B00BDBO28Q EBOK

by Patrick D'orazio

  “I plan on fighting like crazy against this virus, baby, but I’m not taking any chances with your safety. If I turn, I need to know you’ll be safe.”

  After the knots were tied and before the tears could come, Jason’s momma told him to sit down next to her on the bed.

  “Jason, you’re a stronger boy than you realize. I’ve always known that about you. I also know you resent me for taking you away from your father, but I think, deep down, you understand why I had to do it. He could never take care of you, even if he thought that what he was doing was good enough.

  “I didn’t bring you to Ohio to make your life miserable, I brought you here to make you stronger. You needed to get away from that place and learn to stand on your own. I didn’t realize how quickly you would need to be able to do that, but God gives us challenges we think we aren’t prepared for because he knows better than us how strong we are, and how much we can handle.

  “I’ve done the best I could for you. It wasn’t enough, but there isn’t any time left for me to do any more. Now I don’t want you crying for me. Instead, I want you to do exactly as I tell you.”

  Jason’s mother tolerated no back talk, even as she grew weaker by the second. So he listened to every word she had to say, and despite his reservations, he did as she asked. He collected what he could into his backpack—clothes, food, a pocket knife, and the spare cash she had hidden in a shoebox at the back of her closet. She told him that money probably wouldn’t mean anything for much longer, but it might help him out of a tight jam with someone he came across.

  Yvonne didn’t want her son going to one of those shelters, but knew there were few other options available to a twelve-year-old on their own. The scroll at the bottom of the television screen listed the different shelters in the Cincinnati area, and Gallatin high school, which was just a few miles away, was the closest one. He was to try and go to the neighbors first, and see if any of them would take him in, but if that didn’t work, or if he came across anyone acting suspicious, he was to run to that high school as fast as he could.

  She told him that some people might not think twice about taking advantage of a young boy without any guardians, so he would have to stand tall and fend for himself. And once things calmed down and the world got back to normal, he would have to try to reach out to any family they had up north that was still alive. Yvonne hadn’t been able to reach any of them for a couple of days, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t make it through this. And when they did, he needed to find them. They would take care of him.

  Jason wondered if his mother actually believed that things would ever go back to normal. A cure sounded next to impossible from what he’d heard, and the military didn’t seem to be having any luck anywhere as far as containing the spread of the contagion. After watching the news all day, and having heard horror stories coming in from across the globe for the last few days, the chances of the world ever being sane again was about as likely as Momma being able to avoid succumbing to the virus.

  She was the strongest person Jason had ever known, but no amount of determination to resist the rapid creep of the plague was going to keep her from changing. The doctors on TV had bickered back and forth on just about every minute detail related to the virus, but one thing they all agreed on was its 100% mortality and reanimation rate. If you were infected, you died, and then you came back.

  After Momma gave Jason her instructions and was certain he would carry them out, her voice became soft as she reminisced with him about their lives together. She told him stories about her youth she’d never revealed before and managed to get a few laughs out of him, even as the tears flowed despite her stern command he not weep for her.

  On more than one occasion, Jason hinted that he wanted to remove the cords that bound her, but she would chastise him every time he tried, even when she grew delirious and her words were slurred.

  Near the end she told him to leave, to get out of the house and go to the neighbors. He needed to find someone who could take him to the shelter, or away from this place. There was no more pretending. She was going to die and she had accepted that. He refused until she had to yell at him, telling him through her own tears that he needed to go, that she did not want him seeing her like this.

  Jason pretended to leave, hiding at the front door after he slammed it shut. He slumped against it, crying silent tears while his mother lay dying down the hall. He wanted to untie her, cut her free and hold her tight one last time. And when he heard her loudly weeping, that desire became almost unbearable.

  After the crying stopped about an hour later, Jason strained to hear anything coming from his mother’s bedroom. It didn’t take long for him to hear the wheezing as her struggles to breathe became more pronounced. He laid his head on his knees. At that point, he’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours straight. His mother’s struggles with the virus had lasted through the night. So as he sat and listened to the ragged rhythm of her breathing, his eyelids continued to droop lower no matter how hard he fought against it.

  One of Jason’s uncles had died of cancer, and he’d watched him gradually lose weight and hair from chemotherapy. It took several months, and the changes were gradual, but hard not to notice. When the man was brought home to be with his family for the last few days of his life, after the doctors had done everything they could for him, Jason was forced to go into his uncle’s bedroom one last time. The man’s eyes had sunken into their sockets and his skin was gray. The smell of illness in the room terrified the boy almost more than how his uncle’s looks had changed. There was a cloying scent of despair that hung heavy in the room. Even the reassuring grin his uncle gave him scared Jason. It made him look like one of the demonic creatures in a horror comic Jason’s dad had given him. His uncle’s eyes had gone from white to a jaundiced yellow, which added to the devilish effect.

  What had happened to his mother was like a time lapse recording of the illness his uncle had suffered through. Several nightmarish months of agony jammed into a few hours of living hell, with the same terrible sights and smells that had given Jason nightmares for a year after his uncle died.

  Jason woke with a start. He had been dreaming of his uncle, smiling up at him from his deathbed, telling him that his momma would be with him soon. As he spoke, he reached out with his hand, as if asking the boy to join them.

  While he’d slept, the wheezing in the other room had stopped. The house was silent. Jason stood, fearful he’d missed the chance to rush back to his mother’s side to see her face and hold her hand one last time before she died. He couldn’t come to grips with the idea of his mother being taken away from him. How could some minor scratch undo such a larger than life person?

  Jason listened for a few minutes, peering at the walls that separated his mother’s bed from where he was stood. Nothing. No sound at all. Had she passed? He had to know even though part of him was screaming that he needed to run away and not look back. He could pretend she was still alive if he wanted to. All he had to do was leave.

  “Momma?”

  His voice sounded timid, almost embarrassed. He half expected her to come bursting through the doorway, yelling at him to do as he’d been told and leave the house.

  It didn’t happen. Nothing did.

  Fear mingled with a sliver of courage that resided deep within the boy; courage that came from realizing he had nothing left to lose.

  “MOMMA!”

  He waited. Sweat dripped down his face, rolling onto his upper lip. Droplets quivered there before falling to the floor. Jason moved his right foot forward with care, somehow afraid that the noise from a squeaky floorboard might upset Momma even more than the fact that he’d yelled her name.

  His foot was still hovering above the floor when he heard it.

  The bed was making a creaking sound, but there was also another sound. One that was almost human.

  The sweat pouring down his face and back turned to ice on his skin. An involuntary shiver wracked Jason’s body as he brough
t his foot down. Hairs on his arms and legs stood at attention and were almost painfully stiff as goose bumps covered every exposed inch of skin. His foot retreated to its original position and he remained locked in place at the front door.

  It sounded like a moan coming from the bedroom, but not like any he’d ever heard before. He doubted that a human being in a normal state of mind could make a sound like that.

  “Momma?”

  It was the terrified little boy inside of him reaching out for her now. Tears mixed with the cold sweat and Jason’s vision became blurred. He thought he saw his mother in her nightgown, the one she had worn when she had gotten into bed. It was her favorite. She was walking out of the room, coming toward him, angry at him for not leaving as he’d been told to do. He slammed his back into the front door and gave a wailing cry of his own that didn’t sound quite as bad as the moaning, but had the effect of making the inhuman sound grow louder. Frantically wiping at his eyes, he blinked and saw there was nothing in front of him. Momma was still in her bedroom, tied down.

  She needs you. Go to her.

  Jason slid to the floor, hugging himself as he wept. No longer concerned about the amount of noise he made, the sound of his crying echoed through the small house. After a couple of minutes, his sense of loss turned to anger as the moaning increased in volume, as if his mother was mocking him.

  “Shut up! You’re not my mother anymore! Just leave me alone!”

  It’s your mother in there, how dare you yell at her? Go in there and apologize!

  The moaning didn’t stop and his anger gradually changed, morphing into something closer to regret. He begged and pleaded, yet knowing somehow, on a coldly logical level, that the monster his mother had become would never listen to him again. At the same time, the voice inside his head, the one that knew nothing of logic or sanity, kept whispering to him that he should go to his mother, that she needed him.

  Jason knew it wouldn’t stop until it drove him mad.

  That was about all the boy was sure of anymore. That and the fact that there was no way he could face his mother ever again. Not with what she had become.

  He turned away from the noises and stared at the front door of the house. This was no longer his home, and even as the strange voice inside tugged at him, he could feel the house pushing him away.

  You are no longer welcome here. This is a place for the dead.

  Jason leaned his forehead against the cold, unforgiving wood of the door and banged it against the pine gently, but repeatedly.

  “I’m sorry, Momma. I love you, but I’m sorry. I can’t stay here anymore. Goodbye.”

  It was a lousy eulogy, but was all he could think to say. The maniacal voice inside his head screamed at him to turn around and go to her, but he blotted it out, screaming and cursing at it.

  Momma was gone.

  Walking out the door, Jason didn’t look back as it slammed behind him. He stepped out onto the grass, unconcerned with where he was going. The world around him was in panic and upheaval. Several of the neighbors had fled, their front doors flung open while others were already in the process of barricading their homes. He didn’t concern himself with any of them, even as several called out to him, screaming his name. The blare of sirens and the sound of gunfire in the background also didn’t distract him.

  He picked up his feet and ran, moving swiftly past his neighborhood. His only plan was to keep on running, perhaps all the way to Detroit, if he could. He would run until his legs gave out, his heart exploded inside his chest, or one of those things caught him and tore him to pieces. That was the only thought he had left in his head. He would run until he died.

  * * *

  By the time the soldiers caught up with him twenty minutes later, all the tears had dried and the stony visage that George knew so well had taken their place.

  Fred and Bobby

  I’ve debated on the validity of including this particular story, since these two characters come and go so quickly in the book, but I crafted a saga for them in an effort to better understand why they were so desperate. It was easy for me to remove this information in the original book, because they are such tertiary characters, but I though a few folks might be as interested as I was in finding out what makes Fred and Bobby tick.

  Fred had spent his career as a mailman in Lawrence Park, where he and his wife Carol had lived for several years. It was located near Milfield, but closer to the city. Considered a more upscale address than most of the outlying suburbs, several recognizable local celebrities called it home. Old, trendy neighborhoods with half a million dollar plus homes were the norm, and the Harringtons liked the status they gained when they moved into the area. While Fred’s salary wasn’t impressive, Carol was a marketing executive for a large downtown Cincinnati Fortune 500 company, which afforded them a pretty decent lifestyle.

  Despite the ease with which Fred handled the expensive hunting rifle he was carrying when he ambushed Jeff and Megan, the first time he had handled the weapon had been only three weeks earlier. In fact, he had never touched any sort of firearm until he met Carol. Carol might have enjoyed her urban, yuppie existence, but she was still a country girl at heart with a family that loved to hunt and fish. Fred’s boys, Bobby and Charlie, had gone out with Carol’s brother Teddy on many occasions. He took them hunting near his place near Hillsboro, which was about forty-five miles east of Cincinnati. He was the one, with Carol’s permission, who had bought the boys their rifles a few years earlier for Christmas. Fred had been hesitant about the idea at first, but Carol had convinced him that Teddy would teach them all about gun safety before they ever got to use them. He had agreed, reluctantly.

  The rifle Fred was carrying had been Charlie’s. After his older son had died, Bobby managed to teach his father how to use it. That knowledge had helped him and his son out of several tough jams with the undead.

  Up until coming across Jeff and Megan, Fred had handled the rifle fairly well. He’d been willing to pull the trigger when his wife had been bitten by several of the infected. When her eyes opened back up after her heart had stopped, he had taken aim and put her out of her misery, despite the sensation that the world was caving in on him as he did it.

  Fred had managed twenty headshots on the undead at long range with Charlie’s rifle. Bobby had shot even more of the stiffs during their travels. Still, it was Fred, the novice, who came into his own during the apocalypse. He had become a survivor, able to deal with anything that came his way, or so he presumed. That rifle had given him a sense of confidence he’d never had before in life.

  Back when everything started, when the first reports of the virus showing up in Ohio had hit the air, Fred didn’t have much of an assertive personality. Carol had been the one who ruled the roost in the Harrington household, which had been just fine with Fred. When the soldiers with bullhorns had rolled down their street urging everyone to head to the local community center where a shelter had been set up, it was she who had announced that they would be hunkering down in the house and not bothering with such a place. She believed that all of this nonsense would blow over within a few days. Fred didn’t have much to say about that, despite his unvoiced concerns.

  And when everything continued to go downhill, and it was too late to do much except sit and watch as the number of infected in Lawrence Park grew exponentially, it was Carol who decided it was time for the Harringtons to make a run for it.

  Up until that point, the boys hadn’t the need to fire their rifles in defense of the house. They’d learned by watching some of the neighbors as their houses were turned into something like the Alamo that just about any loud noise could set off the rotters. They would swarm and within minutes, there was typically nothing left of the people hiding behind their locked doors. But as long as things were quiet, the stiffs seemed willing to leave things well enough alone.

  Their food and water supply had shrunk to a dangerously low level by the time Carol suggested to Fred that they get in the Acura SUV parked in t
he garage and head out to Teddy’s place. Fred, as he typically did, deferred to his wife’s judgment, which pleased the boys tremendously. Before their parents could say anything else, they were rushing around the house, collecting up everything they wanted to take to their favorite uncle’s ranch.

  Later on, Fred could never quite recall what it was that had set the stiffs off. Perhaps it had been the suitcase Bobby had dropped down the steps, or the vase Charlie knocked over in the front hallway. It might have just been the fact that everyone seemed to have forgotten where they were and let their voices rise with excitement at their imminent departure. All he knew for sure was that one minute they were talking about what route they should take to get to Uncle Teddy’s, and the next the doors and windows were being bashed on by several of their undead neighbors. Within moments, the sounds of smashing fists had increased tenfold and there was a huge crowd surrounding the house. It sounded something like a hailstorm going on outside.

  The Harringtons had attempted to grab what seemed like all their worldly possessions for their departure, and only in hindsight did Fred realize how incredibly foolish that had been. Besides their weapons and the food and water they could carry, grabbing anything else hadn’t made much sense. Still, it seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. That, Fred decided, was the real culprit for what happened next.

  As the front door threatened to collapse under the strain of a dozen bodies, Fred commandeered Charlie to help him drag more furniture in front of the door while Bobby and Carol scrambled to collect the suitcases and bags of clothing that had been tossed into the kitchen so they could move them to the SUV. Before they could get very far, the large picture window at the front of the house shattered and the feeble plywood sheet covering it was threatening to snap into kindling. Foolishly, everyone chose to rush to the window in an effort to hold off the onslaught, but it seemed like a hundred arms were already grabbing and pawing at them through the growing gaps in the barricade.