The Little Ones

  THE LITTLE ONES

  By: Brian Barnes

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1: ORIGENS

  CHAPTER 2: ISAAC

  CHAPTER 3: LUCAS SMITH

  CHAPTER 4: SAMUEL

  CHAPTER 5: THE CHOICE AT THE WALL

  CHAPTER 6: ANNIBELLE, THE BLACKSMITH OF ZION

  CHAPTER 7: CAPTURED

  CHAPTER 8: THE OUTPOAST BATTLE

  CHAPTER 9: THE SEWERS

  CHAPTER 10: THE LOST BOYS

  CHAPTER 11: THE FALL OF BATRAZ, THE EMERALD CITY

  CHAPTER 12: GODDESS WITH RED HAIR

  CHAPTER 13: THE MESSANGER RETURNES

  CHAPTER 14: WAISTLAND RECON

  CHAPTER 15: FRIEND OR FOE

  CHAPTER 16: THE HOUSE THAT SAMUEL BUILT

  CHAPTER 17: MEETING OF THE MINDS

  CHAPTER 18: WAR IS COMING

  CHAPTER 19: RENDEZVOUS

  CHAPTER 20: THE LAST GREAT WAR (PHASE ONE)

  CHAPTER 21: THE LAST GREAT WAR (PHASE TWO)

  CHAPTER 22: DEATH OF A TYRANT

  CHAPTER 23: THE BOY IN THE BASEMENT

  CHAPTER 24: THE END OF AN ERA

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY BEAUTIFULL WIFE, MY CREATIVE MUSE AND MOTHER OF MY SON.

  ISABEL, YOU ARE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE AND MY SOULMATE. WITHOUT YOU EVERYTHING THAT I DO WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE… YOUR LOVE HAS SAVED ME. I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF. YOU WILL ALWAYS BE MY ANGEL.

  MY ETERNAL LOVE,

  BRIAN.

  PROLOGUE

  The world as we know it has come to a screeching halt. Not with a whimper or with a bang as the phrase goes, but instead; it ended with a bloodcurdling scream. The CDC called it a population killer. It only took a matter of months for it to ravage the globe but now what is left of “Humanity” now lies fractured. It had become a broken thing, a pathetic echo of its former self. There are those that try desperately to cling to the past while having no choice but to embrace there new reality; and others who prefer the new world to the old one. Still there are those that are the new reality.

  The Little Ones, once they were the world’s children loving and innocent, full of life and promise but are now anything but. Changed by a virus that no one understands, they now stalk the wastelands of what were once the worlds thriving cities; zombie children. Demons with the faces of angels, they are destined now to forever search for a way to quiet a hunger that will never be silenced. The virus that had changed them was an ancient evil which only targeted the very young. Anyone under the age of ten, it could only survive in hosts that had not yet undergone the changes of puberty.

  Desperate to survive, The Council, a group of six likeminded wealthy individuals commissioned the building of giant walls around six U.S. cities as a refuge for those trying to escape the horrors of the virus. These cities are now called safe zones. The safe zones, ANANDI, ACHELIES, BATRAZ, BEDWOLF, CA’HEL and ZION are now the only thing that stands between the undead children outside the walls, and the living humans inside them. But there is yet another danger that lurks in the shadows. A small band of blood thirsty cannibalistic humans called The Forgotten. Shunned by the cities and denied entry, they seek to destroy the very cities that turned them away. It has now been six years since the downfall of mankind and no one knows how much longer the world of the living can go on. The reign of man has come to an end and now the reign of The Little Ones has begun…

  CHAPTER 1: ORIGINS

  The icy wind howled across the frozen tundra of the arctic landscape causing the tent city that sat scattered across it to shake violently as the wind tried to erase it. If the arctic was good at anything, it was wiping the place clear of all signs of life. Only death could remain here for extended periods of time and death didn’t much like the living encroaching on its territory. We had been here for about three months now and had taken full advantage of every second that we had to do our work. The summers were never very long in the here and it was clear by just looking up at the sky that this one was no different. The usually bright blue sky had started to darken as the winter storms began to move in. Soon the area would be uninhabitable even to a group as well prepared as we were. The howl of the icy wind made it near impossible to hear the ice coring rig that I was using as it cut deep into the sheet at my feet. The angry gusts of arctic air cut right thru the thick arctic jacket and pants that I was wearing, sending a chill thru my body. It was as if I wasn’t wearing them at all. We were in constant battle, the wind and I as it kept trying to yank off my jackets thick brown fir lined hood, and I had to keep pulling it back into place.

  The expedition team that I had been working with all summer was made up of scientists from several countries, a coalition of sorts. We were drilling cores in an effort to study the environmental changes that had occurred throughout different points in the history of our planet. We had been here since spring and by this time and had managed to pull hundreds of cores. So far today we had pulled several cores and only had a few hours left before we the chopper arrived to fly us home. We wanted to make every second that we were here count. Because the extreme winter was just on the horizon and this would be the last bird out before the weather made it impossible to remain here, time was of the essence for us to meet our quota. In addition to the obvious time constraints there was no real answer as to whether or not we would even get another chance to work here. It might be years till there would be another chance like this to retrieve samples so it was of vital importance that we get as much as we could in the time frame that we had. I was ready to go through. As far as I was concerned, I had been away from my wife and three kids far too long. The machine had been running nonstop for days now and we were just a few hours away from completing the core. Soon I would be pulling it up and packing it away in its very own silver tube for transport back to the EPICA in Germany. From there they would be shipped to the NICL (National Ice Core laboratory) in Denver Colorado and all over the world for storage and further study.

  The motor of the drill that we were using hummed under the sound of the wind as it worked. The ground vibrated softly as the bit cut into the frozen ice below my feet and it was slow going. We had to reach a minimum of sixty feet to get to our target depth. Due to the fact that the average temperature here was well below freezing even when it was at its warmest, we were limited in the type of equipment we could use. There were three types of coring drills available, hand augers mechanical and thermal drills. A hand auger was not big enough for what we needed and so we didn’t even bother taking one. Thermal dills are the quickest because they have a heating element in the tip of their cutting barrels similar to the element in a toaster. This element melted the ice as opposed to cutting the ice like the mechanical drills.

  We couldn’t use a thermal drill in the area that we were drilling in due to the fact that a thermal drill melts the ice around the drills barrel and in this environment; a thermal drill was useless when the air around it got below freezing. At this temp the melt water produced as the head cut into the ice would freeze back on itself causing the coring head to get stuck in the ice in a matter of seconds effectively rendering the drill useless. And the thermal drill was built to be used in areas that the ice was a bit softer. Like Greenland and the US, arias where the average temperature didn’t fall below freezing. That left only one option, the slower yet more effective mechanical drill.

  I preferred the mechanical drill to the thermal one. They were just more reliable. As the machine hit its maximum depth I heard the sound of the helicopter in the distance. It was right on time. I felt my pulse quicken with excitement. We were going home! We pulled the sample and packed it away with the others as members of the expedition team packed our gear into the bird. The samples would be loaded into an arctic cat equipped with a freezer designed specifically for transporting ice core samples and from there they would be shipped to their final destinations for study wherever that might be. The heaver gear that the birds couldn’t carry was loaded into the backs of the other cats as well. We had gotten spoiled this trip, usually we had to pack thousands of pounds of gear in on our backs and sleds pulled by dogs. And it would have been multiple trips to get all of it to the site just to get set up it made the entire process slow going. This time we had the added help of vehicles to get us in and out of the site. With the multiple trips that it would have taken to get it all there we would most certainly not have been able to get as many cores as we did.

  Once all of birds were loaded and ready to go we all piled into them and listened to the props as the engine revved up and they reached maximum rotation. I could hear the blades as they passed overhead, slowly at first but then faster and faster, the whine of the motor faded as the props picked up speed and it was replaced by the more prevalent sound of the chinooks massive twin props. A few minutes later, we were airborne. The landscape below grew smaller and smaller as we rose in elevation. Below us, the huge arctic cats grew smaller and I watched as they all started driving single file towards town. For a second they looked like small black and white ants trudging along in the snow and ice. Seconds later they too had disappeared behind us. Below us the white landscape was dotted with black rocks and boulders that the arctic was unable to reclaim. The entire place was breathtaking. I put the headset on so that I could hear the others in the helicopter and instantly the noise from the engines outside the bird disappeared. The thunderous thumping of the props above my head was replaced by a dull hum and the sounds of my comrades inside the vehicle as they jubila
ntly spoke about the success of our expedition and what they were going to do once they got back to their perspective countries.

  We would land in Gnome Alaska for refueling and from there it was just a hop skip and a jump back home. I leaned my head against the glass and reached into my breast pocket, pulling out the battered old faded photo of my family. I carried it with me always to remind me of them. Having the photo on my person made me feel like they were always with me. I looked at it and smiled. It was an older photo, taken back when my daughter was just about three months old. We had gotten other photos taken since then but this one was one of my favorites. There was just something about it.

  “Soon my loves, soon I will be with you again.” I said to the photo. Their smiling faces warmed my heart. I missed them terribly. This time, the expedition had yielded something that I knew would make them proud of me. They were always proud of me but this time I felt like I had actually earned it. What we had stumbled upon in the ice was something that I had never seen before and we were all relatively positive that it would change the way that others in the scientific community would view global climate change forever. We had drilled down to around the time of the dinosaurs and the first ice age and there was an anomaly in the ice that shouldn’t have been there. It was an odd pinkish haze. It looked almost like frozen cotton candy. None of us had ever seen anything quite like it before so we were all pretty excited. Usually the cores were clear or a nice hazy white, but never pink. We had actually come across a small pocket of prehistoric gas that had become trapped in the ice and was still intact. This was actually a small pocket of air from prehistoric times. The very air that the giant reptiles that once dominated the planet had once breathed. Upon closer inspection of the pink aria we could get see what bacteria and gassed were prevalent in it. We felt that this was the reason for why it was pink instead of clear or foggy white. We wouldn’t rely know that for sure until we got a chance to further study the oddity with the proper equipment so as of now it was all just speculation. It could be attributes to any number of things. Only time would tell us if we were right or not. Still, it was all very exciting.

  This was the first time that anything like this was ever found to my knowledge, and it was huge! The implications of what this meant could put us light years ahead of where we were in our knowledge of the planets ecosystems and what the earth was like millions of years ago, and what we might be able to expect in our own future. As a result I couldn’t wait to study it. It was curious. Perhaps this could tell us what had caused the sudden snap in temperature that was responsible for the ice age that had ravaged the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, maybe even what had killed the mighty dinosaurs. Either way, I knew that what the team had stumbled across was going to make us famous, possibly get us all Nobel prizes. The possibility of that was intoxicating. I pressed the tattered picture against my chest and closed my eyes. The smile was still on my face as I drifted off to the most peaceful sleep that I had had in a long time.

  I woke to the feeling of the man next to me patting me on the shoulder to wake me. We were landing in Gnome. I shook the sleep from my eyes and sat up. The picture of my family had fallen from my hands to the floor and the man that had woken me reached down and retrieved it up for me. The snow from our bots had melted in the heat from the cargo aria if the bird and my picture had, as luck would have it, fallen right into the puddle at my feet. I took the photo from him and thanked him then wiped the water away as best I could and returned it to my Brest pocket. The pilot and copilot jumped out and slid the doors open so that we could jump out and get something to eat. We would spend the next few days here before we could begin our last leg to the planes that would take us home. We made our way to the local hotel where we would spend the time before then. I couldn’t wait to catch a shower and then hit the shops. I always brought something home for my little darlings every time that I went on an expedition and they would be waiting for it once I arrived home. I always did my shopping right before I headed home. That way, nothing got broken or lost. Picking out the gifts was the highlight of my trips and it was something that I took very seriously. We all spent the next few days celebrating the potential of our discovery and fantasizing about what it really was that we had found in the ice. Our minds raced with the possibilities… well possibilities and booze. After all, we were celebrating.

  Gnome was beautiful aside from the fact that in the winter months the entire state was plunged into eternal darkness about this time of year. It was a land of extremes; one of those extremes was literally night and day. The winter was spent in eternal night and the summers were the suns territory. All day light all the time. It was a phenomenon caused by the states unique location on the earth and the rotation of the planet as it made its way around the sun. The thing that I loved the most about Alaska was that all I had to do was look up and I could see the northern lights dancing in the sky. The blues and greens of the lights moved and blended together like they were forever entwined in an eternal cosmic ballet. For anyone blessed enough to have seen this phenomenon it was easily the most beautiful atmospheric even in the world. Caused by gasses in the atmosphere being burned up by the suns radiation. The intuit people here believed the lights to be their ancestors looking down on them from the havens. It was easy to see how the tribal people could believe that. Their belief was that it was disrespectful to thistle at them. It is thought that if you whistled or made any loud noise in the direction of the lights that you were disturbing the spirits. The Inuit people believed that you would have bad luck bestowed upon you if you disrespected the spirits. Every indigenous culture throughout history has some sort of myth or legend that represents the spirits of their ancestors and that was one of the Inuit peoples. Who was I to question this, besides it’s a nice story. Who wouldn’t want to believe that their loved ones were forever watching over and guiding them in their life?

  I knew that it was just gases trapped in the atmosphere catching the sunlight. The light caused a reaction as the rays reflected off it. Either way, it was beautiful. I spent the next few days wandering around the town and popping in to see a few friends here and there. For the most part I just walked from shop to shop. The lights form the shops that lined the streets cascaded out into the streets and sidewalks warmly caressing the concrete and asphalt surfaces. I went into a few of them and looked around, thumbing thru the stores wares. I found a few nick knacks that I thought my wife and kids would like and picked them up. It was getting late on my final night in the city and my flight out was early the next morning so, after an early dinner with my comrades I headed back to the hotel for some shut eye. The wind had picked up as I made my way thru the streets from the restraint back to my hotel and a light dusting of snow and a slight chill bit the air around me as it blew.

  My alarm went off at five o’clock sharp. It jarred me out of my slumber as if I had been smacked in the face. I always kept my cell in a

  glass cup next to the bed so that when the alarm went off so that I could more easily hear it. The glass acted like a mini amplifier for the speakers

  on the phone. I rolled over and turned on the lamp next to the bed, picked up the phone and silenced the alarm. Once my eyes adjusted and I had

  rubbed the sleep from them I got up and got dressed, eagerly anticipating the flight home and back to my family. After one last check of the room

  to make sure that I had not forgotten anything, I picked up my gear and room key and headed out the door to meet up with the others for the ride to

  the tarmac. We didn’t even have to wait, as we pulled up I saw the double prop aircraft sitting there well-lit and waiting for us, the ramp was down

  and the baggage crew was in the process of loading our bags into the belly of the craft. We climbed the stairs to the door of the plane and as I

  reached the top I turned and took one last look at the northern lights before I ducked into the plane and taking my seat. I always made sure that I

  boarded last so that I could do this without making anyone wait in the cold behind me. Once everyone was settled and the pilots had completed

  their preflight checks, we taxied out to the runway to take off. The plane lurched forward as it began to pick up speed and climb into the air. The