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

by Flint Maxwell

  “Please, Regina. Please. Just stay here. Stay with us.” With me, Brad added mentally.

  “I-I wish I could, hon.”

  Then her eyes closed, and her ragged breathing slowed. Brad stared at her for what felt like a long time before she spoke again. He knew these would be her last words.

  “K-Keep them safe, Brad. Keep them safe.”

  Regina passed away about thirty minutes later. She went with a peaceful smile on her face, surrounded by friends and family.

  Jane said she’d probably felt no pain after the initial shot. But Brad knew she’d felt no pain at all, because Regina was strong, one of the strongest people he’d ever had the pleasure of meeting.

  Together, all of them—even May with her broken arm, and Grease with his bum leg—dug a shallow grave just past the tree line and down a ways from the wrecked Ford. They had no worry of monsters or road bandits, for they knew Regina’s spirit would protect them.

  The ground was cold and hard, and it wasn’t easy to dig with the jagged rocks they were forced to use, but the determination of the group trumped all.

  Logan wrapped Regina in a blanket and carried her to the grave. Together with Brad, they lowered her into the earth. Then, one by one, they scooped dirt over her until a mound covered the grave.

  Brad found two sticks and tied them together with a strip of bark to create a crucifix. He placed it at the head of the burial site and wished he could’ve done better; he also wished he still had his Bible so he could read passages aloud in her honor. But he didn’t. Instead, he recited one of the few passages he knew from memory, one that had given him comfort whenever he thought about his mother being gone. It was Psalm 34, Verse 18 from the King James Version, and he recited it with tears in his eyes and a heavy heart.

  “‘The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit’.”

  Jane grabbed Brad’s hand and squeezed. Crying, all of them, they bowed their heads as one and laid Regina to rest.

  12

  Forward

  When they came back, the Ford was untouched, and the highway was empty and barren. The weapons belonging to the bandits Carter and Helga were useless, ruined by the wolf monster, the ammo nil.

  Above, the sky began taking on its usual blackness. Gone were the fire-clouds, swallowed by the dark once more. Logan was looking up as he thought, Was it all in vain? Did they blow up the cities for nothing?

  They had seen monsters. Maybe not as many as they would’ve seen before the bombs dropped and the fires burned, but they still saw them. That meant they weren’t all gone. If they were here in Ohio, they would be everywhere else, too. Not dead. Not yet. In time, Logan supposed the radiation might take them, but that also meant it would take what was left of the human race, too.

  The wind whipped at Logan’s back. He thought he could still smell the ashes of Cleveland and Stone Park in the air. He turned around and went to Grease, who was leaning up against the hood of the Ford, looking into the engine block.

  As Logan faced the cracked windshield, he saw, in the last bit of gray light clinging to the sky, the stark-red arterial blood on the front passenger’s seat. Regina’s blood. Sadness lanced through him.

  How can I be a leader when I can’t even protect my people?

  “It’s shot,” Grease said.

  “Huh?”

  “The car, dude. It’s shot, done for, finished.”

  Logan only looked at him confused.

  “I see you’re not a car guy. That’s okay. Most men ain’t in the days of Jiffy Lube, when there’s mechanics on every damn street corner. I don’t blame you for that, but I also won’t bore you with mumbo-jumbo about what’s exactly wrong. All you need to know is that this baby ain’t driving unless you can find it a new engine. It’s a miracle it drove after the blast in the first place.” Grease nodded. “Yep, Tyler told me all about EMPs. So we should just count ourselves lucky we made it this far.”

  “It’s a miracle we’re still alive,” Logan said, mostly to himself.

  Grease nodded. “Yup.”

  “So I guess we walk,” Logan said.

  “I guess we do.”

  There was a slight debate about staying in the car for the next couple of hours. The sky was darkening almost to pitch-black, and if they waited it out, they might be able to get moving when there was a glimmer of sunlight behind all the clouds. But Logan didn’t want to stay in the car that Regina Johnson had been murdered in.

  So they walked on. Each person carried what little supplies they had left.

  They walked in silence down the stretch of highway. Ash skirted and whirled above the faded blacktop, and they saw more than enough cars beaten and gouged by claws and teeth. They were rounding a curve that would give them a straight shot south if they kept to the road.

  Tyler and May walked in front of Jane, Logan, and Grease. Behind them walked Brad. No one was saying much. Their hearts were too heavy.

  Logan shuffled to a stop, ready to have Brad catch up with him. He wanted to help the kid, get him talking, get his mind off of all the bad stuff that had happened in the last couple of weeks. Jane gripped his elbow, lightly but sternly. Her eyes found his, the whites barely visible in the darkness.

  “Let him be for a while,” she said. “He’s grieving. We all are.”

  She was right. She was always right.

  Each of the travelers was tired and cold. They’d been walking for at least two hours. Lugging the supplies was no easy task, either.

  Tyler stopped, and as he stopped, he positioned himself in front of May.

  “What?” Logan whispered.

  “Oh God,” May said in a small voice.

  Logan walked forward. Around the bend, lying across the highway, was one of the behemoths.

  “Holy shit,” Logan said.

  “What is it?” Grease asked.

  “Unknown,” he replied.

  “Exactly,” Logan said. “Is it…dead?”

  “Why don’t you go give it a belly rub and find out?” Grease chuckled.

  Eight legs as thick—or thicker—than tree trunks pointed toward them. The skin of the beast was like that of an elephant: granite gray and tough. Its head was elongated and curved at the apex of the skull, which was easily as big as the Ford they’d left behind. From the face hung tentacle-like stalks, and at each end of these stalks were eyes bigger than a human’s cranium. Three long spikes jutted from the lips, curving down, like reverse tusks. They were chipped and gashed, as if they’d seen a good amount of action.

  Beneath the monster lay crushed cars. Glass littered the ground all around it, glittering in the sorry excuse for moonlight from above.

  The smell of death washed over the survivors, reaching them all at approximately the same time. Logan bent over and gagged. It was the smell of cooked roadkill, of decomposing organs and voided bowels.

  “Maybe it’s sleeping?” Jane said. “What could kill that?”

  “There’s your answer,” Tyler said.

  Of all the others, he seemed to be the most in control, standing with his arm still wrapped around May, her face buried in his chest. They had walked around the hindquarters of the monster, their heads just visible over the ridged spikes on the thing’s back, so they had a good view of what had brought about its end.

  Logan took a deep breath and composed himself, which was not an easy task. He grabbed Jane’s hand and walked over to where Tyler and May stood.

  On the monster’s back were large holes, almost craters. They leaked a black, viscous fluid. It looked like an oil tanker had gone belly-up after a crash. The edges of these holes pulsed green.

  ‘Radioactivity’ was the first word that popped into Logan’s head.

  “Did it get hit by the bombs?” he asked.

  No way even a thing like this could withstand nuclear warheads. Then he wondered if this was the same mammoth he’d seen walking by Brad’s house in Woodhaven, the one that had shaken the earth with eve
ry step it took. Part of him knew it wasn’t; that monster had been covered in tentacles and feelers. This one was not. Still, he hoped it was. He hoped there weren’t as many mammoths and behemoths as he initially thought.

  “There’s some here, too,” Brad called from the other side of the monster. Logan walked back over. “Oh, man.” Brad sounded squeamish.

  “What the fuck?” Grease wheezed from his spot in the grass. This was followed by another spell of vomiting.

  Logan walked next to Brad. What he saw made his own stomach squirm. For a long second, he thought he was going to spew, too.

  There was a gash in the monster’s belly—or at least what they thought of as its belly. It was about two feet across and dripping with more of the black fluid, the thing’s blood. The smell reminded Logan of earthworms and dirt basements after a bad thunderstorm. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and flicked the flame on because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. After all they’d witnessed, things still surprised him.

  The flame offered a meager light, but in the darkness, it was enough to illuminate the gash on the creature’s belly. From this gash, a human hand poked through, the fingers twisted and stone-like in rigor mortis. Part of the flesh of the hand had been burned away by the mammoth’s stomach acid or digestive juices, and white bone showed through the tallow, yellowish skin.

  Jane began walking over with Tyler and May. Logan stood up from his haunches and waved them away.

  “Keep going forward,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”

  He had thought nearly the same thing when they were leaving Woodhaven so long ago; it had been true then, and it was true now.

  Tyler, Jane, and May took Logan’s advice.

  Grease, still in the grass, needed helped up. Logan carried the supplies that his friend could not—a box of canned food and a gallon of water with a shoestring tied around the jug’s handle.

  They left the dead monster behind. Images of what would become of it in subsequent years plagued Logan’s mind. A large, alien skeleton on top of the bones of what used to be U.S Route 77.

  13

  Lola’s

  They walked until the soles of their shoes were warm and steaming. They walked until Logan’s forehead was beaded with sweat, and the back of his shirt beneath his jacket was stuck to his skin.

  They found an abandoned—Everything is abandoned, he thought—restaurant to sleep in. The only reason they stopped was because I-77 was destroyed farther on. A plane had come down, probably for an emergency landing, and hadn’t done so smoothly. The explosion took out most of the road, creating a blasted landscape that none of them had the energy to traverse.

  It was Tyler who’d found the restaurant called Lola’s. Logan and Jane went in first. The place seemed untouched by the apocalypse, except for the smell of rotted meat coming from the storage area. They could deal with the stench. All of them had smelled the cooking flesh and bones of their friends in Ironlock; spoiled beef and chicken was nothing compared to that.

  The place was empty. After they’d confirmed it was clear, they waved the others in. Tyler and Logan moved a booth and table in front of the door. Then Grease pulled down the blinds facing the road and turned on the electric lamp they carried among their supplies. To Logan, that lamp seemed dimmer than it did yesterday. They would need to get batteries soon.

  May looked around wondrously, like a child in a candy store, her eyes wide and shiny.

  “May?” Tyler asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  He tried again, a little louder. “May?”

  She jumped slightly at his voice. It seemed she had been startled out of a dream. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

  “What is it?” Tyler asked.

  “My mom…” she said. “She used to work in a place just like this when I was a kid. She was a waitress or a bartender for as long as I can remember.”

  Tyler smiled slightly, his own eyes hazy with memory. “Yeah? My mom was, too—for a time, at least. She eventually opened her own beauty salon.” Tyler shook his head.

  May continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I remember coming to the place back in the day. It was called the Home Run Grill, or something like that. She took me to work when she couldn’t find a babysitter. You know, like she’d pick up a shift on short notice and she’d always say, ‘May, you’re gonna come to work with Mommy,’ and I’d be so excited because I hated when she left me with Mary from down the street. When the restaurant wasn’t busy, she’d let me sit at the bar on the stools that seemed so tall to five and six-year-old me.”

  May bent down and picked up a fallen stool. She sat on it and looked forward at the bare liquor shelf and the unlit Budweiser and Heineken neon signs, as if she could picture her mother there. “I’d just sit and play the little touch screen games while my mom poured beers to the old, retired men who were always flirting with her. Then, at lunch time, Matt, this big guy with a stubbly face, would make me a special hamburger. That just meant he wouldn’t put the bun on top, so I could see the smiley faces he’d drawn on the patty in ketchup and mustard. It was so…nice.” May’s voice became strangled, and she leaned forward on the dusty bar top, resting her forehead in her good hand, and began sobbing.

  Tyler walked to the bar to console her, but she kept on crying.

  “I miss them,” she said. “It’s been months since they’ve been gone, but I still miss them.”

  “I know. I know.”

  Logan watched this all with a heavy heart. He felt for May and for Tyler and Jane and Brad and all those who had something to lose. His mother died a long time ago and he missed her, but the wound on his heart had already scarred over, hardened. He had no recollection of his father; Uncle Tommy was his father figure in a way, but Tommy would be all right. The thought of his demise had never truly crossed Logan’s mind. Tommy was tough.

  All he really had was Jane.

  “It’ll get easier,” Tyler said. “You’ll never forget them, but the pain…the pain will get easier. I think. I hope.”

  Logan nodded. No one saw him nod. He went to the back of the restaurant and posted up in a corner booth. He was exhausted and disappointed in himself that he didn’t have the means to comfort May. A leader should be able to do that, shouldn’t they? He couldn’t even comfort Brad after Regina had passed away. Brad, who he’d known longer than all of them besides Jane.

  Brad was already asleep, or so it sounded like it. He was snoring softly in the opposite corner, despite May’s soft sobs and Grease going through the cabinets, probably for booze.

  Logan leaned back against the wall. It was cold; he could feel the cool plywood through his jacket. He thought of Devin and Regina, thought about how he had seen them both die, and then he thought about Joe Millard, the coward he was, and Logan vowed to himself that the next time he saw Millard, he would make him pay for what he’d done to them on the highway.

  In the middle of the restaurant, lying in a booth, Brad wasn’t snoring softly. What Logan had heard were cries, tears for the lost Regina Johnson. And undoubtedly, Brad was thinking the same thing: Millard would pay for what he had done.

  14

  Drinking Buddies

  Not much sleep was had. When the group woke back up, according to the clock on the wall, it was pushing five in the afternoon. The world outside was dark and quiet. Logan thought of a graveyard, which was an apt description, for America, at least. As for the rest of the globe, he couldn’t say.

  Grease was the first one up. He had been looking through other drawers and cabinets, making enough noise to wake Logan.

  Jane mumbled something, sat up, and said, “Grease, what the hell?”

  “Thirsty,” he said.

  “Go back to sleep,” May said.

  But Logan was already awake. He stood and stretched his arms, fingers inches away from brushing the ceiling. He went into the bathroom and relieved himself in a urinal that wasn’t smelling the best, and looked in the mirror. His appearance startled
him. It was like looking at a starving vampire. Of course, if he were a vampire, he wouldn’t be able to see his own reflection. Also, most vampires he saw in films didn’t have second to third-degree burns, which he did, on the back of his neck and his left ear. They were a purplish red color. Jane said that after they healed, they would become something called ‘keloids,’ a term he’d never heard before. She described them as raised bumps of scar tissue. He was not looking forward to that, that was for sure.

  Gingerly, he brought a finger up to the back of his neck and touched the burn there. He felt nothing. Jane had also said that most of the nerves there were probably dead, which he guessed was a saving grace.

  Besides the splotchy burn marks, his face was gaunt, his hair was longer than it had ever been, his beard was getting to the point of scraggly, and his eyes were sunken back into his head. He did not look like the epitome of health.

  Though Logan was never one to harp too much on his appearance, he didn’t particularly want to look like this. Like a living dead person.

  He sighed and tried the faucet. No water came out besides a cough and a spray; no more than a half a handful. He brought the water to his face and rubbed it in his eyes. It was so cold that his flesh broke out in goosebumps.

  He walked out of the bathroom and into the main part of the restaurant. Everyone was standing up by then, even Brad. They surrounded the bar. Nearly all of them were smiling.

  “What’s up?” Logan asked.

  Laughter and good cheer rolled over his way. He had not been expecting that. It almost scared him; he wasn’t sure if he wanted to find out what they were so happy about, but happiness like that is infectious. He found himself smiling…confused, yes, but smiling nonetheless.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Jane.