Ally and the dearly damned Read online

  Ally and the dearly damned

  Nick Keller

  ian cannon

  First published 2018

  By NKBooks

  DFW, TX, U.S.A.

  All Rights Reserved

  © Copyright 2018

  www.NickKellerBooks.com

  www.IanCannonBooks.com

  This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author or authors, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition being imposed on the publisher or subsequent purchaser.

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  Contents

  1. Sperm

  2. Egg

  3. Breath of God

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  About the Author

  Here’s what Ian Cannon is up to

  “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.”

  William Congreve, The Morning Bride

  Sperm

  The one time they’d ever made love, it wasn’t really like making love at all. At least not in the way Ally had always envisioned. It was ruthless and clumsy, thrilling and full of panic, yet in a fundamentally organic way, it was also surprisingly seasoned, as if their bodies were, for the first time, expressing a deep, human understanding.

  There were marks on her body that would last for days, subcutaneous bruising left in the wake of all his clawing and gripping. She didn’t mind the bruising. In fact it filled her with a sense of erotic, egotism. Those marks were evidence of his desire for her, badges of a rooted sexual appetite that only she could quench for him. Love, she thought. It just hurt sometimes. Leaves one bruised and sore.

  And now she had to accept that he was gone. They had taken him. The Damned. They shredded him into taco meat…

  With their clawing and gripping.

  She cried profusely, howling with panic. Her hands were like vices squeezing down on the steering wheel, and the world zipped by at the speed of her new, unbridled terror. “Benny, no! Ben-nee-he-he!” she blathered.

  In her frantic escape from the house she’d grown up in, and from the parents who’d raised her, she had bumped the car radio. It turned on as she went peeling out of the driveway. Its auto search function siphoned through the entire FM band, one radio station after the other. It was all static. Everything was dead. Ally hardly registered this fact through her panic, until the search function slipped into the AM band and stopped at 8710, the bottom of the broadcast spectrum, at the one station still broadcasting. There was a human voice coming through that sounded almost as terrified as her.

  She stood on the brake pedal with both feet locking the donut tires of Benny’s Corolla and chucking everything inside the car forward, herself included. The car came to a stop, which rocked her back into the seat, and she sat there in silence, just breathing, trying to wrestle back her fear.

  This is what she heard over the radio through youthful, terror-bloated words: “… get here fast, as fast as you can. Anyone. Just get here. Repeat, repeat. If there’s anyone hearing this, we’re at Mountain View Junior College. All of us, er, a group of us. We, uh—we don’t know what’s happened. We just, oh God, we came here. If you can hear this, just make it here. Bring what you can. Weapons. Bring weapons. Guns, whatever. Food. Bring food. Whatever you can. Just… if you’re out there, if you’re still with us, then get to the junior college.”

  Ally’s horror filled her up, spilled out of her eyes and she screamed out in a terrible, baby screech of horror, “What is going ON!”

  Her answer came from behind, outside the car. A voice boomed, “Living girrrrrl!”

  She spun around and there was a man running toward her. Everything about him was wrong. His limbs didn’t move properly. He seemed drunken and cantankerous, yet he came at her with surprising speed, swinging a limp puppy in one hand back and forth. And the look in his eyes showed an intention that was outpacing his feet. There was death in those eyes.

  Ally screamed, turned, stomped on the gas, and hauled ass as fast as Benny’s four-banger engine could go. When she looked up, there was that man fading away in the rearview mirror in a cloud of her dust. She wouldn’t stop crying until she got to the junior college.

  Others came. They sprinkled in for days looking frazzled and hopeless, survivors of that awful day. Nearly six hundred arrived in all. A few brought foodstuffs. Some brought weapons, mostly handguns and hunting rifles. There were even a dozen or so military personnel that arrived with automatic weapons, including an M-60 machine gun on a tripod from the nearby base, which had been overrun.

  No one knew what to call them, the people outside. The world, it seemed, had been turned into a horde of mumbling drunkards. They shambled around pointlessly without any sense of order, only becoming motivated upon the sight of an unaffected human. And that was usually when the frenzy started. It was as if they were damned to exist in a state of perpetual sleep, animated, but unliving. They came to be known as the Damned.

  Together, the survivors turned that college campus into a fortified compound, or as fortified as their resources allowed. Within a few days they had 24-hour sentries posted above the north and south complexes, which were joined by a skywalk tunnel, an elevated passage way that extended over the beautifully manicured outdoor student rec area. It was decided to position the M-60 machine gun at the north end of the skywalk. In the event of an invasion from the Damned, the humans would evacuate toward the north complex and bottleneck their enemy in the skywalk where, whomever’s duty it was to plow into them, would do so. No one hoped for that day, but in the event that it did happen, each man knew spraying without abandon into hordes of attacking Damned with 180 rounds of pure-steaming-lead-a-minute, would be a goddamn, bloodletting, hardon-of-a-joy—the wet dream of death. Especially after that day in September.

  A leadership council was devised for the community, living arrangements set up, resources secured. Within two weeks, the lonely little community that had trapped itself inside the junior college was like a tiny nation, a well-oiled machine with each person handed daily tasks to carry out from laundry duty, conducting the chow lines, day care for the sixty-some-odd kids who were lucky enough to make it in the arms of parents or strangers, equipment and supplies handling, campus maintenance, etc.

  And then the day came where the overall feeling was to simply exist and wait.

  Ally stared at Door 13B. She hated that door. She hated what was on the other side of it. Her pulse quickened, the heart under her chest pounding like a V-8 engine. The door lever glinted at her as if calling her attention to what was inside that room. It made her shiver. A rape of the human form was in that place. Yet something inside her needed to see it. It yearned to understand. She extended a hand for the door handle, as she had so many times before, in an attempt to scratch an itch she couldn’t reach deep inside herself. But she didn’t open the door. She never had, and she never would. This she knew. She drew her hand slowly back.

  From down the hall, she sensed Kerry and Munica approach. Their pacing slowed and they flanked her, one to each side. The three girls stood in silence for a moment staring at 13B, each of them sharing a universal thought. The thing in there represented this new, frightening reality they lived in, and though the girls had not known each other eight weeks ago, they were sisters surviving in the world of the Da
mned now.

  Kerry broke the silence, “Our sentries say they’re changing into something else. They say those things don’t look like people anymore. They say they’ve changed, or something.”

  Ally didn’t respond, just pondered the thing on the other side of the door.

  “Have you ever seen one of them, Ally?” Kerry asked.

  Ally broke away with an angry notion and started down the hall. The others followed keeping up. They rounded the corner into the history wing of the junior college. Eclectic decorations adorned the halls—paintings of past events, replicas of art from multiple eras in human history.

  Kerry said, “They also say we’re running out of food. They say we’re going to start sending out food parties at night.”

  “Night,” Munica said, her youthful chicana accent noticeable under an English surface. “That’s loco, chica.”

  “What’s it matter?” Ally grumbled.

  The other two eyeballed each other, shrugged. Only humans were afraid of the night, but those things out there—they were impervious to the hours of day. Light. Dark. It didn’t matter to them. Humans tended to tear apart at any time of day.

  “Besides,” Ally continued, “if they’re putting together a search party, I hope they take me with them.”

  “What, why?” Kerry gasped.

  Ally never halted her stride, never spoke beyond a neutral level, just said, “Because I hate them. I want to kill them.”

  Munica spun on Ally with a hand at her chest and cried, “Ally!” They each stopped, looking into the other. “That’s suicide, girl. Totalmente loco, chica!”

  Ally offered a humorless grunt and broke away, moving toward a replica statue of a Samurai warrior, one of the history wing’s proudest decorations. It stood under a cone of display light. It looked strong and unafraid with its ornate armor gleaming under a high, bone sheen and its dual Katana swords sheathed in an X across its back. Next to it was the outfit of a tenth century Irish highlander with a burlap quilt and double-handed Claymore. Across the hall was a medieval suit of armor and a Union soldier. Ally could hear them whisper to her if she listened hard enough, saying sweet warrior-things in her mind.

  She turned to Munica and sneered, “So what if it’s suicide?”

  Munica dropped her head with irreverence and said, “You got that baby in you, girl.”

  Ally looked left, then right. “Shhh, Munica!”

  “They gonna find out, Ally. Can’t hide it forever. You got knocked up, girl. Your belly’s gonna get grande big, chica.”

  Ally just turned and walked off. Munica and Kerry exchanged a weary look and followed their friend into the skywalk.

  They reported to their co-leader, a forty-four year old survivor who, eight weeks ago, looked much younger than his true age, but now appeared to be sixty. Leadership had taken its toll on him. But so had his wife and daughter. They had tried to eat his face off that day in September when he returned home from a deep sea fishing trip with his buddies.

  He read off a list on a clipboard. “Munica and Kerry, we need you both in the laundry room today.”

  “Fun,” Munica said getting a sideways grimace from the group leader. Kerry elbowed her sharply. Munica cleared her throat and forced a smile. “Sure thing, Mr. Group Leader.”

  “Mm-hmm,” he grumbled, and the girls were off saying to Ally, “See you later...”

  The group leader rubbed his face and said, “I know you like keeping busy, Ally, but I’m sorry to say, you have a task pass today.”

  “Why?” she asked, disappointed. “I don’t want a task pass, Group Leader.”

  “Dr. Kinder wants to see you.”

  Ally forced a nervous swallow. “Dr. Kinder?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why Dr. Kinder?”

  Group Leader looked at her with stoic, questioning eyes. “His orders. No arguing this time.”

  She put her head down and murmured, “Okay.”

  Ally could see through the glass partition and into the college’s student clinic area. Dr. Kinder was dressed in street clothes, at least his version of them. Khaki Dockers, an untucked Oxford style button down, white sneakers. He wore whatever clothes he had when he arrived at the college those weeks ago after fleeing from his neighbors. That’s how it was in those first few days, people scattering from the newly-infected to avoid being eaten.

  Dr. Kinder invited her forward; the look on his face was one of hidden awareness. He knew something, and she looked at him skeptically.

  Two other men were in the room, both Ally had seen multiple times here at the college, but neither of whom she had ever spoken to.

  “Ally,” Dr. Kinder said motioning to one of them. “You know Roy Stanton.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ally said sheepishly.

  Roy Stanton was a handsome man in a fatherly way, stoic but smiling, eyes never wavering from the sight of her. He looked at her in a professional, curious way.

  “And this is Sergeant Oleman, one of our resident military leaders. We’re very fortunate to have him.”

  She nodded to the sergeant. He reminded her of what armadillos might look like if they had human relatives, short, broad, very serious. Oleman responded in kind, offering a nod, as if he were greeting a commanding officer in an interrogation setting.

  Dr. Kinder looked at her and sighed. “You know you’re very important to this community, Ally. Every person is. Every person holds a human value now that is even greater than it was… before.”

  Before: The period of time existing prior, and leading up, to the day the world changed, leaving only a scant few survivors with their heavenly souls intact. That word, before, now held an overwhelming sense of painful and bitter reflection.

  Ally muttered, “I guess.”

  He cocked his head knowingly, and said, “Why haven’t you told us about baby?”

  Her hand went instinctively to her belly. There were no signs yet of a pregnancy, except for the nausea and morning sickness that had plagued her in the early days. She had hid it well, hoping with all her shame that there was no problem. But the truth was out now. Her head dropped and the sudden urge to cry took her. “I don’t know.”

  Dr. Kinder stepped forward and pulled her into a hug. “Shh, shh. We’re not here to judge you, Ally. We’re here to protect you, to love you. We’re all family here, now. And that little baby inside you, he or she, will be the biggest part of that family.” He held her at arm’s length, their eyes meeting deeply. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. But we do have to discuss it, okay? You’re one of four pregnant women who’ve come here. Did you know that?”

  She wiped her eyes, sniffled. It was a quick cry, but it was fading now. “Yeah, I knew there were others. They… they show.”

  “That’s right. But you’re the youngest, by far. Your age alone puts you at greater risk, Ally.”

  Her skin chilled. “Is my baby okay?”

  Dr. Kinder asked, “Have you had any episodes?”

  “Mmm. Morning sickness.”

  “That’s perfectly normal. Any discomfort or pain?”

  She shrugged. “Just morning sickness.”

  The doctor grinned at that, but continued, “Any spotting, Ally?”

  She flinched back. “Spotting?”

  “Bleeding. Maybe on the bed sheets, or your clothes?”

  She shook her head, no.

  Dr. Kinder gave her a look that was full of surety. It comforted her. “Okay, well that’s good. I want to give you a full checkup, though, and I will regulate your diet myself. Any tobacco or alcohol, Ally?”

  “I don’t like that stuff.”

  “Good. Excellent. Also, I understand you’re a gymnast, is that right?” he asked.

  Her gaze drifted away sadly, and she said, “I was.”

  “No, Ally. You are,” he said sharply. “We cannot become something less than what we were… before. Have you stopped exercising?”

  Ally shrugged her little shoulders. “I guess. Don’t have the ti
me.”

  “You do now. We’re taking you off the daily task list, altogether.”

  “But, Doctor…”

  “No arguing, Ally. You have a task now that’s far more important than cleaning pots and pans. You’re going to be a mother. It’s as simple as that. That, my dear, is your daily task. Do you understand?”

  She capitulated muttering, “I guess.”

  “Good. Also, I think it would be wise to continue with your gymnastics. I’m not talking about training, Ally. No high bars or balance beams, nothing that strenuous. But stretching, calisthenics, breathing exercises, things of that nature. I want you to continue doing them, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, I’m in charge of your physical well-being, and keeping you fit and healthy to deliver a perfect baby in, I’d say, about seven months is what I intend to do. However, we also want to look after your mental and psychological well-being, too.”

  Roy Stanton stepped forward. He was smiling the way Dr. Kinder had, and for the first time, Ally began to understand that a pregnant girl, even a teenager, represented something far more than an illegitimate womb carrying a bastard. Ally had somehow, all things considered, become a light of hope carrying the ember of mankind’s future inside her.

  “I’ve seen you,” Roy Stanton said. “Do you know what I do, Ally?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “I’m,” he gave a modest chuckle, “a man of God, Ally. I’m a preacher. Baptist. Or I was. Now I’m more nondenominational. I tend to harbor all faiths, these days, know what I mean? I’m someone you can talk to about anything at any time. Actually, I’ve seen you with your peer group, a few girls specifically.”