The Dead Hunger Series: Books 1 through 5 (71 page)

I loved that Jeep.  I’ll get me another someday, and not the damned Cherokee – it’s going to be another Wrangler.

After I packed up, I was tired.  It was Saturday, and I really didn’t want to disrupt my mom this late, so I figured I’d just pull up a couch – I wasn’t going to sleep in the skank-polluted bed – and head over to her house in the morning.

I settled onto the couch early and slept with one ear open in case dickhead came home.  At somewhere around eleven ‘o clock that night, I heard his pickup engine fire, and sat up to see his old Dodge Ram tearing out of the yard and toward the main road, shooting up gravel behind him. 

I was relieved that he didn’t come in and try to kiss ass.  I don’t have too much use for confrontation, and even less for anger and bitterness, and Tommy was exactly who I thought he was anyway.  I never intended to marry him and the whole episode was probably just the kick in the ass I needed to just get out there and make it on my own.

So I got up, made some strong coffee and poured it in my favorite insulated mug – the one that said
I’m the one you gotta blow to get some coffee around here
.  I don’t know why it always struck me as funny.  Maybe it was only because it was a twenty-four ounce mug and I loved my coffee.

I threw the Jeep into gear and set out for Lula, trying not to spill while I shifted and balanced the cup between my knees.  I headed out on
Jesse Powell Parkway, and traffic was as light as you’d expect on a Sunday.  Until, that is, I was approaching Limestone Parkway.  Traffic stopped, and I couldn’t even see far enough to find out what the holdup was.  Some of the cars on the highway had been abandoned, the doors hanging open and nobody around, and I began to wonder how long this particular traffic jam had been here.  I was at the tail end of it, and nobody else had come up behind me, so I backed the car up and pulled off at the Old Cornelia Highway exit.  It would get me to the same place, and I could bypass the entire mess, so long as everyone else didn’t have the same idea.

Turns out nobody had the same idea.  Traffic was non-existent, for the most part.  I passed two men walking along the roadside, neither of whom returned my wave and both of whom looked drunk. 

The thought crossed my mind that people just weren’t as friendly as they used to be.  I forgot about it right after it happened, it wasn’t too much longer before I’d think of those two men again, and wonder what the real story was.

The drive on Old Cornelia took me a little longer, but twenty minutes later I was pulling into my mother’s driveway, only to see the last thing I wanted to see.

Tommy’s pickup.  But it wasn’t just here.  It was crashed into my mother’s Camry, the door was open, and the engine was running.

I parked and ran inside the house.  Carole Ann Sanders always left her door unlocked, and I threw the door open and called, “Tommy!  What the hell are you doing here?”

“Charlene, run, baby!” came my mother’s voice from deep inside the house. 

My mother’s home was a sprawling ranch with wood floors, big rooms and long hallways, but only two bedrooms.  She liked to knit, so being single, she used the living room as her craft and knitting room, and kept the spare bedroom ready in case I came to stay the night or eventually moved back in, which she never ruled out.  We’d always been close, and even if she didn’t agree with my fashion sense or my chosen profession of the moment, she enjoyed my company as much as I always enjoyed hers. 

No judging – it just wasn’t in her fabric to question my choices.  She trusted that what I was doing was right for me, and that I was smart enough to know when to make changes in my own life.

“Run, Charlene!” my mother screamed again, and her call was followed by a splintering crash.  I heard her voice again, but it was suddenly cut off by a muffled gurgling.

I charged down the hallway toward the sounds, and saw Tommy’s boots sticking out of the bathroom door down on the right side.  They were thrashing, kicking back and forth.

“Tommy, what the fuck are you doing here!” I shouted, as I reached the bathroom in four running steps.  When the scene in that small room came into view, I let out a terrified scream.

Tommy was on top of my mother, his teeth embedded in her neck.  He jerked his head up to look toward me, and I saw his eyes.  They were void of irises, but somehow tinged with pink and as horrid as hell, like a demented doll from a horror flick.

As his mouth came off of the wound he’d torn, my mother’s blood spurted from her neck in a jettison, spraying into the hall, all over my shirt.  Horrified, I reached down, the adrenaline surging through my body, and pulled Tommy from on top of her, slamming him into the hallway to my left.  I fell on top of my mother and slapped my hand over her neck, but her eyes were slits, and she was pale white. 

“Mama,” I said, “Hold on.  I’m dialing 911.  Hold on, mama.”

I tried to get my cell phone from my pocket, but I felt Tommy behind me and the phone came out as I fell onto my back beside my mother, my hand slipping from her rapidly draining artery. 

And I saw his face for the first time.  His once bright, blue eyes were dark and sunken, and blood stained his mouth and teeth.  He fell forward, and I was able to get my feet up, my knees bent, and I used his momentum to lift him over my mother and me and head first into the tile wall of the bathtub and shower.  He hit with a dull thud, and I was sure he’d been knocked unconscious.

But after his head slammed the wall and he fell into the porcelain tub, he was scrambling back up.  Before he was able to get back on his feet, I yanked the shower curtain down over his head and got up, slipping badly in my mother’s blood.

Tommy screamed something unintelligible at that point, and it sent chills rippling down my spine.  I grabbed my mother’s feet and dragged her from the room.  I got her perhaps four feet down the hall and lowered her hand to her.  She was unconscious, and I didn’t know then if she was breathing or not.  I pulled out my cell phone, my hands shaking so badly I could barely dial the numbers.  I held one hand on the vein that seemed to have run dry, and with my thumb I dialed the three numbers that were my only hope to save my mother.

There was no answer.

Tommy charged out of the bathroom and slammed into the wall opposite the door.  I didn’t have a choice.  I had to leave my mother for a moment and get my crossbow out of the car.  My mother didn’t have a gun, despite all the times I’d told her to get one, living out there all alone.

I charged back toward the front door and to my car.  I pulled the crossbow out, along with the entire quiver of arrows, and mounted one on the run.  I got into the hallway, and Tommy was there, his face pressed into my mother’s face, her arms twisted in unnatural positions as though he’d twisted and broken them in an attempt to get to something he couldn’t quite reach.

“Tommy!” I shouted.  He didn’t turn, just kept on making those horrible chewing, slurping noises as he continued his attack.  I ran up to him and brought my knee into his head.  He responded with a growl as he fell sideways off my mother.  Seconds later it was as though I never pounded his skull, and he was back on his unsteady legs.

I stood back and raised the crossbow.  I looked at this thing and it dawned on me for the first time that he didn’t appear crazed.  It was something else.  He appeared drawn to my mother’s flesh and blood like a greyhound to a rabbit.

Pure instinct drove him.

There would be no intentional missing this time.  I fired the bow and it pierced his head, right between the eyes.

His already dead-looking eyes stared through or past me – I wasn’t sure which – and he fell backward, his boots coming to rest on the floor beside my mother’s destroyed face and her broken body.

I knew she was dead.  I broke down then, the reality of what had just happened hitting me.  Not the explanation for what Tommy had done; I had no idea that the man I’d just killed had died earlier, or that everything in my world had changed.  But the reality that my mother was dead, and I’d never see or talk to her again.  No last words of wisdom, no hugs, no more nothing.

And if I thought back, which I would do again and again over the next months, I’d realize that it was already too late the moment I first saw Tommy on top of her.  The damage that killed her had already been done.

I sank to the floor beside my mother, my fingers punching redial for 911, and never receiving an answer.  My clothes were blood-soaked, and I don’t have any idea how long I sat there like that.

I had no idea what to do, and no mother to ask for advice.  So I sat there until it got dark and the flies began to gather.  My tears wouldn’t come any longer.

I had nothing left.

Literally.

****

I’m sorry for this sidetrack, and I know I need to get back to what was happening in Concord.

But since you’ve gotten to know me over the last two chronicles, you should know everything.

With the death of my mother, I was alone.  She was an only child, too, but my father wasn’t.  He had several brothers; four, I believe, and a sister.

And it didn’t matter.  My father had left my mom before I was born, and even though I knew his name, I never tried to find him, and he never tried to find me.  I’m not one to put much stock in DNA and blood ties; either you’re a father or you’re not.

He wasn’t.  I don’t know if my mother was immune to urushiol, but I do know she hadn’t changed into one of them before Tommy killed her.

I’ve wondered if my father was immune. Of course I  didn’t wonder it before, because Hemp hadn’t figured it all out yet, but I’ve wondered plenty of times since.

Ironic.  The woman who really cared for me and loved me is dead, and there’s a chance the sperm donor who had nothing to do with me is out there somewhere, alive.

At this point he could walk up to me with my birth certificate and solid proof he was my father, and I’d have to seriously consider whether or not to kill him.

Why?  I don’t know.  I think crazy things sometimes.  Like if he’d never left my mother, maybe he’d have been there to protect her.

She was very hurt by his leaving – so much so that she never even considered marriage again.  She kept men who expressed an attraction to her at arm’s length, never letting them get too close.  I think she got laid occasionally, and good for her.  She took what she wanted from the brief relationships and left the other crap on the table.

She didn’t do it for me, though I thought that for some years.  She did it because she didn’t need men and would not come to rely on them ever again.

Okay.  Enough.  Back to my trek.

I buried my mother behind the house in the garden she tended.  The dirt was soft there, and easy to dig.  As for Tommy’s body, I used the remaining stacked cordwood and made a nice pyre for him.  His body burned about 1000 feet from the house so I didn’t have to smell his char.  I intended to stay at my mother’s a while, so it wouldn’t do to have any stink.

Well, that worked out for a week or two.

At first, I tried calling anyone and everyone I knew, starting with the tattoo shop.  I’m assuming the cell service went out almost right away, because nobody at work was answering their cells, and soon I just got a busy signal no matter what number I dialed.

My mom had cable TV, and I was seeing some weird but familiar shit on there before it turned to static snow.  In
Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, coast to coast.  People from all walks of life were killing other people.  Police, fire personnel, medics, gangbangers, teachers, and not surprisingly, attorneys.

Chaos.  They were saying it was some strange new bug or virus, but it was so widespread that nobody was left unaffected.  Scientists were dropping along with everyone else, and as we saw later, most military and police personnel just headed toward home as fast as possible to save the lives of their families.

Unfortunately, many of them likely ended up being the demise of their family members after contracting the illness themselves.  Fires were burning out of control everywhere, and I wondered why that would be.  I figured it out when one of the last interviews on the news showed a group of four survivors pouring gasoline on a door, having barricaded it closed with plywood and nails.  They were having themselves a good, old-fashioned zombie cookout.

Seeing all that shit, I felt lucky to be alone at this house, which wasn’t as remote as Flex’s, where I’d end up later, but remote enough that not many people lived within a two-mile radius.  Maybe four households.

I didn’t want to check on them.  Call me selfish, or call me smart.  Either way I was taking care of me.

It was a full week before the power went out.  I slept under the bed, the doors completely locked.  I blocked the feet up a bit and put a memory foam pad under there to lie on.  I wasn’t sure hiding would do any good, but it sure as hell worked when I was a little girl hiding from the creatures of my imagination, and no – I never imagined there were monsters under my bed.

That was my safe place.  And closets.  I liked closets.

A month passed.   I ran out of food and I was almost out of fresh water.  I had to get out of there and go on a scavenger hunt.  I had no idea what Lula or the surrounding areas were like since this thing hit, but there was no decision to be made, because I had to go.