Season of Rot (15 page)

Right this second, they had other things to
worry about. Amy glanced over at Katherine, crouched several feet
away. There was no question of who was the leader. Katherine, Amy
had discovered, was an ex-cop, and she was good at what she
did.

On the other side of the docks, a pack of
human-creatures milled about, sniffing the air, occasionally
turning on each other even as they stalked their prey.

Coming to the docks had been Katherine’s
idea. They’d noticed them from the interstate, and she had
suggested they could find a boat and set out to sea, maybe find an
uninhabited island and start over, just the two of them. Even with
their limited supplies, it sounded like a great idea. Traveling by
sea was much safer than any road on the mainland. Out there, the
creatures could never reach them.

Of course neither of them had planned on
running into a pack of the creatures. Their new hope had blinded
them, had made them careless, and now they were trapped, cut off
from both the van and the boats.

She and Katherine would have just killed
them—they were both well armed with gear they’d found or lucked
into along the way—but the pack was over two dozen strong and this
was their hunting grounds. Lord only knew how many still lurked in
the buildings. Hiding from them had become the only option, and
even that had made things worse, giving time for more creatures to
show up as the women waited for the first ones to wander off.

Amy could see the strain on Katherine’s face.
She couldn’t recall when either of them had last slept. Sweat
glistened on Katherine’s tanned skin, and her glance said that this
was it, the end for both of them. All that remained was deciding
how they would die: either hide here and pray, or go out fighting
to reach the van. Amy already knew what Katherine would choose,
even as the ex-cop stood up with her shotgun and blew a hole in the
nearest creature’s chest.

Amy wanted to leap to her feet and help her
friend, but she refused to believe that all their suffering had
been for nothing. Deep down she wanted to live, and she was forced
to admit that Katherine’s pointless exit strategy was just macho
bullshit.

Amy, still hidden behind the crates, watched
the creatures charge toward them as Katherine pumped a round into
her weapon and shot another psycho in its stomach, loosing its
intestines onto the dock. Despite her bulging muscles, Katherine
appeared helpless in the face of the horde closing in around
her.

With tears in her eyes, Amy turned away as
the things reached Katherine and tore at her with their nails and
teeth. She tried to block out the screams for help as she crept
towards the edge of the docks and eased herself into the water
below.

Amy let the currents carry her into the dark
beneath the planks, hoping the things would be too occupied with
Katherine to search for anyone else. As far as she knew, they had
not seen her.

Katherine fell silent, and Amy began to
weep.

Hours later, when the sun had set and the
docks had grown still, Amy hauled herself out of the water. None of
the creatures had stuck around. Even Katherine’s body was gone,
leaving only smears of blood where she’d fallen.

Dripping wet and wrinkled from the water, Amy
stumbled to the van, her muscles aching from hours of keeping her
afloat. She carefully checked the vehicle to make sure nothing was
waiting inside, then slid into the driver’s seat. She clawed the
extra set of keys out of the glove box and shoved them into the
ignition. The moment the engine roared to life she knew the
creatures would come pouring out.

She turned the key, and her heart froze as
the van sputtered loudly without catching.

Amy tried again as she noticed movement on
the docks and in the shadows of the buildings; the night came alive
with the sound of hungry howls.

This time the engine turned over and she
peeled out towards the main road, laughing hysterically as the van
lurched over a speed bump, onto the interstate.

Despite the wreckage and abandoned cars
littering the roadway, Amy found her foot getting heavier and
heavier on the accelerator. Adrenaline rushed through her exhausted
body as she swerved this way and that, dodging obstacles. She felt
free, as if she were losing her mind, and it was okay. It would
have been so easy to just keep going faster and faster until her
reflexes couldn’t keep up and she died in a fiery crash. It would
be a better death than being ripped apart like Katherine.

Amy reached to click on the radio, knowing
she would only find static across the dial, but something flickered
in the rearview mirror and caught her eye. The van almost collided
with what was left of an overturned eighteen wheeler as she jerked
upright in her seat.

Slowing down, Amy studied the police car that
had come up an exit ramp behind her to give chase.

“What the hell?” She knew it wasn’t possible.
Everyone in the world was either crazy from the effects of the
wave, dead, or on the run like she was. Yet seeing the car’s
flashing lights brought back feelings of hope. Maybe her flight was
over and the officers would look out for her and take her somewhere
safe. Maybe somehow in this city people had survived and
organized.

She brought the van to a stop as the police
car pulled up beside her. Amy was in the process of rolling down
her window as she glanced into the car. A man in a tattered uniform
with yellow-tinted eyes stuck a .38 out his window and aimed for
her head.

“Oh God!” Amy snapped around to the steering
wheel and rammed the gas pedal to the floor. The officer’s shot
slammed into the van’s side just behind her door.

“Oh God, oh God, they’re not supposed to be
able to drive!”

In the rearview, she saw the thing’s partner
trying to lean out the passenger-side window to shoot at her.

He’s going to blow out my tires
, Amy
thought. There was no way she could outrun them, not in this van,
not with the roads the way they were. But the creatures could
die—they were just people driven crazy by the wave—so she did the
only thing she could think of.

Making sure her seatbelt was fastened, she
hit the brakes. Tires squealed as the van came to a halt—and the
police car smashed into its rear.

Despite her seatbelt, Amy was thrown forward.
Her forehead struck the steering wheel and her world faded to
black.

#

She came to with a start. Something wet
trickled down her face. Amy wiped at it and her hand came away
covered in a warm, wet red. Her head was pounding, but otherwise
she seemed okay. She reached over and dug a .45 from the glove box
and unsnapped her seatbelt. When she opened the door, she sprawled
out onto the road, unable to keep her balance.

The police car was still there, a mass of
broken metal wedged into the van’s rear. The driver was clearly
dead; pieces of windshield glass jutted from his face, and his head
dangled at an unnatural angle.

Amy pulled herself to her feet and stumbled
closer, holding the pistol ready. When she got close enough to see
inside the car, she noticed the other officer’s bottom half resting
in the blood-soaked passenger seat. The top half of his body was
nowhere to be seen.

She slumped to the ground beside the car. It
was only a matter of time until more of the creatures came out of
the night around her, but both the van and the car were totaled.
She needed a plan. She couldn’t just sit there and wait to die,
regardless of how much she hurt or how tired she was. Her eyes were
heavy with sleep and it fought to wrap her in its embrace. She
shook herself awake, and her head throbbed from a fresh burst of
pain. Her only chance was to find a working car with the keys still
inside.

She got to her feet once more and walked down
the interstate to start her search.

11

Geoff lay back against the tree trunk,
perched high above the ground on a narrow branch, an unlit
cigarette dangling from his lips. He massaged the corners of his
tired eyes with his finger, then blinked several times to clear his
vision.

Below him, a kid moved slowly up the mountain
trail. Normally Geoff would have radioed the base to let them know
and to get orders on what to do. Fuck that:
normally
he
wouldn’t have been out here, risking his life to do the job of the
base’s malfunctioned external sensors.

He hoisted his rifle to his shoulder and
peered through its scope. The kid was in his later twenties and was
dressed like a punk in ratty jeans and a T-shirt of some stupid
rock band. Geoff could have dropped him right then and there,
problem solved, but something kept his finger away from the
trigger.

The last few days hadn’t been a cakewalk,
even for him. He wondered how the punk had managed to survive, much
less come so close to finding the base. Maybe Geoff had seen enough
death over the last few days, or maybe he was just getting old;
either way, the kid got to keep breathing.

He carefully took the cigarette from his lips
and slipped it back inside the pack, then stuffed the whole thing
into his jacket pocket. “Ah... shit,” he whispered to himself and
started down the tree.

The birds were singing in the forest and the
sky above was a bright blue filled with sunlight. The world went on
as normal, oblivious to the hell mankind was going through. Geoff
found that funny.

He reached the bottom of the tree and
vanished into the woods without a trace.

#

Jeremy paused on his way up the trail. He
shrugged off his backpack and opened it, hunting for the map he’d
picked up from the remains of a local tourist trap. He knew the
base wouldn’t be on the map, even if it did exist, but he wanted to
check the other landmarks to make sure he was still headed in what
he believed to be the right direction.

He didn’t hear his stalker step onto the path
behind him until an arm snaked about his neck.

Jeremy choked and fought against his
attacker’s grip until he heard the gun cock beside his ear.

“Stop it, kid, if you want to live to see the
sun set.”

Jeremy stopped squirming. “Look, mister—”

“Shut up, kid.” The man released his hold and
shoved him forward. Jeremy whirled around and almost broke into a
smile when he saw the man’s green camouflage uniform.

“I’d tell you to go home,” the man continued,
“but I guess none of us really have one anymore...”

The man, Geoff, was in his later fifties, and
gray hair covered his head. His eyes were bloodshot and it looked
as if he hadn’t shaved in days.

With cat-like grace, he scooped up Jeremy’s
backpack and slipped it onto his own shoulder. Muscles rippled and
bulged beneath his uniform. “So I suppose I’ll have to take you
back with me.”

“To the base?”

“To what’s left of it, kid.”

As they made their way together through the
woods, Geoff told Jeremy what he knew about the wave and about what
had happened at the base, which he referred to as Def-Con IV.

Apparently, the energy had been some kind of
shockwave from somewhere far beyond the space known to mankind,
perhaps from some interstellar war, or from an alien species’
failed experiments with dark matter. It didn’t really matter where
it came from.

The light was merely a side effect of the
energy reacting with Earth’s atmosphere. A portion of the wave’s
main body had been trapped in greenhouse gasses, and like a super
and perpetual EMP on a global scale, the wave and its lingering
remnants caused technological failures throughout the world,
dampened or disrupted to the point of uselessness. Only basic
things worked now; things like electricity and nuclear energy were
out of the question until the field dispersed, which it was
continuing to do a bit more every day.

The alien energy field also produced a type
of ambient radiation, which scientists believed would still be
there in a thousand years unless they found a way to deal with it.
This radiation was what caused the rampant “plague” of madness
across the globe. It broke down the neural pathways of the human
mind to their most basic core, leaving human shells full of only
instinct and violence, unless you were immune, and very few people
in the world were.

At first, Def-Con IV retained contact with a
handful of similar bases here in the United States and in the
United Kingdom—for the first day they had even been in touch with
the president and the White House—but they’d slowly lost contact
with those bases one by one as the radiation plague and other
problems took their toll. For all Geoff knew, Def-Con IV could very
well be the last holdout of humanity in the world.

During the first few hours of the chaos when
the wave had reached the earth, the base had opened its doors to
the locals who had come seeking shelter. Very quickly, the staff of
the base learned firsthand of the secondary biological effects of
the wave as those same locals succumbed to the radiation.

A mini-war broke out inside the compound. It
was a hard fight, but in the end Def-Con IV’s staff prevailed. Only
Geoff and a handful of staff survived. Two were badly injured: one
in a coma, the other in a wheelchair but healing. Geoff informed
Jeremy that if he had come looking for salvation and hope, he’d
came to the wrong place.

They went through the high barbed wire fence
that surrounded the Def-Con complex, and Jeremy got his first good
look at the site. Before the wave, it had disguised itself as an
agriculture research facility. Inside the fence, there were only
three buildings, two of them the size of toolsheds, but the third
was fairly large and very much civilian in nature. Blooming gardens
stretched beyond the buildings with flowers planted around their
edges, and the rear fence was far beyond eyeshot.