“No sir, just a Pepsi.”
“Carry on.”
She pushed through the crowd to the couch and plopped between Kade and Jem.
Without looking, Kade pulled the beer from her hand and passed it to the guest of honor. “How’d you know Jem needed a beer?”
She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Don’t you guys ever get sick of watching—”
“Shhhh.”
Jem lifted the remote and hit pause. “Kade, while we have a witness, I need to ask you something.”
Ashton clapped her hands in sarcastic excitement. “He’s going to propose.”
“Something far more important. I need someone to watch Argos for me. I’ll give you one of my bulletproof vests as payment.” Jem’s eyes locked on Kade’s.
Kade took a few pulls of beer. Dogs weren’t his favorite animal. In fact, no animal was his favorite animal. Despite his preferences, he couldn’t turn down a request that meant so much to Jem. Especially if it came with a bulletproof vest.
* * *
Jack “Alpha” Ritchie sat at the island in his kitchen. He had received his flu vaccine earlier in the day and had since been trying to erase his guilt with alcohol. He poured the last drops of the Knob Creek into his glass. He was sick of the pain. He wanted it to go away. Now he was out of bourbon. Without the bourbon, the pain would come back. He didn’t want to hurt anymore. He wanted to feel nothing.
Snatching the tumbler, he drained the last of his liquid relief. He fought hard to keep the tears from leaking while he clenched his jaw. He failed. Hot liquid ran freely down his face. He missed Sarah’s gray eyes.
Even though it had been almost two years, it still felt like yesterday that he’d held his daughter in his arms at the veterinarian’s office. Skittles, her calico cat, had been sprawled out on the examination table. Red foam bubbled from the corners of the cat’s mouth.
“Skittles has an advanced case of pneumonia. There’s nothing we can do. I’m sorry, Alpha,” the vet had said.
“I left Alpha with my fighting days. Just call me Jack, please.”
Jack had been prepared to put Skittles down, what he didn’t expect was Skittles being a carrier of the Feline Flu that would lead to the Vet’s death a week later. From there the Flu spread like a college case of crabs. Within a month the Flu had traveled coast to coast.
His hand shook as he clutched the glass. With a battle cry, he hurled the glass off a cabinet, showering fragments across the floor. Anger. Rage. Both burned through his veins. Stumbling, Jack gripped the neck of the bottle and hurled it through the kitchen window. Next were the stools. Grabbing them on outlying ends, he flexed his muscles with all his might. The metal buckled and folded in half, after which he threw them, one by one, into the kitchen wall like they were oversized darts.
He roared; all the veins in his neck and face bulged as he screamed at nothing. Nothing. He had nothing. He was alone.
He’d lost his wife and Sarah in the same day to the flu. They had been following his wife’s ambulance when Sarah’s symptoms started.
There were only two occasions he ever lied to his daughter and they both had happened that day. He squeezed into the chair beside Sarah’s hospital bed; his wife had passed away earlier in the evening. Sarah was in and out of consciousness, and he felt as helpless as he had when Skittles was the one on the table.
Watching her fade away, he regretted he hadn’t retired sooner from mixed martial arts. But when he was winning the money was good and allowed him to take care of his wife and daughter. After a few reconstructive surgeries and a string of losses, he threw in the towel. At first he had been afraid he would miss the rush of the fight, the cheer of the crowd and, most of all, proving his dominance over his opponents, but found he loved the time with his family more. As he sat there watching his daughter die he would have traded his entire career for a few more days with her.
She became conscious one last time.
“Daddy?”
Jack shot to his feet and took his daughter’s small hand. “I’m here, honey.”
“Is Mommy all right?” Sarah asked.
“Mommy is all better now.”
“Will I be all right?”
“Yeah, honey, you’re going to be just fine.”
The end of his world had come.
Jack slammed his fist on the kitchen table, splitting his knuckles against the wood. Bringing both hands together into a unified mass, Jack smashed the table. The crack separated, and half the table splintered to the kitchen floor. With his size fourteen foot, Jack booted the side of the half-standing table, which slid and crashed into the drywall.
Storming across the kitchen, he grabbed the top of the refrigerator and tipped it into the island, spilling condiments, milk, and yesterday’s lunch all over the floor.
He wanted the pain to go away. He wanted to see his wife. He wanted to hold his daughter. He wanted to look into their gray eyes again. He wanted to die.
The room spun like a tilt-awhirl. Cold gripped him to the bone even though sweat ran down his forehead. Jack grabbed his old jacket from the coat rack and slid it on. The back of the jacket had a capital A that stretched from shoulder to hip. He stumbled through his delirium into the living room where he fell onto the couch.
Jack clutched his jacket as he fought against the spinning room. By the time his body settled into the couch, he was unconscious.
Hours passed as Jack’s body fought the vaccine’s virus.
The weakened virus was reviving and waging war against Jack’s immune system, which was losing the fight. The Feline Flu had a strong survival instinct, and found a new area to call home. This new home was Jack’s neocortex.
Just before dawn, the battle ceased. Jack had been defeated by the virulent flu strand.
One of his fingers twitched. His eyes shot open, and Jack rolled off of the couch and onto all fours. He quickly scanned the room, his eyes settling on the TV, which was replaying a late-night infomercial.
He still heard the sounds coming from the TV, but his mind was so damaged that he no longer grasped language, one of the many higher functions he no longer could access. He spun in circles, trying to find a way to escape the cage that had once been his living room. The dark sky beckoned him. Jack charged over the couch and hurled himself through the window, rolling onto the front lawn. He got back onto all fours and screamed in rage. He felt the burn of his ruptured skin, and the warm blood running from his wounds, but he no longer understood them as the concepts of pain and blood, only the rage they instilled.
Alpha charged off into the night, no longer thinking, no longer human, following the instinct that was now his master.
* * *
When Kade awakened on his bathroom floor the morning following the party, he wanted to puke, but his stomach felt too empty to purge. One look into the toilet bowl and he understood why. He flushed the toilet, changed into his work pants and the undershirt he must have hung on the door before he passed out, and stumbled into his room where Tiny and Ashton were sleeping on opposite sides of his bed.
All of his years working as Ashton’s soccer coach had paid off in a full ride for her to UN
C Chapel Hill, a Division I school, where she had a solid chance of starting as a freshman. He worried about Ashton a great deal more than he used to before she tore her Achilles. Her drive for soccer had gotten her into a good college, and he knew from there she’d find her way into a great career, even if he wasn’t around to see it. She decided to take a semester before going to college to rehab her injury, but he worried she would get comfortable with life and not attend UNC. Since she’d gotten a job at the local sporting goods store she seemed to be settling in too well. He would just have to stay on her about it and make sure she didn’t fall into a life of nothingness that too closely resembled his own.
He walked under the katana that hung above his door. His dad had brought the sword back from a business trip to Japan. Kade’s family had aided his apocalyptic prepping tendencies in an effort to rejuvenate his desire to live. This covered anything from supplying him with weapons to buying him memberships to shooting ranges. He stepped silently downstairs in case others were sleeping.
Rounding the corner, he found Mick asleep on the couch, still wearing his police uniform. It was rare that Kade saw him out of uniform; especially now with three quarters of the local PD sick with the flu. With the reduced numbers, Mick practically worked around the clock. Kade knew him to be one of the cops that actually believed in what he was doing. For as long as Kade had known Mick he had wanted to help people and being an officer was his way of doing the most good. Mick took the code to heart.
Kade continued toward the kitchen, but stopped as he came around the wall and found a German shepherd sitting in his foyer with a bulletproof vest beside him. As he took a step closer, he noticed a note folded into the dog’s body pack. The animal watched his every move, but didn’t stir an inch as Kade retrieved the paper.
Kade—Didn’t want to wake you. Everything you need for Argos is in his pack. Thanks—Jem
“Come on,” Kade said as he moved into the kitchen. Argos quickly followed, licking at Kade’s hands the whole way. In the kitchen, he situated the dog with food and water, and then went about getting himself some Lucky Charms. He already felt lucky since today would be far less busy than yesterday. The vaccine release had brought most of the town through the store.
The Feline Flu vaccine was the brain child of his twin brother, Damian, who had been trying to save the world since their mother died of Huntington’s disease when they were twelve. Afterward his father had all the children tested. Kade was thankful neither of his siblings had the disease.
He would be the only one of them to suffer the fate of losing muscle control and brain function, dying young, being unable to recognize those he loved.
Stomaching those test results had put him on the verge of suicide on more than one occasion, but in the end he settled for just quitting at life. Kade’s diagnosis had the reverse effect on Damian, who decided to save the world from sickness and disease. Damian skipped entire grades and took summer classes so he could hurry off to college. When he was taking the SATs, their father made Kade take them as well, hoping it would spark some life back into him. Even though he’d outscored Damian by fifty points, Kade still wanted nothing to do with life.
Damian hadn’t been discouraged and continued on through school at lightning speed, becoming a medical researcher by the age of twenty-two. Now at twenty-four he headed the research team that created the vaccine for the Feline Flu. Kade was destined to die, and Damian was to be the savior of the world.
When Kade was halfway through his cereal, Ashton poked her head through the serving window from the living room.
“You’re late for work. Put down the cereal and get in the car,” she said.
“Cough, cough. I’m sick.”
“I don’t have time to kick your ass today. Get to work.”
He slurped the remainder of his cereal, pulled his Rite Aid vest off the back of the chair, and slung it over his shoulders. His body slouched in conditioned response. Every day he dreaded work. He headed for the door as if he was on the way to the electric chair.
Stepping into the fall morning, he noticed an envelope sticking out of his mailbox. A hand-written letter was about as rare as a dinosaur walking down the street. After a moment of staring at it in awe, Kade took it from the box.
The air rushed from his lungs as something slammed into him from behind. He felt a pair of arms wrap around him, tackling him into the bush beside his walkway. He kept his eyes closed for protection against the branches. Struggling to fight what he hoped was a prank by one of his friends, Kade couldn’t find the leverage to dislodge his attacker.
“You got me, now get off me,” Kade said.
The order was answered with a growl. As Kade attempted to grab some part of his attacker’s body, Argos charged through the open door and barked at Kade’s attacker. The weight suddenly lifted off of Kade, but by the time he rolled over, all he could see was a person scrambling away on all fours. Kade rushed faster than his beating heart into the house, followed by the barking dog. He locked the door, and braced it with his back.
He didn’t want to frighten Ashton, so he waited against the door as his body functions returned to normal. He composed himself by taking in deep breaths.
Argos sniffed at his clothes, while Kade’s attention settled on the crumpled envelope in his hand. There was no return address, only initials.
D.Z.
End of Excerpt
More about Foamers
___________________
“Foamers is a worthy addition to the canon of postapocalyptic fiction, and like the best of such books, at its heart it’s a frontier novel, brutal and exciting, celebrating individualism and self-determination. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.” —Tim McLoughlin, author of Heart of the Old Country
“When a screwed-up flu vaccine mutates much of of humanity into mindless beasts, ‘Trust your intelligence’ becomes the leitmotif of a group of survivors. Fast-moving, violent, and vividly imagined, Foamers creates a dangerous world made disquietingly believable.” —David Poyer, author of Stepfather Bank and The Cruiser
“It’s as if The Stand had a head-on bus collision with Night of the Living Dead. I want to look away, but I can’t stop reading.” —John Koloski, author of Bloodblind, book #1 of the Empyres trilogy
Terminally diagnosed with Huntington’s disease as a child, Kade gave up on living a productive existence. He spent most of his time preparing for the Primal Age, even though he knew the end of the world wouldn’t happen in his shortened lifetime. In Kade’s twenties, the United States is being ravaged by the Feline Flu. After the Flu hits pandemic levels, a vaccine is released to the public. Viewed as the last chance to stop the virus, over ninety percent of the population receives the vaccine within a single day.
The vaccine takes on a life of its own and deprives the recipients of their higher functions, leaving them with only their primal urges. These bloodthirsty monsters become known as foamers because of the red foam that forms around their mouths when they hunt.
As the world as he knows it descends into the Primal Age, Kade finds that he is not only useful, but is expected to lead other survivors. His group is constantly assaulted by foamers and a warmongering paramilitary unit. In an unrelenting fight for their lives, his group is forced to redefine humanity in a world without law.
Foamers is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
JUSTIN K
ASSAB spends his time writing and working, with a little bit of water polo mixed in just for sanity. After a brief hiatus to work on a few other writing projects, he looks forward to continuing work on the third novel in The Primal Age Chronicles.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2016 Justin Kassab
ISBN: 978-1-61775-501-9
e-ISBN: 978-1-61775-524-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939318
First printing
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