And We All Fall (Book 1) Read online

  And We All Fall

  By Michael Patrick Mahoney Jr.

  Copyright © 2017

  Michael Patrick Mahoney Jr.

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book, including all words and images, may be reproduced in any form, copied, stored, or transmitted in any manner, without written consent from the copyright owner. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages, associations, places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional, and co-incidental, all for the purpose of fictional storytelling.

  And We All Fall

  Electronic first edition.

  ISBN 978-1-63587-994-0

  Independently published

  In your honor, dad.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Connect With Mike

  Coming Soon

  Prologue

  Reverend Kenneth Rally’s rotting body violently shuddered as an onslaught of brass-coated bullets were fired from close range, mutilating it. Most of the officers on duty that evening with the Peterton Police Department discharged nearly every round of ammunition they carried. Sergeant Nole Lyle ran towards the action, pumping the 10-gauge shotgun that had been collecting dust in the trunk of his police cruiser when he heard the order from his chief.

  “Hold your fire!” Chief Charlie Batton commanded with the sun behind him, on its way to disappearing below the horizon.

  The chief stepped away from his cover behind the jungle gym at Monroe Park as pieces of the reverend’s plaid shirt and blue jeans fluttered in the air above his body. The one man in the world Chief Batton never expected to see there wasn’t moving.

  Another bullet sped through the hot barrel of a .45 caliber Colt M1911 and whizzed by the chief’s grizzled face on its way into the left thigh of the minister. One more small piece of denim floated into the air as the man’s blood seeped from the wound into the mulch.

  “Enough! He’s dead, for Christ’s sake.” The chief’s baritone voice bullied the tranquil evening air, even silencing the crickets’ chirps. “Stay back!” he yelled, breaking the silence, gesturing at the small crowd of onlookers at the park as he continued roaring commands.

  The chief cautiously stepped towards the reverend, who was also a close friend. Everyone in the small Virginia town adored Reverend Rally, including all four of the law enforcement officers who arrived on the scene less than two minutes ago to witness him doing the unimaginable right next to the swing set where all the town’s children played. He officiated all the local weddings and performed baptisms for all of those children. Each officer on the scene attended his church every Sunday. They would not have believed the call to 911 if they had not seen what he was doing to the sixteen-year-old girl victim with their own eyes.

  “I think he’s raping her!” the 911 caller said five minutes earlier. “My husband was trying to help and he bit him! Yes! Reverend Rally! Please hurry!”

  Sergeant Lyle and the other officers followed behind the chief as he moved closer to the pair of bodies. The park lights reflected just a hint of rare tears in the chief’s eyes. He stood over the corpses, shaking his head now with his eyes closed and thought about his friend. Why, Ken?

  The chief opened his eyes. He’d never felt so disgusted, but that had to be over soon. There was work to do. Duty. He wiped the moisture away from his eyes, doing what he must to bottle up the overwhelming flood of emotions that that boiled up inside him. He asked himself why one last time and then turned to his officers.

  “Get him off of her.” The sadness was gone, replaced by fortitude.

  They all holstered their weapons, except for Sergeant Lyle who held the Browning at his side by the barrel. The threat had ended. The two other officers, a male and a female, were partners who patrolled the small town in the same police car and worked together to push the minister’s limp body off Cheyenne Harper, revealing what was left of her ravaged body. The miserable sight of her remains would have probably been enough to break them both if the minister’s body had not suddenly thrashed like a wounded animal, stunning everyone in the park. He grabbed the chief’s ankle and dug his nails into the chief’s flesh.

  The chief battled to get away as the reverend tried to pull his next victim towards him. Sergeant Lyle raised the shotgun while his eyes widened and he yelled, “Look out!”

  The other two officers dove out of the way, drawing their weapons as they fell to the ground. The chief pulled his leg out of his old friend’s grip, which ripped flesh from his calf muscle, exposing torn muscle and tendons.

  The man, who for more than three decades enriched the lives of countless people at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, rose onto all fours and growled ferociously like an animal.

  Click.

  Click! Click! Click! Click!

  The officers fired nothing desperately at the monster as it shoved the chief’s mangled flesh into his mouth without a pause, each bite seeming to intensify its carnal hunger for flesh and blood.

  Batton crawled desperately on his hands and knees along the bloodstained mulch away from the predator, repeatedly looking back at it with terror in his eyes, as it began to pursue him with saliva and blood dripping from its mouth. Batton slipped and fell prone, his face buried in the mulch while the monster stood menacingly over him, mostly erect again. The chief felt the creature dripping blood from his mouth onto the chief’s back while the chief’s entire life flashed before his eyes.

  The crack of a single shotgun blast echoed around the park just as the beast leapt into the air like a lion pouncing its prey. With most of its face now gone, it kept moving towards the frantically crawling chief, driven by carnal instinct and a thirst for flesh. Sergeant Lyle pumped the shotgun as he stepped closer to it and fired another slug that blew the beast’s head clear off the top of its neck.

  It fell forward on the chief’s back, motionless once again. For good, everyone at the park hoped as the two officers and the witnesses nearby stared at the frozen Sergeant Lyle. He stood crouched like a statue with his shotgun pointed at the minister’s body. Unconvinced. Ready.

  “Are you okay, chief?” the female officer asked him as he fought to crawl out from underneath the minister’s flaccid body, feeling lucky to be alive and in one piece. Mostly. He stood up tentatively on his injured ankle

  “Yes.” Chief Batton lifted his pants leg and studied the wound on his ri
ght ankle. He winced a little with his face purposely turned away from her.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  He looked at her as if she was from another planet. “What do you think?” the chief asked as he wiped the brown mulch off his uniform and then hobbled over to his sergeant. He put his hand on his sergeant’s shoulder for support.

  “It’s over now,” Batton said calmly to his sergeant as he balanced himself. The chief carefully pushed the warm nose of the Browning towards the ground. Sergeant Lyle maintained a firm grip, the way a toddler clutches a teddy bear in the dark. He wouldn’t take his eyes off the monster, not kind enough to stay under the bed. “Easy now, Nole. It’s all over. Sergeant Lyle!”

  Nole turned to look at his chief, who looked at him with an intense yet comforting stare. The sergeant looked down at the chief’s nasty ankle.

  “Your leg,” was all he could say as he trembled and looked up at his chief with helpless eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just a flesh wound.” The chief winked. “It’s all over, Nole. You got him.” The chief looked at the shotgun. “Why don’t you put that away?”

  Sergeant Lyle stood up straight and looked back once more at the man whose head he’d obliterated. He dropped the shotgun on the ground and collapsed to his knees, sobbing like that toddler who watched as the closet door slowly creaked open. He looked up at the sky and took a deep breath of air mixed with the scent of fresh mowed grass and gun smoke.

  “Is he dead?” That was the question on everyone’s mind, uttered by the other male officer as the female officer squatted down by the minister’s body.

  There was no neck left to check for a pulse. His skin was cold too cold for the newly expired.

  “He’s gotta be,” she said and then grunted as she labored to flip the ghastly body over to see if its chest was moving. It wasn’t. “Dear, God. Check him out. And look over there at his eye.”

  The two officers stood over the odd body. Its skin was gray and covered in open sores, some that had a black substance of some kind growing over them. “What the hell is that?” one asked the other.

  Every vein was close to the surface of the skin. One of its eyes was mostly intact, lying on the mulch. The white of the eyeball was replaced with a deep yellow, every blood vessel showing.

  The chief and Sergeant Lyle joined the others in a circle around the decaying body that had more holes in it than a couple of Connect Four game boards, though strangely, no blood was coming out of them.

  “What causes that?” Sergeant Lyle asked aloud as night blanketed the park.

  Vultures circled overhead.

  “I don’t know,” the female officer said. “He wasn’t at church for service this morning. The misses said he was ill.”

  She turned her attention to what was left of Cheyenne. “What the devil causes a man to do that? No sickness I ever heard of, that’s for sure.” Erin hung her head and kicked some of the bloody mulch before she looked back at the girl’s grotesque carcass one last time. “What a shame. That was one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever known.”

  “He ate her! Holy shit, he ate her!” a voice in the distance sounded astounded and shocked as he yelled into cell phone. “Yes! At the park! Reverend Rally done ate Cheyenne!”

  “Who’s he talkin’ to?” Erin asked her team.

  “Not the police,” her young partner, Chris, answered. “We’re all here.”

  Chief Batton snapped his fingers a few times to get the attention of the two officers and then motioned them towards the bystanders. Light from the red and blue strobes atop the police cars bounced off the crowd’s frightened faces as they stood in the shadows of the park. A sudden strong breeze started to nudge the squeaky swings back and forth.

  “Secure those witnesses. Get that guy’s phone and see who he just called. Run the tape.” Chief Batton pointed to the four corners of the park where he wanted them to affix the crime scene tape.

  Sergeant Lyle and Chief Batton turned and faced each other as the other officers grabbed a thick yellow roll from one of their police cruisers, then sprinted to the group of nine who stood bewildered only twenty feet away.

  “What is this, chief?” Sergeant Lyle asked as he looked back and forth at the two bodies. “Drugs?”

  Scripture consumed Nole’s thoughts. And he that kills any man shall surely be put to death.

  It was hard for Sergeant Lyle to take his eyes off either body. It was also hard for him to look at either one of them. Neither could be described as human anymore. Mostly, it was hard for him to accept that he’d just killed the town’s only minister.

  “I don’t know,” the chief answered.

  “Why does he look like that? You think it’s that bath salt stuff?”

  “I don’t know, Nole.” The chief took another look at the wound on his ankle and grumbled as he heard the male officer yell out that the man with the phone called a friend of his with the local news station. “Great.” Chief Batton retrieved his cell phone from his pocket and took a deep breath.

  “What would make Minister Kenny do that to Cheyenne? Don’t make any sense.”

  “Dang it, Nole! I don’t know!” Chief Batton ran his free hand through the remnant of hair age had left on his head and winced. “I wish I knew. Okay? But I don’t. Whatever it is, it’s bad. Real bad.”

  “I killed him, chief! I killed Reverend Ken!”

  “Stop, Nole! Stop it.” Chief Batton grabbed Nole by the shoulders and shook him. “That wasn’t Ken anymore. I don’t know who or what that thing was. But I know it wasn’t Ken. You did what you had to do!”

  Vultures started to land one after another around the two officers and the bodies as a stiff gust of wind nearly blew over everyone at the park. The chief stared up at the darkening sky. He felt something bad was coming, something worse than the weather.

  “Looks like a storm’s coming. Cover them up with something before the birds start eating ‘em.”

  “With what, chief?”

  “A sheet. Tarp. Whatever you can find, Nole! Just get it done!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have to call the mayor now.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea, chief? That’s his niece all chewed up there and his brother-in-law layin’ there lookin’ like Swiss cheese. We don’t even know what happened yet.”

  “I know!” The chief smashed his size twelve boot into a swing-set post, rattling the chains that attached the swings, nearly falling over trying to keep his balance on an injured leg. One swing launched into the air, along with the vultures. “Can’t worry about any of that right now. Go get that tarp damn it!”

  The chief dialed the mayor’s number on his cell phone, put it up to his ear and groaned as the vultures landed again. One started eating Cheyenne with a grateful nod toward the reverend that used to comfort the quiet town of Peterton, Virginia with his kind nature and ability to give deep meaning to the lives of those he touched through scripture. Another vulture began to eat what was left of the man they all use to call Reverend Ken.

  “Have you no respect, you stupid birds!”

  The chief chased them away in agony. It was a futile, but mostly satisfying exercise, despite the fact that it felt like someone had poured acid on his ankle with every step. The phone was ringing against his ear.

  “Come on! Answer the phone, Manny!” You need to get your butt over here before the press and the whole damn town shows up.

  Chapter 1

  FEMA Regional Administrator Franco Accossi sat alone in his quiet office with all the lights off. The streetlight shining outside the window revealed his plump frame spilling out of his burgundy office chair at the Federal Emergency Management Agency office in Atlanta, Georgia. He couldn’t breathe as he felt that familiar, scary ache in his chest. He made a fist and pounded his torso a few times. “Come on.”

  Bad time for another heart attack.

  His wife of thirty-two years, Isabella, expected him home three hours ago, and she had let him kno
w that a few times already. The first ring of each of her calls to his desk phone sent a shiver down his spine and stressed his bad ticker. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, but he had to answer the phone, no matter who was calling. As far as Franco knew, the fate of everyone he cared about, along with everyone else in the world, could depend on the conversation he would soon have in his dark office.

  There was no way he could ignore his home phone number on the caller ID.

  “What’s-uh matta wit you, Frankie?” Isabella asked. “You don’t-uh sound yourself.”

  Over thirty years in the United States and Isabella didn’t care one bit to disguise her Italian heritage.

  “Been a tough day, Izzy. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  “When, Frankie? Dinner’s already cold-uh.”

  “Please, Isabella! I have to keep this line open! I’ll be home soon,” his voice quivered. “Stop calling!”

  “But Frankie-”

  Franco’s hands trembled as he slammed the phone back into its cradle. Tears pooled in his eyes. He couldn’t remember a single time he had ever hung up on his wife. He also didn’t know if what he said to her was true. He hated when he was mean to Isabella. He hated to lie to her even more.

  It was a few minutes past ten o’clock on Monday night and he honestly didn’t know when he would be home again. He wanted to go home. That couldn’t happen until the phone rang again without it being his wife. He was near desperate for the call, as long as it wasn’t Isabella again. He didn’t want to lie to her and there was nothing she could do to make him feel better.

  “Scusa, Izzy,” he said aloud to himself with a pained look on his face.

  No one but Franco could hear that apology to his dear Izzy. Everyone else who worked in the federal building on Chamblee Tucker road had gone home by then. No one was there to help Franco if his heart did give out again. There wasn’t anything he could do about that though. Not until the phone rang again.

  “Cazzo!” Franco yelled as he accidentally kicked his trash can over. “Cazzo. Cazzo.” Even the janitors Franco loathed for always forgetting to empty the gray mesh trash bin under his desk were gone. He only cursed in his native Italian.