by Hetzer, Paul
A PERMUTED PRESS book
Published at Smashwords
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-462-2
Children of the Damned (The Zombie Virus 2) copyright © 2014
by Paul Hetzer
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by David Walker
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
I would sincerely like to thank:
Joseph R. Labrosse II 1SG US ARMY for helping me keep the areas of the story where his expertise is relevant as realistic as possible,
My wife for her patience and support,
Angela Reese for her wonderful help with the manuscript.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
About the Author
Chapter One
The creature peered out from the thick underbrush at its prey while the steamy vapor of its silent breath wrapped misty white tendrils around the thick mass of dark hair on its head. Its blood-red eyes followed every movement through the brightly colored fall foliage that shrouded it from the view of the animal in the clearing. Hunger gnawed painfully at its belly, driving the uncontrollable rage that coursed through its body to a nearly unbearable level.
Pickings had been slim lately and it was only luck that it had stumbled onto the edge of this clearing that held the promise of filling that painful void in its stomach. In the past weeks it had fed on an eclectic diet ranging from insects to snakes, and to even a creature such as the one sitting by a fire in the clearing before it. To an animal living on the edge of starvation, everything that slithered, walked, or crawled was potential sustenance. Unlike other creatures that killed only for survival, the all-consuming hate that burned within its brain forced it to kill to quench that murderous rage, however temporary.
It quietly swatted at a swarm of bothersome gnats that clouded around its filthy, hair-covered face. Hunger and the interminable pain that filled its head were its only realities anymore; that, coupled with an unrecognized but inherent drive to remain a member of its pack on which it sometimes depended for its survival was a part of its relatively simple, uncomplicated existence. At one point in its past, it, like the rest of its pack mates, had been domesticated, even though the part of its brain that allowed for that existence had been devastated. Now it and its companions were as feral, if not more so, than any animal living in the wilds. With little reasoning skills, only instinct drove its actions.
Instinctively, it knew that it had to find nourishment, both for itself and the pregnant female that was part of its pack. It felt no sense of love or responsibility to the female it had impregnated, just some basic impulse that drove it to provide food for her while she convalesced. In fact it did not understand that she was pregnant with his offspring, or even the concept of pregnancy. Most of its reasoning and thinking ability had been nearly wiped out, nearly.
Ghost images of times past still haunted its ravaged mind, images in which it had no concept of their meaning. Its day to day activities were mostly driven by its body’s base needs, controlled by instinctive urges which had been inherent though suppressed in its species for eons immeasurable.
However, it was learning. A kind of equilibrium had been reached in its brain with the virus that had originally decimated that complicated organ, and parts had begun to heal. Lost functions had been rerouted to other viable sections of the brain that the infection had not touched. In the regenerated tissue, new memories were being stored and some basic reasoning skills learned and retained. It would never be what it was. It was becoming something different, something new.
That was how it had learned how to hunt this prey that looked so much like its own kind, although it didn’t have the familiar scent that itself, and others like it, emitted. He and his pack had hunted these creatures before, and each time retained some of the knowledge of those previous hunts to use whenever an opportunity such as this presented itself.
It perceived something analogous to an extreme hatred toward the creature it was stalking, as it did toward any living creature that was not its own kind. It didn’t know why or even have the intelligence to construct such a question. It simply felt an overpowering rage whenever it came close to one of them that drove it to want to destroy them at all costs. That, along with the hunger twisting its guts into painful knots, destined its actions this night. Only the fire caused it to hesitate as some primordial fear held its need to kill in check. Yet it was also drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. Some memory persisted of the comforting heat that was associated with the crackling yellow-orange tendrils of plasma that danced along the glowing wood. Unlike many others of its kind, it had developed the ability to override the maddening impulse that had previously forced it to attack and kill these hated creatures on sight. So it now had the ability to unconsciously fight the rage that incessantly urged it to blindly leap forth and kill.
One other thing it had learned about a successful hunt was patience.
Jeremy McQuinn threw the twigs and branches he had gathered from around the clearing on the burning pile of the fire a few feet from the softly gurgling stream. He wanted to have the fire roaring before the light faded completely and the chill of the autumn night descended heavily onto this mountainous slope deep in the Blue Ridge chain. His heavy pack lay canted against an old fallen tree where he had dumped it after stumbling exhausted into the clearing next to the brook. He had left the highway less than an hour ago looking for a safe place to camp. It had been days since his last encounter with a Loony. However, he knew that staying too close to the highway was an invitation for those unwanted guests to appear.
He kept his Sig P556 AR pistol slung tight to his chest, a Springfield XDM 9mm handgun on his hip, while the suppressed Sig Mosquito .22 pistol was always in his hip pouch. He had learned hard lessons about letting his firearms get too far from his reach. What was a ten year old kid to do when the monsters from his nightmares ended up becoming a reality? For Jeremy, his options were to curl up in a ball and hide his head in his hands, or buck up and deal with the fears, and then deal with the monsters. One other thing he had learned, when you’re up against a determined enemy, you can never have too much firepower.
It had been over three weeks since he had learned that lesson while he had been sleeping in an abandoned trailer east of the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. He had relied on his knowledge that the Loonies also slept at night to keep him safe from any encounters with the creatures while he slept in an old musty bed he had found in the small bedroom of the ramshackle trailer. Its sheets had been thrown back as if the owner had only left that morning. He had tossed his pack and firearms on the couch in the living room after carefully entering through the front door, then wearily made his way down the carpeted hall to the musty smelling bedroom. Once there he had collapsed fully clothed onto the lumpy mattress and fallen immediately into a deep, exhausted sleep.
He remembered dreaming about being in his grade school classroom with his best friend Sean.
Sean’s cherub-like face smiled at him while he stuck a large bore straw between his puckered lips. They were having a spitball fight with a couple of other boys before the teacher showed to start the morning class. The fight was interrupted by his teacher, Miss Margel, and several others of the school staff banging on the classroom windows and snarling madly at them. The teachers’ eyes had glowed with a bright red light as if a hot flame burned deep within their skulls. An arm had suddenly burst through the window in a shower of glass and grabbed him violently by the front of his shirt. He was viciously yanked toward one of their large gaping, tooth-filled jaws. He screamed in his dream and awoke struggling with the sheets and covered in sweat. The dream seemed to follow him into his waking awareness. There was a banging on the aluminum of the trailer around the bedroom window. He stared out the dark window and saw the darker shadow of a face peering through the screen back at him. He really did scream that time and the creature he called a ‘Loony’ slammed its fist through the screen, sending the entire fixture careening into the bedroom. Other growls and snarls could be heard behind the one that was rapidly pulling itself through the open window.
Jeremy’s groggy mind came instantly alert and he rolled out of the bed on the opposite side from the intruding creature. He frantically searched around for his weapons before remembering that he had left them in the living room down the hallway. Already sounds of more Loonies breaching the front door of the trailer reached his ears. He knew that he was trapped and would be dead if he couldn’t get to his guns before they got their hands on him. Adrenaline coursed through his veins adding a burst of speed to his legs and he dove out the bedroom door just as a large, naked, filthy male Loony with a long, scraggly beard and gray hair lunged at him across the bed. He felt its long, dirty nails snag on his pant leg briefly before he twisted out of its reach and sprinted down the dark hallway directly into the arms of two naked women. When he ran into them, they tumbled over like bowling pins and all three fell in a heap onto the carpeted floor. His face had fallen between the two pendulous jugs of the heavier of the two and she locked her baggy arms around him, smothering him in the folds of her sweaty, abhorrent flesh.
He somehow struggled free from her frantic, grasping hands and jumped over her while her companion pushed out from underneath both of their bodies. He kicked the smaller woman in the teeth as hard as he could with his small boots and was rewarded with a bone-jarring crunch when the toe of his boot punched through several of her teeth. He then stumbled across their snarling writhing bodies and dove for the couch where his .223 pistol lay darkly on the paisley cushion. With barely a second to spare he grabbed up the pistol and rolled onto his back, thumbing the safety off and pulling the trigger when the sights had found his first target, the shadowy figure of the gray-haired man who had been striding over the two prone women as if they didn’t even exist. The first three rounds slammed into the man’s chest, punching through his rib cage and exploding out his back, sending bits of spinal cord and bone back down the hallway and killing him instantly. The man’s momentum carried him into the living room where he fell in a heap at Jeremy’s feet.
The two women, one old and fat, the other the polar opposite – young and skinny, climbed to their feet and faced the young boy. The skinny one, with blood pouring down her chin from her rendezvous with Jeremy’s boot was in front and snarling like a cornered badger. Jeremy shot her through the left eye, scattering her brains across the wall and the face of the fat Loony. Before the skinny one could even collapse the fat one had swatted her aside and charged forward on her elephantine legs. Jeremy’s first shot hit her in one of her watermelon sized breasts. The bullet had over-pressurized that ponderous gland as it tore through into her chest, causing the monstrous tit to rupture in a spray of red. He immediately fired another round that slammed into her sternum, adding its shattered, bony splinters to the twenty-two caliber projectile that shredded her heart and lungs. She toppled like an old rotted tree onto the body of the gray haired man and lay there with one leg spasming gruesomely while Jeremy had looked on in horrific awe.
He had never again left his firearms out of reach.
For the first week on the road by himself, he had cried himself to sleep every night, pining for his mother Holly and his father Steven, and the friends and family he had left behind and would probably never see again. Yet over the ensuing weeks, while he fought countless battles to survive, alone in a post-apocalyptic world, something hardened in him. His childhood innocence was replaced by a maturing outlook of what the world had really become for him. He was only ten years old, nonetheless his mind’s thought processes were forced to operate at a level of someone much older. The tears stopped flowing one night and he willed them never to come again.
The creatures that his father had named ‘Loonies’ had once been normal humans until a worldwide virus had erupted, decoded from their own DNA. With a rapidly evolving infection, the virus had devastated the functioning parts of the brain that defined people as human beings, and left a feral animal behind that was mad with a killer lust. One bite from an infected individual almost assuredly would spread the infection to the new victim who would in short time become one of the Loonies. After trying to escape a horde of the infected, he had been separated from his parents and Kera, another survivor. He had tried to go back, however his big biker friend Frank had prevented him, probably saving his life. The two had then escaped into the countryside together. He later lost Frank to a pack of Loonies and had been on his own ever since.
Jeremy removed a can of ravioli that he had liberated from a home yesterday and proceeded to force open the top of it with a penknife. After he had cut free one half of the top he bent it back and then wedged the can in between some white hot coals of the now softly glowing fire. He sat next to his pack with his back against the soft, rotten wood of the old log and looked out across the small babbling brook as darkness gradually enveloped the area. His ears were on alert for any sounds other then the chorus of nocturnal insects chiming in the chilly night air.
When the can of food was steaming, he worked it out of the fire with a stick and the balled up cloth from an extra shirt. He sat eating and savoring the food in silence, pleased with himself and his progress so far. Tomorrow he would have to find a car that still had some juice in its battery so he could run the GPS unit and pinpoint the direction he should be headed next.
When he was finished with his meal he carelessly tossed the can aside and proceeded to spread out his thin sleeping bag on the ground between the cold water of the stream and the warmth of the fire. After throwing a few more branches on the dying fire, bringing it back to life in a brilliant shower of embers and flame, he checked each of his firearms to make sure they were ready and then crawled in between the cool fabric of the bag. He closed his eyes and within minutes was deeply asleep.
The symphony of insect noises emanating from the thick forest around the boy ceased as the creature that had once been a man crawled out from the underbrush on all fours. It chomped its teeth together in anticipation of its upcoming kill, saliva dripping in stringlets from its toothy mouth. Its blood red eyes locked on the dark bundle which steadily rose and fell with each breath its intended victim took. It skirted around the fire, giving it a respectable birth while the contradictory urges played tug-of-war in its diseased brain. It crawled stealthily forward, its knee knocked into a rock sending it into another with a loud ‘clack’ and it froze in place, blending motionlessly with its background.
Jeremy came fully awake, his finger going instinctively to the handgrip of the 9mm pistol he had tucked in the sleeping bag with him, his ears on high alert for whatever noise had awoken him from his sleep. The fire had dwindled back to a few glowing orange coals and barely cast any light beyond a few feet from its lightly smoking pile.
The hair on the back of his neck stood on end when he spotted a dark shape lying immobile on the other side of the fire. As his eyes adjusted he traced the outlines of the form of a large man. Dark
, matted hair covered its angular face and seemed to hang down like dog ears on each side of its head. Jeremy could see that its muscular body was also covered in a thick growth of coarse, dark hair. It crouched there stock-still, its amber eyes locked steadily onto Jeremy’s, reflecting the dying light of the fire.
Jeremy slowly withdrew his arm holding the pistol until it was free of the confining bag and began to lift the gun toward the dark shape.
The creature saw the movement and instinctively knew it had been spotted. It howled a demented snarl and propelled itself with powerful legs over the glow of the fire, its mouth open and arms thrown wide as it pounced on its prey.
Jeremy drew in a loud breath as the thing launched itself over the fire at him, growling with a mad rage. Unconsciously he raised the handgun, his finger tightening on the trigger. The small glowing dot of the front sight hastily covered the dark, leaping shape of the naked man. The gun fired loudly in the quiet clearing right when the creature slammed into the boy and they both rolled the few feet into the fast running stream. The handgun flew from Jeremy’s grasp when he hit the water with the snarling creature on top of him. Water covered him and filled the sleeping bag, trapping him in its chilly, wet cocoon. The creature’s powerful weight pressed down tightly on him, forcing his head under the breathtakingly cold water, the back of his head grinding into the rocks and sand of the streambed. In a building panic he pummeled the creature with his arms trying to get free of the smothering weight of the man-creature and regain the surface where he could breathe. Finally, his head broke free of the water and he sucked in a loud lungful of sweet air while the creature struggled with the wet bulk of the sleeping bag. Jeremy at last pulled free of the clingy wet material and clamored backwards through the water away from the rampaging killer.