Beneath: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 4) Read online

  Beneath

  Taken World - Book Four

  Flint Maxwell

  Copyright © 2018 by Flint Maxwell

  Cover Design © 2018 by Carmen DeVeau

  Edited by Jen McDonnell

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions email: [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work.

  This book is dedicated to the men and women of TSA, who keep the traveling public safe and secure.

  And a special thanks to LTSO Eric Mesenger for his unwavering dedication and devotion.

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  “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”

  Stephen King, 11/22/63

  1

  D.C

  Something slithered in the darkness.

  The sound this something made was like a body being dragged across the floor.

  Tyler reached out and grabbed May by the arm. In his surprise and haste, he forgot that she had broken it a month back and it still caused her a good amount of pain. He didn’t remember until his fingers brushed the cool material of the sling she wore. Too late.

  May screamed, a sound that carried in the quiet of the neighborhood that Tyler once lived in, half a year ago.

  Tyler mouthed ‘Sorry,’ feeling like the world’s biggest idiot. May, tears in her eyes, shook her head.

  The thing moved again, this time faster, the sound almost ripping.

  Tyler’s blood spiked through his veins. He began seeing stars at the edge of his vision.

  They were on a street lined with houses, each one tall and narrow. Outside of the houses were cars. Dust covered the windshields and windows. Most of them sat on flat tires or were parked just slightly askew, as if something big had knocked them off-kilter.

  Above them, the sky was black as tar. Odd-shaped clouds in a slightly lighter shade hung low and heavy like great thunderheads, brooding, threatening to burst. There was no visible moon up there, no stars, no blinking lights of a commercial airline craft preparing for a landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

  Tyler hadn’t taken a breath since he’d first heard the thing slithering in the dark. It sounded like it had come from across the street, behind them, but it also sounded like it was right there next to them, too. The way the street was set up—the houses so close together—and the way the world seemed to be devoid of almost all human life, had a way of playing tricks on one’s senses.

  May flicked her head toward the nearest house, two stories, white, with black shutters surrounding each of the five windows. The door was black, too. Leading to this door was a path of faded bricks. The front gate hung crookedly like a broken jaw. She pointed to the door. Tyler saw that it was off its hinges and the knob was missing. He imagined most of the houses were like this now, and a lump of sorrow formed in his chest like a malignant tumor. It was the same feeling that had taken hold of him a few minutes back, when he’d walked into the house his mother and grandma had shared.

  He and May had come all this way, left behind Logan, Jane, Brad, Grease, and quite possibly a fruitful existence at the place known as the Falls, only to be disappointed.

  Part of him wished he would’ve just found their bodies. At least then he would know what had happened to what was left of his family. But no. Nothing. They weren’t there. No sign of them.

  The place looked the same as it always had: a colorful African blanket hanging over the couch, pictures lining the walls (most of them of a young Tyler Stapleton), a covered platter on the kitchen table full of brownies that had gone stale a long time ago. Aside from the thin layer of dust gracing everything in the house, it was like nothing had happened at all; the world hadn’t ended, nothing had changed.

  He had half-expected to find his nana in her book room with her feet up, and a leather-bound tome resting on her lap as she took her daily mid-afternoon nap, and his mom sitting in the den, the television playing one of the countless soap operas she followed—how she could keep all the characters and storylines straight in her head, he could never comprehend.

  “Tyler!” May shouted now, snapping him out of that terrible past, and he wondered why in God’s name she would yell, when there was a creature so near—

  Her hand grabbed his arm with such force, he thought for a moment that he’d been attacked by whatever creature was out there. It seemed like May had grown claws.

  He exclaimed, grunting in pain, but the grunt couldn’t be heard.

  The creature that had been slithering around his old neighborhood was right behind him, so close he could smell the foul, alien air of impossibility and death clinging to it.

  May’s strength spurred Tyler forward, and he smashed through the door headfirst, smacking his shoulder against the wood hard enough to make one of the hinges screech. His knees clattered to the floor, the pain jolting the entirety of his bones. May landed on top of him on her good arm.

  The fog of memory was expelled from Tyler’s mind. He was alert, focused. The months spent in this ravaged world had made him into a finely-tuned machine. Slip-ups happened, yes, but it was the ability to bounce back from such slip-ups that separated the dead and mutated from the living.

  Both he and May threw their weight against the door, this time in the opposite direction. The latch caught weakly, thanks to the broken knob, but they both knew it wouldn’t last.

  The wood buckled, as whatever monster outside tried getting in, and Tyler dug his boot heel into the hardwood floor.

  The creature let out a series of mad, barking shrieks. Claws scrabbled at the door and against the house’s siding, making a noise like nails raking a chalkboard.

  “The chain,” Tyler said, looking up.

  May followed his gaze and wasted no time in reaching above and hooking it home.

  If they had been dealing with a larger monster, that chain wouldn’t have done anything—thankfully, this wasn’t a larger monster. Tyler hadn’t gotten the best look at it, especially in the darkness, but he figured it was no bigger than a Great Dane. Still, the smaller ones sometimes proved to be more vicious than those that were as big as cars and trucks. The ones even bigger than that hardly noticed humans; they roamed the ruins of America like the dinosaurs had millions of years ago.

  With the chain in place, Tyler stood up, his back still pressed against the door, and moved the closest thing to him to block the door in his stead: a couch that stretched the length of one of the living room walls. It was heavier than he expected. Had adrenaline not been coursing through his veins, there was no way he would’ve been able to move it without slipping a disc or pulling a muscle.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was aware that that was still a possibility, but he paid no attention to that small voice. This was life or death. A slipped disc healed; mutating into one of these monsters did not. That was a death sentence.

  May helped him move the couch the last few feet.

  The creature continued its mad barking as it clobbered the door over and over a
gain, making the hinges scream and the whole front of the house groan. The two humans took a step back and watched the effect the creature’s wrath would have on the structure, both holding their pistols out in front of them.

  Slowly, the madness coming from the monster waned. Its hits softened until they went from halfhearted to nonexistent.

  Tyler exhaled in relief. Part of him knew the consequences of such an attack, but another part of him didn’t want to admit it. When a creature made noises like that, it often drew more monsters to the scene. He had seen it many times before, and though some of the monsters didn’t get along and would sometimes fight among themselves, most of them were able to put their differences behind them and work together to get at the humans. All in all, they wanted the same thing: blood.

  But no monsters came to join the party tonight, because there weren’t as many as there had been before the bombs exploded all over America. That was a fact Tyler hadn’t been totally ready to believe until he and May had struck out from the Falls and traversed the wasteland. They had come upon many monstrous corpses, many deteriorating, many scorched by the government’s hellfire, and all of them equally nightmare-inducing.

  “Back door,” Tyler said.

  May shook her head. He saw that she was shaking all over, but she wasn’t shaking with fear. She shook with rage.

  “No, let’s kill it,” she said with a stern finality that was so unlike herself.

  Tyler was taken aback. He cocked his head and looked at the young girl like a scientist studying some new species of bug.

  “It’s not gone,” she continued. “It’s out there waiting for us. They’re ugly, but they’re not dumb. Most of them aren’t, anyway.”

  Of course Tyler knew she was right, but it pained him to see May like this—reduced to a warrior in a hellscape full of nightmare creatures. She was only in her early twenties; a girl like herself should be in college, studying on the weekdays and hanging out with her friends at the mall or a karaoke bar on the weekends. Smiling, having a good time. Maybe she would meet a nice guy and they’d hit it off, and then a few years down the road, they would get married and have a family of their own.

  But no.

  That would never happen now.

  Tyler’s stomach cramped with nausea. The realization that this fantasy would never come to fruition hurt him almost as much as the discovery that his mom and grandmother were gone.

  He cared for May. She was like family to him, and without her, he was sure he would’ve gone insane a long time ago. He needed her. She needed him. They needed each other.

  “No,” he said, trying to emulate the same finality present in her voice. “We need to move on. No reason to risk dying when we don’t have to.”

  But May wasn’t listening. She made a move for the door, blindingly fast, and wedged herself between the wood and the couch. Using the door for leverage, she slid the couch out of the way, just a few inches.

  May was a skinny thing—had been since Tyler met her. Their lack of a proper diet certainly didn’t help much in that department. But she pushed the heavy couch on her own all the same.

  With her bad arm, she moved the chain free. Then she slid out through the crack, into the darkness beyond.

  Tyler shook his head. “Dammit.”

  2

  Argument

  He followed her, of course. He had no choice. As much as he wanted to stay back in the relative safety of this abandoned house in the Palisades, he couldn’t. It was love that did it, love that made him plunge into the darkness with nothing but a measly handgun for protection.

  Tyler had to move the couch slightly farther from the door to squeeze through himself. The food didn’t come as plentifully these days, but he hadn’t lost as much weight as one might’ve expected. He chalked this up to middle age. He remembered learning a long time ago from his grandfather that men had the tendency to pack on the pounds around their middle. The beer belly would come whether he drank beer or not. Usually.

  ‘So might as well drink it, son!’ his grandfather had said.

  Once the couch was out of the way, he stepped over the threshold. His skin broke out in goosebumps as soon as the night air touched him. It was bitter cold; he knew it would be bitter cold, it was always bitter cold. Still, mentally preparing himself for it hadn’t done much in the way of helping.

  He had his gun raised. His heart beat at an alarming rate. Despite the cold, despite seeing his breath fogging the air in front of him, the back of his head collected sweat, and droplets rolled down his neck. He shivered.

  May was standing in front of him on the small concrete porch. Her eyes darted around the dark street. The darkness was so complete that Tyler couldn’t see the other side of the road. He could just barely make out the blur of the house’s paint. Straining, he scanned for a wink of light that would be the monsters’ own eyes. He saw none.

  “Come on, May. Let’s leave it. We gotta get out of here, back inside.”

  She whirled on him so fast that he stumbled and hit the front of the house. The corner of the mailbox burrowed into his flesh. A dull pain flared angrily on the outside of his spine.

  “And go where?” she asked—well, more like she demanded. “Back to squatting in shitty houses? Back to breaking down tables and chairs and dressers for firewood? Ever since the car broke down—”

  “That wasn’t my fault.”

  Two days before, the car they’d been gifted from the Falls had broken down. May had repeatedly told Tyler not to push it, to ease up, to let the engine rest, but the prospect of reuniting with his mother and Nana, and the constant feeling of being followed by legions of alien monsters, wouldn’t let him. They’d walked maybe twenty miles over the course of a day and a half. Tensions were high; feet were sore.

  “Whatever,” May said.

  Tyler said nothing. What could he say? She was right. The life they were living, this life on the road, was not much of a life at all. It was a life, though, and that was better than no life at all, and so much better than life as a mutated abomination.

  An image of Major Hammond flashed in Tyler’s mind. That day he climbed out of the tank, forty-eight hours after the Ravaging had officially begun, he remembered hearing that strained, almost human voice saying, ‘Killlllll me’. He remembered the mucus-like texture of the thing’s body, the tentacles flapping and dangling like useless limbs. ‘Killlllll meeeeeee.’ He understood why Hammond had been begging for death. Had he been in the man’s proverbial shoes, he would’ve begged for the same.

  Admittedly, May’s tone stung Tyler. He’d told her that she didn’t have to come with him to D.C., that she could stay behind with the others at the Falls, but he also knew she would never listen to him.

  He turned back to face the door, ready to spend another night in some stranger’s home, waiting for the meager sunlight to make its rare appearance in the following hours. Then, when it was at least semi-safe to travel, they would strike out on the road again, heading God knew where.

  “Tyler,” May said softly. “I didn’t mean that—to be mean. I’m sorry. I’m—”

  He turned to look at her, but his eyes only brushed past her shadowy figure. Something was coming out of the darkness, something that had been waiting for this opportunity.

  It was the slithering monster, and it was flying through the air, right at them.

  3

  Attacked

  The monster was, as Tyler had noticed before, about the size of a fully-grown Great Dane. It seemed to have grown four legs, as it landed in front of them with a thump. No more slithering. Its massiveness tore through the gate to the porch steps, ripping the metal bars to shreds. Its skin was covered in the same chitinous armor as the scorpion-thing Tyler had faced outside of a gas station in Ohio all those months ago, the night he met May for the first time. Tyler’s eyes scanned for a weak spot, but couldn’t find one. It was too dark, and the creature moved too fast.

  It bent all four of its legs, its dripping maw full of
serrated teeth opening as it growled. The thing meant to spring forward, meant to cross the twenty or so feet from where it had landed on the other side of the gate and take their heads off.

  Tyler raised his gun. He had learned a lot about freezing up in the past, mostly the negative effects of it. He wouldn’t freeze up now.

  Just as he pulled the trigger of his gun, May pulled hers. The sound was colossal in the quiet of the neighborhood.

  The bullet took the monster right in its open mouth. There was an explosion of dark blood, and the growling cut off as abruptly as a dead car engine. The creature reeled backward, whining, its eyes burning red and orange like smoldering coals. In reality, this shot had probably finished it off. Even Tyler had to admit how lucky it was. Had May been aiming for the monster’s open mouth? Or was it complete dumb luck?

  Tyler couldn’t say, and it certainly didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the creature was injured. Now was their chance to run—

  But May wasn’t having any of that. She pulled the trigger again just as the creature stood up on its hind legs. Blood poured from its mouth in sickening waves.

  The next shot hit it in the chest. By this time, it was closer than it had been when she first hit it. The slug drove it backward, body jerking and limbs flailing.

  A few of the broken gate’s iron bars jutted up to the sky like fangs behind it. The monster, losing its balance when the shot hit home, tumbled back and landed on one.

  Impaled.

  The creature let out a dying shriek, somehow still growling, and then its head lolled, and the smoldering light of its eyes dimmed as it died.

  May nearly collapsed. Tyler reached out and grabbed her shoulder, steadying her before she could.