The Risen
The Survivor Chronicles: Book 4
Erica Stevens
Copyright © 2014 Erica Stevens
All rights reserved.
Distributed by Smashwords
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com
Also from the author
The Captive Series
Captured (Book 1)
Renegade (Book2)
Refugee (Book 3)
Salvation (Book 4)
Redemption (Book 5)
Broken (The Captive Series Prequel)
The Fire & Ice Series
Frost Burn (Book 1, Coming June 2015)
The Kindred Series
Kindred (Book 1)
Ashes (Book 2)
Kindled (Book 3)
Inferno (Book 4)
Phoenix Rising (Book 5)
The Ravening Series
Ravenous (Book 1)
Taken Over (Book 2)
Reclamation (Book 3)
The Survivor Chronicles
Book 1: The Upheaval
Book 2: The Divide
Book 3: The Forsaken
Book 4: The Risen
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my dad, my hero.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to my husband for putting up with me, to my parents for keeping me alive even though I'm sure there were times they wondered why, to my siblings, nieces and nephews who can always make me smile.
To my friends for helping to keep me sane.
To Leslie Mitchell for being such a good friend and amazing help,
to Christina for always being such a good friend and help,
to all the fans who followed along every week for over two years and grew to love these characters as much as I do!
Table of Contents
Other Works
Dedication
Special Thanks
Prologue
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
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Author's note
Where to Find The Author
About The Author
PROLOGUE
It has been years since I picked up a pen and put it to paper, years since I've sought to escape into the world of writing, and the fantasies that my mind creates for me. Fantasies and worlds that helped me get through times that still cause me to awake in a cold sweat, silently screaming, almost twenty years later. A time that shaped my entire life, and no matter how far or where I run from it, it is always a part of me.
Retreating into my writing, and creating a place of my own, was what I did from the age of eight, on. I would take my notebook and pen into the closet with a flashlight, close the door, and lose myself in there for hours. No one looked for me in the closet, certainly not my mother and none of her boyfriends. Most of the time, if I were discreet enough, they would forget I was even there. Physical hunger never drove me from the dark recesses of my imagination, there was never much food to be found within the broken cabinets and rusted fridge in our house. No, it was always my need to use the bathroom that would finally pull me from my hiding place. I would try to scurry unseen to a bathroom that most people avoided due to its brown sink, broken tiles, and yellow stained toilet. Some nights I even slept in the closet. I would awaken with a stiff neck but a relative sense of peace amongst the darkness and words within my notebooks.
I got my food at school, but not by buying what the cafeteria offered, I never had the money to buy my lunch. I stole it from the other kid's lockers and sometimes even picked the scraps from the trash. I'd smuggle some of the food home with me for dinner so that I wouldn't have to go to sleep starving. I was the only kid in school that hated vacations because of the incessant rumbling of my stomach that the days, weeks, and months away from school brought with it. If I was lucky, I was thrown something to eat when my mother sobered up enough to remember to feed me, but for the most part, I took care of myself. By the age of nine I started shoplifting food from the supermarkets and stores with relative ease and was proud of the fact that I never got caught. It was a talent that would help me later in life too.
The people at school never noticed the bruises and marks that constantly covered my skin. In the beginning, I thought it was because they didn't see them, but as I got older I realized it was because they didn't want to see them. I didn't blame them; I didn't particularly want to see the handprints, fist marks, and cigarette burns covering me either, so I hid them under long sleeve shirts and jeans. Even in the middle of summer, I remained fully covered. I still knew the bruises and burns were there though, mainly because the cloth against my skin was a painful reminder every time the fabric came in contact with a sore or open wound.
As I grew older, my writing turned into short horror and science fiction stories, and by the time I turned twelve I'd written two horror books. I loved those books. One was about aliens and the other about a homicidal murderer. Both had given me hours of escape that I'd relished in. They were the only things in my life that were one hundred percent mine. I had created them, I had breathed life into them, and no one could take that away from me.
At thirteen, I had started another book; this one was actually going to be a murder mystery but before it really got going, my friend Chuck gave me my first sip of whiskey and my first joint. I found a whole new way to escape after that. I continued to write until I was fifteen but I couldn't find the same pleasure in it that I had before. By then I was already spiraling into something that I didn't quite understand; I'm not sure I understand it even now. I was delving into something that had dug its hooks into me and wasn't going to let go. During that time, the last thing I desired was to be free of my newfound means of escape and I relished in its hooks digging into me deeper and deeper.
I attempted to pick up a pen again after I dropped out of high school at seventeen, but I was already too far-gone and rapidly lost interest in it. Cocaine, sex and alcohol were where I found my release. When I was twenty-five, I discovered a whole new way to escape. A whole new drug that made everything that had ever happened, everything I'd ever done, and every other drug I'd ever taken, just fade away into oblivion. At the time heroin was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I loved it more than anything else I'd encountered in life thus far and there wasn't anything I wouldn't do to get my hands on it but there was never enough, and the more I took the more I craved.
Time passed in a blur and as I progressed from snorting heroin to shooting it, I slipped further and further into a world that revolved around a drug induced haze that I never wanted to end. Not even when I went
to jail did I consider giving it up. Not just once did I find myself on the wrong side of the bars, but more times than I can remember, and all because of something I had done to get my next fix. Most of the time I was able to get my hands on some heroin in jail but the last time, I'd been unsuccessful. The withdrawals had been so bad that I was begging to die, and not because of how awful my body felt, but because I was forced to become aware of the man that I had now become.
I'd been a lost and frightened little boy, but I'd had hopes and dreams. At one point in time I'd had a life that didn't revolve around manipulation, stealing, and my next hit. I'd been dealt a bad hand in life, I knew that, but when I was young it was a hand I'd planned to rise up against. A hand I was determined to overcome. I didn't care what people said about the house always winning, I was going to beat the house no matter what it took.
All of those dreams had become dust. I had become a broken and unrecognizable man. Every one of my ribs could be counted, my hips dug into the thin mattress I slept on at night. I lived in what most would consider more of a shack than a house with fifteen other people. Of those fifteen, probably only three knew my real name. Track marks and scabs covered my arms from my wrist to my elbow. I had just turned twenty-nine but no one would have guessed that was my age by looking at me.
It was funny, I still wore my ever-present long sleeves and jeans but now it was to hide what I had done to myself and not what someone else had done to me. In between my toes was a mess and the second and third toe on my left foot had been amputated due to an infection that had festered. Two lost toes were nothing compared to the loss of every shred of my dignity, self-respect and pride that I'd lost over the years. I wasn't even sure what those things were anymore or how to go about finding them again.
No one else knew about the missing toes as I never took my socks off in front of others, but then there weren't any others in my life anyway. I'd never met my father, had no idea what had happened to my mother, nor did I care. I'd never been in love, never even had a girlfriend for more than a year. My "friends" were all part of a life that was killing us all, and truth be told they'd most likely stab me in the back if they thought it would get them more drugs. What good friends I'd had in the past had drifted away as my drug habit grew increasingly out of control and their belongings began to vanish. I understood why they distanced themselves from me. In the beginning they'd tried to help me, they loved and cared for me, but few people chose to stand by and watch someone who no longer felt they had anything to live for, slowly kill themselves.
After that last incarceration I set out to get my life back together, but it was only a couple of months before I returned to my old ways, visiting old friends and falling into bad habits once more. I was never quite sure how the downward slide started again or why it had all started to begin with. It had all been so innocent in those early days, just a small little bit to help me escape from the things I didn't want to remember. Just to help me sleep through a night. Over the years it became a treacherous slope that repeatedly swallowed me like quicksand within its dark depths.
Until the day I died.
I don't remember what happened, one minute I was slipping into the blissful haze of oblivion heroin gave to me, and the next I was waking up in the emergency room. I hadn't realized I'd been dead until the doctors told me so, but even then I didn't believe them. How could a person die and not even know it? Then again, I'd been living my life and not really knowing it. So maybe that was the better question, how could a person be dead inside and yet still be considered alive?
I'd actually been dead for years and just hadn't realized it until I was sitting in that bed, hooked up to all those machines, and wondering about the blank spot in my memory that had caused me to travel from that living room to this place.
The doctors gave me the names of drug meetings, clinics, and counselors to talk to in order to get some help. I'd already been through all of these things, but then my heart had never actually stopped beating before. I sat in that hospital bed with those cards and brochures in my hands and wondered if they could do for me now what they hadn't been able to do before. I read through the methadone brochure but I had no interest in taking the medication. If I was going to get through this, if I was going to beat this thing that was killing me, I was going to do it on my own. I simply had to.
The police came and spoke with me but I was able to avoid jail this time, as I'd had no drugs on me. One of the officers already knew me, and I saw by the look in his eyes he already considered me as good as dead, today just hadn't been my day. It was a look I knew well as I'd seen it on countless faces before. I stared at my three toes and wondered why I couldn't have just died. Why was I, a person that had never contributed much to this world, still alive? Why was I still breathing when good men, women, and children were dying every day?
Those questions ran through my mind a thousand times and when I walked out of that hospital, I was determined to find the answers to them. Unfortunately, I don't think there is an answer for those questions. Some of us simply continue to live when others don't; even those of us who have done more harm than good throughout our lives. I don't know why, it is simply the way of a world that I'd spent my entire life trying to escape from.
So I went to the NA meetings, I listened to the stories that the others told, but I didn't share my own. I know it's an important step, but I just couldn't bring myself to stand in front of those people and tell them my sob story. Maybe it was shame; maybe it was the fact that I didn't want pity. Though I knew they wouldn't pity me, why would they? Their stories were no better than mine, and some were even worse. They were there for support, I simply wasn't looking for support, I was looking for the reason I was still alive and none of those people knew why any more than I did.
Over the seven months that followed my death, I would lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling in the halfway house, and fighting the compulsion to get up and find the one thing that I had truly loved in my life. In those hours it wasn't answers I wished for, it wasn't even escape into the haze heroin had given me; it was simply to have not woken up in that ER. I didn't want to be on this planet anymore, alone and lost, and fighting against the demons relentlessly pursuing me.
Every day I would wake up, go to my job at the grocery store, slice meat and go to a NA meeting after. Every day I would do what had to be done, and I would stay away from the temptation I knew was only three short miles down the road. Every day I would continue to fight but I never understood why, not when I felt as zombie-like as I'd felt every time I pushed that plunger on the needle down.
The only things that kept me going were the facts that the way of life I'd had before my death in the ER hadn't been working for me, and the expectation that I would somehow find answers in this new way of life. So I continued resolutely on until the day of the earthquakes.
Standing behind that counter, running ham through the slicer, I hadn't realized just what those quakes would represent, or how much they would change my life. How much of a life they would give to me even when millions if not billions of others were losing theirs. In the chaos that followed, I had no idea where to go or what would become of me. No idea what was going on in the world. I found others, and we hid together, but like so often in my life there had been no answers to be found and no way to escape.
Then we went back into that grocery store. I was given a chance to meet the others, people who were willing to fight and die for each other. Things began to change for me after that. It was the first time since it had all started that I knew my life would never be the same. I'd been going through the quakes, and the events following them, in the same way I'd gone about everything in my life, in a fog with my head stuck in the sand. I wasn't going to do that anymore. I'm not proud of the man I was, I will never claim to be, but I'm not that man anymore and I never will be again.
I don't want pity; I don't expect it. Nor do I want condemnation, I wasn't a good man but I won't be weighed down by my past sins,
not anymore. It took the world as I knew it coming to an end for me to find where I belong, and to realize that there aren't always answers to be found. Sometimes life in itself is simply the answer. I woke up in that ER because I was supposed to be here. For some reason fate, or some greater being, had chosen me to stay upon this earth and that was a knowledge I found myself content to live with now.
The world as we all knew it had come to an end and the strangest thing was that I was finally coming to life. I picked up a notebook and pen again. Not because I wanted to retreat into the world of writing I had hidden in before, but because I was determined to tell a story of survival. Because I was going to show the good and bad of humanity when everything we'd always known was stripped away from us. To show that even at the worst of times, there is good in and among us. There is also bad, and the story of the good cannot be told without the bad. The story of the world that we had known, and this new world we were learning more about every day had to be put on paper before it was all forgotten.
Why am I writing about me now, you'll probably ask. It is simply to give you a brief background of me, and because I finally have something about me I want to tell. Al had said that some of us would fall but that others will rise up to become better people. My name is Donald, and I may have been one of the fallen before, but I will become one of the risen.
CHAPTER 1
John,
John almost kissed the blue "New York, Welcome to the Empire State" sign and not because he was trying to -though he actually did have the impulse to kiss it- but because he tripped over the broken piece of metal post sticking out of the ground as he approached the sign. He caught himself before he fell onto the sign and managed to fall onto the grass surrounding it. The crisp edges of the browning grass were rough against his fingers but he noticed that at the bottom of each blade of grass there was a dark shade of healthy green beginning to appear. He almost felt like crying at the sight of that sign of fresh growth and renewal. He hadn't taken the time to notice the grass over the past couple of days, but he'd never been so happy to be so up close and personal with it.