“I know you did. Did you find anything interesting?”
“Maybe a nice place where we could get- cozy for a while.”
She looked up at him from beneath her lashes. “Cozy, huh?”
“Yeah. Someone turned the attic into a loft or something. There’s even a bed up there.” He gave her a conspiratorial look. “And a door that locks.”
That’s what they had both been waiting for. Privacy. She followed willingly when Lathan took her hand and led her inside.
Hours later, lying together in the quiet loft, Addy murmured, “We’re still drifting, Lathan.”
“We are,” he agreed. “But I think I’m close to having one of the cars running,” he told her. “We’re almost ready to leave this place.”
She didn’t know how she felt about that, because then she would have to face-
“You’ll be ready soon,” he whispered, preparing her. She pushed the disrupting thoughts away and fell into a deeper sleep with the steady, comforting beat of Lathan’s heart close by her.
“Addy.”
Lathan’s hoarse whisper woke her from a sound sleep. She didn’t want to get up. She wanted him to come back to bed and make love to her again. But he called her again and this time there was a strain in his voice that she couldn’t ignore. She heard a commotion downstairs. Footsteps running. Doors slamming.
By the time Addy reached the window, Lathan was throwing his clothes on as fast as he could.
“What do you see?” she asked coming up behind him, alarmed by his urgency now.
“Look for yourself,” he said grimly.
“What- ” Her voice ended in a gasp. Her eyes widened as she rubbed the sleep from them, trying to make sense out of what she was seeing in the distance.
“Get dressed,” she heard as Lathan grabbed his boots.
From downstairs came a pitiful wail, muffled by the ceiling and the walls. “Not dead. Oh, God, no. How could this have happened?”
Halfway down the staircase, Addy stopped short. It was a tense scene down below her. Lathan stood with his sword held at the ready as he faced another man, a stranger wearing military clothes. Parisa was there, too, white-faced and obviously distraught. No one was moving. No one was saying a word.
“What’s going on?” Addy asked, half fearing that by her very words she would precipitate some kind of reaction, some violence.
“That’s what I’m about to find out,” Lathan said without taking his eyes off the other man.
The man spoke. “I know this looks bad, but I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to your friends.”
“So you’re trying to tell me you just happened to show up at the wrong time?” Lathan made a slight scoffing noise under his breath.
Even facing the lethal threat of the sword, and Lathan’s aggressive behavior, the man didn’t lose his composure. And he didn’t back down. “Apparently that’s just what happened,” he said in a deep voice that was like tempered steel.
Lathan jerked his chin slightly in Parisa’s direction. “She said it wasn’t hunters.”
“Don’t you think I’d have blood all over me if I butchered those people the way she said they were?” the stranger pointed out.
Parisa suddenly seemed to find her voice, and she broke in, “He’s telling you the truth.”
Lathan glanced at Parisa, but he still hesitated for several tense moments. The man before him was well armed and he looked like he would be a formidable adversary. Finally, going on instinct alone, Lathan suddenly lowered his sword.
“I had to make sure,” he said without apology.
The man acknowledged Lathan’s decision with a slight nod of his head. “I’d have done the same.”
“Who?” Addy asked Parisa. She couldn’t bring herself to ask the rest. She barely got that one word out. Cold, stark fear was creeping through her veins like ice water. Someone was dead and she dreaded hearing the answer.
“Farran and Preston,” came Parisa’s reply.
Lathan looked from one woman to the other. “Anyone else?” he asked.
Parisa shook her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone else. I came right here.”
Lathan’s attention returned to the stranger. “First, you’re going to tell me who you are,” Lathan told him. “And then you’re going to tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”
The man answered one of the questions right off. “My name is Greyson Kincade. Just Grey.”
After the succinct introduction, Lathan said, “I saw military helicopters earlier. What the hell is going on?”
“That’s just what it is. The military.”
“What are they doing?”
“Cleaning up would be my guess.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I’m not here because of them. And I didn’t come with them. I’m assuming that those soldiers aren’t working for the American people anymore. They’re likely working for a group of men whose own interests come before anyone else’s. Who they might be is anybody’s guess.”
“That still doesn’t answer my second question,” Lathan went on. “What are you doing here?”
“I was sent to find the man behind all this.”
That surprised everyone in the room.
“Does that mean you know why this all happened in the first place?” Lathan asked.
“I do know the whys. And the hows,” Grey replied grimly. “But you’re not going to like the answers.”
“I already figured that out,” Lathan growled softly. “But we’ve been living this mess for a long time now. I think we deserve some answers.”
Parisa was wringing her hands. “What about Preston and Farran?” Both men turned toward her.
“You’re right,” Lathan said. “Answers can wait. Right now we need to know what happened out there, and we need to find out if everyone else is safe.” He looked at Grey. “We’ll go together.” To Parisa and Addy he said, “You both stay here where it’s safe.”
Safe? Addy didn’t know if there was any place that was safe. Especially now that there was the army and a murderer to think about, too.
The two men weren’t gone long. They confirmed what Parisa had reported. Preston and Farran had been brutally bludgeoned to death. It looked like Preston had died trying to protect Farran. Whoever had been responsible for the murders didn’t even bother to hide the bodies. But they had taken the time to make sure they wouldn’t come back as hunters.
“Did you see anyone else?” Addy asked. For all they knew, other people had been murdered, too. She paced the room as she grew more agitated. They should have run into someone that could give them answers.
“My guess is that everyone has gone to get a closer look at whatever the hell is going on out there,” Lathan said, trying to calm her.
They had heard distant explosions for some time now, and they had seen churning columns of black smoke billowing up into the sky in at least ten different places on the horizon.
“Since the cities aren’t needed anymore,” Grey said as he squinted into the distance. “They may have decided to level them so that the staggers- so the hunters, as you call them, don’t have a place to hide.”
“But there are still living people hiding out in the cities,” Addy said.
“Not for long,” Grey commented soberly. “As bad as things are, the military, whoever they’re working for, has probably been given orders to use whatever force it deems necessary to get the situation under control.”
“What’s it like out there?” Lathan wanted to know. “In other places?”
“It’s pretty much the same everywhere,” Grey answered him. “I haven’t run into anything different than what you see right here. Last I heard, this was worldwide, and that was some time ago.”
Addy was aware of the warmth and the light suddenly filling the room as the sun came out from behind the clouds. It set up a chain reaction. Neurons fired and a patch of memory flooded her brain.
She spun aroun
d. “I know you,” she said to Grey. “There was a book and you were in it.”
Greyson Kincade nodded. “Blood Scourge,” he acknowledged. “And if you read Blood Storm, then you know what the army did there. It looks like that’s about to happen here, too.”
“I was reading it when- ” Her voice trailed off and for a moment she slipped back into helpless confusion. “I don’t know how the book ended. I don’t think I finished it.”
She looked up again with a frown marring her face. “I remember now,” she said as another fragment of memory sifted through the darkness. “You were sent with a special team to find the man behind all this. But why are you here?”
“I came to warn you about what’s about to happen. Because it is like the books.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Lathan asked, confused now himself. “Just what was the book about?”
“It was about zombies,” Addy replied.
“Zombies, huh,” Lathan repeated with a frown.
“Strange coincidence, isn’t it?” Grey commented.
“It’s strange all right,” Lathan answered him back.
“But, hey, the world is full of stranger things,” Grey observed next.
Lathan agreed but he remained silent.
“There’s more happening here than you’re aware of,” Grey told them.
“Then we’re in more danger?” Addy asked but she already knew the answer. Thanks to human greed, corruption and radical ideologies, things had gotten out of hand and this plague had spread like an out-of-control wildfire.
“There were terror attacks, Addy,” Grey said, watching her face closely. “Do you remember that?”
“I- yes. But I don’t want to remember.”
Grey went on regardless. “I figure the people behind this must have had a plan to cleanse the earth of the undead,” he went on. “A world of flesh-eating monsters that they couldn’t control wouldn’t be of much use to them.”
“I haven’t seen anything like that,” she said.
Lathan shook his head. “Maybe they just haven’t gotten to that phase yet. But it has been a long time since all this started. It’s possible they got caught in their own trap. By now they should be taking steps to kill off the hunters. Or staggers, as you call them. Unless something went wrong.”
One corner of Grey’s mouth drew back into a slightly ironic smile. One dimple deepened. “I was on a mission,” he said. “That’s, uh,” he glanced at Addy. “Been changing.”
Lathan frowned at the silent exchange between the two of them.
Addy came right out and reassured him, “He’s one of the good guys, Lathan.”
Lathan shifted his gaze back to Grey as Addy added, “I’d trust him with my life, Lathan.”
Lathan thought that over and said, “If she says so.”
Grey went on to tell them about secret government research and stealth viruses and new species of genetically-altered bacteria capable of acquiring genetic material not only from those viruses, but from human and animal cells as well. He also talked about deliberately- contaminated vaccines and Trojan horses and a plot to infect everyone worldwide. About how, in his opinion, it was inevitable that by tampering with the delicate balance of nature, things were destined to eventually go wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong.
“Add to that a coordinated series of terrorists attacks like the world had never seen,” Grey finally said. “What could we expect to happen?”
Lathan shook his head as he took it all in, while Addy made a connection between fiction and non-fiction. The real and the unreal.
“You would think the damned things would start dying off,” Lathan said. “Is that in your book, too?”
“How do you think they would do that?” Grey asked, curious himself.
“I don’t know,” Lathan answered, half frustrated. “Their brains are already half decayed, aren’t they? Shouldn’t they be rotting even more and slowly wasting away, especially in the hot weather. And what happens when they freeze?” he asked. “What about up North?”
“Up North?” Grey echoed. “I hear they just thaw out again after the cold weather.”
It wasn’t encouraging.
“Well, we can’t wait for something to happen. Or someone to come along and save us,” Lathan said. “We’re still outnumbered. Badly. It comes down to what it always has. Survival.”
Grey agreed. Then he said, “It’s time for me to leave you. But think about what I said.”
They were standing behind a stone wall, staring off towards the horizon. There were more intermittent, muffled explosions in the distance. Though the ground shook only faintly, the wall was crumbling in some places.
“This wall’s not going to hold much longer,” Lathan said.
“I know that,” Addy answered him.
“We need to know what we’re up against when it does come down.” He was still gazing off into the distance as if he was trying to see into some unknown future. He breathed out a humorless laugh. He might as well look into a crystal ball for that.
Addy already knew what Lathan was going to say, so she said it first. “We can’t stay here.”
“No,” Lathan agreed with a sober shake of his head. “We can’t stay. It will put everyone in danger. And we can’t forget that there is still a murderer, or murderers, out there somewhere. Other lives might be in danger.
“This wall won’t even keep the hunters out,” he went on as his gaze ran the length of the wall. “They’ll eventually find their way through.”
“I know that, too” Addy said wistfully. “But it makes me feel safer.”
“You should let me do that.”
“I have been.”
“Not completely,” he reminded her.
Addy already knew what he was thinking.
“Lathan, don’t go. Something bad will happen.”
“I have to know what’s going on.” He turned his head and looked down at her. “You’ll be all right here until I get back.”
“You won’t let me go with you, will you?”
He shook his head.
“Where’s Beck?” she asked. Surely he wasn’t thinking about going alone. “Is he even alive?”
“The hell if I know,” Lathan sighed.
They had seen the empty whiskey bottles under a chair on the porch, but there was no sign of Beck. Lathan had no choice but to check things out by himself.
“I don’t want you to go,” Addy said as she turned to him. “Whatever is happening out there, it isn’t good.”
Yeah, she was probably right, Lathan thought. Helicopters. Explosions. Those weren’t good signs. But you couldn’t ignore them. They had to know what they were up against.
“Go with Parisa to the attic room and stay there,” he told Addy.
She opened her mouth to protest, but he stopped her.
“You’re making everything too complicated, Addy. Don’t overthink this.”
“You’re right,” she nodded. “I make myself crazy sometimes. What if- ” She had been about to say, what if she never saw him again, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.
But because he understood her so completely, he said recklessly, “Then let me give you something to remember.”
He gripped her shoulders and ground his mouth down on hers. In the kiss was reflected all the fear and all the uncertainty they were feeling. And all the longing that their hearts were capable of.
“When you’ve loved someone, you can’t ever really lose them completely,” Lathan said huskily as he drew back. He kept his head bowed and his forehead pressed against hers. “Remember that. The love we’ve shared is what matters. Death can’t take that away. Not all the death in the world. Trust me, Addy. It lives on. It will stay in every beat of your heart. Forever. It will make you strong,” he whispered.
He didn’t give her another moment to argue with him, and she didn’t have any choice in obeying him, because, without another word, he turned and headed straight for the mist-shr
ouded woods. Soon he had disappeared completely from sight.
Cayla had come and told them that Mader had killed Preston and Farran and that he knew she had seen him standing over the bodies with a bloody pipe and a bloody knife and that he would kill her, too, when he found her.
“If we all keep quiet, maybe he won’t find us,” Cayla said. “Maybe he won’t hurt anyone else.”
“You know that’s not true,” Addy told her. “He knows you saw him. He’ll look for us. He’ll think we’re afraid and he’ll hurt us even more.”
Cayla knew it was the truth, but facing the truth had always made her angry.
Standing in the shadows by the window, Parisa said, “We could have stopped all this,” she said.
“No, Parisa,” Cayla told her. “It was like an accident. No one can tell when an accident is going to happen. They’re unexpected. Unpredictable. We can’t guard against them.”
Cayla covered her mouth with her hand. “There was blood everywhere,” she said so softly that they could barely catch the words. “And they were so still and white.”
“I hate Mader.” Addy burst out suddenly.
“That still won’t bring them back,” Cayla told her.
Frustrated, Addy said, “I wish Lathan was back.”
“He has to take care of other people, too, Addy. You know that. Shhh,” Cayla soothed them all. “It’s getting dark now.”
“It’s always darkest before the light,” Parisa whispered. And then she said, “I know Mader’s out there somewhere. Waiting in the darkness.”
“What about everyone else?” Addy asked because she couldn’t forget. “Enid will be helpless against Mader. She can barely walk. What about Sisha? Who’s taking care of her? And where’s Dalin?”
“I don’t know,” Cayla answered her. “We were in that big house at the end of the street,” Cayla went on in a very quiet voice. “He had found a baseball hat. Like the one he was wearing when I first met him. He put the hat on and smiled at me and I- ” her voice broke for a moment. “He made me remember how I felt then.”
Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning Page 16