Hell Released (Hell Happened Book 3)

Copyright 2013, Terry and Jordan Stenzelbarton

All rights reserved

No part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the authors

Published by White Feather Press, LLC

www.whitefeatherpress.com

ISBN
978-1-61808-092-9

Cover art courtesy of Rubber Chicken, LLC

Hell
Released

by

Terry & Jordan Stenzelbarton

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental. Businesses, weapons and vehicle types that are real are used for identification only and are not intended to be an endorsement by the author.

Preface

Pastor Phillip VanHouton felt he could not go anywhere else. His wife and children, ages three, five and eight years old, lay peacefully in their bedrooms. They were dead like everyone else in the area. The two older boys in their bunk beds in one room, the little girl in her doll house-style bed, festooned with pinks and flowers in her own room. His wife Alicia was lying in the bed they used to share in the master bedroom.

Over the space of eighteen hours both had watched the children who they loved with all their hearts die from the plague.

As they were kneeling at their daughter’s bed, praying to the God Pastor VanHouton preached about every Sunday for the past 11 years, his wife cleared her throat several times and coughed twice. Phillip got up to get her a glass of water and when he returned, her head was across the little girl’s bed and she was no longer breathing.

Phillip knelt down and cried out softly. “No, no, no. Don’t take her.” After crying and praying for his wife, he lifted her body and placed her in their bed, neatening her hair and blouse. He kissed her one last time and asked God to take her soul to be with those of his children.

As he walked out of his house in the pre-dawn darkness, tears drying on his face, he was of two minds and on the verge of shock. He knew in his heart God was there and He had a plan and it was not up to Phillip to question why God did what He did.

But another part of him raged at God’s destruction of his family and the world in which they lived.

Phillip walked to the church which was on the same property as his small house, barely noticing the wetness of the grass on his bare feet, the birds singing in the trees or full moon that was setting in the west.

He entered through the basement of the church, leaving his keys in the door. He believed he would be called just as his wife and children had and since there was going to be no one left on this earth, Phillip believed, there was no reason to lock doors.

Walking up the steps from the classrooms in the basement, Phillip wondered if this was the Rapture called for in the bible. He asked God if he’d been left behind because of sins in his heart, where his wife and children and millions and billions of others had been taken because they repented their sins and he hadn’t.

In the auditorium, the pews were empty of life, but there were six bodies of people who had come to the church as their last act in life. He looked at the decaying bodies and he knew his beautiful wife and children would become like them.

In anger, he picked up a hymnal and threw it. The thick book knocked the head off one of the bodies in the pews. He was disgusted with himself, but also thought it was a pretty good throw.

Phillip’s bare feet slapped a soft echo as he walked down the main aisle and opened the two doors which led to the street. The air outside was cool this early in the spring and the scents of blossoms was still weeks away, but the air was better than the stench of death inside his church. He stood in the doorway and looked across the road at the houses in which people from his congregation had lived. The street lamps and barking dog belied the life that was no longer there. He wondered of he was the only one still alive in the entire area. He hadn’t seen anyone since early the previous morning and didn’t expect to see anyone now.

His mind was struggling to make any sense of what had come about in the last days of Man. He tried recalling biblical passages that would bring him succor and he tried listening for the Voice of God. He might have believed he heard something in his heart speaking because he started to feel ill. His chest was beginning to hurt when he breathed and he wondered if this was what his wife felt before she passed.

The movement south of him of someone coming his way startled him. Whoever it was, was running in his direction and running faster than Phillip had ever seen someone move.

When the person coming closer ran under the mercury vapor lights in front of the church, Phillip realized that whoever it had been was no longer truly human. The eyes were too big and its brow had become more pronounced. It had muscles like a bodybuilder gone wild and speed of the fleetest sprinter. Its mouth was a gaping maw of teeth and there were dried blood stains on its face and what was left of its shirt.

Phillip turned and ran back inside his church, but the creature was blazing fast and even as Phillip screamed, the beast was upon him, knocking him down and standing on his body in the center aisle of the church Phillip loved so much. A guttural, throaty grunt came from the creature’s mouth as it breathed on him. Its breath stank of the worst sewage. Phillip tried to scramble away but the creature held him to the floor while it sniffed his face and neck. The creature’s clothes were damp and rank with the smell of rotted meat and the face of the beast, while appearing vaguely familiar to the pastor, was grotesquely misshapen…a parody of what had once been the face of parishioner Scotty Litz.

After half a minute, the creature let him up and began to prowl around the church auditorium. Phillip lay stunned, barely able to grab a breath. He rolled to his side and up on one elbow, watching as the creature crouched under the piano on stage and sat, as if waiting for something.

Phillip slowly started to get to his feet, feeling like his body belonged to someone else. He was struggling to not be sick and didn’t know why he was still alive. Just as he was about to stand, a migraine started in his back and moved quickly through his entire head and neck. It felt like a thousand tiny electrified spears were jabbing at his brain. He felt like there was a fire inside him and he screamed out asking God to let him die.

He didn’t die.

The pain was excruciating as he felt his face morphing into something unnatural. His eyes felt like they were exploding out of his head as the light coming from the doors burned at his retinas. Tears, the last that’d ever fall from his eyes, fell to the floor.

He reached a shaking hand to his lower jaw and felt it elongate as he got to his knees. It was unnatural to feel his face change. He fell back to the floor when his leg muscles cramped, ripping through the blue jeans he was wearing.

Nothing about how he was feeling was right.

The touch of his own hand on his face was even wrong and Phillip tried to scream. The scream came out as a grunt and the thoughts of God saving him from this hell were lost in a new desire.

Phillip’s new desire was human flesh.

Chapter
1

C
J was without a friend or someone to direct his life for the first time he could remember.

The California population had fallen from 38 million-plus to 51,701 over the course of four weeks and three days. Nothing could stop the deaths from the plague. It came, it spread, it killed and it left 51,701 men, women and children to try and build a civilization again. There was no one left who had time to count how many survivors there were after the fall of Man, but if there had been, this was the number of live people they would have counted who did not die from what killed everyone else.

No one knew why these people had been spared.

Some who had survived the plague did not survive long. Some died by accident, some by their own hand because they couldn’t handle what had been wrought, and some died at the hands of others. There was no law anymore, except law of the fastest gun, with the best aim, and the quickest wit.

Two weeks after the plague had run its course and there was no one left who would die from the death that had killed civilization, there were 44,622 people left in the state. It was a fact no one knew, and only a few who were trying to rebuild a civilization would care about.

CJ didn’t know there were others. He thought he was alone.

Clarke Joseph Perry IV, who everyone called CJ, was not prepared for the plague. Not that anyone had been. He was even less prepared for it than most people because in his 25 years of living on his family’s estate, he’d done nothing to get ready for life outside the sheltered environment provided by his loving parents, his coaches and managers.

CJ could play tennis very well. He was one of the top five players in the state before the plague. After the plague, he was most possibly the top player in the world. He had long, muscular arms that had been tanned by hours on the court, a tall, athletic form from running and working in the gym and a face with features found on men’s shampoo bottles. His light brown hair had been bleached by the sun and his smile showed the perfect dental work paid for by his parents.

By any standard he was a pretty boy and since the age of 17 had never been without a pretty girl to accompany him.

CJ was home from a tournament in New York when the end came for his family. He’d been on the last direct flight allowed out of JFK headed to L.A. before the President of the United States had declared martial law. The plane landed at LAX amid conversations of what they’d find in the airport and surrounding city.

It was everything they’d suspected and worse. The city was already pock-marked with raging fires and lawlessness. There were bodies in the streets, gunfire echoing and the smell of death hanging everywhere.

CJ and his manager had a car at the airport and they got to it, forgoing finding their luggage, and worked their way north to Sacramento. Usually CJ would have flown from LAX to Sacramento, but they’d left the car at LAX after some television interviews two weeks previous. Cars and trucks on the highways were wrecked with dead people still in them. There were other cars, but not like the typical L.A. traffic.

Both could tell people were running from a dying city, abandoning it.

The sprawling Perry Estate was also seeing the effects of the plague when CJ’s manager dropped him off and headed to Folsum and his family. CJ’s mother and grandmother died within hours of each other on the day CJ arrived home. His granddad and granddad’s father died the next evening. Uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews died over the course of nine days.

The first to die were given elaborate funerals with a Methodist minister, a casket, a crypt and tears from everyone. As the weeks passed, the number of dead mounted so fast, there were not enough caskets, enough grave diggers or enough ministers or tears.

For others, a wooden box or a sheet was all that was used.

It was a horror too difficult to fully comprehend. The dying came so quickly, eventually the dead weren’t being buried. In areas around Sacramento, around California and the world, those who lived in multiple-family dwellings would hear the cries of anguish, but eventually they too would fall silent. The screams of children whose parents died before them tore at those who lived long enough to hear it. Soon the young voices fell silent as well, either succumbing to the plague, or starvation, disease or accident.

High-rise apartment complexes suffered the same fate, but even worse. Those who died early began to decompose before the final victims fell to the plague. The stench of death hung like a fog in cities and improved areas.

Those who panicked and fled died with the same equanimity as those who died alone. There was no place to hide from the plague that was killing most everyone, no island so isolated, no cave so deep, no room so protected. Hospitals and churches filled with the living even as the beds and pews were being emptied of the dead.

The earth wasn’t kind.

Life wasn’t fair.

Death was winning.

CJ and his dad worked together silently to bury the others in the family cemetery of those who had lived on the estate. There was no calling for help. Most of their friends and workers on the estate had already died or gone back to their homes. The migrant workers who were still alive had run when the first plague victims began falling in the fields or homes.

There were no neighbors to turn to, no hospitals still operating. It was the end of the world and Clarke’s dad, like his father and father before him, were independent, strong men who did what they could and then moved on.

His dad was a driven, hardworking man who had dedicated himself to building on the work of his father and grandfather. They had built one of the largest concrete businesses around Sacramento, supplying concrete to the massive road building projects and repairs around the city. They also owned a vineyard of more than 300 acres and another 2,000 acres under seed for peaches, soybeans, almonds and walnuts and several small retail specialty businesses. One of the more recent investments had been the equipment for building concrete survival shelters.

They were a very wealthy and powerful family with highly-placed contacts in both the local and state government.

None of their contacts could help them when the plague came.

None of their contacts had survived.

CJ had been raised driving the cement trucks, tractors on the farm, and equipment in the barns and production buildings, but it wasn’t something that had interested him. He was being groomed by his parents from a young age to one day take over the entire business, but he was happier on the tennis courts.

When he entered his teen years, his dad, in his private moments with his wife, admitted he hoped his son would be able to at least take over some part of the business. CJ’s dad, for all that he could offer his son, could never give him the same drive he had to succeed in the concrete business, or in the vineyards or in any of the other smaller businesses they had interest in.

CJ had little interest in business of any sort because he had plans to be a famous tennis player and when that was done, a television commentator. He finished high school with the most wins in the history of the school and two state championships.

Receiving a scholarship to UCLA, he earned his four-year degree in broadcast journalism after five years of study and a lot of tutoring. His instructors sometimes gave him the benefit of the doubt because he was one of the top tennis players for the college, playing in regional and national tournaments and bringing a lot of recognition to the college.

Three years after school, CJ suffered two injuries, the first on the tennis court and another in a car accident. He’d been laid up for three months and was just starting his return to the court when people started dying. He’d made it to the quarter finals in New York before being defeated in straight sets to a top-ranked opponent. His ankle hadn’t been up to the stress. He pondered this later that if he’d moved on to the semi finals, he’d have missed the last flight home.

He’d considered himself fortunate.

CJ didn’t feel fortunate any longer. He felt lost. He’d depended on his parents for providing him his lifestyle. He was a good tennis player, but not good enough to support the lifestyle he had been living. His mom was a softer touch than his dad, but his dad had not been able to rein him in. He’d spent so much time playing at life he wasn’t ready to live without them. His coach and manager had also stopped answering their phones.

CJ woke at the usual time, 9:30 a.m., the day after he and his dad had buried Uncle Dave and Aunt Susan and their two boys. All four had died within hours of each other and no one knew until CJ’s dad had gone to check on his sister. The young tennis player walked through the kitchen of his ranch-style house and looked through the bay window across the yard to where his mom and dad had lived for most of their 27 years of marriage. His dad was sitting on the front porch swing where he and CJ’s mom had spent Sunday evening entertaining friends.

CJ knew without a doubt his dad had died in the night. He didn’t even have to walk across the yard to know for sure his dad was dead. The man to whom CJ had always thought of as provincial and old fashion, but who he loved as much as anyone, was still wearing the same blue bib overalls and red flannel shirt with ripped off sleeves from the previous day. The weathered straw hat he wore, the one with the Sacramento River Cats baseball logo, had fallen onto the porch at his feet.

Unable to hold it in, CJ ran to his room and cried. It wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t have been the last one to survive in his family. He knew he was going to die and was surprised he hadn’t. He knew he wasn’t a man of the earth, not a worker of the land or leader of men. He’d always had a parent, a coach, trainer or a manager to tell him where to play, how to train or what to say. Now there was no one to tell him anything. He couldn’t go on living alone and he was too afraid to die.

CJ didn’t know why he thought so, but he believed he should have been one of the first to die. It wasn’t fair that he was still living when people like his dad died. He cried until his tears no longer came.

Still wearing pajamas and slippers, CJ spent an hour slamming his pillows with his fists. He tore his bedroom apart in anger. He was afraid to die and he was also hoping it would hurry up and take him.

When he finished his tantrum, he knew he had a job that must be completed before his own death. He moved his father’s body to the family cemetery so he would forever rest next to his wife, CJ’s kind and doting mom. CJ laid a white comforter from his linen closet over his dad’s body and held it down from the light wind with skewers from the barbecue. There was a beautiful white fence that surrounded the graveyard. Before the plague, there had been 11 people buried here, with the longest interred being CJ’s great-grandfather’s dad who had died at Pearl Harbor.

There had been no place in the little cemetery to bury his dad. When he was done laying his dad to rest, CJ looked at the comforter covering his dad and wondered if there wasn’t more he could have done to show his deep respect for his loving father.

“I don’t know what to do now, dad,” he said to the body. “I can’t live without anyone telling me what to do.” He then fell to his knees and hammered the soft grass with the 19 new graves and the one body on top of his mother’s plot.

CJ spent the rest of the day in his house. He closed the blinds and turned his music as loud as he could stand. CJ tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, tried to pretend he was in some alcohol-induced nightmare. He listened to the music for hours then put movies on the 50” plasma TV so he could watch others moving and talking and loving each other. He opened his cell phone and called everyone in his contacts and no one answered. He opened his laptop and posted notices on all his social networks, hoping someone was still out there.

There were messages from previous days from his friends and others. They were all similar. “Armageddon has arrived” and “Repent for God has come.” CJ posted and tweeted that he was still alive in Sacramento and for anyone who was still alive to contact him on his cell phone.

He waited.

He ate.

He cried.

He begged to wake up from the nightmare.

He finally fell asleep for an hour on the brown-leather sectional, believing he would wake from the nightmare he was living. He’d almost convinced himself it was a nightmare brought on from the drugs he’d been prescribed when he was healing.

He was startled awake by the sudden silence in his house. The background noise of the movie he’d been watching stopped, the whispering of the central heating fans couldn’t be heard, the lights went out.

The power failed completely.

Still wearing the same pajamas he’d worn the previous night, CJ, using his cell phone as a flashlight, went first to the circuit breaker box in the basement. He didn’t know much about how the stuff worked, but he knew if the switch was red it had to be turned off and back on.

None of the breakers had flipped. He switched them all off and back on and nothing changed.

He went back upstairs and opened the blinds. Power was out for as far as he could see. From the living room window he could see six buildings, including his parent’s house. There were no lights anywhere.

The nightmare that this was a dream he’d almost believed was real came running at him again that he wasn’t asleep and this hell was decidedly real. The sun was setting and he could see the long shadows falling over the estate.