Darlings of Paranormal Romance (Anthology) (134 page)

“
Three hours to safety,”
his Dad said, as he peeled out and we were on our way. At least we
weren’t walking anymore. I figured I could go along with them to
find their family member and then convince them that we all needed
to head to Atlanta to the CDC. I was convinced it was our only
hope, but what did I know?

Chapter 10

He’s Different

When we pulled up to the safety camp,
I noticed there were a ton of cars in front of it. Checking my
watch, I saw it was three o’clock in the afternoon. The building
was an old factory of sorts and it looked to be pretty decrepit. We
all got out of the truck and watched as Trent crouched low to the
ground and observed the scene. Seeing nothing dangerous-looking, I
figured we were in the wrong place. The quiet was kind of eerie and
I wondered if some of the slow walkers were inside the factory,
waiting on unsuspecting prey.

Trent ran around, looking at all of
the cars, and I shot Cage a questioning look. “He’s looking to see
if the church van my Mom was in is here.” Of course, they were
still trying to find someone. I had to keep my mind on my ultimate
goal, but I hoped Cage could find his Mom. I hoped she was still
among the living and uninfected.

I watched Trent survey the situation
and couldn’t help but wonder if he had been in the military. It was
highly possible he just adapted to the environment to save himself
and his son. Cage reached out to touch my arm. His fingers sent
shockwaves through my arm and I told myself it was because I wasn’t
expecting it.

“
Let’s move, gang.” Trent
signaled us forward and we started to walk towards the building.
After about two stops, a bright red light powered up and started to
move over us. It scanned us, from our heads to our feet, and a
voice boomed out from the building.

“
Go
away, zombies. We are prepared to fire.”
Zombies. Was he talking to us?

“
Release the civilian or
we will shoot.” The voice sounded threatening and stopped us all in
our tracks.

Cage looked over at me, concerned,
and then back at his father.

“
We are all civilians; we
request permission to enter the safety camp,” Trent yelled back at
the voice, but I wasn’t sure that they could hear him.

“
The three companions you
keep are infected, sir; therefore, you are the only civilian. They
have deceived you and we will end them, if you would just move out
of the way.”

“
That’s my son; he is not
a zombie, you son of a bitch.” Trent was beginning to get
desperate. I began to wonder how long the people in charge had
known about the infection if they could scan us and tell the
difference.

“
We will tell you again,
sir. Step away from the zombies, or be on your way.”

Trent went down onto his knees and
looked dejected. He started yelling again and there was pleading in
his voice.

“
You must have the cure
for this infection; please let us in. Please help my
son!”

I looked at Cage and realized why his
dad had been hell-bent on getting to the safety camp. He thought
that they would be able to cure him and that was Trent’s only
thought. My heart wept for him and the love that he had for Cage. I
knew that he would not go into the camp without him.

“
Dad,” Cage came up behind
his father to touch his shoulder. “You can go in to safety; the
walking dead won’t mess with me, because I am practically one of
them.”

“
No, we will find another
camp with a little bit more compassion!” He put all the emphasis on
compassion and flipped the building off as he turned back to the
truck. “Let’s go.” He added something quietly, under his breath,
“Your mother isn’t here anyway. The van isn’t in the
lot.”

I wondered how he could possibly know
that she wasn’t there. Anyone could move a van, or it could have
traveled back to find more survivors. Cage’s mother could very well
be inside, and if Trent wasn’t so stubborn he could be inside with
her.

As we
climbed back into the truck, I became aware of a couple of things.
The zombie thing was bigger than any of us had thought, and they
were using the term “zombie,” which was surreal.
How many of our kind were there. What type of
lights could detect a zombie virus?
I had
so many questions, and I was full of anger at the fact people knew
about this and did nothing to stop it.

We drove on in silence, for what
seemed like hours, when Trent decided it was time to set up camp
and pulled off the side of the road. I realized now why he took
such precaution with others being around when we stopped. They
would want to feed on him because he wasn’t infected yet. I hoped
that he could stay that way. I especially hoped he could stay that
way around the three of us, because it would be awful if one of us
bit him.

My mind flashed back to biting Brett
and I groaned out loud. Cage walked around in front of me then,
giving me a strange look.

“
What’s the groaning
for?”

I blushed, and thought of something
quickly. “I was just stretching from being in the truck too long.”
He must have bought it because he didn’t ask any more
questions.

Trent built a small fire and cooked
some Spam that he had gotten from the Kelmart. Spam had never
tasted as good as it did that night. I was starving, and could have
eaten anything. I was relieved that food tasted good, and I didn’t
have a craving for flesh. I flexed my injured hand and noticed it
was getting stiffer. This probably wasn’t a good sign, but I kept
it to myself. We all told the stories of what had happened when we
were attacked.

Trent and Cage had been out shopping
for hunting clothes when the attacks started. They hadn’t been able
to get home to Evelyn, and had it on good authority that she had
headed out of town, on a church van, to a safety camp. They weren’t
sure which one, but both Trent and Cage were adamant about the fact
that she was still alive, and they would find her. They had fled
the sporting goods store when a half- eaten man had come running
through the sweat pants section. Thankfully, they already had their
guns in the truck. Cage described, in great detail, some of the
zombie killing they had managed.

“
I cut his head off and
then stabbed him through the eyes several times. We didn’t know how
to kill them, and I wanted him to stay down.”

They had come up from Georgia and
happened to end up in Panic, NC, digging through the Dumpster at
our local Kelmart. I hoped they wouldn’t mind back tracking to head
back down to Georgia.

Rose’s story was similar; her husband
had been missing for a day and she was getting worried so she went
out to find him. She found him standing in the parking garage where
he worked, just staring at the wall. When she got close enough to
him that she could see him well, she saw that his skin was gray.
Not sure what was going on, she had called his name. He turned on
her and lunged at her as she tried to run away. He had sunk his
teeth into her leg and she had beaten him with a nearby trashcan
until he let go. As she was running away again, he grabbed her arm
and ripped it open. That, finally, explained the blood that was on
her sleeve. She said his strength was amazing, definitely inhuman.
She had fled and went into town and that is where I had found
her.

“
Trent, where are we?” He
looked up and glanced at Cage before he answered me.

We are three hours out of Panic,
heading toward the coast. There is a possibility the church van had
to take the long way around. When we head back, we are going to
take that route and then head back to Panic looking for the van. If
it was stopped anywhere between there and home, we will find
it.”

We all had to make up some sort of
bed to sleep on. Cage let me have his sleeping bag and let Rose
have his pillow. He was going to sleep in the truck. I thought that
was very sweet of him. My watch read ten o’clock, but I was
exhausted. I tried not to think of the pain that the infection was
causing me. When I was as comfortable as possible in the truck bed,
I drifted off to sleep, looking at the stars.

When I woke up the next morning, it
was hard to believe it had been four days since that crazy man had
showed up in the window of my classroom. Trent and Cage were
talking quietly in front of the truck and Rose was still asleep. I
pulled out a granola bar from my pack and munched on it. I,
finally, decided Rose should get up so I shook her. As she sat up
and stretched, she grimaced like it hurt her, and I assumed it
probably was a combination of sleeping in the truck bed, and her
muscles were getting stiffer. I wanted to ask Cage if he was
experiencing the same thing, but there never seemed to be a good
time for it.

Shortly after we woke up, it was time
to get on the road again. Cage decided to drive to give his dad a
break from it. When we were back on the road, he proposed we play a
game. Trent grumbled his displeasure with this suggestion, but we
all laughed when Rose suggested a game with license plates. With
hardly any cars for miles, that would be a pretty boring game. I
thought back to when I was a kid traveling with my parents and
suggested we play a game that I had played then.

“
You say something that
starts with the letter a, like apple. The next person says your
word and then something that starts with the letter b. When you
mess it up, you are out, and then the remaining two battle it out
until the end. I’ll start. Apple, now Trent you go.

Trent looked thoughtful, “apple,
baboon.”

“
Good, now Rose.” The game
went on for a while and came to a momentary standstill when Trent
drew a blank on a word that started with q.

“
Koala, no wait that’s a
k,” I laughed until I looked over at Cage. He looked like he had
seen a ghost and the color had drained from his face. I didn’t know
what was wrong until I looked up ahead and saw what he did. It was
like a junk yard in the middle of the road. There were different
cars that had run into each other, doors ripped off, and blood
splattered on the insides of windows. The cars had been waiting to
get off the exit, and looked like they were either attacked or
people started turning. The reason Cage looked so upset was because
in the middle of all of the wreckage, turned on its side, was a
church van. It said Clark Methodist Church on the side, and below
it in smaller letters it said Duluth, GA. It didn’t really make any
sense to me why there wasn’t a safety camp closer that they could
have gotten to, but I didn’t ask. I just waited for Trent to see
the van.

“
Pull off here, Cage.” His
voice was calm, but monotone. Cage did what he was told and pulled
onto the side of the road. Trent jumped out of the truck and ran to
the van. He examined the inside of it, while Cage gripped the
steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. When he had
walked all the way around it, and climbed in and out of it twice,
he returned to the truck.

“
Go into town; she’s
there.” Cage didn’t hesitate as he pulled the truck back onto the
road and drove around all the wrecked cars to the exit. It took a
while for him to actually maneuver onto the road we needed because
of the vehicular graveyard. No one said anything. I was thinking,
if mama was in this town, she certainly wasn’t still
living.

Pulling into the little town, I read
the sign, Alexander, NC. At least this town had a normal name. I
wasn’t sure if that could be taken as a good sign or not. It was
deserted like most towns and eerily still. We still had our stash
from Kelmart, so we didn’t need to stop anywhere for supplies. I
wasn’t sure how they were going to go about finding Evelyn, if she
was there.

Cage drove slowly; he didn’t want to
miss the opportunity to see her. We were going down a road that
appeared to be the place strip malls went to die. There were many
littering the sides of the streets, and they all had broken
windows, and trashed parking lots. Cage started to slow down as a
woman came walking down the street. She was moving slow, but not
slowly enough we could be sure of her life status.

As he approached her, his facial
expression turned from confusion to shock. “Ms. Whiteside?” He
slowed the van down to where it was rolling so that he could see
the woman approaching the car. The side of her shirt was ripped so
we could see a gash in her side. If I hadn’t started to get used to
seeing these terrible injuries, it might have made me sick. She was
a thin woman and not much taller than I was. Her brown, short hair
was matted to her forehead, but her face remained
intact.

"She was in my mom's church group."
Trent was also staring, in disbelief, at the woman. She was close
enough now to tell she, was indeed, among the walking dead, and
probably needed to be run over.

They were still staring in disbelief
and I realized this must be the first time this happened to someone
they knew. They had only seen the stranger zombies. Just then, a
loud bump can from the truck bed. We all looked around to see a
hippie looking man punch through the glass and grab onto Trent. The
fresh blood around his mouth suggested he had eaten recently which,
to me, meant there might have been some survivors here, but not
anymore. Trent yelled as the man's nails dug into his shoulder,
tearing through the blue t-shirt and drawing blood.