by Perrin Briar
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Details can be found at the end of RESISTANT.
RESISTANT
Book Two of the Resistance Series
Perrin Briar
Chapter One
SEATTLE was a city suspended, a life-size model before the inhabitants were shipped in. Red painted the streets and smashed windows. A hot-dog stand lay on its side, disemboweled. A preened poodle ate the foot-long buns and left the mystery meat sausages. Dog shit with a footprint in it.
It had been something of a shock when Dana and Hugo had first entered the city proper, walking down streets so familiar Dana knew exactly where she was just by the number of potholes. Now, it was a ghost town.
They hadn’t seen any other living people, only remnants of them. It was a giant murder mystery. A clot of blood here, a fragment of skull there, a smashed window and abandoned school backpack. Everything told a story. It was never with a happy ending.
They came to an intersection jammed with cars. It looked like a giant puzzle where God had attempted to fit as many vehicles into as small a space as possible, and then given up.
Hugo eyed the cars warily. As well he might. They didn’t want anything to come leaping out at them. Dana and Hugo might be Resistant, but they most certainly were not immune. The undead would consume them if there was nothing more palatable within reach.
Dana had learned to switch off her ears while Hugo was wittering on about whatever he had to talk about. He wasted words, using ten when one would suffice. Dana liked to be short and concise. There was not enough time to constantly witter on.
Slack-jawed doors hung open on cars and buses much too close for Dana’s liking. She swerved around them, making large loops so as to remain out of any creature’s clutches.
A whisper of flapping curtains. People too afraid to come out of their homes. Dana couldn’t blame them. If she had her loved ones around her, she wouldn’t want to come out either.
Dana had only a single loved one she cared about. Max, her little sister. That was where she was heading now. It was Dana’s intent to break her out of Eden and take her where people couldn’t misuse or abuse her. Somewhere safe.
Things had gotten off to a rocky start right from the beginning. Dana had gone to Seattle General to get antibiotics for the bite wound her infected boyfriend had given her.
It was there she had been divided from Max and they were forced into separate vehicles. Dana, for whatever reason, had a resistance to the virus that otherwise would have turned her into a mindless killing machine.
Misdiagnosed as an infected, Dana had been taken to quarantine, at a repurposed detention center. She met Hugo, a fellow Resistant—the made-up term she and Hugo had assigned themselves to describe their condition.
They had escaped and come across a band of former fellow juvenile delinquents. It was from them Dana had learned where Max had been taken.
Max had been taken to Seattle University as part of a sinister-sounding Eden Project, to kick start the human race. Max would, once she came of age, be impregnated and used for breeding supersoldiers. It was a fate worse than death, and one Dana would not allow while she still drew breath.
The only upside to the whole adventure so far was the knowledge that Max was too young to begin rearing babies. It was the only hope available, and Dana clung to it jealously.
Hugo was smart enough not to speak as they wound through the cars, and kept his eyes and attention on the danger points. In this case, the abandoned vehicles. It took the best part of an hour for them to get through the gridlocked streets.
Dana checked the ignition of the last row of cars on the north side of the traffic jam.
“What are you doing?” Hugo said.
“Checking the fuel tanks,” Dana said. “We’ll want the car with the most fuel. As soon as we pick Max up, we’ll get out of the city and into the sticks. If we can’t find one with enough fuel we’ll need to fill up before we head to the university.”
“As soon as we start the car up, the undead will chase us,” Hugo said.
Good point, Dana thought.
“Then shouldn’t we find a car at the gas station already?” Hugo said.
Dana blinked.
“That’s actually a really good idea,” she said.
Hugo grinned.
“I am capable of them,” he said. “Occasionally.”
“Yes,” Dana said. “A rare treat. The closest station is this way.”
They turned and headed at a right-angle to the jammed intersection.
“University’s across the river,” Hugo said. “We should think about which bridge we want to cross. Montlake is closest to the uni.”
“Which means the military will be guarding it,” Dana said.
“They’ll know we’re human,” Hugo said. “No zombie can drive.”
“But an infected can,” Dana pointed out.
“If we didn’t stop, they would just shoot us, right?” Hugo said.
“Almost certainly,” Dana said.
“And if we do stop and get out of the car, they’ll think we’re infected by our appearance and shoot us too,” Hugo said.
He frowned.
“We’re stuffed either way,” he said.
“Welcome to our world,” Dana said.
“Just as well,” Hugo said. “We can’t cross Montlake anyway. The I-5 will be crammed worse than the road we just saw.”
“Then we’ll have to find another way,” Dana said.
That, as far as she was concerned, was the end of the conversation. But Hugo, as usual, always had plenty more to say.
“What’s your plan once we get to the university?” Hugo said. “You think the soldiers are just going to give up your sister because you ask them to?”
“I’m not asking them for anything,” Dana said sternly. “Max is mine, and I’m taking her. End of.”
Dana owed the military nothing. They had tossed her into the gym of a converted detention center along with a horde of the undead. If they hadn’t escaped when they had, their bones would be used as toothpicks by now.
“But you do have a plan?” Hugo said.
“Spring Max out,” Dana said. “That’s the plan.”
Hugo didn’t much like the sound of that. Dana sighed.
“Look, there are simply too many variables we don’t know,” she said. “We don’t know how many soldiers there are on guard, how the university is organized, where Max might be held. These are things we’ll need answers to before we make our move. Until then, it’s better to remain flexible.”
Hugo nodded. He looked at Dana out the corner of his eye. He swallowed before speaking.
“We don’t even know if what Miss Jenkins told us is true,” he said. “She might have lied, or misunderstood what she’d overheard.”
He raised his hands in preemptive defense.
“I’m not saying that’s what happened,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s a possibility, that’s all.”
“I know,” Dana said. “But this is the only lead we’ve got and I’m going to follow it to its conclusion.”
To think Dana hadn’t taken Hugo’s concerns into account already was mildly insulting. Dana simply refused to acknowledge them. This was her only chance of finding Max. Without this snatch of overheard dialogue between two soldiers, Dana had nothing and would have to start again from scratch. She didn’t know where she would begin then.
“I’ve been thinking,” Hugo said.
Here we go, Dana thought, rolling her eyes. All Hugo ever seemed to do wa
s think. He had no sense of urgency, of the here and now. His mind was floating off, in a world of its own, when the only world that really mattered was where he was right now.
“Max is with soldiers,” Hugo said. “That’s got to be about the safest place you can be right now. Could you honestly keep her safer than an army of trained killers?”
“They’re kidnapping girls and young women to impregnate them with babies to breed a generation of hardened supersoldiers,” Dana said. “Does that sound like a worthwhile lifestyle to you?”
Hugo kicked a stone at his feet.
“No,” he said.
“They might be trained killers,” Dana said, comporting herself. “They might be loyal for now, sticking to the oaths they promised in the old world. But pretty soon the world is going to look even more different, and a group of trained killers will realize they’re tougher than most, with certain advantages. They’ll start taking what they want, just because they can. What will a little girl mean to them then?”
Dana rubbed her face in exasperation. Having to explain herself like this was exhausting work.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter who’s looking after her,” Dana said. “She’s my sister, my family. Family should be together, especially at a time like this.”
“You’d be right if we weren’t infected,” Hugo said.
He was looking at himself in the window of an abandoned Volvo.
“Look at us, Dana,” he said. “I might never have been in peak physical health before, but I always looked better than this.”
Dana couldn’t bear to look at her reflection, not again. Now wasn’t a time to be feeling sorry for yourself.
“We have to keep moving,” she said.
“Do you really want to be around Max if we turn?” Hugo said.
So there it was. What Hugo had been trying to say all along. His concern about turning into a monster. At his heart, Hugo was a supremely selfish person. His concern now was for himself, not Dana or her sister. Dana should have known.
“I won’t let that happen,” Dana said.
“It can happen in the blink of an eye,” Hugo said. “One day you might go to sleep, and when you wake up… That’ll be it. Dying in your sleep. I guess that’s exactly what it is.”
Dana would cross that bridge when she came to it. But there was no way she would allow any harm, especially from her own hands, to come to Max.
“There it is,” Dana said, pointing.
The BP gas station was located on the loop of a busy intersection. Vehicles dotted the lot.
Dana and Hugo hid behind a car directly across the street from it.
“Do you see any of them?” Hugo said.
“No,” Dana said.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t there. They could be tucked away, not hiding—they didn’t know what hiding was, nor the point of it—but they could be standing in the shadows, prepared to strike if the opportunity came.
“The sooner we get across, the sooner we can leave,” Dana said.
“Which car do you want to try first?” Hugo said.
Dana scrubbed each vehicle, writing off the modern ones as negatives for her. Hot wiring a newer car meant using modern technology she simply didn’t have. She spied an old car parked at pump one.
“The Beetle,” Dana said.
“Are you sure?” Hugo said. “The last time we were in an old car it didn’t work out so well.”
“It’ll be fine, and a lot quicker than walking,” Dana said.
“What if there aren’t any keys inside?” Hugo said.
Dana shrugged.
“It’s not a problem,” she said.
She reached into a pocket on the front of her ammunition bag and came out with a screwdriver and something that looked like a long flat blunt knife.
“Doesn’t look like much,” Dana said. “But this will solve our locked car problem.”
They checked the road one last time and then hustled across the street. They got to the Beetle. Dana inserted the long flat knife under the windscreen. Hugo kept an eye out, eyes darting and frantic. They might have been fighting the invisible man.
CRASH!
Dana and Hugo ducked automatically, behind the parked car, clutching their rifles close. Their heads swiveled on their necks this way and that, eyes wide to take in as much of their surroundings as possible. They didn’t want anything to get the jump on them.
An aluminum trashcan lid rolled from an alley and out into the street. It made a lazy circle, getting smaller and smaller until it rattled in the middle of the road and fell silent.
Hugo tapped Dana on the shoulder.
“What?” Dana said.
Hugo said nothing and gripped her shoulder, hard.
“Ow!” Dana said. “What is it?”
Hugo pointed. Dana followed his shaking finger.
“Oh,” Dana said.
Chapter Two
THERE WERE perhaps forty or fifty of them, most wearing uniforms of national brands. They spilled from the back alley, bloody around their mouths from whatever they had fed on.
Dana and Hugo didn’t move a muscle.
“Maybe if we stay still they won’t know we’re here,” Hugo whispered.
“They will if you keep talking,” Dana said.
Hugo took the hint. They sat watching as the undead drifted this way and that, unsure which way to go, and with no stimulus, they drifted like a lazy tide.
They looked to be following the road. When you had nothing to follow, nothing to hunt, you might as well follow the path that had been built for the purpose. It was the easiest course of action.
Some of the creatures, not looking where they were going, bumped into the abandoned cars and vans. Dana prayed none of the alarms would go off. She was in luck. The undead shuffled past the cars and headed into the city.
Dana wondered how many such roving gangs of undead there were in Seattle now. There must have been hundreds of them. They would need to keep their eyes open while they were on the road. Run into a large enough group, and they’d be trapped inside their car unable to get away.
Finally, the last of the pack disappeared around the corner. Both Dana and Hugo relaxed.
“That was intense,” Hugo said, wiping his sweaty brow.
“Let’s get out of here,” Dana said.
She stood up and seized her car jacking equipment that still stuck out of the door—in the same position she’d left it. She gave it a twist, a pull, and lifted the lever inside. There was a click. Dana smiled.
She reached for the door handle and paused.
“What is it?” Hugo said.
“I just want to make sure there’s no other security device,” Dana said.
“Additional security device?” Hugo said. “On this piece of shit? They should count themselves lucky we’re taking it away.”
Dana shut her eyes and went through the usual procedure of jacking a car. She nodded, convinced she had done everything. The last thing they needed was for the alarm to go off and the undead to circle back on them.
Dana’s hand shook. She hadn’t been this frightened to hijack a car in… ever. The worst that could happen before was she would get picked up by the cops. Now, her life was on the line.
She calmed her nerves and reached for the handle. It popped open. Dana didn’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet.
She opened the backdoor on her side and tossed her weapons and ammunition onto the seat, putting her rifle on top so she could easily reach it at any time. Then she took a seat in the driving seat.
Hugo climbed in beside her. They shut their doors. Dana released the mouthful of oxygen she had been holding.
“That wasn’t so bad, huh?” Hugo said, sliding on his seat belt.
“I wish you would stop saying things like that,” Dana said.
“Like what?” Hugo said.
“Things that make me think something is going to jump out at us at any second,” Dana said.
“Sorry,” Hugo said.
‘Sorry’ wasn’t what Dana wanted to hear. She scratched her head in irritation. She wanted him to be harder than this, stronger. Not a flinching imbecile.
Dana gripped the panel underneath the steering wheel and yanked it loose. It came away in her hands, exposing the wires inside. For a simple car, there were an awful number of wires. But it was easy when you knew what you were looking for.
Dana sorted through the various bunches until she came to the ones she wanted. She extracted her knife and cut away the plastic casing. Then she cut the wires and tapped them against one another. They were live. She could feel the power running through them.
Dana pressed the wires together and wrapped them around each other. Then she took out the screwdriver and inserted it into the ignition. It only fit about a centimeter into the end, but it was enough.
“Here goes nothing,” Dana said.
She turned it. The car coughed, wheezed, and then jittered into life. It hadn’t been that long since the apocalypse had kicked off, which meant this old tin bucket had always been a poor starter.
There was something cute about the vehicle, cozy, like it was meant for short drives in the country on weekends. A far cry from the world it now inhabited.
Dana put the car into first gear and pulled off the forecourt and onto the street strewn with vehicles and corpses. Dana shifted into second and then third, keeping the revs low. She didn’t want to make lots of noise and get the attention of anything dangerous.
She decided not to go down the street they had seen the pack of walkers had gone down, for fear she might run into them again. She would drive slowly, running down an adjacent street. She and Hugo would keep their eyes peeled for traffic blockages.
“Why do you think they group together the way they do?” Hugo said.
“Huh?” Dana said.
“The infected,” Hugo said. “The crowd we saw before. There were what, forty, fifty of them? Why do they stick together like that?”
Dana shrugged.
“How should I know?” she said. “Maybe one makes a noise, attracting others. And then, because there are more of them, they make even more noises. Eventually they swell in number to a great horde.”
