Death Springs Eternal: The Rift Book III Read online

  His feet hit the blood-smeared, cracked pavement, the heels of his boots clanking on the concrete. Pitts stayed by his side, reducing his long strides to keep pace with the shorter man while they maneuvered through the minefield of human remains. The general peered over, saw the look of disgust on Pitts’s face as he surveyed the bloodshed, and gently elbowed him in the ribs.

  “Don’t show your repulsion,” he said, softly. “Act like you’ve been there before.”

  Pitts stiffened his lips and squinted, taking on the aura of a Hell’s Angel on a mission, with his jacket and leather chaps pressed tight against his huge frame. Even his handlebar mustache, which could seem laughable at times, now looked imposing. This was good. The general wanted his men to respect the lieutenant—needed them to—and that wouldn’t happen if Pitts gave the impression that the sight of a massacre sickened him.

  His soldiers, the last few of which were burying the final shots in the few twitching bodies on the ground, gradually fell in line behind him as he made his way down the street. He led them to the pharmacy and the five bedraggled survivors, who had stepped off the store’s front walk and into the road. They waved their arms in victory. From their mouths came proclamations of joy.

  “Let’s hear it for the Army!” one of them shouted.

  “Woo-hoo!” decreed another. “Way to take the fuckers out!”

  The general stopped walking, leaving ten feet between him and the five young men. His soldiers halted, a movement so in sync that all of their feet came to rest at virtually the same time. He stood there for a long moment, staring at those dark, grinning faces without saying a word. The five young men eventually began to grow wary. Their expressions slackened, their body language uneasy, and they muttered among themselves.

  Finally one of them—the oldest, by the looks of it—stepped forward. “Yo,” he said in a deep, rumbling baritone. “What’s going on?”

  The general nodded at him and said, “I find your determination to live commendable. I thought you should know that.”

  To this the man cocked his head, shrugged, and mouthed, thanks.

  In a single motion, General Bathgate spun on his heels, raised his hand in the air, twirled his finger, and stepped behind his soldiers. Pitts was right behind him. He heard the sound of crumpling fabric as his men raised their weapons in unison, the click of rounds being locked into place, and then one of the survivors shouting, “Oh FUCK NO!”

  More gunfire followed as his men peppered the five derelicts with bullets. Unlike the walking corpses, their screams rose above the ruckus, causing a twinge of guilt in his gullet. He chomped down on his tongue and swallowed hard, drowning his shame. There are things that have to be done, he thought. This is the way of the new world, the way of the SNF.

  He and Pitts turned around when the firing stopped. His soldiers parted so he could see the bodies of the five men, splayed out unceremoniously on the concrete, bleeding. One still moved, using his remaining good arm to drag his stiffening body across the street. The general caught Sergeant Jackson’s eye, and the young man burst into action, dashing up to the youngster, kicking him, rolling him over, and jamming the business end of his automatic rifle into his crotch.

  “Where you going?” Jackson asked.

  The dying man mumbled pleas of mercy, and Jackson emptied a round into his scrotum. A high-pitched wailing filled the air as the man writhed, grasping at his ruined nethers with that one good hand.

  “This is a no-fly-zone, you piece of shit,” Jackson shouted over his yowls. “This place belongs to the SNF now, which means you fuckers stealing our shit don’t fly.”

  With that, Jackson pressed the barrel of his rifle into the man’s eye socket and blew his brains out the back of his head. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulders with an insane grin plastered across his face, dropped it to the ground, took out a Polaroid camera, and started taking pictures of the bodies surrounding him. The other soldiers cheered and slapped each other on the back. General Bathgate was instantly intrigued, just as he always was when he saw his men’s reaction to Sergeant Jackson’s work.

  Lieutenant Pitts shivered beside him, and Bathgate glanced over his shoulder. His friend gave him a beseeching look.

  “I know,” the general said. “It may not be for us, but it’s the way of the world now. Might as well get used to it.”

  * * *

  The pilfering of the tiny, ancient town of Enfield, North Carolina, took all of three hours. There wasn’t much left, not now, six months after the end of the world. The supermarkets were bereft of food, the gun shops of guns, the hardware stores of everything but lawnmowers and other motorized landscaping tools. But that was something General Bathgate and the rest of the SNF leadership expected. What the general understood, and many others didn’t, was that there were treasures aplenty remaining in the silos and barns on the outskirts of town: seedlings, plants, grains, lumber, everything a pioneer would need to feed his people and build a sustainable society.

  So while the general led his men through the town proper, killing the mongrels who appeared along the way, both human and undead, another battalion was busy on the other side of the township, tearing down structures and loading a fleet of eighteen-wheelers with all the raw materials they would need. The general, too, found some luck. Along the way, stowed in the historic district, his men discovered seven upper-class families who’d endured months of hardship, locked away in their nineteenth-century, fortress-like estates. These people were all of good stock, German, Irish, English, and Italian. He accepted them into his care and ushered them aboard the armored school buses that arrived to pick them up. He watched as the families, each member thin near the point of starvation, boarded the vehicles, expressions of disbelieving relief on their weary faces. They would be comfortable on their trip back to camp until Registration, when each individual’s value to the collective was assessed. Not all would be accepted into the SNF society. That much he knew. The old were almost always the first to go, and there were quite a few in these families who approached elderly status. The general was left to hope that they might possess some skill that could be of use, be they doctors or farmers or electricians, but that hope was fleeting. In his experience over the last few months, most of the survivors he ran across worth saving were white-collar folks, as they were the only ones with the resources to fortify their homes before the first wave of Wraiths tore across the land. To the general’s thinking, nothing was less important in the aftermath of the apocalypse than businessmen, and aged businessmen even less so.

  This fact made him feel regret despite its obvious practicality, for he hated seeing good, salt-of-the-earth folks set to pasture.

  Soon, with the supply gathering complete, the platoon was back on the highway heading for their temporary home of Roanoke Rapids. As he rode in the back of his personal Humvee, General Bathgate gazed at the gently rolling hills and dense forests of northern North Carolina. The sights caused a stir of memory within him, a spark of joy as he recalled the life he’d lived before his true purpose had been revealed. The tale itself seemed unreal, like a fairy tale.

  In this fairy tale there was once a man named Terrance Graham. He’d been a high-school history teacher in Jacksonville, Florida, for more than half of his fifty-two years. Short in stature but large in voice, he was an intimidating educator who cared for his students. He was also a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. He had joined in college, when his roommate at the time, Johnny Kingsley, whose father was deeply entrenched in the organization, insistently passed him literature to read. Though Terrance was initially hesitant due to the Klan’s sordid history, he eventually began to see what they were trying to do. This was a new Klan, the literature said. We do not condone violence. Our only desire is to assist in the advancement of the white race, to celebrate its history, its achievements. Simply this, and nothing more. To Terrance, those words made sense. He saw nothing wrong with promoting your own nationality—after all, he saw the blacks around campus
doing the same thing every day, gathering together in protest groups, gaining special advantages and being awarded financial help they didn’t necessarily deserve.

  “It’s because they band together,” Johnny told him. “We have to do the same.”

  Terrance agreed.

  He carried that card in his wallet with pride for the rest of his life. Every year he would get in trouble with the school board when he’d present the card to his classes tell them how wonderful this new-age Klan was. Jacksonville was a diverse city, and to Terrance’s surprise, it ended up being mostly whites who were opposed to his presentations. Most blacks took his lectures in stride, or as a joke, though there had been the occasional near-violent reaction. To him, this was simply more evidence of how divided the white race had become, so he pressed the issue, defending himself by saying he was doing nothing but passing information on to his students. Being a tenured teacher who never actually said anything illegal, there was nothing they could do to stop him except slap him on the wrist.

  Terrance Graham had a wife, a fellow educator named Maggie who he’d met during his third year after graduating college. Though she wasn’t the woman he’d dreamed of marrying as a younger man, they were perfect for each other, sharing the same prejudices and causes, likes and dislikes. In other words, Terrance had everything he ever wanted, and he was happy.

  Then the world ended. Maggie was among the first casualties of the Rodent Flu (or Wrathchild, as he’d come to find out was the epidemic’s unofficial codename), contracting the disease from one of her students, who’d spent a week with his family in Mexico. She was sick for eleven days before the change came over her. Terrance watched as Maggie, strapped down on her gurney, flailed her arms and legs, breaking her own arm while she tried to free herself from her restraints. Her features became distorted, as if her bones were growing beneath her skin. He saw her rip out the throat of a doctor who tried to subdue her, gawked as the man’s blood spewed from the wound and painted her nightgown red. Then she had looked up at him, and his heart dropped in his chest. There was no sign of the old Maggie in those eyes any longer. She was long gone, and a monster had taken her place.

  That night, after the nurses had finally sedated her, Terrance used a scalpel to carve her neck from ear to ear.

  General Bathgate shook his head, trying to get back to the present. He felt tears begin their steady trek down his ducts and he gritted his teeth, halting them before they arrived. He would show no weakness, not now, not after all he’d accomplished. There was too much at stake.

  Yet his mind still retreated despite his efforts. He saw his old self sleepwalking through the days and nights that followed his wife’s death; felt the anger rise within him every night as Jacksonville deteriorated into brutal chaos; heard the riotous boom of explosions ring through his ears, shaking his small home to the rafters; sensed the panic of not knowing what to do as deformed fiends rushed through the streets, murdering his neighbors and laying waste to all around him; lived again through the shame of his cowardice when hiding in his basement, before a final loud detonation sounded, dropping his humble abode atop him in a rain of splintered wood and dissolving plaster.

  But most of all, he felt the loneliness and confusion that followed as he lay in the dark, trapped beneath his work bench with only one of his old World History textbooks and a small LED headlamp for company. He felt his stomach rumble and his mind grow weary as time passed. He started reading, becoming enraptured by the story of Alexander the Great the way he had as a child, and soon, as starvation made him hallucinate, he pictured himself grasping the mantle of greatness from that legendary ruler, uniting the globe and reforming it in an image of perfection that only he could imagine.

  Bathgate punched his leg, trying to get the storm of memories to stop, but in doing so he glanced down and saw his uniform, the uniform that was the source of all his power. He moaned, recalling the day the earth shook, shifting the roof of his prison and giving him a sliver of hope. He suffered the torment as he dug his way out, clawing at the dirt and wood, reaching for that shard of light until his fingernails cracked and his hands were covered with blood and sores. He sensed the rain falling around him when he emerged from the earth, a torrential downpour that he opened his mouth to, letting the water slip down his throat no matter how much it stung.

  A. Bathgate. That was the name stitched upon his right breast. Terrance had met the real General A. Bathgate on the side of the road as he exited the ruined city of Jacksonville. The man was alone, lying inside the very Humvee he found himself in now, as dehydrated and hungry as he, suffering from a gangrenous left leg and an infected gash that ran down his side. The man begged Terrance for help, pleaded with him to get behind the wheel and drive to Baton Rouge, where the last “safe” outpost of the American military establishment was located. Terrance heard his cries, his moans, and wished him to shut up. So he dragged the man out of the vehicle, removed the general’s gun belt, un-holstered his sidearm, shoved the barrel into the man’s mouth, and ended his life. He then stripped the man of his uniform and slipped it on his own body, blood stains and all. The fit was perfect, in more ways than one.

  From that moment on, Terrance Graham of Jacksonville, Florida became Alexander Bathgate, five-star general. I will lead this country back into prosperity, he thought as he drove the Hummer down the cluttered, wreckage-filled streets, in search of like-minded survivors. I will rebuild this land, and all I find will be soldiers, soldiers of a new freedom, and we will finally live in peace.

  As the caravan approached Roanoke Rapids, General Bathgate smiled. His goal was close at hand. He could just about smell it.

  * * *

  “Get that goddamn thing down!” shouted Greg Pitts. “We’re leaving in fucking nine hours, you douchebags!”

  The men who were busy dismantling the huge tent that served as the SNF triage center rolled their eyes but kept on working. All but one of them, that is—a young, spunky kid with a shaved head and eyebrows so blond it looked like he didn’t have any adjusted his sash, the required outfit of any SNF soldier, cracked his neck, and stormed across the short distance that separated them.

  “Excuse me?” he asked, his wiry muscles flexing. Pitts chuckled, thinking the kid looked like a tiny male bird trying to frighten a bigger, scarier suitor away from his female.

  “I said get the fuck to work, twerp,” said Pitts.

  “No, that’s not it,” the kid said with a roguish grin. “You said nine hours. How long is that, anyway?”

  Pitts steamed.

  “That’s right,” the kid continued. “That’s old-talk. What was it the general said? Official military time is all that’ll be accepted, right?” He laughed. “You’re supposed to be a Lieutenant, right? What, rules don’t apply to you?”

  Pitts couldn’t believe the kid’s balls. He was out-and-out provoking him, which never should’ve happened, especially since Pitts not only outranked him, but probably outweighed him by close to a hundred pounds. Then the kid started laughing, pointing his finger at him, and Pitts looked down. He stared at his leather chaps, his old, ragged jeans, his black t-shirt, and finally understood. There was a giant wet spot running down the front of his shirt and soaking the crotch of his pants. It must’ve been the result of drinking too quickly and sweating too much in this goddamn heat. He looked pathetic.

  It pissed him off.

  In a rage Pitts leapt forward, his meaty hand wrapping around the front of the kid’s sash. The young soldier, for some reason surprised that Pitts had reacted in such a way, let his mouth drop open while he tried to back away from the larger man’s grip. But Pitts was having none of it. He cocked his arm back and belted the kid square in the nose, breaking it. The kid’s head snapped back and blood gushed over his lips. A spit bubble popped as he muttered, his head lolling.

  Pitts pulled him close, so close he could literally taste the blood running over his mouth. “What was that, shithead?” he asked.

  The kid’s eyes rolle
d and he muttered again. Pitts smacked him across the cheek with his free hand, and that seemed to do the trick. The young soldier snapped to attention.

  “I said, what was that?” he repeated.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the kid replied with a slur.

  Pitts let go of the sash and the kid stumbled backward. Turning around, he saw that he had an audience. The workers had stopped breaking down the tent and twelve pairs of eyes glared at him with a mixture of bewilderment and anger. For a moment he feared the group would rush him, would take him down for striking their comrade, but then they all swiveled their heads at once, snapping to attention as if they’d been standing that way the whole time. If there was one thing about the COC, the nutty religious group the boss bent over backward to please, they always stuck together. Pitts hated them.

  The sound of footsteps reached his ears, and he peeked over his shoulder to see the general and that punk Jackson marching toward him, side by side. The general’s hands were clasped, while Jackson’s arms swung in an exaggerated manner, as if he was trying to make himself appear bigger than he was. Pitts, too, snapped his heels together and straightened his posture. He might have considered General Bathgate a friend and ally, but he’d seen far too often what happened to those who didn’t show him the proper respect, especially in public. Not even those closest to the man were spared his wrath during those instances.

  “What’s going on here?” asked the general as he approached. Jackson just smirked.

  Pitts cleared his throat. “This little shit was giving me lip,” he said.

  The general’s eyes fell on the young soldier with the bloody face. “Is that true, soldier?”