Strung ii the valley of.., p.1
Strung II: The Valley of Death (Strung Trilogy Book 2), page 1
strung 2
The Valley of Death
Per Jacobsen
HumbleBooks
STRUNG II: THE VALLEY OF DEATH
Copyright © 2022
Per Jacobsen & HumbleBooks
1st edition, 2022
ISBN: 978-87-973294-6-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without prior permission from either the publisher or the author.
All characters in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Recognition is an important thing … but sadly it's also something we often forget to give. Therefore, this book is dedicated to Janni Buchholt, who certainly deserves recognition for all the things she does for others.
part one
THE RIVERBED
"In the valley, I saw red.
Neath my soles, I carried it home,
tapped around, watched it spread."
— O. E. Geralt, Red, Red, Riverbed.
prologue
There are no other vehicles on the road and not a single other person in sight. Presumably, there won't be any other people within miles. Still, he takes his foot off the accelerator and brings the car to a halt in front of the bridge.
It's the headlights—more specifically what their cones have brought into focus—that make him do it.
The sight is macabre, cruel. But that's not why he stops and stares at it. By now, he's way too hardened for that. Besides, a hanged human being is no rare sight in this new world.
No, what makes Randall Morgan stop the car are the similarities. Because quite a few things about this scene are almost identical to what he saw on the day it all started.
For you, he corrects himself in his thoughts. For everyone else, it started two weeks earlier, remember?
That day he had also stopped because the car's headlights had revealed a hanged man—and back then he had been frightened. Because that was the first victim he encountered of the police force's ruthless massacre.
Just as he's alone now, he was also alone in his car on that day. Alone he sat and listened to the eerie scraping of the windshield wipers while he waited for the police to arrive.
The same scraping sound also makes the soundtrack now, although at this moment it's snow and not rain that the rubber strips are pushing aside out on the other side of the windshield glass.
In reality, the resemblance may not be so overwhelming, he thinks, as the wind picks up and turns the lifeless man around. For the dead man he saw back then was blueish-purple and swollen, while the body hanging in front of the vehicle now is practically nothing more than a dried-out skeleton.
But at the end of the day, the biggest change is probably found on his own side of the car's windshield. The man behind the wheel now is not the same as he was then. Much has changed dramatically since the day the world collapsed, and Randall Morgan is by no means an exception.
Before that day, he was a semi-famous writer and part-time father, but from the moment the police officer, one he himself had called for, knocked on the side window and signaled for him to roll it down, everything changed.
From that moment on, he was reduced to prey. A survivor, fleeing from an invisible enemy. An enemy that had the power to get those who had sworn to protect their fellow human beings to kill them instead.
But that role is also a thing of the past. Because Randall is not prey anymore. He's a hunter, chasing one particular person: the traitor who deceived them all. The one who planned the massacre at Redwater football stadium. The leader of the invisible enemy's new army.
Randall has to use those kinds of designations when thinking of him now. Otherwise, it hurts too much.
It squeaks and creaks loudly around him as he puts the car into gear and starts driving. Hopefully, it's just the snow under the tires—and not the steel wires keeping the bridge's carriageway floating—that creates that sound. But it's hard to determine, and he can't be completely sure. Because in a world where nothing is maintained anymore, rust is an ever-growing problem. And the Haywood Bridge wasn't in overwhelmingly good condition to begin with.
The empty streets he drives through are almost without exception covered in a thin layer of snow in which the light of the afternoon sun reflects. The small part of it that succeeds in getting through the gray clouds, that is.
On both sides of the road, he is surrounded by tall buildings, which at the same time seem familiar and alien to him.
Familiar because Randall has been here many times before. Alien, because it was a long time ago—and because nothing looks the way it once did.
The city is Newcrest, and it is—like all other major cities after the Collapse—completely devoid of life.
For what feels like an eternity ago, Randall drove these streets every other weekend, even though he himself lived half a day's journey away. He had to, as this is where his ex-wife moved after the divorce—and she took their son, Billy, with her.
Once, this thought would have filled him with both outrage and sadness, but now it seems ridiculous to him that such small problems could bother him in the past. Besides, it would be pretty futile to stay angry with Allie now, as she most likely isn't alive anymore. She was among those who were infected in the first round and turned into a vegetable when the invasion started.
One of the ones they called the blanks.
The blanks are all but gone now. They gradually degraded, both mentally and physically, until at some point they just disappeared. To where, none of the survivors know—just as they can't know for certain that what happened was actually an invasion. But the signs were there. Besides, what other possibility was there? What else could explain how perfectly normal police officers transformed overnight into psychotic murderers who killed innocent people by hanging them from lampposts?
And if not some alien parasite or disease, what could cause almost everyone else to be reduced to empty, mindless shells?
While sitting there behind the wheel, thinking these very thoughts for God only knows which time, Randall picks up a motion out of the corner of his eye: something grayish-brown shooting across the snowy side street on the right side of his car.
He turns his head and feels an intense pain in his abdomen as his brain detects—and then tells his stomach—what it is he has spotted.
A deer. Skinny, but still big enough to keep him—and David, when he comes back—going for at least a week.
Maybe even two, if the temperature doesn't rise too much, he thinks while looking over at the glove compartment where he stores his handgun.
It's tempting, but even though he was trained by his brother during the first few months after the Collapse, Randall still isn't the world's best shooter, so getting the animal would take time. Time that he can't necessarily afford to waste.
He casts one last, wistful glance at the deer, which now leaps over some shallow shrubbery and disappears between two apartment blocks. Then he utters a strained sigh and drives on.
Ten minutes later, he arrives at his destination—and reseeing the place has a strong emotional impact on him. He feels a sting of panic that for a moment paralyzes him and keeps his gaze fixed on the three giant letters on the building's facade.
N.M.H.
NEWCREST MEMORIAL HOSPITAL.
His fingers squeeze so hard around the steering wheel that the knuckles turn as white as the snow covering the asphalt in the large parking lot, and he must concentrate to loosen them and let go.
Once, he set foot here before. That's all. Once, about … what? A year and a half ago? Two years? Something like that.
He's been to other hospitals since then, in search of the same thing, but not here. Not at Newcrest Memorial Hospital. Because this is where he saw for the first time what their invisible enemy had done to the children.
And this is where he had found his son.
Halfway unconscious and trapped in a trance-like state, Billy had sat among hundreds of other kidnapped children in a dark auditorium within these walls, while some small, disgusting creatures were pumped into their veins. Creatures that probably …
You need to stop, he thinks, shaking his head from side to side, as if he's literally trying to toss the unwanted images out of his head. Otherwise, you won't be able to do what you came here for.
To the right of the hospital entrance, a long roof is mounted on the wall to provide shelter for two-wheeled vehicles. The sight of it—and not least the large hole in one of the roof's tin plates—also brings back memories.
Right now, it's covered in snow, so the strange, missile-like object can't be seen, but he knows it's under there, halfway buried in the asphalt. He also knows he won't gain any useful knowledge by scraping off the snow and studying it. Other—and far smarter—people than him have tried that already.
In fact, it was one of the first things set in motion when the first groups of survivors started to organize after the Collapse. Back then, the desire to understand what had almost wiped mankind off the face of the Earth in two weeks was one of their main driving forces. And so, these objects, which were found scattered in random places across different cities, were studied.
But if those studies have led to anything useful, it's certainly a well-kept secret. Therefore, Randall only offers the snow-covered object a fleeting glance while getting out of the car and walking towar d the hospital entrance.
Over there, however, he does slow down and take the time to study the beat-up and burned car, which is lying on its roof—and furthermore is clamped in between the walls on both sides of the entrance. Right in the spot where the entry doors should have been.
The car is a Chevrolet. Once it belonged to Randall's older brother.
The thought of Tommy is allowed to rumble in the back of his head, but only for a second. That's all he can give it. Because thinking of Tommy now is like bursting open a dam in his mind, releasing a flood of shame and guilt.
Shame that he was fooled—and guilt from the responsibility he carries because he didn't see the signs before it was too late.
If only he'd thought it through—really thought it through—when he discovered that damned bag in Tommy's backpack, maybe he could have prevented it all. Maybe he could have even stopped the monster who dressed in human skin and hid right under their noses while it planned and set its trap for them.
If only. Those are the words resonating in his mind as he pulls off his thick scarf and wraps it around his hand, so he doesn't cut himself as he leans against the sill and jumps in through the broken window into the hospital entrance hall.
On the other side, he steers directly over to a double door, which leads out to a covered passageway and from there over to an outdoor pavilion.
When he reaches the pavilion, he hesitates for a moment, letting his gaze slide over the doors of the building on the other side until he has located the right one.
In front of the door lies a pile of snow, which he scrapes away with his foot before closing his frozen fingers around the handle.
He pulls. The door doesn't move an inch. For a moment he thinks it's locked, but then he sees the glittering layer that lies across its frame and hinges.
He breathes on his hands, rubs them against each other, and then grabs the door handle once more. Then he pulls.
The ice layer squeaks and then suddenly crumbles in a flurry of small flakes as the door gives way and opens.
He steps into a semi-dark corridor, looks for the staircase that he knows is there, and walks to it.
The lack of electric light darkens the entire building, and he makes sure to hold on to the stair railing so he doesn't fall while he traverses the steps and moves upwards.
What he's looking for is up on the fourth floor.
The hall is on the fourth floor.
Upon opening the door with the large, blue four printed on it and stepping out into the long main corridor, he once again feels the panic stirring.
It is the sight of the sign—and the memories that it brings forth—that causes it.
AUDITORIUM. It's just a word, but it makes his hands quiver and his pulse approach double pace.
Tommy was the first to open the door to the dark hall when they were here last, and for a split second Randall's inner eye reminds him what his brother looked like when he came staggering back from there.
How pale he was. How terrified he was.
Randall would probably be greeted by something similar if he stood in front of a mirror now. But it's no use. This has to be done.
With that thought as a driving force, he puts his hand on the handle and pushes the door open. Then, without hesitation, he starts to walk down the long aisle separating the two sections of the auditorium's seat rows.
The same seat rows that last time were occupied by children so pale that they resembled wax figures, and who were unable to do anything but stare blankly up at a screen while their bloodstreams were getting infected with a silvery liquid via a series of IV racks behind the seats.
The children aren't here anymore, but that's no surprise to him. Partly because of what he saw in Redwater, but also because it was the same in the other hospitals. The IV poles and the empty bags on them testified that they had been there, but the children themselves had disappeared.
About halfway down the aisle, Randall slows down and then walks in between the rows of seats on the left side.
It was somewhere around here that they found Billy. He's pretty sure of that. The only problem is that the semi-darkness of the auditorium makes it difficult to navigate, so he has to lean down—almost to the point where he's crawling—to be able to look properly at the floor under the seats.
After a couple of long seconds, during which his gaze glides around down there without spotting anything useful, it starts to feel like a hopeless task. Like it's all been in vain.
Then he sees it; a small, transparent plastic bag lying in the shade from one of the metal posts bolted to the floor to hold the seat rows in place.
His heart beats against his ribs like a trapped animal fighting wildly to escape its cage as he reaches out his hand, grabs the bag, and lifts it up.
In the narrow beam of light slipping in from the door he left open behind him, he looks at the bag, turns it, blinks, looks again … and feels a relief so strong that it almost brings him to his knees.
Not only does this bag contain almost a quarter of a liter of the silvery liquid that the IV bags in all the other hospitals had been emptied of. There's also at least one of those disgusting tadpole-like creatures left in there.
He can feel it when he presses the bag. A little lump slipping between his fingers.
Dead a long time ago, of course. Nevertheless, it's a specimen that can be studied to hopefully give the remaining survivors more knowledge about their enemy.
It's fragile, perhaps too fragile, but this bag—which was once connected to his son's circulation via a thin plastic hose—nevertheless represents a hope.
A hope for the survivors that all isn't lost and that they can perhaps get a step ahead of an enemy who, despite having worn several different masks, has yet to show its true face.
And—for Randall himself—a more modest hope that he will be able to make some kind of sense of what happened at Redwater football stadium. That he will find some understanding of the evil that transformed his personal family tragedy into a tragedy for all mankind, so he can grab it by its roots and tear it up.
And holding such a strong hope in his hands brings the tears out.
3 months earlier …
chapter one
The sound of the bell didn't reach Randall's consciousness right away. Instead, it snuck in and became part of the nightmare that caused him to twist and turn uneasily in bed that night. And most other nights.
The nightmares were rarely identical, but there seemed to be two elements his subconscious always made sure to reserve a spot for.
One was the auditorium at Newcrest Memorial Hospital, where he had found Billy and the other kidnapped children. The second was the police officer; the huge man who had hurled Randall back and forth over the rain-soaked asphalt on Highway 55, only to try to and hang him from a lamppost afterward.
Actually, it was this very last scene that was playing out in Randall's subconscious when the high-pitched tones of the bell crept into the dream. They accompanied the raindrops whipping down on him. Added a metallic echo to the soundtrack every time one of the icy drops hit his hands and cheeks as he lay on the asphalt staring up at the officer while he pulled the rope out of the patrol car's trunk.
But while the persistent ringing of the bell was eerie, it was also what ultimately pulled Randall out of the nightmare. Because at some point he registered that something didn't add up. That there was something off—something asynchronous—between the rhythm of the bell and the intervals at which the raindrops hit the asphalt. And that discovery shook his consciousness awake, led it to the realization of what bell it was he heard.
That it was Billy's panic bell.
Disoriented, dizzy—and still with the high-pitched tones of the bell resounding in the background—Randall reached out a hand in the dark and let his finger crawl over the wire to the bedside light until he found the switch.
Click. A sea of white light, which felt like acid in his eyes, washed over him.
