Trent walked over to his wife, rubbing her arms reassuringly. “Sweetheart, I am glad to see you. It isn’t your fault Cindy is dead. Where did those assholes come from anyway?”
The other people in the basement had taken an interest in Trent. I didn’t like the way they were looking at him. I, of course, had noticed that he smelled better to me every day, but I had been able to control it. These were the eyes of people on the brink of death and they were looking at Trent like he was a juicy rib eye in a sea of hamburger steaks. I felt tired and achy all over, thinking it would be great to lay down and take a nap, but Evelyn dashed my dreams when she had other plans.
“They have a camp, as well, on the outskirts of town. Some of the men saw them loading up food from the store down the street and followed them. They aren’t your problem though, honey. You have to leave. It isn’t safe here for you without the infection. Even I am having a hard time being near you, and you should get away from these three, as well. They are just on the cusp of turning on you.” Her eyes looked sad as she told him what I knew he already had been thinking about.
“I don’t care, Evelyn. I am ready to accept my fate. In case you haven’t realized it, I am surrounded by a lot of people that want to eat me. It is just a matter of time before I get taken down. I would rather go down with you and let them come back, if they find the cure.”
The whole scene was touching, and it was as sincere as I had seen Trent behave. It made me want to save him from our fate even more, and I had this thought that some people had to stay uninfected to rebuild the world when all the zombies were finally gone.
Despite his wife’s urging that we leave as soon as possible, Trent determined we would spend the night in the basement and set out again in the morning. By the time she had gotten us all settled with sleeping bags, it was around ten o’clock and I passed out as soon as I lay down.
I woke up to an unbelievable scene; I thought I was dreaming. Trent was standing across from me, leaned up against the wall. The other people in the room had started stirring. I saw Evelyn holding on to her husband’s leg with a crazy look in her eyes, Trent was looking down at her with wide eyes, and Cage was standing over them with the pistol pointing at his mother. I could see blood on his pants where Evelyn’s nails had dug into him, and the aroma filled the room. All of the infected were looking at them, waiting to see what would happen next.
“Mom, let go of him.” Cage was not allowing his voice to tremble but his hands were shaking slightly. I couldn’t believe we had come this far, with Trent not getting infected, to have it end like this. I didn’t know if Cage would be able to shoot his mother, but she was still going to bite Trent and it looked like he wouldn’t have a choice.
Without warning, Cage launched at Evelyn pushing her away from Trent. Her arms flailed wildly, knocking the gun from his hands. She was growling, animalistic, beneath him, gnashing her teeth as he held her face away from him with one hand, the other reaching around aimlessly for the gun. There was no doubt she had made the full transformation into a being driven only by her hunger. It had been a mistake to stay here with her.
I watched her bite into Cage’s arm, as he frantically tried to pry her away from him.
“Punch her, Cage,” I was moving closer to them, yelling at him to fight back. Of course, he didn’t punch her, but they had managed to stand up and she was trying to jump onto his back. I watched, in horror, as she buried her hand in his wound and started to tear at it. His cries of pure pain broke my heart and, before I knew what I was doing, I picked up the gun, aimed, and shot Evelyn.
I hit her in the leg, which was not what I was aiming for, but I had never fired a gun before. She screamed and it was enough of a distraction for Cage to push her off and grab hold of his Dad.
“We’re leaving, Mom; we love you.” Trent looked at his wife, the woman he loved, who had just tried to make a meal out of him and sighed.
“I would have stayed here, Evelyn, but one of us has got to try to help our boy. I love you.” With those final words and Evelyn writhing around on the floor, holding her leg, I tried not to think about what I had just done.
As the others in the basement smelled her blood, they begin to twitch, and a couple moved in closer to her. I had a feeling that they would turn on one of their own if they were injured. How we managed to get Trent out of the basement without getting bit by at least one person was beyond me, but we did and now we were all four headed back to the safety of the truck.
Driving back out of Alexander, NC as quickly as possible, no one said anything about what had just happened. Truthfully, I was glad I hadn’t killed her, and I was glad that the remaining people squatting in the basement were still scared enough to get shot that they didn’t attack us. As traumatic as the whole scenario was, Trent seemed to find closure. He had relaxed a little and was looking at a map, adding numbers on his fingers.
“According to my calculations, we are about four hours away from the next safety camp. We can, hopefully, find a cure there.” He explained that we were heading north to Virginia, where the safety camp was housed in Sawville.
Trent had been listening to the radio in order to find out where the other safety camps were. When we had started driving earlier, the radio was still broadcasting. It stopped working about an hour into the trip, and Trent couldn’t tune in to a station. We didn’t feel like this was a good sign about the state of the country.
Looks were exchanged, but no one said anything. There was a gas station coming up on the right.
“Dad, pull in there and we will get some drinks. I need to stretch my legs a bit.” Trent pulled into the parking lot of the gas station, and we all stepped out to stretch. Cage walked inside to check out the situation, while we walked around outside, waiting for the signal to come in for some supplies. I noticed his movements looked stiff like mine had been earlier, but figured it was from being cramped in the car.
He was gone for a little over ten minutes when a shrill scream pierced the air. The three of us looked at each other briefly, before we all took off running into the gas station. Trent had pulled a pistol out of the glove box that I was unaware he had. I caught the glimmer of it as he ran in front of me, and realized we didn’t know what we were running into. I recognized it as a forty five; my Dad had always carried one with him. The scream came again, louder, and caused us to quicken our pace.
Chapter 12
Time Grows Short
It didn’t take us long to find the source of the screaming. A young girl was in the back room of the gas station, in a struggle for her life. I took in her appearance, as I watched in horror. I determined from the necklace, made of candy, she was wearing and the cheap clip-on hair feathers she donned, she was around fifteen years old. Blood was starting to run down the front of her shirt, all the way down to her cut-up jeans. She was fighting a maniac who was tearing at her throat with his teeth. An inhuman growl came from him and his fingers were digging into her arm so hard that blood was running down it. Her cherry-painted nails were trying to pry his fingers away to no avail.
I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The madman that was latched onto her was Cage. I found myself screaming along with the terrified girl. Trent stood still, with his mouth hanging open. I could see that he was weighing his options before he did anything. I charged at Cage, thinking I would be able to get him to stop.
When I made contact with him, I sent us all crashing to the ground. I knocked him off of her, which only angered him. She crawled away as he turned his anger on me.
“Cage.” I was holding his face back from mine, screaming his name. “This isn’t you, Cage, let it go. It’s Cassie. Let it go.”
Something changed in his eyes. They grew soft and then terror filled them as he jumped up and pulled me to my feet. It let me know, unlike his mother, there was still some of him left.
“I’m so sorry, Cassie. What did I do?” He was looking at the blood on his hands now. The girl had run out o
f the gas station before any of us could stop her.
“Tell me what you remember; start from when you walked into the gas station.”
Rose and Trent had relaxed a little now that Cage was acting normal again. Trent walked over to put a hand on his shoulder to encourage him to tell us what happened.
“Okay, let’s see. I walked inside and I heard a door slam shut. I went to see if I could find out who was back there. I walked through that door and then…” As he pointed to the door, he seemed to be trying to recall what happened. “I saw a girl, and she looked tasty.”
He looked at his father, then at me. He seemed shocked by his own words. I knew exactly how he felt as I remembered thinking the same thing about Brett. It seemed this disease made us completely unpredictable and in little control of our impulses.
“Oh, God.” He put his hand over his mouth. “I attacked her, didn’t I? I don’t remember anything except for running at her.”
He sank to the floor as I tried to find the words to comfort him.
“She’ll be infected now,” his voice was a whisper. “She will become one of them, I mean one of us.”
Trent knelt down in front of his son, putting a hand on his leg to get his attention. ”Look at me, Cage. You couldn’t help it. There is something diseased inside of you that made you attack that girl. If you wouldn’t have done it, someone else would have. You can’t beat yourself up for it. We will find a cure.”
Cage slowly stood up and hugged his dad. He didn’t look completely convinced of his innocence, but at least he was trying to move past it.
“Let’s get some supplies and get the hell out of here.”
“That’s my boy!” Trent smiled and walked towards the door to go back into the gas station.
Rose followed him out of the room, and Cage and I were left alone. He looked so pitiful; I wanted to hug him again. I refrained from impulsively pulling him to me. The last thing he needed right now was my making him uncomfortable. To my surprise, he walked over and held his arms out to me. He folded me into them as I walked forward and I put my head to his chest.
“What is happening to me, Cassie? Who eats someone? I’m becoming a monster.”
I sighed against his chest, searching for some reassuring words. “Technically, you didn’t eat her; you only bit her a little.”
“I wanted to eat her, though. Why else would I have attacked her? It’s like a part of me I don’t know took over my actions. You have no idea how scary that is.”
“I think I do,” I mumbled into his chest and prepared to tell him what happened with Brett. His father interrupted us by running into the room and hollering.
“We’ve got to go, now!” He pulled us both along until he was sure we were following him. We all raced out the door together.
“What’s going on?” I stopped in the parking lot to try and make sense of it.
I realized what the problem was when a large booming voice alerted me to the man standing in front of us with a shotgun. The bloody girl was behind him, and he was aiming right at Trent. Trent was pointing his pistol at the man and the standoff between them was terrifying.
“You the one that bit my girl?” The man with the gun was really pissed. I assumed the girl must be his daughter.
“Yes, I am! I will shoot her if you don’t put your gun down.”
“Go ahead, as soon as I take care of you all, I will be shooting her myself. You will save me the trouble.”
I was appalled and the girl looked terrified. “You would shoot your own daughter?”
“She’s just going to turn into one of you. I am not going to have that. I have a whole family here to protect.” I had guessed right, she was his daughter.
I hadn’t noticed Cage wasn’t with us in the parking lot at that point. What I did notice was him sneaking up behind the guy. He had a bottle of Coke in his hand and he swung it as hard as he could. It connected with the guy’s head. The gun didn’t drop from his hand, but he fell. As he fell, he shot Trent in the leg. Trent hollered and grabbed his leg.
“Get in the truck,” Cage was screaming at us. “Rose, help Dad. Cassie, you’re going to have to drive.”
He tossed the girl he had just bitten over his shoulder as I ran to get in the driver’s seat. He deposited her in the bed of the truck.
I waited until he climbed in. “Go, now!” He didn’t get his door shut until we were on our way down the road again. The girl in the back of the truck screamed as she slid around in the truck bed. I tried to drive as straight as I could, while steadily increasing speed
“How bad is your leg, Dad?” I didn’t take my eyes off of the road but I felt Trent bend down beside me to pull up his jeans.
Trent breathed a sigh of relief. “It just grazed me, son. Lucky for me, that guy was a lousy shot. It’s just a flesh wound. Hand me a cloth or something.”
Cage reached behind the seat and brought out a red handkerchief. The color caught my eye and I glanced over at it.
“Eyes on the road, girl,” Trent reminded me to pay attention to driving, so I turned my focus back to the white lines blurring by. This was the fastest I had ever driven. It would have been exciting if the situation would have been different.
I was beginning to realize we couldn’t rely on anyone. Our fellow men looked at us differently. I had a bad feeling about trying to go to any safety camp. I knew that Trent wouldn’t stop looking until there was nothing he could do for Cage. I hoped we weren’t driving to our doom.
Chapter 13
A Different Family
I had been driving for about three hours before Trent told me to take the next exit. I was glad that we were finally going to be able to stop. I was nervous about what might wait for us at the next camp. After our last run-in, nothing would surprise me. I pulled into the road to the camp and slowed my speed.
“It’s about forty minutes down the road from here. It’s in a more remote location than the other one was.” Trent tied the bandana tighter on his leg and encouraged me to drive forward. I had kind of zoned out a little, checking out the sides of the road where there were lots of trees with houses peppered in between. It was such a sharp contrast to the highway scenery we had been driving past. That is why when a lady walked out into the road in front of the truck, I almost didn’t see her.
I slammed on the brakes and the truck slid to a stop right before I hit her.
“What the hell. Get out of the way!” I was shaking from the scare I had gotten by almost killing her. She didn’t move; instead, she just smiled at us. Trent got out of the truck to see what she wanted. She was a little dirty, and her blue dress was torn up the right side. She didn’t look like she was bitten or turning, but you could never really be sure.
She didn’t say anything, just kept smiling that creepy smile. She could have been a pretty girl at one time but now she looked evil and her skin was covered in dirt and bruises. I was too busy paying attention to the girl to notice the men sneaking up behind the truck. They had slid in under the radar and one of them had a gun pointed at Cage through the window.
“Put your hands where I can see them, ladies.” The man leered at Rose and me. He was missing his front tooth, which made him look more sinister. He was dirty. I was full of rage. Here we were so close to our destination and these crazies were going to take us hostage. I could only imagine what they planned to do with us. I had a feeling they might have been this way before the outbreak of dead people. It had only been a few days after all.
I put my hands in the air, as did Cage and Rose.
The other guy was like an older version of this one with a few more tattoos. His white t-shirt had a hole in it so his large belly was visible. He had a gun pressed into Trent’s back. He was grinning at the girl who had stopped us in the first place.
“Good job, sweetie.” He sent her back into the house with a pat on the butt.
The other guy jerked Cage’s door open and stood back. “Get out of the truck, slowly.” We all piled out of the truck an
d stood on the side of the road. Our gas station hostage screamed as they drug her from the truck bed. Going from one bad situation to another was making her insane.
“What the hell do you guys want from us? We don’t have any money.” I was steamed so I wasn’t really watching how I was talking to them.
They were going through the truck already. I thought they were being extremely rude the way they threw things from the truck and onto the road. I didn’t know what they thought they were going to find.
“Where are the keys? We are going to be taking this truck.”
The way that the older man said it was like he was entitled to it. It really rubbed me the wrong way. How dare these crazy people take the only thing we have?
The guy going through the truck walked back over and pressed his gun into my back. He smelled horrible and just his close proximity was making me nauseated.
“Come on, sweet thing; let’s go see the backyard.”
He pushed me forward as the older guy pushed Cage and Trent. Rose was drug along behind us. They pushed us through a narrow opening between the house and the garage. I heard Rose groan as she struggled to make it through. The smell that came rolling off of the men was seeping out the sides of the house. The girl from the gas station was cussing under her breath until the younger guy walked back to her and slapped her across the face. She then started sobbing and he forced her to sit down beside the house.
When we got around to the back of the house, we had a reason to be afraid. There were people lying in a heap to the side. These people had done this before; I felt like we had just stepped into The Devils Rejects, Zombie Style. They had to be nuts to just kill people passing through. We were in deep trouble here. They were enjoying our fear. I assumed they were father and son, as they stood in front of us with the guns pointed straight at Rose. They must have thought she was the weakest, and they could scare her the most.
Darlings of Paranormal Romance (Anthology) Page 93