REVELATION
Arize #2
By Scott Nicholson
Copyright©2018 by Scott Nicholson
Published by Haunted Computer Books
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“One of the most thrilling writers working today. Miss him at your peril.”
– Blake Crouch, Wayward Pines
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Quote
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Arize #3: Tribulation
About the Author
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“And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.”
—Revelation 13: 7
CHAPTER ONE
The graveyard was a hundred silently screaming mouths of hell.
As rain slithered down in long silver streaks against the creeping dusk, Dr. Meg Perriman stared into the abyss that had recently held her daughter.
“Who took her, Mom?” asked her son Jacob.
Nobody took her. It looked like she’d dug her way up from the ground where they’d buried her the day before. The fresh grave had been disturbed along with all the others. Now there was only a hole in the ground. Red mud slowly trickled down into a dark pool below.
“She’s out there somewhere,” Meg replied. “We’ll find her.”
But she wasn’t sure she wanted to find Ramona. Her dead daughter might be walking with all those others who’d crawled up from the earth.
Jacob clutched the soggy teddy bear, Mister Grizz. The beloved stuff animal had been buried with his sister. Whoever or whatever Ramona was now, she’d shed her last connection with this world.
The rest of the group searched the surrounding forest, looking for clues of what had happened here. The Klondike Flu had caused a zombie outbreak five days earlier, and Meg had come to accept the reality of flesh-eating monsters—made all the worse because she’d unknowingly had a hand in the infection’s spread. She’d brought the virus home from a research station in Alaska, and although she’d recovered from her exposure, she’d passed the sickness to Ramona.
The sight of Ramona as a zombie had been unbearable enough. Encountering whatever she was now, carrying a day’s worth of wet rot, would send Meg the rest of the way over the edge.
But Jacob was still alive, and her son needed her. She forced away the panic that twitched in the alleys of her skull.
“We need to find shelter before dark,” she said, pulling him away from the open grave.
The ten-year-old boy tried to shake free, squeezing the filthy teddy bear so hard that brown water dripped from its feet. “We can’t leave her. Not again.”
“She’s not Ramona anymore.”
A flash of lightning cast a stroboscopic glow along the surrounding trees. Something moved just beyond the creeping gloom.
“Zombies,” Jacob said, barely audible above the hissing raindrops.
“Let’s find the others.” Meg only had two rounds in her Glock semiautomatic pistol. If they were swarmed, she had no hope of fighting them off.
Squinting against the rain, she led Jacob back to the cemetery gates. Smoke from the ruins of downtown Raleigh mixed with the Easter mist that lay low over the ground. Lightning stitched the dark clouds above, casting an ominous pall over the outskirts of the city. For a moment, Meg lost her sense of direction—she didn’t recognize the road from which they’d arrived.
“Over here,” a male voice boomed from the shadows.
It was Rocky Maldonado, the Army specialist who’d volunteered to escort the group. He stepped out of the murk, his face a grim, furrowed mask. He gripped his M16 as if expecting to swing it into firing position at any moment. The three of them gathered under the scant protection of a massive oak.
“Where are the others?” Meg asked him.
He tilted his head to the right. “Up the road. No zombies. Nothing else, either.”
Meg took “nothing else” to mean they hadn’t encountered the recently disinterred. “Any survivors?”
“I saw what looked like some flashlight beams inside a few of the houses, but I didn’t want to surprise anybody.”
“Something was moving in the forest, but I didn’t get a good look.”
“She was afraid it might be Ramona,” Jacob added. “That’s why she made us leave the graveyard.”
“This is something new,” Rocky said. “We can put down zombies with a shot to the head. But how do you kill something that comes back from the grave?”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Meg said.
“Better to think about it now than when one is crawling toward you, knocking its bones together and slapping rotten meat.”
“You’re talking about my sister,” Jacob said.
“Sorry, kid. But we’ve got to keep it real if we’re going to make it. And I promised to get your mom to a research facility so she can help find a cure.”
“We’ve got a couple of days to go,” Meg said, even though she was reluctant to leave Ramona’s grave. What if her daughter returned to it?
“We’re not getting there tonight,” Rocky said. “Let’s get out of this rain and find a place to hole up for the night.”
“What about the others?”
“They’re waiting for us. I told them I’d be back in fifteen minutes. Let’s move.”
Rocky waved them up the road and into the rain. With the electrical grid down, the surrounding houses were cold, dark husks that harbored hungry things inside their walls. Each flicker of lightning turned windows into leering yellow eyes. The naked trees with their April buds shivered at what seemed to be the onset of an eternal winter.
Abandoned vehicles sat parked against the curbs, water pounding against sheet metal and glass. Stretches of the road were open enough to allow passage, but the traffic jams were so frequent that jacking a series of cars was impractical. Many of the vehicles contained rotting bodies. The passenger doors of an SUV were open, and a hand dangled from a doorway, most of the meat stripped from the bone. Meg shielded Jacob’s eyes from the sight, but he’d already turned away, inured to such commonplace horrors.
A distant light ahead shimmered as it approached them. Meg clenched her palm around the Glock’s grip but relaxed when she heard the high whine of a motorcycle engine. The bike slowed as it grew near, the engine throttling back to an idle.
The lone rider flipped up the helmet’s visor. “We found a place,” said the blue-eyed young woman. “About half a mile up the road. We cleared it. There’s food and some dry clothes.”
“Nice,” Rocky said. “Good sight lines in case something comes bumping during the night?”
“Backyard’s open and no cars out front. You can see farther than we can shoot straight.”
The rider glanced at Meg and then looked away. Hannah still felt guilty over Ramona’s death, but Meg held no ill will. The woman had tried to get her daughter to a medical clinic. She’d risked her own life to help, and now she stuck with the group even though she had no obligation.
“All right,” Rocky said. “Tell the others we’ll be along soon.”
“I can take Jacob,” Hannah said, meeting Meg’s eyes again.
“After Ramona, I promised Jacob we’d never be separated,” Meg said.
“Come on, Mom,” Jacob said. “What if I catch pneumonia from this weather?”
Every choice carried a risk now. And all Meg had was her instinct, because most of her knowledge had proven invalid. Hers was the realm of science, rigid rules that governed a more or less orderly natural world. The virus had turned such a reality into a lie, and the recent freak storms shattered any pretense that nature was predictable.
And now the dead not only walked, they rejected the grave.
“All right,” she said, uneasy but knowing she couldn’t protect Jacob all by herself. The boy had faced so much terror and pain in the last few days that he’d already become a new person. Anxiety haunted his features, and she had to look hard to see any semblance of his father in him.
Her husband Ian was somewhere back there in the city, and each step carried her farther from him. She refused to contemplate the slim odds of his survival. Better to focus on the living.
She helped Jacob swing into the saddle seat behind Hannah, gave him a quick kiss on his damp forehead, and watched as the Kawasaki motored up the road. Its red taillight winked like a coal dying in the night.
Rocky and Meg hurried along the road, both of them exhausted. Meg’s clothes were soaked and a chill seeped deep into her bones. She thought of the roof waiting ahead and fell into a near trance, slopping her wet sneakers along the pavement. One step after another, taking her closer, taking her farther away.
She was lost in the numbing rhythm of the rain when Rocky shouted her name. She blinked water from her eyes and looked up.
Three silhouettes stood on the road ahead of them.
“The motorcycle must’ve attracted them,” Rocky said.
Meg wasn’t up for a fight. “Can we go around them?”
“It’s safer here in the open. If we go off into the dark, who knows what we stumble into? At least on the road, we have room to run. Or we can duck into a car for protection.”
“I can’t.”
Rocky nodded. She didn’t need to explain. The shock of her daughter’s resurrection was etched into her face. “I’ll take them out. Watch my back.”
Rocky drew a KA-BAR knife from a sheath strapped above his boot. He wanted to work close because shots might attract more of them. He slung his semiautomatic rifle across his back so he could engage them more freely. That left Meg and her two rounds to protect his flank if things went south.
The zombies shuffled toward them in their stilted, leaning gaits. Meg was pretty sure she could outrun them, and she wasn’t going to let the creatures keep her from Jacob.
The rain drilled down even harder, ripples of lightning punctuated by muted thunder. The heavens seemed to sink down as if intent on suffocating them in thick, gray clouds. The faces of the zombies grew visible in the flashes. Their mottled faces and opalescent eyes revealed an uncanny hunger.
As they drew near, Meg had to remind herself they’d recently been human. Now their clothes and hair were in disarray, and though she could tell two were female and one was male, the trio of zombies projected a peculiar sexlessness. Which made sense, in a way—they were driven by only one need now.
To bite and chew and maul and feed.
Rocky crouched into a battle stance, shoulders arched forward as he balanced his weight over his ankles. He held the seven-inch blade sideways, ready to either slash or thrust depending on the initial attack. The gaunt zombie on the left, water streaming from a black mop of hair, growled and lurched toward him. Rocky stepped back and let it reach for him, and when it was bent low he drove the tip of the KA-BAR into the base of its skull, severing the spinal column and piercing the brain.
It flopped onto the street with a splash, and the second one stumbled over the newly dead corpse as it attacked. As it lost its footing and fell forward, Rocky grabbed one of its arms and drove the knife under its chin. The strike missed, peeling an inch-thick slab of infected flesh from one cheek as Rocky yanked the blade free.
The zombie fell onto all fours and crawled toward Rocky.
“To your right,” Meg said, aiming the pistol in a two-handed grip.
Rocky kicked the fallen zombie, which raked out a hand and grabbed his other boot. Rocky danced away but the thing’s fingers were caught in his laces. Rocky stomped on the attached wrist with his free boot, but the zombie dragged itself within biting range.
While he was engaged, the third zombie closed in. Rocky swung a fist and struck the plump zombie in the chest. It staggered back a few steps but didn’t fall. Its mouth opened wide to issue a sickening hiss of hunger. It steadied itself and shambled forth.
Rocky knelt in the streaming roadbed and plunged the knife into the forehead of the fallen zombie. The zombie, oblivious to pain and even to oblivion itself, refused to let go of Rocky’s boot. Rocky hacked at the hand that still clutched him. After a few strokes of the blade, Rocky was free. He spun toward the last attacker, three bloody fingers dangling from his bootlaces like obscene talismans.
This zombie was larger than Rocky, its affliction not diminishing its prior obesity. Meg wondered if the thing was stuffed with human flesh, and if even now some mysterious digestion was taking place inside that corpulent mass.
Rocky moved backward to regain his fighting stance, but then he flailed his arms as he fell backward. He’d stepped into a pothole hidden by the rain. Meg called his name but was too far away to help him up.
The zombie, operating on an instinct it couldn’t have learned in only a few days, dropped down onto him like a wrestler coming off the ropes. Rocky swung the knife up in time to meet the body blow, but the blade pierced the creature’s shoulder. Rocky’s arm was wedged between their two bodies, locked in place by the zombie’s weight.
The zombie’s slavering mouth descended toward Rocky’s exposed face.
“Shoot it!” Rocky bellowed.
Meg moved closer, arms trembling. She couldn’t see well enough to aim properly and didn’t trust a head shot with Rocky in the line of fire.
“The head,” Rocky roared in a near panic. “Do it now.”
Meg curled her finger inside the trigger guard, jammed the tip of the Glock against the zombie’s temple, and blew its brains out the opposite ear. The zombie went slack, pinning Rocky to the asphalt.
“G-get it…off me,” Rocky gasped. “I can’t breathe.”
Meg knelt in two inches of filthy water and shoved her shoulder against the zombie. On the third try, with Rocky twisting and turning, they managed to roll the massive corpse to the side. Rocky sat up, wiping blood from his face.
“Are you okay?” Meg asked.
“Got a little blowback, that’s all.” He rubbed his wet sleeve across his mouth. “I won’t get infected from this, will I?”
“No,” Meg said, but she wasn’t sure. The Klondike Flu had spread like a cold, both via direct contact and airborne particles. But she didn’t know what kind of mutations occurred once an infected person became a zombie. Either way, direct contact with infected blood wasn’t exactly endorsed by the American Medical Association.
But they could worry about that later. First they had to find the others.
“You think any of them heard the shot?” Meg asked.
“Probably was masked by the thunder,” Rocky said. “The storm’s so loud, I doubt their hearing is sophisticated enough to pinpoint the source.”
She helped him up, and he collected
his knife from the bloated corpse, wiping the blade on its sodden blouse. He finished cleaning his face by turning it up toward the rain. He closed his eyes as he threw back his head.
“Rocky?” she asked.
“What?”
“You were wrong.”
A mob of zombies came out from the surrounding yards, drifting between the cars and trees and mailboxes and utility poles.
The zombies had pinpointed the source after all.
CHAPTER TWO
“When you think about it, heaven’s just a bigger prison,” Arjun Sharma said.
“That’s a weird thing to be worrying about right now,” said Sydney Hall, playing her flashlight around the kitchen of the dark house.
“Those dead people came up out of their graves,” he said. “Where are they going to go now?”
“You tell me. You’re the expert on the apocalypse.”
“Just imaginary ones. I can write a script for a videogame and do some basic code. But I don’t have to worry about what happens to the avatars once they’re eliminated.”
“Well, let’s try not to get eliminated here, okay?”
Arjun opened a cabinet and shined his flashlight on the shelves. “Score. Canned goods, spaghetti, rice, and frosted flakes.”
“Look for some candles. We need to save our flashlight batteries and the others will be here soon.”
Arjun checked the drawers underneath the counter, working his way to the refrigerator. The usual—silverware, utensils, hand towels—and then he came to the drawer that every American household had: the one with all the junk in it.
He pocketed some of the loose batteries and prowled through spare keys, odd tools, and dead electronics until he found a pack of wax candles. “Still got your Bic?”
“You bet.” She flicked the lighter to life and Arjun touched the candle wick to the flame. He jammed the burning candle into the mouth of a soda bottle and used it to light the other three candles in the pack. He spaced them around the kitchen so they could conduct a more thorough search.
“No water,” Sydney said, trying the sink tap. “I was hoping they’d have a private system with a generator.”
Revelation: A Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Thriller (Arize Book 2) Page 1
