Dead Train (Book 1): All Aboard Read online

  Dead Train: All Aboard

  Kal Spriggs

  Copyright 2018 Sutek Press

  This 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.

  Books by Kal Spriggs

  Kal’s Amazon Page

  The Shadow Space Chronicles

  The Fallen Race

  The Shattered Empire

  The Prodigal Emperor

  The Sacred Stars

  The Temple of Light

  Ghost Star

  The Star Engine*

  The Renegades

  Renegades: Origins

  Renegades: Out of the Cold

  Renegades: Out of Time

  Renegades: Royal Pains*

  The Star Portal Universe

  Valor’s Child

  Valor’s Calling

  Valor’s Duty

  Valor’s Cost

  Valor's Stand*

  Lost Valor*

  Fenris Unchained

  Odin’s Eye

  Jormungandr’s Venom*

  The Eoriel Saga

  Echo of the High Kings

  Wrath of the Usurper

  Fate of the Tyrant

  Heir to the Fallen Duke*

  *Forthcoming

  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

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The zombies didn't move out of the way as two thousand nine hundred and fifty tons of steel rolled into them. The train didn't lurch, it didn't shudder, it didn't even really slow as it crushed dozens of the rotting corpses and rolled right on through. The train snow plow on the front mostly sent the mindless undead tumbling out of the way, shattering their bones and leaving those it struck limp and motionless. Jack couldn't even hear the sound of crunching bone and tearing flesh over the sound of the train's wheels on the tracks and the grumble of the diesel-electric locomotives.

  A few would sometimes find their way under the wheels or would catch a grip on one of the sides of the cars in passing. That was why the train riders went to full defensive status as they passed through towns. In towns, the train had to slow down for curves and track switches. As Jack watched, hundreds more zombies shambled out of the otherwise dark and deserted town, drawn by the noise of the train. Most of them were too slow to reach the train in time, but a handful were either fresher or simply more energetic, and those managed a stumbling run.

  Most of those grasped blindly for the train and many of them lacked the dexterity necessary to accomplish anything beyond falling beneath the wheels and being ground into a red paste. Survivors fended off the handful that caught hold, using improvised spears. This situation wasn't severe enough to warrant the use of ammunition.

  "Watch for clingers," Jack shouted over his radio. "Report in your status by car!" Captain Jack Zamora waited patiently, his body armor, weapons, and helmet a familiar weight. The gray-eyed former Army officer kept a confident expression on his lean face, even as he felt worry eat at his gut.

  "Car forty-nine, all clear," Chris Peck reported. The former construction project manager from Cincinnati had a proper attention to detail, which was why Jack had chosen him for the trail car. "No clingers and we're clear of the town."

  The other cars reported in, one by one, and as the train began to pick up speed again, Jack gave a silent prayer of thanks. It looked like they'd made it.

  "This is car twelve!" A panicked voice shouted over the radio, "Taylor is down, there's a zombie, oh god, they're killing us!"

  Jack didn't take the time to swear. He waved at the response team and started running back along the line of cars. Twelve cars, he did the math as he ran, trying not to think about how many women and children were in car twelve, fifty-five and a half feet per car, that's six hundred and sixty-six feet.

  Jack didn't even notice the gaps between cars as he jumped them, shotgun clutched in his hands. A single zombie wasn't too bad of a hazard, not by itself, not normally. They'll be alright, he tried to tell himself. Yet he knew just how close they were to Indianapolis. He knew that bodies rose quicker the closer they were to the dead cities. One zombie would kill one person and the corpse would rise. Two would kill two more...

  As he rushed forward, he saw car twelve. Children clustered on the top, center part of the car, passed up by their parents to safety. As he watched, a screaming woman tried to pull herself up on the side, clutching at the ropes that the survivors had run across the top for just that purpose.

  Reaching arms caught her and pulled her back. She let out a shrill scream as they dragged her back and Jack knew the look on her face, he'd seen it far too often over the past six months. It was terror, but it was also disbelief. She didn't understand --couldn't understand-- why this was happening to her. Before Jack could raise his shotgun, he heard that scream cut off with brutal finality and even over the noise of the train he heard the grinding crunch as she fell beneath the rail wheels.

  Jack knew that there probably weren't any other survivors in the car, but he didn't hesitate. He ran forward, caught a side rope, and swung into the open car door feet first.

  His boots slammed into a cluster of undead and the zombies tumbled back from the impact. Jack found his footing and brought up his shotgun. He recognized Taylor's gray and bloodless face, the former Marine's throat ripped out. He fired the Remington 870 Express and blood and bits of brain matter splattered his face and eye protection. As the headless zombie stumbled back, Jack pivoted, racked the slide, and picked his next target.

  This was an older zombie, its flesh gray and its face sunken. It came at Jack with a jagged shard of bone sticking out of its arm where its hand should have been. Jack fired into the thing's center of mass. As the zombie stumbled back, Jack moved forward, clearing the area.

  The rest of his response team came through the open door behind him.

  There was no finesse to what they did. As they joined him, Jack dropped his shotgun, letting the friction strap swing it back against his chest, even as he drew his hooligan crash ax. The short, ax-like blade was designed purely for chopping and Jack swung it as the next zombie came forward. His heavy blade split the zombie's skull and as the undead child stumbled, Jack tried not to think, tried not to see, tried to turn off his mind as he split skulls, separated shoulders, and kicked moaning undead out the open side of the train-car.

  Clearing the car took less than thirty seconds. He'd become so disconnected that it took a panicked shout "No, no, stop!" for him to halt, mid swing, about to brain a survivor who stood behind a makeshift barricade.

  Jack lowered the ax, the blade covered in blood and hair, with bits of skin stuck to it. He tried not to think about the crusty, sticky nature of his stained uniform. The man that he'd nearly killed stared at him with a mixture of fear and shock, but with a level of hero worship that made Jack want to vomit. He
turned away. "Status?" Jack barked. He answered his own question in the same way he had drilled his team. "One up."

  "Two up," Joshua Wachope reported. The tall, bearded, lanky Special Forces man gave him a thumbs up. Josh was solid and there wasn't anyone that Jack trusted more than him in a fight. I wish he was in charge of this shit, Jack thought, not for the first time.

  "Three up," Johnny Woodard said as he wiped down his ax. The tall, dark, former combat medic looked care-free, as if dismembering people was an everyday occurrence. Come to think of it, Jack thought, it very nearly is...

  "Four up," Hector Chavez snapped. The stocky, perpetually angry man glowered at the survivors of the train car. "How the hell did this happen?!"

  "A zombie came in through the latrine hole," a woman said, her voice distant. "It crawled up and it stabbed Taylor with its arm. Just like that and then he attacked Sophie and..." Her voice trailed off into a confused babble.

  "How many survivors?" Jack asked as he turned back to face the men clustered behind the barricade. They'd flipped up a couple of the bunk beds and chairs, he saw. Quick thinking, Jack thought. Though he wished they'd been quicker. One man with a weapon could have stopped all this before it got out of hand.

  "Uh..." the two men looked around, both of them clearly shell-shocked.

  Jack restrained a sigh. "All of you, come out. We need to check you for injuries and infection." He shouldn't blame them, it wasn't their fault that they didn't know what to do, how to function. The cars at the center of the train were for those survivors who didn't understand, who couldn't defend themselves. They're weak... a voice spoke in the back of his mind, but he squashed that voice. His people would train them, they would become useful members of his group... one way or another.

  "Are they..." a woman gasped, "... are they contagious? I saw Frank, he got bit!" She pointed an accusatory finger at one of the men on the barricade.

  The group surged away from the man and Jack just shook his head. "No. No they're not contagious." Well, he admitted to himself, only in the sense that they're dead and they can make you dead, too. "But if you're injured, then your wounds could turn septic and you could die." And then you'd rise from the dead and try to kill us all. "We've got a medic, he'll check you out."

  In theory, all the people on the train should know that... but they'd just picked up a few dozen survivors two days ago. Train car twelve was one of the places they put those survivors.

  The latrines have covers that should have been latched until we got the all clear, Jack thought to himself. It wouldn't surprise him if one of the newbies had left that cover open. That meant someone in the car had effectively killed Taylor and all the others. Jack just hoped that whoever it was had paid with their life.

  If not, he thought grimly, I'll kill whoever was responsible.

  ***

  "That shouldn't have happened," Hector Chavez growled as the group walked forward along the train cars. They were all more than a little deaf from the noise and the rushing of the wind, but with Hector's prior hearing loss, Jack was pretty sure anyone in the general vicinity could overhear him. "I checked the lid on their latrine, it was latched open. Someone left it open!"

  "I know," Jack shouted back. The train had picked up speed again and he focused a lot more on his balance as the train cars swayed and the wind buffeted them. He ran a hand across his shaven scalp, still wet from being hosed down. He and his team had stood in the car while the cleanup guys had hosed it out. He wasn't remotely clean, but at least his clothes were just wet, and not soaked in blood. Jack's lean face went grim, "Odds are, whoever did it is dead too."

  "Stupid," Hector snapped. "Not just stupid, lazy! It's one of the first thing we tell people, check to make sure the cover is latched down. Anyone who left it up doesn't deserve to live!"

  Jack couldn't really argue with the man. Over the past six months, he'd seen all kinds of stupidity and death, often as a shared experience. He'd seen people try to reason with the undead and seen people fail to take even simple precautions that got them killed... He'd seen death on a scale that his mind shied away from.

  This wasn't a plague, it wasn't a pestilence. It was death that lead to more death, it was magic, it was supernatural... and Jack suspected that many of the "stupid" people just wanted to die, to be free of this living nightmare.

  He didn't say that, though, as he came off car one and dropped onto the back deck of Engine Two. It and Engine One provided the main propulsion for the train. They also had Engine Three hooked onto the back end of the train, but that one they only used when they had no other choice, most often to back out of a really bad situation like back in Cincinnati. He shuddered a bit as he remembered that. "Put everyone down to alert status," Jack shouted up to Josh Wachope.

  He stepped into the whisper cab and it was as if he'd stepped into another world. The crew compartment wasn't big and he suspected he would have thought of it as loud before, but the sound-proofing reduced the constant roar of the engines to a distant rumble.

  "How are we looking?" Robert Brockman looked up from the maps spread across the narrow table. He and Tim Kennedy shared the tight space and with the addition of Jack and his armor and weapons, it was suddenly much tighter.

  "We lost fifteen adults, two kids," Jack said as he took off his helmet. The latter number was the only part that really mattered to any of them. People came and went. Jack had seen men and women fall between the railroad cars, dragged down by zombies, and quite a few suicides. Death was a matter of life in their world. Kids though... Kids shouldn't have to pay for the mistakes of adults.

  "Shit, man, sorry," Tim said. His face was serious, but Jack saw relief there, too. Tim and Robert's families were both in car one. And if Jack had any family left, they'd be there, too. It was the best defended car besides the hospital car, which was car number two. There were perks to having essential skills to the survival of their group. Car three held the orphans, many of them babies, children found along the way who had no family to care for them. In dangerous times, Jack stationed his best people to protect those three train cars and the engines.

  "How about our route?" Jack changed the subject.

  Tim, a former logistician, shifted the map around so Jack could see it, "We heard back from Team Three and Four," Tim said. He pointed out red x-marks on the map. Jack recognized the two towns that they'd hoped to find crossings at. "The bridge at Hannibal is just gone, explosives or flood, no idea but the tracks just end in open air, they said." He pointed at the town of Louisiana, Missouri, "The bridge there is some kind of turnstile thing, to allow barge traffic. But somebody left it swung open. There's no way across."

  "Power?" Jack asked.

  Robert shook his head, "Um, no. There's no lights on as far as they can see. All of Missouri is dark. Richard Cartwright volunteered to swim across, but Tom told him not to try it."

  Jack nodded at that. Rivers were dangerous. It wasn't just that the undead didn't need to breathe, so they'd drag swimmers down. No, there was other stuff in the rivers, too. That was how they'd lost so many people in Cincinnati. They'd moved some across in boats since they hadn't trusted their makeshift repairs to the bridge.

  For just a moment, Jack wasn't in the engine cab. He was perched on top of a stopped train car, covered in blood and listening to the screams of the children in the car below him as he hacked zombies down. Behind him, men screamed as something dragged them over the sides and into the cold black water below.

  The moment passed and Jack wiped a hand across his shaved head. "Okay, so that's not an option, further north?" That was the problem, Jack knew. He'd looked their maps over just as much as Tim and Robert. The junctions that went through Hannibal and Louisiana didn't join up with any northern tracks after they crossed the Illinois River, not until after they crossed the Mississippi.

  Tim shook his head, "Team Five couldn't find a way across the Illinois River, not south of Chicago."

  Jack rubbed his face tiredly as he considered that. No
one in their right mind wanted to go near any big city. The more people who'd died there, the more undead there would be. Worse, cities seemed to be focal points of whatever weird shit had happened. Things that shouldn't have happened, like stories of monsters and blood raining from the sky.

  Cincinnati, had a population of a few hundred thousand and it had been a nightmare. Chicago had a population in the millions. Jack was in charge, he knew that if he told them to go to Chicago, that his people would do it. And they'd all die if he gave that order... and then whoever survived would still have to cross the Mississippi.

  "Okay," Jack said after a long moment. "Alton or St Louis proper, then?"

  "Yeah," Tim cleared his throat. "Look, I know it's the least bad of our options, but I can't say I'm crazy about us going there."

  Jack gave him a level look, "You're the one who pretty much told me we had no other options.

  "Yeah," Tim nodded. He looked down at the charts. "Yeah, I know. I just wonder if..."

  He didn't need to go on. There were plenty of people on the train who had, at one point or another, expressed a desire to stop, to settle down, fortify, maybe to start anew.

  Jack didn't look at Tim, he looked at Brockman, "How many people in St Louis, Robert?"

  The former architect didn't have to boot up his laptop, they'd already gone over it. "Around three million in the city proper." They'd pulled every bit of census data, every bit of information they could get their hands on. His laptop and the other backups held that data, five terabytes of maps, encyclopedias, and detailed manuals on everything from sewing to blacksmithing.

  "And in Chicago?" Jack asked.

  "About ten million," Robert said.

  Jack gave Tim a nod, "There's a few hundred thousand back in Springfield, I'd guess. We just went through a town, I dunno, twenty thousand I'd guess. That's how many used to be alive, of course. There's also the ones crawling out of the graves."