by A. L. White
In his dream Bob was back in his back yard with the lads. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and a slight breeze from the west was making the eighty-five-degree day bearable. Perseus was doing his best to get Zeus to play with him. Zeus, at eleven years old, was more content to sit in the shade provided by the table’s umbrella while he waited for Bob to drop something from the grill. Bob reached down and patted his old friend’s head and Zeus responded by licking his hand.
“You have always been here for me, haven’t you, old friend?” Bob said to Zeus as Perseus nudged his head in between Bob’s hand and Zeus’s head. “We can’t forget our oversized puppy can we?” Bob said as he brought his other hand over to push Perseus off Zeus and then scratched the side of his head just below the ear.
Bob didn’t know what he was cooking on the grill but it smelled great for a moment, but only a moment. Suddenly it smelled putrid, like the meat had rotted while cooking. Then there was a scream that only Bob heard; the lads paid no attention to it at all. The smell wafting from the grill was so rancid Bob could barely take it; then, another scream.
Bob would never know what exactly woke him up. It could have been the stench, or it could have been the scream. The last thing he saw was a grotesquely deteriorated head with maggots spilling out of the scalp as it closed its mouth over his neck.
**********
By Thursday it had become apparent the power wasn’t going to come back on and Charlie was starting to worry. Even more clear was that Annie wasn’t having her normal allergy issues. Sometime during the night her fever had dropped, which Charlie took as a good sign. This morning however her body temperature didn’t even register on the bargain-priced electronic thermometer they owned. In the sunlight, her beautiful pale skin looked grayish in hue with veins in her arm and face prominently showing. Charlie threw the last of the logs on the fire when a knock came at the front door. He walked in a half daze filled with worry over Annie, to the door, and opened it.
“Charlie! I was wondering how you and Annie were doing,” Doc’s forced yet still pleasant smile greeted him.
“Come on in, Doc. Do you think you could have a look at Annie while you’re here?” Charlie asked.
Doc shook his head yes and followed Charlie into the family room. It only took one look from across the room and Doc knew what it was and where it was heading quickly.
“How long has she been like this?” Doc asked as he moved closer to Annie.
Charlie shook his head slowly because he still couldn’t believe the change over night. “She looked like that this morning, when I woke up.”
Doc backed across the room and took Charlie by the arm, “Charlie, you need to come with me and see something now, while there is still time.”
“I don’t think I should leave her right now, Doc. She may wake up and wonder where I am off to.”
“Charlie, do me just this one favor and come for a ride with me, ok? I promise you Annie will be lying right where she is when you get back.”
Reluctantly Charlie agreed to go for the ride as long as it would be a short one. Doc led him out to the car and motioned him to get in. They drove downtown on deserted streets, past deserted shops until they pulled into the small Sheriff substation. Doc parked in the parking lot and again motioned for Charlie to follow him without saying a word as to why.
Once inside Charlie froze at the sight of Red Harken, slumped over on a desk, drenched in blood. Doc saw what he was looking at, “Red couldn’t take it anymore…so he took the easy way out of this mess. Pay no attention to him for now and come with me.” Doc then led Charlie back to the small holding cell area, where there were four cells. Charlie had never been back there, but had heard there were four cells in a town that barely ever needed one.
“Ok, Charlie, I am going to open this door. You need to prepare yourself for what you’re going to see.”
Charlie shook his head ok, still not understanding what was going on and still shocked from the sight of Red. Doc pulled the door open. One of the first things that hit Charlie was the stench of decaying meat. That was followed by the odd breathing sounds, like Annie was making at home. They walked slowly into the holding area and Doc pulled Charlie to the exact center of the aisle.
“Do they look familiar, Charlie?” Doc asked. “These are your friends and neighbors. Pay close attention to the color of their skin, will you? Looks about the same as Annie’s doesn’t it?”
Charlie started to turn to leave when he noticed a corpse in the back of the first cell. A body that wasn’t moving around or discolored like the rest.
“Oh, you seem to have found Deputy Martins. He wouldn’t believe what we told him about these folks. He paid for that in a gruesome way; I can tell you. Red went in the other room, and well… you have seen the outcome of that.”
Charlie folded over and started vomiting as he unconsciously moved closer to the cell bars. The growling and hissing became deafening as Doc shoved him out of the holding area. Charlie regained his composure and stormed out of the station heading back to his house.
“Charlie! Hold on a minute, will you?” Doc yelled after him.
“Why, Doc? Why did you bring me down here?”
“Because… after I saw Annie, I knew that you would need to see this to believe me,” Doc replied.
Charlie stopped and turned on Doc, “Believe what? I don’t know what I just saw, or what it has to do with Annie and me!”
“Charlie, just settle down for a minute will you, please? And let’s talk,” Doc pleaded.
“Why? So you can tell me that my Annie is that!” Charlie shouted, pointing to the station.
“Listen son, the hardest thing I have ever had to do was to give a person and their families what amounted to a death sentence. Bad news like this is never easy to receive, no matter how prepared you are. You can deny it and live what is left of Annie’s life, and yours, in denial or you can come to terms with it right now.”
Charlie knew deep down that something was wrong with Annie; and it wasn’t a little thing. Deep down he didn’t know if there was a life after Annie that he wanted to be a part of. Some men say that about their significant others and probably only mean it at face value. Charlie loved Annie with every part of his being. Annie made living through all the bad times worth while. She made getting up in the morning and trying to find a job where there were no jobs to find so much less of a burden than it should have been.
Tears began to trickle down his cheeks and Charlie looked into Doc’s eyes looking for a reprieve or a way out. This time his old friend had no such trick up his sleeves. “Would you put Bess in a place like that, Doc?” Charlie asked.
Doc looked down to the ground, “I had to shoot Bess, Charlie. She was one of the first that turned that way. She tore the neck out of a National Guard who was helping in the gym.”
The pair stood there, quiet, for a long time, listening to the silence when Charlie spoke up, “Can I lock her up at home, Doc?”
Doc shook his head yes. “Let me drive you back home, Charlie, and I will help you make her as comfortable as we can in a secure room,”
Charlie shook his head yes and started walking back to the car.
CHAPTER 3
Perseus heard it first, responding with an excited moan, and the pounding of his tail against the floor of the loft. Zeus followed suit, dragging Virginia from her slumber.
The unmistakable sound of an engine grinding gears filled the air outside.
Virginia pushed on the latch, causing the door to make a popping sound as it swung open. The truck was swerving all over the road, moving at a slow but steady pace. Watching it near the intersection began to raise Virginia’s spirits for a few minutes until the two yellow busses came into view on course to ram the truck. They watched helplessly as the truck barely missed the lead bus, crashing into a stalled car on the far side of the highway. The resulting crash was so loud that Virginia looked all around for the return of the herd, until she was satisfied that there was no sign
of them.
*******
Before his wife got sick and was taken away along with three of his children, Albert Herman was a faceless voice on an international helpdesk. It wasn’t his dream job, by any stretch of the word; in fact, he had pretty much stayed there for the insurance and to have a paycheck. He had worked the early shift which allowed him to spend more time with the younger kids than he had ever spent with his oldest boy, Joe. That was something he figured was the cause of Joe constantly getting into some trouble or another. That was a mistake he wasn’t going to make with the other three. Every knee scrape or school function they would see their father was there to lend a helping hand. Not that he thought he was completely to blame for Joe’s actions; just that he was hedging his bet with the others. Life wasn’t perfect, they didn’t have a lot of extra money to do the things his coworkers did, or take long expensive trips to exotic locations. He had lost his job to outsourcing back in two thousand ten, right after the wife’s company closed its doors for good; but they had survived.
It was a Sunday afternoon when the local emergency management group had shown up on his doorstep. The euphoric feeling of being saved passed when the men explained that they had an order to remove anyone with the infection for the good of those that where healthy in the area. That was Albert’s first clue that all wasn’t right in the world. Looking back now, there were so many signs that were just overlooked. Maybe he wanted to see the world like it was or had been. That was a mistake that Al promised himself he would never make again. They took his wife and small children outside, toward a large, gray prison bus, or at least what Al thought looked like a prison bus. It could have been military; he didn’t know for sure. What he did know was that a man wearing a gas mask came out of the bus, stopping his wife and children from getting on. Four shots to the head later, they were no more. That was what he saw every night when he tried to sleep. It haunted him during the hours he was awake sometimes; always there just under the surface waiting to erupt. After that Joe didn’t talk to him and the two lived in the house, barricaded away from the world. Time stopped in Al’s mind so he couldn’t remember how long it had been that they stayed that way. Food was running out, the power had gone off, and there wasn’t a lot of water. Joe would sometimes mutter things under his breath, then sneer at him, but that was it. One day there was a knock on the door again. They both turned three shades of pale as they looked into each other’s eyes. There was no mistaking the fear that petrified them until a familiar voice called out; a voice that Al knew well and thought he would never hear again. They both raced to the door, throwing it open, to find old Aunt Zoe standing there smiling at them. That was how they ended up there on the road, in two school busses that they stole from the local school yard. Aunt Zoe had informed Al and Joe that it was their Christian duty to find others who had survived and take them to a place she had heard about on the emergency radio at the retirement home. The buses would be needed so that they wouldn’t have to turn anyone away, she had said. So far that wasn’t much of a problem; they rescued three children. There were not many living people to be found. If there were, they were hidden well, and Al was not about to go on a door to door search in every town they drove through. Even though, he figured, if he gave Zoe the chance to think about it that would be just what he would be doing. Looking back now, Al had to laugh about it. There wasn’t ever a chance to tell Zoe she was wrong or that any of her ideas were crazy. Even if he did tell her he would have been put in his place pretty darn quickly. He remembered telling her once, when he was a kid, that he felt his sock drawer was neat enough for her. He then spent the rest of the afternoon putting all of his clothes back into the drawers, neat enough to pass her inspection. That was Aunt Zoe in a nutshell and he loved her for it. That attention to detail, and wanting to please her, helped him through a lot of things in life, including his job. So that was how he ended up where he was now, on a deserted back road someplace in Illinois heading south toward Florida.
They couldn’t try taking the highway because Zoe said there wasn’t much chance of finding survivors there. Joe had tried to argue with her, having not been around Zoe as much as Al had been; he didn’t know he had lost before he had ever started.
Al didn’t see the truck coming from the side street as he worked his way around the abandoned cars. It was all he could do to just watch for any debris that might be in the road. At the last minute he saw something move in the corner of his eye. Letting his foot off the gas pedal and pushing the clutch in, he watched the truck go in front of him, stopping when it collided with a blue Honda abandoned on the side of the road. Pushing the brake in, turning the motor off, Al ran from the bus. Taking a quick look back toward the other bus, he motioned at Joe to come forward. Joe sprang out of the truck, running towards Al carrying an old hunting rifle that he had found during the last stop.
“What is it, Dad?” Joe asked out of breath.
Al shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “Unless zombies can drive there may be a person in there.”
They made their way closer to the truck; Al noticed that Joe was paying more attention to the goods in the bed of the truck than to whatever was driving it and back handed him lightly against the chest. Al motioned towards the cab, which brought a knowing nod from Joe. When they reached the window, they saw a young girl was slumped over the seat, covered in blood.
“Back up,” Al said, “we don’t know if she has been bitten or not. Maybe we should just drive on and put some distance between us and her.”
Joe nodded in agreement with his father and backed away until he ran into someone causing him to jump, dropping the rifle.
“Aunt Zoe you scared the life out of me! What are you doing out here? I told you to stay in the bus!”
Zoe looked him in the eye with that un-approving look that he had been told so many times by his father about, and she said, “Boy, move out of my way!”
Joe slid out of her way, embarrassed about the whole exchange, as Zoe walked over to the truck door and looked in.
“This child is still alive! Pull her out of this truck so I can get a good look at her.”
Al shook his head no; that was going too far when she was plainly going to put the rest of them in danger.
“I said come help me get this girl out of this truck! I didn’t think I was talking to myself, Albert!”
Al gave in like he had his whole life and helped take the girl from the truck. There was so much blood that he couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
“She has lost a lot of blood, Aunt Zoe,” Al said to her. “I think she is a lost cause.”
Zoe just kept poking and prodding around trying to find the wound. There was a nasty cut crossing her forehead, but it didn’t look deep enough for the rest of the mess. She decided the top had to go if she was going to prevent anymore loss. Clipped to the back of her hip was a knife that she took from the hardware store in Wisconsin. Reaching back she unclipped it and placed the blade under the bottom of the shirt and ripped upwards toward the collar. There it was, Zoe thought, if there wasn’t so much blood I would have seen it right off. Something had taken a chunk off the girl’s muscle off of her shoulder, just above her breast.
“Joseph, run back to the bus and grab as many towels as you can carry.” Noticing the boy still standing there, like a deer in headlights, she added, “I am not going to tell you again, boy. Move!”
Joe snapped out of his dazed state and ran towards the bus as fast as he could.
“Mind you, tell those children to stay put for now!”
“Aunt Zoe, we can’t deal with anything like this. We don’t have the equipment.” Al stated.
Zoe went on to look at the wounds as if he wasn’t there. It looked to her like the bleeding by the shoulder had stopped for the most part. She didn’t know how it had stopped, but it had. The lesser wounds were another story; they were still bleeding badly.
“Albert, I do believe she will live through this just fine. Where is that boy w
ith those towels? While you’re looking for him, grab me a jug of water and bring it back with you.”
Al was nearly floored, there was no way he was leaving her alone with a possible soon-to-be zombie. “I will not leave you alone, Aunt Zoe. Not with this!”
“Why? You figuring if she changes you will run over there, grab that rifle and shoot her before she takes to biting me? Get me that water, please, and hurry Joseph up.”
Al went to get the water; there wasn’t any use in arguing with her right now. If the girl started looking worse off, he would put up a fight Aunt Zoe would not forget anytime soon. Deep down he knew that wasn’t true. The only person who ever proved to be a match for Zoe was his grandmother.
With the towels and water, Zoe started cleaning up the blood and putting pressure on the wounds still bleeding. When she was satisfied, Zoe stood up and looked back at her boys, “Lord help them if anything happens to me; they are two lost souls.” She smiled at Al and pointed towards the bus, “I think for tonight, just to be safe, she should be put in your bus. Doesn’t hurt to be a little cautious while we are being merciful.”
“I don’t want to drive with her behind me like that; and with it getting dark, Joe should drive your bus.”
Zoe understood that; she couldn’t see so well anymore after dark, and there was no one Al would have to watch his back other than Joe. “We should sleep right here for now. We can leave her in that bus, and everyone bunk down in our bus.”
For the first time since they ran across this girl, Zoe was making some sense to him now. Even though it was probably more her way of saying, ‘OK, I understand your concerns, even if you are wrong.’ Al didn’t care; he would take that as a minor win. Any win with Aunt Zoe was a vote of confidence from her in your judgment. Not something earned easily.
