“Ava!” Hailey moved slowly out of her seat. Her coughing had become more aggressive since we got into town. She was clinching shut the stuffed fast food bag while tying her hair into place.
“Mommy!” Ava let go of me and clung to Hailey like a magnet.
“Well, hello there baby girl,” Hailey said twirling our little girl in the air. I watched lovingly as they circled around. Capturing the moment in my mind. Both of them beautiful in the glowing sun’s rays.
“Ok baby, let mommy rest for a moment. We can play later, I promise.” Hailey panted and bent over to spit at the ground.
Ava broke off from Hailey as I helped my wife stand upright. I could tell that brief activity had worn her out. But she was too fearless to admit it.
“You ok?” I asked reaching a soft hand to my wife’s shoulder.
“Just a little tired, I’ll only need to lay down for a few minutes.” Hailey replied tiredly.
She waved me off a second time while I backed off and allowed her to move alone as she wished.
“I’m fine. Whey don’t you get the truck unloaded while I take a break.” She instructed and waved at the pickup.
I nodded and stood silently at my wife struggling to help herself up the porch on her own. She wearily walked up our short stair entrance with Ava by her side for support. Holding her mother’s leg in her tiny hand and guiding her along.
Hailey set a course for the living room while Ava came back out asking if I needed any help getting our luggage inside. Sweet girl was always willing to lead a helping hand. The best effects of country life no doubt rubbed off on her.
At least one of the two was helpful around here. I thought and shook my head.
“Daddy, Mr. Jim is waving to open the gate,” Ava called from the front door while I pulled my laptop bag out of the rear cabin of the truck and slung it over my shoulder while fumbling with a large duffle full of Hailey’s clothing, or bricks.
She was quite the packer—prepared for any occasion. I’m pretty sure she didn’t need to bring a jacket to Florida, let alone two, but there wan’t any convincing my wife to forego fashion accessories. You can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl.
“Oh, ok honey,” I called back not completely sure what she just said, my mind clearly stuck on the fact my wife likes to test my strength with her overstuffed bags. I was bad like that. As Hailey would say, “Sometimes it’s like you aren’t even with the rest of us on earth.”
As much as I hated to admit it, she wasn’t wrong either. I was constantly running circles in my mind of the advertising pitches I had to finish for my handful of clients.
Or the work to be done around the farm. And of Hailey. How she could never be sure I was always thinking of her and the girls late into the night while they lay down for bed and while I went about grinding up some coffee preparing to burn the midnight oil.
Just then, Ava rushed past toward the driveway while I grunted my way toward the door with Hailey’s and my bags digging into both sides of my shoulder blades.
I swung our screen door open as it bounced off the wooden frame before I went to unload our bags in our bedroom. Our clock on the wall read a quarter past noon.
“Dang, late for work,” I said between my breath—tossing Hailey’s bag onto our king-sized bed.
“You feeling any better babe?” I felt Hailey’s forehead. A little warm but nothing to be concerned about.
“I think I’ll have Cathy take me to the doctor, I feel like I might have food poisoning. You think that food last night had gone spoiled?” She dug her phone from her purse beside the couch and dialed her friend.
“I feel fine, a little tired but good all together,” I said shaking my head.
I then got busy setting up for another thrilling day of pitching a logo treatment to a client out of Dallas. Our trip or not, there was always work to be done.
Coffee - check.
Half-finished logo ideas - check.
Last thing before I begin is to check email. Wouldn’t want to get heads-down into my work without first being told to go back and re-do the previous day’s work.
Ah, the life of an artist.
I weeded through the typical spam, and then an email from my latest client popped up.
I read:
Feeling too ill today to meet, Nathan.
Going to have to miss our video call later.
I’ll let you know when I can reschedule. Hold off on the project.
Best, Doug
Well, I guess that’s a day off for me. I happily closed my laptop and called over to the wife announcing we would be spending the whole day together. What luck.
Over my shoulder I saw Hailey’s thumb sticking straight up from behind the backside of the couch.
Suddenly, we heard a shriek coming from outside. Hailey screamed my name in a panic. I, in turn, jumped out of my chair racing toward the door.
It was Ava. She was in trouble.
3
Blood In The Sun
I bolt outside to discover our neighbor, Jim, pulling at my daughter’s princess dress. Jim is growling a guttural howl. He had Ava pressed up against our gate with him on the other side and her turned around facing the direction of our home. Her face was flush with terror as she saw me appear from our home suddenly.
Ava was tugging her dress from Jim in terror—crying a baths worth of tears. She squirmed with all her tiny might from Jim’s much larger hands.
Speckles of green plastic diamonds flashed from her dress in the heat of the Texas sun. He pulled with a determined hand clinched tight around her gown as the other flailed behind the other. I ran forward with every ounce of my energy coursing through me.
I then felt rubble under my boots spread until I slipped and fell forward into the thick weed and dirt. Grains of dirt stung my eyes. Blurring my vision. I felt the bridge of my nose crack from the impact.
Blood gushed from my nose as I quickly dusted myself off—leaping forward and sprinted to the gate. The pain put me over the edge. Running all the while dabbing the blood on my jacket until enough dirt coated my nostrils to stop the bleeding.
“Jim, what’s gotten into you? Let go of her!” I wheezed. His skin was a pale gray, his mouth open wide and exposing teeth in a violent rage as he moaned in gibberish gargles. Saliva was dripping on one side of his mouth with his eyes fixated squarely on Ava.
He looked deranged. Like a desperate animal craving a meal from behind its cage. And he seemed, hungry.
Jim turned his red eyes at me for a brief moment. I could just barely see the white in them as I ran up to Ava. He locked puffy red tinted eyes to the blood staining my jacket and licked his sunburned lips. Momentarily distracted I reached for Ava. His gaze returned back to his prey he had in his grasp and forcefully dragged Ava closer.
“Let go of my daughter Jim!” I yelled. My finger tips grazing my daughters own.
Clearly something wasn’t right with him. His mind was messed up. There wasn’t going to be any reasoning with him it seemed. He wasn’t a drug addict. At least I know he gave that up over twenty years ago as an old Austin hippie. Or so he told me he had.
Jim continued to pull Ava, only now more violently as I once again reached for her arm. She screamed for me to help her. I felt powerless, then, a deep anger as she pleaded.
“Daddy make him stop!” She cried over and over.
My daughters frightened voice wretched my heart and caused my blood to boil. A faint trickle of blood slid down my chin. Jim glanced back up, tonguing the air madly. I have to protect her at all costs.
In a hurry I reached in my pocket and pulled my pocket knife on him. It was only about an inch long but it had to do as a weapon.
“Last warning Jim! I’ll stab you, don’t test me!” I declared in a rage for him scaring my daughter like this.
This only seemed to enrage him further. Ava’s dress tore around her mid-section—her bare back exposed. Her green eyes dilated in the bask of
the sun hanging overhead—staring up as though a vulture would swoop her up and away. Warm blood drained down my cheeks and the only thing I could see was a mad red for him attacking her.
So I lunged at his flailing arm and connected knife to flesh. He didn’t even so much as flinch as I dug it deep, breaking his skin. The knife now stood upright as an extension of his arm. A trickle of blood ran down his outstretched forearm. Soon his thick arm hairs were coated in an almost blackish red.
“What!?” I asked puzzled that it didn’t even so much as faze him.
The pulling continued without hesitation as Ava screamed again for my help. More ripping, more crying. More anger building…
Whatever the hell has gotten into Jim would have to be dealt with later. He probably got back into drugs. The more serious ones I assumed. Do mushrooms make you a crazed lunatic? LSD?
I stepped back and looked over to my side for something to strike Jim with. In the corner of my eye I spotted a wooden beam from a part of the fence that I needed to patch laid over a bucket of rusty nails.
Good thing I’ve been so lazy putting off that project. I thought.
In a fit of rage, I gripped the board over my head and bashed down hard on the back of his head, which now rocked beneath the gate as he snapped at Ava.
Jim’s head bounced off the metal frame violently. A piece from atop his skull ripped from the strike zone of the hit. A layer of skin and bloody hair clung to the end of the board as I lifted up from the follow through.
The hell!? Reality hit me hard through my fit of rage.
“Jim, I didn’t mean to…” I began as he lifted his bloody head, a sagging pile of flesh hung over his exposed left eyeball, which had bulged out from the impact and folded over like a red soaked cloth. Ava turned and screamed as his grip finally gave out. I couldn’t believe what I had just done. But I felt a real danger there with him pulling at my little girl. The police would have to understand it was self-defense. Surely, they would have to.
“Honey, run inside.” I bent down to Ava. Her dress was torn down to her skirt. Turning her around, I checked for any cuts or bruises. She twisted away from me and ran crying down the driveway home. I had made my little girl upset. More importantly, afraid of me.
I stood in a daze, watching Ava leave. My parental instincts at an all time high.
Then I heard Jim moaning and banging his fat fingers into the dirt.
Jim, what the hell is wrong with you? I thought, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
“Nate!”
I heard the front door swing open as Hailey ran outside and down the porch to us.
She stopped at Ava, consoling her before sending her into the house so we could talk.
“Oh…my god!” Hailey gasped between her hands as she covered her mouth in shock of Jim’s exposed red scalp. As she neared, Jim looked over me to her and groaned even louder, as though his attention was heightened even further at the presence of another person.
He was now pinned, twisted into the gate from attempting to come further over the other side. His bloody arm now coated in thick brown from rolling in the dirt.
“What happened? What did you do?” she asked, trying to quickly piece this all together. I could only imagine the sight from her point of view.
This was bad. Really bad.
“Jim was attacking Ava. He wouldn’t listen to me. I asked him several times to stop or I would hit him,” I said exhausted and nervous.
I felt a wave of chill air run up my back as I fought to stand upright. I knew the weather was sweltering, but my body didn’t. I rubbed my arms, goosebumps spreading them like a rash. I tried warming myself up and not faint.
“Why would he do that?” Hailey palmed the air as though I knew why Jim was acting like a raging lunatic.
My legs began to go limp. After a minute, I crouched giving my knees a moment to recover from near collapse. I wiped my face of the buildup of blood and sweat.
“Nathan, you’re bleeding.” In all her panic she only just now realized.
“I fell, it’s fine,” I dabbed my jacket at my nose.
“There’s a knife in his arm Nate.” Hailey pointed at the red casing branding a logo in the shape of a tree—the knife she had given me on our anniversary a few years ago.
“You stabbed him and THEN hit him with what, a baseball bat?” she asked bewildered.
“It was a board, that board there.” I pointed at the blood-stained board with Jim’s hunk of flesh firmly attached to its frayed end.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Hailey bent over at seeing Jim’s ripped skin wrapping over the wood.
Jim reached upward only a few feet from where we stood, swapping the air between us both. His moaning grew more aggressive as we seemed to be teasing him as a snack just on the other side of the gate and just out of his reach.
We sat in silence for several minutes as Hailey gagged and spat at the ground trying her best to keep it together for the sake of Ava who looked on from the porch, Pup clutched in front of her face.
I broke the silence. “We have to call the police.”
4
Help
I called 911 several times and was greeted by a busy signal at each attempt. I paced around our living room taking the occasional peek out the window to be sure Jim was still there. He was indeed there, the gate made sure of that.
“Damn, still nothing,” I told Hailey flushed with panic.
I looked back outside to Jim. He was now slumped over the gate and our property. He clung, pressed to the gate with his arms wide on the other side.
“Oh hey, Dad, Mom. Welcome home,” Emma said walking down the hall as she yanked her remaining ear bud out of her ear. The squealing, nauseating sound of some teeny bopper could be heard playing from her phone as she clicked it off.
“What’s going on?” She came to a stop before us. Hailey sitting on the couch in our living room and me holding up the blinds to peek at Jim with my cell phone pinned to my ear attempting to call the police in a frantic game of redial. The sound of a busy signal on the other end after my repeated attempts.
We both looked at her plain faced before explaining what had just happened.
“Ava is in her room crying,” Hailey said. She turned to me to explain.
“Was it about grandma?” She asked.
The girls were never close to Hailey’s mother. A side effect of her declining memory for who the girls were and them playing nice to an old lady they only understood to be their grandmother.
“Your sister saw me having to fight Jim. Well, fight isn’t really what happened. More like he attacked your sister and I had to stop him,” I explained looking at my feet for the words. Playing over the event in my head as though I was remembering it wrong.
“Wait, what?” Emma asked curiously.
“Jim was acting…crazy,” I muttered as my eyes narrowed at the explanation. Emma’s eyes, however, lit up.
“His eyes were blood red and he couldn’t speak other than some gibberish,” I continued. My eye’s darting from one foot to the other. I waited for her to respond. But was met with only silence from my usually very talkative teenager.
I glanced up. Emma was now glued to her phone. She was flicking through her screen in rapid taps. Emma loved that thing. Always texting her boyfriend Tom or posting to social media.
“Hello, did you hear me? Can you put that thing down and listen?” I said as Emma blocked her phone in front of her face with me looking over it sideways.
“He is infected with the virus everyone has been talking about all week. I’ve been reading all these strange reports online. It’s, like, everywhere,” Emma said as a matter of fact. She continued to stare at her phone without taking her eyes off it while speaking.
Hailey and I looked at one another in bewilderment.
“School was canceled the other day by the way, I meant to tell you guys. But you said only to call in case of an emergency so I didn’t.” Emma admitted finally pu
tting her phone down.
“Emma that WOULD be considered an emergency. You have to tell us those sort of things.” Hailey said as she crossed her arms.
“Why was school canceled? Over this…virus?” I asked waving my hand for Hailey to take it easy and let me get to the bottom of things.
Emma shook her head.
“Principal Davidson got sick and locked himself in his office. No one knew what was going on with him until some teacher went in to check on him. She went to see him before telling us all to go home,” Emma said happily at the chance to get out of school early.
Hailey and I looked at each other puzzled. If there was some sort of virus that made people crazy we would have heard about it somehow.
“Look, it’s right here. An infection that causes something with the word mania in it.” Emma said holding up her phone with a story from one of the social networks.
The article mentioned how an unstable homeless man walked into a grocery store in the early morning and began attacking its customers. He apparently had been sick with this virus by the reports claimed as the cause.
I read when the police came, the man bit and scratched until the police responded by putting a dozen holes in his chest from their firearms. Only, he didn’t go down for long. The man’s body was riddled with bullets and he kept getting up. It wasn’t until they put another dozen in his head that he went down for good.
When they examined his body well after his death, he had an internal temperature of over one hundred and ten. The CDC was called in for assistance but they haven’t made any statements.
“That isn’t real hun,” Hailey remarked dismissing her.
“Tell her Nate.” She looked at me with eyes that said, “Agree with me.”
Emma stood with her hand on her hip, the other extending her phone between us defiantly. It was hard to tell what news was actual news these days. I couldn’t be completely sure to believe something so insane as people becoming infected and attacking their friends and loved ones though.
Dead Over Texas: (Infected Texas Book 1) Page 2
