Contain (38 page)

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(companion series to BUNKER
12)

SERIES DESCRIPTION

Hundreds die in a fiery
train crash in northern China. A cargo ship smuggling refugees is
lost to calm seas off Libya. Entire villages in Ghana are abandoned
overnight.

Contracted by a prepper group to investigate a series of seemingly
disconnected global tragedies, a young freelance reporter,
Angelique d'Enfantine, uncovers a disturbing pattern: each event is
preceded by the sudden spread of a mysterious ailment and is
followed by the appearance of a man dressed in silver and black who
witnesses claim is the devil himself.

Each event is more grisly than the last. As the risk to her life
grows, Angel begins to doubt that the tragedies are harbingers of
an impending biblical catastrophe, but are rather practice runs
conducted by a fanatical organization bent on global annihilation.
Could her sponsors be using her to advance their own paranoid
agenda?

THE FLENSE consists of 12 installments scheduled for limited
release beginning July 2015, but you can subscribe here to get
advance access to the entire first installment absolutely
free:

Tanpepper
Tidings Newsletter

EXCERPT

The exact moment Jamie Peters first suspected the world was
ending — not just this remote part of it she currently
occupied, but the whole wretched thing — wasn’t when the train
she was on crashed in a fiery explosion, scattering incinerated
limbs and hair and shards of bone across acres of barren Mongolian
permafrost.

It wasn’t moments earlier when the
train rocketed past her stop, accelerating instead of slowing, the
startled look of the stationmaster flashing past beneath the
platform's sole spotlight and a surprised "Oh!" stuck in Jamie's
throat.

Nor had she even suspected in the
preceding ten or so minutes during which she observed the sickness
spreading through the car, slipping from one passenger to the next
as each, in turn, reached out to transfer the germ to their
neighbor.

Of course, she didn't recognize it as
a sickness right then. Her first thought was that it was some sort
of strange custom among the locals. Or, less likely though still
possible, a flash-mob type thing. Whatever it was, it appeared to
be some sort of affirmation of their human
interconnectedness.

She might have been amused, but it
irked her to witness it because she worried it would reach her and
she'd not know what to do.

There was something darkly
fascinating about the way their faces changed, the light in their
eyes. It was — well,
seemed
 — as if the touch
imparted upon the recipient an instant of pure serenity. Their skin
would shine as the tension rose and peaked. Then it quickly lost
its luster as their muscles relaxed.

The moment was so fleeting, gone
almost as soon as it arrived, that it felt almost sexual in nature.
Arousal followed by release.

The cycle repeated as the recipient
turned to brush a fingertip across the cheek or wrist of the next
person, host becoming donor. And so on, person to person, edging
closer down the length of the car, which rocked them along on the
uneven tracks.

The performance had apparently started
at the other end of the car, but had only caught her attention when
the ceaseless chatter around her had already diminished
significantly. Disinterest turned to curiosity turned to panic as
she fumbled to check her phone for messages.

But other than the daily updates her
boss in the States sent her, the only new texts in her folder were
from her host family's matron. The old woman spoiled her worse than
if she was one of her own.

Jamie tucked the phone back in her
pocket. There was nothing to be done but to watch and wait in
anticipation for it to reach her.

Finally, the elderly gentleman seated
beside her received his touch. Jamie could actually feel the
tension leave his body. Her heart raced as he turned and reached up
toward her face. She didn’t shy away. His hand, wrinkled from years
of toil working the unforgiving soil before its recent reassignment
to the new factory in Wenbai, rose to within an inch of her nose.
Jamie smiled and leaned into it.

But the hand abruptly swerved to the
side, as if it had a mind of its own, and grazed the chin of the
young boy standing in front of her instead. The old man had skipped
her!

She felt as if she’d been slapped. In
the six months that she'd lived here in this arctic wasteland,
she'd worked tirelessly to immerse herself completely into their
lives, to gain their trust and acceptance. And she thought she had.
All those years in college devoted to learning their language, even
hiring a private tutor to teach her the many tricky dialectical
differences she would need not to embarrass herself. She was still
an outsider.

Not for the first time, she wondered
what the hell she was doing here.

The moment of self-pity was quickly
swept away when the train roared through her station. She opened
her mouth to protest, but the "Oh!" caught up in her throat as she
realized not a single other passenger on the train seemed in the
least bit upset. And that was certainly strange, since theirs was
the final stop, the last outpost. There was nothing between here
and the seaport fifty miles further.

But the young man standing at the
doors just kept staring out into the darkness. The bent-over woman
across the aisle simply sat there.

Jamie recognized her. She was the
district's local cat lady. What was her name? Zhou. Or Xiao. She
couldn't remember it.

They all just sat or stood there with
their blank, black eyes and their pale, serene faces. All of them.
Not a single concern.

The performance was finished. There
was no more touching. And all talk had ceased.

That was when the first inkling that
something was wrong entered her mind. Perhaps if she'd been looking
out her window and seen the train ahead coming directly toward them
around a bend on the very same track, then she might have guessed
the fuller truth of her fate. But she didn't.

What followed was a nightmare of pain
and darkness and blood and fire. She found herself lying in a
frozen field, the bitter biting wind driving across the tundra and
scorching her burnt skin, searing her wounds. Somehow, she was
still alive. But the pain . . . .

The pain was as immense as the
fireball rising up into the night sky.

She managed to extricate her torn body
from the wreckage, pulling twisted bits of metal and plastic and
bone that were not her own from the flesh of her arms and thighs.
Miraculously, nothing was broken. Her ankle was badly sprained, and
it felt as if she’d dislocated her shoulder. But she had remained,
for the most part, intact.

There appeared to be no other
survivors. The absence of their cries suggested to her that she was
completely alone. So when she saw him striding toward her, stepping
through the rubble and the wind-whipped flames as casually as if he
were making his way down Fifth Avenue in New York, she staggered to
a halt and stared at him in awe.

He was a tall silhouette against the
roaring inferno. In an instant that defied reason, he crossed the
distance between them and was beside her, extending his hand in a
gesture of pure selflessness. She noted the coolness of his skin
when she took it.

"I am the man in silver and black," he
told her. "I am your savior."

What she heard in her mind
was,
I am the devil, and this is the
end
.

That was when she finally
knew.

‡ ‡ ‡

Subscribe here to get
advance access to the entire first installment absolutely
free:

Tanpepper
Tidings Newsletter

If you like
post-apocalyptic and dystopian worlds, check out S.W. Tanpepper's
epic cyberpunk series GAMELAND:

http://www.tanpepperwrites.com/gameland

Books 1 and 2 are
free!

Golgotha
(prequel)

The Series:

Episode One:
Deep Into the Game

Episode Two:
Failsafe

Episode Three:
Deadman’s Switch

Episode Four:
Sunder the Hollow Ones

Episode Five:
Prometheus Wept

Episode Six:
Kingdom of Players

Episode Seven:
Tag, You’re Dead

Episode Eight:
Jacker’s Code

Velveteen

Infected: Hacked Files from
the GAMELAND Archive

Signs of Life
(
Jessie’s Game
Book One)

A Dark and Sure
Descent

Dead Reckoning
(
Jessie’s Game
Book Two)

AVAILABLE IN DIGITAL AND PRINT

My thanks to the devoted staff of Brinestone Press, who helped put
this book together and get it out to you.

Saul Tanpepper is a writer of speculative fiction for teens and
adults. A former molecular geneticist originally from Upstate New
York, he now calls Northern California home.

If you enjoyed
Contain
(Book 1 of the BUNKER 12 series), then you'll want to check
out the companion series, THE FLENSE, which follows the events
leading up to the outbreak. You can read an excerpt
here
. You may also enjoy
the GAMELAND series, an epic cyberpunk adventure through a
post-apocalyptic world in which zombies are used as avatars in a
live action game for the rich and privileged. You can find out more
about all of Saul's titles at his:

Website

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