The Zombie Virus (Book 1) (21 page)

“You have to promise me something,
sweetheart,” she said calmly, a thinly veiled look of fear in her
eyes.

“Anything, honey.” I swiped away a small drop
of blood that trickled down my cheek from the shallow scratches,
smearing it into the sheen of cold sweat that covered my face.

“Promise me,” she started hesitantly,
grasping my hands again in hers. “Promise me that you won’t let me
become one of those things.”

I shifted uneasily and shook my head. “I
don’t know what you mean, Holly.”

She squeezed my hands tighter. “Don’t!” she
whispered vehemently, tears rolling down her cheek, “Don’t make me
spell it out for you.”

A sob escaped my lips this time. “Holly,
darling, please…”

“Steven, do not let me become one of those
crazy fuckers!” she emphasized each word, never taking her eyes off
of mine. “Promise me!”

“I promise you,” I said weakly, looking away
from her beautiful face.

How will I be able to do that to you? My
voice screamed in my head. I can’t continue this without you. I
don’t know how to let you go!

She looked around the dark woods with the
moonlight sending silver streamers down through the rustling leaves
and pine boughs far overhead. The quiet was broken by a hoot owl
calling in the distance.

“This is a good place to be,” she sighed as
she looked around us, a faint smile on her lips. “It’s
peaceful.”

I gently brushed her hair away from her face,
feeling her fevered skin through my palm.

“You’re breaking my heart, Holly,” I
whispered, trying to not to let the despair I felt overwhelm
me.

She grabbed my hand and held it to her breast
and smiled lovingly at me. “We’ve had a great life together
sweetheart. I wouldn’t trade another fifty years of life for what I
had with you and Jeremy.”

“I’ll always cherish each moment.” My heart
broke and tears coursed down my cheeks.

Her eyelids were growing heavy and she laid
her cheek against my chest, “Don’t blame the girl, Steven. She’s
just a kid. You have to take care of her now.” Her voice was
growing weaker.

“I know.”

She looked up at me again, her eyes milky
with moonlight. “Find our son, help him to grow up to be a good
man.”

I nodded, more tears rolling down my
face.

“Don’t forget your promise to me,” she
reminded me weakly. She was radiating heat like a furnace.

“My head hurts so bad,” she muttered almost
incoherently after a few more minutes.

Her eyelids slid shut. I shook her gently.
“Holly, stay with me, please!” I pleaded, the despair overwhelming
me.

Her eyes fluttered open and she managed a wan
smile. “I’ll be waiting for you...” she whispered, barely audible.
Her eyes fell closed again. Her breathing was shallow and labored.
I desperately tried to wake her up again, but she wouldn’t stir. I
laid her back onto the cool bed of leaves, the coppery braid of her
hair draped over her right shoulder. She looked ethereally
beautiful in the silver moonlight, like a gossamer fairy. I knelt
down beside her, feeling the cool, damp ground beneath me and bent
down and kissed my wife for the last time. My tears sprinkled her
face, I felt utter devastation.

I don’t know how long I sat there with my
sick wife, trying to will things to be different, brushing her hair
absently with my hand.

Her eyes opened. Even in the diffuse light, I
could see the redness in what used to be the brilliant white of her
eyes. They seemed to glow from an internal flame.

I stood up and put my boot on her chest,
sobbing uncontrollably. I unholstered the .45 ACP and pointed it at
her head. She grasped my boots and growled at me. I pulled the
trigger twice. I heard and felt the sharp bark of the pistol
respond each time.

I turned away quickly, not wanting to see the
results. The gun slid from my fingers and I dropped to the ground,
dissolving into tears.

Kera came running up beside me.

“What happened?” she asked breathlessly. She
must have spotted Holly, because she dropped down next to me, put
her arms around me, laid her head against mine and cried. We sat
there together mourning the passing of my beautiful wife.

The gunshots must have drawn them in. The
crack of a branch snapping back the way we had come spurred us on.
I wiped the tears from my face with the back of my hand and picked
up the Sig, slipping it into its holster. I tightened the empty
Colt onto my back and picked up Holly’s Colt and put it over my
other shoulder. Kera stood up beside me, neither of us turning to
look at Holly.

“I can’t let those things find her,” I said
flatly.

“We can cover her with leaves,” Kera stated
with desperation in her eyes as the sound of something moving
through the tangled underbrush behind us grew closer. She knelt
down and started covering Holly’s face, shielding from my eyes the
damage the bullets had done to her.

“Thank you,” I muttered gratefully. I bent
down and pushed leaves over my wife’s corpse until we had masked
her presence from our sight. The tears started flowing again as I
covered the last of her with the cool blanket of leaves, staring
down at the mound that hid Holly.

Kera tugged urgently on my arm. “Come on,
Steve, we gotta go.”

“I will always love and miss you Holly,” I
whispered solemnly and then turned to leave.

My mind was in a fog of depression. I
couldn’t grasp that my best friend and lover, the mother of my
little boy, was gone. It was surreal, worse than any nightmare for
I was awake and it was a dark reality.

It was hard to quietly navigate through the
brush by moonlight, although we did our best. We fought past
thickets of brambles and trudged over swampy ground. I went on like
an automaton, seemingly trying to escape the vivid memories of
Holly that filled my every thought. I kept the tears at bay even
though I knew they would be back in the quiet of the night when we
were hunkered down and my mind was free to explore its grief. We
circled around back east, back toward my boy, my last link with
Holly.

The thick pine forest ended abruptly and we
were staring out through the edge of the woods into a clearing of
green lawns that surrounded a large housing development. It was
quiet now, though I knew that there had to be Loonies nearby. Kera
stood beside me holding the remains of her blouse together with her
right hand, the shotgun hanging on her back.

“Where are we?” she asked. She put her hand
on my shoulder and lifted her leg to remove her muddy tennis shoe
and empty debris out of it.

“I’m not sure,” I answered flatly. “West of
town I think.”

She slipped her shoe back on and did the same
for the other.

“Ready?” I asked. She nodded silently,
grasping her blouse closed again.

I started moving along the edge of the woods
in a westerly direction following the rising moon. I stayed in the
shadows of the trees, trying to remain unseen by any unwanted
eyes.

I had to get back to the shopping area. I had
to find my boy, that was the only thought that kept me going. The
woods curved around the community to the south and we continued
following the tree line. Occasionally I would see someone moving
among the houses and we would hunker down deeper into the shadows
until they had moved out of sight. We passed by a retention pond
and then came to a road that led out of the development and to a
larger East – West thoroughfare.

Nothing moved in either direction on the road
that we could see. I set off at a jog heading east, keeping to the
fringe of the forest paralleling the road. Kera fell in behind me,
her steps light on the dewy grass.

I’m coming Jeremy, Papa’s coming!

We approached the crossroads of State Route 1
after about a half a mile and stopped amid some ornamental
shrubbery planted along the manicured lawn that ran adjacent to the
road. We knelt down out of view while I scouted the dark, boxy
shapes of what had until just recently been a mark of our
civilization.

Directly before us at the corner of the
intersection was a chain pharmacy, its doors broken open. A large
strip mall sat up on the hill across from us and other shops and
buildings were scattered around the road.

I guessed we were about a half a mile to a
mile south of the road where we had had to leave the truck. There
were groups of infected meandering about the storefronts. Some had
lain down to sleep on the warmth of the concrete parking areas and
roads. Many had gathered together in small, compact groups.

There were abandoned cars scattered here and
there with more bunched up at intersections acting as de facto
roadblocks. It would have been tough navigating past them in a
vehicle.

We sat crouched down behind the bushes while
I tried to decide our next move. My mind was still wrapped in a
dazed shock of grief which made it hard for me to concentrate on
anything else except the fact that Holly was not there beside me
helping me decide what to do next. I knew I had to push the
realization of her loss back into some dark compartment of my mind
and close that door tightly if I was going to survive long enough
to find my son and get him to safety.

A small group of infected pushed out of the
broken doors of the pharmacy carrying food items in their hands.
They were tearing into the plastic coverings with their teeth to
get to the snacks within. It would seem that there was enough base
intelligence left in their disease-ridden brains to know where to
obtain food and recognize that they couldn’t survive on uncooked
meat alone.

The Loonies were mostly quiet except for an
occasional growl or string of gibberish that erupted from their
mouths. Several that were sleeping were snoring loudly. It was like
we were listening to the sounds from some nightmarish human
zoo.

I wish I knew how those things could tell us
apart from their infected brethren. It had to be more than just the
sweet scent that they emitted. I assumed that their different wails
and growls were used to alert each other to prey but how did they
know who was infected and who wasn’t from a distance? Would they
come running to any out-of-the-ordinary disturbance that they saw
or heard? I racked these thoughts in my mind as I tried to keep
Holly’s memories at bay. I had to think clearly. It would be the
only way that I would find my son!

“What are we going to do?” Kera whispered in
my ear. I could hear the fear in her voice as she looked out at the
infested area.

“How do you think they can tell us from
others like them?” I asked instead of answering her.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I dunno, I
thought you said they smell us.”

“Maybe up close,” I whispered back. “But at a
distance...” I thought back through our encounters. “We are
disruptions out of their ordinary, whether by driving a car or
shooting a gun, and when they flock to the commotion we always run
from them. We may look the same, even though we are as different as
chimpanzees are to humans. Maybe they can read our body language,
our reactions – sense our fear, so to speak.” I wondered if it was
just that they simply congregated to disturbances and when they saw
us they sensed we were different, and when we ran, their brains’
base predatory instinct kicked in.

“Maybe we could try just walking up the road
slowly and avoid getting too close to any of them. Maybe we
wouldn’t rouse them,” I suggested, thinking out loud.

“You’re crazy!” she said a little too loudly.
I shushed her and we melted into the bushes even deeper. None of
the Loonies seemed to have heard her.

“Get real, Steve!” she whispered loudly, her
eyes wide with fear. “If you want to go walking out among them
crazy people, you go right ahead. I’ll just stay here and watch
them tear you apart. I ain’t suicidal!”

“No, I don’t really want to test that
hypothesis here and now, although maybe it’s something we should
keep in the back of our mind if we ever find ourselves in a
situation where there is no other choice.”

Kera stared at me like I was one of the
walking insane.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Okay, we have to get to the truck and resupply at least, and try
to meet up with Jeremy and Frank.”

“You lead the way, I’ll follow.” She
shrugged, swiping the hair back from her face, then added as an
afterthought, “As long as it’s not through them.” She pointed her
chin toward the Loonies.

“Kera,” I said looking her in the eyes. “I’m
sorry for blaming you. You did what you had to do.”

She managed a smile. “Thank you.”

I stood up and moved in a crouching run along
the wood line behind the pharmacy. I looked back to make sure Kera
was following. The moon, which had been our ally earlier, now
bathed us brightly in its glow, causing us to stand out in stark
relief to the darkened woods beside us.

We crept along as fast as we dared, crossing
over a large cleared area, which left us feeling very exposed. We
skirted around a raised plateau that held a small strip mall and
found ourselves looking up an access road past the intersection
where we had left the truck.

It was gone.

I was relieved and frightened at the same
time. Relieved that Jeremy had probably made it out of here and
frightened that I may never find him.

“He wouldn’t have left without leaving me a
message,” I stated, scanning the area around the intersection.
There were still a lot of Loonies in the area, although most were
now asleep.

“What kind of message?” Kera asked

I didn’t answer but motioned her to follow
me. We scrambled across a small parking area and dropped down
behind a car. I cautiously looked up over its hood. None of the
infected had spotted us.

“We have to get over there and look around.”
I nodded toward the other side of the intersection past the jumble
of stalled cars. “I have to find out where my son is.”