The Shadow of Armageddon Read online

  The Shadow of Armageddon

  By Jim LeMay

  Copyright 2014 Jim LeMay

  Book cover design by Judy Bullard

  www.customebookcovers.com

  ISBN: 978-0-615-94918-5

  This ebook is displayed using 100% recycled electrons.

  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.

  For Nyla, of course

  This is as much her book as mine. She gave me encouragement, lent a tough critical eye to the manuscript in progress, and did the myriad other things necessary to bring the work to a successful conclusion.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Appendix: The World in 2072

  Sample Chapters From A Shadow Over the Afterworld

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Matt crouched at the edge of the copse of saplings, surrounded by the night. Light from the ceiling of stars compensated somewhat for the sliver of moon’s anemic gleam. He couldn’t hear Leighton behind him but could trust him to be there. He could hear Lou Travis, faintly for sure, but sometimes faintly got you killed. No need to fear that now – he was sure their enemies didn’t know their whereabouts yet – but probably soon. He shivered slightly, despite the heat of this early August morning.

  He had stopped just before crossing the ridge. To search the star-studded darkness above the slightly darker slope for a silhouette that shouldn’t be there. To look for anything unusual on the slope below the ridge line. And to catch his breath; the long hike and the stress preceding it had taken its toll. As he squatted there he became aware of a faint, almost unnoticeable, lightening of the darkness – the first hint of dawn. Then he left the shadows and, careful not to step on rustling dry leaves or deadfall branches and twigs, moved on, crossed the ridge in a deep crouch as Johnson had taught them. In daylight you did this to lessen the possibility of creating a silhouette against the sky. At night you did it because it was habit, drilled into you by years of Johnson’s bitching.

  The other, western, side of the ridge was darker. He moved down it, back into the night. Despite the darkness though, further down he detected a difference in the terrain. Angular features spread across the slope in almost geometrical regularity. Here and there were relatively straight vertical features – rock outcroppings? He looked around (damn this dark!), then moved to the left to check a particularly large flat surface, beginning to suspect where they were. There couldn’t be a big exposed rock like this, not in this part of Missouri.

  When he reached the area, it wasn’t as flat as he had thought, but cracked and buckled with grass growing through its pocked surface. Now he recognized it: the remains of an asphaltic roadway. He approached and examined one of the regular upright protrusions he had seen, some three feet tall, grabbed the top of it. It broke off in his hand. Rotten wood, part of a building wall. His suspicion was confirmed; they were in a ruined town. He needed to warn the others because another part of the town might be inhabited and folks were not inclined to welcome strangers these days.

  A sudden crash split the silence like a bomb, followed by a stifled curse. Then silence. In a single movement Matt crouched, whirled, and brought up his rifle. After a moment he realized that the sound had been that of someone falling through brush and the voice uttering the curse had been Lou Travis’ deep bass. A few paces up the slope a thicket rustled, not as loudly as the first crash, but too noisy under the circumstances. Lou’s huge silhouette detached itself from the thicket.

  “What the hell did you blunder into?” hissed Matt as he approached Lou, his heart pounding.

  “A hole. A basement, I think.”

  “You couldn’t see something as big as a goddamn basement?”

  “It was hidden by brush and saplings and shit.”

  “Sst!” From Leighton nearby. They crept toward him. “Here’s another one, behind this wall.” The kid pointed to a gaping black pit, partially filled with rubble, behind the leaning skeleton of a wall. Looking around in the dissipating gloom, they saw amongst the weeds, brush, and stands of saplings: rubble piles, remnants of walls, flat dark patches that were the remains of streets. Occasional sections of curb and gutter and sidewalk appeared between heaps of debris from the collapsed houses.

  “We’re in a goddamn town,” whispered Leighton. “We blunder half-way acrosst it afore we even know we’re fuckin’ in it. Great bunch a point men we are.”

  “Sorry I wasn’t more careful.” From Lou.

  “Watch what the hell you’re doing,” Matt grouched. “Let’s keep it quiet and see what we can see. It’s more than likely deserted.”

  He regretted jumping Lou, but the terror of the last few days had drawn his nerves nearly to the breaking point. Just as it had the others. Still, there was no excuse for the big man not moving at the highest alert. On the other hand, he didn’t worry about Leighton’s competence at all. The kid moved like a cat, the best point man in the gang now that Johnson was gone, despite his youth and intensity. The irony of these thoughts didn’t escape him. Lou Travis was, after all, his best friend among the gang members while the high-strung Leighton grated on his nerves more often than not.

  “Let’s keep together and move along,” whispered Matt. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

  He proceeded along the edge of what they now recognized as a street, the other two in his wake. The burgeoning light showed what had happened here. The partially-standing walls and the piles of trash were blackened. Fire. Maybe lightning, or a careless cooking fire. Or a looter’s torch. The ground gradually leveled out. Curbs became more discernible along each side of the street as well as occasional stretches of sidewalk. The building walls were more intact, some of them standing higher than the men’s heads. Then they entered a district in which the houses had escaped the fire altogether. Leighton pointed down the street with his rifle. Two blocks away the street ended perpendicularly to another that appeared to be lined with stores: the business district. At the tee intersection, they crouched behind an automobile’s rusted hulk and scanned the street. The business district had been a small one; the forlorn two-story brick buildings only extended two or three blocks in each direction, with houses beginning where the businesses left off. This street appeared to comprise the entire business district. As Matt had suspected, this was – had been – a very small town. And he bet most of the businesses had been defunct even before the Last Days.

  A sense of desolation, intensified by layers of ancient dust, hovered over the street. Brush and weeds grew between the buildings and from cracks and holes in its cancerous paving. The darkened interiors of the buildings peered morosely out through broken windows. Much of the shattered glass from those windows had been swept up and carried away so people
had lived here at least for awhile after the Last Days. A familiar scene, one Matt had seen in hundreds of these little Midwestern towns over the last twelve years.

  He had nearly decided that the street, and most likely the whole town, was now deserted – an uninhabited town was exactly what they sought – when a movement caught the corner of his eye. About a hundred yards to the north, a boy emerged from a store on their side of the street, the east side, a blond kid, about twelve or thirteen.

  Leighton saw him about the same time, raised his rifle. Grabbing at it, Lou knocked the barrel against the car’s fender. The boy heard the resulting scritch, loud in the sad street’s silence, and looked at the men in horror. Dropping a sack he’d been carrying, he raced across the street, burst through a door, and slammed it shut.

  Matt ground his teeth to repress a string of invective. Typical of these two idiots: Leighton acting impulsively, completely unencumbered by the thought process, Lou with well-meaning ineptitude. He didn’t wait to admonish them for their foolishness, though, didn’t even glance at them. Even before the kid had hit the door, he started running across the street to a recessed doorway. There he hid with the smallest amount of his face and rifle barrel showing. Anyone behind that door intending to shoot him could no longer fire across the street from the safety of the building’s dark interior. He would have to step outside far enough to expose himself to Matt’s rifle. After the briefest hesitation, the other two followed him across the street and flattened themselves against the building behind him.

  Matt watched the boy’s door for a couple of minutes, saw no activity, then left the doorway, glided along the wall of buildings, quickly but with his eyes always on the door, his weapon ready. When he reached it, he knocked. No response at first. He was about to knock again when a voice beckoned him to enter. A gravelly voice, that of an old person – he couldn’t tell which sex – but not a weak voice, just old and a little suspicious.

  He opened the door, peered inside from around the corner of the jamb, his rifle ready but not pointed inside. No sense threatening or frightening anyone who intended no harm themselves. The interior was so dark he had trouble making out details at first. There were a lot of unidentifiable objects inside the room, including what appeared to be several people-sized ragged heaps arranged around a low table in the middle of the room. As his vision adjusted to the darkness, the rag piles resolved themselves into human shapes. One of them moved, extended a hand which beckoned him to enter.

  “You might as well come on in,” said the same voice, now recognizable as that of a woman. “You’ve come this far.”

  Matt entered as casually as possible to show he meant no threat but stepped to one side to avoid forming a silhouette against the open doorway. Lou and Leighton, who had followed him along the front walls of the buildings, entered in the same manner and stood at the other side of the door. Lou had hidden his weapon, a .22 caliber target pistol, under his poncho to allay the room’s occupants’ fears, but Leighton held his rifle blatantly before him, barrel raised to the ceiling and obviously available for use in seconds.

  With difficulty Matt ignored Leighton’s puerile arrogance and scanned the room. The large windows along the front did little to ease the darkness. Years of accumulated dust clogging the ancient, once-translucent curtains that covered them and coating the outer surface of the windows themselves cast a sepia pallor over the room. The woman at the low table was one of four adults, one at each side of the table. They all sat on ragged cushions with silverware and cracked dinnerware on the table before them. A steaming teapot and a loaf of cornbread on a cutting board sat in the middle of the table. Apparently Matt and his men had interrupted their breakfast. It took him awhile to see the boy. He was crouched behind the woman who had spoken. The room had a high ceiling and was apparently part of a much larger room. The back was screened off with a row of ragged, faded overlapping draperies, blankets, curtains, and less definable fabrics, all suspended from a rope or cable strung across the ceiling. A wood stove with links of stovepipe running to a hole above the window occupied the northeast corner. A scattered heap of firewood lay by the stove. Sagging shelves, chests, and wooden boxes along the south wall probably held belongings and supplies. A small table held a bucket of water, ladle, and wash basin. A tired disintegrating sofa slumped just inside the door. The draperies along the back must have concealed sleeping quarters.

  “You got here in time for breakfast,” said the figure that sat across the table from the original speaker. Now Matt could tell that the three other adults were male (they had beards). All four appeared to be old, but it was hard to tell people’s ages any more; life aged people quickly nowadays. “Problem is, we ain’t got enough to share.” Then he looked pointedly at Leighton’s rifle. “’Course you can prob’ly take whatever the hell you want, cancha?” He looked from the rifle into Leighton’s eyes, then glared at the others.

  These old farts have balls, thought Matt. Quickly he said, “We don’t intend to take anything that’s yours. We just need a place to stay for a few days.” He glared at Leighton who finally got the message and grudgingly lowered his rifle.

  “Well, there ain’t nobody in this town but us and there’s still a few places with roofs over ’m so I don’t reckon you’ll have a problem findin’ a place.”

  “Sure you’re the only ones here?” demanded Leighton. His Adam’s Apple bobbed in his scrawny neck. He was nervous, suspicious, restless. He was dangerous in that mode.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “The others all died of the Fever last winter. Including the boy here’s mother.” She put her arm protectively around the boy’s shoulders, and he crowded close to her.

  That did it for Leighton. “Fever” spoken with an understood capital “F” meant Chou’s Disease. The mention of it sent shudders of terror through all who had survived the Last Days, even those who had been very young at the time as Leighton would have been. Muscles bunched and unbunched in his face, his hands, and, Matt knew, all over his body. Bright red ascended his pale face from his neck to the orange hair straggling from beneath the wide-brimmed hat.

  “Red,” said Matt quietly, “why don’t you and Lou check out the rest of Main Street? I’ll visit with these folks for a minute.”

  Leighton slipped out the door; Lou followed.

  Matt took his hat off, sat on the sagging sofa, felt the weariness seep out of his body into its lumpy stuffing. Acting slowly and deliberately, he leaned his rifle against the far end of the sofa, an action meant to reassure them that he meant no harm. Then he leaned back, pretending to be at ease.

  “Fever, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said the man directly across the table from the woman. “Didn’t you see the signs we posted at each end a Main Street? They say ‘Fever’ plain as day.”

  “We didn’t come in that way. I’m sad to hear your neighbors passed away, though I’ll have to say it’s unusually bad luck. Chou’s Disease mostly died out years ago.” He fixed his eyes on the man who had spoken. “Where’d you bury them, all these people?”

  The man looked down. The two men who hadn’t spoken looked nervous. Everyone knew that, except for a few very rare occurrences, Chou’s Disease had died out nearly a decade ago. It had been so lethal that in most places it had killed its hosts faster than they could spread it. “Why, in the cemetery a course.”

  “Oh,” said Matt. “You must have more than one cemetery here. The one we passed hasn’t had any ground disturbed for years.” They had not, of course, passed a cemetery at all.

  “Uh, yeah, that’s right,” said the man, definitely uncomfortable, not meeting Matt’s eyes. “You musta gone by the wrong one.”

  “Where is the one you buried those folks in?” Matt continued to look at the man who now assiduously contemplated his empty plate. Matt turned suddenly on the woman, to see her staring at him with a hardened expression and a firmly-set mouth.

  “Okay. I didn’t think you could tell me where they were buried.” And then in what
he hoped was a reasonable voice, “We don’t mean you folks any harm. We’ve come a long way, and we’re tired. We’re not criminals. We’re just traveling businessmen. We find useful goods in abandoned farms and towns and sell them to folks who need them. They call us scroungers or scavengers, but we fulfill a service that folks value.”

  “Or thieves or looters or terrorists,” said another of the men.

  Matt shook his head. “I’ve heard of some that are. Not us.”

  “Then why’d you barge in here?” demanded the man.

  Matt smiled faintly. “We didn’t. We knocked, and you invited us in.”

  “You would’ve come in anyhow,” said the man who had not yet spoken.

  “Probably so,” interrupted the woman before Matt could speak. “But they haven’t caused any harm yet, and they could’ve by now. I say we take them at face value, let them stay here if they want – not that we could stop them in any case – hope they don’t steal anything and hope they get out of town as soon as possible.” Her expression was inscrutable, but her voice was cold.

  “That’s all we ask of you, ma’am. As soon as we’re rested up, we’ll be on our way. And we won’t steal anything of yours. We have plenty of our own stuff.” The latter statement was the only lie he told, and it was a big one.

  “What do you say?” asked the woman of the others. “I’d like to get on with breakfast. We all have things to do today.” The room was silent for a moment; then the man sitting across from the woman shrugged in grudging agreement. The other two mumbled assent. He mentally filed away this evidence of the group’s pecking order, useful knowledge for future dealings. The woman was their tacit leader. The guy across from her probably usually agreed with her – her second in command – and the other two would normally follow their lead.

  “By the way, I’m Matt Pringle. The big guy was Lou Travis and the other Red Leighton.”