by catt dahman
Kim, Beth, and Earl, entered the store.
George told Teeg, “This is how we do it.” He and Andie had guns at the ready.
“This is how we do it.” Teeg sang tunelessly and did a little dance. “What? What are you staring at?” he demanded of Andie and Hannah, but the little girl was rolling with laughter now. Andie smiled thinly.
Inside, the store was cool and reeking of rot.
“Not very picked over,” Earl said. Zed voices greeted him in response.
Two zombies headed their way; the woman wore a pink, blood-splashed bathrobe that hung open, showing her nude, bitten torso. Both breasts were chewed away.
The man’s face was gnawed to the bone, and he was missing the lower parts of both arms; stubs of shattered bone waved frantically as the two advanced, moaning, eyes milky, but excited by fresh meat.
Kim and Earl shot both.
Beth sidestepped to the right, looking down the aisles, her boots making crackling sounds over the shattered glass, littering the floor.
A jar of pickles had exploded, leaving little shriveled pickles on the floor like slugs, and the scent was still there, made cloyingly sickening by the thick stink of the zombies.
She heard a slapping noise. Ready to fire, she scanned the aisle as she walked, stopping in front of a display of old movies for sale. There was one on the dusty shelf, starring Cinder Montaine that made Beth shiver as she noted it was right next to Night of the Living Dead.
Creepy.
Beth heard the slapping-thud sounds again.
A male zombie came around the corner on its knees, feet clad in small scuffed boots, slapping along behind him. He stared down as he shuffled along, swinging his arms to keep momentum. His hands were encased in thick, fingerless, rubber-palmed gloves that he put down occasionally to keep his balance.
Beth knew that even in his former life, he had somehow not been able to use his legs from the knees down; maybe it was a birth defect, but this is how he had gotten around. Muscles rippled under his tight tee shirt as he scuttled closer, looking up at her with a moan and hungry leer. Straight black hair fell around his face and shoulders.
She didn’t see a mark on him, but there was some soaked-in blood on one sleeve about the elbow, and he was definitely a zed with the moaning, dark, sunken eyes, drool, and the nasty scent wafting around him.
It made her wonder about severely mentally challenged people; if no one helped them dress or clean up, and they didn’t speak well, might someone shoot them by mistake? What about people who were ill and needed medications? The idea that this might happen was insane; she could go crazy; trying to think of all the ways things could go wrong.
Beth stepped back two steps, watched again as he came closer, taking in all the signs and was convinced by his lifeless, but still hungry eyes more than anything. She aimed and fired twice, watched his head explode and saw him crumple as he did a header into the cheap knick-knacks on the bottom shelf. “Clear,” she called.
“Clear,” Kim said.
In less than two minutes, Earl met Beth and told her the back storeroom was clear, too. He scooped candy bars and gum into a sack. Outside, George’s BAR Safari 30.06 thundered.
“Just the one?” Kim asked him as they went back outside.
“That’s all I saw,” George said, “you found three?”
“Yep. All clear now.” Earl tossed the bag into the Range Rover. “What were your friends driving?”
Teeg looked in the direction Earl was looking. “Those cars.” He waved happily. “You all have a bunch of guns; try to look friendlier, or you’ll scare them.”
Kim smiled at Beth, “He thinks we should look friendlier? Wait ‘til he meets Julia and Len and Rae, talk about unfriendly looking.”
“We’ve been looking for you, Teeg.” A man got out of a truck, watching the guns closely and keeping his hands in view, “Everything okay?”
“Everything is great, Dawg,” Teeg said, “I found some more people; they saved my ass a ways back when some of the dead meats were chasing me across the road.”
“Why did the Teeg cross the road?” Hannah giggled, “to get away from the zeds.”
“We were getting worried you had gotten caught by those freaks.” The man stepped forward to Kim. “I’m Rev. Nice to see you folks.”
“Only freak I see now is this freakily, smart little girl who doesn’t even have any funny jokes.” Teeg made a face at Hannah.
“Beth. Kimball.” A teen launched from the back seat of the big truck and ran towards them.
“Josh, Oh, my, God.” Beth grabbed him to hug him. “I’m glad to see you. And Deanna and Polly are with you?”
Josh looked at the ground for a second, “No. They didn’t make it, Beth. We should have never left the hospital and gone out on our own; I shouldn’t have let her talk me into it.”
Kim pointed to a little, shaded picnic spot right by the parking lot with a table and several benches. They all went to sit on the benches and have some food while the coast was clear. “So, tell us your story.”
11
Rev
Before the Red or Diamond Flux came and took over the world, leaving shambling, half-dead people, Rev, who was Reavis Allan Mc Junkins, in actuality, and Rev Dog on Insta-Chat, was over-weight, shy, spent his free time on the computer with chat-pals, and didn’t have much going on for the future.
Although he was almost thirty, he lived with his parents, only going to work at the hardware store his dad owned and to church. He spent most of his time on his computer, staying up late to all hours as he chatted with people from all over the world. On the computer, he was mighty fine looking.
He had been amused, at first, with the Red talk until he realized how serious it was. One day China was fine, and the next day it was under siege, falling from within. On the Internet, he had then tracked it as many did, watching countries fall, then continents.
When all of Europe was infected and the first cases in the US were reported, he knew it was all over.
Cyber friends from all over said they had symptoms, and then never again did they log on to their computers, this happening until only he was left and all the lights on the chat program were red; not a single one of his fifty or more contacts was lit up green. Time stood still, and it was as effective as if someone had deafened him.
At his home, his parents were sick, as were his siblings and their spouses. Red was a cruel virus, not happy simply to take the victims, but humiliating them as well and causing suffering to those with it, and to those watching it ravage their loved ones.
Rev waited in fear for time to crawl by and for them to change as it was reported that they would. He believed it would. Was it any shock for the world to end with a moan?
Long before he needed it, Rev got his dad’s shotgun out of the closet and put ammo in his dad’s old hunting vest that he took to wearing night and day.
After Rev buried his dad, mom, sisters, brothers-in-law, and a niece that he had put down seconds after they turned into mindless cannibals, he cleaned the house well, fixed up the yard, and packed up to leave it all behind. Unashamed, he cried in big whooping heaves that left him exhausted, but finally empty of the sharp pain from loss.
When he saw himself in the mirror, he found that a few weeks had taken away the extra weight, while the work outside had bronzed him. He was almost attractive now.
The next few weeks made him leaner, the sun cleared his skin, and his hair grew longer, so he gathered the coal black strands into a ponytail that accentuated the new strong, square jaw line. Lack of greasy, fast food made a huge difference. Startling amber eyes shining from the sun-kissed skin and a new wardrobe of slim jeans, boots, and fitted tees completed his look.
If he kept gaining muscle, he would wear what the gym-rats called ‘smedium’-sized shirts (small mediums).
The tiny town of Elwood, Oklahoma missed the major, ineffectual bombing, but wild fires burned most of the small town as they roared across pastures and farmla
nd.
With all the smoke and radiation on the wind, he stayed a while with six others in the basement of a building in the next town over, where he had walked to when he felt like moving on. They had food, water, and a few basic medical supplies, but it was far from enough and not very comfortable, but it was safe.
Of the six, only one was in a bad way.Christie was a woman who had been badly burned in one of the massive sweeping fires; her long blonde hair was scorched off of her scalp, and her soft, ivory skin was blistered and pocked with glass as she had fallen through a store window when running from the blaze. The others had taken care of her, removing the glass and patching her up with bandages, but she was horribly disfigured, and in pain.
In his former shy life, she was a woman he might have dreamed about and have looked at pictures of on the Internet, if she had been on Face Book, not daring to chat to her.
Now, he was the attractive one, and he found that looks didn’t always make things better. He blushed when she made remarks about his good looks and smiled at him. In his former incarnation, no attractive woman would have thought him attractive.
Sometimes they rode in vehicles; other times they walked, carrying packs, letting the traffic situations dictate what they would do. Jake was one of the guys with them, and he and Rev both seemed to think going southeast was right. It was a strong gut feeling they shared, but couldn’t explain.
During one dark, moonless night, Rev woke, shivering helplessly with fear after a nightmare about wolves and a one-eyed man who chased him; the next morning, the girl and woman were gone, blankets empty, as if they had gone into thin air.
Two nights later, Christie vanished without a sound. Although they looked around at everything, there was no clue where she had gone or why. Or how.
Then a man with them was killed violently by a zed in a short battle that surprised them; he was wearing a Grateful Dead tee shirt. Finally, after the second man vanished, it was just Rev and Jake left.
Jake said he had nightmares, too, about wolves, and about a man with a lopsided face and one horrible, terrible eye. The idea of one eye bothered Rev very deeply, and he tried to recall his bad dreams, but they twisted like dark smoke, dancing just out of his reach so that he couldn’t recall the details.
In one town, a horribly burned man demanded sex from them at gunpoint, but Jake had been a better shot and killed him.
In another town, at gunpoint, a man asked whom they followed: the dark-haired child or the wolf. Rev and Jake were baffled about how he could have known, but said they had dreamed of the wolves.
It scared them to death, knowing they had a fifty-fifty chance of being killed by the man for a wrong answer. It was better to go with the truth, because if this man followed the vile wolves and one-eyed man, then it was better to die than to wait for him to tear them to shreds.
It was a right answer and how they met Pan and the ones with him. Jake had about peed in his pants when he recognized Panola Davies, shortstop for the Boston Red Sox. But Pan shrugged, “Baseball is as dead as the Babe; my bat is for smashing zed head now.” Then he had asked what they knew, if anything, about radiation.
Rev knew a little, concluding his lesson with, “So measured in roentgens, I think it’s better to get like five hundred over ten years than to get thirty all at once.”
“So it can do some freaky things to people?”
“Yes, over time, it can.”
“What if it’s a pregnant woman?”
“Not sure, but it can’t be good, because they make women wear the lead aprons for x-rays if they are in child-bearing years. I think it can cause changes, you know. Maybe spontaneous abortions?”
“We found Cindy in Little Rock, and she was pretty much okay, just showing: a little pregnant and cute as a speckled pup she was, but she claimed she didn’t know she was with child, and she was suddenly showing. It might have been just a swollen belly, but then we could see it was a baby when it started moving, and she felt it, too.”
“Odd.”
“We found some sick kids…radiation, exposure…whatever…tried to nurse them, but they died, and Cindy took it hard…worried about having her baby. This was a week later, and one day she tripped, and I caught her. I almost fell out in shock; she was really big with the bulge of the baby in her belly…”
“Impossible, right?”
Pan told Rev and Jake it had to be possible because she had swelled more, begun labor, and was in labor right then. “We thought…maybe she was sick.”
“Something is off; this is impossible,” Rev said.
“Welcome to my world of nightmares and impossibilities becoming real,” Pan said sarcastically.
Jake knew a little, so he examined her, and sure enough, she was about to give birth. She sweated and whined with the pain, tired from labor, and scared.
He ordered the camp to get him what he needed: a sharp knife, warm water, thread and a needle, towels, a blanket, and barked at them as he prepared.
In a few minutes, with him talking soothingly, the tiny head crowned and then slipped out of Cindy and into Jake’s blanketed arms. He covered it as Cindy fainted with exhaustion and relief.
The baby was still and didn’t make a sound. Rev and the others looked at one another.
“You’re supposed to slap its butt to make it cry and breathe,” Rev told him.
Jake didn’t answer.
“Hey, what’s up? What’s wrong with the baby?” Rev asked. Pan stood close, asking the same thing.
Jake carried the little bundle close to his chest, its head covered.
“I can do CPR, Jake; we have to help the baby.”
He didn’t stop walking.
“Damnit, Jake, give me the baby, then…asshole.”
Jake stopped, turning to Rev. He allowed the blanket to fall back, and Rev saw the prettiest baby face ever, tiny features, perfect in a little, red face, itty-bitty seashell hands, and a pale pink rosebud mouth. She was so very small.
When he pulled the blanket back a bit more, he saw there was nothing below her stomach; she ended in a kind of pinched, fleshy knob. Her little head, in the back, was just brain, and no skull covered it. It didn’t breathe.
They lied, telling Cindy she had died but was a lovely baby they had buried. She remained weak, pale as milk, and tired.
Two days later, Deanna, Little Polly, and Josh with a cat named Mr. Doody, appeared at the camp, worn ragged, their eyes haunted. They had packs on, with Deanna pulling Polly and Mr. Doody in one red wagon. Supplies were in a second wagon pulled by Josh while he tried to keep a gun handy.
Josh said they had left the hospital as Deanna was restless in one place, uncomfortable being treated as a child since she was fourteen, but had not been a child for many years, having worked as a prostitute and porn actress, albeit against her will.
Polly’s father, Ed, had been the cop assigned to Deanna’s case, but he was shot by a drug dealer in front of Deanna’s face.
When Red swept the country, Deanna, with a sense of obligation and no other place to go, had gone to Ed’s home to try to take care of his widow, and his daughters, Nelwyn and Polly.
Polly’s mother, Karen, had a bad case of Red, and although she fought it, she fell into a coma, calling for her daughters. Deanna had cared for Karen, keeping her clean and comfortable, but Nelwyn, who was Deanna’s age, had also caught Red and slipped into a coma quickly.
Unfortunately, only Polly had survived, and she and Deanna had bunked in a closed-up room, until the little girl had sneaked out one day and almost been killed by radiation and wandering zeds.
Josh, two years older than Deanna, had randomly come along as he searched for survivors and saved them, and although Deanna initially wanted him to go away, she had accepted him when Polly was ill from the radiation. They, along with the cat, had come out and gone to the hospital where they were safe, but within a few days, Deanna was anxious and panicked, living with so many people and being treated as a child, so they had left to search f
or a place to lie low a while.
It was pure serendipity that led them to find the camp of the other survivors after having been followed by zombies, and then a pair of wolves that watched them but kept a distance. Mr. Doody hissed at them fearfully.
Polly had shivered, saying, “The wolf et the granny all up. Are they gonna et us up, too?”
Deanna swore no wolf et or ate the granny, but locked her in a closet instead, and then said they were perfectly safe.
Right on the state line between Texas and Arkansas was a huge, crashed pile-up of cars and trucks that were peppered by dead bodies and trash. No way could be seen to get around the twisted metal, so they had to abandon their vehicles and carry their packs with them.
Deanna fretted because they had passed this by a few days before going the other way, but Josh wouldn’t give in to her this time, as nightmares haunted them each night, and he had found out the others were dreaming the same scary things.
Deanna held Polly and the cat close. The little girl was all she had ever cared for, and she looked suspiciously at the crashed cars, seeing them as a threat to her. If anyone tried to hurt Polly, she would die defending her; Polly was Deanna’s redemption. “You tough jocks need to check it out,” she said.
Rev almost couldn’t respond, shocked at having been called a jock when he was as far from athletic as one could be. Or he had been. He had changed. Pan had said one night that things such as horror, catastrophe, and misery, refined and defined people. It showed their true souls. Right then, he was kind of goofily proud his true soul was thinner and better looking than before.
He stared into a car at a zed that was skinny, wrinkled with dehydration and time, but largely unmarked except for the purple and green mottled skin around a filthy bandage on the woman’s hand. She slapped at the closed window of her car, still seat-belted in, drooling, moaning at them. She was a like a deadly animal behind a glass fence. Would she be there forever?
“Do you think they can…yanno. Think? Do they have memories?” Jake watched her.
“No. They are the virus, just bigger, but that’s all they are now. She can’t even get out of the car.”
