Ever Onward Read online

  ‘EVER ONWARD’

  ****************

  by

  W.Wm.Mee

  Smashwords Edition

  Book I of the

  'Ragnok Series'

  Number of words: 153,000

  Copyright Wayne Wm. Mee 2011

  A Short Synopsis of the book.

  An unstable soldier is served his divorce papers. He seeks revenge on his wife by shooting her; not, as might be expected, in their home or in the bed of her lover, but at her place of work --- a top secret chemical warfare lab.

  As the bullets from his M-16 spill blood and shatter bone, they shatter too the highly toxic vials of a secret nerve gas --- a gas cunningly designed to kill only to humans, chimpanzees and the greater apes. So deadly is this 'man-made plague', that, once released into the atmosphere and carried by the winds, eighty percent of the world's population is dead within a week.

  'Ever Onward' is the story of the twenty percent that somehow survive --- at least for a while. As the lights go out around the planet, the rules of civilization soon become a thing of the past, and those few that remain must fight to stay alive --- any way they can.

  Please note:

  This is not a children's book.

  Mature language and actions are depicted.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Content

  Chapter 1 - In the Beginning

  Chapter 2 - Heaven and Earth

  Chapter 3 - The Dark Stranger

  Chapter 4 - Death's Shadow

  Chapter 5 - A Sad Awakening

  Chapter 6 - Pussbag

  Chapter 7 - Home

  Chapter 8 - It Begins

  Chapter 9 - Rare Blood

  Chapter 10 - Be Fruitful & Multiply

  Chapter 11 - Shop Till You Drop

  Chapter 12 - Of Mice and Men

  Chapter 13 - In the Nick of Time

  Chapter 14 - Trouble at the Trailhead

  Chapter 15 - The Climb

  Chapter 16 - The Spine of God

  Chapter 17 - Showdown at Witch's Head

  Chapter 18 - A Leopard's Spots

  Chapter 19 - The Silent Bard

  Chapter 20 - The Lost Boys

  Chapter 21 - The Old Man of the Sea

  Chapter 22 - The Hall of the Fisher King

  Chapter 23 - Necessary Force

  Chapter 24 - Heart's Desire

  Chapter 25 - One Arm

  Chapter 26 - An Affair of Honour

  Chapter 27 - The Texas Rangers

  Chapter 28 - Home Is Where the Heart Is

  Chapter 29 - Once More Unto the Breach

  Chapter 30 - Pussy Power

  Chapter 31 - Avalanche Pass

  Chapter 32 - Tear Lake

  Chapter 33 - Cat And Mouse

  Chapter 34- An Eye For An Eye

  Chapter 35 - The Searchers

  Chapter 36 - The Lion's Den

  Chapter 37 - King Jocco

  Chapter 38 - Scar

  Chapter 39 - Jocco's Justice

  Chapter 40 - Desperadoes

  Chapter 41 - One Eye

  Chapter 42 - Overkill

  Chapter 43 - Vengeance

  Chapter 44 - The Captive

  Chapter 45 - Trail's End

  Chapter 46 - A Sporting Proposition

  Chapter 47 - The Long Run

  Chapter 48 - Judgment Day

  Chapter 49 - Action of the Tiger

  Chapter 50 - Almost There

  Chapter 51 - Ever Onward

  Chapter 1: IN THE BEGINNING

  Nellis Air Force Base,

  Nevada June 21

  Sergeant David Henderson felt like shit. Gulping a ragged breath, he leaned against the wall of the underground complex and squinted up at the bright lights, the M-16 clutched tightly to his chest. He’d had one bitch of a night and the day didn’t look to be any better. To add insult to injury, the booze was wearing off and the fucking pills he’d taken hadn’t kicked in yet!

  The M-16 trembled in his hands. Caressing it lovingly, he thought of his soon to be his EX wife, thought how he’d love to shove the barrel down her big mouth and empty the clip. THAT would shut her the fuck up once and for all! Always nagging him about his drinking, his gambling and his ‘other women’.

  That last part struck him as funny. Booze and cards there’d been aplenty; but no other women. As far as Sergeant David Henderson was concerned, one nagging female was one fucking too many!

  Not that he was any limp-wristed faggot! Christ no! His red-necked father had hated faggots and had gleefully passed on the feeling to his budding red-necked son. Lawyers too! Hell yes! Henderson’s sweating face smiled coldly as he dwelt on those bygone days of yore. Oh my, how his Old Man had dearly hated lawyers. Chased them off the farm with a shotgun when they’d come with the eviction notice!

  ‘Like the little prick that tried to serve me my divorce papers!’ Henderson muttered to himself. A cruel sneer crossed his haggard face. He’d beaten the shit out of the little queer and lost his field commission because of it. The brass had shuffled him off to a desk job, where he now sat shuffling goddamned computer printouts back and forth for a bunch of over-the-hill, lawyer-loving, ass-kissers! What kind of job was that for a fighting man?!

  Then he’d met Willard Larsh in a seedy watering hole on the outskirts of Bakersfield. Willard was one of those egg-head civilian types working on some top-secret project at the base. Henderson thought at first that he was just another computer-geek faggot on the make, but Willard had surprised him. Half way through a bottle of scotch, Henderson found out that Wee Willie Larsh was scared. Not just scared of loosing his job/wife/kids/manhood scared, but REALLY scared! The kind of scared that leaves a fella wide awake in the middle of the night with his heart pounding, his throat dry and his shorts moist in the rear.

  Some strange shit was going down back on the base. Some REALLY strange shit! When pressed, Willy-boy would only say that ‘it’ was all wrong, and that some bitch named Estelle wouldn’t listen to him. Henderson could sure as hell relate to that.

  They’d met several times since, mostly at the same seedy strip-bar. Since Henderson’s wife had already moved out and Wee Willie always paid for the booze, Henderson was more than content to humor the little four-eyed runt. Yet as the hours slid by, listening to Willie ‘wine on’ while watching Suzy Rottencrotch bump n’ grind her way around the tiny stage, Sergeant David Henderson slowly began to get the ‘Big Picture’.

  The brass, so sayeth Wee-Willy, were secretly working on a new type of nerve gas. Not just your average ‘wipe out the whole fucking village’ kind, but one ball-busting, cock-sucking GIANT kind! An honest ta Gawd ‘weapon of muther-fucking mass destruction!’

  ‘Agent C.D.’ was its code name. The letters stood for Crystallized Deterrent. When Henderson had asked what the fuck that meant, Wee Willie had grinned slyly and said: ‘Completely Demented.’ He’d gone on to explain how this new gas would make old soldiers like Henderson about as useful as tits on a nun. Grunts like the sarge would be looked on as dinosaurs. The ‘soldier of the future’, according to a three sheets to the wind Willy, would be ‘some skinny assed kid in a spacesuit, high on drugs, a face full of zits and a squirt gun filled with C.D.’

  Henderson had not been a happy camper!

  First the faggot lawyers had taken his wife, his money, his pride: and now they were after his goddamned job! Well, he sure the fuck knew how to put a stop to THAT right quick! When Wee Willie asked what he had meant,
it had been Henderson’s turn to clam up.

  That had been almost a week ago. Since then the old sarge had been a very busy boy. Now at last he was ready. Hell yes! Was he ever!

  Feeling like his daddy must have as he’d waited on the farm, shotgun in hand, for the lawyers to serve the eviction papers, Sergeant David Henderson thumbed off the safety on his M-16 and stepped out into the hall. Corporal Phil Lavin was on guard duty at the far end. Henderson knew Lavin from way back. They weren’t real close, but they’d downed more than a few Ginger Ales together. Only a week ago they had played in the same poker game. As usual, Henderson had gotten plastered and started a fight just for the hell of it, thus living up to his nickname: ‘Deadly Dave’.

  ‘Hey, sarge! How they hangin’?”

  Deadly Dave’s response was to shoot Lavin twice in the face.

  The corporal’s body slammed back into the heavy door, then slid down into a lifeless heap. A thick smear of blood and brains marred the door’s stainless steel surface.

  Grinning like the madman he was fast becoming, Henderson stepped over both the sanity line as well as the body and punched in the secret code. It had been changed that morning, but he knew that. He wasn’t supposed to. ‘Eyes Only’ shit. But they’d taken his gun and turned him into a paper shuffler, a fucking desk-jockey riding a computer console; a main-frame faggot who could surf the fucking net with the worst of them! Yet with knowledge came power, and the more knowledge the more power! So now he knew all about the famous-fucking ‘Door’ and what really went on behind it--- and that knowledge had driven him over the edge.

  “Bastards!”, he muttered, saliva flecking the corners of his twisted smile. “Cock-sucking job-stealing bastards!”

  The door swished open like the ones on Star Trek. Beam me up, Snotty. Henderson was through in an instant, the M-16 now on continual burst. Full metal jacket rounds tore through the guard just inside the door. At such close range the man’s stomach vaporized. Henderson was past the body before it hit the floor, the M-16 still coughing out death.

  Estelle Dority, one of several non-military technicians working on Agent C.D., turned and screamed. The tumbling slugs ripped into her left side and spun her like a top. One more entered through her open mouth, exiting stage right and taking half her head with it. A mental picture of his wife flashed before him. Henderson began to smile.

  Walking forward, Deadly Dave shot three more people. ‘Time is precious’ his mother had often told him, and Mrs. Henderson’s obedient offspring knew her to be right. He had a lot to do. Miles to go before I sleep. With that he commenced spraying poetic justice at the white lab coats scrambling madly for cover. When his fifty-round magazine finally emptied, a total of nine people lay dead, among them, Willard ‘Wee Willie’ Larsh.

  But Sergeant Henderson’s one man crusade was far from over. He had eliminated the creators, but their job stealing creation itself still remained.

  The smell of blood and cordite filled the room. Trembling as adrenaline pumped its way into his veins, Henderson tossed the spent clip aside and inserted a fresh one. His gaze tuned now to the room itself. Test tubes, beakers and jars littered the lab tables. Electronic machinery, each costing more than what a dedicated soldier like himself made in a year, lined the walls. From one corner a computer glared at him like an accusing eye. Henderson held the stare for as long as he could, then fired. Spent casings tapped out a staccato beat as they clattered on the tile floor. The thunder of the M-16 punched out the base, while his own screams filled in the high notes. ‘Rock n’ roll!’ the old Nam vets used to yell, joyfully wasting friend and foe alike. Henderson could do no less. Shattered glass fell like broken dreams as Deadly Dave boogied on down.

  The noise was deafening.

  He didn’t hear the door swish open behind him; the M.P.’s shouted command; the harsher, crisper sound as the M.P. fired his sidearm. So intent on blasting beakers was ol’ Dave that he never even felt the .45 slug that swung him around, his arms wide like Christ on His cross.

  Startled, the two men stood facing each other. The silence hung in the air like a pop fly at its apex. Then gravity intervened and his smoking barrel began its fall back to earth. Half way through its arc, the M.P. fired again --- three times in rapid succession. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  One after another, small holes stitched their way up Henderson’s chest, the last one hitting his nametag. Dead on his feet, Henderson’s finger tightened on the trigger. The dozen remaining rounds emptied into the far wall. One of them struck a small vile encased in clear plastic, exploding it like a grenade. The contents of the vile, left there by the late, great Estelle Dority, escaped unseen into the room.

  Sergeant Henderson had just killed ten people in order to stop the experiment that Estelle and her esteemed colleagues had labored so long to create. Agent C.D. The ultimate weapon; a type of nerve gas that killed only apes, monkeys and humans, leaving all other forms of life unaffected. Entering through the pores of the skin, it attacked both the red and white blood cells, crystallizing all the liquid in the body and causing almost instant death.

  Estelle’s team however, had been working on a little added bonus --- a way to make C.D. dispose of the bodies as well! Her team had found a way to continue the process so that not just the blood crystallized, but the entire body, including hair, bones and teeth. Only a gray, fragile parchment-like substance would remain, akin to an old wasps nest, easily blown away by the wind.

  Just how this all actually worked, the recently late but far from great Sergeant Henderson could have cared less. When he’d finally broken the code on the ‘eyes only’ document Agent CD and read the bitter truth about what Eager-Beaver Estelle and her geek buddies had done, he decided to act. ‘The faggots are taking over!’, a long – deadyet familiar voice had warned him. ‘Someone should do something about those queer bastards right quick before they get the goddamn farm!’

  In his own twisted way Henderson had set out to do just that, to destroy the creation of the wife/job stealing faggots before it was too late. In so doing he had killed the creators but set their creation itself free. The recently deceased Estelle Dority, B.A., M.A., Doctor of Nuclear Chemistry and an acute sufferer of P.M.S., had neglected to mention one small detail in her last report, (the same report that Sergeant Henderson had inadvertently read and that had set him off on his own personal stairway to heaven). The neglected detail was that there might just be one tiny drawback to the ‘new and improved’ version ofCD.She suspected that this new gas she and her team were working on might not dissipate quite as quickly as the older, non-body disposing kind did.

  It might, in fact, NOT dissipate at all!

  Months earlier, junior adviser Willard ‘Wee Willie’ Larsh, after checking and double checking simulated tests on his computer, had reluctantly informed Ms. Dority of his findings. Young Willard claimed that once exposed to the air, said new gas would most probably undergo a chemical change --- a rather serious chemical change. Wee Willie had even gone so far as to call it a double-scoop mother-fucking RADICAL change! Not only wouldn’t it die off like smoke on the wind --- it would MUTATE AND MULTIPLY!

  As was Sergeant Henderson when he ‘ruffled the placid governmental waters’, Young Willard was quickly and firmly shuffled off to shuffle his own endless stream of computer printouts. But by then the damage had been done. The divorce papers had been served, the farm had been sold, the scotch had been drunk --- and the seeds of destruction had been sown.

  And Agent C.D., known affectionately as Crystallized Deterrent and/or Completely Demented, was set free on an unsuspecting world.

  Had he lived long enough, Young Willard would have had the last laugh, perhaps even renaming it Agent Complete Destruction, for he had been right about the chemical change all along; new and improved Agent C.D. did indeed multiply. The only part Willie had miscalculated was just how fast.

  Almost everyone on Nellis Air Force Base was dead by morning.

  The rest of the world would take a littl
e longer.

  Chapter 2: HEAVEN AND EARTH

  High Peaks Region,

  Adirondack Park,

  New York. June 22

  The boy, in his mid teens, scrambled easily up the steep, rocky slope. The heavy pack on his back seemed to bother him not at all. With the scorn for fear that only youth can muster, the blond boy smiled down on the two older men below.

  “Piece of cake, Dad! How’s Uncle Bob doing?”

  Josh Williams grinned up at his son, then glanced back at his brother-in-law. They were in the High Peaks Region of the Adirondack Park, a vast stretch of mountain wilderness only an hour’s drive away from the sleepy little college town of Hawthorn, New York. Having hiked the High Peaks for years, Josh Williams and his son Jesse were completely in their element. Uncle Bob, however, was another story.

  Robert Fuller had gone on a few day-hikes and canoeing trips with Josh, but this was the first time he’d attempted a week long ‘expedition’, and it showed.

  “Think of it as a pilgrimage!”, Josh had explained. That had been the 24th of May. At the time they were sitting in Bob’s expensive fishing boat in the middle of Lake Champlain, the hundred mile long body of water separating Vermont and upper New York State. The gentle shores were crowded with quaint summer cottages for those with enough money and time to escape the crowded cities. Bob had reached for a Miller Light and laughed. Bob’s idea of ‘roughing it’ was having to contend with warm beer and cold Big Mac’s.

  “A pilgrimage to where? Deliverance Land?”

  Josh had gone on to expound on the beauty of the High Peaks Great Range. Names like Rooster Comb, The Gothics, Haystack, Marcy had rolled off his tongue like honey, his green eyes flashing.

  Bob had belched and reached for another Miller. “Sure, Josh, I’ll go. Just go easy on that ‘Spine of God’ crap, eh?