by catt dahman
“The raiders…cannibals…they…Oh, God…they ate some people; it was horrible; we ran into them,” Beth explained.“During, the first time we ran into them, we executed them.We missed a few more, and those we went after, and they’re dead, too, except for the three we came out to hunt down.”
“Executed?”
“Yep. With extreme prejudice.”
“Good. Bastards are evil. We found some zeds; we found some heading north, which, I feel, is a gathering of some hard, mean-spirited people, and we found some good people, some who went to look for family and friends, and some who died fighting alongside of us.”
“Playing a hero keeps your mind off of the depressing aspects,” Hannah said.
“Who’s playing?” Andie smiled.
Beth nodded. She liked Andromeda and the others a lot. “I hope you join us in hunting down the raiders, finding survivors, and finding where there’s a good place to defend and rebuild.”
“I’d like that,” John said, “okay, a quarter has passed us and is headed north.”
Beth shivered. North was where her friends were.
4
Dead Walking
The zeds headed their way, some slowly shambling, and some trotting in an uncoordinated way. The huge horde was fast, so there wasn’t much time to get out of the school and to safety.
They had mere seconds, which they used to get the five children downstairs and to the front. Afraid to use guns and send the rest into a killing frenzy, they used melee weapons to batter the zeds back. George, Alex, Julia, and Johnny, sat in SUVs and a truck, waiting.
Julia began driving fast, slinging bodies to the side mercilessly, as she pulled up in front of the doors. Len, Conner, and Kim, slammed baseball bats into the zeds’ heads, dropping them, but the situation was getting tight.
Reluctantly, Len switched to gunfire to get the five children and two of the adults into the Explorer, slamming the car door, but then having to reopen it as the children screamed when a zed’s hand was caught.
Len hit it hard enough on the elbow to make the rotted skin break open; the zed fell back as the joint parted. The forearm and hand fell to the ground.
Julia floored the SUV, and they roared away, as zombies moved in waves to fill the space, crowding the three men until they had to go back inside and block the door, again. It was too close for comfort. Julia drove a few miles away with George protecting her. They were very vulnerable, now.
“Alpha Actual? Do you read? This is Delta,” Julia tried again.
“Got ya, Delta; this is Alpha Actual; damned thing is working again. Over.”
“Len, oh jeez….”
“Delta, maintain discipline, please. Over.” Len hated to fuss at Julia, but now he needed her to be calm for information and for her own safety.
“We had a problem getting the cars. On the way, we lost Beth and Jeff.”
“Lost?” Len broke protocol.
“What do you mean lost?” Kim yelled in the background.
“Delta, please clarify. Over.”
“They took a secondary road to avoid a mob and didn’t show up at the car lot. Over.” Julia tried to calm herself.
“Damnit, we need to find Beth,” Kim roared.
“Copy that. Did you see anything coming back here? Over.”
“Negative, Alpha. We followed orders as given, and we returned. Tink did take a different road to look for them, and he has not shown up, either. So we don’t have Jeff, Beth, or Tink. Out,” Julia huffed.
Len thought a second, “Copy that, Delta. Please sustain original plan, and we will do a search and rescue when we are able. Does everyone copy that? Over.”
Julia, Alex, George, and Johnny, unhappily confirmed.
The static began again, and everything else was lost as Johnny tried to ask a question. She yelled at the radio as she threw it into the seat beside her. These people were getting saved, but their friends were lost. No trade-offs. She ground her teeth in anger, cursing the radio loudly.
The zeds were gathering; they wouldn’t leave but would wait and batter down the doors with thousands of hands and feet. Already, fifty or more creatures, which didn’t feel pain, hammered the doors to get inside. Trying to get out would be suicide.
Those who had hidden in the school were terrified to go down and be among the zeds, just as the children had been, but this trip wasn’t by a staircase and then a door, since that way was now fully blocked by hammering fists. Time was running out, the area beneath the window was becoming busier as the creatures moaned, calling to each other.
They tied two ropes, knotted all the way down for handholds to make the descent easier, but still, they worried about some climbing down to safety.
Len, Conner, and Kim, kept firing while Rae and Juan used the ropes to climb down as Alex roared up in a truck.
Some zeds were too close for an easy shot, and Rae grinned wickedly as she kicked off from the building and went flying outwards, slamming her heavy boots into the heads of the ghouls nearby.Juan saw her maneuver and let out a roar as he tried it, his weight scattering bodies like bowling pins.
Grinning at each other, both jumped inside the truck to bash at any who got too close. Juan stopped and began shooting. For a few precious seconds, it was relatively clear, and they gestured for more to come down. A man came down, hitting and breaking the reaching zed hands with melee weapons; then a woman made it down and scuttled forward in the truck bed to cower close to the front.
An older woman started down and froze as she looked down at the hungry faces of the undead. She cried out for help, now looking up with pleading eyes, and although they reached down for her, she was too far down to help. Losing her hold, she fell the two stories, plummeting and landing in a heap in the thick bushes.
“Come on. Climb down. Move,” Juan screamed, “we’ll get her.” He clipped zeds to see past them and find the woman crumpled in the bushes.
A teen boy slid down and thudded into the truck with a gasp, as his ankle turned over.Rae caught his arm and pushed him to the front of the truck bed.
A man following the teen, yelled with fear, grabbed a bat, and swung madly at the zed hands reaching for him. Raw terror filled the man’s mind; if the creatures came any closer, he would go insane. His mouth went dry, and his eyes rolled madly.
Juan had gotten a visual on the woman who had fallen from the building, and he was about to jump out to help her, when the frantic man next to him in the truck slammed the bat home as hard as he could. Juan’s world exploded with pain. The frantic man hit him in the ribs, knocking him out of the truck and into the fight.
Staggering to his feet, he ripped his shirt as two zeds grabbed him in steel grips. Tears blurring his vision as his ribs screamed at him, Juan jerked and went down, rolling painfully under the truck to the other side.
Rae jumped to the cab’s roof to fire down at them, covering Juan while one of the men gave him a hand up.
As he stood up with a glare of disapproval at the man who hit him, Juan took the bat and handed it to the other man. He couldn’t swing anymore, and had to use only his gun.
In that time wasted, the woman who had fallen got to her feet. Her hands, arms, and face were scratched deeply, her ear was torn, and all of her injuries were gushing blood from where she had been stabbed by the thick branches. The zeds were crowding in now, and she couldn’t get to the truck, so she frantically broke and ran to the front doors to get back into the school.
“No, don’t run away,” Juan yelled in frustration at her back.
George flew by in the Suburban to get her, calling out, but she ignored him, running into the middle of the ghouls with her panic and pain.
As some turned on her, the others pushed the doors open to begin staggering inside. The woman screamed as hands dug into her stomach, and one ripped her lips and cheek off, leaving bare bone and teeth showing. Blood spurted. George slapped his steering wheel with his fists, furious and helpless.
In the school, the zeds chilli
ngly moaned, the sound echoing.
In raw panic and back with Len, one of the men ran towards the window and never stopped running; he vaulted over the sill and into midair as he tried to get away.
Rae screamed even as she fired her gun, reloading quickly. The man fell through the air and slammed into the side of the back of the truck, the metal breaking his back as he landed. He flopped into the grass, hands twitching.
“Go,” Len ordered, and Alex floored the car, sending grass and dirt flying behind the wheels as he rushed to get them out.
It was almost too late. Rae had rolled back to her feet in the back of the truck and sat on her haunches, watching. A zed grabbed at the tailgate, missed, and snagged the hitch.
As they drove over the rough ground, rocks flying up, the creature held on, feeling no pain and trying to pull itself up. In a few seconds, on a bump, he bounced away.
“Ha, you bastard,” a man yelled as the zed rolled over and over and then was tossed to the side.
“I hate them. Don’t care if they were people; I hate them,” Juan said. Alex drove to where Julia and George had met up again, but they had to move to keep the zombies from over-whelming them.
Upstairs in the school, Len, Kim, Conner, and Earl,were left with Henry and two others of his group, Mia and Rose. Nine.
“Can’t do it again; they’re on to us,” Kim noted.
Len eyed the window. “I’m running out of ways to trick ‘em and buy us time.”
“We can try the other side; maybe it’s clear,” Henry said.
“We need to move fast,” Len said as moaning filled the downstairs. “They’re inside and coming up, and they want us.”
“Mia, Rose.” Henry looked at the women. Rose was feverish, leaning against Mia now. It was the final hour.
“You said it would happen,” Mia looked at Rose sadly.
“I wish we had not been right,” Len told her.
“You all need to get out…go on...get out of here.” Kim wiped sweat off of his forehead.
“I hate this,” Henry said sadly.
“I bet I could shoot a gun,” Rose said, “maybe take out a few for y’all.”
Conner handed over his pistol, Colt .45. “You have seven rounds; that will give you a chance to take out five of them, might wanna keep two, yanno.”
“Love ya, Henry, now hurry up, and get out of here, so I don’t waste my time,” Rose said. “Thanks, Conner. Good luck to you all.”
The other seven ran for a door only to see zeds climbing the stairs in bunches. In less than a minute, the room they just had run from would be cut off. Five bullets wouldn’t even make a dent in the mass that was headed upward. Two hundred bullets wouldn’t help now.
“Come on, Johnny,” Kim pleaded, as he watched out the window of another room. The zeds below were fewer, but none of his friends were in sight. He helped Niki out the window and down the rope, talking her through the grabbing of the knots. The last six feet, she fell, but she immediately got to her feet, unhurt.Randy expertly shimmied down the rope and held Kim’s pistol.
Henry joined them, then Conner, almost leaping out as the zombies began to fill the room behind him, reaching, clawing, and moaning infernally.
“Len, come on,” Kim yelled, beginning to shoot, now that the zeds had found them on this side. Randy tried a few shots and managed to knock them down, at least. Once the zeds were down, and in between his vomiting, he used a boot to smash the skulls open in messy grey goo.
Len dodged as he watched Henry climb to the bottom of the rope, and then he saw Conner taking his turn, yelling for Len to get out.
A few seconds might buy his friends more time. He could hold them off for the few precious seconds that the rest needed; then, he would climb down, and if he were bitten in the process, so be it.
Jaws and filthy teeth snapped a half-inch from his arm. A girl, her stomach leaking intestines that snaked around her, had the most pained, horrified look on her face as she hissed, reaching for Len. He didn’t believe they still had a normal conscience, but were only hungry and filled with fury, so he felt pity for the zeds’ situation. She seemed so sad at what she had become. He fired into her head, destroying her brain.
He ducked, hands grabbing at him, and fell backwards out of the window.
5
All the King’s Men
“I didn’t want my mother and father coming back,” Hannah said.
“I understand,” Beth told her, “did you run away from them? Did they have Red?”
“Yes, they had it. The real virus is a Lyssa virus, so there is the hemorrhagic side and the rabies side. The CDC said it was somehow attached to a prion, which affects the brain, is untreatable and incurable, and replicates very fast. As it happened, the shape of these evil proteins was sort of like a diamond, and the scientist who first saw the virus was named Henry Diamond, and thus, it was first called Diamond Flux.”
“I didn’t know all that,” Beth, amazed, admitted to Hannah.
“Ironic, huh?”
“To say the least.”
Hannah grinned, “I had access to some pretty odd websites, and most people didn’t know it, and everyone began calling it Red, anyway. And my parents both had it, and Mom came after me.”
“It’s unreal that you managed to get away; did you run?”
Hannah smiled a little, “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks.”
“You…you had to?” Beth stared.
“Yep. Choppy choppy.”
Beth recalled how Julia and she had dressed in camo when they were gathering supplies a month before in the survivalist’s store.
Julia had said she didn’t want a zed to grab her hair and had spontaneously cut it off, asking Beth to even it out in spikes that were cut close to the scalp.
After they had rescued a five-year-old named Katie, the little girl had admired Julia’s short hair, and said ‘choppy choppy,’ asking for the same haircut to remove her long braid. It made Beth feel creepy, now.
“Then my father, then my younger brother and sister. The situation was a colossal mess, let me tell you,” Hannah explained. “So then I hid, had food and water, and looted the neighbors’ homes when I needed more.”
“Were they…?”
She shrugged, “Some were, but I figured out how to trip them and then chop again. They can be real lummoxes. ”
Beth was chilled.
“I think Hannah went through sheer hell,” Andie whispered.
Hannah shrugged, “In some ways, this catastrophe is harder on intelligent people than on sheeple.”
“ Sheeple?” Beth asked.
“Sheep-people…followers…lemmings,” Hannah explained. “They are people who are incapable of thinking and realizing things for themselves. Isn’t it more difficult to know the bad parts of this situation and the disease? Wouldn’t you be somehow happier just being dumb as a box of rocks and letting it happen?”
“No, I think I’d be more confused and scared. At least being a thinker, I can make plans and understand how to take action.”
“I see that, but intelligence also destroys hope, Beth. Trust me,” Hannah said quietly, eyes sad.
Beth nodded that she got it and checked on Jeff. When she came back, she looked more concerned. “He’s not waking up.” He was just a teen, a smart one, yes, and he needed a chance. Time was not helping Jeff.
“Maybe half are past.” Carol grinned. “It’s working.”
“They may be unable to feel pain, and there may be a bazillion of them, but they are essentially stupid,” Hannah told them.
Hannah explained that after hiding for a few weeks, she had come out, curious, and had found the people she was with now. Hannah had devised many of their plans to hide from zeds and to have several safe places supplied, which they could run to, if needed. “I wonder if it’s best to be me and be the prey, or to be them and mindless predators.”
“I don’t wanna be them, trapped in the body with the virus,” Tink shivered.<
br />
“Look at that.” Artie breathed hard, nerves rattled.
“What?” Beth asked.
Andie bit her bottom lip, thinking, watching. “It’s strange, I mean odder than the walking dead, yanno. Some Z’s have gone off east, walking on the streets and heading to the neighborhoods.
Another bunch is heading off to the west, and some are still going north towards the school, but just a few...maybe twenty…are headed back to the south where they came from.”
“Breaking off into smaller, but still big groups,” Carol mused, “that’s even more dangerous; we could run into them any way we go.”
“They are not intelligent,” Hannah said emphatically.
“Not saying they are, but some instinct or something drives them,” John stated.
“Or latent memories? They gather when the rest moan.”
“Wonder why they stopped flocking to the school?” Beth asked. “What if it is ’cause the first ones already got all our friends?”
“Don’t even think that,” Andie said, “you told us that they are smart and strong, and no way did a bunch of dumb zombies get them. I bet they just felt like doing something else…a new instinct is driving them.”
“Not instinct really…a basic…need to reproduce the virus in the best way,” Hannah explained. “It only lives to reproduce. A prion just wants to replicate, see?”
“Not really, but okay.”
“You’re quiet, Tink,” Beth said.
“Just taking it all in and thinking what we should do next. I feel as if Len and the rest surely need us.” He had a sense that his friends needed help and fast.
“It looks clear here,” Artie told them.
“I feel as if I need to get to the others,” Beth said, standing, but looking at Jeff, “but if he doesn’t get medical help, I feel as if he’s going to die.”
“Well, let’s figure this out, and we’ll help you all. All of us can work together and help,” Andie said, and her team nodded in agreement.
“Choppy,” Hannah grinned.
“You need some serious therapy, Hannah,” Carol said seriously.
