by GJ Zukow
Only once in the previous weeks has anything of any real excitement happened. I had taken a squad on a patrol into Jacksonville to check out the Navy bases there. We had barely gotten into Duval County when our Humvee blew its transmission. As the disabled vehicle clattered and slowly ground to a halt the four of us noted with some alarm the area was thick with the undead. I knew, as soon as I heard the harsh grinding, there was no hope of affecting any kind of repair. We had to find another working vehicle, on foot, as quickly as possible before we were overrun by the dreaded abominations.
The walking dead numbered in the dozens, scattered around the roadside with dozens more following behind us as they were drawn to the sound of our passing. The path to our left seemed basically clear, with buildings just beyond a thin stand of trees and brush that had grown untended since the end of civilization, so that’s the way we went. We proceeded as quietly as we could, resorting to clubbing and bayoneting any of the bloodthirsty bastards that got in our way. The plan was to get into the subdivision and circle around to lose the unwanted attention of the undead but what happened was something else. Once past the first row of houses and buildings a scene of absolute destruction greeted our eyes. The whole area was nothing more than the charred and burned out ruins of what used to be a middle class neighborhood. Every building for what seemed a mile around was reduced to rubble and there in the center of the destruction laid the broken remains of a commercial passenger jet. The jet was so mangled and scorched that even though I couldn’t tell what type it had been, I knew it had to be one of the larger models. The place was a hotbed of undead activity, crawling with zeds. We had unwittingly fled from the frying pan right into the fire. There were too many of them to melee our way past the horrors to escape to freedom, we had to start unleashing automatic weapons fire just to make a path through them. The gunshots drew even more of them towards us and it soon became apparent that if we didn’t find some sort of shelter soon there would be no chance of surviving.
By the time we found a suitable place to hole up our ammo was running low and panic was starting to set in. Behind a tall chain link fence was our salvation where we could hole up until we could either figure out a way to escape or wait for rescue. The numbers of the undead in the vicinity was more than I had seen in a long time, they were everywhere. I had no real problem scaling the tall fence to escape the grasping hands and teeth, negotiating obstacles while carrying a full pack and all my equipment had become second nature for me. The other three with me weren’t used to this kind of exertion at all. One man had somehow gotten his weapon stuck in the fence as he was desperately trying to climb his way to safety. Before I could yell at him to just drop the damn thing, the unholy beasts got a hold of him and dragged him screaming into a maelstrom of gnashing teeth. There was no possible way anyone could save him, so I ended his pain with one of my few remaining rounds from my last clip. More and more of the parasitic controlled cadavers were swarming the area and as I started running towards the building I saw something that startled and terrified both myself and the others with me. A man, completely naked and covered in filth came from the mass of undead and roughly pushed aside the walking horrors around him to feed on the corpse of our fallen brethren.
The signs of the scarlet were all over him. His skin was completely red, his eyes were the blackest orbs I had ever seen and when he saw me staring in disbelief at him he laughed nastily at me, blacked gums and tongue horrifying me. None of us had ever seen someone still alive after fully succumbing to the scarlet before, this was something completely new and petrifying. I raised my weapon to kill him but I had fired the last of my rounds off without knowing it when I put the dead man out of his misery. The other two men with me were out of ammo also and to make matters worse, it was the fallen man who had been carrying the extra ammo in his pack. Not only was the carrier still alive, the undead considered him one of them, actually seeming to defer to him. The only insight I have gained into this phenomenon came after I had returned safely to our base and talked to that old man, but I’ll write of that later. Got to keep this on track.
The building was boarded and quite secure, it was obvious once we started looking for a way inside that someone had put quite a lot of effort into fortifying it. It was only once we started trying to break down the defenses that a window on the second floor opened and a white haired and bearded man threw down a rope ladder.
Once inside it was plain to see that the portly fifty year old man who let us in was having second thoughts about his act of kindness. Just as we had never seen someone who had been completely taken by the scarlet still breathing, he and his younger friend had never seen anyone suffering from the scarlet and not dead yet. I swear I could smell their fear even though both of them held shotguns on us.
With all the stress and shit that had been going wrong that day I was getting pissed at the old guy’s attitude. He and his friend kept pointing their damn shotguns at us and started trying to tell me and my men what to do. When the old geezer started yelling at us after I told the men to search the place for any ammo or spare weapons I lashed out. I found it too easy to smash the butt of my weapon into his face and shut his hole up. The younger man stood shocked for one brief moment as his companions teeth flew from his bloody mouth. In that second, one of the men disarmed the boy, right on cue, easily taking his weapon away before the unconscious body of his friend fully hit the floor. The problem with the immune may have been temporarily solved with their subdual but a larger problem was brewing.
The carrier had moved on from his feast of the dead man’s raw flesh and I watched him as he went around the fence line, pushing and shoving the undead out of his way. I thought he would climb over the fence and enter the facility but he didn’t. Instead he seemed to inspect the lock and chain securing the main gate, then he ran off. I breathed a sigh of relief when his reddened back turned towards me and he fled but it didn’t last long. The insane, scarlet stricken man returned all too soon.
As soon as my remaining men reported that they had found the pair’s weapon cache the scarlet covered bastard returned. As soon as I saw him make his way through the mob of the undead towards the gate I knew something bad was going to happen. When he reached the chain and produced some bolt cutters I fired the shotgun at him, wanting to kill the shit before he cut the lock. The two idiots had loaded their weapons with buckshot instead of slugs, expecting close in fighting I suppose. I was severely disappointed when my shots were for nothing, the buckshot didn’t have the range to have the slightest chance of even wounding him. The weapons cache turned out to be a rather dismal affair with only a few revolvers and a couple of old ass bolt-action M1’s being their complete store of weapons. Furiously we loaded up the weapons and got ready for the assault that came at us. As soon as the carrier opened the gate, a wave of hundreds of the abominations rushed through as fast as they could and quickly surrounded the building.
There were more of the hungering cadavers outside, now heedlessly trying to smash their way in the building, than we had ammo. We made every round count, getting at least one kill, sometimes two, with every shot. Still they came at us, more and more of the unholy, rotting things coming out of the surrounding neighborhood and we fired until we were down to our last rounds again. During this whole time, even though I was desperately looking for the carrier, he was nowhere to be found.
The carrier may have been crazed from the parasitic infection but he still retained his ability to be clever. While we were busy trying to keep the zombies out, he had gone around to a side of the building where we couldn’t see him. When we did, at last, find out where he disappeared to, it was when he pried open a fire escape door from the outside and let loose a horde of the undead into our sanctuary. He was letting the zeds be his shock troops, soaking up all our ammo.
The whole situation became untenable, we were fighting a retreat through the building and all the while the two immune were screaming at us. The old man’s bloodied and ruined mouth was in my ear
, with the young man crying and pleading for us to give him a weapon or let him free. It was all too much for me, the anger welled up inside and I shot both of them in their kneecaps so they couldn’t run away. As far as I can see, it was a life or death situation, I have no qualms about what I did to save my life. We tied the victims up and offered them as a sacrifice. When the monsters got a hold of the two it gave us plenty of time to escape. With their screams still piercing the humid air we used the rope ladder to escape from another second floor window. As we were fleeing on the opposite side of the building where the least amount of the undead were, I caught my final glance of the madman as he rushed into the building to join the feast.
Once away from the nightmarish neighborhood, we easily found new transport and decided to call the mission a failure. I will go back to Jacksonville again, I’m sure there’s a ton of goodies on board all those abandoned, rusting and horror filled ships.
Daily life is becoming a walk on a tightrope and in the coming months life is going to turn those dangerously thin pieces of twisted fibers into the razor sharp edge of a sword.
We number twenty-five.
18 April 2013
I don’t really care about writing in this journal of mine anymore. Today I’m using it as more of a distraction than anything else. I’ve got this damn song running over and over and fucking over in my head. For two days now it has just kept playing in my head over and over and over. It’s not even a good song, I never even liked it when I first heard it. It mocks me. A headache accompanies it. With every repeat of the damned song my head hurts slightly more. I know it, and the other mental problems I am experiencing, are due to the parasite boring into every cell in my brain. Still, if I ever find any member of the group ‘Katrina and the Waves’ I’m going to torture them to death for as long as possible. I’m in the middle of a fucking nightmare horror turned reality and “I’m walking on sunshine” just keeps playing, in its entirety, louder and louder in my head.
As far as I can tell, somewhere between fifty-five and sixty percent of my skin has turned the deep scarlet color that marks my doom. There’s an accursed list of symptoms that I, we, are currently experiencing.
I’m hearing whisperings, voices, I really don’t know how to describe them. Sometimes it’s an abrupt shout in my ears and I have turned around to yell back at the person screaming at me, only to find myself alone. Other times the utterances are nonsensical sounds that I can only describe as whisperings. The whispering is unsettling, for some unknown reason I can almost understand them. The whisperings don’t seem to be in English or any language I’ve ever heard before. I think I can almost hear the whisperings of the parasites themselves as they communicate with each other inside of my skull, at least that’s what I fear they are.
Along with the insanities come uncontrolled and sometimes violent muscle spasms. Out of nowhere a leg or arm will start moving around, contorting and flailing completely against my will. Other times I get cramps so bad my muscles lock up and contort into painful positions. Everybody has to go through this shit. It’s almost unbearable. I can’t stand it.
As the Omni overtakes my mind it brings on extremes in emotions that sometimes quickly passes but usually seems to linger. We go from anger to sadness to everything in between in the space of an hour or two. It has become a madhouse with people preferring to isolate themselves, often locking themselves into rooms whenever the emotional chaos comes over them.
Old and forgotten memories sometimes play themselves out in my head, just like I’m experiencing them in real life with every minute detail, sense and feeling rushing back, it’s like I’m actually there again. Sometimes these memories are sweet, other times they are replays of bloody fighting that only increase the seeming reality of my vivid and fright-filled dreams. These things can only be because of the Omni activating and testing out the various regions on my mind. It’s no fucking wonder everyone who is infected goes mad.
The old man, whom I’ve written of before, finally lost it. We most certainly would have killed him if he had shown violent behavior, but luckily(?) for him he went into a fetal position and started ranting and raving in between heavy crying jags followed by crazed prayers to Yama-Kali or any God that would listen to his pathetic mumblings for mercy. The priestesses took him, experimenting on him before he finally dies and faces the resurrection. In his crazed state he was babbling on about seeing through the many eyes of the undead and he was losing his soul. His life is forfeit anyways and if the priestesses end up murdering him in their search for a cure, then so be it.
All the women here have been converted to the worship of Yama-Kali now. There’s five of them here now and they have a gained a lot of power. I at once despise and hate them and at the same time I do whatever they tell me. They are filthy things, never showering or bathing or doing any kind of personal hygiene. They ritually cover themselves in blood and dirt, it is caked on so heavy that pieces of the dried gore fall off of them like rain whenever they move around. Their once long, beautiful hair is either shaved completely off or is caked with muck. Their stench is horrible but every time I catch a glimpse of their naked flesh I get hard and submit to anything they ask of me, just to have sex with one of them.
I know I have fallen from any kind of morality or decency. It is what I am now, I have to find some way to accept what I have become. Those who can’t cope with what they are commit suicide. This reminds me of something at once horrible and hilarious. I have to write this down, I haven’t laughed in so long, none of us have, and even though I know any sane reader will find no humor in the act it will show the insane influence of the single celled bringer of madness. One of our members could no longer take the pain and confusion and the ever growing madness within him. Right in the chow hall he produced a nine millimeter and ate the barrel, blowing the back of his skull all over the wall behind him. Joe went to drag the body away to be dumped in the trench outside when his hand entered into the now hollow cavity that had once held the dead man’s grey matter. Joe found that he could manipulate the empty skull through the cavity and the hole in the back the corpse’s throat, making the corpse a puppet. He sat there and did the funniest routine, using the corpse like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Oh, how we laughed. It may have been sick but it was the best laugh any of us have had in a long time. Freakin’ hilarious.
There are twenty-four of us left.
14 June 2013
Acceptance...it took me a long time before I finally fully surrendered to Yama-Kali. It was by no means easy. The more I fought against what I have become the harder my life became. It is easier now. I have abandoned all my misgivings and guilt. The constant battle I was waging against these new emotions and desires, the nagging guilt that was eating away at my soul, the undue stress I had placed upon my own shoulders is gone now. It was a revelation, a divine, simple realization that if I am to survive any longer I had to make peace with what I am. Now since I have given myself completely to the Goddess I am able to take some happiness from life. The simple pleasures that I can take, I take. No matter if the things that I am driven to do was once the domain of the criminally insane, that kind of thinking is from a life that passed a long time ago. The lion does not lament the fact that he kills the gazelle for his dinner; instead he relishes the fact that he has hunted well and can enjoy his feast. It is the same with me. It is the same with all of us here. Those that futilely fought against their overwhelming desires have either fled or killed themselves.
There came other changes within me that heralded what I have become. My sense of taste and smell has completely changed. I can no longer taste sour or sweet things. Eating candy now tastes like I’m merely eating bland flour. Everything except meat has lost all of their flavors, with the taste and smell of human flesh being almost like ambrosia. Long Pig, of course, is the ambrosia of the Goddess, and I can revel in its subtle nuances now. It’s as if all the capacity to detect other tastes and smells have transferred themselves to one specific craving, the cravi
ng for the meat of the uninfected. When I eat now I swear my taste buds are so attuned that I can tell what my meal had for its last meal.