This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection)

by Craig DiLouie

  It’s deformed from the radiation … but how could something like that live?

  The deformed person burbled something in its throat, then shuffled off to one side. Leona found that she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  “Don’t be afraid of them, dearie,” a voice said from the blackness beyond the open door. “They won’t harm you.”

  Leona pulled her eyes off the deformity and tightened up her stance, clenching her hands into fists and them raising up before her. She watched as another figure stepped out of the deep shadow and into the nominally better light inside the small room. He was clad in dirty, threadbare clothing, but his garments seemed to be in better shape than any of the others. His hair was thinning, and his face was pockmarked with scars left from old, festering sores that had finally healed. He smiled at her, and Leona thought that he had once been a handsome man, many years ago. Now, time and the harsh post-apocalyptic environment had taken their toll. His dark brown eyes seemed to gleam with an uncanny intellect, and when he looked at her, Leona felt he could see directly into the depths of her soul.

  She feared him instantly.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said. “I am the Law. And before you even think about it, let me tell you there’s is no place for you to run, even if you did manage to get out of this room. We know this city quite well, and we have your vehicle. You couldn’t escape.” His smile widened into a broad grin, revealing surprisingly white teeth that looked to be in fine shape. He took another step toward her, closing the distance between them to about ten feet. Leona instinctively tried to back up, but she found she was already against the wall. There was no place for her to go.

  “Tell me … who are you? Where did you come across such a useful vehicle?” the man asked. When she said nothing, he pursed his lips and feigned a crestfallen expression. “Come on, now. I’m absolutely dying to hear your voice.”

  Leona regarded him for a long moment, then slowly lowered her clenched fists. She took a tentative step toward the man who called himself the Law, and forced her dry throat to swallow.

  “Sure thing,” she said, right before she launched a quick snap kick right for his face.

  The man avoided the blow as if he had known it was coming. The air around him seemed to pulse suddenly, to come alive with a rising electricity that quickly filled the room. Leona had never felt anything quite like it before as it enveloped her, almost like a physical thing. Then, every nerve ending in her body exploded with pain so deep and sudden that her legs gave out. Leona screamed as she crashed to the floor, jerking in a series of agonized spasms she could not control. Her scream continued until her lungs emptied of air, then she had to fight to fill them again as bright flashes danced behind her eyes. The pain was immense, as if every cut, bump, bruise, and injury she had previously experienced was only a series of tests before the main event. Her conscious mind retreated, fleeing the pain, but found nowhere to hide.

  The man seemed oblivious to her torment. “I can force you to speak, you know. How do you like the pain? Should I make it worse?”

  Leona’s agony suddenly doubled. She threw her head back and shrieked as she convulsed on the floor, her limbs flailing, completely out of control. She felt consciousness start to fade as tunnel vision set in, and she wondered vaguely if this was going to be the last thing she ever felt—degrees of pain she had never imagined, agony so extreme it threatened to shatter her mind.

  Then, as quickly as it had come, the pain subsided. Leona gasped for air as her nerve endings slowly cooled off, radiating pain like a heat sink.

  Law stepped closer to her. “You didn’t enjoy it? I hadn’t thought you would. But that was just one of my powers, girl. A bit crude, maybe … like a bat against an infant’s skull. Want to try something else? Something a touch more sophisticated. What do you say?”

  Leona rolled over onto her belly. It was almost an autonomous motion, as if her body was taking charge and trying to get her away from the slender man with the bright eyes who could induce such mind-numbing pain that the very thought of enduring it once again nearly drove her mad. She tried to crawl away from him, heading for one of the room’s dark corners, her muscles trembling and her joints barely moving. She let out a ragged gasp when Law stuck his foot under her belly and turned her onto her back. He stood over her, still grinning manically, his eyes agleam with something Leona couldn’t identify. Madness, she decided, something she’d never seen before.

  “Want to see how it all ended?” he asked in a harsh whisper. “A tour of mankind’s demise? It’s a definite E-ticket attraction!” He squeezed his eyes shut, as if concentrating on some difficult task. Veins suddenly stood out on his forehead, and Leona could see them pulsing with blood. The air grew electric again, and she made a small noise in the back of her throat. The pain was coming, and she knew it.

  But the pain never came.

  Images flashed across her mind’s eye—

  An atomic warhead detonates over San Jose in an airburst of brilliant, blinding, malignant light.

  Ear-splitting thunder cracks as streets full of people are instantly atomized, disappearing in brief puffs of flame.

  A luminous shockwave tears across the city, shattering skyscrapers, flattening homes, tossing debris everywhere.

  The same city, now a time-ravaged tomb.

  Mangy, diseased dogs stalk the streets, devouring whatever is left that still bears meat; clouds of black flies descend upon thousands of bloated human corpses that lay baking in the hot sunlight.

  The images stopped as suddenly as they had started, and Leona’s mind was returned to her. She found she was weeping, convulsing with great sobs of despair and sorrow at what she had seen. Was that what it had been like during the Sixty Minute War? The fear, the horror, the destruction of inescapable death? She had spent months over the past year looking at the rotting corpses of the great cities of the Midwest, their crumbling skyscrapers skeletal and gaunt, having shed their facades and panes of glass as the rest of the settlements around them decayed. Examining those cities and the remnants of small towns, the husks of what had once been country houses and farms, she had felt a vague, disconnected sorrow for what had befallen her people, her fellow Americans, and perhaps the entire human race. But that pale mourning was hardly even a drop when compared to the vast sea of grief that now consumed her. She raised her hands to her battered face and cried into her palms, unable to do anything else.

  The man who called himself the Law knelt beside her, and she could feel his lips moving against her hair as he spoke, his voice a calm whisper.

  “Now. Tell me who you are, where you come from, and what you’re doing here.”

  13

  Mulligan sat in the pilot’s seat of SCEV Five, the control column in his left hand as he steered the big rig through the shattered remnants of San Jose. The night was dark and deep, the only illumination coming from the cold, distant stars in the black sky. Despite the darkness, the SCEV ran without any external lighting. Mulligan had decided it would be in everyone’s best interest to make the rig as difficult to detect as possible, and that meant the rig’s impressive array of high intensity floodlights would remain switched off. But the darkness did not pose a substantial problem for the SCEV crew. Projected across the cockpit’s forward viewports was an infrared display of the terrain ahead, which allowed Mulligan to see what lay in the rig’s path as if he were a lion stalking a limping gazelle across the nighttime Serengeti.

  Laird sat restlessly in the copilot’s seat as Mulligan drove, staring at the same thermographic imagery. A route had been highlighted on the display, and that pale yellow line was leading them directly to where SCEV Four’s active transponder said the missing SCEV could be found.

  “Ah, this is a little weird,” Laird said after a moment.

  “Do tell,” Mulligan said. He flexed his right hand against his thigh. When he’d blasted through the people who had tried to attack him in the warehouse, one of them had hit him in the hand with a
piece of piping. The fourth finger on his hand had swelled up, and moving it was painfully difficult.

  “Four’s transponder information—the elevation value is reading negative.” Laird pressed a button on the center console, and a small window opened on the infrared overlay in front of Mulligan. SCEV Four’s position information was displayed in the small box and, sure enough, the elevation value was showing as negative ten meters.

  “So they’ve taken the rig underground,” Mulligan said. “Cunning bastards.”

  “We have detailed data files on the area. Let’s see if I can come across any civil defense or zoning records that have any actionable information on the buildings in that area. You want the data window to stay open?”

  “Negative, it’s just making the view more cluttered.”

  Laird closed the window, then opened another on one of the multifunction displays in the instrument panel. Mulligan glanced over quickly, and he saw the husky captain scrolling through a map of the area.

  “Bingo,” Laird said after a few moments. “Says here that there’s a parking garage on the next block. Right next to a civic center, and across from a light rail station.”

  “Same route as the one we’re on?” Mulligan asked.

  “Hooah, Sarmajor. We’re heading right for it.”

  “Roger. Stay sharp, and switch off the gun safeties, if you don’t mind, sir.”

  Laird made an affirmative noise and reached for the fire control panel. He lifted a red switch guard and flicked the toggle beneath it. When the switch moved to the ARMED position, it made an uncharacteristically loud click, followed by a distinct tone over the cockpit speakers. Anyone trained in SCEV operations would know that the turreted machine guns on either side of the SCEV’s nose had just been made operational. A red targeting reticle appeared on the viewport in front of Laird, and when he moved the grip on the center console, the reticle and the guns themselves would slew onto the designated target.

  “Hot guns,” Laird reported.

  “Roger, hot guns. Let’s see what we can see. Hang on, the road’s pretty torn up out there,” Mulligan said as the SCEV began to bump up and down. He slowed the rig dramatically as its knobbed tires rolled across cracked and shattered concrete. All manner of detritus lay in the street and, a moment later, Mulligan saw why. Several entire buildings had collapsed. He couldn’t tell what had caused the destruction, only that it seemed to be more recent than the nuclear attack that had destroyed San Jose.

  “Parking garage is down the street and on the right,” Laird said. “I think I can see it—there. Looks kind of messed up, but at least it’s still standing.”

  “I’ve got tracks through the rubble,” Mulligan said. “Lots of them. Looks like our friends actually towed the rig here.” As the vehicle slowly approached the parking garage, Mulligan felt his heart rate increase. If ever there was a time for an ambush, this is when it would happen. He didn’t know if any of the survivors that had attacked them had weaponry capable of penetrating an SCEV but, if they did, they’d use them soon. Not that the crew had any choice in the matter; urban terrain made long-range surveillance difficult, so they had to come in close, either on foot or in the rig. They’d tried it on foot earlier in the day, and it had only resulted in the disappearance of Andrews, Spencer, and Eklund.

  The tire tracks led directly to a closed metal garage door. Mulligan looked at it through the infrared overlay, but the image fidelity wasn’t sufficient enough for him to determine how substantial the door was. And he wasn’t going to stop and check it out personally.

  “Lieutenant Jordello, take control of the FLIR turret and put eyes on the building to our right. It’s a parking garage, and the entrance has been sealed off. Let me know if the door looks solid, if you would. We won’t be stopping, so do it quickly.”

  “Roger that,” Kelly said from the science station on the other side of the cockpit bulkhead. Mulligan kept the SCEV moving at just above a crawl, and he looked out the side port to his left. The night was as dark as ever, and there was no sign of any illumination. No firelight, no candlelight—nothing. If the opposing force was nearby, they were certainly adhering to strict blackout routines.

  “Yeah, it looks like it’s a folding metal rollup door,” Kelly reported after a moment. “Seems solid enough. Quite large, though.”

  “They must’ve run semi-trucks in there,” Mulligan said. “You said there’s a civic center somewhere around here?”

  “On the other side of the garage,” Laird said.

  Mulligan grunted. “Makes sense. They’d roll the big rigs in whenever they had a show and offload the trailers right into the center. Okay, let’s go around the block and see what we can see.”

  “Maybe we should dismount,” Laird suggested.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Mulligan said. “The group that attacked us, they didn’t have any projectile weapons—only clubs and bats and knives. If that’s all they have, then they’ll have a hell of a time trying to get at us as long as we remain in the vehicle. If we had more boots with us, we could do what you suggest, but we don’t. Right now, our best protection is the SCEV.”

  “I got you, Sergeant Major,” Laird said. “But from the transponder data, SCEV Four is definitely somewhere inside there.”

  “I know, Captain. I know. Patience.”

  With that, Mulligan slowly drove around the block. He wished he felt as confident as he sounded, but he knew the situation could explode into a clusterfuck at a moment’s notice. While he was comfortable with the assumption that the opposing force—OPFOR, in military parlance—didn’t have much in the way of heavy weaponry, and almost certainly no antitank weaponry, there were still a dozen other ways for their night to be ruined even further. If the OPFOR managed to block off the street and prevent the vehicle from escaping, that would definitely put a damper on the presumed rescue mission.

  As the rig pulled around the huge, domed civic center, the city remained quiet and dark. That made Mulligan nervous. The SCEV had doubtless made a large racket in its passage, even while operating on battery power—driving a multi-ton vehicle over rubble and not making a lot of noise was impossible. He saw no indication that anyone was going to investigate the disturbance made by the rig, but he wasn’t sure if that was a positive or a negative.

  Time will tell.

  When Mulligan made to turn right on the far side of the civic center and head back for the parking garage, he brought the rig to a sudden halt. Laird let out a long sigh when he saw what lay ahead of them.

  “Man, it’s a good thing we didn’t come the other way,” Laird said.

  Ahead, the street had collapsed. The concrete roadway had been transformed into millions of pieces of disjointed rubble, all of which lined the bottom of a wide crevasse. Despite the utter darkness, the infrared sensors revealed that the train station below the street had been exposed in the collapse. An old car lay upended in the rubble, its battered rear bumper gleaming in the wan starlight.

  “Looks like an earthquake hit the city some time ago. That explains why this area is such a mess,” Mulligan said.

  “Then why would they bring SCEV Four here?” Laird asked.

  “Because the place is so fucked up, no one would bother to look around here. Cagey bastards.” Mulligan regarded the train station for a moment. He knew that the BART system had been extended from San Francisco all the way to southern San Jose. That there was a station stop at the civic center was no surprise.

  “You know, we might be able to use that,” he said, pointing at the train station.

  “For what? Catching a train?”

  “Ingress, Captain. Ingress. There’ve got to be ways inside the civic center from there, and from the civic center into the garage.”

  ***

  Ten minutes later, Mulligan parked SCEV Five between two decimated buildings a block away from the civic center. He preceded Laird into the second compartment and went directly to the arms locker located near the second bulkhead. It was locked, of
course; only rig commanders had the keys to the small arms. He turned to Laird and motioned him forward.

  “You mind opening the locker, sir?”

  Laird reached into his uniform blouse and pulled out a set of keys hanging around his neck on a thin lanyard. He opened the locker wordlessly and stepped out of the way. Mulligan removed four of the eight M416A3 rifles that were secured inside and set them on the dining settee. Then he reached further into the locker and pulled out a worn, black plastic case. It had its own lock, this one biometric.

  “What’s that?” Laird asked. “I don’t remember that being there.”

  “That’s because I took the liberty of placing it aboard before we left Harmony,” Mulligan said. He set the case on the settee table and pressed his thumb against the biometric lock. It clicked open instantly, and Mulligan raised the case’s lid on its hinges. Inside the case’s foam-lined interior lay several blocks of white, putty-like substance, several blasting caps and their integral batteries, and two remote detonators. Mulligan examined the case’s contents with a critical eye. The C4 was a bit long in the tooth, but it should still be functional, along with the blasting caps. He checked the radio frequency detonators—they were fully charged. Everything was just as he had left it.

  “Sarmajor, are those explosives?” Kelly Jordello asked.

  “Well, you could play around with one and find out,” Mulligan said. “I like to be prepared, but I gotta tell you, I didn’t think we’d need ’em. Captain, maybe you could start handing out rifles. Everyone should take at least six magazines with them. We have no idea what we’ll run into.”

  “Roger that,” Laird said. He reached past Mulligan and pulled out several pre-loaded magazines, then began slapping them inside the rifles.