Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning Read online

  Blood Reckoning:

  Deadrise IV

  Siara Brandt

  Copyright © 2015 by Siara Brandt

  BLOOD RECKONING: DEADRISE IV

  ISBN 13: 978-1522739388

  ISBN 10: 1522739386

  First Edition. All rights reserved. Except for use in any

  review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in

  whole or in part in any form is forbidden without

  the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living

  or dead, business establishments, events or locales is

  entirely coincidental.

  Printed in USA

  OTHER BOOKS BY SIARA BRANDT

  A Restless Wind

  Dark of Peace

  Kadar’s Quest: The Legend of Iamar

  Blood Scourge: Project Deadrise

  Blood Storm: Deadrise II

  Savage Blood: Deadrise III

  Stealing Cady

  Tales from the Waterlily Pond

  Tangled Vines

  The Ashes and the Roses

  The Belly Dancer and the Border Agent

  The Meadow and the Millpond

  The Patriot Remnant: Return to Freedom

  The Shadow’s Fall

  The Waterlily Pond

  For the ones who still cry out.

  Prologue

  "They want death worldwide."

  "Who the hell wants that?" he heard a voice, his voice, ask from the darkness.

  "They choose death to make themselves feel alive."

  "But death is darkness," he tried to protest. How could they not understand that?

  "They walk in darkness, dead themselves. They are dead in their souls."

  He was fading in and out, wavering like a candle in the wind, but still the weight of responsibility pressed down upon him. "We knew the wolves were coming and now they're at the gate," he whispered faintly. "We have to close the gate."

  "They are already inside the gate," the voice answered his thoughts again. "They have been for a long time. You knew there were wolves walking among the sheep. And if their eyes had been open, they would have seen the deception, too."

  "I can hear their howls . . . " he murmured under his breath as a different sound, a collective wail of calamity rose from the debris all around him and seeped into his consciousness. "How can they hate us so much? What do they want?"

  "Everything. They must destroy what they cannot control."

  He smelled smoke as the blending of agonized voices rose out of darkness to the very heavens.

  "Death has walked the earth since the first humans left the garden," the voice explained to him. "The blood of its first victims still cries out."

  His hazy, disconnected thoughts pooled into a flash of understanding, a singular moment of profound clarity. "There will be a reckoning," he whispered, clinging to one last shred of hope.

  "A blood reckoning," the voice agreed. "The earth will be covered in blood."

  "Of innocents," he said regretfully, still hearing the lamentation of those innocents echoing inside his head. Though it brought shards of agony, his muscles tensed as he reacted instinctively. He couldn't help it. He had vowed to serve and to protect a very long time ago, and instincts, perhaps, were the last things to die.

  The movement was not so very much, but it was enough to let him know that he was entombed, that there was no escape. Panic rose inside him. He fought it down.

  There was a feeble voice near him that whispered, "Help me . . . "

  He was able to turn his head, even though it brought a searing renewal of the pain. He searched the murky darkness and saw beseeching pale eyes close by, eyes that were filled with terror, pain and so much more.

  After a monumental effort, he was able to reach out and touch her hand. It was a mere grazing of flesh, but it was enough. A bond was formed, a connection.

  He gave her a faint attempt at a smile and said, "We'll get out of this. Together."

  For a moment, it seemed to be enough for her. But then he saw that she was sinking farther and farther. "Where are the stars," she whispered just before she closed her eyes.

  "They're there," he assured her, unwilling to let her go. She had become not only a bond to him, but an anchor. "Keep your eyes closed and you'll see them."

  But he felt her drifting away from him nevertheless. "How long are we going to have to wait?" he demanded silently of the void that surrounded him.

  "You must go to the very brink of destruction, as far as you can go while there is yet one gasp of life left."

  "But they'll come to save us, won't they?" he asked. And then as the world shifted, he groaned out loud himself, becoming part of the vast outcry of anguish.

  "The sacrifice has already been made," he heard. "The blood has already been shed. We have only one last mission for you, and that is to believe."

  He held onto that as there came another explosion, one meant for the first responders, he knew. A million stars burst inside his head. And then, as if the sun had hidden its face from all the sorrow that bled from one end of man's existence to the other, darkness spread its shadow wings over the whole of the earth.

  Chapter 1

  As mankind was again plunged into a state of death and darkness, society, in part, had degraded to a form of bestial existence. For there was still evil in the world, just as there had always been, and evil rises up wherever it can get a foothold, and whenever it is invited in.

  But man was designed to think and to reason, not merely to react like the animal creations. Therein lies his hope. From the very beginning he had kept his eyes raised to something higher for his very survival, understanding deeper truths than later, lost generations would comprehend. In the current state, however, many turned their backs on their own salvation, worshipping instead the gods of fear and hunger. They trampled mercy and charity underfoot and let selfishness and depravity guide them instead. But there were still heroes. There were still some who did not forget . . .

  His hands and feet were still bound. The thin, threadbare blanket did little to keep out the bone-chilling cold. The low glare of the lantern held the darkness back a bit, but the shadows were deep along the walls and in the corners of the cellar where the light did not penetrate.

  He had been in near darkness for a very long time when the wooden door banged open at the top of the steep staircase. Two men came down the narrow steps and dragged him roughly to his feet.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” one of them muttered. “And don’t give us anymore trouble.”

  His split lip and the black and purple bruises covering his face were a testimony to the savagery of his captors. So were his sore ribs and the bloody wounds in various places on his body. But there were no broken bones. That, at least, was something.

  When they were upstairs, they shoved him through the front door and out onto the porch. As his boots creaked on the old floor boards, he saw that the sky was pitch black. The moon had not yet come up. There was nothing to light the darkness save for a sprinkling of stars that twinkled high above him.

  They tied a thick rope around his neck, tightened it, and with this extra precaution they grabbed both of his arms and led him down the porch steps. They were taking no chances. They had seen what he was capable of. They were nursing a few bruises themselves.

  He was surprised to find that the instinct to survive was still a driving force within him. That, if given the chance, he would fight. For his life if not against their brutality. Pe
rhaps a man never lost that instinct, no matter how bad things got. He wanted to believe, even now, that human beings were capable of being more than undead creatures without a conscience, that they were not mindless beasts who lived only to hunt and to kill and to eat.

  He already knew that the world was full of suffering and injustice. And death. He had seen his fair share of those things. Mostly a man had no say over the why and where of his final moments. Especially in this world where there was no law except that which was in a man’s heart. And as it had been in the past, it was still true that what a man had in his heart he often kept hidden. Until it was too late.

  As they trekked silently through the woods, Gage dragged in a shallow breath and smelled dead leaves and the pungent scent of pine. Those things, so familiar to him, jarred his memory and made him wonder how different his life might have been had those people not robbed him and left him weaponless and then carelessly abandoned him in the middle of nowhere. Even though nowhere was about anywhere these days.

  But there was no sense going over a past that he had had no control over. What was done was done. He couldn’t change things. And he had been trained too well. There was never a right time to give up. Not while there was breath left in his body.

  One of the men shoved him hard between his shoulder blades and he went to his knees.

  “Get up,” the man snarled as he leaned over him. “Get up.”

  As Gage struggled to his feet, he saw a faint lightening of the sky where the moon was rising like a pale ghost beyond the trees. The soft wind suddenly died, as if all of nature was holding its breath. And watching. A faint mist was rising from the ground. That, too, had a wraithlike quality to it.

  One of the men grabbed his hair and hissed in his face, all spit and whiskey fumes. “He wants you alive. If he didn’t, I’d kill you right here. But this is for interfering in our business and trying to take the girl away. She belonged to us.”

  A vicious blow to his midsection punctuated the man’s words.

  Gage’s breath left him in a deep, raspy groan. While he was still struggling to breath, they forced him to continue on. The narrow trail led upward to where Meng and the girl were waiting.

  “Here we are,” the more brutal of his two captors sneered. “Take a good look. And don’t worry,” he laughed evilly. “You’ll still be alive when we feed you to those things.”

  It was like a scene straight from the pits of hell. Torches lit the scene far below him, casting a reddish glow over the dark, moving mass of figures that reminded him of the damned writhing in mindless, tormented rage. It was a churning sea of the undead that became more agitated when the torches were lit, for they knew what was coming. They were hungry for one thing only. His flesh.

  It would all be so much easier if she could just stop trying. If she could just give up all hope. But she couldn’t do that. The thought of seeing Lathan again, no matter how infinitesimal, kept her going. It was like a candle burning in the darkness that surrounded her. A candle that would not go out.

  Adyson struggled against the ropes that bound her, as she had been doing for what seemed like an eternity. Without warning, the door suddenly burst open and banged loudly back on its hinges. Two men came down the stairs.

  “I wanted this one for myself,” one of the two men said coarsely, regretfully when he reached the bottom of the steps.

  “Hell, you know Meng isn’t going to let that happen,” the other man mumbled from the shadows.

  “Shouldn’t have even brought her back here,” the first man muttered as he leaned over Addy. The soulless eyes that raked her held no mercy. He grabbed her arms and dragged her to her feet, cursing her profanely when she fought against him.

  As she stood there before him with her heart pounding, it felt like she could not get enough air into her lungs. Her limbs seemed to be paralyzed with fear. After all the things she had been through, this was the most terrifying. This was when she felt the most helpless.

  Did they have to be so rough with her, so impersonal? Did they have to hurt her even more? She had fought so hard already. How much more was she expected to have to endure?

  As the man grabbed her wrist, she felt his nail scratching the back of her hand. It sent shards of pain shooting up her arm. And then she heard her own voice cry out when the man jerked her forward with such a sense of urgency that she went to her knees.

  “Get up,” she heard the angry snarl. “He’s waiting for you.”

  A leader leads. And he defines himself not only by his integrity, or the lack thereof, and the choices he makes, but also how he deals not only with his group’s emotions, but with his own impulses as well. It matters, too, whether all members of the group are equal in importance, or whether some become sacrificial lambs. But then, the history of mankind has often been written in its own blood.

  Lathan Daniels stopped and turned slowly.

  “What did you say?”

  Beckham Taget’s look was almost challenging. “I said, it’s time to let go.”

  “I’m not going to do that, Beck.”

  Beck held the other man’s gaze. “You don’t want to make that decision.”

  Something dark flickered in Lathan’s eyes for a moment. “Don’t tell me what I want to do.”

  That surprised Beck. He hadn’t been expecting it from him.

  “Look, I know how you feel- " Beck began.

  “Then this shouldn’t come as any surprise to you.”

  “Adyson is gone, Lathan. The sooner you realize that, the easier it’s going to be on you.”

  “What the hell does gone even mean?” Lathan spat. “That she’s dead? That she’s one of those things out there? Or that she’s going through some kind of hell right now that I don’t even know about?”

  Beck didn’t have an immediate answer for him. He turned his face to the side and stared into the woods for several long moments. He looked back at Lathan and tried reasoning with him again. “You might never know what happened to her. She might already be d- ”

  “Don’t say it,” Lathan warned. His words had been forced out from behind his clenched teeth. His hands had tightened into fists at his sides. "I can't just forget about her."

  "Whether you want to face it or not, there comes a time when you have to let go," Beck’s voice was low now as he looked straight at Lathan.

  "This isn't it."

  “But you know that's eventually what you're going to have to do.”

  “And why is that?” Lathan’s chin thrust slightly forward. “Because it’s what you've decided? Do you know how many people your decisions have already killed? Let’s see, there was that kid back at the restaurant. The guy with the raincoat begged us for help and you wouldn't even consider going out of your way to help him. We watched him die right in front of us. And- Hell, there are too many of them to count. Well, Addy’s not going to be added to the list.”

  “I know you’re frustrated,” Beck tried again, ignoring everything Lathan had just said. "We all are."

  “Frustrated? No, I’m way beyond that.” He slanted a dark look in Beck’s direction. “She was there, Beck. She wasn’t twenty feet away from you. All you had to do was to open those gates and free those people. She would be safe. She would be here with us right now. Macayla told Nolan she heard people crying for help. She must have heard her crying for help without realizing it. This isn’t just about Addy. Macayla’s gone, too. And whoever those people were, it didn’t matter. They didn’t ask for any of this. Any more than we did. You should have at least tried to free them.”

  "The men who attacked us were heavily armed,” Beck reminded him. “They had explosives, too. We didn’t expect that. We didn't even see them coming."

  "I should have gotten back sooner. Maybe I could have changed things."

  "How? We weren't just taken by surprise, Lathan. We were outnumbered. Badly. We couldn't even see what the hell was going on in the darkness. There was no way of knowing that there were even people in there, let alone k
now who it was. We made the only choice we could make. And we did what we had to do. We survived."

  "You're good with that? Is that what we're going to do from now on? Turn our backs on each other because we're too afraid to fight back?"

  "We have fought back," Beck said, a new coldness seeping into his voice.

  "No, you keep tying everyone's hands and stopping them from doing that."

  "We tried," Beck said in a voice like ice. "It didn't work."

  "You didn't try hard enough."

  "I’m going to let that go,” Beck said. “This time. But you gotta know, those people who attacked us- "

  "Those people don't value human life,” Lathan finished for him. “They want us to be afraid. They're using terror tactics to get what they want."

  "So far they've been pretty effective."

  "It almost sound like you admire them, Beck. Are you really getting to that point?"

  "No, but I do understand them. I know how ruthless they can be. That’s what makes them so powerful."

  “You mean dangerous. That’s what makes them so dangerous.” Lathan shoved his dark hair back and pressed one hand to his forehead. He was still having a hard time reconciling with it all. "They were trapped for a long time. They must have been waiting for us to come and rescue them. If Josiah hadn't escaped, we wouldn't even know that they were there."

  "I had to make a hard decision," Beck said. "We're alive now. Isn't that enough?"

  "No," Lathan said in a heavy voice. "It isn't. It's not nearly enough."

  Beck looked at him a few moments before he said quietly, “Even if she did manage to escape on her own, you really think you’re going to find her now? Do you know the chances of that happening? Getting lost out there alone can be the same as a death sentence.”

  A muscle tensed in Lathan’s jaw as he studied Beck with a narrowed gaze. “See, that’s the thing I don’t get. You expect me to just forget her and not give her another thought. Would you have done the same with Misha if things had been different?"