. He wobbled upright. Dizziness enveloped him. What is wrong with me?

  His vision caught something abnormal in the ditch. He rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes, trying to straighten himself out. A bone-white hand stuck out of the ditch. A ghostly hitchhiker, flagging him down for a ride.

  Steele unsteadily walked his way over to the body. The man wore the Army’s standard combat camouflage ACU and was sprawled out facedown. A quarter-dollar-sized entrance wound leaked blood, indenting the back of his skull.

  “Goddamn it,” Steele whispered. He knelt next to the body and strained as he rolled over the remains of the soldier. The man’s head seesawed around, devoid of life. The exit wound had decimated the man’s face, leaving him unrecognizable. Steele patted up and down the soldier’s torso, looking for anything of value. A bloody name-tag was stuck to his breast.

  “Bonds,” he whispered. “Bonds,” he repeated. He repeated the name in his mind. Each time, nothing rang any bells, or sounded any alarms. None of the bits of the dead man was distinguishable. It was as if his brain had exploded outward from his nose. Pieces of bone and flesh hung loosely from his head. Horrific. Grisly. But no other signs of violence were apparent on the former soldier.

  “You were executed,” he said to the body. Bonds didn’t respond. He lay as motionless as a passed out drunk. It was possible he had been infected and executed before he turned into the undead. Bonds. Bonds. Bonds. The memory floated on the outskirts of his mind. His inability to think mocked him. Then the memory flew into the electric bug zapper of his conscience. Nelson Bonds. The Army mechanic they had saved from Mount Eden. Poor bastard. Steele had only known him for a short time, but he was still a good kid. Now he’s dead because someone put a bullet through his brain in the middle of a Goddamn street.

  “Moooaannnn,” cut through the trees, riding
the wind. He adjusted his grip on his knife. More infected were coming. Gray-skinned, lymph nodes black with pus, soulless, infected, and impervious to pain; the undead had only one thought on their minds: to devour the living. No fear. No restraint. Steele quickly unlaced Nelson’s combat boots. If he could take one thing from the man, it would be his boots. He slipped the boots off his feet. At least I’ll be able to run.

  “Rest in peace, kid.” Same size, thank you. He dropped to his rear on the ground, only major gross movements available to him, and he shoved his feet inside them.

  Disheveled bodies crested the road. Time to run. Steele took off at a jog, wishing he had thirty more seconds to lift Nelson’s pants and jacket. Ignoring his belly and head that screamed in protest, he wanted to faint. Do not stop.

  They followed behind him. They weaved through the trees, never resting. Never slowing while on his tail.

  He passed a sign. Durbin, WV 11. He sprinted into the woods trying to the lose the dead trailing behind him. All he could hear in the back of his mind over the pounding of blood was the high-pitched laughter of a woman.

  JOSEPH

  Mountains of West Virginia

  The dark sky pressed down upon his small coupe. The car’s mild yellow headlights were the only light in the dark of the mountain night. The darkness amassed beyond the reach of his high beams, holding all the terrors of his mind and more.

  He pushed his glasses up on his nose. Cold sweat dotted his skin. His eyes were wide and dried out from staring at the endless road. Rows of trees rolled by, and he waited for someone or something to pop out, confirming all his fears. A villain that cares not that my quest is pure, but that I have a vehicle that works and a small cache of food? He shrank down a bit further beneath the steering wheel.

  In the past day, it seemed that men were making a living out of trying to kill him. Something that Joseph was having trouble getting used to.

  “I handle the deadliest viruses known to man, and it’s a bunch of hillbillies that almost kill me.” His mouth twisted as he relived the attack.

  When the bullets started flying, Joseph had been paralyzed with fear. The true grit of a warrior didn’t lie within his genes. The double helices of the ancient phalanx hadn’t been passed down through his ancestors. Only the double helix of a scientist.

  “Damn it,” he swore. He crushed the steering wheel in his hands only causing himself discomfort in his thin arms. “Nothing happened like it was supposed to. We were only trying to help.” Tears welled in the corners of his eyes. It’s only frustration, he told himself.

  He wiped his nose. “Steele’s dead. They just fucking shot him down.” He shook his head angrily, remembering. “Who knows what happened to Mauser and Gwen,” he said aloud to the empty car interior.

  “I mean, what is the probability that those monsters let them live?” Zero. He kept telling himself, I would have saved them if I could have. He didn’t have the skills, abilities, or balls to do it. He’d never had balls to take a chance. He snuck a finger beneath his glasses and smeared a tear out of his eye.

  “Why couldn’t I have stood and fought like the others?” If you were worth a damn, you would have done something. The empty seat next to him was enough of a reminder of how alone he actually was. He shook his head, clenching his jaw. The heart of a lion wasn’t inside him, only the ounce of hope that he could come up with something to fight the vicious mutation of a virus that plagued the planet.

  “No, I would have just died.” His logic and reasoning hauled him above the waves of despair.

  “Yes, you would have died, but as a man,” he muttered to no one.

  So instead, while his friends lived and died on a mountain road in West Virginia, he had hid in the bushes, shaking with each blast of gunfire. The only thing worse being death by the infected.

  “You are a coward.” The bitterly sour taste of fear was left in his mouth as he recalled his crawl away from the gunfire like a sniveling rat. He slammed his fist into the fading leather steering wheel of his coupe. Pain was the only response. How could they expect me to fight? My fight isn’t on a battlefield. It’s under a microscope, and my subject is across the country in Michigan, but what then? Even if I had Patient Zero in my backseat, what could I possibly do with him? Talk?

  “How are you today, Patient Zero? Did you sleep well last night knowing that you have killed millions?” The empty seat said nothing in return.

  “No, no. Of course you did. I am sure you slept fine. It’s not truly your fault. Say, would you by any chance know the genetic makeup of your viral RNA? Oh, you do? Thanks, pal. You are the best,” he said to the empty passenger seat.

  A figure emerged from the trees almost as if he were trying to wave Joseph down. He didn’t cover his eyes from the bright high beams. An indication of infection. He wore a torn red and black checkered long-sleeved shirt, and gore oozed from his mouth. Joseph adjusted the wheel, giving the infected man a wide berth.

  They were here in the mountains of West Virginia too. Not as thick as in Virginia, but the infected were mobile, at least as fast as a walking man. A man walking who never took a break. A man driven by the need to infect all others who still lived. It was impossible to tell the origin of the infected person, but he knew if there was one, more would soon be coming.

  Joseph grabbed up a worn travel atlas which was resting on the seat next to him. The page was already earmarked to the West Virginia map. He scanned the center of the state. Has to be somewhere in here. Dark green mountains covered the map, circles of elevation getting smaller at the peaks. No road markers. How the hell am I supposed to figure out where I’m going? North and west of here was Michigan, logic told him that.

  He tossed the atlas back on the seat, ignoring his tire iron, now his only defense against the dead. He knuckled the steering wheel. Anger bubbled inside him, simmering beneath the surface at his own inaction.

  ***

  It had been around noon when Mauser rolled the airport mobile lounge to a stop. The lounge was a train car that sat upon five-foot-tall tractor tires with a hydraulic system, and formerly had been used to transport people from airport tarmacs to the terminals. It was big, and high enough that the infected humans couldn’t reach the passenger cabin.

  The people inside the mobile lounge stared out at a semi and a dump-truck blocking all but the very center of the mountain highway. Other vehicles dotted the road, abandoned and collecting dust.

  “Steele, come up here and take a look at this,” Mauser hollered back.

  Steele, ever vigilant, was there quickly. He wore a tan tactical vest, with a carbine across his chest, and had arms that looked like they were forged iron.

  “What’s going on?” His beard moved as he spoke, making him look like a young King Leonidas.

  Mauser looked back at him. “I don’t like the look of these trucks. Seems a little too coincidental out here to have them bottlenecked like that.” His anchor-tattooed hand rested on the steering wheel.

  Steele’s bluish-gray eyes debated the scene and his brow furrowed. “I don’t like it. Any way around?”

  “Not unless we want to backtrack about fifteen miles the other way,” Gwen said from her seat near the front. The blonde ran a finger over a map. Steele’s girlfriend was sharp, pretty, and a fighter. Joseph was glad to have her as a friend.

  “And our fuel situation isn’t favorable,” Steele said. He tapped the gas gauge with a finger. The red needle hovered timidly over a capital red E.

  “No, it isn’t.” Mauser rested his chin atop his forearm draped on the wheel. Joseph stood behind them trying to see the obstructions in the road.

  Movement caught Joseph’s eye. Pushing his glasses up from the tip of his nose, he wondered for a moment if he was seeing things. A woman waved her hands over her head in the international symbol for required attention. She stood next to a car with its hood up.

  “Look, somebody’s out there,” Joseph said.

  Steele and Mauser squinted out.

>   Joseph moved up and pointed. “See, right there. It looks like a woman waving her arms.”

  Steele and Mauser gave each other a look, and made their weapons ready.

  “I don’t like it, but we should see if she needs help,” Steele said. A gleaming gold shield hung off his chest. The sun glinted off its surface. Agent Steele still thought that he was a lawman.

  “Could be a trap. Once we get past those two vehicles there, we’ll have a hard time reversing if things go south,” Mauser said.

  “She could just have car trouble,” Joseph said hopefully.

  “Or she could be waiting to put a bullet in us,” Steele said. He gave Joseph a sidelong glance, his beard twitching as he thought. He stood a good three inches taller than Joseph, and his long, dark blond beard was speckled with flecks of brown and even a gray hair or two.

  Mauser gave Joseph a dismissive look coated in violence from the driver’s seat. Joseph was scared of the agent; he looked menacing with all his tattoos covering his shoulders down to his wrists: engines, anchors, an eight-ball, flames, and a star on his elbow. His M4 carbine sat casually in the driver’s compartment next to him, as if he were an Old Western coach driver on the Pony Express.

  Mauser, like Steele, had also played a role in saving Joseph’s life, and it seemed he wouldn’t forgive Joseph for the deaths of his teammates. He saw it in the man’s eyes. You killed them, Mauser’s thunder-cloud-colored eyes said.

  Joseph held that guilt in. The deaths of the other agents stung him. Not in the same way, but watching Jarl’s final moments made his heart hurt. How many people will die for me to live, so I can try to save the world? What if I fail and it was all in vain?

  But he also drew inspiration from their sacrifice. Jarl had fought to his last breath knowing he would lose, then so must I. Joseph wanted to spit. And look where it got him. Jarl’s no more than stinking meat in infected bellies.

  “Forward,” Steele said to Mauser. Mauser nodded and under Steele’s direction they navigated through the stalled vehicles, the mobile lounge narrowly finding clearance between the two large vehicles like Odysseus through Scylla and Charybdis.