The Zombie Chronicles - Book 5 - Undead Nightmare (Apocalypse Infection Unleashed Series) (3 page)

“Remember the scientist riding in the car behind me?”

“Yeah. What about him?”

“Well, turns out, he got mad when those idiots rammed me, and he got out. Big mistake on his part, ‘cause those maniacs threw him over the bridge for trying to defend me.”

I blinked, stunned. “Really? So he’s out here somewhere?”

“Must be, but I haven’t seen him. He was the first one to go over. Maybe he drowned.” Lucas shook his head.

“That’s not good.”

“You’re tellin’ me. That would suck, big time. We need that guy…bad.”

I noticed some commotion in the water and pointed to the river. “Hey! There’s Nick!”

“Dean? Lucas?” Nick said, his loud voice piercing the air. He waded through the current and headed toward the rocky bank. His chest heaved, and he sucked in giant gulps of air.

My shoulders slumped in relief that he was okay, and then I scanned the river for the others. I saw a tangle of arms and legs and a bunch of bobbing heads tumbling through the water. “Hang on to the branches!” I shouted. “They’ll slow you down.”

“Dean!” Jackie shouted.

Emotion flooded me as I heard her voice and spied her fighting the water. When she reached up to grab the overhanging branches, I rushed back into the water and pulled her into a tight embrace. I couldn’t believe they’d thrown an innocent woman off the bridge; then again, we obviously weren’t dealing with the sanest of people.

“Dean, those guys threw us into the river like ragdolls,” she said between gasps. “I’m glad to be away from them though.”

I hugged her, rubbing the hard knots in her shoulders with my palm. As she clutched me and buried her face in my chest, my arms encircled her in a strong grip.

“Those lunatics are dead meat!” Val vowed, breathing heavily in quick, shallow heaves.

I looked up to see my sister, one heck of a police officer, pulling herself from the current. “Val,” I said, relief flooding through me that she was alive and with us, “are you okay?”

She pushed her dripping black hair from her eyes. “Far from it, little brother. We’re right back at square one, with no weapons, no bullets, no medical supplies, no food, water, vials, or vehicle. This situation is starting to stink like Tahoe all over again.”

“No,” Jackie said, “this is much, much worse. At least when Tahoe left us, we had a few supplies and weapons. Now all we have are the shirts on our back…literally.”

I hugged my sister, and she hugged me back tightly. “I know things are bad, Val, but at least you aren’t hurt,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense though.”

“What?”

“Why did they save you only to throw you over the bridge?”

She smiled. “I don’t think they were going to throw us over at first, but we kinda ticked them off.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I gave that guy in the red hat a firm kick in the nuts and called him a few choice names, and then all the girls started attacking them.”

I laughed.

“I’m surprised they didn’t shoot us,” she said, “but we had to try to fight, and they got their butts kicked by a bunch of girls—until they threw us over.”

I heard splashing and people calling my name. When I turned I saw Claire, Asia, and Kate collapsing in exhausted heaps on the riverbank.

“Nick!” Claire said, running toward my brother.

“Looks like we’re on our own again,” Val said. “We need to stick together.” She started to unbutton her black and red checkered shirt.

Nick stopped her. “What the heck are you doing?”

“We’re supposed to have each other’s backs, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Somebody’s gotta dress Lucas’s wound. We aren’t gonna get very far with him bleeding all over the place.” She slipped her long-sleeved shirt off, revealing a soaked white tank-top underneath.

“Oh. I didn’t realize you had a shirt on underneath.” Nick laughed, slightly embarrassed.

Chuckling, she wrung the material out, then wrapped it around Lucas’s wound and tied it up. “This shirt looks stupid on me anyway,” she said. “Lucas looks a lot better in it. Brings out his eyes,” she joked.

“Thanks, Val,” he said, smiling, “but won’t you freeze without it?”

“Not if you keep me warm.”

He grinned and wrapped an arm around her.

Water dripped from my hair and face as I glanced around at my friends and siblings: my brother, Nick, and sister, Val; the two girls we’d met in the forest, Claire and Jackie; Lucas, my brother’s best friend; Kate, who fought alongside us in the arena in Kingsville and kicked butt; and finally, Asia, who proved to be a valuable asset in our nursing home battle. “So we’re officially a team now, huh?”

“Yes,” Jackie said, “and I’m proud to be included. Now who’s in?”

We stood in a circle and slowly lifted eight hands in victory.

Nick’s lips pressed into a grim line. “The journey back home isn’t gonna be easy, boys and girls, and we’re gonna be faced with plenty of challenges, especially since we’re starting from scratch again. We’re going to have to fight with all we’ve got.”

“We will,” Lucas said, “and we need to just stick with this group. I’m tired of turncoats, and traitors. As far as I’m concerned, nobody else is allowed in this private club. We’ve let strangers in twice, and we’ve been burned both times. I know I can trust each and every one of you, but I refuse to trust anybody else.”

“Lucas is right,” Claire said. “No more strangers. We can’t trust anybody.”

“We lost the vials though,” I said grimly. “All that work, and they’re gone…just like that.”

Claire gave me a big smile, which puzzled me. “We didn’t lose the vials,” she said.

Nick grinned.

I cocked a brow. “What?”

She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear. “When you told me about those men and what they said and mentioned that you didn’t trust them and thought they might try to steal the vials from us, well…I hid them.”

My face beamed. “Really? Where are they?”

Claire patted the purse that hung from her shoulder. “Got ‘em right here, safe and sound.”

“What?” Asia asked, dumbfounded.

“Yeah, it was Nick’s idea,” Claire said. “We switched the vials at the nursing home and filled the black bag with vials of insulin and heparin. Nick asked me to carry the real serum because he was sure nobody would ever suspect I had them. Turns out, he was right.”

Confidence shone in Nick’s weary face, justifiably so; it was a brilliant plan to trust Claire with the vials.

“That’s why you grabbed your purse strap and told Nick to go ahead and give the men the vials!”

“Yep,” she said proudly.

“I had to play it cool,” Nick said. “If I had handed the bag right over, they might’ve suspected something.”

“Well played. Even I fell for it,” Jackie said. She nudged Claire. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was sworn to secrecy. Only Nick, Lucas, and I knew. Lucas put the tracker in my oversized purse, and we zipped it up in one of those plastic crayon bags from the activity room.”

“Brilliant!” I said, relief flooding through me as I realized all our trials had not been in vain and that the cure to save mankind was still in our possession.

My brother met my gaze. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have done it, Dean. You really had me thinking about those guys. Lucas and I had discussed ditching them from our group as soon as we could get away from them, and I sent Lucas to nose around a bit and ask some questions. They told him they didn’t understand why I’d been put in charge of the vials, and that was when I knew we had to do something.”

Lucas held his injured shoulder. “We just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. I figured they’d try to take it during the night and sneak away, not try to kill us in broad daylight in a vehicular ambush.”

“Well, maybe they were hoping to have the element of surprise on their side,” Kate said, shaking her head. “I just…I really thought they were my friends, even though I hadn’t known them that long.”

“You heard Nick,” Asia said. “Trust nobody.”

Sickeningly familiar, hungry moans echoed from the forest, and we all glanced at each other. Every muscle in my body tensed, and I blinked, as if that might make the nightmare go away. When I opened my eyes again, the reality hit me: It was time to fight, to survive another day.

“What do we do now?” Claire asked, then pressed her lips together in a hard line. “We have no weapons.”

The scent of rot filled the cool air as I picked up the sharpest, deadliest rock I could find. “We fight!” I shouted.

Val reached down and picked up jagged-edge rock of his own. “We fight!” she parroted.

Jackie held a stone about the size of a softball. “We fight, people!”

Kate picked up a rock of her own, one that fit perfectly snug in her hand. “We fight, fight, fight!”

Nick picked up a huge rock that resembled a bowling ball. “We head into battle…and we fight.”

“We fight!” Lucas roared.

“We fight,” Asia whispered with fire in her eyes. “We take on anything the world throws at us and knock it out of the park.”

Even Claire, who hated confrontations with zombies, picked up a natural weapon and wailed, “We fight…for our lives!”

And with that, we headed into the vegetation, ready to take on whatever came our way.

Chapter 3

My mouth dropped as I watched the scene unfold before my eyes. The living dead staggered along through the vegetation, stumbling over moss-covered logs as they approached through the towering trees. There weren’t more than a dozen of them, so I was sure we could easily defeat them. We didn’t have any real weapons, but there were eight of us, and that was a definite advantage.

Not wasting a second, my sister was the first to charge at a zombie, releasing a loud battle cry as she ran. She kicked its knees out, and it hurtled back and crumbled. A cluster of zombies came at us from the left. Nick picked up the closet corpse and whipped it into the crowd of infected, causing them to clumsily fall. One zombie crawled forward on its knees, glaring at Lucas with glazed-over, greenish-gray eyes, and Lucas ran and drop-kicked it. Asia let out a yell and grabbed a short man’s hair, then slammed his head into a nearby tree trunk, just as Kate delivered a savage kick to a stick-think zombie with frizzy black hair.

A zombie came at me, and I looked into its blank, dead eyes, sizing my enemy up. It had peeling skin, needle-sharp teeth, and blackened gums. It didn’t make a sound—not a growl or even a hiss—probably because its throat had been torn out, leaving a gaping hole in its windpipe. I aimed straight for its chest and swung my leg up in a powerful roundhouse kick. Its rotting exterior crashed against the tree trunk, sending bark flying everywhere. The smell of death assaulted my nostrils as I held the zombie’s destroyed neck with one hand and smashed its head with the other, it hit the ground hard. The sound of muffled screams, shouts, and whimpering moans echoed through the air as our army of eight valiantly fought for our lives, and I anxiously scanned my surroundings for my next target.

Another zombified monster crashed through the weeds with its jaws snapping. The thing was shirtless, and a wound in its gut exposed its ribcage. It took slow, deliberate steps toward me, holding out its inch-long claws. Getting scratched or bitten wasn’t an option, so I had to get out of its reach. As I took a step, my foot caught on something. I glanced down and bit my lip at the sight of my boot, tangled in roots embedded in the forest floor. I gasped a ragged breath and frantically tried to dislodge my foot. Just as the zombie lunged for my gut, my foot loosened. With a burst of energy, I kicked the front of its deteriorated knee with my steel-toed boot. It fell sideways into the grass, and I stomped on it, crushing its skull with my boot until it stopped moving altogether. “Die!” I yelled, gritting my teeth.

Asia bashed another zombie in the face with a jagged rock, then hit it in the gut with a roundhouse kick. It stumbled back, and I leapt up and hit it in the back with a scissor-kick. It fell facedown in the leaves, its body limp.

I couldn’t help but gasp at the next zombie hobbling toward Kate. It was still wearing glasses. My heart sank as I realized he’d been newly turned. His clothes were clean, without any rips or tears, but he did have a nasty gash that ran from his cheek to his waist. I ran to build momentum, then delivered a roundhouse kick to his back with all the fury I could muster. Down he went, headfirst, and I finished him off. Kate shot me a thankful nod.

Jackie’s scream rang out next to me, and I looked over and saw that a zombie had wrapped its dead fingers around her ankle. Just as I headed over to help her, she brought her rock down over the back of its head. She yanked her leg away and signaled that she was okay, then ran toward the next target.

Lucas lifted a zombie up like some kind of wrestler and slammed it straight down.

I saw five more approaching, and my breath froze in my throat. Shouting, I ran at an uncoordinated zombie and swung my rock toward its skull, then hit the one to the left and the one behind that one.
Two more to go.
Nick stepped in one’s path and roared as he took it down. The last one approached, lips pulling back from black teeth. Strands of blond hair clung to its rotting head, but it was too decayed for me to tell if it was male or female. It was missing an arm, and the fingers on its remaining hand were twisted in unnatural, sickening contortions.