Depraved 2 (34 page)

The zombie continued to growl and paw at her, but she was able to keep its head tilted upward while she fumbled at her purse with her other hand. The dark and her precarious position made it difficult, but her hand finally slipped inside the purse and groped around for the guns. The zombie’s face pushed closer again as her fingers curled around the grip of the 9mm. A moment later the gun’s barrel was against the side of the creature’s head. She squeezed the trigger, the gun boomed, and the zombie toppled backward, landing with a crash against the wrought-iron table.

Jessica sagged against the door, breathing heavily. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

She allowed herself only a moment to collect her wits. Speed and ruthless efficiency were what would get her through this. It was how she’d gotten out of so many other jams, by being deadlier and more unforgiving than anyone or anything opposing her. She was feeling centered again and ready to go within just a few seconds.

Move, bitch.

The thought was like the bark of a starter pistol at the beginning of a race. She dropped the 9mm in her purse, scooped up the rifle, and hurried down the steps to the overgrown yard. Hurrying through the tall grass en route to Billy’s truck, she heard something that gave her a chill, a low groan somewhere out there in the night. It wasn’t the kind of sound one of her military adversaries would make. They would be striving for stealth. A redneck cretin might have made a sound like that, but Jessica didn’t think it was likely.

She climbed inside the truck, put the rifle in the previously empty gun rack behind the seats, and again rooted through her purse, this time hunting for the keys she’d taken from Billy earlier. The keys proved elusive at first and she had to take out the handguns and set them aside to conduct a more efficient search. Another groan came from somewhere out there in the night. It sounded closer this time.

At last, Jessica’s fingers snared the key fob and she dragged the keys out of the purse. It took another few seconds to find the right one. Muttering gratitude to a deity that, if He existed, probably took a dim view of her recent activities, she jabbed it in the ignition slot and cranked the engine to life. The ensuing steady rumble reassured her. There wasn’t going to be any of that refusing to start horror movie crap here. After heaving a sigh of relief, she turned on the truck’s headlights.

And saw the zombies.

There were two of them standing out there in the tall grass. One was some fifteen yards directly in front of the truck, lit up like a perp caught in a cop’s spotlight. The other one was farther away. Their clothes were rags and what remained of their flesh was badly rotted. It was no big leap to figure these were resurrected original inhabitants of Hopkins Bend, victims of the massacre she’d helped instigate four years ago. The one right in front of her appeared to have been a man, judging by the tattered remnants of a football jersey hanging off his skeletal frame. His eye sockets were empty and he had a few lank locks of hair atop his brown skull.

Jessica backed up until she reached the driveway, where she hit the gas after changing gears and getting the truck turned toward the street. The truck shot forward and she took a left turn out of the driveway, giving it the gas again as she hit the street. She was halfway to the end of the block when her headlights lit up a white Ford F-350 parked at the side of the road. She hesitated only a moment before stomping on the brake pedal and screeching to a stop next to the big Ford.

She peered closely at it a moment as she debated what to do. The Ford’s windows were tinted, but it was a good bet no one was inside the vehicle. Her intuition told her it had belonged to the big redneck men who were no longer among the living. They had parked at the end of the street in an effort to avoid being heard. They had been hunting someone, she guessed, either herself or the black ops assassin turned zombie. Despite the urgency of the situation, this stirred her curiosity. She almost regretted not having an opportunity to interrogate the men. It would be interesting to know how and why they had tracked them down.

But she had to set these questions aside and deal with the situation at hand. Her impulse was to abandon Billy’s truck and take the big Ford, which looked brand new. Ditching a vehicle owned by a man she’d abducted and indirectly gotten killed would be a wise move. But it was possible the F-350 was also a stolen vehicle. The goons she’d tangled with hadn’t seemed like the upwardly mobile type. A ride like this would surely have been out of their price range. Also, there was no guarantee they had left the keys in the ignition.

Only one way to find out.

Mindful of the new living dead threat, Jessica again gathered her purse and weaponry and got out of Billy’s truck. She left the key in the ignition with the motor running in the event a hasty retreat proved necessary. She paused when she reached the other side of the F-350 and saw a zombie standing in the middle of another overgrown yard. This one had been a woman or teenage girl, going by the tattered dress hanging from its lanky frame. It, too, was little more than bones covered with leathery patches of rotted flesh. A creak of splintering wood somewhere to her right made Jessica’s head snap in that direction. She saw a thin plywood board fall away from a window at the side of a house with a partially caved-in roof. The form of what might once have been a very big man climbed out of the opening and tumbled to the ground. The dead of Hopkins Bend were all coming back and there was no telling how many of them there were inside these homes-turned-mausoleums. At the moment, none of them were close enough to present an immediate threat, but that might not last for long.

Jessica opened the Ford’s driver’s side door and peered inside.

The key was in the ignition.

Thank fuck.

She climbed into the truck and pulled the door shut. The F-350 also had a gun rack. There was a pump shotgun in the bottom slot, but the top one was empty. She stowed the rifle in it, adjusted the seat, started the engine, and reached for the gearshift. After getting the truck turned around, she started heading again in the direction she had been going. Her plan was to retrace the route she and Billy had taken to this neighborhood from the center of town. It hadn’t been a particularly circuitous route, so she doubted this would present much of a problem. Finding her way back to Rural Route 42 from there should also be easy. It looked like the town’s small size was finally about to start working in her favor.

She was out of the neighborhood in less than one more minute, driving down a stretch of relatively straight road at a speed even she would normally consider reckless. Tightening her grip on the wheel, she pressed the truck’s gas pedal all the way to the floor and thrilled at the way the engine roared. It had far more kick to it than the engine in Billy’s truck and she meant to take full advantage of the upgrade in horsepower.

Jessica spotted only one more zombie on her way back to the downtown area. It was standing motionless right in the middle of the street as the F-350 bore down on it. She kept the gas pedal pegged to the floor and ran the thing down. The heavy duty truck absorbed the impact as easily as a gust of wind. The zombie blew apart and there was a brief rattle of bone fragments skittering across the truck’s hood. Jessica let out a whoop of grim delight as this happened. The primitive joy she took from it made her feel like a wild teenager out joyriding in the old man’s truck, an association that inevitably led to thoughts of her father. A dark turn in mood just as inevitably followed.

Zelda’s accusations might yet prove untrue. She could have been just fucking with her head, planting carefully calculated seeds of doubt and mistrust, stoking areas in which there were just enough wisps of smoke to possibly signal fire. But there would have been no point to that. Zelda had been on the very verge of killing her. There were no more games to play at that point, no more reasons for mind fucks, just a knife to stick in and twist for the sheer sadistic hell of it. The part of her that kept rising up to fight against the idea of her father’s betrayal was waging a losing battle. He was a bad man who did bad things. In Jessica he had raised a daughter who, in the end, was just as corrupted and beyond redemption as he was.

This required confrontation and judgment.

But first she had to get out of this godforsaken hellhole.

Again.

She saw more zombies as she got closer to the center of town. There weren’t many of them, just a few trudging through fields or ambling through litter-strewn parking lots. She suspected there were many more of them trapped inside the boarded-up buildings. The ones outdoors might have emerged from places where trespassers or looters had busted open doors or broken locks. Or they might have been among a small percentage of Bend residents left to rot where they dropped when the military swept through and killed them.

A gunshot rang out somewhere in the night and nearly made Jessica swerve off the road.

Shit. What the fuck?

A glow of streetlights came into view just before she turned down the town’s main drag. This was the first hint of restored power anywhere outside of the neighborhood where she’d holed up with Billy and she rightfully took it as a sign that the hidden military presence she had sensed since her arrival in Hopkins Bend had come out into the open, which couldn’t be good news for her. Also not portending well was the realization that the gunshot she’d heard had come from somewhere along this stretch of brightly-lit street.

Jessica stepped on the F-350’s brake and stopped in the street outside the CVS store where she had gotten her first real glimpse of the grisly truth about this town. She saw people directly ahead of her. Well, some of them were people, soldiers clad in commando garb and carrying M16 rifles. The others were zombies and could be considered people only in the loosest sense, if at all. As she sat there and watched, one of the soldiers approached one of the walking dead things from behind, took aim, and shot it in the head. The zombie toppled over and the soldier continued walking along the side of the street at an unhurried pace. At one point, he called out something to one of his fellow soldiers on the opposite side of the street. That man whirled and shot a zombie that came lurching out of an alley.

No one seemed to be paying her any mind whatsoever.

Well, this is weird.

Jessica considered turning around and attempting to navigate her way to some alternate route out of town. Before she could do that, however, she heard the first faint rumbling of an engine somewhere behind her. She glanced at the rearview mirror and discerned the shape of an armored fighting vehicle. It was black with a machine gun mount up top.

Jessica gulped.

Fuck this.

She gunned the engine and the F-350 rocketed down the main drag. Some of the soldiers glanced her way as she roared past them, but no one moved to intercept her or tried to wave her over. So she kept going as she rolled past the sheriff’s office and then through the big intersection beyond. A soldier strolling through the intersection saw her coming and jumped out of the way. Again, though, no one tried to stop her.

Okay, she thought. This is extra super weird.

Then it hit her that maybe the big white truck was a vehicle they were accustomed to seeing around town on occasion. It was possible there had been more to the big rednecks than met the eye. Maybe their activities here had been sanctioned by the secret military unit that controlled the town. It was a crazy idea, but by no means out of the question. And if the truck was the reason for her thus far unimpeded passage through town, getting gone from here fast was more imperative than ever. She wanted to be far away before the bodies she’d left behind were discovered.

Jessica tried to keep her focus on the road in front of her, but she couldn’t help stealing glances at the rearview mirror every couple seconds. She kept expecting to see a convoy of armored vehicles rushing to catch up to her, but there was never anyone back there and pretty soon the lights of the main drag faded from view. When she turned down the narrow stretch of Rural Route 42 that would eventually take her out of Hopkins Bend and back to civilization, she was alone again in the depths of a lonely, dark night.

Or so she thought.

She screamed as the truck’s high beams picked out the form of a little blonde girl walking down the middle of the road. The girl had come out of seemingly nowhere and there was no time to swerve out of the way. The F-350 hit her and rolled over her.

Shit!

Anguish exploded inside her as her hands tightened around the steering wheel in a death grip. Of all the things she had ever done, this was maybe the worst, and it had happened entirely by accident. A voice somewhere inside her said she should stop and see if there was anything she could do. But Jessica never actually slowed down, the cold pragmatism that dominated her life now asserting itself the way it always did. The girl was dead. She was just a little thing. No way had she survived a high-speed collision with a vehicle this size. And even if, by some miracle, she had survived, what could she do?