Hell's Requiem: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Thanks

  Queuing Up Hell's Requiem

  Prelude

  This is the End

  01

  Heartbreaker

  02

  03

  04

  Don’t Fear the Reaper

  05

  06

  Run Like Hell

  07

  Bad Moon Rising

  08

  Painted Black

  09

  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

  10

  One Way or Another

  11

  12

  World is Running Down

  13

  Losing My Religion

  14

  15

  16

  In the Air Tonight

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Bohemian Rhapsody

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  End of The World

  Epilogue

  What is Cicada?

  Where is the Stone Age World?

  Did you like Hell’s Requiem?

  How did it begin?

  Back of the Book

  Who is ML Banner?

  HELL’S

  REQUIEM

  M.L. BANNER

  Copyright © 2017 by Toes In The Water Publishing, LLC,

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-947510-00-5 (Paperback)

  Hell’s Requiem is an original work of fiction.

  The characters, events, and dialog are the products of this author’s vivid imagination.

  Any similarity to real persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Most of the science and historical incidents described in this novel

  are based on reality; the rest is fictional.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Published by

  www.toesinthewaterpublishing.com

  Thanks and Acknowledgments

  To my wife and partner... Thank you for always encouraging my imagination to fly and for supporting my writing habit.

  To my friend Jeffry... Would have loved to have shared this one with you.

  To my Advanced Reader Team... Thanks for helping me smooth out some of the rough edges in the story.

  To all my readers... Thank you for all of your support!

  Queuing Up Hell’s Requiem

  Hell’s Requiem is the name of Tom Rogers’ (one of the heroes of CICADA) musical playlist, which exists on an iPod that can never be played because of constant solar storms (first described in Stone Age) which destroy anything with electric current.

  This is Tom’s story...

  His son died, and his wife left him.

  Then the world ended.

  It was about to get much worse.

  Tom was already prepared for society’s collapse when the nonstop solar storms arrived. He just hadn’t planned on the loneliness.

  When a woman and a little boy show up, they bring with them much more than Tom had bargained for. He’ll not only have to battle for his life; he’ll need to fight for a reason to live, as he recalls the painful memories and the songs linked to them in Hell’s Requiem.

  Prelude

  The Day of the Event

  It wasn’t the crash of the gun, but the thump of the bullet hitting soft tissue that always made Tom Rogers grow cold.

  The sounds and images from that fateful moment were just as fresh to him as the day it happened, even though years had passed.

  The normal thunder of the rifle was followed immediately by a dreadful ping as the round ricocheted. Then the terrifying thunk reflexively yanked Tom’s head toward it. The horror that followed was still unfathomable.

  Each time Tom sat at the table where it happened, he relived that moment, his memory silently regurgitating a slow trickle of nightmarish pictures.

  His son Drew had turned to him, his face locked in a puzzled frown; lips wedged open by the first syllable of the word “father”—his brain functions had ceased before it could transmit the rest. For a long moment, the only movement came from a dark red circle in the middle of his boy’s head, bubbling a line of crimson that slowly dripped, furrowing a track around the bridge of his nose and eye socket, before coursing down his cheek. A droplet clung to his open lip, a silent red tear that would never be shed.

  Then Drew folded over like a book cover, gravity taking control: his eyes rolled back; his face went completely slack; his head listed, and then came to a permanent rest on top of his rifle, his upper-body held motionless by the top of the table they’d been shooting from. His already cooling finger mockingly teased the trigger of the gun, as if it were ready to render another go-around.

  Tom had felt like a detached witness to this unspeakable event, one he could never have imagined: his eight-year-old son had just died right before his eyes.

  “Drew!” he remembered yelling, cupping his son’s limp form into his arms, as if he could squeeze him back to life.

  The rest of that day’s images were a lightning blur.

  His wife had run from the house, dropping glasses of freshly-poured lemonade she was bringing them. The broken vessels remained to this day in the same place they had landed.

  She had found Tom sobbing, rocking his dead son back and forth, just as he did when Drew was an infant.

  The ambulance arrived—she must have called.

  Drew’s body was whisked away, so that all that was left of his boy were the horrific images from that day.

  She went with the ambulance. And just like that, she was plucked from his life too.

  Later, she had told him it was all his fault. It was all that “prepping shit” that forced their son into the situation where an accident like this could happen, and they were too far from emergency services to save him. Her last words in their short phone conversation were, “I hope you enjoy your solitude when the world ends, because it will be without the son and the marriage you murdered.”

  That one word still rattled around Tom’s head like a bad hangover... murdered.

  Now, he fixated on the eight-by-ten target, fastened to a dead tree leaning into a rising mesa, its corners curled by the relentless wind and unforgiving time. Near the innermost circle of the bullseye was the final hole. It was the only evidence left of that ruinous moment.

  Tom scowled at the target and relived the most ghastly of the mental pictures from that day: his son’s helpless look, a face that begged for help, his lifeless form, the bullet hole in the target and the matching one in his boy’s head.

  Each day, he’d park himself on the chair beside the table Drew had been shooting from and he would look at this withering marker of that time and remember his son. He would sit outside until the sun set, and the bright light of the day was consumed by the quiet of night. And each day he waited for the pain of this festering memory to go away.

  This day was no different.

  Seconds bled into minutes, and then drained into hours.

  And as he waited for the darkness to soften his agony, his otherwise empty mind was filled with a Simon and Garfunkel ballad.

  Hello darkness, my old friend... his mind recalling each of the words, as if they were written for him... vision that was planted
in my brain.

  A labored hum rose softly from the base of his throat, slowly matching the familiar words playing in his mind, while all of the day’s light ebbed away.

  But on this night, years after Drew’s death, the light returned.

  Only after a while, Tom’s eyes, previously gazing into the dark earth, now resolved the image of his feet and its surroundings: the edges of his boot, the frayed tips of his shoelaces, the ground cover of chewed-on twigs.

  He noticed his hand was extended out in front of him and he examined it in disbelief, clearly able to scrutinize the dried flecks of dirt on his fingers from that day’s labor.

  He could see.

  But it was well past nine at night.

  His eyes sprang heavenward and he found himself transfixed by the second-most shocking sight of his life: the night sky was awash in green phosphorescence, bathing everything in an eerie jade-colored light, making the world as bright as a cloud-covered day.

  Tom was no astronomer. He couldn’t explain the physical properties of what was going on. But he knew exactly why it was happening.

  He also knew that this would change everything for most everyone in the world.

  He leapt from his chair and ran to his empty home at the top of the hill, where no one would be waiting for him to share the news: that moment in history he knew would come; that moment he’d been waiting for, planning for, and prepping for was finally here.

  He was about to experience the end of the world, utterly alone.

  Hell’s Requiem Playlist, Track 1

  Song/Artist: This Is The End by The Doors

  Keywords: elaborate plans, the end; everything that stands, the end; never look into your eyes

  01

  Current Day

  (Six Months Later)

  Moments before the Event shut down KCBY Radio - All 80's All The Time for good, they played I Can Never Stop Tomorrow by the Bee Gees—perhaps the last time that song would ever be played on radio. And yet since that day, that song, like the images of his dead boy, forever played in Tom’s head.

  He tried to push the lyrics and melody aside, since he had far more important worries to occupy his mind. But he just couldn't. The melody was stuck there, playing endlessly.

  If only he could think of another song. But he couldn't even think of one.

  “Ugh!” he moaned, only to himself.

  This was an affliction that had plagued him his whole life: the inability to think of another song when one already had possession of his mind. It was like some demonic disc jockey inside his head broke all the records in his mental jukebox. His only hope was a complete song exorcism by listening to and singing along with another song. Only then could he hope to replace the song that occupied his conscious song-memory.

  Before the Event it was simple to perform a song exorcism by turning on the radio, or playing digital recordings on one of his many devices, or even firing up an LP on his vintage record player. But in a world without power and with constant electrostatic discharges in the air, radio stations were extinct and so were the devices that played their music.

  Although he still had an iPod—loaded with his favorite playlist, Hell’s Requiem—and it was probably still functional, it was almost out of juice, and he didn’t dare try to recharge it. He couldn't get any of his other hardier batteries to charge up again because each time he'd hook one up to his solar cells, they would get fried from the atmosphere’s constant electrostatic discharges.

  He just didn’t want to chance it and possibly fry his only working digital player, and with it the last of his precious songs. To protect it, he’d even constructed a metal Faraday shell around the device, for the time when he would finally take the chance to see if it worked. But with so little charge left in it, he didn’t want to waste it. And he just wasn’t sure if he took it outside, it too wouldn’t get fried like everything else electronic.

  So like his own memory, his iPod’s archive of songs—perhaps one of the few remaining in the world—and the battery charge which protected it, was doomed to slowly melt away. It would be as if the songs had never existed in the first place.

  He glanced up at the bright orange ball in the sky and cursed at it and its creator silently for causing him this constant torment.

  But he also knew his suffering was of his own making. He purposely denied himself anything pleasurable in memory of his son, whose own suffering ended so quickly. It was all part of his penance for—as his wife Mimi had told him—murdering their son.

  He could, of course, end it anytime he wanted to—he glanced at Drew’s Rock River LAR-15 rifle, resting up against the withering pine tree he and Drew had planted so long ago. It was the same rifle his son was firing that day. It hadn’t been shot since then. In its chamber was one more bullet, the magazine otherwise empty. That bullet was meant for him. But glancing at it and carrying it around the ranch was as far as he’d take it.

  It wasn’t that Tom lacked the backbone to pull the trigger. It was more of another constant reminder to him of Drew, and that at any time he could take the easy way out. But this also reminded him that Drew didn’t suffer; his son’s end was quick. So Tom carried the rifle around with him everywhere, a ball and chain to his son and the torturous memories of that day he died.

  And just like the images of his dead son, or the rifle that gave him a tangible reminder of his crime as well as its offer of solace that he would never accept, he too would do nothing about the song that haunted his head.

  Instead of straining to remember the melody of another song, he focused on his work, pushing his spade into the soft soil, slicing out a nice round hole. When he was satisfied with his creation, he placed the plant into it, and then folded the wet dirt around it. He finished off his work with more water from a watering pail.

  He shot another glance upward at his nemesis, the sun. It was a defiant look that taunted, “You can take everything else away from me, but you cannot take this!”

  He felt a little emboldened, as he and his plants were semi-protected by a fabric mesh stretched over a fixed canopy erected above the garden. It let through just enough sunlight, but cut the UV radiation down substantially. Direct sunlight now withered all plants and trees, and he suspected, would probably kill all humans, eventually. But by God, these plants would survive, at least while he drew breath.

  And with his modified greenhouse behind his house, he was able to nurture more plants from his stash of heirloom seeds, so that if any of these saplings perished, there were others waiting to take their place. He felt some satisfaction at this accomplishment and didn’t hold back from letting a rare smile snake along his cleanly-shaven mug.

  Still, the song came.

  It pulsated its everlasting chorus over and over again, like a painful headache that wouldn’t go away.

  Dammit!

  There was only one thing he could do. It would be the only pleasure he would allow himself.

  He gave up and started singing.

  He paused to prepare his voice for it and then belted out the first verse, “I remember younger days...” In his own mind, his rendition rose to a Barry-Gibbs-like pitch, although his actual delivery was in a monotone crackle.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand...” His refrain broke open as wide as the Grand Canyon as he forced his vocal cords to their sopranic limits, evermore thankful there weren't many people left in this world, and no one in this valley who could hear him,

  “How can you—”

  The distinctive crack of a gunshot cut the air in half and echoed up from the front of his property.

  He paused, holding his spade in midair—a conductor of an orchestra who hit a sour note, tempting his musicians to try that once more.

  Another gunshot.

  Like a sprinter exploding from the starting gate for a fifty-meter dash—or more like sixty-three meters, to be exact—he darted from his kneeling position, dropping his spade and snatching the LAR-15 in one fluid motion.

  His mind gnawed at what
he had heard. It sounded like a 30-30, but it was hard to discern with the distance and the valley distorting its echoes. It was out front, beyond his gate.

  He weaved his way deliberately through the blackberry and raspberry bushes, careful not to be eaten by their wicked thorns. All were purposely planted for protection against all matter of mammals who might wander this way and decide to help themselves to the fruits of his labor.

  Another crack rang out, this one, much closer—probably because he was almost upon the intruder now.

  He speculated that someone must be hunting on his property.

  That thought pissed him off, as there was very little game around now, and he tried his best to limit the number of animals he took from the area, until needed. He was sort of like the Game and Fish Warden for these parts—perhaps the only one left in the world, futilely attempting to preserve the dwindling animal population which still occupied this once-fertile valley. His valley.

  Although he had his holstered Sig, he might need to cover some distance with the rifle, so he snatched the barren five-round hunting magazine from the rifle and swapped it with a full one from his everyday carry bag; all the while he galloped.

  He leapt onto his drive, a long meandering gravel road that snaked down to a six-foot high double gate, where he guessed he would find the person or persons who were making all this racket.

  Approaching the gate, his mind flashed the image of his son’s body being taken away, and his wife Mimi leaving him for good.

  Once more the crack of a rifle, now very loud, erupted only yards away, punching through the raw memory.

  When Tom passed a clearing, just before his gate, he could see movement by a tree, just on the other side.

  It was a woman and a boy.

  The boom of the 30-30 sounded again.

  Tom turned his rifle in that direction and saw a raggedy little man aiming a Winchester Carbine at the woman and the child.