Once Bitten: Twice Mad

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen: I Don't Trust Them

April 1887

Evangeline watched her brother pacing the tiny interior of the cabin. He'd been doing so for an hour as he mumbled quietly to himself. Evangeline had tried to follow his words for a short while but had quickly given up. When Ox got caught up in one of these spells there was no following him and there was no calming him. It was how he dealt with things.

Pacing and mumbling.

They had been hidden in this cabin for days and days. Their food had run out. They had no weapons other than the unloaded rifle and a stick that Ox had crafted into a spear.

"We gotta get out of here, Evie." Ox stated simply as his pacing ceased and he looked at her for the first time in over an hour.

"Yes, Ox, we do." Evangeline agreed. "Is the horse still outside."

Ox nodded. "Yeah but it's hungry. There was a bit of oats in those saddlebags but not much else."

"Yeah well we are getting awfully hungry ourselves." Evangeline reminded him and as if in agreement, Ox's stomach rumbled.

"Shit, Evie, I just don't know which way we should go. Can't go home cuz them things were crawling everywhere and they were crawling all over town too!"

"I wonder if they are everywhere." Evangeline stated quietly and the siblings shared a look of horror.

"Reckon we could go to Aunt Rachel's?"

"Up in Tennessee?" Evangeline asked, scrunching up her forehead in a way that would have had her mother smacking her hand sharply and letting her know she'd get wrinkles. Thinking of her mother caused a sharp pang of pain to hit her heart so Evangeline forced the thoughts from her mind.

"Yeah!" OX said his voice becoming more animated. "Maybe there won't be none of those monsters there."

Evangeline had her doubts though she didn't voice them to her brother. She couldn't voice them. It was too horrible to imagine that this sickness was everywhere. To imagine that everyone in the world other than she and Ox were those flesh eating monsters.

"Ox we have to go to town before we can head that way." Evangeline warned. "That horse will not be able to carry both of us for very long and we are going to need better weapons." She glanced down at her stained nightdress and robe. She had worked hard to scrub the blood out of them but the faintest trace of that horrid substance still lingered. Her mother's blood.

"We can't go back to that town, Evie... Please...." Ox croaked and Evangeline saw the pain enter his green eyes.

"Is there another town close by?" Evageline offered, hating the sheltered life she'd lived in that plantation house and how it made her ignorant to the rest of the world.

Ox seemed to think hard for a moment and then he nodded enthusiastically. "Yep. Probably a day that way.' He pointed toward the corner of the cabin and Evangeline sighed.

"That's where we need to go then... With any luck we'll get there and things will be just the same as they have always been and this horrible nightmare will not have spread."

***

Ox knew his sister's hopes had been useless the moment they rode toward town and he saw the moaning, shuffling monsters wandering around the streets.

He heard Evangeline's gasp and followed her gaze to see a group of those monsters ripping apart the body of a woman who didn't appear to have been dead for very long.