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

by Roach, Aaron

  This time it was Litz who fell into step behind Ward. It wasn’t that Ward wanted to take point, but the intersection was less dense with standing bodies, so he made for it like a diver coming to the surface for air.

  When Ward reached the corner, he peeked around the edge. On the other side, it was the same endless body count. Squat buildings framed the street, packing bodies together in crisscross patterns as roads intersected with more roads. Nearby, the ruin of a news kiosk was still smoldering. But, beyond the dead, there was nothing else to see. No threats or enemy combatants, just a hushed city mourning a loss that wouldn’t leave.

  Ward heard Litz whisper behind him, “These fuckers give me the creeps. Bad idea, not letting us waste them.”

  Ward nodded in silent agreement.

  When the Infantry Corps had first begun its push into the forest of bodies, some of the soldiers, jittery from the unnatural state of the dead that surrounded them, began discharging their weapons into the standing masses. This caused a domino effect of gunfire that echoed across the city as hundreds of bodies were mowed down. Ward remembered the way they had fallen; not a single pleading hand had come up to beg for mercy, and not one voice cried out for help. They simply stood there until they buckled under the gunfire, collapsing onto the ground. The staccato of gunfire had eventually eased into silence as orders to cease fire were called down the line. Apparently, Command was in disagreement over whether the standing bodies were actually dead or not, and until they proved to be dangerous, “civilian remains were to be preserved.”

  Nobody wanted to be accused of friendly fire.

  They had marched deep into the city until the forest of bodies had grown too dense for the support trucks to continue. Vehicles carrying essential equipment were stripped, their cargo dispersed amongst the soldiers to carry before they were abandoned on the street, to be retrieved later. It was the comforting rumble of their engines that Ward missed the most in so much quiet, and he fought back the knowledge that without the vehicles there was no quick getaway possible.

  “Maybe it’s a disease or something, or could be there’s some sort of cure? Maybe that’s why they don’t want us to kill them,” Ward said to Litz, behind him. Even as he said it, he knew he didn’t believe it.

  Litz snorted. “A cure, for this? No man, there’s no coming back from this. Where these fuckers are right now, where their souls are? That place ain’t ever letting them go. Instead we got what they left behind, these –” He leaned his rifle into a corpse’s shoulder, “these husks.”

  Ward wasn’t a religious man and he didn’t believe in souls. But he forced himself to look at one of the things, to acknowledge it. No more walking around with his eyes closed.

  It was a woman. She could have been beautiful had she been smiling and breathing. He took in her face and the auburn curls of hair that framed it. She had freckles, and Ward liked redheads with freckles. But it was her eyes and mouth that gave her away. Her mouth was open, and it led down a dark tunnel, and the pupils of her eyes were scratched and worn from not having blinked in hours. Behind them, there was nothing, no memory, no sorrow or joy. Only a pitted emptiness.

  Litz was right; there was no coming back from that.

  The sound of hustling boots announced the arrival of Staff Sergeant Whitney and the others of their squad joining them at the intersection.

  “Anything?” Whitney asked.

  “Same as before, Sarge. More creepy dead people, no hostiles,” responded Litz.

  Whitney nodded and dropped to his knee, pulling a map out of his breast pocket and unfolding it. Over Whitney’s shoulder, Ward could see scribbling pen marks depicting the movements of other companies of uniformed men and women, thousands of them, across the city.

  “Okay, we are close, six blocks now.” Whitney stabbed a finger down onto the paper, “We’ll establish positions here and here –”

  A gunshot, a pause, then three more, loud and close by, interrupted him.

  -34-

  As he passed the door that led back into the newsroom, Thaniel considered going back in and barricading himself inside. At least in that room was a world he knew, devoid of monsters. He cursed himself for being a coward and forced himself to go past it, moving further down the stairwell and into the unknown. Another groan, closer now, rose like a bat from a cavern. This time, Thaniel could hear a dull, repetitive thud behind the low wail and in response to the noise he brought the detached blade from the paper trimmer up like a samurai sword.

  As Thaniel rounded the bend down to the sixth floor, he caught a yelp in his throat as he almost bumped into Brienna. Her back was to him, and she was wearing the same clothes she had worn yesterday: a long grey skirt and a green sweatshirt. Only today, her clothes were torn and mottled with red. On the back of her head, Thaniel could see long, rust-colored stains that matted her hair together in clumps. She was either confused or in shock, taking short but what seemed to be purposeful steps, hands at her sides, into the closed doorway of the sixth-floor office. She was bumping into the door, bouncing back from it slightly, and repeating the process.

  Above, the fluorescent lights flickered.

  “Brienna?” he whispered.

  His coworker didn’t look back as much as she shuffled a hundred and eighty degrees until Thaniel could see the bloody canvas of her face. One of her cheeks was missing, revealing the rows of teeth below, and her right ear was gone. Her torso was pockmarked with stab wounds and her eyes stared blankly through a glaze of grey.

  The brutality that had befallen his friend caused Thaniel to stumble backwards and trip over the steps. Brienna moaned and moved at him, raising her grasping hands and snarling. Thaniel stared, dumbstruck, until his survival instincts kicked in and, panicking, he put his foot on her chest and shoved hard. She stumbled backwards a few steps only to come at him again, but Thaniel was already on his feet and moving up the stairs at a run.

  His pounding footsteps echoed through the stairwell and he could hear her crashing after him, her own footsteps a jolting, broken tune behind his. Ahead, up around the ninth floor, he heard the skeleton monsters become alert to the noise of the pursuit, their quick high-pitched shrieks sounding like the squealing of angry pigs. Thaniel froze his ascent, pinning himself in a half step. He’d almost forgotten about the skeletals. Behind him, the ambling song of the Brienna-thing’s pursuit grew louder and mixed with the siren of waking monsters above.

  Face a dead Brienna or a pack of skeletals? His mind asked him.

  A dead Brienna. His brain answered.

  Thaniel turned in time to see Brienna round the below landing in a stumbling jog, her head tilted and mouth agape. She could have been yawning had her grey eyes not betrayed the hunger there. Before he could think, he reacted, swinging the long blade of the paper trimmer edge in a sideways chop that buried deep in her temple. She stood there, for a moment, before her knees buckled and she collapsed, her face never losing that dead-eyed, open-mouthed stare.

  Thaniel’s gaze followed his arm down to the hand that gripped the blade, and then down to the corpse at the other end. Brienna had been his colleague and friend, and the sight of her dead at his feet had him suddenly bent over retching.

  The rat-tat-tat of gunfire from somewhere above interrupted his heaving and tore him from his misery. It took him a moment to register that the screeching of the skeleton things only a floor away a moment ago had grown fainter and upwards.

  Towards the roof.

  Thaniel wrenched the blade from his friend’s head and broke into a run up the stairs, cursing himself for having left his friends. His backpack chafed and his shoes squeaked as he rounded a corner past the closed door of the tenth-floor workspace. The door bulged outward as something slammed hard against it from the other side. He willed it to stay closed as he made his way past and up the final set of stairs to the roof.

  Thaniel found himself in the middle of a battle when he came through the door and out onto the open expanse of the rooftop. He saw Chri
s, lying dead on his side with blood oozing from bullet wounds in his chest, while armed men, military, fought with a pack of skeletals in hand-to-hand combat or with their automatic weapons. Jason, Eric and Kim were there too, aiding the soldiers in the melee or locked in their own fights for survival. Nearest to Thaniel, a soldier was pinned flat to the ground, his hands locked over a skeletal’s snapping face as it tried to bite into him.

  Thaniel did the only thing he could think to do. He stepped up behind the monster and swung his heavy blade high, then brought it down onto the thing’s head like he was splintering wood with an axe.

  As the creature went limp beneath the blade, the soldier roared in angry relief and heaved it off of him. The bones clattered as the thing fell into a heap at his side.

  Thaniel held out his hand and helped the soldier to his feet. The man said nothing, but instead brought his rifle up to his sight and let out an explosion of bullets over Thaniel’s shoulder and across the rooftop. Thaniel could only flinch backwards and cover his ears, bewildered at the cold savagery of the man as he moved past him, the staccato of his rifle filling the air.

  In the space of a few seconds, the last remaining creatures began to die, and the soldiers started to call out to each other.

  “All clear!”

  “Cleared”

  “Same here”

  “Where’s Merill? Grim?”

  “Gone, dead along with Salim” spoke the one Thaniel had helped. “Neto, Coop, bring Salim’s body to the chopper. We’ll recover those of Merill and Grim when we leave.” Then the soldier turned to face Thaniel.

  “So, they sent in the Infantry Corps, huh?” was all Thaniel could think to say.

  “Navy, actually,” said the man, offering his hand. “Thank you, for that.” He tilted his head at Thaniel’s blade and the grinning skull at the end of it.

  “Not a problem – uh, sir,” he stammered, returning the shake.

  A quick silence followed as the man’s eyes squinted as if he’d remembered something. He took a step back. “Briends?” he asked, his face hardening, “Thaniel Briends?”

  Confused, Thaniel nodded.

  Suddenly the man brought the barrel of his rifle to Thaniel’s face, shouting commands and demanding that Thaniel turn around and put his hands behind his back.

  Startled at the drastic change in the man’s demeanor, Thaniel resisted and was shoved aggressively to the ground for his efforts. “Hey!” he shouted angrily at his treatment, “The hell are you do–”

  A crack on the back of his head made his vision suddenly go dark.

  -35-

  The tread slipped in the mud, causing the truck’s tires to skid on the old logging road, before regaining traction and throwing the vehicle forward again. Gabe swore angrily at each jolt, muttering under his breath until he saw his children’s faces gazing at him through the rearview mirror. His was a portrait of fear and concern. He plastered on a smile and hoped it hid how close he was to breaking. “Sorry, kiddos.”

  “It’s okay dad. We’re old enough to cuss now,” Riley said so sweetly and unexpectedly that Gabe snorted, and Molly gave a playful scowl.

  “Have you thought of a name yet?” Gabe asked Riley through the mirror, nodding at her lap where the puppy strained to lick her face.

  “Not yet,” she answered distractedly between fits of giggles. “But me and Jacob will think of something.”

  Fake-dad-smile or no fake-dad-smile, the puppy was doing a good enough job on its own keeping the family’s spirits up, and for that Gabe was thankful. Neither of his children had uttered a complaint, not even when Gabe had brought their wreck of a truck onto the old mud-drenched logging road. Even his wife, who was prone to car sickness, was trying her best to hold it together as the vehicle bucked and rocked beneath them.

  The truck had been through hell, two wrecks in less than two days. Its windshield was spider-cracked, forcing Gabe to sometimes hang his head out the window to see clearly. This, however, gave him a clear view of the mangled remains of the front-end of the vehicle where, from somewhere beneath the hood, smoke or steam rose faintly. While the logging road was rough, it was not unmanageable. But Gabe knew he would soon have to make a left that would bring them off the path and into the forest. From there, it was a steep incline up a rocky plain to get to the cave, which was only supposed to be accessible by foot. He hoped his truck, despite its current state, would be able to force its way up the slope.

  It had to.

  The truck was packed full of survival supplies and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make his family carry the gear up to the cave on foot, not with the dead roaming about as they were. No, the truck was going to make it up the mountain, and from there, he and his family would fortify a position for themselves in the cave and safely wait out whatever the hell this was.

  “Come on, old girl” Gabe said to the truck, his tone gentle. He patted the dash as if that would help. “Just a few more minutes and you get to rest.”

  “It’s not a horse, Dad,” his daughter giggled.

  Gabe caught her eye in the mirror and chuckled. “You’re right, it’s not a horse. It’s a beast!” he said, pushing the accelerator hard to the floor. The truck roared and kicked forward, fishtailing as Gabe slammed the steering wheel to the left.

  From the backseat Gabe’s daughter laughed as the truck smashed through the forest and threw her about in the backseat. His son tried to play it cool and indifferent, keeping his eyes pointed out the window at the passing trees, but Gabe saw a small smile play on his face whenever the truck dipped and rose like a roller coaster. Next to Gabe, Molly gripped her hand tightly over his on the shifter. This time, Gabe’s smile was genuine as he thought about how lucky he was that they were all together, and safe.

  Ahead, through the trees, the terrain opened out to a rocky pasture that sloped steeply upwards. Gabe kept his foot heavy on the accelerator, imagining the fuel coursing through the engine below him until it combusted, surging the truck forward. “Come on, come on,” he cooed at the dash. “You can do it.”

  The truck had to get up to speed or else it would never make it up the hill.

  “Dad!” Jacob yelled suddenly from the backseat.

  Too late. Before Gabe could register the sound of crunching metal and the sensation of glass shattering across his cheek, the truck slammed sideways, punching his head against the driver’s side door. He looked up to see his wife’s panicked face as a form behind her grew larger.

  Incoming.

  The truck rocked sideways once more as the form slammed into it a second time. This time, skeletal hands came screaming in, reaching through the empty space of where his wife’s window had been, grabbing at her hair and yanking her backwards. Gabe watched horrified as Molly was lifted off her seat, only to be saved by the seatbelt that locked her down. Gabe let go of the steering wheel to grab for her, but the truck swerved, causing him to fumble and miss.

  Clumsy.

  Gabe’s mind was still recalibrating from the impact. He reached for Molly again, this time grabbing her forearm while keeping one hand on the wheel. Through the ringing in his head, he thought he heard screaming, either his or his wife’s, and his children shouting in the back.

  Boom. The space inside the cab filled with a clap of thunder and the reaching skeletal hands suddenly fell away into the world outside.

  Gabe’s head rung like a bell and he was sure he had burst an eardrum. He turned to look for his children and almost whimpered in relief when he saw them still sitting there in the backseat. His daughter had her hands over her ears and was staring gape-eyed at her brother who had the shotgun in his hands, the barrel still smoking. In the seat’s corner, the puppy let out a small howl.

  Gabe stopped the truck.

  “I…I told Riley to cover her ears…That thing was going to take Mom,” Jacob stammered.

  Gabe turned to look at his wife. Her eyes were wild as she stared down at the barrel that was directed across her chest and out the window. Sh
e breathed in and out deeply through her nose, a tactic Gabe recognized from when the kids were toddlers and she needed to calm herself after a long day. He waited until the breathing slowed and she made eye contact with him. Without saying anything, she nodded at the concern on his face – I’m okay.

  Gabe and Jacob hopped out of the truck and walked around to the passenger side. Lying on the grass was the skeletal, its skull spilling matter like a broken egg. The mouth, the only part remaining of the thing’s face, hung half open in a silent, toothy cackle.

  “Jacob,” Gabe said seriously to his son. “That’s twice now you’ve saved our lives with that thing. If your sister is old enough to cuss now, then I guess you’re old enough to keep that,” he said, nodding to the shotgun in his hands. Then, easing his tone a little, he finished with a chuckle, “Just try not to shoot it in the truck anymore please, or next to your mom.”

  From the passenger’s seat, Molly made a choking noise that could have been a sob or a laugh.

  -36-

  Sophia and Kat made their way back to the roof access, this time with the key. Outside, in the open air of the building’s rooftop, they jumped and hollered and waved their arms to snag the attention of one of the dozens of rescue helicopters that buzzed in the distance. They exhausted themselves in their efforts until finally one of the floating dots broke off from the bunch and began to grow larger as it made its way towards them. As they watched it approach across the sky, the girls collapsed onto their behinds, laughing in relief and panting from the exertion of their calls for help.

  “See kid? We’re going to get out of here just fine,” Kat said, her voice hoarse from shouting into the sky. She turned to flash a smile and share her relief with Sophia, but something had diverted the girl’s attention.

  “Hey, where are you going?” she asked Sophia’s back as the girl walked towards the rooftop’s edge.