Hunger (The Hunger Series Book 1)

by Jeremiah Knight

  When she reached the far end of the room, she found Jakob lifting a garage door. A garage door in a basement? But this wasn’t just any garage door. It was thick and solid, windowless steel. Like the basement door. Jakob was pushing it up, but only with the help of grinding gears. As the door rose higher, the lights began to fade, sucking the remaining battery life to raise the heavy slab of metal.

  Footsteps spun her around. It was Peter—she hoped—coming down the stairs. The booming footfalls were chased by a warbling shriek she recognized, and it made the tiny spires of hair atop her head prickle. Anne took hold of her hand and squeezed. Ella reached her free hand down for her machete, but it wasn’t there. The weapon was still outside, laying in a heap with all the clothing and supplies that had taken her this far.

  Peter, wearing a single backpack, leapt into the basement, spinning around and slamming the metal door shut, but not before three long, brown, talon-tipped fingers reached through and pushed. Peter started sliding back, but before the Stalker could open the door wide enough to enter, Peter shoved his shotgun into the stairwell and pulled the trigger. The cacophonous boom was followed by a wailing shriek. The brown fingers snapped back as the force of the shot shoved the creature back into the stairwell.

  Peter moved to shut the metal door again, but his eyes went wide, and he dove to the side instead. The metal door smashed open, clanging against the stairwell wall. A female Stalker hit the floor awkwardly, falling sideways and slamming into the wall. The stunned creature looked like all the others Ella had seen, its once human face lacking a nose. Black eyes blinked. Its long tail thrashed back and forth, rattling, guiding the others no doubt already flooding into the house. Its long arms and legs scrabbled at the smooth floor, claws digging gouges.

  Before the monster could right itself, Peter, who had turned his dive into a roll, came up, spun around and pulled the shotgun trigger again. The Stalker’s head was turned inside out and splattered against the wall. Peter turned and ran as the lights dimmed to almost nothing. Screeching and thundering footsteps chased him from the stairwell. Ella saw them emerge a moment before the lights went out. The grinding gears stopped.

  For a moment, the world was just sound. Jakob moving behind her, breathing hard. Peter feeling his way through the wide open space. The Stalkers, smashing everything around them. Screaming for their prey. Giving chase. While Peter couldn’t see, the Stalkers had excellent night vision. When the lights went out, the basement became the perfect hunting ground for the nocturnal predators.

  A flashlight came on with a click. The light cut through the darkness from Peter’s position.

  “How much time?” Peter shouted.

  “Ten seconds behind,” Jakob replied. Ella glanced back. On the other side of the mostly open garage door was a large Dodge Ram, reinforced with plates of metal, and covered in spikes and barb wire. It looked like something from a Mad Max movie. Jakob had the door open and was helping Anne climb into the back seat.

  When Jakob leaned over the front seat and turned the key, the truck roared to life, its rear lights casting beams of red. Ella looked back to Peter. He was just thirty feet away, waving her on. But he wasn’t alone. A single Stalker had closed the distance, nearly within striking range. The rest were still fifty feet back, clumsily careening through the maze of contents in the room.

  “Look out!” Ella shouted, as the nearest Stalker leaped forward, its long legs extended, claws open wide.

  Peter dove forward, flipping over to land and slide on his back. He brought the shotgun up, fired—and missed. Instead of putting a hole in the Stalker, he simply took a chunk out of the ceiling. The Stalker landed on Peter’s arms, pinning them to his sides. With a snarl that revealed its gleaming white teeth—now pink in the truck’s light—the Stalker lunged for Peter’s neck.

  With a war cry, Ella stepped forward and drove a kick into the side of the Stalker’s head. “Weapon!” Ella shouted back to Jakob. He leaned out of the truck, eyes going wide at the sight of his pinned father. While the Stalker hissed at Ella, Jakob drew his pistol and flung it to Ella. She caught the weapon and with surprising swiftness, spun around and pulled the trigger, putting a single round in the Stalker’s head.

  The monster fell limp atop Peter.

  The mob closed in.

  Ella bent down and took Peter’s arm with one hand, helping him to escape the Stalker’s girth. With the other hand, she calmly raised the pistol, found her targets and pulled the trigger. The rhythmic pop...pop...pop of the handgun was followed by pain-filled shrieks and toppling supplies, as the struck creatures thrashed and flailed on the floor.

  Peter didn’t offer any thanks when he got back to his feet. He simply shouted. “Time!”

  “Thirty seconds back!” Jakob yelled.

  Ella let out a shout of surprise when Peter’s arm wrapped around her waist, lifted her off the ground and carried her into the garage. She was hefted up and flung over the flatbed hatch, landing hard on the metal floor. She was about to complain when Peter dove over after her. He slapped his palm on the metal floor twice and shouted, “Go, go, go!”

  Tires screeched.

  Peter sat up with the shotgun, but he didn’t aim at the horde of Stalkers nearly at the door. Instead, he turned the weapon to the side and pulled the trigger. Sparks flew as the buckshot struck metal, destroying whatever support had held the large door in place. The door, a large sheet of metal, dropped. The fastest of the Stalkers dove forward and slid through, losing its tail to the door. The second in line had its head crushed. The rest slammed against the other side of the metal wall, attacking it with audible savagery.

  As the truck raced away through the darkness, Ella sighted the tailless Stalker, which had gotten back to its feet, and she pulled the trigger. The monster twitched and fell, just as darkness claimed it again. The truck shifted gears and accelerated to what seemed like a dangerous speed.

  He needs to slow down, Ella thought. We’re safe. We’re...

  Peter and Jakob’s shouted numbers mixed with her vision of the barrels of ammonium nitrate, and then clicked. It was a countdown. Audible. They’d rigged the whole place to explode.

  She looked Peter in the eyes, his face lit by the flashlight he held. Shouting over the roar of the engine, which was amplified by the tunnel’s confines, she asked, “Are we going to make it?”

  When he replied, she was surprised to find he’d learned how to sugar coat bad news. “It will be close.”

  The sudden, blinding light pursuing them through the tunnel, racing faster than the sound of the explosion that generated it, answered her more honestly, with a resolute and resounding, ‘No.’

  12

  Ella felt heat on her back, but it was quickly smothered by Peter, who threw himself atop her and shouted, “Hold on!”

  I can’t even move, she thought at him, but said nothing. She felt the truck jolt and pitch upwards. At first, she thought they’d struck something and gone airborne, but the angle never changed.

  We’re heading up a ramp. Back to the surface.

  And then she learned that Peter’s shouted warning and his body pinning her down had nothing to do with the heat, sound and pressure wave pursuing them. It had everything to do with their exit from the tunnel. Wood shattered with the crack of an explosion. The armored truck slammed through a floor, bursting out of the tunnel, this time actually catching air. As the vehicle bounced back to its wheels, she got a view past Peter’s shoulder.

  It was a glimpse of a barn interior. Old beams. A hay loft. The tang of animals long since deceased reached her nose, complimenting the image and triggering memories of an easier time, when human beings were at the top of the food chain, rather than somewhere closer to the bottom.

  Her father had been a lot like Peter, a Vietnam Vet turned farmer. She often wondered if Peter’s entry into the military hadn’t been to impress him. She hoped not, especially when circumstances had pulled them apart. But he’d taken to the life well enough. It had suited him
. And her father had approved of Peter. Only Peter. When she had told him about Peter’s marriage to Kristen, she could have sworn there were tears in the man’s eyes. But by then she was more interested in genetics than in men. That’s what she had told herself...until fate had brought them back into geographic proximity.

  Who was it that said women fall for men like their fathers? Probably Freud. Whoever it was, he was right. At least about Peter.

  The truck shattered a second wooden barrier, casting aside large, faded red planks like a rhino charging through balsa wood. A shower of large red paint flecks fluttered around them for a moment, butterflies in flight, and then they were left behind.

  The engine roared louder. The wheels buzzed over the clear concrete keeping the ExoGenetic fields at bay. Peter rolled away, sitting up and looking back, his eyes squinting. Expectant.

  She sat up to join him, shrugging away when he put a hand on her shoulder to keep her down. Her protest was cut short by the reason for their pell-mell drive through the tunnel and out the barn. She saw it in the distance first. An orange ball, framed by fluttering debris that used to be a house.

  Peter’s house.

  He destroyed it because of me.

  All those memories...

  As the fiery tumult rose higher, three hundred yards behind the barn, the explosion, which had chased them down the tunnel, compressed and accelerated, reaching the barn. A roaring cough of fire burst from the tunnel’s throat like some ancient buried dragon, and the flames rose up into the barn. The old walls gave way and lifted skyward, propelled by the explosion. The pressure wave hit the truck, knocking them at an angle, just as they hit the wheat field.

  Jakob righted the truck’s course, but they were still in the field, surrounded by the hiss of wheat being shredded, leaving clouds of dust and young seeds in their wake.

  “Shit,” Peter said. His voice was impossibly calm, but his eyebrows were twisted up, following the course of his eyes, as debris was launched up and over them. He shuffled to the front of the truck bed, leaning on a long box covered by a tarp. He tapped on the window twice.

  Anne flinched at the sound, but when she saw Peter, she opened the small sliding window. “Debris is falling from above. Floor it, but keep us straight unless something falls in your path.”

  “I’m already flooring it!” Jakob shouted back.

  Peter turned back and up, eyes widening. He crouched down low, clinging to the side of the truck. Ella followed his eyes and saw a hay bale, trailing bits of loose hay like a comet’s tail, descending toward them.

  The hay landed just feet behind the truck, where they had been a fraction of a second before. It exploded with a cloud of old, rotted grass that no modern, man-eating cow could find remotely interesting.

  Wood came next. While some of the stuff fluttered in the air, carried by the heat rising from the explosion, thicker support beams where thrown free like colossal javelins. Ella nearly fell from the truck bed as Jakob jerked the wheel. Peter caught her, reeling her back in just as they passed the long wooden beam now jutting out of the earth. Had Jakob not turned, they would have crashed. Had Peter not pulled her back in, she would have been decapitated. Despite having survived in the wilds on her own, she was quickly seeing how these two men would help keep her and Anne alive.

  She just hoped it was worth it, and that everything she’d told Peter wasn’t a lie. The lab was real, but she hadn’t heard from the people there in a year. The place could be overrun by now. Maybe the people had changed. Maybe predators had made the swim from the mainland. Or maybe something from the water had adapted to live on land. The possibilities were as endless as they were horrible.

  The truck carved a zig-zag path through the field as debris fell all around. Ella and Peter flattened themselves to the truck bed floor, watching the cloud of debris fly past overhead and falling around them, and in the case of a pair of shears, puncture the tarp-covered case above their heads.

  But then they were clear and all the debris was falling behind them. The truck bounced. Tires squealed. They had reached the road. Jakob cranked the steering wheel hard to the left, but they still overshot the road, plowing back into the field on the other side. Spewing gouts of dirt, the truck nearly completed a fishtailing circle, but then they found the road again. Slowing, Jakob pulled onto the pavement and continued forward at a manageable pace.

  “Keep it straight and steady,” Peter said. “If you have to turn, honk first.”

  The boy looked back and nodded, his eyes wide, but still in control.

  Like father, like son.

  Peter stood, one foot on the truck bed, the other on the tarp-covered container. He gripped the fog lights atop the truck’s roof for balance and looked back. The way the sun caught his rugged features and the wind caught his flannel shirt, he looked like a model in an L. L. Bean catalog, but his face was all wrong. Instead of eye-squinching confidence, she saw regret.

  She followed his eyes to the rising column of smoke. The home where his son had been born, and if she was right, where he had buried his wife.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but her voice was carried away by the breeze, and she didn’t bother repeating it. Because while she felt bad, she wasn’t sorry. Not really. True, within fourteen hours of taking her and Anne in, he’d lost everything of the life he had known before, but most people on Earth had lost that years ago. It was only because of her warning, and wealth, that his family had managed to survive. That didn’t change the fact that her work had caused all this, and for that she was sorry. But she needed his help. And if this was what it took to get it, so be it. He might have helped her anyway, especially after she told him about Anne, but now there would be no looking back. No doubt that anywhere but forward was the right direction. She needed that from him, because looking forward was hard to do when constantly looking over your shoulder.

  She stood next to him, looking ahead. The road was crumbling on the side, giving way to the long roots of the aggressive wheat. In a few more years, the road would be overgrown. A few errant stalks of wheat were already rising from the cracks.

  Her eyes turned skyward. They were headed east, covering more ground every minute than she had been covering in an hour. Traveling on foot meant leaving false trails, walking silently and resting frequently, especially with a twelve year old girl. Anne was a good traveler. Had learned how to survive. But she had her limits.

  Everyone did.

  Ella looked up at Peter and wondered what his were, hoping she’d never have to find out.

  “Hey, Dad,” Jakob called from the front.

  Peter lowered his head.

  “You want me to pull over so you can drive?” Jakob asked.

  “You’re doing fine,” Peter replied.

  “But—”

  “Son,” Peter said.

  Jakob’s mouth clamped shut, knowing his father was about to speak.

  “Pick up the pace. Stay on the road. If anything gets in front of you—”

  “I’ll go around it,” Jakob said.

  “Actually, I want you to run it down.”

  Jakob flinched as though slapped. “They’re still back there?”

  Peter nodded, maintaining his absolute calm. While Jakob returned to the task of driving, the engine revving faster, Peter turned to Anne, who was seated in the back seat. “Hey, honey. There’s a case under the seat in front of you.”

  Anne bent, found the case and pulled it free. It was too big to pass back.

  “Open it up,” Peter instructed. “Inside are two black bands with hooks on either side.” Anne dug through the case, finding the bands. “Those are the ones. Thanks.” He sat on the tarp, quickly untangling the two hooked bands. When he was done, he handed one to Ella.

  “What’s this for?” she asked.

  He tied his around his waist, and then clipped either end into holes on the sides of the bed. The band held him rooted in place. “Things are going to get bumpy.” He pointed to the field, behind and to the rig
ht. “The field is chasing us.”

  Her head snapped around. He was right. Wisps of what looked like wheat, were pursuing them through the field. Some of the Stalkers had survived. A dozen by the looks of it. Maybe more. “We can outrun them in the truck.”

  “In about a mile, the wheat field is going to end, and the road is going to get all kinds of bendy. If they’re as persistent as you say, they’ll catch up. Now, before you buckle up, open the crate behind me and give me what’s inside.”

  Ella threw the tarp off the large wooden crate. It wasn’t locked, so she lifted the top and looked in. The crate was full of gear and supplies, but she quickly understood which item Peter was interested in—the heavy looking tripod, folded down and compact, to which a drum-fed light machine gun was attached.

  Having fled the Stalkers for months, eking out the worst kind of living, slogging through deplorable conditions to avoid the hunting grounds of other predators, she lifted the big gun with a grunt and a grin. This is more like it, she thought, too eager to see the Stalkers’ demise to remember that the noise wasn’t going to go unnoticed.

  13

  It took just a minute to talk Ella through bolting the tripod to the truck bed, but it felt like time had slowed, shifting hours with each tick of the clock. After the first bolt, she moved quickly, securing the tripod and mounting the M249 drum-fed machine gun, transforming the truck into what the military called a ‘Technical,’ which was just a fancy word for ‘improvised fighting vehicle.’ The slowness came from the knowledge that they might be attacked at any second, and if he fired the heavy weapon before it was secure, his aim would flounder with each kickback.

  After firing the last bolt through the hole in the tripod’s foot and into the metal floor, Ella clipped the hooks of her own security band to the sides of the truck, a few feet behind him. They could be tossed and bounced and smashed all about, but they wouldn’t be flung free, which was a good thing—most of the time.

  “Where did you get this thing?” Ella asked. “Weren’t they illegal?”