Lockey vs. the Apocalypse by Meadows, Carl (love novels in english .TXT) 📗

“Whoah whoah!” I shouted, trying to get them to calm the fuck down. “Hey, we’re not here to hurt anyone!”

“This is private property!” declared Testicle... erm… Theo. He tried to muster as much gumption as he could, but honestly, he sounded on the verge of tears. “I’ll call the police!”

Both Nate and I stared at him for a moment, stared at each other for another moment, then turned our gaze back to him. As one, we both laughed.

“Okay, Theo, is it?” He nodded dumbly. “Okay, Theo, first question. Where’s your phone?”

As I thought, nobody who looks like this guy takes his phone to yoga. He looked like a kid just caught in a lie and his bottom lip quivered the same way.

“Secondly, we’re not here to hurt anyone. We heard your drumming and chanting last night and—as you can see—we’re a little worse for wear.” I gestured to my appearance which was clearly lacking my usual hotness. “And thirdly, call the police? Really? How long have you been here? Do you even fucking know what’s going on out there?” I gestured in a general sweep behind me.

“This is a spiritual retreat,” stammered Theo. “We’ve been here since the 20th of June. No electronics permitted.”

“Fuck Testi… Theo,” I corrected quickly. Shit, he really did look like a toothy bollock. “How fucking long is this retreat?”

“Thirty days.”

“A month?” I choked. “A fucking month? Who the hell can afford to fuck off for a month?”

I mean, come on. A month of doing yoga, chanting, meditating, inhaling incense and twatting drums round a campfire? Who the shitting hell can afford that?

“Are you telling us,” growled Nate. “Are you seriously telling us, that you haven’t been in contact with anyone outside this lodge, for the past month?”

“No one,” affirmed Theo. “The retreat finishes the day after tomorrow.”

Nate and I shared another amazed look, one of utter disbelief. While the world has been holding the side of the toilet bowl with two white-knuckled hands, screaming in horror as it shits out bloody spikes, this bunch of twats had been singing Kum Ba Yah, blissfully unaware of the world’s end.

Un-fucking-believable.

“Nate,” I said. “Put the gun down, you’re scaring the hippies.”

Nate snorted and lowered the shotgun.

“Now look,” I said. “We’re really not here to hurt anyone, so can we start again? My name’s Erin Locke, but everyone calls me Lockey. This here is Nate Carter, and this is Particles. I think you better put the kettle on. Tell me you have coffee?”

Theo shook his head. “Green teas, camomile, fruit teas; this is a place of healing and cleansing. Here we detox and reconnect with our inner self.”

Here we go, I thought. Here comes the twat-speak. I could feel Nate’s disgust rolling off him in near physical waves. These were not his people.

“Typical, you’re all on a detox, when I really need to tox the shit out of myself,” I moaned out loud. “Well, put some fucking asparagus and broccoli tea on, or whatever it is you drink here, and let’s talk. There’s some shit you need to know.”

THE LAST RESPONSE

“It’s bad, Dean,” said John. “Really fucking bad.”

Deputy Chief Constable John Walsh was not a man given to profanity or exaggeration, so the gravity of his words and tone were not lost on Dean. The two men had been friends for over twenty years, so Station Sergeant Dean Williams knew that when John Walsh said things were, “fucking bad,” then it was far more serious than the understated simplicity of those two words.

It was a little after 2pm and Dean felt like he had been awake forever. With gritty, dry eyes, hunger gnawing at his rapidly shortening temper, and every muscle fibre a dull ache, Dean was edging ever closer to physical and mental exhaustion. He had experienced some taxing nights over his long career, but nothing like the past fourteen hours.

Pulling the graveyard shift as a favour to a friend, things had apparently started to unravel with the passing of midnight. As the ranking officer in charge of dispatch for the evening at the Cheshire Constabulary headquarters, things soon started spiralling out of control, and he had rung his wife, Maria, to let her know he was staying on a while to help with the ever-growing disorder. The night’s turbulence had started small, just a higher than average number of calls, but they were all themed on violent crime; apparently random attacks had spiked unnaturally, primarily from local hospitals and infirmaries, regarding maniacs assaulting and biting staff or patients on an ever-increasing scale.

Events started ramping up from there. Strange calls started—and continued—to come into 999, as panicked callers screamed down the lines about the dead rising and attacking the living. With so many calls of a similar, bizarre nature, it was clear from the outset that something just wasn’t right.

Off duty officers were called in as an emergency response to deal with the growing mayhem, patrol cars were run ragged, all authorised firearms officers were told to gear up in response to the rising levels of violence, paramedics, firefighters and other first responders were being attacked at the scenes of accidents; it was chaos on a scale unlike anything Dean had ever heard of, let alone experienced. Dispatch was a scene of frenzied bedlam, the operators unable to deal with every request, desperately trying to triage the most serious sounding incidents as the night turned to day, but the rising of the sun only accelerated the panic to new heights as most of the world woke up on what they thought to be a normal Wednesday, 23rd June, 2010.

Once the rush hour traffic started, as people went about their normal routines of work and school, things went exponential. Dean had authorised the constabulary’s brand new EC135 Eurocopter—acquired only a year earlier—to take off and give them an eye in the sky, and the images coming back to dispatch shocked everyone.

Plumes of black smoke dotted the aerial panorama, from