7:00 PM. Twenty-four hours had passed and Olivarez still showed no sign of relenting. The second hand of the clock pulsed ominously, each movement echoing in Agent Litchfield and Dr. Merrill’s ears.
Tick, tock, tick.
HOUR 24
ALL THAT’S LEFT
ROBERT BARNARD
HOUR 24: ALL THAT’S LEFT. Copyright © 2017 by Robert Barnard. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Mount Marshall Publishing, 2017.
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
About the Author
Also by Robert Barnard
The condition of man…
is a condition of war of everyone
against everyone.
-Thomas Hobbes
ONE
The Little Bear Creek babbled and lapped at the shoreline, just a few feet away from where Jim Whiteman stood. It was late fall, and the chill of a Colorado winter was creeping in early. Bends in the creek had clogged with small bits of ice, and short banks of snow had accumulated here and there.
Two years had passed since the terrible outbreak in New York. Two whole years, Jim thought, and he raised an axe high above his head. The nightmare still felt fresh as yesterday.
Memories of that horrifying day still visited him during quiet moments like these. Fuzzy flashbacks that played in his mind in a sleepy slow-motion, no matter how hard he tried to forget them: A woman kneeling over a stroller in a parking lot, mindlessly devouring the passenger inside, blood trickling down her chin. An airline pilot dragging his ragged, mangled corpse along a sidewalk by his palms, exposed entrails bouncing along beside him, his teeth clicking in the air, hopeful to take a bite out of a passing leg or ankle.
The unthinkable had happened on that day two years prior. The dead returned to life, and when they did, they brought nothing of their former selves with them. Only an unquenchable thirst for human flesh and blood, mindless and insatiable. Those that the dead mauled, or scratched, or bit, would soon suffer the same fate as their attacker: They would cease to live, by any technical definition, only to return to life eager to consume the flesh of any unfortunate human nearby.
Quizzically, almost as soon as this terrifying chain of events began—it was started by a virus, news reports would later claim—it ended. Those who’d been infected died—permanently—after their twenty-third hour of infection. Even more perplexing, the virus that caused this catastrophic damage and loss of human life did not spread beyond the borders of New York state. Hell, it barely extended beyond the reach of New York City.
But, in the aftermath of the outbreak, these were mysteries better left unanswered than confronted by a nation of citizens eager to return to happy, normal lives.
The event lasted a mere week, but the consequences of the outbreak would be felt for generations to come. The New York Viral Outbreak—or NYVO (pronounced nigh-vo), as it went on to be affectionately referred to—challenged everything from political beliefs to religious faiths. The event, which left at least a million dead and caused a staggering $4.8 billion in property damage, would turn the United States economy on its head for the six months following the outbreak.
Crack. Jim brought the head of his axe down with a mighty swing; it sliced the log before him in two, a knife through butter. Chopping wood in the crisp, evening air helped to clear his mind. It helped to take his thoughts off the mindless death and destruction that sometimes felt very far away and other times felt like only yesterday. There were worse things he could be doing to distract himself between the end of his shift and going home, he figured.
Crack. Another log splayed in half, a victim of Jim’s hand. He’d amassed quite the pile of timber by now, and before he’d drive home for the night he would stockpile it in the basement of the tiny cabin behind him.
The cabin rested at the outermost rim of the Seven Lakes Park, where Jim patrolled as a park ranger. The log building was erected seventy-five years prior at the base of Mt. Tipoulk, at the end of a long, winding trail used by hunters and fishermen. It was a modestly sized cabin with two bedrooms on either end of the structure. In the center of the cabin was a small living area, a woodstove, and a humble kitchen. On the far end of the kitchen was one door that led to a painfully small bathroom and another that led to a short flight of narrow stairs to the cellar beneath.
Jim discovered the cabin on a lark. During his third month on the job a pair of hikers had been reported missing, each last seen in Seven Lakes Park. Jim was ordered to search a patch of land that covered a narrow bend in the Little Bear Creek and a thin section of land at the bottom of Mt. Tipoulk. While Jim investigated the area, a helicopter conducting an aerial search discovered the hikers—alive and well—on the other end of the park, nearly six miles away. When Jim heard the call come over the radio stating that the hikers were fine, he took a short break to investigate his newfound discovery. The door to the cabin creaked open with a whine, and Jim stepped inside. Thick layers of dust and cobwebs accumulated on every flat surface of the cabin suggested that no one had been inside for decades. When Jim later mentioned to some of the other rangers the possibility of a cabin in the North Western area of the park, by Mt. Tipoulk, they laughed. None of them seemed to be aware that it even existed, and if one did exist, a slightly drunk Ranger Buford commented, it was “probably just some place where fishermen went to pop a squat or teenagers went to fuck.”
Now it was Jim’s own little secret.
When Jim first saw the cabin, it struck him as ideal. Ideal because whatever viral monster hell unleashed two years prior, it wasn’t done for good, no matter how much the media or the government tried to say otherwise. Jim was sure of that. And when it decided to return, reeking it’s nightmarish havoc and terror, causing people to eat the flesh clean off of one another, this particular cabin would make an honest refuge for Jim and his family.
Crack. Jim’s axe swung again, mercilessly breaking the log before him in half. Last one for the day, he thought, and he wiped the sweat pouring from his brow. His pores steamed in the bitter cold. He cupped a palm over his mouth and coughed a hard, wheezing cough, which was followed by a small smattering of blood. Jim wiped his palm on the side of his jacket and ignored it.
Like he always did.
He brought the piles of chopped timber into the cabin and down into the cellar. In total, it took him eight round-trips to do so. Not bad for an hour’s work, he figured. When the last bundle of logs were brought downstairs, Jim sighed, put his hands on his hips, and examined the basement he’d worked so hard to create. He took a quick, mental inventory of the stockpiles he’d amassed. Not just of the timber, but of so much more.
On the north wall of the basement were three bookshelves, each one taller than Jim. They were pushed together side-by-side, and each had four shelves crammed to capacity with supplies.
The first bookshelf was dedicated exclusively to canned good
s and bottled water. Jim often found these on sale at the local super market for buy one, get one free. When these sales occurred, Jim would buy as many as the market allowed to be sold to a single customer. The limit was typically ten per person. And, even then, Jim would sometimes drive across town to another market to get the same deal, or come back to the store later in the day and find a different cashier to make his purchase. All of that hard work and planning hadn’t been for nothing, either. So far, there were fifty-two tins of canned ham, eighty-five cans of peas, seventy-two cans of creamed corn, one hundred and twenty-six cans of Milaca’s brand beef stew, one hundred and twenty-two cans of Milaca’s chicken noodle soup, and one hundred and thirty-three cans of Milaca’s minestrone soup. At the base of the bookshelf were three hundred bottles of purified water.
On the second book shelf were ten dozen seed packets for planting, twelve tins of petroleum, fourteen dozen tea light candles, eight dozen jarred candles, four first-aid kits stocked with bandages, gauze, and anti-septic ointments, several stacks of old magazines and newspapers, thirty-three paperback novels, four packs of playing cards, and six board games ranging from Checkers to Candy Land.
Jim would argue that of the three bookshelves, the third was the most important. On the top shelf of that one was a .38 caliber revolver, a 9mm Glock handgun (semi-automatic), a .22 caliber handgun, and a sawed-off shotgun (Jim made that modification himself, although such alterations on shotguns were illegal in the state of Colorado.) Beneath the guns were no less than a dozen military grade ammo boxes filled to the brim with ammunition. 2,300 rounds of .38 shells (eight hundred of which explode on impact), 3,450 rounds of .22 long-rifle ammunition, and 1,550 rounds of twelve-gauge buckshot.
Jim’s cabin would be a functional fallout shelter, should hell arrive again.
When hell arrived again.
He climbed the stairs of the cellar, locked the front door of the cabin, and walked back towards his truck. The sun was hanging low on the horizon now, and should he take any longer to get home, Dana would start to worry. Dana, his beautiful wife, whom he’d met during the evacuation of New York. She would be cooking dinner, Jim thought, and it’d be delicious as always. Chloe, his daughter, would be home from police academy any moment now, too. Of course Nolan, her boyfriend of two years, would be walking in alongside her, stressed and hungry after a long day of college classes. Jim and Nolan had a complicated relationship, and it was never Jim’s dream that he, his wife, Chloe, and Nolan should all be living under the same roof. But, that was just how life worked out. Nolan’s parents died during the NYVO event, and Jim took the boy—who his daughter was hopelessly in love with—in as one of his own when Jim’s family resettled in Colorado.
Jim climbed into the driver’s seat of his Chevrolet Suburban and started the engine. He took off his wide brimmed cap and reached into the backseat to set it down. When he did, he noticed the red stain on the back passenger seat, and once again one of those dreadful, fuzzy memories from years before crept back.
Jim had been bit by an infected during the evacuation following NYVO. Right on his chest. He bled helplessly on the way to the hospital as Nolan drove, as Chloe screamed with grief in the front seat, and as Dana cradled him like a ragdoll in the backseat. He had been bit, but somehow survived—somehow avoided the horrific transformation from man to flesh-eating beast. The only reminders of that goddamn day were the stain on his rear seat and the dark purple scar on his chest.
One of these days, Jim thought, I’m gonna scrub that fuckin’ stain out once and for all.
Jim sighed, took a deep breath, and directed his eyes away from the seat behind him and toward the cabin in front of him. He gave a proud smile to his little cottage on the hillside. His little secret. He’d yet to even tell Dana, or Chloe, or Nolan about it, because he didn’t want to upset them. While Jim was certain that the dead would once again rise to eat the living, his family only considered it a fleeting possibility, something too horrible to imagine happening once, let alone twice. Why upset them? When the time was right, he’d let them know about the shelter he had worked so hard to make.
Was it perfect? No. Far from it.
But it was good.
Good enough.
TWO
The alarm on Chloe’s cell phone rang three times before she snapped from slumber, reached out towards her nightstand and slapped at the device until it silenced.
4:45 A.M., she thought. Gonna be late. Shit. Sarge is gonna kill me.
She jolted up in bed, fumbled at the nightstand drawer. Even in the dark, she managed to fish for her lighter and pack of cigarettes with ease. Knew exactly where they were. She thumbed open the pack of smokes, brought them to her mouth, grabbed one with her lips and pulled it out. She gave her lighter a shake—a cheap disposable, nearly out of fluid—and brought it towards her chin. A quick flick, and the bedroom illuminated for the first time since her and Nolan fell asleep watching The Late Show the night before.
“What time is it?” Nolan groaned. His nostrils tickled from the scent of smoke. He smacked at the pillows and sheets in frustration. “Not even goddamn light out.”
“I was trying not to wake you.” Chloe took a long draw from the cigarette, swung her legs over and off the bed.
“Well, you failed at that,” Nolan said.
“It’s quarter ‘til five.”
“I thought you were gonna quit smoking.”
Chloe sighed. Her feet hit the shag carpet beside the bed and she clicked on her nightstand lamp. “No use tiptoeing around anymore, as long as you’re up.”
Nolan rubbed his eyes, opened them slowly. She looked beautiful, standing there, wearing nothing but a pair of worn-out panties. She chopped her hair a while back, insisted on wearing it short. Nolan never asked why. It never bothered him. Not that Chloe would change it back if it bothered him—or anyone else, for that matter—anyways.
The cigarettes, on the other hand, troubled him.
“Put it out,” Nolan said. “You’re stinking up the whole room.”
Chloe took another draw off the cigarette, exhaled a puff of smoke towards the other end of the room. “You going to class today?”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
“You know,” Chloe said, “those professors of yours might like to see you from time to time.”
“Yeah, well—”
“Got more important plans?” she asked.
“What’s it matter if I do?”
“What matters, is, you lived in New York the day the world ended.” She flicked some ash into a plastic cup on her nightstand. “Government gave you a full scholarship and you’re wasting it to stay home and watch conspiracy theories on YouTube all day long. People in this town resent our family enough, doesn’t help to have you pissing away four years of college on top of it.”
“I never asked for a free scholarship,” Nolan scoffed. “Some bureaucrat in D.C. wants to give me free tuition so that I don’t ask too many questions about why my parents are missing, and you’re holding that against me?”
Dead, Chloe said inside her head. They’re not missing, they’re fucking dead. It’s been two years. They’re never coming back. She screamed it louder inside her mind. Dead. Dead. Dead!
Chloe puffed on the cigarette, calmed herself and said: “No one gave you that scholarship for any other reason than bettering yourself. So that you could have a chance at life after suffering the worst twenty-four hours of recorded history. Not out of guilt, and not to buy your silence. You have that tuition money so that you can make something of yourself. And you’re doing the opposite.”
“Chloe,” Nolan said, flatly. “It’s way too early for your holier-than-thou bullshit. I never wanted a four year degree. You knew that. You knew that back in high school, before everything went down. And besides, you’re one to talk! You’re graduating with a two year degree, then giving up.”
“Not giving up, ass-hat,” Chloe said. “The police department only requires a two year degree, and you kn
ow that.”
“Beats me why you even wanna be a cop.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you.”
“Good,” Nolan said. “Because it doesn’t. What, are you trying to be like your dad? Because, I hate to break it to you, he’s not a cop anymore. He patrols a nature preserve, makes sure all the squirrels and raccoons and birds get along—”
“He puts the roof over our heads, you ungrateful prick.”
“Only because you refuse to let us move out!” Nolan shouted.
Chloe dropped her half-smoked cigarette into the cup of water beside her bed. It made a snnnizt sound before fizzing out. She finished buckling her pants, then bent down to find the top half of her uniform kicked underneath the bedframe.
“You wanna lay around all day, play the victim, sit on the massive trust fund that the State of New York dropped into your lap?” Chloe asked. “Fine. Be my guest. But some of us actually want to make something of ourselves. Do something with the life we’ve been given.”
Chloe scoffed, buttoned her shirt, tucked it into her pants. She stomped to her closet, pulled out a gun and strapped it to her hip, then took two sidesteps toward a floor length mirror in the corner of the room. She tugged at her shirt and pants, smoothed out the wrinkles, wished that she had time to iron them. When she was pleased enough, she sprayed four big pumps of cheap perfume over her hair, face, and chest.
Nolan grinned, leaned back in bed. “You look so hot when you clip that gun to your waist.”
Chloe said, “Even if I had the time, Nole, you’re officially on probation. After the jabs you just threw, you’re not getting laid for a week. At least.”
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