The Gristle & Bone Series (Book 1): The Flayed & The Dying

by Roach, Aaron

  The alpha.

  With a grunt, the alpha dropped three stories down and landed in front of its challenger. The rival was larger and stood tall enough that the once-Burome was forced to look up at it. The once-Burome let out a low, angry snarl to show that it wasn’t intimidated.

  The rival had completed its transformation much like the once-Burome had. Its torso was jagged and sharp, and the cracks in its head had grown thick, fusing the plates of its skull together. The cranium had grown dense with deposits of calcium already beginning to fill in its empty eye sockets, making its forehead an elongated, solid mass.

  A worthy rival.

  The opponent moved to a crouching position, preparing to duel, but the once-Burome was already on the attack. It launched itself at its adversary, slamming into the alpha’s mouth with its forehead. The rival hit the ground hard, with the once-Burome on top, pounding with clubbed fists. With a shriek, the rival curled its clawed toes into the rungs of the once-Burome’s ribs and shoved hard with its legs. The once-Burome flew backwards into a car door and its enemy was on it in an instant, gripping into its collar bone, hoisting it up effortlessly, and slamming it down until the vehicle’s frame buckled inward.

  The once-Burome roared into the face of its attacker and broke the thing’s grip on its clavicle by shoving hard under the opponent’s chin. It pushed itself forward, keeping its clawed hand on the rival’s mandible, until the once-Burome was back on its feet. With its balance regained, the once-Burome twisted and yanked hard, ripping the alpha’s jaw from its skull. Another roar, and the once-Burome slammed the hinge of the mandible into the enemy’s nasal cavity, then hammered it home with its fist. It continued the assault until the opponent’s head lay in fragments on the pavement.

  The thing died squealing.

  Victorious, the once-Burome snorted at the bloody mess of bones while above, the pack of Others hooted from their perches. The once-Burome turned its dark gaze on them and bellowed another challenge, daring more to come forward, but none did. Instead, in response, the Others rattled their teeth and clacked in acknowledgment of their new alpha.

  Inside the once-Burome’s mind, a flood of senses spilled through like light into a dark room and a connection was made, linking it into the hivemind of the pack and its horde of seedlings.

  Power.

  The once-Burome felt them, their need to hunt and their hunger. It sent a command into the hivemind, obliging them.

  Feed. Grow.

  The Others screeched their approval before setting off on a prowling hunt down the street. They moved swiftly, disappearing into the dusk while the army of seedlings shuffled after them.

  -21-

  As dusk was settling somewhere over the forested mountains of New Hampshire, Gabe Sullivan came out of the woods yanking the corpse of the deer up the hill by its antlers. It was his first kill of the season and he couldn’t believe his luck at the size of the thing.

  It was big, but Gabe was bigger.

  With an exhale that grew into a small roar of exertion, Gabe hauled the deer over the cresting lip of the hill until he felt its weight lessen under the flatter earth there. He collapsed to the ground with the deer’s head on his lap, the antlers splayed at odd angles like leafless branches in the fall. He sat there for a few moments, gathering his strength, before standing back up and dragging the thing the rest of the way to his truck. He loaded the animal into the bed and tied it down until he was confident it wouldn’t jostle too much on the bumpy trip back to his cabin. He climbed into the cab and started on his way.

  As Gabe rounded the first bend of the mountainous road, his headlights lit up the face of a ghost, an old man with eyes that matched the gray of his hair and skin. Gabe swerved the steering wheel to avoid crashing into him, swinging the tail of the truck across the stony road and slamming the side of the vehicle into a tree.

  Gabe shook away the tunnel closing across his vision and looked up to where the ghost had been. He did a double take when he saw the ghoul was still there, very real, and shuffling towards him.

  “Hey mister?” Gabe said, getting out of the car, “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

  A groan, much like an ache, was the only response he received.

  Gabe moved to help the man, but froze when the ghoul suddenly lurched towards him, stumbling as if there was a lag between its legs and upper body. It chewed on its tongue as it closed the distance.

  Without taking his eyes off the thing, Gabe took two steps back, reached into his cab, and pulled out his hunting rifle. He leveled it at the man and said firmly, “Mister, I can only help you if you stop coming at me like that. Hey! Get back, GET BACK!”

  Gabe let it get within two arm lengths before forcing himself to pull the trigger, the solitary gunshot echoing through the forested hills like a thunderclap. The thing didn’t go down. Instead, its momentum brought it crashing into him and in the next second Gabe found himself pinned against the truck, staring at teeth snapping at him from only inches away. His rifle, which he held framed against the ghoul’s chest, was the only thing keeping him from being bitten. Through it all, he heard himself hollering; but whether it was in anger or fear, he didn’t know.

  Gabe braced his feet and began slowly pushing the ghoul off him, moving its snapping piranha mouth away by inches. When it was far enough for him to get leverage, Gabe twisted and brought the wooden stock of the rifle into its temple with a loud crack. The ghoul fell to the ground, yanking Gabe down by the grips it had deep in his shirt. They tumbled, with Gabe landing on the man in a mount position. He tried to pin the ghoul down by its throat, but its snapping teeth prevented him from getting his palm under its chin without being bit. As he yanked his hand back protectively, the ghoul sat up, bringing its snarling mouth straight towards Gabe’s belly. Without thinking, Gabe gripped the rifle in both hands and brought the butt down hard on the thing’s head. He did this six more times until the wood came back red and wet and his attacker stopped moving entirely.

  Gabe sat there for a few moments straddling the corpse as he tried to understand what had just transpired. Between his panting, adrenaline-filled breaths he thought he heard the wind pick up, like the sound of distant wolves beginning to howl. It took him a moment more to realize the sound was neither wind nor wolves, but something different, crashing through the trees nearby. As quickly as he could he dashed the few feet to his truck and jumped into the driver’s seat. He threw it into gear and wrenched it away from the tree. In his rearview mirror he saw more ghouls, some naked and disfigured, come stumbling out of the treeline.

  What the hell is happening?

  Gabe reached down and began turning the dials on the radio. He scrolled through static until he finally landed on a channel with a voice:

  […thousands of Federation citizens across the northeast have been left mutilated or dead by this attack from the Frontier. Witness statements from those fleeing these areas have described the victims as having undergone extreme changes to their physical appearances and mental faculties. If you are living in an affected area, do not approach infected individuals. Your friends and loved ones, if they have been exposed to the virus, are as dangerous as they are contagious. Command has sworn vengeance against the Rebellion for this cowardly act which has violated all codes of civilized warfare…]

  Gabe pressed harder on the accelerator, urging the truck to move faster. He had to get back to the cabin, to where his wife and kids were waiting.

  He pulled into the clearing in front of the rustic home twenty terror-filled minutes later. He turned the key, killed the engine, and stepped out of the truck into the calm, dusky twilight. The cabin stood where it had always stood, surrounded by old pine and thorn bush. The front light was on, the glowing white bulb bombarded by fluttering insects.

  Everything looked normal.

  The front door opened, and his wife Molly stepped out, wiping wet hands on her shirt. “Hey, hon, did you get me anything?”

  Gabe almost deflated with the re
leased stress. She was safe. He faked a smile; there was no point in worrying her just yet. He would tell her what he had heard on the radio later, when the kids were in bed and she was sitting down.

  Refocusing and remembering the buck in the bed of the truck, he replied, “Yeah, I got you something. A big ol’ dead animal.”

  “Oh, boy, how romantic,” she replied laughingly.

  “Where are the kids?” he asked as he turned to open the tailgate, “I need their help getting this thing out of the truck.”

  “Oh, they’re running around here somewhere. I told them to be home before dark, so any minute now. Hey, what happened to the truck?”

  Gabe froze and felt a trickle of sweat form on his spine. “They’re not inside?” he asked, turning.

  Molly’s smile faltered when she saw the look on his face. “Gabe, what’s wrong?”

  “Molly, go get my shotgun,” he said anxiously, retracing his steps back to the cab where he kept a box of slugs in the glove compartment. He reached in and grabbed them, along with his headlamp.

  “What? Why?”

  “Now, please,” he said firmly. “I’ll explain later.”

  She went inside and brought out his 12-gauge, her expression still confused.

  “Which way did they go?” he asked as she handed it to him.

  “They’re probably down at the stream… Gabe, what’s going on?”

  But Gabe ignored the question. “Stay here, Molly. Go inside and lock the doors and windows. I’ll be back with the kids soon and then I’ll explain everything.”

  Molly opened her mouth to ask again, to demand to know what was happening, but she thought better of it. She had never seen Gabe so worried and trusted there was a serious reason for his odd behavior. Whatever was happening, she didn’t want to delay him from getting to their children.

  “Okay, hurry then,” she said to his back as he walked into the forest behind the cabin.

  It took Gabe less than five minutes to get to the stream. At this time of year, it only ran ankle-deep, and it was where his kids spent their weekends looking for newts and other amphibians in the clear water.

  But right now, the stream ran in silence, uninterrupted by the gleeful shouts of his children.

  He clicked on his headlamp and lit up the bank of the stream in the failing night. That’s when he saw footprints in the mud. There were the smaller impressions of his son’s and daughter’s feet, and a different, bigger set of impressions among them that belonged to neither him nor Molly.

  Gabe fought down a rising panic and pushed further into the woods in the direction of the footprints.

  He walked over foliage that crackled and snapped so loudly beneath his feet that he almost didn’t hear it at first: a faint crying sob to the east. He cut a hard right, jumped over a log and sprinted through some brush into a clearing where he came upon his children surrounded by closing ghouls. His son, Jacob, had placed himself protectively in front of his sister Riley, and even in the faint light, Gabe could see their panicked faces.

  Gabe didn’t think. He reacted.

  He blasted the first ghoul in the back of the head, then the next in the shoulder, spinning it to the ground. A dead woman whom he recognized as a cashier at the town general store snarled before her face was peppered into nothingness with buckshot. Gabe couldn’t bring himself to kill the last ghoul, a teen probably only a few years older than his son. So instead he blew out its left knee, collapsing it to the ground.

  Gabe felt a tug at his ankle. He rounded and saw the one he’d shot in the shoulder, still alive and inching its open mouth toward his heel. He brought the barrel to the thing’s forehead and pulled the trigger. A moment later, as he was bringing the gun back around, he almost fired on his kids as they slammed into his waist in a tear-filled embrace. He dropped the shotgun and knelt into a crouch to return the hug.

  “Are you two okay? Are you hurt?” Gabe gasped out, pulling them into him and checking them for injuries.

  They replied in relieved half-sobs that they were alright. Behind them, the one-legged teen ghoul rasped from the ground, crawling towards them and ruining their reunion.

  “Come on,” Gabe said, before it could come any closer. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The three Sullivans quickly made their way back towards the stream, with Gabe’s headlamp lighting the way. Then, when they were almost at the water, a sound ripped through the night. In all his years hunting those woods, Gabe had never heard a noise like it - a shriek that was both anger and horror, both animal and human.

  And very, very near.

  The canopy of leaves above rustled and Gabe brought his face up in time to see a skeleton dropping feet-first. The thing landed on his shoulders, and he collapsed under the sudden weight. As he fell to the ground, he saw a knife come stabbing down at his eyes. He jerked away, avoiding the knife as it dug into the soil where his head had just been. He followed the knife upwards to a skull-faced creature that snarled at him before thunder blew in the side of the thing’s head.

  Gasping, Gabe sat up and rolled the skeleton off of him. He turned to see his son still pointing the shotgun at the lifeless monster, afraid to take his eyes off of it. Gabe scrambled to his feet and hurriedly brushed the dirt from his clothes before turning to his son. “It’s okay Jacob,” he said, “You did good. You did real good.”

  Jacob handed the weapon back to him but said nothing, choosing instead to stare at the monstrosity at their feet. It was mostly bones, held together by sinew and exposed muscle. Its eyes were gone, and so was the skin on its face, revealing the sallow yellow of its skull. With a shudder, Gabe realized the creature hadn’t been carrying a knife at all, but rather had tried to stab him with its own snapped-off arm.

  “Come on, you two,” Gabe said, pulling his kids away from the thing. “Let’s get back to your mom.”

  -22-

  […Disaster support teams across the northeast are setting up safety zones outside of the afflicted areas while Federation Forces will be moving in to protect those fleeing the attacks. Even as I speak, an armada of civilian and federal aerial support craft is being assembled to render aid to those unable to flee. These brave volunteers will be conducting the largest mass evacuation in human history, with immediate aerial rescue operations planned for Boston, New York City…”]

  Kat and Sophia read the closed-captioned words of the Command Spokesperson; the television’s volume muted to prevent unnecessary noise. But a moan, long and loud and close to the apartment door, had Kat scrambling to turn it off. She didn’t know if the animated corpses outside knew they were there, or if they moaned like that simply because they were upset they were dead. Either way, she wouldn’t risk turning the TV on again – it had given her all the information she needed.

  Help was coming.

  “You hear that, Soph? They’re sending in the military and everything.” Kat said, turning to Sophia

  “Yeah,” said Sophia, trying to smile. It was supposed to be a good thing, being rescued. So why did she feel so bad?

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, it’s just…it’s too late,” she replied, thinking of her dad’s face. The image of the skull creature in the torn uniform flashed across the memory of her father, ruining it. She looked away so Kat couldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes.

  Kat saw the girl’s expression falter. In the hours they’d been together she hadn’t asked about the girl’s family or why she had been out on the esplanade by herself, but she could venture a guess as to what had happened to them.

  “Hey,” Kat said, changing the course of the conversation, “When we get rescued, you can stick with me if you want, okay? We can tell people we’re sisters. I’ll look after you, and you can look after me. What do you say?”

  Sophia thought about it for a moment, “I’ve never had a sister…” she smiled, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  “Alright, sis,” Kat chuckled, keeping her voice low, “let’s see if I can find us something
to eat.”

  Kat walked into the kitchen to rummage through the household’s food stuff. It was the typical fare one might find in a young person’s apartment, scarce and unhealthy and she doubted the days-old leftovers in the fridge were still edible. In her roommate’s cabinet, she found a solitary can of spaghetti rings and a stack of canned tuna. It would have to do. She pulled open a drawer in search of a can opener.

  “Uh…Kat?” Sophia called softly from the den, “There’s something going on outside.”

  Kat could hear the wariness in the girl’s voice. She placed the can on the counter and went to join her young companion. She found the girl on her knees on the couch, peering through a crack in the curtains at the world outside.

  On the street below, help was arriving in the form of a tactical police van armored up like a tank. It didn’t come in with lights flashing or sirens blaring, but rather crept up the street as if the vehicle itself was wary of what it might encounter. It rolled to a stop a few feet away from the red SUV where the family was still trapped inside.

  The armored van flashed its headlights at the vehicle, which flashed its own lights in response – Please help us.

  A moment later, the passenger side door of the van opened and an officer clad in full riot gear lowered himself out. A second officer followed, while the third, the driver, remained in the vehicle. The first officer leveled his assault rifle and began making his way to the SUV, while the second officer moved to the back of the van and opened its large rear doors. From their vantage point, Kat and Sophia could see people, other civilians, seated inside. There was a mother holding her baby close to her breast, an old woman, two young men of about Kat’s age, and a boy who looked younger than Sophia.

  “What’d I tell you, kid? They’re already rescuing people,” grinned Kat upon seeing them, her voice filling with hope.