Zombified 1: The Bitten
Page 9
Chapter One
TICK TOCK.
The grandfather clock downstairs ticked off the seconds that had passed since Aunt Frances and Uncle Josiah went to bed. Melinda listened for their creaking bed -- one body, then the second. In fifteen minutes, Uncle Josiah would begin to snore. But even after three years of living with her aunt and uncle, she still had no idea if her aunt ever sleeps.
Tick tock.
She suspected that at least, she had not been sleeping deeply. Although she knew that her aunt could not read her thoughts, Melinda also knew that she suspected something.
It was the night before her fifteenth birthday -- and her wedding. Melinda had been planning her escape for three months now ever since her aunt and uncle arranged for her to become Old Man Herman’s third wife. She tried not to think about the consequences if she were to get caught. The last girl to protest a marriage had been forcibly raped by her betrothed in front of the elders.
Rumor had it that she lived, still bound in chains in the basement of the man she never married, every year giving birth to a child whom she would never see. And she had merely protested. What Melinda was doing probably warranted death if she were caught.
So she had better damn well not get caught.
Tick tock.
She reached over her head to push the curtain aside so that the light of the moon could shine on the alarm clock on the dresser. Ten o’clock. She had two more hours to wait. Melinda felt the exhaustion from the day’s labor creep up on her, but she had poured some of her uncle’s morning coffee into a thermos earlier that morning and drank it before she went to bed.
Now, it was all she could do to keep her body under the covers. Luckily, her cousin Lucy was nine years old and a sound sleeper, so she didn't wake when Melinda slowly eased out of the warm bed and tiptoed out the door.
Until then, though...
Tick tock.
Three years ago, her mother got ran off the road on the way to Melinda’s recital. In any other state, it would have meant a hospital stay... maybe a few stitches and a cast. But in Boulder, Colorado, it was a death sentence. It wasn’t until she saw her Aunt Frances at the funeral that she understood why her mother never mentioned her past.
Three years, living with these crazy Christian Knights, kneeling to pray and biting her tongue and singing the praises of the simple life -- all the while scouting for a way out, watching the timing of the patrols that circled the compound, learning which floorboards squeaked and how to move silently through the creaky clapboard house.
It all came down to this night.
And the boy who was not a boy, but an angel.
The elders said that he was possessed by the devil, but Melinda could see the truth behind his form. It was a gift of hers that she had kept secret in this dangerous place -- being able to see angels and demons as they stalked the earth.
During her first year in the compound after her mother died, she wondered if somehow the gift had died along with her freedom, because she could not see any of the glowing auras in the people they inhabited. She still did not know what to make of the fact that the cult was so isolated that neither heaven nor hell would bother with it.
But then Caleb wandered into the compound, and though she knew him for what he was, nobody else did. When they discovered he didn’t know how to speak and had nothing between his legs, the elders decided he was possessed and needed to be exorcised.
Since then, he had been kept in the equipment barn, crammed into a large dog crate. Nobody quite knew what the elders have been doing to him for two years, but the screams that emanated from the barn frightened even grown men into grumbling about letting the boy go.
Still, nobody dared enter the barn to do it.
The hands of the alarm clock converged on midnight. Everybody was resolutely asleep. Melinda reached under her pillow, pulled out her old sneakers, and slipped out of the room like a shadow.
Tick tock.
She was wearing the clothes that she brought with her when they first moved her to the compound -- sweatpants, socks, Polartec fleece sweater (they allowed her to keep these because they were “more useful than vain”). She was carrying her sneakers -- she hadn’t tried them on this floor. There was no telling if they would squeak.
Her heart was going like a trip hammer and cold sweat broke over her as she went, ever so slowly, down the stairs, each step a careful consideration of her weight on the wood.
The door to her aunt and uncle’s bedroom was closed, but that didn't mean Aunt Frances was lying in bed, sleeping. For all Melinda knew, her aunt could be wide awake, just waiting to throw open the door and catch her deceitful niece who was obviously trying to escape, and then throw her upon the justice of the elders. She wanted to be out the door now.
When she was halfway down the stairs, the banister gave a squeak. The sound might as well be a shriek piercing the silence. Melinda stifled a gasp and held her breath.
Above her, there was a muffled shifting of springs; but after a minute neither her aunt nor her uncle opened the bedroom door. She let the air out of her lungs and she fought to keep her legs from collapsing. And somehow, she managed to make it down the rest of the stairs without a sound.
Then she crept through the living room and into the kitchen. It would have been faster to go through the front door, but the great lock on that door could not be opened quietly, plus the hinges squeaked. The kitchen door was quieter but the tumbling of the bolts as the knob turned seemed impossibly loud, and she wondered how her aunt could possibly not hear the grating noise of metal-on-metal, or the gunshot clarity of the click as the door opened.
Tick-tock.
But still, the house remained silent. And as the cool night air rushed past Melinda, she breathe a sigh of relief. There was a peculiar finality to the act of closing the door behind her.
Ahead of her, there was the night. Behind her, the nightmare.
And on the horizon, a new dawn.