This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down Read online

  This Rotten World: We All Fall Down

  By The Vocabulariast

  Text Copyright © The Vocabulariast 2015

  All Rights Reserved

  Also Available From The Vocabulariast

  Fiction:

  This Rotten World (Available on Amazon.com)

  Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (Available on Amazon.com)

  Non-Fiction:

  Let's Get Drunk and Watch Horror Movies: 50 Horror Movie Reviews and Drinking Games (Available on Amazon.com)

  Music:

  All Hell Breaks Loose Soundtrack with Jeremy Brown (Available on iTunes)

  Movies:

  All Hell Breaks Loose (Available from Wild Eye Releasing in 2015)

  Spec. Scripts:

  Find my work on Inktip.com (email me to find out how)

  Table of Contents

  Also Available From The Vocabulariast

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Dinner Bell

  Chapter 2: Self-Service

  Chapter 3: Pretty Big Balls

  Chapter 4: Those Things'll Kill Ya

  Chapter 5: A Numbers Game

  Chapter 6: Getting Wheels

  Chapter 7: Fortified

  Chapter 8: Boardman, Oregon

  Chapter 9: Rescue

  Chapter 10: Safe

  Chapter 11: Riverside

  Chapter 12: Two to Drop Off

  Chapter 13: The Dumpster of Salvation

  Chapter 14: A New Band

  Chapter 15: Digging In

  Chapter 16: Watching the Gauges

  Chapter 17: In the Coliseum

  Chapter 18: Ginger Fluff

  Chapter 19: Dinnertime

  Chapter 20: Polite Conversation

  Chapter 21: When is Check Out Time?

  Chapter 22: The Last Show on Earth

  Chapter 23: Droppin' Like Flies

  Chapter 24: Barbarians at the Gate

  Chapter 25: Take Two of These and Call Me in the Morning

  Chapter 26: Killing Time

  Chapter 27: Room #27

  Chapter 28: Shit Buddies

  Chapter 29: On Notice

  Chapter 30: In the Booth

  Chapter 31: On the Fence

  Chapter 32: Wanted

  Chapter 33: The Pied Piper of Portland

  Chapter 34: Saint Bryant

  Chapter 35: Into the Night

  Chapter 36: Not Enough Beer to Go Around

  Chapter 37: The Third Time is the Charm

  Chapter 33: We All Fall Down

  Prologue

  The branches scratched at her face and arms as she scrambled down the slope, dewy grass and vicious briars caressing her ankles. The moans from above rained down upon her, driving her like a steer in the midst of a stampede. Wild tangles of blonde hair caught on branches that reached out to her like angry lovers. Her eyes were wide, and she flailed with her arms as she burst through the trees, ignoring the pain.

  At the bottom of the slope, she splashed into brackish, knee-deep water, brown like tea, lifeless and stale. The screams from the top of the hill drifted across the morning air, hitting her ears like lashes from a whip, forcing her faster through the water, if it could even be called that. It was more like nature's sewage. She hooked her foot on a submerged root and tumbled down, filling her mouth with the flavor of decaying leaves and mud. She gasped for air, gagging and spitting in between harried breaths. With trembling hands, she wiped her hair out of her face and continued her slog.

  She had no idea where she was running. All she knew was that she had to get away. She had to get away from the carnage that was happening just over the rise. A highway, swollen with unmoving vehicles, bodies piling up as hordes of the dead swarmed over the trapped occupants. Suzy risked a look over her shoulder. He wasn't there, the handsome man who had helped wasn't following. By now he was probably dead. His name had been Dustin; add it to the growing list of people, including her brother, that had died within the last 12 hours.

  She saw the first one crest the rise as she stood knee-deep in cold, rotten water. Was it him? No. It was not him. It was a lumbering man, huge even from this distance. His uncoordinated steps moved him closer to her, and then he hit the edge of the slope, tumbling down awkwardly, arms and legs incapable of stopping his descent. He came to a rest at the bottom of the slope, shreds of flesh hung from the ashen skin of his snapped arm.

  The creature looked up at her, teeth bared as it attempted to extricate itself from the mass of branches that it had come to rest in. New tears in its flesh had no effect upon it. It was of one mind, one single purpose. It wanted to kill her. It wanted to strip the flesh off of her bones. It wanted to eat her. The terror welled up in her once more, and the reasonable part of her mind shrunk to the back of her brain; the wild-eyed part came forward and sent her splashing through the pond. She ran straight ahead, not even thinking, and planted her hands against a rough concrete wall, a sound barrier erected to protect the occupants of the houses on the other side from having to experience the constant noise of the city's always busy freeway.

  Her fractured mind clawed at the ridged stone wall, searching aimlessly for a way to scale the obstruction that separated her from escape. In an effort to try and scale the fifteen-foot wall before her, she plugged her fingers between the ridges of stone that comprised the surface of the wall, designed to break the sound of the freeway with their irregular shape. She was three-feet off the ground when she lost a fingernail and fell to the ground, too frightened to even swear at her failure. She clutched her ruined finger to her chest, wrapped in a fist to halt the stinging pain of a suddenly missing fingernail.

  Suzy chanced another glance over her shoulder to see the creature fording its way through the rotten pond. Her breath came in ragged gasps, but stopped altogether as she saw more creatures pop up over the rise of the hill. All along the ridge they came, stumbling, tumbling, tangles of limbs with only one thing on their mind.

  She should have stayed in the car.

  As the closest creature neared her, she began a half-jog that took her along the length of the wall. Her left hand trailed along the cold, ridged barrier as she ran towards the sun. The wall ended a half-mile up the road, back in the direction they had come from. She could see the way. A line of the undead was marshalling from the highway towards the wall, slowly moving, threatening to trap her between their advance and the wall she now hugged for support. She picked up her pace, breathing raggedly, her legs thumping into the ground, tired legs, stretched to the limit, filled with an ache that she could not stop to quell. Her pursuers had no aches. They experienced no pain.

  She was closer now, but so were they. Sweat cooled on her body in the chill morning air, her breath puffing in front of her face, hanging for a second and then disappearing. Suzy felt as if she were a child playing some obscene game of tag, only the entire world was "it" and the stakes were life or death. There would be no running inside the house for a cool cup of water from a pastel-green plastic cup.

  She was five-hundred feet from the end of the wall when the first creature managed to reach her. It was a woman, or at least it used to be a woman, somewhat shorter than Suzy. She had been tan, and until recently, she had been alive. Fresh blood plastered the woman's shirt to her chest, her curly blonde hair backlit by the orange sun. Her hands reached out to Suzy, and she slapped them away from her, putting on a burst of speed.

  They were there now, about twenty of them between her and the end of the wall. They were slow and spread out. There was a chance. It wasn't hopeless.

  A wind kicked up, and a helicopter appeared in the distance, not a regular old news helicopter, but somet
hing far more deadly. It had the look of the military about it, sharp angles that screamed death. It flew low, and it flew fast, the thumping sound of it approaching faster than the actual helicopter itself. It crossed in front of the sun, and then it created a sun of its own, spraying thirty millimeter rounds all around her.

  The bodies in front of her exploded. Arms flew into the air amid clouds of dust and clods of dirt. She watched as one of the creatures was cut in half twenty-feet away; the ragged ends of the woman's body looked like raw hamburger. Globs of gore flew through the air, splattering herself and the wall.

  The noise was deafening, the thump of the helicopter's rotors as they sliced through the air, the screams from the freeway, the explosion of the helicopters gunfire, and the shredding of ground and flesh. When a hand wrapped around her, from behind, she couldn't even hear her own scream.

  The pilot of the helicopter swore and swiveled the Apache in line with the woman. When he saw blood, he signaled the gunner sitting in the cockpit below him, and he loosed another volley, turning the woman and her attacker into pulp. He shook his head as he turned back to the freeway. It would have been nice to have saved at least one person, even if it was just so she could fight another day.

  Chapter 1: The Dinner Bell

  Their flight from the apartment building hadn't taken long at all. As soon as they saw that the building next door was on fire, Rudy had run to his room and grabbed his backpack, an old beat up thing with the word "Jansport" stitched across the top of the blue canvas. He stuffed a few items of clothing in it, and then he emerged from his apartment to find Amanda waiting there for him.

  "That was quick," he had said.

  Her hair was brown and tied in a ponytail. It bobbed as she spoke, "I don't have much here, not much that's important anyway. I just have some clothes, my phone and my phone charger."

  "Who are you going to call with that phone?"

  "Ghostbusters?"

  Rudy shook his head as they walked down the hallway and down the steps, bags slung over their shoulders and swords in hand. The swords had come from his asshole neighbor's weird, sex dungeon apartment. Correction, his dead asshole neighbor's weird, sex dungeon apartment. Rudy paused at the second-floor landing. "There's something we have to do."

  Amanda threw her hands in the air. "What is it now? The damn building next door is on fire... and I don't hear any fire trucks headed our way."

  Without speaking, Rudy opened the door to the second floor, and stepped into the hallway. "Which room was it?" he muttered to himself. He stopped in front of the door to apartment 211, and he knocked gently on the door, not wanting to make too much noise, in case more of those things were around. There was no answer.

  Maybe she's gone, he thought, surprised that he actually cared. She had saved him. When he had fled from his apartment down the rickety fire escape, she had pulled him into her apartment through the window, just as the entire structure had collapsed to the ground, crushing his would-be murderers. He would be dead right now if it weren't for her. He owed it to her, so he banged on the door, harder this time.

  "Chloe! Open up!" The fact that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen up close probably had nothing to do with the fact that he wanted to save her... probably. He was about to turn and leave when the door opened a crack, just wide enough for two things to appear, an eye and the cavernous barrel of a gun.

  "What do you want?"

  Amanda ducked behind Rudy, her hot little hands placed on his bulky shoulders. "Um, well... we uhh."

  Amanda spoke for him, as he had forgotten the art of rudimentary communication. "The building next door is on fire, we need to get out of here before we all get burned into ash."

  "Who are you? Step out here so I can see you." The woman on the other side of the door gestured with the gun. Amanda stepped out from behind Rudy so that the woman on the other side of the door could see her. She looked her up and down, her big blue eye peering through the cracked door. "You seem harmless enough. You his girlfriend?"

  Amanda's laugh pricked Rudy's pride, but he managed to keep his face from turning beat red. "I'm just his neighbor," she said, unaware of the damage that she had inflicted on Rudy.

  Chloe bobbed her head, as if she already knew the answer. "Now what is this burning building business?"

  "She's right. The building next door is on fire, and it's only a matter of time before this one goes up as well. We have to get out of here." Rudy's voice was a whine, filled with a hormonal desperation.

  There was silence. The woman on the other side of the door was thinking.

  "I just thought... that since you saved me, I ought to do the same for you."

  The woman on the other side of the door spoke as if Rudy had said nothing. "Where are we going to go? It's not safe out there."

  Amanda and Rudy looked at each other. They hadn't yet discussed where to go. "Anywhere that's not a burning building," Amanda said.

  "Give me a minute," the woman said before slamming the door closed.

  Rudy and Amanda stood in the hallway, Rudy leaning against the wall, while Amanda rocked on her heels with nervous energy. When Chloe emerged from her apartment, she had a bag over her shoulder and the gun in her hand, a silver automatic that made Rudy nervous. Rudy tried to keep from looking too long at her, her tan skin, smooth and glowing, her perfectly straight shoulder-length hair, but most of all, he tried to keep from staring at her breasts, large round and snug in a light blue T-shirt that exposed just a sliver of midriff.

  "Let me help you with that," he said as he reached for her bag. Her reaction was quick, and showed Rudy exactly where he was on Chloe's list of priorities.

  With the barrel of the gun against the side of his nose, Chloe said, "I don't need your help. We're not best friends. We're not going on a vacation. The world is fucked, and I'll stick with you guys until I can, but if it comes down to it, and it's you or me, well then I vote me. So don't go getting all sentimental on me. I don't need any new friends. All the ones I have are probably dead anyway. Let's just get the hell out of here and get someplace safe. We clear?"

  Rudy felt like he was going to crap his pants. "We're clear."

  With that, Chloe stalked down the hall, her blonde hair not even moving, her ass crammed tightly into jeans that seemed to have been made just for her.

  "I love your friends," Amanda said as she patted him on the arm and smiled. She followed after Chloe. Rudy trailed after, and they walked to the lobby of the apartment building. They stood there looking out on a world that had seemingly changed overnight. The streets were empty of people, living ones at least. Creatures shambled along, looking for food, but they were spread out. They could move around them. Rudy hefted the sword in his hand. He could do this.

  "Alright, I heard on the news that the head is the only way to kill them. You have to damage the brain," Chloe said in a no-nonsense fashion.

  Amanda looked at Chloe in shock. "I don't think I can kill anyone. What if they're not dead? What if there's some way to save them?"

  Chloe sneered at Amanda. "You want to save them? Go ahead. Me? I'm only interested in saving myself."

  Rudy looked around the lobby. Then looked up as if he could see through the ceiling and the walls of the building, calculating in his head how many people were still hiding in the building. "We can't leave without letting everyone know that it's not safe here."

  Chloe turned to Rudy and said, "If you want to go knock on everyone's door and play good neighbor, feel free. But I'm walking out that door, with or without you."

  "How about that?" Amanda said, pointing to the red fire alarm handle behind the clerk's desk.

  Rudy sauntered over to it, stopping once he saw what was behind the desk. It was the security guard, lying on the ground, covered in blood. Rudy reached for the handle for the fire alarm and then jumped as the security guard sat up, his eyes unfocused.

  "You ok?" Rudy asked, sparking an extreme shift in the guard. Without warning, the guard reached ou
t to Rudy grasping him by the legs. Rudy stumbled backwards, tripping over his own feet and falling to the ground, his teeth clacking together. The grunts and groans coming out of his labored lungs would have been comical under any other situation, but as the dead eyes of the security guard loomed over his knees, he screamed.

  Amanda was there, jabbing the short sword into the guard's head, but still he came. Rudy slid backwards, unable to rise to his feet as the adrenaline rushed through his body, dulling the logic in his brain and preventing him from getting to his feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Amanda rear back and bring the short sword down on the guard's neck. It was a clean cut, but not powerful enough to sever the dead man's head. It did however sever the spinal cord, cutting the complex circuit of nerves and muscles that drove the creature's body. The head dropped down, hanging by a flap of flesh, and the body stopped in mid-crawl. As the final messages of the man's brain faded away, the arms slipped wide, and the body slowly settled to the ground. Rudy stared in awe as the head continued to move, the eyes blinking and the mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air on the bank of a river.

  Amanda dropped down and looked at the man's face. He had been handsome in a blue-collar way, a stub of a goatee in a plain manly face. She felt bad for him and stood up. She stepped on the side of his near-severed head and brought the short sword down on the side of the man's skull, just above the ear. The shock of metal on bone sent pain through her arms, but she accomplished her goal, and the mouth stopped moving, the eyes stopped blinking.

  Rudy pushed himself to his feet, no small feat for a man as heavy as he was. "Where were you?" he yelled at Chloe.

  "I was over here, waiting to leave. You're the one that wants to save the world. If you had been looking out for yourself, it never would have happened. I hope you learned your lesson."

  "Yeah, well, if you're ever in trouble, we'll just see how well I learned my lesson." Rudy stepped over the body of the security guard and pulled the alarm. The noise was immediate and definite.