This Rotten World (Book 3): No More Heroes

by Jacy Morris

  Also Available From Jacy Morris

  Fiction:

  The Abbey

  The Enemies of Our Ancestors (as The Vocabulariast)

  Killing the Cult

  The Pied Piper of Hamelin

  This Rotten World

  This Rotten World: Let It Burn

  Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (as The Vocabulariast)

  Non-Fiction:

  Let's Get Drunk and Watch Horror Movies: 50 Horror Movie Reviews and Drinking Games (as The Vocabulariast)

  Let's Get Drunk and Watch Horror Movies: Volume 2 (as The Vocabulariast)

  Music:

  All Hell Breaks Loose Soundtrack with Jeremy Brown (Available on iTunes)

  Movies:

  All Hell Breaks Loose

  The Cemetery People (Coming Soon)

  Spec. Scripts:

  Find my work on Inktip.com (email me to find out how)

  This Rotten World:

  No More Heroes

  By Jacy Morris

  Copyright © Jacy Morris 2017

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Also Available From Jacy Morris

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Into the Streets

  Chapter 2: Big Pink

  Chapter 3: Exfil

  Chapter 4: Burnside

  Chapter 5: The Last Run

  Chapter 6: Old Friends

  Chapter 7: Did You See That Elephant?

  Chapter 8: The Compound in the Woods

  Chapter 9: A Bowling Ball

  Chapter 10: Popcorn Eyes

  Chapter 11: A Safe Place

  Chapter 12: The Compound

  Chapter 13: It Was Nice While It Lasted

  Chapter 14: Last Breaths

  Chapter 15: The Journal

  Chapter 16: Death in the Compound

  Chapter 17: The Trial

  Chapter 18: The Rescue

  Chapter 19: The Deal

  Chapter 20: Interrupted Sleep

  Prologue

  Chad Mauer stood regarding the Bronson Farm. Down at the bottom of the hill, a tin shed where the tractors were kept rusted in the morning sun. He knew every tractor in that shed inside and out. He had driven them for the last five years. Off to the west of the hill, fields rolled, flush with row after row of crimson clover. Old Man Bronson's other fields were busy growing corn, potatoes, and watermelons, but the field next to the house was a sea of blood red from atop the hill.

  It was fitting Chad thought, all those blood-red leaves. He had worked for Bronson for five years, helping the man plant and harvest his crops. It was a hard life, but it paid the bills. But that's all it did. It paid the bills. It did nothing else for him. It didn't prevent Old Man Bronson from looking down his long red nose at him. It didn't change Bronson's thoughts regarding the love that Chad and Bronson's daughter Desiree shared. It didn't give him enough money to move up in the world. All the job did was help Chad pay the bills.

  He thought about his shitty trailer in the woods, where he had spent that very summer morning, glued to the TV as the sky lightened outside. Reed, his brother, paid for the satellite with his disability money; otherwise, Chad would have never been able to afford such a luxury. He still had trouble believing the news reports.

  An image of a teenage boy in a letterman's jacket gnawing on the face of a firefighter kept popping into his head. He still struggled to accept those images as fact. No. There was no fucking way that was real. No fucking way. For a moment, Chad almost turned around and went right back home. He didn't have to go to work. No one would be working for the next few days until the world managed to sort itself out again. He would have left if it weren't for Dez. If this was all real, and not just some sort of huge joke, then he still had to worry about her.

  Despite her father's general adeptness at taking care of anything that might pop up, Chad felt that Dez would be safer with him. Hell, her old man probably didn't even own a TV. That hardass son of a bitch only knew how to do two things: work and sleep. If what was going down was really going down, then Dez would be safer off with him. No doubt about it.

  "Come on. Let's go get her." Chad picked his way down the hillside. Two seconds later he heard the shuffling footsteps of his brother Reed coming after him. His brother was twisted in the way that junkies often were. He had spent so much time high, that reality seemed like a nightmare to the poor guy. His brain was fried, and he had spent months in and out of prisons and then subsequent mental institutions when they found out he was hardly capable of thinking for himself.

  Chad was the only family Reed had left. His parents had disowned Reed after their truck went missing, only to be found by the police, crashed into a ditch with a zonked out of his mind Reed behind the wheel. If it had just been the truck, maybe his parents wouldn't have lost it on him. But in the middle of the night, he had managed to pawn several family heirlooms to his dealer in exchange for some meth. His mom never wanted to see Reed again, and that meant his dad, who had never seemed to care all that much for the two kids he had fathered, didn't really want to see him either.

  Now Chad was his caretaker. He tried to be at least. There was only so much you could do for a junkie. His brain was no longer the same. It was like something inside that skull of his had been severed. Despite all of this, there was no one that Chad would rather have at his side. His parents might have bailed on him, but because of this, Reed had an undying devotion to his older brother.

  Their footsteps kicked up dust as they strode through the clover, the red flowery cones waving in the morning air. Despite his confidence, Chad felt nervous. This was not what he thought he would be doing this morning. He probably wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for Terry Ann across the way.

  Chad only had a passing acquaintance with Terry Ann, but she had lived in the trailer park as long as Chad had. Reed knew her a little better, mostly because they had a lot of the same proclivities, namely drug-fueled bad decisions. There he had been, watching the red-faced man on Fox News, the only news that mattered, when all of a sudden Terry Ann had appeared at the screen door, banging on the ratty aluminum.

  "Jesus, you scared me!" he said, his hands clutching the shotgun in his hands. After a half hour of watching scenes of carnage on the TV, he had gone and fetched it from his room. Somehow, holding it made him feel better. You could never be too careful in a trailer park, and the news said that whatever was happening was happening everywhere.

  Terry Ann said nothing, she just kept clumsily grasping at the screen door, as if she had no idea how to use it.

  "Christ almighty! What the fuck do ya want?" He rose from his chair and approached Terry Ann, still holding the shotgun in his hands. She didn't respond.

  From the back hallway, Reed appeared, his eyes puffy from too little sleep, scratching at the mop of curly black hair on his head. "What's that noise?"

  "It's just Terry Ann, wasted out of her fucking mind again. Go back to bed, Reed."

  "Does she want a piece?" Reed asked, jiggling his crotch with his hands. Chad didn't have time to respond to Reed, as Terry Ann finally figured out how to work the door.

  "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he yelled. "You can't just come in here, Terry Ann!"

  She shouldered her way through the door, her arms held out to him like some sort of movie monster. That's when he saw the needle sticking out of her arm.

  "You want us to run a train on you?" Reed joked.

  Terry Ann turned toward the sound, her arms reaching for his brother. Chad knew there was no going back. He pulled the trigger, and buckshot ripped through Terry Ann's skull and sheered through the faux, wood-paneling that lined the trailer's walls. Morning sunligh
t shined through the holes in the wall.

  Reed jumped backwards, his eyes going wide, and his mouth opening and closing in an effort to string together the appropriate words to say. It was almost comical, if it weren't for the dead girl on the ground, leftover brains sliding out onto the floor. Reed never did get those words out, even when Chad squatted down and grabbed Terry Ann by the ankles and dragged her out of the trailer. Her body thumped down the rickety wooden porch, and he deposited her body underneath the pine trees that kept the residents of the trailer park from seeing the highway, or being seen by the judgmental drivers passing by on their way to the beach.

  Other people began poking their heads out of their trailers, but he just waved at them and told them to get back inside. If they had called the cops, Chad didn't know, but by the time he and his brother had struck out for Old Man Bronson's farm, they had seen neither hide nor hair of the police.

  In Chad's mind, either the world was actually going to shit, or he would wind up in prison for what he had done to Terry Ann. He had nothing to lose now, except for Reed and Dez. There was nothing that he couldn't do now. He had already broken the rule, the big one. Killing someone... that could get him the death penalty. He tried not to think about it as he walked across the field, his brother following closely behind him.

  "Whatever happens, don't shoot unless I say so," Chad said.

  Reed said nothing. Chad crossed his fingers and hoped that Reed had gotten the message.

  Before they reached the edge of the field, the door to Bronson's house swung open, and the old man was there, his own shotgun in his hands. He raised it up over his head in a welcoming gesture, though his words were anything but. He stepped out onto the brown dust of his driveway and came to meet them.

  "I see you there, Chad. You guys just turn around and go back where you came from. It ain't safe out here."

  The old man had a knack for stating the obvious. "That's why we come out here. Wanna make sure you guys are alright."

  The old man nodded. "We're doing just fine, but you guys probably want to hole up somewhere until this whole thing blows over."

  Stubborn old bastard is gonna get himself killed. "You sure you don't want us to stick around? More guns is more safety."

  "Nope. It's alright. We'll make do. Things ain't bad right now. Maybe come back tomorrow."

  "I'm not sure I can do that," Chad said.

  He saw the old man's jaw clench. It was a familiar foible of his. When Chad asked for a raise, the jaw clenched. When he asked for the day off, the jaw clenched. When he asked for Dez' hand in marriage, the jaw clenched.

  Then something else clenched... Chad's finger. The old man flew backwards, a hole in his chest. In the dirt, blood splatter made dark spots around the man, and he lay on his back looking up at the sun, the gun far from his clenching hands. The old man coughed, and blood rose from his mouth for a moment, backlit by sunshine, before gravity took a hold of it and splashed it over the old man's face.

  The screen door banged open with a screech, and the old man's wife came running out and down the steps. He saw Dez standing behind the screen, her eyes big and her hand to her mouth. What the hell had he done?

  "You murderer!" Hannah Bronson yelled at him, tears streaming from her eyes. A cloud of dust kicked up as she squatted over her husband. How long had they been married? Thirty years? Forty?

  "Man, that was badass," his brother said from his shoulder. Chad jumped as there was another bang. Then Hannah Bronson slumped over her dead husband, the side of her homespun blue dress stained with her own blood.

  "You didn't have to killer her," Chad said.

  "You didn't have to kill the old man," Reed said, "but you did."

  His logic was infallible, and somewhere in Chad's brain he felt something happening to him. He felt power. For the first time in his life, he felt control, and he liked it. This whole dead rising from the grave thing... it might actually work in his favor. The sound of sobbing broke him from his rare moment of introspection.

  "You want I should shoot her too?" Reed asked.

  "No. I don't, you dumbass. That's gonna be my wife." Chad let his rifle drop to his side, and then he climbed the stairs of the old farmhouse. Dez still stood at the screen door, tears running from her eyes and snot running from her nose. Chad reached out slowly and pulled the door open, the wire spring creaking loudly. Dez stood there, in shock. She didn't acknowledge his presence.

  Chad held his rifle out to Reed, who accepted it gingerly. With his hands free, he wrapped his arms around his soon-to-be wife. She shrunk from him at first, but then she gave in. They loved each other after all. Her fingers dug into his back as she grasped him tightly, her wet face pressing against his shirt.

  He ran his hand over her hair, in an effort to calm her. "I'm sorry," he repeated over and over for what felt like an eternity. It was anybody's guess how long they would have stood there if Dez hadn't started screaming hysterically.

  "Baby, it's alright. What is it?"

  Dez could say nothing. Instead, she pointed, her eyes round like saucers. Chad and Reed turned to see what she was pointing at, and they watched as Old Man Bronson and his wife rose from the ground, stumbling across the gravel, blood dripping from their gunshot wounds.

  Christ. It's all real. It's all really real. Reed held Chad's rifle out to him, and he grabbed it, his mind still trying to comprehend what was going on. They should be dead. They should still be dead. But they weren't. In his mind, he thought that maybe he had erred. Maybe he had committed some sort of sin against God, and the Bronsons wouldn't rest until they had their revenge.

  Reed just giggled as he popped open his shotgun, pulled out the spent shells, tossed them to the ground, and plopped two more in. He closed the breach with a mechanical clunk and took aim at Hannah Bronson, the closer of the two dead folk. He pulled the trigger, and a flock of birds took off into the sky as blood blossomed across Hannah Bronson's chest. Still she came.

  Chad screamed as he fired rounds from his own rifle into the woman and the man both, but still they pressed on, until Chad and Reed both had to reload their weapons. They were pressed against the wall of the farmhouse now, Hannah Bronson's boots scraping against the wooden porch as she climbed towards them.

  "It's got to be the head," a voice said from the other side of the screen door.

  Reed began to shriek as Hannah approached him. He dropped his shotgun and squatted against the wall, his hands over his head as the dead woman pawed at him. Chad struggled to keep his hands steady as he fed a round into his rifle. He rammed the bolt home and took aim at the old lady's head. He pulled the trigger just as she grabbed a handful of Reed's dirty hair.

  Her brains painted the wooden siding of the house, and she fell atop Reed who screamed. Chad had heard that scream before. It was Reed's irrational scream; it was the same scream he had made when they were kids and he snapped, attacking some poor son of a bitch on the playground. But this time, there was fear in it.

  Chad turned and aimed at Old Man Bronson's skull. He pulled the bolt back on his rifle, and the spent shell hit the wooden porch, ringing faintly. He placed another round in the chamber, falling in love for the thousandth time with the sound of the bolt ramming another shell home. He thought of Roy Scheider in Jaws as he aimed at the oxygen tank sticking out of the behemoth's mouth. "Smile, you son of a bitch," he said, squeezing the trigger and ending Old Man Bronson's life for good.

  When the echo of his gunshot faded away. He squatted down, trying to put together the rules of the new world in his mind. Part of him expected to hear sirens any second, but there were none. Then it dawned on him. There were no rules. He could do whatever the hell he wanted.

  With this giddy realization still floating around in his mind, he pulled the body of Hannah Bronson off of his still screaming brother. It took him a moment to calm Reed down, but when he did, he told him to keep watch for the cops. Then he took Dez upstairs and made love to her. Later, they would bury the bodies and burn
the house to the ground.

  It's good to be the king, he thought as he watched the old farmhouse go up in flames.

  Chapter 1: Into the Streets

  Rudy gasped for air in the back of the army truck. He was surrounded by unfamiliar faces, hard faces that looked at him like he was a piece of shit. The rifles in their hands gleamed in the shadows. All eyes were on him, and he wished he had never woken up.

  The sound of dead flesh clanging off the sides of the truck created a deafening racket. As the vehicle pressed through the dead masses, he could see their rotting faces through the back of the truck. The soldiers at the rear of the vehicle smashed at the dead with their rifles as they grasped onto the tailgate in a pathetic effort to reach the humans huddled inside. The butts of their rifles were covered in gore, and sweat soaked their filthy fatigues. Behind them, the Burnside Bridge disappeared in the distance, a thousand of the dead stumbling after the slow moving truck.

  Rudy was constantly jostled side to side as the truck rolled over the corpses underneath. His head ached and black spots swam in front of his eyes. They had come back for him, but he wished he had never woken up. Then Amanda squeezed his hand, and he looked at her to find her smiling; her face was harsher than he remembered, her cheeks less full than when they had first met in his apartment building when this whole crazy scenario had begun.

  Rudy choked down a mouthful of water from a canteen proffered by a soldier, fighting to keep it down.

  "How long was I out?" he asked, trying to take his mind off the roiling sensation in his guts.

  "A week," Amanda said.

  "We thought you were dead already," one of the soldier's said. The patch on his right shoulder had the name Epps printed in neat black letters.

  The soldier next to him, his patch read Allen, said, "Yeah, well, he ain't out of the woods yet."

  "You were just going to leave me there?" Rudy asked. "Just leave me to die in a tent."