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Chapter Forty-four
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2025-10-17 14:45:41
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Project Dakota: Rising of the dead chapters Forty-five
The drive back to Birkin was long and quiet. The only sound was the hum of the car’s engine and the crunch of gravel under the tires. Carlos, sitting in the passenger seat, hadn't said a word for miles. He just stared out the window, his face a blank mask.I understood. He’d stayed at the settlement the longest, fighting for people long after it was hopeless. Even when they’d physically kicked him out, his heart was still back there. And Amanda… well, I shoved that thought away. Thinking about Amanda was like poking a fresh bruise. It hurt too much.I was lost in these gloomy thoughts when the world suddenly spun.The car jerked violently, tires screeching in protest. We did a full, dizzying 360-degree turn before lurching to a stop in the middle of the road, dust clouding the windows.“What the—” Moe started, but his words were cut off by a sound that turned my blood to ice.Pop-pop-pop!Gunfire.My mind went blank with panic. Seriously? We can’t get a single break?“Get your heads d
Project Dakota: Rising of the dead Chapter Forty-four
The world narrowed to the shattered maw of the doorway. My feet were rooted to the spot, fused to the concrete by a surge of primal ice that shot up from the ground and into my veins. My breath, which had been coming in ragged gasps from the fight on the bridge, simply stopped. The scene in the lobby was a still life of slaughter.It wasn’t the random, hungry chaos of the dead. This was… methodical. Calculated. Chairs were overturned not from a struggle, but from a systematic search. Lockers were pried open, their contents—old magazines, a few cans of food, a child’s torn teddy bear—strewn across the floor like garbage. And the bodies… they weren’t just bitten. They were executed.A man I vaguely recognized, Mark, was slumped against the reception desk. He’d been shot in the back of the head. A dark, tidy hole in his skull, the exit wound a grotesque blossom of bone and brain matter on the polished wood of the desk in front of him. Another, a woman named Sarah, lay face down in a cong
Project Dakota: Rising of the dead Chapter Forty-three
The thrumming in my skull was the first thing to greet me, a dull, insistent drumbeat against the back of my eyeballs. Consciousness wasn't a gentle dawn; it was a clumsy burglar tripping over the furniture of my mind. I winced, squeezing my eyes shut against the thin, grey light filtering through the grimy window. Every muscle fiber screamed in protest, a unified chorus begging for just five more minutes, an hour, maybe a week of oblivion.Last night’s meeting with Carlos and Moe hung in my memory like a ghost—a necessary, grim specter. We’d huddled in the pantry, the air thick with the scent of old potatoes and our own fear. Our voices were low, conspiratorial whispers that scraped against the silence of the sleeping house.“We can’t refuse them,” Carlos had said, his fingers tracing the grain of the wooden table. “Eli’s men. It’ll look like we’re hiding something. We need to appear… grateful. Cooperative.”Moe, ever the pragmatist, had nodded, his glasses catching the flicker of ou
Project Dakota: Rising of the dead Chapter Forty-two
The walk back from Eli’s condo to the flickering lantern-light of the memorial was a journey through a landscape of silent, shared horror. Carlos and I did not speak a word. We didn’t need to. The image of that blood-caked knife, the stiff, gore-soaked fabric, was seared onto the back of my eyelids, a grotesque negative of the peaceful scene we were returning to. The very air felt different now, tainted. Each shadow we passed seemed to hold the potential of Eli’s grinning, duplicitous face. The distant, murmured prayers from the memorial service sounded less like comfort and more like a dirge for our own shattered innocence.We moved like ghosts, our footsteps silent on the grass, our bodies tense, coiled springs of dreadful knowledge. The normal sounds of the night—the chirping of crickets, the sigh of the wind through the skeletal trees—now felt like a mockery. How could the world continue its mundane rhythms when we now knew a murderer walked among us, his hands steeped in blood, h
Project Dakota: Rising of the dead Chapter Forty-one
The two hours that followed the tense meeting in our makeshift shelter were a masterclass in the kind of desperate, hopeful logistics that had come to define our new existence. The plan was simple in objective—bring the survivors from the apartments to the relative safety of our fortified shelters—but complex in its execution, a delicate dance of risk and trust. The air, thick with the scent of damp concrete and collective anxiety, seemed to vibrate with a new, cautious energy.I watched the group dynamic shift and reform. Moe, a man whose quiet demeanor I had previously mistaken for indifference, became the unexpected cornerstone of the operation. He didn’t just offer; he insisted, his voice a low, steady rumble that cut through the nervous chatter.“I have a van,” he stated, his hands, calloused and capable, resting on the map we’d spread over a salvaged door that served as our table. “It’s old, but it runs. We can fit eight, maybe nine people per trip if we squeeze. It’s better tha
Project Dakota: Rising of the dead Chapter Forty
The silence in my own head was a screaming thing. It had been days since the murder, days since we had all made that unspoken, desperate pact to pretend that the world had not cracked open beneath our feet. We moved through the sterile, fluorescent-lit halls of the Arcadia Sanctuary like ghosts performing a pantomime of normalcy. But the pretense was a fragile shell, and the memory of Mr. Gable’s blood-soaked body was a corrosive acid eating away at its underside. My thoughts kept circling back to one immutable, terrifying fact: Eli was hunting the immune. And my mind, traitorously, kept pulling Lester into that dark orbit.I found him in the common area, meticulously cleaning a set of tools that already gleamed. Lester, with his open face and a soul that seemed to have been forged from a purer, simpler metal than the rest of ours. His trust was a given, not a prize to be won. It was his greatest strength and, I feared, his most fatal flaw.“Lester,” I began, my voice carefully neutra
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