by catt dahman
“Cindy…I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even know. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You infected me.”
“Gimme your hand,” Norman brandished a big knife, “we can remove it and try to stop the infection. We have to try.”
Cindy backed away.
Reid was leading the rest further away. Norman couldn’t wait, “Let me do it, or I have to go.”
Cindy screamed at him, “Go. Go.” She turned and grabbed the pitchfork she had shoved into the ground, rounded on Dallas and growled, “You’re no better than these things. You did this.”
Dallas wanted to explain about the pain and hunger, but he had broken the rules and bitten someone. He essentially killed Cindy. He lowered his hands and didn’t make a sound as Cindy ran at him, impaling him with the pitchfork. They went tumbling to the ground.
Norman ran.
Reid led everyone up a mound of rocks and onto a cliff, which the zombies couldn’t climb. The biters shuffled around the base of the rocks, moaning and reaching; there were several children here.
“What the hell was Dallas doing?”
“He got hungry. I guess you and Hoyt might do the same…attack one of us,” Norman said. “How can we trust you”
Reid bellowed, “I don’t care if you trust me, fear me, or hate me. You come at me, and I’ll kill you. I have no urge to bite anyone, but if I do and start eating flesh, feel free to bust my head wide open.”
“Gladly,” Peri muttered.
“This was all wrong,” Nick said, “and I know it. What Dallas did…it was just like the biters…Cindy didn’t have to die.” Those who had served in the military would have recognized his thousand-mile stare. He looked past everyone and didn’t really see anything. Watching Dallas chew on Cindy’s fingers and then seeing her skewer him was too much. There was no way they would make it to the vehicles, and if they did, they would carry the infection out of the zone, just like other places; they would kill the world.
Nick took a deep breath and shoved against Reid as he used his weight to push him over the side of the cliff. Both of them had to die.
Reid kicked and jerked away, barely catching himself on the edge with his legs dangling below. Damned if he would ask for help, he scratched and used his fingers to crawl up until his upper body was securely on the rock. After that, he swung his legs up and as soon as he was fully on safe ground, he got to his feet defiantly.
Nick Hoyt was gone, somewhere at the bottom of the high cliff.
“Anyone else?” Reid demanded.
“Come on, we’re losing people way too fast. We have to get out of here,” Dana said.
“Well, it’s been a great run, and we wish all of you the luck on the earth. But Shannon and I will be staying here on these rocks and resting,” Sue stated.
“What?” Hank asked. Everything was happening so fast that he couldn’t take it all in. Losing Dallas and Cindy was like a flash, and then Nick jumping off the cliff was too fast to fathom. Time needed to slow down so he could understand it all.
Sue cocked her head, “You know your sweet friend Rhonda was infected when she got blood and infection in her eyes. It passed through body fluids. Shannon was down on the ground as you may or may not have seen, and I beat the bitch down who was trying to get her, but while I did that, she was fighting off a child. It was fast and busy.”
“And?” Peri asked, fearing the rest of the explanation.
“That woman didn’t bite Shannon. No bites at all. I got her. But the thing is she was grabbing at Shannon’s legs with bloody hands and drooling like a rabid dog. That blood and drool got all over her leg.”
Peri shook her head, “But she wasn’t bitten.”
Shannon looked peaceful, “No, but when we hid under the lodge, that stupid vinyl scraped my shin badly. See?” She showed a shinbone that was skinned and looked painful. The wound was faintly purple, and the raw flesh was beginning to turn yellowish. “I can feel it already. It makes me nauseated, and my bones hurt and my muscles cramp; there’s fever and a headache, but that’s what people really notice. Right now, I feel it itching as it works all through my body, and my brain actually itches as well. I hear a faint roaring in my ears that I think will get louder.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Peri. I am. Hey, we fought a great fight, but it’s over for me.”
Sue nodded, “And I refuse to leave her. She won’t argue with me because she’d do the same if it were me. It’s who we are.”
Peri hugged them both, as did a few others. Reid and his four friends stared at the biters below and ignored the interaction. As far as Reid was concerned, there were fewer to worry with now. He ordered his friends to take point, or to go first as they went down the rocks and into the edge of the woods. The way out was very close.
Once on the ground, a horde came at them again. All the noise and activity had brought every biter that was outside to this area. Those inside hearing the commotion launched themselves through glass and off balconies to join in the chase. Hundreds came at the survivors.
Inside the lodge, in rooms, and in hidey-holes, only five remained uninfected. Three of those were in such deep shock that they couldn’t move. One was three years old, and she simply cried for her mother and toddled about the room aimlessly. The fifth was a man who slit his own wrists with a razor. He was Mike, the one who infected several women sexually.
Blocked from his target, Reid muttered curses and kicked the knees of one of the friends with him, Timmy, hyperextending the man’s knees and dropping him to the ground quickly. Without a second’s hesitation, Reid used his hoe to smash Josephs’ face, breaking the man’s nose, shattering his cheekbones, and deeply cutting Joseph’s face; hardly conscious, Joseph fell backwards into the hands of biters. Reid finished with a blow to Matt’s shins that broke both and sent him screaming to the ground.
Bristol screamed and dodged the swing of the hoe. Reid aimed at her, but she sidestepped and almost fell, but managed to stay safe. As soon as she was sure of her footing, she threw herself at Reid, clawing at his face and dimly aware she should have used her shovel to bash his head in, but her anger was monumental.
Reid backhanded her face. These civilians didn’t understand that he had to get to the vehicle, no matter what, and get out of the area, and report everything to Dr. Parce so they could find a solution. No one understood that he was all that mattered in this and that they were collateral damage if they died or were killed; they were fodder. The entire world’s fate was possibly hinged upon Reid’s getting the information to the doctor.
Civilians never understood the big picture. They didn’t see that sometimes hard measures had to be taken to get a job done. He didn’t care in the least what the others thought, and pushing the civilians into the clutches of the biters was a means to an end.
“Get off me and go,” Reid screamed, “we’re out of time. It’s almost dawn.”
Bristol fought hard, and Reid had to stop and slap her again. Hank and Norma were about to beat Reid’s head in and leave him, but Bristol was in the way. When the biters, too many for Timmy, Matt, and Joseph to satisfy, grabbed Bristol and Reid, they didn’t let go, but surged as a huge weight, moaning so loudly it was like a roar.
Norman had to pick Peri up and with one arm and carry her away as she struggled to get to Bristol.
“BB!” Peri used a nickname she hadn’t used in years.
Seven fought their way to the trees, only stopping when they were far enough away to duck behind some brush and big firs. Dana, in nursing mode, checked everyone but Rudy, who brushed her away. His eyes were glassy.
“We’re almost there. We can do this,” Hank said. He dropped his bottles to rid himself of unneeded weight.
Cedrick mumbled, “I can’t believe Reid did that.”
“Forget him. That’s who he was. We’re going to run to the shed and get in that van and get out of here. I think we need to hurry; that’s all I got from Reid is a need to rush.” Norman took Peri’s han
d. “I need you to be okay.”
Dana nodded, “She’s fine. We’re ready.”
Dana and Hank and with Cedrick, the last of Reid’s companions, quietly darted from tree to tree, thinking that the creatures had momentarily lost sight of them. Moving fast, they covered the distance in minutes. Cedrick pulled the doors apart, hating the grating sound, but almost cheering as he saw the van.
It was gray and unassuming.
Norman climbed into the driver’s seat and started the van. Cedrick got into the passenger seat, and Tina Peri, Dana, Hank, and Rudy climbed into the other seats, cramped, but relieved. It felt safe. As Norman pulled out of the shed, a lone woman appeared and slapped at Norman’s window, smearing blood and slime along the glass, too far to be a threat, but too close to be pleasant.
“Just go,” Rudy said, “she’s out.” He glanced at Tina, who in exhaustion, seemed to fall asleep at once.
Norman hit the gas, and they rolled out onto the rocky drive. He wanted out and fast. They might have seconds before the area was sanitized by the military.
“Noooooooo,” Dana screamed suddenly.
Norman involuntarily yanked the steering wheel to the side and accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake. Right in front of them was pretty, pixie-like Bristol, her dark hair matted with blood, her lips torn away to reveal white teeth, and her arms chewed to the bone. Her fight with Reid had left her dead, eaten, and infected that quickly, and she was back on her feet and searching for fresh flesh.
Given the chance, she would devour her friends, but all they could think of was that Bristol was in front of the van and would be hit. The side of the van clipped Bristol, knocking her down as the van raced forward, off the road, and into a stand of trees.
It was over quickly. The passenger side crumpled against a tree, pinning and crushing Cedrick; he bled out within seconds and never came to after hitting his head on the windshield. Norman checked his pulse and evaluated, seeing that the man was dying and that there was nothing that he could do.
“Peri?”
“Ugh?” Peri pushed and crawled, getting out from under Rudy. She was already sore, but alive and not bleeding. Rudy grumbled and sat up beside Hank and Dana.
“Tina?” Hank called, “are you okay?”
She hadn’t moved.
“Hank,” Dana squirmed to the side, “we need to get out of here.”
Norman slapped the steering wheel with frustration, “It’s not moving. Get out, and go to the other van. Run.”
Tina gurgled as she raised her head. Her arm was swollen tightly with infection where she had been deeply scratched in a fight with the creatures. Thick pus seeped into her sleeve, but she didn’t feel pain; she stared with empty eyes. She had no thoughts, fears, or concerns, but desired to feed on warm flesh. With desperate fingers, she reached for Hank and Rudy at the same time.
Rudy used one arm to grab her shoulder and knock her face first into a side window where she bit at the glass and moaned, “Get the hell out, you damned fools.”
Norman jumped out and opened the back doors, pulling Peri out, giving Dana a hand, and then pulling Hank along. “Come on.”
Rudy gave Tina a last shove that broke her teeth on the glass and leaped from the van, grabbing the lawn tools as he went. He handed them out again, and they took off, running back to the shed. He was glad Peri and Dana didn’t see Bristol crawling along the ground from under the van, where she had been pulled along the gravel drive, her skin grated away. She hardly looked like the same woman but was more a skeleton now, a skeleton that wriggled and crawled like some filthy beetle.
They bashed in skulls to get back into the shed and began loading up again when Dana noticed a girl standing in the shadows; she had long hair and empty eyes, but she wasn’t a zombie, and the sniffling child in her arms, about three years old or so, wasn’t a zombie either. Dana knew she had to hurry but took a few seconds and checked the pair, finding no wounds.
Peri helped her get the girl and child into the van.
Although the girl didn’t speak and was in deep shock, she had left her hiding place in the hotel and walked upstairs to the room where the child wailed, opened the door, and picked her up, patting her absently, and gave her a pacifier. She walked down the hall, ignored by the few zombies that roamed, took the back stairs, and went out onto the lawn as the faintest rays of dawn lit the eastern sky.
The monsters on the lawn didn’t look at the girl and child, and there was no explanation for that phenomenon, but it was so. Barefoot and in a longish, red and green plaid, long-sleeved shirt that scarcely covered her bare bottom, the girl silently crossed the vast lawn while zombies gave chase to a large group of people that seemed to become smaller as they went. She saw them far away on the rocks, but three or more didn’t leave the rocks.
The shed seemed to draw her, or maybe she went because it was the farthest building away. Maybe she had been hiding in the little room right off the bar that no one but the barkeep, Gordie, ever went into and where decorations were kept, along with a soft blanket where she and Gordie, who was forty, had sex a few time after he gave her several very sweet drinks called strawberry daiquiris that made her relaxed and feel silly and sleepy. She was too frightened to come out, and he left her there to her own fate because she was only thirteen. She hadn’t even dressed.
But she had heard the child above the moans and had passed, ghost-like, among the creatures to go upstairs to get the forgotten child.
“Are you sure?” Norman asked. He made Peri buckled her seatbelt in the passenger side of the second van.
“She’s in shock. Very, very deep shock. I can’t believe she could walk, and I can’t believe she made it without being killed,” Dana said. “I can’t be sure, but I think the blood is hers. I think she was raped.” Dana wrapped her modestly in a blanket from the van. The little girl was asleep and unmarked except for her red eyes from crying.
“You think they are okay to go with us?”
“I don’t see any infection or smell any, and you know how it stinks. Maybe one day, she’ll tell us her story,” Dana brushed the girl’s hair off her cheek.
Norman started down the driveway again, going fast, but not too fast and slowing on the curves, “Hundreds…maybe three hundred and only seven of us are driving away. It seems impossible.”
“”We left so many behind,” Peri said, “Shan who fought, Rhonda who accidentally was infected, pretty Lisa who hooked up with the wrong man, Mira who helped lead a group, poor Connie, and my sweet friend Bristol…and your friends…Ricky, Jerry, and Jack…Shannon and Sue were cool…and all those people….”
“Just rest, Peri. We’re okay. Sleep.”
Peri drifted.
Norman carefully manipulated the van down switchbacks and hairpin curves, dog-legs and narrow lanes, and then finally sharp inclines and more hairpin turns until they were at the bottom where the buses that took them up to the lodge were parked side by side under a porte-cochère.
He parked when he saw military vehicles blocking the road.
Men and women with automatic rifles motioned them to get out of the van, and they complied. Were they infected? Bitten? Inoculated? No, no, and no. Had they seen the Doctors Dickson and Lindsay? Yes and Yes. Dead. Had they seen Hoyt, Dallas, and Reid? Yes, yes, yes. Dead. Was there anyone else? No. Where was the other van? Crashed into a tree with a zombie in it. How did it begin? Did they know? Sure. Children biting because there were kids and a man spreading it sexually because he was a horn-dog.
The soldier wrote down a seven and circled it. That was all he wrote; Norman frowned and looked at the number. Of all they had gone through, there was nothing about how many males or females or what ages they were. No one asked the important questions of how they escaped. No one asked how Reid, Hoyt, Dallas, or how the doctors died. It was just a number circled. Maybe that was all they needed to know.
“We have a school that way under siege and out of control, and the town where they’re from and the outly
ing areas are crawling with Biters. “It’s a wash, and we’re not going in.”
“Really. Guess the lodge is a wash, too?”
“Yup,” He was Major Conners, “Big school and town are done for. Lodge is done for. Quite a few places that way now. Infection is a lot of places.”
“Reid said it would be sanitized.”
“Yeah, that was the initial plan but not now. We’re not going to bomb and blow up the little places. They can just remain like they are, Biters’ world.”
Norman looked at the others, confused, “I don’t understand.” Reid thought…well it makes sense you’d blow up and kill all in those places to lower the risk of it spreading.
Conner chuckled, “You don’t get it. I can understand it’s hard to get this situation so suddenly, and you’ve been away from the news all night. This was just a little final bit to finish this job. We’re leaving in five minutes to join a bigger mission. We have orders to take out the worst places and to clean them up…to burn them away…make ‘em cinders….”
“Oh, Okay so there are some bigger places than this. I can see that, I suppose.”
“Son, you can’t see it yet. We’re headed out on planes to take Little Rock off the map. Then, Pine Bluff and El Dorado.”
Norman nodded, “Arkansas has it bad then?”
Conners chuckled again dryly, “Dallas and Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, Waco, Corpus Christi, Austin, Beaumont, and Galveston, Monroe, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Oklahoma City. That’s our first wave, and then we move east.”
“The big cities? Why?” Dana asked.
“While you were vacationing, the infection broke loose everywhere. Dallas is at about forty-five percent now, and we hit them at fifty percent. Can’t have millions of those bastards roaming around, or there’s no chance for us to survive. We’re taking out millions at a time…burning ‘em to ash…imagine millions and millions of those things; anyway, we’ve got it.” He stopped and yelled to his men, “We move in two minutes.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Peri asked.
