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

Once the dead were dealt with, we stacked up behind Nate, as he quietly levered the tool end of the halligan between door and frame. Once it was deep enough, he gave it a fierce wrench and the door cracked away from the frame, revealing the gloom within.

Nate switched on a flashlight attached to his tactical vest, keeping his hands free to grip the halligan, and nodded at us both before stepping into the darkness of the store.

I followed just behind as backup, Isaac remaining outside until we cleared the building of any errant undead. Thankfully, there were just three. One of them had a different colour shirt to the two employees we’d brained outside, so I figured she was the manager of the store. The other two were either customers, or just people that had sought refuge in the store when the car park apocalypse started. Judging by the bite wounds on them all, the refugees had brought the plague in with them, died, killed the manager and bitten the other two employees, who managed to make their escape outside.

There was a trail of congealed blood, dark and crusted, leading to the employee entrance from the main store. Detective Carter reckons those two we brained out back must have had arteries severed, bleeding out viciously as they tried to escape and getting no further than the store’s rear before collapsing from blood loss.

I’m going to take a minute out here, before I continue with the tale. Everywhere we go, all we see is evidence of horrific, unhappy endings for everyday people, and I can’t help but wonder what started all this.

A biological weapon is out of the question. Nate was monitoring the news and radio in the early days before we met, and this was global, all going off at the same time. I doubt anyone could hit everywhere in the world, in every major town and city, and every little secluded farm or hamlet, with a biological weapon timed to perfection to go off on seven billion people. It’s just not feasible.

The same goes for a pandemic virus. That would start somewhere and roll outwards from ground zero. There would be time for many parts of the world to react with some degree of response, but this took everyone, everywhere, completely off guard.

So, what’s caused it? With all the logical explanations defied by the sheer scale and timing of this, in my mind it leaves only one alternative.

This is not of this world.

Okay, hear me out here. I don’t mean aliens, because if there was a race from beyond the stars that could do this scale of global destruction, why do it in this manner? We’d have seen some sign of any such invaders by now. This is an extinction level event, not a cull, or a conquest.

When I say not of this world, I mean something else. What, I don’t know, but all I can see in my mind’s eye is the soul-burning hate of the living, expressed by the dead in their blood-smeared features, when you’re up close with them. It goes beyond predator and prey, because a predator does what it does to survive. It’s a means to an end.

The undead, however, go almost feral when they’re close to you, baring their teeth in those deathly silent snarls of pure, undiluted hatred. It feels… personal… somehow, like the living have committed the most heinous of crimes against the dead, and this is their vengeful uprising.

I don’t know. It’s strange, but I can’t help but feel like the dead are our judge, jury, and executioner, all packaged into glassy eyed monsters that want to tear us from life as punishment for our sins. And let’s face it, humanity has a spectacular litany of sins to choose from.

Okay, back to the recounting of our tale.

It was an easy thing to take down the manager and her two undead cronies, baiting them to a ground of our choosing where we could despatch them in short order. I took one, Nate expertly downed the other two, then we dragged the bodies to one corner out of the way before retrieving Isaac.

I’ve never seen anyone look so relieved to see me. When I appeared at the door and beckoned him in, he almost ran inside. Being on his own, looking at five head-trauma zombie bodies, and knowing there were two hundred or more zeds just the other side of the building, clearly had made him a bit edgy.

The next half hour or so was a little nervy. The big glass front of the store gave Nate and I quite a view over the car park, which was at a slightly lower elevation to the store fronts. We had to keep mostly away from the glass as there were undead milling about outside the shop fronts. The last thing we needed was to be noticed.

In the beginning, Isaac was like a kid at Christmas in the store, scooting around the aisles and loading up a trolley like he’d just won the lottery. He even started comparing one brand with another, reading the boxes with a thoughtful expression, until Nate appeared like a phantom at his shoulder. His approach unseen, he spoke quietly right next to Isaac’s ear.

“Get a move on,” was all he said, but poor Isaac almost shat a whole house, never mind a brick, when Nate breathed beside him. He soon got a move on.

That’s when shit started to go sideways.

A bump drew our attention to the glass doors at the shop front. An undead woman had smacked against the glass like a pigeon, leaving a dirty smudge from the mass of filth and dried blood smeared around her face. Within seconds, two more were beside her, walking into the glass. Then three more. Then… oh shit.

Nate started hurrying Isaac up. As I watched, more undead were drawn to the woman at the glass, as though she was tapping