“Me?” the General said. “I’m just taking orders.” He fired the gun.
A single shot rang out. Foster’s hand instantly went to his left shoulder.
Clay brought up his rifle and pulled the trigger—nothing happened. In frantic effort, he pulled back on the ejector and sent a bullet casing flying.
Baker turned his gun in Clay’s direction and hastily fired while running for the sanctuary of the door leading down from the roof.
“Clay!” Foster shouted while Gus teetered in place.
The soldier dropped to his knees. His rifle fell from his hands. Blood pumped from a hole in his chest.
The General fired from roof’s doorway. The bullet whizzed past Foster’s ear.
Clay turned his eyes to the heavens for a moment, and then removed a grenade from his belt. “We don’t have time for this shit.” Still on his knees, he pulled the grenade’s pin. His left hand drew back…and then Clay went limp, the grenade bounced twice on the roof and stopped.
Billy’s eyes widened and instantly broke free of Gibbs’ grasp.
“Billy!” Gibbs screamed and nearly fell face first as she lunged for him only to grab empty air.
The young boy ended his short sprint by dropping to his knees and scooping up the grenade. His arm came back amidst cries of surprised horror. The grenade launched from his small hand and flew directly toward the roof’s door. Lying flat, Billy covered his head with his hands.
Baker cursed at the top of his lungs, and then the grenade rocketed past the doorway into the stairwell with him, and went off.
The shockwave knocked Gus to his ass.
Gibbs rushed away from the chopper. “Billy!” she called and ran to his side. “You could have been killed.”
Clay was on his back, laboriously breathing.
“Clay…” Foster said, surprised that the soldier was still alive with a bullet hitting so close to Clay’s heart.
“That’s a nice toss you got there, boy. You’ll be a pitcher someday,” Clay said slowly and smiled. His smile melted as his teeth gritted together. And in one long, shallow breath, the soldier gave up the ghost and went limp.
“You saved us, Billy,” Gus said.
“Heck, I used to play army with my friends after school. We’d through the plastic grenade back at each other all the time,” Billy said.
“Rob, help me with Gus!” Gibbs cried out as she grabbed him by the hand.
Foster looked up, somewhat dazed by the situation. He looked at his shoulder and saw the General’s bullet had only grazed him. Foster ran to support the big guy as he struggled to stand. With some effort, they managed to get Gus in the chopper.
Once everyone was securely in place, Watts powered up the engines to full.
As the rooftop slowly drifted from the bird, a wave of zombies poured out of the doorway, with outstretched arms and wide mouths, their eyes white and riddled with the cloud of death. But by then, the bird was well out of the reach of their festering, gnarled fingers.
8
The Tallahassee Military Base was no different than any other place within the so-called quarantine zone. It was a wasteland of rot and festering bile. Countless bodies lay tattered and feasted upon. Those not entirely devoured eventually rose to become one with the never-ending horde of lingering undead creatures. With throats torn out, limbs gnawed off, and the putrid filth of decay spread across the base in every building and on every square inch of its grounds, the dead owned the once militarized fortress.
As the helicopter glided across the dark night sky, no one said a word. Their only hope was to make it toward Jacksonville and the Cordyceps Unilateralis Research building.
If what Grech Vonhinkly had said about the clean sweep was true, then the group en route was cutting it close, too close. Sunup was only a few hours away and the trip would leave them landing soon after daybreak.
Foster looked over at Gibbs and rested his hand on her shoulder.
She turned and looked longingly back, placing her hand on top of his.
*
Back on the base hidden away in the Laboratory Research Facility that had LRF stenciled in large block letters over its doors lay several bodies. Two of the bodies belonged to the people that had worked on the base as lab assistants. The other belonged to a very dead Mr. Wellington. With the final bit of life drained from his body, the fungus began to take over. Starting from the infected area on the dead man’s chest, it quickly spread through the heart and into the blood stream, taking over and quickly devouring any non-vital soft tissues. His body began to rot and rapidly decay as the parasitoid began eating things away from the inside. As it steadily reached the brain, the fungus released its over 48-million-year-old spores rupturing into a rapidly duplicating parasite.
Slowly, his limbs jerked and twitched with reanimated vigor. The once-dead man abruptly opened his lifeless and glazed eyes and began to rise. The hallway was familiar to him. His senses were tingling anew as he stood. As he took his first shambling step forward past the overweight thing that lay next to him, like a distant memory, he reached down with a jerking motion and the lack of coordination. Just as soon as he retrieved the crumpled note in his pants pocket and remembering his son, the thought passed. The thriving hunger for flesh instantly overtook him, pushing out all other thoughts. As his arms lifted in the air, the note fell from his grip. It softly landed in a pool of still-drying blood. The small paper slowly soaked away, fading from Mr. Wellington’s thoughts forever.
EPILOGUE
Entry # 352
This will be my final data entry.
I don’t see what the point is in all of this anymore. We are stuck like animals in cages, and I’ve had enough. We can’t be the only ones left. I refuse to believe that.
It’s time. You knew that this day was coming. I really do hope you don’t take it the wrong way. You have been like parents to me. I would be wrong to deny you, any of you as my family. I am thankful for what you have all done.
Someone has to find the truth about what life is like outside this building, and it might as well be me. Don’t bother trying to come after me. It would do you no good.
Sincerely,
Billy Woods
And with that, he placed the handwritten note on the center of his desk and stood. Having packed beforehand, he quietly slipped away before anyone awoke. The only sound he made was that of the elevator. It stretched and groaned from over ten years of neglect as the underground Jacksonville facility’s elevator doors slid open.
A new day was dawning, and Billy set out to be its master.
The End
Read on for a free sample of Living End
Afterword by P. A. Douglas
This preferred edition of The End was a long time coming. Its first publication in 2011 was met with a price. Having originally been written out at nearly 110,000 words, the first release of this book was chopped up and dissected by the publisher in such a way that I felt it was no longer truly considered my work. When it finally went to print, it was a meager 70,000 words, losing a large portion of the story and characters. After several other fiction releases and years of honing the craft as a writer, I decided it was time to give this novel the true justice is deserved as my first official publication. This re-release of The End is the original extended revised version. Dane and I poured a lot into bringing this book back to life, and we hope that you enjoy it as much as we do.
Stay scared,
P. A. Douglas
www.beardcakes.com
Chapter 1
They slam their fists against the walls and the doors, and they slash their hands on the broken glass when they punch through the windows. But they are dead so they don’t feel it, and they are hungry so they won’t stop. The noise is a barrage. It’s an endless hailstorm on a tin roof. Day in and day out, the dead sense the flesh of the living and pound themselves into paste trying to get a piece of it.
For weeks, the six of them listen as the song drones on and on and on. A
ll rhythm, no melody. A song you can keep a beat to, but not one you can hum or sing. Through nameless, generic days and through longer nights. Double bass and toms, pounding through every thought of every moment of every day.
When Calgary’s power grid goes down, Scott and Cooper head to the basement where there are stacks of long two by fours. Scott cuts them with an old wood saw. Cooper holds the wood still with his feet. They burn smooth, yellow, perfectly-sized bricks of wood in the fireplace and huddle around the scented candles Scott’s mom has been collecting since before Scott was born. At night, they look out at the empty hole in the horizon where the Calgary skyline used to be, now dotted with fire lights.
The candles fill the air with vanilla and honeydew. With sarsaparilla and lilacs and roses. With cloves and cinnamon and earth. The smoke fills the sky with the crisp smell of burning pine. These smells are fragile reminders of the past. And like the past, they wither and die moments after entering the new world.
The smell of dead people overpowers everything. It’s not that sickly sweet bullshit they describe in books. It’s a heavy, primal thing that grabs you by the throat and forces you to breathe through your teeth. It’s as though your body instinctively knows there’s something horrid in the air and refuses to draw it into your lungs. The smell demands attention. It commands it.
But it’s the noise, and not the smell, that finally pushes Allen over the edge. Later, when it’s quiet, Bretta will realize you can get used to anything if you are exposed to it long enough. Anything can become your normal. But not right now. Right now, she wraps her head in pillows for a moment’s peace. And Scott presses those pillows against her ears, and she clutches his hands to force them tighter. And their wedding rings are warm metal touching, but it doesn’t make Bretta feel better the way it did once.
And perhaps they all have their heads buried in pillows when Allen finally takes the plunge. Everyone is too busy fighting their own demons to notice that he has already lost the battle with his.
All they really know is that their sleep is interrupted by the sound of Allen screaming, and then Nancy screams, but it’s a much shorter one. When screams are cut short like that, it’s always because something awful has just happened. The air is filled with the smell of vanilla candles and dead people, but that’s not a trigger because the air is always filled with those smells. Tonight there is something else. The electric tang of adrenaline. And so much rage.
Scott is out of bed before he’s even awake, and then he takes a moment to stare at the floor and wonder what the fuck he’s doing. Outside, dead people are drumming the walls with renewed ferocity. They hear the screams, and it renews their faith that a warm meal is just inside the house. If they can drum their way through. They’ve finally busted out the window in Scott and Bretta’s room, and from under the boards shuttering the window closed, there are shards of glass all over the floor.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU COCKSUCKER!” Allen’s voice, from his room. If Allen was a vinyl record warming in the sun, and his soft vocals were straining past recognition.
Bretta’s in bed with the sheets pulled up over her chest. She asks what’s wrong and Scott ignores her. She asks what they’re doing up there he doesn’t respond to that either. He has a direction now. He remembers why he jumped out of bed. He grabs the baseball bat by the door and heads for the stairs. Bretta cries after him, saying his name like it has power, wanting to be included. And Scott says nothing. He opens the door and steps into the hall, his tanned face sweaty and full-bearded.
At the foot of the stairs, Cooper is in a housecoat, rubbing the sleep off his face and scratching his head. Cooper asks what the hell his problem is now. Scott says he doesn’t know.
“He sounds like he’s flipped his shit for good this time,” Scott says. What he doesn’t say is it’s because of the dead people outside and the noise, because everyone knows about that. You can stay quiet, and they’ll lose interest after a while, but a creak in the floorboards gets them going again. Scott waves his bat at Cooper. “Come on.”
“After you, boss.”
They head up the stairs. Scott takes them two at a time. Cooper takes them one at a time, pacing himself and holding the banister.
Allen is screaming shut up, shut up, I can’t take this anymore, and Scott yells Allen’s name, once, like a dog bark, when he gets to the top of the stairs.
“You’re just making it worse,” Scott says, and he holds up the baseball bat like it’s some kind of ancient samurai sword. Allen’s door is at the end of the hall by the bathroom. The walls are mint blue, like candle wax, like hospital walls. It was Scott’s mom’s favourite colour. Once, when the house was going to be theirs one day, Bretta would talk about getting rid of the blue. Now that they have the house, Bretta doesn’t want it anymore. And she couldn’t care less about what is on the walls – as long as they stay standing.
On the other side of Allen’s closed door they can hear him stomping around. But Scott is pretty sure it isn’t feet making that noise.
It’s something hard, hitting something soft. And wet.
There’s another sound, and when Cooper hears it his face scrunches up and he grabs Scott’s shoulder.
Holy Jesus fuck, man, he whispers. His fingers are corkscrews. It’s like he’s trying to burrow inside Scott to get away from the noise, starting with his hand and Scott’s shoulder. The noise in Allen’s room is high and soft; the sound of sand in the water when you dunk your head at the beach. It’s the tight, panicked whine of a dog at the door who knows it’s not supposed to make a noise but can’t help itself.
It’s the sound of Allen’s girlfriend Nancy, huffing her breath because there’s only a little bit to be had at a time. It’s the sound of her vocal cords so tight they barely let any sound out at all. Scott and Cooper have never heard that sound come from a person before.
Smack.
Smack.
Huff. Whine.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Allen is exploding. He grunts. Smack.
Scott shakes Cooper off. He steps back from the door and delivers a sharp kick to the magic spot beside the doorknob. It’s a hollowcore interior door, little more than MDF and yellow wood glue. It collapses in on itself. Scott thinks about how the room used to be his dad’s library as the door crumbles beneath his foot. Once upon a time, Bretta thought this might be a nursery.
The door explodes inward and showers the room with medium density fibreboard. The doorknob mechanism breaks free and skids across the floor. Allen looks up from his work, the aluminum baseball bat in his hands is black and sticky with blood, discoloured by the candles lighting the room.
Allen pushes his glasses up on his scowling face and gives a little cough. He leaves a red thumb print on his cheek.
“She wouldn’t shut up,” he says, like it should be completely obvious to everyone in the room. Like he just said steak is better than hot dogs.
Cooper yells Jesus Christ from the doorway but Scott’s already halfway across the room. Scott and his samurai sword bat, he has it cocked like he’s ready to crank one out of the park. He’s moving toward Allen and Allen is just watching him, like he’s expecting Scott to suddenly realize why everything went down the way it did. Waiting for him to say it’s OK, because Nancy wouldn’t shut up.
Allen’s been screaming at Nancy, who, in spite of the amount of damage he’s managed in such a short time, is still blubbering — pulling a classic Nancy by making noise long after she has no business doing so. Not when her face is caved in on one side and the only thing left in place is part of her jaw, glistening with spit and a lot of blood and jagged on one the top where her teeth have broken off. Bubbles come out of vomit and blood in her torn mouth like chocolate milk, thick with slime, and she sucks it all back down into her lungs with her next breath.
Scott asks Allen what he did, and Allen shrugs like it’s nothing. Like he decided to move around his furniture for a change of scenery.
“I told her a million times to shut up,” he s
ays. “That noise, man. Who does that when they’re sleeping? Jesus.” He wipes sweat off his forehead and gives a little tick of a laugh when he sees blood in his hand. Allen’s poor dumb luck strikes again. He would get blood on his face, wouldn’t he? Because life just ain’t fair.
Cooper is still yelling profanity, saying Allen fucking killed her. Just in case nobody knows what’s going on. But Cooper’s not entirely right, because Nancy’s not quite there yet. She’s making a different noise now.
In another part of the house, back at the stairs, two sets of feet are pounding the floor and getting louder as Bretta and Denise come up the second floor. Cooper turns and grabs both of them before they can step into the doorway.
“Don’t go in there!” he yells in their faces.
They’re wrestling in the hallway and Denise crying and shouting What happened? and Bretta is in the doorway, her face curling up like she’d just been punched in the mouth.
Scott looks at her.
Allen swings for the fences.
At the last moment Scott senses the movement and ducks, pure instinct, throwing his wooden bat up into the arc of the incoming aluminum one. The two weapons crash together, and Scott’s wrists fold painfully to the side. He almost loses his grip. Allen swings again, chest-level this time, and Scott jumps back out of the way. Allen whiffs on dead air. The follow-through crashes into candles and half-empty cans of meat sitting on the dresser. All of it comes down on Nancy and her open wound of a face. Under the stink of all that blood and mess, vanilla and sunshine candles. If Scott’s mother was here right now he might have killed her for that.
Allen swings again, and this time, Scott counters with a swing of his own. The two baseball bats crash together, stopping instantly. Scott’s wooden bat cracks, and the sound of the impact changes mid-strike, dropping down an octave and ending with a buzz, like a fly caught in your fingers before you roll it around and end its miserable bit of life. The impact sends painful jarring vibrations into Scott’s hands, across his sore wrists, and up into his forearms.
The End Page 28
