by Roberts, EM
Catharsis: Outbreak Z
An Anthology
Books 1-4
By
EM Roberts
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in the novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or places is unintentional.
Catharsis: Outbreak Z: A New World, Choosing Sides, The Journey, and Journey’s End
Copyright 2014 by EM Roberts
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be copied or distributed without permission of the author.
For information please contact via email: [email protected]
Author’s Note
First and foremost, thank you for purchasing this book and taking the time to read! All too often in this busy and digital world of ours, we do not take the time to read—simply for the pleasure of it.
The characters in this book have become dear to my heart, and when one of them dies or experiences loss, I feel it with them. I know that sounds a little weird and corny since I am in control of their fate, but as an author, I have to be realistic. I can’t save everyone and make everything all puppies and rainbows.
There is no hidden political agenda or secret message in this book. I’ve tried to take our current society and throw it into the zombie apocalypse. More than anything, I think the books illustrate the flaws that all humans carry and our versatility when it comes to survival.
I enjoy hearing from readers. Please follow me on Twitter @ema1003 or Facebook @ EM Roberts
Catharsis: A New World
Book One
Table of Contents
Prologue: That Fucking Kid
Chapter 1: Ella and the Poaching Incident
Chapter 2: Roe’s Naughty Night
Chapter 3:Training Day
Chapter 4:
The Most Powerful Man in the World
Chapter 5:
The Girl Who Became Someone Else
Chapter 6: A Message from God
Chapter 7: Fort Johnson
Chapter 8: A Meeting of Leaders
Chapter 9: Let the Wicked Forsake his Way
Chapter 10: The Day of Reckoning
Chapter 11: The Return
Prologue: That Fucking Kid!
Bill Spencer knew something was wrong. His head was pounding, and he felt hot all over. His vision wasn’t so good either. He felt just as bad as he did that time when he and his brother had stolen his daddy’s jug of moonshine and drained the whole thing in one night. It felt like a hangover and the flu all rolled into one. Through blurry eyes, he stumbled into the kitchen, wincing as he stepped on a small, toy car. That fucking kid! The little fucker left his toys all over the house, and every time Bill said anything about it, Jeanine would whine and cry about how Bill promised he would be a good father to her little bastard. He’d already raised two kids of his own, and now he had to play daddy to a two year old just to get a piece of ass?
Hungry—he was hungry. No, he was fucking starving! He could eat the ass out of a buffalo right now. He padded across the shit-green linoleum noticing a piece of dried out onion sticking to the floor in front of the stove. Lazy, fucking cunt! He looked into the fridge and took stock of its contents: a fucking stick of butter, a twelve pack of Mountain Misty, and some slimy green molded goop in plastic container. What the fuck? The bitch couldn’t even buy real pop? He slammed the door shut causing a few bottles atop the fridge to rattle ultimately ending in a container of vitamin gummies making their way to the floor. He kicked the bottle, and it bounced off the refrigerator and rolled aimlessly across the kitchen. Bill felt the rage build in his stomach along with a gurgling, rumbling noise. That fucking kid again. The world revolved around that snot nosed brat, and Bill was getting pretty sick and tired of coming in second.
Bill was sick, angry, and hungry. Where the fuck was everybody? He hadn’t even heard Jeanine get up and leave. Either he was really sick, or she’d just been plain sneaky. Probably just plain sneaky. Women were like that-- he thought as he sat in one of the mismatched chairs at the kitchen table and lay his head down just missing a smear of peanut butter. No fucking food in the house, and his head felt like it was going to explode. He heard the kitchen door open and the sound of small running feet through the house. He growled and felt the rage build. The bitch and her little shit were back, and it was about fucking time. She’d better have brought him some food. He raised his head to look at her and could barely see through the haze. He blinked. Once. Twice. The action didn’t improve his vision. Still, blurry.
“Oh my god, honey, what’s wrong? Your eyes, they’re bloodshot as all get up!” Jeanine gasped as she set the bag of groceries down on the table. She hurriedly ran to Bill’s side, placing her hand on his forehead. He could smell the cheap perfume as she leaned close. It almost smelled like she’d bathed in it. What was she trying to cover up?
“Who you been out fuckin?” he growled, getting angrier by the minute. The cunt had better not be cheating on him while he was paying the fucking bills around this place.
“God Lord, you’re burning up. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I hope you don’t have that flu bug. Mindy Williams had it and was laid up for a week. Everybody in the family done come down with it, too. You stay away from the baby now. He just got over an ear infection.” Jeanine grumbled, ignoring his earlier comment as she took one of the bottles down from the top of the fridge and opened it.
Grabbing a glass of water, she shoved it into Bill’s hand. Next, she shoved three ibuprofens on his tongue, cringing a little at the fetid odor coming from his mouth. Just as she started to walk away, strong hands grabbed her arms. Jeanine flinched, but she was used to Bill’s violence. Every now and then Bill resorted to what he referred to as “keeping her in line.” He was always accusing her of cheating even though she would never cheat on him. To be truthful, she was afraid to even look at another man. She was afraid Bill would kill her. She told herself it was the price she had to pay for the roof over her head. After all, if she didn’t have Bill, she’d be back at home with her mother and three younger brothers. Closing her eyes, she steeled herself for the blow. It never came. Instead, she felt agonizing pain as Bill bit into the fleshy part of her arm. Looking down, she was shocked to see a chunk of her arm missing, allowing the blood to flow freely onto the kitchen linoleum.
“What the fu….,” she screamed in shock as Bill grabbed and shoved her to the ground. She kicked and screamed… as he continued to rip at her flesh with his teeth. She grabbed for his hair trying to pull his head away from her. Chunks of hair and scalp came away in her hands. Her struggles were futile, and she felt Bill’s teeth clamp down on her throat. He ripped and moaned in ecstasy. He was hungry...so hungry. More..more…was all his brain kept telling him. Tastes so good. Chewing, he distantly heard Jeanine make little gurgling sounds as blood spilled from her gaping throat. It was good--so good. A noise from the doorway caught his attention and Bill smiled.
Chapter 1: Ella and the Poaching Incident
“There’s that rain-crow over in the corner again. You better tell your daddy to get it out of here. A rain crow is bad luck, for sure—three days and somebody’s gonna die,” Ella’s mother moaned, wringing her hands as Ella leaned forward and shoved a spoonful of mashed potatoes into her mouth. Her mother chewed, not because she was hungry, but because it was one of the few instincts that her brain remembered. Ella hated having to force feed her mother, but it was the only way to get her to eat.
Ella looked over to the corner, knowing she wouldn’t find anything. Sometimes, she wished she would. It would mean her mother wasn’t going crazy and th
at everything wasn’t hopeless. The doctor had explained to her family that with aggressive Alzheimer’s delusions were likely. It was a little creepy hearing her mother talk to people who weren’t in the room and discuss events Ella knew nothing about. She wondered what was going on in her mother’s head. Her mother’s vacant blue eyes would often stare into nothingness. Sometimes, Ella wondered if her mother was even in there at all.
“How’s my two fa-vor-ite girls?” a voice boomed from the doorway. Ella looked up and smiled. Her father limped through the doorway, slightly hunched over—a symptom of his seventy three years. Theo Johnson wore an orange University of Tennessee ball cap, a plaid shirt, and bib overalls with gloves hanging from the back pocket. It was his standard country wear. Under the ball cap, he still had a few fringes of silver hair he refused to part with. His nose was slightly bulbous, but it was his eyes that drew attention to his face. His hazel eyes literally twinkled. He was a happy man, and it was infectious.
For as long as she could remember, her father had always worn the same uniform. He was, even in his old age, still a farmer-- he’d been one all of his life. The only time he veered away from the farm uniform was when he went to church or a funeral. Even then, it was nice blue jeans and a button down shirt with cowboy boots--not the flashy kind, either. He told Ella he would work until the day he died. Animals don’t stop wanting to be fed just ‘cause I am an old man, he liked to say. This way of life was all he and his wife had ever known.
“Well, I slopped the hogs, threw down some hay for the horses, and checked in on Big Sal and her young ‘uns. I should’a had her fixed. Now, I got 12 mutts on my hands. I guess I’m gonna have to put ‘em out of their misery if I can’t give ‘em away,” he grumbled making his way over to his wife of fifty years. He leaned down, smiled into her faded blue eyes, and kissed her on the forehead. Ella sighed at the love she saw in her father’s eyes. She would be lucky to ever find a love like the kind her father and mother shared.
He was always patient with his wife even though there were many times when Ella’s mother didn’t even know who her husband was. The only time Ella ever saw him cry was when her mother had stolen his truck, sped down the road, and promptly wrecked it into Maddie Smith’s corn field. Having arrived at the hospital breathlessly, Ella burst into the waiting room only to find her father with his head in his hands, sobbing.
“She thought I was breakin’ into the house, Ella. She grabbed the truck keys that I stupidly left in my coat pocket and fled for her life. I tried to go in and see her, but she kept telling the nurses I was tryin’ to kill her,” her father brokenly told her.
“Oh, dad,” Ella replied putting her arms around him, “You know she loves you. She’s just sick. We just have to keep showing her we love her.”
Although the doctor suggested placing Ella’s mother in a nursing home, her father would not hear of it. He vowed to do better at taking care of her, and so did Ella. There were a couple of months when the two of them had to sleep in front of her parents’ bedroom door to make sure her mother wouldn’t sneak off. Now, however, Ella’s mother had deteriorated to the point it was hard for her to walk so they didn’t have to worry about her wandering off anywhere.
“Well, missy, you better go up and take a nap before you have to head to work. There’ll be lots of poachers out and about tonight, I’m sure. Only one more month ‘til deer season opens up and ya know how these wild boys are ‘round here. I think deer went into rut a little early anyways. I been seeing a lot of ‘em out in the fields,” he admonished as he washed her mother’s face and put away the dishes.
“Yes, daddy.”
“Don’t sass me, girly. I can still have you go cut a switch for me. Remember, it’s the little ones that hurt more.”
Ella laughed and started up the stairs. Her job as a conservation officer was normally a pretty peaceful job. It was only this time of the year that all the good ol’ boys went a little crazy. She and the other conservation officer liked to call it “Buck Fever”. It was all about who could get the biggest set of antlers on his wall. It was tough arresting guys she’d grown up with, but Ella took her job seriously. Rules were made for a reason, and those people who broke the rules had to be punished. That was just the way it was. Good ol’ boys or not. It wasn’t unusual for her to arrest one of her neighbors and have a beer with him the next day. That was just the way things were here in the country.
Ella walked to her bedroom door, opened it, and stepped inside. Everything in the house remained the same as it had been when she was a small child. Her parents were country people, and their home reflected that. The robin’s egg blue, two story house stood out like a sore thumb because of the bright color. Ella’s mother used to laugh and say, “The house was this awful color when we first moved here as newlyweds. We didn’t have the money to repaint it. By the time we did have the money—well, I’d grown to love it.” So, the big blue house at the end of Blackbird Lane had become known as the Johnson house or the big blue house, and the color had never changed. Her father always grumbled about having to drive forty miles to special order the paint when it came time for touch ups, but he did it anyway to make her mother happy.
Even her bedroom was still the same, Ella thought, as she walked through the door. She’d taken down the fan posters and the childish mementos, but the bright yellow walls and daisy printed curtains remained. She almost wanted to vomit from the cheeriness of it all, and made a vow then and there to repaint the room on her next off day. Had she ever been as happy as the room indicated? She remembered her mother allowing her to redo her room when she was sixteen and asking what colors she wanted her walls. Yellow, she’d replied. Yellow, because it’d been her favorite color, and it reminded her of the sun.
This was the room of that sixteen year old girl not the jaded thirty-two year old she had become. Now, she knew everything wasn’t bright and sunny. There was hatred and anger out in the world. It seemed there was more of that than there was of love. She’d seen and tasted death, and it wasn’t pleasant. Her time as a soldier in the Iraq War had pretty much changed the way she viewed everything. If she repainted the room right now this minute, the walls would be black—everything would be black. Maybe, she should make an appointment for the local shrink and get some happy pills. She certainly had a lot of issues she could talk about.
Walking into the adjacent bathroom, Ella stripped and looked in the full length mirror hanging on the door. She paused for a moment and took note of her body. She’d read in a fashion magazine that women overwhelmingly felt the need to look at themselves naked. She considered it torture because basically it was a fault inspection. Was any woman ever truly satisfied with her body? She didn’t know that women liked looking so much as being compelled to do it. She straightened to her full 5’8 inches and sucked in what she liked to call her small pooch. Not bad. Of course, she’d never had any children, so there were no stretch marks.
Her friend, Roe liked to say Ella had black girl booty. She smiled and turned, looking over her shoulder at the asset in question. Roe was allowed to say that since she was a black girl, Ella thought as she grabbed the ponytail holder and released her hair from its confines. The one vanity Ella did have was her hair. She combed her fingers through the light red and blond waves. When she’d been in the military, she’d had shorter hair, and she’d hated the practicality of it. It had made her feel so mannish. She supposed since she was a civilian now, she’d become a little vain with her hair. Also, sometimes she felt she had to compensate in some way for the masculinity of her job.
Not that having a nice ass and sexy hair was doing her any good these days. As she lathered her hair, Ella tried to remember the last time she’d been laid. Come on, she groaned to herself, you don’t have to remember. It was two years, three months, and four days ago. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Ella thought about sex more and more often these days. Even old man Peters down the road was starting to look good. She snorted. Get him a bath, trim those whiskers and he
might be up to par, she smiled to herself. He might even be packing a hog leg in those tobacco stained jeans of his. She’d also read in that same fashion magazine that women hit their sexual peak around thirty, so she assumed this was what was happening to her.
Wrapped in her bathrobe, Ella once again looked in the mirror. Give it up already! This time, she focused on the frown lines on her forehead. It wasn’t that she was unhappy--it was just that she didn’t really have anything to be happy about. It was like she was in a purgatory state. No husband, no children, a dying mother, and an estranged brother. She had a good job, and she loved her family, but she felt like she was missing something.
For a time, she’d been happy with her commanding officer, Dan Spignelli. He was her dirty, little secret. Married with children, Dan was the type of man who missed sex and his wife. Ella had known it wouldn’t go anywhere. He was upfront about that, and she’d accepted it. Had it secretly been love on her part? She didn’t think so. It’d been two people far from home who wanted an exclusive, sexual relationship. She’d truly had cared for him and was a little disappointed when it ended. Dan was somewhere in Idaho now, and she was stuck here in Tennessee. They didn’t even communicate anymore, not even through social media. There was no reason to do so. Sometimes, she felt slightly ashamed of that time in her life. She justified it by reminding herself that Dan’s marriage was still intact.
Since being discharged from the military, she hadn’t had the time to become involved with anyone. She smoothed some cream over the freckles covering the bridge of her nose and grimaced. This summer had played hell on them. Her face was a freaking minefield of freckles. They were the bane of her existence. She could go on for hours about her anti-freckle sentiments. She smiled as she remembered how one time when she was eight, she’d bought some blemish cream remover from the pharmacy in the hopes that she could erase the freckles. Obviously, it hadn’t worked. She still had the freckles on her nose, her arms, and her shoulders. Her mother had told her she just needed to accept and get over them. No one, she told Ella, was perfect. At least, she hadn’t told her they were “angel kisses” or some crazy nonsense like that. That was what Ella had always loved about her mother--her no-nonsense attitude. Ella had the same attitude except she called it her being fucking real attitude.
