The Orphans (Book 2): Surviving the Turned Read online

  The Orphans

  Surviving the Turned

  Vol II

  By M. Evans

  Dedicated to my wife and children, who are always ready to put up with one of my crazy ideas. Always supportive of my writing. I love you all. Also to my fans and readers this has been an amazing year!

  ****

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  Prologue

  Fate, love, truths, and lies are just some of a million different things that can happen to change the world for better or worse. One teenage boy helping a girl set in motion the fall of the United States.

  Frank Fox wasn’t looking for love. He was not looking for ways to complicate his life or to try to replace the woman he loved completely and had buried eight years ago. He was content being a workaholic, a widower, and a father to a son who held him forever in contempt for not being there when his mom passed away.

  The US soldiers in Iraq had been fighting an uphill battle, and it was one they were unable to conquer. The Iraqi troops had been using illegal chemical warfare, and the men and women who made it back from base were brought back only to die. The lucky ones never made it back; they weren’t forced to die in more pain than any one person should have to endure. Frank’s wife, and mother to his son, made him go when the call to help others came. Unfortunately for the young family, he never made it back to her. Just when the team of Army scientists had finally reached a breakthrough in their efforts to find a cure and right what was wrong in the world, Frank received an unexpected message from home; his wife had lost her battle with cancer. He needed to return home to bury her and to take on the duties of caring for their only child, five-year-old Shaun Fox.

  Shaun was too young at the time to understand why his father was not there. The explanation that his dad was off on a mission for the greater good wasn’t one that a five year old could comprehend. Even Shaun’s own mother told him it was okay that he was gone. Unfortunately for Frank, Shaun could not see past the pain that his mother had to deal with.

  Shaun and his dad had a love-hate relationship that developed over the years. Shaun could never let go of feeling abandoned by his dad. Frank Fox did not give up on his son, but the two had grown too far apart to be able to restructure the close-knit bond that Frank had always hoped for.

  Through a chance encounter at school, Shaun walked into a situation where he had the chance of a lifetime—to protect the girl he had, for years, secretly had a crush on. An over-zealous school principal forced Shaun’s and Ellie’s parents to come to the school. Frank arrived at the school to pick up Shaun from his undeserved detention and was in the middle of chewing out the principal when he was interrupted. The mother of the girl Shaun had stood up for entered the office, knocking Frank off his feet and taking over the ass chewing.

  If there is such a thing as love at first sight, it had surely happened that day. Frank and Karen fell madly in love. After a very short courtship, Frank asked Karen for her hand in marriage. To his horror, she declined. She confessed that the reason she couldn’t marry him was not because she did not love him. She couldn’t marry him because she loved him too much to put him through the same torture he had been through with his first wife; Karen had been diagnosed with a rare, untreatable form of bone cancer.

  Frank had lost the love of his life once and refused to let it happen a second time. He refused to accept what the doctors said about it being incurable. There was a cure—it had already been developed. But never for civilian use. Frank dug through his old research papers, which held formulas he had long forgotten; he vowed he would save her and keep their love alive.

  He ignited a hope in Karen, and the engagement and race for the cure had begun. In secret, he began to work on the cure, recruiting his lab assistant to help. Neither of the men knew of the zombie outbreak that had occurred following experiments with the original strand of the design on a cool night in Iraq eight years before. It was a night that painted the sand red… until the bomb, which had erased all of the evidence, was released from the sky.

  Frank’s attempts to save Karen were valiant and his research was genius, but in the end, he just didn’t have enough time to do the impossible. His lab assistant, Rogers, who thought Frank drifted too far from the original design of the drug, had faked the research, rushing the results and testing it on rats in the lab. This led to Rogers becoming one of the infected. The damage that Rogers had set in motion that day was unfixable; he had sent a batch of X-74 to the sister location for storage and mass creation. A freak traffic accident caused the container to spill over onto the side of the road. The drug’s vapors drifted in the air, not particular about who it infected. Among its first victims were travelers who waited patiently to get back to their homes following a local volleyball tournament, which was attended by people from every small town in Iowa, as well as the surrounding states and beyond.

  When the infection made it back to Frank and Shaun’s hometown of Adel, the town’s population of the living and breathing went from sixteen thousand to the unknown—at best a thousand or less. Almost the entire town had been at that rally; only the lucky survived. The disease spread like wildfire across the Midwest, leaving nobody safe.

  Chapter One: Day of Tears

  Day 1

  Ellie sat in the old, rusty van quickly stuffing MREs into the worn, green duffle bag. Her normally clean, dark hair was filled with grass, spurs, and thorns from the first of what would be many hard, long trips up the steep hill. They had more supplies that they still needed to get tucked away at Shaun and Frank’s cabin. She was trying her best not to think about her mother, realizing that with all of the insanity going on that afternoon, she had barely had time to take in the fact that she herself was now an orphan. She would never be able to ask her mother for advice, go out for dinner, curl up and watch a movie, to do anything that had the word them in it. She was without parents and had not even had time to have a proper breakdown and deal with all of it.

  She looked out the back of the van toward the path leading up the hill, thinking she should see or smell smoke from the fire they were supposed to be starting up there. She was surprised that she couldn’t stop thinking that Shaun and Frank should have been back down the hill by now. Ellie wasn’t sure why she was getting more worried about them by the minute when the Turned were still miles away. She looked out the back of the van to make sure everyone was where they should be, and no one had wandered off. But mostly, she wanted to make sure Greg was still on top of the van keeping an eye out. They had all agreed that someone should keep watch for those things that they knew so little about… at least until Frank got back down the hill.

  Greg lay flat on top of the van’s roof, holding a high-powered bolt-action rifle. He hadn’t given up his assault rifle that he had used when Frank, Shaun, and he needed to take out a mob of zombies. No, it was lying right next to him, and he didn’t plan on taking a crap without that thing within arm’s reach, along with a
stack of .223 full metal jacket bullets in shiny, new magazines. He was using the bolt action to survey the entire distance in front of them. The bolt-action rifle was not only more accurate and capable of reaching distances of three football fields away, but it had a scope on it almost as long as his forearm. He stayed focused, looking down the long road and checking the field, never removing his eye from the scope. The threat of the Turned was too much to be able to relax; his adrenaline was still pumping readily through his veins.

  Mike looked around, taking in his new home and staring at the woods. He had never been anywhere so remote and so cut off in all of his life. He periodically thumbed through his phone, praying a message from his mother might come through. His phone had not worked since the helicopter in Des Moines crashed into the cell tower hours before. Still, he couldn’t stop praying that he wasn’t alone and destined to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere forever.

  Patrick was a little more realistic about their new accommodations; he turned his phone off after seeing the cabin on the first trip up the hill. He knew that if and when they did start working again, having cell power might not be a horrible thing.

  Kristy was in near shock. She was sitting by herself on the edge of the hill, curled up on a fallen tree, rocking back and forth. She couldn’t get the images out of her head; her mother’s and little brother’s feet sticking out from beneath the bus was what she saw when she closed her eyes. The last thing she remembered was her mother’s final act of compassion, shoving Kristy and her brother out of the way of a bus that was coming straight for them. Her brother didn’t make it far enough out of the way. Kristy, caught off guard, was unable to latch on to him in time.

  Ellie zipped another bag shut and tossed out a half-full duffle bag; it was for one of the girls to carry up. Tina grabbed it and stacked it in a pile. She was thankful for all the supplies the old man had given them and happy that they had gotten bags as well to put the supplies in. She knew very well that if they did not have them, it would take all summer and winter to move everything. She thought of how useful the four-wheeler would have been had they not needed to abandon it in town when the mob of Turned arrived, hungry and searching.

  Ellie smiled for a moment as she watched the butterflies floating through the air. Birds chirped. Squirrels jumped between the trees. She was thinking how strange it was that everything seemed so normal and only a few miles away, hell had been unleashed. Who knew how far the carnage had spread in other directions? She contemplated how it could have been a great day had the unthinkable not happened.

  It was warm but not too hot yet. The Iowa summer wasn’t blazing down on them and probably wouldn’t for another month. The humidity wasn’t making the shirt stick to their backs or the air too thick to breathe comfortably. The forest was painted with beautiful leaves, and she was with her best friends. It could have been mistaken for a camping trip if Greg weren’t required to be on the roof, looking for threats while holding a gun that had a scope the size of her arm.

  She continued to think of Shaun and how long he and Frank had been up the hill. Ellie was surprised that the two hadn’t returned, as Frank had taken charge of the group and seemed to have things under control. She wasn’t comfortable with how many close calls there had been; it worried her because there was currently no cure, and there was no way to get Shaun back if anything happened to him. He was her crutch and she needed him to be around for a long time. She wasn’t sure what would happen between the two of them but knew she wanted him around until she made up her mind.

  She looked toward Tina, ready to say something, when the loud report of a pistol echoed its way down the hillside. Birds and squirrels fled, their peacefulness having been disturbed. They were not used to the sounds of gunfire in the land not frequented by humans.

  Ellie’s eyes grew wide; she jumped out of the van without thinking or hesitating and began what seemed to be an endless sprint up the hillside. Tina and Greg screamed for her to stop, but she was already sprinting up the hill.

  She tripped and fell many times as she made her way up. She was lucky that she didn’t twist her ankle running so recklessly. After what seemed a lifetime, she finally made it up the path. The single gunshot scared her more for than a hundred shots would have. One of the only things that she noticed about the Turned was that they had always been in a group; none so far had been alone. She looked around the clearing. The echoes of the shot had long faded away and the quiet was almost deafening.

  Ellie ran into the cabin and found it empty. The cast-iron stove, which was to have been heated, was still as dark and as cold as when they first arrived. Between the echo of the shot still ringing in her head and the cold, dark cabin, her stomach turned with worry. She ran out of the cabin, leaving the door open behind her. She was confused and couldn’t deal with not knowing what was going on.

  “Shaun... Frank... where are you?” she screamed into the clearing in woods.

  It was difficult to see through the setting of the sun in front of her view, but what Ellie finally found took a piece of her young heart that she would never get back. The news of her mom being taken by one of those things in Des Moines had instantly flipped her world upside down and she wasn’t sure how much more loss she could handle in one day.

  His frame silhouetted by the sun, she saw Shaun before her; he was digging a hole. His posture screamed exhaustion and defeat. He shook as he shoveled, and it was obvious that he was crying as he used all of his energy to complete the task. Lying close to him was another silhouetted figure, long and lifeless, who could only be Frank. Ellie did the math; she was confused and shocked and angry that she hadn’t been told, that she couldn't—for the second time that day—say goodbye to someone she cared about. She dropped to her knees for a moment, the world around her growing fuzzy and spinning.

  She forced herself back to her feet and walked over in a trance-like state. She made her way to them, putting her hands to her face at the sight of Frank on the ground, covered in his own blood. She knelt down by him, her tears coming easily and falling on his chest, but careful not to touch any of his blood. She looked up at Shaun and could see just how bad off he was. He was crying uncontrollably, burying his second parent in his short life. He wasn’t capable of speech and was barely managing to use the shovel.

  “What happened to him?” Ellie asked.

  Shaun tried talking and nothing came out. Trying to explain what he was forced to do was almost as bad as having to dig his own father’s grave. He thought about the grave, realizing it would be a commodity most people would not be bestowed. Going forward, there would be no time for people to have that luxury. He stuck the shovel in the fresh ground and carefully pulled Frank’s pant leg up, exposing the bite and twisting his ankle so she could see the wound.

  Ellie gasped at it and almost all her questions were answered. “Did this happen at the school?”

  Shaun shook his head no as he wiped his nose and eyes with a handkerchief. He whispered, “When we were on the highway, clearing the cars during the attack.”

  “Why didn’t he say something?”

  Shaun shrugged. “What could we have done? There’s no cure. He started turning and said his goodbyes just before handing me his pistol. He thought the Turn would happen slower because of where he was bitten.”

  Ellie got up off the ground and walked to the cabin. Greg and Tina had sprinted up the hill behind her; Greg had his gun in hand. Ellie told them to go back down the hill for now—that she would tend to Shaun. She returned a moment later with a second shovel. She didn’t say anything; they simply dug the hole in silence. There was nothing that needed to be said that would change anything.

  Eventually, the rest of the group came up the path with their arms and packs loaded with supplies, looking curiously upon the scene. From a distance, they watched Shaun and Ellie as they awkwardly slid Frank’s body into the hole. Ellie explained the situation as best as she could after closing the gap between them somewhat.Only Greg and Tina went to
help console Shaun. The rest of the first night was filled with tears, heartache, and trying to console one another… at least those who wanted to be consoled. Shaun sat in the corner, picking at an MRE and scribbling furiously like a possessed man into a fresh notebook.

  Chapter 2: Learning to Cope

  Day 2

  Ellie jumped from her bunk, awakened by nightmares of hands reaching out to rip her limbs from where she very much wanted them to stay. She was breathing heavy and not used to the new smells of the cabin. The warm temperature inside was not like that of a nice and cool, air-conditioned house. She rubbed her shoulders, checking that everything was still attached and wiggled her fingers until she was convinced that one of those monsters was not treating them like a basket of chicken strips.

  She looked around the cabin; the sun was high enough to light up the small space. It had been packed sloppily with their supplies and no organization had taken place yet. She turned around to see how Tina was doing. She had fallen asleep the previous night in Ellie’s arms, sobbing for her brother Lucas and her father, who were both lost to the Turned. When she turned around, she noticed that Tina was not there. She looked to where Shaun had fallen asleep in the corner, but only his notebook and a pen remained. Other than that, there were no signs that he had even been sitting there.

  Next, she did a full spin around the cabin, coming to the quick realization that maybe they all woke much earlier, plagued with not being able to sleep either. What could she expect when each of them lost everything and everyone that was dear to them in a matter of hours? It was going to be a difficult struggle to deal with over the coming days—hell, coming weeks and months, she was sure. She knew that they would be plagued with nightmares for the foreseeable future.

  She did not enjoy being left inside the cabin by herself. “Thanks for leaving me in the big, creepy cabin while there are zombies on the loose, everyone.”