The Virus Within: Secrets Unraveled (Book 5)

Ch 10: Survivors

But those plans would have to wait. I wasn't leaving this place until Daniel returned, especially not with Nicky snoring faintly below.

~

A truck with blue and purple swirls emerged from the forest just before dinner. I remained on the roof as he parked nearby and got out with a bewildered expression.

"What happened?"

"Zombie horde," I replied succinctly.

"At least fifty had to have been bleeding. Was that Jax's blood I smelled?"

"Sixty-eight, and yes, an arrow went astray. Injured his pride more than his leg, but both will take a few days to recover."

Nina must have heard us since she opened the door. "Welcome back, Daniel."

"I wish I brought good news with me, but I don't. There are dozens of unranked along the roads leading east, and more when I checked farther south. At least four of them were screamers, although two seemed different than the others."

"We encountered two today as well," I added, still sitting on the roof. "One similar to the screamer that could direct zombies to a particular target, and one that somehow made them group together."

Daniel shook his head at that news. "We might end up helping this Stronghold relocate."

"That isn't an easy task," I reminded him. "And this place only has four trucks, a couple of vans, and four tractors. That's not enough to move several hundred people."

He shrugged. "It's not something I want to do. Our saving grace is that most of the unranked were similar to Runners and didn't seem to have any special abilities."

"This is sounding worse and worse," Nicky muttered from her bean bag cocoon.

"It's beginning to sound like our only option is finding the group responsible," I muttered, casting a sour look at the distant trees as if wishing the renegade scientists would just waltz out of the leaves and save me the trouble of tracking them down.

"I tried," Daniel said, shrugging his shoulders, "but I didn't see anyone. There weren't any Strongholds in the areas I checked, so I couldn't even ask around."

Nicky sat up in the bean bag chair. "With all this gloom and doom, I think we should get some dinner. The cooks were making cinnamon buns for dessert."

I remained on the roof while Daniel brought a picnic table over and went with Logan to bring the food back. It was tempting to wander through the forest now that Daniel had returned, but there were quite a few people combing the fields and forest in search of missing livestock.

As my companions ate, I kept scanning the tree line in case more zombies appeared. With the unranked ferals appearing more and more frequently, Nicky's gloom and doom statement fit far too perfectly. It was only a matter of time until more arrived, and at least a few were bound to be the more dangerous ones.

My eyes lingered on movement near the trees, and I stood up. "Daniel, you might want to see this."

He immediately left his half-eaten dinner and jumped onto the roof. The dirt bike zipped back into the forest once Regan confirmed there were no zombies near the group of people stumbling out of the trees. A couple of horseback riders blew their horns to alert the Stronghold and cautiously trotted over to investigate.

At first, it was just a handful, then it grew to twenty, forty, and by the time sixty were visible, the guards began blowing something that sounded like a mustering call. Some of the people carried children, and at least two elderly individuals were using walkers.