Dead Days: Season Seven (Dead Days Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 7) Read online

  Dead Days Season Seven

  Ryan Casey

  Higher Bank Books

  Contents

  Bonus Content

  DEAD DAYS: SEASON SEVEN

  EPISODE THIRTY-SEVEN

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  EPISODE THIRTY-EIGHT

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  EPISODE THIRTY-NINE

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  EPISODE FORTY

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  EPISODE FORTY-ONE

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  EPISODE FORTY-TWO

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Want More Dead Days?

  About the Author

  Copyright

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  DEAD DAYS: SEASON SEVEN

  EPISODE THIRTY-SEVEN

  FERAL

  (FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON SEVEN)

  Prologue

  Titus Barkley always lived by the mantra of living every day like it was his last.

  Surviving in a post-apocalyptic landscape really brought a whole new meaning to that idea.

  The mid-September afternoon sun was low and warm. Titus could never recall the autumn days being as intense as this. He wondered if something had changed along with the introduction of the infection, or if some kind of solar incident had affected the weather. Weirder shit had happened. He’d seen the red moon a few months back, the crazy way it made the infected react. He’d seen the new monsters, too. The ones all in black, with teeth as sharp as razors, as long as knives.

  If there was one thing Titus knew for sure, it’s that humanity really did know nothing. Not anymore. And to humanity, that was uncomfortable. Very fucking uncomfortable. All these years, decades, centuries of thinking we know everything, and once again the rug had well and truly been pulled from beneath our feet.

  It was liberating in a way. Staggering, just seeing how much the earth controlled us in ways we didn’t understand; in ways we’d never truly understand.

  But all he had to understand right now? He had to find some place safe for his people, and he had to do it fast.

  He looked around at the vast expanse of the Rivington hills. He saw landmarks he used to drive past to work every day, taking them for granted. The Macron Stadium, where Bolton Wanderers played their football. The Bolton Arena, where several Commonwealth Games events were once played. Horwich Parkway train station, where he first met Chrissie after a night bowling with his friends. He looked down there and he remembered her beautiful smile. That teasing look in her eyes. That luscious blonde hair trailing down her back.

  He thought of her that way and he felt tightness in his throat.

  It took a lot to keep that image the prevailing one, especially after he’d watched Chrissie get torn apart by the undead.

  “How much further you seriously think we can go, Titus?”

  Titus snapped out of the moment when he heard Sally’s voice. He looked back at her, and at the rest of his group. There was Sally, Marco, Kurt. Not many of them left. And Kurt was wounded. Hurt his ankle back in Blackburn. Sally and Marco were holding him up, dragging him along. Titus knew Sally wasn’t too keen on that. She put on this big bravado about having the best interests of the group at heart, but really, Titus saw that act for what it was. An act.

  She didn’t care about their people. She only cared about herself. And given the first chance, she’d cut Kurt loose before Titus could click his fingers.

  “We’ll head down the hill. Check out the stadium. Maybe there’ll be someplace to stay around there.”

  “You’re losing your grip.”

  Titus didn’t know what to say to Sally when she said things like that. After all, he actually did have the best interests of his group at heart. It was her who was always dragging him down, trying to get him to do the things he really didn’t want to do. “Trust me,” he said.

  “For how much longer?”

  He wanted to answer Sally, as he heard Kurt gasping with pain, struggling for life.

  But what could he possibly say to her?

  “Just trust me.”

  He turned around and headed down the side of the hills, into the woodlands, towards Horwich—a place he used to call home.

  The group moved as swiftly but smoothly as they could through the trees. Titus never liked being in the woods. Always took him back to his childhood, when he got left behind in the middle of a Californian forest by a group of jerks older than him. They told him horror stories of bears and wolves, of spiders that could kill boys with one bite. He’d pissed his pants. Shat himself. Cried himself to sleep as the darkness surrounded him.

  He’d moved to Britain not long after. He must’ve been the first person actually happy to be moving to Bolton from San Francisco in the history of man. Dad’s job came first, as always, after he got a big position at a UK baking company. Titus kind of liked England from the second he got here. He liked the tighter-knit communities, the friendliness of neighbours and the smallness of the schools. He’d liked everything about England, but one fear remained, right to this very day.

  His fear of the woods.

  He felt his heart pounding. The smell of his own sweat was strong in the air, which was always the case whenever he was nervous. He tasted sickliness in his throat that took him right back to that day he’d been left behind as a kid, crying and screaming in the lonely woodlands all through the night, swearing he saw movement in the branches.

  Only right now, there were monsters in the woods. The monsters were real.

  And he had to be sharp if he wanted to deal with them.

  He kept on moving down the hill. The area was quiet
. Completely quiet. He hadn’t seen an infected for hours, which he found strange. Of course, there weren’t many people in the woods, so that made it an almost ideal place to live, in the cruellest twist of fate. The place of his nightmares, ideal. Just his luck.

  “Titus, what’s the goal here, man?” Marco asked. “What’s the damned goal?”

  “We keep moving,” Titus said.

  “Which is code for, ‘I don’t have a plan’,” Sally said.

  “Look. You don’t need to follow me. You can walk away right now. Find your own path if that’s what you really want. But we’ve made it this far together. We’ve fought through so much shit to get here. We can’t just give up now.”

  Titus saw Sally, Marco, and Kurt all looking at him with glazed eyes. He figured it’s because he didn’t lash out much. Never had done in his previous life, had no plans to in this life. But sometimes, the situation just demanded it. And if it got through to his people, then it got through to his people.

  And then he realised they weren’t looking at him.

  They were looking beyond him.

  He turned around. Squinted into the distance. He expected to see movement behind the leaves. One of those long-toothed beasts, or the monsters with the fleshy, pulpy heads.

  But it wasn’t any of those things. It wasn’t even something alive.

  It was a cabin.

  Titus walked slowly towards the cabin. His heart raced even more. There was nothing scarier than coming across the infected in the woods. But coming across weird, isolated cabins was definitely a close second.

  “What d’you reckon?” Marco asked. “Shall we take a look?”

  Titus kept on moving towards the cabin. His instincts told him this was wrong. That if he carried on walking, something very bad was going to happen. That this wasn’t where he was heading. There were better places to go than here.

  “We need to go inside,” Sally said, snapping through Titus’ thoughts. “We need to rest. Kurt needs it badly.”

  Titus’ thoughts became muddled. He could take a quick look in the cabin. Just a quick look. How harmful could it be, really? But everything was just so… still. So quiet. Like there was someone around this place keeping an eye on it.

  “There’s no debating it anymore,” Sally said. “We’re going inside.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Titus said.

  Sally stopped by Titus’ side. Shook her head. “You don’t get to make that decision anymore.”

  Titus watched Sally walk towards the cabin, Marco and Kurt by her side. He watched them clamber up the steps, stop in front of the cabin door. He watched them lift their hands and bang on it.

  An echo through the woods. Silence.

  “There’s no one in here,” Sally said.

  Titus still didn’t feel right. He felt like the branches of the woods were watching him. Like there were people whispering between the trees. He looked through them. Scanned them, all around.

  He had a duty to protect his people. He had a responsibility.

  He couldn’t just walk away.

  He took a step when he heard another branch snap behind him.

  “Don’t move another fucking muscle,” the voice said.

  It was a man’s voice, no doubt about that. It sounded quiet, though. Like it was far away. Speaking of which… Titus couldn’t be sure which direction he’d heard it from. Left? Right? Directly behind?

  He started to turn around, slowly.

  “I said, don’t move a fucking muscle.”

  Again, Titus wasn’t sure where the voice came from. He noticed in the corner of his eye that Sally, Marco, and Kurt were still at the door, but they weren’t moving. They’d clearly heard the voice too.

  “Titus?” Sally called.

  “Lift your hands,” the voice said.

  Titus didn’t want to. He didn’t want to give in. Never liked giving in to bullies of any kind. “We’re not here to hurt you, mate. We’re just here for shelter. We’ve got a wounded—”

  “I don’t give a shit what you’ve got. You’re going to turn around from this cabin and you’re going to fuck the hell off my property. Right this second.”

  Titus felt his stomach sink completely. He knew coming to this cabin was a bad idea. But then he heard Kurt whimpering with pain. In the distance, he heard groans—the unmistakable groans of infected. He owed it to his people to fight. To fight for this place. To fight for safety.

  He wasn’t giving up.

  “We’ll leave,” Titus said. “But you’re sending us to our deaths. We’re good people.”

  “There are no good people anymore,” the man’s voice said, drifting towards Titus like it was coming from everywhere. “So you turn around and you fuck off in the direction you came from. Now.”

  Titus knew it was no use. He looked over at Sally. Looked her right in the eyes. It was a look he was dreading giving because he knew she’d know exactly what it meant. They had to drop to the ground, get their weapons out, and then they had to fight.

  “Now,” he muttered.

  But then he felt something rip through his chest, splatter through his ribcage. He tasted strong, coppery blood in his mouth, and as much as he wanted to stay on his feet, he couldn’t keep his weight elevated any longer.

  He dropped to his knees. And as he fell, he saw a bullet pierce through Sally’s neck, leaving her gargling and choking on blood. He saw another bullet splatter right through Kurt’s head, silencing him and putting him out of his misery. And then a final shot cracked open Marco’s skull, sent his brains spilling all over the cabin walls.

  Titus sat on his knees, his mind drifting, and held on to his aching chest. Everything around him had fallen apart. All this effort, all this fighting, and everything was gone.

  He saw a man walking towards him. A man with dark hair. Dressed in black jeans, a leather jacket, a dirty white T-shirt underneath. He stopped in front of Titus. Raised his gun.

  “Please don’t—”

  Titus didn’t feel a thing again.

  The man lowered his gun. Walked up to the cabin door. He stopped by the entrance to the cabin after climbing over the fallen bodies. More people to clean away. More people to discard. And damn. More brain to wash from the cabin walls.

  He went to open the cabin door when he saw Jordanna staring at him, anger on her face.

  “What the hell have you done this time, Riley? What in the name of fuck have you done this time?”

  Chapter One

  Riley dragged the heavy, dead body across the ground and felt nothing.

  The afternoon sun had disappeared behind the clouds now. The air was thick and humid, uncharacteristic for September. There’d barely been any rain all summer, and still hadn’t been any now, in September. There were still streams nearby, though, access to fresh water, and they had plenty of bottles of water stashed away inside the cabin, so right now water wasn’t an issue. They had plenty of food, too. Food they’d hunted. Food they’d gathered from houses and shops that held more goods than they’d ever need. No, food was good right now, too.

  The only thing that wasn’t good right now was the people trying to fuck Jordanna and his world up.

  He dragged the man along, away from his cabin, by his ankles. He didn’t look into the man’s dead, vacant eyes because he’d looked into enough dead, vacant eyes by now to know they all looked the same. He listened for the groans in the woods, still heard them somewhere in front of him, over by the cabin. But as long as the groans followed him, that was fine. They could feed on the bodies of the dead he’d killed. Or he could kill the undead, too, if there were too many of them.

  There was always a purpose for everything in this world now. A food chain. A new way of life.

  The autumn leaves crunched under his feet and under the man’s heavy body. He had decent shoes on; shoes that Riley would have to try and squeeze into. He had some Timberlands of his own, but these were thicker. He’d give them to Jordanna if she didn’t have tiny feet.

&nbs
p; Besides, Jordanna wasn’t quite as… well, chilled about the whole ordeal of killing people to keep themselves safe. Sure, Riley was hardly thrilled doing what he had to do to survive, but it was exactly that. Survival. Staying alive. There was no way around the nasty stuff in this world, not anymore.

  He smelled an intense sourness in the air, so sour that it would’ve triggered his gag reflex in the old days, made the water he’d sipped and the berries he’d eaten earlier that day come sneaking up his oesophagus and out onto the ground below. Not anymore, though. He was used to the smell by now. Wouldn’t be a very good post-apocalyptic survivor if he wasn’t. The weak were the ones who struggled with the sights, the smells, the sounds. Who let those sensory triggers get the better of them. And he had, for a time. He’d not always been this way. He’d been a fuck-up before the world ended, and then he’d turned a fuck-up again when he got too settled back at the Manchester Living Zone.

  But those days were gone.

  He knew how to survive now. What he had to do to survive.

  He dragged the body and pushed it up beside the other corpses. The four people he’d had to kill when they’d tried to get inside his cabin. He hadn’t wanted to kill them. Nobody wanted to kill, unless they were insane, which actually was a lot more prevalent in this world than he liked to admit.

  But they’d given each other the look. He’d seen it. The man and the woman. They’d given each other the look, and at that point, he knew he’d have to kill them.

  He looked down at the pile of bodies. It was strange, in a way, seeing them now their lives had been snuffed out in a flash. They weren’t suffering anymore, at least. Their pain was all over. Not that he cared. He felt no attachment to anyone but Jordanna anymore. He’d done attachment. He’d tried it, and it’d fucked him over. He’d grown attached to his group. To his friends. To people like Pedro, Chloë, Tamara. And he’d grown attached to James, too.