The Virophage Chronicles (Book 1): Dead Hemisphere

by Landeck, R. B.

A new wave of panic tore through the crowd. The first of the dead had managed to flank them from the east, corralling their prey in a lethal pincer between the water and the hills.

  There was no way out now. People started clambering aboard the back of the truck, and others hung off its sides, all beseeching Tom to take them to safety. Amadou was left with no choice. He took a hard left towards the hills, instantly crushing several people beneath the front axle. Living or dead, he did not know. He squeezed his eyes shut as the truck bounced and hobbled across the bodies.

  As a captive of the rebels and as a child soldier, he had killed people by the dozens and in much more gruesome ways. But then he didn’t have a choice. He would do their bidding or be killed himself, or worse, as they threatened frequently, have whatever family he had left slaughtered alongside with him. This here was different. He was in control of this truck, and nobody held a gun to his head. He had sworn to himself when they had left that camp, that he would never take another life and that he was done killing. How wrong he had been.

  Now, each jump of the front axle as another living person was crushed beneath it, he felt his soul fragment, shatter into a thousand pieces. The devil’s own cold hands once again pulled the strings he had fought so hard to cut. He felt sick and disgusted. Ghosts of the past danced before his mind’s eye, threatening to send him over the edge. Amadou raised his head and howled. Tears welled up in his eyes and streamed down his face. His foot on the accelerator trembled, and it took all his strength to not just turn off the engine and resign himself to fate. To him, he had already voided his right to live many times over.

  As Amadou wrestled with himself to keep the truck moving, Tom had his own fight on his hands. People not only clung to the sides but had now managed to jump aboard via the truck’s open rear. Wide-eyed and crazy with fear, they scratched and elbowed each other for pole position furthest away from the tailgate. Tom had helped a few. Next to him now sat an old man protecting his little grandson quivering with fear. On the other side was a young woman. Shot in the leg, she had reached out to Tom in a last-ditch attempt to save her life. Soon though, the vehicle would be overloaded, and any expectation of progress dissipate as the excess weight no doubt would bog it down in the sand for good.

  It was when the first ones wounded by the dead had tried to jump aboard when Tom had drawn the line. A man in his forties, blood spurting from a deep laceration in his neck, had barely had the strength to hold on but still somehow managed to pull himself up halfway by grasping one of the benches’ welded crossbars. Tom’s boot connected with his fingers and the man’s grip loosened instantly. With a yelp, he fell back into the crowd, immediately consumed and trampled into the ground.

  Tom was full of hate. Hate at all this, hate at himself. Hate at these people, who were just like him in their plight and hate at the dead and even the poor bitten ones; the latter walking, ticking time bombs, posing as much of a threat as the former. Another man in a bloodstained uniform, a chunk missing from his forearm, tried his luck, but Tom’s elbow sent him flying back into the moving sea of people.

  The dead were now on them from two sides, trapping everything before them in a rapidly-closing vice of gargantuan proportions. Amadou tried his best to steer the truck, swerving left and right to stay clear of running people, the truck bed, and everything in it, turning into something closer to a tumble dryer.

  “Watch where you’re going!” Tom yelled, trying to keep his balance, holding on with one hand while fending off unwelcome climbers with the other.

  Suddenly the fleeing crowd in front of the vehicle opened up. Ahead, a large white UN Armoured Personnel Carrier sat like a beached whale, and the rushing crowd split and spilled around it like a river’s current around a rock. Amadou was unable to stop in time. Trying to avoid collision, he made a hard right turn, sending the truck sliding sideways, its rear wheels digging deep into the sand as he once again pushed down the accelerator. A fountain of dirt spewed from the truck’s rear in a wide arc. The wheels, having lost all grip, dug themselves further into the sandy surface. Amadou howled again as he floored the pedal and stirred the gears to free the vehicle, but it remained stuck.

  “Let’s go, let’s go! What’s the bloody hold-up?” Tom yelled and banged his hand on the roof of the cabin.

  Amadou tried one more time to free the wheels, frantically shifting forward and reverse gears, but it was no use. Like a slowly sinking water skier, the truck disappeared in the moving mass of the pursued and their pursuers. Like sharks in a feeding frenzy, the dead grabbed and snapped at anything and everything around them.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Tom cursed as he climbed over the roof and, hanging over the side, put his head through the driver’s window.

  Amadou just gave him a panicked look. “We’re stuck. We are bloody stuck!”

  Tom could see something in the man’s eyes he hadn’t seen before. Blind fear. He turned pale. Through the window on the other side, they could see a group of corpses heading straight for the truck. Behind them were hundreds more.

  The constant flow of the living was about to end and give way to the deluge of the dead and recently risen, who had somehow managed to round up the refugees like a giant shoaling of tuna, forcing them into the shrinking space between the lake and the hills. Soon the living would run out of room.

  “Follow me!” Tom already had one hand on the door handle, snapping Amadou out of his tunnel vision with a punch to the arm, just in time to jump to deliver a crushing kick to the skull of a shambling corpse.

  Its eyes grew large as it saw him move and then fell closed forever. Amadou slid out of the driver’s seat and followed Tom through the open door. They dropped to the ground and crawled beneath the truck’s rear axle, just as the group of undead reached the front end. Hands, stumps, heads, and even limbless torsos banged against the metal, demanding their meal.

  With a little luck, Tom thought, these aren’t clever enough to look below, let alone follow. The creatures’ moaned and wailed with excitement each time one of them successfully brought down another victim, and their army swayed, heaved and sank as groups descended to feed.

  The screams of the living were less now in the immediate vicinity, all but swallowed up by the dead in pursuit. Eager to avoid alerting any of the corpses around them, Tom and Amadou almost became one with the sand as they slowly crawled forward beneath the truck.

  The dead were not particularly clever, but their senses, for some reason, stayed acute, in some cases even keener, following their transformation. For now, the two remained undiscovered, but it was just a question of time before the copses honed in. They began shovelling dirt back into the deep grooves the truck’s tires had dug in the hope that it might regain traction. Tom took off his shirt and tucked it tightly between the dirt and the tread.

  “Now for the tricky part. We somehow deed to throw this thing back into gear.”

  With the choir of anguish again rising all around them, Tom’s voice barely carried. Amadou had finished filling the tire groove on his side of the axle and started crawling back towards the cabin.

  “Don’t do anything stupid.” Tom nervously patted his back.

  Upon reaching the underbed just beneath the passenger side, Amadou paused. Densely packed, corpses staggered all around them, their legs almost touching him as he watched them from beneath. Most now seemed to be facing away, mesmerized by the commotion on the shoreline. There, the screaming of the living had reached fever pitch as people faced the impossible choice of drowning in the blood-red waters or getting eaten alive by the advancing horde.

  Cautiously, Amadou twisted around the wheel and rose to his feet. With his back against the door, the nearest corpses were now less than an arms’ length in front of him. Spurred on by the moans of their peers near the shore, they paid no attention as Amadou, at snail’s pace, first put one and then the other foot on the running board. Frozen in place, watching for any sign of interest, he stood there, arms shaking from
the strain of holding on to the window frame, but the dead kept moving along without as much as a second glance.

  He waited until a brief gap opened up in the group, creating enough space for him to move. Lightning fast, he pulled himself up into the cabin with one swift motion, immediately ducking down and coming to rest flat on the front seats. Breathing heavily from the strain, he lay there, anxiously waiting for the unmistakable noise of discovery. But there was nothing. Nothing but the soundscape of horror. Nothing but screams and gunfire and the mournful cry of a few thousand corpses.

  He slowly sat up, just enough to peek over the bottom edge of the driver’s window. Satisfied that indeed none of the creatures had taken an interest, he slid down and carefully placed one foot on the clutch and gingerly slipped the long lever into first gear. Nervously Tom again checked on their handiwork on both sides of the axle and cringed as he braced for Amadou to put pedal to the metal.

  Back in the cabin, Amadou gritted his teeth as the tip of his toes touched the accelerator. Increasing the engine’s RPM’s too early would alert hundreds of the corpses nearby to their presence. Their chances of escape would be ruined before the truck even moved.

  ‘Three, two, one….’ He silently counted down, and his back stiffened as he readied himself for the roar of the engine.

  Messing up the interplay between transmission and gas would spell disaster. He gently pressed down on the accelerator, before slowing pulling back his foot from the clutch. The engine snarled, and the vehicle jerked forward. The rear tires spun once again, trying to get a grip. Feeling the truck rock and move slightly, Amadou put his foot on the gas, sending the engine’s revolutions skyward, but the tires again lost traction. The first of the dead took notice and turned their heads. Their mouths opened in anticipation of warm flesh nearby.

  “Come on. COME ON!” Amadou clenched his jaw, wishing the truck into forward movement.

  A group of ten or more corpses broke away from the herd and slowly but steadily closed the distance towards him. They had seconds before several hundred more would follow. The truck rocked back and forth, back and forth. Tires chewed dirt. The tucked-under shirts offered little resistance. Catapulted from below the truck, they draped themselves over the heads of the oncoming dead.

  Tom bit his lip, wanting to scream in frustration. In the truck bed above, the old man, his grandson, and the injured woman cowered under the metal benches, shaking with fear at the attention the men’s actions were drawing. Amadou was frantically shifting gears now, wildly stirring the lever as the truck lost its rocking rhythm and with it any chance of freeing itself. The transmission responded with a cranky grind. He finally found the forward gear and pushed down hard on the accelerator one more time. The engine squealed and smoked billowed up from the tires at the rear. Then it sputtered and stopped.

  The ceased engine’s sudden silence was as deafening as the noise of the still raging carnage around them. Amadou turned the ignition, and the starter whined, but the motor refused. The first of the corpses had reached the cabin. Bloodied fingers desperate to get a hold, their cries adding to the terror creeping up Amadou’s spine, threatening to dislodge his sanity. The moans were quickly drawing in more of the dead.

  Even from his position low on the ground beneath the rear axle, just by the number of legs stumbling towards them, Tom could see they were in real trouble. Whatever they were about to do, it had to be done fast, or there would be no longer a point in doing anything at all.

  He rolled over and, swearing as he struck his head on the exhaust, launched himself up. Going over the top railing, he landed hard in the bed. Hands reached from all sides, and bodies rocked the vehicle in a dizzying tug of war between the dead on either side. Their excited moans drifted far and wide into the masses, and more and more moving corpses peeled away from the mainstream still busy trying to get to the feast that was underway along the shore. In the cabin, Amadou sweated profusely as he looked around for a weapon. Rummaging through the glove box and checking beneath the seats, he fumbled with bits and pieces, discarded tools and hoses, and all manner of things left behind by whoever had commandeered the truck before him. He leaned over to the passenger side and caught a glimpse of something metallic attached to the underside of the dashboard just above the footwell. Reaching around in the narrow space, he smiled with relief as his hand felt the outline of a gun. He pulled at the Velcro holding it in place, and it came loose with the familiar sound of the strap’s hooks pulling free from their fuzzy counterpart. Swatting away the shredded arm of a man almost tall enough to lean into the cabin, he inspected the magazine.

  ‘9mm Automatic’. He had seen this type of handgun many times before. An Egyptian-made Helwar, it was a knock-off resembling the Beretta M9 and the gun of choice for many armed forces and thugs in the region.

  The magazine slid out with ease. It was still at capacity. Not only that, but an additional round was already chambered. Whoever had loaded this gun had preferred business over safety. Amadou said a quiet thanks. He could hear the stomping of heavy boots on the roof of the cabin, and within a split second, Tom’s face appeared upside down in front of the windscreen, signalling for him to follow. Perplexed, Amadou quickly grabbed the gun with one hand and a small fire extinguisher he had found with the other. Pivoting on the passenger seat, he used the momentum to bring up his legs and deliver a bone-breaking kick to several arms probing the cabin, breaking the hold the creatures had on the door. They fell back into the next wave of corpses like stage-divers into a mosh pit. He brought down the fire extinguisher on the head of a dead woman about to lean in on his side, and the cylinder’s sharp edge split her head open like a walnut. She, too, fell beneath the waves of oncoming corpses.

  Amadou stuffed the gun into his pants and, with cat-like agility, flung himself out of the window and on top of the roof, where Tom was helping the other three survivors across and onto the hood. The dead surging against the truck responded with a collective wail and increased their efforts to get to the warm flesh just above them.

  “We need to be quick!” Tom urged.

  The old man and the woman struggled to keep control of their fear, hesitating to leave the relative safety of the truck bed, which, as Tom could see, would fall to the dead, much like everything else around them within minutes.

  “Where do we go?” Amadou yelled, delivering another kick to the head of a creature closing in with a mouth full of jagged teeth.

  “I said…” He yelled again,”…where are we going?!” Amadou’s almost shrieked now.

  Spinning around just in time, he shoved off a legless corpse that had managed to pull itself up from the front fender, across the grill, and onto the hood.

  Tom’s thoughts raced. Getting to higher ground was their only chance of survival. In the sea of corpses ahead of them, the roof of the white APC they had swerved to avoid was the only thing higher than the truck itself. Tom craned his neck and nodded towards the white monstrosity, still sitting there, unmovable and solid, oblivious to the unfolding disaster around it.

  The corpse of middle-aged man, his leathery features set into a permanent grin, was about to grab hold of Tom’s boot, ready to sink his teeth in when Amadou delivered another blow with the fire extinguisher. The man’s head caved in, and its contents splattered all over the windscreen. Tom pulled away in disgust. Still on top of the hood of the now-defunct machine, they were out of reach by mere inches from the waves of the dead that threw themselves against it.

  “You want us to go there?! How the hell are we going to…?” Amadou stared at the APC and then at the moving ground in front of them.

  Tom had no time to explain.

  The survivors sobbed uncontrollably, clinging to each other in the centre of their island in a sea of rotting flesh. Still, more and more of the corpses arrived, having turned away from the human buffet in full swing all along the shore to the north.

  Taking a couple of running steps, Tom leaped over the heads of the nearest creatures and landed h
ard in the sand between them. Rolling sideways, he brought himself up and, running like a quarterback, bowled over the shambling corpses left and right. Carving a corridor between the bodies, he finally reached APC. Finding a foothold on the large bullet-proof tires, he quickly overcame the awkward angle of the vehicle’s lizard head-shaped chassis and, using its rearview mirrors to pull himself up, quickly managed to roll topside. He had barely stopped next to one its open roof hatches when the dead began pounding against the carrier’s oversized tires and armour-plated body, their fists producing little more than muffled thumps against the thick metal.

  Back on the hood of the truck, Amadou and his three survivors had run out of room. Some of the more agile corpses had managed to clamber into the bed and over the roof and were rapidly gaining ground towards the living. Yet others had managed to use the bodies of their fallen peers, stepping on them to gain a few inches of extra reach in their struggle for flesh.

  Dozens of hands now just about touched Amadou and his entourage. They yelled across the crowd at Tom, urging for action with fear-filled eyes. He shouted something, but his voice was drowned out by the screams from the raging carnage, and the gunfire that still erupted sporadically as the last of the ammunition was spent by desperate men no longer in control of their reflexes.

  “Hang tight!” Tom held up his hand.

  Amadou looked back angrily. Hanging tight was no longer on offer. The first of the dead from the truck bed sled down the windscreen. The hood responded with a clunk as its head hit the metal. Another had managed to clamber over its predecessors and grappled forward, now reaching for the little boy’s feet with broken fingers. The three civilians screamed. Amadou’s ears knew they were finally out of time.

  Tom fiddled with the APC’s controls for a few seconds. It had been a while since he had to manoeuvre any kind of machine like it, but eventually, the ignition turned over. The heavy engine revved for a moment, but fell silent again, a large black cloud of diesel shooting up from its exhaust.