by Damon Hunter
THE SLAUGHTER
Copyright © 2018 by Damon Hunter
All right reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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STAY UP TO DATE
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
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
WHAT'D YOU THINK?
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Chapter 1
Chuck’s Guns and Ammo - Quartzsite, Arizona
Donna could feel the disease spreading through her body, changing her and taking control of her human brain. She knew she had to get away from Bo and Katelin. Especially Katelin. The idea of passing on the rot to her child was worse than having the rot herself. It was more than just the possibility of infecting Katelin that was drumming through Donna’s head as she did her best to put distance between them during her last moments as human herself. Her fourteen-year-old daughter had already gone through too much and fought too hard in order to stay alive during their time stuck on the wrong side of the quarantine. Donna had seen how the violence she had been forced to both experience and perpetuate had affected her teenage daughter. The fact was the kid may have already been broken, having become a seemingly heartless, cold killer; she should instead be a kid getting ready for her sophomore year in high school.
If there was any hope of Katelin going back to being a normal kid after this nightmare was over, Donna knew she couldn’t put her daughter in the position of having to put a bullet in her own mother’s head.
As Donna moved away from her daughter, she desperately wanted to hug her goodbye. She also saw the kid, Gavin, an orphan of the rot they had picked up while trying to escape the Quarantine Zone wandering aimlessly on his own. Like her, this was the end of the line for him. The bite he received had already poisoned him. He was, as the others they had briefly stayed with called the ambling infected, brain dead and drooling. Donna was almost there herself, close enough that when she took the boy’s arm and started pulling him away from Bo and Kate, his rot-driven instinct to spread the disease did not matter. He did not even try to bite her. She was glad she was able to grab him. Bo had rescued Gavin when his home was overrun and managed to keep him alive this long despite some risky situations. Bo was not old enough to be the parent of a ten-year-old and with his long hair and surfer’s tan he certainly did not look the part, but he was the closest thing the kid had left to family. If he had kill Gavin to avoid being infected, it would break him as badly, maybe more so than Katelin would if she had to kill Donna.
It took all her will to hold on to these last moments of lucidity. All she managed to do was get across the street from sporting goods store where an encounter with a vampire rotter finally went the way of the infected predator. It was enough, though. The door to a gem shop, a small store selling what Quartzsite was known for, was open.
Donna shoved a compliant Gavin inside and shut the door. Had she been able to hang onto her mind just a second longer, she would have breathed a sigh of relief. Victims of the rot did not have the brainpower to operate doors for the most part. Once she was inside, she knew neither she, nor Gavin, would be a threat to the health or sanity of her daughter and their friend.
Instead she could think of nothing. The rot had finally gotten a death grip on her mind. All she could feel now was her brain sending shock waves through her being, projecting a burning desire to spread the disease to anything she could sink her teeth into.
Chapter 2
Interstate 10 - Goodyear, Arizona
“Have you heard back yet?” Vance yelled from the cockpit of the TMRT transport they had secured from the overrun TMRT checkpoint in Escondido, California.
They had lost a lot of their people back there, but they had helped Dr. Talbot retrieve his research and hoped he was telling the truth when he said the research held the key to putting an end to the rot, a disease which now had all of California under quarantine.
The way the Tactical Medical Response Team was about letting people come out of quarantine, even if they could prove they were not infected, made them wonder if they could actually make a return to civilization. Dr. Talbot’s status in the TMRT, along with his reputation as a scientist, and the importance of the information they carried should be enough to get them all through, but all the top brass Talbot had reached out to had yet to respond.
Ana, the only member of the seven person crew who went in after the research other than Talbot and Vance to survive, joined him in the cockpit. She was not a soldier. Ana should have been starting her sophomore year in college but had instead joined a group calling itself the South Western Apocalypse Response Crew (S.W.A.R.C.) who took a foolish journey into the Quarantine Zone hoping to make themselves famous and possibly rich by posting videos of themselves fighting the infected. All of S.W.A.R.C but her were now dead.
“Talbot still hasn’t heard from anyone,” she told Vance as she took the co-pilot’s seat in the armored ground transport. “He’s still trying. I think he knows we are getting close and he looks a bit worried.”
“He should be,” Vance said. “If word got around how he collected the samples he used for his research, he might not be welcomed back with open arms.”
Ana nodded. “It was only, what? Days ago when he wanted you to be one of those samples.”
“Hey, you too, now, don’t forget that.”
“I think he just wanted me dead to piss you off. Now
we’re counting on him to save our ass.”
“Yeah, kind of fucked up, but I don’t see any other way.” Vance said as they pulled off the interstate into Goodyear, a small town just outside of Phoenix. They were supposed to meet and pick up his daughter Katelin and a man named Bo there. They were the only two left of a group of survivors that included Vance’s ex-wife and Katelin’s mother, Donna.
As they pulled into town, they noticed a smattering of groups of wandering infected in the street. They all seemed to be headed in the same direction. As they moved deeper into town, the throng of infected became thicker and thicker.
“This isn’t good,” Ana said. “I thought they said the area looked evacuated.”
“I guess they were wrong,” Vance said as the armored transport moved through any infected who got in their way. It was not like the thick hordes they had seen in other areas but it was still a gathering horde, which always meant trouble. Vance grabbed his phone and hit the button to dial his daughter.
After it went to voicemail, he put it down on the seat between his legs and said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Could be she just ran out of battery,” Ana said.
Vance looked at the infected all around them and thought his daughter running out of battery power on her phone was wishful thinking. He tried to keep the negative thoughts out of his mind. As a combat veteran, he knew how dangerous negative thinking could be if shit went down. However, the thought that he had lost all of his family to the rot kept creeping into his mind. He had plugged in the coordinates Katelin had given him into the transport’s GPS. The computerized voice of the GPS told them they had arrived. Instead of a Humvee being in his path, all there was were more infected wandering aimlessly.
Among the infected, they could see the dead bodies of three TMRT soldiers. They were not going to get out and take a closer look, but they all looked like they were infected before they died.
“Shit,” Vance said.
“They aren’t here,” Ana said. “Which is good.”
“It is?”
“If the horde got them, they wouldn’t have driven away.”
“Good point,” Vance said. “But where did they go?”
Chapter 3
Main Street - Goodyear, Arizona
“It’s definitely one of ours,” Sergeant Faber of the Tactical Medical Response Team (TMRT) said as his squad descended on the Humvee they had spotted driving around on the outskirts of the newly established quarantine zone.
Faber and his team surrounded the vehicle. Faber nodded and private Dancin pulled open the door.
“Empty,” Faber said.
“Whoever was driving filled the back with supplies,” one of the men said.
“Weapons?” Faber asked.
“No, bottled water and beef jerky, mostly. Do you think it was our people?”
“Unlikely. They would have tried to make contact, and certainly wouldn’t have run when they saw us.”
“Are you sure they ran?” Dancin asked.
Faber didn’t answer. He knew people at the failed border checkpoint. He was hoping it would be some of them in the Humvee.
“Should we look for them?” Private Sams asked. “If they drove this far, they aren’t infected.”
“Doesn’t matter, quarantine protocol says no one gets through,” Faber told him. “We head back to the checkpoint. The other option is we hunt them down and shoot them ourselves and I don’t feel like doing that. Besides, in a couple of hours the drones will be reprogrammed and anything out here without a transponder will be toast.”
“Should we take the Humvee back?” Dancin asked.
“Leave it for them,” Faber said. “Let’s go.”
“Hey,” Sams said, pointing down the road. “Is that a dog?”
“Looks like a dog to me, ugly thing. Is that one of those labradoodles?” Faber replied.
“Yeah, my mom has a labradoodle, nicest dog ever,” Sams told them as he walked towards the dog. “We should take her to the checkpoint, I bet her owner was evacuated.”
“We aren’t the humane society,” Faber said. “Leave her alone.”
“I bet she’s hungry. I also bet her owner will be so relieved to have her back. We’d be heading off a potential problem.”
“Assuming the owner was evacuated and not infected,” Sams said.
“I think they got most everybody out of Goodyear in one piece.”
“Leave her anyway.”
“Damn, Sarge, don’t be such a hard ass. Can I at least pet her before we leave her to starve out here?”
“No.”
“Seriously? Look, she’s coming to us,” Dancin said as the dog started running towards him.
“Fine, then we go.”
Dancin took off his protective glove.
“Leave your gear on, we’re still in QZ.”
“No dog wants to be petted by an armored glove,” Dancin said as he crouched low and put out his hand as the mass of curly fur walked up to him. He did not see the dog had yellow eyes, a blue tongue and an extra row of jagged teeth until it had already bit off three of his fingers.
“Holy shit,” Dancin said, pulling away and screaming. “My fucking hand.”
Sams was stepping to him when the labradoodle leaped forward and sank its fangs into his leg. Sams brought the barrel of his rifle down hard on the dog’s head but it held tight, shaking its head and tearing into the light armor covering Sams’ legs.
“Get this thing off of me,” he shouted as he smashed the dog’s head again. This time he kept hitting it until he had crushed its skull. The dog went limp but still had its fangs stuck in Sams’ leg.
“Jesus Christ, dude, you just killed a dog, not just any dog, a fucking labradoodle,” Private Curtis said.
“You think I wanted to?” Sams said as he tried to get the dog’s jaws open so he could get it off his leg. “I feel like I just killed Slim Shady.”
“Slim Shady?”
“That’s what my mom named her labradoodle. Could someone please help me, the damn thing is stuck.”
While Curtis went to help Sams free his leg from the dog, Private Dancin said, “Hey, dogs don’t get the rot, do they?”
“No,” Faber said, “Why?”
“Then this has to something else, right?” Dancin said as he pulled his helmet off and pointed to the boil growing like it was a balloon just above his right eye.
“Like what,” Curtis said as he stopped trying to free Sams from the locked jaw of the dead dog and pointed his weapon at Dancin.
“What are you doing, man?” Dancin said. “It was a dog bite, dogs don’t get the rot.”
The sore on Dancin’s face exploded, covering him in a thick, green pus. Another two sores immediately sprung up on his face.
“Get on the ground, soldier,” Faber said, pointing his weapon at Dancin. He kept his eyes on Dancin as he asked, “Are you bitten, Private Sams?”
If Sams answered, no one could hear him over Dancin saying, “No, no fucking way. I recognize new infected protocol. You are not binding me up and leaving me here. I don’t have the rot. It must be something else.”
“Get on the ground or I put a bullet in you,” Faber told him.
“You’re going to fucking shoot me?” Dancin said as another sore exploded.
“Yes, last chance, this way if there is a cure found, you might be still alive for it,” Faber told him.
“Come on, Curtis, you won’t let him shoot me, will you?”
“Do as Sarge says,” Curtis replied.
“Dude, I thought we were friends.”
“We are, just do as Sarge says.”
Faber started to say, “I’m not going to ask again,” when Private Sams lunged for him, looking to sink his teeth into the sergeant’s left shoulder. Sams would have been on top of him, but he still had the black labradoodle attached to his leg, slowing him up just enough for Faber to turn and smash Sams across the jaw with the butt of his rifle.
The bl
ow broke Sams’ jaw but he kept coming forward with savage hunger in his eyes. Faber jabbed with the rifle stock, giving Sams a broken nose to match his busted jaw, but the infected soldier kept coming. His injuries did not matter, all that mattered to him once the rot took over was delivering the fatal bite which would spread the disease to another poor victim.
Curtis turned to help, but Dancin sprung at him. Unlike Sams, who had become a relentless, but slow zombie-like creature, Dancin had transformed into the fast-moving predator type of infected they called vampire rotters. Curtis found himself on his back with vampire rotter Dancin on top of him before he could do anything but yell for help.
Faber kicked Sams in the chest. With a dead dog still on his leg, Sams stumbled and fell hard onto his backside.
He was aiming his gun and looking to finish off the infected soldier when he heard Curtis yell, “Help me.”
Faber spun to see Dancin trying to pull off the helmet Curtis wore so he could sink his new row of teeth into uninfected skin. Faber raised his gun but couldn’t see how he could shoot the infected Dancin without putting a bullet in Curtis as well.
While he was moving to get a good shot, Sams got back to his feet and came for Faber again. Faber saw him and turned. He had been told only to fire his weapon if it was absolutely necessary. He decided this qualified and put a bullet in between Sams’ yellow eyes. He was turning back to try and get a shot at vampire rotter Dancin before Sams’ dead body hit the ground.
He fired as Dancin leapt off Curtis. He put a bullet through the infected soldier’s chest but Dancin kept coming. Dancin grabbed the rifle as Faber fired, sending his next bullets into the sky. The infected soldier twisted the rifle out of Faber’s hands and tossed it away. Faber went for his sidearm but the vampire rotter was too fast. It dove into him before he could clear his weapon.
Instead of trying to pull his helmet off like it had with Curtis, it smashed a fist through the facemask and pull the shattered visor away. Before Faber could even blink, two rows of teeth clamped onto his nose. The infected soldier twisted and pulled as it kept its fangs locked on Faber’s flesh.