One Nation Under Zombies (Book 2): FrostBITTEN

by Raymond Lee

The woman did not acknowledge his question as she slowly walked forward, blood soaking into the white satin of her nightgown. Her lips pulled back in a snarl as she made progress in his direction.

  “Shit,” Richards croaked before his survival instincts kicked in. He quickly assessed his surroundings. The living room offered no help unless he wanted to beat her with a lamp. The open kitchen area offered him a better selection of weapons in the form of a knife block.

  He ran to the knife block and yanked out a long, sharp blade.

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said, turning toward the wall the deadly blonde was about to round any second. “I’ve never abused a woman in my life and I don’t want to start now. Back down and we’ll just let the cops handle this.”

  Deena’s roommate and killer rounded the corner and jerkily approached him, her lips still pulled back like a rabid dog.

  “Stop!” Richards braced himself. His gut knew what was happening even as his mind struggled to wrap around it. Blood coated the woman’s chin, evidence of what she’d just done. She’d killed a person with her teeth and intended to do the same to him.

  Four steps away from him, the woman lunged.

  Richards dodged her attack, spinning quickly to see she’d done the same. He was the woman’s prey and she intended to eat. She lunged again, but he was ready. Reflexes fully engaged, he punched her in the face. Bone crunched on impact but the woman merely staggered back a few steps before coming at him again, her now twisted nose not a concern.

  “Are you serious?” he asked in disbelief. Any other woman would have been out cold after that punch. Hell, that punch would have dropped a man twice her size.

  She growled, arms stretched out to grab hold of him. Her mouth opened wide in anticipation of the enormous bite she intended to take out of his flesh. She surged forward as Richards swung the blade, its sharp edge slicing across her throat. The life-ending move did nothing to stop her attack. Richards let out a cry of fear he’d never admit to as the woman’s claw-like hands gripped his biceps and her mouth closed in on his throat.

  “Not today, bitch!”

  He kicked out as he pulled his upper body back, his foot hitting her in the abdomen and propelling her backward. Her fingernails raked down his arms as she fell back. The moment her body hit the floor he stomped on her head repeatedly, crushing her skull. Finally, she stilled.

  “Gross,’ he muttered as he pulled back his foot to inspect the damage. His LeBrons were destroyed, completely covered in viscera. “Two hundred bucks, and only wore them five times,” he growled before stomping the woman’s head again, completely smashing her face in.

  A moan behind him caught his attention, warning him of danger. He turned to see Valeriya’s date from the night before creeping toward him, his head angled sharply to the right since a large chunk of meat had been taken from his neck. Several chunks had also been taken from his torso and various innards dripped down the front of him. Unfortunately, the dripping innards did nothing to cover the man’s nudity.

  “Oh gross, like this wasn’t bad enough,” Richards complained as the older man and his withered manhood approached. “At least there’s not a chunk out of that. I don’t think I’d ever recover from that sight. Hell, I might not recover from this one.”

  Almost as if he knew he was being taunted, and maybe he did for all Richards knew, the man surged forward, arms reaching out to grab hold of him. Knowing what to do now, Richards sidestepped the man’s attack, carefully avoiding coming into contact with the bodily fluids coating the man and more importantly, his junk, as he swung out with the knife, driving the blade through the man’s temple.

  As the man’s mangled body hit the tiled floor, the brutal reality of the moment hit Richards. He’d just killed two people and had witnessed a third die. Despite his years spent in the army, he’d never actually seen battle. He’d never been given the opportunity to fight against the enemy and experience what it was like to take a life.

  His stomach roiled with acid as his mind replayed what had just happened. He barely reached the bathroom before the burning contents of his stomach erupted in a fiery stream of vomit. The more he tried to come to terms with what had just happened, the more he tried to think of a rational explanation, the more bile his stomach ejected.

  A vibration against his thigh pulled his head away from the toilet as he reached into the side pocket of his jeans and retrieved his cell phone. He was being ordered back to base, his weekend pass terminated.

  “They know what I did?” Paranoia washed over him but quickly evaporated. He didn’t just get into a bar fight and kill two people. He’d killed two people dead set on eating him, two people who wouldn’t die until he stabbed them in the brain or smashed their skull in. Something was very wrong with these people.

  And the military knew it.

  Richards pulled himself to his feet and rinsed his mouth out in the sink. If the military knew what was wrong with these people, they weren’t the only cannibalistic hard-to-kill freaks to be found. He had a duty to the army, but he also had a duty to his son and to the wife who currently wanted him dead as long as she was his mother, in charge of his care. Mind made up, he took a deep breath and turned to leave the bathroom.

  Deena stood in his way.

  “Are you fucking serious? You just died!”

  She snarled, lurching toward him, the massive hole in her neck and blood loss evident by her soaked nightclothes doing nothing to stop her apparent hunger for his flesh and blood.

  Richards cursed, realizing he’d left the knife in the man’s head and there was no way he’d get past the killer woman in the hallway to reach it before she took a chunk out of him. No weapon at his disposal, he slammed the bathroom door closed and quickly turned the lock, throwing up a barrier between him and the rabid woman on the other side.

  She slammed against the door, her nails scraping down the wood creating a sound worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.

  Richards did a quick but thorough search of the bathroom and was disappointed to find the best options he had for weapons were a plunger and his keys which thankfully he’d left in his pocket before hitting the sheets with Deena the night before. Neither option would get him past the woman in the hallway and he didn’t relish the idea of stomping her skull in. It was bad enough doing it to the woman he didn’t know.

  He quickly removed the rubber part of the plunger, deciding the stick part could possibly be useful, and opened the bathroom window. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d escaped through a bathroom window after a one-night stand. He prayed he’d survive whatever awaited outside that window to tell the tale.

  Richards ignored the speed limit as he made his way to the small house he’d shared with his wife and child. He normally blared CD’s or the classic rock station as he drove, but no music played as the DJ’s updated their listeners on what was happening. Panicked listeners regularly called in to update as well, telling tales of people with smoky white eyes hunting others down in the street, ripping them apart with their teeth.

  The streets Richards navigated down were barren, no kids out playing, and no people jogging. He imagined they were all inside, glued to their television sets or radios. As he neared the house, the sirens went off. Meant to warn of tornadoes or other severe weather, they now warned of a storm much more dangerous than anything nature could create. They warned of a shit storm no one could have ever dreamed of.

  Richards pulled to a stop outside the little yellow house he’d brought his son home to three months ago, ice creeping across his heart as he noticed the open front door. Ahead of him, a man staggered in the middle of the street, his movements jerky as he walked seemingly with no direction. A military jeep appeared and the gunshot from within dropped the man.

  Richards retrieved his gun from the glovebox and hurried inside the house. Furniture had been overturned and items knocked off the coffee table. The large family photo taken after the birth of Scotty now hung lopsided from the wall, the glass frame
broken. The aquarium had also been smashed, its water soaked into the carpet along with puddles of blood.

  Hot, angry tears filled his eyes as he followed the trail of blood winding its way into the hallway, both his hands wrapped around the gun he held pointing in front of him. He rounded the corner, into the hallway and saw Scotty’s nursery door open at the end of the hall. Jen was on her knees, hunched over before the crib, her back to him.

  He started to call out, but his gut warned him not to. Trepidation filled his body as he crept forward, the hands gripping his gun turning white at the knuckles. What was she doing? Her shoulders moved up and down. Was she crying? Had whatever had gotten into the house gotten to Scotty?

  He swallowed back the mound of bile starting to rise in his throat as he stood outside the room. His arms lowered to his side as he registered the slurping, crunching sounds coming from Jen. Nightmarish images flooded his brain, but he refused to believe them. He scanned the room in search of his son. The scan came back empty, no sign of the baby other than the little splatters of blood in the crib.

  “Jen?” he finally croaked, his voice coming out broken.

  She turned, focusing milky white eyes on him as she swallowed what she’d been eating. Blood dripped from her chin, blood coming from the tiny carcass in her hands, a tiny carcass still wearing the blue booties his grandmother had knitted.

  Rage flooded him as he raised the gun, firing multiple shots in quick succession as he roared. He emptied the entire clip into Jen’s head, completely obliterating what used to be his wife’s face. He felt no remorse for the action, only rage and betrayal. She’d eaten his son, their son. She was Scotty’s mother and she’d eaten him!

  He continued squeezing the trigger long after the gun no longer held bullets, the sound of its empty clicks lost under the strength of his battle cry. It couldn’t have been but a few minutes before the soldiers in the jeep who’d been canvasing the area rushed in and pulled him away from the gruesome scene, but it felt like hours, hours of agony as he imagined what had happened to his young son.

  “Richards!”

  Richards woke with a start, a cold chill clinging to his sweat-covered body. “Was I screaming again?”

  “Yeah, bro. You all right?” Garcia asked, passing him a bottle of water.

  He took a swig, looking around the small room as he did. The space next to him on the sweat-soaked cot was empty. “Where’s the girl?”

  “I told her to get back to her quarters. She came to us, said to check on you. Said you were thrashing around, moaning. She thought you might be turning. By the time I got here you were screaming. Lucky she left instead of putting a bullet in your head.”

  Richards nodded. The world had made a lot of people trigger-happy since the outbreak. Show even the slightest sign you might be turning into a zombie and you’d find a bullet in your head before you could blink. He’d seen an older woman shoot a toddler in the face after she’d bitten her older brother. The child wasn’t infected, she was just a normal child doing what toddlers sometimes did. The kid’s mother, one of the actresses who’d traveled from California to Fort Huachuca while the base still stood, killed the woman immediately after. He’d done nothing to prevent it, understanding where she was coming from.

  Nightmares of what Jen did to Scotty still haunted him along with the guilt of knowing it wouldn’t have happened had he been there to protect them from the infected person who’d attacked her and left her to turn, left her to eat her own baby. The research that had been done since the outbreak suggested Jen wouldn’t have known what she was doing, but he still couldn’t forgive her.

  “You good?” Garcia asked. “I need to get back on watch.”

  “Yeah, man.” Richards reached down for his pants. “I’ll be out in a minute to join you. I’ve slept enough.”

  “Cool, bro. See you in a few.”

  He pulled his pants on and washed up, using the soap and water in the bucket in his small room, before pulling on his army issue T-shirt. This was the second place they’d established a makeshift fort since their original military base had went down. It wasn’t much, but it was shelter, and the Russian bastards who’d blown up their base didn’t know about it.

  A lot of soldiers had died that day, along with several people seeking sanctuary there, killed by spies within. All of the bases had been hit, but Nebraska had taken the worst punch. No one had survived. A new set of survivor bases had been established by what remained of the military and his men were one of many crews faced with the task of finding survivors and getting them to the safety of those bases. They made temporary shelters along the way, stayed long enough to find people, and then their caravan continued north.

  They’d lost some along the way. Not everyone in their group was survivor material and tended to hinder their progress, but they couldn’t leave those people behind. Those were the people they’d joined the military to protect in the first place. Even the spoiled celebrities who’d came to Fort Huachuca in the beginning, flooding in from L.A. Many of them expected special treatment, luxury in the zombie apocalypse. Their sense of reality already distorted before the outbreak, they continued expecting to be catered to after the country became a warzone between the living and the dead. Many of them were the first ones to die. Grammy and Oscar trophies didn’t mean shit when zombies were on your ass.

  Richards had watched the lead guitarist of one of his favorite bands get eaten. There was a time he would have mourned the loss, having worshipped the band, but in the end the guy was just a guy. Actually, he’d been an alcoholic shithead who’d trampled a woman and two children while trying to avoid getting bitten. You might outrun a zombie, but karma was a fast bitch. He knew. He’d spend the rest of his life trying to stay one step ahead of the bitch himself. She’d already taken his wife and child though. He honestly had nothing else to lose except his life. Some days he thought that might not be a bad thing, but then he’d see a child in need of help. Saving them was the only thing saving him.

  He met up with Garcia at the fence surrounding the shipping yard. As far as temporary campsites went, it was pretty good. They’d emptied the shipping containers, taking useful supplies, and turning them into shelters complete with cots or sleeping bags. A nearby stream provided fresh water, and the whole area was protected by the fence.

  “This isn’t a bad camp,” Garcia said around the cigarette in his mouth, seeming to read his mind. “Almost hate to leave it tomorrow.”

  “We’ve spent enough time here,” Richards advised. “We’ve found all the people we’re going to safely find. There are many more out there who need us to find them.”

  “True dat,” Garcia said before blowing out a series of smoke rings. They walked the perimeter in silence for another ten minutes before Garcia spoke again. “You dream of your wife and kid, don’t you?”

  “We all dream about the ones we lost, the ones we failed to protect. It comes with the job.”

  “Yeah, the recruiters never told us that part.”

  “Would it have mattered? We’re all soldiers now, even the ones who’ve never been trained. It’s all of us against all of them.”

  “Them being the walking dead or the Russian bastards that sent them here?”

  “Both. Two different horns coming from the same devil.”

  “Devil is right.” Garcia tossed his spent cigarette butt to the ground and stomped it out. “I swear we’re all walking through hell now.”

  Richards nearly tripped as an image from his most recent nightmare replayed in his mind. Raven Bleu, the young blue-haired girl from his hometown, reached out to him through a circle of flames licking away at her, telling him to hurry. It was as if she called for him to help her.

  He knew she was most likely dead, just like his parents. The dream still filled him with a sense of urgency, a feeling he needed to be at a certain place at a certain time to help her. It was crazy, the thought he’d ever see the girl he left behind in Kentucky again as he traveled North from Arizona
to whatever remained of the base in Nebraska, but it gave him a daydream to entertain, something to hope for.

  He desperately needed to hope for something.

  “Incoming!”

  Richards jerked to attention, quickly pulling on his clothes and shoving his feet into his boots as gunfire blasted all around the perimeter.

  “What’s happening?” the woman from the night before asked, clutching the bedsheets to her chest, seeming to squeeze the life out of the fabric with her trembling hands.

  “Get dressed and stay inside,” he ordered her, as he struggled for all of five seconds to remember her name and realized just as quick that it didn’t matter. She’d be damned lucky if she survived long enough to be pissed at him about it.

  He checked his cargo pockets, making sure he carried extra ammo, before sheathing his Ka-Bar knife and grabbing his SIG Sauer M11.

  He opened the flap on the tent and peeked outside as Garcia sped past him with a group of people.

  “It’s a shitload of them!” he called out as he ran past. “They broke through the fence!”

  Richards looked beyond the groups of tents that had been put up the previous day when they’d come across the large fenced-in yard surrounding a locked school. The fence surrounding the school gave them enough protection from any dead traveling their way as they rested for the night. They’d believed they’d settled down in a safe spot but as he looked past the rows of tents now being trampled by survivors fleeing their eminent death, Richards realized how very wrong they were.

  What looked like hundreds of infected people poured over the portion of fence they’d knocked down. A line of armed men formed in front of them, quickly trying to gun down as many as they could.

  “Oh my God!” the woman from the night before screamed, stepping outside of the tent.

  Richards grabbed her arm and shoved her toward a group of survivors running past. “Go! Go!”

  She left him, the decision to run for her life not that hard to make, and he raced forward toward the line of men, ready to add his bullets to the mix.