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

by Roach, Aaron

  They had announced themselves to the dead and the dead had answered back.

  “Here they come,” said Sharpe. “Wait until they’re on us, then we go.”

  They stood there and watched as the enemy emerged from the facility’s buildings and headed towards them. There were a few groaners, here and there, stumbling through the snow at the rear of the pack. But mostly there were skeletals, charging on two feet or on all fours, deathly silent as they closed the distance. Thaniel was thoroughly unnerved by the creatures’ unnatural movements. The skeletals seemed to run over the top of the snow, rather than through it. And when they did stumble, they simply rolled, twisting like falling cats before coming back onto their feet without missing a step.

  As they drew closer, their skeletal disfigurations became more apparent, and the operators could see their broken bones, shaped and re-grown to stab and maim. Arms were now daggers or clubs, feet were now elongated and clawed, brows were thicker and calloused, and ribs were pointed and reaching.

  “Wait for it,” muttered Sharpe as they came closer. “Wait.”

  The wall of bones was almost on them and Thaniel could see straight through their empty eye sockets into the dark depths of the incoming skulls. One creature seemed to choose him, altering its course slightly to zero in on his position.

  “Now!”

  The men, teetering on the edge of the cliff, leaned backwards into the abyss. Thaniel closed his eyes and fell after them. He felt the rush of wind and a heartbeat of freefall before the rope snapped taught and he was slammed hard against the rock face. He opened his eyes in time to see the skeletals raining down from the precipice above, reaching and stabbing as they dropped past the dangling operators, only to continue their plummet into the watery depths below.

  Next to Thaniel, Maldonado whooped and cheered as bodies whipped by them. “You think those fuckers can swim, Briends?” he hooted.

  Thaniel answered by way of his own stupid grin. He looked down to the water to see angry skulls glaring back at him as they sank, disappearing into the calm, dark sea.

  A few feet away, Sharpe’s voice interrupted their revelry with a curse – “Oh shit.”

  Thaniel looked over to see Sharpe, Neto, and Hyres dangling from their own ropes, their feet planted against the cliff and looking skyward. Thaniel followed their gaze and cursed too.

  Atop the cliff, one skeletal remained. It stared down at them through eyeless pits, slobbering blood as a low growl emanated from the vocal box hanging at the back of its throat. Though it had no face to form an expression, the thing still managed to look furious.

  “Fuck.”

  Neto moved to bring the rifle dangling from his shoulder up to fire, but the beast reacted before he could pull the trigger. It dropped from the edge onto the operator’s hanging form, stabbing down with jagged bones and snapping teeth. Neto roared in pain as he kicked off the wall and swung, trying to fight off his attacker. The thing held fast, biting into his face and forehead and tearing away large chunks of meat. Neto tried again to bring the rifle up to fire, but the thing caught his arm with a clawed foot and twisted, snapping the arm with an audible crack and causing him to drop the weapon into the sea below. The whole time, Sharpe and the others yelled in helpless desperation, calling for him to be still so that they could bring their own weapons up to bear.

  Through agony and blood, Neto made a decision. As the creature gnawed hungrily on his collar, he reached down with his one good hand and pulled the knife from his ankle sheath. He managed to look over at Sharpe, to give him a wink, before raising the knife to the rope.

  “Good luck, fellas,” he whispered, before drawing the knife across the line.

  “Neto!”

  The others watched in horror as Neto and the dead thing tumbled down the cliff face into the water below.

  Neither emerged again.

  -70-

  Riley sat on the grass outside the cave, looking out over the slope and waiting for her dad to return. To pass the time, she threw a ball for Little Brother, who would limp after it, pick it up in his mouth, and return to drop it at her feet.

  “That’s a good boy,” said Riley, rubbing the pup’s head.

  When she threw the ball next, it went over the edge of the slope and began rolling down the long face of the mountain, picking up speed. Little Brother went after it.

  “Little Brother, wait!” she shouted after him, but her pet had zeroed in on the ball, his primal instincts to seek and retrieve taking over. Despite his leg, the pup moved quickly. Riley chased after him and would have caught up if she hadn’t been distracted by Jacob’s grave as she passed by. She slowed to a stop and made her way hesitantly over to where her brother had been laid to rest. She felt guilty for not coming by to visit since they had buried him.

  “Hi Jacob,” she said quietly to the stirred soil. Small blades of grass had begun to sprout through the earth there. There was a pang of sadness in her heart as she realized once the grave was overgrown, her brother’s resting place would be lost to the mountain forever. She dropped down to her knees and began picking at the baby blades with her fingers.

  “I miss you a lot, Jacob,” she said, grooming the earth. “And so do Mom and Dad.” She stopped and tried to think of something else to say, but it was difficult without Jacob there to answer her. “You should see Dad now, he’s like a boss here. Everyone seems to listen to him. You would be super proud.” She paused as a memory came to mind. “You remember that time when I was little and I broke Grandpa’s urn, Jacob? And I told Mom that you were the one that did it?” Tears were beginning to well in her eyes now, and she used her forearm to wipe them away. “I always wondered why you didn’t tell her it was actually me who did it, why you didn’t tell her the truth.”

  She began to weep softly, “I’m so sorry Jacob. So, so sorry. You were such a good big brother to me.”

  A good big brother.

  Riley slowly pushed herself up off the ground, sniffling and wiping the tears from her eyes. She looked down the slope to see Little Brother approaching the ball which had come to a stop near the bottom of the slope. He was dangerously close to the trees. “I’m sorry, Jacob. I have to go,” she said to the grave, “I’ll come back to visit soon.”

  With that, Riley began running down the hill, concentrating on keeping her feet beneath her as gravity tried to push her forward into a tumble.

  Inside the cave, Molly was preparing a stew of canned meat and wild onions she’d foraged from the mountainside. As she tossed the chopped onions into the pot of boiling water, she looked up at Lucy and Huck who were playing cards on the other side of the cavern.

  “Huck, do you mind checking on Riley for me?” she asked. “I want to get this stew done before Gabe and the others get back.”

  “Sure thing, Molly,” Huck answered, “I’m losing this hand anyways.”

  Huck turned his chair and rolled towards the mouth of the cave, passing by Lou who sat by himself, sharpening the blade of his knife against a stone.

  “And just when I was beginning to enjoy the peace and quiet,” Lou mumbled under his breath as Huck rolled by.

  A moment later, Molly heard Huck calling for her from outside, his voice frantic. Molly was on her feet immediately, running through the mouth of the cave. She came up behind Huck who was pointing at a small figure in the distance. It was Riley running down the face of the mountain towards the trees.

  Molly was already moving before she heard herself shouting her daughter’s name.

  “Riley!”

  -71-

  Hyres kept watch, his rifle raised and scanning, as Maldonado and Sharpe pulled Thaniel up from the cliff side and onto level ground.

  “No rest for the wicked, Briends,” Maldonado said to him as he lay on the ground trying to shake off the vertigo. The operator reached down and helped Thaniel to his feet.

  “Where the hell did they all go?” Hyres murmured from ahead, his eyes still focusing down the sight of his rifle.


  “Who?” Sharpe asked.

  “The slow bastards. The groaners. They were at the back of the pack, remember? I didn’t see any come over the cliff. Just those skeletal freaks.”

  Sharpe and Maldonado came and stood next to Hyres, surveying the area with their own rifles. All they saw was a barren snowy plain, interrupted only by the wreckage of the plane ahead and the facility beyond.

  “Fucking spooky,” Maldonado murmured.

  Sharpe pulled a small black device from his pocket. He aimed its antenna skyward and peered down at the small screen on its front. “The PRD signal is transmitting from somewhere beyond that wreck,” he said, nodding to the fuselage in the distance. “So that’s where we go first. Keep your eyes peeled for the groaners – they could be anywhere.”

  The men moved forward with Sharpe taking point and Thaniel at the rear. Thaniel tried his best to exude the same confidence as the operators as he held his rifle against his shoulder, but he knew he didn’t look the part. He sure as hell didn’t feel it.

  The soft clomping of snow underfoot were the only sounds they heard as they drew closer to the burnt fuselage of the plane. As they approached the nose, they spied through the shattered windshield the burnt mess of the pilot’s body, charred beyond recognition. Sharpe nodded to Hyres, who moved ahead to inspect while the rest of the group hung back to provide cover. Hyres climbed up onto the nose and through the broken glass into the cockpit, where they heard him rummaging around and muttering to himself.

  “It’s the plane that brought in Team Four, sir,” he called from inside.

  Sharpe nodded knowingly. “I thought as much.”

  Something on the ground caught Thaniel’s eye. A dozen steps away, speckled against the white canvas of snow, was red, as if an artist had walked by with paint still dripping from a paintbrush. While Sharpe and Maldonado waited on Hyres, Thaniel went to investigate.

  The red seemed to track next to indentations in the snow which Thaniel quickly recognized as footprints. He followed these until they stopped abruptly at a low mound.

  What the hell?

  Thaniel crouched and began moving away handfuls of snow. There, buried shallow beneath the surface, was a frozen body outfitted in the same arctic camouflage he and the operators were wearing. He kept digging, unburying the body, until a face was revealed. Its open, unmoving gaze stared past him towards the sky.

  “Hey, Sharpe!” Thaniel turned to shout over his shoulder. “I think I found one of your guys.”

  When he looked down at the corpse again, the eyes were staring back at him.

  “Oh shit!” he shouted, falling away from the thing.

  The corpse’s hands shot up and grabbed Thaniel’s ankle. Thaniel stumbled, panic-firing into the thing’s torso. It ignored the assault and stood up, a reverse death rattle coming to life in its throat.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Thaniel kicked backwards, trying to get to his feet, but with the thing’s grip on his leg, he couldn’t find his footing. The groaning thing pulled itself forward and was almost on him when its forehead suddenly exploded. It collapsed, spreading blood all over his legs. Thaniel turned to see Sharpe and Maldonado rushing over to him. Sharpe’s expression was one of fury.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Sharpe shouted. “Why the hell did you wander away?”

  But Thaniel was no longer looking at Sharpe or Maldonado. Instead, his attention was focused on the shifting snow around them, where undead bodies began sprouting from snowdrifts like flowers in a haunted spring.

  Sharpe and Maldonado registered the look on his face and turned to see the emerging dead for themselves. They opened fire immediately.

  “Hyres! Get the hell out of there!” Sharpe shouted as a few of the corpses stumbled towards the fuselage and headed in through the open rear. Hyres was halfway out the windshield when he was suddenly grabbed by the legs from inside the cockpit. He shouted in pain before turning his gun to fire at the unseen attacker. The thing let go and he crawled out through the broken glass, tumbling off the nose of the plane into the snow. Blood dripped from a bite wound in his leg.

  By the time Hyres hit the ground, Sharpe and Maldonado were already running back towards their comrade, with Thaniel close on their heels. The operators brought themselves up beneath the limping Hyres armpits, supporting him while Thaniel did his best to provide covering fire against the advancing, shambling bodies.

  “Damn it, Briends!” Sharpe shouted as Thaniel sent a volley over a dead thing’s shoulder, missing it completely. “They aren’t moving that fast. Kill the bastards!”

  “Fuck you Sharpe, you do it!” Thaniel snapped back. He ran over and took Sharpe’s place beneath Hyres’s shoulder while the operator stepped away and raised his gun. He exploded the head off an incoming corpse.

  On the other side of Hyres, Maldonado chuckled between labored breaths.

  “What’s so funny?” Thaniel asked.

  “I was wrong. With aim like that, Briends, you’d make a shitty operator.”

  “A really shitty operator,” agreed Hyres with a painful groan.

  Thaniel barked a self-deprecating laugh.

  “Keep moving!” Sharpe yelled between bursts from his rifle.

  From the bunker, Francesca heard the familiar rat-tat-tat of gunfire outside. She scrambled to her feet, ran upstairs, and opened the entrance to the bunker to see gunmen dressed in white, firing on shambling corpses that moved to surround them. She registered more movement as a pack of stonemen crawled on all fours from a building beyond. The stonemen formed a line abreast and squatted low in the snow, the exposed grey of their bones blending in well with the blanket of white.

  They were setting an ambush.

  The gunmen still hadn’t seen them. One of them was limping and being helped by two others, while the fourth man covered their retreat, firing at shambling bodies with frightening precision. Whoever the gunman was, he knew what he was doing.

  As Francesca watched, one of the stonemen broke away from its position to charge quietly through the snow like a snow leopard. It headed straight for the shooter.

  Francesca couldn’t just watch them die. “Hey!” she shouted. “Look out!”

  Thaniel looked up to see a woman standing at the entrance to what he initially assumed to be a utility room. She was waving her hands and shouting, but her words went unheard over the booming of Sharpe’s automatic weapon. He looked at where she was pointing and saw the low form of a skeletal sprinting through a snowdrift towards Sharpe’s back.

  “Sharpe! At your five o’clock!” Thaniel shouted just as the skeletal leapt into the air.

  Sharpe turned; surprise written on his face as he registered the mass of bones flying at his head. He brought his rifle up just as the thing’s mouth snapped closed around the end of the barrel. It twisted its head and yanked the gun from his hands, but Sharpe was quick; by the time the thing turned back to him with a victorious snarl, he had already unholstered the pistol from his hip and was leveling it at the creature’s face. He fired six times into the skull and the thing died squealing. Sharpe picked up the rifle and resumed his firing as three more skeletals revealed themselves, charging from behind a snowbank.

  The woman ran from the safety of her shelter and joined the men. She came and replaced Maldonado beneath Hyres’s shoulder while Maldonado stepped away to help Sharpe with the oncoming dead.

  She guided them back into the open doorway of the bunker and slammed it closed into snarling faces. The small group of five living souls stood there, just at the inside of the entrance and at the top of some steps, panting while the door kicked against its frame.

  “Welcome to Aptok Island,” she said between labored breaths. “Quite the welcoming.”

  Sharpe straightened and introduced himself and the others.

  “My name’s Dr. Francesca Holloway,” she replied, taking his hand. “I’m the medical doctor here at the facility.”

  “You’re a doctor?” Sharpe asked before turning and gesturing to h
is injured teammate. “Hyres has been bit. Can you help him?” He said it bluntly.

  Francesca’s eyes tracked down Hyres’s leg and saw the blood there.

  “Oh no,” she said softly before she could stop herself. She looked back up at Sharpe who tried to keep his face neutral but couldn’t hide the desperation behind his eyes. She sighed, “I’ll see what I can do. Bring him downstairs.”

  Carrying Hyres, the operators and Thaniel followed Francesca down into a sparsely furnished concrete room. They ignored the shackles and bloodstains adorning one of the walls and followed the doctor towards a desk.

  “Put him on the desk,” Francesca ordered.

  “Not much of a clinic you have here, Doc,” Hyres groaned as they helped him over to it.

  “More like a black site interrogation room,” Maldonado confirmed.

  “It’s going to have to do, gentlemen, unless you want to take your chances through there?” she asked, nodding towards a door with a barricade across it. She knelt and began cutting away Hyres’s pant leg.

  “What’s through there?” Thaniel asked, but Francesca ignored him. She made her way past him to a mini fridge in the corner of the room and pulled out a syringe. She returned to Hyres and stabbed it into his leg. He let out a groan of satisfaction as whatever was in the injection took hold.

  “Is…is that a cure?” Sharpe asked eagerly.

  Francesca gave a small shake of her head. No.

  “It’ll…slow things down and alleviate the pain. That’s all.” She looked up at Hyres, locking eyes with him. “What’s happened to you…this bite. There’s no stopping what happens next. I’m sorry.”

  The room fell silent.

  Hyres let out a cynical chuckle, “I expected as much.” He reached for the pistol holstered at his thigh, his intent made clear in his eyes.

  “Wait,” Francesca said, putting a hand on his and stopping him from pulling out the weapon. “What was in that syringe…it’s bought you some time, and it will make the…transition…easier, less painful.”

  “Transition? Into one of those things?” Hyres scoffed. “No thanks, Doc. I’ll take my chances with God and the Devil.” He took out the weapon.