Deadrise (Book 2): Blood Storm

by Siara Brandt

  “Well, at least eat something.” Eli’s lips compressed into a thin, straight line as he stared across the table. “You need to keep up your strength if you’re going to be any use to them at all,” he said.

  Looking over the assortment of food on the table between them, Athan picked up a bag of bagel chips and managed to get a few bites down. They had been discussing their options for the past half hour and every one of those options had flaws.

  “You know, my brother who works at the CDC said this was a lab-made virus.”

  That didn’t completely surprise Eli. Secret genetic tampering was never out of the realm of possibility where the government was concerned. He’d known already that this was all started by a bio-weapon that had been stolen and then spread by terrorists. Snead had filled in some of the other blanks.

  “They were churning out vaccines in massive quantities to be used worldwide,” Athan went on. “It had never been done on such a large scale before. This is the part that gets me. They were the ones who had the state-of-the-art labs. They had the latest technologies. They’d spend years on their projects, so they knew better than anyone else what they had. And what they had was something that fucked up the human immune system big time and caused major damage to brain. And led to all of this.”

  The man seemed to need to talk so Eli let him go on.

  “They didn’t care what they were doing to people. They had their own agenda and that’s all that mattered to them. It might have been spread by a terrorist attack, but it was no accident that the virus turned into something deadly when it came into contact with a bacteria that had also been genetically altered. It was designed to work that way. The terrorists don’t even know they were used as pawns. Do you know our government has been actively experimenting with reanimation for years with psychoactive bacteria and viruses that interrupt normal brain function? They even tried to infect enemy soldiers.” Athan gave a grim laugh under his breath. “Not too many people know about that or how it backfired.

  “This has nothing to do with Islamic supremacy. It never did. Just like Hitler’s Germany or any of the brutal dictators in history, it’s all the same. There are power-hungry people who will use whatever tools they can get their hands on to achieve world domination.

  “Well, we’re all united now,” Athan went on soberly. “We all have one common goal. How to survive.” He narrowed his gaze. “I keep wondering what’s going to happen when winter comes and everything freezes over. You think that those things will freeze, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Eli answered him. “What keeps them alive now? They can’t drown. I know that.”

  “And I saw one keep walking even after he’d lost both arms. Loch said they can survive with a something run clear through them.”

  “We already know you have to de-activate the brain with some sort of major trauma,” Eli said. “It’s like some turn-off switch doesn’t work anymore to let the body know it’s dead.”

  They thought that over.

  “They want to eat. You think anything else drives them?” Eli asked.

  Athan ran his palm across his beard-shadowed jaw. “I don’t know. But Steve had some hope that if you could be infected, you could be uninfected. At least in the early stages. As the disease progresses, the neurons die and there are deep lesions on the brain, both of which lead to increased dementia as parts of the brain cease to function The metabolism slows down which probably eventually causes the decomposing flesh. It’s hard to say how permanent the changes might be. Antibiotics have effectively killed the bacteria, but so far nothing works against a virus. Especially not this kind of virus. But antibiotics? Who knows.”

  It wasn’t much of an answer. In fact, it was pathetically lacking in what they all needed most right now. Hope.

  Sitting back in his chair, Athan sighed deeply. “It’s hard to think we did this to ourselves.” He looked at Eli. “We’re going to have to tell them, you know.”

  Eli nodded. “Yeah, I know that.” It was something that so far he’d been able to avoid.

  “If they’ve had the vaccines, they have to know to avoid any contact with the infected. And maybe a round of antibiotics might be worth a shot. Hell, that just might be the reason the government was suddenly speakng out against antibiotic use.”

  “Most of these people just want to get back to their families,” Eli said quietly.

  “I imagine it’s pure chaos in the cities,” Athan said. “They need to know what they would be up against. Look what a simple blackout can do. This goes so far beyond that that I don’t think we can even imagine the scope of what is happening right now.

  “The really scary thought is what if the bastards who started this all are waiting somewhere in isolation to pick up the pieces,” Athan went on. “Because then we’ll have another war on our hands. They might have created monsters, but I wonder if they know they created survivors, too.”

  Eli nodded in agreement. “Whatever we decide to do, we can’t wait much longer. We’ve already lost too much time as it is. I’ve already talked it over with Ailin. She’s got a place outside of town with a supply of food. And weapons. We can head there and work on making it as defendable as we can. We can set out together, decide beforehand where everyone’s going. Make sure the ones who are going off on their own have a full tank of gas, food if we can find it, and arm them wherever possible. We’ll grab up everything we can use on the way. That’s our only option right now. There’s no food to eat and the drinkable water will run out before the end of the day.

  “That firefighter already said he’ll go with us. He has some good ideas and he’s got medical training. Honest Abe, too. He looks dependable. The kids of course come with us. And the bus driver. And . . . ”

  Ailin’s relatives, Eli thought to himself. They couldn’t leave them behind.

  “A few others will go with us,” Eli finished. “There’s supposed to be safety in numbers.”

  “If you have the right numbers,” Athan pointed out.

  They were thinking about Penndle.

  “Yeah. He’s going to be a problem,” Eli said for both of them.

  For fully a minute, Penndle actually trembled with rage. When he finally managed to get himself under control, or as close as was possible under the circumstances, he slammed the bottle of peppermint schnapps down on the dresser and vowed again that he would have vengeance.

  Drinking always brought out the worst in Penndle. It stripped him of the veneer of civilization that he had cultivated for the outside world. It allowed his selfishness and his brutal nature to come to the fore. Normally he would not have even considered the idea of going off on his own. But these were not normal circumstances. The inn had become a hostile world to him, one that he could not control. And he was not handling it very well.

  He squinted down at the bottle which was now only half full. The peppermint schnapps only made him more belligerent and more reckless, but he felt it did him a lot of good.

  He stared at his face in the mirror for a long time as if he was fixated on his reflection. It was something he did often. Something his wife found more than a little creepy. His eyes hardened as he looked at his red nose. First and foremost in his thoughts was the soldier. He wanted the man to pay. He wanted to see him grovel. He wanted to strip the sonofabitch’s dignity away just as it had been stripped away from him. Of course, Penndle could not hope to prevail in any kind of physical altercation, but the thought of humiliating the man was fixed in Penndle’s mind and it refused to be dislodged. It was only right that the man should suffer. Penndle had also convinced himself that Nilah had deserted him not through any fault of his own, but because the soldier had made him look bad in front of her. None of it was fair.

  Penndle stalked over to the window. He had gone without a decent meal for a long time now. Too long. He was hungry and that never improved his mood. His empty stomach was churning loudly, a constant reminder that the situation had to change. And soon.

  He thought about
the food he had pushed under the sofa in the lobby. No one had seen him shove the bags with his foot until they were no longer visible. Now would be the time to go retrieve them. Penndle opened his hotel room door and looked both ways to find the hallway empty. He smiled to himself. He would be eating when everyone else was starving. He had outsmarted them all.

  Penndle smacked his lips as he took another long drink from the bottle. He moved stealthily through the lobby, stopping every once in a while to listen for any sounds that might tell him that someone was coming. He stopped when he saw the ghoulish face pressed against the front door. But this time he didn’t run. His eyes stayed fixed on the zombie with a kind of fascination.

  He jumped when he heard someone coming. He stepped quickly into the shadows and waited.

  When Ailin became aware that she was not alone, she stopped abruptly and whirled around. She placed a hand against her chest and breathed in relief. “You scared me.”

  She saw the suitcase in Penndle’s hand. The bottle of peppermint schnapps. And the bags of food. “What are you doing?”

  Busted.

  Penndle didn’t want her sounding the alarm. He glanced furtively at the staircase. The soldier could come down at any moment looking for her. So far, Penndle had avoided a confrontation by hiding in his room. This time, if he found out he had been hoarding food, maybe he wouldn’t stop with just one punch. But there was a way to avoid all that. He set his suitcase down.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he heard himself ask. His voice was so deep and so authoritative that it impressed even him.

  Ailin turned back around. “To my room.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You stay here.” Again Penndle heard the authority in his voice. He liked it.

  Ailin looked down. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Penndle didn’t know if she was referring to the suitcase or to the bottle in his hand. Either way, she had no business criticizing him. His eyes travelled slowly down her body. She was sharing a room with the soldier. Maybe she was the kind of woman who never said no. It was worth a try. In his alcohol-slurred mind it was worth a shot. Besides, he had to keep her from telling her boyfriend what he was up to.

  He’d made up his mind to leave the hotel anyway. Nilah was through with him. Because of the soldier. Nilah was lost to him and he needed a victim as much as he needed his next breath of air.

  “I’m going back to my room,” she repeated.

  “No.”

  At her startled expression, he said, “You’re not going anywhere except where I tell you to go.”

  Hadn’t this same thing happened to Ailin several times during the past two days? It hadn’t fazed her all that much those times. But this time was different. This time she saw something in the man’s eyes that filled her with a growing sense of dread.

  Penndle found that he liked the look of fear in the woman’s eyes. Bullying Nilah around had gotten old and predictable, but here was something new and exciting. He was surprised at the sense of euphoria that flooded through him at the thought of making her obey his every wish.

  “I’m not going to- ”

  “Yes. You are.” He brandished a gun in front of her.

  “Where did you get that?” She remembered hearing the man say that he wasn’t armed.

  “It belonged to the clerk. I took it when he wasn’t looking.”

  Ailin turned to go up the stairs. She wasn’t about to meekly give in to the man, but she thought she’d better get upstairs and away from him as soon as possible. Before he did something rash. He had obviously been drinking, which meant reasoning with him was out of the question.

  But she underestimated Penndle’s fear of Eli, which magnified his brutality and his sense of urgency. He moved quickly for such a heavyset man. His hand clamped down on her wrist and he started dragging her to the wall beside the front door.

  “We’re going to . . . hide behind the luggage rack and open the door,” he panted between tightly-clenched teeth. “When those things swarm into the lobby, we’ll be able to get to my car.”

  “Go out there? In the dark? Are you insane? You can’t seriously be thinking of letting those things in here.”

  “They’re going to get in eventually.”

  That was all he had to say as he grabbed the door handle and jerked the door open.

  Something was wrong. Eli’s sixth sense had gone onto overdrive. He picked up his gun and slid it into his leather leg holster. Opening the door, he stepped out into the hallway where he paused to listen, expecting to hear something.

  But there was nothing. No voices. No footsteps. No sounds whatsoever. With the power off, there wasn’t even a hum of electricity anywhere in the dark inn. There was just the dead silence.

  It was the silence that was bothering him. Yeah, something wasn’t right. Just where the hell was Ailin?

  Chapter 22

  _______________

  They had no trouble getting to Penndle’s car. To Ailin’s horror, a horde of zombies swarmed immediately through the front door, and then Penndle forced her outside. As she looked back, there were still more zombies finding their way inside.

  Penndle didn’t let go of her wrist. But Ailin knew she had to warn the people in the inn. And Eli had to know what had happened to her. When Penndle shoved her inside the vehicle, she sounded the horn before he could stop her. He hit her with the gun. She fell against the passenger door, moaned and clamped her hand to her face as Penndle jammed the key into the ignition switch and started the car. The tires squealed in his haste to leave the parking lot.

  He was so drunk that he was driving erratically.

  “At least turn your lights on,” Ailin yelled at him, fearing that he was going to get them both killed.

  The lights from the dashboard suddenly lit his bloated face as he gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to focus. But he still swerved from one side of the road to the other.

  Please, don’t let another car come along, Ailin prayed. Or let him hit something else. Here they were in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and she was going to die in a car crash.

  The head lights lit up one thing only. The fog. Penndle didn’t even see the sign coming. They went right over it. Penndle turned the wheel violently, after the fact, and the car left the road and headed for a corn field.

  The tires followed the ditch, which kept them at the edge of the cornfield at first. Whether Penndle meant to do that, she couldn’t tell. Corn stalks suddenly flew past her window and came at them from the front. She screamed as the car tipped precariously towards her side, righted itself again, and then ran right into a tree.

  Eli swore under his breath when he heard the sounds coming from downstairs. The thumps and the snarls got louder as he moved down the hallway. He knew just what it was. Zombies had gotten inside. They would handle that, but right now something else was on his mind. Please, let her be all right, he muttered as he drew his gun.

  Penndle swore again. The dagger-shaped corn leaves rasped against him from every direction, some of them sharp enough to draw blood. The tall corn stalks were like prison bars surrounding him on all sides. Taking the bitch hadn’t been a good idea. He knew that now. It would have been far better if he’d stayed in his room and drank himself into a stupor. It would have been a lot more comfortable than all this bullshit.

  It wasn’t enough that he was a wounded man and there was no one around to feel sorry for him. Now he was lost in the fog in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. And dammit, there wasn’t a single person around to blame for it. He had turned the lights off on the car. He didn’t know if those things were drawn to light, but he knew he didn’t want to find out at the moment.

  He thought he heard something out there in the dark. No, it was only his own heavy breathing. He hurried on, slapping wildly at the corn leaves, cursing when they sliced his skin.

  “This is one fucking nightmare,” he muttered to
himself.

  He didn’t know how deeply he had wandered into the corn. He needed to find the road again. He had no idea what direction he should go in. He didn’t know where the woman was. He didn’t care where she was. She’d gotten out of the car and right away she ran from him. He had decided that it was her fault he was in this mess. If she hadn’t distracted him . . .

  He stopped when something moving beyond the stalks of corn ahead of him. He wiped his face with his sleeve, his eyes bulging as he strained to see what it was. If there really was anything out there, he couldn’t make it out. There were nothing but walls of corn around him. And fog. It was disorienting. He started to move again.

  He yelled out as he tripped and fell, knocking down a big section of corn, had presence of mind to partially blame the peppermint schnapps. He struggled to his hands and knees in the mud and lifted his face. There was the road ahead of him. He staggered to his feet, almost laughed out loud that he had been so lucky. He would be okay now.

  Such good fortune called for a toast. He unscrewed the top of the bottle, and tilted his head far back as he drank deeply. When he lowered the bottle, he reeled a little and licked his lips to lap up the traces of peppermint. As he stood there, his mouth wreathed into a sneer as he considered that she was probably a lot worse off than he was. But that’s what she got for running away from him.

  Stunned for a moment by the crash, Ainlin finally opened her eyes and looked around. She saw corn. Mist. Darkness.

  When she opened her door and fell halfway out, Penndle grabbed her ankle and tried to drag her back inside. But she was holding on to the edge of the door and she used it for leverage and kicked Penndle, catching him in the chest. He howled and fell back, swearing profanely and calling her a whole string of vile names.