Dead Days Zombie Apocalypse Series (Season 8) Read online

  DEAD DAYS SEASON EIGHT

  RYAN CASEY

  Higher Bank Books

  CONTENTS

  Bonus Content

  DEAD DAYS: SEASON EIGHT

  EPISODE FORTY-THREE

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  EPISODE FORTY-FOUR

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  EPISODE FORTY-FIVE

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  EPISODE FORTY-SIX

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

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  About the Author

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  DEAD DAYS: SEASON EIGHT

  EPISODE FORTY-THREE

  AND HE SAW IT HAPPENING ALL OVER AGAIN

  (FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON EIGHT)

  PROLOGUE

  She looked at the mass of undead in front of her and she knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

  The autumn leaves were frosty underfoot, which was a sure sign that autumn was segueing into winter. The thought of the imminent winter didn’t scare her. It alarmed her a little. But in truth, not a lot could truly scare her anymore. Not after the things she’d been through. Not after the things she’d witnessed. Not after the things she’d done.

  Winter was just another hurdle in a landscape of many hurdles.

  And one of those hurdles was right ahead of her at this very second.

  She stood still as the cold breeze blew against her, sending a shiver creeping up her spine. She was still protected by the trees all around her. She’d grown used to using the trees for shelter. When she was out of the woodlands, buildings would take the same role.

  She’d been surviving alone long enough in this world to know the best ways to stay invisible.

  She breathed in deeply, right through her nostrils. She knew some people might call her mad for that. After all, the stench of death never got any better. It got worse, as time went on, as rot kicked in even more. Much, much worse. But that was something else you just had to learn to deal with. Something you had to teach yourself to adapt to.

  If you couldn’t handle a bit of smell, if you couldn’t train that gag reflex to behave, then you wouldn’t still be here today. Simple as that.

  She felt her hands shaking, her heart thumping. She knew she’d have to stay still. Very still. There were a lot of undead at the bottom of this hill. A hell of a lot. Hundreds of them. They seemed to be congregating in bigger groups lately. It’d been strange, watching the evolution of the infection right from the very beginning, even if the evolution of the infection seemed to have halted and even regressed of late. At first, they were the walking type of zombie. Then some of them started running. There was communication, of sorts. Hive mind behaviour.

  Then there were the other things. The ones who looked like normal people, unbitten, but had the parasites inside their skulls.

  They gave her the biggest creeps. Because you just never knew whether you were coming face to face with another survivor, or something else entirely.

  And she couldn’t lie. She kind of missed people. She missed being around them. She’d always been a social being, even if she never used to realise it. She liked interacting with others. She was a kind of extroverted introvert, or maybe it was an introverted extrovert. She drew energy from other people, but at the same time, she needed a break from them every now and then.

  She’d been on a break from people for a long time now.

  She didn’t know whether anyone she cared about was left.

  All she knew was that she had to keep on moving, keep on hoping that one day, she’d find a sanctuary all over again. A place of peace.

  One day, she’d find hope amidst the darkness.

  And if there’s one thing this world was rife with, it was darkness.

  She started to ease back into the forest, knowing that she’d have to watch her step. If she so much as cracked a branch under her foot, she’d draw attention to herself. And drawing this crowd to her wasn’t her idea of a perfect Sunday morning.

  Or wait. Was it Saturday?

  She wasn’t sure anymore.

  Shit. What did it even matter? The days lost their relevance a long time ago.

  She edged back gradually. At the same time, she gripped on to the axe in her right hand. It was a close combat weapon, but she kind of preferred it that way. At least at close range, she could be totally sure she’d taken her enemy down.

  As she stepped back into the woods, breathing deeply to keep herself calm, she thought about some of the other horrors she’d witnessed. The bodies she’d found, mutilated, by something that must go way, way beyond mere undead. The talk of beasts with long, sharp teeth and jet black eyes… those murmurings scared her.

  They scared her so much that she looked over her shoulder into the woods.

  In the distance, she saw something.

  She frowned. At that moment, her focus dropped.

  There was a girl. A young girl, with long brown hair.

  The girl was holding a gun, pointing it right at her.

  She was—

  She recognised her, then. She recognised her and it took her right back.

  It made the dread fill up inside her body.

  It made the fear take a hold, take over her breathing, take over everything.

  Because it reminded her.

  She was lost, then. She knew when she was lost because she couldn’t think straight. And sure, she tried to tell herself just to focus on the present moment because this couldn’t be real. This was nothing more than an illusion. She tried to tell herself to focus on her breathing. To bring herself back to reality.

  But that girl.

  That girl holding the gun.

  That girl looking right at her.

  That girl…

  She heard the blast, felt the bullet pierce her skull, but after that everything went blank.

  It always went blank.

  But this time, it didn’t go blank because of the loss of consciousness.

  It went blank because she heard a groan to her left.

  And the next thing she knew, she was falling.

  The undead creature was on top of her. It looked like it was a woman, once
upon a time. Her grey hair hung down in spindly strands. Her face was covered in broken, rotted flesh.

  She looked like one of the early ones. Like one of the undead that’d turned a long, long time ago.

  She didn’t know when these undead were going to die out. Surely they’d starve eventually.

  But she didn’t have time to fucking think about that right now.

  Instead, she tightened her grip around the axe and swung it at the back of the undead creature’s skull.

  The creature pushed down towards her neck, its teeth snapping and crunching down. She could smell death, and feel drool falling onto her skin.

  She kept on swinging. Kept on fighting. Kept on pushing—

  She heard more groans.

  She caught a glance, then. Just a momentary glance. But a long enough glance for her to realise what was happening.

  The crowd of undead were coming through the trees.

  They were closing in.

  Surrounding her.

  Pressed under the weight of one of the dead, and losing the feeling in her right hand—the one that she was holding the axe with—she started to wonder if this was it.

  If finally, after all this time, it was really it.

  As she struggled some more, the monster closing in and getting ready to turn her into mush, she thought of him.

  She thought of him and she hoped, whatever happened, that he was okay.

  The undead closed in.

  The one on top of her pushed down even harder.

  Her vision blurred, and…

  CHAPTER ONE

  Riley saw it happening all over again.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes when he saw it, it was morning. Others, it was the thick of night. But the time of day didn’t affect things. The weather didn’t affect things. It could be raining. Snowing. Sometimes, blinding sunshine. Others, thick cloud.

  But no matter what, the way it played out was always the same.

  The horror was always the same.

  He was held back, pinned back by the might of two, three, maybe four people. He kicked out and struggled. He knew he had to kick out and struggle because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t even stand a chance of saving them.

  And that was the worst thing about all this.

  Now, when he saw it happening all over again, he knew what was coming. Every single time, he knew what was coming.

  No matter how much he kicked out, how much he fought, or how much he cried and screamed and everything, Riley still couldn’t change the inevitable.

  By its very nature, the inevitable was unstoppable.

  He saw Mattius standing opposite him, machete in hand. He saw the lines on his face, and his ginger hair. He saw his vicious smile, and the redness in his eyes, and he felt the dread he’d felt that day when this scene happened for the first time.

  He saw Chloë.

  He saw Jordanna.

  That was the hardest part of all this.

  “We’ll put you through hell for what you did to us. For the families you killed. For the lives you took.”

  Riley pushed and fought and kicked and cried.

  “But I can think of much, much better ways of putting you through hell than killing you.”

  There was a pause, then. A momentary pause where nothing seemed to matter, but where Riley understood everything that had happened, was happening and was about to happen.

  Then Mattius brought that machete crashing down against Chloë’s one remaining arm.

  He sliced it right off.

  He saw that look on Chloë’s face all over again. It wasn’t fear. In the beginning, Riley thought it was fear. But no, it wasn’t fear. It was acceptance. It was a confused acceptance of the way things were, and of the way the world worked.

  Because that girl had seen how this world worked.

  She knew how it operated.

  She knew how cruel it was.

  “Keep Kesha safe—”

  And then the machete crashed down onto her head.

  After that, no more suffering.

  That image was evil, though. It was impossible for Riley to accept, indigestible for him to swallow. He’d known that girl. He’d helped raise her, in a sense, into the post-apocalyptic survivor she’d been.

  Sure, they’d conflicted over some things. There was the situation with Anna. Then there was Chloë’s single-handed—not literal—upturning of the Manchester Living Zone.

  But for everything they’d fought about, they’d ultimately had so much in common.

  And Chloë’s final words captured everything Riley knew he had to follow, and that he had to carry out.

  Keep Kesha safe.

  The second part of the memory, he saw it differently. Honestly, in reality, the whole scene had happened so quickly that he’d barely been able to process it.

  When he remembered it, it was drawn out. And in a way that made it even more painful because he knew what was coming, and that he was going to be forced to watch every drawn out moment all over again.

  Mattius pressing the blade into Jordanna’s back.

  Pushing it through.

  The life gradually fading from Jordanna’s eyes.

  Then…

  The emptiness. The emptiness was the worst thing. Because that was the moment when all hope slipped away.

  But the worst part? Even worse than everything awful that’d come before, as impossible as that sounded?

  The moment Mattius took Kesha away.

  The moment he turned his back on Amy’s camp and walked away with his people, with Kesha.

  Because Kesha was supposed to be the person Riley protected.

  She was immune. Not only immune, but she could cure others.

  Riley would look out for her until she was older, until the day she was ready.

  He wasn’t sure Mattius would use the same level of restraint with Kesha.

  He worried he was going to use her to make himself even more powerful in the eyes of the other survivors out there.

  Riley watched them take Kesha away and he tried to fight. He watched them take Kesha away and he felt the anger burning up inside. The rage.

  He would find Mattius, one day.

  He would find him, and he would make him suffer for what he’d done. For what he’d taken away from him.

  He’d killed Riley’s hope. He’d taken out Chloë, a child of this new world.

  He’d taken out Jordanna, one of the strongest people he’d ever known. A future, for Riley.

  And he’d taken away Kesha.

  She really was the future, because she represented everything that was to come.

  And for that, Mattius would feel ten-thousand times the pain that Jordanna and Chloë had felt.

  Riley would get his revenge. And he wouldn’t be content until he—

  “Riley!”

  He opened his eyes and gasped.

  He felt his heart racing. He was covered in sweat. Light shone in through the makeshift curtains.

  He’d been dreaming again.

  There was a woman holding on to his shoulder. Sophia, she was called. They kind of had an on-and-off thing going. But to be honest, there wasn’t a lot in it. Not a lot of love.

  Just a way of finding some company.

  It was a lonely world to have no one to fall asleep beside.

  “You dreaming again?” she asked.

  Riley covered his sweat-drenched face and took a few deep breaths. He could taste vomit. He was shaking. He heard chatter outside and he knew it was time to get up and face another day.

  But facing the days was getting difficult.

  The longer he went without getting his revenge on Mattius—and getting Kesha back—the more the suffocating demon of rage grew under his skin.

  “You should leave,” Riley said.

  Sophia glanced at him with narrowed eyes. Her dark hair hung down over her face. “What?”

  “You should go,” Riley said. “Seriously. Please.”

  Sophia ro
lled her eyes and sighed. “Not putting up with this much longer, mate.”

  “Then you’re free to walk.”

  She slapped Riley’s chest. “You might think you’re good company, but seriously. I’ve had better.”

  She pecked Riley’s cheek and then stepped up, getting dressed. She pulled her bow over her shoulder when she reached the door, then opened it wide so the light filled Riley’s cabin.

  “Rise and shine,” she said, raising a middle finger.

  Riley pulled the covers over his face.

  He knew it was time to get up. He knew it was time to rise. But he knew what that meant.

  Another day of trying to locate Mattius and his camp.

  Another day of failing.

  Another day of the anger building up and stewing some more.

  “Knock knock.”

  The voice was unfamiliar. Definitely not Sophia’s, anyway.

  Riley pulled the covers away from his face.

  Amy stood at the door. She was the leader of this place. The one Chloë had brought Kesha to a while ago, and the one she trusted more than anyone here.

  She turned up her nose when she looked around Riley’s room, like she wasn’t impressed with how he was keeping this place.

  “Something wrong?”

  “It’s Mattius,” Amy said. “We’re onto something.”

  And with that, Riley saw it happening all over again.

  He saw Chloë.

  He saw Jordanna.

  He saw their heads on stakes.

  He saw Kesha being taken away.

  He threw the sheets off, got up and got dressed.

  “What’ve you got?” Riley asked.

  Amy half-smiled. “One of his people.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Riley crouched down opposite the prisoner and he looked right into his eyes.

  The prisoner was male. He was called Bob, apparently, but for all he knew that was bullshit. The room they had him in was dark and didn’t have much in the way of water or food. Not that he was mistreated in any way by Amy or the rest of her group. After all, they didn’t believe in treating their prisoners badly. Except for one particular prisoner, who was in a cell next door…

  Riley wasn’t a part of Amy’s group, though. Not really. He’d been here a month. He was the wrong gender, for one.

  So in a sense, his methods were different.