Reckoning.2015.010.21 Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Michaelbrent Collings

  All rights reserved.

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  website: http://www.michaelbrentcollings.com

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  cover design by Michaelbrent Collings

  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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  PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF

  MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

  "… prepare to be creeped out." – San Francisco Book Review

  "Move over Stephen King... Clive Barker.... Michaelbrent Collings is taking over as the new king of the horror book genre." – Media Mikes

  "[Crime Seen] will keep you guessing until the end…. 5/5. " – Horror Novel Reviews

  "It's rare to find an ending to a novel that is clever, thought-provoking and surprising, yet here Collings nails all three…." – Ravenous Reads

  "Crime Seen by Michaelbrent Collings is one of those rare books that deserves more than five stars." – Top of the Heap Reviews

  "I barely had time to buckle my mental seatbelt before the pedal hit the metal...." – The Horror Fiction Review

  "Collings is so proficient at what he does, he crooks his finger to get you inside his world and before you know it, you are along for the ride. You don't even see it coming; he is that good." – Only Five Star Book Reviews

  "A proficient and pedagogical author, Collings' works should be studied to see what makes his writing resonate with such vividness of detail…." – Hellnotes

  "[H]auntingly reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock." – horrornews.net

  "The Haunted is a terrific read with some great scares and a shock of an ending!" – Rick Hautala, international bestselling author; Bram Stoker Award® for Lifetime Achievement winner

  "[G]ritty, compelling and will leave you on the edge of your seat.... " – horrornews.net

  "[W]ill scare even the most jaded horror hounds. " – Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Flesh Eaters and The Savage Dead

  "Apparition is a hard core supernatural horror novel that is going to scare the hell out of you.... This book has everything that you would want in a horror novel.... it is a roller coaster ride right up to a shocking ending." – horroraddicts.net

  "What a ride.... This is one you will not be able to put down and one you will remember for a long time to come. Very highly recommended." – Midwest Book Review

  "Collings has a way with words that pulls you into every moment of the story, absorbing every scene with all of your senses." – Clean Romance Reviews

  Dedication

  To...

  Larry Cossins and Ashley Kalinsky of Busy Bee,

  who showed me things that I probably got wrong,

  and to Laura, FTAAE.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  FINAL CHAPTER: tHE COLONY

  1

  Moans: a big man, tattooed and rocking back and forth on the floor, hands that were little more than bone and tatters of flesh tucked under his arms.

  Screams: a woman, a man, two little girls, deep inside the bunker and shrieking in strange syncopation.

  Roars: a snow leopard, growling in time with the women, the girls, the man.

  Scratches: pieces of flesh that were all that was left of an attacking horde, still scraping their disembodied way across the floor, questing for God-only-knew-what, blindly searching for something to rend, to tear, to destroy.

  And a single
noise that was the strangest, the most terrifying of all: a grunt.

  The sound came from a lone form that turned a slow circle in the center of the room. The body was humanoid, but with slightly elongated arms that ended in bony ridges at the wrists, that bulged at a barrel chest which hinted at enormous strength.

  It was Ken. And yet, it wasn't. It was something both more and less.

  The Ken thing turned to Christopher. Caught his eye, and deep within his (its?) gaze Christopher thought he saw a spark of… something. Recognition? Understanding? Companionship?

  He couldn't tell.

  Whatever it was, it died as soon as it came. Then there was only something more primal. Animalistic.

  It reminded Christopher of the look he saw sometimes in Sally's eyes: the look in the snow leopard's gaze when he was about to attack something.

  It made him afraid.

  Ken had taken down dozens of zombies. Alone. He had been a one-man killing machine, with strange bladelike growths emerging from his hands, then rejoining the bones in his body when no longer needed. He had cut, broken, torn the things to pieces. They had wounded him in return, Christopher could see. But the wounds didn't seem to have affected him.

  And even as he watched, the wounds sealed. Healed.

  And were gone.

  Only smooth flesh remained under the tatters of Ken's clothing – his pants and black shirt, that ridiculous shirt: "I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of the CLAP).”

  Sounds.

  The remains of monsters.

  And something else.

  A sense of fate.

  2

  Christopher had felt it before. Had felt it before, when the Māori and his grandson had found them, nearly dead in the fields outside the bunker. Had felt it again when buried alive in the bunker itself.

  A sense that this had all happened before. That it might, indeed, all happen again.

  That they were being led to an inexorable ending. An inevitable finish in a war that had been fought countless times before and would be fought into infinity after them.

  This is part of it. Ken is part of it.

  Ken looked at him for another fraction of a second. Then suddenly stiffened. Whatever recognition there had been – if there had been any at all, if it hadn't been some bit of imagination on Christopher's part – was suddenly gone.

  Some of the noise stopped.

  It was the least of the sounds in many ways. The most alien, too, so it didn't really register fully in Christopher's mind. The filters that had kept Christopher sane in a world gone so completely mad had refused to notice what had happened around him for a moment. Until Ken swiveled in a quick circle. Until those bony sawblades sprung from his arms again.

  This time Christopher noticed that they weren't just saws. They buzzed like the jaws of some of the zombies, like the ones whose faces had split –

  (like her like my baby like my little girl)

  – into buzzsaws that could eat through solid metal.

  What had Ken become?

  And how?

  The buzzsaws hummed, and that was when Christopher finally realized: the scratching. The sound of the zombies around him – or the bits and pieces that were all that remained once Ken finished with them – had fallen silent.

  They were still.

  What's going –?

  And then he knew. He put together pieces that had only been hinted at before.

  There were two types of zombies. The ones that came from living hosts – that was how he had to think of them, like zombies were the result of some kind of parasitic disease – who were bitten and then instantly Changed to become creatures capable of much more than normal humans… but at the cost of all that made them human.

  And then there were the others. The ones who were a bit slower. A bit weaker.

  The ones who were dead.

  And he realized in that instant, that moment in the bunker below the thin skin of the earth, that he had never seen them together. There was never a "live" zombie when what he thought of as an "undead" was present.

  Like Clark Kent and Superman. Bruce Wayne and Batman. That other dude and Green Arrow.

  His thoughts spun wildly. A Ferris wheel that had somehow tilted off its supports and was now rolling its way over a cliff.

  They're coming. They left, and now they're coming.

  The things on the floor were motionless.

  And he heard sounds at the front of the bunker.

  3

  There was no way to stop them from coming in.

  The bunker had had a massive blast door that sealed itself shut. Then another door separating a kind of anteroom from the main part of the bunker. Both had been closed, but the buzzsaw zombies had gone through them like butter. Now they were nothing but gaping holes with torn bits of metal at their sides.

  Nothing between this central room and the front of the bunker. Mo – the big Māori with tribal tattoos covering face, chest, and legs – still moaned on the floor. His grandson, Amulek – another Māori, though he was a teen who had spoken not a single word the entire time the survivors had been in the bunker – went to him. He tore off his shirt and started binding his grandfather's wounds, apparently heedless of the new threat.

  But the zombies were coming. Unlike their "living" counterparts, these didn't vocalize. But they tripped over the mess of MREs, rations, and the remains of an explosion that Christopher and the others had arranged as a booby trap for the last wave of zombies. Small noises, but they sounded like gunshots in the hollow-pipe construction of the bunker.

  He looked at Mo. Incredibly, he managed to stand and hold out what was left of his hands and arms in what he clearly meant to be a fighting stance. He grinned at Christopher. "We shall die as hammerheads, e kare."

  Christopher held nothing but an empty shotgun. He turned it in his hands, a makeshift bat. He still didn't understand half of what the Māori said, but he muttered, "Hell, yeah."

  Amulek stood beside – almost over – his grandfather. He drew a knife with a ten-inch blade from a sheath at his hip.

  There was no question of getting the girls or their mother or Buck or Sally from their rooms in the bunker. They were the ones calling the zombies, so to do so would only make things worse.

  Aaron was right.

  Should we have killed them?

  Would killing them end all this?

  No time for that now.

  Now there was only survival.

  The first zombie came into view.

  4

  Christopher had no idea where the dead had come from. There were four of them, hunkered in the pipe, pushing in one after another. Two were so rotted away that they barely bore a resemblance to anything human. The other two had clearly died a few days before – at the onset of the Change. The day when humanity fought and lost a ten-minute war for the world.

  One wore the remains of a farmer's outfit: overalls and a t-shirt. His right side was burnt, half-crushed by something. His stomach had started to distend. The other wore a business suit and seemed almost untouched save the spot where something – perhaps a bullet? – had torn his throat away.

  Ken's growl deepened. He hunched low.

  A gunshot rang out.

  Christopher looked at his shotgun. A stupid, foolish, plain ridiculous reaction. But it was the only thing he could think of. He was the only one carrying a firearm. Mo and Amulek held blades –

  (Old school, go warrior bad-ass, whoo-ah!)

  – so that left him, didn't it?

  Another shot.

  Then two more, so fast on top of each other that there was no way one person could have fired them. Two people were shooting.

  At the same time, a pair of the zombies stumbled forward. Still silent, but there was a malevolence in their death-shrouded eyes that made Christopher shudder. They turned, as did the others. And a bit farther back in the tunnel Christopher saw something that made him fear almost as much as the monsters.
>
  Aaron. The ex-special forces soldier –

  (Or maybe still-special forces soldier… he's never been totally clear on that….)

  – who had decided that killing the little girls among the survivors was the answer to the world's problems.

  And with him: Theresa. The chubby redhead clad in full body armor who had been the first one to put forth that idea.

  Both had saved the survivors. Several times. Both, Christopher believed, were good people at heart.

  But they were also convinced that the right thing to do was to destroy two-year-old Lizzy and seven-year-old Hope. And that conviction – that righteous belief – made them all the more frightening.

  Add to that the fact that Christopher was coming to believe they might have something to their point of view… it all terrified him. And he wasn't sure if it was just the fact that the little girls had turned into monsters or the idea that he might himself be willing to kill them that scared him more.

  Now, though, Aaron and Theresa were pumping round after round into the zombies. Aaron had a six-shooter, and he quickly emptied the cylinder. Theresa had some kind of more modern-looking gun – Christopher had only a basic understanding of guns, so he couldn't even begin to guess what kind she was using, or how many bullets it carried – so she kept firing after Aaron ran dry.

  The zombies, of course, didn't fall. Barely seemed to mind the bullets.

  Two turned on the newcomers.

  Two kept moving toward Christopher and the rest of them.

  He took a breath.

  And that…

  5

  … was when Ken moved.

  And ended the fight before it began.

  He cut the legs out from under the nearest undead, the whirring sawblades on his wrists slashing through flesh and bone like paper. No blood flowed – this was one of the decomposed zombies – only rotten meat and brittle bone.

  The zombie fell, still reaching for Ken. Ken tore its limbs loose, the saw blades whirring and cutting the arms to small pieces at the same time.

  Theresa's gun clicked. Dry. Empty.