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  SUCKERS

  A PARANORMAL MENAGE ROMANCE

  AMIRA RAIN

  Copyright ©2016 by Amira Rain

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  When the bloodsucker apocalypse began you only had two choice. Run or die.

  Eva Blake chose to run.

  But now in a world that has been taken over by half-dead bloodsucking vampires known as “Suckers” there is hardly anyone who is alive. And those who are still alive are hard to trust.

  That was until Eva came across a pair of men who were willing to help her. They were WereLion Nick and WereTiger Blaine. Sworn enemies forced to team up together to survive the apocalypse and the dangerous bloodsuckers.

  But with both men finding themselves attracted to her and no other living females around for miles they soon realized they would have to compromise.

  They would have to SHARE her...

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  I could deal with the Husk People. They were pretty easy by this point. Usually, anyway, as long as they weren't in a group of more than two or three. I'd just take out my trusty screwdriver, lunge, stab through the heart or through an eye, and move on to the next. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

  Often, I didn't even bother to attack and kill them. Not unless I'd already set up camp for the night, or one of them was directly in my path, or one of them had somehow backed me into a corner. Otherwise, I just out-walked them, or jogged around them, or hid from them. They weren't very fast. So, because of this, and because I was now a seasoned pro at killing them, they usually didn't cause me much trouble.

  It was the roving groups of men who did. Currently, one group of four burly, raggedy-looking men was chasing me across a vast open land filled with high Kentucky bluegrass, which was slowing me down a bit. My enormous duffel bag filled with supplies was also slowing me down, more than a bit. If I'd had to guess, I would have said it probably weighed close to forty pounds, and was feeling heavier with each step I took. Not to mention that I was also wearing a backpack that probably weighed eight or ten pounds. I may as well have been running across the meadow with a child over one arm and a baby on my back.

  It was my own stupid fault. Realizing earlier in the day that I'd gotten a bit off track from my course south, I'd decided to redirect myself by cutting across the grasslands. Normally, I avoided traveling without cover of trees, or at least without cover of trees very close by, which wasn't very hard to do, considering that the back roads I'd taken for most of my journey were flanked by thick forestland.

  But on this particular day, with the sun just beginning to sink low, I'd just wanted to get myself back on course quickly, then walk a few additional miles before setting up camp at nightfall. Now it seemed I was going to pay for my desire for haste, but I wasn't going to let that happen without trying like hell to save myself first.

  I was a fast runner, normally maybe even incredibly fast. Though saddled with my bags at present, I was maybe just fast. Still, I knew I had a good shot of outrunning the men behind me, who I'd happened to spot when I'd paused for a sip of water. The one-second glance I'd taken before sprinting off had told me that they were all big men, potbellied, and maybe not very used to running.

  If I could just beat them to the tree line, I might have a real shot at losing them. I was good at zipping through the woods, good at stealthily picking my way across rugged terrain where there wasn't even the hint of a trail. Something told me that the men behind me would be more likely to crash through the forest like a herd of wild elephants, their noise alerting me to their location.

  Currently, their location was maybe sixty or seventy feet behind me, close enough that I could hear when one of them shouted, voice low and menacing.

  "Stop, you bitch! We'll shoot you dead if you don't!"

  I was going to call their bluff on this. During my recent travels, I'd learned that most people had long since run out of ammunition. And even if the men behind me did still have some, I was just betting they wouldn't use it to kill me. Try to scare me or wound me to stop me, maybe. Possibly. Though I knew they'd avoid even that at all costs, since sudden noise, especially gunfire, drew the Huskers in droves, and nobody wanted that. But even if the men were reckless and didn't care about that, they wouldn't kill me.

  I was pretty confident about that. Women had become far, far too rare and valuable a commodity to just summarily execute for running.

  It had all started about two years earlier. One day, the world was normal. The next, it wasn't. It was as if some otherworldly portal had opened, releasing hell. Some strange, deadly virus had spread, killing millions and millions of people literally within forty-eight hours. The hospitals had overflowed. The morgues had overflowed. The streets had overflowed with piles of bodies ten feet high.

  In the midst of it all, there were some people who hadn't gotten the virus, some of them terrified, some of them grief-stricken, and some of them both, that had ended their lives right out in the open. From my third-floor apartment balcony, I'd witnessed one woman helpfully place herself atop a high pile of bodies, ranting about God and the "end of days," before putting a gun to her temple and blowing her brains out, joining the other corpses in repose. Sickened, horrified, and saddened in some excruciatingly profound way, I hadn't been able to stop vomiting for an hour.

  Later that day, I'd gotten word that my two figure skating coaches, Sandor and Marta, who'd coached me from my preteen years all the way up to an Olympic bronze medal and present day, had both succumbed to the virus. They'd been like parents to me. I'd even lived with them for the remainder of my teen years after my biological parents had been killed in a car accident when I was sixteen.

  The virus killed young and old, men and women, but it hit women the hardest, by far. As to exactly how many women died, I really had no idea, but some fellow travelers I'd come across in my journey south estimated that when it came to the decimated population, men now outnumbered women ten-to-one. Some put that figure even higher, even a lot higher, guessing that men now outnumbered women fifty-to-one. Others said that it just depended on where in the country you were.

  All that was clear was that women were now exceedingly rare, and women of childbearing age rarer still. This made all women, regardless of age, size, and level of attractiveness, extremely valuable and sought-after as intimate partners and permanent life companions. Women of childbearing age were even more valuable and sought-after. We were wanted not only to be intimate partners and wives, but also because it would be up to us to repopulate the world, as well.

  At present, becom
ing an intimate partner wasn't even remotely on my radar, nor was repopulating the world. I was on a mission. One day at a time and one step at a time, I was heading south, to Nashville. I was going to find my sisters, Jessica and Ebony. They weren't my biological sisters, but they may as well have been.

  All of us only children, the three of us had grown up together, skating at the same rink in suburban Detroit since kindergarten. We'd gone on to compete for nationals together and train for the Olympics together. Jess and Eb had become my heart sisters and the best friends I'd ever had. And I was going to find them. Though first, I had to outrun the group of men behind me. When I heard the same man shouting again, he sounded a little closer.

  "I'm warning you, bitch! Stop or we'll shoot you dead!"

  I doubted it. Though if he and his friends caught up to me, I was certain that rape and other horrific abuse was in my future.

  "We'll shift on your ass, too! We're bears! We'll claw your guts out even after we shoot ya!"

  That I seriously doubted. Not that bear shifters were not a real thing, but that the men behind me were actually bear shifters. If they were, it seemed like they would have shifted right away to chase me instead of running behind on foot.

  Animal shifters had happened, if happened was even the right word, shortly after the virus had hit. The Husk People, who were also referred to as Huskies, Huskers, Bloodsuckers, The Undead, and Zombies, had also happened shortly after the virus had hit.

  During the outbreak, televisions and radios had blared with one message in a computerized, monotone, recorded male voice. Level twelve. Repeat. Level twelve. Midnight. Repeat. Midnight. All level twelve government employees, please report. All military personnel, please report to your posts. This message had played on a loop, over and over without ceasing, on every single television channel and radio station for days before suddenly stopping.

  No one knew what the hell "level twelve" was, or what "midnight" meant. Some people thought it meant that some kind of germ warfare had started the virus. Some people thought that the military would soon come rolling in to clear away the quickly-piling bodies and prevent further spread of the virus somehow, but they never did. And on the fifth day after the outbreak, when the stench coming from the streets was becoming nearly unbearable, the bodies started clearing away themselves.

  Locked in my apartment, where I'd been since the second day of the virus, I'd been looking out the French doors of my balcony late at night, sobbing, trying to get phone calls to Jess and Eb to go through when I'd seen it. It being the corpses in the street rising, staggering off with halting, jerky steps, hissing and moaning, their rotting bodies glinting silver in the moonlight.

  I'd watched for a minute or two, now completely silent, before backing away from the glass doors and into my living room, dropping my phone and collapsing to my rear. Probably the perfect picture of terror, I just sat hugging my knees to my chest, rocking slightly and praying, for at least an hour. Even then, I was only spurred into getting up by the sound of one of my neighbors pounding on my apartment door, begging for help, saying that her little girl had a high fever, which was the first sign of the virus.

  Together, we bathed the two-year-old girl in cool water, fed her crushed acetaminophen tablets in applesauce, and held washcloths dampened with witch hazel and cooling peppermint extract to her forehead. But by dawn, it became clear that our efforts were in vain. Screaming that she hurt, the burning-hot toddler began to seize, and she soon fell silent, not breathing. Wailing, her now-feverish mother snatched up the little girl and made a beeline for my balcony before I could even take two steps.

  She'd somehow managed to hoist herself up to sit on the railing before I could even get close, despite the fact that she had her limp little girl in one arm, and when she jumped, my grasping hands met nothing but air. The yelled word no got stuck in my throat as I looked over the railing and saw both mom and toddler hit the sidewalk a second later.

  Neither of them moved after impact. Several hours later, I watched while they both rose to their feet almost simultaneously and slowly staggered down the street in different directions, joining hundreds of other corpses rising from the body piles.

  I spent the rest of the day crying, rocking, sleeping fitfully, and once again trying to get calls through to Jess and Eb. However, every time I placed a call, a message saying all circuits busy popped up on my phone. All text messages were returned as failed to send. The internet was down as well, not allowing me to connect from phone or laptop.

  Early that evening, sounds that sounded something like roaring made me tiptoe over to the French doors of the balcony, shaking like a leaf, terrified that it was all the dead people, or undead people, or whatever they were, making the ferocious noises.

  However, to my surprise, most of the remaining undead people were clearing the street, being chased away by lions, bears, and tigers. Blinking, I pressed my forehead to the glass, wondering if I was finally coming down with the fever myself and was now hallucinating. I didn't feel at all warm, though. In fact, I'd felt chilled to the bone all day, despite the fact that it was nearly June and muggy.

  My air conditioning had suddenly shut off along with the power earlier that day. From what it looked like, no one in the neighborhood had power anymore, with all apartment buildings and businesses completely dark in the dimness of early evening.

  There was just enough light left in the day, though, that I could see that my eyes weren't deceiving me. The street beneath my apartment was filled with bears, lions, and tigers. Actual wild animals. In Detroit.

  Opening the French doors and stepping out onto the balcony so I could see better, the only thing I could think of was that they must have all escaped from the zoo. Maybe the power outage was citywide, and maybe cage locks at the zoo operated on a power source. And maybe a generator hadn't kicked on or something.

  However, an absolutely bizarre, astonishing sight soon told me that this idea was nowhere near the mark. The wild animals in the street weren't from the zoo. Seeming to suddenly catch sight of me on my balcony, a large black bear just transformed, which was the only way I could think of it, into the form of a man within the blink of an eye. The man was even fully dressed, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, as if his clothes had somehow transformed right along with him. While I stood with my mouth hanging open, the tall, red-haired man then shouted up to me.

  "Stay indoors! The sick people aren't alive anymore! They're just shells...just husks of people! They want blood, and anyone they drink from gets the fever and becomes a husk as well! If you see any in your building and you can't escape them, try to kill them!"

  As the wild animals chased more undead people down the street, I just stared down at the man for a long moment before shouting myself. "But...how? How do I kill them?"

  "They go down and stay down if you get them through the eye or heart with something sharp! But stabbing anywhere else, including their heads, doesn't work! You can also take their heads right off, if need be...that's how I and my fellow shifters are doing it!"

  As if to prove this point, a tiger some distance behind the man pounced on an undead person, severing its head with a snap of his mighty jaws.

  Feeling as if I were in some sort of waking nightmare far beyond my wildest imagination, I just stared down at the man before speaking again. "What are 'shifters'? How are all these animals...how did you...what's happened?"

  As the noise of fighting behind him grew louder, the man cupped his hands around his mouth to shout up to me. "I don't have much time to explain, but whatever the virus is, it turned some of us men into part-animals after the fever instead of killing us! No one knows a lot right now. We're just trying to keep everyone safe and clear all the Husk People from the city.

  “Some of us are getting bitten and turning into Husks ourselves, so I need to go help. Those of us who survive the city-clearing will be back for you survivors. Just stay put! Don't leave your building! Don't leave your own apartment, even, unless you need emergency
food or medicine! We'll be back!"

  With that, the man turned, shifted back into the form of a bear, and headed up the street, where a lion was being swarmed by a group – at least a dozen – moaning Husk People. I never saw the red-haired man again, or any of his fellow animal shifters, either, at least not in Detroit. After a few days, I assumed that they'd all been turned to Husk People themselves during the fighting, or had been run out of the city.

  That had all been nearly two years earlier, and I'd survived by my own wits and strength since then. I wasn't about to let a group of men with rape surely on their minds take me down now. They were gaining on me, though, and their apparent leader was shouting again.

  "We're gonna get you, bitch, and now we're gonna make it harder on ya!"

  His voice told me that he, and maybe the entire group of four, was only twenty or thirty feet behind me now. I knew I had to ditch my heavy duffel bag, even though it contained nearly my entire precious food supply, and also weapons and first-aid supplies that I needed to survive.

  I could re-gather those things, however, if I could survive long enough to do so. On the other hand, if captured, I knew I probably wouldn't be able to escape. Ultimately, the decision was easy.