From Oblivion's Ashes Read online

  From Oblivion’s Ashes

  Michael E. A. Nyman

  © 2017 Michael Nyman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  © 2017 Cover art by Sandy M.

  Acknowledgements

  For my wife Sandra, without whom this book would never have happened and my life would have taken a much darker turn.

  For my father, who taught me all I ever needed to know about heroes.

  For my son, who taught me about why men try to be heroes.

  For my mother(may she rest in peace). Wherever you are, mom… I did it.

  For my readers who waded through crap to help me come up with what I think are pearls.

  For Kendrew, who helped keep the dream alive.

  For everyone along the way who came and when as teachers in the great wonderful story that is life.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: Day 15: Not Alone

  Chapter Two: Day 15: Rescue

  Chapter Three: Day 15: The Swarm

  Chapter Four: Day 16: Willow-O the-Wisp

  Chapter Five: Day 17: Rebuilding Humanity

  Chapter Six: Day 18: Battery Powered

  Chapter Seven: Day19: Crapmobile

  Chapter Eight: Day 20: You Do What You Gotta Do

  Chapter Nine: Day 21: Big Ideas and Beginnings

  Chapter Ten: Day 23: Hydroponics Hostelry

  Chapter Eleven: Day 25: The Brave Die Only Once

  Chapter Twelve: Day 27: Expansion

  Chapter Thirteen: Day 29: Skyscraper Haven

  Chapter Fourteen: Day 30: The Dictator of New Toronto

  Chapter Fifteen: Day 30: Professional Help

  Chapter Sixteen: Day 32: Redeeming Broken Heroes

  Chapter Seventeen: Day 34: Paul

  Chapter Eighteen: Day 34: Meat Market

  Chapter Nineteen: Day 33(night): The Son of Winter

  Chapter Twenty: Day 34: War

  Chapter Twenty-One: Day 34: Force Majeure

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Day 38: T-Bone

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Day 48: Gods and Monsters

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Day 49: Corporate Refugees

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Day 1: Cursed Ground

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Day 52: Hostile Takeover

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Day 53: Ultimate Predator

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Day 53: The Great Boot

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Day 58: The Revolt of the Paper Tigers

  Chapter Thirty: Day 59: Coup D’Etat

  Chapter Thirty-One: Day 75: The Rise of New Toronto

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Day 93: Suicide Watch

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Day 93: Proper Butchery

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Day 93: System Shutdown

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Day 93: Christmas Dinner

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Day 225: These Things We Worship

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Day 253: Ride of the Americans

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Day 254: Loki’s Children

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Day 254: Dead Versus Dead

  Chapter Forty: Day 265: How I Learned to Love the Bomb

  Chapter Forty-One: Day 267: Floating in the Sea of No Cares

  Chapter One: Day 15: Not Alone

  She was a fragile, luminous waif, etched against shadow. Creeping on hands and bare feet, the girl wormed through the broken masonry and fallen rubble of the building across the street. Frightened eyes, white against the darkness, darted left and right, as she slithered into the deep shade under a shredded SUV.

  The sight of her was an electric shock. Gazing out from the dark cocoon of his apartment window, Marshal Einarsson dropped his drink in disbelief. The glass shattered against the hardwood floor. He neither noticed nor cared.

  All he wanted to know was if she was real.

  Squinting in an effort to see her clearly, he pressed up against the plate glass of his floor-to-ceiling window. There. No more than eleven or twelve, she was filthy, smeared with mud from head to toe, and painfully thin, as if from malnutrition. Her clothes were torn, colorless, stained, and barely clung to her spider-like body. Over her bony shoulders, she carried a faded, Barbie backpack, which bulged with her possessions. Her face was muddy, her hair, tangled and tied back in a knot, but she merged with the shadow like just another darker shade of gray.

  She was a young girl. She was not one of them.

  Marshal rubbed his eyes. In the faint reflection of the window, it gave him the vague appearance of a coma patient coming out of sleep. His lean, angular face had a week of wild growth on it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d shaved, and his tangled, thatched, light brown hair was badly in need of a haircut. His eyes, normally light blue, looked hollow and hooded in shadow. A plain black T-shirt, two sizes too large for his trim, wiry frame, and faded black jeans completed the portrait of a man who’d stopped caring.

  He looked down and saw that his hands were shaking. A kind of madness, a weird hybrid between common sense and lunacy, told him he must be wrong.

  She couldn’t be real. She had to be a hallucination. He’d started having them of late.

  It had been two weeks since the outbreak, and he’d come to believe in his heart that he had to be the last human being alive on Earth. It had given him the strangest dreams. At night, he thought he could hear voices and see faces glaring at him out of the darkness.

  Down below, however, the little girl continued to exist, though she’d gone still, as if sensing Marshal’s presence. He knew this to be impossible. If the undead couldn’t find him, then there should be no way that she could. And yet, something appeared to have set off her alarms.

  She was real?

  He ran a hand through his hair, trying to understand what this meant.

  The apocalypse had taken a little less than a week. From the unassailable safety of his apartment, he’d been able to track the coverage until the very last news source had died. The Internet had survived the longest, and had allowed him to witness the outbreak as it reached every corner of the world. In four days, Marshal had seen enough to believe in humanity’s extinction. After that, his window – the Terrible Window, as he’d come to think of it – had given him a front row seat.

  They’d been called zombies. What else could you call them? But if they were zombies, they were like no zombies that anyone had ever imagined before. These zombies could tear cars apart with their bare hands, regenerate from almost any wound, run at speeds in excess of forty kilometers an hour, scale walls like cockroaches, and they ate more than brains. They were coated in a faint, purplish ichor that rendered them fireproof, while at the same time, there was footage of them moving with ease at -60 Celsius during an ice storm in Antarctica. Another video showed one creature being picked apart under a relentless rain of high-caliber gunfire. The husk of a torso had crawled about, eating up the bits of its own flesh and then re-growing to its original shape. The gunmen and cameras went down under a swarm of other undead that had arrived on the scene.

  When they fed…

  Dear God, when they fed.

  Sometimes, after only one bite of a human, a zombie would move on, leaving the victim to writhe and spasm on the ground in their wake. In less than a minute, that victim would become one of them, rising up to hunt with the others.

  But sometimes, especially when they were injured, the zombie woul
d continue to eat, and that was the most horrible thing that Marshal had ever seen.

  The mouth would stretch, and teeth capable of sheering human flesh and bone would appear. Bite after bite would carve chunks out of the victim – who was, most of the time, still alive – chunks that would then slide down the throat, distending it outwards like a serpent as it passed. With each piece, the abdomen would grow fatter, bigger, rounder, until finally, the creature's body would ripple. The stomach would then shrink back to its original size, and the consumed flesh could be seen getting redistributed throughout the body. Every last bit was consumed. Even the blood on the ground would be slurped up with an efficiency that suggested it could absorb it through the skin.

  This same ability to morph its tissue had made the creature the absolute ruler of the oceans, lakes, and rivers. Very little footage had circulated to show what happened to the creatures when they were in the water, but they were able to cover vast distances in short periods of time. Just before the USS George Washington was destroyed, an on-board camera recorded footage of wild, whip-like, fleshy cables tearing through armored bulkheads like taffy. There were also reports of submarines being found and destroyed while cruising the ocean depths.

  It took only four days. The undead had swept the planet.

  By day five, Marshal’s city of Toronto, Canada, had gone quiet. The street outside his home had once been part of a thriving metropolis, vibrant with businesses, lights, and vehicles. Now, it was a ghost town, where the hungry ghosts still shuffled and lurched through the haunted ruins.

  At night, the stars twinkled over a darkened city.

  In the vacuum of the days that followed, Marshal had learned a great deal by watching through the Terrible Window. Though it was only eight feet wide and partly covered with support bars from the Dollar Den sign downstairs, it gave him a near panoramic view of the street below. And, it was during the empty hours of day six or seven, that Marshal came to believe that he might be the last human alive. By day ten, he felt certain.

  The reason wasn’t only that the zombies were indestructible, or that they were strong, or that they were relentless hunters. The speed with which they'd spanned the planet and circumvented any attempt to mount a resistance was an important factor, but even that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The nail in the coffin came from the discovery that the undead possessed a collective intelligence. A large gathering of undead could problem solve, evolve strategies, and work out the functions of the physical world around them. This intelligence grew exponentially as their numbers grew, and as far as Marshal could tell, there was no upward limit. That they did not always travel in groups puzzled him, since the individual zombie was quite stupid, but it didn’t matter. What the group learned, the individual remembered.

  As a result, the individual zombie came with a menu of programmed behaviors and tactics, geared towards the hunting and detection of human prey. They smashed in all windows and doors, investigated all buildings and vehicles, tearing them open when necessary. They always chased after the sounds of gunfire, engines, machinery, and of course, human voices. They searched rooftops and basements. They patrolled through the wilderness and the wastes. And they did these things with ritualistic repetition.

  In Marshal’s darkest imaginings, this was the end of humanity. There was no defensive strategy, no fortress, and no show of force that could resist them. Build a bigger, stronger wall, and the numbers would grow until the hive mind detected a weak spot. Build a better weapon, and the numbers would discover a way to neutralize it. Give any reason for suspicion, or any shred of resistance at all, and the numbers would gather until the genius pitted against you would dwarf the greatest human intellect that ever lived.

  And it all came with an added dose of mystery. All up until the last few hours of coverage, no one had any notion as to where the disease had come from, save that it had started from somewhere in the northeast United States. No one knew why the undead hunted only humans, leaving the rest of the animal kingdom untouched. Or why they left the bulk of civilization standing. No one knew how they could generate the energy to perform their physical miracles, or why, if they could alter their shape, they bothered to retain the human form at all. No one knew why the rain affected the zombies the way that it did. Nobody knew if they hunted only by sight, smell, and sound, or if they had some other, more otherworldly sense to guide them. In the end, nobody knew anything, and now it was too late.

  Through his Terrible Window, Marshal had seen terrible things. He had knelt beside it, sobbed beside it, and prayed beside it. It remained un-smashed only because it had been designed to look like the rest of the black wall that made up the front face of the building. The window was his link to the world outside, and there wasn’t any part of Marshal that didn’t feel the mixed curse and blessing. It preyed on his psyche and emphasized his own feelings of guilt and despair.

  It had all happened so fast - a mere four days to span the world - but for Marshal in his sanctuary, Toronto’s part in the theater had been over after only four hours. During the event, he’d sat inside his safe space and watched as his species was exterminated. He’d hidden, feeling helpless, as people in the streets right outside his home were run down and devoured. He’d hesitated, prayed for, and waited for any sort of intervention to fly in and save the day.

  And then it was over. That was the disgrace of it, his shame. With the apocalypse unfolding right outside his window, Marshal had huddled down and watched it happen in his luxury apartment and on his 60” wide screen TV. While people had screamed and sobbed and suffered and died, right outside that awful window, he waited for someone else to save them and had done nothing. That it was probably the only reason he was still alive did not sweeten the taste of his guilt. The fact that the brave and the selfless were all dead only exacerbated his anger and self-condemnation.

  With each passing day, the magnitude of his aloneness loomed larger and larger in his psyche, and under the weight of it, Marshal’s reality had begun to fragment. Unseen voices would pierce the ruthless silence. Mad shadows danced on the fringes of his vision. The belief that he was the last human alive haunted him with a kind of spiritual vertigo that preyed upon his sanity.

  It was like looking over a cliff, and seeing not the landscape of some panoramic lowland, but instead, a howling, infinite emptiness of cold, star-less space. It was the sudden belief that on him, a mere microbe tucked into the uncooked center of a falling wisp of apocalyptic ash, would fall the entire weight of human history.

  He was the last surviving vessel to a flame that had created Genghis Khan, Leonardo DaVinci, William Shakespeare, and Neil Armstrong. Great explorers and kings, actors and generals, scientists and prophets, slaves and tyrants, their legacy ended with him, their last descendent, the inheritor of all their conceit. Ancient, Asiatic princes, their names lost to the whorls of pre-history, who led their refugee tribes across a perilous ice-shelf in hopes of a better future, were now bound to the rise and fall of Marshal’s last few breaths. When he died, the last survivor of a species that had created music, sculpture, dance, the scientific method, the computer, the Sistine Chapel, and chocolate cake, would pass into the forgetful continuum of eternity.

  And he had cowered in the dark.

  A deep, creeping sense of something like claustrophobia had started to build up in him. It wasn’t the confinement of his prison-like home that caused it, but the sense that the world itself was shrinking, getting smaller day-by-day. An awful, hollow suspicion had begun to grow inside of him that none of it was real… that he wasn’t real.

  And that was the true danger, and the thing that held the greatest terror for him now, the silence at the end. The places it took him in the cold dark at the end of time. The silence was a reminder that reality is a work of consensus. All alone, there is no reality; there is only belief, and what you think you remember about the day before yesterday.

  It was aloneness even more terrifying than the undead.

  An
d, in the midst of this spiritual anguish, it all changed.

  How could a little girl have survived?

  The question resonated inside his psychological darkness like a life preserver. It made no sense! Whole cities had been taken. Entire nations had died. And here, a little girl still crawled through the muck and the despair.

  Marshal watched through the soundproof window as the girl’s body grew taut. Her eyes searched the street in fear, then she dropped, limp to the ground. The shadows of the mangled car she’d been crawling through seemed to swallow her up, and in that moment, it was as if she’d vanished.

  Something was coming. Whatever survival sense had kept her alive had detected it, and she had responded, disappearing with a skill to shame a Maasai warrior.

  Marshal knew that it wouldn’t be good enough.

  He knew what she’d detected.

  It had haunted the streets outside his apartment for the whole of the fifteen days since the outbreak, and it had killed many people. Other undead came and went, but this particular zombie never left the vicinity. As if bound to the land, it trotted in circles, around Marshal’s home. Many times he’d wondered if this one zombie could somehow sense the human occupant in the building it circled. Whatever its reasons, it inspected the neighborhood with a thoroughness that bordered on the obsessive.

  It never failed to look beneath the car wreckage where the girl was hiding.

  Marshal’s stomach became white hot with panic. The zombie would find the girl. It would toss that fifteen hundred pound, crushed Ford SUV aside like a cardboard replica, and it would see her. Marshal knew this for a certainty. He’d already watched thousands of courageous, talented, and resourceful people die outside his window. If there’d been bodies, they’d span the streets for miles.

  There were, of course, no bodies.

  It was at precisely that moment that Marshal realized that he could save her. If he wanted to take the risk, he could think of a way.