It’s so close.
I can see the rotten flesh stuck between its teeth.
I can smell its fetid breath.
The beast is close enough for me to kiss.
My hand tears through the veins and vocal chords and gets a grip on the spine at the base of the skull. I leave my knife jammed in its side and bring my other hand around, bracing it against its forehead. In one swift motion, I push its head back with one hand and yank forward with the other. It’s like pulling a giant chord out of the wall. Its eyes close and it slumps forward, drenching me with a torrent of black blood.
I get Momma to her feet and we stand beside Katia.
“Are you okay?” Katia asks as she dislodges her sword from a skull.
“Yeah. It’s not my blood. Momma?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“Just stay beside me. Call your kills,” Katia says as two more come at us. “I’ve got the one on the right.”
We fight like hell, every man swinging and grunting, smashing heads and severing limbs.
Norton is using the butt of his pistol and his blade to great effect, hammering and slashing, moving like a man half his age. He bats a pair of hungry claws away with the pistol, knees the owner in the stomach, and buries his knife in the base of their skull.
Tomas cries out as two Rabid sink their teeth into his arms. Eric pulls them off, crushes their skulls, and sends them spiraling over the edge of the building, but the damage is done; Tomas is a dead man walking.
Tomas throws down his rifle, pulls the pin on a grenade, and charges three Rabid near the edge of the building, screaming, bloody arms extended. “Come to Daddy, you vicious bastards!” He wraps them up in a bear hug and vanishes over the side, an explosion following soon after.
“That’s how you go out! Like a soldier! For Tomas!” Norton roars as the butt of his pistol shatters the skull of another Rabid; a juvenile female that appears to be no older than ten.
“Tomas!” the voices boom in unison.
The sacrifice seems to spur the men onward.
The chaos swirls around us.
I keep my back to Momma and Katia. We work as a single unit, turning slow circles, repelling whatever comes our way. I pay more attention to Momma, taking up whatever slack she leaves behind. I trust Katia’s ability. Momma is much less seasoned, much less capable.
Men begin to fall and the siege begins to spiral out of our control. Soldiers on either side of us scream for help, for mercy, for a quick death; we are unable to grant them any of their wishes, too caught up with trying to keep our own skin intact.
“Fall back!” Norton orders. “Protect the satellite!”
We join Norton and the few remaining soldiers on the back, north corner of the rooftop, forming a semi-circle around the humming satellite dish. The Rabid quickly fill out the remaining sections of rooftop. There’s nowhere to go but down.
“Katia, Momma, I love you both.”
“Don’t do that!” Katia snaps.
“Do what?”
“Talk like we’re gonna die!”
“She’s right, honey. We’ve got to be positive.”
“Are you two serious right now?”
“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been an honor to fight beside you.” Norton twirls his blade, tongue cocked to one side of his mouth.
“See! I’m not the only one!”
“It’s not over till it’s over.” Katia gets low and raises her swords. Her courage shines brighter than everyone else around us. Some of the men are visibly shaking, unable to cope with the looming threat of getting eaten alive.
All at once the Rabid charge, claws first, eyes bulging, bloody teeth clacking, their guttural roars assembling, sounding the final cannibalistic dinner bell for the ones still waiting below.
This is it.
The moment for me to protect the ones I love with everything I have; even if it means my life.
The Rabid are only twenty feet away.
I’ll meet the bastards halfway!
I sound the charge and take off, my boots sliding out from beneath me a few times before I’m able to get any real traction.
These things definitely weren’t built for running.
“Tim! No!” Momma cries.
“What the hell are you doing?” Katia reaches for me and fumbles.
I close my eyes and extend the knife.
I don’t want the Rabid to be the last thing that I see.
I can smell their breath.
Hear the utterance of their hunger pangs swelling in my ears.
Any minute now…
My foot snags on something and I go down hard. I don’t land on pavement. I land on something squishy. I open my eyes and find myself in hell, lying in a field of Rabid bodies. I roll over and sit up on my butt, unable to find my knife.
I’m still on the roof.
Momma and Katia are still here.
The soldiers and Norton are still here.
But the Rabid…all of them lie motionless around me.
“It worked.” It almost sounds like a question at first. A smile slowly breaks across Norton’s face. “Holy shit! It worked!”
The soldiers begin to hoot and holler, throwing their weapons away and wrapping each other up in big bear hugs.
I stand with the legs of a toddler and turn my head slowly to the parking lot, gasping at the wilderness of fallen Rabid now blanketing the earth.
Momma’s hands come up to her mouth and she collapses to her knees.
Katia tosses the katanas and starts fighting to get to me, bunny hopping the fallen Rabid, all while alternating between laughing and sobbing.
I’m desperate to meet her. I trip and fall, scraping my hands against the shingles. The pain doesn’t register as I clamber back to my feet. “Katia!”
“Tim!”
I pick her up and she coils her legs around my waist.
“It’s over. I can’t believe it’s over.” She cinches her arms around my neck, laughing as her tears drench my shirt.
32
“So that’s it.” Norton is propped up against a streetlamp, watching us with a smile that hasn’t left his face since the Rabid fell.
“That’s it,” I confirm.
Katia loads the last of our bags into the back of a Chevy truck we took from the parking garage. “That’s all of it.”
“Thanks for everything, General.” Momma extends her hand through the passenger window and Norton steps forward to shake it.
“It’s been my pleasure ma’am.”
“Take care of yourself.” Katia hugs him and gives him a brief kiss on the cheek.
“You take it easy on Tim.”
“Yeah, whatever. He’s a big boy.” She hops into the back of the pickup and pulls the door shut.
“So what’s the next step?”
Norton shrugs like he hasn’t thought that far ahead. “Rebuild, I guess. There are plenty of other survivors out there. Plenty of other shelters like this. It’s just a matter of making contact.”
“Well, if there was ever a man for the job, you’re it.”
“We could use the extra hands, if you feel like sticking around.”
I look back at Momma and Katia and shake my head. “Nah. I think I’m gonna bow out while I’m ahead.”
“Not all of us were built for war.”
“You’re right, but we’ve all got one to fight.”
“Looks like yours has come to an end. Where will you go?”
“Home, I think.”
“What’s waiting for you back there?”
I shrug. I haven’t thought that far ahead. “I guess we’ll see.”
***
The truck rocks gently as I turn onto the familiar gravel driveway. Tall trees surround us on either side. Fifty yards up, there’s a gentle bend, bathed in sunlight. As I make the turn, our little, yellow house appears. The bodies of the Rabid…of Bo…have rotted away beneath the he
avy hand of weather and time. The yard looks a bit like an upturned graveyard.
I stop the truck just short of the front porch and we all hop out. “Looks like home.”
“That it does,” Momma says.
“So this is it?” Katia scoots up behind me and wraps her arms around my waist.
“This is it.”
“It’s peaceful out here, aside from all the skulls and bones.”
“Yeah, we had to shoot our way out when we left.”
I take Katia by the hand and lead her up the wooden steps, kicking the bones away and standing with her in the middle of the porch.
“What are you doing?” she asks, her face turning a light shade of pink.
“Hey, Momma,” I call down.
“Look at you two, so cute.” Momma is leaning against the hood, arms crossed.
“Sing us a ditty.”
“A what?” Katia tilts her head at me.
“What do you want to hear?” Momma asks.
“Over the Rainbow.”
Katia giggles. “What is this?”
I put one hand behind my back and offer her the other. “May I have this dance?”
The End
Read on for a free sample of Born In The Apocalypse
One Final Word
We’ve arrived, folks. It’s the end of the Rabid Trilogy. What a ride. I honestly never saw myself reaching this point. When I started writing the first book, I never thought it’d take off like it did. I never thought it’d get picked up by the kind people over at Severed Press.
But, somehow, the stars aligned. As Timmy’s mom might say, the Universe wanted me to write this series. The response to it has been more than I could have ever imagined and I can’t thank all of you enough for your support.
I didn’t know where this story was going to go after the first book. I like to keep the possibilities open and give the characters an opportunity to speak to me and guide me; that’s what happened here. The Rabid started as a big picture apocalypse story. But now that the dust is settled and the Rabid are no more, I see that it became so much more than that. It became a story about a boy (Timmy) finding out who he truly is in the worst situation imaginable. Before the apocalypse, he was the outcast, the oddball, with no friends (let alone a girlfriend); all he had was his family.
But then came the fire.
The pressure.
And Timmy evolved. He found love. He found courage. He transformed from a boy, into a man.
They say diamonds are made under pressure. I think that’s what this story is really about; transforming from a lump of coal, into a brilliant diamond. It’s the story of us. Of me and you. We all go through hard times. How will we allow the hard times to define us? Will they make us bitter or better?
I hope you’ve enjoyed the Rabid trilogy. Until next time, keep your head up.
J.V.
Chapter 1
“Do you think it’s one of them?”
“I dunno. Has it moved?”
“Not for the last ten minutes.”
“How do you think it got here?”
“Dunno. Was it here before?”
“Don’t remember seeing it, but the wind last night might have blown the leaves off it.”
“Throw something at it.”
“You do it.”
My friend Trey Chambers and I were looking at a body. It was a middle-aged man about forty five, although my only reference to middle-aged men was Mr. Greyson over the ridge. It looked about as old as him and about the same color, so maybe it was all right. It was lying on its side under a holly bush with its arms crossed on its chest and its head was turned away from us.
“Should we go around it, look at it from the front?” Trey asked.
“Well, we have to if we want to get home,” I said. We’d been hunting for the better part of the morning, checking our snares and having a fair amount of luck. We had three rabbits apiece, and I had an extra squirrel I managed to knock out of a tree with a well-thrown rock. We had seen the tracks of a deer, but we had nothing on us that would take down a large animal. We had our packs and our knives, but that was it.
We walked carefully through the brush, trying to keep to the game trail that ran a zig-zag pattern through the woods. Behind our houses was a decent-sized forest, and we had both grown up exploring and hunting its depths. There wasn’t much to the forest we hadn’t seen, so to come across this body suddenly was having to admit it wasn’t there before. And in that case, there was a really good chance it was one of them.
We slowly walked around the man, trying to see its face before it saw us. If it was one of them, it would have dark splotches all over its face. If it wasn’t, it would look normal. That was the easiest way to tell, although not all of them had the splotches. A few were normal-looking, and you couldn’t tell they were a problem until they tried to get you.
Trey bumped my arm. I looked over at him, and he pointed to the body once, then pointed to his own eyes. He shook his head, and I took him at his word. I couldn’t see the face at the angle I was at, being taller than he was, but Trey was telling me he didn’t think it was one. We’d seen them before, and we knew what they could do, so we were naturally cautious about approaching one. We’d also seen plenty of dead bodies as well, so if this was another one of those, no big deal.
We worked our way across the path and moved away from the body. I’d tell my dad about it, and he would probably come out and drag it over to the burn hole. It was a deep pit about fifty feet across and was originally thirty feet deep. It had started out as a retention pit for the floods we would get, but it served another purpose in the end.
“Hey, Josh?” Trey said as we followed the trail again.
Whatever I was thinking of answering flew out of my head as the bush over the body suddenly exploded in sound and flying leaves. The corpse, which it now obviously it wasn’t, thrashed and tore at the clinging shrub as it tried to free itself.
Trey and I took one look at the monster coming after us, and we didn’t have to think twice. We turned and ran for our lives.
Behind us, the infected person tore free of the foliage and came after us in the typical fast walk of someone who had fallen prey to the disease that had killed so many. It seemed they couldn’t quite work out the mechanics of running, but walking fast was the next best thing. Of course, when you were twelve years old like Trey and I were, a fast walking adult was almost on par with as fast as we could run.
“Go, go, go!” I yelled, pushing Trey on. He was the slower of the two of us and the most likely to trip on something. If he had been behind me he wouldn’t have made it. I could hear the man stumbling, wheezing, and trying like crazy to get at us. If we fell or stopped, he’d tear us apart.
“Where can we go?” Trey yelled, running past a small stand of trees. That was a landmark for us and told us we were close to our homes.
“Head down the hill; we’ll get him with the rocks!” I panted, stealing a look behind me and wishing immediately I hadn’t. The man was moving fast, and his walk was pretty steady, which on these people meant he had been infected fairly recently, and his mind still remembered how to move. Thank God he had forgotten how to run.
“Are you nuts?” Trey wheezed, turning left anyway. “We’ll get in trouble for sure!”
“Gotta risk it unless you want to run forever,” I said, moving down the hill. The forest we emerged from led out onto a huge man-made hill which extended for a quarter mile in front of us. The top was flat and grassy, and the sides were steep enough to give even a healthy person a case of the heaves. Going up was hard enough, but going down was a piece of cake. We just let gravity take over and slid down the grass until we reached the rocks at the bottom.
The rocks themselves were huge, the smallest of them being larger than my fist. The larger ones we couldn’t even move if we tried together. But we didn’t need those, we just needed ones that were about the size of a pumpkin. Trey and I each picked up a rock the size of a shoebox and lay
in wait for the diseased man to come tumbling down.
We heard him before we saw him. Those infected with the Tripp Virus wheezed a lot since we were told they were missing a lot of their lung tissue, and their throats were messed up. It wasn’t too bad in the daylight, but at night it really creeped me out.
In a minute, the man walked off the edge of the hill, and fell right onto his face. He slid that way for a while and wound up crashing head first into the same rock pile we did. Blood poured out of a deep gash on his cheek, and the impact stunned him just enough for us to move.
“Get him!” I yelled at Trey, heaving my rock up and dumping it on the prone man’s shoulders. The man wheezed suddenly and tried to turn his head, but it was wedged in between two rocks and not going anywhere.
Trey tossed his rock onto the man’s back, and then jumped on top of the rocks, adding his weight to the stones. The combined heaviness was too much for the infected man, and he couldn’t do anything but lay there and bleed.
Trey looked over at me. “You gotta kill him, man!”
I looked down at the pathetic creature with a mixture of loathing, disgust, and fear. I had seen these things since the day I was born, and I never got used to them. But that didn’t stop me from doing what needed to be done, and I picked up the biggest rock I could lift. Pushing it over my head, I brought it down with both hands onto the head of the infected man. The rock cracked into the man’s skull, stunning him, and I lifted the rock and brought it down again. This time there was a serious crack as the rock broke the skull and penetrated the brain. The man’s thrashing ceased, and lay there as blood leaked out of his head and stained the rocks around him.
The Rabid: Fall Page 19