The End Time Saga Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Greene, Daniel

  Steele was silent.

  “I am an officer of the United States Army,” Jackson yelled in Steele’s face.

  Joseph looked down at his hand. He didn’t know how it got there, but his fingers were wrapped around a thin scalpel.

  A short jab into the vital area of Colonel Jackson’s neck should bring the man down quickly. It wasn’t so much different than medicine. Instead, he would make the blows to kill rather than heal. A thick vein bulged in Jackson’s neck, pulsing with the beating of his heart. Joseph’s eyes were drawn to it. Puncture through the vein. Press the scalpel into the tissue until it severed the man’s spinal column. Joseph was so intent on the man’s vein, he failed to notice the loud pitch of gunfire outside the tent.

  Colonel Jackson and Steele both looked outwards, sixth senses spiking. Joseph raised the scalpel back behind his ear. His hand wavered. Can I take this man’s life? How do Mauser and Steele do it with such crude efficiency? Maybe they commit the act as an instinct and think about their actions later. He always overthought things too much.

  Jackson’s red face sobered a bit. Whatever anger clouds had accumulated over the colonel had dissipated.

  “Agent Steele, can you handle a firearm?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s the only reason I am here,” Steele said.

  “Time to prove to me your loyalty.” In two long strides, Colonel Jackson was out of Joseph’s reach and outside the tent. Steele followed him and caught the long gun the colonel threw to him.

  Colonel Jackson went to a knee and, with rapid controlled bursts, slugged rounds at the threat. Steele stepped up behind the colonel. Wounded soldiers were awake and yelling at Joseph for help. Joseph dropped the scalpel.

  “Help me,” screamed a soldier. The soldier held his hands over his ears as he sobbed, tears rolling down his cheeks. It was as if he was being shot himself. Gunfire rattled the entrance of the tent.

  KINNICK

  Mount Eden Emergency Operations Facility, VA

  Inside the building was dark. Kinnick stepped over a partially consumed corpse, its mouth open in a final scream of terror. More bodies covered the floor in a ghastly array of horrible deaths, bodies rigid in death.

  His men rushed their corners, looking for threats.

  “Clear,” Lewis shouted, spinning from his corner outward.

  “Clear,” Turmelle called back.

  A lone moan sang out and was followed by the rustling of clothes and shuffling of feet. The men hadn’t realized the mess they had walked into.

  Near the far end of the lobby, bloody-hued light glowed down on the huddled bodies of hundreds of infected. They pressed upon one another near the edge of the room, crowding around large steel doors. The bunker. The doors were able to withstand five hundred kilotons of an atomic blast, and they worked well enough against the undead bodies of former facility workers.

  The infected turned on the soldiers, ready to welcome them to their office party. They made unstable steps for the entry team. Chewed-up faces, missing lips, and dead eyes tracked them.

  “Zetas,” Esparza yelled.

  “Holy shit,” Sergeant Lewis cursed. Kinnick took a step back as Sergeant Lewis unleashed a fury of lead at eight hundred rounds per minute into the living dead with his M249 SAW. Every fourth round a tracer flared out lighting up the carnage that ensued.

  Kinnick regained himself and stepped up, firing controlled three-round bursts with his M4 carbine. Master Sergeant Hunter stepped next to Kinnick as the rest of the team added their weight to the one-sided firefight. Limbs flew from bodies, heads exploded into cranial bone and brain matter, bodies were shoved backward into one another.

  “Reloading,” Lewis screamed, requesting cover while he got his weapon back in the fight. The others continued their defensive shooting on the infected horde that closed in until Lewis was up and firing again. Kinnick fumbled with a magazine exchange as an infected closed to within ten feet of him. Its rotting gray face mesmerized him. Dead white eyes, no feeling. Fuck. It stumbled closer, reaching a broken-fingered hand, and then a round took it through the side of the head.

  Master Sergeant Hunter gave Kinnick a wicked smile from beneath his beard. “Get your weapon up, sir,” he chided.

  Kinnick got the magazine locked into place and squeezed the trigger, thudding bullets into an infected’s face. Soon after, the last body hit the floor and the firefight was over. The carnage was complete. No time to ask questions, no time for mercy, only time for total war. The infected dead lay amongst their victims with no way to tell the decimated by bullets from the mangled by the undead. Not much a difference, Kinnick thought.

  “Man, I wish I had a portable mini-gun instead of this,” Lewis said. “You know, a backpack filled with thousands rounds. Fight would have been over in seconds.” His SAW looked like an uzi submachine gun in his hands.

  “Lewis and Fannin, check the entrance hatch. Bowman, check comms to comms with below. Pollard, Turmelle, Esparza, watch our backs. Hunter, you’re with me,” Kinnick called out.

  Master Sergeant Hunter walked forward with a slight grin on his face. Is he enjoying this? Kinnick narrowed his eyes at the man. Has he seen too much? Is he beginning to crack? Or is the man some sort of sociopath? Feeding everyone cake until it is time to kill again. The human race was being extinguished by a virus that raised up the dead, and this man seemed happy about it.

  “Something funny about having to slaughter hundreds of Americans?” Kinnick said.

  Master Sergeant Hunter’s smile curved straight upright. “No sir, just happy to take the fight to the savages. It’s hard to sit by while these people kill innocent Americans,” he said.

  “I understand, Master Sergeant, just try not to look so damn happy about it. These are people’s family members we are gunning down.”

  “Copy that. Do not enjoy taking it to the enemy,” Master Sergeant Hunter said.

  “Sir, hatch has been sealed,” Lewis called over, knocking his knuckles on the metal with a deadened drumming noise.

  Kinnick rushed over.

  “Sir, we are getting some sort of feedback from below,” Bowman called out, holding a headset near his ear.

  Kinnick took the headset and pushed it to his ear. The earpiece was wet and he pulled it away. “Thanks for heads up,” he said. He wiped his ear off and listened with the headset away from his head.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  He couldn’t help but feel like the man wasn’t.

  Could there still be people left alive in the underground bunker? A faint rasp of voices trickled in the background.

  “This is Colonel Kinnick, United States Air Force, do you copy? Over.”

  No response.

  “I think I know why they aren’t responding,” Master Sergeant Hunter said.

  “Why’s that?” Kinnick said, rushed.

  “Because you said Air Force. The only reason anyone from the Air Force would be here is to take refuge, not rescue them.”

  “Very funny, Master Sergeant. Bowman, where’d you get this headset?” Kinnick said.

  Bowman pointed to the remains of a half-eaten soldier in the corner. His abdomen was exposed and his guts had been split onto the floor.

  “Search him for access cards. If there are people alive down there, I want to talk to them,” Kinnick said. He held the headset back up, trying not to get bodily fluids from the last wearer on his ear. There was some static, but he could hear voices in the background. A glimmer of hope.

  Bowman crouched next to the body of the guard. “Sir, got an access card here,” he said.

  “I want these blast doors open,” Kinnick said.

  It took about five minutes for the men to figure out that the door system needed two keycards and fingerprints from a sanctioned employee.

  They began the begrudging search of the massacred bodies for someone who might have worked there. His soldiers rolled bodies over with their feet, looking for name tags of somebody off the guard roster. Kinnick pushed a body over, and the man�
��s punctured intestines slithered out of his stomach cavity. Kinnick covered his mouth with a free hand. The smell rocked his insides. No one was supposed to see this kind of depravity up close.

  Giving up on digging through the dead, he relieved Turmelle at sentry duty. The Beret snorted a laugh and pulled his kukri from its sheath behind his back. He used it to flick guts away from decimated bodies. Time slogged by. The men talked loudly to one another, digesting the death with humor.

  “Oh damn, I bet she was hot before she turned,” Turmelle said.

  Sergeant Lewis laughed, holding up a severed hand. “Looks like this guy here wants to lend a hand.”

  Master Sergeant Hunter stepped over a corpse, holding up a blood-splattered list of names.

  “Wait, where did you get that hand? From Connors or Matthew?”

  “Hard to tell. It was closer to Connors,” Sergeant Lewis said. “But Matthew is missing both his arms.”

  “Hand it over,” Master Sergeant Hunter said, snatching the hand from Lewis. The men snickered.

  Kinnick tiptoed back to the underground facility doors.

  “God lends a helping hand to those who need it,” Esparza offered. Kinnick shook his head at the irony.

  “Here you go, Colonel.” Master Sergeant Hunter slapped a gooey access key card into his hand.

  Kinnick grimaced, rubbing the bloody card between his fingers. He went to the opposite side of the door from Master Sergeant Hunter. Hunter held both an access card and Connors’s severed hand.

  The readers beeped and the red lights over the door dinged. The lights continued to glow red.

  “Ideas?” Kinnick said.

  Master Sergeant Hunter chewed the ends of his mustache. He whipped the hand up and down trying to get the blood off. He slammed it back down on the biometric reader and wiggled the hand around. The lights dinged and turned green. Success.

  The steel doors parted and revealed the interior of a stainless steel elevator covered in human remains. A man in a once-nice business suit crouched there, emitting a low moan. In a blur, Master Sergeant Hunter leapt, spiking him in the brain before he could stand. With a boot, he shoved the suited man’s body out of the elevator.

  “I think I know that guy. Wasn’t that Representative Johnson? You know the guy from California who had that scandal with migrant workers?” Fannin asked.

  Lewis grinned, a grizzly full of honey. “You should have let Esparza do the honors,” he joked.

  Master Sergeant Hunter snorted, bent down, and wiped his big Bowie knife off on the body of the dead Congressional representative. “If Esparza wants to get some over me, he’s going to have to get faster off the draw,” he said.

  “The only thing you are faster at than me is in the sack,” Esparza hollered over.

  “I thought little Miguel looked a bit like me,” Hunter retorted. All the soldiers laughed at Esparza.

  “Fuck you, Hunter. That ain’t cool.” Esparza shook his head. The laughter died down, turning to quiet as reality set in. No one knew if Eglin was still in existence. Most likely, Esparza’s entire family was dead, including little Miguel.

  “Hey man, no offense.”

  “It’s alright. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Turmelle, man the comms up here. Let us know of any changes in status,” Kinnick ordered.

  “Copy that,” Turmelle said. He rolled his knife over his hand and slipped it back into its sheath.

  The men hurried into the desecrated space and the metal doors closed silently behind them.

  “What, no music? Cheap government pricks can’t even play a shitty jazz CD,” Esparza said.

  “Do-do-da-da-do—do-do-do-do,” Sergeant Lewis muttered under his breath. Master Sergeant Hunter picked up the tune, and soon all the men were humming along.

  Kinnick found himself nervously tapping his fingers on his gun along with the men.

  The elevator rattled as it sank deep into the depths of the earth, cables clanging and banging as it went.

  “You guys are a twisted bunch,” Kinnick said. He was met by a round of smiles from the operators and soldiers. The elevator jostled its contents as it settled in on the bottom floor.

  Bowman looked up, hand on his earpiece, “Comms with Turmelle are out.”

  The elevator doors rolled open, drowning all conversation.

  Game time.

  MAUSER

  Quarantine Base Rattlesnake, Pittsburgh, PA

  Mauser crawled into a comfy sleeping bag in a snug warm tent. He rested his head back on some rolled up loaner clothes. The thin layer of the sleeping bag felt glorious as if he were in a king-sized bed made entirely of goose down feathers. He closed his eyes relaxing his body after weeks of torment.

  “Exactly what the doctor ordered,” he said to himself.

  He ignored the pop-pop of gunfire and let his body begin to sleep. The gunshots sped up and sounding like someone unloaded an entire magazine. His eyes crept open, they fought him the entire way after finally finding their happy place. More gunshots kicked off. He rolled over. The military can figure out their own shit. He only wanted some hot food and a safe place to sleep for about two weeks.

  He closed his eyes and put a pillow over his head. The booming of the artillery stopped. Bad sign. Gunfire took its place. “Just kill me already,” he yelled into the pillow, muffling his words. Gunfire cracked nearby his tent. Men yelled out.

  “Please, just stop,” he called out to whoever could hear him. He tossed his pillow aside and looked at the ceiling of his tent, a thick tan canvas lined with pliable plastic poles framing it. If he remained very still and quiet, maybe the dead would pass him by. Nothing to see in here, boys.

  Then the screaming started. Piteous, terrified, horrible screaming. Like the sound of a baby calf being butchered. Butchered alive. Except he was pretty sure those sounds came from a human. A living breathing human, and whether it was an innate human impulse to take action when the high-pitched sounds of pain and fear penetrated the brain, or whether it was something that was trained into him through his military and law enforcement schools, it stirred his weary, beaten body from its portable temporary safe womb of a sleeping bag.

  “I swear to God, if Steele makes us leave before I get a week of sleep, I will strangle the man,” he mumbled to himself as he slipped on his pants.

  He poked his head out of his tent, keeping the flaps of the tent closed around his neck. He squinted at the entrance of the base.

  A mass of people were entangled together in a assumedly in a fight. Either that or they were giving out dance lessons. I’m getting too old for this shit. He used to have twenty/twenty vision when he was in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue, but as he’d gotten older he’d lost the clarity. A blurry bunch of men from the artillery unit ran for the gate with long guns. He threw on his shirt and exited his tent like a thief.

  A soldier sprinted in his direction, running away from the fight, and Mauser grabbed him.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Mauser said.

  The terrified soldier looked nervously around Mauser to the side. “The infected broke through. Let me go.”

  The soldier’s name tag read Cody. Mauser shook him. “Cody, the fight is the other way, and I don’t have a gun,” he said matter-of-factly. Cody gestured at a supply tent like a crazy man and took off in the other direction. Mauser hobbled over to the tent and dipped in through the opening. Crates of 5.56 ammunition, artillery shells, boxes of MREs, and other items were stacked all about. What was the point in taking my guns if they were going to leave all these fun toys unattended?

  “Nice,” Mauser said to himself, hefting a tan SCAR Heavy Mk 17 with an red dot optic. A bit of a heavy hitter for close quarters combat.

  “Daddy like,” he said with a grin and shoved magazines holding 7.62x51mm NATO rounds into his pockets. He dug around in a box for some MREs too. When he got a break he would crush some chow. Feeling a sliver better about his situation, he flinched as gunfire grew closer. Crack. Crac
k. Crack. Bastards are moving fast.

  He quickly stepped to the edge of the tent. Peering outside, he zeroed up on an infected man bearing down on a fallen soldier. The man’s white t-shirt was riddled with bloody bullet holes. Somebody had done a good job of getting rounds on center mass. Effective training for before the outbreak, ineffectively deadly post-outbreak.

  Mauser shot, blood spurting where the man’s head used to be. The fallen soldier stood up, looking around for an escape route. Mauser grabbed a long gun from the a crate of M4s. Against his better judgment, Mauser limped for the man.

  “Hey!” The soldier looked startled. “Take this.” Mauser chucked him a rifle and a few mags.

  “Sounds like some of your Nasty Girls need some help,” Mauser said. He took off lamely walking for the gate. Better have followed me. He didn’t wait to see if his pep talk worked.

  When he got close to the gate, he cursed between heavy breaths. The fenced gate reinforced with tall concrete barriers was still closed. Bodies lay strewn atop the concrete walls on either side of the gate. Where the hell are these things coming from? Infected pushed on the fence which flexed under their weight.

  “Nine o’clock,” came a shout from behind him. Mauser shifted his weight, wincing while he swung his SCAR-H around to his left. A man in camouflage with soapy dead eyes lunged for him. Mauser cross-checked the man and unloaded the rest of a mag into the man’s body and head.

  “He was one of our firefinders,” said the soldier he’d saved earlier.

  “Next time, you can do the honors then,” Mauser said.

  The soldier gave a nervous laugh and shot another infected lumbering over the wall.

  “Goddamn learning computers. Who taught them to climb?” Mauser called over, shooting another head not bothering to hide itself on the other side of the wall. When did these things learn to climb? The concrete barriers go up at least ten feet and the infected have never displayed the aptitude to climb. Jesus, they better not be learning.

  “These fuckers are coming over the walls in droves,” shouted a sergeant with chevrons on his sleeve.