Welcome to the silent zo.., p.1
Welcome to the Silent Zone, page 1
WELCOME
TO THE
SILENT
ZONE
VIKTOR CSÁK
Copyright © 2022 by Viktor Csák
Based on the story by Viktor Csák and Krisztián Illés
Published in 2023 by Writing Systems
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, expect for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN Ebook: 978-615-01-7400-6
ISBN Paperback: 978-615-01-7399-3
ISBN Hardcover 978-615-01-7445-7
Edited by Sherry Mooney
Translated by Zsolt Fekete & Viktor Csák
Cover design by Ádám Ludwig
Interior layout by Vanessa Mendozzi
Special thanks to Declan Hannigan, Andrea Kékes-Szabó
Writing Systems Kft.
Hungary | www.writingsystems.eu
THE WASTELAND
It started with a whisper. Something was happening in the alleys of Headland. People mauling each other like rabid beasts. Crazed demons roaming the streets at night. Far away from danger people shuddered, but in this world news only lasts fifteen minutes.
Then rumor became reality, whisper turned to scream, and the crazed demons stormed out of the alleys. People watched the footage, horrified.
The sheer panic.
The unquenchable blood thirst and unbridled rampage.
The gouged, empty orbits and the ragged stumps.
The rest of the world sat back, waiting and hoping that the ocean would stop the devastation. It was the largest quarantine ever, enforced by unmanned warships and drones, since no country dared to send their soldiers to that earthly hell. No one mentioned solidarity anymore.
The vibrant, sparkling cities were silenced forever. The screams faded as time passed. The wasteland devoured everything.
One day the New World was standing tall, was thriving; the next it ceased to exist and was left to collapse. The handful of survivors had forgotten what life was like before the Breakdown. Unfortunately, hell always has a lower pit. Something unexpected happened in the empty, windblown plains. Something that was unlike anything else. New beasts were born in the heart of the wasteland, and no one cared about the survivors’ screams.
Welcome to the Silent Zone… and good luck!
SEVEN YEARS OF MISERY
1.
“Everything’s gonna be just fine,” said the man as he readied his gun. The click echoed in the ruined, abandoned room, and he slowly pointed the Glock towards the woman.
“Where’s my little girl?” she asked. Her voice faltered as her mind struggled with consciousness. Her eyes were deeply blurred, her pupils pulsing. With her fingers she searched for his hand but only gripped air.
“She’s with Abigail.”
“Is-is she alright? I’d like to s-see her!”
He glanced at her wounds and tried to swallow the lump in his throat, but it stuck in his gullet like a glob of glue.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
The woman had been bitten. Her clothes were ripped at the spot where she’d been mauled, and blood spouted from the open wound. A drying puddle of blood covered the two wedding rings that hung from her necklace. Her muscles strained unwillingly as her body battled with the infection.
She had no chance, and it was only a matter of time before she would transform.
“P-promise me you’ll look after her!” She closed her eyes. “You m-must promise me!”
The barrel shook, and he wished he could do what she asked. There were times when he would have promised without hesitation. But not anymore.
“Close your eyes!”
“Please…”
She couldn’t take it any longer. In her very last moment, she only wished for false hope, to be reassured about her child’s safety, the child for whom she had given her life.
“I’m begging you… Do it for me!”
He bit his bone-dry lips and took a deep breath.
“I’m gonna take care of her… I promise!” he said, and they looked at each other. She was ready. He aimed at her forehead and only hesitated for a beat before he pulled the trigger.
The shot echoed in the room, then silence. Only the spicy, sour smell of gunpowder remained.
Deep breath.
Exhale.
He turned towards the others: four children stood in the upstairs room of the abandoned warehouse like ghosts among the dusty, faded office furniture. They watched him with eyes wide open, then…
…they looked at a panting fifth child.
The little girl lay by the wall at the other end of the room, her hands strained to her chest. Her hair was shaggy and bloody, her clothes ripped in several places. She struggled to stay conscious. She moaned quietly and her desperate limbs shook. It was the same feral that had bitten her. And she too had no chance.
The man stepped away from the woman’s body, and the four children started backing away. The little girl was close to transforming, so they didn’t have much time. The infection had quickly overwhelmed the fragile body. He stood before her and raised his pistol, but this time the trigger resisted more.
She looked up desperately from the shadows and her eyes still glittered behind the glassy look, the color of a roaring, crystalline ocean. He felt he would get lost in the waves any minute.
“Cassius, wait!” The eldest child, a teenage girl, gripped her shotgun. “Perhaps…”
“Perhaps what, Abigail?” he asked and stared at the rest of the children, but they were speechless. They just wanted the whole thing to end. Cassius’s face turned red in anger. Now it was the hesitation that annoyed him. The same quarrel again, even though they knew there was no hope. “Perhaps you have another great idea? Well, fire away!”
Abigail squeezed her mouth shut and turned her head. She stared at the door, which they had barricaded earlier. She didn’t want to witness what was about to happen.
“Thought so!” Cassius said, then he felt the weight of the gun in his right hand. For the last time, he gave the little girl a smile.
“Everything’s gonna be just fine…”
2.
Jake Armstrong, or Cassius as his long dead friends used to call him, knew that the last feral would attack soon. They had fought back the first wave, but even the children knew that ferals would immediately reorganize themselves.
It didn’t matter that, even with a struggle, they had killed the first three monsters. The fourth member of the pack was lurking somewhere outside, just waiting for the right moment. It was as hungry as the others, and now it could taste blood and flesh in its mouth.
“Ammo?” he asked, but Abigail was distracted by the blood stain on the wall. The splash pattern above the little girl’s head was reminiscent of the wings of an angel. Abigail winced when Cassius rapped his gun against a nearby desk.
“Abigail! Ammo?”
“Six in the pistol and three for the shotgun. What about you?”
“Three in the Glock, seven in the Remington.”
Not much.
“How the hell could this happen?” Abigail asked, but no answer came.
Cassius looked at the other kids and saw that he couldn’t rely on any of them. The youngest, the seven-year-old, Lucas, was severely injured, and held his elbow tight. The pain pulled at his facial features with an invisible fishing line. The ever-grinning Nia was squatting beside him. The thirteen-year-old girl had carefully placed the boy’s favorite Matchbox car in his hand, in the hope it might calm him. And, of course, there was Molly, who stood by the wall, dejected and staring at the floorboards as if it were her only task. Cassius saw that the quiet ten-year-old girl could not fight a feral. Especially not the one that was after them.
“I’m scared,” Lucas whispered.
Nia caressed his forehead. Her encouraging smile looked as if it had been painted onto her face. It fell away slowly but surely. “Everything’s gonna be fine, okay? We’ll be headed home soon!”
“Yeah, for sure!” Molly rolled her eyes.
So, the only one left was Abigail. The spindly sixteen-year-old girl could barely stand but straightened her back as if she exactly knew what Cassius was thinking. Her deep-brown eyes had grown wide with shock, and the August heat had burnt a blush on her thin, pale cheeks. Her thick lips were half-open as she stamped on the rubble and spun her head around steadily, like an Energizer flamingo. She wiped her dirty hands on her favorite T-shirt: the first piece of clothing she had picked for herself. CHEER UP, read the ragged, over-washed letters.
“Now what?” Abigail asked, then quickly swept aside an unruly lock of hair from her eyes. Her shaggy blonde pixie hair was sweaty from the escape and waved in the afternoon light like a bundle of straw. It was only a question of time before Cassius would order her to cut it even more.
It’s about survival… it ain’t a fashion statement. He said the same thing every single time she felt like arguing. Of course, she knew
Cassius slipped the Glock into its holster and lifted the Remington from the floor. He stepped to the window and looked down from the height. His broad shoulders hid the sunshine, and his long, tense shadow ran through the room, hiding Abigail in the dark.
Where are you? Show yourself!
He was looking for the fourth one, but nothing moved outside in the weedy parking lot. He didn’t let the calm and the silence confuse him. The woman’s bag was still at the tires of the rusty truck where she had dropped it in fear; not far from it a teddy bear lay in the dust, hugged until it was threadbare.
Cassius looked to the side. At the blood-shaped angel wings. Concentrate! You don’t have much time left…
They barely had a couple of hours until sunset.
“What if it gave up?” Abigail asked. No reply came. His sharp contour did not move. “What if it escaped?”
“Has that ever happened?”
“No.”
The answer was pure formality. Once a feral stalked its prey, it never gave up. It could smell uninfected blood from a distance and wouldn’t give up the taste of flesh. Still, the parking lot was empty. Their horse, the last one not slaughtered by the ferals, had been frightened by attack and was already far away.
Cassius turned and the sunlight immediately broke its way through to Abigail. He saw that she was searching for his eye-contact so that she could read his expression.
“It’s already in the building, ain’t it?” Abigail asked, holding on to her shotgun tightly.
Cassius nodded.
“Then it knows where we are!” Abigail involuntarily crept closer to him. Her voice trembled with nerves. “If we split, we can search the building! I’ll take the upper level, downstairs is yours…”
“You’re not going anywhere!”
She stopped and spread her arms angrily.
“Well, what then? Wait for night to fall on us?”
“Better than walking into a trap!” It was Molly’s plaintive voice, which, as expected, was followed by Nia’s objection.
“We can’t stay here! If night falls, we have no chance, even if we dig ourselves in!”
Cassius closed his eyes and tried to recall the attack. How and when it became a clusterfuck. They were headed home on the old Route 285 when they spotted the warehouse among the dry brown slopes and the fresh growth of pepper trees. They hadn’t searched this building before, and they desperately needed supplies. The woman and her daughter meant there were two more hungry mouths to feed, and the lack of ammo had been a worry for weeks.
By then they had already been marching for at least six hours in the August heatwave, and the exhausted children had convinced Cassius to stop. Thinking back: they had made too much noise. The woman and her daughter were happy to be found and saved. They rushed in, but the ferals had been waiting for them in the warehouse. The one hiding behind the truck bit the woman first, and she immediately went into a shock.
“Did you notice anything about them?” Cassius asked. He already knew what he had to do, but something still bothered him. Their survival was at stake.
“Yes,” Abigail said. “The first one was a Delta.”
Delta, meaning it had been infected for a year. Signs of transformation were easy to see on its body and face: its cheek bones strained inside its skin like blades, its limbs grown frighteningly long. Cassius remembered first seeing a Delta, realizing that the virus had not only reprogrammed the ferals’ brains, but their bodies, as well.
“The second was a Gamma.”
Right… and the bastard didn’t give up easily!
The Gammas had been bitten two or three years ago, and in the meantime the virus had forced enormous transformations. Long, thin, spidery fingers; abnormally strong, still delicate human jaws; faded yellow eyes. If you wanted to kill a Gamma, having a weapon was just a start; you also needed training and practice to spot its weak points. Firing at its legs and crippling it was the best course of action, so you could finish the job with a headshot or a bullet into the heart, for the Gamma’s bones had not grown strong yet.
“The third was just a Greenhorn.”
He nodded.
Just a Greenhorn, meaning it was only different from the ordinary humans by its behavior. That, however, meant a hell of a difference. The first symptom was frantic fury as the human body tried to fight the infection, even though the battle had already been decided.
Civilization suppressed the brutal animal instinct in all of humanity, but that instinct could never be fully destroyed. And sooner or later it broke out in those bitten with infernal devastation.
Cassius could only think of one solution: promptly send a bullet into the poor bastard’s head to end its suffering. Transformation was accompanied by dreadful pain, and the longer it took, the more difficult it was to kill the feral.
“What about the fourth one?”
The last one, which was lurking outside.
“I couldn’t see it clearly, but…”
Abigail clipped her sentence, which was enough for Cassius. He had hoped he was wrong. He had hoped he was mistaken, and perhaps he couldn’t see it well, either, but even the distance was unable to hide the atrophied lips, the teeth behind them, the robust shoulders.
Abigail did not dare to finish. Cassius did it for her.
“The fourth one is a Beta.”
3.
Fuckin’ Betas! Cassius had every reason to curse, but he kept most of it to himself. He did not want to cause panic, so he straightened up. Bring it on, we can handle this!
A Delta or a Gamma could be beaten, but the Betas were so fast and so strong that there was not much hope in this labyrinthine, dimly lit building, especially not with machetes and half empty magazines.
The features of the Betas were unrecognizably distorted by the virus. Their bodies had grown as if invisible, infernal forces were pulling their limbs, and even the smallest one towered above their prey. They were seven-foot-tall, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound beasts. Their bony muscles were like knotted cables swelling under the skin, while their fingers were like sharp claws. Their lantern-jaws were a nightmare come to life with fang-like teeth and lips ripped open into the cheeks.
All useless hair and fat had vanished from their bodies, and with their sophisticated sight and sense of smell it was impossible to hide from them. The only thing that could kill a Beta for sure was a headshot or bullets (yes, plural) into their stomach. Their ribs and spine were like Kevlar. Most of the dangerous packs were led by Betas, but there was one thing worse.
An Alpha.
A monstrosity which had transformed in the first year of the pandemic and for some reason had not died from the endless deformation. Their existence had long been a rumor, but nothing more; they were just dark shadows in some traveler’s tale. Cassius had never seen anyone who had met an Alpha face-to-face. Even if some poor soul had the ill fortune to fight one, they were unlikely to have survived the encounter.
“If it was really a Beta, we would all be dead by now,” Molly said, while Nia shrugged her shoulders.
“Not necessarily! There were only four of the bastards. If there had been twice as many, then… yikes!” And the girl raised her fists above her head and let her tongue hang out, pretending to be hanged.
Molly shook her head, as she always did when she was not taken seriously, and curled up on the floor.
“What if it wasn’t four of them?” Abigail asked.
Cassius hesitated.
“We would’ve seen them,” he said and pointed to the cabinet cramped in front of the door. “Help me pull it away. I’ll go look around.”
“I’ve got an idea. If we…”
“You stay here and hold out!”
Abigail lost her enthusiastic look.
“What?”
“If anything happens to me, you know what to do.”
