The Bone Puppets: A Hard SciFi Zombie Soldier Story Read online

  Contents

  The Bone Puppets

  Special Offer!

  Rights & Disclaimer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  One More Thing

  Doug McGovern

  THE BONE PUPPETS

  Book 1

  By

  Doug McGovern

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  Rights & Disclaimer

  This is entirely a work of fiction. All people, places and events contained have been completely fabricated by the author. Any similarities to real people, places, or events are completely coincidental.

  The Bone Puppets Copyright © 2017 Doug McGovern

  http://www.Facebook.com/AuthorDougMcG

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any manner or used in any way without advanced written permission by the author.

  Chapter 1

  With a howl that cracked stone, the desert woke Elias Walklate. He shivered. The pain in his head was nothing compared to the burning sensation that shot through his arms. His first conscious awareness was of his shoes having melted to his feet.

  Will the devil come out to play? The mocking voice still echoed through the atmosphere with frenetic laughter, loud enough to blast the sleeper out of dreams like a rocket from the launch pad.

  Elias had woken somewhere in what had once been the African Savannah. He was beginning to remember that now. Was there a plane?

  He stood up. Pain ignited his lower torso. He gripped the wound, letting his fingers drum over stinging flesh with an emotionless rhythm. He recalled getting the wound. He’d been trying to help his boys muscle through that last tunnel of street-sweepers. What he couldn’t remember was how he came to be in this miserable place.

  He watched as the wind peeled back the dust from the barren wasteland around him. A dry mist rose from rocks as the wind whipped across them, the way sawdust might while a blade’s teeth cut through wood. Elias coughed. Blood pooled at his feet. He hissed.

  What in all of this abandoned creation could be used to make a tourniquet?

  It didn’t take long to realize he'd have no luck with his search here. Elias sighed heavily and stretched his legs. If he was going to die in this advanced purgatory wilderness, he might as well die moving. With a ragged breath that sent rapid flames of pain licking through his damaged tissue, he started walking.

  Every step was agony. He scooped up a flat, porous stone and tucked it in between his teeth, clenching down on it to keep from crying out.

  Desperate, he argued with himself. Most of his psychotic, internalized babble was incoherent even to him. Yet one thought rang clear:

  You’ve never had anyone to fight for in your life before now. But now it’s different. The kid is worth it!

  Elias gnawed the stone, counting out the seconds on it. Each step bringing him closer. One less to take.

  He stumbled through the desert, thoughts and memories dull in the back of his mind. But, as his blood began to pump and his mind gradually cleared, he began to recall how he came to be here.

  He’d fallen out of the sky and crawled away from an airplane’s mostly destroyed husk. It had crashed here. Here. Where he was to complete his mission.

  Elias felt sick to his guts, recalling with terror the stories he’d heard. Stories of the Witchdoctor’s Hollow and of the overpowering evil that presided over the Earth today.

  After walking for God knows how long, he was stopped dead in his tracks. Shock overwhelmed him. Shock, awe, disgust and grave fury. Curiosity, too; curiosity about what he was looking at. How it could exist. How she could exist. A horrific warning sign to those like him.

  Hanging high and dry, impaled at the top of a stake, was a body. A mutilated body of an African woman. The elements had weathered it to the point that it now looked like a doll fabricated from shoe-leather. Old, worn, mangled shoe-leather.

  Elias wanted to vomit but there was nothing in his stomach to eject.

  “What is it?” he said to himself, unable to look away.

  Answers seemed to whisper from every corner of his mind, the schizophrenic internal discussion momentarily making him forget that he was alone. Good thing. For, if not for this delusion, he may otherwise have been mortally paralyzed with fear.

  For he was alone, bleeding and dying in a place of impossibly harsh conditions, even when compared to the rest of this fallen world. Here was the perfect specimen of how the Earth had met its end and how the natural sciences had been corrupted by the higher, interdimensional sciences that had once been more commonly known as magic. He stood in a place where the black arts and science were now one and the same. And, directly above him, hanging like a worm on a fisherman’s hook, was the fruit of these black arts and sciences.

  “What am I?” A voice spoke from an immaterial source.

  The wind picked up as a single raven descended from a hole in the dust-caked sky. How he could be here was a mystery. Elias couldn’t see far through the veils of sand, but he was certain there had been no trees in the expanse that yawned before him. There was nothing to focus on in all of this wilderness save for bleak white stones looking like loaves of salt and this grotesque granite stake looming over the desolate landscape of motor oil and sand.

  In a weird, dull, humming harmonic the bird began to sing to the corpse.

  Impossibly, her carved head lifted. Her filed teeth were bared in one vicious, gnashing motion. Her eyes rolled rapidly, pushing out the mystical herb poultices that had been packed into the sockets. The yellow eyeballs were now naked to the toxic air. She shrieked in unholy terror and fury and her hands began to swing the long grass-rope chains attached to her wrists back and forth.

  Elias hit his knees. He shook his head. Her rotten, mutilated hornet’s nest of a body was coming awake, stirring up death and disease with her thrashing.

  The crow sat down on her shoulder and pecked her hard. Her flailing stopped but the horrible screaming continued.

  The bird hovered, chanting now with humanoid syllables. The woman’s blind eyes followed his movements. At last, she looked down at Elias. Her hands shot out and opened, drawing the pestilence into cavities that had been carved into her arms.

  Then there was a calm in the storm. She licked her lips, forcing years of dust and cancerous knots to fall away from them. She was ready to speak now. Elias fell to his knees. His whole body quaked with the overpowering dread of death’s all-too-real presence here.

  “The dead man walking…” The mummified woman croaked at first like a frog, her tone clearing as she spoke. What was more, she was speaking English.

  “You know me?” Elias felt the last of his resolve crumble. He spat the stone out, hands shaking.

  “I know everything. The start of your life and its finish.” Her head thrashed toward the sky and she screeched again
, with a hollow mourner’s keening, as her body was overtaken by millions of little spiders.

  “Who are you?” Elias figured that if she could speak he might as well run with it.

  “I am Kaluwa. The Witchdoctor’s last wife. I know all things. How the teachers of humanity found ancient black practices but kept them hidden for their own uses. How my master’s dimensions would consume the human landscape with unnatural fire. I remember the very hour that your doctors learned the link between science and the dark arts. That was the day that the believers in ancient religion took power over world politics. That was the day, young man, when the Crescent Kingdom was born and liberty died.” She gnashed her teeth, trying to crunch the spiders. They all scurried away, down across her rotting torso towards the ground below.

  Elias shivered. He clutched at his mouth. Blood was pouring from his throat and his eyes now. He shook his head and groaned. It was difficult with his head throbbing like this to piece together the last few days. He swallowed and closed his eyes. If he talked himself through everything he could remember, he might trigger some kind of full recall.

  You were doing the usual gig for Yim. Remember Yim?

  Elias drilled his fists against his temples. His intense horror was blocking long-term memories partially. He’d have to talk his way out of this one.

  The crazy hag that saved your life never could kick smokes, right? Think, Elias. You had a deal worked out. She saved you. She wanted justice on the crazy bastards that turned the world into a Mad Science version of Hell. You rode with her. You knew you’d never get vengeance on your psycho stage-daddy of a father that tortured you on live TV to show off how hardy his genes were against all of this voodoo/physics crap. So, you rode with Yim because Yim had the goods, the guns, the rides! You weren’t paid or even treated nice but she fed you. You got her smokes. She promised justice against a man that died before he ever saw the punishment he had coming. Oh, and make no mistake, Eli. Reece Walklate had it coming.

  “If you know so much, can you tell me how the hell I got here?” Elias chewed his fingernails. His golden hair stood on ends, as if he’d licked a wall socket. He smelled the ends burning where its length stopped at his chin. Kaluwa’s body shot white strobe lights from its core. She shrieked. Her sentences strung together without making any sense.

  “The last shall be first and the first shall be last! He was last and first. He was the Reborn Doctor!” Kaluwa tossed her head from side to side and sobbed. Scorpions thrust free of her belly and ran rapidly down her legs like pebbles falling from a cliff.

  “If you are his wife, then why did he damn you to such a terrible existence?” Elias beat the ground. The woman giggled, shaking her head as smoke tears rolled from her eyes.

  “Young man…How do you expect to explain cruelty? There doesn’t have to be a reason.” She spat blood at the scorpions and some of them were flicked to the ground.

  “If you knew he was cruel, then why did you marry him?” Elias raked his fingernails across his cheeks. Blood spattered down his neck. Her epileptic episode was pure torture on his nerves. An anxiety attack hit him with tsunami weight behind it. Of all the things he could handle in this freakish world, electric torture was not on the list.

  “Ah! You make it sound like I had a choice!” Kaluwa laughed again, hands scraping at the blue sky. She gasped softly delighted by the soap bubble clouds.

  “There doesn’t have to be a reason for love either, little one,” she continued. “Love for its own sake is a power that should be desired and praised.” She smiled, a grim, twisted jester’s smile as her face was tortured by a sudden, frenetic bout of Tourette’s syndrome.

  “Your husband…The Witchdoctor. He did this to you for no reason at all?” Elias swung his fists at the air, ready to rip people’s teeth out.

  “He had a reason. Is there ever a good enough reason to be cruel? Cruelty is its own motivation. Usually, it just possesses a method to its madness.” Kaluwa coughed asthmatically and worms began to roll up from her throat. She moaned with fathomless sorrow. Elias flinched. His life didn’t look as horrific to him as it had before.

  “Okay, you don’t make sense. Either he had a reason or he didn’t have one.” Elias ripped some of his hair out at the roots.

  “Science and madness don’t blend well together, little one. His reason was to see if he could cheat the Devil of his dead. He played God with people who died of kuru and other diseases on this plane. He wanted to proselytize them into his ritual beliefs and then reward them with immortality. But it was not his to give!” Her body pulsated as if small explosions were going on within. Her hands waved about as she swam against the current of her excruciating pain.

  “His true desire was to raise loved ones from their graves. I was his first success and also his worst failure.” Kaluwa twisted her face to the open air. Her arms popped out of their sockets and twisted behind her.

  “This is my eternity. I will be here until the sun falls from the sky. Don’t let this end be yours.” Her whole body pivoted on the stake until her arms and legs formed a sexton shape. She cast a shadow that made the angle of an arrow pointed away to the Northeast, somewhat in the direction of Egypt.

  “You are here to find the Witchdoctor’s Hollow? You must know the secret if justice will have what it demands. Follow now the path set in the drops of my blood. But know that his path lead to death, and his footsteps light upon Hell.” Kaluwa’s mouth opened and something acidic shot out. It hit the air and, reacting with the poisoned oxygen, it caught fire.

  The fire rolled over her in a great funnel cloud. The winds of the poisoned Savannah picked up the fire and caught in the air.

  They had been invisible before. Now, illuminated in Kaluwa’s fire, a host of tiki torches, each possessing a crystallized blood gem carved into the shape of an eye, lit up across the Savanah, paving a broken but discernable path into the smoke-tarnished horizon.

  “Okay, what? Torches? So, those are like milestones or something?” Elias clutched his chest as if that could still his racing heart.

  Kaluwa’s head sagged to her chest and blood dripped from the bottom of her mouth. There would be no answer.

  Elias knelt there confused out of his gourd and panting. Shaking, he crawled forward, looking up at the torches. At the moment, he couldn’t remember what the magical thing was at the end of that path that he was looking for, but following the torches seemed the most logical thing to do. Elias swallowed and nodded. He didn’t know much, but he knew that he was a man of reason. Schizophrenic repartee wasn’t typical of his mental life; he figured his jumbled, manic thoughts were a side-effect of this bizarre landscape.

  Keeping his head tucked down to hide his eyes from Kaluwa and the horror of the wilderness, he stumbled forward. He didn’t make it far before his legs collapsed.

  As he lay on the edge of unconsciousness in a pool of his own blood, everything came back to him in a flood.

  *****

  Chapter 2

  As Elias lay on the desert ground, slipping into unconsciousness, he saw everything that had happened for the last few weeks in real time, as if it were unfolding just now, right in front of him.

  “You’re now entering the City of Faces. It was built from the population of the U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia's physical remains. To your right, you will see that the remnant of the Coca-Cola headquarters and the CNN building, left standing as monuments, for lack of a better word, to this former empire.” The woman on the intercom was far too peppy for the job she’d been given. The rusted-out tram bus creaked like Hell’s oldest gate as it poked over streets that had been repaved with crushed human bones.

  Elias Walklate pulled his hood lower, hiding his golden hair in fear that it stood out too much in this sea of dull colors. It was an unnatural shade of blonde. Yet another defect of his “superior genes.”

  He cursed his genes. They’d been the reason why his father, the great Judas of Atlanta, had made him the poster child for endurance tests. His golde
n hair was just another reminder to him of the genes that had earned him daily torture on live TV from the time he was roughly 7-years-old until he finally escaped as a teen.

  He huffed and sank against the rusted steel bench seat. He didn’t need the tour of this blood-soaked city. Before the Crescent had destroyed it, it had been his home.

  That had been a long time ago now. This city was the last to go. The people, including most of his extended family, had died in a biochemical fire that left their faces imprinted in the husks of building foundations, etched in soot. Then the Crescent’s street guns had taken the residents’ chemical-fire cleansed bones and made pavement out of them. Having crushed their remains in massive machine-gears until they were the texture of flour, the Crescent leaders had mixed them with crushed pearls and granite until they had the new highway.

  Elias would have believed that claim to be government propaganda if he hadn’t experience black science torture himself. Somehow, the sadistic new regime that had replaced the United Nations with its globalist, return-to-early-civilization philosophies had combined science and Satanism, diluting the polar opposites of magic and scientific principle until they became one and the same.

  They preserved the gaping faces etched in sooty shadows and cast in iron on street signs and building sides all over the city to make civilians wary. Using the arms and legs to make gates for the borders, they’d been sure to turn the hands out in the “Halt” position to ward off any citizens from the outlying concentration camps. If that hadn’t been enough of a fear deterrent, they’d wired empty skulls to electric fences to keep their jaws chattering 24-7. These played recorded warnings against disobedience on loop. The many ghetto camps that had replaced the neighborhoods surrounding Atlanta would be unlikely to try any kind of riot, ever. The risk of worse fates than death by starvation in a poisoned climate loomed over their heads if they did.

  Elias was almost vindicated by coming back here. He’d admit it to himself. He was cynical. Bitter to the core. Most of his family had died when the Crescent occupation had burned all the counties that surrounded Georgia. The rest switched sides quickly, following the example of Reece, the eldest son. Reece had originally been just a businessman. Some big wig in a press conference room for one of Atlanta’s many capitalizing business headquarters. He wanted a piece of the great, ancient-world emulating kingdom to come. He believed in all the same philosophies, but didn’t want to lead the primitive lifestyle most of the common people would suffer through now. He’d been the one who helped get Crescent operatives into the city without detection.