The Dead War Series (Book 2): Desperate Times (10 page)

“Jesus Christ, Linda. It's not okay. Oh, God! It's not okay!” Richard said against gritted teeth and flowing tears. He shook his head as his entire body trembled with the weight of what he had to do.

“Don't wait to the last minute, if you do they might get you,” Linda said as she clenched her muscles, squeezing him harder in her embrace.

“Or, you can just come with me,” a masculine voice said from behind.

Both Richard and his wife yelped and turned around, facing a tall, very handsome, bald, clean-shaven African-American male covered in bloody, torn clothes. His hazel eyes peered at them with an unnervingly calm resolve.

Was he not worried about the threat at the door and how in the hell did he get up here?
Richard pondered.

“Do you have a helicopter?” Richard asked, gratefully pulling the gun's barrel away from his wife's head.

“Do you want to live?” the stranger asked.

“Yes! Damn it, yes!” Linda belted out.

“That's all I wanted to know,” Dante advanced on the couple faster than they could react. He disarmed Richard, tossing the gun aside. “It's pretty much useless anyway.”

“What the fuck--” Richard looked at the man aghast. “How did you do that?”

“No time,” Dante said. He tossed a glance at the first zombie arm that was now peeling back the metal door. He returned his attention to the couple. “Sleep.”

Both Richard and Linda immediately slipped into unconsciousness and he caught them before they could fall. Hoisting them over his shoulder, he took to the skies just as the zombies broke through the door. They rushed the rooftop as such speeds, they propelled themselves over the edge falling on the bloodthirsty horde waiting below.

“Fucking ridiculous,” Dante cursed under his breath before navigating his body faster through the air. It would take him at least an hour to get to St. Louis, so there was little time to waste.

~*~

Aaron balanced himself in a tree about one hundred yards away from where Jesse was feasting greedily on the grizzly remains of a family who had been running from the zombie horde. They sought shelter in a McDonald's, breaking the window in order to get inside as the doors were locked. The terrified employees didn't have time to escape when Jesse and the zombies overtook them. Seconds after their deaths, some of the bodies that still had their heads attached began to resurrect and joined the zombie party either on both feet or dragging what remained of their mutilated bodies behind them. For the past hour, Aaron had been tracking Jesse who was bitten shortly upon arriving at Chicago's south side.

Every time the vampire had satisfied his bloodlust enough to come back to his senses, he was always in the middle of a zombie melee and was instantly attacked before he could get his bearings. That would start the cycle all over again and Aaron was starting to wonder if he'd be saving the world a lot of trouble if he'd just killed his friend before he could create any more zombies with his blind feeding frenzy. Whenever the urge came to mind, he pushed it away. He didn't have many friends...okay, who in the hell was he kidding, he didn't have any other friends other than Jesse. Budding relationships among vampires could be long lasting and even beautiful. But that's if the roles among them were clearly defined. If one wanted to advance, they may have no problem betraying a friend to advance in the hierarchy. Jesse was his best friend and was going to try his best to get him out of the mess he was in. 

He wanted to get close, but he didn't dare risk it. If he couldn't overpower Jesse, he'd only end up joining him and what good would that do either of them? So he waited and watched as some of the zombies began to leave the restaurant in search of fresh blood. He looked down from the tall tree he'd taken refuge at the desperate zombies that had gathered below just waiting for him to climb down. Now, more than ever before, he wished he was old and powerful enough to fly. He would have to jump from tree to tree to avoid those damn things and still keep an eye on Jesse. He hoped the recent massacre would be enough to quench Jesse's zombie-induced bloodlust.

Aaron turned his attention back to his friend who was currently fighting off a zombie. Jesse tossed the zombie across the dining area, the thing landed behind the counter, taking out a register on the way over. With the reprieve, Jesse ran out of the fast food restaurant and Aaron called his name, gaining his attention.

“Take to the trees! Don't let them touch you again!” Aaron yelled as if Jesse needed the advice.

The last thing Jesse wanted was to be bitten again. He had no idea where they were or how much damage was done while he was killing everything in sight. Jesse scaled the side of an apartment complex to the roof. He took a leap to the nearest tree, traveling that way until he reached the same tree where Aaron had been waiting.

“Glad to see you back to your old self again,” Aaron said, giving Jesse a once over. His friend's clothes and body were soaked in blood and decorated with bits of internal body parts.

“How long was I out?” Jesse asked.

“On a killing rampage, you mean?”

“Yeah fucker, how long?” Jesse growled.

“Several cities and one state over ago was the last time you were in complete control of your mental functions,” Aaron shot back. “I've been having one hell of a fucking time trying to keep up with you and away from you at the same time. Especially through the rural areas where it's nothing but open fields and farms and shit.”

“You didn't kill me.”

“I thought about it. But I couldn't. I know I said I would, but I couldn't.”

“What if I had tried to bite you?” Jesse asked, his eyes narrowing a bit relaying his curiosity.

Aaron shrugged. “It never got to that point.”

“But what if it did?”

“I don't know. We got lucky, Jesse. This whole situation is so out of fucking control.” He didn't want to have to think about the answer, let alone ever have to act it out.

“Where are we?” Jesse asked, as he looked around at the unfamiliar landmarks. There were several businesses along both sides of the street, some were out of business. Other blocks surrounding the area were all residential. Single-family homes and apartment complexes lining each street.

“Davenport, Iowa.  So, as you can see, we're pretty far off from where the hell we're trying to get to. I'm hoping we can find some roads to travel on that aren't clogged with traffic. We need to get going,” Aaron said.

“Lead the way,” Jesse motioned for him to take off first.

“Try to keep up this time and for crying out fucking out, don't get bit.”

“Fuck you, I wasn't trying to get bit in the first fucking place. The Master said we all needed to bring people with us for food and that's what I was trying to do,” Jesse said in his defense.

“I know what he said, but it ain't possible for us to bring humans with us when we're trying to get there alive ourselves. We don't have the abilities of his lords and lieutenants. We can't fly there and avoid all this bullshit. So, I'm sorry, that's an order I don't see us being able to follow,” Aaron stated. “By the way, you lost your sword a shitload of zombies ago so you really need to stay close to me.”

Jesse grumbled. “Fine, but are you willing to show up there empty-handed?”

Aaron studied his friend for several long seconds before answering. “Are you willing to risk getting bitten trying to drag some humans along? We tried that. You got turned and then you ate the humans we were trying to bring with us. What if, while we're trying to do the fucking impossible, that whole situation happens all over again? You or I could end up going bloodlust crazy and getting killed by some pissed off Master. We're lucky that hasn't happened yet, but who's to say it won't? We just can't. And I'll deal with whatever is going to happen once we get there, but shit, let's get there.”

Jesse sighed. “Fine. He calling us, I can feel him, so let's get going.”

Aaron sighed. “We're going to catch hell when we get to those open fields. I ain't looking forward to that shit.”

“Me neither... let's go.”

Aaron nodded and leaped onto a tree with Jesse following closely behind him. The two kept to the rooftops and trees, avoiding the zombies below as they made their way to St. Louis. If it was possible, they would save some humans along the way... if it was possible.

Chapter Four

Vincent paced back and forth in the small rectangular room that was obviously the janitor's closet. Shelves of cleaning solutions and other cleaning supplies lined the walls on either side of the room and the humans being held captive inside sat nervously in the middle. He shared the tiny space with Felicia, Dr. Powers, William--who they brought in after them, and three other people. An Asian woman, with short, dark brown hair who looked to be in her mid-forties with brown almond-shaped eyes that darted around the room. Two Caucasian men, both looked to be in their thirties. One was blond and the other had jet back hair, both had blue eyes that watched him as he paced the room.

“Will you sit down, all of your pacing is pissing me off,” the blond male captive blurted out.

Vincent turned to him, sneering. “Did they tell you why you're in here? Do you know?”

“They plan on turning us and you know what... I'll take being a vampire over being one of those fucking zombies out there any day,” the man shot back, pointing to the wall for emphasis. 

“You don't even know what that means!” Vincent argued.

“Right about now, I don't give a shit. I barely survive nearly being eaten alive by those fucking monsters. If it weren't for them, I'd be dead or out there killing more people. As far as I'm concerned, we're the lucky ones,” the man said, settling his back against the cold stone wall.

“Jesus Christ!” Vincent turned to Felicia. “What do you feel about all of this? I mean, you're sitting there, haven't said a fucking word since they threw us in here. You have to be going crazy right now?”

Felicia ran her hands through her hair. “I don't know what to think. In the past hour, I just discovered vampires are real. This is after I had to accept the fact that the world is under attack by zombies. I don't even know if my team is all right or if they even made it to Atlanta. They have to be worried crazy about us, they probably think we were attacked like that other helicopter.”

“I don't know what to think, I'm still trying to process all of this shit,” William said. Felicity had brought him up to speed about everything that happened inside the office and he had a lot of questions they couldn't answer. So now, he was just waiting to see what was going to happen next.

“We have to do so something. We can't let them turn us?” Vincent protested.

“Just what in the fuck do you plan on doing, wise ass?” the blond man asked. “I guess you didn't see the part where those fucking vampires can fly? Or how about the part where they move faster than our eyes can see. I saw the one who saved me take out two of those zombies, cutting off their heads in no time flat. I want that kind of power if it means I can protect myself. As humans, we're no match for those zombies or them.”

“Who are you?” Vincent asked abruptly.

The blond frowned. “What kind of question is that? What do you mean?”

Vincent shook his head as if the action could erase the last question. “No, I mean what did you do? Why are you important to them? I don't see them wanting to turn just any human. What can you do for them?”

The blond stood up, his chest heaving with his mounting rage. “I'm a doctor. Who the fuck are you?”

“I'm a scientist. I worked at SciTech Labs--”

“That's the place where all of this shit started. What in the hell happened there?” the other man interjected. He rose as well, brushing his dark hair from his eyes.

“I honestly don't know. Our experiment had proved a success--”

“What the hell do you mean, 'our experiment’? You mean to tell me all of this shit is your fault?” the blond growled as he advanced on Vincent, grabbing him by his shirt front and punching him in the face.

Vincent grunted as his head jerked to the side. His vision blurred from the impact and pain shot across his nose and upper lip. Dr. Powers, William and the other male rushed towards the two men, pulling the blond back from Vincent as Vincent struggled to free his clothing from the man's forceful grip.

“Fighting amongst ourselves isn't going to solve a damn thing,” Felicia said as she made her way to stand beside Vincent. “And frankly, this space is too small for you to display your base male testosterone-laden bravado.” She pointed toward the blond doctor.

“If it weren't for him, none of this bullshit would even be happening!” The blond yelled as he glared daggers at Vincent.

Vincent dabbed at the blood that was running from his nose and his split lip. He glanced at the redness feeling his anger and guilt boiling within him. “Don't you think I've beaten myself up enough about this? I didn't want this!” He yelled back, waving his arms around to indicate their situation. “I never wanted this. I didn't want to see my friends get killed right in front of me. Fuck!” He turned, walking towards the steel door and slammed his forehead against it.  “I wish the government had never come to us.”

“What the fuck did you do in that damn lab?” the blond man asked. The rage in his voice was still very palpable, but the volume of his tone has settled down.

Vincent turned around, leaned against the door for support. “We thought we were saving the world.” He laughed harshly at shambles of his hubris. “We had success. What the government had paid us for, we had finally achieved...” He looked off to the side, staring at a shelf containing several containers of bleach. “We should have let that fucking ape die. None of this would be happening now if we hadn't bothered to try to save it.”

“You need to apply pressure to that,” Felicia said, snatching a cleaning cloth from the shelf and handing it to Vincent.

“What in the hell did the government pay you to do?” the dark haired male asked.

“It's classified,” Vincent replied. He snorted as he held the cloth to his nose to stop the bleeding. He wasn't even sure if it even mattered if the whole world knew what they'd been up to that resulted in the horror that was just outside their walls.

“Fuck that 'classified' shit, answer the damn question,” the blond barked.

“You already know more than you should and since you can't seem to calm down, I don't have any inclination to tell you the rest, nor do I owe you a fucking explanation.” Vincent pushed himself away from the door. “But I'll tell you want thing, don't put your fucking hands on me again.”

“Okay, for crying out loud, can we just calm the hell down?” Felicia demanded. She walked towards the center of the room, taking a stand between the three enraged males. “We have the data and everything we could salvage from the lab and I guess when it's safe for us to do so, the...vampires... are going to want us to start working on a cure. They have just as much invested in this as we do. I'm guessing they are going to want us to work together, so let’s stop trying to kill each other, all right?” She looked at the men, first Vincent, who nodded and then at the other two. The two men fumed still, but they begrudgingly nodded and took several steps back towards the wall, far away from Vincent.

“Okay, good. That's making some progress,” Felicia said.

Vincent looked at her. “How can you be so calm knowing what they plan to do with us, or is there still some part of you that's in denial?”

Felicia scoffed. “I'm not so stubborn to the possibility of the unexplained or even unnatural to admit the truth when I see it.” She turned her back towards Vincent, taking several steps away. “I'm terrified,” she said finally.

“Shit, that's all of us,” Dr. Powers said, revealing his true feelings. “I don't know what being turned into a vampire means. I don't know if it will help us save the human race or not. I do know that we may not have a choice. When we were on the helicopter, he had complete control over us. I couldn't move or talk or anything. I sat there, fully aware and in awe of what I was seeing: a man who could fly. It's the only way to explain how he got on that helicopter in the first place. Why they don't just turn us now, I don't know. But I do know fighting and obsessing over whether or not it's going to happen isn't going to make matters any better for us.”

“I don't know...I guess I'm just worried about Sarah. She's still out there with the humans they say is livestock and I'm trapped in here. I don't know what they are planning on doing,” Vincent said.

“Well, I guess—and I'm going out on a limb here—they may eat here since you just said that they put her with the other humans 'livestock',” the blond stated sarcastically. 

“What the fuck are you saying?!” Vincent growled.

Felicia went to him, pressing both hands on his shoulders, pushing him back against the steel door.

“Don't! None of us can afford to have you two going at it, damn it. Get yourselves together!” She glared at both men.

Vincent closed his eyes as he took several deep breaths, forcing himself to calm down. He nodded once he felt like he was regaining his self-control and went back to tending to his injured nose. Felicia stepped back, removing her hands from his chest.

“Good. We need you to stay focused. I'm sure Sarah is fine, but right now, why don't you think about your research and what you can do to get us started on a cure. That's where we need your mind to be at right now. That's your priority,” Felicia reminded.

Vincent looked down at Felicia, studying her expression. He knew she meant business. She's been as serious as a heart attack from the moment they'd first met. He also knew she was right. Sarah was his fiancée, the love of his life, but if he didn't find a cure, what future could they have? Would they even have one? He nodded and walked towards one of the shelves and took a seat in front of it. Felicia sat down opposite him and the others began to settle on the floor as well, each one watching the others.

“I don't want to be a vampire, but I don't want to die, either,” the Asian female said, breaking her silence.

“I don't think any of us truly want to be a vampire. We're still not even sure what that means. But I know that I don't want to be one of them either,” Felicia said. “But what does it matter? We don't have a choice.”

Vincent didn't say anything, he knew she was right. He'd been witnessed to the vampire's strength inside that office. No human could do what he'd done and it made him wonder if the red substance they'd been working with was somehow tied to vampires? Every part of him felt that maybe it was vampire blood and that's why it could heal. But what made it so volatile? So difficult to neutralize?

“Vincent, what are you thinking about?” Felicia asked, seeing the frown on his face. She could practically hear the gears turning inside his mind.

“I think the base compound we were working with was vampire blood.”

“So, this shit ain't confidential anymore, is it?” the blond male asked, venom practically dripped from every word.

Vincent turned to him. “Can you handle the facts? Or are you planning on charging me again?”

“I already know it's your fault why the world is fucked up now, so you don't have to worry about me rushing you again,” the blond ground out.

“First off, this isn't all on my head. If it wasn't our lab, the government would have just gone somewhere else. They were determined to get their super serum,” Vincent stated.

“Yeah, well, I wish they
had
gone somewhere else. Maybe we wouldn't be here if they had.”

“Let's not get into the unknown possibilities of 'what ifs'. That kind of thinking doesn't solve a damn thing and besides, it can't be proven anyhow. Who knows, we might have found ourselves in a worse situation,” Dr. Powers said.

“The government came to SciTech because we were the best. Like I said, we finally had success. We had created a serum that could possibly cure cancer, AIDS, diabetes, hell, you name it. Not only that, but we were testing its effects on the body. It could increase a person's strength, agility... heighten their awareness. Who knows what else this serum could do. We were in the first stages of testing when we injected one of our dying apes with the serum. We hoped it would have healed him, but instead, the ape died, then came back to life and killed my co-workers,” Vincent said.

“Fuck, man,” the dark-haired man hissed. “Would it have killed you to run a test before you injected the ape? Couldn't you have taken a blood sample, then see how the serum affected it?”

“The ape was dying at that moment. It was a now or never kind of situation and if the serum was supposed to do what we designed it to do... it should have saved the ape. I still don't know why it didn't when all of the other tests were positive,” Vincent said as he mused over the events. “Besides, we had been injecting the apes with various combinations of the compounds to see how they'd react. We had no idea anything like this would have happened. It was the ultimate test, if it worked, we knew we had truly succeeded.”

The others were quiet as they reflected on Vincent's words. Some were still watching him, seeing the somber look of despair and guilt flooding his features. Others gazed at the floor, unable to look at him.

“Whatever happens next, we need to work together. That's the only thing that matters now,” Felicia said, putting their goal back into perspective.

“I wonder why they're waiting to do whatever it is they're going to do to us,” William speculated, presenting the question to no one in particular.

“I've been wondering the same thing myself,” Dr. Powers said.