Dead Hunt (15 page)

Her laughter turned to sobs which shook her
body. Tears flowed hot down her cheeks and melded with the cold
rain. Her mind raced through recent memories, memories of her
friends, of their happy, smiling faces. Those visions were replaced
with the horror of watching those same faces screaming as their
young flesh was being ripped apart by monsters.

She limped forward in the chilling downpour,
her determination resolute. She was getting off this mountain.

CHAPTER 15 - Crossroads

She walked on and on and had no way of
knowing exactly how long she had been moving but knew it must have
been at least a few hours. The rain had stopped almost as quickly
as it had started, nothing more than a brief sun shower. Lucy
thought God must be mocking her, as the summer heat had returned in
all its blistering glory. Her foot didn’t hurt as much, or perhaps
it had just gone completely numb. Lucy wasn’t quite sure which, but
at least the pain had subsided a little.

“With my luck, I’ll get gangrene and they’ll
have to amputate,” Lucy said to the quiet trees.

The last thing she needed was to give her
exasperated self something else to worry about, but that new
thought played on her mind.

“I can see the headlines now. Cheerleader
with one foot, story at eleven,” she chuckled to herself.

“I must be going crazy. I’m laughing about
cutting my foot off. I wonder what time it is?”

Lucy was not some outdoorsman who could tell
the time by looking at the position of the sun. She was a
cheerleader, not Davy Crockett.

“That’s why people wear watches and carry
cell phones,” she thought, neither of which she had at the
moment.

“My cell phone,” she said to the still quiet
trees, “I miss my pink Blackberry.”

She knew that if she had the damned thing she
would know the time. She could even listen to some music to occupy
her mind to avoid thinking about gangrene and amputating her foot.
Hell, she could call for help.

“Help would be good,” she said to the trees,
but they didn’t answer her.

“Why hasn’t anyone come for me?” she
questioned silently, “Didn’t my parents wonder where in the hell I
was when I didn’t return home from the competition? Why didn’t my
over-protective father send out the entire Glace Bay Police
Department and half the RCMP to come find his daddy’s little girl?
Where in the hell is everybody?”

Lucy couldn’t remember how long it had been
since she’d passed her cabin. She hadn’t gone in, figuring there
was no point; there was nothing there and, thanks to Wade, she
couldn’t even lock the door.

“Poor Wade,” she thought as images of his
shattered face crept back into her memory. “At least he didn’t have
to live through this horror.”

When Lucy breached the top of a blind crest,
the road ended at a stop sign. The Seal Island Bridge was to the
left, Cheticamp was to the right. The bridge was closed, and, if
that cop wasn’t there, that meant a dead end. She could try to swim
across the channel, but the way the current ran in and out from the
Atlantic Ocean that wasn’t much of a choice. She might be pulled
under and swept out to sea. She hadn’t come this far to drown.

Cheticamp was more or less the same distance
away, but there was no way of knowing if anyone was there
either.

If Michael’s theory was right and the problem
started because something in that lab infected the water, then
either direction should be protected by the mountains that
surrounded Margaree.

“Water runs downhill, not up and over the
next mountain,” Lucy said thoughtfully. “So both directions have
about the same chances of being safe.”

Safe was such a relative term these days.

Kelly’s Mountain and Hunter’s Mountain would
be hell to walk over, and Lucy was sick of mountains. The road to
Cheticamp weaved through the valley and around the base of a
mountain, then ran up along the coast.

“Cheticamp it is,” she announced to no one as
she turned right but did not take a step.

“Distraction,” she announced with a smile.
“Michael said something back at the lab about distracting them with
smell.”

She looked at the road behind her as the
zombies approached the foot of the blind crest.

“Let’s see if you fuckers are as dumb as you
are ugly,” she said coldly.

She pulled off her sneaker and peeled the
blood soaked sock bandage from her foot. The cuts had closed over
and stopped bleeding. She winced in pain as she stomped her bare
foot hard on the pavement, then hobbled down the road to the left.
The road slapped and poked her tender foot without mercy as blood
trickled, then poured, onto the hot pavement. She kept walking;
more bloody footprints, more pain. She wiped some blood away with
the sock and tossed it down the road, but it did not go very far.
She tore off a piece of her shirt, sopped up some more blood and
then wrapped it around a rock. She threw it as far as she could,
but it didn’t go very far either.

“Jimmy Fastball Williams you’re not,” she
said with a small laugh as she tore another piece of her shirt,
soaked up some more blood and wrapped it around another rock.

She wound up like the baseball pitchers she’d
watched on TV and let it fly. It passed her last attempt by only a
few yards.

“Yep, you throw like a girl,” she muttered as
she looked towards the zombies. They were getting close. Lucy hoped
Michael had been right about their sight too.

She quickly tore one more strip off her
shirt, which now barely covered her breasts, wrapped her foot
again, shoved it back into her shoe and ran to the right.

Her plan was simple. If the zombies took the
bait they would be walking away from her instead of constantly
being on her ass. When she was a far enough distance away, she
ducked into the trees to catch her breath and wait.

Time seemed to stand still. Then she saw it,
the first one, the big one that was always ahead of the others,
leading them forward. She didn’t think they were smart enough to
have a leader. He probably just had longer legs, so that put him in
front of everyone else. He stopped at the crossroads as the others
came up behind him. Seconds ticked. She held her breath.

The zombies started to walk to the left. She
almost squealed in excitement but muffled it back out of fear that
they would hear her. It worked! All she had to do was wait for them
to be out of sight and then run like hell.

It was a perfect plan.

“Thank you, Michael,” she whispered softly
with a smile.

Her thoughts drifted back to Michael, how he
had managed to stay calm through this crisis and figure things out,
formulate plans, sacrifice himself. She felt a tiny tear trickle
down her cheek.

They were all gone. She didn’t know if Paul
had made it. He was big, strong, a football player, so chances were
he made it, but the rest were dead.

Lucy allowed herself this brief moment to
feel sad, to hurt.

As she mourned her friends the smell hit her
nostrils a fraction too late as a putrid hand seemed to come out of
nowhere and grab her shoulder. In a move that would have made her
cheerleading coach proud, she leapt into the air in a ballet-like
spin. The move broke her free from the monster’s grip, while adding
a tremendous amount of torque to the hand that held her giant
knife. Its long blade sliced into the zombie’s gaping mouth, the
full strength of her spin causing the blade to easily sever the
decomposing skull before digging into the tree behind it. The body
fell limp, crashing to the ground, the top half of the head still
perched on her blade. The eyes looked at her and almost seemed
pitiful before the top of its head succumbed to gravity and fell to
the ground with a thud.

Lucy yanked the blade from the tree and
scanned for others; there were always others. She bolted onto the
road in the direction of Cheticamp and suddenly stopped dead in her
tracks. Paul stood on the road in front of her.

It was Paul, but it was not her Paul. Not the
Paul she had fallen in love with. Not even the Paul who had
abandoned her and left her to die.

That Paul was dead, but so was this Paul. It
wasn’t really him anymore Lucy tried to tell herself as he drew
closer.

She raised the machete for the mighty blow
that would finally end Paul’s existence, the blade dripping with
the blackish-red blood from the decapitation just moments ago. She
stood taut like a cat ready to strike its prey, prey that was
walking straight for her.

Her determination faltered, her blade began
to shake.

“Stop being squeamish,” she commanded
herself. “It’s not Paul anymore. Just cut its damn head off and get
out of here.”

She hesitated.

She knew she should not hesitate, but she
couldn’t help herself.

It was still Paul after all.

She looked behind her. Her decoy had stopped
working. Had they heard her? Had they heard the other zombie moan
right before she cut off its head? Was Paul telling them she is
here? She didn’t know, she just knew they were heading her way. She
was trapped. She looked back to Paul.

“Can I really kill him? I have to.” She cried
in desperation, “Please, God, help me!”

She looked behind her again. There were so
many of them. She looked back to Paul, his massive frame now only a
few feet away. She felt paralyzed.

“Paul, don’t!” she pleaded.

He stretched his arms around her, pulling her
close to him.

“Paul, no!”

Tears raced down her cheeks. His head
lowered, mouth opened.

“Paul!” she said one final time, then jammed
the knife into his lower jaw until the hard steel sank deep into
his skull.

He fell to his knees, his eyes still looking
at her. She brushed his hair lovingly then wrenched the blade free.
He fell sideways like a mighty tree crashing onto the hard
pavement.

She stepped over his bulking frame and headed
for Cheticamp.

CHAPTER 16 – Defeated

Lucy limped down the road, her pace slowing
with each passing hour. Hunger was another pain she had to endure.
Images of her friends haunted her thoughts. Her determination all
but vanquished, she released the last possibility of hope and fell
to her knees, shaking like a thunder frightened dog. She found her
tears again.

“I’m not going to make it,” She
whimpered.

Her skin was slick in the hot sun, stinking
with the sweat of panic. She rose and turned to face them.

Defeated, she raised her left arm towards
them, palm facing up. With her right hand she raised the machete
above her shaking wrist.

“Fuck you,” she said defiantly, then slowly
lowered the blade to drag it across her wrist. The soft skin of her
wrist creased around the edge of the blade invitingly. Then Lucy
heard something that sounded like a thud. She froze, the blade
hungrily waiting for that final cut, as she turned to look for the
source of the noise. She could not see anything. The road twisted
out of view ahead of her, behind her the groans of the hungry mob
grew louder. There it was again. “I know that sound,” she thought.
Her mind struggled to focus, attempting to identify the thuds. The
mob drew nearer, arms outstretched to take her.

“It’s a car door!” she yelled at them, and
then ran. The pain was gone. It shot through her body like a
bullet, but she could not feel it, so she just ran. She rounded the
corner and stopped dead.

New tears ran down her face.

There, in the midst of the tall, green spruce
and the white birch, sat a tiny roadside café. It was an ugly,
faded yellow with a ghastly blue trim, and that hideous looking
restaurant was the most beautiful thing Lucy had ever seen. She
bolted towards it as fast as her exhausted legs could carry
her.

Inside the café, a chubby waitress with
swollen ankles forced a smile as she poured coffee into a big man’s
cup.

“Anything else I can get you, Hank?” she
asked.

“That’s all, Rosie,” he said, watching the
cup fill. “When are you going to play some different music in
here?”

“You know how it is. Damn radio signal
doesn’t get past the mountains and the local station is all French.
Parlez-vouz Francais?”

“What?”

“Exactly. So we play tapes…”

Rosie stopped talking when the sound of the
screen door grunted against its rusty hinges then slapped shut.
Hank was about to say something to Rosie, but his sentence was cut
short by the look on her face.

“Rosie, are you Ok?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She stood frozen in place
as the coffee she was pouring spilled over Hank’s cup.

Hank noticed the sudden quiet. Forks and
knives were not clinking on plates. The handful of diners were not
chatting. He turned on his squeaky stool and saw that everyone in
the restaurant was staring at the door. He followed their stunned
stares.

There, in the doorway, stood a young girl, no
more than sixteen or seventeen years old, holding a giant, blood
streaked knife. Her shirt was half gone, her tanned legs were
covered in scratches, too numerous to count, and she was covered in
blood. She looked like she had walked to hell and back. The young
girl stared at them silently.

“Are you Ok, dear?” Rosie asked in a shaky
voice.

The girl blinked, looked at Rosie and mumbled
something that sounded like “Don’t drink the water,” then collapsed
to the floor.

Everyone rushed to help the poor girl.
Everyone that is, except Hank. He didn’t move, his eyes fixed on
the door behind the mysterious girl.

Lucy’s eyes fluttered open, and she found
herself staring at a water-stained ceiling. A fluorescent bulb
flickered. She could hear screaming and crying. Her eyes tried to
focus. She turned her head to the side to see a woman lying on the
floor next to her, a look of horror frozen on her lifeless
face.