Hell on Earth (Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 7) Read online

  HELL ON EARTH

  ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE SERIES 7

  JEFF DEGORDICK

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  1. A Short Drop and a Sudden Stop

  2. Second Chance

  3. Scouting

  4. Clues

  5. Bloodbath

  6. Coming Clean

  7. Enkindled

  8. Close Encounters

  9. Landslide

  10. Washed Up

  11. Dress Up

  12. Identity Crisis

  13. Slaughterhouse

  14. In Her Darkest Hour

  15. Hell on Earth

  16. A Bump in the Night

  17. Cell Mates

  18. A Fated Reunion

  19. Ultimatum

  20. Hope

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by Jeff DeGordick

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover images copyright © Shutterstock

  Created with Vellum

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  Other books in the Zombie Apocalypse Series:

  The Fall of Man

  A Rising Tide

  Ashes in the Mouth

  In Shadows

  Scourge of Evil

  The Eden Project

  1

  A SHORT DROP AND A SUDDEN STOP

  The gun twisted around in her hand, getting dangerously close to aiming at her face and ending it all. The metal felt cold to the touch. It sent a shiver up her spine that made her teeth chatter. The magazine was full. That would leave Wayne with nine rounds, because she only needed the one in the chamber.

  The pistol made two more rotations on the table, and then she decided on one more, maybe just for the road or maybe it was her nerves trying to prolong the inevitable. Her fingers danced on the pistol like a puppeteer giving life to a marionette. She watched the barrel as it made its final spin and came into view. Upon the completion of the rotation, the gun stopped.

  She stared down at it, her fingers trembling, like it would come to life. With a shaky hand, she gripped the pistol and drew it off the table. To an outside observer, it would look like she was moving in slow motion. The barrel of the gun rose in the air with an unintended elegance, moving across the front of her body toward her head. She felt the cold metal bump against her chin then glide up her cheek. Its lethargic movement came to a stop when the muzzle gently pressed against her temple.

  Then her finger wrapped around the trigger.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed hot tears out of the corners of them. The salty taste ran down into her open mouth as she tried to suppress a sob.

  This was it. Lights out. A few pounds of pressure and she wouldn't have to cry anymore... wouldn't have to feel the horrible pain. Recent events swirled around in her mind like a cataclysmic hurricane, causing utter destruction to any sense of calmness or rational thought she used to have.

  Her son was alive, in a manner of speaking. David was still here. But even though she saw his diseased flesh and blood with her own eyes, there was nothing that she could do about it. There was no way to truly bring him back to life. The Eden Project had been a ruse, and in her final moments in the company of Glass and Ron, escaping death and fleeing into the wilderness, her son was foisted into her view as if to slap her in the face and taunt her, to tell her that everything she had ever worked toward was for nothing. It stabbed at her heart like nothing else could, and now all she wanted to do was die.

  The only thing that delayed her demise was one question: Why did they have David? What purpose could he possibly serve for them? Her mind tried to fill in the blanks, and suddenly some mysteries started to become clearer. Sarah thought back to Glass and his men cornering her in the bottling factory in Raleigh—the way he'd just glided through the undead without them paying any attention to him. She remembered thinking about how that reminded her of her son, and thinking about it now, that should have been her first clue. Could they really have just been using her and her son to be able to gain total control over the undead hordes? Why?

  Ron's grinning face leered at her. The memories haunted her and clawed at her, wrapping around her brain like a boa constrictor. And when she shut her eyes to squeeze out the now-demented grin, his laughing façade was etched into the back of her eyelids. Ever since that moment when the other scientists were mercilessly gunned down in front of her and the rug was pulled out from under her, Sarah had a distracting noise in the back of her head. At first it seemed like the screeching of a great and terrible machine grinding against itself, but then she realized it was screaming... her screaming. A constant shriek of terror erupting and reverberating in her head, maybe just to wash away the horrors.

  She couldn't believe she trusted Ron. She couldn't believe he'd betrayed her like that. And she beat herself up, telling herself she was smarter than that. But despite how much she had trained and strengthened herself, nothing would have prepared her for a knife in the back.

  Sarah's lip quivered as she felt the rim of the muzzle dig into her temple. She sat back in the chair and felt her shoulder blades dig into the top of the wood. As she stared over the desk in front of her and through the window into the wilderness, her finger tightened. Two pounds, maybe? Three? She slowly squeezed and squeezed, and now she guessed that she was at four. Another pound or so would do it and then there would be blackness. Or maybe there would be light. But it didn't matter what came to her, because it would be better than this.

  Her whole body shook and her feet started to inadvertently tap on the floor. Her elbow swayed, but she tried to keep it steady, tried to focus all her intention and will into her forefinger as it squeezed millimeter by millimeter. The trigger stood on the precipice between inactivity and engaging the hammer. Her eyes squeezed together hard and her whole body clenched, waiting for the bang.

  "Sarah?"

  The huge swell of air that had been trapped in her lungs rushed out all at once and her finger flew off the trigger like a dart. Her whole body slumped down in the chair with the breath like she was going down a slide, and then she opened her mouth and tried to suck in a huge swath of oxygen to fill the void as panic rolled in along with it. Her eyes widened and she turned her head for the door behind her.

  The door to her bedroom creaked open and Wayne stuck his head in.

  "Sarah, are you in here?"

  "I'm here," she said quietly.

  He stood in the doorway for a while, saying nothing. "You've been awfully quiet tonight, just thought I'd check in on you."

  "Thanks, but I'm... I'm okay." Sarah found herself at a loss for words. She hadn't expected Wayne to barge in and was completely wrapped up in her own little fatalistic bubble. She expected it to pop, but not this way.

  "Okay," Wayne said meekly. "I'll just be out here if you need anything." He lingered a moment longer in the doorframe then turned and headed
back for the living room.

  He had been unusually accommodating lately, knowing that Sarah was going through a very heart-wrenching time. For the first time since she rescued him from the base, it seemed like he had a modicum of independence, and even more than that, now it seemed as if he was the one taking care of her. Ever since she saw David again, she'd been utterly devastated, speechless and confused. Wayne tried to calm her down from this fantastical turn of events, but he had a hard time wrapping his head around what she must have been feeling.

  Sarah kept her eyes on the door, listening to his footsteps disappear down the hallway. She had been so swept up in her misery that she didn't even spare much of a thought about him on her way to suicide. But it needed to be that way; Wayne was still blind and had no means of truly taking care of himself without her. Questions about how he would find food or take care of any of the other basic necessities of life edged into her mind, but she quickly pushed them out. She was so unabashedly selfish in this moment, but the pain put blinders on her and she wasn't able to see anything other than her own light at the end of the tunnel; her own way out.

  She stood up and clutched the gun in her hand. If she had been in a saner frame of mind, she would have realized the absurdity of her next thought, but she suddenly realized that it was incredibly selfish of her to waste even one single bullet out of ten when Wayne could use it to protect himself.

  Taking the gun with her, she left the bedroom and walked into the kitchen. Wayne heard her behind him and turned his head from the couch, but didn't say anything. She looked at him forlornly with tremendous sadness in her heart, and then she quietly set the pistol down on the table.

  "I'm just going to head out for a minute," she told him, trying to hide the nervousness from her voice.

  "Okay, be careful out there and come back real soon," he said. There was an edge to his voice that betrayed a sense of nervousness in himself, but Sarah thought that maybe she was just projecting.

  She hung a narrow smile on her face, even though he couldn't see it, then she turned and went out the front door. She clomped down the steps onto the earth and walked around the cabin to the back. She remembered there being some long-forgotten equipment underneath the deck, and she seemed to remember spotting a length of rope there once.

  The air was cooler tonight than it had been lately, and the gentle breeze was a welcomed respite from the seemingly stifling air inside the cabin. In other circumstances, stepping out into nature would have cleared her head, but not tonight. She had a single-track mind right now, and she didn't pay attention to anything around her. There could have been a swarm of zombies circling her and she wouldn't have noticed. She marched around to the back as the crickets chirped in the distance and the leaves rustled and the branches swayed. An owl solemnly watched her as it hooted into the night.

  Sarah bent over into the narrow space under the deck and fished around through old and rusted gardening tools. She found the length of rope and yanked it out, unraveling a loose knot in it. It looked to be about eight feet long. It would do.

  The tears returned to her again as she clutched it to her chest with a trembling hand. She turned around and went back inside the cabin, quietly shutting the door and moving to the kitchen. She propped the rope under her arm and wrapped her fingers around the top of one of the dinette chairs.

  She turned her head and looked at Wayne who continued to sit there and say nothing. He craned his head ever so slightly when she walked back in, and he was sitting a bit upright, like he was on edge.

  Before Sarah went back out into the night, she wanted to say something—anything—to Wayne as a goodbye. She couldn't leave a note because he couldn't read it, and right now she would have settled for screaming out to him all the feelings that churned in her heart. Tears rolled down her face in constant waves now as she bit her lip to keep back the sobs. She stared longingly at the back of his head and got one last good look at his handsome self. A sudden surge of emotion rushed up her throat and into her mouth, but she stifled it and swallowed it back down. In the end, though her body was screaming at her, she said nothing.

  And then she turned with the chair and the rope and headed back out the door.

  Sarah trotted through the woods almost like she was running away from something. And she supposed she was. She ducked a couple of low-hanging branches and found a good spot away from the cabin.

  There was a big oak tree standing at the top of a hill overlooking the edge of a road down below. There wasn't a single person or creature in sight, and it would be the perfect spot for her final resting place.

  She set the chair down and took her time tying a noose out of the rope. It was hard to do with her shaky hand, but she kept her cool until it was done, then she placed the chair underneath a thick branch that was just the right height and climbed up. She wrapped the other end of the rope around it and used her shoulder and her teeth to carefully thread the loop and secure it.

  When everything was in place, she tugged on the noose to make sure it would hold, then she held onto it, just standing on the chair and staring off into the distance. Her eyes swept across the trees and noticed the serenity of the night for the first time. But tears stained her eyes and turned everything into blurry and messy blobs of color and shade.

  Sarah twisted around on the chair and looked behind her at the cabin in the distance. She could see the candlelight glowing a wobbly orange inside and she lamented that there would be no need for Wayne to light any more candles. She turned back and looked at the noose in front of her. The rough and scratchy rope was dimly highlighted in the moonlight as it peacefully swayed back and forth. Swallowing a hard knot down her throat, she bowed her head and slipped it through the loop. She shimmied her feet to the edge of the chair.

  As she blankly stared off in the distance, she noticed something moving.

  Sarah wiped the tears out of her eyes with her hand and focused.

  There was a dark silhouette down below walking along the empty road. The figure seemed feminine, and it was all alone.

  Sarah stared harder.

  It was difficult to make out any defining features on the person at all, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something familiar about the person.

  Then another swell of self-pitying and tormented emotion surged out of her and she focused back on her task. She looked down at the chair beneath her feet, her toes now hanging over the edge. She let her throat sink down onto the rope and began to sway back and forth with it, gaining momentum and courage. And with one final swing, she kicked the chair out from beneath her.

  She plummeted for a foot and then the rope gave a sharp yank on her throat. It was incredibly painful, and then a rising panic overtook her. But she knew it would be over soon. She gasped for breath, but no breath would come. She knew it would be over soon... just a few more seconds.

  "Sarah? Sarah!"

  Wayne stood on the porch in the distance, spinning around in all directions and calling her name. He was afraid, and it showed in his voice.

  The dark shape moving across the road stopped suddenly and looked up in the direction of the cabin.

  Sarah blacked out.

  2

  SECOND CHANCE

  When sensation came back to Sarah, she met it with confusion at first. There was something murky and vague swimming through the blackness that encapsulated her, and she wondered if this was what death was like. The more she focused on this vagueness, the sharper it got, until she realized that it was a sound. Odd thoughts started to flood her mind as she began to realize that maybe there really was life after death. She wanted to open her eyes to see what the afterlife looked like, but her eyelids were too heavy. She tried to move her body, but it was unresponsive. Then the sounds became clear enough that she could hear them exactly. They were voices. And right now they were laughing. As she trained her ears more on the voices, she could make out some of the words.

  "...you like country, too?"

  Laughte
r.

  "...could sing a few bars, I guess..."

  "...better than me, I'd probably make the glass shatter..."

  "...don't think you're that bad..."

  Sarah strained against her mysterious limitations, growing more confused by the second. She didn't think she was really dead at all, and when she finally managed to pry her eyelids open, it wasn't the bright and shining whiteness pouring out from behind the pearly gates, nor was it the reddish and frightening light of Hell; there was a simple and flickering orange light that washed over the wooden walls around her. Her head began to move and then the laughter stopped.

  "I think she's awake."

  "Sarah? Can you hear me?" A hand reached out and touched her arm. It felt like the fingers were stretched out and searching for something, then when they felt her skin they eased into a soft grip, comforting and warm. The hand gave her a little squeeze like it was happy to meet her.

  The blurry shapes surrounding her became clear and she saw Wayne and a strange girl sitting next to her. The girl's face was familiar. She had flowing, long brown hair, as deep as ebony wood, and there was a sparkle in her brown eyes that was foreign to the brutal world. There was also a kindness in her face that seemed hauntingly familiar.

  The girl looked at her as if she were waiting for Sarah to recognize her.