Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (77 page)

Danny yawned, his mouth opening so wide that Alec was pretty sure it popped.

“Either of you kids hungry?”  Alec would rather not have to dig into their rations yet, but he needed to keep the kids’ energy up until they got to a safe location.

“No,” Danny shook his head.

“I’m okay,” Alice agreed.  “Unless you have cookies.  I would like a cookie.”

“Sorry squirt, no cookies.  Although where we’re going may have some, you never know,” Alec shrugged.

He kept trying to picture what the service station would look like.  There were a few things it could be.  It could be a simple gas station where the only structure was a little hut-like building for the attendant to stand in.  Or it could be the kind of gas station that had a full shop with the cheesy gift merchandise.  There was even a chance it would have a fast-food joint.  Alec hoped it would be one of those so that he could fry them up some burgers.  He was hungry, starving even, but he was going to wait till they got to their destination.  If there
were food there, he would eat that instead of what they had with them.

They continued to ride in silence awhile longer.

* * *

“So what kind of chair is that?” Danny broke the silence.

“You mean my wheelchair?”  Alec asked as if there were other chairs present.

“Yeah,” Danny nodded.  “It doesn’t look like a normal wheelchair.”

“You mean it doesn’t look like what you picture a wheelchair to look like when you think of one,” Alec corrected him.  “There are lots of different kinds of wheelchairs.  If you remember when I was talking to Kara, I said that Keystone is the one that ended up fixing me.  Well, they gave me that chair.  I guess they knew I wasn’t going to be the most friendly with it, so they gave me the heavy duty, rough and tumble one.  I never bothered to look up exactly what kind it is, but it seems like they crossed an everyday-use chair with a rugby chair.”

“Rugby chair?”  Danny looked at him, confused.

“Yeah, there are wheelchair rugby leagues.  As well as basketball, hockey, tennis, whatever really.”  Alec noticed Danny still looked confused.  “What?  You didn’t think people in chairs could play sports?”

“I guess I just never thought about it,” Danny shrugged.

“Don’t get me wrong, walking and running and all that is great, but there’s nothing wrong with being in a chair.”  That was something Alec had to tell himself a lot.  He really did miss the use of his legs.  If he was going be confined forever, then maybe he would adapt, but having the chance to regain the use of them had put him in a sort of grey zone.  Not long after being in a chair, he had gone to a bar and hit on the most beautiful girl he could find there.  She had talked and flirted with him, but when he had suggested that they leave together, she had laughed.  She told him that she would fuck him when he could fuck her standing up.  Needless to say, that had set his mental therapy back about a week.

Danny looked like he was about to say something else when the truck ground to a halt on the shoulder again.  Alec looked up as the window in the back slid open slightly.

“We reached your exit,” Corey grunted then slid the window closed again.

No one in the cab got out to help them.  Their friendly attitude had completely vanished, which suggested things were looking very bad for the young girl.  Alec was very glad they were getting off.  In fact, he was thinking that if they hadn’t decided to separate when they did, either Corey or Kelly would start blaming one of them for the girl’s sickness, and then all hell would break loose.

Danny crawled to the tailgate and dropped it down.  He started moving their bags and placing them on the ground behind the truck.

“Time to get off, squirt.”  Alec gestured for Alice to get off the truck.

Alice crawled over to Shoes.  She looked like she was going to drop him onto the ground herself but Danny quickly helped her.  Once the space was made, Alec once again hauled himself around to the tailgate.

“I think I remember how to set up your chair, but you better watch, just in case.”  Danny hopped out of the truck and pulled the chair down.

He opened it up and checked the locks.  He only forgot to check one, but Alec reminded him of it.  Alec then, once again, got up on tired and shaky legs.  He moved quickly to drop into his seat, then unlocked his knees and set his feet on the footrest, which consisted of a single bar covered in rubber grip.  His leg muscles were absolutely screaming.  There were some pain medications in both his and Danny’s bags, but he didn’t want to take any.  Those were for emergencies only.

He slung his pack onto his back, and Danny did the same.  Alice dropped off the back of the truck and scooped up Shoes’s leash.  Danny lifted the tailgate back up, and Alec smacked the rear of the truck twice.

Corey and his family drove away quickly.

“Bye!”  Alice waved with her whole arm.  “Thank you for the ride!”

Alec looked at the highway exit.  Thankfully, the grade didn’t look too steep; he should be able to get up it on his own.  Or, at least, with only a minimal amount of help from Danny.

The sun had finally finished sinking below the trees, leaving only a glow behind it in the sky.  Alec took his pistol out and placed it on his lap.  He hoped they could get to shelter before it became fully dark.

Jessi

Jessica watched the world go by outside the window.  She looked for horses or cows whenever they passed fields, but, so far, she had had no luck.

The others were snickering again.  They kept making stupid jokes.  None of this was funny.  The world was ending, and they were making jokes.

Stupid fucking Abby.  Stupid fucking Cender.  Stupid fucking Tobias.

Even Cillian was making jokes.  Her Cillian.  He had come, and he had saved her, but the others were corrupting him.  Tobias especially.  That goddamn boy cunt.

She was also pretty sure Abby was trying to steal him from her.  She had seen her flirting with him.  To her utter disgust, it looked like Cillian was flirting back.  It’s not like he could help it, though.  He was a man.  Men couldn’t help themselves.

Still, she liked Abby, so it was very troublesome.  They had gone through a nightmare together and come out on the other side.  If she would just stop flirting with her Cillian, then they could probably be best friends.

It was nearly dark now.  The last of the sun still lit the sky, but she couldn’t see the sun itself.  The dark was coming.  The fucking dark.  It didn’t feel like that long ago when she and Abby were in the darkness of the subway tunnel.

As that memory came, so did the ensuing memories: the hospital, the zombie she had pummelled, the man known only as B.  He hadn’t been infected, but she killed him anyway.  Once she started swinging that shovel, she couldn’t stop.  She told Cillian she couldn’t remember what happened, but she did.  She remembered every sickening thump.  He might have lived if only he didn’t have that damned gun.

Jessica did not like guns.  She did not like anyone who carried a gun either, and now she was in a car full of them.

When Jessica was twenty-one, and still attending school, she had to stay late one night.  Her group needed to get an assignment done and had gathered in the library.  They had worked for hours because all of them were really busy and didn’t know when they could get together again.

It was one in the morning when they finally disbanded.  They had gotten a lot of work done, and Jessica left satisfied.  They all had a section of the report to review and edit.  Once edited, they would trade sections with someone else in the group and cross-edit.  They would do this continuously until everyone had edited every section.  Since the swapping could be done online, they wouldn’t need to
gather again unless something really drastic came up.

Jessica had left the building with two of her classmates, a couple that she had been friends with for quite awhile.  They offered to give her a ride home, but she politely declined.  They lived in the opposite direction, and her bus stops at both ends weren’t far.  They said their goodnights and went their separate ways.

She walked to the bus stop and sat in the shelter there.  She sat and she sat and the bus never came.  She waited for nearly a full hour before deciding that the bus was never going to come.  Later, she found out that the bus drivers had gone on strike that night at midnight.  She started walking home.

The apartment that Jessica rented with a friend wasn’t that far from the school if you looked on a map, but there was a river between the two that had a fairly long and round-about way of getting from one side to the other.  Taking the bus didn’t take too long, but walking always felt like forever.

As she neared the main bridge, she looked down at the river.  It carved a ravine into the landscape that was surrounded by large amounts of foliage.  There was also a path following one side of the river that lots of students walked, biked, or jogged along in nice weather.  At this time of night though, Jessica did not trust the path.  She did, however, trust the trees.

Once she crossed the bridge, she climbed down the side, into the forest.  She and her roommate had spent many weekends exploring these woods and she knew all the trees and all the hidden deer paths.  She made her way through the dark with confidence.  It would cut her travel time down by over half.  She saw only a couple of people the whole time.  They were two boys sitting on the opposite bank of the river, just off the path.  Judging by the glow that kept passing between them, it was likely a couple of stoners.  The stoners usually came out to the woods at night to get high.

As Jessica neared the end of her journey, the path on the other side of the river crossed over a footbridge to her side.  She met up with it where it bent to go uphill and joined with the street.  Her apartment building sat on the corner where they met.  She was almost home.

“Well, look what we have here,” a voice spoke out of the dark on the other side of the path.  “Looks like a lost, little deer.”

Jessica had turned to face the speaker, but wound up having something cracked into the side of her skull.  She was stunned, and it took her a moment to realize that she was being dragged into the woods.  She screamed, but it was cut short by a hard punch to her face, and then a kick to her stomach.  She gasped for air, not able to breathe for a moment.

“Shutyourdirtymouth.”  It was a man’s voice, and it had turned harsh and violent.  “Give me your wallet.”

Jessica realized she was being mugged.  She pulled her bag to her and started to open it, but the man grabbed it out of her hands.  She watched as he tore open the bag and rooted through the contents.  She remembered thinking how upset her group would be when they found out part of the report had ended up on the dirty forest floor.  Some of it was even getting picked up by the wind and heading for the river.

The man had a large beard and beady eyes.  He was very dirty.  He found her wallet and tossed the rest of her bag aside.  Opening it, he took out all the cash and stuffed it into a pocket in his pants.  He then pulled out her debit card.

“What’s the pin?”  His head snapped, and he glared down at her.

At first, Jessica had no idea what he was talking about.  What pin?

“What’s the fucking pin?”  He pulled a gun out from the back of his waistband, pointing it at her face.

For a
moment, Jessica couldn’t breathe again.  She tried to say something, anything, but it wouldn’t come out.  The gun was then cocked.

“8472,” she said.  She wasn’t even sure that that was the right number, but it was the only thing she could get out.

The man put the card into his other pocket, then glanced back at the path.

“Please, let me go,” Jessica whimpered.

“Let you go?”  The man faced her again.  “But honey, we’re just getting started.”

Jessica knew only fear and pain for the next half hour.  The man jumped on her and crudely grabbed her breasts.  Jessica turned to scramble away, but she only managed to crawl a few paces before he grabbed her hips and pulled her back to him.  The muzzle of the gun was placed against the back of her skull.

With the gun there, Jessica was afraid to do anything as the man reached his other hand around the front of her.  He squeezed her breast again, hard.  Then he undid her jeans and yanked them down with her panties in one tug.  The gun moved away as he presumably undid his own pants.

Now was her chance.  Jessica kicked back with one of her legs.  She wasn’t sure what part of his body she hit; she just tried to scramble away again.  She was foiled by her dropped garments though, and tripped, scraping open her chin on the root of a tree.  Before she could try to get back, a shot was fired, narrowly missing her head.  She never forgot that sound.  It was the loudest thing she had ever heard.  She froze.  The man was on her again in seconds.  She tried to scream again, but a dirty, smelly hand was clamped over her mouth.

“Don’t try that again,” he hissed in her ear, the gun placed against her temple.  “I’d rather do this while you’re still alive.”  His words were emphasized by the dead body.  Another girl lay in the leaves nearby, her dead eyes staring.  Watching.

He then forced himself inside her.  The only thing Jessica could do was lie there and cry.  She could only smell his dirty hand, and practically taste it too.  Part of her mind couldn’t even fathom what was going on.  It couldn’t comprehend that she was actually being raped and that there was a dead woman beside her.  He didn’t stop with just once, either.  The second time, he raped her up the ass.