Deadrise (Book 6): Blood Curse

by Siara Brandt

  Night was always the worst time. But sometimes you were forced to be on the move. Sometimes you had to trust your instincts and do what you had to do to keep on surviving. Like running blindly in the darkness through a neighborhood that you’d never been to and looking for a temporary, safe haven in a house that you’d never stepped foot in before. But if you wanted to have a life, that’s what you did. You kept going, and sometimes you had to take chances.

  This was not the kind of life she was supposed to have. She’d had plans and dreams for herself. A zombie apocalypse hadn’t been part of those dreams. Right now, at the age of twenty-six, she was supposed to be well established in her career, be saving for a house of her own, be in a nurturing relationship with a decent, stable man, maybe thinking about marriage. Instead, her entire world had fallen apart overnight, and the truth was that she had left no tracks during the course of her twenty-six years that one good storm couldn’t wipe out in a minute. None of her plans or dreams had relevance any more. Her future was effectively as dead as those bodies she so desperately wanted to avoid. Ironically, all she longed for now was the past and all the things she had taken for granted. Like hot baths. Clean sheets. A bacon cheeseburger with a side of fries. A sense of peace and security. She glanced up at the seething skies. A raincoat.

  A jagged, branched streak of lightning crackled a path violently across the night sky and bathed the entire landscape around her in stark white light. She was tired of being exhausted. Tired of being hungry. Tired of having to plan everything out very, very carefully. There was no living in the moment anymore. No looking forward to something as simple as a pizza on Saturday night with friends.

  Above all, she wished she had never let herself be talked into taking that job in the city. Even if the pay had been good. In the past two years, she had only been back home a handful of times and now all she wanted to do was to go home, even though she didn’t know what she would find when she got there. The bone-deep grief she’d already experienced over the death of complete strangers was bad enough. To learn that she had lost her mother, that she might have died a horrible death all alone, would break her completely. Even though she knew this, she had to go back. Or she would die trying.

  As a deep sense of loneliness washed over her, she told herself again, as she’d told herself a hundred times before, that she wasn’t going to cry. Even if it felt like she was trapped in a never-ending nightmare that she couldn’t wake up from. She didn’t have the luxury of giving in to futile tears. Not now. Not yet. So she swallowed down the lump in her throat. She needed to stay focused if she wanted to have even a chance of making it back home to see her mother again.

  She scanned the nearest yard ahead of her, calculated her best route for reaching the row of bushes there and the cover it could provide her. As bad as the undead were, they weren’t the only dangers out there. Gangs and cutthroats roamed the streets. With no law to rein them in, some of them had turned almost as savage as the undead. And they were just as hungry. They would slit your throat or knife you in the back for a crust of bread without giving it a second thought.

  Who was more dangerous? The dead or the living? Sometimes it was hard to tell.

  In the next flash of lightning, she saw a black silhouette moving along the fence in the yard of the house she was headed for. She crouched down lower and stayed very still as she silently watched the familiar shuffling gait of the shadow as it passed close by her.

  They were everywhere. The living dead. The undead, some called them. Zombies. Walking corpses. No one knew for sure what they were or what had caused them to change in the first place or to act the way they did. Some people were convinced that this was some kind of pandemic. Other people believed it was the result of biological warfare, or a government experiment gone awry. Some people called it retribution, payback for the sins of the world. The only thing that was certain was that there were two kinds of terrifyingly dangerous predators out there, predators that were like ravening lions stalking their prey, and you had to stay alert at all times if you didn’t want to be eaten alive or murdered by the lawless factions that now controlled the city.

  Seeing her chance, she ran safely to the cover of the bushes and waited tensely for a few moments to see if anyone, or anything, had noticed her. Only then did she turn to look at the door of the house behind her. It was wide open. Most houses had already been ransacked for food and other valuables. Although what constituted a valuable commodity these days was something entirely different than it had been several months ago. Food, medicines and water were the items most sought after. They were items people were willing to kill for, or to die over. TV’s, computers and smartphones? All useless. So was anything else that required electricity.

  And weapons? People were always looking for weapons.

  Emma had one goal and that was to get out of the city. She was nearly there after a harrowing, two-week journey. There had been times when she thought she wasn’t going to make it, but she was almost there. She didn’t have far to go before she reached the outskirts of the final business section of the city. There wouldn’t be so many buildings to hide in there and she had some wide-open highways to cross. But beyond that, there would be open fields with extensive patches of woods for cover. She hoped it would be enough.

  She wondered about the rest of her group, whether any of them had made it out alive because, eventually, getting out of the city had been the goal of all of them. It had just taken some people longer to realize the wisdom in that than others. She had been part of a large group when this had all started. The group had banded together from the beginning and they had gathered more people as time went on. But after a while, it became apparent that the group was too large to move with any kind of stealth, something that was absolutely necessary for survival. Finally, it came down to a ruthless picking and choosing about who would stay and who would be forced to go off on their own.

  She’d never survive, she’d heard one of the men say about her when he thought she couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t fight, he’d argued, and she didn’t have any skills that could contribute substantially to the survival of the group. She just ate food, the man had said, food that was too precious to waste. Not to mention that clean, safe drinking water was even harder to come by. Better that some survived rather than all of them die. That was the justification that more and more people were forced to use.

  A lot of people had begun to die off from starvation at the very beginning. Even worse was the lack of sanitary water to drink. Bad water was just as deadly as dying from dehydration or starvation. Technology had seemed like a godsend to society for a very long time, but in exchange people had lost the ability to provide themselves with the basics, like food and water. Even shelter was not as safe as it had been.

  They needed to go back to castle walls with knights in armor, Emma thought. That’s what was needed now. That’s how far back society had fallen.

  In addition to the food and water shortages, enough people quickly realized that whoever was left when cold weather came would be facing death by freezing. Starvation, dehydration, sickness, freezing to death, not to mention the always present possibility of being eaten alive or murdered for what little you did have, those were terrifying things to have to face. Some people weren’t up to facing such deprivations. Some people gave up hope entirely. Suicides skyrocketed.

  A lot of people, like her, did hold onto some hope, the hope that things were better in the country where people were more self-reliant. And Emma had another motivation. Like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she just wanted to go home to her mother.

  She had taken off from the group before they could vote on it, before she could be abandoned. They’d underestimated her, she thought with a kind of grim satisfaction. She had survived despite their predictions. She had been on her own for two weeks now, was still alive after a crash course in how to survive a zombie apocalypse all alone. True, her survival had been born out of nothing more than fear and desperati
on, and sometimes pure luck. And she was tired. She was hungry. But she was alive and that’s what mattered.

  She’d covered a lot of ground the last few days. But right now the darkness and the impending storm weren’t helping her frayed nerves any. Lightning ripped the sky in jagged halves. A deafening clap of thunder made her pause and wait until it had passed. It covered up sounds she needed to be listening for.

  Unfortunately, the only way out of the city was on foot. All the roads were backed up with abandoned vehicles. Right now, before the storm unleashed its full fury, she had to find a safe place where she could rest for a while. She eyed the houses around her carefully. Going into a strange house, especially after dark, was never a good idea. There was no way to know what was inside a house.

  As she stared a little longer at the house closest to her, she made a decision. She had a bad feeling about this house and she had learned to trust her instincts. She would move on to the next house, or keep going until she found one that did feel right. That big white house down the street with the columns and the wraparound balcony, maybe.

  She stayed there in the shadows for as long as she dared, trying to penetrate the blackness all around her, as well as trying to keep her imagination from going into overdrive. She had seen so many horrible things already, that she had learned to expect one thing only, and that was the unexpected. Fear gnawed at her insides, but it was a feeling that she had almost gotten used to. Your stomach might be empty most of the time, but you never completely lost that queasy feeling that came along with fear, not completely. And the feeling of not knowing what to expect, that something might be stalking you, that right around the next corner-

  Stop, she ordered herself as she wiped her sweaty palms down her jeans. She drew a slow, steadying breath as she slowly rose to her feet, but froze before she had taken more than two steps when she heard what sounded like a groan from the direction she had intended heading.

  She had no way of knowing what had caused it. She didn’t want to know. In this world, simple curiosity could be a stupid mistake. And no one could afford to make stupid mistakes. Especially in the state she was in now. She was so dead tired that she could barely keep her eyes open. She needed to be wide awake and alert.

  She turned to look at the buildings around her and those on the other side of the street. She just had to be rational in her choice, make the best decision possible, and then hope for the best. Forget that groan.

  A bead of sweat trickled down the center of her back as she wished she could make herself invisible. The best she could do was to blend in with the shadows. As much as her brain told her to stay still, the adrenaline racing through her body was telling her to run. She ignored that, climbed a short flight of concrete steps and froze again. Fear sliced like a knife through her stomach as she realized someone was lying in the grass not far from her.

  She hadn’t been able to suppress a startled gasp. She saw the man clearly. He lay sprawled on the ground not fifteen feet away from her. His eyes were open and at first she thought he was dead, but then she realized that he was alive and he was staring straight at her. He groaned again.

  Emma realized immediately that he was not one of the undead, but that did not necessarily mean he was harmless. He was obviously hurt. In what she realized might be her last stupid mistake, she got down on her knees and leaned over him as she heard him gasp, “Help me.”

  The entire front of his shirt was stained dark, and she knew it had to be blood she was looking at. She didn’t know what had happened to him or what kind of wound he had. Still, she leaned closer and heard: “I hid it all in the bushes behind me.”

  Hid what? she wondered. Had he been wounded trying to protect what he had? Food? Water? Medicine?

  He swallowed convulsively and his head rolled to one side. Her stomach clenched in sympathy when she saw the knife protruding from his abdomen. It looked like it was imbedded very deeply, as far as it could go. There was also a large, deep hole in the side of his neck under the dark beard stubble on his cheeks. It was also a deep wound and it was bleeding profusely. The man’s face was the color of ashes and his breath came in short, rattling gasps. “Help me,” she heard again.

  “Try to lie still,” she said, not having any idea how she could even begin to help him. All she could think of was to try and stop some of the bleeding.

  “Just lay still,” she repeated.

  There was a look of gratitude in his eyes when he looked up at her. At least there was that. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t stem the flow of blood.

  His fingers suddenly curled around her wrist with surprising strength. “Stay away . . . from the house with the big columns . . . and the wraparound balco - n - y . . . ”

  His final word left him in a long sigh.

  Emma already knew it was too late for him. She watched, his body spasm once, briefly, before going limp. His head rolled heavily to the side. A moment later, his arm flopped lifelessly to the ground.

  He was beyond help now. He had two wounds that she could see. The one from the knife, and it looked like something had been gnawing at his neck. She knew what that meant. Anyone bitten . . .

  Anyone bitten was going to turn after they died.

  He wasn’t moving. Not now. But soon. Soon his eyes would open up and he would become a threat to her. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t even look to see what he had hidden in the bushes, no matter how valuable it might be.

  Emma had seen death before. Many times. And she had seen people come back from the dead. Right now adrenaline was coursing through her, along with that terrible, helpless, sad feeling she always got in her chest when she watched someone die and she couldn’t do anything about it. When they died without anyone even knowing who they were.

  But overriding that, alarm suddenly formed a tight coil in her belly. Had she seen something from the corner of her eye? Or had it been just a shadow? She couldn’t be sure because of the heavy bushes. But she soon realized that something was there. Something that rustled the bushes behind her. She crouched down low and waited, then saw that there were at least two shuffling figures moving around in the yard. It was only a matter of time before they found her.

  She glanced down at the man. He wasn’t moving. She reached down to her boot, clutched her knife in her hand and drew it out, ready to use it if she had to. Sweat now ran profusely down inside the homemade gear that protected her body.

  When she thought it was safe, she ran. Up the concrete steps and along the sidewalk. Feeling as exposed as a rabbit flushed out of the grass, she hurried toward that dark, gaping doorway, and watching it instead of where she was going, suppressed a cry as her foot jammed into a concrete planter. Wincing silently, she ignored the fierce pain stabbing through her toe.

  Inside the house, she kept her back to the wall and moved stealthily through the foyer past what must have been the living room. It was pitch black in there, with only intermittent flashes of lightning flickering through the windows. At the bottom of a staircase, she paused to listen and to catch her breath. It was the same at the top of the stairs. Pitch black with stabs of pulsating light. She didn’t see anything moving, but there was no telling what was up there.

  She made her way carefully up the staircase, trying to probe the shadows with every flash of lightning. At the top of the stairs she paused on the second floor landing to listen once again, waiting to see what the lightning would reveal.

  The hallway was deserted. She could see that now. She couldn’t hear any noise, either, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was alone because she didn’t know what any of the side rooms held. She stood outside one of the bedrooms for a long time before she decided she either had to go inside or she had to choose another room. She finally entered the room and closed the door behind her, trying to make as little sound as possible.

  Lightning and thunder accompanied her every move. Other than that, the room seemed deathly silent. The instant she had stepped across the room to the window, howe
ver, a wave of stark panic seized her, almost paralyzing her. She was certain that someone was in the room with her. She could feel a presence. Whether it was a living person or one of the undead, she didn’t know. For all she knew, it could be the same person who had put the knife in that man’s chest.

  She stood there tensed and alert, listening for the slightest sound. Fight or flight. It was going to be one or the other.

  A deafening boom crashed outside. It shook the very foundation of the house. It was followed by a sizzling bolt of lightning. She had to make her move now and it had better be the right one or she might very well pay with her life . . .

  Where was he? What was he?

  She needed to get out of that room. Now.

  She didn’t look behind her, not even when she felt something rush at her. She bolted for the door and was frantically trying to turn the knob and pull it open.

  But the door wouldn’t open. Something was holding it closed. As she tried to understand what it was, masculine arms closed around her, folding around her like bands of steel. She was being dragged back by someone much bigger than her, much stronger.

  That’s when she knew she wasn’t going to make it.

  Chapter8

  Vayna Biggers was driven by hunger and by thirst and by fear. But mostly she was driven by maternal instincts. Keeping her son alive had become her one and only priority. Arlend’s one and only plan to stay blissfully ignorant and wait for help to arrive, clearly, was not going to keep them alive for very much longer. In fact, it was nothing more than a slow death sentence. And yet, even facing starvation, getting Arlend to the leave the condo had not been easy. When Vayna had made the decision to take Rylan and leave without him, Arlend had finally relented and agreed to go with them. Not that he had any choice in the matter. With both the food and water completely gone, staying in the condo had ceased to be an option.