Levi figured it was about time to postpone changing the tire. He grabbed the .44 Blackhawk off the ground and stood up. He didn’t have time to turn and face the buck at all. Without warning, the wall of thicket on the right side of the road burst open and something massive and black exploded into the open, filling his view. He stumbled backward and landed on his ass as the thing hit the passenger door of the logging truck. It struck with enough force and weight to rock the vehicle, lifting it four inches off the ground on one side before it settled once again.
It was a black bear, or had been before it had turned. Now it was a great, bloated mass of matted ebony fur, mad red eyes, and teeth and claws coated with swarming darkness. The animal staggered backward and shook its huge head after the impact of the collision. Then it rose up on its hind legs and roared loudly. Erect, it was nearly seven feet tall. From where Levi sat on the ground, it looked even taller.
There was a loud bang and a tortured squeal of metal, and the logging truck rocked backward on its brakes a few inches, knocking the jack loose beneath it. Levi glanced over his shoulder and saw the big deer’s haunches around the edge of the front fender. The son of a bitch head-butted the truck! Put his rack right through the grill!
“Out of the way, Papa!” Jem called out.
Levi reacted, rolling to the side and nearly into the woods. Jem fired his twelve-gauge, putting a load of buckshot into the bear’s back, between its shoulder blades. Levi flinched as the animal’s chest exploded and most of its heart and lungs—dark and infected with parasites—littered the gravel shoulder beside the road. The bear staggered for a moment, then bellowed loudly and whirled, bringing a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt swinging toward Jem. The boy dodged the blow by fractions of an inch. If the bear’s claws had made contact, they would have peeled Jem’s face completely off his skull or decapitated him.
I don’t give a shit what Abe says, thought Levi, the thing is dead. You can’t be alive and lose your heart and keep on going!
He struggled to his feet and aimed the .44 Magnum at the back of the bear’s head. “Aim for the brain, son!” Past the bear, he saw Jem nod and lift the 1100, jamming the muzzle against the critter’s forehead. “Now!”
Together, they pulled their triggers.
On the far side of the truck, Avery had his hands full.
A bee swarm of slugs from the AR-15 had failed to bring the zombie buck down. They had stitched across his broad shoulders and a few had knocked a few points off his rack, but none had found his skull. Avery lurched backward as the buck rammed the front end of the Ford, its antlers impaling the grill. Damn! he thought. There goes the radiator!
Slinging the assault rifle over his shoulder, he drew a machete from a scabbard on his hip and walked up to the front of the truck. The deer huffed and struggled to pull free from the grill, but its rack was firmly embedded. The animal’s bloodshot eyes rolled wildly and its black teeth snapped like gunshots, yearning to sink into living flesh.
Avery took the haft of the machete in both hands and hacked the deer’s head from its body. It took several swings, but soon the body dropped to the pavement, bucking and twitching, while the head with its magnificent parasite-covered rack remained attached to the grill of the logging truck.
Behind him, Avery heard a high-pitched squeal, like a hog that had been grabbed by the hind legs. He whirled and saw a wild boar barreling out of the thicket at the opposite side of the mountain road. It was a big one—at least two hundred and fifty pounds—oily black with crazy eyes. Its tusks were long and curved, the yellow of the ivory obscured by a dense coating of seething black parasites.
Unable to reach the AR-15 in time, he dropped the machete and drew his pistol. Gripping the gun in both hands, he fired. After three shots in the head, the animal failed to slow down. Wild boars were notorious for possessing thick skulls. It would take a heavy-caliber round, point blank, to penetrate the bony plate between its eyes. It was at that moment that Avery wished that he was holding his father’s .44 Blackhawk.
“Shit!” cussed Avery. Soon, his revolver was empty and the thing kept right on coming. Only fifteen feet of pavement stretched between him and the zombie boar. Holding the smoking gun in his hand, he knew that his options were limited. The machete was beyond reach and he would be a few seconds short of grabbing the AR-15 and bringing it around into line.
Right when he was certain that the critter would gore him, a streak of narrow motion flashed from his left and the boar dropped to its knees and flipped. Avery side-stepped as the animal’s hindquarters forcefully struck the door of the truck. Startled, he looked down to see that an arrow had pierced the boar’s skull, entering one temple and exiting out the other.
Avery looked toward the Yukon and saw Agnes Mendlebaum standing beside it, holding the compound bow in her tiny, liver-spotted hands. He simply nodded his thanks, so out of breath that he was unable to speak.
Levi and Jem left the fallen carcass of the black bear and headed around the truck to where Avery stood. Almost immediately, the shriek of the bobcat sounded from the far end of the caravan, followed by the rattle of Kate’s Uzi.
“Come on!” their father instructed and, together, they started toward the Yukon.
They were nearly past the Ram pickup, when something dropped from an overhanging tree limb and landed with a thud on the roof of the cab. Avery heard a snarl and turned to see a gray flash leaping toward them. “Look out!” he yelled as the thing launched itself at his brother’s head.
It was a possum, shriveled, its gray fur missing in broad clumps. Its rodent-like head was more a skull with feverish red eyes than anything else. It landed on Jem’s shoulder, wrapped its fleshy pink tail around his neck, and bit savagely into his left ear.
Jem cried out and dropped his shotgun. He grabbed a fistful of the possum’s hair, but it came out in his hand. Avery stepped over and tried his best to pry it loose. The animal’s sharp teeth—seething with swarming blackness—were clamped firmly shut, refusing to let go.
The pained look in Avery’s eyes matched that of his twin. “Sorry, brother,” he said, then reached down to Jem’s belt, took the six-inch Buck knife from its sheath, and cleanly sliced his ear off at the base, next to the skull.
Jem screamed and sank to his knees, blood jetting from the wound. Avery got a firm hold on the possum, but its tail remained wrapped around his brother’s throat. With a growl of anger, he cut the tail loose with the Buck knife and then tossed the animal to the roadway. It hit on its side and struggled to get up, eyes blazing, teeth still clamped around the cartilage of Jem’s severed ear.
Before it could escape—or attack again—Avery leaned down and impaled the possum’s skull between the eyes. The blade entered with a brittle crunch, passed through the brain, and exited through the back. Almost instantly, a surging stream of blackness erupted from the wound and began traveling up the blade toward the hilt of the knife. Avery let loose and stepped back before it could reach his hand.
A moment later, Nell and Abe were beside the wounded sixteen-year-old. “Someone bring me some gasoline!” the old man instructed. “And a bottle of water.”
Jem cried mournfully as blood soaked the shoulder of his shirt and ran down his left arm. “It bit me! It bit me, Ma! Oh God!”
“Just keep calm, son,” his mother said soothingly. “Your brother got to you in time… cut it off before those things could get inside you.” Her voice was steady, but the fear in her eyes told a different story.
As Avery went to fetch a gas can from the bed of the logging truck, Levi stood over them expectantly. “Abe?”
The scientist looked up at him, his face grim. “I can try something, but there are no guarantees.”
Levi nodded. He reached down and ran a hand gently through his son’s hair. “Take care of him,” he told Nell. “I’m going to check on Kate.”
When he reached the Yukon, he found his daughter and Agnes at the rear of the vehicle. They stood above a large bobcat, about fiv
e feet long from nose to tail. It was riddled with 9mm bullets and was still alive, breathing raggedly, air whistling wetly from its punctured lungs.
“Stand back,” Kate told them, then aimed one of the Glocks, thumbed back the hammer, and put a single round through the spotted feline’s brain. When she turned toward her father, she saw the stricken look on his face. “What is it?”
“Your brother. Jem.”
Kate looked past him and saw Jem on the ground, covered with blood, with her mother and Abe Mendlebaum beside him.
“He was bitten,” her father told her. “By a possum.”
“No!” Kate took off running. Levi and Agnes followed.
By the time they got there, Avery had returned with a five-gallon can of gasoline and a bottle of drinking water. “There you go.”
“And I’ll need a match.”
Reluctantly, the teenager took a match from the box in his pocket and handed it to the doctor. He looked regretfully at his mother. “I’m sorry, Ma. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“Don’t worry, son,” she told him. “You did the right thing.”
“Hold him down,” Abe instructed. “This is going to hurt like unholy hell.”
Levi and Avery did as he requested. “What are you going to do?” asked the boy. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he stared at his frightened brother.
“Attempt to kill two birds with one stone. Cauterize the wound and destroy any parasites that might have infected the tissue.” Tilting Jem’s head—so that the inner ear canal would not suffer—Abe took the gas can and let a trickle of fuel fall over the open wound in his head, covering the area as sparingly as possible. Jem bucked and screamed at the flare of pain. Abe opened the bottle of water and handed it to Nell. “It will need to burn for ten or fifteen seconds to be effective. When I tell you, put out the flames with the water.”
“Flames?” shrieked Jem. “What do you mean—?”
Abe struck the match and lit the gas-soaked wound. The side of Jem’s head caught fire and began to burn.
Those fifteen seconds were the longest fifteen seconds of their lives. The others looked away as Jem thrashed and screamed. Avery held on firmly to his twin brother and cried like a baby.
“Now!” said Abe.
Nell—also in tears—dumped the entire bottle of drinking water on the flames, slowly extinguishing them. Jem continued to scream for a minute, then stiffened and passed out from the shock and pain. Abe laid two fingers against the side of his neck and checked his pulse. “He’ll be unconscious for a while. We’ll need to see if we can find a pharmacy when we reach Cherokee. He’ll need antibiotics and something for the pain… if the place hasn’t already been ransacked.”
“Did any… any of those things…get into the wound?” asked Levi. He remembered the possum’s jagged teeth, covered with black parasites.
The elderly man shrugged. “Only time will tell, I suppose,” he said truthfully. “There was so much blood, it was hard to tell. If there were, hopefully the fire destroyed them.”
Levi looked around, puzzled. “Where’s Mrs. Agnes?”
“I believe she is over there, tightening the lug nuts on your truck.”
Avery shook his head in wonder. “She’s just a jack of all trades, ain’t she?”
Abe smiled affectionately. “She always has been.” He opened a first aid kit that Nell had brought from the pickup truck and began binding Jem’s blackened wound with gauze and surgical tape.
Levi and Avery walked around to the front of the logging truck. Taking a fallen limb from the side of the road, they pried the head of the buck loose. It dropped from the grill onto the pavement. They kept their distance. Thousands of parasites still swarmed from the animal’s antlers, as well as its nostrils, mouth, and the ragged stump of its neck. They popped the hood and examined the radiator. “No punctures as far as I can tell,” said Levi. “A half inch more and one or two of those points would have gone right through the front.”
Gently, they loaded Jem into the bed of the pickup truck and covered him with a wedding ring quilt Nell had sewn with her grandmother when she was a child. Avery sat in the back of the truck with him. He was strangely quiet, a trait that had never been a major part of his personality. It was plain to see that he was concerned for his brother and scared at the prospect of what might soon happen to him.
“I reckon we’d best be going,” Levi told Nell and Kate. “It’ll be getting dark soon and I’d hate be caught out here at night.” He nodded to the carcasses of the permanently dead animals. “Especially with critters like those roaming about.”
Nell’s face looked pale and drawn. “Levi… will Jem be okay?”
Levi shook his head. “I don’t know. I reckon all we can do is pray on it.”
His wife frowned bitterly at the suggestion. “Done my fair share of praying, Levi. Prayed until I was blue in the face… with no relief in sight. I don’t reckon another one would make a damn bit of difference.”
As he watched her climb back into the cab of the big Ram, Levi felt saddened by the woman’s cynical remark. Nell had always been their rock in times of trouble and hardship, and a big part of her strength and wisdom had been hewn out of her faith in God. Now that that faith was faltering, it seemed like a piece of her was dead and buried. A very important piece.
Chapter 10
Cherokee, North Carolina—also known as Cherokee Indian Reservation—was a wannabe Gatlinburg, but on a much smaller scale. There were a few attractions and museums—mostly dedicated to its Cherokee heritage—but it was also a gambling town. Because of its status as a Native American reservation governed unto itself, there were bingo halls among the souvenir shops (which sold Indian blankets, beaded jewelry, and feathered “dreamcatchers” … most with a Made in China tag somewhere on them) and there was even a Harrah’s Casino on the side of one of the wooded foothills. Before the outbreak, tourists would be bussed across the mountain from Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, to play the slots or a little roulette or blackjack.
From all outward appearances, the place was utterly deserted. There was a distinct absence of Biters, too. The streets were dark and empty. If there were any buzzards around—circling the black sky or roosting in the trees of the surrounding forest—they were staying out of sight.
There were only three restaurants in town: a McDonald’s, a Dairy Queen, and an IHOP, all with their doors securely locked. Toward the end of town, they found what they were looking for. The Walgreens was also locked up as tight as a drum, but from their vantage point outside looked to have been untouched. The shelves were still fully stocked, as though the end of civilization had taken place only hours ago.
It was a little unnerving to find the town in such a pristine state, with no signs of looting or vandalism. It was as though the residents had all awakened as Biters one morning and simply wandered off.
Levi busted out the glass of the front door with the butt of his shotgun and he and Abe went in. Avery stayed in the bed of the truck with his brother, while the others waited in the vehicles.
The two made their way directly to the pharmacy in the back. All the shelves were stocked. No one had taken anything, which was odd, since every drugstore in America—or even the world, for that matter—had been looted shortly after the chaos had started, mostly by junkies, drug dealers, or folks who intended to barter pharmaceuticals for other supplies.
Levi wouldn’t have had any idea what he was looking for, but fortunately Abe did. Taking a mop bucket from the cleaning supplies aisle, the scientist filled it to the brim with various kinds of antibiotics and painkillers, including Oxycontin, Lortab, Percocet, Cefalexin, Zithromax, and Amoxicillin, as well as gauze and first aid supplies to change the dressing on Jem’s wound.
“We’ll come back in the morning and get the rest of what we need,” suggested Levi. “Right now, we need to cook us up some supper and get a good night’s sleep. It’s been a hard day on all of us.”
Abe agreed. “It has
been a grueling week. A lot has taken place… has changed… in a short period of time.”
They left the drugstore and headed down the highway to the end of town. There were several large hotels near Harrah’s—a Holiday Inn Suites, Hampton Inn, and Days Inn, among others—but they chose a little place named the Tomahawk Motel with connecting rooms. If trouble came in the form of Biters—like it had earlier that day—they would have quick access to their vehicles. If they stayed in one of the big, multi-floored hotels, they would be packed in like sardines in a can. If the place was attacked or overrun, it would be nearly impossible to escape.
They took three rooms. The Mendlebaums stayed in one; Jem, Avery, and Kate in another; and Levi and Nell in a third. Nell had protested, wanting to stick with her injured boy, but her husband assured her that his sister and brother would attend to his needs. Besides, Nell needed her rest. She didn’t need to sit up all night fussing and worrying over something she could really do nothing about.
After supper, Levi and Abe left the others and sat on the open tailgate of the pickup truck. They smoked—Levi from a pack of Marlboro 100s and Abe his pipe full of Borkum Riff—and quietly surveyed the empty thoroughfare of Cherokee.
“How is Jem doing?” Levi asked him.
“He’s resting comfortably,” the doctor told him. “I changed his dressing and gave him a generous dose of Oxycodone. He’ll sleep through the night.”
A tense silence stretched between them. “Do you think he’ll turn?”
Abe shrugged. “I’m not sure. I saw many men make the transition back in Oak Ridge and I know the symptoms of the parasitic infestation, but so far Jem has exhibited none of them. There is normally immense swelling of the facial features, ruptured blood vessels in the eyes, and signs of parasites in the mouth and nasal passages. Also signs of lethargy and loss of mental faculties as the victim lapses into the faux death and begins to make the transition. I have seen none of that taking place with your son.”
“But it could.”
The Buzzard Zone Page 6