by Ricky Sides
AniZombie 3: Vengeance
Ricky Sides
Copyright © 2015 By Ricky Sides
Photos courtesy of Shaunna B.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1 On the Road
Chapter 2 The refuge
Chapter 3 The search
Chapter 4 The camp
Chapter 5 Deceptions
Chapter 6 Origins
Chapter 7 The base
Chapter 8 The mission
Chapter 9 The hunt
Chapter 10 Confrontation
Chapter 11 The siege
Chapter 12 Redemption
Chapter 13 Counterattack
Chapter 14 Zombie attack
Chapter 15 Night battle
Chapter 16 Terror in the dark
Chapter 17 The last straw
Chapter 18 Trouble at the gate
Chapter 19 Confrontations
Chapter 20 Vengeance
Epilogue
Prologue
A meteorite splashed down in the Tennessee River in Decatur, Alabama. It contained a fissure inside it, filled with parasitic microbes that were released into the river system. Fish ate the parasites, and were subsequently caught by a fisherman. The deadliest parasitic microbes ever to exist were now in the human food chain.
It started with a 911 call in Decatur. Patient Zero died in the emergency room of a hospital and was taken to the morgue. The parasites began to starve due to the lack of nutrients. They sent nerve impulses throughout the body. Brain damage from the lack of oxygen had destroyed the victim’s higher brain function, and his circulatory system had collapsed. Two hours after his death, Patient Zero awoke and he was hungry. The parasites were able to reanimate Roy Akins’ central nervous system.
Corporal Herb Bennett and Private Randy Lions of the Alabama National Guard were mobilized. Their mission was to contain the zombie outbreak in Decatur.
The two guardsmen did their best to do the right thing. Then one day, the two men met Doctor Erma Langley at the Athens, Alabama, National Guard Armory. The scientist was working for the CDC. Her mission was to study the impact the Akins’ parasites were having on wildlife. Herb’s guard unit helped her secure an infected vulture to study. That vulture would later prove to play a critical role in discovering a cure for the parasites, provided the victim didn’t die before being injected with the nanobots that would seek out and destroy the alien organisms.
The cure was discovered too late to save the nation. The United States, along with the majority of the nations of the rest of the world, lost more than 90% of their population, leaving mass numbers of zombies in their wake. Now, there were only an estimated 15,750,000 people scattered all over America. It was thought that the zombie population was around 300,000,000.
As the United States government and military were collapsing, they established several refuges for humanity. One was set up on Herb’s land adjacent to the Dagmar State Wildlife Management Area in Arkansas.
The government worked with the military to establish a short-term refuge in every state of the mainland. The initial assistance came in the form of airdrops containing supplies and weapons. Later, large convoys brought in housing and tons of supplies, weapons, and ammunition, as well as thousands of the nanobot injections containing the cure for the Akins’ parasites. Branches of the military, responsible for these deliveries, managed to hold themselves together long enough to establish a half dozen refuges in as many states. Arkansas was among them. The other forty-two refuges that the government had wanted to establish weren’t outfitted before the military collapsed. Groups of people in those other states had received their startup packages with the airdrops, just as Herb’s people had, but they never received the comprehensive help that the ground convoys had delivered, including the nanobot injections.
Herb and Randy worked hard to clear the zombies from their area, but there was a constant threat of additional arrivals as the ravenous creatures ran out of prey and had to seek out more. This meant the survivors at the refuge were forced to maintain a constant vigil in order to protect their community from the ongoing threat. Although the people and animals under their care at the refuge were immune to the Akins’ parasites, thanks to the nanobot injections, their immunity wouldn’t help a bit against the physical assaults of the zombies and animal variants, or as they came to be known, anizombies.
One day, after fighting off zombies at the fence that surrounded the compound, Herb and his team found Dana Rainey near the Refuge. She had inadvertently led the group of zombies to the area. They let her stay, despite her belligerence and hostility.
That same day, the refuge made contact with a group of people in Newport, Arkansas who were all that was left of humanity in that city. Herb, Randy, and the rest of their team left to attempt a rescue, but were forced to return to the refuge when they rescued a family of three who were about to be killed. A second effort that same day met with similar results. They were forced to return with patients in need of medical treatment.
The third attempt to get to Newport proved more productive, but while they were gone, Dana Rainey sowed the seeds of discord in the refuge as she sought to recruit help in ousting the council that ruled there. At first, her efforts were unsuccessful, but a second attempt proved fruitful when she found a man willing to kill for her. She persuaded him to murder Herb when he returned from his trip to Newport.
When the bus returned to the refuge with the people they had successfully rescued, a sniper in a tree shot Herb. Dana’s henchman was wounded by a guard and later captured by Randy and Jason.
The council held a trial a week later. Dana and her co-conspirator were asked to choose between an unspecified amount of time to be locked up at night and serve at hard labor inside the refuge by day, or banishment. Thinking that the nanobot injection she had received upon her arrival would protect her, Dana chose banishment. Devastated by Dana’s rejection and realizing that she had used him, Bernie, the would-be sniper, elected to remain in the refuge and serve his time.
As Dana was about to be escorted to the gate, Erma stood up and announced that she had one more shot she needed to take before she left the compound. Thinking that it would benefit her, Dana agreed to take it and was subsequently injected by Erma with a hypodermic full of a light blue tinted liquid.
When Dana asked what the medicine was, Erma explained that she’d had a week to think about the fact that she had tried to have her husband murdered. Therefore, she had decided she didn’t want Dana to benefit from her work for the rest of her life. She went on to explain that within a day or two, the nanobots in her bloodstream that protected her from the parasites would be rendered inactive. She was leaving the refuge just the way she was when she arrived, which was vulnerable to the Akins’ parasites.
Dana tried to reverse her decision and take the hard labor and confinement, but it was too late. That alternative was off the table.
Many people in the crowd of spectators laughed and shouted their approval of Erma’s actions. A few frowned and shook their heads, indicating their disapproval.
“You people can’t do this to me!” Dana shrieked as she was led away.
“See to it that she gets the pack of food and water,” Herb added as the men half led and half dragged the woman toward the gate. “And I suggest you stop screaming. Zombies were spotted outside the fence last night, and you’re about to be out there.”
Dana stopped yelling after that. She glared at Herb and the rest of the council as she waited for the gate to open. “Just know this…you have not seen the last
of me. You will regret what you are doing to me.” Then she walked through the gate and headed up the dirt drive toward the road.
Chapter 1
On the road.
Dana squatted beside the body of the dead guard. The man appeared to have been shot in the face by a large caliber bullet. She ignored the brains that had leaked out of the back of the man’s head and manipulated the straps securing the flap of his backpack. Once she had it open, she rifled through its contents. The twenty-four year old former aerobics instructor brushed an errant strand of brown hair away from her face as she discarded several personal items that had belonged to the dead man. She paused and looked at a photograph of a young woman sitting in a chair with a baby in her arms. The man had kept it sealed in a heavy gauge plastic bag to protect it.
“I guess she was your woman,” Dana surmised. She had taken to talking to herself since her exile from the refuge three months ago. “Not bad. Not great, but not bad. I suppose she was the best you could do,” she added, and then she flicked the picture away from her toward the ground, not even bothering to watch to see where it landed.
She continued her search until she found what she was seeking. Near the bottom of the pack, she located the man’s meager supply of food. There was a generic can of spaghetti and meatballs and a small candy bar. She looked at the man’s body then and said, “I’ll bet you hoarded this candy for ages, didn’t you? Well, where did that get you, you idiot? You died and never even ate it.”
Dana stood up and dropped the food in her own pack, which she then slipped on her athletic shoulders. She walked up to the front doors of the church and entered the building. She wasn’t concerned about the marauders who had killed the people at the little country church. In fact, she was seeking them, and she planned to continue to do so when she left the church property, but first, she needed to see if the men had overlooked any other supplies. She thought they probably had because they had in the past.
Inside the church, Dana found seven bodies. Two appeared to be elderly women. One was a middle-aged woman, and the other four bodies were men. Their hands had been bound behind their backs and they had all been shot in the head, executioner style. It was apparent to her that they had first been captured, and then executed.
As the woman walked quietly along the floor, she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She jerked her head around, ready to face a potential threat. Instead, she saw her reflection in a large mirror that was about the size of a plate glass window. It was inset in the wall. Dana wondered why the church had a mirror located there, but then she shrugged it off as unimportant, and continued her search.
There were no supplies evident in the sanctuary, so she left that room and entered a short hall that led to several rooms. One was a nursery and the others were classrooms where Sunday school classes had been conducted. She searched the rooms, but saw nothing of value to her. Then, inside the last room on the left, she found the body of a woman who appeared to be about her age. The body was naked. “At least you got a little action before they killed you,” Dana said. “I can’t even remember the last time I enjoyed a real man’s attentions.”
Beside the body was an open safe. “They did all this for money?” Dana said in an exasperated tone of voice. “The idiots. What do they think they’re going to buy? Hell, why buy anything when everything is free for the taking these days. This group won’t do. They’re too stupid to be of use to me.”
She sighed and proceeded to complete her search of the church. The hallway ended at a door that was locked. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Dana muttered. She could see that someone had tried to force the door open. Dirty boot prints were all over its surface, but they had failed to force it open. “Lazy bastards,” Dana muttered. She wondered why they didn’t just shoot the lock, but then it occurred to her that they might not want to waste the ammunition. Yet, that conclusion made her wonder why they would have wasted bullets on the prisoners they had executed. She shook her head in disgust. The behavior of the group she had been trailing was full of inconsistencies.
She thought about the problem for a moment, and then she went back out into the sanctuary and checked the bodies again. It took her only a couple of minutes to determine which corpse belonged to the minister. He was the only person who had died with a copy of the Bible in his jacket pocket. She searched his pockets and found a key ring that was filled with an assortment of keys. She took them back to the locked door and soon had it open.
“Oh yes, now this is more like it,” she said as she entered the kitchen and dining area. The room was the second largest in the church, surpassed only by the sanctuary in size. The front section was filled with long tables and metal folding chairs. The rear consisted of a kitchen that was separated from the rest of the room by a four foot tall counter.
Dana searched the dark room by the light of her small flashlight. Unlike the other rooms in the church, this one had heavy drapes covering all the windows. She found a rechargeable solar powered lantern, equipped with fluorescent lights, sitting on a countertop and activated the power switch. She gave a grunt of satisfaction when the bulbs flickered to life and flooded the area around her with light.
Dana rummaged through the cupboards in growing frustration. She found a few containers of food, but not as much as she had hoped to locate in such a large dining area that must have supported all those people. The supplies she found consisted of rice, dried beans, and oatmeal, as well as a few cans of potatoes and mixed vegetables. She sighed as she realized that they had more than likely had access to more food, but it wasn’t stored here. Therefore, their secret stash was lost to her now.
Dana took the few meager cans of food and a small bag each of the rice, beans, and oatmeal. She could have carried it all, but she had learned her lesson when it came to how much weight she should attempt to carry with her on the road. Besides, she wasn’t a fan of either of the dried foods.
Dana stepped out into the hall to make her way back toward the sanctuary of the church. She planned to leave the building by way of the front door that she had used to gain entry. She was about half way to the entryway when she heard a moan. She stopped in her tracks and then began to back away slowly.
She had known investigating the building was a risky proposition. After all, a large number of people had been shot to death here, and gunshots invariably drew any zombies that were within hearing distance. However, she hadn’t encountered a zombie all day, and had hoped that meant that she was in an area that was free of them.
As she backed away from the entry to the sanctuary, Dana heard the sound of bodies shuffling around on the floor and more of the eerie moans. She turned and walked to the door to the room on the left, which was the closest. She glanced back toward the sanctuary to ensure that no zombie was observing her before she committed to entering the room. It wouldn’t do to get herself trapped with no way to escape, and not all of the rooms had windows. She was relieved to see that she remained undetected for the moment.
Dana entered the room, and then she closed and locked the door. She found herself inside a nursery. During church services in happier times, parents had taken their babies and young children there when they were becoming a distraction to the congregation inside the sanctuary. She saw a large plate glass window in the wall that faced the sanctuary and remembered seeing a mirror on the wall when she entered the building. She realized that it must be a one way mirror, which meant she could see out, but no one on the other side would be able to see her. That made sense to Dana. The design would permit mothers to nurse their infants and still watch the church service in privacy.
Dana moved over to stand near the window. She looked out through it and was soon staring at the source of the moans. There were three zombies in the Sanctuary tearing at the bodies of the dead parishioners. Dana knew that the undead creatures preferred the living as a food source, but she was also well aware that they were opportunistic feeders and not above stopping to eat the dead if that was the onl
y food source available to them and the bodies were not in an advanced state of decomposition.
As she was observing the undead, she saw a small, reanimated Yorkshire terrier walk over to a female zombie who was feasting on the body of one of the old women. The canine was the blonde and black color combination typical of the breed, but looked a far cry from the show dog she could have been in life. Her hair was matted and filthy from living outdoors for months on end. It was also coated in a variety of liquids ranging from blood to tree sap. The flesh around her eyes and mouth had retracted, giving her a horrific appearance. All in all, it was now a bedraggled looking creature. The blonde female turned her head to regard the dog, but then she resumed eating and ignored the animal. However, every few seconds, the female would toss a small strip of the meat toward the Yorkie, which ate it with a ravenous appetite. “At one time, you were pretty,” Dana said quietly to herself in reference to the female zombie. She needn’t have been concerned about being overheard. The nursery was soundproofed. It needed to be in order to serve its intended purpose.
Dana didn’t know it, but the female zombie she was observing was Shaunna Baugher, and the terrier with her had been her pet Yorkie named Lily. Shaunna was the woman her archenemies Herb Bennett and Randy Lions had once helped on the side of the road in Arkansas.
She then shifted her attention to the other two zombies. Both were wearing uniforms. One was a policeman, or had been before he died. The other had obviously been an EMT. “You guys died badly, didn’t you?” Dana muttered as she saw the ragged tears in the necks and faces of both men. They stood in stark contrast to the female zombie whose face, even in death, reflected her natural attractiveness.
Dana moved away from the window when she saw the little dog start sniffing at the ground around the bodies. She was afraid the animal might pick up her scent and lead the zombies to her. She moved over to study the window that would serve as her escape hatch, assuming she could get it open. She eased the heavy drape apart enough to check outside for more zombies as she heard a scratching sound at the door of the nursery. “Damn that dog,” she muttered as she checked to see if it would be safe to exit the building.
