The Alt Apocalypse: Books 1-3 Read online

  “Is there anyone else?” she asked. “Or are you it?”

  He shook his head but must have stolen a glance at the building where his men had gone. Because the one now holding his radio spoke up and pointed to the ground leading into the dorm.

  “There are footprints,” he said. “A lot of them. There are more people. Not just him.”

  The woman jabbed the barrel into the side of his head again. “How many?”

  Like he was going to tell her. Like he was a snitch, a rat. No way. He’d done his time in a cell and his time in a tent on the beach. He would die with his lips sealed.

  And then he did. A bright flash and a deafening bang were the last things Clint heard. His world went from ubiquitous gray to all-consuming black and he was free.

  ***

  Dub was on Michael’s heels as they bounded up the first flight of stairs. Keri was a few steps behind, using the rail to propel her upward. The sounds of their heavy breathing and footfalls on the concrete echoed through the stairwell.

  Dub pulled his mask from his face. It gathered at his neck, scratching against his sweaty scruff. He broke the hushed cadence of their silent climb. “When this is over,” he said between breaths, “I need to know why you killed that guy.”

  Michael stole a glance back at Dub as he rounded the corner from one flight to the next, his palm spinning on the rounded steel finial. He nodded and kept huffing upward, the strain on his face evident as he tried to take two steps at a time.

  Dub kept pace and checked on Keri as he rounded the same flight. She’d slid her goggles onto her forehead. Her mask was around her neck. Her face was flushed, rosy at her cheeks, but she wasn’t as winded as Michael looked or Dub felt.

  She’d been better about keeping some sort of athletic regime since the attacks. Dub reminded himself he needed to do a better job of that. When this was over, after he’d figured out why Michael had fired two shots into the unarmed man who was clearly dying of radiation poisoning, he’d talk to Keri about staying fit. Or getting fit. He strode up the next flight of stairs, two steps at a time, acutely aware he was trying to distract himself from the task at hand.

  Up ahead, on the fifth floor and likely attacking their room, were five marauders bent on taking from them what was rightfully theirs. As they neared the floor, all of them swallowing and panting to control their breathing, they slowed.

  They stepped more lightly on the treads and held their ground at the stairwell’s exit into the hallway onto the fifth floor. Dub’s mind flashed to the hospital and the sad, sick remnant of a human being who’d crawled and wailed along the ward’s corridor. It echoed in his mind as if it were there. Keri nudged him, bringing him back to the moment.

  “You hear that?” she asked.

  Dub refocused and heard a rhythmic pounding. It was fists on doors. And then a gunshot. It was muted but recognizable. One of the men was armed and had unloaded a shot. Another shot blasted through the noise of the pounding.

  Michael reached for the handle and turned it. “We gotta go,” he said, and swung open the heavy door. As soon as he stepped into the hallway, he lifted the handgun, leveled it with two hands, and fired. The weapon popped two, three, four times, and hot casings clinked into the air. One of them caught Dub on his neck as he slid into the hallway.

  He ignored it and focused on the three men visible in front of him and only feet away, backlit by the daylight seeping through the window at the end of the hall. One of them was slumped against a wall. A second had his hands in the air, his eyes wide with fear and resignation. Another was stumbling forward, trying to lift his weapon and take aim.

  Michael took a fifth shot. It missed the target, which was ambling awkwardly forward. A sixth shot hit the man’s shoulder, but he kept coming. Michael tried another shot, but the weapon didn’t fire.

  Without thinking, Dub, still armed, dove forward and aimed for the man’s gun. He caught him on the side and tackled him to the ground, wrestling the weapon free and tossing it blindly back toward Michael before pinning the target. The moment he had control of him, he felt a heavy hit on the back of his head. His vision blurred as a second punch stung the side of his head.

  Dazed, and his ears ringing, he collapsed on top of the man he’d pinned, vaguely aware that man was now dead.

  Beneath the ringing and the throbbing pulse at his temples, he felt pressure on his back, heard a pair of muted pops, and the pressure was gone.

  Farther down the hall, there was shouting and more muted pops of gunfire. He closed his eyes, understanding at some level how stupid he’d been not to simply put a bullet in the stumbling gunman as he lost consciousness.

  ***

  “You’re a freaking moron,” Keri muttered under her breath, rolling Dub onto his back. He was out cold. “Gallant. And moronic.”

  She stayed low, using the pile of three marauder bodies to provide cover as she tried to take aim at the pair of men at the opposite end of the hall. The body closest to her was the one she’d killed, the man feigning surrender who’d attacked Dub with a flurry of punches to his head. She’d shot him twice.

  Michael was crouched next to her, with Dub’s limp body flat on the carpet between them. One of the men outside their door at the end of the hall was firing shots at them.

  “How many rounds could he have?” she asked Michael.

  He was pressed to the floor, waiting for the end of the volley to return fire. He shook his head as if to tell her he didn’t have any clue.

  Both were armed and somewhat protected by the trio of bodies that jerked when freshly fired rounds slugged into them.

  “I’m not cut out for this,” Keri said, her voice cracking. Her throat tightened. Her eyes glazed with tears she couldn’t stop from welling.

  Michael reached out with one hand and gripped her arm. He squeezed it and nodded again at her. This nod told her she would be okay. He would help her.

  Dub groaned, and his body twitched. Keri leaned to his ear and whispered to him through her tears.

  “Shhh,” she said as the gunfire stopped. Her ears were ringing, but the barrage had stopped.

  She lifted her head just enough to see the gunman running toward them from the dark. His hands were empty, balled into fists. His eyes were wild, his teeth clenched. The man was only ten feet from them. Then five.

  Keri rolled onto her side, her right arm semi-trapped under the weight of her own body, and raised the handgun. Her finger found the trigger and she pulled. She pulled again. And again. Her aim was off. She knew none of her shots had hit him. They’d zipped wide.

  Somehow, the man’s expression froze for a moment as his body torqued to one side and bounced into the wall from more shots than she’d fired. His eyes narrowed, and his jaw slackened. He grabbed for his chest and dropped to one knee, his momentum carrying him forward, and smacked his chin on the floor.

  Keri turned to see Michael’s handgun smoking. She looked back down the hall. The walls and ceiling were peppered with bullet holes. He’d managed to hit the target, where she’d missed. Her hands were trembling now. A sharp, rippling chill preceded a wave of nausea coursing through her body.

  Now there was only one man left. He too was armed, Keri now saw. He was also trapped, pinned between the end of the hallway and Keri and Michael.

  Dub groaned again, calling Keri’s name.

  ***

  Barker wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his arm while keeping his grip on the rifle. Outside his door, the pounding had stopped. The pair of bullet holes above the locking mechanism were ineffective in their efforts to ply open the only thing standing between him and however many men were coming for him.

  He inched toward the door, lowering the front end of the rifle waist high. The wafting scent of the outdoors caught his nose when he inhaled. He glanced behind him and saw the thin layer of ash coating everything close to the shattered window and suddenly noticed how much colder it was in his room than it had been minutes earlier. He wiped a fresh s
heen of perspiration from his forehead and shuddered.

  Barker reached for the doorknob at the same moment it rattled from the heavy fist of someone on the other side. He jerked back and raised the rifle, drawing it tight to his shoulder and off his cheek.

  “Barker?” the voice on the other side called. “Barker, it’s me, Michael. Open up.”

  Confusion swelled in his cluttered mind. He held his finger on the outside of the trigger guard but took a step back. A bead of sweat dripped into his eye.

  “Michael?”

  “I’ve got Keri and Dub. Let us in.”

  Barker hesitated. “Michael?” he said again.

  “Yes,” Michael said. “Open up, dude.”

  Barker stood motionless for a moment, too afraid to move. Then he realized he was holding his breath and exhaled. The tension in his neck and shoulders relaxed. He lowered the rifle and took two large steps forward and cranked open the handle, simultaneously unlocking the door.

  Michael was standing there, the side of his face glowing from the opaque white light from the window to his left. His clothes were stained with dark red and ringed with sweat, his eyes wide with fright. He was rubbing the top of his head with one hand, the other was at his side, holding a pistol he tapped against his leg.

  “Where are Keri and Dub?” asked Barker.

  Michael stepped inside, sliding past Barker and moving to the window. He placed the gun on the chest of drawers and collapsed onto the bottom bunk.

  Barker spun back to the door and took a tentative step into the hallway. He had trouble making sense of what he saw. It was a macabre scene cast in the grays of ambient window light. There were bodies on the floor. There was blood. His chest tightened as his vision swept across the carnage.

  He took a step and then another, staggering along the corridor. He extended his arm and steadied himself against the wall to his left. A slideshow of horrors clicked through his mind. He’d killed people. He’d actually taken men’s lives. Shot them with a rifle and stolen what time they had left. His friends had clearly done the same.

  They were teenagers only two years removed from high school. They weren’t equipped for this. Nobody was, really, but especially young adults with no military history or backgrounds dipped in violence.

  None of them had come from the mean streets. None of them, as far as Barker knew, had lived in abusive homes. They’d led privileged, if not historically typical, lives.

  Now there were bullet holes in the walls and ceilings of their dormitory. There was blood on the floor. There were dead men piled on top of one another like some sick photograph he’d seen in mid-twentieth-century history books. His eyes found a wide smear of dark red on the floor in front of him, and his mind snapped to the hospital and the living corpse he and Dub had seen.

  He wanted to puke.

  “Barker?” came a soft voice from the pile of dead bodies.

  His eyes snapped to the pile. His pulse quickened. He thought he was hearing things, that ghosts were calling to him. He spread his fingers on the wall, searching for something to hold.

  “Barker? Are you okay?”

  Then he saw her through the gray. It was Keri. She was on the floor beyond the bodies, sitting on her heels. She was holding something in her lap. Her goggles were on her forehead above her eyes.

  Barker dragged his fingertips across the uneven texture of the wall and tentatively walked toward her. His body blocked the light pouring in from behind him, casting a shadow that made it more difficult to see where he was stepping. He stopped short of the pile. How many bodies were there? Three? The tangle of arms and legs made it hard for him to count, to distinguish one body from the next. His eyes drifted from the tangle to Keri’s lap. He was now close enough to see what she held in her lap. Dub. She was stroking the hair from his face, absently running her fingers through it over and over again. The top half of his body was propped onto her legs. Barker couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

  “Is he…?” Barker swallowed the end of the sentence, worrying that if he said it aloud, it would make the words true.

  She blinked and looked down at her boyfriend. She stopped stroking his head and placed a hand on his cheek. She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “He’s alive. He’s hurt, but he’s okay, I think.”

  Barker waved his hands across the hall, jabbing his hands at the bodies strewn haphazardly from one end of it to the other. He struggled to find the words and shook his head, blurting out the only thing he could think to say.

  “What happened?” he asked, not recognizing his own voice.

  Keri’s chin trembled. She was rocking now. She shook her head, her glistening eyes searching as much for the answer to the question as they were surveying the hall.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was so fast. So loud. I…I think I killed more people.”

  Barker leaned into his hand on the wall, letting the pressure support his weight. He exhaled loudly, sighing such that his whole body sagged.

  It was one thing to shoot people from a distance, as he’d done from his room. It was like a video game. The results were absent sensation or emotion. There wasn’t the sound of the bullets piercing their flesh, the thud and crack of their bodies collapsing to the floor. There wasn’t the smell of their body reacting to the pain, the fear they were taking their final breaths.

  Here, though, it was inescapable. It was close. It was intimate.

  “More people?” he asked.

  She tilted her head and nodded toward the outside. Her body was still rocking back and forth.

  “I…I killed a man who was trying to kill Dub,” she said. “Shot him. Right there.”

  A wave of exhaustion washed over Barker. He knew it was the adrenaline leaving his body, bringing him back down. He pressed his shoulder into the wall and slid down to the floor.

  They sat there in silence for what felt like an hour but might have only been minutes. Barker didn’t know what to say. For the first time in a long while, he couldn’t think of anything worth verbalizing. He’d always had something to say, something snarky or approaching humorous. He’d never been at a loss for words. He opened his mouth a couple of times but couldn’t speak.

  He just wanted to sleep. He wanted to dream. He wanted to escape the waking nightmare he and his friends were living and that had likely killed their families. Even if those family members were alive, they’d never see them again. They were too far away. Thousands of miles and, in his case, an entire continent separated them. He closed his eyes and thought about Wilmington. He imagined the cool breeze riding the surf onto the soft, wet sand of Topsail Beach. He envisioned riding shotgun in a convertible across the bridge to Figure Eight Island. He pictured the spray of salt water hitting his chest and face as he rode a board behind a Boston Whaler, bouncing on the wake as he crossed from one side of the wash to the other. He recalled the warmth of the sun on his shoulders during the day and the sensation of a sunburn stinging against the stiff sheets in his bed at night.

  He took a deep breath and held it in his lungs, the foul stench of the hallway filling his nostrils and bringing him back to the present. He opened his eyes and focused on a bullet hole in the wall directly across from him. At the same moment Michael appeared from their dorm room.

  Barker watched his friend march toward him with purpose. He held a radio in his hand.

  “I got a hold of them,” Michael said, stopping a foot from Barker’s boots. “They’re getting close.”

  “Who?” asked Barker.

  Michael’s face crinkled with confusion. His eyebrows drew together above his narrowed eyes. “The rescuers. I talked to Victor. They’ll be here in a few hours.”

  “What do we do then?” asked Barker, still in a fog.

  “We get our crap together,” said Michael. His voice was mechanical, like he was detached from everything that had happened. “We make sure we’re ready to go when the time comes.”

  Keri shook free of whatever trance had hel
d her silent. “What about the others?”

  Michael shrugged. “What others?”

  “The other kids on campus,” she said. “There are a few others on campus, right? Are we leaving them here?”

  “There’s nobody,” said Michael. “Everybody’s gone. Maybe there are some kids over in Sproul. And I saw a few last week in Hedrick. But that’s it.”

  “What about them?” she asked. “Do they come with us?”

  Michael took another step forward. His knuckles were white from the tightness of the grip with which he held the radio. He held it out and wiggled it. “They didn’t invite anyone else,” he said. “They invited us. We found the radio. We talked with them. They’re coming for us. They’re not coming for anyone else.”

  Michael pulled back his shoulders and lifted his chin. He motioned toward the space beyond the hallway, waving his arm toward the plaza outside. “Everybody else is on their own. We’re all on our own. This world isn’t getting better. It is what it is. Those students out there aren’t our responsibility. We aren’t theirs either.”

  Barker thought about what his friend was saying. It was harsh. It was cold. And it was true. There was no magically happy Hollywood ending. Hollywood didn’t exist anymore as far as he knew.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sunday, August 10, 2025

  DAY FIFTY

  Westwood, California

  Dub shrugged the pack onto his shoulders and winced. His head still ached, though it was better than it had been the day before. He looked up toward the sky, thankful for once the sun was a muted smudge hiding behind the omnipresent cauldron of swirling clouds.

  “Are you okay?” asked Victor, the soft-spoken but confident man with whom they’d been communicating on the radio. He’d gone from one person to another, checking their gear and their state of mind. Dub was last.

  “I’m fine,” said Dub, offering a weak smile. “Thanks.”

  Victor put a hand on his shoulder and locked eyes with Dub. “Your girlfriend…Keri, is it?”

  Dub nodded and glanced at Keri. She was talking to the leader of the group, an athletic woman called Gilda.