The Dead Among Us (Book 1): Dead Eye Hunt Read online

  Dead Eye Hunt

  A Post Apocalypse Adventure

  Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2019

  Peter Meredith

  Blah, blah, blah, lawyer speak, lawyer speak, blah blah, blah.

  Do we really need to go into this? Here’s the deal. Looky-no-touchy.

  It’s as simple as that.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  Infinite Reality: Daggerland Online Novel 1

  Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2

  Dead Eye Hunt

  Generation Z

  Generation Z: The Queen of the Dead

  Generation Z: The Queen of War

  Generation Z: The Queen Unthroned

  Generation Z: The Queen Enslaved

  Generation Z: The Queen Unchained

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Five

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

  The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9

  The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

  The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

  Jillybean’s First Adventure: An Undead World Expansion

  Tales from the Butcher’s Block

  Chapter 1

  Manhattan

  June 3rd, 2161

  The girl was trying to pass herself off as a vamp. The flesh of her throat and the high mounds of her partially exposed breasts were so white that he could see the blue veins pulsing beneath. She had midnight-black hair that sat piled on her head in braided coils. They wound in ever-tightening circles, a foot in height and made her seem taller than she was. Her teeth were unnaturally white. They were the sort of white that only money could buy.

  Her clothes were expensive as well: the boots that went up to mid-thigh were real leather, and the bone corset was trimmed with ivory and silver. The long, elbow-length gloves: one snowy white, the other rich burgundy, were silk.

  She even had the half-lidded, haughty, slightly bored-with-life gaze of a vamp.

  But now that she was only inches away, Mack-D wasn’t fooled. Beneath the smell of 5th Avenue gin wafting from her breath was the sharp odor of syn-mint, which was normal enough at street level, but down below where the sun’s light could never reach, no self-respecting vampire would touch synthetic anything.

  With difficulty, Mack-D kept his disappointment in check. Sucking the blood from a vamp was a Dead-eye’s wet dream.

  “Welcome to the outside world,” he said, calmer now that he knew she wasn’t real. A minute before, his heart had been pounding at the sight of her and his stomach was roaring louder than the music vibrating through the walls. Still, vamp or not, he had to fight the urge to latch onto her right there and drain her dry. He was hungry after all.

  It was a mortal hunger, and endless pain that he would take to his grave.

  “The outshide?” she replied, slurring in a gin-mumble. “Oh right. I was slummin’ it. But now, I gotta go home. Where’s the shtreet?” She had taken the wrong door out of the club and now she found herself in a piss-smelling alley, eyeing a slag. And a big slag at that. She had to pitch her head well back to look into his tattooed face. As she did, the first touch of fear began to burn its way through the gin.

  Mack-D could smell fear rising off her. He sucked it in deep, his nostrils flaring, his brilliant blue eyes almost closing as his lust and excitement mounted again. The blood was richer when they were afraid, and the flesh sweeter. The animal in him could barely be contained by what was left of the thinking man he had been. He held back. His filthy nails dug into the flesh of his palm, but he held back.

  “I can take you home,” he blurted out. Her fear spiked at the unexpected and unwanted offer. Her fear smelled like shaved brass and, as he breathed it in, saliva flooded his mouth. No! He couldn’t give in to temptation. If he killed her now, draining her, eating his way into her heart, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He’d be seen and the damned taxmen would be called. He didn’t care about the police, they were lazy and could be bribed to look away from anything. But if they called in a hunter, his only chance would be to flee over the wall. Hunters never stopped. Never.

  “It’s okay,” he said to her, holding up his large, filthy hands palms out so that she wouldn’t see the black blood beneath his nails. “You don’t have to be afraid. I’m a thumper here. You know, a bouncer. We provide security.”

  “I ammm shecure. Just get outta my way, ’n I’ll be fine.”

  She tried to push past and he took her by the arm. Now he smelled the cheap lye soap beneath her expensive perfume.

  “Hold on a moment. Taking you home is part of the package. You know, the service we provide for our exclusive clients. You are exclusive, aren’t you?” He was guessing that exclusive was the right word. Or should he have said premium? It had taken him hours to come up with this idea and to memorize his lines. Now, he waited, not sure what she would do, but fully prepared to crack her on the back of the head.

  “Yeah. Yeah I’m ‘sclusive. You got a limo or sumtin?”

  Limo, limo, limo, he ran the word through his slowly disintegrating vocabulary and came up blank. “Uh, yeah. We have all sorts of limos. The best limos. My limo is exclusive.”

  “Really? But you’re a slag.”

  Sudden fury swept Mack-D. I ain’t no slag! he seethed inside, wishing he could chew her curled lip right off her face. It was true that he looked like the spitting image of a slag. His face was scrawled with tattoos in a desperate attempt to hide the pockmarks that were deep as small craters, and the scars that ran like ravines, and the strange snake-like scales that kept peeling from his throat. It was getting progressively worse, but he was no slag. Radiation poisoning wasn’t his problem. In fact, other than his endless hunger, Mack-D would say he had no problems.

  That was the best part about being a Dead-eye. Before he had been infected he had been nothing more than balding Michael McDonald, a complete nobody. The day he was infected was the day he stopped worrying about bills, and work, and the missus complaining about the apartment, or what the neighbors thought of his drinking. He didn’t care if his kids had their indentured licenses sold to one of the horrible Mandarin sweat shops that worked them until their fingers bled or until the toxins built up in their systems so much that they slagged out and became no better than trogs.

  He didn’t even care about the fallout that filled the air or the industrial toxins in the water.
None of that mattered because it couldn’t hurt him now. Very little could hurt him any more and when he did get hurt, he healed in hours. They left scars but they were no consequence to Mack-D

  But he couldn’t exactly say that to the girl, could he? “It ain’t my limo. It’s the company’s.” He held his breath, hoping she wouldn’t ask: which company? The company he worked for melted down trash and strained out the good parts. As far as he knew, there were no limos at the plant. There was only a horrible stench that made the real slags go green beneath their tattoos.

  “Oh, ho-kay,” she said, falling into him. It was another sign that she was a fake. Even drunk, a high-box vamp wouldn’t touch a slag. “Where’s the limo?”

  “It’s close,” he said, pointing.

  She didn’t like what she saw of the alley: the trash, the long oily puddle that ran straight down the middle, the over-flowing dumpsters, the dingy, grey panel van. At least beyond the van was the street. The real street. Behind her the alley was shadow-black as it wormed into the warren of a mid-center block. There was no telling what was back there. Even in Manhattan, a mid-center block was dangerous for an unarmed girl who didn’t belong.

  Mack-D led her up the alley, his hand on her tightening as he neared the van; she would try to run. Drunk or not, she was not going to go quietly. God, how he wished he could let her go, so she could scream and run for her life. He never felt more alive than when they screamed. It was always so primal. It was at that moment that they truly became prey and he became the hunter. Everything before that, the tears as they lay trussed up in the van, the begging, the same insipid questions—What are you going to do to me? It was all just foreplay.

  She edged away from the van as they came close, not wanting to get her clothes dirty. He stopped her. “Hold on.” He wanted to add more, maybe a reason why she should wait calmly while he opened the side door, but no reason came to him, as he fumbled with the latch. It was such a simple thing: lift and pull, and yet his left hand was missing two fingers and had become less reliable as he gradually lost dexterity.

  “Hey, what’re you doing?” she whispered, fear beginning to cut through the gin. “This isn’t a…” Mack-D finally got the door open. The back of the van was windowless and dark as sin. She surprised him by not screaming. “No,” she whispered, sobering quickly. His grip on her arm was like steel. He was hulking and outrageously strong. She was thin and shaking.

  “Yeah. Get in.”

  Before she knew it, she was pushed inside, barking her shin against something hard and unforgiving. Everything inside the van was like that. She was twisted about and pushed down onto an uneven layer of rigid metal. “Please, wait,” she whispered. “I-I’m rich. My f-father will pay good money for me. Just don’t hurt me, please.”

  He was already hurting her. Mack-D had bent her arms behind her back at a severe angle and held her pinned face-down on the metal as he struggled to get the length of nylon rope from his pocket. “Why would I want money? Can’t very well take a trip, can I?” He pictured himself on a white sand beach, sipping some sort of fruity cocktail and turning grey in the sun.

  “Then what are you going to do with me?” She sucked in a sharp breath as he began trussing her up, looping and knotting the rope. It seemed to go on forever. In her mind he was creating the most elaborate knot ever tied. In reality, he couldn’t manage more than a series of granny-knots, though he made up for their simplicity by tying the knots as tight as he could.

  “What I want to do is eat you. I’m going to hang you upside down and slit you wide open and drink straight from your throat.” He was bent over her, drooling down her neck. His hot breath smelled like an open sewer. She screamed, and it was all he could do not to tear into her beautiful flesh. “But not yet,” he said, balling a fist as he fought for control. The screams had to stop and the fist was a convenient tool. One shot to the back of the head and she went face-first into the scraps of rusting iron.

  She woke sometime later, just as the van was slipping beneath the skin of the earth. She was too frightened to move. Like a child, she hoped that if she just lay there, he would forget about her. Then his groping hand found her thigh.

  “Too skinny,” he muttered, giving it a pinch and a poke, like someone assessing a piece of poultry.

  Tears came then. Silent tears.

  The van chugged out a trail of black smoke as it entered the labyrinth of tunnels below the city. It took too many turns to count, still the girl was hopeful she would recognize one of the reflective signs that sometimes hung across the top of the roadway. Hope died a quick death as Mack-D swung into one of the unlit passages that branched from the main road.

  Down they went into unrelenting darkness. There were no signs down here, no traffic, no pedestrians hurrying home. The road narrowed until the van filled the shaft.

  “We’re almost there,” Mack-D told her. “Fourth left. There’s number three.” He slowed, looking for the turn. It always came up so suddenly when driving. When he saw it, he let out a long breath. He took the turn and stopped in front of a wall of solid iron that was splashed with graffiti. It was then that the girl began to realize she would never see the sun again.

  Although she had been calling herself Allegro Albarossa all night, her real name was Christina Grimmett, and she was most definitely not rich. The fancy clothes she had on were the cast-offs of her employer, Ashley Tinsley. She was a true vampire. She was so rich that she only wore an outfit once before having it burned. Were she to be seen in the same outfit twice she would likely hang herself, and donating her clothes was something she could not contemplate. What if, God forbid, some lesser creature was seen wearing her outfit?

  Christina had stolen the outfit piece by piece and now realized it was wrong and that this was her punishment. She began to blubber which made him grin.

  “You can scream if you want,” Mack-D told her, as he slipped out of the van. They both knew screaming was useless now. The earth would swallow it just as it had swallowed her.

  She struggled up, realizing that he had left the van running. Here was her chance—but to do what? He was working a heavy key into a slot, and the door or the gate or whatever it was, would be open in seconds. She would never be able to get the rope off her in time and even if she could, she didn’t think she could back out of there without crashing.

  Then a thought made its way through her rising panic: Maybe I don’t back out. Maybe I crash on purpose. Her captor was framed between the headlights. All she had to do was get in the front seat, somehow get the van in gear, and slam on the gas. With her hands tied behind her back, it seemed impossible. Still, she had to try.

  Squirming, she threw her torso into the passenger seat and then kicked her legs around to the driver’s side. The plan failed at that point. Somehow, she got her crooked arm caught up on the gear shift jutting from the center console—and she couldn’t get it off! To make matters worse, as she fought to free herself, her knee banged the horn and it let out a single tired honk, like a dying goose.

  Mack-D reacted slowly to the sound. He turned and stared through the filmed-over windshield at Christina, his dulled mind unable to comprehend what she was doing. This gave her an extra few seconds to try to jerk her body off the gear shifter, but all she managed to do was mush the shifter into reverse. With a wailing shriek, the van ground backward against the tunnel wall. Desperately, Christina tried again, bucking as hard as she could.

  The van jerked hard as it slipped into drive and then began to roll forward at an achingly slow pace. There should have been plenty of time for Mack-D to do something, but he only stared into the headlights as the van crawled up to him at a steady six-miles-an-hour. He seemed mesmerized by the lights, and to her amazement and grim satisfaction, the van crushed him into the iron wall. He let out a blast of air as his chest took the brunt of the blow and for a moment, he hung his head.

  “Ha!” Christina shrieked. “That’s what you get! That’s what you…” What she saw when he lifted hi
s chin choked her words off. At first, she thought one of his eyes had popped out and was sitting on the stunted hood of the van. Then she saw that it was only a contact lens and what she took for a gaping hole in his face was actually his real eye. It was black and wet as oil.

  “No,” she whispered, finally understanding what he was. “Dead-eye.” It was one of them. One of the undead.

  Her mind reeled. There hadn’t been a zombie seen east of Jersey since before she was born, and yet here was one grinning at her, black blood dribbling from between its teeth.

  She had to escape and not just from the beast, she had to get out of the city altogether. If people found out that there were zombies in New York, there’d be a panic. She’d be in a race for the harbor against ten million people. With a head start, she might beat most of them there, but could she beat the bombers or the missiles?

  In Ottawa, it had taken only a pack of fourteen Dead-eyes for that city to be wiped off the map. That too was before Christina’s time, but they say the city still glowed at night from all the radiation.

  Desperation lent her strength. She heaved herself over the shifter but as she tried to roll over she nudged it with her hip and shoved it once more into reverse. Back went the van, freeing Mack-D. A scream built inside her as she watched his black grin grow wide as he walked around to the driver’s window.

  “Yes. Scream for me,” he said, climbing in, his face dark with hideous pleasure.

  She did more than scream and he loved every second of it.

  Chapter 2

  It was only four and already the day was growing dark, not that it had been all that bright to begin with. A sunny day in New York was a rarity and Cole didn’t like them. They weren’t natural. A sunny day made him feel exposed. No, Cole preferred the anonymity of a dismal wet day.

  The ugly clouds had been pissing out rain since noon. Not in torrents as it sometimes did, but in spurts, and now the streets were slick with muck.

  New York had its own brand of mud. For the most part it was made up of human shit and ash that drifted in from the cratered remains of Newark. There was also a good deal of rat turd in the muck, and industrial waste sometimes made it fancy with prisms of obscene-smelling rainbows. Finally, corpses added their own special tang to the mix—the “daily” pickups had ceased being daily when Cole was a boy, and now a body might sit in the gutter for days before anyone came by to dispose of it.