by GJ Zukow
The priestesses had no luck finding any cure for the parasite while experimenting on the old man. They injected and pumped him so full of drugs that by the time he died he was nothing more than a comatose pile of old, worn bones. They gave him everything from penicillin to herbicide before he died but nothing worked. After he died, two people fled our compound, preferring to face their death and resurrection on their own instead of being the next possible guinea pigs for the priestesses. The experimentation may continue or it may not. Even the High Priest has undergone the changes, he has wondered aloud to me that since our cases of infection are so advanced, what would possibly cure us at this point may in fact also kill us.
The priestesses have started consolidating their control over the High priest. Those bitches have one commodity that is always in demand here. They use sex as a weapon to control us and they are doing a very good job at it. High Priest has started teaching them how to make the sacrament, something he would never teach us. I guess it’s a good thing though, all of us are experiencing memory loss and if anything were to happen to the High Priest we would all be damned to death in a matter of days.
The only other thing I want to note is the sever lack of rain we’ve been experiencing here in Florida. I don’t think it has rained once since the hurricane rolled through. We had actually started a vegetable garden months ago but nothing can grow now without constant tending and watering. Needless to say we’ve had a lot of other shit on our minds and the garden got quite neglected. Fuck the tomatoes and corn, lol, we’re cannibals now anyways.
The whisperings and voices in my head have abated somewhat. I am convinced now that the whisperings are indeed the communications of the parasitic colony inside me. Sometimes I can ‘feel’ another infected soul when they come near...I can almost ‘hear’ the colony in their head whispering. I can almost believe that the undead, parasite controlled, walking cadavers are also aware of it. The things are exhibiting a strange behavior around us now, they no longer try to eat us with the enthusiasm they used to. Initially, as always, they come rushing towards us but then when they get close to us they stop and almost act as if they’re confused. I can imagine them thinking to themselves “Where’s the fucking beef?” The monstrosities are still dangerous towards us, for the most part, but some of them are starting to ignore us.
I still have that meme running through my head. “I’m walking on sunshine” is such a crafty tune that I often, unaware, find myself humming it. It doesn’t bother me anymore, if that’s what my mind wants to do I guess I’ll just sit back and enjoy the music.
Being cured or not no longer concerns me. In fact I would rather come back as one of the undead than to have my brains forcibly removed from my skull when I die. At least then I would still live on in some form.
There are twenty-one of us left.
12 August 2013
I had forgotten all about this journal I had started so long ago. There are gaps and missing days in my memory. I re-read these pages and some of it I do not recall in the slightest. If these pages weren’t written in my own hand I would swear that this journal belonged to someone else. Reading and writing is becoming more difficult with each passing day. The concentration required to process these symbols and make sense of them brings on headaches. I will try to remember what I have started here, try to place down my experiences for any who read this after I’m gone but I can make no promises.
The progress of the infection grows within me. The black dots have started to appear on me. Dark blotches grow under my nails, in my eyes and are slowly covering my gums and tongue. The only benefit the obsidian brings with it is a lessening of the pain. I think my nerve endings are dead or dying now. Small injuries that used to be painful are barely noticeable now. I’ve found that I cut myself, sometimes deeply and I don’t notice the wound until I see my blood dripping down. My libido, on the other hand, seems to have increased. I am constantly horny and become fully aroused at the drop of a hat. Sexual acts ease the torment of my abused and infected nerve endings, providing the only natural relief from the parasite that I know of. Violence, sex and the devouring of human flesh is all I really think of now. The constant agony inside my skull has muted itself into a dull roar that can now be managed effectively with some Oxycodone or other narcotics.
Bad Habits...The insanity the parasite brings with it causes all of us to harbor bad habits. Nothing so mundane as smoking or drinking though, those aren’t bad habits, lol, those are pastimes here. I’m talking about things like my constant efforts to control my mouth from talking to itself or belting out a chorus of some inane song from decades past at the most inopportune time. As long as these new behaviors aren’t violent (towards each other anyways) we all do our best to ignore them. All suffer here. The habits are different in each one of us here. One man masturbates constantly, so much so that the rest of us laugh at him and joke about how long it will take before he yanks it so hard he’ll rip it off at the root.
Another man, who always had a nail biting problem, is slowly and methodically eating his own fingers. The habit he had of constantly nibbling his nails down to the quick slowly evolved into ragged, bloody edges where he would keep chewing. Then he chewed his nasty fingers until the nail came completely off and still he would gnaw. Now he has bitten three of his fingers on his left hand down to the first joints and he just keeps doing it.
One of the priestesses likes to cut herself, slicing ever deeper into her own flesh. From what I can get from her is that the only way she can tell if she’s not one of the undead herself yet is the fact that she can still feel pain. Every day she cuts herself, everyday she cuts a little deeper as the parasite kills our nerves and replaces it with the numbness that only the dead are comfortable with. One day she will cut too deep or nick an artery, and then she won’t have to wonder if she’s truly dead or not because she will be.
Hunting has gotten so much easier since our undead brethren have taken to ignoring us. I know the parasitic colonies inside our bodies are aware of each other, the walking dead no longer see us as food. I think I’m finally starting to understand the whispering communications of the Omni.
Food, and by food I mean people, is getting harder and harder to come by. The uninfected hide from the world like the mice they are. We spend a lot of time just patrolling the surrounding cities and countryside, looking for any signs of prey. A lot of times we spot them as they go on supply runs and then we track them down and capture them. Since the undead pay no attention to us anymore we are able to attack without warning, taking our victims completely by surprise while they sleep. We have developed two rather successful methods of drawing our meals out of their reinforced safe-houses.
The first method is crude, yet effective. Once we locate the house, building or store the survivors are hiding in we wait until we think they’re asleep then we light it on fire. If there are no large amounts of the undead outside the prey always runs outside to escape the flames. Once they run outside we like to kill them as silently as possible so as not to alert the others still trying to flee the burning building. Occasionally, some fear us much more than the flames and they try to hide in the building, hoping the fire will pass over their little hiding spot. That doesn’t work, we make sure of it. The result of that is simply a Bar-B-Q for us. Very tasty.
The second method is more dangerous for us. When we go to ‘Plan B’ it’s because the food is either very well barricaded, there are a ton of the undead around or a combination of the two. We have no desire to feed the undead; we strive to feed only ourselves. If the undead are too great in numbers they get the meal when we light the refuge up and the immune come running out to escape the searing flames of death. With Plan B we silently search and locate ways into the structure and then, with entry gained, we enter and assault the enemy as quietly as possible. I like to slit their throats and feel and taste the warm arterial spray.
Our numbers are down since my last muster. There are seventeen of us left.
24 Oc
tober 2013
Things are falling apart. It is becoming very difficult to organize anything. Everyone here is completely preoccupied by their own miseries and insanities. The only thing that brings us together are runs for either food or supplies for our sacrament. I can no longer really order anyone to do anything anymore. This place has turned into nothing more than an insane asylum, one where the inmates rule the grounds. Everyone stays apart from each other, finding some semblance of privacy away from the mental problems of their comrades. Sometimes, like now, I have brief patches of sanity that only reminds me of what I lost. This old junkyard has been turned into a nightmare infested horror. Everyone here deserves their upcoming death for the crimes we have committed. The dark, black, spots of creeping death are a constant reminder that we have, at the most, maybe four months left to survive.
The raw materials to make the life extending meth we so desperately need are becoming scarce. The sheer amount of cold, diet and allergy pills needed to keep all of us here alive is forcing us to go further and further from the Ocala area in our searching. To tell the truth, when someone dies or leaves the group I give a small sigh of relief, every death brings one less person to have to supply with our ever dwindling meth. It’s not just the pills we need either, we need to gather everything from matchbooks to fertilizer for some of the recipes. Sometimes it’s a good thing, like when we find a stockpile we missed before, or when our wanderings bring us the opportunity to hunt. Sometimes it’s a depressing series of mistakes and blown opportunities that only reinforce the uselessness of all our actions. Like today.
Today turned out to be a very bad day indeed. The morning started off poorly with people constantly arguing and bickering back and forth to no end. I wanted to shoot them all just to shut their holes. Each successive day takes us longer to get organized. The tension between the men is palpable, tempers are short and voices flared up the whole damn day. It was like babysitting a bunch of insane brats. The once tight knit group that we had is fraying. I honestly don’t know how long we can continue as an organized team.
Our search for supplies and food is also getting tougher day by day, forcing us to go further and further afield to find anything. Our caravan drove for the whole morning without finding anything until we came to some small little town out in the middle of nowhere. According to the notes on our recon map, the town had never been properly searched before due to an overwhelming number of undead wandering around. The undead no longer try to eat us anymore, recognizing, I suppose, the burgeoning colony of parasites within us. The detestable undead are picking up the annoying habit of following us around, tagging along like unwanted guests. No longer are the rotting and putrid things a deadly obstacle, instead they now annoy me, like unwashed and unkempt stray dogs hoping for a handout. The good side to this is that if the numbers of the hungering corpses were so thick before that even we couldn’t get past them, nobody else could either. That’s what I thought anyways. We all went into the town hoping to find ingredients, and maybe some long pig for dinner but all we came away with was cans of beans and shit.
As soon as we entered the township I knew things were not going to be as I expected. The streets and fields around the town were littered with the corpses of hundreds, if not thousands of what were once the walking dead. This was a first for me, seeing the remnants of such a large herd. Whoever did this knew their tactics and their prey fairly well. I was almost excited at the prospect of getting into a gunfight with a foe that could clear an area of this size, especially if they turned out to be some of the immune, which they did.
Almost immediately as we rolled into town and parked our caravan in front of the towns one large shopping center some guy actually came running up to us, shouting and yelling how happy he was to see other survivors. Until he got a look at us. Then I had to laugh at the look on his face once he realized his grave mistake. Although I did find the resulting chase exciting, while it lasted, it ended bitterly. The middle aged piece of meat knew his way around the town, he dodged, swerved and ran between the buildings and houses expertly, making it difficult to run him down or shoot him before he could flee. Of course, he wasn’t alone. Before we got the chance to locate and isolate him, some hot little bitch in a fuckin’ monster truck picked him up. They were good, they had done some homework on their area. They drove like, well, like they were fleeing a pack of demons (lol, which I guess they were). Through and around backyards and empty lots we chased them in our Humvee until we came to what appeared to be an open field. The wide expanse must have been a damn swamp before the drought hit central Florida, ‘cause just under the surface was deep, thick mud. The truck our prey fled in had big, oversized, ridged tires on it, perfect for muddin’. Our up-armored Humvee, however, sank to its axles and got bogged down so badly that we had to abandon it. Between the bouncing around of the vehicle and the slow degradation of our eyesight, I don’t think any of us did anymore more to the truck than put a few new ventilation holes in it.
It sucked when our meal got away, it sucked even more when we found the town’s stores had been reduced to almost nothing. We didn’t get anything we needed, or even wanted really.
The rest of the day went like that. The only good thing I found was some Oxycodone, without which I would have developed a nasty migraine from all of this reading and writing.
Fifteen of us are still alive.
11 December 2013
There are only a few patches of unblemished skin left upon me. Over ninety percent of my body is now covered in the abominable markings. The majority of the once pale skin covering my bones has turned the deep, scarlet color of infection. Whatever hasn’t turned blood red has instead turned as black as night, my fingernails, tongue, gums and the orbs of my eyes are now clear evidence that I am no longer human.
My sight, which had had been blurring badly previously has started getting confused. When I close my eyes I still have some sort of sight. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s like I can see out of the myriad of the unblinking black orbs of all those undead around me.
I can communicate through unspoken words, in base pictures in my head, with my undead comrades. I can see through their eyes and feel what they feel. Mainly all they feel is hunger. An overwhelming hunger that is their sole drive. At once I wonder if I’ve gone mad and then I laugh. Of course I’ve gone mad. I just don’t know if my second sight or my contact with the other colonies in the minds of those dead corpses is real or not.
Sometime in the beginning of November the power went out completely in central Florida. I don’t know which nuclear power plant had been supplying electricity to the area for so long, but whichever one it was has finally had its connections severed to the outside world. We have generators to provide our own energy. Any survivors that have their own generators finds that using them at night is a sure way to bring the “Red Death” upon them. Such is what the immune have started calling us, the “Red Death”. I like it. It means the enemies of Yama-Kali within our reach know of us and fear us (as they should).
Master Chef, the High Priest of Yama-Kali or whatever the fuck he wanted people to call himself is dead. One of the priestesses got carried away with her insanity and bit his cock off and fucking ate it while giving him head. She took it down deep and bit it off in one quick motion, right at the base. Master Chef bled out in only a few short minutes, howling in agony. The remaining priestesses of Yama-Kali gave her a vicious and brutal death that lasted for three days before she succumbed to the prolonged torture. Some of the excessive torment doled out to her for her crime was plainly a show to the rest of us that the priestesses had no sympathy for the bitch. That fuckin’ cunt killed our best chance to continue cooking, although the priestesses assured us that they know the recipe for the creation of the sacrament. There is some small stockpile of meth built up for us, but it won’t last long. Things are falling apart at the seams, time is short for us.
The eyes of Yama-Kali are all around me. I know, I can instinctively feel the pre
sence of every single mother fucking undead bastard (and anything else, like us, that has become a housing for the damnable colonies of the Omni) for twenty yards or so. Even when I close my eyes I can still see through the Goddesses dark orbs. The eyes of the Goddess are like mine, black as obsidian, except hers are beautiful. She has a thousand eyes on her skull and all of them have deep purple lines and sparkles within them. So beautiful. I can see the same faint purple markings within our own irises and even in the eyes of the recently undead. Fascinating.
I’m not sure but I think there are only around a dozen of us still hanging on.
4 January 2014
The end of our group came today. Everything had begun slowly sliding into chaos months ago but today it came to a head.
Reading and writing has become too difficult for me. This may be my last journal entry. I have tried to read this old journal of mine, to try and remember who I was so long ago. I tried to read but the words swim away from me and hurts my mind trying to decipher my shitty writing. I have some memories left to me, but most of my life is wiped clean by the parasite. Only Yama-Kali remembers me.
A few of those here went to sleep one night and then woke up dead. When my roommate died and resurrected himself I felt it immediately. I wakened from a deep sleep a couple of days ago, only to greet the walking corpse of my friend when mine eyes opened. He, and all of those that had a more advanced case of the infection, have died in their sleep and have been brought into the everlasting arms of Yama-Kali. They know no more fear, no more pain, no more guilt, only the fathomless hunger. One day Yama-Kali will take me into her embrace fully and then I too will know peace. Peace punctuated by an insatiable hunger.