Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1)

by Flint Maxwell

  “That sounds inappropriate,” Derek mumbled.

  “There’s our Derek. He’s back,” Jane said, smiling, but Logan thought the smile on her face looked…off.

  A sudden feeling came over him, telling him there wouldn’t be many reasons to smile anymore.

  “Yeah…” Brad said. His brow furrowed. He cocked his head, scanned around the room. “Have you guys seen my mom?”

  The others shook their heads. Logan said ‘No’.

  “I’m gonna go check on her really quick,” Brad said.

  “Mind if I finish up the barricading?” Logan asked.

  “Nope. Be my guest,” Brad said. He handed Logan the hammer and took a handful of long nails out of his pocket, setting them on the empty chair closest to him. “There’s more out in the garage. Feel free to break whatever you want for wood. Ma won’t care under these circumstances.”

  Logan nodded. He didn’t feel too comfortable breaking someone else’s stuff, someone he barely knew who’d saved his and his wife’s lives, but the fact of the matter stood that something was happening outside, something none of their minds were ready to accept or comprehend.

  It is the humans’ will to survive. Logan figured if he had to break apart a few tables and chairs and cabinets to help increase their chances of survival, then so be it. “Derek, help me with this,” he said.

  He hardly needed the help. The centerpiece of the living room only weighed a little over ten pounds; for a man of Logan’s stature, that was the equivalent of a feather. He only wanted Derek’s assistance to help ease the kid’s mind.

  Between the two of them, they got the legs off the table without making much noise. Then Logan held the flat surface over the bay window, while Derek hammered away. Softly, but with a driving force.

  “What do you two know about carpentry?” Jane said from the couch.

  “All these years together, and I’m still surprising you,” Logan replied. He turned his head around and winked at his wife. She smiled back.

  “Hold still,” Derek said, muffled because he held a nail between his teeth while he pounded in another one.

  “Sorry.”

  After the coffee table was up, they took apart an end table and nailed it over the front door window, using the last of their nails.

  Logan decided to go out to the garage for more. As he walked through the kitchen, he heard Brad’s low voice coming down from upstairs. Logan paused, straining to listen. Did the poor kid sound upset? He thought so, but who wouldn’t be upset right then? Only sociopaths, he figured. Then he shook his head because he was a guest in this home, and Uncle Tommy had taught him many years before that eavesdropping was rude, and that sort of lesson tended to stick.

  Logan went through the garage door, but stopped when he heard a shrieking bark. Not from a dog, but from something else, something alien. His flesh broke out in goosebumps. As big as he was, he knew he’d be no match for one of those things without a gun…and this one sounded close. Too close.

  He shut his eyes and tried not to think about it. This proved an impossible task, so he opted for busying himself instead—as quietly as possible, that was.

  Past the parked Toyota was a workbench. Logan didn’t immediately see any nails, but after a little searching, he found them on one of the attached shelves. He also found an old radio.

  This made him do a double take.

  He took the radio in his hands and turned the dial. No television, no power, and no internet meant no way to get the news of the world, which he expected to be grim and growing grimmer by the minute. Still, hope flickered in him like a dying candle, and he would not let it go out. Not yet.

  There was a crackle of static. A hiss, like air leaking from a tire. Then—

  Garbled voices. A snatch of conversation. Logan adjusted the dial again, but only got more static. He kept turning it back and forth, the little orange bar running through the numbers.

  He switched to F/M.

  Nothing. Pure static.

  Back to A/M.

  His heart leaped. Another snippet of voices.

  “…fighting…taking back…”

  His eyes wide, he brought the radio as close to his ear as possible.

  “Safe zones in—”

  The transmission cut out, but it wasn’t the signal that went dead; it was the radio. The thing had powered off.

  Safe zones where, dammit?

  Frantically, Logan flipped the device over and unlatched the battery compartment. He switched the batteries around, hoping he could get a little more juice from them that way, an old trick.

  He hit the dial again.

  No sound. Nothing. The piece of work had died.

  He saw that it took four AA batteries, and began searching through the workbench again, but the creature outside shrieked once more, almost a warning… and it was answered by another shriek, more grating and vicious than the first.

  Logan glanced at the one window, saw nothing but blackness outside, and decided he’d had enough time alone in the garage.

  By the time Derek and Logan had gotten the coffee table over the bay window, Brad Long was standing in the doorway of his mother’s upstairs bedroom.

  He’d known she was dead for a few minutes now.

  One candle burned on her nightstand. Wax droplets fell with a soft tink on the glass base. The dancing shadows on her face made it look like she was opening and closing her eyes.

  She wasn’t.

  Neither did her chest rise and fall.

  Brad didn’t know how he’d been able to stay on his feet. When the realization that his mother had died hit him, he lost all feeling in his legs; in fact, he’d lost all feeling in his entire body. A high-pitched beeeeeep echoed around his brain. He saw that his hands were shaking, yet he couldn’t feel them shaking.

  As the fifth minute bled into the sixth, Brad found his voice.

  “Ma?” he whispered. Then louder, “Wake up, Ma.”

  She didn’t.

  A little louder now. “Ma, wake up. I’m sorry. Please wake up.”

  These were the words Logan had heard on his way to the garage.

  Now Brad forced his legs to move, though they felt as if they were made of iron. Each step was a full body exercise. As he got closer to the bed, he realized he didn’t want to; what he really wanted was to turn around and run down the steps and out the door. Maybe then he would wake up from this terrible nightmare; maybe then, his mother would be okay and the world wouldn’t be ending, and maybe his father would’ve never killed himself.

  Of course, the logical part of his mind knew this was no nightmare; it knew the difference between reality and fiction. Unfortunately. This right here? This was cold-blooded reality.

  “Ma?” he said again, reaching out to touch her. As soon as he did, he recoiled. Her flesh was ice cold and rigid, like she’d been dead for days instead of a hours.

  This is your mother, Brad, he told himself. Your mother! She’s not some stranger. Don’t get squeamish now!

  Cold flesh or not, his mind was right. Now he laid his ear on her chest, straining to hear a heartbeat, a breath, anything.

  He heard nothing.

  She was dead. As dead as dead could be.

  Brad sat on the edge of her bed for a moment. Feeling was beginning to return to his body. He rested his head in his hands and sobbed quietly. Three minutes later, booming steps came up the stairs.

  He didn’t bother looking up.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  He didn’t answer, and the door creaked open.

  Logan asked, “Hey, everything okay? I don’t mean to intrude, but I was wondering if you had any AA batteries anywhere? I found this radio—” His voice cut off when the door stopped creaking.

  Brad knew what Logan was seeing: a woman frozen stiff in her bed, her eyes wide open as if in great shock, and her son sitting nearby, crying.

  “She’s dead,” he told the big man.

  “What? How?” Logan asked.

 
; Brad shook his head and swallowed down another sob. “I—I don’t know.”

  Footsteps came across the room, causing the boards to creak. Large hands closed over his shoulder.

  “Come on, Brad. Let’s get you out of here.”

  He went willingly enough. He wished he could say he’d put up more of a fight, but after everything he’d gone through in the span of less than a day, he had no fight left.

  Logan steered him out of the room and down the steps. He guided him to the couch, where Jane was now sitting up.

  All of it seemed unreal, like he was in a daze and would wake up any second now.

  Logan said something in a low voice that Brad couldn’t hear.

  Jane replied, “Yeah, I’m all right. You might have to help me up the stairs.”

  Then Logan was on his knees in front of Brad. Another big mitt on Brad’s shoulder. “Jane is a nurse. She’s gonna go take a look at your mom.”

  Brad didn’t say anything. His vision was blurred by tears. That wasn’t his mom anymore; that was a corpse.

  “Derek, you stay down here with Brad, all right?” Logan said.

  “Sure.”

  The candles were back on in the living room, because the windows were all blacked out with dismantled pieces of his mom’s furniture, but it still seemed too bright for Brad.

  Logan and Jane left.

  Brad wiped his eyes and began laughing like a lunatic.

  The upstairs bedroom smelled, to Logan, like death. He wasn’t sure it had had a smell before. It certainly did now.

  Jane walked to the bed with Logan behind, ready to catch her if she so much as faltered. He didn’t know much about the effects of concussions, but he knew it probably wasn’t good for her to be up and about.

  Drastic times, drastic measures, he supposed.

  Jane studied the dead woman for what seemed like an eternity. She felt her wrist for a pulse that wasn’t there. She peered into her lifeless eyes. She pressed against her stomach.

  “What happened?” Logan answered.

  “I don’t know for sure. Heart attack or a stroke would be my guess,” Jane said. Her voice wavered slightly. She wasn’t an RN yet, but she was on her way. “I haven’t dealt with too many deaths…”

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  Jane looked at him, and Logan saw fear in her eyes. That broke his heart. He hated seeing his wife scared; he hated being scared.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted as she pulled the sheet over the woman’s head.

  “We can’t just leave her up here. That kid’ll go crazy with his mom’s dead body in the room above him.”

  Jane shook her head. “Poor guy. She was so nice.”

  Logan nodded. “We’ll have to—”

  Jane jumped off of the bed and landed on her backside with a thump, screaming. “Did you—did you see that?” she asked breathlessly.

  Logan bent down and grabbed his wife, picked her up. “What?”

  “She—she moved!”

  Logan brought a finger to his lips. “Shh, Jane. Don’t be crazy. She’s dead.”

  “I’m not. I felt the whole damn bed shake. That wasn’t a leftover twitch of her central nervous system or anything like that; that was a full-on movement.”

  “Jane, your head…”

  “I’m fine, Logan,” she said. “I’m fine. My head is fine. I know what I felt.”

  “Come on. You need to lie down.”

  Jane slapped his hand away from her shoulder. He let go of her and looked at his reddening flesh.

  “I said, I’m fine. I know what I saw. I know what I felt.”

  “Jane, she is dead. Dead people don’t move.”

  “And weird diamond-shaped things don’t just pop up all over the world. And monsters aren’t real. Right? Right? The obvious laws of nature no longer apply here, Logan.”

  She had him there. He nodded. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Now he walked to the bed.

  “What are you doing?” Jane asked.

  “Making sure.”

  “Logan, get away from her. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

  “Relax,” he said.

  His intention had only been to humor his wife. She was obviously suffering from some sort of delusion brought on by stress, her injuries, and lack of sleep. Once he could convince her the dead woman on the bed was, in fact, dead and not moving, he could get her back to sleep, which could only help her get better. Then he could get this body out of the house and into the garage, and when the sun rose, they’d all be a little more clearheaded. The military or police or damn animal control would get whatever was happening out there back to normal, and they could go on living their lives.

  Except you know that’s not going to happen, Logan, he thought. Things have changed. Things have changed for good.

  Then he saw the sheet Jane had covered the dead woman with…shift.

  Logan didn’t scream or shout out or do the sign of the cross, none of that. He couldn’t do much of anything besides stare with his lips parted and his brow furrowed in confusion, in shock.

  “Oh, my God,” Jane said. She stood next to him now, one hand covering her mouth.

  “No,” Logan said. “This can’t be real. She’s dead. I checked her pulse. You did, too. People don’t just die and come back to life. This isn’t a zombie movie.”

  He peeled back the covers like Toto peeled back a certain wizard’s curtain in Oz; except what Logan found beneath the blanket was grimmer than anything one would find in the magical land of Oz.

  So much grimmer.

  20

  Transformation

  What Logan saw wasn’t human. Not one bit. It was beyond the scope of anything a human mind could even comprehend… So his mind began searching for anything he could compare it to, anything that would make sense.

  It was not easy.

  Where the woman’s legs had been, a hard-packed mass of squirming gray worm-like creatures now took their place. Her pants—the same jeans she had been wearing the last time they’d seen her—were soaked through with blood. Ripped, too.

  Moving the covers brought forth a foul-smelling gust of air. Logan covered his nose with the back of his hand and stood in front of Jane. She whimpered.

  The worms slithered and twitched as two large masses. They made little shrieking noises—Doesn’t that sound like a much quieter version of the shrieks you heard while you were out in the garage, Logan?

  He shook his head, but at what, he wasn’t sure. Because it did sound a lot like those ‘bears from Hell’, as Derek had called them.

  Now the worms, which had looked like two legs just a moment ago.

  Logan took another step backward. That wasn’t easy, considering he felt bolted to the floor.

  “What is that? What is that?” Jane was saying. She sounded very far away, at the end of a long tunnel.

  Logan couldn’t answer, couldn’t find his voice.

  Brooke Long’s torso was still intact, but the worms were making their way north, taking over her flesh inch by inch. Her stomach began to rise and fall, rise and fall.

  At a distance, one might mistake that movement as breathing.

  It wasn’t. It was the furthest thing from breathing.

  Derek shouted up the steps. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t come in here!” Logan shouted back. His voice didn’t sound like his own. His usual deep baritone was weak and frail.

  Derek, of course, didn’t listen.

  When he came into the room, the kid took one look at what was becoming of the woman who had owned this house, turned his head, and vomited.

  Logan fought back his own sick. He needed to take action. Needed to do something. Nothing got done when one just stood around gawking.

  “Everyone out!” he shouted. “Everyone out of the room!”

  Brooke’s shirt split open. So did her torso.

  “Mom?”

  It was Brad. He was now standing in the doorway, his eyes red and
splotchy. His face looked like the running wax of a melted wax figure.

  “No,” Logan said, trying to grab him, but Brad slipped through his grasp.

  “What is happening?” Derek shouted.

  No one could answer. No one knew.

  Something protruded from the dead woman’s torso; it looked as long and thick as an anaconda as it reached up and slashed the ceiling. Plaster and dust rained down, coating the worms in what looked like freshly fallen snow.

  The thing growing from her chest was a tentacle, one you’d see attached to an octopus in the black depths of the oceans, the parts that are too deep to receive any sunlight. The color of the appendage was a light gray, almost translucent. If Logan had gotten close enough, he would’ve seen the little purple and black veins inside, like lines etched by a seismograph. He would’ve smelled the wetness of decomposition and rotting flesh. But he didn’t, so all he could see were the rows and rows of suckers popping up from the tentacle.

  Except they weren’t suckers were they? No, these small circles were eyes, and the pupils were looking right at him.

  The very air seemed to be sucked out of the room, out of his lungs.

  Logan turned around, breaking away from Jane and subconsciously putting his body between her and the thing that used to be Brooke.

  The sheet squirmed as if a hundred large bugs skittered beneath them.

  Then Brooke sat up, her body springing forward. Her eyes were open—oh God her eyes why—but they were as blank as a stuffed animal’s.

  Of course Brook was still dead. People didn’t revive. Not in this world, Logan told himself. Especially not when one’s body seemed to be in the midst of an alien worm takeover.

  Brooke’s lips parted, and a rumbling escaped from deep within her throat. That, and a few worms that slapped wetly against her chest tentacle, which was growing. In all the chaos, it was almost a miracle that Logan noticed this.