The Zombie Virus (Book 1) (18 page)

“Ugh, that’s nasty!” she choked then rushed
to the deep sink along the side wall, ripping off her mask and
vomiting into the basin.

I went over and grabbed the tablecloth from
under her arm so I could completely cover the bodies. After draping
them with her tablecloth my light illuminated the cleaning supplies
under the sink and I spied a bottle of spray disinfectant among the
supplies. I grabbed it and poured its strong smelling contents over
the covered bodies while Kera rinsed her mouth out with water. The
smell of the disinfectant overpowered the stink of rot, although I
wasn’t sure the foul smelling combination was any better.

“Are you okay?” Her face half illuminated by
the glow of my light looked a bit green. She nodded, even though
she was still fighting a battle against her rebelling stomach. She
walked over to me, her eyes avoiding the reeking pile on the
floor.

I grasped her reassuringly by the shoulder.
“I need you to open the freezer door while I stand ready. Just back
away with the door as it opens.” She tried to smile, instead it
came across as a grimace.

We walked over to the large stainless door of
the walk-in freezer. I listened at the door for any noises then
backed away and nodded to Kera. She grabbed the long handled latch
and jerked it open as I aimed the rifle and light into the
interior. The putrid smell of rotting food wafted out to mix with
the malodorous fumes already assaulting our nostrils. I surveyed
the interior with my light and once convinced that there were no
surprises hiding within its confines told Kera to close the door.
That left the dry storage locker.

We moved to the next door and repeated the
procedure. The room was empty except for a myriad of foodstuff on
the shelves and boxes on the floor. Another metal door was embedded
in this room’s back wall with a bar latch across its length midway
up from the floor.

“That probably leads outside.”

“Can we get out of here now?” Kera asked,
still fighting her nausea.

“Yes, we’re done.” I closed the storage door
and backed out of the kitchen, closely followed by the girl.

Holly was waiting outside the doors when we
returned. “God, it smells awful in there.”

I kept my rifle and light pointed to the
floor to try and reduce the amount of light escaping the building,
and Jeremy and Holly were doing the same.

“The kitchen’s clear,” I said, removing the
makeshift mask from my face.

“We can stay in the office for the night,”
Holly said. She reached out and touched my hand and I grasped hers
in response. “There’s room for all of us on the floor and someone
can take the couch. The smell is not near as bad in there.”

“We checked out the bathrooms too, Papa,”
Jeremy said in his adolescent voice, but sounding very grown-up.
“The water still turns on and the toilets flush.”

I smiled down at him. “That’s good,
Jeremy.”

I looked over to where the dark silhouette of
Frank stood by the glass double doors, staring out into the
night.

“Anything out there, Frank?”

“Nothing close by that I can see,” his deep
voice reverberated back across the room.

I walked over to a booth and literally
collapsed into the seat, pulling Holly in beside me. Jeremy slid in
opposite us. Kera remained standing, cradling the shotgun in her
arms. Holly took out some matches that she had found in the office
and lit a candle on the center of the table. Its dancing warm glow
enveloped our haggard faces. I switched off my weapon light and
motioned for Frank to join us. He lumbered over and squeezed in
next to Jeremy.

“We need to plan what our next moves are
going to be,” I started. “We left all of our supplies in the truck,
plus my lab notebooks. I think we need to try and get back to the
truck in the morning.”

Holly shook her head. “No, Steven, those
notebooks aren’t worth our lives. There’s probably no one left
besides you who would even know what to do with the information
they contain. It may be centuries before we have the kind of
working technology needed to combat this.”

She put her arm around my shoulder and hugged
me tight. “We need to get as far away from that horde as possible.
We already lost one today.” She shot a quick glance up at Kera, who
seemed oblivious to the mention of the loss of Amanda.

I wanted to be furious at Holly, she knew all
that I had to endure to get the data I had generated, she should be
supporting me on this. But I couldn’t, not when I looked into those
familiar green eyes and saw the love and worry expressed in
them.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“My lab is still intact. Maybe at some point in the future I can
get back there and finish what I started, find a cure for this
disease. Without that data out there we would be starting from
scratch.” I looked at the faces around the table. “If we don’t find
a cure for the zombie virus we may never be rid of it, humans may
never have a chance to bounce back.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m
damn low on ammo,” Frank chimed in. “I don’t see us getting too far
on foot with what we have left.”

“We can find stores that carry ammo,” Holly
countered. “Food, clothing, everything can be had on the way.”

“But, Hon, how many of those creatures are we
going to have to fight through to get to what we need, and if we
run out of ammo before we can get to more, what then?” I asked,
taking Frank’s line of thought and running with it.

She looked at me, pleading with her eyes.
“Steven, we could run out fighting our way back to the truck, then
what do we do when we are out of ammo and nothing left to fight
with but our hands against hundreds of those raging maniacs?”

“I thought you said they sleep at night like
we do, Papa. Why don’t we get the truck back then?”

We all looked at Jeremy in astonishment.

He was correct. They were still diurnal from
what I had observed. I hadn’t thought of that.

“We could try tomorrow night,” I
suggested.

“I don’t know, Steven. I still think the
risks outweigh the benefits,” Holly argued from a weaker
stance.

“Seems that we know what we have to deal with
at the truck, beyond that is the unknown,” Frank said earnestly. “I
would much rather deal with something I know than something I
don’t.”

Holly looked up at Kera. “How about you?” she
asked. “What do you think we should do?”

Kera looked down at her for a moment her
expression hard. She swiped dark hair away from her blue eyes and
looked out the window into the darkness beyond. “Fuck them things.”
Her voice was as hard as her expression. “The ones out there killed
Amanda. Let’s go for the truck.”

Holly sighed. “I guess I’m outvoted.”

“The truck’s trashed, but drivable.” I said.
“We’ll have to find another soon to transfer our stuff into before
we go too far.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem with all the
abandoned vehicles around. Worse case we pick up one at a
dealership,” Frank said, stroking his beard as he talked. “I say we
just stay here till tomorrow night.”

I nodded in agreement. “There’s food and
running water and we know what is, or should I say isn’t
inside.”

Holly reluctantly agreed. “Okay, although we
should have someone watching out while the rest of us sleep, and
for God’s sake, keep the noise down and lights dim, we don’t need
to be attracting any unwanted guests!”

“Right. Remember, someone killed one of those
things in here,” I added, “so there may be at least one survivor
running around out there. If someone comes to the door looking for
help, don’t automatically assume it’s a Loony.”

We decided that we would each stand a two
hour watch through the night while the rest of us found whatever
place we could to get comfortable and try and sleep. Frank took the
first shift while Holly and I curled up on the blue carpeted floor
of the office. Jeremy laid down on the small couch and fell
instantly to sleep.

My mind was in overdrive as I lay there with
my wife’s head cradled against my chest. I thought I would never
fall asleep. I replayed all we had been through the past week and
was so thankful that my family was now together, unlike our new
companions who had lost so much. Guilt still gnawed at my gut over
the death of Amanda. I played it over and over again in my mind.
What could I have done differently? Fear and adrenaline had
overwhelmed my thought processes as I had fought to save her. I
should have jumped into the back and physically fought them off of
her and pulled her free. I knew I hadn’t acted quickly or
decisively enough. Her death would haunt my consciousness for a
long time.

The next thing I knew my son was shaking me
awake from a deep sleep for my shift at 0200 hours. Frank was
snoring away loudly on the couch, his legs overhanging one end.
When I got up Jeremy laid down in the warm spot I had just vacated
next to his mom.

I grabbed my rifle, slinging it around my
shoulder as I walked out into the dining area. Kera was curled up
on the seat of a booth, sleeping soundly with the shotgun nestled
in her arms. It was warm and stuffy in the building and the faint
stench of decomposition still lingered in the air. The only light
was from the waxing moon and the much fainter glow of Hosteller’s
comet as it sped away from both the sun and the Earth after reaping
its devastation upon the people of this planet.

CHAPTER 12

In the morning Holly and I braved the sickening reek
of the kitchen to forage around in the dry storage locker for food
items that we could survive on for the day. Most of the bread was
still edible, as were the cheeses from the walk-in freezer. We
pilfered the few canned goods that we could find and exited the
place before our stomachs revolted completely.

We continued our watch cycle during the
daylight hours when the infected were most active. So far none had
come close enough to the restaurant to cause us any worry.

Kera spent the morning sitting on top of one
of the tables adjacent to a front window and would point the Saiga
through the window and simulate shooting the Loonies whenever she
spotted them, making ‘pop, pop, pop’ noises with her mouth. Jeremy
watched her for a while from a distance, then joined in with his
P556. Soon they were giggling together, pretending to take out the
infected that they spotted walking in the distance. Frank napped on
and off during the day while Holly and I sat and just enjoyed being
together and talked about our future at the farm.

The sun climbed higher and the building was
stifling. We tried to limit our movements as much as possible and
were constantly drinking tap water to stay hydrated. Groups of
Loonies, sometimes in large numbers, moved out on the surrounding
streets and sidewalks. Many were hunkered down in the shade of
trees and buildings trying to avoid the broiling July sun. They
were in various states of undress, from completely nude to business
attire. Most were filthy.

Early in the afternoon a dark-haired man who
must have been in his early or mid-thirties, wearing a stained
white button-down short sleeve shirt and dark tie but naked from
the waist down, walked along the edge of the parking lot sporting a
raging hard-on. He approached a younger female Loony lounging in
the shade of a tree and jumped on her, brutally flipping her over
and tearing at her dress while she tried to get out from beneath
him. He was finally able to tear her clothes away and mount her.
She fought his act of copulation savagely until he was
finished.

He stood up and walked off to sit down next
to a tree and she just rolled over and sat there as if nothing had
happened. The man was bleeding from several long gouges where she
had caught him with her nails.

Other Loonies around them hadn’t so much as
looked up at the commotion. We glanced over at Jeremy to make sure
his attention was elsewhere when this occurred. Thank God it
was.

We saw several brutal fights break out among
the males, with blood being drawn. They usually ended as quickly as
they started with the combatants moving away and ignoring each
other. Occasionally we would spot a Loony feeding as it walked or
sat. We guessed they must have been eating animals of some sort,
although sometimes we were sure that they held the bloody remains
of something that looked human.

We even once saw a Loony walking around
feeding from a large bag of potato chips, shoving its face into the
bag like a horse sticking its head into a pail. Others attempted to
get to the bag and there would be a snarling punching match until
the original Loony with the bag was able to dodge away.

By mid-afternoon when the sun was at its
hottest, we didn’t observe any of the infected up and moving. They
were all taking shelter in the shade.

Once in the afternoon we heard a series of
shots off in the distance but they were never repeated. That buoyed
our hopes that there were other survivors like us out there.

In the late afternoon they were moving again.
Several came close to our building causing Holly, who had the
watch, to sound a warning. We all quickly found concealment until
they passed by, totally ignoring the restaurant. Kera relieved
Holly at 1800 hours and Holly and I sat down to make cheese
sandwiches for everyone. Frank sat with us and helped, munching on
a few along the way.

Jeremy was snoozing at one of the booths. We
woke him up to eat and the four of us sat around quietly devouring
the meager meal, washing it all down with bottled water we found in
the back. Kera quietly ate while she stood by the front doors
staring out into the fading day.

I sat snuggled up against Holly, thankful for
the reassuring and familiar touch of her body next to mine. She
wiped crumbs away from her lips and leaned in to give me a
kiss.