Fall of Man (Book 1): The Break Read online

  “Deader than a doorknob, that one,” the Voice said.

  Shut up!

  “You need me. Admit it.”

  I haven’t needed you for years. I don’t need you now!

  “We’ll see about that!”

  Cole scrambled to his feet, fighting the temptation to throw up at the sight of the girl’s face as it disappeared under the onslaught. The man didn’t stop. He didn’t look like he wanted to stop or even realized he was just demolishing mush now, because the bone and muscle and flesh had been reduced to little more than—

  Screams.

  Screams from all around him.

  Cole turned, re-locating the same homeless man that had been attacking the one in the three-piece suit earlier. He had moved on to another victim—a woman pushing a grocery cart out of a nearby store. She was screaming as the man dragged her down to the sidewalk and began ramming what little of the bottle he still had left into her neck. Men in aprons running out of the store tried to pull him off.

  The squeals of something else.

  Car tires.

  “Move move move!” the Voice shouted.

  Cole did, turning just in time to spot a car as it took the corner down the street. It had somehow managed to maneuver around the stalled traffic and had gotten onto the sidewalk. A yellow Honda. He hurried out of its path as it drove past, the driver—a man in his thirties, face frozen in horror—peering out the windshield at the chaos outside.

  Smart guy, Cole thought as the Honda kept going for another twenty meters.

  That was as far as it got, because a U-Haul truck made the turn and broadsided it, and both vehicles disappeared into the front store display of an Army surplus store.

  I guess not that smart.

  A slight grunt from behind him, and Cole spun as the truck driver picked himself up from the bloodied remains of the girl. What girl? There was nothing left that could have passed for a human being. The man’s fists were clenched at his sides, thick gobs of blood dripping down them and onto the street. It was impossible for Cole to separate the big man’s blood from the girl’s, or the other dying people around them.

  Flaring bloodied eyes scanned the streets as the trucker’s chest heaved, the adrenaline-fueled heartbeats pumping so loudly that Cole thought he could not just see the results, but hear each and every rabid beat.

  Bloodshot eyes scanning, scanning…

  …until they fixed on Cole again.

  The trucker’s lips—large, pale worms quivering underneath a thick mustache—tugged upward into a devilish smile.

  Like Donnie’s, earlier.

  Like the others, around him.

  “You need me now, tough guy?” the Voice asked.

  Tell me what to do…

  “Run.”

  Run?

  “Run!”

  He hated to admit it, but the Voice was right.

  So Cole ran, while the thoughts, Get home. Whatever you do, whatever you have to do, get your ass home to Emily! running through his head like a runaway train.

  Chapter 4

  The crash! of metal careening into metal preceded the sight of a school bus as it smashed and rumbled its way through the frozen traffic, knocking cars and people out of its path. A woman who didn’t move fast enough was reduced to broken bones and pulverized flesh against the large vehicle’s grill.

  The bus was either out of control or the driver was insane, but Cole didn’t get the chance to find out before the lumbering yellow vehicle tried to go over one car too many and lost control. It toppled onto its side but continued sliding up the street, casting sparks from grinding steel as it went. Bodies flew out of the windows and thumped and skipped their way across the street, some slamming into parked cars, others bouncing like rubber balls into the air. Teenagers in private school uniforms landed one by one by one, leaving bloodied splotches behind the skidding bus.

  Not all of the discharged children died on impact. Some picked themselves up and, their clothes shredded, bodies and faces bloodied, started running around the street like wild animals. One of them landed within meters of Cole and the truck driver, but zeroed in on the big man first before racing toward him.

  Cole backpedaled, then watched with morbid fascination as the trucker met the wilding teen halfway, the two colliding in a clash of swinging fists. The boy, of course, didn’t stand a chance. The driver grabbed him by the head and smashed it into the street. But he hadn’t followed through on the initial strike when one—two—three more—schoolboys leaped onto his back and began biting his face and neck and arms.

  “Run, you idiot. Run!” the Voice shouted. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

  I thought you wanted me to fight? Cole asked.

  “There’s a time for fighting and a time for running. This is where you do the latter. Unless, of course, you want to die. Well? Do you want to die?”

  No…

  “Then run!”

  Cole was about to do just that when a dark shadow fell over him. He glanced up. It was entirely possible he was the only one staring up instead of looking around him at that moment. Everyone else was too busy trying to murder each other, including the four schoolboys that were climbing over the truck driver, all five writhing figures covered in each other’s blood.

  A plane.

  A 747 passenger airplane.

  White nose and sides, with red paint on the tail that he could barely make out because it was nosediving out of the sky with the fading sunlight in the background. The loud roar of its engines filled Cole’s eardrums, making his teeth chatter as it passed by overhead.

  …it was nosediving out of the sky…

  “That’s not good,” the Voice said, just before it started laughing.

  No shit, Cole thought as he turned and ran.

  “Faster!”

  He ran as fast as he could, focusing only on what was in front of him instead of behind him. There had to be hundreds of people already in the streets, even more spilling out onto the sidewalks from stores and businesses and apartments and out of stalled vehicles. A blurry wall of faces—some covered in blood, others in terror and confusion.

  “Help me!”

  He turned.

  A woman in a blouse, makeup streaming down her face, running in his direction. She was holding her heels in her hands for some reason, while a teenage boy in torn jeans chased after her. She reached out with one hand toward Cole, but she was still thirty meters away when an older woman with curly gray hair lunged out of a parked SUV and into her. The two forms went down in a pile.

  Cole started toward the woman even as the old lady held up bloody car keys clenched between her fist like knives. She might have impaled the woman in the blouse if the teenager with the torn jeans didn’t dive forward and into her first, hurling her into a pair of trash cans. If Cole thought the teenager was going to save the woman in the blouse, he was sadly mistaken, because the teen instead whirled on the woman (who was still holding onto her heels, for some reason—Drop your heels, woman! he wanted to shout) and pounced.

  Blood splattered, and the woman screamed.

  A flurry of movements as the old woman scrambled up from the trash can, banana peel and garbage clinging to her hair and clothes. Her eyes, ringed by smeared blood like all the others, including the boy in torn jeans, snapped from spot to spot—before zeroing in on Cole.

  Then she started toward him.

  Cole turned and fled down the sidewalk, comfortable in the belief that he could outrun an old woman. He blocked out the image of the woman with high heels (“She’s a goner! Forget about her!” the Voice shouted.) and instead fixated on the 747 falling out of the sky as his legs pistoned. He knew there wasn’t an airport nearby and that sooner or later, the aircraft was coming down.

  So what else was coming down? The next plane could fall right on top of his head.

  He leaped over two figures fighting on the sidewalk, then darted around two young boys holding a much older and bigger man down while they drove scre
wdrivers into his body. For a split second, Cole wondered where they got those tools before he noticed the empty tool belt around the adult male’s waist. They were using his own equipment to murder him.

  “Another goner. Run!” the Voice said.

  Cole didn’t need encouragement, and kept running.

  There were blood puddles all over the sidewalk, and Cole stopped trying to go around them because it was impossible. There was just too much, and they were everywhere. His loafers squeaked as they stepped in the wetness and made prints on the concrete pathway behind him as he fled for his life.

  A fat woman in an overflowing cotton robe stumbled into his path, bleeding red eyes searching for victims. Thin trails of blood connected her eyes to the corners of her mouth, giving her the appearance of grinning madly. She reached for him, but Cole ducked at the last second and got by her slow-moving bulk.

  He kept running, not expecting her to follow. She didn’t need to, not with all the other potential victims on the streets. And there were many. Some with bloodied eyes, others like him, without, fleeing for their lives.

  A man and woman across the street saw him, and the man tried to say something when the woman stumbled and fell, and the two of them went down together in a tangle of limbs. Then the man was up and reaching for the woman as she cried, while clutching her broken right leg. There was a moment of indecision—maybe half a second—before the man made up his mind and kept going, the woman screaming after him—before a teenager began beating her in the head with an already-bloodied skateboard.

  Cole kept going.

  The world flashed by him in a blur of activity, frenzied movements, blood-curdling screams, and arcing blood. So much blood.

  Vehicles parked along the curbs, others overturned in the streets.

  Figures fighting, bodies falling, even more running like him.

  Too many. And he couldn’t help any of them. He could barely help himself.

  “This is no time to be a Good Samaritan, buddy!” the Voice said. “This is a time to run! So you better keep running!”

  Cole didn’t argue with the Voice. Sometimes, the Voice was right.

  “You’re damn right!”

  Oh, shut up!

  He ran past someone screaming for help. A woman, her hands stretching toward him as he ran by, while two people punched her repeatedly, their fists already covered in blood and flesh. And yet she still somehow managed to cry out to him when she should have been fighting off her attackers.

  Cole saw all of it out of the corner of his eye as he kept going.

  “There!” the Voice said.

  There what?

  “Look! Up ahead! To your right!”

  He looked up ahead and to his right.

  It was a local tavern. billy’s pub swung from a sign made to look old-fashioned, hanging over the front door.

  It’s a bar. So?

  “Bars serve drinks!” the Voice said.

  So?

  “Drinks are stored in basements. Get it?”

  No…

  “Basements are made of concrete and underground, you idiot!”

  Oh, right.

  The Voice laughed. “I told you you needed me!”

  The door to the pub was wide open, but there were two people fighting in front of it. No, not fighting. It wasn’t much of a fight at all, as a man wearing an apron with a name tag (Rob) was using a baseball bat on a fat man lying on the sidewalk. Rob didn’t seem to notice that the fat man didn’t have much of a head left and was no longer moving. Pretty soon Rob wasn’t hitting flesh with the bat anymore; he was just striking the pavement under the remaining chunks.

  Cole skirted around the flailing mass of flesh and blood and through the opening into Billy’s Pub. He grabbed the door and slammed it shut, then shoved the deadbolt into place. The door had a mosaic security glass on top, and Cole could still make out Rob already beating someone else with the bat. Someone trying to get into the pub, too, but unlike Cole, the poor bastard didn’t make it.

  The man screamed, just before blood splattered the glass from the other side.

  “Goners abound, buddy!” the Voice said. “Now it’s time for you to get hid!”

  He expected people inside the pub—maybe hiding, maybe killing each other—but the place was empty. He hadn’t expected that, but the intense silence was a welcome respite from the chaos and screaming and dying outside.

  Cole ran through the pub, making a beeline for the back hallway. He was almost there when he glimpsed something out the corner of his eye and slid to a stop and looked over at—

  A girl, large green eyes wide against their sockets (but no blood pooling around the sclera!), looking back at him from underneath a pool table across the room. She was sitting on the floor on her knees and rocking slightly back and forth as they made eye contact.

  He should have kept going, but he didn’t. The girl couldn’t have been older than eight. Still a baby, by most measures.

  Still just a baby…like the one in Emily’s belly right now.

  “She’s not your problem!” the Voice said.

  She’s a kid.

  “Not your problem!”

  She’s just a kid.

  “Listen to me!”

  No…

  “Listen to me!”

  No!

  Sudden sounds of shuffling feet broke through his thoughts, and Cole twisted back toward the hallway just as the woman swung the shotgun at his head. It was a sawed-off double-barrel twelve gauge, and it streaked right for his face.

  He jerked sideways at the last second and reached up and grabbed the weapon by the barrels as it swung past his head. He waited for the inevitable discharge as the woman pulled the trigger anyway, but there was none.

  He wrenched the weapon free, heard a pained scream, and took a step back before aiming the weapon at his attacker.

  She had long blonde hair and was stumbling backward, until she bumped against the wall alongside the hallway and stopped. She cradled her right hand, pain on her face as she looked back at him.

  Cole aimed the shotgun at her but saw that the hammers weren’t cocked. He did that now, pulling both back, though if he expected fear on her face, he was surprised when he didn’t see it. That didn’t make sense.

  Then again, what did, these last few minutes? First Donnie, then the woman and her daughter, the truck driver, the school bus…

  Then he heard it.

  The reverberating and ground-shaking THOOM! he had been waiting for.

  The 747. It had finally touched down, the impact like rolling thunder coming toward him from blocks away. But that wouldn’t last. It would eventually reach him, and when it did, there would be potential collateral damage.

  “Oh my God, what was that?” the woman gasped.

  “That was a plane,” Cole said.

  How long did he have? Not more than a minute. Maybe half that. Thirty seconds, if he was lucky.

  “A plane?” the woman said.

  “Yeah, a plane. I don’t know what else will start falling out of the sky, so you better run.”

  He uncocked the hammers on the shotgun and ran past her and into the hallway.

  “Run where?” she screamed after him.

  He stopped, even though he didn’t know why. No, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly why. She was a mother, protecting her child, and he knew with absolute certainty that Emily would have done the same thing.

  “She’s not Emily,” the Voice said.

  Cole ignored it and said to the woman, “Hide.”

  The woman stared at him, then looked over in the direction of the girl hiding under the pool table. Then back at him: “Take us with you!” She didn’t wait for him to answer, and instead turned and shouted, “Ashley!”

  The girl appeared beside the woman, and mother and daughter looked at Cole even as the walls and floor and ceiling around them continued to rumble, getting louder, and more intense.

  “Get downstairs!” the Voice shouted. “Duck and cover,
buddy! Duck and cover!”

  I don’t think that’s going to help if another plane falls on top of us.

  “It’s better than staying up here!”

  “Come on,” Cole said to the two women, before turning around and grabbing the metal door at the end and pushing it open. There was a padlock hanging off a latch, but it was unlocked.

  He flicked on the light switch near the top landing and held the door open for the woman and her daughter as they rushed inside after him. He slammed the heavy metal slab shut, pushed the deadbolt into place, and followed the two fleeing figures down the stairs.

  “What now?” the woman said, out of breath. “What now?”

  “Brace for impact!” the Voice said, even as it laughed maniacally inside Cole’s head.

  Chapter 5

  If all the pieces that made up the world as he knew it came apart, it would be close to what he was hearing above him. The only good news was that Cole couldn’t hear the screams of pain and death and madness anymore. Not that that stopped him from imagining what was going on up there anyway. His mind was filled with death and murder and blood.

  But mostly blood.

  Red, dripping blood.

  It’d been a long time since he’d seen so much blood.

  A long, long time ago.

  He sat in the dark with the sawed-off shotgun on the floor between his legs and kept his eyes closed. He wasn’t too worried about having the roof cave in on him, though. The bar above would go first and even then, the basement would probably be able to withstand just about any blast that could topple the exterior construction.

  Probably.

  The basement was made of solid concrete on all six sides, including the hard floor under him and the equally tough wall behind him. He hadn’t had the chance to see what else was down here before the lights went out, but finding an open space in the darkness hadn’t been that difficult and he had only bumped into the woman and her child a couple of times while all three of them were stumbling around for a spot to settle.

  Mother and daughter sat somewhere to his right at the moment, probably huddled together, finding comfort in each other’s presence. He had no such luxury, not that he needed it. Not too much, anyway. They were close, but not too close. After all, it was probably not a good idea to be too close to a stranger with a shotgun in a dark basement.