Deadrise (Book 2): Blood Storm

by Siara Brandt

  There was a loud whirring sound overhead. People migrated to the windows and looked outside. Penndle went, too.

  “Military helicopters,” he grunted as he maneuvered for a better look. “What the hell are they doing here?”

  Some people had stepped outside, the ones that didn’t mind braving the stifling heat, because even though the air conditioning wasn’t working, it was still cooler in the hotel than it was outside.

  Two women had just come down the stairs. They stayed inside, watching from behind the glass doors as they craned their necks to watch the helicopters.

  “Maybe it has something to do with that explosion we heard to the east early this morning,” one of the women said. “I did see smoke in the distance.”

  “I told you, there’s probably a fire somewhere,” the one in the red blazer said as she snapped a picture of the helicopters with her camera. “That would explain the police cars earlier.”

  The helicopters quickly disappeared from sight and the people wandered back inside and gradually lost interest. But despite the temporary distraction, Penndle was still nursing his grievance against the hotel clerk. It was like an ember that Penndle was perfectly willing to fan to life again.

  “He must think I’m an idiot.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Nilah agreed with him.

  Penndle didn’t as a rule pay much attention to his wife, so he didn’t actually hear most of what she said. “I’ll write a letter when I get home,” he grumbled. “They haven’t heard the last of me. They’ll see.”

  Several military trucks rumbled by, which momentarily put a stop to his rant. He looked around the lobby with a questioning scowl and muttered impatiently, “What the hell is going on around here?”

  No one had an answer for him. Especially not the man in the loose shirt and baggy pants who was just now coming down the steps.

  The man staggered and braced himself against the wall for a few moments. Maybe he was drunk or on drugs. It was hard to tell. He soon straightened up and visibly shook himself. When he saw that Penndle was in his way and staring at him, he warned in a heavy accent, “Get out of my way.”

  Penndle gave the bearded man before him his usual smirk. Why wouldn’t the man get out of his way? He’d been there first. Of course Penndle thought he was more important than any foreigner.

  The man was sweating profusely. His hair was damp and beads of perspiration were running down from his forehead into his black beard. Which was strange, because Penndle didn’t think it was that hot yet. The man’s eyes looked a little wild, too. And his skin was as pale as a corpse. Realizing that the man was sick, Penndle backed away with disgust.

  Worried that the man was close enough to breathe on him, he took another step back. The last thing he needed now was to get sick. Who knew what kind of disease a foreigner might be carrying?

  But that became the least of Penndle’s worries as the man drew out a huge knife and savagely slashed Penndle across the body with it. Without a backward glance, the bearded man rushed across the carpeted lobby and barricaded himself in the pool room. He immediately raised his arms in the air and started shouting something. Of course no one could hear what he was saying behind the glass doors.

  Sometime around 7 am, Josiah Hunter got out of bed to puke his guts out. He’d just - he guessed - emptied his bladder. He couldn’t even tell because it still felt like an over-inflated water balloon. Lord, the pain was getting damned near unbearable. He’d had several kidney stones in the past, so he knew exactly what this was. He’d passed the other stones on his own without having to go to the hospital. Hopefully he would pass this one, too. Eventually. This one was particularly stubborn, however. It didn’t want to go anywhere, but preferred hanging around, apparently, to see how much torture he could take.

  He didn’t need this right now. He was supposed to be portraying Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War event on Creyvan Ridge tomorrow. Despite his present condition, he was still going to make every effort to be there. He swore suddenly, going still and closing his eyes for several long, agonizing moments as the sharp throbbing sensation intensified. He held his breath as the pain slowly ebbed, but it still felt like he had to pee about twenty gallons.

  He had tried an early morning jog. That had gotten rid of two of his other stones, and he’d hoped it would work this time, too. He was back at home again, still in his running shoes and the stone hadn’t budged. So he walked laps around his living room to see if that would help. He tried some jumping jacks. To distract himself, he recited the Gettysburg Address. He knew it by heart and he would be reciting it for the spectators up at the Creyvan House during the weekend. At least he hoped he would be reciting it. The way he felt now, the Battle of Gettysburg itself could be going on around him and he wouldn’t even notice.

  The jogging hadn’t worked. So far, the walking and the jumping jacks weren’t doing any good, either. With just him and his kidney stone for company, he headed back outside and got in his pickup truck. He’d go to the gas station and get some Squirt. Someone had told him that would help. About frantic with the pain now, he started driving.

  Chapter 5

  _______________

  An explosion rocked the town of Willow Grove, suddenly and without warning. Elijah McShane got a bad feeling of déjà vu.

  “What the hell is going on, sir? Are we under attack?”

  Eli didn’t answer the soldier who had asked the question because he didn’t have an answer. The truth was he didn’t know if anyone knew for sure what was happening. They could very well be under attack, but by whom or by what no one seemed to know. If their superiors did know anything, they were keeping that information to themselves.

  They were in full gear and as soldiers they were used to being under fire overseas. But they weren’t under the usual kind of fire. And this wasn’t Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan. This was a small town in the dead center of America. It used to be you came back to the States to survive. But now . . .

  Now? Not much was making sense. Not their orders. And certainly not what had happened back in Arundel. He hadn’t witnessed everything that had happened back there, but he knew enough to know that things hadn’t gone as planned. But he’d been a soldier too long to let the unforeseen rattle him. You had to be flexible in war. Inflexibility could get a man killed in a hurry.

  But, hell, this wasn’t a war. This wasn’t like anything he’d ever encountered before. Right away he could see that this wasn’t going to be like Arundel, which on his end at least, had been a quiet takeover for the most part. Takeover. Occupation. Whatever you wanted to call it. Here in Willow Grove, amidst the heat and humidity, panic already hung in the air. You could feel it.

  Glass shattered nearby. In an instant a store window at the end of the block was completely gone. That upped the degree of panic by several notches. And panicked people, Eli knew, were not going to be passive people.

  “These people are getting crazy, sir,” the soldier next to him said. His eyes were glued on the missing store window. “There’s no stopping them. They’ll have that store damned near cleaned out in no time.”

  Soldiers were trying to maintain order, but they weren’t having much luck.

  “They’re scared,” Eli said and turned immediately to look at a car that had just smashed into the side of another one. He stared at the two vehicles. No one seemed to be seriously hurt, but the drivers getting out of both vehicles looked mad as hell.

  “Look at these people,” the same soldier said. “Do they even know why they’re panicking?”

  Eli had a good idea why. Because even with communications being seriously compromised, word must have leaked out. And maybe they had heard about what had happened in Arundel. News travelled fast in these small towns. Word would spread like wildfire. You couldn’t keep a thing like that quiet.

  So it came as no surprise to him that people were already panicking. Everyone would have already heard about the virus gripping the country, and, in fact, the world.
Most people would be smart enough to realize that it was probably too late to contain it and that this was an outbreak unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, and that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.

  Even though no one could get much credible information out of the authorities, enough calls would have gone through and enough news would have leaked out to put together the pieces of a very chilling scenario, in spite of assurances by the government that they had everything under control.

  All he knew was that they were in a state of national emergency and martial law had just been declared. The President had conveniently given himself that power to do that unilaterally just recently. Whether it was the right decision remained to be seen. And how far things would go was still an unknown factor. But where the government was involved, ineptness and corruption usually followed. And a good percentage of the population knew it, too.

  Because it had never been done before, the shutting down of all communications was causing a panic by itself. First the TV, then the internet. Cell phones had come next. The powers-that-be needed to keep the population in the dark for some reason. Maybe they were afraid of a wholesale panic. Then again, maybe it was something else, something more insidious. With the government, you never knew.

  Personally, Eli didn’t like the way things were going. You couldn’t keep people in the dark like this. They needed to know what they had to prepare for. He glanced upward, squinting at the blazing morning sun that was climbing into a cloudless sky. The temperature was already hovering around ninety. A freakishly hot day for September. The heat definitely wasn’t going to help.

  “You think it’s true, sir?”

  Eli frowned down at the soldier who had asked the question. “Is what true?”

  “Some of these people are talking zombies,” the soldier said breathlessly. “Zombies.”

  With his frown remaining in place, Eli shook his head. Raphael Louvain was known for his wicked sense of humor. Eli didn’t know a single person that took Rafe seriously. In most cases. But then this wasn’t most cases.

  But zombies? Yeah, they were trying to deal with what the authorities were calling the infected. But the resurrected dead? That was going too far. Even for Rafe. But the truth was that a story like that had a way of feeding on itself until it got out of hand.

  “They’re just sick, Rafe,” he tried to assure the younger soldier. “We need to get these people off the streets for their own safety. Whatever this is, we need to- ”

  He had been about to say “restore order”, but he cringed and held onto his helmet as something exploded on the other side of town, sending a plume of white smoke and debris high into the air. Almost immediately darker smoke started rolling up from wherever the explosion had occurred. No one could see the source of the explosion, however. Not with the buildings in the way.

  “What the hell was that?” a soldier asked.

  “Whatever it was,” Rafe muttered grimly. “It’s not good.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s not good,” another soldier said. “That night’s gonna fall without electrical power and we’ll all be in the dark.”

  That particular vision bothered Eli, too. There had been rumors circulating all day about cutting the power.

  “What are we going to do with these people?” he heard.

  “Re-locate them,” Eli answered automatically. That had been their orders.

  “Sir?” It was Rafe. “They don’t look like they want to be re-located.”

  “They’ve declared martial law,” another soldier spoke up. “They can do whatever the hell they want.”

  “These are American citizens, not enemy combatants. Even if they run, we’re not going to open fire on them.” Rafe looked at Eli. “Right, sir?”

  “If they run, that’s what we’re supposed to do,” one of the new soldiers answered for him. “Or we could be shot for disobeying orders.”

  Eli looked out at the crowd and frowned. A good percentage of it was made up of elderly people and women with small children.

  “That’s what all those zombie drills were all about,” one of the men said ominously under his breath. “If the drills weren’t about getting us used to the idea of firing on unarmed citizens, then what the hell were they all about?”

  The other soldiers thought that over, and some nodded, agreeing. Even Eli had his suspicions. But it wouldn’t come to that, he told himself. It couldn’t.

  They had gone through several zombie drills in the past few months. At the time, Eli had thought they were the most ridiculous exercises he had ever been through. They’d all thought it had been like a joke. But now he couldn’t help but wonder if they weren’t, in fact, being trained and programmed to shoot down civilian masses without questioning orders.

  “I don’t care what our orders are.” Rafe sounded dead serious. “I didn’t sign up to commit murder,”

  There was a murmur of agreement among some of the original team members.

  “You think they know something we don’t know?”

  “Who?” Eli asked, distracted as he watched a man running out of a building with a heavy sack in each hand.

  “Our commanders.”

  “I doubt that,” Eli said under his breath. His sarcasm was not lost on the other men. But the truth was, Eli didn’t trust their commanders any more than they did. He’d been in the military too long for that.

  “If everything is falling apart, and it sure looks that way, then I’m going home,” Rafe said right out in the open. “I could make it by tomorrow morning.”

  Eli looked at him and said in a low voice, “Come on, Rafe. You’re talking about desertion.”

  It was true. It would be considered out and out desertion, but they were all worried about their families, especially now that they had lost all contact with them. They couldn’t help but wonder what was happening in other towns. In their own home towns. Especially after Arundel.

  Eli saw a stream of what he could only think of as refugees carrying backpacks and bundles making their way for the bridge west of town. There were two main bridges leading in and out of Willow Grove and roadblocks had been set up at both of them. So far the roadblocks had been unmanned. That was changing, Eli could see. Soldiers were taking positions behind the barricades right now.

  If people weren’t going to be allowed to drive across the bridges, it was a good bet that they were going to try and make it out of town on foot or any other way they could. Panicked, they’d pour out of Willow Grove like ants from a disturbed nest. Just as they had tried to do in Arundel.

  Going up against armed soldiers was a foolhardy decision to make, but these people, he could see, were desperate to escape. Although Eli didn’t know all that had happened at Arundel earlier that morning because he’d been stationed outside of town, what little he knew had bothered him then. And it was bothering him now. Hell, a whole lot bothered him these days. He’d been warned more than once. No more questioning orders. No more questioning anything. He had just three months to go till he was done with the military for good. He’d spent a lot of years taking orders and he told himself he could take orders for a few more months. But that stream of people headed for the bridge and the armed soldiers- yeah, that bothered him.

  Eli drew Rafe to the side and asked him, “I want you to tell me what exactly did happen back there in Arundel. Because I get the distinct idea that you’re holding something back.”

  “That’s because they gave us orders to not talk about it.”

  Eli waited. The man had just talked openly about desertion. He could talk about Arundel, too.

  “We were ordered to put our hazmat suits on,” Rafe began. “We saw that they had already laid out rows of the dead in a field. The infected, they were calling them. They told us we were going to burn the corpses of the infected to keep the disease from spreading. But those people- They didn’t even look human anymore. They were all messed up. Like something from a freaking nightmare. But- ”

  He hesi
tated before he went on. “From what I could make out, they didn’t just die because of a disease. They’d been shot. Every last one of them.”

  Eli didn’t want to ask, but he had to. “By our soldiers?”

  Rafe nodded silently. “Maybe they didn’t have any choice. Maybe the infected are as good as dead and they’re dangerous, just like they say they are. But there were women and kids laid out there, too, Eli. Babies. I can’t get the pictures out of my mind.” Rafe looked around. “They tell us we’re rounding people up to relocate them. But do you really believe it’s for their own good?”

  The truth was that Eli had his own doubts. Especially after what Rafe had just told him. He didn’t know who some of the other guys in the unit were. They were young. Most hadn’t been overseas yet and probably hadn’t seen any real combat. The important thing, as Eli saw it, was that they did what they were told, no questions asked.

  But Eli and the small remnant of his old unit that were still together weren’t young and inexperienced like these guys. They had a lot of combat experience between them. Special ops experience. Maybe that’s why they were questioning things. Because they’d had to think for themselves too many times.

  With martial law being declared, there had been a frantic shuffling of troops back to the states and then from state to state. The rest of the team members had been scattered to parts unknown. They had been a close-knit group. They’d had each other’s backs. This new group? They followed orders. Period.

  Whatever this disease was, it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. It wasn’t some act of nature like all the other plagues in human history had been. Those had been deadly enough. This time, terrorists had gotten their hands on some bio-weapons stored at the Arennes Research Facility. Jihadis had purposely gotten themselves infected and then they’d fanned out to all parts of the world simultaneously. It had been a silent, but lethal invasion. And their goal was simple. Death. As much of it as they could inflict. If women and children were their victims, so much the better. That’s the cold-blooded way the bastards had of thinking. It wasn’t just about killing anyone who disagreed with them. Their sick religious philosophy actually called for unleashing hell on earth. The deluded fanatics didn’t mind dying for their cause. Hell, they wanted to die. All of which made them very, very dangerous enemies.