Deal Sharing Aunt: Transport by Peter Welmerink Exclusive Excerpt

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Transport by Peter Welmerink Exclusive Excerpt

Peter Welmerink Featured Book Release: Transport June 23 to June 29 , 2014

About the author: Peter Welmerink was born and raised on the west side of pre-apocalyptic Grand Rapids, Michigan. He writes Fantasy, Military SciFi, and other wanderings into action-adventure. His work has been published in ye olde wood pulp print and electronic-online publications. He is the co-author of the Viking berserker novel, BEDLAM UNLEASHED, written with Steven Shrewsbury. TRANSPORT is his first solo novel venture. He is married with a small barbarian tribe of three boys. Find out more about his works and upcoming projects at: www.peterwelmerink.com

Book Synopsis for Transport: The HURON, a 72-ton heavy transport vehicle and an army of four; tracked, racked and ready to roll, to serve and protect the walled metropolis of Grand Rapids—both her living and her undead. Captain Jacob Billet and his crew patrol the byways, ready for trouble. William Lettner, the North Shore Coalition High Commissioner, has enemies from the mainland to the lakeshore and needs to be covertly transported home after his helicopter is shot down en route to Grand Rapids. He has no love for a city that give unliving civilians the right to survive. Lettner’s venomous outbursts assaults Billet and his crew along every mile travelled as they are assigned to safely bring him through the treacherous landscape outside the city back to his hometown. The HURON and her crew will have to face domesticated zombies and the feral undead; marauders holding strategic chokepoints hostage; barricaded villages fighting for survival, and a group of geneticists who've lost control of one of their monstrous experiments if they want to complete their mission. The crew will need to stay strong and trust one another in order to finish the mission and bring their “precious” cargo home, even knowing, all the while, the terrible deeds Lettner has done. Travelling through West Michigan was never so dangerous.

Exclusive Excerpt

TRANSPORT Book One

“It goes to show, our troubles aren’t just with the undead.”

– Captain Jacob Billet, regarding the VSU communal of geneticists, November 2025

Grown from a test tube, or at one point a regular beast altered through warped science, the enormous bull appeared taller than the HTV and nearly as wide. Either from experimentation or simply grown too large for it, the creature’s furry hide was non-existent. Red exposed muscle and tendon ran from head to hoof. Though thicker in the chest and shoulder regions, extra musculature wound round the hulking body. A red barb made up its bovine tail, ending in a few long colorless strands, more like knitting needles than hair. Its legs were massive steel I-beams wrapped in corded sinew.

“Phelps, keep her steady,” Jake howled into his throat mike.

“If we wedge a car in a tread or bust an axle, we won’t be moving at all,” Phelps returned as she brought the transport over the grass-choked median, bringing the vehicle onto an eastbound lane that was less debris filled.

Billet watched the mutated bull close the distance between them. The beast’s massive head was as red and fleshless as its body, a creature straight from Hell. A Longhorn variant, its goalpost-shaped horns were dark and stained with gore. It wore a crumpled car door, and a small section of crumbling wood and drywall off each horn along with a number of torn and twisted bodies. Skewered near the sharp tips, the bloody carcasses flopped; broken marionettes. Torn at the abdomen and nothing more than the waist remaining, one poor fellow’s intestines flailed behind him like morbid streamers.

The gunners continued firing as the beast charged and ran parallel to the transport. Phelps wasn’t pushing Huron to top speed, but damn close. She went back over the median as the creature leaned in to give the vehicle a nudge.

“No, you don’t,” she said over the comm.

A row of small trees met their demise as she crossed back into the westbound lane.

Billet saw the big dark eyeball of the thing peer at him as it easily followed them. The eye, big as Jake’s head, gazed at him, into him, so full of malice it froze every muscle in Billet’s body. He was human. He’d known fear, but this thing appeared it wouldn’t be done even if it killed him six ways from Sunday.

“I hate college mascots,” Stokes said over the roar of the machine guns.

Jake drew his pistol as the giant bull veered in to ram them.

He fired at the eye; what looked to be the only soft target on the massive skull. He swore as he leaned away, the right horn of the beast looming an easy arms-length away. He swore at the dead man impaled and dangling off the tip of the horn. He wasn’t dead but undead, clawing and hissing at Billet as it swung by.

The bull crossed in front of the Huron and moved in to start battering the right side of the vehicle.

“Keep pouring it on. Don’t let it get in close,” Billet yelled as his gunners peppered the creature with hot lead. “I’m not sure we could sustain a direct hit from that thing.”

He’d seen enough cars and good sized trucks toppled and flipped in their vicinity. They were much larger and heavier, but again, so was the gigantic brute buzzing them like an angry bee.

“Here it comes,” Stokes shouted, pouring every round from his blazing gun barrels into the thing’s skinless cranium.

The bullets bounced off the thick skull though red, oozing bits chipped off and spun away. Two bodies dangled off its left horn. The headless, limbless cadaver gutted at the bend in the massive horn wore tattered remains of a blue lab coat. Impaled near the tip of the horn, the other body, this one a white-eyed ghoul of a thing, a Feral, lived on, snarling and scraping the air. Stokes could understand its anger, speared in a manner that made the gunner’s own rectum clench.

The bull raged in, slamming its bulk against the side of the transport, nearly bringing the passenger side wheels and track off the ground. The awful horn with the two dangling bodies swung in line with Stoke’s gun position. He fired until it appeared he might be the next victim skewered.