She doesn’t wait for a response. Instead, she props her feet on the dash—something she knows I despise—and leans back, closing her eyes.
Chapter 5. Holed Up
When the dead came back and the world went to hell, there was a lot left behind. Big cities didn’t fare well—Houston burned for two months during the first wave of infection, and Atlanta didn’t just burn, it smoldered, the ash of radiation and infection a true testament to the magnitude of the change.
But small town America didn’t fare so badly. Whole towns were untouched by the first wave of infection, escaped it altogether—until the refugees and the government swarmed in and shoved everyone behind Haven walls.
Sometimes, when I’m drunk and feeling nostalgic, I wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t. If they had let nature and humanity live out together—if we could have stopped the disease if we all fought it, instead of just the ragtag army they sent to fight the Battle of the East.
Not that it matters. The government made their evac orders, and the American people, convinced the world was ending and their government had their best interests at heart, obeyed.
The rest has been a slow march toward extinction.
I slow as we ease into the ghost town, and Nurrin blinks, stretching in her seat as she comes awake.
“Where are we?”
“No idea. Some town between the canyon and 9. We need to stop for the night.”
She leans forward, scanning the streets. “I don’t see anything out there.”
“No, I haven’t seen an infect in a few hours,” I say quietly. It’s still a while before sunset, but the city is the perfect place to hole up for the night, and I don’t want to chance being stuck on the road without a bolt-hole.
And there is the slim possibility that we can scavenge a little.
“That one,” she says, and I glance at the house she’s pointing to. She’s right, as much as it pains me to admit. It’s on a wide swath of overgrown grass. A swing has collapsed into the rotten porch. It’s decrepit and untouched—which makes it perfect. And a small forest of apple trees wave from behind it—fresh fruit wouldn’t be the worst thing to stock up on.
Without saying anything, I turn the truck into the drive. Gravel pops under our tires, a few sticks snapping in the silence. I park a safe distance away—close enough to get to and from the truck safely, and far enough that we can make a quick escape if something is inside—and we sit there, eyeing it.
“How many rodents do you think are crawling around in there?” she asks finally.
“More than you’ll appreciate.”
She snorts. “I appreciate rat stew as much as any Haven girl, O’Malley.”
My lips twitch, and I reach behind us to grab my crossbow. She checks the magazine on her 9mm and then slams it back in, chambering a round.
“Ready?” I ask softly. She flashes me a quick grin, and I shove the door open. Nurrin prowls out of her side of the truck, her gaze darting around nervously.
She’s adjusted, too well, to being in the Wide Open.
It’s a little unsettling how easily we gain the house. There is no sign of life—or the undead—as we move across the overgrown lawn and she reaches down, easing the door open carefully.
I step in quickly, scanning the room with my bow up. Nurrin steps in behind me, sniffing the air experimentally.
It’s dry—musty and old, but there is no hint of rancid badness that clings to the infects.
“Did we actually find a Clean city?” she asks, her voice a little awed.
I shoot her a look. “Those are myths, Nurrin. Get your head on straight.”
She flips me the bird, and I relax a little—she’s not a hundred percent, and I can see the sadness in her eyes when I’m not needling her. But if I can still get a rise out of her, she’s not too far gone, and that is something to hold onto.
We clear the house, finding nothing living or dead. Just an empty house, still carrying the weight of the people who abandoned it.
“I’m going to scavenge, while we still have some daylight.”
She nods. “I’ll get a safe room together.”
It’s what I would have told her to do—that she immediately moves to do so is a little disconcerting. I watch her for a moment, searching for something, and she rolls her eyes. Without a word, I stalk from the house.
The city is Clean. And I haven’t seen one of those since we swept out of the East, retreating to the land the living had claimed.
There are always rumors of them. Even now, twenty years after the world fell apart, people still talk about Clean places—mountain tops and islands are popular—pockets of infection-less land. I used to think there were Clean islands. For half of that first year, I clung to the idea. But the fact is, they don’t exist. ERI-Milan ripped through the entire world and nowhere—not even the poorest villages in the most remote countries—was able to escape the ravages of it. Not after it mutated outside of Atlanta.
But for the moment, the infects have abandoned the little town, and I prowl it unencumbered.
There isn’t much to find—twenty years of decay and scavengers have left it at it’s bare essentials, but I do find a few packs of water pures in an abandoned car and an old can of zom repellant. I grab both and hit a nearby RV.
It’s the newest looking vehicle—a Ford ZTNK2300. The tires are flat-proof. Blood is caked to the side of the RV, and I wonder how long ago they—whoever they were—were killed. I bring the bow up again, my finger twitching on the trigger as I reach for the door.
The bang of it slamming against the outside is ridiculously loud, but nothing comes out screaming, so I duck into the vehicle.
It’s fully stocked. Food and cases of water, a stack of batteries and powdered zom repellant, ammo and several guns. Even the mattress and pillow look sound.
Like whoever had been here stepped out for a breath of air, and never come back.
I think of the blood stain and shake my head—they probably did.
I should feel worse about pillaging from the dead—but in our world, it’s necessary. You do what it takes to survive, and fuck the sensibilities of the dead, or stupid shit like decorum. Decorum won’t kill a zom—but the rounds of ammo sitting in this RV will. I glance at the front of the ZTNK and see the keys there.
Fuck. I’m going to have to let her drive my fucking truck.
I see Nurrin, her blonde hair a pale shadow in the window, as I pull up. I can imagine what she’s thinking—who the hell goes out to scavenge and comes back with an RV?
Part of me says to let it go—I don’t need the damn thing.
Except that I don’t know that. My influence is fading—it has been since I left Haven 1. There are people who hate me, more than I care to think about. And I have no idea what it will take to get Collin out of whatever mess he’s found himself in.
I grit my teeth. She won’t be happy about it—it’ll slow us down and make us more conspicuous on the road, neither of which is ideal.
I grab my crossbow and climb out of the ZTNK, locking it behind me. We might be in an impossibly Clean town, but the Wide Open always holds a few surprises—and I didn’t want this one wandering away in the middle of the night.
Nurrin is standing with her arms crossed over her chest when I walk up the creaking stairs. I glance past her into the room she’s cleared. It’s been cleaned, and she’s set up for the night, laying out two sleep sacks, a couple of MREs, and bottled water. The room reeks of zom repellant, and the floors almost gleam. There is a small pile of curious rubbish, and I flick a glance at it. “I cleared the house,” she says. “Where the hell did you find a ZTNK?”
“On the main street. I didn’t see anything, and it’d been abandoned.”
“And what happens when the people who were trawling in it come back and realize it’s gone?”
“They’ll manage.” I shrug. I reach down and grab an MRE. Beef Strogenoff. Disgusting shit.
“Finn, I really don’t think it
’s a good idea,” she says softly.
I stare at her, a long stare. “Do you really think they’ll be coming back?”
She flinches. “Yes. I have to believe they’ll be back.”
We’re not talking about random strangers in the ZTNK anymore. But then, I don’t think we ever were.
“I picked apples,” she says, an abrupt change of topic. I glance at them—they’re small and look hard, but it’s fresh—looking ahead at a few days of MREs, anything fresh is nice.
“We should have stayed at the damn Casino,” I mutter.
“Their food is definitely a step above ours,” she agrees. I glance at her as she turns to set the apples down. Her ass has dust on it, smeared from her hands, probably, and there’s a smudge on her arm—sometime between getting here and me coming back from scavenging, she’s come out of her zom gear.
“What’s in the RV?”
“It’s fully stocked—looks like they were making a long trip. Ammo, food, clothes, survival gear—everything you’d need for an extended stint outside.”
“Any clue where they came from?”
“Didn’t look. But it’ll be good for trading if we run into any trouble.”
She glances back at me. “Won’t your name be enough to get us through?”
Irritation sparks through me, and I take a deep breath, catching my temper before it breaks completely.
I grab the MRE she tosses to me and give her a blank look. “You’re fishing again, Nurrin.”
“No,” she says. Her voice wobbles briefly. “I’m not fishing—I’m not playing games. I’m through with games, Finn. I need to find my brother.”
“What do you think we’re doing?” I ask sharply.
“You said once that the only thing that mattered was that you’d keep me safe and Collin safe.”
I nod—I remember telling her that.
“You were right. That’s all that matters. I don’t give a fuck who you were, or what you did—I just care about getting to Collin before it’s too late.”
“We both want the same thing, Nurrin. I want him back, too.”
She stares at me for a long tense moment, and then, “Why did you let him in? Of all the people in 8, why did Collin crack you?”
I remember that first day, walking into the training room. I hadn’t needed it—but the Commander had insisted if I were to Walk, I’d train with his men. So there I was, and Collin was leaning against a wall, watching with this little smile on his face. I didn’t know much about him, except two very important things: he survived the Turn, and he was Nurrin Sanders’ brother.
Even then, I knew who she was—a hot-blooded, spitting hellcat at fifteen. I’d been watching her from a distance since I arrived in 18, and I’d learned a lot.
Quiet. Unassuming. And fucking savage when she was threatened. One recurring theme was her brother. He had no life outside his sister and went through hell to keep her identity as a First under wraps.
I walked up and gave him a smirk. “How long do you think you can keep a First under wraps?”
His face had gone comically shocked, and then he punched me.
“O’Malley,” she snaps, exasperated. I blink, staring. How long had I been lost in thought? “You know, it gets really boring when you refuse to talk about anything,” she says grumpily. I shrug, and she snorts and settles across from me with her MRE.
Chapter 6. The Lies of a Clean City
She takes first watch. Even in a city with no evidence of infects, we’re going to have a watch. Anything else would be stupid and irresponsible. When she wakes me for my watch, I stretch and murmur, “Anything?”
“No.”
We don’t say anything else as she crawls into her sleep sack, and I prop against the wall by the window, rolling my neck to work out the kinks. Slowly, silence eases back down on the little room.
I stare out into the darkness, trying to ignore the sound of her quiet, almost silent crying. The wind has picked up, and it shakes the trees outside, giving everything an eerie quality and making the shadows dance. But for all of that, it’s quiet.
“We can leave,” she says.
“Not in the dark, Nurrin. Suicide missions aren’t my thing.”
She makes an unladylike noise and rolls over.
A shrill scream splits the night, and she jerks upright. Even in the darkness, from the far side of the room, I can see the terror on her face, the wild, wide eyes. I put a finger to my mouth, and she nods. Shifts out of her sleep sack and crawls silently to my side.
The first zom appears from the trees, darting out of the depths of the apple orchard. She shivers, watching it, and doesn’t see the second.
I do.
“Fuck,” I whisper. She looks away from that first—it’s almost to the house—and sees what I do.
Infects are pack animals. They travel in small groups—small being the key. There’s a lot of speculation as to why—my theory is that they can’t feed enough to sustain large groups. They happen, occasionally, especially when cities were falling in the East. But they always splinter, a horde becoming smaller and spread out, manageable.
This though—
It’s a horde.
And not just a horde—but the largest I’ve ever seen. It makes the mass of infects in Vegas, drawn there by the Order, seem small. It's bigger than the horde that enclosed the truck on our way back. They pour out of the trees by the hundreds, swarming the orchard and around the house. They aren't silent—not like the last horde we saw. This one is full of fury and hunger, their screams scraping along the walls of the house, filling up the little room until I'm sure it will drown out everything, the last sounds we ever hear. Nurrin mutters a low curse and clamps her hands over her ears, her eyes scrunched shut.
It's not an escape. There isn't one.
The worst part isn't the screams, or the sheer number of them. It's how new they are. The horde moves with speed and fury, at an awkward, limping gate. Like the infection is still ripping through them, changing them.
I see Wall Walkers, snarling alongside the others.
She makes a low noise, almost a moan, and I shift, putting a hand to her lips.
They can't hear us—not over their own noise—and they probably won't be able to sniff us out over the reek of zom repellant. But it's still better to stay quiet until the horde has passed.
She slumps against me, and we sit like that for a long time, watching as they race by. Snap at each other. Scream in anger and hunger.
They’re changing. ERI has always been highly adaptable—it was the miracle of the drug, and the reason it doomed us all. But their behavior is becoming a pattern.
Hordes, moving like they’ve scented the living, when there’s no reason for it. Infects don’t move like that unless they’ve narrowed in on a human. Even animal meat doesn’t raise this kind of response.
I’ve known this was coming—that it was inevitable. I’m still not ready for it.
But at least the falling Havens make a little more sense.
Even after they have passed, we sit in silence, watching a few straggling infects scrambling after the main horde.
The silence, after the screaming fades, is startling. It wraps around us like a heavy blanket, broken only by her raspy breathing as she tries not to fall apart. I sink down and prop my crossbow against my knee. Glance across the window to meet her terrified eyes.
"What are they doing?" she asks, her voice shaking. My muscles clench, and I struggle to stay still. It's the last thing I want. But I can’t have what I want.
"They're adapting," I say, looking away. "ERI-Milan is a highly adaptable virus. It looks like it's changed again."
"But why?" Nurrin sounds lost and broken—I hate that weakness in her voice, hate that I think less of her for it.
"Why do any of us adapt? They're trying to survive."
She opens her mouth to say something, and I roll my head to the side, staring out the window. "Get some sleep, Nurrin. What the infects are doing doe
sn't matter—tomorrow we have to get to 9."
I hear her inhale, probably preparing to argue with me. I flick a glance at her, and she bites down on whatever she's going to say. Snuggles deeper into her sleep sack, which she half drug over when the horde came through. I stare out at the darkness as she closes her eyes and drifts off to sleep, refusing to look at her.
The infects were fresh. That's the most troubling part of it—not the size of the horde. I've known for a long time that they outnumber us. But this is unprecedented. Even during the first wave of infection.
That first three months, while the world fell to pieces and the dead moved like a fucking plague, three of seven people were killed or changed. Those were your odds. Seven people walk into the apocalypse. Four make it out—if they’re lucky.
Three billion died in three months. Then we got our shit together enough that we could fight back, pulling every defense we had into the fight and throwing up walls as quickly as we could. Havens went up faster than anyone believed possible—the first four were functioning within six months of the bombing of Atlanta.
Having the dead killing the living lit a fire under people’s asses. Evac orders were sent, and we hid. The slaughter slowed after that.
By the time First Day rolled around for the first time, another billion were dead. The dead outweighed us by numbers—but we were fighting back and holding our own.
Fucking stubborn.
I shake my head, trying to dislodge the thoughts of another time, another life—back when I thought we could win this fight. Back when winning might have meant something. We all dreamed of something—going back to the world we had before Emilie died and everything changed.
The truth is there is no winning—no going back. The zombies are here—ERI-Milan is too prevalent and adaptable to kill completely. We will never reclaim the East. We will never be rid of the zombies.
We’re all searching for something—a Clean place—but what we’re really doing is waiting for the other shoe to fall.
The World Without End (Book 2): The Horde Without End Page 2