Apocalyptic Fears II: Select Bestsellers: A Multi-Author Box Set

by Greg Dragon

  Where the kids would have stood and sorted stuff, Jack thought.

  The raised platforms were rusted and cracked, and behind them, stacked up high, were metal bins with wheels on the bottom. Mini dumping trucks for whatever the kids must have been taking off the conveyors lines.

  He stood there, the dry wind buffeting his back and the heat of the sun burning his bare arms, and imagined what the place had been like when it was active, when it was busy with dozens of children sorting through the crap that must have been sent there. In his mind, the conveyors were moving, making a clunk clunk noise as each section bumped over the supporting joists. And he imagined a row of young children, from the very small right up to teenage years, lined along the platforms, poking around in the junk that passed and throwing what they found into the metals bins behind them.

  He saw other children, two at a time, pushing the metal bins away to one corner of the warehouse and then pushing another empty into its place.

  They were dirty kids, filthy and covered in the grime that rubbed off onto their hands from the junk passing along the conveyors, and their faces were smeared with dust and sand that blew in from the outside.

  “Well, we better get started,” said Tyler. Jack looked up, snapping out of his daydream and saw the tall man had turned and was looking back at his crew. “We got to take all this down, cut it up and get it hauled out to the dumper.”

  “Dumper isn’t even here yet,” said Rick, coughing into his hand and then wiping it on his shirt.

  “No,” said Tyler. “But we may as well get on the go anyway.”

  Jack spent most of the three days, until they moved into the workshops along the north side, cutting up the conveyors’ parts and snipping down the sides of the bins, stacking them up near the main entranceway when the dumpster truck wasn’t there. By the time they left the three warehouses, and moved into the workshops, his hands were sore, even through his gloves.

  On the third day they moved out of the warehouses and started with the outbuildings, and he was relieved. The heat inside the warehouses was almost unbearable, and the temperature dropped significantly when they entered the smaller, stone-built buildings.

  And so it was that, just an hour before the sun went down and they would be due to head back to the carrier and rest up for the night, he climbed the six flights of stairs to the top floor of the workshop that they were emptying.

  The building was filled with work benches, lines and lines of them in every room, and on each bench was a mess of mechanical and electronics parts. Wound up spools of wires, cutting tools, knives, snippers, hammers, all manner of tools – a lot of which he knew would never make it into the dumpster and would instead be hidden away inside the personal bags of many of his crew. There was just too much treasure lying around all over the place for it not to.

  They’d cleared the bottom floor, moved up to the second, and the rest of the guys, led by Higgins, were busy hauling the contents down to the ground floor with ropes and buckets.

  “Why don’t you go check up top?” Tyler had suggested. “Give us a scoop on what’s up on the last floor, ready for tomorrow. Then come down to bottom and grab a smoke.”

  Jack had nodded. “No problem,” he’d said.

  And so he headed up the stairs and onto the raised gantry that led along all of the north side buildings. It looked like an outer defence platform that spanned most of the north side of the facility, with metal stairwells in between the buildings. He wondered for a moment if they would need to take that down as well. It was, after all, made of metal, and that was the resource most wanted by the Recycling Facility. Metal and electronics.

  He shrugged and stepped out of the bright sun and into the huge open interior of the top floor and looked straight at it.

  There was an old stairwell at the side of the big room, though it had long since crumbled and collapsed. Inside the stairwell the floor opened up into a drop that went all the way down to the bottom floor, but that wasn’t what Jack saw.

  I Need Answers

  Lisa watched as the man fell to his knees, but she didn’t rush forward to help him. Instead she stood there, watching, as she had the whole time.

  He hadn’t noticed her as he had come up the stairs and out onto the gantry, and she hadn’t expected him to. She was a hundred yards away, near the next building, watching out over the sprawling landscape of junk that began fifty feet from the outer wall, and she was tucked inside an alcove away from the heat of the sun.

  Her combat armour protected her from the rigours of the hot sun, from most weather in fact, but only if she was fully suited. And she hadn’t wanted to be at that moment. Sitting up there on the gantry, watching out for movement far away, she preferred to take her helmet off.

  And so she’d seen him enter the workshop and realised he was alone.

  She glanced down and counted the crew members on the ground in the yard below. It was a full crew except for him. No one else up there. He was alone.

  What Jack Saw

  There was some flooring inside the stairwell. Pieces of wood that had probably once been the top of the stairs jutted out from the wall like broken and rotten teeth. Just far out enough, he thought, for someone to step round if they didn’t weigh too much. He would have collapsed them with his weight, but a boy, maybe one only six, seven, or eight years old, and thin, would have been able to walk around them like a ledge to the small platform at the back that would have been the eave over the stairs, a spot most likely unnoticed by most people.

  But this also wasn’t really what Jack had noticed. That was all small, peripheral detail that flooded in as he stared at the top wall over the hole that would have been the stairs. The wall was a pale colour, and he thought that it was coated in paint that somehow still remained after so many years. It was, after all, tucked away inside a building and away from the wind. And it was a light coloured paint, cracked and dry near the corners and edges of the wall, but the paint covering most of the flat surface was still smooth and clear, even if it was somewhat stained.

  Covering most of the surface of the wall were drawings. He didn’t know what they had been drawn with, maybe a piece of charcoal, or something else dark in colour. Even a charred piece of wood could have been used. The figures were all stick men, and they were busy little stick men. Two of them were sitting on a step of some kind with bowls in their hands.

  Eating ant soup, he thought.

  Another two stickmen were rifling through a pile of trash, and the smallest of the stickmen was throwing bits over its head.

  Scavenging in the ruins.

  And then there were another two, walking and pushing a cart of some kind, the smallest riding on the front of the cart and the larger one pushing with its back hunched over.

  Off to The Crossing to sell the finds.

  And there, smack in the middle of the dozens of similar, tiny scenes that were scrawled all over the wall, were the same two stick people.

  One tall and one small, standing holding hands.

  And that was when Jack’s knees went from under him.

  Finally, he thought. Finally I found where you went.

  The End of Part 3.

  Continued in Part 4 from Glynn James at his Amazon page:

  http://www.amazon.com/Glynn-James/e/B004X7VMJO

  CHINA

  Book 1

  of

  THE FLENSE series

  by

  Saul Tanpepper

  Prologue

  The exact moment when Jamie Peters first suspected that the world was ending — not just this barren remote corner of it, but the whole damn wretched thing — wasn’t when the train crashed in a fiery explosion, scattering incinerated limbs and hair and razor-sharp splinters of bone across acres of frozen Inner Mongolian grassland.

  It wasn’t moments earlier when they rocketed past her stop, accelerating to breakneck speed instead of slowing, the startled look of the wizened old stationmaster at Baoyang flashing past in the platform’s sole
light, an inadequate oil lamp clutched in his gnarled fist, and a surprised “Oh!” caught halfway up Jamie’s throat.

  Nor had she even suspected in the preceding ten or so minutes during which she bore witness to the sickness spreading toward her through the car, slipping from one passenger to the next like some delicious little secret as each one of them, in turn, reached out to transfer the germ to their nearest neighbor.

  Of course, she didn’t recognize it then as a sickness. Her first inclination was that they were all playing some sort of game, like a flash-mob type of thing, although that seemed rather unlikely given that so few of these people possessed the know-how to operate the cell phones the company had generously — and, in her opinion, foolishly — provided them. These were children of the Third World, centuries behind the curve when it came to technology. Oh sure, some might find their old customs and beliefs charming. For Jamie, however, the novelty of it all had lost its charm soon after her arrival here eleven months ago. More often than not lately she had been wondering what she had done to deserve being assigned to such a desolate and backward outpost as this.

  Because you asked for it.

  Had she? She couldn’t remember anymore. Or didn’t want to remember.

  It had to be some sort of obscure Baarin custom, this touching thing. That explained it. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have heard of it before now, despite studying up on these people for two years prior to coming out here?

  Well, whatever it was, it irked her. More than anything else it made her feel inadequate, left out. She didn’t like not knowing, not being included. Not in control. She worried that when the stupid little ritual game finally reached her end of the car, she wouldn’t know what to do, and everyone would look at her like she was stupid. It’d just underscore how much of an outsider she really was. Already she could imagine the passengers laughing at her, pointing their fingers. Westerners, they’d think. Stupid, arrogant, know-it-all Americans.

  She almost decided to close her eyes and pretend she was sleeping.

  But there was something too darkly fascinating about it all, about the way their faces changed so suddenly after receiving the touch, that she just had to watch— the light in their eyes flaring, like their bodies had been possessed with some new form of awareness. Their faces shining brightly as the tension built and peaked. Then, not a half second later, the skin losing all its luster, the muscles going slack. It was — well, it seemed, anyway — as if some form of psychic message had been passed from one person to the next. Not really spiritual, rather more . . . .

  Electric?

  No, that wasn’t quite accurate. It was almost—

  Jamie felt the heat rise in her cheeks, and her lips twitched into a slight smile despite her irritation.

  Yes, it was almost sensual, wasn’t it?

  The cycle repeated as one recipient turned to brush a fingertip across the cheek or wrist of the next, host becoming donor. And so on, individual to individual, edging closer down the length of the car as the train rocked gently over the tracks.

  She hadn’t seen it start, just sensed it when the relentless chatter of the people around her diminished sufficiently enough to register in her mind. Was it happening, she wondered, in any of the other train cars?

  Finally, the elderly gentleman seated beside her received his touch. Jamie could actually feel the tension spike, then leave his body. The very air about him felt different, fuller, charged. Then suddenly empty.

  Her heart raced as he turned and reached up toward her face. She didn’t shy away from his shriveled fingers, scarred and discolored from years of working the stingy soil, of herding and milking the ornery yaks through the harsh, dry summers and bitterly cold winters, like the one she’d just endured.

  Her company had done him a favor, she realized. Done all of these poor people a favor by taking them out of the unforgiving outdoors and given them a safe and warm and lucrative place to work and be productive. This made her feel good; it made her feel . . . entitled.

  Do it. It’s my turn now! Do it!

  She saw now how yellowed his skin was, stained from decades of smoking his homemade cigarettes. He could actually afford real ones now, factory-made cigarettes without all that local crap mixed in with it.

  The hand rose to within an inch of her nose, and she inhaled, smelling the musty, sweet staleness of the tobacco. Jamie smiled encouragingly and leaned toward it.

  But the arm veered abruptly to the side, as if it had a mind of its own, and grazed the knuckles of the young boy standing in the aisle in front of her instead.

  She sat stunned for a moment.

  He skipped me! The old bastard skipped me!

  She felt as if she’d been slapped. In the six months she’d been assigned to the Goh Li Xhia plant, she had worked so hard, had sacrificed so much to gain the trust and acceptance of the people who staffed it. All those years in college devoted to learning how to speak both Mongolian and Mandarin. Her company, MECH INVIVO, had even hired a private tutor to teach her the many tricky dialectical and cultural differences which she would need to avoid embarrassing herself, to help her assimilate. The tutor had neglected to tell her about this, though, hadn’t he? This stupid, dumb, superstitious ritual, or whatever the hell it was. She was still just an outsider. She would always be an outsider.

  It was her own fault for thinking this little adventure might be fun. Better than the Peace Corps and a lot more profitable, that’s what she’d been told. Why had she thought coming to this desolate corner of hell might be better than sitting in a cushy air conditioned office in some Midtown Manhattan high rise?

  Of course, the moment of self-pity was quickly replaced by confusion as the train roared through the station. She opened her mouth to protest, but her exclamation never had a chance to exit her throat as she realized that not a single other passenger on the train seemed at all perturbed. And that was certainly unusual, since theirs was the final stop before the long journey to the seaport city of Qinhuangdao hundreds of miles further along the track. Hundreds of mile of nothing but snow and grass and emptiness that would take hours to traverse.

  But the young man standing at the doors just kept staring out into the darkness. The bent-over woman across the aisle simply sat there with that idiotic stare on her face.

  Jamie recognized her as the local cat lady, the one who shared her little stone house with some fifty or sixty of the mangy animals. What was her name? Zhou. Or Xiao. She couldn’t remember it.

  Every village has one, the one crazy old bat.

  Whatever game they had been playing was now finished. There was no more touching. All talk had ceased. They just sat or stood there with their blank, black eyes and their pale, placid faces. All of them. Not a single concern.

  How strange.

  Jamie shivered, and not from the cold this time. The first spark of alarm — real alarm — had taken hold in her gut, sending out that warm low burn. She sensed that something was wrong, though she still could not conceive the full extent of it. Maybe this wasn’t a game. Maybe—

  Maybe if she’d been looking out her window and seen the train heading directly toward them around a bend on the very same track, then she might have guessed the larger truth of her fate right then. But she didn’t. And before another thought could pass through her mind, it was over.

  What followed was a nightmare of pain and darkness and blood and fire. She found herself lying in a frozen field, the bitter biting wind driving across the steppe and scorching her burnt skin, searing her wounds, fanning the embers which alit upon her face like so many snowflakes. Somehow, she was still alive. But the pain—

  Oh, dear God! The pain was immense, as large as the fireball lifting all around her into the oil black sky until it, too, caught and burned.

  She managed to extricate her torn body from the wreckage, pulling twisted bits of metal and glass and bone that were not her own from the flesh of her arms and legs. Miraculously, nothing was broken. Her ankle was badly sprained,
and it felt as if she’d dislocated her shoulder. But she had remained, somehow, incredibly, intact.

  She called out, but there was no answer. No one responded, whether in pain or in fear. There appeared to be no other survivors. By some terrible twist of fate, only she, the stranger in this forbidding land, had survived.

  So when she saw him striding toward her, stepping through the rubble and the tempest of flames as casually as if he were making his way down Fifth Avenue in New York, she staggered to a halt and stared at him in awe.

  He was a tall silhouette, backlit against the raging inferno. In an instant that defied reason, he crossed the vast distance between them and was standing right beside her, extending his hand in a gesture of warm embrace. The coldness of his skin burned her own.

  “I am the man in silver and black,” he told her in a voice that seemed to pierce all the way to her very core. “I am your savior.”

  That’s what he said, but the whisper she heard in her mind was, I am the devil, and this is the end of all things.

  And that was the precise moment when Jamie Peters finally understood the fate of the whole wide world.

  Chapter One

  The destruction was worse than Angelique de l’Enfantine had imagined. Even now, three weeks after the tragedy, it looked as if it had just happened days before. No matter where you turned your nose, the air was fetid with the stench of decay.

  Mud still covered the streets, calf-deep in some places, and caked onto trees stunted and defoliated by the force of the blast. Flies were in abundance, despite the chill in the midday air and the icy nights, breeding on the corpses of the dead. She instinctively mapped the locations in her mind where the swarms were heaviest, places where the sun warmed the earth and allowed the maggots to fester. Places to avoid approaching too closely.