The moment he left, he was back again. The puppets continued bashing their skulls against their prison. One skull cracked and blood seeped down its face. The other disintegrated as a blast of pure plasma carved a hole through its chest.
“No!” the Architect screamed.
The blast couldn’t have come from the Death Squad. He was watching them closely. They were still dodging the undead and blasting at their heads.
The final puppet bashed his head against his prison with such aggression the skull exploded, caking the casket with meaty chunks.
The Architect was all but done.
47.
SAM
Sam and Albert lowered their rifles. Sam wasn’t sure which of them secured the final blow to the Architect’s plans, as they had both fired a single shot at the same time and in the same vicinity.
Who cares?
They shared a smile before turning to the hordes of undead on either side of them and blasting away at their undead corpses.
48.
HAWK
Hawk fell back into his chair and felt release as a new injector entered his system and staved off the approaching Hunger.
The workers continued tapping at their keys and murmuring in low voices, the vast wave of orders having died down as the undead were steered away by the Architect. Reaching out, Hawk could see the undead were no longer moving with a purpose, but wandering side to side, aimlessly.
Hawk couldn’t believe it was over. But it was over. He held his head in his hands and wept. His brothers, who had been so brutally slain in the street, had been avenged.
He got up from his seat and put his headset down on its little stand and calmly walked from the communication center. He left the military to do what it did best—clean up after other peoples’ messes.
49.
TOMMY
The military destroyed what remained of the undead army, blowing them to kingdom come. The entire landscape was littered with rotting corpses and feasting carrion. The sun set on a day and a season of horror that’d felt like it was never going to end.
The Sphere sat perfectly still. The Death Squad approached, rifles clutched tight to their bodies. Tommy had no idea how to get inside as there were no handles or latches. He came up with an idea to blast a hole in the side but was forestalled by Albert, who pressed his hand to the surface and muttered something under his breath. The Sphere’s surface shifted open, forming a doorway.
“How did you do that?” Tommy said.
“The Sphere forms a connection with the brain of whoever commands it,” Albert said.
“Forms a connection?” Tommy said, scratching his head. His knowledge of technology extended the length and breadth of the TV remote control and no further.
The metal side panel melted, bleeding away. The Death Squad took on defensive poses as the craft melted away one skin at a time until it became the size of a baseball. Albert picked it up and tucked it in his pocket.
Bodies—and parts of bodies—lay on the ground. As the team moved through them, they counted and identified each man and woman.
“Those seven must be the Walkers he used.” Sam approached the only body laying separately from the others. “This is him.”
“What’s this?” Jimmy picked something from the Architect’s outstretched hand.
“Looks like a head,” Sam said. “An angel’s head.”
“It’s ceramic,” Guy said. “My grandmother used to collect them.”
“Why would he carry that around with him?” Emin said.
“He was a sick man,” Tommy said. “I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
Sporadic gunfire caught Albert’s attention. “Well, this is time for me to say goodbye, my friends.”
“Goodbye?” Sam said. “Where will you go?”
“I must return home.”
“Home?” Tommy said. “I thought you wanted to see more of the world? You only ever got to see the infected part.”
Albert smiled. “I’ll take the long way around. Besides, there’s enough for you to explain without me being here. I’m quite happy to return and complete my tests. I doubt they’ll be very happy with me. Oh, and I’ll need the weapons back.”
Tommy and the others were loathe to hand them over. They owed their lives to those machines.
“What if we need them again in the future?” Tommy said.
“I hope you won’t. For all our sakes. But if you do, you know where we are. And you have the key. So long as you have that, you will be welcomed into the base any time you wish. Perhaps not warmly, after kidnapping me, but welcomed nonetheless.”
They took turns shaking Albert’s hand and wished him a safe trip. He took the Sphere out of his pocket and it morphed into a much smaller shape than the one the Architect had created—a regular pushbike. Albert collected their futuristic weapons and folded them up like a piece of origami and placed them in the bike’s basket. He climbed on the bike and began to pedal. He immediately stopped.
“Oops,” he said. “Put it in the wrong gear.”
He selected a lower gear and took off. Slowly, silently.
“Was that Albert?” Hawk said, trotting up.
“The one and only,” Emin said.
“Damn.”
“Why?”
“I was going to ask him who really shot JFK.”
Guy chuckled. “He wouldn’t know the answer to that.” His expression turned serious. “Would he?”
“Why not?” Hawk said. “He knew what they found on the Moon.”
Guy’s ears pricked up. “Huh? What do you mean? What did they find? Hawk?”
He followed Hawk as he turned away and crossed the field strewn with the undead.
Emin looked at Tommy and Sam and the obvious love they held for each other. “Come on, Jimmy. Let go see if we can find some tasty ice cream.”
Tommy wrapped his arms around Sam and held her close.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” Sam said.
“It’s not. Not until we kill every zombie carrying the virus. Who knows where it might turn up next.”
“Maybe we’re not the best equipped to chase after the undead. We stopped the zombie virus from spreading. We can leave it up to someone else to clean up.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“There’s no maybe about it.”
They held hands and walked away, following the others as they headed back toward the military camp. To a new life, to a new city, to a new state, a new nation, and a world untouched by the zombie virus.
It was over. For now.
A Gift
I hope you enjoyed Death Squad. I’m currently working on my next series, Cut Off. Until then, why not check out the first book in my completed series After the Fall. It follows a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world forced from the safety of their commune. They embark on a journey that reveals a startling secret that promises to change the fate of the human race forever. Find the opening few chapters below. Details of how to grab the whole book are available afterwards.
THE COMMUNE
AFTER THE FALL | BOOK ONE
-EXCERPT-
CHARLIE DALTON
PROLOGUE
AN ESTIMATED one hundred and fifty million meteorites and asteroids inhabit our solar system. Adrift, aimless.
They’re made of metal, rock or ice, the left-over remnant debris from the birth of our solar system. Some are as large as dwarf planets, others smaller than your fist. They bump and cajole one another in the protective Oort Cloud playschool, disrupting their eternal slumber.
Occasionally, one gets knocked hard enough to be ejected from the asteroid nursing ground and toward the centre, toward the distant point of motherly light we refer to as our Sun.
One hundred and sixty-five million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid exploded with the force of anywhere between twenty-one and nine hundred billion Hiroshima A-bombs. Most asteroids aren’t of supermassive size. Most are much smaller and bombard the Earth at reg
ular intervals.
As the largest country in the world, Russia has experienced more than its fair share of meteorites. The most recent recorded event occurred on 15th February 2013. Many more instances go unobserved.
Not all theories suggest a payload of death. There is also the theory of Pan Spermia whereby life was brought to our young planet just when the conditions became conducive to life. Another planet, far from our world, could have been destroyed, its debris cast into the universe, a billion pieces of cosmic lint flung into the extremities of space. We may, in essence, all of us, be aliens.
Meteorites may have seeded us with life. It’s therefore a peculiar twist of fate it was by meteorites that we were almost wiped out.
Yet not in the way anyone might have ever suspected.
1.
THE DESERT was silent and calm, the way Jimmy had always known it. The only noise came from the gentle rattling of the goats’ bells around their necks and their soft mehing of content.
Jimmy could already feel himself beginning to drift off to the land of Nod. His head would fall in the middle of his dinner plate. His mother would not be pleased.
Jimmy, eight years old and small for his age, turned in his deckchair to look at Billy the Kid—the billy goat that’d been born just a few months ago—but was already the boy’s favorite pet.
The family didn’t keep a dog, no matter how much Jimmy argued for its case. “But he could run and catch rabbits! Could keep an eye out for Rages!”
But his parents were adamant. No dogs.
Jimmy glanced at his parents. They were discussing something. How to grow or find more food, probably. It was the subject that dominated most of their conversations these days.
Jimmy tucked some of the lettuce in his pocket—a weak, pathetic excuse for a lettuce leaf that had no place on a dinner plate, full of holes from the caterpillar infestation they’d suffered during the last cycle. It was all they had, and they were thankful for it.
Jimmy finished up the last of his beans, spooning them into his mouth as fast as he could.
“Done,” he said.
“Wash your plate up in the sink,” his mother said.
She sat with Jimmy’s only sibling in her lap, a pink cretin of six months. When he’d come, he’d taken every last morsel of time that had previously been his. And to think, he’d originally been excited at the prospect of a new little baby brother or sister.
Another disappointment.
Never mind. Jimmy had many other siblings. Billy the Kid was only the most recent addition. Jimmy was close to animals. Perhaps too close.
His first animal friend, Percy, was a pig with a black spot on his left ear. He’d have been close to ten years old by now if the boy’s parents hadn’t been so hungry. They’d held off for as long as they could, stripping the bark off the trees and consuming every edible flower and plant within a five-mile radius, but eventually, they had no food for themselves, never mind the pig. They couldn’t even give the pig their poo any longer.
No food, no poo.
They’d slaughtered the starving little piglet. There had been precious little meat on his bones, but his mother was nothing if not creative, and made the little body last two weeks before they became crazy with hunger again.
Finally, the drought ended and the rain fell. Jimmy had danced in the heavy shower along with his parents. The plants grew back faster after that.
Jimmy washed his plate in the water that had sat there all week. He didn’t think it was much good cleaning it in dirty water, but he washed it anyway and slid it into the dish rack his father had made out of twigs from the elder bush at the back of their home.
Before the Fall, Jimmy’s father had been something called a lawyer. No matter how many times his father explained the concept to him, Jimmy couldn’t understand what a lawyer actually did.
There wasn’t much work for lawyers these days. Or for the past twenty years. The Fall had changed everything.
There was a time when Jimmy’s father couldn’t do DIY, but over the years his skills had improved and he knew which end of the hammer to use.
That was his father’s expression. Which end of the hammer to use. Jimmy didn’t understand that, as it was obvious to him which end should be used.
Jimmy moved around their home, constructed predominantly out of refuse discarded by people of some forgotten civilization. He approached the small enclosure around the back.
It was sturdy and well-made, built to withstand the dust storms that often plagued them during the summer months. Another testimony to his father’s skill with hammer and nail.
Billy the Kid stood, knock-kneed, head bowed to peer up from under the gate’s rungs the way he used to when he was smaller.
Jimmy wondered if he knew how much cuter he looked this way, making it even more likely he’d get a treat. Or did he do it by accident? It made no difference to Jimmy. Billy was getting his treat, no matter what.
Jimmy reached into his pocket and took the flimsy flap of yellow lettuce out. The goat sniffed it. Not with relish. He reached out with his tongue. The leaf stuck to his taste buds. He sucked it in his mouth and made loud slapping noises as he chewed.
“Sorry, Billy,” Jimmy said. “It’s the best I could do today. I’ll try harder next time.”
Billy munched quite happily. Goats even ate paper, so the lettuce leaf, no matter how limp and faded it was, had to be better than that.
Billy’s eyes were a gray-blue hue and stared in both directions, keeping a lookout. His mother said his eyes looked sinister but Jimmy thought they made Billy look confused, in need of protection. Jimmy was only too willing to provide it.
He patted the goat on his bony head and looked up at the sky. The stars shone brightly the way they always did when the temperature began to fall, blinking like cold distant gods. Gorgeous against the desert white and velvet blue of the cool night sky.
The craggy mountains were a mile or so distant, unflinching against the heavy press of the stars. Some nights, they were so vivid he could make out the swell of the Milky Way.
One of the stars flickered. Probably a satellite, Jimmy thought. Occasionally they passed overhead, useless now, empty metal shells from before the Fall. An everlasting remnant of their once illustrious past.
Jimmy liked seeing them. A reminder of the way things could be. One day. Perhaps he might even live to see it. But he doubted it. There needed to be signs of progress, of things getting better, his father said. And they had seen blessed little of that for the past decade.
A flash of light surrounded the satellite, glowing brighter around the undercarriage. That was strange. There was usually a blinking green light on the satellite, not an explosion of yellow-orange like this.
It moved faster than a satellite, growing larger as Jimmy watched it. It was coming toward their little camp, fast.
Jimmy ran and shouted, but by the time he rounded the shack, they were bathed with intense bright light. Jimmy’s cries were lost to the object’s roar as it sailed overhead.
The world bleached white, a powerful blast of air knocking Jimmy to the ground.
The fire swirled, rose, and then doubted immediately like a giant had blown it out. The air rippled, spraying dust outwards and curling back in on itself, forming a tunnel.
A heavy thud in the distance.
The animals mehed and screamed, kicking and beating at their prison. Jimmy and his father secured the gate, ensuring the animals couldn’t escape.
A wall of dust rose, blocking the stars as if reaching up to knock them from the sky. Then it began to settle back down to earth.
“What was that?” Mom said.
“I don’t know,” Dad said. “Another meteorite?”
“Probably best to stay away from it,” Mom said. “Just in case.”
“It wasn’t glowing green,” Jimmy said. “Didn’t all the other meteorites glow green? This one just crashed. Maybe it’s not a meteorite. It could be like those flying metal things you told
me about. The. . .” He struggled with the unfamiliar word. “Helicopter. Or. . . airplane.”
Mom rocked the forgotten baby in her arms. It screamed and wailed. None of them took any notice.
“Jimmy could be right,” Mom said. “What if it’s a plane? Someone might need help.”
“You want me to check it out?” Dad said.
“Just in case,” Mom said. “It might be an airdrop, something we can use. God knows we need more medicine.”
“All right,” Dad said. “Let me put my boots on.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jimmy said. He always liked to join his father on his adventures.
“Fine,” Dad said. “But the goat stays here. We don’t want anything we can’t control. Besides, he’s probably still munching on the lettuce leaf you gave him.”
Jimmy’s eyes grew wide and he flushed red. He thought he’d gotten away with it.
* * *
DAD HELD Smokey’s reins as they crossed the desert. The mountains rose higher with each step. An owl hooted and screeched overhead. Jimmy eyed the darkness uncertainly. He was afraid but didn’t want to look like it. He kept close to his father.
“Don’t worry,” Dad said. “There’s nothing out here that can hurt us.”
They both knew the falseness of that statement. There were all manner of animals that lurked deep under the sand and circled high overhead that wanted to gnaw on their bones. And that wasn’t even mentioning the man-shaped horrors in the world.
Thick bolts of devil grass poked out of the ground, snagging Jimmy’s foot. The world was carpeted with curled silver shadows that stretched over the valley floor.
Death Squad (Book 4): Zombie World Page 24
