Deadrise (Book 6): Blood Curse

by Siara Brandt

  The old feelings of hyper-vigilance rioted through his veins. Who had done this? What had done this? Only an animal attack could have left someone in this condition. He was certain of that. But there were no dangerous animals around that he knew of. Coyotes could attack a human in extreme circumstances. But he knew of nothing that could do this.

  He stood there listening, waiting for something to happen, expecting some kind of threat or confrontation, some kind of rabid animal to come charging at him from out of the brush. But the forest remained ominously, deeply silent all around him.

  That is, until a cat sprang out of nowhere with a screeching meow. Caught unaware, Bram staggered back a few steps and found himself face to face with the cat, who stood there hissing and growling, with its back arched and its fur standing on end before it took off across the yard like a bat out of hell and disappeared completely from sight.

  With his heart hammering like a war drum in his chest, Bram wondered what would scare a cat like that. He waited for what seemed an eternity until he heard a faint rustling in the trees at the far end of the yard. There was something out there, though he had no idea what it was. Whether there was some dangerous animal still prowling around or whether there was a lunatic on the loose, he had no way of knowing. He wished again that he had his gun, and until he knew what he was up against, he decided the best thing to do would be to give himself the advantage of concealment. It was the only defense he had at the moment. While he kept his eyes glued on the tree line, he dropped back further into the shadows of the house.

  He was crouching next to a concrete bird bath and a red-coated gnome. Ardella Dade must have a thing for garden gnomes, he thought vaguely, because there were several small gnomes rising up from the flowers around him. There were a couple of gnomes in the other flower beds, too. They reminded him of the seven dwarves. They all wore clothes of different colors and they were all staring silently out at the shadowed woods just like he was. How ridiculous, he thought as he stood frozen there like one of the gnomes, all of them watching across the yard for what? But he stayed there motionless, waiting to see what he was up against. Although he couldn’t feel it from his concealed position, another light breeze sprang up. It set off the wind chimes again. Across the yard the swing creaked slightly, almost eerily, with no one sitting on it.

  And then Bram saw something that made his nerves come alive and his muscles grow suddenly tense. In the trees, a darker figure was moving among the shadows. At first it was an indistinct blur in the fog, something that lumbered clumsily before it emerged from the misty gloom of the woods.

  Peering carefully through the lower branches of a pine tree, Bram saw the shuffling shape move directly toward the body lying in the grass. He watched the figure stagger and stop after a few feet. He had not been able to make out who it was at first. And then he realized that it was Elwin Dade.

  Elwin Dade covered with blood.

  Elwin Dade looking like Bram had never seen him look before.

  Strange guttural sounds were coming from the man’s mouth. Sounds that didn’t seem like they could come from a human throat. Lurching forward, Elwin paused a moment and suddenly gagged as if he was strangling on something. His shoulders heaved spasmodically. Bram heard the muscles of Elwin’s jaw crack as his mouth opened wide. Then he suddenly vomited out a disgusting mass of viscous, bloody chunks.

  Elwin finally straightened, still spewing bloody strings of vomit that clung to his chin and shirt front. As Bram watched, horrified, Elwin, re-focused on the body in the yard. There didn’t seem to be anything human in Elwin’s eyes. He looked like he was possessed by a demon.

  Elwin staggered over to the body. He didn’t look like he was distressed or grief-stricken to see his daughter lying there like that. In fact, he didn’t look like he was surprised in the least.

  Bram continued to watch in shocked horror as Elwin dropped to all fours beside the body and began-

  Bram had to look hard to make sure that he was really seeing what he was seeing.

  Elwin Dade lowered his face and began to feed voraciously on his daughter’s mutilated body. He reminded Bram of a shark in a feeding frenzy as he tore at the already-ravaged flesh with his teeth. He was like a starving hyena tearing into a carcass. Blood spattered all around, adding to the blood already covering Elwin’s face and clothes.

  Bram couldn’t have uttered a word if he’d tried. He could only stare in complete and utter shock. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what he was up against yet.

  Then some sixth sense sent a chill straight up Bram’s spine. Something suddenly occurred to him. Had that cat been hissing at him?

  A second later, he heard a faint rustle in the bushes near him. He whirled around and saw Ardella Dade. She, too, looked like she was demon-possessed. She was like a ghoul straight out of a horror movie. She was just as bloody as her husband. Her eyes were colorless, terrible. And they were focused on him.

  Everything happened so fast that Bram had no time to think. He could only react. The grass was slippery from the dew. As he tried to avoid Ardella’s grasping fingers, he lost his footing and went down hard. His hip had grazed the corner of the concrete bird bath and sent it wobbling. Ardella lunged forward and crashed into the birdbath like she didn’t even see it. It stopped her, but only momentarily. The top of the bird bath separated from the bottom and thudded heavily to the muddy ground, splashing water everywhere.

  There was only the bottom of the bird bath between them now. The only thing that saved him was that Ardella tripped over it and went down on all fours. Cursing under his breath, Bram scrambled back to his feet, which wasn’t a moment too soon because Ardella fixed him with an unholy glare as she rose up on her knees. Her bloody mouth opened wide. Wider . . .

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the garden gnome in the bushes right beside him. He picked up the brightly-painted, concrete statue. The red-coated one. It was one of those odd details that the brain registers in surreal moments for no reason at all. He hurled the gnome at Ardella just as she got back to her feet. There was the sound of an impact as the force of fifteen pounds of concrete hit her in the chest. She fell backward from the blow. Warring with his immediate instinct for survival was the sickening fear that he’d just killed the woman. But then he heard Ardella snarling. He heard the snapping of her teeth.

  She had managed to get back up on all fours. Then she began to rise up again as if she hadn’t been affected by the gnome at all. With a terrifying growl, she focused on Bram and then lunged at him again.

  Bram fell back instinctively, a section of picket fence hitting his back hard. He was sure it had taken out a good chunk of flesh. An exposed nail gouged his forearm at the same time. He felt the wetness of his own blood run down the back of his hand. But he immediately forgot about those superficial wounds. Ardella’s snarls filtered through his pain as she came at him again. He couldn’t help crying out as her weight came down heavily against him, pinning him against the fence. She was a large woman and it felt like an oversized sledgehammer had rammed his arm between her and the pickets. The pain in his arm was so intense that for a moment he wondered if she might have broken it.

  He bit back another oath as Ardella squirmed into a better position to renew her attack. She lunged awkwardly for him again. This time he kicked out at her, using his martial arts training to try and drive her off. From the corner of his eye he saw Elwin crouched on all fours, his eyes now also fixed on him. Elwin pushed himself clumsily to his feet and came straight for him.

  There wasn’t a moment for hesitating now, no time to try and make sense out of what was happening or to reason with the two of them. They were clearly beyond that. Bram turned and ran along the picket fence. As soft branches slapped against him, he was aware of the heavy scent of pine filling the air all around him. He could still hear Ardella snarling behind him, which urged him to run even faster. He stumbled again on the slippery grass. He swore but managed to regain his footing. He heard his own
ragged breathing in the stillness, but he didn’t care if he made any noise now. There was only one thought in his mind and that was to get away from the Dades. Or what looked like the Dades.

  He finally reached the driveway and sprinted toward his truck, wishing he had parked closer because it seemed to take him forever to get there. As he ran, he was fumbling frantically in his pocket for his keys.

  “Don’t drop them,” he admonished himself silently, desperately. “Whatever you do, don’t drop them, because you’re dead if you do.”

  Just as he reached his truck, the sun came out suddenly from behind the clouds. Any other time, the warmth of the sun would have felt good, but Bram barely noticed it. He was backing his truck down the driveway when Elwin slammed into the front of it. Ardella also appeared out of nowhere and she threw herself at his door. Bram continued to back toward the road as fast as he dared. With both Elwin and Ardella chasing him, he backed into the road, jammed the truck into first gear and then slammed his foot down on the accelerator. After a spray of gravel from his tires showered the Dades, he watched with unutterable relief as they got smaller and smaller in his rearview mirror.

  Chapter 2

  When a bloodied, shaken Bram pulled into the driveway and got out of his truck, the other three men in the garage immediately got to their feet and surrounded him.

  They looked at the blood on the back of his shirt, then frowned when they saw where the nail had gouged him. It was a deep cut and it had bled profusely. But it was the look on Bram’s face that worried them more than anything else.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Jonah Afton asked.

  “The Dades,” Bram got out breathlessly. “They’re dead. Or- or something.”

  “Or something?” Jonah echoed.

  “They’re not alive,” Bram told them.

  That confused the other men. “Which is it, Bram?” one of them asked. “They dead or are they alive?”

  “I saw Salina Dade all tore up. Dead for sure. And I think Elwin might have done it.”

  “Did what?” someone asked.

  “Killed her.”

  The other three men looked at him and then looked at each other as if they couldn’t decide whether this was some kind of joke or not.

  Jonah asked, “You’re saying Elwin Dade killed his own daughter?” He frowned. Saying it out loud made it seem even more ludicrous. “You’re sure she was dead?”

  “Do you think I don’t know a dead person when I see one?” Bram shot back, which wasn’t like him, either. “It wasn’t the Elwin Dade that we know,” he went on, sounding even more like a crazy person. “At first I didn’t recognize him. He looked like something that had just stepped out of a horror movie. It was him, but I’m telling you, it wasn’t him anymore.”

  They had never seen Bram like this before. He had a reputation for being absolutely cool and unshakable under fire. Right now he wasn’t making any sense. Clearly, something bad had happened at the Dade farm. Something that had shaken him up badly. Whether Bram had been in some kind of accident and was suffering from shock or confusion or something else, wasn’t clear yet.

  “Was he hurt?” Jonah asked. “Elwin?”

  “Hurt?” Bram echoed. “No, he- He just wasn’t right. I saw him go over to Salina’s dead body and tear into it.”

  “Tear into it? Like- ” Jonah didn’t finish. How did you finish a statement like that?

  “Like eating it,” Bram finished for him with barely any hesitation at all.

  There was a silence all the way around. That image was just too unbelievable. Elwin Dade was a mild, church-going man, who was well liked in the community. The kind of man who wouldn’t hurt a fly and here Bram was talking about - well, there was no other word for it - cannibalism. Possibly murder.

  “It had to be somebody else,” one of the men said. “Maybe a wild animal- ”

  “It was Elwin, I tell you,” Bram burst out, frustrated because he couldn’t make them understand what was still unbelievable, even to him. “I saw it with my own eyes. I saw him. And Ardella.”

  “You mean Ardella was there, too?”

  Now Bram’s eyes looked haunted with some terrible vision that only he could see as he nodded.

  “They weren’t dead. But they weren’t alive either,” he repeated. “Salina was torn apart. The dog was the same, ripped all to goddamned pieces. They looked like- They both looked like a bunch of lions or hyenas had been feeding on them.”

  “Well, then, it had to be some kind of animal attack,” someone said.

  “No.” Bram stopped and scrubbed his hands across his face, gathering himself for a moment before he could go on.

  “Only a wild animal could do something like that, Bram,” Jonah said quietly, trying to reason with him. “Not a man. No man would tear his daughter up that way and- ”

  “Dammit, it was Elwin Dade. I saw him myself. You didn’t see his face.” His voice lowered until it was a hoarse rasp. “In Salina’s throat I saw a tooth, Jonah. A human tooth.”

  “You know what you’re saying, Bram?” the other man asked him soberly.

  “I wish to hell I didn’t,” Bram answered him just as soberly. “Elwin wasn’t who he was. He looked like a corpse, but a walking one.”

  The men frowned as they looked among each other.

  “Like a- zombie, you mean?” one of them asked, hesitating as if he was almost afraid to say the ludicrous word.

  “Hell, yes, that’s just what I mean,” Bram managed in a hushed voice. “They were all messed up and covered in blood. And I think they would have killed me, too, if I hadn’t gotten out of there when I did.”

  It was a serious accusation. Whatever had happened at the Dade farm, it was murder that Bram was talking about. Possibly cannibalism.

  The four men had all served overseas together. They were ex-military and they had seen a lot of things. But this- this was beyond the experience of any of them. Some of them looked like they were still waiting for Bram to tell them it was all some kind of elaborate hoax. But Bram just wasn’t the kind for hoaxes.

  “We’ll need to report this,” Jonah said. “I’ll call Dave at the sheriff’s office. And someone needs to go over to the Dades and try to find out what the hell is going on.” He looked at Bram. “How long ago did this happen?”

  Bram looked up. The sun was climbing the sky but it was still barely over the trees. “Just as long as it took me to drive here,” he said like someone who was still half trapped in a nightmare and waiting to wake up. “My whole time overseas, I never saw anything like that. I threw a garden gnome at Ardella. It barely fazed her. She just kept coming.”

  “Ardella must be what?” one of the men asked as he looked around for an answer. “Sixty?”

  “Sixty-five, I think,” Bram answered him. “I threw a goddamned concrete garden gnome at her as hard as I could,” Bram repeated as he shoved his dark hair back with a trembling hand. “It should have killed her.”

  This really was serious, more than one man thought to himself, if Bram was actually trying to kill the woman. A sixty-five-year-old, grandmotherly woman who taught Sunday school at the church every week.

  “Is it possible that this has something to do with what’s going on?” Jonah wondered out loud.

  Bram looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Something is happening across the country. And in Europe,” Jonah answered him. “We were watching it on TV before you got here. There have been outbreaks of violence everywhere.”

  “What do you mean by violence?” Bram asked.

  “People attacking each other. Whatever it is, it looks like it’s global,” Jonah informed him.

  “Hell,” Bram breathed. “I hope to God it’s not the same thing I saw.”

  “It’s important to find out what we can while the power is still on,” Jonah told the other men. “The grid is still up, but if this is related, it could go down at any time. If this is something that will affect us in any way, I figure we’ve
got less than twenty-four hours to make some hard decisions. Whether this might be some kind of chemical or biological attack, we’ve got no way of knowing yet. And if this is some kind of new disease, however it’s spread, we don’t want any chance of getting exposed to it.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s close if it’s the same things that’s happening at the Dades,” one of the men pointed out.

  “If this is the start of some kind of pandemic, how do we know we’re not already infected?” another man asked.

  “We don’t,” Jonah replied. “I wish to hell we had more information,” he went on. “But until we do, we’ve got no way of knowing anything. Most likely, they’ll try to keep us in the dark as long as they can. I’ll make some calls, see what I can find out.”

  They were men used to taking action and taking care of their own, not waiting for someone else to do it. They had another thing in common. A common mistrust of the government. They had seen too much, knew too much. They all had families to take care of and there was no question that that would be their priority in this or any other crisis.

  Maybe whatever was happening was tied to what had happened to the Dades. There was no way of knowing for sure. Not yet. Maybe this was the beginning of a global pandemic. Bioterrorism or chemical warfare certainly wasn’t out of the question. Whatever was happening, there would be two kinds of people in the world. The prepared. And the unprepared. If things really were about to fall apart, violence would start escalating rapidly, which seemed to be happening already. Food would be gone in a day or two when people started panicking and cleaning out the stores. On day three or four, most domestic water supplies would run dry. They assumed the worst, that they could be facing a possible grid-down situation in the near future, and that’s when urbanized society would really begin to fall apart. Things would only get worse as food supplies were cut off and fear-driven people became desperate in their attempts to ward off starvation for themselves and their families.