Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  She plastered two more of the creatures before fighting her way almost to the top of the slope. When she was only feet away, the broken asphalt crumbled and she slid back a few feet. Afraid that one of the undead was close enough to grab her, she twisted around, ready to fight. They were having a worse time of it than she was and the closest was twenty-feet down.

  There was little light in the tunnel, and yet her eyes picked out the body of the man the merc had killed. It lay sprawled in a pile of rocks. Seeing it made her feel unclean and weak. And wrong, as well. There had been a right thing to do in all of this and she had failed to find it.

  A strong hand caught the strap of her pack and before she knew it she was being hauled into a new world.

  The old world had been bad enough: People hiding in locked buildings, each one a weakly held fortress; abandoned streets empty save for the armies of the dead, and the tens of thousands of cold unmoving and unmovable cars; the strange quiet, broken only by a moaning wind. That world had been eerie, frightening and dangerous beyond belief.

  Maddy stared about at this new world with her jaw hanging slack. The dark, shadowy street they had climbed up to didn’t belong in New York. It belonged in some alternate universe where everything was backwards and nothing made sense.

  “Is this shit Broadway?” Sid asked of the cratered smoking street.

  Nichola shrugged. The street itself was unrecognizable. Warped and burnt pieces of cars were everywhere. Half a Tesla jutted from the second floor of the building across from them, while the remains of a bus leaned upright over them forming a surreal ceiling.

  Every building in sight had been affected by the bombings. Gone were the sleek steel and glass monuments to a modern world. In their place were pillars of fire, sometimes rising fifty stories into the air. Those that weren’t in flames bore craggy gaping wounds. Burning paper and shards of glass rained down from above, but this was a new hell and other things fell that had most of them turning away in horror.

  People were jumping from some of the burning buildings.

  The sound they made when they hit—like a head of rotting cabbage thrown on the floor—drained the energy and soul from the group. Maddy’s knees trembled and if she’d had a pistol she might’ve stuck it in her mouth. She alone knew what was coming next. Her dream flowered into her mind. The white blast, the searing heat vaporizing the buildings, the nothingness that followed—all of it was set against almost this exact backdrop.

  In her dream, the city was utterly dark, as if civilization itself had been extinguished. But just then there were still lights around them. Down a side street, orange neon glowed invitingly over a Japanese restaurant, high up in the untouched buildings frightened people peeked out of windows, and amazingly, despite the horrendous destruction, there was still a crosswalk sign working across from them. Its white light outlined a walking man.

  There’s still time, Maddy thought. Then, as if the very thought triggered it, the sign changed.

  Its red light showed an angry red hand. It flashed at her, blinking out a countdown, and she knew.

  Chapter 43

  “What is it?” Bryce asked her.

  Just like everyone else, Maddy had trembled and had gone pale seeing the bodies explode on impact with the street. However, the shudder that ran up her back a second later meant something else. She sensed something. His eyes were sharp and blue. Intensely blue, as if he were looking into her.

  Do I tell him that we’ve fought all this way for nothing? she wondered. That all this was a waste?

  She didn’t know what he would do if she told him what was coming. The old Bryce would’ve given up. He had been just a normal person. Giving up sounded nice. Nice but wrong. “Nothing. It’s just…nothing.

  His eyes narrowed at the lie. He stepped closer, looking into her upturned face, trying to understand her new fear. It couldn’t be danger. That was like sensing water while drowning in the middle of the ocean. They were surrounded by danger.

  Zombies were still trying to clamber up from the subway tunnels behind them, and there were other half-alive corpses coming their way, struggling through the craters and the debris. Overhead in the night sky were bombers and more than one building in sight had collapsed.

  But this feeling coming from her was different…it was worse…no, it was urgent. He felt the urgency coming off her like a fever.

  It wasn’t the demons doing this to her. Bryce took in a deep breath, drawing in more than just air around him. He breathed in something he couldn’t articulate. It wasn’t a smell or a taste. The closest thing to a name was one he couldn’t give it. He refused. He was a scientist and the term aura was the furthest thing from science he could get.

  Just the thought of it made him feel distinctly hippy-ish, and he had his own shudder.

  Whatever the sense was, he trusted it. The two demons were not near, or if they were, their dark minds were not bent on killing him. But there was something out there. Bryce felt just an inkling of it, then it was gone, leaving a sensation akin to déjà vu.

  “Behind ya,” Sid said. Bryce glanced over his shoulder as one of the zombies emerged from the tunnel.

  “Mine,” the angry merc said and smashed the creature with his railroad tie. He grinned at the blood.

  Sid rubbed his head as he eyed the zombie rolling back down into the darkness. A wicked hangover was just beginning to make itself felt and there was only one cure. “Maybe you can put that zombie killing to good use. Come on, I need a drink.” While everyone else huddled in the street not knowing where to go or what to do, Sid and the merc tromped down the Japanese restaurant. He had a passion for sake and wearing silk kimonos over bare flesh. At the moment, he would settle for just the sake.

  They passed Wilkes, who had been off by himself, hissing into a radio and looking angrier than usual. How the radio hadn’t been destroyed after everything they had been through was a mystery even to him. He glared at the two men, but didn’t try to stop them. The one was more interested in drinking than surviving and the other had no future. If they were both killed, it would be no skin off Wilkes’ back.

  Griff had sat down only to pour the rocks from his shoes. Now, he stood, grimacing as he shoved his knuckles into the small of his back. “We have to get moving. It can’t be much further.”

  No one moved, except Nichola who had been run over by a train and had been buried alive without being so much as scratched. She was quite ready to ditch the walking wounded and get gone. This might be considered cold, but in her mind it was only a matter of basic math: if they all made it to the FBI building, her chances of getting one of the few spots on their choppers would be slimmer than if only a couple of them made it.

  “It’s like ten minutes from here,” she lied. It was a fifteen-minute walk on a Sunday in late fall when all the tourists had gone home. With the streets blown to shit, people raining from the skies and zombies popping up out of the blue, there was no telling how long it would take the entire group. If it were just her and Bryce, like she wanted, they would be there in no time.

  “Hold on,” Wilkes said, hurrying over. “We need a new fucking plan. South is out of the question. We can’t see it from here, but everything downtown has been obliterated worse than all this. So we’re going to go west to the Hudson.”

  “Obliterated? How do you know?” Then Bryce heard the whirring of the drone. It was a different machine. This one was sleek and black. Bryce wondered if this was the cause of the odd feeling he’d been having.

  Wilkes thrust the radio away. “Our guy got a visual. They bombed the crap out of the city to the south. There’s nothing left. Our only choice now is to try to make it off the island, and the way I see it, the only way to do that is by boat. Supposedly, there’s boats coming down the Hudson from upstate. If we can snag one of them we’ll be in business.”

  “By snag, you mean steal,” Griffin said.

  “With you coming with us, Agent, it won’t be stealing. We’ll commandeer it. It’ll be f
or the greater good. Right? We have to get these two to the proper authorities.” He gestured towards Maddy and Bryce. “They’re fucking medical marvels.”

  Nichola stepped forward, her chin set high. “And the rest of us? We getting on this boat?”

  Wilkes looked down at her, pretty sure he had never seen her before. To him, she was just another stray they had picked up along the way. “If there’s room, maybe. It all depends on how well you do following orders. You can start by handing over the bat.”

  Instead of putting it into his outstretched hand, she cocked it, ready to knock the shit out of him. “Get your own.”

  “Strike one,” he said, dismissively. He looked around at the destroyed buildings. “We’re going to need a bullhorn and a spotlight. Probably some…”

  “We’re not going with you,” Victoria said, her voice strident and high. She pointed at Bryce. “Me and him are going to Federal Plaza. He promised to help me.” She eyed Bryce hard, ready to jump down his throat if he even thought about trying to back out of their deal.

  When Bryce nodded, Wilkes threw his hands in the air. “Are you kidding me? Look, Bryce, you don’t get it. They described everything south of Canal Street as hell on earth. They bombed the fuck out of it. There’s nothing there!”

  “If that’s the case, we’ll figure things out then. But you can go get your boat. I bet a bunch of these people will go with you.”

  Wilkes’ dark eyes glared at the battered group, most of whom wouldn’t be able to stand on their own. “Shiiit,” he drawled, stretching the word out so that every one of them got their own taste.

  “I’m going south as well,” Griff said. “My partner may be down there. And for all we know the field office may be untouched. If not, like you said, we figure things out.”

  “Your partner is fucking dead!” Wilkes snapped. “He and everyone…” In mid-sentence he raised a fist and shook it as he bit down on the torrent of curses that wanted to come pouring out of his mouth. Before they could, he turned and marched furiously off. He didn’t go far, stopping at the side street Sid had taken. With his teeth clenched hard and his lips pressed into a snarl, the burly mercenary stared at the red neon sign until the words: Kyoto Bowl! burned a temporary imprint into his retinas.

  He was staring when the power failed in Manhattan and the city went dark. His anger was extinguished as quickly as the neon sign and like everyone else in the group, he looked around in wonder and fear at being thrown back into the Stone Age in the blink of an eye. Behind him, there were gasps and a few of them cried out softly. They edged in closer to each other and the few with weapons held them tighter.

  “Fucking children,” Wilkes spat. Unlike them, he did not fear the dark or the things in it, except the demons that is.

  The power outage should’ve been expected. The possibility had been in the back of his mind, simmering there, bubbling up little flashes of the cold dark city, almost exactly how he was seeing it now.

  A sigh escaped him as he realized how worthless his promised million dollars was. At this point, a million dollars wouldn’t get him a ham sandwich or a seat on a canoe. “It’s always been worthless,” he muttered, realizing that Magnus had known this was going to happen all along and had fucked him from the very start. “But I still have cards to play.”

  He also had allies who were not insubstantial. He still had employees working the drones and the communications. He had his government contacts dating back twenty years, people who owed him. And as much as Magnus had dicked him over, he claimed to be an honorable man. Maybe that really meant something.

  “Or maybe not.”

  Magnus might turn a blind eye, and Wilkes’ government contacts might go deaf and pretend not to hear his pleas, and his few remaining employees might grow a brain and realize just how screwed they were, and that every minute they spent sitting in front of their computer screens was a minute in which they weren’t making their own escape. This was Wilkes’ reality.

  He couldn’t trust any of them.

  It made him shudder to realize that here, right in front of him, were people he would have to trust. He looked over the beaten down group. Most of them were sheep and would deserve the slaughter that was coming to them. On the flip side there was Agent Griffin Meyers; he might be a goody two-shoes, but he also had an in with the FBI. And there was Bryce and Maddy.

  If anything or anyone made him nervous, it was these two. The changes they were going through were unnatural and there was no telling where they would lead—his mind flashed to that horrible burnt creature. Was that the end result of this process? It was possible. His role in all of this had been to watch over Bryce and Maddy, to keep them safe. The million dollars hadn’t blinded Wilkes, it had made him cautious and he had asked the obvious: “Safe from what?”

  Magnus had given him the cryptic reply, “Maybe from themselves. We shall see, won’t we?”

  He hadn’t known exactly what would happen and Wilkes had been paid an obscene amount of money to babysit a science experiment, one that was still in the process of unfolding. One that seemed good on the outside. They were growing stronger by the hour. And that was a good thing and would remain so, right up until it stopped being a good thing. The list of scientific failures that started as bright lights was long and frequently sickening. Edison killing his assistant with X-rays—Marie Curie dying of radiation poisoning, the Stanford Prison experiment in which normal college kids were turned into veritable Nazis within days.

  Wilkes was going to have a front row view of this train wreck, if he lived long enough. He hated the idea of being defenseless and worse, he hated the idea of having to depend on others for his safety. There was no getting around it—just then he needed the group more than they needed him.

  “What I need is a gun.” A gun would more than even things out. A gun would put him back on top. Until he got one…he forced a grin onto his face and walked to the group.

  “You guys want to see what it looks like down south?” he asked. “Then let’s do it. Let’s move. The quicker the better.”

  There was no quick with this group. Bryce insisted they wait for Sid, who came back bleary-eyed a minute later, clinking from the bottles stashed in his coat. He stumbled more than before, but even drunk, he wasn’t the worst of them. Most of the others could barely plod along. Griff limped and frequently massaged his lower back. Victoria had turned numb and walked like the zombies pursuing them. Maddy was distracted and stared at the western skyline where the buildings thrust upward like black teeth. They were like shark teeth, sitting over-crowded, one on top of the other.

  It was not an easy walk by any measure. The street was an obstacle course of death. One lady found out the hard way that some of the bomb craters had no bottom but opened into a black subterranean world—she slid into one, screamed and disappeared forever. The mountains of rubble were no better. They shifted and crumbled under their feet— one man ended up being impaled on rebar. Luckily for him, it tore through his thigh without hitting a major vessel and he lived. Of course he had to be helped along which slowed them down even more.

  Every step was treacherous.

  Many of the buildings on either side leaned dangerously over them, threatening to collapse at any moment. Then there were the zombies that would appear suddenly out of the dark. For the most part the group was unarmed, but they could throw rocks of which there were plenty around them. A shower of rocks would slow or stop a single zombie, but when two or more attacked Bryce would have to race to each threatened point.

  Each of these problems had to be dealt with by the little company and each would stop their already aggravatingly slow progress.

  Wilkes led but grew so frustrated by the frequent stops that it was all he could do to maintain his fake smile. Walking next to him, bat slung on her shoulder, Nichola didn’t bother to spare anyone’s feelings. Being nice for the sake of being nice felt like a luxury and she didn’t whisper when she talked about leaving the “Dead weight” behind.

/>   She thought she would be safe when they got to the Federal Plaza. According to his earpiece, Wilkes knew she was going to be in for a rude surprise.

  Eventually, the street they were on bent southeast and the nearer skyscrapers could no longer hide what Wilkes knew: there was no going forward.

  Giant mountains of near impenetrable black smoke, a thousand feet high, stretched from east to west as far as the eye could see. Here and there within the smoke were red-gold fires. Because so many of these were hundreds of feet in the air, they made it seem as if volcanoes were erupting in downtown Manhattan.

  Nichola stepped back, her mouth open and her eyes unblinking. She hadn’t been born when the towers fell in New York, but she had seen the videos. The smoke from the terrorist attack had engulfed the southern part of the city. It was night and with the smoke it was hard to see, but she guessed that the destruction wrought upon the city by the Air Force was a hundred times worse.

  The group straggled up two or three at a time. Each of them were staggered by the sight. Some wept. Some collapsed in place and sat there, shaking their heads in disbelief.

  Victoria walked past everyone, shaking her head, her face broken by misery. She whispered, “No, no, no, no. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

  Bryce should’ve gone after her, but he lacked the energy to drag her back or the emotional strength to deal with her. Groaning, he eased onto the dented remains of a car. A bomb had turned its windshield to glass dust, and yet a pair of baby shoes still hung from the rearview mirror. They had once been pink but were now grey. He sagged, exhausted. His sword arm felt like it was filled with lead. He didn’t know what to do or even think.