This is the End 3: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (8 Book Collection)

by J. Thorn

  Crayons. Thousands and thousands of black crayons. Just like the one that Aaron had dropped before....

  Jason stared at the crayons all around him, unsure what they meant, unsure what to do. He actually pinched himself, hard enough to draw blood, to make sure he wasn't stuck in some insane dream; to make sure that he wasn't going to wake up and find himself still hunting in the woods.

  He looked over then, and saw one more thing that chilled him to the bone.

  A clock on the windowsill. Digital. A happy clock, Donald Duck with a clock inset in his belly. Normally this would be nothing but a fun though kitschy child's plaything. Three-fifteen in the afternoon and all's well.

  But as Jason watched, the numbers shifted. Blurred, just like the microwave clock had done, the numbers suddenly disappearing in a faded swatch of gray on the LED screen. And again he heard Sean's mother, Amy-Lynn, saying "The clocks" in that gravelly voice from beyond.

  A cloud moved over the sun outside.

  Shadow draped the room in darkness.

  Jason's breath caught in his throat. He stared at the clock for along moment. Then the cloud moved past the sun. Light returned to the room, and with it the clock returned to normal once again. Jason felt himself breathe once more.

  At least, he breathed until he looked again at the desk. And this time the breath didn't catch in his throat, no this time it exploded out of him in an insane rush of air that left him instantly gasping. Gasping in the center of a room filled impossibly with darkness and black crayons and blurred clocks and there...on the desk...in a place where just a moment ago there had been nothing, there was now a piece of paper. Large and white.

  The kind that children drew on in school.

  Jason couldn't move for a moment. Then he did move. He grabbed the paper and crammed it in his pocket, then left. Fast.

  The paper felt like it was burning him all the way down the stairs, charring a hole in his pants and then in his leg itself, searing its way through to his femur.

  The paper was large and white. The kind that children drew on in school. And on it, in large, panicky letters written in black crayon, there were four words. Four words on a paper that Jason was damn sure had not been there only moments before. Four words that chilled him even as they burned:

  I wiL be FiRSt.

  ***

  SEVEN

  ***

  Lenore drove slowly down the street. It was deserted, which was unusual for this time of day. Generally there would be kids playing, neighbors chatting.

  Today, however, there was nothing. And she had the strange feeling that she was being watched; as though the silence that had enveloped the town hid within it some kind of watchful, angry presence. Something that resented the inhabitants of Rising; something that wanted the town for itself.

  Still, Lenore continued looking.

  Finally she saw what she had hoped she would: after hours of rolling up and down Rising's streets, over and over, she saw Albert, camcorder in hand, filming his feet as he walked dejectedly down the sidewalk.

  She pulled up next to him and rolled down her window.

  "Albert," she said.

  His head jerked up to look at her. He looked afraid, as though he had not noticed the car pulling up beside him. Worse still, when he did see the car and who was driving it, the look of fear only intensified. He cringed as though about to be struck some serious blow, the look of someone who had been beaten down so many times that this was the only way he had left to react.

  He saw her, and started running.

  She got out of the car without thinking, pausing only to turn off the engine before running after him.

  "Albert, wait!" she hollered.

  "Why? So you can make me look stupid again?" he shouted back, not slackening his pace, rapidly drawing away from her.

  Lenore tried to keep up, but was no match for the heavy but deceptively fast kid. He leapt over an ivy-laden fence, halting only an instant at the top to scream at her, "You're all out to get me!"

  Then he was gone.

  Lenore's shoulders drooped. She had wanted to explain; to tell him...

  What? Sorry I shouted but I saw your eyes start to bleed?

  She turned and walked slowly back to her car. What could she have told him? And for that matter, what had caused that strange vision in the middle of the school?

  A cloud fell across the sky. A storm was coming.

  She walked by a house on the way back to her car and heard a chilling sound: the sound of a door shutting and a lock being thrown. In all her time in Rising, she could not remember ever hearing those sounds together before. Locks were something that out-of-towners used, not the people of this hamlet in the mountains. It was a measure of the fear that had fallen over the town, though, that people were actually trying to keep the monsters at bay with such basic methods as turning locks.

  The wind blew for a moment, and Lenore could see stray wisps of fog curling down from the mountains, beginning the long crawl toward Rising. Soon, if they continued unabated, the fog would roll over the town, and all would be lost in the white darkness. Fog in Rising could reach otherworldly levels, making it all but impossible to move about, so thick that you could literally lose sight of your house - lights ablaze and all - within ten feet of exiting. It was never a death-sentence, as the fog usually came when the temperatures were fairly warm, so it wasn't as though getting lost would mean anything other than getting wet and uncomfortable until you could find your way to a friendly haven, but the fog was tremendously isolating and even frightening.

  Not today, she found herself saying to herself in a kind of mystical mantra just short of prayer. Not today, not after the funeral. We don't need the fog.

  But the low-hanging clouds that clung like nightmares to the mountains paid her no heed. They reached out tendrils of moisture and gradually started to writhe and roll into the town.

  The wind whipped up again.

  A storm was coming.

  ***

  EIGHT

  ***

  Jason strode back into his office, feeling an unusual mix of emotions. Fear, certainly, but also confusion and even an unsettling sense of the unreal, as though he had stepped out of Rising and into some mirror image of the town; one where nothing made sense and where the laws of nature no longer applied.

  Where did all those damn roaches come from?

  Hatty was typing at her desk in the reception area, and the old woman looked over her reading glasses at him as he entered. "Find anything we didn't expect?" she said as she handed him a stack of handwritten phone messages.

  Jason looked at her. How was he supposed to answer that question?

  Unable to come to a satisfactory way of responding, he chose not to, instead sidestepping the query by saying, "Hatty, could you dial me up the local FBI branch and connect me in the office?"

  He went into his office without waiting for a reply. One thing was certain: whatever was happening in Rising, it was beyond him. He needed help, and the fact that there was a missing - though presumed dead - child would be enough cause for him to get it fairly quickly.

  He sat down, glancing at the picture of Elizabeth and Aaron that sat in its customary spot, the only thing to detract from the Spartan, almost sterile, neatness of his desk. He looked at his phone. The extension light was not lit up, so Hatty clearly hadn't gotten through to the FBI field office yet.

  Jason pulled two papers from his pockets. The first was the sheet that he had taken from Sean's classroom that morning. That thought brought thoughts of Lenore to mind, and he immediately blushed and glanced at the photo of his wife, fully expecting to see her frowning at him in the celluloid. But she still smiled.

  He looked back at the paper. The page with no picture, but only four simple words on it:

  I wiL be FiRSt.

  Then he pulled out the other paper, the one that he had taken from where it had appeared out of thin air on Sean's desk in the little boy's room. Other than the fact that one had
been carefully folded and the other was wrinkled and creased from being hurriedly shoved in Jason's pocket, the two were identical.

  He felt something skitter over his hand then.

  A roach.

  Jason threw it from him with a shout, pushing away from his desk reflexively as the grotesque insect drew from him a visceral reaction of disgust and loathing. The roach flew off his hand, Jason's flailing propelling it through the air until it hit a wall and fell into the dark space between two filing cabinets. Jason could hear it scuttling about between the metal cases, its carapace bouncing off the cabinets as it hurried to the darkness that it called home.

  Then it was silent. As quiet as though it had disappeared.

  Maybe it has.

  Jason watched the file cabinets intently for a long moment, more than half expecting a black crayon to come rolling out at him.

  But nothing did.

  The roach was silent.

  The room was quiet.

  The only noise was the noise in his heart, which was pumping at a furious pace. Thud-dud, thud-dud, thud-dud....

  Then Jason jumped so hard it felt like his skeleton had fractured when the phone rang. He stabbed the speaker button and Hatty's voice came through. "FBI office on the line," she said.

  He hit the speaker button again and then picked up the phone. And his heart sank. Instead of the strong voice of a young FBI agent in training, he heard a faraway whisper, interspersed with static. "This is...FBI field...e help you...."

  Jason frowned. Perfect, he thought.

  "Sorry," he said. "Can you say again?"

  Again, the whisper came through. "We got...call about...."

  Then the line cut off. There was no dial tone, even, only a strange, high-pitched hissing that hurt Jason's ears within a matter of seconds. He toggled the disconnect button a few times, but there was no improvement, so he hung up and resorted to the ultimate request for aid: "Hatty!"

  The woman appeared at the doorway in an instant. "What's going on with the phone lines, again?" he asked.

  Hatty frowned. "Don't know, exactly. They've been acting spotty all week. We can call places in town all right, but out of town calls are a problem."

  Jason felt fear rise up in his gut, a feeling like ice and fire at the same time. Cold enough to burn, hot enough to freeze. He pushed it down, focusing on Hatty, and felt his fear ebb, morphing into anger. "Really?" he snapped. "Is there anything else I should know before I try to call someone who can actually help? Like, say, the FBI?"

  Hatty pursed her lips and squinted angrily, and suddenly his own rage dissipated, replaced by fear for the force of nature that was Hatty Reeves. "Don't you get smart with me, Sheriff," she snapped. "I slapped your ass when you were five for giving me lip and I'll do it again if you keep up that attitude."

  Jason tried to keep his anger going, but knew it was misplaced; was worse than that, it was just plain wrong of him to be lashing out at someone who had tried to hold the town together for him in his absence.

  "Sorry, Hatty, I just-" he began, but Hatty cut him off.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, too, Sheriff. Everything's gone all wrong here, hasn't it?"

  Jason put his head in his hands, feeling the dull throb of a headache beginning. "I've got to find him, Hatty," he said.

  Hatty patted him on the hand, and he didn't have to see her face to tell she was as worried about him as anything else. "If anyone can, you will, Sheriff." Then she moved back to the doorway and said, "I'll try to get the FBI back on the horn."

  "Don't worry about it, Hatty. I'll email them a report and that'll get through for sure. They'll have someone out here by tonight, I imagine."

  "We could use the help, couldn't we?"

  "Got that right."

  Hatty nodded at him and then went back out the door, closing it softly behind her.

  Jason turned to his computer, which Hatty had turned on for him at some point during the day. He clicked open the internet application, then clicked his "Favorites" file to bring up the "FBI - Office of Law Enforcement Coordination" website. He clicked a link, opening an email message, and began typing a lengthy email detailing the situation in Rising as far as he knew it. He glanced at the two crayon notes from time to time, but for the most part tried to remain focused on his task, attempting to make the email as concise and to-the-point as possible: he knew it didn't help the process any if the email was perceived as coming from some yokel out in the sticks.

  Soon, he was almost finished, and was about to click "Send" when the computer suddenly hissed. There was a faint whiff of ozone.

  "What the-" began Jason, and then a large spark leapt from the computer. The email flickered, unsent. "Oh, no, don't you dare!" he hollered.

  A popup appeared: "Connection failure. No such domain."

  "No such domain?! It's the flippin' FBI!" Jason pounded on the side of the computer, but to no avail: the email disappeared, replaced by a random swirling of dots and colors. Then the screen went completely dark.

  But only for a moment.

  In the next instant, the screen began flashing with different websites and images. Faster and faster, too fast to make much sense of, but then Jason began to notice: all the sites, all the images, all the videos that were coming through were about one thing.

  Death.

  Pictures of car-wrecks.

  Images of fire, burning people.

  Faster they came.

  Streaming images of people falling to their death, leaping from a fiery high-rise.

  A close-up of a leprosy victim.

  Faster, faster.

  Shots of a trauma ward, patients frozen in pain.

  Faster.

  And now it wasn't just images. Sounds started coming from the small computer speakers. Faraway screams, shrieks, and howls. The sounds of the doomed and dying.

  Faster, faster.

  Images of wars. Video of gunfire.

  And now words began to flash between the images, broken letters that swirled around the edges of the computer screen in random patterns before coming together to form words.

  Harappan.

  Hoer-Verde.

  Destruction, death, pictures of diseased limbs falling from bodies, cancerous sores on the faces of third-world mothers.

  Chinese Army.

  Roanoke.

  Death, death, death.

  Jason grabbed a felt-tip pen and wrote quickly, noting the strange words he had seen as quickly as he could, before they were lost to his memory. Harappan, Hoer-Verde, Chinese army, Roanoke.

  And then the images and the words came too fast to see, a tumbling collage of horror and pain. Jason blinked, his eyes tearing, managing only with difficulty to look away from the computer screen, focusing on the one thing that could give him comfort after such a barrage of mayhem: the picture of his family.

  But when he looked, there was no comfort to be had. He did not feel the familiar melancholy of love and sadness, did not feel even the familiar pain that usually gripped him when he thought of them.

  Because they were gone.

  The photo was still there, the background untouched. But his loved ones had been wiped away from the picture as though they never were. At first he thought it must be some kind of joke in extremely poor taste; that Hatty had somehow Photoshopped the picture. But he dismissed that idea in the same instant that it occurred to him: Hatty, though a woman of consummate skill in many areas, bordered on computer-illiterate. Besides, she would never do such a thing as this.

  So what the hell happened to them?

  He kept peering at the photo, as though by looking he could draw his family's image back into the frame; could save them from exile into nothingness as he had not saved them from the bullets of a sociopath.

  Then something new caught his attention. The computer screen suddenly dissolved into random-pattern flickers of pixilated confusion. Jason tore his eyes from the hideous emptiness of the photo and stared at his computer screen, trying to find something else, something less
horrifying than the specter of losing his family yet again, and this time in an even more disturbing way.

  He leaned in as the computer picture utterly disintegrated. The screen was just a random mass of colors now, but even so, he thought he could almost make something out. As though there was something behind the meaningless mass of confusion, something struggling to come out; to be born.

  He leaned in even closer, almost touching the screen with his nose. Then gasped suddenly as, through the computerized haze, he saw something. It was something completely unforeseen, something that penetrated him to the depths of his soul. Something that could not be, but somehow was.

  "Elizabeth?" he whispered.

  It was his wife's face, mouth open in a silent scream of pain and terror.

  ***

  NINE

  ***

  The image on his computer screen changed a moment later. It was still, impossibly, his wife, but now she was not screaming that horrible, blood-curdling silent scream. Now her lips were moving, as though she were trying to say something. He couldn't hear it, though, just as he hadn't heard her on the night she was killed...not until it was too late, anyway. He strained to make it out, to read her lips through the flickering pixels that threatened to crowd her face off the screen at any moment.

  Then the door to his office flung open with a bang. He looked over and saw Hatty, looking perturbed, then looked back almost instantly at the screen. But it was too late. There was nothing there. The screen was blank.

  He looked at the photo on his desk, and was relieved to see it was back to normal as well, his dead family smiling back at him once again as though all was well.

  "Ox is out here again," said Hatty.

  Jason almost didn't hear her. He was staring at the computer, as though trying to call his wife's image back by force of will, as though by staring he could re-impose the insanity that had somehow fallen over the office during the last minutes.

  The computer blinked once, and Jason hoped that his wife's image would return. But no. The screen went dark. Silent.