Journals of the Damned (Book 2)

by GJ Zukow

  I was slowly backing down the rows in that pharmacy, aiming to keep the two in front of me as each of them would move to flank me. Joe had been trying to talk the situation down, still sane and not willing to die that day, seeing and respecting the uniform I still wore. The fat man kept agitating to kill me, his words interspersed with an odd facial tic. I got the sense from Joe that he was exasperated with his compatriot, that the fat man was more of a liability to him and the group than anything else. When the fat man raised his weapon too quick for my liking I set a round into his forehead. Joe didn't return fire, he held up his arms instead, his fingers spread away from the trigger of the pistol he held. The lookout was yelling at Joe to find out what was going on and at the same time telling him to hurry the fuck up, the zeds were coming.

  Joe was nothing but chill, as cool as a cucumber. He knew, like I did, that nobody with the infection was still walking unless they had some notion of how to hinder the parasite. Neither of us knew of carriers at that time, neither had seen someone still alive after the Omni completely claimed a person.

  I sensed Joe figured it a good trade, the crazy fat man for me. In no time he explained what they were here for. They were here for the same stuff I had come in for.

  The lookout started firing off rounds then and when Joe offered me the chance to help them, and possibly join them, I took the chance. I'm actually glad I did.

  In a few minutes we had grabbed everything in the store that was on Joe's list, including not only the cold meds but matches, rubbing alcohol, iodine solution and an odd assortment of items. When the driver yelled to us that it was time to go, that the undead were getting too many and too close, we left. We didn't go directly back to the camp then. Joe directed us to a number of other stores.

  As we worked together, Joe sized me up and I tried to do the same to him. When I first heard what the hell all of the ingredients were actually for I almost got pissed. The first thing that went through my mind was these guys were looting stores to cook meth. All of my old conditioning rose up inside me and I instinctively thought they were criminals that I should arrest or kill right there on the spot. That thinking was from a world gone by and I realized it. All the old rules were gone and this new world would have new rules to go along with it. A good soldier has to adapt and change with every situation. If meth was now a medicine then I had no problem with that at all. Hell, if I had to eat elephant shit to keep the damned parasite within me under control, then I'd be waiting with a plate under an elephant's ass for that hot, steamy goodness.

  When I first joined the group it was a disorganized mess with everybody basically doing whatever they wanted when they weren't carrying out Chef's orders. All of that has changed since I've arrived. Now there is some semblance of order. Watch schedules and work details have been instituted. Chef also laid down a few basic laws, with the maximum penalty for any infraction being death. Our camp is out in the middle of the boondocks. Master Chef had been using the spot for his clandestine cooking for quite some time. There was at first less than a dozen refugees in our group, all infected to some degree and all except me had been using meth for quite some time. The core of the group seemed to consist mainly of Master Chef and his more loyal customers. It was immediately apparent to me that the only reason that the camp hadn't been over-run already by the cannibalistic dead was due to the location of the camp, not any inherent defenses. That gave me a use to the group. They had no idea how to set up an effective perimeter and secure the area.

  Up until this point the meth-heads had been stringing barbed wire, razor wire, chicken wire and anything else they could scrounge to make a half-assed barricade to hold off the few undead stragglers that found their way to the camp. The wall of trash around the camp, at that point, really only slowed down the isolated zeds. Any real threat of more than a handful of the beasts would surely cause the makeshift barricades to fail, that's where I came in. First of all I set up a watch schedule and with Master Chef's approval we instituted a death sentence upon anyone who was found sleeping at their watch post, with no exceptions.

  The second thing I worked on was the defense of the campsite itself. I didn't have to search very long for a backhoe and a bulldozer, we had more trouble with the damned zeds following us around than anything else. With the bulldozer I directed the clearing of all the trees and brush from around the camp for almost fifty yards. A good clean fire zone was mandatory. Once that was complete, and no fuckin' zombies could sneak up on us I had the men create a ten foot deep trench all the way around. The dirt from the trench I had them pile up on the outside, creating an almost ten foot high berm with the help of the bulldozer. The dirt berm served not only to break the line of sight of the mindless zeds but also made it difficult for them to get to us. If they managed to drag their dead bodies over the berm they would then come over the top to tumble into the deep trench. The trench was carved out with vertical sides, far enough down so that there was no way for the bastards to crawl out of it. Once in the trench they were simple to eliminate. Simple, yet it was effective. It would take a lot of the undead to fill that trench up to where they could crawl over each other to get to the campsite.

  By the second week of my taking over the defenses I was directing the others on setting simple wood and log fences on the camp side of the trench. We used the fallen trees from when we cleared the area, along with all the miscellaneous wire that had been strung around haphazardly from before. There wasn't enough wood to create a palisade to surround our camp but that wasn't my intention. If there were so many undead attacking us the trench became filled, the fence would serve mainly to slow their progress down so we would have the time to kill those who got through our defense or give us time to abandon the camp and flee.

  The entrance itself was the weak spot. I wanted to make a drawbridge of some kind but that was a bit more difficult to actually create. What we did instead was to set up gates on each end of the entry road and set our vehicles (cars, trucks, bulldozers, etc.) in between them to completely block the area between the fences. There was no room for the undead to traverse that earthen ramp to our camp, instead they would be forced down into the trench.

  There was only one building (if you could call it that) at the campsite. An old, worn and dilapidated one room building that was built a long ass time ago. It was in that building that the Chef kept his "kitchen". It was also where Chef stayed. The rest of us lived out of tents or lean-to's around the huge bonfire that invariably got built every night.

  The first serious wave of undead that found us had come out of the ruins of the scattered buildings and homes around us, here at the farthest outskirts of Ocala. The defenses I had set up worked like a charm for the hundred or so of the zeds that came at us. We barely had to fire any shots at all, instead, once they clumsily stumbled into the trench we poured gas on them and lit 'em up. I was proud of how it ended up working on that first real test.

  To celebrate our victory, the next day we all went to "church" and sampled the latest batch Chef had cooked. Then we went and burned down all the buildings in town nearest us after raiding them. I don't know if it was necessary to burn all those houses and shops down but it sure was fun.

  Even though the meth does a good job of slowing the parasite breeding within us, we still feel the anger and agitation it causes in its victims minds. It is always there, brewing and simmering just below the surface. Watching the buildings turn into blazing little infernos and killing all those zeds was a good outlet for our violent desires, not just on an individual level, but for the group as a whole. The violence allows us to release some of that pent-up hostility.

  When we raided the buildings we made sure to make plenty of noise and ruckus to draw the attention of as many undead ghouls as we could. When they followed us back to our defenses we made a sport out of shooting them as they came over the berm. For two days and nights the zeds came at us. Every dead fuck for miles around was drawn to us from the constant gunfire like moths to a flame. By the time it
was over and the area was cleared of zeds the trench was half full of rotting cadavers. The carcasses lying in the trench blazed and then smoldered for days. The charred flesh of the dead sent up thick black plumes of smoke for so long that the smell of burning flesh is permanently scorched into my nostrils.

  20 October 2012

  It's been four days since I last wrote in this journal. Not that it matters, nobody but myself will ever read this.

  Life seems unreal. Like I'm trapped in some nightmare dream turned reality. The parasitic infection, the drug use, the walking dead, all of them lend themselves to the unreality of my reality. Writing and then reading what I have written in this journal seems to place reality in a more concrete state for me.

  The last four days have been busy for my infected companions and me. Everyone has been living out of tents and shoddily crafted shelters, getting by without electricity or running water. The only reason we're here is because this is where Master Chef had set up his kitchen. Before the fall of civilization Master Chef was forced to practice his clandestine profession out here, in the middle of nowhere. Now things have changed. The Chef decided it was time to look for someplace more appropriate.

  After two days of recon work we narrowed the possible candidates for our new HQ down to three buildings. The first building we considered was a large property, formerly used as a supply depot for one of the supermarket chains. It came with both a warehouse for dry goods and a separate, huge, refrigerated warehouse. Although there was plenty of property, surrounded by a tall barbed-wire chain-link fence and it had its own generator, it proved too close to other (uninfected) survivors. The warehouse had been raided more than once, even though the stocks were low to begin with. While it still held a lot of food, the gate and doors had been busted down and small groups of people were drawn to it like flies to shit. When the team sent to survey the site got shot up by a well armed group from the county prison, we decided the zone was too hot. Not only would we have to worry about hungry survivors constantly trying to break in, once the immune found out there was a band of the infected using the site they would surely try to exterminate us (and not bargain with us) for what paltry foodstuffs remained. All the traffic to and from the site also meant that there were plenty of undead cannibals roaming about. If we could take, secure and hold the property we could make it work but Chef didn't like it.

  The second site was a High school. The main thing it had going for it was its location. The main thing it had going against it was its location. Centrally located it was close to everything. The school didn't have its own generators for when the electricity will ultimately fail (just a matter of time before that happens) but that can easily be remedied by bringing some generators to the site. The site was in the middle of a large residential neighborhood and the zeds were going to be a huge problem. I looked over the property and my opinion was that it would take too long to secure. Chef decided the same.

  The third place turned out to be very nice indeed. We've finished moving everything here and everyone is much happier indoors, out of the weather. The place was, and still is, a large auto junkyard. There are rows upon rows of cars, along with tons of old machinery. There’s a generator already here for electricity, along with a gas station across the street that has diesel fuel. The property includes an auto repair shop, complete with welding equipment and a load of tools. The biggest surprise is the fact that property also has an old working well in addition to city water. The junkyard isn't located near anything really, in fact it's a bit isolated. Tomorrow Chef wants us to start on a new trench and berm system set up like I had built before. Shouldn't be a problem.

  All in all, the past four days have been both good and bad. Good because we found an excellent new base and bad because we lost two men. The first man died of his wounds from the gunfight at the warehouse. There's no doctor here and my skills as a medic only go so far as to keep a soldier alive long enough to see him in the hands of a corpsman or safely evacuated.

  The second man was caught stealing some of the "sacrament" during the move. (We have taken to calling meth the "sacrament" as it is what we take at "church". Why we have taken to calling our group meetings 'church' is mainly due to Master Chef passing out the smoke like a priest handing out wafers and wine.)

  I wasn't particularly happy about Chef deciding that I would be the enforcer of his laws, although I well understood them. There could be no way that we could let someone steal the life giving meth from us. The meth is life at this point, as necessary for survival for us infected as food and water. As it is, we only have enough of the sacrament to barely keep the parasite crawling inside of us at bay. Once every four days we go to church. It's not easy at all. The first two days after smoking is good, the high is there and the parasite goes into recession. The next two days before we smoke again and the insidious single-celled menace starts to reassert itself.

  It would be best if we could smoke every other day but we just don't have the supplies yet. Some of the others here want to smoke everyday but that's because they were addicted to the drug before the Omni raised its evil head.

  Master Chef had told everyone, repeatedly, that stealing from him would result in death. Chef is the only one who knows how to cook. Chef holds all the power here. Nobody here will go against him, nobody wants to be cut off from the sacrament. Chef called church and gave me the responsibility to not only execute, but to publicly torture the thief. I may have killed plenty of people in battle but I had never tortured anyone before. At first I had a hard time listening to him scream as I skinned him alive. At first. After a few minutes, when his warm blood covered my hands and arms, I found the experience somehow exciting. I am mortified at how I enjoyed mutilating the man. It has to be due to the parasite's influence. I have no other way to explain, to myself or others, why I felt the way I did. Anyways, the thief's head is now impaled upon a fencepost while his desecrated body is hanging like some awful spread eagled scarecrow attached to the fence itself.

  24 October 2012

  It was the seventeenth of September when I first noticed the symptoms of the Omni. It seemed everyone, except a very small minority, showed signs of infection. The government issued meds I and my men took worked with limited success, reducing the rate of the parasites breeding within us, but only barely. The 'sacrament' does a hell of a lot of a better job, but still it seems every morning when I wake up I find some of the red blotches have either grown or a new scarlet spot has appeared. When I first joined this ragged group of infected survivors I was around thirty percent dead. After almost a month since being here the infection has slowed to a crawl. Today, a third of my body is covered by the splotches. I'm further along the path to death than some here and less infected than others. Everyone here now (except Chef, whose skin shows twenty percent coverage) has between thirty to forty percent of their bodies covered with the damnable tell-tale signs of the parasite.

  Securing the area around our new home has turned out to be tougher than any of us had thought it would be. The junkyard is on the outskirts of town and when we initially scouted the site, the numbers of the undead were few. On the first day, when our caravan of trucks and cars rolled in with all of our equipment and supplies, we tried to be as quiet as possible. Immediately after arriving we set out with axes, swords and sledge hammers to eradicate the walking monstrosities as silently as possible. There weren’t a lot of them then, just a few handfuls of isolated stragglers. It was the sound of the engines and the commotion of unloading our possessions that drew the zeds to us. There must have been hundreds of them that came out of the surrounding area in the next couple of hours. The property is large, all of it fenced in, and the hungry dead staggered to us from every direction. The fence held under the weight of the famished horrors, the chain links only bowed inwards slightly where the mass of decaying abominations was densest. For hours we stabbed them through the fence and still they came. Somebody started spraying them with gasoline and lighting them on fire. The ravished undead kept
coming and coming. Singly and in small groups they kept being drawn here. They shambled and dragged their broken and rotting carcasses for miles, drawn by the sound of our engines previously and the sounds of our struggles currently.

  They came for three days. A relentless stream that has only recently slowed to a trickle. So many of them have shown up that we must have killed over a thousand of the things. There has come a consensus amongst us that the zombies must be somehow calling out to each other that there was living flesh here. Surely there could not have been this many undead in the area when we arrived. There was certainly not this many of the beasts around here when we scouted the location.

  This morning before 'church', Chef told some of the others to start armoring up our bulldozer and backhoe so the operators will be secure from the zeds that will almost certainly come out of the woodwork when they go out to dig fortifications. The fortifications around the junkyard will easily take two to three weeks to complete. The job at the campsite only took a couple of days but that site was far smaller than this one is. My job will be to provide additional security for those operating the heavy equipment. I had to go out and find a suitable vehicle to guard them from.

  We decided that while it would be much easier to shoot any of the undead that found their way to us, the sounds of the gunfire would travel further than the sounds of the machines. There was no way any of us would go and stand outside the compound armed only with melee weapons to keep back what could be another horde of undead. Instead I found a tracked APC in good condition that I will use to simply run over and grind to mincemeat any undead that wanders into the area.

  On another note, I am noticing some peculiar behavior in many of my comrades. Not just the increased hostility nor the disturbing dreams, I've noticed something else.

  There are a number of women here with us also. The number of women to men isn't equal, only approximately a quarter of our numbers belong to women. Whether the lack of females is due the parasite killing off their sex easier than men or if it's got to do with the psychological makeup of the individual I can't comment. What I can comment on is the affect the Omni has on the human sex drive. The parasite doesn't increase the sex drive itself, instead stimulation that leads to an orgasm seems much more pronounced. Honestly, I don't know if the strength of the orgasm is increased or it only seems like it because it provides some relief from the constant pain and discomfort the infection causes in all of its victims. As a result there are a couple of girls here that have turned to providing sex as their contribution to the group. For some, any respite from the ravages of the parasite within us is a valid excuse to engage in wanton sex acts. Chef is going to have to step in and create some sort of rules concerning this activity at some point soon. I actually caught one of the men playing with himself while on guard duty. I beat the hell out of him as a warning to all that there would be no dereliction of duty, no matter the reason.