Rhonda nodded her approval and suddenly lightheadedness and a wave of sickness hit her. She focused on the road and then on the gauges. The gas tank dipped to a quarter full, and if she didn’t fuel this shitbox soon, they’d be forced to hoof it. She’d never make it anywhere on foot.
Rhonda looked ahead and her vision blurred on a sign for a Kingsland, Georgia exit. Another unclear sign appeared with gas station logos. What was Tyler saying? She couldn’t seem to hear very well. What was happening? Ty’s voice, along with sounds of rock music and wind, all faded away.
Her eyelids fluttered as she merged onto the Kingsland exit. They fluttered once again and closed for good.
Chapter Twenty-One
A screech of metal on metal. Hard and painful jolts kicked her eyes open.
“Look out! Rhonda!”
Tyler yelled, his voice cracking. Her eyes widened. Christ! How’d she lose control of the car? It careened and jumped a median, taking out every sign in its way.
Rhonda pushed both her feet into the brake pedal. Tires squealed on pavement and everyone flew forward against their seatbelts. She’d bitten hard into her bottom lip and tasted blood. Breath locked in her lungs as the Humvee stopped only inches away from hitting a 16-foot livestock trailer beneath an overpass.
“What happened?” Rhonda held the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. Her heart in her throat.
“You like, totally conked out.” Tyler’s voice rose, full of frightened excitement. “You were laughing one minute and then your skin turned green and you shut your eyes. Lucky for us this heap stayed on the road all the way down the exit.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
Rhonda caught her breath and stared at the livestock trailer just ahead. In the open spaces between the slats, Rhonda saw heaps of bones, the remains of abandoned animals left inside when their owners fled or were killed.
“Are we there yet?” Ellen batted her sleepy eyes and yawned.
Rhonda laughed, hard and loud. She felt slap-happy and ridiculous all at once. She leaned her forehead against her white knuckles and shook with hysterical laughter.
Startled, Tyler and Ellen stared at her and then joined in. The kids laughed harder as Rhonda did.
“Why are we laughing?” Ellen looked at Rhonda and at her brother while she surrendered to giggles.
“I don’t know.” Rhonda lifted her head and snorted once. “It’s just one big silly day.”
Rhonda reversed and drove the exit road. Time to find one of those gas stations she’d glimpsed on the vendor sign. The pain in her leg sobered her. Nausea crept up and she began to sweat, dizzy.
Tyler and Ellen watched her and their laughter died.
Ellen blinked. “You need medicine.”
Tyler leaned close to Rhonda. “You’re turnin’ green and really white... like back and forth. Are you okay?”
Rhonda nodded. She swallowed and focused on the large blue and red logo of a Chevron Food Mart ahead. She wanted to get there more than anything. Maybe, she kidded herself, everything might be fine if she just got a breather.
Rhonda parked and scanned their surroundings. A large alligator crossed the road and disappeared on the other side. Were there rivers or marshlands around here? Maybe a swamp? They were near the Georgia/Florida state line after all. Other than the lone gator, she didn’t detect any movement in or around the Chevron lot area. Everything looked zombie-free, but Rhonda knew she couldn’t stock in first impressions. The undead could appear out of nowhere. She turned to the kids. “Okay, we really gotta get some gas. Potty break, too.”
Tyler and Ellen left the Humvee and ran around to her open door. Tyler eyed her anxiously. “Need help with the gas?”
Rhonda didn’t answer right away. She felt hotter than ever and ready to puke. She closed her eyes, swallowed, and mustered a smile. “That’d be great. Check the pumps while I get my cane.”
Tyler looked concerned. “You’re not doin’ good, are ya, Rhonda?”
“Just a little under the weather. Don’t worry ’bout it right now.” Dots floated in front of her eyes. She blinked several times and tried to clear her vision.
“Maybe they got medicine in the store.” Ellen pointed to the Chevron Food Mart beyond the pumps.
“Maybe. Let’s check it out.” Rhonda bent and nearly swooned as she pulled her M4 and magazines out from under the seat. She tucked mags into her belt and strapped the M4 over her chest. She reached in again and retrieved her cane. Moving with a shaky hobble she spoke to Tyler while he tested the pumps. “I’m taking Ellen with me. We’re gonna check this place for stuff.”
“Okay. I’ll find us some gas.” Tyler grinned. “I wanna get to Florida.”
“Me, too.” Florida, she figured, might as well exist in another solar system. She exhaled a long and joyless breath. “Me too.”
“Yeah, me too.” Ellen said and leaned into Rhonda’s hip.
Rhonda swayed and placed a shaky hand on Ellen’s blonde head. “Careful, Ty. Keep your eyes open.”
“Will do.” Tyler returned to the pumps.
Rhonda walked Ellen toward the Chevron Food Mart. The station stood quiet, imbued in red and gold from the sky. Every window was covered in grime, and the blackness beyond revealed nothing. Everything was a tomb.
Home to ghosts now. Her mind drummed up imaginary monsters of all kinds. Or more frightening things.
“Where do zombies come from?” Ellen chirped beside her.
Rhonda produced a weak laugh.
“Why’re you laughing?” Ellen stopped and looked at her.
“It’s funny a kid your age is asking about zombies rather than asking me where babies come from.”
“Oh, I already know all about that.”
“I see.” Rhonda wasn’t up to getting into a Sex-Ed talk with a fourth grader. “Well, about zombies. They’re the result of... “
Uh, ohhhhhhh...
Her world spun. Rhonda watched little Ellen blur and wash into the reddening sky and distorted Chevron station. Everything revolved faster and out-of-focus. She closed her eyes and hoped it would stop. She swayed on her legs, and closing her eyes helped nothing. Her head felt swollen with fever. She opened her eyes, stepped away from Ellen, and vomited violently onto pavement.
“Rhonda?”
Rhonda bent at her waist and retched. Her right hand clutched her cane and her left arm shot out with palm out to keep Ellen away. She heaved and spit out long strings of bitter saliva. “I’m okay. Jus’... gimme a minute.”
She gasped. Her stomach clenched and she tasted a mixture of bile and blood in her mouth. Sweat poured from her and she blinked at the puddle of watery puke on the parking lot in front of her. Her head cleared for a moment and she stood straight. She looked at Ellen’s worried face. She wished she could raise a smile to reassure the girl, but it was beyond her.
Ellen asked Rhonda something, but Rhonda didn’t hear. Her full attention was on the Chevron Food Mart’s front door. Horror filled Rhonda’s heart. Her voice cracked hoarsely from her raw throat. “Oh, God, not now.”
Rhonda’s peripheral vision caught Ellen’s movement; the young girl’s blonde hair twirled in slow motion as she whipped around to see what Rhonda was blubbering about. Ellen screamed and ran behind her while Rhonda dropped her cane and unslung her M4.
Five Cujos shambled out of the Chevron’s doorway a few yards away and made straight for them. Whatever small amount of adrenaline remained within her, Rhonda’s body tapped it and pushed it into her veins for a slight boost.
She’d never get used to the sight or smell of them. Undead terrors scorched with putrefaction. Yolk-colored eyeballs jittered as they found her. Rotten rags hung off their limbs and festered torsos. They hissed.
Rhonda aimed her gun burst at their rotting heads. Zombie skulls blew to pieces like rancid fruit while Rhonda swept the M4 from right to left in one smooth motion.
Every Cujo fell... then she followed their lead. Her head gyrated in a sea of sickness and h
er legs gave out. She landed on her knees and fell forward on her belly. Her descent stopped on the left side of her face, her M4 now pinned between concrete and her breasts.
Flat on pavement, Rhonda’s vision fluttered in and out of focus. She couldn’t pass out, not now.
Gotta get up. Gotta keep it together. For the kids.
Hard as she tried, Rhonda couldn’t summon any strength to rise. So this was it?
Rhonda panted. Fucking helpless. She burned from the inside out. Both kids yelled her name and ran to her. Through her fuzzy gaze, she stared straight ahead at the Chevron Food Mart’s open doorway. There, she caught movement, outside of daylight; fuzzy things writhing on the edge of darkness. Rats. Fucking rats, she realized... lots of them inside the gas station store. Each one packed full of Necro-Virus.
Long shadows were setting in. Rhonda watched curious rat noses poke out into cool October air. Did they catch her scent? Something large moved behind the rats. What in the hell was that? She observed a tall profile rising past the rats and doorway. It moved inside the building, outlined against the filthy windows of the station store’s far side. Whatever it was, she must’ve woken it from a squalid slumber, thanks to her explosive appearance. From inside the store came a series of loud crashes. All the vermin in the doorway scattered. She prayed they’d hide and stay put in whatever offal-stuffed recesses they dwelled in.
“C’mon, Rhonda! You gotta get up!” Ellen tugged at her arms.
“Please, get up. Somethin’s comin’.” Tyler sounded frantic.
Gotta stand up.
She knew she must get her ass off pavement and protect these kids from whatever was banging around inside this little pit-stop of nightmares. But she couldn’t do it. She only wanted to rest just for a moment. Just a short break to catch her breath.
Okay...
Again, Rhonda’s eyelids fluttered and she felt herself drifting away. A heavy and merciless sickness overpowered her. But before she succumbed, she smelled the thing. Then she saw it in all of its hideous glory. It emerged, glacially slow, from Chevron Mart darkness and entered into afternoon light.
No. Gotta make it... make it go away.
But Rhonda couldn’t do anything about it. Neither wishes nor wasted prayers would send this shape back to the hell from which it had surely come.
This decayed thing, like all of them, wasn’t supposed to be animated. But a new world turned, didn’t it? The improbable walked.
Rhonda panted and strained to move her head for a better look. Sharpened by terror, her vision took on a new clarity as she absorbed every morbid detail of this unmentionable. She stared at it from her snake’s-eye-view as it dragged itself on rotten legs.
Good God, how it smelled. An absolute carrion reek of a hundred combined road-kills emanated from every molecule of its moldy form. It lagged and inched along and pushed a primitive terror button deep in Rhonda’s brain. It should be interred 100 feet below ground where larva and bacteria and time could do their work. But here it stood before her, trapped in a horrifying state of suspended death and prolonged putrefaction.
The ultimate zombie, Rhonda thought. An über-Cujo if ever one wandered terra firma.
Those first five Cujos looked like healthy, young things with dark suntans next to this bipedal atrocity. Never had she seen such a horror. Across its unclothed body, she noticed exposed bones poking through deteriorated flesh.
To her disgust, Rhonda also saw internal organs in full view. Gray and shriveled lungs hung from the creature’s bare ribcage, jiggling in a distended ball near its lower abdomen. This putrid mass swung like an obscene pendulum, just barely held in place by a fragile and transparent wall of decrepit belly skin. This abominable paunch looked ready to rupture and spill its contents with every zombified step.
She gasped and gawked. Ferocious dread bit into her. She scanned its yellow and black-spotted flesh, the disintegrated tissue clinging to its skeleton like a maggot-laden sheet of linen. Where she saw countless divots throughout this fetid flesh, she imagined rabid station rats had taken their chances and bit away rotten morsels from every available inch of this super-Cujo.
Perhaps, she wondered in her hot and infected mind, this was why its genitals are gone. The rats...
Countless flies orbited and lit upon its head. Her soul released a silent scream. She thought her entire world would end here as she took in the thing’s contorting, abominable face as its cankered and blighted globules twitched in their moldered sockets and rotated to stare at her.
Surely, she imagined, this thing’s eyes were sightless. All these fuckers should be blind... but the walking corpse sure didn’t act blind. It reacted when Rhonda’s own gaze met its own. It released a shallow hiss at her before turning its hideous head and wasted spheroids toward new movement. It stared at both kids, who shouted and tugged at Rhonda’s feet.
Run! This word roared in Rhonda’s head, inaudible. She hoped the kids would get it and make for high ground.
Rhonda couldn’t keep her neck and head off pavement any longer. Exertion broke her. Her head dropped and she landed on her chin. She saw stars, but felt no pain. On her chin, she rolled her fever-drowsy eyes upward. To her terror, she found the monster once again peered at her. It reached with a rotten crypt-hand to seize her.
“Leave her alone!”
Rhonda watched in alarm as Ellen ran at the thing with Rhonda’s cane in her small hands. When she reached the Cujo, she swung and nailed the Chevron abomination in its bloated gut. The cane handle tore into thin flesh and disappeared into the rot within.
“You big nasty!” Ellen crowed as the cane pierced deep into the zombie and slipped from her hands.
“Ellen, get back here!” Tyler’s voice cried out from somewhere behind Rhonda.
Rhonda watched the two-legged fiend freeze just before its rotten claw touched her face. The terrible thing paused. Maybe it had gone into shock? Perhaps whatever foul jelly sloshed in its dome was calculating its next clumsy move. To Rhonda’s dismay, it shifted and rose to its full height, hissing and drooling like some rancorous reptile.
It peered down at the cane impaled in its swaying bag of guts. Rhonda watched its threadbare bottom jaw ratchet and flop open wider, as if with surprise. Reaching down with both hands, it pulled the cane from its bowels with a slow drag. Its lower abdomen opened into a wide gash and eviscerated the monster right where it stood.
Rhonda viewed everything from her prone position. All of the creature’s tainted innards, green with rot and slick with the marinade they’d soaked in for months, slopped out in coils and lumps and threatened to baptize Rhonda’s head.
Rhonda squeezed her eyes shut just as liberated internal organs landed with a vile splatter next to her face. Something nasty and wet peppered her left cheek. Between this repulsive scene and overwhelming stench, her stomach rolled again.
Rhonda felt herself slip into a fevered stupor. Above her, she heard king Cujo’s relentless hiss along with terrified cries of her foster children.
And then, gunshots.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rhonda awoke to a burning in her right leg. She opened her eyes and found herself on her back beside the parked Humvee. She sat up painfully. Tyler and Ellen crouched next to her.
“What the hell’s going on?” Rhonda croaked. She needed water. An unpleasant wetness spread on her right leg while Tyler knotted a dressing around her wound.
“We cleaned up your cut.” Tyler wiped his hands and stood. “I had all that stuff from the other place. Y’know, the alcohol and stuff? We dumped it all in your cut and bandaged it up. I guess when I tightened the cloth, it musta hurt, ’cause you woke up screaming.”
Rhonda looked at her right leg, impressed to find it cleaned and wrapped with a fresh tourniquet. A sudden jolt of panic hit her as she remembered. She put a hand to her left cheek and stared at both kids. “Where is it? That thing?”
“Tyler shot it.” Ellen stood and grinned. “And I helped kill it, too. It’s now j
ust a smelly pile of yuck over there.”
Rhonda looked at Tyler. “Where’d you get a gun and how the hell’d you know how to use it?”
Tyler shrugged. “We saw you fall asleep, or faint, or whatever. So when that thing lost its guts and went for Ellie, I just grabbed your pistol and started shootin’.”
Rhonda sat dumbfounded. “But... how’d you know how to?”
“My dad showed me how to shoot guns. Pistols, rifles, shotguns.”
“And you definitely killed it, Ty?”
“Yep. Blew its stupid head off. Blam!”
“Yeah, only after shooting its whole body like cray-cray.” Ellen scrunched her face.
Tyler looked away and half-smiled with red in his cheeks. He put his hands in his pants pockets and scuffed the ground. “I kinda freaked out with all the stuff goin’ on. I was shootin’ too fast. Y’know... it wasn’t like aiming at beer bottles and whatnot.”
“Hey.” Rhonda smiled at Tyler and pulled Ellen close to her. “You both did real good. And thankfully, none of us got hurt.”
“I helped kill it.” Ellen crossed her arms.
“I know, honey. I watched you nail that ugly fu... fudger with my cane.”
Tyler nodded at his sister. “You’re pretty tough, Ellie.”
“You both are.” Rhonda winked.
“Do you think I’ll get a merit badge for this?” Ellen looked hopeful.
Rhonda nodded and patted the sash across Ellen’s chest. “Absolutely! Lessee, the way I figure, you got badges comin’ for First Aid, Bravery, and definitely Cujo Killing.”
Ellen clutched her sash and squealed with delight.
“Cool.” Tyler smiled.
Rhonda felt woozy. She swallowed and her throat hurt worse than ever. She blamed this rawness on hot vomit she ralphed out earlier when they rolled into the Chevron station. Her leg hurt, too, and she knew the kids’ efforts to clean her up were for naught. Sickness and infection still ravaged her.
What irreversible damage did her leg and health suffer from lack of proper medical care and rest?
Rabid Heart Page 15