Base

by Cathleen Ross

  Base

  Cathleen Ross

  www.escapepublishing.com.au

  Base

  Cathleen Ross

  The world’s gone to hell, and her only chance of survival is the sexy, dominant soldier determined to keep her safe…

  Doctor Ruth Parker has always taken care of herself, and that’s what she’s doing now, hiding out in her apartment and avoiding her neighbours: once privileged Mosman residents, now flesh-eating braindeads, thanks to the virus that’s turned her world—and everyone else’s—to hell.

  Captain Jack Lang has always taken care of others, and with the newly secured Base he and his loyal commandos control the only safe place in the city. But the Base has needs that he can’t meet—doctors. And women. So when he discovers Ruth and her two friends in an unsafe apartment, he brings them back to Base where he knows he can keep them safe, and where he will do anything to make them stay.

  About the Author

  Cathleen Ross likes to write about the quirky side of life. She loves writing erotic romance featuring hot heroes and feisty heroines. When Cathleen’s not writing for Harlequin, she’s working on her Forbidden Fantasy self-published series.

  Acknowledgements

  To Kate Cuthbert for all her suggestions that made this novel stronger.

  To Rob for sitting through The Walking Dead, keeping me company and holding my hand while I screamed.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Bestselling Titles by Escape Publishing…

  Chapter 1

  Mosman, Sydney, Australia. Three months after the viral outbreak.

  Ruth Parker didn’t plan to be a sex slave for the navy base captain, not when she’d devoted her life to becoming a doctor. Nor did she want to be eaten by one of the viral-affected braindeads staggering on the street below her apartment. Right now her choices didn’t look so hot. Ruth shuddered. From the balcony on the second floor overlooking Middle Head Road, she could see the captain driving his combat truck from the base towards her apartment, music blaring. If she crouched low on her balcony, he wouldn’t see her. The merciless shoot-to-kill look on his handsome face terrified her.

  Bang. A middle-aged, virus-infected Mosman matron, her teeth snapping, fell off her stilettos and hit the road. Sound drew the braindeads in and the hideous beat of the captain’s music was working perfectly.

  ‘Idiot male. Why don’t you alert the whole peninsular that we’re here? Keep bringing every braindead right to our door,’ Ruth muttered under her breath. But he was a great shot. She had to give him that.

  She heard the tread of her flatmate, brilliant immunologist and old school friend, behind her before she crouched on the balcony beside her. ‘Evening cull,’ Lea whispered. ‘Clearing them back from the fences. Oh God, Ruth, there’s so many now. How are we going to escape? I think I’m getting agoraphobia. Two months is a long time to be trapped in this apartment.’

  ‘Please don’t freak out on me.’ Ruth gave Lea’s hand a quick squeeze. Guilt ate at her. It was her fault they were stuck here and Lea was right to be scared. They were trapped. The ragtag, so-called, self-appointed captain and his followers had decided on local containment after the braindeads had taken over Sydney city two and a half months ago. He’d ordered the Harbour Tunnel and the Harbour Bridge blocked so the braindeads from the city couldn’t cross the harbour, then he demanded The Spit drawbridge be risen so people from the north couldn’t cross into the Mosman area. The local talkback radio program had gone crazy about the liberties he’d taken, but the besieged government in the city had done nothing to stop him. The radio had reported the captain had set barriers along Military Road and every main arterial road to their peninsula. Contaminated couldn’t climb. No one came into Mosman, which was great, except she and her roomies couldn’t drive out either.

  Lea worried the dry skin on her lower lip. She looked at her watch. ‘Right on six o’clock. Can’t fault the navy in their timing.’

  ‘They’re not navy. They’re every renegade male capable of getting to the base, let loose with a gun, since they put out the call on the radio two months ago. The few women who have entered the base never leave.’ What was going on?

  ‘The men should train the women to shoot,’ Lea said. ‘We all need to know. There’s no cure for this virus.’

  ‘Teach them? Ha! Unlikely.’ Ruth narrowed her eyes and flashed her roomie a glance. How naive could Lea be? Guess that’s what happened when you spent your life looking down a microscope for a living. The real world stuff didn’t make sense to Lea at the best of times. She’d been the same at school too, a science nerd and that’s when they’d started their friendship because Ruth loved science too. The trouble was Lea didn’t have a sense for danger. Something was wrong at that naval compound. Her apartment was the last on her street and closest to the base. Sure, with the tall fencing and bushland zone, she couldn’t see in but she could feel it in her gut.

  ‘I overheard one of the brass discussing retreat plans when I nursed him several months ago. They spill their secrets when they’re overcome with fever. He said, “Preserve the women. There are so few left”.’ Sue, Ruth’s boisterous flatmate, sat on the lounge inside the apartment, adjoining the balcony.

  Lea raised an eyebrow and turned to face Sue. ‘You serious? That’s nice. That’s more than the government did for us. They wouldn’t even admit there was a mutant virus until people started dropping dead in the city streets.’

  Sue moved from the lounge, crawled over and squatted next to the girls. ‘And rose again, teeth snapping.’

  Ruth frowned at Lea. ‘Nice for whom?’

  ‘For us. It’d be safe there. Safe from them.’ Lea nudged Ruth and pointed to a businesswoman still wearing her large designer-stamped sunglasses, stumbling towards the source of the music. A bald-headed, middle-aged man in the latest Lycra-clad bicycle outfit followed her.

  Ruth shook her head. ‘Don’t think you’d enjoy the base, Lea. More men than microbes there.’

  ‘I would,’ Sue piped up. ‘Not much competition from other women since they got bitten first because they didn’t have the muscle to fight off the braindeads.’

  Ruth grinned knowing Sue used humour to cope. At the hospital where they’d worked in North Sydney until the military had shut it down, Sue’s asides had kept Ruth laughing all day. ‘Voice down, Sue. Don’t wake Mrs Nichols.’ Did the braindeads ever sleep? Ruth wasn’t sure. She’d treated her beloved neighbour, Mrs Nichols, with every viral treatment available, staying by her side as the elderly woman burnt up with the fever until she’d turned. Then the captain had shut down all the roads making it impossible to drive out.

  Bang. Ruth jumped at the sound of gunfire on the street.

  A low groaning noise sounded outside their apartment door. A hand thumped at the wood. Fingernails scraped down, sharp and strident.

  Sue rose, went inside the apartment and ran down the hallway towards the front door. In a moment she returned, her face bleached of colour. ‘Eww, one of Mrs Nichols’ fingernails just broke off. It’s stuck in the peep hole.’

  ‘I checked a report I had on my computer on cases overseas. They’re only strong and fast moving at first. The brain chemistry changes over time and they become uncoordinated and slow. Thank God they can’t climb,’ Lea said.

  ‘It’s really spread everywhere,’ Sue said, taking a step forward to peer over the balcony.

&nbs
p; Lea nodded.

  ‘Stay out of sight of the street, Sue,’ Ruth warned her, waving at her to squat. The captain didn’t know they were there and Ruth wanted to keep it that way. The safest option was to get on her boat and get out of Sydney.

  Lea brushed her hair from her face. ‘People have to either kill them or stay away from them. That’s the only way to stop this virus. I don’t know if the vaccine I was working on will be effective. It’s not like I can test it on humans.’

  ‘The moment Mrs Nichols weakens, I’m braining her with the frying pan,’ Sue said.

  ‘They stay strong if they get meat,’ Lea said.

  ‘Flesh,’ Ruth corrected her. ‘Raw flesh.’

  ‘Our flesh.’ Sue looked accusingly at Ruth. ‘You should have put her down two months ago instead of insisting on treating her fever. You knew when the hospital got overrun, the antiviral treatment the government ordered sucked. If we can’t get down the fire stairs, we can’t escape and we’re running out of time.’

  ‘We’ve eaten most of our food,’ Lea added.

  ‘And everything we took from Mrs Nichols when she got sick,’ Sue said. ‘Lucky she was such a hoarder.’

  ‘For goodness sake, Sue. Have some empathy,’ Ruth said, rubbing her hands over her eyes and blinking. She cast a look at her doctor’s black bag sitting on the lounge behind her. It was as good as useless. She’d emptied its contents into a smaller medical bag and thrown it into her duffle bag, ready to escape.

  ‘My empathy ran out when the food ran out. I wish Mrs Nichols would walk downstairs and get shot. The other braindeads are leaving their houses,’ Sue said.

  Remorse jabbed at Ruth’s heart. ‘I couldn’t kill her, okay? I couldn’t addle her brain. Killing goes against everything I was trained to do. Mrs Nichols was a good person. She nursed Mum right through cancer when I had to work. I locked her up in her apartment when she turned. I didn’t think she’d be able to break straight out.’

  ‘You should have staked her through the eye. The moment she got bitten she was as good as dead,’ Sue said.

  Sickened, Ruth’s fingernails dug into the wooden balcony as her gaze wandered to the view of the peninsula. Six months ago it had been a bushland reserve dropping away to Sydney Harbour on one side before the navy had commandeered it. On the street side, strong fences lined Middle Head Road, enlarging the navy base’s holding on the peninsula, one of the few fenced off compounds on Sydney’s lower North Shore. When Ruth saw men ploughing and planting crops a few days ago, her worry level ramped up. Was the whole of Australia going to shit except in the few areas where braindeads couldn’t enter?

  Bang. Three braindeads staggered and fell out on the street below. Bang. More followed. A garbage truck trailed the navy combat truck the captain drove, its mechanical crane scooping up the bodies and dumping them in the compressor.

  ‘Maybe they can secure this peninsula like the radio broadcasts said and it’ll be safe to walk the streets again,’ Lea said.

  Sue shook her head. ‘Safe my arse. Not while braindeads are still spilling out onto the streets from their houses like they did in the city.’

  ‘We’re trapped,’ Ruth said. Unless they could get to her boat moored off Balmoral Beach. It was a quick drive in a car.

  ‘We could give ourselves up to the captain.’ Lea pulled at the dry skin on her bottom lip.

  ‘Oh goody. We could become sex slaves.’ Sue winked at Ruth.

  ‘I’d rather starve,’ Ruth said.

  The garbage truck came to a halt in front of their apartment, the crane ready to pick up another designer-clad Mosman matron, her eyes staring vacantly, mouth gaping, her elegant shoes still attached to her feet. Even after the fever her hair was still nicely tinted blonde. One of her diamond earrings was missing. She bared her teeth and growled.

  The garbage truck driver leaned out his window. ‘This one’s dressed up for her funeral,’ he called out to the captain. ‘Come on, gorgeous, come to Daddy.’

  ‘She was a person once, Lieutenant Armstrong,’ the captain called out, but he still took aim at the woman as she shuffled towards him. Bang! She fell flat on the road. Her hair flopped off. A wig.

  ‘Nice shot, Captain,’ one of his men called out from the following truck.

  ‘Hundreds more to go,’ he called back, his voice resigned.

  Stomach roiling, Ruth couldn’t watch anymore. The woman had been one of her patients. Breast cancer. She’d recognised her when the wig came off. The navy shot them like refuse but these were humans to her, with some sort of incurable disease.

  ‘Waste of a great dress. I could never have afforded that on my salary,’ Sue said, envy flashing in her eyes.

  ‘Sue!’ Ruth said. ‘How can you?’

  ‘What? I can’t use humour anymore?’

  ‘Really, Sue?’ Lea asked, distressed. ‘I think we’ve got more important things to worry about than the price tag of a braindead’s dress.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Sue said. ‘I’m totally freaked out, okay? And I saw that dress in Vanilla. It cost over one thousand dollars.’

  The gunfire continued.

  Lea’s body jerked with every shot. ‘Do you think they feel pain?’

  Ruth nodded wearily. ‘The newly infected. Yeah. The fever’s terrible. The others? Who knows? They lose their ability to talk.’

  ‘Who cares,’ Sue said. ‘A snake has feelings too, doesn’t stop a person from shooting them dead. If you’d left Mrs Nichols we could have escaped. The radio said the road to the Blue Mountains was open when the virus broke out in the city. We could have gone to my parent’s farm in the Megalong. The whole damn thing is fenced. Now? Who knows? Everything is blocked off thanks to that megalomaniac down there.’

  A groan and a hiss sounded down the hallway. Their apartment door rattled this time. Thump.

  Lea, her crystal-blue eyes stark with fear, pulled off the worrisome bit of dry skin from her lip.

  Sue raced down the hallway then back up to the lounge area again. Her hazel eyes were so wide Ruth could see the whites. ‘Mrs Nichols is thumping at the door handle with a rock. It’s the size of a rockmelon. The handle’s going to break off.’

  Ruth stood and grabbed a long iron sculpture from her deck. She needed two hands to hold it. ‘Stay back. This is my fault. I’ll fix it.’ She heard a click from the street. She turned slowly and cautiously towards the road. Her eyes slid to the truck. The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

  The captain had his rifle pointed at her. ‘You need help up there, miss? We’ve got a live woman here,’ he called out to his men. ‘Don’t shoot.’

  She froze staring into his handsome face.

  He smiled. ‘Don’t be frightened. I’m coming up,’ he called from below her apartment. He launched himself out of his truck, his rifle, loose and comfortable in his hands and raced towards her apartment.

  Thump. The sound came from down the hall. Louder this time.

  Lea whimpered with fear.

  Ruth raced from the balcony into the apartment and down the hall. She looked down at the carpet in front of the door. The handle lay there. The door creaked open. Mrs Nichols stood on the landing between their two apartments. She staggered towards them with the gait of the braindead, opened her mouth and growled. Her bloodshot eyes, the capillaries traumatised with the illness, didn’t blink. A monster. Frighteningly unrecognisable from the sweet lady she was. Ruth froze. She’d never killed anyone before.

  Lea screamed, her pitch high with terror.

  Sue grabbed a poker from the fireplace.

  Ruth gripped her weapon in both hands. Years of treating head trauma patients had taught her what strength it took to smash a skull in but she’d never actually done it. She raced down the hallway and swinging the sculpture like a baseball bat hit Mrs Nichols on the temple.

  Mrs Nichols fell to her knees, catching Ruth’s arm as she did so. Her other hand lashed out trying to claw her. Horrified, Ruth raised her foot and kicked at Mrs Nichols in the gut so that
the old lady lost traction and flew backward, hitting her head against the wall before sliding onto the floor. Dear God, who was the real monster now?

  The captain raced in through the front door and aimed his gun at Mrs Nichols. Bang.

  Ruth looked up to find his gaze on her. His piercing green eyes pinned her for an instant before he turned to Mrs Nichols, pointed his gun again at the groaning woman on the floor and fired another bullet.

  Mrs Nichols lay still.

  ‘I had this one,’ Ruth said panting, knowing wariness for this vigilante would be loud in her eyes.

  ‘A thank you would be nice,’ the captain said.

  ‘I had it covered,’ she said through gritted teeth. There was no way she wanted to owe this guy anything.

  ‘You only dented the skull. She’d have gotten up again,’ he said, looking the dead woman over. ‘Next time run a poker through her eye. You have to disable the brain or what’s left of it.’ He nodded at Sue who still held her poker. ‘You got the right idea. Pulverise the brain.’

  Behind him, two other men raced up the stairs, twisting and turning, their rifles cocked in front of them as they scoped out Mrs Nichols’ apartment opposite.

  ‘Three healthy women,’ the captain said to his men with a wide smile.

  ‘What a find,’ one of them said, his gaze moving over them as if assessing his catch.

  ‘What a relief,’ said the other. ‘Live women. Yes!’ He punched the air.

  For whom? Ruth thought. She stared at the captain. His shoulders were as wide as her doorway, but it wasn’t his raw-honed build that intimidated her, it was his face. He looked like it’d been hewn from stone and that kind of hardness took years to achieve. She knew. She’d seen it in the experienced doctors, the ones who’d worked too long in accident and emergency. High cheekbones hollowed out his face. His winged black eyebrows and sensuous mouth brought some relief but he looked like he lived on adrenaline and coffee. She supposed he could be called handsome if one fancied the footy-player type with his black, razor-cut hair and broken nose.