Blood Run – The Complete Trilogy – First Promise, Two Riders, Last Chance
The Blood Run Trilogy
Book One ~ First Promise
Book Two ~ Two Riders
Book Three ~ Last Chance
Christine Dougherty
The Blood Run Trilogy
By Christine Dougherty
Copyright © 2011 by Christine Dougherty
All Rights Reserved
The Blood Run Trilogy is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and/or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
The Blood Run Trilogy
Also by Christine Dougherty
Dedications
Book One ~ First Promise
Book Two ~ Two Riders
Book Three ~ Last Chance
Excerpt from The Boat
About the Author
Also by Christine Dougherty
Faith, Creation, All Lies Revealed
Faith was three the first time her twin sister died. The second time, she was ten. Discover the paradox of Faith. Book One in the Faith Series.
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Darkness Within, A Collection of Horrorific Short Stories
These bone-chilling, mind-wrenching short stories will leave you wondering about the people around you…and yourself.
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Messages
James Smith is receiving messages. Will he find the right answers? Follow James as he pieces together the puzzle in this taut, psychological thriller. You'll be guessing until the last page.
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The Devil Stood Up
Could the Devil, Himself be the ultimate hero? This is the brutally told story of how the Devil, after countless millennia of strictly doing God’s will of punishing sinners in Hell, decides to lay down a Judgment of his own.
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Born Lucky, The JD Chronicles,
Adventures of a Reluctant Psychic
At three days old, JD was blown clear of the explosion that killed his mysterious parents and set him on a path of uneasy discovery. A reluctant psychic, JD chooses to live in the safe world of a mental institution, unable to control the things he ‘sees’…sometimes with unwelcome, and even dangerous, consequences.
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The Boat
The undead aren’t the greatest threat to those who have survived.
Click here to preview and buy on Amazon
Click here to read excerpt
Evil Eight, Eight Tales of Horror
This collection of short stories will have you up late into the night and then chase you down in the nightmares which are sure to follow. Zombies, Vampires, Ghosts and Human monsters alike crowd the pages of Evil Eight. Contains the best selling short story 'Stephen King'!
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Dedications
A special thank you to the early readers, Anne Francemore and Rich McGee for their insight and to Michelle Revelle, who shared a good portion of the 80s with me.
Thank you, Pauline Nolet, copy editor and proofreader, for keeping me tidy.
www.PaulineNolet.com
***
As always, dedicated to my husband, Steve Dougherty.
Love you, Biggie
***
Book One ~ First Promise
Chapter 1
1985
The horse’s hooves pounded the shadowed forest floor, kicking up clods of leaves and mud. The girl grasped the pommel with both hands and lowered herself into the wild thrash of the horse’s black mane. His breath streamed over her in hot, rhythmic clouds. She could feel the desperation in the straining muscles of his neck and shoulders, and her knees tightened on his sides. She’d never ridden him so fast, but now he ran as though his life–their lives–depended on it.
They did.
She chanced a look over her shoulder. The man was still behind them and, unbelievably, closing the distance. It didn’t seem possible; how could two legs hope to outdistance four? Yet it was true. The horse’s mane whipped across her face, stinging, but she could still see the man’s mouth gaped wide and black, a cavern that housed a damned soul. He was less than twenty yards from them, now less than eighteen and still accelerating, his dark and ragged clothing streaming behind him like the pennants on hell’s car lot.
“Please, Ash, run, run!” It was a whispered command, as there was no hope of the horse hearing her plea, even if she yelled. His pistoning hooves and the breath tearing through his great lungs drowned out all other sound. The world became a blur of passing trees, black mane, and overwhelming fear.
Then she saw the edge of the forest, the light and open pasture beyond, and her heart leapt into her throat. She squeezed Ash tighter between her knees and leaned all the way over, pressing her head next to the horse’s neck until she could hear the blood pump through his veins.
There was nothing she could do; it was up to Ash to get them to the clearing. They would make it. They would.
She glanced back once more.
To her horror, the man was nearly upon them. His neck seemed to have elongated and there was a dull fire in his bulging eyes. He seemed alight from the inside, and a muddy orange glow radiated from his widening eyes. He raised one white hand high over his head to deliver a blow, and his nails caught a dapple of sunlight. They blackened instantly, and a rill of smoke was there and gone like a rumor. The man screamed, it was a sound as empty and insane as screeching brakes on a rain-slicked highway, and he brought his hand around in a swipe, catching the retreating horse across one leg.
The horse’s answering scream was mingled pain and triumph as girl and horse breached the forest and burst into the gray white brightness of a mid-winter early afternoon. He continued to run until they were halfway across the field, and then the girl sat up and relaxed the pressure of her legs. Her trembling communicated itself through the reins to his sensitive mouth, and he slowed to a nervous canter and then huffed to a full stop, his head dropping almost to the ground. From a distance, it would have looked as though he’d merely stopped to try and crop the winter grass of the cold, January-brown field.
The girl dismounted, and her knees nearly buckled beneath her, but she turned anyway and checked back the way they’d come. No sign of the man. The forest was deep and deadly dark as ever, and she could see no movement there. They were safe, but her pounding heart didn’t seem to have yet gotten the message.
She unhooked a heavy, leather bag from over her shoulder and dropped it to the ground. It clunked as three wooden stakes rolled free. She leaned against the horse’s heaving flank, exhausted. Her long, black hair, so resembling the horse’s mane, fell like a curtain over her face, and she sighed, her chest hitching as tears tightened her throat in reaction.
“Hey, Promise!” A man’s voice.
She looked up, and her heart skipped in fear. Then calmed.
Mark and Lea were coming across the field from the other direction. Even from a distance, she could sense disapproval…Mark’s disapproval. “What are you doing out here alone?” he said, calling across the remaining distance. “You could get yourself killed!”
But disapproval wouldn’t stop her from hunting the beas
ts that had taken everything from her and from finding her lost heart: her changed little brother. She rubbed a hand across her face and then pulled her hair into a ponytail held by the disheveled pink scrunchie that her mom had given her–the last thing her mom had given her. She squared her shoulders as Mark and Lea came closer and contemplated the new name she’d given herself…Promise.
Until the day I rest in my grave, I will look for him, she thought. The burden she shouldered felt both inevitable and right. I made a promise.
Chapter 2
Promise rode past Willow’s End, conscious of the sun, which seemed to perch along the distant tree line like a phoenix. She was conscious, too, of being very near her former life, when she’d been a girl named Destiny Riser and everything had been normal. The deserted houses and empty streets seemed somehow worse than haunted, and she urged Ash to go faster. His hooves clocked a hollow lament on the highway, and her old neighborhood slipped away behind them as they made their way to the outpost in Wereburg. Tears were drawn across her cheeks, and she wished her memories were as easily left behind.
Jim and Linda Riser, the parents of the girl formerly know as Destiny, had grown up in Wereburg and had started dating in 1963 while still in high school. Jim’s plans of attending community college after graduation were cut short by Linda’s unexpected pregnancy in late 1966. They did what people did–they got married–and Jim got a job at the local grocery store. Destiny’s arrival in June of 1967 coincided with Jim’s first promotion, and the young family was able to take an apartment just off of Town Center in an old Victorian that had been broken up into three residences. The Risers were on the top floor, and Linda kept house while Jim worked at the grocery. She tie-dyed a set of onesies for her baby daughter to match her own tie-dyed mini dresses. Destiny’s cradle was tucked under the eaves in the smallest bedroom. Western sun filled her nursery with a mellow white glow from morning until night.
Destiny was nine by the time her baby brother, Chance, was born. The Risers were by then living in Willow’s End with calm and mostly unthinking satisfaction.
Destiny loved her baby brother deeply at first sight and involved herself in everything from bottle-feeding to diaper changes. It seemed to her that she’d been waiting for him for as long as she could remember. She would sit cradling him without complaint as she watched Little House on the Prairie and daydreamed of being the fourth Ingalls sister. Even her friends weren’t always able to entice her away from time spent with the baby.
Linda and Jim were happily–if somewhat provincially–married. Linda was content to raise Destiny and Chance, and in time, Jim became the manager of the grocery store. As Destiny entered her double-digit pre-teen years, she found her parents to be more boring than infuriating, and she was not prone to the fights that some of her friends had with their parents. There was very little to conflict with them over, as she was a patient and mostly rule-following girl. She loved them dearly even though at times she felt a stirring within herself that was more impatience than pique.
Even her impatience was more with the slow, steady nature of existence, rather than with her parents themselves.
As the seventies became the eighties and Destiny turned thirteen, she started to chafe at the confines of a ‘normal’ family, a ‘normal’ town, a ‘normal’ life…it seemed to her that there must be something more than what she experienced on a daily basis. More than school, sports, homework, and living for weekends where you went to the lake or the movies–but never both in the same weekend. She understood that if she stayed on this trajectory it would turn into work, marriage, housework, children, and living for weekends where you went to the lake or the movies–but never both in the same weekend. There must be more to life than that.
Destiny was close to her mom and at fifteen, she’d broached the subject of her ‘is this all there is?’ feelings. She did so without fear of censure but with a limited ability to express what she felt. A bird who’s lived her entire life with clipped wings may know down deep that she can do something…she’s just not sure what. Her mom had been kind but vague, not really understanding her daughter’s yearnings.
Luckily for Chance, the restless streak in Destiny never turned her attention too far away from him. Even when she was sixteen–1983, the year the world trembled on the edge of the plague but did not yet know it–she’d taken seven-year-old Chance with her almost everywhere she went.
She taught him to catch at the Town Center park and supervised as he fed the ducks in the pond. She helped him with his schoolwork and counseled him on his social interactions. She watched over him when they rode bikes down Route 562, and led him through the woods behind their neighborhood, pointing out interesting things like caterpillars, small lizards, frogs, and spider’s webs woven between branches–everything she knew instinctively he would like.
Destiny and Chance would sit for hours on end at the edge of the lake when they went there as a family on summer weekends. The sun would be hot on their backs, and a steady breeze came off of Lake Ontario, and seagulls called in the sky, hanging suspended like cottage decorations. Other children ran past, screeching, made frantic from the three-foot Pixie Stix bought at the concession stand, but Destiny sat patiently, listening to her baby brother tell her stories of the Smurfs–his latest obsession. Sometimes her thoughts would drift, but she mentally checked in now and again to make sure she didn’t miss any of Gargamel’s evil plans for the obviously delicious little blue people. She did wonder idly if they would ever have an episode where a Smurf was actually eaten.
In the late spring, early summer of 1983, whispers of atrocities outside the scope of believability had finally filtered to Wereburg. By the end of 1983, the news was all bad. Wereburg huddled into itself and planned to wait out the storm the same way they’d gotten through Vietnam: by (hopefully mutual) disregard.
By early 1984 everyone knew, even in Wereburg, that the end–a bitter and bloody end–was a very real possibility. New York City and its outlying areas had fallen first, and outbreaks had been reported in Trenton, Bethlehem, Philadelphia, Reading, Wilmington, Baltimore…the disease was spreading steadily and unchecked.
By then a junior in high school, Destiny listened to the news and the rumors with the same outward signs of fear as her family and friends. But inside, deep enough where she almost didn’t even have to admit it to herself…there came a small shift of excitement.
Something was finally happening.
It was this tiny, blameless, inner thrill that would come back to haunt her with black guilt after the death of her parents.
She rode into town with barely an hour to spare before sunset and made her way to the outpost. As usual, entering the high school was like submerging herself in a cold, dirty pond of memories. She jerked Ash’s rein as they passed the gym, and though she spotted Lea and Mark talking to Mr. West in the wide-open expanse, she hurried past it and to the former classroom that had become her home. She avoided the gym whenever possible.
The classroom was cleared of desks, but the blackboard remained, and a few tattered posters lined the walls. Two cots were currently in use–hers and Lea’s–and a nest of blankets in the far corner along with heavy buckets made it obvious where Ash was kept. Her eyes went to the windows…reinforced and covered over along the bottoms with a slit of glass above showing the bruised Western sky. Night was here and, with it, the vampires.
It still felt weird on her lips and in her ears. Vampires. The word was squirmy and old-fashioned and almost…embarrassing. Vampires conjured visions of white-faced, urbane men with tall collars and blackest capes, swooping in with their twirling eyes to abuse fair maidens. In this era of slash and bash Freddy and Jason movies, vampires were antiquated and uncool, something your grandparents shivered over in the movies in bygone days.
These vampires, though, were anything but Hollywood urbane, despite having come from Manhattan. Crosses, coffins, garlic…a lot of the old folklore turned out to be untrue. These vampires were vacant, bloodth
irsty, inhuman and inhumane and subject to bouts of unparalleled horridness. They acted rabid, and they were voraciously hungry for blood. That was one of the things from the folklore that had turned out to be true. The bloodsucking part.
Not everyone turned into a vampire after they’d been bit, either. Mr. West–her high school earth science teacher and one of the smartest people left in the Burg–had explained that he thought it had something to do with communicability and immunity. If you caught the disease through a bite and were susceptible to it, you became a bloodsucking human leech. If you were immune to the disease, you died from blood loss if the bite was bad enough. According to rumor, some people had been bit and lived through it; mythical half-and-halfs that lived with the disease dormant in their blood. But that rumor seemed to be based more in wishful thinking than actual fact. In Wereburg, they’d never seen anyone who’d survived a bite. Chances were if you were in a situation where a vampire got to you, you were a goner because they were as strong as they were stupid.
Promise pulled the scrunchie from her ponytail, letting her hair cascade like a black waterfall around her shoulders. She considered the scrunchie in her hand and then used it to blot the fresh tears from her eyes. She dropped her head as a heavy black wave of loneliness rolled over her. Distantly, people called to each other in the hallway, but it sounded too far away, unrelated to her.