Tunnel Rats_Episode One_The Diggers Read online

  Tunnel Rats

  Episode 1:

  The Diggers

  by

  Michael Bunker & Nick Cole

  Tunnel Rats

  Episode 1: The Diggers

  © Copyright 2016 by Michael Bunker & Nick Cole

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in reviews, without the written permission of the author.

  Editing by Ellen Cambell

  Interior and Easter Egg Illustrations

  by Ben Adams

  http://www.benjadams.com

  For information on Michael Bunker or to read his blog, visit: http://www.michaelbunker.com

  For information on Nick Cole or to read his blog, visit: http://www.nickcolebooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2: Interludes in the Wasteland: Bad Things Just Happen

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5: Interludes in the Wasteland: Other Bad Things that Just Happen

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8: Bad Things Do Not Just Happen

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17: A Whole New World

  Chapter 18: Interludes in the Wasteland: Things to do Before you Die

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20: The Baron of the Scraps

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23: When It All Goes Down

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  19: Texocalypse

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Chapter 1

  5 YEARS EARLIER

  Some dates drill through your skull permanent-like. They eat through skin and bone and gray matter until they’re imprinted in the memory like the saddest and most heart sick tidings ever carved in granite. September 22nd was one of those dates.

  No.

  It was THE date. The one day, month, and year combination that no one who was alive then, would ever forget. Bigger than December 7, 1941. Bigger than D-Day. Bigger than 11/22/63. Bigger than 9/11. A million times bigger. Because that was the day when the whole world went... completely blind. Except for at least one lady who finally saw the world for what it actually was.

  Not partial blindness, like maybe a curtain was drawn down over the sun. Not like the whole world got dipped in raven shadows. Or like the power went out on a moonless night. For Ellis, and for everyone else he’d ever spoken to about it, it was like every bit of light that ever existed in the whole world, from “let there be light” to that crystalline moment in September, well, it was just extinguished and swallowed up in utter blackness.

  The blindness was palpable. Distilled, evil, stygian darkness, and heavy on the skin. Like one’s funereal duds, only tighter and made of spandex, or hell’s essence except darker than the mind could conjure. Even Ellis’s memories were dark. In that moment, no light illuminated his thoughts. It was like he forgot that light had ever been, or that the gift of sight had been his since the day he breached the womb.

  In the distance, a woman cried out in a city; a city that would soon be filled with pleas, groans, weeping, gnashing of teeth, and yes even cries for help. But her cry was unique. It was the first.

  She could see.

  Blind from birth, she’d said, but at that moment she could see. She let everyone know. It was Dallas, Texas and Ellis Kint was seventeen. Skipping school to skateboard at the museum downtown when the blindness fell, and this woman was not twenty yards from him as far as he could remember. Mere seconds had passed since the dark descended.

  Then he heard the crunch of a friend who’d been in mid-stunt, halfway down the handrail and he hit hard. But the dark in Ellis’s mind and the wailing of the woman who could see drowned out his friend’s protruding bone fracture screams.

  And there was no light. Just...

  Utter. Complete. Darkness.

  Ellis sat down. It was a reflex action. He can’t remember thinking about it now. He halfway thought to look around wildly for light, but the thought died on its way to being born and his head just dropped to his chest and he listened for anything.

  The woman cried. “I can see. Lord God, why? I can see!”

  He learned over the next hour that she never struggled to see, like patients do when their sight is returned. She didn’t start with shadows and blurry colors. Her sight came back full-on, and though she’d been blind since birth, she knew and understood what she saw for the first time. She explained this in tears and sobs. She described the horror as it happened. Moment by moment.

  Ellis sat. Sounds came at him in waves. Fear gripped his heart like an animal’s claws. He heard the loud squeal and Doppler Effect as a plane, probably intent on landing at Dallas Love Field, screamed urgently and exploded violently.

  This time Ellis looked up, the faint thought that maybe there would be flames on the horizon, but there were none that could be seen.

  Do flames exist if you can’t see them?

  There was a connection with 11/22/63. The day Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Not far from where he sat. Didn’t Kennedy land at Love Field? Hadn’t the world changed then too?

  And people ran by, stumbling, falling, breaking bones that, in the un-medicated days, months, and years that would follow, they’d wish they’d never had. He heard the crunch of bones and the ripping of flesh as humans careened off of things or collapsed at full speed into the ground.

  Just sit down, Ellis thought at each passing disaster.

  Cars crashed. Sometimes into one another. Sometimes into people. Sometimes into buildings.

  And there was a moment, a long horrible moment when one knew that they could easily be a part of the next disaster regardless of whether they participated or not. It was like swimming in the dark with a shark you couldn’t see.

  Ellis heard it all as he waited to be next.

  He sat because he could do nothing else. Fear gripped him like ice on a pond. Complete and seemingly without end. That is the power of fear.

  The woman pleaded on and on. Chattering.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God! Why today? It’s horrible, Lord! It’s… Oh God, please!”

  She talked nonsense too. She spoke of tentacles and the arms of beasts. She said she looked upward and saw sounds as colors resonating through the sky. Strings like cables tangled together, like time trapped in a snare. In a ball. In a knot.

  But for Ellis there was only blackness and the grip of an evil that whispered the words “nothing else” over and over again.

  Maybe she’s mad?

  Maybe we’re all mad?

  Maybe this is Hell?

  Ellis tried to think of his father, of his home. His dad was the only family he knew now. He tried to think about his father, a pilot for American flying out of DFW who was in the sky somewhere, probably near Kansas City, but that thought lay paralyzed in his mind, and he couldn’t even see it because of the blackness that sucked at and buried everything else.

  Reckon everyone’ll be dead soon.

&n
bsp; That thought made it through the cloud in his brain. Reckon they’re all dead. His dad. His brother and mother, wherever they were. Wherever they’ve been since they ran off. He didn’t even remember them much. But, reckon them dead too. Because... the world’s just changed forever. Don’t worry about who you’ll see again ‘cause you’ll never see again, kid. Period.

  Then the woman… “Lord, there’s blood. So much blood!” She sobbed. “Why isn’t anyone coming to help us? Why are you just sitting there?”

  Splat.

  Pause.

  Splat. Splat

  Pause.

  Splat, splatsplatsplat...

  Later he would know that was when the bodies started to rain down from above. They splattered across the pavement at irregular intervals. Hopeless people jumping through windows. Not knowing where they were. Maybe just hoping for death and the nothing they’d been promised. Hoping for senseless darkness, which perhaps they figured had to be better than evil, endless night.

  Chapter 2

  Interludes in the Wasteland:

  Bad Things Just Happen

  Walker kept the convoy moving forward. They’d survived the rocky hills and winding passes west of their position, bartering their way past a fortified overpass, and now the big stretch of the Texas Badlands lay before them in the golden light of morning.

  Better times ahead, thought Walker, even though he didn’t believe himself. He climbed down from the observation hatch they’d built on top of the old bus. The massive push-pull diesel engine rattled away loudly beneath his feet and it didn’t sound any more dire than it always sounded. The shooters inside the bus cast a quick glance at him, checking his face to see if he’d spotted trouble ahead. He shook his head and they returned to their shooter’s nests, the sunlight coming in through slats in the makeshift armored shutters. They would make Hagersville by dark at this speed, crawling, ten miles per hour, over the forty miles of rent and cracked county road.

  Walker crouched down near his pack, the last surviving piece of issue gear that remained of his time in the Big Red One out of Fort Riley Kansas. He pulled out a dented big box store thermos they’d looted and took a long pull, tasting the clear sweet water from the last good spring.

  We should’ve stayed and done something with that, he said to himself for the thousandth time. But the city that no one could find on a map, a large town really, had been dosed. Attacked with chemical weapons. In their post-Beginning lexicon, they said a town like that had been “chemmed”. If anything had ever been “chemmed” then it was bad forever as long as anyone was concerned. Even if it tested good, no one would drink from it. The nearby town with no name had been poisoned and made dead in one night, probably. Just like Austin back in the early days when there were still news outlets to let you know how bad everything was getting. Now you just assumed it was all bad and getting worse by the day.

  None of the other survivors had wanted to stay near the spring in the midst of the silent, haunted buildings of that lost city. So they’d topped off on water and moved on. There were rumors about West Texas ahead.

  Rumors, Walker thought. In his mind he spat out the word. His life was now driven by rumors. He walked to the back of the bus and tried to push the rumors of the Texas Coast and abandoned boats and the tropical paradises they’d been promised far from his mind.

  It was all rumors, and it didn’t seem like they could all be true. California was a zombified wasteland crawling with unheard of beasts. Nevada and Utah were almost as bad. Was any of it true? Not all of it could be. Montana had died from some kind of Bio-Engineered blight. Washington and Oregon and probably most of the Western Coast of Canada on up into Alaska had been “chemmed” or were destroyed by earthquakes or meteors or aliens. The story always depended on who you were listening to and how sane they might still be. And Arizona. Arizona was just plain crazy.

  Which made New Mexico… thought Walker with an audible sigh of remembrance that none of the others detected over the rattling of the bus. That made New Mexico simply worse by orders of magnitude. Going west again would be foolish, but only slightly more foolish than going in any other direction.

  So, maybe the Texas gulf coast is the place. Maybe it’s the paradise some people said it is.

  But he didn’t have high hopes. He hadn’t had those in a long time. All Walker had was the convoy and the other survivors who’d chosen to follow him.

  Their little armored procession could outrun hordes. What else could you do when you ran across an endless sea of craven, cannibalistic survivors? You run. And you’d better do it faster than the hordes can move. The hordes were little more than mindless locusts who’d start consuming each other when there wasn’t someone else’s stuff to be had.

  The armed towns and gangs they occasionally found, his people were more than a match for. They’d always had plenty of weapons and lots of ammo. Walker and the few vets he had on his team had trained everyone to be a shooter. The worst of them was better than most they met.

  Let’s stay well clear of Hagersville, Walker told himself again. They had no intel on it. Which, in and of itself, was cause for suspicion.

  Why was there no intel? If a city was dead, people salvaged there. If the burg was still operating as a town, people did trade there. Instead, there’d been a conspicuous absence of palaver regarding Hagersville. And as they’d drawn closer, when they would have expected to hear chatter and rumors, there was not a word from—or about—the city.

  Steer clear.

  Walker peered out through the armored slats at the back of the bus. Twenty-three vehicles stretched out behind him: three buses, two semis, and an assortment of dune buggies. All of them kept barely running on a homebrew fuel that was only just reliable.

  An offhand glance to the north, looking for Hagersville, expecting nothing, and he saw them.

  Bikers coming on through the low scrub and thick sand, creating dust clouds in the morning breeze.

  He ran back to the ladder that led up to the observation platform, tapping the shooters on the head. They knew the drill.

  Action.

  Stations.

  He climbed the ladder and raised his busted ‘nocs to his eyes.

  A lot of ‘em, he thought as he saw the dust trails blooming in the sand and scrub.

  But they’d fought biker gangs before and won.

  They’d fight them again today.

  They’d win today.

  Because they had to.

  Ever since the Dark Day, every single day was a day you had to win.

  And biker gangs move faster than hordes. You can’t outrun them. You have to fight them, and you have to win.

  Unconsciously he circled his upraised arm and stomped his foot on the old galvanized steel of the roof of the bus. Rufus the driver knew what to do as he pulled the ancient Bluebird school bus off to the right hand side of the road. The other buses came alongside as did the two massive trucks, forming a small box fort. The dune buggies and assorted other cars were now under the command of Mason. Moments later, Mason in the lead buggy, pulled up alongside the bus.

  “Circle off to the south and try to get up on that low hill!” shouted Walker, pointing off toward the hill in the distance. Mason knew what to do after that. They’d wait until the bikers attacked the mobile fort, then they’d come in like a quick reaction force and try to chew them up from behind. Or lay low out in the brush and provide sniper cover. Either way they had options.

  In seconds, Mason and the rest of his force were off in great clouds of dust, disappearing into the scrub like wary coyotes.

  Walker let his ‘nocs go and shouldered his hunting rifle. He scoped the bikers, looking for an obvious leader. Nothing. They were the usual assortment of road trash, probably held together by a violent psychopath. Probably looking for easy prey. Probably used to it in all the years since the day the blindness hit, when absolu
te darkness like a palpable and impenetrable spirit came down and all of humanity went blind. When the sun went dark and all the stars refused to shine. He hated to stereotype, but since the Beginning, he’d learned that survival favored those who embraced unpleasant realities. Before the collapse, there were good bikers and bad bikers just like there’d been good accountants and bad accountants. But in this new world it paid to assume the worst, and despite his pre-collapse proclivities, he’d learned that stereotyping was often a valid survival technique. Perhaps these bikers would ride on by, but he doubted it. Probably they were on the hunt.

  Stray families caught broken down along the highway.

  Lone preppers with a single AR-15 who thought being off the beaten track was enough to avoid trouble.

  Basically, the outnumbered weak.

  Still, there were a lot of ‘em, thought Walker as he watched the bikers come on in three distinct, though ragged waves. They weren’t riding on by. This was an attack formation.

  The sudden loud reports of rifles began to erupt from within the bus and already the first wave of bikers were falling. Walker scoped a downed rider who dropped his bike after being hit. He was small, bow-legged and brown. He had a large Pancho Villa mustache and bad tattoos. Talk about stereotypes. This guy was a cartoon. He wore a sleeveless leather jacket with some kind of specific white paint design across the back. A devil, maybe.

  Affiliated, thought Walker. A “one percenter”.

  Another bullet from one of the shooters on the bus tore the downed biker’s head off an instant later.

  Probably not used to a fight, thought Walker. Been too easy for far too long.

  For a moment he thinks they might do something here in the Badlands, Walker and his plucky band of survivors, even if that something is just to survive one more day.

  The second wave of bikers weaved through the sagebrush and sand and passed the downed Mexican bikers without a look or thought. These are different. The first ones were meat, meant to draw fire. Walker tracked one, thought about squeezing off a shot on the guy, and passed when the rider suddenly dropped down out of sight into a gully.