Chasing The Cure
The Caitlin Chronicles™ Book Five
Daniel Willcocks
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 Daniel Willcocks, Michael Anderle
Cover by Mihaela Voicu http://www.mihaelavoicu.com/
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
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Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, October 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-545-3
Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-546-0
The Kurtherian Gambit (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2015-2019 by Michael T. Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.
Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Author’s Notes - Dan Willcocks
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Other Books by Daniel Willcocks
Books by Michael Anderle
Connect with the authors
The Chasing The Cure Team
Thanks to the Beta Readers
Micky Cocker, Nicole Emens, Larry Omans
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Peter Manis
Diane L. Smith
Paul Westman
Dave Hicks
If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
For you. This one is definitely for you. You know who you are. You.
—Dan
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
—Michael
Prologue
Potato Creek State Park, Illinois
The storm came out of nowhere.
Grey clouds bubbled and roiled above. Rain fell in sheets from the horizon, washing over the landscape and turning the sun-dried earth into sludge. Worms and insects, untouched by any of the corruption the Madness had brought, rose to the surface and sniffed the air, unaware of the many passing feet about to tread their way.
The lake swelled in an instant—one of the main features of the several square kilometers of what had once been a natural visitor spot for the locals of the city, hundreds of years ago before the world collapsed and foliage claimed back the land.
It had been beautiful at one point. Hell, it was still beautiful on an average, moonlit evening in the Age of Madness.
But now, as Helena dashed through the forest, all she could think of was how the hell she was going to make the distance to her house before they came.
And come, they did. In their herds and droves as they had done for decades and would continue to do until something monumental stopped them. The creatures she had been studying for almost a century, trying to find a way to reverse the effects of the event which had brought on the feral rage within the majority of the human (and Unknown) population.
The Mad. A name that was apt.
Over the years, she had seen them all across the great continent. Her travels had taken her to the four corners of America, and even beyond that to their Canadian neighbors. She had seen a world crumbled and torn. She had met colonies, stayed with the devastated, and then struck out on her own with a dogged determination to find the answer that everyone was looking for.
The cure.
What the hell was the cure?
Progress had been made, of course. Even continents made glacial progress, moving millimeters a day. But, over the course of her travels and the years she had spent dedicating her life to the discovery of something which could reverse it all, had it been enough?
She felt old now. Tired in her old age. Even a vampire had their limits. Without a regular supply of fresh human blood, even the strongest vampire will wither and crack.
Much like the world around me, she thought.
Still, she had learned something, at least. She had learned how to slow the transition of the newly-infected as they spiraled into Madness. Logged the concoction in a series of books—many of which she had friggin’ forgotten and left behind on her travels. Perhaps she was losing her mind in her old age.
She had even made an attempt to halt the affliction that caused the Weres to get stuck in their creature or human form, free of the curse of finding themselves stuck in the in-between and morphing into hideous lycanthropes.
Ultimately, that hadn’t panned out. But at least she’d given it a go.
And then there were the vampires. The creatures who were the most frightening when afflicted with the Madness. The creatures whose nanocytes in their blood were the most corrupt, which caused them to become primal beasts of a nightmarish magnitude.
She had seen it happen. Far too often, in her opinion. She hadn’t enjoyed staking her brothers and sisters, but what choice did she have? A vampire stricken with the Madness had the capacity to raze entire cities to the ground, let alone the remaining clusters of terrified survivors living in the current times.
One day…Helena thought, as she always did. One day it’ll all be over.
But that day wasn’t today.
Helena’s breath caught in her throat. Her eyes pulsed dimly with red light.
She ran, the sounds of their gnashing and their cries close behind her. A horde of Mad drawn out of their hiding by the clap of thunder at the chance moment that a vampire had strolled past. Reaching for her, driven by instinct, they were now hot on her tail.
Helena aimed for a gap between the trees. A place where the path was broken and crumbled from years of neglect. She knew she had been pushing her luck when she roamed outside of the park’s limits and into the remains of the old city, but she had needed a way to act on her latest hunch. An idea that had come to her last night in her dream.
An idea that you’ll never get to execute, Millican. You know that, right? You can’t keep running and hiding forever.
As if to confirm her own thoughts, her foot lost traction, and she slipped.
Helena slid several feet across the mud, doing her best to dig her toughened nails into the ground
and slow herself down. She hit the twisted trunk of another tree and grunted as the wind was knocked out of her, and something in her back clicked.
The Mad were ravenous. Seeing the opportunity to attack, they flooded toward her, several slipping in the mud in crude mimicry of the ancient vampire.
“Not today, thank you,” Helena muttered, pushing herself quickly to her feet. She struggled to gain ground but was able to withdraw her Glock from the holster around her waist.
A relic from the old ages. That was what people considered it to be. In all of her travels, people had been stunned that such technology could still exist.
What Helena never had the heart to tell the colonies she had found barricaded and fenced in old wooden shanty towns was that the technology was still very much alive. That there were still some groups that were trying to rebuild. Groups which had salvaged the relics and gathered them together, hell-bent on reviving the ways of the past.
Her trusty little pistol was something that had seen her through many adventures. Something which she knew would be key to survival in this world. At any chance she had, she gathered ammunition and stockpiled, using the strength her vampire gift granted her to cart around the large load and arm herself against the elements.
And the Mad, of course. You can’t forget the Mad.
Helena smirked. I never do.
Light exploded before her eyes. The report from the shots hurt her ears, but she knew the alternative was worse. Several of the frontrunners of the group—those who had been the most recently converted to the Church of Fucked-uppery—went down in a spray of gore.
A small gap, some breathing room.
Helena seized the opportunity to make her exit.
Disoriented from the afterglow blossoms of the light in her eyes, Helena tried to blink them away. The rain had joined the blurs in her eyes, and no amount of sawing with her sleeve would fix that. She had to get home, and soon.
She took a left at a park bench overlooking the lake. The bench was crooked. Only one leg remained strong. Helena had often passed by and wondered when the last time was that someone sat on that bench in the quiet peace of the world and fed the ducks.
Had it been two lovers? A loner? An elderly woman pining the loss of her husband and finding comfort in the creatures of the park?
These were the types of thoughts that kept Helena’s dream aflame. A world in which safety was the norm and the Mad were no more. A world in which, maybe, she could finally settle down and relax, basking in the satisfaction that saving the world could bring.
Vampires had done it before. God knows that she had heard it in the legends of Bethany-Anne and Michael. They were vital tales told around the campfire to all vampires, about the most powerful vampire and how she had taken to the stars to protect Earth from the Kurtherians.
So now it was up to vampires to save the world again, surely? To defend the world in the Queen Bitch’s absence and bring it to rights, should she ever return again?
Up the forest road ahead, twin willows leaning against each other like ancient lovers signaled the way back. Helena breathed a sigh of relief. She knew her way now. She wasn’t too far from home at all.
She picked up her pace, immediately regretting her decision as all friction failed and she went skidding once again. The momentum took her off the path, where she slid along mud that may as well have been frying pan grease. Her slide carried her toward a small dip where rain had collected and water-logged the ground.
Helena spluttered on the water. The Mad closed in. At least two dozen by an initial count, and no time to pick herself up and dash off.
“Okay, fuckers. You want it. Come get it.”
She managed to push herself to her knees before the first Mad came. With a strength that surprised her, she grabbed the tattered remains of the Mad’s clothes and pulled it down into the mud behind her.
The Mad gargled on the filthy water, disoriented as it fought hard not to drown.
Helena got to her feet and reached for her pistol. Her hand met empty space.
“Shit.” She looked wildly around, realizing that the pistol must have fallen out when she fell over and was now somewhere beneath the surface of the murky water.
Another Mad attacked her, now. In a panicked whirl, Helena grabbed either side of the Mad’s head and yanked upwards. It was a trick she’d used a hundred times before, learning very early on that Mad didn’t cope so well without their heads.
Neither do most creatures.
Only, her hands were so slick with mud she could only grab the Mad’s ears. These she yanked off with very little resistance, hurling them as far away from herself as possible when she realized what she was holding.
“Don’t judge me.” Helena frowned, meeting the angry stare of the Mad. “If you must, you could always summon me to a hearing.”
The Mad growled and reached for her. Maybe he understood her humor. Maybe he was just pissed. Helena ducked under his arms and drew out a small knife, glad to know she always had a back-up, should things go…Well, exactly like they were.
She plunged the knife into the Mad’s back, right between the shoulder blades. Another two Mad were approaching fast. She withdrew the knife, then booted it in the chest. The Mad flew backward and bowled over the other two. She imagined the sounds of bowling pins smacking into each other in her head.
Bubbled gargles sounded nearby. The Mad in the puddle had worked its way free. Helena took the split-second opportunity to feel around in the mud for the tell-tale metallic feel of her pistol underneath her boot.
The cloying mud at the bottom of the puddle hugged her foot and tried to suck her in. More Mad were gaining on her now. Another few seconds, and she’d be nothing more than food for them.
“Gotcha!” She celebrated, dipping a hand into the filthy water and withdrawing her pistol. She wasn’t sure if it would work now that it was soaked, but it was worth a try anyway.
She spun at the last moment and pulled the trigger. A low whine met her ears as a Mad’s face exploded into a thousand tiny fragments.
Helena fired again, and again. Several more heads exploded, the noise of the gunshots sending a flock of nearby crows into the air. A Mad ran headless until its body fell to the ground.
Helena seized the opportunity to run again. Her legs were numb and wet, and her clothes clung to her skin. She felt hands on her leg, saw the hungry look in the Mad’s eye, its teeth inches from her ankle.
A man shot through the trees, arms pumping as he sprinted along the path. He closed the gap in moments as Helena shook the Mad from her leg.
“Helena! Watch out!” The man’s eyes pulsed with a dull red color. A second later and a small explosion flung up the water, freeing Helena from the Mad’s grasp.
“Thank you,” she breathed. “Took you long enough to get here.”
“Don’t thank me, yet,” the man replied. “We’ve still got to kill the rest of them.” He tugged her arm and led her back toward the trees.
“Save one for research,” Helena groaned.
The man rolled his eyes, a small grin on his face from his mentor’s ludicrousness.
The pair of them would kill off the rest of the Mad. A short distance away was the small wooden shack which they shared in the isolation of the woods. The Mad fell into their traps, caught in the ropes, or stuck in the pits. They waited until all were caught before going back, and the light was soon extinguished from their eyes.
Later, when the rain subsided and the moon was bright, they would clean up the mess and bring any survivors in for experimentation. More research subjects to work toward their noble purpose.
But little did either of them know that at that moment, in the final dash through the trees and toward their wooden front door, that this encounter with the Mad would trigger the change of all that was to come.
The cut on Helena’s ankle oozed with dark blood, and the Madness set to work, racing through her blood to undo everything that she had done.
Chapter On
e
The Black Lake, The Broken City, Ontario
The view was beautiful as they climbed off the boat and their feet touched the sandy shore. The water behind them was a dark stretch of gentle waves, its hushed lullabies broken only by the cawing of the seagulls high above them.
Caitlin was unfamiliar with the seabirds. White in body, with patches of grey and bright yellow beaks, they were more colorful than the starlings, larks, and crows which had taken residence in the forests. She watched them fondly, a small smile playing on her lips as she breathed the fresh air.
The Broken City was behind them now. A long way across the shore, now nothing more than a faded landscape. Although she had only been there a short while, she already felt a fondness for that place.
The place, or the people? Caitlin wondered, knowing the answer already. It was always about the people.
It had been hard leaving the others behind, but the boat could only take so many. The rickety thing had been questionable at best when they first climbed aboard and, now that it was docked on the sands of the opposite shore, Caitlin still failed to understand how they had made it so far on something that looked like it had been dragged through a horde of Mad upside down. It was a rowboat. Two oars and four benches.
Chasing The Cure: Age Of Madness - A Kurtherian Gambit Series (The Caitlin Chronicles Book 5) Page 1
