Once Bitten, Twice Dead Read online

  Once Bitten, Twice Dead

  Once Bitten, Twice Dead

  BIANCA D’ARC

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Somewhere near Stony Brook, Long Island, New York

  “Unit Twelve.” The dispatcher’s voice crackled over the radio.

  Sarah perked up. That was her. She listened as the report rolled over the radio. A disturbance in a vacant building out on Wheeler Road, near the big medical center. Probably kids, she thought, responding to Dispatch and turning her patrol car around.

  Since the budget cuts, she rolled alone. She hadn’t had a partner in a long time, but she was good at her job and confident in her abilities. She could handle a couple of kids messing around in an empty building.

  Sarah stepped into the gloomy concrete interior of the building. The metal door hung off its hinges and old boards covered the windows. Broken glass littered the floor and graffiti decorated the walls.

  The latest decorators had probably been junkies and kids looking for a secret place to either get high or drink beer where no one could see. As the early Autumn weather grew colder, places like this became more popular. There didn’t appear to be anyone home at the moment. They’d probably cleared out in a hurry when they’d seen Sarah’s cruiser pull up outside. Still, she had to check the place.

  Nightstick in one hand, flashlight in the other, Sarah made her way into the gloom of the building. Electricity was a thing of the past in this place. Light fixtures dangled brokenly from the remnants of a dropped ceiling.

  As Sarah advanced into the dark interior, she heard a scurrying sound that could have been footsteps or could have been rodents. Either way, her heart rate sped up.

  “Police,” she said, identifing herself in a loud, firm voice. “Show yourself.”

  She directed the flashlight into the corners of the room as she crept inside. The place had a vast outer warehouse-type area with halls and doors leading farther inside the big structure. She didn’t really want to go in there but saw no alternative. She decided to advance slowly at first, then zip through the rest of the building, hoping no one got behind her to cut off her retreat.

  She had her sidearm, but she’d rather not have to shoot anyone today. Especially not some kids out for a lark. They liked to test their limits and hers. She’d been up against more than one teenage bully who thought because she was a woman, she’d be a pushover. They’d learned the hard way not to mess with Sarah Petit.

  She heard that sort of brushing sound again. Her heart raced as adrenaline surged. She’d learned to channel fear into something more useful. Fear became strength if you knew how to use it.

  “This is the police,” she repeated. “Step into the light.”

  More shuffling. It sounded like it was coming from down a corridor on the left. Sarah approached, her nightstick at the ready. The flashlight illuminated the corner of the opening, not showing her much. The sounds were growing louder. There was definitely someone—or something—there. Perhaps waiting to ambush her, down that dark hallway.

  She wouldn’t fall for that. Sarah approached from a good ten feet out, maneuvering so that her flashlight could penetrate farther down the black hall. With each step, more of the corridor became visible to her.

  Squinting to see better, Sarah stepped fully in front of the opening to the long hallway. There. Near the end. There was a person standing.

  “I’m a police officer. Come out of there immediately.” Her voice was firm and as loud as she could project it. The figure at the end of the hallway didn’t respond. She couldn’t even tell if it was male or female.

  It sort of swayed as it tried to move. Maybe a junkie so high he or she was completely out of it? Sarah wasn’t sure. She edged closer.

  “Are you all right?”

  She heard a weird moaning sound. It didn’t sound human, but the shape at the end of the long hall was definitely standing on two feet with two arms braced against the wall as if for balance. The inhuman moan came again. It was definitely coming from that shadowy person.

  Sarah stepped cautiously closer to the mouth of the hallway. It was about four feet across. Not a lot of room to maneuver in.

  She didn’t like this setup, but she had to see if that person needed help. Sarah grabbed the radio mic clipped to her shoulder.

  “This is Unit Twelve. I’m at the location. There appears to be a person in distress in the interior of the building.”

  “What kind of distress, Unit Twelve?”

  “Uncertain. Subject seems unable to speak. I’m going to get closer to see if I can give you more information.”

  “Should we dispatch an ambulance?”

  Sarah thought about it for a half a second. No matter what, this person would need a medical check. Worst-case scenario, it was a junkie in the throes of a really bad trip.

  “Affirmative. Dispatch medical to this location. I’m going to see if I can get the subject to come out, but I may need some backup.”

  “Dispatching paramedics and another unit to your location. ETA ten minutes on the backup, fifteen on the paramedics.”

  “Roger that.”

  With backup and medical help on the way, Sarah felt a little better about taking the next step. She walked even closer to the corridor’s mouth. The person was still there, still mostly unrecognizable in the harsh light of the flashlight beam.

  “Help is coming,” she called to the figure. From its height, she thought it was probably a male. He moved a little closer. Wild hair hung in limp, greasy clumps around his face. It was longer than most men’s, but junkies weren’t known for their grooming and personal hygiene.

  “That’s it,” she coaxed as the man shuffled forward on unsteady feet. “Come on out of there. Help is on the way. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Sarah stepped farther into the corridor, just a few feet, hoping to coax the man forward. He was definitely out of it. He made small noises. Sort of grunting, moaning sounds that weren’t intelligible. It gave her the creeps, as did the way the man moved. He shuffled like Frankenstein’s assistant in those old horror movies, keeping his head down.

  This dude had to be on one hell of a bender. Sarah lowered the flashlight beam off his head as he moved closer, trying to get a better look at the rest of him. His clothes were so shredded it looked like he’d been in a fight with a bear—or something else with sharp claws. His shirt hung off him in strips of fabric and his pants weren’t much better.

  Sarah grew more concerned. He had to be in really bad shape from the look of the blood that had been spilled. She wondered if that was all his blood or if there was another victim lying around here somewhere in even worse shape.

  His head was still down as he approached, and Sarah backed up a step. Only as he drew closer did she realize his hair wasn’t matted with oil and dirt. It was stuck together by dried blood.

  Then he looked up.

  Sarah stifled a scream. Half his face was…gone. Just gone.

  It looked like something had gnawed on his flesh. Blank eyes stared out at her from a ruined face. The tip of his nose was missing, as were his lips and the flesh of one side of his jaw and cheek.

 
Sarah gasped and turned to run, but something came up behind her and tripped her. She fell backward with a resounding thud, cracking her skull on the hard cement floor.

  She fought against the hands that tried to grab her, but they were too strong, and her head spun from the concussion she’d no doubt just received. She felt sick to her stomach. The adrenaline of fear pushed her to keep going. Keep moving. Get away. Survive until her backup arrived.

  Thank God she’d already called for backup.

  Not one, but two men—if she could call them that—were holding her down. The one with the ruined face had her feet and the other had hold of her arms, even as she struggled against him.

  She looked into the first one’s eyes and saw…nothing. They were blank. No emotion. No feeling. No nothing.

  Fear clutched her heart in its icy grip. Her flashlight had rolled to the side but was still on, lancing into the darkness of the building’s interior nearby. Faint light shone on her two assailants. The second man looked wild.

  They both looked like something out of a horror movie. The one from the hallway was by far the more gruesome of the two, but the one who wrestled with her arms was frightening, too. His skin was cold to the touch and it looked almost gray, though she couldn’t be sure in the uncertain light. Neither spoke, but both made those inhuman moaning sounds.

  As she kicked and struggled she felt teeth rip into her thigh. Sarah screamed for all she was worth as the first man broke through her skin and blood welled. The second man dove onto her prone form, knocking her flat and bashing her head on the concrete a second time. Stunned, she was still aware when his teeth sank into her shoulder.

  She was going to die here. Eaten alive by these cannibals.

  Something inside Sarah rebelled at the thought. No way in hell was she going down like this.

  Help was on the way. All she had to do was hold on until her backup arrived. She could do that. She had to do that.

  Channeling the adrenaline, Sarah ignored the pain and kicked the man off her legs. She bucked like a crazy woman, dislodging the first man.

  Once her legs were free, she used them to leverage her upper body at an angle, forcing the second man to move. The slight change in position freed one of her hands. She grasped around for anything on the floor next to her and came up with a hard, cylindrical object. Her nightstick.

  Praise the Lord.

  Putting all her remaining strength behind it, she aimed for the man’s head, raining blows down on him with the stick. When that didn’t work, she changed targets, whacking at his body with the hard wood of the stick. She heard a few of the bones in his hand crack at one point, but this guy was tough. Nothing seemed to faze him.

  Finally, she used the pointy end of the stick to push at his neck. That seemed to get some results and he shifted away. He moved enough for her to use the rest of her body for leverage to crawl out from under him.

  His friend was up and coming back as she crab-walked away on her hands and feet, toward the door and the sunshine beyond.

  The two men followed her, moving as if they had all the time in the world. Their pace was steady and measured as she crawled as fast as she could. It didn’t make any sense. They could have easily overtaken her, but they kept to their slow, walking pace.

  Sarah hit the door and practically threw herself over the threshold. She had to get out in the open where her backup would see her right away. She was losing blood fast and her vision was dancing, tunneling down to a single dim spot. She was going to pass out any second. She had to do all she could to save herself before that happened.

  Backup was coming. That thought kept her going. They’d be here any second. She just had to hold on.

  She crawled into the sunlight, near her cruiser. Leaning against the side of her car, she tried for her radio, but the mic was long gone—probably a victim of the struggle with those two men. They were coming for her. They had to be.

  But when she looked up, she saw them hesitate at the doorway to the building. The second man stepped through, but the first stayed behind, cowering in the darkness. He looked like some kind of walking corpse, with grisly brown stains of dried blood all around his mouth and on his clothes. Some of it was bright red. That was her blood—from where the sick bastard had bitten her.

  The man walked calmly forward, under the trees that shaded the walkway to the old building. Sarah had parked on the street, out in open sun. She watched in dread as the man walked steadily toward her, death in his flat gaze.

  Then something odd happened. He stopped where the tree cover ended. He seemed reluctant to step into the sun.

  Sarah blinked, refocusing, but there wasn’t any other explanation for his hesitation she could think of. Then she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Her backup.

  With salvation in sight, she finally passed out.

  USSOCOM Commander’s Office,

  MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida

  The next day

  “Commander Sykes, reporting as ordered.” Matt stood at crisp attention waiting for the admiral to acknowledge his presence.

  “At ease, Commander. Have a seat.” The busy admiral pointed to a chair in front of his giant mahogany desk and pulled a red folder from a stack on his desk. It sailed through the air toward Matt and he grabbed it in a purely reflex action. “Read that while I finish signing these orders. Note the security level. It’s eyes only, Commander. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Whatever this was, it couldn’t be good. Matt had met with this terse admiral only once before, when he’d been called down to MacDill unexpectedly to interface with some Army Special Forces officers. Admiral Nealy was the current head of the unified Special Operations Command that got involved whenever the special ops groups from different branches of the armed forces needed to work together.

  Matt was still working on the mission this man had tasked him with at their first meeting. Matt’s normal duty station was Quantico, Virginia, but lately he’d been spending most of his time in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He’d been at Fort Bragg for the past week, helping some Army Rangers deal with an unexpected problem he’d seen before. Everything had been going reasonably well until this morning when he’d been rousted out of bed at 0-dark-thirty and pushed onto a cargo plane heading south. It had spit him out here at MacDill where an attaché was waiting at the airstrip to escort him directly to the admiral’s office. No waiting in line. No appointment necessary.

  This couldn’t be good, he thought again. A feeling of foreboding invaded his mind.

  Matt opened the folder and scanned the single sheet of paper it contained. Oddly enough, it was a police report from Suffolk County, New York. A report that sounded all too familiar.

  No, not good at all.

  “What do you make of it?” The admiral had finished with his paperwork and was looking at Matt expectantly when he finished reading.

  “Sir, I think we have another flare-up on our hands.”

  The admiral’s expression turned even grimmer. “That’s what I thought, too. You’ll have to send someone to check it out. Who can you spare?”

  Nobody, Matt thought. They needed every single soul they had to fight the problem in North Carolina. They were spread too thin as it was. But this couldn’t go uninvestigated. He had to find someone….

  “Captain Beauvoir is probably our best bet. He has enough rank and experience to run an op with little supervision, and he’s learned fast since being released from the hospital. I’d say he’s our man to look into this potential problem.”

  “All right.” The admiral scrawled Beauvoir’s name into the empty space on the set of orders he’d been signing when Matt arrived. “I want you to keep track of both operations. Beauvoir will report directly to you. He can pick a small team from among those who’ve been briefed but not rated to work in the field. If this really is another outbreak, I want this contained quietly. Impress that upon the captain.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

 
“Now, while I have you here, give me a sitrep on the situation at Bragg.”

  Matt spent the next half hour talking with an admiral he never would have known, if not for the colossal screwup at Quantico a few months ago. His life had taken a turn for the decidedly strange, and his career was going places he’d never expected because of it.

  Being at the wrong place at the right time had given an otherwise normal career a boost. He now had expertise on something so top secret only a few people in the world knew about it. And Matt was rubbing elbows in the stratosphere of not just the navy brass but the marine corps and now the army as well. Not to mention the political aspects. He’d been given his initial orders directly from the president herself.

  Nothing had been normal since the first outbreak. Matt had thought it was all over, then he’d gotten the call about Fort Bragg. Now this.

  Matt was truly worried. It seemed more and more like this nightmare was only just beginning.

  Chapter One

  Sarah woke with a pounding headache. Little jackhammers were beating against the inside of her skull, and her eyes didn’t want to open. The fog in her brain lifted all at once and she gasped. Was she safe?

  She forced her eyes open and a beeping sound interrupted her panic. She was lying in a hospital bed, and the beeping came from a machine to her right. The pace of the sound had increased as her heart rate began to spike higher and adrenaline hit her system.

  She was safe. No need to panic.

  A doctor moved hurriedly into the room. “You’re awake,” he said.

  Sarah had to wonder why he sounded so surprised.

  “Did they get them?” Her voice was a croak of sound that made her headache even worse, but she had to know.

  The doctor looked confused. “Did who get who?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. Instead he moved closer and took her hand. “Can you squeeze my fingers?”