by Gareth Wood
My name is… Amanda Marie Martin… My name… is Amanda… Marie…
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
Chilliwack Airport ruins, September 12, 2013
Robyn held Amanda's hand as she stopped breathing, and felt the life fade from her friend. Amanda had squeezed her fingers once at the end, a farewell that Robyn hoped meant that the pain was finally gone. The empty Euthanasia Kit rolled across the floor to stop under a plastic chair leg.
"I'm so sorry," Robyn whispered, and wiped the tears from her eyes. She crossed Amanda's hands over her chest, then knelt to smooth the hair from her face. She leaned down and kissed Amanda on the cheek.
"Thank you, for everything," she whispered. "I promise I won't let them have you."
She drew her handgun out of its holster and checked the chamber. It was loaded and ready, but she was certain that firing a gun inside would bring the hundreds of undead outside down on her. She was equally certain that she couldn't leave Amanda to reanimate. Whether or not that event would actually happen was a question she didn't wish to know the answer to.
"Feynman, come here, girl," she said, and led the dog away from Amanda. Feynman had curled up next to the other woman in her last minutes of life, hopefully offering some comfort. Robyn couldn't have said whether Amanda had even been aware that the dog was there. She led the dog to a table against a solid wall.
"Wait here, okay? I have to go take care of something." The dog looked at her with dark, sad eyes, but lay down and buried her muzzle in her paws. Robyn gently scratched her ears, then stood and looked around.
She walked into the Airport Coffee Shop, ducking down when she saw the large windows and the crowd milling about in the sunlight outside. They didn't appear to be able to see her, possibly due to the tint on the glass, but she moved carefully anyhow, keeping low and staying behind whatever cover offered itself. A few minutes of searching through the thoroughly looted cafe led her to what she needed, most likely left as garbage among the debris. She gathered the things together and took them back to where Amanda's body waited.
Several sheets of thin flexible packing foam, an empty two liter pop bottle, and a roll of packing tape were all she needed to improvise a silencer. First she rolled up several sheets of the packing foam and pushed them into the bottle. Then the taped the open top of the bottle over her gun's barrel, using several windings of the packing tape, tearing it off with her teeth. It took a few minutes, and as she finished she realised that Amanda hadn't turned, at least not like Nick had. Amanda was still dead, still lying peacefully.
It was possible that she wouldn't turn, but Robyn couldn't take the chance. They had agreed, anyhow, that the follow-up was a headshot. Use the Euthanasia Kit, then a bullet to the brain, just in case. Amanda hadn't been bitten, but that was no guarantee. Maybe she hadn't turned fast because she hadn't been bitten? Robyn didn't know.
The silencer was an improvised model, a one-shot design that had been around for ages. It worked best, was quietest, with lower calibres, and Robyn was firing a 9mm. It wouldn't be silent, but it would contain the escaping gasses enough, she hoped, to keep the undead outside from hearing.
Bury the grief, she told herself. Deal with it later, if you live. It was a struggle to put a lid on the well of horror and trauma that had opened as Amanda died, but she tried. It was a live-or-die kind of situation, and her attention needed to be on survival, not on emotional reaction. So, as she had done so many times before, she pushed the feelings down. She closed the cover on the well, sealing the feelings up in her mind, visualizing it that way, like capping a well. The feelings were still there, just put away to be taken out later. She knew that the price she would pay for bottling them up would be high, but she really had no choice.
There had been so much death that she had witnessed, so many lives lost in the years since the apocalypse had begun. She thought back to all the lost ones. Dr. Girenko going mad at UBC, and Todd and Steve, her friends that she had put down. All the others since, the salvagers and the people of the town. Nick. The deputies in Mission. The women that Corrone had killed. And now Amanda.
The cap on the well shuddered, and Robyn clamped down on it desperately, but it was far too late. The cap burst, and the grief and the fury and the pain that she had been burying in her mind for the last nine years erupted. The feelings ran through her like a flood, and her grip on the handgun with its awkward silencer faltered. She fell heavily to her knees, while pain and grief had their way with her psyche. The gun fell and her hand pressed to her face as she moaned and cried, sobbing uncontrollably.
Robyn's eyes shed hot tears until she was blinded; her nose ran and her throat tightened, making breathing difficult. And still she sobbed, lost in her world of pain.
Something blew hot breath over her hands, still covering her face. A wet tongue licked her fingers, and she blinked up at Feynman, the dog standing silently in front of her where Robyn knelt on the filthy carpet.
"Oh, Feynman!" She hugged the dog, who whined and licked her face and hands. Robyn stayed there for some time, crying her pain and grief into the dog's fur, her body shaking until the sobbing ran its course. Finally, utterly drained, she wiped her reddened eyes so that she could see again. Her nose was clogged, so she blew it noisily with a scrap of newspaper.
She looked at the dog, who stared at her with trusting eyes, even if they were nearly as sad as Robyn knew her own eyes were. Her shaking hands scratched Feynman's head, and Robyn managed a small smile. Picking up her gun, the silencer bulging from the barrel, she sat in one of the chairs facing Amanda's body. Feynman came over to her and sat down, and together they silently rested.
Looking at her watch, she realised almost half an hour had passed. The response team from Mission should be almost to the airport, so there was a small chance of survival. The hundreds of undead outside might have other plans, and there were no guarantees one way or another, but Robyn would take even a tiny chance over none at all.
Fifteen minutes later she heard the sound of engines outside, and then shouting. The deafening sounds of gunfire. She didn't turn to look, but instead raised the hopefully silenced 9mm, aimed with hands that had finally stopped shaking, and fired one round into Amanda's head.
THE END
Afterword and Acknowledgements
This was the first book I set out to write with a definite beginning and ending already set in my mind. I knew from the first days of plotting it out that it would involve a serial killer in a community of survivors, and that it would begin in Coquitlam BC inside a hospital, and that it would end with a wild shootout on the highways. What I couldn’t predict was that almost everything else about the book was going to change before I was done writing it.
Originally this wasn’t going to be a book set in the RISE universe. It involved vampires and zombies and lots of gothic imagery. I scrapped that idea fairly quickly, and it was when I was driving the Abbotsford-Mission Highway Bridge that the main plots leapt into my head. Characters formed from nothing, scenes appeared in my mind, and dialogue began to write itself. Within a few weeks I had fleshed out the basics and was getting into specifics. I had most of the characters mapped out, but I didn’t know who would survive to the end. Certainly some of the deaths came as a surprise to me, but looking back I cannot imagine the book would be better if those characters had lived.
This is the last book set in the RISE universe. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Never say never, right? I know there will be questions. I know some things are unresolved. Think of this book as another tale, separate from the first two books in time and space, that happens to be set in the same world. So, not a direct sequel, but still connected.
This book would never have existed at all without the encouragement and support of many people. Special thanks to: Stephanie and Kirin; Felicia, my editor, for not speaking to me after she read the first draft, because of who I had killed; Jacob Kier, for taking that chance; Robyn Bayles and Shawn Fleming, for friendship and Gemalte Leiche; Permuted
Press and the new regime. Research into viruses and electron microscopes courtesy of the UBC Department of Microbiology and Immunology (Deanna Shew, Rick White, and Marc Horwitz)
Thanks to – James Cyr, Ken Dolphin, Will Atkinson, Dale Bouchard, Jessica Holder, Jonathan Martin, James Wolfden, Lee and Serena, Sean Penney, Shannon McKay-MacKay, Marquita Milliken, Jeff Betke, Carrie McAunaul, Nathan Barnes, Keith Durocher, Rosa Sudar, Kirsten Masse, and Jude Harrison and Jim Martin. There are too many others to mention, but you know who you are, and I thank you all.
Next up, I am working on a science-fiction trilogy for Permuted Press. The first book is called BLACK HORIZON. Keep an eye out for it, or look me up online. I will gladly answer questions. On FB I am under Gareth C Wood-Author.
Extra Special Thanks goes to my beta readers, for comments and reviews and a thorough going-over; the New Westminster Writers Group, Nancy, Amber, John and Keith, this would have been a poorer book without your input.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Interlude One
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Interlude Two
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Interlude Three
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Interlude Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Interlude Five
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Interlude Six
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Afterward and Acknowledgements