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Author Topic: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse  (Read 5809 times)

gthez

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A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« on: February 18, 2012, 02:44:09 pm »

1


     My name is Allan Russell Phillips. To my knowledge I am the last living survivor in the greater Orlando area. While I am sure that there must be more, holed up in some secure location, I have no knowledge of them. I wasn’t always alone, there were others with me, but one by one all the others have joined the ranks of the dead. Most of them still walk. It’s been just over a year since the Scarlet pandemic swept the globe. Even though it didn’t turn people into “zombies” outright, the dead started rising just as the epidemic was receding. Cause and effect in my mind. Of course I could be wrong though, and if anybody (hopefully) in the future is reading this then they will have a better understanding of just what the hell really happened.

     I’m not sitting down and writing this because I’m a scholar or a historian, I’m doing it because I want to leave something behind. Time is running out for me, along with food. Eventually I’m going to starve to death here.
     I could try to find another place to hole up, but there are so many of them outside now. Sometimes I think the sheer weight of them outside will collapse the walls and they’ll come busting through, so much so that I spend a lot of my waking time just ensuring the building is secure.

     My paranoia has become so obsessive lately that I find myself doing nothing but checking the doors, windows and perimeter over and over again until I finally pass out from exhaustion. Even sleep is no longer any refuge, filled with horrible nightmares. Waking up from them is bad too. Most times when I awake it’s in a paranoid delusion that they have gotten in and are about to find and eat me alive.

     Writing this will, with any luck, take my mind off of the endless cycle of paranoia that has gripped me. Psychologically it may help to calm me, allow me to better come to grips with what has happened. Death doesn’t particularly scare me, (no more than most people anyways) it’s the walking undeath that does.

     When I get to the final stages of starvation, and the end is for certain anyways, I’m gonna take my .38 and blow my brains out. Although I’m ninety-nine percent certain that I won’t rise from the dead, I was never bitten, nor did I catch the Scarlet Fever, I will make damn sure that I won’t come back as a zombie.

     Until then though, I’ll tell you my experiences, as I remember them, starting from when I first heard of the Scarlet Fever.


2


     It was another hot and oppressively humid central Florida late summer day. I don't remember what day it was exactly, (even back then when things were normal it didn't matter too much to me what day of the month it actually was) but I do remember it was sometime in the latter part of August. I know it was in August because that's the height of the slow season for cab drivers.
     The students from UCF and Rollins were for the most part, still on their summer break, having gone back home from wherever they came from. The "snow-birds", (who migrated from their homes up north to sunny Florida for the winter) hadn't even started to return. This was compounded by the fact it was the hottest part of the year down here, and it was also the rainy season. Nobody who knows Florida weather decides to spend their vacation in a hundred plus degree sauna. The rotten economy didn't help either, people without jobs don't take a cab unless they absolutely had to.

     Anyways, it was around that time that I started to hear of a new flu going around, like every year. I really didn't pay much attention to it though. It seemed every year the CDC and the government blows everything out of proportion and issues dire warnings for people to get some new flu shot. Swine flu, Bird flu, blah, blah, blah. To most of us it was just another effort for the government, in collusion with the pharmaceutical companies to sell more product to the public.
     This strain supposedly came out of North Korea, or so they speculated, as no news ever comes out of that crap hole except propaganda. The South Koreans were the first to officially report it, followed by the Chinese and then it rapidly spread throughout the whole of Asia and the rest of the world. The quick spread of the disease and the fact that about ninety percent of the population was affected by it was the most alarming aspect of it.
     It was quickly dubbed "Rat flu" as the local rodent population always suffered mass casualties wherever it turned up (at the time that seemed like a good thing to most people. Nobody likes rats). In humans though, it was a relatively mild flu, with a short duration and, for the most part, people responded to it like it was an allergy (like dust or pollen). The symptoms lasted about a week or so, but unfortunately that was only stage one of the disease. As the Rat flu spread around the world, and then just as quickly died off, the government warnings for children and the elderly to get their yearly flu shots died off with it.
     The CDC admitted that they still hadn't actually identified the virus, but they would continue to research it.

     "Whatever," was what I and most people thought. It seemed that it was just another knee jerk overreaction, as there were no actual deaths related to it.

     Soon after the Rat flu died off is when things started to take a really bad turn for the worse. First the animals went insane and then the disease entered stage two, and everybody who contracted the Rat flu automatically ended up with "Scarlet fever".

     I'm going to stop writing for the day. I'm worn out and constantly tired now. I have to make sure the barricades are still holding before I can try to get some rest...


3


     Last night was bad, really bad. It was by far the worst night of my life. Around 3:16 am, according to my watch, I was startled awake by the sound of a transformer or something exploding. There was a huge flash of light followed by numerous secondary explosions and I swear I could hear the electricity arcing.

     I hesitantly made my way to one of the small windows, in what I suppose was the CEO's office here on the second floor of "Orange County Tool & Die". All the power was out. It was out as far as I could see. Granted, I could only see through a couple of small windows but it was pitch black out there. There was and is, no hope of the electricity coming back. The only light was a small glow to the west and I suppose that means whatever blew started a fire.

     I think I broke down last night. I had never been afraid of the dark, even as a kid, but since I've been closed up here I've used the desk lamp as a night-light. That weak little patch of light reassured me that I was safe. Without it I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. I kept thinking that they had breached my make-shift defenses and were shambling around downstairs, slowly working their way up the stairs to the offices here. I know now it was just the normal sounds of the building, all buildings have their own creaks and moans, but I was not used to this one’s peculiar sounds. I was too afraid to actually go downstairs and investigate. No way was I going to go down there in the dead of night to face down the undead of the night. I huddled up in a corner of the couch and basically sobbed and pleaded with God, the Gods or whomever would listen to my sad little prayers to let me escape this prison.

     It seemed like it took an eternity for dawn to break. When it finally did, I fell into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

     It is now early afternoon as I write this. There is a heavy smell of smoke in the air. To the west, where there was just a small glow in the darkness last night, I can plainly see buildings burning. Oh god I hope it doesn't spread and come this way. Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK! I don't want to die!

     I didn't pick this building to hole up in on purpose. At the time it seemed the most secure one I could get to, the old one having been over-run. Jannie died in that one. This one was close, the zeds were everywhere. A building made of solid construction blocks and steel doors. Windows only on the second floor where the rotting fuckers couldn't reach or look into.
     I thought I could hide in here for a day or two and then move on. They must have seen me come in here. I swear there was only a couple that could have possibly even seen me come in here, but the next day they had literally surrounded the place. Every day there's more and more of them. How the hell do they know I'm in here? How the fuck are they growing in such numbers? Are they communicating somehow?

     Dammit, I only have a few days worth of food left. I guess my options are limited now. I can hide in here until either I starve or die of thirst (the water went out last night too, no power to run the pumps to pressurize the water lines I guess), die by being eaten alive trying to escape or by burning to death if that fire spreads any further. Suicide may be a mortal sin but I think I'll risk hell after death rather than this fuckin' hell on earth.

     I know I've gotten way off track here... I'll get back on track and write again about when the chaos started and the Scarlet fever brought down mankind after I check something out. I might be able to get out of here after all, if things go right for once.


4


     I remember sitting in my cab at a BP station when things started to get weird. A squirrel literally started ambushing people. I first noticed it when it leaped out of a tree and started biting a middle aged, slightly overweight woman. She screamed hysterically as the "tree rat" viscously latched onto her head and just started to rip apart her scalp. As the poor woman screamed, she was practically running around in circles in the middle of the parking lot, flailing her arms. Every time she would try to yank the insane squirrel off of her head, the squirrel would bite a huge chunk out of her hand.

     Everyone who saw this was completely taken aback, and initially everyone involuntarily backed away from her. My initial reaction was shock, my jaw dropped, and I watched the scene unfold mouth agape.

     It didn't take too long before the disbelief of the situation wore off and a nearby older guy with graying hair, who had been pumping gas into a beat-up old Ford pick-up, ran to help her. His first attempt to grab the crazed thing failed, as the woman was by now completely hysterical and weaving around the lot. The guy rushed towards her again in his attempt to help, and at the same time the woman, who by now had blood literally pouring from her head and hands, stumbled right into him. They collided, but her rescuer managed to get a grip on the thing. The impact with the man sent her tumbling harshly to the ground while the mad squirrel came away from her head clutching a huge tangle of dark brown hair. I could see in the well intentioned guy's eyes a momentary pride that he had gotten the monster off of the woman. That look was completely erased in a sparse second as the squirrel turned on him. Pain showed plainly on his face as teeth and claws sunk into his hands. He added his screams to the woman's, who by now was sobbing while screaming. The rescuer, now victim, reacted by shaking his hands around wildly, throwing the creature to the ground.

     The little hairy fiend hit the asphalt with a solid "thunk" and lay there momentarily stunned. The thing landed no more than a foot away from a burly guy who had just gotten off of a Honda motorcycle. A brief moment passed, and the squirrel from hell (wild-eyed and tangled hair all askew to begin with, now practically covered in the blood of its victims) started to twitch and recover. There was a small amount of panic in the biker's eye as he went to stomp the squirrel to death with his heavy boots. I could plainly hear the maddened tree-rats skull and bones breaking and crushing as the big, 300 plus pound biker repeatedly put some serious boot leather down, over and over again until there was naught left but hair and gore.

     My Gandalf (the brand name of the computerized dispatch system) went off then, telling me I had a fare to pick-up. I left the scene, driving slowly away thinking this was an isolated case and would make a hell of a story to tell my friends.

     How wrong I was. It wasn’t an isolated case. This same scene was playing out all over the world, and it wasn’t just squirrels going mad. Whatever rats survived went into a blood frenzy...and mice...and cats, both feral and domesticated...and raccoons, to name a few. Basically all the smaller species of mammals went hell bent for blood. Dogs, horses, cattle, things like that, they didn’t go mad, but they also suffered the onslaught.

     The crazed critters didn’t just attack people, they attacked anything that moved, even each other. Over the next few days, as Mother Nature turned on herself in an orgy of violent, pointless destruction, everything practically came to a halt worldwide.

     The American CDC and the British NHS both announced that the cause was due to some kind of new parasite. Stay inside until this was over they said.

     This dreadful single celled menace seemed to lodge in its hosts’ brain and shut down any serotonin production, while putting the aggression and anger centers into overdrive. The parasites eggs were transmitted into a new host through the saliva into the victims’ bloodstream.

     A mass killing of cats and hamsters and any and every other small pet ensued, adding to the death toll that was happening outdoors.

     As humanity waited for the unbelievable, horrible act to play out, and the animal madness left, Scarlet fever strode onto the stage. There was already the smell of death and the rotting of flesh in the air from the billions upon billions of animals who died within the two, seemingly eternal, weeks it took for the infected ones to starve off.

     I stayed in my apartment for those two weeks, until the wave of horror subsided. It hadn’t completely ended, but I was broke and absolutely had to get back to work. I guess the same could be said for most people, as we tried to get back to some semblance of normality. Unemployment went down, as animal corpse collection, and elimination (mainly by burning the corpses) became a new career choice. Teams went out dressed in heavy riot gear and killed any animal they even suspected of being capable of being infected. The heavy black smoke of the burn piles and the constant sound of gun-fire added to my overwhelming feeling that I had somehow breached the walls of hell and had ended up in some obscure ring of Dante’s Inferno.

     That was nothing compared to what was starting up. The first symptoms of Scarlet, small red freckle like splotches, started showing up on everybody. Everybody except the ten percent, or so, of us that were for some reason immune.

     I’ve got to go and check on the spread of the fire now. From the thickness and smell of the smoke, I think that the building next door has started to burn. It may be a huge danger, one that may roast me, but it may also be my savior if my plan works.
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gthez

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2012, 02:46:35 pm »

5


     I did it! I made it out of there! This new place is good, and it's isolated, and it's got food! I'm going to eat. Then I'm going to get to work on making this place more secure. Then I'm going to get some rest. Somebody had already started on some fortifications here, now I'm going to finish them. There's also a hell of a lot of blood, blackened and dried, not only in the entry way but spread throughout the house. Oddly there are no bodies or, thankfully, zeds. Whatever happened here it took place possibly months or more ago. The place is abandoned now. More later.

     Ok, I feel better than I have in a long time. It's abso-fucking-lutely amazing what a meal and some decent sleep can do for someone. Before I continue with what I remember with the rise of the Scarlet, I want to tell you how I got out of the tool and die shop.

     There was nothing special about the shop, it was a standard set-up. Offices on the second floor, loading dock and machinery on the first. The loading dock had a sturdy metal roll-up door and although it bowed inward and shook and moved with the weight of the zeds trying to gain entry, it held quite nicely. There was a propane fueled Hi-Lo and an assortment of chain hoists and tools, as I suppose there is in every machine shop.

     Until the fire started, I didn't think of any use for the Hi-Lo besides driving it out of there. That would be suicide, most of the zeds can still shuffle along quick enough to catch up to a slow moving Hi-Lo. I have to say though that they do seem to be slowing down. It's about god damned time too. After almost a full year they're finally starting to show some signs of true decomposition.

     There was a small window, the old fashioned kind operated by a little hand crank, at the top of the stairs facing the burning buildings to the west. It wouldn't open more than a crack and the glass was the opaque kind that you couldn't see through. I used a sledge hammer I found in the shop below to bust apart the window. At the time I was mainly interested in just having a better view of the spread of the conflagration. It only took a couple of good whacks from the sledge to knock the window out.
     The undead bastards immediately started converging on this side of the building. There were a bunch of them here already, but now they were just piling into the area. Their hearing isn’t very good but they were already close enough to hear the window being shattered from the other sides of the shop.

     (I have to comment on something though, as long as I’m writing. The zombies in the movies always either moaned or hilariously shambled around muttering “Brains...” In reality though, they never uttered a single intentional sound. Occasionally they will bump into each other, forcing putrid air out of their lungs and past whatever is left of their vocal chords, making a sound that’s an odd cross between a sigh and a whimper. The multiplied chorus is completely unnerving when they group up in a “herd”, packed close together and in large numbers. Combined with the foot dragging, they sound like some huge beast thrashing around in agony in the dirt and whining in its death throes. I guess in some way, that is exactly what is happening.)

     I got pissed at the abominations and started throwing pieces of the window down at them. The pieces just bounced off, of course, and I started looking around for something heavier to drop on their heads. In a rage I started to destroy the surrounding wall, hoping to get a whole block of the construction masonry to come apart to crush some skulls. It wasn’t working though, the sledge was just busting off fist sized pieces. I dropped the heavy hammer as the blaze swelled rapidly, engulfing almost the whole of the building that was merely ten to fifteen feet away from me.

     Downstairs I found iron and steel and brass rods and bar stock. Not quite what I was looking for. The rods were approximately a half an inch in diameter and about twelve foot long. I briefly thought about making a spear with one of the pieces, but then something else caught my attention. There was a propane canister rack where the Hi-Lo was parked.
     The full canisters were heavy enough by themselves to crush a zeds head by throwing it down on them from above. As an extra added bonus, I knew they could explode. I didn’t have any idea of how to make that happen, nor could I find any flares or something to attach to them. I figured that I could toss them into the inferno raging next door, and that the flames would be hot enough to cause the canisters to fail and release a nice fireball. It was dangerous, bordering on insanity. I really knew nothing about if they would actually explode, or for that matter, how big the explosion(s) would be. There were six full propane tanks and I dragged them to the upstairs landing, setting them under the gaping hole in the wall where the window used to be.

     It took no time at all before the building wall opposite me started to catch. The zeds seemed oblivious to the fire with some getting so close to the heat that the rags they wore started to smoke. I had to be sure my plan would work so I waited until the most opportune moment to toss those babies into the voracious crowd of undead below me.

     The smoke started to become as thick as water and I could start to feel the heat of the flames. Small flames started to grow on some of the zombies hair and clothing. It wasn’t my plan to simply catch the horrors on fire, they would burn for some time before they stopped moving. Not to mention the fact that a flaming zombie horde is much worse than a normal zombie horde. The fire next door by itself may or may not light this building on fire, but a flaming zombie horde sure would. I wanted to blow a hole in the herd that I could run through and escape to freedom.

     I went and quickly gathered my backpack and few possessions I brought with me, adding a few tools from the shop to it in preparation for whatever happened next.

     Back upstairs the outside paint started peeling and I crouched under the partial wall to stay out of the majority of the heat. A couple of the zeds were actually alight now, but it seemed they didn’t burn well for some reason (There was some kind of waxy coating they developed, or at least it appeared so. I never actually wanted to get close enough to one to give it a physical examination). After a brief few minutes I could hear the supports and ceiling of the structure across from me about to give way. Now is the time I thought.

     I nervously heaved those propane canisters through the jagged hole in the wall and prayed they didn’t go off until I got to a safe place (not knowing how big the explosion would be and also hoping that it wouldn’t collapse this building on my head), if they even went off at all.

     I was able to run and hide behind a huge CNC machine in the shop and as I was wondering how long it would take for them to explode, they went off. I heard the structure next door collapsing, followed by multiple explosions. They sounded huge to my ears as pieces of rubble and flaming debris wafted down around me.

     I got up quickly, more than worried, and made my way through the ruins as fast as I could, hoping I didn’t just sign my own death certificate. I initially was thinking I would have to go back up the stairs and risk jumping out the cavity I made in the wall, but when I got there, the wall was gone. The wall was gone not just by where the window used to be, but the whole west wall was gone. Small flames started up inside the shop and bright red embers were falling all around, both inside and outside the collapsed wall. The smoke was thicker the closer I got to the outside. I didn’t see any standing zombies as I ran outdoors, through the burning wreckage, but there were pieces of them. I ran. I ran as fast as I could. I looked behind me at the horde that I knew now was recovering from the shock-wave and detonations. Most were struggling to stand upright, having been packed so densely together they must have fallen like dominoes. A shit load of them were on fire, which pleased me to no end. The surrounding area was practically zed free, the ravenous undead had been driven by their hunger towards the Tool & Die shop where I was holed up. There were a few stragglers here and there, but they were much slower and clumsier now so I had no problem out running them.

     My luck was good that day. I found a dirt bike right out in the middle of the road, just waiting for me to claim it. It started on the first kick and I drove it, off road, away from civilization. The bike ran out of gas on me on some dirt road. Only God knew where I was now, but it seemed clear. Following the lonely, now slightly overgrown, two track road, I came to this place. I cased it out from a distance and slowly, hesitantly, made my way towards it.
     I’ve got stuff to do. I’ve spent more time than I thought I would writing this out. It does seem to be helping me though, so I’ll continue the next time I get a chance.


6


     Everybody was traumatized to some extent from what had just happened. The madness that swept the animal kingdom was finally waning. People the world over were just starting to timidly poke their heads out from their homes, like scared rabbits (I don‘t even know if there are any rabbits left) from their earthen burrows. Just because a lot of the population wasn’t personally attacked by the marauding parasite controlled critters, didn’t mean they didn’t suffer loss or know terror. Children especially, were terrorized by what they saw on TV. Added to this, many were also in mourning over a beloved family pet that had to be put down or were frightened to death about going outside. The media was in full swing of their over-coverage, of course, endlessly showing animal attacks again and again. The twenty-four hour looping of some of the more violent and horrendous videos were only broken up by speculation and baseless accusations. The Army and National Guard units were still conducting sweeps in the more inaccessible parts of the nation, while trying to effectively quarantine the most remote and unreachable wildernesses.

     The food chain was broken, and the natural order of things was truly screwed up. Nobody had any idea of what Mother Nature was going to do next.

     I remember watching a particularly disturbing video in which a whole colony of prairie dogs was ripping the flesh off of a herd of cattle. The cows, which had for thousands of years been bred for docileness and timidity, seemed confused and unable to react to this new threat. The image of the fear and agony of these poor victims stays with me even now, creeping into my dreams.

     I remember coming to the realization that our food supply was also dealt a heavy blow. Farms were abandoned and the countryside was quickly de-populated. In areas where the animals outnumbered people, the people fled to the urban areas. Even though the initial threat was on the decline, most people didn’t want to go back out to the country until this had completely dissipated. There was talk of the government actually forcing people back to the farms. The U.S. was the bread basket of the world before the parasite and now whole states were without any living livestock. Produce was rotting in the fields. Once crowded chicken and turkey farms were open fields of decaying meat, having been ravaged by maddened squirrels, rabbits, cats, etc.

     Famine wasn’t the only thing we had to look forward to, oh no, there was more coming. The predators, those that survived being attacked by what used to be their prey, would start coming in force into the urban areas. A second wave of animal attacks was rushing towards us like a freight train (and we were tied to the tracks). Wolves, coyotes, bears, eagles, hawks, wolverines and every kind of animal that used to feed on the smaller animals were going to starve and they would do the only thing they could, they would add mankind to the menu. For the most part, people didn’t (or didn’t want to) think about what the near future held in store for them, although everybody knew. But that was still in the future, and that was what was going to happen if the Scarlet fever hadn’t reared its ugly head. The Scarlet saved us from an agonizing slow death and granted us a quick and violent one.

     When the Scarlet fever first appeared, it showed up as small freckle like, blood-red spots all over the body. Everyone knew this had to be connected to the parasites somehow. The government and CDC were trying to keep as close a lid as possible on it. Looking back, I’m absolutely positive they knew what was happening, and what was going to happen. I’m also absolutely sure they had no idea how to treat it though, otherwise they would have and they would still be alive today (maybe). Maybe it didn’t matter. The CDC admitted that it was indeed a reaction to being infected with the parasite. In the beginning they (and every government on earth) tried to calm the populace, telling us that it would quickly pass and it would be ok. No other large mammal they said (and they were right in this), reacted to this in any other way than a mild cold or flu. They guaranteed that now that they knew what they were facing, that they would shortly have a cure. Top scientists were working day and night they said.

     People were clearly on edge. Tempers were short and anger flared easily. Myself, I just put it down to all the stress people were under lately. Fistfights, brawls and a slight increase in the murder rate ensued. Completely understandable for what we were going through. It got so much worse though.

     As the parasitic infection grew in its new hosts, the little red freckles became larger and larger. As the parasitic infection grew, people started acting more and more like the infected animals that had plagued them previously.
     The people who were obviously suffering from the infestation openly started to hate the small percentage of us that were immune. It got to the point that everyone who got into my cab, upon seeing me, went into a spit flying rage at me for no reason at all.

     When I watched some wild eyed, scarlet speckled teenager with a knife chase an older woman into rush hour traffic on Colonial Drive I decided I was done driving a cab for awhile. The teen’s eyes were a deep blood red (almost black), I remember it clearly, there was no white left. The panic-stricken woman was chased into traffic and got hit by a passing motorist, who I’m sure didn’t see the terrified woman at all. As the poor woman was thrown by the impact and lay in the middle of the street, the teen ran over to her and just started stabbing the injured woman over and over again. I don’t even think she was conscious, thankfully.

     I was even more surprised when the driver of a new Cadillac gunned the motor of his car and proceeded to run the teen down. The sound of the teens head busting open on the front grill was sickening. The Caddy just drove over him, dragging him about a hundred yards down the road and never stopped, he just drove away like nothing happened.

     I wasn’t making any money at all anyways so I decided to keep a low profile until this shit worked itself out in one way or another.

     I once again retreated to my apartment, watching what I could stand of the news channels, but mainly sticking to reruns that had nothing at all to do with what was happening outside.

     I remember the night they declared martial law nationwide. It was the same night I heard my apartment manager beating on my neighbor’s door demanding the rent which was apparently only a week late.

     “Open the God damned door and pay me my rent mother fucker!” were the first words out of his mouth.

     I peeked out the small window in my door, pushing aside the privacy curtain to view the skinny, frail looking manager. His face was half covered in blood red blotches.

     The manager was just pounding on the door with both fists screaming obscenities. I knew this was not going to end well.

     “Get the fuck away from my door asshole.”, was my neighbor’s reply. It came out more like a growl than spoken words.

     I knew my neighbor. He was over six feet tall and easily weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Normally he was a nice, easy going guy that got along with practically everyone. If he wanted he could crush the manager’s skull with his bare hands and I feared that that was exactly what he was going to do.

     “You’re a week late and now you owe me a late fee fuck head. Get out and fuckin’ pay me right now or get the fuck out right NOW!” he yelled. The manager’s blood-shot eyes had a crazed look to them as he beat so hard on the door that his knuckles were bloody.

     “You want me out you little douche bag? Go ahead and evict me then you little piece of shit.”, was my neighbor’s reply.

     From there things just got worse and I won’t bother to write what they said to each other. It wasn’t like I was the only one who heard them. People were poking their heads out of their apartments, (and all of them had red blotches clearly visible on whatever skin wasn’t covered) some adding to the chaos by yelling at the two to shut the hell up. Somebody must have called the cops because shortly sirens were heard in the distance, quickly getting nearer.

     Police involvement was my neighbor’s breaking point I think. He was on parole for gettin’ drunk and assaulting someone pretty badly in a bar fight previously and I knew he thought he couldn’t win and that he was going to jail. It didn’t help my neighbors frame of mind one bit that the manager was crazily laughing at him now and taunting him, saying he was going to toss all of his shit out on the street as soon as the cops took his ass away.

     The door to the apartment whipped open then and in the blink of an eye my neighbor had a shotgun pressing into the stomach of the apartment manager. My neighbor was wearing only boxers, sweating like a pig. His skin was so covered in those blood red blots that it appeared as if his skin was naturally scarlet colored, broken by white freckles.

     With the shotgun pressing so hard into his stomach I thought it might actually spear him and come out his back, the manager was backed up into the hallway wall opposite the apartment door.

     There were no more foul words spewing from the manager’s mouth, as he was completely silent then. My neighbor was also silent as I knew he was trying to figure out how to control himself and not pull the trigger. The cop car pulled up just outside the main entry way to the apartment block, the blue and white lights flashing inside the hallway. My neighbor looked to the door where the cops were sure to enter momentarily, then he looked back at the manager.

     The roar of the shotgun was deafening in the enclosed hallway. I backed away from my little window real quick then as the cops came in guns drawn. The last thing I saw as I recoiled from the shotgun blast was the utter disbelief shown in the manager’s eyes as he tried to hold his guts in, which were spilling out from both the front and the back.

     It turned into a shooting gallery then, like something from the old west. Multiple shotgun blasts and the sharp sound of police issue nine millimeter pistols rent the air. There shortly came the sound of automatics, with their distinctive, repeated quick-fire echoes as others joined in the murderous fray. I jumped in my shower, hoping that any errant bullets would be deflected by the metal bathtub.

     After about half an hour the gun shots stopped. The sound of my TV, which I had left on one of the twenty-four hour news channels, was only marred by distant shots, screams and the occasional siren. I lay there wondering how long it would take for the Scarlet fever to run its course and if I could ration my food to outlast it. After an hour or so I heard the National Security Advisor issue martial law nationwide.

     I knew they were hoping that the discipline instilled in the members of the armed forces would be enough to overcome the parasites insidious emotional control, but it was not to be.

     At first it seemed to be working. Shoot to kill orders and strict curfews put a damper on the insanity that threatened to over-run the nation.

     For a few days anyways. Even the members of the military were only human though. They just started mass murdering everybody they saw as their skin turned beet red. Then they turned on each other.
     Someone once said that there were only three things that nature used to keep man’s numbers in check. Famine, Disease and War. War because as man had no natural predators, he had to be his own. Nature was harsh and brutal, but it had decided that seven billion plus people were too many.

     The last news I heard (the television and cable stations blinked off one by one) was that this parasite was a man made, bio engineered creation. The CDC showed proof positive that DNA from three separate deadly organisms had been spliced into this parasite. Mother Nature had not evolved it. Two of the bio-engineered gene strands were identified, but the third strand was an unknown. The third strand was a very specific thing that targeted the nervous system for some reason, but they had no real idea how it was supposed to help the parasite or what it specifically was meant to do. Fingers were pointing at North Korea, and almost as a final fuck you, North Korea launched a full scale nuclear attack on South Korea, obliterating Soul, Pusan and a number of other cities, even launching a few nukes at Japan before they crossed the de-militarized zone and literally slaughtered everyone in their path.

     Pakistan and India went to war, they also quickly used nuclear weapons. Israel and most of the Arab nations went directly to nuclear war. Russia and China exchanged a limited number of nuclear weapons. Genocide and war became the norm for nations as all sense of humanity left all of humanity. War raged in the last few days in the sky, on the seas and on land. In the end I don’t think it mattered who the men with the weapons attacked, as long as they could sate their blood lust. The only thing that stopped them was when the parasite finally ended up killing its host.

     Then things went quiet. Like being in the eye of the hurricane. Quiet and still for good twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

     That’s when the dead, in their billions, started to rise.

7


     It's been a couple of days since I last wrote in this journal of mine. I can't begin to tell you how much better it feels not to be hiding in some random building with a multitude of ravenous undead trying to get inside to devour me alive. I personally haven’t felt this good since before this all began, over a year ago. Concealing myself and my every move, with nothing to do but wait for the seemingly inevitable, made time just crawl along at a snail’s pace. For the past three days I’ve been passing the time, which has been flying by, fixing up the place and cleaning it.

     About this place though, it has some real good features about it. It’s sturdy, well built and isolated. The only real way to get here is down a now partially overgrown dirt road. Until you get to the drive way itself, you can’t even see the house. The lack of visibility isn’t due to the thick growth of the surrounding wooded area, although now in late summer that would normally be the case, it’s due to being in a natural depression. Its sits on a small plateau in the middle of a huge, almost bowl like hollow. The roof of house and attached garage sits far enough below the upper ridge that even in winter, when the leaves have fallen and the lush vegetation has died off, that it still can’t be seen from the surrounding area. About ten feet below the plateau, upon which the house sets, there’s a lake. I think there’s a natural spring that feeds it, as the lake actually feeds a little creek that runs off into the woodland. There’s a little dock here, and a row boat, and there’s actually fish in it. I think this building had been originally built before electricity and water were even invented. It has been expanded and obviously upgraded a number of times, but its origins are still observable, here and there. The pantry is also, surprisingly, well stocked.

     There’s also some things that kinda worry me about this place though. I actually spent two full days cleaning the gore and blood from this place. The blood trails start in pretty much every room and they all converged in the kitchen. There’s an old style pump that can be used when the water main is out (which it is) next to a large double sink and a largish butcher block. I’m hoping that somebody came back here during the height of the madness and found some scared animals had taken refuge in the place, and that whomever it was (person or persons) took the opportunity to do some hunting. Meat is really a rare thing now. I’m not sure, but some of the dried blood looked like it was layered on top of each other, like the killing had been dispersed months apart. The butcher block, a thick hard wood slab, was covered in the dried gore and shows signs of repeated use. Smaller blood tracks went through the back door, across the dock to the lake itself. I guess if I really want to know what was butchered here, I could swim down to the bottom of the lake and look for the bones. I don’t really want to know that badly though.

     I keep getting this feeling to just take what I can and get out. I’m sure it’s because I feel that this is too good to be true, what with the experiences of the last two years coloring my mind. I keep trying to tell myself that eventually luck would finally favor me, that eventually I would have to find a safe haven, but it still feels to me like this place is somehow haunted.

     Enough of that for now. Tomorrow I’ll resume my telling of what happened. Today I’m going to go fishing. I’ve seen a couple of nice ones jump out of the water and I’ve got a craving for some fresh fish. It’s been so long since I had any real meat, let alone something fresh. Wish me luck.


8


     It was my old friend hunger that made me leave my apartment. Until I found this place, hunger had been my constant companion. Always was I hungry, always I had to ration every scrap and morsel of food I found.

     Even though I knew of the scene that lay just outside my doorstep, I wasn't prepared. The first thing that hit me was the smell. It was the scent of rot and death. Inside my apartment it hung in the background but it wasn't overpowering like it was when I opened the door. I don't know if it was the strength of the smell that assailed me and made me involuntarily retch or the sight of my door and the surrounding wall. My door was covered in the blood and pieces of my neighbor’s brains, dried and stuck firmly to it. Thankfully I hadn’t much at all in my stomach, or it all would have come out instead of the thin dribble that did. What did come out landed right smack dab on what was left of my neighbor’s head.

     I had never really seen death this close up before, and the puke reflex had bowed me over, bringing my own face that much closer to his. What was left of his head was flattened, being just his face, lying there like a mask with a small hole in the forehead. Everything else that wasn’t his face was, I suppose, splattered all over the walls and my door. I remember I had to force myself to close my eyes and regain my composure before I could continue. Now though, neither the sight nor the smell bothers me.

     There were footprints in the blood, both coming and going through the scene, as if people didn’t care at all. The apartment manager’s body was gone, along with the shotgun that killed him, but to where I had no idea. I didn’t care to linger but before I left the apartment I remember I made sure to lock my door. I never made it back to my old apartment, nor do I have my keychain anymore.

     I carefully stepped my way outside and was grateful to be outdoors where the smell of death wasn’t so cloyingly thick. The gray, muted quality of the light drew my eyes skyward. Dark heavy clouds covered the sun and the whole part of the sky. Pieces of ash and soot fell down like rain. The world was burning and I could smell it.

     There was a dead cop lying in the parking lot. Whether he was one of the police that responded to the altercation between my neighbor and the manager I don’t know. I do know that he had been shot in the neck and bled out soon after just by looking at him. He was clearly dead and I about jumped out of my skin when I saw his fingers flex and twitch. It didn’t help at all that the cop spasmed as I was checking for his weapon. I didn’t know at the time if it was rigor mortise or my imagination or what. Now I know that it was the parasites regaining control of the body. There was no weapon though, somebody had gotten it already.

     I made my way over to the side parking lot thinking I would just get in my car and drive to Wal-Mart. Yeah, I nervously laughed aloud when I saw it. It was crushed under a big yellow school bus that had somehow ended up laying on its side across the top of the row of cars. So much for that.

     My stomach growled, urging me to walk to Wal-Mart if that’s what it was going to take.

     My apartment complex wasn’t really that far from Wal-Mart. It only took me about 20 minutes to walk there. As I was walking I don’t remember seeing anybody or anything moving, except for the occasional corpse twitch. I do remember thinking that even if I had my car it would be worthless anyway. Autos and trucks were strewn around the roads and every intersection was an accident scene. Traffic signals were still changing from red to green and I caught myself actually reflexively waiting at one of them until the pedestrian crossing light flashed that it was legal to cross.

     The Wal-Mart parking lot looked as though a major riot had taken place there. Burned out cars and trucks, a military troop carrier (I think it was a deuce and a half, the kind with the canvass covering the rear bed), a fire truck and two police cruisers were interspersed with decaying bodies of every age, sex and color.

     The inside of the store wasn’t any better. Every once in a while one of the dead would twitch and I hurried around the store getting what I could.

     I had grabbed a camping backpack, one of the nicer ones that I would have never have been able to afford before. After gathering a bunch of other items from the camping section I made my way to the food isles. It was there, while I was stuffing Spam and chili and whatnot into my new backpack that I realized I was going to have to carry all this weight around with me as I had no car. I was lost in concentration, trying to decide what I wanted to carry with me on this trip, as I thought for sure I could make my was back here again, when I heard a mechanical click behind me.

     “Stop right there...,” said a distinctly female voice.

     There was a hard edge to her voice and I slowly turned to face her.

     “Put your hands on top of your head, nice and slow, or I won’t hesitate to kill you.” She said it nice and calmly, like she had said it more than a few times already.

     The barrel of an M16 was in my face so I decided to comply with its owner’s wishes. She was looking me over and I knew she was scrutinizing my face and skin for those tell-tale red marks to see if I was one of the infected. I was doing the same to her, noting that she could barely be out of High School, if she had even graduated yet.

     “Lift up your shirt and turn around. Show me you’re not affected and you can live.” Her voice was steady and I had no doubt she wouldn’t hesitate to murder me if I didn’t do as she said.

     “Ok, good...,” she said as I finished turning around for her.

     “Now drop your weapons to the ground nice and slow...One fast move...,” she said as I interrupted her.

     “I don’t have any weapons.” I stated nervously.

     “What? Bullshit. Who the fuck walks around anymore without a weapon?” Anger was starting to tinge her voice and the M16 was being leveled into a firing position.

     “I don’t...I been in hiding ‘til the shit blew over, now I’m just hungry...,” there was a pleading tone in my voice as I tried to talk her out of shooting me.

     “Turn around and place your hands on the shelf. I’m going to give you a pat down and if I find a weapon on you you’re dead. If you don’t submit you’re dead. Do ANYTHING I don’t like and you’re dead.” Her voice was flat and monotone.

     Not wanting to be dead I let her give me a pat down. I could tell that it seemed incredible to her that someone would actually be running around the apocalypse unarmed.

     Her stance changed a bit then, and I could tell she relaxed a bit, which made me relax a bit.

     “Where the hell have you been hiding? The shit hasn’t blown over, it’s getting worse dumbass.” She looked at me as if I was a retarded, red-headed step-child.

     “What do you mean worse, the streets and the whole city’s fuckin’ empty except for the corpses.” I thought there was some insanity lurking in the girl yet.
     “Yeah, the corpses...You seen any of them twitching on your leisurely stroll here?” Her eyes narrowed as she spoke.

     “Well, yeah, so what?” I replied. As I had stated before, I had no idea of what that twitching and spasmodic flexing was from. For all I knew it was completely natural.

     “So what?” she asked in reply, and then let out a little dark laugh.

     “That means the dead will rise shortly. That‘s so what.” The words came out of her mouth with the sharp ring of truth to them.

     It was clear that she believed what she was saying, but I thought she had lost her mind and started to back away, slowly.

     “It’s ok, just stay calm and let me go.” I carefully picked up my backpack and continued to put some distance from her, slowly backing away.

     Her eyes went cold as steel then and she raised the rifle and sighted down the aisle towards me.

     I didn’t know what to do so I spread my arms wide and stopped walking backwards from her to show her I had no weapon or intention of harming her.

     “Get down dumbass!” She yelled at me.

     That’s when I felt the presence of someone behind me. I instinctively started to drop down like I was ordered as I turned to see who had crept up on me.

     It was a close thing too. This horror that used to be a human being had started to grab me close and I could hear its jaws bite the air where my head was just a moment before.

     I felt the hairs on my head swish as the bullets from the teen’s gun whipped past me. The gunfire was loud enough to partially deafen me. Three shots to the undead things chest and shoulder knocked it back and flat on the ground. The slugs didn’t stop it though, and now I was scrabbling back towards the person who I was previously backing away from. I swear the girl couldn’t be more than nineteen years old by the look of her, but she easily stepped over me and put a couple of rounds into the nightmares face until it stopped moving again.

     “C’mon dumbass, we need to get the hell out of here before more show up to investigate,” she told me, with a snarl on her lips.

     That’s how I met Jannie.

     The light is fading now and I don’t want to waste any of the candles I have left, so I will continue again tomorrow.

Logged

gthez

  • Bay Watcher
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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #2 on: February 18, 2012, 02:48:31 pm »

9


     For the past two weeks that I've been here, I've had these nagging feelings that something about this place is wrong. I kept putting it down to my nerves, past experiences, mental fatigue or whatever. Sometimes I would notice something out of place from where I left it before but I just ignored it, blaming it on a crappy memory. Then there was the time I was absolutely sure I had eaten the last can of asparagus (because I love asparagus and I know I counted them out and rationed them for myself), and then lo and behold there appeared another couple of cans of them tucked away in the corner of a shelf. Not to mention the blood, the layers of blood that I had laboriously cleaned.

     I know when I arrived here I was down to about a hundred and thirty-five pounds or so, which is skinny as hell for someone a hair over six feet tall. I must have put twenty or so pounds back on, living the good life. Ha. Probably I was just being allowed to fatten myself up for the slaughter.

     Dammit, if Jannie were here she would have raided the place and left on day one. She was only half my age but that girl paid attention to her surroundings. I hoped (and still do) she had gotten out of our last safe house alive, but I don’t see how it could be possible.

     I mentioned before how the building was solid and well built, but I didn’t really go into details. I will now though. The windows are all triple pane with a clear sheet of thin material between each pane, making them bullet proof, hurricane proof windows that can be closed remotely. The walls are of a solid brick and mortise type, with steel reinforced bars. Even the ceiling is solid cement reinforced with rebar and drywall covering it. Apparently, the solid hard wood doors also have steel bars that can be slid into them, from the walls, and remotely too to boot. Where the electricity to do this is coming from, I have no idea as all the available outlets I’ve found are dead. I knew about the triple pane windows and I knew the walls were brick, however, I just this morning found out about the rest of the security features. I’ve found out that this place is well suited to not only keep people out but is well designed to keep people in.
     Somebody spent a lot of money on this place before the world went to hell. That same somebody was probably planning for world war three to break out and being ready to hunker down and wait it out when this day of reckoning happened instead. That somebody is probably in a thick, deep, fall-out bunker under this house. That somebody has decided, for reasons I’m sure aren’t for my benefit, to lock me in here.

     I woke up really groggy, looking back I know I was drugged. I slept soundly, without dreams, for almost fourteen hours. Normally I sleep very lightly, waking at any small noise (being surrounded by the walking dead will do that to you), for no more than six or so hours at a time. It took quite a while for the cobwebs to clear from my brain, and as I noticed that all my shit was gone, my backpack, gun, even my boots, I wondered if I was still dreaming.

     I remember leaving the bedroom window cracked open and locked in place before I slept so I could have a little flow of fresh cool night air. This was something I would never even consider in any other safe house, so it was worth noting when I did it. When I noticed it was closed and when the window would not budge open one bit is when I seriously started to freak out.

     I ran into every room and tried every door and every window, while furtively searching each room for my stuff.

     Until I walked into the kitchen. Then I stopped in my tracks. Then I knew I was being toyed with. My journal was lying open on the kitchen table, to the next fresh page. This page. This page that I’m writing on now. Placed neatly to the side of it was this whittled down, next to nothing but an inch left, small ass golf pencil.

     When I saw that I went crazy trying to rip apart the ceiling and walls with my bare hands. All I did though was manage to break up some drywall and pull a few pieces of molding off the walls and tire myself out. I searched and searched but I still couldn’t find any of my stuff or any possible hatch or hidden entry to a bunker. Even the pantry door and the damn cupboards and silverware drawers are shut tight.

     Whatever. Fuck it. I’m not giving up. I know this was left out for me to write my own obituary, or last will and testament, or finish up whatever I had to say. Maybe the fucker wants to keep it as a trophy or something. I don’t know. I’m writing because frankly, it gives me a chance to kill some time until whatever is going to happen, happens.

     Hopefully I’ll be able to write what the hell happens with this situation when it resolves itself. Hopefully I can either get the fuck out of here or kill the bastard who locked me in here, but accomplishing both of those goals would be best.

     Been over twenty-four hours now and there’s nothing but stillness and quiet. I thought whoever locked me in here would have attacked during the night but it was unnervingly eventless.

     Forty-eight hours and I’ve tried repeatedly to find a way out of here. All I found were two cameras. They were extremely small and well hidden. I found one in the bedroom, embedded in some of the more intricate molding, looking like it was part of the carved scroll work. The other was behind the mirror of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I found that one when I started smashing the shit out of it. Even that was thick and reinforced. I don’t think he (I’m assuming it’s a he), will be expecting me to be armed with this nice, sharp, wicked, piece of mirror that I’m going to try and gut him like a fish with. I’m so tired now. That’s his game then, to wait until I pass out. Time to play possum and draw him out...


10


     If anyone is reading this, you surely noticed that there is a page torn out. I did that. The bastard wrote a bunch of foul shit in my journal, taunting me with his vile ramblings, as he took breaks from his torturing of me. You're not missing anything by not reading it. His childish scribblings were hard to read to begin with and what you could read was pure filth. Insane garbage of how he was going to enjoy torturing, raping, cutting me up and eating me (and not necessarily in that order). I have no doubt that he would have done exactly what he said he was going to.
     As it is, he cut off both of my small toes and fucking ate them in front of me. He cut me multiple times (in some very sensitive places) and rubbed salt in the wounds. I’m in a lot of pain and it’s going to take me awhile to heal up from this lunatic’s assault. I had seriously thought that being eaten alive by the undead would be the worst way to go. Now I know better. At least with the zeds you bleed out and die within a minute, maybe two at the most. But this, this is so much worse. He worked me over for a day before I got loose and killed him. I don’t even want to think about how long the fucker would have drawn out my death to satiate his hate.
     Unfortunately, there isn’t just the immune and the walking dead. There are also those who are carriers. Like the maniac who was going to torture me to death. The carriers are the ones whose immune system are strong enough to stop the Scarlet fever before it kills them, but not strong enough to beat it. They exist in that stage of the disease where their skin is a permanent bright red and their mind is utterly gutted. I’m sure it’s a horrible way to exist, completely filled with rage and hatred. I know now that they are aware that their brain has been mainly eaten away, causing extreme insanity and delusions, driven by the parasite to crave the taste of living flesh and blood. While I do take pity on them, they are by far more dangerous than a hundred zombies.

     This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with a carrier. Jannie and I had our run-ins with some previously. I’ll have the time now, since I need to recuperate, to tell you about her. But not right now. Right now I need to write about my day in hell.

     I sat there at the kitchen table, not moving, pretending as if I were sleeping. I may have actually dozed off at some point, but it was a dreadfully light sleep. I had gotten used to the normal sounds of the house, and still I awoke at the slightest sound, waiting for a noise that was out of place. It seemed to take forever, my body was crying out for me to change my position. I was cramping up from the forced motionlessness and every small itch seemed unbearable. Then it came. A noise I hadn’t heard before. A small creaking of hinges from the same bedroom I had chosen to sleep in all those nights. If I hadn’t been so keyed up and waiting for such a sound I wouldn’t have heard it. Then came a sound I could place. It was the closet door in the bedroom sliding open. That’s where the entrance to the bunker was. I knew how much time it took to get from there to here and I strived to get up and get into position. I had wanted to get to the spot beside the doorway to the kitchen but my body wouldn’t comply fast enough. I was nervous, stressed, keyed up and exhausted at the same time. My adrenaline was flowing and panicky sweat covered me. I stood up too quickly and my legs cramped up on me and I fell solidly to the ground.

     As I was forcing my body to get back up and ambush the sadistic fuck I saw him coming in the doorway.

     He was bright red, obviously he was a carrier, naked and just covered in filth. I smelt him then and his scent was overpowering. They say that demons are proceeded by the stench of decay and shit, but they could have nothing on this guy. His eyes and fingernails were completely black and no cloven hoofed devil could be as terrible a sight as him. I fully expected him to try and tackle me or physically assault me, if that is, he didn’t try to put a couple of ounces of lead in me. I had my makeshift knife, made out of the painfully sharp piece of mirror, ready for the physical attack. Even if he shot me I still thought I would have the time to slice open his gut or jugular if he missed or if I got the drop on him.

     What he did though I didn’t expect. He tasered my ass. His black gums showed as he laughed manically while he shocked me repeatedly. With my body going into spasms from the electric shocks from two separate taser guns, he quickly hand-cuffed my wrists to my ankles, effectively hog tying me. He screamed obscenities at me as he beat me so hard with the butts of the tasers that they actually broke on my skull. Then I passed out as he beat me unconscious.

     When I awoke I was tied spread eagle and naked to a gore encrusted work bench. I knew I was in his private bunker as I had never seen this room before. There were no windows. The light was from a flickering fluorescent light fixture, one bulb wasn’t working and the dim, almost strobbing, quality of illumination from the single remaining bulb lent itself well to this nightmare.

     I don’t care to write down what he said exactly, or for that matter, what he did to me. What he said were vile ramblings and bragging about how I wasn’t the first to fall into his lair. He was bat-shit crazy it was true, but he was also telling the truth. I found five severed heads in his freezer. Two adult males, a teenage males, a middle aged woman’s and a little girl’s. They were in there along with some pieces of meat I will bury as soon as I can. Enough of that. I don’t want to get into what he said he did to them, and how he planned to do all the same evil shit to me.

     His anger and insanity either lead him to overconfidence or he just plain overlooked the fact that the strap holding my left hand down wasn’t nearly as tight as it should have been. With every slice and hateful torture he committed on me I pulled with all my strength on that loose leather strap. The pain he placed on me made the pain in my left wrist seem like nothing, so I worked that strap until I knew I could break it easily. I just couldn’t break it while he was in the room with me. The torture seemed all the more worse knowing I could break at least that bond and smack his infected ass upside the head whenever I wanted. It took all of my composure and will not to.

     Finally though, after he fuckin’ masturbated himself over my bleeding and mutilated body he went into the door-less adjoining room to sleep. After lying down for about twenty minutes giggling and talking to himself he finally slept.

     The strap gave way easily then. I was nervous that he would hear the sound of me undoing the restraints but I’m sure he had learned (even relished) to sleep with the crying and sobbing pleas of his other victims in his ears.

     He is now going to be sleeping for the rest of eternity. There is no chance of him coming back from the dead either. I picked up a ball-peen hammer, which I am absolutely sure he was planning on using on me, as it was on a shelf along with some of his other “tools”. Then I slowly crept up on his foul ass and manically beat his skull and head into a bloody pulp as he slept. I think I laughed like I was insane (and maybe I was) and uttered vile things at his corpse, as I literally beat his body into an unrecognizable mass of meat.

     Tomorrow I’ve got some digging to do. Body parts and a body to bury. Tonight I need to rest.





11


     It took me most of the day to dig a proper grave for the dead. I didn't want to bury the carrier’s body with his victims, but I did anyways. Even though the ground is mainly sand here, using a shovel was another experience in pain.

     The bastard who cut my little toes off was no surgeon. The bone is exposed on what remains of my right small toe and is plainly sticking out, with the skin around it having shriveled and turned black. What's left of the toe on my other foot isn't any better, with both of them giving off the putrid odor of infection. I have tried to bandage them as best I could but with any amount of walking they weep a sickly mixture of puss and blood. I need to find a doctor (good luck with that) to have them properly amputated. There is a small amount of medicine and pain-killers in the bunkers stock and I'm hoping that it will be enough. If not I'm going to have to go back into town and find a pharmacy and find something stronger than the penicillin I have now. Maybe I'll be able to find a doctor’s office or something where I can get a hold of a Grey's anatomy book or something so I can operate on myself if it comes to that.

     I’m so depressed right now. What is the point of all this struggling to survive in a world where there is nothing left? My outlook is bleak. I can stay here and hope that my feet, which are swollen and red with a deep blackness spreading from the severed digits, miraculously get better. Or I can force myself to hobble slowly, with each step bring fresh pain, into town. There is a decent collection of weapons here, if there aren’t a large number of zeds in my way, I could probably fight my way through. In my condition though, not being able to run, if there’s more than a handful I’m just going to be zombie bait. To stay here I’ll surely die, but to try to get to town I’ll only probably die. For what though? Even if I do heal and get better what for? To eat canned and freeze dried food for the rest of my life? To bear loneliness as my only companion? My .38 looks to be a viable option. I think the only reason I’ve made it this far is because I’m a coward. I only carry on in this life because I’m afraid of death.

     I did have the time to investigate the bunker. There’s a whole pantry fully stocked with canned and freeze dried food. One room, the main room I guess, is full of monitors and a couple of computers that control the security for the house and shelter. There’s the small bedroom, of course, well stocked with plenty of DVD’s and a couple of books. A small kitchen and a tiny bathroom with a shower are also down there. I don’t know what the original purpose of the torture room was, it was possibly an exercise / utility room as I found some weights and what’s left of a now destroyed tread mill. The place is a complete mess though, with broken and shattered stuff scattered all over. The place stinks to high heaven, being covered in filth and blood and God knows what. Gonna be a huge project to clean it up, I’ll wait to do that when (and if) I’m healthy again.

     I had to do some serious investigating to find out where the electricity was being generated from. Remember how I told you there was a small stream that flowed from the spring fed lake? Well it seems there is a cleverly hidden water wheel under some large carved and hollowed rocks in the stream. I was actually standing on top of the covering stone before I noticed that the water swirled oddly around it. The constant flow of electricity is such a blessing.

     Even though this place is fairly isolated, it isn’t free from zeds. While I was doing some of the digging I was occasionally swearing and bitching from the pain my feet were giving me, forgetting all about the current state of the world. The damn thing had stumbled to within twenty feet of me and I hadn’t heard it. I was so absorbed in the task at hand and my pain that I didn’t hear the things clumsy crashing through the brush towards me. It was a close escape, one that was due more to luck than anything else. I couldn’t limp away from the horror any faster than it could shamble towards me. I placed the grave away from the house. As I went down the slope that leads to the lake and the house itself I tripped and slid down the embankment, almost ending up taking a swim. As I got up, the zed came crashing over the ridge and it also fell and went head over heels down the steep slope. I got out of the way as fast as my painfully swollen feet would let me, narrowly avoiding the things outstretched hands as it rolled right at me. Thankfully it didn’t have the coordination to stop itself from going into the lake. I know that if this had happened six months earlier it would have caught me and quickly made a meal of me. Time was finally decaying them as it should have a long time ago.

     The undead clearly can’t swim, but they don’t drown either. It splashed and struggled to get free of the muck and silt that hampered it. Slowly it ended sliding further and further down into the lake. The water is really clear in the lake and I was surprised as a veritable swarm of fish, both large and small, surrounded it and start taking tiny pieces off of it. I was worried that the monster would find a way out of the lake eventually and I would have to keep an eye out for it until God knows when, but the fish were taking care of that for me. When it finally disappeared into the depths, the last thing I actually saw wasn’t the zed itself, it was the school of fish that were slowly, methodically eating it. I think I’ll stop putting fish on my menu for the time being.

     For the next few days I’m going to concentrate on getting together my equipment and weapons for my foray into the nearby town.


12


     Another pain filled two days have passed. Agony is now a familiar friend. I've almost forgotten what it’s like to feel normal.

     I decided to get my ass in gear. The sooner I get my feet taken care of, I figured, the better a chance I have at surviving.

     It was the pain that spurred me into action, or the hope of being able to be rid of it anyways. My right pinky toe isn't as bad as my left. The right toe seems to be sheared off cleanly, almost at the joint, while the left is a jagged mess with the remainder of the bone sticking out. I have to try and amputate both of them as best as I can.

     After I had packed my gear up into the ol’ backpack I went about choosing some weapons from the “Reds’” cache. (It was Jannie that introduced me to the slang word to reference the infected ones.) Along with my snub nose .38 I grabbed up a sawed-off shotgun and an AK47. Both the AK and shotty were considered illegal, but what cop was going to arrest me? The shot gun was illegal because it was sawn off just before the pump, and used with buckshot it makes a nice room clearer. Even if the shotty don’t kill a zed outright, it’ll definitely knock a group of ‘em back and down so I can shoot their fucking asses in the head with the AK. The AK was modified to fire on full auto, highly illegal. Plenty of ammo and clips. There were other guns there to choose from, but I didn’t want to load myself down with a bunch of stuff. Besides I thought, if this wasn’t going to be enough firepower then I would probably need a tank. That and the fact that every step brought a huge jolt of pain to begin with.

     I padded my feet as much as I could, even using a pair of the Red’s work boots that were three sizes too big for me. I started by filling them up with rags and cotton balls to lessen the shock of walking.

     I really hadn’t thought about the lack of a vehicle here. I found a key chain with some car keys and there were oil stains on the driveway and in the garage, but there was no car. There was doubtless a car or truck hidden somewhere, the crazy bastard had more than likely stashed it somewhere nearby. I hadn’t seen anything of it in my explorations of the immediate surroundings. I’m sure the fuck hid it in some remote location, camouflaged of course, to keep his prey from being able to easily flee. Instead of taking the time to wander around the woods aimlessly in the hopes I spot it, I could just save myself some time and head on over to a neighbor’s house. One of them was sure to have a car I could find the keys to or hotwire or something.

     Nature was quickly reclaiming what was left of the now unused dirt road. Saplings and brush were growing in it. In some places I could only determine where the road used to be by looking at the relationship between the old growth of the forest and the shorter, younger growth that was taking back the road. In another year or two the road would doubtlessly be completely obliterated and impossible to find. As I trudged along, the pain in my feet grew worse and worse. By the time I reached the nearest neighbor my left foot, especially, was screaming out in pure agony.

     With an amount of relief I saw the house had an attached garage. Even if there turned out not be any car there I was glad I at least found a place I could rest up and check the status of my feet before moving on. I had only hiked about a mile and a half, but by the time I reached the front door I was huffing and puffing and covered in sweat.

     I beat on the door, the banging seeming loud and out of place here, and waited for a minute or two, gauging the area to see if it attracted anything. Nobody answered the door, I would have been surprised if anyone did. Nothing came crashing out of the forest trying to eat me either.
     The screen door was locked, as was the front door behind it. Even in civilized times locks only serve to keep honest people honest. Not that I was a thief or anything but locked doors are only a nuisance to me now. A quick slice with my nice sharp bowie knife (also allocated from the dead Red’s bunker) gave me access through the screen door to unlock it. A quick strike with the shotgun’s butt shattered the decorative window placed, conveniently, in the center of the hardwood front door, allowing me to simply reach in and unlock it.

     After I entered I closed the door behind me and waited. I waited not only to let my eyes adjust to the gloom of the house, but to listen for anything unusual. It seemed all clear. My feet were howling in pain but I decided to make a speedy search of the house before I got caught unaware from any crazy shit that might happen. There was an underlying scent of rot hanging in the house, but I didn’t consider that anything unusual. The house had been closed up for the better part of two years now and it would be only natural for the smell of the rotting food and consumables to linger in the enclosed space.

     There was a nice family portrait hanging above the fireplace mantle. Two beaming parents and their healthy child. My stomach turned a bit as I recognized the little girl in the picture. Her parents I’m sure I’ve never seen before. I know the face of the little girl though, I buried her head just the other day.

     A wave of anger mixed with sadness rose up in me and I sat down on the family couch and softly wept for a moment before moving on.

     My suspicions about the child were confirmed and explained a bit when I searched the kitchen.

     On the refrigerator door was a hand written note, in the girls own writing.

     “Dad, I don’t know where you are and it’s been a week since you came home. I hope you’re OK. Mommy’s upstairs and I’m afraid of her. She got the Scarlet real bad since you left. She didn’t move all day yesterday but I had to lock her in the bedroom because she tried to hurt me today. I’m going over to Mr. Kolinsky’s like we discussed. Please come back. I love you, Kimmy.”

     My eye’s teared over again and it took some will to halt it. I knew now how the little girl ended up in the bunker. Her father had, in all probability, died in the insanity. Mommy though was a possible problem, I couldn’t account for her and she could very well be upstairs still. Which she was.

     I wasn’t sure undead mommy was going to be found upstairs though. I had made a lot of noise and that always alerted the zeds. The undead never worried about being stealthy and clumsily bumped or bashed anything that got in their way.

     On alert, and as silently as I could, I crept step by step up the stairs, heart pounding, feet throbbing, waiting for any sign of danger.

     All was quiet as I spied the bedroom door that must contain mom. The door itself was solid, not like most of the interior doors in a lot of houses. Most houses nowadays have those cheap hollow doors that you can punch through in, at the most, a couple of swings. These people must have had some money as most of the items in the house were of quality. Still, there was evidence someone, or something I should say, tried like hell to bust out. The door itself was intact but the frame had started to come away from the wall, cracking the drywall and plaster around it. It’s a god damned good thing the zeds are so stupid. Just by looking at the knob on the door I knew all the bitch had to do was simply turn the lock on her side of the door. That and actually turn the knob itself.
     I listened but I didn’t hear anything. I tried the door and it was indeed locked from the inside still. There was one of those holes in the knob, one that was designed so that you can sick a coat hanger end or one of those funky jimmies in the hole to pop the lock. It was no big deal at all to grab a metal coat hanger from the hallway closet, unbend it and go back to the bedroom door. It took only a second to pop the lock and the door swung open.

     Mommy was there, desiccated, emancipated, shriveled and stinking. She was sitting on the floor with her legs splayed and her back propped up against the bed.

     I took a quick look around the bedroom from the doorway and was wondering what, if anything, I could gain by scavenging the room. I had decided to come back later when I had looked after my feet and searched the rest of the house. I would leave this room for last, or completely alone, out of respect for the dead.

     Almost on cue as I thought about respect for the dead, the corpse started to slowly reanimate. It started to get up at a snail’s pace, haltingly, stutteringly. Old dried muscle and flesh straining to rise to devour the flesh of the living. This was a first for me, I had never known a zed to shut down and go into a comatose state before but, I suppose, a year is a long time to be inactive.

     “Go back to sleep.” I told it as I drew my gun and laid her down permanently.

     Found a nice Hummer2 in the garage, half a tank o’ gas. Started on the third crank. Raided the house and loaded it up.

     I'm taking a break to write this before I head out. I don't know what the near future holds. I feel like just giving up. It would be so easy to just lay down and die. Let the dark, peaceful nothingness engulf me and take me away from all this pain.



13


     I'm holed up here at Walgreens. I'm writing this while the meds I took kick in. I lost my watch somewhere. When I lost it I don't know. For all I know the crazed Red stole it from me and stuck it up his ass. I'm going to need one for these meds. I don't want to accidently OD on this shit.

     I'm currently taking refuge in some small, nameless town. Small means the zed population has been manageable. This store hadn’t been raided by looters, it looks like it’s been untouched since the shit hit the fan. Until I arrived that is. Now there’s a H2 crashed through the wreckage of the sliding doors and about a dozen dead zeds decorating the aisles.

     Drove that Hummer like it was a snow plow and made a game of playing tag with the dead heads that strayed in the road. The windshield is half missing on the passenger side and the rest is spidered and cracked. Hit one on my side and it damn near came through the windshield. Thought the fuck was gonna ask to drive. When it hit the windshield, it seemed to violently burst open and a thick, black fluid mixed with its guts clings there, hampering my vision. The wipers just got stuck in the sticky, stinking mass, smearing it around and generally made it worse. Drove with my head hanging out the window or practically in the passenger seat till I spied this place. Drove right into it at almost 50 miles per hour.

     I know I used my seat belt and I may not care if I live or die, but suicide is something else. There's a strange strength I have found in not caring about dying. Like I can be content in the sole fact that I tried and that alone is enough.

     I guess 50 mph was a little fast. Almost went through half the building before I stopped. Shelving forming the aisles were knocked into one another, effectively closing three rows access to the rear of the store.
     Ran over a zed that was standing where the first lane was. He got stuck somehow in the crumpled up remainder of the front passenger tire and the frame. His body thumped under the tire, trying to throw off my steering. The H2 was still drivable though and I parked it sideways across the gaping hole I made. The damn zed in the undercarriage had to be shot as though being twisted and mangled was only a minor handicap to it.

     The wave of zeds from the nearby area arrived shortly, more spread out in their arrival. The shuffling beasts were finally on the verge of collapse with their slowed, restricted movements. That first wave was followed by a small, weak second wave that I had no problem taking care of.

     I dispatch them easily now. I blocked off some of the aisles to funnel them into one row. The security mirrors in the corners, meant to stop shop lifting, gave a good view from the pharmacy booth. The pharmacy register is surrounded by good thick glass, it’s small but it shows the place had gotten robbed more than once. The manager’s office entrance (and the access to the safe,) was also on the other side of the locked door.

     A foot past the frame was a regular drywall covered wall.

     Punched a hole in that large enough to reach around and open it. Doubt a zed would figure it out but I put file cabinet from the office to cover the hole. Sometimes if a zed can’t see into a room, he thinks he can’t get in it that way.

     I think the pain-killers have kicked in now...

     I'm going to try to do this then I'll write again.

     The only watch I could find in the store was a child's model. There is no date or day on it, just a digital read-out of the time. I don't know how accurate it is but all of the cartoon character watches, for the most part, read within an hour or so of each other.

     Found "The Complete Guide to Prescription & Nonprescription Drugs." Didn't take me much time identify a fist full of antibiotics and pain killers. I don’t even remember how many I took. I waited for what I figured was an hour to gauge the strength of the pills I had swallowed. It seemed OK until I started to seriously put the blade of the bowie knife to the right mutilated toe. Tried to cut it off at the joint in one go. Thought I could do it as it there was just a small piece to actually cut off, the actual joint was close.

     I yelled.

     Damn I yelled.

     I decided that cartilage was tougher than it looked and another fist full of drugs was called for.

     I knew my yell was going to bring another round of zombies. They came stumbling and crawling over and around the rubble of the entryway. The Hummer blocks what's left of the doorway, but it just serves to slow the bastards down instead of stopping them. They were all pretty slow now, except for some. Some of the undead still possessed a decent amount of vigor. It was evident the ones that retained their speed and mobility were the ones that had fed the most.

     I took care of the zeds then locked myself in here again. Fuckin' buckled down and sliced that piece of shit toe off.

     Sorry, Dear reader of mine, if the following seems a bit incoherent. I think I took too many drugs. That's right, "Don't do drugs kids. 'Cause if you do you might end up OD'ing in a Walgreens attempting to perform Autotomy."

     Just thought it was funny.

     I am so stoned right now.

     I'm trying to use this to stayed focused.
     Kinda don’t care about life right now. It’s leading me to be reckless, I know. Honestly though, like I said, I don’t care.

     Anyways, where was I?

     That child. Kimmy. I thought how carrier dude killed her and I shot her mommy.

     I can clearly see her mother’s mangled body, with its arms broken off from the constant beating upon the door. For how long had she uselessly beaten herself upon that door I wondered. Broken bone shards and finger digits were scattered about the immediate vicinity of her animated corpse.

     I’ve done some rotten shit to survive before I started the journal. Wondered how much the same we and the necromantic parasite are. I curse it for killing people while I’ve been doing the same. Not just the carriers or the hungry dead, but I’ve been forced to (in my mind) justifiably kill the immune too. The parasite just does it on a larger scale.

     I told you I was depressed, stoned and writing.

     I got to remember to find some antidepressants or something before I leave.

     I think I dozed off or zoned-out or something. I think I remember being awakened by zeds pounding on the thick glass of the pharmacy. I barely remember firing repeatedly at the group of almost mummified, walking cadavers through the group of small circular holes that were actually meant for speaking. It took only one shot of the sawed-off to make a bigger hole through those concentric rings of holes. Then I just put the barrel of the AK through and blasted away.
     The memories have a fuzzy quality to them, dream like. Definitely had to be from the mix of meds and this fever that’s hittin’ me. I kinda remember having to go out and foolishly hunt down a much more active one. I'm not sure.

     I don't remember if I went to work on the second toe before or after I went out and cleared the store again. It's all confused and jumbled in my mind. I thought I had been becoming inured with the pain I had already inflicted upon myself. The left small toe had to be cut off midway up the bone, as the joint was too high up into my foot for me to want to dig. I was covered in my own sweat and blood. Before I decided to just try to cleanly cut it off and slap some liquid suture on top of it, I grabbed another round of painkillers. I used a disposable plastic lighter by itself and I used some tape to get three lighters bound together to heat up some cheap silverware for cauterization.
     I’ve got some more visitors now. I’m going to have to give them their prescription of hot lead. I’ll write again after I administer their dosage.
     Too early to tell what’s gonna happen with the surgery.

     Gotta piss.

     Drank a shit load of water, so thirsty.

     Place seems quiet.
     
      I think I successfully performed the surgery on myself, but I’m no doctor. At least the pain has abated somewhat and that’s got to be a good sign. It could be due to the shit load of pain killers I’ve been eating like candy, but some of the swelling and puss have seemed to abated.

      Gonna pass out again.
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gthez

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #3 on: February 18, 2012, 02:51:06 pm »

14


     I awoke with a head full of cobwebs and body full of dull aches. How long I was actually holed up there I can’t say exactly. Guess it’s been about four days since I made my desperate entrance. My feet still hurt like hell, especially when I bump them clumsily into something. Better than they were before, so I guess that’s what matters.

     I gave myself a whore’s bath with a mixture of distilled water and rubbing alcohol. Dried off with some medicated baby wipes. Found some lice shampoo and washed my hair over the big sink in the janitorial closet.

     The distant sound of gunfire caught my attention as I was putting on some T-shirts. Seems there was currently a sale on pocketed tees so I got rid of my old, tattered and stained crap. I wore three of ‘em out the store and tossed the rest in the Hummer. There was a pile of T-shirts to choose from, but there weren’t any other clothes in the store. One day soon I was going to have to go hit up a clothes store. I think I been switching between two pairs of jeans now for about a year and both of them are in some sad ass shape.

     The gunfire was steady, single shots, interspersed with quick tattoos of automatic rifle fire. Now and then the heavy sound of a shot gun barked and made itself known.

     As I looted the store and stuffed it all in the back of my busted up H2 I glanced out the windows. Whenever I came back to it with an armful of expired chips and melted together candies I took a minute to check out the outside.
     There were no zeds in the immediate vicinity, those in the distance I did see were all making their way as fast as they could towards the gunfire. All the better for me to make a quick exit. I could tell that the gun fire was issuing from more than one survivor. Sounded like there were two, possibly three of them.

     I stepped and slipped a bit as I was getting into the Hummer. Looking down I knew what I stepped in. The cooling system had a leak. Green, viscous liquid had pooled under the engine. Checking under the hood was going to be a problem, the hood was crumpled and buckled so I didn’t even bother to look.

     I briefly mulled over whether or not to go and at least check out the situation and decided it really wasn’t a good idea.

     There was the scent of change and hope in the air. The zombie terror was waning. People who had been cooped up for years had a serious case of cabin fever by now, I’m sure. Now that the lifeless, parasite controlled hosts were showing signs of weakness it was a good time to start thinning out their numbers. Absolutely the gunfire could be the sounds of somebody’s last stand, a do or die situation, having run out of food or water. Be that as it may though, it wouldn’t serve me or those that might be needing rescue for me to go staggering with my bad feet into the ass end of a herd and end up needing to be rescued myself.

     I turned the key and the Hummer grudgingly turned over. With a nasty clanking and grinding the engine voiced its displeasure at me. Momentarily I considered turning the key off and searching for another car. There was no guarantee the Hummer would start again, and no guarantee I would find a car I could drive. Batteries died, gas either evaporated or went bad in the tank or you couldn’t find the keys or I couldn’t hotwire it, etc., etc. I could easily spend hours trying to get another ride and not have any luck. The bunker was only a couple of miles away, easily walkable if not for the fucking flesh eaters of bad feet. As long as the H2 was still willing, so was I.

     The damn Hummer broke down and finally quit. I let it slowly roll to where I am now, the last of the antifreeze being blown out as steam through the broken radiator. The smoking heap rests just off the road in the parking lot of this little restaurant / gas station / market.

     On a good note I broke down within sight of the dirt bike I used to get here the first time. The dirt bike was simply out of gas and I was in the process of siphoning the tank of the H2 when I heard the sounds of the pack.

     Dogs.

     I heard a pack of them nearby barking and yowling like the wild animals they’ve surely reverted to. All the small dogs were dead so this had to be a pack of some of the bigger and more vicious (since they had survived this long) former pets. They seem to be getting closer. For a while it sounded like they had chased something down and were in a frenzy.

     I had almost gotten the gas I needed from the tank of the hummer. As I grimaced and spat out the residue of the gas from my mouth for the twentieth time, a large mongrel of a dog slowly crept towards me.

     It kept its distance, for the time being, waiting for the others in the pack to join it and decide what to do about me. Head lowered, fangs barred and growling, it slowly inched towards me, pausing occasionally to let out a rough bark to alert its motley companions.

     Within a few short minutes it's companions showed up. That's when I decided I had to get to shelter.

     The front door to “Dmitri’s”, as a faded blue and white sign proclaimed, was deceptively sturdy. It took repeated bashings with my shoulder and the butt of the gun to bust it open. I didn’t want to completely destroy the door, I wanted to be able to shut out the dogs after I broke in.

     Rottweilers, Pit bulls, German Shepherds, Dobermans...unkempt and hungry. It was a huge pack and they were running around the building excitedly. They kept jumping up on the windows and throwing their starving bodies at the door trying to get at me.

     The main windows started cracking and the door won’t stay. The AK is out of ammo but the shotty and my .38 are going to remind these bastards and bitches why we were (and still are) their masters.

     When I bashed the market door in I busted it up a bit. It still closed but just barely. It surely wouldn't hold up for even one good smash by one of those dogs and I knew it. I hurriedly crammed and kicked stuff into the jam and between the bottom of the door and floor. Hoped to make some ad hoc door stops.

     One of the dogs, a huge and natty haired Great Dane charged the door then, testing my makeshift repair. I did a horrible job, with just that one blow the door bulged and almost came open.

     The barking and baying was ringing in my ears, so loud I could barely hear myself think.

     I did the only other thing I could do in such a short notice. I pushed a nearby shelving unit, full of old and moldy magazines, behind the door to add some weight to help block the door. I’d be lucky if it held more than ten minutes under any amount of determined blows, and it turned out I was right.

     I took refuge behind the cash register counter and as predicted, the door gave way. It was momentarily stopped by the shelf behind it but that didn‘t stop the hungry pack for long. As soon as the first dog had partially pushed through, two more of the motley mongrels were busily, excitedly, struggling to force themselves and the first dog through.

     I almost felt bad about blowing the first dogs head and shoulders to hell. My first shot got a bite of some of the dogs that were behind that sack of meat, squirming their way in behind it. The barking and howling stopped momentarily, the only thing I heard was the pain filled whines of one of my shotguns victims.

     Almost felt bad that is.

     The dogs milled about unsure of what to do then. More than likely they had been chasing down and eating undead stragglers for the past year. Can’t really see there being much else to eat. I’m sure they remembered, to their horror, what a boom stick was. I’m sure of this because when everything went to hell with the animal madness, people abandoned and then hunted them mercilessly. Generally anything over a hundred pounds was safe but nobody stopped to try to weigh a damn animal before they shot it. Then with the insanity of the human madness, I’m sure they learned that it was a bad thing to even be near a human.

     The veneer of civilization has been completely peeled away, we have all reverted to savages. When once we fed dogs, now we feed on them. I knew if I lived I was going to gut and dress those dead dogs. I’ve learned to like the taste.

     The pack was working itself up again then. Getting itself ready to make another go at me. The door was open and the shelf was pushed out of the way. I could see them taking quick glances at me and moving quickly away from the now buckshot peppered door. A Pit bull with one eye missing and drool dripping from its yammering jaws busted out the previously cracked pane window.

     That’s when I fired my second shot. More or less just aimed at the open doorway, hoping to either get a lucky shot and knock down another one or scare ‘em away. Either would have worked.

     As soon as I fired I felt an enormous pain in my left shoulder. Some god damned walking stiff was gnawing on me. Dead, cold hands and arms gripped me with a vice like quality, knocking the shotgun out of my hands.

     I didn’t have time to even think about reconnoitering the store before the group of famished canines attacked. Fucking batshit world. The flesh eating prick of a zed was just tearing a huge gouge in my shoulder. It was an agony to fight off the withered claw like hands while it was eating me alive. I unholstered my .38 as it greedily, repeatedly bit into me. My first shot didn’t kill it. It knocked it back however and I was free of its grasp.

     Just barely in time too. The dogs saw us fighting and had breached the door. I let loose another shot at the zed, hitting him in the chest as I ran to the nearest interior door.

     The pack zoned in on the zombie as I slammed the door shut behind me. Thankfully this door had a lock on it and was in good shape. It was dark as hell in the room and I hoped I didn’t just lock myself in with another of those lumbering terrors. I could clearly hear the pack satisfying its hunger with the body of the zed that tried to make a quick snack of me.
     While the animals were tearing apart their meal I was able to quickly check out the back room by the small flame of my lighter. Old storage and cooler access room. More importantly it was zed free. I stayed quiet and took care of the jagged hole in my shoulder as best I could. Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness in here I found it wasn't too bad. Plenty of light spills in from the space under the door for me to see. Been a couple of hours now since I heard them run off. Gave me time to get off my throbbing feet and scribble this down. There’s still a whining coming from outside from one of the wounded mutts.

     I guess now I’ll go and put the wounded fur-bags out of their misery.

     Then finish gassing up the dirt bike to tow the Hummer and my swag back to the safe house.


15


     When the "Rat flu" made its debut on the world stage, killing off the vermin by the billions, no mammal was safe. The infinitesimal eggs of the parasite came out in the animals urine, feces, sweat, blood and saliva. They were light and resilient, excellent qualities for airborne transmission. Bites and deep scratches from an infected animal injected not only the eggs of the parasite, but the parasites themselves. It took time for the eggs to grow into adults who then multiplied at an exponential rate inside their hosts. The body reacted to the egg infestation as if it was pollen or another irritant, causing slight flu like or mild allergy symptoms. The eggs quickly hatched, becoming young, single celled invaders. The immune system of most mammals, including humans, didn’t react strongly to the new invaders once they hatched and were few in number. But once the number reached a “critical mass” then the body went into overdrive in a fight for its very survival. It was this period of the contagion that was dubbed “Scarlet Fever”. Red and itchy splotches appeared all over the host’s body and high body temperatures of a hundred and four plus degrees Fahrenheit weren’t unusual. Once the parasite established its foot hold it rapidly spread along and throughout the host’s central nervous system and the most basic parts of the brain.

     I know I’ve stated before that I was immune and that I never caught the Rat or the Scarlet but this bite pressed my body to its limit. I have gone through a shit load of injury and infection in the last couple of weeks. More than likely my immune system was already stressed and was slow to react to this new danger.
     The disgusting wound festered and swelled. At first it seemed like it was a normal reaction to any wound. Then hole in my shoulder started to itch like a mother and small red freckles started popping up around it. I broke out in a fever and I gobbled massive amounts of drugs that I looted from the drugstore.

     That damn thing tore a big chunk out of my shoulder. My whole left arm is weak now, any real weight brings massive pain.

     For three days I lay in complete misery wondering if this massive injection of eggs and adult parasites inserted directly into my bloodstream would overwhelm and overcome my weakened system. To survive the airborne phase was one thing, to survive a direct bite was another. I personally hadn’t seen it happen to anyone before. What I mean is I hadn’t seen anybody escape from just a single bite. Usually when someone got themselves into a situation where they got bit, they got eaten.

     I overcame it though.

     I have a lingering headache now, it gets less painful day by day. It was a close thing.

     My feet are doing better. The emergency surgery I performed upon myself seemed to do the job. They still hurt a great deal, and every bump and miss-step sends shocks of curse word laden pain through my body, but they seem to be healing well.

     I plan on just holing up here for the next couple of months, waiting out the rainy season while I fully regain my strength.


16


     It’s been a long hot summer and dry fall. It's now the beginning of December and I don't remember it raining since before I started this journal. That changed today. Today the heavens let loose with a heavy downpour. It started raining around noon and it’s still pouring now as night falls.

     I've spent the last couple days cleaning and bringing some sense of order to the chaos of the bunker. It's a complete second house, bigger than the upstairs "real" house. The bunker is also filthier than the upstairs was. I don't even want to think about the refuse filled room that is the bunkers bathroom.

     I'm sure it was a pain in the ass getting all this stuff down the hatch that seals off the bunker. I know getting the garbage and stuff like the foul mattress out of here sure was.
     The false floor in the closet has a rung ladder set in the side of a concrete wall that leads down to a room just large enough to fully open the kind of a hatch that you would expect to find onboard a naval ship. Beneath the hatch there is a set of stairs that are almost straight up and down that go down into the bunker itself. I had to take breaks from just dragging up the grimy, blood and gunk covered clothes and accumulated trash he had down there. Even though there is a small washer and dryer set down there, amazingly, it looks like he just wore whatever clothes he had until they almost rotted off of him (kind of like what I’ve been doing, but he had no excuse to not wash). A lot of shit down there is just battered and broken, including every dish and glass. That damned soul of a carrier must have vented his rage on whatever was at hand when he had nobody to torment.

     At the end of the last couple of days I had my own private bon fire getting rid of all that refuse. I threw junk that I knew wouldn't burn in there too, hoping to at least purify with fire any contaminate left on it.
     Dug the burn pit well away from the house, not that zeds are attracted to fire, but because the extended drought had caused a lot of the vegetation to just dry up. I didn’t want to accidentally start a forest fire that would engulf my new home.

     On one of my breaks from my custodial duties I decided to try and see if the “Red” had indeed stashed a vehicle somewhere around here. He did. He had an expensive but reliable Land Rover with four wheel drive stashed away. He dug a trench with one sloping side (to drive the Rover in and out), covered with plywood, which was itself covered with topsoil. It was overgrown with weeds and plants and I didn’t notice anything special about it until I was standing right on top of it. When I did notice something unusual it was because the ground seemed to give way slightly when I walked on it and it had a bit of a bounce to it. I jumped up and down a couple of times and I heard a distinct crack of splintering wood. I kicked the dirt around to see what was buried and there it was. After a year or so the plywood had started to rot. Getting the layer of sand and soil off of it enough to drag the plywood aside took longer than I expected.

     Some dry-gas and a fresh charge to the battery were all I needed to get the Rover running. Took it out for a spin to the neighbors. The house where Kimmy used to live. Raided it for clothes mostly but also grabbed a good bed and some clean, fresh sheets. Nothing about the house had changed. The dead woman in the bedroom was still, thankfully, dead. One day when I go back I should bury her. There are other houses scattered here and there and I should go scope them out too. I’ve got plenty on my to do list as it is, so that will have to wait.

     What was notable though while I was there was the distant sound of gunfire that I could hear coming from the direction of town. I swear, but I’m not sure that I heard someone yelling through a bullhorn. For a while the gunfire and yelling (I couldn’t make out what was being said) seemed to be coming closer to me. The ruckus appeared to taper into silence at the cross road where I almost became zombie chow. I don’t have any clue as to what’s happening back in town, but I am worried. I’m going to have to stay low for a couple of more days here, at least another two weeks, before I’ve healed up. Then I’ll go and check out the town.

     It’s raining like hell now. I’m not going anywhere until it stops. Knowing central Florida though, it could be weeks or even a month before that happens.

     No matter how much I clean down here it still stinks. I know I’ll eventually get used to it but damn. I’m going to have to go to town just to load up on air freshener and shit.

     As I sit here writing this, there is a large monitor that flashes the feeds from the security camera. The light is fading rapidly and on one of the outside feeds I thought I saw movement.

     A lone zed is wandering outside. Can barely make him out between the night and the rain. One isn’t a problem. Tomorrow I can evict his undead soul from the planet. Tonight I can’t do anything about it except stay quiet and catch some shut eye.

     On a side note, I have been taking Zoloft for my depression, and while it does seem to help (a little), there is no getting past the fact that if I weren’t depressed by my fucked up life I would be insane. I’m also using sleeping pills to help me fall asleep. The sleeping pills don’t stop my nightmares but without them I can’t seem to shut my mind off enough to doze off.


17


     When I awoke this morning, the first thing I did was to check the three outside monitors. It was still raining slightly, which didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was the number of walking, decaying corpses that seemed to be slowly moving to the west. I was expecting to have to go and silently crush an undead skull or two, even a handful of them with my sledge hammer. A small number of them are manageable, but there are zeds all over.

     There's a dog pack following the swarm. The grainy black and white monitors don't have any sound, but I don't need to hear the spectacle taking place outside. In the early morning, before the swarm became too thick, I spotted a number of mangy, flea ridden curs weaving in and around the slow moving shamblers. I watched them take one down and quickly devour and rip it to pieces. At times they seemed to actually play with their food, rushing up on one and knocking them down from behind. The dreadful, animated undead have a hard time struggling back up from any prone position and the dogs, being much faster, would grab one by the arm or leg and shake the limb around like it was some rotted chew toy. They tugged and shook until the limb came apart or was pulled from its socket completely. The pack seemed to actually be enjoying themselves, making a great game of it.

     As the day progressed the swarm became thicker and thicker. Once the numbers of zombies became too great the dogs ran off and I haven't seen them since. There are so many of them out there now, all slowly moving towards the gulf coast. Each zed seems to be following the zed in front and around them. I have no idea why they act like this, blindly following each other in groups like this.
     The clumsy bastards keep stumbling and falling into the lake. As the swarm of bastards became a densely packed herd, more and more of them come over the rise and roll down the steep slope to disappear into the now murky water.

     There was something that was disturbing me about the zeds themselves though. I figured out what was different about them. Before the rain the corpses were starting to look more like the mummies you see in museums, all desiccated and leathery. Since it started raining though, the fuckers seemed to have been revived a bit. The rain moistened and softened the dead flesh. Just a week ago the vast majority of them struggled just to move around it seemed, but now they appear to move around much easier and faster. Damn it all to hell. It’s as if the parasites were on the brink of dieing from thirst, if that was possible. Even if the dead flesh of its host didn’t need water any longer, I’m sure the parasites themselves need it to survive.

     The zeds are in various states of decomposition and undress, with most wearing nothing but tatters of clothing. Some walked, some crawled and some dragged themselves around with one clawing arm attached to a partial torso. The demons have no regard for any others of its kind, crushing and trampling any who get in their way.

     I’m safe here, underground in this modern bomb shelter. I can wait for a long time until the herd passes.


18


     Been two days since my last entry. The water pump overheated and shut off. What water it had been giving was tainted and dark. It gave the odor of death and I know it was contaminated. I hope it shut down because the filtration system got clogged. I pray it was due to something I can easily fix once the herd moves on. I have some bottled water so I’m not in any immediate danger of going thirsty.

     I crept upstairs to the house to check on the old fashioned hand pump in the kitchen. It may have been that the hand pump was a back up to the automated water supply but I found a flaw in the system. It seems that the water supply for the hand pump and the modern electrically driven pump got their water from the same source. That source had to be from the lake.

     The curtains, drawn tight across the triple pane windows, showed the shadows of the wandering undead outside. I pumped the lever to the hand pump as quietly as I could, praying that the hungry dead just a foot away didn’t hear me. I don’t think they heard my efforts, thankfully, but the pump was dry.

     When I returned to the bunker the generator quit. The electricity switched off and went into battery backup mode. It won’t last for long. I kept the lights on only as long as it took me to find out what happened. The water wheel, which acts as the electricity generator, has a main panel in the utility room here. Something is jamming it. I shut it down knowing that the only way to get it running again is to go outside and manually clear the obstruction. It has got to be a zed or detached body part that has clogged it.

     The situation outside is unbelievable. The once clear, spring fed, lake is now an overflowing mass of writhing, grasping corpses. As body upon undead body goes into the lake they make a horrible mash of those that are beneath them. All are grasping, struggling, and clawing their way out of the steep sided depression. The water churns and quickly turned black. It’s now a thick viscous soup of rancid flesh. They climb over and on top of each other in their struggle to escape while more and more are added to this scene. All the time more fall in and they rip each other to pieces like they're in some hellish meat-grinder.
     The small dock, even though it was sturdily built, has been destroyed. Grasping and groping for purchase they pulled and wore down the wooden posts at the end of the dock first. The dock collapsed and the monsters seethed over each other using the docks wreckage to make their way out of the depression. The dock is completely gone now. Pieces of stray planks resurface every now and then, breaking the surface momentarily, only to be pulled back down into the writhing mass. Flotsam on a sea of death.

     If they keep coming I fear wondering just how deep the zeds will pack themselves into this depression. The roof of the house is actually lower than the rim and if the zeds keep coming, the house itself could possibly disappear under decaying flesh.
     The lake is a nightmare scene taken straight from hell. The quality of the air itself now is horrible. The air, and it’s not just the air in the bunker but all the air inside and out, smells of rot and decay and disease. A foul miasma of filth and death. The odor is so strong that I retch unless I keep a towel soaked with cologne around my face.

     No way can I leave now. I’m trapped here. I can deal with the lack of electricity but eventually water will become a problem. Sanitation is going to be a problem. Toilet don’t flush, of course, but I can’t just open up a window to empty out a make-shift chamber pot. I sure as hell can’t go do my business outside either. This situation is going to get rather bad rather soon.

     The herd does seem to be slowly moving on. They move a mile or two an hour on average. There must be a hundred thousand of them in this herd. Easily. Florida had a population of over eighteen million before the Scarlet. It seems like most of them are coming to my house to visit.

     Nothing I can do but wait it out.



19


     It's taken about a week for the herd to move on. During the thickest core of the undead mass I could hear them even through these thick walls. Their constant stumbling and bumping into each other, forcing fetid, rancid air past the remnants of vocal cords causes them to emit a truly terrifying sound (especially when its multiplied by the tens of thousands). The relentless sound of legions of rotted and foul footsteps endlessly trampling over everything in their path, including their slower comrades. The disturbing sounds of a multitude of grasping claws randomly pounding and grasping the building. Added to this is the horrible splashing and thrashing of the things struggling to escape the now rancid pit that was the lake.

     I’ve caught myself talking to myself and even having small arguments with myself. Whenever I became aware of my verbal outbursts it was with horror. I never realize when it starts, but when I catch myself doing it I fearfully wonder if any of the ghouls outside heard me. Then I huddle in the darkest corner of the bunker and fret that they know I’m in here. I’ve picked up the bad habit of chewing my nails. I don’t know when that began but my nails are gnawed down to the point they start to bleed. I seem to slip into this verbalization of my thoughts without realizing it. I think I’m going slightly mad. The boredom is a palpable thing now. The few books and magazines down here are useless, having been written, torn, scribbled over and covered with unknown stains. I haven’t even thought of peeking outside through the curtains to watch the legion of the undead march by.

     Trapped here, with the smell of the death and decomposing flesh and the addition of the smell of my own unwashed body, is almost unbearable. Additionally, I’ve added to this is the odor of my own excrement. I started using the freezer that had once held the remains of Kimmy as my chamber pot. The freezer closes still, but it doesn’t stop the smell from escaping. The reek is overpowering and I’m constantly nauseous.

     I have to get the fuck out of here. I’ve got my trusty backpack and a sturdy duffle bag all packed up and ready to go. I haven’t heard anything from outside for a full day now, except the cawing of birds. No water or electricity isn’t the reason I need to flee so badly. It’s the stench. The stench is laden with the taint of disease. The lake, even though the natural spring that feeds it is clean and clear, won’t be safe for swimming, fishing or drinking for a long time. I know it’s a festering hole of infection. I think I remember reading how people used to poison wells and water supplies with dead bodies. This is beyond that, way beyond that.

     I’m going to go up and peek outside soon. I wanted to put down my thoughts in the journal beforehand because it does a lot for my grasp on reality and helps me order my chaotic mind. I need to steady myself and not screw up and let some passing dead fucker see me and call down the horde on me.
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gthez

  • Bay Watcher
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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #4 on: February 18, 2012, 02:52:39 pm »

20


     The sight that greeted my eyes needs to be written down. I thought I would never see a vision worse than the hellish lake of churning bodies but I was wrong. My nightmares are going to be worse now, of that I’m positive.

     The multitude of the damned was gone. I peered out the front window long and hard for any of the undead. Only a few scattered crawlers were left, all busily heading westward, towards the coast. It’s a complete mystery to me why the hell they group up in such a huge mass like this and start, seemingly aimlessly, heading off in one direction or another.

     I grabbed my .38 and my shotgun and gathered up some weapons for quiet killing. The sledge hammer and a sharp hand axe was all I needed though.

     The house’s driveway was the only gentle slope that led away from the natural depression that formed the boundaries of the lake. It was here that those of the zeds that escaped the lake continued their unholy pilgrimage. It was here that I dispatched the first of the handful of crawlers.
     A nasty partial torso being dragged along by rotted and broken hands. The skull had most of its flesh gone and stringy strands of filthy long blonde hair hung from it in small patches. It had to be a mercy for it to be finally sent to rest when I crushed its head with my sledge. There was no way to tell if it had once been a man or woman when it was alive. The tissue on its chest had been worn away and only broken ribs showed.

     I had been more worried about dispatching these isolated monsters than my actual surroundings though. Overlooking the lake of the damned I killed those few that seemed to have a chance of escaping, easily dispatching them and kicking their rank bodies back into that abyss of zombie stew. The waterline had risen with the sheer mass of the zeds that had tumbled into it, sending the foul dark water with its chunks of unrecognizable body pieces to just below the back doorway. A sickly oil and filth cover the surface and haphazard limbs form an unnatural dam that partially blocks off the stream.

     When I was sure that there were no more stragglers is when I finally focused on the landscape around me.

     In all of human history, with the multitude of its forsaken battlefields, could any site match the utter dreadfulness. Body parts, tattered pieces of clothing, trampled ground and felled trees. Every living thing had been trampled into the mud. Not one blade of grass nor bush or shrub survived. Not one sapling stands. Large trees and palmettos, having stood for decades in the sandy soil, were knocked down. Those trees that still stand have been stripped of their lower limbs. Everywhere the soil has been mashed into a muddy soup from the rain and the tens of thousands of uncaring, unfeeling feet. Mixed into this carnage were pieces, chunks and sometimes whole limbs. One arm and hand sticks up from the mud, clenching and writhing as the body it is attached to tries to lift itself out of the mire after having been driven deep into the earth during the undead’s slow stampede. In every direction, as far as I could see was a nightmare.

     If the devil were real, he would love this place. He would turn this into his summer home. I can see him reclining on a fold up chair. Admiring the beauty of a sunset as it slowly descends over the anguish of the lake. Sipping a tall, cold glass of despair from the ruins of the dock. Smiling at the earth covered with mangled body parts. Breathing deeply the stench of rotting human meat.

     Oh God, I don’t know where that came from. I don’t know why I wrote that. I have got to get away from here. This place is cursed. If I go to hell after I die, I fear I will be chained to this place.

     For all of its horror, some things enjoy it. A huge murder of crows, fat and healthy looking, has landed and is walking amongst the carnage. They walk around and selectively eat the pieces of once human flesh they find the most delectable. There is such an availability that none have to scrabble or fight for a meal. The numbers of the murder are as the numbers of those they follow. In the past year their food supply has grown and so has their children. The crow never really competed directly with man for food. Insects, lizards, snakes, berries and seeds were what it always had. Sure, they would raid a farmer’s field occasionally, necessitating the need of a scarecrow. Usually I saw them by the side of a road or highway pecking at some unfortunate piece of road-kill.

     While I went around and finished off the undead laggards I could feel the black crows cold, black eyes watching me. More than once I would spot one starring directly at me, like they were just waiting for me to drop dead so they could feast on flesh that was fresh. More and more of the black birds flutter down to join the feast. The multitude of their caw’s sound like a deranged laughter in my ears.

     I can hear the distant sound of barking. I don’t know if it’s the same pack I tangled with before or if it’s a different one altogether.

     I don’t care though. I’m packing up the Rover and driving the fuck out of here now. I keep getting the feeling of someone walking across my grave and the hairs on the back of my neck won’t go down. If I stay here surrounded by this madness I will soon completely loose the tenuous grasp that I currently have on my sanity.


21


     The Rover hadn't come through unscathed by the horde. It was still drivable, although it had been dented up pretty badly and had all of the passenger side windows smashed. The sheer numbers of the herd, banging into the vehicle, as it broke like a wave around a stone in a fast flowing river, had actually pushed it off the driveway.
     Driving down the dirt road I passed the neighbors house again.

     The last time I had been at the house, except for the broken glass on the front door, it had been in good shape. Now it’s basically in ruins. It's still standing, but all the windows are shattered, the doors are gone and even a lot of the aluminum siding has been stripped off. It was in the direct path of the massive horde that swept through, and all around the landscape was a shambles. As I idled slowly past the property, one of the undead must have heard the sound of the Rover's engine.

     I actually stopped the Rover and was going to wait until it got close so I could shoot the asshole in the head. The walking corpse belonged to a very overweight guy in life. The zombie was clad in the remnants of what had to be a pair of jeans, torn and tattered. He was wearing only one shoe and sock on his left foot and as he ambled out the broken living room window he got about five feet and stopped. Then it tried to come at me again and abruptly stopped again. The unfeeling corpse tried over and over again, each time more violently than the last but it kept stopping after about a mere inch or two. It looked like there was a leash around its waist or something and if that were true than that meant that a living somebody had tied it there.
     I stopped the Rover and slowly, cautiously approached it. I laughed out loud at the stupid thing and put it out of its misery with my "nine" when I realized what had happened. There was a jagged gash in its side and back. Old, blackened, stringy intestines had spilled out and had gotten wrapped around something inside the house.

     I drove past "Dmitri's Gas-N-Go" and noted it was in as bad of shape as was the neighbor’s house had been. There was something new here though.

     An older model Dodge Ram pick-up truck was overturned in the ditch.

     I had to check it out. I don't even care about not caring about the zeds anymore. I had already started swerving for the fuckers in the road. Not away from them, screw that, towards and over them. I find it damn hilarious to run over their stupid asses. I don't care if the zeds hear my gunshots or not. I won't be here by the time they arrive anyways. As long as it's not a herd, it's not a bother.

     Lot of blood in the cab of the truck. Somebody bought it. Crap had flown out of the bed of the truck and was strewn all over the area. Standard stuff you'd expect any survivor to have, canned goods (which I grabbed a few of), clothes, and some loose ammo. I didn't grab any of the ammo as it was the wrong type and caliber for what I had. While I was rooting around I did notice that there was baby diapers and formula lying about. That kind of made me sick to my stomach.

     I hadn't thought about children at all really since the world went to hell. Not until then.

     I mean, sure, I can completely understand what is almost certainly bound to happen between a man and a woman who are stuck in close confines for a long period. Either their gonna kill each other of fuck each other’s brains out. I never had sex with Jannie, I never even tried to get into her pants. I think my sex drive died with the world. Besides, I thought of Jannie as more of a daughter than a possible mate. Not everybody is like me though. Just killing the overwhelming sense of boredom for fifteen or so minutes by having sex is a good enough reason for most.

     Still, I have my questions. If both the parents are immune does that mean the offspring will also have that immunity, or is it still going to be a crap-shoot of random genes that give immunity? If the baby isn't immune when will it get sick, before or after birth? I certainly hope it's the latter, because if it's the former then that's a horror that I don't want to think about.

     Went into the gas station looking for some wine I remember seeing from before. I normally don't drink wine, but none of the beer is good anymore. All the beer skunked up over a year ago.

     Inside Dmitri's was a blood spattered bull horn. I remember how I thought I heard some gunshots and someone shouting through one before the horde made its way past the bunker. Behind the counter where I made my stand against the dog pack, someone else had made a last stand. Weren't much left at all. Just a few pieces of bone and clothes ripped apart by ravenous teeth and claws amidst a dried up blood stain. I know it wasn’t animals that ate the poor bastard though, the undead did it.

     Poor son’s ’o bitches probably ran into the herd and got forced off the road. The unlucky sod that ran in here probably used the bull horn to try and distract the horde away from his girl and child. Didn’t work though. He should have ran and left ‘em for dead. I would have. I certainly ran out on Jannie when the shit hit the fan. Sounds cruel, but I’m still alive aren’t I? Aren’t I? Maybe I died a long time ago and am in some ghastly purgatory. Doesn’t matter I guess. Either way I still got to deal with this.

     There were a dozen or so unbroken bottles of wine and I took them all. Did some drinking and driving that day. Actually, I got drunk and stayed drunk for almost a week. Today is the first day I haven’t been hitting the bottle, except for some hair of the dog to ease the hangover I have.

     It was weird where I ended up driving that day. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to come back here to see if I could find any sign of Jannie. Maybe see if she really died or escaped. I don’t know the reason, but here I am, back in Ocala.

     I drove here drunk and was having great fun taking pot shots at zeds by the side of the road and running over the ones in the road.

     The low gas light came on and I decided to hole up in what looked to be a decently secure bar. I chose a bar because I was four sheets to the wind by then. The booze was calling out for more booze to join it in my stomach. Got tired of wine, I wanted some real hooch, I wanted to get so drunk on some whiskey I would forget everything.

     And I did.

     I at least didn’t bust through the front doors in drunken stupidity. I climbed up on the roof and chopped a hole in it with my axe and sledge.

     Ah, I got to go answer the door. Some damn dead fuck is banging on it. Been having to go up on the roof every now and then and kill them off. I’ll write some more once I take care of these unwanted visitors and get something solid in my gut.


22


     I don't know the exact date, but I'm positive I'm about two weeks into December. The weather is definitely changing. Along with the cooler air comes the incessant rain. It rains every day, sometimes it’s a light drizzle, usually though it comes down in sheets. It may not be for another month or so that the rain starts to slack off. Living in central Florida without an air conditioner is almost unbearable. I have no idea how anybody lived down here before electricity. While I'm thankful for the reprieve from the hundred plus degree heat, the rain just cranks up the humidity.

     This bar is no bigger than a hole in the wall. The trailer I used to live in as a kid was bigger than this. The hole I chopped in the roof just happened to be directly over the woman’s toilet. After sticking my head down the hole to look around to make sure it was clear I jumped on in. Landed with one foot in the bowl and gave myself a soaker. Luckily whoever used the can last had the decency to flush. Now with all the rain the little drain in the tile floor overflows and half the bar gets flooded. The ratty old carpet squishes whenever I walk on it and I've been sleeping on the pool table. Nothing to eat here, except a couple of cans of cherries in syrup. Everything else has gone bad.
     The only thing interesting about this place is what was behind the locked door to the manager's office. I knew something was dead behind that door when I approached it. I've gotten to the point now, after having been around the dead for so long, that I could tell it was the smell of old death. The walking abominations, although dead, have an entirely different smell to them than rotting corpses. I can even tell how long a body has been decomposing, and this one had been there for quite awhile. The manager had done himself up right by eating the barrel of his gun and pulling the trigger. If you ask me it actually takes a lot of guts to wack yourself and go hurtling into the unknown void. If I weren't so chicken shit afraid of dying, I probably would have joined him a long time ago instead of living out this nightmare. Someone once said that life was misery and they sure got that one right. The old guy used an old military issue forty-five, the kind the armed forces used before they switched over to the nine millimeters. The clip was full, except for that one round. I thanked him for the weapon, closed the door and haven't bothered the room since.

     Every day I have to go up to the roof and kill off the undead that are drawn here. It's a viscous cycle of me killing them and them hearing the gunshots and wandering over from whatever the fuck they had been doing, causing me to have to go out and let off another round of gunfire.

     Last night's sky was amazingly clear. A billion stars sparkled and shone in the sky. There were no clouds and the visibility was perfect. There was no light pollution from the thousands of streetlights and neon signs since civilization fell. The complete absence of manmade noise left only the sounds of nature. Before the world ended I could never get away from the sounds of civilization. Even when I went camping miles from the cities I could still hear the distant sounds of the endless traffic on the highways. For a couple of hours I just laid back and really enjoyed the night sky with all its wondrous visions.

     Of course even that didn't last long. Something huge streaked across the sky, leaving a burning wake of debris. From west to east it plummeted. It was no mere satellite that was breaking up in the atmosphere above my head, it was much bigger than that. Pieces broke off of it, causing multiple smaller pieces of comet like wreckage to follow in its wake. It could only be the International Space Station falling out of orbit. I certainly hoped those astronauts and cosmonauts who had manned it had escaped before it fell from the sky. I can't see them surviving up there for this long with their limited food supply. They must have gotten into their Soyuz capsule a long time ago, but I'm sure they waited until the very last day to do so. I don't know how much they knew about what had happened down here, but I figure they didn't survive too long after they got back to earth. From what I understand, spending any extended amount of time in the absence of gravity means your muscles atrophy. After a couple of months in space, those who return can barely stand and need help to even walk. Hopefully they came down in some isolated countryside where the unholy zeds wouldn't have quickly run them down and devoured them as they desperately tried to crawl away.

     My time here is just about over. It's getting about that time to move on again. I'm going to have to go on foot from now on. The Rover's out of gas and there's no likely replacement for it in sight. Of the three cars in the area, two of them have flat tires from just sitting here so long. The third one is nothing more than a burned out shell.

     I'm not that worried about it though. Even with the rain rejuvenating the zeds somewhat, they only way they'll catch me is if I do something stupid. I have more to fear from my fellow humans than them. I'm gonna try and work my way to a mall or camping store. I'm in serious want of clean socks and underwear, among other things.




     
23


     Man, I just love this big-ass fire axe. Found it laying next to a fire engine. I was already loaded down with my pack and the heavy sledge hammer when I came across the scene. Made the decision to drop the sledge in favor of the heavy duty axe. It’s Got a nice sharp blade and a ergonomic fiberglass reinforced handle. Just perfect for chopping zombie heads or smashing down doors. Still keeping my hand axe with me, just in case.

     There are scattered zeds all over the place, but very few notice me. The jostling of my pack makes more noise than I do. Those staggering corpses that do notice me are quickly put down. The axe bites deep, slicing through skulls with ease.
     Only once did it get stuck from an overhand swing, mainly due to it being driven so deep ‘cause of its weight. I had to stand on the fucker’s chest and brittle ribs snapped as my foot actually entered its chest cavity. Black ichor and rotted flesh oozed, covered and seeped into my shoe as I wriggled the axe from its disfigured face.

     I spent what seemed like an eternity running as silently as I could from building to building, furtively peeking around corners and planning the best way to move around. While I made my way to this already looted shopping mall, I noticed the numbers of the undead bitches were somewhat thinner than they normally were.

     I quickly found out where they were. I hadn’t spent any amount of time in Ocala before the Scarlet, (even after having lived in Florida for twenty years, the first time I had been here is when Jannie and I fled the infested suburbs of Orlando) so I was basically running blind. Being holed up in that death-trap I never did get around to doing any sight-seeing. I spotted a huge horde surrounding what had to be the city jail. I damn sure didn’t get close enough to see what building it was exactly, but any jail in any city always has the same look to it. The horde didn’t notice me at all, all of their hunger was directed at the building down the street. To me that means only one thing. Other people. Whether they were still alive inside that place was another question altogether. The zeds would single-mindedly try to gain entry into wherever there was living human flesh until they turned to dust. I knew from personal experience that they would not give up until they were destroyed or finally gained entry and ate the living alive. Even if they gained entry and found the starved occupants dead they would still feast, such is their craving for human meat.

     It was with a guilty comfort that I realized that the majority of the walking dead had their attention directed at someone else. Having been surrounded by the ghastly things I knew how terrifying it was.

     The strip-mall that I came to had been looted already, with every one of the stores having their doors and windows smashed. By the number of head wounded corpses I knew other survivors had been here since the ghoulish parasite took over mankind. There was the odd monstrosity around, but they fell quickly and quietly to my axe. The jail wasn’t far from here so I dreaded to use a firearm.
     As I suspected, almost all of the food and water was gone from the Winn-Dixie. More proof someone had made repeated forays here. It would take a semi-truck to get all of the missing canned goods out of here at once. The back office to all the shops had been busted open also, though that may have actually happened during the riots and insanity.

     I found some camping gear and a tent along with the new socks and underwear I had originally came here for. Some nice new boots too. Most of the camping gear was untouched…guess nobody wants to go camping during the apocalypse.

     Since there was no secure place inside the pillaged stores I set up the tent on the roof of Winn-Dixie. The grocery store had an access ladder back in the dock area. I had never seen one of the undead cannibals have the co-ordination to climb a ladder, so I figure I will be safe. Besides, now I can see the surrounding part of town easier. Keep an eye out in the direction of the jail.

     I’m going to light up this can of Sterno and eat some Raman noodles before it gets dark. Can’t risk a fire at night. Sleeping on the roof, even in this one man tent, means no flashlight to write by either. Been awhile since I had something hot, even if it is just simple noodles and instant coffee.


24


     The roof doesn’t drain properly, even after I tried to clear the drainage spouts and grates. Grass, weeds and even a small sapling have taken root on these flat roofs. I had to go inside the docks and find some pallets to put under my tent. I couldn’t just haul them up the ladder, the hatchway was too small for the pallets. Finally had to go around and scavenge up some rope to haul them up here.

     I almost became zombie chow while rummaging around the stores for an adequate length of rope. Damn "sleeper" woke up and tried to eat me for breakfast while I was distracted. Fucking things…It’s hard to tell, with the rot and decay of the dead, which corpses are actually dead and which corpses are still undead. The cannibalistic ghoul was that of a boy no more than ten years old or so. It really sucks to see someone so young die so violently, but by now I was used to it. Besides, there were many much younger. There were many much younger than him that I had buried this very axe in their rotted faces, deep into what was left of their grey matter. For the future I’m just going to have to preemptively start crushing the craniums of any corpse I come across.

     What had caught my attention was a portable battery operated CD player. The packaging hadn’t been touched since all hell broke loose and I almost didn’t even notice them. I was actually looking at some cable wire and thinking how I might be able to tie enough of them together to reach the ground from the roof. As soon as I saw the CD player I was like a child in a candy store, oblivious to the fiend lying only a few feet behind me. I was having a hell of a time, even with my bowie knife, trying to open the stupid plastic packaging.
     The foul ghoul had risen to its knees and reached out with a cold, fetid, clawed hand and grasped my thigh like a vice. Its grabbed a hold of me with an iron grip and dug its filthy nails in deep. I let out a horrified shout (I probably sounded like a scared little girl) and instinctively tried to jump away. It was that jump that caused the vile thing to miss biting a chunk out of my leg. It was also that jump that ripped open my jeans and allowed my flesh to be harshly dug into by its nasty nails.
     I could see the undead things reaction to the smell and sight of my warm, fresh blood. The evil, dead, beast that once was an innocent child, seemed to double the speed of its actions. I did what I could. I drove the Bowie knife into its skull damn near to the hilt. Thick black blood flowed from its wound and it staggered from the blow. Normally a maiming like that would have put the thing down permanently, but every now and then I run across a zed that is more resilient than the others of its damnable kind. Even with eight inches of steel buried in its brain, it didn’t loosen its grip on my leg one iota. I had to chop the damned things hand off with my axe and then pry open its fingers. I was nauseated as I felt old, infirm, rotted flesh squish onto my hands as I struggled to open its clawed fingers. The strength of these things is amazing. Never in life would a ten year old boy have such strength. The parasites couldn’t feel the pain of their hosts and worked the dead’s muscles like the strings of a marionette. If more than one of them grab you it’s all over.

     The crawling corpse shook like it was having an epileptic seizure, then it stabilized and came at me again.

     “Fuck this bastard.” I thought and brought my axe down squarely on the rotted things neck.

     No medieval executioner could have done a better job. The things head separated cleanly from its shoulders and rolled away.
     The body collapsed but the lifeless head still moved. Black orbs for eyes, covered with opaque milky cataracts, still rolled in their rancid sockets, keeping its gaze locked on me. Yellowed and rotting teeth surrounded by blackened gums still snapped violently, hoping to tear open my flesh. A horrible mucus coated, blackened tongue still writhed, waiting to taste its prey.
     I picked up the head by the handle of my Bowie, as it was still lodged firmly through its right temple, and firmly ground my boot heel into what was left of his face as I pulled the blade out. After a few hard stomps, which resulted in some satisfying crunching and a goodly spray of black blood and brain matter, it finally ceased its futile grasp on undeath. Even though the zombie was a child, any morality or pity any normal person would have felt was misplaced here. Guilt and sorrow is out of place when dealing with the undead. I felt bad about the situation, but not about killing a mindless automation. Even a toddler in diapers, once it joins the ranks of the undead, is a deadly foe.

     Afterwards, I found a crap load of batteries, they’re old and the charge on them isn’t what it used to be, but they work. I haven’t listened to any sort of music for a long time. Literally. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. I’ve got a shopping bag full of old CD’s, all grabbed from the bargain rack.
     The wound in my thigh, while painful, isn’t deep and I poured enough hydrogen peroxide into it to kill anything.

     I can see a three story building in the distance, a couple of blocks away, that’s closer to the jail and its waiting horde. It should provide a much better vantage point to observe the jail. Tomorrow I’m going to try to make my way towards it and check it out. I hate the idea of having to clear a building by myself, but if I can I will.

     I thought I saw a light from inside the jail house last night but I can’t be sure. It was just a fleeting moment that I witnessed it. I could be mistaken but I still have to find out, if there’s other survivors I have to know.

     I really need to find some binoculars. I think I can just barely make out the ruins of the Tool and Die shop I escaped from when I started this journal. If I can get over there I can figure out where the safe-house that Jannie and I holed up in until the mass of undead overcame our defenses was. I have to find out if she survived. It’s becoming a fucking obsession with me. Maybe, hopefully, The three story building will give me a better view.

     The days are getting shorter and I’m going to enjoy my CD player tonight. Tomorrow I head out.
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gthez

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #5 on: February 18, 2012, 02:56:49 pm »

25


     I made my recon to the big building in the distance. It didn’t turn out to be what I thought it was though. In fact the whole thing was an exercise in futility. The only good thing that I got out of it was a pair of decent binoculars. I write this now tired as hell. I had to spend the night underneath a dilapidated mobile home in some trailer park. Needless to say I didn’t sleep for shit. I was finally able to make my way back here to the Winn-Dixie. I left the tent set up here in case I ever came back this way, never thought it would be so soon though.

     The closer I got to the building that was my destination, the denser the zeds got. I’m not going to give a blow by blow account of how many of the monsters I killed, but by the time I reached the building my arms were tired from swinging the axe.

     The whole thing of it was that the building I was trying to get to was closer to the Marion County Jail than I thought it was. It’s hard to judge the distance from this roof top with all the trees and power lines blocking my view.

     The building turned out to be some sort of huge factory where they built modular homes. The undead got so thick as I approached it that I knew more had spotted me than I could kill. There was an APC and an Abrams tank parked in front of the building. If there weren’t so damn many of the fucks I would have loved to try and loot them, at least see if I could grab the fifty cal. off of one of them. Thank God the main doors were left unlocked. I ducked in and locked the doors behind me. A number of the lethargic, shambling corpses were following me and I had no faith in the strength of the glass double doors to hold them back for long. I found myself in a foyer with a second set of double doors that led into an office area. I locked them too, meaning until they broke through them I may have possibly locked myself inside with no other way out. Nothing else I could do though. I was counting on such a big building having some other exit, mercifully I was right.

     There were two putrid cadavers that I had to put down before I was able to explore the office area fully. One of the undead was in battle dress and I grabbed his sidearm and what ammo he had on him after I split open his skull. I ended up needing it. The other was some unfortunate secretary or something that could barely even walk, she was hampered by having her nasty panties around her ankles. Whether the soldiers had raped her before they put a shotgun shell through her chest or her flesh had rotted away to the point where the elastic band on her once pink flowered undies couldn’t hold them up any longer, I don’t know, and I had no intention of lifting her skirt. I was searching for a stairwell to get up to the second floor when I opened a door I thought would lead to it.
     As soon as I cracked open the door rotting arms grasped it and violently flung it wide open. I had no recourse but to pull out my shotgun and start loudly blowing their heads into little chunks. The first ones I killed were soldiers. There wasn't much ammo on them but one of the soldiers did have a nice set of binoculars. They came at me so packed together I was able to kill two at a time with most of my shots. More came through and I started to sweat about how many were in there. I backed away as I fired and when I ran out of shells I just dropped the weapon and pulled out my “nine” and the “nine” I had procured from the first soldier I had encountered. After about a good dozen soldiers, another dozen or so civilians came through in a rush. The odd thing about the civilians was that they all had their hands tied behind their backs. They all, except for the few that were missing one or both of their hands, had been tied with those plastic zip ties.

     I knew that all the shooting would undoubtedly attract more zeds to the area. Fuck it though, they already knew I was in there, and once one knew, another somehow senses the first has found prey and soon there was a horde at the front doors.

     The door I had opened finally swung shut on its own accord, as there was a break in the zeds coming through. The gun smoke was thick, hanging in the air like a cloud as I reloaded.

     I could hear banging on the main doors and felt if I stayed in the office area I was soon going to be kibbles and bits for the pack. My only chance of survival was to go deeper into the rabbit hole. Others were starting to thump on the door in front of me. The zeds are too stupid to figure out even the simplest door knob so I was, for the moment, safe.

     Doorways, especially those with self-closing doors were excellent places to fend off a number of the undead ghouls. The restricted area meant that only a few (or one fat bastard) could come through at a time. The self-closing mechanism served to shut the door any time there was a gap in the group, unless one fell in the doorway itself and blocked the door from closing. Even if one met its final death in the doorway, it served to slow down or trip up any that were stumbling in behind it.

     I could hear the glass on the first set of double doors shattering and knew I had very little time left. Re-armed I kicked open the door and let the next wave walk into my zone of fire. There weren’t so many then, and the dead (truly dead now) corpses laying in the hallway hampered their progress towards me.

     As the door shut itself again, more crashing came from the entryway and there came the sound of fists on the second (and final) set of doors. I reloaded as quickly as I could, fumbling a few rounds into the gore spreading across the grey carpet.

     I almost slipped and fell into the gross black blood and chunks of decayed flesh and bone as I hurried to the door.

     Once past the door, as it slowly closed behind me, I heard the shattering of glass. It would take them a while to figure out where I was now and how to get to me if I could stay quiet. As the smell of the place assaulted my nose I waited for my eyes to adjust to the gloom of the factory. My ears picked up the sound of halting and unsure footsteps coming from deeper within and I spotted two remaining zeds. The remaining pieces of shit were in sad shape, both were missing their eyes and it looked like most of the bones in their arms and legs had been splintered and broken. It was with a silent ease that I put them down.

     The factory had been turned into a killing field with most of the machinery and building materials pushed to one side of the building. The building itself was fuckin’ huge. It was easily as big as, if not bigger, than a football field. There really was no second (or third) floor, and no real way to get up into the rafters easily. Cranes and hoists were on tracks overhead with only a couple of metal framed catwalks crossing it.

     There was a metal rung ladder further back that lead up to the catwalks and as I approached it I saw a mass of bodies covering the back half of the factory floor. There had to be a hundred or so people, all killed execution style, lying on top of each other. Mass murder had taken place here, more than likely committed by the military, but what the crimes were I can’t say. All I know is the victims all had their hands bound. They were from every age group. Young children sprawled out amongst the elderly and every age in between.

     Some fucked up shit indeed happened here. Oddly though, and I wonder what it says about my growing lack of empathy, all I could think of was how glad I was that they had all been shot in the head. If they hadn’t of been, there would be no way my now slim reserve of ammo would last long enough to kill ‘em all.

     I finally made my way up to the highest point I could get to and was able to peer out the opening of an industrial size fan facing the jail. Length-wise along the building were dirty plexi-glass windows for letting in some sunlight (at least when the building was maintained and clean) but they were on the wrong sides.
     The high, razor wire topped fence surrounding the jail was only a couple of hundred of yards away, just past a thin row of trees. From what I could make out the fence was still standing in the area that I could see, but there was an almost solid mass of zeds on the other side of it. Somewhere there was a breach and the zeds had poured in. They were packed in there and most of them were facing in my direction. If it weren’t for that fence they would all be coming over here to investigate the gunfire. Disturbingly, it reminded me of pictures of Hitler's concentration camps. From such a limited view I couldn't tell if there were any living souls in there or not.

     However much I wanted to stay there and observe the jail I knew it was too dangerous, with zeds both inside the building and out.

     I spotted a more than one exit and as I was deciding which one would be best to use I spotted a pallet of mineral spirits along the wall. I rolled one of the drums over to the mass of executed bodies and opened it up, letting the liquid soak into the carcasses which were no more than clothes and bones. I rolled another over to the door where the zeds who had followed me into the building were now pounding and let it empty itself under the door as best as the conditions would allow. The last two I just kicked over in the center of the building and watched as it spread over the cracked concrete floor, wetting the shit load of wood and other flammables stacked all along the walls.

     Not only would I get some satisfaction in killing zeds, making a diversion and cremating those who should have been buried a long time ago, I would also be letting any survivors in the jail know somebody else was in the area. I just had to figure out a way to communicate with them.

     I opened the exit door and checked the area out for zeds. Finding that the majority of them were mindlessly trying to cram themselves into the factory through the front doors, I lit a piece of cardboard on fire and tossed it into the ever spreading pool. The mineral spirits caught fire all in a rush and before the exit door could fully close I was running my ass off. Before I ran five feet the vapor lit up and exploded.
     The plexi-glass windows along the top of the building blew out and pieces of plastic rained down around me. I got up and laughed as I thought of how I seemed to be in the process of burning as much of Ocala to the ground as possible.

     The sound of the gunfire, then the loud as hell explosion attracted every dead mother fucker for a mile. I wasn't really counting on that, I just wanted to do some damage to the herd that had gathered at the building.

     I made it about a half a mile away and across the street into a trailer park when I started having to swing my axe again. In no time at all another group had spotted me and I ran around and even through the wreckage of one trailer, to try and lose them.

     I was momentarily out of sight of the first herd when I spotted another group up ahead of me, blocking my way. I was screwed, big time.
     The trailer I was hiding behind had a plastic skirting around it and I knew if I couldn't get out of sight quickly I would be surrounded and devoured. I would definitely take a shitload of them with me but my run in with the horde at the factory left me low on ammo. It wasn't easy but I forced myself under the skirting as quietly as I could.

     I spent the night terrified that they were going to discover me at any moment. They staggered and stumbled around only a few feet away from me, with only a thin plastic shield to protect me from them. I tried to remain as motionless as I could stand, and when I had to finally take a piss after holding it for hours I was freaking out that they would hear my zipper slowly being opened. Then after rolling on my side and relieving myself, only to have it run back towards me and soak my pants, I sweated bullets hoping they wouldn't react to the smell of human urine.

     Sometime around ten in the morning the majority of them had moved on past and I felt it was safe enough to make my way back here.

     On my way back I decided to try to locate the burned out building I thought was the tool and die shop. Turned out to be the dilapidated and scorched ruins of a different building entirely. The whole excursion was for nothing but a pair of binoculars I guess.

     The factory is still burning and sending up great plumes of thick black smoke.

     I got to figure out a way to contact those inside the jail, if there is anybody holed up in there.

     I'll spend tomorrow mulling it over in my head and finally get around to writing about Jannie. I know I've been putting off writing about her because of the guilt I feel. I also have been secretly hoping that she's safe inside the jail. Still got to figure out where the old safe-house was in relationship to where I am now and search it.

     Ah, places to go, things to see and zombies to kill. It' always something.


26


     It has been raining all night and all day. It comes down in great, massive, swollen drops and when the rain slows down it still comes down in the form of a fine mist. Welcome to sunny Florida. The sky is a dark grey and black mass of roiling lightning speckled clouds that blot out the sun. Thunder cracks so loud that it shakes my tent. There is no way I'm going to venture out in this. The overcast heavens and the unrelenting rain do nothing to help my state of mind. There's only so much that Zoloft can do to help my depression. While my tent is above the rushing flow of water, on its platform of wooden pallets scavenged from the grocery store below, the gusting wind forces fine droplets of water inside the tent and the moist air makes everything damp.
     If this storm turns out to be the front end of a hurricane then I'll have to barricade myself in one of the houses in the area. Not really wanting to do that. I've developed a sense of claustrophobia about being enclosed in any structure I guess. I feel so much better, even with the pouring rain, being outside where I can see the sky and actually look around me and see the trees and the grass. Being pent up in that accursed bomb shelter, and the number of buildings before that, I never even saw the sun or the stars for most of my stay in them. Not to mention that in the end, the security they provided was a false security. Maybe if this were Europe, with its castles and fortresses, would I feel comfortable being locked inside.

     That first day I met Jannie was the first day the stark horror of this new reality hit me. As I followed the seventeen year old high school student with long dirty blonde hair out of the Wal-Mart I felt as if I were caught in a dream gone hideously wrong. Making our way as quickly as we could, past and over twitching and slowly re-animating bodies, we exited the store.
     Just outside the entrance a brunette in a blood soaked sundress shakily and slowly had been resurrected by the insidious parasite. All the telltale signs that she was dead were plain to see, signs that I would come to recognize instantly. The lurching carcass was as pale as snow, the only color on her skin was a deep blackness that covered the left side of her lower extremities. I came to realize that was where what blood remained in the corpses' body congealed after death. The cadaver was missing its left arm below the elbow and the torso and once attractive dress was riddled with large caliber bullet holes. The orbs of the eyes were as black as jet and as it barred its teeth it showed the blackened tongue and gums.
     Without missing a step Jannie smoothly raised her weapon and unloosed an accurate burst of automatic weapons fire. The thing in the sundress's head snapped back as the top of its skull and the majority of its brains were ejected in a thick spray. It was then that a ball of fear started to knot itself in my stomach. Here was a girl, who's pretty blue eyes held a coldness that could seemingly freeze a glass of water with a glance. This fucked up world had changed a schoolgirl who should be in a cheerleader outfit into a hard as steel killer.

     I turned then and wanted only to get back to my apartment when an Abrams tank rolled into view, callously running over the dead, straight towards us. The way back to my apartment lay past the tank and I was completely unprepared for what happened. The tank opened up on us, spraying the area surrounding us with its fifty caliber slugs. The first burst from the tank missed, but not by much, sending pieces of shattered brick and mortar from the wall of the Wal-Mart behind me, to stingingly  strike me. I stood there frozen, flabbergasted that this could be happening.

     "This way dumbass." She shouted at me.

     Jannie roughly grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, ripping it in the process, dragging me in the opposite direction than I had wanted to go. I was off balance and as we rounded the corner I fell flat on my face. Whomever was operating the tank was mercilessly firing the machine gun and chunks of the bricks that made up the corner of the building were being turned to dust just feet behind us.
     I got to my feet and I ran after Jannie as fast as I could. There was a momentary silence as the tank stopped firing. In a second, two at the most, the fleeting silence was gone as a huge explosion rocked the Wal-Mart. Even though we had ran beyond the building the explosion still knocked us down. A cloud of rubble, dust and burning pieces of Wal-Mart stock plummeted on and around us. The bastard was serious in his rage and started shelling the store.

     Once we were well away from the berserk tanker, who now seemed content to reduce Wal-Mart to a smoking ruin, Jannie abruptly turned around.

     "You can stop following me now."

     "I'm not really following you," I stammered, "I just don't know what to do."

     "What you should do is go back to where you came from and stop following me."

     Her voice had a firm, steady quality to it and the barrel of her M16 raised slightly in my direction, adding a subtle hint for me to leave now.

     "But you're the first sane person I've seen in the last couple of weeks. What the hell has been really going on. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask you." The words came out with a pleading tilt to them, almost embarrassing me.

     Her mouth opened to answer me, but before the words could come out we both saw another of the newly risen coming at us as fast as its jerking legs could propel it. There were no visible wounds on the undead marine, so I could only surmise that he had finally succumbed to the parasite and died of the infection, only to arise from his short rest. Jannie wasted no time in placing a few new holes in his head. As soon as the corpse hit the ground she ran towards it and stripped the sidearm and body armor off.

     "Here, you're going to need this." She said, handing me the handgun.

     "Thanks." I told her, feeling slightly subdued that a girl had to get me weapon.

     Feeling the cold weight in my hands I realized I had never held a gun before in my life.

     "Grab whatever ammo he has on him." Jannie told me as she adjusted her newly acquired body armor.

     I had no want to touch the corpse but damned if I was going to balk at rummaging around the dead man after she did. I wanted to prove I actually did have some balls, even though my stomach disagreed with the act of corpse looting.
     I was in the act of stuffing the extra clips into my pockets when some crazy bastard started shooting at us from inside one of the houses.

     Jannie looked at me hard, trying to judge my character in that split second as rounds went wide and missed us by a mile.

     "Come on, I know someplace safe." She said with obvious reservation.

     We ran through backyards and over fences, staying away from the streets and open areas as much as possible. Smoke, fire, screams and gunshots could be heard all around as we made our winding way to the back entrance of a strip club.

     I was curious as to what we were doing here as she pulled a set of keys out and unlocked the back door. We quickly entered and she locked the door behind us.

     "A strip club?" I asked her, motioning around with my hands. I wondered if I had accurately judged her age. She definitely had the body and the looks to make a good living here. The odd look on my face clued her into what I was thinking. She wasn't stupid by any means.

     "Yes, a strip club, and no, I didn't work here."

     She was all business as she walked away from me through the kitchen area past the coolers and into the club itself.

     "If you'll note there are no windows. The front and back doors are heavy duty and the walls are construction block. There are monitors in the office for surveillance. Plenty of food, bathrooms, and even a shower in the women's locker room."

     Shouldering her rifle she stopped behind the bar and grabbed a carton of orange juice.

     "Fuck with me even once and you're going to end up like this prick." With one hand she pointed at a dead man with the left side of his face missing as her other hand lifted the carton to her lips.

     I'm guessing she saw the look of concern cross my features, and after she had taken a deep drink she explained further.

     "The prick's little head did the thinking for the big head and he tried to rape me. I guarantee you if you try it will be your death."
     Whether or not she had actually killed him, or if it was for that reason, I don't know. She may have been bluffing just to keep me in check. There can be any number of ways she got a hold of the keys but I really wasn't concerned with that. I had a ton of questions that were busting to spill out.

     "Help me get this corpse to the dumpster, then we can talk."

     That was Jannie. A cold, hardened murderer in a schoolgirl's killer body with even deadlier instincts.

     Damn I miss her.


27


     Today was an interesting day for two reasons. The first, and to me the most important, is that I was able to locate the old safe-house that was over-run. The one where Jannie and I were hiding until the zeds battered down the fortifications. The second reason is I saw a group of survivors looting a store and driving off in a working delivery truck.

     The day started on a good note to begin with. By the time I awoke, the rain had stopped, the sun was burning brightly and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. I rigged up a clothes line and hung everything up to dry. Refusing to go back into a confining building and lock myself in it provides a few (minor to me) disadvantages. The worst of "Urban Camping", as I like to refer to it, is your more exposed to the elements. Fine with me.

     I was stripped down to my skivvies and boots, waiting for my clothes to dry out, brushing my teeth, when I got a couple of ideas almost all at once. I was splashing around in pools of water and using bottled water to brush with. Seemed like a huge waste of resources to me. I knew there were buckets and containers in the shops below and I decided I would go grab them and use 'em to collect the rain water. The only problem would be trying to keep the shit-load of mosquitoes and other bugs out of the water. If I could keep the nasty insects out of the water supply to begin with I wouldn't have to boil it first. I was standing there, on the roof of Winn-Dixie, idly brushing my teeth in my boxers, while starring at the abandoned houses behind the strip mall. Bingo, I thought, I can cut the screens out of the windows and layer them over the tops of the buckets to keep the bugs out.

     The second idea, which wasn't a big idea, if I were smarter I would have thought of all of this a long time ago, was to store as much as my stuff in zip-lock bags as possible so I wouldn't have to dry everything I owned out every time it rained.

     I went downstairs, still in my underwear, with the AK on my shoulder and my axe in hand. I cleared out the wandering dead and made multiple trips back up to the roof with my swag. On the final run through the stores, to see if I missed anything I could use, I spotted a map book. It was a decent map book, not one of those cheap fold up paper maps that always ripped and I could never fold back up the right way when I was done with it. I knew I could use it to orientate myself with the city better, if only I could figure out the area Jannie and I had been holed up in. Then the best thought of the day hit me. I knew the name of the tool and die shop. I had put the name in this journal. If it weren't for this journal I know I would have forgotten the name of the place with all that has happened. The burned down shop was basically only a few blocks away from our old hide-out. If only I had a phone book I thought! I realized there had to be at least one phone book in all of these shops, more than likely there was a copy in each store's office. I practically shit my drawers with joy. I felt like a complete idiot for not thinking of it sooner.
     As soon as I had located the tool and die shop on the map I gathered up my gear and headed out. My clothes weren't completely dry yet but I didn't care.

     It took me over three hours to cover the nine miles between my camp and the wreckage of the tool and die shop. I stuck mainly to backyards, with the lots being overgrown now and the fences still locked for the most part. The wildly out of control growth of the plants and trees provided an excellent natural cover and the closed yards kept the undead out. There were a few houses with disgustingly rotted terrors that noticed my passing, none of which could do anything but bump and claw at the closed backdoors so I ignored them. The few I had to use my axe on (which was starting to show some wear and tear, with nicks and dents along the blade) proved easy enough to kill. I was slowed down from all the fence jumping I was doing, having to stop occasionally and catch my breath. The weight of the pack and my weapons and ammo isn't great but after awhile it seems much heavier.

     I finally arrived at the burnt out shell of Orange County Tool & Die, slightly out of breath. The corpses of the herd that had me surrounded back then were strewn about for a block, a thick pile of them encircled half the building. The corpses were almost fully decomposed now, with burned and tattered clothing covering bare bones. The fire and resulting explosions took out a hell of a lot more of them than I thought it did.

     I heard the unmistakable sound of an internal combustion engine. Quickly I hunkered down and scanned the area in the direction of the sound with my binoculars.

     A UPS truck was running over zeds that got in its path in the road. It was obvious that it had a destination in mind and it made a bee-line towards a pharmacy. It backed up towards the entry doors and plowed through them.

     I watched two people jump out of the cab and start blasting away at the now alerted undead. I could hear muffled shots coming from within the drug store. Obviously more than one person was inside the building, having gotten out the back out the van, and was busy clearing and looting the store. This was a planned, concerted effort. Before I could make up my mind as to whether or not to try and hail them and run the mile or so to them, they got back in the truck and were gone. I watched them drive off and lost sight of them as they rounded a corner. The whole thing lasted less than 10 minutes.

     I don't know if this is the same group that looted the stores where I'm camping, but I am definitely going to come back here soon and try to track them down.

     From the tool and die I easily, with the binoculars, spotted the familiar landmarks I saw a thousand times from the old hideout.
     The house Jannie and I had holed up in was in bad shape. The windows were smashed. The doors were off their hinges. The corpses of the hungering dead were lying thick, limbs all akimbo, most missing the better part of their skulls, grouped around the internal doorways. I hadn't done that. Jannie must have. I, like a coward, jumped out a window and ran for my life as soon as the front door busted down. There was no blood spatter, no ripped and torn clothing, no pieces of gnawed bones. There was a hole in a closet wall, a hole that was opened by multiple shotgun blasts through the drywall, insulation, plywood and aluminum siding.

     She had escaped!

     If she was still alive was another question entirely.

     I went into the kitchen mainly to see if there was any food to be scavenged but ended up finding something of an even greater value. If I hadn't dropped a package of instant oatmeal between the stove and refrigerator I would have never noticed the worn corner of Jannie's journal. How the journal ended up under the 'frige I have no idea. The last time I remember seeing it she had been writing in it at the table. I suppose one of the undead could have knocked it off the table and from there it could have easily been kicked to where I found it. It was a good find. I hope I get the chance to return it to her.

     I made my way back here, to my roof top camp, happier than I had been in a long time. I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders knowing I hadn't let her die there.

     Tonight I'm going to break open some bubbly and celebrate.
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gthez

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #6 on: February 18, 2012, 02:57:57 pm »

Accidental double post, sry
« Last Edit: February 19, 2012, 09:56:26 am by gthez »
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gthez

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #7 on: February 18, 2012, 03:00:05 pm »

28


     I met another survivor today. While neither one of us said where we were holing up, not totally trusting each other, I did get a lot of information. Some good, some bad.

     I had been exploring, checking out possible places to flee to if I had to abandon my camp. I was slowly making my way back to the old safe-house Jannie and I shared. The prison wasn't very far from the route I was taking either, every time I came within a block of it I found the undead just too numerous to get any closer.

     In my searching, I had been going into random houses and pilfering food and items. There was a two story house that for some reason caught my eye. It had been very well barricaded, with plywood over all the windows and front door. I found the back door solid and securely locked with three additional bolt locks. After making my way up to the awning covering the back porch I used my axe to chop my way through the plywood (which wasn't too hard to do, seeing how the plywood had been exposed to the unrelenting elements for two years or so), covering one of the upstairs windows.
     Once inside the first thing I noticed was the smell of old death. The second thing was the vast amount of dead flies all over the place. I cautiously went room to room prepared to lob the heads off any of the walking or sleeping undead I found. Family pictures were hung on the stairwell, I noted this because if the family had turned it would be a very good thing to know how many there were. Two parents and two children. This was the residence of a reasonably normal middle-class family.
     I really wasn't prepared for what I found. I'm just glad that the scene in the kitchen had been degraded by the passage of time and the work of the flies and insects. The corpses I found there had been reduced to bare bones, I could only image (and I really don't want to, but I can't stop myself) what the scene looked like when it was fresh.

     The first thing I saw as I slowly made my way down the stairs, into the living room was the zombified corpse of what could only be the mother. It could only be a member of the damned undead, any other corpse would have rotted away to bones by now. It was standing like a silent sentinel staring blankly towards the kitchen doorway.
     The wretched thing had gone into one of those odd comatose states that the undead go into when inactive for a long time. It didn't become aware of my presence until it was too late for it. The bitch fluttered her soulless eyes, like it was awakening from a deep sleep, just as my axe bit deep into her skull. As the horror collapsed in a heap at the foot of the couch I noticed a hand-written, time faded note safety pinned to one of the cushions. I didn't read the note until after I had investigated the rest of the house, including the kitchen.
     Three skeletons lay in a pool of dried, putrefied flesh. Two of the skeletons could only be those of the children, by their size they could only have been about five or six years old when they died. Both of the children's remains were missing their heads and one of them was missing a leg. The adult skeleton had to be that of the fathers, it was intact but there was a meat clever sticking out of his face. The oven door was open and there was a roasting pan with the child's missing leg bones still in it on the table. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what had happened here, and the note more fully explained it.

     There came a rustling from the plastic trash can sitting next to the counter and I became curious as to what animal could have gotten into this closed up house. There was no animal in it though. The re-animated, desiccated children's heads were in there, gnashing their teeth and wriggling around feebly at the sound and smell of fresh delectable flesh, my flesh, in the room with them. I hesitated then, it was upsetting and I swallowed hard at the sight before I drove my axe into their small skulls.

     Here is the note verbatim that was pinned to the couch:

     "To whom it may concern;

     I am not a murderess. Even though I killed my husband it was in self defense. With all the madness and insanity that has engulfed the world I cannot take this anymore. I'm in fear of losing my mind and losing control like all the rest that have become infected. This is my suicide note. I swallowed every pill in the family medicine cabinet, sleeping tablets, pain-killers, birth control, everything. I ate hundreds of them. Do not resuscitate me. Please let me die. I can't go on without my family. My poor children. They were everything to me. My loving husband of eleven years had gone insane from the parasites and had killed and gutted my darlings like they were deer. I awoke this morning and came down stairs with the smell of my husband cooking some strange but mouth-watering meat. When I found him smiling slyly and offering me a plate of my babies for breakfast I screamed in horror and then he came at me too. So I killed him. I killed him and I know it was the infection that made him do it. We were all infected. I can't come to grips with the fact that even now, knowing what the smell is from, I still want to eat it. We were all going to die anyways but dear God why like this? Forgive me. Forgive my husband."

     After reading the suicide note I should have felt something more but I'm numb now and that worries me. Only the brief twang of sadness at the sight of the contents of the garbage and that was all I felt.

     I left the way I came in and went about my way.

     I reached the old safe-house, which turned out to be not so safe, and searched it again for clues. On my second tour of the house I found a spray painted note on the inside of the closet that she had blasted her way out of.  It read:

     "Fridays 12 - 1 dumbass"
     " As long as I can"
     "Don't die"
     "J."

     I don't know why I didn't notice it before, although it was written on the back of the broken closet door. I should have spotted it before though.

     I checked my watch and cursed it. It was a cheap plastic kids watch with some idiot cartoon character on it and no day or month even, just the time in am or pm.

     It didn't take me long to find a pawn shop. It was easy to spot, there were still sun faded signs hanging in its smashed windows stating boldly that "We buy GOLD" The store had been looted before, with all the jewelry cases (that assuredly held the afore mentioned GOLD) shattered and empty. The cabinet that had obviously held expensive watches had also been robbed but there were still a few that had been missed. I lucked out when I spotted a stainless steel kinetic model that had a battery backup. I slipped it on my wrist and noted it said today was Wednesday. Excellent I thought, if Jannie is still around it gives me a day to prepare to meet her.

     While I was admiring my new found watch and giving it a shake or two to energize it I heard the UPS truck again. As soon as I heard it I knew it was the same truck that I had spotted raiding the pharmacy. For a moment I stood there, inside the pawn shop listening as the truck came closer, it sounded like it was coming right down the street towards me.
     I was about to go outside and flag it down when unexpectedly a thirty something year old man in worn blue jeans and worn blue jean jacket ran into the store and dove for cover behind a shelf. We were both surprised and we both instinctively pointed our weapons at each other.

     The guy's weathered and bearded face somehow matched his clothes. He raised his left hand, palm towards me and said "Don't shoot! Get down! Don't let them see us!"

     He wasn't shouting, in fact he was almost whispering but his voice was tinged with fear. I did as he asked, keeping him in my sights as the UPS truck sped past the shop. After the noise of the truck's engine had dwindled off into the distance he visibly relaxed. But not a lot. We were still in an uncomfortable situation with each of us ready to kill the other.

     His name was Steve, and I can't remember what was said word for word, so I'll just write down the gist of the conversation.

     Steve had lived in Ocala all his life and knew the area well. He gave me a brief run down on the town's current situation.
     When the dead started to rise from their brief slumber the last surviving police and members of the military, along with the few surviving city government officials took refuge in the most secure buildings in the city. The county prison. That's who's trapped inside now, not Jannie. I was glad to hear that bit of news I tell ya.

     There came a separate faction in the city, a drug addicted group of the infected who've sickly named themselves the "Red Death". It turns out that meth slows the progression of the parasites down to a crawl. They sadistically prey upon and eat any of the immune they come across. With the help of the last of the law they had been basically confined to the fortified junk yard on the south side of town. Somehow they found a way to lead a horde to the prison and knock down the fences, effectively giving those holed up there a life sentence with no chance of parole. I'm sure the meth-heads found the irony appealing. Since then they've terrorized the remaining civilian population. They come out of their garrison to loot ingredients to "cook" more methamphetamine and search for fresh meat. If I thought the infected were bat-shit crazy to begin with, now the world has to deal with drugged crazed, parasite infected addicts who need the drug just to live. After a year and three months they've only now reached the point where the red spots cover around three quarters of their skin. Not good. Not good at all. On the bright side their anger and insanity should soon cause them to start turning on themselves. But how long would that actually take? Six months? Another year? What will actually kill them first? The meth or the infection?

     I asked him about Jannie, about seeing a blonde teenage girl around town and he laughed.

     "How could I not notice a fine looking thing like that running around?" Steve winked and laughed again.

     "Yeah, she's still alive. She's holed up with another girl. Where, I don't know, she's a slick one. I've tried to follow her but she always manages to lose me." He confided.

     He wasn't hiding by himself. From what I could get out of him he was hunkered down with a couple of others and there were scattered groups here and there around the city.

     I asked him about the possibility of joining up with him and the other survivors to which he told me that may not be possible. The others of his group would want to vote on it first. He went on with other excuses but I understand. To be honest, it hurt my feelings to be turned away.

     All in all, it was a decent day. I'm going to make preparations for meeting back up with Jannie. I'll write again before I leave.


29


     I'm writing this now, waiting inside the old safe-house. Waiting for Jannie to arrive. God I hope she shows up. If not I will come back here every Friday and wait. For as  long as it takes. Until I hear word she's dead, or I'm dead.

     Had a hard time sleeping last night. I read some of Jannie's journal but didn't get past the first couple of entries. I couldn't concentrate enough to get into it, that and I never was a reader. I left with the intention of getting here at least an hour ahead of time. Only got here 15 minutes early due running into packs of the undead blocking my path.

     One pack almost killed me. It happened almost right on the overgrown lawn in front of this house. I got too excited about finally arriving here. As I jogged out of the backyard across the street to this broken-down, old safe-house, I ran right past a group of five furiously famished zeds. In the street right in front of my destination I battled them. I heard the shuffling of footsteps behind me and turned quickly. They were almost upon me. I had the time to swing my axe and kill the bastard that was closest. His animated corpse was quicker than the rest, in better condition, probably due to having gobbled the flesh of the living more recently than the others. The swing of my axe bit deeply into his skull, almost decapitating him at the line between the upper and lower jaw. Unfortunately, when he fell, the axe was wrenched out of my hands and stuck in the foul corpse. Using my guns were out of the question, I was too close to want to draw a herd here. I yanked out my hand axe and with two quick successive blows I took out the second. The third one, a nasty thing with half the flesh missing from its face, pearl white bone glistening in the morning sun, grabbed a hold of my right arm with both of its clawed and gnarled hands. I kept backing up towards the house trying to keep it off balance as I switched the axe to my left hand. I had to repeatedly rain blows on its rotted head (not being very good at using that hand, always been a righty) and keep walking backwards using the zombie as a shield against the two that were now within arm's reach. Finally I split open its skull and it collapsed, causing the larger of the remaining two lifeless monsters to stumble and fall. That left the animated remains of a pre-teen to put down, knowing it would be a minute or so before the fourth zed got shakily to its feet. From that point it was easy.

     My arm is bruised badly and aches but besides that I'm OK.

     I brought some of those "Orlando Magic" flags that people used to attach to their cars windows and crammed them in place along the weathered railing that goes around the front porch. I put them there to let Jannie know at a glance I was inside. I'll stash them here and re-use them every time I stay here, waiting for her.

     I hear somebody...I think Jannie's arrived!


The following is written in the hand of a different person.

     My name is Janet but everyone calls me Jannie.

     Allan was a good friend. He was for the most part honest and generally loyal. Those are two hard qualities to come by in these times. He was one of the few people I got along with and that counts for a lot when you're locked up inside in close confines for extended periods of time.

     His body will be buried. He deserves that at least.

     It was his fate to die I suppose and he played a hand in his own undoing. Smarts wasn't one of his qualities but I don't want to speak bad of the honorable dead. At least the cruel Gods spared him from being eaten alive or having his corpse desecrated.
     I was making my way here, as I always do on Fridays, planning on reaching the house I have set up across the street and two doors down by about twelve-thirty. I always watch the old safe-house from there. It's secure and I have an excellent vantage point to watch the comings and goings. I heard through the small grapevine that he had resurfaced. I was looking forward to meeting back up with my "dumbass" friend.

     I need to tell you that after reading this journal of his, that I will keep it with my other treasured possessions. I'll keep it right next to mine.

     I can't believe he had actually found my old journal. I had searched the house repeatedly for it with no luck. I thought it was lost forever.

     He was killed by one of the "Red Death" hunting squads. Of the four that killed him and were about to take his body back to their unholy lair, only one escaped. I had my dealings with them before, had killed a handful of them before but now it was going to be my personal goal to kill them all.

     I heard the sound of the UPS truck earlier that day. I heard it enter the neighborhood somewhere and shut down. I know how they operate and knew that this meant they were dispatching a hunter-killer team to look for food. As in food, I mean we survivors. If they were on a raid they wouldn't often shut down the engine, they would keep it going 'till they got what they wanted and drove off again.

     The infected bastards, for all their drug-addicted, parasite addled minds, were very proficient at raiding.

     The parasitic colony in their cursed bodies also give them another, huge advantage. Once the colony of single-celled leeches reach a certain mass in their host, other colonies no longer see it as a possible food source. Once the "Scarlet" is visible over around sixty to seventy percent of their body, give or take, with its red splotches, they can run through the zeds with impunity. Some have said that the large swarms, or herds, have at the core of them a "Red" or two that have fully been taken over (but their immune system is such that those carriers of the infection stave off actually dying).

     I had barely reached my post when I heard gunfire coming from the old safe-house. I scrambled as fast as I could to the unboarded upstairs window and got into a firing position.

     I heard the UPS van's engine start up again and knew it could only be coming here to make a pick-up.

     It was plain to see why the Reds had found him. Allan had stuck a stupid number of those idiot car flags on the porch railings. One would have been sufficient. One in a window, on the inside, and I would have easily noted it and knew what it meant. That and there were fresh killed zeds almost on the front lawn, uneaten by stray dogs, insects or the always hungry birds.

     I thought Al might be alive yet and my hopes were dashed when the van drew up. Immediately one carrier got out the back and took up a defensive position at the rear of the truck. Just as quickly one from inside the house, who I noted with some happiness was holding a bleeding arm, took up a position on the lawn by the front of the truck.
     When I saw one of them dragging out the body of my dumbass, who I recognized in an instant, I fired a shot from my AR15 and blew his neck out. It wasn't my best shot as I was aiming for his head. Anger had flared and tainted my aim. My next shot was better.
     None of them actually knew just where that first shot had come from and they momentarily froze, giving me time to send a bullet into the Red's right eye who was at the rear of the truck.

     Then the van driver started to yell for his wounded ally as he revved the engine and started to duck down.

     I missed completely with my third shot, aiming for the wounded bitch who I thought was running back to grab Al's corpse. Instead he grabbed the weapon and walkie-talkie from his throat less buddy who had bleed out fast and nothing could save his life. The soulless fuck dodged and weaved and immediately went out of sight, the van blocking my view. The next I saw of him was his furtive hand reaching for the head-shot gang member's weapon and my forth shot removed half of it, fingers flying away in a spray of blood.

     The delivery van sped off then, and I was able to get one last burst off. I had a nice angle, being up on the second floor, and could see the driver as he practically drove from the passenger side floor. I'm sure I placed a round in his ear and one in his shoulder.
     The van started to careen wildly, taking out a mailbox and I was hoping it would crash so I could finish the last one off. It wasn't to be though. I suppose the wounded piece of shit grabbed the wheel.
     I emptied the rest of my clip in the back end of the now bullet ridden van and watched as it drove manically out of sight.

     I didn't have much time to grab Al's corpse before the wave of ravenous undead arrived from all the noise. I fireman carried his corpse to my post, hoping he was still alive but he was gone.

     He died on Friday, January 3, 2014.

     You will be missed Al.
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gthez

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #8 on: February 18, 2012, 03:04:30 pm »

This is something I wrote while waiting for the update. Gratz Toady, when  get some money freed up I'll absolutely donate. I started a Zombie Apocalypse blog and if you want to read more here's the link http://gthez.blogspot.com/

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joemoben

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #9 on: February 19, 2012, 01:21:27 am »

That was an amazing story that was great fun reading through. I haven't read something as great as this in quite some time and I thank you for sharing it with us members of the bay12 community.
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Something about this game makes me wonder why God lets it exist.
Say, if you give birth on a ranch and then murder your baby will a corpse drop be guaranteed?

Tiruin

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  • Life is too short for worries
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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #10 on: February 19, 2012, 09:17:08 am »

This is amazing.

Posting to remind myself to re-read this.
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Trapezohedron

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #11 on: February 19, 2012, 10:06:44 am »

Absolutely wonderful. I haven't finished reading this yet (out of time), but the parts that I've read has a believable human feel to it, and the journal doesn't sound like the author (as in the real life author, you) wrote it.

Currently on page 9, posting that to never forget.
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Thank you for all the fish. It was a good run.

gthez

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #12 on: February 19, 2012, 11:26:39 am »

I'm glad ya'll have enjoyed the story. I write about 3,000 words a week and this story took me about 3 months to hash out.
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Immortal

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #13 on: February 19, 2012, 11:01:31 pm »

That kept me wanting to read, love the variety of events you conjured from a zombie genre. I would pay for a whole book. Do you plan to write more of this story?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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joemoben

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Re: A Journal found after the Zombie Apocalypse
« Reply #14 on: February 20, 2012, 08:46:41 pm »

That kept me wanting to read, love the variety of events you conjured from a zombie genre. I would pay for a whole book. Do you plan to write more of this story?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
He does have more stories on his blog which he posted right after the story ended. Although, some of it is a little NSFW so safety first. Only a little bit though.
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Something about this game makes me wonder why God lets it exist.
Say, if you give birth on a ranch and then murder your baby will a corpse drop be guaranteed?
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