Time of Zombies (Book 2): The Zombie Hunter's Wife (16 page)

Teddy fought his way out of the
nightmare. Again and again he heard Bennett saying Michelle’s name. Again and
again he stumbled forward to find him hurting the young dark-haired woman.
Again and again the bastard shot her and flung the body at him like so much
garbage instead of a precious life wasted. His vision blurred with sweat as he
struggled to keep the undead girl from biting him. He reached with searching
fingers and found his knife. Pulling it, he stabbed it into her temple with a
sickening crunch. Hot blood gushed over his chest.

He flung the girl one way and the
knife the other. Pushing up from the ground, he searched for Bennett, but
double and triple versions of the scenery provided no one around him. He got
his leg under him, but it folded and he collapsed to the ground. A groan
escaped him.

At the sound of rushing feet, he
scrambled to find the knife. He turned to find Josh and Suz running around the
edge of the building.

“Teddy,” they whispered loudly.
“What happened?”

He mumbled a reply of scrambled
words and everything went dark.

Opening his eyes, he found it dark
still. He rubbed his face. He remembered light and pain and Michelle. His
flung-out hand found no one in the darkness. Noises intruded. Yells and moans
and cries filled the compound.

“Mr. Teddy,” a young voice cried
over the pounding of a fist on the metal door of the motor home. “We need you.”

“I’m coming,” he yelled, pushing up
from the bed. Whatever the doctor had given him must have worked. He stood and
only swayed slightly. He couldn’t put full pressure on his leg, but limping
along seemed to work.

He pushed open the door and found
the RVers huddled in a group there. Dylan wrapped around Bryant like an extra attached
limb.

“What’s going on?” he asked,
stepping slowly down the stairs.

Six voices, because he noticed Sarah
and Stephanie Madison with the boys, all talked at once. He held up a hand.
“Aidan, you tell me.”

“At dinner, some people said they
didn’t feel so good. Beth and Jed ran away when they were supposed to watch us
like the doctor said. Mom went after them, even though we tried to stop her. The
sick people are skinbags now and attacking people.” He took a long breath as he
finished his ramble.

His heart sank. He only heard
Michelle went after the runaways until the screams filtered through the fog of
his brain. “What sick people? Nobody was sick. Never mind. You kids all get in
the trailer here. I’ll be back.”

Dylan started crying harder. “That’s
what Mom said too, and she didn’t.”

He scooted them into the motor home.
“One thing at a time. Now, kids.”

Teddy shut the door and leaned his back
against it. Mayhem ruled the yard. Thrashing bodies and gunshots overloaded his
semi-drugged senses. In the middle of the melee he spotted Seth. Rushing over
as fast as he could limp, he bowled into several shambling, moaning women and
sent them to the ground. Seth turned and handed him a machete.

Once they dispatched the undead near
them, they moved to help Shannon and Jim fight off a man trying to drag the
doctor to the ground. Teddy waded in, shoving Shannon one way and the skinbag
the other. Seth jumped in to put a knife through its skull.

Except for some crying, the yard was
silent again.

He turned to Seth. “Where in the
hell is Michelle?”

“What do you mean, where is she?
She’s with the kids, isn’t she?”

“The kids came to me. Something
about Beth and Jed running away and Michelle going after them.”

Jim Evans pushed himself up from the
doorway of the trailer, coughing like he was about to hack up a lung. “Where’s
Beth?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know,
but I have a real good idea. I’m going to talk to the kids and get the whole
story.”

By the time he got to the hospital
trailer, he just gathered up all the children and brought them back to where
the others who were still alive were gathered.

Shannon had gotten a chair and put
Jim in it, wrapped in a comforter. Seth had an arm around Joseph Jones’
shoulders. The man was bent over, crying, his eyes red-rimmed and blood coating
his hands. His husband, Bob was not at his ever-present spot by his side.

The boys grabbed a bench and pulled
it over. The kids sat down, oldest to youngest, Dylan huddled with Connor and
the Madison twins in a sniveling ball.

Teddy went over and leaned against
the trailer with a sigh, his thigh on fire and screaming in pain. “Aidan, start
at the beginning.”

“Jed and Beth were watching us in
the office because everyone got sick and Dr. Shannon said we would be safe in
the storeroom. Beth told Jed that now was the perfect time to go after Bennett
because no one was guarding the walls. They made us promise to stay in the
storeroom, but they went out a back window and over the fence. When Mom came to
check on us she made us tell her everything too. She took Ran and Cody and they
went after Beth and Jed, but they aren’t back yet. Then all the noise and
yelling and shooting started and we ran to get Mr. Teddy.”

“Why would she go?” Jim muttered. “I
thought she was all better.”

“She went to kill that sick
bastard,” Dylan piped up, with all the kids nodding along.

Jim struggled to get up from his
chair, falling back and coughing until he was red in the face. “I have to save
her.”

Shannon put her hands on his chest.
“You aren’t going anywhere.”

The man started crying and Teddy
looked away. He was a mess too with the slightest pressure on his leg sending
shock waves of pain to his head, but no one was stopping him from going and
getting Michelle away from Bennett.

Or die trying.

Rule #13   
Say what you mean and
mean what you say. Your word is the only thing of value you have left in the
zombie apocalypse. Unless a lie will save your ass. Then lie your head off.

Michelle sat on the grimy carpet and
shivered as Bennett’s fingers trailed along her bare shoulders. She would throw
up if her stomach still held anything to lose after the first two times, the
last on Billy Joe’s leg. That got her a backhanded slap to the face and the
tearing off of his shirt and her tank top underneath.

She took a deep breath and held it.
Anything she was suffering was nothing to the pain and degradation Jed and Beth
had been through. The young man was tied to a pillar, his back a mess of cuts
and blood. He’d stopped screaming forever ago, the only sound the lashing of a
belt against his torn skin.

Tears filled her eyes at Beth tied
to another pillar, her skin cut in so many places that Michelle wasn’t sure the
girl still lived. Someone had carved
whore
across her slightly sagging
post-pregnancy stomach. Her long brown hair covered her face, but wisps of it
blew with each ragged breath.

The coppery stench of spilled blood
gagged her as she fought to keep the bile from spewing forth again. A hand dug
into her hair and pulled her head back, the wood of Bennett’s ‘throne’ digging
into her bare back between her shoulder blades.

“Do you see what we do to the
unfaithful? God has put me in charge of spreading His word, of making sure we
are true and devoted to the right way of living.”

He pulled her head harder, forcing
her back to arch and bringing her breasts within reach. He grabbed a nipple
with his fingers and twisted. She pressed her lips together but her moan of
pain escaped her throat. Her fingers itched to pull the gun from her boot and
put one between Billy Joe’s cold blue eyes, but the large man whipping Jed
stopped her. She’d never get Bennett and his henchman and she wasn’t any good
to Jed and Beth if she were dead.

His tight hold relaxed, his fingers
strumming across her pebbled nipples, hard in spite of herself. The other hand
smoothing her hair and fondling the strands. Her gorge rose. She’d rather he
beat her or cut her or torture her, not this pseudo-petting he seemed to think
she enjoyed.

“Are you a virgin?” he asked, his
silky tone hissing, bringing the serpent in the garden to mind.

“Of course not,” she huffed. “I was
married before the flu pandemic and the Z virus.”

“He isn’t here now, though, is he?”

She turned her head to stare at him.
“No, he was attacked and turned. I had to shoot him.”

“What about now? Have you been
faithful to his memory?”

She blushed and looked away. “That
is none of your business.”

His hand twisted in her hair and he
yanked her off the ground and into his lap. He grasped her chin and forced her
to look at him. She shuddered at his crazed eyes, his fingers digging into her
skin.

“Or have you been a whore like Beth
there and spread your legs wide for every man at your camp?”

She swallowed her inhaled breath and
choked and coughed. “Beth is not a whore and neither am I. And even if I were,
it is no business of yours. My body belongs to me. I’ll give it to whomever I
wish.”

His hand left her face and latched
onto her crouch in a painful grip. “You are a woman. You are weak and willful.
Your only place is under a man. Your only place is under me.”

The laughter came from some hidden
place. A reckless side she didn’t know she had. “As if I would have you after
Mitch. He was a wonderful man. He was kind and sweet and loving. He had more
goodness in his toenail than you have in your whole body.”

“What about Teddy Ridgewood? Was he
kind and sweet and loving too?”

“No,” she uttered, and then spit in
his face. “He is big and powerful and can fuck all night.”

A look of disgust crossed Bennett’s
face just before he shoved her off his lap and she hit the floor with a thump
of her hip.

“I hope you enjoyed his fucking.
Unless you have a thing for the undead, as you call them. After I shot him and
threw a resurrected woman at him, I’m sure there isn’t much left of Mr.
Ridgewood.”

“You really should learn to shoot
better.” Teddy isn’t dead. He was there when I left.”

He stood up and planted his foot on
her chest. Her breath caught and stopped, trapped in her lungs. She couldn’t
breathe as Billy Joe pressed his foot harder and harder against her. She pushed
hands against his leg, the edges of her vision turned to gray and the blood left
her brain, making her light-headed. Dizziness filled her, silence roared in her
ears.

He lifted his foot.

She sucked in a breath.

He stomped on her chest.

Pain surrounded her. A rib cracked.
Her screams echoed in the room.

Blackness beckoned and she ran for it.
Anything to escape the pain.

“Damn, damn, damn,” he bellowed,
kicking Michelle in the side. She rolled over and moaned.

“Elias,” he screamed. “Stop whipping
that boy, he’s got to be dead by now. Go roundup the men. We’re attacking the
RV yard. Teddy Ridgewood is going to be dead by the end of the night.”

The big man dropped the leather belt
to the floor and lumbered down the hallway. The sound of a slamming door echoed
into the church a moment later. Michelle’s mewling cries irked him. Why did
women make you hurt them? All they had to do was know their place. You could
treat them like queens if they let you.

He flung himself into his chair.
Jed’s moans and Beth’s sobs indicated they weren’t as dead as he thought.
Leaping out of the chair, he grabbed the belt Elias had dropped and added a few
whacks to the boy’s lacerated back. The sound of the leather connecting to
bloody flesh, the young man’s groans of agony, and the power of dispensing deadly
punishment was an aphrodisiac. His erection pounded in his pants, the blood pooled
in his groin.

He dropped the belt and marched over
to Michelle’s unconscious body. Undoing her jeans, he ripped them down to her
ankles, too inflamed to pull her boots off. He undid his own pants, crouching
over her, when the door slammed again and footsteps pounded down the hall.

Elias slid to a stop at the entrance
to the church. “Reverend Bennett, the Resurrected are loose. Someone let them
out of the cages. They are all over the parking lot and trying to get in the
windows and doors.”

He stood up and fixed his pants.
Whipping around, his face heated, he glared at Elias. “Well, get some men to
round them up. You can manage that, can’t you?”

“They’re gone.”

“Who’s gone? I thought you said the
Resurrected were around the building.”

“The men, sir. They’re all gone.”

He paced back and forth, a step in
each direction, with the beat in his head pounding a tempo of pain. “I want
their women and children. They will pay the price for their men’s mutiny.”

“The families are gone too. The only
women left are these two,” Elias said, his eyes darting to Michelle on the
ground and Beth tied to the pillar. “And your wife and mine.”

“This is a trap. The RV camp
attacked us before we could attack them.”

“Are you sure, sir? I didn’t see
anyone outside. Just the undead wandering around.”

“They are the Resurrected, damn it,”
Bennett yelled. “And they didn’t let themselves out of the cages.”