Extinction: The Will of the Protectors

by Jay Korza

  In the scant few hours since the massacre had begun, I had already learned that I was faster than any of the demons. Their strength, however, was that they seemed to never tire and could maintain their moderate pace forever. I had seen a few people succumb to exhaustion only to collapse and be descended upon by the feeding frenzy of one or more demons. It wasn't a pretty sight, to say the least.

  The worst part was, depending on how much of the person was eaten, or maybe which parts hadn't been eaten—I still wasn't sure which was the deciding factor—the person became one of the demons and got up and began hunting their own prey. I had seen plenty of horror movies with my father but none of them, not a single one ever, showed this kind of demon.

  Now, if the demons had been turning people into beasts, I would know exactly what to do, how to hide, and how to kill them. If the demons wanted to drink your blood, no problem—there were plenty of easy solutions to that problem. But these cadaverous monsters were a complete mystery and I had yet to see one killed, so I was at a loss of what to do except run.

  I was careful not to run too fast, just fast enough to not get caught but also to not get tired too quickly. By the time I was free of the monsters following me, I had already lost the original pair from the house awhile back and then picked up a few more groups along the way. I finally found myself alone in an alley with the ragged sounds of my own breathing filling my ears. The desperate cries of unseen victims were barely audible to me as I tried to relax my breathing and get my bearings.

  I lived in a small city, so although I wasn’t overly familiar with this particular area, I did have a pretty good idea of where I was. I was pretty sure the alley would lead me to a parking structure near a large shopping center, where I knew there would be food and water. I quickly dismissed that idea; the shopping center would’ve been full of people today, which meant it could now be full of shoppers transformed into the demons. What to do?

  I decided to risk scouting out the parking structure. People often leave snacks or bottles of water and other drinks in their vehicles; maybe I could find something there. And if things got bad, I could always start running again. I wouldn’t be trapped inside a building like if I went in to the shopping center. The sun would be setting soon, so I needed to move quickly if I didn’t want to be fumbling around in the dark, which I didn’t.

  With so many corpses everywhere, I had no choice but to walk near or over a lot of them. Every time I did, I just knew that this body was going to be the one to rise up and make a gruesome meal of me, but none of them did. When I finally reached the parking structure, I became witness to the awful tragedy that had taken place just hours before. Cars were on fire, bodies strewn in impossibly awkward positions, and all sorts of other remnants of chaos.

  The one thing I didn’t see was a demon. Not a single one walking around or feeding on the fresh bodies that were free for the taking. This scared me a little. Were they hiding, waiting in ambush? I didn’t think so; they hadn’t shown any real sense of intelligence that I had seen. Maybe they were inside the structure, sharing a large meal and not paying attention to the outside?

  As I was pondering the situation and my options, I spotted a large truck on the second floor of the parking structure. What drew my attention was the large shiny words on the side, marking this vehicle as a police truck. Looking at the size and build of the truck, I thought for sure it was one of those armored models I had seen before at a demonstration, the kind of truck used for riots and such. If I could get to it and if it were unlocked, I would have a safe place for the night.

  Taking more time than was probably necessary, I finally crossed from the alley to the parking structure and entered the barely lit area. I paused to see whether I could hear anything other than my own pounding heart; nothing. I slowly walked through the first level of cars, almost forgetting my original intent was to find food and water. I decided I would check out the police truck first and then go from there. If the truck was open and clear of danger, I could use it as a fallback point if I were to get into trouble while foraging through the cars. My mom had always told me that watching all of those war movies was a waste of time but at the moment, I was finding all of that osmotic knowledge and tactics helpful.

  When I finally reached the truck, I allowed myself to smile and actually feel hope for the first time today. The back of the truck was wide open; the cops probably deployed from the vehicle and didn’t have time to close it back up before they started crowd control or whatever their mission here had been. The only thing left to do was to make sure it was empty and safe.

  Then my smile and hope faded just as quickly as it had come; there was a demon inside. A cop demon. He was aimlessly looking around, trapped only by the direction he was facing and apparently oblivious of this fact. I now knew that these creatures didn’t have an intelligent thought process, probably just a base reactionary ability like some of the predatory plants I had learned about in school.

  It wasn’t hard to formulate a plan considering my options were limited. I needed shelter and this was the best I would ever be able to find, so I had to get the demon out of the truck. I had no weapons but I would've doubted their effectiveness even if I did have them. I would just have to lure this one out just as I had done with the other two from my house. I looked around the truck and decided on the path I would take to lead the monster away and then how I would get back. I also examined the truck’s back doors to determine how to close them and make sure they at least looked like they worked. Once that was done, I was ready. Or at least that's what I told myself.

  I didn’t want to start yelling to get the demon’s attention; that could bring other unwanted attention with it. Instead, I picked up an abandoned riot helmet from the ground and threw it at the demon, hitting it square in the back. It worked—it worked very well.

  The demon turned and locked eyes with me as I was already backing away from the truck. The demon pounced, which I absolutely was not ready for. I was ready for the demon to chase me but the demon apparently had other plans. With the creature much closer than expected, I took off running but feared I wouldn’t have enough of a head start.

  I made it just a short distance away from the truck when I felt the demon reach out and grab part of my shirt. The pull was just enough to throw me off-balance and send me tumbling to the ground, with the demon falling on top of me. I landed hard on my chest and skidded maybe a foot before my shoulder ran in to a parking block that abruptly stopped my forward momentum.

  The pain that radiated throughout my body was a small price to pay to the parking block that saved my life. As my body was stopped, the demon who was falling on me wasn’t, and the demon continued his journey forward and beyond his would-be prey. I felt the feet of the demon pass over my head and I looked up in time to see the creature impale himself on a metal rod that was protruding from the concrete wall.

  The demon was, of course, still alive, or alive-ish as it were, and trying to crawl back towards me. I got up and quickly ran back to the police truck and got in, closing the doors behind me. Finding the lock, I made sure to secure the doors and then tested the handle to make sure that I had worked the mechanism correctly. I then looked through the truck, making sure it was safe; there was no reason to take any chances with something this important. And then I collapsed.

  Lying on the floor, I tried to drift into unconsciousness but couldn’t. The monster outside was making too much noise—horrible noise, frightening noise. I wasn’t sure whether the noise itself was the problem or the thought of that noise bringing more demons was what really bothered me. Either way, it had to stop. The problem was, I had no idea how to accomplish that goal.

  Looking around the truck, I found some ammunition but no weapons. The riot truck must not be armed, I thought; it must have been loaded out with the idea that the street cops would have their issued weapons so they would only need an ammunition resupply if things got bad. I saw riot implements such as batons and shields but how could I use th
ose?

  After several more minutes of searching, I was satisfied that nothing better could be found in the truck. Several more minutes to devise a plan, and then a few more to build up the courage to implement it, and I was opening the back door, shield in one hand and baton in the other.

  As I approached the demon, I saw that the cop still had a gun slung around his waist. If I could get that gun, it might prove useful later. Keeping the shield in front of me, I took a few tentative steps towards the creature. The demon lashed out and struck the shield harmlessly with one of his partially eaten hands. This gave me some confidence; the shield had worked. Even if it had deflected only a weak attack, it was better than nothing.

  I looked at the demon’s predicament to get a better idea of what I was dealing with. A car had run in to the concrete wall and a pipe of some sort had come down from the ceiling and then broke in two pieces. The demon hit the pipe with the upper part of his back where it impaled him and then continued until it exited the lower part of his abdomen. Gore and blood had pooled below his body and continued to accumulate as he tried to free himself from the metal rod. The way he was pierced, the demon couldn’t stand upright and looked as though he were a puppet whose master had fallen asleep while still holding the strings partly upright.

  An arm lashed out at me, and I instinctively swung with the baton to protect myself. I had been so engrossed at examining the situation that I had failed to see the oncoming attack. Luckily my reflexes were faster than I ever would’ve believed them to be and the baton struck the arm with a satisfying CRACK of bone. The demon’s arm was broken near the shoulder.

  The injury didn’t stop the demon from trying to get at his prey: he didn’t pause to take stock of his wounds, he didn’t flinch and cry at the pain. However, I felt a small sense of elation when I realized that the demon could no longer use that arm! The injury may not have slowed the demon down as it would have a normal person, but the injury still had the same end result—lack of use of that limb.

  If I couldn’t kill an attacker, I might still be able to disable it long enough to get away and not have to run everywhere. But I had to confirm my theory and I had more limbs to try it out on. Aiming high on one of the demon’s legs, I reared back and swung with all my might. Nothing. Damn. Five hits later, I finally heard and felt a bone break and the limb went limp. My theory was confirmed but I realized it would probably take too many hits to effectively disable the leg on one of the monsters, especially if the demon was actively trying to eat me.

  Exhaustion was setting in and I wondered whether that played any part in how many strikes it took to break a leg bone. I knew I needed to finish my experiment and shut this demon up so I could get back to my truck and sleep. My original mission was to find food and water in the parking structure but I decided it was too late to do that now. I would be fine overnight, if not uncomfortable, but I could wait until morning to look for those things.

  Now, how to shut this thing up? Finishing up the rest of the demon’s limbs, I found that arms were much easier to break than legs. I then focused on the head—the mouth, to be specific. Even without a working jaw and windpipe, the monster was still surprisingly loud and obnoxious. And that’s when I lost it, completely broke down and went nuts with the baton. I began smashing the demon as if he were a child’s party favor filled with candy, waiting for someone to beat the treats out of him.

  Hit after hit began tearing the demon to pieces. Limbs began to come free, flesh thrown and sticking to the wall and ceiling, blood creating spirals of art on every surface. As I stood over the lumps of flesh all around me, I realized that the demon had stopped making noise. The only sound left were the maniacal and fervored ones coming from my own mouth. Barely audible rantings that even I couldn’t clearly understand. Then I saw the head of the creature, disembodied and lying on its side a few feet from the bloody mass that used to be its torso.

  The head was still moving its destroyed mouth, still wanting to feed but silent at last. I thought I should be happy about this: I had met my goal and made the creature silent. But the chewing mouth only angered me more and I began hitting the face and skull of the demon. When my baton finally made it through the bone and into the squishy tissue that used to define who this person had been, the mouth stopped moving. The eyes stopped looking around. There was no motion whatsoever.

  I stopped moving, too. I looked for a moment and then gently prodded the skull with the baton, just to be sure. That was it; I had found the ultimate answer. To kill these already dead creatures, you had to destroy their brains. It had seemed easier to get through the skull than it had been to break a leg, so that should make things easier. And, now that I knew where their weak point was, I could find weapons specific to that purpose to make it even easier.

  In the distance, a faint noise came to my ears. Shuffling perhaps? Low moaning? Even with my newfound knowledge of how to kill the demons, I didn’t know whether I had the energy to do it again, especially to one that wasn’t trapped on a piece of pipe. Turning to head back to my truck, I only made it a few steps before I remembered something. The gun. Quickly, I sprinted back and found the weapon under the mess I had made and then ran to the truck. As quietly as I could, I closed the back doors and locked myself in.

  It wasn’t long before I saw three or four of the demons walking by the truck, apparently oblivious of my presence inside. I tried to watch them through the windows but I was also careful to not give my position away. As the small group approached the guardrail at the back of the parking structure, one of them was headed right for a break in the guardrail, probably caused by a car driving through the railing in a panic. The creature walked right off the second floor into open air and fell out of sight. The other demons didn’t pause, look after their fallen comrade, or anything; they just kept going. Just another piece of information to file away: they were very susceptible to traps and you didn’t even have to hide the traps.

  Slinking down away from the window, I curled into a tight ball, resting on my side in a fetal position. Having already searched through the truck a second time, I was sadly confident that it didn’t contain any left behind food or water. With nothing left to do but sleep and wait for morning, I drifted off into unconsciousness, my last thoughts of a memory from earlier in the day. For just a moment, I was back at my birthday party, making the traditional birthday wish. Remembering my wish from earlier, I spoke out loud for the first time in more than half a day. “This is not what I wished for.”

  Extinction Biographies

  The biographies for twelve of the characters from the original book Extinction are included here to help you reconnect with them or connect with them for the first time if you didn’t read the first installment of the series.

  Daria

  Daria was more excited than she had ever been in her nine years of life. She kept looking at her dad and squeezing his hand. The line was moving at a fairly constant rate but it wasn't fast enough for Daria.

  In the hand not occupied by her father's, Daria held a raffle ticket, a winning raffle ticket. THE winning raffle ticket. Daria had used her allowance and some saved lunch money to buy five raffle tickets at her school's carnival fundraiser.

  The first-place prize was a brand new digital-optical hybrid telescope that was the top of line in consumer electronics. Daria loved astronomy more than anything in all the worlds. And now, she stood in the customer service line of the store that had donated the prize to her school, waiting to redeem her winning ticket.

  Daria and her family lived in a colony on the outermost planet of a Coalition co-op solar system. Their place in the system would make the views from the telescope the most wonderful sights Daria had ever seen. She already had every night for the next month planned out as to what she would be viewing. Tonight she would be mapping a system belonging to the Wordols with a name that loosely translated to “To Look Upon the Gods.”

  At the edge of Daria's periphery, she heard a commotion that grew to a point she c
ould no longer ignore it. As she turned, she immediately saw two men, with handguns, pushing store patrons to the ground. At only nine, even Daria recognized the crazed look of someone high on Track Star.

  The drug became popular when a galactic sports super star died during the last Olympics. The human sports hero was taking a new drug to help him compete against some of the Coalition species that had definite genetic advantages over humans. Daria didn't remember the Olympian's name but she did know her father would joke that he wasn't even in track events so the drug's name was kind of stupid.

  The drug was a bad one, not the worst to be found but bad enough. It caused paranoia, aggression, a lack of grounding in reality, and a host of other issues that were common in a lot of drugs. What set this drug apart was that it had a synergistic effect with the neurotransmitters associated with the fight-or-flight response.

  The synergistic effect astronomically enhanced the high experienced by the user. As a result, the user tended to perform acts to stimulate the response. Casual users, if there were such a thing, would typically take the drug before activities like planetary free-falling. Hard-core users didn't have the money for the extreme sports, so they tended to commit criminal acts to get their blood pumping and adrenaline up to enhance their high.

  The two junkies were herding the customers and slapping them around, hoping someone would fight back. If a victim fought back, it would help stimulate the users' adrenal response and make their high better. Most people knew that being docile with the bastards would cause their high to wane and usually they would move on.