The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 2): The Rise

by Deville, Sean

“Shut up,” he managed to whisper, the lips burning as they moved. That was a new sensation, heat throughout his body.

  This won’t end well you know.

  “I said shut up,” Smith ordered, louder now, loud enough for the watchers to hear. The voice in his head was his own, and yet completely alien.

  “Colonel Smith, can you hear me?” Perry insisted.

  You should embrace it. Why try to fight? You really don’t know the damage you have done to yourself…you will learn.

  What was his own mind trying to tell him? With exaggerated effort, Smith tried to lift his head off the ground, a wave of dizziness ripping through him just from that slight movement. When he persisted, nausea was added to the equation, and even though there shouldn’t have been anything left in his stomach, his body still managed to eject a fair volume. Blood, so much blood.

  “Somebody’s going to love cleaning this up,” he joked to himself, the words virtually incomprehensible with his delirium and confusion. Through double vision and a cloud of confusion, he looked at the skin of his left hand, bringing it close. The skin seemed to dance, as if something was crawling under the surface, but Smith was too far gone to be concerned about that. His body twitched slightly, and he had one more thought before the blackness of unconsciousness took him.

  The black tendrils…they were gone.

  22.08.19

  London, UK

  Night-time and the crowd no longer moved forward. Whilst he couldn’t see it, up ahead Colin could hear the orders being shouted through a bullhorn.

  “Return to your homes.”

  “There is nowhere for you to go.”

  “You risk spreading contagion.”

  That last one was true enough. All around him people were coughing. On his travels, he had seen dozens of people doubled over in the street as they threw up. How quickly Britain had collapsed, spurred on by panic and the death of those who were supposed to be running the show. The army and the police couldn’t fight a war and control the population at the same time, there just weren’t enough of them. Even what they had was being whittled away by Lazarus which spread amongst them, unconcerned by rank or experience or age.

  People had piled into their cars, intent on driving to motorways. But then where would they go? When the cars no longer became viable, they set out on foot, following the same plan, desperation and the faint hope of safety their only guiding light. As many people as there were here, even more still hid in their homes, listening to the advice given, hoping that some sort of order could be restored before the lights went out. Before the food was all consumed and before the taps ran dry.

  Before the horde came.

  On his way here, Colin had passed by a supermarket car park that had been signposted as a food distribution area. There was no sustenance to be found there, only dead bodies littering the cold asphalt. Colin didn’t get close enough to find out if those were the bodies of the undead. Perhaps they had been alive, dead as a result of a riot or an attempted insurgent action against those handing the food out. None of that mattered, only the creation of more undead was of concern to Colin. Two dozen out of billions that needed to draw their last breath were of little consequence.

  He had also seen a young child’s body with its head caved in, the bloodied baseball bat that had been used to commit the foul deed abandoned and left as evidence by the side of the body. The killer would never be found, and truth be told there was no crime. It was clear that the child had turned and its body dispatched by those with the will to survive.

  The crowd surged and pushed, concerns about contagion seemingly now forgotten. All they wanted was to get away, to forge forward, to clear the blockage that stood in their path…even though most of them didn’t know where they were going. What was there for them past the boundary of the M25? The more people that fled into the suburbs and the countryside, the more they would be like locusts, stripping the land of any kind of life sustaining nutrition. It was as if a kind of collective madness had overcome them, their minds overtaken by a force too strong for their will.

  Colin didn’t realise how right he was.

  Whereas many infected with Lazarus hid themselves away from the world, others felt compelled to interact, to spread the virus throughout their community. Many in the crowd were now displaying this characteristic, most blissfully unaware that their brain chemistry was being manipulated by a genetic aspect that tweaked thoughts and fired neurons. An addict would know exactly how they felt, because it was the same mechanism that was being manipulated, endorphin rewards being released the more those infected touched and caressed the human world around them. In this way Lazarus maximised its spread and its survival. Some carriers would circulate the disease, whilst others hid away so they could be guaranteed to transform into the virus’s ultimate creation.

  Several people over from Colin, a young man collapsed to his knees so he could vomit, the stream splattering across the floor. People tried to back away, shouts of abuse and distress rippling through the mob. Because that was what they had become, turning on the hapless youth, feet suddenly descending on him in a rain of merciless kicks. Colin, unimpressive physically as he was, managed to position himself to witness the desperate act of self-preservation. All the victim could do was curl into a ball and accept the blows that fell on him relentlessly, some of his attackers grinning madly, their minds swamped by the madness of what they were doing.

  Colin thought he heard bones breaking. The sound was fantastic.

  A hefty kick got through the defences, smashing into the man’s temple. The villain of that particular assault was wearing heavy work boots, and the mob seemed to part to give him more room. The villain kicked again, this time stepping back to put more power into the effort. The fallen man’s face exploded, his defensive hands falling away, resistance now gone. Then the throng renewed their attack and Colin turned away, bored now of what he was seeing. Civilisation was being stripped away with every second so Colin wormed his way to the edge of the crowd, knowing that this was the best way for him to move his way forward.

  Still the cacophony from the megaphone ordered and pleaded for the people to go home. Wasn’t it clear to the speaker that there was no going back for most of them? Colin knew he had to act fast, for it would not be long before guns were used to quell the pack. He suspected that this would be an epic mistake, because this was a herd, and they were not intent on going anywhere but forwards. There weren’t enough bullets to stop what was inevitable.

  Colin slipped into a side road, the crowd almost pulsing as the numbers continued to grow. Ten metres down this smaller road, he saw a woman being gang raped by a group of three men. A second woman, one with the rapists, sat on top of the car the victim was being held against. She shouted encouragement to her companions, mindless of the damage that was being inflicted to a fellow woman. Somehow Colin caught her eye, and she beckoned him over, a bottle of some nameless cleat spirit gripped firmly in one of her hands.

  “Come and stick your dick in something sweet,” the vile woman yelled at him.

  There was no temptation to join in such unthinkable abuse. Colin was here to end such atrocities, not engage in them. Ignoring the drunken woman and shutting out the plight of the men’s prey, Colin turned and forced his way back into the crowd, the finger on the trigger he held itching to be used. He would stop this, he would stop it all.

  By the time he got into the centre of the mass, his ear was swelling and he thought it a strong likelihood he was now the proud owner of a black eye. Elbows and fists had been thrown, some by accident, some deliberately as people objected to his intrusion. Standing there amongst people compressed into four people per square metre, jostled by everyone around him, Colin knew the violence humanity was capable of. People were dying here as well as infecting each other. Some fell through sheer exhaustion only to be trampled underfoot. Others were singled out and killed by a group mind that seemed intent on removing any perceived threat.

  Any apparent slight w
as no longer met with a verbal exchange, but by instant physical retribution. Now was the time before those present descended into a primal version of themselves. Here and now Colin would make himself known to the world, and with his death he would do his part in bringing forth the new order. He was not unique in the desire to kill himself, thousands across the city already having done so. Very few however had the desire to cause such mass carnage.

  Colin pressed the button.

  His concerns that he had created a dud were to be unfounded. The bomb detonated at the rate of twenty-eight thousand feet per second, the surrounding air pressure spiking to over two thousand pounds per square inch. Those within the initial blast radius were ripped apart, organs rupturing, eyes liquefying, limbs stripped clean off. The shockwave turned the nails into lethal projectiles travelling at over a hundred miles an hour, shrapnel thrown out into the crowd. Ball bearings passed through pliant flesh like it was tissue paper. Within seconds there were over a hundred dead, hundreds more maimed and mortally wounded. Broken limbs, ruptured ear drums, shattered organs, flesh pierced by shrapnel, some of it from the very bodies closest to the blast.

  Colin’s torso was completely obliterated, his head hurled into the air, landing within the maimed crowd several metres away. He would never have to worry about the plight of humanity again.

  Those killed directly next to the blast would be useless to the virus, others damaged too badly to be of any worth. Many of those killed outright died before the virus could get a grip on their system, the blood streams already dead so as to prevent the transmission of Lazarus to the brain. But enough were left to resurrect, either due to already being infected, or maimed just enough that it took them time to die. Others with less serious wounds were victims of the shrapnel, the virus forced into their system by the piercing of the flying knives.

  Colin did his part that day, and within minutes, dozens of the undead were rising up to attack what was left of the living. Within an hour an undead horde had formed that numbered into the thousands which moved north to the M1, the country’s primary motorway. With so many people congregated in one spot, a new battalion of the damned formed. And with its many feet it would head out north expanding the war that was already being lost.

  22.08.19

  Preston, UK

  To look at him, people would think that Azrael was asleep. Still on the bed that Smith had shackled him to, his body was immobile but his mind raced. Once again the dream had come, and now it was more intense than ever. To think that Azrael had somehow missed this ordeal. Even he wasn’t guilty enough to suffer such cruelty.

  A thousand times he had been here, but the world of his nightmare had never felt this real. This was true pain. The sky above burned with the heat of hell itself, the sun red and baking in the sky, the very air moving as the ground was scorched beneath it. Azrael looked at what was left of the flesh of his hands and saw only a blackened crust. Every movement caused the surface to crack, blood and pus seeping from the wounds, only for it to boil away into the atmosphere.

  His ability to see confused him for he remembered that his eyes had been plucked out long ago. There was a new sensation here also, one that he had never before suffered. A hunger so terrible it felt like his innards were being sliced apart by the finest of razors, thousands of them meticulously and surgically altering the lining of his intestines. He needed food, and there was only one thing that would satiate him…human flesh. The need for it almost brought madness, but he wouldn’t be spared by that mercy.

  Around him hundreds of bowed and decimated figures walked as he did, the feet never stopping despite the toes now being reduced to blackened stubs. It was as if the floor below was coated in a myriad of needles that pierced into his calves every time he took another faltering step. Yet still he walked, the agony there almost irrelevant, hidden by the purgatory that seemed to encase every cell of his being.

  To his right somebody fell, only for them to pick themselves up out of sheer force of will. Never before had Azrael seen someone so close in the wasteland, and what was left of his sight became drawn to the form. A female who had suffered damage, but nowhere near the torment inflicted on Azrael. Had he been here longer than her? And why was she so familiar?

  In the distance the great mountains called to him as they always did. They towered on the horizon, guardians against the storm that swept the dust off the ground to contaminate even the smallest of wounds. Again, the woman staggered, her nakedness hidden by the dirt that caked her, burning away the top layer of her epidermis, changing her.

  Over the sound of the wind, Azrael heard her weep. Then she turned to look at him…Jessica?

  Never had he deviated off the path, but he did so now, turning towards her, steam rising from the ground where her knee rested. Stumbling, he reached her, helping Jessica from the parched earth, the very contact with her flesh sending lances through the palms of his hands. He cared not, and he held her so that together they could move forward.

  “Thank you,” the words came from her cracked and desiccated lips. Why was she here? What did this mean? Azrael did not speak, merely urged her on because he sensed the true danger was close. Others felt it too, the lost souls picking up their benign pace as the dust rose high to their rear. The horsemen were near and they were getting closer.

  “Why are we here?” Jessica asked. “What have we done to deserve this?” Azrael knew his own crimes, but had no knowledge of the sins of Jessica’s flesh. He urged her on, better to be away from this place. There was no escaping the horsemen, but at least there were others in their path. They still had time. They still had…

  “TIME,” Azrael shouted to the room as his eyes opened. The space around him seemed to retain the heat of the desert, but only briefly, the sun vanishing to be replaced by the overhead halogen. The bindings held him, the room locked and empty of anything sentient. His captors would be outside, unwilling to leave him somewhere he could even remotely escape from. How little they understood about him now, Azrael wasn’t going anywhere. The fact that he had pissed himself meant nothing to him.

  “Carter,” he demanded loudly to the room knowing that there would be people listening, “It’s time to uphold your end of the bargain. Bring me Jessica. Bring me Jessica now.”

  22.08.19

  RAF Northolt, UK

  As they were under observation, the men in quarantine would have to sleep with the lights on. Many here no longer had any set sleep patterns. They spent their time in their beds or by spending torturous hours walking to and from the bathroom. Every time the door opened, everyone expected another soldier to be unceremoniously deposited. Not this time.

  “Corporal, I need you to come with me.” The door to the barracks had opened and Captain Beckington had walked in flanked by two Military Police guards armed with pistols. Several of the quarantined men closest to the door cowered in their beds, wary of the guns the two MP’s were brandishing. They had seen what those MP’s had been willing to do.

  Whittaker stood up. He didn’t know that the evacuation order had been given due to multiple zombie outbreaks north of London. A series of defensive lines were being set up across the country, and if they stayed here they risked being on the wrong side of the battle. Most of the army personnel at the base would be relocated to Northwood Command, the military headquarters facility of the British Armed Forces. Military strategists had deemed it an essential facility to hold. The RAF were preparing to abandon the base if necessary.

  “What about the quarantine?” Whittaker asked. The knife he had been given was now thrust into the belt at his hip. With the volatile reaction he had witnessed in Tod, he was wary about not having it on his person.

  “You let me worry about that, Corporal.” Whittaker stood, but so did Tod.

  “Hey, why does he get special privileges?” Tod objected, stepping forward from where he had been sitting. His breathing was laboured, but he resisted the irritating temptation to cough.

  “Sit down private,” one of
the MP’s said menacingly. He didn’t raise his gun, but the arm holding it tensed.

  “Or what? You going to shoot me are you? Might be better, put me out of my misery.”

  “That is presently a strong possibility,” the MP countered.

  “I’d rather not leave these men,” Whittaker pleaded.

  “That’s an order, Corporal,” the Captain insisted. Whittaker looked around at the men and simply shrugged his resignation. It was at that moment the Sergeant chose his moment to begin his final death spiral. Going into violent spasm, everyone in the room was distracted by the event.

  Whittaker turned, one of the guards stepping forward into the room further than he should have. Tod was thus partially obscured from the MP’s sight.

  “Restrain that man,” the Captain shouted indicating the Sergeant who was very close to drawing his last breath. Several of the men followed the orders, but not Tod. Even though he was shaky on his feet, he sidled up beside Whittaker who was momentarily engrossed with the Sergeant’s impending death. Whittaker wasn’t expecting Tod to be so stupid until he felt Tod rip the knife from his belt. With desperation, Tod gripped him by the back of his collar, the knife pressing dangerously into Whittaker’s back.

  “Easy now, private,” Beckington said. Any lunge at the man risked Whittaker being impaled. Both MP’s raised their weapons.

  “You know I’ve always thought you were a cunt,” Tod almost whispered in Whittaker’s ear.

  “Feeling’s mutual.” Whittaker tried to crane his head to look at the idiot holding him captive, but that just got the knife pushed into his back a little bit more. It was yet to break the skin. This just proved what he had always suspected about Tod. Unstable and unworthy of anyone’s trust.

  “You don’t want to do this Private,” one of the MP’s stated calmly.

  “Oh yeah? Why does he get to leave and the rest of us get stuck in here?”