Apocalypse Hill (Apoc Hill Miniseries Book 1) Read online

  He tried to push his evil thoughts aside and opened one of his beers, swallowing hard. This will dampen the desires; this will dampen any thought of running out onto that Hill.

  Dad always says Mum had the Devil in her. Says he thinks he sees it in Mary, too, sometimes.

  Mary, Mary.

  Sometimes he worried that the Devil was in him. The things he thought about. The dreams that came to him night after night. The visits to his sister’s room. He worried that Dad might see the Devil in him. See it clearly. He had to keep it under wraps. Had to keep it pressed down and hidden, or else Dad might find the need to deal with him just as he had his mum.

  But he hadn’t given in to the dark, had he? Not completely. Only in his head. In his thoughts. With his eyes. Never done nothing else, though. He was strong and in control. He’d touched her that one time, as she slept. Just that one time. But that was months ago now, and he hadn’t even come close to doing it again since.

  He would keep the Devil at bay. He was a God fearing boy who did as his dad asked of him. What more could any boy do?

  ‘No more. I couldn’t do any more,’ he said aloud to himself and to the demons that he was sure crept in the shadows, that gathered on the Hill, waiting for him to make a false step.

  He wondered where Mary was.

  Perhaps she’d already gone to bed. Perhaps she was up there right now, fast asleep. Laid in bed in her cloth nightie, a thin sheet stretched taut on top. Hair falling to partially cover her face. To cover her eyes, so she wouldn’t see as the door slowly opened.

  He drank and tried to distract himself with the TV. Colombo was on. He liked Colombo. He liked knowing who the bad guy was right from the start. It was all black and white. No mystery to solve. Just the righteous good coming after the fallen.

  He finished the beer and dropped the empty bottle into the box, feeling around to find a fresh one.

  He wondered what was keeping Dad so quiet, he was usually shouting down by now. Wanting to see him. To talk to him about his latest insights into the coming end times. His sickness made him see things. Opened doors to truth. He wondered if he would be strong enough to survive what was to come. Judgment day. They’d look into his soul and what would they see? What would be pulled into the light?

  Just one more thing.

  They always thought they’d got away with it. But the dark was always exposed in the end. It was inevitable from the moment they strayed from the path. He came after them, relentless, until the evil fell to its knees, ready to be judged.

  Maybe he’d just finish another beer after this. One more. Two more. Then he’d go check on Mary. See she was safe and sleeping sound. It was his duty as her brother and protector. That was true. Her dad couldn’t get out of bed these days. It was up to him to watch over her. To care for her.

  Just a few more drinks, and then he’d go check on her. Stand over her. Watch her.

  Just one more thing.

  He didn’t notice when Mary, still bare skinned, crept swiftly but silently up behind him and dragged the blade of the same knife she’d used to kill their dad across the left side of his neck. Eyes wide, hand pressed to his neck as blood pumped powerfully between his fingers and across the room, he jumped up, the bread and cheese plate clattering to the floor.

  He saw Mary there, saw her nakedness, saw the blood dried on her face and arms, saw the knife in her hand and how her eyes didn’t blink. He saw. He saw. He felt cold. He felt like he wanted to reach out and grab her and squeeze her close and tight to him.

  ‘What’ve you done? What’ve you done?’ he said.

  Mary jabbed forward, the knife sank into his stomach, then retreated, a geyser of blood following.

  ‘Stop.’

  Again. And again. She stabbed and she sliced and he fell back into the TV, knocking it to the floor.

  ‘What’ve you done to Dad, Mary?’

  Mary stepped over his fallen body, hair hanging to conceal her face as she looked down at him. ‘You didn’t have to help him with Mum,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to do that at all.’

  ‘What will they see in me, when they look?’ he whispered. ‘Is my darkness well hidden, Mary? Will they see and know and judge?’

  He watched as she knelt on top of him and raised the knife above her head. ‘You should’ve looked after me better. That’s what you should’ve done, you know.’

  He remembered seeing his dad sat beside his dead mum in this very spot. He remembered standing over his sister in the dark. He remembered a Yellow Man that came to him and whispered as he slept.

  For a second he felt the knife split the skin once again, and then he was dead.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘It is done!’

  ‘The game begins.’

  The Knot Man heard them chattering and laughing as he passed them, but he did not join in their revelry. True, he was a thing not so very different from some of them, but he had no hand in this game. No vested interest in the result.

  All he had was his warnings to deliver.

  Whichever way the cards fell that would always be so.

  ‘The Hill, the Hill, the Hill!’

  ‘It is soaked in the blood of time.’

  ‘Soon she will fall upon its slopes, her fluid spreading.’

  ‘The Hill will crack!’

  ‘It will open.’

  ‘We will rise.’

  The Knot Man left the creatures behind, he had a warning to deliver elsewhere. He wondered if the creatures would get what they longed for. He supposed he would find out, one way or the other, soon enough.

  ‘We will rise.’

  ‘We will rise.’

  ‘We will rise!’

  …

  …

  …

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mary woke from a black and dreamless sleep. After killing her daddy and her brother, she had curled up naked on her bed and slept. She had felt so at peace, so satisfied; it had been done at last, at last. All was right with the world.

  That’s what she thought.

  She had no idea.

  But now Mary was awake once again and something had changed, she could feel it deep in her bones. She stood and dressed, patches of dried blood cracking as she moved. She could hear voices. No, not hear them, sense them. Hundreds of voice, thousands. A rumble of glee that rolled in from outside and assaulted her.

  Hello to you, Mary May. I have come to deliver the warning.

  She hadn’t heard him, not really. How could she? All she’d heard was now, now, at last, do it, now!

  She had to burn the bodies! Turn them to ash. Get rid of them altogether and then she could really be free.

  Since she was born, the Hill has looked over her.

  ‘No!’ said Mary, or thought Mary. Perhaps she screamed it even, eyes wild, throat raw, as the demons made their way down the Hill and pressed their noses against the glass. The house creaked and complained as they pushed.

  She had to burn them; she had to burn the bodies! Had to—had to—so she ran! Ran from her room and down the creaking corridor towards her daddy’s room, throwing open the door to find nothing on the bed but twisted, bloodied sheets. A funeral shroud missing the corpse.

  Mary held a hand to her mouth but the crazy noises escaped anyway. The bloody footprints led away from the bed and towards the door. They weren’t her own, she could see those; these were a second pair.

  Our time. Our time!

  A window cracked downstairs.

  Mary walked out of her daddy’s room and down the stairs, to find her dead Daddy helping her dead brother up and onto his feet. They turned and looked at her as she cowered on the bottom step.

  ‘Daddy?’

  Mary could see the wounds on them, the wounds she had inflicted. She could see the resulting blood that had gushed and glugged and sprayed from the flesh tears covering their bodies.

  ‘Mary,’ said her brother, in a voice that was not his own. Not anyone’s. No one spoke like that; no one human. Th
e voice made her feel as though she might choke and she ran for the front door; she had to get out, to escape them. To escape that dreadful voice.

  Mary ran from her house and the Hill filled her vision. It rose giant before her, like a whale breaking surface before a lone fisherman. It rose, shining red, red, red; every blade of grass a crimson slash, like the wounds she and the knife had delivered to her daddy and brother. Mary could see them clearly then, all of those that stood waiting upon Apoc Hill; all of those that were standing with their bodies pressed against the walls of her house.

  The world tilted and Mary staggered to her knees, hands in the dirt; one of the creatures reached down and helped her up.

  ‘The Hill shall crack,’ it said with a nightmare smile.

  Mary screamed, unblinking, a parade of terror surrounding her, and the creatures screamed back, drowning out her own demented anguish. She screamed until blood ran from her mouth and threatened to drown her.

  Perhaps she stopped screaming then, perhaps not; she turned and staggered back into her house, pushing the door closed as though that would be enough to keep out the monsters. They were already inside of her, what could a wooden door hope to achieve?

  Her daddy and brother were stood waiting, smiling.

  ‘You have done a great thing, Mary May,’ said her daddy.

  Her brother nodded, ‘A great thing.’

  The two held hands and their eyes shone yellow.

  ‘That’s not you. That’s not either of you.’

  Mary ran for the stairs, falling twice, her daddy and brother walked on calmly after her.

  ‘I told you. End of the world. Didn’t I say that?’

  Mary had nowhere to go, so she curled on her bedroom floor and thought about her little-bird mum. Wondered if she would see her soon.

  ‘The game has begun, Mary May.’ Mary looked up to see a yellow man in her room. His eyes were black and two horns twisted from his forehead.

  ‘I know you,’ she said.

  ‘Your whole life,’ he replied. ‘You could say I brought you up.’

  She didn’t always remember her dreams, but now Mary’s head was full of them. Full of the Yellow Man’s visits as she slumbered.

  ‘You have made me very proud, Mary May,’ said the Yellow Man.

  Her daddy and brother entered the room.

  ‘What have I done?’ she asked.

  ‘The Hill will crack,’ said her daddy.

  The Yellow Man took a knife and approached her daddy and brother, piercing the windpipe of each in turn. Neither flinched. He dragged the blade down across their chests, all the way down to their groins. He let the blade fall to the floor, then began to peel them back, as though their skin was nothing more than that of an orange. As he peeled, whistling as he worked, he revealed no blood, no bone; no muscle, nor organs. They were opened to reveal a black void, and in that void, something beyond comprehension writhed.

  ‘Is it not beautiful, Mary May?’ asked the Yellow Man.

  The beast in the void opened its many mouths and beaks, and began to vomit a thick cloud of yellow pollen into Mary’s house. It was intoxicating, sweet. She felt like she knew what it was: splinters of Hell bursting into the sane to turn people crazy. She was far beyond screams then, as the yellow pollen torrented in like a waterfall, swirling around the Yellow Man with his arms raised to the heavens before it exploded brightly through the ceiling and out over the Hill, covering the creatures as they fell to their knees and wept for joy.

  ‘Now!’

  ‘Now!’

  ‘Now!’

  ‘At last, at last!’

  Mary May thought of her mum.

  The trick has begun.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Mary needs your help, Bill,’ said a yellow man. ‘The Hill will crack.’

  It shone red and bright and she fell to the earth as the shot rang out and—

  …

  …

  A yellow room and she lay curled on the floor, unable to—

  …

  Bill Reed’s head jerked and his eyes sprang open as he realised he was drifting again. He stretched in the ancient chair and winced as his joints creaked more than the chair’s leather.

  ‘Getting old, Bill,’ he said to himself.

  He rubbed his tired, baggy eyes and squinted again at the blinking cursor on the computer screen. ‘Who’re you winking at?’ He ignored it for a while, played a hand of computer solitaire. Before long he was stuck and pushed the mouse away with a frustrated snort. He gagged on a cup of coffee that he’d ignored for far too long, dropped the mug into the wastepaper basket, then flicked his latest manuscript back up.

  Bill was ten thousand words or so into his latest novel. He had hoped that burying himself in writing the new book whilst Cali was away would help keep his mind from actively worrying about his daughter; from concocting new and horrific ways for her to die up there. Damn it, why the hell did she have to love such a dangerous job anyway?

  Ah, but there’s the rub: she did love it. Bill could hardly have held her back any more than he could have in all good conscience stopped her breaking into the University for that anti-fascist sit-in demo all those years ago. She was a girl of strong convictions and powerful loves, and to have stopped her (or even tried to stop her) doing something she believed in and needed? Well, it would have torn Bill apart twice as bad.

  So he lived with it.

  And he was proud of her. God knows he was proud of her; that wasn’t fake, there was no pretence there. His little Cali, an astronaut. Bill’s heart grew three sizes just thinking about it.

  But that didn’t stop the fear. The worry. The imaginative, blockbuster movie death scenes and disasters. It was worse when he tried to sleep. When the thought of his nightly texting ritual came and the knowledge of where she was and why he couldn’t press send hit home like a ton of bricks.

  So the latest book.

  The distraction.

  It was due, anyway. It wasn’t purely an exercise in keeping his mind too busy for dark thoughts. Jack, his agent, had been on at him for the last year to hurry the hell up already and get writing the latest Hell Mouth novel; it was already three years since Bleeders had hit the stores. Your fans are crying out for this, Billy! Don’t you care about them? D’you want them to forget about you? Turn their backs on you, ‘Cos I’ve seen it happen, Billy, I truly have and it’s heartbreaking, I tell ya’. Those fans are begging you for fresh type, Billy. They’re begging!

  Yeah, yeah, but probably none of his fans were begging quite as loudly as Jack’s bank balance.

  So he was getting down to work, a new story was freshly bubbling inside the pot in his head, but now as he tried to write he found every word a struggle.

  Bill didn’t believe in writers block. All that meant to him was that the story wasn’t fully cooked yet. It wasn’t ready to be plated up, so let it simmer on the back burner a while. But this wasn’t that. This was his mind saying Hey, who the hell d’you think you’re kidding with this bullshit? You think you can keep me from thinking about Cali? Distracting me with one of your dumb stories? Please, you don’t know who you’re dealing with, matey.

  10,000 words eked out at double slow speed, and Bill Reed was supremely confident at least 9000 of them were utter garbage.

  He looked at the two framed pictures of Cali that stood to one side of the computer monitor. One showed her as she was now, a grown woman, proudly beaming in her spacesuit whilst in training over in the States. Ever since she could talk, all she’d wanted to do was go to the stars. To pull beyond this hunk of rock and its blanket of choking pollution.

  Actually, that’s not quite true. For a while there, she’d wanted to be a steam train. Bill smiled as he remembered Cali, tiny, mop of black hair, choo-choo-choo-ing across the kitchen floor. ‘All aboard!’ He’d thought the astronaut thing would pass as quickly as the train thing, but nope. This infatuation had stuck, and hard. She used to get him to climb out onto the roof, lie down on the blanket
she’d spread out and just stare up at the stars. Living up here in the lakes, away from any big city, the skies were pure and clear. No smog to hide, not enough light pollution to obscure. The stars came out to play each and every night.

  ‘What’s that one called, Daddy?’ She’d ask, wide-eyed. Now at first, Bill could only point to two things in the sky with any certainty and call them by their names, so he bluffed. He told tales. Hey, it’s what he did for a living, so it wasn’t difficult.

  ‘Well, you see that bright, bright spot over there?’ he’d say, pointing up, Cali following his finger.

  ‘I see it, Daddy!’

  ‘Well, that one there’s called Monroe, named after the famous actress Marilyn Monroe. She received the honour after the President of the United States proclaimed Some Like it Hot to be the best film of the year. You see those two stars just off to the side of her? Well, that pair are Lemon and Curtis. The President really loved that movie.’

  This worked for a while, but soon enough Cali had pulled books from the local library all about astronomy, the planets, the stars, and she had a firm word with her lying so-and-so Daddy. He’d tried to keep up, reading the same books, watching the right documentaries, and before he knew it, he’d fallen in love with it too. Or maybe he just fell in love with his daughter’s own all-consuming passion for the subject. She had a way of voicing her passions that just pulled you in and made you want to be just as crazy over it.

  Bill tried to think if he’d ever been as passionate about anything, outside of his child, as Cali was about space. Well. There was fishing. He did enjoy that. Though it was more the tranquillity, the being alone with your thoughts, a beer, and your rod that he loved, as opposed to the act of actually bagging a new catch.

  Stories? Well, he read less these days, and he didn’t write as quickly as he once had; the stories seemed harder to come by and trickier to wrangle onto the page, but sure. Stories had fired his every fibre as a teenager and young adult. He could recall hours, days, and weeks bent over an old fashioned typewriter, bashing out word after word onto the white page, whilst his sister and school mates ran around in the sunshine.