It had taken him years to develop the discipline necessary to find this place. With his body fluid in form and motion, his mind disengaged. The cloud lifted and he began to understand things that he’d missed. All of his life, he’d lived under the shadow of the horrors he’d committed during that burglary thirty years ago. In his mind, he was a murderer, a destroyer of lives, and he feared the harm he might do to others. Yet, in this place, in this time, he could see a formidable truth. He had helped people. He cherished life too much to take it from those who were innocent. Randi, despite her capacity to put a quick end to walking corpses, was an innocent. Davis was an innocent. Steven, Sheri and little Charlie were innocent. He did not intend to cause them harm. Carol, who had lost her innocence a long time ago, was still in need of defending. The world would no longer be her friend.
“I have value,” Jack breathed. His body was slick with sweat and he stood in the moonlight huffing from his exertion. He was not yet free of the chains of condemnation that had held him for so many years, but he felt their hold loosening. When he finished, he looked to his watch. He’d been at it for over an hour.
From the second story window, a pair of lazy hazel eyes watched Jack as he exercised in the moonlight. His body was taut under the strain of motion. She’d never seen a man move with such control. She drank in the shape of his body like the booze she’d wolfed down trying to erase the image of Jeffrey’s walking corpse.
Carol stood in her underclothes, holding the windowsill with an unsteady hand. She had just vomited in the toilet and wiped her chin on the curtain in front of her. Jack was nothing like Jeffrey, she thought. Jeffrey couldn’t protect her. Jack would. She would see to that. From somewhere deep inside her she felt the stirrings of something she hadn’t felt in a very long time. Desire. She wanted that man standing in the moonlight below her.
Jack laid his clothes on the counter in the kitchen and reached into the box where Randi had found a case of Avian bottled water. He stood on the patio once more pouring the water over himself and shivered in the night air. He never really understood how much he enjoyed clean running water. After toweling himself dry, he slipped his jeans on before lying back down on his pallet at the top of the stairs.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Saturday, October 23rd, 2017
T he morning was a wash of activity. On the surface, one might have thought that the world hadn’t changed, that the dead had not risen, and that it was a typical Saturday morning. The only thing missing was the sound of the television blaring in the living room downstairs.
Jack must have slept pretty hard because everyone managed to slip down the steps without waking him. Downstairs, he found two of the kids in the kitchen eating cereal. Randi was standing with her back to the sink, her hair was unkempt and for the second time since he’d met her, she looked more her age.
“Morning, sleepy head,” Randi said with a mouthful of breakfast.
“Good morning,” Jack replied. He stood barefoot in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. He was shirtless and rubbed a hand across his stubbled face. “Where’s everybody?”
“Carol took Steven out to the car to get something,” Randi said. Something about what she’d just said didn’t settle well with her. She just looked at Jack — a look that communicated much.
Jack turned around and walked over to the front door. It was ajar. Through the crack, Jack watched the red headed woman whispering violently into the face of her oldest boy. Steven’s arms were crossed defensively and his perpetual scowl was directed at the ground. Jack started to open the door but froze when she slapped the ten year old across his right cheek. His head snapped to the left. Tears poured from eyes now filled with fear as he nursed his cheek.
“. . . do it or you’ll regret it,” he overheard Carol say as he stepped out onto the porch.
“Is everything alright out here?” Jack asked.
Carol reached out a tender hand to her son and pulled him close. He melted into her chest sobbing. Her face was filled with affection for her eldest son and in a quiet voice, she mouthed, “He misses his father.” The look on her face was one of understanding and compassion.
Jack looked to the body of the man lying in the yard. Jeffrey was stiff and cold.
“No. Jeffrey wasn’t the kid’s father. He was . . . just a guy. We weren’t that close.” Carol raised Steven’s chin with a well-manicured finger and kissed him on the nose. “Go get some breakfast and,” looking the boy in the eye added, “remember what I said.”
Steven shuddered and stepped away from his mom. He wore a black T-shirt that had the words Death Jam scrawled across the front. His eyes were red-rimmed and he wiped at his nose as he passed Jack.
Jack tussled his hair.
Carol’s long red locks were pulled back with a green shell-like clip. She wore no make-up this morning and he found the woman to be quite attractive in her own way. She was narrow and curvy in all the right places and it made Jack wonder how much of it was due to a surgeon’s touch. Though her clothing looked slept in, there was something different about her that he couldn’t put his finger on. She was surprisingly perky for having passed out last night just shy of alcohol poisoning.
Carol’s smile lit up her face. Yes, she was very attractive, Jack thought. Her hazel eyes fell across his bare chest. She bit her lip slightly and when their eyes met again, something was different. So different in fact that he was caught off guard by the boldness of her gaze. It was almost predatory.
“I never did get to thank you for saving my life,” she said. “I’m sure I would have ended up just like Jeffrey if you hadn’t played the hero.” She stopped a few feet in front of Jack and place a finger on her lip. “Yes, I think that is a good description of you. You are my hero.”
“Well, I—,” Jack stuttered.
“What you need,” she said, as she stepped up close enough for him to smell the stale alcohol on her breath, “is a hero’s reward.” Her body pressed into his and she tiptoed so that her lips brushed his ear. “I’ll think of some way to repay you, my dear man,” she whispered. Her breath in his ear made the hair stand up on his neck.
When she stepped away, Jack cleared his throat and ran his fingers through his hair. She smiled again and then turned to go inside. Her short walk to the screen door drew his eyes down her slinking form and he blushed. He turned to face the morning and leaned against the handrail of the porch. His chest was tight and his throat felt constricted. He had been a pup the last time a woman looked at him in that way.
“Jack!” It was Randi.
“Yeah,” he said and opened the screen door.
“You need to see this.”
Randi and Carol stood in front of an open door in the living room that was situated just beneath the stairs leading to the second floor. He’d figured it for a closet. It wasn’t. Just inside the door were wooden stairs leading down to what appeared to be an unfinished basement. A ghastly odor rolled up from the dark throat-like passage making Jack’s eyes water. Carol pulled her blouse over her nose and Randi wrinkled her nose and looked at Jack. It smelled like rotting road kill.
The silence seemed loud. Then a scraping noise followed by the clinking of a small chain came at them from below. In a second, Randi had her gun and was trying to shoulder her way into the basement.
“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Jack as he blocked her path.
“To check it out,” she said as if that was something every sixteen-year-old girl with a machine gun should do under the present circumstances.
“Hold on,” Jack offered. “Put your cannon away and grab my pistol from under my pillow upstairs. Carol, why don’t you take the kids out back for a minute? The yard is fenced in and there’s a tire swing in the tree.”
Carol looked from Jack to her kids, and then said, “You heard him. Out back NOW!”
Sheri’s brothers jumped and ran for the back porch. Sheri stood there staring at her mother as if weighing some options. After a
moment, she seemed to come to a decision. She turned and followed her siblings.
Carol watched her go. “She kinda’ creeps me out a little,” she said to Jack with an apologetic smile.
“Why?” Jack asked.
“You’d think she was my mother, for Pete’s sake.”
When Randi returned with Jack’s pistol, he checked to see that it was loaded and stepped into the doorway. The basement air was damp, even at the top of the steps. The smell grew stronger. Jack took the steps one at a time in his bare feet and despite his admonishment, Randi and Carol followed close behind him, their hands on his shoulders. There wasn’t much light seeping through the dingy windowpanes wedged against the ceiling around the basement. Two naked sixty-watt bulbs hung from the rafters by wires. One was at the bottom of the steps. The other dangled over a washer and dryer a few feet along the wall on the right side. Jack pulled the cord on the nearest, forgetting the electricity was out. There was no light to push back the gloom.
It was then that the three noticed that the basement had been divided by a hastily constructed, plywood wall. There was a door. The scraping and scratching was coming from the other side.
“Anybody down here?” Jack asked, already knowing the answer. Carol and Randi just looked at each other. When no answer came immediately, he turned to the women and said, “Wait here on the steps, please.” He waited for a reluctant nod from each of them before he moved toward the door.
Holding the gun with both hands, he pointed it at the ceiling with his elbows close to his sides just as he’d seen in the movies. Surely, it was the standard way of approaching a closed door with a gun. Again, he heard the scrape on the floor and the light jingle of a chain coming from the other side of the wall. He stood to one side and looked toward the steps for encouragement.
The girls nodded.
He checked the door. It was unlocked.
A strange sound erupted from behind the door. It sounded like a child crying as it was being shaken. “B-B-Ba Ah-a- a B-Ba.” The chain jingled constantly now. It raised the hair on Jack’s neck.
When Jack kicked the door open, the smell about bowled him over. The second half of the basement was littered with corpses that were in an advanced stage of decay. Standing among the strewn bodies were four children. They were dead. Each was handcuffed to an adult corpse on the floor. None was much older than six years old.
Holding their hands over their noses, Randi and Carol came off the steps behind him. The three companions stared in disbelief at what they were seeing. One of the boys, who looked to be dressed in a suit and tie, was having a seizure. His little frame would shake for a moment, and then his head would snap to the right. He was frothing at the mouth when his body hunched over and his head flew backward. Spittle flew from his lips. Something was happening to the corpse. It was as if its muscles were no longer under its control. The child’s facial muscles spasmed along with the rest of his little frame. During the whole ordeal, a keening noise rose from the child’s lips. “B-B-Ba Ah B-Ba-a-a.”
“Put it down,” Randi said. Revulsion filled her voice.
“I wonder, what’s wrong with the damnable thing?” Carol asked.
Jack raised his gun and lined the sights on its little forehead. Then it suddenly stopped moving. It offered a single throaty gurgle and fell limp to the floor.
They stared at the motionless form. Then another began to shake and convulse. It was the other boy. He was dressed in a pair of shorts and a white T-shirt. His socks had blue stripes on them.
Jack watched it for another second and then took aim.
“Wait!” Randi whispered and put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “This may be what we’ve been waiting for! I think the virus may be mutating.”
The two girls now joined the boy. Their small frames convulsed in body-racking seizures. It was difficult to watch so Jack used Randi’s comment as a reason to turn away from the dead children and said, “What does me not shooting them have to do with that? What are we looking for?”
“Confirmation.”
“So, you’re saying that the same virus that caused the bodies of these children to appear alive may be changing — mutating, I think the word was — in such manner that it may just kill itself?” Carol asked, trying to get past the fact that the conversation should have been labeled fiction.
“More or less,” Randi offered without further explanation.
The boy’s body suddenly fell limp to the floor.
“This is good?” Carol asked.
“Yes.”
In a few moments, both of the girls stopped shaking, their strangled cries ended abruptly and the silence that filled the room seemed strange to their ears. They expected the girls to fall down like the others. They did not. They simply stood in place handcuffed to their corpses. One of the girls was facing away from the threesome. Her pink sundress was heavily soiled and what had once been white socks were now a dingy brown. Her dark ponytail was slowly falling loose behind her head. The other, dressed similarly, stood rocking back and forth. They might have been sisters for all they resembled one another.
Carol sneezed.
The two fragile-seeming bodies snapped to attention at the sound and spun to face the open door. Something was different, was all Jack managed to think before the two children raced forward. They moved with such speed that it startled Jack and his two cohorts. Randi yelped.
When it became clear that they couldn’t get at their prey because they were handcuffed to a corpse on the floor, the girls screeched and began pulling and yanking like desperate animals in their attempt to get loose. The one on the left began to tear at its own wrist with its teeth to get loose. The sound of teeth on bone made Randi shiver. The other pulled so hard that instead of dragging the corpse with it, something in her shoulder snapped loose. Her arm was pulled off at the joint, sinew and veins stringing from around the empty socket. The little thing came screaming at Jack like a banshee with its mouth gaped open revealing a black slug-like tongue.
The creature moved too fast. Jack fired two shots at the thing and missed both times. Instinctively, he kicked it back through the door as the two women ran for the stairs to escape the nightmare. He closed the door, trapping the creatures on the other side.
“This is what dad feared the most,” Randi said through fresh tears.
“That was horrible,” Carol added covering her mouth with a hand.
“Well, zombies don’t do doors,” Jack said. He walked slowly back toward the steps rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. The pistol hung limp in his grip. THUD! Jack turned to look back. THUD! They things were beating on the door.
“I don’t like it,” Randi said, her voice quivering. She raised the butt of her AK to her shoulder, the muzzle still pointing at the floor.
“They might be dangerous, but as I said, they have yet to master the simple mechanics of a door knob,” Jack said.
The doorknob turned. The door flew open and two vicious little monsters came screaming out of their would-be prison — one without an arm, the other missing a hand.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
T he soldier watched with fascination as nearly a thousand zombies began to shiver, shake, and convulse like heroin addicts detoxing. The air was filled with a symphony of strange sounds that erupted from quivering lips across the field below him. He and the men around him had been commissioned by Berkley to keep the flood of undead from overtaking the camp while they flew off to scavenge supplies from a military depot in the city. The semi-trailer upon which they stood stopped shaking when the crowds of bodies began their epileptic frenzy.
Behind him, the sentry could hear children laughing and playing. Wives, with their husbands standing close, watched with concern as the soldiers slowly lowered their weapons. The barricade was lined with armed men. Boxes of ammunition were stacked at various intervals among them. The smell of spoiled meat was so pervasive that they no longer recognized it for what it was.
“Nicholas,” Doctor Shirley B
aker said. “What’s going on? Why are they making that sound?”
Nicholas turned to find the doctor standing below him. Her sandy blonde hair was pulled back in a bun with a pencil stuck through it. Her doctor’s smock had been replaced by a yellow sweater, but it didn’t change the fact the she looked like a doctor. She carried the air of such authority that when Berkley wasn’t around, she seemed to control things. He shrugged. “The zombies stopped moving forward and have begun to shake. It’s like they’re having seizures,” he said.
Shirley raised an eyebrow and bit her bottom lip. There was something nagging her in the back of her mind and she couldn’t quite get a grip on it. Shaking her head, she gripped the ladder with both hands and climbed. The men made way when she stepped up beside them. She was completely unprepared for the view from the top of the barricade, however.
There was a sea of faces stretching off for the better part of a half a mile. Most of the monsters were convulsing like epileptics. The seizure prohibited any form of muscle control, so they merely stood in place. A cold chill quivered its way up her spine and she found herself covered in a sheen of clammy sweat. She remembered a discussion she had with her husband before he died.
“Sweetheart,” he said, lifting his face from the microscope. “The virus that animates the corpse is highly unstable. There’s no doubt that it will mutate and there’s no way to predict what affect it will have on the host corpse. It could simply revert to an inactive condition thereby rendering the corpse harmless or it could have some unforeseen affect that could make it far more dangerous. If it goes airborne, humanity may be lost.”
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