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

by Roach, Aaron

  “Do you smell that?” Sophia responded, without turning to look at Kat.

  Kat smelled the air, and she caught it. The sweet scent of decay had returned.

  At the edge of the roof, Sophia looked down and gasped sharply before bringing her hands up to mute herself.

  The dead were back, and they were everywhere. They filled the street by the thousands.

  “Oh no,” Kat muttered as she came up from behind to look. “Where the hell did they all come from?”

  “I don’t know,” Sophia responded in a half whisper, “but look, they’re acting different from yesterday.” Where the walking corpses from yesterday had been hungry and violent, these were more like the statues she had seen in the museum, the old ones that were missing arms and legs and had crumbling stone faces. They didn’t move, but all gaped skywards with mouths hanging open in limp fascination. She wasn’t sure which way she preferred; the dead standing around like statues or moving about and trying to devour the living.

  Kat suddenly grabbed Sophia’s hand and pulled her away from the precipice.

  “What is it?” Sophia asked.

  “I see something,” Kat replied, just above a whisper. She didn’t look down at Sophia, keeping her eyes instead glued on something across the way. “It’s one of the skeletals.”

  Kat felt the girl stiffen at her side as she remembered the hulking mass that had almost killed her downstairs. Kat spoke quickly, this time taking care to sound more reassuring. “There’s just one, though, and it’s not moving.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s across the street, and two buildings to the left. Look for the water tower.”

  The lurking mass of bones was well hidden in the dark shade of the water reservoir perched on rooftop stilts, but Kat’s eyes had been drawn to the creature, almost as if she had known it might be there. Even as she watched, the blood-wet dome of the thing’s skull caught the sunlight and she could see its skeletal face turn in their direction; the dark pits where its eyes should have been, gazing.

  The girls had the thing’s attention, but for now, for some reason, it seemed content to watch them from a distance.

  Behind and above the pair, the thumping of rotary blades grew louder as the inbound helicopter drew closer.

  “Our ride’s here, kid,” Kat said, nudging the girl gently. “We’ll be leaving that thing and his ugly friends behind in no time. Let’s get out of here.”

  Sophia nodded and together they waved their arms in welcome at the descending aircraft, ever keeping the monster across the way in their peripherals.

  -37-

  Less than ten minutes after climbing through the young couple’s window, Don reached his climax. He stared at the back of the woman’s head, grunting as he came, before he pulled the trigger. The woman’s resisting arms and flailing legs immediately went limp beneath him. The woman died and he rode the waves of ecstasy back to reality.

  Don pulled himself out of the corpse and wiped himself off on the legs of her partially removed pants. He stood and looked down at his handiwork. A tide of crimson grew from where the top of her head used to be.

  I’m getting good at this.

  In the corner of the room, the girl’s man sat hunched and sobbing over the wound in his gut. Don had kept the man alive to watch, but the sniveling cuckold could only cry from the pain in his belly.

  He walked over to him and pointed the gun at his face.

  “Please –” the man tried to say.

  Don pulled the trigger. Once, then three times for good measure.

  Don pocketed the gun and walked into the couple’s kitchen. He hadn’t eaten since the previous morning, and the girl had put up a fight. Now he was famished.

  Finding the pantry, Don reached for a box of cereal before he saw movement, in the corner of his eye, through the kitchen window. He crouched low and out of sight before inching closer to peer through the glass at the street below.

  When Don had walked up that street ten minutes ago, it had been gloriously empty and he had been the only person left in the world. Now, it was filled with hundreds of corpses, standing unmoving on the pavement. A contingent of soldiers pushed its way through them, leaving a path through the bodies like dogs in high grass. Even as he watched, two soldiers broke off from the pack and began heading in his direction.

  Don muttered a curse.

  People.

  Don didn’t want to live in a world with people. People meant rules, meant people telling him what to do. He had been looking forward to doing things his own way, to be king of a world without consequences. Now, people with guns were coming to take that world away from him and replace it with, what?

  He imagined the boots of soldiers kicking in the door and uniformed men rushing in to haul him off to prison. They would have no idea what he’d done or how special he was. They wouldn’t know that even the monsters were afraid of me. He would be treated as just another person that needed rescuing, a victim, weak. That would be worse than prison.

  The final struggling moments of the girl in the next room played in the theatre of Don’s mind. The man was there too, pleading, and so was Delilah failing to fight off his grip on her throat. The thought of his victims filled him with a half-swallowed breath, and he felt his member stiffen.

  They had been weak too, and easy to take.

  Outside the apartment door, he could hear the heavy impact of boots running on stairs. They were close, but the beginnings of a plan were already coming to mind.

  He returned to the corpse of the girl, dropped to his knees next to her, and buried his face in his hands.

  He began to weep.

  -38-

  As Ward and Litz made their way into the building from where the gunshots had come, Litz cursed.

  “The fuckers are in here, too” he grimaced, shoving his way past a corpse. They had to navigate through dozens of the things crowding the stairwell before they reached the second floor. “Now what?” he asked as they ascended the last stair. He pointed his nose at one of the many doors leading down the hallway. “Do we check each apartment?”

  Ward didn’t answer. He thought he could hear something – sounds of anguish.

  “The way I see it,” Litz continued to himself, “whoever’s up here firing off rounds has the right idea. That’s what we should be doing – shooting these fuckers.”

  There. Third door on the left. Crying.

  “Litz, shut up. I hear something.”

  Litz hushed, and the muted wailing grew. Definitely human.

  Ward and Litz approached the door from which the sound emanated. Ward looked back at Litz, who nodded, I got you, before pushing his way into the apartment, rifle raised. Inside, the soldiers found the source of the noise– a man in the den, weeping over the body of a young woman. In the corner, another body of a man sat slouched and folded at the waist, a puddle of blood growing beneath him.

  The crying man looked up and saw the two soldiers standing there. His eyes were red and swollen with grief. “My daughter, her husband…” he sputtered.

  “Sir…Wha - What happened?” Ward questioned hesitantly as he approached the man. This was the first civilian he or any of his unit had seen since they started their push into the city, and the sight had thrown him.

  “I came here looking for them, hoping they were still alive, you know? But it was too late. When I got here…” He paused and looked up at them, his eyes red with strain. “I tried to shake them awake and next thing I know, they are clawing and biting at me.”

  Poor bastard. Ward didn’t know what to say.

  “Were you bitten?” Litz asked suddenly, barely veiling his anxiety.

  “What? No, I shot them before…” The man buried his face in his hands and resumed his weeping.

  The man’s pitiful state made Ward think of his own father. Would the old man pull the trigger on me if I were in the same situation? Ward didn’t like the answer that came to mind.

  “Sir, we need to get you somewhe
re safe. Haven’t you seen the helicopters? They are evacuating people all over the city.”

  Something dark, for half a heartbeat, flashed behind the man’s pupils, like a cat crossing a street in the night. Then it was gone and only his tears remained. “Evacuate? Where?” he asked.

  “There are shelters being set up outside the infected zones for the refugees,” Ward answered. “We can get you to a helicopter, and they’ll get you to one of them.”

  The man sniffled and stood up, “Okay, if you insist…”

  He was silent as they left the apartment and began making their way upstairs. As they ascended, Litz radioed down to Whitney that they had found a survivor and were escorting him upstairs for helo retrieval.

  “Copy that,” said Whitney over the static. “We’ll wait for you. Hurry back.”

  -39-

  When Thaniel came to, he could have sworn he was back in his apartment, hung over and still lying next to the naked form of Celia. But the dull pounding in his head wasn’t from a night of drinking but rather from the swelling at the base of his skull. It took him a moment to realize his hands were tied behind his back.

  “Where the hell am I?” he mumbled, but the thunderous noise of an engine drowned him out. He tried to blink away the assault on his senses, but it hurt to keep his eyes open. He hoped he wasn’t concussed. Somewhere in the gloom, red and white lights winked at him as if he was privy to some inside joke.

  Then he heard voices.

  Thaniel turned away from the laughing lights only to see his friends, bound like him, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to three body bags. They were surrounded by seated armed men, solemn and serious. And there, gazing toward the cockpit, was the leader of the group; the one he had saved and the one who had struck him. “Hey!” Thaniel shouted to make himself heard over the roar of the engine. “Hey you, asshole!”

  The man turned, unfastened his seat belt, and came over to stand in front of him, his expression blank.

  “Where the hell are we? Where are you taking us?” Thaniel demanded.

  “Mr. Briends. You are aboard a VT68 Darkwing Vetala, en route to the Federation Ship Defiant.”

  “And you are?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Sharpe, Federation Special Warfare, Operator Class.”

  “Informative.” Thaniel replied, caustically. “You mind telling me what we are doing here then, Lieutenant Commander Sharpe? What do you want with us?”

  “Mr. Briends, your friends are here simply because they know you. Guilty by association, you understand?”

  “Guilty by association.” Thaniel rolled the words around in his mouth before asking, “Guilty of what?”

  The man gave him a hard stare before replying. “Tell me about Dr. Neyra.”

  Thaniel shook his head, denying the name until it clicked – the crazy scientist, the tape. He chuckled a curse word, “You know, I would have come willingly if you had asked nicely. You didn’t have to hit me.”

  Sharpe hadn’t been expecting that kind of response. “That was …unfortunate;” he said, almost apologetically, “but necessary given that one of your people had just attacked mine. I lost three men because of him.”

  Thaniel remembered the still form of Chris, riddled with bullet holes, lying dead on the rooftop.

  “Chris Mathenson was many things, but I don’t think he would have considered himself one of ‘my people’. And I had nothing to do with your men dying, or Neyra, or any of this. I was just the unfortunate bastard that picked up the phone.”

  Just then, the pilot’s voice came in over the operators’ earpieces. “We’ll be touching down soon, Commander. ETA, two minutes.”

  Thaniel continued, oblivious of the operators’ internal conversation. “…I even taped it. Ask them,” he said, nodding to his friends. “They heard it.”

  Across the space, the others nodded in agreement.

  Sharpe held up a silencing finger. “You have a tape of that conversation?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level.

  Thaniel nodded, “I mean, the quality is shit because I had him on speaker phone, but yeah. I–”

  “Show me.” Sharpe interrupted.

  “Where’s my bag?”

  Sharpe gestured with his arm and one of his men tossed Thaniel’s bag across the cabin to him. Sharpe snatched it out of the air and raised an eyebrow at Thaniel. He nodded before Sharpe opened it and pulled out the heavy brick of plastic that was the recording device.

  “That’s the one. My good luck charm,” Thaniel muttered with a hint of sarcasm.

  The voice came on in Sharpe’s ear again. “We’re approaching the Defiant now, boys. Be sure you’re all strapped in tight. Wind’s picking up. I’ll try and bring us down easy.”

  As they touched down onto the deck of the Defiant, the wind brought whisperings of a growing squall. Sharpe felt the low breathing of the ship as she rose and fell faintly with the inclement weather. When the door opened, sailors were there to greet them and escort the bagged bodies of Salim, Grimaldi, and Merrill down to the ship’s tiny morgue. Before his dead friends could be carted off, Sharpe touched each of them on the shoulder and sent up a quick prayer. As the detainees were being disembarked, he called back to his men, “Briends will be joining us with Captain Harig in his briefing room. Bring the others to the brig until we can ensure his full cooperation and the validity of his claims.”

  “The brig? We had nothing to do with any of this!”

  Sharpe rounded on the group of civilians and directed a pointed hand at Thaniel. “Mr. Briends, I need you to understand something. Until I can verify that you indeed had ‘nothing to do with this,’ you and your friends will be treated as suspected terrorists. Is that understood? And this,” Sharpe held up the tape-recorder, “if it is what you say it is, it may go a long way in clearing your name. Now, the sooner we go inside and let the commanding officer of this ship listen to what’s recorded on this device, the sooner you can go about convincing us of your innocence.” He took a step closer, “So, would you like to continue arguing about it out here or …?”

  Thaniel returned Sharpe’s stare for a long moment, then sighed, defeated. He turned to his friends, “I’ll do what I can, guys. You won’t be in there long.”

  As they were led away by Sharpe’s men, Kim gave Thaniel a smile that could have been gratitude or sympathy, Eric winked and Jason whispered under his breath, “See you soon, Thaniel. We’ll be alright.”

  Separated from his group Thaniel had no choice but to follow Sharpe down into the metal innards of the warship’s belly.

  -40-

  The thunder of propeller blades overhead was deafening as Kat and Sophia ran for the helicopter. Crouched just inside the open doorway was a man whose face was covered by a neckerchief and sunglasses. He waved them into the cabin and, as they climbed aboard, Sophia looked back to check they weren’t being followed by the skeletal.

  It was nowhere in sight.

  Before she could ask Kat if she had seen where the thing had gone, they were being directed by the neckerchief man towards the benches that lined either side of the space. They were not alone and had to share seating with two other disheveled refugees. A man in a muddy and torn business suit, greeted them with a nod before resuming his dozing, and a woman with broken glasses glared at them angrily as they took a seat next to her.

  Kat was going to ask the woman what her problem was when the man with the neckerchief and sunglasses came and crouched in front of them, interrupting her. He leaned in to make himself heard above the roaring din.

  “Have either of you been bit?” he shouted the question. Kat saw with envy the man wore a headset which muffled the assault of noise. They shook their heads.

  “Have you been touched by, or come into physical contact with the creatures in any way?”

  They both shook their heads, choosing to omit Sophia’s earlier encounter with the skeletal in the hall.

  “Show me.” He nodded at their sleeves and pant legs, which they rol
led up to reveal undamaged skin beneath. Without warning, he reached out, grasping each of them by the chin, and forced their heads to turn, checking for wounds around the neck and face. That done, he lifted his glasses and revealed his eyes. They were dark green, surrounded by skin that was wrinkled with sun and time. They met Kat’s and dared them to lie.

  “Any wounds under your clothes? Either of you?”

  Kat was growing impatient with the interrogation and the assaulting noise of the helicopter engine. She leaned in close and answered firmly, “None.”

  The man accepted her answer with a nod and then pulled his neckerchief down to reveal a genuine smile; the interrogator behind the eyes, gone. “Good. Have to ask, you know? Can’t be too careful.”

  The man turned and signaled to the pilot with his thumb up. The helicopter grew louder and lifted from the roof. When the man faced them again, his tone was gentler, though he continued to shout to make himself heard. “Sorry about the noise,” he said as he tapped the ears of his headset. “Our first batch of rescues made off with most of our hearing protection when we dropped them off. They were in such a daze they must not have realized they still had the headsets on them, and we were so eager to get back to the operation we didn’t even check. Here,” he took off his own headset and placed it on Sophia, who smiled in thanks. To Kat, he said “It shouldn’t be too bad if you keep your ears covered. We have another twenty minutes or so in our rotation and enough space for a few more rescues. Then we’ll get you folks to the nearest SZ.”

  “SZ?” Sophia asked.

  “Safety Zones. There are several of them being established, inland of course, and away from the cities. Command has troops setting those up, with the help of a few thousand volunteers. That’s what Sue and I are,” he explained, gesturing back at the pilot. “Volunteers, I mean. We’ve pulled out fifty-three people from the city so far today,” he announced proudly. “And that’s just us! There are hundreds of birds in the sky – you should see the armada of aircraft over New York right now. Phew, now that’s an operation! My name is Bill, by the way,” he said, holding out his hand. He said it all so quickly that it took them a moment to process everything before they shook his hand and introduced themselves.