The Lazarus Contagion: An apocalyptic horror novel (Dying Breed Book 1)

by Jacob Rayne

  The mutants drew ever closer.

  Jeffries hung up and put the phone beside him on the floor.

  ‘Done?’ Abbott said.

  ‘Yes. Done. They’re going to destroy every last one of those things.’

  ‘Good. Any last words?’

  Jeffries looked puzzled.

  Before he could make sense of what Abbott had said, the soldier had lunged forward and dealt him a punishing blow to the head.

  Jeffries fell sideways.

  Abbott grabbed him by the throat and shoved the gun into his mouth. Jeffries’ eyes were wide. He tried to speak but the magnum barrel in his mouth made his speech unintelligible.

  ‘This is what you deserve for causing all those deaths,’ Abbott said. ‘And for almost causing so many more. So you tell the devil I sent ya.’

  He pulled the trigger, spraying Jeffries’ head over the racks of food and water. A small piece of brain slid down the surface of one of the water bottles.

  Abbott wiped his bloody hands on Jeffries’ shirt and told the party outside to come in.

  Blake was suspicious about Jeffries’ phone call.

  The business magnate had always said that there was a possibility that someone could find out what he was up to and try to coerce him into shutting everything down.

  Jeffries said that if he ever called Blake requesting everything be destroyed (something he’d only do in the direst of circumstances) that Blake was to listen carefully to his voice and the background noises.

  Blake thought that Jeffries sounded strained, as if he was being forced to call in.

  In fact, he’d sounded like he’d had the shit kicked out of him and a gun pointed in his face.

  Blake was unable to pull up an image from inside the shelter, but he had a feeling that whoever was with Jeffries had made him call in then done away with him.

  He gave it a minute, then called Jeffries back.

  ‘Aren’t you going to get that?’ Duggan said, pointing to the ringing cell phone on the floor near Jeffries’ body.

  Abbott reached for the phone slowly as if fearing it would bite him.

  He glanced at the display. The name on screen said, ‘Blake’.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  If he answered it, there was no way Blake would believe he was Jeffries.

  No way he could talk like he was wrist-deep in his own butt.

  He let it ring out, hoping Blake wouldn’t call again.

  When no one answered Jeffries’ phone, Blake’s fears of foul play were pretty much confirmed.

  Still, he didn’t want to jump the gun, considering what was at stake.

  He decided to give it a couple of minutes then try again.

  Abbott jumped as the phone once again started vibrating in his hand.

  He glanced down at it.

  Blake again.

  He cursed and pressed the button to cut the call, then quickly sent a text saying he was busy and couldn’t speak.

  Hopefully that would buy him some time.

  Blake knew the text wasn’t from Jeffries.

  For one thing the text was spelt out properly, whereas Jeffries always used infuriating text speak, which took him a good few minutes to work out.

  Still, he wanted to be sure, so he texted back to ask for the password he and Jeffries had agreed upon.

  ‘Password?’ Abbott said aloud. ‘What the hell?’

  For a split second, he wished he hadn’t killed Jeffries so the lanky cocksucker could tell him the password, but then he put this thought out of his mind.

  The world was a better place without Jeffries, no matter the consequence.

  He racked his brain, trying to think if Jeffries had said anything that stood out.

  Joyce smiled at her own ingenuity as she tore away in an abandoned SUV.

  Not only had she saved her own life with her quick and clinical thinking, but she’d also ensured the glamour of the story was all hers.

  ‘Your momma’d be so proud,’ she said, grinning at herself in the mirror.

  As she looked back to the road, her eyes picked up movement in the back seat.

  Sadie could do nothing to stop the mutants, other than wield the shock stick like a hoodlum with a bat.

  Some of the mutants ignored her, running right over her.

  Their feet stomped into her limbs and kidneys, making her grunt in pain.

  A group of mutants dived onto her, ripping at her flesh with their teeth.

  One of them twisted her arm up behind her back, making her scream in agony.

  She managed to get the shock stick into a gaping mouth as it lunged towards her throat.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The mutant convulsed then ran back, whimpering like a kicked dog.

  Sadie squirmed, trying to get the shock stick onto the rest of the mutants.

  It looked hopeless as the swarm fell on her, ripping her skin away from her body with nails and teeth.

  Joyce screamed as she saw the cold black eyes and the grimace on the black-veined face of the lady in the back seat.

  The scream became louder still when she saw the curved scythe-like blade that protruded from the rotting mass of the woman’s forearm.

  Then the blade came through the back of the seat, impaling Joyce.

  She looked down in disbelief at the blood-drenched black blade that protruded from her stomach.

  Stared in horror at the blood that coursed from the wound, running down her belly and onto her legs.

  Then the blade came up, cleaving her body into two bloody pieces.

  The car careened into a wall, in a horrific collision of metal, concrete and glass.

  In the back of the car, Florence smiled then hauled herself out of the wreckage, shedding the remains of her human skin as she went.

  For a minute, Sadie thought she was dead, but then the pain came and she realised she must’ve blacked out.

  The pain of the gunshot was worse than the many bites, but not by much.

  She let out a cry when she saw that the mutants were still tearing off her skin.

  She had hoped that they’d been part of a fear-induced nightmare.

  But they were real, the screaming of her nerve endings confirmed that much.

  The shock stick lay by her side. She tried to reach it, but it rolled from her grasp.

  Her hand was too slippery from the blood to get a good grip on it.

  Her own breathing was the main sound in this horrendous new world of agony and terror.

  The ragged breathing of the mutants was coming through a little too, but thankfully her own panicked gasps blotted it out.

  A sound louder than all of this registered.

  At first she thought it was an air raid siren, it had that same piercing whoop to it.

  The mutants froze, a couple of them mid-bite.

  They released their grip on her skin and leant back.

  Sadie looked at the blood-soaked faces in disbelief.

  They crouched, staring towards where Joyce had ran, looking like homicidal kids listening to a good story.

  Then they started shuffling towards the source of the sound.

  Abbott still couldn’t think of anything to use as a password and he was aware of how long he’d taken to come up with nothing, so he typed the name of the island where he, Hammett and the rest of their doomed platoon had landed.

  He hesitated for a moment then pressed the send button.

  Blake too was very much aware of how long it had been since he had asked for the password.

  With every second that passed he became more suspicious.

  When the text finally came, he looked at it, nodded then got on the phone himself.

  Sadie lay in the road, too hurt and shocked to move, for a full ninety seconds before she realised she’d been given an opportunity to escape.

  Every part of her hurt.

  She had teeth marks and patches of raw, bloody flesh where her skin had been ripped away.

  She sta
ggered to her feet and set off towards a distant car that glinted like a gift from God.

  Her leg was fucked, and it was agony to walk upon, but she struggled on towards the car.

  As she moved, she saw a gang of men attacking a thing that looked like a cross between a human and the black, skull-faced things she’d seen earlier.

  The group of mutants were headed towards the fray, no doubt to help the creature fight off the throng of armed men.

  She didn’t want to watch.

  She’d seen enough bloodshed to last her a lifetime.

  Everything she had was focussed on reaching the gleaming automobile.

  Every step was torture, every inch a test of heart and spirit, but she reached the car and collapsed through its open door.

  The keys were in the ignition. It really was a gift from God.

  She started the car, wincing at the noise it made.

  But the mutants were busy with the group of men and didn’t seem to hear her.

  She pulled out and headed for the base she’d heard the men speak about.

  Abbott waited with the phone in his hand, checking it every few seconds like a teenager waiting for a text from a crush.

  No reply came.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’ Duggan said.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘So what’s the story with the bodies?’ Hank said.

  ‘Hammett wanted to let you guys in. Jeffries, that sack of shit there, didn’t want to, in case the sleeping woman had one of those bugs in her.’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ Duggan said. ‘I saw her get hit on the head with a falling lump of rock.’

  ‘Good,’ Abbott said. ‘Jeffries shot Sergeant Hammett when he went to open the door for you guys. I then killed Jeffries. By the way, he’s the one who started all this shit. He was the one conducting the research that created those mutants.’

  ‘Good riddance,’ Hank said, spitting on Jeffries’ corpse.

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ Abbott said, shaking Hank’s hand.

  ‘Well, we ain’t much to look at,’ Hank said. ‘’Cept for the two ladies there, but we made it.’

  A car appeared on the screen.

  They saw Sadie get out then collapse on the road beside the cigar shop.

  ‘Shit, we’d best go and get her,’ Duggan said.

  He and Hank rushed out to find her.

  Sadie was pale where she wasn’t bloody.

  Duggan and Hank both had doubts about her chances of survival, but they pushed them away and concentrated on helping her down to the shelter.

  She was pretty light, so it didn’t take long before she was with the other survivors.

  The unconscious female cop woke up, and the shelter’s inhabitants were all relieved to see that she wasn’t acting drunk and didn’t have a bulge at the back of her head.

  Instead she complained about her sore head.

  She had enough medical knowledge to stop the bleeding from Sadie’s leg. The bullet was a through and through so at least they didn’t need to fish it out.

  Sadie came to and screamed the place down until she saw the survivors weren’t leering at her through dripping masks of gore.

  She handed them her camera, which she’d taken the evidence on, but it was smashed beyond all recognition.

  There didn’t seem to be anyway they could salvage the footage, so they sat tight in the shelter for the time being.

  Abbott picked up Jeffries’ phone instinctively, then cursed his decision to do so.

  ‘This is Captain Abbott, isn’t it?’ the voice said.

  ‘Well howdya know that, son?’ Abbott said, realising there was no point in pretending.

  ‘I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry. The floodgates are open. I wish I hadn’t done it but it’s too late now. May God have mercy on your souls, Captain Abbott.’

  The voice sounded curiously deflated.

  When Abbott went to reply, there was a deafening roar and the phone call cut off abruptly.

  The sawn off shotgun in Blake’s twitching hands had been meant as a defence against any escaping test subjects, but his final act had been to jam it into his mouth and pull the trigger.

  As the slick mass of his blood and brain slid down the wall behind him, his head slumped onto his chest, his sightless eyes staring at the monitors which showed the other test facilities vomiting out godless abominations on an unsuspecting world…

  Bonus

  Read on for a sample of Becoming…, the first horror novel from Rayne of Terror, available now in e-book and paperback from Amazon.

  Becoming…

  There are places in this world which are magnets to evil and violence. Peth Vale, the large, secluded house on the hill at the edge of Marshton town, is one such place.

  There is probably a similar place in most towns, a place that parents forbid their children from visiting, where those same children will cower, yet dare each other to enter.

  Peth Vale is variously known as: ‘A portal of evil,’ ‘Hell’s gates,’ and ‘The Murder House,’ depending on which of the superstitious locals you were to ask.

  Rumours say that the house is haunted, and it may well be: enough lives have ended here to justify that claim. Others say that blood taints the land the house stands upon, a curse forever to be repeated.

  Some of the more imaginative locals have reported hearing screams and depraved laughter from Peth Vale during Marshton’s long nights.

  You may dismiss this as urban myths, bogey man stories, but, on the days before today, their ears have not deceived them: the screams and laughter have been real.

  This is not the first time in Peth Vale’s short history that the house has been a site of horrific violence. It will doubtless be the last too, but those are stories for another day, for it is with one particular spate of horrors that we are concerned.

  Peth Vale, which sits in expansive gardens, is currently ablaze; the fires illuminating its many windows making them look like blazing, infernal eyes. The air is thick with petrol fumes and smoke, which rise from Peth Vale’s roof in a huge black column.

  The house continues to burn, the flames which crackle and consume its frame helped by a light southward breeze.

  The air soon fills with sirens, as the police arrive at the scene and cut the hefty chains that secure Peth Vale’s iron gates. The gates creak open, allowing the crime scene team to flood into the grounds of the burning house.

  What they find there brings more than one meal up and out of the stomach of its host, to lie, steaming, in the damp grass. Peth Vale’s paved side yard is awash with blood, some of it mere hours old. Two trails lead across the patio, ending near a row of dirty white tiles.

  A fingerless, decomposing hand sits in the corner of the patio, among the dried blood. A severed noose hangs from one of the trees, the loop from it lies a few feet away in the grass, blood drying on the thick strands of rope.

  One of the officers follows the twin trails of blood, past fresh blood splatters, towards the swimming pool. The water is filthy, with a red tinge to it.

  Just visible through the murk are black cylindrical forms at the bottom of the pool. The smell from the stagnant, bloody water causes the policeman to gag and lose his supper.

  The police drain the water from the pool and start to drag the black, weighted tarpaulins out, storing them on the poolside before they are unwrapped.

  There is a corpse inside each one, most of them horrifically mutilated. They all look as though they have died very recently.

  By this time, the fire brigade has reached the scene. They are too late; the house is beyond salvation.

  ‘Best thing for it,’ states one officer, who is in the midst of discovering his second Peth Vale crime scene.

  Two firemen venture into the burning building and drag out one more body. This is the worst of all. Although badly burnt, the body is still recognisable as being female. The head has been severed and the skin removed. Arguably, it is
this body that has the most significance to this tale.

  It will take the police all night to catalogue the crime scene, then transport and identify the bodies.

  By the time this is done, they will already have apprehended their main suspect, allegedly a death-masked, merciless killer seeking bloody revenge on all who have wronged him.

  But there is more to this tale than first meets the eye.

  And that is the end of the story, years after this all began.

  Instead of observing the police’s brutal interrogation of their suspect, let’s hear the events which led to this bloodbath.

  Let’s hear about the real killer and his becoming…

  Part One – Hunted

  Becoming: To come, change or grow to be

  Chapter 1

  The dying October sun was shedding the last of its blood onto the dark clouds above Marshton town as Rhonda Williams pulled her car onto the driveway of her detached home.

  Cursing, she realised that the bin men had recklessly left the bin across the bottom of the drive, in such a way that she’d have to get out and move it before she could park up. Raindrops spattered the windscreen as she opened the door.

  ‘Just great,’ she hissed, putting one of her work files over her head to shield it from the concussive force of the falling rain while she hauled the bin back to its usual position by the back door.

  As she dusted the stale dirt from her hands, she noticed that the kitchen light was on. ‘Lazy little bastards,’ she hissed, realising that her son, Mark, and her sixteen year old daughter, Hannah, were home and hadn’t been arsed to put the bin back. ‘How many goddamned times do I have to tell them?’ she muttered as she got back into the car.

  She parked the car in front of the garage and got out, again sheltering under the file as she used the light from the boot to search for the correct key.

  With it in hand, she pulled the bag of shopping from the boot and moved to the door.

  She inserted the key and turned it, feeling a strange sense of something being wrong.