The Night Sweeper: A Zombie Conspiracy Novel (The Sweeper Chronicles Book 1)
Read The Night Sweeper: A Zombie Conspiracy Novel (The Sweeper Chronicles Book 1) Online
Authors: J. Steven Butler
By J. Steven Butler
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 by J. Steven Butler
All rights reserved.
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To Kim and Ethan. You are my entire world.
Table of Contents
only because rough men stand ready to do
Chapter 1
Cray
I sprint toward the sounds while a detached part of my mind analyzes the remains of Central Park around me. Leaves drift to the ground in the whispering, autumn breeze. The air holds a chill, but there is also freshness to it as if it carries something new and clean. It makes me feel alive, and running feels effortless.
My senses have always been above average. Well, that’s actually an understatement. Fact is I can pick up on things most average Joes wouldn’t pick up on in a thousand years. I suspect it’s somehow related to how my mind processes information, but even running at top speed, I’m able to detect subtle earthy smells from the soil, a hint of magnolia, and the funky smell of animal crap somewhere nearby. I know the wind is moving at 4.2 miles per hour, and I know the padding of my footfalls is unlikely to be detectable at a range of more than ten yards to someone of normal hearing.
I cross a sidewalk. The concrete is cracked and bulging in places, and grass and weeds snake through the cracks. I leap over the decorative fence on the other side, its paint peeling and rust peeking through. This part of the park hasn’t been kept up. Manpower is limited. It’s a pity. I remember the park from my childhood when it was still majestic and beautiful, a haven in the middle of the city.
I keep running, faster now, and a hundred yards later I move across a small clearing and stop.
I can hear more grunting and hissing not far ahead and inch forward like a wraith, no sound whatsoever. This is part of my training. I could make a ninja sound like he was walking around in tap shoes on a wooden floor. Concealment, firearms, blades, lethal state-of-the-art hand to hand combat training combined with all the best parts of traditional fighting methods, explosives – there was no limit to the level of training The Organization poured into its recruits. And I soaked it up like a sponge.
I find it’s both a blessing
and
a curse to never forget anything. As far as training goes, I can instinctively pull upon everything I’ve learned. On the other hand I also remember every bad thing that’s ever happened to me with crystal clarity, and the face of every Fester I’ve killed is etched in my head like a who’s who lineup from Hades.
I duck behind a tree and direct my senses outward to another small clearing ahead, the location of the noises I’ve been hearing. Based off of what I can hear now, I place four Festers beyond the tree line, the approximate position of each forming an imaginary grid in my mind. There are two groups of two, one about thirty feet directly in front of the tree I’m camouflaged behind, and another to my right, roughly one and a half times that distance. Relaxing, I allow my senses to expand beyond the clearing, absorbing every sound of the night, every smell, every rustle of leaves and flutter of birds, to determine if there are any other Festers nearby. It appears the four in the clearing are the only ones within the range of my perception.
I notice the metallic, sickly-sweet tang of blood in the air as the breeze stirs in my direction. It mixes with the nauseating stench of the Festers and creates a disturbing atmosphere of disease and decay. They must have a kill. Probably a rodent or bird, maybe one of the trillion pigeons that still inhabits the park.
Easing my head around the tree to keep from drawing attention, I absorb the scene in front of me. My estimation of their location was spot on. The two Festers directly ahead are milling about mindlessly while the two off to my right are crouching in the dew-laden grass, ravenously devouring what might have been a small squirrel. It's hard to tell from here. The moon is hanging low and bright on the horizon, but the Festers are in deep shadows from the surrounding trees and the tiny details elude me.
I cross my arms over my chest and ease two semi-automatic .45 caliber hand guns out, one from a holster under each arm. Careful not to make any noise, I savor the comforting sturdiness of the carbon grips and the solid weight of the weapons.
I take a long, calming breath, allowing all tension to leak from my body, and force my thoughts to clear and focus. Then without further hesitation, I explode from behind the tree like a flash of lightning into the clearing. My hands come up smoothly to squeeze off the first two shots. One of the hollow point rounds bursts through the head of the nearest Fester. Blood, bones, and brain matter glitter in the moonlight before raining onto the ground. At the same instant my other shot plows through the neck of the second one, nearly decapitating him and sending him sprawling onto his back where he remains motionless.
The other two freaks wheel from their prey at the sound of my gunfire and charge with shrieks of insane rage, but I’m already pivoting from my first two kills and level a slug into the chest of the foremost attacker. The bullet slams him to a stop mid-stride. A female Fester emerges from behind him as he crumples into a heap, and she’s on me before I can get another shot off, diving at me like a banshee, lunging towards my face with razor-sharp fingernails.
I allow my perception to speed up until the Fester woman seems to move in slow motion, her arms extended, a snarl locked on her face. In that moment, I feel a warming sense of calm, a sense of belonging and purpose. I feel at home, doing what I do best, protecting my city from this scourge.
With intuitive movements, I spin out and away from her charge and smash my right forearm down across her hands to deflect the attack. The force knocks her off balance, but she’s on me again in an instant, more infuriated than ever. But with my awareness amped to the max, I’m ready for her and slam the butt of my gun into her forehead just as she completes her turn. She falls to the ground, dazed, her body twitching in awkward, contorted movements.
For a moment I stand watching the woman lying on the grass in front of me, tapping my fingers absentmindedly on the grips of my guns, a pause before the inevitable. I’ve never
enjoyed
killing Festers. It’s no secret that some of the Sweepers do. They find it somehow satisfying or sporting, but I can’t bring myself to see them as anything other than pitiful creatures that need help. I suppose it's odd for me to feel that way considering my job is their utter extermination. But I know the only
help
I can offer is putting them out of their misery. And deep down, if I’m honest with myself, I know there’s another reason for wanting this job. It’s primal and raw, and it’s the thing that drives me and keeps me going night after night.
The girl in front of me makes a strangled, gurgling noise in her throat, and her eyes flutter open. They’re a rich shade of mocha and surprisingly beautiful despite being set in that diseased face. It’s unlike me, but I suddenly find myself trying to picture what she may have been like before. Probably dark skinned, shapely, the kind of girl who commands the attention of every man in the room. Maybe she was a sweet and gentle person, loved by everyone that knew her. Was she a mother, a wife, a best friend, maybe a school teacher or a nurse? But there’s no way to know. She could just have easily been a cruel and hateful person who took pleasure in the suffering of others.
Her expression twists and it’s almost like she’s trying to convey something to me, willing me to understand, but she’s starting to rise and I shake off my hesitation, a little shocked with myself. There’s no more time to sit around. I extend my gun towards her forehead. As I do, I am aware that some deep part of me chooses to believe the best of her former self. The words come unbidden, and it’s like I hear someone else say them.
“You can rest now.”
I pull the trigger.
I am a freak. At least that’s what my pop used to tell me when I was a kid. The guy was a real ball of inspiration. I guess, in all fairness, it’s a pretty accurate description. But he could have been a bit more understanding. It wasn’t like I asked to have a photographic memory, remember anything and everything, and have a mind that works like a machine. You can be sure with a background like that I never had a girlfriend.
My name is Alex Sorren, but I prefer to be called Cray. In my younger years I was somewhat of a nerd. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a nerd, but it didn’t work out well for me. I had acceptance issues at home and at school on top of the fact that the whole world had gone freakazoid. As a result, I spent a good portion of my life hating my own mind.
True, there are some advantages. Unlike most geeky brainiacs, my brilliance has always gone beyond the purely cerebral. I have a greater connection between mind and body – things like heightened senses, almost supernatural hand-eye coordination, agility, blah, blah. Oh yeah, and I also have this bizarre ability to speed up my perception to the point where it seems like things around me are moving in slow motion. But I digress.
If you can’t tell by now, I’m a tad bit cynical. I know that, and I'm okay with it. No doubt a lot of it comes from growing up like an Einstein wannabe in the ghetto. A good deal of it also comes from my job, and that’s where things get interesting. But first let me give you a little history.
For a while back in the early 21st century, zombies were a huge fad, and everybody thought they were so cool. People sold lots of books, made movies galore, and everybody wanted to capitalize on the undead thing. Well, when the “zombie apocalypse” came for real, we found that the storytellers got a lot of it right. However, unlike the stories, there was no cool factor to the real thing.
It's awesome to watch people fight off hordes of mindless wackos on television, trying to survive. Very dramatic and all that. But it's a heck of a lot different when you're there for real and one has just slashed a six-inch gash in your gut and it's kill or be killed.
It was the result of chemical warfare, if you can call a one-sided attack “warfare”. That part pretty much all the fiction guys “predicted” so no gold medals to any of the prophets there. The nations didn’t get along too well back in those days, so the President decided it would be better if we tried to turn everybody into a monster. Well, it worked, and I think we can all agree that this plan wasn’t well thought out.
These “zombies” eat human flesh like the ones in the stories, but not exclusively. They’ll make a meal out of anything they can kill: bird, deer, horse, it doesn’t matter. They’ll even eat things they didn’t kill like those puke-nasty carcasses you find in the middle of the highway, not that we use highways much anymore. And they’re not walking corpses as far as we can tell, although you might be tempted to think so from their stank.
We call them Festers because their skin is foul. Understandable given that they’re covered in sores, lesions, and a host of other disgusting disorders that have never even been named. They’re the diseased shells of people that used to be like us, but now they have an incurable virus that makes them your everyday run-of-the-mill homicidal maniacs that try to kill everything that moves. It can be pretty comical to see one try to take out a freight train. They don’t seem to have much left in the way of brains. They’re more like crazed animals always ready for a fight, kinda like politicians.
You can kill them any way you can kill a regular person. There’s no one-size-fits-all method like brain stabbing. And most of the time the zombies in the books were slow and goofy. These guys are fast, vicious, and dangerous. They tend to move in small packs and primarily at night. Why? I don’t know. We can’t have all the answers can we?
There’s also the issue of biting. When the Virus first hit, everybody was afraid of being bitten by a Fester because they thought they would turn into a zombie too, but that proved false. If you get bit, you don’t turn into one of them. You just lose a chunk of flesh and it hurts like you know what.
But this much is certain, you don’t want to cross them. So what is left of the normal population stays locked away in safety during the dark hours from around twilight until dawn. Where the Festers go during the day isn’t a hundred percent clear. We think a lot of them go into the sewers and old subway systems. That’s probably the real cause of their rotten stench. Either way, you’ll almost never find one out during the daytime.
And that’s where I come in. They call me a Sweeper, and my hunting ground is good old New York City. I’m sort of like a trash collector, but instead of debris, I clean up Festers. Every night, while everyone else is locked away in their safe little condos and high rises with steel bars and chain mail over the windows, I go out and hunt.
My job is to take out any Fester I can find. Since no cure has ever been found and the Festers are such an overwhelming threat to the remaining populace, it’s the hope of the government that one day the Sweepers will be able to completely clear our cities from the scourge so we can all get back to partying late into the night and breaking curfews and other important stuff like that.
As I said, Sweeper is my official title, and we fall under the domain of The Organization. The Organization is an ultra-elite, paramilitary group that works hand-in-hand with the government. There are several of us. We’re highly trained, intensely disciplined, and overall kick-butt if I do say so myself. I don’t mean to brag, but rumor has it that I’m the best at what we do. We work on a solo basis, sleeping during the day and hunting at night. As a result, the ordinary citizens have nicknamed us “Vamps”.
The remaining population of uninfected people isn’t very large. At the outbreak, the Virus spread like wildfire. Only a small percentage of people were naturally immune, and a lot of those who
were
immune were killed by those who weren’t. Luckily, a lot of the Festers were also killed by natural causes such as accidents, lack of food, that type of stuff.
