The Dead Years-New Dawn (Book 1): Resurrection

by Olah, Jeff

  And he didn’t.

  Since he’d lost his family nearly five years before, he wanted only to help those who were in need. Take care of those who couldn’t do it for themselves. He wanted desperately to make up for not being able to protect the ones he loved more than anything in the world. They were gone, and it was his small way of trying to make up for a life he’d rather forget.

  Mason had made a promise all those years ago that he would help anyone who asked and even those who didn’t. He was going to keep that promise, although he now knew the entirety of what that meant. He would protect those who deserved it, and eliminate anyone or anything who got in his way.

  Through the damp mud at the side of the highway and up onto the road, Mason wiped the sweat from his face, looked back through the trees, and then in the direction of Harbor Crest. His lungs were on fire, his legs ached, and he was attempting to block the pain from the wound above his left ear.

  He didn’t think Ava would be out in the open, and knowing her, she would have avoided the main highway. She was a talented runner, and with fear as her motivation, she would have made it to the rear gates without having to stop. On one hand that gave him comfort, but on the other hand that sent a cold chill up his spine.

  “AAAAAAAVVAAAAA!”

  It didn’t matter if Vince or even the men with rifles at the gates of Harbor Crest were within earshot. If the tall thin man was lying, and Mason and his people were safe, he at least needed to give Ava a chance to find him. Although if all of it were true, he still needed to find the girl he promised to bring home. If she was still out here, he wanted her to know she wasn’t alone.

  “AAAAAAAVVAAAAA!”

  He fought the urge to continue running, holding his breath for a few seconds as he just listened. He thought he heard something moving in the thick scrub to his right, but quickly noticed it was just the slight breeze blowing over the wet brush.

  Nothing, she wasn’t here. The most likely scenario put her in the exact same danger as the others. The same as her parents, the same as her little brother, the same as Travis, and Owen, and Emma, and Dr. Gentry, and as much as it pained him to imagine it … Savannah.

  Mason pushed aside the pain in his head and again broke into a sprint. He kept one eye on the left side of the road and the other on a small grouping of Feeders directly ahead. He could easily move around them, but something about them being out here, so far from anything else had him questioning what he was running toward.

  Ten minutes down the four lane highway and he came to the dirt road leading to the rear gates of Harbor Crest. That wasn’t the play—he’d need to come in from the west wall and try to confirm what he thought he already knew.

  Ahead, maybe fifty yards, was another grouping of Feeders. He counted at least a dozen this time, although so far they hadn’t spotted him. Mason continued to run, but now stayed near the trees at the side of the road. He scanned the crowd, looking over each of the infected individually.

  After eliminating the first eight, he found one that had what he needed. An average sized female walked with an uneven limp and her right arm was nearly severed. She had a piece of jagged metal through her abdomen, extending out from her lower back.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was something.

  Mason came at the crowd from behind, moving quickly by a pair of large males, knocking the woman to the ground, and planting his right foot on her back. He leaned away as one of the two massive male Feeders reached for him, and pulled free what looked to have once been a piece of a pickup truck’s front grill.

  The jagged metal tore into his hand as he extracted it from the woman’s back, the pain running a close second to the pounding in his head. He also pulled free a section of the woman’s shirt and quickly wrapped it around the end.

  As the others now turned and started toward him, Mason raised the makeshift weapon and swung on a man who wore a thick down jacket and had half his face missing. As the man growled at Mason, the jagged piece of metal slammed into his exposed jaw and knocked two of his teeth loose.

  With at least a fractional reassurance that the weapon would hold, he ducked the arms and hands of another trio of Feeders, and headed back to the road. After another five minutes, he again searched the left side of the highway, finally finding the dirt path that would take him home.

  As he plodded quickly through the thick brush and tossed aside the speed limit sign used as a landmark, Mason again began to increase his pace. His heart was now beating in his ears although from somewhere in the distance came the first voice.

  It was Travis.

  His friend was shouting over the low rhythmic groans of the dead and what sounded like a growing fire. There were others, although they were too close together, and at nearly the same pitch. He thought he could hear Natalie calling out to Ava, but figured it was just his mind playing out what it wanted to hear.

  At twenty feet from the wall, he could feel the heat and finally see the flames. From his vantage he imagined that the main structure at the center of the twenty-five acre lot wasn’t necessarily the intended target. The fire was closer to the perimeter.

  Much closer.

  22

  Randy stepped in front of Mayor Gil and used his right arm to urge his older friend in behind him. He looked from the radio in his left hand to the man in the green jacket, and keyed the mic. “Mason …”

  The radio was quiet as the men gathered near the last Tesla Model X began whispering to one another.

  Again, “Mason, you there?”

  Nothing.

  “I think you heard the man.” Norman Davies readied the black pistol in his right hand and motioned back toward the gate. “This place no longer belongs to you or your people. We’ll let you leave without any trouble, but you’re not taking the car.”

  “Let me ask you a question.”

  Norman shrugged, a half grin crossing his face. “Okay, but you do realize that every second you spend here trying to prove what kind of a man you are is one less second you could be helping your people back at Harbor Crest, one less second you could be helping Megan, your son?”

  Randy lunged at the man in the green jacket, although as he did, the report from the black pistol felt as though exploded inside his head. The pain in his right ear was instantaneous and approaching apocalyptic levels. Before he got his hands on Norman he could feel a warm trickle beginning to run down his neck.

  Randy dropped to his knees as a second shot was fired, it was loud and close, however; nothing like the first. He wasn’t hit, but was sure his right ear drum had been shattered. Pulling his leg forward and attempting to stand, he looked to his left, and saw his friend clutching his own shoulder.

  Norman began backing away as those around him also drew their weapons. “Listen, you can keep trying to get yourself and your friend here killed, but I’m not going to be the one to do it. I gave my word, and I intend to keep it.”

  Mayor Gil straightened and pulled his hand away from his shoulder. His lip quivered and it appeared he was having trouble remaining upright. His right arm was now covered in blood, the hole in his jacket exposing the quarter inch gash where the round had torn open the skin.

  “And,” Norman said, “neither of those were meant to do anything other than what they did. So leave now, before I decide to change my mind.”

  Mayor Gil reached for Randy’s arm. “We can do this some other time. Right now we need to get, the man is right.”

  Randy looked out of the corner of his eye at his friend. Gil was right, and if all of this was the truth, if Harbor Crest had fallen, if the only place left in this world that was supposed to be safe no longer was, he needed to get his friend out of here, and back to his wife and his child.

  He turned back to the man in the green jacket. “You do know I’m going to have to come back for you.” And then to the others. “Every single one of you.”

  Norman nodded, his expression now almost somber. “Yeah, I get it. But you have to know that we’ll be read
y, and it probably won’t end well for you … or anyone you decide to bring. If I were you, I would take what you have left of your pride and start over. Learn a lesson from this and make sure it never happens to your people again. Or maybe at some point beg Vince to let you join us. I’m sure he’d find a job for someone with your sort of demeanor.”

  Randy again eyed Gil. “You gonna make it?”

  Gil nodded, a wave of pain slowly growing behind his eyes. “We got a long walk, better get started.”

  Randy responded with a nod of his own before turning one last time to the man in the green jacket. “I will find you, all of you. Even the man on the other side of this radio. Let him know that I know his name and that he’s going to know mine.”

  And before the man he’d come to know as Norman could respond, Randy turned and started back toward the road to Harbor Crest. There were a few minutes where he and his friend just walked in silence, but as they reached the main highway, he started to slow. “Gil …”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You gonna be okay?”

  Gil pushed back his white Stetson, took in a slow breath, and looked toward where the sun would come up in just a few hours. He rolled his right shoulder forward and then back, again nodding. “What is it, another two, maybe three miles?”

  Randy stared off in the same direction. “Probably less, easy for a man of your obvious athletic abilities.”

  The older man chuckled. “Get going. Mason’s gonna need you. Just make sure you leave the lights on for me, I’ll be right on your heels, cowboy.”

  Randy took a closer look at Gil’s arm. “Stay off the road, don’t go lookin’ for trouble, and come in through the back. I’ll send someone out with a vehicle once I get there.”

  23

  The fire was so close and the flames so intense that Mason was having trouble finding a place to scale the eight foot block wall. He finally found a spot less than a hundred yards from the main gate, his pulse now rocketing as he laid his makeshift weapon atop the wall, took two paces back, and silently prayed that what he would find would be somehow different than the images in his head.

  He leaned a broken tree branch the width of his arm against the wall, used it to quickly climb to the top, and took a half-second to right himself. As the scene came into focus, he felt a knot building in his stomach and his mind beginning to race. There was too much, too many things happening all at the same time. He couldn’t focus on any one horror and couldn’t wrap his mind around where to even start.

  One disaster at a time.

  The massive parking lot, the building, the vehicles, everything was on fire. Either starting to burn, burning, or had already burned. The most intense flames were coming from the exits and where the loading docks bled into the main structure. He didn’t see it right away, but then it hit him like an out of control eighteen-wheeler, and all at once.

  There was something out of place, something that wasn’t there before, something he didn’t notice at first. Small individual fires that seemed to be moving, slowing more as they intensified. The flames had a darker tint than was normal, some more grey, a few blues, and a handful of greens and purples.

  Although after studying one of the larger spot fires near the end of the loading dock and noticing how it moved toward one of the exit doors, Mason now realized how Vince had planned to take Harbor Crest, and it had little to do with the weapons the thin man had said he’d been stockpiling.

  Vince was using the most abundant resource left in the world. Feeders. Mason couldn’t help but admire the brilliant simplicity of the plan. Get the infected all moving toward your target, light them on fire, and get out of the way.

  Mason shook his head. “This can’t be the way.”

  A door along the south wall of the abandoned mall shot open, screeching voices blasted from the interior just before five silhouetted figures ran from the exit. He could see that two were women and at least one was a child, it looked to be Ava’s brother Noah. The others must have been Natalie and Owen.

  He was down off the wall and sprinting toward the darkened runners as a second round of high-pitched voices came from the same doorway. There were women and men shouting, their words one on top of the other, nothing in particular making it through.

  He was able to confirm the first few through the door. Natalie and Noah, he assumed the third or fourth was Ava’s father. He didn’t have to get to them, they looked like they’d make the gate, but there was something he needed.

  “OOOOOOWWEEEENN!”

  Those in the front and those in the back continued running, but the largest of the group turned. It was Owen. He shouted for his wife and son to keep going, that he’d catch up to them, but stopped and called back to Mason. “THEY’RE INSIDE, WE HAVE TO GET EVERYONE OUT!”

  “WHERE’S SAVANNAH?”

  Owen shook his head, looking back toward his family as they approached the gates.

  “GO!” Mason shouted. “GET THEM OUT!”

  “OKAY, I’LL BE BACK!”

  Mason glanced back along the southern wall of Harbor Crest. The door his friends had exited through wasn’t the only one open. There was one closer to the main entrance that also sat open, and tucked behind it stood a man with a rifle. He watched as one after another Feeder stumbled into the former abandoned shopping mall.

  He turned and ran, careful to stay in the shadows and behind the walking mounds of fire. The man behind the door hadn’t seen him and as Mason got close, he pulled up his makeshift weapon, gripped it in both hands, and shoved a large Feeder head-first into the back of the door.

  The man dropped to the ground in an explosion of flames and flailing arms and legs. He was shouting obscenities and swinging at the monster above him as he released his weapon and tried to scoot away. The massive Feeder pulled the man in by the legs and dropped his head onto the man’s stomach, the flames now eagerly jumping between the two men.

  Within seconds the two bodies seemed to melt into one, the fire growing as the man’s screams slowly faded away.

  Mason quickly looked over his shoulder, picked up the man’s rifle, and moved through the doorway.

  The hall was dark and beginning to fill with smoke as a pair of Feeders thirty feet ahead stumbled toward the first floor. The flames that covered their scorched bodies had started multiple spot fires as their clothing dropped to the carpeted floor.

  There wasn’t room to go around them, and no time to wait. The main level would have been his first choice, but the stairwell ahead on the right was now looking like his only option. Mason pulled his shirt up over his mouth, ran the last several feet, and as the Feeders continued on, he pushed open the door and ducked into the stairs.

  The air was clear and still, but the way up was even darker than the hall. It appeared that Travis had powered down the facility, probably to give his friends a fighting chance at getting to an exit undetected. They would have known the layout much better than Vince or the monsters—both infected and not—that he’d sent to evict them from their home.

  And then, two quick blasts from above. Sounded like the second floor, somewhere close.

  Mason switched the rifle to his right hand and reached for the railing as his eyes finally adjusted to the pitch-black stairwell. He was going to make sure that every last one of them regretted coming into his home.

  Another three shots.

  His first objective was getting every single one of his friends to safety. And although he wasn’t going to be able to save them all at once, he knew he needed to start somewhere.

  “Savannah.”

  24

  Randy reached Harbor Crest and although he was having trouble breathing and hadn’t been able to feel his hands or his feet for the last several minutes, he continued to run. The gates were open and unattended. There were multiple fires on the north and south sides of the building, but from his vantage, not a single person … anywhere.

  At the moment though, there was only one thing on his mind, his wife and his
two year old son. He needed to find them and get them to safety, at all costs.

  But were they still inside?

  Had they already made it to the gates?

  He didn’t know, but he was going to find out. They had planned for a perimeter breach; however, no one could have prepared for this. And approaching the building, he could now see what he hadn’t before.

  There was a man who had flames coming from his jacket, his pants, and even his shoes. He was top heavy, and as he stumbled forward into another Feeder, the two momentarily appeared to become one. Their bright orange and yellow flames danced with one another and then just as quickly separated when the smaller woman was knocked to the ground.

  Randy scanned the remainder of the lot, searching for a vehicle that wasn’t surrounded by the dead. Although as their numbers grew and the flames continued to spread from one to the next, he didn’t like his chances.

  “MAAAASOOOON!”

  The voice came from the front of the former abandoned shopping mall. Randy thought it was Travis, but it also could have been Lucas or maybe Bryce. The crackling of the individual fires and the muffled sounds of the infected made it hard to be sure.

  Randy sprinted the final hundred yards to the loading docks and quickly scampered inside. He instinctively turned back and stepped outside as a thick blanket of smoke billowed out from the open doorway.

  It was bad, worse than bad. It was in his mouth and in his nose.

  He stepped away from the door, holding it open, and dropped into a squat. He took a few deep breaths, slowly filling his lungs with what he assumed may be the last clean air he would get for the next several minutes.

  “Okay.”

  He looked out over the lot, watching as the crowd continued to grow in numbers, nearly doubling in just the time since he’d run through the rear gates.