The Hunger (Book 2): Consumed (4 page)

Lance laughed harder.  Cass had started messing with Eifort a few days ago.  Considering she had been in the military, Eifort was easily embarrassed.  She didn’t swear often, and got red-faced whenever someone mentioned anything sexual.  Cass, being the instigator that she was, rarely missed an opportunity to take advantage of the young soldier’s discomfort.

“Yeah, we’re done.”  Lance walked over to the ladder and looked down.  “What’s up?”

“It’s almost noon.”

“OK, we’ll be down in a minute.”

Every day at noon, they listened to a crazy man broadcast on the radio.  Though he was nuts, he communicated good information over the airwaves.  He had contact with people all over the country and he relayed what they told him to the survivors of Pittsburgh.

Lance and Cass went back to the first floor and grabbed bottles of water from a crate by the door.  Eifort fiddled with the controls behind the bar until she found the right station. 

“Where’s Doc?” Lance asked.

“Out front trying to catch some fish.”

“I should probably go out and watch what he’s doing.”  Lance thought about getting up, but he wanted to hear what the man on the radio had to say.

The voice came through the overhead speakers a few minutes later.

“
Helloooo, Pittsburgh!  It’s the Wild Man of Monroeville here, coming at ya once again!  How many of you survived another night?  Boy, oh boy, I hear from less and less of you every day.  I’m probably talking to myself at this point. Any who, I haven’t talked to my buddy Connor from Ireland in three days now.  It’s probably safe to say that his eyes are falling out of his head right now.  Poor bastard.
”

Eifort sat down by Lance, shaking her head.  “If this guy rambled less, he could tell us what we want to hear a lot faster.”

Lance shrugged.  “What else do we have to do?”

“
... crazy bastards are still shooting up the place.  Yeah, that’s right.  I’m talking to you militant fucks out there.  I know you’re trying to find me.  You camouflaged dickholes are going to have to try a helluva lot harder.  My super-secret location might as well be the Batcave.  You ain’t finding me.  Now, for the rest of you, stay away from Edgewood if you can help it.  Those assholes have taken up camp there for the past two days and I don’t know what they’re up to.  They’re somehow recruiting more people too, so watch out.  They’ve got a damn army down there.
”

“Great.”  Cass leaned back in her chair.  “Edgewood isn’t that far away from us.”

Lance didn’t like the sound of it either.  The Minutemen were heading East.  He hoped they weren’t going to Greensburg to take out the next safe zone.  The idea made him want to vomit.

“
... and I’ll be goddamned if I didn’t find out something new today.  Does everyone out there know how the Xavier virus got its name?  I’ll tell you what, I feel like a real horse’s ass for not figuring this out.  It’s spoiler time—everybody ready?
”

“Spit it out already,” Cass grumbled.

“
Charles Xavier.
”  The man paused for several seconds.

“Who?” Eifort asked.

“
I know, right?  How could I not know that?  Sometimes I wonder if my momma dropped me on the head one too many times.
”

“What’s he talking about?” Eifort asked.

Lance shook his head in disbelief.  “Charles Xavier is the guy who led the X-Men.”

“The comic book characters?  Wolverine and those guys?”

“Yeah.  He was a mutant like the rest of them.  I’m guessing someone thought it fit because the Xavier virus is distorting its victims’ bodies.”

“Someone named the plague that wiped out all mankind after a comic book character?”

Cass stared up at the ceiling.  “That’s fitting, actually.  Some nerd in a lab is laughing about how witty he is, even as the world burns around him.”

“...
lot to report on otherwise.  Los Angeles is still burning, from what I hear.  Here’s a protip people—don’t burn the goddamn cities down.  Without a fire department to put them out, the fires spread.  California is so damn dry that the whole thing might go up.  NYC is still silent.  Some people from the other side of the pond are telling me that it’s pure madness there.  Goddamn vampires have consumed everything possible.  They’re even eating the dogs.
”

The man rambled for another twenty minutes, giving updates on different cities and countries.  No place sounded particularly safe.  He rattled off the list of functioning safe zones, including Greensburg, but he warned people not to flood to them for fear of overpopulation.

Surprisingly, the British Virgin Islands were still clear of the infected.

“I wonder if we could sail there?” Eifort asked as she shut off the radio.

“That’s pretty far away,” Lance said.  “Just getting to the ocean would be damn near impossible.”

Brown stepped into the doorway, grinning from ear to ear.  He held his good arm up, fishing line wrapped around his hand.  Three fish dangled from hooks.  “Who’s hungry?”

“Nice going, Doc!”  Lance jumped out of his chair, the idea of eating meat making his stomach growl.

Brown spent the next half an hour teaching Eifort and Lance how to clean and gut a fish.  Because she already knew about hunting and fishing, Cass went about preparing a small grill in the back of the boat.  She found some Old Bay seasoning and oil, which she pulled from a cabinet.

Lance could barely keep himself from drooling as he watched Cass season the fish and throw them on the grill.  He paid attention to the preparation of the food as best he could, but his excitement made his thoughts wander.

They ate shortly thereafter, sitting around a dining table with goofy grins.  The fish were medium-sized, so they couldn’t gorge themselves.  When they finished, they sat around, laughing about how great, and simple, Brown’s fishing idea was.

They popped open champagne from the bar and drank from the bottle, passing it around like a couple of teenagers.

“Now we just need to shoot a deer,” Cass said.  “That would feed us for a month—longer if we ration it out.”

“We’d need to be in the country for that.”  Lance winked at her.

Cass stuck her tongue out at him.

“Where does the river lead?” Eifort asked after she took a pull from the bottle and handed it to Brown.  “Maybe we can take the boat away from the city and drop anchor somewhere a little less crowded.

None of them knew.  They threw out a few guesses, but that’s all they were.  A month ago, Lance would have hopped on Google Maps and figured it out.

They all agreed that they would have to move the boat, regardless of where the river went.  The daywalkers by the shore had thinned a bit, but the majority remained.  The group made an incredible amount of noise that would only attract even more.

It was time to move on.

Lance had quite a buzz going behind his eyes as he climbed the ladder to the cabin.  He turned the engine on and watched as Eifort and Cass raised the anchor.  Brown stood at the bow of the ship, watching the water from the upper deck.

None of them were proficient at reading the instruments in the cabin, so they stationed themselves around the boat and looked for shallow places or other obstructions that might snag on the bottom of the Duchess.

They moved at a slow pace, conserving fuel and not seeing a point in hurrying.  They didn’t have any pressing appointments to get to.

The crowd of infected followed them along the shoreline for the first half an hour before falling behind.  As the river bent, Lance lost sight of them and hoped it would stay that way.  They crossed under a series of bridges, always wary of something dropping down on top of them.

By the time the sky darkened with the first touches of dusk, they’d passed New Kensington and Brackenridge.  They spotted small groups of the infected staggering between buildings and filing out of homes.

They kept moving.

On the outskirts of another small town, Brown held up a hand.

“Let’s anchor here for the night.  We can decide where we want to go in the morning.”

Lance shut everything down.

They spent the last of the failing light on the deck, sitting on benches attached to the wood.  The occasional daywalker shambled by, but the streets were mostly silent as the night approached.

Stars burned through the darkening sky.

Lance watched his first sunset in years, maybe a decade, with a group of people he’d only met a week ago.  Things were so simple, so primal, that he found himself enjoying the little things in life that he had once overlooked when the day’s complexities seemed so important.

He took Cass’ hand as the horizon turned red.  He half expected her to pull away and insult him.  She squeezed his fingers instead, lacing their hands together palm to palm.

The first lament of the vampires came ten minutes past sundown.

Eifort shifted in her seat next to the doc, giving him quick glances to gauge his reaction.  Brown remained stoic as ever, his eyes scanning the rapidly darkening streets.

“There,” he said, pointing at an intersection by a small deli.

A storm grate lifted by the edge of the road, clattering against the sidewalk.  A hulking shape climbed clear of it, walking on all fours across the road.  It reared back on two legs and blared at the crescent moon.

Dozens followed behind it, filing out of the drainage system and spreading out like a swarm of bees.  They stalked through the streets, their bulk slapping at the concrete loud enough to be heard from the boat.

Several moved to an adjacent apartment building, smashing through the doors like they were kindling.  Their power and speed still amazed Lance.  He’d always known the human body, even in its natural form, was capable of amazing feats.  But this was beyond his wildest imagination.

The first Vladdie to exit the sewer continued forward, occasionally baying at the sky.  It crossed a gravel parking lot and approached the edge of the river.  It was fifty yards from the boat when it stopped, feet splashing ankle deep into the water.

Its head tilted back, elongated nostrils flaring as it tracked a scent through the air.  It stopped abruptly and stood back on its legs again, raising its muscle-bound arms to shoulder height.

The shriek that escaped it made all four of them start in their seats.  They’d heard similar cries hundreds, probably thousands, of times over the past several weeks, yet this one still made them uneasy.  It was more ferocious, primal.  It went on for half a minute before dying away.

The beast slammed its massive forearms down on the water, sending an explosion of droplets cascading through the air.  An unnerving rage emanated from its every movement.

It didn’t just
want
to devour them—it
needed
to destroy them.  The rage, the hunger, controlled its every action.

“And you wanted to leave the boat and head on foot into the mountains.”  Cass leaned over to him, her voice hushed.  “Our only chance is to stay as far away from them as possible.”

Lance nodded.  They had no chance of survival at night.  Not this close to the city, anyway.

Brown stood from his chair, his eyes locked on the shore as a handful of Vladdies joined the first one by the river.  “We’re going to have to fight back at some point.”

“What?” Eifort asked.  “Are you nuts?  We saw those things take out a thousand people in the blink of an eye!”

“Exactly.  How safe can we ever be when they’re still roaming underneath our feet during the day?  What happens when they exhaust their food supply in the cities?  They’ll push into the forests and eat all the wildlife.  Then what?  They’ll hunt us until there’s nothing left.  They’ll consume the entire world.”

The rest of them stood, watching the overrun streets until the last of the light faded.  They went inside, saying their goodnights and crawling into their meager beds.

Lance lay on his back, thinking through Emmett’s warning.  What would happen if they did nothing?

Cass’ breathing slowed beside him as sleep took her.  He stared at the ceiling, thoughts of their future still bouncing through his mind.

He dozed off after a long while, his eyelids growing too heavy to hold open.  He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when he heard it.

Something scratched the side of the boat.

––––––––

L
ance sat up, listening for a recurrence of the sound.

He heard nothing for a full minute and had just started to lean back on his bed when he heard a small squeak.  It sounded like a tiny bird.

Or a wet shoe.

Lance put his hand across Cass’ mouth, hoping to keep her from speaking as he woke her up.  Her hand snapped from its position by her waist and latched onto his wrist.  He held his hand fast, raising a finger to his lips.

He pointed to his ear and then toward the wall.

Cass nodded and pushed his hand away, focusing on the silence around them.  After several seconds, she shrugged and shook her head.

Getting to his knees, Lance crawled to his shorts and freed his knife from its sheath.  Seeing the blade in his hand got Cass’ attention.  She went to her axe and lifted it from the floor, eyeing him the entire time.

The darkness experienced in a place with no streetlamps, lit windows, or moving headlights was shockingly complete.  The stars and moon provided just enough to see the outlines of a few objects and little else.

As Lance peered through a window, he realized he was wasting his time.  If something was out there, he wouldn’t be able to see it until it was on top of him.

They moved along the hardwood floor in complete silence, their bare feet allowing them to sneak down to the first level.  Cass took the lead, crouching low as she approached the back door.  She paused beside it, peering through the adjacent window.  Shrugging again, she looked back at Lance.

He could barely see her movements in the shadows of the Duchess.

She opened the door and slinked into the night, disappearing around the side of the boat.  Lance slid through next, but turned left and went the other direction.  He reached the corner and peered around, seeing the side was empty.