She walked for a time in the middle of the highway, looking back the way she had come for signs of vehicles via their headlights. The darkening road gave no hope. Either way, she didn’t want a repeat of the earlier experience, and if things kept going the way they had so far, she would reach Port Arthur ahead of the horde.
Soon after, the mass of infected began to behave strangely. Their instinctive actions had been to follow her, but now, they seemed distracted by each other and some started to veer off course. Their persistence, when she thought about it, was quite impressive. But that changed when she passed Stingaree Bay, and the last of the light finally faded.
She walked backwards for a while, shining the torch ahead of them. Those in front raised their hands to shield their eyes, but on they walked, with several showing the strange behaviour. A fight began between a long-haired woman and a younger girl. A man tripped and struck his face on the road. The others trampled over him, and he disappeared behind a forest of legs. The ever-present slobbering and hissing were soon replaced by growls and grunts. Tammy turned back to the front and walked on, faster than before, the light bobbing and bouncing from the blacktop to the fields and beyond on either side. She silently pleaded for lights of safety ahead to show her the way.
But she couldn’t walk for long without turning around to check on her followers. Consequently, she wasn’t watching where she was going. She took a step and, suddenly, the road beneath her foot wasn’t there. Her head jolted and her neck jerked. Pain shot through her foot, up her ankle, and into her leg. She cried out, wincing at the mishap.
“Oh, bloody shit,” she said, hobbling along, careful not to stop. Tammy shone the torch at a sizeable pothole at least three times her shoe length. She flicked the light at the infected and saw they had crept a few yards closer. She turned and started off, moving as quickly as her new injury would allow. Each time the foot touched the road, she felt pain. Tammy had to adjust her pace to allow herself not to put as much pressure on it but to remain well ahead of the dead.
On she hobbled. Was she going to die out here and let her husband win? No goddamn way. She thought about the last time she had seen him. They had argued fiercely again over politics. They had both started slightly left, but over the years he had moved to the right and beyond. Admittedly, she had wound him up, twisted his words and launched a tirade at him. With no ability to respond verbally, he had flown into a physical rage and grabbed her by the throat, shoving her against the wall, and then he struck her in the cheek with a semi-clenched fist. She had slid down the wall and sat there, too stunned to move. She had expected him to beg forgiveness, but instead, he stood over her, stony-faced. This was the moment Tammy decided enough was enough.
A growl shook her from the memory. She turned back and saw the infected were less than thirty yards away. The growl sounded again, and before Tammy could point the flashlight towards them, she saw something that chilled her skin. Near the back of the throng, deep within the hollow faces and straggly hair, she saw a set of red eyes.
Tammy ran. With every step, she cried out as pain speared from her ankle to her knee, but she did not stop. Scrub passed her on either side of the road. She didn’t know for how long she continued. Those red eyes drove her on like nothing had before. Panting, she spotted a sign on the edge of the highway. As she approached, she saw the words she so desperately wanted. Port Arthur Historic Site: 400m on left.
“Move,” she yelled at herself.
It had been so long since she heard a human voice out loud, it sounded strange. But it provided the motivation to get her moving faster. The road dipped, and she felt like she was flying as she ran down the slope. The enclosed scrub gave way to a spacious property and house on the right and a set of buildings on the left. Tammy shone the torch on the Stewarts Bay Lodge and, in another thirty steps, the Tasman Island Cruises. Had she taken a cruise once with her parents? She couldn’t be sure.
At the bottom of the hill, she turned left off the Arthur Highway onto Church Street. A sob of joy escaped her throat. She was close. Bush hugged the road on both sides. She had been down this far a number of times in her life since early childhood. A curve or two in the road, and she was at the historic site. But her stamina was running low. She hadn’t eaten since the morning and her mouth and throat were parched. As she dragged her feet along the bitumen, the bouncing light caught a fence off to the left. It was wire—chain linked and taller than her. Is that part of the secure place? she wondered.
The road rose again, and she had to dig deep as the pain in her ankle was surpassed by the strangle of lactic acid in her thighs as she climbed the last slope. She almost stopped. Part of her wanted to look back and check if the infected were any closer, if the thing with the red eyes had crept up to her heels and was ready to tear out her throat. But she refused.
The last downward gradient had never felt so good. Chest wheezing, she stumbled twice but caught her balance just in time before face planting on the bitumen. As she raised the flashlight, the yellow beam caught two large gates across the road. On either side, steel panels had been erected that ran off into the scrub. Tammy lifted the torch even higher and saw a turret standing above the left side of the fence, and in it, two figures looked down at her.
She staggered the last few yards and reached the gate.
“Hello?” she gasped. Her voice did not sound like her own. “Open up. Please.” She stepped back and shone the light up at them, panting. One of the men stepped back. Tammy turned and poked the light back the way she had come. “Hurry. Please. They’ll be here any moment.” Truth was she didn’t even know how far behind they might be. She looked back up at the men, wondering why they had not spoken.
One of them men finally said, “I’m sorry. We’re not taking any more people in.”
Cold terror struck Tammy’s heart. She almost couldn’t say another word. But she forced it out. “What? What does that mean?”
“They’re not our rules.”
Rage replaced terror, and she said with venom, “They’re always someone else’s rules, aren’t they? Then you don’t have to take any bloody responsibility.”
“I’m sorry.”
But her anger did not dissipate. She thought of all the people she had lost along the way. She thought of Darren, who should have been with her now. “Please. I know you don’t have any idea of what I’ve been through. And you probably don’t care. But—”
The men talked in low voices. One of them gave the impression he wanted to let her in.
“I’m going to let her in then,” one of the men said. The other glared. “She’s a bloody politician. A senator. If the world ever goes back to the way it was and we didn’t let—”
“Let me go and ask…” Tammy didn’t hear the name. “He’ll be royally pissed if we let her in without checking with him.”
“You know he’ll say no.”
“Wait a minute. Till I get back.” The man disappeared.
The other turned to Tammy. He had a moustache and wore a baseball cap. “I’m sorry. It won’t be long.”
Tammy looked back up the road and shone the flashlight, looking for those red eyes. The thought made the skin at the back of her neck tingle.
“Were you running from someone?” the man asked.
“Some things. Not one of the normal ones though.”
“They’re out there,” the man said, peering into the distance.
Tammy waited. At least the place was real. She hoped with all she had left that they would let her in. To come this far on a rumour, to have so many others show doubt, to leave her, and then to have it all come true. There was such a place that provided security from the infected and she had made it.
“We knocked back a large group earlier,” the man said. He glanced back into the compound.
Tammy hoped the other man would hurry up, too. She didn’t care about who might be pissed off or how many people they’d knocked back. All she cared was the thing with the red eyes couldn’t get her in the
re.
A noise sounded from the darkness behind. Goosebumps appeared on her arms and legs. Tammy fumbled the torch and turned it on, casting a long glow of light off into the scrub. With her hand shaking, she slowly turned it around, until it shone along the road she had run down.
The horde of infected that had followed Tammy’s trek was almost upon them. The slinking, sliding sound grew louder. Hundreds of dead shuffled and lurched down the road, bumping into each other. Tammy’s entire body froze. When they spotted Tammy in the light, she thought they started walking faster.
The man in the turret whimpered. “I’m… coming.”
As the light quivered in her hand, Tammy narrowed her gaze. Within the moving mass of dead, she thought she could recognize those red eyes looking at her.
“Hurry,” Tammy whispered. “Hurry, please.”
THE END
Authors Note
I started this book with good momentum after finishing Breakdown, but we all know how that turned out. Writing is a funny business, sometimes you get into a groove and the words spill out of you and it feels like magic. Other times, it’s like digging a hole in rock and no matter what you do, it just doesn’t want to happen. This book had a bit of both. The problem was the time in between either was far too great.
A lot of the story for the next book and subsequent books with our friends on the pier in Melbourne is fleshed out in my head. I know who lives and dies, who become the heroes and villains, who end up together, or not. But in my experience, the story has a way of taking over and sometimes these things don’t turn out the way you expect. I’ve had several important characters earmarked for death, but for whatever reason, they’ve survived. I like that. It’s a surprise, even for me.
I took a reader poll on Facebook for the title of the next book and Departure beat out Separation. That should set the tone of what happens. I have the titles for the last three books already selected: Arrival, Divided, and… maybe I’ll leave that one until it’s published.
Once again, if you are able to leave a review for this book (or any other of mine you’ve read) I’d be sincerely grateful. I can’t understate the importance of a review for an independent author. Click here to leave a review for Resolve.
If you haven’t signed up to my mailing list, feel free to do so. It generally covers new book releases and every so often, I do a giveaway of paperbacks from the series. Click here to sign up. Your e-mail address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe easily at any time.
Feel free to drop me a line about what you thought of the story, good or bad, or anything else. You can e-mail me at [email protected].
Here are some of my links to social media (there are so many these days):
Facebook: Owen Baillie Author or Owen Baillie
Website: owenbaillie.com
With the best of intent, I hope to get the next book out sooner than this one.
Thanks for reading,
Owen
Melbourne, Australia, December 2019.
FIVE ROADS TO TEXAS SERIES
Five Roads To Texas
From the best story tellers of Phalanx Press comes a frightening tale of Armageddon.
It spread fast- no time to understand it- let alone learn how to fight it.
Once it reached you, it was too late. All you could do is run.
Rumored safe zones and potential for a cure drifted across the populace, forcing tough decisions to be made.
They say only the strong survive. Well they forgot about the smart, the inventive and the lucky.
Follow five different groups from across the U.S.A. as they make their way to what could be America’s last stand in the Lone Star State.
WJ Lundy ~ Brian Parker ~ Rich Baker ~ Joseph Hansen ~ Allen Gamboa
Foreword by JL Bourne
After The Roads: Sidney’s Way (Five Roads To Texas Book Two)
The infected rule the world beyond the protective walls of the Texas Safe Zone.
Fort Bliss, Texas is home to four million refugees, trapped behind the hastily-erected walls of the Army base--too many people and not enough food.
In a desperate gamble, the soldiers responsible for securing the walls begin searching for pre-outbreak food storage locations. Not everyone will make it home.
For Sidney Bannister, the Safe Zone's refugee camps have become a nightmare that she can no longer endure. She must find a way to leave before her baby is born, or risk never experiencing freedom again.
Follow Sidney's story from the Phalanx Press collaborative novel Five Roads to Texas.
Brian Parker
For Which We Stand (Five Roads To Texas Book Three)
El Paso wasn’t the Promised Land that Ian and his crew had hoped for, but it wasn’t a total bust either. The concept of a safe haven in today’s world was a fool’s errand at best. This was the consensus of their tiny band and to keep moving, their only salvation. While others waited in their pens the four from the private security company moved on taking on as many they could help, in hopes that they too would join the fight. Their journey was long and arduous, but it was worth it… they hope.
El Paso is where the final evidence that this is more than a simple lab experiment gone wrong. It was too focused with too many players who knew too much too early in the game causing assumptions to be made. Assumptions that gained strength with every step they took until the small troop was convinced that this was not just a simple virus of natural origins, America was under attack.
Joseph Hansen
SIXTH CYCLE
Nuclear war has destroyed human civilization.
Captain Jake Phillips wakes into a dangerous new world, where he finds the remaining fragments of the population living in a series of strongholds, connected across the country. Uneasy alliances have maintained their safety, but things are about to change. -- Discovery leads to danger. -- Skye Reed, a tracker from the Omega stronghold, uncovers a threat that could spell the end for their fragile society. With friends and enemies revealing truths about the past, she will need to decide who to trust. -- Sixth Cycle is a gritty post-apocalyptic story of survival and adventure.
Darren Wearmouth ~ Carl Sinclair
The Invasion Trilogy
Aliens have planned against us for centuries... And now the attack is ready.
Charlie Jackson's archaeological team find advanced technology in an undisturbed 16th Century graves. While investigating the discovery, giant sinkholes appear across planet, marking the start of Earth's colonization and the descent of civilization.
Charlie and the rest of humanity will have to fight for survival, sacrificing the life they’ve known to protect themselves from an ancient and previously dormant enemy. Even that might not be enough as aliens exact a plan that will change the course of history.
Darren Wearmouth
DEAD ISLAND: Operation Zulu
Ten years after the world was nearly brought to its knees by a zombie Armageddon, there is a race for the antidote! On a remote Caribbean island, surrounded by a horde of hungry living dead, a team of American and Australian commandos must rescue the Antidotes' scientist. Filled with zombies, guns, Russian bad guys, shady government types, serial killers and elevator muzak. Dead Island is an action packed blood soaked horror adventure.
Dead Island: Dos and Dead Island: Ravenous are available now!
Allen Gamboa
INVASION OF THE DEAD SERIES
This is the first book in a series of nine, about an ordinary bunch of friends, and their plight to survive an apocalypse in Australia. -- Deep beneath defense headquarters in the Australian Capital Territory, the last ranking Army chief and a brilliant scientist struggle with answers to the collapse of the world, and the aftermath of an unprecedented virus. Is it a natural mutation, or does the infection contain -- more sinister roots? -- One hundred and fifty miles away, five friends returning from a month-long camping trip slowly discover that death has swept through the country. What greets them in a gradual revelation is an e
nemy beyond compare. -- Armed with dwindling ammunition, the friends must overcome their disagreements, utilize their individual skills, and face unimaginable horrors as they battle to reach their hometown...
Owen Baillie
Torment (The Soldier Book One)
From the War on Terror a world crippling Bio-Weapon is released. The United States scrambles teams of scientists from the Centers For Disease Control. America's top field agent are tasked with collecting samples and developing a cure.
Thus, begins the greatest outbreak in the history of human kind. In the wake of the fast spreading pandemic, state and local governments, desperate for answers, rush to provide relief to the devastated and overwhelmed communities. Experts in Bio-Medical Research are desperately summoned to Atlanta and military facilities across the country.
On a cold morning, the men of India Company, Second Platoon, are alerted and rapid-deployed to Virginia. Their mission: to recover and escort experts in bio-medicine, specifically in the development and production of vaccines. With faulty intelligence and half-truths, Second Platoon moves forward. What they find is worse than anyone could have predicted. What was a rescue mission, turns into a struggle for their own survival.
Donovan’s War
With everything around him gone. Tommy Donovan must return to the war he has been hiding from. When his sister is taken, the Government fails to act. Tommy Donovan will take the law into his own hands. But, this time he isn't a soldier, and there will be no laws to protect evil. This time it's personal and he is making the rules.
The Darkness (The Invasion Series Book One)
While the world falls apart, Jacob Anderson barricades his family behind locked doors. News reports tell of civil unrest in the streets, murders, and disappearances; citizens are warned to remain behind locked doors. When Jacob becomes witness to horrible events and the alarming actions of his neighbors, he and his family realize everything is far worse than being reported.
Invasion of the Dead (Book 5): Resolve Page 28
