Tales of Courage From Beyond The Apocalypse (Book 8): John Read online

  Tales of Courage From Beyond the Apocalypse:

  JOHN

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, places or events is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2019: Ira Robinson. All Rights Reserved.

  This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the copyright holder.

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  1

  "You can't tell me what I can and can't talk about, Galen!" I screamed at my boss, my hands on his desk almost shaking with the rage.

  Just seeing his smug face across the desk was enough to set me off most days, but this was something else entirely. Galen might have been the station manager, but I'm the one who made the place what it was. We wouldn't have a single listener if it weren't for me, and he had the audacity to think he could take command of my show after all the years I dedicated to it.

  "John, if you don't control yourself on air, it's over." He leaned forward, the foul smell he always had surrounding him spreading out like a cloud. "You consider yourself some superstar, but you're just another employee here. I can replace you anytime."

  "Yeah, good luck with that." I whirled around and stormed out, the door slamming shut behind me.

  I didn't want to give Galen the satisfaction of thinking he was right--not about a single word--so I tromped my way through the station. The few other employees avoided my glares as I walked past the engineer's room, the studio, and the long hallway to the reception area. No one said a thing, which was fine with me.

  This was not the first time Galen and I’d gotten into it. Our fights were almost well-rehearsed by then. I was controversial. The stuff I talked about on air were things probably better left for the Rush Limbaughs and the Howard Sterns, but I had to be true to what I believed. Sometimes that meant stirring the pot while it boiled rather than allow it to simmer.

  In spite of all his protestations, Galen knew he needed me much more than I required him. I might have been a small fish in the big pond of the radio world, but enough people listened to my show, I could write my own ticket in any of the bigger markets if I wanted to.

  Besides, I was the one who kept the advertisers coming in and the station afloat. There was no way a greedy bastard like Galen was ever going to let that kind of thing go.

  So it was a familiar dance, his hatred for me probably as much as mine was for him, and neither of us cared enough to want it to change.

  It didn't make things easy on me, though. As I drove home to the little trailer not far away from the station, I looked back, as I so often did, on that building and wondered how much longer I would be prepared to stand it.

  It was a huge wart on the terrain, the three-story concrete building an old army barracks that never knew the use it was created for. The government got that one building complete, then abandoned it to go elsewhere, for some reason deciding the whole thing was a bad idea. It was tall, practically windowless, and sitting in disuse for years. Galen was able to buy it for pennies on the dollar and convert it into the media giant he assumed it could become.

  It rarely saw itself out of the red, and the more in debt Galen became, the worse he treated those he considered his “team,” as if it was our fault he didn't know how to run it efficiently.

  He was one of those trust-fund babies who thought they knew how the real world worked, but he didn't have a clue. About the only good thing he did with the place was set it up so it would broadcast on both AM and FM channels, setting it up to transmit as far as he could legally go, and then some.

  During the ten minute drive back to my trailer, I seethed, thinking about how much I really wanted to back out of my contract with the station and move somewhere further south. The whole town was nothing but hicks and addicts, but it's where I grew up. So what did that make me?

  Hell, I lived in a mobile home, of all places, the only hovel I could afford on the pittance Galen thought was a competitive wage. What a damn joke.

  “John Taylor,” the sign on my front door read. “Talk Radio with Guts” right below the big NO SOLICITING painted in white. I don't think anyone ever saw either of them, for all the “fame” I had and the constant stream of salesmen with this vacuum or that must-have “oh my God this thing is awesome” product tucked under their arms.

  No, things were not spectacular for ol' John Taylor, and it just seemed every day was getting worse.

  Of course, drinking myself into a stupor most nights when I ultimately made it to my crap-hole of a home didn't do much for my attitude, and I set in with a fervor that particular night.

  At least the heat was working. The cold fall was setting in harder than anyone thought it would, and the furnace went on the fritz more times than I could count.

  I eventually fell asleep with the bottle in my hand and the television blaring something about sick people, but by that time, I was too out of it to even bother turning it off.

  2

  The hangover the next day did little to help my disposition, but I never let that kind of thing interfere with my work.

  If anything could be said about ol' John Taylor, it would be that he was a pro at what he did. I could be half-drunk and raging with angst, but I'd learned years ago how to channel that into glorious radio, using the pain to carve an emotion out of nothing, or to rouse the people into any action I wanted them to do.

  When you're on the air, a lot of cranks call in.

  Sometimes they’re just a lonely old lady looking for another human voice to chat to, sitting by their table with their cats and their knitting near them in sadness before picking up the phone. Other times, they’re the fringe, the ones who do little more with their lives than sit around thinking about what conspiracy the government is cooking up next or how the aliens are on their way from Rigel to probe them in ways unimaginable.

  On talk radio, it gets worse. We invite the cranks, begging them to call in and spill whatever guts they want all over the airwaves, because it makes good radio.

  Oh, they were out in full brute force that day, calling in to tell their story.

  It started simple, really. My engineer, Carissa, did a good job filtering out those who called in with the random "Hi Mom"s and crackheads playing a joke. She could sniff that out like a bloodhound in heat.

  But even she was surprised by the number of callers talking about all the sick people, the ones they loved suddenly coming down with some virus.

  I mean, I asked them to call in with whatever was on their minds, and I guess it was the news of the day, but I found it a bit tedious compared to the normal things I had as my unfettered fare. Anger was my fuselage, my safety net. None of those calling in were in that kind of mind.

  I heard them spilling their guts about how this person they knew was gone, or that guy was down sick, complaining about what the doctors were going to do about all of it. One guy had the temerity to claim he saw a zombie walking down the street. Really? A zombie?

  I didn't have any answers, but hearing how much people were freaking out about how individuals were wandering around looking half-dead, well, that got to me.

  Something that day felt so off to me, and I couldn't put my finger on it. I chalked it up to the hangover still hitting me, even after a dozen cups of coffee and what seemed half a bottle of Advil.

  "Seriously," I said, my voice low and deliberate, "if you're going to call in and think you're going to give me a ride, you're mistaken." I thought I was so right, so sel
f-aggrandizing. I didn't know the people who took the time to dial the numbers that day were dead-on with their worries.

  I cut my show off early, telling Carissa to play some easy-listening to try to calm the masses until the next act was due to run. I couldn't handle it anymore.

  Professional or not, when the crazies come out, you have to make the choice to shut it down until they got wise in their heads.

  Nope, I wasn't in the mood to play games.

  I headed to the parking area, the fresh air helping to ease the ache in my head. The lights in the lot were coming to life, automated to switch on as the levels of light from the sun diminished.

  I caught movement on the other side of the lot, a man, from what I could tell, his shoulders sagging a bit as he trundled across the pavement. He was heading for the double-paned glass doors at the front of the building, leading into the foyer.

  I didn't pay him much attention. Rebecca was still there behind the reception desk, her shift over an hour later.

  There were only a few other cars surrounding my truck, all of us parking close to one another in spite of the huge amount of concrete available. The big building was an island in the wilderness, built like a fortress and barely utilized.

  It was created to house a few hundred people, yet we only used a tiny portion of it all. It was like a person with no purpose. A guardian standing over a wasteland without anyone bothering to tell him his job was completely meaningless.

  I pulled the truck out, grateful I could leave it behind for a little while. Maybe the next time I saw it, I could look at it through the lens of sobriety.

  Maybe it would be a brighter day.

  I was such a fool.

  3

  When I drove to the station the next morning, I flipped through all the channels we had in our podunk town and there was nothing but static or, worse, silence. Even without anyone around, most stations had some kind of automation set up.

  The trip took only a few minutes. The lack of traffic was pretty damn weird, too. But I pulled into the lot and parked the pickup near the other cars there from the evening before.

  How odd. At the very least, Carissa's car should have been gone. She wouldn't have been on shift all night long.

  I shrugged my shoulders all the same and flipped the truck off, strolling across the lot to the opened front doors.

  My feet stopped moving.

  I glanced to the far end of the building, where the huge door led into the underground parking garage. The station's van for remotes was kept there. It was still closed, but the two large glass doors going into the foyer were standing wide, like a mouth opened in a scream.

  My hands slipped out of my pockets, my guts churning with warning. Even on the nicest days, Galen wouldn't allow those gates to be chucked open. The electric bill already crazy because of the size of the place.

  The sunlight was in a bad position, though, so I couldn't see into the interior, the whole thing trapped in shadows. I squinted, trying to catch any sign of movement, my nerves screaming something was wrong.

  I moved a few more steps closer and found those instincts were right.

  The doors weren't merely standing open. They were broken at the hinges, bent at such an odd angle they had scraped into the cement walkway and become stuck.

  My ears detected a weird snuffling sort of sound and, as I took another few paces, it was joined by a low, moist growl.

  I was close enough now I could see the inside of the foyer. The large reception desk sitting in the center of it reflected some of the outside light as my eyes adjusted to the shading.

  Five things caught my attention in those next few seconds.

  Three bodies lay in different places within the space, trails of blood streaming from them as if they had been dragged. Rebecca was near the reception desk, her face looking into the lights in the ceiling, her mouth, or what was left of it, opened wide. The dress she wore the day before was ripped to shreds, and there were whole chunks of her flesh missing.

  Carissa was in the same condition, not far away from the two-inch-thick steel door that led into the rest of the building. On the other side of her, Tad, the night janitor, had been beaten to a pulp, or whatever had done all of this tenderized him before digging into the body.

  My stomach heaved, the stink of it all overwhelming all of my senses, and I stumbled backward, shaking my head in disbelief.

  That's when I realized there was movement beyond the flies ducking into and out of the pools of blood everywhere.

  Another low growling sound accompanied his shambling steps, his arms outstretched as his eyes rolled in his skull. Had he been waiting for me, sneaking around the corner, knowing I was coming and trying a surprise attack?

  What clothes remained on his torso were soaked with blackened blood, as was the entire bottom of his face, and he opened that maw as he came at me. His gore-coated fingers opened and closed like claws.

  My feet kicked me back, nearly making me losing my balance. I swung my arm wide to catch myself and stay upright. My body went on auto-pilot as I spun and rushed off at a breakneck speed across the parking lot to the truck and opened the door.

  I tossed a glance backward as I slung myself into the seat and blasted the key into the ignition. The man/thing/freaking-by-Jesus-zombie was still only halfway to me, his movements a lot slower.

  Thank God for small favors.

  I turned the truck on and whipped out of the lot, my heart pounding out of control.

  It took a while before I calmed at all, my thoughts racing.

  The callers had been right. Zombies, of all things, were real and they were there, feasting on everything they could get hold of.

  I kept driving, not having a clue about what I could do, seeing all around me the evidence my mind wanted to deny. Now that I knew what to look for, I spotted more than a few of the stumbling, shambling creatures as they hunted for anything that moved. Some even came after the truck as I went. Terrified, I kept the gas pedal down.

  Where could I go? Where was a safe place I could reach and bunker down until all of this passed by?

  The keys jangled on the ring as I crossed a bump and an idea flickered into my head.

  I rounded the truck toward my trailer and prayed there would be none of the things nearby.

  4

  I used the long road to the station to gain speed, my knuckles nearly white from the grip on the wheel.

  Sucking in a deep breath and holding it, I flipped the key only a bit, leaving the steering wheel unlocked but turning the engine off.

  The things were attracted to sound, there was no doubt about that. If I could manage to get there without much of it, I'd stand a chance. There was only one of them before, and if they moved as slow as I'd seen, there might not be more yet.

  The gamble I was taking was huge, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. Nowhere was safe, the town already practically deserted, or the people still alive holed up in their own shelters to ride out the storm.

  I certainly couldn't do it in a trailer. A lone brute had taken down three of my friends and was ready for more when it spotted me. They'd shred my shack like a tin can.

  But the station? The place was practically a castle, and if I could just make it past the one I saw before, I might be able to get in and lock it down before more showed up.

  My hand dropped to the bat on the passenger seat as I drifted into the parking lot, still heading at a speed I hoped would out-pace the creature.

  Yeah, there it was, the by-then-familiar horrific thing shuffling around the corner of the base. Maybe it was hunting something over there or looking for me.

  The truck bumped over the concrete blocks near the front doors of the building, the stuff in the back jostling. My foot slammed on the brake and I skidded to a stop. Jamming the gear into park, I sailed from the cab and pulled the bat with me.

  It was twenty paces from me, moving slow, but it knew right where I was. A weird substance like bloody drool hung from the c
orners of its mouth, that nonsensical growl crawling from its throat.

  My bat swung before it had a chance to raise an arm, the metal clanging into its skull so hard my hand flared with ache.

  It went down, carried by the power of the hit and the speed of the run I gained before impacting it. The loud crunch reverberated through the bat, but it didn't die or knock out.

  Instead, it struggled to stand. Holy crap, it tried to get to its feet, though I was sure the strike had cracked more than a little of its cranium.

  I took another swing, clubbing it in the face, trailing a glitter of blood that landed on the pavement between us.

  That time, it was less active. Stunned, perhaps, but not dead.