Hell happened (Book 2): Hell Revisited

by Terry Stenzelbarton

  Superior firepower

  The Stryker trying to crash into them had been effectively neutralized…tires were being blown out, main gun empty and the armor was being torn away. It was no longer a major threat even though it was chasing after them.

  The bunkers too had been neutralized. The men in them couldn’t stick their heads up without being shot at by first one, then the other HUMVEE’s heavy machine gun.

  Their hunger for battle, something to kill, had been whetted by the zombies at the truck stop earlier that morning. Now they saw an opportunity to satiate their hunger by defeating the entrenched farmers and taking down a Stryker. This morning the reward had been beer and canned food. This evening their reward would be women.

  Their confidence was as high as it had been since entering the farm.

  True, they had lost two of their HUMVEEs and some of the soldiers in those were dead, but the two others were still mounting a good offense. They knew they had the upper hand and were going to end the battle with discipline, superior firepower and a better battle plan.

  Copyright 2013, Terry and Jordan Stenzelbarton

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored an a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the authors

  Published by White Feather Press, LLC

  www.whitefeatherpress.com

  ISBN 978-1-61808-063-9

  Cover art courtesy of Rubber Chicken, LLC

  Hell Revisited

  by

  Terry & Jordan Stenzelbarton

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers imagination or have been used ficitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental. Businesses, weapons and vehicle types that are real are used for indentification only and are not intended to be an endorcement by the author.

  Preface

  The Rapture, The Great Death, The Second Plague, The Killer Virus, Armageddon, The End of Times.

  It was called many things by the few people who remained alive. In some cities around the world, thousands of people lived when tens of millions did not. If there had been a census taken, Shanghai in China was still the world’s most populace city after the Great Death with more than 2,600 survivors.

  In other cities and towns around the world, no one survived. Every last person, from the richest to the poorest, healthiest to the sickest, leaders of the community and criminals locked up in the local pokey, all died with equal rapidity. It was a quick end to civilization, as ends of civilizations go. It started everywhere with thousands of deaths the first day and several thousands by the third day.

  Major news networks started reporting the deaths at the end of the first week. It was difficult for them to cover because the speed at which it started and then how it spread through the populations around the world.

  In an effort to slow the progress of the virus, governments shut down mass transportation, every airport and train station, all subways and shipping stopped. Highways were blocked off by National Guard and Active Duty units until they either left their posts to return home and die with their family, or died while on duty.

  By then, however, there were few people left to drive the highways.

  The world’s people stopped gathering at malls and theaters, churches and restaurants. If someone had a home, they went to it and died there with family. If they were homeless, they died alone on the street. People living in crowded environments and those living far from anyone, isolated in mountains or on islands met the same fate.

  No edict by a country’s leader did anything to stem the flow of the virus. Everyone around the world, from the northern-most city of Longyearbyen, Norway to the scientists working at the South Pole scientific station were infected and most died. First, second and third-world countries all had their populations dying at a rate unseen in the history of man.

  Scientists tried to find a cure, but most died before making any headway and the ones who didn’t die, found no cure. The virus ran its course and when done, the world had less than 1/100th of one percent of its pre-virus population.

  The deaths weren’t like on television or in the movies. There was no dramatic death scene. It was suspected, some people might not have even known they’d caught the virus. The person infected coughed a little, ran a low fever and within three days their brain shut off. Those who survived found people dead crumpled against their cars while fueling up at a gas station, sitting in chairs by their pools, some still at their desks, others in wrecked cars or trucks on the highway.

  It was surreal for the ones left alive. Some of those who witnessed the deaths of everyone they knew and loved, lost their minds and stepped off the edge and into the chasm of insanity, eventually ending their own lives.

  Others found some way to make it from one day into the next. They were survivors who didn’t have the answers to why so many had died, but after the tears had stopped falling, they continued to make the best of the life they still had.

  Some of those who lived did not survive as human. For them, life went from bad to worse. They coughed, ran a fever but instead of dying, their body mutated into something not Homo Sapien. They lost the ability to reason as a human. They became what some people called the not-deads, mutants, monsters or zombies. Their strength and speed increased 10-fold over that of a normal human. Their night sight became as keen as any night fighter and sense of smell that’d rival the greatest bloodhound ever bred.

  The zombies, for unknown reasons, hid inside dark areas, and lusted for human flesh. No one knew why their only desire was human flesh, but it was the horrific truth many found out. The zombies hunted singularly or in packs, like wolves, and attacked with ferocity and no concern for one of their own. Entire survivor camps were wiped out by the packs. No one knew how long the zombies could live without food, but rumors were that buildings abandoned for nine or ten months still had zombies waiting inside for some hapless survivor to enter.

  Zombies were also almost impossible to kill. Clean headshots that separated the brain stem from the body and shots that destroyed the spine worked well if the shooter used a heavy caliber weapon. Machine guns worked for shredding them apart, but the problem was getting enough lead flying to take down an entire pack before one of them jumped you and began his meal. It was better to avoid the zombies altogether.

  The survivors of the Great Death had to learn to live their lives in a much different world than before. It was harder for those who had grown up with a dependency on technology and the corner store for food. People who couldn’t grow their own food had to rely on non-perishable foods they scavenged from stores or other homes. At best, it was just enough until they could start growing their own food, raising animals or learning the art of fishing. At worst they encountered zombies and became something else’s meal.

  Many people living in areas that didn’t have an agricultural environment, deserts and snow-bound areas of the planet, didn’t live past the end of food stores. With the end of petroleum distillates, gas stations no longer provided fuel for cars. There were no longer any public services and electricity producing industries shut down.

  Dams and coal fired producers also shut down and electric grids no longer provided power. Without power, water towers weren’t re-filled and sewer processing plants stopped, frozen foods thawed and air circulation systems stopped. Everything taken for granted was now yesterday’s memories.

  Nuclear power plants were put on emergency shut down before the fall and worldwide only three ejected radioactive gas into
the atmosphere after people no longer operated the units. The radiation made areas in Germany, Japan and the South Africa unlivable for thousands of years. In the middle east, oil refineries and drilling stations shut down, but fires happened and burned until the fuel was exhausted.

  All the documentaries written about what would happen to the earth when people disappeared were remarkably accurate. Animals moved into homes of the dead. Lack of maintenance caused man-made structures to collapse. Vegetation re-took roads and tracts of land that had been managed by humans.

  The only major difference was that not every man had died. Some still lived.

  The sun that now rose every morning was on civilization much different than one from the previous year.

  Chapter 1

  Jerry Saunders stretched as he lay down on the fold-out bed in the back of the Prevost tour bus that he and his friends had acquired a few hours earlier. They’d located it at a destroyed truck stop south of Montgomery, Alabama.

  Jerry’s tee shirt and blue jeans were sticky with sweat from the work he’d done today and he still smelled of salt water. His three-day brown and white beard itched.

  He was tired from constant activity through the 22-hour long day, but his mind was still filled with how much his life had changed in the past few months and was sluggish in letting him drift into a dreamless sleep.

  The bus they found had been saved from the recent hurricane by what was left of a cinder block building and several semi trucks that had piled up forming a protective barrier. It was one of the very few vehicles that hadn’t been thrown around by the winds and debris from the hurricane that had recently ravaged the south with a ferocity Jerry had never seen in his 50-plus years.

  The fold-out bed was also surprisingly comfortable compared to the bed he’d been sleeping in for the past four months back in the shelter.

  Since the fall of civilization, Jerry and his friends had been literally living in a hole in the ground.

  The “hole” began as a way to work off anger from his divorce years earlier and evolved into a shelter with three sleeping rooms, a kitchen and living area and a cellar for storing food. He’d had a lot of anger to work off after the divorce.

  He hadn’t meant it to become a survival shelter, but it did help him and the others survive the recent hurricane that had passed though the area, destroying brick and mortar and steel buildings, toppling sky scrapers, bridges and wiping entire cities off the face of the earth.

  The shelter he built had electricity from windmill-driven generators and a paddle wheel that recharged the batteries in the cellar. It had food that was grown on the farm or salvaged from abandoned stores, heat from an outdoor wood burner and a state-of-the-art air filtration system.

  What the shelter provided most for the people was protection from the elements and the dangers that lurked in the night. It wasn’t roomy and no one called it comfortable or pretty, but it was better than the alternative.

  Before the fall, Jerry had been a farmer, living on the same tract of land he’d inherited with the passing of his parents. He worked the small farm with his own son and some seasonal help, raising a few crops and some cattle. He lived a life without much excitement but without boredom. He worried about his crops and milk prices, weather fronts and taxes.

  In the evening, he and his son Randy, a part-time community college student, would eat dinner while watching the local and national news most nights. One of them would do dishes and both would go do their own thing until the next morning. Jerry often went to his garage or barn to work on repairing his farm equipment or whatever project he had, Randy would go to his room and play video games or work on his homework.

  It was a simple life.

  At least once a week Jerry would email his daughter, Amanda, who was serving with the US Army when the fall came. He loved his daughter but she was never one to stay down on the farm. As soon as she graduated high school she’d joined the Army to fix helicopters. He and his ex-wife had disagreed with Amanda’s decision, with Jerry supporting his daughter. It was the last brick to come down in their marriage and soon his wife had filed for divorce and moved out. He had to sell 40 acres of his farm to a developer and cash in all his savings to pay the woman off. They’d been together for more than 20 years and the judge said she’d earned her fair share.

  Jerry didn’t agree with the judge, but he had no choice.

  When the President of the United States ordered martial law, stopping all air traffic and interstate travel, before the internet ceased operating and phone service no longer worked, Jerry received an email from Amanda telling him that she was afraid and people on her base had started dying. She told him how much she loved him and wished she could be there when her end came.

  Jerry missed his daughter and wished there was something he could do, but she’d been stationed at Fort Wainwright in Alaska, 4,000 miles away. Jerry replied to the email, but didn’t know if she received it before the internet did stop working. He tried calling her, but the calls never went through. He didn’t know if she survived but prayed everyday that she had.

  There was no reason for him to believe Amanda survived just because he and his son had, but there was no harm, he told himself, in asking God for the favor.

  The world collapsed around them and Jerry and his son Randy continued to work hard to survive. Gone were all the conveniences they’d grown used to. There were no more public works, no government, no law enforcement, no regular television or radio broadcasts, no internet and no phone service. Fuel for their tractors and equipment was salvaged from other vehicles or fuel tanks they could find. The stores they could safely raid provided them with canned food and dry goods, but even that had to be a carefully planned out project.

  Hundreds of millions of decaying bodies were now occupying millions of homes and churches, hospitals and clinics, in cars and trucks on the highways, in the streets and scattered about the countryside. The bodies were drawing in wild animals, but the bodies had grown too old for the zombies that inhabited some building. Zombies, for some reason, only fed on live or recently dead bodies. It was something they both talked about, but knew there was nothing they could do.

  Before the hurricane that had blown through, Jerry and his son had grown anesthetized to the bodies they’d seen when they went on scavenging hunts. The hurricane had washed most of the bodies from casual view, but for several days he had to clean the paddle wheel in the river of bodies.

  Jerry pulled the pillow over his eyes and laid his arm across it. He felt the driver, an elderly Mexican-American, Juan deJesus, put the luxury bus smoothly into gear and pull back onto the interstate. They’d be second of the three-vehicle convoy.

  Leading the convoy, driving his used and abused dark blue Ford F-350, was Rusty, a recent arrival to the farm. Rusty was a former tattoo artist from Florida. He was a heavy smoker and surly, but was a hard-working man and good with a gun.

  Eddie gave over the driving duties of his SWAT truck to Monica while he got comfortable in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard. They brought up the rear of the convoy. Eddie was his son Randy’s best friend from high school. He had untamed orange hair and was rail-thin. His thick eyebrows gave his face a slight Neanderthal look, but he had a quick, albeit sarcastic, wit.

  Eddie had found the SWAT truck while on a supply run with Jerry and a few others and took it as his own vehicle.

  Monica was a heavy-set woman in her early 20s and was the team’s first aid expert. She’d been found shortly after the fall of civilization by Jerry and his son, sitting outside a Gas & Go eating Little Debbie snack cakes. She had been overweight and confused, manufactured drama and craved attention.

  That had been months earlier. Monica was still overweight, but she was becoming more fit because of the work that had to be done on Jerry’s farm to keep it functioning. Eddie, Randy and Tony, the shelter’s electronic specialist, were all within a few years of age and the three men hadn’t put up with the drama Monica’s personality e
xuded. They had found a balance to their friendship which wouldn’t have been probable before more than 99 percent of the people in the world had died.

  Tony was curled up with a blanket on a cot in the back of the SWAT truck now. He wanted to be near the electronic equipment he’d installed in the truck.

  Tony was still nursing the injuries sustained when he had been captured by vigilantes a few weeks back. He and Jeff had told Jerry they were going to look for weapons and ammunition, but in reality they were looking for drugs. The two had been captured and tortured then used as bait for zombies.

  During their rescue by Jerry, Eddie and a former soldier named Terrill, the soldier had been killed by a booby-trapped grenade. Jeff hadn’t survived either. His neck had been broken by the heavy foot of a vigilante.

  Tony suffered a broken ankle, bruises on his face and chest and missing teeth, but he survived.

  Also on the bus with Jerry were the three astronauts from the International Space Station. The convoy had left their shelter and farm near Moody Alabama very early the previous morning to drive to Gulf Shores, Alabama to rescue the two men and woman.

  The four astronauts on the station had spent months trying to reach someone left alive on earth after contact had been lost from ground stations. Tony had been the first to hear their call and arrangements had been made for three to return to earth. The Russian commander of the station had remained behind.

  Chances had been slim that a rescue could be effected, but Jerry and the rest of the people on the farm had decided to give it their best effort. They drove to the gulf, found a catamaran that had been washed two miles in shore that hadn’t been totally destroyed.

  The group re-launched the cat and Juan, an experienced weekend sailor, piloted it five miles out into the calm waters of the gulf. The rescue spaceship had landed more than a mile from the catamaran, but Juan’s piloting got them to the craft before it sank and the crew was rescued.