Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Read online

  Into the Wasteland: A Zombie Novel

  Michael Totten

  Belmont Estate Books

  Contents

  Title Page

  I. Demon Inside

  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

  II. The Resistance

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  III. The Horde

  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

  Review request

  Mailing list

  Also by Michael J. Totten

  About the Author

  1. Copyright page

  INTO THE WASTELAND

  (Resurrection #2)

  By Michael J. Totten

  Also by Michael J. Totten

  The Road to Fatima Gate

  In the Wake of the Surge

  Where the West Ends

  Tower of the Sun

  Dispatches

  Taken: A Novel

  Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

  “One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self will still dream horrid dreams and mutter unmentionable thoughts.” – Herman Melville

  Part I

  Demon Inside

  1

  Sometimes Parker could almost convince himself that everything would be fine.

  He, Annie, Kyle and Hughes rode in a Chevy Suburban in the Eastern Oregon outback. No threats of any kind in any direction. Powdered milk and Corn Flakes in his belly. A bubble of warmth surrounding his body, the low winter sun slanting in through the side windows. A ribbon of clear open road slicing through sagebrush prairie, the spicy scent of the desert like a strong whiff of incense.

  He rode shotgun where he could stretch his legs as Hughes took the wheel. Kyle sat in the seat directly behind him so Parker wouldn’t have to look at him, with lovely Annie in the back behind Hughes radiating her essence of goodness.

  Not an abandoned car in sight, let alone any bodies. No evidence that the human race had been annihilated. No infected anywhere, as if they didn’t even exist.

  But Parker sat there in terror and gripped the armrest like a rail on the rim of oblivion as his mind collapsed on itself.

  He should be dead. If not dead, then one of those things, the post-human infected that created a near-extinction event using no technology of any kind, not even a stick. Their teeth and the virus alone were enough.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. There was one other terrible thing between the virus and their teeth. Their thoughts. The insatiable appetite and the relentless rage of hungry hungry predators.

  Parker knew what they were thinking because he had been one of them, the victim of a deranged medical experiment fit for Nazi doctors.

  His companions had turned him on purpose.

  Annie, bless her heart, was immune. And Parker, in a moment of unchecked aggression and towering asininity, had tried to kick Kyle over a cliff on one of the San Juan Islands. They would have executed him for attempted murder, but instead they strapped him to a chair, injected him with Annie’s blood, then infected him with the virus to see if her immunity could be transferred.

  He turned, of course. For days he was one of them, a hungry hungry predator left to thrash out his torment alone, his mind turned into a buzz saw, while they waited to see what would happen.

  Three days later he recovered and returned sort of to normal. Annie’s immunity indeed could be transferred. They decided that turning him into one of those things was enough of a punishment, so they let him live.

  He wasn’t sure—in fact, he doubted it very strongly—that he had entirely beaten that virus.

  Annie couldn’t believe what she was looking at. Just sere brown wasteland, prickly scrub and blue sky. Wide open emptiness like an ocean of land. No trees, no water, no houses, no cars, no nothing.

  And this was in Oregon, a state she’d always thought was entirely rain-drenched and forested. She’d hardly seen even a tree, let alone any water, since she and her companions crossed the Cascade Mountains on snowmobiles. Hardly anything existed on the other side of the mountains, which meant no infected, no ruins, no bodies.

  Any infected people that had ravaged the eastern sides of Oregon and Washington had frozen to death by exposure to winter. There was no snow on the ground even in December, but a rock-hard frost covered the sagebrush in the early parts of the morning, and the road sparkled as if it had been paved with ground-up pieces of glass. Those things could not last a night out there, let alone two.

  This part of the world had been emptied of the infected. It had also been emptied of people.

  There were no apparent survivors. At least none who dared show their faces to strangers, and anybody with ears could hear the Suburban coming from miles away without trees to muffle the sound. The silence of the Oregon desert was total.

  Somebody had actually built a road through that void. A road that could carry her and her companions clear across the continent, to Atlanta if they could make it that far. To the Centers for Disease Control, if it still existed, where a real vaccine could be made from her blood. And then home to South Carolina, or whatever was left of it.

  Charleston, South Carolina’s second-largest city after Columbia, was not the Oregon desert. Hundreds of thousands of people lived there. Millions more lived in Atlanta, which meant millions of potential infected. The southeastern United States could very well look like Seattle. Dead and burned to the ground. A wasteland even more wasted than the Oregon desert that Annie had not known existed.

  She sat in the Suburban’s back seat behind Hughes as he drove. Kyle sat next to her and listened to music on his phone as Parker cringed up front in the passenger seat.

  Annie worried about Parker. He’d recovered from the virus when her natural immunity was passed on to him—thank heaven they shared the same blood type—but his recovery was considerably rockier. The man wasn’t himself anymore. He had always been keyed up and difficult and aggressive, but now he looked ready to crack.

  The virus ravaged his brain for three days and left hideous wreckage behind. Homicidal thoughts kept bubbling up. The impulse to act on them was missing, but the thoughts themselves hadn’t gone anywhere.

  “For God’s sake,” Parker said as he turned around in the front seat and faced Kyle in the back. “Would you please turn the volume down on those earbuds.”

  Annie had barely noticed the scratchy sound coming from Kyle’s ears until Parker couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Sorry!” Kyle said angrily. He turned the volume down, but not by much.

  “I can barely hear my own thoughts,” Parker said.

&n
bsp; Annie wondered why Parker even wanted to hear his own thoughts. She knew what he was thinking about. When he was infected he wanted to rip everyone’s throat out with his teeth. He still imagined ripping everyone’s throat out with his teeth. The neural circuits the virus created in his mind hadn’t fired apart yet.

  Kyle placed his hand in the exact center of the seat between himself and Annie. She noticed him sneaking his fingers closer to her a quarter inch at a time. If he’d done that a few weeks earlier she would have held his hand—followed by much more in private, of course—but she felt differently about him now

  Kyle was enraged when Parker tried to shove him over that cliff, but they had punished Parker enough by infecting him. None of them had any idea if Parker would recover like Annie did, no idea if injecting her naturally immune blood into his arm would have any effect, but they sure knew what the virus would do. If what they’d done to Parker couldn’t be legally defined as attempted murder, it was certainly reckless endangerment. Parker and Kyle were more or less even.

  Kyle still wanted Hughes to execute Parker even after Parker’s recovery. Annie found Kyle’s vindictiveness, his bloodthirstiness, repulsive. Maybe she could get past it in time. There were only three men left in the world that she knew of, and Kyle was the obvious choice if she wanted to pair up with one of them. Hughes was terrific, even heroic, but a 250pound black man and former bail bondsman in his mid-forties wasn’t even in the same time zone as her type. Parker was even less so. The man was an angry and impossibly difficult head case. She and Kyle, though, were both in their early twenties. He’d worked in high tech and owned a loft condo in Portland. He was her type even before the world crashed.

  Out the Suburban’s window the expansive flat scrubland rolled by. They were traveling at 70 miles an hour, but Annie felt like they weren’t going anywhere. Every mile looked identical to the previous mile and she hadn’t seen a single house in at least the last fifty.

  “How long does this desert last?” she said to no one in particular.

  “No idea,” Hughes said. “Never been here before.”

  “Why would anyone have ever been here before?” Parker said. “There’s no here here.”

  “There’s someone on the road up ahead,” Hughes said and slowed. Parker sat bolt upright in his seat. Kyle yanked out his earbuds. Annie leaned forward and, squinting, made out four figures a mile or so up the road.

  “Are they infected?” Kyle said.

  “Hard to say,” Hughes said, “but I don’t think so. They look like survivors blocking the road.”

  Hughes cut the Suburban’s speed by more than half. The four figures moved closer together into the center of the road. Annie saw rifles in their hands.

  “They’re tightening up,” Hughes said, “and it looks like they’re armed. Definitely not infected.”

  Hughes slowed the truck even more, and when he’d closed the gap to a hundred yards or so, one of them fired a shot into the air. Hughes came to a stop.

  “Kyle,” Hughes said. “Hand me my shotgun.”

  Kyle handed the shotgun to Hughes and kept it low so the men on the road wouldn’t see it through the windshield.

  Parker flicked the safety off his pistol.

  “What should we do?” Annie said.

  “Nothing aggressive,” Hughes said. “Wait for them to come to us.”

  A few moments passed, then the four men started walking toward the Suburban. Two aimed their rifles at the truck while the other two kept theirs pointed at the ground.

  “Everybody be cool,” Hughes said.

  “This is bad,” Parker said.

  “If they wanted to shoot us,” Hughes said, “all four of them would be aiming at us.”

  “You can’t know that,” Parker said and leaned forward, his body coiling with aggression like he wanted break through the windshield and hurl himself at them.

  Hughes rolled down his window and waved. “Roll down your window and wave,” he said to Parker.

  “The hell I will,” Parker said.

  “Roll down your window and wave!” Hughes said. “We want them to relax. They have no idea who we are.”

  “We have no idea who they are,” Parker said.

  “Whoever they are,” Hughes said, “we’re barging into their area.”

  The four men stopped a few dozen feet from the truck. “Turn around,” one of them said above the sound of the Suburban’s idling engine.

  Hughes placed both his hands outside the window and stuck his head out. “We’re on our way to Idaho.”

  “Can’t let you drive through town,” the man said.

  Annie didn’t see a town anywhere, but there was a slight rise in the road ahead just barely obscuring what lay beyond.

  “Where exactly are we?” she said quietly to Kyle.

  “I think the town up ahead is called Rome,” he said. “It’s just a dot on the map.”

  “We understand,” Hughes said to the men outside. “Is there a way around?”

  Annie rolled down her own window. “Can we get out for a second? We haven’t seen any other people in weeks.”

  Nobody said anything at first, but the four consulted with each other and two of them nodded. “Okay,” said the first. “Out with your hands up. Leave everything in the truck.”

  All four stepped out unarmed. Parker was last. Hughes’ shotgun and Parker’s pistol were right there on the front seats within easy reach, but not easy enough if the four men opened fire.

  The frigid dry air felt like a sandblaster on Annie’s face and hands.

  “We haven’t seen anyone for a while either,” said the first man.

  “Name’s Hughes,” Hughes said and stuck out his hand.

  “Ed,” the man said and warily shook Hughes’ hand. Nobody else introduced themselves. “Where y’all coming from?”

  “Seattle area,” Hughes said.

  Ed raised his eyebrows.

  “Seattle is gone,” Annie said.

  “It no longer exists,” Kyle said.

  Ed flinched.

  “Whole thing burned to the ground,” Hughes said. “No government left to put out the fire.”

  “Jesus,” Ed said.

  “Yeah,” Hughes said.

  “Portland?” Ed said.

  “No idea,” Hughes said. “We’ve been on back roads the whole way. You’re the first people we’ve seen.”

  “How’d you get over the mountains?” Ed said.

  “Snowmobiles,” Hughes said.

  Ed stuck out his jaw and nodded. “Why Idaho?”

  Actually, Atlanta, Annie thought. So the Centers for Disease Control—if it still even exists—can put my naturally immune blood under a microscope. She wouldn’t dare say that out loud to a single person for any reason until they got there.

  “Because Idaho isn’t Seattle,” Hughes said.

  Ed nodded.

  “We need to get through here,” Parker said.

  “Nobody goes through town,” Ed said. “You can go back the way you came a mile or so and turn right onto the Old 10 North Highway. It will put you back on 95 after you’ve cleared us.”

  “Why not just let us through?” Parker said. “We’re not here to rob you. We didn’t even know you were here.”

  “We don’t know you people,” Ed said.

  “We don’t know you either, but we’re just driving through,” Parker said.

  “It’s okay,” Hughes said. “The Old 10 North Highway, you said?”

  “Back that way about a mile,” Ed said and gestured with his head. “You’ll want to turn right.”

  “What the hell’s so special about your town that you won’t let us through?” Parker said.

  “Parker!” Hughes said. “It’s fine. We’ll go around.”

  “We make everyone go around,” Ed said. “It’s not personal.”

  Annie noticed Parker’s hands shaking and the muscles twitching near his left eye. The men on the road noticed it too. One of them pointed his weapon at him.<
br />
  “You going to shoot me?” Parker said. He looked like he was ready to charge them.

  “Parker!” Annie said.

  “Easy now,” Hughes said to no one in particular.

  “Fucking nutjob,” Kyle said. “Get back in the truck before you get us all killed.”

  Annie placed her hand on Parker’s arm. He snapped his face toward her and snarled. She flinched and stepped back.

  All four men, including Ed, now trained their rifles on Parker.

  Hughes wrapped his arms around Parker and dragged him to the truck as Kyle opened the front passenger door. “Sit your ass down in the truck,” Hughes said, “or I’m gonna make you sit your ass down.”

  Parker sat his ass down, and Hughes slammed the door shut on him.

  The men on the road lowered their weapons.

  Annie thought about Parker’s pistol sitting there on the passenger seat and Hughes’ shotgun on the driver’s seat.

  “Sorry,” Hughes said. “He’s had a rough week.”

  “Haven’t we all,” Ed said.

  “We’ll get out of your hair,” Hughes said. “Happy to go around. I’d make everyone go around too if I were you.”

  Ed nodded.

  “One question first,” Kyle said.

  “What’s that?” Ed said.