THE FLENSE: China: (Part 1 of THE FLENSE serial) Read online

  CONTENTS

  THE FLENSE

  Part 01/12

  Excerpt

  CONTAIN

  Companion series to THE FLENSE

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Care to share?

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Tanpepper Tidings Newsletter

  (subscribe for exclusive access, pricing, giveaways and more)

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  THE FLENSE

  Part 01/12

  Contracted by a prepper group to investigate a series of seemingly disconnected global tragedies, a young freelance reporter, Angelique de l'Enfantine, uncovers a disturbing pattern: each event is preceded by the sudden spread of a mysterious ailment and is followed by the appearance of a man dressed in black and silver who witnesses claim is the devil himself. THE FLENSE is a 12-part serialized international thriller and companion to the post-apocalyptic series BUNKER 12.

  by Saul Tanpepper

  © 2015

  All rights reserved ( full notice)

  [email protected]

  (rv.150628)

  Prologue

  The exact moment when Jamie Peters first suspected that the world was ending — not just this barren remote corner of it, but the whole damn wretched thing — wasn’t when the train crashed in a fiery explosion, scattering incinerated limbs and hair and razor-sharp splinters of bone across acres of frozen Inner Mongolian grassland.

  It wasn’t moments earlier when they rocketed past her stop, accelerating to breakneck speed instead of slowing, the startled look of the wizened old stationmaster at Baoyang flashing past in the platform’s sole light, an inadequate oil lamp clutched in his gnarled fist, and a surprised “Oh!” caught halfway up Jamie’s throat.

  Nor had she even suspected in the preceding ten or so minutes during which she bore witness to the sickness spreading toward her through the car, slipping from one passenger to the next like some delicious little secret as each one of them, in turn, reached out to transfer the germ to their nearest neighbor.

  Of course, she didn’t recognize it then as a sickness. Her first inclination was that they were all playing some sort of game, like a flash-mob type of thing, although that seemed rather unlikely given that so few of these people possessed the know-how to operate the cell phones the company had generously — and, in her opinion, foolishly — provided them. These were children of the Third World, centuries behind the curve when it came to technology. Oh sure, some might find their old customs and beliefs charming. For Jamie, however, the novelty of it all had lost its charm soon after her arrival here eleven months ago. More often than not lately she had been wondering what she had done to deserve being assigned to such a desolate and backward outpost as this.

  Because you asked for it.

  Had she? She couldn’t remember anymore. Or didn’t want to remember.

  It had to be some sort of obscure Baarin custom, this touching thing. That explained it. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have heard of it before now, despite studying up on these people for two years prior to coming out here?

  Well, whatever it was, it irked her. More than anything else it made her feel inadequate, left out. She didn’t like not knowing, not being included. Not in control. She worried that when the stupid little ritual game finally reached her end of the car, she wouldn’t know what to do, and everyone would look at her like she was stupid. It’d just underscore how much of an outsider she really was. Already she could imagine the passengers laughing at her, pointing their fingers. Westerners, they’d think. Stupid, arrogant, know-it-all Americans.

  She almost decided to close her eyes and pretend she was sleeping.

  But there was something too darkly fascinating about it all, about the way their faces changed so suddenly after receiving the touch, that she just had to watch— the light in their eyes flaring, like their bodies had been possessed with some new form of awareness. Their faces shining brightly as the tension built and peaked. Then, not a half second later, the skin losing all its luster, the muscles going slack. It was — well, it seemed, anyway — as if some form of psychic message had been passed from one person to the next. Not really spiritual, rather more . . . .

  Electric?

  No, that wasn't quite accurate. It was almost—

  Jamie felt the heat rise in her cheeks, and her lips twitched into a slight smile despite her irritation.

  Yes, it was almost sensual, wasn't it?

  The cycle repeated as one recipient turned to brush a fingertip across the cheek or wrist of the next, host becoming donor. And so on, individual to individual, edging closer down the length of the car as the train rocked gently over the tracks.

  She hadn’t seen it start, just sensed it when the relentless chatter of the people around her diminished sufficiently enough to register in her mind. Was it happening, she wondered, in any of the other train cars?

  Finally, the elderly gentleman seated beside her received his touch. Jamie could actually feel the tension spike, then leave his body. The very air about him felt different, fuller, charged. Then suddenly empty.

  Her heart raced as he turned and reached up toward her face. She didn’t shy away from his shriveled fingers, scarred and discolored from years of working the stingy soil, of herding and milking the ornery yaks through the harsh, dry summers and bitterly cold winters, like the one she'd just endured.

  Her company had done him a favor, she realized. Done all of these poor people a favor by taking them out of the unforgiving outdoors and given them a safe and warm and lucrative place to work and be productive. This made her feel good; it made her feel . . . entitled.

  Do it. It's my turn now! Do it!

  She saw now how yellowed his skin was, stained from decades of smoking his homemade cigarettes. He could actually afford real ones now, factory-made cigarettes without all that local crap mixed in with it.

  The hand rose to within an inch of her nose, and she inhaled, smelling the musty, sweet staleness of the tobacco. Jamie smiled encouragingly and leaned toward it.

  But the arm veered abruptly to the side, as if it had a mind of its own, and grazed the knuckles of the young boy standing in the aisle in front of her instead.

  She sat stunned for a moment.

  He skipped me! The old bastard skipped me!

  She felt as if she’d been slapped. In the six months she’d been assigned to the Goh Li Xhia plant, she had worked so hard, had sacrificed so much to gain the trust and acceptance of the people who staffed it. All those years in college devoted to learning how to speak both Mongolian and Mandarin. Her company, MECH INVIVO, had even hired a private tutor to teach her the many tricky dialectical and cultural differences which she would need to avoid embarrassing herself, to help her assimilate. The tutor had neglected to tell her about this, though, hadn’t he? This stupid, dumb, superstitious ritual, or whatever the hell it was. She was still just an outsider. She would always be an outsider.

  It was her own fault for thinking this little adventure might be fun. Better than the Peace Corps and a lot more profitable, that’s what she’d been told. Why had she thought coming to this desolate corner of hell might be better than sitting in a cushy air conditioned office in some Midtown Manhattan high rise?

  Of course, the moment of self-pity was quickly replaced by confusion as the train roared through the station. She opened her mouth to protest, but her exclamation never had a chance to exit her throat as she realized that not a single other passenger on the train seemed at all perturbed. And that was certainly unusual, since theirs was the final stop before the long journey to the s
eaport city of Qinhuangdao hundreds of miles further along the track. Hundreds of mile of nothing but snow and grass and emptiness that would take hours to traverse.

  But the young man standing at the doors just kept staring out into the darkness. The bent-over woman across the aisle simply sat there with that idiotic stare on her face.

  Jamie recognized her as the local cat lady, the one who shared her little stone house with some fifty or sixty of the mangy animals. What was her name? Zhou. Or Xiao. She couldn’t remember it.

  Every village has one, the one crazy old bat.

  Whatever game they had been playing was now finished. There was no more touching. All talk had ceased. They just sat or stood there with their blank, black eyes and their pale, placid faces. All of them. Not a single concern.

  How strange.

  Jamie shivered, and not from the cold this time. The first spark of alarm — real alarm — had taken hold in her gut, sending out that warm low burn. She sensed that something was wrong, though she still could not conceive the full extent of it. Maybe this wasn't a game. Maybe—

  Maybe if she’d been looking out her window and seen the train heading directly toward them around a bend on the very same track, then she might have guessed the larger truth of her fate right then. But she didn’t. And before another thought could pass through her mind, it was over.

  What followed was a nightmare of pain and darkness and blood and fire. She found herself lying in a frozen field, the bitter biting wind driving across the steppe and scorching her burnt skin, searing her wounds, fanning the embers which alit upon her face like so many snowflakes. Somehow, she was still alive. But the pain—

  Oh, dear God! The pain was immense, as large as the fireball lifting all around her into the oil black sky until it, too, caught and burned.

  She managed to extricate her torn body from the wreckage, pulling twisted bits of metal and glass and bone that were not her own from the flesh of her arms and legs. Miraculously, nothing was broken. Her ankle was badly sprained, and it felt as if she’d dislocated her shoulder. But she had remained, somehow, incredibly, intact.

  She called out, but there was no answer. No one responded, whether in pain or in fear. There appeared to be no other survivors. By some terrible twist of fate, only she, the stranger in this forbidding land, had survived.

  So when she saw him striding toward her, stepping through the rubble and the tempest of flames as casually as if he were making his way down Fifth Avenue in New York, she staggered to a halt and stared at him in awe.

  He was a tall silhouette, backlit against the raging inferno. In an instant that defied reason, he crossed the vast distance between them and was standing right beside her, extending his hand in a gesture of warm embrace. The coldness of his skin burned her own.

  “I am the man in silver and black,” he told her in a voice that seemed to pierce all the way to her very core. “I am your savior.”

  That’s what he said, but the whisper she heard in her mind was, I am the devil, and this is the end of all things.

  And that was the precise moment when Jamie Peters finally understood the fate of the whole wide world.

  Chapter One

  The destruction was worse than Angelique de l’Enfantine had imagined. Even now, three weeks after the tragedy, it looked as if it had just happened days before. No matter where you turned your nose, the air was fetid with the stench of decay.

  Mud still covered the streets, calf-deep in some places, and caked onto trees stunted and defoliated by the force of the blast. Flies were in abundance, despite the chill in the midday air and the icy nights, breeding on the corpses of the dead. She instinctively mapped the locations in her mind where the swarms were heaviest, places where the sun warmed the earth and allowed the maggots to fester. Places to avoid approaching too closely.

  This is how she threaded her way through the debris, giving the insects rising with their angry buzz a wide berth, leaving the pestilence to resume their molestation of the spoiled flesh.

  But the mud sometimes masked the corpses, encasing them so that you were sometimes unfortunate in where you placed your foot. It was inevitable, knowing too late the distinctly unpleasant sensation of stepping on a body part, feeling the slip of the liquefying muscle and the crunch of the brittle bones beneath your heels.

  She stumbled upon a blackened, deflated corpse, the desiccated skin pulled taut over a barrel ribcage, and she reeled back before recognizing it as a pig. Partially hidden at the base of a pile of torn lumber and ragged plastic, the carcass was long past the bloating stage and had begun the process of collapsing in on itself again, so she guessed that it must have died during the initial event or soon after. It looked just like so many of the human corpses she had seen since disembarking from the boat she’d chartered to bring her here.

  But what troubled her now were the fresher bodies, some newly maggot-ridden and thus only days old. Others harbored full-blown infestations, had become horrifically swollen, like carnival balloons. These were dead a week, which meant that they had survived the initial impact before succumbing to their injuries or the sickness which now must be sweeping across the island. Other corpses, their skin bruised to deep shades of yellow and green and brown. Marbling, she thought with clinical detachment. That’s what it was called in certain forensic circles. Marbling had set in, meaning they had been dead two weeks.

  The scene seemed to confirm her suspicions, that disease was taking the lives of the survivors. She’d seen it before, in Haiti, for example. In Indonesia a couple years ago. One of her first assignments. The events had been uncannily similar to this, the earthquake and tsunami. Cholera — the possibility of it, anyway — was what had prompted her to come here.

  Cholera.

  Seeing the devastation, she still couldn’t believe how clueless the world was about this. How could this have gone unnoticed, unreported for three weeks? The answer, of course, was that it couldn’t, not unless someone wanted to keep it quiet. But who? And why?

  She herself had only become aware of the tragedy from a single isolated tweet on her Twitter feed from an account named @VIBRIO, just a seemingly random string of numbers: 28.130347 125.126928. The coordinates mapped to the East China Sea, to a tiny resort playground island called Huangxia, some three hundred kilometers off the coast of Shanghai. An 8.1 earthquake had struck in the region a couple weeks earlier, spawning a tsunami warning. But as far as she knew, the affected islands were all well along in the recovery process by then.

  Normally she would have dismissed it, but for some reason this cryptic post clung stubbornly in the rafters of her mind and wouldn’t let her rest. Vibrio, the genus name for cholera, an opportunistic pathogen that often took hold in areas devastated by natural or manmade calamities and where recovery efforts were delayed or hampered. But she hadn’t heard of any such problems in the wake of this quake.

  She searched the internet, but found nothing on any of the social media sites, nothing in the usual news feeds. In fact, there was no mention at all about Huangxia Island. It was as if it had dropped off the face of the planet.

  On a whim, she searched the satellite images for the past week. The photos confirmed the destruction, same as a few other islands in the region. But what differed here was that there were no obvious signs of recovery activity.

  Why the hell not? Where was the Chinese government? Why hadn’t they reported this to the international relief agencies?

  It wouldn’t be the first time the PRC had tried to hide something from the world. But those events tended to be politically or militarily embarrassing. Human rights failings or outright abuses. But Huangxia wasn’t some undeveloped, remote place. Or a military asset. Or prison camp. It was a fairly well-established international resort. Hundreds of foreigners came here daily during the summer. Had it not been winter when the earthquake struck, tens of thousands would have died.

  “Are you getting any of this?”

  Attached to her was a United Nations pho
tojournalist, P. Mark DeBryan. He tilted the camera off his shoulder, moving the viewfinder away from his eye, and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Where the hell is everyone?” she asked.

  “Good question. No search and recovery activity at all as far as I can see. No clean up. No demolition. No electricity or clean water. It’s screwed up all right.”

  Despite the chill in the air, a bead of sweat trickled down his brow. He wiped it away with a bright red bandana he pulled from inside the front of his parka, then shoved it back in. He didn’t bother zipping the jacket back up again. After shrugging the bulky pack higher up onto his back, he returned the viewfinder to his eye and resumed recording.

  Angel stepped over to a set of concrete stairs and climbed them until she reached the top, unzipping her own jacket as she went and readjusting her own pack. She was an attractive woman, tall and slim, though few would describe her as beautiful. Her face was just a little too angular to be considered that, though it did possess quite pleasing proportions. If she were a man, she might be described as handsome. Her breasts were smallish, and she had the hips of a teenaged boy. Her eyes were her most striking asset. The palest of blues, or gray, depending on the lighting, they contrasted with her dark eyebrows and the Mediterranean skin she had inherited from her mother.

  The small building which had once occupied the foundation where she now stood was gone, shorn clean off of its foundation by the power of the tidal wave. What had it once been? A home? A souvenir shop? Maybe a cafe.

  She could see the stubs of pipes poking up out of the cement pad, the sewer lines, gas and water. A set of loose wires rose from a broken hub in one corner, looking like disemboweled intestines.

  Where were the bulldozers? Why the hell were there still corpses in the street? Even the International Red Cross had no record of any operation here. She had requested, and they agreed to send out, an advance team to rendezvous with them.