Last Fight of the Valkyries
Read Last Fight of the Valkyries Online
Authors: E.E. Isherwood
Last Fight of the
Valkyries:
Sirens
of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 4
© 2016 E.E. Isherwood. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
businesses, companies, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
History has all the excitement of a haunted jack-in-the-box.
A few turn the handle. A few try to stop it. Most just look away.
And sometimes, what comes out surprises us all.
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E.E. Isherwood [April 2016]
Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse Series
Since the Sirens
Siren Songs
Stop the Sirens
Last Fight of the Valkyries
Zombies vs. Polar Bears
(June, 2016)
Zombies Ever After
(Working title, August,
2016)
of Books 1-3
This note is for readers who have skipped the first three books,
or need a quick refresher. If you intend to go back and read them,
you might want to avoid this summary. However, I don't think this
will give away anything major in the plot beyond what's in the book
descriptions on Amazon. It's designed to give a basic framework of
the
Since the Sirens
universe so this next book has a context.
Since the Sirens
introduces Martinette Peters (104) and her
great-grandson Liam (15). Together they decide their best bet is to
escape the city of St. Louis at the start of the Zombie Apocalypse,
rather than hunker down in her home and ride it out. A majority of
the middle part of the book is spent in and around the Gateway Arch
in the city's downtown, where Liam meets a slightly older teen girl
named Victoria (17). The last third of the book takes place on a
freight train trying to get clear of the swarming zombies. They head
south to Liam's parents' house in the suburbs.
Siren Songs
picks up as they enter the suburbs. When they
finally reach the house, Liam's parents aren't there. A horde of
zombies arrive and rip the place apart, but Liam and Grandma are
saved by a group of CDC agents led by a man named Douglas Hayes. Liam
discovers how the government is trying to find a cure. He learns
there are multiple types of zombies and that only people who are over
100 years old have some kind of resistance to the virus. His elderly
grandma becomes a target for those tests, and she is whisked away by
researchers at the end of the book.
Stop the Sirens
centers around Liam and Victoria as they
come to grips with the kidnapping of Grandma. The kids eventually
find the research base where she is being held, and arrive just after
a serious battle had taken place among several competing factions of
the United States government inside that building. An agent of a
secretive bureaucratic agency called the National Internal Security
(NIS) reveals it was the President who authorized the release of the
plague. He wanted to wipe out a movement called the Patriot
Snowball—a group of angry citizens marching from Colorado to
Washington D.C., but it spread everywhere. The book ends with Liam,
Victoria, and the now-rescued Grandma walking up a collapsed span of
highway to the sight of a military vehicle called an MRAP. It's
filled with their allies. This is also the same moment that begins
book 4.
There is a persistent sub-plot involving Grandma Marty throughout
the first three books. When she sleeps she has visions/dreams
involving her deceased husband. She wants to believe he's an angel
protecting her because some of his help could be construed as
religious-inspired miracle-working, but Marty comes to suspect he is
something else. Possibly it's as simple as she's losing her mind...
There you have it. A very top-level overview of almost 900 pages
of material—kind of reminds me of college. Now, get ready to
see where Liam, Victoria, and Grandma Marty are going next. I hope
it's as much a surprise to you as the reader as it was for me as the
author.
E.E. Isherwood
of Contents
Chapter 1: A Day at the Ballpark
Chapter 2: Grandma Dreams of Blue
Chapter 4: Ghosts of the Colonel
Chapter 6: Grandma Dreams of Pink
Chapter 10: Grandma Dreams of Black
Chapter 11: Voices in the Dark
Zombies vs. Polar Bears
Prologue
Sample of
Post Apocalyptic Ponies
Grandma
Six months before the sirens.
The phone rang.
Marty woke with the feel of electricity coursing through her body.
She wrote it off to how she fell asleep in her soft chair—her
neck was tilted to the side a little too far. She let the call go to
her answering machine as she always did.
“Would you like me to pick up?” Angie yelled from the
kitchen.
“Oh no, dear, let it go to the computer.”
Marty knew it wasn't really a computer with a keyboard and a fancy
monitor, but she thought anything “hi tech” was a
computer of some sort. The little box had buttons and a screen and
blinking lights—a lot like a computer.
It beeped as the announcement played, “Hello, this is the
residence of Mrs. Marty Peters, please leave a message and she'll try
to call you back.” That was Angie's voice—the woman in
the kitchen and also Marty's full-time live-in nurse who stayed in
the flat above her. She agreed to do the greeting message for Marty
because her voice was getting so weak. Marty had recently turned 104
years old, and was starting to feel her age catching up. Last year,
she might have tried to get out of her comfortable chair and pick up
the telephone, but now—it was just easier to let the computer
do all the heavy lifting.
Normally she'd have the handset of her cordless phone sitting next
to her, but it was still early in the morning and Angie hadn't been
able to get all her morning chores done down here yet. Getting Marty
set up with all her sewing equipment, reading glasses, and even the
telephone, were still on her to-do list. She was currently making
breakfast.
As the answering machine clicked over, Marty listened in, “Hello
Grandma. Uh, listen, I need to talk to you when you get a chance. I
got a call from my mom and she has some things going on in Colorado
that concern all of us. I don't really want to talk about it on the
phone.” The voice hesitated for several seconds. “Just
being safe is all. I'll be over this afternoon. Love to Angie. Talk
soon.”
A beep closed out the transaction.
Marty stared thoughtfully across the room to the machine now
flashing a little number one at her. Her eyesight was still quite
good. The man on the call was her grandson, and he was referring to
her daughter-in-law, Rose, who had just won an election to a
congressional seat in her home state of Colorado. Marty had about as
much interest in politics as she did computers, but something in the
tone of Jerry's voice told her this would be no ordinary meeting.
Just being safe.
She pulled out her rosary and began to pray for guidance, but
before she got into it, she had a premonition of a sort. A
deja
vu
? No, it felt like the
start
of something, but it made
no sense though it continued for a minute like a daydream.
I saw Liam and three young girls. All with guns!
“Will Jerry be stopping by, Grandma?” Even Angie, her
54-year-old nurse, called her Grandma. Everyone did, and she was OK
with that.
The question startled her out of her reverie.
“Oh. Yes. Jerry will be stopping by after lunch.”
“Will he have his tools? My door is sticky again.” It
was a running joke between them. That door would never be straight.
Marty couldn't reply right away. She felt that surge of energy
leaving her. She gripped the beads a little tighter, worried her time
had finally come. The vision of her great-grandson and those girls
was unlike anything she'd experienced in her many years. It was like
a waking dream. Her thoughts turned dark as she recalled horrible
scenes of kids with swords, guns, and lots of dead people. She was a
spiritual woman to the core. How such evil scenes could come from
inside her was a mystery.
The end is coming for me.
“He's always prepared, Anj.”
“He sure is,” she shouted, “you're lucky to have
him around.”
Angie cooking. A call from her grandson. A vision of her
great-grandson.
She couldn't imagine a busier morning.
1: A Day at the Ballpark
Liam Peters was shirtless and soaked. He'd just survived a
perilous swim in the Mississippi, followed by a harrowing escape from
a massive pile of wreckage floating in that river. By his estimation,
they consumed quite a few miracles as they made it from a boat on one
side of the river, into the water, onto the wreckage, then to the
safety of shore. For most of the journey he'd hauled his 104-year-old
great-grandmother Martinette (Marty) Peters on his back. He was
assisted by Victoria Hennessey, his girlfriend. In fact, they'd all
been running, dodging, and escaping one problem after another for the
past couple weeks. Pretty much every moment since the sirens ended
the world and the zombies poured forth.
But that was all in the past. They'd reached this moment when
rescue was finally at hand. As part of their recent tribulations,
their friends had come into the possession of a military truck called
an MRAP. Built for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a large
six-wheeled vehicle structurally designed to deflect improvised
explosive devices left by insurgents over in those hellholes. Here in
America, it was nearly invincible. And it was waiting for them half a
football field away.
“Grandma, we're saved.”
As he said it, a sheet of newspaper drifted up and over the edge
of the bridge when a stiff breeze caught it and blew it directly
toward him—along with the stench of death from the city below.
He swatted it with his free hand, but missed. It planted itself on
his chest.
The newspaper was a single sheet—the front page—and it
was filled with headlines, but almost no descriptive text underneath.
The only photo was a black and white snapshot of the Gateway Arch,
from a time that had to be before it was overrun with refugees and
zombies. The edition was obviously rushed.
The biggest words were at the top. The headline caught his
attention, as intended. “CURE FOUND!” It was one of the
few articles that had any text. “CDC promises vaccine. Stay
indoors. Stay calm.”
He laughed. He had the inside track on that imaginary vaccine.
A cursory look at the other articles gave him similarly curt
titles. “Domestic Terrorists Blamed.” “Stocks
Fall.” “Pols point fingers over failed response.”
“Pope says not Rapture.”
“I guess the zombies won.” He tossed the paper away.
The wind carried it down the highway. Too late, he wondered what date
was on the paper. It seemed trivial, but he was curious how long the
papers still managed to print.
The sheet floated over the MRAP to points beyond. It drew his eye
as it fluttered.
“Liam, look ahead,” Victoria said with a quiver in her
voice.
It didn't need to be said. All three of them could see the mass of
zombies coming onto the raised highway, not too far beyond the MRAP.
The infected were coming up from the city, which had been swarming
with them. Now, as if released, they began fleeing the
downtown—heading anywhere but there.
Liam and Victoria held Grandma Marty between them as they walk-ran
her toward the truck. Ahead, the rear doors opened and a few men
piled out. And a few boys.