The Rotting Souls Series (Book 1): Charon's Blight [Day One]

by Ray, Timothy A.

  Ben nodded while typing. “Her signal is still coming in strong. She got out before Mark and is moving west right now. She lost touch with her husband as well and I haven’t been able to provide her with any comfort on that regard. I don’t think I should be the one to tell her,” the boy said.

  He must have realized how cold he could come across and Todd agreed with the assessment. But that was one task he wasn’t going to commit to until they knew for sure one way or another. No reason to upset her if they could avoid it. “Best to tell her you’re working on it then. If we find out anything concrete, I’ll make the call,” he told the youth.

  Ben nodded and brought up a map with the GPS signals on it. He could see several at their present location and three heading in from the east. There were two sets of signals in California, Nevada, and Utah. From the maps he had seen on the way in, he was sure that the girls hadn’t made it.

  “Ros and Matt are slowly making their way east, but they still haven’t gotten out of Vegas,” Ben told him, bringing up a map of the infection’s progress on the monitor in front of Todd.

  Things had grown worse since the last time his app had refreshed and he wondered if Ben had quit updating his phone once his family had arrived. Flagstaff and Phoenix were heavily overrun and Tucson’s red dot was beginning to grow. The west coast, from San Diego to Sacramento was completely red. Oregon and Washington were just showing signs of infection and he knew that the California portion of the plague would soon move north, as those to the south fled their way.

  Southern Nevada was completely overrun and he sent a silent prayer to the Gods that Ros and Matt made it out of there all right. Texas was beginning to rival California and most of the mid-west was lost. Montana looked all right for the moment, but then their population was so small he doubted they’d have trouble until fleeing survivors converged there.

  There were only a few uninfected areas on the east coast; it was red from Vermont to Florida. Luckily none of their friends were coming from that area, with Mark and Roxanne being the furthest out, having refused to leave Ohio. Columbus had long turned red and he wondered if his silent friend had perished in his escape from the city.

  “Are Ros and Matt going to make it out?” he asked, his eyes kept returning to that map.

  Rosilynn was the core of their medical staff, such as it was, and it would hurt them deeply to lose her. Matt had taught them a lot about self-defense and they needed him here to help defend the compound from attack. His skills were too valuable to lose. Their group wasn’t large to begin with and every person was vital in some way.

  That was the cold way of looking at it and the heartache he felt at their plight was too much to think on at the moment. Maybe the attachments they had made were a mistake; the pain he’d feel at their loss would be too much to bare. You’ve got to get out of there, he mentally told the screen, staring at the slow-moving GPS signals leaving Vegas.

  “They’ve slowed, but they’re steady at the moment. There is a military engagement at the site of their GPS signal, so they might get out. I don’t know yet,” Ben grunted, not liking the response he got from something he was trying to do. Traffic cams were floating by as Ben cycled through them, eyes quickly scanning and moving on faster than Todd could keep up. He finally stopped and maximized a video feed. It was a camera overlooking an intersection in front of an interstate off ramp. Cars were packed on both sides of the road, all of which were trying to merge onto the onramp on the other side of the overpass. Vehicles were moving slowly along the top and he saw a flash of light in the sky; six planes had just flown overhead. “That’s where they are,” Ben told him, leaving the screen up almost as a distraction to keep Todd from asking him too many questions.

  “And the others?” he asked, his eyes not seeing the familiar vehicle that the Millers drove. He knew that they had probably ditched it and switched cars at some point. He prayed they weren’t on foot. They’d never get out of there if they were.

  “Paul and Christine are still in Utah. They are dragging their feet leaving and no amount of pushing is making them move any faster. Christine keeps asking if I’m sure,” Ben sighed. “If one of those zombies took a bite out of her ass she’d probably still ask me that.”

  He chuckled, that sounded just like her. “I could try calling them, speed them up a bit,” he offered.

  “Your dime. But I don’t reckon they’ll listen to you any more than they did me. Old folks move slow, that’s all there is too it,” Ben replied. His parents took their time when preparing to leave for any kind of road trip, so he understood what the boy was getting at.

  Ben took another sip of his energy drink, then continued. “Joseph is making good time out of Arkansas. Linda and Jackie’s phones never left Linda’s work,” Ben confirmed his earlier suspicion and his heart sank. Although Linda had never really joined in on what they were trying to do here, Jackie had grown to be a large asset in their group. She had trained in first aid with Rosilynn and could fly their reconditioned Huey like she had been born with wings. She was a clerk at a law firm and spent her spare time flying a Cessna on her days off. If only they had gotten to her plane—he tried to shrug it off, but the loss was too painful and fresh.

  It was easy to look at that map as a whole and not react violently to it, but when you considered the single lives being lost; it drove the horror home of what was going on out there.

  He had pushed his family to get here without stopping, disregarding family members scattered across the length of Arizona. Now, as he stared at those growing red dots, he wondered if he shouldn’t have at least tried to bring some of them with them. The infection hadn’t even reached Safford yet. They could have made time to visit aunts and uncles, his grandparents, his cousins; but all he had thought about was the safety of his wife and kids.

  Would it have made a difference? Would they have believed him without a firsthand experience to convince them? By the time that happened, it would have been too dangerous for them to be there. He was sitting in front of monitors, watching videos flash by of the violence and death erupting across the nation, and he still had a hard time believing it was real. How could he convince them, when he was still struggling with his own doubts?

  Though, it wasn’t all his fault; they had never considered the phone carriers going offline so quickly. “Why did the kid’s phones go out?”

  “Sean never set them up on our network. We share the satellite with a host of other companies and the amount of lines that we could use was limited. We could have gone with one of the mainstream carriers, but Sean was paranoid that they’d get shut down. He called that one right. Almost immediately after the shit hit the fan, the phone companies were offline. Most of the internet servers followed shortly thereafter. A few of those still online are porn sites. Their firewalls have protected them so far; but as to how long that will last? I couldn’t guess. Someone tried to breach our network and I had to counter like mad to keep the fuckers off,” the younger boy said, finishing off the Red Bull. He crushed it and hooked it towards the trash can to the left, missing it completely and slightly splashing the wall with an impact. “After that, the other networks began to crash. Cable and radio networks simply went to a standby screen and have yet to come back up.”

  “Why the hell would someone do that?” he asked, speaking to his feelings of disconnection that had swarmed him back at Texas Canyon.

  “If I had to guess? The government had all their top hackers kill the entire communication grid. For the moment, most of the cameras are still up,” he said, indicating the slow movement of cars on that Las Vegas traffic cam. “But I suspect that’s more for their surveillance benefit than anything else. They have to be keeping track of what’s going on; much like we’re doing here.”

  “I didn’t realize they could do that, shut everything down remotely,” he responded, trying to work it out in his mind. His hacker skills were non-existent and he didn’t get too far.

  “If you had asked me that before, I
would have told you there was no way they could either. This shit was massive and immediate. Either they knew this shit was going to happen or they have spent a long-time planning for it. If you put a lot of the top minds together long enough, you can really accomplish anything. They probably had a kill code written so that it really only took a press of a button; then instant black out. I don’t know, I’m still trying to unravel and trace the intrusion attempt to its source. YouTube was one of the earliest hit though, looks like they’re trying to minimize panic by controlling the information people are getting.”

  “Well, they’re fucking up on that score,” he said back. “That might have worked ten years ago, but now? When the whole world is interconnected the way it is? It’s probably what is driving those people out into the streets!”

  Ben was about to respond when his cell went off. “Talk to me,” Ben said as he answered the phone, his left hand tapping the Bluetooth in his ear.

  He turned his eyes to the monitors, trying to absorb all that he was seeing. There were street cams from several cities hovering on one and his eyes refused to be moved away from them. The horror unfolding was too much for him to stomach. Suddenly, the Coke didn’t seem like a good idea after all; it’d burn coming back up. People were getting torn apart on each of those feeds. The violence unfolding was beyond anything he had ever seen in a movie, and he had seen a lot of them. On a few, the cops and military were fighting shoulder to shoulder, but they were slowly getting overrun. New York City, Los Angeles, Tampa, it was everywhere, and the scenes so similar you’d think you were looking at one from different angles.

  “Dude, I told you that you were clear through Socorro, which is as close to Albuquerque as you get. And this shit hasn’t hit there yet. All for nothing bro,” Ben paused, smiling. He began to wonder if the boy realized the enormity of what was happening. This wasn’t a movie playing for his own amusement; this was life and death. Ben glanced at a screen, then up at him. His eyes were red and puffy and though his voice sounded calm, his soul shown clear from within.

  Okay, he did understand.

  “Yeah, dude, you’re fine. Alpine is quiet at the moment, though I’d watch out for a bunch of rednecks driving around shooting mailboxes—and anything else that comes into range. They are not discriminating,” he laughed, wiping a tear from his cheek. “I know you did, but Casey man, Roswell is gone.”

  The enormity of what Ben said hit him.

  He looked to the screen above his head and saw a live feed; an intersection littered with corpses. Roswell, New Mexico, the labeled window said. He saw a little boy with a toy gun laying half out of a truck window and his heart broke. Before his eyes the hand moved, the head jerked, and the little boy raised his head at an awkward angle.

  It was too much.

  He turned to leave and as he was getting ready to exit the room, he heard the boy ask Casey where his stash was hidden. As much as Todd hated that shit, he wondered what his friend from Texas said in response; he might need a hit himself before the day was over.

  How was it spreading so fast?

  Chapter 17

  Run

  Saint

  Tucson, AZ

  She took a long look through the bubbled window on the dock door. There didn’t appear to be anyone out there, but she couldn’t see directly below them. She nodded to David and he slid the door up. They could have gone out the receiving door rather than jumping down from the dock, but there was no way to tell if anyone was on the sides and the street was directly to their right. Anyone passing by would see them as they exited the store. At least this way, their field of vision was funneled by the large wall that ran the length of the docking bay. They felt reassured that the distance to the bottom would let them quickly step back in case something was down there and came at them.

  The store didn’t sell backpacks, so they had packed as much food as they could carry in the reusable blue grocery bags they sold. They were made of low cost material and couldn’t hold much, but it was better than leaving empty handed. They would have to find more food later. Odd saying that, knowing what they were leaving behind. But even if they got the truck backed up to the dock, they couldn’t assure they wouldn’t draw attention just starting the engine. If those things funneled their way down here they’d be fucked.

  Now they were about to plunge back into the fray, after what only seemed like a short respite from fighting. Yet, they all had loved ones out there that needed them and the drive to get there overrode everything else.

  They began to help each other down, Randall and David remaining until the end and quickly jumping down to take their place at their side. Her manager shook hands with them and wished them luck. He had his wife and kids to look after and she knew he’d be taking no precautions to get there as fast as he could.

  She was resolved to do the same.

  Her own family was too spread out to be able to get to any of them and Randall’s were already leaving the city. Jeff’s only family member was in prison and there was no hope of getting him out of there. Of the remaining four members of their group, Jesus was the only one that had immediate family nearby and they had all resolved to see him returned to them.

  If for no other reason than he had a shit load of guns at his place and she could finally have a way to defend herself. Jesus was cracking under the stress he was under and the quicker they got him to his wife and baby, the sooner he’d become his old self again.

  With a final nod and look from everyone else, they all began to jog up the docking bay. They neared the top, the road opening up on their right, and she was immediately concerned about their flank. She did her best to push it out of her thoughts and poured on the speed; it was too late to do anything else. Her legs burned from the exertion, but she worked through it.

  Jeff was at her side and David was pushing ahead. He was going to make a break for his car on the side of the building, but it was towards the front. She had to give it to him; he had balls. He planned to drive around the front and draw them away. While he did, they were going make a break for it around the back.

  The others were falling behind as Randall was big but not fast and Jesus was not in shape enough to run for very long. She turned and the heaving Hispanic tossed the keys to her as he tried to catch his breath. She snatched them midair, her black hair whipping her face as she quickly turned and dashed towards his beat-up truck. She had a bag of groceries in one hand and the weight was slowing her down. For a moment, she considered dropping it. It wasn’t worth her life, but she might regret it later; she couldn’t be sure when they’d be able to stop again. Jeff was carrying two sets of bags and was making it look easy.

  As they cleared the rear wall and came around the corner, they were going at a full sprint on a downgrade. There was a long row of cars to her right and sitting on the ground by the first was a large Yaqui tribe member in dark blue soiled clothes. He raised his head and stared at them. His eyes were fierce and his slackened jaw opened in a disgusting display of hunger. He lunged and her legs began to pump faster. She slipped right and darted towards the black pickup ahead.

  She was almost there.

  Her head was suddenly yanked backward as something took hold of her hair and pulled. She couldn’t help the scream that came ripping from her throat. Her glasses slipped and hung loosely upon her nose as she was almost flipped onto her back. The bastard had gotten her! The panic rose as she felt the constant tugging and her momentum came to a halt.

  Jeff grabbed the sneering man, his teeth snapping at her neck, and she felt her neck hairs bristle from the touch of teeth. Her body shivered and she screamed again. A metal pole came crashing down on the head of the dead man and split it open with a sickening crunch.

  Randall had caught up to them.

  The creature fell to the ground, its hand still clutching her hair and pulling her down with him. She tried to pull away and felt Jeff’s hand on the back of her head trying to get the clenched hand to free her hair. She shook her head to qu
ell her panic, but her nerves had been completely shot. She was ready to a break down; she had been close to becoming one of those things. She wanted to vomit.

  She turned to the Randall and saw the large man gripping a bent pole in one hand. He was having a hard time catching his breath. She mouthed thank you and he nodded. Then movement caught her eye and a horrifying realization hit her; she had just alerted the entire horde at the front of the store that their food source was leaving. They came streaming around the front corner of the building and would be upon them in seconds.

  David had just gotten to his car and she cried out a warning but it was too late. They swarmed him, arms flaying, teeth tearing. A loud hoarse scream came out of the pile of zombies and her stomach decided it had enough. She vomited; the bile burning as she emptied the contents of her stomach on the asphalt below.

  Jeff grabbed the keys and bolted for the driver’s side of the truck. She wiped her mouth and the fear drove her towards the truck; her eyes needing a distraction or she’d keep retching even after those things tore into her.

  Jumping into the passenger seat, she felt the truck buck as Randall and Jesus climbed in the back. The truck took a moment, then roared to life. Jeff threw it in reverse and hit the gas. The truck staggered backward and rammed four of the closest walkers. The truck shuddered from the impact. The backend rose as they drove over the undead and came to a sudden halt.

  “Shit shit shit!” Jeff yelled, putting it into drive and swinging the wheel around. He floored it and they lurched over the bodies once more; she could feel the crunch of the bones through the floorboards.

  Jesus suddenly screamed. She jerked her head around and looked out the back window. One of the walkers had jumped onto the back of the truck. The pole that had saved her life flashed through the air again, clipping Jesus, and slamming against the shoulder of the raving undead. The walker was flung free as Jesus dropped to the truck bed unconscious. The truck screamed forward, its engine pushing its limits and making sure they all knew it.