Dead Alive: Eden Lost Book Two (Hunter Wars 8)

by SD Tanner

  “Why’s that big one whining all the time?” One of the men asked.

  “Probably ‘cos ya shot it, ya jackass,” another man replied aggressively.

  “What was I supposed to do? It’s an effing hunter,” the man complained.

  “Oh, so who’s whining now?”

  While the men bickered, Ted wrapped the little hunter he called Lucie into a big bear hug. He knew how that felt. Ted had strong arms that always made him feel safe. He remembered a ship and the hunters, almost drowning, and then being brought to this Ranch to be raised as Ted’s son. He was only one of many children Ted had taken on as his own. Somewhere on the property there were four other children, three boys and a girl. Being twelve years younger than him, he’d considered them to be his siblings and a lucky replacement for the brothers he’d lost during the outbreak. He was used to being the youngest in the family, and it was with some pride he’d become their big brother.

  Ted had turned to the small group who’d now gathered to look at them. “This is Lucie. She’s one of ours. She was never the same as all of the other hunters, and then Ip touched her mind, making her even more special. Lucie helped save us from Ruler and we owe her sanctuary. No one is to hurt her, or the one’s she’s brought with her.” With his arm still around Lucie’s shoulder, he added sternly, “That’s an order.”

  A small boy he recognized darted out of the group and stopped about ten feet in front of him. A name popped into his head. Ant. He’d never thought his name suited him. Far from being small, Ant was almost twice the size he should have been for a boy of five. Tall and stocky, Ant studied him with sharp, intelligent eyes. Ant was his adopted brother, and caught up with the delight at seeing him again, he quickly moved towards him. Unflinchingly Ant watched him advance, and he swept the boy into a bear hug, much like the one Ted have given Lucie. Looking over the Ant’s head, there were four guns were trained on him.

  “Don’t point your guns at my boy!” Ted shouted sharply.

  Once they’d lowered their weapons, Ted led them into the big house, and he found himself in a lounge that was all too familiar. A woman with dark hair he knew as Angel had immediately washed his wound, and gently placed a white bandage across it. She was with Ted, and although never quite his mother, she’d always treated him kindly.

  Ted was trying to talk to Lucie, but they didn’t speak the same language. “We found Benny living in Mac’s old RV. He’s at the Marine supply base now. He’s gonna want to see you. He’s been very worried.”

  Lucie clicked and moaned to say she’d understood and wanted to see Benny too.

  “Where did you get the other hunters? Did you make them? Are they infected with your version of the virus, because you’re very different to the original hunters?”

  Again Lucie replied and said she had made them, but it wasn’t her choice. She told Ted there was a bad man who made her infect the living, and although she’d been confused for a while, as soon as she understood what was happening, she’d found a way to escape.

  “Are there more, Lucie? Or is this it?”

  There were more and not all of them were sane. The one he’d fought on his way to the Ranch was crazy. It wanted to kill everything, and it never answered him when he asked it why.

  With his heightened sense of awareness, he knew a man was walking into the lounge from another room. There was something odd about his scent, something he recognized as if he was also a hunter, but he didn’t smell quite right.

  “You’d do better to play charades with her than talk,” the man said as he entered the lounge.

  “Mac?” Ted asked in shock. “What the hell are you doing awake?”

  Angel had rushed to Mac’s side and was looking intently into his eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

  Giving Angel a warm smile and a brief hug, Mac replied, “Yeah, I do now. Gears found me in hell and Ruler kicked me out. He was holding me prisoner until he realized I was spying on him through his demons.” With a wave of his hand, he added, “It was a whole thing. As Gears would say, you’ve gotta keep up with the changing dynamic.”

  Ted muttered in a disgruntled tone, “Nobody tells me anything. I didn’t even know they’d found you.” Breaking into a warm smile, he hugged Mac. “Good to have you back.” Turning to face them, he asked, “Can you talk to them? I mean, you know, the way the dead can talk to the dead.”

  Mac nodded. His head filled with his calm presence and he welcomed another mind into his. Turning to Ted, he said, “This is Luke.”

  “You mean my Luke?” Without waiting for an answer, Ted stared intently at him. Unsure how to explain to him who he was, he lifted his hand wearing a heavy metal ring. Grabbing Ted’s arm with his other hand, he put them side by side. Both wore matching Marine rings and Ted’s face fell.

  Grabbing him in a fierce hug, he asked unhappily, “Where did you go? Why did you leave?”

  A baby was crying somewhere in the house and it was the reason he’d left. When Angel had fallen pregnant, Ted had declared himself the father of four and one on the way. He clearly saw himself as father to only his four siblings, and that one simple statement had wounded him to the core. To him, Ted was his father and his flippant remark had left him feeling abandoned. With the anger that only a teenage boy can carry, he’d taken his backpack and gun, and stormed out into the countryside. For a while, it was just an adventure. He’d travelled from town to town, being welcomed and learning about the world beyond the Ranch. It was an exciting time, but Ted had always told him his first priority was to protect his siblings. Eventually guilt at abandoning his post overwhelmed him, and he’d planned to head home.

  Always traveling west, he’d reached the other side of the country, and was preparing to take the same journey back. Along the way, he’d met a girl who’d also wanted to discover their new world. Being his first real girlfriend, they’d shared an intense relationship. When the men wearing black came for them, he’d managed to escape, but they’d caught her. It was only when he tried to rescue her that he was captured too. After that everything was a blur. Ted’s weapons and combat training was the only reason they didn’t kill him immediately. Apparently, they valued anyone with any sort of military background. They’d told him he should join their army and thrown him into a prison cell while he thought about his options. In retrospect, he should have pretended to join them and then escaped, but he’d been hotheaded and uncooperative with them.

  The man who wore a dark cape had said he wanted skilled hunters and that’s why they infected him. They had an idea he’d be able to use his weapons skills even once he was a hunter. He wasn’t bitten, but they’d cut him and poured Lucie’s fluids into his. Once infected, time lost all meaning, and it took a while for his brain to begin to function again. Their escape and endless running had cleared his head and a lot of memories were coming back to him.

  He’d made a huge mistake and let Ted down by leaving his post. If he’d stayed, none of this would have happened. He’d failed both the young woman he was with, and the man who’d taken him in as his son. With his new awareness came a recognition of his own stupidity, and it only added to his deep sense of shame.

  Mac clearly understood his thoughts and explained. “It’s your fault, Ted. Apparently you forgot Luke is your son.”

  Ted’s jaw dropped in surprise. “I’ve never forgotten that. I promised to protect him and I’ve clearly failed.” Grabbing him by the shoulders, he stared intently into his eyes. “I dunno what I said or did, I can be careless some days, but make no mistake, you’ve been my boy since the day I bombed our own people. You were the only good thing to come out of that day for me. Taking care of you was the one decent thing I could do, so don’t ever think I don’t love you like the son you are to me. Whatever I did to make you feel any differently, I am truly sorry.”

  The words were complicated, but the meaning wasn’t and he moaned softly. They’d both made a mistake, but he was home now and that was all that mattered.

  CHAPT
ER TWELVE: Cain

  In the gloomy light, the snow seemed to glow against the dark backdrop of the horizon. The frozen wasteland wasn’t to his liking, and the featureless town in the middle of the landscape didn’t appeal to him either. It was a collection of dark and drab, boxy shaped buildings, and they were in sharp contrast to the whiteness surrounding them. The main building in the center was tidy enough, but the sofas in the open room were so marked with heavy use, they had deep black stains on the arms and head rests. The acrid stench of human sweat had impregnated into the fabric, and the unpleasant odor leaked into the room, giving it a dusty scent. He wasn’t fussy about décor, but he’d be relieved to return to his own prison bases. They might not smell much better, but at least he could open a window. As it was, he was watching the night slowly take over outside a window blurred by condensation.

  He’d brought jars of hunter blood with him. It wasn’t so much blood as a reddish, black liquid, so dark no light penetrated it. It was pure poison. A person could be infected by just a small droplet on an open wound. They’d learned a thing or two about these new hunters. Having tested it on sixty so-called Sinners, it took longer for them to change, and the results were unpredictable. His last batch had escaped from their cells and attacked the soldiers living in the prison. He’d lost twenty men to the fight before the hunters sprinted into the surrounding forests. Fortunately, some of his men had turned and he was able to harvest a good amount of hunter fluids from them.

  It took him two weeks to make the journey to Alaska. Ruler had told him he would find humans and super hunters in a small town near the border. It was an arduous trip and not one he intended to make again. Along the way, he’d been joined by super hunters and learned they were demons possessing the bodies of humans. It seemed Ruler had quite a set up, and the country was already heavily infiltrated by his demon super hunters. It convinced him he’d made the right choice when he made his deal with the Devil. He’d never given much thought to Beelzebub or the ruler of hell before, and he was pleasantly surprised to find the Devil, or Ruler as he preferred to be called, was quite sociable and easy to get along with.

  It’d been three days since they’d arrived. The three thousand super hunters living there had hustled the living into the middle of the town and methodically infected them. Ruler told him they were the remnants of Hull’s Army, so they were quite capable with a weapon, not that the townspeople could have defended themselves. There was nowhere for them to run. No human could survive the surrounding snow, and the few that had tried to escape were quickly caught. Having infected them, they left the two thousand people on the wide, empty road outside of the main building. They would either turn or die, and he was ambivalent about which they did.

  They had some early successes, and at least fifty of the people had turned instantly. Some remained listless, but others were already aggressively hunting for food. It seemed they ate any animal life, and in the absence of human flesh, made do with the surrounding wildlife. The super hunters could communicate with them, but declared them a fairly stupid lot and he could understand why. Being dumb like dogs, the hunters largely seemed to do as they were told.

  A young man he knew to be a super hunter walked in, kicking his heels to clear his boots of snow. “They’re all starting to move.”

  “It’s about time,” he replied irritably. “The sooner they’re up, the sooner I can leave this disgusting place.”

  Rising from the grubby sofa, he pulled on a fat, quilted parka, tugging the fur-trimmed hood over his head. Jamming his naked hands into his pockets, he followed the man out of the front door. Outside, the bodies that hadn’t moved for days were squirming against the frozen ground. Covered in snow, they appeared like a field of maggots, moving slowly in an undulating rhythm. His mouth turned downwards, and his nose wrinkled in disgust.

  Trying to stay warm, he stamped his heavy, fur lined boots against the icy, slushy concrete beneath his feet, and blew his smoky looking breath into the cold air. “What are they doing now?”

  “I dunno. They started moving about thirty minutes ago.”

  “It’s too cold to wait out here. Call me if they do anything other than wriggle about. It’s boring.”

  Working with the Devil hadn’t proven to be very interesting. He and Ruler agreed he’d have Troy send his Crusaders further into the country, while he took a trip to Alaska to convert the living into hunters. They were planning to use the super hunters and hunters strategically to disrupt the towns. Ruler’s aim was to pit man against man, and he said the best way to achieve it was by giving them an enemy, but not an undefeatable one. He wanted to inspire fear and distrust, not unify man against a common enemy.

  It was very Machiavellian, which appealed to Troy’s sense of corruption, but less to his. His mission was to take absolute power over the people left alive, and bringing hell to earth was of less interest to him. He didn’t share Ruler’s ambitions, but he could see the creature might succeed, and he didn’t want to be on the wrong end of that argument.

  With a final sneer, he was about to return to the warmth of the main building and its dirty, blackened sofas, when the snow puffed and a body sat up. Its head was white with ice, and chunks of frozen snow fell away from its body. More bodies sat up, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred.

  “What are they doing?” He asked the super hunter still standing next to him.

  “Becoming aware.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Their stars are appearing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means their bodies are dead, but they’re still alive inside.”

  “And the stars?”

  “It’s how the dead know the dead.”

  The living dead were beginning to look around them. Some were trying to stand, slipping clumsily against the snow covered and still moving bodies. He was watching a birth of sorts. Infected with a virus and left in the snow, their living bodies had finally died. The virus had taken full control and they were reanimating. He struggled to make out their faces in the creeping gloom, and took a step closer. The idea a person could live beyond the death of their body fascinated him. He tried to keep a person alive to the very last second before he would remove their beating hearts, and these creatures took his vision one-step further by never dying at all.

  In the glow of the light emanating from the entrance to the main building, a woman’s face was staring at him blankly. Despite being virtually frozen, her skin was tanned, and large chunks of her hair were missing, leaving her with straggly ends and patches of shining scalp. The woman lifted her hands to her face and stared at them with a confused expression. Patting her face with her clawed hands, she ran them down her body as if trying to confirm she still existed. A man next to her sat up, and she turned to him as if surprised to see him.

  The two hunters stared at one another for a few moments, and he wondered if they were communicating in some way. Whatever they may have said to one another didn’t end well. In perfect unison, they launched into each other, scrabbling to find their feet in the icy wetness. Their actions signaled the start of a war between all of the hunters, and he turned abruptly and headed to the second floor of the building where he could watch the battle in safety. Behind him, the once peaceful town center became a mass of writhing, howling noise, becoming quieter the moment the main doors were closed and locked.

  From the upstairs window of the room he knew once belonged to Faith, he pushed the old style panel of glass up. The sound of angry growls and screeching filled the peaceful room. Hunters were flailing at one another, and using their hands and teeth to tear at each other’s clothes, seeking vulnerable flesh. Still newly turned, they bled deep red blood, and the snow around them was becoming a blackened, mushy and thickened stew. Hand to hand combat was exhausting for the living. Usually any fight was quickly over when one party would run, but hunters didn’t tire and their injuries, that would be devastating to humans, went unnoticed.

  They ripped at one
another with hands like claws, smashed their heads into bodies in a way that would break any human’s neck, and used their teeth to leave deep rends in one another’s throats. None of these actions stopped the fight, and their victim would respond in kind, dragging the brawl out in an endless frenzy of violence. While he stood in the window, an expressionless face stared up at him, and only its eyes were blazing with anger. Its chin and neck was drenched a dark sticky red, as if it had dipped its face in blackcurrant jam. If it could have reached him, he knew it would have killed him without hesitation or conscience. It snarled aggressively, but realizing he was out of reach, returned its attention to the victim in front of it.

  “Oh, dear, this isn’t going at all well,” a jovial voice said.

  Recognizing Ruler, he replied casually, “You don’t say.”

  “Who was the seed hunter you used at your prison?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The one you used to infect all the others.”

  “I don’t know, just some hunter my men found in the hills. She was the only one we’ve ever found. Why?”

  “The imp had a pet hunter they used as a spy. She was different. She had more of a mind left. I think the imp affected her development somehow and it changed the virus in her.”

  “How would that work? A virus is a virus.”

  “I suppose it’s like any illness, some people die of diseases that don’t kill other people.”

  Trying to remember the small hunter they’d captured, he did recall she was uncommonly female and surprisingly still attractive. He’d used her to attack the living during his ceremonies until she refused, so they’d held her down and harvested her dark, thickened blood instead.

  “Ah, I see,” Ruler said, obviously reading his mind. “Hunters don’t have blood and they’re quite sexless. It seems you found the last hunter left and it belonged to the imp.”