by John Russo
Two more zombies came at Bill, and he whirled and fired at them, hitting one and missing the other. Then another one appeared, from around the corner of the building. He fired two more times in rapid succession and both shots hit home this time, splattering the zombies’ blood and brains.
But three more were coming at him. He killed one, but then he was out of ammo. No time to ram in another clip. He clubbed the nearest zombie over the head—a big fellow in bibbed coveralls—who did not go down but instead clawed the gun out of Bill’s hand.
Desperately, Bill ran for Pete’s car and jumped in. But he didn’t have the keys, Pete did.
Frantically he locked all the doors. But the big zombie in the bibbed coveralls picked up the fallen gun and used it like a hammer to shatter the driver’s-side window. Two others joined him, pounding and pounding at the other windows, trying to get in. With a shudder, Bill recognized one of them as the rapist, Roger Dalton, whom he had tried to sock away in prison, but had failed. His body was ghastly white, drained of blood and covered with bite marks. He looked as if he had been attacked by a pack of wild animals.
Bill thought he was going to die, ripped apart and devoured. To him, it was a worse fate than being killed in combat. He didn’t think he was this terrified even when he was fighting in the Middle East. Or were those older fears now muted by time and distance?
Right now he didn’t think he would ever see his wife and daughter again.
But as he was thinking he was done for, Reverend Carnes’s pickup truck screeched into the lot. Carnes plowed into two zombies, running them over. Then he jumped out of the truck with a revolver in his hand. He shot two of the zombies who were pounding and clawing at all the windows of Pete’s car, trying to get at Bill. Then he shot another one who was munching on Pete Danko’s arm.
Lastly, he shot Pete in the head to stop him from arising.
“May he rest in peace,” the reverend said. “The rotten bastard!”
CHAPTER 55
Lauren was in bed, sleeping fitfully, when an eerie, childlike voice began calling to her.
“Mommy . . . Mommy . . . wake up . . . come on out . . . come on out, Mommy . . .”
It was Jodie’s voice, but it sounded distorted, metallic, unusually high-pitched, calling out in a strange singsong rhythm.
“Mommy . . . wake up . . . come on out . . .”
Lauren came fully awake, went to the bedroom window, and looked out. She was shocked when she saw her own daughter outside in the middle of the night, in the open yard surrounded by woods. She flung open the window and cried, “Jodie! My God! What are you doing down there?”
Jodie didn’t answer. Didn’t even look at her. She just kept calling, “Mommy . . . come out . . .” She looked like Jodie, wearing the same jeans and blouse she had worn to go out on a date with Darius, and yet she didn’t look like herself, and it was unnerving. She appeared to be stoned, zonked out, removed from reality in some strange way.
Again Lauren cried, “Oh my God!”
She slammed the window shut and ran out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out onto the porch steps. She peered into the moonlight.
“What are you doing?” Lauren said. “Are you sleepwalking?”
Jodie slowly turned around and started walking away from her, toward the surrounding woods. Lauren came down off the porch steps. Jodie kept going, getting even closer to the woods. Then she stopped and turned around, near the first line of trees. She faced her mother, smiling weirdly.
Lauren called out more desperately. “Jodie!”
Then Darius stepped out of the woods. He silently came to Jodie’s side and took her hand in his. They smiled lovingly, and yet demonically, at each other.
Lauren gasped. She wondered vaguely if she were dreaming. And she desperately hoped it were so.
Darius and Jodie both laughed at her.
Then a pack of zombies stepped out of the woods—seven of them—looking utterly hideous in the moonlight.
Lauren stepped back in utter fear.
She recognized one of the zombies as the Dr. Traeger she had once known, not as a close friend, but as one of the important people in Chapel Grove. Now this formerly solid citizen was standing in front of her naked, her body bruised and battered, her face gruesome-looking. She took a step toward Lauren, and Lauren backed away.
Still holding hands, Darius and Jodie backed into the woods and completely disappeared in the foliage, leaving Lauren to face the pack of flesh-hungry zombies who were coming at her, rasping and groaning.
She was frozen for an instant, and the zombies were reaching for her, and she knew she would be torn apart. Too late, she started to run, and was tripped up by an undead woman, beefy and rawboned, at least 250 pounds of her.
But then, when Lauren thought she was doomed, a shot rang out, and the undead woman reeled back, struck in the chest. But at first she did not fall.
Bill Curtis had fired the bullet. He jumped down from the passenger side of a truck driven by Reverend Carnes, leaving the doors wide open. He aimed and fired once more, dispatching the woman he had shot in the chest with a bullet to the left side of her head.
Reverend Carnes jumped out of his pickup and fired off balance, missing an attempted head shot at one of the zombies but getting him with a well-placed second round.
Still firing as he ran, Bill got to Lauren and shielded her with his body as he and Reverend Carnes kept firing at the rest of the zombies in the yard.
Bill took careful aim at undead Dr. Traeger, squeezed his trigger and—BLAM!—she, or it, crumpled to the earth.
Then Bill, Lauren, and the reverend heard helicopter sounds! The chopper circled a few times over their heads, as if scoping out the situation. Then it moved on.
“They don’t think we need help!” Bill yelled. “They’re looking for other people who do!”
“But there may be more of the undead creatures back in the woods,” the reverend said.
“Let’s get into the house and lock the doors,” Bill said.
Lauren cried out, “But our daughter is out there somewhere, and they might kill her, Bill!”
“Was she here?” Bill blurted out.
“Yes! With Darius! He’s got some kind of weird control over her.”
He put his arm around her and said, “I think she may be one of them now, honey. If so, I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”
“But she didn’t look like one of them,” Lauren told him. “Not completely, anyway. I think she can be saved.”
Shaking his head sadly, Reverend Carnes said, “I tried, but I couldn’t save her soul.”
“I won’t give up on her!” Lauren said adamantly.
They could hear gunfire in the distance, all around town, and knew that the battle against the undead was still going on.
CHAPTER 56
The chopper hovered and strafed. Cops and posse men deployed in squads, firing their weapons.
Ghouls were exterminated outside a church, near a school, at a playground.
A group of armed men burst into a house just in time to save some of the family members, while others had been partially devoured. Outside in the street they shot an undead mailman about to bite into a dead woman’s arm. They watched until the dead woman opened her eyes and started to come back to life. Then they shot her in the head.
There weren’t near as many of the flesh-hungry creatures as in the first outbreak, sixteen years ago.
This time the cleanup was easier, and by morning it was done.
Some of the ungodly creatures may have gotten away, but nobody knew for sure.
CHAPTER 57
Reverend Carnes parked his pickup in Bill and Lauren’s driveway and went up onto the front porch and rang the bell. Bill invited him into the living room, and they sat down and eyed each other solemnly.
Lauren, with an anxious, forlorn look in her eyes, came in carrying a tray and set it on the coffee table, then sat next to Bill on the couch. The tray was laden with a pla
te of cookies, hot coffee, and fixings. But nobody reached for anything.
Finally Carnes opened up and said, “I just came from the mayor’s news conference. None of the missing children can be accounted for. None of them apparently were killed, except for the one Steve Kallen shot, at his funeral home.”
“That’s what we think right now,” Bill said, “Ballistics will almost certainly confirm that the bullet came from his gun.”
“Quite a few Chapel Grove children are still missing,” Carnes said. “Among them are Darius Hornsby, Kathy Traeger, Brenda Kallen, and of course, your daughter.”
“Those are just about all of Jodie’s closest friends,” Lauren said. “We’re supposed to believe they’re just plain missing? Maybe Homeland Security knows more than they’re telling us. Maybe somebody has them in custody somewhere, and they just aren’t admitting it. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
She pulled a balled-up tissue from her apron pocket and tried to wipe away tears even though the tissue was soggy. She had been crying off and on all through the morning and afternoon.
Bill said, “I don’t think we were ever told the complete truth about much of anything connected to the plague. I think we were fed a pack of lies, going all the way back to our first outbreak.”
“What about Tricia Lopez?” Lauren asked Reverend Carnes. “You didn’t mention her.”
He gave her an odd, hesitant look, then looked over at Bill as if wondering how much he should say.
She picked up on it and said, “Don’t tell me she’s—”
Bill put his arm around her. He said, “I wasn’t going to tell you right away. I’m sorry, honey.”
“But what about the others?” Lauren asked through her tears. “Maybe they didn’t survive either.”
“Their bodies weren’t found anywhere,” Bill said. “So there’s still hope for our daughter, and I prefer to believe that.”
Reverend Carnes said, “My gut feeling tells me that they’ll be very hard to track down, and they must have some secret destination and some purpose of their own. I think they got clean away.”
“To where?” Lauren asked anxiously.
“God only knows,” said Carnes. “But they’re carriers. They can start the plague again anywhere.”
Bill said, “I’m going to find Jodie, and I won’t rest until I do.”
“But you don’t know what she’s become!” the reverend exclaimed.
“Nothing’s wrong with her,” Lauren told him. “I saw her! She seemed to be drugged or something. Brainwashed. If we can get her away from that boy, she’ll be all right. I’m sure of it.”
“I hate to say it, but you’re in denial,” Carnes said. “You both are. She’s your daughter and you don’t want to believe the worst of her. But she’s given in to Satan.”
Lauren started weeping again. Bill certainly couldn’t blame her, in light of all she had been through. Last night in the wee hours he had shed some tears in private, after Lauren had gone up to bed, because he didn’t want to show weakness in front of her.
“The strangest thing,” Reverend Carnes said, “is that the SWAT team found the body of that notorious pickax murderer from Texas, Kelly Ann Garfield. The news reports say there’s no doubt that it’s really her. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“I heard about it down at the station,” Bill said. “It’s her all right. DNA doesn’t lie. Nor fingerprints.”
“But she was executed,” Carnes persisted. “I watched it on television. I don’t believe in the death penalty. And she had become a true Christian.”
“Well, she was ghoul-bitten,” Bill said. “And the SWAT guys had to gun her down.”
“She must’ve come back from the dead after she was executed,” Carnes speculated.
Bill said, “I wouldn’t begin to know. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Lauren told him, “You should start going to church. After all that’s happened to us, you need to believe in something, Bill.”
“That’s exactly my point,” he countered. “When people are scared and uncertain, they need to believe in something. But I believe in myself. And I’m going to find Jodie, come hell or high water. Maybe she’s been brainwashed or something. But I’ll never stop loving her, and I think she must know that.”
CHAPTER 58
After checking their luggage, Darius Hornsby and Jodie Curtis took an escalator down toward the security gate at Pittsburgh International Airport. They had bright angelic smiles on their youthful faces. He smiled his handsome, dimpled smile at her and put his arm around her. He was wearing gray trousers and a nicely tailored dark blue sport jacket with an open-necked white shirt. She was wearing an organdy dress.
She smiled back at him and said, “Darius, will we ever see our friends again?”
“Someday we will, love. We’ll gather for a reunion.”
“I’m going to miss them a lot. Where did you send them?”
“All to different cities, in groups of two, like us. To the bigger cities mostly . . . New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Rome . . .”
“Rome!” she exclaimed. “Who got to go there?”
“You don’t know them. They wanted badly to see Italy. You and I get to live in New York, so cheer up, honey. If we all work hard and do the right thing, soon there will be many more like us. And still more of the undead ones, to do our bidding until the day when they’re not needed anymore.”
“What are we trying to do?” Jodie asked. “What are we trying to achieve, Darius?”
“The survival of our kind,” he told her confidently. “We will eventually become the only free and noble human species inhabiting the earth. Just as Neanderthals took over from their less capable precursors, and then intellectually superior Cro-Magnons exterminated the Neanderthals, we shall supersede the races that came before us. It’s survival of the fittest, Jodie. We were taught that in biology class.”
“But why do we deserve to live and others to die?” Jodie asked.
“Because we can!” Darius responded smugly. “We’re smarter than the adults who spawned us. We’re more intelligent and more ruthless. And we will have an army of our own creation to help us. The undead creatures that we make when we sink our fangs into them are good for little except to become our slaves.”
“But . . . what about extremely brave and smart people, like my father?”
“I actually like him in a way, but he’s not one of us,” Darius explained. “You’ll get over the loss. Together we’ll have the kind of life he can’t even dream about.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right, honey,” Jodie brightly agreed, then fell silent as she and her young lover entered the security checkpoint and got in line behind a slew of people.
CHAPTER 59
Bill Curtis peeled back a living room curtain to see who was pulling into his driveway. To his surprise, it was a black stretch limo, and two army corporals got out, then held doors open for a major and a full-bird colonel. Bill came out onto the porch and watched them approach. The sun had been up for two hours now, and the dew was still on the grass, sparkling like diamonds, as if nothing was wrong in his plague-ridden world.
As they mounted the steps, the colonel said, “Good morning, Detective Curtis. I’m Colonel William Spence, and this is Major Steven Thurston. We’re both from Homeland Security. May we come in?”
“Have a seat, gentlemen. We can talk right here. I don’t want to disturb my wife.”
They all sat on white wicker chairs with flower-patterned cushions.
“We’ve examined your personnel records,” Colonel Spence said. “You did two tours, Iraq and Afghanistan. You have a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. You were a good soldier. And a brave policeman, we know that for a fact.”
“Thanks. But what brings you here?” Bill said warily.
“First of all, we have some good news for you,” Major Thurston said.
“Good news with a caveat,” Colonel Spence added.
“Good news
and bad news,” Bill said wearily. “I hope it has a good punch line.”
Colonel Spence chuckled. Major Thurston didn’t.
“The good news is that we have your daughter in custody,” Major Spence said. “The bad news is that her boyfriend got away.”
“Is Jodie okay?” Bill blurted, completely stunned and wanting to see his daughter as soon as he could. “I have to let my wife know, one way or another.”
Major Spence said, “They were halted at the Pittsburgh airport, trying to get through security. We had a BOLO out on them, and an Interpol bulletin. Your daughter bit one of the officers before she was taken down. Darius Hornsby punched and kicked two passengers in the X-ray line and fled onto an escalator, shoving people aside and leaping up two and three steps at a time. Eyewitnesses said they never saw anybody move so fast or leap that high. At this time, we don’t know where he can be hiding. He must’ve made it out of the airport, so he could be anywhere right now.”
“We’ll get him though. I know we will,” said Major Thurston.
Bill had his doubts. He asked, “Where are you keeping Jodie? Is she under arrest?”
“You’ll be glad to know she’s not far from you,” Major Thurston said. “We’re holding her at the Chapel Grove Medical Research Institute. We think she has a DNA mutation.”
“You think?” Bill shot back at him.
“Well, we think that in time we may be able to cure her and the other children who fell prey to Dr. Marissa Traeger and her illegal experiments. She and your boss, Captain Peter Danko, were coconspirators. They were working under Homeland Security supervision, but they went rogue on us. We were unaware of the things they were doing behind our backs. Their experiments went awry, and we now know that they were responsible not only for the first outbreak of the plague here in Chapel Grove, but also the strain of the disease that developed in the children they co-opted. Your daughter was one of the unfortunate ones.”
“When can I see her?” Bill asked. He wanted badly to get into his car right now and fly to the institute.