Post-Apocalypticon by Clayton Smith

Author:Clayton Smith [Smith, Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, humor, horror, zombie
Publisher: Dapper Press
Published: 2018-10-23T23:00:00+00:00

23.

Ben could see for almost a mile in every direction from the crow’s nest in Fort Doom. Mobile lay stretched out to the northwest, or what was left of Mobile did. A string of controlled fires burned in the streets, and lanterns dotted a few of the windows in the taller buildings, but all was quiet. The town sprawled and trailed off to the east, where the mid-rise buildings stepped down to low huts and ruined houses, into the darkness of the outskirts, where the coyotes and the wild boars kept mostly to themselves. The bay stretched out behind the fort to the south, opening up into the great Gulf of Mexico, and sometimes the tides brought in boats and makeshift sea craft, but there had been no manned vessels for weeks, and when there were, they didn’t come at night. There were no lighthouses, and the bluffs were treacherous.

It was a quiet night outside the walls of Fort Doom. And that had made it even easier to fall asleep.

He didn’t know how long he was out. Too long, there was no doubt about that; the moon had climbed high above the dogwoods and was now hovering near its zenith. How long had he slept? An hour. Maybe two.

It was a sharp crack that woke him. The sound of a gunshot, or maybe wood breaking. The sound broke through into his dream, snapping him out of his sleep. He opened his eyes. Had there actually been a gunshot? Had he dreamed it? He thought he heard the reverberation against the walls of the fort, but maybe that was just dream residue.

He climbed to his feet and lifted the rifle to his shoulder. James had fitted a scope to the barrel of the firearm, but it was something he’d scavenged, and there was a thick crack down the center of the lens. The break made it impossible to accurately sight a target, but it was still sort of useful as a magnifier. Ben angled the rifle around to the east of the wall, where he thought the sound had come from. If it had come from anywhere at all.

Through the broken scope, he saw silhouettes of burned-out cars and abandoned houses outlined against the darkness by the moonlight, and the swaying shadows of the wild grass and weeds that had reclaimed the suburban sprawl. He scanned the horizon to the southeast, to the far edge of the bay, and then back up toward downtown Mobile, tilting the rifle upward, then downward, searching for movement.

“Nothing,” he said out loud, trying to convince himself. “There’s nothing there.” But when he lowered the rifle, something did move, out beyond the wall. A dark shape flashed in the edge of his vision, over near the bay cliff. He threw the rifle back to his shoulder and searched through the scope. The shape was gone, swallowed up by the darkness…but the grass along the bay wall dropped and sprang back up, disturbed by whatever had muscled its way through.

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