The Rotting Souls Series (Book 2): Charon's Blight: Day Two

by Timothy A. Ray

  One was overseas in the Gulf serving his last year in the Marines; the other was in college in Tampa. Neither one of them had responded to her urgent texts and he could tell that despite her cool exterior, she was dying inside. Well, he could understand that, it was affecting him as well.

  It had suddenly grown hot in the car, the concealed panic somehow generating heat and causing him to break out in a sweat. He had to turn on the a/c just to keep them somewhat cooled off; glad he had serviced it over the summer or the trip would have been unbearable.

  They hadn’t seen anything to indicate what was causing the destruction and warfare around them and part of him still had tried to reason away what he was seeing and hearing. It just wasn’t possible. Despite what the young man had been texting him, there had to be some other plausible explanation for this morning’s madness and chaos.

  After spending most of the night driving, they were now entering the small town of Springerville, just another stop along the way to the compounds to the south. They would need gas soon and his stomach was reminding him that he hadn’t eaten throughout the night. They had some hastily thrown supplies in the back, but he hadn’t thought things through much and eating a cold can of chili didn’t seem appetizing at all.

  Christine was giving their gas gauge an ugly look and he laughed, “I know, we’ll have to get gas here before moving on.”

  “Is there even a place after this to get gas?” she asked, seemingly ignorant of the route they had taken numerous times over the years. She had a round face and short black hair. There were strands of gray beginning to show and he knew that they were weeks from another dye job. Her brown eyes glared at him and he flinched at the intenseness of her stare.

  “You know there is, but we won’t make it much further. We have to stop.” They were on the outskirts of town and there should be a Conoco coming up on their right.

  It was early morning and while he expected the traffic to be sparse, he wasn’t prepared for it to seem empty all together. Most of the small towns were up early and closed early; it was nearing 9 am., where was everybody? There should be more people coming through or leaving town, getting breakfast or coffee, grocery shopping, going to school, something other than desolate and empty. The place seemed to be a ghost town.

  After another quarter of a mile, it began to become apparent why the traffic was non-existent. He looked into his rear-view, saw no one on the road behind him, and began to ease off the gas as they approached a long line of vehicles parked in the road.

  There was a blue pickup truck at the rear of the congestion and the driver side door was left ajar. There was no one in sight and as they slowly approached, he let out a low moan; they’d never get around this mess. The cars hadn’t kept to the right side as they were entering town; both sides packed with a large assortment of vehicles, all of which appeared abandoned. There wasn’t room to maneuver around the outside, as abandoned cars had tried that and were left unattended there as well.

  He could hear his wife trying to calm her breathing and it only raised his alert level.

  “Maybe we should have put on the suits,” she said under her breath.

  They hadn’t bothered with them. It seemed an unnecessary inconvenience and having seen nothing the entire drive down to make them think they needed them, they had rejoiced at their decision to forgo putting them on.

  Now, he was beginning to question his logic behind that.

  He applied the brake and looked to his wife. She knew what he was already thinking. They could try to turn around but they didn’t have the gas to make it back out of town; he was already in the red. They had to go forward or get out. He looked to either sides of the mess in front of him and could see no way of squeezing their Taurus past. They’d have to get out and see if there was another way through. The lack of people and the silence in the air filled his heart with dread just thinking about it.

  While the others had created weapons, he hadn’t spent much time with it. All they had was a pistol in the glove box. He suddenly found himself wishing he had spent more time training and gathering more armaments. He punched the button on the lower dash and the glove box popped open. He reached in and retrieved the pistol. His wife glared at him again and he saw the fear creeping into her eyes. “We’re going to have to get out and look for a way around this mess.”

  “I’m not getting out of the car,” she said firmly. He could see the fear eating her up and felt sympathy for her, but at the same time, it was beginning to piss him off. She would need to come with him; he wasn’t going to just leave her here.

  “Yes, you are,” he stated flatly. He was already opening the door and she saw her hands tighten on her purse, ready to dig in. Movement caught the corner of his eye and he looked in that direction. Between the cars he could see someone coming their way. He gripped the .45 in his right hand and took a step away from his open door.

  The wind shifted in his direction and his stomach suddenly clenched. There was a rotten odor drifting towards him and the stench of it made him want to puke. There was a tall man in blue coveralls stumbling his way towards them, apparently unaware of the panicked old man standing scared stiff in the middle of the road. He was black with a shaved head and from the logo on his clothes he appeared to be a mechanic. There were dark stains on his pants and Paul hoped that it was just grease, but as he looked back at that face his heart nearly stopped as the truth of it all finally came home to roost.

  The eyes were there but they weren’t really looking at anything. There was gore dripping from the man’s mouth and half his neck looked like it had been gnawed off. Bile rose and he puked, his guts hitting the warming asphalt below. Wiping his mouth, he looked back up and saw that the man, if that was what he was, had finally seen him. With a guttural growl the mechanic pitched forward, his arms stretching forward and fingers gripping. There was a swarm of flies that detached from the sudden movement and now they raced to keep up with the man lumbering his way.

  “Holy fuck,” Paul said, raising his gun. He tried to fire it but the trigger wouldn’t move; he had forgotten the safety. The man was less than fifteen feet away and his finger stuttered as he fumbled at the switch. Almost upon him, he could hear his wife scream and his arm jerked, squeezing the trigger. The shot took the man in the shoulder and drove him back a step, halting his approach.

  It was momentary lag however, as the thing shook it off and threw himself forward once more, as if the bullet had been nothing but an annoyance and not a serious gunshot wound.

  This is not happening! his mind screamed. He tried to steady his arm, aimed for the man’s head and squeezed the trigger once more.

  With only a few feet left between them the shot was almost impossible to miss. Yet he had no real experience with guns and his gun hand jerked, making the bullet veer off of its intended course.

  Luckily the distance allowed for such a mistake as the left side of the man’s head disintegrated. Gore flew backward as the man finally stopped walking, paused, then fell backward on his buckling knees. Brain matter coated the pavement and even though Paul tried not to take it all in, his mind saw every spatter, every piece of flesh, every twitch of a limb and once more his stomach emptied itself; his body retching even though there was nothing more to give.

  His wife was still screaming and though she was still in the car, it carried on the wind. Stepping back from the horrid thing he had just done, he tried to look up at the sky but his eyes paused at another flicker of movement at the edge of his vision.

  Time stopped dead in its tracks.

  One by one, more heads appeared along the lines of cars. It reminded him of that scene in Jurassic Park when the man had made a hooting noise and a whole herd of dinosaur heads broke free of the trees in response to the sound.

  Except these weren’t dinosaurs and they weren’t eating grass.

  One of the creatures had a stray arm gripped in its hands and was tearing away a piece of flesh as he looked around for the source of the commoti
on. Their eyes met and Paul’s insides jerked. Looking across the parked cars he saw other heads turn to look at him and his legs turned to jelly; he almost fell right there.

  His hand reached out and grabbed the car door as more frenzied moans filled the air. It was all he could do to get back in and shut it. His wife was still screaming; he turned and slapped her. If he was going to die, he wasn’t going to do it with her railing in his ear.

  It was a reflex action and the stunned look she gave him made him realize she had no clue what was going on. She was a frightened child hiding in an adult body. He turned the engine over as the first of the “herd” broke from the cars. He threw it in reverse faster than a Nascar driver trying to get back on the track after a spinout.

  Christine screamed again as a guy in a gore covered suit launched himself at the car, slamming into the hood. Three more were breaking free of the vehicle pileup and he watched as the first one he’d seen threw the severed arm away for the fresh food in his sights.

  His car was accelerating backwards and although he swerved in quick jerks, he was unable to dislodge the man gripping the front of their car. The monster reached forward; gripping the hood near the windshield wipers and brought his fist down on the glass between them.

  Christine let out another wail and he jerked the steering wheel to the side, trying once again to dislodge the man. Gripping the gun in his right hand tightly, he brought it up and aimed it at the drooling maul in front of him. He pulled the trigger; his ears instantly deafened by the loud discharge that had been amplified by being fired in such a contained space. Ears ringing, he hadn’t heard his wife throw up in her lap or seen her hands flying to her ears in response to the gunshot.

  The man’s head blew apart.

  The corpse hovered for a moment, then fell backwards off the car. More were there to take his place as the others jumped over his body and flung themselves at them. They didn’t make. The car jerked backwards, freed of the excess weight, and just barely slipped out of their grasp. With the sudden increase in speed, they finally began to put some distance between them and those raving corpses bearing down on them.

  He couldn’t hear a thing and his sight was limited by the broken glass. All he could do was try to tear his eyes away and look out his rearview window in an effort to keep them on the road.

  His mind reacted quickly as he saw that another car was coming straight for them. He violently jerked the wheel, trying to swerve out of the oncoming vehicles way and the car began to rock from the suddenness of his action.

  The oncoming car blared its horn and he gripped the wheel preparing for impact. At the last moment, he swerved to the side and the side mirror was blown apart as the other car whipped past. There was another burst from the other driver’s horn and the sound of an impact, but he was beyond being able to see what was happening.

  He lost control of his car. It went flying off the road and into the forest beyond.

  Chapter 5

  Ignorance

  Rosilynn

  Lake Havasu, AZ

  When she opened her eyes, she found herself lying in a hospital bed, her clothes replaced by a nightgown and a monitor beeping occasionally at her bedside. There was a pulse monitor on her finger and as her weary eyes adjusted to her surroundings, she realized that she had company. Matt was lying in a bed by the window and her mind began to ease as she saw the antibiotics in a bag being fed through his blood stream. However, he wasn’t the person that had caught her eye; there was a sheriff sitting in a chair across from her with his eyes glued to her every movement and facial expression. She tried to just look relieved, but she knew that her wariness of his presence had slipped through and the man grunted as if suspecting it.

  “Before we begin our conversation, I just want to make one thing clear—there will be no talk about whatever shit is going on anywhere else; I just won’t stand for it. Is that understood?” the man asked her. He was wearing a brown uniform with yellow patches, a brown ball cap with a deputy shield on it, and had the handle bar moustache that made the whole thing seem stereotypical and surreal. However, the grimace set upon his face and the set of his eyes made it clear that not only was he real; but he was quite serious. Through the fog of the meds that they had given her, she tried to reason out what the man was trying to convey, but things were moving slow for her at the moment and she settled for simply nodding her head.

  “Good,” the sheriff said, a smile breaking across his face. “Now, I’ve run background checks on the two of you and ran your permits, so I cannot say anything about you carrying those weapons of yours before you got here, but I can say something now that you’re here. Until you leave our quiet town, which will hopefully be soon, you will not brandish those in public, can we agree on that?”

  She nodded again.

  “Good. Even though I know there’s some crazy shit going on out there and that once you leave you might have need of them again, I would still like nothing better than to lock them up and simply kick you two out of town—make you somebody else’s problem. But as long as you cooperate, I don’t see any reason why things have to go that way. Best thing for all is for you two to get patched up and back on the road and into that crazy world you left behind. We here at Lake Havasu don’t need to be brought into it,” he stated, as if he really had a choice in the matter. He appeared confident he could shield his people from the outside world and was apparently ignorant of the true danger everyone was in. “I need to know—those guns have been fired recently, have you used them on the living?”

  She shook her head; not sure of what to say. This reminded her of a scene in a Stallone flick and she wondered what would happen if they turned around and came back into town the moment they were dropped off at the city limits. Would this man shoot them to prevent them from returning? She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. “Only—”

  He cut her off. “Crazy people?” he asked, supplying his own word for hers. She nodded again and he seemed satisfied. “I could check on that you know.” She had no response to give and he seemed to just be saying that out of habit, because in a world gone mad, who was he going to check with? “We haven’t had any incidents here,” the sheriff continued, “and I don’t plan on having any either. The people of Havasu are only aware that a possible terrorist attack has been carried out at the Hoover Dam, resulting in the devastation you two floated in on this morning. Those that found you think you are survivors of the attack, although your clothing made more than a few think you were the perpetrators instead. By the way, sorry about the suits, afraid the doctors here had to cut it off to treat your wounds. That a bite?” he asked, pointing to Matt’s recently dressed ankle.

  “Yes,” her husband spoke, his voice sounding dry but stronger than it had been. “Got bit back in Vegas.” She could tell by the expression on her husband’s face that he fully expected the sheriff to pull his side arm and shoot him for saying that, but the man simply nodded in response and smiled.

  “Good thing it’s not fatal, eh?” the sheriff grinned.

  “What was that?” she asked, making her bed lift upward so that she could better face the man talking to them. Had he said that the bite wasn’t fatal?

  The man actually laughed. “Yeah, saw that look of dread on his face, figured he didn’t know. The President herself was on the TV last night, told everyone that bites aren’t fatal, that this virus only works when people die. Of course, the people in this town think this is some hoax or drill. None of them actually believe anything is happening and I plan on keeping it that way.”

  “I’m not going to die?” her husband asked, as if a weight had been lifted. He had never truly believed her when she tried telling him the same thing; showed how much confidence he had in her craft.

  “Well, the doctors say you had a nasty infection from that wound in your leg, but near as they can tell, it was that shit in the water that made it worse. There was some slight radiation exposure, but nothing lethal and definitely nothing that is catching, or my
ass wouldn’t be sitting here. Which means, you two were at that dam. What the hell happened up there?”

  She shook her head, “I don’t really know. Some crazy ass cult leader had his followers leap to their deaths off the dam. We jumped in the river to get away from them and I nearly drowned and must have blacked out. When I awoke in that campground, there was a mushroom cloud on the horizon. We must have just barely gotten out of there in time,” she told Matt softly. They were okay, neither of them were going to die from radiation poisoning, which was her chief concern. Yet she knew—the day was far from over yet.

  The sheriff nodded. “Kind of figured it was some crazy ass shit like that. Like I said, none of that is happening here and if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “You may not have a choice Sheriff,” her husband replied, trying to bring himself to a sitting position. He must have been feeling better because he was able to do so without passing out; it was a good sign.

  “How’s that?” the man asked, an eyebrow raising.

  “We were attacked by some of those—crazy people last night, they came right out of the river,” he responded, being careful not to say the word zombie. She glanced at the door, saw that it was firmly closed and wondered who the sheriff was worried about hearing this.

  Her hands were already pulling the needle out of her wrist and her finger reached up and turned off the alarm as it began to sound. “We should get out of here.”

  “Hold up there,” the sheriff said, suddenly alarmed by their sudden interest in getting out of bed. “You two aren’t in any shape to leave just yet. I’m not going to have them haul you back in here if you pass out up the street. And I don’t know what you are referring to son,” he said to Matt, “we haven’t had anything wash up here but the two of you.”

  Matt was shaking his head. He waited for Rosilynn to get out of bed and start unhooking him, his grip was tightening on the bed rails with impatience. With the news of his non-fatal wound, his lease on life had been renewed and the resurgence in his physical bearing was a welcomed sight. “Just because they haven’t yet, doesn’t mean they won’t. At any moment one of them can float onto one of your beaches and believe me officer when I say, all it takes is just one of the monsters to make everything in your peaceful town go to shit real fast.”