The Cloudy Skulls (Cloudy Sandbox Book 1) (6 page)

‘You should have gone inside,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’re too curious for your own good.’

His boot twisted on top of my hand and I winced in pain again, feeling a wave of dizziness wash over me. ‘You shot Major Cartell.’

‘I did. This wasn’t how I intended things to go, she got an extra day that I hadn’t bargained for. But in the end she’s still as dead as she would have been in the airslicer crash, so I’m not unhappy with the course of events.’

‘The airslicer was your work?’

‘Yup. I can’t take all the credit; Sanderson planted the EMPs for me so that communication between the base and the airslicer would go down. Then he was supposed to make sure the gates were closed, but some genius had already opened them up. I hadn’t predicted a victim attack in that short space of time, and that ruined things on the ground, that and Keswick. Even after a victim attack and Sanderson trying to kill him, he still managed to unlock the gates for us so the crash was sustained. And to think you blamed the poor guy.’

‘You’d have died in the crash too, though, you were on the airslicer.’

‘I would have happily died to see that woman burn,’ he said, and for the first time I saw an insane rage in his eyes, rather than the usual warmth. ‘Keswick was right about her; she’s a scourge to the world. Building these bases in dead zones is insane. She doesn’t care about the soldiers she leaves here. My daughter-' he cut himself off, and the light in his eyes darkened. ‘She sees casualties as statistics. So I’ve added her to them. Another casualty of war.’

‘You know the problem all evil geniuses have?’ I asked, doing the best I could to ignore the white hot pain in my hand.

‘Do tell me,’ he said.

‘You spend so much time gloating about how great your plan is that you distract yourself from an impending attack.’

He grinned, that gold tooth of his flashing in the lumalight. ‘You’re not going to attack me.’

‘No, but he is,’ I said, just as the victim gave a primal howl and collapsed onto Parker’s back, sinking its teeth into the soft flesh of his shoulder.

Parker screamed in pain from the bite, I screamed in pain because he crunched down on my hand, and the victim screamed in pain and fell backward when Parker punched him in the gut.

‘Shit!’ he screamed into the night, knowing as well as I did what a victim bite meant. ‘No. No, no, no.’

‘I thought you were happy to die for your cause?’ I said, taking the opportunity to pull my hand back and cradle it to my chest. The noises and the light were drawing victims to us and we were surrounded, I didn’t need light to know that. My hand wasn’t broken, but it hurt when I got my gun into position to pull the trigger, so I shifted it to my left side. My aim wouldn’t be as good but it was better than nothing.

The scrape of shoes on concrete was my guide as I pushed myself to my feet and began firing out into the darkness. I could hear when my shots hit home and every so often when I turned I would see the flash of red eyes in my lumalight. One pair was too close for comfort, so instead of firing I slammed my boot into its chest and it sprawled backwards into the dark, but another was soon taking its place, and then another grabbed my arm. I slammed my head back into its face and pain blossomed in the back of my skull, then something grabbed my ankle and pulled me down to the floor. This time it was Parker, and the victims had been at him too. The left side of his face was bleeding and I could see claw marks in his cheek.

‘I wasn’t an evil genius. I wasn’t evil. I just wanted revenge,’ he said. 'She was my little girl. Cartell sent her off to die and for what?
For what?
'

‘You were going to kill me too in that airslicer crash,’ I said. ‘And you were the one that told me to expect casualties in war. You can burn in hell for all I care.’

I pulled away from him and dodged a set of teeth that tried to bite into my arm. I rammed my elbow back and felt teeth shatter, then I spun around and smashed the butt of the gun through the top of the victim’s skull. Another hand reached out of the darkness to grab at me and I roundhouse kicked the body away from me, just as another hand grabbed my hair and yanked me backward. I nearly overbalanced but managed to find my feet just in time, and shot out blindly behind me until the grip loosened. I plucked the amputated hand from my tangle of hair and tossed it to the ground, then something pulled at my leg. Before I had time to look down I felt pain explode in my thigh and I crumpled to my knees, my hand clamping over the wound where warm blood was beginning to soak into my trousers. When I looked up Parker was clutching my knife with a bloody grin. There were more bite marks on him now and his nose was crooked.

‘We’re dead anyway,’ he rasped. ‘And I don’t know about you but I’d rather die the way God intended and stay dead. I’ll shoot you, you shoot me. Together.’

With shaky hands he lifted his gun to aim at me, but over his shoulder I could see salvation. ‘I’m not bitten,’ I told him, just as the shot fired out and the pyrebullet exploded in Parker’s back. He lurched forward, but thankfully didn’t fire, and crumpled to the ground.

Lucan came running over to me, and grabbed my hand to haul me to my feet. ‘Are you alright?’

‘I’m- owww. Shit. Stabbed. But fine. What are you doing out here?’

‘I went to one of the towers to give you backup, but I couldn’t see well enough with the tower beam lights. So I decided to come out and find you. Are you…?’

‘No bites. Not yet. There’s still some walking dead I think. And…where’s Parker?’ I asked, panic rising within me. I shone my light on the ground where he’d fallen, but apart from a pool of blood there was nothing. Except an empty bullet; Cartell must really regret declining the vest I’d offered her, it would have saved her life. She just hadn’t expected to be hit by her own team.

‘Where did he go?’ Lucan asked, shining his own p-luma about, illuminating Parker as he rushed toward us, screaming like a lunatic and with his gun raised to fire. I grabbed Lucan by the arm to brace myself and kicked up with my injured leg, feeling pain tear through all the way up to my hip. My boot connected with his chest, and from the force of his run I heard a rib or two crack as he went stumbling backward. He must have tripped over a body or something because I heard him fall in the darkness, but then suddenly the whole world lit up. Bright blue sparks flew out and the wires of the fence glowed neon blue. Parker screamed and convulsing as the electricity coursed through him, the stench of searing flesh enough to make me gag. His body kept seizing long after his screams died, and by lumalight we saw the steam rising and heard the hiss of the burning, and finally his body fell forward and hit the ground hard with a heavy thud.

‘Fence is back on,’ I said.

‘Indeed it is,’ Lucan said. ‘Shall we get back inside?’

‘That would be a good idea, I think we can clean him up in the morning, along with any leftover victims.’

‘Think you got a good chunk of them,’ Lucan said, as we made our way back and shone our p-lumas over mangled corpses.

‘Well, less work for tomorrow then.’

Just a metric crap-tonne of paperwork what with aircarrier explosions, victims infiltrations and two dead officers. All in all, not a bad start to my command.

When the sun came up the next morning we sent out a small team to kill the last few remaining victims, and to burn the corpses and toss them over the fence. We did the same to Parker and I have no shame in admitting that I wasn’t sad to see his body being thrown out for carrion. Major Cartell’s body was treated with a little more dignity as she hadn’t been bitten by a victim and wasn’t a scumbag traitor, so she was zipped up in a body bag and stored in the medical bay to be taken home and given a proper funeral.

The remaining officers handed me the base officially with very little fanfare, and when the airslicer arrived they left with barely a goodbye. I ended up being stuck with Keswick, thanks to all the repairs that needed to be made, and the fact he hadn't completed setting up the base in the first place. He put in a request for more engineers to come and help him to speed up the process but I think the officers were too quick to leave to hear him. That and the UR isn't exactly teeming with extra staff. So god knows how long we'll be stuck with him, but at least I'm not worried about him shooting me while I sleep now.

Our spare aircarrier arrived with the airslicer, and when all was said and done we had ourselves an escape vehicle should the worst ever happen and we needed to evacuate.

Walking the halls seemed strange, seeing people go about their normal business, training, eating, sleeping, but knowing that we were bang in the middle of a dead zone. The rocky start made us all realise how dangerous the situation was, but already I could see friendships forming between my soldiers. We were as isolated as you could get, and in the most dangerous part of the world, so we had to trust each other.

We had to be more than a team, we had to be friends. We had to be family.

We were the Cloudy Skulls.

Thank you for reading! I’d be very happy if you’d consider leaving a review to let others know what you thought.

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Out September 2014

Volume 2: Ground Rules

Second Lieutenant Rin Komatsu has taken command of the Cloudy Skulls squadron base, right on the edge of the world's most dangerous dead zone. Hoards of undead batter at the gates but they're nothing compared to the soldiers she has to deal with inside her own walls.

Mandatory consignment means that her squadron is a mix of some of the most unlikely candidates to ever hold a gun, and most of them aren't happy to be there at all. Before Rin can start any missions she has to face her toughest challenge yet; earning the respect of her team and teaching them how to be soldiers.

Time to lay some ground rules.

Also by Eva Harper in the Cloudy Sandbox series:

1. Cloudy Skulls

2. Ground Rules

3. Tokyo Tower (coming soon)

4. Deep Freeze (coming soon)

In software development a sandbox is a testing environment for changes in code and general experimentation.

That was the idea behind the Cloudy Sandbox. I started by creating a few characters, because I wanted my sandbox to be character driven, and then I dropped them into the background setting of a world overcome by a zombie apocalypse. Then I let them free to see what they would do.

I wanted to make the world as free as possible and because of that the characters and the world are completely free to use by anyone. Want to write some fanfiction? Go for it! Want to draw some fanart? Awesome! And why stop at making it just fan-stuff? I'm not going to stop anyone using my characters and publishing what they create, because it doesn't really harm me. I'd be flattered if anyone liked my series enough to want to create works based on it, and if you've put the work into creating the stuff then why not publish it and make a little money?

So yes - this is a sandbox. Go play in it if you want!

Any questions, queries, letters of raging anger can be emailed right to me: [email protected] and I'll be very happy to get back to you ASAP!