Chasing Shadows (The Initiative Book 1)

by Kindra Sowder

  The doorknob was cold copper in my hand as I turned it, swinging the door open and letting it bang against the wall, taking a step back from the doorway just in case the zombie wasn’t what I was accustomed to. I was greeted by a smell that I had only encountered twice. The smell of rotting flesh. A groan escaped my lips, but I pushed on. Because of its origin, there was no telling if it was different somehow. This was new territory for me as well as anyone else I knew I was certain. Nothing. I saw nothing in the blackness, but I couldn’t just walk away. Something was in there, and I could feel it. A groan came from within the room, haunting and tortured in some way, but still nothing to be seen. Turning to gaze around the chamber, I found the closest candle sitting on a small table by the door and took its warmed glass in my hands, using it as my light to see even if it wouldn’t help much. I at least needed to find a light switch and I didn’t want to feel around in the darkness for fear something would begin chomping on my flesh. Zombies weren’t flesh eaters unless ordered, but this was different than anything else I had encountered.

  With my arm completely stretched out, I forced the open flame into the dark, seeing nothing beyond it. Not even a flicker or reflection of the candle. My feet crossed the threshold, and I adjusted the salt, placing it between my arm and side and reached out to feel along the wall to the left of the doorway, finding it easy enough. When I flipped on the light, I was shocked at what I saw, sour vomit bubbling up into my throat at the sight of the zombie. I was correct in the assumption that I had never once seen something like this before and what was before me had proven it.

  The zombie was already rotting away, its face barely recognizable as flesh and meat were falling away from bone, some of it on the floor around its feet as well as some liquid of putrefaction. It was standing in a puddle of its own decay. The thought made the nausea rise from my gut again, but I swallowed it down. This was going to get messy, but it didn’t stop what I had to do. I placed the candle on the only table in the room that was put in the very center far away from the zombie, not even the slightly pleasant scent of its wax was perceptible past the smell of the decaying corpse in front of me.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, taking it all in.

  It was a woman. That much I could tell from the small swell of what was left of her breasts underneath her yellow V-neck t-shirt, her short cropped hair a rich and dirty blonde that was turning a disgusting hue of green and brown from the refuse leaving her body. Her clothes were soaked entirely in the flesh that was falling from her bones and the liquid flowing from beneath her skin, blood leaking from her orifices like what you see with a dead body that had bloated in the sun. The smell and the sight were too much, and I could no longer keep the bile down that was threatening to spill over. I attempted to make it out of the room, but only made it right inside the door, vomiting up everything I had eaten that day which hadn’t been much more than a scone and cup of coffee McGrady had brought me before I left the office.

  Once my stomach was completely empty of its contents and my throat sufficiently on fire, I turned back toward the zombie. This was going to be dirty work, which would possibly send me retching one more time before the experience was over. I wiped the corners of my mouth on the back of my hand, not caring anymore since things were about to get even worse than my own spew, and moved to stand in front of the zombie. Its dead eyes barely registered me. Either that or it didn’t care, but it had to be dispatched, and it had to be now. This was torture. It had to have been. I had never been a soulless creature walking the Earth before, but my own educated guess told me that this had to be one of the worst fates imaginable. You were left to stand and rot, waiting for orders that may never come and if its current state was any indication, it was being left here as a form of punishment for the poor soul that had once inhabited it. Constance had a motive behind this. That I could tell.

  “Marcos,” I called, hearing his heavy footfalls as he entered the room, leaving his grandmother lying on the floor.

  “Yes?”

  I pointed at the zombie woman and asked, “Do you know who this is?”

  “I’m sorry. I do not. I didn’t know anything about this,” he insisted.

  I sighed and poured some of the salt from the container in the palm of my hand, setting the remainder on the floor and looking into the dead, glazed over eyes of the revenant before me. I wasn’t into handling or even touching the dead, but this was a part of my job. The only two I had dispatched before were nowhere near this level of decomposition, and they had been kept longer than this, meaning that raising the sacrifice itself caused this.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s time to end her suffering. I can’t let her stay this way any longer.” I took another step toward the zombie and raised my hand with the salt cupped inside to its mouth.

  “You’re going to salt it?” Marcos asked. I could feel his eyes on me as I stood there, frozen in place at his question.

  “Do you expect me not to? It’s going to happen now and then we are taking your grandmother to prison after an exorcism. There is no wiggle room, no loophole.” Staring at the zombie, I saw its gaze move up to my own, a wet groan escaping its lips as it finally realized I was there. Like it was begging me to set it free of its foul prison. “She killed this woman and used her sacrifice to raise the one she had murdered. This is even more fucked up than anything else I have ever seen. The retrieval team is on its way, and I want this done and over with before they get here. No one should have to see what this looks like.” I turned and looked at Marcos, his wide and terrified eyes jumping between the zombie and me. “Not even you. Get out and close the door.”

  With those words he left, but not before shooting me a glare that could’ve killed me as I stood there within seconds. The door slammed behind him, and I turned my attention back to the zombie, wishing I didn’t have to do this at all because of what was coming. The result of salting a zombie was never a gorgeous sight to see, but this was going to be much worse since it had already begun to decay. Much worse. It was something I wished I could pawn off on someone else, but it was just little old me and McGrady or his team didn’t get paid to dispatch. That was my job, and I was damn good at it and, for some reason, with each one I had killed I felt like I needed to explain it to them even though they wouldn’t understand me. This time, I decided just to cut to the chase and put it out of its misery. It had been like this long enough. Its mouth was hanging open; slack-jawed from the loss of muscle mass in its jaw that would be responsible for holding the bones together. My stomach churned, but I held myself together.

  “You can do this. You can do this,” I repeated to myself, taking in a deep breath and raising my fist full of salt that I was sure was stuck to my hand because of sweat to its wet mouth. Drool and liquid meat leached from it and a solid pit formed where the nausea had been. I held my breath for a moment, the taste of the rot hitting the back of my tongue, and pushed the air out of my lungs in a whoosh. “You’ve got this.”

  Without another moment’s hesitation, I pushed the salt into its mouth, placing my hand on the back of its head to keep it from attempting to break the contact with the crystals. It cried out in a horrible, wet screech as the salt made contact with its insides and worked its way down its gullet. I could feel it working as I touched it, the potent magic in the air dissipating slowly, at first, speeding up the longer I kept the connection. The zombie’s flesh began to slough off, making it harder to keep my hand on its skull. I slid it to the back of its neck and held on, pushing myself against it and ruining my clothes in the process. I was disgusted, but I had to make sure the connection wasn’t severed until it was time. You could feel when the time was right. It felt like an electric zap that resonated all the way down into your bones and muscles, working its way down into that special place inside where the magic came from. I wasn’t magical in any way as far as I knew, but magic was the only word for what the salt crystals did to this th
ing and what I felt on the inside as it died for a second time.

  The zombie began to liquefy against me, my body sagging to the floor to remain connected to the creature until my work was done. Then there it was. The electricity I had been waiting for. It moved through my entire body, starting with my flesh and then working its way inside to my very center meaning the zombie and whatever animated it was gone for good. I let go, and the zombie fell to a mass of liquid and bone in my lap, leaving me there to sit in the muck until the retrieval team showed up.

  The door to the room opened, and I heard very familiar footfalls make their way in my direction, stopping behind me and a chuckle left that velvet, Scottish throat.

  “Ye cooldn’ wait, loove?” McGrady laughed as he watched me sitting on the floor in a pile of goo.

  “You know me. When do I ever do what you say?” I retorted, using my soiled hands to attempt to push some of it off of my legs so I could stand without much success.

  “Well, at least yoo’re honest.”

  He reached his hand out to me and, without hesitation, I took it.

  Chapter 6

  Watching the retrieval team scoop up what was left of the zombie and place it in a clear plastic container was something I didn’t care to see again. I felt that way every time I had to dispatch a zombie, and this was now number three I could add to my resume. I would never be leaving the Initiative because of my family name. There was nowhere else for me to go because of not only that name, but also because I had no other marketable skills besides this and no one else wanted to hire a Van Helsing. Not like there were any other jobs out there anyways. Another problem was that I couldn’t tie Marcos to anything that happened inside of the shop, which only made my job so much more difficult than it already had been. Even with Constance locked away in the high security holdings built by the Initiative.

  I was now showered and in clean clothes, ditching the knee high boots for a pair of Converse sneakers and sitting behind my home office desk. I hated bringing work home, but after having to dispatch that zombie, McGrady grabbed my files and brought them home for me, knowing I hated the showers at work. He also knew it was because I did not want to risk being cornered by Richards again, especially if he decided to try to sneak a peek while I was showering. That wouldn’t end well for any of us.

  My hair was still wet, soaking the back and shoulders of my black t-shirt, leaving it cold because of the chill of the air conditioning. My office at home was much larger than the one I had at Van Helsing Exterminations within the Initiative, and I could decorate it in my own style, which they did not allow at work. It was beige and modern only in that building. Here at home, I kept the modern feel with a sleek, dark wooden desk and crisp white walls with single black shelves scattered along one wall covered in books and candles as well as knick-knacks of the trade. One even held a lovely display of vampire stakes through the centuries, starting with the one used by the same Van Helsing that slew Dracula. It had been passed down to me by my parents after their deaths, including the money I inherited, but this was my prized possession.

  A somber mood fell over me like a thick blanket. Thinking about their passing was tough for me, but it was something I couldn’t avoid whenever I looked at that item, and it brought back the memories I had tried so hard to suppress. They both worked within the Initiative even though my mother wasn’t a Van Helsing. She was healthy and beautiful and had been brought into the fold just like McGrady on the recommendation of someone within the government defense offices. Interestingly enough I was gifted with my father’s looks, and Jared looked more like our mother, neither of us a perfect blend of the two. They had been killed by a demon that they had not managed to pin down, and he had brought shadows with him, taking his sweet time with my parents as they were tortured and killed in the hopes for information on the Initiative to get rid of it altogether. They didn’t receive any of that material from them and became so infuriated they slew them in cold blood, leaving my brother and myself orphans. I was sixteen at the time while Jared was twenty and was already working with the Initiative at the time so I didn’t have to move into foster care. Now he was nearing thirty and reminded me so much of our father who also happened to be a chronic rule breaker while our mother was the picture of obedience as long as she could agree with that law.

  The Initiative had not heard from the demon since, stating that the demon had to have been a manifestation of something else, possibly conjured by Voodoo as a way to better intimidate our parents once they were within their clutches. It was a myth, according to them and something not to be mentioned again. Did I believe that? No. Did Jared? He surely didn’t. He had been attempting to hunt it down ever since, but had no luck, confirming what the Initiative had said about it and its existence.

  I had a file sitting open in front of me, but had stared at the clean pages inside of it until the words and lines began to blur. Dispatching the zombie Constance had raised had not only taken my focus, but my resolve as far as her case. It had scared me, terrified me beyond any fear I had ever felt. I was sure that sleep would elude me just as well as my focus. Constance had been taken away quickly and quietly in an attempt to keep the news of her arrest as silent as possible to avoid the retaliation of the community that held her in such high esteem. Now, here I was. Trying to focus on something that I knew I couldn’t. It was time to stop for the night. I closed the file and pushed it away, resting my head on the back of my chair and closing my eyes while listening to the whooshing sound of the central air conditioning.

  “Knock, knock.”

  The sweet, velvet voice of McGrady floated to my ears from beneath the darkness my lowered eyelids offered me, penetrating it with a small tinge of light.

  Without opening my eyes, I said, “I won’t be doing that again. Never again.”

  I heard the slight click of the door closing, and his muffled footsteps crossed the room, stopping in front of my desk. “They ne’er said dispatchin’ a zombie was easy, but whit makes this body so different from th’ others? This body was yer third.”

  “Then I’ll let each and every one that crosses my desk come straight to you. You’ll see what it’s like pretty quickly and trust me,” I opened one eye and closed it again once I barely saw his image, “you’ll ask not to be assigned another after the first one.”

  “Ah don’t doubt that. Not e’en a wee bit.”

  Both eyes fluttered open, and I took in his form. His hair was slightly disheveled and wet like he had taken a shower after I had finished, a blue fitted t-shirt covering his torso and tattered jeans on his legs. From the sound he made coming into the room, I assumed he wasn’t wearing any shoes and only socks. The look on his face was pitiful. I sighed and pushed my chair away from the desk, standing to move around the large chunk of wood separating us.

  “Please don’t give me that look. I can’t take it,” I voiced as I walked toward him, my fingers sliding over the smoothness of the desk. Once I was standing in front of him, his fingers lightly traced my jaw, working their way down to my exposed collarbone.

  “Ye look tired. Mebbe ye shood sleep,” he suggested.

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead, McGrady. I know what I want and you just so happen to be the man to give it to me.” I smiled seductively at him and slid my hands underneath his shirt, feeling the toned muscles along the line of his jeans that hung low on his hips.

  McGrady smirked and nodded his head, reveling in my touch as my fingers worked over his smooth flesh. “Och, am Ah?” His voice was lower and deeper, a husky tone penetrating it and rolling over my sensitive skin.

  “You sure are.”

  I stood up on my tiptoes and grazed my parted lips over his neck and up until I reached his jawline, the scruff along it scratching my skin in such a soft and pleasant way. He sighed, and his hands gripped my hips and pulled me into him. My hands rose to his chest, resting there and feeling his
racing heartbeat underneath his ribcage.

  “Is Addi here?” I asked as I breathed in his scent.

  McGrady’s hand ran through my wet hair and gripped it, pulling it slightly so I’d look up at him. A moan escaped my lips as heat licked up my belly and through my chest, my heart beating furiously like a jackhammer. I could feel it in my throat.

  “She is, but she’s up in ‘er room wit yer brother. Ah don’t think they’ll care if we bang in yer office,” he purred as he looked into my eyes. The lust inside of them could be felt in the air, palpating around us and against us as we stood in perfect unity.

  There was only the two of us in that moment as his hands shook, gripping the bottom of my shirt to pull it over my head which I let him do. My breath caught in my throat as I kissed him, long, deep and hard; claiming him with my mouth like I would with my body over and over again.

  I pulled my lips from his and whispered, “You’re shaking. Are you nervous?”

  He grinned and laughed quietly, softly moving his fingers over the bare flesh just below my rib cage. There was a sharp intake of breath between the two of us at the exact same moment and a giggle from me, knowing it was a stupid question to ask.

  “Each an’ every time, loove. Ah can’t help it. Ye knoo how ah feel about ye. It’s no secret.”