The Apocalypse
T.M. Williams
Half-Light Publishing Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
The Apocalypse: Undead Winter
By T.M. Williams
Published by:
Half-Light Publishing
First edition Printing copyright c 2014, 2016, T.M. Williams
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission of the author.
1- Fiction 2- Horror 3- Apocalypse Printed in the United States of America
www.halflightpublishing.com
www.theaccidentalwriter.com
For my readers
who loved the novella
so much they wished upon a novel.
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” – Newton’s Third Law
Note from the Author
Early in 2013, I wrote a recap of a nightmare I had on Facebook and several friends asked me to turn it into a book. Deep in the midst of writing and editing the Bohemian Grove trilogy I wrote a short novelette and posted Undead Winter on Amazon, not putting much thought into it. Undead Winter quickly started to climb the ranks, reaching the top 100 in horror short stories.
After several requests to expand Undead Winter, I turned it into a novella, doubling the length of the book. On Halloween, the novella had reached #1 in short stories on Amazon and #12 in the Amazon horror list, where it stayed for a short time. This is a sur-prising and extremely rare accomplishment for a self-published e-book.
Over the last year I have been working on expanding Undead Winter into a full-length novel as I continue to work on my other writing projects. I’m happy to present this edition of Undead Winter, with a chapter from the expanded version soon to be released.
The chapter that tells Christoph’s story as he travels through Germany will give loyal Undead Winter readers an idea of what to expect in the expansion.
To stay up-to-date on all books by this author please visit
www.theaccidentalwriter.com
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
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
One
Allison
FEMA Camp 3
December 20th, 2021
“When did the last alarm go off?”
I didn’t need to look at my report. “Thirty-two minutes ago.”
“Which zone?”
I took a deep breath before answering. “Three.”
Colonel Tempest stopped in his tracks and spun on me. “Three?”
I took a step back and nodded apprehensively. “I was thinking we could start a new containment field in seventy- two.”
The Colonel’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot. They had just returned from Dallas and the news wasn’t good. He shook his head. “No, not seventy-two.”
“But...”
He stepped in closer and his face was inches from mine. “I said no.” I felt the command in his voice.
“Sir, there’s something else.”
I felt his defeat as I watched his shoulders fall. There hadn’t been good news in weeks. I walked down the hall and opened the door to my lab and he followed me in.
The lab – my home. I had spent more hours in this room over the last few weeks than I had anywhere in my entire life. I knew finding a cure was a shot in the dark, but I had to do something. What I had found in the process was even more startling.
I unlocked the safe, pulling out my journal and reports. I held them in my hands, feeling the weight of the knowledge I now possessed.
“Dr. Wells?”
I handed him the journal and he scanned it quickly. I
knew the precise moment he came across my findings.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I tested them more than I needed to.”
He set the reports and journal back on the stainless steel counter and then slammed his fist into the wall. “Dammit!”
He spotted an old, worn-out journal just as he was storming out of the room. “What is this?” he stopped to ask. I had completely forgotten about the book until then. “It’s a journal I found in the archives back home.”
“In D.C.?”
I nodded.
“Find anything useful?”
“I don’t know. It was from a Doctor Eugenia Ray Uchuda.”
“Strange name.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “I agree. I don’t know what this is,” I said holding the journal open to a random page. “It doesn’t seem like much. She was working on an engineered heart, inspired by her father’s early death. But something happened in the end. She suddenly shifted her studies, but it was all in code. I don’t quite understand it, but I feel like there’s something here that can help.”
Two
Colonel Tempest nodded; the news had visibly calmed him down. “It’s something at least.”
The Colonel left and the hours ticked by as I began reading through the journal again. It felt like I had come to know her personally. I couldn’t help but feel like there was something there that I was missing. But the more I read, the more lost I felt.
The blaring alarms startled me from my focus. The room was swathed in flashing red lights from the fire alarm. I ran to the door to see three soldiers running down the hall.
“What’s going on?”
“Perimeter breach – get to the tube!” one of the soldiers
yelled as he passed by.
I looked behind me into the lab and was about to run back quickly to grab the journal when another soldier barreled around the corner yelling.
“Doctor Dorsett, we need you to get to the tube now!” He pulled me from the room and shoved me in front of him. By the time we got to the central lobby, the room was already overflowing with people. There were a mix of soldiers, civilians, and other scientists all experiencing a wide range of emotion.
Most looked just like I did – confused.
“What’s going on?” I asked again to one of the scientists I had seen only once before. I remembered her admission. She was in the last group of refugees.
“Dr. Dorsett, isn’t it?” she asked in a British accent. I nodded. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.” “Penny Hobbs.”
“You can call me Allison.”
She smiled warmly at me, even under the circumstance.
It left me wondering what family she had lost and left behind. The idea saddened me.
Three
“I heard there was a perimeter breach,” stated Penny Hobbs.
“We’ve had a lot of perimeter breaches before,” Spike, the admissions coordinator chimed in. “They never set off the alarms. This is different.”
We all looked around as groups of people were led down via
the elevators. “Why don’t we take the stairs?” I asked.
Spike squinted through his glasses and I turned around to see what had caught his eye. I spotted it immediately -- a soldier guarding the stair doors, looking extremely pale and worried.
“They’re guarding the doors?” Spike asked and Penny spun to see what we were looking at.
“Hey, why isn’t this elevator working?”
I turned to see a man I had never seen before pointing to the east cargo elevator. Colonel Tempest was standing just a few feet from him and he looked like he was going to be sick.
“That elevator is out of service,” the Colonel answered quickly.
“Why is it out of service?” the man asked. He sensed in the colonel what I did. We both knew he was hiding something.
“Because one of our men took it to the surface.” “The surface? Why the f-”
An ear-piercing screeching sound suddenly penetrated the room, silencing the chaos as we all stood there, bewildered at the auditory invasion.
“They’re here,” Penny whispered just before the room plunged into darkness.
Four
Christoph
Down by the Riverside.
Moselle, Germany
October 1st, 2021
The river bent around the swaying, singing blades of grass. I made my own little snow angel into the folds of green--a beautiful green grass angel. The clouds were picture perfect puffs against the deep-blended blues and grays in the sky. I loved this part of the river, where the water bent around me in a perfect u-shape. I felt encapsulated by water, sky, and land. It was perfect.
That was my last beautiful memory. The darkness cut into it like an ugly dagger’s slash against a baby bottom’s flesh. Harsh? Yeah, now you know how ugly that memory turned. It turned grotesque. I thought moving to Germany would be poetic. What a fucking joke.
It was the sound at first. I will never forget that sound. It echoes in my mind now, even in the darkness I’ve been swallowed by. It echoes in my mind like it’s the only sound I’ve ever heard. Two snorts and a snarl that sounded like it was coming from a pig but you just knew it wasn’t. You could hear the human in it. Or the human that had been. I didn’t know at the time that the thing was only in the early stages of infection. I didn’t know that I would’ve instantly been taken had it been any more advanced. The longer you’ve been infected, the more rabid you become.
That sound. That sound that turned my poetic land into a dark, crazed, festering wound. It sat at the edge of the river, crouched down on its legs, watching me. It was only a few feet away. I could tell by the way it glared at me that it took in my scent, smelling me.
News of the infection hadn’t gone public yet and I had no idea what was going on. I guess that was a good thing. If I had, then I probably…I don’t know what I would’ve done. All I can think of is how it glared at me, snorting. Its eyes were half the size they should have been, making its face look extremely distorted. Beady little black eyes in deep sockets, and its tongue rolled around in its mouth, like it had no control over it.
I didn’t move; I couldn’t. What could I do? I was facing something worse than death and my mind ran off without me.
Its gray skin looked so out of place on the beautiful green grass that I thought the land would spit it out. I don’t know why it left me alone that day. I really don’t. I wish it hadn’t. Because the two weeks that followed turned out to be worse than anything hell could ever have dreamed up. If I’d known then what I know now, I would’ve asked it to take me, or better yet, I’d’ve just drowned myself in the beautiful Moselle River, losing myself in that last beautiful dream.
When it turned and walked into the river, traversing the shoal before riding the current like a damned raft, I knew we were done for. It floated on its back watching me, and it felt like the thing was on the verge of changing its mind and coming back. Or, maybe it was just fucking with me the entire time – playing with its food. I don’t know how I knew, call it human
Instinct, buried from centuries before.
But, I knew then that we were no longer on the top of the food chain.
I watched as that thing coasted down the river and then I ran back to the house. As soon as I stepped into the living room I turned on the television. The news didn’t say anything about crazy people floating down rivers with small, beady eyes. I called the police; there was no answer.
No answer?
I don’t know how long I paced the living room floor. I’m
sure it was seconds, but it felt like an eternity.
I called the D.O.D. headquarters back in the states. Busy signal.
Okay, something was definitely happening. But what?
I hopped on my pathetically exposed moped and made my way towards the main part of town.
What the -?
I was only about twenty yards from the first cluster of buildings when I stopped, and I couldn’t will myself to go further yet. Everything looked normal, but it wasn’t. I rested my foot against the gravel and the sound of crunching rocks didn’t sing through the air. The sound was still, like stale, dank water.
Even sounds cowered in fear.
I looked down at my arm and saw the raised flesh of fear and I felt the cold dampness on the back of my neck. All the great things instilled into our bodies to warn us when something wasn’t right.
The warning alarms of fear sounded in my mind, blasting my eardrums into near deafness.
There was nothing more to it and I had to keep going. The town was silent, too silent. Not a soul walked the streets. The day had been a most beautiful one, and normally the streets would be bustling with citizens enjoying the crisp, fresh air. I made my way then, quickly, to the local D.O.D. office where I worked. The front door was cracked open. The security key code box to the right had been - had been scratched off? I could distinctly see the scratch marks and streaks of blood. Everything within me told me not to go in, but I had no other choice. I suddenly hated my fear of guns.
Only two feet into the front door and I saw my boss, Dr. Ramstein, dead on the floor. I didn’t need to double check that he was dead, because his head had been almost completely ripped off.
I quickly glanced around the room, my hair standing on edge just as I phoned Colonel Tempest.
“So this – Undead Syndrome – that people are experiencing, they think it has something to do with the frontal lobe? Like an infection?”
I could almost hear the stress in the Colonel’s voice as he strained to speak. “It’s wiping out all morality, all ethics. People are being driven to their most primal instincts.”
“Shit.” This conversation was giving me the creeps. I even felt like someone was watching me through the window. I quietly retreated into the shadows of the room, hiding myself more as I whispered even more softly into the phone. “How bad is it?”
It took so long for him to answer that I thought we had lost our connection. “It’s an apocalypse.”
The crash in the front room caused me to drop the phone. I didn’t wait around to see what it was; I jumped through the open window and ran across the street into the woods, away from the village I had spent the last three months.
I dared a brief glimpse over my shoulder as I ran away and saw a dark, shadowy figure silhouetted in the window I’d just left. For a moment I thought it was someone who needed
my help. Then, a slight shift of movement reflected the hollowness in its eyes. Where the whites should have been there were dark crimson pools. The image so stunned me that I stumbled over a fallen tree, gashing my leg open.
Somehow, I managed to make it away alive. It never came after me and I never understood why. What unnerved me more than the image that burned into my brain that day was the realization that it was watching me with intent satisfaction. It was still human in the rawest form – still holding onto its intellect and leaving everything else behind.
Two hours later I found myself looking up at Eltz Castle, nestled in the hills abo
ve the Moselle River between Koblenz and Trier. A family still resided in the castle. The same family had resided in that castle for centuries – something one would only see in this tiny corner tucked into the folds of Germany.
I stood on the edge of the forest before the clearing, looking up at what I’d once thought was one of the most beautiful places in the world. The medieval acropolis perched on top of a lush green hill surrounded by the autumn changing forest. At first sight, it was still beautiful. Yet, my hair stood on end as I looked at the Undead. Nothing had changed visually but something was – off.
I contemplated my actions, aware that it was most likely my nerves, shot from the realization of what we were facing. My choices were limited. I could keep going through the forest until I hopefully found somewhere civilized to get me to one of the FEMA camps or I could find shelter in the castle with the family there. Chances were that they were untouched, unscathed, in this remote area.
Yet, not all the will in the world could coax me into taking a step further. I imagined if I had a dog with me or a horse, it would have had the same reaction. The same lack of will also kept me from retreating back into the forest. I was stuck.
I had been sitting there on the edge of the woods for nearly an hour, watching what seemed like a desolate castle. The sun began to set behind the tree tops and I knew I needed to do something. It was too late to go back into the woods. I wouldn’t dare it in the dark, without any source of light or any gear with me.
I had come to the conclusion that the castle had been deserted, most likely in a hasty escape in the eye of the apocalypse. As I walked alongside the stone wall upon which the road was built , I realized I had heard no signs of life since the hours I’d spent by the river – not a bird chirping, not a rustling of trees – nothing. If it hadn’t been for the sounds of my footsteps on the gravel, I would have thought I had gone deaf.
I trailed my fingers against the cold stones in the wall and wondered about that. Had all the animals retreated? If so, to where? I shivered as the last of the sun’s rays slivered through the breaks in the tree tops, casting oranges and reds against the castle walls. I stopped abruptly when I saw a movement from the corner of my eye. I looked back towards the trees where I had seen the shadow, but nothing was there now.
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