“I’m not going,” Lena said.
“But I thought I was picking you all up?” Rick asked.
Holding up her bloody wrist in explanation, Lena said, “I need to talk to you for a minute, Rick.” Turning to her oldest, she said, “Take Ethan and
go over by the truck.”
Megan hesitated, but a stern look from her mother got her moving. They had already
gone over what needed to be done, but it didn’t make it any easier.
When they were
gone, Lena led Rick a short distance away before saying bluntly, “I got bit by Shawna after she died and came back. She killed…” Choking up at the very mention of her dead husband’s name, she shook it off and continued, “I didn’t tell you when I called because I didn’t think you’d come if you knew what really happened. I didn’t believe it before when Megan was going on and on about what she’d been seeing on the Web, but I believe it now. From what we’ve been able to gather from the reports, it means I’m infected.”
“
It does,” Rick told her. “We’ve been finding out the same thing in town. If you get bit or get any fluids from one of them on you, you get the disease. You die, and then you come back. I heard from the sheriff that they’ve had quite a few cases today inside the city limits. Seems like people are dying and getting back up and then attacking and eating each other. It’s gotten so bad that the council got together and decided to isolate us as much as possible. They’re planning on blowing up the bridge later this afternoon. I don’t know what good it will do, though, seems like we’ve got quite a few infected people that already snuck in. They might have been away on vacation or whatever and got bit, then came home because that’s where you want to be when you’re hurt.”
“I know Shawna was out of town visiting her family,” Lena said. “She must have caught it there.”
Rick shrugged and said, “Nobody knows much about this thing, and the news media isn’t telling it straight. Who knows, some of the dead might have been here the whole time.” After thinking about it for a few seconds, he gave Lena a sideways glance before adding in a quiet voice, “I’ve had to kill two today, do you want me to end it for you, too?”
Lena thought about it for a moment before saying, “I’ve gone over that in my mind a million times since it happened, and I have to say no.
Like you said, nobody knows shit about this disease, so I’m going to sit here for a day or two and see what happens. If I don’t turn into one of those things, I’ll come get my kids. But if I do die and come back…” Her voice trailed off.
“What about your kids
?” Rick asked. “Did they get bit or scratched or anything?”
Lena sighed and shook her head before saying, “No, it was only me.”
Rick shrugged again and said, “Well, I’ll take care of your kids, but if I don’t see you in forty-eight hours, I’ll come back and do what has to be done.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve always had a good immune system
, so maybe I’ll work through it.” Turning to the truck, she called out, “Megan, Ethan, come here and say goodbye to your mother.”
After a tearful
parting, Lena watched as the truck drove away. With a heavy heart, she walked over to the fresh graves and sat in the shade of a nearby tree.
Forty-five minutes later, the first convulsion struck. A minute later, Lena died. Two minutes later,
it rose. It was hungry.
Wandering down the drive to the main road, it would stop occasionally to sniff the air for prey.
Its brain was almost gone except for its base functions, but its senses were still keen. Even with its extremely diminished mental capacity, it knew that if it kept to the cleared areas, its chances of finding flesh were better than being in the woods. Not smelling any food, it started on and then stopped, suddenly overcome by the urge to hide, to wait. It had to stay safe, feeding would come later. Its deep-rooted instinct told it to suppress its hunger until it could join others like itself. It knew that in a pack, the hunting would be good.
With saliva running down
its chin, it gave in to this urge and headed into the woods. It had no particular place in mind to go, but nonetheless, its feet carried it with a purpose. Before long, it came across three more like itself, standing in a clump of trees and moaning with hunger pains. Within a few hours, their group had grown to over twenty.
Then, as if b
y some unheard signal, they all started off in the same direction. Along the way, they picked up more stragglers until their number had grown to thirty. Within half an hour, they came to a clearing with a small house set in the middle. Night was upon them, so the lighted windows threw long beams of illumination across the well-tended lawn. The dead grew still for a moment, taking in the scene as their senses tried to discern if there was food inside. When a figure passed by the glass of a large picture window, it was all they needed.
With what had once been a woman named Lena in the lead
, the dead lurched forward as a group. While Lena might have forgotten her past life and everyone in it, she did know that the flimsy glass was no barrier against their numbers.
***
The small groups like Lena’s that formed in and around Jasper eventually merged into one larger herd of dead. Now a thousand strong, they swarmed over the town, easily overwhelming its defenses by sheer weight of numbers. Doors were busted down, not with axes and battering rams, but with the pressure of hundreds of bodies pushing against them. In this initial onslaught, thousands of the living fell to the dead.
First the humans and their domesticated pets were killed and eaten, and after they were gone, the cattle were set upon and devoured to the bone. Woodchucks, rabbits, gophers and anything that burrowed into the ground were then dug up, torn apart and stuffed into the mouths of the dead in a quest to assuage their never-ending hunger. Some animals like the coyote and the bear fled before this onslaught, and this proved to be the wisest course of action
. It was the same for man and animal alike; if you barricaded yourself inside your home or den, you eventually starved to death or were forced to venture out in search of food and water. Once away from shelter, anything living was easily outnumbered by the lingering zombies and was torn apart. Then, the ones that didn’t have their brain destroyed in this carnage got up to join their brethren. The only thing that didn’t get up were the animals, since the disease wasn’t able to jump the biological barrier between man and animal.
After the entire population of the city was dead, in one form or another, the group moved on to the nearest population centers. With the bridge to the west gone, they headed east.
Burkville and Newton
, Texas, had had their own outbreak, so the dead from Jasper found little to eat. The groups of dead from these three towns merged into one and moved south, and then further east. After ravaging this region, they went back and forth through the area in a constant search for food, wiping hundreds of square miles clean of anything living. Now on their way back west to scour the bleak terrain once again, they would let no barrier made by man or nature stop them until they found flesh. The downed bridge had been a deterrent so far, but not anymore. The urge to feed was so strong that they would go over, under, or through anything that stood in their way.
L
ocated between the lake and the outskirts of Jasper as they trudged westward, the herd stayed on Highway 190 since it gave them an easier path than cutting through the forests and fields on both sides of the road. Coming to the edge of the lake, the road narrowed as it funneled them into a single column of tightly packed dead flesh that stretched from shore to shore as they spilled onto the causeway. Coming across the downed section of the bridge, without hesitation, those in the lead stepped off to drop into the water.
The rest of the dead followed, looking like
a collection of gruesome lemmings following the leader over a cliff. After hitting the water and sinking to the bottom, they slogged through the mud and silt that made up the floor of the lake, endlessly moving forward in a search for food.
W
ith their number at over twenty thousand, the dead in the lead were well ashore and moving off the causeway before the final zombie dropped over the ragged concrete and exposed the rebar that made up the edge of the blown bridge. It took hours, but finally the last of the stragglers made it across. These at the rear were not the walking dead, but rather the legless that had to crawl and the blind that made their way on all fours as they felt their way along. Dripping wet, they made their way on shore and moved forward, closer now than anyone at the mansion realized.
CHAPTER THREE
The Happy Hallow Insane Asylum:
Sitting on the bed of an unused room, with his back against the wall and a map laid on his lap, Steve studied the unlit cigarette in his hand. His mouth already tasted like he’d scoured it out with oily steel wool from smoking too much, but the habit and the stress kept him wanting another one. It gave him something to focus on, something to think about other than the mess they were in. Instead of lighting it, he took a drink from the water bottle lying next to him. After screwing the cap back on, he said, “Fuck it,” and fished around in his pants pocket for his Zippo lighter. As soon as he took the first drag off the stale Marlboro, though, his body said, ‘No’, and he started dry heaving. Grinding the butt into the tile floor, he coughed and gagged a few times as he fought not to throw up.
“Those things are going to kill you,” Heather told him from where she stood at the door.
Halfway regaining control, Steve choked out, “I hope I live that long.”
“We’re all going to live a long time,” Heather reassured him. “I just checked on Brain
, and he said that he’s almost finished with the explosives.”
Looking up in interest, Steve said, “I didn’t hear a loud boom
, followed by us getting eaten, so I guess everything went well.”
“I
was down in the kitchen watching him for a while before I went up to help Tick-Tock,” Heather told him. “It was scary for a second; when he was moving the pot off the stove, some of the Styrofoam dripped onto it. I thought Brain was going to shit one big brick when it happened, but luckily none of it hit the open flame.” Laughing, she added, “When he said, ‘Got to remember to turn that flame off next time,’ it sounded like his balls were in his throat “
“They would have been if it went off,” Steve commented
with a laugh, “or more likely in New Jersey. How long until he’s ready?”
Walking over to the bed, Heather held out her hand and said, “
He’s molded them all and set the detonators in them, but he told me they still have to cool and harden for a little bit. He said it would be another hour or so, which means it’s time for you to get up and get to work. Tick-Tock and Denise are almost done getting everyone organized, so the next step is to take them on the roof for target practice. We could use your help.”
Steve grimaced as he
grabbed her hand and let her pull him to his feet. After steadying himself, he stopped for a moment, thinking about something that had been weighing on his mind. Quietly, he asked, “What do you think our chances are?”
Heather
stopped to think about this. After a moment, she said, “Overall, I have no idea. I learned a long time ago that when I’m facing something that seems overwhelming, to break it down into steps. First, when you consider that we have to travel over forty miles -”
“Double that,” Steve interrupted. “It’s over forty miles to Fort Polk as the crow flies,
and since we’re driving it will be more than that. Then you have to consider that we’re going to have to make a huge detour to the north to get around the mob coming at us from Jasper -”
“So call it seventy miles to get to Polk,” Heather
interrupted him this time, “but once we get into radio range, we should be able to get someone to come pick us up, so I’m going to go back to my estimate of forty.”
Steve opened his mouth to say something else, but Heather cut him off with a warning look
not to interrupt her again. He saw this and chose to remain silent, so she continued, “The best way to complete a journey is in stages. First stage, we have to get away from the mansion. I think that once we do that and get into the woods, we should be in pretty good shape.”
“Why’s that?” Steve asked.
“We’ve probably got thousands of Zs around us, not counting the ones bunched up around the mansion, and they’re not going to just let us leave without following.”
“
Well, from everything we’ve seen and heard lately, it seems like the dead are mobbing up into big groups,” Heather told him. “We’ve got these big herds -”
Steve laughed and said, “Herds?”
Heather shrugged and said, “It’s as good a name as any, now back to what I was saying, we have these big herds wandering all around us, but I think that since they’re all bunched together, they’ll be easier to spot and avoid. If we stay on the move and send scouts ahead of our main group, we should be able to avoid them. Think about it, most of the people we’ve lost have been to one or two Zs that were hidden somewhere and came at us from nowhere. From here on out, though, we’ll be in a position to keep track of them. As for the dead that follow us, we’ll just have to figure out a way to lose them. When we were looking at the map earlier with Tick-Tock and Denise, I saw a couple of choke points that we can use to slow them down.”