DEAD MOON Box Set: Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series (Books 1-3)

by Matt James

  The wall to our right is full of snacks.

  Bingo.

  Jill looks at me, and I tip my chin toward the find. Less than ten seconds later, we’re all shoving anything we can fit inside our backpacks—even Hope. Having a smart kid with us is a blessing too. She understands the gravity of our situation and forgoes the candy, minus one bag of yellow M&M’s. Peanut… Good choice! Instead, she, like us, focuses on the bags of trail mix and individually wrapped protein bars. Most of them have chocolate in them either way, so she’ll still get her fix.

  “Why is there so much food?” I ask talking to myself more than to anyone in particular.

  “Does it matter?” Dad asks back.

  “Yes,” I reply, “it does. All of this shouldn’t be here after all this time. You’d think someone else would’ve come across this stash by now.”

  “Maybe they don’t like healthy stuff?” Hope asks, loudly munching on her candy.

  I roll my eyes and look back out into the atrium—back to the streaks of blood. I need to see what I can find. There has to be a reason why no one has come here. A foreboding feeling washes over me. Maybe whoever has been here hasn’t left.

  “Hang out here for a second,” I say, stepping away.

  “I’m coming too,” Jill says. Before I can argue, Jill turns to the others. “Keep an eye on Hope, will ya?”

  “Of course,” Mom replies, placing a reassuring hand on Hope’s shoulder. Dad just nods at us and begins walking the room.

  Jill kneels in front of Hope. “We’ll be right back, I promise.”

  Hope nods but doesn’t look happy about it. I’m already outside of the gift shop by the time Jill catches up with me. When she does, I make my way around to the right side of the ticket counter and see what I was dreading. There are six bodies behind the desk, and they’ve been ravaged to pieces.

  “Frank…” Jill says, pointing.

  There’s a second trail of blood starting from the bodies, heading back toward where the elevator travels down to the caves is located. This trail, unlike the other ones, is that of an upright being with bloodied footprints, something alive, whereas the first set of crimson streaks came from something being dragged.

  And they’re little.

  “More gremlins,” I say, keeping my voice down.

  As much as I don’t want to look, I have to. I push through the rear double doors and scale a short set of steps up to the outer building that holds the elevator. The footprints lead the way, and when we round the corner, we see that the doors to the elevator are broken and ajar.

  As far as the gremlin tracks are concerned, they just keep right on going into the darkness.

  Jill draws her gun, and I unsheathe my machete. Side-by-side, we edge forward until we can barely peek out into the empty shaft. Unfortunately, or in this case, fortunately, we can’t see squat. Jill quietly digs into a pocket on the side of her pack and produces a small, yellow, pen-shaped object.

  A glowstick.

  She snaps the object and vigorously shakes it. Then, she looks at me. I nod. Biting her lip, Jill leans out into the black hole and drops it. Not twenty feet below our perch, we get the first glimpse of a gremlin. She’s clinging to the side of the elevator shaft—and so is another one.

  And another.

  And another.

  “Run,” I whisper, as I see dozens upon dozens of tiny faces turn up our way.

  Terrified, Jill doesn’t move, staying locked in place instead.

  I grab her arm and yank her back toward the castle. Just as we push back through the rear doors, a chorus of high-pitched shrieks let loose. Jill responds and tugs free of my grip, moving on her own now. We hustle back down the short flight of stairs and burst through the rear doors, back into the atrium.

  Hope, Mom, and Dad all rush out from inside the gift shop, unsure of what’s happening.

  “Go, go, go!” I shout, terrified by what I saw. “Don’t stop!”

  4

  “What is it?” Dad yells, struggling down the steps of the castle.

  “Oh, my god!” Mom shouts, looking behind us.

  Everyone bolts out of the door and, instead of turning down the narrow one-way street that Ruby Falls sits on, we continue forward, straight down the hill on the other side. The front lawn is somewhat steep and rocky, but we make do and successfully traverse it without injury.

  Eighty-feet later, we find ourselves in the middle of the Cravens Terrace and Scenic Highway intersection. The Ruby Falls castle is alive with movement, as in, the entire building is swarming with crawling bodies. But that’s where they stay. There are hundreds of Unseen children squirming atop the castle now, each one of them hissing and screeching into the air.

  I’m not sure why they aren’t following us, but my guess is that they don't like the daylight and the open space that surrounds us. Like I said before, gremlins tend to not like either.

  Not that we’re going to hang around long enough to find out.

  “Which way do we go?” Dad yells, looking down the street.

  I shove him forward. “Screw the roads. Everyone back into the trees!”

  I’m the first one over the guardrail and I quickly turn to help my parents. Jill lifts Hope up and hands her off to me before vaulting the barrier like a gymnast. As she passes me, she gives me a look that says she’s still thinking about what we witnessed in the elevator shaft.

  So am I.

  That was by far the worst thing I’ve seen thus far. I know it sounds crazy, but it really was the worst. I knew it would be hard to process seeing a gremlin up close, live in person, but seeing so many monsters that used to be kids of Hope’s age…

  Some were even younger.

  I shake my head and try to clear the memory away. It doesn’t work, but you know what does? Hope squeezing me tight. I know its sappy, but it’s true. I’m a maple tree—full of sap.

  God, I’m an emotional wreck.

  It’s incredible what the end of the world can do to you. I was emotionally dead just a month ago. Now, I have a hankering to eat a gallon of ice cream while watching a Hallmark Channel movie marathon.

  Candace Cameron-Bure Christmas special?

  Sure, I’m down.

  The grade beyond the guardrail is steep, and our footing is poor. No one stays on their feet for more than a few seconds at a time. Luckily, none of us crack our skulls either. I tumble with the rest of them, sliding to a stop when the earth finally levels out. Standing, I see that we’re fifteen feet beneath road level and another twenty feet to the north, and whatever gear we lost during the grassy slide is quickly collected.

  Now, we restart our escape with rockets lit under our asses.

  The trees here are even thicker than those from earlier. While the woods around Lookout Mountain have paths to use, these weren’t meant to be hiked through. These are all cluttered with branches and tall grass, the latter coming up to Hope’s chest. After only a few feet, she climbs into my arms and out of the suffocating underbrush.

  We move this way for a hundred feet before we’re forced to stop at a cliff. It isn’t that high—about three-stories tall. While not high up in cliff terms, it’s still too high up for us to jump.

  Mom and Dad argue with one another about how to get down while Jill and I do the same ourselves. The only one that isn’t speaking is Hope. She’s facing away from the drop, looking back into the trees.

  “Shhh!” she hisses, keeping her voice low. “Listen.”

  We all quiet down and hear it immediately. At first, it sounds like a thousand sheets of sandpaper doing work on wood. But as the noise rises in volume, I realize that it’s actually getting closer.

  The gremlins are giving chase.

  “Not good,” I say, turning to my father.

  He’s already digging into his backpack. Not a heartbeat later, he pulls out a coiled length of rope—the last one we have. He picked it up a week ago, but we’ve yet to need it.

  ‘Now’ sounds good.

  After he tie
s off an end to a tree, Hope and I are the first to descend. This time we don't have repelling harnesses to help us out like we had in Art's store back in Florida. We’re going to be doing this completely naked, as in, with no help of any kind.

  With Hope clinging to my chest like a frightened koala, I turn and lean my ass out over the cliff. As comfortable with my positioning as I can get, I jump away from the wall and release my grip on the rope just a bit. Hope yelps when we drop, and I do everything I can to keep us from actually doing just that. The ground beneath us is asphalt and nothing else.

  Thankfully, the only parts of my hands that are beat up are my knuckles. My palms are okay, and we make short work of the descent. I quickly set Hope down and search our landing zone for anything unfriendly. Thankfully, I don’t find anything. No cars either. U.S. 64 is completely deserted.

  “Shit,” I mumble, disappointed.

  “Faster!” Dad yells from above, begging Jill to move her ass.

  If she had the time, Jill would’ve gladly free-climbed the damn thing and let someone else use the rope instead. Even now, she’s only halfway to me, and my mother is already starting her own descent. This is where it could get really bad, extremely quick. Like I’ve mentioned before, Mom and Dad are in phenomenal shape for their age.

  But this is insane!

  Jill lands and rolls her ankle, grunting as she hits the ground. She doesn’t stay down for long, though. She hobbles to her feet and draws her gun, just as my father opens fire on our pursuers. Jill does the same from here, taking pot shots at anything that moves in the canopy above—shadows mostly.

  After four booms of his shotgun, I see Dad practically leap from the ledge. Small, clawed hands rake at his back in midair, missing him by mere inches. He has the rope wrapped around his waist and is clutching it tightly. A second later his fall is averted, and he is yanked back and thrown hard into the stone facing. With a loud, “oof” he hits the back of his head and let's go, dropping like a bomb from fifteen feet in the air. While not usually a fatal height from which to fall from, it's just as likely to kill him as it is to break his back and legs.

  With one last desperate swipe of his hand, Dad snags the rope and slows himself just enough to keep himself from landing on top of me with the force of a wrecking ball. We hit the street hard, yes, but we’re both alive. Tiny hands find my shoulder, and in my dazed state, I think it’s one of the gremlins.

  “Get up!” Hope urges, once again pulling on my jacket.

  My wife and mother appear overhead, and they help Dad and me up. Woozy, I stumble into Jill’s arms and shake my head hard. I blink away the spots and notice that we’re alone. No Unseen at all.

  I look up and see why. The gremlins are still there—dozens of them—but they’re not following us down the side of the cliff. We must’ve left their territory by scaling its natural border. This is the first time that I’ve thought of the Unseen as being territorial. There’s a distinct hierarchy within their species for sure, but until now, I only thought of them as nomadic beasts.

  Interesting, I think, rubbing my head, I’ll need to remember that.

  Unfortunately, I will remember it—all of it. The snarling, drooling faces of so many mutated children will stay with me for the rest of my life.

  “Give me a second,” I say, going to one knee, catching my breath. The first person to check on me is Hope and I wrap the girl up in my arms and squeeze her tight.

  “Are you okay?” she asks, sniffing.

  I nod and release her, getting to my feet.

  “How’s Dad?” I ask, looking at my mother. Somehow, both are still on their feet.

  I need to stop underestimating them.

  “Alive,” she says, staring up at the shaking treetops. “Bleeding—probably has a concussion too.”

  “I’m fine,” he says, shoving out of her arms. As soon as he’s on his own, he almost collapses in on himself. “Ugh… Maybe not.”

  I double check the road in both directions and confirm, once more, that we’re alone. I cross the street and lean out over the guardrail of the westbound lane. There’s another cliff, but this one is much too high to scale. Looking northeast, all I see is water and green—the Tennessee River and the peninsula of Moccasin Bend, respectively.

  But a little further to the east is a city.

  Chattanooga.

  From here, the main road into Chattanooga is I-24, a route we can’t quite get to from where we currently stand. After taking a minute to compose ourselves, we plod down 64 for a half a mile. My “plan” was to keep going this way for as long as we were forced to, but we found a break in the tree line bordering the roadway.

  There, on the other side of the guardrail is a somewhat-smooth, yet rocky slope, and at the bottom of that slop are train tracks. But it's not the train tracks that have my attention, it’s the interstate wedged between them and the river.

  And if we can get to it…

  “Alright everyone,” I say, “on your butts.”

  No one says a word. We all climb over the rail, sit down on the gravely ground and let go. After a few feet, my ass is already killing me. The stones beneath my cheeks are more prominent than they appeared from above. Forty feet later, we come to a jarring, painful stop. Hope seems fine, however. Then, I see why. She was sitting comfortably on Jill’s lap.

  The girl pops up like it was no big deal, smiling wide.

  “Fun?” I ask, rubbing my ass.

  She shrugs.

  “Hey,” I say. She looks up at me. “You’re still allowed to have fun.” She smiles when I reach down and tickle her ear. “Just pick your moments.”

  We follow the tracks northeast for a quarter of a mile until we reach a train yard that appears to be abandoned. Besides a few random structures and a perimeter of barbed-wire fencing, the only other things on the property are nine, steel petroleum trailers.

  “Over there,” Jill says.

  She’s pointing further down the fence line. I spot the gate to the yard and quickly make my way toward it. We enter with no issues and cross the empty expanse quietly. Just on the other side of the yard is I-24.

  “Cars,” I say, sighing.

  The interstate isn’t backed up too bad either. From here, I see only a couple of stoppages, nothing too serious. With any luck, we’ll find one with keys and get moving.

  “Um, Frank?” Mom asks, looking around. “How do we get through?”

  I was thinking the same thing. There doesn’t seem to be an entrance to the interstate from here—and why would there be! No shit, Frank, it’s a fucking interstate! Like all major highways, the only way on or off is by entrance and exit ramps.

  Hmmm…

  “What about that?”

  I turn and find Jill looking straight up while shielding her eyes against the rising sun. The sky is void of all cloud cover. If it weren’t for the looming threat of the Unseen, it would be a perfect day for a family outing.

  “A billboard?” Mom asks.

  The metal support post is inside the rail yard’s property line, but the frame holding the Subway advertisement hangs out over the road—the trees bordering the road, really. If we can scale the sign and climb down into the trees…

  I smile. This could actually work.

  And the echoes of screams behind us gets everyone moving.

  I turn and look back the way we came and see movement in the trees on the opposite side of 64. The gremlins didn’t lose interest in us back at the cliff face, or reach the edge of their territory, for that matter. They were merely delayed in finding a way to us.

  My parents are first this time. Then, Jill and Hope. The initial wave of Unseen-children enters the yard just as I get my foot up on the billboard’s ladder. It’s an awful sight too. Every pre-teen age group is accounted for. The only range I don’t see is anyone younger than Hope—around four or five.

  “Faster!” I shout, scurrying higher.

  Halfway there, I watch as Jill and my mother help my dad down into the branch
es situated inches below the sign’s catwalk. With their backs turned, the only person with their eyes on me is Hope. But as I hustle further up the ladder, I notice that her eyes aren’t actually on me.

  They’re fixated on something beneath me.

  Seconds later, I finish my ascent and practically flop onto the catwalk with a loud bong. On my back, I go to sit up, but am ensnared by multiple sets of tiny hands. I thrash at their tiny, clawed fingers, successfully knocking them loose before they inflict any damage.

  I struggle to get to my feet, almost careening off the twenty-foot-tall walkway when I do. Twin sets of screeches respond to my escape, and I promptly spin and lash out with a backhanded fist, catching two little boys mid-air. The kiddies are knocked back and drop into the swarm of bodies below.

  Oh. My. God.

  It’s precisely what I saw inside the elevator shaft. The gremlins crawl over each other as if they are a mass of serpents. More take the places of the two I dispatched, scaling the ladder to the catwalk. I back away and swiftly draw my machete. Using my bow would be a complete waste of time and ammo.

  I wish I were John McClane right about now.

  Now, I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.

  “Let’s go, Frank!”

  I turn and see that I’m the only one still here. Jill and the others have already made it into the trees. Mom and Dad are on the ground aiming their weapons up my way. Neither has fired and for a good reason. A) I’m in the way, and B) the catwalk is too. Plus, their line of sight isn’t right either. They don’t have a clear shot. And honestly, how many of them are they realistically going to kill?

  Again, another example of wasting of ammo.

  I judge the distance between the edge of the catwalk and the topmost tree limb, and with the billboard entirely overtaken by wriggling bodies, I make the choice to jump. Now, this isn’t a great idea for a number of reasons—mainly because I’m still holding my machete. If I hit wrong, I could impale myself.

  I’m going to need both of my hands free.

  So, I toss the weapon aside with the intention of finding it when I land. And boy do I land!

  The limb I picked immediately snaps beneath my weight. The next one doesn’t, however. Instead of breaking, I take it across the back of my thighs and flip ass over tea kettle. I’m not sure how many times I’m spun, nor the time it takes for me to hit the ground.