Hungry Series_Book 1_Hungry_Origins of Red
HUNGRY - Origins of Red
Book 1 of the HUNGRY Series
by Lawrence Herbert Tide
All rights reserved ©
Table des matières
Approach
Unconscious
Attacked
Diversion
Xmas
Help
Community
Discovery
Blame
Visit
Demonstration
Journey
Hidden
Depressing
Test
Arrival
Paradise
Grading
Space
Experiment
Democracy
Surprise
Voracity
Approach
“We almost made it!” shouted the driver, while the car was racing through the woods.
The trees passed by on each side of the vehicle, which got close to them many times, as the dirt covered ground became more and more irregular.
A bump of the car, harder than the others, made the red-haired woman near him cry out in surprise. She regained control and glared at him.
“Sorry, honey,” said the driver, glancing at her for a fraction of a second, before returning his attention to concentrating on the rough path again, while frantically turning the steering wheel. Calming down, the woman also turned her attention back to the road and became suddenly pallid. Now, not only did she see bigger trees on their path and passing by, but also, something else.
Much more worrying silhouettes, slightly more mobile than the plants she could see. She murmured, “My God… there are already some of them, here!”
A hand touched the back of her shoulder.
This startled her and made her swiftly look back.
It was the small hand of a little, red-haired girl, just like her, with freckles on her face, and whose green eyes showed fear. The child cried, “I’m afraid, Mom…” Her mother gave her a reassuring smile and answered, with a warm tone, “Don’t be afraid, honey, we’re approaching the Community… it’s the end of the afternoon and soon, we’ll all three be sleeping in a comfortable bed, protected behind its high walls.”
“Mom’s right, don’t be afraid!” shouted the father, wiping sweat from his moustache with a hand, before putting it back on the wheel.
He didn’t say anything about the position of the needle on the fuel gauge indicator, which was becoming dangerously low. He turned quickly at a corner and…
braked in front of a tree which had surprised him. The violent braking shook the little family and could’ve thrown them through the windscreen, if ever they had forgotten to fasten their seat-belts. The vehicle was now completely stopped.
“Ron!” shouted the woman, angry. “For God’s sake, be careful!” Looking at him and then glancing at the rough surface of the tree in front of them.
“Sorry…” He slumped over the steering wheel, his heart beating hard in his chest, conscious that he could have thrown the vehicle against a century-old oak tree. And their long journey would’ve ended there. The woman felt bad having shouted at him. After all, he had driven many hours, and was clearly exhausted.
A single-stroke metallic sound startled them. Another, louder, shook the vehicle.
Looking back, they saw the face of one of them.
It was watching them with its strange, red, gleaming eyes, because of the darkness. The sunken face of the zombie reminded them of the face of death.
The creature roared and hammered even harder on the car trunk.
“Oh no!” the driver said, watching the undead begin to climb on the car's trunk, crawling over it toward them. The woman turned her head in the direction of her husband and shouted, “Start the engine!”
“I’m trying, what do you think I’m doing?” shouted back the man who was fighting nervously with the starter key. The engine made a bad noise, and nothing happened. Slowly, the little girl sitting behind them turned around, trembling, and looked back.
The zombie approached the rear window, and its empty eyes observed the small girl through it. Her green eyes met its red eyeballs. Horror was visible on her face.
Fear…
A prey's fear…
The creature's hand smashed through the window, making the child turn around to protect her face.
“Ruby!” her mother shouted, seeing the skeleton hand of the zombie grabbing her crying daughter’s hair, drawing her behind.
“Nooooo!” her father shouted while looking back.
All of a sudden, the engine finally ignited and roared when he stepped on the gas, while torturing the gear lever, making the car reverse at great speed.
The back bumper brutally hit another tree, crushing the undead between.
Its bones cracked noisily.
The ugly face of another creature made them jump. It had appeared at the mother’s eye-level. It roared, watching her with red eyes surrounded by wiggling worms. It clawed the window's surface, trying to reach her.
The driver switched forward and the little family car leapt ahead, after having jumped over a bump.
A deafening shriek startled the parents again.
Watching behind them, they saw that the zombie was still clinging to their crying daughter’s hair, its torso on the back trunk. The remains of its bony pelvis protruded over the trunk, its legs lost.
The creature crept closer, the child’s head tilted back under the pull, her white, exposed throat now under the thing's gaping mouth. The girl could smell a mix of odors of blood and of decay.
The creature emitted a thunderous roar, advancing its jaw with its yellowish, rotting teeth.
A machete cut the hand of the undead.
A new and violent jerk of the car made the creature with its missing hand fall. It dropped on the ground and rolled in the dust.
Leaning forward, now that her head was freed, the girl saw her mother who was lying on her stomach, over her tilted seat’s back, the machete still in one of her hands. The thing’s dark blood dripping down the blade, the mother watched her daughter with concern and asked, “Are you OK?”
The girl opened her mouth to talk but closed it immediately.
She felt something odd…
The skin on her scalp was scratched. Reaching back, she felt the hand, which was still moving, its fingers closing, putting now some pressure on her scalp. The child fought with the decaying fingers to free her long, red loops.
At last she won the struggle. Turning around, she threw the thing outside, through the broken rear window. Turning forward, she focused her attention on her mother. Their eyes met, and they exchanged a knowing smile, like only mother and daughter can exchange.
A new bump made the woman in a horizontal position literally fly toward the vehicle’s roof.
Her head bumped violently against the ceiling of the vehicle.
“Mom!” the girl shouted, startling her father who looked at his wife, who was now lying unconscious on the tilted back of the chair. He asked, nervousness in his voice, “Are you OK, honey?”
When he returned his attention to the road he saw, too late, another big tree. He veered as much as he could but was unable to avoid it.
The deafening shock threw the driver violently against the steering wheel as his wife was thrown backwards.
Her feet smashed through the windscreen.
The little girl was thrown towards her mother and almost hit her.
The child remained in the backseat, saved by her safety belt, which restrained her. The vehicle was almost instantly immobilized.
***
Unconscious
Silence had arrived, finally.
The three of them were now unconscious, and many minutes passed by. As the evening approached, the wood started to become dark.
The little red-haired girl was suddenly awakened by a noise. She lifted her head laboriously and, slowly, tentatively, opened her eyes. There was a kind of mist in front of the car, and she only could guess the origin of the sound. It was a hiss coming out of the engine; the radiator probably broken. Water vapor was escaping and making the hissing noise which had awakened her. A kind of mist was accumulating in front of the car, over the hood, between the windshield and the tree.
She looked at her parents. Her father was still sitting, his head down, apparently unconscious in the driver’s seat. Looking to the right, she saw that her mother was also unconscious, still lying on her stomach over the tilted back of the passenger’s seat, her head, near the child's knees. The woman had fallen in an almost horizontal position, because of the shock provoked by the collision.
Neither of them moved…
The little girl began to be inundated with fearful thoughts. They don’t move… are they both dead? Am I… completely alone now?
She tried to repel these depressing thoughts, trying to restore hope in herself, but these same bad thoughts came back, nagging at her. Stress and sadness invaded her mind as many more minutes passed by. The girl decided that she had to do something.
She tried to unfasten her seatbelt, but it was useless. It was stuck.
She had to get closer to her parents so she could at least examine them.
Know if they are...
She closed her eyes, shaking her head while fighting the thought of having lost her parents. The brisk movement gave her a sudden headache. She tried to not pay attention to the noise of the vapor escaping the radiator.
It's only a nightmare... I'm going to awaken in my bed, at home, intown, without zombies… I'll not be starving and dying here...Dad andMom will be at home, and I’ll eat my breakfast with them...
She heard a groan of pain. The girl was startled, as if she had received an electric shock. She opened her eyes and saw her father's head move, slowly, in the driver's seat in front of her.
He moaned again, and looking on his side, he saw his wife slumped on the passenger's seat, near him. His eyes red and crying, he hadn't seen that his daughter was now trying to awake the red-headedwoman by shaking one of her shoulders.
"Mom!"
Her voice helped the woman in her thirties to awaken completely, startling her, making her father turn around and, when seeing her alive, smile at her. The woman looked back at her daughter. After many seconds, which seemed to the child to take centuries, the woman murmured, with some difficulty, "Honey... You OK?"
The girl nodded affirmatively while smiling to her mother, who smiled back at her, slowly turning her head toward her companion at the same time.
The woman’s smile vanished when she looked at him, opening her eyes wide. She slowly approached him, seemingly horrified.
The girl was intrigued, and, curious, decided to fight again with her safety belt in order to free herself. After another effort, she at last unfastened it. She quit the backseat, a rather small bag hanging from her shoulder.
She crawled, her body aching, toward her mother, who was concentrated on her father. When she arrived at her level, turning her head toward her father, the sad woman was surprised by her approach and shouted at her, "No, don't look!"
It was too late…
The little girl opened surprised eyes, and almost immediately disgust made her vomit on the carpet of the car.
She had seen that her father's thoracic cage had been caved in by the steering wheel. Some of his broken ribs were visible, protruding through his blood tainted T-shirt.
"Dad!" she shouted, and she was then blinded by the hand of her crying mother, who didn't want her to see anymore. Her father moaned again, weaker this time. Finally, she murmured, "I'm so sorry you saw that, honey."
Her husband coughed some blood, all of a sudden, adding more over his already red-tainted T-shirt. His wife, keeping now their child's face against her chest, was startled and made a disgusted face, while watching all the blood pour out of his mouth.
He began to move spasmodically.
He seemed to... laugh? An almost silent, discreet laugh, but nonetheless a laugh...
The wounded man croaked, "It’s so... so laudable..."
His wife and his daughter, who tried to only watch his facial features, which were hardened by pain, were astonished by the laugh, despite the fact that it was mixed with coughed blood. He continued, trying very hard to smile, "Since we've been together, Jessie, you always told me my taste for vintage cars was expensive, and useless..."
He stopped speaking, swallowing a mix of saliva and blood, winced, and closed his eyes.
Time passed and then he reopened them and added, watching his wife with blood-stained eyes, “If I would've listened to you, I may have bought a recent vehicle with airbags. This..." he peeked at his chest in which the wheel had seemed to seek refuge, "... this never would have happened..."
He began to laugh again, but quickly coughed a lot more blood, again, on his T-shirt and his blue jeans.
His daughter and wife watched this scene with a mix of disgust and sadness, both unable to talk. The man stopped to literally vomit blood on the dashboard. After a few seconds, he got his breath back, not without some difficulty.
The young woman decided to react and, bending down, took out of the glove box a little medicine chest. She opened the chest with a red cross on it and took out a syringe, and murmured, “I kept that for later, just in case… and this is a good case…”
She removed the thin plastic cap which was covering the needle and planted it in one of the veins of her husband’s right forearm. The sting made him shiver and moan, but quickly, while she was injecting the morphine, his face relaxed.
She extracted the needle and he sighed heavily, smiling slightly while looking at her, and he murmured, “Thank you, honey, I feel better…”
“You’re welcome… it’s the only thing I can do for you…”
"My preferred nurse now that I'm done, huh?"
Silence came back, many seconds passing by. Finally, his wife resumed, trying to look him in the eyes, "I'm... I'm so sorry, Ron..."
He sketched another timid smile, whispering now, "It's not your fault, I'm such a bad driver...". He smiled slightly, the very powerful drug inundating his organism.
Suddenly he became silent.
The two others waited, very attentive. Finally, his wife couldn’t wait anymore.
"What?"
"I thought I had heard something... something weird..."he answered, frowning.
The window near him was suddenly smashed. In an apocalyptic crash of broken glass, pieces flew toward the left part of his face, the woman and the girl on his side turning their heads away.
They all three screamed because of the surprise, and again when two rotten hands grabbed the driver and dragged him toward the broken window. Loud grunts could be heard...
Despite the pain he felt, the father resisted, helped in this by his security belt, which he hadn't unfastened, and held him in his driver's seat. He shouted to his wife, "Give you-know-what to me, quick!"
She plunged toward the glove box and opened it, getting out a relatively small gun, while her husband, continuing to resist, extended his right hand.
His eyes widened when he saw that she was aiming the gun at the face of a long-haired undead, which was trying to go through the breach in the window. Its skin was so rotten that it was almost dark, and its disgusting, stinking smell literally invaded their nostrils. Its neck scratched on the sharp edges around the breach. This wounded the thing, and made dark blood trickle down on what remained of the window, and finally on the interior side of the car door.
His wife pulled the trigger.
The shot made a hole exactly in the middle of the thing’s forehead. It opened wide, surprised, reddish eyes. Its hea
d tilted back and its hands became soft, releasing the driver.
The creature finally fell back on the ground, and the scene which had been hidden by its standing body was suddenly shown through the breach in the window.
And the scene really wasn't reassuring at all for the three humans…
Seeing them through the breach too, now that the first zombie had fallen on the ground, a bunch of zombies was watching the family, a dozen meters away.
They reacted instinctively. They began to walk more than they ran, awkwardly, toward the broken window.
They roared like animals, opening huge mouths, so huge that they were distorted in an abnormal, horrible way, watching them with an avid gaze.
***
Attacked
The driver turned his head and looked at his wife and kid, who were horrified, and he croaked, "Flee…"
The mother hesitated, maintaining their daughter near her, both watching alternatively the horrible creatures approaching, and the face of her deadly wounded husband.
Finally, anger appeared on his face, and he shouted with a powerful voice, "Get out, and run!"
His head bowed and he closed his eyes. He seemed to have become unconscious because of the effort which had been needed by his shouting.
Shaken by the imperative tone of his voice, the red-haired woman pressed the handle of the right door car down, half opening it.
The little girl cried, "Daddy!” resisting the pull of her mother who, crying too, murmured, "We must go out, honey..." her hand resting on the handle of the door, which was ajar.
A bony hand seized from outside her wrist. The mother screamed and, surprised, dropped unintentionally the gun near the hand brake.
The girl's father was awakened. He was already touched by the hands of the [D10] zombies. These were now standing in mass on the other side of the car door, looking at him with some kind of appetite visible in their normally empty eyes.
Turning his head to look at his wife, he saw that the wrist of her exterior hand was caught by the skeleton-like hand, and that she couldn't get free of its grip.