The Hunger (Book 4): Ruined
Page 1
Ruined
The Hunger #4
Jason Brant
Copyright © 2018 by Jason Brant
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
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1
A shrill beep coming from Brandon’s watch startled him out of heavy slumber. He jerked awake, eyes wide, and searched his surroundings. The remnants of a nightmare bled from his mind, lost before he could fully recall what it was. Something about teeth. And talons.
Darkness enveloped him.
Panic settled in a moment later.
To awaken in darkness was to awaken in mortal danger.
Brandon’s heart raced as he stayed perfectly still, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Details slowly emerged.
Dusty old clothing hung above him. Shoes rested upon a carpeted floor, lined along barely visible walls surrounding his legs and feet. Rays of light seeped in through slats on his right, giving his still-adapting vision just enough to play with.
The bleating from his watch continued.
When he sat up, Brandon heard the crinkle of a sleeping bag shifting underneath him, and he finally remembered where he was.
In a closet.
Off a kid’s bedroom.
On the third floor of a townhouse.
Baltimore.
Exhaustion had nipped at his heels all morning, and he decided to get an hour of sleep before continuing scavenging for the rest of the afternoon. After searching for a safe spot for twenty minutes, he’d settled upon the brownstone and crashed moments after laying down in the closet. Though sleeping in the small space wouldn’t keep him safe from demons—which he didn’t need to worry about until nightfall, anyway—it kept him hidden from the occasional survivor who might stumble upon him napping.
Brandon glanced at his watch, pushing the button on the side to stop the annoying alarm. He paused, eyes narrowing as he stared at the glow-in-the-dark display.
6:19 PM.
Sunset.
Or somewhere around there.
The alarm on his watch went off at sunset every single day, a warning his time outdoors was finished until the next morning. When the chime went off, he had less than thirty minutes to get to safety.
Maybe only twenty minutes as the beasts of the night often braved the tail end of the magic hour if they caught the scent of fresh prey.
But his watch couldn’t be right. He’d crashed in the closet around two in the afternoon. There was no chance he’d slept over four hours, no matter how exhausted he’d been. Knowing he couldn’t possibly sleep that long was the reason he hadn’t bothered to set a separate alarm to wake him.
The panic bubbling in the back of his throat began to boil.
Maybe the alarm is fast, he thought.
Reaching out, he pushed open the closet doors.
There wasn’t nearly as much sunlight pouring into the small space as he’d hoped. He blinked at the dark room beyond the doors, realization finally setting in.
“Oh, crap.”
He scrambled to his feet and stumbled across the boy’s room, glancing at the Wolverine and Iron Man posters on the walls. Kicking action figures out of the way, he sent them banging into other toys on the floor.
He staggered to a window, yanked the curtains aside.
Tore the blinds up.
Groaned at what he took in.
The sun had already set behind the tall buildings stretching out in front of him. Brandon must have slept through several minutes of his alarm going off before it finally roused him. He didn’t have twenty minutes until the city was crawling with monstrosities.
He didn’t even have ten.
Maybe five.
Tops.
“Oh, crap!”
Brandon raced across the room toward the door he’d closed hours earlier. He threw it open hard enough to send it bouncing off the wall with a bang, the handle punching a hole in the drywall.
His backpack sat just inside under the light switch. He hooked it with one hand as he sprinted into the hallway, looping one of the straps over his shoulder. Before he’d made it ten steps, he’d wrangled the other strap in place and secured it with the buckle across his chest.
The move was so practiced, automatic, he hadn’t even thought about it as he raced toward a set of narrow stairs at the other end of the house. Weight from computer parts and a soldering iron he’d scavenged earlier in the day made the backpack sway with each step.
He absentmindedly adjusted the straps on the sides of the packs to tighten the goods he carried. The weight stopped swinging around as he reached the stairs and hopped on the bannister.
Dust kicked up as he slid down to the first floor, his cargo pants cleaning a long swath along the dark wood. He hopped off the bannister just before the end, letting his momentum carry him toward the front door.
He burst outside without breaking stride, jumped down the eight stairs leading to the sidewalk, and sprinted into the street.
Brandon stopped to glance at the skyline.
Many of the buildings in the distance had already begun to lose detail.
The night approached.
And death nipped at its heels.
He glanced south, toward The Light, but couldn’t see it in the distance. The miles stretching in between were too many.
There was no chance he could make it home before the demons would emerge from hiding to tear him asunder.
His mind raced as he tried to remember the location of a nearby safe house. All the scavengers were forced to memorize the addresses of the hidden sanctuaries in case they needed a place to hide out for the night.
It was too dangerous to carry around any kind of written evidence of safe house locations in case rovers captured them. Unfortunately for Brandon, his memory had never proven much of an attribute. He’d nearly failed ninth grade biology because he couldn’t memorize facts worth a damn.
Shutting his eyes, he tried to focus.
If he
was a few miles northeast of The Light, then…
“Moravia,” he muttered.
A safe house rested in the basement of a home on Moravia Road.
Brandon cut to his right, sprinting down the middle of the street. He was a few blocks away. If he hauled ass at a dead run, he might make it before the demons came out to play.
A roadblock of burned-out cars stretched across the street before him.
Without breaking stride, Brandon placed both hands on the hood of a charred, forever-dead sedan and vaulted over it, curling his legs up and launching forward.
His feet never slowed upon landing as he angled across an intersection and ducked between two homes, accelerating to his limit.
Heavy shadows blackened the driveway he ran down, the deepest corners impossible to see. His anxiety spiked. Anything hiding behind a dumpster or in a basement of one of the homes would pounce on him before he could react.
His footfalls echoed as he dashed toward the rear of the houses.
A foul smell emanated from a home on the left as he crossed the end of the driveway and reemerged into the dwindling twilight. He glanced toward the back and spotted a large, circular brown stain behind the rear door, which hung ajar.
Smears trailed away from the dried patch, stretching into the overgrown grass of the rear lawn.
In any other circumstance, Brandon would have avoided the yard at all costs, not knowing if the cause of that brown stain might be hidden amidst the tall grass and weeds.
But he didn’t have time to reroute, so he plunged into the heavy overgrowth.
The grass was waist high, but the weeds and saplings reached his face.
He swatted at them with his hands, protecting his eyes as he plowed forward.
A chest-high fence that had once been white but was now filthy with stains caked all over it, waited twenty yards ahead.
Brandon grabbed the top and vaulted it with ease, landing on a cracked, buckled sidewalk.
That was when the first demonic wail echoed throughout the neighborhood.
The horrific cry made Brandon’s pulse race even faster.
Fear clouded his mind.
The wail hadn’t been far behind him.
A massive cemetery stretched before him, the grounds so overgrown that most headstones were barely visible in the brush. Weeds and brambles jutted through the wrought-iron fence surrounding the property. A massive gate stood guard in front of the unused entrance, rust and overgrowth concealing much of its ornate ironwork.
Brandon spotted more brown stains on the road, one almost five-feet wide, beside the driver’s side door of a white SUV. All four doors were open. A baby seat was buckled into the back.
The last thing he wanted to do so late in the evening was jaunt through a cemetery, but the safe house waited for him on the other side. If he had the time, Brandon would have gladly run the entire way around the perimeter. But the demon’s cry behind him had canceled any detour he might have considered.
Taking a deep breath, he bounded across the street and threw himself at the large gate blocking his path. He scrambled up, grabbing hold of the spikes atop that stood a foot apart from one another, and used them to launch up and over.
He curled his body just before he hit the ground, rolling into the impact and wincing as something in his backpack crunched as it hit the pavement. Someone would be pissed off he’d busted their loot. His momentum propelled him forward as he found his feet again in a flash, then raced down the entrance.
The pavement was in better shape than most of the sidewalks snaking through the city, making his run easier than he could have hoped.
A three-way intersection split the road before him as he ran toward a twenty-foot-tall mausoleum that loomed above the jungle that had slowly consumed the cemetery over the years. A stained-glass window, partially broken, stood near the top of the structure, darkness encroaching behind it.
When he was less than ten feet away, another demonic cry reached Brandon’s ears, the terrifying lament so close he flinched and nearly lost his footing as he ran past the door of the mausoleum.
The cry had come from inside, reverberating off the stone surfaces, the effect amplifying its already-horrific nature.
Hard, sharp nails scraped along the inner stone.
Heavy breaths thundered from just beyond the front door.
They were coming.
Brandon pushed his legs to their physical limits as he plunged into the tall weeds beside the old death chamber. He would have preferred to follow one of the narrow roads that twisted through the cemetery like arteries, but his time was up. The straightest path would have to be his choice, no matter how treacherous it proved to be.
Grass cut his cheeks, poked at his eyes.
He held his hands in front of his face, doing his best to clear his vision, but it didn’t help much. Between the darkness and the overgrown brush, he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him.
If his sense of direction failed and he canted off into the depths of the graveyard, he would be finished.
How many are in here? he wondered. The numerous mausoleums and buildings on the grounds would give them ample hiding places during the day. Have they tunneled under the ground like they had outside the city?
The thought frightened him nearly as much as their perpetual wailing.
The city was mainly covered in concrete, giving the demons little soil with which to dig their nests. They mostly stuck to the sewer and drainage systems, the basements of homes and buildings. But the cemetery gave them all the dirt they could desire for a proper nest.
Brandon couldn’t help but wonder if he’d run straight into the mouth of Hell. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of the beasts might be just under his feet.
Trying to brush those thoughts aside before they sapped his strength, he pushed forward. The dense brush fought him for nearly a hundred yards before he emerged onto another road, giving him a temporary reprieve from the tiny slashes of the grass. His skin already itched.
Another bay of the damned trailed him.
A dozen more followed it, each drawing closer than the last.
They had his scent.
It wouldn’t be long now before they left their hiding places. The demons were fast. Damn fast. They could catch a man in a flash as they scrambled on all fours, bounding off objects and walls with ease. Their power and speed made the hunt of a regular person little more than a game.
But Brandon wasn’t a regular man.
At least not when it came to their hunt.
They would have to work for their meal.
To his left, the road angled north toward what he hoped was the exit. He followed it, feet pounding the pavement as the cries behind him drew nearer. His breathing grew labored as he struggled to maintain his torrid pace.
He kept himself in phenomenal shape—his job required it—but no one could stay at a dead sprint for long before their body failed. Brandon’s legs were close to jellying, his lungs threatening to seize if he didn’t grant them a respite soon.
A few cries came from the east, followed by ten more from the west.
The bellies of the shadows stretching across the graveyard continued to fatten, blacken. Heavy rain clouds consumed the sky, casting the entire city in a gray pall that would soon become an impenetrable darkness. Without the urban glow of streetlamps, headlights, and bedroom windows, cities were little more than monolithic husks during the night.
Rounding a bend, Brandon spotted another gate leading to the other side of the neighborhood. A compact car had crashed into it, bending the bottom inward, lifting it nearly two feet from the pavement.
The safe house waited on the other side of the street, a few doors down.
He pressed on.
A foul stench assaulted him.
The stink of the damned.
Tall grass to his left rustled several yards into the overgrowth.
One of the beasts wailed in rage and hunger.
A path cut thr
ough the grass, heading straight for Brandon.
It would be on him in seconds.
Brandon charged the gate. He reached into one of the cargo pockets of his pants, fishing for something to fend off the demon. A normal person would have reached for the sidearm attached to his hip.
That was why most were already dead.
He might have been able to shoot down one.
Two at most if his aim was true.
But dozens of them? Hundreds?
Not a chance.
His fingers wrapped around a flare resting at the bottom of his pocket. Tugged it free. As he approached the destroyed gate, Brandon dropped and slid under the mangled metal like a baseball player stealing second. The friction warmed his pants, tore at the fabric.
He struck the flare as he hopped back to his feet, wincing at the bright fire that belched from the end. The smell struck him instantly as the burn intensified. Stopping just behind the car that was wedged under the gate, he spun around and threw the flare into the cemetery as far as he could.
It arced through the air, end over end, illuminating trees and the ever-expanding overgrowth.
The stench of it, the hiss of its burn, and the light it emitted would cover his tracks for a short while. If the distraction bought him even thirty seconds, that would be enough for him to round third and slide into home.
Or so he hoped.
When it disappeared deep into the graveyard, Brandon cut his eyes back to the homes lining the far side of the road. One had a safe house hidden in the basement, but in his panic, he couldn’t remember exactly which it was.