Diaries of the Damned

by Laybourne, Alex

  Robert gradually rose from the emptiness that had enveloped him, to a world that seemed filled with a heavy banging. He opened his eyes. He lay on the floor, in the same place he had fallen. The thudding sound invaded his senses. He closed his eyes; it wasn’t a hangover… Then he remembered the blood, the zombies. He sat bolt upright, convinced that they surrounded him, only to find the room was empty… and dark. Wood and all manner of objects were crudely fastened over the windows, blocking out all but the smallest views of the street. The bodies were also gone. The smears on the blood-crusted floor showed that they had been dragged outside.

  Robert climbed to his feet. His legs screamed in agonized revolt as he moved. The pain from his aching joints seared through his nerves. His left side felt as though it was on fire. Robert pulled up his shirt, worried that he had been bitten; he saw a large bruise that ran almost the length of his torso, but no blood.

  “Oh thank God you’re awake. I couldn’t take having to throw you out there too,” Mark exclaimed, seizing him in a bear hug.

  “Mark, where is Dan, did he get…”

  “No man, he’s upstairs securing the door to your room against the window. I tried to tell him those things don’t climb, but he just said…” Mark began.

  “I said those things don’t fuck either, but Todd sure did give it a good go. We’re not in a movie here. Who knows what those bastards can do in the real world,” Dan interrupted as he walked down the stairs. Dan was an annoyingly upbeat person; the glass was not just half full with him, but overflowing. He tried to see the fun in everything, even the rising of the dead. “I’m glad you’re up man, didn’t fancy having to kick you out,” Dan echoed Mark’s sentiments.

  “How long was I out?” Robert asked, twisting from side to side in an attempt to work the stiffness out of his joints.

  “A while. You just dropped,” a female voice spoke up. Robert turned around and winced when he saw the young blonde girl, sporting a large, swollen set of purple lips. “I took one of your shirts while I was upstairs; I hope you don’t mind.” She tried to smile, but the pain in her mouth stopped her at a grimace.

  “It’s fine. I’m really sorry about that,” Robert started.

  “It’s nothing; I shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that. Besides, I took a hockey stick to the head last year. Now that made a real mess of me,” she joked, and a light shone in her eyes and that told Robert she meant it.

  “Robert.” He held his hand out, much to the entertainment of his two friends. “What?” he asked, turning to face the grinning pair.

  “We’ve met, two days ago, when you invited me here, to the party… I… um… we slept together last night… I was still in your bed this morning when you woke up,” the girl answered. “Nathalie,” she prompted, smiling at the group.

  “Oh yeah…” Robert began to make excuses when a deep growl silenced them. A number of frame splintering blows that pounded against the door followed it. Had it not been reinforced with the dining room table, there was every chance that it would have yielded under the torrent of abuse.

  “It’s getting dark out.” Mark had walked to the window and peered through the barricade. “They seem to be more active in the dark.”

  “Then we should probably head upstairs, maybe block it with something,” Nathalie offered.

  “Good idea. If we keep all the lights turned off, they should leave us alone. I mean, there are plenty of other places…” Dan caught wind of how callous his words sounded and stopped himself. “You know what I mean.”

  On the first floor of the dorm house, Robert got introduced to the remaining survivors, people he had not thought about until he saw them. Glenn and Matt were the only two from the dorm that seemed to have survived, and they each had a woman with them. The girls introduced themselves as Rebecca and Danielle; they were also students at the university. Robert even had a couple of English classes with Rebecca; not that they ever hung out beyond the odd accidental meeting on campus.

  “Dude, do you think getting plastered is the right thing to do?” Robert asked as he saw Glenn open up a fresh can of beer and take a deep gulp.

  “Why not man, what else is there to do? There are too many of them for us to leave, and if they come in, hell, I would rather be drunk and not see it coming than anything else.”

  “He’s got a point, man. Besides, what else can we do? The TV is off-air; they’re just showing this damned alert message and recording the whole time,” Dan agreed as he grabbed a beer and emptied half the can.

  “I just think we should keep our heads, that’s all,” he offered. Yet when a beer was slid into his hands, Robert found it empty before he could remember taking the first sip.

  As night began to fall, the party resumed. After, a while, Robert took Nathalie by the hand and led her back up to his room. It was cold in the house; the heating had broken and the winter weather made the air electric on their naked bodies. They fell to the bed, their bodies entwined. Robert winced at the pain in his side, yet as Nathalie slipped on top of him, her warm skin pressing gently against his own, he forgot all about it. They toppled over the edge of the abyss together and fell into carnal darkness, enveloped by the beast with two backs, which moved through the shadows and engulfed them both within his dripping maw.

  By the time they surfaced, it was morning, and the barricades held firm.

  As he had done the previous day, Robert slipped out of bed while Nathalie still slept, although this time, he remembered who she was, and found his hangover to be non-existent. Instead of rushing to the bathroom, Robert crept to the window. He pulled the curtains to one side and peered through a gap between the wood.

  Robert’s room looked out over the rear of the property. There had been a heavy frost, and the ground held that white shine which only a crisp winter morning can create. There were a few zombies that wandered along the street, but not as many as he had feared. As they had expected, with the lights turned out and the house secured, the Zombies had grown bored and wandered off in search of fresh meat.

  Out of the number of creatures that dotted the street that ran behind the house, Robert could see a few people he knew…or rather, used to know. Surveying the damage, he noticed that the majority of the zombies had not merely been bitten, but ravaged. Their bodies were torn and broken in ways he had not ever seen in movies. As he stared, a fat man walked past wearing nothing but a dressing gown and slippers. He appeared fresher than the rest, because his organs, which hung from the wound in his flank still smeared the street with gore as he walked, dragging them behind him. Robert watched him move, shuffling aimlessly in whatever direction he faced. His intestines stretched the longest, of course; and when the end came in sight, there was a dead dog attached to them, hungrily chewing his way through the heavily flavored meal without hesitation.

  What is going on out there?” Nathalie whispered, slipping her arms around Roberts’s waist. They were both naked, and the warmth felt good.

  “Nothing,” he answered quickly, dropping the curtain back into place. After everything that had happened the previous day, there were still some things that were best left unseen. “Just a boat load of nothing,” he lied, and Nathalie knew it, but she let him have it. He did it to be nice.

  “So, what is the plan?” Nathalie asked, sitting on the bed as if the pending discussion was a trite affair, like what to eat for dinner or where to hold a birthday party.

  “Don’t die,” Robert answered as he sat beside her on the bed. The simplicity of the answer, and the way it was delivered, caused them both to giggle; a fit which spread through their bodies like a warm drink on a cold day, and soon had them lying on the bed in a fit of hysterics. Both had tears in their eyes by the time the laughter passed and the reality of it all sank in. “No more drinking. We can’t drink and expect to survive. I’ve seen enough of these movies to know how quickly it spreads, and how important it is to be prepared.” Robert tried to sound as authoritative as he could.

  “Agreed. I don’t
want to be…eaten by one of those things,” Nathalie confirmed.

  “In any meaning of the word,” Robert added without thinking, referencing the seemingly horny mindset of some of the zombies. Nathalie looked at Robert, and when she realized he had meant it in jest, she smiled and another bout of laughter ensued.

  “If someone could train them, I wouldn’t need a vibrator anymore,” she joked.

  “True, and you would save a fortune on batteries,” Robert continued to joke and both laughed so hard that at first they did not hear the calls coming from the first floor. They both dressed still shaking with laughter.

  When they did hear the calls, however, both fled the room at a run, their jovial-in-the-face-of-adversity mood shattered, and their game faces set.

  The cries came from Glenn’s room, which was on the opposite side of the house. The room looked out over the residential area in front of the house. In the background the main office blocks of the City center could be seen on a clear day.

  “What’s wrong?” Robert called as they burst through the door. Nathalie was close on his heels, and behind them, clearly the worse for wear came Dan, Mark and Rebecca – each in various stages of undress.

  “You’ve got to see this.” Glenn stood by the window, while Danielle lay in the bed, with the covers pulled up to her chin, seemingly unfazed by the crowd in the room.

  Robert, Mark and Dan quickly headed to the window, eager to see what had gotten Glenn so worked up. The girls hung back at the door. Danielle jumped out of bed and pulled on some clothes, while the boys had their attention diverted. She was unsteady on her feet from the alcohol that still coursed through her body.

  “Sweet Crap on a cracker,” Mark whistled. The sky was a beautiful blue, the sun had already risen high, which told them all they had slept until well on toward the middle of the day. The only clouds in the sky were the plumes of black smoke that rose at a distance. It looked as if the city were burning. For the source of the smoke was a wide strip that encompassed the area where the tall buildings of the business sector once dominated the skyline. “What caused it?” Mark asked once the initial impression faded.

  “I would guess an explosion or a fire, but who would do something like that?” Glenn asked, unable to take his eyes away from the scene.

  “It’s panic, man,” Robert answered. “People are fucking scared. Just look down there.” He pointed to the far right of their field of view. The large cross-road, was the scourge of intercity commuters. It was a mass of cars, but not neatly queued and waiting for the lights to change, but rather piled up and broken. A handful of zombies stood around the mess, the majority searching for the flesh of the dead that lay trapped inside. While a few, having been found before the release of death could hit, re-emerged into the world.

  “Shit… I kind of hoped it had all been a dream or something,” Dan spoke under his breath. He didn’t want the girls to hear.

  The others gave no answer, but nodded their heads and cleared their throats in agreement.

  The front of the house was more active than the rear. Zombies filled the street. They wandered up and down, no focus to their movements, yet when they reached the end of the road, most simply turned around and ambled back again.

  “Do you recognize anybody?” Robert whispered as he saw the faces of the three people he had been playing darts with in the campus bar just a few nights before.

  “Yeah, it seems like most of the ones out there are students.” Dan answered, while Glenn offered a similar response. Mark was quiet, his face pale.

  “It’s unreal, man,” he whispered, his voice breaking.

  The sound of an approaching car reached their ears, and a few moments later an old Volvo Estate came crashing into view. It careered straight through three zombies, sending two over the top of the car to land on the pavement behind. The first landed head first, its skull popping like an overinflated balloon. The second landed softer, its legs broken. The bones protruded just below the kneecap on each leg. Immediately, the creature began to writhe on the ground, twisting itself over onto its belly, whereupon it resumed its back and forth pacing; inching its way along the road, a thick smear of fecal matter tailed behind it, from where its exposed bowel had ruptured as a result of the impact.

  The car, having survived the initial impact of the bodies, swerved at the wrong moment, mounted the pavement and crashed into a tree. Blood covered the windshield, and while the wipers worked at full speed, the last round of collisions had bent them to an angle that rendered them useless.

  The zombies descended en masse. Seeing how quickly they transitioned from aimless stumbling to intentional stalking at the first scent of a new meal chilled them each to the bone.

  The car doors opened and three men tumbled to the ground. Each was armed, and fired several rounds into the approaching zombies. Several fell. A star shaped wound appeared on in each of their foreheads, as the bullets found their mark. These, at least, would not rise again. Most were merely winged, so continued their advance. Rather than running away, the three men backed themselves up against the car.

  “Oh god, they’re going to…” Rebecca began. The sound of gunshots had brought the three women to the second window in the room, where they stood with slack-jawed horror as the three men were overrun by the sheer numbers of the group.

  The sound of the gunshots was a dinner bell to the undead ears. All within sight had turned and readjusted their trajectory to bring them over to the car.

  “Shit! They´ve just attracted half the fucking city to this street. Idiots,” Glenn growled.

  As a fellow zombie enthusiast, Robert nodded his agreement, but did not give voice to them.

  “There are still people in the car,” Danielle called, as the zombies fell into three squirming piles. Fresh rivulets of blood flowed into the street, and through the single glazed windows, the squishy sounds of human organs being snacked upon didn’t fail to turn the stomachs of all seven onlookers.

  “She’s right, look.” Robert pointed to the car, where a woman and two children were trapped in the car. Their attempts to escape from the rear door without attracting any unwanted attention had proved to be a labored affair.

  “We have to help them.” Robert and Dan both took off, running down the stairs without a thought as to what they would do.

  They freed the door from its reinforcements – a little too easily – they reasoned as an afterthought. Robert ran into the street, waving his arms in a frantic attempt to get the attention of the women.

  A growl from behind him made Robert jump and fall. The naked woman from the kitchen was once again behind him, her fingers still buried deep within herself. The blood encrusted pubic hair had dried to resemble a giant scab, which flaked away with each cold thrust her fingers made. She reached forward for Robert with the other hand, but stopped when Dan stepped in from the side and blindsided her with a shot to the face with what looked like the leg of a bar stool.

  “Thanks,” Robert nodded to his friend as he scrambled to his feet. He turned back to the woman just as the first child was ripped from her arms. Two zombies argued over the small body, which tore apart under the pressure. Each undead monster ended up holding a severed arm, while blood fountained into the street. The child’s cry was overpowered by the mother’s agonized wail.

  “Come on lady,” Robert and Dan screamed, as she ran down the steps, and into the descending crowd of the undead.

  “My baby,” the woman had turned white, and could barely support herself. The other child, who must have been about nine, stood frozen with fear between the convulsing body of his brutalized younger sister and his mother.

  “Mummy,” the small boy cried as the monsters encircled him. They closed in on the kid just as the mother looked around in answer to her child’s call.

  “No,” the mother shrieked as she changed direction, to charge after her son. Dan reached out and grabbed the woman, pulling her back toward the house. Robert, knew he should have turned back, but he had t
o at least try to rescue the child.

  Robert grabbed the nearest zombie to him by the back of the shirt. He pulled with as much strength as he could find, and the creature flew free. Robert stopped and howled in horror when he saw the face that stared back at him. The skin of the boy´s face peeled away in one thick strip; including his eyebrows, lids and lips. Tears dripped from the exposed white eyeballs, as three zombies continued to feast on the tender flesh.

  “Leave him man, leave him. It’s too late,” Dan called as he continued dragging the mother inside. Robert pivoted and ran, leaping up the steps and slamming the door shut behind him.

  Robert turned and leaned against the door, but did not have the chance to breathe before the mother was upon him, beating him with a flurry of slaps and scratches. Her wails so loud they made his ears ring. As quickly as they could, Dan and Mark pulled the mother away, while Nathalie appeared at Robert’s side, eager to help him to his feet. He shrugged her away, tears stinging his eyes as his mind overloaded. He could not hold it back any more; the child’s mutilated face was burned into his mind.

  “Let me go, I want to go outside to my babies. My babies need me. Please.” The mother collapsed to her knees on the floor, her torment writ upon her face. Her pleading sobs echoed in Robert’s head.

  “I’m sorry, but they’ll kill you.” Glenn tried to reason with the woman, who was in her mid-thirties, a few strands of grey beginning to mar the thick raven – colored locks.

  “I don’t care,” she growled. The knife came from nowhere, pulled from the waistband of her trousers before anybody could even register it. The women swiped out at Glenn, plunging the knife into his chest. She pulled it out and held the weapon before her, a wild and crazy look in her eyes. The last spark of her sanity was extinguished; it had died with the agonized screams of her children. “Now open the door, and let me walk away,” she spoke through clenched teeth; the act of violence she had committed had yet to register with her.

  None of the group paid her further mind as they rushed to aid their stricken friend. The woman opened the door and ran wailing into the street, swallowed by a host of the undead.