Ferine Apocalypse (Novella): 4 Hours by John F. Leonard Read Free Book Online Page A

be a rat trapped in a maze. They were everywhere, those creatures. Prowling the streets, searching for anything breathing.
    Anything like her.
    She’d seen a dog, an enormous Doberman, cornered and torn apart.
    Devoured.
    Dogs like that, attack dogs, had always scared her. Compared to these things, it was a harmless rabbit.
    Something she could hug and love.
    She needed to get out of London, but she had no idea of how to do it.
    On foot?
    That was beyond ridiculous. So preposterous that she felt like slapping herself for even considering it. A senseless, absurd concept. Yet she couldn’t think of another option.
    She couldn’t drive, had never learned, and now didn’t seem like the best time to teach herself.
    She needed help.
    Other people who hadn’t been changed by whatever this was.
    Before the Collapse event, if asked, Angela Gacek would have characterised her life as a grim, dismal affair. She often felt despondent, sometimes hopeless.
    At that point, on that rapidly darkening city street, she was experiencing a much deeper understanding of hopelessness.
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    The thing lurched out of a recessed shop doorway.
    Was on her before she had time to breathe or scream.
    It hadn’t completely mutated. Straggles of hair remained on its head, although the jaw and claws had developed into lethal weapons.
    It had been curled in the doorway. Angela’s slow progress gave it opportunity to lunge at her legs.
    She didn’t feel its talon slice through her black jeggings and open her calf.
    She was already falling as its emaciated arm tangled with her legs. The arm was knurled and corded, a texture more akin to wood than flesh.
    The creature had been hideously wounded. An entire side of its body twisted and broken. Nevertheless, hunger smouldered within it.
    It dragged itself on to her as she lay prone. Slithered up her with one barely functioning arm and one half-good leg.
    Heedlessly raked her stomach as it snapped ever closer to her face.
    Angela swung the knife from the side. Desperation lending her energy that she didn’t think she had.
    Buried the blade in its temple more by luck than skill.
    Gasped as it collapsed on her.
    Appalled by the pulsating shivers that racked its body as it died on top of her.
    Crawled out from under it until she was free and then lay on her back, staring at the sky. The quivering of it had been awful.
    Almost sexual.
    She turned her head and weakly threw up. Water vomit dripping into her black hair.
    Lay and looked at the unforgiving sky again.
    Heard the low rumble of a car and then a splintering boom that seemed to fill the gloomy air like judgement.
    She began crawling again.
     
    The knife was gone.
    Hilt deep in the monster’s head.
    It didn’t matter, she still had the bag, clutched in her white-knuckled fist. There were more knives in there.



Chapter 9
Meetings
    Gallagher fell as Pearcey hauled him out of the car and Pearcey let him fall.
    He had other concerns.
    It had been one of the creatures that had hit them.
    It lay thirty feet distant.
    Small spasming movements. Jittering signs of a desperate will to live. No sign that it was about to get up. No indication that it was about to give up the fight to keep breathing either for that matter.
    There were shards of glass glinting on the road. Pearcey looked up at a broken window above their heads.
    Third floor.
    Jagged fragments of the glazing were all that remained in the frame. Like sharks teeth. The rest was strewn around him and the car.
    He distractedly pieced together what had happened while he appraised their situation.
    It had jumped, smashed through the window.
    Trapped, he guessed.
    Woke up from the coma and couldn’t get out of the room. Whatever intelligence they possessed was animalistic, had its limitations. He filed that away for future reference and turned to more immediate issues.
    Like the creature that had appeared from a side road a hundred yards away.
    And was coming towards them.
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    The Jaguar was a