Sever, p.1
Sever, page 1
SEVER
Washington, Dead City
Book Three
Brian Parker
A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK
Published at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-68261-114-2
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-115-9
SEVER
Washington, Dead City Book 3
© 2016 by Brian Parker
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Christian Bentulan
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Permuted Press
109 International Drive, Suite 300
Franklin, TN 37067
permutedpress.com
Novels by Brian Parker from Permuted Press
Enduring Armageddon
Washington, Dead City
Gnash (Book One)
Rend (Book Two)
Sever (Book Three)
Additional works available by Brian Parker
The Path of Ashes
A Path of Ashes
Fireside
Dark Embers
The Collective Protocol
Origins of the Outbreak
Battle Damage Assessment
Zombie in the Basement
Self-Publishing the Hard Way
But your dead will live, Lord; their bodies will rise—let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy—your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead. Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until his wrath has passed by.
~ Isaiah 26:19-20 (NIV)
CONTENTS
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Interlude
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Epilogue
About the Author
PROLOGUE
15 September, 2256 hrs local
Carroll Park
West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The rain splattered against Marcus’ window screens and separated into hundreds of tiny droplets before it fell to the old hardwood floor. “Goddamn it, can’t I just get a drink and some fresh air in peace?”
“What’d you say?”
“Nothing, dear. I’ll get some paper towels and clean up the floors.” The old man muttered under his breath as he walked from the study into the kitchen. The worn wooden floors had been in the row home for almost a hundred years and Marcus was sure that they’d seen worse than the little bit of mist that the rain outside had deposited on them.
He was irritated about the water on the floors. The cooler weather was a welcome relief to how hot this summer had been and all that he wanted to do this evening was to drink his bourbon while he assembled his latest scale model. He’d built models for almost forty years; he’d picked up the hobby as a young man in Vietnam. The doctors at that shitty little firebase clinic had given him his very first model—an old sailing ship—as a way to help him deal with the battle fatigue, which is what they used to call PTSD in his day.
It worked. The focus required to place those tiny parts exactly where they needed to go before the glue dried helped him to clear his mind of the horrible sights that he’d seen on a daily basis while his platoon was out on patrol. Young, dumb and full of cum, he’d extended for another tour after only three months in country… Idiot. By the time his twenty-three months were up, he’d built eleven models. He’d wrapped his models proudly and carefully to ship back to his parents a couple of weeks before he outprocessed Da Nang, but the box was lost and he never saw them again.
For years after the expiration of his enlistment, he’d suffered what the doctors at the Veterans’ Administration called Post-Vietnam Syndrome. It was just another name for the same problem that veterans had experienced for thousands of years. Doctors seemed to like coming up with new phrases to describe the same problem: Shell shock, battle fatigue, PTSD. They were at a loss as to what to do with the outwardly healthy young man who couldn’t hold a job and had explosive outbursts of anger for no apparent reason.
Marcus met his wife Alice at the VA clinic in Philadelphia in ‘77. She was there with her brother who suffered from strange breathing problems after he returned from the jungle in Laos. He’d formed a friendship with old Sam and the man introduced Marcus to his kid sister. They began seeing each other on a regular basis and Alice helped him rekindle his love of model building.
Turns out, the old sawbones in Khe San knew what he’d been talking about. Within a couple of months, Marcus’ nerves had calmed enough that he was able to hold down a steady job at the bank as a security guard and his troubling dreams visited him less often. Ever since then, he’d been a true hobbyist, he’d even appeared in the late 80s in a hobby magazine that did a story on him and all the models that he gave away to orphanages when he was done building them.
Marcus had been looking forward to starting a model of an Army Humvee—a High-Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle in military jargon—tonight after his drink. It was going to be the first of four Humvees, which would become the centerpieces in a new diorama that he planned to build for the National Guard armory’s main entrance. The scene was going to depict the battalion’s firefight at the Sadr City marketplace in 2006 where two of the unit’s soldiers lost their lives and a platoon sergeant earned a Silver Star for valor.
“And Marcus?” Alice called after him.
He sighed and answered, “Yes, dear?”
“Make sure that you get the windowsills too.”
“Oh, good point,” he lied. Of course he was going to wipe off the windowsills, what’d she take him for, a moron?
He unwrapped a handful of paper towels, resisting the urge to slam the roll on the counter. At least he hadn’t started with the model yet; he’d just been separating pieces from their frames. He glanced over at Alice where she sat watching one of those television reality shows while she knitted a blanket for his newest granddaughter, Meadow.
Hell of a name, Meadow, he thought. Then again, it only made sense, since his idiot son also had a daughter named Brooke. He and Michael had been on the outs for a while since the kid quit his big-time, high-paying job on Wall Street to be a full-time National Guard soldier in eastern New York.
Marcus had read all about it on the World Wide Web down at the library. They had some special program where people who were in the National Guard could work full-time for the Guard, essentially an active duty Army soldier, but they didn’t have to go through all the B.S. hassle that regular soldiers had to endure. He was a proud military supporter, but he thought that his son was throwing away the opportunity to make a lot of money in exchange for a job that he said he loved. That was the problem with kids these days. They wanted to “experience life” and had astronomical credit card limits, so they didn’t understand the value of money and what it was like not to have any. Yup, Michael was an idiot who was underwater on his mortgage, had massive credit card debt and struggled to send his two older children to private school, but he loved riding around on those damned tanks.
He walked back to the front of the house where the single window looked out onto the old neighborhood street. Marcus enjoyed gazing out that window at the children playing in the park across the street while he worked on his models. The kids, loud as they were, helped to calm him down and ease the memories that sometimes still haunted him to this day. He pushed the window down firmly into the sill and locked it securely for the night against the rain.
The old Marine’s knees popped as he bent down to wipe the tiny puddles of water off of the floor. If he’d continued to look out the window, he would have seen an army of the undead as they advanced steadily northeast under the cover of the storm, intent on making it to the heart of the city before they began their attacks in earnest.
A mostly-bald head appeared in the window right above Marcus and stared down at him for a moment before the creature pulled back a hand and smashed in the old single-pane window that the row house still maintained. Long shards of wet glass rained inside the home and fell upon poor Marcus.
He cowered on his hands and knees while the glass hit him. The wind made a hideous moaning noise as it blew through the broken window above him and something banged against the side of the house.
“What’s going on, Marcus? Are you alright?” Alice yelled from the family room.
Marcus didn’t know what had happened, but when he looked up, a man grasped frantically at the broken windowpane as he tried to pull himself inside. His feet pounded loudly as they hit the side of the house, attempting to find enough footing to leverage his way in the window that stood a full five feet above the ground outside.
Even at sixty-four years old, Marcus had a few tricks up his sleeve. He shuffled painfully across the floor, the glass cutting into his palms, until he reached the front door and he picked up the commemorative Phillies baseball bat that he kept there. He used the bat to help him to his feet and the combat veteran walked calmly over to the intruder.
“You have one chance to get out of here punk, or I’m gonna bash y
The man finally looked up at Marcus and the old man’s blood ran cold. He’d seen and done some horrible things in his youth. From the horrors of the war to the hookers of Saigon, his time in the Marines had forever left an indelible mark on his soul, but he’d never been as terrified as he was in that instant when he stared at the thing trying to enter his home.
What he’d thought was an intruder was actually a creature straight from hell. Giant patches of skin and hair were missing causing him to think that the man had a bald head originally. So much of the creature’s flesh was missing that even part of its skull shown through dully in the poor lighting of the street lamps. Where the meat still clung to its face in a semblance of its former humanity, the skin sagged away like it had been put through an old-fashioned dough stretching machine and then wrapped back around its head in a grotesque mockery of life.
Marcus could handle the sight of those horrific injuries; he’d seen similar things in Vietnam. His best friend had been on the receiving end of a basket full of grenades when a North Vietnamese sympathizer handed him a bouquet of “flowers” and pulled the pins when they were on liberty in the city of Quang Tri near Khe San. When that much ordinance goes off in such a close proximity it’s not a pretty sight.
No, the part that terrified Marcus was the eyes. The creature’s eyes were more than dead; they were desiccated—dehydrated and shriveled away to almost nothing. The disgusting, shrunken orbs rotated in the sockets as they followed his movements, like they could still take in images and process them into something that its brain could recognize and that scared the hell out of the old vet.
Marcus knew what he was looking at. He’d seen the news reports, even read stories about these things on the web. It was a zombie. They were supposed to be locked away behind The Wall in Washington, DC. What was it doing here in Philadelphia of all places?
The Marine steeled his resolve and swung with every ounce of strength that he had in his weathered body. The bat connected firmly against the creature’s face with a crunch. Bones collapsed inwards as the bat shattered the cheekbones on both sides of where its nose had once been and collapsed its maxilla, which held the zombie’s upper teeth in place.
It fell backward to the ground and Marcus caught a sobering glimpse through the vacant window. Zombies filled the entire street from his small patch of grass all the way to the fence around the park. They moved in unison, heading toward downtown.
“Alice, get upstairs. Now!” he ordered.
He moved toward the back of the house where his wife sat trying to collect up her knitting equipment. “Are you crazy, woman?” he asked as he grabbed her arm firmly without being rough.
Alice stared at him like he was a stranger. Hell, maybe he was. Maybe the old Marine that he’d tried to repress for four decades had resurfaced. “Marcus, what is wrong with you?”
“Zombies. The zombies got out of Washington and they’re here, Alice! We need to go upstairs.”
The thudding at the front window returned as the creature with the ruined face reappeared. This time, his wife had a clear view from the family room to the window in Marcus’ model-building study and the creatures in the street. She started to scream and the old man’s hand covered her mouth like a vice. “Don’t, it’ll only bring more of them. Let’s go,” he ordered.
Alice dropped her needles and yarn, running toward the center of their home where the stairs were located. Marcus followed her and shoved her gently in the rear end as she started up the steps. “Call Michael, tell him that he’s got to get that National Guard unit of his alerted.”
“Shouldn’t I call the police?”
He shook his head. “It ain’t gonna do any good. Philadelphia is lost. Call Michael first and then we can call the police if it will make you feel any better.”
“Where are you going?” she asked in alarm.
“I’m defending my home,” he replied and walked into the front room.
The creature continued to try and pull itself up through the window, even though it was clearly too high for it to do so. Marcus wondered fleetingly why it didn’t just use the stairs and open the front door. As he got closer, the thing tried pathetically to snap its teeth, but his baseball bat had ruined any chance that it ever had of biting someone again.
“Stay away from my house!” he hissed and smashed the bat down into the top of the creature’s head as it stared at him. The bat sunk several inches into its skull and the fight left the creature. He took another swing from the side just to be sure and it collapsed against the windowsill. Gravity took over and pulled the zombie through the window to the ground outside.
Marcus flattened himself against the wall and watched the horde pass by through the broken window. If this many creatures had made it all the way to Philadelphia, what did the country between here and DC look like? he wondered. Even more importantly, how did these things avoid being seen and alerting the government?
He hoped that his son would be able to get the word out to all the National Guard units. The police weren’t going to be able to stop this; they needed the Army’s big guns to put down that many of the things and they needed it fast, otherwise it would be too late.
ONE
19 September, 1418 hrs local
Nash Community College
Rocky Mount, North Carolina
Asher opened the truck door and tossed his backpack across the center console onto the passenger seat. He’d just finished a day of classes at Nash Community College, the small community college in the town where he lived. After this semester, he will have taken enough classes to earn his Associates degree and then he planned to transfer his credits to North Carolina Wesleyan College to seek a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Homeland Security.
Homeland Security, what a joke, he mused. If the American public knew what kind of shit lurked behind The Wall, there would be mass hysteria. Last spring, he’d helped the FBI with the recovery of the Charters of Freedom from behind The Wall in the nuclear wasteland once known as the District of Columbia. Now people referred to it as Washington, Dead City because everything in there was dead.
The Wall was a massive brick-and-mortar structure that had stood for almost seven years with the dual purpose of locking the zombies inside and keeping the public from accidental radiation exposure. The unintended consequence of The Wall was that it allowed the nation’s organized crime families an almost untraceable alternative to outright murder and provided them with a massive revenue stream as they robbed the abandoned banks and museums.
During the mission to recover the Charters, made up of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, he’d fought against thousands of zombies. They infested the Dead City and Baltimore area. The government told the public that there were only about ten thousand zombies trapped inside, but the truth was closer to a couple million of the fuckers running all over the place. He’d been shocked to learn the truth after a beautiful FBI agent showed up at his house one morning to recruit him for the mission.
He and Allyson Harper had a rocky start due to their strong personalities, but over the course of their train-up for the mission, they grew closer and ended up having a relationship together. Allyson was the perfect woman for him; she was smart, sexy and committed to her career. Unfortunately, that commitment had gotten her killed in early July when she went on the raid of a mob boss’ house in New York.
Asher, once known as The Kestrel in the Special Operations community, had taken her death hard. He’d known lots of good men—some of them extremely close friends—who’d died over the course of his thirty-one years in SpecOps. None of them had affected him as much as her death had. They only had a short time together, but those months had given him hope. Hope for the future with a partner who could understand his drive and some of the experiences that he’d been through. He’d even considered the possibility of starting a family with her, something that he’d never really thought about, regardless of the fact that he’d been married twice before. But she was dead and buried in her hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.
