Suddenly, a loud blast pounded against her already damaged eardrums, startling her back to her senses. Her eyes popped open and the first thing she saw was Sgt. Colaneri on his back in the middle of the road about ten feet away, with his pistol pointed in her direction. Why would he be pointing a gun at her, she wondered?
As he squeezed off another round, Becks fully expected to feel the additional agony of a bullet wound. Instead, the searing pain in her left arm subsided. Blinking rapidly, she turned her head to see the young female scummer—who had been chewing on Becks’ forearm—fall backward and to the right, while the fragments of her skull blew off to the left.
Still blinking her eyes again and again to try to focus in the wind-whipped rain and the fog of injury, Becks finally realized that this was worse than any swarm of rats. Far worse. These were the unclean, unrelenting, unholy, undead, and they were in the process of trying to make a meal out of her. Finding her voice again, she screamed as she had never screamed in her life. Adrenaline pumped through her like a fire hose and she started punching and kicking at the four remaining scummers latched onto her, but her thrashing only seemed to make them sink their filthy teeth in deeper.
The sergeant fired several more rounds, and even though he was obviously badly wounded, he was able to take down each of her attackers with devastating headshots, splattering her with the foulest smelling gore in the process. For a moment, she was glad of the heavy rain that almost immediately washed away most of the blood and lumps of brains.
Springing to her feet, the universe suddenly spun out of control and Becks dropped to her knees in a wave of pain, nausea, and vertigo. Placing a hand on either side of her head—as if that would help to steady her thoughts and clear her vision—she found that her hair was soaked in her own blood from a long gash in her scalp. But her injuries were nothing compared to the scene that began to resolve itself in front of her.
About 40 feet away, the lead Humvee was a flaming, scattered pile of parts—both mechanical and human. Whatever they had been carrying created an explosion of such force that the largest piece of anything that existed was half of one of the armored doors and some smoking tire rims. You can imagine what that meant for the flesh of the four occupants.
What was left of Becks’ Humvee was lying on its left side, but she had no clue how many times it flipped over before stopping in that position. She didn’t know at what point she had been thrown from the vehicle, or how long she had been lying in the street unconscious, or even how long the filthy scummers had been chewing on her. Head spinning, heart pounding, she managed to crawl over to Sgt. Colaneri. They would need to help each other to get to safety, as dozens of scummers were staggering down both ends of the street towards them. It wasn’t until she was right next to the sergeant, however, that she realized he was beyond help.
At first, Becks thought his legs were just pinned under the Humvee, but there was a gap of almost three feet from the edge of the massive vehicle and his thighs. His legs were gone! Blood was spurting out of the two stumps at a furious pace, and she grasped at the hot, gooey masses of flesh to try to stem the flow. She knew it was a futile effort, but still tried clamping down on the slippery arteries squirting out the remaining seconds of his life.
With his last bit of strength, the sergeant dropped his gun, grabbed Becks’ wrists and told her to stop trying to help him, and save herself.
“Run!” he whispered between gasping, raspy breaths. “Take my weapons and run!”
The scummers were closing in fast, and for a brief moment the blood and pain and horror of the scene was too much and she gave up, resigned to just letting the undead bastards kill her and get it all over with. But then Becks looked into the sergeant’s eyes, and his look burned into her soul. It was a look of sadness, fear, and agony, for sure, but there was also something else, something good and pure and unmistakable—the look of fierce defiance, even in the face of certain death.
“Tell my brother I’m proud of him, and that I went down fighting,” he said in a strong, clear voice, a moment before a gush of blood erupted from his lips. Two choked gasps later, and Sgt. Colaneri lay still and peaceful—his life’s burden lifted.
Her life seemed inconsequential at that instant—except for the purpose of honoring the memory and request of the man who saved her life, the man who rested in bloody pieces on the pavement, the man who had yearned for a chance to be a hero, and paid the ultimate price for that honor.
Becks could smell the scummers now, they were so close, but she took the time to straighten the sergeant’s hair, cross his arms across his chest, and kiss him gently on his cheek. Then as fast as she could, she grabbed the pistol he had dropped, and tried to unfasten his belt which held another sidearm, ammo, a canteen, and other equipment, but her fingers were so slick with blood and rain she couldn’t unlatch it. Finally, she just yanked down as hard as she could, and pulled the belt off over the stumps of his legs.
As Becks tried to stand, a former clergyman with half his face missing and the other half swarming with maggots, lunged for her. She managed to barely roll out of the way, and his head hit the pavement just a foot from hers. Instinct kicked in, and before she even realized that she had raised a pistol to the side of his head, she pulled the trigger. The concussion blew some of the maggots off his face and into her hair, but she had no time to pick them out as it looked like the clergyman’s entire congregation was almost in arm’s reach of her.
Trying to bolt forward toward the nearest house, after just a few steps the vertigo brought her splashing down into a big, cold puddle. She tried again, but still only made it another ten feet to the edge of the muddy lawn. Her body convulsed a few times and she vomited; the force of which felt like a hammer blow to what she realized must be a fracture in her skull.
A tiny Asian girl carrying a half-eaten squirrel grabbed at her leg and Becks raised her pistol, but with everything spinning she realized she was just as likely to hit the squirrel, or her own leg, as hit the girl. She decided not to waste precious ammo and opted to kick the little girl right in the teeth, which completely yielded in her soft, decaying gums beneath the sole of Becks’ boot.
There was no longer any more time to waste; she knew if she fell again she would be dead meat—literally—so with all her strength and determination, Becks got to her feet and raced forward, somehow managing to go the twenty or thirty feet to the side of a modest Cape Cod style house. The windows were not boarded up, which most likely meant one of two things—the occupants evacuated when the outbreak first began, or they all turned and never left the house. Still, facing one zombie family was better than facing an entire neighborhood of scummers.
Grabbing a decorative stone which once helped frame a little flower garden, she bashed away at a side window. The window was just above eye level, and her chewed-up arms and legs didn’t have the strength to hoist her through the opening she had created. Plan B wasn’t exactly an elegant solution, but beggars can never be choosers during a zombie apocalypse.
Waiting until the nearest scummer was about ten feet away, Becks raced forward and grabbed the moldy collar of his velour jogging suit—really, people still wore those in the 21st century?, she thought—and yanked him up against the wall of the house. Pressing the pistol against his forehead so she wouldn’t miss, she blew a good portion of his brains out, and then directed his falling corpse so that he landed doubled over, not flat. This grisly stepping stool of flesh gave her just enough height to get her arms and shoulders over the window sill. Squirming and pulling herself forward, she let gravity do the rest and she fell forward onto the hardwood floor of a dining room with a jarring and excruciating thud. But she was inside, and she prayed that was a vast improvement on her previous situation.
Dirty, rotting hands grabbed at the window sill, and one extraordinarily tall woman—was she standing on the human step stool?—had her chin on the inside sill, snapping her broken, green teeth at Becks. Still deciding to conserve bullets, in case she was
not alone in the house, she pistol-whipped the Amazon bitch and slammed down the upper section of the window, crunching quite a few fingers in the process. But it wasn’t until the third time that she raised and slammed down the window that the sill was finally clear of grasping hands. She hefted up one of the dining room chairs to wedge into the gap above the window, just in case some clever scummer tried to lift it open, and then pulled the curtains closed, hoping that “out of sight” was “out of mind” for the horde of her pursuers.
Now, she had to make sure the house was secure. She would need to do a slow and careful room by room search. Becks still had one of the sergeant’s pistols clutched in her right hand, and with her left, she pulled out her faithful Smith & Wesson, which she hadn’t needed to use in many months. It felt like an old friend in her hand, and she was suddenly confident that she could handle anything this house had lurking in the shadows. Unfortunately, her wounds and the ensuing shock got the better of her, and before she could even take a step, the deep, dark well opened up again and swallowed her whole.
When the storm moved off and the skies cleared the next morning, a search and rescue helicopter took off from the Picatinny Arsenal. With so much debris from the storm, and so much human carnage from over a year of apocalyptic chaos, it wasn’t easy finding the wrecked convoy. But the helicopter’s FLIR camera finally picked up the heat signature of the huge explosion and resulting fire that was still smoldering despite several inches of rain.
Passing overhead a few times and taking photos, it was clear that the lead Humvee and its passengers were blown to bits. The second Humvee was less damaged, but that was a relative term as it was just in larger chunks. Also in chunks were the bloody remains of Sgt. Colaneri and the scummers he had shot, which the rest of the neighborhood scummers were now feasting upon. At least one of the recognizable pieces of body appeared to be from a female. There were no signs that anyone had escaped the blast or the ensuing raw meat orgy.
The official conclusion was that everyone had been killed, and there was no reason to risk inserting a search team into such a heavily infested area.
When word reached West Point, Phil sank to his knees and wept. When Cam got the news, it was like his heart had frozen in his chest—but some small voice in his head told him not to completely give up hope, yet.
To the unconscious, lone survivor bleeding on the dusty floor of the suburban New Jersey house, the roar of the helicopter engine and the emotional turmoil of the people she loved were all unknown to her. She was blissfully ignorant, in a near coma-like state. It would only be when she awakened that the real nightmare would begin.
The next thing Becks knew was that there was a terrible taste in her mouth and her tongue and lips were as dry and parched as paper. Her eyes flickered open to see that her right arm was glued to the worn hardwood floor in a dried puddle of her own blood and pus. Prying her arm free, which started it bleeding again as the massive black scab stuck to the floor, she used both shaky arms to push herself to a sitting position, which only started the Merry-Go-Round spinning again in her brain. The resulting nausea made her heave, but she was so dehydrated that nothing came up.
It was daylight, but which day was it? From the scabbing and swelling of her wounds, she had to have been unconscious for at least 24 hours, but more likely it was closer to 48. Her head was splitting, and she was so, so weak from lack of food and water and blood loss—but on the bright side, she hadn’t been chewed on any more, so she assumed there weren’t any scummers roaming freely through the house. Becks held her breath for a moment to listen carefully, and when she didn’t hear any sounds, inside or out, she also assumed the crowd at the window had given up and wandered off.
Just as she was about to breathe a sigh of relief, it hit her—infection! Not the infection caused by all the bacteria in her wounds, which looked bad enough, but infection from the zombie parasites! Her bloodstream must be swimming with eggs. She needed an Eradazole tablet, and she needed it ASAP. Even though she foolishly didn’t travel with a backpack of supplies, she always, always, had a small pouch of Eradazole on a Velcro strap around her left wrist. It was against regulations at West Point to not carry the life-saving, ZIP-killing medication with you at all times, and thank god that was one regulation she didn’t ignore.
Carefully peeling back the torn sleeves of her jacket and shirt, she got a much better look at the festering bite marks in her forearms. They would need immediate attention, but first things first. She yanked open the zip lock of the little pouch on her wrist, and tipped it over to let the half-dozen tablets drop into her right palm, but nothing fell out! Panicking, she tapped the bottom of the pouch harder and harder. Something did finally fall out—a single lump of blood-soaked tablets. Then she noticed that the waterproof pouch must have gotten torn in the accident, and when she was trying to stem the flow of blood from the sergeant’s stumps, his blood must have filled the pouch and drenched the pills.
“Think, Becks, think!” she said out loud.
Would the medication be ineffective now? Would the compounds in the blood or the moisture deactivate the precious and delicate chemical structures that kill the ZIPs? Using her fingernail, she scraped off the bloody outer crust of the lump and saw some flecks of mint green—the color of untainted Eradazole. Were there enough of those flecks to stop the infection? There was only one way to find out.
Like some macabre act of communion, Becks popped the entire congealed lump into her mouth, pulled the sergeant’s canteen from his belt, and took several big gulps. The coarse mass scraped the length of her dry esophagus and she could feel the cool water when it hit her stomach—her very empty stomach. She remembered the Hershey’s bar that Captain Lennox had given her as she was leaving, and she fished around in her jacket pockets until she found it. She downed it in two big bites.
She would need a lot more food and water, as well as something to clean her wounds, and some heavy doses of antibiotics. Walking was still out of the question, so she kind of pushed and pulled herself with her hands and feet and slid across the smooth floor to an open doorway that looked like it led to a living room. Every few feet she paused to catch her breath and listen for any sounds, and bit by bit, she inched her way onto the dirt-matted shag carpet of the next room. As she pushed her way past a grimy, tan, faux leather sectional couch against the wall, she had her answer as to the fate of the former occupants.
There were five sleeping bags of various sizes arranged in a circle around a kerosene heater in the center of the room. Cautiously dragging herself forward, it was soon evident that the desiccated bodies were no threat to her. Tins of chips and cookies, and a couple of bottles of Gatorade, sat on a nearby coffee table, and she pushed her way past the corpses and ate and drank as much as her stomach could handle. The exertion of crawling just that short distance was exhausting, and she stretched out across the floor and either fell asleep immediately, or passed out again.
This time it was night when she awoke, and the faint moonlight probed the empty eye sockets of the nearest corpse, which seemed to be staring right at her. By its size and lack of hair, she assumed it had been the father of the household—World’s Greatest Dad, if the macaroni picture on the wall was to be believed. Groping for the flashlight on the sergeant’s belt, she was relieved to feel the cool cylinder of metal between her fingers.
By flashlight and with more crawling, she moved on to the kitchen, the floor of which was thick with mouse droppings and dead ants and roaches. That didn’t bode well for the food supply, and sure enough, chewed up and empty boxes of crackers and pasta covered the countertops. She considered herself lucky that the food in the living room had been in metal tins.
Using a chair to help herself get up to unsteady feet, she fought the vertigo long enough to open some cabinet doors, and was rewarded with a feast of things such as canned veggies, canned spaghetti with tiny meatballs, no less, and a blessed family-sized jar of crunchy peanut butter. Thank god those little bastard mice hadn’t chew
ed their way into the cabinets!
As tempted as she was to eat as much as she could possibly cram into her belly, she realized that she didn’t know how long this food had to last—which was an entirely different subject, which she didn’t want to even contemplate at this point. If she didn’t treat these infected wounds soon, it wouldn’t matter how many rescue squads the Picatinny Arsenal and West Point sent to find her. And now that she thought of it, she wondered why a patrol hadn’t located the wrecked Humvees yet…
After she finished eating—like an animal, she had to admit—she made her way into a bathroom. Under the sink she found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some bandages. However, her hopes of finding antibiotics in the medicine cabinet above the sink where dashed by tubes of suntan lotion, toothpaste, and some poison ivy cream. At least there was one bottle of iodine and a small bottle of aspirin. She would have to try the upstairs bathroom for some real medicine, but she knew she was still too weak and dizzy to tackle the stairs.
Using a pair of scissors she found in a kitchen drawer, and holding the flashlight in her mouth, she carefully cut open her pants to expose the various bites on her legs. The BDUs and boots had offered some protection, but not enough that she didn’t have eleven infected wounds of various depths, mostly in her lower calves, just above the boot tops. At least no large chunks of flesh were missing. She must have spent an hour squeezing out pus and screaming into a balled up towel she stuck in her mouth as she poured alcohol and iodine on the wounds, and then carefully bandaged them.
Her left arm had a big hunk of skin and a flap of flesh peeled back, but she doused it in alcohol, pushed it back in place, and put in a couple of stitches with blue thread from a travel sewing kit she found. Her right arm and hand were worse, as a few bits of flesh had definitely been torn off and swallowed by the scummers—an image that made her feel sick to her stomach to even contemplate. She did her best with the alcohol and bandages, and then turned her attention to the crusty gash on her scalp.
HVZA (Book 2): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse 2 Page 4
