B00BDBO28Q EBOK

by Patrick D'orazio

  When the prayer was done and the fervor gone, George tried to comprehend the response he got. His words had bounced off his impassive congregation like everything else the human race had thrown at them. But at least they were coming for him—that much was certain.

  Jumping down inside the small compound, he watched the first of the raggedy monsters slam into the fence. George stepped back, getting the first daylight close-up of one of the creeps, as Jason called them. He had seen enough of them in the dark, but now was getting a full Technicolor display of the dead soldiers and refugees he’d shared the high school gymnasium with.

  As gruesome as the crowd was, George was still relieved. He didn’t recognize anyone, and the niggling fear Al or Jennifer might crop up was something he doubted he could handle. But if they were in the crowd, they were indistinguishable from the rest of the rotting mass of corpses, which was a small blessing.

  The fence appeared to be strong enough to keep the army of slavering maniacs at bay for at least a few minutes. The rust on it didn’t inspire confidence, but at least the invasion force pounding on the chain link didn’t appear to have much in the way of climbing skills. All they could do was press their swelling, overheated carcasses up against the fence, bashing at it and hissing wildly at George. They seemed almost insulted that the meat so tantalizingly close was not willingly sacrificing itself.

  More and more corpses crowded up against the fence. They were drawing attention of others...it was a domino effect: even those that could not have possibly seen or heard him were moving in his direction, away from the van, attracted by the noise.

  Looking through the gaps in the crowd, George could see that there were fewer bodies pressed up against the Odyssey. It wasn’t rocking back and forth anymore, though many persistent attackers were still engaged in an effort to crack into it.

  George frowned, his frustration with the driver of the minivan surfacing. Why haven’t they tried moving yet?

  The path was clear, or so it seemed, though it was getting harder for him to see over the bodies tugging at the fence. He did see a smaller group of the infected splitting off from the main force coming in his direction. They were on the opposite side of the street, still near the van, but moving toward the church.

  Looking over at his old hideout, George groaned. The kid had done it. He’d disobeyed the order to sit tight and wait. When all the attention was drawn away from the church, Jason would have had his chance to take off. Until then, he was supposed to be safe behind the closed doors.

  Now that plan was shot to hell.

  George watched in stunned silence as the twelve year old whipped a clunky textbook out one of the second floor window at the crowd of onlookers gathered around the front of the church. The book spun like an oversized shuriken and sideswiped what may have been an elderly woman. The creature had a cloud of messy white hair and the tattered remains of a flower print dress on, which were the only hints at its gender. The book spun the recipient of the blow around, but didn’t knock it over. What it did do was draw its attention, and moments later it was clawing and beating at the church doors.

  Where the hell did he get the book? It didn’t matter much, but George surmised that Jason must have done some exploring in the classrooms and found a few teaching manuals. More rectangular missiles flew out of the window, smashing into the heads of the ghouls down below. Though it was hard to tell from a distance, it looked to George as if Jason was enjoying himself.

  “Get out of there now, dammit. GET OUT!”

  It was pointless—the kid couldn’t hear him. The maddening sound of hornets was too loud, and they were vibrating every bone in George’s body. He could barely hear himself.

  Resisting the temptation to launch his body at a part of the fence still bare of smashed-up bodies, George paced behind the walls of his prison as more stiffened corpses made the pilgrimage to the church. His movements were spreading the ghouls out around the perimeter of the fence. As they tried following him, more blocked his view of the van and the church. He wanted to signal for Jason to just cut and run, but it was fast becoming clear that for the first time in a long time, the boy’s fate was entirely out of his hands.

  The crowd outside the fence continued to shift, moving to the side of the compound George was closest to—at least most of them were doing that. There were more than enough to spread around and those pressed up against the chain link appeared unwilling to give up their prime spots along the fence line.

  George knew he would have to make a break for it soon. The fence was starting to sway as more bodies pressed against it. It wouldn’t be long before it collapsed.

  He was still sizing things up when he heard the roar of the van’s engine. Finally! At least the people in the van would be able to escape this nightmare, even if he and Jason were screwed.

  Even as he thought about how futile this whole rescue effort had been, George had to smile. It beat sitting on his ass until he starved to death.

  Moments later, George’s eyes widened as the sound of metal crunching against metal jolted him out of his reverie and he saw the blue prow of the minivan heading in his direction.

  He managed to dive out of the way as the Odyssey plowed through the fence, smashing at least five stiffs into its grill as it did so.

  George wobbled to his feet, still in a daze, as he finally got a good view of the scraggly driver of van when he rolled his window down. At the same time, the cargo door on the minivan slowly opened. A thin, haggard looking woman stood behind the door, a massive revolver in her tiny hands.

  He was still staring at these ragged people, trying to comprehend what had just happened, when he heard one of them shout “Get in!”

  Jason, Alone

  I realize that this story takes place chronologically before the previous story of George and Jason’s escape to the church and their initial meeting with Jeff and Megan, but my original intention was to reveal this story about Jason right around the time he has the nightmare about his mother. I think it fit more to divulge this part of his history at that time, but of course I ended up taking it out of the final version of the book. So here it is, and I think it provides a better understanding of who Jason is and why he acts the way he does with George, Megan, and Jeff.

  Everything had been screwed up since Momma dragged him out of school up in Detroit and moved him down to this white bread hillbilly paradise. They sure as heck hadn’t been rich up in Dearborn, but he’d gotten to see his father every now and then and they had a nice apartment. Jason didn’t want a house, even if Momma insisted that they needed a place where they weren’t crammed in next to twenty other families. He didn’t want to leave his school either. It wasn’t like he had lots of friends there, but he was comfortable with his teachers and knew what was expected of him. Here, he stood out like a sore thumb. They had gotten a house like Momma had always wanted, but there were even more trailer parks in the town they lived in than he’d ever seen back home. That Momma somehow thought moving to Gallatin, Ohio was a step up from Dearborn, Michigan was beyond Jason’s ability to understand.

  After living in the small town for a while, things leveled out, though they still sucked. The kids in Gallatin more or less ignored him. There was a good share of white trash, but most of the kids were nice enough. There were only a few black families in town so it was almost like most of the white kids had no idea of how to act around him. He could tell that they’d been taught that racism was bad and yet they were still uncomfortable being around someone who wasn’t the same color as they were. The school was okay. Jason had always been smart and adjusting academically wasn’t too challenging. His mother insisted he was getting a better education here, though he kind of doubted it.

  He was getting used to things in Ohio, even though his father hadn’t called or written since the move. He didn’t like the nasty things Momma said about dad, but didn’t argue with her about it. With as many times as she called him worthless, it didn’t seem all that surprising that Jason�
�s father chose to forget about his son once they moved away.

  Momma never accepted any blame for anything in regards to Jason’s father, even after deciding to pick up and move almost three hundred miles away from him. She insisted that it was her ex-husband’s fault he couldn’t pick up a phone or try to arrange to have Jason go back up to Detroit for a week during the holidays or in the summer. She didn’t accept any blame, but Jason silently affixed much of it on her. But as with everything else, he suffered quietly and didn’t act out or complain. He was her good son, well behaved and shy. He loved his Momma and even if he wished she wouldn’t have made some of the choices she did, he was smart enough to know that she was the one person in the world who would always be there for him, no matter what. He still loved his dad, but he’d known for years that the man was unreliable. That was just the way it was. Momma could always be counted on.

  That was, until the world fell apart.

  Jason was watching TV that morning, the morning when everything changed. He already knew things had been getting bad over the past few days, but with all the special reports breaking in on every channel, things had boiled over.

  Yvonne, his mother, had been concerned about what was going on around the country and around town, but that concern didn’t mean she was interested in skipping out on work.

  “They need me down there, especially now. You stay home today—no playing outside. Lock the doors and don’t answer the phone. I’ll be home after my shift.”

  She hugged him tight and left. Jason wasn’t concerned for himself. Things had been quiet in their neighborhood, but there were some terrible stories on the news about what was happening in the cities, like where Momma worked.

  As the day wore on, Jason found himself glued to the TV, watching news reports that were getting harder to believe by the second. Every program he switched to was talking about the same thing. The virus had gone global and there were reports of infection everywhere. Doctors were baffled, despite the government’s reassurance that they were working on coming up with a vaccination or cure.

  People were dying all over the world, and the televised attacks by the infected were hard to watch. Still, Jason was mesmerized by the violent images as they rolled by on the screen.

  More than once, he was tempted to call the hospital where Momma worked, but resisted the urge. He was only supposed to call in case of an emergency. This was a worldwide emergency, no doubt about it, but it wasn’t as if someone was banging on the front door, trying to get inside the house to attack him. So instead, he continued watching the stories about the virus spreading, maps with containment vectors discussed by Army Generals, and the riots breaking out in towns and cities across the country and across the globe.

  Jason was still in front of the TV when his mother came home five hours before her shift was supposed to end. He was thrilled she’d returned early, until he saw the bandage on her arm. She had been scratched by a patient at the hospital.

  She had been plain unlucky. That was how she described it. Jason’s mother was a nurse in a big downtown Cincinnati medical center and was taking the vital signs of a patient who’d come into the emergency room after claiming to have been bitten. The man was delirious and he freaked out when she put a stethoscope against his chest. He’d been lying on a gurney in one of the hallways off the ER, because people were jammed to the rafters in the place and the nurses and doctors had to deal with patients where they sat or stood. Yvonne had been commandeered from her post on the Cardiac ward to help with the overflow.

  The man had reached up to grab her wrist as he babbled unintelligibly at her. When she tried to remove his hand, he raked his fingernails across her forearm as he spit up blood and frothed at the mouth. With the help of a couple of orderlies she got the man under control and sedated, but not before his spittle and blood and gotten all over her, including into her brand new wound.

  Yvonne Samuels told her son that she’d had the suspicion that things were going to hell the moment she had walked into the hospital six hours earlier. It’d taken less than an hour before she’d been called into the emergency room. The rumor mill among the nurses had gained a full head of steam, and while much of what she was told sounded ridiculous, it was getting easier to buy into the various stories they were feeding her as the day went on.

  A particular one stuck with her. One of the regular ER nurses indicated that she’d heard that the National Guard was planning on shutting down most of the hospitals in the area and not letting any more patients into them. In addition to that measure, rumor also had it that any of the people already in the hospitals, including staff, were to be quarantined.

  It had sounded like an unlikely possibility the first time she heard it, but by the time she was scratched a few hours later and the emergency room had turned into an utter madhouse, it was getting hard to deny that something was about to happen. Fear, like the virus, was spreading across the hospital at an exponential rate.

  No one really knew for sure how the virus spread. Bites without a doubt, but no one knew if it was also airborne, could be transmitted through drinking water, or if there was some other route to getting sick.

  Paranoia and panic were engulfing the hospital. Both the patients and staff were rapidly losing their minds. Yvonne suspected that whatever plan the National Guard had in mind to restore control would be acted on far too late to do any good. The situation had deteriorated far too fast.

  There had been several attacks when bitten patients died on operating tables or while waiting to be checked out in the ER. Far too late, someone in a position of authority decided that anyone who came in bitten was to be restrained. Unfortunately, that wasn’t before several nurses, doctors, and other patients were attacked.

  Jason’s mom had never been one to pull her punches and she didn’t do so as she relayed her tale to him. She had a pretty good idea how much trouble she was in after bandaging her scratched arm. The wound had felt like it was on fire mere seconds after the attack. Since it wasn’t a bite, no one paid the wound much attention, but there was no doubt in her mind that she would be getting curious glances in no time. She was already running a fever. She had to get the hell out of there before she ended up tied to some bed while she waited to die.

  Taking one last look around, Yvonne decided to make a beeline to the garage where her car was parked. There was no way she was going to let them quarantine her or tie her up; not with her boy waiting for her to get back home. She had been prepared to do anything, up to and including blasting through the gate at the edge of the employee lot with her beat up old Buick Skylark. It didn’t matter that there were two police cruisers parked on the street outside the garage; nothing was going to stop her from leaving that place.

  Fortune smiled on her. The attendant waved her through without even looking up from the portable TV he had in the booth with him.

  On the drive home, Yvonne listened to traffic reports that indicated every highway in and out of the city was either clogged or blockaded by the military. Even many of the major roads were backed up, but Yvonne had been driving in the city long enough to have learned about several lesser known routes that would get her home without all the traffic headaches the main routes tended to provide. It was clear as she headed east out of Cincinnati that the city was shutting down, and soon there wouldn’t be any roads open to traffic. There was unchecked chaos and destruction everywhere she looked. People running in the streets, gunfire, and the sounds of screams she heard through the rolled up windows. She didn’t see any of them, but suspected they were there, nonetheless.

  Perhaps it was a miracle, or just dumb luck, but she managed to get back home without incident.

  She told Jason her story in a breathless rush. By the time she was done, her skin had gone an ashy color and she was drenched in sweat. When he suggested they find a doctor in Gallatin to check her out, she waved him off.

  “What we need to do,” she replied, “is find someone to take you in while I deal with this.”
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  Jason had learned over the years that there was no use arguing with Momma, especially when she gave him the “look”. The woman could be downright scary when she wanted to be. So when she picked up the phone and tried to reach out to some of her friends in the area, he remained silent, even as he felt terrified about what was happening to his mother. She was still in charge, and until she said different, there was nothing her twelve-year-old son could say about it.

  After the final call, when Yvonne was unable to reach a single other person, she sat in a chair in the living room and took a deep breath. A few seconds later, she slapped her hands on her knees, announcing to Jason that she had come to a decision.

  “There’s just one thing left we can do.”

  Jason would never forget when his mother directed him to tie her arms and feet to her bed. She told him that if she got delirious, like the man at the hospital, she didn’t want him to be in any danger of getting scratched or bitten. She also joked that it was ironic that she had been desperate to avoid that fate at the hospital, but now felt it was the only solution she had remaining at home.

  “If I turn into one of those monsters, and I doubt I will, I don’t want to be able to hurt you. I don’t want to bite you like all those people you’ve seen on TV.”

  Once again, Jason had the urge to argue with his momma, but even with her eyes getting cloudy with infection, she wielded an authority that brooked no debate from her son.

  So he helped get her into bed, taking several extension cords and wrapping them around her wrists and ankles and then the bedposts. When he tried to be gentle with the knots he made, Yvonne chastised him, insisting he make sure she couldn’t break free.