About a Woman, a Zombie Chronicles Novel

by Mark Clodi

  "Zombies." Paige said, aiming her rifle down the street towards the trench. She fired three times, hitting two of the closest zombies. Dora retched again.

  "Dora! Less puking, more gunfire!"

  Groaning Dora dropped Mike's head and reached for her own rifle, then stretched out on the ground prone to start firing at the zombies. She did move over enough before she started firing to avoid laying in her own tossed cookies. Less than a minute later a worried voice called out from behind the second fence, "Paige? Dora?"

  "Yeah Leon, we are here, open the gate will ya?"

  "Sure thing."

  "Peter? Peter? Madre de Dios! Peter!" yelled Mary, trying to haul the gate open forcefully.

  "Over there." Dora said pointing at the boy.

  "I told you we shouldn't have kids in the trench. How many times have I told you?"

  "Every other day, at least. He wasn't in the trench. Leroy shot him, no zombies got him."

  The gate finally opened wide enough for Mary to squeeze through she rushed to her son with a backpack she used for emergencies.

  "Oh God! Oh God! Please, Lord save my son! Please God!"

  Alex came through the gate next, he took up a kneeling position on the other side of Peter and added his gunfire to Paige's. Leon and five other teens came through after that, Leon squatted down to examine Mike.

  Dora waited until he was done, then gave him a questioning look, to which he answered, "It's bad. Mary, bandages please or Mike might bleed to death."

  Mary had a flashlight out and was examining Peter's head. Peter was not responsive, his pupils were pinpoints. Dora watched the woman, who paused for a moment and shook off her hysteria, then very carefully and clearly said, "Well this is not too bad. Peter you will live through this. You are going to be okay." The boy seemed to take that as a cue to pass out. Mary nodded and tossed Leon a few packs of gauze and some bandages to hold it in place.

  Leon and the younger boy from the first gate wound Mike's leg up, the blood soaked through it, so they kept adding gauze and wrapping to apply more pressure. Mary was taking similar action with Peter's head, glancing at Leon's work she snapped, "Harder, Leon, you have to bind it tighter!"

  Leon nodded and pulled with much more force, the dripping blood slowed to a trickle. In a moment they were done and he said, "We got to get inside the gates, we didn't bring enough ammo for a long fight."

  Two of the teens stopped firing into the zombies and helped bring Peter and Mike inside the perimeter. The rest of them then started to make a fighting withdrawal into Doraville. Alex stopped to help Dora up.

  "You wounded?" he asked gazing at her wet arm and her legs.

  Dora looked down and discovered her pants were covered in blood. "No, I don't think so." The blood was from where Dora had dragged Peter to safety after Leroy shot him. Following the trail with her eyes Dora noticed a black rectangle lying on the ground, close to where Peter had been.

  "What is that?" she asked pointing.

  Alex bent down and picked it up. It was a digital video camera, covered in electrical tape to make it black. On the back a flap had been fashioned into a crude hinge that covered a small square video screen. "Digital video camera." Alex said, handing it to Dora, "Yours?"

  "No. Did Peter have one?"

  "No."

  "But, he had this one."

  "It looks like it."

  "Dora, Alex!" Paige called, "Talk once the gate is closed behind you!"

  Moving behind the fence Dora watched wistfully as Mike and Peter were hauled away, more people had shown up at the North gate, the word had gone out that there was trouble. Dora did not feel up to explaining what was going on, especially not why Leroy and Susan lay dead in front of the gate.

  "Leon, get a couple guys and get these two out of hear." to the rest of the gathering crowd Dora said, "Could be for nothing, but zombies got over the trench, and it looks like they are going to press to the gate, so everybody needs to get your ammo, find a rooftop or take a position along the wall, got it? Steve here yet? Steve?!"

  "Naw he was pulling on clothing, should be here in a minute." a voice called out of the crowd.

  "Okay then you will have to suffer with me and Leon coordinating things until he arrives, got it? I want two teams of you juniors to haul ammo and information to and from the inner gate, two teams of two, the rest of the juniors need to get back inside the inner gate and make sure there is ammo there for the two teams to keep bringing us." Dora pointed out two kids in the crowd who she thought were 'junior' helpers, a term Steve had come up with. There was no rank per se, in the way things were done, but people were classified according to ability, the juniors were kids from eleven to thirteen. No one wanted the juniors on the front lines if they could help it, but they could haul ammo and information back and forth to the coordinators of the fight. The walkie-talkies were good for communicating, but when you had fifty people trying to talk at once they could get congested really fast, using the juniors helped with the problems of getting data where it needed to be, when it needed to be there.

  The town didn't have a name for kids under eleven. So far there were none; the cutoff for those wily enough to survive on their own seemed to be about eleven. Dora often wondered what this was going to mean for the future, if there was one, there would be at least eleven years between the generations. Shaking her head she cleared her thoughts and got back to the task on hand of running the battle. It was a battle, they realized all too soon.

  Two super zombies came over the fence to the east of the gate, they led a group of slinkers and a whole mob of slow zombies into the second ring of defenses and the town had to fall back to the inner fence. By sunrise Dora was scrolling down an excel spreadsheet on her laptop, tallying the dead and wounded. Fourteen people dead, including one of the pairs of juniors she had selected for running ammo. They had gotten caught near the fence when the supers came over and just didn't run fast enough to get away. And this number didn't include the missing scout patrol or the two presumed dead at the trench. Or Leroy and Susan.

  Dora scrolled down the list and marked the patrol, the trench guards, Leroy and Susan as dead too, bringing the final count to twenty two. Twenty two people, twelve of them over twenty years old. Ten had been between fourteen and nineteen and two had been juniors. The ratio of adults to kids had just taken a turn for the worse.

  Peter and Mike were going to live. That was positive news, the only positive news. Peter's wound was superficial, the bullet had creased the top of his skull splitting the skin from two inches passed his front hair line to almost the back of his skull. It was an ugly wound. If it had been Dora who had been shot the bullet would have hit her in the head or neck. Mike was in worse shape. Steve had been trying to get a hold of the guard all morning.

  The town did not have a long range radio, the farthest their walkie-talkies could go was only about four miles and the border was probably twenty miles away. They best Steve could hope for would be to get a hold of a vehicle on patrol that wandered into range. Mary didn't think she could save Mike's leg and wanted to ship him off to Iowa for treatment. A compound fracture was bad news even when society had hospitals and x-rays. Mary's prognosis for saving Mike's leg were poor, she gave it about a fifty fifty chance and unless they got him to better care he would never regain full use of his limb again. Mary was a little out of her depth treating injuries like Mike's. Her specialty was actually infectious diseases, which didn't do the town a helluva lot of good, but a doctor is a doctor and all of them had to go to medical school and learn the basics before specializing. The last few weeks had given her a lot of experience treating a variety of wounds. It was almost with amazement that Dora realized that this was the first time since Marge that a gunshot had to be treated.

  The town did have an incredibly good stock of antibiotics and medicines, a few trips to some of the pharmacies had gotten Mary everything she thought they would need for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately antibiotics could not put a leg back t
ogether. Even as Dora pondered what to do with so many less adults Mary was performing 'surgery' in the clinic downstairs trying to save what she could of Mike's leg.

  Paige had seen Dora to the master bedroom and told her to go to sleep, and then disappeared into her own room. Dora assumed the woman was sleeping, these days it was hard to tell, Paige didn't snore any more. She had lost a lot of weight over the past six weeks and when the pounds came off the snoring stopped.

  "Dora?"

  Mary's soft voice startled her from her thoughts.

  "Yeah? How is Mike doing?"

  "Maybe it won't be as bad as I originally thought. I have him stitched up now and drugged senseless. Why are you still up?"

  "Just updating the town roster." Dora said gesturing to the computer screen. She pushed her chair back and stood up, stretching her back, immediately she felt nauseas, she rushed to the bathroom and made it to the toilet just in time.

  Mary followed her in to the bathroom, a concerned look on her face. Dora finished up and smiled weakly as the other woman handed her a towel.

  "You hate it when that happens don't you?" Mary asked.

  "When what happens? I puke? Yeah I sure hate that. I mean who likes puking? All those diseased kids getting me sick every go-gosh-darned week."

  "You're pregnant." Mary stated flatly.

  "What! Bite your tongue woman! It is just a bug going around…"

  "Dora." Mary said raising her hand up in a stop gesture, "No one get else gets the flu every week, a flu that lasts four or five or six days. When is the last day you didn't throw up? When was your last period?"

  "I don't…oh shit…oh shit…oh shit!" Dora stammered.

  "C'mon downstairs. I got a bunch of home pregnancy tests when we raided the pharmacy two weeks ago."

  "Oh shit…oh fucking shit. I told him! I told that douche bag…"

  "Dora. Stop. I am too tired right now to deal with anger, with denial, with your usual bullshit. After we do the test, three, four times, I don't care how many it takes to convince you, after we do the tests, we get some sleep. After that we can go back to the usual games you play. For now, let's just get this done."

  Meekly Dora wiped off her mouth again and followed Mary downstairs. They only needed one test, but Dora insisted on two.

  Chapter 30

  Dora was crying in the dark alone. Large, silent tears came out of her eyes as her head lay back on her pillow. Mary had closed her door to the bedroom a few minutes before leaving her alone. Paige barged in ten minutes later, tired and dirty from the fight the night before. The younger woman rushed over and gave Dora a big hug.

  "What the fuck is this? What about doctor patient confidentiality?" Dora had asked Mary who was lurking by the door.

  "I am not your doctor. I was not acting as your doctor as we played out a hunch I had about your condition and further more you can feel free to sue me if you want. I knew you wouldn't tell her. I knew you wouldn't tell anyone until the little bun fell out of your oven. And I know that is the wrong tactic to take. For you, for me, for everyone. You are resting today, all day. Maybe you go to the council meeting if you go to sleep right now. We can't risk it. You know that."

  Now an hour later all Dora could think about was the baby. A baby. Her child, a last gift from Roger. Her first impulse at finding out she was pregnant had been to ask Mary for the morning after pill. This was what had gotten Dora out of bed so long ago the morning that she met Paige and Mike. The thought of filling her prescription had never even crossed her mind, there was simply too much going on.

  Dora should have restrained herself from asking for the morning after pill, she knew Mary was a strict Catholic and there was absolutely no way the woman had taken any of that sort of medication from the pharmacy. To her complete surprise Mary had gone over to a cabinet, pulled something out and then returned to hand Dora a packet of pills.

  "Right here is how you can end this. This is Mifeprex, 'RU-486' or better known as the morning after pill, whatever you want to call it. You can end a pregnancy up to nine weeks with it and you are probably about seven weeks along."

  "What? You? I thought…"

  "You thought right. I told you, no bullshit until after we sleep. I am not condoning you taking this pill, I knew you would ask about it if the test came back positive. I am not having this baby. You can end it right now, right here and we will never discuss it again."

  "Why?"

  "Why did I pick this up? First, there are actually times when saving the life of a patient requires the sacrifice of the child, if the patient dies the child dies too. I am too pragmatic to kill both, especially now. I have never, ever written a prescription for this. Or were you asking why am I offering it to you? Dora I have never given this to any of my patients. I am not an obstetrician, so it really never came up. This is the first time I even have to contemplate going against my beliefs, I knew it could happen someday and this mess with the zombies made me realize it probably would happen. People have sex, people probably do not want to have babies right now. The decision was easier than I thought it would be. As to why I am giving it to you, well I am not prescribing it. You have free will as God intended, you have to make the 'choice' to murder your baby. If you do you will go to hell, I do not doubt that for a moment. You have me pretty well convinced you are going to Hell anyway, if we are all not there already. I have put the ability to murder your own child in your hands, I will have to answer to a higher authority for that. I can only hope that I will be forgiven for this crime against God."

  "I thought this was a sin, like the biggest in some way? A mortal sin?"

  "Is it a mortal sin to make a hand gun? Even knowing hand guns are made to kill people? Or is it the fault of the person who buys the gun and kills someone? Funny how religion works, isn't it? I put the gun in your hands, I created the situation for you to make the moral choice, not me. I feel bad about my part in this. I could have lied and said I didn't have the drugs, a lesser sin. I don't know how it works Dora. If there is some sort of naughty and nice list, like Santa is supposed to keep, only my immortal soul. I do the best I can and right now I am running on three hours of sleep, my only son is unconscious, my own former lover is living in sin with me and I make medical decisions every day based on the group's needs rather than the individual I am treating. I am in no position to judge you. This decision is also important to the group and I, alone, cannot make it. How many babies have we rescued? You know as well as I do that the child will give people hope as well as being a drain on our resources. I think the boost to morale will outweigh the costs. What do you think?"

  A look of wonder crossed over Dora's face, "You and Alex are…"

  "Stop it. This is not the time for that." Mary held up her hands in front of her, gesturing for Dora to stop talking, "Just make up your mind, don't get sidetracked on things that are not relevant to your decision."

  Dora handed the medicine back to Mary, who put it into the cabinet and locked it back up without a word. There was a slight smile of victory on Mary's face as she guided Dora up to her to bed. After telling Paige not to let anyone disturb Dora for the day, the two women did the unthinkable; they took all of the walkie-talkies off of Roger's dresser and left. Dora had started crying again the moment they left.

  Dora looked over as her door softly opened. Paige's head peeked into the room.

  "Oh God! I didn't mean to wake you!"

  "You didn't. I can't sleep. Too much going through my head."

  "You want to talk?"

  Dora gave her a look that could have curdled milk.

  "No, really it might help." Paige let herself in, she had a purse in one hand.

  "You going somewhere?"

  "This? No, it is just the walkies. It is easier to carry them around in the purse than it is to try and juggle them in my arms everywhere I go."

  "So, do what I do. Dump them on a dresser and only answer them when you are around."

  Paige looked mortified at the very idea, "Dora, tha
t might not be the best way to handle them…"

  "It is the best way, none of us can handle all the crap that goes on around here, except by getting away from it. And really, where can we go?"

  Paige shrugged her shoulders, not quite agreeing with Dora, but not disagreeing either. "You could delegate more of it to other people."

  "To some juniors? You know, after last night more than half the town is under thirteen years old?"

  "Fuck."

  "Yeah, 'fuck' is right. What are we going to do Paige? What are we going to do?"

  "We got to get out of this place. We have to head to Iowa. If we don't have the man power to stay on here, then we have to leave."

  "I don't want to agree with you. I really don't, but I can't see how we can make it here anymore. We can't hold on with children. We have thirty people over twenty years old left in town. We have seventy kids thirteen and under and we have thirty eight, well, older kids really, between fourteen and nineteen."

  "I didn't realize it was so bad. I mean, I knew there were a lot of kids running around, but that many?"

  "Yeah, I just ran the numbers before I found out I'm expecting. Last night was bad for us. Not just Susan and Leroy trying to kill me, or losing Jeff and Sarah and Sally, but all those others who were killed when they came over the fence. Damn the wonder twins! I know they set that attack up!"

  "No one saw them last night. Just those other two supers, the woman that looked like Clinton and the old dude. And we got Hilary. Sure the old man was driven off, but one super for ten humans is about how it works out for us, actually that is a better than normal ratio, isn't it? I remember when we first ran into them when the horde came down from Denver, I thought we were all dead."

  "Me too. I was so afraid that night, more than any other time since this shit started."

  "Even at the restaurant? I mean that was pretty bad, we didn't even have guns then."

  "Somehow I think of that day as the time before I really knew what to expect. It is like the days of my youth or something, an enlightened time before we really lost our innocence. No, I was more frightened when I saw that super tear Vic Slater's head off and throw it into Nancy Wald. I am pretty sure if I had checked I would have found piss running down my legs at that moment."