Darlings of Paranormal Romance (Anthology) (132 page)

I walked on, for what seemed like
hours, until I came to the edge of town and could see the hardware
store just up ahead. Our town really didn’t have anything in it
besides a high school, a movie theater, and a few shops. You had to
drive thirty minutes to get to a big store and most people didn’t
feel like it was worth the drive. The door to the hardware store
was open and I could hear the TV on inside. I was hoping that the
news would give me some type of direction.

“
What started as an
isolated incident in a small town northwest of Maine is quickly
becoming an epidemic. The people, who are being infected with a
disease passed by saliva, are becoming more unstable by the hour.
There are reports all over the country of neighbors stopping by for
a cup of sugar, and taking a bite out of the person holding
it.”

The news reporter chuckled at his
joke, which I didn’t find funny. He seemed to straighten himself
out and continued reporting the story.

“
For lack of a better
term, those who are building up a resistance are calling the
affliction “zombified.” If you are in a town that has not been
affected yet, find your closest safety camp and sit tight. If you
are in the middle of these sick, soulless bastards, then God save
you. Reporting live, this has been Zane Davis, Channel Two
News.”

He had told me what I had already
known. I knew that people were eating other people, and I knew, to
some extent, that it was spread through saliva. All I could hope
was I had so little of the disease inside of me that my body would
fight it.

I was about to leave when I thought I
heard someone mumbling in the back of the store. I walked slowly
toward the sound to see what was happening. The tools had all been
knocked off the shelves, and the store was a real wreck. I wondered
how many of the walking dead had been through here at one
time.

A blond head of hair came into view
and it was attached to a plump woman holding a shovel. The shovel
had a small amount of blood on it, and it was shaking vigorously,
along with her body. There was some blood on her jeans, right below
her left thigh, and her clothes were dirty. She was repeating the
same thing over and over again.

“
I don’t want to eat you;
I don’t want to eat you; I don’t want to eat you.”

I cleared my throat and startled her
so badly that she dropped the shovel. She turned around and looked
at me. I thought she looked more embarrassed than anything
else.

“
It’s okay, I’m normal.”
Kind of, I thought. I held my hands up and noticed she honed right
in on my finger and I saw her eyes widen. She was a pretty lady,
through all the dirt and blood, and her eyes were still heavily
lined with blue eyeliner that matched her blue blouse.

“
I wasn’t going to eat
her,” she was quick to point out, looking like the cat that ate the
canary. “At least, I was trying not to,” she mumbled.

“
You are fighting the
urge,” I said, “I am, too. My name is Cassie.”

There was no point in denying it; I
had caught her about to make a meal out of someone she had
purposely knocked out with a shovel. A quick once-over of the girl
on the floor told me she was not even a little infected.

“
Rose,” she held her hand
out to me, and I shook it with my uninjured hand. She walked away
from the girl and we both headed to the door. I suppose if there
was a kindred spirit out there to find, Rose was it. She was
fighting the infection, and the desire to eat people, much like I
was.

“
They got you, too, did
they?” She pointed to my finger and then pulled up her jeans to
reveal a pretty nasty bite on her calf.

“
Yeah, my teacher attacked
me in the bathroom,” I explained. I had tried to forget about it.
“She was missing her legs, but I still let her get me.” I was
shaking my head at how pathetic that sounded.

“
Would you like to walk
with me? Maybe we can help each other until we fight off the
disease or it wins and takes over our bodies.”

I decided having some company
wouldn’t be a bad thing. Rose was pleasant enough, besides hitting
people over the head with shovels. I was no better than her; I had
bit Brett and caused permanent damage to that beautiful face of
his. I hoped he wouldn’t turn into one of us; it would be such a
waste of perfect cheekbones. Great, I was already lumping myself in
with the dead, and I was still warm and breathing.

I wondered if we would come across
others like us. I didn’t know what to call us since we weren’t yet
zombified, but we had cannibalistic tendencies. I decided the “not
dead yet undead” was a little long so I pondered it as we walked
out into the street again and on our way. Wherever the road took us
is where we were going, and we were just trying not to eat anyone
along the way.

My new BFF and I were walking past
hoards of gray-skinned people, snacking away on the living, and
they didn’t pay us any attention. I noticed, after a while, she had
started to limp and wondered if her bite was getting
worse.

“
It is just getting numb,”
she reassured me, having seen the concern on my face. ”I don’t
think it is getting worse; it hurts the same as it did.”

“
Do you need to stop and
rest?” It wasn’t like we had some agenda to follow; I had no clue
where we were even going. Part of me thought they wouldn’t let us
in any of the safe houses, but maybe they had a cure we didn’t know
about.

I realized I hadn’t really been
paying attention to where we were going, and we were on the highway
now. I leaned against the guardrail and squinted towards the signs.
We were getting close to the edge of Panic, yet another town. Who
named the towns around here? I could see a few people dragging
themselves down the road up ahead and some behind us. The only way
I had found to judge what stage of disease someone was in was by
the pace of their walking.

If they were moving along like Rose
and me, then they were probably only minimally infected. I had not
yet seen anyone else moving as fast as us, but I was holding out
hope that there were others. The ones, who moved a little slower,
like they were really sore from an intense workout, were starting
to transform into a groaning mess with no control of their body,
but they weren’t quite there yet.

Then there were those that moved at a
snail’s pace, but would move in packs so they could slowly walk
their prey into the center of a circle. Those were the ones that
were gone completely. I hoped we weren’t heading that
way.

Chapter 9

Kelmart

Rose and I exchanged a glance as a
familiar sign came into view; we had made it to the next town over,
Panic. I looked at my watch and saw it was almost six o’clock. It
had been around noon when I found Rose. I couldn’t believe we had
been walking for five hours. The Kelmart sign was the first thing
you saw when you drove into town. Of course, it was the first thing
we saw when we walked into town. I found myself thinking that I was
stupid for not driving my car; why did I just take off walking? It
must be the infection messing with my brain. I had noticed that it
had spread a little. It stretched down from my finger to the palm
of my hand. I was also thinking that we might need to get some
supplies from Kelmart, if we could. We really didn’t know where we
were going, but neither one of us had eaten or had anything to
drink since we started.

I recognized a stiffening of my
muscles, but hoped it was just from walking so much. I stretched
and hopped around, trying to see if I was still agile. I felt okay,
just a little nauseous and hungry. I blamed the nausea on the
stress of not knowing where to go or what to do.

As we walked up to the parking lot,
it looked a little spooky. I watched a bag blow slowly through the
white lines and catch on one of the light posts. I couldn’t help
but think of all the scary movies that started with this exact
scenario. Walking into the Kelmart was a shock because of the
complete destruction that lay in front of us. The gray people
hadn’t done this; looters had.

There were carts turned over
everywhere, with open bags of chips and cookies strewn throughout
the store. I felt something under my shoe and raised my foot to
stare in the lifeless eyes of a teddy bear. It had been left there
to be trampled. My mind flashed back to the child I had seen at the
school with his sallow skin and his muddy teddy bear. I shuddered
to think what had happened to the child that might have bought this
teddy bear.

“
Crazy people in this
town,” Rose was walking up ahead of me, and I noticed that the
flowing sleeve of her blouse was sticking to her arm and blood was
slowly creeping through the blue embroidered pattern there. I
believed Rose had been bitten more than once, but I wouldn’t dare
say anything. It wasn’t like she would turn on me if she did start
to turn into a slow walker. I had a sick feeling I was already
doomed.

I tried to push this thought from my
mind as I entered the candy aisle. I was looking for something to
take with us on our walk to find others like us. I assumed that was
what we were doing; we hadn’t discussed our plan much. I walked,
aimlessly, through the food aisles thinking that nothing appealed
to me. I had lost track of Rose and decided to find her before I
selected our road-walking munchies.

I yelled for her as I headed towards
the sound of a television. When I rounded the corner into
electronics, I saw her standing there transfixed on the wall of
televisions. Her blood was steadily dripping on the floor, and her
mouth was slightly open. The televisions were showing aerial views
of towns all over; there were lots of slow walkers moving beneath
the helicopters and some of them were stopping to enjoy a
snack.

The newscaster was talking over the
flashes of video as the words “horrific” and “end of days” flashed
along the bottom of the screen.

“
The soulless agenda of
the zombified seems to be, simply, kill as many of the uninfected
as they can. If the uninfected are lucky, then they stay dead and
are at peace. As you can see, a few of the uninfected become
infected and don’t die right away. They, instead, feast on others.
They appear to not even be human anymore.”

The newscaster’s voice went up at the
end of “anymore” because the camera had zoomed in on a few
gray-skinned children making a meal out of an older man. I looked
away from the screen, wondering when everything had gotten so
crazy.

“
Rose, we have got to wrap
that up.” I motioned to her arm, as it bled on the floor, and
started toward where I thought first aid might be
located.

“
Heavens, I didn’t even
notice.” Rose followed me and let me wrap a sweater, as tightly as
I could, around her arm. It would have to do for now.

I touched Rose’s good arm. “Come on,
let’s get some food.”

We walked back over to the food aisle
and I grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips, while Rose had a
hankering for cashews. I grabbed a couple of cool drinks from the
cooler and handed one to her. We pulled out some chairs in the
camping section and sat enjoying our snacks. I was wondering if we
could live here; they certainly had a lot of things we could use.
There were bathrooms; although, I wasn’t sure if there was running
water.

“
I think we should stay
here until we figure out our next move.” Rose looked thoughtful, as
she nibbled on her cashews.

“
I think that’s a good
idea, but eventually we will have to move along. You can’t trust
that people will not want to take us out if they know we are
infected. “

Rose had a good point. I hadn’t even
thought of that scenario, but now it made sense that they would
want to take us out. I shivered a bit, and made a note to stop by
the clothing section for a sweater. The salt and vinegar chips
didn’t taste as good as they used to. I wondered if that had
something to do with the Ms. Hamrick venom working its way through
my system. They had been my favorite type of chip.

In the sweater section, I found a
cardigan I thought would keep me warm, and it kept my wrist covered
where the wound was spreading from my palm. It was long so I could
pull the sleeves down over my hands. Not being able to see the bite
spreading could allow me to pretend it wasn’t really there. Rose
put on a blue sweater with giant flowers on it, and we walked back
over to the television section. We decided to hook up a DVD player
and make use of having power for as long as we could.

We watched a couple of movies to keep
us occupied. During ’27 Dresses’, we took turns, in the bathroom,
cleaning up the best we could. The skin around the outside of my
bite mark was turning a little black, and it stung. I debated on
washing it, but chickened out. Using some gauze and antibiotic
cream I had taken from an open first aid kit someone had thrown on
the ground, I dressed it the best I could.

I wanted to get some flashlights
together before the power went out. Seeing as how the lights I
could see in the distance had been disappearing, I only assumed
that Kelmart would be dark soon. It took a while to find some
flashlights buried among the piles of things that were knocked off
the shelves. I found three and then set about finding batteries for
them.