The Rot (Post Apocalyptic Thriller) by Paul Kane Read Free Book Online

process. Nothing’s ever wasted.
    I heard movement off to my left and made to get up, remembering where I’d crashed – what had happened at the facility, what had been happening below me in the town. If I was still alive, I wouldn’t stay that way if the affected had found me. I let out a moan at the pain in my side where the collective had banged into me, but fortunately hadn’t torn the SKIN.
    “Don’t move!” said a voice; male. “I’m warning you!”
    If he was speaking to me, and not trying to either kill me or shag me, then I figured I was okay. Slowly, I turned to look in his direction – and I saw the guard’s gun, the one that had been in the back of the chopper, pointing at me for the second time. It was in the hands of a guy of about fifty – with bushy eyebrows and a beard to match – wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and light grey trousers. I raised both my hands in surrender. “There’s no need for that. I’m okay.”
    He looked at me sideways on, with suspicion. The light in the room flickered and it was then I realised it was coming from some candles. One quite close, a few more back there in the gloom, like they were deliberately keeping it dim.
    “Where… where am I? How did I get—”
    The man’s eyebrow’s met in the middle, and his grip on the rifle tightened. “I’ll be the one asking the questions.”
    “Fair enough,” I said.
    “Who are you?” was the first one.
    “My name is Adam Keller.”
    “Where are you from?”
    “What originally? Well, my mother was from—”
    “Don’t get bloody smart with me.”
    “I wasn’t.”
    It went on in that same vein for a little while until we got to the meat of it. I told him that I’d come from a hospital – thought that would be better than a heavily guarded R&D facility – about an hour away, but not to ask me where, because I didn’t even know where this place was.
    “Hospital? Don’t know of any hospitals that far out, just our local one,” he said. I was trying to get a handle on his accent, not that it would tell me anything – he might have moved to this town for all I knew. Northern was about as close as I got.
    “Well, you asked me…”
    “That why you’re dressed like that?” he used the barrel of the rifle to point to my shorts.
    “Er… yeah, that’s right.”
    “Where’d you get the gun?”
    “What?”
    “ This gun.” He shook it for emphasis. “The one we found in the wreck with you.” Now we were starting to get somewhere. We … so he wasn’t alone, and I had him to thank for dragging me out of the crashed chopper before any of the affected could get to me. “Military hospital, was it? You some kind of soldier?”
    “Some… something like that,” I replied.
    “Ask him about that stuff. What’s wrong with his skin?” Another voice – female – came from the back of the room.
    “Who—” I began and promptly got cut off.
    “Answer her,” said the man. “What’s wrong with you, why’re you scaly like that?”
    From a distance, they might not have noticed – but up close, dragging me back here, they couldn’t fail to clock the SKIN. “It’s… kind of hard to explain,” I said.
    He looked at me, puzzled. I wasn’t sure myself what exactly this thing was, so I sure as hell couldn’t explain it to this guy; he needed Weeks, and I’d left him hog-tied and barking in that corridor. “There something wrong with you? That it? That why you were in the hospital?”
    “Yeah… that’s right.”
    “It’s not… you know, contagious is it?” This was the woman again.
    “No,” I promised her, shaking my head. “No, it’s not.”
    “That why you’re bald, too?” The man again.
    “Listen, doesn’t matter. What matters is that most of the people back there where I was being… treated just went nuts, same as they did here. Something’s happened and—”
    “Something’s fucking happened, all right!”
    “ Dennis! ” The woman scolded. “You’re