Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) đź“•
Read free book «Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: -
- Performer: -
Read book online «Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕». Author - -
It belted out a scream unlike anything she had ever heard in her life, even from the others she had encountered. Those things didn’t take kindly to being detained and controlled by their food. If malevolent violence had a sound, this was it.
She felt shocked and appalled all over again that she had once been the same kind of thing that made such a noise.
It lunged like a big cat and bit Parker’s ankle.
Annie turned away as Parker screamed in horror and agony. She knew that sound because she had made it herself when she had been bitten. It came back to her in a rush, the knowledge that she was finished, that the dark waters were rising, that she would transform into a thing so mindless she’d be a brain-dead woman walking, yet walking all the same and biting and spreading the disease that burned down the world.
But then she recovered. She came back from the other side as if she had been resurrected.
The same thing might happen to Parker.
Please, she thought. Let him recover. Let him live. She needed him to rise whole from that chair.
She snapped back to alertness when Hughes took the pistol from her trembling fingers and blew the thing’s brains onto the floor.
“Kyle,” Hughes said. “Frank. Get rid of that body. Throw it on the lawn outside next to the others. And try not to get too much blood on your hands.”
Annie was angry. Kyle could see that. She wouldn’t talk to him. Would not even look at him.
He sat on the front steps of the guesthouse while she slammed kitchen cabinets and banged things on the counter. He wanted to go in there, but he wouldn’t be able to say the right thing, not after the violence upstairs in the main house, and especially not since they all knew more violence was coming whether or not Parker recovered.
They hadn’t yet discussed who would shoot him when this was all over, but Kyle would make sure he got the honor. He would insist. It was his right.
Parker was beyond pain now. The part of his brain that received and interpreted it had switched off. The rest of his conscious mind would shut down soon enough. Only a distorted version of the lizard brain would remain.
It was all over for him even if he recovered, but a tiny flickering part of him hoped he’d recover anyway. For Annie’s sake and for the few healthy humans left in the world. If her immunity could be passed on to enough people, she might prevent this scourge from becoming an extinction event, but he’d never know. He’d be dead either way. So he also hoped, for entirely selfish reasons, that when he slipped out of consciousness, it would be lights out forever.
Please, he thought. Just let me go. Let me go to sleep and never wake up.
Hughes wasn’t easily disturbed, but what happened in that room was the worst thing he’d seen since the death of his family. And this time he was to blame.
What was wrong with him?
He should have insisted they do it differently, that Parker be injected rather than bitten.
It was possible that the virus could only be transferred through saliva and biting. Kyle was right about that much. They didn’t actually know that the blood carried the virus. None of them had witnessed a person getting infected from contact only with blood. But they’d figure it out. If Parker didn’t turn after being injected, then they could have brought that awful thing into the room.
That would have been the civilized way to handle it.
Kyle could be awfully persuasive. He was persuasive when he was naive, and he was persuasive when he was vindictive.
That made him a dangerous man, one of the most dangerous Hughes had ever known. He didn’t seem dangerous in the slightest, not like Lane or even like Parker, and that’s what made him worse than either. Not even Hughes kept his guard up consistently enough, and Hughes was more allergic to dangerous people and ideas than just about anyone.
What really shook him was how Kyle had seemed like the most decent of the whole bunch after Carol. Yet look at what he did. Look at what he made all of them do.
Annie slipped out of the guesthouse and into the main house. The rotting corpse in the living room smelled worse every time she walked in there. She was hoping she’d get used to the sight and the smell, but no.
She crept up the stairs so Parker wouldn’t hear, and he was whimpering and moaning when she reached the door leading into his room.
Yes, it was his room now. His very own room of torment and horror. No one else in her group would ever use it for any other reason.
Parker hadn’t turned yet. The sounds he made were too soft and too—human. He wasn’t screaming or violently thrashing about.
But oh God, was he going to scream after he turned. No one had gagged him or taped up his mouth. Perhaps they should have, but this way his bellowing would allow them to monitor him from a distance. Annie would need to find something to plug her ears.
She pressed her hands against the door as if she could feel the energy inside. She couldn’t, but all the same she tried to transmit some peaceful energy of her own across the grim threshold. It was useless, of course, but she didn’t know what else to do with herself.
She wanted to say something, anything, but it would only make Parker feel worse. From the sounds he was making, she figured he was in some kind of delirium. Perhaps that was best. Delirium is its own form of anesthetic.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear her but needing to say it.
She hoped with all her heart that he would recover and make all this worthwhile. It would be a major breakthrough, especially for a small band of survivors without any medical training. She might be able to save lives in the future, but for now she just hoped Parker pulled through so that something decent could result from the horrible thing they had done to him.
The horrible thing that was her idea, sort of. His body would be shot through with holes and broken at the base of the cliff right now if she hadn’t told the others about her immunity and suggested they test it on Parker, but she had no idea it would be such a nasty business.
Another thought occurred to her, something no one had mentioned yet and probably had not even thought of, partly because it was a bit early for that, but mostly because the idea would terrify everyone else.
If her immunity could be transferred, they couldn’t stay in the Pacific Northwest. They’d need to find an operational medical facility, one that could study her and mass-produce a vaccine. Certainly no such facility existed anywhere near Puget Sound. They might have to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles. She’d need to tell the others. And she’d need to tell them sooner rather than later.
If Parker recovered.
And there was one other thing. If Parker came back, he’d be the only person in the world who understood what she’d gone through. She needed him to recover.
She needed him to survive.
The whole world needed him to recover and then to survive.
Comments (0)