Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  “Hold on,” Wilkes whispered before making the mistake of grabbing Bryce. He was still bigger and stronger than the scientist, but he was no longer faster.

  Bryce knocked the hand away and darted in until they were nose-to-nose. “Gather everyone who can walk or you get left behind. We don’t need you to find Magnus. Remember that.”

  “I remember that just yesterday you were a little shit.” Wilkes wasn’t the kind of guy that backed down from a fight, even in the middle of an apocalypse.

  “That was yesterday,” Bryce retorted, staring him in the eye. “Today you’ll do what you’re told.” This was all the time either of them had. Bryce was unhurt and leapt across to another of the cars. He jogged down it and dropped to the tracks, landing next to Maddy. She had been trying to quiet Victoria who was attempting to dig beneath one of the subway cars with a broken hunk of wood.

  A bare leg stuck out from beneath the metal. It might have been Tessa’s and yet it was so torn and twisted that it could’ve been any child’s.

  Standing near them were the survivors of their group; it wasn’t a large group: along with Griff was Sid—slow blinking and bleary-eyed. The infected mercenary, —wild-eyed and angry. Nichola—twitchy and skittish, ready to run; and the thirteen-year-old boy—he was so covered in dirt and dust that he defied description. He was nothing but a grey shape that blended into the background so perfectly, he would’ve been invisible if he wasn’t still clutching the sword.

  “We have to go,” he told them.

  “Bryce, no,” Maddy said, softly. She shook her head, suggesting it wasn’t a good time.

  It would never be a good time, he realized. Good times for anything were gone. “The dead are coming. Maddy and Griff will do a quick scout for survivors. The rest of you cross the tracks to that far wall. Keep low, keep quiet and don’t touch the electric rails.”

  “I’m not leaving without Tessa,” Victoria stated and slammed the wood back down, losing another chunk of it.

  “And what about my mom?” the thirteen-year-old asked. His name was Brian Addis and the sword in his hand belonged to his father, a deployed marine. “And my brother? He was right next to me.” He stared with vacant eyes around the dust-filled tunnel. “They were right here.”

  Bryce didn’t have time for this. “If I find them, I’ll send them over. Does that sound fair?”

  “If?”

  “When,” he replied quickly, lying with a fake reassuring smile. “They’ll catch up. But first, I’m going to need your sword to hold back the dead.” The makeshift group of weapons everyone had been carrying had mostly disappeared, buried under the rubble along with Tessa and the remains of Brian’s family. Maddy had kept hold of her climbing axe and Nichola still had her bat and that was it.

  Brian only hesitated a second before handing over the sword. He looked like he was going to be sick the moment he did.

  Nichola pulled him close. “It’ll be alright as long as we keep moving.” She really wanted the boy to live, at the same time, the fugue state he was in would make him an excellent target if they were seen by the dead. He was a walking sacrifice, which was sad, but there was a lot of sadness in the world just then.

  The group started to move out, all except Victoria. She continued to attack the crumbling cement with her broken board. Bryce grabbed it from her. “You still have a son and a husband. They’re on their way to…”

  “They’re on their way to hell,” she hissed, furiously, tears making her eyes look like clear blue pools of water. “They’re dead! They’re all dead. You know it. You know they are, right?” She had seen him and Maddy earlier. They had been afraid of the tunnel when it was clearly their safest route. They had known something bad was going to happen. And that hadn’t been the first time, either. “What do you know of Jordan? Tell me what you know about my son.”

  He faltered, uncertain what he knew and what he could only guess at. “I don’t know what’s become of them. But…but your husband was strong and brave. There’s a good chance they’ve been at the FBI field office since yester…”

  “No!” she shrieked. “I want the truth, freak! Yeah, I know what you are. You and that girl, both of you are freaks. You aren’t normal. You aren’t…natural. I don’t think you’re even human anymore.”

  Chapter 39

  The word freak struck home harder than Bryce had expected. All his life he had been a geek, a nerd, the little shit that the girls would look right through when they were drooling over the football players. And now that he was different…it was no different. He had exchanged one insulting title for another.

  “I’m trying to tell you the truth,” he told her. “I don’t know what’s happened to your son. I do know what happened to your daughter, Tessa is dead.” The leg sticking from beneath the subway car was small, coltish with tiny blonde hairs. Only one toenail was left to the foot and a tiny bit of pink showed through the dirt. He knelt and touched the foot. It was still warm and he knew this was Tessa.

  Victoria saw the truth on his face and more tears streaked through the grime on her face as she started to come apart inside. Her tendons and ligaments seemed to melt, and her muscles just pulled away from the bone. She collapsed, too weak to stand, too weak to live.

  Bryce caught her. “Go with the others,” he said, speaking straight into her ear. “You still have a son. He’ll need you.”

  How could he need a mom like her? She had run from her husband and son. She had abandoned them. They were dead. That was the truth. That’s what the freak wouldn’t tell her. A scream of fury and despair built up inside her. She could feel it like a ball of fire, only just then a putrid, grey-faced monster appeared over the top of the train. The scream seemed to get trapped in her throat, and she realized that maybe she didn’t want to scream.

  Maybe it would be better if it just tore out her throat. “Yeah. I don’t care anymore,” she said to the zombie.

  Bryce had been so focused on Victoria and the unnatural feeling of knowing, that he had disregarded his other senses.

  The scraping he had attributed to a survivor. The scent of the creature was masked by the dust that filled the air. And the zombie, who was so covered in dirt and ash that it looked like a dumpling layered in grey flour, and it completely blended in with the filthy surroundings. The thing had been run over by a train and by some hellish miracle, it had come out of the collision unscratched.

  And now it launched itself at Bryce. He was turned away, holding Victoria in one arm and the sword in his free hand.

  To Victoria, Bryce moved in a violent blur, lifting her as he spun. His sword cut a silver arc through the air until it connected squarely with the zombie’s neck. She expected the thing’s head to go flying from its body...and so did Bryce. But the thing’s head was still very much attached.

  He set her on her feet before running his thumb over the edge of the sword. His lip curled. The sword had all the sharpness of a butter knife, which explained how the zombie was still moving. He went to it and saw that he had managed to cut halfway through its neck. Knowing that it would heal, he lifted the sword and finished the job.

  Victoria turned away and dropped to her knees, her stomach flipping over.

  “Get up,” Bryce said, his voice both gruff and distracted by the disappointing sword. It would need an edge; of course the closest he’d come to sharpening a blade were those thousands of times he’d put a wicked point on a number 2 pencil. Yes, even timid little Bryce Carter had something of a barbaric nature. They just weren’t done in his eyes until the point was like that of a spear.

  He needed the sword to be like that.

  She hadn’t moved.

  “Get up,” he said again, glancing quickly around for something he could use as a whetstone. He was pretty sure that even a chunk of cement would do in a pinch. You don’t have time, his own voice whispered through the dark spaces of his mind. Now that his senses were tuning back to their surroundings, he heard the groans that were hunger and not pain related.


  Too many of the dead had survived.

  “I said, get up,” he growled, grabbing Victoria by the arm and pulling her to her feet.

  “Get off me, freak!” She ripped her arm out of his grasp and then began jabbing him in the chest. “You think you can push me around? You think you’re something special now, don’t you? Let me tell you, you’re not. You’re no hero. This is all your fault. All these dead people; your fault. And Tessa is your fault, not mine. You knew we shouldn’t have come down here. You said you had a bad feeling and yet you just walked us right into this!”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  The realization didn’t hit him like a slap it was more of a slow twist of an embedded knife. The only person he could claim to have saved in all of this was Maddy, while the list of people who had died because of his actions grew longer every second.

  “I-I didn’t mean for her to die.”

  “Do you think that matters? To Tessa? To me? To all of them?” Her voice was a perfect blend of ice and poison. It withered Bryce and he shrank back, turning so much into the old version of himself that the sword clattered from his fingers. He stared at the dull metal until Victoria hauled her hand back and slapped him across the cheek, leaving four blazing stripes on his face.

  She grinned hatefully through her tears. It was as if she had triumphed over him by slapping him, and in a way she had. Her grief had become his guilt.

  “You owe me a child,” she hissed into his face. “You’ll find my son. That’s all that matters now. Swear it. Swear you’ll do everything you can to find him.”

  He bowed his head, his eyes falling on the near useless sword. “I swear it. We’ll go to the FBI field office first. He might be there.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  “I’ll go look for him.”

  The FBI wouldn’t need him, not if Maddy made it. Though they would have a handful with her. He knew her well enough to know that she had no intention of becoming a guinea pig for the government. Sure, she would let them have a little blood from time to time, but there was no way Maddy would allow herself to be housed in a little cage and watched all the live-long day.

  The new Bryce wouldn’t have either. Getting to the FBI had always been an excuse to get to safety, but that ship was going to sail without him. Maybe.

  Victoria dropped to one knee to touch her daughter’s leg one last time; he knelt as well, though only to pick up the sword. As he did, someone started to scream in the rubble. It was another brick to add to the guilt-load riding on his shoulders.

  “Go with the others,” he told her. “I’ll catch up.”

  “But…” was all she could spit out before he was gone, dodging through the wreckage, racing past body after broken body, each one his fault. Not far into the mess, the darkness drew back slightly. Part of the roof of the tunnel had collapsed and Bryce could see a small patch of the city through a lattice of rebar. A building rising twenty stories right above them was being engulfed in a raging fire.

  This horrifying scene was given only a glance. The fire wasn’t his fault. The teenage girls trapped in one of the cars were, however.

  Sixteen tons of concrete and rock had crushed the back half of the car, while the front half was canted into the air. This was the only thing that was keeping the girls alive. Zombies had been falling down from the street for the last few minutes, attracted by the smell of blood, and now a gang of them was trying to climb up to the girls.

  Audrey Brooke, who was all of fourteen, was nursing a shattered arm. As the bones rubbed together, the pain was so great that she couldn’t exhale without making a whimpering sound—it was driving the dead mad with desire.

  Her friend, Barbi Doll Morales, was a year older, but was so covered in dust that she looked like an old woman. A minute before, she had pried her dad’s long-handled framing hammer from his dead hand and was smashing grey fingers one at a time as the beasts piled up at them. Broken fingers were ignored and Barbi Doll was starting to get frantic when Bryce came flying into the crowd, his sword flashing in the meager light.

  Had they been human or the sword actually sharp, his charge would’ve been a thing about which songs were written. Instead, the dead barely noticed him at first as he hacked at them with ugly two-handed strokes. There was little grace or skill to his attack. He used the sword more like an axe.

  Half of them had their heads caved in by the dull blade before they even realized he was there. They turned on him; ten against one, but they were slow and with the ground broken beneath them and the twisted rails sprawled everywhere, they were more awkward than usual.

  Still there were so many, and Bryce gave ground slowly, the sword going up and down, up and down, and the dark blood flying. He quickly discovered that any blow that wasn’t aimed for the crown of the head was a waste of his energy. When he chopped at necks, he was lucky if the dull blade sunk in an inch, and when he slashed at the grasping hands, it had little effect. The zombie might lose a pinky or a thumb.

  He fought among the rubble and the cars, always retreating. He fought until the canted subway car was lost in the darkness and by then, the newfound strength in his arms began to flag. The ten zombies he had attacked were dead, but fifteen more had taken their place and he was starting to realize that fifty would take their place if the battle lasted much longer.

  It was time to run.

  With a last flashing swing of the sword, he darted into one of the subway cars, jumped through a blown-out window and ran through the maze of cars back to where Maddy was trying to help the girls who were still stuck, while Griff fought off more zombies with a short chunk of wood.

  To Bryce, their roles had reversed. Griff, who was vulnerable to a scratch from the undead, was taller and stronger and could’ve caught the girls if they jumped the short distance. Maddy, who was fast becoming svelte, was quicker than ever and armed with a real weapon in the climbing axe. Unfortunately, there was no time for role-reversals.

  There wasn’t even time for Audrey Brooke to climb gingerly down, nursing her broken arm.

  Bryce ran to the canted car and yelled to Barbi Doll Morales, “Jump!” His voice had deepened and there had grown within it a leadership quality that he had never known before. When he yelled the word Jump! it came out as more than just an order, it was a command with an imperative that it had to be followed.

  Barbi Doll Morales jumped to Bryce’s waiting arms. It was only a six-foot drop, but she topped a hundred and twenty pounds. He wasn’t nearly strong enough to catch her and she pile-drived him into the ground.

  “It’s okay,” Bryce groaned, ignoring the twinge in his back. He struggled to his feet. “I’m fine. You. It’s your turn.” Grimacing, he lifted his arms as if Audrey were a toddler at the playground.

  Audrey backed away from the edge. They didn’t understand the pain she was in. She could barely stand and her head swam. Dying was preferable to the pain.

  All this was going through her head when Maddy climbed up into the car. Maddy thought they were running out of time, but when she glanced back, she saw that she was wrong; they were already out of time. From her vantage, she could see the zombies pouring down through the collapsed ceiling a dozen at a time.

  “You have to jump!”

  Audrey tried to back away, however Maddy wasn’t going to allow that. The zombies were falling through the gap like sand in an hourglass. Time was flying.

  Maddy grabbed the girl and hauled her to the edge. “Sit!” She pushed Audrey down, ignoring the girl as she cried out. “I’ll lower her down by her coat,” she said to Bryce. Audrey tried to squirm away, but Maddy put a knee in her back and shoved her off the edge.

  One quick grunt escaped Maddy—the girl was surprisingly light, or she had grown surprisingly strong. Maddy liked to think it was the latter.

  Because of her arm, Bryce caught her by the hips and lowered her easily down. “Hopefully you can run,” Bryce said, picking up his sword. Barbi Doll was ready to run at that exact second. Her
eyes were wild in her filthy grey face as she watched Griff swinging his hunk of wood in exaggerated circles as the dead closed in on all sides. “Get them moving,” Bryce ordered and rushed to Griff’s side.

  “I don’t know if I can,” Audrey said in a whimper.

  “Too late,” Maddy told her and started dragging her along. The girl whined constantly, but Maddy had that ugly feeling growing in her again. Death and more death rode on the dark air. “Nothing new,” she muttered. Death had been their constant companion and she was sure it would be until they got out of the city.

  If we get out of the city.

  There was that. It was beginning to feel impossible.

  The three of them cleared the wreckage and caught up to a gaggle of men, women and children, most of whom were limping or swaying dangerously. They were making their slow way towards another tiny band of survivors, who were crouched down at the far side of the tunnel. Among them was sour-faced Wilkes, waving impatiently at Maddy.

  “Where’s Bryce? Never mind. He’ll catch up. We got to move now. They’re coming.”

  “No duh,” Maddy snorted. They never stopped coming. But he was right. Maddy could see far down into the gloom to where dozens of shapeless, stumbling beings were heading their way along the one set of tracks not destroyed by the crash.

  She hissed this new group along after Nichola who was at the front, her feet skipping sideways, eager to race out of there. But she didn’t run, and when the others caught up, she mingled with them, staying close to the front.

  Of all of them there, she alone seemed to truly understand the concept of survival. She had the three basics down in her mind: flee, hide, fight. She even had the nuances: there was no need to be the fastest, she just couldn’t be the slowest. Hiding didn’t just mean cowering under a bed, it could mean hiding behind someone stronger…or weaker. Fighting was the last resort and if someone wanted to give their life up for hers, she’d let them.

  Maddy hung back, her nerves mounting with every step. She hoped that her fear would dissipate when Bryce and Griff caught up…and it did. They came jogging up out of the dark, and for a brief second, she grinned, happy that they had made it unscathed. Then her fear crept back. It built inside of her until she grabbed Bryce’s arm.