Deadrise (Book 2): Blood Storm

by Siara Brandt

  Whatever might be out there, he wasn’t about to risk a run-in with one of them in the dark with the kids. He looked at the thing in the road. He looked at Tessa. By the look on her face, the thought of being in the dark with those things, whatever they were, must have terrified her. It terrified him.

  “I know a safe place where we can wait out the storm,” he said. “The old Creyvan house isn’t far from here. We should be able to shelter there for the night.”

  “What do you have for a weapon?” he asked Tessa. “We may need one.”

  As she handed him the ax, Bobby said, “Mister, you look just like Abraham Lincoln.”

  Chapter 14

  _______________

  There was a definite change in the weather. Storm clouds were reaching out across the sky and the wind had picked up. A low rumble of thunder made Eli look up.

  He shook his head. She- Ailin didn’t take enough precautions. Of course, she was a civilian, but after what she had seen earlier, he would have thought she would be a little more cautious. He was going to have to talk to her about her downright reckless behavior, which could put them both in danger. They needed to work together as a team. That was the only way to stay alive. When he stopped, she needed to stop. The thing was, she didn’t seem to have a clue as to how to pick up on his signals.

  Take that shed. Anything could be inside it, but she was blindly heading right for it. He jogged to catch up to her, intending to make sure she understood that she had to wait for him at all

  times . . .

  Ailin, also, was looking up at the seething sky when a rough hand grabbed hold of her arm and yanked her inside the shed.

  She was spun around so fast that it took her breath away. Her arms were immediately twisted behind her back, so hard that she thought her shoulders would dislocate.

  “Don’t make a sound,” she heard as a man hauled her up against his body like a shield and backed them both away from the doorway.

  Ailin felt the man’s whole body suddenly grow tense. She looked up and stared at Eli, who remained silhouetted in the doorway as he stopped short.

  “Don’t make a move for your weapon, McShane,” Ailin heard next. “I’ll do what I have to do.”

  Eli’s mouth twisted into a humorless smile.

  Brannet Sneadley.

  Could their day get any more complicated?

  “You don’t have to do this,” Eli said in a low voice.

  After a nasty little laugh, Ailin’s captor said, “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time we disagreed, now would it? Put your hands up where I can see them.”

  Eli raised his hands into the air.

  “I see you found the bridge,” Snead said. “That works to my advantage, too.”

  The man holding Ailin maneuvered to the side, away from the door, dragging her along with him. “Set your gun down on that chair, McShane. Real easy- And don’t get too close,” he added quickly. “I don’t want her. I just want your weapon. It’s a simple trade.”

  Eli’s level gaze didn’t waver as he set the gun down. “Take the gun and let her go. There’s no need to turn this into a hostage situation.”

  A short laugh was the man’s reply, followed by, “I know you have a blade in your boot, McShane. Make the slightest move towards it, and I won’t think twice about shooting her.”

  When he released her, Ailin wheeled stiffly to face the man. He was wearing camouflage. Another soldier. As he picked up the gun, she automatically took a step away from him.

  “Uh-Uh. Not just yet.” His hand shot out snagging her wrist and jerking her roughly toward him again. “You stay with me.”

  He motioned with the gun. It was the third time today someone had waved a gun at her.

  “Let her go, Snead. You don’t want to be hiding behind a woman.”

  Ailin’s gaze darted from one man to the other. These two obviously knew each other.

  Brannet Sneadley wasn’t taking any chances. Not with Eli McShane. Because of his special ops training, he knew McShane was wicked with a knife. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of McShane’s fists, either. He’d seen the man fight. He could do some real damage.

  “What’s your next move, Snead?” Eli’s subtle slur was not lost on the other man.

  “Don’t push me, McShane. I’ll be the one giving orders and asking the questions.” He brandished the gun. “Sit down. Right where you are.”

  In one smoothly-fluid movement, Eli was sitting.

  Snead looked down at Eli and made a scoffing sound under his breath. “You special ops bastards always did think you were better than us. Not so touch now, are you?”

  Ailin looked at Eli, reassessing him.

  “So what’s your next move?” Eli asked.

  “Same as everybody else. I’ll try to find a safe place.”

  “What about us?”

  “I’ll let you both go. When I’m ready. Right now I need her to bandage up my leg.” He eased himself down in one of the wooden chairs that was stacked against one wall of the shed.

  “What happened?” Eli asked.

  “Log stabbed me when I tripped over it. Abbott and me were trying to get away from those things.”

  Snead reached into a pocket and tossed a small sack full of what looked like medical supplies at Ailin. “You can put a bandage on, can’t you?”

  Ailin glanced at Eli, who slowly nodded.

  Snead carefully rolled back his pant leg to reveal a long, painful-looking gash. It had bled some and already it was scabbing over but the surrounding flesh was discolored by heavy bruising.

  Snead winced as soon as Ailin began to wrap the first layer of bandaging around his leg. “Easy,” he snarled. “It hurts like a sonofabitch already.” He pulled a flask out from his breast pocket and tilted it up toward his mouth. He smacked his lips and breathed a long, satisfied, “Ahhhh.”

  “What happened to Abbott?” Eli asked.

  Snead’s eyes shifted back and forth for a few seconds. “Abbott got careless.”

  “Careless?”

  “He didn’t listen to me when I told him how dangerous those things were.”

  “What happened to his gun?”

  Snead drew a deep breath through his nose and lifted his chin as he thought about his reply. “Turns out those things are like lions. They won’t let you get anywhere near their kill. In case you haven’t found out by now, those things are a little more clever than you would think. I swear they were lying in wait for us before they attacked. Course, any dumb animal can do that.”

  The smell of alcohol on Snead’s breath, even from across the shed, made it obvious that Snead had been drinking for some time now. But the whisky he was drinking wasn’t going to give him courage, Eli knew. It was just going to make him stupider.

  “You happened to get away and Abbott didn’t?”

  “There was nothing I could do.” Snead shot back and glared at Eli as he jammed the cork back into the flask.

  As Ailin continued to work on his leg, Snead eyed her up and down with an openly-lecherous smirk on his face. “Where’d you find her?” he asked Eli.

  “She needed help,” Eli answered. He didn’t offer any more information.

  “The rules are changing,” Snead said half to himself as he squinted down at Ailin, considering her. “The old ones don’t necessarily apply anymore. A man might- find himself adjusting his priorities.”

  The muscle in Eli’s jaw tensed. He had to discipline himself not to get up and wipe the smirk off Snead’s face.

  Suddenly becoming aware of the look in Elis eyes, Snead sobered.

  “What exactly is going on, Snead?” Eli asked. “You obviously know more about this than I do.”

  “What’s going on is that this disease is a lot worse than you- than anyone’s been told. And it’s gonna change things in ways you can’t even imagine.”

  Eli waited for him to go on.

  “Worst part of this is that there are so many of those things. They’re hungry and they’re
hunting. Us.”

  “What exactly are they?” Eli wanted to know.

  “That’s a fair question,” Snead slurred. “Some people call ‘em zombies.”

  “A zombie. As in reanimated corpse?”

  “Abbott didn’t believe me, either.”

  Eli wanted to know what they were up against, so he wanted to keep Snead talking.

  After another long drink, Snead said, “You already know that terrorists were responsible for bringing it here in the first place.”

  Ailin’s eyebrows lifted. She looked at Eli for confirmation. Eli gave her a single, slow nod and said, “I also know it was a bio-weapon developed at one of our own research facilities. How’d it get out?” Eli asked.

  “The usual way,” Snead answered him. “Where there’s money to be made, corruption usually follows. And you know how it is. People with money think they’re invincible and that they can buy their way through anything.”

  “Nobody was concerned about the possible consequences?”

  “See, that’s the thing. There’s been some talk this was all intentional. So there’s a good chance that if it got out of control, it was because they wanted it to get out of control.”

  “Who are they?”

  “That’s a good question. There are so many possibilities. But nobody knows for sure.” Snead snorted under his breath. “I mean somebody knows. Somewhere. But they’re not going to let us in on it.”

  “How did it start?”

  “It’s a stealth virus. Something new. Something never seen before. At least they weren’t aware of its existence before. The world is full of viruses, but this is something different. All viruses need a living host. This one has an ingenious method of insuring its own survival. While it kills its host shortly after being infected, death is actually a trigger for the virus to become super activated. It’s ingenious really. Death causes the virus to grow at an accelerated rate, even to the point of reanimation of the host. It makes the body come alive again so that it can stay alive itself. Once you die from the virus, you’re up again, a walking corpse. This particular virus also has the ability to acquire genes from bacteria that it comes in contact with. Combine it with the right bacteria, and you’ve got yourself a new species of hybrid organisms.

  “They’ve been testing it in a limited capacity on the general population for the past few years. But it was containable. It didn’t spread easily, only by direct contact with bodily fluids. Course you know the potential to mutate. It’s what these things do.”

  “They had to be working on a cure- ” Ailin began.

  “Who?”

  “The people that started all of this.”

  “There is no cure,” Snead informed her. “There’s not supposed to be a cure.”

  “They were willing to unleash something like that on the world without developing a way to control it?” Eli asked.

  “I guess they were more interested in how the virus could be used to their advantage,” Snead answered him.

  They again.

  “There was some interest in using the ‘nfected as a weapon.” Snead was slurring some of his words now. “The mil’tary is always interested in that kind of thing. Turn ‘em loose against enemy soldiers, and you win yourself a war without sacr’ficing your own soldiers. Gives you th’ advantage of numbers.”

  “Where do the zombies come from?” Eli asked. “Or is the sacrifice of human life just one of the minor details to be worked out? Because somewhere deep down inside, Snead, even you have to know that whether they’re infected or not, they’re still human beings.”

  “No, they’re not,” Snead insisted. “They’re living corpses.”

  Snead sipped loudly at his flask, gulped the whiskey down, belched and then shrugged. “When they first discovered it, everyone wanted to test its poss’bilities.”

  “Possibilities to do what?”

  “It depended on where their particular interest was,” Snead replied as if Eli should already know that. He began listing those possibilities. “Climate or population control. Social engineering. Eugenics. Vaccines. They were even looking at it as a possible cure for cancer. And some scientists thought they had a shot at an actual fountain of youth. Think of the money to be made, McShane. When they saw what they had, everyone saw the potential to make money. Lots of it.”

  “And you’ve known about this all along,” Eli said flatly. “You were stationed at the research facility for a while.”

  “What was I supposed to do about it?”

  “The right thing, maybe,” Eli suggested.

  Snead laughed under his breath. “You can’t fight those people. Do you know how powerful they are? You don’t think that the men b’hind this were more than willing to kill anyone standing in their way?”

  “Where did this start? Here?”

  A nod was Snead’s answer.

  “So our own government was playing Frankenstein. Bringing the dead back to life must have made them feel like they had the ultimate power of life over death.”

  “It started here,” Snead told him. “But it goes beyond just America. Why do you think they’ve been pushing vaccines in other countries? The men behind this want world-wide domination. Man has been looking for power of one kind or another since he first walked the earth. Whoever controls this, has the perfect weapon and makes more money than anyone has ever made before. Money is the ultimate power, McShane.”

  “And the world gets a doomsday virus.”

  “I’m not to blame here, McShane,” Snead said as he tilted his chair back on two legs.

  “So what happened? They found they were holding a tiger by the tail, and by that time it was too late?”

  “You’ve gotta admit, it’s one hell of a tiger,”

  “Why are we unaffected? Or are we going to eventually get infected, too?”

  “Probably. But not necessarily. The virus needs a catalyst.”

  “What kind?”

  “Like I said, when the virus latches onto the genetic coding of a certain kind of bacteria, the result is a hybrid, a cross between a virus and a bacteria.”

  “And the bacteria is introduced how?”

  “In vaccines.”

  “What the hell is bacteria doing in vaccines?”

  “You’d be surprised what can be found in your common, everyday vaccine. Mercury. Aluminum. A whole cocktail of secret ingredients that gets injected right into the blood stream. The manufacturers aren’t required by law to reveal all of them. The government can force every single citizen to get the shots. And make ‘em think it’s for their own good. Pretty clever, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s downright diabolical,” Eli agreed.

  “The latest flu shots have the bacteria,” Snead went on, talking a lot more freely now. “So do the hepatitis vaccines and maybe a few others. If you haven’t had either of those, which most people have had, you won’t get any sicker than if you had the common flu. Of course, if you manage to avoid the virus entirely, you’ll be okay, too. But the jihadis have been working hard to spread it. So . . . ”

  Ailin suddenly let go of the breath she had been holding. As Eli raised a questioning brow in her direction, she shook her head “no” meaning that she had not had the vaccines.

  “So how do we protect ourselves from the zombies?” Eli asked Snead.

  “You stay alert at all times. These things are hungry. They’re voracious feeders. They’ll probably eventually end up at the top of the food chain. It’s like any species that is trying to survive.”

  “Sounds like you almost admire them.”

  “I’m just telling you the facts. Their aggression makes them stronger than us. It gives them an edge.”

  “You’ve got one cold-blooded way of looking at the world, Snead, you know that?”

  “I think about surviving when I look at the world.”

  Eli was watching closely for the first sign that Snead was going to kill him and take Ailin. He thought Snead had it in him to do just that.

  A
nd the truth was that Snead had been considering that as an option. McShane had humiliated him back there in Willow Grove and he longed to pay him back for that. His throat still hurt just thinking about it.

  But he just couldn’t bring himself to make such a deadly move against the big man seated across from him. He couldn’t get himself to the point of actually putting his life on the line like that. Because that’s just what he would be doing. Risking his life. But he thought about it. The very notion of killing McShane fascinated him. And the woman? Well, that was a fascination, too. He had the gun. She would be helpless.

  In spite of the whiskey he’d consumed, however, he was aware enough to know that McShane was watching him too closely. Deep down the truth was that he didn’t have nerve enough to go up against Eli McShane.

  Ailin shifted her weight. The gun shifted, too. “What are you doing?” Snead growled.

  “My leg is falling asleep. Do you mind if I move it?”

  “You can move both of those legs right around my waist, honey,” he said crudely and then laughed under his breath at his own joke.

  Eli’s hands slowly clenched into fists at his sides. The whiskey was making Snead bolder. But at the same time, it would make him careless, too.

  “Not that I blame you.” Snead grinned lewdly as he tilted his head back and looked down at Eli. He took another long, deliberate drink of whiskey, enjoying his role of captor.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Snead drawled as he lowered the flask. “I’d almost guess that that’s a possessive look in your eyes. I could see you didn’t like it when I had my hands on her.”

  “You only had your hands on her because you had to use a gun to force her to put up with it.”

  Snead gave an ugly laugh. “You’ve always been a real pain in the ass, you know that? Ever occur to you that maybe you don’t know as much as you think you know.”

  “I’m smart enough to know you don’t have any problem leaving us weaponless out here in the middle of nowhere. You know what that means for us, don’t you?”

  “You think I don’t know?”