Decimated: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 3)

by Flint Maxwell

  The next boot came from Greg Stimey. He wore shell-toed Adidas, dingy white. His blow didn’t hurt as badly as Joe’s, but that didn’t mean much. It still hurt quite a lot. Logan was only slightly aware of his screaming and of the tears stinging his eyes; the pain had taken over everything else. Then came Mikey Melrose and the stocky Mark Young, who had been given the nickname “Stubs” because of the missing pinky on his left hand.

  Rumor had it that his dad had gotten drunker than normal one night and found out about the dirty movies Mark had been renting on cable, and Mr. Young had taken Mark out to the garage and held his pinky between the steel jaws of his JET 11800 utility vise grip and turned the wheel until Mark passed out from the pain and the screaming, and his pinky had been ground into nothing but bone dust, unable to be saved. What was left of it had to be amputated by the docs at Akron City Hospital, after the one ambulance in Stone Park had been called on by the cops who’d been called by Mrs. Jones next door after she’d heard the boy’s blood-curdling shrieks.

  Suffice it to say that the boy didn’t live with his daddy anymore. But Mark “Stubs” Young was as mean and angry as his pops, and would eventually find the comfort of the bottle and beat kids of his own. Life is one big wheel, isn’t it? In the meantime, when Joe, Stubs, Mikey, and Greg weren’t smoking stolen cigarettes and tying up cats and jamming firecrackers up their butts and lighting them and then running for dear life, they were bullying poor schmucks like Logan Harper.

  They kept kicking and kicking until they were almost in perfect synchronization, each foot hammering Logan in tandem. He coughed up blood, tasted the hot iron in his mouth. He tried scrabbling away, his hands turning to claws and beating at the soft dirt, which packed beneath his fingernails until they felt like they were so full of mud and earth that they were going to split.

  Through the whole beating, Logan didn’t beg for them to stop. Aside from the screams of pain and agony, he didn’t make any other noises. And eventually—much too later in Logan’s book—the bullies stopped. First, Joe Millard quit kicking and punching and laughing, and then the rest followed after their demented leader.

  “You learn your lesson, Bird Boy?” Joe asked.

  Logan found enough strength to flip over onto his back. His face had swollen to two times its size. One eye ballooned until he could hardly see out of it. Blood leaked from his ears, warm in the chilly air. The park seemed darker.

  “F-F-Fu—” Logan began, but it was hard to speak with swollen lips.

  Joe Millard leaned forward and began mimicking Logan’s quivering mouth. “Wuh-a-wuh-what’s t-t-that, Buh-buh— Buh-Bird Boy?”

  Logan’s mother may have died too young, but he remembered her telling him to never back down, to never give up. Despite all the pain coursing through his body, the fear, too, Logan stuck to that sentiment.

  His right hand closed around a heavy, jagged rock he’d found in the course of his scrabbling, and he sat up. This action took almost all of the strength he had left. The pain was excruciating. He grimaced, his mouth full of blood, lining his teeth, one of which was indeed chipped.

  “Oh, look at this idiot!” Joe Millard said.

  He turned and looked at his goons, laughed. They echoed him. Some of it seemed forced, at least from Mikey and Greg, who seemed to have finally realized what they’d done. The utter destruction they’d caused on this poor, lanky kid. How close Logan had been to death was evident just looking at his crumpled, swollen, and bloody shape.

  Stubs and Joe, they might’ve realized, too, but they didn’t give a shit. As far as they were concerned, Logan was getting off lucky. Maybe next time, they’d pull the switchblades they kept in their backpacks and really teach the Bird Boy a lesson. Cut out his tongue, perhaps, because if he wouldn’t speak to them when spoken to, then he shouldn’t be able to speak to anyone else, either. Right?

  Joe was walking back toward Logan with a snarl on his face. “C’mere, Stubs.”

  Stubs obeyed like a dog.

  “I want you to hit him in the face, Stubs. Hard as you fuckin’ can,” Joe said.

  Mark “Stubs” Young smiled eagerly. He cracked his knuckles—yes, even what was left of his stubby pinky—and took a step in Logan’s direction.

  The rock was cold in his palm, cupped so they couldn’t see it. He squeezed until he felt the skin give way and could track the wetness from his own blood running.

  “Joe, uh, maybe we should lay off a bit,” Greg Stimey said. He took a hesitant step in his leader’s direction.

  Joe whirled on him. “Lay off? I say we gut the motherfucker.”

  Logan’s courage faltered for a moment. Gut me?

  “But I ain’t gonna do that, because I’m a good fella. So, Greg, I think I’m already laying off. Don’t you?” Joe poked Greg in the chest, and Greg’s courage blew away like a paper plate in a hurricane. Joe looked at Mikey Melrose. “You got anything to say, fuckface? Think I should lay off?”

  Mikey Melrose shook his head.

  “Good.” Joe twirled his hand at Stubs. “Now, Stubs, proceed. Knock this Bird Boy’s fuckin’ lights out.”

  “Gladly,” Stubs replied, and somewhere in that voice, though it may have been a delusion, Logan expected Stubs to add in a ‘Boss,’ like he was a henchman in a comic book or one of the cheesy action flicks Uncle Tommy loved so much. But he never did. Instead, he lurched forward.

  Logan’s window was closing, closing fast. The rock was meant for Joe Millard. He hadn’t expected Joe to just kick back and enjoy the show, and now that it seemed to be the case, Logan could’ve kicked himself for not realizing that of course that was what the ringleader would do.

  He kicked Stubs instead.

  Stubs didn’t see it coming. Hell, Logan didn’t, either; it was an act of pure instinct. Logan’s Nike did not have much force behind it, but the spot he hit—well, one doesn’t need too much force to cause damage to that spot.

  He hit Stubs right below the belt, square in the balls. José Conseco couldn’t have had a cleaner hit, hopped up on steroids and using a metal baseball bat. Logan would’ve smiled if everything didn’t happen so fast after that. That was the worst part—not being able to savor the moment he’d stood up to the bullies.

  Stubs fell to his knees, his eyes crossed, his hands cupped over the strike zone, and wailed in a high falsetto. It was perfect, exactly like a cartoon. All you needed to complete the picture was an anvil whistling down on his head, and the little birds twittering around a massive lump after the impact.

  Joe Millard’s face erupted in a flash of color, and he struck again as fast as a snake.

  But Logan had anticipated this, and this time he was ready for it.

  With all the strength he had left, he chucked the rock. It flew through the air in slow motion, the jagged edges twirling and making a kind of star. Joe’s eyes shot wide open, but when the rock connected with his forehead, they shut fast. The sound the impact made was like an axe thumping into a thick oak tree. There was no hollow echo, as Logan would’ve thought. It seemed Joe Millard’s head wasn’t empty, but full; Logan would’ve bet that it was full of shit.

  “Motherfucker!” Joe yelled and he stumbled, staggered, wound up leaning on a thick oak tree.

  Logan pulled himself up. It was a slow-going movement, but he’d bought enough time with the kick and the throw. Before he turned and hobbled off into the thicket of gnarled branches and bare bushes, the skeletons of the forest, he saw two things: the first was the sheen of blood pouring from the cut in Joe’s forehead. It was a lot, more than he’d expected, and that was good. Logan hoped it scarred—and it would. The other thing Logan noticed was that Mikey Melrose and Greg Stimey hadn’t moved; they were looking right at him with what he thought was fear, maybe even a little respect. That was good, too. Real good.

  Then Logan turned and stumbled off the path. Each step was a pain, and not because the bushes and vines and roots tugged at his pants and thwacked his face and arms. When he took a deep breath, the pain in
his ribs flared up to a maximum, as if Joe was right next to him, poking him with his switchblade in the place his steel-toes had been moments before.

  The sun was going down, and there was hardly any light at all in the forest because of the density with which the trees huddled together, but Logan kept going. He heard the cries of Mark, and Joe’s barrage of cursing and confused speech, and it was so satisfying that it was almost worth getting his ass kicked.

  He kept going and didn’t stop until maybe a quarter-hour had passed. The trail was long behind him, and he didn’t recognize any of the landmarks around. At a rock wall, he paused and caught his breath…which was painful in and of itself. Leaning up against the rock, his clothes torn, his ribs possibly fractured, his eye swollen shut, his nose and lips bleeding, Logan began to cry—deep but silent cries that shook him to his very core. This was before everyone had a cell phone, mind you, and if he had one, it wouldn’t have gotten service out there anyway, that deep in Cuyahoga Valley Park.

  Another five minutes passed, and the darkness settled all around him. He decided it was high time to get the hell out of there. Every few minutes, he thought he heard the shouting voices of Joe and his gang, but then his young mind would kick into overdrive, and he’d decide that no, that wasn’t them…those voices were ghosts, the phantoms of the forest, and that was enough for him to get moving from that hard slab of rock.

  From there, he trekked on north, in the direction he thought his house was in.

  And that was that.

  Stubs died of a heroin overdose in 2014. Greg Stimey shaped up pretty well; last Logan had heard, ol’ Stimey had gotten through law school and opened up his own practice in Knoxville.

  Mikey Melrose moved away from Stone Park when he was sixteen. What he’d been up to, Logan had no idea. Not like it mattered anymore. The world had ended. If the monsters didn’t get him, then the bombs surely did…or the radiation sickness, if the other two had failed.

  Everyone had an expiration date.

  As for Joe Millard, the leader of that gang of assholes, he dropped out of high school in his sophomore year. He was in and out of juvie and actually ran with Derek Fritz’s older brother, selling dope and doing B&Es. There was a rumor going around Stone Park that he’d also raped a college girl, drugged her wine cooler. That sort of seedy stuff. But if that had happened—which Logan was sure it most likely had—Millard never paid for it.

  Unfortunately for Logan, the Monday after the beating, Joe Millard came back to school with stitches above his eye and a knot as big as a rock on his forehead. Logan did his best to avoid him and his gang, but Stone Park was a small town. As such, Joe and the gang beat the living hell out of Logan again that Wednesday, on the basketball court behind the school. He was sure they would’ve killed him—at least, Joe Millard would’ve—had Mr. Sharping not been in the teacher’s lounge, grading papers for his social studies class. He ran them off and asked if Logan needed to go to the hospital…which he probably did, but Logan said no and somehow, for the second time in less than a week, limped home.

  Joe didn’t bother him again; Mr. Sharping made sure of that. More than that, though, Logan and Joe’s gang were even-steven for the time being.

  Then, that summer, Logan put on some weight, thanks to puberty and the workout routine he’d found in one of Uncle Tommy’s Men’s Health magazines. This consisted of a hundred pushups and sit-ups a day, a regimen he stuck to religiously. After the summer was over, Joe Millard went on to Stone Park High, and Logan remained at the middle school. Joe had bigger fish to fry, like dropping out of high school and getting pretty heavily addicted to prescription pain killers.

  Logan hadn’t heard of or seen him for almost two decades. Sure, he thought of Joe Millard a lot; it was hard not to. Those beatings he’d taken had been quite formative experiences on his younger self, for better or worse.

  But when Logan slowed the Ford Escape to a stop as he came about a hundred feet away from a blockade of ruined cars, he felt like he was in throes of a hallucination.

  The man standing in front of the blockade holding a rifle, though older now, was none other than Joe Millard.

  9

  Pay the Toll

  Logan truly couldn’t believe it, but the white scar above Joe Millard’s eyebrow was what gave him away. Everything else about the man had changed. Years of drug abuse and hard living made him appear much older than he actually was, which was only a couple years older than Logan. One side of his face was burned, slick red blisters almost bursting.

  He pointed the gun at the Ford and smiled. His teeth were not all there.

  “Logan?” Jane asked, putting a hand forward and squeezing his shoulder. He jumped at her touch.

  From the trunk, Grease said, “I think we should back on out of here, big guy.”

  Logan barely heard them. He was back in Lion’s Park, a lanky kid on the ground, getting the crap kicked out of him.

  For nearly three days after his run-in with Millard’s gang, Logan had urinated bright red blood, and he couldn’t sit up straight without a pinch in his lower back. They had made that autumn—one of Logan’s favorite times of the year because of Halloween and the scary movies that would play on AMC and the SyFy channel—a total hell.

  Logan revved the engine.

  “Or you could just hit him…” Grease said.

  “What’s going on?” May asked from the backseat.

  Regina reached over and closed her hand over Logan’s on the steering wheel. “Honey, we don’t need any more violence in this world.”

  Her voice, he heard with total clarity. He looked at Regina, then looked at his wife and the others in the rearview. He was their leader. Their lives were in his hands. He couldn’t risk them because he had a schoolyard grudge to settle.

  Shifting in reverse, he began to back up. A collective sigh escaped from the others.

  Logan believed without a doubt that they would go to battle when the time came; Brad, Jane, and Grease had proved that already, and Tyler, May, and Regina were tough as nails, but now wasn’t the time for battle.

  “Find me a different route,” he said to whomever had the map.

  Tyler unfolded it behind him. That was when two more figures came out of the surrounding woods and stood behind the Ford. They also held guns.

  Logan hit the brakes, more as a reaction than anything, and everyone was sent lunging forward. Jane and Grease cried out.

  “Fuck it,” Logan said.

  Taking his foot off the brake and shifting into drive again, he slammed on the gas pedal. Now everyone was forced backward in their seats as the shrieking of tires filled the silent world. Logan’s plan was to cut the wheel hard enough to turn the vehicle around, so he wouldn’t have to back up to get to safety. If anyone got in his way…well, so be it.

  The Ford possessed a pretty good kick, and the four wheel drive made maneuvering on the cracked highway easier than he expected. The speedometer rose to thirty miles per hour in the blink of an eye. In front of the vehicle, Joe Millard still stood with his rifle aimed and his mouth twisted in a grin. He didn’t even flinch when the SUV came within a few feet of breaking both of his legs—and certainly knocking some more teeth out of that sick smile.

  Then a shot went off from somewhere to the right. Out of the corner of Logan’s eye, he saw the burst from a muzzle and the spray of fire in the gloom.

  “Shit!” Grease called. “They’re shooting!”

  The rounds thumped into the side of the vehicle. Logan was gripping the steering wheel so hard that he thought he might either break his hands or grind the leather into dust. He bared his teeth in determination. Just as he cut the wheel, the SUV dipping into the overgrown grass median, a sound louder than the gunshots sliced through his head.

  The Ford gave a tremendous jerk to the left, and Logan lost control of it as it sliced across the highway, heading for the trees.

  May screamed loudly.

  In the side mirror, sparks could be seen coming from where
one of the tires used to be.

  Logan slammed on the brakes, and the SUV skidded to a stop, fishtailing and then going nose-first into a ditch.

  From the dashboard, an array of lights flashed, and a steady ding-ding-ding sounded, warning Logan that something was wrong. Dazed and scared, he looked at these lights, these symbols he hardly recognized, and thought, No shit.

  “They’re coming,” Jane said.

  As Logan turned to watch his bully approach, he saw that Regina was bleeding from the nose. She must’ve knocked her face across the dashboard. He reached over to her and touched her shoulder gently. She looked at him and nodded, letting him know she was okay.

  “Fuck yeah they are,” Grease said. “Little bitches. It’s only three. We can take ‘em.”

  “We have to fight,” Logan agreed. A wildfire of rage burned in his stomach, one he was already sure he had lost control of. “I’m sorry. We have to.”

  The problem was they didn’t have any ammunition. Ironlock’s armory had been buried amongst the rubble. They’d been able to scavenge a couple of pistols and one rifle, but no rounds for any of the weapons.

  Logan reached down and took the pistol off his belt. This one had been Devin’s. It was a big silver thing, its appearance almost as intimidating as its purpose. Logan had seen this gun’s power firsthand, out on hunts with Devin. The handgun’s round had penetrated the hard, chitinous armor of one of the monsters that so resembled a hellish lobster. He remembered the flow of black blood that pulsed from the wound and the way the creature had screeched in agony before Devin finished the job. This baby would make even quicker work of a human.

  In the backseat, Brad brandished his own gun. It was a revolver with no rounds in its cylinder, the metal as black as the voids.

  “Intimidation,” he said. “Might work.”

  “Let’s hope it does,” Logan replied.

  “I won’t be much good in this fight,” Grease admitted. He handed the rifle over the backseat. “All yours, scientist.”