THE
CULLING
Heroes of the Undead
Peter Meredith
Copyright 2020
Peter Meredith
Blah, blah, blah, lawyer speak, lawyer speak, blah blah, blah.
Do we really need to go into this? Here’s the deal. Looky-no touchy.
It’s as simple as that.
Fictional works by Peter Meredith:
A Perfect America
Infinite Reality: Daggerland Online Novel 1
Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2
Generation Z
Generation Z: The Queen of the Dead
Generation Z: The Queen of War
Generation Z: The Queen Unthroned
Generation Z: The Queen Enslaved
The Sacrificial Daughter
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Five
The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1
An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2
Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3
The Punished
Sprite
The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1
The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2
To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3
Dead Eye Hunt
Dead Eye Hunt: Into the Rad Lands
The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1
The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2
The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3
The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4
The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5
The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7
The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8
The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9
The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10
The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One
The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two
Tales from the Butcher’s Block
Prologue
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
The line seemed to go on forever and that wasn’t such a bad thing in Michael-13’s mind. Any excuse to put off the inevitable for even a few minutes was okay with him.
It was the day before Thanksgiving and all around him were thousands of other travelers looking to get out of the heat of L.A. Nothing killed the desire for turkey more than an eighty-five-degree day. Nothing except maybe murder on a global scale, and Michael-13 wasn’t hungry in the least.
He was a slight man with receding brown hair and soft quivering hands. Just then his complexion resembled curdled milk. He stood in the third of eight security lines that wound in tight loops towards the metal detectors where the dull-eyed TSA agents ruled like petty tyrants.
In another line thirty feet away was Monica-3. She was a tiny thing, not even five foot. Along with her diminutive stature, she had limp brown hair and a timid character, which made her the perfect person to be hung with the label of mouse, as in, “Monica Mouse.” Before joining the Order, everyone called her that.
She was mostly hidden by a young backpacker, who flagrantly hoisted three immense carry-ons, in spite of the dozens of signs that forbade more than one. In contrast, both she and Michael-13 carried simple one-pocket satchels. Hers held only a few magazines, a boarding ticket damp with sweat, her driver’s license and a thermos. Although the thermoses they carried didn’t look like much, they were in fact special.
The two of them needed nothing else. They were in L.A. on business, the entirety of which was about to occur in the next minute. Theirs was an important mission. They, and a hundred couples just like them, were going to destroy the world, one thermos at a time.
Destroying the world was not an easy thing. Physically, it would be as simple as twisting the cap on their thermoses a half turn to the right and walking away. The difficult part was all mental. The hundred couples had to accept that their actions would kill eight billion men, women, and children.
Each of them had killed before. Each had jabbed a syringe full of bleach into a person as part of their training. It had been terrible watching their victims squirm in misery, and cry, and froth at the mouth. Terrible, but necessary. When the time came, there could be no cold feet or half measures. The future was too important to trust to chance.
Michael-13 had wept and squirmed along with the grizzled old man they had scooped up off the street with the promise of a meal. Killing him went against everything he had been taught since joining the Order, and yet, when it was done, he had not wavered. Magnus had asked him personally to be a part of the mission and although the great man had explained at length the need for a new start for humanity, he really hadn’t needed to. Michael-13 would stab himself in the eye for Magnus.
Others had wavered. In fact, the majority of the volunteers had failed, either before, during, or after their first killing. None had been blamed or scolded. That was not the way.
The way forward was beautifully simple: be the best person you can be. For Michael-13, a one-time school teacher, it seemed that being a mass murderer was the best he could be.
It also made his stomach heave.
Ahead of him in line was a man and his five-year-old daughter. With her button-nose and oversized eyes, she was precious. Looking at her made him want to run out of there, screaming.
He stared across at Monica-3 instead, and she stared back at him as they progressed forward, one step at a time. His line was the quicker. In front of him were the conveyor belts and the grey bins. The five-year-old dropped down onto the thin carpet to pull off her sneakers. She had to pull them off like everyone else—Why? Because she is a terrorist? thought Michael-13.
A mad laugh began to build inside him. It threatened to explode from his mouth, so he turned away.
Now in front of him was the garbage can.
At every airport and in every security line, there was always that last chance garbage can. It was half-filled with water bottles and soda cans. Sitting among these were a sprinkling of make-up containers and shampoo bottles. There were a few paper bags as well. Michael-13 had always assumed these held drugs or booze. Or maybe porn.
“You gonna go?” the man behind Michael-13 asked. He had slick, oiled hair that ran straight back over his great dome of a head. There was mustard at the corners of his mouth. He wore a suit coat over a Hawaiian shirt and teal shorts.
Michael-13 stared, his mouth hanging open. The man and his outfit were incongruent. He made no sense and Michael-13’s mind flailed in uncertainty. Then his watch chimed and he found his voice. “No. You go.”
The alarm on his watch went off a second time. It was time. A hundred couples around the world were looking at their watches at that exact moment. Some were at airports and some were at subway or train stations. None were where they were by chance. Magnus had a plan. He always had a plan.
With damp, sweaty hands, Michael-13 opened the satchel and produced the thermos. There was nothing obviously special about it. From the outside, there was no way for anyone to know that the fate of humanity lay inside.
A long sad breath escaped him as he turned the cap a half turn to the right.
Across from him, Monica-3 had reached her own trashcan. Like Michael-13, she had been somewhat lost in life before meeting Daniel Magnus. Her degree in
literature had meant nothing. Her friends had been directionless partiers who had drifted away after graduation. She had once been religious, however the concept of God had been so thoroughly abused by her teachers and the mainstream culture that she pretended to be an atheist. It was just easier.
Then she had met Magnus, and to her, he was a god.
God or not, she was trembling inside when her alarm went off. Her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped her thermos. She sucked in a quick breath and took a step back as if it might explode. It wouldn’t, of course. The only thing inside was what looked and tasted like dry ice. And it was mostly dry ice. Mostly.
“Let me get that for you.” Monica-3 froze as a TSA agent dipped and picked up the thermos. “Last chance,” he said, handing it to her. Her mouth moved up and down but no sound came out. He grinned at her odd behavior and said, “Nothing over two ounces from here on.”
“Yeah, right” she answered, suddenly relieved. He gave her a smile that she saw right through. He wasn’t just some friendly man in a uniform, he was part of the system, the same system that was responsible for so much misery in the world. They all were—everyone around her.
Without another thought, she turned the lid on her thermos. There was the expected click and the top began to slowly twist. The spring inside had enough resistance for it to take five full minutes before the cap popped off. Then the dry ice would begin to sublimate, changing directly from a solid to a gas. When the molecules lifted away, they would take with them tens of thousands of tiny viral-like cells, and no one would know.
Dry ice only gave off the fog cloud in the presence of water. Without water, the gas was invisible. In twenty minutes, there would be an unseen cloud of death, around the trashcan. Hers and Michael-13’s.
Only he was still standing by his trashcan, staring down at his thermos. Something was wrong. She dodged through the travelers until she was steps away. She couldn’t bring herself to get closer. “What are you doing?” she hissed, glancing back at the TSA agents.
“It didn’t click.”
A man brushed into Monica-3 and she flinched. “Can you hear anything going inside?” He listened, but with the background noise of a thousand people crowded into a small area, he could hear nothing. He shook his head.
As more people swept around them, the two stared at the thermos until she asked, “What are you going to do?”
“Follow the plan. I guess.” The contingency plan for a malfunctioning thermos was simple: manually open the thermos, walk through the airport with it and then die. There was no cure for what was coming and Michael-13 knew that anyone with symptoms would not be allowed back inside the compound. Of course, he could simply leave the thermos and board his flight, but…
“I’d be nothing to the Order,” he whispered. Sucking in a harsh breath, he grabbed the cap like he was going to tear it off.
“Hold on,” Monica hissed. “Not yet.” She eyed the thermos nervously as she eased towards him. A few people glanced their way, but no one really cared about the stressed-out couple. It looked like they were in the middle of a low-key spat and it was none of their business.
Monica gripped his thin arm; he was shaking. She couldn’t bring herself to get close enough to hug him. “Magnus will know what you did here. You’ll be a hero.”
This was little consolation. “No. I’ve lost my chance.” Those who made it back from the mission would be given the opportunity to advance, to become one of the Chosen. They would be gods among men…if they survived the process. Only one in five made it through, but the reward was worth the risk.
Now he would just die, the first of billions.
The thought made him feel weaker and smaller than ever. He tried to give her a smile, but it was frail and twittered at the edges. “You better go.”
She backed slowly away before turning for the conveyors. Her shoes came off in a blink and her satchel was thrown into the bin. The crowds seem to part like magic and she breezed through the checkpoint. Just as she retrieved her shoes on the other side, she looked back. Michael-13 was gone.
He had popped the top off his thermos and after a deep shaky breath, had looked inside. A part of him expected to see a vile witch’s brew of sickening green sludge, but there was nothing in it except a large cube of gently smoking dry ice.
It looked harmless, and yet he felt suddenly sick. Although he was already breathing in the disease, it was an irrational sensation. It would be a couple of hours before he even felt the change. Then it would be another hour before he became infectious, and it was anyone’s guess before he turned completely. According to his briefing, the test subjects had taken between four and six hours to transform.
“Oh, God,” he whispered as he tottered off.
The first hour went by in a blink as he walked around the airport, holding the open thermos out away from him. People stared at the sweat dripping from his chin. They knew there was something wrong with him but they were too shallow and wrapped up in their own unimportant lives to ask if he need help.
At the end of the hour, the ice was gone; he had done all he could. A thousand people had been infected—he pictured the five-year-old and her button nose. His stomach twisted and he had to fight the acid puke gurgling up the back of his throat.
He spent the next hour at an airport bar, drinking and feeling every breath go in and out. He kept waiting for something terrible to happen. In his mind, he was sure there would be a sudden onslaught of pain, or vomiting, or his heart would start to chug like an old engine; however the change actually started as a rash on his palms. It took fifteen minutes of absently scratching himself before he realized that this was it. This was the beginning of his death.
“Where’s the nearest hospital?” he asked the portly, sagging bartender. A shrug was his reply. Michael-13 stared in disbelief at the man, but only for a few seconds. Then he smiled ruefully. That ugly, inhumane shrug of complete apathy was exactly the sort of thing he was destroying. That was Magnus’ plan.
In a moment of extreme passive-aggression, Michael-13 tripled what he normally would’ve tipped the man. Then he went looking for a taxi to take him to the nearest hospital. He knew what was coming. It would be painful and it would be violent.
The pain started in his joints and worked its way into his head, where it began a fire. By the time the cab made it to the emergency room, he was drenched in sweat and writhing on the floor of the backseat. The cabby leapt out of the vehicle and stood back from it pointing and calling for help until the EMTs rushed from the building. Within minutes, Michael-13 was given an IV and pain meds. And then more pain meds. Doctors rattled off orders and blood was drawn.
“There’s something wrong here,” a nurse named Natalie Gere said. She held up a vial of the darkest blood any of them had ever seen. The room grew quiet as the staff stared, first at the vial and then at Michael-13. His flesh was grey and his eyes were sunken and terribly dark.
Natalie hesitated before taking a step away. That one second of indecision doomed her.
Michael-13 was gone and in his place was a monster, one with a ravenous appetite. He snapped out a long arm and grabbed her wrist. Instinctively, Natalie ripped her hand away, leaving skin under his nails. The scratches weren’t deep, and yet they were deep enough, as the microscopic cells swarmed over her flesh and then slipped inside.
She fell back as other nurses darted in to try to calm him. He was beyond calm. He was beyond the capacity for rational thought. Like a wild thing, he attacked the women. His strength was a shock to them and with ease, he pinned them to a wall by the throat, one per hand. Their screams were loud but when he tore a chunk from the face of one, they went beyond shrill. The terrifying sound filled the emergency room and in seconds, orderlies and doctors were grappling Michael-13 in a wild melee.
Half a dozen were bitten and more were scratched before they managed to pin him down and tie him to a gurney. Even then, he wasn’t done infecting people. In his madness, he bit his tongue nearly in
half and soon he was spitting blood as he raged.
It took the equivalent of a horse tranquilizer to sedate him. By the time it took effect, Natalie was complaining of a headache. She was the smallest of those who’d been injured and the first to feel the effects of the cells replicating throughout her system. She left work early, hoping to get home quickly and lie in the dark. But this was the day before Thanksgiving and the freeways were gridlocked even beyond L.A. standards.
The sound of the first horn was like a knife in her skull. By the hundredth, she was downing Midol by the handful. Then a shiny green Honda Civic cut in behind her. The driver, bone-thin Jun Bae, had his bass thumping, and the pulse coming from the four 20-inch subwoofers caused the air to shimmer.
It made Natalie’s eyes quiver in their sockets. She screamed a dozen curse words at Jun and flipped him off. He smiled at her reaction and proceeded to turn up the sound until his windows danced along to the beat. It was a little loud even for him, but he had some grass and after firing up a joint, the sound and the creeping traffic was all good.
His eyes were half-lidded and the world was in a fine haze when Natalie appeared at his door. In vain, she ripped at the handle, but the door was locked. So, she stepped back and crashed the heel of her sneakered foot into the green door, denting it badly.
“What the fuck!” Jun Bae’s face was twisted in anger as he shouldered his door open. Halfway out, his fury turned to surprise as Natalie dove into the car and slammed into him, throwing him back. She was all claws and teeth, and spitting rage. Jun was a thin man and he found himself wedged between the console and the passenger seat. There was no way he could defend himself or fight back.
He tried to push her away, but she was viciously strong for someone so small, and she forced him down. Then he tried to punch her and she bit off two of his fingers. For the first time since he was a little kid, he screamed.
Jun lost two more fingers and a chunk of his left forearm before she was wrestled away by two very large men, both of whom were bitten. Three others were scratched and a police officer was kicked in the mouth. His lip was split and a minute later, he was infected when Natalie screamed like a hellion into his face.
Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling Page 1
