by Sarra Cannon
He walked over to his dad’s gun cabinet and searched along the top of it until his hand made contact with the small metal key. The cabinet held six different shotguns. They were mostly hunting rifles his dad had inherited from his brother when he died. They probably hadn’t been fired in six or seven years, but Noah was pretty sure they still worked. He pulled open the drawer at the bottom and grabbed a box of shells.
He also pulled out a lockbox that held his dad’s .45.
“I’m going to keep the first watch,” he said. “If anything breaks through one of the windows or doors, I’m going to shoot it.”
It. He’d used the word without even really thinking, but those things out there, they weren’t really people anymore.
“One of you can sleep in my dad’s bed,” he said. “The sheets are clean and no one’s slept in there since last Friday. The other can take the guest room. Dad’s room is just after you get to the top of the steps on the right. The guest room is to the left, down the hall. Second room on the left.”
“What about you? Don’t you need sleep, too?” Parrish asked.
He shrugged. “I’ve got so much going through my mind right now, I don’t think I could sleep even if wanted to,” he said.
Parrish nodded. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“You should at least try to get some rest,” he said. “I’ll wake you up if anything interesting happens.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to get up the stairs on my own,” Karmen said. “My leg is still pretty bad. Don’t suppose you guys have any painkillers in this house?”
Noah laughed. “Maybe. My dad had a root canal a couple months ago. I think he might have some pills left over from that.”
Karmen sighed. “Thank God. I need it.”
“I’ll carry you up and then see if I can find them.”
He lifted Karmen into his arms and was amazed at how light she felt. Not that she was big by any means, but still. He didn’t even have to exert himself at all to lift her off the ground and carry her all the way up the steps.
He set her down on his dad’s bed as gently as he could and she hung on, hugging him tight when he tried to let her go.
“Thanks for letting us stay over,” she said in his ear.
“It’s no problem,” he said. “I’m glad we’re all together.”
He searched his dad’s medicine cabinet and came back with a bottle of Vicodin. Karmen took the bottle and popped one of the small white pills into her mouth, swallowing it without even a drink of water.
“Thanks,” she said. “You could come lay down with me if you wanted to.”
Noah cleared his throat. What was he supposed to say to that? Karmen was gorgeous, but she wasn’t the one he wanted to be with.
He decided to not say anything at all.
He checked the bandage and as soon as he was sure the bleeding had stopped, he loosened the belt from her leg. By the time he was done putting on a new bandage he’d found in the bathroom, she had fallen asleep.
When he came out of the room, he shut the door carefully behind him.
He turned to find Parrish standing in the doorway of the guest room.
“Thanks for taking us in,” she said. “If you hadn’t opened that door, I’m not sure what would have happened to us.”
“We’re in this together now,” he said. “I promise I’ll do whatever I can to keep you safe.”
And he meant it. For some reason, he’d felt connected to her since the first day he met her. What were the chances with half the world sick and dying that they’d both be immune and that she’d have ended up here with him like this? Something inside him said it hadn’t been chance at all.
“Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Parrish nodded, then disappeared into the guest room. Noah waited until he heard her door safely click closed, then went downstairs to start his first watch against the night.
Crash
Crash woke with a start. His body jerked from the shock of his dream and he nearly fell out of his chair. He’d fallen asleep in front of his monitors again. Lately, he’d been glued to them like his life depended on it.
And didn’t it?
He closed his eyes and rubbed them with the back of his hand. Holy crap, what was that all about? Maybe he needed to lay off the energy drinks for a while.
He’d been dreaming of someone hiding in a dark place. A closet, maybe.
He could feel their fear as if it were his own.
Outside, noises of a fight made them shiver and whimper. He wanted to help them. He couldn’t see them because the inside of the closet was so dark, but he knew them all the same. The fifth.
It wasn’t the first time he had dreamed of the fifth, but in his dreams, he could never quite see them.
He sat up straighter and tried to shrug off the feeling of fear and loneliness.
On the six main monitors, he had set up a grid of information. YouTube on one screen, email on a second, prepper forums loaded in tabs on the third listening for any recent news on the virus, a hacking program he’d written running on the fourth monitor constantly trying to break into a CDC database, local news playing on monitor five, and finally, on the sixth and center monitor, he had a map up of the affected zones.
The prediction software he’d created had come back with a very scary outlook for the future. According to the information he’d been able to pull from various news organizations and websites, he estimated there were over two billion people worldwide who had already died from this virus. Another billion were currently sick and most of those would probably be dead within a week. That was nearly half the world’s population.
Gone in a matter of weeks.
A quick search through YouTube showed nothing new since he’d fallen asleep three hours ago, but a beeping sound drew his attention to the fourth monitor with a snap.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” He shook his head, then ran his palm up and down over his face, making sure he was really awake and not dreaming this.
Then he started laughing.
He was in. Screw those guys who’d said it was impossible to hack the CDC. He couldn’t believe it. He was really in. And he honestly had no idea how he’d done it. The idea for how to create the program just sort of came to him.
He dragged the CDC database to the main monitor and started typing. Searching. He needed to find their main files on the so-called super-flu before someone realized he was poking around and shut him down. Hell, he’d be lucky if a SWAT team didn’t come crashing through his door in the next ten minutes.
His heart raced and he sat up on the very edge of his chair. His fingers flew over the keyboard faster than he’d ever dreamed he could type. Damn, the adrenaline pumping through his veins was better than any drug he’d ever tried. This was pure energy right here.
He searched their main files for any possible mention of the virus, but it wasn’t there. Impossible. They had to have files on this. But where? As far as he could tell, no one had even named this virus yet. So what exactly was he looking for?
He paused, fingers hovering above the keys as he worked through it.
In the news, everyone was calling this virus the super-flu, but there wasn’t a single reference to it that he could see. If there was a technical name for this virus, he hadn’t seen it referenced anywhere.
So what were they calling it?
He tried reorganizing the files according to when they were last modified, but nothing on the virus came up and he didn’t have time to search through all of these files. There had to be thousands stored here in the main database.
He looked at the time counter. He’d already been in for three and a half minutes. If he was lucky, he had another minute and a half before someone at security realized he was there and shut him down. For all he knew, they could be running a tracer program right now. He’d have to disconnect at five minutes no matter what.
He thought of his dream. The image of that littl
e girl with the flower in the snow.
His eyes widened as a new password box popped up on his screen.
He wasn’t even sure where it had come from. It was like just because he wanted to find it, it had appeared.
Above the keyboard, his hands began to tremble. His breath caught in his throat and his mouth gaped open. As soon as he saw the box, a string of numbers and letters had appeared in his mind. He had no idea where it came from, only that it was there, clear as day.
He was almost scared to type it. Scared it would work.
He could hardly breathe.
Crash lowered his fingers to the keyboard. He had to at least try it. He had no idea when he would ever get a chance like this again. Carefully, he entered the password in his mind.
Q1X4TnOs5!Ip355xow#M
An impossible combination. The string was so long, his own hacking program never would have been able to crack that, even if they had ten straight years to work on it.
His pinky shook slightly as he pressed the enter key. He knew there was no way it could possibly work.
But it did.
Crash opened his eyes wide as the secret files revealed themselves to him.
“Holy crap!” He jerked out of his chair, standing up and lifting his fists high into the air. “No freaking way.”
He had no idea how or why, but some little voice deep in his brain told him to move quickly and ask questions later. He sat back down in his chair and got to work.
He started a program that would copy the entire folder to his hard-drive, then sat back and watched as the files copied to his computer. The progress bar moved fast despite the large size of the drive and he thanked the solid state hard-drive he’d shelled out big bucks for just a few weeks ago. That and his twelve gigs of RAM.
He bit his lower lip and tapped his toes against the cold cement floor. He glanced over at the timer. 4 minutes 50 seconds. He had less than ten seconds before he’d have to pull the plug to make sure no one caught him.
Go, go, go.
Five gigs of info left and only ten seconds. Impossible.
He willed the bar to move faster and it did. The progress zoomed from seventy percent to a hundred in the blink of an eye. He shook his head. That was impossible. Something must have glitched.
The timer beeped and blinked huge red numbers, showing three, two, one…
Crash hit the kill switch, his heart racing in his chest.
He’d done it. He’d hacked one of the most confidential systems in the country and he’d actually managed to take the data he wanted with him. But he was sure something had messed up there toward the end.
There was no way the data had downloaded faster just because he’d told it to.
He opened the new file on his hard drive and looked through the file names. He couldn’t believe it. Everything was there. He’d copied the entire folder.
How was that possible? How could twenty gigs of information download to his system in less than thirty seconds? His system was fast, but nothing was that fast.
He stood up, placing his hands behind his head. He paced in the small space behind his computer system. He couldn’t even make sense of it in his head. If he was looking at all the facts, he would say he’d just dreamed up the code to unlock one of the most highly protected files in the world.
But that was impossible right?
A twenty digit password that just popped into his mind at will? It was ridiculous.
He put his hand on his forehead to check for a fever. He was definitely flushed, but he wasn’t sick. There had to be some other explanation. Like maybe he’d seen that code somewhere else online during his research. Or maybe it had been some kind of secret code his subconscious mind had put together.
Yeah, it had to be something like that.
He wasn’t crazy.
Well, maybe he was a little bit crazy. He’d been couped up in this stupid basement for the past two weeks without leaving once. He’d barely slept and had been staring at computer monitors almost 24/7. That was bound to make even the most rational person a little bit loopy. And his sanity had already been questionable at best.
He sat back down in his ratty green chair and stared at the copied drive.
He sent a quick message to Atomic, telling him he had the files.
All the answers he’d been looking for were right there on his computer. Just like that. He got up and started a pot of fresh coffee, then grabbed another energy drink out of his mini-fridge. No more sleep tonight.
Tonight he was going to find out the truth about this virus.
The Witch
“Wake up.”
The young witch opened her eyes to darkness. She remembered setting up camp in a large blue house, but there was no one for miles. She had made sure of that before she slept.
“Who’s there?” she asked. Regular humans posed no real threat to her now that her magic was growing, but she couldn’t afford any interruptions now. Not when she had such an important task to complete.
Plus, she knew if anyone got in her way, she’d have to kill them. She didn’t like killing.
Annoyance crept over her as she listened in the darkness. All she wanted to do was get a good night of rest so that she could press on in the morning. She’d been traveling on foot for days, following the stone like the Dark One had taught her to. The closer she got to the guardians, the warmer the stone felt in her hands and the brighter the marks glowed.
Each of the five marks referred to one of the guardians. From the way the stone glowed, it looked like three of them were close to each other already. That would make her work finding them easier.
“Awake, my faithful servant. Come and speak with me.”
A dim light flickered in an adjoining room, and the young witch opened her eyes wider. The voice had called her a faithful servant, and she only had one master. A master whose voice she’d only heard in dreams. She swallowed and stood up from the bed she’d made on the floor with her cloak.
Following the flicker of light, she made her way to the next room and gasped at what she saw.
A tall human female sat at the kitchen table next to a glowing candle. From the rancid smell, the witch could tell that the woman was dead. Or rather, undead. The body had already begun to decompose and there was a wound on her arm that ran with yellow puss.
“Who are you?” the witch asked. She’d seen these undead servants roaming around ever since she’d killed the man. She had never heard one of them talk before, though. Nothing more than meaningless moans or growls, anyway. But this one had known her for who she was. Had called her servant.
“Why do you ask me questions you already know the answer to? Do you dare waste my time when I have chosen to visit with you?”
A shiver ran up the young witch’s spine. Without thought, she threw herself onto the floor, bowing her head toward the undead woman. “I didn’t realize,” she cried. “How—”
“My power is growing with each new day,” the rotting woman said. The Dark One spoke through her. “I can feel it coursing through me with each new life that is taken. And as I suck the life from the living, I give it back to the dead, making them rise up as my servants. One at a time, I’m taking control of this world. But I need the guardians’ power. I need to infect them with my virus so that I can steal their power from them like I have the rest of humanity. If I could have their power, I could finally free myself from this prison of ice.”
“I am close,” the witch said. “The stone is glowing brighter every day.”
“You are not close enough.” The corpse turned its head toward her and she could see that one of its eyes were missing. A large worm crawled through it and the witch looked away in fear. “Their powers are awakening. Can’t you feel it? They won’t understand them, of course. They have no memories of who they used to be or the many lives they have lived. Now they will begin seeking each other out. They will feel drawn to each other in ways they do not understand,” the Dark One said. “You must find them b
efore they complete their group. Three are already together. Soon, they will join up with the fourth. You must find them before they become five. Do this for me and I will reward you.”
“But how can I find them?” she asked. “I’m already doing all I can by following the stone.”
“You are a tracker,” the Dark One said. “Has no one taught you of your own abilities in all your sixty years?”
The witch opened her mouth. A tracker?
“How do you think it was that you knew exactly where Tobias Prague had gone that day in the woods? You knew by instinct, didn’t you?”
The witch nodded. She had known which way he went without knowing how or why.
“This is a part of the power you were born with,” the Dark One told her. “In your dreams, you will begin to see the guardians more clearly. As you see them, you will begin to be able to track them. You will begin to see them. To know them. You will even be able to see into their minds. Their dreams.”
The witch shook her head. She didn’t have that kind of ability. She wasn’t strong enough.
“Do not doubt yourself,” the Dark One said. “It is only by believing in yourself and trusting your natural instincts that you will begin to fully embrace your destiny.”
The witch burned with the desire to please the Dark One. She yearned to live up to what this great necromancer believed she was capable of. She would do anything—sacrifice anything—to please her.
“I will not fail you.”
The candle on the table blew out and the corpse’s eyes dimmed, glazing over with the milky blue of the mindless.
With great speed, the young witch dressed, packed her things, and headed back out on the road in search of the guardians.
Parrish
Sunlight streamed in through the window and Parrish’s eyes fluttered open reluctantly. Disoriented, she looked around the room, trying to remember where she was. Then she spotted a picture on the wall of the guest room. Noah and his father.
They were sitting in a boat together, holding up small fish and smiling ear-to-ear. Noah looked to be about ten or eleven in the picture.
She smiled, then remembered why she was here and not at home, and the smile faded.
