Faith in the Apocalypse - Pt. 01

She gibbered wordlessly, cringed and slammed her back hard against the door over and over. Every time she slammed back, the door barely rattled on its hinges, it was stoutly constructed. Her trembling legs and panicked desperation powered her slams. She knew they'd get to her soon and tear her apart, but she couldn't run anymore. There was nowhere else to go.

"What the fuck?" grumbled the deep gravelly voice from above.

The dark running forms got closer and closer. Her slams got weaker until they were just small pushes against the wood. She was exhausted and dizzy. Her mouth and throat were dry as dust and her lungs burned.

Darkness flooded in, dimming the edges of her vision and the running, red-eyed figures disappeared from her sight as her body began to shut down. Her consciousness spiraled down a deep dark hole made up of exhaustion and resignation to her fate.

The old man would either help her or watch her get ripped apart and devoured by the demons in human form who had hounded her through the woods for hours.

Eyes blinking rapidly, she tried to stand but her shuddering legs wouldn't obey. She tried again, bracing her back against the door. Still leaning hard against it, she finally got to her feet. She'd keep running until they caught her or she lost them, or she found a good hiding place.

Her eyes flared wide in surprise and she toppled backwards to the ground as the door behind her leaning back suddenly squealed open. A pair of large hard hands grabbed her under the armpits and dragged her unceremoniously across the threshold, dumped her in the dirt, and then the door slammed shut.

Before she passed out, she caught a glimpse of shaggy white hair and a thick bearded face by the light of the cratered blue moon.

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Robert "Scorn" Scornell hated people.

Ever since he'd come back from Nam and people spit on him and called him a murderer and a baby killer, he couldn't stomach them or their comfortable weak lifestyles.

While they'd slept in soft comfortable beds, he and his buddies dozed in fox holes filled knee-deep with muddy water. While they took the bus or drove to watch a movie in an air conditioned theater, he'd humped the jungle on swollen rotting feet looking for Victor Charlie and waiting for a sniper's bullet to turn his misery into eternal sleep.

After four years in the Army, two tours in Vietnam as an infantryman, and bullets to the chest, belly and groin he'd been discharged from active duty.

Swaddled in bandages on an uncomfortable cot in the field hospital, his friends had been so happy for him, exchanging addresses and telling him how lucky he was to heading back to the land of the big PX, to freedom and round-eyed girls.

They'd been through a lot of shit together, shared so much, saved each other's lives so many times that they were closer than most brothers.

Scorn laughed weakly and joshed and teased with them until an ugly tight-assed nurse drove them all out of the hooch. He fell asleep to their hurried farewells. When he woke, his buddies were gone... their goodbyes said. At that moment, they were probably slogging through the jungle on another useless patrol.

He spent nearly a year of his life recovering from his wounds at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

He was six and a half feet tall and had been fat ever since he could remember, even during boot camp, where he'd been put on half rations and referred to as a "fatbody." No matter how good his physical condition, how strong he was, how fast he could run, or how many push-ups he could do, he always had a thick layer of sloppy fat on his enormously tall heavy body. He couldn't help his fucking genes.

"Goddamn, Scorn, you're one big, fat, sloppy mother fucker," his drill sergeant used to say inoffensively, "but you sure can PT."

His words were offensive but his tone wasn't.

On his second tour in Nam, his platoon was ambushed while on a foot patrol. He'd been on point and well ahead of the rest of the men. A barrage of crisscrossing rifle fire met them while they were halfway across a rice paddy. He was hit three times but somehow managed to slog painfully through the ankle-deep water back to the platoon's main body.

The lieutenant called for close air and artillery support.

When a brace of Air Force F-4 Phantom IIs dropped napalm and artillery rounds impacted danger close, the lieutenant led the platoon out of the kill zone. They carried Scorn and two other wounded soldiers to a place where a medevac landed and carried them away, to the "wop wop" sound of helicopter rotors and the occasional.762 bullet pinging through the aircraft's thin fuselage.

At the aid station, they found a rifle bullet lodged deep in his left pectoral muscle, probably a ricochet since it hadn't gone all the way through. Another round tore through his abdominal muscles, into his stomach and out the other side of his body, miraculously missing his spine. The final round had hit him low in the abdomen, missing his groin, but tearing into his intestines and shattering his pelvic bone.

He went through countless surgeries and his recovery was long, slow and painful. He'd weighed about 250 pounds when he was wounded. When he left the hospital, he weighed nearly a hundred pounds less.

The wounds he'd suffered and his "Vietnam Syndrome" diagnosis, now known as PTSD, allowed him to receive a monthly check. Not much but it was something.

When he was finally released from the hospital, he was a skinny wasted image of his former self. The fat was burned off his tall frame and all that was left was bone and stringy muscle.

His mother had passed away six years before he enlisted in the Army. Since her death, his father's mind had quickly deteriorated. He'd once been a highly-respected engineer and inventor. He'd patented a large number of his inventions, most of which had to do with hydroelectric power.

He hadn't gone far in the company where he'd worked for years. Mental issues kept him from moving up and others either took credit for his innovative designs, drowned them in bureaucracy or refused to give him recognition.

Eventually, he quit and hired a lawyer to represent him. He went on create a number of groundbreaking inventions which he patented and used his lawyer to represent him in all business dealings. He made both of them a lot of money.

As the years passed, the old man began to suffer from paranoid delusions and became dead sure the Russians would rain intercontinental ballistic missiles on heavy U.S. population centers.

His paranoia led him to buy land deep in the woods just south of Lake Fork in northeast Texas. The large tract of forested land had a lazy creek chuckling through the property, but he'd picked the spot because a survey team discovered that a fast running underground river had cut a tunnel through the granite deep below the forest surface.

The old man spent their savings on a deep concrete reinforced underground bunker, complete with branching tunnels and store rooms. It took years to build and once finished, filled it with enough supplies to survive for years after a nuclear holocaust.

He also designed and built a hydroelectric generator powered by the fast underground river. It provided an independent, dependable, never-ending power supply that allowed him to have all comforts of the modern age without being tied to a power grid.

Then he built a cabin over the bunker, concealing the entrance.

His father's paranoia was the main reason Scorn joined the Army. But four years had passed and with nowhere else to go, he took a series of buses from the hospital that eventually got him to the bunker.

Once in Alba, he put his skinny arms through the straps of his green Army duffel bag, adjusted it until it sat comfortably on his back and humped to the edge of the sun-dappled pinewood forest.

After staring at it for a few minutes, he plunged in and trudged through the trees.

It was a cool fall midafternoon and a steady breeze shook and rustled the tops of the trees, hissing and whistling through the high branches. It was so different from the sweltering, bug-infested jungles of Vietnam half a world away.

He pounded the door of his father's cabin for nearly ten minutes before he heard the old man's familiar voice several feet behind him, along with the ominous sound of a shell being chambered into a pump-action shotgun.

"You touch that door again and I'll blow your fuckin' head clean off your shoulders," the old man said in deadly earnest. "Who are you and what do you want?"

Scorn put his open hands up and turned around slowly.

"Damn, pop. The gooks fill me full of holes but they don't kill me in Nam and now my own father's gonna blow my brains out half a foot away from home. Ain't that some shit?" he said with a twisted mocking smile on his face.

"Rob? Robbie? That you?" said the grizzled old man, lowering the weapon's muzzle.

"Yeah, pop. It's me. I'm home," Scorn said. He sounded disappointed. He'd half wished the old man had pulled the trigger and put an end to the nightmares and the pain.

The years passed in a blur and some of his father's paranoia infected him. They lived a life far removed from civilization, though Scorn did occasionally go into town for salt, machine parts, tools and other necessities. He also checked the Post Office Box where he got his mail and deposited VA disability checks at the local bank. The two of them depended on that money and so he kept everything current.

Scorn knew the old man's head was fucked up, but some of his paranoid theories lodged in his head and so at one point he half expected the world to end in a fiery nuclear inferno. It was foolish and he knew it, but he couldn't help believe it was going to happen.

Hi father's mind and health deteriorated more and more every year. He held on for more than ten years before he passed in the middle of the night, but not before he taught Scorn everything he knew about survival. He also spent countless hours teaching him everything there was to know about the independent hydroelectric power grid he'd built deep underground.

As the months passed, Scorn grew fat again. He stayed away from people, living a hermit's life. Years then decades passed and his hair turned white. It and his beard grew into a wild tangle, filthy and greasy with bits of leaves and twigs mixed in.

On the rare times he went into town, people stayed away from him. He looked like a homeless bum. His baggy jeans and black and red flannel shirt were old, torn, soiled and he reeked of sweat, stale body odor, rot and faintly of urine. On his feet, he wore a pair of skillfully crafted moccasin-style shoes.

Over the years after his father died, he rarely dipped into his disability money so it slowly accumulated in his bank account. It accrued interest until he had a significant amount, which he decided to use to upgrade his underground bunker.

He reached out to his Army buddies for help in 2012. The ones who were still alive responded and three of them agreed to help him. They appeared on the agreed date a year later and helped him install up to date industrial heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, water filtration and electrical systems.

They also wired the cabin so it had power and installed up-to-date amenities there and in the bunker. It was truly a haven for the old hermit. Both the bunker and the cabin had an electric stove, filtered running water, electric water heater, and a bathroom with shower and toilet that drained downriver into the fast-running underground river. The bunker now also had a large walk-in freezer and a washer and dryer, though he rarely used them.

It took them nearly a month to finish the work. By the time his friends left, each with a few hundred dollars cash in his pocket, his bank account was nearly empty but he figured his solitary underground home was decked out like no other doomsday prepper or survivalist bunker in the entire world.

His buddies even helped him build a sturdy wooden fence along the edge of his grove. He'd gone further and added loops of foot-high concertina razor wire along its top edges.

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Scorn glanced down briefly at the young woman passed out at his feet then scrambled quickly up the stand he'd built next to the gate and looked down at the more than 20 people crowded on its other side.

What was the matter with them? Why were some of them whining high and desperate, like children about to cry when they weren't immediately given what they wanted, and why where others groaning low and long?

He didn't have a flashlight, but the full moon's faint blue light suddenly peeked from behind a cloud and revealed their red feverish faces. Their features were desperate with ravening hunger as they glared with shining bloodshot eyes, empty of thought or emotion.

Their whines grew in pitch and they increased the desperate attempts to claw at the gate when he shouted at them to leave or he'd shoot them. The stout doors swayed and quivered, but they held.

From the corner of his eye Scorn thought he saw the man wearing a blood-drenched tattered gray suit standing beside a thick cluster of trees watching. When he turned to get a better look, the man was gone. Maybe he'd imagined him.

He had no idea what to make of them. Even though he stayed away from people, he knew how they normally behaved and these people were not behaving normally at all. There was absolutely something wrong with them. Some of them looked like they should be six feet under. He'd seen plenty of dead people in his lifetime and some of them looked just as dead as them, maybe even more so.

He snatched his pump-action shotgun and chambered a round. The ominously threatening sound of a 12 gauge shell being chambered should've made the crowd below pause and scatter, but all they did was whine and moan even louder.

He raised the muzzle over their heads, closed his eyes to maintain his night vision and squeezed the trigger.

Boom!

The weapon hammered back into his shoulder and a bright light flared from its muzzle as the deadly closely-packed pellets flew several feet over their heads to rattle into the trees and dry brush.

He opened his eyes immediately after the blast only to see them resume their frenzied attempts to tear through the gate. There was no hesitation, no fear, no panic. Their frantic whines and groans got even louder.

Scorn dropped the muzzle until a man's face was squarely in his sights, put his finger on the trigger and squeezed slowly. It would be gruesome. The man was less than 10 feet away.

He took his finger off the trigger and raised the weapon's muzzle to the sky. What the fuck was he doing? He almost blew that guy's head off.

Was he in danger? Was the girl in danger? He looked back at her lying still on the ground, her clothes drenched in sweat... and blood.

He looked at the crowd of people. Some were drenched in blood, theirs or someone else's, he couldn't tell. Some were missing entire arms and yet they still moved. Some had what looked like bites taken out of their flesh. Some wore rags and looked as if they were rotting and some looked like they should be walking the isles at Walmart.

Had the world gone insane?!

What the fuck was going on?

The Texas stand-your-ground law said you could use of deadly force if your life was in danger.

Were his and the girl's lives in danger? If he didn't shoot these motherfuckers would they eventually break through the gate doors and attack them? He was pretty sure they would.

Fuck it.

He looked down at the man he'd almost shot. He was probably in his 40s, overweight, wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, comfortable shorts and strapped sandals on his feet.

He wouldn't have glanced twice at such a man had it not been for the fact that his scalp had been torn nearly to the back of his head and the skin pulled down to his eyebrow and torn off until the white bone of his skull was visible. How was this dude still walking around?

He chambered another shell, took aim and squeezed the trigger.

The man's head disappeared in a shower of brains, shattered bone and blood and his body slumped to the ground in a boneless heap.

Scorn expected the rest of the crowd to scream and scatter in panic, but all they did was whine and groan even louder. Their claw-like hands reached out at him, their mouths open wide as they whined and groaned and their dead red eyes stared at him with ravenous intensity.

He decided to shoot the ones who whined. They seemed more energetic and dangerous. The moaners were slow and almost mechanical in their actions.

He racked the weapon and shot another, then another, then another, and another until the shotgun was empty and he had to reload. Seven were down, all the whiners. There were only moaners left. And the one in the gray suit he'd seen by the clump of trees, if he was still around.

Scorn reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out another handful of 12 gauge shotgun shells and calmly loaded them into the weapon.

After the first shot, his mind had snapped back to a time in Nam when his fire support base had been attacked and almost overrun. A time when he'd picked up a shotgun similar to this one and blasted small Asian men wearing black pajamas until the weapon was so hot it nearly cooked his hands.

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Faith started out of her swoon at the sound of the first shotgun blast.

She looked blearily up at the silhouette of a large fat old man with a shaggy white hair and tangled beard standing on a wooden platform, pointing a shotgun down at the other of the fence. She watched with satisfaction as the weapon's powerful recoil rocked his body back time after time.

She closed her eyes and when she opened them again the man fed shells into the shotgun. He was a black shadow against glowing clouds sweeping slowly between the world and the moon's blue glow.

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The raver in the gray suit watched motionless from the shadow of the trees.

He'd once been human, at least in form. He'd worked for a company that swallowed up and broke up small businesses. He'd gloried in the pain and destruction he caused. He'd been a masochist, a sadist, a true psychopath who lacked empathy or remorse. He'd been shallow, glib, manipulative and callous. He'd even murdered... and never been caught.

He'd been rich and handsome and he used it all to his benefit.

When an infected girl he'd assaulted bit his forearm, he'd smashed her head in with a hammer-like fist and fled. He'd been in the poor side of town, waiting in the shadows of a building when the girl stumbled towards him. In the darkness, he hadn't seen the flushed skin or bloodshot eyes of an infected.

Hours later, his mind was gone and all that was left was hunger, but there was something different about him. Whether it was a combination of genes, the unique chemicals in his twisted brain, a different strain of the virus or a unique combination of all these things, his infection was distinctive.

He retained some elements of human self-preservation and an animal-like cunning, but over them all was the malevolent desire to cause suffering and pain.

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Scorn fired and reloaded until the shells in the chamber and in his pockets were gone. By the time he lowered the weapon's smoking red-glowing muzzle there were more than a dozen corpses crumpled on the dirt, some stretched out, most missing their heads.

His mouth filled with bile and he had to turn aside as his stomach violently emptied its contents onto the lush grass of his glade.

He'd killed a lot of people early in his life, but he'd never enjoyed it. He'd known soldiers who did, who got off on the experience, but he'd never been one of them.

He knew there was something wrong with people he'd just shot, but no matter how necessary it was, he felt sickened and disgusted with himself at what he'd done... and there were still nearly a dozen more beating at his gate.