The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (8 page)

Kera turned around and vomited violently on
the ground. Tears overflowed her eyes as the realization of what
had been done to those poor girls hit her like a Mack truck.

“How could someone do that?” she choked out
hysterically. She had never seen such brutality before. At least
the Loonies had the excuse of being crazy animals acting from a
diseased mind. This was the deliberate act of a sick, demented mind
like she had never encountered before or would have even believed
existed.

“That must be Diana, her daughter,” Steven
whispered flatly, backing away from the broken, rotting bodies.

“Did they make her watch that happening to
her baby?” Kera sobbed, her mind becoming numb with the horror of
what she had just seen. She couldn’t bear to look at the bodies
anymore and ran, half stumbling, in the other direction. Steven
hastily caught up with her and they quickly scrambled up the creek
bank, neither one looking back until the macabre sight and foul
smell of the dumping ground were well behind them. Finally, when
they were well away from the remains, they stopped and hugged each
other tightly, both of their eyes red with tears.

“Are you okay?” Steven asked her, brushing
her dark hair away from her eyes. He felt more protective of her
than he had ever been before.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay,” she
replied flatly in a low voice, as if speaking louder would wake the
dead. She experienced a seething hatred boiling in the pit of her
stomach. She wanted to make someone pay for what had been done to
those girls, and there was only one man left to receive her wrath.
There was enough horror in this messed-up new world without
uninfected people having to add to it. The hatred boiled up from
her stomach and coated her mind like a warm balm, calming her. She
knew what she had to do. This evil couldn’t exist on the same
planet with her. It must be eradicated, and she would be the
avenging angel to carry the sword of retribution to those who had
defiled that young girl.

The camp was only a hundred yards or so in
front of them and she strode purposely forward in its direction.
Steven struggled to keep pace with her.

“What are you doing?”

“Cleansing my fucking soul,” she snarled, not
breaking pace.

Steven reached out and grabbed her arm,
spinning her around to face him.

“Think about what you’re doing. Don’t stoop
to their level.”

She pulled free from him and marched
determinedly into the camp.

“Don’t do something you’re going to regret!”
Steven called from behind her. She ignored him and with a face set
in a cold mask of hatred strode into the camp toward the two girls
who were coming out to meet them. He knew what she was thinking,
and didn’t blame her. On the other hand, he was afraid that the
anger would eat her up inside. If she did what he thought she was
going to do, she would be crossing a threshold that she wouldn’t be
able to turn back from, and would be changed forever. He raced
after her. He would take care of the monster in the camp, which was
the only way he could think of saving Kera.

“Hey, did you guys see anything?” Dontela
asked. The words froze in her mouth when she saw Kera’s face and
hurriedly stepped back out of her path.

Kera walked up to the bound bearded man and
straddled his legs.

His eyes were dull with pain and shock, yet
he managed to smirk at her. “Hey bitch. What you got sand in your
pussy about?” he asked through gritted teeth.

She looked him hard in the eyes. There was
madness in there, and yes, she saw it… evil.

Steven had run up behind her and was reaching
out to grab her shoulder and stop her, however he was too late.

“You’re a fucking monster. You’re worse than
the goddamn Loonies.” she replied coolly to the man, barely above a
whisper. She raised the shotgun barrel to his forehead and squeezed
the trigger.

She walked away from the body while its legs
quivered spasmodically.

Katherine sat down near the smoldering embers
of the fire staring at the body of her abductor as the last of his
blood gushed from his shattered head. She had a distant smile on
her face when Kera walked by and sat on another log.

Dontela shook her head. “Damn, home-girl, I’m
really beginning to like you.”

Steven stood next to the blood-soaked corpse,
his arms hanging limply at his sides, watching the last vestige of
innocence disappear from the woman who loved him.

Chapter Four

Jeremy and the dog came down off of the Blue Ridge
Mountain range into the fertile plain of the Shenandoah Valley. He
slipped out of his backpack while he scanned the lush, expansive
valley that spread out before him, filled with small towns and
shopping centers that were hopefully ripe for the picking. From
this distance they looked devoid of life. Nothing moved, which he
knew was deceiving. Experience told him they would be swarming with
Loonies. He would have to be extremely cautious when entering one
of the towns and try to avoid any confrontations with the murderous
creatures. How he was actually going to avoid them he hadn’t quite
figured out just yet.

The dog sat down slightly out of arm’s reach,
panting lightly, and looking at him expectantly. “What do you
think?” he asked the dog. “We need supplies and that’s where we’ll
find them.” The dog canted its head while he talked, yet offered no
reply.

Jeremy was feeling more confident now that he
had his newfound furry friend. He was desperately low on food and
ammo and needed a new sleeping bag. The dog whined and shifted
expectantly.

“Yeah, I think we should try it too.”

Ahead, a green sign indicated an exit to
Waynesboro in a half mile. Jeremy hoped silently to himself that
the Loonies had moved on from this area, although instinctively he
knew otherwise.

“Come on, dog, let’s go food hunting.” He
stretched his shoulders before slipping back into his pack, and
then quietly continued on down the highway with the German Shepherd
keeping pace. After a few hundred yards he paused to open the door
of an abandoned pickup truck to the disappointment of its interior
light staying dark.

He looked down at the dog after searching the
truck for anything useful and coming up empty. “I’m going to have
to find a name for you. I can’t keep calling you ‘dog’ if you’re
going to stick around.” The dog yipped and wagged its tail
furiously like it thought the idea was simply grand. It also liked
the sound of the boy’s voice and sensed a pack bond growing with
the human. Jeremy pulled out his last piece of beef jerky and split
it with the animal, who ecstatically gulped it down in one ravenous
bite.

“We’ll get some more, boy. I bet there’s a
Walmart down in that town and they’ll have everything we could ever
need.” He tried to pat the dog on the head, however, it shied away
again.

They walked off of Interstate 64 onto Route
624, which angled back toward the mountains and the town of
Waynesboro. A few warehouses sat off the road and some
neighborhoods could be spotted back through the trees which still
held some of their brightly colored fall foliage compared to the
barren trees on the mountaintops. Jeremy knew he wanted to avoid
those densely packed homes from his past bad experiences and passed
those areas very cautiously, giving them a wide berth and trying to
be extra quiet.

Up ahead, the neighborhoods were becoming
more tightly grouped and pushing in on both sides of the road.
Beyond that it looked like they would be entering an industrial
area. He could spot smoke stacks in the distance, clawing at the
sky like dead, bony fingers. Their tops would probably never again
gush the dirty clouds of foul smoke that marked the human race’s
accent to its industrial height.

I
guess
that’s
one
good
thing
to
come
out
of
this
, Jeremy giggled to himself.

He steeled himself as he approached the
unavoidable neighborhoods. Nothing moved anywhere he looked.

“Do you smell any of them Loonies, dog?” he
asked it. He imagined that it shook its head ‘no’.

The silence was eerie. There were no barking
dogs or the melodious call of birdsongs. No honking horns or sounds
of kids playing in the yards, sounds he had taken for granted all
his life. He felt like he was the last person alive on Earth. The
dog sensed the emptiness also and moved in closer to the boy.
Across the road a block of homes had been leveled by a fire and
only blackened foundations remained. More and more cars littered
the road, as the pandemic had hit here during the early morning
rush hour. More of the vehicles also held the dried husks of
bodies. People who had been too sick to get out of their cars and
had turned into Loonies and been trapped in their vehicles on that
fateful July morning. Still, many had escaped before passing out or
crawled out their open car windows if they had been down when they
had turned into Loonies.

The dog whimpered at Jeremy’s side. Its tail
was tucked tightly down between its legs.

“This isn’t a good place.” he whispered to
his companion, looking down at the spooked dog. They walked further
into the silent, deserted town. Even in the cool air he felt the
palms of his hands sweating and held his AR pistol with a grip that
turned his knuckles white. Overgrown lawns replaced the woods he
had been walking beside and forced him down onto the four-lane
blacktop. He moved as quietly as he could next to the concrete
divider, warily scanning the houses and yards in between for any
movement. The dog followed close at his heels. Leaves had piled up
thickly on the edges of the road without the motion of vehicles to
sweep them clear. Jeremy realized that in a few years the asphalt
would probably be completely obscured by leaf matter and debris as
nature gradually reclaimed what man had once built. He walked up to
the intersection of a street that a road sign proclaimed to be
Mountain Road and paused to consider his options. Ahead seemed to
be the industrial section of town, to his right the road stretched
for a couple of blocks to the wood line, and to his left the road
ran north across a set of railroad tracks, through some woods, and
away from the factories. He didn’t like the looks of those ominous
industrial smokestacks and buildings.

“I don’t think we’ll find what we need up
there.” He winced when his voice echoed off the pavement around
him. The dog still kept its tail low to the ground. “Come on,” he
told the dog in a whisper and cut to his left across the road.

Jeremy didn’t notice the hackles go up on the
dog or hear the low growl building deep in its throat as they
progressed down the street adjacent to a large warehouse-like
building. What he did hear was a sound coming from the open loading
doors of the building; it reminded him of the buzzing he used to
hear from a model train transformer that he and his papa used to
set up around the Christmas tree. He stopped and stared at the
building. The dog stepped in front of him, facing the building with
his teeth bared and a menacing growl rumbling from his throat.

“Maybe there’s power in that building,”
Jeremy whispered hopefully. He stepped around the dog, which stood
rooted in place and approached the roadside in front of the large
warehouse. A tall chain-link fence completely surrounded the
building and the only way through was an open gate that would have
blocked the way onto a parking lot if it had been closed. A guard
shack stood forlornly next to the gate, overgrown by weeds and
Virginia creeper. The huge tan metal building was approximately
seventy-five yards beyond the fence, several of its garage type
loading doors stood open like dead empty eye-sockets.

The noise didn’t sound so much like a
transformer to him anymore, but more like the mad ramblings of a
hundred voices moaning in unison. The dog barked once loudly at
Jeremy, as if to ask him what the fuck he was doing approaching
that place.

Then literally all hell broke loose.

They poured out of the building’s open
loading doors like water from a breached levee. The half-naked,
emaciated horde seemed to be never ending as it flowed from the
building. Jeremy stumbled backwards, tripping over the dog and
falling hard to the ground on his backpack. When the lead Loonies
spotted him, the tempo of their mad ramblings escalated and the
killing rage overtook them. They charged the fence, screaming their
guttural cries and hit it en-mass. Jeremy thought at first that
they were going to push right through it as if it wasn’t even
there, yet it held… briefly. More and more of the horde pressed
against their brethren in a mad rush to get to the object of their
rage, needing to satisfy a killing lust that gnawed relentlessly at
their brains. For many of them, there was also a real hunger that
clenched their guts in a tight fist of near-starvation, and the
sight of the boy and the dog promised a chance at quenching the
pain of both of those constant agonies. While they massed against
the fence in ever growing numbers, those in the rear scrambled up
and over those in the front, dragging themselves up the fence like
rats escaping rising waters. The fence became a living mass of
tissue as the first of the Loonies reached the top and became
entangled in the strands of barbed wire.

Jeremy struggled hastily to his feet while
the shepherd barked madly at the throng of Loonies. The fence
leaned outward as more and more of the creatures piled against it,
crushing those in the front so that their flesh began to smear and
pulp between the metal links. The overflow reached the gate and
poured around it. Jeremy tore off in the opposite direction,
screaming for the dog to follow him. There were a handful of houses
on the opposite side of the street and he ran wildly for them.
Behind him he heard the fence give way with a crash and glanced
back to see the horde tangled up on the ground around it. More of
the Loonies spread out or clambered over their fallen comrades and
joined the chase.