Depraved 2

by Bryan Smith

  A growing sense of horror overtook Jodi. “You killed a child? Oh, Sienna…how could you?”

  Sienna shrugged. “I had good intentions. And anyway, you’re a murderer, too, so you know what you can do with your bullshit righteous indignation.”

  Jodi dropped to her knees in front of Sienna. The lord was testing her something fierce today and she had tried her damnedest to cope and prove she was strong, but there was only so much she could take. She reached for her sister with a shaking hand. “Please pray with me, baby. I know somewhere inside you is a sweet, lost little girl, the girl I knew before everything went so terribly wrong. With God’s guidance, we can get the real you back again. We just have to pray hard enough.”

  For a long moment, that familiar dead-eyed look was in place again as Sienna stared down at Jodi. But then she smiled and said, “Okay. I’ll pray with you.”

  Jodi sobbed, her relief was so huge. She closed her eyes, clasped her hands together in supplication, and began to recite The Lord’s Prayer. Sienna’s voice joined with hers two lines into the prayer. The poor girl still knew it by heart, despite the darkness that had overtaken her. Of course she did. Jodi had made her say it hundreds of times that first dark year after their escape from Hopkins Bend.

  Jodi sensed movement and assumed Sienna had taken up a kneeling position at her side. Then she felt the cold touch of steel at her throat and instantly understood that her life was at an end. She opened her eyes and saw that the girl had taken a big carving knife from the knife block on the counter.

  Sienna wound a hand in Jodi’s hair and jerked her head up. “Here’s my prayer, sister dear. I pray this fucking hurts.”

  She dragged the knife across Jodi’s throat.

  Blood leaped from the gash in her flesh as Jodi fell over onto her back. She looked up to see her sister standing over her, a look of satisfaction on her face. The girl let the knife slip from her fingers and clatter on the linoleum.

  “You’re gonna wake up again, but you won’t really be you anymore.”

  The girl turned away from her and began to walk away. Her footsteps were the last thing Jodi ever heard.

  29.

  The mutilation of the redneck son of a bitch named Floyd brought Jessica some measure of visceral satisfaction. So did the coup de grace she delivered to the asshole’s head with Zelda’s gun a few minutes later. But the feeling didn’t last long. She was still in a desperate situation and now had no choice but to abandon her compromised place of refuge. Standing in her way was a host of possible foes. Somewhere in this town lurked a hidden military presence. They would be coming for her when Zelda failed to check in. And then there were the rednecks. She didn’t know where they’d come from or why they’d targeted her, but it was reasonable to assume there might be more of them. Also in play was this inexplicable zombie element. For all she knew, that could portend some serious wider world implications.

  Jessica laughed.

  At this point, I’d welcome a goddamn zombie apocalypse.

  There was nothing she could do about any of these complications except to go forth and deal with each of them to the best of her abilities as she encountered them. She for damn sure couldn’t waste any more time hanging out in this house.

  After grabbing her purse and slipping the strap over her shoulder, she gathered up as much of the weaponry scattered around the room as she could. She dropped the handguns in the purse and took the rifle, too. The more firepower she had at her disposal, the better. She took one last look around and decided there was nothing else worth taking. This place was lousy with her DNA, but somehow she doubted that would ever matter. Legit law enforcement would never get a look at the scene anyway.

  Satisfied she’d done all she could, Jessica left the living room and exited the house through the back. Though lights were on in the house, the backyard was still swamped in darkness. However, she was moving so fast and was so intent on getting out, she didn’t think to pause a moment and hunt for an exterior light switch.

  And so it was that she ran right into a resurrected Billy a split second after hauling the door open and rushing out onto the deck. She shrieked as she collided with him, the impact of it jarring the rifle from her hands. His hands clutched at her and his mouth was inches from his face. His fetid death breath made her gag as she recoiled and fell back against the door behind her. The zombie growled and came at her. She shrieked again and got her hands up in time to brace them against his chest and keep him from tearing out her throat.

  Maybe it was just her imagination, but she thought she detected a trace of actual anger in the sounds it was making. She doubted the creature was capable of anything but the most rudimentary thought processes so long after expiration, but perhaps there was some small trace of the person Billy had been somewhere inside its curdled brain. A fleeting wish she could tell him she was sorry for dragging him into this mess flitted through her head.

  But then the zombie took another lunge at her throat, this one so ferocious it pushed her hands back and allowed its teeth to come within grazing distance of her skin. Jessica kept her hands braced against its chest as hard as she could, but the creature had caught her off-balance. One more lunge at her throat and she would be dead. A change of tactics was necessary. So she shifted her weight as best she could and kicked out against the deck rail to her right to propel herself sideways. This jostled the creature enough to give her a couple precious extra inches of separation, which she immediately exploited by letting go of the shirt and ramming a forearm up under its jaw.

  The zombie continued to growl and paw at her, but she was able to keep its head tilted upward while she fumbled at her purse with her other hand. The dark and her precarious position made it difficult, but her hand finally slipped inside the purse and groped around for the guns. The zombie’s face pushed closer again as her fingers curled around the grip of the 9mm. A moment later the gun’s barrel was against the side of the creature’s head. She squeezed the trigger, the gun boomed, and the zombie toppled backward, landing with a crash against the wrought-iron table.

  Jessica sagged against the door, breathing heavily. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  She allowed herself only a moment to collect her wits. Speed and ruthless efficiency were what would get her through this. It was how she’d gotten out of so many other jams, by being deadlier and more unforgiving than anyone or anything opposing her. She was feeling centered again and ready to go within just a few seconds.

  Move, bitch.

  The thought was like the bark of a starter pistol at the beginning of a race. She dropped the 9mm in her purse, scooped up the rifle, and hurried down the steps to the overgrown yard. Hurrying through the tall grass en route to Billy’s truck, she heard something that gave her a chill, a low groan somewhere out there in the night. It wasn’t the kind of sound one of her military adversaries would make. They would be striving for stealth. A redneck cretin might have made a sound like that, but Jessica didn’t think it was likely.

  She climbed inside the truck, put the rifle in the previously empty gun rack behind the seats, and again rooted through her purse, this time hunting for the keys she’d taken from Billy earlier. The keys proved elusive at first and she had to take out the handguns and set them aside to conduct a more efficient search. Another groan came from somewhere out there in the night. It sounded closer this time.

  At last, Jessica’s fingers snared the key fob and she dragged the keys out of the purse. It took another few seconds to find the right one. Muttering gratitude to a deity that, if He existed, probably took a dim view of her recent activities, she jabbed it in the ignition slot and cranked the engine to life. The ensuing steady rumble reassured her. There wasn’t going to be any of that refusing to start horror movie crap here. After heaving a sigh of relief, she turned on the truck’s headlights.

  And saw the zombies.

  There were two of them standing out there in the tall grass. One was some fifteen yards directly in front of the truck, lit u
p like a perp caught in a cop’s spotlight. The other one was farther away. Their clothes were rags and what remained of their flesh was badly rotted. It was no big leap to figure these were resurrected original inhabitants of Hopkins Bend, victims of the massacre she’d helped instigate four years ago. The one right in front of her appeared to have been a man, judging by the tattered remnants of a football jersey hanging off his skeletal frame. His eye sockets were empty and he had a few lank locks of hair atop his brown skull.

  Jessica backed up until she reached the driveway, where she hit the gas after changing gears and getting the truck turned toward the street. The truck shot forward and she took a left turn out of the driveway, giving it the gas again as she hit the street. She was halfway to the end of the block when her headlights lit up a white Ford F-350 parked at the side of the road. She hesitated only a moment before stomping on the brake pedal and screeching to a stop next to the big Ford.

  She peered closely at it a moment as she debated what to do. The Ford’s windows were tinted, but it was a good bet no one was inside the vehicle. Her intuition told her it had belonged to the big redneck men who were no longer among the living. They had parked at the end of the street in an effort to avoid being heard. They had been hunting someone, she guessed, either herself or the black ops assassin turned zombie. Despite the urgency of the situation, this stirred her curiosity. She almost regretted not having an opportunity to interrogate the men. It would be interesting to know how and why they had tracked them down.

  But she had to set these questions aside and deal with the situation at hand. Her impulse was to abandon Billy’s truck and take the big Ford, which looked brand new. Ditching a vehicle owned by a man she’d abducted and indirectly gotten killed would be a wise move. But it was possible the F-350 was also a stolen vehicle. The goons she’d tangled with hadn’t seemed like the upwardly mobile type. A ride like this would surely have been out of their price range. Also, there was no guarantee they had left the keys in the ignition.

  Only one way to find out.

  Mindful of the new living dead threat, Jessica again gathered her purse and weaponry and got out of Billy’s truck. She left the key in the ignition with the motor running in the event a hasty retreat proved necessary. She paused when she reached the other side of the F-350 and saw a zombie standing in the middle of another overgrown yard. This one had been a woman or teenage girl, going by the tattered dress hanging from its lanky frame. It, too, was little more than bones covered with leathery patches of rotted flesh. A creak of splintering wood somewhere to her right made Jessica’s head snap in that direction. She saw a thin plywood board fall away from a window at the side of a house with a partially caved-in roof. The form of what might once have been a very big man climbed out of the opening and tumbled to the ground. The dead of Hopkins Bend were all coming back and there was no telling how many of them there were inside these homes-turned-mausoleums. At the moment, none of them were close enough to present an immediate threat, but that might not last for long.

  Jessica opened the Ford’s driver’s side door and peered inside.

  The key was in the ignition.

  Thank fuck.

  She climbed into the truck and pulled the door shut. The F-350 also had a gun rack. There was a pump shotgun in the bottom slot, but the top one was empty. She stowed the rifle in it, adjusted the seat, started the engine, and reached for the gearshift. After getting the truck turned around, she started heading again in the direction she had been going. Her plan was to retrace the route she and Billy had taken to this neighborhood from the center of town. It hadn’t been a particularly circuitous route, so she doubted this would present much of a problem. Finding her way back to Rural Route 42 from there should also be easy. It looked like the town’s small size was finally about to start working in her favor.

  She was out of the neighborhood in less than one more minute, driving down a stretch of relatively straight road at a speed even she would normally consider reckless. Tightening her grip on the wheel, she pressed the truck’s gas pedal all the way to the floor and thrilled at the way the engine roared. It had far more kick to it than the engine in Billy’s truck and she meant to take full advantage of the upgrade in horsepower.

  Jessica spotted only one more zombie on her way back to the downtown area. It was standing motionless right in the middle of the street as the F-350 bore down on it. She kept the gas pedal pegged to the floor and ran the thing down. The heavy duty truck absorbed the impact as easily as a gust of wind. The zombie blew apart and there was a brief rattle of bone fragments skittering across the truck’s hood. Jessica let out a whoop of grim delight as this happened. The primitive joy she took from it made her feel like a wild teenager out joyriding in the old man’s truck, an association that inevitably led to thoughts of her father. A dark turn in mood just as inevitably followed.

  Zelda’s accusations might yet prove untrue. She could have been just fucking with her head, planting carefully calculated seeds of doubt and mistrust, stoking areas in which there were just enough wisps of smoke to possibly signal fire. But there would have been no point to that. Zelda had been on the very verge of killing her. There were no more games to play at that point, no more reasons for mind fucks, just a knife to stick in and twist for the sheer sadistic hell of it. The part of her that kept rising up to fight against the idea of her father’s betrayal was waging a losing battle. He was a bad man who did bad things. In Jessica he had raised a daughter who, in the end, was just as corrupted and beyond redemption as he was.

  This required confrontation and judgment.

  But first she had to get out of this godforsaken hellhole.

  Again.

  She saw more zombies as she got closer to the center of town. There weren’t many of them, just a few trudging through fields or ambling through litter-strewn parking lots. She suspected there were many more of them trapped inside the boarded-up buildings. The ones outdoors might have emerged from places where trespassers or looters had busted open doors or broken locks. Or they might have been among a small percentage of Bend residents left to rot where they dropped when the military swept through and killed them.

  A gunshot rang out somewhere in the night and nearly made Jessica swerve off the road.

  Shit. What the fuck?

  A glow of streetlights came into view just before she turned down the town’s main drag. This was the first hint of restored power anywhere outside of the neighborhood where she’d holed up with Billy and she rightfully took it as a sign that the hidden military presence she had sensed since her arrival in Hopkins Bend had come out into the open, which couldn’t be good news for her. Also not portending well was the realization that the gunshot she’d heard had come from somewhere along this stretch of brightly-lit street.

  Jessica stepped on the F-350’s brake and stopped in the street outside the CVS store where she had gotten her first real glimpse of the grisly truth about this town. She saw people directly ahead of her. Well, some of them were people, soldiers clad in commando garb and carrying M16 rifles. The others were zombies and could be considered people only in the loosest sense, if at all. As she sat there and watched, one of the soldiers approached one of the walking dead things from behind, took aim, and shot it in the head. The zombie toppled over and the soldier continued walking along the side of the street at an unhurried pace. At one point, he called out something to one of his fellow soldiers on the opposite side of the street. That man whirled and shot a zombie that came lurching out of an alley.

  No one seemed to be paying her any mind whatsoever.

  Well, this is weird.

  Jessica considered turning around and attempting to navigate her way to some alternate route out of town. Before she could do that, however, she heard the first faint rumbling of an engine somewhere behind her. She glanced at the rearview mirror and discerned the shape of an armored fighting vehicle. It was black with a machine gun mount up top.

  Jessica gulped.

 
Fuck this.

  She gunned the engine and the F-350 rocketed down the main drag. Some of the soldiers glanced her way as she roared past them, but no one moved to intercept her or tried to wave her over. So she kept going as she rolled past the sheriff’s office and then through the big intersection beyond. A soldier strolling through the intersection saw her coming and jumped out of the way. Again, though, no one tried to stop her.

  Okay, she thought. This is extra super weird.

  Then it hit her that maybe the big white truck was a vehicle they were accustomed to seeing around town on occasion. It was possible there had been more to the big rednecks than met the eye. Maybe their activities here had been sanctioned by the secret military unit that controlled the town. It was a crazy idea, but by no means out of the question. And if the truck was the reason for her thus far unimpeded passage through town, getting gone from here fast was more imperative than ever. She wanted to be far away before the bodies she’d left behind were discovered.

  Jessica tried to keep her focus on the road in front of her, but she couldn’t help stealing glances at the rearview mirror every couple seconds. She kept expecting to see a convoy of armored vehicles rushing to catch up to her, but there was never anyone back there and pretty soon the lights of the main drag faded from view. When she turned down the narrow stretch of Rural Route 42 that would eventually take her out of Hopkins Bend and back to civilization, she was alone again in the depths of a lonely, dark night.

  Or so she thought.

  She screamed as the truck’s high beams picked out the form of a little blonde girl walking down the middle of the road. The girl had come out of seemingly nowhere and there was no time to swerve out of the way. The F-350 hit her and rolled over her.