The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (12 page)

“I took Shawn over to his old frat house
where he had arranged to stay for the night so we wouldn’t have to
drive back into town. Everyone else was still sprawled out in the
lawn in chairs and blankets watching all those meteors falling
while I was trying to keep Shawn from falling on his face. By
midnight he was passed out on a bed with me curled up next to him,
trying to shake that uneasy feeling that was bouncing around in my
mind like a tune you can’t get rid of. I don’t remember when I fell
asleep, although I finally did.”

Dontela stopped and motioned to Katherine to
pick up the narrative.

Katherine smiled at her nervously and nodded.
“The party lasted through the night. I drank too much and ended up
with a boy in my room. He was toasted too and other then some
clumsy heavy petting and kissing, we simply fell asleep there with
our clothes still on. I didn’t even get his name. The sun was well
up when I woke and this guy was still lying there in bed. He had
vomited half on the bed and on the floor and I was real pissed! I
started yelling at him and shaking him but could only get a few
moans out of him. He wouldn’t wake up.

“His skin was scorching hot and I started to
get a little scared too, although mostly I was just angry at him. I
thought maybe he had alcohol poisoning or something. Maybe I did
too. My head was pounding from a hangover and my mouth was dry. I
ran down the hall to one of my sorority sisters’ rooms, though she
wasn’t there. The other sister staying in the house for the summer
had a downstairs room and when I ran down it was locked up tight
and she didn’t answer the door no matter how hard I knocked. I
thought maybe she had met up with one of the frat guys and had
shacked up with him at one of the other houses on Rugby Road.

“Then I saw the living room and the yard
outside the window. People were laying strewn out on the couches
and chairs inside the house and on the outside they were curled up
on blankets where they had sat watching the meteor storm. They all
appeared to be out cold. It was after 11 in the morning. There
shouldn’t have been that many there still, no matter how much they
drank. That was when I started thinking things weren’t right.

“I about jumped out of my skin when the
bathroom door slammed opened next to me and this brunette chick
stepped out dressed in only her panties and a tee-shirt. I must
have startled her too because she let out a little squeal when she
saw me. Her name was Patty and she was a second year student also
taking some summer courses and crashing there with one of the frat
boys for the night. She was staying with a bunch of students down
in the Old Dorms. She had just woken up and stumbled into the
bathroom to pee and wasn’t even really aware of where she was. Of
the about fifty people that had stayed or passed out in or around
the house, there was only the two of us that woke up. We tried to
wake everyone, but they were exactly like the boy up in my room,
burning with fever, and like, in a coma. By then, I wasn’t angry, I
was scared to death. After Patty dressed, we headed out to other
parts of the campus to get help. I was beginning to think that
someone had slipped poison into something people ate or drank the
night before. Was I ever wrong!” Dontela nodded. “Yeah, I had the
same experience when I woke up right after sunrise. I was already
pissed at Shawn for acting so juvenile that night and wasn’t even
going to bother waking him in the morning. While I was getting
dressed he woke up on his own complaining about a splitting
headache. I told him it served him right. He talked me into staying
there with him, and even though I was pissed at him I still loved
him, so I stayed. The aspirin didn’t even touch his headache, and I
could tell it was a really bad one. When the fever started building
I got really worried. I told him we needed to get him to the clinic
but the knucklehead refused. I kept pushing water into him hoping
he would get better. Sometime before noon he stopped responding to
me anymore and I got really scared. I started thinking, shit, my
man is going to up and die on me!

“I called 911 and damn if no one answered,
only some message saying to please hold if it’s an emergency and
someone would be on the line shortly. Why the fuck would I be
calling 911 if it wasn’t a damn emergency? I left to try and find
some help to get Shawn to a car so I could get him to the hospital.
There was nobody around. It was like a ghost town. No one answered
doors when I knocked. I was getting freaked the fuck out and that
bad feeling I had the night before was coming back stronger than
ever. I went out on the street and started yelling for help.”

“That’s when Patty and I were leaving the
Alpha Delta Pi house. We heard her calling and ran up the road to
her,” Katherine chimed in. “We were near hysterical.”

“Yeah, it was surreal,” Dontela continued.
“These two white girls running at me in a panic screaming their
fool heads off while I was doing the same thing as I ran toward
them. We kind of ran into each other, grabbed hold and started
tugging in opposite directions. I would have been comical if it
wasn’t so damn absurdly terrifying.” She laughed cynically to
herself at the memory. “We were jabbering at each other like a
couple of scared hens and then the realization punched through our
thick skulls that this wasn’t something that was local to each of
us. That is was happening all over. That’s when a kind of calm came
over me. I actually had to slap Katy to get her to shut her damn
mouth for a minute so I could talk to them.”

Katherine blushed slightly in the firelight.
“I was so terrified I just wanted to throw up.”

“Anyway,” continued Dontela, “I told them we
need to get in my car and start driving around campus looking for
help. That’s what we did, simply started driving around, blasting
the horn and yelling for help out the windows. It was fucking
eerie! Not a soul around. There were some abandoned cars on the
main roads and a couple had people in them in that same comatose
state that Shawn was in. Finally on the south side of the campus we
came across a guy walking around in a robe looking all but lost to
the world. His name was Eric and he said when he woke up and
couldn’t find anyone around that he thought he was the only person
left in the world. You could see the shock and fear in his eyes. We
probably all looked that way.”

“There were probably around a thousand
faculty, interns, summer students and support people on campus that
week. Only four of us were walking around not sick,” said Katherine
sadly.

“After finding everyone sick and unresponsive
around campus we drove out into Charlottesville,” Dontela said. “It
was the same everywhere. We couldn’t go far because traffic had
snarled on many of the roads and we couldn’t drive around it. I
guess when people started getting really sick, they left their cars
sitting where they were and tried to go get to help. There were a
lot of people passed out on sidewalks, in yards, just about
everywhere you looked.”

“That’s when Eric said that the comet did
this to everyone,” said Katherine. “We couldn’t explain why the
four of us were okay and everyone else was so sick, although we
were sure it was because of the comet.”

“We did find one radio station broadcasting
that gave us some news; nothing good, just that this shit seemed to
be happening all across the country, and it reinforced our idea
that it was the stuff from the comet doing this.” Dontela scratched
her head nervously while Kera threw a piece of wood into the fire.
She stared up at the burst of glowing embers that drifted into the
sky like over-energized lightning bugs. “That’s when we started
making phone calls to our families. I got hold of my parents in
Georgia. They sounded fine, along with my younger sister and
brother. I broke down and cried like a little bitch when I heard my
momma’s voice on the phone. I felt like the scared little girl I
was trying so hard not to be.” Dontela sneered scornfully at the
memory, her teeth flashing in the firelight. “I promised them I
would be home soon. I hung up thinking maybe things weren’t so
bad.”

“My parents weren’t so lucky,” Katherine said
sadly. “My dad answered the phone and told me that Mom was really
sick. He was so happy to hear from me but I could hear in his voice
how scared he was. He was staying home that morning to take care of
her. He asked me to come home now, to leave right then. We live
just up in Fairfax, Virginia, less than two hours away. I told him
I would get my stuff in the car and that I would leave for home in
a little while. I think it was about one in the afternoon when we
were making our phone calls.” She paused to wipe tears away from
her eyes. “Eric couldn’t get hold of anyone at home. He was totally
freaking out. He finally got hold of his grandmother, who lives on
the other side of the country. She was as scared as he was. His
grandfather was sick and she didn’t know who to turn to for help.
Patty was in the same boat as me, except it was her dad that was
sick and her mom doing okay. They were up in Chicago, so she was
going to have to go on a major road trip to go home. Poor girl
didn’t even have a car here. She was just bawling into the phone
that she wanted to come home.”

Dontela picked up her narrative again. “We
found two more people on the edge of town, a crotchety old woman
and a young Mexican guy who barely spoke a word of English. We ran
across the old woman first walking around in her nightgown in a
complete daze. We tried, but she wouldn’t go with us. She was
looking for her husband, walking the route he had taken that
morning to run to Walgreens to get some cold medicine after he had
felt an illness coming on. He never came back and she was worried
sick. We would have driven her along the route if it had been
passable. That old biddy refused to come with us and we left her
walking down the sidewalk in that ratty pink nightgown with a pair
of matching slippers. We never did see her again.

“As we were heading back to campus this
asshole came running out of nowhere and I about run him over. He
came over to my window chattering away in Spanish. I didn’t
understand a fucking thing he said. His eyes were big as saucers
and you could tell that motherfucker was spooked and completely out
of his element. He was pointing back up the road, trying to get us
to turn around and go somewhere.”

“I know a little conversational Spanish,”
said Katherine, her eyes still welling with tears, “but he was
talking so fast I could barely catch a word. When we got him to
calm down I found out that he had a wife and friends at a nearby
apartment that were very sick. I tried to explain to him that
people everywhere were sick and that we were trying to find help.
We asked if he wanted to come with us. He just went off on a rant
again, and wanted us to come and help, but there was nothing we
could do. We finally had to drive away with him trying to hang onto
the car and screaming at us. It was awful and I felt so bad, but
what could we do? We had our own friends and family to worry
about.”

“We went back through the abandoned vehicles
to Rugby Road so I could go check on Shawn. When we got there Katy
and the others agreed to help me get him into my car so I could
head home. It didn’t even cross any of our minds that the roads
were blocked with traffic still. I figured we would find a way.”
Dontela shook her head at their naivety. “All of us just wanted to
get home and get away from the damned nightmare.

“Shawn was still unconscious and had started
to drool blood down the side of his cheek. I don’t know why, but
that scared me more than anything else that had happened that
morning. It took all four of us to get him down to the car, he
wasn’t a small man. We stuck him in the back seat and put a blanket
over him. Eric and Patty were talking about just taking whatever
damn car they could find the fucking keys for and driving up to
Chicago. Eric would drop off Patty at her parents’ house before he
headed on west. It was sometime after 2 in the afternoon and we
were standing by my car after loading in Shawn and saying our
goodbyes and good lucks to each other. That’s when things started
getting a lot fucking worse.” Dontela glanced over at Katherine,
who shifted uneasily as the images of that day were remembered so
vividly, haunting both of their thoughts as if from some late night
B-movie horror flick.

Dontela stared deep into the glowing coals of
the fire before resuming. “The windows were down a little in my car
because of the heat. Shawn was sitting up, his face at the window,
his eyes looking right at mine.” She paused in thought. “No, not at
them, right
through
them. At first I was like, thank the
baby Jesus, he’s awake…but they weren’t his eyes anymore. They were
the eyes of a monster. He snarled like a lion and lunged at me
through the window. He hit the glass so hard his nose split,
smearing blood all over it. All of us jumped back scared to death.
Patty screamed and that only sent Shawn into a full-blown
motherfucking rage. He was growling and yelling, trying to jam his
hands through the crack in the window to get at us.” Finally,
sorrow overwhelmed her and the tears flowed down her face while she
recalled the horror of that moment.

“I was just in shock. I kept crying his name
over and over again. He was pounding away at everything inside that
car trying to get out. I ran back toward the frat house. I couldn’t
watch anymore.” She turned her head away to hide her tears and fell
silent.

Katherine cleared her throat and spoke again.
“The rest of us followed Dontela toward the house. None of us said
a word. What can you say to a girl you barely know whose boyfriend
has recently turned into some sort of monster? When we reached the
porch we heard some people yelling gibberish from up the road. It
was coming from my sorority house and several of the girls and guys
were on their feet. Even from where we were we could tell there was
something wrong with them. Patty screamed again and it was like a
wolf catching the scent of its prey. They saw us and just bolted
toward us, snarling madly. I’ve never seen anyone run as fast as
they did. We couldn’t get through that door fast enough and get it
closed behind us. We barely got it locked before one of those
people hit the door like a battering ram. I thought it was going to
come off its hinges. Thank God it held. Patty collapsed on the
floor, blubbering like a baby, and I wasn’t in much better
shape.