BITTEN Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3): The Resurrection Virus Saga Read online

  A REGOLITH PUBLICATIONS BOOK

  BITTEN: THE RESURRECTION VIRUS SAGA

  Volumes 1, 2, 3

  BITTEN: Resurrection, BITTEN 2: Land of the Rising Dead, and BITTEN 3: Kingdom of the Living Dead are Copyrighted ©2016

  By Tristan Vick. All Rights Reserved.

  www.tristanvick.com

  BITTEN 1 & 2 edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

  BITTEN 3: edited by Sheila Shedd

  Cover art by Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics

  Bitten: Omnibus First Edition: November 5, 2016.

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  —WARNING—

  CONTENTS MAY BE HAZARDOUS

  BOOK ONE

  BOOK TWO

  BOOK THREE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOK ONE

  TRISTAN VICK

  PART ONE

  United States of America

  NEWCASTLE CITY

  1

  Outbreak

  Alyssa Briggs arrived at the animal clinic at 8 am sharp and, as usual, put on a fresh pot of coffee. She spent the next few minutes writing down the events of her lackluster morning in her diary, a small purple leather-bound book with flowery stenciling on the cover just large enough to cram into a back pocket if necessary.

  After pouring the doc a cup of coffee, she threw on her white lab coat, tucked the diary into her right pocket, and went to take him his coffee. As she made her way to his office she noted that the animals seemed to be more restless than usual.

  All week long the phones had been ringing off the hook with reports of dog bites from all over the city. Soon enough reports of other animal bites were coming in to the clinic as well. Everything from bats to cats to rats. It seemed everyone and their dog were getting bitten—literally.

  Sometime early yesterday afternoon Dr. Beckford brought in an extremely wild-eyed Shiba inu, a spitz breed from Japan. As he was placing him in his kennel, the dog nipped Dr. Beckford’s hand and drew blood. He’d diagnosed the dog as positive for rabies and, to err on the side of caution, immediately administered himself a post-exposure prophylactic treatment. But due to the sudden rush of bite cases flooding in he decided to burn the candle from both ends, as he liked to say. Sending Alyssa home early to get some rest so she could come in on her day off to help deal with the pile up, Dr. Beckford opted to personally oversee the animals through the night.

  Alyssa knocked on the door to the office, but there was no answer. She could hear a muffled breathing coming from inside the room. Perhaps he had fallen asleep at his desk again, which was a frequent habit of his after pulling long night shifts.

  Poking her head in, she saw the doctor hunched over his desk. Good, he’s not asleep, she thought. No need to worry about waking him.

  “I brought you your coffee,” Alyssa chirped, placing the steaming mug on the end of his desk. As she leaned over Dr. Beckford’s shoulder, she realized he was attending to one of the smaller animals. Alyssa watched as he put his mouth to it. Oh, no, Alyssa thought. One of the newborn pups must have stopped breathing in the night and he was trying to resuscitate it using CPR. “Do you need me to fetch the respirator?” she asked.

  That’s when she heard the hideous sound of bones crunching.

  The pit of Alyssa’s stomach bottomed out. Calling out Dr. Beckford’s name, she took a step closer, trying to get a clearer view of what he was doing. “Dr. Beckford!” she called out, louder than before. But he remained unresponsive. Walking up to him from behind, she placed her hand on his shoulder and leaned over to see exactly what he was doing.

  Alyssa let out a shriek and reeled back as she reflexively gagged, covering her mouth as not to let herself vomit. Her horror-filled shriek aroused the doctor’s attention, and looking up with bloodstained chops, he stared at her with an apathetic gaze from behind awful whitish eyes. Even his pupils had fogged over with the eerie milky white.

  The bowels of the puppy he was gnawing on were torn to ribbons and dangled between the doctor’s bloodstained fingers. The doctor growled at her and staggered to his feet. His movements were rigid and a little jittery. As he walked toward her his steps were uneven and he leaned to the side, favoring his right. It was as though he was slobbering, pie-eyed drunk. Reaching out his bloody hands, the doc grabbed the lapel of Alyssa’s lab coat. His clacking teeth came uncomfortably close to her, chomping at the air between them. Fearing the worst, Alyssa tore herself away from his clutches, leaving behind only the doc’s bloody handprints on her jacket.

  Whatever the reason, her movements seemed to aggravate the doctor, and he moaned and pawed at her again, his teeth still clacking viciously.

  Alyssa sidestepped another advance and then reached for the closest object she could find. It was a stapler. She clutched it tight as the doctor moaned and then shuffled toward her. Alyssa stepped back, again, to keep a safe distance between them. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, Dr. Beckford, but if this is some kind of a joke…it’s not very funny.”

  It was no joke. The doctor bared his blood-soaked teeth, as if to prove it to her. In the animal kingdom showing one’s teeth was a sign of aggression, and Alyssa knew for certain something was terribly wrong with the doctor.

  Backing up some more, she tried to inch her way to the door when suddenly the doctor lunged at her. Panicking, Alyssa chucked the stapler at him and it pelted him in the head.

  “Graaahr!” he growled. The stapler had no effect. He pressed forward, and Alyssa found herself scurrying back to avoid another attack.

  She frantically looked around for something else that she might use to defend herself, and found the doctor’s umbrella, which she opened and used as a makeshift shield to deflect the growling maniac’s clawing advances.

  “Why? Why are you doing this?” Alyssa asked, tears seeping from the corners of her eyes. She had never seen a case of rabies act this quickly before—not on a human. And especially not after receiving treatment. If the doctor was already this far gone, she didn’t know what else she could do to help him.

  Whatever this contagion was, it was new, and deadly.

  Not paying attention to her surroundings, Alyssa neglected to see the Internet cord running to the computer sticking out from the wall outlet behind her, and she tripped over it. She fell backward and crashed into the glass medicine cabinet that ran along the side of Dr. Beckford’s office wall. The sheer weight of her body falling into the cabinet with a violent force caused it to rock. Just then the doctor lunged at her again, hitting her hard, and together they fell back into the cabinet again. This time it pitched forward, and before she knew it the whole thing came violently crashing down on her.

  Lucky for her, she was spared the crushing weight of the cabinet when it caught on the doctor’s desk. Specimen jars of animal skeletons, sheep eyes, a pickled pig’s head, a preserved fetus of a calf, and all kinds of organic horrors came sliding off the cabinet shelves and shattered all around her.

  In the tumult, without her realizing it, a long jagged piece of glass from the cabinet’s broken window panes had pierced Alyssa’s right thigh. Sitting up, she started to panic, but before she could even react to the searing pain of serrated glass tearing into the meat of her thigh, a snarling Dr. Beckford clutched her ankle.

  Alyssa
screamed as she looked down to see Beckford’s blood soaked teeth clacking away as he tried to pull her leg toward his mouth. His jaws snapped at her relentlessly, like a crazed shark driven mad by the scent of fresh blood. Tearing at her clothes, the mad doctor managed to get a hold of the bottom flap of her white lab coat, and reeled her toward him.

  Thinking fast, Alyssa tore the shard of glass out of her leg with a yelp and slammed it down onto the doctor’s hand. It went straight through his flesh, like a hot knife through butter, and pinned his hand to the floor. Alyssa looked at him in horror as he continued to grab at her with his free hand, ignoring the fact that the other one had nearly been sliced off. What is wrong with him? Even pain doesn’t seem to register, she thought.

  Kicking her feet, Alyssa managed to wriggle her way away from his clutches and backpedaled her way out from underneath the cabinet. Crawling on her hands and knees, Alyssa scrambled over broken glass toward the door. Looking back to see whether or not the doctor was pursuing her, she barely noticed her purple diary inconveniently lying under the cabinet.

  “Shit,” Alyssa said at the turn of bad luck.

  Stumbling to her feet, glass popping under her heavy footsteps, Alyssa hobbled back toward the cabinet, making sure to go the long way around so the doctor couldn’t sink his meat hooks into her. Reaching underneath, she snatched up her diary as quickly as possible and turned to escape.

  Beckford tore his hand from the glass spike without so much as a whimper and began thrashing and clawing at her all over again. Squeezing himself under the cabinet, he tried to follow her, but got himself wedged in a tight spot. Unable to catch his prey, he merely growled and reached out toward her with bony fingers.

  Alyssa held her purple diary to her chest and slowly backed out of the room. She watched Dr. Beckford flounder to get himself unlogged from the small trap he’d mindlessly gotten himself into. Not knowing how long it would take him to get free, her heart pounding in her chest, Alyssa spun around, fled down the hall and didn’t dare look back.

  Limping down the hallway, Alyssa stopped to tear out some remaining slivers of pesky glass with her bare fingers. Leaning up against the wall, she groaned as she tore out each agonizing piece. Dropping the shards of glass onto the checkered linoleum floor, she watched as red blood oozed out from her leg wound. “Crap,” she said.

  “GraHh!” the doctor snarled as he stumbled out of his office like a cock-eyed drunk. Alyssa screamed so loud that it frightened the rest of the animals in the back kennels, and soon the whole clinic was in an uproar. She quickly limped away as fast as she could, with Dr. Beckford hot on her heels. Sensing he was gaining on her, her fright and flight instinct kicked in and she ducked into the nearest room she could find—the dog kennels.

  2

  Survival Instinct

  Menacing snarls filled the claustrophobic kennels while the ammonia-rich smell of urine stung the insides of Alyssa Briggs’s nostrils. She cringed. The smell was bad enough, but the racket was even worse. The metal cages rattled all around her as she pushed herself up against the cold concrete of the kennel wall. Even through her thin white lab coat she felt chills race across her shoulder blades as she scraped along it.

  Overhead the pulsating glow of a dying fluorescent light flickered, revealing the jagged jowls and razor-sharp fangs snapping at her from behind enclosed bars as she slid past. A crimson smear of blood trailed behind her and glistened on the floor from her leg wound. The beasts caught the scent of her blood, and the horrid sound of rabid growling intensified.

  Alyssa sat with her back to the wall as her eardrums filled with the pounding of her own pulse. Sweat stains saturated her gray tank top, and dark red seeped into her denim jeans from the gash on her leg.

  Alyssa desperately tried not to make eye contact with the dark beady eyes that ravenously watched her—for all they were concerned, she was fresh meat. She didn’t want to excite their carnal fury any further than she already had.

  The dogs were all mad. The Lyssavirus, more commonly known as rabies, had already consumed them. The virus had boiled their brains away, literally, which made them feral and vicious.

  But it wasn’t like any rabies virus she had ever seen before. It had infected hundreds of animals in just under two weeks, and the veterinarian hospital had been swamped since the middle of last week. And the reports of biting just kept coming in. It seemed as if the entire city had been infected. Now the caged animals were already entering the stages of mouth-frothing madness. But they were the least of her concerns.

  With a loud hiss and pop the fluorescent bulb overhead unexpectedly blew itself out. The short-out caused the fuse to blow too, and the whole room suddenly went dark.

  “Great, now the flippin’ power is gone too!” Alyssa grumbled as she fought back the urge to cry. Her leg was throbbing and the incessant noise of growling wasn’t helping any either.

  In the dark, amid the madness, she could barely make out the scraping sound coming from the hallway. Peering through the dark, Alyssa strained her eyes to see if she had bolted the door. Reaching into the inside breast pocket of her lab coat, she pulled out her smart-phone and used it as a makeshift flashlight. She didn’t have much time. The scraping sound was inching closer.

  Using the dim glow of her phone, Alyssa searched around for something to use as a weapon. Something blunt would do. Anything she could use to defend herself with. Brushing some loose strands of her dark brown hair out of her eyes, she squinted as what appeared to be a metal container sitting in the back corner of the room. She could scarcely make it out, but it had big red letters written on the side. Letters that read “First Aid Kit.”

  It must be Dr. Beckford’s old travel kit, she thought. Alyssa reached over to grab it but, dizzy from her loss of blood, lost her balance in the dark and fell onto her side. As she crashed to the floor her cell phone slipped out of her hand and slid up against one of the cages.

  “Dammit,” she whispered. She timidly reached over for it, but her fingers were met by snapping jowls. Recoiling from fright, Alyssa seriously considered leaving it. She would have done so, if she hadn’t needed it so badly. Mustering up enough courage, she made a second attempt and successfully retrieved her phone.

  She used her arms to drag herself over to the kit and quickly unlatched the metal clasps. The scraping could be heard down the hall. It would only be a matter of minutes now.

  Flipping open her phone, Alyssa held it up and used its dim glow to get a look at the contents inside the first-aid kit. Rummaging through, she found some disinfectant, gauze, a needle and thread, and a long pair of metal scissors. She also found a fluorescent orange flare gun. Feeling it might come in handy, she tucked the gun into her pants waistline.

  She had to do something about her leg wound. The loss of blood was beginning to make Alyssa feel extremely faint, and she worried what would happen is she let herself slip out of consciousness. She had to hurry. That she knew for certain.

  Using the scissors, she carefully slid the blade under the tear in the denim jeans and cut off the tattered pants leg. Discarding the blood-soaked strips of denim, she gritted her teeth and poured disinfectant onto the wound. Wincing from the pain, Alyssa felt like screaming as her wound sizzled and foamed. The searing pain caused her eyes to well up with a flood of fresh tears, which squeezed themselves from the corners of her eyelids.

  Bad luck, she thought. The gash cut deeper than she had initially realized. Biting her bottom lip, she took the needle and thread and carefully stitched up the wound by the faint glow of her smart-phone. The funny thing was, as she pushed the slender needle through her flesh, there wasn’t that much pain. She chocked it up to the fact that she was probably experiencing mild shock.

  Getting herself all stitched up, she tied off the thread and then poured another dose of disinfectant onto her leg just to be safe. It fizzled less this time but the throbbing, burning sensation in her leg was just as horrible as the last time. Finally, she wrapped the medical gauze around h
er upper thigh and cinched it tight. That would do until she could get herself to a proper hospital.

  Out in the hall the scraping noise was practically upon her, which excited the dogs and made their frenzied barking even louder. She wanted to cover her ears and just hide in the corner but, of course, she knew that was a bad idea.

  Snatching up the scissors Alyssa slid back up against the concrete wall and used it for support as she slowly rose up onto her feet. Shuffling along the wall, she took a few steps to test her leg. Even though her leg wound throbbed like a son-of-a-bitch, the mending job held. Good, she thought. At least now she’d have a fighting chance.

  Turning toward the door to the entrance of the kennel, Alyssa’s heart sank in her chest. She dreaded what she had to do next. She was only twenty-three years old. She didn’t want to die. Not today. The only problem was there was no other way out except the way she had come. She had to go back out there...with him.

  Alyssa looked attentively at the small rectangular window that sat in the middle of the door, then suddenly screamed as the doctor’s mutilated face appeared from behind the small pane of glass.

  Alyssa slammed back up against the cold, clammy, concrete wall in alarm and nearly knocked the wind out of herself. She gulped down a terrible scream that fought to get out, but she knew it would only make things worse.

  Dr. Beckford’s clawed-up face appeared as though he had been mauled by a rabid animal. Alyssa had seen a similar case when she was in Veterinarian school and had to treat a bear attack victim.

  What was left of the doctor’s face was torn to ribbons. Shredded face meat dangled from the remains of his cheeks and chin. Without warning he slammed his body against the door. This excited the animals even further. The animals’ excitement seemed to arouse the doctor, and he smashed his mutilated face into the glass window, to no avail. Alyssa shuddered as she suffered listening to Dr. Beckford’s mindless growling on top of theirs.