The Rising
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Z CHILDREN
THE RISING
BOOK THREE
ELI CONSTANT
B.V. BARR
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means, without explicit permission from Eli Constant & B.V. Barr. Eli Constant and B.V. Barr assert their right to hold copyright of this work entitled “Z Children: The Rising.” The branding ‘Eli Constant Books’ was created for the express purpose of labeling ‘Eli Constant/Eli Grace/Eliza Grace’ works; this includes the Z Children world, first appearing in an original Eli Constant work in the anthology “Let’s Scare Cancer to Death”.
This is a work of fiction. Any locations, characters and entities are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously; they should not be construed as real in any capacity. Similarities to actual persons, living or deceased, organizations or locales are purely coincidental.
Cover Design- Wilde Book Designs © 2017
Z Children: The Rising
Z Children Book 3
1st Edition eBook Print
Copyright © 2017 Eli Constant, B.V. Barr
Cover Design © 2017 Wilde Book Designs
All rights reserved.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS
We send you our sincerest thanks for purchasing Z Children: The Rising! We hope you enjoy reading the story as much as we loved writing it.
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We hope the next book you pick up to read is a true literary ride, a veritable page-turner with a cornucopia of spunky characters. Thank you so much for taking a chance on our book! It is our honor to share it with you!
-Eli Constant & B.V. Barr
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CONTENTS
Part I –
Bethany Thomas Intro
Juan, Sherry, Marty, & Frank:
Part II –
Amber Murphy (Border Patrol)
Hunter Jorgenson (TX Ranger Ret.)
Part III –
Bethany Thomas
Air Force One Closing
PART I
BETHANY THOMAS
Zombies, zombies everywhere and not a drop to…
Wait, that made no sense.
Or did it?
My tired mind was playing tricks on me, fiddling about with nonsensical crap that didn’t help me survive. And I had to survive…survive for them. And right now, if we were going to survive, we needed new transportation. There were too many of them in this area. Too many of those things that were killing people. Z Children…that’s what Cliff had called them after he’d hung up the phone and rushed back into work, barely taking the time to push his arms into the sleeves of his light fall jacket.
I was angry when he left because he always seemed to be called back into work on days when we had something to do as a family. That day—the day he’d left and not come home—we were supposed to take Mari to our nephew’s Halloween party at his school. I’d gotten her a bumble bee costume, even little yellow bows for her hair. October was always my favorite month, though this year it was proving to be the peak of Flu Season across the nation. Even Texas was being hit by abnormal influenza numbers.
So, we’d missed the party and Thomas had been insanely disappointed. It wasn’t fair that I had to be the one to let down a five-year-old child.
But then the night had come and the morning had come and Cliff hadn’t come home.
By that evening, the street in our ‘safe’ suburban neighborhood had been overrun. Our house had been broken into and ransacked—people were panicked, and when people get panicked, it seems like they often lose their humanity. I’d fled, letting the brood of black-masked figures have what they wanted. With little but the clothes on our backs and the diaper bag, which was fully supplied thanks to Scott, we’d made it this far.
There’d been some close calls…Thomas-sized monsters that had taken us by surprise. Some were shorter, some taller…none looked over the age of thirteen or fourteen. Not the fast ones. The slow ones, the ones that didn’t seem nearly as aggressive, those could be anything from a teenager to a senior citizen. It was all my nightmares come alive to haunt me.
But we were almost there now.
Almost to Albuquerque and Cliff had to be here. Only an hour or two away. We’d camp one more night, we’d suffer one more night, I’d be reunited with my husband, and everything would be fine.
I didn’t know if we could keep surviving by the skin of our teeth. When we still had Two Penny with us, I felt like we had a chance…but he was gone now. He hadn’t liked his real name, yet, it felt odd to continue referring to him using the nickname even if I wasn’t saying out loud.
But he was gone.
He was dead.
It was the least I could do to honor him.
I’d kept us alive even though I knew nothing about survival and everything about mani-pedis and NY Fashion Week. Me. A stay-at-home mom who once worked in the retail industry with a decent hand for beadwork and a relatively popular online boutique selling ‘upscale’ jewelry from the ‘heart of the nation’s capital’. Not that our home was really in the middle of DC. We actually lived in a suburb of Maryland, but the ‘heart of Bowie, MD’ didn’t sound nearly as chic and pricey as the shop being in the district. Cliff still considered it a hobby. Hell, it was a hobby. Anything I made went to frivolous things. He paid all the actual bills.
A lot of my school friends and even family commented in the past on how lucky I’d been to snag Cliff. The brilliant up-and-comer from the good family. Press Secretary, Clifton Tiberius Thomas. He never made me feel that way though—like I was the lucky one. We were lucky. Lucky together. But now…now we weren’t together. I had to believe we would be again…someday.
I had to believe it. Because he would be there. Air Force One would have set down at Kirkland; he always said it was an E4 Air Force Command, a place AF1 could set down if it needed an isolated pitstop. If only we could have stopped somewhere, had time for Scott to use his skills to get in touch with Cliff, with AF1…with anyone.
I needed my husband.
God. There is so little about me that’s worth anything on its own without Cliff.
And I wasn’t the kind of person who made it to the end of a horror film. I was the fodder, the first to go, the weak, short girl with a phone in her hand running away from a killer in a screaming mask. Jesus, I was the idiot that ran up the stairs instead of out the front door.
***
Tucking my body against the warm metal of an older sedan with antique
plates, I tried to be a shadow, which wasn’t hard given my 5’2”, 115-pound body. The car’s passenger door was nearly caved in, flakes of aged paint came off on my hand as I leaned and waited for the group of zombie adults to pass me by. More than likely there was a Z child in the center of the crowd. That seemed to be the case each time we ran into a horde. One, sometimes two, rabid and intelligent monster children to every pack…one kid to rule them…one kid to find them…one kid to bring them all and in the darkness… I almost laughed hysterically. What the hell was wrong with my damn brain?
I didn’t dare breathe right now…or move, or make any sound. Even the pitiful breeze barely rustling the golden leaves on the Aspens was audible. Fall in New Mexico was nothing like fall in Virginia. There we had proper seasons; here everything seemed to change according to some mysterious clock. And then, before you could blink, things were blooming and growing again. We could savor the changes in the Northeast; they were a lazy river, waves of water flowing slowly over our bodies. Here, you had to have a camera to capture the moment, and even then, another change might come before the first photo is even flashing across your digital screen.
I wanted to laugh again. The sound bubbled up in my body like champagne fighting its containing cork.
If the slight wind above me could make sound, then laughing like a crazy woman at the ramblings going on inside my brain would be really, really stupid. I was already hedging my bets roaming about looking for food. How the monsters didn’t smell me was a wonder. My body reeked of filth and baby spit-up. At least I still had milk to feed my baby girl with, it wetted the front of my shirt now; we hadn’t stopped long enough anywhere in the past day for a proper feeding. I was giving her just enough to keep her calm and quiet. She needed more to be healthy. I prayed that my milk would keep flowing. But if I didn’t feed her regularly and fully, my body’s production would slow down.
And then we’d have one more mouth to feed. But that wouldn’t matter soon. It wouldn’t. Because Kirkland Air Force Base would be safe. My husband would be there. I wouldn’t have to steal fuel and food and drive all night until my eyes’ moisture dried and my head pounded rhythmically.
At times, I wanted to scream at Scott for not having his license. He was too intelligent for his own good, majoring in communications and all things technological. I always thought that kind of warred with his need to treat the world better, to ‘save the planet’ so to speak. He believed in public transportation, saving the planet, all that jazz. And none of that mattered now. All his little sacrifices, none of them mattered now. The planet that was... It just wasn’t anymore. And, somehow, I knew it never would be what it was again.
My stomach rumbled; I refocused on food and water.
Scott had wanted to go this time, but I hadn’t let him. I was only going a little way away; he and my daughter were locked in the little beat-up car, which desperately needed a go through the car wash. Mari had been asleep in her car seat when I’d left. She looked safe with Scott beside her, even though he was slight-framed and timid-looking. But I was also slight-framed and about as menacing as a field mouse.
Having him—having Scott with me—I wouldn’t be sane without him. We’d had so much help along the way, but that was gone now. Without him, Jesus, I’d be lost.
I highly doubted that Scott had planned on being a nanny in the middle of the end of everything. I’d hesitated in the beginning, hiring a guy to take care of my daughter, but Cliff worked with Scott’s father—Secretary of Defense Allen Chambers—and Cliff had also known him since he was a baby. Now he was twenty.
Cliff sometimes joked how that made him feel old and that he remembered Scott in diapers, when his father was an undersecretary for international security policy rather than SecDef and Cliff was just an assistant editor at the Washington Post. They were both members of CFR, the Council of Foreign Relations, and they’d bonded quickly during a chance meeting at a DC charity event. Cliff wasn’t even supposed to be there, but the Page Six fluff piece had fallen to him unexpectedly.
In my head, I tried to imagine Scott as a baby and the image of him became superimposed on my gorgeous Mari instead of the geeky, acne-riddled high school student he’d been when we’d first met.
***
I hadn’t wanted children when I’d married Cliff and he never pressured me. I was nineteen years younger than him and I wasn’t just undecided about kids; I was undecided about everything in my life. For the longest time, we’d just enjoyed one another’s company, but when I had gotten pregnant with Marilyn at 29, I’d been unexpectedly delighted and had quit my retail marketing job on the spot. I’d never been happy working for someone else anyway.
It had been a hard pregnancy, full of doctor’s visits and special precautions because I had low amniotic fluids. One doctor had even advised against carrying my daughter to term. Every stress test, blood draw, ultrasound—every step I had to take to finally hold my Mari had been worth it.
And just as every distressing element to my pregnancy was worth it, choosing a man for a nanny was worth it. Scott was a good role model for Mari. A boy from an influential family working his way through college rather than taking the easy way out. That’s the kind of person I wanted my daughter to aspire to be, especially since Cliff’s family was well-off and had already setup a trust fund for Mari. I wanted her to be independent, strong, willing to work for her own future, confident enough in herself to know what she wanted and take it. Not like me. I felt like I’d fallen into retail after college and just stayed there, because I didn’t know what I’d be better at. Jewelry wasn’t world-changing, but it was pretty. Adding a little pretty to a dirty, shitty world wasn’t the worst thing you could do with your life.
Marilyn would do amazing things, though; I always knew that. And I wanted her to be anything she wanted to be in the future. If she had a future anymore.
I’d come to really like Scott over the past seven months he’d worked for us. He was intelligent, mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and amazing with my daughter. He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag (not that I could either), so bodily protecting my daughter would take some effort on his part, but give the boy a computer and he could take over the world. Again, I wished we’d had time to stop, for him to have access to…was it fiber optics...a POP? I couldn’t remember what he’d said now, just that he’d made it clear that, given the time and the right equipment, he could call Air Force One.
And we would already know if Cliff was alive, if Scott’s father was alive.
Mari had turned one just last month and she had taken her first steps two days ago—in the back of a small car we’d traded my BMW for a few states back. She’d stumbled forward in that tiny little space walking along the back seat while Scott leaned over the front seat and held her hands. I’d almost missed it because I’d been out searching for help and supplies. But by the grace of whoever the hell let the world go to shit, I’d been back in time. I had gotten to see her pull herself up on wobbly little legs and shuffle her feet across the coarse black carpet, one in front of the other, before falling in a heap with a child’s delighted shriek.
She was going to be petite like me, but she had Cliff’s jet-black hair and dark green eyes. Soon she’d walk without support. Marilyn’s milestones would be tainted by blood and death from now on until things were right again. That made me sick to my stomach.
Would things ever be right again? Yes. Whatever this is, whatever is happening, it would be right again.
The apocalypse was no place for a developing child, so it had to be right again.
A mother, no matter her occupation or anything else, can’t give up. She has to keep fighting, keep struggling, and search for ways to nurture. Not even a week…it’d only been five days of this. What if this goes on for years? What if my daughter never knows what it means to feel safe?
***
The zombie horde was gone from sight now and I stood slowly, always trying to be cautious.
Across the road was a ve
ry small convenience store—the kind that you’d be lucky to find sample packages of medicines and four varieties of chips in—connected to a four-pump gas station. We didn’t need gas right now, thankfully. Kirkland was so close I could almost taste it. Time would fly, that hour or two, and we’d be brought to safety again. Standing and running full-out to the double doors, I crossed my mental fingers. I doubted there was anything to salvage…it seemed every town we crossed had been stripped of anything useful within the first few days of this Z plague.
I’d scavenge anywhere at this point, even if I was sure it was pointless. Because there was always a small sliver of hope—maybe there’d be some baby food, maybe a can of beans rolled beneath a display shelf, maybe I could use a toilet instead of squatting on the ground, maybe everything will be sane again tomorrow. Again, I was struck by how bad everything had become in less than a week. The Z kids, the zombie adults…spreading like wildfire.
I crossed my actual fingers now, thinking that the repetition of physical and mental might just to do the trick, might just call lady luck to me.
Might is such a shitty word to count on.
Zombies, zombies everywhere and not a drop to drink.
But, by the mercy of God, maybe a morsel to eat?
JUAN, SHERRY, MARTY, & FRANK
(Corpus Christi, TX)
“I don’t care how much you love this woman, Sherry. We’re boxed in and exposed. We. Can’t. Stay. Here,” Juan slammed each word down with intensity, daring Sherry to argue with him. “Dammit, woman, standing here fighting is basically inviting the monsters to a lunch buffet.” Juan wanted to shake her; he couldn’t believe he was arguing with a woman instead of launching into action. It was the end of the fucking world. There wasn’t time for this shit.