Rabid Heart

by Jeremy Wagner

  Rhonda didn’t move. She sat, she quivered, and tried not to freak. An insistent car horn blare sounded as her achy forehead rested on the center of the steering wheel. Thankful for her seatbelt, Rhonda cursed the military for lack of airbags.

  She heard Brad hissing loudly from the backseat while the horn wailed and hard rock blasted her ears. Her heart jackhammered and she thought, yes, she might’ve pissed herself.

  “Christ. A cow? A goddamn cow?”

  Her words disappeared under the loud horn and music. The blaring horn stopped as she straightened in her seat. She silenced the stereo. With shaky hands, she shifted to park and let the engine run. Through her windshield and past the hood, she saw tall ditch weeds.

  “Fuuuuck.”

  Oh, God. Brad.

  She removed her seatbelt and turned around to check him. Thank the gods, he looked fine and remained buckled in his seat. He looked at her with wide Cujo eyes and seemed to ask, now what?

  “I really did it this time.” Rhonda’s voice trembled. She felt sick.

  She left the Humvee to get some air and assess her predicament. She also needed to see the bull. If the poor animal lived, she’d shoot it.

  She slammed her driver’s door shut behind her and scaled the muddy slope of the ditch to worn county blacktop above. Holy shit, the Humvee certainly hadn’t escaped the collision unscathed. The massive bull had not only fucked up her windshield, but its carcass had torn off the entire weapons platform, the .50-Cal machine gun and MK-19 Automatic Grenade Launcher, the whole goddamn thing. So much for the weapons accessory being USA tough. Bull one, Humvee zero.

  Rhonda turned. Behind her, she saw large and small hunks of metal scattered across the county road.

  Hunks of the bull also littered a stretch of asphalt. A hundred feet of fresh blood glistened over the centerline, legs and internal organs strewn along the way. She spied the rest of the carcass balled in a truncated heap off to the side of the road. It looked like Godzilla had chewed and spit out the Hereford.

  Rhonda felt horrible. The whole stupid accident could’ve been avoided. In this new and dangerous world, she knew better than to daydream.

  Unhappy with herself, Rhonda looked away from the roadkill and spotted other red and white Hereford cows grazing in a field farther up the road. They appeared normal and rabies-free. She caught a whiff of old manure and liked it.

  Among properties near the fields, Rhonda took in buildings and grain silos of a forlorn dairy farm with a long gravel driveway. Everything felt Halloween-ish in October’s incandescent glow that covered the countryside. She turned and looked behind her. She thought it was a gorgeous rural scene. Nice and tranquil... before Cujos ruined it for her.

  She counted ten. Most ambled with a slow gait, like handicapped horrors, but a few, to her dismay, moved at a faster speed and were sprinting quickly toward her. Panic punched her gut when Cujos reached the field’s far edge and disappeared into the corn. The rabid and rotten bastards were moving somewhere in the unharvested crop between the road and farm. Well, if she didn’t piss herself before, she was about to now.

  She whirled at sounds of mooing from startled cows behind her. The herd scattered and ran across a field and into the county road. Sonofabitch, six new Cujos from the neighbor farm across the way were making haste toward her.

  On instinct, Rhonda reached for her M4 and her sidearm, but she carried no weapons. “Shit!” She’d left her firearms on the passenger seat and she doubted they were still there since the accident.

  Not my day.

  She ran and jumped into the ditch. Cold mud covered her boots and she grabbed her driver’s side door handle. Locked. She swore and ran to the passenger door. It wouldn’t open. Brad was out of his seatbelt and crawled around inside. He stopped and stared at her with milky eyes and without expression.

  “Open the door, babe.” Rhonda jabbed her finger at the driver’s side door and desperately hoped he understood. “The door.”

  Brad put a white palm to the window and offered a crooked Cujo smile, but made no effort to unlock anything.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  Rhonda ran around and frantically tried all other doors. To her alarm, they were all locked. She realized she’d left her keys in the ignition with the Humvee running when she went to survey the accident. Did Brad hit something and lock all the doors? Perhaps her collision with the bull and impact with the ditch caused some internal glitch with the doors. She knew she didn’t have time to speculate. Corpses in motion emerged from the cornfield before her and from the road above.

  She clambered onto the Humvee’s hood, and damn near slipped off when her muddy boots didn’t bite. She fell forward onto her knees and hit hard with a metallic bang. She pushed her pain somewhere else and sprang from her sore knees.

  With feet firm on the Humvee, she used her right foot and kicked the windshield with all the power she possessed. It wouldn’t give, of course. She might as well have kicked a brick wall. All she wanted to do was bust through and get behind the wheel. Again, entry denied. Though the glass layers of the laminated windshield had shattered into countless bits from the impact of the bull’s head, the high-strength plastic contained every piece of broken glass and refused to yield to anything else.

  Cujos from both farms filled the ditch and approached her Humvee. Rhonda hysterically scrambled onto the roof. Maybe she could crawl through the roof hatch where the weapons platform had been. But again, the day was out to fuck her. The thick steel now bent over the hatch like a giant beer-tab.

  She stared in angry awe, amazed at how sheer Herford mass had managed to twist armor and tear off the entire weapons platform.

  Damn cow’s worse than an IED.

  From where she stood on the angled roof, she surveyed the nearby farms and the wide countryside beyond the deep ditch. Ten Cujos circled her Humvee, hissing and eyeballing her with milky orbs full of ill intent while six other Cujos helped themselves to the fresh roadkill several yards away. Engrossed in consuming bull pieces on the road and the mangled Hereford carcass, they didn’t seem particularly interested in this little chick in distress.

  Then she did a double-take. What was that one doing?

  No... Really? That’s just wrong.

  She watched a Cujo crawl into the gape of the bull’s cleaved belly and disappear deep inside, somewhere behind the bull’s chest cavity. For a second, she glimpsed the Cujo’s dirty ankles, exposed in late afternoon sunshine before they followed their owner and slipped inside the beefy carcass.

  Rhonda blinked her eyes away and flicked her gaze to the .50 caliber machine gun lying in the middle of the road like a discarded piece of scrap metal, just a few yards from where carnivorous corpses fed. She might be able to make the distance and get her hands on the weapon—if she moved fast enough.

  The Cujos around the Humvee grew agitated, straining and swiping their clawed hands at her. One particularly nasty fellow’s putrid shirt emblazoned: LIFE’S TOO SHORT TO EAT STORE BOUGHT MEAT.

  If there’s redneck zombies, it’s these guys.

  These undead neither confirmed or denied the accusations. But two Cujos near the front of the Humvee managed to scramble onto the hood. They found their balance and came at her. Rhonda turned, and in one fast motion, she kicked and her boots connected with the Cujos and sent them tumbling into tall grass near the grounded Humvee’s grill.

  She slipped again, pin wheeling her arms before catching herself, and stood firm.

  Fuck it.

  With a running start she jumped off the Humvee, only to land a foot shy of the shoulder. She kissed gravel. But with one more step, she made pavement—and began running as fast as she could.

  She heard hisses from behind her, but didn’t look back. She imagined rural Cujos from the ditch in hot pursuit. The .50-Cal rested a few yards ahead. However, now the Cujos at the roadside bull-buffet had taken notice of the commotion and were headed her way.

  The .50-Cal was on its side, a lengthy piece of am
mo belt hanging from the feed chamber, disconnected from ammunition cans. A long piece of intestine also dangled from the gun like a huge fleshy hose. Rhonda ignored the guts. Only the couple hundred belted rounds mattered to her.

  Rhonda kicked aside a blood-spattered and dented ammunition can and lifted the machine-gun by its grips. It was heavier than she anticipated. She’d only fired these kinds of guns mounted before.

  With the large gun finally in her hands, Rhonda faced a dilemma. First, she needed to dispatch 16 Cujos. Yeah, right. Second, the .50-Cal didn’t have a stock or a traditional trigger. She couldn’t aim the gun or shoot from her hip since both butterfly triggers were placed at the far end of the gun. How would she do it? She required a fucking base, some kind of support to give her a platform to fire from. In the middle of this country road, she didn’t see anything to help her.

  All around her, Cujos drew near.

  Rhonda cried out. On fear and adrenaline, she used all the power she could muster and spun herself counter-clockwise, dragging the gun barrel and bullet-belt with her. The Cujos were closing in. She spun harder and faster. Finally she built up enough momentum and the heavy gun rose up to her waist. While she rotated, she depressed both butterfly triggers and force-fed bullets to every Cujo around her.

  A few Cujos in closest proximity Rhonda first took the solid machine-gun barrel to their bashed and putrefied faces before losing their entire heads to point-blank shots.

  Rhonda whipped her hefty .50-Cal around. It screamed and pummeled her with insane recoil. Her teeth clenched. Was she going to break under the stress and strain of it all? It felt like it. Cujos blurred as she spun and blasted away. Cujo heads exploded and disappeared in reddish-black puffs of flesh and bone. Undead bodies blew in half and backwards with basketball-sized holes in their bodies.

  In seconds, Rhonda wasted a dozen Cujos and burned most of her bullets. She slowed and stopped, her body tottering with dizziness. Her ears now rang worse than ever. She dropped the .50-Cal to the pavement and bent over to catch her breath. With hands on her knees, Rhonda looked ahead where three Cujos approached her. Her eyes flicked to a fourth and last Cujo, rolling in a large pile of Hereford offal, oblivious to recent gunfire and liquidation of its brethren. Rhonda noted one of the Cujos, a middle-aged woman in a worn-out blue dress, didn’t have arms. Blackish-red fluid oozed from ragged stumps at its shoulders. It didn’t appear bothered by this and came at Rhonda with intense, white-washed eyes and black teeth.

  Far across the blacktop, and behind these road Cujos, Rhonda noticed movement. She watched as the gorging Cujo finally emerged from the remains of the Hereford. Rhonda’s mouth dropped with disgust. It backed out of a huge red hole somewhere between the bull’s sinewy, visible ribs and the animal’s road-ravaged rump to birth into the open like a repugnant breech-baby.

  It rose and stood next to the dead bull, and Rhonda wished she could teleport the fuck out of there. From scalp to heel, red shiny bowel-goo covered the Cujo, matting its sparse hair and soaking through its already tainted rags. It chewed on something gruesome.

  The Cujo was holding something bloody. Was that a hunk of beef in its hands? It was oddly shaped. Then the creepy bastard spotted her. Its rotted mouth opened to hiss angrily, dropping half-chewed chunks of Hereford meat to the road.

  I’ve gotta bad feeling about this fucker.

  While the other three Cujos in the road turned and looked at their loud, gore-slicked friend, Rhonda picked up her .50-Cal and walked backwards toward her Humvee. Her gun scratched a white line in the road as she retreated, her eyes focused on the Cujos.

  The bull-birthed Cujo hissed louder and began speed-walked toward Rhonda, clutching its meaty prize.

  Rhonda turned and jumped off the shoulder. She dug her boots into the grade and used the ditch and road edge as a level vantage point to shoot from. She rested the machine gun barrel on a disconnected Cujo head and coordinated her axis of motion. Leveraged and prepared to fire, she glanced at her bullet-belt: maybe a dozen rounds remained.

  Gotta make ’em count.

  The last four Cujos came at her and she fired the .50-Cal with deliberate care. The decapitated Cujo head absorbed the recoil and stayed in place. Every shot hit.

  Her next target was the carnage-covered Cujo quickly closing in on her. But when she squeezed both triggers, Rhonda realized—too late—that her undead mark held something catastrophic. In a nanosecond, the late day exploded into a burning sun.

  The Cujo hadn’t been holding chunk of meat at all. No, the fucker clutched a gore-plastered, 48 round can of primary ammunition for the MK-19 Automatic Grenade Launcher. About 50 pounds of grenades were packed in the ammo can, and Rhonda shot it.

  Sarge had taught her how the immediate impact from MK’s high explosive, dual-purpose M430 grenades would kill anyone within five meters; and wound everyone else within a radius of 15 meters.

  She didn’t need to be Stephen-freaking-Hawking to know anything within 45 feet of a detonated M430 grenade got fucked. Part of all civilian and soldier “post-Necro-Rabies defense training” at Camp Deadnut involved use of an MK-19 launcher on decrepit Army tanks. Rhonda had personally witnessed a lone M430 grenade rip through two inches of rolled homogenous armor.

  Her bullet hit the grenade-box dead-center.

  A roar of white light swallowed the day’s end. The Cujo corpses in the road blasted into charred atoms. All of this Rhonda caught in a flash of time before she ducked her head and the mountain of hot energy propelled her into the bottom of the ditch.

  Am I alive?

  Rhonda opened her eyes and found herself on her backside, next to the Humvee’s ass end. The vehicle idled. She groaned. Her head pounded and her ears rang painfully. Her dad had always said she’d get tinnitus from all the hard rock she jammed on. She’d be lucky to even hear music again after this.

  She shakily rose to her feet and a blanket of dirt fell off her. The late afternoon sun hung low like a footnote in the sky. She shook dirt from her hair and patted debris from her clothes. Brad remained safe and quiet in his backseat. He fixed her with his constant zombie-gaze. If only she could read his thoughts.

  Rhonda climbed the steep ditch to the road above.

  Her body felt wrecked and her head hummed. She drew a deep breath and tried to calm herself. How many lives did she have left now? Not many, she figured. She must have some kind of luck to be alive. Hell, she had avoided pure incineration. Not to mention shrapnel from the massive detonation could’ve cut her to bits.

  Christ, she didn’t feel good. She couldn’t smell manure in the air anymore. Everything smelled burnt. The air itself smelled cooked.

  This is what war must smell like.

  Rhonda gazed at a smoky crater, spread out from the county road and into the ditches on both sides. Every last Cujo and chunk of bull, along with a large section of road, had vaporized into micro-particles. What if she had remained on the pavement, closer to the grenade-carrying Cujo? No doubt, if she’d been a little closer, she’d be fertilizer for bygone cornfields by now.

  “Someone get me the fuck outta here already.”

  She turned from the scorched earth and walked back to the Humvee, drained and exhausted like never before. She hurt. Every muscle throbbed in pain when she leaned and once again heaved the .50-Cal machine gun from the ground. She wasn’t sure it ranked as her favorite weapon-of-choice anymore. Sure, she knew this mean motherfucker saved her tush, but what an absolute bitch to handle without a tripod. Nonetheless, she had one last mission for it.

  Rhonda remembered a tidbit of trivia Sarge had taught her, relevant to strengths and breaking points of bulletproof glass. Bulletproof glass was manufactured as a glass/polycarbonate laminate combo, a high-strength plastic similar to airplane windows.

  But if multiple bullets hit a compromised area, they’d punch right through. She was banking on it. The bulletproof glass on her driver’s side window was rated resistant to 7.62mm AK-47 rounds, but she knew damn well it wouldn’t s
top a black-tipped, armor-piercing .50 caliber bullet.

  Rhonda faced Brad. “Hold your balls and cover your ears, baby. This is gonna be loud.”

  With a grunt, she lifted her .50-Cal and pressed the barrel against her drivers-side window. With gun grips firm in each hand, her fingers hovered above each butterfly trigger.

  She eyed the barrel position and made sure it aimed straight through her window with a clear shot through the front passenger window-glass, hoping she didn’t do something stupid like shoot through seats or the dashboard, only to have those rounds continue into the engine block or tranny.

  With her gun aimed straight, she turned her face away, squeezed her eyes shut, and fired. The .50-Cal jacked in her hands. She let off the triggers as the gun barrel pushed through open air and into her Humvee. She yanked the .50 out and dropped it. Both driver’s and passenger side windows obliterated to tiny chips. She reached her hand through her glassless door and unlocked it.

  “Meaner than a Slim-Jim. Huh, baby?”

  Far beyond tired, she’d kill a platoon of Cujos for a hot shower and a soft bed right about now.

  She sucked it up and climbed gingerly behind the wheel. She needed to get the Humvee out of this ditch if she ever hoped to make Florida. She shifted into drive and reversed, going forward and back again and again to build traction. Dad had taught her how to do this when they got stuck in a winter storm while driving to Washington D.C. a few years back.

  I kinda wish he was here.

  An hour later and into nightfall, she finally freed her vehicle. Too tired to celebrate, she continued on her journey, this time more slowly, the frigid night air from windowless doors biting at her mile after tortuous mile.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sometime in the night, she hit I-95 South. Later, she crossed into South Carolina. I-95 was smooth, only the occasional wrecked car and the dead—both walking and not.

  Nothing interrupted her journey. She kept her speed down.