Blood Scourge: Project Deadrise

by Siara Brandt

  Grey could tell she was thinking her way through some things.

  “Maybe this was all inevitable,” she was saying. “Because the world was in such upheaval. Maybe something like this was bound to happen because we were losing our way. What do you think?”

  Hanna heard him sigh deeply beside her. “It’s hard to say,” he said. “I have seen this bring out the worst in some people. But there were times when I saw it bring out the best, too. I guess we’re still responsible for making our own choices, right or wrong.”

  “It’s important to remember that,” she said quietly. “We still have to try and choose to do the right thing. In spite of all this, we have to believe that our decisions do matter.”

  Grey didn’t agree or disagree with her. He simply nodded his head, as if he was thinking over what she had said. It was something she needed to believe, he knew. That there still was a right and wrong.

  “Some people say there is a dark side to everyone,” she went on. “Maybe the- staggers are the emergence of the dark side with the absence of anything good. Maybe the ability to choose is gone.”

  “H’m,” he grunted. “That’s an interesting theory.”

  Hanna wasn’t sure why Grey was still with her. She already knew she had a habit of questioning other people’s motives. It was ingrained. Maybe it was a bad habit, but she had made the mistake of trusting the wrong people in the past and it had cost her. So far Greyson Kincade had been a perfect gentleman. In her experience most men would have only had one thing on their mind by now. Even the married ones couldn’t be trusted. Even now.

  Ironic, she thought. It had taken a zombie apocalypse for her to meet a man that didn’t seem to be obsessed with sex. At least so far he didn’t seem to be obsessed with it. It would still be best for her not to let her guard down completely.

  She wondered, as she lay there trying to get back to sleep, if her mother and brother were safe. She would just believe that they were. The alternative was too painful for her to contemplate.

  She had just dozed off again when she heard loud pounding all around her. She grabbed her squirt gun out of pure instinct. But Grey was already in the front seat putting the Jeep into gear. The tires squealed as they grabbed the pavement.

  Chapter 10

  Both Patch and Gun were completely spent and out of breath. Their muscles burned. And they were weakening. They hadn’t ridden their bikes in years. The ride from Patchwork’s house to Settler’s Grove had taken everything out of them. They had spent several hours in the shed waiting for the zombies to be gone before they’d headed out for the long ride here. They’d pushed themselves. Hard. It had been almost a superhuman effort for them.

  “The lights are out here, too,” Gun panted, looking up at the house that he shared with his uncle.

  The lights had been out everywhere. Even the security lights of the farmhouses weren’t working. They’d had only the moonlight to guide them.

  “You think it’s safe to go in the house?”

  Patchwork didn’t have an answer. For a while they just stared up at the house, listening.

  “We don’t have any choice,” Patch finally said. “We have to go inside.”

  They had seen enough zombies on the way that they knew it was just a matter of time before some showed up here. And there was something else on their minds. Gun‘s uncle lived here. Thought they didn’t say it out loud, they were both afraid of what they might find inside. They had had the discussion more than once in the past. Could you kill a zombie if it was a family member or someone you knew? They never did come up with a definitive answer.

  “Let’s go in in quiet, Patch. If we see- anything we’ll make a run for it.”

  Apparently, Gun had realized that he wouldn’t be able to kill his uncle even if he had turned.

  They peered into the garage window. “The truck’s gone.”

  “If we have to,” Patch said. “We can barricade ourselves in the garage.”

  There was a refrigerator in there. There would be drinks and maybe some food. They were thirsty. They’d had to leave their back packs behind because they were too heavy with the soda cans.

  They left their bikes standing upright on the kickstands, just in case they had to get to them in a hurry. There was one good thing about bikes, they’d realized on their ride here. They wouldn’t run out of gas.

  They searched every room in the house and found that it was empty.

  “Patch, I’m getting hungry.”

  “So am I. Let’s eat something and then make a plan.”

  Dr. Ellis Vaden sat down to rest. He looked at the corpse slumped over in the tractor seat. There were two other bodies lying in the field. Both were partially eaten. And rotting. The sound of buzzing flies was loud in the sun-bright stillness. That stillness was suddenly broken by the sound of a door slamming.

  His head snapped around to look down at the farmhouse. A young boy had come out onto the porch. As Ellis watched, the boy tripped and went down hard, falling flat on his stomach.

  Ellis could see the boy’s face clearly. It was tear-streaked. And dirty. The boy looked terrified. Panicked. And then Ellis saw why. There were three zombies headed straight towards the porch. Another one was trying to push its way out of the front screen door of the farmhouse.

  Ellis immediately got to his feet. “Come on kid. Get up,” he muttered beneath his breath. There was no way Ellis could get down there in time. But he had to try. He was thinking in the back of his mind that the kid had survived this long and that took some doing. Maybe he had a chance. But the kid was so little.

  Ellis had no weapon. He looked around. There was only a gnarled tree limb, broken off and lying on the ground near him. It was oak. If it wasn’t too rotted, it would make a sturdy club. He reached for it.

  With the branch in his hands, he looked back down the hill. The boy was running across the yard, heading straight for the door of a mounded root cellar set in the ground.

  “Run,” Ellis breathed. His attention was riveted on the scene unfolding down below him as he started to run. Ellis saw the boy open the door of the root cellar and slam it shut behind him. The three zombies started throwing themselves at the door. They clawed at it and snarled like ravenous beasts. They were so intent on getting to the boy, they didn’t even see Ellis coming.

  Grey had been leaning lazily against the fence. He straightened and walked towards Hanna.

  She squinted up at him and said, “You don’t think I can hit anything, do you?”

  “You might get lucky.”

  “I might surprise you, you know.”

  “You might,” he said grimly as he closed his hand over hers. She had been pointing the loaded weapon squarely at the center of his chest.

  He redirected the barrel of the gun. “Remember, you’re going to have to get good at hitting moving targets. And that takes practice. And discipline.”

  He repositioned her body so that she was standing with her side to the crude, makeshift target he’d made. He lifted her right arm so that it was level with her shoulder.

  “Squeeze the trigger nice and easy,” he told her. “You’re going to feel some kick, but you’ll get used to that pretty quick.”

  Grey stepped back. She pulled the trigger and the muzzle of the pistol jerked upward.

  “Did I hit it?”

  “Well, you came close to hitting that squirrel if that’s what you were trying to hit.”

  The squirrel was taking cover right now. She hadn’t come anywhere near hitting the target. It was important that she learn how to shoot and actually hit something. Not only for her own safety. She might be in a position to save his life sometime.

  “Let’s try it again,” Grey said as he walked toward her. “And this time make sure you keep your eyes open.”

  He lifted her hand, then leaned forward to sight the gun from her perspective. That’s when Grey froze. She would probably turn the gun on him if she knew what his thoughts were at the moment. He couldn’t help it.
Being so close to her had caused an immediate, purely physical, purely sexual reaction. Desire hit him hard, like a sucker punch to his midsection. It took him completely by surprise. He recalled what she had done to the last guy who had had thoughts in that direction. He stepped back and focused on what she was saying.

  “I’m going to hit it this time.”

  She seemed pretty certain. Typical Hanna.

  He nodded slowly. “All right. Let’s see you do just that.”

  She fired the gun once more, and she did hit the target. She just clipped the edge of the wood, but it was a vast improvement from her first attempt.

  She beamed up at him. He could tell she was really proud of her accomplishment.

  She practiced for the next half hour, improving at a fast pace until even he was impressed.

  “Pretty good,” Grey told her with a half grin. “I’ll be calling you Hanna Oakley next. I’m going to let you continue to shoot off live rounds for a while, but I don’t want to waste too much ammunition. We’re going to have to eventually find some more ammo somewhere.”

  “We seem to be drawing some attention,” Grey said after a while. He had expected it. Making any kind of noise with staggers around was like ringing a dinner bell. And there were staggers everywhere, it seemed. You couldn’t get away from them.

  “You want to practice on a moving target?” he asked.

  Hanna squinted dubiously at the stagger moving towards them from across the field. It was one thing to shoot at a piece of spray-painted plywood. But the thought of shooting an actual person was something else entirely. The thought made her feel more than a little queasy.

  “Let’s save that for another day,” she said. She held the gun out, expecting him to take it from her.

  “Let’s not. Take care of him.”

  The stagger kept coming on across the field. Straight at them.

  “You freeze and you’re dead, Hanna. Or I’m dead. Either way you need to learn how to do this. Take him out, Hanna.” This time Grey’s voice was definitely getting a little more tense.

  The stagger was moving fast, faster than he’d ever seen one move. It was definitely fixed on a meal and heading right for them. They were running out of time.

  But Hanna seemed paralyzed. Grey had to pry the gun from her hand and take the stagger out himself with a single shot.

  “Hesitating means dying, Hanna. That was your first and your last hesitation. From now on when I say take a stagger out, that’s just what you’re going to do.”

  His military experience was kicking into high gear. He had trained plenty of men. And he’d seen plenty of them hesitate. But he made sure they got over that quickly.

  But Grey had to remind himself, like Hanna had once told him, that she wasn’t a soldier to be commanded. No, Hanna definitely wasn’t like any of the soldiers he had trained in the past. And this wasn’t anything like the past. The old rules didn’t apply anymore.

  Chapter 11

  Stefan huddled alone in the darkness. He was only six years old, but he knew to keep quiet. Experience could be a brutal teacher. He crouched down in the corner of the root cellar and covered his head with his bare arms. Then he covered his ears with his trembling hands. He didn’t want to hear the snarls and the growls any more. He cried, but silently. His terrified screams were a high-pitched, raspy sound in his throat. Of hopeless, helpless horror.

  They were throwing themselves at the door with a relentless fury. He felt the terror of being trapped on a purely instinctive level. He wanted someone to save him. But there was no one left.

  The sounds outside the door grew louder. The thumps on the wood increased. There were hisses and scratches and he knew they were clawing at the door, desperate to get at him.

  The door was suddenly flung open. Sunlight poured in. But only for a moment. A shadow blocked out the light. Someone was reaching for him. He heard harsh breathing. His own terrified screams were hoarse and frantic. Someone grabbed hold of his arm and yanked him forward.

  “Come on, kid,” he heard. “We gotta go.”

  “We need to fill up,” Gabe said absently while his eyes remained fixed on something in the town below. “The pumps won’t work without electricity. But there are enough vehicles around. We should be able to siphon what we need. The gas station ought to have some gas cans. We can fill them up, too.”

  After looking around a while, Jake said, “There are some trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles down there. We would probably be safer in one of them.”

  Silently, they all continued to scan the town a while longer, looking everywhere for signs of life. Or death. There were no snarlers, but there were quite a few half-eaten corpses strewn around on the street. There was also an eerie silence surrounding them.

  “There were people around,” Gabe said ominously, eyeing the corpses. “But I don’t see anyone now. There are probably snarlers around somewhere. Everyone be careful.”

  “Well, we either go for the gas, or we risk running out in a bad situation in the middle of nowhere,” Jake said as he looked around. Everyone agreed. They needed to go into the town. They slowly drove into the town and made their way to the gas station.

  Gabe got out of the car and walked across the gas station parking lot. “Let’s make this fast.”

  Ana peered through the gas station windows. “I don’t see anyone inside.”

  Gabe placed a hand on her shoulder, stopping her and telling her that he wanted to check it out first before she went inside.

  He pulled the door open and went inside, carefully checking the aisles. There was a rotted corpse slumped over the counter. It must have been there a long time. Gabe motioned to Ana and she entered the gas station behind him. Jake was next, followed by Nygel.

  They covered their faces by pulling the collars of their shirts up. The place smelled horrible with the corpse and the rotting food since the refrigeration was out.

  But they had been hungry for a long time, existing only on a limited supply of canned foods, so they were drawn to the variety of foods on the shelves around them.

  Ana stared at a movie in the video rental section. Night of the Living Dead. There were several other movies about zombies.

  Gabe looked at the lottery tickets strewn across the counter around the corpse.

  “I don’t think he got a winner,” he muttered as he passed by. He continued to search, found a flashlight, a pack of batteries and a gas can. They all grabbed up some plastic bags and stuffed them with everything they could carry. No one wanted to stay inside long. The smell of death surrounded them like a thick cloud.

  Gabe checked the backroom. He was backing out of the room when a snarler suddenly smashed hard against the glass of the freezer beside him. It startled everyone. For a few moments, the trapped snarler held their attention. He couldn’t get at them, but he was definitely trying his best to do just that.

  Gabe, distracted by the snarler trapped in the freezer, was suddenly attacked from behind by another snarler falling out of the bathroom door. There was a desperate struggle. Gabe was pulled halfway to the ground. There was an explosion, a splatter of blood on the wall and the snarler slumped to the floor and lay still. Ana, pale and shaken, was standing with her gun in both hands.

  Gabe looked at the “dead” snarler. He looked at Ana. She lowered her weapon, and asked breathlessly, “Are you all right?”

  When Gabe nodded, she grabbed a handful of candy bars off the shelf beside her and stuffed them into her bag. “I told you I would kill for some chocolate,” she declared in a shaky voice.

  Jake walked calmly to the freezer door, opened it and shot the snarler who was still making violent sweeps with his arms towards the glass.

  “If they run, we’ll take that truck and one or two of the SUV’s outside,” Jake said. “That way we can back each other up. If something happens to one of the vehicles, we’ll still have backups. If we’re lucky there are keys. Otherwise I can hot wire them.”

  Gabe nodded. “I see a hunt
ing shop down the street. It would be a good place to look for some weapons. If they haven’t already been cleaned out.”

  Ana, with Amanda and the children, got into one of the SUV’s. Nygel and Catra got into the other. Gabe and Jake were standing by the truck. Hanna and Grey had just come down the road in the Jeep Cherokee and they pulled over. Guns were drawn and held at the ready. Tense moments passed as the two groups eyed each other. By silent mutual consent the weapons were cautiously lowered.

  “There’s no need for trouble,” Grey spoke up as he opened his door. “We don’t want anything from you.”

  “Same here,” Gabe said.

  Ellis and the child were in the backseat of the Cherokee. Grey indicated the two with a slight wave of his hand, and said, “We picked these two up just outside of town. Where are you headed?” Grey asked, wondering if the group knew anything about the area and how things stood here.

  “We were headed for my father’s farm,” Gabe said. “It’s in the country about six miles up this road.”

  Grey nodded. Everyone, it seemed, was watching Grey who was still dressed in military fatigues and had various weapons in holsters strapped to his body.

  “You’re armed,” Jake commented.

  “Barely,” Grey said, looking at the women and the children in the SUV. It seemed like a safe enough group, but you still had to be careful when people were desperate. He’d already learned that the hard way.

  “There’s a hunting store up the street.” Gabe jerked his head in the direction of the store. “We were heading up there.”

  “If you don’t mind, we’ll come along and try there, too,” Grey said, looking around. He and Hanna definitely had to get their hands on some ammunition.

  There were staggers with holes in their foreheads lying all over the street and the sidewalks. Someone had spent some time taking staggers out here. “You been here long?” Grey asked.