by catt dahman
In the back, Ruby began to scream and wail, her fingers trailing down the glass of the SUV’s window. I turned and saw a pretty Hispanic woman and child, walking close together, moaning and hungrily watching us.
The townspeople had put up barricades on the sides and front of the courthouse, leaving a portion open so they could see what was going on and presumably could fight the creatures. Shot through the heads, the bodies were stacked and were lying everywhere outside on the grounds of the courthouse.
The courthouse doors were shattered open, and a body was hanging from a front window. Trash, bricks, bats, boards, and everything else imaginable were lying out on the courthouse lawn.
Inside looked as if there had been a war, and I thought I saw hands and pieces of bodies.
“Stop.”
“Arisbe….”
“Stop, or I’ll jump out anyway,” I said. When Bev stopped, I waved her on saying, “Let me look, then pick up me later, but keep moving.”
Nick jumped out with me, and Marshall and Ruby followed. I didn’t explain but took the revolver from my pocket. I pointed the gun at the head of the first creature that came near and pulled the trigger. A neat hole appeared in its head, and it fell. It was like lancing a boil when relief flooded me. I had killed one with a gun.
Marshall ran to another body and dug about for a second. He held up a Glock. “I found five magazines, too. And it’s still loaded. He shot himself after one bit him.” He calmly shot a ghoul and came back to us.
“Was that…?”
“Deputy Dawg…Ummm, Deputy Dawson.”
“Jeez,” I said, “I saw people I knew with guns to their heads. They must have been infected and were attacking the fortress, but there were so many. What had happened here?”
Nick read my mind and said, “They came to the courthouse, but they were bitten fast and turned. They lost control within seconds.
That’s why Mrs. Smith never heard from them after the first time.”
“I wonder if she and Mona are still at the school?”
No one answered since all three of us had to shoot the creatures.
Brandon and Jerico ran about, shoving knives into heads and some-times shooting the things. They stabbed and shot, stabbed and shot and moved on, running. Curt and Billy would have enjoyed this part.
Ruby screamed, and when we turned, we saw that she had already lost some fingers and was slapping and shoving a ghoul’s face, trying to keep him away from her.
I ran over and shot the monster, noting it had glossy black hair and a beautiful face like Ruby’s before it had been chewed on. She wailed when I shot it and sat down to run her remaining fingers through the hair and patted the face.
“Ruby, come on.” I told her that even if she were infected, I didn’t want to see her eaten alive. “Get up,” I yelled at her. She slapped my hand with her good hand and told me to go away.
I saw Brandon staring at a corpse that was getting way too close to him, but he didn’t move. He was lucky that Jerico shot the thing in her face.
“Go,” said Jerico as he slapped Brandon on the arm.
With sad eyes, Brandon looked over at Nick and shook his head.
He went to a corpse, ripped off part of its shirt, and covered his mother’s face with it.
Furious and hurt, the boy now was using his knife, trying to hurt the zombies but to no avail.
I hugged Nick before we had to shoot a pair of shamblers. There were too many now, and we had to retreat, or we’d be overrun with them. We headed back to the vehicles, but what we saw was insane.
Mr. Chase, Mrs. Chase, and Donna were fiercely fighting a horde of their own, using the shotgun and melee weapons; they had already killed three of the creatures, but there were too many, maybe two dozen. I wondered why they hadn’t gotten back into the truck; why had they waded into a battle with practically nothing to fight with? What were they trying to do?
“That’s Bill, Donna’s husband and Mr. and Mrs. Chase’s son. That one…the one in a red shirt?” Bill was at the back of the pack, moaning and trying to get to his parents and wife to feed. They had seen him and without rational thought, they had tried to fight their way to him.
“We gotta go,” I said, running down the sidewalk. In another few seconds, we would have been caught in a massive horde and then eaten. We were ahead of them and running, but we’d get tired soon.
Nick pointed, and we cut down the block, away from the burning buildings and courthouse. I almost ran into a car and banged my leg against the side as I came to a stop. I knew the back of this SUV like I knew my own hand; I had washed it many times and helped Mom put the stickers on the back. They were tree-hugger stickers: Save a Tree; Peace, Love, and Freedom; Don’t Make the World Your Toilet: those kinds of stickers.
“Hey.” Nick looked at me curiously.
“Just a second.” I walked back and then forward. The SUV belonged to my parents for sure. I stepped to the right and could see nothing because of the smoky glass. I was scared to touch the SUV.
Gritting my teeth, I steeled myself to look into window on the SUV’s driver’s side.
The zombies chasing us were getting closer.
My dad and mom were there in the front, holding hands as they often did. One of them had drawn a heart in blood on the windshield, a heart with an A in the middle. That was for me.
Blood was thick and matted into the pavement and led from the bodies to the SUV. Had my parents fought these four and been injured?
Dad had a gun. A bat was dropped beside the bodies. My mom was an awesome baseball player in her day and had taught me to be a good batter. I knew that bat. I had held it many times and practiced with her.
I really don’t know exactly how I got to the SUV that Bev was driving: Nick and someone else half dragged and half carried me along the sidewalk at a run, swearing and sweating as my head lolled and my vision swam in and out. The ground and sky tilted.
For a while I floated. Sometimes, I felt my feet slapping the pavement; sometimes I watched from above, laughing at the little group dragging and carrying the girl along so the zombies couldn’t eat her. The girl was a nobody. She was with somebodies. She didn’t belong, and it was funny. I laughed and laughed.
Nick popped my face again. “Arisbe.”
Ouch. My face stung. Why had he hit me?
“Get to the car,” Nick said.
Lance swept me up and planted me near the SUV, and I climbed in. Jerico and Brandon crowded into the back. Lance snapped at me to put the seat belt on, and although I fumbled, I managed.
Where was Nick? I tried to see.
“Nick?”
“He’s comin’,” Lance answered.
Nick climbed in and reached for my hand.
I knew something was wrong. “Hey, Hey, Marshall. We have to let him in. Scoot over.
“He can’t.”
Marshall gave us a little wave and turned to face the advancing horde.
“Why? Why isn’t he coming with us?”
Nick squeezed my hand, “He’s bitten, Arisbe. He’s infected. He can’t come with us. He’s bitten,” he repeated it.
Bevvon hit the accelerator, and the SUV went flying down the street. She turned and dodged and didn’t slow down until we were far from the main part of town.
Then she drove a little slower and headed back to where we had spent the first night: the Duncan’s house. We were practically back where we had started.
“He took care of himself, right? Like my parents? Marshall did?” I asked.
“Nick handed the Glock to Lance and then the magazines. “No, he said we needed the gun. He wanted Lance to have it.”
“But….” My brain tried to get around this. How could he take care of himself before he turned? He didn’t want to be one of those things.
“How is he supposed…?”
“He can’t. He can’t do it.” Nick held me and cried for everyone and everything.
I thought about my parents.
And
passed out.
Chapter 1 8
Young Brains
“I saw Mike, Loveta, and Brett. They made it to the outside of the courthouse, but that’s all. They were shot. I think the people there put up a helluva fight, but it didn’t go well.”
I told Bev I found my parents.
“I didn’t find mine, but that’s okay. I saw Robin’s dad. He was dead. She’d be glad,” Bev told me.
The school burned; it was a smoking, long burn that smudged the sky for days as the old place smoldered and some parts burned fast and furious and then slowly and quietly.
We never saw Mona or Mrs. Smith again, and we never knew what became of them. When I thought of the school, it was more like a movie I once had seen than something real, but I was glad it burned.
The school had been the place for a lot of evil.
As we fortified the house to stay in for a while, Jerico blundered into a nest of yellow jackets that were swollen with poison and in a bad mood. They attacked him, stinging and stinging all over his face and hands. His fingers swelled like fat sausages, and his hands looked about ready to burst. He died when his throat swelled up with a reaction to over thirty stings.
I didn’t cheer, but I was relieved when Jerico was gone and felt that a reign of terror had been stopped; he got what he deserved. Karma is a bitch.
In the months after the infection began, no one came to help us,and no one came to save us. We knew we were on our own and that there was no help out there. I thought maybe the entire world was dead.
Bev handed Brandon a bowl of stew. “You did good but not good enough for seconds. Tomorrow, work a little harder.”
“I tried.”
“Look, just do better. You know you are on shaky ground as an outcast, and if you can’t do the work, then you’re a burden, got it?” Ben snapped at him.
“You should be getting twice the water you got today,” Lance said.
Brandon had to work hard to earn his keep. If he worked, he was given food, and if he slacked, he missed a meal. He slept on rags in a closet at night because we didn’t trust him. He might have been alone, but he was still dangerous. He didn’t get to carry the rifle, either.
On a forage for supplies, he turned his ankle. I poked at it as it swelled, remembering Patricia’s ankle.
“I need some help or a big stick for a crutch.”
“You’ll be useless, now. You expect food and protection when you can’t do anything?”
“I’ll be okay in a few days. Damn, I just need help getting back to the house,” he argued with me. “Great, shamblers.”
I surveyed the three shamblers. One was a woman I didn’t know, or rather I didn’t recognize because she was torn up so badly. A man and a teenager were with her. I looked down at Brandon.
“Remember Robin?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Good, think of her.”
I walked away and left him with the three shamblers and his twisted ankle.
The next day we had to waste bullets putting down the three shamblers and Brandon, who was snapping his teeth and hungrily moaning as he lurched around on a ruined ankle.
“I love you,” Nick whispered to me one night. He was where my world began and ended.
RaVon caught what I was sure was scarlet fever.
Underneath her jaw swelled so much that the skin grew tight enough to burst. She suffered terribly, and Bev wailed.
Finally, I lanced underneath her jaw; I pressed a sterile knife in deep below her chin until the pus poured out, relieving the pressure.
She fell asleep after that.
Later, I gently pressed out the last of the infection and cleansed the hole. But she died in the night.
In a few days when we were emotionally healed as best as we could be, I announced a plan: I wanted to pack the SUV, get in it, and go somewhere that made more sense.
“Where can we go?” Lance asked.
“There’s nowhere.”
I smiled. “I know the perfect place. We’ve known all along, but we forgot. We were told.”
“Where are we going?” Nick asked.
“Billy’s house. He prepared and collected everything we need.
We’re going to Billy’s house.”
And that is what we did. But that is another story. It was a great plan. For a nobody, I came up with an amazing idea. My days at school had been a nightmare, but nothing remains the same.
I was somebody.
(ForthWorth 2014)
(Fort Worth: 2013)
