The Girl who Shot First: The Death Fields

by Angel Lawson

  With all my strength I lift my legs and manage to kick her with both feet in the gut. She stumbles backwards, off balance, but manages to recover before falling completely. I’m not surprised when she charges back over, palm open and slaps me hard across the face.

  “Jane!” my father shouts.

  She ignores him and grabs me by the stinging cheeks. “I’ll throw you back outside these walls, Alex. Don’t test me.”

  My head is spinning and not just from the slap. Who is this woman? She’s certainly not the sister I grew up with and fought to find. “Don’t test you?” I spat. “Trust me, I’ve been tested. I was tested when I left home with Mom, with nothing but the bags on our back. I was tested when we watched our friend get murdered by the military. I was tested when I killed my first Eater.” She rolls her eyes but I keep going. “And yes, I was tested when I shot our mother, your wife,” I shout in my father’s direction. “In the head after she’d been infected. You left us out there to die.”

  My father doesn’t blink, which tells me he already knew about Mom. Once again, I’m the one left out of the loop here.

  “No, honey,” Dad says. “We never wanted this to happen. For your mother—” He swallows hard. “I can explain. Just give me a chance to explain everything.”

  “Screw your explanation!” I shout, once again struggling away from Hale. I manage to slip out of his grasp and lunge in Jane’s direction. He catches me before I get to her, tackling me to the floor.

  “Get her out of here,” she barks at Hale. “Let me know when she calms down and stops acting like a feral animal.”

  He wrestles me to my feet, drags me backwards but I don’t fight. I don’t want to see her face.

  “Jane,” I hear my father plead, but Hale pushes me through the office away from my family I fought so hard to find.

  I grab onto the door and spin around. “I don’t know what all of this is about, but we’re not finished,” I say. “I worked too hard to get here. I deserve answers. I need to know what the military wants with me. I want to know why all of this happened.”

  “Go,” Jane says to Hale and again, I’m dragged away from my family. Again.

  ***

  I spot Cole the second the elevator doors open. He storms across the lobby and out the front door. Just before the door shuts I hear an anguished wail.

  Without hesitation, I race toward him. Hale catches up, stopping me with a strong hand. “I’m supposed to take you downstairs.”

  I shrug him off. “He’s my friend.”

  “I have orders.”

  “Fuck your orders,” I spat. “Tell my sister I said that. Don’t worry-she can take it up with me.”

  Through the glass we see Cole, face pinched in pain. Something terrible has happened. Thankfully, Hale backs off. “Go,” he says. “But I’m telling her you escaped.”

  “Whatever.”

  I would deal with Jane later.

  Pushing open the door I step outside. It’s dusk, the sky behind over the wall turning pinkish red. The battle from earlier is over but the air is thick with smoke and ash. I can’t tell who won, other than the fact the walls are still up. I have no clue if they eliminated Erwin or not. At this point I’m not even sure I want them to.

  I take a second to scan the area for Wyatt or Walker. Neither come into view. Shoving down the irrational concern I have for them, I focus on Cole.

  “I guess PharmaCorp won,” I say approaching him. He leans against the building, chin to his chest. I step over a mangled piece of metal that looks like it came from a vehicle. Drops of dark blood litter the ground. “What’s going on—how’s Chloe?”

  Cole lifts his head. His eyes are red and watery. “She’s unconscious. Shot in the head by Erwin’s men.”

  “Shot? I thought she hit her head on the window.” Another wave of loss crashes over me. When will this end?

  “No. The bullet hit her head. I don’t know how she’s still alive. I’m not even sure she is because they kicked me out.” He slams a fist into the building.

  I take a deep breath and reach for him. His body is warm and shaking but relaxes just a little when we make contact. “Hey,” I say. “She’ll make it. She’s tough.”

  He laughs darkly. “Hell yeah she is.”

  “Still not sure what exactly is going on around this place but I have a feeling their medical team is probably amazing. At least we’re not out there somewhere.”

  He nods and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “Did you find your father?”

  “I found him, but I wish I hadn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story.” I glance around, but the only people around are dressed in black fatigues, with a bright “FF” on the shoulder. “I do know that I’m no longer sure he’s a good man. Like Wyatt and Walker and the others. I don’t like this place and what they’re doing.”

  He looks around the grounds—at the debris from the battle. Our images reflect off the glass walled building now pink from the sunset. “This is not where I expected we would end up.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think I would travel all this way, lose my home and my mother, to ultimately end up alone.”

  He frowns and in a heartbreakingly pained voice says, “You’re not alone. How could you say that?”

  “You don’t know what my father is doing, Cole. And God, my sister. It’s like I’ve stepped into some kind of crazy alternate reality. They may not be dead.” He flinches when I say it and instantly I feel like crap. “But they’re not the people I thought I knew, so yeah, it feels like I’m pretty freaking alone right now.”

  He grabs me by my shoulders so that I face him and then tilts my chin up, until I’m looking at his searing blue eyes. “When I said you aren’t alone, I didn’t mean your family.”

  “Oh, uh,” I mumble and try to look away, but he holds firm. A flare of nerves race through my body—an inappropriate, or maybe the only realistic response in our current situation. “I just…I feel like I’m falling, like I’ve got nothing real to hold onto anymore. Wyatt lied to me. Erwin is insane. My family…even you started this off hiding stuff from me.”

  “You know I never meant to hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  He steps closer until his mouth is close to mine. I get a close look at the beard he hasn’t shaved since we left the Army base and reach up to touch it. I feel his heat and warmth. I spot the look in his eyes, beneath the red weariness. It’s a look I’ve seen before but not on him. Not for me. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen and I’ve faced down a horde of Eaters.

  I close my eyes to block out the pain and in a heartbeat, feel his mouth on mine. The kiss is a little sloppy—definitely nervous but I allow myself to slip into the moment, into the feeling of the moment. It’s certainly more pleasant than the other emotions I have bubbling under the surface. Than seeing the hurt and want in Cole’s eyes. His lips, the scratch of his beard, the way his hands tug on my hair, they feel amazing. Real.

  I clench the front of his shirt between my fingers, twisting the fabric into a bunch. His hands land on my hips, pulling me closer. This. This is easy, I think, sinking into his hard body.

  The loud scrape and groan of the gate cuts through the intensity and I step back.

  I take a breath and rub my chin. “Why did you do that?”

  “To give you something to hold onto,” he replies touching his forehead to mine.

  “Cole, these people—my family. They’re out of control. Horrible things—”

  He cuts me off. “Just because we’re here doesn’t mean we have to be like them. We know who we are, what we want to do. It’s about humanity, stopping this nightmare while helping other survivors. Together, with the resources of PharmaCorp, we will figure out how to stop this insane virus ravaging the country and the rest of the world.”

  “Yes! That’s what I want to do.”

  “Good. We’ve got this, Alex.”

  For the first time in weeks
I feel steady. I look out at the grounds—at the fighters standing on the watchtowers. The massive walls protecting us. The answers are in that building. With my father, sister and myself. They can’t push me out of this and I will demand that they do the right thing.

  And if they don’t?

  There will be hell to pay.

  Please follow this link for a special excerpt from The Girl Who Shot First. Read the second book, The Girl Who Punched Back today! And check out an excerpt from the second book below.

  The Girl Who Punched Back

  Chapter 1

  The blade, slick with blood, is the only thing separating me from the drooling, oozing, smelly human trying to spread the infection that ravaged his brain to me.

  God, I hate Eaters.

  I hate their black, veiny eyes. I hate their rabid aggression. I hate their addiction-like need to sink their teeth into my skin. I hate what they’ve done to my family, our society, and I hate the fact I can’t just go on a simple mission to help other people without getting covered in their foul blood.

  I hate that they took my life and future away.

  “Get. Off.” I mutter more to myself than him. The Eater certainly doesn’t care about my wants and chomps his rotten teeth in reply. My arms shake from the weight and I know he’s going to drop. I really, really don’t want that to happen.

  A second howling Eater stumbles near me, followed by the sickening thwack of metal slicing through tendons and flesh. Turning to the side, I see the body on the ground. The head rolls lazily in my direction until I’ve got one disgusting Eater face hovering over me and one inches to my left. The decapitated head is so close I can see the stupid hoop ring she thought was a good idea to insert in her nose back in her former life.

  “A little help? Wyatt? Walker?” My elbows wobble. A stream of sticky spit lands on my cheek. A little louder I shout, “Wyatt!”

  A streak of black flashes behind the Eater and I close my eyes as my arms collapse. I flinch, expecting the weight of the body to fall on mine. It never comes. Grunts and howling cries fill the air and I blink, seeing the fight above me. Well, not a fight. Wyatt is merely showing off.

  From the ground, I watch as he punches the Eater in the jaw twice before grabbing his head and snapping it with a powerful twist. Standing over the dead body, Wyatt adjusts his black gloves and glances down at me.

  I glare at him and say, “Took you long enough.”

  “I thought you had him.” He walks over and offers me a hand. I take it, feeling the ache in my muscles with every move. Back on my feet, I look down at my uniform. Even though it’s black you can see the blood and guts seeping into the fabric.

  “Is that what winning looks like to you?” It’s an honest question. I never have any idea what he’s thinking, not since the night we met, back on a farm in North Carolina. Not even when he saves my life—repeatedly.

  He narrows his eyes, like he’s truly assessing me, and I wait for the reply. For some reason I always want to know how his brain works, why he does the things he does. Instead of an answer, he clenches his jaw and looks toward our vehicle. Walker, the leader of our mission, reloads her gun.

  “We should go, Alex,” he says. “We’re losing daylight.”

  He walks off, leaving me in the street, surrounded by bodies.

  I exhale and follow him, thinking how lucky we are to live another day in the apocalypse.

  *

  “Dead.”

  “Hiding.”

  “Negative. Dead.”

  “They’re educated. They’re smart enough to have gotten away.” I have my own logic. It’s the only thing that keeps me going right now.

  Wyatt glares at me. “Then infected.”

  I glance out the window at the house. Two stories, but modest. Built in the ‘70s or ‘80s. The three Volvos with bumper stickers that proclaim the colleges where they or their children all went. Yes, ‘went’. They certainly no longer go.

  I sigh. “Fine. Infected.”

  He doesn’t smile, more like a smug smirk. It takes everything not to smack it off his face, but that seems like an extreme emotion for losing a game. The expression slips and he nods at the next house we pass.

  “Hiding,” he states.

  “Shut up, both of you,” Walker says from the driver’s seat. “I can’t believe you made a game out of this God-forsaken situation.”

  Wyatt and I both shrug. Dead, Hiding, or Infected is how we pass the time on patrol. We have to do something while we sweep the streets for survivors and wait for my megalomaniac sister, Jane, to unveil the entirety of whatever delusional plan she’s cooked up.

  The truck bounces in a large pot hole and I brace myself against the seat against the impact. There’s certainly no government left to repair the roads now, and it’s increasingly obvious how fast everything has eroded. I don’t just mean the road conditions.

  It’s been three months since Wyatt, Cole, Chloe, and I arrived at my sister’s lair, the southern headquarters for PharmaCorp. We came in a blaze of gunfire, after unknowingly traveling with a mercenary for five hundred miles, fighting off the remaining vestiges of the US government, and hand-delivering information my father needed to create a vaccine for the E-TR virus. Unfortunately, I still haven’t decided if my father, the renowned Dr. Ramsey, and sister, Jane Ramsey (or as she likes to be called, “The Director”) have clear motives. I know my sister doesn’t. The problem is I’m not sure how nefarious her plans actually are.

  Sure, that may sound overly-dramatic, but in a post-apocalyptic world who’s going to stop me?

  “Walker,” Wyatt says, nodding to a house at the end of the street. The windows are boarded over, the garage marked with a huge black X. Everything about the home screams abandoned. But not to Wyatt. He’s got some sort of spidey-sense.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Let’s check it out.” She stops the Humvee with a lurch and we exit the vehicle. I try not to stare at the blood stains in the driveway next door.

  “Alex, stay with me,” he instructs, giving me an annoyed-but-knowing look. He feels like he’s babysitting me, I know. I heard him shout those very words, “I’m not The Director’s freaking babysitter!” back at the fort. Except he didn’t say “freaking.” I was assigned to go with him anyway, and when he’s not off on super-top-secret Freedom Fighter missions we do this, patrol the suburbs of Augusta, Georgia for signs of life and death.

  The weird thing is that it’s mostly a dead-zone. Little life and not even that much “death.” Either everyone scattered months ago, or this segment of the city has already been cleaned up by an earlier team, or the people here are really good at hiding.

  “Exactly what are we stopping for?” I’m not arguing. I just want to understand.

  He puts his finger to his lips and he and Walker exchange complicated hand gestures. They split up and I stick to his side like a shadow. After the fight earlier today I have little desire to be on my own again.

  I notice the difference in this house from the others as soon as I get closer. The plywood tacked over the windows has holes drilled through it like Swiss cheese. My first thought is that they’re to allow in light, but then I notice the short spikes poking through each one.

  “What good is that?” I ask, because the spikes are too short to do any real damage. I reach my glove-covered finger up and touch the tip. A coil winds and I cock my head just before I hear a loud click.

  “Oh shit!” I cry, flying through the air, landing hard on my back. I stare up at the sky, my lungs gasping for air, after mentally assessing that I was not injured. Wyatt saved my butt with his quick reflexes. “Jesus, dude.”

  He stands over me, weapon drawn, the spike elongated and inches from his face.

  “Clever,” he says, touching the tip of one of the spikes with his own gloved hand.

  I scramble to my feet, hatchet secure in my hand. I haven’t quite caught my breath. “Who the heck are these people?”

  “I don’t know, Alex” he
says with a flash in his eyes. “But I plan on finding out.”

  Thanks & Stuff

  Many of you know that originally the Girl Who Shot First was a companion to my contemporary YA book, FanGirl, a novel about a girl obsessed with a zombie graphic novel that ends up cast in the lead role in the TV mini-series. FanGirl is the redheaded stepchild of my books. My favorite but not my most successful. Those that do read it seem to love it, but the topic either weirds people out or confuses them. Either way, my plan from the beginning was to write the zombie companion to FG but life and other books got in the way. Eventually I did write and publish it but again, I got aimless and started new projects before completing the series.

  Guys, writing zombies is hard so hard that I didn’t even successfully do it. I realized later that I’d written more of a post-apocalyptic novel instead and didn’t know what to do with that. So after some much needed advice I dug in deep and created a new series around the first book and now things have just grown to an amazing point. I’m excited about everything coming up next!

  Please keep up with me via my mailing list—one specifically designed for dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels. You’ll be the first to receive information about the next books in the Death Fields series as well as sales and other goodies.

  Also, you can find me on twitter @theangellawson or on Facebook at Angel Lawson or Angel Lawson Author. Come say hi. I do have cookies but they’re gluten free.

  Angel Lawson Books

  The Death Fields:

  The Girl Who Shot First

  The Girl Who Punched Back

  The Girl Who Kicked Ass

  Creature of Habit Series:

  Creature of Habit (Book 1)

  Creature of Habit (Book2)

  Creature of Habit (Book 3)

  The Wraith Series:

  Wraith

  Shadow Bound

  Grave Possession

  The Lost Queen

  Vigilant

  Contemporary Romance: