Zombie Immunity



  Zombie immunity

  By Allen Wells

  Chapter 1

  Dany woke up and lay quiet and still, listening with every sense she possessed. Every morning was the same thing. She almost couldn't remember what life had been like before the outbreak. It couldn't have been more than a year ago that all hell had broken loose on the planet. Unfortunately, that was a day Dany remembered vividly. She had come home from school and was watching the news with her parents and her little brother, the way families were supposed to back then. There was a report on about some terrorist attack coming from a country she couldn’t remember now, but that they had used a mutated version of the bubonic plague that no one could find a cure for. It had been contained a year ago, even though New Jersey got bombed heavily. A quarantine had been built for any survivors in the area at an old army post called Fort Dix.

  Dany snorted in contempt at the memory. Not a month later, the bubonic plague virus started infecting people. Over the course of three days, victims would develop a fever and headache, shaking, and ticks or twitches. Within four or five, sometimes even less days, the person had turned into a zombie. All rational thought left them, their movements became slow and jerky, but they were so strong. They usually moved in singles or groups of two, but it had been known to make the news for groups of three or four...at first. After a while, the number of infected far outnumbered the healthy people. Body fluids were the weapon of choice for the infected. A single bite, or blood in an open wound would turn a healthy human into a zombie in no time.

  Dany usually blinked back tears at this point in the flashback, but lately she found that she couldn't summon tears at all. She remembered the day that a group of two zombies got past the defenses her parents had hastily erected and made it into the house. Her parents had killed both zombies, but her mother had been bitten, and her father had gotten some of the blackish, red soup-dense blood of a zombie into an open scratch. It had been a tearful goodbye when Dany's parents left. They knew they were infected and wanted to be far away from their children when the change came over them.

  Michael had run after them, crying and pleading with them to come back until Dany had dragged him back into the house. Once the attacks became too frequent, Dany decided it was time to leave. There was a quarantine in New Jersey. With an Army garrison still stationed there to protect it. That's where Dany wanted to go. It was going to be a long way from their small town of Charleston, Missouri. When they started out, gas stations still had gas, but three days into driving, they found no more gas and they were forced to leave the car behind.

  They had just reached the Missouri/Illinois border, when the car came to a shuddering halt. Luckily, there was a rest stop a mile down the road. It was, for lack of a better word, demolished. When they got inside, the place was a mess; food strewn about, almost everything was broken, and blood was streaked over everything, both human and zombie alike. If Dany could go back in time, she would take that back. She would have bypassed that rest stop.

  They had been rummaging through the broken shelves, not really paying attention when the zombie attacked them. It grabbed Michael and tried to drag him closer to bite him. Michael kicked the zombie in the face before trying to scramble away. By the time Dany came to the rescue by rushing in with a two by four, the zombie had Michael again. Poor Michael was covered in the blackish goop that is zombie blood when Dany finally managed to knock the zombie's head off. Dany was trying to help Michael clean off the blood when she noticed the cut. He was bleeding freely from a shard of glass stuck in his arm. She let out a gasp when she saw the black in the bottom of the cut. Michael knew what that gasp meant. For a fifteen-year-old, he was very strong and brave, and Dany envied him those qualities. He crawled over into Dany's lap and cried for a few minutes before hugging her and walking down the aisle with the cleaning products and picking up a bottle of Draino. He looked her in the eyes before opening the bottle and chugging away.

  Dany was in tears when she crawled over to her little brother and held him until his spasms stopped and the breath ceased to enter and leave his lungs. She was so proud of him for choosing death over infection, but she was dying inside at losing the last member of her family. Then she noticed the scratches on her hands...

  Dany made her way over to the bottle of Draino. She took the cap off, but she knew she couldn't drink. She was a coward. She would lose her memories in three or four days, anyway. She decided she was going to continue on her way to New Jersey...as long as she could cling to rational thought.

  Five days later, found Dany unchanged. She couldn't believe it, but she had to start facing the fact that somehow her blood was immune to the virus.

  The sun was peeking out and Dany was still listening with every sense of her body. No death moans. That was a good sign. That usually meant the coast was clear. She got up and let her eyes adjust to the brightness before looking around for Regan. Their eyes met and Regan took a running leap to jump on her and lick her face. Regan was a young German Shepard who Dany had found on the road. She had been digging through the trash behind an abandoned house that Dany was ransacking for water and other nonperishables. Dany had found a backpack in a house a few days ago that was almost like brand new and she'd filled it with canned food every time she found it. Since then, the German Shepard had stuck with her.

  They were somewhere in Illinois, still heading north. Zombies liked to congregate in the cities and bigger towns, so Dany was sticking to back roads as much as possible.

  She travelled mostly by day because it was the safest. Being able to see what was coming at you was always better than getting surprised in the dark. The world was changing Dany, and she was glad. She used to be a girl with no courage, no strength, and no willpower. Now, however, with all the things she’d seen, and all the people she’d lost, she had a steel core, and she made sure that she worked out as much as she could. She had been forged anew in the flames of the world’s destruction, and she was ready to take the new her for a test run. Dany had found a map somewhere along the way, though she couldn’t quite remember where it had come from, and she was marking off her progress whenever she came to a landmark or city that appeared on the map. Regan stuck with her most of the time, and it gave Dany a feeling of companionship. It was almost like she had a family again. Almost. Regan earned her keep, though, Dany had to admit that. For some reason, the rabies virus that had been generated in the labs didn’t infect animals. They could have the virus enter their bloodstream, but they wouldn’t change. It was a conundrum that Dany thought about sometimes, but she was glad of that fact. Regan was a big help any time that they encountered one of the zombies, because she could bite them once Dany knocked them down, and be able to separate the head from the spinal cord to deliver the final blow.

  Dany was now somewhere near the middle of Illinois, following a highway that she was marking off, mile marker after mile marker. Regan was padding along next to her, tongue hanging out and tail wagging slightly.

  “I know, girl. We’ll stop as soon as we find a cluster of houses and we’ll get you some water. It’s hot out, today, isn’t it?” Regan woofed in response and Dany rubbed her head between her ears. It really was nice, as far as nice went nowadays. A lot of the more positive words in the dictionary would have to be revamped, if there was anyone still alive to work a printing press. Dany had to stop dwelling on the past. It had been almost three months since she lost her parents and her brother, it was time to move on. She would never forget them, and she even dreamed of joining them one day, but the thing that haunted her dreams the most was the fact that she hadn’t turned into one of those soulless, mindless, rotting sacks of m
eat that had infected her family. She would spend hours at night, just lying awake, think of things that could have made her blood immune even though she had to have had something happen to her that hadn’t happen to the rest of the family. During her waking hours, though, she didn’t have time for thoughts like that to barge in. She had to be on high alert to make sure nothing happened to her or Regan.

  Dany was walking just inside the wood line of the trees lining the highway. It was easier to see open spaces from cover, and she wanted to be able to duck behind some cover if she found a group too large to fight singlehandedly. Dany had a pistol with her, and whenever she could find bullets for it she reloaded it. But the one thing that she knew would pack a wallop and that didn’t require anything but her arm’s strength was a machete she’d found in an old farm store. She didn’t know what it was being sold for at the time, but she definitely knew what it could do now. The upkeep on it was really simple, too. It only needed a rock to sharpen it, and rocks were everywhere. Dany could see a little clearing up ahead of them and she began to make sure her footsteps were absolutely silent. She saw a farmhouse, and she smiled. Maybe there would be food inside. She knew there had to be water. Once the outbreak came, no one thought to shut off the water, so the sinks everywhere still had water when you turned the tap.

  “Look over there, Regan. That means there’s going to be some food and water, and maybe a nice place to sleep tonight. What do you think?” Regan leaned forward and gave a few sniffs before she woofed. Another great thing about having Regan around was that her nose could pick up the putrid scent of the decaying zombie flesh before Dany’s ears could pick up the death groans of the zombies around them. It almost made her feel like the bomb teams that they showed in the commercials for the Army on television. It made her laugh. That was such a short time ago, and yet it seemed like ages ago. Dany sighed. Her feet were now on the fringe of the clearing and she looked around to make sure there weren’t any zombies around. So far so good. The coast was clear. She and Regan cautiously made their way to the house. The front door was open and there was blood streaked across it. Dany listened hard, but all she heard was silence. She gave Regan the thumbs up and walked through the door without moving it. She looked around and saw which way she had to go to find the kitchen.