Dahmer Flu by Christopher Cox Read Free Book Online Page B

right away. Their Dad ran to them, but by then everyone was panicking. When the first of the things came out of the tree line, everyone lost it. All of us.”
    She said to her son, “Take your brother over there- stay where I can see you.” She paused as the pair of footsteps rose, and then fell as they passed.
    With the children out of earshot, she continued in a hushed whisper. “The parents all ran blindly to try and find their children, but since they had been playing hide and seek it wasn’t easy. The children came from all directions trying to find their parents, and others ran home to hide. I couldn’t find my babies. I ran; I ran to all of their favorite spots but they weren’t there. I couldn’t find them.” Her voice quivered with the terrifying moment of that day; she was clearly back in the moment. “By then, the things were all through the town, but I wasn’t going nowhere until I found John and Sayer.”
    “We still have nightmares about it,” She said sadly. Only a few dozen of us or so made it back to our homes. Some of the parents never found their children, and some of the children never found their parents. The screaming… it didn’t stop for hours. My husband, Clyde, he was a good man-” I noted the past tense, and took the small advantage of her pause.
    “Thought you said his name was John?”
    “No, I made that up. I don’t know who that was, just same poor jerk who got in an accident, I guess. Clyde, he was a good man,” she repeated, “and he already had the windows boarded, had our hunting rifles laid out, and had food ready. I thought he was being too paranoid, but thank God he was- the rest of us just didn’t know how bad it had gotten, thought it was just like that bird flu that we saw a while back; but Clyde was always a ‘big picture’ guy. That’s the only reason we made it. We watched home after home being forced open, and heard the screaming again… The worst part was when they stopped.”
    “I think, eventually, we were the last survivors. Days passed, then all at once, it was like we were just discovered; the whole crowd came at us, beating on our door and cracking the boards on the windows. We just locked the boys in their room with the rest of the food and started shooting. Some of them we knew, they were our neighbors and friends- we shot them, too. You know you gotta shoot them in the head, right?” She waited for an answer.
    “Yeah,” I replied.
    “Good.” She started again, “After a couple hours it was dark; that’s when they made it inside, they broke one of the doors open and came pouring in like ants to a picnic. We shot evr’thing we had at them until we ran out, then we started fighting with anything we could hit ‘em with. By the end, they were all dead. So many were dead.”
    “We let the boys out; we hugged, we cried- we were safe. We fixed the windows and the door and loaded the bodies in the guest room; we piled in our bed until the kids fell asleep. Clyde pulled me aside and told me he was bit and pulled down his bandage. It was covered by his shirt, so I didn’t see it ‘till he showed it to me. It was real deep; I cried in his arms until I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was still and on the floor- he had already started turning into one of them .” She spit the last word. “I pulled him into the side room and kissed him one last time… I smashed in his skull with a brick. He didn’t make a sound, he just… twitched a bit. Do you have any idea what that feels like?” That time, she didn’t wait for an answer.
    “We didn’t have enough food left to last much longer, and we didn’t have anything to protect the boys with, since we were out of bullets and all. I saw your headlights last night and knew it might be our only shot, so I set this up before morning. I had to take it… I’m really sorry about it, but I had to.” Deep down, I knew I would have done the same thing.
    “Who’s in the RV?” She asked.
    “No one,