by Tracey Ward
In The End
The Quarantined Series
Book Two
By Tracey Ward
In The End
By Tracey Ward
Text Copyright © 2013 Tracey Ward
All Rights Reserved
Cover image by Tracey Ward
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in book review.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events or incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or incidents is purely coincidental.
Table of 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
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter One
What’s a good way to tell a man with a gun that you do not have carnal knowledge of his daughter?
Short answer – there isn’t one.
Long answer – there isn’t one, dumbass.
I’ve been trying for the last hour to make conversation with Uncle Dad here but I’m coming up dry. He’s a nice enough guy, I guess, but ever since Alissa laid down in the back of the RV, he’s started silently shooting me the Evil Eye. I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking I’ve taken advantage of a horrible situation with a mentally unstable girl. Nothing could be further from the truth. But since he refuses to outright accuse me of sleeping with her I can’t easily defend myself. To bring it up on my own, to open my mouth and say I’ve never joined in sexual congress with his daughter, that’s a mistake. It’s as sure a sign of guilt as having him walk in on us and find me with my pants around my ankles.
“Where are you from?” Syd asks suddenly.
I glance at him, startled.
“Boston, sir.”
“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’. Syd will do just fine.”
“Okay. Thank you, s—Syd.”
Now he probably thinks I have a stutter. Nice.
“I want to thank you,” he says, his voice low. “I don’t think she would have made it here alive without your help.”
“Neither of us would have. I couldn’t have done it without her,” I tell him honestly.
“So you being from Boston, you must not have any family around here.”
My skin suddenly feels tight. Itchy. Of all the topics to bring up. Why couldn’t he be a sports guy or into motocross? Something I can talk about intelligently. My family… I don’t think about my family if I can help it.
“No, sir, I’m alone,” I mutter. I rub my tingling hands together briskly, trying to relieve the tension.
He frowns at me again. “I told you not to call me ‘sir’.”
“Right, yeah. Sorry.”
“You alright?”
“Sure.”
Syd’s frown is permanently etched on his face.
I don’t blame him. I’m acting like a freak. I’m not this guy; nervous and unsure. I hate it. It’s the stress of the end of the world. Well, the end of the world for us. Outside this place is a world carrying on as usual. ‘Nother day, ‘nother dollar. No bigger worries than whether the barista got your coffee right and who will get who in the draft come June. Wait, what day is it? Has Spring Training started? I pull out my phone to bring up my ESPN app. We might be trapped in a nightmare in here but if the outside world is going to continue on, I may as well keep up with it.
It takes forever to load the page but eventually I get a “Signal Lost” notification. My stomach drops. I had full bars an hour ago.
“Do you have a cell phone on you?” I ask Syd.
“It’s in my bag turned off. Why?”
“Here, Jordan. You can have mine,” Alissa says.
The sound of her voice right beside my ear makes me nearly jump out of my skin. My injured arm aches as the muscles clench reflexively. I’m wound so tight it’s a miracle I can sit still. I miss the river and the rowing. It kept me sane. Kept me even.
“I thought you were trying to sleep,” I say calmly. I take her offered phone, trying to act like I didn’t almost die of heart failure.
“Yeah, I can’t.”
When she kneels in the empty space between Syd and I, I can see the fatigue still with her. It’s in her eyes, in the set of her shoulders. She has to sleep more but I don’t say anything. If she told me I needed to sleep I’d shrug and tell her I’m fine. In fact, I think I’ve done just that. Probably more than once. I imagine I’ll get a similar response from her if not just to spite me.
“When was the last time you used your phone?”
“Last night when I checked the news. They hadn’t updated their information from a couple days ago. Why?”
“I think the cell towers are down.” I bring her phone to life. No bars. “Do you usually have service here?”
“Yeah, of course. Why? Do I not have any?”
“No. Neither do I.”
“The power plants are probably shutting down,” Syd says. “People will have stopped going to work the last couple of days as the town flooded.”
“And now they’re almost all dead,” Alissa agrees grimly.
I nod, handing her phone back to her. She tosses it carelessly onto a seat in the back.
“The government has probably cut us off.”
I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist here but facts are facts. In the information age where everyone’s phone has a camera linking it to the rest of the world through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (insert social media of choice here) they can’t afford the PR nightmare of us showing the rest of the world what’s really going on. People might have already seen too much as it is. If every citizen in the world was able to see what this illness is doing, there would be mass hysteria. Imagine the pages on You Tube full of shaky videos showing families eating each other alive in the yard. Parents attacking children, kids chasing down grown adults. People would take one look at the opaque eyes of an infected and they’d forget all about us survivors. Losing access to the outside world is annoying but if it keeps people from writing our death warrants I’ll deal.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Syd agrees. “They can’t let this get out because they can’t save us. It wouldn’t look good. People wouldn’t accept that.”
“What do you mean they can’t save us?” Alissa demands.
I told her something similar the first day we met and her reaction was the same, only a little angrier. She still thinks there’s a chance we’ll get out of the quarantine. I admire her hope, even if it is deluded.
“Al,” Syd says patiently, “they’ve boxed us in.”
“They’ve stopped the infection from getting out, yeah. But I figured that was step one and step two would be looking for a cure.”
“They will,” I tell her, “but they’ll do it in order to save themselves in case this thing breaks their barriers. They have to do whatever they can to stop it from going global.”
“Most likely, they already consider us lost. Dead.”
Alissa si
lent beside me. I want to reach out and touch her, to comfort her. I want to let her know that we won’t stop, that we’ll keep trying. But with Syd sitting right here and the words sounding hollow even in my head, I keep my hands and thoughts to myself.
“Where are we?” she asks, breaking the silence.
“We’re coming up on Lebanon,” I tell her.
“Are we going through or around?”
I don’t know the answer to that. It would save us time to go through but without knowing what the city is like, it could end up being a disaster. I wouldn’t be so worried about running across any infected were it not for my injured arm. I can’t swing a bat like I used to, like I’d like to. That worries me. I’ve got the handgun which is great but I’m a terrible shot. With a bat I had to let them in my space but I know myself with it. I know what I’m capable of. The handgun is a huge looming question mark that could get me killed if I’m wrong.
“We go around,” Syd says confidently.
I exchange a look with him that tells me instantly we’re on the same page at the moment. I can see it in his eyes, exactly what I’m feeling. We keep clear of people because push comes to shove, groaning comes to biting, and we will ditch anyone but Ali without looking back. Syd has survived too much in his life to go down at the hands of the dead refusing to die.
Then there’s Alissa. She’s been through more than I can imagine, seen more than any person our age has a right to and still be sane, yet she keeps on ticking. She’s resilient, determined, funny and too beautiful. It’s distracting. Her staring down a mass of zombies with her bow in her hands and a knife on her thigh… Well, it does something to me. She’s like a female version of Hawkeye and I’m a little disturbed about what that says about my feelings regarding Hawkeye. I try not to analyze it too much.
Sirens begin blaring behind us. I check the mirror to my right to see the flashing lights of a police car coming up fast. I get the knee jerk adrenaline spike that always accompanies the sight of those lights and I immediately start wondering what we’ve done wrong. I wonder if my alcohol levels are still up from last night even though it wouldn’t matter since I’m not driving. Old habits die harder than zombies, I guess. Syd slows down and pulls halfway off the road. The sirens get louder, the lights closer.
“What the hell?” Syd mutters.
We’re both watching the car in our side mirrors. I see it too. It’s coming up right behind us, only it’s not slowing down.
“Is he going to ram us?” I ask incredulously.
Syd doesn’t answer. He quickly pulls us farther off the road, nearly putting us in the ditch running parallel to it.
Just as our tires leave asphalt, the cop car goes wailing by. The RV rocks as the car skims past, nearly sideswiping us. The sound of the siren is unnervingly loud for just a moment but then it’s gone, headed off down the road.
“He almost hit us,” Alissa says in amazement. “Why didn’t he get in the other—“
“Oh!”
We all cry out in unison as we watch the car come up on a bend in the road, but it doesn’t slow. It doesn’t even try to turn. Instead, it sails off the end of the road and into the orchard beyond. A cloud of dirt and dust explodes into the air around it when it makes impact, the earth and surrounding trees stopping it dead.
No one moves. No one speaks. There’s only the sound of the idling RV engine and the mournful, off key moan of the busted siren.
Chapter Two
“Should we help them?” Alissa whispers. “Do you think they survived?”
I swipe my hand over my mouth. “Maybe. If they weren’t dead already.”
“You think it was a zombie driving?”
“Either that or someone on their way to becoming one.”
“We have to check it out. They might still be alive.” Syd grabs his gun from under his seat, checks the clip. “Alissa, wait here. Jordan, you’re with me.”
“I’m not waiting here,” she insists, already grabbing her bow.
Syd runs his hand over his forehead. “Just stay here.”
“No. Jordan is injured. I’m coming with you to cover his weak side.”
I bristle at any part of me being called ‘weak’, even if she’s got a point.
“I got this,” I tell her.
She raises an eyebrow at me. “Really? How’s your arm?”
“How’s your leg?” I shoot back, since apparently we’re calling people out on their ‘weak sides’.
“Better than your arm,” she replies, not missing a beat. Without another word she launches herself out of the RV.
I glance at Syd out of the corner of my eye as I follow Alissa out of the RV. His face is made of stone, showing us both just how much he hates this. It’s a risk to even get out of the RV right now and he knows it. Corvallis just recently fell, going down hard and fast. There were so many people in the area. They were trying to hide, trying to run, but what they found instead of a safe haven was a breeding ground for the illness. It consumed the bloated population in a matter of one night. Just like Portland.
And now, after all our efforts to escape it, we’re in the thick of it again.
When I catch up to her, Alissa falls into step a few paces behind me. We take the same configuration we took the first morning when we stepped out of her apartment. I like that we have a system. I also like having backup because my arm hurts like I cannot believe. I try to surreptitiously roll it, testing my range of motion. It’s crap.
“Are you hurting?” Alissa asks quietly.
I lower my arm. “It’s fine.”
“Liar. Use the gun.”
I can feel the steel of it pinching into my skin at my hip. It irritates me.
“I don’t like guns.”
“Zombies like ‘em less,” she insists. ”Use the gun.”
I don’t respond.
The car is a disaster. I doubt anyone could survive it, undead or living. The entire front end is wrapped around a tree, the windshield burst from the frame and laying on the ground among the fallen, rotting apples. Both tires on the back are flat.
Syd moves quickly around the driver side of the car, giving it a wide berth. He keeps his rifle trained on the window as he bends down to look in the fractured side window. He studies the interior for only a moment before he quickly and silently retreats, shaking his head at us.
“It’s a cop. He’s turned,” Syd tells us. “He’s buckled in, though. He’s not going anywhere.”
“We have to kill it,” Alissa says immediately. “We have to kill any we can or they’ll always outnumber us and we’ll never take back control.”
I look at her in surprise. A month ago this girl didn’t know the first thing about zombies, now she’s planning big picture eradication. I’ve created a monster. A sexy, vengeful monster.
I spin my bat in my hand, grinning at her. “Let’s go get ‘em, then.”
She shoulders her bow to pull her knife out, grinning back at me.
“What’s your plan exactly?” quizzes Captain Buzzkill.
Kill zombies, I think sarcastically.
“Open the door, release the kraken, beat its head in. Simple.” I tell him.
He frowns at me. I think it’s the only expression he has.
“What happens when you can’t swing that bat? Al has to save you again?”
I feel my temper rise but I keep my voice cool. Indifferent. “I won’t need saving. I told you, I’ve got this.”
“No one is saying you don’t,” Alissa says, giving Syd a pointed look.
He ignores it.
“I am,” he pipes up. “I’m saying he doesn’t have this.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about any of this,” I tell him, my tone tightening.
“You think I don’t know about combat? I know more than you’ll ever dream of, kiddo.”
“Kiddo? Really? You know what, old man, you might know about combat but you don’t know this enemy. You don’t know jack
about them, so you can keep your condescending ‘kiddo’ to yourself.”
I’m seething angry now. I hate it. I’m not the type to lose my cool like this. I need to pull it together or he needs to back off.
Alissa abruptly walks away from us without a word. Her gun is in her hand.
“Al, where are you going?” Syd demands.
In answer, she throws the car’s driver side door open. Her gun raises swiftly. She fires once. The interior explodes in red, white and brain. Blood, bone and gray matter splatter across every surface. Then it’s still, inside and out. We all freeze at the sound of the gunshot, at the finality it brings when in the right hands.
I know we’re both shocked when Alissa reaches inside to rummage around. I’m not breathing as she hovers half in, half out of the car, nestled up next to a dead zombie. Then she yanks hard on something several times, finally coming away with the cop’s belt. It looks to be complete with handgun and what I think is a Taser.
“If you ladies are done bickering,” she says, her voice sounding tired, “I’d like to get the hell out of here.”
“Agreed,” I say, watching her hand still clutching the gun. It’s steady as a rock.
“The siren and that gunshot might…” Syd trails off, his eyes focused on a spot over my shoulder, toward the south. There’s a rumble like thunder in the distance. “Get down! Now!”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Alissa hit the deck without hesitation. Syd shoves me and I fall down as well, reaching my hands up to cover the back of my head. My arm is screaming. I might be too, but if I am it’s drowned out by the sound of a jet streaking overhead. Then the thunder is right beside us. The ground is shaking, taking me with it. I can’t hear anything anymore, not even my own breathing. All there is now is the percussive sound of the earth being bombarded three times.
Boom, boom, boom!
I feel a shockwave roll over us, hear the scream of the jet moving on. I lift my head to look at Syd and Alissa. To make sure we’re all still alive.
“Are they blowing up the roads?” I shout.
“Keep your heads down! It’s not over!” Syd shouts back.