Darkest Before Dawn (A Guardian's Diary Book 1)

Darkest Before Dawn

A Guardian’s Diary Series

Written by Amelia Hutchins

Darkest Before Dawn

A Guardian’s Diary Series

Copyright © October 14, 2014 by Amelia Hutchins

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Amazon Edition

This book both in its entirety and in portions is the sole property of

Amelia Hutchins

Darkest Before Dawn Copyright ©2014 by Amelia Hutchins. 

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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Cover Art Design:  Vera DC Digital Art & Photography

Cover Art Illustrations:  Vera DC Digital Art & Photography

Copyright © October 14, 2014 Amelia Hutchins

Edited and Formatting: E & F Editing Services

Copy Editor: Gina Tobin

Published by: Amelia Hutchins

Published in (United States of America)

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Darkest Before Dawn

A Guardian’s Diary Series

Written by Amelia Hutchins

Going through an apocalyptic event doesn’t mean the end of the world.

My dad is a modern day Noah, you know building an ark, trying to save folks and getting my brother, and I ready for the impending end of days – whatever that means.

Nothing in his prepper manuals had us ready for what actually happened.

I had nothing to prepare me for Jaden and Lachlan. Heck, I don’t know of any girl that would have been prepared for those two.

There was nothing to prepare us for the things that go bump in the night or zombies, although now that I think on it, zombies might have been easier to deal with than what really happened. No, an apocalyptic event is just a set-up for things in our world to be shaken
and
stirred.

What will rise from the ruins remains to be seen.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the fans for their continual support and unwavering trust. To everyone who helped this book be all it could be, and more. To the family who moved on to greener pastures, God Speed. And last but not least, to the bloggers who give us endless hours of their time and are just truly amazing. You are the reason little authors can make their big dreams come true.

Also by Amelia Hutchins

The Fae Chronicles

Fighting Destiny (Book One)

Taunting Destiny (Book Two)

Escaping Destiny (Book Three)

Warning!

This book is not suitable for anyone under the age of eighteen. This book is intended for those who enjoy dark humor, and a wild ride. There is adult language and scene’s that may leave you tying up your partner and making him or her, very happy. This book is a series, but has a happy for now ending. There are no zombies in this book, but should my imagination place a few in the next book, do not worry, I will kill them off shortly. Not intended for anyone who doesn’t enjoy being taken for plot turning, panty soaking, and edge of your seat wild ride.

Prologue

Some things will stay with me forever. Some things I wish I could forget. Those days—when it all began early last spring—are a big block of memories that I would like to hit delete on and start over.

The news had run on a nightmarish, surreal loop. Terrifying stories of the fast moving virus and the devastation it had left behind. The World Health Organization as well as The Center for Disease Control had been at a loss because this virus spread so quickly that within a week, at least half our nation’s population was wiped out. Other countries hadn’t fared any better than ours did. With time passing, and no cure in sight, the government made an announcement; those who hadn’t been infected should seek shelter and avoid other humans, or anyone they might suspect of being infected.

I was one of the lucky ones, but only because my father had been prepping for the end of days since my mother had been killed almost ten years ago. He had been working on an underground bunker, one large enough to sustain our entire town. Like the Old Testament stories of Noah, most of the town’s people thought he was crazy. Guess who’s laughing now? Not my dad, that’s for sure. I would often catch him mumbling something about the whole thing being a criminal shame. 

He trained me and my brother mercilessly in survival techniques for years before the virus hit, almost like he knew something we didn’t. Not too long ago, he went out in search of help, and we haven’t heard from him since. I suspect his kindness was his undoing. I was left with my brother, my best friend, and a handful of those who listened to my dad. We have added to our count survivors from all across the country; however, I would only take in those who I felt I could trust.

I don’t trust easily, not since I witnessed acts of violence that were so grotesque and inhuman that I spewed my lunch soon after. Basic services such as public utilities and emergency services broke down within weeks of the virus outbreak. Random gangs roam the countryside and no one is safe anymore. We save who we can, but every day it grows more desperate, and I often question why we are prolonging the inevitable.

Someone once told me that silence was golden. They lied. It’s deafening. There are no planes in the skies, no kids in the parks playing, no car horns blaring anymore. Although my father warned me what the aftermath to an event like this would be like, the reality is far different than the theory.

A few weeks after the virus left millions dead, news of other creatures roaming the land hit the radio. At first we thought it was a joke, but then I wondered why anyone would joke about something like this after the virus. We chose to ignore it, because our minds just couldn’t comprehend it.

Not until I met him.

He is my salvation, and my damnation. He watches me, and he’s not like anyone I have ever met before. Maybe I’d been waiting for him? Maybe fate works that way, because until him, I never cared what anyone thought of me, but I would find myself watching for him. I would actually go out of the shelter, just hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

If I had known then what I did now, I mean really
believed
that life as I knew it would forever be changed, I’d have taken a chance with him sooner. Maybe I wouldn’t have been afraid of living, or loving. I found out the hard way that life really is too short to hold back and constantly second-guess yourself.

In my darkest hour, he was my dawn. His kind is dangerous, but in the world we now live in, he was and is my best chance of survival. Other creatures exist, and while I’ve made a choice to accept it, I haven’t always found that acceptance came comfortably or easily. Each new revelation I discovered would shake my foundation a little more than the last. To keep those I care for alive, and thriving, I’ll have to do so much more than I could have before. Still, my darkest hour is yet to come, and I’ll keep fighting until we’ve won.

I’m getting ahead of myself. For you to understand it all, we need to start at the beginning. The day the virus hit our town. The day the world as I knew it ceased to be, and a new world began.

Chapter 1

The day the virus came to town.

“You can’t be serious,” Addy laughed.

“Dead serious,” I said as I checked my watch for the fifth time. Grayson would be out of school in the next hour, which meant my shopping buddy needed to move her ass.

“So how many more hours of clinical do you have?”

“Five, and then I start an internship at the hospital. I worked my schedule around Grayson, but I’m hoping Dad will snap out of his prepper state and man up.”

“You know that won’t happen,” she said as she grabbed popcorn and turned to head to the dairy aisle. “So, what’s he say about that virus?”

The virus was bad, and the news was just depressing. Rh Viridae or ‘Pacers Flu’ had hit Europe hard; hospitals there were overflowing with the sick and the morgues couldn’t keep up with the dead. “He says it’s the end of days, but he said that about the war in Afghanistan, too. I just hope they find a cure for it before it can get this far.”

“Chocolate, or no chocolate?” she asked as she wiggled her eyebrows.

“You have to ask?” I mocked.

“You’re right,” she said as she added a few bars to basket. “So, is he all prepping or…”

“Or,” I said as I reached for a gallon of milk, and put a few cartons of yogurt into the cart. I was still dressed in my plain blue scrubs from the hospital, which did nothing for my figure. I caught Miss Smith watching me, her eyes narrowed on the items in my cart.

She was one of the teachers at the high school, and had always struck me as pretentiously prim and proper. She’d also been the one to report my father to Child Protective Services because she believed Grayson would have been better raised by a ‘normal’ family, instead of our little broken one. I gave her a sharp look before I purposely added more flavors into the cart.

I had been failing school back then, so I knew where she had been coming from. Did I care? Nope. He was my family, and while my dad seemed crazy to everyone else, I knew he had his reasons for what he did. He wanted to protect us, and I think it was his way of coping with my mother’s death. He’d started his prepping the week after her funeral.

I’d only been eleven when she had been brutally gunned down and killed in a robbery gone wrong. It had been a low point in our lives, but we’d dealt with it. Grayson was only two when she’d been killed, so to him, she was just gone. He’d been a surprise to my parents who thought they couldn’t have any more children. Hence the huge age gap. He was twelve now, and in fifth grade. I pretty much raised him, and so far, I think I’ve done a good job of it.

Grayson was a normal twelve year old boy. He got in trouble once in a while, but managed to keep his grades up. Unlike me, he had more than one friend, and was outgoing. I was more of an introvert. I loved Addy, but I had never been much of a social butterfly. I was driven, and had plans.

“We should invite some guys over tonight. Dillon has been asking about you. You know he likes you. I don’t see why you keep refusing to go out with him.”

“He isn’t interested in me, he’s only interested in something new,” I said dropping Captain Crunch cereal into the cart. “I think he has three more to go until he beats Brad’s score.”

The problem with small towns was everyone knew what everyone was doing. I have to agree with my dad sometimes when he says that boys act like some sort of weird species that are best avoided until they grow out of the phase where the little head does more thinking than the big one. In a small town, their competiveness can take on a bizarre twist.  Brad and Dillon were best friends, and we’d gone to high school with them. Dillon had chased me up until Candace had moved to town. He immediately stopped chasing me and started chasing after her, right up until she gave it up to him. The very next day he was after me again. “I’m not interested in being used.”

“It’s just having fun, for crying out loud,” she mumbled as we headed to the register with her back a little stiffer than it had been. “You should try it sometime.”

“No way on the Dillon thing, and there’s a ton of things I know I’d find to be more fun. Half of our graduating class is hopeless! They barely managed to graduate because most of them already had children. Look at Tabitha, she slept with Dillon and nine months later she’s jobless, a mother, and on welfare. Worst of all, I know she was on birth control because I was there at the clinic when she got the shot. I just don’t get why people would play with their lives like that. There is so much more out there, and we can do anything we want to. A child or a disease is so not on my to-do list right now.”

“Are you done preaching yet?” Addy said as she turned to look for anyone to ring us up. “Where the heck is everybody?” she asked and I looked around the store.

The clerks were gathered around a TV monitor at the far end of the store. I tilted my head to see what had them careless enough to the leave the registers unattended. There was a beautiful news lady on the monitor, with what looked to be a hospital behind her that was taped off with bright yellow quarantine tape, and workers busy setting up barricades.

I left my cart and moved closer until I could make out what was being said.

“At one o’clock, the Deaconess Hospital announced it had eight new cases of Rh Viridae and out of the eight cases, only one patient remains alive. The CDC is asking that only those with life threatening emergencies come to the emergency room, and those who can manage it, to go to Sacred Heart and avoid Deaconess at this time. Patients inside Deaconess are being secured in their rooms while the emergency room is being locked down to prevent the flu from spreading. Again, they are asking that you avoid Deaconess and seek other hospitals …” she continued on, but I was done listening.

“Ray? Can you ring us up? Please?” I asked one of the cashiers.

“Oh, sorry, Emma, I got caught up watching the news. Can you believe this? New York and Florida are reporting that a ton of folks have already died overnight. They’re saying the flu that was in Europe is here in the States now.” He gestured back at the monitors as he walked with us to his register.

“Crazy,” I answered while a shiver ran up my spine.

“They say it’s moving really fast, just like it did in Europe,” he continued.

“Crazy,” I said again, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

I waited for Addy to get through with checking out before I paid for my groceries and we loaded our few items into her car. “Can you drive me by the school? I want to get Grayson and get him home. I have a bad feeling about this.”

Addy looked at me cautiously as she tossed her purse in the car and pulled her long blonde curls into a ponytail. “Should we be worried?”

“They were watching a reporter from Spokane,” I explained.

“Shit,” she said as she slid into the driver seat of her Volkswagen bug which she had named Satan. The car was named aptly, since it had a tendency to break down when she needed it the most. “Yeah, let’s go grab him. You think we should go buy more food?”

“No, I think we should get him and then get home. Dad is probably at the shelter already. Might be a good idea to grab some things and meet him there.”

“Emma, give it to me straight. No bullshitting!”

“I’m starting to think my father was right to prep, and I think we should get Grayson and your parents to the shelter, right now.”

“My mom’s in Spokane with my dad; he’s getting another treatment at Deaconess.”

My heart chose that moment to plummet to my stomach. I had a feeling that this flu was something bad, really bad. “Try to call them when we get to the school, you can use my phone.”

I took out my phone from the side pocket of my purse and checked the list of missed calls and voicemail messages. I hit the play button on the first one, and listened to my father as he barked out orders like any good drill sergeant. “Emmalyn, this is your father,” duh, Dad, “I picked up Grayson, where the hell are you!? Get to the house and grab your bags; have Addy do the same.  I packed one for her and put it in your closet last week. Tell her I reached her mom, and she’s fine. She’s with her dad, and he has to stay overnight because of the quarantine order. She said for us to take Addy with us, and she’d keep in touch…” the message ended so I clicked on the next, “Grab a gun from the house, use the back way to get to the shelter, and be careful.”

“Change of plans, head to my house, Addy. Your parents are stuck at Deaconess, but they want you to come with us. Your mom says they’re fine, but stuck until they lift the order.”

“What order?” she asked as she flipped the bug around and headed back in the direction we’d just come from.

“Quarantine; they have him at the hospital so he’s probably started his chemo.”

Fuckitty fuck! Chemo took your defenses against viruses down because it killed your immune system. Her father was stuck at Deaconess, where the news lady had been reporting from. I did my best to keep the worry I felt from showing. Addy was delicate already from her dad’s cancer coming back, but this would make her strong façade crumble.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Means they are playing it safe, and trying to keep him away from the flu.”

At my house, we both jumped out of the car and headed inside. It was quiet, with the exception of the television which had the news on. My dad must have forgotten it when he bugged out with Grayson to the shelter. I walked over to it quickly and turned it off. “You want to grab some movies and I’ll grab the bags?”

“Sure,” she said, and I smiled reassuringly. We’d been through drills before. Not like this though, and I had a bone-deep worry that this time was different than the other bug-outs we’d done. Addy had been a true friend staying with me even when my father ran drills daily. At the most random of times, he’d make us practice escaping to the shelter.

Even though most of the kids we’d grown up with had made me the brunt of their jokes, she’d stood beside me and defended me when the need arose, and I loved her for it. The jerk-weeds didn’t tease me just because they thought my dad was crazy. No, my hair had that weird orangey thing going on as a kid. Fortunately, I’d grown out of that and it was now more of a long strawberry-blonde mess that was always in my way. Them thinking my dad was nuts wasn’t anything I could grow out of, though. I walked down the long hallway and into my room, where I threw open the closet door and grabbed both of the heavy bug-out bags. I opened mine and tossed a few more clothes in, then gave my room a quick once-over.

I wasted no time in heading to the safe where the handguns were kept, and punched in the code. I stuck one of the guns in the back waistband of my pants, and added back-up ammo clips to each of my pockets, then closed the safe and picked up the bags. I stopped in the hallway, and set the bags back down before I grabbed some of the photo albums my mother had made; they held some of the only photos with her and Grayson in them.

I met Addy by the door to the pantry and smiled as she held up bags of snacks for Grayson which I’d implemented in the last bug-out we’d had. There was nothing worse than a cranky preteen who had to go without his snacks and was convinced he was going to have to eat MREs. Together we headed back to the car.

“Did you want to stop by your house?” I asked.

“No, this is a drill, only a drill,” she snapped, and I lifted my eyes to hers.

“You sure? We could stop for you to grab a few things. Just in case; you never know, right?” I hated that she was going to say no. I knew it before she answered.

“No, it’s only a drill. It won’t hit us like it did Europe. This is the United freaking States!”

I didn’t point out that Europe had amazing medical facilities, or that they had some of the most skilled doctors on the planet. She was grasping for straws and I understood why. Her parents were in a hospital that was currently under quarantine for a deadly virus. They were in the eye of the storm, and her brother was in the Army. He was currently deployed to Iraq, and on his second tour.

“I love you, bitch,” I said and watched as her lips curved into a soft smile.

“Love you too, whore,” she said, and started the car.

“You know, I’m not sure you can call me that.”

“I know you well enough that I can call you whatever I want. I know you are a whore deep inside where it counts. Just because you don’t advertise your deviant ways, doesn’t mean I don’t know the real you,” she snarked with a mischievous glint in her soft brown eyes.

I smiled back, even though I was consumed with worry for my family and hers.

We hit the highway just in time. I looked over at the town of Newport as shit hit the fan. Cars were lined up, and it looked like some of the people from town were heading out. Why would they leave Newport? It was less likely to be swamped with infected people, and yet it seemed like they were all heading to Spokane from the looks of it.

I looked over to Addy who also noticed the line of traffic, and I wondered what she was thinking. Fortunately, she normally voiced her opinion pretty loudly, so I didn’t have to wonder what was on her mind for very long.

“They’re idiots. All of them.”

Blunt and to the point; yet another reason why she was my best friend. I closed my eyes and sent a silent prayer that this would pass. We made it to the shelter in record time, and I smiled as I mentally high-fived Addy for being so vigilant through the bug-out drills we’d endured through the years.

The shelter was an abandoned missile silo my father had purchased from the government. When he got it, the silo had been nothing more than piece of crap metal fortress. It now had solar panels, and my dad had paid to have the well that fed it cleaned and rebuilt. It had over a hundred rooms, and seventeen levels. Most of the levels had rooms with sleeping quarters, but some of the floors he’d used to store food, ammo, weapons and pretty much anything else you’d need to sustain life for quite a few years in the event of an all-out emergency.

“Thank God!” My dad wrapped his arms around me the moment I stepped from the car and smacked a wet kiss to my forehead. “I was so worried,” he continued and then did the same to Addy. He grabbed the heavy bags as we grabbed the groceries. Inside, Grayson was reading and looked a little pissed off, but he’d always hated being pulled from school for anything related to the shelter.

Cool kids didn’t bug-out.

I smiled as he raised his eyes and waved. “Dad pulled me out of school. Again.”

“If he hadn’t, I would have this time, buddy,” I said as I walked to the makeshift kitchen all the way down the hall, through three other rooms. Dad hadn’t made this place for comfort, and that had been his reply every time I’d complained about the kitchen being so far from the media room, as I referred to it. Addy followed me, and helped me get the food put away.

I sat on the counter while she prepared popcorn smothered with extra butter, and grabbed the wine from the refrigerator. We were so close to the twenty-one milestone that Dad would indulge us once in a while as long as it wasn’t done without him present. She poured three cups, and once the popcorn was done, we headed for the media room.

Dad had locked us in, and I knew nothing from outside could get in unless we let it in. The door to the shelter had three layers, and the outer, being the strongest, was made to withstand pretty much everything. Inside the main room was a large table that had a few old computers built into it which were pretty basic and controlled much of the shelter’s functions. There was also a flat panel TV that was digital, but according to Dad if the grid went down, so too would the internet and our visual link to the outside.