Dawnland (Book 2): Hella Kills

by Karen Carr

  “Let me do that,” I said to Zeke.

  I took the alcohol from Zeke’s hands and proceeded to clean his wounds. The bite on his side was made by incisors, more of a pinch than a bite. The one on his tibia was deeper, the blood soaked into his jeans.

  “You want me to take my pants off?” Zeke said and then scoffed at my blush. He took out his knife and cut through his jeans below the knee, discarding the blood soaked portion.

  “I am only trying to help,” I mumbled and then began cleaning his wound.

  “Sorry,” Zeke said. I looked up to check his sincerity. He frowned. “No, really. I am.” He winced and pulled his leg away. “Watch it with that alcohol, it stings.”

  Zeke flashed a grin at me, which caught me off guard. The wound on his leg was deeper, but the flesh was still mostly intact. I taped it up and wrapped a bandage around it, grateful for the first aid kit Zora had found in the Hind.

  “Here,” Zora said, handing Zeke another olive shirt.

  He took it and tucked it in his back pocket. “No sense in getting this dirty just yet.” Zeke smiled. I was beginning to like his smile. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

  “Sounds like a done deal,” Huck said. He pulled the lever to the hatch of the helicopter and pushed it open with his shoulder. “Come on and help me, man.”

  Zeke joined his friend and they both shoved the door open. Sunlight streamed into the Hind as Huck and Zeke plunged outside. When they didn’t come back, I took a timid step forward and looked out.

  The helicopter had landed lengthwise in the ditch, and the hatch was wedged in the dirt, making it hard to get out. Once I had scrambled through the small space, Huck helped me out of the trench. After me came Zora, the Professor and then Stan. We were standing on the side of the road in front of the helicopter surrounded by dead bodies.

  At first, when I realized the power of my virus, it had given me a thrill to wipe out so many zeroes at once. I felt like it would always keep me safe as long as no one found out about it. But now, standing in amidst all the corpses, I just felt an overwhelming sorrow. These all had been people once. Their virus turned them into zeroes and my virus killed them. I was responsible for thousands of deaths. Maybe there was a cure for the virus, but the people lying at my feet would never know. It was too late for them, but it wouldn’t be too late for the others.

  “How far out are we Professor?” I asked.

  “From the village? About twenty five miles.” When he saw my reaction, the Professor put his arm around my shoulder. It would take a whole day to walk back to the village and the sun was already low on the horizon. I didn’t mind travelling at night, but the clouds in the sky meant there would be no stars to guide our way.

  “We have to find a car,” Zora said.

  We stood in a row looking up and down the 15/501. There weren’t any vehicles on the road, and if there had been we’d never be able to drive them over all the bodies. The helicopter had attracted hundreds of zeroes and they were now laying everywhere, in the streets, in the bushes, in the ditch, as far as we could see.

  “Next plan?” Huck asked.

  “Hey, you at the end,” Zeke said to Stan.

  “His name is Stan,” I offered.

  “Stan.” Zeke strolled over to where Stan stood. Stan, in turn, touched his throat, a sign of his discomfort, like he thought Zeke was going to do something to him. “You were with those guys who invaded the village.”

  “But they kidnapped me,” Stan interjected. “I had nothing to do with…”

  “Relax.” Zeke smacked Stan’s back. “That’s not what I meant. How many are there? If we’re going back to Haverlyn Village, we need to know how many, how big and how strong, like how many guns?”

  Stan looked thoughtful. I could tell he wanted to give us an accurate report. “Maybe twenty two came with us. Six of them died on the green. Four turned into zombies when that older woman bit them.” Stan stopped and regarded me with an open mouth. “Hella why didn’t they die with your virus?”

  Huck smirked and folded his arms across his chest. “That’s right, Hella. You bit the creep that was fighting with me and then he turned into a zombie, a zero in your words. But he didn’t die. Why?”

  “At this point, you know as much about my virus as I do.” I twisted a finger around my hair.

  “They’re immune to your immunity,” Zeke offered. “So that means we have twelve humans and four zoids that we have to watch out for, unless the remaining humans have been turned into zombies. Depending on who bit whom, they will either die with Hella’s presence or be immune to her virus.”

  “That sounds about right.” I lowered my eyes, not wanting to face anyone. I hated what I had become and this infection. I hated the whole world for doing this to everyone and making me special. Why me? I certainly didn’t deserve it. I just wanted to let it go, to fly away with the wind.

  This time it was Huck who put his arm around my shoulder and brought me back to earth. “We have to get away from the Hind before they spot it.”

  “And all the bodies around it,” the Professor added.

  There were dozens of dead bodies around us and more down the highway toward Sanford. From our vantage point, we saw the zombies coming toward us from a thousand feet away. We watched them drop as soon as they hit the invisible border where they contacted my virus and died.

  “I’m going to test something real quick,” Zeke said. Before anyone could stop him, he jogged toward the incoming zeroes. The pain in his leg obviously didn’t affect him much.

  Stan raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and focused on Zeke, making a chortling noise in his throat. Huck grabbed them from him, took a look through the lenses, and then handed them to me.

  Zeke stood on the inside of the zero barrier with his arms folded across his naked chest. He was testing his virus. If he had picked up the same kind of protection I had from his bite, then the zeroes should be dying farther out from where he stood.

  Huck took the binoculars from me. “Shouldn’t they be dying by now?”

  “I don’t know. Mine started out small. I was in an apartment for days before I ventured out. First, it only killed the ones right in front of me, and then a few minutes later it killed the rest.” I crossed my fingers and waited, stretching my neck to see what was happening, resisting the urge to snatch the binoculars from Huck.

  If Zeke were like me, and not just immune, there may be others. There had to be others. If there were, we might hold hands and march across the continent, wiping out this terrifying apocalypse all together.

  Huck lowered the binoculars. “He’s coming back.” He touched my chin. “You’re still unique.”

  I frowned at Huck’s attempt to cheer me up. He knew how much I wanted to find someone else like me. On the way back, Zeke kicked several corpses, sending guts and stuff spewing into the air. He pressed his hands to his temple and shouted out an expletive. I felt the same way and almost let a whole torrent of swear words out of my mouth, but Stan’s touch on my shoulder stopped me.

  “Saudah is immune,” Stan said.

  “What?” I asked, shifting my attention to Stan. “Saudah’s immune?” I asked, feeling my mouth getting moist. “Hurry up and tell me about it.”

  “Yes, she’s immune.” Stan flushed. “She was bitten when Mace Duce captured us.”

  “Who is Mace Duce?” Huck interrupted. “I thought Sergeant Enroy was in charge.”

  “Enroy is a cog in Mace’s machine. Mace runs the tri-state show. You never want to meet him. Ever.” I shivered at the way Stan said Mace Duce, spat the name out like it was poison and burned the roof of his mouth. I regarded Zeke, who was picking through corpses on the ground, pulling out their weapons.

  “Get back to Saudah,” I said.

  Stan clasped my hand. “At first Saudah and I thought they were rescuing us. In the days after the event, I’ll never forget that sickly smell, the helicopters were flying all over Chapel Hill. We watched them come in from Durham, circl
e around downtown, and then head back north. We thought it was safe up there, so we went north. We made it all the way to Durham, had to fight hundreds of zombies—Saudah’s a hell of a fighter, no offence Hella—you could learn a thing or two from her. She’s strong and...”

  “Get to the point, Stan. She’s immune?” Stan bristled at the tone of my voice. I made a gesture for him to continue with my eyes.

  “We were trapped near the Durham Bulls Athletic Park—big mistake going that way. The helicopters spotted us, but not before Saudah was bitten. One of those creatures took off her finger. This one.” Stan showed us his pinky.

  “She didn’t yell out in pain or anything. She just hid her hand in her pocket once the helicopter rescued us. But they found out by the blood seeping through her jacket. I begged them not to kill her and they laughed. They told us she was most likely immune like several others they had found. When we heard the word immune, when I realized Saudah wouldn’t change, my heart fell to the ground.”

  Stan grasped my shoulders. “Saudah is immune, Hella, but not like you. No one has your kind of immunity. No one can kill zombies with their virus, they just don’t change when they are bitten. If Mace Duce found out about you, I don’t know what he would do.”

  “We’re not going to let Mace Duce get near Hella,” Huck said, putting a protective arm around me and knocking Stan’s from my shoulder. Stan didn’t seem to mind, but Huck lifted his palm as-if to say sorry.

  “So, what about Saudah?” I asked. My friend Saudah, one of my three best friends, one I promised myself to rescue months ago. I had been to her house in downtown Chapel Hill and only found a Walkie-Talkie, the one that connected us to Enroy.

  Stan swallowed hard before he started to speak again. I wished I had some water to give him. “Before I left, they put her in a cell with one of those things, and that wasn’t the first time. They put her in two times before to see how many bites she would be able to take.” Stan paused, his voice catching in his throat.

  “The first time, it caught her in the ankle, barely. The second, the side of her hand, but she healed. Then you called on the Walkie-Talkie. They were mad because we didn’t give out your location. The third time, Hella, it was awful. The thing bit her thigh and didn’t let go. There was blood everywhere. I had to tell them where you lived. They took me to the village soon after. Hella, I don’t know if she’s dead or alive anymore.”

  “We’ll find out,” I told him, brushing away the moisture in my eyes. “After we find the monster truck and the others, living or dead, we’ll go on to Durham to find Saudah, I promise.”

  I slipped out of Huck’s protective embrace and hugged Stan. He smelled of heaviness, of fear and sorrow. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to cry, I would save those tears and release them when I hug Saudah, and then they would be tears of joy.

  Zeke had finished picking through the bodies and joined us wearing a pair of headphones around his neck and a cord leading to his pocket. Soft music, heavy metal or rock, played from the headphones. He dumped a shirt-full of pistols and knives and other sharp looking weapons at our feet and unslung several rifles from his shoulder, placing them on the pile as well.

  Zeke’s eyes sparkled with a mischievous charm as he looked at me. “These aren’t for you to catalogue, Hella.”

  “I’ve given up that hobby,” I said, not giving him any of the warmth he gave me.

  “Good for you,” Huck said, surprising me with his comment.

  Huck sounded sincere, which made me feel like a loon. I sneered at him. Was it really that much of a waste of time? I catalogued the intimate items in the pockets of the dead because I wanted to preserve their history, their life before the apocalypse. Maybe it was true, maybe I was stuck in the past. I hadn’t overcome the massive loss of life I had witnessed and keeping those items, viewing them, made me feel in touch with the old way of living.

  It was stupid. There would be no returning to the old way of living, and it was best forgotten. I was over it.

  Zora picked through the weapons and chose a bowie knife in a holster. It reminded me of the one Lily always carried. She strapped it on and tightened her fists. “Let’s go find my sister. We’re wasting time.”

  “It’ll take several days to get there if we are going to walk from this distance,” the Professor said. He was holding his head and looked very uncomfortable. “It’ll take us right through Pittsboro.”

  “And Hella will be leaving a trail of dead zombies in her wake,” Huck said.

  “They’ll be searching for us,” Stan said. “When they saw the circle of dead bodies around Haverlyn Village they became very interested in you guys.”

  “We’re going to have to jog from here,” Zeke said.

  “All the way back to the village?” Stan asked.

  “We can’t let Hella’s virus catch up to her, not for a while,” Zeke said.

  “Let’s get what we can out of the Hind,” the Professor said.

  I regarded all of the corpses. Just a few days ago, I would’ve picked their pockets and cataloged them back in the village and then burned their bodies. I no longer had the desire to do any of it. I no longer wanted to catalogue the dead, I no longer wanted to bury anyone, and I only wanted to save the living. If I was going to save humanity, I would do it by walking the earth, step by step, to kill all the zeroes.

  CHAPTER 3

  The hind rested in the roadside ditch looking like a banged up duck decoy. The rest of the world, with the exception of the dead bodies lying everywhere, was full of life. Birds flew in the sky, the bushes and trees were full of natural sounds, chirping and cooing and frog-like belching. Stan, Zora and I would search the hind and bring up anything we found while Huck and Zeke waited and watched for anything to happen with the Professor.

  I scrambled down the ditch and then climbed into the hind followed by Stan and Zora. We found a couple of helmets, a long scope for a gun, some surgical gloves, a doll’s head with a haircut, a canteen with water in it, a six pack of soda, a signal flare, a compass, a fishing pole, two army jackets, lipstick and a device that looked like a large blow gun and spikes to go with it. I decided to keep the blowgun for myself.

  Stan crawled into the damaged cockpit area and brought out a backpack full of books and paper among other things. “I saw this there when I was flying. It looks like maps and other important information.” A piece of paper dropped out of Stan’s pocket as he climbed out of the cockpit.

  I picked it up, he snatched it from me, and shoved it back in.

  “What was that, Stan?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, a red flush crawling up his grimy neck. “A note from Saudah. It’s private.”

  “Come on, let’s go,” Zora said. She held two full backpacks and had found some hair clips to pin back her once glamorous and now frizzy dark brown hair. I touched my own hair, my silky blond locks had morphed into dirt tinged strands with the texture of hay.

  “What’s in there?” I asked. A roll of toilet paper stuck out of the top of one.

  “Essentials,” Zora said as she maneuvered out of the hind, making sure to give me a look that said don’t ask me any more questions about it.

  We climbed out after her and walked over to the others putting our stash near the guns Zeke had collected. I handed out the sodas and opened the remaining one. It tasted cool, like it had been in a refrigerator before being in the hind. I wiped the can across my sweaty head before I took another sip.

  Zeke was wearing a new pair of jeans, no doubt borrowed from one of the less dirty dead. He had put on the shirt Zora gave him and it clung to his chest revealing his chiseled muscles. I blushed when my eyes travelled up to Zeke’s face and made contact with his. He must have noticed I was staring at his chest because he wrinkled his nose and shook his head.

  “Nice shirt,” I said, trying to disguise the fact that I was looking at his muscles.

  “Likewise,” Zeke said, nodding toward my own top before throwing his empty soda on the grou
nd.

  I looked down at my shirt and saw it had a rip in it revealing the left side of my pink lace bra, not a very practical apocalypse style. I blushed, wished I had put on a sports-bra like I normally wore and hoped that my matching lace underwear weren’t sticking out of my pants.

  The Professor rubbed his neck. “It’s getting late. We’ll have to find a place to sleep overnight. There are too many clouds in the sky for the stars to light our path. Snowball can last another night, I left her enough food.”

  “The Professor’s right,” Huck said. “We can’t be running around the woods in the dark. We’ll get your cat fed tomorrow."

  Stan unfolded a map that he had taken from the hind. “Old School,” he said. We all huddled around Stan to examine it.

  “There,” Zeke pointed to the map. “Take that road, there. Walker Bright Road. It runs parallel to the main road, but it’s far enough away from the main road, 1000 feet right Hella? The flesh dolls on the main road won’t be affected by Hella’s virus. We’ll find a place to stay somewhere on Walker Bright.”

  “There are bound to be more zeroes out there, not just on the road.” I regarded the dead bodies around us. “We don’t want my virus to leave a path of corpses with their heads blown off. I’m going to have to jog fast enough for my virus to weaken.”

  “I just don’t think I can run that far,” the Professor said. Zora put her arm around him. “I’m sorry Hella.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I’m the only one that needs to run. It’s my virus that needs to break.”

  “She’s right,” Huck said. “Hella’s a great runner. I watched her every morning run around the green.” His eyes flitted over my legs.

  “Then we’re going to have to split up,” Zeke said.

  “I’m going with Hella,” Zora said.

  “So am I,” Huck said.

  “Now wait a sec,” Zeke said.

  “You can’t run with that leg,” Huck pointed out. “And you need to protect these two.” Huck motioned to Stan and the Professor.