I heard similar tales from western and eastern refugees. They fled inland, away from the stench of brine and blood, and the drifting islands of bloated bodies.
The military tried fighting back, but there were too many of those things claiming the coast. That’s when the plague started. It floated across the land in great, black clouds, like dust storms during the Depression. Those who breathed the stuff didn’t die. they changed. They grew gills, and fangs, and writhed like snakes, spitting venom. Feeding on each other. Soon there weren’t any more soldiers.
I heard they tried nuking Manhattan, where something big as the moon crawled out of the ocean. The missiles didn’t fire. Something shorted out all the technology, every computer on the continent. probably the planet. every piece of electronic equipment. all dead. Air Force jets fell out of the sky like dead birds. Somebody called it an electromagnetic pulse. As if the rules of the universe had shifted. In a flash, the modern world was done.
There was nothing to do but run. Hide.
Hordes of the Biters took to roaming the plains, the hills, the valleys and mountains. Those poor souls who didn’t get taken by the rolling clouds eventually got rooted out by the Biters or the worm-things that followed them around. Big, saw-toothed bastards, like leeches the size of semi-truck trailers. I saw one of the Biter hordes hit Bakersfield, saw a school bus full of refugees swallowed whole by one of those worms. Still see that in my nightmares sometimes. the faces of those kids. sound of their screams.
Whiskey helps, when I can get it.
About fifty of us from farms in the San Joaquin Valley had banded together, loaded up with guns, ammo, and canned food from Lloyd Talbert’s bomb shelter, and headed east in a convoy of old pickups and decommissioned Army jeeps. We figured out that the black clouds usually preceded the Biters, so we stayed one step ahead of them. We tried to pick up some relatives in Bakersfield or we would have avoided it altogether. Barely made it out of there, and we lost twelve good men in the process. Nobody got rescued.
It had rained for two months straight in California, nonstop ever since the Big Waves. Farther inland we went, the less rain we got. We figured out that the Biters liked the wet. they hated the dry lands, so we went on into Nevada. Thought we’d find kindred souls in Vegas.
That was a mistake.
Sin City had been smashed flat by something terrible that came out of Yucca Mountain, where they buried all that nuclear waste. We couldn’t tell what it was, but we saw it slithering through hills of rubble, rooting up corpses like a hog sniffing for truffles. We watched it for a while from a high ridge, until it raised itself up and howled at the moon. Its head was larger than a stadium, and it split open like a purple orchid lined with bloody fangs. What grew along the bulk of its shapeless body I can only call. tentacles. Looked like something from a B-movie filmed in hell. It was the Beast That Ate Vegas.
Then it belched out one of those black clouds, and slammed itself back into a sea of debris that used to be a sparkling dream of a city. This cloud wasn’t like the others. There were things inside it. flying things. maybe they were miniature versions of the Vegas-eater. We thought our vehicles could outrun the cloud, so we headed back west, until the Flyers came down on us.
I was riding in a jeep driven by Adam Ortega, a man I’d known since Iraq. We were two lone wolves who had gone through a lot of shit together and somehow came out alive. One of those Flyers swooped out of the dark and landed on his face. It smelled like fish guts. He screamed, and the beast pointed its orchid- face at me. A cluster of pinkish tongues quivered between the rows of fangs, and I raised my shotgun just in time to blow that thing to hell. My shot took Ortega’s head off. God knows I didn’t mean to do that. I was scared.
The jeep veered off the road, hit an embankment, and sent me flying. I blacked out, and when I woke up the entire convoy was in flames, every man lost beneath a mess of black-winged monsters. But they had forgotten me, at least for a few minutes.
They were good men, all of them, but there was no helping them now. Some had brought families with them. I heard women screaming. And children. Me, I’d always been alone, ever since my divorce. Farm life was lonely life, but it was good. My daddy passed away three years previously. Now that I think about it, I’m glad he went before all this happened. And that I never had kids of my own to see all this evil shit coming down. But some of my friends had loved ones they weren’t about to leave behind, so there they were. deep in the middle of the shitstorm with the rest of us. I hid in a ditch and watched a few stragglers try to escape, but the Flyers tore away from carcasses like flocks of ravens and flapped after them.
I still had my.45 Desert Eagle and knew I was probably dead anyway. I could run, maybe live a while longer. But one of the women trying to outrun those things was pregnant. So I started picking off the Flyers chasing her, one by one. A man ran behind her, and the things took him down. He screamed her name and I knew who she was.
“Evelyn!”
That was Johnny Colton and his wife. They hadn’t been married more than a year.
Johnny’s blood spouted as the damned things tore his heart out, then set to work on his face.
I ran toward Evelyn, shooting two more Flyers out of the air. I’m a pretty good shot. Got a lot of practice in the Mideast. Kept up my skills at the shooting range over the years.
One of them landed on her back and she fell not twenty feet from me. I was afraid of shooting her, so I came at it with the hunting knife from my boot. Sliced it clean in half, but its blood was some kind of acid, splashed across my left cheek. burned like the Devil’s piss. Still have one helluva scar from that.
I helped Evelyn to her feet, and we ran together. She cried out for Johnny, but I wouldn’t let her look back. The black cloud was bearing down on us, blotting out the stars and moon. I smelled the stink of the ocean rolling over the desert. the smell of dead and rotted marine life.
I grabbed a satchel of gear from the overturned jeep, and we took off into the desert. The Flyers must have forgot us after a while. They had a big enough feast back on the highway.
As the sun came up, red and bloated in the purple sky. it had never looked right since the Big Waves. we came into Pahrump. The tiny town was deserted, and corpses littered the streets. We saw they had been gnawed up pretty good, probably by the Flyers. or something just as bad. There wasn’t a single living soul there. But we did find a good supply of canned food, bottled water, a gun shop full of ammo and a few rifles, and some other odds-and-ends.
It was Evelyn who told me about the old silver mine on the edge of town. She was a Nevada girl before she married Johnny.
“Maybe we can hide there. in the mine tunnels,” she said. “Maybe they won’t go underground. Those mines are pretty deep. We’ll be safe down there, Joe.”
I didn’t believe we would, but I looked into her big, blue eyes, crystalline with tears shed for her dead husband, for her dead relatives in San Joaquin. for the whole damn world gone to hell.
“Yeah,” I lied to her. “We’ll be safe down there. Good idea.”
We loaded wheelbarrows with provisions, water, guns, blankets, and I picked up an old ham radio from the gun store. I didn’t expect it to work, but it was something. Something to pin our hopes on. When the world is ending, you’ll take anything you can get.
Evelyn was five months along when we moved into the mine. We weren’t exactly comfortable down there in the belly of the cool earth, but it was as close as we were going to get. Even a blanket laid over hard stones feels good when you’re half-dead from exhaustion and worry. She tended the wound on my face, and I told her hopeful lies to settle her nerves. I said this would all blow over and things would be back to normal in a few months. I didn’t believe a word of it. Maybe she did, or at least she wanted to.