Decimated: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 3) Read online

  Decimated

  Taken World - Book Three

  Flint Maxwell

  Copyright © 2018 by Flint Maxwell

  Cover Design © 2018 by Carmen DeVeau

  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.

  For my mom

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  Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

  Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

  1

  Fire

  The sky burned.

  Somewhere in a bunker or in a control room, a button was pressed, keys were turned, codes punched in, and because of these few simple acts, the ruination of the world was confirmed.

  None of the survivors would know if it was an accident or a deliberate action; all they would know for certain was that things would get worse. And things would change.

  Forever.

  Moments before the bombs would go off, and a month after the events that transpired in downtown Cleveland, Logan Harper sat on the stone steps of Ironlock, looking out at the guard-towers. There were two of them, just beyond what would’ve been the exercise yard. Past the fences, which were made of sturdy steel and topped with barbed wire (not that it mattered much), was a dense forest of trees as black as the Lucifer’s heart. Sometimes, you could hear things moving in those trees—branches snapping, leaves rustling, trenches ground out by some giant monster’s foot. Growls, too…deep, guttural growls and moans and screams from some mutated thing that was almost human.

  Logan slept worse and worse these nights, his mind heavy with guilt and anxiety, but he would rather hear these sounds from the forest than the laughter he heard in his head; the laughter that belonged to the old woman named Annette, the old woman who’d worshipped the monsters as gods. He’d heard that same laughter after he’d thrown her to the monsters from the platform; it was the same laughter he had heard when the large spiders and the thing that Jane called a ‘troll’ ripped her limb from limb.

  But, on this night, in the utter darkness, Logan heard no sounds from the forest…and that made him uneasy. He scratched at the goosebumps on his left arm, then lifted up the small bottle of Jägermeister he’d taken from the food store with the same hand he used to scratch. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but sometimes a nip from the green bottle soothed his fraying nerves. The stuff tasted good, too. If Jane wasn’t sleeping now, she’d slap the bottle out of his hand and say something about how stupid it was for him to be willingly consuming poison, because alcohol was poison after all, wasn’t it? And then he’d be tempted to bring up the fact that she’d been smoking again; he could smell it on her clothes and her breath and in her hair. But he wouldn’t bring it up because he loved his wife with all his heart, and there was no point in fighting with her over something as frivolous as smoking cigarettes. If the end of the world and the arrival of the monsters proved anything, it was that life was shorter now; you really had to take advantage of it while you could. Every day in this wasteland was both a blessing and a curse.

  He took another swig from the bottle, loving the way the alcohol burned in his mouth, let it sit on his tongue for a moment, taking in all the flavor, then swallowed and said, “Screw it,” and downed the rest.

  Almost instantly, his head started swimming. He’d skipped dinner that night, and without food in his stomach, he guessed he would be getting pretty drunk pretty soon. But that was okay. Maybe it’d knock him out, and he’d actually get some sleep.

  Turned out that that wouldn’t be the case. He was looking down at the empty bottle as the sky brightened from the east…and then from the south. Confusion took hold until he heard the first immense—but distant—BANG!

  From the guard tower, Mark flipped on the lamp, but its light was blotched out by the light in the sky. Then the ground shook violently.

  Logan, standing up now on the stone steps, lost his balance. The Jägermeister bottle pitched from his grip and shattered on the walkway. The shards glittered like green diamonds in the light. He almost fell, had to grab the banister so he wouldn’t.

  Then came another BANG! This one was louder than the first, and it did more than shake the ground; it fractured it, the way the ground had fractured six months ago in Woodhaven, after the voids erupted.

  A wave of heat, like a flash fire, rippled through the air. Sweat popped up all over Logan’s skin. He was trying to move from the spot he seemed stuck in, trying to get into the doorway—Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do during an earthquake?

  But this was more than an earthquake.

  Another BANG! from the north, from Cleveland; one from the south. Logan turned. That was the direction of Stone Park, his former hometown.

  He needed to go inside, he needed to go to his wife and take her far from here, somewhere safer.

  On his second step, which proved as difficult as the first, the ground split open, creating a wide chasm behind him. The noise the breaking earth made was what he imagined a Boeing 747 crashing into a speeding train might sound like.

  He lost his balance and fell to his knees, gashing his jeans and his skin wide open. The blood stood out starkly in the bright white light above. In front of him, the trees toppled. The fence was gone, taken out by the hot wind or fallen into the chasm. And the guard towers, both of them, crumbled. Mark had been crushed.

  Logan’s lungs burned. He began coughing, tasting a terrible poison on his tongue.

  Another BANG!, this one muffled—by distance or by the fact that Logan’s ears felt like they were bleeding and he was at least partially deaf, he didn’t know.

  Jane-Jane-Jane-Jane— Gotta get inside and get to Jane.

  As he clambered up the stone handrail—the ground now in ruins the way he had come—the outer wall cracked above him, and a loose stone caught him in the side of the head.

  Blinding pain.

  For the moment, that darkness he had grown so used to came back.

  Ironlock, a once abandoned prison, now a home for eighteen survivors of the apocalypse, began to crumble.

  2

  Recovery

  Rough hands jolted him back to consciousness. He opened his eyes and saw Jane.

  He focused on her. Her face was smeared with soot and dirt; her oversized sleep shirt was ripped, one side hanging in tatters, and a bit of blood trickled down the side of her head, from one of her ears. That was when the heavy reality of the situation hit him like a semi-truck.

  He sat up, but too fast. His head spun with the movement and thumped with steady pain. He put his fingers on the side that had been hit by the falling stones, and when he pulled them away, they were sticky and red with blood.

  “Shit,” he mumbled, looking back at his wife. “What happened?”

  It was mostly a rhetorical question… He could guess what happened. The simple fact of the matter was that he didn’t want to.

  “They’re stuck, Logan.” Jane’s face looked sunburned.

  On the
air—the increasingly warm air—he smelled fire and smoke. Dimly, as if at the end of a very long tunnel, he heard screams. These were screams of pain and anguish. Jane offered her hand. He took it and felt that it was wet with a mixture of sweat and blood. His legs were weak, and he almost pitched over, probably would have if Jane hadn’t caught him.

  A good portion of the two hundred and fifty pounds he’d weighed five or so months ago was gone. Lack of food, lack of sleep, and an increase in physical exertion had been the cause of that. He was down probably thirty pounds, maybe more, and you could see it in his face: the way his cheeks sank in, the way his jawline was razor sharp, but in a decomposing-corpse way instead of like a model or movie star. You could also run your hands along his side and feel his ribs. Jane didn’t like that much, he could tell, but had he not lost some of his mass, she wouldn’t have been able to hold him up when he tipped over. For that, he was grateful.

  “I can’t get them out. The stone—it’s too heavy,” Jane was saying.

  The people of Ironlock, over the last months, had become Logan Harper’s family. Now, in the span of a few minutes, they were gone, taken from him.

  “Brad?” he asked. “Devin and Regina? Grease? Billy and Greg? Manny?”

  Jane shook her head after each name, and Logan started feeling dizzy.

  Pinch yourself, Logan, he thought. Wake up from this nightmare.

  But he knew it wasn’t a nightmare. The sensations were too vivid. The blood, the stark redness of it; the fiery orange that the sky, after having been dark for so long, had taken on; the destroyed watchtowers and the parted, broken ground…and now the prison—his home—ruined, too.

  “We have to save them,” he said.

  Jane squeezed his hand tightly and smeared blood on his fingers. Then they plunged into the destruction.

  The lights had cut out in the compound, and there were no emergency backups, so the place was nearly dark, except for a smattering of small flames from the fires that had caught in the corridors.

  Logan plunged over deadfalls of rock and grit. The air was thick with dust, and he had to cover his mouth with one hand. His other hand, his left, gripped Jane’s. He had known this place well, but the destruction had rendered it an almost entirely different landscape. He wasn’t sure if he was in the cafeteria, where the eighteen survivors of Ironlock would share their meals every night around eight, or if he was heading toward their quarters. It was like a sense of strong vertigo had overtaken him.

  They came upon a pile of rubble. Logan stopped, feeling his heart crawl up into his throat and form a lump there. A small, pale hand stuck out from the stones like a wilted flower. Jane gasped and shuddered. Logan, tears stinging his eyes—not caused by the heavy smoke in the air—turned and hugged his wife tight to his chest.

  There was no telling whom that hand belonged to. It could’ve been a child’s or a woman’s. In Logan’s mind, faces of possibility swam. Could have been Sandra Robinson or her seven-year-old son Theo; maybe it was the teenaged girl, Melody, who always had ear buds in her ears; or Kim Tran, who’d lost both her husband and her son at the outset of the Ravaging.

  Logan shook his head. He didn’t want to think about who that hand belonged to.

  “Can’t we help them?” Jane asked. Tears coursed down her cheeks, cutting tracks in the soot and dirt. “Can’t we?”

  The hand remained unmoving. If Logan had to guess, whoever was under all those rocks was crushed. He shook his head. Even if they were able to move the fallen wall from the body, he was pretty sure it would be futile.

  Jane buried her face in Logan’s chest. He kissed her atop the head. If only they could just stay like this, in each other’s arms, all would be okay.

  They parted, and Logan took his wife’s hand again. Staring straight ahead, the both of them went down the corridor. At a T-junction, they took a left toward the stairs that led up to their quarters. From above, screams radiated outward, drowning out the steady roar of the flames and the crackling of wood and dry wall and tile from the main corridor off the back entrance.

  Logan paused at the foot of the steps. They were broken and jagged, like crooked fangs of one of the monsters outside.

  “Stay here,” he told Jane. “I’ll be back.”

  Jane, tears still falling down her face, frowned at him. “You’re not leaving me here,” she replied. “I’m helping. Dammit, Logan.”

  “No. Go outside.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. Her mouth puckered and she arched an eyebrow.

  He grabbed her hand. The blood was already starting to dry. “I can’t lose you again. After Cleveland—” He shook his head. “That was too close, Jane.”

  Her stern expression lightened slightly—and that was saying something, considering the screams and the sounds of destruction all around them.

  “I know, Logan. I can’t lose you, either. But we’re better together.”

  Pushing past him, she mounted the steps, easily avoiding the cracks in the stone and upturned bricks. Logan sighed, shaking his head. All he could do was follow her. So he did.

  At the top of the corridor, cells stretched along the left side of the walkway. The ceiling had cracked and fallen in. Rocks and twisted metal cluttered the iron grating. Some of the iron had fallen through, unable to bear the force of the weight.

  This wasn’t Logan and Jane’s block—theirs was on the opposite side. This was the side Devin and Regina Johnson stayed in, as well as Kim Tran, Sandra Robinson and her son Theo, Billy and Gregg. Logan knew all of the people here pretty intimately.

  “I’ll take down there,” Logan said. “Start at the beginning.”

  Jane nodded. They split up, Logan bounding over the iron grated walkway, which creaked and groaned beneath his weight. There were no fires up here, thank God, but the rocked foundation had done a number on the second story’s structure.

  In front of him was a gap about eight or so feet wide. He stopped just at the edge and sized it up, then he backpedaled to leave room for speed. His heartbeat hammered the inside of his chest, like a caged wild animal that wanted out. He did his best to ignore this, to ignore the fear trying to seize his muscles and joints.

  With a great burst, he took off, clearing the eight-foot gap easily enough, but when he landed on the opposite side, the metal gave beneath him. He scrambled to the left and caught hold of the bars to cell thirteen. The hole in the walkway opened wider, maybe about twenty feet. Logan looked at it wildly, not believing what was happening. He pulled himself into the cell.

  Billy was in the corner. His knees were tucked to his chest at an impossible angle, face covered in dust, blood soaking his shirt.

  “Hey,” Logan said, panting. “You all right?” Stupid question. Of course he’s not all right. No one’s all right.

  Billy didn’t answer.

  The boy was dead.

  Where was Gregg? He knew they shared a cell. Space wasn’t exactly limited in Ironlock, especially with less than a couple dozen people inhabiting the place, but blood usually stuck with blood.

  “Where is…?” Logan began, but then he saw.

  Stark brightness was falling through the ceiling. A chunk of the stone above had been blown open, and the cell was lit up. Halfway under the bottom bunk lay a pair of legs…and a pool of blood. Logan leaned forward and looked closer. As soon as the brutality of what happened settled in, he wished he hadn’t.

  The ceiling had fallen directly on Gregg’s head. The lump still lay in the gore, red blood and gray brains and pieces of bone from Gregg’s cranium.

  The last bit of courage that had been infused in Logan fleeted. He felt weak all over again. Still, he had to move. There were others yet.

  I hope.

  He shimmied back in the opposite direction. Cells fourteen through seventeen were empty. In cell eighteen, Daryl Marshall was dead; he looked like he’d gone peacefully. If Jane was here, being the nursing student she had been before the end of the world, Logan figured she’d tell him Da
ryl died of a heart attack.

  Even though he wasn’t religious, Logan crossed himself and said a few words for Daryl. There was no way he’d be able to drag the dead man out of the cell—not now, at least, while World War III was going on outside. So this would have to be Daryl Marshall’s final resting place.

  Cell nineteen was empty. That was good. Usually, Kim Tran slept there. He hoped she’d gotten out.

  But cell twenty…cell twenty was the one Logan had been holding his breath for. It was the one Devin and Regina called home.

  He stopped just outside the cell, too afraid to look. Everything inside of him told him to turn around and go back to Jane. He didn’t want to see whatever was in cell twenty.

  But he went anyway. He had to. Devin and Regina were not just friends, they were family.

  The bunkbed had fallen over. Their mattresses lay scattered in the cell. Books all over the floor, too. A Bible, War and Peace, some other military history books. It was so dark inside, Logan could hardly read the titles.

  “Logan?”

  The voice startled him. It was so dark, he hadn’t even seen Regina Johnson in the corner of the room. In her arms was a figure wrapped in a blanket.

  “Regina,” he said. His head began spinning, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. “Is he...?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. But very close.”

  Moving on legs that didn’t feel like his own, Logan clambered over to the bunkbed, bent at the knees, and lifted it up against the wall. He took a mattress off the bottom bunk and straightened it on the floor.

  “Put him here.”

  Countless movies—and his own wife—had told him you weren’t supposed to move someone who’d been in an accident, or was hurt very badly, but Devin Johnson would fare better on a mattress, on a bed, than in the shaking arms of his distraught wife.