The Accidental Apocalypse: Aftermath

By Chris Devine

The world has ended. Not with a bang or a whimper, but by an unfortunate series of coincidences set in motion before the human race was even a gleam in creation’s eye. The plague unleashed on humanity is 100% infectious, 99% fatal and has plunged two thirds of the world back into the dark ages.

Paul is a middle class, middle-aged middle manager whose idea of living dangerously is to drive with the traction control switched off. He has a car, a house, a wide screen TV with 7.1 surround sound, and knows how to build a flat-pack wardrobe.

Trish is an underaged single mother who was abandoned by her drug dealer boyfriend when she started to show symptoms of the plague. She has a six-month-old son, a semiautomatic pistol, a dark past and a chip on her shoulder.

They are citizens of the twenty-first century who have never had to live without electricity, accessible healthcare or online shopping. They have to learn to feed and clothe themselves, as well as surviving everything their new world tries to throw at them. They have to build a new life that neither of them wanted, but first they must learn to survive each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Devine
• Release date: Sep 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005057558

Chris Devine

Chris Devine is a project manager implementing high performance computing systems to universities and research establishments throughout the UK. He has devoured science fiction novels for as long as he can remember: from E. C. Eliott and Hugh Walters as a child, to Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, A E van Vogt and Isaac Asimov as a teenager and Elizabeth Moon and so many others as an adult.He published his first novel, The Archer’s Paradox, in 2014 although the germ of the idea was born in a daydream decades before when he was eleven years old. What started as a short story to fill the evenings on a long contract away from home, took on a life of its own and became the Travis Fletcher Chronicles which eventually spanned five books. It still provides embryonic ideas for spin offs and sequels.Although science fiction is his first love, he believes in letting the story take him where it needs to go, rather than pulling it in a direction you want to go, just like real life. Sometimes you end up on a different path to the one you thought you were on. Petra’s Story, therefore sits more in the mystery / psychological thriller section of the bookshelf, although there is still a sci-fi element. As with Travis Fletcher, Petra Connell is flawed, out of her depth and afraid of failing, and there is always Chris’ dark sense of humour lurking in the background.Writing a book is a daunting prospect, daring to publish it is just scary. If Chris’ literary ramblings persuades one more person that they have a story that needs telling, then he will consider that a success.Chris is a father and grandfather and lives in rural East Yorkshire in the UK with his wife, Julie.

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THE ACCIDENTAL APOCALYPSE - AFTERMATH

Copyright 2022 Christopher Devine

Published by Christopher Devine at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

About the Author

Other books by the Author

Connect with the Author

Dedication

For our wonderful grandson Jason, and all babies born in Lockdown 2020

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, to my wife Julie for her love, patience, ideas and continual encouragement when I was running out of words. Also for helping with read-throughs, picking out plot holes, and inconsistencies and rewording some of the nonsense that spilled out of my brain.

To Claire, Mike, Ryan, and Anna for their encouragement and being the best family a dad could wish for.

To Emily, Katie and Jason for being the most amazing grandchildren in the universe.

To all the people that read The Travis Fletcher Chronicles and Petra’s Story - thank you buying this book and continuing to enjoy my stories.

To all my new readers – I hope you enjoy this story, and you should check out The Travis Fletcher Chronicles and Petra’s Story

And last but not least, to all the people that provided me with a montage of attributes I used to create some of the characters.

Proofreading by Julie Devine

Cover Art by Black Pearl

Bookcoverzone.com

Prologue

Millions of years ago and tens of thousands of light years from Earth, an automated probe orbited a planet in a star system too small and too distant to be picked up by Earth’s telescopes. The probe was large enough to have its own measurable gravity and was packed with all the equipment required to map every known aspect of a planet, as well as enough fuel and spare parts to maintain itself for the duration of its mission. It had been in orbit for over one hundred of the planet’s years and had made precise topographical maps of every land mass, catalogued its seasons at all latitudes, created timetables and statistics for all tides that lapped against every shore. It had measured the planet’s dimensions to the micron, its rotation to the millisecond, the behaviour of its moons and its orbit around the sun. In the atmosphere, thousands of autonomous drones analysed its atmosphere and catalogued every species of every lifeform that crawled or walked across its surface, flew in its skies, or swam in its oceans.

It made no decisions or drew any conclusions based on the data it collected, that was not its purpose. Every piece of information it collected was packaged up and sent back to its origin in tight data bursts. The transmissions would take decades to reach their destination, where they would be dissected, analysed and their meaning debated in minute detail.

At the completion of its assignment, it recalled its drones, sent a final transmission, calculated the trajectory to its next preprogramed destination, and set off. The probe’s mission had lasted tens of thousands of years and it was programmed with star systems to visit for tens of thousands more.

Its makers were looking for suitable planets for the expansion of their species. They were in no hurry. They were not invaders and had no concept of conquest or war. If a planet did not meet every criterion required for colonisation, it was struck off the list of potentials. They knew how fast their population increased and the chances of finding a suitable home before a migration became crucial. They were exceedingly long lived, immeasurably patient, and they used mathematics and statistics as a rulebook that governed every aspect of their existence. They never made mistakes, and neither did they have any concept of any civilisation other than their own. The closest translation of their name for themselves was ‘Us’, making everything else ‘Not Us’ and therefore irrelevant. Even before the probe had been launched, its route, destinations, and chances of success at each stop had been precisely predicted from ground-based analysis.

There were no celebrations, cheering, mutual back slapping or popping of champagne corks when the probe’s data revealed a potential new home. Someone merely sent a set of instructions to one of the huge stations orbiting the planet. In this instance, two hundred and fifty-seven cylinders leapt from tubes along the station’s length at apparent random intervals and accelerated towards the outer reaches of the solar system.

The cylinders had very little intelligence of their own, they didn’t need it. Their trajectory had been calculated to an accuracy of hundreds of decimal places and would reach their designated targets within a few kilometres, or whatever percentage of units of measurement used to program them was considered acceptable.

**********

The cylinders approached their destination. Their makers never made mistakes or errors in calculations. They worked in absolutes. The rotation of a planet was calculable and predictable to a hundred decimal places. It took the same amount of time yesterday as it did today, and it would be the same tomorrow. Similar logic could be applied to a planet’s journey around its sun. For over one hundred years the automated probe had mapped and timed every aspect of the target planet’s behaviour. Yet when the flotilla of cylinders finally approached their destination, the planet was not where it had been calculated to be. It didn’t matter what had happened to it, it was not there. With no inbuilt intelligence, or decision-making logic, the cylinders flew on, unable to report their failure or warn the convoy of migrants following them that their new home was no longer where it was expected to be.

**********

One hundred and twenty-three cylinders remained when they eventually entered the untidy system of a small yellow sun. Eight significant planetary bodies, hundreds of smaller planetoids, and a ring of asteroids. Many of the casualties along the way had been struck by meteorites and other debris of various sizes. Some had been destroyed outright, others had merely been knocked off course and spun off in random directions. Others had been caught by the wreckage of destroyed cylinders with similar effects. As they journeyed towards the centre of the system, they were caught in the gravitational pull of a gas giant. Some were catapulted off on a new trajectory. A few were pulled into the gravity well to be crushed by unimaginable forces, or were added to the planet’s count of orbiting satellites, while some had had their trajectory altered so much that they drifted away from the main pack. Some never made it through the asteroid belt, but the rest now bore inextricably down on the blue-green third planet from the sun.

Of the final ninety-five that made it, some bounced off the atmosphere to carry on their journey for eternity, some entered too steeply and burned up in the atmosphere. Some mechanisms of the cylinders had become jammed with dust and particles or damaged by micro meteorite impacts from their prolonged journey through deep space. Some crashed into the sea or onto the planet’s polar ice caps. The rest, as the planet’s atmosphere began to thicken, began to rotate and unscrew. Sometimes, the simplest mechanisms are the best. They entered the atmosphere in a rough north to south path, finally depositing their cargo over the largest continent and most of the larger islands and continents, including Iceland, Europe, the British Isles, Africa, Asia, India, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Chapter One

Paul Durante turned over in bed and immediately regretted it. He moaned as the full force of his hangover smacked him across his forehead, as if he had walked into a steel beam studded with pointed rivets. Slowly the rest of his senses started kicking in. Pain lanced through his eyeballs like hot knitting needles from the sun streaming in through the curtains. His guts felt like wet knotted string and his mouth tasted as if he had been sucking on a tramp’s toe all night. With a great effort he turned over again, away from the light. It was the morning after his best friend’s stag party. There had been shots in various luminous colours and far too many of them. Some of them had been set alight. He was a beer and wine man with the occasional whisky. These faddy shots served no purpose except to get very drunk very quickly. There was no enjoyment in the tasting and savouring of them, and if the object of the exercise was to get drunk, then why set fire to it and burn the alcohol off? He remembered being violently sick, but he couldn’t remember where, except that it was as luminous green as the shots that had been forced down his throat. in fact, he could not remember much of the previous night at all.

Must have been a good night, his addled brain decided, or so Andy would tell him next time they met. He tried to retreat into that dark canyon of oblivion he had just crawled out of, but his mind refused to co-operate. He was awake now, so tough titties, he was going to have to deal with reality and the aftereffects that would inevitably bring.

Need water, his body insisted. He felt extremely dehydrated and strangely weak. Food, his mind added, causing his stomach to threaten to turn inside out at the suggestion. He rolled to the edge of the bed, poked his legs out and forced himself into a sitting position. Must be well past checkout time, he deduced, as the sun was so high in the sky. It had not occurred to him that the hotel faced west, so it was more like early afternoon than late morning. Need to get home. Work tomorrow. He forced his body upright and immediately fell face down on the floor. Unable to stand, he crawled to the bathroom where he was met by piles of dried, lime green vomit. It clung to the toilet bowl like solidified lava and formed a solid crust around the pedestal. So that’s where I threw up, he thought. Thank god I don’t have to clean that up.

With great difficulty he managed to claw his way up the vanity unit to the sink so he could get his head under the tap. He ingested at least a litre of the cool water before slumping back down to the floor. The liquid began to lubricate his brain and revive his body and he started to wonder why he felt so weak. Weird colours or not, it was still only alcohol and he had woken up in his hotel room, and not A&E with alcohol poisoning. Andy was going to have a lot to answer for. It was his friend’s second marriage. Andy’s fiancé was much younger than him, and she had reawakened the teenager in is friend, and now Paul was suffering the consequences.

I’m getting too old for this, Paul decided and heaved himself back to his feet and stuck his mouth back under the cold tap for another litre of water, then he checked the reflection in the mirror. He gasped in shock, lost his purchase on the sink, and crashed to the floor. The face that stared back at him looked nothing like it should have. Granted there were two blue eyes, the hair looked the right shade of brown and the nose and ears looked right, but the apparition in the mirror had at least two weeks of beard sprouting from its sallow, sunken jowls. His body dumped a load of adrenaline into his system, and he began to hyperventilate. No, he must have been mistaken. He put his hands to his face and felt the bristles under his fingers. Not just a day’s worth of growth, he could grab it in his fingers and tug. They belonged to him as well, so it wasn’t Andy’s idea of a practical joke to glue false whiskers to his face while he was unconscious. He raised himself up again to verify what he’d thought he’d seen. Yes, it was him, but with the beginnings of a full beard!

Oh fuck, of fuck, oh fuck. His voice cracked from disuse and hurt his throat. He checked the reflection again and the, not quite, stranger stared back at him with bloodshot eyes. He stumbled back into the bedroom and fumbled himself into a pair of jeans and t-shirt. His shirt from the previous night’s festivities lay on the floor, caked in hardened vomit. Last night? What the fuck happened last night? Was last night really last night? On impulse he checked his watch. Holy shit! It’s two in the afternoon! He checked the date and confirmed that it was actually fifteen days since he went to bed. Oh my good god! He reached for his phone to verify what his watch was telling him, but it was completely flat. Belatedly, his hearing caught up with the rest of him and he began to notice just how quiet it was. Ok, he was on a high floor and the windows were double glazed, but Manchester is never that quiet and there was no banging or sounds from other guests or movements in the corridor. If it was two in the afternoon, then there should be hotel staff banging around as they cleaned the rooms ready for the new influx of guests.

He made it to the door, opened it and stuck his head into the corridor. The unnatural silence offended his ears. As an afterthought, he kicked his dirty shirt and trousers into the gap to stop the door swinging shut and locking him out of his room. If it really was two weeks later than he thought it was, then his key would have stopped working long ago. But why did no one check on him? Surely someone must have noticed that he hadn’t checked out, or had come to clean the room and found him lying there in a coma.

He stumbled to the lift, and that is when he saw the first body. The man, about the same age as himself, was covered in the same lime green crust that decorated Paul’s hotel bathroom and clothes, but without the growth of beard. He was lying in front of the bank of lifts with one hand reaching for the doors, as if he’d collapsed trying to escape from something. Paul’s stomach summersaulted, and he regurgitated his recently ingested tank of water, which splashed all over the corpse.

He ran, stumbled, fell and crawled away in panic towards the stairs, and tripped over a tangle of legs protruding from a half-closed door. Two more corpses, young women this time, dressed as if they were just about to start or had just finished a night out, blocked his path across the corridor. They clung to each other as if they knew what was happening to them and were trying to draw comfort from each other. He skirted around the cadavers, half ran, and half fell down five flights of stairs to the ground floor.

He found the reception desk unmanned, as was the bar and the restaurant. He went to check outside. As he approached the main entrance, the glass doors obediently slid open. No trucks rumbled past, no cars, motorbikes or busses disturbed the eerily silent air. The scene was so unreal, Paul’s brain had no idea how to react.

The next thing he noticed was the smell. The sickly stench of rotting meat that had been left out in the sun, hung in the air. He had never smelled death before, but he knew instinctively what it was. There were more bodies on the pavement outside the hotel, but not many. He retreated back into the hotel reception and slumped to the floor. He kept telling himself he needed to do something, but what? Was everyone dead? If so, why? Was he the only one left alive? The ridiculous thought bounced around in his head until it started to make sense. He stuck his head out into the street again. It was as eerily quiet as it had been the first time. He retreated back into the hotel. His dehydrated and malnourished mind went into overdrive. Plague? Biological weapon attack? Zombie outbreak? Alien invasion! Each idea was more ridiculous than the last, but then what is ‘ridiculous’ when the only evidence you have are dead bodies covered in green vomit. There should be more bodies, he decided. It was not as if the whole world had just keeled over and died without warning. Even in the hotel, which has over 250 bedrooms, he had only seen four bodies. The rest must either still be in their rooms, like he had been, or had managed to leave before whatever disaster had struck.

Was it only local? Maybe it was just Manchester, or Lancashire. At worst it could just be Britain. Maybe dozens of rescue planes were waiting to airlift the survivors to safety. Safety from what? He went through to the bar. He found the TV remote control behind the counter, switched it on and flipped through the channels. Nothing, not even an automated message, or screen of apologetic text saying that there was a fault, and that normal service would be resumed as soon as possible. There was not even any static in this digital age, just a blank screen.

His thoughts turned to food again. He needed something in his stomach, or he would be joining the rest of the stiffs scattered on the ground. He made his way to the kitchen behind the restaurant. The fruit and vegetables were mouldy, the bread had turned green and was now playing host to a range of new organisms. He dared not think what the milk had become. The freezers were still working but he did not have the time or the inclination to wait for a steak to defrost. Canned food it was then, and eggs, but he’d have to test the eggs first. He remembered a trick about putting raw eggs into a glass of water. If they sank, they were good. If they floated, they were full of gas and had turned bad. Beans on toast but without the toast. He did have the foresight to pull a couple of steaks out of the freezer for later, just in case.

It didn’t take long, and he was soon tucking into a plate of beans and scrambled eggs. He felt his strength returning and his thoughts became less chaotic, but he still had no clue as to what had happened, how it had happened, or why. Neither did he have a mechanism for coping or even understanding his predicament. He grabbed a bottle of whisky from behind the bar, climbed the stairs to his room, deciding that the lift was too much of a risk, and drank himself into a stupor while looking out over the dead city

**********

The next time he awoke, he had a real hangover from the bottle of whiskey he had drunk. He reminded himself that this was why he never drank whisky in any quantity, but at least he didn’t feel as if he had just woken from a two-week coma, which if he believed the evidence, he had. Maybe it had just been a really vivid and really bad dream, but the mouldy green crust around the toilet bowl and on the bathroom floor put paid to that hope. He treated himself to a shower and a shave then went downstairs, past the decomposing bodies, to the restaurant. He knew he should feel something for the bodies lying in the corridor. Compassion, pity, sorrow? But he felt nothing. If anything, he felt as if they were the lucky ones.

For some reason, this time he felt self-conscious about invading the kitchen and stealing food. He half expected the chef to appear and start beating him to death with a rolling pin or chasing him with a meat cleaver. Then his imagination began embellishing the scenario and the chef became a flesh-eating zombie or controlled by alien parasites. Damn his thoughts of zombie outbreaks and alien invasions last time!

All he knew now was that he needed to be home, in familiar surroundings. If whatever had happened was local to Manchester, then he needed to be away from here as soon as possible. He began preparing a plate of steak, eggs and chips, and pulled a bottle of Beaujolais from the bar’s wine rack. If it was not local, if it was everywhere, then the gas and electricity could give out at any time, so he might as well make the best of it. Maybe he was better where he was. If there were fleets of rescue planes waiting on a runway somewhere, then maybe he was better off where he was. He was in a well-stocked hotel in one of the largest cities in the UK and probably one of the most likely places for a search and rescue operation to start, apart from London of course. London always comes first, he sneered to himself. Fucking Southerners, fucking shithole. The only thing worse would be a load of Americans turning up, ‘saving the day’ then making a movie about it, except the crisis would have taken place in some god forsaken town in the middle of the Arizona desert, or California, or some such place. It’s amazing how the mind works if you leave it to its own devices for too long.

Fortified by a stomach full of red meat and red wine, he stuck his head out of the front door again, decided nothing had changed, retreated back into the bar to finish his bottle of wine, and to consider his predicament in more detail.

**********

He was still ‘considering his predicament’ three days later while he worked his way through the hotel’s stock of frozen meats and various wines. The electricity had gone off sometime during the night. There was still no sign of rescue or other survivors, and the freezer was starting to defrost. The gas rings still worked, but he had no idea for how long. He managed to find a stock of tea lights that the hotel put into little coloured glass bulbs on the restaurant tables to enhance the atmosphere. They didn’t exactly light up the night, but at least he could identify where most of the obstacles were, and it was better than the pitch black that had descended on his world, now that even the streetlights had gone off. He finally plucked up the courage to move the bodies in the hall. He reverently laid them in the same room as the girls who had been trapped as their room door closed on them. When the room door clicked shut behind him, he reflexively breathed a sigh of relief, partially because he no longer had to see the corpses as he passed by, but also if they turned into the living dead, he would probably hear them smashing their way out of the room, giving him time to escape or hide.

He had thought long and hard about his family, his friends, his work colleagues, his ex-wife. Ok, not so much about his ex. He felt as if he should be mourning them, or at least wondering if they were still alive and where they were, but he felt nothing, just numb. Maybe grief would come later when he understood what he should be grieving about.

He forced the, no longer automatic, sliding doors open and stood in the hotel’s entrance, looking at the empty street, listening, as he did every morning, just in case. Gunshots! Was he sure? Yes, he was. So, he was not the only one left alive, but then if people were shooting at each other, did he really want to be waving his arms about and attracting their attention? He jumped back inside, pulled the doors closed and retreated to his room with another bottle of wine.

He decided it was time to do something. Help and salvation were obviously not coming anytime soon. But do what? His thoughts turned to home, such that it was. A bland detached house on a bland estate of bland houses, but it was his home, and it wasn’t in a dead forbidding city he knew very little about. He needed familiarity, he needed to know where things were, he needed to get out of here.

He went downstairs for a final meal of steak. Considering the gunfire, maybe it would be better to wait until dark before making a run for home. He still had no idea what was out there. It could be zombies, or aliens, or even the army eliminating any evidence of a man-made virus that had escaped from a secret laboratory. That was a new one to add to his list of catastrophes that had befallen the world. His mind started working overtime again and he wished it wouldn’t.

The sound of the glass front doors shattering scared him out of his wits. He nearly fled in panic but held himself in check and listened. Voices in reception caught his attention. He started to get to his feet to check who was there, but something stopped him. He froze and listened. He could make out four voices. They seemed to be arguing, sounded distinctly unfriendly and definitely not looking for survivors to rescue. Then there was another crash, and the sound of more breaking glass followed by raucous laughter and cheers. There had been a huge mirror in the reception area, the only piece of glass large enough to make such a sound. Paul fell to the floor, scuttled into the kitchen like a startled crab, and hid in a corner, behind some boxes.

He held his breath as the doors from the restaurant crashed open. His hiding place was far from perfect. All the interlopers had to do was look under a counter, and there he was.

I’m sure I saw somefink, one of the voices shouted near the doors.

Ha ha! Bazza’s scared of his own shadow! another voice out in the restaurant teased.

Fuck off! Bazza shouted back. I ain’t scared of nuffin’! he declared. Bang! Bang! Two bullets hit metal pans and sent them flying onto the tiled floor with a loud clatter. Paul nearly screamed and ran in panic, but he managed to hold his ground.

Oi! Don’t waste ‘em! Paul heard someone admonish Bazza. We might not find no more.

And you ain’t gettin’ none of mine, another voice warned.

More crashes in the restaurant and shouts