Journals of the Damned (Book 2)

by GJ Zukow

  One of the very first things that happened when we got back from Georgia and told people about the odd behavior of the zeds, was experimentations on them. If the unholy beasts get sprayed with a shot of the freezing liquid ammonia, undiluted, they die almost immediately. Lesser concentrations of ammonia kill in accordance with its strength. Amazingly, even ordinary household cleaner kills them. You have to spray the hell out of them but once coated with Windex the dead will finally collapse in forty hours or so.

  The knowledge of how to easily wipe out the abominations that mindlessly crave our living flesh is almost too good to be true. The accidental way we uncovered this secret makes me wonder just how many other survivors (both infected and immune) know it. The murderers holed up in the prison haven’t figured it out yet, they still have to keep their perimeter clear with firearms and hand weapons every day. Nobody here is going to tell them either.

  Since the ammonia deals so effectively at killing the parasite in the undead there has come a lot of things people are doing with it in order to eliminate the vile parasite inside of themselves. There became such a rush to get some ammonia that Chef had I set up a guard to watch the tanker and put a stop to it. Any further experimentation with the ammonia has to be approved by Chef himself now. Pretty much anything that could be tried has been tried, resulting with three deaths already. Between him needing some of it for the Birch reaction and its use against the zeds, Chef was worried about making it last as long as possible.

  Before we regulated the ammonia’s dispense, people had been showering with different dilutions of it in water, sometimes causing burns and coughing. Some people swore that it helped with the infection but the effects were short lived. I, of course, gave myself a shower with a twenty five percent solution in the same hopes. My experience with washing my body down with the solution didn’t make me feel any better, unfortunately. I think that the ammonia reacts much differently with dead, animated flesh as opposed to living flesh. The body can deal with some amounts of ammonia naturally (since it is in our atmosphere and we breathe in some of it all the time) and the infection may be too deep inside of us at this point to be affected. Since some say it helps a little to shower with the solution, Chef hadn’t stopped it but instead limits the practice to a small shower once a week.

  Not soon after the depressing lack of results from showering with the toxic substance, someone tried exposing themselves to the fumes by huffing it. As soon as the guy took in a quick, deep lungful he passed out. That man recovered but others were desperate too. It was quickly discovered that inhaling the vapor can cause coughing, shortness of breath and burns to the mouth, throat, sinuses and lungs.

  One person had locked herself in a closet, stuffing the cracks with rags and attempted to give herself some prolonged exposure to the chemical. After a couple of hours she emerged again, in absolute agony and unable to get any air into her scorched and burned lungs. It took that woman three days to die, all the while in complete misery.

  That didn’t stop anyone from trying something else though. I understand the mindset, faced with the choice of a slow descent into what is already a living hell and certain death, to die trying to cure one’s self seems an attractive alternative, especially if it works (or if you survive).

  A day later we had another ammonia poisoning related death. One of the guys, someone whom I knew, whom had worked for me, had taken to putting ammonia in everything he drank. In his water, his beer, whatever. He had been trying to ingest the ammonia, trying to get it inside of him without it burning his lungs and killing him. He died in complete agony also. It took him two days to die.

  The last death we had from people trying to use the ammonia to save their lives was just the other day. We found his corpse with a needle sticking out of his arm. The crazy bastard tried to main-line some of it, like it was heroin and it killed him within minutes.

  Other than that, the day to day operation goes well. Now that we have a way to keep the undead at bay, the work on the fortifications proceeds easily. We don’t even need to use our guns against the undead very often now either. All it takes now to thin the population of dead cannibals is a few brave men with spears. The zeds hate coming close to the scent of ammonia, giving us excellent opportunities to stay out of the reach of their grasping, necrotic claws. Our new ultimate weapon against them is a toy squirt-gun (one of the big super-soaker ones) filled with a fifty percent solution of ammonia and water. The fifty-fifty mixture isn’t strong enough to drop a zed in its tracks in most cases but it does kill ‘em within a day or so.

  22 November 2012

  I can feel the effects of the parasite growing within me. The insidious organism is wreaking havoc with my emotions. With every passing day, the anger and agitation builds inside of me. It’s like a seething cauldron of pure hate boiling just below the surface. It isn’t just me, everyone here feels it. Along with the anger and restlessness comes an odd and disturbing craving. We’ve all seen what the craving makes the infected do. Before the apocalypse caused the collapse of civilization we all saw our family, friends and neighbors brutally murder each other in a frenzy of violence. Then, horrifically, we all witnessed what the contaminated did to those they killed, they ate them. Now the craving is among us. It’s not an overwhelming desire yet but eventually it will be. As we all sat down to our thanksgiving feast, everyone of us silently wished there was something else on the table besides turkey and ham.

  In October a third of my body was covered by the damning Scarlet. Even with the meth slowing the colony of the single-celled menace named Toxoplasmosa Mondus Omni from breeding inside my body, it still grows. Each week it advances another full percent. In a month’s time another four percent of my skin turns blood red as the capillaries burst. At this rate, in less than sixteen months I will die after being driven insane, only to rise as one of the ghoulish undead.

  Chef, who is the least infected of us, has had another visitation by the dark goddess. He has ordered the building of an altar to her. He gave the decree to all of us as we finished our meal and before we started drinking in earnest. None of us were surprised by this. All of us have dreamed of her. Whether she is real or not is a moot point. Many here have started to become fanatical in worshipping her image. Some believe, I suppose, out of desperation that there is at least one god that looks after her children, comforting them in their fears of an afterlife or a hell. Myself, although I have dreamed of her unholy beauty, still feel that the shared visions of her are more of a psychological nature than the goddess actually being a reality. The altar, as commanded by Master Chef, must be large enough to perform sacrificial rites upon. It also needs be built without the use of nails or glue. The materials of the altar can only be built with certain materials. Human bones and skulls, barb and razor wire, weapons that have drawn blood. The top of the altar must consist of a single smooth piece of slate or black marble. Within a central hollow of the altar there must be placed seven still animated heads of the undead. The building of the altar is going to be difficult, to say the least, with those restrictions in my eyes. Chef gave the responsibility for the construction of what will eventually be the dark lady’s temple to two of the women. Master Chef has given himself the honor of being the High Priest with the two chosen women being given the honor of becoming the Goddess’s first High Priestesses. The large auto repair bay is going to be the site of the new temple and no one besides those three are allowed inside of it, excepting for certain occasions, upon threat of death. The two women Chef had chose to be his priestesses are also the hottest of those taking refuge here. Both of the girls are young with one still in her teens and the other barely twenty-one or so. I have no doubt that some of Chef’s ‘rituals’ will end up being nothing more than some sort of sex act with them.

  With the completion of our ditch and ramparts for defense we are still making continual improvements. I have started setting up some of the surrounding buildings as sentry posts. The ammonia keeps those buildings outside of the perimeter f
ree from the undead and our reach will soon include all of Ocala.

  Whenever a patrol from the prison comes within our zone of control, our men snipe at them mercilessly. We have killed a number of them but they keep coming back with an ever increasing level of arms and vehicles. The immune may outnumber us but we have an ace in the hole.

  The APC’s we use run on diesel, one fill up of their fuel tanks takes ninety-five gallons. The gas station across the street from the junkyard ran dry of diesel weeks ago but we have come across plenty of diesel tankers since then. The big find came from a private airfield on the southwest edge of Ocala. A full tanker truck of jet fuel was just sitting there, waiting to make its final delivery. While the vast majority of Abrams tanks used by the US military are multi fuel capable, being able to use kerosene or gasoline of any quality, JP-8 (Jet Propulsion fuel, grade eight) is the preferred fuel for these beasts. It takes almost ten gallons of the stuff just to get the turbines started. I may have been trained in the basic operation of an Abrams but I never received the specific knowledge of how to maintain, configure or repair them. The tools and methods to switch the engine over to run on regular gasoline are unknown to me and I didn’t want to risk fucking up an Abrams when I need it the most. Now I don’t have to worry. Now the people who need to worry are the immune who stupidly try to murder us on sight.

  Since I last wrote in this journal we have suffered two more casualties in the ongoing battle with the immune. One man was killed outright, while the second man still convalescences from his wounds.

  Two more refugees have joined us, one man and one woman. Chef knew them from before the world went to hell in a hand basket. Seems they had been addicted to meth since before all of this started and when their local dealer had been murdered, they simply helped themselves to his remaining stash. It’s only due to luck that they are still alive at all, they had absolutely no idea that the drug slowed the progress of the Omni, they simply wanted to stay high as fuck before they died. They had run out and she had remembered Chef’s number, calling him in the middle of the night hoping he was still alive and was still dealing. By the time they reached us here they were also around forty percent covered in the Scarlet, just as we all are.

  The guy she came here with wasn’t very good at controlling himself where the emotional chaos of the Omni was concerned. Soon after arriving he got into a heated argument over nonsense with the woman and started to beat the hell out of her. The girl is young and pretty, the rest of the men here definitely want to keep her around (if mainly for sex) and they quickly turned on the man and beat him to death, there on the spot. Nobody stopped them, it was almost therapeutic for them to give vent to the anger inside and unleash it on another living being. I personally could care less that the man was beaten to death, since Chef didn’t care either nobody was punished for the act.

  One man killed, one woman gained. Our numbers remain the same.

  13 December 2012

  My dreams are nothing more than nightmares at this point. That is, when I can find sleep. The constant agitation and latent anger, not to mention the drug use, makes it unbearably difficult to fall asleep. When I do, perchance, happen to find solace in unconsciousness, the dreams I endure are more real than any waking reality. I mostly find myself back in Iraq, reliving the worst day of my life. Only within my dreams the enemy will not die. The face of every man I killed comes back, accusing me of murdering them and determined to repay me in kind. My weapon clicks hollowly upon an empty chamber, having fired every single round into the bodies of those that have come back to haunt me. Mine enemies laugh at me then, a cruel, hard, mocking laugh that chills me to the core of whatever soul I have left. Then they attack me with teeth and nails, devouring me alive and I feel every single wound. The agony wakes me from my all too brief slumber, into this nightmare I call reality. I have never experienced such pain in any mere dream before, it must be due to the parasite’s influence. It’s getting to the point I fear sleep. I know I’m not the only one having these problems, many here awake screaming bloody murder from their horrific visions. When the others tell me of their dreams, many speak of an unrelenting violence broken only by the dark lady’s promises. For the others, it’s their conversation with the goddess that causes them to awaken, screaming and thrashing.

  We lost another man today. It was due to his own carelessness that he ended up dying. His death serves as a warning to the rest of us to stay ever vigilant. He and another man had taken up a position within one of our scattered safe houses, maintaining a watch on this city and the comings and goings of the few uninfected that still remain. The two had cleared the house and laced the entryways with ammonia but they failed to spray around one single window. The dead still hunger for our flesh and they will not cease in their efforts to get to us whenever they can. Through the window it came at them, heedless of the sharp shards of glass that sliced open its rotting flesh. Where one zed finds a meal others follow, it’s almost like they emit some sort of communication between themselves that we (the living) cannot hear. It was something unexpected and the thing caught them off guard. (I have noticed that those of the undead that have recently fed show much more vitality and speed than those of the ghouls that haven’t partaken of a mouthful of human meat). Before the two realized that their perimeter had been breached the cannibalistic beasts were upon them. One of the men had suffered a huge wound in his bicep, having been bitten mercilessly by one of the monsters. Although they escaped and made their way back to the base, the nasty wound the man received caused his death. The man’s wound festered, the skin around the jagged hole in his upper arm immediately turning scarlet. He died from the massive injection of the single celled parasite and it minute eggs. No amount of ammonia wash or meth could do anything to stop the rapid progression of the disease. Within two days his skin was completely stained by the scarlet with his tongue, gums and the white’s of his eyes turning as black as coal. In the end he died a raving lunatic, such as we all will, and I personally put him out of his misery with a double tap to the back of the head, not just to kill him but to keep him from rising again.

  There are thirty-two of us left.

  22 December 2012

  Last night was the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. It was this night that the High Priest and his Priestesses have declared to be the High Night of the Goddess. Christmas, nor any other holiday for that matter, will ever be celebrated again. The old gods have deserted us and aligned themselves against us. The High Priest has told us the name of the new goddess. Her name is Yama-Kali. Yama-Kali is death incarnate. Yama-Kali is here, on this earth, to eradicate the men who have turned to the ways of the demons and destructive forces. She has but a short time on this earth and within that time it is her job, and the job of us, her disciples, to wipe out the evil that mankind has become. We will serve her, whether we wish to or not, in life and in death, such is the power she wields.

  The altar to Yama-Kali is a monstrosity of a thing to behold. It is almost a thing of wonder to gaze upon. No nails or glue or any fastener is used in its construction. Only bones supporting more bones, held in place with barbed and razor wire form its base. Upon the top is a single slab of the blackest marble, taken from the altar of another god that has abandoned us. Channels have been carved into the dark stone, draining the blood of our sacrifice to the chamber below, inside of the altar itself. Seven still unliving heads are within that hidden chamber of the altar. When the blood poured down into the chamber the severed heads squirmed and struggled to lap up the blood, tearing and shredding what remained of their blackened tongues and lips upon the barbs and blades of the rusty wire in their eagerness to satiate their hunger.

  We had found and taken a small group of three survivors that had been hiding in an abandoned restaurant. To the High Priest’s delight, (no longer are we to call Master Chef by that name...he now demands to be called High Priest) one of the uninfected turned out to be a twelve year old girl. Whilst the other two adults, a man and a
woman, were subjected to whatever we wanted to do with them, short of killing them, the child was untouched. The child was anointed with ammonia and kept clean and pure. The two adults however were subjected to all manner of physical abuse, including prolonged raping. The child was the high sacrifice held at 1:12 am.

  At dusk we sacrificed the first of the adults, a woman who screamed and cried, dying badly. The priestesses removed their rags of clothing and covered themselves in her blood, the color of the blood is the scarlet that will cover us all. The priestesses adorn themselves with the entrails of that first sacrifice, making a short skirt of human skin, held up by a belt of intestine.

  Of the three, the child actually died the best, even though she had suffered the worst tortures of all three of them. With barely a whimper or moan she took the depravations of the complete removal of all of her innocence’s and the following dismemberment of her small living body. We took this as a very good sign and afterwards her head was placed upon a pike at the entry to the temple to honor her. Then with the end of the ritual, the temple turned into a drunken, drug fueled orgy with the priestesses opening their bodies to anyone who desired them. A feast was prepared consisting mainly of the meat of our first sacrifice and it was unbelievably tasty.

  At daybreak we cut out the heart of the last sacrificial victim, who begged and pleaded to unlistening ears for his life to be spared. The man turned out to be the weakest of the victims. I was glad when the High Priest finally cracked open his chest and sliced out the still beating heart, ending his degrading whining.

  With all the struggling and desperate pain filled thrashings of our sacrifices the altar stood firm, without any signs of weakness. The priestess hands and lower arms had been cut and sliced open in their work but they showed no evidence of pain or regret at having been ordered to build it, only pride.