by catt dahman
The driver quickly was soaked by the rain, which pelted through the hole in the windshield that his head had made. He was trapped in the wreckage, almost crushed.
The teen {in the sports car-go crash } beat at the steering wheel, gnashing his teeth at the others and struggling to get free to rip them to pieces. Unmindful of his broken bones and deep cuts, he fought the rubble to get free. In a panic, the passenger on his right and the three in the backseat grabbed umbrellas and pulled their hoodies over their heads and ran for the hospital.
In shorts and flip flops, jeans and sneakers, they were soaked by the time they reached the doors to the hospital but barreled inside anyway.
Mark and Gus stared at the five teens.
The teens shook their heads, growled, and felt a rising fury towards the people they saw. Had they stayed in their apartments, they would have been fine. Had they stayed on 3rd Street, they might have been okay, but now they were wet, and the ‘frog was in the bugle’, compelling them to rip apart everyone they saw before they went smooth.
Mark leveled his gun and said, “You wanna stay back.”
One of the boys, hands cramped into claws, ran at Mark and Gus. It was his intention to tear each finger off of the people he saw, then the hands, then all of the arms. Mark released his breath and fired; three of his four shots hit the boy in the chest area.
Two girls rushed them.
Mark used his last two shots and dropped one of them.
“Oh, boy,” Gus called out. Mark was already fumbling with his speed loader, but the loading of his gun was anything but speedy.
Gus first poked at the girl, knocking her backwards. She was tall with long, coltish legs, had a Romanesque face with strong features and long, glossy blonde hair that swept her shoulders like corn silk. The rain had dampened the silk, molding it to her head. Had she not been in this situation, she would have been a pretty woman, and a beautiful senior with her classic features. Gus didn’t think all of this, but he did appreciate her attractiveness.
While he tried to maneuver her into a spot where he could bash her head, the other two attacked: a boy and girl.
Marnie, Carrie, and Susie ducked to the side; both women tried to protect Carrie and her injured arm. Rodney, the orderly, yanked the nurse Tina to the corner and pulled a wheelchair in front of them. He grabbed a chair and jabbed its legs toward the attackers.
David, the man who had come with Mark in the RV, grabbed a clip board and began to fight with the girl, leaving Jack to fight with the boy: he tackled him.
Earlier, Jack had been cutting down a tree in his yard and had hit his leg instead. Luckily, it was just a bit more than a long nick that had needed a few stitches.
Gus now had the girl where he wanted. He slammed the pipe down on her head at an angle as if he were knocking out a home run.
Her sturdy body went poker-stiff, and she dropped to her knees with a terrible thud. Wincing at her ruined kneecaps, Gus slammed the pipe home once more; the girl dropped to the ground and didn’t move again.
On the floor, Jack and the boy were having a fistfight. The boy ripped Jack’s stitches loose and dug into the axe wound, raked open furrows down Jack’s cheek, and almost had squeezed the man’s testicles off.
Jack had managed an uppercut to the boy’s jaw that hardly affected him. As Jack hugged himself into a ball, cradling his damaged manhood, the boy grabbed Jack’s head and slammed it into the hard floor.
Jack’s head now hurt as much as his testicles ached, and he struggled to crawl away from the assault.
The girl who fought David had bitten his arm twice and taken a chunk out of his shoulder with her teeth. Her dark hair whipped about, making her look like a possessed witch; she snapped her jaws at David and kicked at his legs, trying to roll on top of him and get another bite.
He clasped her throat in his hands and struggled to raise her off of him. But in seconds, he would tire as she squirmed snake-like, and she would fall on his throat and rip it out. He knew this.
“Zombie bitch,” Mark yelled. He fired three times, and one of the shots hit the girl in the back, knocking her off of David. He didn’t look as David scrambled to his feet and hefted a table made of faux wood. He didn’t look when he heard the terrible cracking sound and thud. He didn’t look as the sound repeated.
Gus hit the boy who sat on Jack’s chest, digging at his neck. Blood covered Jack’s leg; the bandage was torn away, and the axe wound was wide open. His neck had been worried and dug at until it also opened up. The boy yanked at the flesh, tearing it opened wider, ignoring the slippery blood pooling. When Gus hit him, the boy slid off of Jack, his arm broken by the pipe.
As the boy raised the other arm and lunged at Gus, Mark shot him.
The silence was heavy.
Chapter 9
Curiously, Marnie and Rodney ran over to look at the boy. “He’s alive. See his chest? It’s a sucking wound. You can hold it shut, ” Marnie said, “Dr. Roberts might can do something.”
“Do you wanna give him first aid?” Mark asked her.
“No.” She went to where Rodney knelt by Jack. Blood was everywhere; Jack’s carotid artery had been torn open, and he had bled out. Rodney shook his head in defeat.
“She wasn’t really a zombie, was she?” David asked Mark.
“I dunno what she…they are. No, she’s not a zombie.”
David let out a heavy breath. “I have been bitten. If she’s a zombie, I’ll turn, too.”
“She isn’t no zombie,” Gus said. “I don’t think she is anyway. Do you feel…you know…like you want to bite and eat someone?”
Tina had run back into the Emergency Room to grab additional supplies, ignored Dr. Roberts’ snide remarks and taunts, and then ran back with what she needed. Telling the rest she needed a second, she bathed David’s bite with antiseptic which set him to cursing loudly, then packed one wound with gauze, and bandaged and securely taped the rest. She gave him a painful shot of antibiotics.
“Why are you doing that? I’m gonna turn.”
“Turn into what?” Tina asked him. She gave him something for the pain.
Mark looked at the girl that David had finished with on the table, her head a leaking, mashed thing. “He thinks he’s gonna turn into a zombie and bite and eat people. He thinks the girl was a zombie.”
“I think you’ll be fine, but if you feel zombieish, you tell me right away, and I’ll pop you in the head so that you don’t turn. Deal?” Gus asked, “I have your back.”
David cast him a withering look.
Mark told them it was time to get out before they were attacked again.
Outside under the cover, they were dry and were able to go right to the RV where Sara helped Carrie, Susie, and Tina into the vehicle. When everyone was inside, Sara and Mitch looked at Mark expectantly. “We saw those crazies, and we heard the gun shots.”
“We took care of them. We lost one guy who was with us. And David is bitten and thinks he is gonna become a zombie.”
“I can’t believe these are all the people who would come with us,” said Mitch while starting the RV. He pulled out, and they heard the tapping: Pitter-patter of rain on the top of the RV. The sky was lightening with sunrise.
“Look,” Sara said. Mitch slowed down and came to a stop as he came to 2nd Street. “What do you think?”
Mark came forward to look at Mitch’s shoulder. A half dozen people stood in the intersection, looking at the Winnebago, deciding if they would attack it or keep going.
The people in the RV had never seen such hatred and fury on anyone’s face. Each of the six in the rain looked as if he wanted nothing more than to rip and tear people apart and to cause as much pain and fear as possible.
In that moment, Mark had a revelation. That night that he had clubbed a man unconscious with his sidearm, he had shot and killed three people, and he had watched people die. He had been on the force ten years and had wanted to be a cop since he was a kid. He had found it to be a good vocation, quie
t mostly, and he always had self-pride that he was fairly good at his job.
But he had been skimming along. In a bigger town or city, he would have worked much harder and faced much worse. Anywhere else, he would have dealt already with the incidents that he had faced one rainy night.
Mark would see this through and do as well as he could, but the plain truth was that tonight he had been most unsure of himself, more afraid, and more horrified than he could ever have imagined in his worst nightmares. He didn’t want to get wet and hurt anyone and go smooth, but he understood if someone did want to, as terrible as this was, it was much easier than being scared shitless every second.
Being one of them had to be better than being so damned afraid.
“Run over them,” Sara whispered. The thought both terrified her and seemed right; she was just scared of the people in the rain. Rainies.
“I could,” Mitch whispered back.
‘Do it. Do it,’ thought Mark. Do it like David had done it by bashing in the girl’s skull with a table until her brains leaked out. Do it like he had done when he shot those crazies. Run them over. He wasn’t angry like they were. He was afraid. ‘So, do it.’
“Go around them,” Mark said. The moment was gone.
Mitch maneuvered the big vehicle to the left and turning, and then at the Catholic Church across from Coral’s Diner where all of this had all started, he turned left again and pulled into the hotel’s portico.
The half dozen angry people watched the big RV drive away and then returned their interest to the hospital, which was brightly lit even against the sunrise. They walked to the building.
In a few minutes, screams filled the morning as the six tore the people to shreds who were still in the hospital. When they finished, they walked around a while, unsure of what to do next.
In an hour, they stopped walking and stood in one place, faces as blank as statues of marble. In an hour and a half, they were unable to respond to anything around them.
They had gone smooth.
Chapter 10
Coral drove carefully.
He went all the way down 2nd Street and turned left on Elm. He saw the laundry mat, police station, and fire station on his left and the library and school on his right. At the intersection of Elm and 1st was the courthouse on the corner. He stopped there.
“What do you think?” he asked Katie and Jobie.
“I think the water is pretty deep. And it’s dark,” Jobie said. He wanted to go check on his parents, but Coral said they had to come here first. With the headlights and spotlights beaming from Coral’s big Ford Explorer, they could see the dark water as it flowed south. A lot of trash was in the water: plastic and paper and leaves and branches swirled and twisted as they bounced off the stones of the school and kept going. A large tree turned over in a heavy sweeping motion that drove trash around it.
But before he could hit the brakes, the Explorer slipped down 1st street towards the lake. Once in a while, there was a lump of clothing and pale limbs that could only be human. {Although the two who watched might pretend those were bleached tree branches}.
“I think there are people in the hotel, and they can see us but can’t come down because of the water,” Jobie said. “Mr. Coral, they may be up there, wondering why we can’t help them and what they’re gonna do. I bet they’re scared.”
“I guess we’re all scared.”
Katie whined. Coral patted her head absently.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Jobie said.
Avoiding the deeper water, Coral backed up until he was in front of the police station. Ronnie pulled her cruiser into one of the car bays, and Coral pulled into the other.
After Ronnie unlocked the weapons cabinet, she and the rest loaded up the Explorer with extra ammunition, a pair of Glock .22s, and three Remington .870s. She added a stack of rain gear, some flares, a few sets of handcuffs, and several flashlights.
Ronnie tried to reach the State Police on the radio but got no response. She tried other bands, but no one was there. “How can they all be gone? Someone should answer.”
“Maybe they’re busy, “ Coral said, “you’ve been busy.” He told Ronnie that they hadn’t seen anyone on the street but that they felt people were in the hotel, not knowing what to do or how to keep from being frightened.
“Besides a boat…a boat with a cover on top, how would anyone get out of there anyway?” Jobie mused. “We’ve all been getting damp, so I think it takes a substantial amount of rain directly on the skin to make someone sick, but you’d still need a really dry boat to be safe.”
He shrugged and said he didn’t have any more ideas as he climbed into the cruiser with Ronnie. She gave Coral, Jake, and George a wave, promising to meet them at the hotel as soon as they got Jobie’s parents and sisters safely into the cruiser.
Chapter 11
“Jobie, you’ve been very brave tonight. I know your parents will be super proud of you.”
“Thanks, Miss Ronnie. Mostly all I’ve done is watch. What do you think it feels like? I think it would feel like all the anger in the world, and maybe when you feel it, you want to destroy anyone who isn’t angry. You’d want to rip him to shreds because you’d be changing and knew it. Then, I think everything inside, who you are, the personality part, just burns up and vanishes.”
“Do you think people can come back? The personality part?”
Jobie frowned and answered, “I wish they could, but no, I think they’re gone forever. Once something is burned away, it can’t somehow regenerate.”
“What do you think is causing it?”
“It could be anything, right? Maybe someone did it maliciously, but I bet it’s natural: I like biology and other sciences, and I think Nature is a pretty tough b…ummm witch.”
Ronnie snickered. She saw a deep puddle almost too late, slammed on the brakes and swerved. Instantly, she regretted not having Gus fix her car seat as it failed to hold, and she slid into the dashboard. She threw her left knee up to keep herself from plowing head first into the dash and breaking her ribs and collar bones, cursing that she had known better than to let this happen.
A bright light filled her head as enormous pain lit up her knee, radiating into her lower leg and into her hip. Her kneecap dislocated, sliding to the left as it took her full weight, ligaments tore, and Ronnie groaned loudly, ending with a small scream.
“Ronnie?”
She let Jobie worry and call her name without responding because she felt as if someone had hit her in the stomach and knocked her breath out. She had to concentrate just to inhale.
Black and white lights danced in her vision as she tried not to pass out. Finally, after several minutes, the pain was just bad enough to make her wish she could pass out; then, she was able to notice the cold sweat that had covered her and how hard she was gritting her teeth.
“I’m okay. Yep. I have it.”
“Ronnie, you are really pale.”
“I bet I am.” She took a deep, slow breath and found that helped with her pain. She dug pain relievers out of her glove box and swallowed them dry. “Okay, we’re going again slow…very slow, you ready?”
“Ready.”
A block down, Ronnie turned left onto 3rd and then right onto Oak. She told Jobie to take his feet off of the floorboard since water was creeping up and the floor of the cruiser was beginning to squish with rainwater seeping in.
Although the car hardly crawled now, Ronnie worried that she was going to stall out. As she made the turn onto South Oak, waves pulsed outward to race across submerged yards.
“Look,” Jobie pointed out a black SOS written on a pale blue bed sheet and hung from a window of the fourth floor apartments on their left.
In the hazy morning, it could barely be seen. “Why hasn’t someone come to get us? Why hasn’t the army or something come yet, Ronnie?”
“Maybe it’s taking them a while or they’re being careful not to get wet. And the bridge is washed out, so maybe that….”
> “Or because it’s happening over the bridge, too. Why would the poisonous clouds just sit above Cold Springs and nowhere else? That’s impossible, isn’t it? For clouds to do that? I know it is. I like science,” Jobie said.
“Yeah, you mentioned that. What were you doing in the diner alone tonight without your family? Were you with friends?” Ronnie waited for the waves of water that she had caused to end.
“No, I was drinking a Coke and watching people. I like to do that, too. Last semester we had psychology, and that’s a type of….”
“Science. And I bet you liked it. Behavioral science.”
“Yes, and I didn’t have anything else to do anyway. I don’t have a lot of friends; they don’t like things I like so much.”
Like science, Ronnie thought.
“Stop,” Jobie shouted and motioned to the side.
Ronnie stopped again and looked around the boy. From a small house, a man, woman, and child ran out onto their porch, pointing at the cruiser and shouting. Ronnie wondered how she could safely let them know they should go back inside where it was dry and wait and why they couldn’t help them right now while it was pouring rain.
Ronnie took the time to feel sorry for herself and silently cursed the pain of her left leg. It was almost over-taking her. She understood how the crazies were consumed by anger; she was almost consumed with the pain in her poor knee.
Jobie made motions to the family, indicating they should go inside and wait. “They don’t know sign language,” he said.
“Should they?”
“It would be easier to tell them to wait inside if they did,” Jobie answered, “I know it.”
“ Most don’t know it. Plan B is to make them understand. Pantomime,” Ronnie said, “Jobie, what the hell?”
She screamed.
To the right, a door flew open, and a man in blue jeans and a tee shirt came out; in one hand, he held a can of beer, and he was followed by a woman with short hair in a faded, saggy sundress and a little boy in a diaper and little ball cap. The woman and toddler were a few steps behind the man. The baby had a ratty stuffed animal in one hand.
