Dead Fall

by Joseph Xand

  a XandLand publication

  Published by XandLand Press

  Copyright © Joseph Xand, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either for the are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1548051921

  ISBN-10: 1548051926

  Printed in the United States

  For my mother.

  I always said I'd write you a novel.

  Chapter 1

  T HE SECOND BODY FELL from the sky minutes after the first. The first had jostled him from his dream. The second roused him completely. Dr. Thaddeus Palmer sat upright in his bed and rubbed his face. The wind-up clock on his nightstand told him it was just after 3 a.m. He pulled back the curtain on the window next to his bed and peered outside. Even in full moonlight, he couldn't see much detail beyond the front porch.

  Thad stretched back out on his bed and soon dreamed again. Whatever was out there could wait a little longer. Too dark to chance going out now.

  Nearly three hours later, Thad awakened to another dull crash, this one closer and coupled with snapping branches. He swung his legs over the side of his bed and snagged his jeans off the locker next to his nightstand. He pulled them on, then stammered two doors down to his daughter's room.

  Peeking in, he found her sound asleep and slowly pulled the door closed behind him.

  He sat in the chair next to the front door and pulled on his boots. They were, in fact, his father's boots and fit Thad a little too loosely. Loose enough that on long days working in the yard they rubbed blisters on his heels. He'd grown used to wearing Band-aids before he needed them in hopes of avoiding blisters. He wore no Band-aids now, but did have two pairs of socks on for the cold and reasoned that they may provide enough cushion against the rubbing, especially for a quick trip outside.

  He'd never owned boots himself. As a well-respected and well-paid professional in his field, he could afford Allen Edmonds and did so by the dozens. But his father, also a well-respected physician in his own right, was always most comfortable lounging in a pair of cowboy boots. Of course, his father was well-respected in the small-town-private-practice, he-knows-everyone-and-everyone-knows-him sense of the word. Thad had been respected in the highly pretentious, you-know-me-but-I-don't-need-to-know-you sense. His father had earned respect. Thad had required it of any employment contract, along with a hefty, sign-on bonus.

  As quietly as possibly, Thad released the quadruple bolts securing the door and opened it slowly. The squeaking hinges, normally imperceptible, were now like fingernails on a chalkboard. Outside the sun was just beginning to crest above the far, distant mountains. Before heading out, Thad grabbed from the umbrella stand what was quickly becoming his most useful tool. His daughter referred to it as his "stab stick." He honestly did not know what to call it.

  It was nothing more than a six-foot piece of rebar nailed to a thick, wooden broom handle with long barbed-wire fencing tacks wrapped and padded with duct tape. The bottom end of the rebar stuck below the broom handle about a foot and was sharpened roughly to a point. Spear? Javelin? Harpoon? Stab stick seemed as good a name as any.

  Thad stepped gingerly onto the wrap-around porch and surveyed his small world beyond it. His home (his father's home) was nestled on the south end of a one-and-a-half acre outcropping that jutted from the cliff side of Bear Pass Mountain, a medium-sized peak within the lower Catskill range of Upstate New York. Behind the house, on its west side, a wall of rock rose vertically for over 100 feet to the mountain's summit. In front of the house, trees and brush sparsely dotted the landscape before, roughly fifty yards out, the slight knoll ended abruptly, giving way to a sheer 300-foot drop to Bear Pass's nadir. Standing at the side of the cliff offered a semi-panoramic view of the Lower Hudson Valley beyond.

  Thad walked slowly down the few steps leading onto the front lawn, his senses focused, noting every sight and sound around him. Birds flitted about among the trees and sang their morning serenade. Squirrels chased one another up and down tree trunks, and somewhere, possibly echoing from the zenith, a woodpecker tapped to its own rhythm.

  He walked north, casing, towards where he believed the earliest morning thuds had come from. Two-thirds of the way to the partially-disassembled barn, he discovered two fresh depressions. One of the depressions was empty, as was often the case. In the other, though, a body lay crumpled and broken, the head split and crushed. That happened sometimes, too.

  Behind him, chickens clucked in their makeshift coop inside the dilapidated barn. At first, he wasn't going to buy chickens, fearing they'd die during the first harsh winter. But last winter had been somewhat mild and the chickens thrived as a result, providing him and his daughter with plenty of eggs and even the occasional chicken dinner.

  Thad craned his neck upward toward the top of the towering cliff. He wondered how anything could survive such a drop, but realized that "survive" is a strong word. He scanned the yard for the former occupant of the empty hole. All around him the ground was littered with small craters, nearly a dozen in this area of the yard alone.

  Just where did you get off to, Thad thought.

  Creased grass led from the crater and he followed it with his eyes. The trail went beyond the small, rusting tractor and towards the edge of the cliff. This one had likely walked off the cliff above and then dragged itself off the next cliff. The bodies usually continued in whatever directions they were facing after impact. Thad started moving that direction when a deep gurgle turned his attention to the back of the house.

  He half jogged around the corner to find one of the creatures at the base of the rock wall. It pulled itself along the edge of the wall slowly, inch-by-inch, only able to utilize its left arm. Its back was broken at a disturbing angle, its useless legs jutting right nearly 90 degrees. Its right arm slithered along, hugging the contours of the rocks and crevices it encountered, the bones probably completely crushed. Behind Thad, about ten paces from the corpse, Thad noted two small, broken branches. They had snapped off a tree growing awkwardly halfway up the side of the cliff wall.

  So that one was you, he thought.

  Thad straddled the thing quietly. He raised the stab stick and brought its iron point down through the center of the creature's skull. He didn't put much weight or effort behind it. He'd learned he didn't need to. The stab stick was heavy enough that gravity did most of the work. The thing stopped moving immediately.

  "Daddy?"

  Thad whirled around. Karen, his daughter, stood at the top of the back porch steps in her pajamas clutching and petting Bun-bun, her stuffed rabbit. Thad waved her inside. "Don't come out here right now, Sweetie."

  "Is everything okay?"

  Thad looked down at the corpse between his feet. The killing tool stood stiffly in front of him. She must have seen him quiet it. The thought made him uneasy. But it wasn't the first time she'd seen him kill one of those things. Not by a mile. She'd dubbed it the stab stick, after all.

  Someday she'd do more than watch him quiet a corpse. Someday he'd have to teach her how to do it herself. A whole new world. To think he used to worry himself to death with future discussions about drugs and condoms.

  "Are there a lot of 'em?" she asked.

  More than usual, he thought. He looked down the rough gravel driveway, infested with potholes and weedy growth, to where it disappeared behind the high rock wall.

  "Hey, why don't you go inside and mix us up some pancakes. I'll be
in a few minutes to help you cook 'em up."

  "Okay," she replied drowsily. He smiled at her as she padded back inside in her Cookie Monster slippers.

  Once the screen door slapped closed, he pulled up the stab stick and started down the driveway. He was still a good distance from the edge of the rock wall when he heard the chain link fence rattling around the corner. Before he rounded it, the smell of the thing nearly knocked him over.

  The corpse stood in the middle of the eight-foot fence, pressing tightly against it. One of its arms was thrusts through one of the diamond-shaped holes in the fence. Skin and flesh were ripped free of the bone to accommodate the arm fitting into such a small space. The thing was stuck, but it didn't seem to know it. It pushed into the fence and dug its feet into the ground, trying to walk forward, or maybe thinking that it was doing so. When Thad came around the corner, the corpse stepped faster and dug into each step deeper. The fence groaned under its weight even as the creature moaned at Thad.

  Thad looked to the top of the fence where it met the rock wall. The L-shaped bracket that was supposed to keep the fence securely mounted to the rock was coming loose of its moorings. He had no idea how to fix it. The fence leaned and bounced as the thing pushed against it. Thad thought the fence might hold two, maybe three of those things pushing against it. But much more than that and he was sure it would give.

  Thad hefted the stab stick and sliding it through the fence, carefully rested it squarely on the corpse's forehead. The thing seemed to wait patiently as Thad leaned into it and quickly jabbed the rebar into its skull. He nearly lost his grip on the tool as the corpse, finally quieted, slid down the fence. Thad yanked it free and the corpse collapsed only as far as its trapped arm allowed.

  Thad shook his head. He'd have to chop off that arm to remove the corpse and clean up the mess. Thad walked the length of the fence, all of fifteen feet, which included a six-foot wide gate, to where it ended over the edge of a steep drop-off. The drop-off wasn't as steep or as sure as the cliff in front of the house, but it was still treacherous, especially for the non-living. The side of the fence continued strangely about three foot beyond the edge. The dead weren't smart enough to figure out how to climb around the side of the fence. At least none had managed the trick yet. Thad looked over the edge, hanging onto the fence for safety. Some distance below, three sets of eyes stared up at him and clawed at the side of the rise in a fruitless attempt to climb.

  That's one more corpse than yesterday, he thought.

  Every once in a while, the corpses, attempting to circle the end of the fence, would fall over the edge. Sometimes they'd get stuck on the ledge below rather than falling all the way, such as these three. The oldest two had worn their hands to nubs trying to climb back up, clawing at the hard rock. The newest addition likely wouldn't learn from their failures.

  Five of them in one night, Thad thought. Something's drawing them in.

  On average, no more than two of the things wandered off the cliffs above in any given week. Five of them in a matter of hours wasn't a record. But it was close.

  Shouldering the stab stick, he walked along the south side of the fence and back to the front yard. There was a time when he couldn't come this way without stopping at the graves, those of his father and his ex-wife, and paying his respects. Now he barely noticed them at all. Karen, on the other hand, still came out here nearly every day. She'd sit on the grass next to her mother's gravestone (which was really just a big, round rock Thad had found behind the barn; Thad had promised Karen a proper gravestone someday), petting Bun-bun and whispering quietly to the grave. In the spring, he'd see fresh flowers in a cheap, plastic kitchen cup sitting between the two mounds of dirt.

  He moved quickly towards the edge of the cliff. But halfway there, he stopped, considered a second, and changed direction to the front door of the house. Mounting the porch, he leaned into the house and whisked his binoculars off their hook next to the door. Strapping them around his neck, Thad leaped off the porch and jogged to the end of the yard, being careful not to get too close to the edge of the cliff. Looking down at the prison in the valley immediately below, he didn't need the binoculars to see there were more of the dead today than ever before. Yesterday about six dozen of the dead surrounded the prison's perimeter, most of them pounding the tall, chain-link fence, others wandering the cast fields that encased the prison on all sides. Today easily twice that many crowded the fence lines.

  Punching the stab stick into the ground and bringing up the binoculars, Thad surveyed the fenced interior of the prison. Nothing seemed out of place. It had been a couple of months since he'd seen any live humans within the prison fences. Even then he'd never counted more than four separate individuals, all of them wearing prison jumpsuits or grays. They always surfaced on the roof of a particular building, probably the cafeteria. None of them ever ventured onto the prison grounds below and chanced an altercation with the fifty or so corpses sauntering within the perimeter.

  Thad often wondered how many prisoners survived the outbreak, only to die slowly, locked and starving in their cells. How many of them, now dead, pounding on the cell bars in vain, serving a sentence beyond life? How long could the lucky survivors, those not locked in a cell, survive on the prison food stored in the cafeteria pantries? Would they let the others out or just let them starve?

  Thad thought he knew the answer. The food would last with fewer people eating it. Even so, before the world ended, Thad knew the prison received food deliveries twice a week. Obviously, the food supply wasn't endless, regardless of how many people were eating from it. He also wondered what desperate measures they would take once the food ran out.

  Thad heard a flapping sound and looked right to see the creation he'd sown together several months back had come loose. He'd need to tie it back down before the whole thing spilled over the side.

  Hell, he thought, I need to take it up and toss it in the barn.

  But he knew his daughter wouldn't let him. They'd talked about it before. She nearly cried.

  "But Daddy, what if people need us?" she'd begged through tears, and he relented to leaving it tied down to the edge of the cliff.

  In retrospect he wondered why he'd even wasted the time and energy making it, sewing it together, slopping on paint. Was it empathy? Guilt? Redemption? An attempt to hold onto some last shred of humanity? Did it even matter anymore?

  Raising the binoculars again and moving his gaze along the fence line, Thad noticed something that hadn't been there the day before. Tracks. Someone had recently driven through the tall grass around the prison, probably doing reconnaissance, looking for the prison's vulnerabilities. He followed the tracks around the perimeter and to where they disappeared into the tree line to the east. He looked towards the highway and inspected it as far as he could see. Nothing.

  Bringing his eyes back to the tree line, he swept the binoculars right to left slowly. Finally, he saw them. Two men stood just inside the trees, passing their own pair of binoculars between them, visually scrutinizing the prison fences, pointing, discussing what they were seeing. One of them sat on the hood of a silver Hummer. The other stood in front of it.

  Thad continued inspecting the tree line in front of them. The two men appeared to be alone. No one else that he could see. But odds were, they were part of a larger contingent sent ahead to scout the prison.

  Bringing the binoculars back around to the men, Thad was shocked to see their binoculars trained directly on him. Thad dropped his binoculars and stammered backward, slumping out of their line of sight.

  Then his daughter screamed.

  Unconsciously, Thad snapped up the stab stick and bolted towards the house. The binoculars bounced painfully on his chest. He ripped them off and tossed them in a bush as he ran.

  He was halfway to the house when she screamed again. He stopped in his tracks and looked around. That hadn't come from the house. A chicken darted across the yard to his right. The barn.

  He scrambled towards the b
arn and nearly fell when he lost his footing in a crater. Finally, he bursted into the barn. His daughter was pinned in a corner. A corpse edged towards her. It stood impossibly on a pair of legs that were obviously broken in several places.

  "Karen!" Thad screamed. In a single motion, he rushed the creature, spearing the stick through its ribcage and pinning it to the barn's wall. At the same time, with his right hand, he grabbed Karen by the arm and slung her out of the corner and onto the pile of dirt behind him. He looked to make sure she was okay. Tears streamed down her face and she looked like she may be on the verge of screaming again.

  "Stay down!" Thad demanded but realized she was likely too scared to move anyway.

  Thad turned his attention to the creature to see it sliding, little by little, along the length of the stab stick's handle, trying to free itself, moving towards him. Its only good eye focused squarely on Thad. The other eye dangled from its socket, and in the back of his mind, Thad wondered if it had happened on impact from the fall from the cliff top. Somehow neither arm was broken. Both extended towards him, thin bones reaching and wiggling where fingers should have been.

  Thad noticed feathers on the thing's hands and face glued on by wet, sticky blood. The corpse had been feeding on chickens when Karen came in. The door of the chicken coop was off its hinges, and in one corner of the coop lay several bloody lumps of feathers and blood.

  Thad scanned the barn around him for a weapon of some kind. Nothing. He'd always been obsessive about putting away tools. Even the typical farming utensils found in most barns—pitchforks, rakes, hoes, shovels— were carefully stowed away in the basement to keep them from rusting. When they'd first arrived, Thad had left them hanging on the nails on the barn wall. But after he'd had to disassemble nearly half the barn, he'd moved them to keep them out of the elements.

  The barn! Thad thought. He looked to the other side of the barn, or what was left of it. Several pieces of wood hung loosely from a wall fragment on the far side. Thad took off that way just as the creature slid off the end of the stab stick with a wet, sickening slurp. Suddenly loose, the thing nearly collapsed on its weak legs, but soon gained its footing.