The Undead World (Book 1): The Apocalypse Read online

  The Apocalypse

  The Undead World: Novel 1

  By Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2013

  Kindle Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Horror of the Shade

  An Illusion of Hell

  Hell Blade

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Feylands: A Hidden Lands Novel

  The Sun King: A Hidden Lands Novel

  The Sun Queen: A Hidden Lands Novel

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  Pen(Novella)

  A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

  The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

  The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

  The Drawer(Short Story)

  The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)

  Chapter 1

  June 27th

  Rostov-on-Don, Southern Military District, Russian Federation

  Under the neon lights, Yuri Petrovich seemed a sick, pasty white, however since this was normal for almost everyone at the facility, it went unremarked if it was noticed at all. From his office, he passed through the agriculture research section—what once was the façade of the operation, and took the secure elevator to the lowest sub-basement.

  There he grunted a 'hello' to the aged guard, Beria and signed his name on the log board. “Time for my monthly checks,” Yuri said affecting a bored voice despite the tremor in his hands.

  The guard didn't look up from his magazine, a German rag that was two months out of date. “Better you than me,” Beria replied, as he always did. Though the man wore a gun at his hip, he was extremely disinterested in anything concerning the facility and no one knew who or what he actually guarded.

  “Key me?” Yuri asked.

  Once upon a time it would have been a sharp eyed and sharp dressed political officer who had to match keys to get into the White Room. Now it was only fat, put upon Beria. He sighed heavily as he heaved himself out of his creaking chair.

  “On three,” he said, taking up his position on one side of the door. “One, two, three.” They both turned their keys and the door opened with a hiss. Beria beat a hasty retreat to his beloved chair, where his fat rear had only wiggle room left.

  Yuri went into the next room and donned his bio-suit, ran down his checklist, inspected his filters twice, and then went through, first one air lock and then a second. Despite his years on the job, the White Room always gave him a shiver down the spine when he entered, however today the shiver went to his guts and wouldn't leave.

  “Fifty million rubles,” he whispered to himself. “Fifty million fucking rubles.”

  This helped. And so did the fact that he knew Beria was completely ignoring the cameras. To be on the safe side however, Yuri went through the dull routine of cataloging the various strains of Bio-weapons stored there and he did so as slowly and methodically as he could.

  Though it was called the White Room by the sad few who knew of its existence, it was officially unnamed and not at all associated with the Department of Agriculture. Instead it had grown as an offshoot of the Stepnagorsk Scientific and Technical Institute for Microbiology. It was what the Soviets had called a Biopreparat facility and thus very illegal in the eyes of the world, and for good reason.

  Yuri glanced down the rows of steel and glass cabinets that were clearly marked: anthrax, Ebola, Marburg virus, plague, Q fever, Junin virus, glanders, and smallpox, numbering them and checking the dates labeled on each. He worked, with clipboard in hand, in the tedious manner he had cultivated ever since he had become chief of scientific research at the facility.

  The term research made him want to gag. There hadn't been a kopek of new research money in a decade, and every year his budget shrank. There was even talk of ending the bio-weapons program altogether.

  And then what would Yuri do?

  The struggling Russian government wasn't hiring many scientists, and the private sector wasn't eager to be associated with a man who had made his living producing and maintaining weapons of mass destruction. His legal options were few, and his illegal options were even fewer, but they were oh so lucrative. Fifty million rubles worth of lucrative. The promise of the money was the single reason he had taken to going to the one locked drawer in the room on every visit.

  With a quivering in his chest that wouldn't stop, Yuri undid the stout combination lock, opened the door to the locker and pulled back on the stainless steel slab...and then forced himself to breathe in a normal manner: in and out, in and out. The body lay beneath a sheet and as always, Yuri uncovered it with gritted teeth, while his gorge rose in the back of his throat.

  The body was that of a man, or rather it used to be a man, now it was something else.

  He took the right arm of the thing, it was grey and stiff, and let it hang as far as the handcuffs would allow, letting the black blood pool in the extremity. Yuri then went through, what had become a routine and unnecessary check up. The thing on the slab should have been dead. It was quite literally ice cold since the refrigeration unit was kept at a constant zero degrees centigrade. And yet it was already moving.

  The hands spread and the muscles around its mouth began to work, opening and closing, however it was in the eyes where it was most “alive.” Somehow they were hungry and furious, but also glassy and empty of any intellect. Lately Yuri had begun to dream about those eyes, and lately Yuri had become an insomniac. He couldn't sleep, knowing that those nightmare eyes would be worn by everyone he knew—if things went wrong.

  Still he had a job to do and after a deep breath of stale bio-suit air, he began his check-up, starting with the hated eyes. He then peered into its ears, and nose, and its horrid dank mouth. And then, making sure that his body was completely blocking the camera. Yuri pulled a syringe from one of the zippered cargo pockets and jabbed the needle into the crook of the things arm where the fat vein had begun to bulge.

  The thing didn't flinch. According to every report the creature, what once was a man, couldn't feel the slightest pain.

  Yuri filled the syringe with black blood, and then very carefully pocketed it. The virus was blood born and though he could bath in it if he wished, a single prick from the infected needle would kill him in hours.

  With sweat running down his back, he then covered the body, slid it back into the freezer where it belonged and then went on to his next chore, and that was to switch out the attenuated viruses in their little plastic pipettes. There were a total of twenty doses of the vaccine—he took six, leaving normal saline in their place. No one would notice, not until it was too late for them.

  Of the six doses, he would inject himself with one of them that night, just in case; three were part of the bargain that would make him rich, and the final two he would keep for himself.

  These last would guarantee him a position of power if his clients, the North Koreans, were ever foolish enough to release the virus. Given the right conditions he could churn out vaccines in as little as four months, while he had to wonder if the Koreans would ever figure it out. They were pathetically behind in all aspects of technology, as everyone knew.

  Yuri closed the last glass case and breathed a sigh of relief. He was done and not a single alarm had gone off, which meant that one wouldn't. Beria had been as poor at his job as ever.
Moving quickly, now that the toughest part of his job was past, Yuri breezed through both air locks, and with the utmost care he transferred the needle from his bio-suit to his jacket pocket. It felt like he was carrying a bomb with a hair trigger as he made his way up to his office, however nothing untoward happened and he was able to take the needle off the syringe without mishap.

  The now capped syringe and the clear pipettes he bagged and then placed inside his thermos, while the needle he dropped onto the open face of the sandwich his wife had made him for lunch; he could never eat after a visit to the White Room either way. Very carefully he wrapped it back in the brown bag it had come from and this he gently put in a medical waste container.

  One last item: Yuri took the container, which was nothing more than a plastic bag, and walked it personally to the incendiary chute and tossed it in. Now he was done. He went to his desk and sat there picturing everything fifty million rubles would buy, and sighing happily.

  Chapter 2

  Rostov-on-Don, Russia

  The second link in the chain of disaster occurred the following day when Yuri met with the North Koreans, who were far more adept at espionage than they were at bio-chemistry. Somehow they knew all about the dreadful creature locked away in the White Room, but knew almost nothing about science—though they did make a great show of it. They had surgical masks and pristine plastic Bio-suits and gloves that ran halfway up their arms, and a single microscope that looked as though it had come from an eighth grade science class, and through which they took turns peering at the virus and jabbering away.

  Without notes or images to compare it to, each agreed that this was indeed The Virus, forcing Yuri to hide a look of incredulity, and he had to wonder if he could have passed off a different virus, something far less deadly. Their incompetence gave him a nervous chill, however this was swept aside when they produced a briefcase full of rubles. The sight was so full of promise that his fears for the future left him and he became all smiles as he counted the money.

  When he was satisfied he handed over the remaining blood as well as the three vaccine filled pipettes and neither side knew that they were a part of some grand cosmic joke for a few more months. That night as Yuri planned his permanent vacation, the North Koreans, not a one of whom was a scientist, boarded a plane set for Pakistan. And the following day as Yuri began making deposits in the various bank accounts he had opened, the North Koreans set to bargaining with the Pakistanis: shale oil contracts in exchange for a virus of untold potential.

  The North Koreans were out of hard assets to purchase fuel with, while the Pakistan scientists were bristling with excitement to get a hold of the fabled Super Soldier virus, confident that they could pare back its negative side effects. If they could, it would give them an edge in their endless armed rivalry with the Indians and perhaps even a super power status.

  Their excitement made the bargaining tougher than the Pakistanis had foreseen, but in the end everyone came away with what they were looking for.

  General Choe kept his face rigidly impassive as he handed over only a portion of what he had been given: a half-filled tube of blood and a single pipette. He was prepared to hand over the other two pipettes and the rest of the blood, yet no one asked and he didn’t offer. Instead he remained perfectly calm despite that his insides were leaping with excitement.

  The following evening, when Yuri was transferring his money to a Swiss account, General Choe was in Cairo meeting with a group of Saudi extremists, ensuring that he too would make a handsome profit from this dirty deal. He had seen too much of the world to go back to the prison that North Korea had become.

  “I need proof,” Kahled Marzouq, the chief financier present demanded. They were in a dusty warehouse where the desert ran up against the edge of the city, and Choe, despite that his flat features twitched not at all, was more than a touch nervous. To extremists like these everyone outside their little circle of hate was the enemy. “Twenty million U.S is too much money to hand over without proof that this virus will do what you say it will.”

  A dog was called for, and a gun. The gun was the easier of the two to produce, though eventually a little mutt was brought in and tied to a girder. Choe pricked the dog and then came a four hour wait where it gradually turned from healthy to sick—its breath grew labored and its head went back forth with a long string of drool swinging below. Eventually its whining ended and it slumped and ceased to move. There were seven of them in the warehouse and all waited with baited breath, and then just as the Saudis were beginning to grow irritated, it reawakened into a mindless beast with blank staring eyes and barred teeth and whose sole aim was their death.

  “It no longer feel pain,” Choe said in his broken English. He had been chosen for the foreign desk due to his ability in languages—he spoke six well enough to be understood. He gestured to the man with assault rifle and said, “Shoot in the back quarter.”

  One of the men had an AK47 and he put a well placed bullet into the cur. The little dog didn’t so much as yelp; it only turned on the shooter and pulled at the end of its leash desperate to kill, making a low moaning sound that seemed more human than canine.

  “Now shoot in thorax. You know this word?” Choe asked, pointing toward the chest of the dog. The man again aimed his weapon and shot. The bullet staggered the dog, but after a pause it came on just as before, unrelenting despite the gaping wound that went through its body. The Saudis were wide-eyed now. “Next in head,” Choe said. “Is only way is kill.”

  This last bullet did the trick. When the dog finally ceased to move, one of the extremists came forward; he stared down at it, lying in a puddle of its black blood and asked, “Ami, how long before you can get that vaccine into mass production?”

  “Two years with my current funding,” Ami Khalifa answered. He had the lilting cadence of an Englishman to his voice and the soft hands of a man unaccustomed to manual labor. “Eight months if my budget could be quadrupled. Of course your definition of mass production may be different than mine. If you are talking about millions of doses then I will need fifty times what I have and a hundred more men…and a much better facility.”

  “That I cannot do,” the financier said. “However I can begin…” He paused suddenly and would not say more with General Choe present. Instead they made arrangements to pay the North Korean and then when the man went his way, the Saudis began a general discussion concerning the implications of the virus that went on for hours—and the body of the dog was forgotten. As the Saudis made plans to bring the west to its knees, rats began to feast on it. Many of them had open wounds and these became sicker by the hour, snapping at their brothers in a fever driven delirium, further spreading the virus.

  It became a slow motion chain reaction that spread across the middle east and before Ami Khalifa reproduced even a single vaccine, infected rodents began to show up on cargo ships heading all over the Red Sea and beyond.

  And on October first, as Yuri Petrovich came off the plane in New York City in a dapper suit, he was only three days ahead of a cruise liner that would put into port in Miami carrying a great many sick passengers and a number of dead ones as well. The company tried to keep it hushed up, but very quickly it got out that cannibals had been aboard the ship.

  By then the Saudi extremists were well aware that their designs had gone awry and though they had only managed to create two-hundred doses of the vaccine they put their faith in Allah and put their murderous plan into action.

  Chapter 3

  Sarah

  Danville, Illinois

  Sarah's cart shimmied to the right, while one of the wheels thumped with every rotation; that little bump ran up her arms and right to her head where it pulsed in a dull ache.

  Why don't you just get another cart?

  She knew the answer. It was the same reason she had only dropped hints to her daughter instead of just coming out and stating plainly exactly how upset she was. Sarah Rivers didn't like to make waves...nor even ripples, like returni
ng a cart. Some of her friends thought of her as a pushover, and she wouldn't have argued the point.

  “Hey look at this,” Brit said, grabbing up a tabloid as they took a turn near the front aisle. She was a bright and sunny girl of sixteen and like her mother was strikingly beautiful. Unlike her mother, however, she was more than a little gullible. She held the tabloid up for her mother to see the headline. “Zombie monkeys are invading India. That's messed.”

  Sarah smiled. It was thin and forced, but it was what the situation called for and Sarah was always very aware what every situation called for. “It's probably not real,” she said.

  Brit looked closer at the tabloid picture and replied, “You don't know that. Maybe they have, like, Mad-cow disease or something.”

  The thin smile stayed in place and to it she added a little shrug, as if Brit's theory was actually possible. They turned up the next aisle and Sarah swept her blue eyes past the soup cans, Brit was the soup eater and it didn't make sense to buy more if she was leaving. Instead she grabbed up four cans of French-cut green beans and a tin of fried onions, thinking they would have green bean casserole for dinner that night.

  “Again?” Brit asked, eyeing the beans.

  “You're the vegetarian,” Sarah answered. She wasn't a good cook to begin with, but when her daughter had announced earlier in the year that 'Meat was Murder', her limited skills were really put to the test. “Just be happy that you won't be getting Mad-cow by eating my casserole. Though, I think only cows get Mad-cow disease; not humans or monkeys.”

  “You don't know that,” Brit said again; it was a phrase she used frequently when talking to her mother. She held up the tabloid and tapped on the picture. “Maybe this is what happens when a monkey eats a cow that has the disease.”

  “Do monkeys eat cows?” Sarah asked—and was JFK really an alien, as the next headline suggested? She didn't ask this, though she wanted to. It would mean more waves and with her daughter on the verge of moving eight-hundred miles away to live with her father, Sarah was afraid to make even the tiniest of ripples.