The Rising: Selected Scenes from the End of the World

‘Kresby’ (his real name was H, but Paul always used his online name—Kresby.) They’d never met, but knew each other from various internet book forums. Kresby lived in Minnesota. Paul wondered where his friend was now. Maybe he’d crossed the border into the Canadian settlement. Maybe they’d finally meet in this dead new world.

He slept.

Tina’s scream woke him. That, and the jolting lurch in his stomach and the cold air whistling around him. His ears popped as he opened his eyes. At first, he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Tina’s face was wrong. It was red, and the eyes, ears and nose were missing, and it had grown feathers. Paul bolted upright and slammed into the bulkhead.

The plane was plummeting downward. The cockpit was filled with undead birds. Their rotten bodies obscured Sanchez and Juan. More zombies fluttered around him, feasting on Destiny and Roche. Destiny reached for him, opened her mouth to scream, and then a bird ripped her tongue out. Another zombie nipped at his face, the razored beak slicing into his cheek. Paul smashed it aside and found his footing.

There was nothing he could do for the others. Even as he moved, Tina disappeared beneath the avian corpses. Soon, she and the others would start moving again. Probably before the plane hit the ground.

Die in a plane crash, or die as a bird buffet…

He chose a third option.

Paul had skydived only once in his life, from 14,000 feet, in tandem with an experienced instructor. The experience was one of the most thrilling days of his life, and he’d never forgotten it. He was grateful for the memory, and it all came back to him as he strapped the parachute onto his back. The roaring wind filled his ears. The squawking birds made his testicles shrivel.

They shriveled more when he forced the door open and stared out at the spiraling sky. Jumping from a steady, level airplane with an instructor was one thing. This was something very different.

“Paul,” the thing that was now inside Tina croaked. “Join us.”

He crushed another bird in his fist. His face and hands were bleeding from dozens of cuts and scratches. Another zombie darted towards his eyes. Paul slapped it away and stomped on it. He grinned, feeling the delicate bones snap beneath his heel. Tina’s bloody hand closed around his ankle.

“Stay, Paul. It’s such a long way to fall.”

He shot her in the head.

She was right about one thing, Paul thought as he jumped. It was a long way down. If he survived, he’d have plenty of time to reflect.

His chute opened. Paul breathed deep. It took a long time to reach the ground, and Paul did indeed have plenty of time to reflect. And plenty of time to scream…

The birds stayed with him, hovering like a cloud, all the way to the bottom. When the pain became unbearable, shock took over, and Paul thought about Kresby again.

The plane fell. Paul fell. The birds fell with him. They all fell down together.

The plane crashed first.

THROUGH THE

GLASS DARKLY

The Rising

Day Twenty-Three

Modesto, California

Larry Roberts didn’t have to understand what was going on to understand what he was seeing. He looked into Hell, plain and simple. Hell, right on the other side of the glass.

Larry knew glass. When he wasn’t running his real estate business on the side, he was a plant manager for the Gallo Winery, producing bottles for the wine. And as another crack spiraled through the Humvee’s windshield, Larry paid attention. Obviously, he didn’t know as much about automotive glass as he did glass containers, but he knew enough. He knew it wouldn’t last much longer. All glass was basically made the same way, starting with the batch process, which mixed all the ingredients for the type of glass in production. In many ways, it was like mixing a cake, only on a much larger scale; ingredients being sand, soda ash, limestone, sulfur, and cullet. After cooking in a furnace at 3,000 degrees, it was then put it into a fore-hearth, which conditioned and evened out the glass for blowing. The glass was then put into molds and shaped. After it had been formed, it was annealed, to take the stress out of the glass. Larry wished the windshield had been annealed a little bit longer, because it was all that stood between him and the things outside.

The Humvee was upside down, its tires sticking up in the air like four dead legs. Larry didn’t know what had happened. They’d been cruising along, the soldier and he, looking for a way out of town. The zombies had barricaded the streets, turning Modesto into a giant trap. With General Dunbar dead, killed in that explosion in Corona, the troops had lost focus. The regular soldiers were drifting away, and the civilian recruits, people like Larry, drifted with them. It was either that, or wait for the zombies to kill them.