by Perrin Briar
“I have to say, I’m in agreement,” Anne said.
“He won’t live for long,” Jordan said. “Not with the injuries he has. Not in this desert.”
“Then it’s still a waste of food,” Jessie said.
Anne moved to Jordan and pressed her hand to his cheek. A cut to his eye oozed blood to another gash at the corner of his mouth. Anne leaned over the stern of Hope Tomorrow, getting her feet wet in the shallows, and pulled the First Aid box out from its protective casing.
“Sit down,” she said to Jordan.
Jordan did. Anne knelt beside him and began to clean his face with the antiseptic cleansing wipes. She pressed a little harder than she needed to, but Jordan grinned and bared it.
Sam joined Jessie at the water’s edge.
“Those are some pretty fancy moves you have there,” Sam said.
Jessie looked at her knuckles. They were red and sore.
“Not good enough,” Jessie said. “I wanted to kill him.”
“You would have done, if you’d kept going,” Sam said. “For what it’s worth, I think Jordan was right not to kill him.”
“I would have thought of all people you would have understood,” Jessie said.
“Why?” Sam said.
“Didn’t you ever feel angry at the people who locked you up?” Jessie said. “For reasons no one ever bothered explaining to you?”
“No,” Sam said. “I didn’t. I just thought it was a part of my life journey. It was my destiny to be in there. It brought me to Jordan and Anne. And you.”
There was an obvious emphasis on the last part.
“Don’t start thinking I’m going to be giving you smackers for every time I feel sorry for you,” Jessie said.
“With the smackers you give, I wouldn’t ever want one,” Sam said.
They turned to look at Jordan and Anne. Jessie looked at Sam out the corner of her eye. Her mouth formed a smile, but she stifled it quickly.
Sound carried well in the desert, where there was nothing to drown out the noise. The footsteps made by Ori were still audible, but growing distant. There was a voice on the wind, low like a wolf whispering, and then a deeper voice responding.
“No,” Ori’s voice said in the darkness. “No! No! Please! No!”
Footsteps hurried back toward Jordan and the others. Jordan stood up, holding his arms out to the side to protect Anne, Jessie and Sam. There was a thud, and a puff of dirt was kicked up and drifted into the light, and then a scraping noise as something was dragged away.
“Noooo!” Ori’s voice screamed. “No! No!”
There was a horrendous wet tearing sound, like innards falling to the ground. The scream became muffled and was cut short with a sharp crack.
Jordan and the others stared at the darkness, edging back toward Hope Tomorrow.
Footsteps approached them. Slow, and in no hurry. A figure emerged.
They all froze. Jordan turned as pale as a ghost.
Save for a burn mark across his face, he looked exactly as Jordan remembered him. He even still wore the same vampire Halloween costume, his hair long and black, hanging limp over his corpse-white face and blood-red lips.
Jordan felt a shiver run through his body from his toes to his head and back again. He was scared, and yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the small figure. Jordan was wrong. He wasn’t over the torture he’d been through. He realised with cold certainty that he never would be.
Tim tossed the backpack Jessie had given Ori onto the ground. It was covered in splatters of blood.
“I believe this is yours,” Tim said.
He made an attempt at a smile. It did not look genuine. He cast his eyes over Anne, Jessie and Sam.
“It’s nice to finally meet you all,” he said. “You’re very hard people to get a hold of. Jordan, aren’t you going to introduce us?”
Jordan’s voice locked up tight. They were all going to die. And it was his fault.
“Take me,” Jordan said. “Leave them out of this. They’re innocent.”
Tim shook his head.
“I need all of you,” he said. “Together.”
A dozen points of light glinted around them, the glimmer of undead eyes. When Jordan looked at one group of dots, more constellations appeared out the corner of his eyes. Looking at them brought more, ad infinitum. Just how many Lurchers were out there?
Tim rubbed his hands together, and then placed them behind his back.
“I would like you all to keep your hearts and minds open,” Tim said. “I have a proposition for you.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Perrin Briar is the author of the popular Blood Memory, Z-Minus and Swiss Family RobinZOM series. He makes his online home at www.perrinbriar.com. You can connect with Perrin on Twitter at @perrinbriar, on Facebook at facebook.com/perrinbriar and you should send him an email at [email protected] if the mood strikes you.
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Chris Smith has eight hours to get his infected daughter Maisie to the rumored cure or lose her forever. The only things in his way: a marauding army of killer zombies, a self-declared warrior goddess and a secret buried deep in his past.
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Book Three
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In the Swiss Family RobinZOM series
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Book Three
The Robinsons are rebuilding their lives after surviving the recent zombie onslaught. They've rebuilt their treehouse, fixed the water supply, begun to farm again, and carry out dangerous scouting missions to sweep up the last of the zombies. Just when everything is going well they each catch a terrible illness. They're in a race against time to discover their illness's cure before it's too late.
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In the Skip series
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Book Three
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In the Sink series
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A sinkhole is a natural phenomenon. It can happen anywhere, anytime. It drinks lakes dry, consumes jungles, and even demolishes entire mountains. You may have seen one in your street. But these things aren’t lost. They’ve simply been moved. Things are forgotten on the surface all the time. Beneath the crust, they’re always remembered.
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Standalone Novels
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When modern-day Scrooge Hetty Loveridge saw the opportunity to exploit an inheritance tax loophole for her children, she took it. She need only live seven more years. One week shy, she keels over, dead.
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Square
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Copyright © 2015 Perrin Briar
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by Briar Patch Publishing.
Cover design by Alisha at www.damonza.com
Editing by Gary Smailes at www.bubblecow.com
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