Among Monsters: A Red Hill Novella Page 8

  Dad leaned forward. “What is it?”

  Brad was watching the north side of the road, and we all—with hesitation—moved our lines of sight in the same direction.

  An old two-story church was crawling with those things, as if it had been infected itself. They wriggled in and out of the broken stained-glass windows, like maggots squirming in the open wounds of a dead animal. Large shards of partial picturesque art hung from the tops of the window panes, and the jagged edges of wooden planks stuck out from the walls from which they were still nailed.

  “Do you think people are stuck in there?” I asked.

  “Lord, I hope not,” Tavia said, her big eyes looking up toward the second floor.

  Brad drove past slowly, and he pointed up. “Look there! An open window! They got out!”

  “But look at all the blood on the side of the building,” I said, noting the dark red smear leading from the AC unit to the roof.

  “Mommy?” Madelyn said, her voice trembling.

  “It’s okay, honey. We’re going.”

  The infected noticed the van, and one by one, they began filtering out of the church.

  “Go, Brad,” Darla warned. “Hurry!”

  Brad pressed on the gas, and the van surged forward. Just as he got back up to speed, someone ran in front of the van, a woman, with her hands waving in the air.

  “Stop!” she screamed. “Please!”

  “Brad!” Darla shrieked.

  Brad yanked the wheel to the right, crashing hard into a truck parked in the middle of the road. I managed to grab Halle this time, holding her shirt tight in my fists. She flew forward, toward the driver’s seat, and my shoulder rammed into Logan’s booster seat, but I didn’t let go. The shirt choked Halle for half a second, but other than that, she was unharmed.

  Tobin was crying, and Tavia was checking him over.

  Brad and Darla both looked dazed, half-wondering what had happened and half-worrying what would happen next.

  “Mommy!” Madelyn said again.

  Logan began crying, too.

  “Andrew! Is Tobin okay? He hit his head!” Tavia said with a strained voice. She was trying to keep calm.

  Dad reached for him and pulled down one of his lower lids to get a good look in his eye.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Brad said. “Unbuckle your seat belt, Maddy!”

  “Open the door!” I said, lunging forward.

  Madelyn reached for me, so I helped her get unbuckled, and then I did the same with Logan. I put my hands under Halle’s arms and lifted her up and forward, taking a big step out of the passenger-side sliding door. I was glad this van was the kind that opened on both sides. We wouldn’t have been able to get out on the other side.

  I glanced back at the church, at least a quarter of a mile behind us. “Halle?” I said, leaning down to look into her eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “My throat hurts,” she said, rubbing the red line the collar of her shirt had left.

  “Sorry,” I said, hugging her.

  I took a quick sweep around the truck and van, looking for any more infected, and then I stopped at the front. The two vehicles, an old green truck and Brad’s silver van, were twisted together, both of their guts exposed and intertwined.

  A dark, oozing liquid crept slowly from beneath the wreckage. “Something is leaking!” I said, pushing Halle backward.

  Dad appeared next to me, holding Tobin. “That’s…not from the van. That’s…”

  I leaned down to peek under the mangled vehicles to see a waif of a girl, not much older than me, lying beneath the van. One of her arms had been severed by the driver’s side tire, and it was barely visible behind the tire.

  “Oh my God, did I hit someone?” Brad said.

  Darla covered her mouth.

  “She was already dead,” I said. “She was shot in the head. Probably infected.”

  Dad leaned down. “Looks like she’d been sick a long time before catching the zombie virus.”

  “Don’t say that,” Darla said. “Zombies—that’s ridiculous,” she spoke the words with a nervous giggle, like it was against her nature to speak up like that, but she had to say it out loud just for her own sanity.

  “Are you okay?”

  We all turned around to see a woman standing in a dress. It was once a red dress with white polka dots. Now, it was just red. One section of her frazzled dark hair was still tied back. Three children, a girl and two boys, stood behind her, wide-eyed and afraid.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Are we all right?” Brad stepped toward her, his expression severe.

  She retreated back a step, holding her arms out, shielding the children with her body.

  “We had a perfectly good vehicle! We were nearly to our destination! What the hell were you thinking, running out in the road like that?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes glistening. “I was trying to get us a ride out of here.”

  “Brad,” Darla said, touching his arm.

  Brad pulled away from his wife. “A ride? How did that work out for you? Now, none of us have a damn ride! I have kids, too! You nearly got them killed!”

  “I was…I was desperate!” she said, taking a step forward. “The town is overrun. It’s just me and these kids, and I…I wasn’t thinking. I’m so sorry.”

  Brad looked back at the vehicle and then threw his keys. They skipped across the asphalt and landed somewhere in the grass on the other side.

  “Can … can we start over?” she asked. “My name is April. I have a house over there. You’re welcome to stay. Please … please stay.”

  “Get your bags,” Dad said. “We have to move.”

  “We have a house,” the woman said. “O-over there. My husband boarded up some of the windows. If we’re quiet, they won’t bother us.”

  “Where’s he?” Dad asked.

  Her eyes danced between each of us, and then she simply shook her head.

  The little girl—her hair, when it was clean, was probably nearly white—was younger than Tobin and Logan but not by much. She reminded me a lot of Halle when she had been that age. The boys were younger than me and looked nothing alike. They were scared to death. The older one had big green eyes and a splash of freckles across his nose, and the younger one had brown eyes, his sandy-blond hair already overdue for a haircut.

  Tavia glanced at the approaching mob of infected slowly limping and stumbling toward us from the church.

  “We’ll have to run,” the woman said. “We can lose them around the elementary school, and then we can sneak in through the back.”

  “Of the school?” Darla asked.

  She shook her head. “It’s full. You don’t wanna go in there. Not all the kids were picked up in time, and…” She trailed off, blinking away whatever images were in her head.

  “C’mon, boys,” she said after picking up the little girl.

  We quickly gathered our belongings and followed. We ran into the grass on the south side of the road, went across an overgrown empty lot, and continued behind the elementary school. The woman stopped there, her labored breathing making her chest heave. Dad was holding Tobin for Tavia, and Brad carrying Logan.

  We had way too many little kids in our party. No one who got far on zombie television shows ever had this many kids under ten.

  Once we were all standing behind the tin exterior wall of the school, the woman took off again. We made a half circle and then snuck into a back yard through a gate. She gestured for us to go inside and then put her finger against her lips. After we did so, she quietly shut the gate behind her.

  We stood in what looked like a former single-car garage that had been turned into a bedroom. A set of French doors led into the rest of the house. Dad handed Tavia’s son to her, and then he turned the knob of the door on the right, slow and cautious. He was holding his rifle with both hands. Brad and Darla held their kids close, and Tavia moved to the side while the woman joined us. She closed the back door
softly and turned the lock.

  “What is he doing?” she whispered.

  All three of her kids were standing against the wall, eyeing us warily.

  “Checking to see if anyone else is in here,” Brad said, keeping his voice low.

  “No one is here,” she said, shaking her head. “Just me and the kids.”

  “We need to make sure,” Brad said.

  Gunshots could be heard, popping like firecrackers somewhere nearby. It reminded me of the Fourth of July, but it definitely didn’t feel like it.

  Dad appeared in the doorway. “It’s just us,” he whispered.

  He turned on his heels, and we followed him down a hallway that opened into a kitchen. The lights were off, and it would have been dark but for one broken window. Jagged edges of plywood hung from the nails driven into the wall.

  Dad gestured to the unsecured window. “We need to patch that up—now.”

  “There are more sheets of plywood in the garage outside. We should have enough to double up on most if you’d like.”

  Dad complied, following her outside. They returned less than ten minutes later. April was carrying a toolbox, and Dad was grunting and walking awkwardly with the stack of plywood sheets in both hands.

  Once Brad and my dad were finished refortifying the windows, only the few holes in the wooden sheets offered enough sunshine to see. I’d worried about the noise from the hammering, but Tavia had kept an eye out, and she’d said any curious infected kept being drawn the other direction, toward the sound of the gunshots. They were now just popping off one at a time. It was more sporadic, but they were still happening.

  I made my way to the table and pulled out a chair. My leg muscles were still burning from our long walk.

  Dad and Tavia immediately got to work with making us a small meal. Brad and Darla did the same for Madelyn and Logan.

  The woman and her children just watched.

  Darla’s eyebrows pulled in. “Haven’t you got any food?”

  “We’ve already eaten. You go ahead,” she said.

  “We haven’t got much left, but you’re welcome to share,” Darla said.

  The woman walked with pride over to a door. She opened it to reveal a deep pantry with a decent stock of various cans of vegetables, rice, bread, peanut butter, chips, cereal, boxed stuffing, and bottles of water, and that was just what I could see right away.

  “You’re welcome to ours, too,” she said.

  “Goodness me,” Tavia said, holding her palm to her chest.

  Dad frowned. “You had all this food, yet you were so desperate to leave that you nearly got yourself mowed down in front of your kids?”

  I raised an eyebrow. I was fairly impressed with him at that moment.

  The woman looked at her kids and then back at Dad. “I’m scared. I was over there at that church when it was overrun, and we lost a lot of friends.”

  “So has everyone else.” Dad scoffed.

  “I lost my husband.” A gunshot outside served as the period to her sentence.

  Dad didn’t have a response to that.

  “I’m alone with these kids. I saw your van, and I panicked. I didn’t know if we were leaving or you were staying. I just knew I couldn’t keep us all alive by myself.”

  Tavia touched her arm. “You’re not by yourself anymore. I’m Tavia. That’s my son, Tobin,” she said, pointing.

  “My daughter’s name is Nora, and my son is Jud.”

  “And who’s this?” Darla was referring to the boy who looked to be around seven or eight, gauging by his oversized front teeth and his baby teeth on the bottom.

  The boy spoke up, “Did you see that blood streak on the side of the church?”

  Some of us nodded.

  “That was from my teacher, Miss Stephens. She saved me from my parents when they were trying to kill me,” he said the words matter-of-factly, as if he were talking about something that had happened at school that day.

  Darla gasped, and Tavia’s hand flew up to her mouth. Halle looked to me, not knowing how to react. Since it had all began, all I could think about was getting to my mom. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like if she were dead—or worse, if she tried to kill Halle or me.

  April offered an apologetic smile and cupped the boy’s shoulders. “This is Connor. Annabelle Stephens was our first-grade teacher. She was the best. Right, Connor?”

  He looked up at April. His eyes darkened with guilt. “She would have lived if she hadn’t saved me.”

  April frowned. “She wanted it that way. Don’t forget that. She loved you, and she wanted you to live. She would have done that for any one of you kids. We’ve discussed this, Connor. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “What did you do,” I asked, “when your parents changed and chased you?”

  “Jenna!” Dad scolded.

  Connor’s eyes shot up to my dad and then back at me with a blank expression. “I ran.”

  After I finished my sandwich and chips and downed an entire bottle of water, I helped Dad fill up the empty bottles from the tap, and then we resituated our packs.

  The gunshots still continued, but they were infrequent, and I was beginning to get used to them.

  Halle was playing with Madelyn and the younger boys while Connor seemed to prefer standing by the window and looking out of the holes.

  Dad joined the adults to discuss what was next, but their conversation derailed somewhere between plans and theories to what had caused the virus.

  “I’m just glad I never got a flu shot,” April said. “There were reports that those who had one were turning faster once they were bit.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Dad said. “I had mine, so if I get bitten, I guess you’d better shoot me quick.”

  “I didn’t get mine, so let me say my good-byes,” Tavia said, glancing back sadly at her son.

  April scratched the back of her neck. “I still don’t understand though. People with the flu shot are turning more quickly? After they’ve been bitten? After they die?”

  Tavia leaned in closer. “The man on the news said that people who were bitten would get sick. They would run a high fever, vomit, and have headaches within the first hour. At first, they thought it was some kind of flu, so the doctors or whoever began looking at medical records. They were confused because those with the flu vaccination got worse and died quicker than those who hadn’t gotten one.”

  April snorted. “You’d think when they came back and tried to eat people, the doctors would have figured out it wasn’t the flu.”

  Tavia pressed her lips together. “That was early. It was right after they talked about the scientist. He did this. He created zombies, and now, we’re all screwed.”

  April picked at her nails, nervous. “Do you think it’s something in the vaccination?”

  Dad shook his head. “No. I think, for whatever reason, the virus reacts with the vaccination. It’s enzymatic, not the cause.”

  “Whatever that means,” April said.

  Dad grinned. “The flu shot isn’t turning people into zombies. It just turns up the speed on the virus once you’ve been bitten.”

  “Oh,” April said. “So, what caused it?”

  Dad clenched his teeth. “The psycho scientist. He was probably obsessed with zombie movies and was just trying to see if he could make it a reality.”

  “We’ll never know,” Tavia said. “The only thing that matters is that he did it, and now it’s a reality for us all.”

  Tavia was right. The cause didn’t matter, only that it was here, right outside the windows, and we were hiding from it, whispering to keep it from hearing us.

  I used to do that when I was younger, when Mom and Dad were fighting. Dad was usually mad at me, and Mom would pick a fight with him just to keep him downstairs and out of my face. Since the divorce, he’d had a better handle on his anger, but I wondered how long he would last before he blew. We were all tired and exhausted and scared. None of those things made for a good combination for s
omeone with so much rage boiling beneath the surface. Back then, I would hide from him in my closet. Now, we were hiding together—from something much worse.

  I stood next to Connor, noting the wrinkles he made when he scrunched one eye while he looked out through a hole with the other.

  “See anything?” I said quietly.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “I can see the cemetery from here.”

  I sighed and leaned against the thin plywood, looking up. “We’re going to need something stronger to put on these windows.”

  “Yep.”

  The kids were at the table, coloring quietly. It seemed so easy for them to forget about the nightmare happening outside while they chose the perfect shade of blue and dragged it back and forth on the paper. I wished it were that simple, that I could just busy myself with something and pretend everything was normal.

  I smirked and looked at Connor. “Are we running for our lives or running a daycare?”

  He leaned away from the hole in the plywood and watched me for a moment, frowning. “If you saw inside the school, you wouldn’t be complaining. Out of this entire town, only three of us are left. Another boy was in the church. His name was Evan. He was older than me, but he didn’t make it out. So, now, it’s just us and April. Your bunch brings the kid population to a grand total of eight. Eight—that’s not even a daycare. That’s just sad.”

  “I…I’m sorry. I was just trying to make conversation. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” he said, looking back through the hole. “I didn’t mean it either. I’m just mad.”

  I wondered what Connor was like before this had happened because he didn’t act his age.

  “I bet you are.”

  “If I were older, I could have saved more people. If I were older—”

  “There are a lot of adults around. None of them have stopped this. Don’t carry that around with you.”

  “I’m not carrying anything. The only things I have are my clothes.”

  “Where do you live? Maybe we could go get some of your things?”

  He shook his head. “What does any of that stuff matter now?”

  I shrugged. His way of thinking made me miss Chloe. I wondered where she was, if her mom had picked her up in time. I would hope. That was all I had left. “I wish I could have brought something from my old room. Makes it feel more like home.” When Connor didn’t respond, I continued, “It’s not as loud as I thought it would be. Not a lot of screaming or hysterics. People get quiet when they’re afraid.”