Death's Awakening (Eternal Sorrows, #1)

by Sarra Cannon

  With every sound, the three of them stopped and looked around. Every time one of them spotted a zombie stumbling around on the street, they had to find a safer route around the thing, watching their backs the entire time.

  “We have to pick up the pace,if we’re going to make it.”

  “What do you mean if?” Karmen said.

  “Maybe he means ’if Karmen doesn’t try to stick her fleshy arm in front of any more child zombies and offer them a little snack’,” Parrish said.

  Noah hid a smile and kept walking. The last thing he needed was for these two to get started again.

  “For your information, I didn’t realize the little girl was a zombie,” Karmen spat back.

  “Right, cause the putrid smell and the black circles under her eyes didn’t give that away,” Parrish said, stomping ahead of Noah and leaving Karmen behind.

  They were walking through an alley in between two tall buildings just off Maryland Avenue, and Noah just wanted them to shut up. The darkness was creeping in on them second by second. Here in the alley, there were too many shadowy corners and open doorways.

  “Hey! That child was beautiful. She didn’t even look dead at all until she woke up. I honestly thought she was sleeping. What if she had been alive? Would you rather I just leave a sleeping child trapped in a carseat until she died?”

  Parrish stopped and stomped her way back toward Karmen. Noah’s stomach tightened. They couldn’t afford to lose time, and this argument was pointless.

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t have tried sticking my fingers practically in the child’s mouth just to see if she was alive or not,” Parrish said, standing still in front of Karmen with her hands on her hips.

  “I wasn’t sticking my fingers in her mouth.” Karmen’s voice echoed through the alley, sending a panic through Noah’s body. What were they trying to do? Lure out every single rotter in a ten mile radius?

  “Shhhh,” he said, stepping between the girls. “Keep your voices down. If you haven’t noticed the sun is going down and we’re in the middle of a dark alley filled with shadows and doorways and all kinds of nooks and crannies. Unless you both have a death wish, I suggest you drop this discussion until we’re safely inside Crash’s apartment.”

  As he was talking, he noticed movement in the distance. Squinting in the hazy twilight, he now saw that a small group of zombies had stumbled out of a nearby shop and were making their way down the alley. One of them stopped briefly to let out a long and echoing moan that sent a shiver of fear through Noah’s body.

  Both girls turned at the sound and froze as they saw the approaching group of undead. “Oh my sweet Jesus,” Karmen whimpered.

  “We’ll be okay,” Noah assured her. “We just need to keep moving and keep our mouths shut, okay?”

  Parrish and Karmen nodded and he motioned for them to get moving. Their steps were timid as they all made their way through the rest of the alley, which seemed to be growing darker by the second.

  Beside him, he felt Parrish’s body stiffen. He followed her gaze and stopped cold.

  A redheaded man stumbled out of the door in front of them, his fingers reaching toward them. Karmen screamed and Noah clamped his hand over her mouth. Barely able to draw a steady breath, he turned around to see zombies pouring from every open door and dark corner. Karmen’s scream must have acted like some kind of dinner bell for these things.

  “Tell Crash we need a way out of this alley. Fast!” Noah looked to Karmen, but his words didn’t seem to register with her. She was staring dumbly at the wave of zombies shambling towards them.

  He ripped the radio out of her hand. “Crash? Are you seeing this? We’re surrounded! Where can we go?”

  “Oh shit, dude. Hang on,” Crash said. Noah could hear fingers tapping again at the keyboard. “Okay, straight ahead, then turn in the second doorway on your left.”

  Noah didn’t hesitate. He grabbed Karmen by the arm and pulled her along as Parrish followed close behind them. Between them and the doorway Crash was talking about, Noah counted five zombies. He let go of Karmen’s arm and slid his bat from his pack.

  He’d have much rather used the handgun, but that would make noise. And right now, noise was their enemy.

  Behind him, he heard the collective moan of several undead. And they were close.

  Still, Noah hesitated. These things used to be people. He hated to go on a killing rampage. What if there was some kind of cure?

  Noah knew he was being ridiculous. He could either see these zombies as people and let them possibly kill him, or he could kill them first and worry about their human status later. He’d killed his own father, hadn’t he? A handful of strangers shouldn’t be any worse.

  Even if these things had been human at some point, they weren’t human anymore. They were monsters. They were killers. He had no choice. If he wanted to live, he was going to have to kill zombies. This is simply what the world had come to.

  His hand steadied, and Noah swung the bat. The zombie closest to them fell backward as his head jerked to the side.

  Another came up behind that one.

  He swung again, hitting the zombie dead in the center of its forehead. It fell limply to the ground. A surge of confidence flowed through him as he quickly aimed at the next one, took a deep breath, and swung again. Parrish put her back to his, her katana slicing through the ones that approached them from behind. One-by-one, all of the infected fell to the ground.

  “Wow,” Parrish said. “Hell yeah! Let’s move!’

  The three of them moved around the dead corpses and into the second door on the left, making sure to close the door behind them. There were no lights on in the building and out of habit, Noah reached for the light switch on the wall. Then he remembered Crash had said most of the city was without power. He reached in his backpack for a flashlight and shone it around the room.

  They seemed to be in some kind of storage room for an office building. Tall metal racks held cases of copy paper, boxes of pens, extra toner cartridges and packaging materials.

  “Now what?” he asked Crash.

  “You should be inside the first floor office of some accounting firm. I can’t see inside the building with my satellite, and the infrared scanner doesn’t pick up the zombies because, well, they’re dead and not giving off any body heat. Once you get into the main office, I should be able to pull you up on the security cameras. You’ll have to carefully open the door to the main office and see if there’s anyone in there. If you can make it through the office and out the front door, it should put you on the main street, which is Florida Avenue. It appears to be basically clear right now. Of course, it will only be clear if you guys stop making noise and screaming at every cockroach that scurries under your feet. The more noise you make, they more attention you’re going to get from those things.”

  “So no guns?” Noah asked.

  “Not unless you’re in trouble,” Crash said. “When it comes down to you, do what you gotta do to stay alive.”

  “Stay behind me,” Noah whispered to the girls. He took a shallow breath and felt a buzz of energy center in his chest. Carefully, he turned the knob on the door and opened it. He peered into the room beyond and felt a second of sweet relief. “All clear.”

  The office was dark, but there was some light coming in through the front windows on the far side of the room. The room was divided into small cubicle offices, and Noah felt a strange uneasiness crawl up his spine as he looked around. One desk had a person’s lunch set out on top, only one bite missing from a moldy sandwich. It was as though the desk’s owner had simply disappeared mid-meal.

  He crept through the dark maze of desks, noticing overturned chairs, discarded cell phones, and further evidence of a world gone very wrong. What had he expected? The world had gone wrong, hadn’t it? Still, he somehow pictured the scene inside these tall city buildings to look like everyone had simply gone home for the weekend. Instead, it was chaos. Struggle. Abandonment.

  Crash’s voice o
n speaker sliced through the silence in the office. “Uh-oh.”

  “Great, what is it now? Werewolves? Aliens? The fun just keeps on coming,” Karmen said, throwing up her hands.

  “No, Barbie, everyone knows there’s no such thing as werewolves,” Crash said. “Zombies. About a block away from where you are, but moving in your general direction. I have no idea if they can smell you from that far away, but I don’t think now is the time to test that theory.”

  Noah picked up the pace, kicking an overturned desk chair out of the aisle. He heard a low moan, but before his brain registered what was happening, the zombie had attached itself to his leg. He yelled out and shook his leg, trying to get it off him, but it wouldn’t budge.

  From the shadowed cubicles, he heard another growl, then another. His head snapped up and he looked around to see a few zombies stand up throughout the room, awakened by his own yells of terror.

  The Boy

  Something had caught their attention out on the street.

  The boy was huddled in the corner of his small apartment. It was still at least half an hour until the darkness came, but something else had drawn them out. They seemed to be getting hungrier lately. More desperate.

  Either that, or they were stronger and less afraid.

  The boy shivered and brought his legs up tight against this ribs. He put his hands over his ears. He didn’t want to hear them out there. He didn’t want to hear the screams of the people they tore apart.

  The growls and moans of the undead echoed off the tall buildings and no matter how tight he held his hands to his head, he could still hear them. What if they came for him next? What would happen to him if they found him?

  Terrified, the boy crawled low across the floor and climbed in to the closet near his mother’s bed.

  He pulled the pillows and blankets up over his head, forming a cocoon against the noise.

  Night was coming and the darkness felt like it lasted for an eternity.

  He would hide for as long as it took. He would hide until the screaming stopped.

  The Witch

  The group of infected was impressive.

  The Dark One would be proud of her. Not only had she used her tracking to locate most of the guardians, but she had also been working on a very special new spell.

  She was excited her plan had worked so beautifully. Getting rid of the evacuation site had been the most difficult part of her newest plan. It had taken a lot of infected to scare off the soldiers and such a large group of survivors.

  If the three guardians had gotten on that transport, she wouldn’t have been able to get to them very easily, but outside, on their own, they were much more vulnerable.

  And thanks to Crash, the rest had simply fallen in to place.

  The Dark One had been right. Once she’d tracked down the guardians and established a strong connection with them through the stone, she’d been able to see their dreams as if they were her own.

  The one called Crash had a very special talent with his dreams. He could see the future. Which worked out perfectly for the witch. It had helped her stay one step ahead so she could set the ultimate trap.

  She knew he would contact the three guardians and guide them through the city.

  Tonight, she had managed to round up five beautiful specimens for her experiment.

  The witch walked down the line, inspecting each one thoroughly. The short, athletic woman would be agile and fast. The two tall, muscular young men would be even stronger once they were infused with her new spell. The fourth infected was an older woman with a thin frame and long, bloody fingernails. She must have been using them as an effective weapon against her prey.

  The fifth and final infected, however, was the real prize. A giant of a man. Thick, rough skin. Bear-size hands big enough to crush a human head with a single squeeze. He was wearing a long black trench coat that made him look like some frightening character from a horror comic. The witch was anxious to see what her new spell would do to him.

  “Your instructions are very simple,” she said to them, still pacing like a commander in front of new recruits. “Kill the guardians.”

  The group of zombies groaned and grunted. She knew they would obey. It was the Dark One’s magic that flowed through their blackened veins and gave them this life after death. They had no choice but to obey.

  As the sun began to set behind them, a tingle of excitement traveled through the witch’s body.

  The Dark One had commanded her to keep the guardians apart. To get rid of them in whatever way she could.

  It had taken the witch a full week to come up with a spell that would turn a zombie into a deadly weapon, but she had done it. More than three dozen infected had been lost during her experiments, but tonight, it will have all been worth it.

  Of course, these five would also be lost. Their bodies would corrode quickly once the virus was magnified inside them, but she was certain they would hold up long enough to get the job done. It wouldn’t take long.

  Soon, the guardians would be dead.

  As individuals, they were powerful. But as a group of five, they would be nearly unstoppable once they reached their full potential. Killing even one of the guardians would be a victory.

  The witch looked down on the office building across the street. Inside, she could see the guardians fighting the first wave of servants. They had already succeeded in killing more than half of them, but their swords and guns would have little effect on this new breed of zombie. When they left the shelter of the office building and emerged into the near-darkness of the twilight hour, her super zombies would be waiting for them.

  It is time.

  The voice of the Dark One whispered to her, and the witch turned to the line of zombie soldiers and smiled. She began reciting the spell she had perfected, calling forth the element of fire. Above her, the sky responded with a bright crack of lightning.

  Storm clouds rumbled above, moving in fast and blocking out the sun’s remaining rays. A great power coursed through her like electricity as she cast the spell. The blood in her veins turned to a fiery lava, thick and hot. She gave herself over to it, letting it burn from the inside out. She welcomed the pain, because with great pain came great reward. She had learned that during her weeks here in this world.

  Words of magic spilled forth from her mouth and she raised her hands high into the air.

  Lightning cracked again, this time connecting with her and flowing through her body. She screamed in agony as the power coursed through her, then fell to her knees when it stopped.

  Slowly, she rose, eyes blazing with the power of pure fire.

  Her hands dripped with a red-hot liquid that seemed to glow from within. The witch commanded the first zombie to open its mouth. The short woman fell to her knees and opened her mouth, and like a child receiving her first communion, she welcomed the magic potion as it poured down her throat.

  The infected woman grabbed her neck in pain, then crumbled to the hard surface of the rooftop. Disappointment and fear flashed through the witch. This spell had to work. She had practiced it over and over again. It had to work. She could not fail the Dark One tonight.

  Then, with wonder, she watched as the woman’s body shook with a violent seizure. Her already damaged skin bubbled up as if her blood were boiling inside her veins.

  The small woman’s body stilled, then her head snapped up. Her eyes were no longer a milky blue, but instead glowed a deep and fiery red. Her teeth had grown longer. The skin of her face stretched as her mouth opened and closed with a horrible snapping sound. She was animal-like, hunched over on all fours.

  The witch, confident now, instructed each of the zombies to drink from her poisonous fingertips. The tall men grew taller, their skin ripping apart to reveal their now elongated muscles and bone. The old woman’s nails grew to a terrifying length, now as thick and sharp as daggers.

  When the giant man in the trench coat drank, he let out a roar that rivaled the coming storm. He doubled over, hi
s muscles rippling with the power of the virus. He cried out as his body transformed into a hulking brute of a thing. When he stood, he was well over seven feet tall. His muscles were thick and strong.

  “Go and find the guardians,” she told them. “Kill them for the glory of the Dark One.”

  With that, the witch walked to the edge of the rooftop and looked down. The guardians stepped out into the street below, the first wave of zombies defeated. Above her head, lightning cracked and rain began to fall.

  She looked back on the new monsters she had created. They were beautiful in their grotesque new forms, their skin stretched to the point of breaking open. With her index finger, she pointed down at the guardians and the super-infected soldiers took off into the night to fulfill their morbid destiny.

  The witch turned away. She wished she could stay and watch, but tonight, she had one more job to do for the Dark One.

  Crash

  Crash pulled the Hot Pocket out of the microwave and tossed it onto a paper plate. Dang, those suckers got hot. He blew on his fingers to cool them off.

  It wasn’t the healthiest meal, but he’d become addicted to these things when he’d started gaming.

  If only the zombie fight he was watching on his screen now was a game.

  He took a bite and sauce oozed out onto his desk.

  “Damn,” he muttered, jumping up to grab a paper towel from the kitchen.

  “Everything okay over there?” Noah’s voice shouted through the speakers.

  “Yep,” he said, wiping up the red sauce and tossing the napkin in the trash. “Just had a minor food accident, but all is well. How are you guys doing? Is the room clear?”

  “Yeah, the office is cleared out. We’re about to head back into the street. Can you see anything on any of the security cameras or infrared? Or are we clear?”

  Crash sat down again and studied his live video of the streets surrounding the office building where Noah and the others were hiding. “Actually, it looks like you’ve got a pretty clear shot right now. All you have to do is head back out onto Florida Avenue and look for Trinidad Avenue somewhere to your right. You’re still a couple blocks from my apartment, but if you hurry, you should make it here before the sun sets completely.”