The Apocalypse War
The Undead World Novel 7
By Peter Meredith
Copyright 2015
Kindle Edition
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Fictional works by Peter Meredith:
A Perfect America
The Sacrificial Daughter
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two
The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1
An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2
Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3
The Punished
Sprite
The Feylands: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Sun King: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Sun Queen: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1
The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2
The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3
The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4
The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5
The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7
Pen(Novella)
A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)
The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)
The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)
The Drawer(Short Story)
The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)
The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World 1(Novella)
Chapter1
Neil Martin
There were only fourteen steps for him to overcome and they were no steeper than any other set of steps in the valley and yet Neil found himself winded and his head spun just a touch as he made his way to the second floor of the house. He gripped the rail and took a moment to compose himself. It wouldn’t look good for him to go into the interview sweating and gasping from a single flight of steps.
It wasn’t as though he was out of shape, it was the altitude. Estes Park sat at over 7500 feet above sea level and the air was gossamer thin. Breathing in the pure mountain air was nearly as effective as breathing in the used air from last year’s birthday balloons. Until they adjusted to the altitude, only people in top physical condition managed to operate at peak strength. Neil was at about seventy percent, at least physically. Mentally, it felt as though he was bopping along at around forty percent of brain capacity and this was simply because he didn’t feel that any more was really needed.
You could say that he was on a mental vacation.
Ever since the renegades had made it to the safety of the valley, he had happily turned over all responsibility to the military governor, General Johnston. Since then he had slept ten hours a night, eaten voraciously at each meal, read when he felt like it, napped every afternoon and generally tried not to think if at all possible.
He felt like a hollowed-out pumpkin and that was just fine. Letting go like this was a form of healing that was desperately needed. He had a lot to let go of and, when he wasn’t actively trying to let go, his thoughts turned to Eve or Ram or Sarah, or Jillybean. He thought of the little hell-child most of all. She had been his biggest failure. Ram and Sarah had been adults and driven to their deaths by their own ghosts, while Eve had been murdered through no fault or lack of supervision on Neil’s part. Eve had been perfect and Neil took a lot of credit for that; he had been a great dad to her.
He could not say the same thing about Jillybean. He had never officially adopted her as he had Eve and Sadie, which, in hindsight had been a mistake. Jillybean had needed him, badly. She had needed a father, not only to guide her but also to protect her. She needed someone to protect her from herself.
Standing there on the edge of the second floor hall, his mind turned to the little girl once more. Where was she? he wondered. Was she dead? Had the grenade that destroyed the truck killed her? Or was she in captivity, held by the Duke for sale to some horrible pedophile? Or had she escaped and was even then struggling over the last seven hundred miles, fighting her way to Colorado?
This last was Neil’s hope and it was the reason he was there that afternoon, appealing the ruling that had placed him in the position of farmer.
With a last deep breath, he went to the furthest door on the right and gave it a light knock. “Come,” a curt voice said.
Neil stepped into the converted bedroom. The entire house had been repurposed and was now known as the CAB to the military government. In human speak it was the Civilian Administration Building. There were twenty-four hundred non-military personnel in the valley and they were treated, in the nicest possible way, as little more than serfs. Their lives were ordered almost as if they were prisoners and the minutes of their day were regimented and accounted for, down to the second.
It wasn’t an arduous life, just a controlled one. No one complained since they were as safe as could be and the soldiers weren’t anything but polite. The civilians were free to leave the valley at any time; no one did unless they were one of the hunting teams that left in packs of ten or more and brought back game of all sorts: deer, elk, mountain sheep, and sometimes bear. The only other people who left the valley were the salvage crews that dared to creep down out of the mountains under the cover of night to scavenge among the ruins of Denver or Boulder or far off Colorado Springs.
“I’m Neil Martin,” Neil said as soon as he stepped into the room. The walls were purple and the carpet white shag. He guessed a now-dead teenager had once lived there. The room was spare; it held a heavy desk and seven tall filing cabinets. On the purple walls, instead of posters of teen pop stars, there were fifteen clipboards nailed into the drywall.
Behind the desk was a man in BDUs. He was balding and bespectacled—his glasses being what the soldiers called ‘birth-controls’ since they were so hideously ugly they would automatically turn off any woman who happened to see them. On the shirt of his camouflaged blouse was stitched the name: Willoughby.
Willoughby sighed. “Yes, hello Mr. Martin. I received your note. Thanks for being punctual.” He didn’t offer Neil a seat, mainly because there wasn’t another chair in the room other than the one beneath his buttocks. He simply gave Neil a once over, his face registering a slight curdling of displeasure.
Neil pretended not to notice. He knew what he looked like. The swelling and bruising, though faded in the last week, gave his skin a strange yellow tint which was made all the more unsettling by arcing pink scars that ran along both sides of his jaw line and on his right cheek. He was missing most of his left eyebrow and the top third of his left ear. He wasn’t pretty by any measure, in fact, most people tended to look away when they were in his presence.
“You received my note, I take it. And?” Neil asked, letting the word hang.
“And…” said Willoughby, busy shuffling papers on his desk. “You aren’t really salvage crew material. Sorry, but it takes a certain, I don’t know, toughness to make it out there. It’s my recommendation that you accept the position as farmer. It may not be a glorious job, but it is a necessary one. You’ve read over the hand out, yes? You will be able to keep a full forty percent of what you grow. And look at the acreage you’ve been given.”
Willoughby pulled out a map of Estes that had been stashed in a drawer and pointed at a strip of green along one of the smaller, finger-like valleys that branched off the main one. �
�Here. Look, it’s barely a three mile walk and…and see this?” He pointed at a tiny line of blue. “That is a runoff stream. Half the year you’ll have access to that water and will be able to retain a twentieth of it. And, look at all this on the side of the hill. It’s forested now, but you can clear that and add to your tillable land. Really, this is a primo spot. You can thank your friend the captain for that.”
“You don’t understand,” Neil said. “I want to be a farmer, really, it sounds perfect for me. I just can’t at the moment. I...I left someone back out there and she may be trying to get here. But she’ll...”
Movement outside the window caught his eye; men were running in all directions. They ran with a purpose and there was no panic to them.
“You’d risk the outside world over a woman?” Willoughby asked with a snort of skepticism.
More men running and Neil began to have a familiar sinking sensation in his gut. “No,” he said, vaguely, going to the window and looking down. It appeared that half the base was on the move. “It’s a girl. A little girl, I mean. Someone I should have taken better care of. Tell me, do you know what’s going on out there? Do you have drills here?”
Willoughby glanced out the window but for only a second. “Yes, frequently. Back to the issue at hand. I’m going to deny your request. I’m sorry, but you aren’t cut out for salvage work. Look at your hand for goodness sakes. How do you even fire a rifle with missing fingers like that?”
Neil took his eyes from the soldiers and glanced at his left hand. His pinky had been bitten down to the nub and his ring finger was half gone. “It’s not so bad. Using the axe is a bit of a challenge, however.”
“You use an axe to kill them?” Willoughby asked. Again the skepticism was obvious in his voice and manner. Neil understood. Few of the remaining people left in the world liked getting that close to a zombie. Any mistake, any unnoticed scratch, any minor mishap could spell doom.
“Yes,” Neil said. He pointed at one of the scars on his face. “You see this? And the missing fingers? All from zombie bites. I am immune. I was inoculated in New York, which makes me the perfect candidate for a salvage team, wouldn’t you agree?”
Willoughby gave Neil a closer look, squinting despite the thickness of his ‘birth-controls.’ “Immune? Really? We didn’t think that was legit. We thought it was a scam. Well, that would change things if it weren’t for the fact that salvage teams do not go into the field in order to find lost children. It is an admirable goal; however, we won’t be able...”
A sharp knock interrupted him. Willoughby had only time enough to cast down his thick brows behind his even thicker glasses before a soldier stuck his head into the room and spat: “We’re going to Alert 1. Formation in five minutes.” The soldier was gone before Neil could blink once.
“Alert 1?” Willoughby asked, glancing out the window. “How could we be at...” He was interrupted again, this time by rifle fire. It was distant and metronomic in its cadence: pop...pop...pop. Whoever was shooting was doing so in a deliberate manner. “I have to go,” Willoughby said, coming around the desk and shooing Neil to the door. “We’ll reschedule in the next week or two.”
Neil was back in the hallway before he knew it.
The house, which had been sleepy with the quiet drone of people working, now was bursting with energy as soldiers with stern faces rushed about. Neil was nervous and curious—the single gun was no longer a solo act; a dozen more had been added to the first—and so he joined the throng of soldiers racing for the outdoors. They barely gave him a second glance as he was practically carried along by the momentum and urgency of the men. Down the stairs they went, and the next thing Neil knew he was jostled right out the front door.
Along a steeply sloping street from the house, nearly half a mile away, stood the famous Stanley Hotel. It was three stories of pure white elegance. Two wings boasted seventy rooms a piece and the views were amazing. It was here that General Johnston and his senior officers lived and worked, and in the wide open area in front was where the soldiers held their daily formations.
The soldiers jogged for the hotel at a rapid clip, leaving Neil quickly winded and unable to keep up. “Go...on,” he said, his chest, heaving like bellows. “I’ll...catch...up.” A few gave him odd looks as if he were somebody’s unwanted kid-brother tagging along. The rest simply ran around him as though he were a rock in the middle of a stream.
Panting, Neil straggled up to the stately hotel. He wasn’t the only civilian who had come down to see what all the fuss and shooting was about. Hovering behind the solidifying formations, were hundreds of people standing and chatting in little knots. The renegades, who Neil had shepherded across the country, were the largest of these groups and the most noticeable. They wore their fear openly. One week wasn’t long enough to make them complacent and as always they were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
They all looked to Neil for answers. Before he could catch his breath or get his quivering muscles under control, they had surrounded him and were whispering urgent questions.
“All I know is that they are on a Priority 1 alert,” he told them.
Since no one knew what that meant, the information only caused a new muttering to erupt. Neil left them to their mutterings and their fear. He went searching through the group of renegades, looking for Sadie. She was his one remaining responsibility and the last thing in this life that he truly cared for. Even his own life was a distant second to hers.
She wasn’t in the crowd. Her black clothes always stood out from the civilians in their blue jeans and bright dresses and even more so against the backdrop of the uniformity of the soldiers in their camo.
“Damn it,” Neil said, looking to the east, past the stables where the two dozen horses were kept, and beyond the wheat fields, where the firing had picked up; any semblance of regularity in the shooting was gone. It sounded like a battle was fully underway—Sadie could only be there in the thick of it, Neil would bet his life on it. He started toward the sound of the shooting only to be turned around by a strong arm.
Captain Grey had come out of nowhere and had Neil by the bicep. “Don’t go down there, Neil,” he said. His voice was stern, commanding and yet there was still a note of friendship in it. The two had barely seen each other over the course of the last week. Grey had been busy acclimating himself to his new command while Neil had been busy trying to heal both mentally and emotionally.
“Sadie’s down there,” Neil answered. “She’s going to need me.”
“No,” Grey told him. “The situation, at least for the moment, is in hand. I need you up here. I’m pretty sure General Johnston will want to talk to you after formation.”
“But...”
A stern look from Grey shut him up. “You don’t say ‘but’ to an officer, and especially not General Johnston, remember that. Secondly, if Sadie is down there, she’s fine. The wall will hold. You’ve seen it. Stay here and await your orders.”
Grey was gone before Neil could say ‘but’ again. Really, he was on the verge of throwing out the fanciful version of but, the ‘however’, only before he could, Deanna was at his side and was turning him back to the others, again by his arm. He felt like he was at a hoedown.
“Neil,” she said, with a note of warning.
“Neil, what?” he asked, showing a flash of anger that had been rare in the last week.
She pulled him in close and, wearing a bright and cheery false smile, said in a low voice: “Don’t make it worse for him. He’s new to his command and there have been whisperings. Mostly jealousy on the part of those who were passed over, but still it wouldn’t help him for you to be seen back-talking him.”
“I wasn’t back-talking,” Neil shot back, testily. “And so what if I was? He may have been promoted, but I’m not his to order about and…and what would the general want with me? I have nothing to do with any of this…probably.”
In the pit of his stomach, Neil feared that he was up to his neck in what was going on.
A part of him knew that Duke Menis or his brother King Augustus was behind the shooting. If that was the case, there was a good chance that they would demand his head on a platter.
“We both know what’s going on,” Deanna said, gesturing with her chin toward the sound of the shooting. “It doesn’t take a genius to see what precipitated this, it’s the duke’s doing. I know it. He wants revenge or some sort of outlandish payment. I suspect he’ll want me and you as part of some sort of diplomatic blackmail.” She suddenly bit her lip and looked to where Captain Grey was standing at the head of three solid blocks of men. “I hope they don’t blame him as well. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
Neil raised his remaining intact eyebrow. “And I did? I guess I don’t remember things the same way you have. I was only trying to…” Just then someone called the formations to attention and Deanna shushed Neil. There had to be three thousand people in an area the size of a football field and yet, other than the crackle of distant rifle fire, the thin air was altogether silent.
General Johnston, a tall black man with an aura of intense self-assurance that was palpable from fifty yards, came to stand before the formation. There was a quick ceremony of salutes and counter salutes, the gist of which was lost on Neil, and then the general stepped forward and said in a voice that could carry to the least soldier in the hottest battle: “Men! What you are hearing are the opening shots of a battle. I have just received a message from the Azael. It seems that we are now at war!”
When the general said this, his eyes flicked in Neil’s direction and even with the distance between them, the two found themselves locked in their own strange battle of wills. On one side was accusation, on the other a bitter, angry defense.
Chapter 2
Sadie Walcott
The apple-cheeked soldier who had run down from the wall had a nametag which read: Morganstern. He stood tall and lean as a birch-sapling, looking down on the mega-herd of zombies, gulping down oxygen, waiting, with his radio half-cocked toward his ear. When nothing came from it, he practically yelled into it: “Red Leader! Come in Red Leader! We have a major event down the hill from Red Gate. Can anyone read me? I’m looking at five-thousand stiffs. Say again five-thousand stiffs advancing toward Red Gate.”
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7 Page 1
