Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (24 page)

“She bit me,” Dean moaned.  He continued to try to get away from Misha.  “She bit me so many times.  She fucking chewed on me.  I tried to fight her off but she just kept coming back.  Even after I heard her ribs
snap, she just kept coming after me.  I took care of her though.”

“Your skin is hot, you’re running a fever.”  Misha pulled Dean’s blankets off his bed and started to wrap them around his arm.  Misha noticed that Dean had other wounds, but none as bad as his arm.

“I’m on
fire
!” Dean screamed.  He threw his head back onto his bed and stared up at the ceiling.  His eyes and mouth hung wide.  His gums were bleeding.  Also, his eyes had a slightly milky look to them.  His pupils were wider than Misha had ever seen and many veins were visible all throughout the whites.  Dean started to sing
Run To The Hills
by Iron Maiden but the words had a drunken slur to them.  He didn’t get very far into the song before he trailed off.  Dean’s skin was going very pale.  Paler than Misha’s.  The skin around his eyes had taken on a purple tint.  He stopped struggling against Misha’s attempt to assist him.  Then he started seizing.

“Shit!”  Misha slid Dean to the floor, trying to keep his head stable.  He had no idea what to do if someone seizured, but he figured a flat surface was better than sitting up, and keeping the neck as stable as he could seemed like a good idea.  Dean’s body jumped about like a fish out of water.  Eventually though it stopped.  Misha quickly searched Dean’s pockets until he found his cell phone.  He flipped it opened and called 911, but it was busy like before.

Misha stood up and paced, not knowing what to do.  His friend was probably dying, and an unknown woman was already dead.  He kept trying to call 911 but he never got anything different than a busy signal.  He decided to call someone else, anyone else.  Maybe Cassidy would know what to do.  Misha found her number in Dean’s phone and called.  He got a busy signal.  He called Juliann, another one of their housemates, but that number gave a busy signal also.  He tried three other numbers in Dean’s phone, including the sports store Dean worked at part time.  Each time he got just a busy signal.

“Fuck!”  Misha threw the cell at the wall.  What was he supposed to do?  What
could
he do?

Dean moaned on the floor.

“Dean?  Dean, you okay?”  Misha knelt down beside him.

Dean stirred and rolled his head.  Misha placed a hand on his chest and shook him slightly.  Dean weakly grabbed Misha’s wrist.  As he turned his head toward Misha, his mouth hung open.  He tried to put Misha’s hand in his mouth.

“Dean!”  Misha pulled his hand away.  Dean’s teeth snapped hard on empty air.  He reached for Misha again but Misha scrambled out of reach.  “Come on man, that’s not funny.”

Misha bumped into his hockey stick.  He grabbed it, then stood.  Dean started to get to his own feet
slowly.

“What’s wrong with you?” Misha asked.

Dean got to his feet but was slouched far over, basically bent in half.  His fingers brushed his baseball bat.  Then they wrapped around it and Dean stood taller, now holding the bat.

“Dean?”

Dean swung the bat at Misha.  Misha lifted up the hockey stick on instinct.  The bat struck it in the middle smashing it in two.  This left Misha holding a pair of slightly pointed wooden stakes.  Dean swung the bat again, driving Misha away.  Misha slid in the blood on the floor, the strange woman’s blood.  He fell over, one of the broken ends of the hockey stick sticking up in his hand.  Dean fell upon him, teeth snapping.  The stick held him back for only a moment.  Dean pressed down hard, driving the broken end into his own chest, between his ribs, and into his heart.  Yet, he continued to bite at Misha.

Misha was terrified for his life.  He had never been so
scared before.  His best friend was trying to rip out his throat with his teeth.  His best friend had stabbed himself in the heart trying to do this, but was somehow still alive.  Misha brought up the other end of the broken stick.  He squeezed his eyes shut and stabbed out with the broken end.  He felt a little resistance, then heard a squelch followed by a crack.  The stick slid forward a bit, and Misha felt something hot and wet drip onto his hand and the side of his face.  A much larger and heavier weight followed.  Misha knew that was Dean’s body.

He shoved Dean off him and scrambled to his feet.  He fled from the bedroom blindly, eyes still closed.  He didn’t want to see what had happened.  He stumbled about the basement and somehow ended up in the bathroom.  He found the shower and turned it on.  He huddled under the water scrubbing blindly at his face and hands.  If he opened his eyes to find any blood on
him, he was going to freak out.  He was already freaking out.  There must be blood on his shirt.  Blood didn’t wash out of clothes as easily as it did skin, even black clothes.  With his eyes still closed he peeled off his shirt and threw it somewhere in the bathroom.  It landed with a wet plop and reminded him of the sound he heard back in Dean’s room.  Only that was more of a squish than a plop.

Misha’s thoughts whirled and reeled.  Dean was dead
, but not dead.  He was the living dead.  He was indestructible.  He was coming for Misha.  He was right outside the shower.  He was leaning down…

* * *

Misha’s eyes flew open, fully expecting Dean to be looming over him.  Nothing was there but the dark bathroom.  The only light came from a tiny frosted window that was perpetually stuck in the shade between houses.  It let in just enough light to see and navigate by.  Misha finally got to his feet, his legs shaking.  He turned off the water and listened carefully.  There wasn’t a sound except for the water dripping off his body.  He stepped out of the shower and then out into the hall, leaving a trail of puddles behind him.  Misha was torn between going upstairs and checking out Dean’s room.  He’d flip out if Dean was dead, but the thought of him not being dead and wandering around made him panic more.  He headed for the bedroom.

He went carefully, taking each step in a slow and calculated manner.  He listened intently, expecting to hear something, perhaps the chorus of
Run To The Hills
.  He didn’t hear anything.  He made it to Dean’s room and stood near the wall, just outside the doorway.  Every fibre of his being was terrified about looking in.  He kept expecting that at any moment, Dean would walk out.  His muscles were tense in case he needed to flee.  He peered around the corner.

Dean still lay on the floor, crumpled onto one side.  He lay next to the woman that had her head beaten in.  Half of the hockey stick still protruded out of Dean’s chest, out of his heart, the blade of the stick making it look like a badly made flag.  The other half had been rammed into his eye socket.  Pure luck on Misha’s part.  Dean wasn’t moving.  He must be dead.  Even so, Misha still expected him to rise up.  He closed the bedroom door.  Since the door opened into the room, it was pointless to try and block it with anything.  He headed up the stairs, moving a lot faster than he did on his way down to Dean’s room.

The top of the stairs had a door that opened into the living room.  The door had probably never been closed the entire time that Misha had lived there but he closed it now.  Then he shoved the couch around so that it barred the door.  Of course, it might not stop a determined undead, but it did make Misha feel slightly better.  Then he noticed the half bath’s door was open.  It wasn’t open earlier.  When he had run to help Dean, he hadn’t turned the knob.  That meant that either someone was in there earlier, when he almost opened it, or someone was in there now.

Misha decided he didn’t want to know and went out the back door.  He had no idea where to go from there.  He remembered the movement in the house behind his, and the sick-looking neighbour next door.  And of course, no matter what happened, he would not go to the grumpy neighbour’s house.  That meant going around to the front of the house and crossing the street.  Although a path led easily around one side of the house, Misha decided to go around the other side.  He didn’t want to pass by Dean’s window.  He got scratched up by the untamed weeds, but made it to the front of the house.  He focused on the house across the street and started making a beeline for it.

It was when he was about to step into the street that a sharp bark sounded behind him.  He was startled to a stop, which in turn, saved his life.  A large moving van roared past right where Misha had been about to step.  He was so frightened by the sudden appearance of the van that he fell over backwards and scraped his hands trying to catch himself.  He sat there for a while, breathing heavily, trying to calm his heart.  That was twice today he nearly died.  That he knew of anyway.

Remembering the dog bark, Misha turned around.  A big German
shepherd stood on his lawn behind him, its head lowered, sniffing in his direction.  Misha didn’t know how to react to the dog, so he waved at it.  It seemed like a dumb idea once he did it, but the dog came closer, keeping low and looking from side to side.  When it got close enough, it sniffed Misha all over.  Misha was too confused and exhausted to push the dog away.  And possibly still a little drunk, although the adrenaline seemed to be quickly burning that off.  The dog sat next to Misha and looked around, ears pricking this way and that.

“So where did you come from, eh?”  Misha rubbed the dog’s shoulder.  The dog appeared to be
well groomed but a small bloody handprint in the fur on its side ruined its perfect coat.  He also noticed a few twigs and burs stuck in its fur as well.  Apparently, the dog had been skulking around in some brush much like Misha. It was wearing a harness too, which he found unusual.  However, it also had on a collar and Misha found its tags.  He read the name ‘Rifle’ on one of them.

“So you’re Rifle, huh?”  Misha rubbed the dog again.

Its ear flicked in his direction when he said its name.

“I kind of wish I had one of your name sakes with me.”  Misha read the rest of the tags, including an address.  “857 Jackson Ave.  That’s not that far from here.”

Rifle whined.

“What?  You can’t possibly recognise your address, can you?”

Rifle whined again and got to his feet.  Misha turned and looked at whatever the dog was focusing on.  A man in a UPS uniform was coming up the street.  He was running in a shambling manner.  He tripped, got back up, ran a few more steps, then tripped again and repeated the process.  He didn’t seem to register any pain.

Misha quickly got to his feet.  “So where do
you
think we should go, Rifle?”

The dog looked up at Misha then back at the UPS guy.  He whined, growled,
and then whined again.  He was shuffling his paws about in an urgent manner.

“I guess anywhere but here is fine, right?”  Misha Jovovich decided to head to the dog’s owner’s house.  If the dog was loose, it was likely something bad had happened there too, but it was a destination and he thought he might not even go all the way there.  Misha thought he’d just get over to the next power grid. 
Surely, there would be
someone
there who could help him.

Kara

Kara sat in her bus seat, patiently waiting for her stop.  Her cane stood on the floor between her feet, her hands resting lightly on top of it.  She needed the cane eight years ago when she had badly twisted her ankle on poor pavement outside a supermarket.  She didn’t need it for its proper purpose anymore, but kept it anyway.  It had its uses, like now on the bus.  The bus was very crowded when she got on, but because she had the cane, and faked that she needed it, a nice young man gave up his seat for her.  She felt no guilt about taking it and enjoyed her ride.

At sixty-eight, Kara felt very little guilt about anything.  If she took a cab from someone else, oh well, they weren’t fast enough.  If she took the last box of cereal that some kid had been begging his mom to get, oh well, it’ll teach the kid respect.  If she stepped on somebody’s toes, oh well, they shouldn’t have been standing so close.  Kara looked out for herself, and herself alone.  She always had, because she always needed to.

The bus rattled and bounced along, the people inside swaying with the motions.  Some of them bumped into each other, muttering soft apologies.  Kara didn’t even need to take the bus, but she did it anyway.  Her family had built a very successful career in
groundbreaking sciences.  Her grandfather and his brothers had been the key founders of Marble Keystone Pharmaceuticals, one of the largest research and development companies in the world that had gone on to become the Marble Keystone Corporation.  Kara’s mother had passed away when she was young, and when her father, who had followed in
his
father’s footsteps, had died several years ago due to a job-related accident, he left Kara everything.  It upset his mistress greatly, but it meant Kara could continue never to work a day in her life unless she wanted to.  Her father’s money was now officially hers.  Considering he had always gotten her what she wanted when she wanted, very little changed.  She still did a few things for the company: going to charity and fundraising events, deciding who was to receive donations, settling a few petty disputes among some of the higher-ups, many of whom were her cousins or second-cousins.  She was the one who thought to have the concert they were throwing today for spinal cord research.  She knew little about what Keystone was working on specifically, but she knew what the public liked to hear.  That was why Kara rode the bus.  Being amongst the general public gave her an understanding of their general mood.  That, and people watching had always been a favourite hobby of hers.