Once Bitten: Twice Mad

Chapter Two: They're dead, they eat folks and ya shoot 'em in the head

              Frankie watched the man sleeping restlessly beside the small fire she’d built to try to keep him warm. What kind of man spent his nights fighting off the ‘rabid’ with a shovel while wearing nothing but a pair of trousers? Apparently this man. It didn’t seem he was going to wake any time soon and so Frankie let her mind wander.

                Born Frances Wynamier Valgred, Frankie had quickly doused her parent’s hopes that she would ever continue in her politician father and proper homemaker mother’s footprints. At the age of three she had killed her first squirrel with her hand made slingshot and had had it frying on her mother’s stove when the woman had come into the kitchen for tea with the other ladies from the garden club.  Then at age five she had been punished soundly when it was discovered that she had replaced her older brother’s coffee with ink and the ten year old had sported black teeth for a month.  At eight she’d been temporarily kicked out of school for sticking tacks on the schoolmarm’s chair and at nine she’d been kicked out permanently when she had knocked out the teeth of a boy much older than herself for making fun of her name.

                It was then that her parent’s had given up and sent her to live with her uncle. Uncle Gibbs had been different from her parents. He’d always been the black sheep and so Frankie fit in with him perfectly and he had understood her. As a matter of fact it was he that had given her the name Frankie after stating that it wasn’t right for a runt of a girl to have a name bigger than she was. Frankie had grumbled at being called a runt. She was five and half feet tall but no matter how much she ate she couldn’t gain weight. She had a thin, willowy frame that drove her crazy since people seemed to think that meant she was weak.  

                Uncle Gibbs had raised her right and while she wasn’t always the most honest of folks and she tended to have sticky fingers when the situation called for them, she knew how to take care of herself. That was why she’d survived so well when the ‘rabid’ had appeared.

                She’d been in New York City at the time, visiting mother and father dearest. They’d wanted to discuss her inheritance with her since she was now twenty-one years old. They had let her know she could have the ten thousand dollars upon her wedding day and she had laughed at them. Marriage and a wedding were something that Frankie had never wanted and hadn’t been able to see ever happening.

                The ‘rabid’ had been created in that city. A new drug, an elixir, said to cure all chances of the catching the fevers and illnesses that seemed to take so many lives so often, had had some unforeseen consequences.  Folks had been so eager for a ‘cure all’, a ‘miracle drug’, that they hadn’t paused to think that it sounded too good to be true.

                Her parents had taken the elixir as well, though Frankie had refused it. She wasn’t foolish enough to think that every sickness in the world could be cured and prevented by one drink of a thick, foul smelling elixir.

                That had been exactly one month ago and within a week every single person that had taken that elixir had changed. They had gone mad. Rabid. They only wanted to kill. They seemed to have no memories of their families or friends. Frankie had seen a mother turn on her own child and begin to chew the toddler’s cheek. Frankie had shot that mother but then had been forced to shoot the child as well when it had gone ‘rabid’ and attacked her.

                So Frankie had fled the city but the sickness had followed. It seemed that anytime a ‘rabid’ bit someone the sickness spread.

                A moan from the man beside the fire had Frankie jerking from her memories and coming back to the present. She didn’t like having a fire since the ‘rabid’ could smell the smoke and were sometimes drawn to it, but she figured with all the blood and death in the air around this strangers home, a small fire would more than likely remain unnoticed.