What Lies Beneath: Z is for Zombie Book 6

by catt dahman

  Yuki stared in disbelief. “My…vagina…is fine. No infection. Jeez, okay then…look.” She let Chase raise the sheet and Neal, Jenny, and Sarah, frowning and pale, took a look. They reported that everything looked normal.

  “Let’s get back to the problem. We can guard her and meet back in four hours if nothing happens; that’s plenty of time.”

  Some sorted supplies while others reinforced the fences and windows in case any got through the fence. Adam and Neal saw a small group of Zs go by the front gate and hid, but the monsters didn’t moan or notice their comrades who were dead in the road, just kept going. They didn’t know the two watched them walk by.

  A small group went out to loot and brought back a huge load to be sorted.

  When they gathered again, they were shocked to see Yuki was fine.

  Chase took over. “She looks normal; no infection down there and none at the bite. The infection begins within mere minutes of exposure. It’s as if she gave it to him on his penis.”

  “Some STD that is, Kee Kee,” Adam said. Chase frowned at him.

  “Before I got with the group, I was sick…like the Red, but I never went into the coma. I don’t have an STD anyway, jerk.”

  “Can people be immune and get well?”

  “No, no one reported that anyone did from all those countries that had it before us,” Chase said. “But she also dreamed she was given a shot to make her immune, and that was before she was so sick. She said in her dream, the injection site did get infected, but it cleared right up. Also, she said that when she left her house, she saw a parked military Humvee close to her house.”

  “So, maybe they were out giving shots?”

  “When I had the nightmare, a man said, ‘don’t do it without a condom, Yuki, and don’t bite; you can’t catch it, but you can catch....’ I had a high fever and pain…a headache…and a stomachache. They gave me soup; it was red, salty, bitter and meaty, like blood. Terrible.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything though. We all have bad dreams about the wolves and the withered child,” Jenny added, “I can’t stand even to talk about it in the daytime; it’s horrible.”

  Neal looked at Yuki’s arm. “Look, here on Kee Kee’s arm…the scar; it’s new like something was infected and healed.”

  “Doesn’t mean it was the army.”

  “Why not? It’s always our government who does things and lies,” Adam said.

  Chase nodded. “So why wouldn’t they be giving inoculations if they could? And they’d give them to those they found.”

  “If we accept that, then why was she contagious but not showing symptoms?”

  Greg was thinking. “That’s how it works. Injected, then symptoms, and you have a small dose and are then immune. Once you have chicken pox, you still carry the virus; you can have shingles.”

  “She’s a carrier?” Neal cocked his head, “then Tommy got it via sex? And he bit her.”

  “And she’s immune,” Adam added.

  “Okay, we have to eat, Think Tank,” Jamal said. “We have the burgers going. Sarah and Jake have side dishes….”

  “Make mine rare. No, just hand me a patty, please.”

  “Yuk.”

  “My stomach is cramping; I want my steak rare. If I eat raw meat, my stomach stops hurting,” Yuki explained.

  “Since always?”

  “No, I was a vegetarian…no meat; then, I craved it when my stomach ached. I found some along the way, and then Henry fixed mine rare.”

  “So you craved it and needed it since you were sick, and they gave it to you in the dreams, blood?”

  “Was it blood?” she asked, shivering.

  “Your dreams…who knows,” Neal said.

  “So what if…I mean she had symptoms of becoming a Red, but she didn’t…if she gave the disease to Tommy…then…why not crave the raw meat like the Zs do?” Chase mused. “That actually makes perfect sense to me.”

  “You think the dreams are real?”

  “Yes. And I think you will be fine. In a day or two, we’ll know because that bite will heal, and you’ll be fine.”

  “She stays here and is guarded the whole time?” Neal asked.

  “Absolutely. Then we’ll kind of have the answer.”

  Yuki had her raw patty, stayed in the chair but was allowed to dress under watchful eyes, and got up only to relieve herself. In three days, the injury didn’t look good, but it was healing with no sign of the infection. Chase, her hands in gloves, used a needle and thread carefully to close the wound, and it continued to heal.

  They didn’t have to shoot Yuki but kept her tied by one hand and watched her for another week; then, they locked her in a room alone, but she was so glad to be alive that she didn’t care. They thought their theory was correct but couldn’t be sure; it was very much science fiction to them.

  Chase figured the theory was right and wondered why they would inoculate people with something that left the raw meat craving and infectious part still there. They also thought that maybe the craving couldn’t be removed, and this was amazing even to get this far with any inoculation. Also, if they inoculated enough people, then those would be the ones who could kill more Zs without being infected and could survive this.

  Brushing Yuki’s hair and braiding it from her face, Chase accidentally found a tattoo on the girl’s neck and showed it to the rest. She felt sure she was right, now. It was one more reason to distrust the US military if they offered to take them all to a Rescue Station.

  16

  Rabbits on the Run

  Doc, Alex, Ed, and Bob couldn’t stay hidden any longer. They didn’t know where the others were, but it was time to get out. Ed found a wheelchair for Bob, and they began an arduous trip to the only place they could think of: the hospital.

  Sometimes Zombies tried to attack, and they beat them down. Hands of people trapped beneath the concrete rubble still clutched and tried to grab anyone since they were zombies and still moving.

  Close to the hospital, a horde ran at them, and Ed was separated. The rest continued their trip, hoping the man would find them, and the three made it finally.

  Alex went in first, then Bob and Doc. To Doc’s amazement, he knew the doctor there: Sally. She asked, “Didn’t anyone else make it?”

  “I don’t know. People kept trying to get in, and we were just over loaded; everyone went into that deep sleep or coma. Only, we were cleaning up after them and watching; we had a full house with family members helping and kind of camping out. A few soldiers kept order, but everything felt as if were at a standstill and not a nice outcome,” Doc shook his head.

  “It sounds horrible,” Sally shuddered, “we just had a few here, but the smell was bad.”

  Doc told his story. All his patients sank into comas, and family members increasingly worried. Sanitation failed, food ran out, and no one came in to bring supplies.

  “My God, it was bad; they were just lying there, and the filth…nothing we could do with so little help. The floors where we washed them down were a half-inch deep in water and gore. We just kind of hosed them off and hoped for the best; there was nothing left we could do.”

  “Were there that many?”

  Doc looked surprised. “Sally, we had maybe five hundred at the school.”

  “Five hundred people?”

  “Patients! They came from the small towns, and the military brought them for a while until they quit coming. Others showed up: gym full, classrooms full. We had some in an open courtyard. It was horrible; for every patient, we had two or three family members, who tried to help. ” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Then they…changed…like the reports said: mothers attacked children, husbands attacked wives, children attacked…madness. Screams. Flesh ripped, and it sounded like duct tape torn off…or Velcro…. Then everything went bright, and the building started to fall in. We ran like rats. Eight of us huddled in a bathroom for hours.”

  It was hellish when they looked out: people climbed out of the rubble of a downstai
rs bathroom, amid the debris. The loose concrete and bricks crushed many people.

  “We dug one out who moaned and wiggled. His arm was crushed, chest a mess; he had Red and was awake. Sally, he should have been dead because he was so torn up and so crushed, but he didn’t react to pain and shock. He tried to attack and bite us. If he didn’t have crushed legs, he would have gotten us.” Alex bashed his head in.

  They were scared to dig people up but did so a few times only to find moaning zeds. A few were uninfected but injured, and their number swelled to fifteen.

  Then a horde came at them. They were his patients, but now the doctor and the others fought them off with pieces of wood and pipes, smashing at their heads. The horde threw themselves at the survivors, bringing down those injured and bleeding. More zeds gathered and dug themselves out of the rubble to lurch at them, mangled and tattered.

  “Alex grabbed a wheelchair, and this big guy Ed or Fred...something, picked up the Reverend and carried him. We ran.”

  “Amazing you made it, considering how they ganged up or flocked like damned birds,” Len told him.

  “Ed saved my life,” Bob said, “I owe him and Alex.”

  Alex joined in. “So we ran, and they kept coming. I never could have imagined hitting anyone with a piece of pipe, but I swatted those bastards right down. They smelled even worse when I popped their heads open; they smelled horrid.”

  They hid and ran, trying to stay ahead with the hospital as their goal. “Most of two stories fell in, one stories took damage…windows blown out. Pushing the wheel chair was a bitch,” Doc said, “sorry, Reverend.”

  “I felt helpless in this damned chair, their pushing me or carrying me. I asked them to leave me, but they wouldn’t.”

  “Of course, we wouldn’t leave you here alone.”

  The Red Zeds took down all of the injured, causing bloody, violent battles, which the survivors kept losing. “They are hardly human; these filthy things were covered in shit and blood, nasty smelly things. The Reds.

  Then, after we rested and ate, we saw worse: bloody ones who tore up bodies and missing parts, and the ones they called dead zeds who were alive, just crazed.” Alex shivered. “And they hunted us. We ran into a big horde of them, and we split up, just scrambling. Doc, Bob, and I hid. The others ran, and we heard the most horrible screaming.”

  Everyone wanted Bob to talk to him; they needed spiritual guidance, it seemed. Sally was beside herself with excitement to have another doctor with them. They would see many injuries over the weeks, and later when Sally died, it would be Doc who took over all of the patients.

  Alex would become a warrior in his own right and come out as gay to his friends.

  The other group of Jill, Patrick, Candy, Ron, Tiara, Adrian, Solly, and Evvie went the other way. They gathered supplies into backpacks and walked north, intending then to go west. They had the dreams of the boy with a withered face and the ones about the wolves, but they didn’t want to be a part; they wanted to go their own way and hope the boy with the wolves won.

  At the State Line, they saw bodies piled up, and within a few steps, they realized that a group of men with guns surrounded them.

  For a while, the group of eight hardly ever saw each other since Frank camped with a group of men and gave the group of eight to the other men as slaves. Frank ate raw meat: animals and humans. They also saw that nightmares could come true as they saw the boy child with the withered face.

  Evvie saw a red-haired man, a black woman who was beautiful, and a strong looking, clean cut man, all shackled to a tree. She would have felt pity, but her pity was all for herself and her friends.

  Jill, Evvie, and Candy were kept in a motor home and used as whores so they served twenty men a night each. Evvie and Candy held up fairly well, but Jill was upset and cried most days and was hysterical at night.

  “Give them what they want. It’s your body; they can’t touch your mind,” Evvie told Jill.

  “Most finish in two minutes anyway,” Candy said, “just think of something else, and don’t let them win. We’ll get out of this.”

  Three men came in, two of their least favorites, and a new one who just joined the camp.

  Jill got on her hands and knees as ordered but still sobbed. The man raised Jill’s head by her hair and brought her face to his.

  “Stop the damned crying,” he ordered. When she didn’t, he backhanded her hard, making her nose gush blood. “You innocarlatered?”

  Jill didn’t know what that meant so she shook her head no.

  “Ha, Red by midnight. Should have got the shot; it makes you ‘mune.”

  Evvie tried to ponder what all of that meant, but the man pounded at Jill’s sex, and Evvie was screwed by a huge man and passed out after he finished.

  She awoke as Jill screamed loudly. The man sliced off part of Jill’s breast and ate it as he would meat. Evvie shuddered and vomited, yelling for someone to come get the crazy man out of there.

  As he tortured Jill, he chewed at her upper arms and then her thighs, made her shriek, and left gaping wounds. He continued to eat until Jill stopped moving. He slapped her to the ground. “Have fun, girls.”

  Jill curled up, weeping.

  Evvie and Candy tried to stop the bleeding, but Jill had a sudden seizure and then went still.

  Candy checked her and then shook her head. “She’s dead, Evvie.”

  Candy felt hopeless. She came back to this place to find her mother, Johnnie, whom she thought still lived here and worked as a truck stop waitress. In her head, she could see her mom now dressed in biker leather and tough as could be with bleached short hair and a soft side. Her mother named her Candi with an I, but she thought that way looked too much like a stripper’s name, so she spelled it C-a-n-d-y with a Y.

  All Candy wanted was to find her mother, but instead her boyfriend got the Red, they almost died in the Rescue Station, and then a crazy army of convicts and cannibals captured Candy.

  “We are like paper plates they have: use them up, leave them dirty, and then throw away.” Evvie wanted nothing more than guns and knives to take the men apart. She wanted to be Eve of Destruction on them.

  She and Candy cried for a while over losing Jill, wondering when the man would come for them and slice and hurt them, too. Neither one could think of an escape plan or decide how to prevent what was going to happen to them.

  Candy skittered backwards as Jill twitched and moved a leg. “No way, she’s dead…what the hell?”

  Jill jerked up to her knees and then to her feet, her eyes purple shadowed and milky white. The spots the man bit were greenish with infection, and Jill smelled terrible.

  Evvie and Candy ran to the back room, locked a door, and then began banging on the windows for help. Mostly they were ignored. They knew what she was, but had no idea how the man infected her since he was human.

  Jill banged on the locked door.

  In a little while, there was a gunshot, and the body was dragged away.

  That night, Evvie was the man’s next victim, and she didn’t cry or fight him. He said she would be a Red by midnight, too. She served thirty-five men that day and didn’t care if she were Santa Claus with a hangover by midnight. He didn’t chew on her, so she thought she might be okay after all; bites spread the infection.

  Within fifteen minutes after he left, the area between her legs itched badly. She cleaned herself as always, but then the skin around her vagina began to ache, as did her vagina and womb. In an hour, using a hand mirror, Evvie saw that her privates were purple and green and yellow as if they were bruised, but a thick flow of yellow, stinky pus came from her vagina. She put a pad into her panties and called for a doctor who never came. The flow worsened. The pain was horrible. In time, she felt hollowed out, had a terrible fever, and vomited a lot.

  When Candy saw Evvie get up and come for her, moaning and white-eyed, she didn’t scream or panic but slid to the floor.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she said to herself, knowing that
she couldn’t keep serving scores of men day after day and live like this. She wanted just to be dead.

  When Evvie bit into her throat, it hurt, but she turned so Evvie could bite deeper. In a few minutes, there was no pain at all, and she felt warm and sleepy. Evvie chewed at Candy’s shoulder hungrily, moaning, but Candy didn’t fight her, only smiled and sank into a deeper place of relief. In time, Evvie stopped feeding as Candy bled out.

  There were two more whores who moaned and had to be shot in the head. The man who infected them was also shot.

  Tiara because she was black, Solly because he was Jewish and looked it, Ron because he was half black, and Adrian because he was Mexican were selected for something else. They were spray painted on their bare chests and backs with colors: red, blue, green, and yellow.

  Tiara was never so afraid. She stood naked with the other three in front of many men of the Reconstruction Army and listened to them making bets. It was terrifying and humiliating.

  “See that there bon fire?” a man asked them, “alls you gotta do is climb over it to the other side and get out of the fire, and you get to go free.”

  Tiara didn’t believe him.

  “If you cheat, we’ll hurt you with these and push your face in the fire.” The man showed her a spear of some sort. “Now you ready? Set. Go.”

  Solly took one step closer to the heat and froze.

  Tiara felt a spear hit her left buttock and go in deeply. She screamed and went to the fire’s edge. Ron did the same. Solly still lagged, but Adrian got one taste of the spear and fought back. Several men shoved spears into his butt cheeks, his stomach, legs, and arms. Blood ran down his body.

  “I can do this,” he hissed and took off. He screamed when his feet and hands hit the bon fire and wanted nothing more than to run back, but he leaped to the top where burning boards lay, blistering his feet, and danced his way across, avoiding the mass of fire. As badly as that pain was, the spear wounds hurt horribly, and by moving first and fast, he wasn’t hurt too badly and might have made it because of the boards. Men whooped as their bets paid off.

  A board broke, and he fell butt first into the main inferno, screamed and howled so much as to raise the hair on everyone’s arms. His legs and lower body melted and ran, the fat caught fire and sizzled in the fire, and the aroma of cooking pork filled their noses. He got to his charring legs, unable to feel his burned-black feet and took a leap, landing face and hands first onto the edge of the fire where the flames were low; then, he crawled and fell to the other side, unable to use any of his limbs. He wanted to die to stop the pain.