Avenging Angel: Z is for Zombie Book 7

by catt dahman

  Her siblings cried as she left the suite to travel. I held back my tears, wondering if I would ever see my strange, but amazing child again. Her father cried a little, too.

  She wouldn’t be alone.

  Len was going with some travelers to a settlement in Oklahoma to help them for a while like he did often; he had the need to roam. He would be with them for a while.

  Ricky, the son of Ivory Joe who helped save Kim’s life once, was going, as was Lance, the brother to Matt who had yet to find his place in the community. Sadie, who became close friends with Hannah, was joining them, as were Anthony and Robbin, the ones saved at the mall. The last traveler hurt my heart as well. My son, Jet was going.

  When did the boy-turned-man not watch out for his little sister, protecting her and always siding with her antics? It wasn’t a huge surprise, but I hoped not to lose both children.

  Jet was Matt’s second for security for years, and if anyone could protect Hannah, it would be the big, strong man who once Gothic and grungy and was now handsome and muscular, tall and self-confident. He stood well over six feet, maybe six foot four, as he was taller than Kimball.

  They saddled up; Hannah was on the lovely blood bay mare we gave her for her nineteenth birthday. They went through the first paddock, and I held myself back from begging them not to go.

  Mark and Matt saluted them, and Johnny opened the next gate. Then, Conner opened the final gate, and they rode out, eight people I knew and cared about, all promising to come back and visit soon, promising to settle down one day, promising they would be in touch.

  Of the eight, I would see less than half again.

  Chapter 9

  Hannah

  As they left the compound, each had a mental picture they carried along. Hannah’s was of her family; it was the same one Jet took in his mind.

  Anthony had an image of the last baseball game he played there and Andromeda the woman he spent some time with.

  Sadie thought of the food they were leaving and wondered what it would be like to be hungry. In the cellars were more food than people in the old world could imagine: jellies and jams of all kinds of fruit carefully canned and dated, canned vegetables, dried nuts and herbs, bags of ground wheat and corn, dried beans, and pickled items such as eggs and veggies, smoked and salted meats, and that was just what they added daily.

  Shelves still were loaded with canned and packaged foods and MREs from ten years ago. Some of the fresh food gathered every day was eaten, and some was stored away as they rotated the stored food.

  Sadie ate better these last ten years than she had the ten years before.

  Robbin would miss the business, work, play, noises of children, the sounds of the animals they kept, and the constant movement that happened in Hopetown.

  Ricky had a picture in his mind of his family, but he wanted to see the world again and to take those mental pictures with him. Maybe he would paint or draw them.

  Lance would miss family and the water; he had a terrible fear of not ever having fresh water or of never being clean. He wanted to see the ocean, no matter how bad things looked at the coast; he wanted to watch the waves roll in.

  “It should be easy going for a while,” Jet said. That meant the way was passable.

  In some places, the cracked and eroded highway was over grown with tall grass and was breaking further as tree roots shoved the asphalt upwards as the trees grew, despite the conditions. Mostly pine trees had sprung up. Fields were forests of scrub pine, the barbed wire long gone. Cars lay in junk heaps, crashed together in jumbled piles of rusted metal, broken glass, rotten tires, and big diesel trucks were almost unrecognizable, all caused by the event, wind, rainstorms, and other elements of nature.

  The group, having left Len at the Texas border, walked their horses south, along the edge of the roads where once a few small towns had been, the buildings now in piles of old wood grown over with ivy, mold, grass, and pine trees.

  Hannah stopped at one spot and puzzled over it. “I remember that.” A broken, huge letter M was leaning on a tree. The yellow color was still there although very faded. “Mack Ds?”

  “McDonald’s, famous for its hamburgers and French fries. People drove up to a window, ordered food, and then took it home to eat. Or the customers could go inside and eat. Kids liked the food and the playground.”

  Hannah nodded to Lance. “I remember now. I went there to eat.” She kept looking back as if in fear the large M would follow them. “My sister and brother got the toys: Barbies, Matchbox cars, Hello Kitty toys, and super heroes.”

  Jet pointed out a spot. “A park or a rest stop: a person could stop his car, pee in the bathrooms, buy snacks, and check directions, using the map hanging on the wall.

  “It looks haunted,” Sadie said.

  Lance agreed, “Do you know people used to buy and sell grass, trees, soil, flowers, even water, and oxygen?”

  “Didn’t they have it? I mean…water was from a tap, and everyone breathed air,” Hannah said.

  Lance laughed. “They wanted the best air or best water, filtered. They wanted better grass, a better color of green.

  “They could have filtered the water. We do. And we grow grass; why buy it?” Hannah was confused.

  “You didn’t do it yourself; you bought it already fixed for use.”

  “I don’t understand that,” Hannah said finally, after thinking about it for a while.

  She looked over a car lot of old, rusted vehicles and had a memory of a car dealership with a woman who had bad manners or talked about manners, and there was something about a zom. Hannah had shot her gun there, but she pushed most of the memories out of her mind and didn’t quite recall the details, as if it were a dream she had awakened from.

  A few ghouls stumbled about in tatters of old clothing or were naked, but they had been zeds and had eroded badly so they walked on leg bones that rubbed away on the ground.

  They didn’t groan or moan, but hissed through old, worn out vocal cords, and the prions just about had given up on controlling those useless bodies and brains. People shot them from a distance, using scopes, but didn’t pay much attention to them.

  An old home stood with heavily boarded, dusty windows and a battered open front door. Bones littered the yard and porch where insects and animals had stripped them. That was a fairly common sight as many had tried to secure themselves and homes but had been over run, the inhabitants of the house long gone.

  They found a ranch-styled house still standing on a hill where they made camp, a fire was built behind the structure out of sight. Hannah purified water they drew from an old well; it looked clean and was cool. Jet and Lance brought back a deer that the others cut up and began to cook.

  Later, Ricky licked his fingers and sighed. The venison, potatoes baked in the coals, onions, and corn grilled were their meal. The rest of the meat would be carried for dinner the next night, supplemented with a few cans of vegetables they found in the remains of the old house. Len taught them to live on what they could find as much as possible.

  They set up guards but slept well in their own sleeping bags in the house.

  Before going to bed, Hannah curiously walked through the home. There was a kitchen because families then ate dinner alone or in restaurants with strangers, not in common places with people they knew. Wasteful.

  There was a living room where parents sat before huge televisions, laughing with the audience as they were cued, and they watched famous people acting foolish and uneducated, or they cheered for teams who played in stadiums where fans wore the same colored shirts and ate stadium foods. Endless hours were spent before televisions and in those stadiums.

  There was a desk with a computer, something Hannah missed: being able to find answers with a few clicks. It was so much easier than looking in books or learning by doing something or being taught. She didn’t recall much of what she learned from the computer, however.

  In the master bedroom was a closet the size of a small room with clothing pack
ed into it. Hannah picked up a high-heeled shoe and looked at it closely. These were used for dress up in plays; she tried wearing one on stage, but to imagine women choosing to wear them daily was confusing. Why would they need so many in so many colors and styles, and how did they squeeze their toes into the pointed ends everyday and above all, how did they walk in them? And why?

  Crystal, cloudy bottles, tiny and fascinating sat together. Hannah opened a bottle and sniffed as an old, but lovely scent perfumed the air, flowers and musk. Another bottle had a fruiter, lighter scent. Hannah took the tiny one that smelled of y’lang y’lang, her mother’s favorite scent.

  On a bedside table lay an old book: The Stand by some man named King. A lamp had fallen to the side, and the bed sheets, once expensive and soft, matched the coverlet and pillowcases and were marred by rat droppings.

  Under the table and behind a door were a diary that Hannah ignored, some photographs chewed to bits, a box of junk jewelry, and a rat-gnawed plastic thing, about eight inches long, green, and shaped like a penis. Hannah found old batteries inside. She could guess the intention of its use but not the reason for it.

  Everywhere were so many things that belonged to the people who had once lived in this house. How could they have used so much, and why did they want to? She could remember living this way but didn’t know why she did.

  She opened the door of a child’s room and closed it again. It was full of toys and old faded wallpaper that reminded her of her siblings’ bedrooms ten years ago. She could almost hear Tracie yelling, “Mommmmmm,” and feel her fingernails puncturing her arms when the girl threw a fit. Bad memories.

  “Choppy, choppy,” Hannah muttered, not even realizing she spoke aloud.

  In the bathroom, Hannah did look at the big tub with longing. She took a few rolls of tissue paper and stepped out. Of all this, a tiny vial of perfume and toilet paper were all she saw of value.

  “You doing okay?” Ricky asked her.

  “Sure. It’s like a museum of the past, interesting to look at, but worthless.”

  The next night, they abandon the first choice for a campsite because as soon as Sadie, Hannah, and Jet saw that someone filled the house with religious symbols, filling every surface and wall, and that many footprints were fresh, they backed out wide-eyed and jumping at shadows.

  Only after the night passed peacefully and they had set up camp the next night would they explain to the rest about the people in the basement they had found years before.

  “Historical District,” Jet read aloud the faded sign.

  “I wonder what the history was?”

  So far, most of Jefferson, Texas looked burned to the ground, but as they canted to the left and not directly through the town, a few unburned sights remained. “That’s amazing,” Sadie said, “that old house…was it like Greek or French or something? This isn’t New Orleans.”

  Hannah knew about those places and had looked at pictures but had no answers. The lawns were terribly over grown, trees were tall but some had fallen, causing damage. The original neat white paint was scraped and weathered to a dull shade of grey, and some of the glass was broken, but the old house was standing behind giant azaleas and magnolias.

  Built over a hundred years before with care and craft, the house still had its elegant columns, wide porch, and stone steps.

  “Can we look?”

  Jet and Lance nodded. As they picked their way through the fallen wrought iron fence and gate and over the grass and moss covered rock walkway, they stared at the three-story beauty.

  Inside, was neither a computer nor a television, only dusty, dirty velvet drapes, faded rugs, and a lot of old furniture that, beneath the dust, was beautiful and strong.

  Lance lit an old lamp and watched Hannah’s surprise. “They used oil lamps in the old, really old days.”

  “And candles. And they used a scrub board?” Delighted, Hannah skipped from room to room. She rubbed her hand along a quilt, thinking of Misty.

  “Why wasn’t it stripped?” Ricky wondered.

  “See how the water has been up? Until recently, I bet the water was up almost to the top of the porch, and for some reason, people didn’t want to wade into the water, I guess.”

  Anthony marveled at a big cypress, the Spanish moss hanging from the branches as if it had been festooned with decorations and watched everything curiously. Birds filled the clear blue sky. “I like it here.”

  “I think people came here, shopped, ate out, and looked at the old houses.”

  “Why?” Hannah asked.

  “They were curious and amazed how people lived back then without electricity and other modern things. I think people admired life before now; don’t you miss things from before Year Z?”

  “No. Not at all,” Hannah said. She hated life before when no one who loved her or felt appreciation for her abilities.

  “I miss some things,” Lance admitted. He stopped and used his binoculars.

  “There’s the water,” Jet said. He looked at the slightly sloping land. Although grass grew in places along the brick streets, it was still mainly clear with cars and trucks tossed into the remains of shops, and mud and trash left behind.

  In a few minutes, they saw a taller stone building, maybe granite, that was partially flooded but standing strong. Buildings around it had burned. To the right were more building, some destroyed and some standing, a railcar turned sideways and punched through at one spot.

  Jet’s horse didn’t object as it splashed into the few inches of water that lapped lazily over the brick roadway.

  To the right, they saw a rusty-red railroad bridge with huge sides that made a trellis. They splashed towards the battered traffic bridge, which crossed not far from the other one. Jet said there must be a river near.

  The water got deeper.

  “That bridge isn’t passable,” Lance said. It had been hit many times by floodwaters carrying trees, cars, and anything else it could capture. Chunks of concrete and pieces of metal had fallen away. Other than a thin strip of concrete and parts of the railing, the bridge was useless other than possibly by foot. “We can swim through and go over.”

  “Swim the horses?”

  Yup, Dismount and swim with them while holding on to the saddle

  Floodwaters did this.

  Sadie blanched. “Do you see over there?” She pointed to some gnarled trees that hung with moss and kudzu over the water, which lapped in brown waves, a yellowish film caught on the top. Green mucky slime lined the edges of the black muddy shoreline at a distance. “That’s a snake.” She thought they had missed it.

  “Could be harmless.”

  “Could be a cotton mouth.”

  “Does that mean you want to back track?” Lance asked. We need to be looking for a spot to camp soon.

  “I’ll swim, but so you know, there are snakes.” She unhappily followed Lance into the water.

  When Jet plunged into the water last, he didn’t think it was a good idea to mention the alligators lying on the bank, each as long as a man was tall. They curiously flopped into the water but didn’t approach the swimmers.

  “You had to say you saw them,” Robbin complained to Sadie as she rocked back and forth on her butt as she sat on the muddy bank.

  “What?” Jet squatted and looked at the thin stream of blood from a pair of puncture wounds on Robbin’s shin, “no way.”

  “Way,” Sadie grimaced, “you wanna suck out the poison?”

  “You don’t do that anymore.” Jet looked over the injury and bathed it well with antibacterial lotion.

  Robbin could only say the wound was fairly small and brown and hurt when the snake bit her. After bandaging her leg, he helped her to her horse and said they needed to find a camp soon, warning her to stay calm and assuring her she would be okay.

  Up on the left sat a house that wasn’t a big Greek Revival but looked sturdy, was on a good spot, sat high from the water, and was located in a smart place to watch for trouble. Thunder rumbled as they rode
up.

  “Looks as if we have a bad storm coming up…could flood again.”

  Lance and Jet returned with smiles. “Warm, dry, and fireplaces, looks like a good spot for the night or more if it is still raining.”

  Once they unpacked the horses, they led them across the yard to stable them and were shocked to find old, but useable hay and sweet-corn horse feed and a trough that was already filling with rain. The barn was dusty and smelled of mice, filled with old junk, but dry and great for the animals.

  “We are lucky as hell,” Lance said, “they can stay dry and rest.”

  “Us, too.” Jet grinned.

  Soon a cheerful fire was blazing in the fireplace, and Sadie swept out the dirt from the furniture and floor. Some was lovingly covered with faded pink sheets, and while nothing was fresh, the furniture wasn’t dirty underneath the sheets. They pulled off cushions from the couch to throw over the floor.

  Robbin relaxed on cushions, her shin slightly bruised and angry red around the fang marks, but while she claimed it hurt like hell, she wasn’t short of breath or getting sick.

  Jet said maybe the snake didn’t inject much venom or was non-venomous, but he gave her an antihistamine anyway. She was obviously reacting to the bacteria and whatever nastiness the snake shared. He slathered antibiotic cream on the bite, put a loose bandage on, and gave her some antibiotics to take with a meal. Jet checked often on Robbin, but other than a slight fever and some pain, she was okay.

  “Guess if the rain has to happen, it is for the best for me to relax,” Robbin said.

  Over the fireplace, Sadie and Anthony got a thick stew cooking: squirrels, a few vegetables, and some dried pasta.

  “Do you miss home?”

  Hannah nodded. “I miss everyone, but this is nice, too.”

  The scent of the stew was mouth-watering, the dim light was cozy and golden-warm, the feelings were very relaxed.

  After they ate, Lance shared a book he found and told them it was about the town: the water way was a bayou where paddleboats once came down from the north to New Orleans. He thought that like in the past, the little town would flood again.