Apocalypse Harem

  Book One

  By Carley Hitchens

  Copyright 2024 © by Carley Hitchens

  Author’s Note: All characters depicted in this novella are at least 18 years old.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Carley Hitchens

  More From Carley

  Chapter One

  I woke up, still tired after a long night, rubbing the sleep from my eyes as sunlight poured into my bedroom. The sky was clear, the air cool, a welcome reprieve from the storms last night.

  Knowing I had work to do, I ditched my pajamas and got right into my work clothes – jeans, flannel, boots – and went downstairs for coffee. My stomach growled, insisting on breakfast, but I had two dead goblins out in the woods and I wanted to burn their remains before the wolves could get to them.

  I went to the mudroom, adjacent to the kitchen, where I kept my power strips and spare batteries, and took a Makita battery from its charger. I popped it onto the coffee maker, added some purified water and coffee, and hit BREW.

  As it brewed, I stepped out back to feed the animals. They’d weathered the storm well. The chickens were already poking around their coop. I tossed them some feed and they cluck-cluck-clucked as they pecked at it. Over to the pig pen, I dumped slop into their trough. Four full-grown hogs trotted out, snuffling and grunting as their hoofs splashed through the mud-slick pen, with ten bright pink piglets oinking happily among them.

  I still had to let the cows out to graze, but the corral was on the opposite end of the property and the caffeine withdrawal had sunk deep into my bones, so I went back to the house, figuring the coffee would be finished.

  I paused as I neared the backyard – no fence, just a gently rolling patch of well-maintained grass – and stared up at my home. Once, this sizable three-story home had been the fashionably rustic mountain getaway for a stranger. A friend of my old boss. I’d come up here just before the world changed forever. It was supposed to be a two-day job, pouring a fresh concrete slab out near the tree line for an oversized garage. The old owner had been a vintage car collector and wanted a place to…well, I guess that part wasn’t important.

  The point is, I never got around to pouring the concrete.

  My house now, I thought to myself with some well-earned pride as I recalled all the improvements and adjustments I’d made over the years, turning some rich guy’s vacation mountain house into my own personal apocalypse mini-fortress.

  Secure. Safe. Self-sufficient.

  Not a bad place to spend the end of the world, if I did so say myself.

  Back in the kitchen, I filled my thermos then got some fresh milk from the fridge. The fridge, along with the freezers I had down in the basement, devoured a great chunk of my solar power, but it was worth the effort. I was probably one of the last people on the planet who could actually store frozen meat.

  I stopped, staring at the milk mixing with the coffee. Dude, you might be the last person on earth, period.

  A nice grim thought to start the day.

  I took my coffee then gathered my supplies. My hunting rifle, plus a sidearm. A machete on my hip. The crucifix with sharpened edges. A small drone stuffed into my backpack. A small bottle of holy water plus the gasoline can – the gas had gone bad years ago; it wouldn’t power an engine, but it was still flammable – a pilot lighter, and some old newspaper for kindling. Finally, my radio earpiece, which was connected to an open mic down in the radio room.

  I sighed tiredly. All this for two dead goblins. Better safe than sorry, though. Goblin corpses decomposed rapidly and you could smell them from almost a mile away, like skunk spray mixed with rotten fish. Despite the stench, animals were still drawn to the corpses, most notably the wolves. Due to their strange eating habits, goblin flesh could be toxic, so I liked to burn the corpses before the wolves could get to them.

  These days, the wolves were my only neighbors. I liked to look out for them.

  I’d killed the goblins a quarter-mile down in the southwest quadrant, where the hills sloped down rather sharply. It was tough going, with exposed tree roots and muddy soil from the previous night’s rains, but this far up in the mountains it provided the best view of East Stroudsburg sitting quiet and lonesome several miles to the south.

  I trudged through the trees, the soil muddy and sticking to my boots, turning the hike into a real workout. I paused to check one of the microphones. They were mostly shotgun mics, built for outdoor use, as reliable as you could get, but I always checked on them when I stumbled across one. I had them spread out in the four ‘quadrants’ around the property, each connected to small solar panels sitting in nearby clearings or, if I could manage it, up in the higher tree branches. The mics were Bluetooth-capable, synced with the receivers back in my radio room, which in turn were synced with my ear piece.

  If a portal opened anywhere on my property, the mics would pick up the radio interference. It wasn’t a full-proof system, but between the radios, my drones, and the telltale howls of the wolves when they caught a monster’s scent, it was rare for any hostile creature to catch me off guard these days.

  The shotgun mic looked to be in good condition so I kept on, trudging downward into a small ravine. The night before, I’d been crouching in these bushes during the storm – downpours, raining buckets – and caught each goblin with a headshot, night vision-assisted, easy peasy. Two quick kills, but then I had to wait around for the portal to close. It hovered there, three feet overground, sizzling white-hot and diamond-shaped for two hours before it finally vanished. I waited there miserably, soaked to the bone the whole time, the rifle barrel trained on the portal, but at least no more monsters emerged.

  Due to the rain, I couldn’t burn the corpses, hence my morning hike. I found the goblins where I left them, pot-bellied and lanky, armed with big wooden clubs and crude iron armor. They were damp and muddy from the rain, but I doused them in gasoline then added the newspaper kindling and they burned easily enough. As the flames crackled and spewed white smoke over the trees, I caught movement back behind me, up the ravine.

  The wolves were watching.

  “Sorry guys,” I called out. “I can’t let you eat this crap.”

  They studied me, their eyes bright gold, their fur shades of white and brown and gray. Northeastern Pennsylvania hadn’t seen wild wolves in over a century. Due to industrialization, deforestation, and the booming human population, the wolves were forced north. That had changed in the last five years.

  There weren’t many upsides to having the entire human population vanish from the planet, that is, unless you were a wolf.

  I set my pack down then opened it up and retrieved a bag of beef jerky I made myself. I tossed it to the wolves, a consolation prize for stealing their corpses, a neighborly gift. The wolves each shot forward to snap them up then vanished into the trees again.

  I sat down, watched the fire – keeping the area clean of brush, ensuring the flames wouldn’t spread – and drank my coffee. Goblin flesh burned as rapidly as it decomposed. Within half an hour I was finished then hiking back to the house, my stomach growling for breakfast.

  Chapter Two

  Back at the house, I made a fire out back and fried up some eggs on a skillet then doused the flames and returned to the kitchen, where I had another coffee brewing. I ate contemplatively, enjoying every bite. Back before the world changed, I tended to scarf down my meals absentmindedly. Once I had to be responsible for literally every morsel I ate, however, I learned how to slow things down, how to enjoy each meal.

  However, I was only halfway through my breakfast when I heard the screeching wail from the radio room. I sighed, frustrated.

  Another portal had just opened.

  All the microphones and radios were set to the same frequency, right around 450kHz. Each was connected via Bluetooth to one of four speakers in the radio room, one speaker dedicated to each quadrant. To differentiate between the speakers, I’d programmed each with a sound filter. The one that had just gone off represented the northeast quadrant.

  I gobbled down the last of my eggs then grabbed my backpack and headed out back again. I opened the pack and removed the drone, a nifty little bug-like DJI Mini-3 model outfitted with a 4k camera.

  I had several drones, each one kept at a full charge so that I’d always have one handy when I needed it. I unpacked the Mini-3 and fired up the controller. The drone zipped up off the ground, buzzing, an oversized gnat, and it vanished into the pale blue sky as I sent it sailing over the trees, up the hill, over the northeast quadrant.

  Watching through the camera feed on the drone’s controller, I studied the trees and the hills, keeping an eye out for the telltale white glare of an open portal. It didn’t take long to find it, diamond-shaped, sizzling, sending birds and squirrels and rabbits fleeing in all directions.

  I kept the drone hovering at an angle above the portal then refocused the camera, zooming in for a better view. The burning white diamond opene d just beside a cluster of pine trees on a large bluff, relatively flat ground covered with pine cones that had shaken during last night’s storm.

  “Let’s see what we got,” I grunted. Sometimes portals opened randomly and nothing came out. With any luck, that’s just what was going to happen now.

  A black silhouette appeared. I cursed under my breath and the humanoid shape shimmered in the white glare as it stepped from its home dimension into mine.

  “Damn it, undead,” I sighed.

  It was an undead necromancer. A lich, more specifically. No, this apocalypse hadn’t come with a Dungeons and Dragons-style manual, so I had no clue what all these fantastical creatures might have been called in their own dimension, but if it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck…you get what I’m saying.

  The lich didn’t step out as much as it hovered out, levitating smoothly and somewhat lazily over the portal’s threshold then lingering over the scattered pine cones. It was thin and wispy and dark, like black smoke that had come to life, with deep-set emerald eyes that seemed to burn in the creature’s semi-solid skull.

  I refocused the camera, edging the drone just a few yards closer. The billowing blackness must have been some kind of enchanted hooded robe. The flaps blew open slightly. Beneath, I saw pure white bones and organ husks. The lich’s hand slid out from its robe. It held a thick book, bound in black leather. On its hip, it wore a small dagger that glowed faintly with an enchantment.

  Two portals opening within a span of hours. Bad luck on my part, especially in the last year or so. Directly after the ‘vanishing’ (as I’d come to call humanity’s abrupt disappearance), portals opened fairly often, especially closer to town, but lately things had been quieter.

  I pushed away from the table, keeping the drone controller in hand as I fetched my gear. After last night’s storm, I had lots of work to do, the most important being cleaning off the solar panels around the property; they tended to get gunked up from the leaves and mud. With a ghoul on the loose, however, the solar panels – as well as the rest of my to-do list – would have to wait.

  I kept a sharp eye on the drone’s camera. Liches had a knack for summoning other undead, but so far, this one had stayed put, content to look out over the bluff and listen to the wolves howling at its presence.

  Undead monsters – vampires, zombies, skeletons, liches, and the like – differed from their more ‘normal’ counterparts in that they needed to be weakened by holy items before they’d take any permanent damage. I learned that through trial and error during a trip to town, when a swarm of various ghouls – mostly skeletons, under the command of two liches – happened upon me while I was scavenging. I emptied a clip into one lich to no effect. They chased me until I took refuge in an old Catholic church, where by accident, I dropped my machete in a bowl of holy water.

  That made short work of them. After that, I liberated holy water from every church in town, three of them…one of which had several cases of the stuff sent straight from the Vatican, hundreds of little plastic bottles packed into cases.

  I glanced at the drone’s camera feed. The lich was on the move up on the bluff, slowly levitating down a hill, moving more or less directly toward me. I was still a hundred yards off, but I stayed out of sight, in the bushes, and decided to let the lich come to me.

  I kept one eye on the camera feed, which I’d turned back toward the portal in case anything else popped out. So far, nothing had.

  I cracked open a bottle of holy water, poured some on my forefinger then rubbed it smoothly over the edges of the rifle’s bore. (You couldn’t just dip a bullet in holy water since it might misfire. I’d learned that putting a little dollop around the edge of the barrel worked well enough, though.)

  As the lich drew closer, a light, rasping howl filled the woods, like late-night wind gusting ghostly through a dark forest, shaking leaves free as it rattled the tree branches. Forest critters scattered, all sorts, rabbits and squirrels and birds and deer and even bugs, worming up through the soil and from the trees and squirming for safety, sensing the ghoul’s dark presence.

  It broke through the trees, still hovering, the leather-bound book clutched in hand, its dagger in the other. A young deer burst through a wall of dogwood bushes to the lich’s right. The ghoul shrieked and thrust the dagger in the deer’s direction and a black bolt of energy emerged from the dagger’s tip. It crackled through the woods – stinking like sulfur and hot blood – and the deer fell dead.

  I exhaled slowly, resisted the urge to go for a headshot – too risky at this distance, and with that nasty-looking dagger, I didn’t want to miss – and aimed for its center mass.

  The lich’s body jerked as the shot rang out and the enchanted dagger tumbled into the grass. Dark-purple blood spewed from the exit wound in the lich’s back and the creature dropped to its feet, staggering, but one shot wasn’t enough. I grabbed the holy water, shifting the barrel upward to smear the blessed fluid across the bore again, but before I could, the lich raised its free hand, magic crackling around its bony white fingers.

  There was a gout of gray smoke to my left, pluming up from the forest floor, narrow at the base but widening as it rose, a miniature tornado forming in reverse. I turned toward it just as the skeletal warrior stepped out, rasping through ragged, blackened teeth, a ghostly exhalation from non-existent lungs.

  The skeleton was humanoid in shape, but not human. The creature was pushing seven feet tall, maybe an inch higher, with broad shoulders roughly three-and-a-half feet across. Though stripped of all flesh and muscle, its bones were dense and heavy, like thick copper pipes spraypainted white. Whereas a human had two lower canine teeth in its bottom jaw, this ghoul had two sharply protruding fangs, curving upward, like scimitar blades.

  An orc skeleton, it had to be.

  “Shit,” I grunted just as the skeleton swung its weapon, a dented iron longsword battered so dull it was less a blade and more of a cudgel. I squirted a splash of holy water across my rifle then ducked beneath the skeleton’s attack, bowling into it, ramming my shoulder into the undead thrall’s thick sternum.

  The orc skeleton felt like I’d run into a brick wall. Pain flared in my shoulder, yet the force knocked the skeleton back, off-balance, giving me time to pivot forward and turn my hunting rifle toward the lich once more.

  Not a moment too soon, either. The lich, though still leaking ink-purple blood from the gunshot wound in its chest, had just recovered the enchanted dagger it had dropped in the grass.

  Mindful that the orc skeleton was just a few feet to my left, I took a knee, a calming breath, and aimed for the lich’s center mass.

  Another shot to the chest. This one put the lich down for good.

  That quickly, though, the orc skeleton was coming at me again.

  It let out a hollow rasp as it raised its blade. It was too close and coming too quickly for me to get more holy water on the barrel. I spun and pulled the trigger and the muzzle flashed as the round struck the skeleton’s right shoulder.

  It halted, the impact driving it back by a foot or two but nothing more. The ambient necromantic magic sustaining the creature rippled where the bullet struck. I fumbled for the holy water. As I raised the bottle toward the barrel the skeleton rushed me again, a savage crosswise slash from its dented blade hurtling toward me. The dull blade might not have cleaved off a limb but it could have definitely broken one, so I quickly raised my rifle – one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel – and parried the blow. The dented blade struck the barrel, enough force to knock it from my grip.

  Slipping my hand down to my waist, I pulled the sharpened crucifix from my belt. The skeleton swung again – harder, but sloppier – and I ducked it easily, the wind whipping an inch or two above my head as the blade shot past.

  The crucifix gripped in my fist – long side up, like a spike – I drove the sharpened point up into the skeleton’s eye socket, piercing its skull and driving the spike straight through where it’s brain had once been.

  The skeleton went limp. I yanked the crucifix free then pivoted out of the way as the skeleton tumbled heavily into the grass.

  I checked the drone’s camera feed again. The portal was closing. Nothing else had emerged.

 

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