Escape from the Damned (APEX Predator Book 2) (18 page)

He waved her to his left.  Then he threw open the door with his left hand, pistol pointed in the direction of the room.  The door opened only about two feet before it slammed into something.  Jen couldn’t see what it was, neither could Frank.  He tried to shove the door one more time without any luck.

Both jumped back at the sound of moaning coming from behind the door.  A pair of pale grey fingers gripped the door and pulled it open.  Jen was horrified at the sight before her.  Six zombies began shambling towards the door.  Three were adults, one was a young teenage girl about Theresa’s age, and the other two were small children.

All were in their bed clothes.  The adult males had several bites with huge chunks of flesh hanging off of their bones.  The adult female was literally covered in blood.  A single wound noticeable on her wrist.  Someone had torn her pink nightgown and used it to bandage her wound.

The children were in the same shape as the males.  The dark haired teenager had dyed green streaks into her black hair sometime before she died.  She also had a nose ring that stood out against her grey skin.  She had a bandage tied around her ankle.

Jen could imagine the woman and the teenager bitten in an attack.  The family barricaded themselves in this room in an attempt to provide aid for the two women who would ultimately kill them all.

This realization took only a millisecond.  Jen’s mind had more important things to worry about.  Right now, it was telling her right arm to bring her pistol up to eye level and her left hand to relax and drop the flashlight so it too could be brought into the fight to steady her aim.  At the insistence of her adrenal glands, her heart began to race, her blood pressure shot up, and her breathing quickened.  Her body was going into fight or flight mode.

Her pistol leveled on the nose of the closest zombie.  The graying hair and what was left of a white scraggly beard made him look about 60.  Unlike most of the zombies she had seen up to that point, this zombie was not covered in another human being’s blood.  There was no flesh dangling from the spaces between its teeth.  This zombie had not yet tasted the flesh of a living being.

Bang!  The pistol bucked in her hand.  The zombie’s head snapped back as a black-pink mist exploded from the back of its skull.  Its body crumpled to the ground in a heap.  It did not move.

Her overactive mind ordered her neck to turn left and right and her eyes to seek out another target.  As she did, her ears were assaulted by the sharp crack of Frank’s pistol.  It was a heavier caliber and therefore much louder than her 9mm.  The sound made her flinch as her eyes settled on another target.

This monster was a girl of maybe six years old.  Half of the flesh on her face had been torn off, leaving a gaping hole where her left cheek and left eye had been.  The lack of a cheek caused her to permanently bare her teeth on that side.  It was as if her face were locked into a macabre smile.  And she was smiling at Jen.

The child advanced on her as fast as her slow firing undead neurons could fire.  She let out a moan and raised a hand towards Jen.  Jen hesitated for a moment longer than she should have.  The child’s fingers could almost touch the gun when she finally pulled the trigger.  The child’s head exploded in a mist of bone, brain, and partially clotted blood.

Bang!  The other child was knocked to the floor by a point-blank shot fired by Frank at almost the same time.

Jen looked up from the dead girl, into the face of the teenager with the green hair.  She began to swing her gun up but it was too late.  The creature was too close.  Its fingers were already closing around Jen’s shirt.  Jen let out a scream and tried to back away.  The girl’s grip was too strong.  All she succeeded in doing was to cause both to fall over.

She quickly shoved her left hand under the zombie’s jaw.  Her right hand and the gun ended up behind her back and underneath her.  The girl snapped at her several times.  But with Jen’s hand wedged beneath its bottom jaw it was only able to drool on Jen.  Another gunshot from Frank told Jen that he was still in the fight.  She hoped he was going to help her soon.  This little girl was just strong enough that Jen was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep her off.

There were several other gunshots.  These were the higher pitched rifles firing.  That meant that either Mike or Kerry had arrived.  Help was finally here.  The zombie girl redoubled her efforts to bite Jen.  She almost succeeded.   The last thrust brought her teeth within a hair’s breadth of Jen’s nose.  She kicked with her legs in an attempt to get out from under the girl.  The shooting continued.

It finally dawned on Jen that they couldn’t still be shooting at the one zombie Frank had shot.  Something else was wrong.  Suddenly the girl was lifted off of her and flung across the room; her fingers still grasping at Jen’s shirt, ripping it. 

Jen followed the girl with her gaze.  When she landed, Jen saw Mike stick his foot in the girl’s chest and fire his rifle at point blank range.  The girl with the green hair finally stopped moving and slumped over to the side; a wisp of green hair falling in front of her pale, unseeing eyes.

“Are you alright?” asked Mike, as he helped her to her feet.  She took stock of herself.  Shaken but not bitten.  Thank God.  She nodded her head.

The scene around her was worse than she had at first believed.  Not only had the six zombies from the parlor come after them, but four others had come from the dining room.  She realized how careless they had been.  If it hadn’t been for Mike and Kerry’s timely arrival she and Frank would have been trapped in a small room between ten zombies.  When that thought sunk in, she bent over retching.  Getting so close to death will do that to you, she thought.

After the shock had worn off, the group began searching the house.  It turned out to be a treasure trove of medicines and food.  Apparently Mrs. Johnson was quite the canner.  In her basement they found shelves covered with canned beans, carrots, potatoes, rhubarbs, apricots, and other assorted fruits and vegetables.  Jen hadn’t seen this much good food in one place since before the fall.

Although the food was great, it wasn’t the real score.  In the backyard they found a large barn.  They could still hear the mooing of the cows.  The cows were all emaciated from weeks without food.  Many were dead in their pens.  Mike and Jen let those that were still alive out of the barn to fend for themselves.

The cows, however, were not the score.  The real score was the stall in the barn that Mr. Johnson had been using to inoculate and treat his cows.  In a refrigerator, that felt reasonably cool to Jen, they found several vials of Penicillin G.  Jen wasn’t 100 percent sure, but she thought Penicillin G was the same thing as Bicillin.  She had given Bicillin a thousand times in the ER.  There were other vials in the room, but most she did not recognize.  She decided against anything she didn’t know for certain was safe for humans.

“So, what did we learn today?” asked Frank, as he pulled the SUV out of the driveway.

“There are other survivors around her looting all the good stuff,” Jen said.

“And they mark the houses they’ve decided were too dangerous,” Kerry added as she scowled at Jen.

“Jen can’t handle a 110 pound zombie teenager,” Mike added.  They all chuckled.

“I would like to know who’s out here,” Frank said.  “I know most of the folks in this part of the parish, and if they’re alive, it would be nice to bring them in.”

“What if they don’t want to come in?” Mike asked.

Frank hadn’t thought about that.  Most of the people he’d seen from the time this began to now had wanted to band together.  He hadn’t thought about someone who might want to go it alone.

“I guess we respect their wishes.”

“Touché,” Mike answered.

Day 24

15 miles west of the Mississippi River

The first rays of sunlight began to shine over the horizon.  Shane knew that it was time to wake the big soldier up.  The three men had split the guard shifts last night.  Shane had been awake for the past three hours.  Thankfully, those hours had been uneventful.

The house had truly been a God send.  Not only had they found a safe place to sleep for the night, but they also found a medicine cabinet full of over the counter medications, including several different anti-inflammatory meds.  He’d taken a large dose with dinner last night and another large dose when he was awakened for guard duty.  His feet felt so much better this morning.

They’d also found a cupboard full of dry food.  They ate like kings on canned peaches, cold rice, cold chicken noodle soup, and Oreos.  They had even found a case of sodas.  They were warm, but Shane was a bit of a soda-holic.  He drank two with his dinner.  They also found a couple of key rings in the house.  Several of the keys looked as if they would fit the grey Dodge.  He closed his eyes in a silent prayer that the Dodge worked and could get them to the river.

Shane’s mind wandered to the previous day.   The horde of zombies dogging them for hours and the sudden run in at the edge of the woods sent a shiver down his back.  He knew things were bad, but most of the people in Captain Reynolds’s group had been spared the horror of coming face to face with the walking dead.  They had been rounded up and protected behind tall, brick walls at the first sign of trouble.

Yeah, the dead were there.  He’d see them when they would shuffle up to the station.  But that was different.  They were down there on the ground or outside.  He was never part of the hose crew that took care of the monsters.  Somehow they weren’t as scary to him.  They were separated or distant.  The thought of living in a world covered in zombies was not as terrifying as actually coming face-to-face with one.

His thoughts wandered to his traveling companions.  They were strangers.  Oh, he thought he knew Ms Hebert.  But he really didn’t.  He had always thought she was just this stuck up, angry, prissy woman.  Between the stories she told in the HMMWV and how she handled herself in the fights, he realized she was more than that.

Then there were the two soldiers.  Both seemed very confident and competent.   He could see that both of them cared very deeply for the people they arrived with.  The older one, Staff Sergeant Brown, was a little quieter and seemed more reserved than the younger one.  He was a thinker.  His mind seemed to always be in motion.  He reminded Shane of a teacher he’d had once.  The image of the big NCO sitting in a high-backed chair, army uniform and boots on, book in hand, pipe in his mouth flashed into Shane’s head.

He chuckled at the thought.  Master Piece Theater presents the Great Louisiana Zombie Slaughter.  I’m your host Staff Sergeant Brown.  Today our heroes will go toe-to-toe with another horde of walking dead.   Join us as we find out who lives and…  The smile left his face as the rest of the sentence formed in his mind.  Not me, he thought.  Not today.

He walked quietly to the big NCO and shook him gently awake.  Several minutes later, everyone was awake.  A quick breakfast of spam, tuna, dry cereal, and more warm sodas and the group was ready to go.  Sgt Procell grabbed a pillowcase off of one of the beds upstairs and loaded it with some food and soda cans.  He made Ms. Hebert promise to grab it if they had to bail out of the truck again.

The Fire Station

Jackson walked into the makeshift infirmary without his ACU jacket.  He felt immensely better this morning.  His fever had broken over night and the abscess under his arm was not nearly as tender as it was yesterday.  Jen looked up from the book she had been studying.  Jackson saw the title:  Pre-hospital Emergency Care.

“Good morning Private Jackson,” she said with a smile.  “You look like a brand new man.”

“Thank you ma’am,” he answered with a bigger smile.  “I feel like a new man thanks to that shot you gave me.”

“Here,” Jen began.  “Let’s take your temperature.  It feels like the fever has broken but let’s check.”  She shoved the thermometer in his mouth.  99.2 degrees.  Still a little warm, but definitely moving in the right direction.

“Let’s see the arm,” she ordered.  He complied.  The gauze pad that covered it was still saturated with dark puss.  But the abscess itself was much smaller than it was yesterday before they had left.  That was the Bicillin working.

She remembered from her ER days that people with strep throat would get either a ten day course of Penicillin or a single shot of Bicillin CR.  The CR was for controlled release, meaning it would slowly release into the blood stream over a week or so.  To be honest, she wasn’t 100 percent sure that the Bicillin would work.  She was hoping that the antibiotic would have a broad enough spectrum to kill whatever was growing under Jackson’s armpit.

“What’s with the book?” the young trooper asked.

“Oh, just boning up on my first responder stuff,” she answered.

“I thought you was an ER nurse.  You don’t know all this stuff?”

“Oh, I know most of it, but remember I am used to having all these lab tests, x-rays and don’t forget, ER doctors to help me do my job.  These days I don’t have that.  I have to do everything based on what my eyes, ears and nose tells me.  Like what a paramedic has to do every day.  So, I figured I’d try to bone up on primitive medicine.”

“Primitive medicine huh?” Captain Reynolds asked.  He was standing in the doorway.  “So, we practice primitive medicine?”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” she fumbled. “I mean you guys practice medicine with just your brains.  We use every piece of technology in the hospital.  It wasn’t an insult,”