Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7

by Isherwood, E. E.

  Yes. Look at me.

  He had stopped in his tracks. Facing her, he seemed to hesitate.

  She knew she had him.

  “Not so bad, huh?” She wasn't cheerleader material. Or scholarship material. Honesty was easy at the end of the world. But she wasn't horrible, either. Getting boys with alcohol was never a problem. Getting one with her body alone was a challenge, but an enjoyable one.

  She lifted her shirt so it was over her head. One arm was free. She'd deal with the bra later. For now…

  The thing wouldn't go all the way over. The mud was very heavy, and slippery, and she found herself caught up in her own clothing. But, she thought quickly, perhaps that, too, could be used to her advantage.

  “I'm, uh, stuck again. Will you give me a hand?”

  A little girlish giggle for good measure.

  He laughed, and it sounded genuine. She had him. It was music to her ears.

  “I'll help you out—” he began.

  Emil cursed as if he were stung.

  “What the hell? Oh, God. No!”

  “What? What is it?” She struggled in her shirt, for real. She couldn't get it up and over. Getting it to go back down was also giving her fits. There was no way to get her arm back in.

  “Run!”

  Her sense of panic spiked. With a heave she nearly ripped her shirt as it fell back down partway over her chest, still with one arm out of its sleeve. When she saw what freaked out Emil...

  She screamed.

  A body? A zombie. He'd been in the deep mud, but not buried. It had pulled Emil off his feet and took a healthy bite out of the boy's neck. The mud's surface had a deep red liquid spreading around from the wound. Emil was now stuck in the mud, as she had been moments before. The zombie was pulling itself free, next to him.

  She screamed again.

  “Help, Darcy,” he said weakly.

  Forgotten through all her machinations with him, her rifle hung uselessly on her back. In her haste and hormone-addled game, she had tried to remove her shirt without first taking off her rifle. The sling was tight over her shoulder. It was no surprise she couldn't lift her shirt over her head.

  She tried to loose the rifle from its perch, but it was no use. Even if she got it off, Emil was lost.

  It's my fault.

  No shit it was.

  She ran in the opposite direction. Toward the river. Toward the deeper mud, though it took her several leaps and jumps before she appreciated her mistake.

  Why can't I think, today?

  She blamed it on all her losses. All the running. The dying days. The dying nights. Round the clock death. And finally, alone with a cute boy, all she could think was that they were alive.

  The zombie bellowed behind her. The sound was a whip that drove her into the deeper mud of a mud flat. She wasn't far from the shore, and not far from the open water beyond. Swimming entered her mind.

  A boat!

  A steel-gray boat had been run up onto the flat. It had two engines on the back and a small cabin right in the middle.

  “Help me!” she screamed.

  The waist-deep mud had become almost impossible to claw through.

  “Help!”

  The volume of her voice waned as she tired beyond words. Getting out of the mud with Emil had taxed her. This had her bankrupt. And only a dozen more feet to the boat.

  Another yell from behind. She didn't look back.

  “Oh God. Please help me.” With great effort she managed another couple of steps. The boat was tantalizingly close.

  “Hey, is anyone there?”

  It was likely no one was on the beached craft. Surely they'd have heard her...

  Her lungs burned and her muscles cramped. Soon she'd be frozen for good. She turned to see the shore. The zombie which claimed Emil was now standing on a little mound of dirt at the edge of the mud field. Though it had come from further inland, she noticed it was standing at the end of a path of disturbed mud leading to the boat.

  The boat did have at least one passenger, she decided.

  With another powerful twist she managed another step.

  Her life flashed before her eyes, which she assumed only happened when a person was about to die. The edge of the motorboat was so near, yet impossibly far. The mud only got deeper. It was too wet to get on top, and too deep to push through.

  Even releasing the gun on her back seemed a monumental chore.

  She looked back to shore, getting a read on her chances.

  Now, there were two zombies.

  I'm screwed.

  ###

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for reading Zombies vs Polar Bears!

  This book, like all my books, came out of my keyboard in ways I didn't expect. The three main characters keep trying to find ways to split up, and I keep trying to find ways to keep them together. But the Zombie Apocalypse calls each person differently. To survive, we all need someone we can count on absolutely. For Liam, that person is Victoria. I think she feels much the same way. That's why the next book is titled the way it is. Can these two kids grow up and have a happily ever after when zombies are on every street corner? We shall see.

  Please allow me to call out a good friend in this space. Brent L. has pre-read each of my books before I released them, essentially ensuring that I wasn't putting big shotgun holes in the continuity, or story. He has been a beta reader, a critic, and a great supporter of my work. If I had ten more of him I would probably be a bestseller. He's that good! If you would like to join my team and help fashion the story and beta read the earliest versions of future books, please look me up. For now, thank you Brent!

  I hope you are enjoying the ride!

  E.E. Isherwood, June 19, 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 6

  Zombies Ever After

  Since the Sirens

  Book 6

  © 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.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Miss Liberty, our beloved daffy rescue greyhound. She passed during the penning of this volume and I immortalized her in "ink" the same day. Watch out for her. She's fast!

  You wrecked my truck, boy.

  You ate my dog, boy.

  Have you lost your mind, boy?

  When our love died, my heart shattered.

  But my soul escaped, boy.

  Now you run from me, so run, boy, run.

  --Midnight Foxes (found scratched in blood on basement floor)

  Prologue

  Major General John Jasper sat on a hard chair. He'd been tied
to it by the same team that captured him on the levee outside of Cairo, Illinois. He had a bag over his head, reminding him of any number of interrogations from his time overseas. There, he was on the other side of the cloth. The hours of monotony gave him plenty of time to think about what he did wrong. Explosions and gunfire rattled the room from somewhere close by. His men were out there, fighting.

  Elsa and her team had bagged him while he maneuvered the ad hoc battalion of Army units near the big ditch to the north. For some reason, she wanted all his men outside the town, though his military brain could fathom no legitimate reason for doing so. The Paladins were not well-suited to direct fire. That's why he had them among the houses to the south, so they could rain the hurt on the zombies as they came over the interstate to the north. Keep the fighting miles from population, instead of at the front gate.

  Homeland Security had taken charge of all military operations inside the continental United States, getting around Constitutional roadblocks, as part of the government's response to the zombie outbreak—he'd long since given up trying to call them by other names—and her role in Homeland gave her direct control of his units. Up until that day she'd deferred to him on tactical issues. He never imagined she would relieve him of duty. How many other two-star generals could she tap here in Nowhere, USA?

  “I did everything she asked, and she still sacked me,” he thought. Though, being totally honest with himself, he knew what he did wrong.

  “Mrs. Peters. I shouldn't have gone to see Mrs. Peters.” Elsa never prohibited his movements, but she did suggest the 104-year-old woman was her prisoner. By all indications Elsa had made every effort to kill her, which was confusing as hell, since she was supposedly cured of the zombie plague.

  And then you broke her out.

  It seemed the chivalrous thing to do. Marty Peters had gone loopy from heat exhaustion because Elsa had cut her air conditioner power cord, and the temperature in the room had gone into the stratosphere. If he hadn't gone there, she would be dead.

  “So what's the score, general?” he said to himself. “Elsa knows where Marty came from, and knows the doctor who cured her. That doctor went AWOL; then Marty shows up in Cairo. Elsa finds the old woman and locks her up, intending to kill her. Why? She wanted me to go track down the good doctor. Why?”

  Nothing made sense. Zombies. Elsa. Cures, or no cures.

  Elsa wasn't who she said she was. He was sure of that. Homeland Security was led by boot-licker bureaucrats whose idea of “security” was patting down toddlers and feeling up women at airports. Obviously, they failed in epic fashion in preventing travelers from bringing in the plague from overseas. He was far from a patriot in the vein of the Patriot Snowball movement, but he didn't believe for one second they were capable of causing the zombie plague. His sources all insisted it came from overseas. Homeland dropped the ten-thousand-pound ball.

  And that's why she wants to blame old ladies and rogue administrators.

  So, Marty Peters was the good guy. Whatever else she had going on, she was an enemy of Elsa Cantwell. That made her his friend, though it didn't elude his steel trap mind that his biggest assistance to his new ally was getting himself relieved of duty and tossed out of the Zulu World War, just when it was getting important he be there with his men. She was probably back in her prison room by now. Or dead.

  He tried for the hundredth time to jiggle his hands in the bindings. Unlike the movies, he was unable to free himself and make a heroic escape. Before all this, he was comfortable in his desk job—a few years from retirement and the good life on a tiny wooded lake somewhere—and his physical training had been a bit lax. That was costing him, now.

  A door opened, then closed. Someone had come into the room. He tensed up, listening.

  “Hello, John,” a female voice taunted.

  “Good—” he didn't know if it was day or night. “—morning?” He'd been taken at dusk, and it felt like days since he'd been hauled away.

  “Not quite.” Elsa pulled the bag from his head. He was in the same room where Marty had been kept. The dirty motel was near the front gate of the town, which explained how he heard the fighting over the levee, to the north.

  And Elsa had completely changed. Far from the attractive, but reserved-looking blonde woman he'd known since she arrived in Cairo, she had transformed into—

  “You're undoubtedly wondering why I'm dressed like this?” she nodded to him as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the room. He couldn't take his eyes off her, despite his inability to properly focus, or his general disdain for her.

  The woman was in her thirties but had the body of a woman in her twenties. She looked like she had just come from the gym, where she apparently ripped up the StairMaster as well as the free weights. She wore tight-fitting black capris and a similarly tight orange sports bra. But now that he could see the silhouettes of her powerful legs and the muscle definition on her arms, he could see she'd been a wolf-in-sheep's clothing all along. He was focused on her mind, and the dumb decisions she seemed to make. It never crossed his mind she was as strong as this…

  “Did you know eight of the ten women in my graduating class were CrossFit champions in their respective countries? I was top girl for several years when I was a transplant in Iceland. Look it up sometime.” She laughed. “You probably thought I was a pushover, and that's why you didn't respect me in our meetings, or when you went to free Mrs. Peters from this detention facility.” She swept her arms around the room.

  “I didn't know this was a prison.”

  “No, I guess you weren't as smart as I'd hoped. Maybe losing you won't be the blow I thought it would be.”

  He couldn't help feel the sting of that statement. Elsa's six-pack abs drew his eyes when he should have been paying attention to her words. He missed some of what she said next.

  “...and that's why you're here, John. I told you I needed someone I could trust to do what was asked of them. You've gone off the reservation. Now you have to pay for that, I'm sorry to say.”

  He looked up, to her cool blue eyes. “I thought she was a threat. I had to see for myself. But she's just an old lady. All I did was get her medical help.”

  He was telling the truth, though now he was glad he set her free.

  While she responded, Elsa untied the rope around his feet, then his hands. “John, there's so much you don't know, I wouldn't know where to start. Homeland Security has many branches, and the division I work for has been planning for this event for a long goddamn time, and you and that old lady aren't going to mess it up for me. That's the main thrust of what this is all about tonight.”

  As the ropes came off his hands, he imagined himself lunging at her and putting a stop to whatever it was she was doing, but his old arms had been bent backward, and the soreness prevented him from moving them quickly to his lap, much less using them to tackle her.

  Her quads bulged in her stretch pants.

  “I know what you're thinking, John. Can you take me? Well, Major General, do you think you can take down a helpless little girl like me?” She laughed, knowing his impotence at that moment.

  “It's not very fair. I can't even move my arms.” He tried to convey bravado, but the truth was still unflattering to a career soldier. He finally got both arms to his lap and rubbed his hands to restore blood flow.

  “I'll tell you what I'll do,” she said as she walked to and opened the motel room door. “If you can get by me in the next sixty seconds, I'll let you go on your way. If you don't, I'll kill you.” She giggled. “Sounds fun, doesn't it?” Her smile was evil.

  He took a deep breath and continued to rub his hands. The feeling was just starting to come back.

  “Fifty seconds left, John.”

  “Give me a second.”

  “You don't have many of those left. You aren't getting out of this door.”

  Another ten seconds went by. He tried to stand, which went better than he assumed it would. He plopped heavily back down. A plan formed in his head.<
br />
  More hand rubbing. “Why are you doing this? You can't off a two-star just because...”

  He hoped that was true. It would have been accurate before the sirens.

  “That's what I've been trying to tell you, stud. I can do whatever the hell I want.”

  But why? Who the hell are you?

  “Thirty seconds left. Tick tock.”

  John imagined himself doing the actions, knocking Elsa down, then running for his men. Maybe he could convince them to arrest her. It wasn't very clever, but most military actions succeeded when they were dead simple.

  “Wow. Nothing? Are you just going to die there? I'm so disappointed in you.”

  He feigned having trouble standing. When he made it to his feet, he turned part-way around and pretended to lean on the chair back.

  With a firm grasp in both his hands—still in pain—he lifted the wooden chair from the floor and turned as fast as his body would allow, throwing it the ten feet over to Elsa. In his head, he intended to follow the chair for a deadly second strike, but that turned out to be something his thirty-year-old self could have done. Not his current self.

  Elsa was clipped on one arm. She let out an ambiguous sound, like air hissing, as she dodged. It took John several seconds to reach her. He knew he'd taken too long.

  The smile on her face invited the challenge.

  They met a few feet from the door, but Elsa dipped low as she put a shoulder into the side of his ribs. He tried to grab her.

  What the!

  His arms slid harmlessly over her oiled-up midsection. She'd positioned herself behind him and in one fluid motion put her arms around his neck and flung herself onto his back. He saw himself in the dirty mirror on the wall. A bemused look on his face signaled his acceptance of how this was going to go down.

  Elsa's knees dug into his back as she pulled on his neck. The woman knew her stuff.