The Virus Within: The Road Ahead (Book 1 - SERIES COMPLETED!)

Chapter 71

I was beginning to detest long road trips where I did nothing but sit in the back of a truck. Even staring at the passing yellow dandelions was getting old after so many hours.

The air was warm and dry, so scents weren't traveling as far as they could have. Now that my control was no longer being questioned, we were simply trying to find a feral Nightstalker. On a highway. In the middle of the day.

The fact that it was late afternoon showed how well this plan was working. I took another deep breath of the air that swirled around the back of the truck.

"Are you sure a Runner won't work? There's one around here somewhere."

This truck had a window in the back of the cab, so even Nina could hear my normal speaking volume fairly easily.

She glanced back at me through the open window. "We inoculated the last two Runners in the barn with that drug before we left, and several people are keeping a close eye on them. At this point, we really need another Nightstalker to see if they have the same side effects you did."

"Last two? I thought there were seven left?"

Nina grimaced. "We tried this drug and the cure on two of the zombies, which is why we know for certain it's a deadly combination. The other three died earlier when we tried tweaking the cure into something more effective. It turned them into humans, but the additional chemicals interacted and became toxic, killing them before the new cures wore off enough for us to re-infect them."

This was like a horror movie with a mad scientist, only the evil one had already fled, leaving the conscientious one behind to try and patch everything up. And, lucky me, I'm stuck in the middle of it...

"So, we need a Nightstalker," I said in resignation.

"Yes, and your sense of smell is better than mine," Daniel pointed out. "Besides, even if we were close enough for me to smell one, your proximity and scent would probably overwhelm a faint Nightstalker trail."

In other words, it'd be much easier for me to detect the scent of another Nightstalker, which left it up to me to locate this zombie. I sighed before taking another deep breath, trying to pick up any hint of a Nightstalker without success.

While keeping tabs on the air, I noticed we were driving toward a swath of green stretched across the road.

The truck slowed down as we got closer, and Daniel asked, "Would you mind moving that tree?"

He must have come across the remnants of one of my tree kick-boxing matches to have such certainty in my ability to move a tree this large. Without answering or even grumbling, I vaulted out of the back of the truck and jogged forward, taking advantage of the chance to stretch my legs.

I passed the still-slowly moving vehicle and altered my course to where the pavement met the grass. I darted into one of the few gaps with no branches and gave the trunk a hard kick. The wood crunched under my feet but didn't give way. A second kick rectified that, breaking it in two.

I went to the other side of the road to grab some branches near the top of the massive spruce tree and dragged the broken section off the road. My muscles strained against the weight, even though I was only dragging the top third of the tree.

Daniel let the truck cruise by slowly, allowing me to easily jump into the back as he passed. With our path clear for now, he picked up speed and continued driving. I had a feeling the tree behind us wasn't going to be the only one I'd have to move off this untraveled road.

Hours passed as we continued northward, with nothing to look at but the road, occasional zombies, and trees, three of which had decided to sprawl across the road to suntan.