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

by Roach, Aaron

  “I’m looking for the goddamned key,” he snapped. “Like you told me to!”

  “Hey, it’s okay, Thaniel. Whatever is going on with you, you’re okay.”

  But Thaniel wasn’t seeing her. Instead he saw his friends lying dead on a cold ship’s deck, the Defiant sinking in Boston Harbor, Neto’s body dropping from a cliff, and a growling Hyres shackled to a wall. He saw red. He grabbed the empty desk and flipped it, swearing in frustration. He raised his rifle and rounded it towards Francesca.

  “Move!” he roared.

  She screamed and threw herself out of the way just as he pulled the trigger and unloaded the magazine into the locked filing cabinet. Metal tore into metal and the sound carried.

  “What the fuck is going on in there?” Maldonado shouted from outside. Within seconds, the operator was climbing through the window, his weapon held at the ready, expecting to see the civilians under attack. Instead all he saw was Briends, his rifle raised, while Francesca cowered in the corner with her hands over her ears. The look on Briends’s face was one he recognized, from other operators who had been in the game for too long or from soldiers immediately after a prolonged firefight.

  When he thought about it, Maldonado was surprised the man had lasted this long before breaking.

  “Hey, Briends?” Maldonado asked, trying to sound calming. “Why don’t you lower the gun, my man? You’re scaring the doc.”

  Thaniel snapped his head at him, his eyes distant. He stared through him for a long moment before focusing. “Maldonado… Francesca…I’m sorry.” He lowered the rifle and Maldonado came over and gently took it from him. “It’s okay, Briends,” he said. “You’re just experiencing a break…a teensy tiny psychological break.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Thaniel said dumbly.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not.” Maldonado replied, keeping his voice delicate.

  In the corner, Francesca crawled to the filing cabinet now riddled with bullet holes. “Hey, Thaniel?” she said warily.

  “Doc, I’m…I’m really sorry.”

  “No. It’s not that… look!” She pointed to one of the holes where a bullet had slammed through the cabinet’s locking mechanism. “You got it open!”

  Maldonado raised an eyebrow – “Guess you’re not a shit shot after all, Briends.”

  Thaniel ignored him and ran over to Francesca, “What’s in it?”

  “Everything!” she answered, beaming. She reached in and pulled out folders, video recordings, stacks of floppy disks, handwritten notebooks, and papers. “There’s got to be answers in here somewhere, right?”

  “Hopefully,” Maldonado answered, “Pack all of it.”

  Moments later, all three of their backpacks were filled heavy with the materials.

  “Hope you two have been keeping up with your cardio,” Maldonado grunted under the weight on his shoulders. “It’s a long way back to the ducky.”

  “Wait!” Francesca exclaimed, remembering. “There are snowmobiles over at the security building!”

  “Where?”

  “Nearby! Only two buildings over!”

  -82-

  Don dragged the unconscious Delilah by her hair through the frantic running mob. Around him, blood eagles tackled people to the ground and groaners swarmed over downed victims. Yet he continued on, unfazed and unmolested by the dead.

  As he made his way through the chaos, he hummed a tune.

  I am a god to be feared.

  With a smile playing on his face, Don mused on how well the apocalypse had treated him. He had evolved into something better, grander – a new being who commanded deference from the dead and took respect from the living in the form of his Delilahs.

  Suddenly, a skeletal came charging through the throng directly towards him, startling him enough to pull the pistol from his waistband. He raised it, only for the thing to come to a skidding stop a few feet away. Don snorted in amusement as it squealed in misery before turning to find a different victim. “Shoo, little blood eagle!” he called after its retreating form. “Your god is working!”

  Behind Don, the unconscious Delilah began to stir, coming awake. He rounded on her and kicked her in the head until she stilled into unconsciousness again.

  “Shh, Delilah, we haven’t even started yet.”

  At the schoolhouse, Don dragged her up the steps and closed the door behind him.

  -83-

  While the horde feasted, the once-Burome sniffed at the forest floor outside the camp. It tried to focus on the scents there, but the dull, hungry thoughts of newly turned seedlings flooding into the horde’s shared consciousness sent ripples across its mind.

  It was distracting.

  With a grunt, it numbed itself to the feasting and brought the meaty slab of its tongue to the musty earth. It tasted the faint presence of long-dead seedlings, three of them, and then spat when it recognized the taste of the Foul One.

  But there, between the seedlings and the Foul One, was the memory of the girl.

  Baby…girl… The once-Burome tried to mutter, but only clicks and chirps spilled from its broken-toothed maw. A memory from its birth unfolded in its mind, blooming like a water lily on a pond.

  The girl, skirting around bodies on the museum floor. Why were there so many bodies? Where was Sophia running? A red and white backpack disappearing through a doorway filled with daylight.

  The reins of the horde trembled and the once-Burome brought its attention back to the feasting in the camp. It felt the pleasure of thousands of its underlings satiating themselves on the unchanged, feeding and growing the horde.

  But the Foul One was there, and so was the memory of the girl.

  Where the Foul One walked, the strands of its control over the horde came falling away like a broken spider’s web, forcing the once-Burome to repair the links in the Foul One’s wake. Further testing its control were its Others who sought to destroy the girl, who recognized the memory of her as a source of their master’s weakness. Through seedling eyes, the once-Burome could sense the girl running through the swarm, panicked and scared. As its underlings dared to draw closer to her, the once-Burome was forced to snap its reigns taut with a lie.

  The girl… Foul.

  It flooded the taste of scat and bile into their thoughts, hammering home the illusion.

  Daddy can't save you all the time, baby girl.

  The words came out of nowhere, from a memory of a memory, unreachable like a drop of water sizzling out of existence in a fire. The once-Burome snarled as it tried to understand the meaning of the words, but its thoughts were too primal, too basic to comprehend the love and sorrow there. It grew furious at its lack of understanding and roared its frustration at the trees. It brought itself up fully vertical and charged through the thick brush towards the camp.

  To find the memory.

  To know.

  -84-

  Through the stampede, Sophia saw the man she recognized as Don Truant coming up behind Kat. Though she knew who he was, there was something about the man that was different – the way his face was set, the darkness in his eyes. It was a look she’d never seen on a person before, one that was both violence and lust.

  Evil.

  She opened her mouth to shout a warning to her friend, but before the words came, she was knocked to the ground by panicked passersby who rushed to put distance between themselves and the dead. When she attempted to regain her feet, she was knocked back down, pushed into the hard earth until she found herself beneath a riot of stampeding bodies. Helpless, she tucked into a fetal position and covered her head and face, waiting and hoping that the flood of people would pass before she drowned under the weight of it all.

  Then, just as her last breath was being squeezed from her body, the weight suddenly disappeared. She pulled air in deep, inflating her lungs with a gasp then pushed herself into a sitting position. She sat there in a daze for a few heartbeats, trying to bring the world back into focus, only to realize the world was now full of dead things
eating their way through fleeing victims. Off to her left, a mob of ambling groaners moved in her direction and she scrambled to run away. She had only taken three steps when she was tackled to the ground again by a pouncing skeletal. She looked up to see its drooling, snarling mouth come to a sudden stop inches from her face. The skeletal snorted, before backing away slowly, growling as if hating every retreating step. Sophia hesitantly returned to her feet to see that she was now surrounded, enclosed in a crowd of snapping teeth and reaching, grasping fingers. The dead were gathered in a perfect circle around her, as if she was in some invisible bubble that they couldn’t enter. As she watched, one of the skeletals tried to charge into the clearing only to stop abruptly, stumbling at the edge as if yanked hard backwards. It shrieked and beat its skull in frustration.

  Sophia took a tentative step forward, and the circle of dead things moved with her. They snapped at the edges of the unseen barrier but didn’t approach any nearer. She took another hesitant step, and another, until she was running at a slow trot, keeping her gaze cast downwards so she wouldn’t have to look at the snarling faces.

  Eventually, the dead seemed to lose interest in her. Unable to reach their prey, they began to break away to seek victims elsewhere, until finally Sophia was left alone in a field of corpses twitching upon the grass.

  Throughout the camp, the shouting and gunfire continued.

  Sophia ran, skirting around bodies and calling out for her friend, panicking that she would never see Kat alive again. Then, as she started to fly past the schoolhouse, she remembered the face that grinned at her through the rain.

  An evil grin to match an evil man.

  Sophia charged up the steps.

  -85-

  Sharpe focused on his countdown and breathing as he pushed his way through the deep snow. At any moment he expected the dead to catch up to him, to feel stabbing bones at his back, and put an end to his mission before he ever arrived at the lab.

  But the trail of skeletals and groaners lying dead in the snow behind him was growing longer and, despite all odds, the entrance to the lab was looming closer.

  …Five…four…three…two…one.

  He turned and knelt, bringing the sights of his rifle to focus on a skeletal sprinting after him. He saw it stumble as the gunfire ricocheted off its dense body, before a well-placed shot through an eye cavity sent it crashing face first into the snow. He turned and continued running, beginning his countdown all over again.

  Turn and fire.

  Sharpe killed one more skeletal before arriving at the lab. The door was riddled with bullet holes and hung partially ajar. He didn’t slow as he ran through and slammed it closed behind him. Inside, he pulled a metal table loudly across the linoleum floor and jammed it against the door just as the dead arrived on the other side, screeching and pounding against it.

  Rifle leveled, Sharpe turned and scanned his surroundings. He found himself in a small white room filled with scientific equipment, where microscopes lay toppled over on tables and discarded lab coats and shattered test tubes littered the floor. The floors and walls were pockmarked with craters of gunfire and to Sharpe’s right there was another wall, one interrupted by a large glass window, like a double-sided mirror in a police interrogation room. On the other side of the glass, he saw it.

  The room full of metal.

  There were six large vats, three on either side of the space, with a maze of bronze and stainless-steel tubing connecting them all. In between the vats, running down the length of the room, were tables adorned with burners, petri dishes, and flasks containing colorful, unknown potions. Beyond the tables, along the far wall, was a control panel with lights that winked at him across the distance like faraway stars. Underneath the stars, hunched on the floor with its back against the control panel, was a corpse in a bloodied lab coat.

  Sharpe watched the room and the corpse for several minutes, waiting. Other than the shrieking skeletals outside, nothing moved or made a sound.

  He didn’t trust the stillness.

  This is where Hyres said the alpha is hiding.

  Sharpe grimaced – there was no point waiting any longer. He pushed his way through the door that separated the two rooms, rifle raised, and walked into the metal-filled lab.

  Nothing stirred.

  Sharpe moved at a slow trot between a row of tables, his rifle scanning and ever vigilant, until he reached the control panel at the end of the room. As he approached the corpse there, he saw the gaping hole that went through the top of its head and the splatter of brain matter on the panel behind it. At its feet was a discarded, long-handled axe and in its right hand, with its finger still on the trigger, was an old six-shooter. Down on its right hip, clipped to its pocket, was a security card. Sharpe knelt and read the name.

  Dr. Emilio Neyra.

  Sharpe grunted in contempt. The mad bastard had taken the easy way out.

  Sharpe’s eyes came up to the panel as he tried to make sense of the controls there. To his relief, most of the buttons were labeled, though he had no idea what many of the words on these labels meant. It took him a moment to find what he was looking for in a series of buttons and lights just above the dead Neyra’s head.

  Next to labels that showed Vats 4, 5, and 6 was a designation that read “Compound Armed.” And there, above Vat 4, a solid white light indicated that the contents of the vat had been released. Above Vats 5 and 6 however, next to wording that read “Pressurized – Primed for Release,” green lights winked at him mockingly.

  The ‘Released’ indicator above those vats was pleasingly empty of light.

  Sharpe felt his heart rate rise. He immediately set to scanning the panel for an off button, a kill switch, anything that would stop the doomsday containers ready to go off. His eyes came across a red button beneath a label: “Emergency Neutralization.”

  It was one of the few words on the panel he understood but he had no idea what it would do. Fuck! He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and slammed his thumb down onto the button, hoping.

  Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing.

  Sharpe opened his eyes and stared intently at the control panel, looking for changes. The lights above Vats 5 and 6 now blinked an intermittent green and red. He let out a long exhale. Okay. He scanned the panel until his eyes came to a switch beneath a blinking white light that read ‘Activate.’

  Was that on before?

  Sharpe whispered a prayer before leaning over and flicking the switch. Immediately above and behind him, the maze of pipes connecting the massive vats came alive with rattling and hissing. He turned and let his gaze track along the pipes as he tried to pinpoint the moving sounds, imagining some miracle concoction making its way through the tubes to neutralize the threat at the end of the maze. As he followed the sounds around the bends and turns, he saw, through the tubing, two large pits staring back at him like the eyes of some jungle cat in a forest canopy.

  Sharpe’s breath caught in his throat when he saw it, but beyond that, he didn’t react. He forced his face to remain impassive, to keep his eyes on the sounds of the moving liquid until his gaze went past the observer. He didn’t want the thing to know he had spotted it watching him. He needed to see this through to the end first. He forced himself to turn his back on the gaze as the hissing and rattling of the pipes moved overhead and down to the vats on his right.

  Immediately, the vats began to groan like poisoned victims.

  The groaning and shaking of the vats went on for what felt like several minutes before the blinking lights above Vats 5 and 6 finally went dark. On the other side of the panel, next to the words “Compound Neutralized,” a white light flicked on.

  Just like that, it was over.

  Sharpe grinned. Almost.

  He rounded, raising the rifle high and made ready to let loose a hail of gunfire at the observer in the pipes.

  It was gone.

  “What the –” he stepped forward, keeping his aim directed at the ceiling when he felt a sudden explodin
g pressure in the small of his back, followed immediately by a numbness in his legs. He looked down to check if they were still there, still attached to his body, but all he saw was an ossified pike that protruded outwards from his stomach. It had come through his spine, severing it. A groan escaped his lips, only to be cut short a moment later as he felt a presence over his shoulder, close to his ear. A low growl followed by moisture as the thing salivated onto the back of his neck.

  Sharpe still had the use of his arms and despite the pain crashing upwards from his wound, he still had the mental faculty to fight back. He turned his rifle around and directed the barrel over his shoulder at where he assumed the beast’s face would be. Using his thumb, he pulled the trigger. He felt his eardrum burst with the proximity of the shot, and a moment later the floor came crashing up to him as he was dropped from the thing’s spiked arm. He collapsed into a broken heap and began crawling across the floor with his arms while still managing to grip his weapon. When the ringing in his ears stopped, he glanced over his shoulder to see the beast, a massive skeletal with hornlike protrusions from its forehead, staring furiously at him.

  Sharpe turned to bring his rifle up to bear one more time, but the beast leapt away. It launched itself upwards, dodging gunfire as it scrambled across the ceiling, before dropping back down on top of him. Sharpe grunted as the thing landed, stabbing into him with its speared arms like a gorilla slamming its fists into the ground. Despite his ribs shattering and his lungs bursting from the onslaught, Sharpe kept his finger on the trigger and held on to life.

  They stayed like that – for heartbeats or an eternity, with monster stabbing downwards while man fired upwards – roaring defiantly at each other.

  When the gun clicked empty and the firing stopped, so too did the stabbing. The skeletal grunted in victory and Sharpe used the intermission to drop his empty rifle and unholster the 9mm strapped to his thigh, but as he brought it up to fire, the beast swatted it away nonchalantly. He watched it clank against the floor and settle nearby.