Death's Awakening (Eternal Sorrows, #1)

by Sarra Cannon

He’d been waiting all morning for the three from his dream to arrive.

  He was trying to imagine what it would feel like for them. Who knows where they’d been hiding out since this whole thing began. What they’d lost or what they’d been through. And here they were, headed to what they thought was a safe zone.

  They were going to be majorly disappointed.

  Crash had watched as the first of the military convoy had arrived. That was first light, just as the sun was peering over the horizon. They had set up a perimeter using tanks and concrete barricades they’d brought in on a truck.

  The survivors had started reporting soon after. They came in cars, trucks, on foot. One lady even pulled up on a golf cart.

  By noon, the area was buzzing with activity. The whole process was surprisingly organized with survivors checking in and being examined on one end, then being assigned a number and a basic supply kit in section two. Finally, they made their way to the final section where they were asked to wait until the first of the convoy started heading back to the safe zone.

  Crash had managed to hack in to the central communications system of the entire United States Military. Through there, he had been able to locate the group that was assigned to McLean. With a few simple pieces of code, he now had access to every computer, every radio, even every cell phone of the military personnel in that unit.

  It was amazing what he’d become capable of in the past week.

  He still didn’t completely understand how or why it worked, but his mind was able to communicate with any machine. It was as if they were people he was talking to on a forum, only they weren’t people at all.

  If he wanted to get into a person’s cell phone, he simply reached out to the phone with his mind.

  It sounded insane, but it was real and it was awesome.

  And what made it even more amazing was the fact that all of the power in the greater D.C. area had gone out two days ago. No one in an entire fifty mile radius of his neighborhood in Trinidad had power.

  Except him.

  He’d simply told the machines to all work and they did. He could even unplug his computer from the wall if he wanted to, and it would still work.

  So here he was in his crappy basement apartment with all these luxuries no one else had. Of course, he was glad to be below ground with no windows. That way, if anyone out there was looking for a place to pillage and plunder, they wouldn’t know what he had down here.

  He paced behind his computer now, waiting for the three to arrive. It had to be soon.

  The evac site looked like a war zone with its mangled, half-eaten bodies and downed zombies piled on top of each other.

  There had been a group of survivors, but they got the heck out of there as soon as they could. On the radio, the acting commander had said he didn’t want to risk losing any further survivors, but Crash thought the guy was probably just scared to death and wanting to get the hell out of dodge.

  From the corner of his eye, Crash saw movement on the screen. He leaned over the desk, planting his palms on the top of it as he watched the screen closely.

  Was it them?

  A van pulled up and three living, breathing humans got out, their faces stricken with fear and sorrow and confusion.

  Yes, it was them. Two girls and a guy. All three about Crash’s age. Maybe a little younger. But it was them.

  The blond guy walked over toward where the check-in had been and Crash sat down, prepared.

  A two-way radio had been left on the table. They had been using it to communicate with the supply camp, but when all hell broke lose, it was discarded and no one bothered coming back for it.

  Crash pulled his microphone close to his mouth and took in a breath. This was going to be interesting.

  “Pick up,” he said. “Is anyone there?”

  He waited, watching on one of the hospital’s outside security cameras as the three of them hurried toward the radio. It was the guy who picked it up first.

  “Hi,” he answered. “This is Noah Vincent. We’re reporting for evacuation, but this place is a mess.”

  “I know,” Crash said. “There was an attack earlier in the day. Anyone who was still alive when the smoke cleared was taken to the safe zone.”

  “Is that where you are now?” the hot blonde girl shouted into the radio. “Are you coming to get us?”

  Crash cleared his throat. Man, she was one hot tamale. But she sounded terrified and it made his stomach sick to have to break the news to her.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. But the soldiers aren’t coming back for anyone. I’m pretty sure they’ve written that place off for good at this point.”

  “Wait, so you aren’t a soldier?” Noah asked.

  “Not in the slightest bit,” Crash answered.

  “Then who are you?”

  Good question. This was going to be the hard part. How exactly would explain this? They would think he was some nut-job.

  “My name is Crash,” he said. “I’m just a guy who’s been hiding out in a basement for the past several weeks. But I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for all three of you.”

  He saw them stare at each other, confused. He couldn’t blame them. He was still confused about how all this worked.

  “This is going to sound crazy, but I dreamed about you before this virus even started,” he said. “I didn’t know your names, but I knew that fate would somehow bring us together.”

  He paused. No one said anything, so he kept going.

  “I hope you guys are still with me here, because this is important,” he said.

  “We’re listening,” Noah said.

  Crash ran a hand through his hair. “I dreamed about the virus before it happened,” he said. “And somehow, I knew that I needed to be prepared to meet up with four others. People like me who would have a special purpose in this new world. Am I making any sense?”

  The girl with the black hair exchanged a meaningful look with Noah. She took the radio from his hands.

  “More than you can know,” she said. “So you have special abilities too? Something extraordinary that you couldn’t have ever imagined doing before this began?”

  He laughed. “How do you think I’m talking to you now?” he asked. “I’m sitting at my computer in a city with no power, but for me, the power is still on and on my monitors I can see you clear as day from the security cameras just outside the emergency room.”

  All three of them turned and looked toward the hospital.

  “I’m Parrish, by the way,” she said. “And this is Karmen.”

  Karmen, huh? In his mind, he’d been calling her Barbie. He kind of liked that better, because she was so freaking perfect.

  She grabbed the radio from Parrish. “You said you have power? And food?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  “Where are you?” Noah asked.

  “Trinidad,” he said.

  “Like Trinidad the island?” Noah’s eyes got huge and Crash had to laugh.

  “No, like Trinidad, the neighborhood in D.C.”

  Noah’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “Man, that’s not too far from here,” he said.

  “I know,” Crash told him. “Do you think you can make it here? I’ve got enough food and water to last for months. I think we have a lot we need to talk about.”

  “Wait,” Parrish said. “Earlier, you said that in your dream there were four of us. But we only have three.”

  Crash frowned. “I know,” he said. “I can’t explain it. I just know there are five of us out there. Five with special abilities. The four of us and someone else, but for some reason, I haven’t dreamed of the fifth person yet.”

  Noah took the radio. “How do we know we can trust you?”

  Crash looked at the video. “Because you have nowhere else to go.”

  Parrish

  As she climbed out of her dead mother’s van, Parrish’s hand trembled. On the road, they had seen a few undead wandering around, but there was a sense of safety ins
ide the car. As long as they were moving, there was no way any of the zombies could touch them.

  They had brought the radio with them and Crash had managed to get them all the way to the 14th Street Bridge in the van, but now there was no choice but to go the rest of the way on foot.

  The entire bridge was one massive pile-up of cars. People who had been desperate to flee the city.

  Getting out of the car was terrifying. In the distance, she could see the sun hanging dangerously low in the sky. Night would fall in the next few hours, and they did not want to be outside when the rest of the undead wandered out to look for food.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Noah said, startling her when she saw that he had made his way around the car to her side. “We’ll make it in time.”

  Being with Noah definitely made her feel better and she was glad not to be alone on this journey. She tossed a look back at Karmen. She was worried about her. Afraid she was going to be a liability if things got rough. She seemed pretty shaken up by the scene at the evac point. Not that Parrish could blame her. It was gruesome.

  And she knew Karmen had been thinking of it as her chance to get back to a normal life.

  Normal just wasn’t what fate had in mind for them.

  “Okay, let’s get this over with,” she said, carefully shutting the door to the van. “According to Crash we need to be as quiet as possible from here on out. He said there are packs of them inside some of these dark buildings. He thinks that the sun makes their bodies decompose faster, so they try to stay cool during the day and only come out at night, after the sun goes down. But if they hear us, they won’t care about the sun. They’ll just see us as food, and come straight after us.”

  “I don’t think I can do this,” Karmen cried. “Why don’t we just turn around, head for the mountains or someplace secluded? I don’t get why we’re voluntarily going in to the city.”

  “We’ve been through all that,” Parrish told her, motioning for her to join them outside the car and to keep her voice down. “You’re free to stay here or drive up to the mountains on your own, but we’re going in.”

  “Fine, but if we die in there—”

  “If we die in there, what? You’ll kill us?” Parrish smiled. Karmen didn’t seem amused.

  “Let’s just get going,” Noah said. “We’re burning daylight.”

  “Here,” Parrish handed the radio to Karmen, “you talk to Crash and help guide us through the city. Noah, you stay out front, and I’ll stay in the back.”

  Parrish took her shotgun out of her bag, so glad they’d brought all the guns despite the orders to leave them behind. She gripped the gun tight and followed as Noah started climbing through the obstacle of smashed up cars that blocked the bridge into the city.

  Karmen

  Karmen struggled to keep her eyes on Noah’s back or her own feet. Anything to keep from looking into those smashed-up cars with dead bodies inside. All those people who had only been trying to get out of the city. Her stomach felt queasy just thinking about it. She definitely didn’t need to see it.

  It was all just too much. Too much sorrow. Too much disappointment. Too much uncertainty.

  The evacuation was her last real hope of a normal life. She’d wanted it so badly. When they drove up and saw all those dead bodies, the soldiers gone, she almost lost her mind.

  And now these cars. She didn’t want to look.

  Still, her eyes betrayed her.

  Karmen glanced inside the blue station wagon to her right and immediately wished she hadn’t. Inside, a small child, still strapped into her car seat, lay lifeless. In front of her, Noah’s foot slipped. He told her to wait there while he searched for a better path through the pileup. No matter how hard she tried, Karmen couldn’t tear her eyes away from that stupid blue station wagon. In the front seat, the mother was slumped over the steering wheel. Another person was doubled over in the passenger seat. The father? Maybe. She couldn’t see very well from this angle.

  But it was the child that disturbed her so much. She looked like she was only sleeping. Karmen leaned in toward the car and studied the little sleeping face. The more she looked, the more she began to convince herself that the child was still alive. Her cheeks looked almost rosy in this lighting.

  The window was rolled down and Karmen reached out her hand, very slowly, toward the child. She thought that maybe if she could shake the little girl’s shoulders, she could find out if she was still alive or dead. She imagined saving this little precious thing from her metal tomb, and carrying her to Crash’s house where she could clean her up and take care of her.

  Her hand shook slightly as she reached through the open window. She could hear Noah and Parrish whispering toward the top of the car pyramid, but she couldn’t hear them. All she could think about was this little girl and what she would name her once she got her out of the car.

  “Hello?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  Karmen ran her index finger over the child’s pale, soft cheek. The girl’s eyes opened wide and her head twisted with a morbid crack. The girl made an awful hissing noise and Karmen jumped back, screaming in horror.

  Inside the car, the child writhed against her restraints. Her arms stretched out toward Karmen, and her jaw opened and snapped shut like an alligator. Falling back, Karmen scraped the back of her leg against the twisted metal of a pickup truck and screamed again, this time in pain.

  Parrish and Noah ran to her side. “What happened?” Parrish asked, her eyes wide.

  Karmen wasn’t sure she could trust her voice. It was as if the moment had scared it out of her. Instead, she could only point toward the child zombie in the station wagon. In horror, she watched as Parrish lifted the butt of her shotgun and jammed it into the child’s head. The tiny figure went still.

  The group kept moving, finally finding a path through the twisted pile of metal. But for a long time afterward, Karmen’s heart was filled with a sick, hollow sense of loss.

  Noah

  “You have to be more careful.”

  Noah wasn’t sure whether he wanted to hit Karmen or hug her. What was she thinking? Thank God the child had been strapped into a car seat or else he would be facing a very difficult decision right about now. She could have been bitten by that thing.

  He shuddered.

  “We need to keep moving,” he said.

  Karmen wiped her eyes and nodded. He felt like a complete ass for being so cold toward her, but what choice did he have? Hadn’t he lost everything, too? There simply wasn’t time for pity and compassion until they got to a safer place, and Crash’s apartment was still six miles away. On foot, they would be lucky to make it before dark.

  Noah made his way back over the top of the metal mountain of cars, making sure to find a solid place to set his foot before putting his weight on it. Slowly, the three of them made it through the pileup and back on to the asphalt of the main road.

  “It’s so eerie out here,” Parrish whispered. “So quiet.”

  She was right. There were none of the sounds you would expect to hear on a busy intersection in Washington D.C. No car horns beeping. No voices or footsteps. The familiar sound of tires on the road as cars zipped by. It was all missing. Instead, the city was silent. Flat.

  Dead.

  Noah reached over and took Parrish’s hand in his own. She looked over at him, a surprised look on her face, and he gave her a gentle squeeze before letting go. He wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, but how could he promise such a ridiculous thing? All he could really promise was that he was there, standing by her side.

  “Okay,” he said, hesitating before pulling his gaze away from her face. “Let’s do this.”

  The walk toward Crash’s was easy at first. Once they made it over the bridge, the three of them moved together from city block to city block barely saying a word. Crash led them on a path that went down Independence Avenue and around the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

  Noah had been here many times with his dad and on fiel
d trips and stuff. But it was all so different now. The passed the House of Representatives and he couldn’t help but wonder what part of the U.S. government even still existed at this point. Was the President still alive?

  Karmen told them to turn right on Constitution. The street was a piled with bodies. It looked like some kind of bloody march on Washington. Noah and the others had to cover their mouths and noses just to survive the stench of it.

  “Is there some other way?” Karmen asked Crash through the radio. “I mean, are you seeing this on your little cameras? Because this is disgusting.”

  Crash insisted that this was the safest and fastest route. “Wouldn’t you rather walk through a few blocks of disgusting dead people than have to try to walk a few blocks through hundreds of walking dead ones?”

  “Point taken,” Karmen muttered.

  When they got to Stanton Park, Noah pulled his gun out, ready for anything. They kept several feet clear of the trees and shadows and luckily made it through without running into anyone. Or anything.

  Every once in a while, they saw a rotter shuffling along one of the side streets, but for the most part, they were nowhere to be seen. Packed into buildings until the sun went down, Crash told them.

  In the distance, the sun was making its descent, coloring the horizon the slightest bit pink. None of them mentioned it, but Noah knew that they only had about and hour before the sun went down for good. He didn’t want to think about what would happen to them if they couldn’t find a safe place to hide or settle down before then.

  The were running out of time.

  “Karmen,” he whispered. “Ask Crash how much farther to his house.”

  He heard Karmen whisper into her headset. There was silence for a moment, then she said, “He said we’re still about two miles away, but that if we don’t run into much trouble, we should make it just in time.”

  A couple of miles. Shit. They weren’t walking fast enough. Under normal circumstances, two miles wouldn’t take more than half an hour to walk. But this was far from normal. And the streets were becoming more compact in this area. The buildings were getting taller, creating more shadows. More places for the rotters to hide.