“Is it a zombie?” John whispered.
“Zombie eyes don’t reflect like cats’ or dog eyes do,” I carefully whispered back. I tightened the grip on my gun.
“Well then, what the hell is it?”
The creature answered John’s question for us. It crawled toward us with lightning speed, a multitude of legs sprawling from its hardened body like the legs of a spider. Its shiny black body hugged the ground. The creature opened its mouth, revealing what looked to be dozens of thin, long, sharp teeth.
We were so taken aback, and then paralyzed by fear, that we forgot to fire our weapons. I shook myself out of it, though, and squeezed the trigger of my gun. The flash of the muzzle lit up the aisle as the bullets ripped through the creature with ease, sending bits of its body flying everywhere along with black blood.
The creature came sliding to a halt just a couple of feet away from us. Its body twitched, and I put a couple more bullets into it for good measure.
The four of us stood there for a few moments, just staring at the body, not saying a word. We were all thinking the same thing, though. Where the hell had this creature come from? We were too busy trying to figure out what the creature was that we weren’t asking ourselves the most important question: were there more?
And the answer was yes.
CHAPTER SIX
I TURNED AROUND, and one of the creatures launched itself from the shadows right on top of me. Both of us fell to the ground as I let out a startled scream.
Before I even had the chance to try and fight it off me, its head exploded. I pushed it off me and jumped to my feet, gun at the ready.
Using the gun he’d just used to kill the creature, Pike shot two more to our right.
“Back to the van!” he shouted. I turned and ran toward the front of the store, the sunlight beckoning me in the far-off distance.
The light turned to darkness as a wave of these creatures came charging from the front of the store.
I didn’t have to say a thing. I turned around and ran toward the back of the store, Pike now leading the way.
I could almost feel the creatures behind me. The sound of their feet hitting the concrete floor sounded wet as it echoed around the room. It sounded like hundreds of feet, even though there weren’t hundreds of them.
We reached the back of the store and barreled out the back door. I was the last one out, and slammed the door behind me. It was pointless, though. I looked over my shoulder, and the door exploded off its hinges as the creatures charged into day-lit back yard.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
As soon as the ink-black creatures hit the daylight, their skin bubbled and acted like acid had just been dumped on them. They fell to the ground and writhed around, and a wet, guttural-sounding scream emitted from their mouths. They stopped screaming and then moving altogether, their skin continuing to bubble and pop, spewing rancid-smelling liquids into the air that continued to bubble as it hit the ground.
The creatures still inside couldn’t stop their momentum, and they continued to spill outside to their deaths. The last remaining few managed to stay inside, out of the light.
The four of us stood side to side, our guns aimed at the store. The creatures stared at us from the doorway, their black beady eyes blending in with the rest of their wet, liquid-looking skin. They opened their mouths and let out a scream, their long white teeth a striking dichotomy from the pitch-blackness of the rest of their body.
I raised my gun and unloaded into the doorway, the three others following suit. The bullets ripped the creatures apart with ease. They fell to the ground in a black mess.
“Well, at least they’re easy to kill,” John said.
I looked at the bodies that made it outside into the sunlight. They were all almost completely pools of bubbling liquid. “The sun is disintegrating them,” I said.
“That’s correct,” a woman’s voice said from behind.
I swung around, bringing my gun up to my shoulder.
A woman and four others stood a few yards away, their guns already raised and pointing at us.
“Put your guns down,” she said. “You’re outnumbered.”
“By one,” Pike said. “I’ll take those odds.”
The woman smirked and fired a shot into Pike’s head. Blood splattered my body as his head snapped back and he slammed to the ground.
“Now it’s by two,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT TOOK everything within me to not shoot the woman where she stood, but trying to keep my composure as I watched someone I looked up to as a mentor die right in front of me was taking all the energy I had. Plus, it surely would’ve gotten John and Julia killed.
“Now,” the woman said, “would you kindly put your guns down.”
The grip on my gun had never been tighter. I gritted my teeth so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if they turned into dust.
“Just let us take the body of our friend and we’ll go,” I said through my teeth.
“How many of you do I have to kill before you realize that I am not playing around?” she said, offended.
“Miles,” John whispered. “I think we should listen to her.”
I looked over at John and Julia. John kept his composure, but tears streaked down Julia’s dirty face as she fought for the strength to stand.
I lowered my gun.
“Put them on the ground slowly,” a scrawny olive-skinned man to the woman’s right shouted at us.
The three of us put them down.
The men were on our guns like zombies to a corpse. They snatched them up almost before we were even able to stand back up straight.
Standing up was pointless, though. Some of the men kicked us behind our kneecaps, causing us to fall to our knees. They shoved their guns into our backs hard; I fought back to urge to groan in pain.
The woman walked over to me. She stood tall above my cowering body. “Where are you from? What camp do you belong to?” she asked.
I looked down, and my gaze met Pike’s empty, dead eyes. His body lay just inches away from mine. Rage coursed through my veins. I looked up at the woman and smirked. “Eat shit.”
She punched me in my face hard. I fell to the ground right next to Pike’s body, my face just inches away from his. The rage and despair filtered out the physical pain from the punch. I couldn’t believe I lost two of the people closest to me in the exact same way just days apart. I looked up, and just inches away from my head, was Pike’s gun. They didn’t think to take his.
It was decided. I wasn’t going to just lie there and give up when the people I loved were dying around me. I wasn’t about to let John and Julia become casualties either.
I looked over at the woman and her comrades. Their attention was on Julia, who was telling them everything. Now they really had to die. I couldn’t let them get to Jefferson Memorial, not when we were already weakened by the zombie attacks. Plus, who knew how many more of these people there were? If they were Roves, the answer was hundreds.
So why couldn’t I do it? They weren’t looking at me, and the gun was just an arm’s length away. I had the element of surprise on my side; I could easily kill all five of them in one swoop before any of them could even point a gun at me. Still, my stomach twisted at the thought. Killing zombies was easy. Killing people was another thing altogether.
What if one of them is just as scared as I am? I thought. What if they don’t want to be here and are just following orders? What if one of them is somebody’s Ashley? Or Pike?
“Take the girl. She’ll lead us to their camp. Kill the others,” the woman ordered her men.
I acted before I could think. I reached for Pike’s assault rifle and pulled it to me. I aimed at the olive-skinned man on the far left, and didn’t stop shooting until the last bullet left the gun’s magazine and shot through the woman who’d started this all.
The gun clicked, signaling the need to reload, and I realized that I was screaming. I didn’t stop. I screamed
and screamed. My throat felt like it was being torn apart. I fell back to the ground, looked into Pike’s dead eyes, and my screaming turned to sobbing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I SAT in the back of the van, my head leaned up against the side wall. John and Julia sat up front. The sound of the car speeding down the road was the only sound to be heard.
The light outside grew faint as nighttime neared. Had circumstances been different, I’d be worried about spending another night keeping zombies away from our camp. I’d be worried about how we’d get the wall up in time, or whether or not the number of zombies attacking had increased.
But all I could think about was why now? I’d survived the virus, I’d survived the early days of the apocalypse, I helped found Jefferson Memorial, and I was surrounded by people I loved and loved me back. So why now? Why was everything falling apart now?
My eyes bored into a dark corner in the roof of the van, as if it held the answers to my questions.
I guess I always knew my luck would run out eventually, but now that it was happening, I was scrambling. I always considered the possibility, but there’s a difference between knowing something is going to happen and being prepared for it.
I definitely wasn’t prepared, and of the two people I knew I could go to for help, one’s body was lying at my feet, and the other’s body lay in an alley in the city.
My stomach twisted and I thought I’d throw up at the thought. An image of Ashley’s slain body in an alley conjured itself up in my mind. I washed it out as fast as I could. I didn’t have the mental strength to think about something like that.
My mind turned to the next most pressing thing that weighed on it, what the hell those creatures were. I’d never seen anything like them. In a world where zombies were normal, the fact that there was something weird terrified me.
They were obviously alien, but they were unlike any I’d seen before. I remember seeing photos and videos online of the aliens before the virus destroyed everything. Their skin was a gray color and looked hard. Not quite the rocky and scaly skin that they had now as Xenomortises, but it still looked chiseled and rough. They definitely were not black creatures that died in sunlight. Were they creatures that the aliens kept a secret? A mutation of some alien animal? There was no way to be sure, but either way, I had a very bad feeling about them.
Why didn’t we see them when we first came into the store? I asked myself. The only explanation I could come up with was that they had somehow been stuck to the ceiling. Which made sense since they did look like they were halfway between a liquid and solid.
Great, I thought. Now we’re going to have to keep our eyes on the ceiling, too.
I closed my eyes and sighed. I didn’t think the day could get any worse.
* * *
We pulled up to Jefferson Memorial, and parked the van in the parking lot in between a giant Ford pickup and an SUV. Since the virus hit and wiped people out so quickly, there wasn’t enough time for people to ravage the supplies. That meant that once everything began to “settle” and different camps began to form, there was plenty of gas for us to stockpile.
However, I knew that one day it’d run out, a fact that lingered in my mind whenever we did something like use a half a tank of gas like we just did.
“I’ll get Andrew; we’ll take Pike’s body to Rachel,” John said.
I nodded, thankful I wasn’t going to have to transport his body twice in one day. “Make sure he’s up for it,” I said. “He might still be woozy from The Wall collapsing last night.”
John nodded and muttered an okay.
Julia put her arm on my shoulder from behind, and moved in front of me. “Where are you going?” she asked.
I looked into her eyes, and I felt sorry for her. I could tell that what we just went through wasn’t easy on her in the least. She was used to keeping the car warm and running, not running for her life and having a gun pointed at her head.
“I have to tell George about Pike, then have an emergency Board meeting.”
She nodded and her eyes drifted to something behind me. I turned around to see what she was looking at.
Dirt flew in the air as people worked frantically to dig the ditch around the Bank deeper. They were working especially hard on the area around the collapsed part of The Wall.
“It’s getting dark soon,” Julia muttered.
I turned my attention to the setting sun. Another forty-five minutes and it’d be pitch black.
“Is it going to be another long night?” she asked.
I almost sighed but held it back. “We’ll see, Julia.” I offered her a slight smile. I began walking to the Bank, leaving Julia watching the sunset behind me. “We’ll see.”
* * *
I entered George’s room. He sat at his desk reading a book, and while normally I didn’t mind him—even considered him something of a friend—the fact that he was reading instead of out there helping prepare for the night irked me.
He turned to see who it was, and when he saw it was me, he smiled a toothy grin. His freckles pushed upwards toward his eyes that he pushed his ginger hair away from. “Please tell me you brought good news,” he said.
“Pike’s dead,” I said, injecting the two words with venom.
George’s demeanor faltered for a split second before returning to a more neutral expression. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Not Pike. He was one of our best.”
I nodded. “He was.”
“What happened?” George asked. He picked up his chair and turned it around to face me, trying his best not to bump the legs of it on the tiny walls.
I walked to the edge of his bed and leaned against the mattress. “We encountered a group of people, and their leader just shot him. No warning, no nothing. Just bang.” My voice wavered, but I stayed strong. I wasn’t about to collapse right now, especially not in front of George. “They made us get on our knees, and started interrogating us about where our camp was. I was able to get Pike’s gun and kill them while they weren’t looking.”
George tried to hide his disappointment, but failed. “Damn,” he muttered under his breath. “You should’ve tried to keep one of them alive. We could’ve found out where they came from, see if they had anything we could use.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My stomach flared with heat, and my heartbeat pounded in my head.
George noticed before I could say anything, and did his best to recover. “Miles, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I couldn’t possibly know what you went through. You made a call and you followed through with it. I can respect that.”
I looked down at the ground and nodded my head in acknowledgment. “Okay,” I said. I looked up at him and sighed. “It’s okay. You gotta think diplomatically. That’s why you’re the leader.”
George sighed and rubbed his hands on his legs above his kneecaps, clearly uncomfortable. “So,” he began with an awkward laugh, “any good news?”
“Not at all,” I said. “We need to have an emergency Board meeting. We have another threat. Something that makes zombies and maybe even Xenomortises look like an inconvenience in comparison.”
“Holy shit,” George exclaimed. “I almost don’t want to know.”
“Trust me,” I said. “You don’t.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE SIX OTHER founders stared at me with sad faces—a look I was tired of getting. I’d just got done telling them about Pike, although Rachel already knew since she was the one who prepared the dead for burial.
“Dammit!” Daniel shouted so loud it caused Rachel—who held his hand—to jump.
“What was this new threat I heard mentioned?” Peter asked, already over Pike. I wanted to be mad at him for it, but Peter stuck to his laboratory, so he never was friends with Pike.
“Yes,” I began. “This is something that I find hard to even describe, but I’ll do my best.” I began to recount the story, doing my best to describe every terrifying detail. I didn’t want to sugarcoat a thi
ng. They had to understand what we were up against. “They were pitch black, and would’ve been invisible if it wasn’t for their—for lack of a better word—liquid skin. It shined in what little light there was. Their footsteps sounded wet as they charged at us. They didn’t even try and investigate us or anything. Their first reaction after we’d discovered them was to kill us. Nothing else.
“Once we got outside, though, they began to melt…disintegrate in the sunlight. After a few moments, they looked like puddles of bubbling acidic ink. Eventually, it was like they evaporated. All traces of the ones that melted were gone.”
Pete’s eyes turned from horror to intrigue. “You mean that there’s still the bodies—”
“—if you could call them that,” I interrupted.
“Okay, but there’s still the remains of the ones you killed inside the store left?”
“I guess. Maybe? I don’t know, I wasn’t really looking,” I said.
“Is it a possibility?”
“Yes, it’s a possibility.”
Peter turned to George. “George, I need to see these remains. Study them, take samples, do whatever I can to find out more about these creatures.”
“I don’t know if you heard Miles, Peter, but there were a ton of them,” Daniel said.
“I don’t know if you heard Miles, Daniel, but these creatures are a serious threat! We have to learn everything we can about them so we can know how to defeat them. We’re already vulnerable. If these creatures were to attack us right now, we’d be done for.”
Silence filled the room as everybody considered what Peter said.
“He’s right,” Rachel said, her voice shaking as she held back tears. “It’ll be dangerous, but we can’t afford not to go back.”
George nodded in agreement. “Miles, you take your team back there tomorrow, and take Peter and Daniel with you.”
The Mortis Desolation (Book 1): Mortis Page 3
