She eases on the throttle when the lights of the island have become specks in the distance.
We made it. I don’t know how, but we made it off that deathtrap of an island.
I’m still trying to figure out what the hell happened back there, how we’re still alive. There was no chance we were making it, she was bitten. I came to terms with the fact that we were going to die there. I think we’re both trying to wrap our heads around everything because neither of us has said a word and we’ve been cruising along for a solid three minutes.
Without saying anything, she stands up, and I get the impression I’m supposed to follow her lead. We wrap our arms around each other and stand here, hugging in the middle of the lake, the reflection of the moon dancing off the ripples in the water.
“You have no idea how badly I wasn’t ready to say goodbye,” she whispers in my ear. “I thought it was over. I’m not ready for it to be over yet. I can’t believe you were gonna let me eat you after I turned.”
“I couldn’t do this without you. I wouldn’t want to.”
“We do kinda kick ass, don’t we?” She shrugs out of our embrace with a giggle, cupping my face in her hands. “We just fought them off with one sword. And what you did, from under the dock, oh my god. I don’t know how you did it but you stuck that sword straight up his ass, I mean hole in one. You should’ve seen the way his eyes bugged out of his head. Who the hell were they? Were they raping girls on that island?”
“I think so, with the way they called it their island.”
“Why is it that the assholes are the ones who survive?” She shakes her head and plops down on the little seat by the motor. “People like that, and Buckley, that’s who’s gonna be left, isn’t it? The ones with no morals who are willing to do whatever they have to, and whatever they want to. We have to get on that helicopter Noah. We can’t fight them and the infected. It’s just gonna keep getting worse. We came too close back there, no matter how much ass we kicked, we barely made it. I’m still not totally convinced I did. Is there any way we can still get there in time?”
“If we can find a car to drive back, maybe. Leave first thing in the morning, like we planned. We can get the fuel truck out of the ditch with the Stryker. We’re still on schedule. The problem is, we’re down Blake and Shane, Doug, Neil and his brother. How are we gonna fight through a thousand of these things to get to the helicopter?”
“You, me, Norwood’s crazy ass. Noah, we fought them off with one freakin’ sword. Plus, Marty’s back on his feet. Caylee will hop if she has to, she already has. We’ll pick up a scooter along the way, a Power Wheel or something for her to zip around in. Maxwell, I mean, she’s holding her own out there. Besides, that cannon on top of the Stryker, we’ll blow up as many of these things as we can and fight the rest like we’ve been doing all along.”
“Alright then. Let’s get us a car.”
She flashes me a beaming smile and steers us toward the mainland. Now more than ever, I want that normal life with her. The life we would have had. The one that would have started tonight. At prom. The life she tried to start with me the night she was raped.
I still can’t believe my friends could have any involvement in something like that. Or that I’d be the one she’d turn to. But she was right, I would have been there for her. And all I want to do is take back the time that was stolen from us. To know that we’d be together right now, apocalypse or not, it makes me want it all that much more.
I don’t need to tell her to head for the streetlights, she already is. It’s almost scary how in synch we are. This is why I’ve trusted her since the beginning. Why we work so well together. Why I know we can make it through anything.
“Is that a dock, to the left, under that big tree?”
“Got it.” She changes course ever so slightly as we approach the huge house at the end of the street.
Bayport isn’t known for little homes or anything less than luxury living. You can’t find an ice cream cone on the pier for less than $10. Nothing but the bougiest here, they won’t even allow chain restaurants to move in. What kind of town doesn’t have a McDonalds or a Starbucks?
This is the kind of place you take a girl to if you’re trying to impress her. Neil has taken many a chick to the shops on the Bayport pier. I wonder if he ever strolled the boardwalk with Felecia. Would we have come here this summer? It seems like the kind of place she would frequent with her beauty pageant family.
Wind rustles the leaves, interrupting the silence of the night. She kills the motor before we reach the dock, I get the impression she’s done this before. I’ve paddled plenty of boats but I can’t say I’ve ever been in one with what appears to be a lawn mower engine strapped to the back. What? We were typically hunting, and motors aren’t exactly quiet. They’d yell at me for splashing the oars too loudly.
I can hear their groans, carried on the breeze. We’re not alone here. They only make noise when they’re moving or excited, otherwise, they just stand there quietly. Motionless, waiting for their moment to strike.
I grab the edge of the dock and pull us in while Felecia gets the rope ready. I’m hoping we won’t need it again, but if the shoreline is too congested with hungry hippos, we might have to head back out on the lake and devise a new plan. With any luck, they’ll all be hanging around the boat launch, drawn to the commotion we created. How long do these things hang around? Will they just stay there in a dormant state until something else catches their attention?
It’s a woman. That’s who we were hearing. She looks young. What in god’s name is she doing? Is she pacing? She’s bolting back and forth across the yard in erratic patterns.
The solar lights along the pathway cast a dim light over the manicured lawn. It looks like she’s only wearing one shoe, but it’s not slowing her down any. They got her neck. It must have been days ago, the blood is completely dried on.
Whatever she’s doing, it’s distracting her enough to not notice us creeping ashore. She dives face first onto the stone walkway, crushing one of the decorative lights beneath her.
Her hands dart to her face, I’m assuming because she face planted it onto the stepping stones. But they’ve never shown any signs of pain before. Is this what they do for fun, when they think no one’s watching?
A gust of wind sends our boat banging into the dock on the tiny waves. Shit, she heard it. She hops to a squatting position, hands still covering her mouth. Those gruesome golden eyes lock on us as she lets out a growl.
She’s not covering her mouth to stop it from bleeding. She’s eating. I can see the silhouette of the long tail protruding from between her fingers. A mouse? She wasn’t pacing back and forth erratically, she was hunting. She just chased down and ate a mouse.
CHAPTER 6
Well this is a new development. I think. I mean, I guess it’s entirely possible they’ve been eating mice since the beginning and we just didn’t happen to see it. To be fair, we’re typically trying to kill them or run from them, we haven’t exactly studied their behavior. Is this normal?
She takes another bite as if the furry rodent is just a hamburger in an extremely moldy bun. Her eyes don’t leave us as we inch our way closer. Her growls sound as if they’re coming from some other source, like there’s a demon hiding inside of her. She’s too tiny to make noises like that.
I’m pretty sure she’s strung out. Those look like track marks on her arms, not that I’m some kind of expert but if I had to guess, I’d say she was a drug addict before this all started. The scabs, the fact that she looks like she hasn’t eaten in a month.
That’s not a shoe on her foot. It’s an ankle bracelet, and not the sexy kind. She must be on house arrest. Probably drug related.
“Noah, have they been eating animals all along and we just haven’t noticed?”
“I don’t know, but she seems pretty into it. She should be coming after us by now. Maybe we can sneak past her before– shit, too late, she’s done!”
The skin and bone jun
kie jumps to her feet and races towards us before she’s even done swallowing. The mouse’s tail is still dangling from her mouth, slapping off her chin as she runs down the walkway, blood dribbling from between her teeth.
Wait a minute here, hold on, say she didn’t kill the mouse, say she just took a bite… would it become infected like a human? Are there zombie animals out there? Oh this is freakin’ lovely. Last thing we need are zombie cougars coming down the mountain passes to attack us on our way to Sonny Valley. This better be an isolated incident. Maybe she did it on a dare, one of the other zombies bet her she wouldn’t eat it.
We step out of the way at the last second, Felecia in one direction, me in the other. We don’t even need to communicate our plans anymore, it’s like we just know.
Our swords meet her throat from both sides, sending her head falling to our feet. Her body continues running down the walkway before crashing onto the dock and sliding over the edge. The tail is still hanging out of her severed head’s mouth.
“Look.” Felecia points up the dark lawn towards the streetlights. “Car in the driveway. I bet the keys are in the house.”
I wonder if this is where she lived. Is it the junkie on house arrest’s car we’re going to be stealing? She looked kind of young, more likely her parents’ car. She probably sold hers for drug money.
You know, when you really stop and think about it, this virus, this infection, it’s really no different than an addiction. They need blood or flesh, whatever it is they’re after, and they’ll resort to any means necessary in order to get it. Someone like her, she’s probably no different dead than she was alive. Haunted by cravings that can’t be satisfied.
I do a lap around the car first, last thing we want to do is waste time finding keys for a vehicle with a flat tire. Or one with the keys already inside.
A little light’s blinking on the dash, must be the alarm, which means the keys aren’t in it. House this size, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say they have multiple cars, so with any luck there’ll be a key rack the second we step inside. Unless this is where the mouse muncher lives, in which case her parents have probably hidden the key just so she wouldn’t be tempted to–
Crash!
What the fuck? We spin around before we’ve made it five steps from the sporty SUV and its blaring alarm.
Okay, he was not there a second ago! A middle aged man is stuck in the collapsed windshield, trying to wriggle himself free. Pretty sure I would have noticed that when I was checking the tires. Where the hell did he come from?
I look up just in time to see a woman emerge from a second story window. Without taking the time to so much as balance herself on the frame, she leaps. Her blood covered nightgown flutters in the breeze as she falls through the silent night, interrupted by the squeal of the car alarm.
She hits the hood and bounces, propelled at least ten feet into the air, landing a few feet away, knocking over a stone birdbath in the process. Son of a bitch, there’s no way this dented squawk-box is going to run. The hood is pushed in so deep you could turn it into a kiddie pool. And the alarm is deafening standing this close to it.
She’s on her feet in seconds, hobbling towards us the way zombies are supposed to move. I’m guessing she broke a hip on the botched landing, and by the looks of it, an arm as well. It’s okay, I like the slower ones, it gives me time to think. The rest of them run at you as fast as their legs will carry them, snarling and growling like wild animals.
The first free faller squirms his way out of the broken windshield, flailing about like he’s trying to climb out of a slippery bathtub. I can hear him grunt and groan, even over the sound of the blaring car alarm. Are these the parents of the drug addict, hoping to see their little girl get clean? Hoping to see her kick the addiction before it claimed her life?
A gust of wind whips through the trees that border the yard. Even over the incessant honking, I can hear the leaves and branches smacking off one another. And thunder? No, we can’t possibly be getting more rain. I swear, there’s a rumbling, like a jet flying overhead but there haven’t been any planes above us for days.
Unless, is help arriving? Are they sending in rescue crews? Something more substantial than armored buses and transport choppers? I don’t know how many times a jet would have to refuel to make it across the country but it’s got to be less than twelve. We’ll be in New York long before the last flights leave America.
Oh god. It’s not a jet. It’s not thunder. It’s them.
The iridescent glow of the porchlight illuminates the yard just far enough to see them, trampling over each other as they burst through the trees that separate the neighboring homes. They trip over decorative bushes and lawn ornaments, falling to the ground and getting crushed under the stampede coming up behind them. They’re coming around both sides of the house, drawn to the familiar sound of the car alarm.
Where are they coming from? Is there a pit to the depths of hell under the neighbor’s sandbox? Be sure not to dig too deep Little Jimmy.
Someone’s shooting nearby. Shotgun. The echo bounces off the water, I can hear it in between blasts of the car horn. The infects must have been surrounding someone’s house, knowing there were people inside. They would have been too distracted to even hear us sneaking around the neighbor’s house in search of the keys. We’d have made it out of here undetected had these idiots not thrown themselves out of the second story window and landed on the car like it was a damn trampoline. They never would have known we were here.
There’s too many to fight, this has to be the entire neighborhood. We do the only thing you can do in a situation like this, run.
I’m not going to lie, I kind of miss those New Balance dad shoes. I know, I know, I wasn’t old enough to wear them, but man were they comfortable to run in. These boots are lightweight, which is nice, but they’re not broken in. I can feel new blisters forming on my old blisters already, and smaller ones on top of those. I will say, the mesh sides are quite breezy, my feet feel pretty much dry already, and there were literally puddles in them back at the lake.
Our feet pound off the pavement, not as pleasant as running on the squishy lawn, but the streetlights paired with the even surface of the road allow us to run as fast as we possibly can.
Unfortunately, that means these guys can run faster as well. With no obstacles to get in their way, and no diminishing stamina to slow them down, the fastest among the pack are gaining on us.
I can hear their slobbering draw closer the further we get from the obnoxious alarm that will go until it can’t go anymore. That SUV was our ticket out of here. We should be cruising the streets in style right now, not huffing and puffing our way through suburbia on foot. I don’t know how much longer we can go. How many steps until exhaustion sets in and my legs stop moving?
Felecia’s wheezing like crazy, clutching her side, trying to keep up with me. She won’t be able to run much longer.
Where are we even going? I don’t know what to do. Normally we’d talk it over and come up with some brilliant plan that’ll fail in the end because let’s face it, they always do, but they’re pretty freakin’ promising when we come up with them.
Should we be trying to hide in a house? They’ll just burst through the front door, like they did back on the island. And that was only a handful of them, with this many, they’ll take down the entire structure, Big Bad Wolf style.
I know what we need, we need a god damn car, like we originally planned. But they’re closing in, we don’t have nearly enough time to stop and search for keys. Which royally sucks because half the garage doors are open. Do you know how many cars we’ve passed, just sitting there, taunting us?
Son of a bitch. There are more coming. They’re running down the street, heading straight towards us. It looks like maybe four or five. How the hell are we going to fight them off? We can’t even outrun the ones we already have on our tail.
“Noah, I can’t… I can’t breathe.”
Her short choppy brea
ths can’t sustain this kind of pace any longer, let alone fight off the ones we’re currently playing a deadly game of chicken with.
“Have to stop.”
The fact that she’s been able to run at all with an injury like that is nothing short of a miracle. Only, it’s not a miracle. It’s Felecia Harmon. And I’ve come to expect nothing less than the impossible out of her.
But we can only do the impossible for so long. Adrenaline and determination can’t get us out of this situation. Not this time. She’ll never make it, to wherever it is we’re running.
Leaving her behind is not an option. Which means, it looks like it’s time to stand and fight. Me and her against the world. But what else is new?
CHAPTER 7
We don’t have any choice but to take cover. We’re gonna have to hide in a house like whoever was shooting back there. Who knows how long they’ve been trapped. They might have been stuck in there since day one. We don’t have that kind of time to waste, we need to be on the helicopter before the sun sets tomorrow if we’re going to have any chance at making it off this god forsaken continent.
We’re out of options. If we can fortify the doors and windows, maybe it’ll be enough to keep them out. Just pile all the furniture against every potential entrance, find the car keys and wait until the herd thins enough to fight our way into the car.
Oh great, we have to be running towards the car with rails on the roof. This will be just lovely. I can see it already, speeding down the coast with zombies clinging to our bike rack.
Bike rack. Open garage. Hanging on the wall, it’s a mountain bike. I realize a car would be better but we don’t have time to search for the keys.
“Bike in the garage,” I manage to choke out with wind pouring down my throat.
Changing course, we make a beeline for the driveway. She doesn’t slow down but I can hear her wheezing, trying desperately to take a breath that her lungs won’t allow her to capture. How is she still going? This girl is the epitome of willpower, I swear, they do not come any tougher than this. She literally can’t inhale but she’s somehow finding a way to carry on.
Blood Type Infected (Book 4): Betrayal of Hope Page 4