Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise

by Chesser, Shawn

  But Hal was no longer seventeen. He was thirty-seven and his fast-twitch muscles were that in name only. Plus, as he rolled over onto his back, the overhead fluorescents blinded him long enough, literally and figuratively, to be ignorant of the fact that he was dead meat.

  Upon leaving the realm of the living, Charlie Noble had lost all ability to reason or think or strategize. But that was no kind of advantage to the fresh meat writhing on the floor a yard away. The undead creature currently locked onto Hal like a heat-seeking missile had three things working in its favor: forward momentum, gravity, and inertia. When put behind a hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight and delivered in the form of an unintentional head butt, it was more than enough to mercifully render the janitor unconscious. Which then left the door wide open for Patient Zero’s first kill of the day.

  Chapter 7

  Nearing Muncie, Indiana

  Riker opened his eyes and wiped a gossamer thread of drool from his chin. He stole another look at Cat Lady’s watch, did the math, and found he’d only been asleep for thirty minutes. Glancing out the window, he saw that the bus was still creeping along the back road behind a long line of vehicles full of people all in the same boat as him—almost.

  “Why in the fuck is this cunt driving so slow?” said his seemingly Tourette’s afflicted neighbor.

  Riker said nothing. He aimed his muscled back at the annoyance and stared uncomfortably out the window at Middle America. There were farmhouses set back on large tracts of land. Behind gnarled post-and-beam fences he saw rusted farm implements, hand-painted sandwich boards hawking farm-fresh goods, and old cars sitting on half-filled tires, most of them adorned with handwritten For Sale signs.

  “At this snail’s pace, we’re never going to get to Muncie for my connection,” said the same woman, her voice several octaves higher this time.

  Riker felt a twinge between his shoulder blades as a muscle spasmed. On the heels of that, the ringing was back in his ears.

  When the lady stopped her bawling, a murmur went through the half-filled bus. Then someone in back implored the woman to Shut her pie hole.

  Which only added fuel to the fire.

  Her voice becoming shrill, nearly unintelligible, the woman asked, “Do you know who I am?”

  There was silence. Not even the initial heckler added to his pie hole comment.

  Which only emboldened Riker’s miserable seatmate. “I bet the black bitch up there gets paid by the hour and is driving like Miss Daisy just to make sure she gets her bonus.”

  To that, Riker turned away from the window, looked down on the woman, and said sardonically, “Actually, in the movie, Daisy didn’t drive. And I bet your friend the driver gets paid whether you’re happy or not. And I’d bet she doesn’t know you from Adam. In fact”—he dragged out his wallet and extracted a crisp Andrew Jackson—“twenty dollars says you’re a nobody to her.” Riker pulled his Braves cap low over his face, concealing a wicked smile, and waited for Vesuvius to erupt. And she did. The woman spewed words that’d cause a merchant marine to blush as she told Riker to do things to himself in positions he doubted could be found in the Kama Sutra.

  Eventually the driver could take no more of the woman’s ranting and the bus drifted to the shoulder, where it lurched to a stop amidst a grinding of gears and squealing of brakes.

  Mission accomplished. Riker tilted his cap back to normal, gripped the armrests, and rose up from his seat. Over the other passengers’ heads, he saw the driver talking into a handheld microphone. He watched her for a short while under the white-hot glare from the waste of skin to his left, then sat back down and stared out the window. A couple of seconds after fixing his gaze on the distant clouds, the bus began moving again. It wasn’t long before another burst of static emanated from the overhead speakers and, in a singsong voice, the driver was promising to have whoever was acting up yanked from the bus and delivered to the Muncie jail in the back of a squad car.

  The threat seemed to do the trick.

  The woman’s lips pursed into a thin white line and she slammed her slight frame into the seatback.

  Checkmate, Riker thought triumphantly. Doing his best to ignore the holes being burned into him by the woman’s hate-filled glare, he kept his gaze fixed on the gray strip of asphalt scrolling by outside his window, where soon a long string of military vehicles, of which he possessed intimate knowledge, began passing them by. He saw a trio of camouflaged deuce-and-a-half troop transports painted in a black, green, and brown woodland scheme. Used mainly for moving soldiers and supplies, these vehicles were at the head of the column. Next came a half-dozen desert-brown Humvees: squat, slab-sided vehicles, the first four sprouting whip antennas and turret-mounted heavy machine guns. The two bringing up the rear had camper-like shells out back with large red crosses on the top and sides. Filled with specialized lifesaving equipment, the top-heavy-looking rigs were used mostly for transferring gravely wounded soldiers from casualty evacuation helicopters just arriving on a flight line to the trauma surgeons awaiting them in a nearby field hospital. Or, as in Riker’s case a decade or so ago, to a waiting Air Force C-17 Globemaster III that delivered him to Ramstein Air Base in Germany where he was immediately delivered by ambulance to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center for skin grafts and other unspeakable operations. Just seeing the vehicles tooling the road right outside his large tinted window started a knot twisting slowly in his stomach and got him to rooting in his pocket for the roll of antacids.

  He stared at his visage reflected back at him in the window. The Braves cap failed to completely conceal the evidence of that day. Stretched tight on his forehead, the pink scarring was but one reminder of how close he’d come to meeting the Reaper.

  Pushing the sounds of imagined screams from his thoughts, he popped three chalky Rolaids into his mouth and stuffed the remainder in his pocket. In the process, his left elbow brushed his neighbor’s leg, starting a chain reaction he should have seen coming.

  The vibration from the kick delivered by the woman coursed up Riker’s leg but barely resonated in his stump. However, the flurry of expletives she spewed following the loud clunk was heard round the bus and likely in the next county.

  What happened next was mildly amusing to Riker. Cat Lady lifted her right foot off the ground, removed her canvas shoe, and with the sleeve of her cat-hair-covered sweater, staunched the blood flowing from a split big toe.

  Suppressing a smile, Riker removed his ball cap, rubbed his bald head, and uttered the words, “Bitch’s toe, meet prosthetic leg. Prosthetic leg, meet bitch’s toe.” Then, before she could answer, he was on his feet and pushing past her on a mission to find a seat as far away as possible.

  Having seen the altercation as it happened, and clearly aware of the outcome, the man two rows back and to the left who had shouted the pie hole comment, bellowed, “We have a bleeder.”

  Settled into his new seat a couple of rows behind the driver, Riker closed his eyes and cracked a sly smile.

  Chapter 8

  Middletown University

  Attuned to the constant ding and whoosh of the doors on the distant elevator opening and closing, the thing that used to be called Charlie Noble placed one bloody hand on the janitor’s slack face, clumsily planted both feet in the growing pool of blood, and rose on shaky legs.

  It stood there for a few seconds, listening to conversations between students on their way to the journalism wing a couple of hundred yards west across a glass skybridge. Driven by a primal urge to feed, and moaning softly, it staggered to the open door, bulling into the bucket and mop and sending it rolling across the hall to the far wall where it stopped, sloshing foul-smelling water onto the carpet.

  As Charlie’s husk stood wavering in the hall, the brain propelling it was bombarded by stimuli. The jerking movements of the cars trickling into the lot below drew his gaze. Then, the elevator bell dinged again far down the hall, causing his head to swivel slowly left. But it wasn’t until the high falsetto of someone singi
ng filtered down the hall to his right that signals were sent from deep in his brain to the limbs that started him moving toward the sound.

  Jamming out to Bruno Mars, Savion Jones emerged from the stairwell, pleased with himself for having avoided a ride in an elevator potentially filled with a dozen of his highly caffeinated peers. Head bobbing to the beat and causing the white wires attached to his earbuds to sway to-and-fro, he continued on down the back hall toward the media center, where he hoped the October issue of Filmmaker Magazine awaited him on the shelf.

  With the last few bars of the peppy dance song fading, he retrieved his iPhone from his coat pocket, thumbed it to life, and searched for something moody to carry him the rest of the way.

  He selected the Music icon, scrolled down through the available artists, and started an Imagine Dragons tune playing. One hundred percent moody, he thought, cracking a smile. How could a song called “Radioactive” not be? He slipped the phone into his pocket and looked up to see the backlit silhouette of a person cutting the corner ahead.

  The first jangling guitar chords were starting up when the overhead lights illuminated the form from the front and it registered to Savion that the lab coat on the cat didn’t come crimson off the rack but was instead thoroughly soaked in blood that, at the moment, was dripping steadily onto the carpet.

  As Savion jammed to a halt, his Adidas made a soft squelch on the carpet. Conversely, the pallid, hunched-over figure to his fore let out a soft moan and took a stilted step closer. In the ensuing split-second during which Savion was deciding which way he was going to run, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons drew a deep breath and the music rose to a crescendo. As the vocals rode over the bass-heavy track, a switch was seemingly flicked in Savion’s brain and his smile returned when good old normalcy bias shoved the primal urge to run aside and convinced him the monstrosity was merely someone making a dry run at Halloween in one hell of a kickass costume.

  The apocalypse, indeed, thought Savion as he yanked the buds from his ears and fumbled for his phone.

  “Duuude. That is some sick ass makeup,” Savion said, looking the groaning man up and down. “But if you’re gonna prank some fools and put it on YouTube … you had better be recording that shit.” He raised his phone and flicked through three pages of apps until he found the one with the cartoonish-looking black camera. Finally, with the zombified student trudging steadily closer, he started the video rolling and zoomed in on the dude’s pasty-white mug.

  The shell that was Charlie Noble saw the meat moving and making sounds but was no longer able to comprehend the words. The inflection and nuances meant nothing. The hunger pangs, however, were back with a vengeance and something deep down in its brain told it that eating the noisy thing was the only way to numb them.

  With the thoroughly made-up guy inexplicably remaining in character and his faux moans getting louder and carrying down the hall, Savion decided to go with the flow. Playing along for the camera, he backed up until he was adjacent to the stairwell he’d just exited. Then, placing a palm up, universal semaphore for halt, he said, “Stop there for a just a sec and be quiet.”

  The dude kept moaning.

  “Shhh,” Savion said. Are you a freakin’ exchange student? was what he was thinking as he tucked a stray dreadlock behind his ear, reached blindly behind his back, and took ahold of the door handle. “Shhh …” He smiled big. “You hear those footsteps? Someone’s about to be coming out.”

  You’re a natural, thought Savion as the guy advanced on him and the hollow-sounding footsteps at his back drew nearer and grew louder, resonating in the stairwell behind the closed door.

  In a perfect moment of cinematic confluence—timing is everything, as Savion’s thespian father liked to say—the dude in zombie makeup was nearly even with the stairwell door and the footsteps echoing behind it had just ceased. So Savion did what any aspiring filmmaker coveting a clip worthy of a million social media hits would do—he flung the door open and stepped aside, hoping for both an Oscar-winning performance out of Zombie Dude and an epic reaction from the unsuspecting mark poised to emerge from behind the door.

  Chapter 9

  Coming down from the fifth floor, expecting nothing more than to burn a few calories by descending the three flights of stairs, Tiffany Jensen paused behind the second-floor door, hitched her pack higher on one shoulder, and reached for the handle. But someone had beaten her to it and it turned freely in her hand. Then, on its own accord, the door was ripped away from her outstretched arm and a form half a head taller than her was darkening the doorway.

  Pissed at the prospect of having to step aside so that some asshat in a hurry could barge past her, Tiffany was about to give the offender a piece of her mind when she found herself trapped in the embrace of a snarling madman.

  “You’re laying it on a little too thick, my man,” said Savion, standing on his toes and jostling for a better camera angle. Wishing he was filming with the Blackmagic video cam instead of his effin iPhone, he edged partway into the stairwell, keeping the door propped open with his hip.

  The would-be actor snarled, gutturally, like an animal—an altogether too realistic a sound that started a ripple of gooseflesh coursing up Savion’s ribcage.

  Struggling to break free from the man’s cold grip, Tiffany held her breath against his awful, vomit-tinged breath and brought her knee up viciously between his legs, connecting solidly with no noticeable effect.

  “You’re pushing the envelope, man!” shouted Savion. Still filming, he put a hand on the guy’s shoulder and pulled back just in time to see him sink a picket of obviously brace-straightened teeth into the co-ed’s ivory-hued neck, causing a spritz of hot blood to splash the tiny camera lens and continue across Savion’s face and into his mouth. It smelled to him like a jar full of ancient pennies, metallic and strangely chemical. It tasted bitter and salty on his tongue. Spitting the sticky warm glob onto the carpet, Savion dropped his phone on the landing. Incredulous, he shouted, “This is not gonna fly with YouTube’s TOS.”

  As the statement echoed inside the stairway, three things happened. Tiffany fell backward onto the unforgiving cement landing, her head impacting with a sharp crack. Savion leaped onto the crazy guy’s back, trying to wrap him up in a WWF headlock. And the door leading out to the deserted hallway swung shut, sealing them all inside behind an audible snick.

  With a scream stuck in her throat and a flat fan of dark crimson pulsating rhythmically onto the wall and stairs all around her, Tiffany struggled to breathe with what seemed like a ton of cold flesh crushing down on her.

  For all intents and purposes, Savion Jones died the second he caught the mouthful of saliva-tainted blood. But seeing as how he was oblivious to his fate, plus feeling like a massive douche for setting the girl up like he did, he fought tooth and nail to pry the silent dude away until she stopped struggling and the blood-drenched freak turned on him.

  Flicking his gaze from the girl’s wildly fluttering eyelids to the crazy man now easily overpowering him, Savion felt a flare of white-hot pain as his supposed actor’s teeth plunged into his neck. Then, seeing his blood mingling with the girl’s on the landing, darkness began to close in on the periphery of his vision and the overhead lights danced violently back-and-forth in front of his eyes. Drawing a final breath, Savion Jones witnessed through tearing eyes the freak rearing back and coming away with a mouthful of his flesh. Trailing ribbons of tattered dermis, the glistening plug of meat jiggled as his killer worked it into his maw with both hands. The last sensations received by Savion’s brain before it switched off was the soft little patters of his own lifeblood raining down on his upturned face.

  ***

  Less than a minute after dying the first time, Tiffany Jensen’s hands opened and closed, the recently manicured nails raking the concrete and sending ripples across the warm, sticky pool. A tick later, her body began to twitch and shake as the prehistoric part of her brain rebooted. In the next instant, her eyelids snapped open and the gla
ssy vacant eyes started their never-ending search for prey.

  Teeth grinding and clicking, Tiffany Jensen’s reanimated corpse rolled over onto its stomach and rose to all fours. With the lake of blood now encompassing the entire landing, the monster shuffled forward on hands and knees, starting a mini crimson waterfall cascading over the top stair. The nerve-jangling noise of its teeth coming together ceased only when it nudged undead Charlie Noble aside and dove face-first into Savion Jones’s guts.

  Feeding next to its killer, the ravenous creature shook its head side-to-side doglike and came away with a greasy rope of intestine clutched two-handed, working one end greedily into its mouth, the other dribbling partially digested Egg McMuffin onto the dead kid’s khakis.

  Chapter 10

  Tara knew her day had just rocketed from bad to worse the instant the young male student with blood sluicing from a gaping neck wound stumbled from the elevator and landed face-first on the floor not thirty feet in front of her. Acting on muscle memory, while gaping past her customer at the gory spectacle, she popped the lid onto the cup with practiced ease and pushed the coffee forward.

  “You’re welcome,” said the fortysomething rather snottily as she took her coffee in hand and slam-dunked the two quarters change into Tara’s tip jar.

  Without meeting the woman’s gaze or catching the sarcasm dripping from her words, Tara muttered, “Thanks,” and felt her limbs stiffen.

  Shaking her head, the woman adjusted her pack on her shoulder, turned and took her first tentative steps toward the elevators—the one on the left now buzzing angrily and opening and closing continuously on the prostrate body in its path.

  While the lady with the backpack hustled across the lobby toward the fallen man, the rest of the people present seemed to gravitate to the coffee kiosk, their nervous chatter rising as blood pooled around the fallen man’s head and upper body.