69
When I came to, the Escort was lying on its drivers side in a ditch pooled with rancid water, some of which I woke up with my face half-submerged in. It stunk like rotten vegetation, and didn’t taste too much better, either. I nearly puked it tasted so fuckin’ bad.
I was very surprised to find that I was uninjured with all my limbs still intact, as all the cars windows had blown when it rolled down the road - but at the same time, I wasn’t, ‘cause over the years, I had heard stories about people getting in horrible accidents that came out of them without a scratch due to the fact that they were so fuckin’ wasted that their bodies just flopped around loosely like a rag dolls as their vehicles were turned to useless, unrecognizable junk. I even heard a story, told by a friend that saw it happen, about a dude that wrecked his Ferrari on the interstate - nearly vaporizing it - that got tossed through his windshield, only to end up walking around afterwards with just a few scratches to show for it. I guess the fact that I was both wasted and unconscious made my body especially loose, preventing me from serious injury and dismemberment.
I unlatched my seatbelt - Vince and Larry had helped me out yet again - and rummaged around in the car till I found my M4, then crawled out the front window into the ditch. A huge wave of dizziness washed over me right when I got out, so I had to roll over on my back and stare up at the sky as I waited for it to pass. I must have hit my head or something in the roll, ‘cause all of a sudden I was fucked up. I was concussed.
As I lay there, my spinning world slowly but surely coming to a stand-still, screams erupted from the direction of Fosse, filled with fear, anguish, and pain. I quickly hopped to my feet, knowing what they meant, and immediately regretted it as a vice clamped around my skull, causing me to keel over and vomit all the beer I had drank as I took the backroads. I almost laid back down on the ground, to let the pain pass, but looked up in between heaves and saw exactly what I thought I would see - and quickly changed my mind.
A giant horde of zombies was pouring out of Ottawa down 23, right in my direction. The head of the giant had enveloped a mini-van (what I am assuming had hit me) that lay crumpled in the center of the road, and was pulling it’s screaming occupants into its ravenous maw. I couldn’t help but think that their deaths were all my fault, that if I had been paying more attention to the road instead of a stack of shitty cd’s, they wouldn’t be getting ripped to pieces before my very eyes. I forced myself to watch until their screams and pleas were silenced forever, their bodies forever still. Until they rose again, filled with an endless hunger that will never be quenched.
By that time, a large part of the horde had broken off, after spotting me standing there beside the road, and was half the distance from the van to where I was standing. I peeled my eyes from the human wreckage I had caused and stumbled over to the Escort’s hatch to get my ruck out before it was too late. Luckily, the hatch wasn’t jammed shut, and opened up easily so I could get my shit. I pulled it on and turned south, and began to jog down Route 23 as fast as my beaten body would allow.
My legs gave out at about a hundred yards or so down the road, and I dropped hard to the ground and laid in a heap, panting and in pain. Things were not looking good at all - I could barely stay on my feet, Streator was still a good clip down 23 and I was on fuckin’ foot, and I had hundreds of zombies right at my fuckin’ heels. I had to do something, and I had to do it now!
I shrugged off my ruck to see if I had anything in there that would make my situation even remotely better, and was very pleased when I dug out the Claymores. “Now we’re talking! Shit’s gonna get messy now!” I had forgot I put those fuckers in there. I figured they were exactly what I needed to slow the hordes advance and maybe give myself some more time to stumble and drag my ass a little further away.
I had five claymores at my disposal to thin out and hopefully destroy a large part of the horde with, and I had a plan of how I was gonna do it. I got back to my feet, again, but steadier that time ‘cause I was all excited about the fact that I was gonna blow up what amounted to people with a fuckin’ Claymore - so excited I had a fuckin’ murder boner getting in my way - and limp-jogged with a bandolier over my shoulder back in the direction of the Escort, where the zombies were almost up to.
I went to my knees and got out the M18A1 Claymore, set it on its legs, aimed it at the ass end of the Escort where the gas tank was fully exposed, attached the M4 blasting cap, and unrolled the cord as I limp-jogged back down towards where I left my gear. Once I was at the full range of the cord, I attached the clacker and waited till the horde got where I wanted them, which was right in line with the Escort.
Them motherfuckers took forever getting by the car, even with bait - me - sitting right there in the middle of the road, in plain sight. Figured they’d have a little more motivation to get me than they did. After an agonizingly slow amount of time - probably around five minutes, or so - the giants hand (as the head was still eating the mini-van family value meal, hold the lettuce, extra on the sauce) wrapped around the Escort, reaching for me.
The time had come! Finally! I got down in the prone to hopefully avoid any flying debris, and quickly squeezed the clacker three times - clack!clack!clack! The explosions happened so fuckin’ fast, that even though I knew the Claymore went off first, the car exploding and the Claymore exploding were completely indistinguishable from one another. The blast was fucking HUGE, too! I figured it would be - I happened to look at the gas gauge when I was on my little joyride, and seen that the tank was ¾ full.
Right after the blast, I was on my feet and moving further down the road. I didn’t even wait for the smoke to clear so I could see the damage done. I could tell that the car bomb did what I wanted - the arms, legs, heads, and torsos that rained down around me as I lay there told me that. So I limp-jogged back to where I left my gear, knowing that even though I took out what had to be a pretty big fuckin’ number of land-sharks, there were still hundreds more right behind them that had been completely unaffected by the blast.
At my gear, I got two more Claymores and set them up on the shoulders of the road, each facing slightly in, opposite from one another. I then threw on my ruck, slung my M4, and limp-jogged some more down the road, unrolling the det-cords as I went. Once at the cords full range, I attached the clackers and took a knee. I was in the zone, the killing zone, and it felt good.
When the horde got within the effective range of the weapons, I quickly squeezed the clackers three times each - clack!clack!clack! - and watched with a huge grin as fourteen-hundred white-hot ball bearings ripped the first few rows of zombies to shreds. It was an amazing thing to see, the devastation caused by such small pieces of weaponry, as the Claymore is maybe around the size of a license plate. It was also a horrible thing to see, due to the devastation they caused - I couldn’t imagine using it on live combatants. The Claymore is an anti-personnel weapon, whose sole purpose is to maim and not to kill. Which is just something I could never do to anyone. Not ever. But on the zombies, well… it was just A-okay.
Now I was down to my last two Claymores. I tossed the used clackers to the ground and set the Claymores up, only this time I placed them in the center of the road, about three feet apart, each of them facing slightly outwards (for some reason, the zombies stayed on the road - from shoulder to shoulder - so I figured I’d set up the Claymores differently, to take out different parts of the horde, rather than hitting the same place twice). Again, I limp-jogged away, trailing the det-cords, attached the clackers, and took a knee as I waited to thin the herd out a little more. Once they were where I wanted them, I clack-clack-clacked away, and shredded some more of the zombie fucks.
“Well, that was fun,” I said, as I turned around and began limp-jogging away, “I hope it fuckin’ helped. Now I just have to make sure I stay on my feet and keep those meat-bags a good distance from me. Should be fuckin’ easy, even if I have to walk…”
70
It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I didn�
�t even make it thirty yards before my fuckin’ legs gave out again and I found myself staring up at the sky, screaming to the heavens. By the time I got to Friendship Village - which is beside 23, right between Ottawa and Grand Ridge - I lost fuckin’ track of how many times I fell and had to drag myself up again, while the zombies kept getting closer and closer.
And let me tell ya, Friendship Village did not live up to its name, not at all. Should’ve been called shit like “Hatred Village”, or “Date-Rape Village”, or something along those lines. It fuckin’ sucked. Zombies had poured out of it onto 23 - I had been shooting at the pursuing horde and they must’ve heard the shots - and were blocking my way. I had to stop my forward progress, which at that time was haltingly slow, and take off my ruck to see what other goodies I had in there, ‘cause there was just way too many to shoot through. I thought I remembered seeing some hand grenades in there when I was digging out the Claymores, but my memory was still fuzzy from two serious back to back car accidents. I wasn’t sure of much at that point. Just that I wanted to live.
Turned out I was right - there was well over twenty grenades inside. I say “was”, ‘cause I quickly hopped up to my feet and tossed twelve of them into the Friendship zombies (sounds like a club, or a gay bowling team), and blew a wide swath through the center of them, then forced my body into a herky-jerky “run”, where I tried to make it through to the other side.
I was almost three-quarters of the way through, going balls-out, when a zombie that had been blown in half snaked its arm up and snagged my ankle. I went down fast, and landed hard right on my face. The only plus to that, was that instead of hitting the blacktop with my mug, I came down onto the shoulder blade of a headless zombie. Either way, it fuckin’ hurt like hell, and my concussion got concussed even more.
I rolled over off the zombie and crammed my AR’s barrel under the snagging zombies chin, driving it six inches into its head - I could see the barrel in its open mouth - pulled on the trigger a couple times, and blew the top half of the zombie’s head into a spray of chunks and gore. The fucks right eye even popped out and smacked me in my cheek. When I yanked the barrel out of its head so I could get off the ground and keep moving - as there were more zombies closing in - it got caught or something, and I ripped the fucking things jaw right the fuck off. It was brutal!
I was only to my hands and knees, crawling myself, when two more crawlers grabbed at my ankles and feet from behind and tried to pull me into their mouths. I dropped to my side and swung my AR up and emptied a whole magazine into the both of them, turning them to mush and chunks from their nipples up. I was getting pretty fuckin’ gore-covered again, and loving every second of it. I got back to my hands and knees and crawled another five feet before I was able to slowly raise myself to a standing position, using my AR as a crutch, and continue on my “run” through the what was left of the Friendship Zombies.
“Maybe I can use this to my advantage,” I breathlessly said about the road before me, once I was in the clear. What I was talking about was the big-ass hill that 23 went up after it passed Friendship Village. It wasn’t a particularly steep hill, but it was long as shit. I figured - shit, hoped - that it would slow the horde I had at my ass down more than it would slow me down. So I looked over my shoulder at the zombies who were now less than fifty feet from me, gave a chuckle of derision, and started up that big mofo.
It was a long, hard trek up that bitch, but I eventually made it to the top, and collapsed in a heap on the center lines of the road. I figured I had the time to take a breather, as I had actually put a little bit of distance between me and the zombies on my way up. For some reason, the hill was a lot more difficult for the undead than I had thought it would have been. I was thinking that it might have had something to do with them not being smart enough or maybe even lacking the physical capabilities to flex and stretch their legs as a normal person would do when they are climbing hills or staircases. I think that might’ve been it, ‘cause I couldn’t remember seeing a single zombie go up or down stairs, or even a hill. All the ones I had seen up to that point had all been flatlanders.
As I sat there recuperating, I took off my ruck and dug out a handful of the remaining hand grenades and lobbed them down the hill at the approaching zombies. Thought it might be a good idea to see if I could slow them down a little more, that maybe by blowing up the first few ranks and causing a “zombie blockade” of sorts, I’d have even more time to rest and recoop.
Plus, it was lots of fun, watching the grenades bounce and bounce and bounce down the hill, and then land somewhere in the horde where they’d explode and rain gouts of blood and limbs all over the place. This one zombie, a nerdy accountant-looking motherfucker, even caught one - if you can believe that shit - by some fluke or whatever (I hope), and gave the grenade a “huh?” look before that bitch blew up, splattering his ass into zombie fragments. I was glad that motherfucker blew up, ‘cause that shit was scary - he seemed to have an acute awareness of his surroundings, to be smarter than the average zombie. He was the zombie “Yogi the Bear”.
After the nerd blew up I figured I had better make tracks, so I used my AR as a crutch again and dragged myself to my feet, and started moving back towards Grand Ridge, where I had hoped to maybe find some help or get some medical attention - or at the very least a fuckin’ first- aid kit - and maybe hole up for a couple days while I healed up a little.
The pain I was in was so fucking intense and excruciating I nearly blacked out with that first step I took, but I took another and then another, and kept on moving. I knew if I stopped, the pain of being eaten alive would be far, far worse than the pain of a couple bullet and stab wounds, and some broken bones and bruises. There probably isn’t even a word in the dictionary to describe how it would feel to be eaten alive by a horde of ravenous zombies. And if there is it’s probably got like eighteen syllables or some shit in it. I still had some Vike’s in my pocket that I could have taken to dull the pain, but I didn’t want to, ‘cause even though the pain was nearly hobbling me, it was also fueling me, keeping me alert and on my toes, keeping my mind sharp.
The road ahead was pretty clear, so I didn’t have any immediate threats, but I was able to see many zombies - not in massive hordes, but in singles and doubles, and spread out from one another - shambling towards me in the surrounding fields. Every now and then, as I shambled along (looking just like a zombie myself - something I hoped any survivor didn’t mistake me for and try to blow my head off) I had to struggle to bring up my rifle and cap a zombies’ ass when it got too close to the front, but thankfully not too often, ‘cause I was barely able to fuckin’ move, the pain and exhaustion were so intense. By the time Grand Ridge appeared over the horizon, I was reduced to a feet-dragging shuffle, with the horde a mere thirty feet behind me, and closing.
“Oh, fuck yeah,” I wheezed out, “that is so fucking awesome… almost there… god I need a fucking car, this shit really sucks…”
71
There was no fucking way into Grande Ridge.
Earlier on, I had noticed that someone had built some kind of barricade that looked like it went around the entire town. As I got closer, I saw that the barricade was made of a bunch of train cars stacked two-high, and end to end. Grand Ridge wasn’t very big, and there was always hundreds of the cars lining the tracks that passed by the town (I think they got filled with corn or grain, or some shit), so it was entirely probable that the town was surrounded by them. I had hoped that there was a gate or some type of way through, but when I got within four-hundred yards I saw that the road was completely blocked off - no entry, no exit - and that the wall was at least twenty feet high, or more.
“FUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!” I bellowed as I held my AR over my shoulder, and fired into the horde that was now so close they were scratching at my ruck as they swiped and clawed at me, so close that if I slowed down to even a fraction less than the shuffle I was at I would’ve been ripped to shreds within seconds. “C’mon, man!!! What the fuck!!!”
I then began to laugh my ass off, ‘cause it was just my fuckin’ luck that I’d make it all the way there - on foot, no less, with hundreds of zombies trailing me - to be locked the fuck out. I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. Unfortunately, my stupid laughing fit caused me to slow down that little itty-bitty fucking fraction the zombies needed.
I felt them snag a good handhold, and then I was yanked back, right into their midst. At the same time, the stupidest thought I could’ve had at that moment flashed through my mind. Instead of thinking about how shitty it was gonna be to be eaten by a shit-ton of zombies, I was thinking, “Oh god, I hope I don’t get fuckin’ stung!”, ‘cause at the exact same same time I was grabbed by the zombies, I had walked right into a swarm of wasps, of which I am deathly allergic to - I’m talking anaphylactic shock allergic, and shit. No good, but the wrong thing to be thinking about at the time.
The next thing I knew, the back of my head got splashed with some bitter smelling, hot wetness - and it wasn’t man-gravy, so get your fuckin’ head outta the gutter - and I was dropped to the ground right on my ass, along with all the zombies who I am assuming were trying to eat me, whose heads were unrecognizable as such - they were all blown the fuck up, with their brains on the outside and their skulls in chunks that were scattered all over the place. I felt something land in my beard, and I was sure it was one of the two – skull chunks or brains - or both.
A.K.A. No Time for a Love Story (Book 1): Just Another Day Page 27