Shore Haven (Short Story 4): Welcome To Edge Burrow Read online

  Welcome to Edge Burrow

  Welcome to Edge Burrow

  Jennifer Reynolds

  Copyright © 2020

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Copyright © 2020

  Jennifer Reynolds with images used from Pixabay.com.

  Jennifer Reynolds asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. You may not produce any part of this publication, store it in a retrieval system, or transmit it in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the owner. The owner is selling this book subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, or circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding other than that which it is published and without a similar condition, including this requirement being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Author’s Note

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real places or events is purely coincidental.

  ***WARNING: ADULT CONTENT AND STRONG LANGUAGE***

  Welcome to Edge Burrow

  Jennifer Reynolds

  Also, by Jennifer Reynolds

  Novels:

  Alone

  Shifter, Supernaturals Book 1

  Outcast, Supernaturals Book 2

  Captive, Supernaturals Book 3

  Resistant

  HIM

  Shore Haven

  Awake

  Novellas

  Saying Goodbye

  Marked, Valeterra Series, Book 1

  Short Stories:

  Charles Wallace’s Favorite Toy

  In The Dark

  Leaving Liberty: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Childhood’s End: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Hostage: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Nowhere: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Sweet Sixteen: An Awake Short Story

  Coming Soon:

  Fated, Valeterra Series, Book 2

  Willa: An Awake Novella

  Dedication

  I’m dedicating all the Shore Haven short stories to those who love the novel so much. If you all hadn’t been so excited about Shore Haven’s world, I wouldn’t have had the inspiration to dive back into it so many times. I love you.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author’s Note

  Welcome to Edge Burrow is a novella set in Shore Haven’s world and is a sequel to Nowhere. While it isn’t crucial to read Shore Haven or Nowhere before reading this story, having done so will better help you understand the world in which Tera lives. You will also need to read the novel to discover the fates of a few characters in this story.

  Enjoy—Jennifer Reynolds

  1.

  For weeks after the outbreak, I searched the east coast looking for my son, Jeremiah, before forcing myself to give up and head west. He and my ex-husband, Carl, were nowhere. I went to every family members’ home, every friends’, every place I could think that Carl would’ve taken our son to escape the hordes. At none of those places did I find a sign that the two were alive.

  How I’d survived as long as I had in the zombie apocalypse, I didn’t know. When the news broke of the outbreak, I was sure I’d be one of the first to die. I was a stay-at-home mom and a housewife, even though I was no longer married. I had no military or survival training, no skills what-so-ever that were conducive to the life I currently lived, yet there I was a month or so after the outbreak, walking through the end of the world.

  I’d grown hard quickly after I’d killed my best friend and her infant children. That act alone had taught me most of what I needed to know to survive. Those creatures may look like my family and friends, but they weren’t. They might walk upright as humans do and wear clothing, but they were killers, and if I didn’t take them down first, they would eat me and move on to their next meal without a thought or care of what they’d just done.

  Not finding Jeremiah’s body made it hard to give up looking for him and his father, but after visiting my final family member’s home, the last place I could think he and his dad would’ve gone to hide, I didn’t have a choice. Or at least I had to stop looking on the east coast. I had to move inland. I had to seek alternatives. I had to keep moving, though I knew deep in my heart that I would never see either of them again.

  By the end of the first month after the outbreak, I was on foot, having abandoned my car along a highway somewhere west of my home town. The vehicle had died, and I’d barely gotten it off the road as it did so. I could pull bodies out of any number of abandoned or stalled S.U.Vs, trucks, or sedans, but I hadn’t felt right doing so. Besides that, gas was disgusting to siphon. Motor sounds also got the attention of the turned once the majority of the population was dead, in hiding, or one of the undead.

  I’d loaded myself down with essentials, as anything I wanted I could get by entering a store or home. The outbreak happened so quickly and thoroughly that there weren’t enough people around to fight over what remained. I would be able to live on the remnants for a good six months or more…some of it even longer.

  With our planet mostly water after the meteors, quakes, and tsunamis that had caused the first devastation a mere hundred years ago, I rarely wanted for that either.

  Most days, I didn’t even look at a map to see where I was going. I simply walked west. I knew other survivors were out there. Every so often, I would hear the footsteps of a live person running away from me or see a hastily drawn curtain when I passed by a house. Since the person didn’t seem inclined to talk to me, I let them be.

  To be honest, at first, I wanted to be left alone. I slept for three days in a stranger’s house when the idea fully set in that I wasn’t going to find my son. I didn’t cry. I’d cried so much since the outbreak started that I couldn’t anymore. On the morning of the fourth day, a zombie found me and forced me from the bed. I hadn’t remembered leaving the front door to the house open, but I guess I had, and the remains of a man in a business suit had sniffed me out in the hopes that I was breakfast.

  We’d fought.

  I’d won.

  In doing so, I’d decided that I couldn’t sleep away the end of the world.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, so I’d started walking west. I didn’t hunt the creatures. If I wanted to do that, I would’ve lingered longer in the cities where the hordes had migrated. I did slaughter the zombies I came across on the road, though. Unfortunately, for those living in the areas where I killed the monsters, I simply left the dead where they fell. Ending their existence was one thing. Stopping to bury each one was a different story.

  In the first few weeks, I tried burying those family and friends of mine that I’d come across, but there had been too many zombies to contend with, so I’d tried funeral pyres with the same result. My actions brought the zombies to my location. Too often, I’d barely made it out of a situation alive.

  My grandparents’ house had sat alone on a few acres of land. I had burned the house down with them inside. Both of my grandparents had turned around the same time, I guessed. Neither looked as if a zombie had bitten th
em. Since I had to use my key to get inside their locked house, I assumed only the two of them had been there since the beginning of the sickness. Their home was the only one I’d burned. Within minutes of fire spreading, those creatures flooded the area.

  I couldn’t give my parents’ the same funeral, though I hadn’t had to kill them. My father had taken care of that for me. He’d killed my mother when she’d turned before taking his own life. I’d found them side-by-side in bed. He was holding her hand. I covered them with a few of my mom’s favorite blankets.

  If I couldn’t bury my family, I wouldn’t bury strangers. I didn’t think it mattered anyway. There weren’t enough people left in the world to notice. Where there was, and they wanted to memorialize the dead, they could do it themselves.

  I was depressed. I knew I was. The only thing that kept me from spiraling into insanity or taking my own life was the mission and the hope that one day, I would find my son.

  As I said, I wasn’t suicidal, so I stayed away from large cities, especially if I saw signs that a horde had congregated inside it. If I needed something from a place, I would skirt the outside of the town and pick off as many as I could. Mostly, though, I wandered through the open country, following back roads to small towns, hoping that my ex-husband thought to do the same, though with no real hope that I would find him or Jeremiah.

  That wasn’t to say I didn’t run into a horde or two in the occasional one-stoplight town, but that was rare. Usually, the biggest group I came across was about ten or fifteen. A group that size was large enough to be a danger to me. Hell, just one of those creatures could kill me, but if I pinned a large group into a fenced-in yard or managed to get on top of a roof, I could pick them off simply enough.

  I preferred the lone straggler, though. They were easier to kill. I usually saw them coming in time to figure out what weapon I would need and could scope my surroundings for a place to hide or ambush it if I needed to.

  When the outbreak started, I hadn’t been in shape, but I’d been thin. With all the walking and fighting, I’d toned up a great deal. I could outrun most of the creatures if I had to, but that took too much energy. If I could hobble them first, killing them was easy. Yet, that didn’t always work. If a creature had eaten recently, it could move fast, using only its arms to drag itself on the ground if it needed.

  During my time on the road, I’d learned what to wear and what not to wear. On any given day, I had several bruises from where one of the turned had tried to bite me, but couldn’t get through the thick leather, denim, and Kevlar I wore. The only parts of my body I left exposed were my face and the tips of my fingers.

  Yes, I burned the fuck up and drank double my weight in water daily, but I wasn’t one of those creatures. Cooling towels and a few other interesting items I picked up at sporting goods stores along the way helped keep me from having a heat stroke while I was on the move.

  The event that destroyed our world a hundred years ago might have been devastating, but we bounced back quicker than anyone thought we would. We’d lost a lot, but our planet had been seriously over-populated. Once the dust had settled, we still had enough people with the knowledge of how things were before and how they worked that within fifty years, large sections of the planet barely showed signs that anything had happened.

  While I walked, I could almost forget that we’d suffered through two apocalypses. Or I could until I came to a bridge or a place where a bridge should be, then I would remember. Then I would curse God for letting it happen to us again. Then I would rage at him for taking my son and for leaving me to figure out how to survive in a world without him.

  I’d all but given up on finding more than the scattered remnants of life until I saw a billboard with Shore Haven’s shining compound on it and the slogan: Promising You a Better Tomorrow, written across the bottom.

  I shot at the sign, flipped it off, and started in the direction of Liberty Island, muttering to myself that I had better find a better tomorrow at Shore Haven or I was burning the place to the ground.

  2.

  I’d made it to Larkin, the country’s tenth largest city, located a few hours south of Liberty when I discovered my first group of survivors who weren’t actively hiding from the world or the creatures in it. I initially spotted them raiding a strip mall that housed a medical clinic, a dollar store, dry-cleaners, and a few doors with Now Leasing signs on the glass.

  At that time, I’d assumed the group of men and women were from Larkin. They moved through the area as if they were familiar with it and weren’t afraid of the undead. The lack of creatures trying to attack the group suggested that the people lived in the city and had cleared out it’s dead.

  Nearly every large city I’d come across had been brimming with zombies, so I’d approached Larkin via one of its southern suburbs. There were more turned in the suburb than there was in the city. I killed as many of the creatures as I could, but I’d run from most, fearing that any disturbance would lure the dead out of Larkin in search of me. Upon seeing the empty city, I understood I hadn’t needed to waste my energy.

  I followed the group of three men and four women as they moved from store-to-store, gathering supplies and loading it into the back of a big rig. They carried weapons but didn’t look worried about encountering one of the turned or another survivor. The seven talked, laughed, and generally went about their errand as if the day was a typical one for them.

  For all I knew, it probably was. I didn’t know what the world would be like the further west I got. Maybe, beyond a certain point, there weren’t any zombies. Larkin, after all, appeared to be devoid of them.

  If the group knew I was watching them, they never let on, not that they could’ve heard me over the noises they made. For a bit, I thought they were making noise to draw out the zombies, but after a while, when only the random straggler that had to have wandered into the city from the suburbs came their way, I decided that wasn’t the case. They truly didn’t fear the creatures hearing them, leading me to believe further that they’d been the ones to get rid of the dead in town.

  For most of the day, as I followed the seven people from one location to the next, I debated approaching them. They didn’t look crazy or dangerous. They looked like ordinary people who’d survived the zombie apocalypse relatively unscathed and were trying to make a new life for themselves.

  Still, I held back. Something about the groups’ calm demeanor worried me. Plenty of zombies roamed our land, meaning we should be on the lookout at all times. No one should’ve been that relaxed.

  The group knew something or were possibly up to something. I wanted to know what that something was before making my presence known.

  Once the sun started to fade, I assumed they’d stop for the night and head home. I’d been able to track them as they had gone from business to business down one of the main roads of Larkin. I’d feared home would be somewhere on the outskirts of town or on the other side of the city, which was why they had the truck. If either had been the case, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them.

  I was trying to figure out how I would follow them if their home weren’t nearby when they began settling in for the night inside a furniture store.

  I watched as they made themselves comfortable in the store, even propping open the door so that they could fire up a grill just outside the entrance. At first, I’d surveyed them from across the street, but the smell of cooking meat that I hadn’t had in so long, drew me to the parking lot.

  I was hiding behind a minivan when I heard one of the women ask one of the men, “Has King Dominic said how much longer he thinks it’ll be before he can get the bridge down?”

  King. We didn’t have a King. Had this Dominic person decided to take advantage of our situation and set himself up as a king? Probably so, and he most likely wasn’t the only one. Crazy people were going to come out of the woodwork in droves with our world depleted as it was.

  The United States ruled by a King. I didn’t like the sound of that.
>
  The woman had said the name so casually that I hoped the moniker was something she chose to call the man and not one he forced her to call him.

  “Rumor has it that it’s nearly ready—a week—maybe two,” the man said.

  “What kind of condition do you think Liberty is in?” the woman asked, shifting my interest away from the word “King.”

  Liberty Island was my current destination, after all.

  “The people King Dominic is talking to say it looks about the same as it does out here,” the man said.

  “Do you think there are a lot of survivors inside of Shore Haven? Or do you think that’s really where this virus started?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t know, but King Dominic doesn’t want us going anywhere near that place until we know for sure. I can’t imagine there are that many survivors on the island. There aren’t that many in that group. They’ve only found one new survivor in the last few weeks.”

  “What I can’t figure out is why he’s going to…”

  I slipped, trying to keep myself out of sight and banged into the van, cutting off the woman’s words.

  Shit.

  “Who’s out there?” a male voice asked. I was almost sure it was the man the woman had been talking to, but my senses were on overdrive due to fear, so I wasn’t positive.

  “Come on out. We know you’re there.” He continued, moving toward me.

  I cursed again but stepped around the van. I had my shotgun out, but not pointed at anyone.

  “You know, all day I’ve had this feeling that someone was watching us,” a short, stocky woman said, coming out of the store.