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

by Roach, Aaron

  In silence and early morning light, Don emerged from the dumpster and looked down the alley to where it intersected with the road beyond. There, crimson puddles of blood collected like rain on the black asphalt, as if some biblical plague had ripped through the city in the night. Scattered amongst the pools of blood were bits of torn clothing and grisly pieces of meat. Every now and then, his eyes would register an abandoned baseball bat or tire iron, futile weapons against the dead. He was staring at the remnants of a massacre.

  But where were the bodies?

  Don shrugged. It was of no importance. All he felt was a deep appreciation. Appreciation that he’d survived the massacre, yes, but also an appreciation for the butchery and what it meant.

  It was a cleansing.

  The raised dead were killing anybody that had ever wronged him, denied him, or mocked him. It was a universal reckoning, and the cosmos had taken his side. Don had survived day one of the apocalypse; the rest of the days would be history he would write.

  He walked down the abandoned street through the rows of buildings and realized he didn’t know where he was going. At the same time, he realized he had nowhere to be. He smiled at the thought and strolled with his shoulders held high.

  As he rounded a turn, Don saw movement in his peripheral. There, a dark bloodied mound was trying to pull itself across the blacktop like some overgrown slug.

  Don strode towards it.

  It was a police officer, or had been once. Now it was just a heap of meat lying in the tattered shreds of a patrolman’s uniform. So voraciously had the man been eaten that only the head remained on the carcass of its limbless torso. As Don approached, the dead cop’s head turned its dull grey eyes at him and snarled. Without its arms and legs, the thing had to pull itself forward across the ground with its upper teeth.

  Don stopped and watched the dead man inch towards him at a snail’s pace. “Where are your friends, officer?” he asked the thing, mockingly gesturing at the empty street. “Where have they all gone?”

  A moan.

  “Hey, I have a confession to make,” Don chuckled.

  A grinding sound of teeth.

  “I killed a woman yesterday. A coworker, actually. Her body is probably still there, in a closet in the museum, if you want to go looking for it.”

  Another moan. The cop-slug merely pulled itself forward.

  “I enjoyed it actually. The killing, I mean.”

  The moan became a whine.

  Don turned to walk away when he saw it – a pistol lying on the sidewalk with the stump of a hand still attached to the handle. He picked up the weapon using his index finger and thumb and shook it until the severed hand released its grip.

  Don had fired guns before as a kid, borrowed without his old man’s permission, at raccoons and cats in the woods behind his house. Now, he held the weight of the weapon in his hand and remembered how powerful it felt to hold one. He held his arm straight out, lining his sight down the length of it, and imagined faceless targets on the other side.

  “Boom, dead. Boom, dead,” he whispered to himself as he killed invisible foe after invisible foe.

  Another whine brought Don’s attention back to the dead officer. He took a few steps forward and put himself in front of the corpse. Looking for the thing’s grey eyes, he raised the pistol and placed his finger on the trigger. Just before he was about to squeeze, he stopped himself.

  The dead thing’s eyes weren’t meeting his own.

  Don needed to see its eyes.

  Don shifted, trying to catch the thing’s stare but the dead cop groaned its head in the opposite direction, denying him. Whining, it began to crawl away. Frustrated and angry, Don tried a new tact; he crouched down and held out his forearm to the creature’s mouth. “Bite me, I fucking dare you,” he said.

  Again, the dead officer turned away.

  Just like with the blood eagles.

  Why?

  Don pulled the trigger and blew fragments of brain all over the pavement. The deed done, he wedged the pistol into his belt and walked away from the scene, an invincible man.

  In a world where the dead devoured the living, neither the blood eagles nor the sleepwalkers seemed interested in him.

  He recalled the night before; of the dead who had surrounded his car and chased him into the dumpster. The cop-thing had wanted to get to him too, until it had moved near enough to change its mind.

  Maybe it was something about his smell that repulsed them?

  Or something in my blood?

  Don smiled. He liked that, the idea of something inside of him that made him special, unique.

  He sauntered down city block after city block, encountering neither human nor ghoul. It was as if the whole world was now his alone. He wondered, at first, where everybody was. But then, he thought, who cares? He strolled through the abandon, amusing himself as he scavenged empty vehicles, or rifled through stray wallets or purses he came across on the street. At one point, he found a lighter and lit a street-side newsstand on fire, using papers and magazines as kindling, just to see it burn. He watched the fire build until the flame-tips became a thick pillar of black smoke.

  Above, a helicopter suddenly roared through the chimney of smoke, sending dark swirls through the air. The intrusion was so abrupt that it had Don rushing to take cover in the shade of a nearby building. From there, he watched several more aircraft fly low across the rooftops, searching, before disappearing behind the surrounding buildings. He heard them as they buzzed away into the distance, but he was too low to the ground to see where they were going.

  He did, however, see something else.

  There, in a window across the street, Don saw the faces of a young couple peering through the glass. They looked, with pointing fingers, at the path the helicopters had flown across the sky, their expressions painted with relief. The woman turned to the man and threw her arms around him in a hug, and he returned her embrace. Help was coming and they had survived.

  Don couldn’t hear their words, but he imagined them to be filled with hope. They would be talking about rescue, about how they had survived and how it was finally over. They would ride out of hell on a helicopter and the shared ordeal would bring them closer.

  The notion filled him with rage.

  He started progressing, unseen, towards the young couple’s building where, on the outer façade, a metal fire-escape stairway snaked its way right past their window.

  -27-

  High in the rafters of the Boston Public Library, the once-Burome perched atop a small mound of skulls, the trophies of defeated alphas who had sought to challenge it. Through the window at its back, the heat of the sun on its spine caused it to itch. It ignored the gnawing sensation. To scratch at it would require energy it needed for its evolution.

  The once-Burome was changing.

  Its skeletal structure was growing denser as it reshaped itself for war. The beginnings of antlers were protruding from its forehead like saplings of hard calcium and the teeth on its lower jaw had grown sharper, longer. Lower still, where its broken ribs had been, the individual bones had grown together into a pointed shell.

  It was a painful process, but not as agonizing as its birth.

  To ease its tortuous metamorphosis, the once-Burome sent its suffering out into its horde, dispersing the pain evenly through the hivemind that connected them. The Others of its pack chirped and resisted as the trickle of their master’s suffering entered their consciousness. The once-Burome exerted its will to quash their defiance at its intrusion. It branched itself through their minds, and its awareness grew deep into the earth where thousands of its underlings occupied the tunnels and sewers beneath the city.

  Its swarm had grown large.

  Through them, it could sense the horde’s army of seedlings, thousands upon thousands of them, standing still as statues beneath their Other masters.

  Each Other collected their seedlings around them like ornaments in a garden, arranging their standing, waiting bodies
in patterns. They were eager to show off their kills, after all. Despite their blindness, they could still ‘see’ through sound; and the moaning of the seedlings, when arranged in certain ways, sounded like music. Those Others whose collections were larger, fluttered and nitpicked, nudging their seedlings into place so their patterned songs were just perfect.

  Like wind chimes of the dead.

  The once-Burome shut off its awareness to the patternmaking. As an alpha, it was above such things. Instead, it turned its senses outward, to its scouts that were scouring the limits of the city in search of more Others. Those found without masters would be brought into the fold, and those bound to an alpha would be followed and tracked.

  The once-Burome would kill any alphas itself and take their hordes for its own.

  As it killed alpha after alpha, it had begun to feel the exertion of it in its bones. With each victory, it took longer and longer for it to draw a dead alpha’s horde into its own. To control so vast an army took a toll on the body, and thus its evolution had been necessary. The reshaping of its body would soon allow its mind to be expanded beyond the horizon, where its swarm could grow even larger.

  A newly formed tendon snapped into place, and the once-Burome let out a grunt of satisfaction. The transformation was almost complete.

  Invaders!

  The thought came shrieking into the hivemind from a scout. The scout’s uneasiness reverberated through their consciousness, causing the Others to chitter in concern and the seedlings to sway where they stood.

  Many invaders.

  The sense of fear flowing through the scout sickened the once-Burome. The scout would have to be killed upon its return, for the good of the horde. Fear was an infection that threatened to eat away at its control and had to be dealt with swiftly. For now, though, the once-Burome needed the scout to get a better understanding of the situation. It cast its focus out, penetrating the scout’s mind to know what it knew. Its senses tingled as information flowed – The unchanged were coming, from all directions and in vast numbers, into its territory.

  It felt a pang that was both hunger and anger at the trespass.

  The once-Burome sent a tendril of thought, a command, to its horde.

  Invaders. Kill.

  The order rippled through the hivemind, sending shrieks of eager anticipation erupting up from the tunnels beneath the city. The floor of the library below the once-Burome began to shake as thousands of inert bodies suddenly began to move.

  The horde was on the march.

  To war.

  -28-

  Private Derrick Ward had joined the Federal Infantry Corps as a reserve soldier because one weekend a month seemed a fair price to pay for military benefits. Besides, his regular day job as a veterinary technician didn’t pay nearly enough, and an enlistment with the Forces would help supplement his income. The uniform also had its perks. It gave him a little bit more self-respect than the scrubs he had to wear at the animal clinic which, as his bastard of a father often said, made him look like a male nurse for cats.

  When he had enlisted, Ward expected he might be called to war one day, but out west to the rebellion. Now he found himself marching east, towards a major Federation city.

  It was all fucked, and he wanted no part in it.

  But where could he go? There was no place to escape to unseen. The others of Ward’s unit were in front and behind, on the death march with him, and if he tried to make a break for it, they’d label him a deserter and probably shoot him on the spot.

  There was nothing to do but keep moving forward.

  As his unit progressed down the quiet road, the soldiers kept a sharp eye for their supposed enemy, a difficult thing to do when they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for. Most, including Ward, had heard the rumors that had trickled down the chain of command, descriptions that had probably been so warped and exaggerated in the process, they couldn’t be believed.

  Skeleton mutants. Walking corpses. People eating people.

  It has to be bullshit.

  Ahead, the trunks of Boston’s skyline grew like concrete trees out of the horizon and helicopters flittered like hummingbirds across the city as they evacuated civilians. Between some of the structures, pillars of smoke rose like incense at a funeral shrine, darkening Ward’s thoughts.

  Maybe there was some truth to the rumors.

  “Contact,” Staff Sergeant Whitney’s voice cut into his thoughts, loud and clear over the sound of marching boots.

  Ward dropped to his knee; his rifle raised. Around him, the other soldiers did the same. He took comfort in their presence, and the line of Command vehicles that shielded their backs.

  “12 o’clock, directly ahead. Shit.”

  Ward turned in the direction indicated and mumbled his own curse.

  A hundred yards in front, at the crest of a hill and in the middle of the road, a lone man stood dressed in a torn and bloody suit, as if he’d just attended a board meeting that had become disastrously violent. His hands were at rest at his sides and his face stared skyward, mouth agape. The face was pockmarked with red craters.

  At the sight, the soldiers started calling to one another, softly so their voices wouldn’t carry.

  “Is it one of those things?”

  “Don’t look very skeletal to me.”

  “It’s just a dude with a bad case of face herpes.”

  “Shut it.” Whitney interrupted, as loud as he dared. “Ward, Litz, that’s you,” he said, nodding towards the bloodied man.

  Ward bit back the refusal before it could escape his lips. Litz was already up and moving so he fell into step behind him with his own weapon raised before the sergeant could sense his hesitation.

  As the two soldiers closed the distance, it struck Ward as odd that the man hadn’t registered their presence yet. He simply stood there with his openmouthed stare, oblivious as they advanced on him across the asphalt. About halfway there, a gust of wind carried with it a sweet stench of decay that caused Ward to instinctually falter.

  “Ward?” asked Litz, noticing his slowed pace. “You with me?”

  “Yeah, I’m with you. I’m good.” Ward lied.

  As the pair ascended the hill, the source of the sickly scent quickly became apparent. Over the crest, invisible to the company of soldiers behind them, thousands of bodies in various states of decay stood unmoving and in no particular order. Like the bloodied businessman, they gaped skyward, as if waiting for some foretold comet in the daylight.

  Where the hell did they all come from?

  Litz called to the man. “Sir?”

  No response.

  Litz advanced with Ward a few steps behind him. He placed the barrel of his rifle against the man’s shoulder and shoved. The man stumbled backwards a step where he resumed his dumbstruck, skyward stare. With a shiver, Ward noticed the man never blinked.

  “It’s like he’s brain dead, or in shock or something,” murmured Litz, as he poked at the man again.

  “You’d be in shock too if someone had been chewing on your face. Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They kept their rifles trained on the man as they backed away slowly. When they felt they had gone far enough away to turn their backs on him, they hustled back to their waiting unit.

  “Did he or the others seem hostile?” asked Staff Sergeant Whitney when they had made their report.

  Litz looked at Ward, then back at Whitney, before shaking his head. “Negative, Staff Sergeant. They don’t seem like they’d be a threat. They don’t seem – anything, actually. They’re just…standing around…like they’re waiting for something.”

  “Yeah, but waiting for what?” Whitney wondered aloud, letting loose a long exhale that reeked of indecision. Ward felt his confidence drop even further. It was unlike the staff sergeant to hesitate on a course of action.

  Their unit, along with several others, had been tasked with penetrating as deeply as they could into the city to establish a position where reinforcement
s could safely join them. It had been easy going, until now.

  Whitney walked to the nearest Humvee and spoke into the radio there, relaying what Ward and Litz had seen. A minute later, a voice squawked back through the static – “Press on.”

  -29-

  Thaniel sat with his ass on the floor and his back pressed against the side of the desk. He gazed through the window to where the sky was waking, and he focused his attention on the reds and yellows of the new day rather than the world that was being illuminated below. He knew he hadn’t woken from the nightmare of the day before, so the least he could do was ignore its existence for a precious few moments while the sun rose.

  Has it already been a full day since my last cigarette?

  “Thaniel? Would you like a pastry tart?” Kim asked, interrupting his reverie. She came up behind him holding out the sugary breakfast food already unwrapped from its foil packaging. He recognized it as plunder scavenged from one of the desks.

  “Oh, sure, thanks Kim,” he replied, taking the snack from her hands.

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Kim mused, taking a seat next to him on the floor.

  “What does?”

  “That,” she answered, turning her gaze toward the window, “all that hell down there, all those people dead…yet the sun’s coming up just like any other day and the earth keeps on spinning. Just makes you realize how fleeting it all is.”

  Thaniel stared at the side of her face for a few seconds while thinking of a response. When none came to mind, he cast his eyes down and forced himself to acknowledge the serene aftermath of the chaos below, where bodies lay sprawled like starfish in the deep.

  Those people had died painfully, sometimes slowly, and in a confused panic. There was nothing at all fleeting about their situation. Whatever was happening was here to stay, and Thaniel was sure the world would be reeling from it for quite a while yet.

  He let out a long exhale, wishing it were smoke, before changing the subject. “How’re Eric and Jason?” he asked.

  “Eric’s that snoring you hear. And Jason just wants to be alone, he’s thinking about his family. I don’t think he slept.”