Scavengers (30 page)

Dejah suddenly regretted coming here. Oh God, what had she been thinking?
They’re going to eat me again and again and again.
Doubt washed over her as fast and furious as the rain had, and she knew the plan hatched in the confines of the pseudo-safety of the barn would never work. There were just too damn many of them. She glanced around the room. Office furniture was shoved to the sides. The floor was stained by dark smears. Two zombies sat in chairs facing the desk, and the infected guard she came with stood next to Bal Shem discussing, she assumed, her claims about being the healing child’s mother.

Dejah’s line of sight roamed from the infected deciding her immediate fate. The rest of the trailer had become a gruesome abattoir.

To her right was a kitchenette with a dining nook. Clearly the trailer had been intended for temporary housing before it was converted into a clinic. Cupboard doors swung on hinges, medical supplies stashed on the shelves. One quick look around revealed an examination table piled high with mutilated flesh. Dejah gasped at the awfulness of it, and the only thing that enabled her to look as long as she did was the fact that it just seemed so unreal. Gnawed bones, some with fleshy bits stuck to them, lay here and there. Cracked-open skulls dripped brains like tapioca. A striking Asian woman, beautiful even in the throes of infection, gripped a supple female thigh, blood dripping from her hands and smeared over her face. Dejah wondered if the thigh had once been a part of Lauren’s body.  The infected woman took the time to lick the congealing blood from between each of her fingers.

Dejah felt the surge and it happened quite suddenly; she vomited all over the floor. She closed her eyes in her sudden throes of revulsion, couldn’t bear to look again at the gruesome table, or the ground around the table thick with unrecognizable clumps. Her bout of vomiting didn’t seem to faze any of the other occupants of the room, and the woman at the table didn’t stop her grisly feast.

Wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve, Dejah hugged her aching stomach and blinked away tears.  She focused on the infected guard and Bal Shem. They were still talking. Despite her resolve not to look again at the awful horrors in the kitchen nearby, gazing upon the visage of the infected terrorist wasn’t much less revolting.

Bal Shem’s body was a mutant blasphemy of rotting flesh. Arms bulged with muscle that wasn’t quite covered by thin layers of skin, patchy in spots, blackened in others. The infection was taking its toll on his body, just as it had done on the rest of the infected. He may have remained more lucid than the others, but he obviously couldn’t stop the physical ravishment of the disease.
He wouldn’t be so remarkably rational without Selah’s touch
, Dejah thought.
Selah is keeping his mental faculties intact. Remove Selah from the equation and Bal Shem wouldn’t be any more intelligent than the other talkers. And it wouldn’t be long until his mind broke down and he turned into another of the feral infected roaming around on the other side of the cow pasture
.

Bal Shem’s chest was broad, and a network of muscle overlay a sinking ribcage. His skull was a patchwork of hair, one side of his face wet bone and cartilage, the other side peeling, dying flesh. He gave a lipless smile at the vision of Dejah before him.

“You don’t like how I look, no?” he said to her, laughing. “A few hours ago, I barely looked ill. Only my thumb was beginning to rot. And now — now, look at me. This infection spreads so quickly. Some of these around me now will be dead in a matter of days.” He gestured to the infected seated in the chairs before the desk.

Dejah didn’t respond. What was she supposed to say?

“Bring her to me,” he growled to the infected guard.

Dejah realized what a terrible mistake this was coming here like this, but there was no going back now.

The talker brought her to Bal Shem. Without warning, he lunged from his seat, grabbed her, tilted her head back, and savagely bit her throat.

Dejah reflexively inhaled with the shock of the sudden attack. Her windpipe filled with blood. She coughed as it filled her lungs. Bal Shem dragged her across the room, blood gushing from the hole in her throat, and then threw her on the examination table atop fresh piles of human remains.

He ripped the legs of her pants until they hung around her in tattered strips, and then tore into her leg, ate her thighs, and ripped open the skin of her stomach to spill some of her guts over the edge of the table. Laughing maniacally, he straightened himself, flesh and entrails smeared over his cheek and slipping between his hands. Then he seized her leg and arm, and tossed her with a half-circle twirl into the corner.

She cracked paneling as she crashed against the wall.  She fell into a heap, gurgling blood as consciousness slipped away.

*       *       *

Dejah came back to life in a cage of barbed wire, chicken wire, and aged, paint-peeled wood. She was in another room of the trailer. The light through the windows was a darker gray so she either regenerated through most of the day and it was now a dusky twilight or it was very early the next morning. Her hands were tied behind her back. Her body was screaming pain like it usually did after regeneration. She was disoriented, dizzy, and struggled to piece together what happened.

She’d announced herself as Selah’s mother, but it seemed clear that Bal Shem recognized her, probably from information he’d been given by Evelyn, no doubt.

He didn’t kill Dejah, and he hadn’t dragged her off to Selah —
God, let it be Selah
– to be healed and “reused.”  Since he’d caged her, she could only guess one thing: the madman must have wanted to see if what he’d been told of her regenerative powers was true. And if so, he intended to keep her for a very long time.

Or as long as he survives.

Her cage was not far from the doorway of her room. She could see down the hall, past the slaughterhouse kitchen, into the main room. The talkers stood in a line on the other side of the room, but she couldn’t see why they were lining up. Bal Shem rose from behind his desk and took his place at the head of the line. Dejah situated herself so she could see whatever it was that was happening in the other room. 

Her heart caught in her throat.

Oh my God.

She wondered if she’d finally lost her mind. Was she hallucinating?

Bal Shem stood on the other side of the room where a disheveled, dirty girl was brought in on a wood platform, locked in a cage. The girl was thin, surrounded by her own refuse and the remnants of whatever scraps of food the infected fed her. They were keeping her alive, but not doing a very good job of it. The girl turned around toward some noise near the door.

Selah.

As soon as she saw her daughter gazing despondently through the bars of her cage, Dejah broke into violent, hitching sobs. “Selah!” She tried to speak, but her throat was still healing. Her voice emerged as a mere whisper. “
Selah
!”

Selah’s arm was tied so her hand protruded from between the metal squares in the filth-covered chicken wire used to construct her cage. Bal Shem knelt beneath her, forcing her hand to touch his repulsive head. Dejah watched the transformation.

Oh God
, she thought. Dejah closed her eyes to the memory of Selah’s christening. Selah being blessed by the pastor. Selah healing the cancer that had spread through the man’s body, leeching the life slowly from him. “Oh, dear Jesus,” Dejah groaned.

Her fears were realized. Bal Shem somehow discovered Selah’s gift and used her to rise to power among the other infected. He probably started out as a talker, she mused, maybe a bit smarter, until he was touched. It was evident, from the short line of infected waiting their turns, that Bal Shem allowed a chosen few limited access to Selah’s touch — just enough so they could become an elite squadron fulfilling his wishes.

Now they were lining up for their promised rations.

Across the room, Selah’s tiny hands, her precious little fingers, touched putrid flesh and gave it unholy life. Dejah focused in on her daughter’s vacant stare.  What she saw there ripped her very soul.

“Selah!” she cried. Now her voice came out in a harsh rasp. Bal Shem’s chosen infected few jerked their pustule-covered faces toward her. “Selah!”

The sound of her mother’s voice stirred Selah from near catatonia. “Mommy?” She started to cry. “Mommy?”

Dejah struggled against her bonds, but she was tied fast. “Selah! I’m here. Mommy’s here!”

Bal Shem focused in on her, eyes swimming as he spotted her at the end of the hallway, bound in her cage.
“Mommy?”
His tone mocked her desperate words. He looked from daughter to mother, something working in his twisted mind. Nearing Dejah’s cage, his gaze narrowed as he pointed at her, and then at Selah. “This girl is your daughter?” Then he muttered, more to himself, or a dim hallucinatory companion. “The woman before told the truth. Is this the truth?”

“What reason do I have to lie?”

He shuffled into the room at the end of the hall and knelt to examine her.  This close, she could see too well that the right side of his face was in ruins, falling apart. His lower lip hung loose as the skin began to separate from the chin.  It gave him a toothy sneer, gums blackening at the roots of his teeth.  He breathed on her and it smelled like a dumpster in August.

Dejah spit in his face. She cursed and struggled against her ropes. The dirty fibers gave way, snapping amidst her struggle. Hands free, she grabbed the wire cage and shook her prison’s walls.

Bal Shem watched her with a hateful smirk on his face, and then pointed to the door.

“Everyone out,” he commanded firmly.

Grumbling that they were cheated from Selah’s touch, the chosen infected few stood around for a moment, looking lost. One infected guard, whom Dejah recognized from the food delivery detail, placed his oozing boil-ridden hand on the doorknob, but was hesitant to leave. They wanted Selah’s touch. They gazed longingly at the child.

“Get out,” Bal Shem growled. His voice was low, guttural, evil. He balled his fists tightly, his body shaking as if he were on the verge of losing control.

The others filed from the room. Their boots clanged on the metal stairs. The last one slammed the door closed and shook the trailer. Dejah rocked her cage, pushing against the opening. It was wired shut.

“Mommy!” Selah screamed, terrified.

Bal Shem’s body shuddered with rage as Dejah shook the cage again. “Stop it,” he roared, his face a twisted puzzle of decaying flesh. Menace gathered around him like poison mist.

“Let me out, damn you!” Dejah rocked the cage to one side. It almost tipped over. Bal Shem kicked it back into position.

“Mommy,” Selah continued to wail.

“Silence!” Bal Shem commanded. Selah recoiled into a corner, whimpering and sobbing.

“Let me the hell out of here.” Dejah found strength in her anger, courage in her rage. “Damn you!
Let me out!”

He reached a diseased hand toward her through the wire cage. Flesh hung in rotting strips from his bones. His body was failing him despite the constant renewal from Selah. The virus was potent. Selah could heal cancer that was killing Reverend Forbes, but against this virus all she could do was stave it off, buy some time for these monstrosities. Touching Selah was like popping a pill: they got just enough energy and renewal from her to continue living in their diseased state, but not enough to be completely healed before her affect on them wore off.

Dejah could tell Selah’s powers were weakening, too, and that could have been part of it.  Her poor sweet girl was exhausted, pushed to her absolute limit by these fiends. Bal Shem already confessed that his body had begun a rapid deterioration. They’re using her too much, she thought. Dejah looked at her daughter, a waif, a mere shadow of the beautiful girl who’d left home with her father what seemed so long ago.

Bal Shem was killing her. Draining her last drops of life.

Dejah kicked, rocked, banged, and shook her cage like a wild woman. Bal Shem laughed as his hands flailed around in the cage, trying to latch onto her throat or hair.

Dejah pressed against the distant side of the cage to avoid his clutches, slipped her hand into her jean pocket, and pulled out the whistle Brooks had given her.

With all of the strength she could muster, she blew the whistle.

“I say we go in,” David said, eyeing the back door to the trailer. “There hasn’t been anyone at that door, or even looking through that back window all night. I’ve got to go. I can’t take this anymore. Something’s wrong.”

“The plan is: we wait for the whistle,” Robbins said.

“Damn it, it’s been too long. What if she lost the whistle? Maybe Bal Shem found it, or God forbid something worse happened.  We’ve got to do something. We can’t let her—”

“Ssh. What was that?” Robbins smacked David in the chest and he shut up.

The loud, shrill sound of a whistle sliced the damp morning air.

“That was it.”

“Let’s go!”

David led the charge as he and Robbins dashed from the secondary barn toward the back door of the trailer.

*       *       *

Abbott had been watching throughout the night.  He’d had a chance to mull over his decision to join the military last year. It was lauded by his father (“Now, you’re a man, son,” and he’d patted his back and blew cigar smoke into his face, sauntering off to claw another beer out of the fridge), and decried by his mother (“Abe, damn it
do
something, not
our boy
”, and to Dad’s deaf ears she’d cried all night about how they’d ship him off to Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or Iraqistan or some god awful place and they’d never see him again). He didn’t regret it, now.  It was all that had kept him alive.

“Here’s to you, Dad,” he muttered, and pulled the last bit of a mostly-smoked cigar stub out of his pocket. He cooked the black end with his lighter.  Smoke puffed fragrantly into the morning air.  He had just taken his third deep puff when he gazed across the mist-laden encampment and saw the doctor and David Murphy dashing to the trailer. Listening, he could hear the faint sound of the whistle.  He stood.

“It’s time to rock and roll!” he shouted.

The group they’d assembled, no more than a dozen willing volunteers, stood as a ramshackle squad of unlikely heroes.  They brandished makeshift weapons.  Some of them prayed. Some of them seemed on the verge of hyperventilating. A couple of them just stared at the back of the door, ready to rush out. Abbott wished he had some words of encouragement for them, but the fact that they stood here with him at this moment said more than he could have expressed with words.  Unlike the rest of the barn’s inhabitants, cowering in the shadows and the loft, these men and women were willing to fight for their lives.

Abbott looked over and saw Torri, a broken pitchfork in her hand, rocking just slightly with nervous energy.  She caught him looking and gave him a strained smile.  He nodded back.

It was time.

“On three,” he said.  “One—”

The group tensed.

“—two—”

They gripped their weapons and put shoulders and backs against the doors.

“—three!”

They heaved against the barn doors. The air exploded with shouts and war cries as they battered through.  The first door swung free.  It creaked on its hinges and swung like a massive hanger bay door.  Two infected guards stood at their posts, turning slowly, stunned and confused. Their group attacked the infected guards in a surging wave of brutality.

Abbott saw Brooks separate from the group. It was time for them to make their run.

“Are you ready?” Brooks yelled at him.

Abbott was about to yell affirmative to his buddy when he spotted two feral zombies running around the back of the barn behind the group. Their mob of freedom fighters was intent on beating down the guards. The feral zombies would catch them unaware, and those snarling fiends looked worse off than most.  Patches of flesh had opened in sores and then dried, leaving wide open wounds through which muscle and sinew shone like jerky. Their eyes had sunken into their heads, hair mostly fallen out, what remained clung to their mottled skulls in patches. The fastest of the pair came around the back of the barn and attacked like a diving hawk.

It leapt on Torri’s back and pulled her splashing back into the mud.

Abbott yelled and ran for her. She struggled, half-rolled, realizing what had happened. The broken pitchfork was still in her hand, but she couldn’t adjust it to an effective angle. The feral zombie opened its jaws wide.  It clutched her head in its rotted hands. Torri screamed one last time before it twisted her head around, bone crunching over bone. Abbott knew he’d be too late, but he ran anyway.

Gluey saliva stretched between the feral zombie’s jaws as it bit down on top of her head.  Its teeth lodged in skin, dug into the skull.  It jerked her head in its mouth, like a crazed prize-winner bobbing for apples.  She screamed.  The sound of her neck snapping was like gravel crunching under a boot.

Abbott ran and launched a powerful kick at the thing.

All the bones of the zombie’s midsection snapped. It arched away from Torri’s limp body, flopping on its side and twitching. Abbott looked down at Torri’s face beneath him.  Her lifeless eyes stared heavenward, the lower half of the bite made a half-crescent above her left eye. The front of her skull was cracked open like a porcelain doll.

“Jesus,” he said.  And it wasn’t a curse.  It was plea.

As he looked up, a few members of the group had taken on the second feral zombie.  A third was coming around the barn to join the fray.  It lurched toward them like an emaciated Frankenstein’s monster, arms out, hands grasping toward them.

“Abbott,” Brooks yelled for him.  “We’ve got to do this,
now!
”

Abbott gripped his lighter in his pocket and rushed to the fuel shed along with Brooks and another man. Gas was stored there for the emergency generators, but they had a more pressing use for it.

They ran around the end of the center rows of tents.  Inside of many of them were groans and wet coughs of the infected who were not yet too far gone, who hadn’t utterly lost their minds, but had pledged their allegiance to Bal Shem in exchange for food. 

Brooks and the other man reached the fuel shed.  Brooks kicked the door in, breaking loose a tongue latch and padlocked loop. Splinters flew. They rushed inside and shut down the generators. Grabbing ten-gallon cans of gasoline, Brooks heaved one out to their new partner, a gray-haired man with weathered skin and solid arms.  Brooks handed a full gas can to Abbott. Brooks pointed out the door, “Douse the tents before they all wake up.  I’m right behind you!”

Heart pounding, Abbott sprinted down the hill with the other man.  They ran up and down the aisles between the tents. They tossed the fuel onto the tents and the side-trailers — whatever they could — before Brooks came behind them with fallen tree branches, tossing the burning wood into and on top of the tents.

The infected began to stir.  Some of them appeared from their tent flaps, pushing up the collapsing structures wet with gasoline.

Abbott’s hand shook as he flicked his lighter and held its flame to as many locations as he could.  The flames exploded.  It happened faster than they could have hoped.  In a moment, there was a blaze, flames licking up the sides of the fabric tents.  The whole tent city caught fire like tinder and rags.

They heard the groans of the infected who’d been resting inside the tents.  Brooks made a sideways comment that if only it hadn’t rained the previous day, the fires would’ve been more intense.  All Abbott could think about suddenly, despite all the horror they’d seen inflicted upon so many innocents by the infected, was how many of these people might have been saved by Dr. Robbins’ serum.

Then again, how many of us would they have killed before we could even try? 

Brooks seized a gun from a fallen infected and began exterminating as many of the shuffling feral beasts as he could. They were wandering over the perimeter of barbed wire, sensing that the careful order to which Bal Shem had restricted them was in decay.  Still more of the infected came stumbling out of the blazing tents, flames licking away final shreds of hair and clothes, sizzling flesh.  They made awful, almost inhuman, screeching groans. Brooks mowed them down with blasts of rifle fire.

In moments, the camp became a roar of flames and chaos. Abbott’s heart sank as he looked around him and saw, down the hill from them, the feral monsters taking down healthy people by the barn in droves.  Their plan had failed; their rebellion was short lived. It died a slow, bloody death.

“Abbott, watch out!” He heard Brooks’s yelled warning too late – he felt the soft flesh of his side ripped away in a roast-sized hunk.  Abbott turned and found himself staring deep into the eyes of an infected, dilated pupils reflecting a soulless nightmare. He stared into that abyss, face-to-face with death. Teeth ripped his face. Diseased fingernails opened his throat.

*       *       *

Bal Shem lunged for the whistle, smacking at Dejah through the cage wire. Infuriated, he yanked the door from the cage. He dragged her out. With bone-bare knuckles, he pounded Dejah in the face and grabbed the whistle from her hand.

Blood poured from her nose and mouth. Dejah looked frantically around the trailer. The front door was locked, so even though Bal Shem’s infected generals were nearby, they couldn’t get the door open. Without the touch from Selah they’d been expecting, their mental states were diminished and they just kept kicking the door instead of trying to bust it down. She could see by the gathering shadows that more and more of them congregated on the rickety stairs and beyond the other windows.

Bal Shem held onto her arm, twisting it behind her back. She yelped. He forced her to the floor, and bit a huge chunk of meat from her forearm, growling and reveling in the wet rags of flesh like a rabid dog.

“Mommy!” Selah screamed and banged on the door to her cage. The wires were loose. The more she shook the opening, the more the door worked free.

Dejah rolled, slipped free, and grabbed a metal folding chair, trying to swing it at Bal Shem. She only managed to knock him off balance. He reeled for just a moment, but then was standing and moving toward her again.

There was a loud crash from the rear of the trailer.  The padlocked door that led into the back hallway burst from its hinges and clattered to the floor.

Dr. Robbins and David rushed into the room. Bal Shem immediately swung around, leaving Dejah untended as he pivoted swiftly to deflect a blow from David.

Dejah leapt up, trailing blood across the room, and removed the door to Selah’s cage. She gathered her daughter in her arms in a tearful reunion. Having her, holding her, sent a thrill through Dejah which she had no time to enjoy. They crouched in a corner, huddled together. Dejah searched the area for a weapon. She knew it wouldn’t be long until the infected talkers, Bal Shem’s chosen few who’d been deprived of Selah’s touch, discovered the back door was open.

Bal Shem pulled a revolver from his pants and shot Dr. Robbins. The doctor cursed, clutching his lower leg.  He wobbled back against the wall but didn’t fall. A look of grit and determination set in his face as he blinked against the pain of his wound. Bal Shem smiled, seemed to gloat even as he gave a barking laugh, coughing wet globules from his lungs, unaware that David moved behind him.

David swung and hit Bal Shem in the head with a metal wastepaper basket, knocking the infected leader momentarily senseless.

Dr. Robbins lunged forward and stabbed Bal Shem in the arm with the syringe. The sinister terrorist gave a wolfish howl and dropped to his knees as the serum began to course through his veins. He curled up and rolled on his side, gripping his mid-section as if in exquisite pain, his howls drawing out into deep groans.

“How long does that shit take?” David said, panting.  He reached over to lean against a counter, but saw that it – and everything around them – was covered in gore.

“It’s different for everyone,” Robbins answered, face pale and speckled with sweat.

Three infected generals lurched into the room from the rear of the trailer. They’d found the back door. Robbins lurched quickly away, favoring his wounded leg, digging in his bag for more syringes of serum. 

David snatched up the pistol that Bal Shem dropped. He spun and emptied the clip into the three zombies. Exit wounds exploded from their backs. He hit one in the neck. They didn’t slow down much.

With a frothing infected man looming closer and closer, Dr. Robbins backed toward the front door. As Robbins met the door, his head brushed the curtains on the window aside, revealing faces of the infected smashed against the thin glass. Dejah screamed, pointing to the glass as it shattered, bloody arms reaching inside to grab the doctor.

And then suddenly: “Get down!” It was Brooks’s voice from outside.

Dr. Robbins ducked as Brooks peppered the door’s window with rifle shots. Brains sprayed through the window into the trailer. Bullets riddled the walls and made the place shudder. Zombies with ruined skulls fell in heaps down the stairs outside. The rest of the infected outside moved away from the door. Robbins crawled toward Dejah and Selah. Bal Shem hissed and reached out for David.  He snatched his ankle and brought David down hard. He tried to catch himself but slipped on the carnage-smeared ground.

The front door of the trailer burst open, breaking the locks and splintering the wood. Brooks stood in the doorway, M-16s in each hand.