Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2)

CONDEMN

BUNKER 12 Series, Book 2

Excerpt

THE FLENSE

Companion series to BUNKER
12

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Acknowledgments

About the
Author

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CONDEMN

a BUNKER 12 novel

by Saul Tanpepper

© 2015

All rights reserved
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full
notice
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[email protected]

(rv.151108)

wraith
/rāTH/ (
n
)

1.
a ghost or ghostlike image of someone, especially one seen
shortly before or after death.

2.
an individual infected with, or carrying, the
Flense.

flense
/flens/

(
v
) to slice or strip away the skin
and fat from a carcass.

(
n
) a highly contagious disease,
spread by touch, capable of stripping away an individual's life
essence.

"You think there'd be more cars on the road," muttered Danny
Delacroix as he steered the bus past a faded and dusty stop sign
canted forty degrees off the perpendicular.

He felt Susan Miller's eyes boring
into the back of his skull. She was seated in the first row behind
him, leaning forward like she wanted to wrestle the steering wheel
away from him at any moment. Like she didn't trust his driving
abilities. He wondered what she thought about his coming to a full
stop and checking in both directions before proceeding.

Such caution was certainly
unwarranted. Theirs was the only vehicle on the road, the only one
they'd seen in four hours of driving, and he really had no reason
for following the rules at all. In fact, it was quite possible that
the bus was the only operating vehicle in the entire
world.

Force of habit. Funny how
quickly the old behaviors come back
.

It had been a long three years since
he last sat behind a steering wheel. Three years since he'd even
been out on the road. And yet, after only twenty minutes of
driving, it felt as if it had been just yesterday. Like nothing had
changed.

Except everything had changed. Life as
he had known it was gone. Vanished in a touch and a puff of bloody
mist. Human civilization had died. And here he was turning on his
turn signal and checking the mirrors.

Stupid.

He willed Susan to go away. And yet,
at the same time, he was glad for her company, even as
uncomfortable as it made him feel. He needed to know he wasn't
alone.

"I mean, where on earth are they all?"
he wondered aloud.

"We're in the boonies."

"Here we are, yeah. But not back
there."

"Home," Susan replied dryly. The sun
and rain-rotted plastic crackled as she shifted on her seat, making
the skin on the back of his neck prickle. "Dying is a very private
matter, you know."

He turned to frown at her. He could
have just glanced at her reflection in the mirror, but this
particular comment warranted a more personal treatment. In the
slanting rays of sunlight, the dirty tracks of her dried tears
stood out from the pale skin on her face. He supposed his own
appearance was just about the same. They'd all cried back
there.

She ignored his stare and kept her
eyes glued to the road ahead. They had turned onto a particularly
flat stretch of cracked and broken blacktop that had, after years
of disuse, faded to a silvery shade of gray. The pavement went on
for miles through a barren wasteland of desert scrub, the surface
sometimes disappearing beneath untouched drifts of sand or else
vanishing into the folds between the silvery ripples of overheated
air.

He recalled a memory from his
childhood crossing over from Mexico, riding that "ribbon highway"
in the back of the coyote's rusted lime green Toyota pickup truck,
the tape deck blasting Woody Guthrie. He relived the sensation of
the truck diving into the shallow swales and up the other side as
they crossed the arroyos.

This landscape was just as bleak and
desolate as the one he remembered, despite their being much further
north now, closer to America's northern border. It certainly seemed
just as hot and arid as he recalled it had been back
then.

They had seen few homes since leaving
Finn behind, just rock and scrub and a few collapsing structures
that might have been warehouses of some sort in the past. Before
the Flense.

And a few cars.

Not a lot of them, but certainly less
than he expected. They sat along the sides of the road like
hollowed out skulls, covered in thick layers of dust and sand.
Weeds grew out of the places that trapped the windblown dirt and
held water long enough for seeds to germinate. Where the paint
showed through, it had faded away like the road signs.

More cars is what he'd expected. And
more bodies.

"Death is a very personal matter,"
Susan explained.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Danny
asked. He really didn't want to know.

"It means that when the shit hit the
fan three years ago, when it kept right on hitting the fan and
people ran out of places to run to for safety, they all just went
back and parked their cars in their garages and driveways. They
went inside their houses, locked their doors and drew their
curtains. No one wants to die in public. No one wants to be seen
with their bodies all messed up, rotting away, turning to soup.
It's . . . embarrassing."

Embarrassing?
he thought, more disturbed by her choice of
metaphor than her characterization of behavior. But he realized
that she had a point. He remembered coming across a van in the
Sonora filled with the bloated fly-infested corpses of a family
trying to escape the cartels in Columbia. The runners had run out
of fuel. And instead of walking out into the desert to die, they'd
shut themselves up inside the van and turned to mummies
instead.

"Anyway," she said, "that's what I
would've done, if I hadn't bought a spot in the bunker. I would
have climbed into bed, probably with a shotgun, a four-pound bag of
peanut M&Ms, and a Dean Koontz novel. And when the book was
read and the bag empty, I'd stick the—"

"You guys mind changing the subject?"
Harry Rollins asked, stepping quickly up to them. There was a look
in his eyes, like barely contained sanity. Danny wondered if it was
the same look in his own. They were all on that razor's edge,
barely holding on. Barely maintaining.

Of course, it had to be worse for
Harry. For three years he'd managed to keep his entire family, his
wife and boys, safe from the Flense. Alive and uninfected inside
the safe haven of the bunker. What were the odds of that? And then,
to just set that safety and security aside one day to follow some
kid out into the unknown . . . .

You did, too.

"No problem, Harry," Susan
said.

"At least keep it down." He tilted his
head to where the boys were sitting with their mother. "I think
we've had enough of that kind of talk for now. For a lifetime,
actually. Don't you think?"

This time, Danny used the mirror to
check the people behind him. His gaze fell first on Bren Abramson
and Hannah Mancuso sitting together, the younger girl's head
lolling on the older one's shoulder. Hannah's father, Eddie, sat
alone a few seats forward of them. Despite his assurances that he
wasn't contagious, it seemed that nobody wanted to be near him, not
even his own daughter.

Or maybe he chose to
separate himself from the rest on purpose.

But it was poor Bren that Danny felt
the most pity. She had followed her boyfriend, Finn Bolles, out of
the bunker. She'd left her parents behind, mostly because she
thought she loved the boy. And then he'd gone and disappointed them
all by changing his mind. He betrayed Bren's loyalty by leaving her
without so much as a good-bye. He'd just disappeared while she was
passed out with exhaustion.

Oh, how she'd fought them all when she
woke.

Danny's eyes slipped over to Jonah a
couple seats back. The boy, just a year older than Finn, was
studying the landscape, drawing on his memories of the day they'd
driven this same route from the evac center so he could guide them
back there in their search for the mythical twelfth
bunker.

He'd taken the brunt of Bren's tirade.
She blamed him for letting Finn go, accusing him of driving him
away with their petty fighting. She ordered him to turn the bus
around.

But rather than try and reason with
her or calm her down, Jonah threatened to leave her on the side of
the road. He was just like his father, insensitive to other
people's feelings, lacking in the tact department.

But it had worked. Bren soon relented
and sat back down. Her silence worried Danny more than her protest,
and Danny was relieved when Hannah went to comfort her. Hannah was
an angel.

Now Bren stared out the window like
Jonah. Unlike him, her face was slack and her eyes empty, seeing
nothing. Well, there was nothing out there to see anyway. The tears
on her cheeks had long since dried and her hair was a knotted mess
by the wind coming in through the shattered window.

She's in
shock
, Danny thought
We're all in shock, but she more than the rest.

He couldn't imagine how hard it must
have been for her to find out her father had had a hand in bringing
about the end of the world, though they were all still unclear
exactly how or what the man's specific role had been. Nevertheless,
the choice that she'd been forced to make, deciding between staying
inside the bunker with a murdering father versus accompanying the
boy she loved out into a dead world tore at Danny.