Blackbird's Fall

Evernight
Publishing ®

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2015
Jenika
Snow

 
ISBN: 978-1-77233-569-9

Cover Artist: Sour Cherry
Designs

Editor:
Karyn
White

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized
reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.
 
No part of this book may be used or
reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All
names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

This is to
all the readers that asked for more in the Savages series.

BLACKBIRD’S FALL

Savages, 3

Jenika
Snow

Copyright © 2015

Preface

It
was a flu vaccine that collapsed civilization, which destroyed humanity.

What
was supposed to help prevent a simple virus ended up being the cure for
cancer.
It had been hailed worldwide as a miracle, a medical
breakthrough, one where the scientists had thought they had come across
something monumental. They had, but what they brought to humans was a hell on
earth. The ones who had gotten the vaccine started exhibiting signs of
cannibalism and necrosis immediately. The infection was far too advanced and
spread too quickly for a cure to be created.

Everyone
thought they were safe if they stayed away and waited for the sickness to die
off. The scientists and physicians refused to take responsibility for what
they’d done, what they had created. They thought they were helping people,
curing something that up until then was incurable.

They’d
been wrong.

The
infected had the ability to contaminate others through bite and scratch, and
the virus spread at a monumental rate. They were not simply the sick, but the
“infected”, becoming crazed, hungry for human flesh.

They
were no longer considered human by any means. They were, in every sense,
walking corpses.

The
virus slowly killed them from the inside out, made their flesh rot, every
orifice
bleed, and all logical reasoning vanish. The
infected focused only on the primal need to feed.

This
was the world they lived in now, tried to survive in with each passing day.
Starvation, death, rape, and being hunted by the infected were the world now,
and the ones standing, the healthy, needed to be the strongest, and have no
remorse in doing whatever they needed in order to survive.

Chapter
One

The fall
of civilization

It was the anarchy and chaos that were the most
frightening at first, the fact humanity was slowly crumbling, and that nothing
was ever going to be the same.

The news reports blared that people should go home
and stay there until they got official word that everything was okay.

Maya knew it wasn’t going to be okay.

Those words were just something to placate society,
to make everyone stay calm in an otherwise crazy situation. It was just
something to keep everyone in line, but it wasn’t doing its job, not in the
cities, at least.

There was no cure, would never be a cure, not given
how fast the infection was being spread.

Bites.

Scratches.

Blood-borne infection.

That’s how it was spread. The healthy humans walking
around with those little white paper masks probably thought they were safe, but
they were far from it. That wouldn’t save them when the infection wasn’t
airborne. The ones that thought they were safe were fools, especially when they
got bitten, a chunk taken out of their body, and the infection pushed into
their bloodstream and changed them from the inside out.

Maya had seen an infected, only once, but she knew
as time passed that would change.

“Turn that off, sweetheart,” her father said from
the bed.

Maya looked over at him, saw the ashen look on his
face, the fact he had dark circles under his eyes, and that he was starting to
bleed from his nose and mouth. She turned off the radio that was repeating an
emergency broadcast about the infection, one that she’d heard countless times.

“How are you feeling?” she asked and moved toward
him. The slight commotion of her mother in the kitchen couldn’t hide the noise
coming from her father: the sound of dying.

He wheezed and pushed himself up on the bed. “How do
I look?” he asked and tried to smile, but it looked weak, sickly.

“Honestly? Like shit.” She was teasing, but it was
obviously the truth. Her father had always told her never to sugarcoat anything
with him, that honesty was a genuine reaction.

Her father, before he got sick, had been full of
life, always teasing, calling it like it was. He wouldn’t have had it any other
way. To even think that he’d die, and most likely very soon, was too much for
her. So Maya joked about it, and so did he. It was their way to cope.

He chuckled softly and reached for the glass of
water beside him. She grabbed it before he could wrap his hand around it, held
the straw for him, and brought it to his mouth. He took several long sips from
the straw, but started to cough. Swirls of redness started to fill the glass,
and she felt her chest clench painfully “I feel like shit.”

She grabbed a washcloth and dipped it in the cold water
before wringing it out and bringing it to his mouth and wiping away the smear
of blood. She cleaned it by repeating the action with the water, and placed the
cloth on his forehead now. The silence stretched on as she didn’t respond to
what he’d said. She didn’t want to acknowledge any of this, even if it was
their reality and right in front of them. She was about to turn away and grab
some fresh water when her father grabbed her arm gently, stopping her.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and
she told herself not to show emotion, not to break down right now. She knew
what he was about to say, and as much as she didn’t want to hear it, she knew
it was the truth, and the truth of the situation needed to be laid out.

“When it happens I want you to finish me off with my
rifle, understand?”

She breathed out slowly and nodded.

“I don’t want to hurt you or your mother, or anyone
else, and I don’t want to live like one of … those.”

Maya’s eyes were watering, but she didn’t let the
tears fall. Her father had said this same statement over the last week, ever
since he’d gone out to search for supplies for them and had gotten bitten.

Although they’d initially had food and water stocked
up, had started stockpiling when they’d first heard about the infection rapidly
spreading, among the three of them it was running low. That’s why her dad had
gone out, despite Maya and her mother pleading with him to stay. Although there
weren’t a lot of infected in the small town they lived in, what was more
dangerous right now were the looters and rioters in the heart of town, and the
ones migrating from the bigger cities. That’s what they’d been so worried
about, but it seemed like it wasn’t the healthy that had gotten her dad, but
the damn infected.

“I promise, Dad,” she said and sniffed, turning and
grabbing the medical kit to look at his wound.

“I don’t like you even touching it, Maya,” her dad
said, knowing what she was going to do. “There isn’t any point in cleaning it.”

She ignored his last comment. “You know it’s only
spread through bites and scratches.”

“It’s blood-borne, sweetheart.”

“I’ll wear gloves, like I do every time. I’m not
going to let it fester without trying to make you comfortable.”

Her dad smiled sadly, and didn’t argue anymore.
Good, because she wouldn’t deviate from what she wanted to do.

“Here, honey,” her mother said as she walked into
the room carrying a bowl of steaming water. Her mom set it on the table and
grabbed an apron. “Wear this, just in case.”

Maya put the apron on, triple-upped on the latex
gloves, and pulled up the blanket. She exposed her father’s legs first, and
continued lifting until she got to his thighs. He wore a pair of boxers, and
the leg that had gotten the bite was patched with a thick, white bandage—one
that was seeped through with black and red fluid. The smell was intense, that
of rotting, decaying flesh. That was what happened with the infected, with
someone who was bitten: the infection spread throughout their body quickly,
turning usually happening within a week’s time.

The person rotted from the inside out … literally.

“Here,” her mother said and handed her a mask. “I
don’t want any risk of you catching it.”

It wasn’t airborne, and although the likelihood of
the blood or fluid getting into Maya’s mouth was low, she knew this had been
her parents’ biggest fear since the infection spread. She was their only child,
and with her father on the brink of turning, life seemed hopeless.

She held in her gag reflex as the wound was
revealed. The bite mark had been nasty when he first got it, and now because of
the infection spreading it was god-awful. Necrotic tissue was all the way
around the wound, and spreading throughout his legs. Even the site of his
veins, now black, was visible. There was blood and grey fluid oozing out, and
the flesh that wasn’t grossly rotting was ashen, as if corpse-like.

She made quick work of cleaning it with peroxide and
alcohol, of spreading ointment on it, and then bandaged it back up. Of course
this wouldn’t heal or cure it, but she felt better knowing she was at least
trying to keep it clean.

“How did it look?” her dad asked, but he sounded
exhausted. When she looked at him she saw he had his eyes closed, the wear and
tear of what was happening taking over him.

“The same,” she lied. It looked so much worse than
it had just hours before. The infection was spreading fast.

“Even though my eyes are closed I can still tell
when you’re lying.” Her father’s voice was distant, sleep taking control of
him.

“Get some rest, Dad.”

Her father was asleep before she even got the rest
of the words out.

“Come on, Maya. Let’s eat something.”

Maya followed her mom out of the room, shut the door
behind her, and that’s when she couldn’t stop her tears. But she wiped them
away, not wanting to start that floodgate.

“He won’t last much longer,” her mother said with a
detached voice. She turned around and gestured for Maya to sit at the table.

Sherman, her old and greying black lab, came
trotting into the kitchen and lay down by Maya’s feet. He was going on ten
years, but he had a lot of energy and spirit still. She reached down and ran
her hand over his head, scratching behind his ear.

Maya didn’t respond to her mother, because she knew
that was the truth, but didn’t want to think about it. Her mother set some
rationed food in front of her, and once Maya’s mom was seated they ate in
silence. The sound of her father’s wheezing and gurgling as his lungs filled
with the fluid, as he was dying, surrounded them.

This was her life, her reality, and the sooner she
fully accepted that, the better chance she had of surviving.