Mad World (Book 3): Desperation Read online

  Mad World:

  DESPERATION

  Books by Samaire Provost:

  Mad World: EPIDEMIC

  Mad World: SANCTUARY

  Mad World: DESPERATION

  Mad World:

  DESPERATION

  Samaire Provost

  Copyright © 2013 Samaire Provost

  All rights reserved.

  ASIN: B00FNVHELO

  For Dave, who was so keen to find out what happened.

  And for Steve, always.

  And for you, dear reader, if you have followed Luke’s story to the very end.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  Chapter One

  3

  Chapter Two

  9

  Chapter Three

  19

  Chapter Four

  29

  Chapter Five

  37

  Chapter Six

  45

  Chapter Seven

  49

  Chapter Eight

  59

  Chapter Nine

  65

  Chapter Ten

  71

  Chapter Eleven

  79

  Chapter Twelve

  83

  Chapter Thirteen

  89

  Chapter Fourteen

  101

  Chapter Fifteen

  109

  Chapter Sixteen

  121

  Chapter Seventeen

  127

  Chapter Eighteen

  135

  Chapter Nineteen

  139

  Chapter Twenty

  145

  Chapter Twenty One

  149

  Chapter Twenty Two

  157

  Chapter Twenty Three

  161

  Chapter Twenty Four

  165

  Chapter Twenty Five

  175

  Chapter Twenty Six

  181

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  185

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  193

  Epilogue

  201

  With special thanks to Natacha Lalande for her invaluable help with Canadian French dialect translations;

  and special thanks to Gordon Anderson for his great help with USMC procedure and dialogue.

  All myths have a basis in fact.

  PROLOGUE

  We were surrounded.

  “Leia, stay up high!” I looked down from our perch in this big tree and saw a dozen zombies at the base, trying to climb up.

  “AAAHHHHH!!!!!”

  Blasts and yells sounded from below as the Sanctuary team fought without us.

  “I can’t do this.” I leaned out and began shooting, my blasts too high to be very effectual. “Dammit.” I began to climb down.

  As I dropped to the ground again, I swung my knife wide and caught a zombie that had been about to grab Risa as she crouched down by the trunk of the big tree.

  “My stupid leg …” I looked down and saw her leg had begun to bleed again. It was useless. Risa looked into my face and grimaced. “Painkillers wearing off …” Her face contorted in pain as she crumpled to the ground.

  I cut down three more zombies that had made it to the base of the tree.

  “Jake!” DeAndre had gone down in a rush of at least twenty zombies.

  Zach and Jonathan were fighting to get to DeAndre. Dad got there first and began chipping away at the monsters, but three more jumped onto him, and he turned to fight those.

  “AHHH!!!!!!”

  “I got this! I GOT THIS… OH GOD!!!”

  “AIEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  “GET OFF ME!!! AAAHHHH!!!”

  We weren’t going to win this one. They just kept coming. The stream of zombies seemed endless. I kept chopping at them, and blasting at them until my ammo ran out. Zombie bodies fell at my feet and began to pile up. I kicked them off, but more replaced them. After a few minutes, I didn’t hear DeAndre or Dad’s voices anymore.

  “AAAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGHHHHHH!!!!!”

  I cried in despair at the cruelty of the situation, and my mind flashed back to the beginning of all this…

  ONE

  “I have to try,” I said to them. Their eyes all rested on me, and for a moment I felt that weight. But then the task at hand, the emergency, my desperation, came flooding back into my mind and my heart surged with a feeling of resolution. “There is no question. I’m leaving immediately. The only issue is who, if anyone, is coming with me.”

  “Well, I have your answer,” said Risa. “We all are.” She checked the barrel on her new shotgun for the fourth time. DeAndre smiled at her. She shared his love of personal firearms.

  “Risa is right,” he said, looking at me. “It’s a moot point.”

  “Son, we all have no choice,” Jacob said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “We have no choice. Even if there’s the slightest chance we can save her, we must try. At any cost.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Jonathan said, walking over to shake my hand.

  ___

  It had been a day since we’d returned after trying, unsuccessfully, to reach Boston. It had been a short trip, and a disastrous one. Caitlyn lay cold in the ground; we’d buried her this morning. My mother Alyssa lay unconscious in her bedroom upstairs, in an induced coma. It was an attempt to prolong the incubation period of the deadly illness that had infected her during yesterday’s fight.

  Yesterday. It seemed like a hundred years ago. So much had happened in the last 36 hours.

  My father and I had consulted with the doctor last night, and he’d let us know the situation.

  “She’s been infected, and the contagion has already entered the incubation period; that’s why she collapsed,” the doctor had explained. “I’ve had them clean her up and settle her into bed. She’s resting now.”

  “What are her…” Dad’s voice choked with unshed tears, his face pale and drawn. He swallowed and continued; “Doctor, what are her chances?”

  The doctor looked at him silently. Dad’s gaze held resolute.

  “Jacob, you know the answer to that,” the doctor said.

  Dad’s head dropped, and tears spilled from his eyes onto his lap. Tears flooded my own eyes as I watched my father. Then I looked up at the doctor.

  “Doc, wait a minute,” I said. They both looked at me. “We were on our way to Boston, to help Doctor Carroway develop a cure. Couldn’t that cure help my mother?”

  “Luke, cures take years to develop,” the doctor answered. “Alyssa has a matter of weeks, at the most.”

  “But wait a minute,” Dad said, rising from his seat and wiping his eyes. “That professor has been working on a cure for 17 years. He has everything ready, he just needed the antibodies from Luke’s blood to add to the work-up he’s already got.”

  The doctor shook his head. “It would be the longshot of a lifetime,” he said. “There have to be different serums tried, trials, months if not years of trials. To have the first attempt work, the first time. Well. It would take a miracle.”

  “But it is possible,” I said, looking into the doctor’s eyes. In this epidemic that had pretty much overtaken the planet, there was very little room for pie-in-the-sky dreaming. Realistic thinking and action were the rules my mother had taught me to follow. But sometimes, longshots worked. If you tried hard enough, and hoped for that miracle, sometimes the unlikely did occur. It wasn’t unheard of.

  The doctor looked at us and sighed. Rubbing his eyes he said, “Yes, it is possible. There is a small, remote chance that it could work.” His hand dropped to his leg and he stood up.

  I felt a change in the air of the
house. For the last day there had been hopelessness. Despair. My mother Alyssa had been infected with the zombie plague. She was our family’s leader, the person who drove us all. And now she had been afflicted with the very illness she had spent over half her life fighting. It was a death sentence. We all knew it.

  But this small kernel of hope had begun to take root in my heart. Maybe, finally, I could repay all the years Mom had worked to keep me safe and alive. My whole family, they had all protected me, raised me, and now there was a chance to repay them all, make a difference, change the world. Mom didn’t have to die. Maybe, just maybe, she could be cured.

  I looked down at my arm. The muscles and tendons bulged, the veins stood out slightly. Flexing it, it felt strong. I was 20 years old, stood 6 feet, 3 inches tall and had been raised to fight zombies. My arm was lightly dusted with brown hair, there was a tan on the outside of my forearm, and, looking at the veins that glowed a dull, pale blue, I wondered. There was a chance the fluid that flowed through them could save my mother. I felt hope trickle into my heart and push back the sorrow that had filled it.

  “Doctor,” I said, looking up, “How long does she have before…” I cleared my throat. “How long does she have before she turns?”

  “The longest anyone’s ever lasted before succumbing is two weeks. And that was in an experiment: the patient was placed in an induced coma in an attempt to slow the progression of the illness. The patient was in held in this state, and held completely immobile, without any agitation to the body, so that the incubation period was stretched as long as possible. Two weeks,” the doctor explained. “Fourteen days: 336 hours. And Alyssa was infected yesterday morning. At the outside, if we induce a light coma, and hold her completely immobile, she might last 12½ more days. 300 hours.”

  “Then there’s no time to lose.”

  ___

  That had been yesterday. This morning, Mom had woken up briefly, and we had given her the news. She had taken it exceptionally well, if a little fatalistically.

  “Well, that sucks,” she said.

  Sniffling loudly, Dad hugged her. I knelt on the other side of the bed and put my arms around her, too. She patted my arm.

  “You guys, I love you so much.” She had been utterly dry-eyed. “You need to be strong. You need to…” she just held us then. We all just held each other.

  Shortly thereafter, after we explained to her what we were going to try, the doctor had injected her with the drugs that placed her in a light coma. She looked like Sleeping Beauty, lying there against the white sheet, her sable brown hair, lightly striped with sun-bleached strands of lighter brown, falling down across the pillow. Her face was deathly pale.

  Dad and I had then gathered the others in the study. We’d explained what I had decided to try …

  “Then it’s settled,” Jonathan said, walking over to shake my hand.

  ___

  It was 9:30 a.m. and the whole house was buzzing with activity. Dad had gone upstairs to write a letter to Dr. Carroway, explaining what had happened and what we hoped to achieve, so the scientist could be ready for us. Of course, there was every chance in the world that we’d arrive before any letter would. Everyone rushed about getting ready. It didn’t take long; we’d already been packed for the trip since yesterday morning. But we were also writing letters to Mom and gathering tokens to place around her room. We didn’t know what would happen. It really was a case of “hope for the best, plan for the worst” as we rushed to write and gather. I finished writing my note and sealed it in an envelope just as Dad poked his head in the door.

  “You all right, Son?”

  I nodded, “I’ll be okay. There’s no time for anything else.” I grabbed up my favorite childhood book and walked out of the room. We went together to her room. It already looked a little like a shrine. Walking forward, I placed the old, tattered copy of “The Graveyard Book” by her bedside. She had read it to me often when I was a little boy, creating some of the fondest memories of my childhood. I tucked the envelope with my letter on the table beside her bed. Bending down, I kissed her forehead and squeezed her hand where it lay on the sheet. Stepping back to let Dad come forward, I bumped into Risa and she put her arm around me. We both watched my father give benediction to his soul mate. I felt tears well up in my eyes, and I turned around and walked down the hallway. This had to work.

  TWO

  Dad turned the black SUV down the driveway and through the gates, and they swung shut behind us. It was like old times, except that Mom and Caitlyn were missing. Our hearts were heavy with our recent losses, but we were determined in our quest to get to Boston. I felt like a precious jewel being smuggled through dangerous territory. They had to protect me, but the irony was that they were the targets of the zombies, not me. The things didn’t even acknowledge my presence in a fight. It was weird, but I was used to it, and I used it to my advantage.

  “Okay, while we are all inside this vehicle, I am going to pretty much ignore just about everything that happens on the outside,” Dad said. “We have a mission, and we have to complete it in record time. There is no wiggle room. Sound good?” None of us wanted a repeat of the incident that had gotten Caitlyn killed and Mom infected. Not on this mission. Helping people that had been in a car crash was good, but saving Mom, saving the world, was better. Much better.

  “Yes.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  We drove out of the city, passing several fires in the distance, and headed down the Trans-Canadian Highway.

  “Normally I’d head south into the U.S. and east through Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, but Chicago is completely overrun, and the infestation reaches almost clear over to Detroit,” DeAndre said. “Minneapolis is also getting really bad. Some of our people have had bad outcomes in rescue operations there, despite their preparedness and expertise. The route is nearly impassable.”

  We’d all been monitoring the situation in the States as part of our work with the Sanctuary team. Couriers and members of the team brought people to safety from areas overrun by the plague and its victims almost daily. They also brought back news, and it wasn’t good. We’d gone on some of those missions ourselves and had seen the carnage firsthand. You kind of got used to it, but in some ways, you never did, and it was only getting worse.

  At DeAndre’s suggestion, we decided to go east rather than south, hoping that we’d see fewer delays on the less populated route. Crossing over the Red River and Provencher Park on our right, we turned right and headed through the industrial area of Winnipeg. I breathed deeply, eyes scanning the area we passed. I hoped we wouldn’t have any trouble to delay us, but at the same time, sometimes emergencies happened. You had to be ready for anything life threw at you.

  Speaking of which…

  “Oh man!” Dad cried, swerving the wheel as a woman ran out onto the road. Dad got control of the SUV and pulled off to the side.

  “Nobody get out,” he said. Unbuckling his seatbelt, he craned his neck, trying to see where the woman had gone.

  “She ran off over there,” said Jonathan, pointing off to the right and behind us. We all turned to look, but couldn’t see where she was.

  Suddenly, two zombies in advanced stages of decomposition appeared on the driver’s side and ran headlong into the doors.

  “Ah!” DeAndre jumped about a foot, then looked sheepishly around. “Took me by surprise…” he said in an octave lower than his normal speaking voice.

  “There’s a containment team coming up, see?” I said, looking in the rearview mirror at the armored police car pulling up behind us.

  The two officers inside aimed a pair of shotguns through a narrow space in shielded windows and took out the two zombies. Looking around, making sure the coast was clear, they got out of their vehicle, approaching the driver’s side of our SUV.

  Dad rolled the window down about 6 inches.

  “Sir, are you okay?” the female officer in full riot gear i
nquired through her mask.

  “Yes, we’re fine,” Dad said, “but we almost hit a woman who came running across the road just a minute ago.” He gestured off to the right out past the embankment. “She went off down there.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” the officer said. “Now please move along; it’s not safe to idle.” She waved us along and then ran behind us to the edge of the road, where her partner had already begun searching.

  “Think they’ll find her in that?” Risa asked.

  “No,” answered Jonathan. “It’s a near swamp out there, perfect hiding place for zombies. I give her a 20 percent chance.”