by Ricky Sides
AniZombie 2
THE REFUGE
Ricky Sides
Copyright © 2014
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Prologue
A meteorite streaked across the sky over North America and splashed down into the Tennessee River in Decatur, Alabama. A fissure inside it contained parasitic microbes, which were released into the waterways. Fish ate those parasite colonies, and were subsequently caught by a local angler. The deadliest, parasitic, microbes ever to exist on Earth were now in the human food chain.
It began with a 911 call in Decatur. Patient zero died in the emergency room of Decatur General Hospital and he was taken to the morgue, where the parasitic microbes began to starve due to the lack of nutrients. They sent nerve impulses throughout the body. Brain damage from the lack of oxygen had destroyed the victim’s cognitive ability, and his circulatory system had collapsed. Two hours after his death, Patient zero awoke and he was hungry. The parasites were able to reanimate Roy’s central nervous system.
Corporal Herb Bennett and Private Randy Lions of the Alabama National Guard are mobilized along with the rest of their unit. Their mission is to contain the zombie outbreak in Decatur, which has been officially quarantined, even if it meant the death of millions of people.
What follows is a story of two guardsmen doing their best to do the right thing. The two guardsmen met Doctor Erma Langley at the Athens, Alabama, National Guard Armory. The scientist was working for the CDC. Her mission was to study the impact that the Akins’ parasites were having on wildlife. Herb’s guard unit helped her secure a vulture to study. That vulture would later prove to play a critical role in discovering a cure for the parasites, provided the victim didn’t die before being injected with the nanobots that would seek out and destroy the alien organisms.
The cure was discovered too late to save the nation. The United States, along with the majority of the nations of the rest of the world, lost more than 90% of their population, leaving mass numbers of zombies in their wake. The population of the United States was down by 95%. This left an estimated 15,750,000 people scattered all over America and an estimated zombie population of around 300,000,000.
As the United States government and military collapsed, they established several refuges for humanity. One was set up on Herb’s land adjacent to the Dagmar State Wildlife Management Area in Arkansas.
The government worked with the military to establish a short-term refuge in every state of the mainland. The initial assistance came in the form of airdrops containing supplies and weapons. Large convoys that brought in housing and tons of supplies, weapons and ammunition, and thousands of the nanobot injections of the cure for the Akins’ parasites provided the long-term aid. Branches of the military, responsible for these deliveries, managed to hold themselves together long enough to establish a half dozen refuges in as many states. Arkansas was among them. The other forty-two refuges that the government had wanted to establish weren’t outfitted before the military collapsed. Groups of people in those other states had received their startup packages with the airdrops, just as Herb’s people had, but they never received the comprehensive help that the ground convoys had delivered.
Herb and Randy worked hard to clear the zombies from their area, but there was a constant threat of additional arrivals as the ravenous creatures ran out of prey and had to seek out more. This meant the survivors at the refuge were forced to maintain a constant vigil in order to protect their community from the ongoing threat. Although the people and animals under their care at the refuge were immune to the Akins’ parasites, thanks to the nanobot injections, their immunity wouldn’t help a bit against the physical assaults of the zombies and animal variants, or, as they came to be known, anizombies.
Chapter 1
On the road.
“You’ve got to keep up, Bill,” twenty-four year old Dana Rainey said to the man who had moved in with her prior to the onset of the zombie apocalypse.
Bill Wiley shook his head in frustration as he pressed his right palm against his side and struggled to catch his breath. Bill was a computer programmer, or had been prior to the collapse of the country. As such, he had led a sedentary lifestyle that left him ill prepared to deal with the rigors of surviving in the post apocalyptic hell that America had become.
“Don’t do this to me, you lazy bastard!” Dana shrieked at him angrily. “We’re ahead of them, but not by more than a few minutes. We don’t have time for this shit!”
“You go ahead. I’ll catch up with you when I can,” Bill said, quietly in the hopes that his own lowered tones might cause Dana to realize that she was being too loud, and was probably attracting more of the zombies.
“Oh, no! Once I leave, we’re finished. There is no way that I will allow your slow ass to lead a pack of those creeps to me.”
Bill stared at Dana and thought of several things he’d like to say to her by way of reply, but instead, he just shook his head and wondered what he’d ever seen in the woman. “Then I guess this is goodbye, because until I rest a bit, I can’t run anymore.”
“I’m not kidding here,” Dana said, narrowing her eyes angrily.
“Then you’d better take some of the food and water from my pack,” Bill responded.
Dana checked the road they had been traveling toward the promised safety of the refuge they had heard about from a fellow traveler three days ago. The man had claimed he’d left his family at the refuge and was going back to his hometown to try to find his sister. “I don’t see any of them yet. Are you sure you can’t keep going?” the former aerobics instructor asked Bill.
“I can’t. I’ll have to find shelter from them for the rest of the day, I guess.”
“Okay then, just take off your pack and I’ll take what I need,” she replied as she slipped off her much lighter pack that contained her bedroll and a change of clothing.
Bill did as she had instructed and watched as she stuffed her pack with most of the food and water. He tried to caution her against overloading herself, but she ignored him, saying only, “I’ve got to eat, you know.”
Bill raised his hands in surrender. He didn’t much think he’d be alive long enough to worry about starving anyway, so he wasn’t inclined to argue with her about the rations he had found at an abandoned house down the road. They were leaving that house when they had been spotted by a group of zombies at a nearby field where they had been feasting on something they had managed to catch out in the open. Bill and Dana hadn’t wasted any time trying to figure out if their victim was human or animal. They just ran away as fast as they could run.
That had been an hour and several miles back down the road. Dana settled the pack on her shoulders with practiced ease. She stared back down the road, and then she looked at Bill one last time. It seemed to the man that, for just an instant, her eyes softened and he thought she might change her mind and be more reasonable, but then she turned and walked away from him without saying another word. After taking a few steps, she began to jog at that ground-covering pace she seemed capable of maintaining for hours. He noticed that she never looked back to see if he was following her, but then he thought, “Why would she? She knows she can outdistance me in minutes if she wants to.”
Bill wished he could find it in his heart to wish her luck. Prior to the breakdown of the country, he had regarded meeting Dana as the best thing that had ever happened to him. However, she had changed in the wake of the apocalypse. Of course, everyone had changed by necessity, but he noticed that some people changed mu
ch more than others, and not for the better. Some grew more selfish and hardened their hearts to the misery and suffering of those around them. It had saddened him to see Dana fall into that category.
Bill sighed as he shouldered his pack and resumed his own journey. He had little choice but to continue down the road in Dana’s wake. Turning back would just bring him closer to the zombies that were certain to be following them. He knew he needed to get off the road and he had every intention of doing so the moment he found a suitable place to hide for the night.
The first few minutes of his run, Bill could still see Dana in the distance. Then she topped a small rise and disappeared over the other side. The man concentrated on his surroundings as he jogged in her wake at a pace about half the one they had set when they had fled the zombies. The lighter load he was carrying, after splitting the food and water with Dana, coupled with his brief respite and the slower pace he had set for himself, seemed to have brought new life to his tired body.
Bill ran for half hour along the country road, seeing little in the way of civilization beyond an occasional piece of litter along the roadside. Then things began to change. Houses and abandoned autos appeared in the distance. He stopped beside the first one he came to and looked at the road behind him to ensure that nothing was closing with him. Once he was satisfied that he had the time to examine the car, he did. He was disappointed to learn that the car keys were in the auto, but it wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. He had feared that would be the case, because the driver’s door had been left open. The dome light had drained the battery.
Bill sighed in disappointment and resumed his journey. As he jogged along, he thought back to the events that led him to this point in his life. He and Dana had fled the suburbs near Little Rock in the wake of the nuclear missile attack on the capital of Arkansas. The electromagnetic pulse from the explosion had killed both their vehicles, so they left on foot. What followed was a nightmare of epic proportions. They had checked in at a hotel in a small town, while Dana tried to contact her sister who lived in Brinkley. It had taken two days to reach the woman, who had agreed to let them stay with her for a while.
Dana’s sister, Jessica, had picked them up at the hotel and taken them to her home. Bill liked Jessica. She was a pleasant person to be around. Happy and upbeat, she had done her best to make the displaced couple feel welcome in her home. Jessica’s husband, Ira, was a different matter. He made it clear that he wanted Bill and Dana out of the house as soon as possible. This led to a pitched argument between the married couple that Bill and Dana heard as they waited in the spare bedroom that Jessica had assigned to them for their stay. It ended when Ira stormed out of the house in anger. He returned hours later, still angry, but he had nowhere else to go.
Bill wanted to leave, but Dana insisted that they stay. It was awkward in the home for several days, but then one day, Bill chased away two men attempting to steal Ira’s supply of gas he had stored in a shed behind his house. After that, Ira seemed to embrace their presence.
For a few days, the tension in the home dissipated and things improved, but then the power failure hit Brinkley. They had hoped it would just be temporary. After all, there had been numerous short-term power outages since their arrival. Yet, this time, the power never came back on in the city. Two days later, the first zombies began appearing in the town.
Bill shuddered as he remembered the morning that he heard Ira’s screams coming from the bedroom he shared with his wife. The previous night, Jessica had gone to bed early, complaining of a migraine headache. That day, she had returned from an emergency supply run and complained about being scratched by a wild woman as they fought over the last box of rice at the supermarket. At the time, none of them had thought anything of the incident. They had no idea that the woman had been infected with the parasites.
Bill would never forget what he saw as he entered his host’s bedroom that morning. Jessica was lying on the bed with her face pressed against the left side of Ira’s face. Her husband was thrashing around and screaming at the top of his lungs. Bill had shouted to make himself heard over the man’s screams, asking him what was wrong. Then Jessica raised her head and stared at him. A moan escaped her bloody lips. Small pieces of flesh were sticking out of her mouth, and blood coated her chin. Ira took advantage of his wife’s distraction and rolled away from her toward the edge of the bed. As he did, Bill saw that pieces of his face and his entire left ear were missing.
The thing that had once been Jessica followed Ira and pounced on him where he lay sprawled on the floor gasping in agony from the wounds she had inflicted. Tearing sounds reached his ears as Bill tried to decide what he should do about it.
Dana had grabbed Bill’s arm and dragged him out of the room. She then insisted they leave the house and not return. “You’ve seen the reports on the television,” she said. “You know as well as I do that she’s a zombie now, and Ira will be too. We’ve got to leave, and we’ve got to leave right now!”
Bill was stunned by Dana’s apparent lack of caring about what had happened to her sister and brother-in-law. He would have expected her to grieve the loss of her sister. Yet, her only concern at the moment seemed to be her personal safety.
In retrospect, Bill realized that her attitude in the face of what had happened should have prepared him for the moment she would be willing to abandon him, but it hadn’t. He realized that he had rationalized Dana’s lack of emotion as her way of coping with the horrific loss, when in reality, she just didn’t give a damn about what happened to anyone but herself.
The couple had fled once more. They took Jessica’s car and got out of the city. Another involuntary shudder passed through his body as he jogged along the highway, lost in the memory of the nightmare that had greeted them when they tried to get out of Brinkley. Overnight, zombies appeared all over the town. One was attacking the neighbor’s dog as they got into Jessica’s late model, white, Impala. Several were in the street as they pulled out of the drive and Dana floored the accelerator.
Bill didn’t know how many people he saw being attacked by zombies in Brinkley. In fact, he tried his best to forget what he had seen there. However, certain images still stood out in his mind. One of those horrible images was an old man in the street being mobbed by several zombie children. He’d also seen several men with rifles and shotguns walking down another street, shooting zombies and victims alike. One of those men had been a uniformed police officer.
Then there was the church where people had gone to seek shelter because they had several generators and were operating a sort of soup kitchen to feed people. Bill and Dana had eaten there the day before with Jessica and Ira. Dana had decided to go there to seek shelter, but when they arrived, they saw that zombies had surrounded the place. Several men tried to fight off the zombies so that the people trapped inside could escape, but they had failed. Bill shook his head as he jogged down the rural road and tried to banish the images of the monsters flooding in the big double door of that church. However, it was the screams that he remembered the most. “My God,” he thought, “the screams had been so loud that we could still hear those trapped souls two blocks away as we left them behind and Dana drove the Impala toward the outskirts of the city.”
Dana drove them toward Forrest City, where they hoped to find safety. However, radio reports were warning people to avoid that community because zombies out of Memphis, Tennessee, as well as the surrounding area had overrun it.
Running out of options, and low on fuel, the couple had stopped at a couple of service stations to try to buy supplies and gas, but they were all closed. Finally, they took to traveling country roads in the hopes of finding shelter of some sort. The radio had made it clear that the cities were deathtraps now. If they were to have any hope of surviving, it would have to be far away from the masses of people and zombies.
They ran out of gas before finding a suitable shelter, and they had been forced to walk for hours. Late that afternoon, they found a place to stay at an
abandoned farmhouse. Bill and Dana never learned what happened to the people or their animals. It didn’t make sense for people to leave when they had plenty of food stored there, but they had left it all behind. The couple stayed at that house for several weeks before they’d used up the stockpile of canned foods the family had stored. Then they left in search of another place to stay.
For months, they survived by selecting isolated farms and houses to check for food and water. Most of the houses had been unoccupied, and their pantries had also been bare. They soon learned to leave when they were down to a week’s supply of food so they could take it with them to carry them through until they located more. During that period of time, they went through several vehicles as well. They’d find them at some abandoned home and drive them until they broke down or ran out of fuel, which usually occurred first. Bill found himself checking outbuildings for fuel, just as the men he had once chased away from Ira’s shed had been doing when he stopped them.
From time to time, the couple met other survivors. Not many though, because most were too skittish to approach strangers and more than a few ran away when they saw them coming. They traveled for a while with a couple who had a four-year-old daughter. Bill had liked them and felt a natural inclination to help protect the girl. Even Dana had felt that compulsion. Late in the afternoon of the fourth day of their travels, a dog attacked the little girl when she wandered out of the house where they had stopped to seek shelter for the night. The two men had worked together to kill the mongrel, but the girl had been bitten. The two groups parted company then, because the parents refused to believe that an animal zombie had bitten their daughter. Bill wondered if they had been right.
Then one day, they met a man who had spoken of the Arkansas Refuge for Humanity, said to be a safe haven for people who were willing to go there. The man had heard about the place and he was headed there. He gave the couple instructions on how to find it, and then left them to continue his journey.