The Survivors: Book One (10 page)

Sighing, Angela turned the radio off, switched it to the TV setting. She had hoped to make at least 50 miles a day at first, putting her on base in a month, but after a four hour trip to get to the local store, which had already been cleaned out, she began to understand that making even twenty a day would be hard. It now came to roughly three months on the road, and her mother’s heart cried out again. So long and so many of the odds were against her!

"Gets better when you call the boy’s real daddy,"
the Witch seduced, sending her memories of cool, Harrison nights and the softest, blackest hair she’d ever felt, until their son was born. Angela closed her eyes as pain filled her heart as if it had happened yesterday. She had never forgotten what it felt like to belong to Marc Brady.

“Call him. He’s restless, adrift. He will come,"
the Demon insisted, and the woman huddling in the nicely warming storage room gave the thought serious consideration this time, instead of pushing it away like the fear in her mind wanted. Marc was also a Marine, had been for a long time, and she had no doubt he could make the trip. More importantly, he owed her.

"You can’t!"
her fear screamed.
"Kenny will kill you both!"

She stretched carefully, wincing at a lance of pain. He'd probably try. Kenny would think they had been having an affair all along, even though she hadn’t seen Marc in almost fifteen years. There was a spark, a connection between them that was undeniable, and her man would see it right away. Not that it mattered. She’d made her choice, and she would face the consequences when the time came. Nothing would keep her from her son, not after all that she had lost, and maybe, just maybe, her man could be surprised into making a mistake by not only Brady’s presence, but by how much she had changed. The Demon inside was awake. She was a slave no more, and Kenny would find out very quickly that she wouldn’t go back to her old life of bondage.

First, she had to have time to heal, was scared that even if she managed to leave Ohio without Warren and the others stopping her, she wouldn’t be able to handle the trip west. If just surviving in one place was so hard, how bad would a three-month journey across this broken land be? She needed help, and there was no one else she could call. Marc had to come.

“But not yet,” she told the Witch and the heart that had both jumped eagerly. She would call out to him when she was ready, and that wasn’t today.

Angela lit a cigarette and blew out thick smoke rings that stayed intact until they hit the big brown blanket hanging over the thin, wooden door. She had been an abused animal in a luxury cage, and it had happened fast. Her gifts (
curse
, Kenny always called it her curse) were the end root of their fights, what he wanted her to do with them. After a while, the Demon inside had gone to sleep, locked behind a thick steel door, to prevent Kenny from using the power to satisfy his own selfish, petty desires.

And Angela had spent a decade in hell because of it. There had only been two things she had kept from him during their long, hard years together - her abilities and the name of her baby’s father. Everything else had been under Kenny’s unforgiving control each waking moment and many of the sleeping ones too.

Until the War.

 Being alone while her world was being blown away had ripped off the locks on the Witch and the old Angela. The twisted, slotted cell door was barely standing, and the dark, shifting spirit behind that thin shield whispered almost constantly to her now, guided her. She found it easy to listen, still surprised to look inside and see the courage she had been forced to lock away. She was suddenly allowed to be her own person again, to make her own choices based on what she wanted and needed, including exploring these things that she could do…and of that, there was a lot.

Her gifts had aged well in storage. Most of it was random, coming and going without control, but she was learning to direct it again, to concentrate and get what she needed - to trust the powers inside. When the Demon spoke, she listened.

The Witch said it was fated for a new, more careful world to replace the old, but when Angela asked if her own small family would be a part of that peaceful population, there was only darkness.

Chapter Five

January 28
^th
, 2013

West Virginia

1

“Hell..."

Sergeant Brady knew it was a bad idea as soon as the front tires of his muddy SUV eased out onto the mostly clear suspension bridge. He could feel the way it vibrated in the heavy wind, but the waters had risen while he slept and left only this way out.

 The iron grates under the Blazer groaned, their supports completely covered in slushy, menacing debris as he neared halfway…then they gave.

Crack! Rreeennttpp!

The solidness under his wheels tilted suddenly, one of the two foundations slid enough to pull the bars out of the other bank, and it rocked the bridge like a child’s race track.

The Blazer tilted violently and the guardrail began ripping away with horrible grinding noises, cables snapping like string.

Marc hit the gas, aiming for the end now dropping heavily towards the shallow side of the dammed-up Black River. “Semper Fi!”

Dust and debris flying, the Blazer leapt off the bridge’s lowered side and dropped into the foot of rushing water like a lead ball, crushing the front bumper and throwing up a huge spray that drenched the older 4x4.

Pulled along with the swift current, Marc rolled the two front windows all the way down, surprised the engine hadn’t stalled. Slinging his kit over one broad shoulder, the grunt ignored the water rushing inside, and aimed for a steep bank he knew he had no chance of making it up.

Wincing at the cracking sounds of the bridge behind him, the furious yapping of the big animal in the passenger seat confirmed what he already knew. They were in trouble.

“Dog, out!"

Marc shoved his 6’, 225 pound frame through the window an instant after the wolf. They jumped down into the icy water just as the bridge finally collapsed, and the wall of liquid death lunged forward.

Marc scrambled up the slick, muddy bank, taking rope from his kit, working it into a lasso. He threw it as the surging water hit the slowly moving Blazer, and rolled it like a White Castle box in the wind.

The thick rope sailed over a burned, wireless pole, and Marc hoped it went deep enough as he quickly tied it around his waist. Then the water came thundering down like an army, submerging him. Unable to breathe or protect himself from all the debris in the nasty liquid that slammed into him mercilessly, he held in the panic. The light pole trembled under the pressure of the rushing Black River, vibrating against his hip as he used it to shield himself from the bigger chunks.

He drew his knife, ready to cut himself free if it came out of the ground. The pole shifted suddenly, tilted, and then he could breathe again, as the first tall wave went by.

Coughing, spitting, sliding in the gelatinous slop, the Sergeant cut himself free, moving to safety as quickly as he could. Yet another lesson learned in this harsh new homeland - bridges were not safe here, either.

Marc moved to higher ground, shivering in the cold wind, as Dog danced in the mud around his ankles. Lungs aching, he stumbled away from the crumbling bank.

Quickly jerking on his long coat from his kit, Marc’s eyes watched the fast-moving water. With the barrier gone, it would now flow downstream and rise up to spill over weakened banks before seeping into the next town, the way it had been in every other place he’d come through. Nature was quickly reclaiming her property.

Marc took a long look around as he got his breath back, deciding where he would make camp and wait out the water. The Blue Ridge Mountains were east, rolling peaks of foggy blue under a wide, purple and yellow sunset that was marred by angry gray layers that never went away. South was dipping valleys and hills full of tobacco fields and Virginia white pines. It was the way he had come and those empty, snowbound towns had given him nothing to take hope from.

West was another community whose name he’d seen on the map, but couldn’t recall, and the newly released water was already overwhelming it. He saw no one fleeing the filling houses and businesses, though, and grunted unhappily. The sitrep was bleak. North, then.

Maybe a full click above him, a small white building with a large, silver cross beckoned in the dim distance, looking pristine perched on top of a large, muddy hill. Backdropped by cherry and wild crab apple trees, again, only the gritty sky spoiled the perfect picture of safety in the wilderness.

Shrugging at the irony - Marc hadn’t been in a church since being robbed of his dreams - he headed that way with his eyes and ears open for anything that looked like trouble. Seeming empty didn’t make it so.

Dog, who came almost to his hip, stayed close, occasionally growling his dislike at the now softer rumble of the river.

Head starting to hurt, Marc foraged in his kit for a pain pill, and swept the small town around him. The outskirts of Franklin (identified by the sign on a nearby street corner) looked mostly untainted. Surrounded by neat white homes and white picket fences, his eyes flicked from untouched manger scenes to the Christmas lights that still decorated most of the area. Not much damage. Were there people here?

Marc listened intently, heard only wind. The silence pressed in, like something was wrong, but other than the river trying to kill him, it was the same here as in every small town he had passed briefly through since the War - empty, over.

He scouted the next intersection, landing on a charred metro bus still full of rotting corpses, and he was thrown back in time to his escape, to his first brush with the walking dead…to what he’d seen when he rolled out from under the greyhound bus.

“Help!”

“Oh my God!”

“Aahhh!”

Marc stared in horror at the people stumbling past the bus as he stood up. Soldiers and civilians alike, faces bloody, stumbling blindly... shooting at random.

“Help!”

“No!”

The screams were deafening and there were other noises too, ones that made him want to sick his guts up, but the gunfire was the clearest to his trained mind. Marc backed away from the walking corpses who were firing out of reflex, mowing down others like themselves.

Eyes wide and feet unsteady, Marc looked for even one other survivor, but found only more breathing dead. He turned suddenly, sensing movement.

“Uuhh!” Marc threw himself back from the outstretched fingers of a uniformed man tightly gripping his pistol. He tripped over a bloody pile, landed hard on his ass.

“Please, what happened?”

The soldier’s deadened green eyes dripped blood. It ran over his lashes and cheeks in small torrents, and Marc hesitated, almost overcome with his first ever case of panic. This wasn’t a foreign land – it was America!

“I can hear you breathing, you know,” the Army man stated almost casually, head tilted.

Marc watched the scarlet drops roll from his dead sockets, creeping down his pale cheeks to hit the dirt before disappearing - all of it seeming to be happening in slow motion. “W-w-war… a bomb.”

“But, where? North or south?”

Marc considered, aware that a muscle in the blind man’s jaw had begun to twitch erratically while he waited for the answer. “South.”

“I thought so,” the soldier’s voice was without emotion. “Thank you.”

Calmly, without any indication he was going to, the wounded man raised the gun to his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

Blood sprayed wildly, raining across Marc’s face, and then he was running, trying not to scream and not sure he was succeeding.

Crunchhh!

The water’s destruction of debris pulled him from the flashback, and Marc shook his head, wishing the images would go away. He had begun moving carefully on foot after that, headed determinedly for the family home, only to discover no one there despite the funeral being set for that very day. The house had no signs of a hasty retreat, no letters of explanation, and there were no fresh graves at the family plot. What the hell had happened?

 His eyes wandered the city limits of Franklin, drawn to the hills. He lingered on the cemetery, its iron gates surrounded by decaying bodies, few of them wrapped. No one knew what to do with their dead. Neither had Marc. He almost hadn’t come home at all.

“I’m sorry, Marine.” The base Commander clapped him on the shoulder sympathetically.

Marc stuffed the legal letter into the garbage can they were standing next to, as other men moved by. Drill calls and Mess bells echoed throughout the brick halls of the base.

“Thank you, sir.”

His superior regarded him for a long moment, unsure of his man’s mood. Didn’t he care? “I’ve scheduled your leave for the funeral. Starts ASAP.”