The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (22 page)

Then the darkness moved. It erupted forth up
the stairs in a burst of speed, a large, dark hulk with no form.
She took in a breath to scream as she tried to scramble up the
stairs but terror overcame her and her long legs tangled together
and her scream caught in her mouth.

Then it was on her.

It was like a wall of solid rock hitting her
and she was slammed backwards into the hallway, her breath gushing
from her lungs with a whoosh. She hit the floor and nearly blacked
out, though by sheer will she won the fight to keep conscious. She
smelled the reek of sweat and stale breath as the bearded figure
pressed her down onto the floor, his face inches from hers. A
large, calloused hand closed around her mouth, pressing her head
back hard into the carpet. She tried to scream though the meaty
fingers although she could only force a moan deep in her throat.
She beat at the man with her balled fist and it was like striking
steel. When she realized her blows were having no effect, she
reached back and smacked the wall next to her head over and over
again with the flat of her hand, however the thickly bearded man
hastily grabbed her arm and pinned it to her side.

She breathed loudly and heavily through her
nose, struggling under the unyielding weight of the man.
Is
it
an
M80
or
a
man
? her
mind screamed at her. In her terror, she forgot about the sweet
stench that always accompanied the diseased humans.

“Shhh! Stop struggling. I won’t hurt you!” a
husky voice hissed into her ear.

She nodded her head in understanding and the
man eased the pressure on her mouth a little.

“You’re in our house!” he said softly in her
ear. “Who’s here with you?”

She gave a muffled reply into his hand.

“If I take my hand off, do you promise not to
scream?

She nodded her head vigorously.

He hesitantly removed his hand. As soon as it
was clear of her mouth she let out a bloodcurdling scream, which
was abruptly cut off as the hand came back across her lips harder
than before. She tasted the coppery taste of blood in her mouth.
Please
not
again
! her brain screamed at her as
she felt the man’s body pressing down on hers.

He leaned in again. “I’m not going to hurt
you!” he emphasized in a harsh whisper. “Why are you in our
house?”

Abruptly the area around them was flooded
with light.

Katherine saw a blur of movement in the
hallway beside them as a flashlight beam bounced over their prone
forms. There was a solid thump and the man grunted and fell
sideways off of her. She lay there in shock as the weight came off
her body and her mouth was free to suck in a large lungful of air
before she moaned loudly in terror.

Kera was in a deep, dreamless sleep when
something woke her into a semi-aware daze. She opened her eyes in
the darkness, listening for any sound besides Steven’s gentle
breathing beside her. A girl’s scream erupted from outside the
bedroom door to be just as abruptly cut off. Steven sat up suddenly
in the bed, shaking off his sleep.

“What was that?” he asked groggily.

She didn’t answer him. Jumping out of bed,
she grabbed her shotgun from beside the dresser and the flashlight
lying on her pile of clothes and ran to the door. Disregarding her
own nudity, she slammed it open and flew out into the hallway.
Behind her Steven grabbed up a pair of boxers and awkwardly slid
them on while fumbling for his own light and handgun.

Kera’s light illuminated the scene in the
hallway. She saw the large, bearded man dressed in brown kaki
paints and a red and black flannel jacket lying on top of a
half-naked Katy with a big grubby hand over her mouth.

The man gazed up into her light-beam with
widening eyes and she sensed a terrible anger rising up within her
body which morphed swiftly to an unimaginable rage. She rushed at
the stranger before he could react and slammed the butt of her
shotgun into the side of his head, watching with satisfaction when
the force of the blow knocked him sideways off the girl.

He immediately sat up with a trickle of blood
winding a red path down his temple, his mouth open in an expression
of surprise at the naked teenaged girl with long, dark tousled hair
who stood so boldly before him with a military looking shotgun
pointing at his chest.

“Wait,” he started, bringing his arms up
defensively across his face. “I wasn’t hurting her!”

Kera only heard the blood pounding in her
temples. She glanced down and saw Katy cowering on the floor with
her shirt pulled up, revealing her nakedness from the waist down
and a smear of blood on her lips. The sight sent Kera over the
edge.

“You motherfucker!” she screamed at the man
and squeezed the trigger.

The boom of the 12-gauge and the resulting
fireball deadened all her senses. When her vision cleared the man
was lying on his back with his upper chest a mangled, bloody mess
and his lifeless eyes fixed on the ceiling. Steven appeared beside
her with his .45 pistol and flashlight pointed at the body. Dontela
approached behind him with a comforter wrapped around her tall,
naked form.

Before anyone could say a word, the front
door at the bottom of the stairs flew open and hit the wall with a
bang. Kera spun her shotgun and light to illuminate another person
rushing into the foyer. They were dressed heavily against the cold
with a black knit cap pulled down tightly over their head and a
matching scarf wrapped tightly around the face. She saw the glint
of metal in their hands and realized it was a shotgun.

“Daddy?” came a frightened voice from the
small figure as it rushed up the stairs at them, except that all
Kera heard and saw was the shotgun safety clicking off and the
barrel beginning to rise toward her. She rapidly pulled the trigger
on the semi-automatic shotgun again.

At practically the same instant, Steven
screamed “
No
!” and rammed his shoulder into Kera, causing
her to stumble sideways, and the shot to tear a hole into the wall
of the stairwell inches from the stranger.

The small figure on the stairs stopped
abruptly, eyes wide in shock as the small shotgun fell from their
gloved hands.

Kera nearly snarled at Steven and gave him a
look of pure venom as she caught herself on the railing to keep
from falling onto the dead man beside her. Steven bounded down
several stairs and grabbed up the shotgun before the intruder could
recover from their shock-frozen stance and pick it up.

He backed up the stairs keeping his light and
handgun covering the intruder, and handed the shotgun to
Dontela.

The liquid green eyes peering out between the
winter coverings opened wide when the person caught sight of the
dead man.

“
Daddy
!” a child’s voice wailed loudly
and the person shot up the stairs between Kera and Steven and threw
themselves on the body lying on the blood soaked carpet.

Katy crawled over to the weeping child and
pulled off the knit hat. A thick, curly plume of long hair cascaded
out around the shoulders of the little girl, who snarled and batted
away Katy’s hand.

“You killed him!” she screamed. “You killed
my daddy!”

Katy stood up and backed away, looking at
Kera with wide eyes. Kera stood looking at the little girl with her
mouth hanging open, ignoring the cold air streaming through the
open front door and chilling her naked body. Steven stepped up to
her and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him as if she
had just woken from a dream… or a nightmare.

“Why did you kill him?” the girl sobbed,
“This is
our
house. You shouldn’t have been here!”

Kera glared back at Katherine. “He was
hurting you! He was trying to rape you, wasn’t he?” she asked
desperately.

“I don’t know,” Katherine almost whined, and
began to cry. “He, he said he wasn’t going to hurt me.” She glanced
back at Dontela with pleading eyes. “I thought it was happening
again.”

The small girl jumped up and ran at Kera and
beat on her with her tiny, blood covered fists. “You killed Daddy!”
she screamed, her fists pounding on Kera’s breasts and stomach.
Kera backed away, her eyes overflowing with tears and wide with
shock.

“He was hurting Katy!” she cried frantically,
looking for understanding in the eyes of her companions.

Steven grabbed the little girl by her wrists.
The scarf had fallen away from her face revealing the delicate but
determined heart-shaped face of a preadolescent child.

“We’re sorry.” Steven whispered to her
soothingly. “We didn’t know, we thought he was a bad guy.”

The girl stared at him with red-rimmed eyes.
“Daddy would never hurt anyone unless they were trying to hurt me.”
She was overwhelmed with sobs again and Steven drew her close into
his arms and hugged her tight. She buried her face in his shoulder
and he felt her hot tears streaming down his bare chest.

The little girl finally pushed away from
Steven, walked over, and sat next to her father. She laid his head
in her lap and stroked the hair away from his open eyes. “Oh,
Daddy, please don’t leave me. I love you so much.” She hung her
head low and kissed him on the forehead.

“This is some fucked-up shit,” Dontela
muttered from where she had been watching from behind the
group.

“But I thought—” Kera pleaded, stifling a sob
with the back of her hand as the horror of what she had done
overwhelmed her.

Katy put her arms around the naked girl and
hugged her close. “It’s okay. You couldn’t have known,” she
cooed.

“I just thought—” She shook her head, trying
to delay the tears that wanted to pour forth. She couldn’t believe
that only moments ago she had destroyed that poor little girl’s
life, taken away the only family she probably had left in the
world. And she had almost killed
her
too! She gasped out
loud as that horrifying thought screamed devastatingly in her
brain. She swooned and almost collapsed, however, Steven was there
and had his warm arms around her too, holding her up.

“Come on, babe. Let’s go get you dressed,” he
said gently, and led her back to the room on rubbery legs.

Katherine and Dontela stood staring at the
grieving girl, who now was oblivious to all else except the body of
her father whose hair she lovingly stroked.

“Are you all right?” Dontela asked Katy, who
stood in the darkness with blood dripping down her knees from where
she had knelt next to the man.

Katy nodded absently, her long hair in
disarray around her face. “It all happened so fast. I was so
scared. I thought it was those men again.” She wiped the tears from
her eyes with the palms of her delicate hands.

“Those men are dead and not going to hurt
anyone else. Now go get yourself cleaned up, honey. I’ll watch the
child.”

Katy nodded and backed into the darkness of
the hallway and Dontela heard their door open and then softly
close.

“Well, what are we going to do with
you
now?” she asked under her breath, staring at the little
girl.

Kera sat on the foot of the bed in a daze.
Bloody smears where the girl had hit her covered her abdomen like
obscene testaments to the pain and sorrow she had inflicted.

“What’s happening to me, Steven?” She gazed
up at him with a deep sadness in her eyes.

“Nothing is happening to you. You made a
mistake. It’s going to happen with the times we’re living in. It
could have been any one of us that made that mistake.
Unfortunately, this time it cost an innocent man his life. However,
next time if you hesitate to act, it could cost one of us ours.” He
sat down on the bed beside her and put his arm around her shoulder,
hugging her lovingly. She shivered in the cold air of the room.
Becoming aware of her nakedness, she pulled a sheet up and around
her.

“It wasn’t anyone else, it was
me
, and
I orphaned that little child,” Kera said flatly, fighting to
control her emotions. Tears started to roll down her cheeks again
and Steven reached up to wipe them gently away.

“How am I ever going to look that little girl
in the eyes after I took her father from her?

‘It’s something that’ll become a part of you
and unfortunately you’ll carry it with you for the rest of your
life. Nevertheless, you
will
deal with it and get past it, I
promise. You really don’t have a choice.”

Steven thought back to the day the two of
them had fled the pharmacy and the man in the boxers they had
spotted walking drunkenly toward them. He had shot the man down
from a distance, assuming wrongly that he had been a Looney. He had
never told Kera the truth about that day; when he had checked the
man’s eyes and found them to be porcelain white. The man’s face was
now burned into his memory forever, along with the guilt associated
with his death. The thing was, he knew he would do it again if
faced with the same circumstances. You couldn’t take chances that
the choices you were making were the wrong ones. Hesitation would
get you and your loved ones killed.

“How can you promise that?” Kera asked,
looking at him questioningly.

He took a deep breath and decided to tell her
the truth. “Remember the day we left the pharmacy?”

She nodded her head. “It’s a little foggy,
but yeah I remember it.” She had been recovering from a concussion
so some of the events in those days were a bit jumbled in her
mind.

“Do you remember that Loony I shot who was
wearing nothing except a dirty pair of boxers?”

She nodded her head again. “Yeah, I
remember.”

Steven sighed and looked her hard in the
eyes. “He wasn’t infected. He wasn’t a Loony.”

Kera’s eyes grew large. “What? How do you
know?”

“I stopped and checked him. His eyes were
clear and there was no bleeding in his gums.”