The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Read online

  The Apocalypse Sacrifice

  The Undead World Novel 10

  A Zombie Tale by Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2017

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  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 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

  Pen(Novella)

  A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

  The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

  The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

  The Drawer(Short Story)

  The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)

  The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

  Chapter 1

  Sadie Martin

  Five minutes before, the interior of the Humvee had smelled strongly of a combination of feet and armpit. It was an acrid smell that always took Sadie a few minutes to get used to whenever she climbed back in after scouting or scrounging.

  Now, the Humvee smelled harshly of diesel and smoke. The air was filled with it, that and the screamed orders of Sergeant Christopher Steinman, who was in the back seat next to Jillybean. The little girl had her hands out, one gripping the back of the passenger seat, the other on Steinman’s arm, holding it tight. She had been sleeping on the downhill run into Yellowstone when the explosion sent the Humvee into what felt like a death spiral.

  Up until that point, their trip had been the closest thing to easy that Sadie had experienced since the beginning of the apocalypse. The four of them—the fourth being a tattooed private named Jimmy Logan, who had come on the trip ostensibly to hit on Sadie—had made good time as they rode north into Wyoming and then west through what had been the least populous state in the union.

  The land was so desolate that it didn’t make sense for bandits or slavers to roam there and so far, their only true obstacles had been the zombies—thousands upon thousands of them, all of which seemed tremendous in size—and the roads themselves. The highways weren’t exactly potholed as much as they were cratered. Frequently, there were holes in the road that could swallow not just a man but his Jeep as well.

  It was May tenth, three days after Jillybean had declared: “It’s my birthday! I’m Eight. I made it!” They had been on the road since the first of the month and the ease of their passing had obviously made Jimmy complacent. He was in the “Navi-guesser” position, as Grey had always called it, and was in charge of monitoring the drone feed. He should have seen the ambush from a mile away—literally.

  Now he was pinned against his door by the force of the spin, while Sadie, who had been driving, was desperately trying to right the vehicle and set it square to the road. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do when they didn’t have an expanse of windshield to look out of. Instead, she had a ten-inch, black and white monitor that displayed a sterile grey view of the front of the vehicle. It was currently spinning clockwise and there was a “chugging” feeling running up into the steering wheel which she guessed meant that one of the tires had blown.

  The Humvee shuddered to a halt, half on the road and half in the strip of tall grass next to it. Before Sadie could take a breath, Sergeant Steinman screamed, “Forward or back! One or the other, damn it, but you can’t stay here.” Their SOP was to clear an ambush sight as fast as possible.

  This was their first ambush and, as the driver, Sadie had to pick either blasting through or retreating based on her reading of the moment. She actually thought she was choosing retreat as she heaved the wheel to the right, however she was turned around and struggling to make sense of the screen in front of her which was clouding with smoke just as was the interior of the vehicle.

  In mid-turn, the chains hanging like a metal skirt all around the base of the vehicle began to make a merry tune as bullets smacked into them. Whoever was out there, hiding in the night, was gunning for their tires, hoping to pin them to the road, helpless.

  “We need to move,” yelled Jillybean, recovering quicker than any of them. There had been a splash of panic across her features at the initial explosion, but as Steinman hadn’t immediately manned the M249, she jumped to the back of the center console. It was here that the main controls for the machine gun were set.

  The controls consisted of nothing more than an iPad velcroed to the console and a standard Xbox controller with the “A” button highlighted in red. The iPad showed a thermal image of a towering rock wall with an aiming curser dead center on it. Jillybean pressed the “right arrow” and above her there was whirring noise as the gun tracked right.

  “I got bad guys!” she screamed.

  Directly in front of Sadie were five monitors, the largest of which was the front view. The other four were seven-inch monitors surrounding the main; port and starboard were obviously placed, while the rear camera view was set below and the thermal gunsight above.

  She could see the bad guys as light grey, humanoid shapes that bloomed orange every time their guns fired. There was a lot of blooming.

  “What are you waiting for?” Steinman yelled at Jillybean. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  From above, there came a stuttering barking noise as the M249 started ripping off rounds. For a few seconds, Sadie found herself watching the thermal image instead of driving. It was only after the wisps of smoke in the main cab turned to clouds of it that she remembered her duty.

  Stomping the gas and sending everyone lurching back, she sped down the road, only just then noticing how little room there was on either side of them. Their attackers had chosen a narrow gorge to set their ambush; it was textbook. It was so obvious that Sadie sent Jimmy a sour look. He should have seen this coming.

  She only had time for the brief look. The forward screen was practically sparkling with the number of people shooting at them. To Sadie it seemed as though there was a bad guy behind every rock and tree. “Jillybean, to the front! To the front!”

  Everything was chaos. They had all been bored out of their minds for days on end, but now their world had devolved into shouts and gunfire and smoke—Sadie glanced up more than once at the cloud filtering down and felt a sudden queasiness.
In the steel-encased racks situated on top of the Humvee were the extra fuel tanks at least one of which was on fire.

  Would it spread to the others? Would it engulf the vehicle and cook them alive? Speed seemed the best antidote for both the fire and the bad guys. Sadie punched the vehicle forward, leaning in close to the monitor, trying to pick out the obstacles in her path: the potholes, the sharp curve of the road, the tree limbs, and the many zombies flooding in towards the sound of the fight.

  She had to switch to her backup fore-camera after hitting half a dozen of the beasts. The screen had gone a gunky black with their blood.

  “Uh, Sadie?” Jillybean said a few seconds later. “I think we’re through.”

  It was a moment before Sadie realized there were no more of the humanoid shapes crouching here and there along their path. The road was clear…more or less, after all there were still ottoman-sized rocks, gangs of zombies and the ever dangerous car-swallowing potholes. She took her foot off the gas and concentrated on the steering wheel, which she had in an iron grip. It was fighting her, wanting to heel constantly to the right.

  The vibration grew worse with each passing second; a glance toward the rear camera showed black chunks the size of her fist bouncing along behind them. The front right tire was disintegrating and it wasn’t long before there came a squeal of metal as if there were a thousand-pound safe in front instead of a wheel.

  “Keep going,” Steinman ordered. “We gotta clear the area.”

  “I wouldn’t, Sadie,” Jillybean said, pointing up. “We’re on fire.” The three of them looked back at Steinman who only sat there staring up at the roof of the Humvee which was clouded over in grey. When he didn’t say anything more, Jillybean warned: “We gots bullets up there, and gas, too amember?”

  “I amember,” Sadie said, stopping the Humvee, the metal rim giving an ear-splitting screech that made them all cringe. “We clear?”

  Jillybean whirred the M249 back and forth, the screen casting a pale light on her pale, but studious face. “They’re a quarter mile back. That’s not all that far but we passed, like a gazilion monsters, and I think I got a few of the bad guys. They’re probably wondering what hit them.”

  “Now’s not the time for talk, everyone out!” Steinman barked, coming to life once more.

  The four scrambled out of the armored vehicle, which was indeed on fire. Two of the reserve fuel cans had been hit and were raging atop the Humvee, lighting up the night and drawing zombies from all over.

  Sadie was surprised to find herself next to one ragged beast as she backed away from the Humvee. For a moment, the two of them stood gaping up at the fire as though they were watching a wreck on I-95 back in the day. If the thing had calmly asked her for a cigarette, she wouldn’t have been shocked.

  She knew how they were with fires. It would stay mesmerized as long as no one disturbed it or made too big of a commotion. Of course, once the rounds in the belt-fed M249 started cooking off, things would change quickly and not for the better. Sadie ignored the zombie and started looking for something to put out the fire.

  Other than a bit of sand along the edges of the road, there was nothing. And truly, the sand was useless. It would have to be scraped up and thrown by the handful at the fire. “What do we do, Jillybean?” Sadie asked her little sister, rolling the dice that the little girl would be able to think of something that would put out a gas fire before the Humvee burnt down, leaving them stranded in the middle of the wilderness, surrounded by zombies and people trying to kill them.

  There was a pause that suggested they’d soon be doing a lot of walking, but then: “Right, the bicarbonate!” Jillybean said as though someone had whispered it to her. She turned to Steinman, who had been busy swinging his head back forth from the fire to the ring of zombies closing in on them. A questioning grunt escaped him. “The bicarbonate!” she repeated, louder. “The baking soda.”

  When he only said: “Huh?” for a second time, the little girl, pushed him aside and dove back into the smoke-filled Humvee, searching in the cargo space, her skinny tutu-covered butt poking up. The zombie next to Sadie forgot the fire, made a hungry noise in the back of its throat and started forward for the girl.

  Sadie had her black-bladed hunting knife out in a flash and in a quick move, one that Captain Grey had made her practice over and over, she spiked the knife into the back of the zombie’s neck aiming for the notch between the C1 and C2 vertebras. “It’s like unplugging them,” he had said.

  Sure enough, the beast gave a full-bodied twitch as if there was a hot wire running from the hummer’s battery and up through the knife. It then toppled over, still alive, at least for a while, but disconnected.

  For the most part, the beasts hadn’t even noticed the knife or the swift, human movements. A couple did and came forward to die as well. Steinman wasn’t the quickest intellect among the soldiers, but he was an excellent fighter. He carried a climber’s ice axe as a weapon: two and a half feet long, four pounds in weight with a long awl-like head that could bury itself seven inches into heavy ice without a problem.

  He preferred quick temple strikes where the bone was thin. In two moves, he dropped both zombies.

  A second later, Jillybean had wriggled out of the Humvee, holding a familiar orange box. “I need a boost up there,” she declared. Steinman was taller, however, he was the better fighter and had more protection with the flak-jacket he wore. It looked to Sadie that he would need it; the other zombies were starting to become aware of the humans. As he started swinging his axe in short, vicious strokes, Sadie picked up the little girl.

  “Put me on the hood,” she ordered. Sadie pushed her up; a second later Jillybean cried: “Oh! That’s hot!”

  She was on the hood of the Humvee cringing, but moving forward all the same, her only defense against the flames that were growing higher and wider was a pink Power Puff shirt that she yanked up in front of her face. That was good enough to keep her face from blistering off, but her hand was suffering.

  A scream of pain escaped her as she got as close as she dared. In her outstretched hand was the box of baking soda, maybe only a pound worth in all. Sadie couldn’t understand what she thought she was going to do with it. Had it been sand, she would need a wheelbarrow full to douse the fire that was growing larger by the second.

  The fire was raging and spinning the air around the little girl, lifting her hair until it seemed to float around her. For a moment, she looked like a pink, tutu-wearing witch and when she extended the orange box and started splashing the powder around, it seemed as though she had conjured some sort of magic.

  “Whoa,” Sadie said. The effect of the baking soda on the flames was immediate and startling—there was a noise of “foomp” and then the three-foot high flames simply disappeared. A huge pall of smoke took its place, engulfing the little girl who moved forward, covering the entire rack in the white powder.

  Sadie had never seen anything like it. “How on earth did she…”

  “Watch your six, Sadie!” Steinman shouted.

  The warning came just in time. The fire was out, but the danger was still great. They were surrounded by eleven zombies who acted as if they were just waking up and were ready to feed. Sadie lashed out with her knife, which was an altogether useless weapon when confronted by three zombies at a time.

  To keep from being bitten or scratched, she retreated until her back was to the Humvee and she had nowhere else to go. “Hey, look up here!” Jillybean yelled from above. She threw the orange box at the zombie in front and then started waving her arms at them. “Yoo-hoo! Monsters? Look at me.”

  In the midst of the desperate fight, Sadie cracked a smile. Only a daughter of Neil Martin’s would ever call out “yoo-hoo” to a pack of zombies. The brief interruption gave Sadie a moment to drop down and roll beneath the Humvee. She popped up on the other side where Jimmy was swinging an aluminum bat around at only two zombies.

  He’s fine, she thought and ran around the Humvee to help Sergeant
Steinman, who was battling stiffer odds. With the zombies either focused on the axe-wielding human or the butt-swinging girl, Sadie fell on their rear with her hunting knife stabbing over and over for the base of the skull. The beasts, huge and terrible as they were, died by her knife or were felled by Steinman’s axe.

  When the one side was clear they went to help Jimmy, who was just finishing the last of his enemies, bashing its head into the earth.

  “Are we good?” Sadie asked. “Anyone scratched?”

  As the men inspected themselves, Jillybean touched her face and said: “I think I lost an eyebrow. Boy-oh-man that was hot and that’s what means…”

  Steinman interrupted: “Jilly, get down from there. We still got bogeys up the road.” He put his hands out to her and she dropped down into his firm grip. “And another thing, from now on call it baking soda. It says it right on the box. No one cares if you know all the sciency names for…”

  It was his turn to be interrupted. A gun was fired from somewhere up in the hills to the east and Sadie felt something hot and wicked breeze past her neck. The shock of the bullet passing so close sent a spastic shudder running through her body and involuntarily she froze in place as more bullets rained into the group.

  Chapter 2

  Jillybean

  Sergeant Steinman dropped into a crouch, while Jimmy spun with one arm out, looking like a strange, camo-covered ballerina, his silver bat bouncing and blood flying.

  Jillybean had dropped to one knee at the first shot and was already heading for the safety beneath the tilted Humvee when she saw her sister simply standing right out in the open, a frozen wide-eyed manikin. Before she knew what she was doing, Jillybean was on Sadie in a full body grip, like a monkey attacking a leopard. The little girl used surprise and her fifty-five pounds to drag her sister down as more bullets whipped by, smacking into the side of the Humvee.

  There was a curse shouted and gravel kicked up off the road in tiny explosions next to Sadie’s unflinching face—she was still in some sort of shock. “Get under Hank!” Jillybean yelled, pushing Sadie who finally began to blink and kick with her legs. Only once she was under did Jillybean crawl after. Sadie had stopped midway and was panting: “That was close, that was fricking close.”