Devouring The Dead (Book 2): Nemesis (23 page)

The s
word he had killed Jackson with, the same sword he had cut Lazarus with. The sword still had Jackson’s blood on it,
infect
ed blood. Lazarus was a strong man, but strong enough to survive being run through with a sword? Harry’s blood ran cold. This was Lazarus’ boat. When he had left the dungeons, where had he gone? Not to the mainland. To crawl away in a corner and die somewhere? Not likely. What if he came here? What if he was infected? What if Lazarus was that one-in-a-million chance, the one subject the aliens needed? What if he had the rare blood type that the toxin needed to…

“Mac. Moira. Don’t open that door!” Harry jumped
up and shouted at them.

“What’s
up, Harry?” said Moira waving and smiling at him as she finally pulled the door open.

The
deformed creature that used to be Lazarus flew out of the cabin and sliced clean through Moira, its wings cutting her in half. Mac was sprayed with crimson blood as Moira’s lifeless body fell to the wooden deck. The flying creature’s tail swung wildly and thudded into Mac sending him flying back into Christina. She screamed and let go of the wheel as Mac landed on top of her. Mac hit his head on the deck and was knocked out immediately. The boat, uncontrolled, lurched and Heidi fell over the railings into the ocean. The flying creature swooped up into the air and hovered above the boat.

“Moira!” shouted
Harry in disbelief.

Tom could see she was dead before she had hit the deck. Bright red blood
pooled from her body and sloshed across the wooden deck.

Harry
looked up and saw the dead body of Lazarus silhouetted against the sun. He recognised the dark flowing hair and distorted facial features. Two antennae were sticking out of his skull and his eyes were dead, yet without a doubt, he could see. There was no doubt it was him either. Lazarus had somehow sprouted wings covered in matted black hair. His arms bled into them, leaving only short stumpy hands to protrude from his torso. His legs were the only part of him that still looked human, and where his genitals used to be there was now a long tail that lashed from side to side.

“Help H
eidi!” yelled Tom to Christina.

She crawled over the deck and threw a lifesaver over the side
of the boat. Jessica and Rosa got to their feet.

“
Tom, what do we do, what do we do?” Jessica took her eyes off the abomination above them and looked at him imploringly.

“We don’t have any guns left, we don’t have anything. I
…” Tom was dumbfounded.

Suddenly,
the magnificent creature swooped down toward the boat again to attack. Harry roared as Tom ducked and Jessica tried to drag Rosa out of the way. Jessica slipped in Moira’s blood as she felt the weight of the creature’s wings flapping above her. The sunlight was obscured as Jessica was covered in a huge shadow. As she fell, she heard Rosa scream her name.

Turning
over, she saw Rosa flying up into the air, the creature holding her tightly with its tail. Rosa was crying and beating on the tail, trying to force it to let go, but it held her firmly. The creature flapped its wings slowly, hovering about fifteen feet above the deck.

“Let her go!” shouted Harry. “Lazarus, let her go, take me!”

The abomination turned its head toward Harry slowly. It made a series of growling noises and clicks before it opened its jaw widely.

“O
-tak-tay,” it said slowly. “Otaktay,” it repeated. The creature spat the words out rather than spoke. Its tail tightened around Rosa and she gasped as it began crushing her. Two of her ribs snapped as it slowly coiled more of its fleshy tail around her slender frame. Her eyes bulged as the tail squeezed harder and she could feel her bones breaking. A creamy substance oozed from the tip of the monster’s tail, dribbling onto the deck far below.

“Rosa! Rosa!” screamed Jess
ica from below. She jumped up, trying to grab Rosa’s feet, but she was too far away. Jessica was directly beneath her, but it was impossible to reach Rosa.

There was an audible pop when
Rosa’s spine came apart. As it splintered, Otaktay’s tail sliced clean through Rosa’s body, splitting her in half. With one last dying scream, Rosa was ripped apart. Her left side went one way and her right half went the other. A massive waterfall of blood cascaded down over Jessica, choking her as it filled her open screaming mouth. The ocean turned red as Otaktay threw Rosa’s twitching decapitated body into it, discarding the useless flesh he had no desire to devour. He had pierced her head with the tip of his tail and he flicked it away, down onto the boat. Rosa’s head skipped across the deck until it fell over the side and bounced one last time off the hull into the icy water. Jessica fainted, drenched in the blood of her dead lover.

Otaktay swooped high up into the sky and then plu
nged straight back down again towards the out of control boat. Christina was trying to haul Heidi up the side of the hull from the freezing cold water. Tom and Harry were frantically looking for a weapon to defend themselves with, so far unable to find anything.

“Look out!” shouted Tom too late.

Otaktay flew quickly above them and in an instant, Harry had been snatched up in its tail. Tom picked the sledgehammer up from next to the unconscious Mac. He took a swipe at the thing that used to be Lazarus and clipped a wing. Otaktay still managed to fly up out of reach of Tom and again hovered over them whilst Harry punched and kicked, desperate to release himself from the creature’s hold.

“
Harry, I can’t reach you!” shouted Tom. “Fight it!”

Tom swung the sledgehammer wildly
, but couldn’t gain enough height. He felt useless, angry that they were going to be picked off like this, one by one, first Moira, then Rosa. Now Harry was going to be slaughtered whilst Tom could do nothing but watch on helplessly.

“Flare gun!” shouted Harry as he felt the tail tighten around him. He knew he only had a minute left before he was killed like Rosa.

Dropping the sledgehammer, Tom scrambled down into the cabin, praying he would find something. There, on the wall down below deck, was an emergency box. He pulled it open and was grateful to find it had not been used. He cast aside the torch, life-vests and whistles and finally pulled out a flare gun. Tom raced back upstairs while loading it. As he set foot back on the deck again, he looked up. He could see that Harry was in immense pain as Otaktay slowly squeezed his body, the tail crushing him like a python would a deer in the jungle.

Tom aimed and fired before the creature could react and the flare tore through a wing.
Otaktay let out a howl of pain, but did not let go of Harry. The antennae on Otaktay’s head suddenly went rigid and the monster flew away, up into the air with a burning hole in one wing, still holding onto Harry. Tom fired again but Otaktay was too far away, wings flapping relentlessly, and the red blossom of the flare harmlessly ignited the sky above them.

Tom watched as
the creature flew away to the west, with Harry still kicking, until it was out of sight. Why had it not released Harry? If it just wanted to kill him, it could have done it easily by now. Tom looked across the deck. Jessica and Mac were unconscious, covered in Rosa’s blood. Moira was dead, and Christina was hugging a wet, shivering Heidi. He walked over to them and picked up the sledgehammer.

“
Oh Jesus, what now, Tom? What the hell do we do now? Where do we go?” asked Christina. She and Heidi began crying together.

Tom
threw the flare gun to the side and weighed the sledgehammer in his hands. He looked upward into the sky and then back down to Christina and Heidi, who was looking up at him through teary eyes.

“
We’re going after it,” snarled Tom, as anger coursed through him like fire. “I’m going to get Harry back. Then, by God, I’m going to fucking kill it.”

THE END

Read on for a free sample of Dead Team Alpha

Chapter One- Silo, When I Was Young…

“Fourteen checks out.”

“Only twelve more to go.”

“More like twenty-four.”

“What?”

“Twenty-four to go.”

“What’s this all about, TL? First, the increased copper quota for the Reclamation Crews and now these equipment checklists we have to go over at each silo, marking the circuitry that works, the supplies the silo has, and all this crap, for what?”

Silo Team Alpha’s Team Leader turns to the woman on his right.

“Need to know,” TL Joshua Mills replies. “All Command has said to me is we need to be on constant patrol. The silos have to stay secure and they need those detailed lists of what works and what doesn’t.”

The woman frowns and looks about the barren landscape. Scrub brush and sparse grass are all that cover the hardscrabble hills of what the citizens of the Stronghold call Silo Park, a four hundred square mile region of what once used to be where the borders of Colorado, Wyoming and North Dakota met.

But the
days of states is long past, and Silo Team Alpha knows nothing about borders or state lines. They only know their carbines, their training, and their hatred for the undead that they occasionally come across in the wasteland.

“We have about four miles before Silo Fifteen,” the woman, Team Mate Tonia Delaney says. “We can clear that one and then move through Sixteen, Seventeen, and Eighteen.”

“Can we make Eighteen by dark?” Team Mate Troy Morrissey asks. “I fucking hate the Park at night.”

“You afraid of the
boogeyman?” Team Mate Stephanie Lazzar laughs. “Afraid he’s gonna jump out from behind one of the boulders and grab your tiny dick?”

“No,” Morrissey replies.
“Because I don’t have a tiny dick.”

“It’s true,” Delaney smiles. “He has a vagina.
A big, gaping one.”

“Fuck you,” Morrissey sneers.

“What’s wrong with a vagina, Morrissey?” Lazzar asks. “Oh, that’s right, you don’t know what they’re for, do you? Still too busy with that love affair between you and your right hand, eh?”

“This is a lovely conversation,” Team Mate Adam Chinn sighs. “But can we cut the little kid bullshit for just five minutes? Been listening to you punks jabber for days.”

“Let them have their fun, Chinn,” Team Mate JT Blackmore says. “God knows we have to have something to talk about in this fucking place. I always hate it once we leave the Fort Collins outpost. It means nothing but blah blah blah for miles.”

“No shit, man,” Team Mate Mark Miller agrees. “We don’t even get to put down
Zs out here. We’re so far from any of the old cities that it’s nothing but fucking buffalo and prairie dogs.”

“You fuck buffalo and prairie dogs?”
Lazzar asks.

“Fuck off.”

“Bison,” Team Mate John Ellis says from the back of the Team. “They’re called bison, not buffalo. Didn’t you pay attention in school at all, Miller?”

“I paid attention to Ms. Fortney’s tight ass in those jeans she always wore,” Miller replies.
“Nearly busted a nut every time she dropped the chalk, man. I’d have to rub one out during break just to get through the next class.”

“Well, I had Mr. Shipley,” Ellis says. “So I actually learned something other than how to spot a panty line.”

“Oh, Ms. Fortney didn’t wear panties,” Lazzar laughs. “Trust me. I studied that ass more than Miller did.”

“Fuck yeah,” Miller says, holding up his hand for a high five.

Lazzar responds in kind, but then quiets down as they see the look on TL Mills’ face.

“
You done reminiscing about ogling a woman’s ass?” TL Mills asks. “Because that woman worked harder than you know to educate you ungrateful fucks. Not so easy to expand minds and open new avenues of thought in the fucking apocalypse.”

“They’re just
Zs, TL,” Miller responds. “No harder to deal with than rats. Why do so many people get all bent out of shape? This is how the world is, has been for nearly a hundred years, so who cares? Folks need to lighten up and get some joy where they can, you know what I mean?”

“And there was plenty of joy in Ms. Fortney’s jeans,”
Lazzar smiles. “Gettin’ wet just thinking about them.”

TL Mills shakes his head and looks towards the horizon. He frowns and holds up his hand. The Team stops instantly, all eyes on him, their M-4 carbines to their shoulders.

“What you got, TL?” Delaney asks. “Zs? Wind’s blowing this way and I don’t smell them.”

“I don’t know,” TL
Mills replies, “thought I saw someone up past that hill.”

He nods with his chin and Delaney turns her attention that way. After a couple of minutes, she shakes her head.

“Not seeing anything,” she says. “You sure it wasn’t one of Ellis’s bison?”

“No, no,” TL Mills says. “It was human size. I know what a fucking buffalo looks like.”

“Fucking park,” Morrissey says. “I hate this shit. How many days are we out here?”

“Until we have every checklist completed,” TL Mills says. “We clear the silos, one by one,
then send Cook back with the data so the Beta Team can come relieve us.”

Morrissey looks over his shoulder at the wiry man following behind the team. Armed only with a 9mm,
Pauly Cook doesn’t come close to measuring up to the muscled and geared out bodies of Silo Team Alpha. However, the look in the man’s eyes tells a story of survival and endurance.

“
You looking forward to running back to the Stronghold all by your lonesome, Cook?” Morrissey asks.

“As long as it keeps me from having to stare at your ugly face, Morrissey,” Cook grins, his tanned and weathered skin looking as cracked and rough as the earth around them all.

“You can’t ever get away from this pretty mug,” Morrissey laughs. “Once you see me, I’m in your head, man.”

“Like syphilis,” Delaney says. “But without the fun of fucking first.”

“Shut the fuck up,” TL Mills says, still studying the horizon. “I saw something. I’d bet my commission on it.”

This gets the Team’s attention. No one would dare insult the privilege of being a Team Leader by betting their commission unless they were very serious. The Team life is what drives the survivor refuge of the Stronghold. Military discipline and the warrior ethos are the fuel that keeps the engines of post-apocalyptic endurance running.

“Let’s go have a look then,” Blackmore suggests. “It won’t take us too far off course.”

“No, we move to the next silo,” TL Mills says, “but stay sharp. If it’s not a Z then it could be wasteland trash or one of the crazies scouting new land.”

“Trash wouldn’t last out here,” Delaney says.

“Neither would the crazies,” Miller adds. “No resources, just dirt and shit.”

“They aren’t called crazies because they make sane choices, moron,” Morrissey says.

“Can it,” TL Mills orders and the jabber quits. “We hit
Fifteen, then keep going. If we can’t get to Eighteen by dark, then Seventeen is where we dig in.”

The Team all nod, look away from the horizon, and keep marching towards Silo Fifteen. TL Mills wants to look over his shoulder, but he knows that would look weak. A Team Leader can’t be weak in front of his people, not out in the wasteland where
the closest backup is miles and miles away at the Fort Collins outpost. Every Team needs to know that they are in steady hands. He shakes it off and concentrates on their mission and the two dozen more silos they have to check before they can head home to the Stronghold.

***

The pitch-black tunnel is outlined in ghostly hues of green and grey as Delaney moves forward, her vision enhanced by the night vision goggles (NVG) each Team Mate is outfitted with. Having cleared Silo Fifteen, STA is now working its way through Sixteen, ready to secure the site and move on.

Made up of two main sections, each silo site has a launch control
center (LCC) and a launch facility (LF), connected by a long concrete tunnel. The LCC houses the missile controls as well as the personnel barracks while the LF is where the actual missile is stored and ready for launch.

Leaving TL Mills, as well as Mates Miller, Morrissey, and
Lazzar, back in the LCC, Delaney takes point in the tunnel with Chinn and Blackmore following close behind. They are halfway to the LF when Delaney pulls up, her fist in the air. The two men behind her go into a crouch, with Chinn pivoting so he covers their six while Blackmore creeps up closer to Delaney.

“Huh?” Blackmore grunts. The sound is like a gunshot in the pure silence of the tunnel.

Delaney nudges him with her elbow and points forward, her hand moving from left to right. Blackmore pats her shoulder and crouch walks his way towards the direction Delaney has indicated. He gets to a junction in the tunnel and looks left then right. If he turns right, he’ll move to the maintenance area of the LF. If he goes left, he’ll come to the launch site and the massive nuclear missile that the underground silo houses.

He focuses his attention right and then glance over his shoulder. Delaney and Chinn are holding their positions, waiting for him to give them the clear. There is only a short stretch of tunnel ahead with a large steel door at the end. While the door should be shut securely, Blackmore can see that it’s open a crack and there’s actually a faint light coming from within. He waves his Team Mates forward.

Delaney comes up on him and pats his left shoulder as she moves past, her senses at full alert and muscles tensed for the worst. With light present, it’s highly unlikely it’s a Z that’s made its way down into the facility, which leaves the possibility of a human element.

As every survivor has found out since Z-Day, the human element makes the zombie apocalypse a true nightmare.

Less than a foot from the door, Delaney stops, with her head cocked as she listens for movement. She extends her leg and slowly pushes the door open wider, then hurries through, sweeping the room with her carbine. Nothing moves and she relaxes as she spots the source of the light.

A low whistle brings the other two into the room with her, and Blackmore laughs.

“Poor bugger,” he says as he walks over to a set of shelves and nudges the dead gopher on the ground. The thing is covered in luminescent green goo that drips from a low shelf above its corpse. “Thought it found a snack and instead found Mr. Black.”

“You should be a poet,” Chinn says. “That’s a good rhyme.”

“Glow sticks,” Delaney says as she crouches and pulls the gnawed box free from the shelf. “Rats got to it first, looks like. I’ll bet there’s a nest of glowing rat corpses somewhere in this place.”

“Any still good?” Chinn asks.

“Nope,” Delaney says, setting the box back. “Looks like they’ve all been nibbled on. Come on, we’re only half done.”

“Godspeed, little gopher,” Blackmore says as he nudges the gopher again. “May you find peace in the great burrow in the
sky.”

Back in formation, the Mates leave the room with Delaney pulling the door shut tightly behind them.

They miss the glowing handprints smeared on the back of the door.

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