When he waved for her to come up the hill, she took only a few steps before she stumbled and went down hard. He hurried down to help her, and when she got back to her feet again, she sagged against him, her expression full of remorse. “I’m sorry,” she whispered against his shoulder.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
“I’m slowing you down. I don’t know if I can make it much farther.”
“You’ll make it,” he said grimly, though even he was having his doubts.
There were thick woods bordering the field on all sides, and no way of knowing what might be lurking in them. But there were no houses as far as he could see and they couldn’t stay here. They had no choice but to push on and cross that field.
He didn’t know what he would do if she did collapse here in the middle of the field. He wouldn’t be able to leave her behind and go for help. He didn’t think he could carry her very far. Things could be worse, he tried to tell himself. Those ghoul-looking things could-
And then, halfway across field, the worst did happen. He jerked his face around when he heard growling coming from the woods. One of those things staggered out into the open field. Soon, another one emerged from the trees. A picture of that bloody heap of remains in the barn flashed through his mind. Elan didn’t know what to do. They had no weapons of any kind. He knew that Dani didn’t have the strength to make it through to the other side of the field, let alone to a safe place.
“Sometimes prayer is all we have,” his mother had told him many times. He could still hear her saying, “Remember, Elan. Faith takes a different kind of strength. You can let faith lead you or you can give up and give in to the darkness. I know as well as anyone that giving up can be easy to do because there is so much darkness around us, but don’t do that, Elan. Don’t ever give up.”
Prayer really was all he had. So he prayed.
“What’s wrong with them?” Dani whimpered. “What do they want from us?”
“I don’t know,” Elan lied.
One of the ghouls came right at them. Elan hit him. It had no effect. Elan hit him again. But though the thing went down, it was still alive, if that’s what you could call it. Desperate, Elan kicked it in the head while it was down to try and disable it that way. It still squirmed. He kicked again. And again. Finally, it did lay still in the weeds while a gush of dark blood poured out of one of its eyeballs.
“I don’t think we’re getting out of here,” Dani sobbed.
Elan himself didn’t know how they were going to survive this. Dani couldn’t run. She could barely walk.
But he had been taught never to give up and Dani was relying on him, literally, for her life, so he gritted his teeth in grim determination and kept plodding doggedly forward. They kept going, clinging to each other the whole time. Whatever happened, they would live, or they would die, together.
They heard a distant roar. An engine. The noise confused Elan. And then, at the other end of the field, he saw a tractor, a big one, with an enclosed cab. It was moving rapidly in their direction.
The tractor stopped right beside them, vibrating loudly as the engine continued to run. The cab door swung open. Elan looked up at the man leaning out of the door.
“You’d better hurry,” he heard the man call down to them. The engine was loud. He had to shout.
“Who are you?” Elan shouted back.
“Your only hope.”
Elan stared at the hand that he held out to them. He helped Dani grab that hand and prayed with everything in him that there was still such a thing as hope left in the world.
Chapter 7
“Eby, you need to get up.”
Eby Selway yawned and massaged his still-closed eyes in a circular motion with his fists. He was tired and it still seemed like the middle of the night. But Hunter wouldn’t wake him unless it was time to get up and it was his turn to keep watch. Usually he didn’t wake him until it was past his turn.
Eby gave a sleepy groan and muttered, “I’m already awake.” But for a long time he didn’t move and he didn’t open his eyes. Minutes passed. He dozed again. Then, without warning, he suddenly bolted upright from his blanket, trying to separate reality from his dream, and gasped, “Wh- what? Is there something out there?”
“Relax, Eby,” came Hunter’s low voice in the darkness. “There’s nothing.”
Eby released his breath and sank back down on his blankets.
For now there was nothing out there. At least nothing that they could see. Or hear.
But the darkness could hide a lot. Eby realized that dawn couldn’t be far off. There were morning birds suddenly twittering in the trees. He opened one eye. Right now the moon was playing hide and seek with the clouds and the clouds were winning.
“It’s so dark out there,” he heard Kyler Freyne say. “How could we see anything even if it was coming straight for us?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter answered him. “The only thing I’ve seen all night is just- darkness.”
It was true. There were no lights anywhere. Not from houses. Not from towns. Not from traffic or even from the stars. There was the moon, but not when the clouds were covering it. That’s why some of the group had argued that they needed to stay locked up tight at night. Being out in the open was too much of a risk.
“The weather is good. It could be a lot colder for this time of year,” Kyl murmured quietly. When no one else commented, Kyl said, “I’m just saying. At least we have that.”
Maybe the weather was good now. But it would be turning cold soon enough. Especially at night.
As if to remind them that winter was not far off, the wind gusted, scattering dead leaves across the ground. They couldn’t see them, of course. But they could hear them. Eby couldn’t suppress a shiver and it sent a chill through him despite his wool coat and the thick layers of blankets.
So much for the Pleasant Valley Halloween Festival, he thought as he finally sat up. It was something he had always looked forward to, for as long as he could remember. He had fond memories of trick or treating in the square that would normally be decorated with spider webs, scary displays and fake tombstones. Not to mention the fall foods: hot chocolate with whipped cream, pumpkin pie squares, hot cider, funnel cakes, donuts, chili dogs and taffy apples.
But there would be no decorations this year. And no funnel cakes.
His thoughts turned to food a lot these days. Especially since their food supply had been dwindling so rapidly.
“French toast,” Eby said out of nowhere. “I’d like a big breakfast of French toast with strawberries and whipped cream on top.” Just the thought of it made his mouth water. “And hash browns, too. And those little sausages my mom- ”
He suddenly went silent. No one talked about family if they could help it. The subject was too painful for everyone. Both for the ones who had lost family members and the ones who still didn’t know what had happened to their loved ones. As far as he knew, Eby had no one left. It was the same for Hunter. And Kyl, too. They kept searching. And they kept hoping, but that hope grew dimmer as time went on.
It had been worse for Kyl. He’d had to put some of his family “to rest” as they tried to call it. after they’d turned. It had not been easy for him. He still struggled with it.
But not knowing could be bad, too. When you didn’t know whether the missing were struggling to stay alive somewhere or whether they had turned into one of those things, that was sometimes just as hard.
“We’ve got canned ravioli for breakfast,” Kyl said.
Why not ravioli for breakfast, Eby thought. The whole world had been turned upside down. Life had become a daily struggle just to survive and you were grateful for small things. Even a can of ravioli.
They still didn’t know what had started all this. Everyone had their theories, and in the beginning they had talked those theories to death. Eby knew a lot about government conspiracies and bioterrorist weapons and there was no doubt in his mind that this was a plague of some ki
nd. There were all kinds of possible causes. Environmental toxins, parasites, fungi, stealth viruses, bacteria, prions, and even the new hybrid viterias. All those things had been tested in government labs for a long time. Could one of those experiments have escaped a lab somewhere and gotten out of control? And was it really any wonder that an accident could have finally happened?
Of course, nature was full of possibilities, too. He had heard about zombie alligators, zombie bugs, even zombie frogs. Wood frogs re-animated after winter. Their hearts stopped beating and their brains ceased functioning before coming back to life again. The toxoplasmosis parasite actually re-wired a rat’s brain so that it wasn’t afraid of cats anymore.
There were all kinds of possibilities, but with all forms of communication wiped out, there was no way of knowing what was going on for sure. One of the biggest questions in their minds was why weren’t they infected? Was a certain percentage of the population immune? And could the infected be uninfected again? They just didn’t have any answers. Maybe they never would. There was only one thing they knew for certain. It wasn’t getting any better out there. In fact, it was getting a whole lot worse.
When everything had started falling apart, the three of them had met at Kyl’s house and they had decided to stay put and to wait for help. But help hadn’t come. And each day that help didn’t come looked more and more bleak. The time came when they realized no one was coming. Not their parents. Not the authorities. They would have to help themselves.
They never stopped wondering what was happening in the world beyond Pleasant Valley. Beyond Illinois. Beyond America. Was it the same everywhere? Or would the National Guard come along some day and rescue them? Would they ever see their loved ones again? It was a faint hope, but Eby, at least, wasn’t ready to let go of it completely. Not yet. Though from all they’d seen in the past few weeks, hope would be easy enough to lose sight of. For anyone.
They’d met up with another group. Friends they’d known most of their lives. They stayed together, maybe because some kind of herd instinct was bred into them. And in the beginning, it did feel like there was safety in numbers. Lately, however, they had begun to question that decision.
Eby shook his head slowly, though no one could see the movement in the last of the darkness. “I don’t know if things will ever go back to normal. But I can’t help thinking, hoping, that there might be a better place out there where life isn’t so hard, so dangerous. Where people have figured things out. Of course, there could be places that are a lot worse, too.
“Did you know the concept of zombies isn’t a new invention at all?” he went on. “The draugar, from medieval Norse mythology, were walking dead creatures that fed on human flesh and blood.”
“Doesn’t all that thinking make your head hurt, Eb?” Kyl asked.
“I can’t help but think about things,” Eby answered. “I’ve overthought everything my entire life. I still do it.” It was true enough and sometimes that borderline obsessive trait had made him an outcast. For most of his life people had labeled him a nerd or a geek. And mostly people didn’t listen to him. So he had gotten into the habit of keeping his thoughts to himself. But thinking was a way of surviving now. And he often did have an audience.
“So,” Kyl said. “What you’re saying is that the concept of zombies has been around for a very long time.”
“Probably since the very beginning of man’s existence. It’s probably a survival instinct that we’re born with. From different threats throughout history, man has often had to deal with the fear of being eaten alive.”
They all thought that over, then Kyle asked, “You think sitting out here is a waste of time?”
Hunter said, “I’ve been wondering about that, too.”
Eby, Kyl and Hunter had spent the past two nights in a house just outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the old middle school, while the rest of the group stayed inside the abandoned building. To do the same thing that they were doing. Watching. Though from a distinctly safer vantage point.
“We’re out here because this is where Deklin thinks we need to be.”
That was true. This was Deklin Kullvein’s idea. Still, the mutual thought, though it was an unexpressed one, was that Dek should have offered to take his turn out here, too. But no one said anything for a while until Eby spoke up again. “I’m still not sure just what is it we’re supposed to be looking for.”
Kyl repeated in a dragged-out, half-mocking tone what Dek had told them all. “Any threats outside the fence. If there’s something out here at night, there’s no way of knowing from inside. And knowing is surviving.”
Hunter didn’t comment. There were a lot of other thoughts churning around inside his mind, but he didn’t voice any of them. Maybe it was just the undead they were supposed to be watching for. Maybe it was something else.
Undead. It was a word they all hesitated to use. But they didn’t know what else to call them. Whatever Dek’s suspicions might be, he kept them to himself. But they hadn’t seen a single threat all night. Not one. The street was silent as a tomb, almost unnaturally so. The same as it had been last night.
“I’d like to think that if there was something better we should be doing - you know, spending our time more wisely - that we’d be doing it,” Eby said. “This seems kind of redundant.”
To himself, Kyl was thinking of plenty of things he’d rather be doing. He was also wondering what the hell redundant meant. He hated when Eby threw out those geek words and left him wondering what he was talking about.
“Deklin’s been getting more and more secretive lately,” Eby said next. “It’s almost like he’s keeping something from us.”
Kyl grunted his agreement.
“I’ve been wondering if he’s even- thinking clearly,” Eby went on. “His behavior’s been a little, uh, erratic.”
Erratic. Another word straight out of the geek dictionary.
Eby might have been the only one to put it out in the open like that, but it was the same thing they were all wondering.
“He’s not the same person he was,” Kyl said quietly.
“None of us are,” Hunter remarked under his breath.
“No reason why he shouldn’t tell us why he wants all three of us out here together night after night for- ” Kyl’s voice trailed off as he searched for the right word.
Eby said it for him. “Surveillance.” It was the word Deklin himself had used. “There’s no denying that the more we know, the better off we’ll be. But- ” After a drawn-out silence, Eby said in a low voice, “We haven’t talked about it, but how do you think Dek got all that food the last time he went out? You don’t think he would actually- ” Eby hesitated as if he didn’t want to even say the word. “Kill someone just to get what he wanted?”
“I haven’t wanted to think that way, either,” Hunter answered him. “But I’ll admit it has crossed my mind.” After a sigh, Hunter said, “We weren’t there. We’ll probably never know for sure.”
“Back at the drug store, when we were trapped,” Eby went on. “Dek was out of control. He went too far. I’m worried about him. About what he’s becoming.”
The others were worried about that, too.
“It’s like he’s stuck in some kind of survival overdrive,” Eby continued in a low voice. “He’s too ruthless. Too brutal. Too eager to kill. I was thinking,” he said thoughtfully. “That he goes about killing the same way that the undead do. Savagely. And that once he gets started, he can’t stop.”
Hunter agreed. “Dek has always had a cold-blooded way of looking at things,” he said. “The bad thing is that some of the others are starting to see things the same way.”
For as long as they had known him, Deklin Kullvein had been a bully. Now he was just a more brutal version of one. Dek’s thoughts were consumed with his own needs, his own comfort, his own survival. They all knew that Dek kept the group together for one reason. Because it offered him a hedge of protection. And because he liked the feeling of contr
ol that he got from assuming the role of leader.
Dek’s drinking was another bad sign. Hunter suspected drugs might also a part of the equation. Dek went off more and more by himself. Just disappeared without a word. Sometimes for hours at a time. Once he was gone for a whole day, leaving them all wondering if he was even coming back.
The usual restraints of society had always kept Dek somewhat stabilized, but those were gone now. Hunter knew Dek’s behavior was just a symptom of something else, something that was potentially far more dangerous for the group. The more Dek killed, the more aggressive he became. Hunter was beginning to think that it wasn’t just a slide into moral decay. He had begun to think that Dek was in the grip of some kind of mental disorder. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it. There were no hospitals, no doctors, no magic pills. Any kind of diagnosis would be just a guess. Whatever it was would have to just play itself out, hopefully without destroying the people around him.
“He’s been justifying a lot lately,” Kyl spoke up. “I have no doubt he’d sacrifice anyone in the group in a heartbeat if he thought it was necessary.”
“I think you’re right,” Eby agreed. “Dek is taking everyone down a dark path. He shouldn’t be leading this group.”
Kyl agreed. “What’s going to happen is he’s going to lead us straight to hell. If we let him.”
“Remember Dek said that when you walk through hell, you’ve got to expect to get burned,” Eby reminded them.
“Like we all haven’t been through hell.” Kyl’s comment had a trace of bitterness in it.
They all thought that over for a while, and then Eby admitted after another silence, “I’ve been having a bad feeling about things lately. About Dek’s plan to go to the airport. It’s a bad idea. I know we’re eventually going to have to find a better place than this. But the airport won’t be any better. Even if there is a chain link fence all around it. There are too many weak spots and it’s too wide open.”
Deadrise (Book 3): Savage Blood Page 7