by Jenika Snow
Blackbird’s Fall
Savage World, 3
Jenika Snow
BLACKBIRD’S FALL (SAVAGE WORLD, 3)
By Jenika Snow
www.JenikaSnow.com
[email protected]
Copyright © July 2020 by Jenika Snow
First E-book Publication: 2015
Cover Designer: Mayhem Cover Creations
Editor: Kayla Robichaux
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: The unauthorized reproduction, transmission, or distribution of any part of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.
This literary work is fiction. Any name, places, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or establishments is solely coincidental. Please respect the author and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials that would violate the author’s rights.
Contents
Synopsis
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue One
Epilogue Two
About the Author
Before the infection and fall of civilization, Marius Blackbird worked as a scientist for the government, specializing in virology. But now, after the end of the world, he was just a man trying to survive.
Maya Pointe lost everything and everyone after the virus took over, and now years later, the isolation was slowly consuming her. But venturing off the property she claimed as her new home could get her killed—or worse, infected.
But then she saw someone who needed help, an injured man who could be friend or foe. The humanity in her wanted to help the only person she’d seen in far too long, but strangers weren’t to be trusted.
She was an angel. His.
Marius instantly wanted Maya, and he knew gaining her trust would be next to impossible these days. And rightly so. But as they grew to know each other, the attraction and trust between them built. He wanted Maya as his and only his, wanted to have her by his side as they rebuilt their lives in a destroyed world.
But could they come to grips with the reality that nothing would ever be the same?
And would Marius’s secret destroy the relationship he and Maya built?
Reader Note: This story was previously published under the same title. It has since been re-edited, revised, and new content has been added.
Preface
It was a flu vaccine that collapsed civilization, which destroyed humanity.
What was supposed to help prevent a common virus ended up being the cure for cancer. It had been hailed worldwide as a miracle, a medical breakthrough, one in which the scientists thought they had come across something monumental. They had, but what they brought to humans was a hell on earth. The ones who had gotten the vaccine started exhibiting signs of cannibalism and necrosis immediately. The infection was far too advanced and spread too quickly for a cure to be created.
Everyone thought they were safe if they stayed away and waited for the sickness to die off. The scientists and physicians refused to take responsibility for what they’d done, what they created. They thought they were helping people, curing something that up until then was incurable.
They’d been wrong.
The infected had the ability to contaminate others through bite and scratch, and the virus spread at a monumental rate. They were not simply the sick, but the “infected,” becoming crazed, hungry for human flesh.
They were no longer considered human by any means. They were, in every sense, walking corpses.
The virus slowly killed them from the inside out, made their flesh rot, every orifice bleed, and all logical reasoning vanish. The infected focused only on the primal need to feed.
This was the world they lived in now, tried to survive in with each passing day. Starvation, death, rape, and being hunted by the infected was the world now, and the ones standing, the healthy, needed to be the strongest and have no remorse in doing whatever they needed in order to survive.
1
The fall of civilization
It was the anarchy and chaos that was the most frightening at first, the fact that humanity was slowly crumbling and that nothing was ever going to be the same.
The news reports blared that people should go home and stay there until they got official word that everything was okay.
Maya knew it wasn’t going to be okay.
Those words were just something to placate society, to make everyone stay calm in an otherwise crazy situation. It was just something to keep everyone in line, but it wasn’t doing its job, not in the cities, at least.
There was no cure, would never be a cure, not given how fast the infection was being spread.
Bites.
Scratches.
Blood-born infection.
That’s how it was spread. The healthy humans walking around with those little white paper masks probably thought they were safe, but they were far from it. That wouldn’t save them when the infection wasn’t airborne. The ones that thought they were safe were fools, especially when they got bitten, a chunk taken out of their body, and the infection pushed into their bloodstream and changed them from the inside out.
Maya had seen an infected only once, but she knew as time passed that would change.
“Turn that off, sweetheart,” her father said from the bed.
Maya looked over at him, saw the ashen look on his face, the fact that he had dark circles under his eyes, and that he was starting to bleed from his nose and mouth. She turned off the radio that was repeating an emergency broadcast about the infection, one she’d heard countless times.
“How are you feeling?” she asked and moved toward him. The slight commotion of her mother in the kitchen couldn’t hide the noise coming from her father: the sound of dying.
He wheezed and pushed himself up on the bed. “How do I look?” he asked and tried to smile, but it looked weak, sickly.
“Honestly? Like shit.” She was teasing, but it was obviously the truth. Her father had always told her never to sugarcoat anything with him, that honesty was a genuine reaction.
Her father, before he got sick, had been full of life, always teasing, calling it like it was. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. To even think that he’d die, and most likely very soon, was too much for her. So Maya joked about it, and so did he. It was their way to cope.
He chuckled softly and reached for the glass of water beside him. She grabbed it before he could wrap his hand around it, held the straw for him, and brought it to his mouth. He took several long sips from the straw but started to cough. Swirls of redness filled the glass, and she felt her chest clench painfully. “I feel like shit.”
She grabbed a washcloth and dipped it in the cold water before wringing it out and bringing it to his mouth and wiping away the smear of blood. She cleaned it by repeating the action with the water and placed the cloth on his forehead now.
The silence stretched on as she didn’t respond to what he said. She didn’t want to acknowledge any of this, even if it was their reality and right in front of them. She was about to turn away and grab some fresh water,
when her father grabbed her arm gently, stopping her.
They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and she told herself not to show emotion, not to break down right now. She knew what he was about to say, and as much as she didn’t want to hear it, she knew it was the truth, and the truth of the situation needed to be laid out.
“When it happens, I want you to finish me off with my rifle, understand?”
She breathed out slowly and nodded.
“I don’t want to hurt you or your mother or anyone else, and I don’t want to live like one of… those.”
Maya’s eyes were watering, but she didn’t let the tears fall. Her father said this same statement over the last week, ever since he’d gone out to search for supplies for them and had gotten bitten.
Although they initially had food and water stocked up, had started stockpiling when they first heard about the infection rapidly spreading, among the three of them, it was running low. That’s why her dad had gone out, despite Maya and her mother pleading with him to stay.
Although there weren’t a lot of infected in the small town they lived in, what was more dangerous right now were the looters and rioters in the heart of town, and the ones migrating from the bigger cities. That’s what they’d been so worried about, yet it seemed like it wasn’t the healthy who had gotten her dad but the damn infected.
“I promise, Dad,” she said and sniffed, turning and grabbing the medical kit to look at his wound.
“I don’t like you even touching it, Maya,” her dad said, knowing what she was going to do. “There isn’t any point in cleaning it.”
She ignored his last comment. “You know it’s only spread through bites and scratches.”
“It’s bloodborne, sweetheart.”
“I’ll wear gloves, like I do every time. I’m not going to let it fester without trying to make you comfortable.”
Her dad smiled sadly and didn’t argue anymore. Good, because she wouldn’t deviate from what she wanted to do.
“Here, honey,” her mother said as she walked into the room, carrying a bowl of steaming water. Her mom set it on the table and grabbed an apron. “Wear this, just in case.”
Maya put the apron on, tripled-up on the latex gloves, and pulled up the blanket. She exposed her father’s legs first and continued lifting until she got to his thighs. He wore a pair of boxers, and the leg that had gotten the bite was patched with a thick white bandage—one that was seeped through with black and red fluid.
The smell was intense, that of rotting, decaying flesh. That was what happened with the infected, with someone who was bitten. The infection spread throughout their body quickly, turning usually happening within a week’s time.
The person rotted from the inside out… literally.
“Here,” her mother said and handed her a mask. “I don’t want any risk of you catching it.”
It wasn’t airborne, and although the likelihood of the blood or fluid getting into Maya’s mouth was low, she knew this had been her parents’ biggest fear since the infection spread. She was their only child, and with her father on the brink of turning, life seemed hopeless.
She held in her gag reflex as the wound was revealed. The bite mark had been nasty when he first got it, and now because of the infection spreading, it was god-awful. Necrotic tissue was all the way around the wound and spreading throughout his legs.
Even his veins were now black and visible. There was blood and gray fluid oozing out, and the flesh that wasn’t grossly rotting was ashen, as if corpse-like.
She made quick work of cleaning it with peroxide and alcohol, of spreading ointment on it, and then bandaged it back up. Of course this wouldn’t heal or cure it, but she felt better knowing she was at least trying to keep it clean.
“How did it look?” her dad asked, but he sounded exhausted. When she looked at him, she saw he had his eyes closed, the wear and tear of what was happening taking him over.
“The same,” she lied. It looked so much worse than it had just hours before. The infection was spreading fast.
“Even though my eyes are closed, I can still tell when you’re lying.” Her father’s voice was distant, sleep taking control of him.
“Get some rest, Dad.”
Her father was asleep before she even got the rest of the words out.
“Come on, Maya. Let’s eat something.”
Maya followed her mom out of the room, shutting the door behind her, and that’s when she couldn’t stop her tears. But she wiped them away, not wanting to start that floodgate.
“He won’t last much longer,” her mother said with a detached voice. She turned around and gestured for Maya to sit at the table.
Sherman, her old and graying black lab, came trotting into the kitchen and lay down by Maya’s feet. He was going on ten years, but he had a lot of energy and spirit still. She reached down and ran her hand over his head, scratching behind his ear.
Maya didn’t respond to her mother, because she knew that was the truth but didn’t want to think about it. Her mother set some rationed food in front of her, and once Maya’s mom was seated, they ate in silence. The sound of her father’s wheezing and gurgling as his lungs filled with the fluid, as he was dying, surrounded them.
This was her life, her reality, and the sooner she fully accepted that, the better chance she had of surviving.
2
“This is fucked,” said Brandon, one of the scientists who had been working on the immunization from the ground up.
Marius was shoving items into a large backpack, intent on getting out of the bunker they’d been in for far longer than he could even comprehend.
Brandon was walking back and forth, pacing the small confines of the room. The underground bunker had been government issued, a place that held several scientists as they worked on a cure.
But there was no cure, and despite telling the government officials that, informing the president that there was nothing that could be done, they still kept working. What else were they supposed to do this deep below the earth?
Besides, Marius didn’t want to give up, didn’t want to be a part of why humanity had fallen.
“We’ve done all we can, Brandon.” Marius kept his back to the other man as he shoved in bottles of water, canned and packaged food, and grabbed medical supplies.
“So you’re just leaving?”
Marius turned and faced Brandon. “I can’t stay here any longer. I need the fresh air, the sun. Besides, staying here with the supplies diminishing like they are will only make this our tomb.”
Brandon didn’t speak for several long moments.
“You can come with me. We can find a place above ground, try to find survivors, help them.”
Brandon shook his head. “I don’t want to run into those fuckers, Marius.” He ran a hand over his face. “We already had to deal with that down here with Marie and Kyle.”
Just thinking about the two other scientists who had been put down here when they’d gotten infected made Marius sick. Marie had been infected with the virus when she accidently pricked herself with a needle, a rookie mistake that had cost Marie her life.
But she hadn’t told anyone she was infected, and they hadn’t known until it was too late. She’d kept herself away from them as the infection ate away at her body, and when she finally did die and was resurrected as one of those walking corpses, she’d gone after Kyle.
Marius ran a hand over his face. He’d been the one to kill both of them before they got him or Brandon. It was something that had to be done, and he knew something he’d have to do above ground if he wanted to survive.
“Staying down here will be your ultimate death, Brandon. If you want to survive, you need to get out while you can. If lack of food and water doesn’t kill you, the isolation will drive you insane.” Marius shook his head at the reality of that. “We haven’t heard any news from up above in weeks. That has to tell you something, tell you that we are now on our own.”
It took a moment
for Brandon to move or even speak, but he finally breathed out and nodded. “You’re right; I know that and should be smart enough to understand it, but I can’t leave, Marius.”
Brandon was afraid, and rightly so, but staying down here really would bring about their deaths.
“What if we just get supplies and come back here?” Brandon sounded hopeful.
“Brandon, I need out of this fucking place. We’ve been down here for a long damn time, and I can’t take it anymore.” Marius grabbed the backpack and slipped it over his shoulders. He had his boots on, a couple changes of clothes, and he hoped enough food and fresh water packed that he could survive until he found something else. “You’re welcome to come with me, to face the world above, but I can’t and won’t stay here.” Marius walked toward the man who had stood by him through all of this, since the very beginning. “I’ve left you enough food and water that you shouldn’t have to find any for a while, but Brandon,” he pleaded with the other man, “staying here will have you dying too.”
Brandon sat down on the chair in front of Marius, and made this low, exhausted sound. “Good luck out there.”
And he knew Brandon wouldn’t come, not even with the knowledge that he would die down here if he didn’t at least try. The world anymore was hectic and deteriorating, but hiding in a bunker underground wasn’t the way to live, no matter what anyone said.
Marius held out his hand, and Brandon took it. The men shook, stayed silent, and then Marius nodded once and turned to leave. He had to try to survive out there, try to see if he could help anyone. He knew about the virus, about every aspect of it.