by D. F. Noble
First published by Strangehouse Books in 2012.
Cover art Copyright © 2012 by Gabriel Wyse
“Grownups Must Die” © 2012 by D.F. Noble
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Printed in the USA.
Table of Contents
Chapter Zero 5
The Rift 5
Prologue 15
The Meek 15
Chapter 1 16
The 6th Grade 16
Chapter 2 31
The 8th Grade 31
Chapter 3 38
Three Musketeers 38
Chapter 4 42
The Last Summer 42
Chapter 5 49
The Boy Who Cried Wolf 49
Chapter 6 54
Archimedes 54
Chapter 7 56
The First Day 56
Chapter 8 60
The Sky Is Falling 60
Chapter 9 67
Ring Around the Rosie 67
Chapter 10 77
Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down 77
Chapter 11 87
As The Crow Flies 87
Chapter 12
Hide and Seek 95
Chapter 13
A Wise Old Owl 103
C hapter Zero
The Rift
A big blue sky stretched out forever, with painted cotton clouds, cumulus, towering like smoky castles that diluted a harsh summer sun. It was noon, July, and hot like an oven. A couple houses, just their roofs, jetted up out of the overgrowth. Five straight years of people not mowing their yards and the old world was already being swallowed up by the Wilds. Morning Glory and Ivy vines grew up over the walls of what was once someone’s home. What was maybe once a place kids would watch cartoons, and moms and dads would have come home and watched the game or a soap, was now just a shell, a den for feral dogs and coyotes.
It had been awhile since Red Crow and Blood Wolf had been this way, but it was summer again, and the grownups were migrating. A bloody and beaten Roadie had shown up at the edge of Tree Top, saying his caravan had been overrun; that a big pack—one of the biggest he’d seen in a year or two—had attacked their group.
He was the only one to make it out. Said there were dozens of Bigs, just swept right over them.
Red Crow and Blood Wolf, bored with village life in Tree Top, were more than eager to go and scout it out. They geared up and set out the very next day, even though Owl had bickered with them relentlessly, saying they needed more warriors for a Nest that size. And while Owl was the Keeper, Tree Top’s wise man, Red Crow was the War Chief. He and Blood Wolf had fought side by side since the First Day, and they took orders from no one; although, when Owl made sense, they would occasionally listen.
For now, there was the Hunt, and they had a spring in their step. Through the tall grass they walked, heading to a ghost town the Roadie had said they’d stopped in to make camp. Two days out and Red and Blood hadn’t seen squat but wildlife and old husks of dead cars and houses. They were beginning to think the Roadie was full of shit, and was more than likely an escaped thief that had screwed over another nearby tribe. The kid probably made the whole thing up to seek refuge there at Tree Top; wouldn’t be the first time.
“Fuckin’ Roadie,” Blood Wolf grumbled. “If we don’t find this Nest, I’m gonna have his ass with a thorn bush.”
Red Crow nodded. “At least we’re not running a plow. Maybe you should thank him for the vacation.”
“Thank his ass with my boot.”
***
“Footprints here.”
Blood Wolf looked over Red’s shoulder. The tall grass had been broken and trampled, and Red was right: there in the dirt were big barefoot tracks.
“Bigs,” Blood asked, “or kids?”
Red Crow stood, simply said, “Aye, Bigs.”
***
Red and Blood followed the trail with their weapons drawn: Red Crow with an arrow notched on his bow, and Blood Wolf with his spear ready, his broadsword swinging close by on his hip.
The Roadie hadn’t been lying.
The trail took them into the cracked streets of Brighton. In The Before, this trip would have been a thirty-minute drive from their hometown; but now, working cars were rare, as was the gas they ran on. Now, it was a hard day’s walk or a couple day’s hike if you took your time. In The Before, this was just another little country town, with a couple gas stations, a few bars and churches—like the dozen others that pockmarked the Wilds. It was taken now, by saplings and weeds. It was a graveyard, a memory of The Before.
They followed the tracks through the broken streets. Grass higher than their heads, their ears were perked for the slightest sound, the slightest indication of danger. The footprints grew, more and more numbers, which meant a decent sized pack had been through here. Their guards up, they followed till the prints led them to the outskirts of town.
***
Peeking between leaves and branches, Red Crow and Blood Wolf laid wide eyes upon the horror before them. The grownups—Bigs, Grownies, Muties or a dozen other names survivors had labeled them with—they thought of as mindless crazies, for the day The Meek had inherited the earth, and the strange static signal had come, the adults had torn their own eyes out, raked open their faces with their fingernails and turned against their offspring. What had once been their parents and elders, had become vicious insane killers and eaters of children.
The first years were bloody, unforgiving, ruthless times. Few had survived the onslaught of the first day. Something dark, something wicked had gotten into the minds of the grownups, hollowed them out, and turned them into savage, mindless animals. Red Crow and Blood Wolf were mere children then, children with different names, of a different time. Even now, growing into their late teens, the First Day was still a mystery. Some believed it to be the work of the devil, others believed an alien force was at hand, and various other conspiracies that all amounted to sundried dog crap. There were no answers, only mystery, only survival. Leave the philosophy to the Keepers like Owl and his pupils. Leave the dirty work to Red Crow, Blood Wolf, and their warriors.
Grownups were known to use rudimentary tools. Anything they could swing, cut or stab with, they would use. But most tools—most importantly, guns—were useless to them. So looking through the dense overgrowth into a den of the Bigs and seeing this…
The Change had many names. Some tribes called it The Fall, or The Static, but the name didn’t matter; what mattered is what It did, and what It did was change the fate of the world. One afternoon, a day like any other, a signal—some type of frequency—went out, worming and swirling from phones, radios, computers and TVs. Adults not even close to any of these, the signal somehow found them as well. It was like a dog whistle that only grownups could hear, and when it came, they were caught like flies in a web.
Their names were not Red Crow and Blood Wolf then. The old names did not matter. That world is dead. Its buildings are gravestones, its technology mere trinkets, its weapons powerful relics. A new world was born, a brutal and vicious world where all culture and etiquette were abandoned so man could survive.
The Great Reset Button had been pushed, and now the world belonged to the wood, and to the wild, and to the children of the earth, the inheritors, The Meek.
***
Blood Wolf spoke just under a whisper, keeping a low tone, since it seemed the Bigs had impeccable hearing or some extrasensory power that allowed them to find and mutilate children. “What the fuck are they doing?”
Red Crow—tall and
thin, his hair long and obsidian with red feathers knotted into several braids—wondered the same thing. Red and Blood were both seventeen, both wore face paint (red marks etched across their young faces), and while they were from the same clan, their garb varied greatly. While Red preferred lightweight clothing and armor that allowed him to sneak and move and climb freely, Blood wore heavier. Red preferred finesse, accuracy, cleverness to his kill, while Blood was battle hungry. He preferred his work up close and personal.
They both wore khaki camouflage pants and low-level Kevlar vests (looted from the bodies of police officers gone insane), but that was it as far as similarity. Red carried a bow and a quiver; this he used for when silence and stealth were absolutely necessary. Years of practice had made him a crack shot, but they both carried pistols for those moments when they were surrounded by Grownups or a hostile tribe of kids. A hatchet and Kukri blade, his hand-to-hand weapons, hung from his belt.
Red kept his gear to a minimum; the less weight, the faster he could run or climb a tree. In a pouch from his belt, Red carried a length of strong hemp rope with a heavy iron grappling hook bound at one end. This tool he had come to respect, for there had been times, when surrounded by eyeless monstrous adults, he could climb up, unleash the weight and swing it down, bashing skulls till bodies piled up below him. It served well for climbing as well, and with much practice, he had learned to scale old buildings and trees with it.
Blood Wolf, his brother in arms, was slightly shorter, but what he lacked in height, he doubled in muscle. He was not short by any means, but most kids looked short next to Red, who was an easy six-foot and still growing. Blood excelled in hand to hand combat. He was vicious, merciless and enjoyed having his enemies fall at his feet by either spear or axe or sword. He wore a steel helmet, which had been fashioned to have a sleekness like that of a wolf. The design had been pulled from a magazine they’d found that specialized in Masquerade parties, and Sun Bear—Tree Top’s hardy and round-faced Smith—had spent months perfecting it. Besides Blood’s two-handed broadsword, the helm was his favorite possession. It had been painted black, and the muzzle, which rested down by Blood’s chin, had been splattered red, to give credence to his name and his persona. He wore football shoulder pads that had been colored black and had spikes drilled into them, as well as leather bracers with steel plates that were also spiked. Beneath that, a leather jerkin was tightly bound around his bulletproof vest and had been treated to give it a muscled chest and torso look, much like Greek and Roman armor.
Blood Wolf was a tank, a meat grinder, strong like a bull, and ferocious as a jungle cat. He carried a spear with him as well. It was a First Attack weapon, and could be thrown with lethal effect. It was a simple long steel rod that had been shaved down to a fine point at the end and bound in black electrical tape and leather. He could use it as a staff or short-ranged javelin, and it had seen as much blood as his sword. Various knives hung from his belt, but hardly saw battle. They were there just in case.
They both carried revolvers in holsters that hung on their hips on belts that were as integral as their weapons (they carried everything from spare bullets, to flint and steel, to canteens and various other essentials for long trips into the Wilds). After trial and error, the revolvers were found to be best suited for them, for they rarely jammed, and while one couldn’t fire the capacity of a fifteen round 9mm automatic, there was one assurance: when you pulled the trigger, it fired.
Through the foliage, they peered. There was a nest of Bigs before them, but not like a nest they’d ever seen. The Bigs were migratory, like birds—in the summer months they roamed, eating anything that moved like a plague of locusts; in the fall, they moved south to warmer climates. It was Summer now; life was slow at home, at Tree Top. But out in the Wilds, there was the Hunt, and Red Crow and Blood Wolf craved these months.
The Bigs, most of them were nude, and so covered in filth and dirt that one could hardly tell they were actually naked. Somehow, a few of them still retained tattered fragments of their clothing, clothing that was now five years old. A typical nest or den would have a group of a dozen strong, but again, this nest was far from typical. From Red Crow’s count, there were over twenty. In the early years, there would be herds of them, moving in waves, but as time passed, and as huge lots of them began to die off, the larger groups slowly dwindled and became smaller and smaller packs. The grownups, not only devouring any animal life they could catch, and children, also fed on each other. When a Big was too weak or too crippled to hunt, the others simply tore into it and devoured it. Only a severed head would remain, for they would gnaw even the bones. You could hear them feeding if you were close enough or the wind was just right—that crunch like celery, or the snapping of twigs, that was bone being broken down in powerful jaws.
Their empty eye sockets had grown over with scabs and scars, leaving only dark pits. They were a horrid sight, and smelled just as bad as they looked, but something was odd. It was apparent that the nest had been here for some time, for the skulls, which were usually discarded in mounds, were now piled up neatly.
It was a pyramid. In a clearing of grass nestled between the trees, this formation of skulls reached almost to the tree tops. This was new. Bigs didn’t build. Bigs ate and shat and pissed and killed. When they were tired, they slept in a huddled mass, and the only time they used tools was to murder. But now apparently they were constructing precise mounds of human remains.
Red Crow quietly opened a pouch in his tactical vest and withdrew a small digital video camera. It was a trinket from The Before, but the Keeper, Owl, had implored Red to use it to document life out in the Wild. Owl was what you would call a wise man, even though he was a year younger than Red and Blood. He had been an honor roll student in their school, back when the world was seemingly normal. In that first year, as Tree Top slowly formed, he had become a crucial member of their clan. While Red and Blood focused on the ways of combat and battle and trained incessantly at the Hunt, Owl studied agriculture, architecture, the old technologies. Inside the grounds of Tree Top, Owl had shown them how to build greenhouses, how to keep and sustain gardens, how to extract medicines from plants. He had them acquire solar panels, windmill parts, generators and batteries, and all sorts of tech that most would look at as garbage. Owl utilized every resource, left no stone unturned, and while he could be an anal retentive prick, he had respect. Without him, Tree Top would be just another shithole patchwork clubhouse; but with him, they had clean drinking water, electricity and a steady surplus of food.
Blood would often joke that the only time Owl would get a boner was when they brought him a new book. Yet, Red understood him. Owl was the factor that bound their clan together and what had made them flourish in a world where most tribes and clans were starving to death and turning to cannibalism or even eating the Bigs. So, when Owl wanted something, Red made it a point that he got it.
Just like the video he was taking now. Owl was going to, in the words of Blood Wolf, “knock lamps over with a big ol’ woody.” The Bigs mulled about; some of them were feeding on the remains of carcasses, others simply stood and turned their faces to the sun. One in particular, feeding on the corpse of what had to be a small boy, carried the remaining skull to the pyramid, as if he were going to place it there amongst the other disembodied heads.
As he focused on this particular Big, something caught Red’s eye. As it approached the pyramid, some of the heads…some of them opened their mouths, their facial expressions twisted.
“What the fuck?” gasped Blood Wolf beside him. “You see that!?”
“Shhhhhhh!” hushed Red Crow. Owl was definitely going to want to see this. His boner would be taller than the water tower that stood in the center of Tree Top itself. As the Big carrying the head of the child neared the pyramid, many more of the mouths began to open.
Sudden electricity filled the air. Red and Blood both felt the hairs on their arms and necks begin to stiffen and stand on end. And then, a sound that hadn’t been he
ard since the first day emitted from the pyramid—that dentist drill sound—echoed out from the mouths of the disembodied heads.
Red Crow’s eyes went wide, for a terrible thought began to dawn on him.
He and Blood were seventeen years old. On the day of The Change, that static sound had taken all the adults, and as far as they knew, not a single soul above the age of twenty was immune to it. Red had not feared in a long time, but he feared then.
A burning sensation, like there was an electric prod at the base of his brain, seared him for a second, and his palm shot to his forehead. The Big carrying the head to the pyramid stopped in its tracks. Its head jerked right to where Red and Blood hid in the brush, and Red’s heart seized in terror.
A voice, deep and static and baritone, as if thunder could speak, tore through his mind. It did not come from the Big’s mouth. Red knew then that whatever was in the body of the adults used them like puppets; the body was just a host to something strange and powerful and alien.
The words, the voice, they said then…
I
See
YOU!
And hell broke loose.
***
“Red!”
Someone was calling his name, and someone was screaming. Red Crow’s eyes were locked onto the Big carrying the head, the Big that now strode forward through the clearing, with his kind falling in rank behind him.
“Red!” It was Blood, shaking him, pulling him backwards through the brush. “Snap out of it! Goddammit, stop screaming!”
What the… Red Crow thought, aware now it was his voice he’d been hearing. What the hell?
A thought that was quickly followed by, Oh shit!
Red Crow leapt to his feet just as Blood Wolf was snapping down the faceplate of his helmet. “Fall back!” he yelled to Blood. “I’ll stagger them!”
