This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection)

by Craig DiLouie

  I didn't know what that meant when I first read it, but it's obvious when you are there. You'll know it when you see it."

  Rudy and I stood quietly for what seemed a long time. It was he who spoke first, but we both knew what this last note meant.

  "He never made it did he?"

  "Doesn't look like it. He never got the key from the bus, otherwise I never would have found it, and he never came back to where you died to find the other one."

  "He went through the swamp. Why? That's just suicidal."

  "I don't think he had much choice."

  "No, I suppose not, but I'd rather face those, what do you call them?"

  "Zombies."

  "Yes, them. I'd rather have to fight my way through them than try and get through the gargants."

  That reminded me of something I had never asked Rudy, since the dreams that led me to him.

  "Do you remember that you said they weren't zombies, during my dreams, before I came to the shack?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "What did you mean?"

  Rudy shrugged.

  "I didn't know what a zombie was."

  It took me five minutes to stop laughing.

  Then I remembered something and stopped damn quickly.

  "Damn."

  "What?"

  "I've already crossed the wall."

  Rudy looked puzzled.

  "In the professor's notes."

  I took the book and showed him that last page.

  "He says right there, don't cross over the wall from the ground. I've already done that. Well, once anyway. It was back when I first got here, I had a camp right against the wall. I had to leave it because it got overrun with zombies. It was when I met DogThing. I was running from the zombies and there was one that was in the way; it had a head that it was swinging."

  "It was swinging its head?"

  "No, it was swinging another head. It had hold of it by the hair. Well, I set fire to it and I had to jump over the end of the wall to escape it."

  "Oh. I see."

  We both stood quietly for a while.

  "Do you think I'm screwed?"

  "No. No. Look, Adler doesn't say why, does he?"

  "No, I suppose he doesn't."

  "Well it may only be some kind of warning. You know, don't go over the wall, there are all manner of nasty things over there. He doesn't actually say that crossing it is the bad thing."

  "Yes he does. It says right there. Do not ever, ever cross from the ground."

  "Well, you're still here, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Right."

  "I miss DogThing."

  "Yes. Me too."

  Day 31

  The nausea and headaches seemed to have stopped, so I packed up my stuff. There was a proper hiker's backpack stuffed in among a lot of junk that the professor had collected. It was quite tatty, with a few holes in it, but fixable. From what I found in it, and threw away, he had probably used it a few times and then left it. It was huge. I couldn't imagine anyone going for any length of time on a bicycle with that monstrosity on their back. For me, it was a godsend. If we were to head into the swamp then I couldn't take my cart any more. I filled the pack with as many supplies and kit as I could, but left a lot of heavier stuff. I had to leave most of the petrol, and some of the water, behind, just because of the weight. I kept two bottles of petrol though. Fortunately seeing in the dark was no longer an issue. My eyes adjusted alarmingly fast to the darkness now.

  I even managed to attach the two long blades that CutterJack had left behind to the back of the pack, after I had wrapped them in a tatty grey shirt that looked too small for me anyway. I wasn't having those two sharp blades hanging loose; one accidental fall and they would dice me. I'd like to say I made decent holders for them. What were they called? A scabbard? But that wasn't the case. I'd have to untie them if I needed them. It was kind of handy and reassuring. I had this horrible image of CutterJack sneaking up on me and pulling his blades off my pack. The same image was less worrying when it involved him standing there for five minutes untying them. I locked up the house again and stuffed the rope into the pipe.

  We set out a few hours after I'd woken up, moving as quickly as we could out of The City and making a direct route to the swamp. There were no Maw around now, so I was uneasy for the first hour or so. The ground was hard, mostly rock, so signs of us passing were few, at least as far as I could see.

  I think it took us about three hours to reach the small group of buildings at the edge of the swamp. Neither of us had expected to see buildings there, let alone ones so intact. We started checking rooms, and finally found some kind of camp fire in a room on the ground floor of the largest house. There was no way of knowing if it had been left years ago by the professor.

  While Rudy took a look round some of the other buildings, I walked down to the swamp's edge. There were a few small pods growing in a bush right next to where the path started. Of course, I hadn't expected there to be a path either. It was about ten feet across, and made from piled-up earth and rocks that had flattened from use. Who had used it, I don't know. I presumed that it had been made a long time ago.

  The path twisted through the swamp in a snake-like fashion. Dotted here and there were large rocks jutting out of the stinking mud.

  "Well that makes our journey a little easier," said Rudy when he saw the path.

  "Aye. I wonder if it goes all the way across."

  "Well I've never seen a path on the other side, but it could be hidden or come out in an area that I've not been to. I've been along a lot of the shoreline on the other side of the swamp, but I didn't always follow the edge. There are large areas of rocks that I just went round."

  "I guess we will find out."

  Rudy wanted me to rest in one of the buildings before we moved on. He was convinced that I might not get another chance, but I wanted to put as much distance between myself and CutterJack as possible. Even if he was wounded, I still had this gut feeling that it wouldn't stop him following us if he found our trail.

  The trail meandered through the swamp for what seemed miles, and I was glad of it, because away from the hard ground was deep sludgy mud. I had thought that all of the plants I'd seen growing in The Corridor were strange, until I walked through that swamp.

  Clustered all along the trail were plants weirder than anything I had ever seen. Dotted here and there were huge, bulbous, green blobs, fifteen feet across, with spikes that looked like sharpened spears jutting out of them. Massive lily pad plants, probably twenty or thirty feet in diameter, hung a few feet above the sludgy mud, the underneath covered in thick, moving tentacles that seemed to sift through the swamp, occasionally popping up with some unfortunate creature that it would then wrap in tentacles until the creature vanished from sight into a tight cocoon. There were reeds that must have been fifty feet high, reaching upwards into the darkness, glistening with something that looked sticky, and crawling with strange cockroach creatures the size of my fist. And the mushrooms; I had thought the mushrooms I found in the field near the junkyard were massive, but these things stood almost the size of a house.

  After a couple of miles of walking along the path it became clear that it didn't head towards the shack, but with a bit of debate, we figured out how to roughly guess where we were heading.

  "The zombie trail," said Rudy. "Somewhere along the trail that runs the other side of the swamp I'd say."

  "Maybe it will be clear. Maybe we killed most of them in the fight at the shack."

  "Maybe."

  He didn't sound convinced.

  "We have a bigger problem though. Look."

  He was pointing along the path.

  We had passed quite a few of them while negotiating our way along the swamp trail. Fortunately they were all a long way away. I'm not sure how, luck probably, but each time we saw another one, they were far enough away not to notice us. We were moving quickly, not wanting to be down in the swamp any longer than we had to, but as
we started to see rocks and dry ground in the distance, probably four or five hours after first setting off across the swamp, our luck ran out.

  A gargant was sitting on the path, a massive gargant. It was easily the size of a double-decker bus, and was right over the path, sprawled out, munching on some of the odd vegetation that grew all over the place, and it didn't look like it had any intention of moving.

  "Crap."

  "Err, James. It gets worse."

  "What?"

  "Behind us."

  They'd found us, at least a dozen of them, behind us on the trail, staggering slowly along. For all I knew there were more hidden in the mists that obscured my vision past a hundred yards or so.

  The zombies were back.

  "Double crap."

  "We're trapped. This is not good."

  "Ok, no panicking."

  My mind raced. I was panicking. I grabbed my mace and tried to decide which form of death I was going to face first. No Maw with us to fend off the zombies, and not even the slightest clue what to do about moving a gargant, which to make it worse, seemed to have noticed us and was hauling its fat butt off the ground and along the trail, no doubt with the intent of coming over to munch on me.

  "I hope you like swamps Rudy, because if we can't think of something fast, you might be following a gargant around for a while."

  I dropped my pack to the ground and fumbled for the bottles of oil. I knew that the zombies could be burned, and there was no way I was going to handle a dozen of them on my own.

  Why the hell does everything take so much longer when you are in a hurry? If I had been hunting for something else, the damn petrol would have been sitting on the top of everything else.

  "What now?" asked Rudy. He was hovering next to me. The fear rising inside me was equally detectable in his voice.

  "Pray," I snapped back, and felt immediately guilty.

  I poured the first bottle of oil onto the ground, drawing a line all the way across the trail, and then stepped over it onto the side where the gargant was. It only took a couple of flicks of my lighter, and the oil burst into flame. The roaring heat quickly swept along the line and rose up nearly to my waist. I had to jump back away from the flames. Foul-tasting smoke filled my lungs.

  The zombies were now about thirty feet away and closing slowly. The nearest one was another bizarre creation that should never have walked. It had two heads, one right where it should have been, but facing in the wrong direction entirely, and the other protruding from its bulbous stomach. There were far too many eyes glaring at me out of that bloated, rotten face, and each of them with sheer hatred.

  The zombies didn't seem at all fazed by the fire, but then I didn't expect them to be. I had to hope that they would carry on moving slowly enough for my thin line of fiery defence to catch them. Otherwise I was screwed.

  The gargant on the other hand was reacting in a way I hadn't expected. It screamed, loudly. I mean extremely loud, as loud as a fire alarm going off right next to your face kind of loud. That piercing noise would have carried across miles if echoes had even worked here. I felt the noise reverberating through my skull, and for a panicked moment thought my head was going to explode.

  That would have been a really rubbish way to go out.

  The enormous slug didn't like the fire, or it didn't like the brightness, or the heat, or something, and with that sudden realisation I grabbed my pack back and pulled out one of the remaining torches, lighting it on the burning path. As stupid as I thought it was I started forward towards the gargant, burning torch in one hand, bottle of oil in the other. I would never have been this reckless and stupid back home. I hadn't a clue at the time how much I would regret it later.

  "What are you doing?" shouted Rudy.

  I almost laughed.

  "James! Have you completely lost your mind?"

  "Absolutely."

  I glanced back at the fire to see the first of the zombies walk mindlessly into it. BellyFace had caught fire a treat, and was a walking inferno in seconds. Damn if those eyes didn't start popping. But he was still stumbling forward, a walking Guy Fawkes, still intent on coming for me. The second zombie stepped into the flames.

  I turned back to the gargant, my main problem, and nearly jumped back again as I discovered that I was only about twenty feet away from it. Trust me, twenty feet is way too close when it comes to a giant tentacle slug.

  It reared forward at me, screeching. I had seriously pissed it off. I began waving the torch backwards and forwards and psyching myself up, ready to hurl the oil at it. It was furious, screeching at me at the top of its voice and throwing out tentacles and spit, to try and knock the torch out of my hand, but it wasn't coming any closer. It didn't like fire, and it liked it even less when I threw the oil on the ground and lobbed the torch at it.

  Fact: Zombies burn well.

  Important fact: Gargants burn so much better.

  They also move through swamp a lot faster than I expected. I hadn't even seen the other ones approaching, but soon spotted them when the burning gargant went screaming off through the muck towards them at full speed. It was popping and sizzling and leaving massive bits behind as it bulldozed its way through the other gargants, which in turn were catching fire as the one that I had lit up smashed into them one by one.

  Then I realised why they burned so well. It wasn't the gargant at all. It was the damn swamp, the stuff the gargant was covered in. It must have been oil, or even some form of gas being given off by all the dead and rotten crap. It didn't matter. It still meant the same thing.

  The swamp was on fire.

  A burst of flame erupted from the mud, reaching up into the darkness like a geyser, spewing out hot steam and launching a spray of hot fiery mud over everything was nearby. I was lucky to be out of range. The hot mud splattered across the swamp and spread the fire even further. Then with one almighty whoosh the fire took hold, and geysers burst upwards every ten feet or so, launching debris over everything. Soon the flames were spreading out from where the gargants were burning, sweeping across the swamp at such a speed I barely had time to react.

  I looked around for any form of cover, but there was nothing nearby, just clumps of vegetation and a scattering of rocks. I spun back round to where my pack was lying, about thirty feet away, reaching distance for the zombies that now crawled their way along the trail. My flaming barrier had set fire to them but it wasn't stopping them.

  Rudy was edging his way along the path towards me now, keeping his distance from the zombies. They couldn't hurt him. I guess that was one of the advantages of already being dead, but that didn't stop him being afraid of them. He glanced at my pack as he passed it and looked worriedly at me, then picked up his pace.

  Across the swamp the fire was spreading fast. All around me was lit up like a furnace. I think I was lucky that it wasn't gallons of pure oil. I can't imagine what the explosion would have been like if it had been.

  No way to go back and get my pack, not even my mace, which was lying on the floor next to it. Oh for hindsight!

  "Run."

  That voice was in my head again, the same one that spoke to me when CutterJack first showed up.

  "Run. Don't go back. Don't stop. Just run."

  Rudy caught up with me, as the flames swept over the path where I had dropped my pack. The zombies, about ten feet behind him, were consumed by the inferno seconds later.

  "Don't go back."

  Who was in my head? It wasn't Rudy. It wasn't CutterJack. The voice was softer, almost feminine, but not quite.

  "Run. Run. Run."

  I ran, finally snapping out of my fears, taking off along the path as fast as my legs would carry me, cursing at myself out loud with every breath.

  Then it was there. The end of the path, and dry ground, fifty or so feet away, close enough to hope, but yet it still seemed so much further. Time seemed to stop dead for me. That sprint through the fire seemed to last for ever, and I could feel the heat of the flames burning my back
as I finally hit the rocks and struggled upwards out of the swamp.

  I had no idea if Rudy was with me. I hadn't looked back once.

  It was the path that saved me. The rocks and dry, sandy ground gave the flames nothing to burn, so the fire swept past me on both sides. It reached the end of the swamp much sooner than I did.

  At the top of the slope I collapsed, rolled over onto my back, and lay there, stunned, as the expanse of the swamp behind me lit up in flames. Gargants were screaming, unable to escape from the heat. All of those strange, alien plants were destroyed, one by one turning black and then withering to nothing as the fire consumed them. I watched, dumfound and horrified, as a line of behemoth-sized mushrooms in the distance lit up like bonfires, burning bright blue for a few seconds, before collapsing.

  Rudy sat down next to me, and we both watched as the entire swamp burned. What else could we do?

  "Well that went better than I thought it would," said Rudy eventually.

  I laughed and laughed. I have no idea why that was my reaction. I could have just completely incinerated an entire ecosystem for all I knew. That swamp might be the only place in the entire universe where some of those things grew. The gargants, as much as they disgusted and frightened me, hadn't actually done anything to harm me, yet, and I'd roasted a heap of them.

  "Well I'm glad you find all of this funny."

  "It's not. It's not funny at all."

  After about ten minutes, Rudy went back into the fire, walking unharmed through the flames and along the path. It had been his idea, even though I had thought about it. I didn't want to ask him. Dead or not, I wouldn't have volunteered to step into a burning fire. But it seemed that during my run out of the inferno I'd inadvertently dragged him right through the flames. I didn't know what he meant at first, but then realised that he was bound to stay near me, near the key. If I ran, he had no choice but to follow.

  If our judgement was correct, and I went down the slope as far as I could without getting scorched, then he might be able to get to the pack and see if there was anything worth salvaging. He paused for a moment before stepping into the fire, and I cringed as he disappeared from view. There's something not right about being able to walk through a blazing fire.