This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 by Chuck Grossart
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781477820452
ISBN-10: 1477820450
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912873
To Nessa
CONTENTS
START READING
THE FIRST NIGHT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
DAY ONE
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
THE SECOND NIGHT
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
DAY TWO
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
THE THIRD NIGHT
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
DAY THREE
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
THE FOURTH NIGHT
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare
(The Geneva Protocol of 1925)
The undersigned Plenipotentiaries, in the name of their respective governments: Whereas the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world; and whereas the prohibition of such use has been declared in Treaties to which the majority of Powers of the world are Parties; and to the end that this prohibition shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and practice of nations . . .
Entered into Force February 8, 1928
Ratification Advised by United States Senate December 16, 1974
Proclaimed by the President of the United States April 29, 1975
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction
(1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention)
The States Parties to this Convention, determined to act with a view to achieving effective progress towards general and complete disarmament, including the prohibition and elimination of all types of weapons of mass destruction, and convinced that the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons and their elimination, through effective measures, will facilitate the achievement of general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control . . .
United States
Signed April 10, 1972
Ratified March 26, 1975
Soviet Union
Signed April 10, 1972
Ratified March 26, 1975
Entered into Force March 26, 1975
THE FIRST NIGHT
CHAPTER 1
The extermination of the human race began in a salvage yard.
Under the left rear fender of what remained of a 1962 Chevrolet Nova, to be exact. A rusted shell of what was once called a Chevy II—a “Deuce” to those who loved them—built at the old Kansas City GM Leeds assembly plant during the last week of November 1961. Wagon Train was America’s favorite TV show in the winter of ’61. On the radio, Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” replaced Dion’s “Runaround Sue” at the top of the Hit Parade. Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and the rest of the New York Yankees had won their nineteenth World Series by beating the Cincinnati Reds 13–5 in game five.
The world turned, counting down.
In the weeks and months before Chevy’s newest grocery getter rolled off the assembly line, the world witnessed Berlin split in two by concrete barricades and concertina wire, and heard news of a 58-megaton Soviet nuclear device—Царь-бомба, the Tsar Bomb—detonated over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Eleven months later, grainy reconnaissance photos of Soviet missile sites in Cuba would take the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Dallas crowds stood dumbstruck less than two years after the Deuce left the showroom floor, as American innocence slipped away in the back of a ’61 Lincoln Continental. A big-eared Texas politician, standing next to a woman in a bloodstained pink Chanel suit, put his hand on a Bible, took the helm of history in his well-washed hands, and slithered full speed ahead toward Southeast Asia to keep all the dominoes from falling.
The Nova was built in a time of war—a cold war. The fear was real then, under the skin, every moment of every day. Like two bullies on the block vying for dominance, a brawl between the opposing forces was a foregone conclusion; it would happen, eventually. Maybe tomorrow. Or even today.
It was an era of calculated risks and strategic brinkmanship by two great powers, each holding a uranium-edged blade to the other’s throat. Missiles sat at the ready in buried coffins and silos, armed bombers lined the ramps, and alert crews awaited the Klaxon’s scream.
MAD was the acronym of the times: mutually assured destruction, the ultimate catch-22 of the twentieth century. They kill us, we kill them. When the missiles launched and the bombers flew, even the most steadfast warriors on either side knew there’d be no victory parades.
Scientists designed the city-kill
ing bombs, but they’d also built smaller weapons, engineered to be just as deadly, and in some ways, even more destructive. Virulence and infectivity supplanted blast and radiation in the killing lexicon. Careful planning and controlled employment of these tiny weapons would render the MAD game obsolete. There’d be a winner, and a loser.
The research had been promising—and productive—until it escaped from a clean room.
In a ’62 Deuce.
CHAPTER 2
The Nova’s trunk, shut for years as the car silently rusted away in the salvage yard, had sprung open when another wrecked car was dropped on its roof. The old Chevy had leaned toward the passenger side for nearly two decades, and now the driver’s side drooped down. Just a few degrees of movement, but it was enough.
It’d been raining steadily since that day, now a week past.
The rain, each drop carrying tiny particles of toxic garbage continuously pumped into the atmosphere, pooled in the low areas of the trunk. In short order, the corrosive filth—a stew of many ingredients—slowly began to eat through the exposed steel.
Mother Nature was funny that way. Complex. Unpredictable.
And unforgiving as hell if you fucked around with her.
The events of this night had been set in motion years before, with an escape, a bullet, and a mistake. On the Nova’s last trip, its driver had been murdered, his killers following the voices in their heads screaming at them to kill, to run, instead of following their specific instructions to find the car, secure the passenger, and return with him where he could be quarantined . . . and, of course, studied, for as long as he remained alive.
Contact, and resulting exposure, soon changed their plans.
Their protective suits had been mistakenly equipped with the incorrect filter, allowing the aggressive contagion to enter their bloodstreams and instantly ravage their sanity.
After killing the frenzied driver with a single bullet to the head, and six or seven more to his neck, chest, and legs as their own diseased frenzy began to build, they stuffed the driver’s bullet-riddled body in the Nova’s trunk and left the infected corpse to bake in the New Mexico summer heat. They drove west, escaping whatever threats their fevered minds had fabricated in their quickly twisting consciousnesses, only to meet an abrupt end against a bridge abutment fifteen miles away. Luck—in the form of an exploding gas tank—had been on mankind’s side that day.
Over the next three days, the inside of the abandoned Nova’s trunk became a sauna of stinking rot and bile as dead flesh swelled and burst in the intense heat, the ruined body spilling its macabre contents to congeal on the floor.
A frantic search, now involving nearly a hundred people flushed from classified agencies to cover an expanded four-state area, ended suddenly with an intercepted radio transmission over the police net. An abandoned car had been found, sitting two hundred yards off Interstate 40 near tiny Manuelito, New Mexico. With a body in the trunk.
In less than an hour, the state police became onlookers as others arrived to take over their crime scene. People in white suits and masks.
They were there to hide an unfortunate mistake, to erase the evidence.
To keep a secret, a secret.
The car was quickly taken to a salvage yard in another state—ironically, the same state where it’d been built—and the paper trail of its history thoroughly expunged. The Chevy would meet its fate in a glowing smelter of molten steel, the last bit of evidence turned into a shiny set of stainless flatware.
But the car wasn’t immediately destroyed as planned. A ’63 Nova had taken its place in the smelter, similar enough in appearance to the ’62 it just happened to be sitting next to that the crane operator selected it instead, an honest mistake, which condemned his two grandchildren—not yet born—to a horrific death at the hands of something he couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
For twenty years, the Nova sat in a far corner of the yard, useable parts stripped away occasionally until only a shell remained. But within the shell, within the empty trunk, an echo of the body it once held still lingered. It was an echo of the damned, hiding in the crevices, between plates of rusty steel. Waiting. Living. And now, with the rain adding a special twist to the mix, mutating.
Nature had been fucked with. And Mother was pissed.
CHAPTER 3
Rats prowled the salvage yard, scurrying from junk heap to junk heap, searching for anything to quell their endless hunger or add to their nests of assorted garbage. Underneath the Chevy, a single rat crept toward the left rear wheel, having spied a shiny piece of foil sticking out of the mud. For the rat, the piece of trash was a treasure; for humanity, however, it represented an end of things, for at the same instant, the Nova’s trunk began to leak, the pool of muck inside having finally eaten a hole in the rusted steel large enough to pass through. Just one drop at a time.
The rat sat on its haunches, holding the silvery gum wrapper in its forepaws, small, beady eyes examining the find. A moment before it scurried away with its booty, a single drop from the trunk landed on its back. Just one drop. The effect was nearly instantaneous. The other rats scattered, spooked by the sudden commotion.
A large Rottweiler tied to a fencepost at the far end of the salvage yard pricked its ears up and growled, but only for a second. The sound, the terrible screeching, caused the dog to cower against the yard’s security fence and whimper like a scared pup.
Beneath the car, the rat lay on its back, legs kicking furiously, clawing at the air, a high-pitched squeal escaping its open maw, much too loud to be produced by its tiny lungs. Its head lolled from side to side and its tongue flapped about like a meaty whip. Beneath the rat’s coarse hair, bones were snapping, rearranging, fusing. Muscles were flexing, ripping, building. Cells ruptured and then re-formed. DNA strands resequenced, and resequenced again. Something was being born, at the same time something else was dying.
The rodent’s violent struggles suddenly ceased, and it lay deathly still.
All that could be heard in the salvage yard was the staccato tap-tapping of the rain against rusty steel, the broken snare drum thuds of water droplets hitting the mud.
Quiet. For a time.
Just the sound of rain.
Other rats crept from their hiding places, sure that whatever had startled them was gone, and it was safe to forage once again. Moving slowly, a rat crept toward its fallen comrade, which would make a fine meal for it and a few others. Sniffing the air, it sensed no danger and drew closer. Perching itself against the soft underbelly of its meal, it lowered its head for the first bite.
In a ravenous flurry of newly formed claws and teeth, the unsuspecting rat was torn to shreds, pieces of its body powerfully flung from underneath the Chevy and splashing into the mud, small crimson pools gathering around the shredded strands of brownish-red meat.
The other rats scattered, startled, but only for a moment. The smell of blood drew them closer.
A pair of bright yellow eyes peered out from under the old car. It could see them gathering, creeping nearer. Thick blood dripped from its new set of oversized fangs. Its rippling musculature quivered in anticipation, the restructured body tensed to strike.
Fifteen feet away, one of the rats gulped down a strand of bloody muscle from its shredded comrade, still warm and twitching in the mud.
At once, more unearthly screeching shattered the night.
And then, there were two. The pair moved quickly, biting, tearing, eating. Infecting.
Soon, there were six.
Then, fifty.
The wailing of the changeling rats filled the air with an eerie sound, a shrill screeching building in int
ensity with each new addition to the fold.
And then, all at once, as if triggered by an internal clock, each of the infected creatures began to convulse violently, snarling and wailing as they were seized by the next stage of their evolution.
Hides split. New legs burst forth from where there’d been none just moments before. Single heads became two.
The first furious doubling—one of many to occur in the next hour—had begun.
The Rottweiler clawed at the chain-link security fence, trying to scratch his way through the metal, as hundreds of pairs of glowing yellow eyes moved closer, bouncing across the darkness toward him.
The dog’s whining abruptly ceased as the things covered him, tearing him to shreds with hundreds of razor-sharp fangs and claws, slicing and cutting in a feeding frenzy as quick and violent as a school of piranhas devouring a careless river animal.
The new things quickly escaped the confines of the salvage yard and began to spread, the killing sound building in intensity. Neighborhood dogs slung their tails between their legs and cowered in the corners of their yards, instinctively aware that something they couldn’t possibly escape was coming.
Yard by yard, the frantic yelping of terrified pets was replaced with the muffled thunder of hundreds of tiny, powerful legs, and then by the sickening sound of flesh being ripped and torn. Outside the houses and inside.
The creatures moved as an unstoppable wave, killing and feeding, but in some cases simply biting, an infectious, vampire-like bite ensuring the growth of their new species, adding others to their numbers, both animal and human.
The killing wave grew in intensity as the things continued to double, again and again. Their numbers increased exponentially as they spread in a circular pattern from their point of origin in the salvage yard . . . five miles, ten, then fifteen, leaving nothing but death and an eerie silence in their wake.
The onslaught slowed as a blush to the east heralded the rising sun. The creatures flooded into the sewers, into Dumpsters, basements, into the dark places—any place to hide from the coming light of day.