The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (13 page)

“Eric kept his composure the best of all of
us, although he was just as scared. He told us to check the house
for anyone else while he pushed a big heavy desk in front of the
door. The people outside were pounding and beating on the door
trying to get in, they were making awful animal sounds; guttural
noises. It was like a nightmare.

“The house was empty except for us. The
students that were staying there for the summer must have not made
it back there after the party. We were lucky for that. We believed
we were pretty safe in there. The first floor windows were pretty
high off the ground and the whole house was brick, so we hoped the
crazy people outside couldn’t get in. After we made sure the place
was secure, we settled down in the living room to wait. We figured
the government would be fixing this soon somehow. So we merely had
to wait until the authorities got here and captured those
people.”

“You’re kidding?” Steven asked skeptically.
“You really thought the government was going to save the day for
you?”

Both Katherine and Dontela nodded.

“Yeah,” Dontela answered. “The government has
always been there when people needed help. We thought it wouldn’t
be any different this time. Maybe take a little longer, but they
would fix things. As I said, we were naïve. We had a lot of growing
up to do still.” She stabbed the fire with a stick while looking
defiantly at Steven. “I called my parents again. They were still
okay and hadn’t seen anything out of the normal around their house.
The nearest neighbors were down the road a bit. They did say all
the television channels had stopped broadcasting and there was no
one on the radio either. I told them what was happening there at
UVA and that I didn’t know how the hell I was going to get home.
They said when the news channels were still broadcasting they were
saying this was happening all over the country and maybe the world.
The authorities were telling everyone to stay home and try not to
interact with other people; a kind of quarantine. My papa pretty
much told me to be safe and stay there and wait for help to
arrive.”

“I couldn’t get hold of my dad anymore,”
Katherine said in a whisper. “It just rang and rang.” Fresh tears
filled her blue eyes. “Patty got hold of her mother, who was
hysterical. Her father had attacked her and bitten her badly. She
had locked herself in the bedroom, but he was beating on the door
and she was afraid he was going to get through. Patty stayed on the
phone with her until she heard the door crash open and her mother
scream. She said she heard the phone drop to the ground and
wouldn’t tell us anything more. She never talked to her mother
again.”

Steven and Kera listened in silence. There
was no need for words. They shared each girl’s grief and understood
the emotions that surged back and forth through her and Dontela as
they told their stories.

Dontela put her arm around Katherine’s
shoulder as the girl tried to choke back her tears.

“I rag on her a lot about being a rich
sorority girl,” Dontela said, looking at Katherine as she spoke,
“but we’ve been through a lot together since that day. I don’t
think either of us would be here if it hadn’t been for the other.
We got ourselves a bond stronger than any sisterhood.”

After a few minutes Dontela continued their
story. “The M-80s beat on the doors for about an hour. All the
racket they were making attracted even more of them. After the
phone calls we all sat huddled together in that darkened living
room with all the shades drawn and the lights off listening to the
horrible racket they were making. All of us were scared shitless.
Sometime in the early evening most had lost interest in us and
wondered away. There were still a few outside. They kept going over
to my car whenever Shawn made a noise or moved around, I guess to
see what he was. They never bothered him or each other for that
matter. It was just us that set them off.

“There was some junk food in the house, not a
lot, scarcely enough to get us through a day or so. The power was
still on then, and the water was working. We never did lose that. I
was planning on ditching the group and trying to still get home to
my family, even though they told me to stay put. I wasn’t sure how
I was going to do it, especially with Shawn bouncing around like a
demented animal in the back of my car.”

Dontela stood and stretched lithely in the
oversized clothes of her ex-captors. She sat back down, looking at
each of them in turn as she continued.

“We decided the next morning to go outside
and try to figure out what was going on. Go as far down the street
as Katy’s Alpha Delta Pi house and scrounge for some food. We
couldn’t see any of the M-80s out any of the house’s windows, so we
thought maybe it was safe to go out. We armed ourselves with a
hammer and some kitchen knives, unblocked the door, and stepped
outside. There wasn’t anyone on the street. We avoided my car and
tried to be as quiet as possible when we went by. Still, Shawn saw
us anyway. He just went fucking ballistic. This time when he hit
the window it fucking exploded all over the sidewalk. He pulled
himself through that window, snarling at us with blood dripping
down his face and chin. Patty took off first. She dropped her knife
and ran screaming back toward the house. Shawn zeroed in on her
like a fox on a rabbit. She got maybe ten steps and he was on her.
Hit her like a fucking linebacker. He sat up on her back and just
started ripping and beating on her. We all stood there in shock
watching as he bent down and bit her on the back of the neck. Her
scream was bloodcurdling. I think that finally knocked us out of
our trance. Eric got there first. He hit Shawn hard in the back of
the head with a hammer and Shawn stopped what he was doing and
stared up at Eric like
what
the
fuck
you
just
do
,
home
boy
? It didn’t
even seem to faze him.

Eric turned the hammer over and when I saw
what he was going to do I screamed at him to stop. He brought the
claw part of that hammer down hard on Shawn’s head and I could see
the blades go into his head in slow motion. I was about ready to
stab Eric for doing that, but Shawn stood up with that damned
hammer sticking out of the top of his head and growled. I shoved
that knife as hard as I could through Shawn’s eye. He backed up a
few steps and stumbled over Patty and fell to the ground. That’s
when I saw other M-80s running up the sidewalk at us.

“When I turned back around Shawn was dead. We
grabbed up Patty and dragged her back to the frat house. Those
things were at our heels again and back to beating on the door. We
were all in shock at what had just happened. Patty was in bad
shape. She was bleeding badly from where Shawn had taken a huge
bite out of the back of her neck muscle and the pain was terrible
for her.”

Dontela was poking at the fire with her stick
again; lost in the memories of her story. “I was having trouble
coping with the fact that I had just fucking killed my fiancé, the
man I loved and had wanted to have my babies with. It took me a
while to reconcile with myself that he wasn’t really Shawn anymore,
just something inhuman that looked like him.

“Katy did a good job of patching up Patty the
best she could with what we had available. We didn’t think it was a
mortal wound, although a human mouth is pretty filthy and we were
worried about infection. We were right to be worried, but we never
thought it would be
that
kind of infection.”

“We had her lying down on the couch trying to
keep her comfortable,” Katherine said. “She was moaning with the
pain and complaining that her head hurt too. We figured it was from
Shawn hitting her so hard. She was burning up with fever, though.
None of us connected it with what had happened the day before.
Maybe we didn’t want to acknowledge that that could be possible. We
tried to keep her cool, but after a while she stopped responding to
my questions and then even her cries of pain stopped. Her eyes were
closed and I thought she was asleep. That’s when I noticed the
bloody froth around her mouth.

“I told Eric and Dontela I thought something
was really wrong with Patty. She was soaked in sweat and kicking
and thrashing on the couch. It was Eric that finally said out loud
what we were all starting to think. He grabbed her under the arms
and told Dontela to grab her legs and we took her into one of the
bedrooms. We got her into the bed and covered her up. It couldn’t
have been much more than an hour after the attack, and just like
that her fever broke. I wanted to stay there and help her, I
thought she was getting better and would be alright. Eric didn’t
think so. He grabbed me by my arm and dragged me to the door, and
that’s when she opened her eyes. They were so bloodshot it was like
they were glowing from within. She lunged at us, and we barely got
the door closed in time.

“There was no way to lock that door from the
outside without a key. Patty banged and kicked at it from the other
side for a long time, never even tried the doorknob. So now we had
them outside the house trying to get in and one inside the house
trying to get out. There were only the three of us left. We were so
scared and didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know if we were
all going to end up like Shawn and Patty. If we kept quiet, those
things would settle down. The ones outside finally went away again
when some noise off in the distance caught their attention. It
sounded like a gunshot. We never left that house again that day or
the next.” Katherine took a drink of water and grew quiet.

After a few moments Dontela picked up where
Katherine had left off. “We were having trouble agreeing on what to
do. I still wanted to get the fuck out of there and head home,
although I was kind of scared to do it myself. The battery in my
cell finally died after calling my family constantly and I used
Katy’s until it died also. I guess my anxiety over not being able
to talk to my parents anymore turned me into a real bitch. We had
these silly arguments in whispers so that we wouldn’t rouse Patty
into one of her tantrums. It would have been damn comical to
someone outside looking in to see the three of us yelling in
whispers at each other if the fucking world had not been ending all
around us.”

“So what did y’all do for food?” Kera asked,
snuggling next to Steven.

“We were starving, trapped in that damned
house by our inability to act due to our fears, both real and
imagined. After the first few days we had picked the house clean of
anything to eat, which didn’t diminish the bitch sessions any, let
me tell you. Eric and I made a million excuses why we didn’t want
to go outside; it was only Katy that admitted the truth that she
was scared to death to go out there. The power died on the third
night; that was hard on all of us. At least we still had running
water and toilets that flushed. We were grateful for that.

“After a few more days, hunger finally forced
our hand and we armed ourselves like before and snuck out early in
the morning. Our plan was to go as far as the frat house next door
and raid its kitchen. I had the presence of mind to take a blanket
with me and toss it over Shawn’s corpse. A lot of his flesh had
been striped by animals, birds and insects. It was a stinking mess
covered with ants. Eric took his hammer back. When we got to the
house the front door was locked, so Eric broke out one of the glass
panes in the casement window with the hammer. He reached through to
unlock the deadbolt and we all heard the growl from inside and
something running toward the door. He barely pulled his arm out in
time before one of those M-80s was reaching through trying to grab
him.

“We learned quickly after that to check all
the windows of a house we were raiding and knock and listen at the
doors before trying to get in. We kept ourselves eating that way.
We only had to go out two or three times a week, and only when the
big crowds of M-80s weren’t in our neighborhood. We lived like
rats, scavenging when the coast was clear and then scurrying back
to our fucking hole to hide. We learned that the M-80s didn’t move
around much at night and that’s when we did most of our runs. I
still thought I was going to get in the car and escape home. That
was my plan. I kept putting it off, telling myself maybe tomorrow.
That tomorrow never happened.

“We knew that there were other people out
there. Every once in a while we would hear gunshots way off in the
distance. I never believed in owning guns until this all happened,
none of us did. Damn we wished we had some then. It was a gun-free
campus; we weren’t going to find any there. After the first week we
never heard Patty moving behind her door anymore. Even so, none of
us had the balls to go in and see what had happened to her. We were
pretty sure though by the next week when the smell of rot started
permeating the house. We lived with it though.

“Until a few nights ago we never did see
anyone else except the M-80s, and there were
lots
of them
motherfuckers everywhere. It was the middle of the night, and we
were all sleeping in the middle of the living room like usual.
Anyway, that’s when we heard a vehicle driving up the street. We
went to the windows and could barely see it coming up the road with
its lights out. We thought we were being rescued when we heard that
pickup truck. Damn! It was like we never learned a God damned
lesson the entire time.” Dontela frowned and spat into the
fire.

“Oh, we learned lessons,” Katherine cut in in
a soft voice; her face impassive, “just not the right ones. We
never thought there would be that kind of evil out there. We
thought we knew who the monsters were.”

Dontela nodded. “Yeah, I was always a
pessimist when it came to people and expected the worst from them,
but I let that distrust slip away in the face of the M-80s. I just
wanted to be fucking saved.” She shook her head in disgust. “We ran
out into that street waving our arms and whooping and a hollering
like the damn fools we were. Suddenly all the lights on this truck
flicked on, and there was a fucking load of them, and we were all
standing there like deer in a spotlight. I heard this loud bang and
saw the flash overtop of the truck’s cab and I remember wondering
to myself what the hell they were shooting at. I thought maybe
there were M-80s coming up behind us. I turned around and I see
Eric lying on the ground with the back of his head gone and what’s
left of his brains leaking out. I still didn’t get it. I thought it
had to be a terrible mistake. That they fucked up with their shot.
It was
us
who had fucked up. Katy and I just stood there
with our mouths hanging open, staring at Eric. Over the past three
months he had become like a brother to us and seeing him…” She
choked back a sob as tears welled in her eyes, reflecting back the
firelight. “My mind wasn’t grasping the situation. We were supposed
to be getting fucking rescued. I didn’t hear them get out of the
truck. Don’t even remember them hitting me on the head. The next
thing I knew I was waking up with my skull on fire, trussed up like
a prized pig going to slaughter and laying face-down on the cold
metal of the truck bed. After a few moments I turned my head and
saw Katy lying next to me, tied up too. We both had dirty rags
stuffed in our mouths. I can still taste the oil from it. There was
a big white dude standing in the bed between us, holding onto a
roll bar with one hand and a rifle with the other.” She grabbed
hold of Katherine’s hand and held it tight, not looking up at
Steven or Kera. “I’m not going to tell you what they did to us when
they got us here or some of the things they told us they were going
to do to us, I’m sure you can guess.” She continued in a whisper,
“The M-80s don’t hold a candle to the type of monsters that these
motherfuckers were.”