In The Season of The Damned (Book One)

by Shannon Allen

  “Peter, Peter!” Ira called. I positioned my chair to put my body in and wheeled to the front. “There’s someone coming she said.” At 5 AM, It was still dark out, but you could see a figure working their way up the front of the cabin, and it didn’t look like Zen. We waited until he got close, then watched as he passed the last remaining trees. The person looked dark-skinned, and it seemed to take him thirty minutes to make it to where we were.

  Ira grabbed one of Zen’s guns. He did not look like one of the zombies. He climbed the ramp and knocked, and Ira opened the door. “Oh, thanks,” he said, glancing= at us. He was a guy around thirty-five to fortyish. “I’m glad to see people. It’s horrible out here.”

  “Where did you come from?” Ira asked.

  “Ten miles away from here,” he said. “There’s a group of us holed up in a gas station, Pat’s Diesel Diner.” I noticed a few things immediately: this person’s collar was covered in something that looked like blood, and he had a smell that reeked.

  “Are you bleeding?” I asked.

  He just ignored me. “I’d really like to come in,” he said, “it’s so cold out here. I need to get in and get warm.” He smiled and said, “Well, I can’t come in unless you invite me, wouldn’t feel right just walking in, you know. I notice you guys don’t have a welcome mat? You really should change that.” I could tell by Ira’s look that she noticed the smell. I can only describe it as a rotting odor. “I need to get in,” he continued, “there could be anything out here.”

  Something in me wanted to say come in, but Ira and I looked at each other, something didn’t seem right about his insistence. “We can’t let you in,” Ira said. “This isn’t our cabin; it doesn’t belong to us.” At that moment, a hint of sun shown through the trees.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, slinking off and disappearing quickly. “I’ll be back tonight!”

  “Did that guy creep you out as much as he did me?” Ira said. “Where’s he going to go if the diner is ten miles away? I don’t think there’s a diner in this vicinity anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying not to show just how much it all had creeped me out.

  “He had blood on his neck, it looked like,” she said, “and I don’t like how he said he’d be back tonight. I think we should get some more guns and have them ready for tonight.”

  That day, we prepared ourselves. We closed off parts of the cabin, and we booby-trapped doors so we would hear metals crashing down if someone came through them. We dimmed the lights and waited, guns in hand. Peering out of the curtain, we sat close to each other and talked until it was night. “Peter,” she said, “I want to say sorry about what I said to you that first day we met. I’m so sorry I called you that. There is no excuse. I was having a very, very bad day.”

  “What do you mean, when you called me dead weight?” I said, nodding as if to say forget about forgiveness.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” she said, looking down, embarrassed. “I want to give you something.” She pulled out an old CD player and a burned disc.

  “So on top of everything, you’re a pirate, too?”

  “Huh?” she said. “I own the copy, this is the backup!”

  “Where did you get this from?” I asked.

  “It’s my favorite song; I’ve had this for awhile. I keep it for when we come up here. The song is called ‘Beautifully Undone;’ it’s by Lindy. Promise you’ll listen to it some night,” she said. I promised her I would, and then that movie moment happened, our eyes locked in unison. It was like flying down that road again. I closed my eyes as our lips met. They say your whole life flashes in front of you when you are about to die, but every moment I had spent with Ira was flashing in front of me. My lips kept getting tangled in her hair while going in for more kissing.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Well, that was amazing,” she said. And then we heard a knock at the door. We grabbed the guns, Ira walked to the door.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “It’s me,” the voice said.

  Ira lowered her gun. “It’s my boyfriend,” she whispered.

  “I don’t know if we can trust him,” I said, “timing’s a bit strange.”

  She motioned for me to hold my gun toward the door as she opened the lock. “Thank goodness you’re up,” he said as he walked in.

  “Nice to be inside?”

  “I was invited. And who are you?”

  “That’s Peter,” Ira said.

  “Well, to me he looks like dinner.” He slammed the door and he leaped over on me and my chair flipped over. Ira ran at him and tried to pull him off, but he backhanded her. So much for a shotgun shootout. That’s when I noticed his face was changing. Rows of skin began falling off to reveal a face that would haunt my nightmares. His teeth began to grow into spiraled fangs as slobber and maggots fell out of his mouth. For the first time in a long time, I felt helpless, and looking at Ira, I could tell she was almost unconscious. My gun was across the floor. Ira’s words about inviting her boyfriend up came back to me; he’d been invited, whatever that meant.

  He picked me up and threw me into the firewood stack. I screamed in agony, feeling the shock to my upper body. I wrestled my hand on one sharp piece, while he walked closer and closer. “I’m going to rip out every organ of yours, and when you’re done, I’m going to suck every drop of blood out of her,” he said, looking at Ira with his bloodshot, glowing eyes. I prepared to jam the sharp piece into him. I knew this was probably it for us.

  He got closer, and I managed to stab him in the shoulder as he was about to lift me again. Black blood spewed forth. He pulled the wood out, and the noise it made coming out was disgusting. He was about to grab me again, but right then his head exploded, the splatter of parts hitting the floor. Zen had put a shotgun shell in his head, shattering the moment.

  My mouth gaped open. I was having a hard time recovering from what just had happened, and having a hard time catching my breath. My breath had reverted back to how it felt when I was just recovering from my injury; back then, it was easy to get winded. They’d said my breathing might be affected for life, most times it wasn’t an issue. Here, now, it was an issue.

  “I think we are safe now,” Zen said, pulling out a pack of cigars and placing them on a table. He then started helping now-fully conscious Ira to her feet.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Ira.

  “Yes,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said, “just let me rest here a bit. That was insane. How did you know, Zen?”

  “Just a coincidence,” he said.

  “A coincidence?” I said.

  “Just luck,” Zen said.

  “Luck?” I said, feeling uneasy at the fact that just sheer luck had saved us. This could have been it; we’d be done if Zen hadn’t decided to return from hunting. I knew I’d grapple with this for months.

  “I had a feeling I should return,” Zen said, “I just thank you for helping save Ira and yourself. Had you not slowed it down, I would not have made it in time.”

  Just at that moment, the door flew open again, and a black figure darted in and caught on fire, exploding as pieces of skin flew everywhere. I screamed, “What was that?”

  “A hybrid,” Zen said.

  “A hybrid what?” I asked, while looking at a startled Ira.

  Zen helped me into my chair. “Hybrid, it happens when a vampire feeds off a zombie. The zombie becomes a hybrid. Except it is just as mindless as a zombie, so it didn’t know it wasn’t invited in. The hybrid seems to still have to follow the rules like any other vampire. From what we understand, the vampires can mind control the hybrid to a certain extinct.”

  “What else they can do?”

  “We don’t really know yet.”

  “We? Who is we?” I asked wondering if I was going to finally find out more about Zen. “And wait, vampires, vampires exist?” I told Ira everything that happened when she was almost unconscious and Ira told Zen about the guy who said he’d be coming bac
k that night. Ira looked at where Sonny was laying and I saw her tear up.

  “They can’t get in,” Zen said, “unless invited. I think they learned about this place from Ira’s boyfriend, and they sent him. We just have to be a bit more cautious for awhile. In before sundown. I could not believe what I was hearing, vampires I asked again. Zen began to speak, the ‘we’ I mentioned, Peter, is us, the bastards who created this mess. This is the war on terror brought to our very doorsteps. What color are terrorists? They can be any color, and the color green fuels a lot. Money pushes everything, and many are bought and paid for by someone. I used to be untouchable, but they found the thing I couldn’t resist, in return for my skills. I never knew that this would happen, never knew that what I was studying for them would become this, people being infected by a virus. Ira knows part of this, and it’s time we told you about my involvement in all this, Peter.” He handed us crosses to put on. “Are you a believer, Peter?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “my grandmother used to take us to church, but I have not been in a long time.”

  Zen said, “It’s good; I believe it gives us more of a chance in this new world. Then, he began again: “When I was told about these things, I didn’t want to believe it, but this matches the research we were doing. See, I was told that I’d be given something very precious if I helped them find the answers they wanted: a cure, a cure for Ira, my lovely daughter. You see, since birth, she’s had a problem.” Ira looked at him and nodded yes.

  “Peter, Ira has HIV. She was born with it; her mother had it. I don’t. We knew that there was a risk, and we took it. At first I thought we had committed a sin against Ira. I don’t regret taking the chance now, it gave me Ira and the only thing left of her mother I have. Ira’s mother passed away from AIDS; she slipped away as Ira held her in her arms, I’ll always remember her eyes, the beauty surrounded by the darkness. She asked Ira to put her lipstick on, she knew she was leaving, and she passed away on the loveliest day I have ever seen, fitting for the loveliest person I have ever known.

  “Ira had to live through that. She saw what her disease did to her own mom; she accepted that it could do the same thing to her one day. So when they said that there was this cure and I could have it. I thought it was a lie, but I had to see. I knew that I could not lose Ira like that. If I could cure Ira, I could cure others, I could copy it, but it was crazy to think they would let me. That day she was born, holding her in my arms. I looked at her little face, and it was perfect.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Ira.

  “Why should I have, Peter? You think people treat you strange?” She glanced at me with a half smile. “When you tell people you have HIV, do you know what they say to you? They say, they say you have AIDS. They don’t even know the difference. I had a friend I used to play with, I told her about it, and she asked her parents. They forbid her to ever play with me again. From that moment I never told anyone. Only Zen, that poor bastard with his brains blown out tonight, and the cocktail I take ever single day of my life to keep my T cell count undetectable. This, while I wait for a cure that never comes, it is always a promise, never a reality.”

  “The best I could do for Ira is get her a special cocktail,” Zen said puffing the Cuban. “It’s kept her in great range and she doesn’t have to take it as much as the market stuff. I know it’s prolonged her life all. You guys wash up and get some sleep,” Zen instructed, “I’ll take care of this and watch out. Just try to digest tonight, Peter, tomorrow we have much more to talk about. I’ll be up watching, not going to get any sleep tonight anyway.”

  I couldn’t argue at that point, I wanted to know more, but there was so much to digest it was crazy. I lay in bed thinking of what Zen had said, wondering about his total part in this. I felt queasy that we’d come so close to our demise, despite all of our plans, and I was listening for every sound in the cabin. Zombies were absurd, but vampires made everything a whole other level of what the hell. This was some strange nightmare. I thought about Ira; now I understood her temperament a bit more. She didn’t knock on the door to lay with me that night. I wonder if she felt I would shun her, but I just missed having her there.

  I did not think I’d sleep, but that night I dreamt of people, of a girl, her name was Fran. It was a weird dream, she was trying to tell me we were related, and then I woke up. The morning started pretty normal. Yeah, right! I asked Zen what he’d done to the body.

  “I buried it as deep as I could,” he said nodding, “wouldn’t want those things getting a hold of the scent. Peter you know where this started? In Tijuana, Mexico. There were so many deaths and nobody cared, nobody investigated. Thousands of slayings in Mexico. I drove to Mexico, and it took me very little time to find what I was looking for: victims with gaping holes in their necks. We turned our backs on Mexico, maybe this is our punishment. These vampires have been hiding in plain sight. That’s the funny thing about our world: Everything is in plain sight, most of it beautifully hidden under the word ‘conspiracy.’ They count on that, the public has been marvelously trained to label everything a tinfoil conspiracy. It gives people like me the opportunity to operate safely in the shadows.”

  “You mean the Illuminati?” I asked. “Is all that true?”

  “Well, sort of,” Zen said. “Cut on your radio, listen to your playlist, and notice how many songs mention the word light, to illuminate. Every other song? The Illuminati exist, but we are not them, we’re your government, and there’s a difference. Vampires are real, the blood-sucking, and those that are greedy for money. Seeing the world in chaos seems like the perfect time for the vampires to complete their agenda.”

  “What is that?” I asked Zen.

  “Food,” he said.

  Ira entered the room. “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning,” I said back. “Where were you last night?” I asked, noticing her fluffy bunny slippers. “Seriously?” I said as I looked down at them, shaking my head. “Your feet work, and that’s what you do to them?” She broke into a smile. “I missed talking with you,” I told her.

  “I just needed to be alone,” she said. “I just, I dunno…I wasn’t really prepared for all that happened yesterday. Ya know? I’ll be there tonight if that’s okay. I can’t believe Sonny attacked us. We’d been having problems, but he’s dead now. He wasn’t the best person, but he accepted me for who I was.”

  “That wasn’t Sonny,” Zen said, “that was what was left of him. I could attack you under that circumstance Ira, this is a different game we’re playing now, and you have to be on guard. I told you about the virus, but not much about these other things. This was the other thing my colleague told me that I said I’d tell you about later, he informed me that they had found out that vampires existed. Something we didn’t create. The vampires are cunning. They will use what you know against you. One day I will tell you two the story of Zero Laboratory in Alaska.”

  I took that moment to thank Ira and Zen. “I don’t know what I would have done without you and Zen. You guys have been great to me; I’d have likely been alone. My uncle oddly had not been in touch with me; I couldn’t find him for weeks before this happened. I’m happy to be here. Zen, if you hadn’t helped me into the camper that day, I hate to think where I would be.” Ira looked like she was about to tear up. “Come on, Ira,” I said, “don’t go getting soft on me. So, Zen tell me more.”

  “Peter, it will make you think less of me.”

  “Zen,” I said, noticing his expression, “as far as I’m concerned, you are a kind and caring person, that’s not going to change.”

  “Okay, Peter. I went to Mexico because they told me to. We started finding victims drained of blood with gaping holes; all the bodies were decapitated. I took DNA samples from some of these victims. The DNA came from the bites of victims that had been torn apart, literally; it was like nothing I’d ever seen. I had my suspicions, but some people said it was an unknown animal causing it. I think they knew it wasn’t a normalds animal. Under
the microscope you could see how it would change radically in ways regular samples did not.

  “Many people quit the project out of fear, and perhaps they were the moral ones. The rest of us, we began injecting insects, and nothing would happen at first. We injected pigs with the DNA. It killed most of them, and the ones it didn’t kill, it didn’t seem to have an effect on until we found out it created a flu. At first, this flu went undetected, as no one knew what to look for, but those close to the project, we knew we were on to something with this DNA, so the tests continued. That’s when we noticed the flu one of the pigs had somehow contracted; it was so much like regular swine flu, just with subtle variations.

  “Then, we moved on to mice, but nothing happened until we remixed the vampire bite DNA with the rare flu we found in the swine. We came up with the idea to inject a dead mouse with the concoction. It reanimated the dead mouse. Something about seeing that first mouse let me know I wanted to stop, but I was in too deep by this time. At the time, I didn’t know if we’d already gone too far. Those mice scratched or bit each other, causing all of them to get sick, die, and reanimate.

  “The higher-ups ordered that human tests be done. I refused. I told them I would not work with humans. They wanted me, so they told me they could definitely cure Ira. They convinced me that they had a cure, and it would be mine if I continued to work with the testing, and I told them no at first. Have you ever heard of the Rohingyas? They are the most persecuted people in the world. And you have never heard of them, right? Well, in Burma is where human testing began. I took a reserved role. The scientists there thought they’d found the ultimate bio-weapon with this flu, but guess what they found? That this thing sickened people with brown skin only, but not people with white skin, and they were overjoyed. But I wasn’t, I was done.

  “They didn’t get humans to reanimate though, but could reorder the Middle East, which has long been a dream; we could sicken any opposing army without it affecting white people. That is where I lost contact with the project. I fell off the radar for a year, until a week ago when I was contacted by a friend still with the project. He told me to get ready and that they had gone further than we’d ever imagined. They’d found that the virus mutated at an insane rate. They’d found out how this virus turned anyone who got it into a zombie, and how it could be passed on from one person to the next, that another mutation caused the people who were infected to crave flesh, and as we feared, it would be out of control soon and a cure was not likely. This colleague also said that a cure for Ira does exist. I don’t know what to believe in that regard. So, I blame myself for having anything to do with this, but science always made me want to see what was next and love almost took me there.”