Surviving The Virus (Book 4): Extinction Read online

  Extinction

  Surviving the Virus, Book 4

  Ryan Casey

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  Contents

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

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  Chapter One

  Karen Midgely ran as fast as she could the moment she smelled rot.

  It was a blindingly hot Los Angeles afternoon. The kind of day where in her old life, she might’ve finished college and headed down to the Santa Monica pier with her friends. Sat on the beach. Smoked some weed. Ran into the water with no clothes on. Soaked it all up. A life of privilege she used to lead. A life she longed for. A life she missed, every darned day.

  She ran down the shady streets. Ran past an old pizzeria she always used to head into after her nights out. Franco’s, it was called. A guy called Johnny ran it. Damon, one of Karen’s friends, said Johnny definitely crushed on her. He always gave her free slices of whatever new pizza creations he’d come up with. Some of them were gross, but a bunch of them were pretty nice.

  So as far as Karen was concerned, a little flirting with Johnny all in exchange for a few slices of free pizza was worth it.

  Even if she found Johnny repulsive.

  But Franco’s was closed, now. Like everywhere. Shuttered up. Silent. Infested with rats, no doubt. The rats made Karen feel weak. Sent shivers right the way down her spine. She’d walked into a McDonald’s a few weeks after the virus struck hard. She was suffering; she’d lost her friends, and she was on her own. And weirdly, that place looked pretty untouched. Hard to believe. And maybe the lack of food and water was just getting to her.

  But something had made her head inside that McDonald’s.

  Something had made her search desperately for a delicious fast food delight, even if it was cold. Even if it was slightly mouldy.

  The first thing that struck her was the smell of decay.

  Then the sound of flies buzzing around.

  And something else.

  Scuttling.

  Gnawing.

  She peered into the kitchen area and froze.

  Rats gnawing at the crumbs and scraps.

  But also, three bodies, lying there.

  Stripped of their clothes but for a few bits of fabric the rats hadn’t got through.

  Skin and flesh gnawed away at, right down to the bone.

  And it was the way one of those rats looked up at Karen that really freaked her out more than anything.

  Long tail dangling down the side of a grey, decaying ginger man’s face.

  A piece of his tongue dangling between its long, blood-soaked teeth.

  The rat looked up at her with confidence. Like it wasn’t budging.

  Or like Karen might make a darned tasty meal herself.

  She turned around, ran outside, and threw up everywhere.

  She’d seen worse things, since. Sights nobody deserves to see. People doing shit to one another. Awful, horrible shit. The kind you read about on Facebook but always consign to somebody evil, somebody with mental problems.

  But no. This was normal people tearing each other apart.

  This was awful shit, all in the name of desperation.

  She looked over her shoulder and heard those footsteps getting closer.

  Smelled the rot.

  And heard the snarls.

  She spun back around. Focused on the road ahead. Shit. She knew she shouldn’t have come down here. She’d spent the last few weeks drifting across the West Coast. She was away on vacation when the outbreak hit. A solo retreat up in Oregon. Meditation thing, supposed to bring her peace, something she really needed after breaking up with Cal.

  And when it hit, she didn’t expect to survive. She’d just drifted back home, taking every damned moment as it came. Place to place, day to day. Community to community. She had this idea in her head that she had to get home. She was away from home when the outbreak started, after all. And as much as she knew it wasn’t, like, logical—as much as she knew home was just gonna be in as much if not more shit as everywhere else—a part of her just needed to head back home. Closure, more than anything.

  But she’d found no closure. Her family was gone with no sign of them at all. No idea whether they were alive or dead.

  And there was no sign of her friends, either.

  None except Kirsty, whose dead body she’d found rotting away in the chair of a beauty salon she always frequented. Skin grey and pallid. Bluebottles covering her freshly painted pink nails.

  One thing was for sure.

  Santa Monica was just as much of a wasteland as everywhere else.

  And it had one thing in common with everywhere else, too.

  The dead walked the streets, now.

  Or ran.

  She raced down these streets that used to feel so safe. Past the tall palm trees. Past the taco joints and the shuttered-up street stalls. Past the hotels, where excitable tourists basked in the beautiful blue skies. She’d made a mistake coming back here. A huge damned mistake.

  Because there were a good twenty of them racing towards her.

  Pursuing her.

  Hunting her down.

  And they looked like goddamned zombies.

  They looked hungry.

  She went to take a left when the worst happened.

  Her right ankle cocked over.

  Splitting pain stretched up her leg.

  She let out a little cry and fell to the sidewalk, busting her nose, biting down into her lip ’til she tasted blood.

  She lay there a few seconds, an agonising pain racing up her leg.

  All the time, those footsteps getting closer.

  Those snarls getting closer.

  That smell of death closing in.

  She was in pain. Sure as hell.

  But she needed to get up.

  She couldn’t just lie here.

  Couldn’t just accept defeat.

  She pushed herself to her knees. Went to run.

  But that ankle. It was bust. She went tumbling back to the sidewalk with another thump.

  And this time, a horror approached her.

  A realisation. Dark. Unavoidable. Like a voice whispering in her ear.

  You’re not getting up. You’re not getting away. You’re going to die here, on the s
idewalk. Then you’re gonna become one of those things.

  She turned over onto her back, crying. She looked at those bodies racing towards her. Some of them clearly dead. But others alive. Others more recently infected. A ginger man with a long red beard crying tears of blood, topless, covered in scratches and sores.

  And then the grey faces of the dead. Stumbling but running. Like something was controlling them. Possessing them.

  She held her breath, lay there, and then she did the only thing she could.

  The thing she used to do when she was scared as a kid.

  Scared in the dark.

  She closed her eyes and squeezed them tight shut and waited for the end…

  The footsteps.

  The snarls.

  Closing in.

  Surrounding her.

  She squeezed her eyes tighter.

  Thought of Cal. Wished she was still with him. Because things were good when she was with him. They’d had nice times together. Sunset drives by the coast. Sneaking off into bedrooms in the middle of parties. Jogs through the hills. Nice times. Good times.

  And then her family, too.

  Her mum. Her dad.

  So supporting.

  So caring.

  So kind.

  She thought of them all, and she felt the tears flowing more freely as she kept her eyes tight shut as the footsteps powered towards her, as her heart raced so hard it might burst out of her chest.

  And then… silence.

  She sat there. Hands around her knees. Crying. Screaming, actually.

  But then she realised something.

  She was still alive.

  She could still hear herself screaming. And thinking.

  She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to look.

  But something else struck her, too.

  The screaming. The crying.

  They were the only sounds she could hear, apart from the light breeze.

  She took a deep breath. You’ve got this, Karen. You’re strong enough. You’ve got it.

  She opened her eyes.

  It took her a few seconds—maybe even minutes for all she knew—to process what she saw.

  The infected hadn’t surrounded her.

  They hadn’t even reached her.

  But they were here.

  They were all here.

  She got up. Forced herself to her feet, even though her right ankle killed like mad.

  She stood there and looked at the scene before her. Smelled it, rotten. Tasted it, even.

  She tried to understand it, in disbelief. What happened? What the hell had gone down here?

  And then she turned around and limped off down that Santa Monica street, trying to understand what had gone on, what she’d seen.

  The infected lay dead behind her.

  Totally still.

  Chapter Two

  “So what do you think?”

  Noah stared down the road at the movement in the distance. It was late afternoon. Sunny. He felt sweaty. Exhausted. Hungry. Tasted blood, right across his lips.

  But he was alive, so that was okay. Eddie was alive. Kelly and Zelda and Barney were alive.

  And they’d finally reached this supposed “safe place” near Galgate, south of Lancaster.

  Noah didn’t reply to Eddie. He looked ahead at what was clearly the safe place Tim and his family were heading to before he’d met Noah. Before he’d sacrificed himself at Dr Jenkinson’s compound to save the rest of the group. He saw the tall steel and brick walls erected around the place. The barbed wire lining the top of it. He saw movement inside. People moving around, going about their lives. Surrounding fields of crops being planted and picked. Large armoured vehicles sitting by the entrance gates of the road, which were manned by two people with binoculars. A safe place. A community.

  He didn’t know a thing about this place. Didn’t know whether he could trust it. Didn’t know what kind of people ran it.

  He just knew they’d walked a day to get here. They’d fought off infected. They’d battled with looters. They were exhausted, they were hungry, and they were dehydrated.

  They needed something. Some kind of exit plan. Some kind of hope.

  And as much as Noah felt uncertainty, as much as he felt terrified about trusting anyone else, about getting close to anyone else, or about putting his hopes in some place that might just come crashing down in no time… he knew damned well his group—and himself—were at the end of their tether right now.

  “We’re gonna have to make some kind of call,” Zelda said. She stepped up. Dark hair. Piercings in her ears, in her eyebrows, through her nose. Didn’t smile much. Seemed constantly pissed off. Spat to the ground. Barney stood by her side, weirdly attracted to her as much as she didn’t seem to give a shit about him.

  “We have to make sure it’s right,” Noah said.

  “Noah, buddy,” Eddie said. He stepped forward, too. Kelly by his side. Eddie looked thinner than he used to, in his face anyway. Healthier. A lot damned healthier, whereas Noah’s weight loss had just left him gaunt and malnourished. Might be the first time in their lives where Eddie actually looked the healthier of the duo. No wonder he was bustling with confidence, especially where Kelly was concerned. “We’ve been sitting here hours now. It’s gonna be dark soon. I’d rather head down there now so it doesn’t look like we’re sneaking up on ’em or whatever. Don’t want ’em to think we’re spying, either.”

  “It has to be right,” Noah said.

  “And how will we know?” Kelly said.

  “Huh?”

  “When it’s right. How will we know? How will we be certain?”

  Noah wanted to say a lot back to Kelly. Especially after the discoveries they’d found. The discovery that she was supposedly carrying some asymptomatic form of the virus. Eddie probably the same.

  And then there was himself.

  Immune.

  Unable to get infected.

  Special in some way. Valuable.

  He understood the fears Kelly had of infecting people, unbeknownst to her. But the fact stood that Zelda was alive. She was standing.

  And if Noah really did act as some kind of weird anti-Trojan virus beacon, then maybe that would suppress Kelly’s spread.

  He didn’t know how it worked. He could only speculate.

  He just knew he wasn’t giving up on his friends. No matter what it took.

  And Kelly was a friend.

  Noah shook his head. Sighed. “I just… I don’t want to lose anyone else.”

  “Bud,” Eddie said. “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “It is,” Eddie said. “We might’ve had your back at the weird lab place. But fact is, I wouldn’t’ve made it this far if it wasn’t for you. Not just in this virus shit. But in life. We’re here, mate. By your side. No matter what.”

  Noah looked into Eddie’s eyes. His best friend. So strong. So confident. Unrecognisable, compared to his old self.

  And yet still Eddie. Still daft old Eddie with the jokes, and the gaffes, and the insatiable appetite for cheese puffs.

  His friend had grown into something else entirely.

  And hell. Noah was proud of him.

  “Maybe I should go down there myself,” Noah said.

  Eddie shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea,” Zelda said.

  “No,” Eddie said. “Not a chance.”

  He stepped forward. Looked at the group, one by one. Never in his life before had Eddie looked such a leader.

  “We live together. We die together. If you’re not down with that deal… well. Now’s your chance to walk away.”

  He looked at Zelda mainly, then. This mystery woman. This tough motherfucker. She’d proven her strength. Proven her loyalty, too.

  But she did strike Noah as a lone ranger. So it depended just how far she was willing to go with them.

  “Tim and his family wanted
to reach this place more than anything,” Eddie said. “They died, all of them, because they changed their route for us. All of them died helping us. We owe it to them to check this place out, at the very least. Or they died for nothing at all.”

  Kelly stepped up. Joined Noah.

  Barney followed too.

  And by that point, it was just Noah and Zelda hesitating. Resisting.

  But knowing damned well what they had to do.

  Noah looked at Zelda.

  Then back around at Eddie.

  And despite all his fears, all his trepidation, he smiled and walked.

  He stood at Eddie’s side. Looked around at Zelda.

  She stood there. Hands on her waist. Looking at each and every one of them like they’d made her drink their piss.

  “Well?” Eddie asked. “You coming, or what?”

  Zelda looked over her shoulder, back towards the long road they’d walked down.

  And then she sighed and turned to face the group.

  “I guess I’ll come along. Until I get bored with you, anyway.”

  She reached their side.

  They turned around, all of them.

  Looked at this supposed “safe place” sitting there in the distance.

  “Live together,” Eddie said. “Die together. Right?”

  Noah looked into his best friend’s eyes, and he nodded.

  And then, before he could change his mind again, he took a deep breath and walked towards Galgate.

  Walked towards their future.

  Noah sat on his bruised, torn knees and shook his head.

  The taste of blood filled his mouth. His head ached from the beating. From the shouts. From the cries.