Blood Type Infected (Book 4): Betrayal of Hope

by Marchon, Matthew

  I take my opportunity, reach my hand down and grab the handle of the sword. I don’t need it to remember my friend, but when we make it out of here, I’m seeing to it that his weapon is put on display. The world needs to know that without him, I wouldn’t be alive right now. We wouldn’t have the antidote. We wouldn’t be rescuing the scientists who are probably behind all this in the first place and might have some sort of solution in that dam. His sacrifice could save the world. This sword is coming with me.

  My fingers wrap around its handle on the third try and I yank it from her throat, pulling Replica Excalibur from its stone, just with more blood.

  She howls and groans as her body splits in half. With nothing of any substance left to hold her together, her torso begins slipping. No more solid bones, there’s only mangled flesh to hold everything in place. Her legs fall off, disappearing beneath us. Her bloated torso goes flying the second Maxwell picks up speed, she must have gotten word that we’re ‘safely’ onboard. At least I’m hoping that means Norwood made it.

  Felecia’s ponytail disappears from view, Caylee must have got her pulled up to the roof and not a moment too soon because Maxwell’s aiming straight for the picnic tables. I have a feeling this ride is about to get bumpy.

  With every burning muscle I have in my aching stomach, I lift my legs and wrap them around the railing. When this is over, I’m not moving for a week. I swear to god, they better hook me up to an IV and a catheter because I’m not getting up for anything. Even if I wanted to, I doubt I’d be able to. I am so done with this. And let me tell you, I am never running again. Running isn’t fun. Why the hell is this considered a hobby? An enjoyable activity? If it ever was, it certainly isn’t anymore.

  Oh no. Hold on, hold on.

  We ram through the first row of picnic tables, sending splintered boards exploding into the air, crunching beneath the wheels as more bodies get flattened beneath twenty tons of steel. I’m guessing that’s how much it weighs after lifting its rear wheels off the ground for exercise the other– yeah fine, Maxwell said it weighs nineteen point something tons and I just happened to remember. But I could have lifted it if I wanted to, just not with my injured hand of course.

  With one last burst of energy, I roll onto the top, holding the sword tightly in one hand, railing in the other. Is this a normal occurrence, are soldiers clinging to the side of this beast while battling insurgents and that’s why there’s so many handlebars and railings? I’m not complaining, just curious. Whatever their purpose, they are certainly saving my ass right now.

  “Felecia,” I call over, able to see her and Caylee’s feet from around the side of the cannon, turret, tank piece, thingy, whatever it’s called.

  “I’m okay. We’re alright. Dustin?”

  “Present,” he shouts from the other side of the boom blaster, though I think cannon is probably more technical. “Holy shit that was close. I can feel my heart pounding in my sphincter. Can someone check to make sure I didn’t make doody in my pants?”

  “Aww, see Cayles, it’s okay,” Felecia coos, like she’s talking to a child. “It happens to the best of us. I’m sure we can find you some adult diapers.”

  “Oh my god, no way.” Norwood’s laughter is almost loud enough to overpower the one or two thousand infected inhabitants chasing after us, I don’t plan on counting heads for an accurate tally. “Did you seriously shit yourself?”

  “No,” she growls defiantly. “I did not soil myself. I had to make pipí. And it kinda just, ya know, came out, without me telling it to. Leesh, tell him it’s not my fault.”

  “It’s not,” Felecia says, begrudgingly. “Her parents just didn’t potty train her in–”

  “No! That’s not it.” I can feel the vibrations as she pounds on the steel frame in protest. Norwood and Sami are laughing their asses off because to them she just couldn’t hold it or got so scared she tinkled, they don’t know what saltwater does to your system. “Tell them what you told me.”

  “Fine, alright, fine. The concentration of salt in ocean water is too much for our bodies to handle, we have to get it out immediately.” I never really thought about it because she likes to play dumb, but she’s in some of Paul’s advanced classes. “Too much will kill you. It should have killed me, but, I don’t know, something about the way it fights the infection, I think I peed for about five minutes straight. Of course I didn’t go in my pants,” she adds, dropping her voice a few decibels. “But whatever, to each their own.”

  I clear my throat loudly to remind her I was there to bear witness to the incident.

  “Crap,” she grumbles, “you heard that? Fine, I watered the living room rug of a fancy cabin.”

  “And,” I sing, coaxing her to continue.

  “Ugh, but the puddle grew too large and it got all over my feet.”

  “Ewww,” Caylee squeals in disgust. “The feet I just pulled you up by?”

  “It’s fine, I was in the ocean for a while, I’m sure it sanitized them.”

  “You guys are gross,” Sami giggles from her seat behind the machine gun.

  “We sure are,” Felecia declares proudly. “But what’s a little pee between friends? You’d do anything for the people you love.”

  “That’s what my mom says. I’m never gonna see her again, am I?”

  A hush falls over us because how do you tell an eight year old that she’s right and will probably never see her mom or sister ever again? I’m just totally guessing on the age, I’m horrible at this. Earlier I could have sworn she was like thirteen but hearing her now, I don’t know, somewhere between five and fifteen.

  The reality is, that poor woman is never going to find her daughter, and if by some miracle she does, they’ll be trapped on this god forsaken continent where the dead things live. Yet, I understand her decision. Maybe not leaving her other two children with strangers, but her need to find her daughter. The guilt she must feel over allowing those men to do what they did to her little girl, there’s no way she could live with herself. I don’t have kids so I don’t know how a situation like that should be handled. Do you abandon two for one who needs you more? I don’t think there’s a right answer, just two mistakes you have to choose between.

  “Can you guys hear me up there?” Maxwell. “Everyone okay and accounted for?” Norwood must still have the walkie talkie.

  “We’re good,” he answers. “Not exactly the most comfortable seating though.”

  “What the fuck happened back there? Did dipshit in the tanker seriously run you guys over?”

  “That’s affirmative. At least, he tried.”

  “He’s not getting on that chopper.” She says it so matter of factly, I don’t think anyone would argue even if they saw a reason to. “End of story.”

  “He’s not alone,” I call over the twirly whirly cannon spinner, much more technical term than the boom blaster.

  “I knew it,” Norwood yells. “I knew someone was in that passenger seat. Who the fuck is with him?”

  “It’s gotta be Darius,” I say, staring straight at the front windshield as they drive about twenty feet behind us, still chained up.

  It’s too hard to see through the glare but I know it’s him. Paul wouldn’t associate himself with Clay Hansen. It could be the O’Connor kid but I can’t see that either. Him and Darius are friends and they’re both co-captains of the I-all-of-a-sudden-hate-Noah-Britton club, so it makes sense. I just don’t know what their end game is.

  Are they trying to kill us and take the helicopter for themselves? That doesn’t even make sense. They know we’re going to have to gas it up along the way and Darius has killed about as many zombies as he has spiders, which is none because he’s too scared to get close enough to kill those little eight legged spawns of Satan.

  “Max, he ain’t alone in there. Noah says he’s got Darius with him. What’s the plan? They got that field blocked, we’ll never make it through.”

  “We’ve gotta go through town. Maybe if we take enough corners we can
lose this mob. I can’t risk you guys trying to hang on up there, you gotta crawl through the hatch. I’m gonna slow down a little for you but we don’t have enough time to stop. Shit, you gotta get the girl down here, now! Her brother is freaking out. Kid no don’t–”

  The transmission goes silent. She took her finger off the button. Was that Marty yelling right before it cut off? What the hell’s going on?

  Something makes a thwamp noise beside me, all I can think are those t-shirt guns they blast into the crowd at sporting events. But, like, ten of them at once.

  Simultaneous explosions wreak havoc on the storybook community turned hell’s courtyard. Buildings, cars, a park… oh no, gas station!

  The gas station in front of us got hit. What the hell just happened? Shit, the little smokestacks beside the cannon, there’s eight of them on this side alone, they must be grenade launchers. The kid had to have hit something down there and fired all sixteen at once in every direction.

  The blast at the gas pump sets off a chain reaction. The one beside it goes up in a fireball, tossing cars into the air like they’re Hot Wheels. The pump beside that bursts into flames a second later, shooting fire fifty feet into the sky.

  Maxwell takes a sharp right, tires squealing as I’m pretty sure we tip onto two wheels, well, four since there’s eight total but I’m positive not all of them are on the ground right now. I hold onto the railing like there’s lava below the monkey bars and this time it’s not a third grade game on the playscape at recess.

  The gas station explosion sends a surge of fire across the street, blowing away everything in its path. The storefronts on the other side of the road give way under the heat as glass shatters and cars are thrust against the building. The less than innocent bystanders passing by on their frantic quest to reach us are scattered into the air, lifted off the pavement and sent crashing through second story windows.

  No no no, why is the cannon rotating? It’s coming right for me!

  I try to duck down even lower but I can’t go much flatter than my current pancake mode.

  It doesn’t matter, I won’t get to see if I’ve flattened myself enough for the barrel of the cannon to pass over me. The base of it is pressing against my hip, pushing me right over the edge. I can’t compete with a cannon. There’s nothing I can do. I’m going over.

  CHAPTER 29

  The base of the cannon pushes me off the side of the Stryker as it rotates, leaving me nowhere to go. If I hit the ground, Paul’s running me over whether he wants to or not, but I’m leaning heavily towards want. As it is, he has to keep a close distance or he’s getting dragged by the chain, crashing on the first corner and blowing us all up in a fuel truck explosion. There’s no way he’s going to avoid hitting me, and he’s probably gonna smile when he does it.

  I latch onto the barrel of the cannon in a bearhug so tight it’s cutting off circulation to my arms.

  Here we go, it keeps turning, dangling me over the street, nothing but air on all sides of me. I’m not sure if the bright dot in the sky is the sun or just another floater that thinks it’s fun to sit directly in my line of sight.

  All eight tires are firmly planted on the pavement again, rocking us back and forth. I feel like I’m humping a fireman’s pole that thinks it’s a mechanical bull.

  Oh no, here come Caylee and Felecia, I’m still turning. If it were just the cannon they’d have enough clearance to duck, but not with me clinging to it. I’m gonna knock them both off the back. Do I let go? If I drop right now, I won’t hit them. Maybe I can land on my feet and jump out of the way before Paul runs me over. I know, I know, me land on my feet, but I have to, it’s them or me and I can’t–

  Caylee wraps herself around the handrail and flops over the edge, hanging off the back of the Stryker in baby-bear-clutching-tree-trunk mode just like me. Felecia flattens herself as close to the steel frame as she can but it’s not enough. There’s not as much space as we thought. My back hits hers, rolling her closer to the edge.

  “Felecia, hold onto me!”

  Her arms wrap around my body just in the nick of time. We’re spinning around the other side of the vehicle, suspended in midair with her arms around my neck and her legs wrapped around my body, wrapped around the barrel. And we show no signs of stopping.

  I flinch as we come around the front where Norwood is trying to get out of our path. But where the hell is he supposed to go? I’m amazed he even made it to his feet as we swerve around deserted cars, over the sidewalk and past body parts that litter the road. He’s out of room to run. If he takes another step, he tramples Sami in the gunner’s seat, but if he stays there, we’re essentially a battering ram knocking him off the side.

  He leaps over us like a giant game of Skip-It, except with a cannon. Why isn’t this thing stopping? If I wanted to be on a carnival ride, we’d have gone at the pier or in the town square half a mile that way.

  Oh no, we’ve done a complete 360, back to the exact spot where I first climbed aboard the Devil’s Merry Go Round. There’s no way we can both fit. Not with Felecia hanging off me like this, her back’s gonna scrape.

  All I can do is press my body tighter against the barrel. She pulls closer to me until we’re basically the same person. I can feel every muscle in her body quiver as she squeezes with everything she has, so hard I might pop at any second.

  We’re over the street again, it worked! We did it. She got her body close enough.

  We’re dangling in midair when the cannon comes to an abrupt stop, rocking me back and forth on its smooth surface like a pendulum on a grandfather clock. Caylee’s right below us, we must be pointed backwards, directly at the fuel truck. Oh please don’t let that kid press any more buttons or whatever it is that happened down there. I do not want to be attached to the barrel of the cannon if it fires at the tanker, this will not be a good situation.

  I don’t envy Paul right now, anything less than five vehicle lengths is not enough for him, so the fact that he has to tail us so closely we could spit and hit the windshield, is certainly not sitting well with him. Add to that the fact that he knows he’s getting his ass beat, probably to death, the second we stop moving, this is the car ride from hell for him.

  “Noah, what do we do?” Felecia croaks out between heavy breaths as the world rushes by.

  All I can see are the clouds above us, but I hear fire crackling from the explosions at the gas station and the groan of the truck’s engine as Paul maneuvers his way through the streets. This is the type of day you spend at the beach, this is the view I should have, but we should be on our towels with our feet in the sand, not suspended upside down off a giant gun turret.

  “I’m okay holding us here, I don’t know what else to do.”

  “We’re so close. That steeple coming up on our left, I’m pretty sure that’s about halfway through the city. I saw it on our way here. Someday, we’re gonna stand in one of those, one of the old ones you see in pictures of Scotland or Ireland, and you’re not gonna be my boyfriend anymore. I just keep telling myself that, over and over again. And since I don’t have a dad to walk me down the aisle, I’m gonna ride an animatronic dinosaur, if that’s okay with you.”

  “We’ll find you the best styracosaurus robot there is.”

  “You remembered my favorite dinosaur?” she swoons. “I mean I know we only discussed it yesterday but most people can’t even pronounce it. Shit, we’re spinning again.”

  The cannon continues its clockwise rotation, or counterclockwise, I don’t know, I’m upside down and clinging to this thing for dear life, plus we’re going really freakin’ fast.

  It stops halfway with a jolt, nearly flinging us off. I prepare to hit the ground where I’ll land in a badass superhero pose, probably kneeling like I’m being knighted, cracking the pavement beneath– oh, nope, we’re good, no need to stick my epic landing. I was able to hold on. But Felecia’s yelp in my ear means I’m not the only one who thought we were going flying. I’m convinced I heard three other girl scream
s as well, Caylee and Sami make sense, but the third was either me or Norwood. We’ll go with Norwood, mine would have been much more masculine.

  I hold on with everything I have as we flip over the top of the barrel, swinging back and forth until I can adjust my legs enough to hold us in place. Pretty sure my stomach is still somewhere above us, I’m assuming it’ll catch up soon.

  “Guys, guys!” Maxwell’s voice cuts through Norwood’s walkie talkie, not far from us. “Are you alright? Please tell me everyone’s okay. We need the sister down here now! Now! If you can hear me, get her down here. He bit the doctor, he’s not letting go.”

  “Oh my god, is he infected?” Felecia pants in my ear, a sentence that surely should never turn anyone on, yet, here we are. Think it had more to do with the panting reminding me of last night on Sex Island than the words, but still. “How, he couldn’t have been bit, he’s been in there the whole time.”

  “He’s not one of them,” Sami yells. It sounds like she’s moving around, climbing out of the gunner’s seat. I’m not sure if she’s directing it at us or everyone inside the Stryker. “He’s done this before. He bites when he feels threatened. Hold on Anthie, I’m coming.”

  “Max, I’m gonna get her down there right now, open the hatch! We gotta get the cannon pointed forward, they’re hanging off of it. I repeat, Max, they are dangling over the edge hanging onto the barrel! Get it straight, now!”

  “Noah,” Felecia whispers, “how high off the ground do you think we are?”

  “Maybe eight feet. Why?”

  “Because there’s a crowd running towards us and some of them look really freakin’ tall.”

  I turn my head and, yep, she is not seeing things. Son of a bitch. We’re about to plow through a hundred meat eaters and I don’t see any side streets to turn onto. There’s only one way to go and that’s straight through them. Oh god here they come.