Cassie’s legs kicked at her sides and Cheryl backed up a few steps, knowing there was no way she was going to get around this fellow while carrying her cargo. She was going to have to shoot him…and fast. Her hand finally found the hilt of the gun, and she drew it as the monster advanced towards them. Her first shot missed, just grazing the right side of the Eater’s temple. He was just six feet away when she fired again and landed a shot above his misshapen nose.
He went down with a skull-cracking thump, but the second he landed a new chorus of growls materialized from behind the Jeep where it was parked on the side of the building. An amoeba-like mass of Eaters appeared from around its back side. It shifted and morphed into a half dozen individual shapes that lumbered towards her.
Where’s Jeremiah? Aidan?
Her answer came with the sound of more gunshots, evidence that they were tied up with their own problems.
The group advanced, and she hesitated, not knowing which way to go. The front door of the building was the closest entrance, but she might not make it that far before being surrounded, and the door might be locked unless someone was right there to let her in.
Where’s Jordan? Why doesn’t he open the front door and shoot?!
Then, she saw him. The dutiful sentry was there in the window. He stared back at her as blankly as if he was watching a television screen instead of witnessing some horrific real life drama that required action on his part. He appeared to be zoned out or paralyzed with fear, so it looked like she was going to have to take this gang down on her own.
Cassie’s head was buried in her shoulder, and she was screaming bloody murder now, soaking the fabric of her shirt with spit. Cheryl hoisted her around, trying to balance her on her left hip, so she could have her right arm and hand more free to shoot.
She fired and a heavyset woman with blood-caked hair fell. The second shot took out an older, bald man who was missing his lower jaw. Three more went down after that then her gun clicked empty. She fumbled for the magazine in her back pocket and reloaded.
When she glanced back up, the next corpse was almost on her. Looking at him, she froze stone cold.
He was blond and taller than her by a good six inches or so. His face was completely caked with mud and gore, and his blue eyes were yellowed and filmy. It would be easy to dismiss him as someone that she hadn’t known, but his familiar pants and shirt cinched the identification. It was him…it was Mark.
At the very last second, before his crusty hands reached her, she raised her gun and fired off one shot. Then, she ran…
She bolted right through another trio of Eaters rounding the front of the Jeep. One of them grabbed a fistful of Cassie’s hair. Cheryl yanked her free and bolted towards the east side of the building carrying her precious cargo.
After passing the shed, she reached the side door that led to the kitchen, flung it open, ran inside, and slammed it behind her. She put Cassie down and shouted the alarm to the others. As everyone scurried to grab their weapons, the little girl ran to the back bedroom to hide. Since no one had actually witnessed them coming in, Cheryl decided not to tell anyone that Cassie had been outside. She figured that Cassie was probably traumatized enough to never sneak out again.
Aidan and Jeremiah came in through the kitchen door a few seconds later, panting and wheezing as they cried out for more ammunition. While they reloaded, the sound of moans grew louder as more Eaters surrounded the building, beating on the doors, the walls, and the wood slats that protected the windows.
“Get to the roof!” Zach shouted.
Rifles and pistols in hand, the men ran to the room with the trap door. One by one, they scurried up the ladder and disappeared through the opening—all of them except Jordan who was still standing next to the front window staring out like nothing was happening.
A few second later, the barrage of gunfire began.
“How many are there?” Hannah asked as she slumped onto a pew.
“I saw about ten.” Those were just the ones she’d seen and killed. From the sound of it, there might be a few dozen out there, but she didn’t say so. There was no need to make Hannah any more nervous than she looked.
A loud thump on the nearest window made them both jump.
After regaining her composure, Hannah said, “Cassie must be hiding. Poor dear. All this ruckus probably has her scared. I should go find her…”
She rose to her feet and Cheryl waylaid her with a raised hand. “I’ll check on her. Why don’t you get some water? The guys are going to need some if they’re up there long—it’s pretty hot out already.”
Hannah nodded as she took a few steps towards the kitchen, seeming happy to have been assigned a task to distract her from the melee outside. Then, she paused and turned back around. “They used to leave us alone, you know. When the herds came through, they walked right by the building like they were just trying to get around it. You saw it once. Maybe, God’s not protecting us anymore.”
Cheryl opened her mouth to say something in reply, but words escaped her as Hannah disappeared into the kitchen. She walked to the bedroom and found Cassie on the floor surrounded with some cloth dolls that Hannah had made for her. Cassie had altered a couple of them with crayons to give them bloody red faces with black teeth.
“You okay, sweetie?”
“Mmm…hmm” she said, keeping her hands in the pockets of her dress, but poised on her hips like she was contemplating the next scene in her doll drama.
“You’re a trooper,” Cheryl said as she bent down and ruffled the girl’s hair. “I hope you didn’t get too scared out there.”
“I’m okay,” she said looking up towards the roof as more gunfire sounded. “You don’t think they can get in here, do you?”
“No. We’ll kill all the monsters. Then, it will be quiet again.” She thought her tone sounded convincing—she almost believed it herself. “If you’re all right in here, I’m going to help Hannah bring the guys some water. Do you want some?”
Cassie shook her head. She hummed a tune as she picked up one of the dolls, tossed him to the ground and chose another doll to start attacking him.
Cheryl let her continue to play and left, thinking what a brave little girl she was.
Chapter 4
The attack was over an hour later. They counted forty-seven dead. It was too many to bury, so they decided that the whole lot of them was going to have to be piled up and burned or carted off to another location far away from Divine Sundaes. Neither was a good option. The smell of the burning bodies would be unbearable, and a fire that big might draw more Eaters in. (They figured the garden fire might have drawn this lot from some distance away.) The only running vehicle was the Jeep, and they couldn’t carry many bodies at a time in it, or likely move all of them before it ran out of gas.
Later that afternoon while they were still pondering what to do, Zach and Diego decided to walk the perimeter of the building to verify that all of the corpses were truly dead and make sure there were no more wandering around. Cheryl decided to go with them. Although it was partly to help them with their task, it was more for her own peace of mind. She had to know if Mark’s corpse was among the Eaters that had attacked them.
After checking out every body that looked male, and a few whose sex was indeterminable because of their advanced decay, she conceded that her former fiancé was not among them. She knew she must have imagined seeing him. Even more disturbing than the idea that she was losing her mind and hallucinating was the idea that her mental lapse could have cost Cassie her life.
She was giving herself a virtual ass-kicking when she realized that Zach was speaking to her.
“Did you notice that some of them have the black boxes that control them? I don’t know if that’s a coincidence. What if they were sent here by O.N.E.?”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” Cheryl said. “On the way up to Sedona, we saw a few Beasts with the boxes that were wandering around. They may have just been test subjects they let loose to track.
And…with all the numbers of them that went offline Sedona, it’s possible that some just naturally made their way down here by coincidence.”
“Well…I hope you’re right. I’d hate to think that you brought O.N.E. down on us. We have enough problems as it is.”
The accusation stung. Where else could she and Aidan have gone? “If it eases your mind…I think all of these Eaters were just as wild as any other of the undead, so it’s not likely that any of them had working tracking devices.”
“Just to be sure…maybe we should examine some of the EM boxes to see if they’re active.”
Cheryl shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She thought he was being a little too paranoid like Aidan, but knew he needed to do whatever felt right to give him some peace of mind that this was simply a random attack. She left him and Diego to their chore of yanking the black boxes out of the scalps of the corpses, a task that came with the unavoidable sound of wet suction and the potential for putrid fluids spraying on them.
Later, when they were all back inside, the idea that Cheryl and Aidan were responsible for luring a batch of Eaters to Divine Sundaes just wouldn’t seem to die.
“All the Eaters you said they were operating like slaves up in Sedona…you think any of these came from that far?”
Everyone turned around and looked at Jordan who was still standing at the window.
Diego stood up and threw one of his hands up in the air. “Oh…you decided to join us again. Welcome back to reality, asshole.”
“Hey,” Jeremiah said. “That’s enough.”
Jordan walked to the rear pew and sunk down onto the seat. “I’m sorry. I choked today. You see …I see those things in my head…every fucking waking minute of the day…and then in my sleep. Real ones show up, and it’s like I don’t know if they’re real or not.”
Diego walked over and stuck a finger in his face. “You’re fired from watch duty, man. You didn’t sound the alarm when those maggots showed up. Cheryl says you saw her surrounded out there and you didn’t do a damn thing to help. Stupid tonto! I don’t even want to see you next to that window again. I think we’re going back to doing shifts.”
“I’ll watch,” Kai said, stepping over to the window.
“I said I’m sorry,” Jordan said again. “Maybe I just need to rest a while.” He didn’t speak another word during their conversation. He just sat on the back pew, hunched over with his head buried in his hands.
“At least one of them could have come from up north,” Cheryl said, remembering the one thing that haunted her the most about the attack. “I thought I saw Mark out there.”
“No way…” a few of them said at once.
Aidan looked at her, squinting with his good eye and the top of his lip curled up, like she’d plumb lost her mind.
“You don’t believe me? You don’t believe it was him? I’m telling you it was. In hindsight, I thought I was hallucinating…but I just don’t know now.”
“We walked around and looked at them,” Zach said. “There was no Mark out there in those bodies.”
She replayed the reel in her memory of what had happened. It had looked like him—it really had. Had she killed him? She remembered running and not seeing him fall, but she had no doubt that she’d hit him square in the head. A shudder ran though her. She was losing it. It couldn’t have been Mark. He’d been murdered, not turned into a zombie. Maybe she was starting to hallucinate like Jordan. Maybe she needed some rest herself. She let the subject drop and vowed not to bring it up again lest the others start to think she was losing her mind.
A vote was taken, and it was decided that they would use the wheelbarrow and make some sleds to haul the bodies about a quarter mile away and then burn them a few at a time. It would be a time consuming process, but it was better than letting all those corpses rot near the building. That afternoon, they were able to cart off almost half of them, but had to stop as the sun sunk lower in the sky and they had run out of energy.
That evening, when Hannah said she was going to look for something for dinner, Cheryl and Jordan offered to help while Jeremiah rallied the rest of them together for a Bible reading and a prayer session. Cheryl had learned earlier that most of the group, religious or not, had decided to go along with this daily event—it seemed to bring them closer together and gave them a tiny bit of comfort and hope.
After they all decided on a dinner of canned peas, rice, and the last jar of canned peaches, the rationed food was dished up on plates. Cheryl went back to the bedroom and attempted to call Cassie for dinner. When she refused to come, saying she wasn’t hungry, Hannah made an attempt to lure her out to join the others but she was also turned down. They brought a plate to her in the bedroom then settled in the sanctuary to eat and talk.
Later that evening after the dishes were washed, Jordan found his voice again. “Don’t you think some of them could have come from Sedona?” he asked, reiterating his question from earlier.
“I guess it’s possible,” Cheryl admitted, wondering if it really mattered where they came from. “Tucson is a ghost town, so I doubt they came from there, but there were hundreds that attacked Fort San Manuel a few months ago, and some of them may have wandered out this way.”
The idea that there could still be bands of hundreds of roving Eaters roaming so close to their area got some of them talking about ways to fortify the building better. Some of them were cleaning their guns and lamenting about how little ammunition they had left when Cassie rejoined the group, appearing amongst them again as if she’d simply materialized. She walked between the pews and sat down next to Hannah with a grim look on her face. “Grandma Hannah….can I have a bandage?”
“Sure, dear. Did you get a splinter from that old bed post again?”
“No.” Cassie held up her left pinkie. “It’s more bad than that.”
Cheryl gasped at the sight of the tiny red stump trickling blood down the little girl’s hand and the dark stain that had seeped through the corner of the pocket on her dress.
Hannah’s face went white. “Oh dear…no…no my dear…”
Cassie showed no sign of alarm. “I didn’t want to tell you I went outside, because I was afraid you’d be mad at me. One of those bad guys bit me, but it’ll be all right, won’t it? Maybe we can find the rest of my fingernail tomorrow and sew it back on. I saw them do that on TV once.”
The steadiness of her voice was admirable, because she was clearly missing more than a fingernail. The finger had been bitten off down to the knuckle.
Hannah tore a strip off the hem of her apron. Then, with shaking hands she managed to tie it around what was left of the small finger before pulling Cassie into her arms and rocking her.
Cassie peered over Hannah’s shoulder towards Cheryl with wistful, damp eyes. “Will you go look for my finger part?”
“I’ll do it,” Aidan said, jumping up after giving Cheryl a solemn glance. Then, he left, supposedly to go outside to look for it, but more likely to avoid anyone seeing him choke up.
“If it’s out there…he’ll find it,” she said, trying to reassure the little girl and keep her calm. There was definitely no benefit in explaining that the digit was now in the belly of the rotting corpse that had attacked her.
“Maybe I should take a look at her,” Kai said as he reached for Cassie’s arm.
“No,” Cheryl said, reaching out to stop him. “Just…just let her rest for now.”
“But we could still—”
“It’s been hours since she was bit. There’s no…” She started to say there’s no point in trying to amputate, because the infection has already spread, but she stopped herself from saying it out loud. Kai seemed to understand what she was trying to say and backed off with a grim nod.
“Where’s Jeremiah?” Cheryl asked as she realized he wasn’t in the sanctuary with them. “He needs to know.”
No one seemed to know where he was, so she asked again, directing the question to Hannah who was now softly humming in Cassie’s ear.
“No,” Cheryl said. “We may not have much time. We need to tell him now.”
She started down the hallway, and Hannah, still bearing Cassie in her arms, rose to her feet and chased her down the hall. “No…don’t! He doesn’t like to be—”
Cheryl flung the bedroom door open.
Cassie’s dolls were still on the floor. They were stained with blood like she’d kept playing with them as she tried to ignore her wound. No one was resting on top of the full-sized bed. “Where is he?” she asked as she turned around and found herself nose to nose with the pastor’s wife.
“I don’t know…he must…”
Before Cheryl could verbalize the anger building between her clenched teeth, she heard the clink of glass. It seemed to have come from the other side of the wall facing her. She studied the panels for a moment, noticing that one of the sections was slightly dislodged from the others. She reached out her hand to touch the groove.
“Don’t!”
Ignoring the woman’s plea, she pushed her fingers into the crack and yanked on the edge. A door swung open, revealing a hidden room on the other side. There were no windows, and the only light came from a lantern and the headlamp on Jeremiah’s head that shined in her eyes as he turned around to face her with a startled look. Behind him was a workbench covered with an array of test tubes, flasks, beacons, and coils of tubing.
Dozens of questions flitted through her mind along with a surge of fury about the fact that Jeremiah was doing something in this hidden lab that he was keeping from them, but she quelled it all for now due to the more pressing matter. “Cassie was bit this afternoon during the attack. She lost part of her finger…and just now told us.”
Eaters: Resurrection Page 4