Hell's Children: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

T
his is a work of fiction
. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

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John

F
or
Dorothy

F
ourteen-year
-old Jack Ferris shoveled another scoop of dirt onto his mom’s grave. Two feet to the right was his dad’s shallow plot, dug weeks ago by his mom while she still had the strength.

He leaned on his spade and surveyed the work through eyes red from crying. Neither grave was even close to deep enough, but he doubted if such things mattered anymore. The world had gone to hell, it liked it there, and it wasn’t coming back.

“Love you Mom and Dad,” he said.

Jack grabbed his coat and the .40 caliber pistol resting on it and climbed the short flight of stairs to the deck of their modest corner townhouse in Centreville, Virginia. Standing there in his t-shirt, breath steaming in the frigid November air, he scrutinized the road that looped through the neighborhood. Nothing to see but a row of cars on either side covered with leaves from months of sitting idle. Well, that and a Volvo the Asian kid five doors down had plowed into a tree. That was yesterday. Jack hadn’t seen the crash, but he’d heard it. Scared him to death. He’d run out with his pistol thinking it was the food gang coming to make a go at the house. Instead of the food gang, he’d seen his neighbor climb out of the car, fall down, get up, and then stumble out of sight.

Jack hadn’t bothered to check if he was all right. What would be the point?

All the townhouses in their row of eight had sliding glass doors. The neighbor’s door two units down had been smashed in long ago. After that, Jack and his dad had boarded up their own door using fencing from houses where people had died. They’d run the boards vertically, allowing only a narrow opening to get in and out.

After a last look around, Jack slid the door open, then carefully stepped over the dark towel stretched over the floor like a mat. Lurking beneath it were three boards hammered through with about fifty nails.

Months ago, in noble acceptance of their looming deaths, nuclear workers everywhere had preemptively shut down reactors. Weeks later, the coal plants followed when nobody was well enough or willing to work. With the electricity out going on two months, the house wasn’t just dark, it was cold. About forty degrees.

Jack tried to imagine the small kitchen without his mom standing there in her apron doing three things at once. His dad should have been sitting in his leather recliner reading out loud from whatever he’d picked up, regardless if anyone was interested. That’s how he’d been—couldn’t enjoy something unless everyone was involved. Both parents had been Jack’s world in ways other kids could never understand. And though he’d known since his seventh birthday that they’d die one day—because they’d told him so—that knowledge didn’t ease his pain one bit.

Jack grabbed the flashlight from the stainless steel island and stalked angrily through the living room. With barely a glance at the boarded-up windows, he went upstairs to yet more shuttered darkness, in search of the rest he needed but wouldn’t get in that too-quiet house.

* * *

I
n the beginning
, when his parents stopped going to work for fear of getting sick, they’d guessed rightly that trucks would stop delivering food to the supermarkets. They’d further assumed desperate people might take from others if it meant their families could eat. As the Sickness raged, it quickly became obvious the quarantines were useless. In the end, the news people on TV—visibly sick through their heavy makeup—as much as said so. Everyone got sick, but only kids ever recovered, and only about twenty percent. That’s how it worked. Adults and the older teenagers wasted away over a course of weeks and months, and then they died.

The electricity lasted a little longer than the newscasters, whose final broadcasts turned bleaker and bleaker. Scientists had learned a little bit—the Sickness was a metabolic disease that attacked the mitochondria in cells, interfering with their ability to turn fuel into energy. But though they got better at describing in detail the effects of the disease, they never found a cause. No pathogen or poison had been discovered, leading one flustered contributor to refer to it as a
curse
, and not a virus.

As the adults disappeared, gangs of kids emerged, going door to door demanding food from those too sick to resist. In response, Jack’s parents—still in the early stages of the disease—hammered up the boards, established a watch rotation, and made sure all three floors had a gun: rifles upstairs, and pistols on the main floor and basement. An emergency hoard of beans and rice kept them fed while most of world slowly died from not just the Sickness, but starvation.

If only the Sickness had killed in a week, the adults would have left behind a world of packed supermarkets and pantries. But the disease could take months to kill, and the food disappeared.

* * *

P
ounding
on the front door shook Jack from his troubled doze. He knew instantly who it was, but peeked out his parents’ bedroom window to be sure. Standing in the street facing the house was a group of teenagers ranging between twelve and fifteen years old. There were also three cars and a yellow Humvee that hadn’t been there before. Each boy or girl was armed. One of them—a tall, redheaded boy—had a carbine of some kind slung around his neck like a marine. Probably an AR-15, like the one Jack’s dad had. Serious firepower.

The redhead cupped his mouth and shouted something.

Jack unlatched the window and raised it all the way up.

The boy shouted again: “Hey! In the house!” He reached through the window of one of the cars and honked the horn.

Some laughed at that. Some didn’t.

The boy was so big, it was amazing he’d survived the Sickness, unless he was just a really large fifteen year old. His voice carried a sense of confidence and power, and his friends seemed to defer to him in their body language. It also helped that he had the coolest gun.

Jack’s father had taken him deer hunting four years straight, the last time a year ago. He’d let Jack bring down a buck of his own on his tenth birthday and then made him field dress it. Shooting the older boy with his dad’s rifle would have been the easiest thing in the world. The thick boards over the windows were spaced for concealment and protection while allowing a clear view of the front yard and street. If he shot him, the rest would scatter, and he’d be safe. Sooner or later, though, standing watches alone with no sleep and trying to guard two entrances would take its toll. Also, he wasn’t sure he was ready to kill someone. Not in cold blood. Which was why he’d decided to leave. With the burials concluded, he’d hoped to slip out early tomorrow, start fresh, but there was zero chance of that now.

“I know you can hear me,” the boy shouted.

“Yeah, I hear you,” Jack yelled back.

The boy smiled, big and showy. “Someone said you buried your momma. I would say sorry to hear it, but I’m not. Their time is over. I’ll make it simple: we want your food. Guns, too.” He laughed. “We know you have at least one. Also, you’re gonna join us. Do what I say, no questions, and you get to eat. If you don’t, you need to get out and keep going. That’s the rules.”

Beside him, a wild-looking girl held up a gas can and shook it. “Better hurry, too, or we’ll burn you out!”

The crowd around her hooted and yelled and punched their fists in the air. The older boy seemed oblivious to that. He just stood there confidently, staring up at the window.

“And who makes the rules?”

“That’d be me,” he said, head cocked to the side as if trying to figure something out. “Come on out. You know it makes sense.”

“Tell you what,” Jack said. “You stay there while I think about it. Maybe invent some fun new rules while you wait.”

The girl’s shrill voice carried over the mob. “We won’t warn you again!”

After a quick look out the back window—kids there too, just outside the fence—Jack tugged down the stepladder to the attic, climbed up, and pulled it shut behind him. He turned on his LED flashlight and moved to the wall they shared with the next-door townhouse. A month ago, before the two neighbors there died, that wall had been smooth plywood blocked by boxes of old stuff. Now there was a hole in the middle barely wide enough for Jack to slip through in an emergency.

He’d known for a while now the house was being watched. His dad’s AR-15 leaned against the wall next to the jacket he planned to take and the backpack of supplies his mother had packed for him. She’d called the pack a
bugout bag
and had stuffed it with so much food it nearly tipped him over the first time he’d tried it on. Since then, he’d replaced some of the food with fishing gear, a book his dad had wanted him to read, and a small selection of family photos. He’d also packed extra ammo for the rifle and the .40 caliber on his hip. Both guns were mostly plastic, except for the barrels and internals, and he hoped he wouldn’t be forced to shed more weight when he started walking. He liked the rifle and hoped to use it for hunting.

The sound of shattered glass carried from downstairs. Quickly and quietly, he passed the rifle and pack through the hole and climbed through. Then he pulled the big box with his mom’s old wedding dress in front of the opening to hide his escape.

The neighbor’s attic wasn’t nearly as packed as Jack’s. Just a few boxes stacked up near the floor entrance. Jack stepped around those, careful to place each foot squarely on the wooden planking so as not to bust through the ceiling, then made his way to another wall with a hole in it. With no electricity, it had been a chore cutting these holes with his dad’s various tools, but he’d managed to bust through four houses. He’d stopped there because the Asian kid lived in the fifth one.

Thinking back to yesterday’s spectacle, he wondered if the kid was still alive. Maybe he was out there with that mob, right now.

In no time at all, Jack traversed each of the four connected attics. After listening for half a minute, he lowered his gear down to the second floor and followed after. The family who’d lived there had fled early on, before roadblocks made that nearly impossible for anyone else. He felt bad for them. They’d had a baby.

“Focus,” Jack said quietly, then flinched at the crack of automatic gunfire outside. He revised his earlier assumption—it was an M4, not an AR-15.

What the hell is he shooting at?

Looking around the room, he wrinkled his nose at the sour stench of condiments rotting in the fridge. He’d searched the house before and found it empty of food, people, and pets. The family hadn’t taken much. Mostly clothes, it looked like. A waste of space. One thing the world would never run out of was clothing. And if the Sickness didn’t take him one day, he’d have an endless supply sitting on store shelves waiting for him to find.

“You survived it already,” his weakening mother had said when he’d broached the subject. “That makes you immune.”

Jack had just nodded. If it wasn’t a disease—if it really was a curse like that news guest had said—none of the old rules applied.

More shots sounded from outside, back-to-back like the grand finale of a Fourth of July celebration.

He slipped out the back door and crept to the gate. At the last second, he stepped onto the horizontal rail and pulled himself up for a look. Four houses down, a group of boys stood on his deck. One of them opened the sliding glass door—purposely left unlocked—and went inside. A second later, pained yelling issued forth, bringing a grim smile to Jack’s face. Another boy ran in after him, and then he screamed, too.

Jack hiked his pack a little higher on his back and ducked out into the common area between the houses. As he trundled along the fence deeper into the neighborhood, he wondered how anyone could be so stupid as to follow someone into a nail trap.

He shook his head.
What do you expect from a bunch of cabbages?