Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7

by Isherwood, E. E.

  I want to thank every reader who came through the series, or just read this third book. As a writer there is no greater honor than knowing someone thought enough of my idea to take time out of their busy lives to step into my imagination for so many hours. It doesn't escape my notice that an author can get the near-undivided attention of a reader for periods far longer than many TV personalities and entertainers, including most politicians. This is what drives me to become a better writer, build more creative stories, and make my worlds as interesting and thought-provoking as possible. There are so many great authors out there—a multiverse of them! I'm eternally grateful you chose to visit my tiny waterfall.

  Finally, a special thank you to my wife. As an indie author, you would think the pressures of writing and publishing would be reduced—I'm my own boss after all. But the opposite is true. I've spent a lot of late nights at the computer. She has never complained, has always been helpful with reading and correcting my drafts, and always encourages me to pursue my passion. I could not have done it without her.

  E.E. Isherwood, Feb. 2016

  E.E. Isherwood’s other books

  Minus America – After an event sweeps from coast to coast, nearly everyone in mainland USA disappears. Only piles of clothes remain. Can the last Americans survive long enough to learn how it happened? Five books.

  Impact (co-written with Mike Kraus) – A post-apocalyptic thriller about an asteroid slamming across the heartland of America. Six books.

  End Days (co-written with Craig Martelle) – A post-apocalyptic adventure about a father and son on opposite ends of a continent ravaged by a failed science experiment. Four books.

  Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse – A teen boy must keep his great-grandma alive to find the cure to the zombie plague, but what if the only people immune are those over 100? Seven books.

  Amazon – amazon.com/author/eeisherwood

  Facebook – www.facebook.com/sincethesirens

  My web page – www.eeisherwood.com

  That’s all the time I have. The next book calls to me!

  SINCE THE SIRENS BOOK 4

  Last Fight of the Valkyries

  Since the Sirens

  Book 4

  © 2016 E.E. Isherwood. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  History has all the excitement of a haunted jack-in-the-box.

  A few turn the handle. A few try to stop it. Most just look away.

  And sometimes, what comes out surprises us all.

  Prologue: Grandma

  Six months before the sirens.

  The phone rang.

  Marty woke with the feel of electricity coursing through her body. She wrote it off to how she fell asleep in her soft chair—her neck was tilted to the side a little too far. She let the call go to her answering machine as she always did.

  “Would you like me to pick up?” Angie yelled from the kitchen.

  “Oh no, dear, let it go to the computer.”

  Marty knew it wasn't really a computer with a keyboard and a fancy monitor, but she thought anything “hi tech” was a computer of some sort. The little box had buttons and a screen and blinking lights—a lot like a computer.

  It beeped as the announcement played, “Hello, this is the residence of Mrs. Marty Peters, please leave a message and she'll try to call you back.” That was Angie's voice—the woman in the kitchen and also Marty's full-time live-in nurse who stayed in the flat above her. She agreed to do the greeting message for Marty because her voice was getting so weak. Marty had recently turned 104 years old, and was starting to feel her age catching up. Last year, she might have tried to get out of her comfortable chair and pick up the telephone, but now—it was just easier to let the computer do all the heavy lifting.

  Normally she'd have the handset of her cordless phone sitting next to her, but it was still early in the morning and Angie hadn't been able to get all her morning chores done down here yet. Getting Marty set up with all her sewing equipment, reading glasses, and even the telephone, were still on her to-do list. She was currently making breakfast.

  As the answering machine clicked over, Marty listened in, “Hello Grandma. Uh, listen, I need to talk to you when you get a chance. I got a call from my mom and she has some things going on in Colorado that concern all of us. I don't really want to talk about it on the phone.” The voice hesitated for several seconds. “Just being safe is all. I'll be over this afternoon. Love to Angie. Talk soon.”

  A beep closed out the transaction.

  Marty stared thoughtfully across the room to the machine now flashing a little number one at her. Her eyesight was still quite good. The man on the call was her grandson, and he was referring to her daughter-in-law, Rose, who had just won an election to a congressional seat in her home state of Colorado. Marty had about as much interest in politics as she did computers, but something in the tone of Jerry's voice told her this would be no ordinary meeting.

  Just being safe.

  She pulled out her rosary and began to pray for guidance, but before she got into it, she had a premonition of a sort. A deja vu? No, it felt like the start of something, but it made no sense though it continued for a minute like a daydream.

  I saw Liam and three young girls. All with guns!

  “Will Jerry be stopping by, Grandma?” Even Angie, her 54-year-old nurse, called her Grandma. Everyone did, and she was OK with that.

  The question startled her out of her reverie.

  “Oh. Yes. Jerry will be stopping by after lunch.”

  “Will he have his tools? My door is sticky again.” It was a running joke between them. That door would never be straight.

  Marty couldn't reply right away. She felt that surge of energy leaving her. She gripped the beads a little tighter, worried her time had finally come. The vision of her great-grandson and those girls was unlike anything she'd experienced in her many years. It was like a waking dream. Her thoughts turned dark as she recalled horrible scenes of kids with swords, guns, and lots of dead people. She was a spiritual woman to the core. How such evil scenes could come from inside her was a mystery.

  The end is coming for me.

  “He's always prepared, Anj.”

  “He sure is,” she shouted, “you're lucky to have him around.”

  Angie cooking. A call from her grandson. A vision of her great-grandson.

  She couldn't imagine a busier morning.

  Chapter 1: A Day at the Ballpark

  Liam Peters was shirtless and soaked. He'd just survived a perilous swim in the Mississippi, followed by a harrowing escape from a massive pile of wreckage floating in that river. By his estimation, they consumed quite a few miracles as they made it from a boat on one side of the river, into the water, onto the wreckage, then to the safety of shore. For most of the journey he'd hauled his 104-year-old great-grandmother Martinette (Marty) Peters on his back. He was assisted by Victoria Hennessey, his girlfriend. In fact, they'd all been running, dodging, and escaping one problem after another for the past couple weeks. Pretty much every moment since the sirens ended the world and the zombies poured forth.

  But that was all in the past. They'd reached this moment when rescue was finally at hand. As part of their recent tribulations, their friends had come into the possession of a military truck called an MRAP. Built for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a large six-wheeled vehicle structurally designed to deflect improvised explosive devices left by insurgents over in those hellholes. Here in America, it was nearly invincible. And it was waiting for them half a football field away.

  “Grandma, w
e're saved.”

  As he said it, a sheet of newspaper drifted up and over the edge of the bridge when a stiff breeze caught it and blew it directly toward him—along with the stench of death from the city below. He swatted it with his free hand, but missed. It planted itself on his chest.

  The newspaper was a single sheet—the front page—and it was filled with headlines, but almost no descriptive text underneath. The only photo was a black and white snapshot of the Gateway Arch, from a time that had to be before it was overrun with refugees and zombies. The edition was obviously rushed.

  The biggest words were at the top. The headline caught his attention, as intended. “CURE FOUND!” It was one of the few articles that had any text. “CDC promises vaccine. Stay indoors. Stay calm.”

  He laughed. He had the inside track on that imaginary vaccine.

  A cursory look at the other articles gave him similarly curt titles. “Domestic Terrorists Blamed.” “Stocks Fall.” “Pols point fingers over failed response.” “Pope says not Rapture.”

  “I guess the zombies won.” He tossed the paper away. The wind carried it down the highway. Too late, he wondered what date was on the paper. It seemed trivial, but he was curious how long the papers still managed to print.

  The sheet floated over the MRAP to points beyond. It drew his eye as it fluttered.

  “Liam, look ahead,” Victoria said with a quiver in her voice.

  It didn't need to be said. All three of them could see the mass of zombies coming onto the raised highway, not too far beyond the MRAP. The infected were coming up from the city, which had been swarming with them. Now, as if released, they began fleeing the downtown—heading anywhere but there.

  Liam and Victoria held Grandma Marty between them as they walk-ran her toward the truck. Ahead, the rear doors opened and a few men piled out. And a few boys.

  Liam smiled broadly when he saw the Boy Scout uniforms. He'd recently spent a lot of time in a camp built around a Boy Scout property in the southern suburbs of St. Louis, and the fact they came to rescue him warmed his heart. He half-expected his mother and father to appear, but he couldn't see them.

  The chatter of gunfire prompted him to move faster. The big chaingun on top of the truck remained silent. It should be easily chewing up zombies.

  Like so many times of the past few weeks since the zombie plague began, he ran for his life. He turned to look at his tiny grandma and her hideous pinkish-red pantsuit. Her white hair was a stark contrast to her lower body—which was soaked and muddy like his own. Victoria ran along on her far side. He admired her long brown hair, also filthy with mud, and her normally pretty face. It would have been much prettier had it not been covered with bruises from some earlier mishaps, and soaked with dirty river water. Her white shirt was torn at the midriff and stained with both coal soot and river water. None of them was a model of hygiene at that moment.

  The passenger door of the MRAP opened and Phil Ramos, ex-police officer, popped out.

  “Come on, Liam. What are you waiting for?” he shouted as he ran to the front bumper, knelt down, and began shooting the increasing numbers of infected coming their way.

  They reached the rear doors, and he helped Grandma climb the stairs to get inside. He had no weapons to assist in the defense of the vehicle, so all he could do was watch the battle. Given all that he'd been through of late, he was content to sit this one out. He climbed into the passenger area and took a seat on the long bench next to Grandma. Victoria remained on her other side, as if to prevent her from sliding too far in either direction.

  For half a minute, the shooting continued, until a command was given and the rescue team all clambered back into the relative safety of the metal beast.

  “Go!” one of the Scouts screamed.

  An older man, likely his dad, put his hand on the kid's knee as he sat next to him. “We're good. We'll be OK,” he told the boy.

  The engine was already running, so the driver threw it into gear as soon as the last door shut. The vehicle lumbered down the road in a direction Liam knew was wrong. They were all pointed toward the river, but the bridge was out. It was lying in the river.

  He shouted, “The bridge is out,” just as the truck began to decelerate and turn. The driver expertly rounded four lanes of traffic on the empty highway and then gunned the engine as it headed back toward the zombies.

  “Grandma, will you be OK? I have to see this.”

  “I'm fine, dear. Sitting is...heavenly.” Her head was already nodding in the hot and stuffy truck.

  He'd gotten up, but noticed she snapped right back awake as if she caught herself dozing in class. Something about the look on her face gave him pause.

  “You sure?” he asked in a tentative voice.

  She looked at him, but was already tipping over again. Her head fell to Victoria's shoulder, who held her steady.

  Must be the exhaustion.

  He tilted his head to Victoria with a weak smile, then held on to the tie-downs and moved forward. As he arrived in the space between the driver's area and the rear seats, he saw who was driving the truck.

  “Mel!”

  Melissa was a fellow survivor—a shoe saleswoman by her account—he'd met a week ago in front of his own house. She and Phil were a tag team of sorts when it came to driving the MRAP.

  “Yep. Good to see you too. Now hold on.”

  She aimed the truck into the crowd of zombies on the pavement ahead. Beyond the first loose cadre of zombies were an endless sea of them. They used the entrance ramp to flood onto the interstate from the city's center.

  The hull shook a little as they ran over the first few. Liam saw men and women of every shape, color, and dress shambling up the ramp. Most had bloody messes on their faces and necks. They diverged east and west on the highway as they came up onto the bridge, ignoring all rules of the road.

  He thought Mel was going to punch through the initial clump of them to try to continue on the raised bridge, but there was a big roadblock less than a quarter mile away. This segment was mostly free of dead vehicles because cars couldn't pass the distant barricade. She veered directly into the exit ramp going faster than Liam thought prudent.

  “Hang on!” Mel shouted, just as they got into the thick of the undead.

  Liam, unprepared for a collision, fell into the space between Phil and Mel. The truck shuddered and swerved as it pounded the pedestrians. The engine roared as Mel kept their speed just above reckless.

  “This ramp was empty when we came up. They must have followed us,” Phil offered.

  By the time Liam got to one knee so he could look out the front, she had them most of the way around the sweeping left turn of the ramp. The end was in sight.

  Mel had the steering wheel in a death grip. It was vibrating badly as more of the plague victims fell under the high front cross bar of a bumper. Blood splashed all over the hood and was beginning to reach their windshield.

  Still she kept her foot on the gas, taking them to the bottom of the ramp. Liam almost relaxed, until he saw the new roadway. They'd left the raised highway of the east-west interstate and entered the north-south highway below which should have taken them out of St. Louis. Except it was a parking lot.

  When the city collapsed, people got in their cars and tried to head out into the country—anywhere but a city awash in a growing problem of neighbors biting neighbors. In hours, the interstates were traffic jams of Biblical proportions. It was entirely appropriate for the Apocalypse. Even the burly MRAP couldn't push its way down an endless highway of parked cars.

  Mel turned hard to the right. Dangerously so. The MRAP jumped a high curb while simultaneously slipping on the...remains...of the crowd of people outside. More blood shot onto the hood. Liam tried to hold on, but fell to the left and bounced off Mel's seat. He knew she wanted to say something to him about getting back in his seat, but she was unable to take her focus from the road.

  “I have—”

  She turned hard to the right again, and put th
em on a north south road going into downtown.

  “—to find somewhere without so many infected.”

  Like most adults, Mel was reticent to use the term “zombie” to describe the people outside. He'd had philosophical debates several times over the past few weeks with people who shared her view. Zombies were from the movies. These things couldn't be categorized so easily. So people used what terms they could. “Infected” was most common. “Plaguers” also gained favor, mostly because the source of the infection was a disease sort of like Ebola. It was officially called Extra-Ebola, an understated and simplistic name for a very complicated disease process which made the victim bleed like they'd caught the worst equatorial disease imaginable. The joke was: twice the Ebola and one-half the life expectancy. In fact, it killed people—though the resulting dead bodies just kept walking around like they didn't get the memo. And they sought the blood of the living.

  After Hayes and his research team had drawn in all the zombies, the roads nearest the center of the urban core were now thinning out. It was the direction Mel had them going. As the engine continued to strain against the still considerable crowd, she tried to plan her next move.

  “We can't afford to stop. If we do, we're dead. We'll never get this thing moving again against such numbers. I'm going to head north, then turn west as soon as a street looks passable.”