Riley, the pain in her leg forgotten for the moment, watched as the truck headed off the road, the forest fast approaching. The front tires caught on something, sending the truck into a sideways slide, landing with a rocking crash into the ditch alongside the road. Riley’s seat belt dug into her neck like a blade.
Suddenly all the commotion ceased. The only sounds Riley heard were the crinkling of car parts as the wreck settled. She was leaning sideways in her seat, the truck at an angle, her seat belt keeping her from falling onto Joanne.
Riley looked down and saw Joanne. She had shattered window fragments in her hair and on her face. Small cuts appeared along her cheeks, neck and forehead. Her eyes were closed, her body limp.
Riley’s neck stung where the seat belt sliced into her. Using her fingers, she touched the injured area to assess the bleeding. It wasn’t bad as her fingers were hardly smeared. She’d be fine, but she needed to help Joanne.
“Joanne,” Riley said, hoping to stir her awake. “Joanne.” The woman didn’t answer. Looking at her chest, Riley saw that she was breathing and felt a small amount of tension disperse.
This was all Riley’s fault. Even leaving at night, without informing anyone and she still managed to hurt the ones she loved. It seemed like life was easier at times when she was alone and no one knew of her existence. But none of that mattered now; her thoughts were ridiculous. She loved having Joanne and Eric in her life and wouldn’t trade them for the world, but at the same time she had to do what she did. Damn, life was so screwed up sometimes.
Holding onto the strap to keep from falling, she unbuckled her seat belt. The truck’s incline wasn’t too steep, so keeping herself from sliding into Joanne wasn’t a problem. “Joanne,” she said again. “Joanne, wake up.” The woman began to stir, letting out a groan.
“Riley?” she muttered.
“Joanne, you’re okay.”
Joanne opened her eyes. “Well this can’t be good.”
“We’ll be okay. We crashed.”
“Damn deer,” she said. Riley smiled. Joanne craned her neck and began moving, pieces of glass and debris falling off of her. “We need to get out of here. The zombies… They’ll be coming.”
“This far?”
“If they have trackers among them, which I’m sure they do, they’ll still be able to catch our scent. We aren’t really that far from them and the road is unobstructed—an easy trail for them to follow.”
Riley climbed out of the passenger window. She grunted with each painful movement, but managed.
From her view above, Riley saw Joanne’s face begin to glisten with blood as the liquid life flowed from a gash in her scalp. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing,” Joanne said, gathering up supplies that tumbled to her side of the car.
“Looks kind of serious.” Riley had seen a lot of wounds and a lot of blood. Joanne’s wound was gushing.
Wiping at her face, clearing the blood away from her eyes, Joanne said, “Head wounds bleed a lot.” She felt through her hair until she came across the cut. “Hurts like a bitch, but it’s not deep. I’ll be fine.”
Joanne handed the bag she’d brought with her and Riley’s backpack to Riley, along with two handguns. “Now help pull my old ass up.” Riley reached as far into the car as her arms would go and helped Joanne out of the window.
“Now what?” Riley asked, staring at the slanted-in-a-ditch truck. “I can’t walk too well on my leg.”
“Let’s see it,” Joanne told her.
“No.”
“Riley, what the hell’s the matter with you?” Joanne asked, taken aback. “It might be broken.”
“It’s not,” Riley said, looking down at the wet roadway, shame evident in her tone. “It’s where…” the words were caught in her throat for a moment, but she managed to get them out. “It’s where I was bitten.” She looked up at Joanne.
The woman’s eyes widened, her stare intense. “You actually went through with it?”
Riley looked away from the woman that had become a mother to her. She wasn’t ashamed of her decision. No, it was something she’d do again. How could she have known the zombie would take more flesh than she wanted to give? And what were the chances a mass of undead would come ambling down a lone back road? “I’m sorry I got you into this. And I’m sorry I ruined the truck.” She felt tears coming on, breathed deep and fought to hold them back.
“Riley,” Joanne said, laying a tender hand on her shoulder. “I’d love to discuss this mess with you, but we’ve got to get moving.”
Joanne helped Riley put on the backpack, stuffing the two handguns into her own pants. “And I pray that you don’t turn and that the Hag was correct and you really are special. I can’t explain what happened to you the first time you were bitten, but…” she turned her back and began walking in the direction of the house, “if you begin to turn, I’ll shoot you myself.”
Riley was stunned, as if slapped in the face by Joanne’s harsh words. But she knew the woman was right in saying so. Joanne had a son to protect and that meant keeping him as well as herself from harm’s way. And if Riley did become a zombie, she wouldn’t be any different than the rest of the undead. She picked up her rifle and Joanne’s bag. Wincing with each hobbled step, she followed Joanne down the road.
Chapter Eighteen
War Zone and Miracles
Riley’s entire leg was burning with pain, but Joanne refused to stop and Riley didn’t want to cause a problem by resting. She pushed through the hurt.
They walked for what seemed an eternity. There was no sign of the undead, but Riley knew that didn’t mean they weren’t coming.
An hour later they arrived at the house. Riley began wondering if maybe they had driven far enough away, and that the sniffers wouldn’t be able to track them.
“Might’ve gotten lucky with the zombies,” Joanne said, as if reading Riley’s mind, as she and Riley huffed up the stairs to the house. They each took a minute to rest as they collapsed on the couch. “Can’t rest long. Just in case.”
Riley limped to a first aid kit in the kitchen. She cleaned her wound again, this time making sure she did a decent job before bandaging it up again. She would have to make sure, if she didn’t turn, to keep the wound clean or the relief of not becoming a zombie wouldn’t matter. Infection could set in and kill her.
Eric was woken up and told they were going into lock-down mode. Weapons and ammo were rounded up and placed in the living room: twenty rifles of various caliber, twelve handguns, two compound bows with forty-two arrows, a dozen grenades, forty sticks of dynamite and ten homemade pipe bombs. The dynamite was found on a construction site not far from the Milners and the grenades were acquired from a damaged military truck sitting off the road in the brush along the Thruway.
Next, Riley and Eric tied sticks of dynamite to the arrows while Joanne went around the house making sure all the doors and windows were locked. The only way into the house, not that zombies could think to use doors, was up the front porch stairs.
With the assortment of weapons at their disposal, the three combatants took their posts on the front porch and waited.
“I don’t think they’re coming,” Eric said. “They would’ve been here by now. Wouldn’t they?” Then as if on cue, a low, almost humming sound, could be heard in the distance. “What’s that?”
“It’s them,” Riley said. “I’ll never forget the sound of so many of them together.” Eric’s face paled. “It’ll be all right, Eric,” Riley told him, trying to sound sure of herself. But deep inside, her stomach churned as if worms were at work.
“We’ll be fine sweetie,” Joanne offered, not taking her eyes from the bend in the driveway. “Just keep them from getting up here and we’ll take care of the rest.”
Within minutes the zombies appeared. They came down the driveway like an unwelcome and out-of-tune marching band.
“You’re on, kid,” Riley told Eric.
Eric, using a match, lit the small torc
h that Joanne had made. The end, doused with kerosene, caught in a blaze, and he was ready to go to work.
Joanne and Riley stood to either side of him with bows and dynamite-arrows at the ready. “Aim for the mass of them,” Joanne commanded. “And the bigger of the groups if they begin to separate. The explosions should blow off the limbs making them less of a threat, and hopefully we’ll destroy some of their brains too.”
Riley pulled back her bow string. “Light me up.” Eric brought the torch’s flame to the dynamite’s fuse. The fuse ignited and began to burn, a snake-like hiss filling their ears. Riley released her hold on the string, sending the dynamite-arrow in the air. It arched across the sky and landed in the shoulder of a zombie. Completely unfazed, the thing kept walking forward.
Eric had already lit Joanne’s arrow. Riley watched it fly as she readied another arrow herself. It sailed into the air as the previous one she’d fired ignited, blowing a hole in the zombie line.
The sight was awesome. Zombie body parts flew away from each other, their rotted corpses disintegrating into bits of flesh and bone. The zombie line was missing a piece now, but within seconds it filled in as if the throng was a liquid mass.
Joanne’s arrow, which had hit a zombie in the chest farther down the line, exploded. Another gaping hole was created in the crowd of undead, but again quickly filled in. Riley and Joanne’s first shots had crippled about twenty zombies in total. A small number, but a decent start.
More arrows were launched into the approaching horde, as zombie after zombie was ripped apart and left either motionless or crawling feebly. But no matter how much damage they did, the zombies kept onward without a care in the world for their safety.
By the time the last dynamite-arrow was fired, Riley guessed there were about seventy-five maimed or dead zombies. Some of the nearby foliage had caught fire, leaving the battleground looking like a scene from what Riley imagined Hell might look like.
She’d read history books and had viewed photographs of Civil War battlefields. Pictures of dead and wounded soldiers littered the pages, the front yard resembling the scenes in those textbooks.
Bodies missing arms and legs, intestines trailing behind like the tentacles of a dead squid, crawled toward the house. The zombies missing all their limbs, reduced to sacks of squirming meat, writhed around with endless abandon. The undead’s resolve was daunting, as if they truly believed they had a chance to reach a meal. But it wasn’t anything they could help, Riley guessed. They were like robots in a way, programmed with a single purpose: to eat human flesh.
“Use the grenades,” Joanne said. “Riley, get on the runners.”
The wave of undead kept coming. Grenades exploded, sending bodies this way and that, the shrapnel tearing through rotted flesh.
Riley had taken up her rifle, firing at the fast zombies, the runners. Hitting the runners, with their bobbing heads, proved to be a challenge, but in the case of the slow-walking zombies, it was like shooting the side of a mountain.
The grenades hadn’t done as good of a job as the dynamite had at crippling the undead. “There must be a hundred left,” Riley said as she continued firing into the crowd.
“At least we’ve taken most of their numbers and we’re safe up here on the deck.”
Eric had moved to the stairs as the zombies drew closer to the house. He blasted any undead that tried to make their way up and soon the bodies piled too high, creating an impenetrable wall.
Riley and Joanne continued shooting, taking aimed shots at heads. Soon the deck was shaking, surrounded by zombies. The mass was directly under them, arms raised and groping at air, like a crowd of eager fans at a rock concert.
It took some time, Riley’s arms like rubber, her trigger finger numb, but between herself, Joanne and Eric, the zombie horde was reduced to only the crippled.
Riley and the others were exhausted, their ears ringing from the explosions and constant firing of weapons. She had used four different rifles, running out of ammo for three of them.
With nothing but the crippled zombies left, the group took up handguns, walking through the yard and finishing off the undead. After hours of monotonous pulling of triggers, the group was done. They went inside, all beyond tired, and fell, resting with relief.
Later that afternoon, Riley woke. The pain in her ankle was intense and she wondered how she’d been able to sleep at all.
The front yard resembled something Hell threw up. Burnt cinders from trees stood over hundreds of rotting, dead corpses. The air smelled of death and decay, a pungent odor that Riley knew would haunt the area for months to come. They had a lot of work ahead of them. Cleaning up the mess would take lots of time and energy, the area forever tarnished with death.
That night during dinner, no one said much. They were all still exhausted, eating only to give their bodies sustenance before crawling to bed.
“We did it,” Joanne said, breaking the silence.
“That’s for sure,” Eric said, sighing.
“Going to be some clean-up,” Riley added. “And we can’t take our time with it. The odor will attract others.”
“I don’t think there are any more,” Eric said, jokingly.
“I still don’t understand where they all came from,” Joanne said. “And why they came here.”
“They followed the sniffers,” Riley said, shoveling a piece of soft deer meat into her mouth.
“No, not that amount. Undead will follow sniffers, but that many? And for that far?”
“That far?” Eric asked.
“Yeah,” Joanne said. “The only way there were that many undead was if they came from the city. How the hell they followed us from there… I mean we left the city so long ago…” she trailed off, having no answer it seemed. Riley began to wonder if it had anything to do with her, but said nothing.
After dinner Joanne asked Eric to let herself and Riley have some time alone to talk. “Girl talk,” she said. He gladly left for his room after rolling his eyes. “Good, I’m going to sleep. Wake me when it’s my turn to stand guard.”
“Honey-tea?” Joanne asked.
“Sure,” Riley said.
Joanne left the kitchen area, going to the wood stove in the living room where a kettle sat with boiling water inside. Using a blackened oven mitt, she removed the kettle from on top and returned to the kitchen table with it.
Riley had put a teaspoon’s worth of honey into her cup. Joanne poured the scalding liquid, melting the honey into a mixable state. The tea bags had long been finished, both females missing the once so common beverage. Honey had no expiration date, and they had plenty of it from the bunker.
“Where do you think all the undead came from, really?” Riley asked.
“Had to be the city. It just creeps me out that they’d come all the way here, as if we were the only meat left in the area and they smelled us out.” Joanne sipped her honey-water tea. “But that’s not what I want to talk about now anyway.”
Riley stared at the steam coming off of her cup. “I know, but do you think it’s something we need to worry about? We are extremely low on weaponry now.”
Joanne didn’t answer, her face looking perplexed. “Let me see your leg.”
Riley put her cup down. She drew in a deep breath, exhaled. “It’s ugly.” She slid her pant leg up. The bandage had a large red stain showing through and Riley wasn’t surprised. With all the action that had taken place earlier, she was surprised that she made it through the day.
Taking off the bandage, Riley saw that the wound was raw and fleshy. Fresh blood leaked from small areas, the damage already healing in places.
“No purple veins or discoloration, but I have to lock you in the basement. I’m too tired to stand watch over you.”
“I know,” Riley said. “My plan was to stay cuffed to a tree until I knew for sure.” Her heart sank inside her chest like a stone. “Obviously it didn’t work out that way.”
Joanne dressed Riley’s ankle with a fresh bandage. Standing bef
ore her, tears in her eyes, she asked, “Can you tell me why you needed to do this?”
“I had to know.”
“Why?” Tears fell down Joanne’s cheeks. Riley felt the weight of the woman’s sadness, pushing down on her like an elephant. “What’s the point?”
“For a cure,” Riley said, fighting off the need to join in with tears. “To find out who I really am.” Joanne was pacing back and forth.
“Who you are?” Joanne asked, incredulously. “You’re my daughter, Riley. Eric’s sister. I don’t care if you came to us so late in life. You’re family. We need you alive.” She paused, staring at Riley. “You’re not alone anymore.”
Riley had never seen Joanne so distraught, not even after George died.
“I love you guys too,” Riley said, her voice squeaky. “More than you could ever know. I’ve told you my story, so you know how I want to be loved and how much you guys mean to me.” She fought back the incredible need to cry, her voice trembling.
“Then why take a chance at destroying it? Family is all but a forgotten relic in this world. We have something so powerful that no zombie or evil can ever take away, unless we let it.” Joanne paused, then stomped the floor. “Damn it, I can’t take losing another member of this family.”
Riley stood up. She limped over to Joanne who was standing, shaking, and hugged the woman. “The world is dying,” Riley whispered, through tears. “If there’s a chance for a cure, for turning all this around, then I have to try.”
That night, Riley stayed in the basement. She took a book to read by candle light, not knowing if she’d be able to sleep. But to her surprise, even with her ankle burning, she grew tired and nodded off.
“Riley,” a voice said. She felt her body shaking, but not because she was cold. Someone was rocking her gently. The voice was Joanne’s. Opening her eyes, she saw the woman’s pleasant face close to hers. “Oh my God, Riley, you look…” tears filled her eyes, “fine.”
Riley sat up slowly. “Yeah, I feel fine too.” She threw off the covers and undid her bandages. The wound looked the same as it did yesterday—no ugly purple veins or skin discoloration.
Amongst the Dead Page 16
