The Zombie Virus (Book 1) (29 page)

“It doesn’t feel like a fat piece of sausage
anymore.” She laughed.

I decided to leave off the gauze wrapping to
allow the air to get to it. The swelling all about her face had
subsided nearly to the point of normalcy and the bruises were
turning yellow as they healed. She was starting to look and sound
like her old self.

“One more thing,” I said when I finished
bandaging her face. I held up a black baseball cap with the Colt
emblem embroidered on its front, leaned over, and placed it on her
head. After adjusting its band and pulling her hair through the
hole above the back strap I sat back and admired my handiwork. The
brim sat cocked up over the bandage on her forehead, but would
effectively keep her hair out of her face.

Her face radiated her pleasure up to me.
“I’ve been meaning to find a barrette to clip it back, but never
had a chance.”

If her face wasn’t so ravaged by the beating
she had taken she would look attractive wearing the ball cap.

“That looks good on you,” I told her.

She smiled. “Any food in there?” she asked,
indicating the back of the truck. “I’m tired of vending machine
junk.”

“Let me see what I can find.”

I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on
stale bread. It tasted like ambrosia after the junk food we had
been forced to eat over the past several days. We ate like starving
wolves at a fresh kill and devoured a pile of the sandwiches that
would have probably won us a contest at some hick town fair, if
there were still hick towns… or fairs. Hell, even the sight and
smell of the dead bodies didn’t dampen our appetites.

After we ate, I pulled out one of the Samurai
swords and set it on the front seat with Holly’s rifle. I thought
it may come in useful for close combat with the infected if I ever
ran out of ammo again.

“Is that an authentic katana?” Kera asked
when I backed out of the passenger compartment. She sat in the
shade of the truck with her back to one of the large tires and
drank from a bottle of water.

“Yep. My grandfather brought it back from
Okinawa, the hilt is leather made from human skin.”

She wrinkled her nose. “That’s gross!”

I laughed. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

When I opened the driver’s door, Kera loudly
sucked in her breath.

“Oh shit!” she exclaimed and jumped to her
feet. “Frank! It’s Frank!” she shouted and took off at a run in the
direction of the housing complex. I spun around and looked toward
where she was running. Frank’s unmistakable figure was rounding a
row of hedges that surrounded the entryway to the development. His
shirt was missing and he looked injured.

When he spotted Kera yelling and running with
her arms waving in greeting he accelerated in a burst of speed that
seemed uncanny for such a big man. I ran around the truck after
her. Something wasn’t right. Something was off in his movements and
in his lack of acknowledgement as Kera closed the distance.

“Kera! Stop!” I screamed, running to catch
up. She had left her shotgun on the front seat of the truck. She
was defenseless and the thing that was running for her was no
longer Frank.

I don’t know if she heard me yell or whether
she was close enough to the man to finally see what he was, either
way she came to a skidding halt. She tried to back-peddle, then
lost her footing in the grass and fell onto her back.

I unclipped the sling from the front of my
rifle and activated the sights. The Frank Loony was over a hundred
yards away and Kera maybe seventy-five. He would get to her first.
She rolled over and tried to get to her feet and run at the same
time. The big man hit her like a linebacker sacking a receiver with
the ball. They plowed hard into the ground. Somehow Kera was able
to break free and scramble backwards on her butt. He got to his
knees and lunged after her. I could hear his snarling growl over
the pounding of the blood rushing through my head. I raised the
rifle as I closed the distance.

He grabbed her viciously by her ankle and
yanked her back, causing her to scream in terror. His other hand
clamped tightly around her delicate throat and he bent down with
his mouth agape, bloody spittle dripping in viscous strings from
his brown, matted beard.

The top of his shaggy head exploded sending
gray brain matter, white bone fragments and bright red blood
fanning out in a wide plume behind him. I kept the holographic
reticle on his chest as I approached and was prepared to pull the
trigger on the rifle again, then the corpse of what had been Frank
teetered sideways and toppled to the ground like a mighty oak at
the hands of a skilled lumberjack. Kera screamed again and crawled
backwards away from the corpse that continued to pump pulses of
arterial blood into the air from the gaping wound in its head. As
its heart eventually succumbed to the inevitable, the blood flow
slowed to a trickle, his legs continuing to kick spasmodically.

I reached Kera’s side, keeping the barrel of
the rifle trained on the big man’s corpse, expecting it to jump up
and resume its attack, however, there was no life left in the body.
I was grateful to see its blood-red eyes.

“You killed Frank!” Kera screeched, her eyes
wild with fear.

“Calm down, Kera!” I yelled back. “He wasn’t
Frank anymore! You know that!”

She put her head into her hands and sobbed,
her small shoulders shaking with the intensity of her grief.

I clipped the sling to the front of the rifle
and cinched it tight to my chest then knelt down and put my arms
around her. She threw her arms around my neck and cried heavily
into my shoulder.

“It’s okay. We’re okay,” I reassured her.

But it wasn’t okay, was it? Frank, my son’s
protector while I was absent, had become infected. What did that
mean for the fate of my little boy? Was he one of them too? I
couldn’t let myself think that. He had to have escaped unharmed. He
was safe somewhere waiting for me, I just knew it. I couldn’t rest
until I found him!

“I’m sorry I said that to –”

“Shhh!” I cut her off as I spotted movement
coming around one of the houses in the development. I pulled her up
with me as I stood, our arms still wrapped around each other.

“Are you okay?” I asked, untangling myself
from her arms.

She nodded hesitantly, but still managed a
small smile of reassurance.

“We have more company coming. Let’s get back
to the truck.” I grabbed her hand and started running away from a
group of Loonies that had rounded the house and were sprinting
after us.

We reached the truck well ahead of our
adversaries. I jumped in the passenger door and slid across to the
driver’s seat, pushing the packs, guns and sword out of the way.
Kera jumped in behind me and slammed her door shut. The Loonies
were in a dead run across the field that separated the road from
the housing complex, although they were still over a hundred yards
away.

I turned the key and heard a ‘click’ in the
engine compartment, but nothing more. The dome light dimmed at the
same time. I reached out and slammed shut the driver’s door hoping
to conserve a little more battery power. When I turned the key
again I was rewarded with the same ‘click’.

“Fuck!” I yelled. “The battery’s dead!” I
looked at the approaching Loonies, we wouldn’t have time to find
another vehicle.

“Grab your stuff and get out!” I ordered
Kera.

Without hesitating she grabbed her shotgun
and pack, threw open her door and slid out. She looked back at me
questioningly.

“Head on down the road, I’ll catch up.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said,
sounding a lot like Holly, and then turned south down the road at a
trot.

I reached across the seats to the glove
compartment and threw it open, taking out the small set of
binoculars that I had last used at the Potomac River Bridge.

I opened my door and stood up on the running
board and, using the roof to stabilize the binoculars, looked out
across the field at the closing group of infected. I prayed my boy
wasn’t there as I quickly scanned the two dozen or so faces. The
only children were female. He wasn’t there. I let out a sigh of
relief and dropped down to the ground. I grabbed my pack and
stuffed the binoculars inside.

When I was withdrawing from the cab something
caught my eye, or should I say the lack of something. There was a
round smudge on the center of the windshield, exactly where the GPS
unit had been mounted. Someone had removed it. I searched around
the front of the vehicle. It wasn’t there. My hopes rose. My boy
had to have taken it. It would guide him to the farm!

I jumped back out of the truck and threw my
pack on my back. I slid the sword and scabbard through my belt and
grabbed Holly’s rifle, chambering a round from the magazine. The
short-barreled Colts were only ‘minute of body’ at one hundred
yards, although that was plenty accurate enough to take out the
Loonies that were in the lead and well under one hundred yards
away. I swiftly switched on the holographic sight and lay the rifle
barrel over the truck’s engine hood. They all had to be Loonies.
There was no way a survivor would be running with that pack like
that. I couldn’t be second guessing myself if I wanted to
survive.

I put the sight center mass on a tall, naked,
balding man running like he was in a marathon, his dick swinging in
tempo to the rhythm of his pumping legs. He was nearly to the truck
when I pulled the trigger and dropped him with the first shot. I
rapidly followed that shot with another on the next Loony, and then
another, continuing until the bolt snapped open and held there,
indicating the magazine was empty.

A dozen bodies lay strewn about the field,
some writhing in the agony of their wounds.

More were coming.

I looked back over my shoulder and saw a
handful running from that direction also. None of them were
children. I deftly released the empty mag from the rifle as I
started backing down the road, and slammed in a full one, hearing
the mag catch click in place. I hit the bolt release and ran,
sprinting toward the distant figure of Kera.

CHAPTER 17

We had to get away from suburbia. As long as we were
in or near these population centers, we would always be running,
and I was so tired of running. My soul yearned for our farm. It had
taken on the illusion of some kind of Shangri-La in my mind. A
paradise where all the nightmares we had endured of late would come
to an end. It was as if deep in my psyche I believed that Holly and
Jeremy would be waiting there for me like they had greeted me
countless times before when I had arrived home from long, hard days
at work.

I closed the distance to Kera as I opened it
on my pursuers. I had stirred the hornet’s nest with my gunshots
and they were appearing from out of the framework of the
countryside. There weren’t hundreds chasing us, but there was
certainly enough to overwhelm us. I would occasionally stop when I
thought I saw a young child among the horde, using the binoculars
to determine if it was possibly my son. So far, what remained of my
heart was unbroken.

When I reached Kera she was swooning from the
exertion and the heat. Sweat poured from her body in streams. We
both stopped in the middle of the road, gasping for breaths of the
humid air. When my heartbeat had subsided to a respectable level
and I could speak without a breath interrupting every other word, I
asked Kera for the umpteenth time how she felt. She just nodded,
her mouth hanging open in her fight to catch her breath.

I looked back at the chasing horde. They were
again closing, and fast.

“We have to push on,” I said urgently.

She drew a deep breath and nodded again.

Up ahead the four-lane road drew down to two
lanes and the scenery became noticeably more rural. We were leaving
the Fredericksburg suburbs behind. Far in the distance to the
south, a thick pall of dark smoke hung on the horizon, probably
from Richmond. Let that hellhole burn, we were going nowhere near
it.

We ran as fast as our tired legs would carry
us. We were running on pure adrenaline now, although no longer
outpacing the faster of the infected on the road behind us. They
were like dogs on a scent that would never give up.

After about a mile I saw an old two-story
farmhouse sitting off the road to our left. Its white paint was
peeling in places, a testament to the hard times farmers faced in
this area.

Behind it, in an arc, sat an array of barns
and sheds with farm implements scattered between them. The farm
complex sat back from the road about forty yards and was surrounded
on three sides by large fields of tall corn. Several vehicles were
parked in the driveway near the house.

I knew we were both run out. We would hole up
and make a stand there. Night was only a few more hours away. If we
could last until then, maybe we could slip away unnoticed by the
Loonies and make our escape. I didn’t see any other options. We
were just too tired to continue.

“There!” I said breathlessly, pointing at the
farmhouse.

We turned up the driveway, no longer running.
The fastest of the Loonies, a young woman and a teenage boy, were
close behind, running relentlessly on a seemingly never-ending
reserve of energy. I turned and fired three shots with Holly’s
rifle before I struck the woman in the leg, causing her to stumble
and fall. I was shaking uncontrollably from adrenaline dump, and
along with my heavy breathing I was having difficulty holding my
point of aim.

I fired twice more at the boy who was now
about thirty yards away. I don’t know where I hit him. He just fell
face first into the gravel of the driveway. I half-ran
half-stumbled up the driveway and onto the porch where Kera was
trying to open the front door.