Vampire Apocalypse: Fallout (Book 3) by Derek Gunn Page A

remembered them. Even when everyone
else, including herself, had forgotten. He had not. Even with all
his responsibilities and the terrible things people accused him of,
he had been the only one who had remembered the dead. She leaned
against Harris and kissed him briefly on the cheek, ignoring his
winch of pain from the wounds across his face.
    “Thank you,” she whispered and
he shrugged and squeezed her hand. Sandra felt another rush of
emotion flood through her. With all that had happened in the last
few days, with the whole community shunning him and banishing him
despite his actions being for their own good, and with the death of
his closest friends, Harris had still somehow managed to come back
here, clear away the bodies and give them a decent burial.
    She realised with a sudden flash
of understanding how deeply everyone’s death affected Peter Harris,
how he blamed himself for each of their deaths, and, for a moment,
she wondered how he kept going with all that guilt bottled up
inside him. None of this was his fault, but no matter what she said
to him she didn’t seem able to stop him taking all of the
responsibility.
    She wondered how he could
possibly cope with the fact that those he had rescued had turned
against him. He hadn’t said a word to her about it since they had
left the community the night before and she worried that he would
continue to internalise his feelings. She would have to work on
that. But for now they had a lot of work to do. She looked around.
The room seemed somehow brighter now that she knew that the dead
had been laid to rest. Even the air seemed fresher. Harris hadn’t
been able to hide the bulk of the damage, of course, but at least
she had not had to face the rotting bodies of her friends. God , she thought, it must have been horrific clearing
away the dead.
    She came to the torn metal doors
that led to the lower levels and shuddered. They had been peeled
back like wet cardboard and she wondered again at how powerful the
vampires truly were. Humans were like mosquitoes to them. What hope
did they really have against such power? Especially now that they
knew that the free humans existed.
    She felt a heavy weight begin to
press in on her as the reality of their situation hit her hard.
They had all lost so much since they had first overcome the serum,
the sacrifices they had all made in order to eke out a paltry
existence, constantly under threat from their former inhuman
masters. She had almost given up; especially when their blood and
sacrifices had resulted in their being banished by those very
people they had bled and died to rescue.
    She was fairly sure she would
have given up at that point if Harris hadn’t kept them all going.
She had felt like shouting and cursing at the community for their
disloyalty. Didn’t they realise that they would be dead now if she
and her friends hadn’t risked their own lives constantly to rescue
them? Ungrateful bastards. She felt a surge of anger toward the
people of the community, and she had to take a number of deep
breaths in order to regain control.
    She didn’t know how Harris kept
going. She had once thought that he was driven by an irrational
need to put himself in danger, a death wish to somehow make up for
the fact that he had survived when others hadn’t. But as she had
grown to know him she realised that he was driven more by a strong
sense of humanity rather than his own selfishness.
    He was far more focused than she
had first thought. Quite simply, he cared deeply about all of their
futures and knew that the only hope they all had was by saving
sufficient numbers to be able to survive in this new world. He
might be too focused at times, and he was certainly blind to how
his actions affected others, but his outlook was still more
refreshing than that of those who acted only out of self-interest.
It was this innocence and purity of motive, she supposed, that she
had fallen in love with.
    Oh, he wasn’t stupid - naïve yes
- but he