The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (7 page)

“I think that’s it for the bladder in your
CamelBak,” she said thankfully, relieved that it was only
water.

She pulled up his shirt and saw the faint
outline of a bruise forming in the center of his spine. “You’re
okay,” she stated, the tears flowing freely again, and hugged him
from behind. “You’re okay.” she whispered.

“Let’s take care of these girls.” Steven
turned around and kissed Kera on the lips. “You were stupid to
charge in here, though you did good. We got lucky.”

Kera attempted to smile. “I know. I’m sorry,
but I had to.”

“I know.” Steven sighed and walked over to
the bound man to retrieve his carbine.

“That was my boy that bitch killed,” the man
snarled at Steven in a raspy voice.

“Yeah? Sorry for your loss, asshole.”

The man sneered at him and nodded with some
inner thought while he gritted his teeth against the agonizing pain
of his wounds.

Steve picked up his gun and walked over to
the two women tied to the tree. He delicately unwrapped the wire
that bound their necks and then carefully cut the rope that joined
them together, and with his arms around their waists, eased them to
the ground.

“Thank you,” a black girl with close-cropped
hair growing out into an afro whispered, throwing her arms around
his neck and hugging him tight. She was easily as tall as his six
foot frame. The other girl, blonde haired and slight of build, sat
crying quietly with her knees drawn up to her breast-challenged
chest. Both were dirty and bruised, with cuts on their necks where
the barbed-wire had dug into it. Their wrists were purple and
swollen from the strands of tightly bound rope.

“Don’t thank me,” Steven said quietly to the
two girls as he unwrapped the black girl’s arms from around his
neck. “That’s your heroine over there,” he said, indicating Kera,
who was freeing the third woman. “I didn’t think it was worth the
risk trying to free you, however, she got it in her head she was
going to do it with or without me.”

“
Were
we worth the risk?” the blonde
girl asked between sobs without looking up.

Steven smiled kindly at her and knelt next to
her, brushing dirty, matted hair away from her face. “I’ll let you
know.”

“Well, thank you anyway,” said the black girl
in a subdued voice. She had southern drawl mixed in with an
inner-city inflection. “They had us up on that tree like ripe
fruit, ready to be plucked for whatever sick sport them
motherfuckers could dream up. You and your woman were God
sent.”

Kera had freed the hands and ankles of the
other woman, who had rolled up into a ball and retched violently
for a moment. With a whimper she had stiffly scurried away from
Kera with a mad, suspicious look in her eyes.

Kera cautiously approached her. “Wait,” she
said and reached out to touch her gently on her battered back. The
woman cried out and swatted her hand away, crawling further away
while making a sad mewling sound.

“I won’t hurt you,” Kera cooed at her. “We’re
here to help.”

The woman was curled up in a ball again
sobbing uncontrollably. Kera heard her moan ‘Diana’ and ‘my baby’
in between her sobs.

Steven and the two women watched the scene
unfolding before them.

“She was here before us,” the black girl
offered. “They have done some god-awful things to her and made it
clear to us that we was next.”

“She had a daughter,” the blonde girl said
when she got control of her own sobs. She still had her knees drawn
up tight as if ashamed of her nudity, in stark comparison to the
black girl’s boldness.

Steven walked over to the tents and went
inside. He found a couple of old flannel shirts that obviously
belonged to the men and a couple of bottles of water and brought
them back to the women, whom he judged to be in their early 20’s.
They were both rubbing their hands and wrists as the numbness faded
and pain coursed through them with the return of the blood
flow.

“Thank you,” they both said as he helped them
into the stiff, smelly shirts. They opened the bottles and
thirstily quaffed the water in long, noisy gulps.

“There are more clothes inside the tent. Help
yourselves to what you need.” He got up and walked over to Kera,
who was still trying to console the other woman. He knelt down
beside her a few feet from the curled up sobbing female.

“How is she?” he asked in a low voice.

“She’s been hurt bad,” Kera replied in a
whisper, the words nearly catching in her throat. “One of those
bastards burned her nipples off.”

“Goddamn monsters!” Steven spat, looking back
over his shoulder at the bearded man who gazed malevolently back at
the both of them.

He turned back to Kera. “One of the other
girls said she had a daughter.”

“Diana, my baby!” the woman moaned,
overhearing Steven.

“Where is she?” Kera asked the woman.

“No, no, no, no, no, no!” the woman muttered
over and over again, staying curled up on the ground.

The other two women came over now, dressed in
ragged clothes they had liberated from the tents. One set a bottle
of water by the woman who grabbed it up and instantly drained it,
losing half of it down her chin as she rushed to quench her awful
thirst.

“She ain’t all there anymore,” the black girl
said, looking down kindly on the older woman. She laid a moth-eaten
wool blanket that she had brought from the tent over the naked
woman’s shivering body.

Kera thought the woman appeared to be in her
early to mid-thirties. She had greasy, dark-brown hair, still wet
with the dead man’s piss, and what was probably a pretty face,
although presently deformed and mottled with black and blue
bruising.

“I’m Dontela, by the way. As in ‘don’t tell-a
your momma that you’re pregnant.’” The black girl grinned revealing
straight, white teeth. “At least that is how my momma said I got
that name.” She hitched her thumb at the blonde girl standing
beside her. “This here is Katherine. She’s a sorority girl. We’re
both from the University of Virginia. At least we were before all
this shit went down and those three inbred redneck honky assholes
found us.” She grinned sheepishly. “No offense.”

Steven smiled back, wondering which epithet
she was apologizing for. “None taken. I’m Steven and your heroine
for today is Kera.” Kera smiled wanly at them while caressing the
shoulder of the crying woman on the ground.

“Any idea what her name is?” he asked.

Both shook their heads.

“As I said, she was here before us,” Dontela
said. “Those motherfuckers brought us here a couple a days ago.
Been here long enough to see too much, though. They had some fun
with us, but hadn’t roughed us up too much yet.”

“What are we going to do with him?” Kera
asked, nodding toward the man on the ground behind them.

They all stared back at the bearded man who
was stoically enduring the pain of his gunshot wounds. He blew them
a kiss.

“Leave him for the Loonies,” Steven said.
“Speaking of which, I don’t think we should stick around here long.
I don’t know if all that racket we’ve made will draw them in like
flies to shit.”

“Loonies?” repeated Dontela. “That’s funny. I
like that. You’re a comedian, aren’t you? We call ‘em M-80s. You
know, ‘cause them people are M-A-D, stark raving mad, and can go
off like an M-80 firecracker when they see you.”

Steven smiled to himself. He liked this girl.
“Whatever we want to call them, we don’t want to be here if they
come swarming up this valley from the highway,” he warned, the
smile fading with the thought of having to run from another large
group of the murderous creatures.

“Someone help me with her,” Kera said as she
tried to lift up the battered woman. Dontela bent down and took her
other arm and helped get her to her feet. The woman moaned out the
name Diana again and softly cried ‘No’.

Steven gasped when the blanket slid from her.
Her nipples had been burnt to blackened bits of charcoal and
shallow, blood-encrusted knife slices traced patterns like a jigsaw
puzzle across her breasts and stomach. Her nose was smashed flat to
her face and one eye was swollen shut. Blood and fluids leaked anew
from her ravaged vagina and anus. The woman couldn’t stand on her
own feet.

“She’s not going to be going anywhere like
this.” Kera stated as they carried the woman over next to a tent
while Steven dragged out an old sleeping bag for her to curl up
on.

“The sounds echo weirdly in these hills.
Maybe they won’t come.” Katherine had crept up behind Steven.
“Maybe we’ll be safe here for now,” she stated hopefully.

“Unless we make a litter and drag her behind
us I guess we don’t have much of a choice except to stay here for
the time being.” He sighed and stared at the dense woods around
them. “Kera and I are going to have to scout around and see if
there are any Loonies in the valley while the two of you stand
watch.”

“Stand watch? What, we in the Army now?”
Dontela laughed.

“You have to always be on your guard,” Steven
responded with a serious tone. “We can’t become complacent.
Complacency kills.”

They dragged the bearded man roughly over to
the tree that the girls had been bound to. He screamed several
times while he was brusquely pulled across several protruding roots
causing his wounds to bleed even more profusely. They bound him to
the tree with the wire and rope he had used on the girls.

Kera took care of the woman as best she
could. After giving her some more water and applying some
anti-bacterial salve to her wounds she laid her on a sleeping bag
and covered her with the ratty blanket. In minutes the woman had
fallen into a fitful sleep.

Steven gave the men’s two rifles to the
girls. One was a Savage bolt-action 30-06 while the other was a
Marlin 30-30. He made sure they understood how to use them and told
them to be relaxed but vigilant while he and Kera took a look
around the area for any Loony activity. Katherine held the rifle
away from her as if it would blow up in her hands. The girls soon
located the camp’s food supply and ravenously tore into their first
meal in several days.

“Keep that asshole in your sight at all
times. You don’t want any surprises while your backs are turned,”
Steve warned them and he and the bearded man exchanged sneers. “We
shouldn’t be gone for more than a couple hours.”

“You’re not going to leave us here and not
come back, are you?” Katherine asked in a frightened voice.

“We’re leaving our packs containing most of
our supplies here,” Kera said. “We’re all together as a group now.
Like a family. No one is abandoning anyone.”

The girl nodded graciously and returned to
scooping pears, dripping sugary syrup from a can into her mouth
with her dirty fingers.

“We got shit covered here,” Dontela
proclaimed, patting the sling of the Savage she had across her
back.

Steven nodded at the tall, proud-looking
girl. “I think you do.”

Steven and Kera took off up the valley in the
direction of the river. They planned to hike up the far mountain to
the ridge and reconnoiter the highway and train tracks for any sign
of the Loonies. If all was well they would circle down the slope
and come in the back way in the direction from which they left. It
took the full hour to get to the head of the valley, ford a broad,
rocky stream, and hike up the slope to the crest of the mountain.
With relief, they saw that the road was quiet in both directions;
only the corpses of cars and trucks littered the highway. Behind
them the railroad tracks were void of any movement. They could see
where the trestle spanned the river a mile or so away. Thankfully
the Loony horde had disappeared. Further to the west the valley
that the highway ran through widened on both sides of the road with
the sprawling suburbs of Charlottesville. After their run-in with
the horde this morning, they both agreed that that would need to be
avoided when they resumed their trek to the west.

“We’ve gotten lucky again.” Steven sighed. “I
know I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

“Yeah, me too, lover.” Kera put her arm
around his waist and leaned into him. They were both exhausted and
hungry, their legs rubbery from hiking up the steep mountain slope,
and the daylight was burning away rapidly.

“We’ll walk the ridge for a while and then
cut back down to the camp.”

“I would rather just lie down here in the
grass and take a nap in the sun next to you,” Kera said
wearily.

“That would be heaven,” he admitted.
“Unfortunately, your charges are waiting for you.”

“I know.” She nodded. “I can wish
though.”

They followed the ridgeline for about a half
mile before turning down off of the mountaintop along a small
gulley that grew in size and turned into a deep, cascading creek
where springs of clean, cold water fed into it. They finally
reached the damp forested floor of the valley where the small creek
dumped noisily into a steeply banked swiftly flowing stream that
bubbled and churned over a rocky bed. After carefully crossing over
the fast-flowing stream by hopping from one exposed slippery rock
to the next, they headed downstream, navigating along its bank in
the general direction of the squatter camp.

Steven came across them first. The putrid
smell of death alerted him to the carcasses before his eyes found
them. He blinked his eyes savagely, his breath catching in his
throat with a gasp. Kera stepped around him and stifled a scream
with her hand when she saw the bodies. What appeared to be two
women and a child of around 12 lay rotting next to the stream where
they had rolled down the bank. The two women were barely
recognizable, as the flesh had mostly rotted from the bodies or
been removed by animals. The girl’s body was fresher, bloated with
gases and grotesque with stiffly outstretched arms and legs. She
was horribly mutilated. Both of her breasts had been brutally
hacked off and she had been beaten about the head so badly that the
skull had an alien appearance to it where the bones were shattered.
Her body was laced with cuts and welts from what must have been a
nightmare of torture. Her female parts were a bloody mess. They had
both seen plenty of death before, although not like this.