HVZA (Book 2): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse 2

by Zimmermann, Linda

  Becks had to assume that the Rovers would return, in force, to search for survivors or recover bodies—or what was left of them—knowing full well the latter was more likely. If nothing else, they would want to recover the weapons and those five ATVs, which was another reason she couldn’t ride off into the sunset on one. If an ATV went missing, they would know the Army doctor was still alive. It didn’t take a West Point tactician to realize that when outnumbered and alone in hostile territory, the best course of action was to make the enemy think you were dead or gone.

  She was even gladder now that she hadn’t taken out Reggie or the others with a headshot. Bullets through the skull were rather telling, especially after zombies scoured the flesh clean off the bones. With no obvious gunshot wounds, perhaps they would just think that the group had simply been overwhelmed. The fact that Angie’s skull was shattered by a point blank shot was most likely not a problem, as a lot of people had probably wanted to shoot her.

  Nick’s body in the basement was a problem, though. If the Rovers searched the house and found him with a hole poked in his neck, they would know Becks was probably still alive. Unfortunately, while one can physically hide a body, it’s very difficult to mask the telltale odor of decomp, but she hoped she had a solution for that.

  Returning to the scene of her crime, so to speak, she managed to drag the boy’s body into the back corner of the basement without feeling too dizzy. Covering it with a pile of old drapes and curtain rods, and anything else she could find that would have no value to the Rovers, she then took a deep breath and braced herself for the second part of her plan.

  Prying back the lid of the large plastic bin in which she had placed the bodies of the two boy zombies she had dispatched when she first entered this house, the stench filled the room with the power of a solid object hitting her in the face. Becks was certainly not squeamish, and decomp was a prevalent odor since society had started to crumble, but this was a special kind of revolting. By wrapping the bodies in plastic and sealing them in a bin, she had created the foulest smelling, gelatinous mess that biology could devise. Feeling her pork sausage breakfast on the verge of becoming the ammunition for projectile vomiting, Becks retreated upstairs for a breather.

  Donning a medical mask, she searched the kitchen cabinets and found some mint extract. Placing a few drops on the mask as an odor shield, she reluctantly returned to the basement. Unfortunately, nothing could shield her from the sight of the soupy stew of runny flesh and bones. Working as quickly as possible, she poured out some of the disgusting goo and remains of one of the boys near the base of the staircase, which should deter anyone from wanting to search the rest of the basement.

  Dragging the bin with the remaining stinking guts upstairs, she dumped the contents on the lower steps leading to the attic. As Becks planned to hide in the attic if the Rovers returned, she hoped no one would want to step in that obscene muck, therefore assuring her safety.

  The opportunity to test her strategy would come very soon, as a different type of engine sound suddenly caught her ear. This was no puny ATV. This was something big. Grabbing all of the gear, weapons, food, and water she could carry, she headed for the attic stairs.

  “Oh crap! Why didn’t I bring everything into the attic before I dumped the guts on the stairs!” Becks said out loud, astounded at her own stupidity.

  She was able to step over the putrid remains, but the long stretch compromised her balance so she had to make several trips with smaller bundles of her supplies and weapons. Once everything was hidden way back under the eaves behind boxes labeled “Photo Albums” and “Marching Band Uniforms”—and what was more worthless in a zombie apocalypse than that!?—Becks pondered the wisdom of leaving the attic hatch door open or closed. She decided that the psychology of an open door—coupled with the stinking guts on the stairs—might influence any searcher to think that the attic had nothing to hide. Perhaps she was overthinking the situation, but the slightest advantage could literally mean the difference between life and death.

  By this time, the deep rumbling of a truck was very close. Crouching beneath the south-facing window, which Becks decided to keep closed against the cold air, in case she had to be up there for any length of time, she could see a large vehicle, like a semi-trailer truck, pulling some type of modified trailer. Not until the massive vehicle was about to turn onto Sparrow Lane could Becks make out all the details.

  This wasn’t any ordinary trailer truck; it was one of those massive, heavy-duty tow trucks designed to haul away broken down 18-wheelers and their contents. Huge steel plates had been welded on the front in a V-shape, like the zombie equivalent of a cowcatcher on train. A long cargo container was attached to a flatbed in tow, and it had gun ports cut into all the sides to allow 360 degrees of shooting flexibility. On top of the container was a crude but effective turret with a pivoting machine gun. The container was a weapon of war, and everyone on board was at battle stations.

  Becks allowed herself a soft whistle in admiration, and she also felt more than a mild pang of jealousy as the powerful truck effortlessly pushed aside fallen tree limbs and knocked down and crushed every zombie in its path. As most of the meat on the street had already been consumed, the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of zombies had thinned to about half its previous number, but that still left a couple of hundred targets for the deadly juggernaut.

  The zombies not getting squashed in the path of the truck were suddenly flying to pieces as all of the weapons sticking out of the gun ports and the machine gun on the roof erupted at once. Despite the fact that Becks had undoubtedly become the mortal enemy of the Rovers, she couldn’t help but silently cheer them on as row after row of the undead finally became the dead, once and for all.

  As the truck rolled slowly down the street, Becks switched positions to the north window so she could see what would transpire by the row of ATVs. The hail of gunfire slowly died down to a sporadic shot here and there, to make sure that what went down stayed down. Even then, Reggie’s two brothers waited another five or ten minutes to exit the cab of the tow truck. They were obviously much more cautious than their impetuous sibling. They had also thought to wear high rubber boots to wade through the bloodbath of fresh kills. Gingerly stepping over the new bodies, they used sticks to poke around all of the older chewed-up remains. Becks doubted that anyone, short of a team of seasoned homicide crime scene investigators, would be able to make any kind of identifications in the tangled masses of bones and shredded clothing, but these two men were determined.

  As it was clearly going to take a while, one of the brothers barked some orders back to the cargo container. Immediately, a half dozen men in biohazard suits jumped out, with another half dozen heavily armed men and women right behind them to watch their backs. The men in the protective gear started carrying bodies to the side of the road to clear a path to get the ATVs on the truck.

  When two of the men couldn’t budge a particularly rotund male corpse, the big gorilla of a man Becks had seen on their last trip emerged from the container. Snapping on a big pair of yellow rubber gloves, he reached down, grabbed a couple of fistfuls of the fat zombie’s clothing, and picked him up and tossed him like he was carry-on luggage. He then remained on the street, keeping a watchful eye on the two brothers.

  As the third ATV was being loaded into the back of the cargo container, one of the brothers started shouting to the other. He was in the exact spot where Reggie had been shot down, and with the toe of his boot he was pushing some bones around. When the other brother joined him, he pointed to something on the ground and was very animated. Squatting down, he thrust one of his gloved hands into the muck. Becks used her rifle scope to get a closer look as the man rummaged around. He grasped something, but it slipped away twice before he was able to yank it free. Holding it high above his head, both brothers began sobbing, and everyone else stopped what they were doing.

  A gore-encrusted, gold crucifix hung at the end of an even more blood-covered, heavy gold chain. The
two brothers reached down under the tops of their coats and each pulled out identical crucifixes on identical chains, touching them together like some morbid toast to a fallen comrade. The ensuing wailing and beating of their chests was worthy of the most dramatic Irish wake, but other than the big gorilla, no one else appeared to be the least bit upset by Reggie’s obviously gruesome demise. In fact, as their eyes darted back and forth between one another, the only emotion they displayed was fear. Becks imagined that they were all wondering how they would be made to suffer for the brothers’ anger and grief.

  Becks felt nothing but contempt. Perhaps the three brothers considered themselves to be very religious, and were very close and genuinely cared for one another, but they probably didn’t give a damn about anyone else. They certainly didn’t care about Angie, whose shattered skull and clumps of gray hair they roughly kicked aside as they began slowly picking up the remaining bones of their brother, placing them with great ceremony in a cardboard box.

  “Hurry up already!” Becks whispered, as she hoped they would just take Reggie’s remains and leave.

  But she would not be so lucky.

  Once they placed the box in the truck and draped a cloth over it, they both began barking orders and pointing up and down the street. The last two ATVs and all the weapons they could find were loaded in the cargo container, and then several groups of three people began house-to-house searches. Becks couldn’t be sure if they were searching for her, supplies, or both, but she wrapped herself in an old, musty quilt and squeezed in next to her supplies behind the large marching band uniform box. She had overturned a few other boxes and pulled out their contents and scattered them, as if the attic had already been thoroughly searched.

  With a pistol in each hand, she breathlessly listened as one person came in the front door—which Becks had left unlocked and slightly ajar, and two more came in the unlocked back door. She strained to hear what they were saying and could just make out someone instructing one person to check the basement and another to check upstairs.

  The young woman tasked with searching the basement fearlessly opened the door with her pistol raised, only to stagger back a few steps when the decomp stench wafted up to greet her. Holding her breath, she descended the stairs, but rather than step into the muck at the bottom, she instead “searched” the basement by shining the flashlight back and forth. Seeing nothing but ordinary household items and a pile of drapes and curtain rods, she quickly retreated upstairs and reported that there wasn’t anything useful in the basement. She then helped the man giving orders carry away all of the firewood in the house, and then started on the pile in the backyard.

  The older man, who had been ordered upstairs, climbed the steps slowly, as his arthritis had been tormenting him since the cold weather set in. After pulling out dresser drawers and rifling through the bedroom closets, he filled the plastic garbage bag he was carrying with some warm sweaters, flannel shirts, socks, and underwear. On top of that, he emptied out what was left in the bathroom cabinets. All the while, the odor of the gelatinous decomp on the attic stairs had been assailing his nostrils, and he had no intention of stepping in that filth, or in taxing his already aching joints on those steep and narrow stairs. He did shine his flashlight up into the open hatch for a minute, but as long as no zombies looked down at him, he would report “all clear.”

  It probably wasn’t much longer than ten minutes that the three people were in the house, but it felt like hours to Becks, who barely took a breath and didn’t dare move an inch. When they exited, she let out a long sigh and took several slow, deep breaths. Her tense body slowly uncoiled, but her relaxation was short lived.

  “We found her! We found her!” someone shouted in the street.

  “What the fuck?” Becks swore as she sprang to her feet in a panic. “How the hell did they find me?”

  Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how she had gone wrong and given away her position. Were there still hot embers in the woodstove? Had she left bloody footprints? Were all the bullet holes in the side of the house from Reggie and his men a dead giveaway? Were the staged gelatinous remains just too staged?

  After half a minute of pure anguish, she realized it didn’t matter how she had been discovered. The important thing now was how she was going to play this thing out. The brothers had no clue that she had shot Reggie. She could claim that she was out looking for supplies, and when she came back she found the ATVs and all the zombies feasting on bodies. Or, she could make a run for it out the back and into the next street, Bennett Lane, but the Rovers had a lot of people and a lot of firepower, and she wasn’t physically one hundred percent. Surrender went against every fiber of her being, but the “living to fight another day” concept was making a lot of sense—assuming she was able to surrender and wouldn’t be shot down on sight.

  Holstering her weapons, she prepared for the second time to give herself up, this time to try to save her own hide. It didn’t work so well with Angie the last time, but Becks would do her best to keep a bullet out of her own skull. As she was about to step down through the hatch onto the stairs, there was a huge commotion on the street and a woman was screaming.

  Rushing to the north window, Becks saw a couple of the Rovers dragging a woman past the pieces of Humvee and the explosion crater. She was tall, emaciated, with large eyes and skin the color of someone who had spent a few months in the Caribbean. She was trying to struggle and break free, but only had the strength to scream. Even that effort threatened to make her lose consciousness, as her screams were interspersed with violent coughing fits.

  “It’s not me!” Becks practically shouted, and then instinctively clamped a hand over her mouth.

  Her relief in finding out that it wasn’t her who had been discovered was short lived, however, as she watched this pitiful-looking woman being hauled before the two brothers. Becks dared to open the window a crack so she could hear what was being said.

  “You that doctor?” one of the men shouted at the screaming woman.

  He asked again, and then smacked her hard across the face to get her to quiet down. It worked, and the terrified woman stared blankly at the man who had just slapped her.

  “What is your name?” the other brother shouted. “Where are your supplies?”

  The interrogation was brief and fruitless, as the woman fainted. Her wrists were bound with a plastic zip tie, as if that was really necessary, and she was carried into the back of the cargo container. A few minutes later, after the other teams had returned with whatever they could scavenge from the houses, the truck began to slowly back down the street. It was unfortunate that an innocent woman had been taken by the Rovers, but Becks prayed that this would be the end of it, and she wouldn’t see any of them again. She just needed a couple of days to fully recover from this latest blow to the head, and then she would start heading west.

  The weak sunlight through the high overcast did nothing to warm up the temperature, so after several hours, when she was certain the Rovers weren’t returning that day, Becks took the risk of breaking up some furniture and cardboard boxes to burn in the woodstove, since all the firewood had been confiscated. She knew full well she was breaking the rule about no fires in daylight, but her nerves had been so rattled these last few days she had the shakes, and the cold wasn’t helping. The fire would at least drive away the physical chill.

  The warmth started making her drowsy, and just as she was drifting off to sleep, she heard a voice at the front door. Was she dreaming?

  “Hey!” the voice said again, bringing Becks to her feet so quickly she was woozy. Steadying herself against the couch, she pulled out both pistols and held her breath.

  “Please, I know you’re in there,” a deep male voice said. “I’m not one of them. I’m not one of the Rovers. They took Isabella today. They took my wife and I need your help!”

  Becks cautiously moved to the front bay window and pulled back the curtain. On the front steps, there was a large man with long, black, curly ha
ir, clad in military pants and a parka. He reminded her of one of those big Samoan football players. He had two overstuffed duffle bags beside him. She couldn’t see any weapons, but the parka and bags could have held an arsenal.

  “My wife and I have been watching you for weeks,” he continued. “We live up the street. We heard that awful explosion the night of the storm. We’ve seen you running between houses. I wanted to contact you, but Izzy, my wife, she didn’t trust anyone. Especially since our boy was killed by the Rovers. She hasn’t been the same since. She kind of gave up, you know?

  “Anyway, I can’t go back to the house. Once they question her, they’ll know about me. They’ll know I have weapons. I know you are a fighter, and a good shot. I saw you shoot that bastard Reggie. I need to get Izzy back! She’s all I have left.”

  This was one of those moments where Becks’ conscience was slugging it out with her primitive fight-or-flight response. Her heart told her to open that door. Her amygdala told her to open that door and put a bullet in his brain. She settled on a course of action in the middle.

  “How do I know you aren’t with the Rovers?” she shouted, backing away from the bay window in case he opened fire.

  “Look, I could have gone to the Rovers and told them all about you, and where to find you, in exchange for Izzy. But I didn’t. I came to you. Honestly, I don’t know you, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about you, but I won’t trade a human life…not even to save my Izzy.”

  He was saying all the right things, and then some, but Becks had heard good stories before and then been stabbed in the back. But there was another element in play here—guilt. Becks knew damn well that none of this would have happened if the Humvee accident hadn’t happened on this street. And the search parties were looking for her, not this man’s wife. Of course, they could have found her eventually anyway while looking for supplies, but Becks felt responsible, and that was a feeling that had the veto power over all of her other feelings.