The Uncivil War Series Box Set

by B. T. Wright

  “Elaine!” David shouted. “I’m so sorry! I couldn’t hold him!”

  Elaine was white as a ghost. When she looked over at her shoulder, Emily had to catch her when she fainted. David rushed over to help lay her down on the floor, but they couldn’t stay there. Because when Emily looked back up at John Two. As he chewed on flesh and muscle like a cow chewing cud, he yanked so hard toward the three of them that the leather strap holding down his arm ripped in two.

  He was about to break free.

  12

  Amy’s scream was so loud that Jake thought his eardrums might rupture. Everyone in the SUV jumped, then held their ears, because her shriek lasted a good four or five seconds. Jess moved her hands from her ears to Amy’s shoulders, and Amy nearly jumped out of her skin. She started breathing way too fast, and she was about to hyperventilate.

  “You’re okay now, Amy,” Jess said. “You’re safe in the truck with us. Everything is okay.”

  Amy was still breathing heavy, but in between she tried to speak. “No,” She panted. “I’m not okay.” Three more quick breaths. “None of us are.”

  “I know it’s scary,” Jess continued in a soothing voice. “But we’re okay now. We’re on our way to Virginia. The infected are behind us.”

  Amy shook her head emphatically. She gained control of her breathing to form a full sentence. “No they’re not. They’re all around us. And they know where I am.”

  Jess flashed a look of concern to Jake. Jake knew she was thinking what he was. But he wanted to hear what Amy meant.

  “Amy, did you keep them from attacking us back there?” Jake asked.

  Jake saw Bryan turn around in the front seat, and Tyler did his best to drive while glancing back. They both were eager to hear.

  Amy nodded. “I didn’t really mean too, I just started praying, and then I felt something flow through me. Almost like a current. I could see all of us on that road through their eyes.”

  “What?” Tyler said. “That’s amazing! Now we can always know where they are and avoid them!”

  Jake watched as Amy immediately shook her head no.

  “Is that not what it means, Amy?” Jake asked.

  “No. Well, yes . . .” She stopped for some more air. Her face wasn’t nearly as red as it had been back on the road.

  “It’s okay,” Jess told her. “Take your time.”

  Amy continued, “Yes it is true, I can see them. But they can also see me. There are a lot of them, and every single one could see where I was when I did that. Like, our exact location.”

  “Unbelievable,” Tyler said. “We are living a movie right now. How the hell is this possible?”

  Jake asked, “Do you know what they were doing when they all turned and looked up at the sky?”

  Amy didn’t hesitate. “Listening.”

  “Listening? To what?” Jake said.

  Amy tucked her hair behind her ear. “Not to what. To who.”

  Jake already knew what she meant. “By who, you mean the things we heard talking on the radio transmission that the professor recorded back at the university?”

  “Yes. They are the leaders. And when I tapped into whatever their communication line is, they told everyone, all of the infected, that I was Element Zero. That they must terminate me.”

  The SUV went quiet. Tyler had managed to pull back onto the road, but every few hundred feet he was forced onto the shoulder, and the buzz from the tires rolling over the rumble strips in the pavement made all of them jump every time. Jake and Jess shared a knowing glance. He was right earlier when he knew Jess shared his feeling. That if Amy could see through their eyes, they could see through hers. Jake wasn’t sure of how far the repercussions would extend, but if all of them knew where Amy—Element Zero—was, it could be catastrophic. He imagined if Element Zero was the alien’s only weakness, they would send everyone anywhere near Amy to end the threat. That in and of itself was scary, but the thought that the infected were much smarter now––and they might not show their hand before they attacked––made Jake shudder with worry.

  “I’m not going to let that happen,” Jake finally said to her. “No one is going to hurt you.”

  Amy looked deep into his eyes, searching for comfort. But she didn’t find it. How could she? He was just one man. And no matter his level of skill in combat or otherwise, there was no way he could stop them. Not with the numbers the aliens had. All he could do was try to keep her alive long enough to get to Virginia, where they might actually have some help.

  “Amy.” Jess rubbed the back of her head. “Do you have any sense for who, or what, They are?”

  The confidence with which Amy responded surprised them all. “I know everything about them now. That’s why they want me dead.”

  The words hung in the air like a like a cloud of thick smoke, choking them all into silence. The hairs on the back of Jake’s neck stood on end. Not because he was afraid—that ship had sailed—but because for the first time since he’d watched that crazed man chew on the throat of the little boy on the baseball field four days ago, Jake had hope. If Amy knew everything about them, then they could find a way to fight. And he knew that if there were enough uninfected humans left to put together something remotely formidable, they might just have a fighting chance. Especially if Amy was truly their weakness. What that meant, and how it made the aliens weak, would take some exploring.

  Tyler started to ask a question, but Jess asked him to give Amy a while to rest. Jake knew his friend was chomping at the bit to know more, because so was Jake. But Jess was right. Amy had just been through a lot, and she really needed time to get some of her energy back. And they really needed some new clothes. Amy’s white T-shirt was soaked in the blood from her nose. Jake’s was bloodied from the gash on his back, and everyone else was going to smell soon. But on the scale of things that mattered, clothes were about as low on the totem pole as something could get.

  Jake took the moment of quiet to check on the dry ice in the bag of Beritrix vials. It seemed as though it was staying cold. All of their food and water was still back on the boat. That was the more immediate concern. Other than staying alive of course. He slid back up from the floorboard and sat in the back seat. He looked out the window. He could see the Ohio River in the distance across the lanes of abandoned cars. He’d made this drive thousands of times when he was a kid. His parents would take him and his brother to visit their grandparents in South Shore, Kentucky. A tiny little town only twenty minutes in the opposite direction they were going.

  They were headed toward Ashland. It wasn’t a large town, but with the metro population, there would be hundreds of thousands of potential infected. There was a pit in his stomach. Not because of the situation they were in, but because he was thinking about his childhood. Driving down that road brought hundreds of memories down on him, most of which hadn’t touched his senses in over a decade. After moving away from Ashland, Jake had managed to compartmentalize his childhood. He’d been able to almost forget about it altogether––not because it was bad––because it was so great. Thinking about his life with Colt and his parents made him sick with longing when he thought about it. But a longing feeling was almost an escape from the desperate feelings the last few days had brought.

  He wanted so badly to go by the neighboring town of Flatwoods—to the house he’d grown up in. But it was out of the question. Life wouldn’t be yielding any time for side-trips down memory lane. It might not yield much time at all, for that matter. The horrors they would face in the days ahead, if they made it that long, would be unimaginable, and Jake knew it. Just like every day since society had collapsed under an alien virus had been. It was hard to fathom how it could get worse, but one glance over at Jess behind him told him it still could. He could lose her.

  Jess had her eyes closed and her head leaned back on the headrest. Even through all the horrible things they’d just seen, nearly dying more than once, she still looked beautiful. And it wasn’t just that she was fit and gorg
eous. Jake saw much more than that when he looked at her. Though this new world was as unromantic as it could get, he still thought romantic thoughts when he looked at her. He saw her in a white dress, laughing as a photographer snapped pictures and Jake smashed cake in her face. He saw her with a round belly, beaming with pride as she carried their child. And he saw her old and gray, rocking away on the front porch, watching their horses frolic in the green grass-covered field.

  All of those romantic thoughts were gone in an instant when his mind stuck on the thought of horses. His brain froze on the fact that not only were there no horses around at the moment, but he hadn’t seen an animal, not one, since this entire thing broke loose. And before he knew it, his thoughts were vocalized.

  “Where the hell are all the animals?”

  13

  Karen and John One had almost completely stopped screaming while they struggled to break free of the restraints on their chairs. But as Emily hovered over Elaine, trying to wake her up, she noticed that big John Two was more than making up for it. His rage had gone up another level after taking a chunk out of Elaine’s arm. One strap was broken, and he had begun tearing away at the one holding down his right wrist.

  “David, we have to get out of here! John Two is going to break those restraints!”

  The veins in John Two’s neck were bulging, and so were his eyes. Emily couldn’t help but think of the Incredible Hulk when he was turning from Bruce Banner into the big green monster. And she couldn’t help but feel like John Two would be able to bust those restraints the same way the Hulk would, too.

  “The restraints will hold. We need to sedate him!” David answered.

  “What?” Emily couldn’t believe what he was saying. The complete lack of common sense in his words threw her off entirely. “He’s gonna break those restraints. We have to leave this room!”

  Emily watched David look back over his shoulder at John Two. He had turned just in time to watch him pull his right arm free of the second restraint. A bolt of fear flashed through Emily. If he managed to get his feet free, the two of them were dead.

  John Two turned toward them, and with one kick of his right leg, the strap broke free. It occurred to Emily that they had made a massive mistake the way they had gone about the injections. But at the same time, she realized that it might not have been a coincidence. Maybe the docile way the three infected had been acting was just that . . . an act. Maybe all this time, the aliens had been biding their time, waiting to pounce when their captors’ guards were down. If they had been hostile the entire time they’d been prisoners, more stringent measures would have been taken to secure them. Something more than a few leather straps and a chair fastened to the concrete floor. Either way, it didn’t matter. Emily, Elaine, and David were all dead if they didn’t move, right then.

  “Get the door!” David shouted. He put both hands inside the back collar of Elaine’s lab coat and began to turn her so he could pull her through the door. Emily jumped up, and as soon as her hand hit the handle of the door, John Two snapped the restraint on his left ankle and lunged at David. It happened so fast that by the time Emily had opened the door and stepped through, John Two had bitten down on David’s neck and blood sprayed all the way to the windowed wall.

  Emily screamed. It was pure reflex. She had never seen something like that in all her life. A man so easily snatched up and in one chomp, dead. David hadn’t even had time to scream. Emily’s second reflex was more productive than the first. She ran four steps back inside the room and grabbed the first thing on Elaine she could, her ponytail, and pulled it with her left hand as she managed a grip on the right shoulder of her lab coat. As soon as she began to pull, David’s lifeless body dropped in a thud to the floor, and when Emily looked up, her eyes locked onto John Two’s alien-black-eyes. He was ready for his next kill.

  With a surge of fear-ridden adrenaline, Emily managed to pull Elaine all the way to the opening of the door, but it wasn’t going to be enough. John Two rushed forward. He was going to take Elaine, and there wasn’t a damn thing Emily could do about it. The infected monster reached down and wrapped his oversized hand around Elaine’s right leg. All Emily could do was scream. John Two lifted Elaine up like a rag doll and as he went to sink his teeth into her thigh, his head exploded.

  Bang! Bang-Bang!

  Three more shots followed into the alien’s chest. Emily rushed forward when Elaine dropped to the ground and pulled her out of the room. Two armed men moved into the lab where John Two was now a lifeless body on the floor. Emily laid Elaine on her back in the hallway, but she was distracted by the men inside.

  “What do we do?” one said to the other. Both of their pistols were aimed toward Karen and John One in the chairs.

  “I think we shoot them. If they break loose, it could be a disaster.”

  “No!” Emily shouted. “You can’t!” She rushed into the room. “Put your guns down. They are sedated. Don’t shoot!”

  Both men looked at Emily, then looked down at David’s bloody body. Neither of them put his gun away. The moment was so intense that Emily’s heart was pounding. She was drenched with sweat and shaking all the way to her toes. Between the pressure of injecting the rabid infected, Elaine getting bit in the arm, David’s slaughter, and these men about to shoot dead the only viable options they had to possibly find a cure, she was completely overwhelmed.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  The room began to spin. Karen and John One had become completely still. “Please,” Emily managed. “Please don’t shoot . . .”

  Emily tried to take a deep breath, but one wouldn’t come. The last thing she saw was one of the armed men rushing over and grabbing her by the arms. Then everything went dark.

  14

  “Animals?” Tyler said from the driver’s seat. “We have an army of alien humans chasing after us, communicating through the heavens, with the one goal of killing us all, and you’re worried about animals?”

  Amy instantly began to cry.

  “Nice,” Jess said. “Mister Sensitive.”

  Jake watched Tyler roll his eyes in the rearview mirror.

  Jess consoled Amy. “It’s all right. None of this is your fault.”

  Her blue eyes were red with tears, and her face flushed. “Yes it is,” she cried. “It’s all my fault.” She looked at Jake. “If you hadn’t saved me from those things outside your house a couple days ago, none of you would be in this situation.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Jake’s response caught Jess off guard. Jess eyed him with a confused stare. He knew she was worried he’d say something to make things worse. He had never been much of a sensitive man. That was especially true when it came to kids, because he was never around them. Amy looked on, inquisitive.

  Jake continued after a short pause. “Amy, if it wasn’t for you, every single one of us would be dead. Regardless of if you were with us or not, we would still be trying to make it to Virginia. But if you weren’t with us, what happened back there, they would have killed us. All of us. You are the only reason we are even in this truck having this conversation. You stopped them from killing us all.”

  Jess’s face was half bewildered, half infatuated. Jake was sure she was surprised he hadn’t fumbled that up. Because he too was surprised he hadn’t. He could tell it had hit home with Amy as well by the half smile she was wearing on her face.

  Amy sniffled once and let out a sigh. “You mean it?”

  “I mean it.”

  He held her eyes for a few seconds. He had finally given her the comfort she’d been searching for over the last few days. And then, just like every other time he’d tried to talk feelings with a woman, something went wrong. Amy began to cry.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Jess asked.

  Amy glanced at Jess, but looked back at Jake. “Jake? What is wrong with me?”

  Before he could answer, Amy wriggled across the seat and buried her head in his chest. She began to sob. He looked up at Jess and watched
as she began to cry as well. If either of them were hoping for a round two of comforting words from Jake’s mouth, they were going to have to wait a while. He had nothing left in the tank. But he did manage, this time without a nudge from Jess, to wrap his arms around Amy and just let her cry. He didn’t ruin the moment with words. He knew the only way it could go after his last statement was downhill.

  By the grace of God, Jess spoke for him. “Nothing is wrong with you, Amy. Nothing at all.”

  Amy looked up. “Then why is this happening to me? Why can I understand them? Why do they want me? Why do they keep calling me Element Zero? Am I one of them?”

  No one in the SUV had an answer for any of those questions. Not one. And Amy knew it; that was why she was so upset. Jake had been wondering all of those same things as well, along with several others. Was Amy one of the aliens? How far back did this thing go? Had the aliens been monitoring humans since the day she was born? Was this how they knew they could survive here on earth? Was watching her and living through her how they came to know they wanted to take earth over?

  Jake was a man who was used to getting answers, so not being able to get them had begun to drive him mad. That was why he’d pushed all of those questions aside for the last two days and focused on something he could control—their attempt at making it to Virginia. But now that was completely out of his control as well. After what happened by the dam—after Amy said that all the aliens now knew where they were—any plan they had was rendered useless . . . wasn’t it?

  Jess finally ended the silence. “I don’t know these things, Amy. But you do, don’t you?”

  Jake’s entire process of doubt shifted. How had he not thought of that? Amy just said she knew everything about them now. Wouldn’t that mean she knew the answers to those questions too? He waited for Amy to respond.

  “I—I . . . I think so.”