Buried.2015.03.04

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Copyright © 2015 by Michaelbrent Collings

  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 written permission from the author. For information send request to info@michaelbrentcollings.com.

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  cover and interior art elements © Nomad Soul

  used under license from Shutterstock.com

  cover design by Michaelbrent Collings

  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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  PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF

  MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

  "… prepare to be creeped out." – San Francisco Book Review

  "[Crime Seen] will keep you guessing until the end…. 5/5. " – Horror Novel Reviews

  "It's rare to find an ending to a novel that is clever, thought-provoking and surprising, yet here Collings nails all three…." – Ravenous Reads

  "Crime Seen by Michaelbrent Collings is one of those rare books that deserves more than five stars." – Top of the Heap Reviews

  "I barely had time to buckle my mental seatbelt before the pedal hit the metal...." – The Horror Fiction Review

  "Collings is so proficient at what he does, he crooks his finger to get you inside his world and before you know it, you are along for the ride. You don't even see it coming; he is that good." – Only Five Star Book Reviews

  "Move over Stephen King... Clive Barker.... Michaelbrent Collings is taking over as the new king of the horror book genre." – Media Mikes

  "A proficient and pedagogical author, Collings’ works should be studied to see what makes his writing resonate with such vividness of detail…." – Hellnotes

  "[H]auntingly reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock." – horrornews.net

  "The Haunted is a terrific read with some great scares and a shock of an ending!" – Rick Hautala, international bestselling author; Bram Stoker Award® for Lifetime Achievement winner

  "[G]ritty, compelling and will leave you on the edge of your seat.... " – horrornews.net

  "[W]ill scare even the most jaded horror hounds. " – Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Flesh Eaters and The Savage Dead

  "Apparition is a hard core supernatural horror novel that is going to scare the hell out of you.... This book has everything that you would want in a horror novel.... it is a roller coaster ride right up to a shocking ending." – horroraddicts.net

  "What a ride.... This is one you will not be able to put down and one you will remember for a long time to come. Very highly recommended." – Midwest Book Review

  "Collings has a way with words that pulls you into every moment of the story, absorbing every scene with all of your senses." – Clean Romance Reviews

  Dedication

  To...

  The fans (among them my mommy),

  who kept bugging me incessantly to finish this one,

  and to Laura, FTAAE.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  24

  25

  26

  27

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  1

  This is what happens when you stare at a dead man:

  Water falls on your face.

  Blood mixes with the rain, makes it pink and barely-there and somehow both less real and more vivid than it should be.

  The boom of nearby gunshots that ended lives fades away, replaced by distant thunder that echoes like the sky itself is screaming in confusion, rage, pain.

  And through it all, a woman screaming. A big man gasping, gasping, gasping for breath. Two children who stare at nothing and make not a sound.

  What just happened?

  Ken's dead, that's what happened.

  Ken Strickland's body started to slide down the bank, down the mud-blood beneath his soaked body, toward the rushing canal.

  Maggie didn't move. She was rocking, screaming, staring as her husband slid away. Perhaps she couldn't move, perhaps she didn't want to move. Maybe she thought it wasn't real. Maybe she thought if she waited long enough Ken would jump up and never mind the gaping hole in his shoulder or the even bigger one in his chest, he'd just jump up and smile and shout "Just kidding" and they'd all laugh right there in the middle of the storm and the death and the Apocalypse.

  Maybe.

  Buck didn't move, either. He kept gasping. Maybe having a heart attack? Young for that, but certainly high-strung enough. The dude could give a strung-out cheetah lessons in spaz-osity.

  Ken's little girls didn't seem to notice that their father had been killed. Lizzy hung from a carrier on her mother's back, her chubby arms and chubbier legs dangling loose and limp, her head tilted back, her mouth and eyes open and totally oblivious to the rain. Hope, seven years old to her sister's two, hung from Buck's arms. Equally limp, her face also turned skyward. They were breathing in time. In-out, in-out, in-out. Panting.

  The snow leopard licked Liz's feet, legs. He took no mind of the dead. He never had. Just the girls. The biggest and least fluffy-lovey teddy bear of all time.

  Ken slid toward rushing water, a few inches from being swept away.

  Other than to breathe or scream, no one moved. Maybe no one could.

  Why is no one moving?

  Christopher's thoughts crashed in on themselves, jumbled in his mind like a hundred-car pileup.

  His body remembered how to work, though. Seemingly on its own it lurched toward the bank, toward the wate
r.

  Toward the body of a friend.

  Christopher fell forward, sprawled purposefully in the slick mud, plowing through long grass and reeds as Ken's body twisted its way to the water. He felt for a moment like he was a kid on a Slip'N Slide.

  Only no prize for going the farthest or fastest. No prize I want, at least.

  He caught Ken's arm. The body was heavy, a loose weight that yanked at Christopher harder than he expected.

  Ken's legs fell into the canal. The current – fast, strong, terrible – tore him into a position nearly perpendicular to Christopher.

  Christopher didn't let go. He wouldn't. It didn't matter that Ken was dead. It didn't matter that Aaron was still hunting them all, or even that the world had mostly ended. He wouldn't let go of his friend. He couldn't, he refused.

  Christopher had left his baby behind. He had left what he believed was his dead child, and then had buried an axe in the child's head when it came back. And it didn't matter that the baby survived both times, that the thing that he had once cradled in his arms kept right on going. It didn't even matter that the second time the baby had been a monster, and the first time had been when the hospital where the baby was staying had turned to rubble in the first moments of the finality of civilization; that he thought his baby surely dead.

  The fact remained: he left the child behind. Ran from an innocent.

  So no more. Not again.

  He wouldn't leave Ken. Not like this.

  The current pulled. Pulled. Pulled.

  Christopher didn't let go.

  So the current pulled him, too. He started moving down the bank. Anchored by his grip on a dead man's hand, by his determination to keep one thing sacred, one thing safe in this world gone haywire.

  The current pulled them both toward the canal, into the water.

  Into death.

  2

  Christopher's toes kicked down. Deep divots in the mud that turned into furrows as he was dragged closer to the water.

  A part of him screamed to let go. Shrieked that he was going to die; that he had barely made it out of this canal in the first place. He had jumped in to escape from Aaron, the cowboy/rodeo clown/special forces operative/clear-overachiever-with-a-severe-lack-of-self who had decided Ken's girls probably had to die to save the world. And Christopher had survived. But only barely. Plus, that last time in the canal he had had a makeshift flotation device to help, to keep him afloat.

  Now? With a dead body pulling him down? No way. He was going down, he'd drown for sure.

  But he didn't let go. He screamed at himself to let go, and then screamed back to shut the hell up. There was no turning back. No turning away.

  Ken dropped completely into the canal. The only part of him above the water was his hand, still clutched in Christopher's.

  Christopher's feet no longer left any furrows. They flew up from the ground as the current took full control of Ken – and of him by extension. He shot forward. Felt his arm spear into the water. His shoulder.

  His head went under.

  A terrifying instant – an instant that lasted forever. A deep, coughing, choking inhalation. Foamy water that was as much air as liquid. He coughed, inhaled more fluid, almost vomited.

  Still wouldn't let go.

  Slid further in.

  And something stopped him.

  He reversed direction. Started moving backward.

  His head came out of the water. Shoulder pulled free of the canal's grasp. The water seemed to hiss below him, enraged by the loss of its prey.

  The backwards motion continued. Christopher kept a tight grip on Ken's hand.

  They both came free of the water. Christopher's fingers cramped, pain shooting up his arm and all the way to his twice-broken nose. He grinned through the pain. Ken had broken his nose, both times. It now seemed almost a happy memory.

  Death converts all manner of painful pasts to present pleasures.

  Deep stuff, there. I could make millions in the fortune cookie market.

  Do zombies eat fortune cookies?

  Someone was pulling him. Made sense – even in a world as insane as the one in which he had recently found himself, gravity still seemed to be working. So the fact that he hadn't fallen into the river meant someone was helping. A strong hand encircled his ankle, a grip so tight it was almost painful.

  He heard a grunt. Someone exhaling with effort.

  Buck?

  He couldn't look. He couldn't move a single muscle without unclenching them all, and that would mean losing Ken.

  A few long moments and the hand finally pulled him fully onto the bank.

  A few longer moments and Ken – Ken's body – joined Christopher on the bank. He tried to let go of his friend. Couldn't. His hand wouldn't open.

  He settled for looking back. To thank Buck. It couldn't have been Maggie. He could still hear her sobbing some feet away.

  But it wasn't Buck.

  "You must have a very great death wish," said the newcomer.

  3

  "It's not a death wish," said Christopher. His body – specifically, his mouth – seemed to be operating on autopilot. No thought, just stimulus-response.

  Thought was something reserved for civilized times. Barbarity demanded only base instinct.

  The man standing behind him, one gnarled hand constricting the blood flow to Christopher's right foot, looked like he was likely more at home in the new world than he had been the way things used to be. He wore a ghillie suit: a full-body camo outfit of the type favored by military snipers, the most serious hunters, and survivalist whack-jobs. Camo-print base, with frond-like bits of twine and fabric trailing off it, all colored various shades of green and gray and brown. His head was covered, too, a green mesh hood with the same stringy sheets coming off it like flayed tree-flesh.

  Still, even the full-body covering couldn't quite subdue the gray beard that poked out from under the face mask. Christopher wondered if he had just been rescued by a renegade cousin of the Duck Dynasty guys, or maybe some Grateful Dead fan who would turn out to be completely tie-dyed beneath the suit.

  A long hunting rifle with a scope was slung over the man's shoulder. Christopher remembered Elijah. Remembered the huge black man pointing a gun at Maggie and her youngest daughter, Lizzy, after shooting Ken.

  Remembered a loud crack and then Elijah's head exploding.

  This must have been how. This must have been who.

  "Thank you," he said. The words came out with difficulty. He didn't even know what he was thanking this stranger for. For killing Elijah? For stopping Ken from being lost? For saving Christopher?

  The hood of the ghillie suit went up and down slowly. "You are welcome," said the voice. It was deep but pleasant; almost sounded as though it was making its way through a smile. Then the head swiveled. "Are there any more of them?"

  Again, Christopher's thoughts tangled. It didn't help that Maggie was still screaming. The shrieks were petering out, but still had enough power to dig into the folds of Christopher's brain, to shove aside his ability to think straight.

  He kept thinking of his baby. Seeing his little girl, Carina. The bracelet he gave her. The way her head broke in two when he hit her with the axe.

  "Are there any more of them?" asked the voice again. More insistently this time.

  Buck answered. "Yeah," he said. His voice, always seeming a bit too high in pitch for someone so large, seemed even higher. Pinched with exhaustion and grief.

  More than that. What's going on with him now?

  "One guy," Buck continued. "Maybe a woman, too. Probably not, though, she got –" He cut off, glancing at Ken for a moment. "She got hurt, probably out of commission. But the guy's coming."

  "Are you sure?" asked the man in the suit.

  Christopher didn't have to answer. A shot cut through the sky.

  A red flower bloomed on the newcomer's suit of greenery and vines.

  The man who had saved them pitched backward.

  Fell.


  4

  Buck yipped. Christopher felt a laugh bubble up at the sound. Inappropriate, but wasn't that all laughter was? An inappropriate moment caught in our gut, struggling to get out in fits and starts?

  He tamped it down.

  Other things to think about.

  The ghillie suit was a tangle of green and brown, a sodden bush in the mud. The man inside groaned and rolled over. Sat up.

  "That was not nice," he said. Voice a hoarse whisper.

  Christopher tried to tell him to stay down. The shooter was Aaron. Had to be. The cowboy was deadly up close, deadly from afar. He was neutralizing the threat: the man with a weapon, the man who had killed one of Aaron's helpers –

  (Or was it the other way around? Was Aaron helping Elijah? Wasn't Aaron our friend? How the hell did this happen? When did we fall apart?)

  – with a well-placed shot. The newcomer had been shot in the shoulder. And there was no way Aaron had missed. It was a shot meant to lay a man out without killing him. Aaron didn't kill –

  Not unless it's necessary. Not unless it's the monsters, or the two little girls.

  And are they the monsters?

  No answer to that. Not yet. Certainly they were more – less? – than just a two- and seven-year-old.

  Another shot. The man in the portable duck blind grunted. Another hit, but this time he didn't go down.

  "Dude, fall," said Christopher. His skin prickled. Somehow he knew that the next shot would be somewhere final. Would kill the man.

  "I do not think so."

  Christopher was finally struck by something: the hunter's beard said redneck or roadie, but his voice, his choice of words, said something quite different. And was there the slightest trace of an accent there?

  Christopher wasn't sure what he was, but the newcomer was more than just a hillbilly in camo.

  The man moved. Fast. Faster than anyone Christopher had ever seen other than Aaron. Maybe even faster than the cowboy. In a fluid motion the hunter shrugged his shoulder – the shoulder that had two bullet holes in it, and not the slightest hesitation or cry of pain – and dropped his head. The rifle on his back swung around. He rammed it against his bad shoulder. Aimed it. Pulled the trigger.