Dazed by the words that came from the Mongrel’s beak, the woman stammered, “We can’t just . . . steal a car.”
“Get away from us!” the man snapped as he tried his best to squirm in the cramped confines to put himself between her and the Mongrel.
Ben merely stepped back, allowing the man to play his role as protector without reacting to the threatening tone in his voice or the way he grabbed a long flashlight and wielded it like a club. “It’s not stealing,” he told them both. “The owners of that car were killed by the same creatures we just chased away. My advice is to take that car and get to somewhere safer. Also,” he added while dropping to all fours and scraping away the top layers of snowy earth using long, curved claws, “don’t look too hard at the mess in the ditch.”
When the man turned to where Kayla had been standing, he found only the bloody remains of two Half Breeds. The third had already bounded down the Interstate chasing after a lean figure that slid gracefully into another lane.
“I think we should go,” the woman said.
Taking his eyes from the sight of the chase toward the row of lonely abandoned vehicles on the side of the road, the man swallowed hard and zipped up his coat. “Right. Do you have our suitcase?”
“Just move!”
He followed her order and bolted from the car. Along the way, he thought about the fire that had all but consumed Topeka after the werewolves had sprung up in the autumn. Only during the drive to KC had he asked his fiancé why they might have been spared. The conversation had lasted until they pulled over to fill the gas tank and their stomachs at a place that had a Subway sandwich shop and Pizza Hut tacked onto it. Every seat was filled with people of all ages, genders and nationalities. Each stunned face was focused intently on their meals. The terror implied within their features was all too familiar to the man from Topeka. He’d been wearing it ever since he’d abandoned his hometown.
It hadn’t been an easy decision. When the first werewolves showed up, everyone he knew wanted to fight them. A call to arms swept throughout the entire country at about that same time, encouraging everyone to buy a gun and defend their homes from the animals that meant to do them harm. Explanations would wait for later. Now was the time to fight.
That lasted for a few weeks.
When the angry voices died down, it wasn’t because of victory or fatigue. The people who’d bought their guns and started firing at the wild animals in their yards had been torn to shreds. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t spectacular. Even the few who’d rigged explosives with some degree of success barely managed to do any damage. After that, the wolves had swept in to kill them all.
The police were just more men with guns.
The military was taking a stand, but not in Topeka.
Soon, like most other cities, Topeka burned. Whether the fires had been started by accident or as a last-ditch effort to kill the werewolves didn’t matter. The flames rose and the people who tried to put them out were set upon by another pack of ravenous beasts. The firefighters that lived to crawl away only howled in pain as their bodies were twisted into one of those things that set out to hunt for food. Like the rest of his family, the man who now clung to his fiancé to keep from slipping on a patch of ice on I-29 hadn’t wanted to leave Topeka.
His natural instinct was to stay. For the first several weeks of the crisis, people barricaded themselves indoors to fight for survival. They watched their televisions for news about how far the insanity had spread and what was being done to stop it. Before long, people stopped watching the news and just focused on living for another day. Then, as things got worse, the highways became crowded with cars on their way to someplace better. The people behind the wheels may or may not have known where they were headed, but it was time to go.
The man from Topeka stayed until his friends and family were consumed. That’s what people started calling it, since there often wasn’t a way to know if they were truly dead. At least that word was better than the thought of seeing a parent, child or neighbor broken down into a screaming heap to be re-forged into something with fangs and wild, pain-filled eyes. The last possible good he could do was take his fiancé away before her pretty face was twisted into something cruel and hungry. They’d made it as far as KC and he was determined to keep going. When she slipped, he was there to pull her to her feet and urge her onward. They’d passed the minivan which had spun one hundred and eighty degrees before plowing into a drift. The four-door was directly ahead of them, cleared off and waiting for them like a freshly unwrapped present.
“Stay here and I’ll check it out,” he said.
The door was unlocked and the keys were on the dash. After fidgeting with fingers that were almost too numbed to feel the keys, he slipped the right one into the ignition and started the car. “Come on, honey!”
The woman cautiously stuck her feet into the snow. Tracks that were too large and spaced too far apart to be set down by humans surrounded the car. They converged a bit further away from the road near a pile of crimson pulp that had been covered by a fine layer of snow. Heeding Ben’s advice, she turned her eyes away from the mess and fumbled with the handle of the passenger side door. After she’d gotten in, but before she’d gotten a chance to pull the door shut, the car lurched forward.
“Where are we going?” she asked while frantically tugging at her safety belt.
“I’ve got some old friends in Saint Louis. We’ll go there.”
“Can we make it all that way? How far is it?”
Blinking furiously as a Half Breed leapt out from a hole on the side of the road, only to be overtaken by a beaked Mongrel, he sputtered. “I don’t know, but we’re going. We came this far, we won’t stop now.” He looked over to her and saw nothing but determination on her trembling features. She swiped some tears from her eyes, nodded and placed her hand in his.
About the Author
MARCUS PELEGRIMAS graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in Criminal Justice as research to become a maniacal super villain. When too many of his plans were thwarted, he went back to his first love: writing. He is also an active member of the Nevermore Paranormal ghost-hunting group. That one worked out much better than the world domination thing.
Visit Marcus on the web at www.marcuspelegrimas.com.
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By Marcus Pelegrimas
Skinners
BLOOD BLADE
HOWLING LEGION
TEETH OF BEASTS
VAMPIRE UPRISING
THE BREAKING
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BREAKING. Copyright © 2011 by Marcus Pelegrimas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt from Extinction Agenda copyright © 2011 by Marcus Pelegrimas
Cover art by Larry Rostant
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition JUNE 2011 ISBN: 9780062079503
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Extinction Agenda Bonus Chapter
About the Author
By Marcus Pelegrimas
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Breaking Page 47
