The Unchanged (Book 3): Safe Harbor
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THE UNCHANGED
Safe Harbor
T. M. Starnes
THE UNCHANGED
Safe Harbor
T. M. Starnes
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover art by:
BetiBup33 Design Studio
betibup33@gmail.com
Twitter.com/BetiBup33
Book layout by T. M. Starnes
Copyright © 2018 T. M. Starnes
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9781790819560
Imprint: Independently published
DEDICATION
For all those who are willing to help their fellow humans in their time of need.
Adversity brings either the hero or the villain out in all of us.
Contents
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
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Katherine again.
She read the bile, guts, stench, and gore and still could have a snack after she finished.
I think she’s becoming jaded.
Thanks to the pony-tailed, blonde, Park Ranger stationed at the top of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on September 22nd, 2018.
You gave me more edits and corrections, but you helped make a better story.
Chapter 1
“Well, shoot ‘em already!” I screamed.
I swerved the Rubicon to avoid a stationary car with a lifeless mutant collapsed behind the steering wheel, trapped in the makeshift oven, expanding in the heat.
“Maybe if you would hold the Jeep steady I could!” Cheyenne yelled back at me, sitting on the windowsill on the passenger side as she aimed her Winchester Model 94 150th Commemorative rifle at the road ahead.
Cheyenne was tied to the passenger seat by a strong rope. She preferred shooting out the side window and, over the last week, since the Change happened, she tended to nearly fall or be pulled out by the Changed if she wasn’t careful. She was headstrong, but one hell of a great shot.
“They’re going to get her!” I yelled.
“No, they’re not. If you’ll keep the Jeep steady!”
Well, then you try to weave through an obstacle course of wrecked and abandoned cars at twenty miles an hour, with dead humans, mutants, and other nasty decomposing, bloated, road things boiling in this heat wave, so you don’t end up adding to the mix.
BANG klik-klack
Her rifle deafened me. I never remember to put in my noise plugs and I swear I’m going to be deaf one day.
“You missed!” I yelled.
“Taylor!” She screamed, “I swear to God, if you don’t shut up and drive and let me shoot, I’m going to put my boot up your ass!”
Ah, there was my delicate flower.
I grinned, glancing for a split second at her tanned, powerfully toned legs in frayed jean cutoffs. Her flat belly exposed beneath her jogging top caught my attention before I turned my attention back to the road.
Her targets were four Changed hounds.
The large canines had mutated into hairless, purple-spotted, and malformed creatures. Their paws were ragged, transformed into reptilian claws. Their teeth were elongated and Sabertooth-like. Their spines were hunched with small bony protrusions along the length of their arched back. Only one still retained a tail.
They raced after a red Irish Setter wearing the remains of a yellow “service dog” vest harness. The Setter was beginning to slow down. The hounds would be on her in a minute.
BANG klik-klack
BANG klik-klack
BANG klik-klack
And just like that, three hounds were bloodied, tumbling to a stop, each twitching in its final death throes.
Just gotta swerve around this car.
BANG klik-klack
“Taylor!”
Yes, ma’am.
BANG klik-klack
The final hound yipped, twisted sideways, and fell.
“Yes!” Cheyenne yelled, attacking the parentage of each of the hounds as we passed their dead remains with her own colorful phrasing.
She slid back in the window, tossing back her loosened, long brown hair, pulled free of the ponytail she wore. She immediately began reloading from the boxes of shells at her feet.
“She’s not slowing,” I said, pointing at the dog.
Cheyenne glanced up and began untying the rope around her waist, “She’s terrified. Roll down the window on your side and call her.”
Whatever caused the Changed mutations had finally jumped species in the last few days. What started with just humans mutating, now moved on to other creatures. Canines, felines, cattle, and more as we encountered them on our four-day trip up from Georgia, to South Carolina and now North Carolina as they became daily more prominent. Even certain species of plants appeared to be transforming. It didn’t help we were now going into the fourth month of upper 90’s to lower 100 temperature days in addition to droughts. Everything was brittle and dry, and things were only getting worse.
I whistled out my window for the dog as we pulled alongside it.
The Setter’s long hair was tangled, matted, and clumped. She was skinny and panting. She glanced over at the Jeep, stumbled, and picked up speed again which didn’t amount to much.
“Come on, girl. You’re okay now,” I called between whistles. “You can stop. They’re not after you anymore.”
The poor thing glanced at me again, stumbled and fell hard and lay still. I slammed on the brakes and pulled over.
“Go help her, I’ll keep look out,” Cheyenne said, as she threw the door open and stood on the edge of the Jeep.
Man, she was gorgeous.
I put the Jeep in park, left it running, grabbed a bottle of water from the back seat, and hopped out, running back to the poor animal.
The dog lay on its side, panting, used up. Her eyes were wild. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, dry as a bone.
She struggled to rise as I approached but collapsed back to her side.
“Easy girl, easy.” I held out my fist to let her smell me, she sniffed twice then went back to panting.
I opened the bottle, poured water in my hand, and dribbled it into her panting mouth.
She sniffed, lapped, panted, smacked her jaws, and stretched her neck for more.
I moistened her tongue before pouring water across her snout.
“Let’s see what your name is, girl.” I reached for her collar and she licked my hand, sniffing for the bottle.
Pulling her collar free from the tangle of the remains of the service dog vest, I flipped it over and read.
I glanced down at the dog’s hindquarters.
“Oops, sorry, dude, my mistake.”
“Is she alright?” Cheyenne yelled from the Jeep.
“Yeah, he’ll be alright, I think. His name is King, by the way.”
“Oh, it’s a boy?”
I nodded, “You want to come with us?” I asked King. “No need to get up, I’ll carry you. You take a rest.”
I gave him some more water, put the cap back on, put the bottle in my mouth, reached under the panting dog and lifted him.
He was skin and bones, his heart thundered against my forearms as he tried his best to lick my face.
“Runners! Twelve o’clock! Coming our way!” Cheyenne yelled as I increased my pace.
“How many?” I mumbled with my mouth clamped onto the bottle top.
“Two. How’s the dog? King?”
I opened the rear driver’s side door and spat the bottle into the foot. “Yeah, King, he’s exhausted and thirsty.”
“Saddle up, they saw us.” Cheyenne aimed into the distance in front of the Jeep.
I shoved the food and drinks we scavenged from an abandoned gas station to the other side of the interior’s floor board, giving King a nice soft place to relax.
I sat more ammo down behind my seat for Cheyenne’s reach before I climbed back into the driver’s seat.
“Watch your fingers,” I said as I rolled up the windows and turned on the A/C full blast.
Cheyenne stepped to the ground as I did.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
BANG klik-klack
“One less of them,” she said, crawling back inside.
She turned to look at King, her heart melted as she began petting him and giving him water.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she sighed, “Let’s get back to camp and get him some food. Janessa is going to love him. Lori and the kids will too.”
I turned the Jeep around, aiming for our overnight camp and wagon train of survivors.
“Where’s the Runner?” I asked, “I don’t see it. Man, you have some good eyesight.”
Cheyenne glanced up and kissed me on the cheek, “Thank you.”
I glanced at her, “For?” I then saw the Runner racing down the interstate toward us. “Oh, I see it now. See ya!” I hit the gas and took off.
“For not driving by and letting him die,” she concluded, “I didn’t even see him.”
I shrugged, “Man’s best friend. They’re becoming fewer and fewer.”
“He’s falling asleep.” She turned around and watched the Runner fall behind us in the side mirror. “They’re getting uglier.”
“Yep, still mutating. The mutations just keep getting weirder.”
She turned her attention to the road ahead and around us.
In this new world, you couldn’t lower your guard and slacken off just because you didn’t see any danger. The Changed were everywhere, new types each day.
If you grew complacent, you ended up dead. Hopefully dead, but in some cases, you would change too, depending on if the mutation type had the ability to change you and you were susceptible to the mutation.
Some humans were, most weren’t.
I glanced at the stitches and healing scars on Cheyenne’s legs, arms, chest, and face. The parts of my exposed arms were scarred too. Below my shorts, both legs were healing from claw attacks from the first few days after the world went to hell. Even though I stretched as much as I could to retain movement and my martial arts stances, the cuts and stitches, not to mention pain, on my right leg continued to give me a limp. We both wore bandages and our acting doctor/nurse, Janessa, did an excellent job of stitching our wounds for a sixteen-year-old. Cheyenne helped her with the college semester’s worth of knowledge she knew but Janessa would eventually surpass her in studies and practical application.
Thankfully, the cuts and scratches weren’t like fictional zombie, werewolf, or vampire bites. Only certain Changed could mutate the humans who remained unchanged.
Four days had passed since we began our journey from Patterson, Georgia, on our trek to Hatteras Island and my hometown of Bruxton, North Carolina.
It was an arbitrary choice. We traveled with the survivors of an overrun, under construction hotel. We escaped with the help of Randy Desilva, a road worker with a snowplow converted dump truck, Patty Coleman, who lost her father in a rebellion against a power mad psycho, Julie Nakamora, a cyber security specialist, and a hundred others, not including our young companion Janessa Simpson, who we met and rescued the first day, hours after the initial change.
“Gator,” Cheyenne said pointing to the right side of the road.
“I see him. Get out of the way or be luggage.” I smiled.
We were on Highway 64 by Alligator Swamp Wildlife Refuge just south of Eastern Lake, and two hours from my home. The seven-footer crawling across the road was not the largest of the gators we’d seen in our scouting trip ahead of the rest of the survivors camped down an access road, deep in the preserve. The big ones were crawling out of the surrounding refuge with the lure of fresh decaying meat stinking up the area. It took them longer to find damp conditions to slide into due to the heat wave and made them surly too I’m guessing.
I slowed and let the dinosaur creep casually across the asphalt.
“Those things give me the creeps,” Cheyenne said, leaning forward to watch it pass. “They scare me to death.”
Grinning, watching her wide eyes as the reptile slid into the tall cross, I said, “They scare you? Worse than the Changed?”
“Pfft!” She frowned. “The Changed are monsters. That thing is, it’s, it’s a monster, yeah, but it’ll drag you under and drown you, then let you rot under some tree, then come back and eat you when you’re softer. Only real monsters do that. The Changed are just mutated people. They’re scary but not ‘scary’.” She made finger quotes in the air.
I stared at her, giving her a slow smirk.
She grinned, “Shut up. You know what I mean.” She playfully shoved my face, aiming my attention back toward the road.
Over the last four days, we had developed a relationship. Not just of mutual respect, she saved me as often as I saved her, but one of a more physical nature.
I accelerated, “You know that’s going in the book, don’t you?”
She gave a short laugh, “Oh, come on. I’ll sound stupid. You know what I mean, other people won’t. Anyway, I can just erase anything you write. I know where you keep your stash.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” I tried to sound intimidating, which just made her laugh.
“You don’t scare me either.” She wasn’t intimidated at all.
As a mystery author who hit the bestselling, self-published top ten sales list in America and the UK weeks before the change, I planned on writing a book of our adventures and how we survived for those who came after us.
If any survived to read it.
Or if I could finish it before something happened to me.
“Right,” I grinned. “Do it and you won’t get anymore of this.” I wiggled in my seat and gestured up and down my chest.
Cheyenne’s expression turned into one of amusement as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said with an air of smugness. “None. Nada. Zip.”
She poked out her bottom lip, nodded a few times, and sighed. “So that would mean you wouldn’t get anymore of this?”
Out of the corner of my eye, Cheyenne pulled her shirt and sports bra up over her chest and turned her upper body toward me.
Cheyenne was already every country boy’s dream. We had lost weight in the last few days, on the run, scavenging, fighting for our lives, and she was already slim and fit, but now her ribs were beginning to show. We both were dirty, sweaty, and smelled. Her scratches, stitches, and scars didn’t bother me. Not much about her did. Her bikini tan lines were fading, replaced with the darker tanning of her exposed skin over time. The heat and sun were relentless. Her figure was superb. College life in Miami while studying cancer biology s
uited her. Athletic, a Georgia country girl through and through, she could hold her own and proved it daily.
My salacious grin grew slowly and with appreciation.
Smiling victoriously, she glanced back toward the windshield.
“Taylor!” she screamed, pulling her top back down.
Chapter 2
A creature, a Changed, but unlike any we had seen before, blocked the eastbound lane as we approached.
It took a moment for my brain to comprehend what I was seeing. It looked completely alien from the rest of the mutations we’ve encountered.
It walked on four pointed legs, it’s two humanish looking legs dangling beneath it. Its arms were stretched, elongated, the hands turned into foot-long pincers. The thing’s body had widened along with its head. To say it looked like a nightmare hybrid of a human and a crab was an understatement.
Cheyenne reached for her Winchester just as the thing positioned itself in the center of the road and braced itself.
The Jeep hit it head on at forty miles an hour, it roared as we collided, but it remained on its feet and held on to the collision bar and winch welded to the front bumper. Its pointed legs skipping down the road, trying to find secure footing.
Cheyenne cursed and rolled down the window.
The Changed crab-man looked into my eyes. Purple lines crisscrossed the whites of its eyes, the iris was golden and slightly reflective like all the Changed. An animal, rage-filled intelligence glared at me as it raised its claws and began trying to climb up on to the hood.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” I yelled, trying to keep the Jeep steady so Cheyenne could aim.
King barked in the rear.
One of the things’ pointed legs stabbed into the fender over the driver’s side front tire, another slipped between the bars and winch, getting stuck.
BANG klik-klack
The thing’s head snapped sideways, it’s attention riveted toward Cheyenne. The wound made by her bullet barely bothering it.