No Good Deed: A Sheriff Duke Story (Forgotten Fallout Book 2) Read online

  No Good Deed

  Forgotten Fallout. A Sheriff Duke Story. Book Two.

  M.R. Forbes

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Thank you for reading!

  Other Books By M.R Forbes

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  The traveler opened her eyes.

  The sky was visible above her, a million stars shining down. Even after so many years, she looked on them with an edge of wonder and amazement. So many galaxies. So many worlds. A universe so large nobody would ever know every secret, and would never see every corner.

  A pressure in her head changed the thought against her will. Did she even have a will of her own anymore? She fought the answer to that question and the strength of the voice behind it. It wasn’t true. Was it?

  The Relyeh would cross the entire universe. They would visit every world. They would find every intelligent race.

  And they would subdue it.

  That was their destiny. Their reason. Their purpose. Their hunger.

  The pressure in her head. Its name was Keshk. It was a Relyeh khoron, once called an Observer in the days before the trife came. Its kind hadn’t always been part of the Hunger. Many thousands of years before, they were one of the intelligent life forms the Relyeh discovered during their conquest of the stars. They lived on a water world, an aquatic parasitic species who used their long, thin tendrites to seize control of more powerful creatures and use them to do their will. Through this manipulation, they built vast underwater cities and a culture rich in history and philosophy. They were a peaceful race.

  Until the Relyeh came.

  They conquered the khoron. They took them from the sea. They manipulated them, breeding them in captivity. Changing them into Relyeh. Keeping the parts they could use and discarding the rest.

  There was no more history. No more philosophy. The great cities were all gone. All that remained was servitude to the great ancients. The offspring of the planet-sized Old One.

  All that remained was the hunger.

  Through Keshk, Grace knew these things to be true, though she couldn’t see its water world in her mind or any details about it. That information was stored in the Relyeh Collective. Accessible, but only with a distant view, like looking directly at the sun.

  “You’re awake,” Cain said.

  Grace turned her head to the side. Cain was still one of the largest men she had ever seen—over two meters tall and thick with muscle. He had a head of dense, curly hair that joined with a rough, full beard covering most of his face. He wore a heavy leather coat over a faded t-shirt with the letters AC/DC written across the chest, along with leather pants and huge boots handmade by Shurrath’s worshippers.

  He carried an old military pistol on his left hip, and a large hatchet on his right, though both looked diminutive against his frame. He was a terrifying presence wherever he went.

  Grace’s fear of him had kept her out of his reach for almost two years. She had traveled so much of the old United States in search of her father, looking for the place both he and Shurrath had chosen to call home. She had managed to stay one step ahead of the big man, always aware he was on her tail. Always ready to bolt away when he arrived.

  Until she couldn’t stay ahead of him another day.

  Until she got too close to the place she had spent the last ten years seeking.

  Until she had died.

  Dead and reborn. Her body resurrected by Keshk after Cain’s partner Dodge managed to get the drop on her. Remembering her father’s painful struggle to keep from breaking completely in the years following his subjugation to Shurrath—in the years when Shurrath was still finding his footing on this new world—she would have preferred to stay dead.

  The Relyeh ancient was an infant compared to his siblings and as such controlled very few planets. He had little to offer to the genetic pool or the Collective. Little to trade with his siblings to increase his supply to match his appetite. And he had arrived here almost by accident, after an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Axon.

  The pressure on Grace’s mind increased. She wasn’t allowed to know more than that. The Relyeh’s secrets belonged to them, and she would never have more than a thousand-kilometer view.

  She didn’t need it. She recognized the threat the Relyeh presented to Earth, even after one of their number had already started the process of converting her. Humankind was hurting, broken and beaten, but not defeated. Not completely. There were still good people in the world. Good men who were standing up to Shurrath.

  She winced, the thought blocked by sudden, intense pain. She wasn’t allowed to think like that. She wasn’t allowed to resist.

  “Still trying to fight it?” Cain said, noticing her reaction. “You’re so damn stubborn, Grace.”

  “That’s how my daddy raised me,” she replied, angry at her inability to master herself.

  “Even your father serves Shurrath.”

  “My father is Shurrath,” she said.

  That was the rub of the whole situation. She had spent years looking for her father with the belief he had put her in stasis to save her life so that when she came out, she could find and kill him. She had maintained that belief for the last ten years, even as she became a wanderer and hunter. A Ronin. That’s what Graves had called her. She liked the title.

  But that truth was a lie. Shurrath wanted her where she was right now. Under his control. Older, smarter, stronger. A survivor. The Relyeh didn’t suffer the weak for anything but food. The strong became part of their vast armies, dozens of races working in unison through the Collective to continue the advance across the universe. She couldn’t imagine it, but she could feel it.

  I hunger.

  She growled softly, trying to fight that voice. It was steadily increasing in power, becoming harder to resist with each passing hour. The need to feed on fear and pain, to breathe in the pheromones of terror and replenish the strength of the khoron inside her. The Relyeh ancients had learned quickly that all living things shared a handful of basic emotions, and of them fear was the strongest. It was what they needed to survive, and with it they would live forever.

  “No. Your father was Shurrath.”

  “He still is. Shurrath may have left him, but his mark is still there. His alterations
are still there. My father can never be the same.”

  “None of us can.”

  “How did he entice you?” Grace asked. “I always wondered, but I couldn’t exactly ask. A man your size is difficult to subdue.”

  “Not when you fall for the wrong woman,” Cain replied. “She was a follower of Shurrath. I didn’t know anything about it at the time. We had sex. I fell asleep. She placed Vorsk in the bed with me. We battled for weeks, the khoron and me. I was strong. He was stronger. Now we’re the strongest together.”

  “And you believe in Shurrath’s way?”

  “I do,” Cain said without hesitation. “The old world is dead. The one you grew up in is gone. I fought for my freedom. To continue taking advantage of the world as it is. But Shurrath offers so much more. I know you feel it by now. It’s better than sex.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never had sex.”

  Cain laughed. “A woman like you? I find that hard to believe.”

  “It wasn’t important to me. I had bigger things to worry about.”

  “Finding your father.”

  “And killing him.”

  “One out of two isn’t bad. Killing him now wouldn’t help you, anyway.”

  “I know. Shurrath didn’t let me see him.”

  “What would be the point? He isn’t what you remember. Not at all.”

  “Then you’ve seen him?”

  “Once, a long time ago. Right before you came out of hibernation. Shurrath shed him a long time ago, but you’re right. He’s still a Relyeh. He’s too changed ever to be otherwise.”

  “He still has to die.”

  “If you insist. But you won’t be the one to do it.”

  “I’ll find a way to fight this.”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times. You won’t.”

  Grace stared at Cain. Then she got to her feet, facing him. She wanted to grab the microspear on her hip and jab it into his chest. She wanted to kill the khoron inside him and be rid of him once and for all.

  She managed to get her hand on the weapon. Cain raised an eyebrow at the movement while the pressure built in her head. She fought against it, lifting the spear out of its loop and raising it into an overhand stab in front of Cain. He didn’t try to stop her. He stood up, moving closer, positioning himself within easy reach of the weapon.

  “You can’t do it,” Cain said.

  Tears burned her eyes. She strained against the pressure. The khoron inside her wouldn’t allow her to bring the weapon down. Allow. The idea of the imprisonment added to her anger. Her father had warned her about the khoron in the moments when Shurrath was too weak to control him. And she knew from that experience that it was his love for her that had saved her, both in the classroom after the idiot in charge of the research team, Riley Valentine, had infected him to see what would happen, and in the years that followed before he could no longer keep her safe.

  She knew Valentine and her team had made it off the planet on one of the generation ships. They hadn’t given a shit about Earth at that point. Not when the world leaders had already determined the planet was lost. So why not allow an alien enemy a new foothold? It didn’t matter anymore.

  Or so they thought.

  They didn’t understand the purpose of the trife. Of the virus or the war. They still didn’t. The trife were farmers tending a crop, not weak-minded substitutes for the zombies popular in movies and television before the war.

  But she was a zombie of sorts now, wasn’t she? A human under the control of a parasite, driven by an internal hunger.

  Not for brains, but for fear.

  The thought sickened her, churning in her stomach. That had always been her fear. To wind up like her father before she found him. To become the thing she hated the most.

  And it had come to pass.

  Her whole body shook. She glared up into Cain’s eyes. She saw amusement there, but also concern. The real Cain wasn’t the monster she had always seen. He hadn’t always been a follower of Shurrath. There was at least some small dose of humanity left in him.

  For some reason, she found that speck of concern comforting, and that sudden comfort seemed to confuse Keshk. Her hand drove forward and down toward the center of the AC/DC on Cain’s chest.

  A powerful hand caught her wrist, stopping the microspear before it could connect. Cain’s thumb squeezed the nerve, and the weapon fell out of her hand as she cried out.

  “Interesting,” he said, letting her go.

  She released herself, exhausted by the effort. The other part of her picked up the microspear and returned it to its loop.

  “We’ll be back in Dego tomorrow,” Cain said. “The experience will change you.”

  She stared at him. She was already changing.

  And she hated every second of it.

  Chapter 2

  Grace hadn’t seen much of Dego on her first visit. The sun had been setting, and she was eager to locate some locals and get a bead on Dodge. She had heard he was in the town from the last group of cultists she had met—newer recruits only recently converted to the cause. A two-day ride had kept her what she thought was a day ahead of Cain, but in reality turned out to be less than an hour. She had left her horse with a local and gone to the saloon, knowing it was the most likely place he would go during the stopover.

  And then everything went to hell.

  Ten years of hunting ended in one night, her worst fears realized. Her life no longer completely her own. Why hadn’t her father gunned her down that day, when he killed the other children in Dugway? He would have saved her life by taking it.

  Now she stood with Cain on an I-5 overpass, one of the few in the city that was still intact. Their motorcycles rested behind them, nearly out of power. They had never planned to take them the entire way north. The Interstate was inaccessible beyond their current position. The massive interchange where I-5 met I-8 over the river had been collapsed long ago to keep the trife on the north side of the city and provide three natural water barriers to slow the alien advance. Looking across the segment of the former city, she could still see the remains of the barricades and gun positions where the U.S. Army had tried to hold the lines and defend what was left of the population. The graffiti and rust on the metal barriers was a testament to their eventual failure.

  “Take a look,” Cain said, handing her a pair of binoculars.

  She used them to find the active part of the town not too far in the distance. There was activity among the buildings a few blocks over from Graves’ Saloon. Four larger modboxes rested off to the side, behind a number of people in matching uniforms who were talking to some of the residents. They spoke and pointed as if they were discussing better ways to protect themselves from the trife. There was a larger vehicle a little further off, and it looked like the uniformed people were unloading wooden crates from the back of it. Grace saw one of them reach into a container and lift out a shotgun, handing it to a resident.

  “It looks like they’re arming the townspeople,” she said.

  “Giving them protection,” Cain agreed.

  “Against the trife?”

  “Or us.”

  “Do you think Duke expects us to come back?”

  “Probably now, but this isn’t a result of that. It’s too soon. Even in a car, he couldn’t have made it back home and organized this equipment to send it south. Shotguns are the best simple trife defense.”

  “At least until you need to reload.”

  “True.”

  “They should have given them bows and arrows. They take more skill and they’re slower to shoot, but at least the ammo is recyclable.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s all coming too late.”

  A hiss behind them stole Grace’s attention. She lowered the binoculars and turned, bringing her sidearm to hand. A half-dozen trife had emerged from beneath the overpass, hunching on top of a rusted, burned out car.

  Cain turned to face them. “Where are the rest?” he asked.

  The trife came f
orward, staying low in front of him. He stepped forward, and they scurried out of his way as he crossed the overpass to look off the other side.

  Grace trailed behind him, joining him a moment later. An entire slick of trife were assembled in the shadows in a group nearly a thousand strong.

  “This is why I believe Shurrath is the way forward,” Cain said, waving his arm out across the mob. “The trife bend to his will. To our will.”

  The sight of them caused part of Grace to begin to panic. She knew what was going to happen next. The other part couldn’t wait for the attack to begin.

  “We don’t need them,” she said.

  “No. But they’ll add to the fear.”

  Cain turned around again, heading back to the left side of the interstate. Grace did the same. They looked out over the town without the binoculars.

  “We’ll go in together,” Cain said. “I need to keep an eye on you.”

  “I thought you said we can’t fight it?”

  “You surprised me last night. The integration is taking longer than I expected. Like I said, stubborn.”

  “Are you afraid I’ll shoot you instead?”

  “No.” Cain paused. “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  They watched the people for a few more minutes. They would never expect a random trife attack in the middle of the day. Not when they were staying so quiet.

  “Let’s go,” Cain said.