The New Night Novels (Book 1): Rippers: A New Night Novel (12 page)

     “Thinking it will makes me feel better about all of this since I saw…since yesterday.”

     Phoebe avoided looking in the play area out back. Leland noticed her hesitation and wished Jameson could be the one to do this with him. The teenaged girl was resilient, but her skin was ashen and her steps were unstable. Not only was she back in a nightmare, she’d been injured not long ago.

     “Let me go first, okay?” Leland said as he approached the door.

     Phoebe nodded and held back as Leland pulled the door open.

     The smell made them both jerk back. In the enclosed heat, the bodies Phoebe had covered had begun to decompose. The stench of meat left out and forgotten mingled with a visceral scent neither of them had ever encountered.

     The worst thing Leland could compare the powerful stench with was the dead dog he’d had to move away from his aunt’s mailbox two summers ago. And as a comparison, they were nowhere near the same level.

     “You can stay out here,” Leland suggested.

     Phoebe covered her face with the top part of her shirt. She grimaced and said, “Don’t be stupid. I can find the appointment book a lot quicker than me telling you places I think it might be. Come on.”

     Leland rolled his eyes and held open the door. “After you, then,” he mumbled.

     Phoebe took a deep breath of untainted air and stepped forward. Three steps into the daycare, she heard Leland follow.

     “Just stand watch here,” Phoebe suggested in a whisper. “I should be able to grab it quick and we can get going.”

     Leland stood near the door and kept it cracked. Getting some fresh air into the building would be helpful, he thought.

     Phoebe moved among the draped sheets and blankets she’d placed over the small, mangled bodies of the children she used to care for. She tried not to look at how the fabric molded to the misshapen forms beneath and instead focused on finding her mother’s appointment book.

     “Desk?” she asked herself in a whisper. She shuffled through some papers, opened the squeaky drawer. The appointment book wasn’t there.

     For a moment, Phoebe felt a shock of terror. Had it been in the van when it was stolen? No, she told herself. She’d seen her mother bring the book in and she hadn’t gone back out to her vehicle before she’d been killed.
     “So where did she leave it?” Phoebe muttered to herself.

     Before she moved to the shoe rack, where her mother sometimes dumped stuff if she was in a rush, Phoebe heard a thump from the back area.

     She jumped and skittered back toward the front door. When nothing came at her, she decided she’d heard either something from outside or her mind had played a trick on her. The sound had been muffled. Even if there wasn’t a direct threat, hearing anything made her think they needed to get a move on. The place wouldn’t stay empty forever.

     Phoebe made her way over to the shoe rack and saw her mother’s light jacket. When she’d opened the daycare at 6a.m., it had been chilly. Phoebe picked up the light gray coat and clutched it close to her.

     “Oh, Mom,” she whispered. Tears squeezed out of her eyes as she brought the fabric to her nose and inhaled the barest hint of her mother’s perfume.

     When she lifted her mother’s jacket, Phoebe saw the small black appointment book resting underneath. She picked it up and held that to her chest, as well. The last remnants she might ever have of her mother. She held them to her like the precious mementos they were.

     “Got it?” Leland asked as he approached.

     Before Phoebe could respond, a louder thump sounded from the back. Leland’s raised voice had caught the attention of whatever had made the noise the first time.

     Phoebe shushed him, but their presence had been made. The door to the closet in which she’d hidden with the children burst open. With a shrill wail, a noticeably infected man tumbled out.

     Phoebe screamed at his torn, bloodied appearance and stumbled back. “Get away!” she hollered as the Ripper came at her.

     Leland raised the metal baseball bat he’d taken from beneath the convenience store counter. As Phoebe ducked a swing from the attacking man, Leland put all his upper body strength into a swing of his own.

     He clipped the seemingly rabid man on the shoulder and spun him away, right back toward Phoebe.

     The man pounced; barely deterred at all by the solid blow Leland had landed on him.

     Phoebe shrieked and batted his hand away as he clawed his way toward her. Blood that had yet to dry soaked through the blankets Phoebe had used to cover the murdered children and drenched her pale blue leggings.

     The Ripper dragging himself toward Phoebe was missing an eye but the uninjured one was an unblemished, warm chocolate orb. Half of his shaggy blond hair had been torn from his head and several teeth had been knocked out in a previous struggle. Phoebe thought for some reason it’d be even worse to be torn into with the jagged remnants of his damaged teeth.

     “Leland!” Phoebe yelped as she scrambled backward. The room spun and only solidified when her back hit the far wall of the bedroom. She didn’t feel like she even had enough strength to stand when she needed to leap up and run away.

     Leland came up from behind the man and swung the baseball bat once more. He hit the Ripper square in the head with so much force the man’s face struck the wall beside the corner Phoebe had wedged herself into. Bones cracked and protruded from his torn cheeks. The previously undamaged eye collapsed under the viciousness of Leland’s swing.

     Thick, dark blood smeared against the wall. There was much less of the stuff than Phoebe anticipated there would be, and some of it seemed to be drying out. What slid from the wounds seems more like wet sand than blood.

     “Come on. We gotta get out of here.” Leland held out his hand to Phoebe to help her up.

     Phoebe stumbled but Leland steadied her. “I think I’m still a little woozy or whatever from the fall,” she admitted.

     “No, Leland, I don’t want to wait outside,” Leland mimicked Phoebe’s earlier protests about him entering alone. “It’ll just take longer if I stay out here and don’t go in to try and get my ass munched on.” 

     “No comment,” Phoebe muttered. “Let’s just get back to the others.”

     “Just follow my lead this time, okay?” Leland said in a kinder voice as they stepped into the parking lot.

     “Oh, no,” Phoebe said. There were three Rippers in the parking lot.

     Leland wore a determined expression. “They pulled the van right up to the door,” he pointed out. “Just get in where the kids are and climb into the back, okay? I’ll get in the driver’s seat and we’ll haul ass.”

     Phoebe nodded and clutched her mother’s jacket and book tighter. “We have what we need. Let’s go.”

     They both ran to their agreed upon doors. Though the Rippers saw them and began moving toward the vehicle, neither of them were in any danger from the slow-moving creatures.

     “The sun really drains them, doesn’t it?” Phoebe asked as she squeezed in between the kids. With the supplies on the floor, the fit was tight and uncomfortable. She was able to get in the back with Jameson without causing too many problems, especially seeing as there was one less child to maneuver around.

     “Yeah, lucky us,” Leland agreed as he gunned the van out of the daycare parking lot. Phoebe wished she could see it out of the tarp-covered windows. She was sure it would be the last time see would ever see it.

     “Not all of us,” Jameson commented as he huddled in the corner. The blanket sat close to him, just in case. “I already want the night back.”

PART III – SURVIVORS
Chapter Eighteen – No Rest for the Wicked

     The city had become an impassable, wreckage-filled hell after the first night of the Ripper incursion. Though it would take them hours out of their way, Jameson suggested going around the city.

     “We’ll have to avoid the freeways,” he said. “Regrettable, but you know they’re going to be even worse than the city. Everyone and their grandmother would have been trying to get away on the highways.”

     “If we see a clear stretch, we should try for it,” Leland commented in an off-handed tone. He was keen on keeping options open. “You know the area we’re trying for?” he asked Jameson.

     “Actually, yeah. You’re going to want to go through Cedarburg, then it’s a lot of hilly, rural area until you hit Alexander. A little while after that, there’s a tiny little place called Springfield that you’ll hit about an hour before Greenville, which is where the farm is. Greenville is bittier than Alexander. I think if you sneezed while driving through, you’d miss it. Good choice, Phoebe.”

     He’d hoped to get a smile out of the girl, but she’d fallen asleep again. He frowned at her, worried about the possibility of a more serious injury than they knew. If the fall had really hurt her by causing internal bleeding or damage to her brain, what could they do? She could be dying a slow, exhausting death without any of them being able to do anything about it.

     And what about Elise? She was only a month or two away from her due date. Without a doctor or a hospital, the process of giving birth was going to be incredibly difficult; more so than usual.

     Jameson sighed and adjusted his position in the back. There was no reason to worry about things he couldn’t change or help, especially when they weren’t an obvious problem yet. He’d have to take over driving when the night came, so he figured he should get some sleep.

     Even though Joselyn had told him he could operate with little sleep for an extended period of time, he just wanted to shut down his brain for a while. He didn’t want to think about crazy, cannibalistic infected people or the girl he might have seriously damaged. Nor did he want to entertain thoughts of Joselyn; the lover he’d lost, the maker who’d abandoned him in the first days of his new life. What had she died for? Jameson felt for the flash drive and found it still secure in his pocket. He hoped he’d be able to figure that out eventually. 

     Between Leland and Elise, they were able to drive for several hours. Even in the smaller towns, crashed vehicles sometimes made the passing of a large van like Elise’s impossible.

     Around 6p.m., they stopped to put gas in the van’s tank. When Leland stepped out to do the job, he noticed they were close to a freeway entrance.

     “It looks pretty clear,” he told Elise as he hopped back into the passenger seat. “I think we could risk it, seriously. Instead of driving through the boonies for another three hours, we could get on the freeway and cut that time down to a half hour.”

     “But what if we get stopped and have to turn around?” Elise worried.

     “We could do that through these small ass towns, too. Might as well do it somewhere we’ll move quicker.”

     Elise nodded and turned the vehicle toward the on-ramp. “They’ve been out a long time,” she remarked of Phoebe and Jameson. The kids were asleep again, as well. Elise envied them all.

     “He’s used to the nightlife and she’s still pretty messed up,” Leland said. “He can handle all the night driving if we need to go much longer, though.”

     Elise shivered. “I don’t want to be on the road all night again. Those things are horrible to watch prowling around, looking for anything they can destroy.”

     Leland agreed mentally but outwardly responded with only a shrug.

     The freeway was clear for the most part from the stretch visible to them. “If it stays like this, we should be golden,” Leland said as he smiled and leaned back. He couldn’t wait to get to the farm, or anywhere else they could be safe for a night. He wanted to stretch and actually relax for a while. A shower would be even better.

     Thirty minutes into the drive down the freeway, Carmen awoke with a thick, hoarse cry. In the back, Phoebe instantly shot up. She groggily reached for Carmen and patted the girl’s thick, dark hair.

     “Shh, honey.” Phoebe’s voice was almost as bad as Carmen’s.

     “Legs hurt,” the girl whined.

     Eli was awakened by Carmen’s voice. He groaned and rubbed at his eyes. “Momma?” he queried in a confused, desolate tone.

     Phoebe stroked his hair, as well. “Honey, we haven’t found your Momma yet. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

     “Feel bad,” Eli said. He began to cry and Phoebe’s face fell.

     Jameson sat up and put what he hoped was a calming hand on her shoulder.

     Phoebe sat back. She tried to gauge the time from the sky she could see out the windshield but all she could tell was it wasn’t quite full dark yet. The night was coming, though. She wanted to get out for a while before the world belonged to the Rippers again.

     “Can we find somewhere to stop?” she asked Elise. “I think the kids could use a stretch. I know I could.”

     She tried to work out the kinks in her back but didn’t have enough space in the back to do so.

     “There’s a rest area just up ahead,” Elise said. “I was thinking of stopping anyway. Now that everyone’s awake, it seems like a fine time for it.”

     “It’ll help everyone out,” Jameson agreed. “Leland, you and I should check it out first to make sure it’s safe. If there are too many cars, we shouldn’t stop.”