by Greg Dragon
She licked her lips. “You went down. I freaked and flashed. Like a lightning strike in telep and the ones near me dropped dead. I thought, I thought I killed you too. It happened before I healed you.”
He hugged her. “It’s self defense, not vengeance. There’s a difference.”
“These were people I passed on the street.”
He rubbed her back. “I know.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist. “My healing is stronger.”
“Lucky for me.” They walked to the dead exotic with webbed feet and hands.
“This exotic bit you. Your blood gave him seizures or an allergic reaction before I flashed.”
Scot cut his eyes at her. “Exotic? Accurate description, and it fits all. Is this worldwide or localized?”
“Worldwide, but not everywhere yet. We could get nuked before it spreads all over.”
“Can we make a difference?” he asked.
“Yes.” She looked again for her sister and mother. Not a trace. Sadness stabbed her. What if she could’ve healed Kimmy? Didn’t she owe her sister to find her and try?
“Look at the web’s claws, they’re hard. Why bash my head in and not stab me?”
“They’re learning like we are. It feared injury.” She kicked its chest. “They have exoskeleton chest armor.”
He squatted. “They grow armor, but we’re left vulnerable? What does this imply?”
She didn’t want to express her internal fears. “This breed isn’t supposed to be here. They pose the biggest threat. They use telep too.”
“Mine’s vanished because of the head whack. Think it will come back?”
Eddie Jean didn’t know. “After you rest, I’ll try to boost your signal.” She found a stick and touched the exotic’s eyes. “Protective scales,” she said. “No hair, just bristle, but you can still see he formed from a man.”
Scot reached over and pointed to a spot where an eyebrow would be. “A gill?”
“Let’s roll it over.”
Four slits at the nape. They rolled the web back supine. Eddie Jean touched the skin on its legs. It was dusky gray and felt like sandpaper. When she was young, the family had stopped to visit relatives on Dauphin Island during summer vacation. A deep-sea fishing rodeo was in progress. Her dad had lifted her up to touch the shark’s body. The exotic’s skin felt similar.
“Amphibious?” she asked him. “Webbed extremities and gills, not like the others.”
Scot shrugged. “Armor would make them sink, right?”
“Unless it softens in water or they excrete an enzyme when under attack. After attack, the armor shrinks. This species formed from humans infected with Anchorons.”
“I’ll accept DNA upgrades, but physical changes are impossible. It kills scientific principles.”
“My fingers left a purple blister over your wound. How come you can believe in my healing but not evolution? The Anchorons had intelligence.”
He shook his head. “So, we have three types of humans. Those like us, those like we used to be, and regulars. Four types of exotics counting the Swarmers, right?”
“So far. The West Coast could be different or unaffected.”
“Okay, focus on here. This web made the evolutionary jump. He’s fully changed. Are the others failures? In time, they’ll die out?”
“The failures could be a result of chronic diseases or blood infections.”
“Guess we’re back to survival of the fittest,” he said.
“The webs change everything.”
“Are you afraid they’ll knock us off the top of the food chain?”
She nodded.
“Let’s check its teeth.” Scot struck the jaw with the rifle butt. Its jaw gaped.
Eddie Jean flinched. It had two rows of ripping teeth.
Scot looked pale. “We’re their food source.”
Eddie Jean walked over to sit on a tree trunk. A new thought had depressed her.
He followed. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m tired.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. “The flood of emotions you’re experiencing is normal. Soldiers go through it after close combat. Let me help you for a change. Talk to me.”
She shook her head.
“Don’t keep secrets like Q.”
She didn’t want him to feel guilty or think he owed a debt because she chose to heal him over Kimmy. “I thought I lost you,” she blurted before the tears and hurt poured out. “I can’t, I can’t lose anyone else.” She started shaking, sniffing, and hiccupping.
“You won’t. Don’t give up—even if I don’t make it. You get up and go on.”
She wiped her face. “I never expected a brutal killing world. I expected—”
“Paradise? Humans fought our way to the top of the food chain before, and we can do it again. Right, soccer girl?”
Eddie Jean smiled. “I’ve been training to help people, not learning fight skills.”
“You were kicking ass,” he said, pointing at the corpses. “Don’t step backward, we need you. I need you.”
She shook her head. “I can’t heal and kill. I’m not meant to do both.”
“You healed me. People who won’t fight,” he said, taking her hand, “will be weeded out. You’ll have to do your part.”
She stared at their locked hands. “Most people were upgraded. Who will I be healing?”
He frowned.
“Q told me people would come to me to heal their monsters, and he said I should refuse.”
“Why?”
“He said Swarmers’ basic natures were altered, and healing doesn’t reach their minds.”
Scot stood. “I’m not used to you acting like this. You’re the optimist, not me. This is our time. We’re poison to the invaders, and they want to destroy us. If we pursue our personal dreams, we’ll waste our best chance to defeat them.”
“I saw Kimmy when I healed you.”
“You’re conflicted. You wonder if she’d come back like a serial killer or a sweet little girl. You feel guilty because you weren’t here when she got sick. Ease up on yourself.”
How did he know about her guilt? She licked her lips and nodded.
“You’re looking for excuses to duck the fight. Now is the time to help people. We’ll form a resistance and use telep to tell others how to fight them. We’ll use coordinated attacks. Once we’ve got them on the run, we find our families. Agreed?”
“What if everyone is still evolving? Stop the killing and see what happens.”
“They’re attacking! Offense is better than defense. Until we know the score, we protect our own. We fight, we use our skills, and we make sure the new kind doesn’t end us. You in?”
She shook her head. “I have to find Kimmy.” She stared at their locked hands, expecting him to let go, but he didn’t.
“This is survival. You have to deal with the situation. It’s our turn to step up and help people. Isn’t your thing helping people?”
Halfway commitments always failed. She had another choice to make. Healing a Swarmer had never been done. Although Q had told her she was nature’s answer to Swarm, she knew he lied. He had a way of weaving truth between lies. She had to find balance. She could waste time and energy trying to do the impossible, or she could help people the best she could. As she had always done in the past, she chose to follow her heart. She squeezed his hand.
“I have to find and help Kimmy.”
He stared off in the distance. “I wasn’t truthful,” Scot said. “I’d give anything to have my dad back.” He looked into her eyes. “I don’t blame you for wanting to heal her. Let’s go into Cloudland and hook up with the others. We need to get a handle on the scope of the situation. After our group is united, we’ll come back and find her. Deal?”
She nodded and tried not to act emo. “Together?”
He nodded and put his free hand over their clasped ones. “We’re connected, and I’m not going to deny it. I promise, I won’t let go.”
The End
About the Author
R.V. Doon loves to write stories with added thrills and chills no matter the genre. Swarmers is her first apocalyptic thriller. The story seeds sprouted during a forensic brain cutting, and she wrote the story from there. Doon claims the best way to relieve work-related stress is to read scary stories, because it changes your brain chemistry.
In any case, she hopes reading Swarmers will evoke comparisons to The Strain and The Walking Dead as a lethal virus with no known cure is awakened and goes airborne in a small town. After every catastrophe, unlikely leaders arise to help the stunned survivors survive. Swarmers is their story.
Other books by R.V. Doon:
The War Nurse: Chosen as a 2015 Next Generation Finalist in Historical Fiction. The War Nurse is a historical thriller and adventure story.
Double Blind: Is a medical thriller that will make you think of whistle-blowers in a new light.
Body Wave: Is Book 1 in the Text-A-Nurse Cozy Mystery Series, featuring Reece Carson RN as an amateur sleuth. In this book, Reece discovers secrets can kill.
Body Aches: Book 2 in the Text-A-Nurse Cozy Mystery Series. Reece finds out lies are more dangerous than secrets.
Body Magnet: Book 3 in the Text-A-Nurse Cozy Mystery Series. Reece discovers that black-hearted lies create coldblooded killers.
Find R. V. Doon:
Blog
Facebook
Twitter
Thrown Away
Parts 1-3
Glynn James
PART ONE
IN A FALLEN WORLD
He sensed them in the darkness, all around, moving quickly through the building, room by room as they searched. Every few minutes the silence was broken by loud crashing sounds as they broke into another area, the clatter of broken wood scattering across rotten floorboards and cracked concrete, or the terrible, grief-stricken and desperate cries of those who had been found, their hiding places uncovered. He could hear the thud of boots sometimes, echoing through the corridors, or the creaking of the building’s very structure as it protested against the abuse.
Centuries old and given to spontaneous collapse, the tenement buildings of the outer zone had ceased to be safe long before any of their current residents had been born, but the crumbling ruins were the only real shelter for many of the inhabitants of the zone, the only place to hide from the danger on the streets or the often unforgiving weather.
Most of the dangers lay outside of the crumbling walls – things that wandered the streets at night that were far from human, but the hunting squads from the city travelled deep into the darkness of the buildings, seeking those who would avoid capture. Finally, the noise that everyone dreaded could be heard in the distance – the rising hum and the sharp crackling buzz as a stun rifle was fired.
Jack sat in silence, listening, willing his nerves to calm and his heart rate to slow. The sounds were getting closer now, and he knew they were in a nearby corridor, possibly just a few rooms away. He heard boots shuffling along the floor, and the crash of rubbish as it was kicked aside – the barrier that he had built outside provided no protection, was merely an inconvenience for the heavily armoured troopers whose faces had never been seen, at least by anyone who remained to tell of them.
Jack had never known where the raiding parties took the captured, for no one ever returned. There were always tales, and rumours of course, but no one that he had ever met had confirmed any of them.
The corridors of the sprawling, old building were littered with the junk and debris of decades, most of it useless and left there because there was nowhere else for it to go. But the trash also acted as a territorial marker, a sign of neighbouring borders, of marked out claims. Often it was piled up to waist height, to act as a makeshift defensive barrier, and a way to slow intruders down or ward them away. Folks who lived in the area would know to stay away, and recognise the barrier for what it was, but the Hunters saw it as a sign of life, of someone to capture and drag away to their prison vehicles. The vehicles had no windows on the sides or the back, and Jack suspected it might be completely dark inside them, but that was something else that no one had confirmed. No one ever came back.
His heart thumped harder in his chest and he doubled his efforts to control his breathing, to remain silent, but a cold trickle of sweat heightened the twitching of already ragged nerves as it ran down his neck. Jack knew there was a chance, if only very small, that they could pass him by. The Hunters might enter the room, their pinpoint searchlights flickering over the walls, passing over the cracked paint and the curled and mould-ridden wallpaper, skittering over the rubble and litter covered ground and not stopping as they zipped past the broken wardrobe that was his hiding place. Even if they did look into the wardrobe, they could still miss him as he lay huddled in the bottom, covered by rags and old clothing. With this thought, he crouched lower and did his best to be a pile of discarded junk.
It was possible. But maybe this is my time? He thought. They could pass you by, like before, but they are smart, not stupid, and you know that they see more than you think they do, don’t you? What if they did take you?
He tried to ignore the thoughts. From his hiding place he could only see a tiny slice of the derelict room beyond. Both doors of the wardrobe were still attached, even if they did hang at odd angles, and he had pulled them as closed as they would go. It only left a few inches in between the doors, so his vision was limited, but his hearing was sharp, and when the first Hunter stepped into the room Jack slowed his breathing to almost nothing. Instinct kicked in and he lay there, perfectly still and silent, not knowing how long he could keep it up, but hoping that the search would be over quickly.
Slow and shallow, slow and shallow, he thought. Repeating the mantra in his mind, over and over. If he could just keep this up long enough, and if he made no noise, they would go away, wouldn’t they? The old man that Jack had once travelled with, so very long ago, had taught him how to hold his breath and stay perfectly still, had even beaten him with a stick until he got it right. And so, over the years, he had done this before in many other places and not been found.
But I’ve also never been this close to them, he thought. Not this close. Just a few feet away. They can see through walls – that’s what some folks claimed, and they can see you in the darkness. His breathing wavered very slightly at this thought. If they could see him anyway, wasn’t he just delaying the inevitable, waiting and waiting only to be taken like all the others? But what choice did he have?
The same choice you had back then, he thought. You have your machetes. But what good would they be against the armour of the Hunters? If you had the guts to use them, you would have done it back then, back when it really mattered.
The Hunters never searched thoroughly, they just swept through an area like a hurricane, raiding entire buildings in just minutes, satisfied if they found someone to stun and carry away. Jack would hear the buzz of a stun rifle and the thud as a discovered victim hit the ground, and then heavy boots clomping away as the Hunters carried their latest catch to the vehicles that awaited them in the street – the vehicles with no windows.
Sometimes there would be a struggle if the Hunters found a group of people together, but the fight was always over quickly. There was little defence against the weapons that the soldiers used. Sticks, knives and metal pipes were no match for reactive armour and a stun rifle that could knock you out cold, at fifty yards, with one shot. Fists were useless against a shock stick that could render you unconscious with just one strike, twitching and writhing on the ground as the electrical pulse surged through your nervous system. And if the resistance was too high then they would just throw in a grenade and stun everyone in the room. One loud thump and it would be over. Except the grenades didn’t always stun – sometimes they caused more damage than that. Sometimes there would be bodies left behin
d.
The outer zone of the city – the area beyond the glowing barrier – was massive. Thousands and thousands of square miles of ruined, crumbling decay. Endless desolate streets lined with empty shells that had once been buildings – their windows shattered, doors long taken for firewood, bricks and stone cracked and collapsing, leaving holes that looked like gaping wounds. It was among these ruins that the destitute – the people not allowed to live on the inside of the barrier – were forced to make their homes, to scavenge and scrape some form of life from the remains of a fallen world. These people were never permitted within the confines of the barrier, but for some reason that no one had ever discovered, the people on the inside were capturing the ones on the outside, and in large numbers.
Where were they taken? This was the question everyone wanted an answer to, but one that was never given. There were places that were left alone – larger outer zone communities, workhouses – anywhere that had a dense population – these weren’t raided. Maybe there was too much risk involved attacking such heavily defended locations? He didn’t know. What he did know was that to claim your own pitch in many of the bigger hovels was a fight that most people couldn’t win, so they were forced to live in the surrounding ruins. Those were the ones who would be hunted and taken.
It had been nearly three months since Jack was last in an area targeted by the Hunters. With such a vast city to search, it was rare to even see them in the distance. They only came down from the inner city once every few weeks, that much he did know. But knowing where and when they would strike next was an art form that very few had mastered, a total mystery to most.
And it was so fast when it happened, the huge Dropship soaring across the sky at a speed that was dazzling for such a massive behemoth of a vehicle. It would land within seconds of appearing on the horizon, the huge black shape plummeting towards the ground as if it were about to crash. But it never did crash. Seconds after the blast of jets were unleashed, the Dropship was on the ground, spewing out a torrent of fast-moving armoured carrier vehicles that burst through the clouds of dust kicked up by the beast’s arrival. The vehicles quickly sped through the streets at a terrifying speed, and when they arrived at their target location, dozens of armed squads would jump from the trucks, surging into the ruined buildings in search of vagrants. In search of prey.
