The Zombie Virus (Book 1) (13 page)

“I-I don’t think so,” she managed to answer
between sobs.

“Frank, get her down to the river and get her
cleaned up.”

“No problem, bro.” Frank gingerly placed his
arm around Kera and led her across the church yard.

Holly went over to Amanda, who was still
riveted in place. “Are you okay honey?” she asked the frightened
girl.

Amanda looked at Holly with tear filled blue
eyes, her lip quivered. “I…” she hesitated. “I can’t believe this
shit is happening!” she screamed. “I want to go home!” She
collapsed to the ground. “I want my mom!”

Holly knelt down beside her and hugged her
gently. The girl put her arms around her and cried into her
shoulder.

“I need to go check inside the church,” I
said to Holly. She nodded. “Stay with them, son,” I said to Jeremy.
“You did really good,” I said, mussing his hair with my hand.

I jogged back to the entrance of the church.
It was very dark inside except for the patches of light from the
multicolored windows. The heat from the place hit me along with
stink of shit, piss, and something else. I removed the SureFire
light from my hip and flipped it on. The beam cut through the
darkness. Dust particles swam and danced in the light, swirling
from the gentle breeze coming through the door.

I illuminated the neatly lined up pews that
led to the main altar on the other side of the small church’s
sanctuary. I walked down the aisle, sunbeams from the ornate
stained glassed windows casting rainbow hues across the wooden
benches. Then I saw them.

By the looks of things they had been locked
in here since the plague had hit. Three bodies lay before the
ceremonial place near the front, already stinking with rot, half
devoured. I felt the bile rise to the back of my throat when the
putrid smell of decaying flesh reached my nostrils. The bodies
seemed to ripple in the darkness and I shined the light on them.
Masses of maggots blanketed their remains. My empty stomach heaved
and I quickly retraced my steps back outside, gasping large
mouthfuls of sweet, clean air. I slammed the door to the church
shut and moved a heavy concrete statuary over to it to block its
opening.

A hand grasped my shoulder and I uttered a
startled cry, twisting away. I let out a relieved breath when I saw
it was Holly.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” she said. “Is
everything okay?”

“It’s bad in there, but there are no more of
those things,” I rasped, still shaken. I looked behind her at
Jeremy and Amanda, who were sitting in the shade of a tree on the
other side of the old cemetery.

“Are they okay?” I asked.

She looked back over her shoulder before
answering. “Yes. It’s been a traumatic day for them both. They are
young and resilient. I wish I could say things will get
better.”

I spotted Frank and Kera walking back up from
the direction of the wooded riverbank.

“What do you think of our new additions?” I
asked her as they approached, a bear of a man and the petite
eighteen year old girl.

“First impressions seem good,” Holly replied.
“Not that we can choose who we climb in bed with in this brave new
world, so to speak.”

“No,” I countered, “we do have a choice.” I
eyed the two again as they sat down with our son and Amanda in the
shade. “Anyone that threatens our family, whether infected or not,
we will deal with decisively if we have to.” I pulled Holly close
to me, comforted by her familiar form next to mine. “I couldn’t
imagine doing this without you, you know.” I smiled at her. “I love
you.”

“I love you too, Steven,” she replied, taking
my hand. “And neither of us has to face this alone, thank God.” She
looked back again at the group under the tree.

“We have to watch them,” Holly said. “Just
until we know they didn’t contract the virus.”

“We’ll know soon if they did. They should
start displaying symptoms within an hour of infection.”

We started walking back.

“The greater our numbers the better chance we
have of surviving this,” she said bluntly.

“I know, Holly. We just have to be careful.
Not everyone who survived will be decent upstanding human
beings.”

She nodded. “I know.” “How do you feel about
these three?” she asked.

I looked over her shoulder at them. They were
sitting in the shade with Jeremy and talking, looking over to us
occasionally.

“It will take some time before I trust any
newcomers completely, although I have a good feeling about Frank.
I’m not sure about the girls yet.”

“They’re young and scared. Probably lost
everyone they were close to.” She squinted her eyes against the
sun, surveying the group. “I think they’ll cope.”

“Should we take them all the way to the
farm?” I asked, already knowing how I felt.

“We have to. We’re going to need as many
people there helping us as we can find.”

“My thoughts too,” I affirmed, smiling. Still
holding hands, we walked back to the group.

CHAPTER 9

We sat in the shade eating sandwiches that Holly and
Kera made for us. We arranged ourselves in a circle so we could
watch behind each other’s back for any movement. Frank had taken
some fishing line from our supplies and tied several soda cans to
it and strung it across the bridge. The idea was that any Loonies
coming over the bridge would hit the string and rattle the cans,
alerting us to them. It was our hope that our shooting foray in
Port Royal had killed all the Loonies in that area, nonetheless, we
wanted to be cautious anyway.

We had also carefully dragged the two
infected corpses into a culvert so we didn’t have to see or smell
them while we enjoyed our brief respite from the hazards of the
road.

“So tell us how the three of you came to be
here,” I inquired of our new additions between bites of my
sandwich.

Frank raised his eyebrows and looked at the
two girls, “Ladies before brutes,” he said jokingly.

Amanda looked at Kera. “Um, you go ahead,”
Kera urged.

“We’re from down in Gloucester,” Amanda said,
then looked toward Kera, “we’re cousins. My mom and her dad are
sister and brother. We just graduated from high school a couple of
months ago and were just hanging together for the summer until we
left for college.

“Kera stayed over Monday night so we could
stay up and, you know, watch the meteor storm together. It was
really cool to see, almost as good as a Fourth of July show. The
next morning Mom woke us up before she left for work and told us a
lot of people had gotten sick overnight and the news people were
saying the comet caused it. She was feeling fine and wanted to make
sure Kera and I were, you know, okay. She had called my brother at
his apartment and woke him up. He was okay too.

“Kera called her house and spoke to her
parents before they headed to work. Her dad was fine, but her mom
wasn’t feeling good. She was going into work anyway. My dad passed
away in a car accident when I was younger, so it’s just been me, my
brother Nathan, and my mom for a while now.

“Mom made us breakfast and left for work. She
gave me a hug and kiss and told me she loved me. I never saw her
again.” Amanda’s voice caught in her throat as she fought back the
tears. She wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands and
continued.

“We decided we would head to Buckroe Beach in
Hampton and hang out for the day. We had a friend whose parents had
a house there. We sent him several texts but, you know, never got a
reply. He usually sleeps in late, so we figured we’d surprise him.
It was late in the morning when we finally got ourselves together
and on the road. Things were getting bad already. There were
pile-ups and stalled cars everywhere. People just passed out behind
the wheel or along the road. It was scary. The back-up was so bad
at the York River Bridge, we couldn’t even get over it.

“I texted my mom, who works down in Newport
News and she replied back that she had no trouble getting into work
this morning, but that there was a lot of very sick people around.
She told me to go back home and wait for her there. We didn’t have
anywhere else to go, so we turned around and headed back. We saw
very few people up and about, but there were bodies everywhere,
people had just left their cars and passed out where they were
walking.”

“It was spooky,” interjected Kera
uneasily.

Amanda nodded. “Really spooky! We stopped at
a shopping center to pick up some snacks and there were only two
people working in the entire store. They were all worried-like ‘cuz
they had people passed out that they were trying to take care of.
One of them rang us up and we got out of there quick.

“When we got home we pulled my car into the
garage and went in the house and waited. My brother was there. His
apartment was just down the street, so he had walked down when Mom
called him and asked him to wait there with us. We watched the news
a little bit but mostly just played video games.”

“We never even went outside to see what was
happening out there,” Kera added. “I don’t think we wanted to
see.”

Amanda took a deep breath and went on with
her narrative. “My mom usually gets home about five. By five after,
I was trying to call her on her cell. I left a voice mail and
several texts but didn’t get any replies. I was getting real
scared. Nathan kept saying she would be walking through the door at
any time, but, you know, I could tell he was really worried
too.”

“I, um, called my parents again,” Kera said
flatly, absently picking at the grass with her fingers. “I never
got hold of them. I don’t know what happened to them.” Tears poured
down her face and Amanda put her arm around her and hugged her
close, crying also.

Amanda took a few moments to compose herself
before she continued. “That evening we heard them outside, it
sounded like, you know, wild animals were in the street, and we
heard some screams. We were so scared we didn’t know what we could
do. Nathan told us to stay away from the windows so no one would
see us and try to break in. He also made us carry knives from the
kitchen. That’s all we had. We saw the glow of fires in the
distance from my bedroom window. It looked like the world was
ending.

“We called or texted everyone we knew and
didn’t get hold of anyone. We got stupid recordings when we called
911 and the sheriff’s office. We were afraid to turn on any lights
and, you know, draw attention from those things making those awful
noises outside. We didn’t sleep much that night and kept telling
each other things would be better in the morning.”

“It wasn’t any better,” Kera cut in again.
“It was way worse! Those people outside were crazy, they were
busting into people’s houses and fighting each other. I still
couldn’t get hold of my parents.” She looked over at Amanda. “We
decided to drive over to my house, just to check.” She stopped
talking, her raven dark hair falling over her face and hiding her
haunted eyes.

“Kera’s parents live up north off of 17,”
Amanda said. “We ate some breakfast and then headed out. I was
driving and Nathan was in the back. When we drove out into the
road, the people out there came running at us. They had these blood
red eyes filled with rage that made them look totally insane. They
were running into the car and beating on it. Some of them were
around a big dog. They were eating it while it was still alive.”
She paused a moment, seeing it in her mind’s eye and then
whispered, “I ran over some of them, I couldn’t help it.”

She looked around at the group like she was
expecting a scalding recrimination, however, everyone remained
silent, sympathy showing in their expressions.

“The drive was awful. The insane people were
everywhere, chasing us as soon as we got close. What normally takes
us twenty minutes to drive took us an hour. When we got there
neither Aunt Alice’s nor Uncle Jimmy’s car was in the driveway and
no one was home. There weren’t any houses close by or any of the
crazy people around so we decided to stay there for awhile. Uncle
Jimmy had a handgun and we tore the place apart looking for it, but
couldn’t find it.

“There’s a small shopping center on the other
side of the woods behind the house. We could hear the people there
making all kinds of, you know, horrible sounds in their madness.
Nathan was sure if we didn’t make any noise they wouldn’t know we
were there. We were going to just hang out at Kera’s house for a
few days since it seemed pretty safe. Her backyard is fenced in and
Toby, her lab lived there. We were sure he would bark and warn us
if any of those people came around.

“We actually slept pretty good that night. We
all just crashed in the living room together. We never went outside
much the next day except to feed Toby. We called or texted every
one we knew again, but it was like the rest of the world was
gone.

“There wasn’t a lot of food in the house, but
enough that we made do. We couldn’t get any TV stations on the
satellite box. Even the local channels were gone. We tried the
radio and got a Virginia Beach station with some guy ranting about
the apocalypse being upon us. That next morning, I think it was
Friday, we were looking in the kitchen for something to eat when
Toby started barking up a storm. Before we could even make it down
to the rec room and look out the patio doors he was cut off in mid
bark. When we looked out the door it was horrible! There must have
been a half dozen of those crazy people who had climbed over the
dog fence and attacked Toby. They were tearing him apart with their
hands and teeth. You could hear the sound of his skin ripping even
through the glass doors.” Amanda paused to take a sip of her water
and looked over at Kera.

Kera avoided her eyes, looking back down, her
fingers nervously picking at a blade of grass. “I know I messed
up.” Her whisper was barely audible. “I was so angry!” she said
with more strength, “They were killing my dog right there in front
of me!” She looked up at us pleadingly. “I wanted them to stop. I
banged on the glass as hard as I could and screamed at them to
stop,” she looked back down, “but he was already dead.”