August Burning (Book 1): Outbreak Read online

  AUGUST BURNING: Outbreak

  By Tyler Lahey

  Copyright © 2016 Tyler Lahey

  All rights reserved

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Prologue

  Present Day, 450 days after Outbreak. Appalachia

  “What the fuck is that?!”

  Jaxton heard one of the guards yelp, and his head snapped around, to the north. His bowl clattered against the roof of the Citadel where the chili’s foul meat festered on the metal.

  There, against a mosaic of blues and yellows, a tiny flare arced into the sky. He couldn’t yet process what it meant, even as the fear began whispering his name.

  “What outpost is that?” Jaxton demanded, resisting the urge to scratch the lice.

  One of his Rangers took a step towards the lip of the high school’s roof, a Wolf patch emblazoned on his tattered camouflage. “North Ravines, I think. Liam’s got…four Wolf troopers there.”

  “What’s the protocol for a blue and yellow?!” Jaxton snapped, furious he had forgotten.

  Bennett stepped forward, his face filthy and gaunt from four hundred days holding their valley against the infected. Jaxton could scarcely recognize the man he had been before the Outbreak. He felt the familiar unease as he friend drew closer; he still hated his face. “They need reinforcements, but they can hold the ravine. The Destrier has the ATVs, two of the horse carts, one pickup ready to go,” Bennett declared.

  “Another one, Jax,” someone growled, from under shaggy, unkempt hair.

  Jaxton snapped his head around and saw a second flare, racing skywards to the south. “The Bluffs,” he repeated, feeling the panic digging into him. “Adira’s there. How many men can we get out right now? I need to get to those settlements.”

  Bennett spat off the side of the roof, sweat shimmering on his forehead in the late August heat. “Give me one of the factions. Give me the Wolf. Let me save them, and Adira.”

  Jaxton shook his head emphatically, “If you think I have learned to trust you again, you are mistaken. Where are the other commanders? We need to plug those gaps before the valley is overrun.”

  Jaxton slid his tomahawks into his cracked and broken thigh armor. He cast grey eyes out to survey the walls of the rural valley that surrounded them, the valley that they had called home for the past four hundred nights…and another lifetime before that.

  “There are no commanders here, Jax. They’re in the field,” a woman with stolen US Army regalia countered.

  “Two flares,” Jaxton forced a smile. “Nothing we haven’t handled before. Summer has been kind to us. ” He could scarcely wait any longer. Shouldering Bennett’s bony form aside, he jogged towards the ladders thinking only of glittering dark eyes. Jaxton tugged his helmet into place and gripped the ladder with callused, cracking hands. As he turned, he saw something snaking up between the silhouettes of his brothers and sisters. Suddenly, his hands felt cold on the metal.

  “Black and red...” he muttered aloud. As Jaxton remounted the three-story rooftop, the survivors locked eyes festering with fear. A third flare’s vile smoke wafted like a tower on the eastern horizon. No one moved, transfixed by the twin pillars of smoke chasing each other higher and higher.

  Bennett drew in close, so Jaxton could see and smell the twenty-five year old’s rotting teeth. “They’re being overrun. That’s three settlements under simultaneous attack. We’ve never had three before at the same time. Never three.”

  Jaxton raced to the other side of the school’s roof, where the fields of vegetables and weak crops struggled below. Standing between the old white lines from the football field, dozens of survivors pointed at the sky. Memories of Friday night lights flooded his head and he fought to return to reality. Jaxton turned back to the ragged group of Citadel guards, with their old shotguns and compound hunting bows. “Sound the alarm. Now. Full call-up. Get our reserves to those settlements now, before they are lost.”

  “Full-call up? We’ve never had a full call up…five hundred survivors…that’s the Builders, the Wolf, the Destrier, the Eagle-“

  Jaxton cut the fool short. “I know what it is damnit! Get everyone to arms, now!”

  His men raced to the ladders, gaunt figures in pitiful garb.

  “Sound the alarm!”

  As tiny figures raced across the fields below, the horns began to bellow in the summer dusk. Three flares at once?

  “Jaxton!”

  Jaxton stopped halfway down the ladder, and forced himself to climb back up with mounting dread. A lone silhouette stood against the fading summer sun. Bennett turned, his lip twitching, and pointed to the western horizon.

  “What color is it?” Jaxton demanded, though in his heart he already knew.

  Bennett gulped, and slapped a fresh magazine into his pistol. “Black and red.”

  Jaxton froze, and heard shouting voices rising from the school below him. Within several minutes, all the factions would be racing down the road, to hold the valley against nature’s holocaust. He took a deep breath. His friends were spread out all over the valley’s forest floor. “I need to hold the Western ravine. It’s the largest. If those settlements fall, we’ll lose the valley. The Lion is with me.”

  Bennett straightened his bony back. “Place your faith in me, as you once did in simpler times. Let this be the hour. Give me something, and I will save her.”

  Jaxton crushed the anguish that was festering inside his gut. Where were his friends? Where was Adira? There was no time. He drew from his pocket a patch.

  Bennett stiffened sharply, his eyes alight. Tears streaked little lines on Bennett’s filthy face as Jaxton slapped the Eagle’s patch on his shoulder jacket.

  Jaxton drew his friend closer. “Bennett, this is it. The Horde is real. There could be thousands, more than we’ve ever seen. Everything we’ve built, everything our friends have died for…Take the Eagle. Stop the bleeding- Plug the gap.”

  Bennett clasped his friend on the shoulder, his grip firm. “For the Citadel. I’ll save her, Jax. You won’t regret this.”

  Jaxton nodded sharply, and raced to the ladders to the wailing of desperate horns.

  …

  “Keep fucking shooting!” Viera screeched. She fumbled with another arrow and cursed, dropping it. Controlling her breath, she raised her bow. The sun’s demise cast brilliant, dancing shadows on the ravine, and made it hell on her poor eyesight. She paused over an advancing infected form, and released her fingers. The arrow flew far wide, and she grasped her cramping arm. Viera sank to her knees and scrambled sweaty fingers in her quiver. In despair, she launched it against a tree, empty.

  “I’m out! Are you out!? I’m out!” Malcolm wailed, as the infected advanced over the piles of their own dead. There had never been this many. Never. Where were the men from the Citadel?

  More than three dozen bodies torn and bloodied bodies littered the ravine at random intervals, prickled with colorful barbs. The closest laid no more than fifteen feet away, their stench wafting on the breeze. A husky inhuman snarling filled the ravine’s rocky embrace, and two more infected stalked into view, advancing to a quick trot. Viera flung wild eyes to her flanks, where the other two archers loosed another wild volley. They were hitting one out of every three shots.

  “Where is the Lion?! Is there another flare? Fire anothe
r! Fire another god damnit!!” Malcolm screamed, the veins on his narrow head bulging.

  Viera fumbled with the final cartridge in her rucksack, finally slipping it into the tube. Raising it skyward, the flare gun belched. Twin pillars of red and black smoke soared two hundred feet into the sky.

  “They should be here by now!!”

  A snarling infected woman closed within ten feet before she took a round through the skull. Todd hefted his sniper rifle, slid the bolt back and loaded another bullet. He shifted in his treetop hunting stand. “I’ve got three left,” he said calmly, his voice drifting down from the perch.

  “Malcolm, look!” Viera pleaded. Malcolm wrenched his eyes away from the fore and his heart pounded. There was another flare, several miles away to the south. “There’s another! It’s the fucking horde!”

  “We’ve gotta get outta here!” Malcolm screamed. He saw more infected hastening down the chute, stumbling over the corpses of their allies a stone’s throw away.

  Malcom saw Viera drop her bow and run, even as he heard Todd cursing her cowardice from his lofty perch. The sniper rifle cracked again, and again. The other Wolf archers were gone, but the rifle snapped once more. The weapon clacked: empty.

  Todd cursed quietly to himself, twenty feet off the ground, as he saw the final guard fleeing back into the valley. Todd shifted his hips, annoyed at the painful metal seat. “They don’t make these damn things for comfort, do they?” He looked up absent-mindedly, and saw the infected closing to him. He grunted. The ravine had fallen. Squinting in the dusk, he saw the stream become a river of rotting flesh.

  His spine tickled at the sound of scratching, and he looked below his metal stand, to the base of the oak. Four infected were dragging their broken fingernails on the wood, their bloodshot eyes fixed on his own. He chuckled. The ladder was right beside them, but their diminished mental faculties could not comprehend its usage. Todd leaned back, and waited for the cavalry to arrive as more and more infected stumbled into the valley. The Lion would handle these, Todd knew. Jaxton had never failed them before, not for one night in four hundred.

  There were fireflies in the air when they came. Todd awoke with a start, to the roar of men. Angry men, armed with iron and steel.

  Todd sat up quickly, knocking his sniper rifle off the tower. He watched it fall with amusement, but his heart skipped a beat when he saw the infected. There were at least fifty, all crowding around his tree, clambering over one another like one celled organisms with no awareness of their fellows. It was a giant, seething mass of rotten meat, fluid, and bone that reeked in the cool summer air, spoiling its natural magic.

  Towards this mass, his brothers advanced. He could see them advancing now, in a tightly packed line. They chanted rhythmically as they walked, letting only trees break their formation. Five men held great torches aloft, behind the unbroken line of heavy riot shields. Todd could see their faces, masked and goggled, peering out in the shield’s little square glass windows. The chanting grew louder, and it awoke the summer forest.

  The infected below the tower turned to meet this new food source, and clawed at each other gleefully, in a sickening attempt to reach the survivors first. The first several infected hit the riot shield line, but the wall did not stop- it rolled over them. Makeshift spears fastened to heavy wood lashed out from over the line, striking the infected in their path. As these fell, the riot shielders crushed them underfoot with heavy steel-toed boots. As a guaranteeing measure, a line of men at the very rear hacked into each corpse with wood-axes, splitting their necks.

  The line of men did not waver as the infected came in greater numbers; it surged against them, the men with Lion patches striking out with a terrible frenzy under the torchlight. Where others used bows, or guns, these only used steel. Todd’s heartbeat was hammering inside him, so moved was he by his compatriots’ savage efficiency. They would never die.

  Todd could see the leader, the head of the Council, the one who had created all the factions. Jaxton’s dark hair fell from his helmet and mask, and his spear was dripping with crimson. He walked in the second line, among those that lashed out over the shield wall. As Todd watched the Lion move into position in the ravine, he looked back into the valley. He was no hero. Scurrying down the ladder, he made for the Citadel.

  “ROTATE!” Jaxton screamed above the din. His second line jumped to their feet, from where they had been resting ten paces behind the fighting line. He could see a break in the flow. He waited till the last infected was cut down by one of his axmen, and called the advanced. “NOW!”

  His front line of riot-shielders reeled back from the line and switched with a fresh batch of Lion troopers. They pressed their black shields into the blood soaked earth and took a step back from the line of corpses that littered the ravine’s floor.

  “How long can we keep this up?!” A muffled voice cried out from behind a black balaclava spattered with blood. Jaxton couldn’t see any skin on the masked and goggled figure, but he knew from the imposing form that it was Liam.

  “I don’t know,” Jaxton panted, wishing he could run to find a set of glittering dark eyes.

  “Brace!” He heard his officer roar, and another five infected slammed into the riot shields, clawing and biting them in raw futility. Jaxton hefted a weighty tomahawk and placed his left hand on a shielder’s back. Using it as a brace-point, he leapt up and buried his axe in an infected’s skull, where it was lodged. “Weapon!” He cried. A younger boy raced to his side, gingerly stepping over the hacked corpses, and handed him a maul.

  Jaxton turned to strike down another target when he saw a wall coming towards them. Most of the Lion froze, unable to process what was coming down the ravine at a breakneck speed.

  “Reserves to the front! Reserves to the front!”Jaxton screamed. His second line rose with confused and exhausted faces, unable to comprehend why their rest period was being cut so short. Then they saw it.

  The ravine was filled, as far as the eyes could see. The teeming mass that approached them was a mass of frenzied, bloodshot limbs and screeching faces. As they closed the final distance, Jaxton knew there were too many. He guided his shielders into position all the same, and braced against one.

  The impact sent them reeling, as if the line had been struck by another group of determined men, but these were no men. The mass of infected, stretching back in their hundreds, pushed and clawed at the wall with renewed vigor.

  “Take them down!” A brave soul roared, his husky voice rising up the rocky walls.

  With a bloodthirsty cheer his men set to work, hitting the infected with spears and axes, mauls and cleavers. The foe’s severed limbs and bleeding torsos hit the ground faster than they ever had before, but another always took their place.

  As Jaxton watched, his line began to buckle in the middle, where the weight of the infected was heaviest. The Lion’s line began to bow inward, the heavy shielders straining under the weight as their massive boots sunk into the bloody soil. Jaxton summoned all his men behind the wall and threw them at the center, where they hacked at the foe.

  Jaxton heard a scream as the moon hid behind the clouds, and one of his own tumbled back from the line, clutching his hand. His compatriots rushed to him, but Jaxton took a step forward to end his life; he had been bitten. At the same time, a shielder fell forward into the mass of infected, bitten on the calf, around the back of his shin-guard. The line faltered, sensing there was a hole. As another man moved to fill the gap, the infected surged into it. There were no shielders in place as they broke through and fell among the rearguard.

  Jaxton turned, caught in indecision. In that moment, an infected man rose behind them, his Lion patch shimmering. Jaxton cried out in horror, knowing this was the moment his precious faction failed. The strongest. The boldest. The Lion would die here. He could hear the horns behind him. The other factions were already retreating from the other ravines.

  “The Citadel is being overrun!” One of his troopers screamed, pointing. Jaxton threw
a glance behind him, to where a tower of black smoke rose from the valley’s center. The infected spearman sunk his teeth into a shielder’s meaty thigh even as Liam struck him down with a broken spear.

  The shielders could sense it, could sense their flanks were unprotected, and they began to tumble backwards, one by one at first and then in a sudden rush.

  “RETREAT!” Jaxton bellowed the order.

  In the frenzied rush Jaxton sought desperately to find a Lion patch emblazoned in gold. His search was in vain, for they had all turned to scarlet.

  Chapter One

  One Day Before Outbreak. Washington, D.C

  The sluggish river swept past them and into the dark night. Its churning black waters swirled in the dim lights hanging over the park. Five figures relaxed at the water’s edge, content to let a few moments pass entirely in silence. The city behind them bustled and hummed lightly in its own fashion. It was the last night they would spend in that place.

  “End of the road. One final night of revelry,” Jaxton said with mock severity. His muscled frame cut fine lines in his black t-shirt, grey eyes cutting back to meet his friends’. He raised the crinkled water bottle dramatically, “For those we leave behind.” The cheap vodka splashed on the brick sidewalk below.

  “You might as well pour the rest. I’m not having any more of that. Not even to celebrate graduating college.” The shortest one among them grimaced.

  “Elvis needs a fruity beverage to drink it with. Who was supposed to bring that?” A strong hand snatched the bottle and turned it up. Troy guzzled what was left of the vodka, his stocky frame accepting the strong alcohol without a complaint. He belched and sighed, tossing the empty bottle into the sulking waters. Another few drinks and he would be rowdy beyond belief. Jaxton grinned mischievously, delighted at the thought of spending his last night at university with such a group.

  Liam looked at his watch, “I’ll set the timer. I wager Troy vomits by…shall we call it midnight? Any wagers? We can also do uhhh…shouting mildly racist epithets or ordering that horrible Chinese food. No, not Bangkok Tasty, that’s Thai you idiot.” Liam looked up and burst into laughter, his bear-like form casting moving shadows in the dim glow of a street lamp. Jaxton looked at his bushy black beard, in envy.