The Preston Six Collection: (Book 1, 2 and 3)

by Ryan, Matt

  The streets were quiet, but he felt them. They lurked behind every car he passed, inside every building and back alley, waiting for some fool to spark them to life with noise. He slowed the car down, making sure not to put any extra sound on his stop. Two grinners stood in the middle of the road ahead.

  He opened the door and stood on the front seat, holding his bow. He selected an arrow and shot the first one in the neck, it fell to the ground flailing; the second one took a head shot and fell on the ground motionless. Lucas sat back in the car and drove by the gurgling grinner to retrieve his arrows.

  Julie looked at him disgusted as he got back into the car.

  “What? I’ve got to have these.” Over the next mile, he shot a dozen more.

  “Did you hear that?” Hank asked.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know, sounded like a bell.”

  “I heard it too,” Julie acknowledged, but was mostly concerned with her Panavice. “Okay, we should be there in the next couple blocks.”

  Lucas slowed the car down and pulled over to the side of the road next to a hotel. “I don’t want to drive into another trap, we should walk from here.” He opened the door and got out of the car. He might have waited for a debate, but he knew he was right. If MM had a bunker nearby, they would be looking for something like a driving car, but if they could pass for grinners, they might have a chance at a surprise. Hank and Julie got out of the car.

  “Do we even know what we’re going to do when we get there?” Hank asked.

  It was a good question. “We’ll have to figure it out as we go.”

  Weeds grew into the concrete sidewalks and through the cracks in the road. The buildings’ lower windows were broken out and a layer of dust caked all the windows. A bird flew out of a busted upper floor window and glided down the road.

  The bell sound rang again. Lucas focused on the noise and where it came from.

  “I knew I heard something,” Hank exclaimed.

  “Shh,” Lucas hushed. The bell sound wasn’t far away and the last thing he wanted was a horde of grinners coming after them. He spotted a half torn down door at an apartment building next to them. They could escape there if needed. The long straight road ahead looked to have similar buildings lining it for a block and then it opened up, maybe a park. “Let me guess, that’s the direction we’re heading?” Lucas pointed his bow toward the sound of the bell.

  “Yes,” Julie said.

  “Great, let’s get moving and if the crap hits the fan, follow me.”

  I’m pretty sure it’s already splattered,” Hank said, pointing behind them. A horde of grinners stumbled down the road directly toward them.

  “Our car must have stirred them this way. I don’t think they’ve spotted us yet.” Lucas eyed his escape door across the street; if they ran, they would probably be seen and a horde that size could tear down the building. They were still next to the car but how much could the car hold up against the horde if they were spotted?

  “Great,” Julie said and shook her head.

  He couldn’t risk the car. “Follow me,” he commanded.

  They ran across the street and to the apartment Lucas had been eyeing. He stepped over the lower half of the torn door and into the entry. Hank picked up Julie and pushed her through. He glanced down the road and with an urgent look, climbed through the opening and fell to the tile floor.

  Lucas placed an arrow on Prudence’s string and scanned the area for movement. Large cracks ran up the walls of the entryway and parts of the plastered ceiling had fallen to the floor.

  “I think they spotted us,” Hank warned, peeking out of the opening.

  “Let’s get up stairs,” Lucas suggested.

  Hank and Julie shot up the stairs behind him. He turned at the landing and ran up the next set of stairs. Two more sets and he breathed heavily at the top.

  The bell rang out again.

  Lucas grabbed the wood rail and listened. A rustling could be heard at the door below, followed by raspy groans of the grinners. Maybe they couldn’t get past the door? “We need to get out of this hall.”

  Next to the stairs, a ladder led up and was marked Roof Access. Lucas pulled Prudence over his shoulder and climbed the ladder. A plastic dome was the door for the top, and he pushed it open, daylight flooding in. He jumped on the gravel roof and then reached back to help Julie get out. Hank pulled himself through the small opening and plopped his feet onto the roof, closing the door behind him.

  Julie took out her Panavice and pointed to the other side of the roof. “It’s right over there, we might get a good look at it from up here.”

  They walked to the edge of the parapet wall, the smell of tar wafting up. The bell rung again, clearer this time and it felt much closer.

  “Oh my God,” Julie said, getting her first look.

  “Holy cow,” Hank said.

  They looked down at the blackened park below. The sea of grinners below them moved as one. A pool of black bubbled swathed through a section of grinners and they collected large amounts of black tar-like substance on their clothes. A few buildings were scattered around the park, encasing the area in a large rectangle the size of a couple city blocks. Grinners covered much of the available space.

  “Is this the tar pit?” Hank asked.

  “Yep, and their base is under all that,” Julie said, looking like she might be sick.

  “Anyone see an entrance?” Lucas squinted, searching the landscape.

  “What does it matter? There must be ten thousand grinners down there,” Julie said.

  “What, we’re going to give up now?”

  “No, but what chance do we have?”

  The grinners grumbled and moved around. They seemed most dense near a small shed with a single door attached to it and a large black box on top.

  “There, that shed . . . it has speakers on it.” Lucas pointed.

  “How much you want to bet, that’s the entrance,” Hank said.

  Lucas turned from the scene and sat on the roof with his back to the short wall. Julie took a step back and looked at him. Hank stayed on the edge, staring.

  “If we can get closer, I may be able to turn off the speakers, or blow them out,” Julie said.

  “Then they focus on us. No, there has to be another way.”

  “We take out the speaker and maybe they’ll disperse after a while,” Hank suggested.

  Lucas huffed out his disagreement. “They could be behind that door right now, looking out. They might as well be on the moon.” He kicked the gravel and sent a few rocks skipping across the roof.

  “I have an idea,” Julie tapped her chin and looked out over the edge. Her face was full of emotion as she wrangled the idea in her head. Her lips moved in unspoken words as if she was arguing with herself. She stepped away from the edge, looking resolute. “Tar is flammable. If we can get a few grinners lit, the rest might go up as well.”

  Lucas frowned as an idea formed in his head. He jumped to his feet. “You’re a genius.” He hugged Julie. Her plan was so awesome, he couldn’t stop smiling. “I can shoot a flaming arrow down there and light them up.”

  It had to work. What could go wrong?

  “HARRIS.” EMMETT SHOOK HARRIS’S SHOULDER.

  He jerked back from the touch and looked into the cold man’s face. Emmett’s stone features had returned and the anger displayed in the bowels of Marcus’s playground was gone.

  Gunshots sounded off in every direction as MM soldiers tried to hold the line. Harris had been in Ryjack when it happened there. Seeing it destroy a different world was like hearing about a person on the news dying in a car crash . . . it felt distant. But this, staring at him in the face, on his home planet, felt much worse.

  He took in a quick breath. “Emmett, we need people at the sea port, stopping any ships from coming or going, we need men at each of the two entrances to close the gates. The airports need to be shut down. Not a single person can come or go from Capital.”

&
nbsp; “People won’t like it, but I’ll make it happen.”

  “They’ll be happy to make it through this alive.” Harris paused and a great realization struck him. “You guys cured Lucas, what did you use?”

  “We don’t have a cure. I read that the boy simply lived through it.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Not quite impossible, more like one in a billion.”

  “You’re telling me he has the virus in his body, but can live with it?”

  “It appears so,” Emmett said. “Marcus wanted to get the kid in the labs to see why, but that didn’t happen.”

  “No cure then. We’ll have to be extra cautious, as we have no safety net. I don’t want this planet turning into another Ryjack. What about the Arracks?” Harris asked.

  Emmett shook his head a tiny amount. “They’ve been pissed for seventeen years, ever since Simon started sending them to their deaths through countless stone travels. The parking lot was a major blow as well. You and I both know, Marcus has something on them—I never found out what—but they are still loyal to him. Once they find out he’s gone, we can only hope they return to their home.”

  Harris knew it was a fantasy wish. The Arracks would not kindly pack up and leave. But he had to control the grinners before he could even think of the Arracks.

  “Okay, fine. Let’s get this city locked down. Get the info to your people anyway you have to.”

  “I’ll send out the orders.” Emmett ran away.

  A few MM soldiers ran by and did double takes as they saw Harris. He stood in the lobby of the MM building with small groups of soldiers behind desks and trashcans, anything they could stand behind, while they shot into the oncoming grinners. The grinners jumped past the doors and took chest shots, but kept moving.

  “Head shots only!” he yelled out the order.

  A few of the soldiers glanced at his proclamation and turned to shoot the grinners in the head, finally sending them to the ground.

  Harris fought the sight of Compry from overtaking his mind. He shot down her body when he thought there could be a cure with Lucas. Maybe if he could get Lucas and study his blood, maybe, just maybe. . .

  He pushed the thoughts from his head and a barrage of bullets landed on a group of grinners emerging from the staircase near him. Plenty of time for mourning later. Now, he had a company to run and a world to save. But how do you save a world you can’t talk to? He knew of a way.

  Harris ran down the stairs, stepping and jumping over the lingering bodies in the stairwell. A man sat in the entrance way with bite marks on his arm. He looked pale, but hadn’t turned yet. Harris shot the man in the head and kept running down the hall. MM only used it once for Marcus’s five hundredth birthday party, but it had to still be there.

  After thirty years of being absent from the MM headquarters, he still remembered every corner and staircase. He slammed open a steel door and ran down a few flights of stairs. Level B8. He kicked the door in and held his gun out in front of him. The room was devoid of any movement. It didn’t look any different than it did all those years ago.

  He closed the door and walked behind the desk and faced the control panel on the wall. It took him a few seconds to orient himself with the analog dials. There was a long row of switches that turned on the speakers through the city.

  He pressed a large green button marked Start and the board lit up. Harris wasn’t sure where the generator was, but it worked and that was all that mattered. He flipped all of the switches on and, last but not least, he pushed down the button marked Mic.

  He leaned over the square microphone on top of the desk. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the talk button. “Attention, attention. People of Capital, please listen. This is Harris Boone, newly appointed leader of MM, rank ten. There has been a terrible outbreak and I demand all citizens lock yourselves in your homes for the time being. If you go outside, you will be shot, if you try to leave the city, you will be shot. This is not a drill. If you stay outside or try to leave the city you risk being infected. Keep away from other people at all costs. I repeat, stay inside and lock your doors.” Harris gripped the microphone with one hand. “Godspeed.”

  He released the talk button and turned off the switches and generator. Had he said enough? Would they heed the warnings?

  He opened the door and a grinner fell in toward him. Harris jumped back and shot the thing in the head. Several more struggled to get into the room with a partially open door. He kicked the front two grinners in the gut and looked past them into the room beyond. A horde of grinners filled the halls and adjacent room, many in black uniforms, holding their guns in their dead hands. Their fresh bodies hadn’t decayed yet into the ones like Ryjack, so they moved faster and screamed louder. Soon, they crowded together in a mob, moving toward him.

  Relaxed, Harris entered his zone and held both guns in his hands. He shot the first four in rapid fire. He jumped to the desk to get a higher ground and ended six more grinners. The pile blocked the door. As he gazed to the back rows, he saw the horde was much larger than he first assessed.

  He fired the last bullets in his guns and switched to just his rail gun. Did he have enough bullets? He gritted his teeth, and pulled the trigger, making each shot count, but the pile of grinners was pushed forward, through the door and spreading into the room like a giant meat grinder. Closing in on him, the grinners began filling the room. They seemed to be multiplying. As he killed one, two more appeared through the door.

  He hated making mistakes, but he might have when he opened that door.

  LUCAS LOOKED OVER THE ROOF and down to the horde of grinners the digital bell collected. “Hand me the cloth, please.”

  Hank handed him the white cloth they found in their first aid kit and Lucas took the roll and wrapped it around the head of an arrow until it formed a nice ball and taped it in place.

  “Alcohol.”

  Julie handed him a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  He poured it over the gauze ball and smiled at the concoction. He looked down, searching for his target. It didn’t seem to matter where he shot, the grinners were heavily drenched in tar and Julie thought it would spread to the entire grinner pile. “Okay, here it goes.”

  Lucas placed the notch of the arrow into the string and extended the end to Hank to ignite. Pulling back the lit arrow, he aimed quickly as his hand was now too close to the flame. Sending the arrow flying across the sky, it struck the back of a grinner and stuck. “Yes! Direct hit.”

  “Was that the one you were aiming for?” Julie asked with speculation.

  “Of course. Exactly the one.”

  “Look,” Hank said.

  Lucas watched as the shirt on the grinner’s back took fire. It flailed around, bumping into other grinners, passing the fire like an unwanted gift. The fire spread as each of the burning grinners stumbled into other grinners. After a few minutes, Lucas could no longer make out any single grinner on fire as the flaming ball engulfed a large cluster of them, building on itself exponentially. The huge flames lit the whole park and all the grinners began to groan and yell.

  Lucas smiled in his triumph and raised Prudence into the darkening sky. Then, the smell hit him. He hunched over at the mixture of burnt oil and, it almost made him throw up thinking it, BBQ. Julie dry heaved and stepped away from the wall and went to her knees.

  “The smell,” Julie said, taking quick breaths. “Oh my God.”

  Hank didn’t seem bothered by it and looked on at the burning man party below.

  “You’re sick, Hank,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad.”

  Lucas felt the olfactory disagreeing with his buddy’s assessment and his eyes began to water. “How can it be worse?”

  “This gives us a way in. How could it be any better? They could be right there.”

  “I hope not, it’ll be five hundred degrees down there,” Julie said.

  “It’s getting hot up here as well.” Lucas felt a bead of sweat on his fo
rehead. He walked back to the edge of the roof and looked over. The flames had quadrupled in size, encompassing much of the park, reaching high into the sky. The smoke gathered into a black cloud above, blocking what little light the setting sun produced.

  “Holy smokes,” Hank said.

  “Julie, you better look at this.” In the blazing light of the fire, he saw every corner. There were far more grinners than he originally thought; they filled in every space of the surrounding areas and small buildings, the park’s visitor center had a fire climbing up the side.

  “We better think of an escape plan for when the fire reaches our building,” Julie said.

  Lucas looked to the sky, the smoke sending a black beacon for anyone within a hundred miles. He hoped the fire ended by morning, having an arrow pointing to their location was disconcerting.

  Leaning over the edge of the roof, he saw a few dozen grinners stumbling around. The raging fire sent tall dancing shadows up the walls of their building. He squinted and looked down the street into the darkness. Things moved and more shadows bounced around. A horde walked toward the inferno.

  “Moths to a flame,” Lucas said under his breath.

  The fire reached the edge of the street where many grinners were held back by a steel fence, but they ran their faces into the wire mesh, setting their clothes on fire. A burning grinner ran in a circle as the flames engulfed its face, nearing their building until it fell against the bottom.

  “Great, they’re already against our building.”

  “Lucas, it may not matter what happens here if the entire city goes up in flames,” Julie said, seemingly annoyed—completely ignoring the fact the fire was her idea.

  Lucas agreed, ran across the roof and opened the hatch. The fire provided enough light to see down into the vacant room below. “It looks clear. Come on.” He climbed down the ladder and jumped off the last rung, landing on the carpeted hall.

  He held Prudence out in front of him and walked down to the staircase. Nothing moved. The place had to still be clear. He waited for Julie and Hank to get to the bottom of the stairs before moving down the next flight. “There are a few places down the street,” Lucas whispered, remembering an escape path he logged while driving in.