Deadrise (Book 6): Blood Curse

by Siara Brandt

  Jonah looked up. No chem trails in the sky this morning. He always checked. It was part of his routine. But the sky was clear and cloudless. God knew, he didn’t want to have to think about that right now, or something being spread overhead.

  They had seen things fall apart in third world countries. Sometimes it was intentional. Sometimes it was not. They knew that a lot of people were going to close their eyes and hope for the best, or for someone to come to their rescue and take care of them. Preparedness might be a way of life for some people, the minority, but they knew that more often than not, ignorance for others was a way of surviving.

  “We’ll learn what we can, make sure our families are safe, and then we’ll meet back here and decide what to do next. We’re lucky the weather’s halfway decent. We can take to the woods if we have to. And we’ve got the Compound. If this is a disaster of global proportions, we’re about as prepared as we can be.”

  Which was more than most people could say.

  “We’ll take a ride over to the Dades and see if we can figure anything out,” Jonah said.

  “And then?” someone asked.

  “And then we hunker down at the Compound and wait for Reyne,” Jonah answered him. “If this is something serious, Reyne will probably be on top of it more than any of us.”

  “But if this is something really bad, Reyne is in the city,” one of the men pointed out. “If things start falling apart, there’s a chance he could get trapped there.”

  In the event of some major catastrophe, they knew that cities would quickly become death traps. With traffic backed up and clogging the roads in and out, people would be forced to try and make it out of the cities on foot. If they could even make it out at all. If there was not attempts at an enforced quarantine. The cities would become the new war zones.

  “Yeah, but this is Reyne we’re talking about,” Jonah said. “He’ll get here. Hell or high water won’t stop him.”

  They all looked up at the sound of a plane’s engine sputtering loudly above them.

  “He’s flying low,” someone commented, then added tensely, “Damned low.”

  “Something’s wrong,” another man added.

  They watched as the plane dropped even lower, then dipped into a sudden nosedive and disappeared into the tree line. The disappearance was followed almost immediately by an explosion and a plume of thick, black smoke billowing high above the trees.

  The small group of men continued to stare in stunned disbelief at the spot to where the plane had just disappeared.

  “Whatever is happening, I think we can assume that it’s bad and that it’s only going to get worse.”

  “Yeah, real quick,” someone agreed with him.

  An then Jonah, who had led them before, said, “Let’s go. If there are any survivors, they may need our help.” He wasn’t a man to waste words. He was already on his way to his vehicle.

  He was right. Things were very, very bad. And they were about to get worse than any of them could have imagined.

  Chapter 3

  Reyne Coulter tossed his pen down in the dead center of the big, elaborately-carved mahogany desk he was sitting behind. As he stretched out his long legs and sprawled back in the plush leather chair, it creaked ominously beneath his weight. As he glanced up, his dark brows drew together in a frowning perusal of the richly-appointed details of the office that surrounded him. It was not a small office by any means, but it still felt confining. It still felt like a cage. There were no bars on the windows, yet it had seemed that all four walls had been closing in on him all morning. It was nearly noon and he was still battling the same sense of restlessness that had been plaguing him all morning. He was still wishing he was anywhere else but here.

  With a deep sigh, he got up out of the chair and walked over to the window. He was over six feet tall, lean and hard-muscled, a man used to strenuous physical activity, not one who was used to being confined in an office, even one as spacious and luxuriously-furnished as this one was. He crossed over to the tinted windows that took up one entire wall and adjusted the blinds so that he could look down into the street six floors below him. Not that he had much time to look, but at least the view included a park with a little bit of green. Other than that, there was nothing but concrete. Concrete and buildings and traffic, and a constant stream of anonymous, nameless people who were part of the proverbial rat race as they rushed to or from their own offices.

  It had not been a good day, but then there hadn’t been any good days since he had agreed to take on this job. At that, he’d only agreed because he was doing a favor for a friend. When Eaton Harwood had been fired, he had not only taken his office keys with him. He had taken passwords, codes and anything else he could think of that would make things damn near impossible to straighten out. A vindictive little bastard, Harwood had left things, in short, a fucked-up mess, clearly doing everything he could to sabotage his replacement. And Reyne was supposed to unravel it all.

  Turning from the windows, he looked over at the massive desk, which was cluttered with foot-high stacks of folders, papers and various pieces of computer equipment. One corner of his mouth quirked sarcastically. Somebody should have realized that Harwood was bad news a long time ago. There had been plenty of signs along the way. For one thing, the man had spared no expense when it came to furnishing and decorating his own office. Reyne looked at the oil paintings on the walls and the expensive furniture, which included a leather sofa and several silk-upholstered chairs that looked like they belonged in the drawing room of a mansion, not in a downtown office. The rest of the offices were plain to the point of being Spartan. But then Harwood had been secretly lining his pockets in every way that he could think of for the past three years, in addition to sexually harassing every secretary he came in contact with that was not nearing retirement age.

  Reyne glanced up at the clock. Normally, immersing himself in work cleared his mind and gave him focus. But that wasn’t the case today. Every time he turned around he was confronted by a whole new set of unexpected problems. He had tried calling Jordan Sauder, the friend he was working for, to discuss the latest problems that had come up first thing that morning. Either Jordan was in a dead zone or he wasn’t answering his phone, and that wasn’t like him, so Reyne had no choice but to wait for him to call or to show up.

  He stalked across the room like a restless panther prowling the confines of its cage. As he sat down behind the desk again, he mentally counted the days he had been here, and calculated, as best he could, barring too many more unforeseen problems, the days he had left. He figured he had three days left to go. Four tops. Sitting behind a desk certainly wasn’t a permanent option for him. And if this wasn’t temporary, and if Jordan’s brother-in-law hadn’t made such a complete mess of the business, he wouldn’t be here at all. Problem was, things were worse than they’d first suspected. A lot worse.

  Okay, maybe he had to play the businessman for a while but that didn’t mean he had to wear a tie and this straight jacket of a suit coat, he told himself as he jerked the tie loose. The damned thing felt like a noose. He didn’t care how “corporate” he looked today, not after the morning he’d had. He didn’t have any meetings to attend this afternoon, thank God, so the lack of a tie shouldn’t make any difference at all.

  He leaned over and started fishing through the bottom drawer of the desk, knowing he couldn’t put off looking through the files Harwood had stashed there. He finally lifted out a stack of folders, dropped the files on the desk and opened the first one.

  Ah, hell.

  What he saw had him scowling all over again. A single word was scrawled in Harwood’s now-familiar handwriting: SUCKER.

  No doubt this was going to be good, Reyne thought with a deep sigh. But he closed the file again, deciding that he should probably give himself a break, take time out for a nice leisurely lunch before he got started. He’d get out of the office for a while, order a steak and a beer from the bar downstairs, and then he could begin looking int
o this latest sabotage attempt, whatever it was. From the thickness of the folders, and the accompanying note with its open taunt, he was definitely going to need some fortification before he even began tackling it.

  He picked up his half-empty coffee cup and drained it as he turned back to look out the window. Saw-

  Smoke.

  Thick, dark clouds of it were billowing up to the west, high above the tops of the buildings in the distance. A high-rise fire? He couldn’t tell.

  He looked up as the door burst open without so much as a warning knock.

  “Mr. Coulter, there’s something you need to see.”

  Caleb Brinley didn’t enter the office. He stayed rooted in the doorway, looking as distraught as somebody who had just found out his entire family had been wiped out in some kind of unforeseeable, freak accident.

  Thinking that the young man might be referring to the smoke, Reyne began, “I already saw- ”

  But in an instant Reyne’s eyes narrowed to a hard, steely gray as he set his coffee cup down. The look on Caleb’s face told him that this was about more than just a fire. Something was wrong, seriously wrong. He didn’t need another major problem this morning, but then, hell, he should have anticipated one.

  “What’s wrong now?” Reyne asked.

  For a long moment, Caleb just stood there, looking like he didn’t know how to answer him. And then he said in a voice that was almost trembling with emotion, “You need to come and see this for yourself.”

  See what? Reyne wondered as he got up out of his chair.

  He never got a chance to ask the question out loud. Caleb had already started down the hallway without even waiting for Reyne to follow him. In fact, he was hurrying down the hallway in a near run, leaving Reyne to wonder what could be so urgent.

  Obviously, Reyne thought, this was something he was going to have to handle in person. Whether Caleb was afraid to tell him what it was, or whether he didn’t know how to explain the problem, remained to be seen.

  Finally, Caleb said with an anxious glance over his shoulder as he kept moving, “I hope he’s still in there.”

  Reyne didn’t know what he was talking about. Of course he had questions, but he couldn’t ask them just yet, not with the man’s back to him. If Caleb was making a big deal out of nothing, or if he was blowing things out of proportion again, Reyne was not going to be very happy. Caleb had already proven he had a knack for exaggeration. He was so fussy and nervous that on day one he had reminded Reyne of a French poodle. Caleb led him to the inner offices, and then he headed straight for the conference rooms at the far end of the hallway, leaving Reyne to imagine all kinds of bad scenarios.

  When they halted before the door of the largest conference room, Reyne stopped short and couldn’t hold back his own breathless exclamation. “What the hell- ”

  He never finished. All he could do was stare at the man on the other side of the door. Or what looked like a man.

  Whoever it was inside the conference room, his white shirt was covered with blood. And the room was a bloody mess behind him. Even the walls were streaked with bloody handprints. Had there been a fight? Reyne wondered. An accident? He hoped it wasn’t an attack by a disgruntled employee. Where the hell was Jordan while everything was falling apart?

  He turned to the man beside him and asked, “Did you lock him in there?”

  Caleb nodded his head vigorously without taking his eyes off the door. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed convulsively. By now a small crowd was gathering behind them. Reyne Coulter was the kind of man who exuded an air of authority. Jordan wasn’t here so the others automatically looked to him to tell them what was happening.

  Except Reyne didn’t know any more than they did.

  “Tell me what happened,” Reyne said as his eyes narrowed.

  Caleb shook his head. “I- I don’t even know where to begin. I didn’t realize it at first, but that’s Brexton Teasdale from Accounting. I walked right in there, not seeing him at first. As soon as he looked at me, I realized something was wrong. He came right at me, scared the living shit out of me. I got out of there as fast as I could and slammed the door behind me. When I first got hired here, I started working in the Accounting Office,” Caleb murmured as an afterthought. “Teasdale wasn’t an easy man to work for then,”

  Reyne stared at the man on the other side of the door for a moment and then muttered his own thought. “Yeah? Well, he doesn’t look so easy to get along with right now, either.”

  “You got any idea what’s wrong with him?” Caleb asked, shooting a glance up at Reyne.

  “Not a clue,” Reyne admitted.

  “He doesn’t even seem- human,” Caleb said.

  Reyne agreed. “Is anyone else in there with him?” he asked.

  When Caleb didn’t answer right away, Reyne looked down at the smaller man.

  “Honestly, I didn’t check,” Caleb told him. “At the time, I just thought of getting out of there. I didn’t see anyone else. I hope to God someone isn’t in there with him and is hiding under one of the tables.” He stood on his toes and leaned slightly forward to try and get a better look inside the room. It wasn’t easy seeing around Teasdale who was lumbering around the room like an enraged grizzly bear.

  Reyne continued to study the man on the other side of the glass, assessing it all with a trained eye. He’d seen a lot of things on the battlefield and in covert ops, things that could give any man nightmares. But as well trained as he was for handling all kinds of disasters and emergency situations, he had never seen anything like this. And until they knew what was wrong, he was thinking that a quarantine just might be called for. A temporary one at least.

  Oh, yeah. There was definitely something seriously wrong here.

  “You made a good call, locking him in there like that,” he told Caleb.

  “What the hell are we looking at?” someone asked behind them.

  “Obviously there’s something wrong with him,” another voice said. “He’s sick or something. But who do we call?”

  Reyne didn’t answer right away. He didn’t have an answer to the question himself. Finally, he said, “Let me make some calls.”

  Everyone looked up as the lights flickered, went out completely for a second or two and then came back on again.

  Oh, hell, that wasn’t good. Everyone turned back to the window. And the thing beyond it. No doubt, they were all thinking the same thing. If everything went black, how could they be sure Teasdale would stay confined?

  They looked around when another small, highly-excited group of people came hurrying down the hallway. One of them had a bloody bandage wrapped around one hand.

  “What happened to him?” Reyne asked.

  “Teasdale bit him,” someone said.

  “When did this happen?” Reyne wanted to know.

  “Not long ago,” was the reply.

  Reyne jerked his head in Teasdale’s direction. “Did he look like that when he attacked him?”

  One of the women shook her head. “Not that bad.”

  When Reyne turned back to the door his lips were set in grim lines. His eyes were hard and assessing. Teasdale was now throwing himself against the door. Blood streaked the glass. Reyne had seen crazy things all around the globe, but he’d never seen anything like this. He had a bad feeling about this. A really bad feeling.

  “You have no idea what it is?” Caleb asked him.

  “No,” Reyne replied shortly.

  “You think he can see us?” Caleb asked in a tense whisper. “Look at his eyes. They’re all messed up.”

  They were. The entire eye, even the pupil, was pale and milky looking.

  “I don’t know,” Reyne answered. “He can hear us though.”

  As if to confirm that statement, the thing on the other side of the door lunged at the glass with renewed fury. The growing crowd of onlookers gave a collective gasp and drew back in one terrified, united surge. Someone muttered a profanity, a long, colorful one.


  “What the hell is wrong with him?” Reyne heard.

  “You think he has rabies or something like that?” a woman asked.

  “Maybe,” someone answered her. “He looks like he wants to tear us apart. What else but rabies could make someone act like that?”

  “Maybe he’s having a reaction to some bad drugs,” someone suggested. “I’m just saying,” he quickly added when he got some prolonged stares. “You remember that naked guy in Georgia who attacked someone and bit their face off.”

  Except it had been in Florida, not Georgia, Reyne mentally corrected.

  Except Reyne had never seen drugs make someone look like that.

  One of the bolder men moved several steps forward to get a better look over Reyne’s shoulder, but Teasdale fixed him with a glare that was so feral and so hostile that the man immediately stepped back until he was again standing behind Reyne.

  “We’re just riling him up,” one of the onlookers said.

  “Yeah, you’re right. He looks dangerous.”

  With his face pressed up against the glass, Teasdale’s mouth opened and twisted in a snarl. Though the sound was muffled, they could hear it even through the glass.

  “Should we call his wife?” Reyne heard.

  “What would we say?”

  Good question. What would they say?

  “Maybe he can’t see very well with his eyes like that,” someone said in a low, tense voice. “But he’s thinking.”

  It appeared he was.

  Teasdale’s mouth opened wide. He stiffened and his whole body went into a series of violent spasms.

  “Oh, that was gross,” someone said as Teasdale projected a bloody splatter of vomit against the window. It slid down the glass in dark, slow-moving chunks. At the disgusting sight, several of the onlookers couldn’t help gagging themselves. Most looked away and only cautiously looked back again.