by GJ Zukow
As the little engine sputtered and caught, slowly propelling me along the coast, my friend the Red showed up again, driving recklessly along the beach, firing at me through the passenger window of an ancient AMC Jeep. I had thought he was long gone by now but apparently he was merely staying quiet and keeping his ears open for my return. The fishing boat has a low profile, I placed Candice in the lowest part of the boat and Laelaps crouched on the deck next to the baby, instinctively keeping her head down as bullets whined overhead. My return fire was much more accurate, I had a better target to shoot at and I spent the last of the ammo in my M16 directly into the WWII style Jeep. I laughed at the crazed, Scarlet infested madman as he quickly tumbled out of the disabled vehicle and ran for cover between the beach front homes. He followed me as far as he could, on foot, firing randomly until he could follow no longer, marsh and wetlands finally blocking his pursuit.
The engine suddenly and roughly quit, seizing up completely on me just an hour or so after I lost sight of the Red. Slowly I’ve been drifting further and further out into the Gulf, no matter how hard I row. I can’t make any headway at all against the current and the anchor isn’t nearly long enough to touch bottom and stop me. The sun is setting as I write this and I fear my luck has completely run out. I only have enough water for the three of us for another day or two at the most. I was doing fine in Ocala, I should have never have left. Nancy would have died of her infection anyways, I guess the fates had her marked for death to begin with. All I did was lead more people to their doom.
For Candice's and Laelaps sake I’ll keep rowing until my arms fall off, I die from dehydration or I make landfall again. It’s all I can do.
Book Four
Martin’s Journal
March 1, 2013
My name is Martin S. Trebuchet, M.D. and if you are reading this then I am dead. I am sound of mind although my body has entered the mid stages of starvation. I will die within the week. I no longer have the strength to continue my limited research into the animated physiology of the parasite controlled dead. For the past six months I have occupied my time and mind on the foul abominations that should only exist in nightmares. I am no longer able to safely conduct any further research into the controlled corpses of the infected. They are too strong and too violent for me to deal with safely at this point. I absolutely refuse to call them "zombies." This is not some B grade Hollywood movie, these poor souls were once human beings and to call them such a thing seems degrading and disrespectful to me. I will write in this final log, filling it with how I came to be here and the results of my examinations until either I die or am, hopefully, rescued. I should have enough time to describe my situation starting from shortly before martial law was declared, until the present. Writing this will take up the most part of the next couple of days, after which I will become too weak from hunger to do anything but sleep (before entering a comatose state and then dying).
I must admit that what follows will contain useful information regarding the animated dead but it will also contain a lot of material that you may decide to "skip" over. That is fine with me. I need a mechanism to occupy my mind with something other than the looming shadow of my own death.
I won't bother to write a last will and testament. There is nobody in my family still alive to leave an inheritance to anyways. My mother, my father, my brother, my girlfriend and all my friends were infected and surely they are denied a restful peace. Their cadavers are assuredly being forced to walk the Earth and do the will of the parasitic colony inside them, making a mockery of their lives. I take some solace in knowing that the evil won't control my corpse after my spirit has left it. If there is a spirit. If all of this isn't a random mathematical expression of chaos. An illusion forced upon us for a short amount of time, to be quickly forgotten and never remembered. If death only leads to an unrelenting blackness then even our names will be forgotten. All of our works and struggles will be a cosmic joke, even the most famous of us will one day fade from memory. The great pyramids will crumble to dust and none will even know such things existed. Even the Earth itself will one day be engulfed by our Sun, destroying every last scrap of evidence that we ever were. It is to that void I am headed, to join the billions already there. I was never very religious before but staring my own death in the face, I find religion to be a double edged sword. The idea of an eternal spirit of some sort brings with it a desperate hope that I will at least still exist after my mortal body has collapsed. The Buddhist ideals of reincarnation seems a bit unpalatable to my mind and there are aspects of Monotheism that terrify me. To be judged and found unworthy of heaven and thrown into a demon filled pit of fire and eternal torture would definitely be worse than simply a void of nothingness and far worse than returning to life and its multitude of sufferings. This prolonged knowledge of my approaching death is eating me alive. Often in the past couple of months I have pondered the fact that I may already be dead and that this is purgatory. Time seems to stretch in my isolation, seemingly taking a bare minute and turning it into an hour.
It took me over eight years to get my MD. Four years of undergraduate studies and another four years of medical school. By the time I finished my residency more than ten years had passed. After my two year residency was over, I was thirty years old and in debt up to my ears. I had wanted to open my own practice but that would have entailed getting another loan. The financial meltdown tightened up the credit lines and with the amount of outstanding loans I already had, it made my own practice an impossibility. I received a few offers from other established MD's and a couple of commercial enterprises to join them but the best offer I received was from the state of Florida. I'm sure if I would have had the time to seek a job for another couple of months I would have found a better offer. Unfortunately the rent on my small apartment was due and my cupboards were so bare a mouse would have starved to death.
In all honesty, I never thought I would be here more than a few years. I only planned on staying and working here at the Marion County Jail until I repaid my student loans and then I would go into private practice. The hours here were manageable, the handful of doctors employed here worked in shifts and it was all pretty routine. The medical services used to be handled by a private firm but the contract wasn't renewed with them over a demanded raise in prices. All the better for those of us who worked here, the pay wasn’t as good as the private firm offered but the benefits provided by the state are much better. We were always on call but rarely were we actually called in. The toughest part of the job was dealing with the inmates. There were always the few that were hostile and prone to violence, but that was relatively rare. The biggest problem was trying to sort through the ones that were lying to gain access to prescription meds and the ones that were already on prescription meds that were also addicted to street drugs. Those cases of addiction required a certain amount of time where we had to make sure the prisoners were clean, thereby stopping all meds and then referring them to a psych for further evaluation before I could authorize a resumption. For any real life threatening emergencies the prisoners were sent to the civilian hospital until they were well enough to do their recuperation here. All in all, if it wasn't for the benefits I would never have taken the job.
I had been here nearly two years when the animal madness swept the globe. The prison population spiked to capacity and beyond as the homeless and the destitute committed crimes just to escape the attacks. Better to spend three to six months in jail for breaking and entering than to be mauled to death by insane cats and squirrels while you slept in the bushes. The jail grounds hold other buildings, mainly used by the Sheriff's office and was surrounded by a tall, razor wire topped chain link fence. Note I said "was" in the previous sentence but I'll get to that shortly. The "Rat flu" filled the medical ward to capacity and threatened to blow our budget, thankfully it turned out to be a mild mutation and not the virulent strain we feared it might be. At the time, none of us here realized the symptoms of the Rat flu were merely the opening salvo of wh
at would be the end of our world. Never in a million years would we have guessed that it would cause the dead to hungrily walk the Earth in search of warm human flesh to devour. With the animal kingdom going hell bent for blood I didn't see any reason to turn down the offer made to all the workers to stay on the grounds until the plague of madness burned itself out. As horrifying as it was to watch the violence unfold on the television, I felt safe surrounded by the razor wire and the armed police and jail staff. I think the jail populace, in general, was also somewhat grateful to be in a secure facility even if it was against most of their wills.
With all the vicious and bloody animal attacks that I saw, one video still stays with me. It's not one of the always normally dangerous animals like the tiger or lion attacks that got to me. It was watching a small group of rabbits attack and maul to death a child. In my mind it was absolutely terrifying to see such timid animals driven to such a state of ferocity. Immediately the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail came to mind where the killer rabbit of Caerbannog attacked and bit the heads off of three stout knights in one fell swoop to the accompanying sound of a can opener. I remember how the two things overlapped in my mind and I had to actually bite my tongue hard enough to draw blood to keep from releasing a nervously fearful giggle in front of a room full of other employees, lest they think I had lost my mind.
The horrors of the animal madness waned and passed. I left the security of the jail facilities and we all tried to get back to our normal lives. Our normal lives were over with though. The aftermath of the animal madness was sobering, to say the least. The world's farms and livestocks were in ruins. There was legislation being pushed through in Washington that would mandate the resurrection of the "chain gangs". Prisoners would be made to do manual labor picking crops and getting the agriculture industry going again. Strict rationing was going to be implemented and while the United States had enough food stocked up to keep its populace from starving to death, the same couldn't be said for the rest of the world.
Some nations, nations that had a hard time feeding their people to begin with, started rattling their sabers. To them it was either go to war in the hopes that they could capture enough food for their people, or watch as their entire population starved to death in the worst worldwide famine ever seen in human history.
It seemed one week we were all talking of how glad we were that the madness had passed and how we were going to get past the oncoming famine when it was all forgotten in the next week. As soon as the "Scarlet" manifested itself, with its small, red, freckle like spots, it didn't matter anymore.
The few of us employees that were immune were forced, by our contract, to stay at the facilities full time until the emergency passed. Before everything collapsed in a maelstrom of bloodshed and brutality, myself and a dozen others who were also immune, secured and holed up in the primary services building. I could do nothing for the infected. The government gave us very little information regarding the parasite. When we did get instructions on how to proceed in regards to the prisoners, they were simply procedures on mandated disposal methods of the dead. The health and welfare of those incarcerated was no longer a priority at any level.
As the Scarlet grew in its victims, taking over their minds and bodies, open acts of violence became common place. It wasn't just inmate on inmate violence that filled every bed in the medical ward and demanded the majority of my waking hours. The insanity and its manifest aggression caused those guards that were under the parasites insidious influence to go cell to cell, beating, torturing and murdering. There was nothing we could do except stay away from them lest they expend their madness on us.
Inside the prison, life became a horrific orgy of violence. The convicts, locked in close confines with each other, argued, fought, struggled and killed each other with their bare hands and teeth. There are multiple monitoring stations throughout the jail complex and every cell contains at least one camera. I sickly watched the unfolding carnage and bloodshed on the black and white monitors, unable to turn away from the sights. I was transfixed by the sheer ferocity of the aggression and madness. Even though I knew what was transpiring was real and was occurring right in front of my eyes, a feeling of utter disbelief and incredulity overcame me. I was finally able to turn myself away from the terrors after I watched one exceedingly large prisoner take huge, bloody bites out of another, smaller, prisoners face. The sight of absolute fear and pain, as the huge madman sat upon his chest and hungrily ate the flesh from his face, made me vomit. When the other infected prisoners joined in the horrible assault, biting pieces off the screaming and futilely struggling man I had to get up leave, never returning to the monitoring station.
Outside the gates it was worse. By the time martial law was declared and the army and National Guard came in to try and restore order it was already too late. What could only have been considered acts of terrorism before was now being committed by everyone from infected school kids to retired old ladies. We watched on CNN as Mexico City burned to the ground amidst riots and chaos like I could never have imagined.
Just before the end came, that is, just before the Scarlet killed the infected, when the madness was at its height, all the saber rattling of the nations turned into war. Before the television stations went blank there came rumors that the Chinese had devastated the west coast with nukes. Whether it is true or not I have no idea. Certainly the depth of the psychosis caused by the parasite made nuclear war a distinct probability.
Through all of this I kept in contact with my parents and my girlfriend as long as I could. They were infected and with every phone call I could hear the change taking place in them. In the beginning they wanted to know, since I was a Doctor, how they could be cured. It broke my heart to tell them there was no cure. The first phone calls were desperate and pleading as they sought any way to stop what was going to happen to them. After a couple of days they demanded I tell them everything I knew about the parasite, which was very little. I felt helpless, having spent the better part of my adult life studying medicine to help those I loved, only to realize that all my expensive schooling was a waste. The final phone calls were nothing more than raging diatribes against everything and everyone. I prescribed myself antidepressants and mourned them when they no longer called.
During the worst of it all we maintained a limited contact with what was left of the Sheriff's office personnel. The police stations and the officers themselves were prime targets for the population’s murderous rampage. The prison held a modicum of safety and it became a refuge for those immune that could make their way here. Soon the prison held over fifty refugees that were immune to "Omni" (I'm going to use Omni in reference to the whole name Toxoplasmosa Mondus Omni as it is not only shorter but seems fitting) along with however many inmates were left from the original two thousand or so.
It wasn't until after the Omni killed its hosts that we started to go back outside again. It was then that we went through and took stock of the prison population. Overnight it seemed, the parasite killed, bringing an end to the violence. The dead were everywhere, having died in the middle of whatever horrible act they were in the midst of committing. The interior of the prison was a slaughterhouse. Numerically speaking, there should have been about two hundred survivors. There was an eight to ten percent ratio of people that should have been immune but we only recovered only ten inmates. They had been abandoned and left to fend for themselves, locked in their eight man cells with those that went murderously insane. Most of the survivors came out of "the pit" (solitary confinement) or had been able to find a place to hide. Every cell was a bloody mess and it was more than apparent that cannibalism had been practiced. I know it may have been days since they had been properly fed but that should not have led them to eat each other. I find myself extremely distressed over what befell the prisoners under my care but what was I to do?
March 2, 2013
There was one detainee that had survived but he was not like the rest. He wasn't immune, far from it. His sk
in had completely turned a deep red and his tongue, gums, sclera (whites of the eyes) and even the flesh under his fingernails had turned black as night. He had been driven completely insane by the parasite but he did not die from it. We left him in his cell with the partially devoured corpses of his victims, nobody wanted to go near the man. The convict was the first carrier of the Omni that I had ever seen and later I used him as a subject in my research.
The sheer amount of the dead all around us tainted the air with the stomach churning scent of rotting corpses. We formed up a burn pile detail and starting collecting the bodies of the dead. Most of the prisoners who had survived fled at their first opportunity. Nobody stopped them. They had no idea the magnitude of what had happened, being locked up with no connection to the outside world. There are no TV's here at Marion County Jail like other facilities have. The only connection to the outside world they had was the collect-call only phone in their cell. In the madness of the Scarlet the phones were soon destroyed and in most cases the broken pieces were actually used as weapons against each other.
There had come an order from the Federal government to destroy the brainstem of any victim of the parasitic infection who had died, amongst other directives for the legal mass disposal of the dead. I put that down as more insanity and ignored it. The government obviously knew more about the parasite than they let on. I soon found out firsthand what was going to happen, enmass, to those cadavers that hadn’t had their dead brains scrambled.