End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Isherwood, E. E.

  Dad would be pissed if I let that happen.

  A crack of thunder made him flinch in shock because there was no flash of lightning to give him a warning.

  “Dude!” He exhaled.

  The rain clouds pressed in and turned the world green. The cars ahead slowed to walking speed, so Garth had to match it. He strangled the steering wheel in nervousness as he rode the bumper of the van ahead of him. He had to put on his headlights, which he realized everyone else had already done.

  As soon as his lights came on, a man appeared as he ran across the highway in front of Garth’s nearly-stopped taxi.

  “What the hell?” He tapped the brakes, but since he wasn’t going more than a few miles per hour, he stopped instantly. A horn complained from behind.

  The dark shape ran around the front fender and came up to his window.

  “Let me in!” The man tapped the glass with something metallic. It was difficult to make out in the torrential downpour, but he was almost certain it was a gun.

  “I’m out of service!” he shouted back. It would take a miracle for the guy to hear him because of the rain beating on the car.

  The soaked person looked like he could have been a serial killer from the local summer camp. Garth instantly knew terror.

  What do I do?

  The man tapped again, and he was joined by people pounding at the rear passenger window. Garth whipped his head in surprise to see who they were, but he only saw two indistinct black shapes in the murky rainstorm.

  The man on his left shouted to the new people, and deep male voices shouted back.

  Garth patted the pistol in his pocket again.

  What would Dad do?

  The closest man moved back a bit and brandished the metal object toward the newcomers. Those people cursed him, but Garth got a better look at the weapon when it flashed in the headlights of the car behind him.

  It wasn’t a gun, but a knife.

  Garth pulled out the PX 4 Storm Subcompact. It was identical to the one Dad carried in his truck. He and Dad had fired them together the first weekend he’d brought them home. Never in a million years had he thought he’d need to use it in self-defense.

  The highway crawled along at a few miles per hour. The pedestrians moved along with the cars, including the people surrounding his taxi.

  Just go away, he said to himself.

  He gripped the black metal weapon, but disappointed himself by how much his hand shook. He steadied his breathing and concentrated on the fundamentals he’d been taught.

  Always keep it pointed away from things you don’t want to kill. No finger on the trigger until ready to use. Always assume it’s loaded.

  He flicked off the safety and pulled the slide to rack the first round.

  Dad always said the best deterrent during a home invasion was the sound of a shotgun racking a round. He wished something similar would happen in his taxi, but the rain beat down on his windshield and roof so hard that Garth barely heard the round go in.

  The people continued to shout back and forth in the downpour. Garth sensed the desperation of both parties, and if he could have taken his time to pick up decent-looking stragglers, he might have let someone in. But not like this.

  The man with the knife cupped his hands around his face and looked inside Garth’s window. “You’ve got to let me in! These people have Ebola!” He pointed to the far side of the cab.

  The two drenched figures trotted up to the passenger-side front window to defend themselves from the charge. “No! Let us in! Radiation is almost here!”

  Garth kept the gun between the two front seats so neither party could see it, but he was ready. The cars ahead still weren’t making better than walking pace, so he couldn’t hit the gas and leave these people behind as he so desperately wanted.

  His vision lingered on the two shapes to his right because they didn’t appear armed. It was hard to tell if they were men or women because there was so much water dumping on them. The wipers swished back and forth like maniacs.

  “Please, I’m not—”

  The glass on his left shattered.

  Garth jerked away from the window. “Holy shit!”

  He accidentally fired the gun into the floorboard.

  “Fuck me!” he screamed in reaction to what he’d done.

  The man had used the butt of his knife to crack the side window. Pieces of glass were all over Garth, but the attacker ducked and ran after the gunshot at point-blank range.

  He checked the other side of the car, but those people also disappeared.

  The acrid smell of the gun blast filled the interior of the cab, adding emphasis to what he’d done, but it quickly dissipated due to the broken window. Diesel fumes and the stench of gasoline mixed with the odor of gunpowder and rain.

  Steady, Garth. At least you didn’t shoot your foot off.

  He would have never lived that down.

  Garth breathed in and out like he’d run a four-minute mile, and his ears rang from the surprise blast. He tried to look for where the bullet had gone into the floor but put that task aside as the cars started moving again.

  The silver car to his left moved along as if nothing had happened. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Was the guy going to roll down his window to see if Garth had been shot? That didn’t seem likely. Not in New York City.

  “Nothing to see here,” he quoted from a movie.

  There were no police lights visible in the darkness of the storm, which gave him mixed feelings. They weren’t going to arrest him for shooting the gun, but they weren’t going to arrest the knife-wielding window breaker either.

  Since he was on his own, he stayed alert for his attacker as best he could. He kept a sharp watch out his shattered side window since it was his weak spot now. The roar of rain and booms of thunder sounded distant and muted, even as his left side became soaked with rain.

  He never stopped checking his mirrors until they were moving fast enough that no one could catch him on foot. He let out a deep breath many minutes later, when he felt far enough away from the scene of the crime.

  Finally, thirty minutes after the attack, as he was on the bridge crossing from Staten Island into New Jersey, he put the safety back on and pushed the pistol into his pocket.

  He allowed himself to chuckle when he realized his greatest fear wasn’t that he’d been attacked with a knife, or that the police might pull him over. It was that he’d broken one of Dad’s rules about guns.

  Fifteen

  Bridgeport, California

  Buck watched the empty road leading back to the small town. Somewhere ahead a yellow VW waited with two gang members inside. Both were armed. Buck had his nine millimeter, and Connie carried the small caliber rifle. Buck counted the eighteen-wheeler as an added asset. The VW didn’t stand a chance against the big rig if it came down to a game of bumper cars.

  They passed the first house. “Here we go,” he said as matter-of-factly as possible. He turned onto a cross street and quickly reached the main drag.

  Bridgeport consisted of one major street with about five blocks of shops and motels. The wide street had four lanes of traffic through the business district, but the two north-bound lanes were the busiest.

  A few people walked the streets and waved at traffic as if curious to see the parade go through their sleepy town. The VW had last been seen behind a sign on the main road leading out of town. Buck hoped they were still there. He needed to reduce what he didn’t know.

  “This town is tiny,” Connie commented. The last house was already in sight.

  “I don’t see them,” he replied.

  Buck spotted a little girl fifty yards ahead standing in a small park. She continually pumped her arm in the universal “please blow your air horn” request.

  At that moment he was the only truck on the strip, so he had gotten her attention. She ran to the edge of the sidewalk and leaned into the road as if that would help.

  He glanced at Connie with a wry smile, then laid
on the air horn for a full five seconds.

  The girl jumped up and down and flailed her arms in happiness as they rolled by. Adults in the nearby park also waved.

  “Won’t it give us away?” Connie asked as she waved to the girl.

  “We’re the biggest, baddest thing on this road. Those assholes won’t miss us either way. I’m not going to pass up a chance to spread a little joy. Did you see her face?”

  “I did.” She giggled.

  Buck laughed, too. “I should warn you: my ex-wife used to say I sometimes had a tendency to act like a little boy.”

  She snickered. “I can see why.”

  “And she didn’t mean it as a compliment,” he added.

  “Some women can’t handle the typical male. They want to beat the boy out of them.” She sounded sympathetic, which made him want to ask what she meant, but as they left the edge of town, he saw them.

  “There!” he shouted. The bikers were parked behind a large green highway sign. Most of the car was visible because it sat so low to the ground.

  “What’s the plan, Buck?” Connie asked.

  “Do what we have to.”

  “Like at the motel?”

  “If we have to. If you point the rifle at them, be ready to pull the trigger.”

  Buck’s eyes went blurry for a second, and he slowed the truck in response. The sun went behind some clouds, and the sky turned dingy gray.

  “Whoa!” he exclaimed.

  “It wasn’t just me?” Connie asked. “The world shimmered for a second.”

  “I saw it too.” He regained his senses and ignored what had happened because he was about to engage the enemy. “Stay frosty.”

  The two burly men sat in the front seat, watching the truck as it rolled their way. “These guys wanted to be seen,” he said to himself.

  The gun was on his center console, but he had a more effective weapon. He needed to stop hoping for a good outcome. It was time to take charge and force the outcome he needed.

  “Hang on, guys,” he said to Connie and Mac. He pushed a couple of buttons on the dashboard.

  He accelerated to thirty miles per hour as he approached the VW, and he saw the two men both raise pistols and hang them out their windows. They planned to fire as he drove by. That was the moment he knew he was doing the right thing.

  Buck jammed the wheel to the right and pointed his 80,000-pound truck at the small sign and the tiny car behind it.

  The driver opened fire.

  “Shit!” Connie screamed as she ducked.

  A single bullet went through the glass of his windshield almost exactly where the rearview mirror would have been.

  Buck’s reaction was to duck a little, but he stayed high enough to see where he was going.

  A couple more gunshots clapped through the air, but Buck lost sight of the shooter because the VW went below the end of his hood.

  His heavy truck plowed into the road sign, which crumpled over on top of the Beetle. The Peterbilt continued through the sign’s moorings like they were made of plastic, then bashed into the nice yellow car with the two thugs inside.

  The impact made him and Connie lurch forward in their seats, but he’d pushed the buttons to deactivate the airbags so they didn’t deploy. Mac had it worse because he wasn’t buckled in. He slid on the floor and ran into the shifter with a yelp.

  The VW shot off like a yellow billiard ball crushed by a powerful break. Buck hit the brakes after contact, and his truck stayed upright as it slid on the shoulder of the road for thirty or forty yards. The car rolled many times because of its ball-like shape, and Buck imagined it would have kept going forever if it hadn’t tumbled into a small creek, out of view.

  Buck thought about getting out of the truck and making sure the guys were good and hurt, but he worried about getting unlucky. If one of the guys was still alive and still able to fire a gun, he could just as easily get a round between the eyes for his effort.

  The safe play was to back up his truck, rejoin the flow of traffic, and disappear.

  He reached down to check on Mac. He’d gotten on his feet and stood looking at his human with curiosity, as if to say, “Drive much?”

  Connie was fine, too.

  “I should have asked you if that was okay to do to your car,” he said with some regret. “I figured it was safer than either of us getting shot.”

  “I’ll send you a bill,” she said in a deadly serious tone before giggling to reveal it was a joke. “For the second time today, you protected me. Do it a third time, and you might have a permanent passenger. What do you say we get the hell out of here?”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Buck maneuvered the truck out of the impact zone, listening and feeling for any mechanical changes in his truck. To his relief, the truck responded when he backed up. Nothing was jammed in the axles, and no tires were blown. There were no creaks or squeals.

  He entered the traffic lane and ran through the gears until he hit the highway speed limit.

  “Let’s hope that’s the last we see of those scumbags,” he replied with as much hope as he could summon.

  They had to slow two miles down the road. Buck couldn’t believe his eyes. Traffic had come to a stop, but not because of a fantastic crash.

  It was June in the Nevada desert, but snow was coming down like cotton-candy whitewash.

  “What now?” he asked.

  Canberra, ACT, Australia

  Destiny walked with Zandre around the side of the house, but her friend tripped and fell as he reached the stairs to the wrap-around porch.

  “Zandre!” she said with surprise.

  A dizzy feeling forced her to kneel to avoid falling.

  “Wow,” she said as she blinked away the sensation.

  “I’m all right,” Zandre huffed. “Just nicked my ego a bit.”

  “I felt woozy too,” she replied.

  They both got to their feet and stood for a moment, but Zandre seemed anxious to forget about it. “Come on. You have to see what we’ve got here.”

  They went around to the back of the house to where half a dozen men stood over a long row of animal carcasses. They’d been lined up under the awning of the porch to keep them out of the sun.

  She first noticed the Tasmanian Tigers.

  A middle-aged man strode up to Zandre. “How the bloody hell are ya, mate? You’ve got a helluva place here. When are you fixin’ to go out again?” He fidgeted with the gun slung over his shoulder like it, too, was anxious to go out.

  Zandre was dismissive. “Soon. I’ve got to show my friend here what’s been going on. This could be important for science.”

  The man seemed unimpressed. “Well, as long as I get one of these trophies. Other blokes say you can’t miss out there.” He pointed to the dead animals as evidence.

  “Yes, yes. Soon.” Zandre pulled her away from the man and went beyond the section of Tasmanian Tigers. There were a couple of large marsupials she recognized as recently extinct, and some smaller mammals she’d never seen before, even in books. They then came to a larger beast.

  “This funny-looking thing is like a cross between a lion and a black puma. Its coal-colored pelt is totally inappropriate for Australia. We have no idea…”

  The animal was beautiful and exactly as he described it, right down to the furry lion’s mane, except its fur was all-black.

  “All this stuff is just waiting out there to be taken,” Zandre said with excitement. “A world of wonderful, beautiful, and very mountable animals.”

  Faith’s words came back to her. Things were messed up with time. That suggested these animals had never seen human hunters and had no idea they needed to run away. If she could get out there and figure out where they were coming from, maybe she could protect them.

  Don’t do it, Dez.

  She had to restrain her preservationist instincts in the presence of the hunters. Based on the little she’d seen, they weren’t likely to want to give up this once-in-a-lifetime chance to bag more of the exotic cr
eatures.

  A man in his mid-twenties crashed through the rear screen door like he’d been thrown through it. He looked around until he saw Zandre. “Z! Radio just lit up. The second group up by Walker Hill swears they saw that fucking Duck of Doom again!”

  A few men standing nearby looked at him with interest, but not much more.

  The man seemed to figure no one believed him. “Richard Thompson is with that group. He says he’ll pay ten million US dollars to anyone who can get him one. I’m going out!”

  The bounty lit a fire under the hunters. The whole camp radiated excitement as the men ran around gathering weapons and gear. Destiny stood where she was, unsure of what to do. The dead animals on the porch were unique and rare, and very valuable to the research community, but if there was something unique and alive, out there, it could be priceless.

  Zandre looked at her like he wanted to head out as well.

  Destiny paced back and forth, trying to walk through her options. She could wait until a specimen was brought in or she could go out and see one alive.

  “Well, mate, I’m not here to fuck spiders,” she replied with the common saying.

  “No, that’s not your style,” he said with a laugh.

  “You have a tranquilizer gun I can borrow?” she added.

  He almost gasped. “You want to take one alive?”

  “I have to see it, yes. You still have a four-wheeler I can use?”

  He nodded. “Better hurry. Everyone is going out.”

  Her whole life had been spent studying animals. Now she had a chance to study something that had been extinct for thousands of years. Whatever magic Faith had done at SNAKE, she wasn’t going to ignore the opportunity to observe it any more than the hunters could ignore the call to kill it.

  “Bring the tranq gun down to the pond. I’m leaving right now so I have wheels.”

  “Okay, Dez, but I’m going after it with real bullets. Ten million would keep this place afloat for ten generations.”

  “Thanks, Zandre. I understand,” she replied as she went toward the row of gas-powered four-wheelers. “You brought me here to see something amazing. Those bodies are part of that, but I have to see a living specimen.”