The Living Dead Series (Book 2): World Without End
Read The Living Dead Series (Book 2): World Without End Online
Authors: L.I. Albemont
Tags: #Zombies
A Novel of the Living Dead
Copyright L.I. Albemont
2012
All Rights Reserved
Edited by
Excellent Editions
E-mail the author at
[email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Characters, locations, names and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Liberties have been taken with dates and geography. Any resemblance to anyone living or undead is purely coincidental.
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Original Cover Art by Sarah-Jane Lehoux
“What do you do if the very ground is evil? If something so horrific happened here that it can never be cleansed?”
Welcome to
The Kirk
,
the just-released page turning new horror thriller from best-selling author L.I. Albemont.
A picturesque town with a dark history is the setting for Albemont’s newest offering. Secrets lie beneath the prosaic surface of the small town of Falkirk. Bucolic beauty conceals an ancient evil that lurks in the quiet woods and lanes, an evil that feeds on murder and madness and fear.
Contagion: A Novel of The Living Dead- Book 1
A remote mountain town is isolated by a snowstorm as an ancient evil, gone pandemic, turns the residents into the living dead. Almost overnight the town becomes a snowy tomb of the roaming, hungry dead. Stranded, hiding, a small group of survivors is determined to survive. Will they be able to adjust to this hungry new world?
Dead Coast: A Novel of The Living Dead-Book 3
The story continues as survivors flee the infested cities, looking for a refuge from the ever-increasing, ever-hungry dead.
Fleeing a troubled past, Sarah Faust thinks she has found the perfect place to start a new life. Neglected but with potential, the three-hundred year old townhouse in the port city of Charleston offers a refuge and a place to start over. But all is not as it seems at 5 Rue Lane and she soon finds that her new house harbors something that has been there for a very long time. Something that refuses to stay buried.
Have pity upon us miserable sinners, that now are visited with great sickness and mortality, that like as thou didst then command thy angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness; through Jesu Christ our Lord…As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end, Amen
-The Book of Common Prayer
Table of Contents
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh, soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?
-Thomas Macaulay
V
iruses by definition are neither dead nor quite alive. Unable to grow or reproduce they are nevertheless quite capable of hijacking a host’s genetic material and, much like millions of microscopic Dr. Frankensteins, using it to create replicas of themselves. Hidden inside layers of flesh, disguised inside the very cells they destroy before moving on to the next, they are the ultimate stealth predator. Ever looking for ways to expand, leaping species barriers with devastating consequences, they are capable of altering their host’s behavior in profound and disturbing ways.
The veneer of civilization is thin and it takes little to peel it away, exposing the barbarism that lurks beneath. In Haiti that veneer has been tested time after time by hurricanes, failed economies, and vicious, oppressive political regimes. When the country was felled by the most devastating earthquake in their history and reports of widespread cannibalism circulated, no one understood that sending in more supplies and workers would not stop the problem. By then the victims had already been transported almost worldwide to the finest medical facilities available. Once everyone understood that quarantine was the only possible solution it was too late to stop the nightmare already ravaging the world.
A series of earthquake and aftershock-triggered tsunamis washed over the islands of the Caribbean, the waves pulling thousands of the dead and the living out to sea. Aerial video shot by the media the day after the first earthquake showed bodies floating, washed back and forth by the currents and winds. Further video shot the next day revealed these people still struggling in the water, floundering about in apparent attempts to stay afloat. The local island maritime police sent out boats and helicopters to rescue these intrepid survivors. Most of them, police and victims, never returned.
Geologists determined that the magnitude ten plus earthquake had knocked the earth six and one half degrees off its axis. The long-term ramifications of that (weather changes, shorter days, etc.) were many but there was little time to speculate as the rapidly-spreading virus took center stage.
~
Dulles International Airport 5:20 p.m.
William Blount stood waiting at the luggage carrel, tired and ready for this nightmare day to be over and done with. He didn’t see his leather duffle bag yet and figured it was probably lost. That would be the icing on the cake.
He glanced down at the bandage on his left hand. The bleeding had stopped but it ached with a non-stop, cold throbbing. Why he had jumped in and helped with that crazed passenger he didn’t know. He would
never
do it again. His belief that no good deed goes unpunished had been proven and then some.
When the man boarded the plane at Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic he looked deathly ill, so much so that William wondered why they had allowed him to board at all. There were so many displaced people since the earthquake and so many were trying to get the heck out of the country maybe the airlines just weren’t paying close attention. He was grateful to be seated four rows away from him. The sound of that wet, loose cough was driving William insane and when it finally stopped, he settled back into his seat and closed his eyes, grateful for the quiet.
After what seemed like only minutes he jerked awake to the sound of screams. He turned and looked around trying to find the cause of all the commotion. A flight attendant crouched in the aisle, crying and holding her arm, out of which a huge chunk of flesh was missing. Blood covered the white cuff of her uniform blouse but hardly anyone was looking at her. The star attraction stood in the center of the aisle.
The ill passenger was on his feet, mouth, chin, and the front of his shirt drenched with blood as he chewed on…something. His glazed eyes locked in on a small girl with a particularly shrill cry and he moved in her direction. She screamed louder and her mother pulled her closer, turning and trying to shield the child with her body.
William looked around. What the hell was this? Was no one going to do anything? He didn’t see the other flight attendant anywhere.
William was a big guy but the sick man looked insane and he preferred not to take him on alone. Even so, (he looked around again but no one else was getting up) someone had to stop this.
The first thing he noticed was that the guy was
strong
. When William gripped his arm to pull him away from the child it was like trying to bend a steel rod. The second thing he noticed was the smell. Had he rolled in something dead before he boarded the plane? William must have pulled him off balance because the guy fell sideways on the woman across the aisle. She scrambled to get away and wound up in the lap of the woman next to her but the sick guy wasn’t paying attention to her. He pushed himself back up and turned toward William who now saw his face up close.
Gray-white except for the blood-spattered mouth and chin, the eyes were unfocused but his movements were feral and predatory. William realized for the first time what the guy was eating. His mouth continued to chew and William heard teeth clicking together as he put his hands up and slowly backed away down the aisle and tried to talk some sense into him.
“Look, buddy, you can stop where you are right now. Or even better, just go back to your seat and stay there. I don’t want to hurt you but I will if you don’t stop. Of course I could really use A LITTLE HELP!” He shouted the last three words and two men somewhat shamefacedly stood and moved into the aisle.
They came at the sick man from behind but before they reached him he stumbled, falling hard into William and knocking him to the floor. That gore-filled mouth bit into the hand William held up to hold him off. The ill man shook his head as if he were a dog trying to tear the hand off. William screamed. The two men moved in and pinned the man’s arms behind him, using someone’s luggage strap to tie him up. They trussed his ankles as well and dragged him down the aisle behind the galley curtain and into wherever the flight attendant had gone. The captain’s voice came over the speakers.
“Uh, ladies and gentlemen, we have requested assistance from Airport Security and our flight has been re-routed to Miami International Airport. They are, uh, clearing a runway for us and we expect to land in about, uh, fifteen minutes. Emergency medical personnel are already waiting for us there so everyone just hold tight for a few more minutes.”
Easy for them, thought William, cradling his injured hand. The bite went to the bone. He had thought the guy was going to tear his finger off. A continuous moaning came from somewhere and he wished they would gag him and shut him up. He could still smell the stink of him and again wondered what on earth made someone smell like that. Gangrene? And why do pilots talk like that?
After they landed and armed officers removed the tied up passenger the EMT workers came for William and the flight attendant. He caught a glimpse of the injured woman as they loaded her into an ambulance. She was prone on a stretcher and her face was the same gray/white as the sick passenger. The techs cleaned and bandaged William’s hand and prepared to take him to the hospital but he refused. He didn’t have time for this.
“Sir, you really should get that x-rayed and you’ll need some heavy-duty antibiotics. Human bite wounds are filthy. When was your last tetanus shot?”
“I don’t know. Look, just bandage me up here and I’ll go to my doctor when I get home. I work for a living and I don’t have time for this.”
William brushed off the tech’s remonstrations and now, watching the endlessly turning conveyor, felt relieved to be almost home. His duffle finally slid into view and he hoisted it onto his shoulder with his good hand. He got in his car and sat, massaging his arm. He could swear it actually felt cold to the touch and that cold ache had spread to his shoulder. No matter. He would take some Tylenol and eat a hot meal and he’d be fine tomorrow. Both the boys had hockey games this weekend and he was more than ready for a little down time with the family. A fit of coughing surprised him and it was several minutes before he could stop. Eyes still watering, he started the car and pulled out into the evening D.C. traffic.
