AniZombie

by Ricky Sides

  “I’ll remember all that,” she said. “Thank you again.”

  Randy and Herb watched the woman drive away, and then they got back in the vehicles.

  Erma had fallen asleep while she waited for the men to get Shaunna’s car ready for the road. The lack of sleep the night before had caught up with the woman who had her head laid back against the headrest in the truck. She never even stirred as Herb steered the Ford around the zombies and they resumed their journey to his cabin.

  Herb debated the idea of stopping for more fuel, but decided that that could wait. Erma was exhausted, so she was asleep at the moment, but when she woke up, she would want to check on the computers and external hard drives to see if the experimental data was still available.

  Randy led the way. Soon they turned off Interstate 40 and started the slower drive along the back roads to Herb’s cabin.

  The country road they were driving along was sparsely populated, which caused Herb to relax. The last thing he expected in such a rural environment was to encounter a serious zombie threat. Therefore, he was shocked when he rounded a curve and saw Randy breaking hard in front of him. Unlike the last stop, this time Randy hadn’t feathered the brake to alert him.

  Herb slammed on the brakes in an effort to keep from rear ending his truck. The arrested momentum caused the still sleeping woman beside him to fall forward, but he stretched out his right arm to catch her before her head could hit the windshield.

  As the Ford stopped, he pushed the still groggy woman back in her seat, and then he stared out the windshield to see what caused his friend to stop so precipitously. His eyes narrowed in consternation as he saw a group of men and women walking out of a yard and onto the surface of the road. Then he noticed that trademark moaning sound that the zombies made when they were seeking their intended prey. He looked closer and saw that the seven or eight individuals were zombies. They had been on the lawn of a well kept, wood frame house, but had moved out into the road as Randy approached.

  Herb leapt out of the Ford with his rifle and the pistol on his belt.

  Randy didn’t have time to get his rifle out from behind the seat. Instead, he exited the truck with his Berretta and stood behind the door as he aimed at the nearest zombie and fired.

  Herb instinctively went for the high ground, stepping on the back bumper and vaulting into the back of his truck. He moved up toward the cab as Randy fired the first shot. To his horror, Herb saw that the zombies were within ten feet of his friend. He leveled his rifle at the closest pair and fired a three round burst, moving the barrel from left to right as he fired. His bullets hit the chest of two of the zombies, slowing, but not terminating them. He then sighted in and fired a single shot to the head of one of the creatures as Randy’s second shot took down another.

  Shots rang out from the house and Herb saw another zombie fall with a good portion of its head missing. He wondered who was helping them, but didn’t dare take his eyes off the remaining zombies to try to find out.

  Randy fired three more rounds in rapid succession. His bullets hit the chest and face of a zombie that had closed to within five feet of him.

  Herb’s next round took out a large female zombie, whose face and neck had been ravaged while she lived. Most of her lower lip and all of her upper was missing. His bullet hit her in the forehead, ending her moaning.

  Another shot rang out from the house, and the last zombie fell when most of its head exploded, causing Herb to wonder what weapon their mysterious ally was firing.

  “Are you folks okay?” asked a grizzled old man who stepped out onto the front porch of the old wooden house.

  “We are now,” Herb responded.

  “I want to thank you two. Those things had me cornered in the house for hours. I was afraid they’d separate and try several entry ways at the same time, but they never did, so I was able to wait them out.”

  “Where did they come from?” Randy asked as he reloaded his pistol.

  “The farmhouse down the road. That’s the Jernigan family. I’ve known them for twenty years. They were some of the best people in this area. Always there to lend a helping hand if anyone needed it. I don’t know why they took a notion to try to get to me, but I’m sure glad you two guys came along when you did.”

  “We need to get moving. Are you going to be okay here, sir?” Herb asked.

  “No, but that’s my problem, not yours. I appreciate the help,” the old man said.

  “What’s wrong?” Herb asked.

  “They broke down my front door, and I had to keep shooting at them to hold them off. I fired my last two shots just now, so I am out of ammunition. I’m surprised it even fired at all. I haven’t shot this old shotgun in a good twenty years.”

  “You can’t stay here unarmed. If these things found you, others probably will too.”

  “I’ve got nowhere to go, and no money to get there with. The government didn’t send me my retirement check this month,” the old man explained.

  “Henry! Are you okay out there?” an old woman yelled from the porch.

  “I’m fine, Martha,” the old man yelled back.

  “Herb! I see more zombies behind the trailer! They must have heard the shooting!” Randy yelled.

  “How far out?” Herb enquired.

  Randy had recovered his rifle as his friend spoke to the old man. He looked through his scope and made his best estimate when he replied, “At least two hundred yards.”

  “How many?”

  “Nine at the moment, but I think more are converging on them from the right!”

  “Henry, get your wife and get in the truck. Bring that shotgun with you. I might have ammo for that at the cabin.”

  Henry was a proud and stubborn man. He would have refused the offer of assistance from the strangers, but he had seen enough on the news to know that the zombies would kill his beloved wife, making her one of them, and that brought a fear to his heart so great that no amount of pride would permit him to refuse the offer. “Let’s go, woman,” he said. “We’re going with them.”

  “You need your heart medicine,” Martha argued. “I’ll go get it!”

  “No, Martha!” the old man yelled, but it was no use. His wife had entered the house.

  “Go get her. While you’re at it, get any medicine you two need, but hurry. We’ll hold them off as long as we can, but there are a lot of them.”

  “I’ll be right back,” the old man promised and then he hurried up to the porch.

  Herb was turning back toward Randy when movement on the other side of the road and behind his friend’s field of view captured his attention. Three zombies had apparently left the house across the road and were stepping onto the asphalt when Herb saw them.

  “Look out!” Herb shouted, and then he sighted on the first zombie and squeezed the trigger. That zombie dropped to the asphalt, permitting Herb to sight on the second.

  Randy spun around in time to see the two remaining zombies just six feet away. He fired his rifle at the closer of the two at the same time that Herb fired his second shot. Both rounds hit the zombie in the head.

  Herb heard a woman scream and glanced toward the house, but then the woman screamed a second time and he turned his attention toward the Ford truck where Erma was waiting. He saw a zombie standing on the running board and pawing at the passenger window. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired the moment he had target acquisition. The rushed shot wasn’t his best shooting, but it did hit the zombie in the ribs. The round did the job of dislodging the creature from the truck. It started to get up and Herb’s second bullet hit it in the head.

  Randy killed the remaining zombie that had come at him from behind, and then he shifted his attention back to the oncoming zombies. He began to fire in a rhythmic manner that indicated he was targeting the creatures carefully before firing.

  Herb added his rifle fire to that of his friend. Then, just as rapidly as it had begun, the firing ended. No zombies were left standing.

  Henry and
Martha came back out of the house and made their way to the trucks. “I brought some food too,” Martha said. “It was already packed. I knew we should leave when I saw those demons outside earlier.”

  “Throw your stuff in the back and get in the cab of this truck,” Herb instructed the old couple. He climbed down from the bed of his truck and looked at Randy. “You okay, buddy?”

  “Yeah, but that was too close.”

  “Yes, it was,” Herb agreed. Then he said, “Get moving. Get them to the cabin. We’ll be right behind you.”

  As the men drove the trucks away from the dead zombies, they didn’t see the crows that left the nearby corn field and descended upon the bodies. The birds went after the choicest bits of dangling flesh. When they had gorged themselves on the dead, they took to the air. Later, the Jernigan’s dog wandered over to the bodies of its former masters and whined. It licked the face of the dead woman who had raised it from a pup, cleaning bits of blood from the woman’s ravaged visage. The animal sat beside the bodies for two hours, and then it got to its feet and wandered away.

  The dog hadn’t been fed in two days, so it was hungry. Its hunger drove it to loping down the side of the road, looking for food. It sniffed at the bodies of the dead zombies, but they no longer smelled like food to him, so he moved on. At a crossroads, the dog scented something that did smell like food. He saw a woman feeding her cat and waited patiently for her to enter the house. When she did, he ran over, chased the cat away from the food dish, and fell upon the cat food with a ravenous hunger.

  It had almost finished eating the food when its fleas drove it to distraction. It scratched itself for several moments, as dogs do.

  The door opened and the woman saw the stray dog. “Get out of here you!” she yelled at the dog.

  Accustomed to obeying its masters, the dog fled.

  “Angel! Where are you, girl? Oh, there you are!” the woman said when she saw her cat. That bad old dog ate your food, didn’t he? Well, don’t you worry, sweetheart. Momma’s going to be right back with more.”

  The woman entered the house and soon returned with more food for her feline. She saw the cat finishing off the food that the dog had left behind. As she poured more, the cat sat on its haunches and began to scratch itself.

  The woman didn’t feel the two fleas that jumped on her legs as she headed back inside. It would be days before the minute quantity of Akins parasites, the diminutive creatures injected into her body, made her sick.

  The cat was a different matter. Dozens of fleas bit it. The feline was missing the next morning. It turned up several miles away in the backyard of a farm where it raided a chicken house. It killed and ate a young pullet, and fought off a large rooster that sought to defend the henhouse.

  The cat left well fed and none the worse for wear. The rooster had been bitten and clawed several times. Chickens are cannibals. They fell upon the remains of the pullet that the cat had left behind. Soon, the entire flock was infested with the Akins parasites.

  Chapter 15

  Guests

  “That was nice of you,” Erma said when Herb got back in the truck. “Oh, and thank you for protecting me earlier. I woke up to see the windshield rushing at my face. If you hadn’t stopped me, I would have hit it, and that would have been painful.”

  “You’re welcome. It seems things are escalating. This area seemed clear this morning.”

  “I know how this situation was resolved, but what about the woman in the car?”

  “She ran out of gas. We gave her ten gallons to get her to a service station. She should be all right.”

  “That was nice of you guys. You two seem to be in the rescue business today.”

  “That’s just the way things worked out. We didn’t plan on trying to save the world today. Just you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” asked Herb as he concentrated on driving.

  “Why did you two come to help me?”

  “Oh that why,” Herb said as he understood what she meant. “Speaking for myself, I did it for two reasons. The first is because you tried to help us, so I felt I should do the same.”

  “How did you know I needed help?”

  “We didn’t. Our plan was to locate you and keep our distance, if you were doing all right. Had that proven to be the case, you would have never known we were in the city. When we got to Little Rock and saw how desperate the situation was becoming, we decided to try to get you to call us. That was Randy’s idea. We were a little desperate ourselves at the time. When we saw the smoke from the fires in the direction of the university, we feared the worst and wanted to try to find you. He must have thought that you’d be listening to the radio for news, if you were able to do so.”

  “I was. I had begun to despair after the police refused to send help, but listening to the local news was better than listening to the occasional moaning zombie.”

  “You know, this discussion reminds me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask you. As we were talking on the phone while I was driving toward you at the university, you said Oliver had the key in the door.”

  “Yes, I recall that comment,” Erma said as she nodded her head.

  “How did you know that? You were inside the trailer when they were attacked.”

  “I saw it when I decided to make a break for the truck. It had been quiet for over an hour, so I thought maybe the zombies had all left the area. I opened the door and looked out to see where the bodies were located. I knew I’d have to search Oliver’s pocket for the key. I glanced at the door, thinking maybe he had already opened it, and that’s when I saw the key. That was also when the zombies in the area saw me. They started that God awful moaning, and I panicked and shut the door. I was too afraid they’d catch me before I could get inside the truck to even make the attempt. If I had been a little braver, you men wouldn’t have needed to risk your lives. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. You did the right thing. You might have made it, but the odds are that you wouldn’t have. Even if you had, unless you are experienced at hauling big loads, chances are you would have wrecked the trailer.”

  “Is it that hard to control?”

  “Not if you know how. The trick is in backing up, should you need to, and making turns wide enough that you don’t drag the load into another auto or the curb.”

  Erma grew silent and pensive. The silence stretched on so long that Herb said, “What’s wrong?”

  “What are we going to do?” she asked. “It seems everywhere we turn, the zombies are ahead of us. What happens if the government collapses before we can get this cure to them?”

  Herb shook his head. “I can’t answer that for you. I doubt anyone can with any real degree of accuracy. I have limited experience with this sort of thing. All I know is that the zombies overran Decatur in less than a week. The spread was slow at first, but now it seems to have accelerated wildly. Maybe they could have stopped it if they had nuked Decatur much sooner, but then again, maybe that wouldn’t have worked. The spread seems to have followed the Tennessee River. At least at first it did.”

  “You’re thinking it was waterborne?” asked Erma.

  “Possibly, hell, I don’t know. I get a headache trying to figure this thing out.”

  Erma laughed for the first time since Herb had known her. “I’m afraid that you and everyone at the CDC share that ailment. I know I’ve had my share of them.”

  They rode together in silence after that until they reached the dirt road that led to Herb’s cabin. Herb had trouble making the turn and had to stop and back the trailer a time or two before he could swing it onto the road without running into the ditch.

  “I see what you mean about the turns,” Erma said.

  “It’s no big deal, unless you’ve got a horde of zombies breathing down your neck,” Herb quipped.

  Herb’s phone rang and he struggled to answer it as he maneuvered the long trailer slowly along the rutted dirt road. “Where are you?” Randy asked when he activated the
phone.

  “We’re just starting up the drive. We had an issue turning in with the trailer,” he explained.

  “You got company at the cabin. Lots of company. I see two vehicles,” Randy explained.

  “Law enforcement?” asked Herb.

  “Not unless they are in unmarked cars. I stopped halfway up the drive to try to see who they are. Hang on while I use the binoculars to see what I can learn.”

  Herb stopped the truck. He knew that if he had to turn around at that location, they were screwed, and he doubted that he could back the trailer back out of the drive and onto the asphalt without having a serious accident. Several seconds stretched by as he waited. Finally, Randy said, “I don’t know who they all are, but one of them is Agent Marx.”

  “I guess we need to ride on up and see who the others are and what they want. I can’t turn around here, so we don’t have a lot of options. You be careful,” Herb advised his friend.

  “Roger that. I’m moving in to check them out.”

  “I’m on the way. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”

  The Ford handled the dirt road well enough, but the trailer was a problem. It lacked sufficient clearance for some of the washed out holes, so Herb had to maneuver the load with care.

  Soon, he was close enough to see his truck, which Randy was driving, as it stopped about fifty feet from the other vehicles. Men got out of two cars. Herb’s eyes fell on Agent Marx of Homeland Security and he groaned.

  Herb didn’t know the remaining three men, but apparently Erma did. She voiced a shout of joy. “They are members of the CDC team that was investigating the parasites,” she explained. “I was afraid they were all dead.”

  Herb stopped the Ford he was driving behind his truck and shut down the engine.

  “It’s good to see that they are here and can help you. Him, I’m not so sure about,” Herb said as he stared at Agent Marx.

  The agent heard his comment and frowned. “I’m not here to bring you grief, son,” he said. “I’m here because of Doctor Langley. I was heading for Little Rock when I learned that you two were already there.”