Table Of Contents

1. Blood

2. Radio Nowhere

3. The Trail

4. No Hiding Place

5. Brothers

Afterword

Also By The Author

Praise for Sean Cregan

"Cregan writes breathlessly classy pulp with real brio" - Daily Telegraph

"One of the most talented and original voices out there" - Jason Pinter (The Fury, The Darkness)

Virginia Day Zero

by Sean Cregan

Copyright 2013 Sean Cregan

Smashwords Edition

Cover Image: ‘Lonely Nights Wear On’ by Garrett Gill, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 3.0 (cc by-nc). You are free to distribute or share it however you want, so long as the author retains credit and you do so for non-commercial purposes. (In simple non-legalese, don’t try to claim someone other than me wrote it (and why would anyone do that, really?) and don’t try to make money from it. Otherwise, share away! Thanks!)

1. Blood

“If this is as big a deal as you think it is, Uncle Don’s not gonna want us seeing it,” Rory Caulfield said for like the tenth time. “What if it’s something really bad?”

His brother Murphy, pedalling hard beside him, tried not to sound too frustrated; it was one thing riding over to the western pasture to see Hell-knew-what, quite another to do it alone. “Course it’s something really bad,” he said. “The way Uncle Don came back and went for the phone like he did, can’t be anything else. But you hear what he said to the Sheriff’s Department? Just that he had something in his fields they really had to see. He didn’t say, ‘Hey, Al. I was just checking on the herd this morning and I found a dead body.’ So it’s bad but it’s not bad like that.”

“So what, then?”

They were starting up the long climb to the top of the ridge. Beyond it, the western chunk of Don Caulfield’s grazing land and whatever they were here to find. Murphy figured they’d have maybe twenty minutes to a half hour before the Brook County Sheriff’s Department showed up with their uncle. Maybe nothing there for two kids to see, but when you lived in a place like Coombs, Virginia, you had to take the chance. To be the first and best with big news would be worth gold at school that morning. Murphy had been thinking on the ride out, and the best he’d been able to come up with was that it was something to do with the base. Cardinal Hills AFB was twenty miles north and you heard the jets all the time. Maybe one of them had crashed in Uncle Don’s field. Maybe he could bag himself a souvenir, something cool to show his friends. Part of an F-22’s engine, something like that. One of those warning signs off the pilot’s ejector seat, wherever that had floated to earth.

Then the thought occurred that maybe the pilot hadn’t ejected in time, and he told his brain to shut up. “Dunno,” he said to Rory. “Could be anything.”

“Maybe a fighter plane or a missile or something!”

Murphy, annoyed that his kid brother had had the same idea. Only two years younger, but what a gulf there was between twelve and fourteen. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe something even bigger than that.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe it’s a stealth bomber. With nukes on board and everything.”

“That doesn’t really happen.”

“Read it on Wikipedia. They lost a nuclear bomb in Chesapeake Bay once in a plane crash. Never found it again, either. Happened a bunch of times, all over the place.”

“You’re such a nerd, Murph.”

“You’re gonna want my nerd skills if we do find a nuclear missile in Uncle Don’s field. Without me, you’d be just dumb enough to walk up to it and wonder why your skin was glowing.”

The scrappy barbed wire that topped the rise glinted in the dawn, all the way to where it vanished into the woods that ran away to the north, spreading all the time, the outermost fingers of Whiteacre Forest. Now they were up high, Murphy could see the thin mist lying the valleys, the same ghostly haze still clinging, just barely, to the trees above. Smell like damp sawgrass.

“Cows are quiet,” Rory said between heavy breaths, tiring on the incline.

“Probably asleep. Or scared off by the plane crash.”

When they hit the fence at the crest, though, he saw they were there, and they weren’t sleeping. The pasture was littered with dead cattle, dotted all over like the herd had scattered. There were two near the fence just a few yards from the brothers. Murphy could see the white of rib bones jutting from their backs. Purple-red gashes in the flesh. The throat of one had been torn out so hard the poor animal was nearly decapitated. The grass around both was brown with blood.

“Holy hell,” he muttered. “Holy hell.”

They didn’t say anything else for a while, just stood there. Eventually, Rory pointed to a dark, deep furrow at the bottom of the valley, little more than a smudge at this distance. Said, “What’s that?”

“Dunno.”

“What did this to Uncle Don’s cows, Murph? You think there’s a bear or a cougar or something out here?”

“Dunno.”

Murphy swung off his bike and climbed over the fence. Approached the nearest dead animal slowly, carefully, tried not to imagine something was going to jump out of it or from behind it and attack him too. The smell wasn’t bad yet, just cold and wet and sticky. A smell that just sort of stayed. Pretty much everything he’d ever read, and he’d read a lot, said that blood smelled ‘coppery’. This reminded him more of the taste of cold fried egg. Maybe it was always like that.

Whatever had killed the cow must’ve had some serious claws on it. The slashes in its hide went a good five inches deep. No way to judge how big its teeth had been, but it must’ve eaten some of what it took because there weren’t enough bits of cow here to make a whole animal. The ground around it was all churned up where its hooves had torn at the earth in its death throes. And there were other marks, too. They were a bit hard to make out, and it wasn’t like Murphy had ever been in Boy Scouts or anything like that, but they looked sort of like a bear, but with an extra pad on the feet, and an extra clawed ‘toe’. Maybe it was just a mess, two prints overlaying each other. Could be.

But even if there was a bear round here, what kind of bear did this to a whole field of cattle?

“Murph? Can we go? I don’t wanna be here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sounds goo—”

“What’s that?”

He turned to look where Rory was pointing. The treeline, a belt of darkness spreading more and more as it marched into the distance. A lot closer than he now realised he wanted it to be.

“What was what?” Moving, now. Over the fence, back to his bike.

“I saw something move in the woods. Murph... I’m scared.”

Now he could see something moving in the woods too, and it wasn’t his imagination, not at all.

2. Radio Nowhere

Down the hill now, pedalling like Hell itself was coming after them, and it was. Murphy had risked one glance back and seen the things racing out of the trees after them. He wanted, desperately, to believe that they were animals, bears gone strange, something like that, but he couldn’t. Just as he knew this wasn’t one of those anxiety dreams where horrors hounded you without pause and you woke, puffing and worn out from night spent fleeing round the inside of your own skull. After them were monsters like nothing he’d ever seen. Big, huge, like he imagined a grizzly to be, but bald and grey and moist, weird wide shark-like mouths and massive teeth and claws. Their break from the woods had forced the two boys to follow the fence line as they fled, away from Uncle Don’s house, town, and everything else you wanted to be there for you when the only thing stopping you from fainting in terror was knowing that you were going to die for sure if you did. Rory, being smaller, wasn’t as fast as Murph, and it was all he could do to fight against the white-ice adrenal flight urge enough to hold pace with his younger brother, not to abandon him. Rory was pale beside him and Murph could see tears drying in streaks along his cheeks as they shot down the ridge. He didn’t have enough breath to shout anything, just silently willed him on, willed them both to survive and escape and for the monsters to give up.

The track they were on shot through a crop of thorny scrub at the base of the hill, a dark tunnel of jagged foliage. Murph chanced another look behind them as they were swallowed by the belt of shadow, and the monsters were a long way back, just loping grey shapes away up the slope, too slow to catch a pair of terrified boys on bikes. But then, he knew, they couldn’t keep up this pace themselves for much longer. Fear would only carry you so far.

He tried to remember where exactly the track came out, but couldn’t. How far they’d have to go to get home — if that was even such a good idea with those things on the hill — or into Coombs and the sheriff’s office. The odds on running into someone, anyone, who’d have a cell phone at this time of the morning.

Metal gleam through the trees, and suddenly they were skidding out onto Route 23. Old man Ogden’s gas station was fifty yards away. Dad always said Ogden had owned it since before he was a kid, and that the place hadn’t changed at all since and the last guy who’d offered to buy him out had wound up in the county ER having buckshot picked out of his lungs, that Mr Ogden must be going on ninety years old now and they’d probably have to bury him there. Murph knew what gas pumps looked like in old movies, and these didn’t look like them, so the old man must’ve allowed some things to evolve. There was a phone wire strung from the corner of the station’s storefront to a pole on the road, and if the old man still had a shotgun, well, that wouldn’t do any harm either.

The lot was empty when they skidded into it. Morning breeze skirling dust between the swaying hoses. Murph couldn’t see anyone in the store, and the windows of the house above it were dark. The road was deserted, not even the distant thrum of far-off traffic.

“What do we do if he’s not here?” Rory, breathing raggedly.

“Of course he’s here. Where else is he gonna be? Anyway, we’ll just have to break in and use the phone.”

“You think those... they’re still behind us?”

“Maybe we lost them. They were a long way back. Look, the sign says ‘Open’.”

They left the bikes out front, walked into Ogden’s little store. The bell over the door tinkled, tinny and echoing in the quiet. “Hello?” Murph yelled. “Mr Ogden?”

Nothing. Not even a floorboard creak from upstairs.

“Let’s call someone, Murph.” Rory was staring around with wide eyes, whatever hope or relief he’d felt when they reached shelter clearly draining fast.

“Sure.” Round the counter, picked up the phone. Nothing on the line. No dial tone. He looked at his brother, shook his head. There were two velcro strips stuck to the underside of the counter, both hanging loose and open. Imagined an old shotgun there once, a polished walnut stock and the faint metal smell of oil. Gone, with the old man. Tried not to imagine why. Next to it, an age-worn CB radio. He picked up the bit you talked into and switched the thing on. Found himself rewarded with a blast of static like steel being ground down, gone once he pushed the ‘talk’ button. “Hello? Can anyone hear me? I’m at Ogden’s gas station. Hello?”

Nothing but static. Rory peering in the direction of the windows, lip quivering.

Murph found a channel selector and turned it to ‘Emergency’. More groaning metal noise. “Hello? We’re at Ogden’s gas and we need help real bad. Hello?”

Noise.

“Murph.” Rory tugged on his arm. “Murph! I think there’s something out there.”

He dropped the radio, hit the power switch again. Saw movement away down the road, something big following the edge of the treeline. Then the huge, awful face of one of the monsters reared up in front of the window. Wide jaws open like a Cheshire Cat, metal banding pinned like a crown to that hairless, glistening skull. The empty black pits either side of its snout held him near-transfixed for a second before he grabbed Rory’s shoulder and pulled him down behind the counter.

His little brother was crying silently. Choking back sobs as they listened to the thing’s footsteps, surprisingly soft and quiet, as it prowled around the building. He held Rory, felt his throat tighten and his own tears well up. “It’ll be OK. It’ll be OK,” he whispered, as much to himself as to his brother.

Rory clutched him back and they huddled like that for a long, long time. Waiting at any moment to hear one of the creatures enter the store, to see massive clawed limbs reach out for them. Instead, the soft thud of alien feet slowed and paused. Distant clicking and a faint shrieking noise. More thudding, fading now. Going away. Leaving them.

Murphy stayed where he was, didn’t believe it could be over. Didn’t want to risk looking and finding the thing waiting, silent, for them to break cover.

Then, finally, they heard the roar of a truck engine coming closer.

3. The Trail

“One hell of a day this, boys,” the man, who’d told Murphy and Rory his name was Flaherty, said. “I gotta say I have no clue what’s going on, but it’s something bad as all fu— very bad. Them creatures you told me about, up in the woods. You reckon they coulda made enough folk disappear like this?”

When they’d flagged him down, expecting at any moment for his 4x4 to be jumped by the monsters, Murphy had told him what had happened, what they’d seen. Flaherty had taken it all in his stride. When Murphy had asked if he believed them, he’d just jerked his hand at the back of the vehicle and said, “Got no choice but to believe something like that.” Back there was a teenage girl a year or two older than Murph hugging her knees, Calista, whose mom had gone out for eggs and the last thing she’d heard was her screaming from the end of the driveway, an elderly couple, Ben and Maggie, who’d fled their trailer when something started tearing through its shell, and a nameless kid maybe eight years old, covered in blood, who seemed to be totally catatonic.

“Maybe,” Murph said. “I didn’t stop to count.”

“I’ll bet. Let’s see if we can find the sheriff, huh?”

“Look, we’re heading there, could we stop at our house and check on our mom and dad? Uncle Don was already going to get the sheriff anyway on account of what he found, and it’s right on the way.”

“You stay with your uncle sometimes?”

“Every couple of weeks usually. He lets us help him out, which is pretty cool.”

“More or less how I got started as well. Where’s your house?”

“Strickland Road, just before you turn left for town.”

“Sure.”

Flaherty was a handyman, he’d said, working most of the farms in the county whenever anything needed fixing. He’d been on his way to a first-light job outside Coombs when he’d found Ben and Maggie in the road, and everything had gone from there. In the space of ten miles he’d built up a carload of traumatised survivors of whatever had happened, but only Murph and his brother had actually seen anything much. And in all that time, he said, there’d been not a single other car on the road, and the cell phones were off the air. He said it all pretty matter-of-fact, didn’t seem to be freaking out, which Murph was glad for.

“Hell of a day,” he said to no one in particular.

The house looked normal when they first turned onto the drive. Dad’s Chevy was still parked out front. The drapes were still mostly closed though, and when they reached it Murph could see shreds of siding lying in the grass out back, the side screen door hanging open with its mesh in tatters.

“You still want to go in, kid? Want me to check first?”

Murphy shook his head. “I’ll go.” Something heavy and awful in his chest. “Rory, you wait here. I’ll tell you when it’s all clear.”

“Calista?” Flaherty said. “Can you drive at all? Anything happens to us, keys are here, you get to the sheriff’s office. OK?”

The girl snapped out of her misery for a moment, nodded wordlessly.

Out, gravel crunching wetly under Murphy’s feet. Not even birdsong any more. He led Flaherty round to the side and the busted porch. The mesh of the screen along with some of the wooden frame had been blasted out by buckshot from the inside. Dad had a shotgun, and for a moment Murph felt hope rise, that the things in the woods had come here and Dad had done for them. But then no one answered his tentative call into the house, and there were scrapes in the kitchen floorboards made by something more than human.

Gloom inside, drapes blanketing the daylight. Cold air smell, and the lingering scents of other things, remnants of whatever had occurred here. It no longer smelled like home.

Flaherty patted him on the shoulder, then moved past and took the lead as they slowly explored the house. There were three more buckshot patterns in the hall, shell casings near the foot of the stairs. Stains that looked like damp marks on the floor here and there. Blood soaked into the carpet in the doorway to the front room, spatters leading through a trail of tossed furniture running towards one of the windows. Murphy trying and failing to stop himself imagining his mom running for escape while his dad tried to hold off the horrors that had come for them. Pinned through one of the drapes were two quills like porcupine spines, cored with luminous green like the stuff they used for high-vis jackets. Flaherty tugged one free, tested the end with a fingertip.

“Jeez. Sharp, real sharp. Freaky damn monsters. You see anything like this on what you saw?”

Murph just shrugged, shook his head. It was all too much of a blur and he’d been too busy trying not to die.

“Upstairs then, if you want to. Quick check, then we’ll try the sheriff.” A look in his eyes like he was sorry.

The upper floor was peaceful, but empty. His parents’ bedroom was like they’d just gotten up and were downstairs having breakfast, which Murph figured maybe they had been, except for the closet being open, the shotgun missing. The two smaller rooms, his and Rory’s, had been left untouched since they’d gone to Uncle Don’s.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs again, Flaherty swore and stopped dead. Turned back to look at Murph with the first glimmer of freaking out, the first, suddenly wide, crack in the calm face the guy had put on this horrible morning. He was gripping his hand like it was going to bite him. The finger that he’d tested the spine with was the same neon green as its inside had been, and the stain looked to be spreading.

“What the hell?” Flaherty said. “Look what it’s done to my hand! Just... Look!”

Murphy, fear rising anew, staring at it. “Does it hurt? Is it poisoning you?”

“I don’t goddamn know. It’s not hurting, it’s fine. I hadn’t noticed until... Christ, what is this?”

Nothing good, they both knew that, but that was all.

4. No Hiding Place

The rest of Coombs looked to have fared no better than Murphy’s family, whatever had happened to them. The town was quiet, but buildings had been smashed open, one truck, which Murph thought might be Uncle Don’s and quickly looked away in the hope Rory wouldn’t notice too, was burning in the street, and there was a dead body impaled on a concrete fencepost next to the church. Looked like Terry Coyle, the guy who fixed the phones and the cable when something went wrong with them. Murph could see the bright orange of his toolbox on the corner of the roof, where the phone line joined the building. Fallen, or jumped, and no one had come for him afterwards.

When they reached the sheriff’s office, Flaherty jumped out and made them wait while he darted inside. Left the engine ticking over. He’d covered his green hand with a work glove, kept them from seeing how bad it had got. He came back out a few moments later, running. Reached the door just as one of the monsters came round the corner of the building. An inhuman tongue flickered out of its teeth-packed mouth as it loped towards them. Quills like the ones they’d found flexed along the backs of its forearms. Murphy saw more emerging from the dead ruin of the town in the edges of his vision.

“Go! Let’s go!” Rory, yelling. Calista, humming a panic song to herself in her seat, very carefully not watching.

Flaherty flung the truck into gear and roared away just before the creature could reach them. “There weren’t any inside that I saw,” he said. “Everyone was gone, or killed. I didn’t make any noise. They must have heard the engine, been waiting for us.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Try the airbase. Anyone’s gonna deal with this...”

“What if they can’t?” Calista, breaking tune all of a sudden. “What do we do then?”

“They should be able to. Town’s empty so maybe everyone who could headed there as well. We can do this, OK?”

More and more of the monsters, trailing in their wake like terrible ghosts. Every one that Murphy saw was tasting the air as they passed, like the scent of Flaherty’s poison was drawing them on.

Cardinal Hills AFB had been a part of Murphy’s world all his life, just as it had been for everyone in Brook County since it was built back when his grandpa had been a kid. You grew up with the regular roar of the jets overhead, craning sometimes to see what it might be, like the time in third grade Tick Hanson told everyone in class that his older cousin Mike, who was a USAF gate guard, had seen stealth bombers in one of the hangars. Every time they’d heard something thunder overhead, they’d stared at the sky and the tiny grey shape whizzing across it, hoping to see one of these mythical vehicles.

Murphy wondered if Tick Hanson’s cousin was still pulling guard duty here when they reached the base, because the whole place was being torn apart when they shot out of the trees and onto the approach road, the gatehouse just ahead. Many of the buildings had been smashed like dry wood, there were planes crumpled on the distant apron like they’d been stepped on, and the far-away forms of a few of the creatures were roaming in the carnage. No smoke or flames, and that seemed strange. There was still gunfire, forlorn and lonely, the chatter of bullets as some final holdouts fought to survive deeper inside. Corpses dotted the concrete. Two cars were wedged in the gateway, locked together where one had crashed trying to round the other. There was blood on the splintered rear windshield.

He was going to tell Flaherty to get them out of there when a grey metallic crescent shot overhead like one of the planes Murphy had watched as a young kid and something hammered into the engine block of the truck like a gigantic invisible fist. No explosion, no fire and smoke and razor shards of bomb case shrapnel ripping through the vehicle, just a burst of force, the shockwave pounding the truck and the roadway ahead of it, shattering glass all around them and leaving the truck a wreck. In the air above, tracing a line to the spot the flying craft had fired from, doughnut rings of vapour bursts like the smoky vortices that trailed off the wingtips of fighter jets in damp air.

Then Calista was screaming and Flaherty was yelling, “Out! Out! We’ve gotta go!”

As the brothers jumped down, Murphy could see, away down the road behind them, the massive shapes of monsters emerging from the trees, closing. Shrieking. He had Rory’s hand, saw Flaherty scoop up the little kid and grab Calista’s arm, and they were running. He felt bad for Ben and Maggie, the old couple, seeing them lagging further and further behind as they ran for the admin building, but the adrenaline screamed in his ears and his body could do nothing but answer.

He heard the metal wailing noise as the creatures tore the remains of the truck to pieces in the gateway, and then they thumped through the main doors and into a sort of military reception area. Papers and office equipment were all over the floor. There was blood by the entrance. A large chunk of the front wall away to the left had been blown in by what Murph imagined had been one of the same vortex weapons they’d flattened the truck with. Flaherty rooted in a locker behind the front desk, then handed Calista a handgun, tossed one to Murphy.

“You ever used one of these, kid?” he said.

“Nuh-uh.” He’d used an air rifle a few times, but that was it.

Grabbed one for himself. “No better time to learn, then.”

Doors smacked open as they scurried down the hall. Murphy turned knowing he was going to die, that he wasn’t even sure where the safety catch was, if the thing was even loaded. But it wasn’t the creatures, just Ben and Maggie, jogging as fast as they could even though she was wincing with pain. Movement behind them, but the things seemed to have been held up by the vehicle jam and were lagging a long way back. Flaherty led them through the building, turning through an open plan office with a view across the base to where fighting still seemed to be going on, then across a short corridor and into a storeroom with a fire door to the outside world. He shooed them in, closed the door behind them and slid a set of shelves across it.

“Shhh. We should’ve lost them, right? Let ‘em give up and go away and we can figure out our next move.” He leaned back and puffed out his cheeks. “They’re the things you saw before, right? Up on the ridge. Killed all your uncle’s cows.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said. “I didn’t see any of those flying things. You think everyone on the base is dead?”

“If they’re not now, they’re going to be. You saw what they’d done to it.”

“Howell’s Landing,” Calista said.

“What’s that?”

“Through the woods.” Her voice was very quiet. “Through the woods east. We can get down to the river to Howell’s Landing. There’s usually a couple of rowboats. We can get across the river, away from them. You think they can swim?”

Flaherty shrugged. “They look kinda heavy to me, but what do I know? We make a break for it when we can and make for those boats. Shhh.”

Heavy tread on the boards outside growing closer. More than one set. Everyone held their breath, tried to pick out every single noise their ears could detect. Imagined the monsters in the hallway outside, shambling past, claws flexing. It all started to go quiet, and Murphy fancied he could hear a slickering wet sound, pictured the creatures seeking out the scent like he’d seen that one do outside the sheriff’s office, like the others had done through town.

Then two massive hands punched through the wall and hauled Flaherty back through the ragged hole. Calista was yelling, “How did they know? How did they know?” and Murphy saw the spine and its luminous payload, Flaherty’s finger and hand turning the same colour, and alien tongues savouring the taste of it.

And they were out through the fire exit, and running, and he had Rory’s hand in his again and he could hear Maggie screaming horribly somewhere behind.

5. Brothers

Murphy could hear the dry wood crunching sound as the monsters pulled Maggie to pieces. The wet snap as Ben was torn in two by a set of massive jaws. Shrill screeching. Aware of things spattering into the leaves around them as they hit the treeline and the cover of the woods. Vision gone tunnel in his panic, slowly coming to realise that he was still holding Rory in one white-knuckled hand. Calista was by his side with the mute little kid clasped over her shoulder. Running and running. They must have passed the perimeter fence at some point, but he didn’t remember it. Guessed it had been torn down by the things when they attacked the base. Leaf mulch and the smell of moss, scents that had filled half his childhood, hours spent playing around in the backwoods of Brook County, all of it turned into nothing but terror, like being chased by something hideous wearing your own baby security blanket for a face.

The sound of alien creatures fading behind them, and Murph’s lungs were burning. He slowed to a jog, then a walk, Calista and Rory following suit. Risked a glance back and saw nothing but forest.

“Where are these boats?” he said. “Never heard of Howell’s Landing.”

“It’s just a fishing shack,” the girl said. “My stepdad uses it sometimes.” She looked like she was about to burst into tears talking about her family. Her dead family. “It’s down the hill, on the river.”

“And there’s boats. We can get over, get... away.” Didn’t think about what had happened to his own.

“Maybe. Yeah. I hope so.”

Then Rory said, “I’m tired Murph. Everything hurts.” And he looked at his brother and saw the quill in Rory’s back, the luminous green showing in the flesh exposed by the tear in his shirt. Knew that the monsters would be coming for him, for them, and that like Flaherty before, it wouldn’t matter where they hid.

He felt his throat tighten, ice fill his head, as Calista glanced behind and said, “C’mon. Why are you stopping?”

“Yeah, what is it, Murph?” Rory, looking at him, the girl, back again. “What’s going on?” Murph turned Rory round, showed Calista the spine. His younger brother, craning to peer over his own shoulder. Said again, voice trembling now, “What is it? Tell me, Murph. Please tell me.”

The girl shook her head. “That’s how they found us, isn’t it? Mr Flaherty. Oh my god.”

“What is it?”

“I think so. I saw them licking the air like they could smell that stuff.” Noise of movement at a distance, the first they’d heard since escaping the base. They were coming.

“What?”

“There’s one of those... quills,” Murphy said, the words thick and heavy, his mind picturing the monsters closing inexorably on his little brother. “One of those quill things. They must follow them by scent or something. They must fire them or fling them when something runs away from them or whatever...” Getting lost, wishing he didn’t have to tell his brother the truth, but forcing it out. “There’s one in your back. They got you with one when we ran. They got you, Rory.”

His kid brother, wide-eyed and suddenly silent, looked at Murphy like he was sure he hadn’t heard right but knew deep down he had. Said, eventually, very quietly, “Murph?”

“We’ve got to leave him,” Calista said. More movement up the slope, something big pushing through the undergrowth. “If he comes, they’ll track us.”

“We can’t. We can run, get over the river, maybe it’ll wear off...”

“We don’t know that!”

“We don’t know we’re right that they’re tracking it,” he said.

“What else is it going to be? Mr Flaherty wasn’t poisoned or anything. They couldn’t have known where we were hiding at the base otherwise; we didn’t make any noise. They followed us all the way from town. They knew. As soon as they got close, they knew.” She was right, and he couldn’t deny it. “Look, I’m not dying today. You get that? I’m not dying today.”

Looking at her, at Rory, terrified and crying, at the bloody and unmoving boy still draped over her shoulder. The river and an uncertain escape seemed a very long way away indeed. He said, “Go. Take the kid and go. I’ll stay here with Rory.”

She paused for a second like she was thinking of something to say, then hurried off into the woods.

“Are they really going to come after us?” Rory said.

“Probably. If they don’t, we’ll get away, just you and me, right?” Forced a smile, hugged his brother and didn’t let go.

“I’m sorry, Murph. I’m sorry.”

More noise from the way they’d come. Alien shrieking, muffled, but close.

In his mind, he was walking with Rory on his first day at elementary school. His kid brother knew a few other children in his class, but he still insisted on trailing along at Murphy’s heels when they left the bus and headed for the doors. Murphy cringing inwardly, because you didn’t want people to think you were hanging out with a kid two grades below you, even if he was your brother. Especially, in some ways, if he was your brother. Miller and Sam-Bee had both gone running past him, shouting, “Babysitter! Babysitter!” and he was desperately hoping some of Rory’s dorky friends would come and spare him further embarrassment. Near the doors, he heard his brother say hi to someone and breathed easy, but when he looked back it wasn’t any of his little friends but Dean Cawley and Mark Whitford, jerks from the grade above, and they were doing the lunch money hustle Murph had seen plenty of times before.

No contest, really. He turned back, dropped his bag, and went in, fists swinging. Caught them both by surprise because he didn’t bother shouting at them to leave Rory alone. Winded Mark and laid into Dean like it was him against the world and if he ever stopped punching he’d be dead. Because Rory was his brother, and that was what you did.

Close enough to hear the monsters breathing now.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said.

In fifth grade, they’d gone squirrel hunting with Uncle Don’s friend Pete. Hiking through the scrubby, tangled woodland that tracked the twists of Harrowine Creek with air rifles, a bag lunch and Pete sharing stories of his time, years ago, in the Marine Corps. Pete had told them to find a good spot to lay up and watch the trees overhead, get good and still so the little critters’d get used to them being there, and Murph had slipped down a bank slick with cedar roots and fetched up on his back on the rocks beside the water, winded and too shocked to be able to move. He’d heard Rory skidding down after him and then his face had hovered into view, scrunched with worry. Murph, who wasn’t sure yet if he wasn’t paralysed, had told him over and over that he was fine and that there was nothing to worry about. To call for Pete to let him know where they were. Rory had listened quietly until Murph had him convinced, and then backed off and yelled for Pete to come get them, voice ringing clear along the valley.

The creatures were here, now, all around. Jaws open, screeching as they closed. And the brothers shut their eyes one last time.

Afterword

So that was Virginia Day Zero and I hope you enjoyed it. If you didn’t, you probably want to stop reading now (seriously, why didn’t you quit earlier on?), in which case: no hard feelings, let’s call it here, shall we? But if you did, maybe you’re wondering where this came from and how it relates as a story to anything else I’ve done, most especially a full-length novel called Day Zero.

If you’re not then I’m sorry, because that’s exactly what I’m about to talk about.

It’s not a sequel to DZ or a sampler or anything else. It tells a parallel story of what happens outside the narrow field of view of the other book’s characters. Originally, way back in the distant country of Firstdraftlandia, this story was part of that book. It was a self-contained subplot, written independently (since it needed to follow the basic structure of a tale in its own right; I haven’t had to add/cut anything to turn it into the version you clutch in your sweaty palms) and interspersed, chapter by chapter, throughout the book. It was there to show the reader that what was happening wasn’t confined to Philly but was (at the very least) a national or global event. I also spaced it so there were reveals for the reader given in the VDZ portion just ahead of similar things’ appearances in the main storyline. The scent-trace from the quills, for instance.

“Take it out,” I was told on early reading, before the parent book made its way out into the wilds. “It’s confusing having a completely different story in here.”

So I did, always intending to keep it back to go as a short story companion piece set in the same world on the same day, but having no direct connection to the DZ storyline. Self-contained, but related. And here it is. It’s not a sequel or a prequel or a cut-down chunk of another book. It’s its own story, once included with another concurrent one, now separated out.

It is probably better this way; apart from anything else, the tone of this story is slightly different. I was shooting for more of a Stephen King-y backwoods apocalypse tragedy vibe here, less of the big set piece stuff in DZ. (Don’t let that stop you, mind; if you liked this one, you could do worse than check out the mothership. Reading one does no harm to the other.)

Right, rambling now. Thanks for reading, hope you liked it, sorry if you didn’t. There’s a list of other stuff I’ve written under either of my names (life would be easier if I only had one writing identity, but for one reason or another it didn’t work out that way) following in just a moment. (I thought about including a sample of Day Zero itself after that too, but I’ve never been a big fan as a reader of having wads of some other book following on from something I’ve just finished. Apart from anything else, it always makes me think I’ve got longer to go in a book than I realize and the end throws me right off. And it’s very easy to have a look at just such a sample in your nearest ebookery emporium should you want to do so.)

Many thanks again,

- Sean C., February 2013.

Bloggery: namelesshorror.com

Twittery: @nameless_horror

Also By The Author

As Sean Cregan:

Day Zero

Murder Park

All You Leave Behind

Hardboiled Jesus (short story)

Wishes (short stories)

The Unpublishable (short stories)

As John Rickards:

The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer’s Cut

The Darkness Inside: Writer’s Cut

Burial Ground: Writer’s Cut (coming soon)

The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned (coming soon)

Table of Contents

1. Blood

2. Radio Nowhere

3. The Trail

4. No Hiding Place

5. Brothers

Afterword

Also By The Author