Dead Days Zombie Apocalypse Series (Book 9) Read online

  There would be more than enough pent up energy to go around.

  So she stood right opposite the tent and waited until she heard snoring.

  Then, disappearing out of the realms of thought and feeling, she pulled back the axe and she hacked at the bodies, right through the tent.

  There were shouts. There were cries. But she moved with swiftness. She knew her hits had mortally wounded those in the tents. So even if they hadn’t died instantly, they would.

  Maybe them not dying instantly was a good thing. Maybe it was justice.

  She moved from tent to tent, slamming her axe into every one. The material on the tents went red. She saw blood spurt up through the rips in the tent walls.

  But she felt no guilt.

  She felt no shame.

  She felt only justice.

  She moved onto the last tent. And by this point, she didn’t even care who she was attacking. She didn’t care who she was taking her anger out on. And right then, she wondered whether maybe that said a lot about her. Maybe it said that she was evil. That she had darkness inside her.

  But she didn’t care.

  She just kept going.

  Just kept going.

  When she was done, and sure she’d dealt with every tent sufficiently, she looked at the mess she’d left. A torn mess of tents. Blood oozing through the cracks in every one. People writhing around inside them. Glimpses of disconnected limbs.

  And she felt better for a moment. Really, she did. She felt relieved. Like the justice she’d been seeking had been served, once and for all.

  Then she turned and she saw her.

  She was poking out of the fourth tent. She was small. Blonde hair. Her arms were skinny and her body was tiny.

  She was looking up at Anna with total terror.

  A girl. Couldn’t have been any older than eighteen.

  Anna felt her body cave in, then. Because she got glimpses at some of the other people in the tents. And she realised then that they weren’t all some fully armed group. They weren’t a bunch of marauders. They weren’t rapists or bandits.

  They were just people trying to get by.

  People who had made a mistake.

  People who she’d butchered.

  She watched the girl’s eyes quiver before she passed out, once and for all.

  And at that point, Anna didn’t feel better. She felt worse. And worse than anything, she felt a burning gaze staring down at her. A voice crying at her, telling her she’d made a mistake, that she had insulted his memory and everything he had taught her.

  She heard Gary, and she knew she had let him down.

  She walked away from the site of the butchering. She held on to her blade at all times.

  She was numb.

  And she would be numb for a long time.

  She would be alone for a long time.

  She would be walking like the infected for a long time.

  And she’d deserve everything bad that came her way…

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  From the moment she regained consciousness, Anna knew something was wrong.

  She didn’t know where she was. She just knew that she’d fallen. She’d fallen from quite a height.

  She wondered if she was back home, playing with her best friend, Dimitri. They’d been best friends ever since they were eight, right up until they were…

  No.

  Dimitri had died.

  It couldn’t be him.

  She tried to squint further. She could hear something tapping and scraping. And she felt deep down a sense that if she could figure out the source of that tapping, then she’d find all her answers. She’d understand what was happening. And she’d understand how to get out of whatever situation she was in.

  Because… weird as it was, deep down, Anna knew the situation she was in was a bad one.

  She just didn’t know why yet.

  She just…

  She saw it, then.

  There was someone right above her.

  No. Not someone.

  Something.

  She screamed a little and pushed herself back. Suddenly she came completely to her senses. She was in a… a lift. Everything else came back to her. The fall. Trying to help Riley out.

  She must’ve fallen through the hatch of the lift and… yeah, that was it. She’d passed out after the fall.

  But she’d found her way inside this lift.

  And now there was just broken glass between her and a whole load of infected.

  Not only that, but three of the infected were trying to squeeze their way in through the escape hatch at the top of the lift.

  She kicked back at them as they reached for her ankle. She could see that they’d pushed themselves too hard through that shaft. Their skin was falling away. One of the infected—a woman on the left—looked bloated to an abnormal size. She looked like if she pushed any harder, she might just burst…

  “Oh shit,” Anna said.

  Right on cue, the woman’s body split. Her head cracked in two.

  And out of it came a little piece of moving flesh.

  A parasite.

  It threw itself at Anna. And as distracted by the actual infected as she was, she knew she had to deal with this parasite because she knew that they were the source of the infection.

  So she reached for her blade.

  She turned it on the parasite.

  But the parasite got to her first.

  It landed on her arm. She felt its little teeth tightening around her. She knew it wouldn’t be enough to infect her alone. The parasite bites didn’t seem to infect directly.

  But she knew she had to act fast because if she didn’t take out this parasite soon then it would find a way to work its way into her system.

  She slammed the blade against her arm, almost cutting it in the process.

  She missed the parasite narrowly as it twisted out of the way.

  “Fucking little shit,” Anna said.

  She swung the blade again. But all the while, the parasite’s grip kept on getting tighter. And now that the woman had exploded, the two other infected who had been struggling to work their way inside the hatch were making the most of the extra space.

  The smell was intense. The taste in the air was insufferable. Anna wanted to be anywhere but here. She didn’t even know what’d happened to Riley yet.

  But she didn’t have a choice but to fight.

  She took another swing at the parasite.

  This time, she hit it square on.

  The parasite burst, sending a sticky blast of goo all over her body. She spat it away, wiped it from her eye.

  Then she looked at the infected beneath her.

  They were still struggling to get inside. Seemed like they’d wedged themselves in, acting like a corkscrew. But maybe that was a good thing. Maybe them being there was stopping anything else from getting inside.

  Maybe she’d just have to wait…

  But no. Waiting wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Because she knew how the infected worked.

  They would keep on going and going.

  Even if it took until the end of time, they’d keep on trying to get to her.

  They wouldn’t sleep.

  They wouldn’t turn their attention.

  All they’d do was keep on trying.

  There was no hope for Anna stuck in here.

  Especially not when she heard the crack right above her.

  She looked up, slowly. She didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t want to see it. She wanted to hide from the truth.

  But she had no choice.

  When she saw what was above her, right on the cracked glass of the sides of the elevator, her stomach sank.

  There were two infected.

  And the glass beneath them was cracking.

  She felt a shard of that glass crumble away and instantly she turned her blade so it was facing upwards, ready to kebab them.

  They fell down and slammed onto the knife, both of them on top of one a
nother, both of them wriggling on despite being impaled by the blade.

  Anna pulled herself back. She couldn’t breathe. The teeth of the infected on top of her gnashed and cracked together. Both of them were pushing hard to try and get to the other side of the knife, their guts spilling out of them in the process and covering Anna, their cold insides slurping their way right down her body.

  And all that Anna could think of was that girl she’d killed when she’d been getting her revenge on the people that killed Gary.

  All Anna could think about were those people she’d butchered.

  Maybe this was what she deserved.

  Maybe this was justice.

  Maybe this was the right ending for her.

  Still she tried to pull away that blade. But it was jammed. Completely jammed. And as more infected came over to join the two on top of her, and the two wedged in the hatch entrance finally broke free and staggered towards her, she held her breath and waited for the moment when it all, finally, went away.

  She felt teeth on her neck.

  Her body tightened.

  And then she heard a blast.

  She didn’t understand it. Not at first.

  But there was another blast.

  Then another.

  And before she knew it, Anna did understand. She didn’t know how it was happening, but she understood.

  A gun.

  Someone with a gun.

  She opened her eye, pushed the mass of dead weight off her, which only went to pour more guts onto her, more blood on her hands.

  Then, as she dragged herself out through the rotten flesh above her, she saw someone.

  It was a man. He was hooded. Wearing some kind of gas mask.

  He was holding a rifle.

  He scanned Anna from blood and gut-soaked head to toe. Time stretched on. It seemed like he was weighing her up, silent, focused.

  Anna was about to attempt to break the ice when the man finally spoke.

  “We should get out of here. There’s more of them. But before we do… don’t take this the wrong way, miss, but I think it’s time you thought about getting yourself a change of clothes.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Riley felt the mass of creatures building up on top of him and he knew he didn’t have long left.

  He had no sense of his outside surroundings. He’d lost all concept of time and place. All that he seemed aware of was the crushing intensity of this clothes stand on top of him as more and more creatures piled on.

  The smell was sickening. It actually brought him to a point where he was almost vomiting. And the sounds… the sounds of the undead piling further on top of that clothes stand, their groans deafening in their loudness…

  And for what?

  “For a pair of boxers,” Riley muttered. “For a fucking pair of boxers. And they don’t even look that great.”

  He lay there as the weight of the clothes stand got heavier. He could see a creature to his right. It was trying to worm its way underneath, but the increasing weight of the rest of the undead on top of the clothes stand, that was becoming something of a struggle.

  But that wasn’t exactly an advantage to Riley. Because after all, humans were humans. He was a person. He had the same anatomy as the undead.

  And he knew damn well that he was just as likely to burst under all this weight as any of the other undead.

  Of course, they’d decomposed a little—some of them a lot. Which meant they were actually more likely to crumble apart under such weight.

  But still. The fact of the matter stood.

  He was screwed.

  He’d heard Anna a short while ago. She’d called out to him, told him she was doing something to help him. Only it’d been a while ago now. And in that space of time, Riley had heard an almighty crash, as well as a few shrieks.

  He tried calling out for Anna, checking she was okay, but he just didn’t have the strength in him anymore. He didn’t have the lung capacity.

  He was slowly suffocating. There could be no doubt about it.

  He felt a hand brush against his arm then. And when he looked to his left, he realised exactly what it was; what was happening.

  The creatures.

  Three of them.

  They were underneath the clothes stand.

  They were getting closer to his position.

  He shuffled to his right. He knew it wasn’t a safe move in itself, mostly because the creatures were on the right too. But what choice did he have? What other choice did he have?

  He shuffled away and tried to find his blade. He’d dropped it when the clothes stand had fallen on him. If he could just find that, then…

  He saw it.

  It was to the right.

  Only it was just out of arm’s reach.

  His stomach sank and his body went cold. He wasn’t going to stick his arm out and reach for that blade. And sure, Kesha had shown some remarkable abilities—she was capable of curing the infection.

  But he didn’t want to use her as a blood farm. He didn’t want to get complacent. It wasn’t fair for her to be his get out of jail card every time he did something damned stupid.

  The clothes stand pressed further down and now Riley was totally stuck. The full force of the rack was being pressed right onto his head by the creatures on top of it. There was no way of getting away. No chance of getting out.

  And then something happened just to make everything worse.

  A hand shot through the clothes stand and grabbed the back of his neck.

  More hands followed. And after that, legs. And before he knew it, the clothes stand was completely splitting, and he could see the faces and the gnashing teeth of a dozen creatures, all of them eager and hungry for one thing—him.

  He tried to move but there was nothing he could do anymore.

  He waited for the sharp gnashing of teeth.

  And then something happened.

  There were gunshots. And then after the gunshots, there was a shift in the weight above him.

  He felt blood pooling down between the holes in the clothes stand.

  He heard the groans reducing in number and intensity.

  The creatures were dying—again. Somebody was killing them.

  So he pushed back. And as hard as it was, with a whole load of weight on top of him, he found himself managing to push the rack away. He found himself with a speck of extra lung space.

  So he dragged himself out from underneath that clothes stand, covered in blood, still only wearing those boxer shorts on his lower half.

  He slipped and slid on the bloodied floor as he tried to stand up…

  And then he felt something grab his shoulder.

  He turned around.

  A creature.

  So old.

  But so close.

  So Riley did the only thing he could instinctively do.

  He cracked his fist hard into that creature’s face.

  The creature’s skin and flesh had decomposed so much that just one punch made it turn to mush.

  So Riley punched again, and then he punched again.

  And when he was sure the creature was nothing more than soup on the floor, he turned and ran over to where he’d heard the gunshots, and where he’d heard the almighty crash over where Anna must’ve gone earlier.

  But something stopped him.

  It wasn’t Anna’s dead body that stopped him—thank God. It wasn’t even another mass of creatures that stopped him.

  It was the sight of two people outside.

  One of them was Anna. No doubt about it. She was being dragged away and didn’t look best pleased about it.

  And the other…

  He was wearing a hood. Riley couldn’t figure out his face because he was wearing some sort of black mask.

  But he was holding a rifle.

  He tightened his fists and tried to bring his breath back despite the crippling crushing sensation still running through his body.

  He was going to go after that man.


  He was going to get Anna back.

  He wasn’t losing her. Not again. Not ever again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Riley flew towards the exit of the department store.

  He didn’t give a shit he was still only wearing boxers on his lower half. Bloodstained boxers, nonetheless.

  He had bigger things to worry about right now.

  Namely the man with the rifle who was taking Anna away.

  He ran outside the front of the department store, past the few remaining straggling creatures. It was late morning, and the sun was warm. He could hear the birds singing. They didn’t sound like they’d been too affected by the change of global circumstances over the last few years. If anything, they were flourishing without as many humans around to alter the environment.

  He looked around the streets of Lancaster for a sign of Anna and the man. He’d had his sights on them. He’d seen them just moments ago.

  Now he couldn’t see them at all.

  “Anna!” he shouted.

  He ran around the side of the store, past the abandoned cars, over the shards of glass on the ground. If he’d had time, he would’ve thrown something on his feet earlier. He’d been in a goddamn department store, for heaven’s sakes. What a wild goose chase all this had turned out to be.

  “Anna!”

  He turned the corner and scanned the street where he’d seen the man taking Anna away not long ago. There was no movement. Total stillness other than the birds flying in the sky, the clouds forming shadows on the ground below, which were admittedly a little chilly on his bare legs.

  He stood there, heart pounding, totally still, and he wondered whether he’d fucked it all up. Whether he was being torn away from Anna all over again. He didn’t want to think that was the case. He wanted to believe they’d be together forever. Friends eternally reunited, all that crap.

  But he couldn’t deny the truth.

  She was gone.

  And he’d not been there to help her.

  He was about to turn around and start searching another street when he saw the movement.

  It was right at the other end of the road. Two people, disappearing between the buildings.

  His body tensed. It was them. It had to be them.

  And if it wasn’t… well. He’d just have to find a way to explain why he was sprinting around the streets in boxer shorts shouting “Anna” at the top of his voice.