by S. O. Green
SIN CHASER
AFTER: A POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVOR SERIES
S.O. GREEN
EERIE RIVER PUBLISHING
Hamilton, Ontario
SIN CHASER
Copyright © 2021 Eerie River Publishing
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, organizations and incidents are either part of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except the climate change. That is real.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any
manner, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission by the author(s) and or publisher.
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-990245-37-4
Edited by S.O. Green & Michelle River
Cover design by Michelle River
Book Formatting by Michelle River
What happens after a worldwide cataclysmic event leaves the human population almost extinct?
Within these pages we explore grim
possibilities in this post-apocalyptic series of novelettes and novellas. Each unique story will delve into a world changed forever in a future not far from our own.
Experience with us the terrifying possibility of a world rent asunder and the struggle to survive in a world AFTER.
An eight part mini-series:
Derelict
A Place Beyond the Storm
Quantum Rule
The Creeping Void
Heart of Thorns
Fading Echoes
Carry On
Sin Chaser
www.eerieriverpublishing.com/after
For husband John, without whom
none of this would be possible.
Chapter One
Crash
The beast had to be at least a mile wide, tearing a swathe of destruction across the country as it belly-crawled coast-to-coast. Ness stared at the ruined fields and demolished buildings in its wake. Miles and miles of Kansas prairie, torn up to trenches and rubble.
At least i-70 was still intact, or as intact as anything could be after almost half a century and no maintenance. Heat-baked, fissured, littered with rusted wrecks and fallen signage. Chip steered their Hilux around the worst of it and powered over the rest, and Ness was just glad she had the easy job.
“You ever seen one this close before?” she asked, eyes flicking between the demon and the maps lying in her lap.
Chip adjusted his grip on the wheel of the truck. Ness caught his eye in the rear-view. He raked his fingers through his wiry, white beard. Not too many folks remembered the time before the Reaping, but Chip did. Made it worse that he was sweating.
“Saw Greed mow through New York City, back when it was more than just a graveyard. You could see people on the ground, like ants, slitting each other’s throats for pocket change. Buildings collapsing, streets falling into the subway. Folks should have been running, but they were looting instead.”
“How close did you get?”
“Not very. Saw the whole thing through a scope.”
“Fuck…”
The true danger of the Big Seven. Not their size, not their casual decimation of anything that stood in their way, but the aura they gave off. Sowing their sin like seeds in their wake, inciting the darkest parts of human nature like a spark to dry grass.
The Leviathan might have been the kindest of the Seven. Get too close, and you’d succumb to the heaviest, most numbing sloth. Your muscles, your heart, your brain would atrophy in seconds. Even at that distance, Ness could feel her eyelids sagging, the overpowering urge to lay her head down on the dash and never lift it.
A billboard flitted past, flying the sunflower. ‘Tiredness kills’.
Leviathan looked like a lizard—flat snout and dull, grey scales. Down below, it would have sat on a hot, flat rock somewhere to wait out eternity. On earth, it circled the globe tirelessly, another wheel spinning in the demonic war machine, purging the earth a city, a settlement, a soul at a time. It’d keep going until it reached the sea, slide into the Pacific somewhere along the California coast, emerge somewhere in Australia or Japan, killing as it went.
There was no pattern, no rhyme or reason to it. If you kept moving, kept an ear to the ground, you could avoid the Seven when they crawled or slithered or soared past. Some years, things were almost peaceful. Folks got to thinking about putting down roots. Always a mistake. They’d come back around, and they’d destroy everything you’d built. Nowhere was safe; nothing was sacred, and it could all change overnight.
Someone needed to warn people to get out of the way.
Ness lifted the ham radio handset. “Archangel, this is Sin Chaser Forty-Five. Be advised, we have Leviathan at the following coordinates and bearing…”
She rattled off her calculations, checked and double-checked. The only good thing about the Big Seven was that they seemed brainless. Easy to predict their movements. Leviathan would probably follow this course until she slipped beneath the waves. Plenty of time for everyone in between to move out of the way.
”Copy that, Forty-Five. God be with you.”
“Yeah. Copy that.”
Ness dropped the handset back on the dash. She’d learned her lesson about speaking her mind over the radio that time she’d cussed out their absentee father to a chorus of awkward silence. She hadn’t thought much of it until Twenty-One hogtied her and tossed her off an overpass. She was just glad she shared a car with one of the few Faithful still tolerant of an atheist.
“You’re doing God’s work,” he usually told her, “in your own way.”
“There’s a town coming up, few miles ahead,” she said, overlaying her topographical map with the up-to-date settlement markers. “Sanctuary. Real original.”
Most of the settlements on the map were labeled things like Sanctuary or Bastion or Haven. She wondered if it made them feel safer. Hell, if you believed in something strongly enough, didn’t that make it true?
She tried to never compare the new settlements with the ones from the world before the Reaping. Seeing how many candles had been blown out made her drink.
“Are they safe?” Chip asked.
“Should be. So long as it stays on this course.”
The radio crackled. Other cars sounded off. Reapers and road crews were carving up the remains of North America. Another of the Seven had crawled up out of the Atlantic, and there was a third heading south through Canada. It’d be a busy few months as the settlements in Ness’s territory shifted and fluctuated, trying to keep clear of the chaos. There’d be losses, as usual.
The updates tailed off, and old gospel music spilled from the speakers. The broadcast from Archangel wasn’t just news; it also carried an array of music from before the Reaping. Ness liked some of it more than others. She reached for the dial.
“Mind leaving it on?”
“Sure.”
She pulled her hand back. For Chip, she could deal. And when the Shepherd started up, well, she’d play it by ear. Depended on what the sermon was today.
She watched Leviathan’s hind leg lifting, so high it could have stepped over a building. The impact against the ground bounced the truck on its suspension. Rattling and creaking. Ness felt the vibration in her tired bones.
Cold sweat prickled down her back. “She’s turning.”
“Wha-?”
“Chip, she’s fucking turning.” She seized the radio handset again. “We need to warn Sanctuary. They’re right in the-“
“Ness…”
Her gaze snapped to the rear-view, just in time to see Chip’s eyes falling closed, his beard descending onto his chest.
Too close. We’re too close.
She snatched for the steering wheel a second too late. Chip’s hands fell away and the truck swerved hard.
The world flipped upside down.
…
”What is a Sin Chaser? I’ll tell you what. They’re the brave women and men, out on the frontline of a war we already lost, trying to keep us, the dregs of humanity, alive long enough that we might be able to rebuild. Should we be thankful to them, even if they are not of our flock? Surely. After all, are we not all at the mercy of the Big Seven, each and every day? But sometimes, Faithful, I can’t help but ask myself, what must they be running from, if running towards the Big Seven sounds like the lesser of two evils?”
“Not right now, sister,” Ness groaned, twisting the radio dial into silence.
She stared at the dusty asphalt through the shattered windscreen and realized the world was still the wrong way up. Above, her maps and charts were strewn across the ceiling of the cab. A crow sat in the open window, eyeballing her.
“Fuck off,” she grunted, swiping at it. It shot skywards in a flurry of black feathers.
She popped her belt and landed on her shoulders, hard. With a growl, she kicked open the passenger-side door. It scraped on the concrete.
“Chip,” she gasped, reaching for his blood-streaked face. “Chip, say something.”
He dangled from his belt, expression serene behind his Santa Claus whiskers. His Circle hung from its chain, nestled in his beard instead of under his shirt. Slowly, pain creased his features and his blue eyes bloomed open.
“Gotta warn ‘em…” he wheezed.
“I’d love to,” Ness said, grabbing the handset and twirling the severed cable around one finger, “but we’re off the air, old man.”
“Gotta get to ‘em…”
“Okay. Okay, I get it. Let me just…”
She reached for his belt. He grabbed at her hands, pushing them away until she stopped.
“What the fuck, Chip?”
“Leave me…. Slow you down…”
“I don’t care.”
“We both know…what happens…after… Stop…the Reapers…”
“How? How am I supposed to…?”
“You’ll…figure it out…”
He pulled the Circle from around his neck with bloody fingers, pressed it into her palm. She cringed. A holy symbol didn’t feel right in her hands, but how was she supposed to refuse the solemnity in his eyes.
“You’re doing God’s work,” he whispered, “in your own way.”
“Chip, I…”
“If the Reapers get there first, they’ll… You have to go.”
“I’ll come back for you.”
He shook his head, tucked his hands into his shirt to keep them from dangling. Just a little dignity. Red trickled through his hair and dripped from the bald patch on his crown. Ness tried to figure out where all the blood was coming from.
“Don’t,” he said, finally. “Won’t be nothing worth coming back for.”
She took a breath, false-started a sentence, and settled on, “God be with you.”
He smiled, crimson-marbled teeth. His tears snagged in the blood in his eyebrows. “Copy that.”
Ness crawled out of the wreckage, stopped just long enough to grab the tire iron that had fallen out of the trunk, and started the long hike towards Sanctuary.
Chapter Two
Awake and Alive
Sanctuary was dead.
Ness stood in what passed for the town square of the town with the hideously ironic name, tire iron in one hand, baseball cap emblazoned with a slogan that meant nothing to nobody anymore in the other. She chewed her lip, took a breath and pulled the cap over her fire-red hair, threading her ponytail out the back.
About one hundred people, all told. They’d lay down to sleep and hadn’t got back up. A few folks were sprawled in the dirt outside the church—the biggest, grandest building in town—but most of them had died at prayer. She could see them through the doors, slumped in the aisle, kneeling with their heads bowed, leaning into each other in the pews. The little prefabs they called their homes had barely survived the tremors from Leviathan’s passing.
It was on the horizon now, just a grey smudge. Ness wondered if it knew how many people it had killed.
The Big Seven didn’t even stop to collect their own harvests.
The Reapers would come soon. They were scavengers. Fucking carrion feeders, and this was a meal they wouldn’t pass up.
She needed to burn the bodies. All a hundred of them. As she saw it, she only had one option. Drag them all into the church and make it their pyre.
Doing God’s work, in her own way.
She picked up one of the bundles that was easiest to carry and hurried into the church, trying not to step on anyone as she passed. She lay her burden down by the altar and mopped the sweat off her brow.
Just another dozen dead children still to go.
Something moved, inside the church. Ness twisted, eyes narrow, ears sharp, tire iron in hand.
“Someone there?”
She heard a gasp, a sob. She passed the end of the front pew and saw a girl—couldn’t have been older than fourteen—kneeling beside a dead woman. She looked up, tan face emerging through a curtain of lustrous, black hair. Tears dripped off her chin and spotted her pristine, white church dress.
“Hands,” Ness ordered, because pretty, little girls weren’t always pretty, little girls, especially when they were alone in a dead town.
The girl did as she was asked, trembling with shock and grief and fear. She looked lost. Terrified. Ness realized the town hadn’t prepared her to deal with something like this.
They called it Sanctuary for a reason. They never expected her to need to.
“Name.”
“F-Faith,” the girl whispered.
“You the only survivor?”
A sob caught in Faith’s throat and she looked like she’d buckle. Instead, she kept her back straight and nodded.
“How?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Can you stand? Walk? Carry?”
Another nod.
“Good. Then I need you to help me bring them all in here. We need to cremate them now, before the Reapers show.”
“What’s a Reaper?”
“You don’t… Holy shit, girl, are you kidding?”
Faith shook her head. Outside, in the godless dark, an engine roared to a stop on the border of town. Ness heard laughter, jeering. Diesel-fed jackals looking for a corpse to strip.
“You’re about to find out,” Ness growled.
She slid back to the door, leaned hard against the wall, and glanced out. Three of them—two males, one female—dressed in hard-wearing leathers. Ink in the skin, faces full of shrapnel, hair both shaved and cultured in equal measure. Probably part of an old road crew, but the rot had set in. They were Reapers now, all sharp teeth and red eyes.
As she watched, the female straddled a woman in a summer dress, grabbed her by the shoulders and crushed their mouths together. She started sucking and sucking and sucking, until the dead woman’s throat distended around something glowing so bright it lit up the veins in her neck. The Reaper pulled it into her mouth with a slurp, and the thing shone green in the line b
etween them. Then she swallowed it.
Ness heard a gasp at her shoulder. Faith watched the whole thing, eyes wide and hands clamped over her mouth.
“Don’t worry,” Ness said, gesturing with the tire iron. “I’m not gonna let them get away with it.”
The other Reapers stalked around the bodies, eyes lit with savage delight, probably wondering how many they could get away with before others arrived. And they would arrive. This was just the vanguard.
Ness still didn’t know how the Reapers chose their meals. What were they looking for? Purity? Corruption? Conflict? Or was it just a free-for-all? Was a soul just a soul when you didn’t have one of your own?
The closest walked up the steps to the church, lips peeling back in a shark-toothed leer as he glimpsed the extent of the feast ahead. Then he spotted Ness in the corner of his eye and his glee soured.
The tire iron smashed his temple, crushed his eye socket and burst his eye like an overripe grape. He pitched back. Ness grabbed his jacket and kicked his feet out, slamming him to the floor and hammering his face into the ‘All Are Welcome’ doormat until he stopped struggling.
By then, his friends had noticed.
The other male drew a pistol from a side holster. The bloody iron whirled across the space between them and flattened his nose. Before he could shake it off, Ness drop-kicked him in the chest and sent him sprawling.
She grabbed his arm and twisted, spiral-fracturing him from wrist to shoulder. He jammed the gun at her as she mounted him and she blocked it, thrust the barrel under his chin. She flicked the safety off.
“No, no, n-“
The top of his head popped like a bottle cap, spattering the ground behind him with black ichor. Before Ness could get to her feet, the female tackled her with a shrieking cackle and they tumbled in the dirt. The Reaper came out on top, straddling her, hammering fists into the side of her head. Ness covered up and the Reaper bit her on the arm, needle teeth piercing through the rough fabric of her drab army jacket.
Ness tried to throw it off, but it grabbed her by a fistful of hair and pulled her closer, their lips on a collision course.
