Time of Zombies (Book 2): The Zombie Hunter's Wife (10 page)

Teddy stared as Michelle stirred. 
Her eyes opened and she smiled at him. She raised a hand and ran her fingertips
down his cheek. His gaze raked her body. A rosy blush covered her face and
chest.

“Quit staring at me, Teddy
Ridgewood. Teddy? Is your name really Teddy? All I can think of is a teddy
bear.” Her gaze traveled over him. “And you are no teddy bear.”

“My parents, in their infinite stupidity,
God rest their souls, named me Theodolphus. Teddy seemed an easier choice.”

“What about Theo?”

He twitched like a goose walked over
his grave as her mom used to be fond of saying. “I had a drunken Uncle Theo. No
thank you.”

She laughed and looked up at him as
voices rose outside the motor home. It sounded like a crowd was gathered on the
other side of the thin aluminum shell.

“Don’t worry about it. If it was
important, one of the boys would be here.” As if she’d conjured them up with
magic, a pounding rattled the door and a young voice yelled from outside.

“Mom, you and Mr. Teddy need to come
out here right now, ‘fore someone gets hurt.”

He stared at the door and back to
Michelle as she started whipping on clothes. “How did Bryant know I’m in here?”

She laughed as she sat down to pull
on shoes. “There is nothing that goes on in this place that the Rogue Vantage
doesn’t know about it.”

She opened the door with Teddy at
her back. A circle of people filled the area by the picnic tables. A very
pregnant Beth and Jed stood in the center. The girl held a knife out toward the
radio operator.

“You have to do it. You promised.” Her
scream carried throughout the yard.

Rules #8   Never say
the zombie
apocalypse can’t get any worse—because it can. And it will. Then it will be
worse than that. Evil has no plateau.

"Beth, don't do this," Jed
begged the young pregnant girl, his hands outreached.

Her father inched toward her, but a
shake of the head from Jed stopped him in his tracks. The man clenched his
fists at his sides, his body shaking.

"I told you I would take care
of you and the baby."

Her voice rose and carried over the
silent crowd. "This baby was made in sin. I won't give birth in sin. You
have to claim me as your wife. I won't be a whore."

Jed stood tall and advanced on her.
"You are not a whore. Don't say that. Nick loved you and you loved him.
You told me so. This baby was made in love. There is nothing to be ashamed
of."

The mother-to-be stopped him with
the point of the knife to his chest. Her hand trembled as the blade shook and
ripped his shirt. The sound of tearing fabric was as loud as the snap of canvas
in a hurricane in the silence the camp had become.

"Claim me, please. Make me submissive
and pure." Her hand reached and pulled her headscarf off. A long braid of
shining brown hair fell to her shoulder. She pulled on it and tried to force
him to take it.

His hand closed over Beth's and
pried the knife from her. He handed it to her father as her eyes rolled back in
her head and she collapsed.

Jed caught her before she could hit
the ground.

Her gut-wrenching screams filled the
air as her body convulsed. Blood and her amniotic fluids gushed down her legs.
The coppery scent flooded the senses as the wetness splashed on her and Jed's
legs and formed a puddle on the ground.

Michelle turned to Teddy. "I
have to help."

"Of course you do," he
said, squeezing her shoulder. "Just know it probably ain't gonna end
well."

She sighed, staring at him. "I
know."

Proving he was stronger than he looked,
Jed lifted Beth's limp body into his arms and headed to Jim's motorhome.
Shannon ran ahead of him and held the door open.

She came up to the vehicle to find
Emily arguing with the doctor.

"I'm perfectly fine. I want to
help."

The tall blonde shook her head.
"This is going to be bad. The baby isn't due for four to six weeks as far
as I've been able to tell." She looked around the RV yard. "This
isn't a medical center here. With your fertility history, I'm doing this for
your own good. You want to do something? Get these people away from here."

Michelle squeezed Emily's hand,
released it, and looked up at Shannon. "Can I help?"

The doctor moved out of the doorway
and let her in. She heard her friend huff out a breath and the stomp of her
boots as she herded the onlookers away from the motor home with a deep, gruff
voice.

The stench of blood and Beth's
screams filled the small space. Jim sat in a chair with a lost look on his
face. Shannon touched his cheek before she rushed by to the bedroom, Michelle followed
in her wake.

The young girl writhed on the bed,
the covers tossed and bloodstained. Jed tried to talk to her, but she turned
her face away. The doctor grabbed his shoulders and pulled him away. "Let
me deal with this. You go look after Jim for me. I'll yell if we need
anything."

As soon as the young man left,
Shannon turned to her. "Help me get her clothes off so I can see what we
have."

Her stomach roiled and bile rose in
her throat as they managed to get Beth's ruined underwear off. She hiked up the
girl’s dress and helped Shannon pry her thighs apart. Beth’s screams had dialed
down to hoarse whimpers. Her head tossed back and forth, her hair tangled
across her face, loosened from its braid.

"I can't have this baby. I
can't. I'm not claimed. I'm dirty."

"What is she talking
about," she asked Shannon. "Jed loves her. I can tell. He's going to
marry her, isn't he?"

A flash of disgust rolled across the
doctor's face, worse than any she’d ever seen on Shannon’s face.

"Oh, Jed wants to marry her all
right. As soon as the baby was born, from what I hear and he told Jim."

Shannon reached to examine Beth and
Michelle stared off across the room, afraid to look at the young girl’s bloody
thighs.

"But?"

"But she's got some stupid
notion that she has to be 'claimed.'  That she won't be pure until she is submissive
and a wife, just like those nutjobs at the church. You saw their women, right?
You think they cut their hair off themselves, like some modern day ritual of
the Orthodox Church from the ancient past. Hell, no. That's how the men 'claim'
them. At least that's what Beth told me and Jim one day after she'd been to see
Reverend Billy Joe Bennett. They marked them by cutting off their hair."

Shannon sat up and wiped her hands
on the covers. "Tell Jed and Jim to boil water and find me as many towels
and blankets as possible. She's dilated. This baby is coming today, whether it
is time or not."

Michelle left the room and got the
pot of water going. She sent Jed to get towels and set Jim to watching the
water. She took a deep breath and returned to the bedroom. Beth sat up on her
elbows and strained, her face red and covered in sweat. Her lip bled where
she’d bit through it.

Michelle went to the head of the bed
and placed herself behind Beth, supporting her shoulders and giving her
something to lean on. The girl collapsed back and panted in gulps. Her crying
brought tears to Michelle's eyes. All this effort in what would almost
certainly be a lost cause. Was this what Emily had felt every time she'd
thought she was pregnant and she wasn't or she lost the baby after only
dreaming of it for days or a week or two? Poor Beth had seven months to think
and dream of a baby.

She stepped away from thoughts of
babies and dreams and futures. All there was, was now. This just highlighted
the point. Beth cried out as her stomach stretched and moved, pressure from
hands and feet appearing on the taut skin. She moved and pushed the girl up
higher.

"Push, Beth," Shannon
yelled from between the girl's legs. "Just a little bit more."

Beth groaned, her fingers grabbing
into the covers. Her screams echoed in the little room as a gush of blood
proceeded the baby. Shannon worked to pull the baby the rest of the way out.
Stark silence filled the room.

"Why isn't it making any noise?
Let me see my baby." Beth cried as she tried to reach for what Shannon
held in her hands.

Michelle forced herself to look. She
girded herself to look at the blue, lifeless body of a baby born before its
time. But she gasped and choked gagged at the gray thing in the doctor's hands.
It lay there motionless, and then twitched, its eyes opening, opaque and dead.

"Oh, hell no," Shannon
whispered. "Michelle, hand me your knife. Now."

"No, don't hurt him. He's
resurrected," Beth cooed and smiled.

The hair rose on her arms as she
reached for the knife in her boot. She handed it to Shannon and wrapped her
arms around Beth. The girl thrashed and tried to reach for the thing she’d
birthed, but Michelle was stronger than Beth, especially in her weakened
condition.

Shannon removed her shoelace and
tied off the umbilical cord. She reached and cut it a few inches from the
stomach of the abomination on the bed. She placed it to the side, and worked to
take care of Beth.

By the time she finished and gave
Beth a shot from her medical bag the infant skinbag bled out and lay truly dead
on the stained and soiled covers.

She turned away as Shannon used the
knife on the tiny skull to be sure. Michelle gagged and swallowed against her
stomach rising to her throat.

The room looked like a battlefield
and maybe it had been with the bloody sheets and the dead thing on the bed.
Michelle got up and reached for the doorknob.

"Michelle, tell Jim and Jed the
baby was too soon. Okay?"

She nodded. "Of course."

Because what else could she say? We're not going
to hell. We're already there
.

Michelle plodded down the stairs from
the motor home like a million pounds sat on her shoulders. The bloody, lumpy
blanket she held in her arms said it all. Her red-rimmed eyes looked up at him
and Teddy wanted to take all that weight off her shoulders and his heart ached
with knowing he couldn’t. He didn’t care what anyone said. Women were the
stronger sex, they had to be. How else could they keep getting pregnant and
having babies?

“It was still-born. Can you ... you
get rid of it, please?”

He took the bundle with all the care
he would have given a newborn baby. His natural curiosity rose as he cradled it
in his arms.

Why hadn’t she said he or she or
even, the baby?

“Don’t ask,” she said, her eyes
refusing to meet his.

“It will be okay,” he whispered,
wanting to hold her instead of the bloody bundle.

“I’m not so sure,” she muttered as
she turned and walked back to the motor home. Several people opened a walkway
and gave her a wide berth.

At the click of the door, Teddy
hefted the tiny load and headed out to the gate and the field across the road.
He plodded along until the boys of Rogue Vantage met him at the gate. He shook
his head as they tried to exit the yard with him.

“Not today, boys. You don’t need to
be seeing this.”

“We can watch your back,” Aiden and
Bryant piped up.

He gave them a weak smile. “You
watch from the gate, just in case. Give a holler if you see anything.”

Trudging across the asphalt his gaze
swept over the tidy field with its collection of makeshift memorials and
crosses. Not a lot, but still too many. The first row contained the parents of
the boys watching his back. Commander Canida told him of finding the little
ones the only living beings in the yard. The bodies of their parents and the
other grown-ups had been too heavy for the children to move and the skinbags
had made it too dangerous for them to dig graves.

The next section held four graves of
people with injuries that in the before Z time would have needed a shot of
antibiotics and rest to cure. He scuffed his feet in the dirt as he passed the
next section with three graves of the elderly who’d died in their sleep and
needed to be put down after the turn.

He trudged along until he reached
the empty section with a grave already dug, with Jed standing by its side.
Teddy stopped and gripped the bundle tighter. “You don’t need to be here, bro.”

Jed’s hands gripped the handle of
the shovel until his knuckles stood out against his pale skin.  “Yes, I do. I
let Beth down. I should have seen it coming.”

He knelt beside the grave and slowly
lowered the blanket-wrapped bundle into the ground. His vision blurred with
wetness as he stood and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Can you say a few words?” Jed
blurted out, the tears rolling down his face.

“I’m no minister or pastor,” Teddy
started.

“To hell with them all,” Jed said,
his eyes narrowing and his lips thinning.

“Okay, then,” he began, lowering his
head. “Lord, please talk this baby into your arms and keep it safe in your love
and protection. Amen.”

“Amen,” Jed echoed, taking his
glasses off and wiping his face with his sleeve.

Teddy reached for and took the
shovel, scooping up the dirt of the field and filling the small grave with
three or four shovelfuls. He leaned on the tool as Jed squatted down and picked
up the tiny cross he’d made of two pieces of wood nailed together. Colorful
ribbons criss-crossed and wrapped around it.

Teddy read
Baby Evans-Cruz
as
Jed hammered it into the ground at the top of the mound of freshly turned dirt.