The Survivor Chronicles: Book 1, The Upheaval by Erica Stevens Read Free Book Online Page B

bottom of a box marked hunting supplies. It actually could have been marked garbage for as often as he’d gone into the woods these past ten years. Once Nellie had been diagnosed with cancer, he’d spent all his free time striving to find some answer, some miracle that would save her. There had been none, at least not for Nellie, but he’d donated a fair amount of his money in the possibility that there might be a miracle for someone else someday.
     
    Al pulled the CB free and retreated back up the stairs. Mary Ellen had abandoned the radio and now paced anxiously from one end of the room to the other.
     
    “Does it still work?” she inquired.
     
    “We’re going to find out.” He placed it on the table and settled onto the couch. It had been years since he’d used the thing, he wasn’t sure he’d remember how, or that the batteries were still good. But static filtered out when he turned it on and began to move through the channels. Mary Ellen hovered restlessly nearby, but the other woman had still not vacated her spot by the window. He was looking to connect with someone, anyone, but there seemed to be no one out there as he was greeted with nothing but static and silence.
     
    He turned it off, unwilling to drain the battery, but also unwilling to give up on it just yet. He might get a better response somewhere else. He looked over at Mary Ellen. She was visibly pale; her hands shook as she pushed back a loose strand of chestnut brown hair and tucked it behind her ear.
     
    “It’s getting strange out there,” the other woman muttered.
     
    Al exchanged a look with Mary Ellen. “Getting?” she inquired in disbelief.
     
    The woman turned away from the window, and her lower lip began to tremble. “Yeah.”
     
    Al didn’t like the sound of that, or the look of the woman. He placed the CB down and rose to his feet as Mary Ellen stepped next to the window and pulled the other curtain back. He stood beside her, staring out at the darkening day. It was still early in the morning, the sun was somewhere behind his house, but the shadows were all wrong. It shouldn’t be this dark.
     
    “What are they doing?” the woman inquired.
     
    It was how her attention was engrossed on something across the street that alerted him to the fact that the darkening sky wasn’t the strangest thing occurring right now. His focus became riveted on the sidewalk across the street. In all of his seventy-two years, including the five years he had spent watching his wife waste away, he had never seen anything quite as terrifying as what he witnessed now.
     
    Across the street, lined up in a perfect row, were a collection of dogs from the neighborhood. They sat in a straight line, and although their gazes were directed on his house, it seemed as if they somehow saw through the house to whatever was causing the darkness behind them to grow. Their tails and ears were pricked. They didn’t move, didn’t bark, drool or wag. There were large dogs and small ones, there were even a few he wasn’t entirely sure were domesticated. There were about twenty of them in total, sitting, staring.
     
    Al’s breath hissed out of him, Mary Ellen released the curtain, letting it settle back into place as she stepped to the side to peer through the opening left by the drapes. “What are they doing?” she whispered.
     
    “Nothing good. I’m certain of it,” the woman answered.
     
    There were still people out there, and though most of them seemed to have started noticing the dogs, there were still some who were walking around in a dazed oblivion. He wanted to open the door and yell at them to run, to get away. But he couldn’t bring his feet to move. A young man, holding a hand to his bleeding cheek bumped into a Husky, but the dog didn’t move. The man staggered back, stared at the dogs for a minute, and then turned and bolted down the street. Al held his breath, waiting to see if the dogs would take off after him and attack.
     
    They