by ML Banner
Contents
Copyright
Part I - MADNESS
Prologue
DAY ONE
01
DAY TWO
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
DAY THREE
10
11
12
13
14
DAY FOUR
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
DAY FOUR cont...
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
DAY FIVE
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Epilogue
Part II - PARASITIC
Prologue
DAY FIVE cont...
39
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
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
DAY TEN
79
80
81
Part III - SYMPTOMATIC
PRELUDE
82
83
DAY TWELVE
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
Epilogue
A Quick Word From The Author
Is this really the end
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THE
FINAL
OUTBREAK
M.L. Banner
Copyright © 2018-2019 by Michael L. Banner,
All rights reserved.
Version 1.01, April 2019
THE FINAL OUTBREAK is an original work of fiction.
The characters and dialogs are the products of this author’s vivid imagination.
Most of the science and the historical incidents described in this novel are based on reality,
and so are its warnings.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Published by
www.toesinthewaterpublishing.com
Part I
MADNESS
“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.”
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
“It’s a plague of madness that has infected most animals...
a ticking time bomb, which could go off at any moment.”
T.D. Bonaventure
Prologue
Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
1712
A scream sent him into motion. Aldolfo Suárez raced up the face of La Gomera, sure his son was seriously injured. He bounded deftly over the volcanic rocks, focused on not catching his sandals—there was no helping his son if he too were injured.
Halfway up the summit, his fatigued legs forced him to stop and find rest under the ancient umbrella of a dragon-tree. While trying to satisfy his oxygen-starved lungs with fitful gulps of the foul, sulfur-filled air, he took in the world’s surreal textures.
Besides being colorless, like a charcoal drawing, it was soundless, not unlike a dense snowfall. Gray ash, instead of flecks of snow, quietly floated down from the murk, spotting the landscape.
He glared over his left shoulder to examine its origin. Only the thick plume of La Palma’s volcano was visible now. An unending boiling geyser, belching ash from the depths. The townspeople blamed the eruption on God, saying that they were being punished for the sins of their past. Aldolfo knew it wasn’t a vengeful God; evil was at the root of all of this and it was getting worse.
In the week since the eruption, the looming clouds thickened with each passing night. Daily, the sun’s life-giving warmth was quelled by this cloak. And the skies grew more violent, with darker shades of crimson each afternoon.
He caught a glimpse of several sheep by his granero, the only building up on the hill. They had spread out from their normal confines, now testing the farthest reaches of his vast property. Sheep preferred to remain together for safety and not spread apart.
A tortured screech and several sheep dashed below him, not even slowing down, as if he wasn’t there. They always stopped to gather around their shepherd.
Puzzled by this, he carefully studied them as they scurried along the well-trodden path, then around a corner into one of the two caves on his property. They disappeared inside.
However odd and troubling this was, he thanked his good fortune. At least those animals would be easier to gather.
Bleating pulled Aldolfo’s attention once again back toward his granero. Above this, an undulating cloud of black dots fell from the sky, disappearing behind the building. Then the cloud rose again, where it clung to the air for barely a second and then tumbled downward. The chaotic dots then circled back to some unseen spot behind the building.
Movement to his right.
A winged shape emerged from the gray gloom. Black and angular. Bright red eyes. It flapped furiously, arched, and then dropped onto the back of a frantic sheep, which cried a labored bleat and burst past him. Its normal coat of alabaster—his flock’s wool was well known throughout the region—was covered with tawny splashes. The winged shape rode on its back like death bridling a horse of the apocalypse. It lifted its head and shrieked back at him. Something fibrous hung from its orange beak.
Aldolfo gaped, dumbfounded.
Then he understood. The shapes, the clouds: these were cuervo negro, a black raven common around the island. Except their normally coordinated flights and wonderfully sinuous formations were erratic. Almost angry.
There were more shrill cries coming from behind the building. He ran again, to the sounds of his distressed animals. Making no connection to the birds, he became sure that one of the neighbor’s mad dogs was attacking a few of the wandering herd. It had already happened twice this week. He clutched his staff, getting ready to wield it against the attacking perro. There’d be no warning this
time; he’d beat the devil out of the animal, and demand payment for his injured or killed sheep.
Aldolfo arrived breathless, just off the side of his granero, and was once again frozen in his steps. What he witnessed stupefied him. For the first time, fear raced up his spine, faster than a cold December chill.
The cuervos were swarming three of his sheep; each lay in a dying heap on the rocky ground, wailing in pain. The birds pulled at the bloody flesh, frantically ripping at and plunging their heads into the moribund bodies.
Finally, the good shepherd in him reacted. Aldolfo jumped up, hollered a command at the offending fowl and swung his arms wildly.
The birds reacted instantly, the cloud breaking free from the mostly still carcasses—they were once his beloved animals. The haze of cuervos barely rose from the ground before quickly changing direction and flapping frantically, this time toward him.
They no longer seemed disorganized.
He yelped as each cuervo pelted him. One after another they hit, causing him to lose his balance. But he righted himself and swung at the thickening cloud, now swarming him en masse.
Their wild screeching was so loud he thought he might go deaf, if he even survived this.
Some of the birds fell from the swings of his staff, and a few others broke away, just avoiding being hit. But there were far too many. Each momentary hole in the black clog filled up again, as they continued their unyielding barrage.
Spikes of pain flared all over his body, and he caught momentary flashes of his own blood with each swing. A flood of panic rushed over him, causing him to thrash wildly. Losing his balance again, he dropped his staff and started to tumble toward the ground when he saw perhaps his only outlet of salvation.
The door to his granero was slightly ajar. If he could only make it inside there.
Using his headlong motion, he drove his legs forward, pushing through and into the comforting darkness, landing hard. Several cats bolted past him, yowling their own displeasure, and disappeared outside, just before he kicked the door closed.
The frame of the large building rattled and then, for a moment the world was a muffled quiet but for his own harried puffs for air.
A shaft of weak light nudged through the granero’s single dirty window, illuminating a small lump in the middle of the floor, as if God Himself had reached in with His invisible hand and left a foggy thumb-print of light that split the darkness. The thumb-print crackled with movement.
His granero was not used much anymore, so the building should have been empty right now. He squinted at the abyss, fighting an inability to see anything in the dark.
One of his eyes wasn’t working. He spat mental curses at the devilish birds for what they did to him. The back of his hand trailed over the nonfunctional eye, tentatively confirming nothing was blocking his vision. It felt sticky and moist. He purposely forced both eyes closed and attempted to reopen both again, hoping it might improve his vision. It didn’t.
It was only then that he realized he wasn’t alone.
With his one good eye, Aldolfo refocused on the illuminated lump in the center of the structure that he had first assumed was something his son had left there—he often didn’t put things where they belonged. Maybe it was some more of those damned cats that were everywhere.
A spell of dizziness rocked him, and only then did he know how badly he was hurt. Yet he fought back the wooziness: he needed to know what this lump was. He felt drawn to it. An unshakable feeling, however irrational, that whatever the lump might be, it would offer him comfort.
He attempted to pull himself deeper into the building, using his elbows to propel his body forward.
A painful ringing crescendo in his brain, which already felt as if it might pop at any second. And yet above the internal din, he heard something else.
It was a dull murmur, coming from the illuminated mass.
The benign image of a litter of puppies jumped into his head; its edges fuzzy, like after a dream.
His son had watched over the neighbor’s newborn pups, long before they had become vicious. Back then they were adorable, but when it came time to feed them, they showed their inner animalistic self, attacking their food, ripping at it and gnawing each morsel with untamed abandon. Their gnawing sounded like what he was now hearing, only raw.
As if something covering his ears were removed, he could hear better, the ringing barely noticeable. At the same time, the image became clearer. He halted his progression and focused. He could now see and hear this lump in motion.
He convulsed uncontrollably.
It was chewing sounds he was hearing, along with sounds of tearing and ripping at flesh. It was the evil cuervos eating from the mass...
They were eating his son.
His boy must have attempted to escape the birds inside, just like his father.
Aldolfo gave up all fight, fully accepting his fate. There would be no escape for him, just as there wasn’t any for his son.
He watched the cuervos race toward him and wished at that moment, he could have once more told his boy he loved him.
Before everything went black, he marveled at the redness of the cuervos’ eyes.
DAY ONE
WE DIDN’T KNOW IT AT THE TIME, BUT IT ALL STARTED TODAY... THE BEGINNING OF OUR END.
01
Madrid, Spain
The red-eyed beast came out of nowhere, moving so fast they had no time to think, only react. And if it hadn’t been for TJ seeing the creature and calling it to their attention before it struck, one or both of them might have suffered serious injury or a far worse fate.
Two days would pass before they’d come to realize that this was just one of many signs of an apocalypse that was about to befall the world. Until then, they would chalk up this event to just another part of the normal chaos that comes with travel these days. Technically, the chaos began over a week ago.
When they had boarded their transatlantic flight, they were mildly aware of some travel disruptions that had started earlier when Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano began spewing ash into the atmosphere. The volcanic ash plume slowly ballooned out toward Northern Europe causing flight delays and diverting air traffic across the continent—the thick particles of ash played hell with jet engine rotors.
This very thing had happened years before, and so neither Ted nor TJ Williams gave it much thought as they luxuriated in their first-class flat-bed seats and happily discussed their upcoming transatlantic cruise from Malaga, Spain back to the US. Their flight attendant added to their self-imposed detachment by topping off their glasses with seemingly endless sparkling wine.
An hour before landing, Sicily’s Mount Etna blew its top as well, diverting more flights and adding to the already heavy air traffic coming into London’s Heathrow Airport.
When they arrived, they received their first taste of the travel problems that lay ahead of them. Many flights had already been canceled, and further cancellations were mounting by the minute, as flights around Europe and Asia were being grounded. Their next flight was one of them.
Ted and TJ had only one more leg left on their journey to Malaga before Regal European’s Intrepid would set sail at five tomorrow afternoon. Although Ted’s agent set up the trip, TJ had done all the detailed planning, as she normally did for any of their vacations.
Now anchored at the American desk, outside their arrival gate, they were both scrambling for options. The gate agent busily searched for other air-travel possibilities on American, while they also searched on their phones for other available flights on competitor airlines.
“How about Madrid?” Ted spoke just below a shout, to be heard over the commotion. “There’s a BA flight leaving in thirty. Ah... flight number 6-2-8-0.” His eyes met TJ’s for confirmation that this would work for them.
Instantly her face was awash with excited expectation. “Yes!” She turned to the gate agent. “Can you find us two seats?”
The agent furiously tapped at her keyboard, eyes drilled into
her screen. “I have two bulkhead seats in coach, but at least they’re next to each other,” she announced with pride.
“We’ll take them!” TJ threw back, without hesitation. In other circumstances, she might have been disappointed as a Platinum member of American’s frequent flier program who just lost first-class seats on a canceled flight. But she was pretty sure they’d have no other choices if she waited even a few more seconds. This flight didn’t get them to Malaga, but it brought them to within driving distance.
Once she heard the printer below the desk spit out their tickets, she asked the next obvious question. “Do you or anyone else have anything from Madrid to Malaga?”
“Sorry, there’s nothing available. This may be the last flight in or out of Madrid,” the gate agent responded fairly quickly, still not looking up.
Ted handed TJ his phone. “Here. I’ll get our tickets. This is Cynthia with Hertz in Madrid.” He flashed a Keanu Reeves sort of smile, which then broke into a grin. The curl of his handlebar mustache—the one part of his made-up British author persona she’d like to change—lifted high on his face.
At any other time, she might have smirked or said something about his appearance, made more out of place by his Cubs ball cap. Instead, TJ beamed at him, accepting his phone. After twenty years of marriage, he still loved making her smile.
They had to run to the gate to make the full flight to Madrid, with barely a few minutes to spare. Ted pulled their luggage, while TJ secured an economy car with Hertz in between harried puffs for air.
Relief turned into worry after they landed at Madrid’s Baraja.
They made their way to baggage claims and customs, pacing silently, taking in news snippets from each TV they passed—most were tuned to BBC. The results of Mount Etna’s eruption were devastating: it was the largest eruption in over a hundred years; several hundred perished in a giant swirling pyroclastic cloud that swept through Fornazzo; and air travel throughout Eurasia was now at a standstill.
They were the lucky ones, indeed.
At the Hertz counter, where lines of frantic travelers received the bad news, they were evermore thankful they had booked their car when they did, and that it hadn’t been given to someone else. Yet a sinking nervousness gnawed away at their bellies. Something much greater than an immediate disaster was occurring and they were about to get their first taste of it.
