HVZA (Book 2): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse 2

by Zimmermann, Linda

  Becks closed her eyes and let out a prolonged groan. She couldn’t go back. She had to go forward. The only way forward was over this barricade, down the street, and over the next barricade, which she couldn’t do as long as children were shooting at her.

  No, they’re shooters, not children, she said over and over in her mind, as the crosshairs settled on the girl’s shoulder where the rifle butt rested. But right before she squeezed the trigger, Becks readjusted the target ever so slightly. The bullet struck the wooden stock of the rifle, shattering it to pieces, two of which drove into the girl’s neck and chest, but she would live.

  The two pistols were much smaller targets, and the shooters couldn’t keep them still, as the kickback was more than they could handle. Their shots were spraying wildly about, but she still couldn’t take any chances they might get lucky. The oldest boy took one of Becks’ bullets in the forearm, but before she could take out the other shooter he ran out of ammunition. Removing her finger from the trigger, she waited to see if anyone else would pick up the guns.

  When it seemed as though everyone inclined to shoot at her was out of commission, Becks hoisted herself back up onto the mattress and swung her feet over onto the ladder. But before she started to descend, she paused to close the eyes of the little girl whose pale, drawn face was splattered with her own blood.

  Pulling out both pistols when her boots hit the ground, Becks was relieved to see that the unharmed children had scattered. The woman and the two wounded kids still lay where they fell, writhing in pain, and she actually took a half step toward them to at least consider binding their wounds, until the crazy lady started shouting again about killing her.

  Suddenly a hail of rocks showered down around her, a few bouncing off the silverware armor, but a couple finding their mark. One even struck the side of her face sending a trickle of blood down her cheek.

  Picking up the pace, she ran as fast as she could to the other barricade. The children ran too, carrying sticks and knives. In the middle of the second block, a little four-year-old boy came running out of the bushes, catching her by surprise and colliding with her. They both fell, but Becks was quickly on her feet to see if the boy was okay. As she knelt down to help him up, he thrust a pocket knife into her leg, just below the knee. He didn’t have the strength to drive the blade very deep, but it still hurt like hell, and he wasn’t finished.

  As he raised the blade to strike her again, Becks blasted him right in the eyes with pepper spray. The little boy howled in pain and started running around in circles, crashing smack into a tree, which knocked him out cold.

  “Serves you right, you little shit,” Becks shouted, as she turned to sprint the last half a block to the other barricade.

  The ladder here was even more rickety than the other one, but she couldn’t take her time as rocks were already reaching her. Straddling a broken coffee table at the top of the barricade, Becks looked for some safe footing to the ground, but two of the kids were already ascending the ladder. A couple of bursts of pepper spray sent them reeling backward, but others quickly took their place.

  Stepping down onto a wicker rocking chair, her foot went right through the brittle seat. Tumbling forward, with the chair shoved up to her hip, Becks bounced off a stack of old tube televisions, and down a series of file cabinets before slamming onto the pavement. It took a moment for her to flex her arms and legs to determine that she was battered, but not broken. Using her free foot to push the wicker chair down off her leg, she got to her feet and scanned the road ahead. It appeared clear for at least a block, but before she had time to move another rock hit her square on the left elbow—right on the funny bone—sending shooting pains down her arm.

  “Owwww!” she bawled, spinning around and aiming her pistol at the ten-year-old boy who had just thrown the rock from the top of the barricade. “Get down right this second or I swear I will put a bullet in your face!”

  The boy’s eyes widened a second before he dropped out of view—which didn’t prevent him from launching a piece of brick up and over the barricade, missing Becks’ head by just inches.

  “I should have shot you, you little fucker!” Becks screamed, completely incensed. She was tempted to climb back up the barricade and put a bullet into every one of those demon children, but deep down she admired their courage and tenacity—qualities she would need as she ran for her life.

  Chapter 17

  Becks wanted to sprint full speed down the center of the road, straight to Interstate 287 in no more than an hour, and much less if she dropped everything and ran free. She felt like a dog on a leash, always tethered, never able to go where she wanted, when she wanted. In fact, more than that, she just wanted to stroll down the sidewalk and admire the brilliant blue sky and white puffy clouds, and stop to smell the wild roses.

  The reality was that the smell of rotting zombies filled the air, and she had to crawl alongside houses and cars, and creep through tall weeds. She was a fugitive from the undead, and every group of zombies was a posse looking for public enemy number one—Dr. Rebecca Truesdale, wanted for her human flesh.

  It was an unusually hot day for spring and the sun was intense. Even though zombies thrived in warm weather—which was why the southern states had far fewer survivors—their eyes couldn’t handle the super bright sunlight. Fortunately, the ZIPs controlling the bodies were not the best managers of the more delicate sensory organs. So at high noon, the majority of the undead stood under the shade of trees or any other shelter that was convenient.

  Those left out in the open would simply close their eyes and face down. This behavior was not to be confused with a twilight state, where the zombie needed some time to “wake up.” It was a distinction that survivors often failed to make, at the cost of their lives.

  After getting a couple of blocks away from the hell of “Kidtown,” Becks found an unlocked SUV to climb into and take a breather, and attend to her knife wound. Thankfully, it didn’t need stitches, but any open wound was inviting infection in these unsanitary living conditions, so she slathered it in antibacterial ointment and applied a bandage. Using the rearview mirror, she checked out the cut on her cheek made by the thrown rock. It was superficial, although it bled profusely. More ointment and another bandage and she was good to go.

  What wasn’t good, in fact, was terrible, was the way she looked. Becks was shocked by her pale, sunken cheeks, the dark circles under her eyes, and could it be… the start of wrinkles!

  “Stress lines,” she assured herself. “That’s all they are, just stress lines that will go away as soon as I get back and get some real rest.”

  Twisting up the mirror so she didn’t have to look at herself any longer, she had some crackers and water, and then hit the road again. As she was crawling along the foundation of a house on the corner of a block, she noticed something two houses down a side street that demanded her attention. Tattered, fading, but still flying high, was a Washington Redskins flag atop a tall flagpole.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Becks said, as her New York Giants blood began to boil. “A stone’s throw from the Meadowlands and these people are Redskins fans!?”

  Of course, in Becks’ book, it wasn’t as bad as being a Dallas Cowboys fan, but it was still treason, punishable by burning. She had wanted to send another smoke signal anyway, and this house would be as good as any to torch. Carefully making her way along a bank of out-of-control hedges, which reminded her of films of the impenetrable hedgerows of the Normandy invasion, she then darted toward the open garage of the Redskins’ house. It was open, but it wasn’t empty.

  To get out of the bright sunlight, four zombies had taken refuge at the back of the garage. As Becks froze, they sprang forward. Not wanting to raise more of the undead with gunshots, Becks deftly wielded her hockey stick into the ribcage of the closest female, who was completely naked except for a toe tag from the morgue. The blade got stuck between her ribs, and with no time to spare, she pushed the stuck zombie back into the other three,
causing them all to fall down. That gave her precious seconds to pull out one of her broom-handled spears and drive the long knife into the eye socket of a 40-ish male in a really nice hand-tailored suit.

  Another zombie female, probably in her seventies, tried to stand up, but Becks put a boot on her throat and used her spear to send the old zombie to her long-awaited eternal rest. But as she tried to pull out the spear, the last unharmed zombie—a robust male in his twenties, wearing some sort of fast food uniform covered in too much blood and gore to identify — shifted the pile, sending Becks sidestepping to stay on her feet. The sudden movement and sharp angle caused the knife to twist and separate from the broom handle, just as the former burger slinger grabbed her foot.

  Gripping the handle like a baseball bat, Becks began whaling away on the zombie’s head, but still he hung on. Pulling himself out from under the three corpses, he got his other hand on her leg, right on her knife wound. Wincing in pain, she nonetheless continued her furious assault on his thick skull, breaking the wooden shaft. Spinning around the broom handle in her hands, she drove the sharp, splintered point into the back of his neck, clean through to the concrete floor. His hands trembled for a few seconds, but then he started to grip even more tightly—until she rotated the shaft in wide circles to inflict maximum tissue damage. Slowly, his hands went limp, his body twitched once or twice, and he was finally still.

  As soon as Becks was sure they were all truly dead, she lowered her boot on the naked woman’s chest and yanked the blade free. During the early days of infection, everyone stockpiled bleach, and this household was no exception. Grabbing one of the gallon jugs that lined a shelf, she doused the blades. Then she soaked a rag in bleach and went over everything she was wearing, as the messy battle had splattered drops of infected blood all over her.

  Checking the garage for other useful items, she found a can of fluorescent orange spray paint. Removing her packs and the quiver, she slithered across the lawn through the high grass to the edge of the road. There were a few zombies a couple of blocks further down, but none really close. Taking a chance, she stood up and sprayed a short message on the black pavement. With an arrow pointing west, she simply wrote “BECKS.” With an arrow pointing to the barricaded neighborhood, she wrote “KIDS NEED HELP.”

  Crawling back through the grass to the flagpole, she reached up with her knife and cut the rope. The Redskins flag fluttered lazily to the ground. Grabbing it, she hurried back to the garage and lowered the door so she wouldn’t be seen. She had hoped to explore the house for supplies, but after tapping on the metal door leading into the kitchen, the racket that arose inside signaled it was too full of zombies to attempt to clear. On the plus side, a lot of Redskins fans would go up in smoke.

  Some cans of kerosene and paint thinner would do the trick nicely. Stacks of newspapers that were never picked up for recycling would make it even easier to torch the house. (As she crumbled up the newspapers, Becks resisted looking at the increasingly alarming headlines, which spoke of the onset of infection and the ensuing horrors.) With the kerosene-soaked flag as a wick, Becks set her latest bonfire. What she didn’t know as she began creeping and crawling westward again, was that sparks from the Redskins’ house would ignite the house next door, which would set ablaze piles of dead brush that would eventually involve six more structures and several cars. With half of a suburban New Jersey block burning to ashes on such a clear day, the towers of smoke could be seen for miles around—especially by the patrols on the highway.

  The westward road on which she had been traveling since New Ridgelawn finally ended at a T-intersection. It would have been a great dilemma as to which way to go, if it hadn’t been for the most wonderful sight—a bright red and blue, shield-shaped, Interstate 287 sign pointing to the right. A black Volkswagen beetle had crashed into the sign and bent it almost to the ground, where Becks would never have noticed it, but fortunately it was just high enough for her to see. Not only did it mean she was headed in the right direction, it meant she had to be even closer to the highway than she originally thought.

  And there was even more good news—the three dead passengers in the VW had taken a big box of food with them, and a pistol. They never got to eat the food because they had crashed due to a swarm of zombies, which then surrounded their car. Rather than try to make a run for it and be eaten, or die slow deaths trapped inside the car, they had chosen murder-suicide as their best option. The interior full of dried corpses and brain splatter didn’t faze Becks in the least as she settled into the empty back seat and gorged on high-calorie snack cakes and Red Bull energy drinks.

  The potent combination hit her stressed-out, malnourished body like a buzz saw, and when she started moving down the road this time, it was the fastest crawl on record. In less than ten minutes she had traveled two blocks and speared five zombies. She really only needed to kill two of them, but she was so amped up that she went out of her way to get the other three just for fun.

  At this point, another Interstate 287 sign directed her to turn left, heading west again. Ahead was a long, tree-lined street that looked like a war zone. Houses had burned, cars were overturned and riddled with bullet holes, and remnants of corpses and countless bones were scattered everywhere. It was impossible to tell if survivors had fought zombies or other survivors, but the end result was that this neighborhood was toast. And it had obviously been picked clean by scavengers, as there weren’t any weapons next to the bodies, and every car and backpack was emptied of food and water.

  Maybe Becks’ nerves were just on edge because of the sugar and caffeine rush, but this area made her very jittery and really gave her the creeps. For all the horror she had witnessed, for some reason, this was one of the most unsettling sights. She had seen death in many places, but this is a place of death, she thought. And the more she saw of the carnage, the more she got the sense that this had been humans fighting humans. Killing for supplies had been commonplace after quarantine, but this looked like it was a massacre.

  “Fuck the tortoise,” Becks said, forsaking her usual caution. “I’m going full on hare!”

  No more creeping through bushes and between cars, she decided, as she stood up and just started running as fast as she could along sidewalks, front yards, and even in the street to avoid zombies, downed trees, and other obstacles. Perhaps it had been her survivor’s sense, or some sixth sense, but she couldn’t have picked up the pace at a better time, as several shots rang out behind her, near where she had first turned the corner.

  Becks couldn’t be certain she was the intended target, and she certainly wasn’t going to slow down to find out, but she doubted it was a mere coincidence that just as she arrived in the neighborhood, someone decided to start shooting. And unless he or she had some kind of vehicle, there was no way anybody would catch the rabbit-swift Dr. Rebecca Truesdale as she raced block after block, lungs burning and heart pounding.

  Her mad dash only slowed when the zombies became too thick to evade. There were a few close calls where her hockey stick and spears weren’t sufficient and she had to use her pistols—drawing even more attention—so she knew she had to get off the streets as quickly as possible. A large neo-Victorian house to her left became her objective, as it had a high turret room that might afford a good view toward the west. To reach the porch of the house, she had to shoot and stab a pack of five zombies, who appeared to have been a family with two boys and a girl.

  Other packs were coming together and heading her way with the makings of a significant herd, so she had to act fast. Banging on the front bay window, she tried to keep one eye on the street and one inside the house. As two zombies entered the living room, a dozen reached the end of the driveway. As three more zombies shuffled into the living room and pressed their ugly faces against the window, two dozen more approached the front yard from all directions. She could handle five zombies inside, but if there were many more it could become too dangerous. Unfortunately, the odds on the porch were about to get even worse.
There was a third option, and she went for it.

  Standing on the railing of the porch, she reached up and grabbed the gutters, and swung her right foot up into them. Luckily, they were strong, copper gutters—probably costing more than she used to make in a year—and she was able to hoist herself up onto the roof of the porch. From there, she was able to scale the slanted first-floor roof, scamper across the ridge to the bottom of a small porch off the second-floor master bedroom, and raise herself up and over that railing. Through the glass French doors, Becks could see that there were two bodies on the king-sized bed. Banging several times on the glass, the figures didn’t move, so she could assume that they, at least, were dead. Becks contemplated entering the house from here and taking her chances, but she could do that later, as she wanted to get to the third floor.

  That was a little trickier; she had to remove her packs, quiver, and rifle to be able to grasp onto the decorative Victorian-style moulding and swing her legs up onto the small section of roof below the turret. Standing up, she could see through the windows that the sunny room had an overstuffed chair with bright yellow upholstery, with a cozy handmade afghan draped over the back, a tea table with a floral china teapot, cup and saucer, and a small rack of books and magazines. This had obviously been a sanctuary for the lady of the house to escape for some peace and quiet during her hectic schedule.

  Perhaps Becks would break a window and enjoy an MRE there in the evening, but first she turned to the west and brought her binoculars to her eyes. As much as she hated the winter, at that moment she wished it wasn’t spring, as the leaves were already thick on the trees, obscuring the views. What she could see, was a frightening number of zombies in the surrounding streets. Travel from here would have to be only after dark, and with the night vision goggles.

  Carefully scanning to the west, Becks had hoped to see a convoy of army vehicles within spitting distance. Unfortunately, a block away looked like more trees and houses, as did another block further down, and so on and so on. A cold stab of sick fear hit her stomach, as there was nothing to indicate how far she was from the highway. Logically, she knew it was out there somewhere close by, but emotionally it felt like it was a million miles away.