Read Ferine Apocalypse (Novella): 4 Hours for Free Online Page A

the crap.
    The mission had become a dangerous wound.
    Bleeding and all too likely to kill him. A trial of resilience and ingenuity, something he needed to endure and overcome.
    Survive and then recover from.
    Carlton Pearcey was tiring.
    <><><>
    As they’d come off the bridge, it had been reasonably free of creatures. To begin with at least.
    The creatures were there of course.
    The mutated people, the monsters.
    They saw several of them, but always far enough away that Pearcey was able to blow past before they could approach within attacking distance.
    As they entered more residential areas, it all changed.
    The roads became increasingly full of activity.
    None of it was good activity.
    At intervals, the streets seemed to swarm with them. Snapping predatory things that reacted to noise as if it signalled the proximity of prey.
    Food.
    Pearcey detected a pattern to their reaction.
    First, a stillness.
    Poised.
    Motionless, but alert.
    It was evident from their peculiarly angled stance.
    An almost feline position.
    Reminded Pearcey of the way a cat gets when it spies something it wants to catch. To run down, paw and play with.
    Until it tires of the game and bites.
    Those once human creatures stood, jaws gaping, alien eyes scanning for the source of the sound. If they locked on to the car, identified the movement, they invariably began pursuit.
    At times, Pearcey had no choice but to crash into them. Smash through one or more of them.
    The car was already dented and scratched.
    Smeared with their thick blood. A lumpy maroon liquid.
     
    Those instances terrified him.
    The times when he had to crash through them left his heart rate soaring and his armpits dripping with sweat. He could feel it under his shirt, running down the sides of his body.
    They scared him more than he let on to Gallagher.
    Pearcey let little show on the surface.
    It wasn’t his way.
    He’d never been inclined to displays of emotion, and his early life had hardened the characteristic. Engrained it so deeply into him that it moved beyond any conscious thought or decision. Carlton Pearcey was essentially honest by nature, but wearing his heart on his sleeve was another matter entirely.
     
    At one point, one of those monstrous skeletal things caught under the Jaguar, threatened to halt them. Or worse still, cause them to crash.
    The collisions horrified him. In that type of vehicle, despite its high-end spec, it would be all too easy to come to grief.
    When he judged the density too great, he had to backtrack.
    It became a dismal cat and mouse dance of evasion. They were constantly moving, but actual progress towards the objective was laughable. A painfully small distance covered.
    In reality, there was nothing laughable about any of it. Pearcey fancied that he could see the shadows lengthening.
    Hear the tick of each second as the clock relentlessly counted down to night.
    The thought of darkness out there left a slick sheen on his skin.
    <><><>
    He didn’t see the name of the street. He thought they were in Lambeth.
    Wasn’t sure because he’d become disorientated by the nightmare run of the last few minutes. The continual switching back and forth.
    He drove London a lot, it was a daily part of his life, but he generally followed proscribed courses.
    Familiar routes.
    He knew short cuts, but he was off the beaten path now.
    As he entered it, the street with no name, it was blissfully empty. Empty of prowling monsters. Empty of immediate threat.
    He accelerated. Felt the engine purr.
     
    It was rundown.
    A street that didn’t have much to do with the new shiny London. There wasn’t a great deal of gleaming steel and contemporary glass.
    A mixture of three and four story buildings that seemed to crowd out the darkening sky.
    Casting shadows and mystery like aspersion.
    At street level, shops lined both sides of the road.
    Some obviously derelict and abandoned.
    Some still going concerns, albeit grim and somehow despondent. The entire length of it