Ray swallowed hard and paused before continuing his story.
Like the ants, the undead attacked as a unit, swarming over their victims mercilessly. Ray remembered that all the black ants looked just like the bigger red ant except for the color and size, but the black ants sure had recognized the difference in species.
He watched the ghouls attacking the living with that same sense of fascinated dread as he’d had watching that insignificant skirmish on his front lawn years earlier.
The tide of the undead plodded along, excited yet systematic in their assault. Some would stop and focus on a car where they thought someone was hiding, while the rest forged ahead, pursuing the huge crowd of the living that had gone mad with fear. A great sea of humanity was being pushed and prodded toward where Ray stood.
He realized he’d seen enough and turned to follow his parents. It was only then that he realized that they were already gone. They had not waited for their son to figure out what was happening and had left him behind. Ray ran forward a few car lengths and then reversed his course and went back to his family’s car to glance inside; irrationally believing his parents might have returned to wait for him there. He climbed on the hood and screamed for them, scanning the highway to the south, away from the slowly encroaching doom. He couldn’t pick them out amongst the hundreds, if not thousands, of people surging away from his position.
Ray screamed for his parents once again, although his voice was drowned out by the screams and the sound of locusts he’d heard before.
Much like what George had discovered a few days later when he fled the high school gymnasium with Jason, it dawned on Ray that it was the song of the dead he was hearing, not some harmless insects. They were crying out to him and the desperate refugees trying to flee from their inevitable grasp. From his vantage point he could see thousands of the dead marching forward. Those not busy biting or tearing into those frantic souls in their path were moaning. As the moaning sound emanating from their ragged, rotten vocal chords joined together, it sounded like some sort of deranged chorus. It was so loud that it vibrated the car roof beneath his feet.
Ray could feel his grip on reality slipping away, but was coherent enough to realize that the screams of the living weren’t just coming from behind the car. He turned around again and made one last futile attempt at a search for his parents. There were people being trampled everywhere and he feared that given their physical condition, his mother and father might be injured. As he looked further in that direction, thoughts and concerns for his parents evaporated.
The dead were coming from the other end of the highway as well.
They were further off in the distance, but still surging toward the living caught in the middle of the two groups of surging corpses. They moved with a purpose, opening their arms and mouths to the crowd that appeared oblivious to their existence as they ran from the threat coming at them from the opposite direction.
Ray glanced around the immediate area and noticed that while most people were following the path of the highway in some blind attempt at escape, more people were taking off toward the trees surrounding the areas on both sides of the road. There were sound barriers off in the distance that helped shield the neighborhoods abutting the interstate from excessive noise, but in the immediate area, the woods provided a natural barricade, and a fortunate exit route for those stuck on the highway.
There was no hint that any ghouls were hiding in those woods, but it was almost impossible to tell from Ray’s current vantage point.
He stayed on top of the car for a few more moments, screaming. This time, it wasn’t for his parents, but for anyone who would be willing to help him, to tell him what to do, or to take him away from this place. He shouted at the people running by, warning them of what was up ahead, but either they couldn’t hear him or more likely, chose to ignore the pimply faced kid raving like a lunatic from the top of the Volvo.
Even in his state of growing hysteria, Ray knew what he was doing was pointless. Everyone around him was already dead, they just didn’t realize it yet.
He wasn’t ashamed to admit to Teddy it was at that point where he broke down crying. It was easy to tell the other boy because Teddy had wept openly more than once during their escape from the factory. It was a heck of a lot easier to admit you cried these days and only Frank and Marcus seemed to get upset if you did.
Teddy listened, fascinated by Ray’s tale. After another bout of crippling fear, Ray was able to give up on the idea of ever finding his parents again. There was poorly hidden guilt on his face as he talked about sliding off the roof of the Volvo and making for the woods to the east of the highway. When Teddy patted Ray on the back and smiled at him, the older boy felt a tremendous relief, as if a great burden had been lifted from his soul by revealing what was his darkest secret.
Not long after that, Ray managed to make his way to where Michael and his band of survivors were hiding out. It had been a harrowing adventure for him, but most of it had consisted of hiding in dark corners and staying as still as he possibly could as the song of the dead haunted his every waking moment for the next few days.
After his story was finished, Ray never brought up the subject of his parents again. Teddy was smart enough not to ask anything further, knowing that the guilt his friend felt was probably mixed in with a sense of betrayal and confusion at what they had done to him. They had left him behind and that was almost impossible for Teddy to imagine being forced to cope with.
Ray and Teddy
Part II
Teddy’s story was quite a bit different than Ray’s, but he had no interest in sharing it or anything else about his family with the other boy, or anyone else for that matter. It just didn’t seem necessary. His life had been altered permanently, like everyone else’s, and just like them he had a sad story to tell. But it seemed like almost a violation of his privacy to share it with someone.
Teddy was an only child and his parents were much younger than Ray’s, but he had always been surrounded by cousins, aunts, and uncles his entire life. His father and mother were born and lived in Ellington, Ohio. Like the rest of his relatives, they stuck close to the area, which was a small town not all that far from Manchester, where the RV’s were parked.
Teddy, like his father, had always been short but athletic. His father was an outdoorsman who loved to hunt and fish and had tried extremely hard to pass that interest along to his son. As many times as Teddy had been pushed out the door at four AM on cold fall mornings or was dragged along to sit all Saturday in a little boat out on a lake, he never gained much of an interest in either sport. Instead, he discovered soccer. His mother decided early on that he should be able to choose for himself what sports he could play and despite the fact that his father said no son of his was going to play a “queer” sport like soccer, his mother, who was usually quite passive, stood her ground.
Joe Schmidts never went to any of Teddy’s soccer games when he was little and even when his boy took up wrestling in the seventh grade, he didn’t think much of the sports his son had chosen. By that time, Teddy’s parents were divorced and he was only with his father every other weekend. They shared even less time than that together since all Joe ever wanted to do was go out on his fishing boat and get drunk on the weekends. Teddy was old enough to take care of himself, so he was left behind by his grumbling dad in the rickety shack he’d moved into after the divorce.
It was one of those weekends when things started getting strange.
It was about five PM on Saturday; at least three hours later than Joe usually got back from one of his typical fishing expeditions. Usually his trips landed him no fish, but a case of empty Bud cans rattling around in the bottom of the ten foot aluminum Crestliner. The boat was dented and beat up, but was the pride and joy of Ray’s father. That and his collection of hunting rifles.
When his father finally did stumble into the house, he was drunk as a skunk, as Teddy’s mother used to say, and in a foul mood to boot.
; Joe never hit his son, despite what Vicky believed. He pushed Teddy around a bit to toughen him up, but never abused him. At least not physically. Usually he rambled on about Teddy being a wuss and that he should try out for the football team. He was fast and could be a running back if he bulked up like his daddy. Joe was all of five foot six himself, but weighed over two hundred pounds. He claimed it had been all muscle in his day and perhaps that had been true when he had been a star player on the local high school baseball team. But now his beer gut was the most impressive part of Joe’s physique.
Upon Joe’s return from his latest fishing expedition, he tripped through the door griping and growling, like he normally did. But that wasn’t the first thing Teddy noticed about his dad. It was the blood on his shirt sleeve and his sloppily bandaged hand. It was wrapped with gauze from the first aid kit his father kept on the boat. All the teen could get out of Joe was that some bastard had bitten him when he pulled his boat to shore. After that, Joe proceeded to knock the man flat, kicking and punching him until he went down for the count. After regaling his son with the brief story, Joe threw up and collapsed to the floor.
After checking to make sure he was still breathing, Teddy dragged his father to the couch and with a Herculean effort, got him up on it. His father didn’t wake up the entire time his son manhandled him. Teddy then managed to clean up the vomit, which had left a foul trail from the spot where his father fell all the way to the couch. It bothered the teen that there was blood in his father’s puke, but he didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t the first time that had happened.
Teddy glanced at the bandages on his father’s hand and dismissed them as well. The gauze looked gross, but not too bad, and the wound underneath had stopped bleeding. He doubted the validity of the story his father had told, but had heard stories on the television about all sorts of the freaky stuff going on all over the place. Teddy wasn’t much for TV so he didn’t pay much attention to those stories, figuring it was more of the same overblown crap newscasters were always babbling about.
Regardless, he made no connection between the news and what happened to his dad. More than likely his father had done something stupid like get one of his fishing lures stuck in the webbing between his fingers where the cut was and in his drunken state ripped it out with some pliers. Making up a ridiculous excuse about some nut job biting him just went with the territory with his pops.
Teddy didn’t bother trying to take the bandages off or even looking too closely at the wound. His father looked green around the gills and was probably going to throw up a few more times before it even got dark out. Instead, Teddy grabbed a bucket from under the sink in the kitchen and set it on the floor close to his father’s mouth.
Teddy decided to go for a run to clear his head. Exercise had always been like that for Teddy; it allowed him to think when all his thoughts seemed to be zooming by at a hundred miles an hour. None of his friends liked running, even the ones he knew on the soccer and wrestling teams. So he was typically in far better shape than nearly everyone else at the start of the new seasons of his two chosen sports. In less than one month, soccer practice would begin and he wanted to make the varsity squad. He would be the only sophomore if he made it, and his coach told him that he had a great chance this season. There were enough seniors who had graduated the prior year that there would be room for one sophomore and he was hoping that Teddy would put in the effort to be that one.
Teddy couldn’t imagine not going full bore with every sport he tried. Despite their differences, he knew that his father and he had persistence in common. His father was a talented athlete, but said time and again that no one had given him a God damned thing—he worked his ass off for it all. He claimed he got a scholarship to play baseball in college and did so for one year before he jacked up his knee. And that, according to Teddy’s mother, was when the drinking started. He and Vicky were married by then and Teddy came along a year later, but Joe was already on the path to oblivion well before his son was born.
Vicky had spotted Teddy’s natural abilities early on, as well as his endless energy, and got him into the peewee soccer leagues. Wrestling was discovered later. He excelled at it as well, but soccer was the boy’s first love. Teddy dreamed of getting a scholarship like his father and leaving his small hometown for good. The conditioning he put his body through would insure that he didn’t “jack up his knee” like his dad, and maybe someday he would have the chance to play professionally.
So Teddy ran out of his dad’s dingy, broken down house out in the sticks and down his gravel road so he could clear his mind and focus on all his big goals for the future.
The other houses in the neighborhood were as cheap and shitty as his dad’s, and were populated mainly by Joe’s lame ass drinking buddies. Buddies Dad had made after the divorce. All of them seemed as hateful and bitter as Teddy’s father toward women, and the world in general. At least he would not have to put up with them tonight, since his father probably wouldn’t be awake to call them over. Hopefully he would stay passed out all damn night and Teddy could head back to Mom’s by noon the following day. It wasn’t like Dad wanted him around when he had a hangover anyway.
After about an hour of running, things started to look strange out on the road. Teddy had followed his typical route of five miles down the road and back again. He was about a mile from his father’s when he noticed a few people in their overgrown yards stumbling around nearby.
Must be Miller time. It seemed a bit early, but who was he to judge? His father was already passed out on the couch and Teddy hadn’t seen anyone who lived along this back road that ever met a beer they didn’t like. Still, it was only six o’clock. Usually they were just getting started at this point and wouldn’t be fall-on-their-faces drunk until ten if they decided to stay home or a bit later if they headed to the local tavern Joe frequented with many of them.
What was stranger still was the fact that Teddy was seeing at least six or seven people out on their lawns all looking exactly the same—stoned out of their gourds. His best guess was that someone had a booze picnic. He had to chuckle at the fact that his dad hadn’t been invited. If he wasn’t passed out, Joe would’ve been pissed at the snub.
Teddy kept his eyes trained on the road, setting one foot in front of the other, watching his feet kick up dust on the gravel road. And yet, he couldn’t help but notice the people stumbling around.
It wasn’t just how they walked. That would have been enough for Teddy to think it somewhat funny. But as he glanced even closer he realized they looked messed up. Really messed up. Every last one looked like they had thrown up all over themselves, and not just with normal vomit—there was blood and other gunk all over their clothes.
After a few more moments of jogging, Teddy dared to look at one of the drunks head on. He figured he could divert his eyes just as quickly if need be; if the person saw him staring and took offense. Teddy learned that keeping his eyes diverted from some of his father’s “friends” was the best thing he could do most of the time. They wouldn’t necessarily leave you alone because of that, but for the most part it kept them from pushing too hard when they were three sheets to the wind.
When he glanced at Missus Chilton, it was the first time that Teddy suspected that these people weren’t just drunk.
Marge Chilton was a widower who was probably ten years older than Teddy’s father, and Teddy unfortunately also knew from his dad that she was easy, which was grosser than just about anything. Most of the men in the area had taken a “whack” at ‘ol Marge, and if what Dad said was true he had ridden her a time or two as well. That was far more than what Teddy needed or wanted to know about his father’s sex life, though Joe thought it was hilarious when his uptight son turned beet red and ran out of the room after several graphic descriptions of his conquests.
When Teddy worked up the courage to take a look at Missus Chilton, he stumbled and fell hard to his hands and knees on the gravel. The pain was intense, though he barely noticed it as
his eyes never left the woman stumbling toward him.
Marge Chilton’s left cheek was gone. Teddy’s eyes were glued to the hole where he saw her jaw working underneath. It was a bloody mess, with the white of her teeth and pale gums clearly outlined. Part of the skin that had either been torn or ripped free remained behind and jiggled as she opened her mouth and moaned. It was like nothing Teddy had ever heard before. A ball of what looked like phlegm landed with an audible plop in front of her as her jaws split wide.
She was in a house coat, exposing a small and tight fitting nightgown beneath. In the lunacy of the moment, Teddy could tell it was silk and that his mother had one just like it. It clung tightly to the middle aged woman’s body.
Missus Chilton had been an attractive, if rather trashy, woman, and her forty-five year old figure still garnered its share of looks. Teddy was not sure how trashy she really was, but she had been at his father’s house with all the guys and a few other women on occasion, and was hanging on a different man each time. She smoked like a chimney and even tried flirting with Teddy once, which had ended with a horrified look on his face and her cackling like some insane witch at how funny she thought she was being.
The silk nightgown was covered in a brown fluid that Teddy guessed was a mixture of blood and something else he didn’t want to know anything about. More importantly, she was shambling toward him across her small front yard.
“Missus Chilton? Are you okay?” Teddy winced as he tried to get back up and pushed up on hands that had a thousand shards of gravel jammed into them. There were no cuts, at least.
The Dark Trilogy 02 - Into the Dark Page 22
