by Hetzer, Paul
Kera turned around and vomited violently on the ground. Tears overflowed her eyes as the realization of what had been done to those poor girls hit her like a Mack truck.
“How could someone do that?” she choked out hysterically. She had never seen such brutality before. At least the Loonies had the excuse of being crazy animals acting from a diseased mind. This was the deliberate act of a sick, demented mind like she had never encountered before or would have even believed existed.
“That must be Diana, her daughter,” Steven whispered flatly, backing away from the broken, rotting bodies.
“Did they make her watch that happening to her baby?” Kera sobbed, her mind becoming numb with the horror of what she had just seen. She couldn’t bear to look at the bodies anymore and ran, half stumbling, in the other direction. Steven hastily caught up with her and they quickly scrambled up the creek bank, neither one looking back until the macabre sight and foul smell of the dumping ground were well behind them. Finally, when they were well away from the remains, they stopped and hugged each other tightly, both of their eyes red with tears.
“Are you okay?” Steven asked her, brushing her dark hair away from her eyes. He felt more protective of her than he had ever been before.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay,” she replied flatly in a low voice, as if speaking louder would wake the dead. She experienced a seething hatred boiling in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to make someone pay for what had been done to those girls, and there was only one man left to receive her wrath. There was enough horror in this messed-up new world without uninfected people having to add to it. The hatred boiled up from her stomach and coated her mind like a warm balm, calming her. She knew what she had to do. This evil couldn’t exist on the same planet with her. It must be eradicated, and she would be the avenging angel to carry the sword of retribution to those who had defiled that young girl.
The camp was only a hundred yards or so in front of them and she strode purposely forward in its direction. Steven struggled to keep pace with her.
“What are you doing?”
“Cleansing my fucking soul,” she snarled, not breaking pace.
Steven reached out and grabbed her arm, spinning her around to face him.
“Think about what you’re doing. Don’t stoop to their level.”
She pulled free from him and marched determinedly into the camp.
“Don’t do something you’re going to regret!” Steven called from behind her. She ignored him and with a face set in a cold mask of hatred strode into the camp toward the two girls who were coming out to meet them. He knew what she was thinking, and didn’t blame her. On the other hand, he was afraid that the anger would eat her up inside. If she did what he thought she was going to do, she would be crossing a threshold that she wouldn’t be able to turn back from, and would be changed forever. He raced after her. He would take care of the monster in the camp, which was the only way he could think of saving Kera.
“Hey, did you guys see anything?” Dontela asked. The words froze in her mouth when she saw Kera’s face and hurriedly stepped back out of her path.
Kera walked up to the bound bearded man and straddled his legs.
His eyes were dull with pain and shock, yet he managed to smirk at her. “Hey bitch. What you got sand in your pussy about?” he asked through gritted teeth.
She looked him hard in the eyes. There was madness in there, and yes, she saw it… evil.
Steven had run up behind her and was reaching out to grab her shoulder and stop her, however he was too late.
“You’re a fucking monster. You’re worse than the goddamn Loonies.” she replied coolly to the man, barely above a whisper. She raised the shotgun barrel to his forehead and squeezed the trigger.
She walked away from the body while its legs quivered spasmodically.
Katherine sat down near the smoldering embers of the fire staring at the body of her abductor as the last of his blood gushed from his shattered head. She had a distant smile on her face when Kera walked by and sat on another log.
Dontela shook her head. “Damn, home-girl, I’m really beginning to like you.”
Steven stood next to the blood-soaked corpse, his arms hanging limply at his sides, watching the last vestige of innocence disappear from the woman who loved him.
Chapter Four
Jeremy and the dog came down off of the Blue Ridge Mountain range into the fertile plain of the Shenandoah Valley. He slipped out of his backpack while he scanned the lush, expansive valley that spread out before him, filled with small towns and shopping centers that were hopefully ripe for the picking. From this distance they looked devoid of life. Nothing moved, which he knew was deceiving. Experience told him they would be swarming with Loonies. He would have to be extremely cautious when entering one of the towns and try to avoid any confrontations with the murderous creatures. How he was actually going to avoid them he hadn’t quite figured out just yet.
The dog sat down slightly out of arm’s reach, panting lightly, and looking at him expectantly. “What do you think?” he asked the dog. “We need supplies and that’s where we’ll find them.” The dog canted its head while he talked, yet offered no reply.
Jeremy was feeling more confident now that he had his newfound furry friend. He was desperately low on food and ammo and needed a new sleeping bag. The dog whined and shifted expectantly.
“Yeah, I think we should try it too.”
Ahead, a green sign indicated an exit to Waynesboro in a half mile. Jeremy hoped silently to himself that the Loonies had moved on from this area, although instinctively he knew otherwise.
“Come on, dog, let’s go food hunting.” He stretched his shoulders before slipping back into his pack, and then quietly continued on down the highway with the German Shepherd keeping pace. After a few hundred yards he paused to open the door of an abandoned pickup truck to the disappointment of its interior light staying dark.
He looked down at the dog after searching the truck for anything useful and coming up empty. “I’m going to have to find a name for you. I can’t keep calling you ‘dog’ if you’re going to stick around.” The dog yipped and wagged its tail furiously like it thought the idea was simply grand. It also liked the sound of the boy’s voice and sensed a pack bond growing with the human. Jeremy pulled out his last piece of beef jerky and split it with the animal, who ecstatically gulped it down in one ravenous bite.
“We’ll get some more, boy. I bet there’s a Walmart down in that town and they’ll have everything we could ever need.” He tried to pat the dog on the head, however, it shied away again.
They walked off of Interstate 64 onto Route 624, which angled back toward the mountains and the town of Waynesboro. A few warehouses sat off the road and some neighborhoods could be spotted back through the trees which still held some of their brightly colored fall foliage compared to the barren trees on the mountaintops. Jeremy knew he wanted to avoid those densely packed homes from his past bad experiences and passed those areas very cautiously, giving them a wide berth and trying to be extra quiet.
Up ahead, the neighborhoods were becoming more tightly grouped and pushing in on both sides of the road. Beyond that it looked like they would be entering an industrial area. He could spot smoke stacks in the distance, clawing at the sky like dead, bony fingers. Their tops would probably never again gush the dirty clouds of foul smoke that marked the human race’s accent to its industrial height.
I guess that’s one good thing to come out of this, Jeremy giggled to himself.
He steeled himself as he approached the unavoidable neighborhoods. Nothing moved anywhere he looked.
“Do you smell any of them Loonies, dog?” he asked it. He imagined that it shook its head ‘no’.
The silence was eerie. There were no barking dogs or the melodious call of birdsongs. No honking horns or sounds of kids playing in the yards, sounds he had taken for granted all his life. He felt like he was the last person alive on Earth. The
dog sensed the emptiness also and moved in closer to the boy. Across the road a block of homes had been leveled by a fire and only blackened foundations remained. More and more cars littered the road, as the pandemic had hit here during the early morning rush hour. More of the vehicles also held the dried husks of bodies. People who had been too sick to get out of their cars and had turned into Loonies and been trapped in their vehicles on that fateful July morning. Still, many had escaped before passing out or crawled out their open car windows if they had been down when they had turned into Loonies.
The dog whimpered at Jeremy’s side. Its tail was tucked tightly down between its legs.
“This isn’t a good place.” he whispered to his companion, looking down at the spooked dog. They walked further into the silent, deserted town. Even in the cool air he felt the palms of his hands sweating and held his AR pistol with a grip that turned his knuckles white. Overgrown lawns replaced the woods he had been walking beside and forced him down onto the four-lane blacktop. He moved as quietly as he could next to the concrete divider, warily scanning the houses and yards in between for any movement. The dog followed close at his heels. Leaves had piled up thickly on the edges of the road without the motion of vehicles to sweep them clear. Jeremy realized that in a few years the asphalt would probably be completely obscured by leaf matter and debris as nature gradually reclaimed what man had once built. He walked up to the intersection of a street that a road sign proclaimed to be Mountain Road and paused to consider his options. Ahead seemed to be the industrial section of town, to his right the road stretched for a couple of blocks to the wood line, and to his left the road ran north across a set of railroad tracks, through some woods, and away from the factories. He didn’t like the looks of those ominous industrial smokestacks and buildings.
“I don’t think we’ll find what we need up there.” He winced when his voice echoed off the pavement around him. The dog still kept its tail low to the ground. “Come on,” he told the dog in a whisper and cut to his left across the road.
Jeremy didn’t notice the hackles go up on the dog or hear the low growl building deep in its throat as they progressed down the street adjacent to a large warehouse-like building. What he did hear was a sound coming from the open loading doors of the building; it reminded him of the buzzing he used to hear from a model train transformer that he and his papa used to set up around the Christmas tree. He stopped and stared at the building. The dog stepped in front of him, facing the building with his teeth bared and a menacing growl rumbling from his throat.
“Maybe there’s power in that building,” Jeremy whispered hopefully. He stepped around the dog, which stood rooted in place and approached the roadside in front of the large warehouse. A tall chain-link fence completely surrounded the building and the only way through was an open gate that would have blocked the way onto a parking lot if it had been closed. A guard shack stood forlornly next to the gate, overgrown by weeds and Virginia creeper. The huge tan metal building was approximately seventy-five yards beyond the fence, several of its garage type loading doors stood open like dead empty eye-sockets.
The noise didn’t sound so much like a transformer to him anymore, but more like the mad ramblings of a hundred voices moaning in unison. The dog barked once loudly at Jeremy, as if to ask him what the fuck he was doing approaching that place.
Then literally all hell broke loose.
They poured out of the building’s open loading doors like water from a breached levee. The half-naked, emaciated horde seemed to be never ending as it flowed from the building. Jeremy stumbled backwards, tripping over the dog and falling hard to the ground on his backpack. When the lead Loonies spotted him, the tempo of their mad ramblings escalated and the killing rage overtook them. They charged the fence, screaming their guttural cries and hit it en-mass. Jeremy thought at first that they were going to push right through it as if it wasn’t even there, yet it held… briefly. More and more of the horde pressed against their brethren in a mad rush to get to the object of their rage, needing to satisfy a killing lust that gnawed relentlessly at their brains. For many of them, there was also a real hunger that clenched their guts in a tight fist of near-starvation, and the sight of the boy and the dog promised a chance at quenching the pain of both of those constant agonies. While they massed against the fence in ever growing numbers, those in the rear scrambled up and over those in the front, dragging themselves up the fence like rats escaping rising waters. The fence became a living mass of tissue as the first of the Loonies reached the top and became entangled in the strands of barbed wire.
Jeremy struggled hastily to his feet while the shepherd barked madly at the throng of Loonies. The fence leaned outward as more and more of the creatures piled against it, crushing those in the front so that their flesh began to smear and pulp between the metal links. The overflow reached the gate and poured around it. Jeremy tore off in the opposite direction, screaming for the dog to follow him. There were a handful of houses on the opposite side of the street and he ran wildly for them. Behind him he heard the fence give way with a crash and glanced back to see the horde tangled up on the ground around it. More of the Loonies spread out or clambered over their fallen comrades and joined the chase.
The boy and the dog raced toward the house, even as the Loonies closed the gap. Jeremy charged up the front porch of the house with the first of the creatures close on his heels. He whipped open the screen door and tried the entry door, the knob wouldn’t turn.
It was locked.
The dog launched itself off of the porch onto the first of the Loonies to reach them, growling and snapping its teeth tightly around the thin neck of a tall middle-aged man whose matted beard gave him a piratical appearance. The Loony grabbed the dog by a front leg and ripped the animal away, tossing it aside. A chunk of the man’s neck tore out, still clasped tightly between the dog’s powerful jaws, and the man collapsed to the ground in a fountain of blood. Other Loonies converged on the dog as soon as it struck the ground.
Jeremy pointed his gun at the group of raving, mad creatures and unloaded the entire thirty-round magazine into the horde before they could pile on the dog, which bounded out and away from them. Close to a dozen Loonies dropped from the gunfire, allowing him the breathing room he needed to jump off the porch and dash around the side of the home while more of the creatures leaped over their fallen comrades after him. He ran up the back steps, virtually overcome with terror, and slammed the gun into one of the window panes of the door. The glass shattered in a spray of tinkling shards and he jammed his arm through the open pane and quickly worked the deadbolt open. Slamming open the door, he tumbled into the small mudroom while the dog leaped over him deeper into the house. Scarcely before the first Loony reached the entryway he kicked the open door hard, slamming it shut in the creature’s face. He jumped up and instantly threw the bolt home. Within seconds the rear door was jam-packed with Loonies, growling and hissing. Two arms reached through the broken door window, flailing wildly for whatever they could get their claws into. The powder blue curtains were abruptly ripped free and disappeared out the window. Bodies smashed into the door, jarring it on its hinges.
Jeremy released the empty mag from his pistol and jammed another in, slamming it home with the palm of his hand. He let two more shots go through the open window pane and was rewarded with screams of pain and an arm disappearing out the window. He had maybe a dozen rounds left in the AR pistol’s magazine. He stood and patted the dog on the head. For the first time the dog allowed it. They seemed to now have forged a bond under fire together. The dog was still growling in the back of its throat as the mass of creatures piled up outside the back door. It sounded like they were inside a bass drum with all the pounding and clawing on the outside of the door and siding of the house. Another window pane of the door exploded inward when a fist drove through it. Jeremy let loose two more hastily fired rounds through the door before backing further into the home and shutting tight a door that separated the mudroo
m from the kitchen. The sound of the turmoil of Loonies trying to get into the house was thankfully muted when he closed the door. He jammed the back of a chair under the doorknob. He had seen that done in movies and hoped it really worked.
“What now, dog?” he asked, absently stroking the big shepherd’s head. “The Loonies will be busting in those doors soon.”
The dog knowingly wagged its tail as it kept its eyes fixed on the door. Something crashed on the other side of the door, causing Jeremy to involuntarily jump. The dog started barking loudly.
“Shhh!” he hushed the dog and backed further into the home where it opened up into a dining area and living room. Out the window he could see the yard about the house, literally crawling with the creatures. There were hundreds of them. He ran to the front door and peeked out a casement window. There were still several Loonies meandering around the front porch and lawn, or gathered around the bodies of their fallen comrades as if waiting for them to rise again.
More crashing sounds reverberated through the house from the direction of the mudroom.
“We got to get upstairs, dog. Quick!” He raced around the living room to the carpeted stairs that led to the upper level of the house, the dog quick on his heels. He sprinted to the top of the stairs where he promptly sat down and laid out his two handguns on the carpet next to him. He decided to leave on his pack in case he needed to make a fast exit. He didn’t want to leave any of his stuff behind, especially the GPS that had the farm’s location programmed into it. He sat the last of the magazines for the 9mm and .22 next to each handgun.
