The Dark Trilogy (86 page)

What had happened to his mother was like a time-lapse recording of the illness through which his uncle had suffered. Several nightmarish months of agony jammed into a few hours of living hell, with the same terrible sights and smells that had given Jason nightmares for a year after his uncle died.

Jason woke with a start. He had been dreaming of his uncle smiling up at him from his deathbed, telling him that his momma would be with him soon. As he spoke, he reached out with his hand, as if asking the boy to join them.

While he’d slept, the wheezing in the other room had stopped. The house was silent. Jason stood, fearful he’d missed the chance to rush back to his mother’s side to see her face and hold her hand one last time before she died. He couldn’t come to grips with the idea of his mother being taken away from him. How could some minor scratch undo such a larger-than-life person?

Jason listened for a few minutes, peering at the walls that separated his mother’s bed from where he was stood. Nothing. No sound at all. Had she passed? He had to know, even though part of him was screaming that he needed to run away and not look back. He could pretend she was still alive if he did that. All he had to do was leave.

“Momma?”

His voice sounded timid, almost embarrassed. He half expected her to come bursting through the doorway, yelling at him to do as he’d been told and leave the house.

It didn’t happen. Nothing did.

Fear mingled with a sliver of courage that resided deep within the twelve year old, courage that came from realizing he had nothing left to lose.

“MOMMA!”

He waited. Sweat dripped down his face, rolling onto his upper lip. Droplets quivered there before falling to the floor. Jason moved his right foot forward with care, somehow afraid that the noise from a squeaky floorboard might upset Momma even more than the fact that he’d yelled her name.

His foot was still hovering above the floor when he heard it.

The bed was making a creaking noise, but there was also another sound. One that was almost human.

The sweat pouring down his face and back turned to ice on his skin. An involuntary shiver wracked Jason’s body as he brought his foot down. Hairs on his arms and legs stood at attention, almost painfully stiff as goose bumps covered every exposed inch of skin. His foot retreated to its original position, and he remained locked in place at the front door.

A moan came from the bedroom, but not like any he’d ever heard before. He doubted that a human being in a normal state of mind could make a sound like that.

“Momma?”

It was the terrified little boy inside of him reaching out for her now. Tears mixed with the cold sweat, and Jason’s vision became blurred. He thought he saw his mother in her nightgown, the one she had worn when she had gotten into bed. It was her favorite. She was walking out of the room, coming toward him, angry at him for not leaving as he’d been instructed. He slammed his back into the front door and gave a wailing cry of his own that didn’t sound quite as bad as the moaning, but had the effect of making the inhuman sound grow louder. Frantically wiping at his eyes, he blinked and saw there was nothing in front of him. Momma was still in her bedroom, tied down.

She needs you. Go to her.

Jason slid to the floor, hugging himself as he wept. No longer concerned about the amount of noise he made, he cried freely, the sound echoing through the small house. After a couple of minutes, his sense of loss turned to anger as the moaning increased in volume, as if his mother were mocking him.

“Shut up! You’re not my mother anymore! Just leave me alone!”

It’s your mother in there. How dare you yell at her? Go in there and apologize!

The moaning didn’t stop, and his anger gradually changed, morphing into something closer to regret. He begged and pleaded, though he somehow knew, on a coldly logical level, that the monster his mother had become would never listen to him again. At the same time, the voice inside his head, the one that knew nothing of logic or sanity, kept whispering to him that he should go to his mother, that she needed him.

Jason knew that if he stayed here, it wouldn’t stop until it drove him mad.

That was about all the twelve year old was sure of anymore. That and the fact that there was no way he could face his mother ever again. Not with what she had become.

He turned away from the noises and stared at the front door of the house. This was no longer his home, and even as the strange voice inside tugged at him, he could feel the house pushing him away.

You are no longer welcome here. This is a place for the dead.

Jason leaned his forehead against the cold, unforgiving wood of the door and banged it against the pine gently.

“I’m sorry, Momma. I love you, but I can’t stay here anymore. Goodbye.”

It was a lousy eulogy, but it was all he could think to say. The maniacal voice inside his head screamed at him to turn around and go to her, but he blotted it out, screaming and cursing at it.

Momma was gone.

Walking out the door, Jason didn’t look back as it slammed behind him. He stepped out onto the grass, unconcerned with where he was going. The world around him was in panic and upheaval. Several of the neighbors had fled, their front doors flung open, while others had already begun the process of barricading their homes. He didn’t concern himself with any of them, even as several called out to him, screaming his name. The blare of sirens and the sound of gunfire in the background didn’t distract him either.

He picked up his feet and ran, moving swiftly past his neighborhood. His only plan was to keep on running, perhaps all the way to Detroit if he could. He would run until his legs gave out, his heart exploded inside his chest, or one of those things caught him and tore him to pieces. That was the only thought he had left in his head. He would run until he died.

***

By the time the soldiers caught up with him twenty minutes later, all the tears had dried and the stony visage that George knew so well had taken their place.

Fred and Bobby

Author’s note: I wasn’t quite sure if it was necessary to include this story with the others, considering how small a role Fred and Bobby actually play in the scheme of things. But I also felt it would be unfair to leave these two and their back story untold. I wanted them to be appreciated as human beings, filled with as much regret and frustration as everyone else, despite their small part in the overall tale of Jeff and his newfound friends.

Fred had spent his career as a mailman in Lawrence Park, where he and his wife Carol had lived for several years. It was located near Milfield, but closer to the city. Considered a more upscale address than most of the outlying suburbs, it boasted several recognizable local celebrity residents. Old, trendy neighborhoods with homes worth half a million plus were the norm, and the Harringtons liked the status they gained when they moved into the area. While Fred’s salary wasn’t impressive, Carol was a marketing executive for a large downtown Cincinnati Fortune 500 company, which afforded them a pretty decent lifestyle.

Despite the ease with which Fred handled the expensive hunting rifle he was carrying when he ambushed Jeff and Megan, the first time he had handled the weapon had been only three weeks earlier. In fact, he had never touched any sort of firearm until he met Carol. Carol might have enjoyed her urban, yuppie existence, but she was still a country girl at heart with a family that loved to hunt and fish. Fred’s boys, Bobby and Charlie, had gone out with Carol’s brother Teddy on many occasions. He took them hunting near his place near Hillsboro, which was about forty-five miles east of Cincinnati. He was the one, with Carol’s permission, who had bought the boys their rifles a few years earlier for Christmas. Fred had been hesitant about the idea at first, but Carol had convinced him that Teddy would teach them all about gun safety before they ever got to use them. He had agreed, reluctantly.

The rifle Fred was carrying had been Charlie’s. After Charlie died, Bobby managed to teach his father how to use it. That knowledge had helped him and his son out of several tough jams with the undead.

Up until coming across Jeff and Megan, Fred had handled the rifle fairly well. He’d been willing to pull the trigger when his wife was bitten by several of the infected. When her eyes opened back up after her heart had stopped, he took aim and put her out of her misery, despite the sensation that the world was caving in on him as he did it.

Fred had managed twenty headshots on the undead at long range with Charlie’s rifle. Bobby had shot even more of the stiffs during their travels. Still, it was Fred, the novice, who came into his own during the apocalypse. He had become a survivor, able to deal with anything that came his way, or so he presumed. That rifle had given him a sense of confidence he’d never had before.

Back when everything started, when the first reports of the virus showing up in Ohio had hit the air, Fred didn’t have much of an assertive personality. Carol had been the one who ruled the roost in the Harrington household, which had been just fine with Fred. When the soldiers with bullhorns rolled down their street, urging everyone to head to the local community center where a shelter had been set up, it was she who announced that they would hunker down in the house and not bother with such a place. She believed that all of this nonsense would blow over within a few days. Fred didn’t have much to say about that, despite his unvoiced concerns.

And when everything continued to go downhill, and it was too late to do much except sit and watch as the number of infected in Lawrence Park grew exponentially, it was Carol who decided it was time for the Harringtons to make a run for it.

Up until that point, the boys hadn’t needed to fire their rifles in defense of the house. They’d learned by watching some of the neighbors—as their houses were turned into miniature Alamos—that just about any loud noise could set off the rotters. They would swarm, and within minutes, there was nothing left of the people hiding behind their locked doors. But as long as things were quiet, the stiffs seemed willing to leave things well enough alone.

Their food and water supply had shrunk to a dangerously low level by the time Carol suggested to Fred that they get in the Acura SUV parked in the garage and head out to Teddy’s place. Fred, as he typically did, deferred to his wife’s judgment, which pleased the boys tremendously. Before their parents could say anything else, they were rushing around the house, collecting up everything they wanted to take to their favorite uncle’s ranch.

Later on, Fred could never quite recall what it was that had set the stiffs off. Perhaps it was the suitcase Bobby had dropped down the steps, or the vase Charlie knocked over in the front hallway. It might simply have been the fact that everyone seemed to have forgotten where they were and let their voices rise with excitement at their eminent departure. All he knew for sure was that one minute they were talking about what route they should take to get to Uncle Teddy’s, and the next the doors and windows were being bashed on by several of their undead neighbors. Within moments, the sounds of smashing fists had increased tenfold and there was a huge crowd surrounding the house. It sounded something like a hailstorm going on outside.

The Harringtons had attempted to grab the majority of their worldly possessions for their departure, and only in hindsight did Fred realize how incredibly foolish that had been. Collecting anything other than their weapons and what food and water they could carry didn’t make much sense. Still, it seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. That, Fred decided, was the real culprit for what happened next.

As the front door threatened to collapse under the strain of a dozen bodies, Fred commandeered Charlie to help him drag more furniture in front of the door while Bobby and Carol scrambled to collect the suitcases and bags of clothing that had been tossed into the kitchen so they could move them to the SUV. Before they could get very far, the large picture window at the front of the house shattered, and the feeble plywood sheet covering it threatened to snap into kindling. Foolishly, everyone rushed to the window in an effort to hold off the onslaught, but it seemed like a hundred arms were already grabbing and pawing at them through the growing gaps in the barricade.

A stray arm clutched at Charlie’s neck, and before he could even cry out, he was pulled through the rapidly increasing gap in their defenses, head first. It was just that quick. There was no slow, dreadful struggle, no failed tug of war between his family and the undead. It happened so fast, Fred didn’t even realize Charlie had been attacked until Carol screamed out a few seconds later. By then, it was too late. Charlie’s body didn’t even have much of a chance to twitch in its death throes as it was dragged ruthlessly out the hole. As soon as his head was yanked out the window, several ghouls tore into his face and neck, killing him almost instantly.

The moments following Charlie’s death were a blur. Fred might not have believed in miracles before then, but he did after he somehow managed to drag his wife and other son to the garage as the rotting horde on their front lawn poured into the house. Bobby and Carol both fought him every step of the way, believing in their stunned state that Charlie was somehow still alive and that they needed to save him.

Something snapped in Fred after Charlie’s death. His voice, always quiet and unassuming, thundered as he exhorted his family to get to the SUV. And for some reason he couldn’t quite comprehend, they listened to him. They managed to grab their weapons, but little else, before they climbed into the vehicle.

The back end of the Acura took a beating as it plowed through the garage door and several stiffs that had been in the Harringtons’ driveway. Their race through the neighborhood was a chaotic obstacle course that forced Fred to navigate through several of their neighbors’ yards in an attempt to escape the horde. Tucked away inside their house, it had been hard for Fred to believe that most of the people in the world had turned into savage monsters, but the moment he saw how many foul, rotting creatures were shambling around outside, all his doubts about the magnitude of the plague evaporated.