AMERICA THE DEAD
Book One: The Rising Of The Dead
By Lindsey Rivers
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SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Original Material Copyright © 2010 - 2014 by Lindsey Rivers
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PUBLISHED BY:
Lindsey Rivers & independAntwriters On Smashwords
All rights reserved, domestic and foreign
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
One: Kate
Two: Journals and Diaries
Three: To Live Again
Four: More Is More
Five: City Of Dead
Six: Best Laid Plans
Seven: War
Eight: The Morning of the Day
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual living persons places, situations or events is purely coincidental.
This novel is Copyright © 2010 – 2013 Lindsey Rivers & independAntwriters Publishing. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic, print, scanner or any other means and, or distributed without the authors permission.
Permission is granted to use short sections of text in reviews or critiques in standard or electronic print...
America The Dead
Book One: The rising of the dead
PROLOGUE
USGS Alaska:
10:15 PM GMT March 1st
“What is that?” Mieka Petre asked. He planted one hand on the back of the chair and then leaned forward, staring at the monitor harder.
“The Yellowstone Caldera... That's what I've been trying to tell you. It wasn't there when I left for my break... Uh,” he looked up at the clock. “Fifteen minutes ago,” David Jones said.
“That can't be. Has there been any activity from...” He stopped talking as David called up the log from ten minutes prior. He watched as a small counter measured the sudden change in ground level. He watched the elapsed time. “Christ, Jesus. Eleven inches in twenty one seconds. That's impossible.”
“Started about five seconds before that... At least on my readout...” David sighed. “The point is it wasn't there, and it is now.”
Other people wandered over from where they had been, zoning in on the hurried conversation, and the edge of excitement it carried.
“I can goddamn well see that, David.” Mieka motioned for David to move, and took his seat, rolling closer to the monitor and watching the counter. “It has to be an error.” He caught a flash from the corner of his eye and turned away from the monitor and faced David. “Who knows?” His eyes rose and took in the half dozen men and women standing around listening to their conversation and watching the monitor. Three of them had their phones in their hands.
“Did any of you make a phone call, snap a picture? I'm telling you right now, I will personally fire anyone who causes a panic over this. This is a bad sensor... A bad read, it has to be. Ground level rise like that takes years, we all know that. It's fact. There has been nothing in the last few days to indicate anything like that coming up...” He fixed a hard look on his face and met as many eyes with it that would meet his own. “No one is leaving until I check their phone. Nobody!“ His eyes swept the room. The cell phones vanished. “Who has a different set of readings?”
“I got fifteen,” Joan Allen said in the silence that held the room. Her phone was folded discreetly in one hand and she slipped it into her front pocket as though she were drying her hands against the fabric of her pocket. Mieka swore under his breath.
“Jesus, Mieka, I just got a read from Long Valley.” This from Jason Lewis.
“What? ...When?” Mieka asked as he turned to face him.
“I was watching it. There was some funny seismic stuff earlier and...”
“And? Get to it,” Mieka shouted.
“And it seemed like it was nothing … There was nothing when I got up to see what you guys were doing... Two feet... Two feet in the last minute!”
Panic gripped the room and voices immediately leapt into hurried conversation.
“People! People! Shut up!” Mieka Petre yelled above the din. The silence was instantaneous. He turned to face Jason. “Up two feet?” Sweat ran freely from his brow.
“Down... Down. It's like it suddenly sunk... Suddenly...”
Mieka waved him off, and turned to face the room. He swiped at the sweat as it rolled into the corner of one eye, stinging.
“What else... Anything else?”
“Seismic... 4.3 … 5.8 … Jesus... Clusters around Yellowstone.” Jane Howe.
One by one everyone had gone back to their monitors. Alarms began ringing in the silence that had descended. First soft chimes then urgent warbles.
“Japan,” Someone called out. “Off the coast... Chiba... Seismic... It's a big one... A big one... 8.9 … More... More coming...”
An alarm that was mounted partway up the wall above the huge banks of monitors began to bray. Long, strident calls. Mieka turned to the alarm, frozen for a second. It had never been triggered in the ten years he had worked at the Alaska station. Never. He had begun to believe it never would be triggered. He thought of it as the Oh Shit, alarm. It was triggered from the central office on the mainland. It was only set off if there was a catastrophic failure of some sort.
He turned to go back to his own chair; there were decisions to make, people to notify. Suddenly the floor dropped from under him, and he found himself falling. Before he could reach the floor it suddenly leapt up to meet him and he slammed headfirst into the polished concrete, nearly losing consciousness.
He regained his knees and tried to brace himself as the floor shook harder still. Blood ran from his hairline and joined a small trickle of blood from one eyebrow. A second later it ran across his cheek to his chin; dripping to the floor.
He watched the drops hit the concrete and splatter, and thanked God that he could still see. There was a stabbing pain behind his eyes. He had hit hard, and the shaking building wasn't helping at all.
Screams and yells mixed with the crash of file cabinets and the splintering of plastic as monitors shook apart or crashed to the floor. The air suddenly became clouded with dust as the concrete the room was made from began to shake apart.
Mieka watched as Jane Howe bounced across the floor, her eyes wild, and slammed headfirst into the corner of a desk, sliding underneath; her body suddenly loose, shaking like a rag doll as the jolts hit the building: Her legs jumped up and down. Mieka tore his eyes away. He tried to maintain his position on his knees, the palms of his hands flat, grasping at the concrete, but the constant pounding of the floor against his kneecaps was becoming excruciatingly painful. Reluctantly he dropped back down to the floor, trying to control the drop as much as he could, but he went rolling away to slam into a wall: He felt his ribs break as he hit.
The noise was a constant roar. Screaming, yelling, crying, pleading, the constant rain of concrete chunks, sounding like hail stones as they fell from the ceiling above. The thickening dust. A roar of something else, wind? ... Something beginning to overtake everything else, closing all other sounds out as he sagged against the wall and tried to hang on. His ribs were definitely broken, it hurt to lift his arms. He could feel the bones grinding together. He knew he was crying out each time they were moved, but he could not hear those cries.
The ribs ground harder, and this time the light d
immed further; he had a harder time opening his eyes. A second later they slipped shut again as the floor suddenly dropped from beneath him once more, causing the splintered ends of his ribs to grind together even harder. He found himself falling as consciousness slipped away from him. The noise increased as he fell and then suddenly it was gone. He fell silently through the darkness.
March 2nd
Grocery King Supermarket:
Watertown New York: Early Morning
“I don't give a fuck what you think, girl. Get that fuckin' money in the bag and get it in the bag now.” He shifted away, leaning back from Pearl, but with the mirrored sun glasses it was hard for her to tell whether he was still looking at her or away from her. She picked up her cash drawer and dumped it into the green plastic garbage bag he held. The ground trembled a little under her feet causing her to sway, and they both paused... Waiting...
There had been earthquakes. A few aftershocks in between the major jolts, and then the power had gone out. This was, Pearl hoped, only a tremor.
It had been the new assistant manager's bright idea to stay open. To be a gathering place for people in the area until someone in charge showed up. It was three A.M. and no one in charge had shown up. Twenty minutes ago three people had walked through the front door: All dressed in military fatigues; all wearing the mirrored sunglasses and some sort of scarves or bandanas tied around their heads and below their noses. Hair, eyes, all the features you could look for and remember were gone. They would probably never get caught, there was nothing to remember. Never mind the fact that the alarms were out, the cops hadn't been seen for hours, and they were robbing the supermarket in the middle of some kind of disaster. Pearl only hoped they made it fast and didn't hurt anyone. The oldsters, her nickname for the older folks that lived in the downtown area, couldn't handle a lot of shock. Already some of them were overly frightened and shaking.
Her eyes swept around to the other two. The one guy seemed slightly heavier through the upper body. But the fatigues were outsized so it was hard to tell. The other had a deep booming voice that he had only used once when they had come into the market, kicked the chocks that held the doors open out of the way, and announced the robbery. None of the three had spoken since then.
There were twenty eight people in the market, mostly the oldsters from the downtown neighborhood who had come to the market area because the lights were still on and there were other people there. The downtown area contained many older buildings that had been converted into housing. Some young couples lived here, but getting into and out of downtown was sometimes too much and before you knew it a face you had gotten used to seeing was gone. The oldsters with their pensions and fixed incomes stayed. Driving, as rarely as they had to do it, meant nothing to them. Crime was usually low: There was a small satellite police station down on the square itself, it wasn't a bad place to live.
A tremble passed through the floor once more; weaker than the last. It felt like a heavy truck passing over a bridge, no more than that, she thought.
Three earthquakes had hit so far, each one stronger than the last. Pearl herself had watched the lights outside of the market dim and then wink out. All of those streetlights that had lit up the sky over Watertown every night for as long as she had been here gone in the wink of an eye. The flat screens that hung above the checkouts had winked out, and the two televisions at the front of the store that were on every hour of every day, blacked out and then came back with snow and static.
Pearl had grown up on a council estate in London. When her mother had died she had come to the United States only to find herself in the Maywood projects on the north side of Watertown. From one pit to another. Just different names, she liked to tell herself. Up until a few weeks ago she had still made the trip back and forth every day, but she had found a place, a small walk-up, not far from the market. It seemed extravagant to have her own space, but living in the downtown area suited her, or had. She didn't know how this was going to change the equation.
The lights ran by generator. The generator was necessary for the meat department at the back of the store. It wouldn't run forever but it was on now, keeping the meat freezers and the cold cases working, and running the low powered emergency lighting system inside the market.
The man that had been in front of her moved down the line to the next register when the shaking stopped. Bag in hand, the other two stood silently at the front of the store, some sort of rifles with clips held in their hands, watching, Pearl supposed, through their mirrored lenses.
The man with the bag had reached the end of the line when a much heavier earthquake hit and things began to tumble from the shelves into the aisles. Above her she watched the ceiling lift from the painted cinder block walls and then slam back down once more. One second she had been looking outside at the massive bare limbs of the oaks that lined the other side of the street, and the next she had been looking at the backside of the corrugated panels that made up the roof of the market. It had happened so fast that she wondered to herself if it had really happened at all.
Her eyes swept quickly around the inside of the market. Most of the oldsters were screaming, cowering where they stood, trying to melt into the floor, but a few were standing stoically; watching parts of the ceiling begin to fall. Pearl held the side of the dead conveyor belt of her checkout lane as the floor rose, and shook. The robbers scrambled to stay on their feet, the stock tipped and tumbled, spilling across the floor.
The looks on some of the oldsters faces said, “I knew this is how it would end,” and Pearl believed in that split second that they really did know all along that the world would come to an end in the Grocery King supermarket in downtown Watertown just like it was right now. They had been children playing in the school yard, young lovers chasing after one another through the tall grass, parents watching their first born go to school on that first day: Pensioners walking to the box to get their check as the little girls that lived next door played hopscotch on the sidewalk; old folks coaxing the cat into the house through the back door, and they had known. They had known all along. Her eyes swiveled back to the front of the market, and that was when the roof at the front of the store collapsed. The robber, the one with the bigger upper body, screamed and jumped back, and Pearl understood then that he was a she. It seemed like a signal to everyone, and a fraction of a second later they were all, oldsters, employees and robbers, running for the back of the store as the ceiling of the market collapsed onto the tops of the aisle shelving.
The doors to the back stock area slammed open and the crowd poured into the rear storage area, coming up against the stacks of boxes and crates and stopping. Just that suddenly the situation had changed. They were no longer running for their lives, they were being herded like cattle by the three and their waving, motioning rifles, holding the doors open, motioning the last stragglers, cut and bleeding, into the area as the shaking stopped. Large clips depended in a curve from those rifles, Pearl noticed. They were in their hands, but they also had other weapons depended upon their backs by straps that looked every bit as capable as the ones they held in their hands. The one with the thicker chest, the one who at least screamed like a woman, kicked the doors shut and they stood, choking and sneezing as the thick clouds of dust swirled and billowed in the emergency lights.
The Parking Lot:
The old Chevy began to rock on its springs, lunging first right and then left. It took a harder lunge to the right and then jumped forward and slammed head on into the side of the building.
“Fuck, Calvin. Fuck,” the woman driver screamed. She held a rifle with a long banana clip that slammed into the ceiling. Her finger squeezed the trigger tightly for just a brief second and spat a burst of bright white light and noise, a jagged hole appeared in the roof of the car.
“Bitch! What the fuck?” Calvin screamed as he tried to roll with the shaking car, hanging onto the dashboard. The three in the back added their own comments and in a second the entire car erupted in to cursing a
nd yelling. The ground movement tossed the car once more, picking it up and slamming it sideways into a truck that had slid over three spaces. The screech of grinding metal and breaking glass silenced the screams and yells from the car. The car bounced away from the truck, jiggled from side to side and then settled onto the ground, one tire flat, the nose bent upward.
“Get out... Get out of this motherfucker,” the one called Calvin screamed. Bricks and pieces of concrete block began to tumble from the roof line as the main wall of the market bulged out and the false roof structure that fronted the store titled backwards and tumbled into the store space. A few of the huge glass windows that fronted the market cracked with loud audible clicks: Spiderwebs running like a bolts of lightening top to bottom, and shooting off to the sides. Huge walls of glass that were now held together only by the aluminum frames they rested in.
”Jesus... Jesus, those bitches will go... I know it,” one of the men that had been in the back seat muttered as he tumbled from the car and staggered away. One tall window groaned, splinters of glass shooting out onto the sidewalk and the front passenger side of the car, and then collapsed in a small pile onto the concrete as if to prove him right. Screams surged out from inside the store, mixing with their own. A thick cloud of dust billowed out through the opening. The glass glittered like gemstones in the sparse light from the interior of the market.
“Out... Out!” Calvin yelled. A small section of brick bonded to concrete block fell over and crushed the nose of the car, pinning it to the ground. Steam erupted from the buried nose of the car and rose into the cold air, mixing with the dust as it did. Calvin skipped backwards, the hard heels of the combat boots he wore getting a good purchase on the asphalt. He fell backwards with the momentum, his hands splaying behind him, immediately cut on the glass and other debris that covered the asphalt. He wrenched himself forward and began to pluck at the pieces embedded in his palms. His eyes rose and swept across the others as his fingers worked. “Who? “ he asked. His quick head count had come up short.
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