The Haven Series (Book 2): Haven

by Brian M. Switzer

  “The next time we’re due to get with her remind me to send you alone,” Will grumbled as they exited the tunnel that held the kitchen.

  Jiri shot him a broad grin. “Betty? She’s a darling.”

  “She needs to understand the point of that kitchen. I don’t care if all we serve is beef jerky and water twice a day. The point is to get everybody together in a routine, and to cut off individual access to the food supply.”

  “I know. But if we put people in charge of things we have to let them, you know, run them.”

  “Hmph. If everybody would just do exactly what I want, this would all be so much easier.”

  Jiri laughed hard. “Does that go for me too?”

  “You don’t worry me. You already do what I want, usually without my saying anything.”

  Jiri opened his mouth to respond, but closed it with a snap and stared. Danny and a team had taken a Dodge truck out on a scavenging trip that morning; now, the truck careened down the hill into the quarry. The horn honked over and over, blaring out into the still of the day.

  Will’s face darkened. “That damned fool. We’ve got three or four creepers falling over the edge every day. He’ll have every zombie within ten miles headed straight toward us.”

  People poured out of the tunnels as the Dodge kicked up dust across the bottom. Will saw Terrence sprinting in his direction with a handgun at his side. The Doc stood outside the tunnel that housed his office, wearing a concerned expression.

  The truck skidded to a stop near Will. Danny jumped from the driver’s seat while it was still rolling. He caught Will’s eye and flashed a crazed grin.

  Terrence pulled up, breathing hard. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked.

  Will shrugged.

  Danny ran to the bed and vaulted over the side, standing amid a load of tall boxes. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Come and take a look, folks. It’s a new day in the quarry!”

  Riley

  * * *

  A thick ring of tunnel-dwellers circled the truck, buzzing and firing questions. One of them reached over the bed rail and pulled at the flaps on one of the boxes. Danny gave a prissy little hand slap. “Ah ah ah. Not yet.” Danny caught Will’s eye. “We drove out this morning to check a grain elevator in Jasper and log how much of what crops it holds.” He looked at Will but yelled

  so

  the crowd to hear. “The elevator is just outside of town. We put down a handful of creepers in the parking lot, and after that, I looked around the place. The high school was across the street, and right next to it was a football field. A field house sat on the far side of the field, and a little birdie in my head went ding-ding-ding.

  “I’m sorry to tell you Will, but we broke rule number one and crossed over into town so we could sweep that field house. And guess what we found?” He reached into a box with both hands and threw a number of items into the crowd. “Creeper protection!” He dug back into the box for more. “Hip pads to cover your forearms.” He threw another. “Knee pads to wear around your calves. Padded gloves. Helmets. Shoulder pads, if you want them. Neck pads!”

  The tunnelers grabbed pads and helmets out of the air, tried them on, and traded them back and forth. They chattered happily while Danny emptied the contents of the boxes.

  Will approached the truck. “Nice work,” he called, “but did you have to celebrate by drawing the attention of every creeper north of town?”

  Danny gave him a wild grin. “Fuck ‘em. Bring ‘em on. I’ve got bite protection now!” He bent down and picked up a football. He held it over his head in a terrible parody of a touchdown dance, scissoring his knees and gyrating his hips.

  Three gunshots sounded in quick succession, kicking off a small melee. People cried out in surprise, twisting and turning to find the shooter. Some ducked down where they stood; others ran. Terrence moved in front of Will with liquid speed, covering the rancher’s body with his own. His 9mm was out of its holster but not raised. “Stay down,” he said in a calm voice, “until I figure out what’s going on.”

  Danny squatted in the truck bed and looked over the cab. “They came from inside one of the tunnels,” he yelled at Terrence.

  A woman screamed. “A creeper!” She pointed at a figure staggering out of tunnel five, a storage shaft next to the kitchen.

  “That’s Riley,” Terrence said in a wondering voice. He took a few steps forward and stopped. Riley teetered in the general direction of the crowd. He was drenched in fresh blood and held both hands over his throat as if trying to staunch the flow. His eyes were wide and his mouth moved wordlessly.

  “Is he bit?” The Judge cried in a voice that bordered on hysterical. “Has he turned?”

  Charlie O’Brien approached Riley with a gun in his outstretched hand. “Biter!” he snarled.

  Terrence popped off a shot, kicking up dust near Charlie’s right foot. Charlie yelped and jumped backward.

  The bounty hunter rushed toward his partner, his weapon and attention on Charlie as he ran. Will ran close behind; more footsteps pounded the concrete behind him.

  Terrence slid to a stop and Riley collapsed in his arms. He fell to his knees, cradling the stricken man in his arms. He choked back a sob. “Riles, Riles, shit man.” He looked up at Danny. “Keep that fucker back!” He commanded, motioning to Charlie, who had drifted closer. He turned to Will. “Where’s the goddamn doc?”

  Will raised his head and looked for Doc Joseph.

  Terrance spoke to Riley in a soft tone. “Hang in there, buddy, the doctor’s comin’. Hang in there, Riles. What happened man, were you bit? Let me see your throat.”

  “No!” Will and Jiri cried in unison. Will put Terrence’s hand on top of Riley’s, wincing at the blood rushing through the dying man’s fingers. “Keep as much pressure on there as you can, Terrence.” He saw The Doc hurrying over, black bag in hand. “Here comes Doc Joseph.”

  “Hear that, Buddy? Help’s coming. Just hang with me.” Riley’s eyes locked onto Terrence. His mouth opened and closed, like a fish in the bottom of a boat. Tears ran down his cheeks and the blood flowing from under his hand turned sluggish.

  Doc Joseph pushed his way through the knot of people surrounding them. “Let me through!” he demanded, shoving his way to the center of the circle. His face sagged as he took in the injury. He kneeled next to Riley and gently pulled his hands away from his throat, replacing them with a white hand towel. In the instant the wound was uncovered, Will caught a flash of a long, straight cut right above his Adam’s apple. Terrence clasped Riley’s hand and murmured in his ear. The Doc held his other hand while holding the towel against his throat. He looked up and caught Will’s eye, shrugged his shoulders, and shook his head.

  Riley’s blood-slickened hand grasped Terrance’s hard and his legs flailed for just a moment, then it relaxed. Riley opened and closed his mouth one more time, then his body sagged. It jerked once, then was still in Terrence’s arms. “Riley?” he whispered. “Riles? No no no no no. Come on, buddy.” Will and The Doc disengaged Terrence from his dead friend and guided him first to his feet and then away. Twice he pushed against them and tried to return but Will pulled him back with a gentle persistence.

  They walked him to Doc Joseph’s office and sat him down on an exam room table. The Doc rustled around in a cabinet and came out with two small pills. “Okay, Terrence.” He handed him a bottle of water and placed the pills in his palm. “Swallow these.”

  Terrence washed down the meds.

  “Let’s get you out of these clothes,” The Doc said. He nodded at Will. “I’ve got it from here, William. I’ll find you in thirty minutes.” He raised his eyebrows, telling Will to be sure Riley’s body was gone before Terrence came back out in half an hour.

  Will gave a heavy sigh, nodded, and headed back to the bottom.

  Terrence

  * * *

  That evening Terrence sat side-by-side with Will, Danny, and Jiri on a limestone boulder near the railroad tracks. They passed a bottle
back and forth to combat the bracing air. A pair of lanterns chased away the night and threw shadows out into the darkness.

  A skimpy dirt patch on the south side of the quarry held a smattering of homemade grave markers, and that’s where they had buried Riley’s body earlier in the afternoon. They searched the tunnel he had stumbled from and found the body of a stranger. He had suffered a terrible beating before he died and his body had two bullet wounds, one in his stomach one in his forehead above his left eye. A gout of dried blood stained the tunnel wall. More splattered and dried on the floor, leaving a trail that ran in crazy zigzags and half-loops out to the quarry bottom.

  Terrence took in the scene and reconstructed what happened. “Riles came inside alone. This fucker,” he gave the stranger’s corpse a solid kick, “comes from further back in the tunnel. For whatever reason, the two of them engage. Maybe that was the guy’s intention all along, maybe he was here for something else and Riles tried to stop him. They duke it out, and Riley is kicking his ass. Except for the throat wound my man didn’t have a mark on him. This guy took a beating- he’s got cuts on his cheek and above his eye, a busted lip, bruising on his abdomen.”

  Terrence pointed at the blood spray on the wall. “They end up there when the stranger gets a knife inside Riley’s guard and cuts his throat. And let me tell you, to do that, he had to be a serious operator or incredibly lucky. In the sand pile Riles was legendary for his hand-to-hand combat ability. I out-shot him but when we grappled, he put me on my back almost every time.

  “Anyway, he cuts Riley’s throat. Rather than press his advantage until Riles bled out, he backed off him- which points to his getting lucky rather than being a pro. A pro would have stayed on his target, cut both femoral arteries and punctured both lungs. He’d kill his man in about seven seconds instead of leaving him with the ability to shoot before he dropped.

  “Even as he’s choking in his own blood, Riles pulls his gun and gets off three rounds, two of them kill shots. Then he staggers outside.”

  There was a long silence while the other men took that in, then Will spoke. “Coy, backtrack down the tunnel. See if you can tell where he came in and if he was alone.”

  Coy grabbed a lantern and whistled. Sally, his golden retriever, bounded in and sat at his feet, her rear end quivering in anticipation. He gave her a hand signal and they took off at a brisk pace.

  Terrence watched with skepticism as they zigzagged away. “Is that kid any good at tracking?”

  Will just nodded his head, but Danny puffed up his chest and beamed. “Bet your ass. Coy and Sally could track a bullfrog through a rainforest during a hurricane.”

  Ninety minutes later Will, Jiri, and Terrence met with The Doc. After examining Riley’s body, Samuel had no information to add. “He died of asphyxiation and acute blood loss after suffering a cut to his right external jugular vein and right common carotid artery by a sharp, short-bladed, hand-held instrument.”

  Terrence led them from Doc’s office and out into the bottoms, where they ran into Coy.

  The young tracker pointed to the tunnel where they’d found the body. “He came in from the other side. He either knew where he was going or he didn’t care where he came out- he walked a straight path through, no turns. There was a car over there. I couldn’t tell if the dead guy drove it or if he had a driver waiting for him, but there was another guy and he drove off. The car turned left out of the parking lot. I lost it after that.” The kid lowered his gaze as it embarrassed him that he failed to track a car on a paved road. Terrence was impressed, and he said so. The kid blushed scarlet, and Terrence decided on the spot he was fond of him.

  Now he sat with the kid’s Dad, and Jiri and Danny, sipping whiskey and remembering Riley. How many times had Riley told him, ‘I’ve got your back?’ At least a hundred. Terrence decided where they were going to go and Riley kept him safe to do it.

  “This why I quit the sandbox, this feeling right here,” Terrence told them. “I did three deployments as a CW2- chief warrant officer. I lost eighteen men. It killed a little piece of me each time.” Will passed the bottle to Terrence. He took it and stared at the label by the lantern light. He traced the letters on it with his thumb. “To be honest with you, some of those fellas I barely knew. And to see ‘em get blown up and have to write their families… it still killed a little piece of me.” He took a swig from the bottle of Knob Creek, grimaced as it burned its way down his throat, and swiped at his mouth with his coat sleeve. “Riley was my best friend since the third grade. Seeing him come out of that tunnel drenched in blood, watching his life fade away… that took more than a part of me.”

  He handed the bottle over to Danny and turned to look at Will. The man met his gaze without faltering, and Terrence appreciated that. “I told you I’d be your law officer. And I will. After I find out why my friend died, and who killed him. And I’d like to do that working out of this place.”

  Will didn’t hesitate. “You’re a member of this group, one of the few men I like, and one of the most capable guys I’ve ever seen. You do what you have to do. What’s ours is yours and we’ll help you in any way we can.”

  Terrence nodded his thanks. “Good. First thing- how long ago was it you had biters in the tunnels?”

  Will rubbed his chin. “About six weeks ago?” He squinted at Jiri for confirmation, and Jiri nodded.

  “And you’re sure somebody turned them loose on you? They didn’t wander in?”

  “As sure as we can be. The evidence was pretty clear.”

  “Two separate lethal incidents, less than two months apart? In my line of work there are no coincidences. That leaves one thing- somebody is coming after us down here.”

  Will gazed at Jiri, who shrugged his shoulders. He turned back to Terrence. “If you’re right, whoever killed Riley is the same person or people that turned the creepers loose.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Terrence watched Will. The ex-rancher’s eyes turned black and hard, and his nostrils flared. He pressed his lips together and took a deep breath. He spoke to Terrence in a flat, emotionless voice, devoid of pity or mercy.

  “Then you’d better find out who they are fast.”

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people or events are coincidental.

  JOURNEY, BOOK ONE OF THE HAVEN SERIES

  First edition. January 21, 2018.

  Copyright © 2017 Brian Switzer

  Written by Brian Switzer

  Published by The Learned Pig Publishing Co

  Hidy.

  Thanks for giving Haven a whirl. I know your time is valuable; thanks for spending a chunk of it with me and giving me a chance to entertain you.

  If you made it this far, hopefully you are enjoying the books in the Haven series. If so, I’d like to ask a favor. Good reviews are the lifeblood of a novice independent author’s career. The knowledge that you enjoyed the books in the Haven series gives other potential readers the confidence to give my work a try. Please take two minutes and give Haven a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or anywhere else readers visit. You’ll be helping me to continue my author journey. Thanks in advance- it means a lot.

  If you’d like to find out more about my books, I’d invite you to visit my website- brianswitzerauthor.com.

  I love to hear from readers. You can holler at me on my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/brianmswitzer/, Instagram-www.instagram.com/br.switzer/ or email- brian@brianswitzerauthor.com. It would be a pleasure to hear from you.

  Coming in March- Storm Horizon, book three in the Haven series!

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  On the Ledge

  Mark

  The Quarry

  Becky

  Introductions

  After the Meeting

  Will on the Warpath

  Confrontation

  Coy

  Return to the Lake

  The Judge

  Will and Becky<
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  Justin

  The Lesson

  Will and Jody

  The Judge Comes Clean

  Prepare to Scavenge

  First Trip Out

  Where to Go?

  Mormont Trucking

  Will Takes a Shower

  Relaxing

  Will and Jiri

  Will Takes a Tumble

  Danny Gets Some Action

  Creepers on the Inside

  Creepers on the Outside

  Looking for Danny

  Bad News for The Judge

  Outside Threats

  The Hendrickson Girls

  Jiri

  Cyrus

  Jiri and Mark

  The Meeting

  The Judge

  Agreement

  Readying

  Jax

  Shoot Him in the Leg

  Shot

  Last Stand

  Santa Claus

  Saved

  The Doc Draws Down

  The Doc

  Sam and Jody

  Will and The Doc

  The Exam

  More Science

  Next Christmas

  Tara

  Danny Comes Through

  Breakfast

  Dollar Hut

  Dollar Hut 2

  The Stranger

  Some Success

  Steven

  The Bar

  Lavelle

  Throw Down in Carl Junction

  The Bounty Hunters

  In the Alley

  Fight

  Danny and Terrence

  Leaving

  A Busy Week- Danny

  A Busy Week- Terrence

  A Busy Week- The Meeting 1