Defensive Instinct (Survival Instinct Book 4) (59 page)

The shots hitting their wall decreased, but the cracking gunfire didn’t slow down. It took a moment for Danny to realize that the shooters were now aiming at the trebuchets and pulley systems, trying to destroy the machines as opposed to those running them.

“Second team!” Jon was finally the one to call it for them.

As a fresh group of four scrambled onto the deck from where they had waited on the ammo bins, Danny and his team fell back. It was as they were slipping down the side, bypassing the ladders that had been set up, that they heard the explosion. A crack, a bang, a heavy whump and a great rumble dwarfed the gunfire from the shoreline. The submarine was rocked and Danny found himself losing his balance and being thrown overboard into the river. He wasn’t the only one, but no one was hurt, and the low lying position of the ammo containers allowed everyone to scramble back aboard. As Danny was hauled out of the water by Jon, he looked into the sky beyond the submarine and saw several large plumes of dust that had been launched into the air. He tried to count them, to determine if all of the explosives had gone off.

“Rear deck fire!” Bronislav screamed into the silence that had followed, snapping everyone’s focus back onto his or her task. They needed to keep launching the dead, keep the chaos going so that the team that had set off the detonator had a better chance of getting back out.

Danny breathed heavily, sitting flopped over and letting his limbs rest. He needed to prepare for the moment when the replacement team got tired. Bryce vomited once into the river, but insisted he was fine, just exhausted, and that he’d be okay soon. Misha was the only one to remain on his feet, his head cocked and listening to all the various sounds of battle, waiting for the call to return to pulling.

When the call finally came, the submarine was moving slowly backward, retreating down the river. The gunfire had dropped off drastically, but they continued to throw dead things onto shore anyway, trying to keep the enemy from following. Danny and his team had begun to scream with effort whenever they ran, although the urgency was less.

“Cease fire!” Bronislav called out. They must have reached the rendezvous point around the bend in the river where they had arranged with Evans to pick up the explosives team and didn’t want to pepper the area with corpses before they got there. They were currently sitting ducks, or rather, one big floating duck.

Danny rested as he watched the two canoes that had been loaded onto the submarine slide into the water. Their four strongest paddlers were onboard in seconds, the blades of their paddles slicing deep into the river. The canoes moved fast and were quickly out of sight, heading for shore to pick up the team.

Danny redirected his gaze to the wall and saw there were more holes than he had been aware of; some of the bullets must have passed dangerously close to them.

“Bronislav!” one of their loaders called up. “Did we get them? Did you see? Did all the explosives go off?”

Bronislav was a red mess when Danny looked up. What had to be a narrowly missed head shot owing to the fact that he was alive, had left a gash across Bronislav’s face, covering him in his own blood. It looked like his arm or shoulder had also taken a hit based on the way he wasn’t using it.

“I can’t say for sure about the deeper bombs, but all the entrances are certainly gone.”

The U-boat volunteers all cheered, while silently praying the lower bombs had gone off as well. If they hadn’t, then the Black Box might still have power and the raiders would be able to survive long enough to dig themselves out. If that occurred, Danny imagined an angry hornets’ nest of people descending on the container yard in the coming months.

“Team safely aboard canoes, resume firing!” Bronislav suddenly shouted.

Danny scrambled up and returned to his place in the line. As soon as all four of the team members grabbed hold, they ran across the deck again, more zombie debris flung to shore. The canoes came around the back of the submarine, off-loading onto the ammunition containers. As soon as they were all aboard, the sub resumed its backward retreat.

Between shots, Danny looked over at the returning team. They were all dirty, bloody, and hurt.

“Someone replace me!” Jon shouted.

Instead, the entire replacement team took over. Jon ran over as Rose climbed up onto the sub. The two of them had been close friends ever since the Diana, and it seemed that closeness hadn’t diminished despite living in separate locations. Rose was bleeding freely from a cut on her stump arm, but seemed to be the least wounded of the bunch. The injured were quickly hauled up the conning tower to be administered to by the doctors waiting inside. Danny watched as James limped his way along, finding it difficult to tell what was mangled boot and what was mangled foot on the end of his left leg. Canary was bleeding from her leg as well as several small cuts on her face, neck, and shoulder. Doyle was holding an arm across his bloody waist, but the fact that he was moving under his own power gave Danny hope that it wasn’t too bad, that it was just a cut from a blade and not a hole from a bullet. The man Danny knew the least, the one he guessed was Jamal, was the worst off. He had to be carried and the bone sticking out of his leg made it obvious why.

“Where’s Evans?” Danny asked as Rose and Jon released one another.

“He decided he wasn’t badly injured enough to need a doctor. He’s headin’ his own way.”

“What, he’s leaving?”

“He told me to tell anyone who asked, goodbye for him, so yeah, he’s goin’ someplace else.”

Danny didn’t know how he felt about that. Evans had kidnapped him, but he had grown to like the man anyway.

“Did you get to the right spot?” Bronislav shouted down.

“Oh yeah!” Rose grinned. “My ears are still ringin’ from that! Felt the land jump beneath me too!”

Everyone cheered again. Jon helped Rose up the ladder of the conning tower so that she could get her wound attended to. As they moved down river and back into the big bay, there was no need to keep throwing zombie parts, so everyone sat down to rest.

“What’s next?” Misha wondered.

“We get everything cleaned up, and everyone settled in,” Bryce told him. “After another week or two, we’ll send some teams over to see who’s left at that place and if any radiation has leaked out of the ground. If it hasn’t, we’ll look into killing whoever’s left and reclaim our crops.”

“And if it has?”

“We’ll have to monitor it and decide what to do then,” Bryce said, shrugging.

Danny felt confident there wouldn’t be a radiation leak. They had the container yard, a place they could call home. Nothing and no one was going to take it from them this time. With blades and bullets, with teeth and nails, with everything they had, they were going to stay put this time, and damn anyone who thought otherwise.

The End

Read on for a free sample of  Infernal Corpse

One

Megan Howzer stood on the rocky shore of Lake Superior, staring at the choppy, early November waters and wondering if she finally had the courage to jump in and let the frigid waves carry her out to her death.

Not for the first time, Megan reflected on how most people would consider that cowardice, not courage. It was her experience, however, that anyone who said that didn’t understand how depression seemed to work. She’d read somewhere that lots of people started to look outwardly happier right before they committed suicide, much to the chagrin of their grieving family members. It was because they’d finally made the decision to do it, that they knew this unidentifiable pain and numbness was going to end. She suspected that might be bullshit, though. She couldn’t imagine being happy most of the time. Instead, the depression held her down, much like if she were weighted by one of the large rocks she currently stood on. When she was like that, she couldn’t do anything. She could barely leave the house. She had trouble making herself eat. All of existence was a thick curtain she was tangled in. It blinded her and kept her from escaping. So killing herself? That seemed courageous to her. It felt like it might be the only way to rip through that curtain and prove it couldn’t stay wrapped around her.

But it’s not the only way, she thought. Just open up the bottle in your hand and take what’s inside.

She’d driven here directly from the pharmacy, here being the grounds of one of the vacation rental cabins outside of Mucwunaguk, Michigan. Her summer job all throughout high school had been cleaning a number of these cabins between rentals, and she’d come to love this particular stretch of the Michigan coastline. In the winter, it had always been even more of a sanctuary, provided she was willing to brave the treacherous roads and try ignoring the subzero temperatures. The Upper Peninsula didn’t exactly get many tourists at that time of the year, so she knew she could be alone with her thoughts here. It was here she’d first thought about killing herself. It was also here that she’d finally decided to get help. It had only seemed appropriate that, when she made what she was sure would be her last choice between living and dying, she do it in the same place.

It’s okay, the voice in her head said. You can live. Really. She had wondered for a while if this meant she was schizophrenic, but the psychiatrist had told her that particular illness didn’t necessarily work that way, despite what the media said. The voice always sounded to her suspiciously like Angie Zwiersky, the first person Megan had ever had a crush on and the first clue that Megan might be something other than straight. She wasn’t sure why it was Angie’s voice she always heard as the comforting voice of reason, although it probably had something to do with the fact that Angie had been nice to her during a time when no one else had.

According to the doctor, there was nothing wrong with hearing that voice as long as it didn’t tell her to do anything bad. It was a coping mechanism, apparently, one she’d picked up and latched onto over the years, giving that voice its own face in her mind, its own personality and mannerisms. Apparently, in the face of all her mother’s drunken antics over the years, Megan’s mind had decided that the best way to stay sane was to go just a little insane. And it had worked for a time. Then she had dropped out of college after only a year and she was back here, no job, not many friends, no real prospects for the future.

It’s not always going to be like that, the voice said. And the pills in your hand are the first step.

Of course, Megan didn’t expect them to work right away. She wasn’t even sure if they were the ones she needed. She’d never taken this kind of medication before. Megan’s mother had always been saying to her, ever since childhood, that any and all pharmaceuticals were toxic. Never mind that the woman was more than willing to pollute her body with enough vodka to drown a fish, it was prescription medications that were bad. Even now, Megan still thought she could hear that woman whispering to her, saying that would be bad, that she would be a tool of the industrial drug complex or some other such nonsense.

Megan opened the child-proof cap and dumped the prescribed dosage of one capsule into her hand. This shouldn’t be that hard of a decision. When choosing between living and dying, it didn’t make sense that a fear of a couple of little pills would be the thing to keep her from making a decision. But most fears people had weren’t rational. At least she knew where hers came from. A part of her wanted to take the pills just to spite her mother for filling up her mind with garbage and conspiracy theories, but she knew that wasn’t a good enough reason to do it. Whatever she chose here, she had to do it for herself, not for anyone else.

She looked to either side up and down the shoreline. Nothing but rocks, trees, and empty open water as far as she could see. To her left farther down, she could see the gentle rise of the Porcupine Mountains (a title she had always thought was something of a misnomer, since she had seen the Rockies and in comparison these were more like hills with delusions of grandeur). Behind her, past the remains of a long-dormant shoreline campfire and copse of scrubby trees, a path led back to the rental cabin, completely deserted for nearly a month now. There were a few people still in a cabin farther down the shore, she knew, a group of friends taking advantage of the off-season rates before the weather made coming this far into the boonies an impossibility. All this meant she was alone. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going and no one would likely think to look for her here. If she walked into the water, it would probably be hours before anyone missed her. So this was it. After all her hemming and hawing, this was really the moment where she had to choose.

Maybe fighting this really was the more courageous choice. She popped the pill in her mouth and swallowed it dry. It would take several weeks of regular doses before she would likely begin feeling anything other than side effects, yet this still felt like an important moment. This was the moment she decided to keep living.

Megan took a deep breath, the cold air feeling sharp in her lungs. Okay, so she wasn’t going to kill herself. Now was the time to decide where she was going to go from here. Maybe not make plans for her future, since plans had a way of getting fouled up. Goals, then. Things she could strive for. Things she knew it was in her capability of doing. She’d doubted herself for so long that she wasn’t entirely sure what those capabilities were, but she thought now was a good time to start learning.

First, however, she needed to eat and find something to wash down that nasty pill taste. For the first time in what felt like months, she smiled.

You know where you want to go, the voice in her head said. You know who you want to see.

She did indeed. The voice’s original owner, Angie Zwiersky herself, was also part owner of the Gitchigumi Café downtown. She would probably be waitressing right about now. And according to local scuttlebutt, she was not only currently single but had recently come out as bi. Megan wasn’t sure if she had the flirting chops to catch Angie’s eye. What she was sure of was that, after all these years, it was finally time to at least try.

Something exploded farther down the shoreline.

Megan almost lost her precarious balance on the slick rocks. Her sneakers slipped but thankfully found purchase as she pinwheeled her arms crazily. It wasn’t just that the sound startled her. The explosion, while not exactly nearby, had been close enough that she could feel a shockwave in the air. She hadn’t been looking directly toward whatever had exploded, but out of the corner of her eye she’d seen a flash bright enough that she’d had to look away. Once she was sure she wasn’t about to end up in Lake Superior after all and the explosion’s echo had faded out across the lake, she turned in that direction, thinking for sure that she would see something on fire.

There was no fire, but there was a thin wisp of black smoke curling in the air and getting carried away by the cold wind. It was about a quarter mile west down the shore, closer to the Porcupines. The vacationers had probably heard it, but she doubted they would be close enough to inspect it before Megan herself got there. That left the question, of course, of whether or not she even wanted to investigate.

Angie’s voice told her no, that wasn’t a good idea at all, although it wasn’t very loud. It probably knew saying such a thing wouldn’t work. Megan’s curiosity was too strong, coupled with a fact that this was probably the most exciting thing she would see in Mukwunaguk all winter.

Megan carefully worked her way off the outlier rocks to a more solid section of the shore then ran as best as she could over the stony terrain to the source of the explosion. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out what might have caused it. There shouldn’t have been anything out here flammable, unless the vacationers had left something out that they shouldn’t. At least, whatever it was, it wouldn’t have hurt anybody. The edges of Lake Superior at the beginning of November could feel like an empty land at the very edge of the world. No boats or ships would be crazy enough to be out on the water. Even the roads, not even visible from here through all the trees, would be more or less deserted until they were closer to town.

Whatever the explosion had been, Megan could see from some distance away that it had left something of a crater. It was right at the edge of the shore, a depression in the earth just close enough to the lake that the waves deposited a small amount of water inside it. The closer she got, the better she could hear a hissing noise, almost but not quite like a snake. This gave her pause until she remembered that no snakes would be out in this just-above-freezing temperature. No, the steam rising up with the last of the smoke told her the sounds actual origin. Something in the crater was hot, hot enough to instantly evaporate any water that touched it.

She slowed down, taking this fact in. The distance and the angle were such that she still couldn’t see whatever was in the crater, but her first thought was that it had to be a meteor. The rocks were certainly scattered around it as though there had been an impact. But would a meteor have caused a flash like that? How big would it have to have been for her to feel the shock wave from a quarter mile away?

Megan shoved the pill bottle in the pocket of her coat, all thoughts about whether to live or die gone now in the excitement of the moment. If it was a meteor, maybe she could take it and sell it. There had to be someone that would pay for it. Weren’t there websites that made jewelry out of such things? If nothing else, she could sell it to the Mukwunaguk Historical Society, yet another trinket in their crowded little museum for the tourists to coo over in the summertime.

She thought she heard voices somewhere beyond the trees. That would be the vacationers finally responding to what they had heard. If Megan wanted to get to the meteor first then she would have to move quickly. She wasn’t quite sure yet what she would do with it once she was there, given that it was likely still way too hot to touch, but at least she would have first claim on it.

Megan slowed, though, as she got close enough to see over the shallow lip of the crater. She’d never seen a meteor in person, but she’d always been under the impression that most of them were fairly small, maybe about as big as her fist. Whatever was still smoking and steaming in there, though, was bigger. Much bigger. And while the smoke and steam obscured her vision, she was almost certain that the soot-darkened thing inside was moving.

She stopped, knowing well enough that she didn’t want to deal with any mysterious moving object in a crater. She almost turned around and ran off, knowing full well from years of consuming media what happened to anyone bold enough to investigate mysterious circumstances. Given a few more seconds, that was probably exactly what she would have done, too. But as the temperature in the crater lowered and the hissing was no longer so loud, she thought she could hear something else, a voice.

“Help…”

Holy shit, there was actually a person in that crater.

Any thoughts of self-preservation vanished as she pictured the horrible mutilation that the person might be suffering at this very moment. The voice had sounded female, although hoarse and scratchy like she had been breathing in too much smoke. Maybe it was one of the vacationers after all. Megan had been so lost in her own internal struggle that she wouldn’t have noticed if someone had snuck on down to the shore for a little quiet-time of their own. But if a person was at the center of it, she highly doubted the explosion had been from a meteor.

Megan pulled her smartphone from her pocket, aware that she might need to call 911, yet she wasn’t surprised when she saw that it had no signal. There was a cell tower over on the far side of Mukwunaguk, but here the reception was always spotty. The tourists even kind of liked it that way, the lack of phones making them feel more isolated even in the height of tourist season where every cabin was completely full.