Season of Rot (32 page)

#

As Kyle reached the second level, he skidded
to a halt, staring straight into the face of the largest rat demon
he’d ever encountered. It looked pissed off, and it threw itself at
him. Kyle barely avoided its claws by hurling himself over the
stairway’s railing. He toppled over the side, grabbing the base of
the rails so fast and so hard the impact broke one of his fingers.
He screamed but didn’t let go.

The Rat King moved towards him like a cat
playing with its victim as Michelle reached the second level with
Darren and Brook at her side. Brook blasted the creature with her
shotgun, and the scattershot tore tiny holes across its skin.

Michelle’s rifle clicked empty as she jerked
the trigger back. She cursed, tossing it aside.

Moving in front of her, Darren fired a trio
of rounds from his .45 into the monster as it spun to face
them.

#

After Michelle left, the people in the mess
hall barely had time to barricade the double doors before they
heard noises in the corridor outside. Something struck the doors so
hard the whole barricade shook, and Benji watched in horror as
monsters slowly pushed their way in. Chairs and tables clattered to
the floor as the doors swung inward.

“Fire!” Paul roared.

Rats streamed through the debris of the
barricade, but the two massive demons held everyone’s
attention.

Benji was closest to the entrance, and,
unleashing a battle cry his sister would have been proud of, he ran
straight at the lead demon, firing his 9mm over and over into its
chest. The demon grimaced and snarled in pain, but kept walking and
swatted Benji across the room with a wave of its hand; he struck
the far wall and landed in a mass of broken bones, and as the
darkness took him, his last thoughts were of Michelle.

People screamed all around the room, some
dying at the hands of the demons, others falling under a whirlwind
of hungry rodents. Soon, only Corrie and Paul were left alive.

They fought their way into a corner of the
room and kept shooting. Paul was pale and sweating, barely standing
as he ripped a rat off his arm where it wiggled, gnawing deeply
into his biceps. Corrie was covered head to toe with small bleeding
bite marks. She took aim and blew half a dozen rats to pieces with
a well-placed blast from her shotgun.

Paul’s eyes rolled up in his head as he cried
out in pain and collapsed. The rats covered him almost
instantly.

“Oh God, please,” Corrie wept, flinging a rat
from her hair and bringing her shotgun up to face the demon walking
towards her.

“God is dead,” it said in broken English.
“This land is ours now.”

The small rats backed off as the thing leaned
in to lick the blood off Corrie’s face with its long black tongue.
Its breath stank of death and decay.

Corrie’s shotgun fell from her trembling
hands as the rat demon placed a claw between her legs. Her eyes
bulged as its finger poked inside of her through her clothes. The
creature mimicked a human smile as best it could and jerked
upwards, gutting her from groin to neck before she even had time to
scream.

#

The Rat King laughed as it lifted Darren with
a single hand and threw him against the stairwell wall so hard the
sound of breaking bones echoed above the chaos of the battle.

Realizing the scattershot in her weapon was
useless against the monster, Brook took advantage of the
distraction and slipped past the beast into the hole that led to
the tunnels beyond, leaving Michelle and Kyle on the stairs. A dead
man dressed in a blood-covered police uniform stumbled toward her.
Brook shoved the barrel of the shotgun into the corpse’s mouth and
blew the man to hell.

Back in the stairwell, Michelle drew her
sidearm as Kyle struggled to climb over the railing back onto the
platform. Anne knocked Michelle aside and let loose on full auto,
her AK-47 chattering, spraying a stream of bullets into the Rat
King’s stomach at pointblank range. The monster retreated, leaving
a pool of blood where it had stood.

Kyle swung himself onto the platform,
cradling his broken hand in pain. “Don’t let up!” he yelled. “Kill
the damn thing!”

The Rat King lashed out at Anne with a long
arm, and her head disappeared from sight as it bounced down the
stairs.

“No!” Michelle screamed and launched herself
at the monster. It gawked in surprise as she crashed into it and
sent it careening over the side of the stairs. Even before its body
had crashed into the floor below, Kyle was dragging Michelle toward
the hole in the wall. “Run!”

As he darted into the tunnel and saw Brook
sprinting down the passageway into the distance, he dropped a
time-delayed grenade onto the ground behind him. He ran on at full
speed, dragging Michelle by the hand until the force of the blast
hit them and sent them rolling into the dirt. When the dust
cleared, they saw that the hole into the stairwell had collapsed,
but they could hear the Rat King clawing at the pile of debris that
separated them. Kyle got up and yanked Michelle to her feet.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“We keep running.” Kyle smiled and sprinted
after Brook.

Epilogue

Kyle sat at his desk. The world had ended but
the paperwork went on. His superiors wanted a full report on his
trip to America.

He sighed and got up, letting the work wait.
He poured himself a glass of wine from the office’s bar and looked
out his window into the streets of London. War raged between the
military and the dead, but Britain was holding. A tank made its way
down the street, surrounded by a squad of heavily armed men in
black, and he watched absentmindedly, reaching up to trace the scar
on his cheek that Michelle had given him. He regretted that he’d
been forced to put a bullet in her skull when she’d learned of the
steps he’d taken to ensure their escape from the base. He’d longed
to feel her wet lips around him at least once, but Brook’s lean,
tan body had charms of its own, and Brook, unlike Michelle, had
been able to grasp that sometimes sacrifices needed to be made for
the greater good.

And she was grateful, very grateful in fact,
to have a roof over her head and a warm bed to sleep in. He
smirked. His job did have its perks.

He returned to his desk and picked up his
pen. He’d stood face to face with the new ruler of America and had
seen him badly wounded. The demons could be hurt. They weren’t
immortal like the legends had hinted at. They bled and could be
taken out like any mortal foe.

There was hope in the world as long as
Britain stood, and when it finished securing its borders and rose
up from the ashes of the dead, it would be men like Kyle who would
show the evil unleashed upon the earth that mankind could fight
dirty too.