Notes from the Edge: Donita

Posted by Dell 01/16/2024

It’s Tuesday already, where in hell did Monday go. It seems as though
it arrived here way too fast, like I could have used a few extra
days, maybe a nine-day week… Will whoever is in charge of that take
care of it? Thanks…

This Week:

• I talked to Geo Dell, and we will tackle the Dreamers series together. But, because I don’t want to
  take time away from the the Zombie Plagues series, Amber Smith will take the lead with that. We hope to have the second book ready by March 1^st. She’s happy with it and I am too. It puts her foot in a door she wanted it to be in and it gives me some of my time back. She will be publishing some more short fiction soon. I’ve seen it and it’s good. Once you read it you will see how compatible our styles are and why I decided as I did for us to work closer together.
• The Zombie Plagues is now available in Paperback. It will be available on Amazon within the
  next week some time. It is also available digitally at Smashwords
• Dreamer’s Worlds book two is done. There should be no problem with the March 1st
  publishing date. That will be available in Paperback and Smashwords
  editions.
• The Zombie Plagues main site was updated to reflect the changes involved in moving the content.
• An Author site was added at Smashwords. Smashwords

This week I thought I would treat you to a little preview of a character you may not have met, if you have
not purchased and read the first books. She doesn’t come on the scene until the second book, but she is a major character from there on.
Meet Donita…

This Book Preview
is Copyright Dell Sweet 2024 all rights are reserved. It may not be reproduced by any means except short
references for review or critique.

Meet Donita

In the Dark

The cow turned her head towards the woods, nervous. Her large eyes
reflecting silver glints from the moonlight.

The smell of death and corruption was nothing new, and that was the smell
that came to her now. But there was something wrong with it.
Something not right with this smell. Something different. Her calf
nuzzled her and began to nurse. The smell of humans came to her along
with smoke and mumbled snatches of conversation and she stopped
thinking about the dead smell. Turned away from the woods and stared
at the firelight across the fields.

In the Trees

The eyes watched her and the other cows from the cover of the trees. The
hunger was terrible, all consuming, and it came in crashing waves.
The impulse to feed seemed to be the only coherent thought she had.
It was hard to think around, hard to think past.

A few weeks ago, she had been… Been? But it did no good, she could not
force the memory to come. A name came, Donita… she had been Donita,
she knew that, but that was all she knew. And a name was not
everything she had been. She had been something else… Something
more, but she could not get to whatever it was though. Something that
did not wander through the woods. Something that was not driven by all-consuming passions that she could not understand.

She turned her eyes up at the moon. It pulled at her. Something in it
spoke directly to something inside her. Something deep. Something she
believed had always been there but there had never been a need to
address because it lived under the surface. Out of her line of
thought. Below her emotions… Now it didn’t. Now it ruled
everything. It was all she could do not to rush from the trees and
find the smell that tempted her and consume it. Eat it completely.
Leave nothing at all. Oh, to do it… To do it…

Her eyes snapped back from the moon and a low whine escaped her throat.
The calf, sated, had wandered away from her mother. Behind her the
boy made a strangled noise in his throat. She turned, gnashed her
teeth and growled. The thin, skeletal boy fell back, hungry but
frightened. She could feel his fear. It fed her, tempted her to taste
him, but he was no food for her. She knew that much. It was a sort of
instinct… Drive… Something inside of her. The boy was not her
food. The boy was not her sustenance. He was one of her own.
Corrupted. And corrupted flesh could not feed and sustain itself on
corrupted flesh. Fresh flesh was needed, live flesh. Fresh Human
flesh, she corrected.

The boy trembled and grinned sickly, his one good eye rolling in his
head. The other eye was a ruined mass of gray pulp sagging from the
socket. A great flap of skin below that socket had curled and dried,
hanging from the cheek. He felt at it now, carefully, with his
shrunken fingers. She hissed at him, and his hands fell away. She
turned her attention back to the wandering calf that was nosing ever
closer to the edge of the trees.

She desired human flesh. She needed it, but it didn’t absolutely have to
be that way. Two nights ago, it had been a rabbit, the night before
that she and the boy had shared a rat. The night before that they had
come upon the old woman. She thought about the old woman as the calf
wandered ever closer to the line of trees. The old woman had been
good…

The old woman in the ditch

They had come across the old woman at near morning. Near morning was the
best she could do. Time was not a real concern to her anymore. She
understood near morning because the sickness, the sickness that began
to send the searing pain through her body, had started. The boy had
already been whining low in his throat for an hour. In pain. It was
like that whenever the night began to end. When the morning was on
the way. Soon to be.

She remembered sunlight. Her old self had needed sunlight just as she now
needed darkness. Absence of light. That had been Donita too, but a
different Donita.

They had been crossing the rock filled ditch to get to an old house on the
other side. The basement of the house was what she had in mind.
Quiet, private, darkness. She had been scrambling down the steep,
sandy side when the smell had slipped up her nose and froze her
brain.

That is the way she thought of it. Frozen. Everything… Everything besides that smell of flesh was frozen out. The boys whining, the
coming dawn, the constant hunger in her belly, the moon silvery and
bright so far up in the night sky. Nothing got by that desire, urge,
drive. It consumed her, and it had then. It had started with her
brain and then had spread out into her body. Her legs had stopped
moving and she had nearly tumbled all the way to the bottom of the rock-strewn ditch before she had caught herself, her head already
twisted in the direction of the smell. Her ears pricked, her tongue
lick licking at her peeled, dead lips.

She could smell the old woman. Knew that she was an old woman. It
was in the smell. Somehow it was in the smell. And her flesh. And her
fear… The boy had slammed into her then, still whining and nearly
knocked her to the ground.

She had come up from that near fall in a crouch and the boy had slammed
into her once more, so she had grabbed him to steady him. He had
thought she meant to kill him and had pulled away but a second later
he had caught the scent and they had both gone tearing down the
ditch.

The Old Woman

The old woman had heard them coming. She had begun to whine herself,
replacing the boys whining which had turned to a low growl. The panic
built in her as she heard them coming. Her heart pounded, leapt,
slammed against her ribs bringing pain with it. The pain rebounded
and shot down into her broken leg. The leg that she had broken the
day before trying to scramble down into this ditch to reach the house
across what was left of the highway so she would have a safe place to
stay. The pain slammed into her leg, and she cried aloud
involuntarily. A split second later the female slammed into her.

She had been on her belly. The pain was less that way. When the female
hit her, she drove her over onto her back. A second after that she was
ripping at her flesh, biting, feeding and she could not fight her she
was too strong, too…. Animal strong. And then the boy hit
her hard, pouncing on her chest, driving the air from her lungs, and
before she could even react, catch her breath back, he was biting at
her throat.

She felt the pulse of blood as he bit into her jugular, and it sprayed
across his face. She felt it go. Felt her consciousness drop by half.
Her eyelids flutter, flutter, flutter and then close completely. And
the biting was far away and then it was gone…

The Feasting

The boy had her throat, but Donita had been biting her way into her
chest. She had felt her heart beating and she had been gnawing
against her ribs when she felt it stop. They had both calmed then,
loosening the grips they had had on her, and settling down to feed.

She glanced now at the calf that was less than three feet from them. It’s
huge moon eyes staring curiously at them. The calf did not know
death. Had not seen it, she thought. It knew it’s mother’s tit, the
sweet grass of the spring field, the warmth of the sun and nothing
else. It edged a little closer.

She had killed the old woman. She had had no use for her at all. They had
eaten so much of her flesh that she was useless to them. Couldn’t sit
up all the way, the boy had taken one arm off at the shoulder and
carried it away like a prize.

Donita had eaten so much that she had vomited, but that had only forced her
back to feeding until she was once again filled. She had looked
around the ditch and spied the rock. The old woman had come back already, and she was trying to raise herself from the ground. Trying
to raise herself and walk once more. She had picked the rock up from
the ditch. A big rock, but she was powerful, and she had smashed the
old woman’s skull in as she had tried to bite at her.

She turned again to the calf. The calf was not what she wanted, but the
calf would have to do for now. She let her hand fall upon the boy’s thigh and they both sprang at the calf.

The calf did not have the time to react, it didn’t even bawl. One second
it was standing the next it was on its side, Donita’s teeth clamped
tightly across its throat. A second after that it was sliding across
the dew wet grass and into the woods, one wild eye rolling and
reflecting the silver of the waning moon.

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