Dead Hunger IV: Evolution (2 page)

Speaking of my pregnant wife. 

“How’s she doing?”
I asked Vikki, who was sitting on the floor next to her, cradling her head.

“She’s fine,” she said, looking up at me
, her face filled with worry
.  “But she’s out
cold
.”

Jen
ny
continued to struggle
, alone on the table
.  We couldn’t chance getting any closer.  We
could do nothing for her
now, even as she cried out in pain
.
  Kim started to cry, followed by Vikki.  I tried to keep it together – at least on the outside.

We needed our damned doctor.  That damned doctor is J
im
Scofield
.  An older man, but one who had probably delivered more babies than
the entire population of
Concord
as it stood today
.

Jen’s screaming reached a fever pitch.  I watched as she tore at her clothing, pulling the maternity blouse away and exposing her
distended, tumultuous stomach.

Then it started sinking in.  A small spot, just below her belly button.  Maybe two inches in diameter.

I was fucking horrified.  I was glad Gem
wasn’t awake to witness this.
  She would never be the same, and neither would I.

I don’t know how to finish telling you what happened.  I don’t want to finish.  It tore its way out.  How those tiny hands and that little, toothless mouth did the damage
they
did, I’ll never know.  I never wanna know.

But it came
tearing out of Jen’s stomach
like the fuckin’ Alien baby
.  Jen’s face had gone white, and while she was still awake, I saw her dying before my eyes.  Her blood leaked out onto the blanket draped over that pool table, and
the creature that had escaped her womb clawed and struggled, never losing any of its determination, if that’s what it could be called.

I knew what I had to do.  The only compassionate thing I could.

“Get on that fuckin’ radio and call Hemp again.  Call the doctor
again too,
Vikki.”  My voice was low, far more calm than I felt.

I walked around, trying not to look at the infant monster, and I moved around behind Jen.  Her head was about a foot from the end of the table.  I leaned forward and put my bare hand over her mouth, pinching her nose. 

I
wasn’t killing
Jenny Rockford in my mind
.  I
was
just
moving
her along toward peace
and away from the horrible pain
.
  I’d seen enough at that point that I knew the rivers of blood that poured from her body left her with too little to recover.  Not to mention the damage the little monster inside of her had wreaked.  
Concord
didn’t have any significant blood supply, and Jenny’s fate was sealed the moment the apocalypse hit.
 

Tears ran from my eyes as I felt and saw her chest rise for the last time, and it was then that I released my
own
breath.

I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding it.

The six-pound creature had scrambled free of Jen’s stomach, and rolled onto the table.

Three more minutes passed with that fucking
tiny
abomination, unable to walk, rolling around on the moving blanket.

I should have shot it.  Charlie ran in with Hemp behind her, and she stopped short, her face aghast.

“What the fuck is going on?” she shouted, staring at the horrific scene on the pool table, the creature that wasn’t a baby
gnawing on the umbilical cord, making horrible sounds.

Hemp answered.  “The baby turned,” he said simply.  “My God.”

Charlie spoke without taking her eyes off of Jen and the thing beside her body. 
“It’s one of them, isn’t it?  Is Jen dead?  My God, Flex, is Jen dead?”

I nodded and felt my lunch and a warm beer coming up. 
I choked it back. 
“Kill it, Charlie
,” I croaked.
 
“
Please.
”

Charlie moved fast.  She pulled a Glock from her holster
, moved to within three feet of it, and blasted the infant zombie in t
he face, flinging it off the table to hang from the cord that once provided it nourishment, tugging Jen’s lifeless body sideways.

Hemp calmly walked over to Kim, who had gotten another blanket, but stood there dumbfounded with it in her arms.  He took it from her, went back to the table and lifted the dead thing back onto it.  His expression grim and serious, he spread open the blanket and lay the creature atop it.

From his pocket, he withdrew a knife, reached down and cut the umbilical cord.  He placed the tiny creature in the blanket, and folded it over four times, sealing it in, and removing it, thankfully, from our sight.

He turned and looked at us.

“I’ll be in my lab,” he said.  “I don’t think I need to explain.”  With that, he walked out. 
The lab was actually built in a storage room connected to the bar, accessible by a long hallway at the rear.  It had primarily been used to store extra equipment for the kitchen, but all of that had been long ago cleared out. 

Charlie stared after
Hemp as he walked away
, and I went and knelt beside Gem.  Three light slaps and she awoke.

Turns out the baby vapor isn’t as long-lasting as the more mature stuff.

Well, fuck it if that isn’t something, anyway.

There’s that.

Doc
Scofield
came in and got the shock of his life.  We knew Hemp and the doc would want to see what this thing did to Jen, so we got her wrapped up and took her to Hemp’s lab.

Charlie drove Gem home.  She got her out of there before we tended to Jen
’s body
.  I didn’t want
Gem
to see
any of that
horror in her condition.

I’ll never forget that day.  Despite all we’d been through, this was a reminder that there
were
some horrors we
hadn’t
yet faced that
were
worse than any in our pasts.

I’ve got to stop now.  I’ll be back.  Just recounting it for you was harder than I ever
thought it would be
.

*****

Gotta take a deep breath. 
Breathe, Flex.  Breathe.

First off, let me say
that Gem
has been tended to enough and the baby’s heartbeat monitored regularly, so we are confident our
baby is
alive and well.  
Gem is six months along
. 
The doc says that Jen was just about in her
sixth month, too, but she’d never come to him for any pre-natal care, and hadn’t
really been
showing very much for a pregnancy that far along.
  She was from the next town over, so nobody knew what she looked like before.  Maybe she’d been skinny as a rail.

But
the doc
also said that she could have been in her
sixth
month
when
this thing began.  This zombie shit.

How
, you ask
?  I asked the same thing. 

He said that the baby could have
died in the first week after the gas started coming out of the ground.  Jenny
would feel it moving,
and would automatically assume
it was okay.  Hell, she might even be happy that she
wasn’t
gaining too much weight
, as many young women are
.

The development of the fetus told Doc
Scofield
how long it had survived, because sure as shit, they stop growing when they die.
 
But for fuck’s sake, the damned things d
on’t quit moving
. 
So, believing her baby was kicking and healthy, the young, immortal Jenny took a pass when Doc
Scofield
had offered his pre-natal care to any pregnant women in town.

Jennifer should have been a bit more cautious, because her boyfriend – the one who got her pregnant
in the first place
–
had
turned into one of them.  Which meant her little one only had a
fifty percent
shot at immunity.  If it even works that way.  I don’t know if Hemp
even
knows that yet.

Gem took it hard, and so did Charlie.  Charlie was more involved, even though she came in at the last, after I’d
put Jenny out of her fear and misery
.

As for Gem and me, we
get to the doc too much, maybe.  Hey, it’s free.  We
don’t know and we don’t want to know the sex
of our baby
.  Just like old times,
we’ll
let the
old women
use their wives tale methods to determine the gender, and no matter how wild their theories of prediction, they’ll still have a fifty percent chance of being right.

Okay.  I’ve calmed a bit.  I need to get past that horrible memory, and I gotta apologize for hitting you with that so soon.

But it’s part of it.  So now you know.

*****

Now, a little history.  I
f you’re new to our chronicles, then
all of this, including
the Ratz must be explained. 
Please allow me
to gather myself and continue
.

When we first came across the zombie rats, hence the name
Ratz
, with a z, we thought they were sleeping.  In fact, they had fallen into some sort of a coma, and upon awakening, they had become just like the human zombies.  They have an insatiable hunger and crave human flesh, tissue and organs.

While the brain is the strongest scent that draws the
rotters
, it is not all they
crave
to eat. 
It’s just
the source of the aroma – sort of like
the garlic
in Italian cooking
; the
most fragrant part.  Nobody comes
sniffing around the kitchen
because they smell
spaghetti
cooking; they come because they smell the sauce with the garlic in it cooking.

The brain is the sauce.  But they like to eat everything.  Right
down to the gnawing of the bones if no easier meal presents itself
in the meantime
.

So
,
the Ratz a
re
harder to kill than the zombies, even with our
Urushiol
oil solution.  Urushiol
is the poisonous oil found
in
Poison
Ivy, Poison Oak and Poison
Sumac
, as well as
in cashew shells and mango skins
.  We refine it, essentially
extracting the oil
, at an old
microbrewery. 
When blended with water, it
creates a solution that when sprayed on the zombies, renders them a popping, hissing, melting pile of goo.

Nothing gives me more satisfaction that watching a zombie melt like the fuckin’ Wicked Witch of the West.

But given the choice, I like my Daewoo K7.  It’s a machine gun with lots of killing power.  Like nearly everyone else, I carry a couple of 9mm semi-automatics, but I like the accuracy of the machine gun.  If I’ve taken WAT-6, then it doesn’t matter.   Most of my kills are point blank.

But I digress.  Get me started, you know?

Concord
is mostly clear. 
Two
months have passed since we finished our previous chronicle, after getting Hemp back. 
Nobody was happier than Charlie, let me tell you.

But in the meantime, we’ve taken to watering down the cemeteries with those water spraying trucks they use on construction sites to keep the dust down.  It works great with our little solution
, and we’re fairly certain that as it soaks into the soil it’s making its way down to the diggers trying to claw their way out
, melting them where they lie
.

Now let me tell you a bit about Charlie and Gem.

Gem, as you might recall, is one Gemina Cardoza Sheridan
.  She is Guatemalan by
birth
,
has long, dark hair and deep, brown eyes.  She
is
,
and always has been
,
one
bad-ass woman.  She
demonstrated it
in
different ways prior to the zombie problem, but since she found me in
Gainesville
, she has proven to me again and again that I don’t really need anyone but her by my side.