The Final Winter: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel

by Iain Rob Wright

  Lucas wasn’t about to accept any more of this pious nonsense. “Look, Gabriel. I know you spend your weekends at Vegas, counting cards and downing Amaretto cocktails like you’re trying to put out a fire in your belly, so why don’t you cut the bullshit and start speaking a wee bit of the truth. How can I stop this?”

  Gabriel seemed to think for a moment before letting out a sigh that seemed to signal his walls coming down slightly. “Brother, you cannot. While my own fondness of humanity, and its vices, is something I admit too, I will not defy my Lord. Not all can have your strength of rebellion – and not all would even want it. It is done. A concordant has been met and at this very moment a plague of Angels descends to the Earth like you once did – thousands of falling stars ready for retribution. All life will be extinguished.”

  Lucas couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was this lack of rational compromise that turned him against Heaven in the first place. He didn’t miss it. “There are…loop holes?”

  “Perhaps,” said Gabriel, already turning to walk away. “But can you remember them?”

  Lucas shook his head. “I can’t, it was too long ago. Gabriel stop, I need answers.”

  Gabriel turned back around. “I cannot remain here, Lucifer. I have…duties. If you need answers, perhaps you will find them in there.”

  The Angel pointed and Lucas spun around. Behind him, on that hill, was a pub called The Trumpet. Lucas smiled to himself.

  A drink sounds like a bloody good idea right about now.

  NEWS AND WEATHER

  “This is Jane Hamilton, signing off for Midlands-UK News.” Jane handed her microphone to a production assistant and let out a shiver. She was wearing a huge pink ski-jacket but the cold was still getting through. “Was that okay, Steve?”

  Her cameraman, Steve, gave her a thumbs up. “Perfect. There might have been a slight issue with snow on the lens, but nothing we could do with things the way they are. “

  “I know, it’s crazy, right?” Jane looked down from the motorway bridge and examined the tipped-over transit van. She had no idea what the contents were, spilled all over the snow, and each second only shrouded them further in layers of fine white powder. As a professional news reporter, Rule One was always to remain unaffected by the stories she was reporting, but this one gave her the willies. All of the meteorologists back at the studio were flummoxed by the recent weather – a few went so far as to say it was impossible. She took their expert opinions very seriously and had some serious anxiety about what the coming days would bring. People had already started dying and she couldn’t help but worry that the toll would continue to rise substantially.

  “You okay, Jane?”

  She let out a breath and watched it steam in front of her face. “Yeah, Steve. Thanks. I just don’t like this cold.”

  “You want me to get one of the guys to fetch you a coffee from the van? There’s still a bit left in the Thermos.”

  Jane cringed at the thought of the stale taste of lukewarm coffee from a flask. “No, thanks, that’s okay. I just want to get back to the studio. There’s going to be other things to report before the night is through, I can feel it.”

  “You’re probably right,” agreed Steve. “We’ll get going in a few minutes. Mike and Tony are just trying to dig the van loose.”

  Jane’s eyes widened. “What?”

  Steve tutted. “Hard to believe, but in the short time you were reporting, the snow was heavy enough to cover the wheels.”

  “Oh, hell!”

  Steve waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it, Kitten. We’ll be gone in a jiffy.”

  Jane narrowed her eyes. “I told you to stop calling me that. We’re not together anymore.”

  “Pity,” said Steve. “You look hot in that ski-jacket.”

  Jane laughed and decided to head for the van. The snow was beginning to melt through her boots and her thick socks were becoming soaked. It was hard to walk and, after only a few steps, her calves began to ache. She wanted nothing more than to wrap up warm at home with a DVD and her cat, Thompson, but she knew the night would be long. At times like this it was all hands on deck. The freak weather conditions would keep every news channel in the world busy until its cause was known.

  “Hey, Mike, how’s it going?”

  Mike was kneeling next to the van, mini-shovel in hand. “My hands are so numb you could put them on a pair of tits and I wouldn’t even know.”

  “Charming,” said Jane, laughing. “I guess I should stay out of the van until you’re done. My weight would probably make it harder to get the van free?”

  “Dunno,” said Mike, “but don’t worry about it. I’ll manage.”

  “You’re a dear,” said Jane. She patted him on the head and stepped into the van via the side door, then slid it shut after her. The van was slightly warmer than outside, but was still uncomfortably chilly. A bank of blinking monitors lined one side and she sat on the stool in front of them. The monitor on the left showed the studio feed that was currently going out live to the nation. The monitor on the right showed the feed from Steve’s camera outside – the images were still streaming but were not being recorded. Back at the studio, one of her colleagues was interviewing an ecology expert. He was currently refuting claims that a damaged Ozone layer could be the cause of all the snow.

  Something caught her attention on the other monitor. The camera mounted on a tripod outside had picked up the image of Tony, the other production assistant. He was currently taking a piss off the top of the bridge to the deserted road below.

  “Nice,” Jane commented, shaking her head. Steve was in the picture too, speaking on his phone. He was probably checking in with the studio to confirm it was okay to come in. Beyond them both of the men, though, was something else: a dark shape in the background, partly out of focus and obscured by the snowfall.

  What is that?

  The shape seemed to be coming closer, heading towards Steve and Mike at the centre of the bridge. Jane leant closer to the screen to try and make out some further details. The dark shadow didn’t seem like another person. It was closer to a small vehicle than anything else – perhaps a motorcycle.

  As Jane continued watching, the shadow continued getting closer. Inch by inch, the shape revealed itself. When it became clearer, Jane was even more confused.

  “What the…?”

  It appeared to be an animal of some kind; a huge dog maybe – but too big and too hairy. It was creeping up slowly behind Tony, who was still taking a leak.

  Jesus, is that guy part-camel or what?

  Jane kept waiting for Tony or Steve to notice the creature, but they did not. She tried urging them through the monitor to look around, but of course she knew it was hopeless – she wasn’t telepathic. Just when she was about to lean out of the van and shout for their attention, the creature made itself known to the two men outside.

  The over-sized hound pounced at Tony from behind, crushing him up against the bridges railings. The monitor didn’t give out sound but Jane could hear his startled cries from inside the van anyway. The bloodcurdling screams that followed were unpleasant enough, but twinned with the disturbing images on the feed monitor they were horrifying. The beast outside had pinned Tony to the ground and was ripping and tearing at his back. The snow turned red all around.

  Steve realised the situation and made a run for it, most likely heading for the van. He exited the view of the camera and Jane was left wondering how close by he was. A second later her stomach turned as she watched the hound-beast leaving the mutilated corpse of Tony behind to give chase to Steve.

  Jane stared at the monitor and tried to control her breathing. Steve’s screams were coming closer and it wasn’t long before she heard Mike’s join them. Outside of the van the two men were being attacked by something she couldn’t describe – something unnatural.

  Banging at the van door.

  “Jane, let me in. Open the door.” It was Steve.

  Jane stared at the door handle and fou
nd herself unable to move from her seat. Every part of her mind screamed at her to let Steve in, but every fibre of her nerve-endings refused to let her move. Steve continued to scream as ripping sounds began. Whatever was out there was ripping him to shreds. Mike was probably already dead, and here she was, hiding like a coward while it all happened only inches away from her.

  I just report the news. I don’t take part in it.

  Steve’s screams finally stopped and Jane sat in silence, listening only to the sounds of her own panting breath. She turned back around to face the monitors. The live feed from the studio had gone black, but the camera outside was still recording. On it she could see the snarling face of a jagged-toothed demon appear from off-camera. Then she saw its jaws gape wide and the video feed was no more.

  Jane waited in terror for what seemed like an eternity, hoping against all hope that the beast would go away. But it didn’t.

  The van began to rock as the creature attacked it, trying to get at the prize inside. Jane Hamilton cowered in the rear of the vehicle, knowing it was only a matter of minutes until she joined the recent death toll.

  CLOUD COVER

  Quinton Barstow was worried. Flying an airliner was nothing new to him; he was more nervous driving a car in actual fact. In a car you have to trust in the driving skills of other people, and trust that people are even paying attention, but in a plane it’s just you and the clouds; nothing to crash into and nothing that could go wrong in the engines – there were just far too many ground checks to miss anything. Piloting an airliner was an almost fully-automated and pretty plain sailing – or flying to be more accurate, and excuse the pun. Yet he was worried all the same.

  All of the above only applied, however, when the aircraft’s electrical systems were responding correctly. This evening they were not, and Quinton could think of no reason why. Any errors with the plane’s on-board computers should have been rectified by a quick reset, but he had tried that several times now to no avail. He needed those systems to compensate for what his eyes could not see. The current weather was making his natural vision near-useless.

  “I can’t believe they cleared us to fly in this,” said Quinton’s co-pilot, James.

  “They didn’t see it coming,” replied Quinton. “The weather reports for the week ahead were mostly clear. All of this cloud cover doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You think we should bring her down at the nearest airport?”

  Quinton looked at his dials and meters. The spindles spun and flickered without any sense of reason. They were flying blind. “I’m beginning to think so.”

  “Okay,” said James. “I’ll try and contact ground support at Paris. They should be able to receive us.”

  Quinton nodded his agreement and continued to examine his controls. The autopilot navigation system was displaying random error codes in sequence, as if it could not decide what its problem was. The dials continued to spin and the altitude indicator seemed to think that the plane had banked to the left 90-degrees. In twenty years of flying, Quinton had not witnessed such a catastrophic failure of instrumentation.

  “I can’t reach anyone,” said James without any sign of exaggeration.

  Quinton looked at him. “What?”

  James thumbed at buttons and switches on the console but gave up with concerned sigh. “I’m getting nothing but static.”

  “That’s nonsense. De Gaulle is only thirty-miles away.

  “They’re not responding. I’m not even sure they’re reading us.”

  Quinton did not like this at all. “Okay, we’ll hold position in the area for thirty minutes. Keep trying to reach someone. Try Heathrow.”

  James nodded uncertainly and went back to twisting dials and flicking switches. Quinton would have liked to have inputted some commands into the guidance system and gone and stretched his legs, but the way things were, meant that he had to remain at the plane’s manual controls. He steered in a steady curve, planning to circle until they spoke to someone on the ground.

  As was natural to an airline pilot in the 21st Century, Quinton began to worry about the bogeyman of all frequent flyers. He wondered whether his aircraft had been the target of terrorists. Had the on-board systems been tampered with in the effort to bring the plane down? Was this just step one of 9/11 part two?

  No. Something told Quinton that his concerns were misplaced. For all the effort and planning it would take to disable a plane’s systems so entirely, it would be just as easy to plant a bomb on board or hijack the cockpit. Whatever was going on here had to be down to some other cause. Quinton couldn’t understand why, but he felt that it had something to do with the weather.

  A knock at the cockpit’s door startled Quinton and he spun around on his cabin chair. After a hostess identified herself, he pressed the lock release and a red light above the door turned green. Samantha entered with a mug of coffee for both him and James. Coffee was as necessary to a pilot’s job as aircraft fuel and he couldn’t have welcomed anything more at that moment. He took one of the steaming mugs from the hostess and thanked her. She looked back at him with a scrunched up expression that he supposed meant she had an issue to raise with him.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  She took in a breath as though she had many words to get out. “It’s really bizarre. I don’t even know how to explain it really. At first it was just one or two passengers but then more and more people started to complain, and now I think it’s everyone.”

  “Spit it out,” Quinton told her.

  “Okay, okay. Well, it would appear that anything electrical has gone a bit haywire. The passenger’s phones, ipads, mp3 players, et cetera have all gone a bit…funny.”

  Quinton raised an eyebrow. “Funny?”

  Samantha nodded. “All the displays have gone squiggly as if something is interfering with them.”

  Quinton turned around and looked at his own malfunctioning gadgets. Something wasn’t adding up here, and anything unknown aboard a plane could be extremely dangerous. He leant forward and pressed the intercom button. The normal ding! sound did not occur. In fact nothing happened at all.

  “Damn it! The intercom is down. Samantha could you inform the passengers to turn off all electrical devices. Tell them that…we’re passing through an electrical storm and leaving them on could permanently damage them. Also, please inform them that we will be performing an unscheduled landing due to adverse weather conditions.”

  Samantha nodded, but didn’t seem comforted by his suggestions. Quinton couldn’t blame her, he wasn’t either. He turned to his co-pilot. “You got anything, James?”

  James’ bleak expression told him the answer was no.

  Quinton bit at his lip. There were no protocols for this. In the event of system failure, the plane needed to land, without question, but the danger of coming down unguided in the thick snow blizzard that hid beneath the cloud cover would be a near suicide-mission. The situation was dire, and as Captain it was his responsibility to decide what to do next.

  “Okay, James, enough. We’re going to bring her down.”

  The co-pilot’s eyes went wide. “We’re going to land blind?”

  “What choice do we have? I would rather that then run the risk of falling out of the sky if the engines fail.”

  James nodded. Quinton knew the other man thought he was right. It just didn’t make the decision any easier.

  “Okay,” said James. “Reducing speed. Descending to 20,000 feet.”

  Quinton prayed that the plane’s landing gear would deploy when approaching the runway. Being mechanical, he hoped they would. After all, the flaps and rudders were all responding.

  Many tense minutes of ensuing silence were eventually broken when James spoke again. “Cruising at 20,000 feet. Runway is approximately twenty miles out.”

  “Reduce altitude to 10,000 feet.”

  James did as he was instructed and Quinton looked at his dials out of habit despite the fact they were currently useless. Once he reminded
himself of this, he instead chose to look out of the cockpit’s wide, glass window. Now that the plane was descending, he could see the bulbous clouds below more clearly. They seemed unending, letting no light from below make it through. Which was why Quinton thought it inordinately strange when he saw several bright lights coming from above the plane.

  He craned his neck to get a better viewing angle and saw that more than a dozen glowing spheres had appeared in the sky. They seemed to be falling, like meteorites, but Quinton knew that wasn’t what they were. He knew that, because they were falling too slowly, not free-plummeting the way a lump of space debris would.