Surviving: The Complete Series [Books 1-3]

by Westfield, Ryan

  Jim moved his eyes to the man’s neck. Right where he wanted the knife to hit.

  A split second later, his knife made contact.

  Jim felt it. That sickening feeling of soft flesh giving way to the knife.

  Blood gushed.

  Jim felt the hot blood on his face. Some got onto his eye. Some in his mouth. He tasted it. A lot of it.

  A second later, Jim’s falling body collided with the big man. Jim’s shoulder was the first to hit.

  It was a hard hit.

  Jim fell hard into the man. But the biker was big enough that Jim’s momentum didn’t knock him back.

  Jim’s vision was partially obscured by the blood. The taste in his mouth was strong. Overwhelming. Primal. Intense.

  Jim felt something as hard as stone smash into his side. Probably the skinny guy had smashed him with a handgun, not wanting to accidentally shoot his buddy.

  Jim had no such worries. He was desperate. He didn’t bother to aim. He just pulled the trigger, knowing that his gun was pointed more or less in the right direction.

  The knife wound hadn’t been enough to down the big man. But it had been enough of a distraction. It had bought Jim enough time.

  Jim heard the gun go off, despite the roaring in his ears. But for a few seconds, he didn’t know what had happened.

  And then the big man started to fall.

  Jim still had never really gotten his balance. He’d only not fallen down because of the weight of the big man.

  Now, though, they were both falling together.

  It was as confusing a fight as there could be. With blood in his eye, with the darkness, with the roaring in his ears, Jim was lucky to have half an idea of what was happening. Everything felt like chaos, and he found his body just reacting to the situation, trying to keep himself upright, trying desperately to gain some situational awareness. There might have been more men coming up the stairwell, and there might not have been.

  Jim thought he’d found his footing right when something smashed into him from behind.

  He fell forward, his face colliding with a concrete step. A hard hit. Blood everywhere. Pain. Maybe his nose was broken. No time to break the fall with his hands, which were at his sides. One hand was still on the gun and one was on the knife. Not an ideal situation for fighting. He’d have to let one go. But which one?

  He didn’t have time to make the decision.

  He felt a body fall on top of him. Judging by the weight, it was the skinny guy.

  There were strong fingers around his neck. Gripping tightly. Jim reflexively gasped for air. None came to him.

  He didn’t have long.

  He swung with his knife arm, but it didn’t reach. Not even close, probably.

  The skinny guy was strong, but Jim was a bigger guy. He had the advantage, if he knew how to use his size.

  Jim wanted to slash at the man’s hands and wrists and arms. But he knew that risk was too great. Without being able to see, he was just as likely to slice open his own neck.

  Jim let go of the knife and gun. He didn’t hear them clatter to the concrete. It was still just the roar in his ears.

  His whole body was screaming out for air. His neck was nothing but pain, an intense burning sensation.

  Jim got his hands against the concrete underneath him and he pushed hard, as if he were doing a push-up.

  The skinny guy may have been strong, strong enough to keep his hands around Jim’s neck. But he hardly weighed anything.

  Not that it wasn’t a struggle to get himself upright with the guy on his back. It took every ounce of strength that Jim had. He felt like he might lose consciousness at any moment. And that’d be the last time he lost consciousness. He had to fight his own instinct to grab at the hands around his throat. He knew intuitively that he wouldn’t be able to get those hands off. They were too strong.

  Upright, with the man hanging off his back, Jim drove himself backwards as hard as he could. He didn’t know if he was headed down the stairwell or into the landing wall. And it didn’t really matter.

  It turned out to be the wall.

  The small biker hit first, lessening the impact slightly for Jim.

  It was a hard hit. Jim felt the hands loosen around his neck just as the back of his own head smashed into the concrete. It probably wasn’t as bad of a hit as it could have been. But it was still bad. His vision blacked out for a full second, which felt like a long time.

  It came back, all fuzzy, and Jim had collapsed to the floor, his hands on the concrete, barely holding himself up. He felt the urge to vomit from the pain, and he started retching uncontrollably. Hardly anything came up, except some off-color liquid.

  A fist collided with his head.

  Still retching uncontrollably, Jim spotted the knife on the floor. Not far from him. He brought his hand out as fast as he could, reaching for it. He lost his balance as he reached, falling with his chest and face against the concrete again. Blood mixed with the liquid vomit in his mouth. But he got the knife. His fingers wrapped around it.

  Another fist.

  Somehow, he stopped retching. The reflex was gone.

  Jim got to his feet. Spun around.

  The skinny guy was barely standing. He was half-doubled over. He looked like a sick animal, heaving and panting. Blood gushed down the side of his skull.

  Jim wasted no time. He brought the knife up and across with all the speed and strength he had. A straight, neat line right across the man’s throat.

  Blood gushed.

  Jim didn’t wait. And he didn’t go for the gun. The concrete landing was covered in blood and vomit. No telling where the gun had gone.

  The roaring dying down slightly in his ears, Jim thought he heard footsteps behind him, down that first stairwell.

  Jim almost fell as he made it up that second staircase, his one hand on the railing barely managing to keep himself steady and upright.

  But he made it to the top. And through the doorframe that had no door into the little surveillance room.

  No one followed him.

  The skinny man and the big man were dead.

  The space wasn’t large. There was a desk made of metal and a cheap swivel chair. A couple notes taped up to the wall. And not much else.

  As Jim had predicted, from the little room, you could see down into the entire store.

  Jim spat blood as he wiped more blood away from his eyes. He didn’t remember if it was his own blood or another’s.

  Taking a quick look, Jim didn’t see any activity down below. But it was hard to tell if he could trust his eyes since the two-way mirrors made everything look even darker than it already was.

  As Jim turned around, ready to face an onslaught of more attackers, he suddenly felt too weak to even stand up. Maybe it was the head injury. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it had just been too much for his already weakened system to handle.

  He collapsed to the floor for what felt like one too many times in the last few minutes.

  This time, he managed to catch himself with his hands.

  The concrete was cold to the touch. Almost freezing.

  The roaring in his ears had died down somewhat. But there were no footsteps that he could hear.

  Ideally, Jim would have pushed the desk and chair into the doorway. Maybe he could push them down the stairs against an attacker.

  But he knew he didn’t have the strength. The weakness that had come over him was like nothing he’d ever felt before. It was terrifying. He was used to his body working a certain way. He was used to a certain threshold of fatigue. He was used to being able to tolerate certain stresses. But he’d pushed himself farther, apparently, than his body or nervous system could handle.

  While Jim had known he’d been probably heading to his death, cornered, alone, without much of a chance, he still hadn’t imagined it like this. He’d had something more in mind of a heroic last stand.

  But the reality was nothing like that.

  He was too weak to stand
up.

  Too weak to really defend himself.

  The best he could do was to crawl under the desk and pull the swivel chair towards him, partially hiding himself, even though it was only too obvious that he was there.

  He felt like a coward. Definitely not a hero.

  He could barely keep himself from falling completely to the floor. His arms were shaking with exertion as he tried to hold himself just slightly up.

  The knife, his last remaining weapon, had somehow fallen again to the floor.

  And he was too weak to get it.

  Because of the roaring, he wasn’t sure if he could hear or not.

  His mouth tasted of blood and vomit.

  His vision was slightly blurry. Blood ran freely from his nose. And probably from other places too.

  His whole body felt cold, as if he were currently submerged in ice-cold water.

  He’d never felt worse.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  Wait until the next biker came.

  6

  Jessica

  Jessica woke up from the blackness of what felt like a nightmare.

  She opened her eyes. The world was gray and blurry.

  What was going on?

  For a moment, she was worried that she’d lost her mind. Or her memory. She knew who she was, and about the EMP, but that was about it.

  She couldn’t remember what had happened. The last thing she could remember was that she’d been driving. Driving a strange kind of car. Like a van? A large van.

  Then the memories of the RV came flooding back to her. She’d seen another car at the last minute and crashed right into it. And that’d been the last thing before she’d blacked out.

  Jim was back at the pharmacy. They’d left him there. Rob had been unconscious.

  Jessica had been driving. She’d crashed into something. Her vision had been damaged somehow.

  Sure enough, her vision was still bad. One eye wouldn’t open, and something was partially wrong with the one that would.

  Where were the others? And where was Jim?

  She felt the ground with her hands. It was grass. Grass that was supposed to be there. Like a lawn. Not wild grass.

  She stood up and looked around, trying to get a better look at her surroundings. There seemed to be a road near her. Or something like a road. Maybe a path. It was too blurry to tell.

  There was no sign of the RV. Or the others.

  “Aly!” she called out. “Rob!”

  She tried again, and again, but there was no answer.

  This didn’t make any sense. How could she have gotten separated from them? How had she wound up on her own, nowhere near the RV? She clearly remembered hitting the car in the road.

  It was so frustrating that Jessica almost wanted to scream out. The logic just wasn’t there.

  Did she have a head injury or something? Was her own thinking the problem, and she was just not intellectually capable of understanding the situation?

  She doubted it. She tested herself, trying to remember the names of past US presidents, her birthday, the birthday of her parents. She passed her own tests fine. She could remember the names fine. Now she did some simple arithmetic. It all seemed to check out.

  She felt OK. She didn’t seem to be injured besides her eye and her vision, and that was from the first crash, rather than the second.

  So, working backwards, she figured that someone must have dragged her unconscious body from the RV. Whoever it’d been, they’d either dragged her far enough from the RV that she couldn’t see it now, or they’d dragged her only a short distance, and then driven off in the RV.

  Who would have done that? Aly? Jessica doubted it. Unless there was some really crazy circumstance in which it had made sense. But what would that have been? Jessica couldn’t imagine Aly leaving her behind intentionally.

  Had someone stolen the RV? After the crash, maybe they’d decided it was a better vehicle than their own, found Jessica unconscious, dragged her out of the RV, and driven off in it themselves.

  That was a definite possibility.

  But it didn’t explain why Jessica was alone, rather than with Rob and Aly.

  Of course, there was the very real possibility that Rob was dead.

  And Jessica supposed that she had to consider the possibility that Aly was dead as well.

  But what kind of person would steal an RV and leave two alive or dead passengers inside it as they drove off? What was different about Jessica?

  Then it hit her. It was obvious. She’d been the driver. Someone had needed to get into the driver’s seat in order to steal the RV. They hadn’t bothered with Aly and Rob because they were in the other seats.

  Jessica was sure that’s what had happened.

  And with that idea came two more important pieces of information. And that was that at the time of the accident, when the RV had been stolen, both Aly and Rob had been unconscious, or at least incapacitated enough not to be able to stop the thief. Either that or they’d been dead.

  It also meant that Jessica was likely not far from the site of the accident.

  Who knew? Maybe she’d been dumped out of the driver’s seat and she’d crawled in such a daze that she still didn’t remember to this grassy patch here.

  She almost gasped when she realized she hadn’t checked to see if she was still armed. Her hands went to her holster.

  Her gun was still there.

  And there was a knife in her pocket.

  But that was it.

  No food. No water.

  For a moment, she considered her possibilities as widely as she could. She could set off on her own, forgetting about her friends. If she were someone else, maybe that’s what she’d do. Maybe the possibilities of survival would be better in the long run, or maybe they’d be worse overall. She didn’t know.

  But she’d grown attached to the others. She’d really been something of a loner. A very independent woman. That was before the EMP. The world changed, and Jessica had changed with it.

  So she threw off that possibility.

  She was going to try to find the others.

  But the others were in different places. Did she go for Jim at the pharmacy, or Aly and Rob?

  It was hard to know who was in the worse position.

  And it was hard to know who had the greater chance of still being alive.

  The outlooks were grim for both parties.

  Jessica started walking before she’d made up her mind.

  She found her way to the road, despite her blurry vision. She didn’t bother walking slowly because of her vision. Her strides were long and purposeful, and she held her gun at the ready, despite not being able to fully see her surroundings.

  She made her way to the road. In one direction, she could almost see the outline of a building. Or something that might have been a building. That kind of made sense. She couldn’t have been that far from the crash site, which meant she wasn’t that far away from the pharmacy, or any of those strip mall-like stores that lined the road.

  Jessica knew that she was a potential target, standing out in the open road by herself, unable to see any potential oncomers. After all, there were people out there, even if they weren’t always in sight.

  She’d have to take the risk. She’d have to rely on her hearing. On the remaining vision that she did have.

  There wasn’t time or need to mourn the partial loss of her sight. It might come back, anyway. Whatever the situation, it was the situation. She didn’t have the ability to change it. Just to make do with what she had.

  She couldn’t see the sun, either because of the clouds or her vision. But she could see that off in one direction, the sky was much brighter.

  Knowing the rough path of the sun as it rose and set throughout the day, hour by hour, Jessica was able to guess the cardinal directions. It was helpful to know north from south, since she couldn’t see well enough to identify any other landmarks.

  She decided to walk towards the pharmacy fo
r five minutes to see if she could find the site of the wreck. After all, it seemed likely that the vehicle she’d crashed into would still be there.

  After that, she’d retrace her steps and go five minutes in the other direction. If she found the crash site, it might give her some more information about which of her friends to pursue. Hopefully, she didn’t find the body of Aly or Rob.

  Or both.

  “Hey, lady!”

  It was someone’s voice.

  It was such a surprise that Jessica’s heart started to pound.

  Jessica snapped her head around, looking for the source of the voice.

  But everything was just a blur. There was that building off in the distance, a blurry backdrop with nothing but smaller blurs in front of it.

  “Hey, lady, watch where you’re going!”

  This time, Jessica was able to tell that the voice was coming from off to her right. She spun around, pointing her gun.

  “Whoa! Don’t shoot! I’m just trying to help.”

  Each time she heard the voice, she was getting a better read on the person. It was definitely a woman’s voice.

  So she was pointing in the right direction.

  “I’ve got you right where I want you,” said Jessica, using her most ruthless tone.

  The sound of her own voice surprised her. It sounded gravely and hoarse. Maybe an effect of the crash.

  She was trying to fake out this new threat.

  The only problem?

  Whoever this person was, they’d be able to tell easily enough whether Jessica’s gun was actually pointed at them or not. Whereas Jessica couldn’t.

  It wasn’t a great situation.

  But there were certainly worse.

  7

  Aly

  Things couldn’t have been going worse.

  So many things had happened in the last few minutes that Aly’s mind was reeling. Her pulse had skyrocketed upwards. Her body was full of adrenaline.