Death's Awakening (Eternal Sorrows, #1)

by Sarra Cannon

  All he knew was that he liked her more than ever.

  “We should get going,” she said. “I’m hoping we’ll have time left to go through a few of the neighbors houses after we get done with mine.”

  He stood and followed her back into the bedroom. “Why?”

  Parrish stopped suddenly and Noah nearly tripped over her. She put her hand out to the side to steady herself, then froze. In the dim light of his flashlight, he could see the fear in her eyes.

  He followed her gaze toward the door of the bedroom where a tall man stood, his eyes locked on the two of them.

  Todd.

  He’d been years ahead of them in school. Noah was pretty sure he graduated about seven or eight years ago, and he’d only seen him a handful of times since. But even with a large piece of his face missing, Noah still recognized Karmen’s brother.

  He swallowed hard, then reached for his gun.

  But it wasn’t there.

  Shit. He’d left it on the bed when he was packing up. The bat was there too. He tried to calculate how long it would take him to get to it in comparison to how fast Todd might be able to sink his teeth into one of their necks.

  Beside him, Parrish made micro-movements. The fabric on her backpack hissed as she pulled the sword out with a slow, steady motion. Her eyes didn’t move from the zombie’s face.

  The creature growled, then took a step toward them.

  As soon as he moved, Noah dove toward the bed. He landed right on top of his gun, grabbing it up and twisting around, hoping to get a clear shot off before the zombie reached them.

  But by the time he turned around, Parrish was already in mid-air, her body twirling around as her sword danced through the darkness with fierce accuracy and speed.

  The zombie’s head tilted to the side, then toppled to the floor, sliced clean off. His body followed soon after, falling with an awful thud on the carpet.

  Noah gripped his shotgun in his hands, his jaw open.

  He was breathless. Trembling. He thought of the day he’d seen her in the alley, beating up those bullies to save that geeky transfer kid. This was like that, only…more. More graceful. More precise. More deadly.

  “How did you do that?” he asked.

  Parrish wiped both sides of the sword against the comforter on Karmen’s bed, leaving streaks of blackish blood behind.

  She shook her head and met his questioning gaze. She raised one eyebrow. “Are we still being honest?”

  “Of course.”

  She sighed and placed the sword back through the straps of her backpack.

  “I have no freaking clue.”

  Parrish

  “What do you mean?” Noah asked her once they were out of the house and back in the safety of the bright light of day. “You just woke up one day knowing how to behead zombies with a ninja sword?”

  Parrish shrugged. She knew it sounded crazy, but yeah, that was the basic truth of it.

  “So you’re telling me you’ve never taken any kind of self-defense class or martial arts or anything like that?”

  “No, nothing,” she said.

  “You made it look easy, but decapitating a full-grown man with a big sword like that is not something a girl your size can just do on a whim,” he said.

  He paused and Parrish stopped and turned around. He was chewing on his bottom lip, his hand raised up as if he was thinking something through.

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “It’s too crazy, forget it.”

  He started walking again, but now she was too curious. She put her hand on his arm and he glanced down at it, then at her.

  “What?” she asked again.

  He turned. They had made it to the front of her house and were standing very close to the spot where they had sat, listening to Zoe’s violin concert. The night the virus interrupted their lives. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

  “In the past couple of weeks, have you felt…different?” He scrunched his eyes together. “I can’t think of the best way to describe it, and I know how crazy it sounds, but—”

  “At this point, do you really think anything is crazy?” she asked with a half-smile.

  “So does that mean you’re saying yes?”

  Parrish took in a deliberate breath. How could she deny it? Yes, she’d thought she was crazy too, at first, but after today, she knew he was right. Something was definitely different.

  “Yes.”

  Noah’s shoulders relaxed and he took a deep breath in and out of his nose. “I’m glad it’s not just me,” he said. “But I don’t really understand it. What’s it like for you? Just the ninja sword stuff? Or is there more to it?”

  She walked over and sat down on the steps in front of her house. Something she’d done a thousand times before, but never once because she was terrified to go inside.

  “There’s more,” she said. “You’re right, though. Ever since the virus, it’s like I know how to do things with my body I never learned. Like roundhouse kicks and using this sword. But there was something really weird that happened right after my mother died.”

  Noah came to sit next to her.

  She nervously picked at the skin around her fingernails. “I was really upset and alone. And the more I thought about what was happening, the angrier I got at the world. I had this crazy urge to start destroying everything in the house, so when I looked up and saw this sword on the shelf, I gave in and started slicing things up,” she said. “There was this violin on the wall that my parents bought me when they still had hopes that I had an ounce of musical talent in my body. I just felt this pure anger and hatred and I took the violin and smashed it up.”

  “None of that sounds weird,” he said.

  “No, it was what happened after that,” she said. “I started crying and all of a sudden, my tears were really cold. Ice cold. One of the teardrops fell onto the violin and the whole thing frosted over with this thin layer of ice. I know it sounds impossible, but it happened. I have no way to explain it. It was like I was crying ice.”

  Noah’s breath came faster and she looked up to see his face had gone white.

  “Something similar happened to me,” he said, his eyes wide. “When I killed my father with that bat, my whole body felt like it was freezing cold. I mean, I honestly thought that for a second, my bat iced over, but then I wondered if it was a trick of light. And when I hit him, did you see it? His head came off with one swing. A sword is one thing, but to take off a human head with one swing of a bat?”

  Parrish nodded. “I guess I didn’t really think of it that way,” she said. “I was just focused on the horror of it all.”

  “Me too at first,” he said. “But when I was sitting there afterward, I started piecing it all together.”

  “Piecing what together?”

  “The fact that I’ve been growing stronger and stronger ever since the virus started,” he said. “And it isn’t just strength. It’s some kind of healing, too, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you and Karmen first came to my house, remember how her leg was bleeding and I put my hand on it?”

  Parrish nodded. She remembered him making some kind of bandage to stop the bleeding.

  “It was like I could feel her pain being sucked from her body,” he said. “I felt that same kind of cool energy I felt when I hit dad with the bat, but it was different. Instead of pouring out of me, it was like it was flowing into me. It’s hard to explain.”

  They fell silent and Parrish thought about what he’d said. About what they were saying to each other.

  “Do you think this is happening to everyone?” she asked. “Everyone who is still alive?”

  Noah shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “I thought it was just me. I thought maybe I was imagining it or losing my mind or something.”

  She laughed. “Me too, honestly.”

  “Come on,” he said, standing and offering his hand to her. “We need to grab your stuff and get moving. We’ve got
a lot to do today.”

  Parrish took his hand, then followed him inside her house for the last time.

  Noah

  Noah raised his glass.

  The three of them sat at the long table in the dining room. He’d managed to find long white candles and crystal candlesticks that must have been his mother’s long ago. Light flickered across the table. Parrish had set out his parents’ wedding china. He couldn’t even remember the last time it had been used. Maybe not since his mother died.

  The table looked beautiful.

  Parrish finished pouring red wine into the other glasses, then the two girls raised theirs as well.

  They’d done what they could to dress up and look nice for dinner and he was glad they had this one last night together before it all changed.

  “I’ve never really given a formal toast or anything before,” he started. “But since this is our last night in this house. This neighborhood. Maybe even this city. I wanted to take a moment to say thank you. We’ve been through so much in the past few weeks that it’s hard to imagine things changing any more than they already have. At the same time, we don’t really know what tomorrow might bring.”

  He couldn’t help but look to Parrish when he said that. He knew she ached for her sister, but was she really going to go to New York to find her? Did she want him to go with her? There was so much uncertainty in their lives right now.

  In the candlelight, her eyes sparkled like amethysts.

  “I wanted to say that despite everything else, I’m grateful for both of you,” he said. “This would have been a very scary, very lonely couple of weeks without you.”

  Parrish and Karmen nodded, then they all took a long drink of wine.

  Karmen nearly choked on it.

  Noah laughed and Parrish brought a hand to her mouth to hide her smile.

  “Sorry,” Karmen said with a giggle. It was a sound he hadn’t heard in a while from her. A happy sound. “I’m used to vodka.”

  “Haha,” Noah said. He knew nothing about wines, really, but he’d seen it sitting there on the counter. He’d heard his dad say it was an expensive bottle, and it seemed wrong to let it go to waste.

  “What are you grateful for Karmen?” Parrish asked.

  Karmen looked up toward the ceiling. “Grateful? It’s hard to think about being grateful right now,” she said. Then she held her glass up and smiled. “I’m enormously grateful to have clean underwear and deodorant.”

  Noah couldn’t help but laugh. Only Karmen would be grateful for underwear.

  “What about you?” he asked, turning to Parrish.

  She held her glass in both hands, then looked down, fidgeting. “I’m grateful for the time I had with my sister,” she said. “I’m grateful she might still be alive somewhere. And if she isn’t, I’m grateful not to have had to watch it happen.”

  Noah ached at her words, but he understood them. He would have given anything not to have been here to see what his father had become.

  “I’m grateful that I never got close enough to most people to miss them,” she said, heavy sadness in her tone. She tried to smile it away, but there was such truth in her words, it hit Noah hard. Then, she looked up at him, her eyes glistening as she raised her glass. “And I am truly grateful there are still people on this earth who are worth getting close to.”

  They each took another drink. Parrish looked at him over the top of her glass and a smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

  Noah smiled back, his heart full. Maybe he’d managed to break down a little piece of that wall she kept around her heart after all.

  They sat down as a group. Karmen had managed to put together a meal despite there being no electricity. It was mostly things like crackers and anything that she could salvage from the fridge and the cans in the pantry.

  But it wasn’t half bad, really.

  For the rest of the dinner, they shared their memories of life here on the street. Life as neighbors. Good times with their families and friends. Things they hoped never to forget.

  They all slept in the living room instead of going to separate rooms for the night, finding comfort in the closeness of each other.

  And in the morning, they loaded up in Parrish’s mom’s van and drove toward the hospital, leaving the neighborhood where they’d lived with their families and dreamed of a different future, behind forever.

  Karmen

  Karmen kept her eye on the house where she grew up for as long as she could until the van turned a corner and the house was gone.

  So many memories to leave behind. Some of them nightmares for her.

  Parrish had said she thought Karmen’s life was perfect. She had no idea what Karmen had been through in her life. What her father had made her do.

  Karmen shuddered, then pulled her backpack closer against her chest, hugging it like a teddy bear. The end of the world was both a blessing and curse. It had brought her out of one nightmare and straight into another.

  But now things were going to be better.

  The Army was going to take care of them. And she didn’t care if Parrish wanted to go off on her suicide mission to rescue her sister. Let Noah go with her for all she cared. As long as Karmen could be safe and taken care of at the evacuation zone, that was all she cared about.

  At least that’s what she kept repeating to herself over and over.

  But the truth was that she had really grown attached to Noah and Parrish. She acted like they annoyed the crap out of her, and sometimes they did, but she loved them in some weird way. She felt like herself when she was with them. Like she was complete.

  Which was ridiculous.

  Anyone in their right mind would rather be in a safe zone where they didn’t have to worry about rotters or electricity or where their next meal was coming from. That should be what Karmen wanted more than anything in this world.

  And yet, the thought of separating from the other two made her feel like her heart was being torn from her chest.

  She stared out the window as they made their way toward the hospital. They had planned to take the highway since it was faster, but when they got to the spot where they would normally pull on, the ramp was trashed. Four cars were piled up in a horrible crash, the bodies of the dead still inside.

  Karmen looked away as Parrish pulled the van over to the side of the road.

  “Which way should we go?” she asked.

  “Can you pull up GPS?” Karmen asked. Noah had brought her cell phone from her house, but the screen was cracked pretty bad and it wasn’t working right.

  “I tried,” Noah said. “The cell service is down. I can’t get it to come up at all.”

  “I kind of know how to go,” Parrish said. “But I might need help navigating.”

  “Maybe we should stop somewhere and grab a map,” Noah said. “Just in case.”

  “There’s a gas station over there across the street.” Karmen pointed toward the one with the blue sign. She’d been there a thousand times with Aaron to pick up cigarettes. There was a guy named Boone that used to work there. He was always hitting on her when Aaron wasn’t looking.

  Karmen had made out with him a couple of times.

  Boon was probably dead by now, though. Like most of everyone else. She just hoped he wasn’t dead and still hanging out at the gas station.

  “They have all kinds of maps beside the cash register.”

  The car jerked as Parrish ran the van straight over the median and across to the gas station. Even though there was no one around, it still felt strange to be breaking the rules. Karmen felt like she should be looking back to see if anyone noticed what they’d just done.

  Of course, no one had.

  They had gotten a later start than they’d intended, but they had yet to see a single car or person on the road.

  When the van stopped, Karmen jumped out. “I’ll grab the map,” she said. “What do we need? Just the city?”

  Parrish shrugged. “Just grab one of everything,” she said. “Be
careful.”

  Karmen jogged inside, so glad to have her tennis shoes now instead of just those flip-flops she’d been wearing. The bell over the door dinged as she entered. Gosh, how many times had she heard that sound? A million?

  It had never felt eerie until today.

  The station had windows all around the top half, so there was plenty of light inside. She walked up to the counter and imagined Boone behind it, smiling and winking at her, asking if she wanted to meet up with him when he got off work.

  It had seemed fun and naughty to do stuff like that back then, but now she felt guilty. If she had known what would happen to Aaron, maybe she would have treated him better.

  Or maybe she would have never strung him along the way she did.

  Karmen sighed and grabbed a couple of lighters from the display up front. She also reached behind the counter and grabbed all the medicine she could find. Aspirin. Ibuprofen. Stuff like that. She put them all in a paper sack, then walked down the aisles and quickly snatched up some candy bars and a couple sodas.

  Outside, Parrish honked the horn.

  “I’m coming already,” Karmen muttered.

  She took one last look at the shop, thinking how she’d taken so much for granted before all this.

  Then she shook her head. Now who was being the emo one?

  She quickly picked up one of each type of map, then ran back out to the van.

  With the help of the new maps and Noah’s navigation skills, it only took them another two hours to get to the hospital. They were lucky the van had plenty of gas. Karmen never would have thought it could take so long to go just ten miles or so, but the roads were wrecked. Literally. Cars and debris were everywhere.

  There must have been several fires, riots, and general freaking out going on. They had been lucky to be sheltered from it on their quiet street.

  But when the sign for McLean Memorial finally came in to view, Karmen started tapping her toes.

  This was it. No going back. Everything was about to change, one way or another.

  Crash