by Will Lemen
"Great, I'm getting a boner, now can we stop fucking around and get back to business? I insisted once more.
Grab a light and the rest of the 9mm ammo, and pick out a couple of those spare pistols to use with it, and toss me one of those flashlights, we're going to need them. And God damn it make it quick," I said sternly, hoping my urgent tone would penetrate Derek's thick semi-loser skull, as I dropped two additional flashlight batteries into my pocket.
Derek quickly took my suggestions to heart and threw me a flashlight, put one into his own pocket, and then chose two of the abandoned 9mm pistols (another Glock 19 and a Springfield XDM), then grabbed the remaining Luger ammunition and followed me out of the room.
Upon further perusal of the dwelling, we discovered several cans of tuna fish, and five 16 oz. bottles of supposedly spring water. Which was most likely water drawn from the hose out behind the factory that had been bottled to cater to the well to do suckers that purchased it.
In addition, we found a few miscellaneous items such as crackers and peppered beef jerky to take along with us.
We decided to spend a couple of days in that house, resting up for the upcoming journey and getting our gear in order.
Besides getting the well deserved rest that Derek and I both needed, among other things those two days gave me a chance to finish drying Cassandra's womanhood, and stitch her borrowed shoelace around the edge of her severed tit to insure the opening of the titty-bag would close firmly when cinched up tight.
When I was finished, I ran my belt through the looped drawstrings (shoelace) and hung the bag at my waist on the left side so that it wouldn't interfere with drawing my gun from its holster.
In the early hours of the morning of the third day at the rest home, we were ready to resume our trek north.
"Let's go son, were burning daylight, we wouldn't want to keep the Caucasian waiting," I jested, as I peeked out the front door to see if the coast was clear.
Geared up and on the move again, we sprinted outside and jumped into our restored 1951 fastback getaway car that had been so generously donated to us days earlier by an unknown benefactor.
Upon getting back to the interstate, we headed north again up I-65, and after driving slowly for about fifteen miles to avoid all of the usual pitfalls that we both had grown accustomed to, Derek informed me that things were about to change.
"Take this exit to highway 39, I-65 is blown all to hell about a hundred yards ahead," he warned.
I followed Derek's directions and eased onto the freeway exit that led to state highway 39. We turned right onto 39 to maintain our heading north, but after only a half-mile or so, the road ceased to exist.
"This is where we walk, unless you have a tank or a four wheeler hidden up your sleeve," Derek informed me as he opened the passenger door.
"How much farther to the Caucasian's stronghold?" I asked, noticing the extremely pock marked landscape.
"Fifteen or twenty long ass miles," Derek responded, pulling his meat clever from his belt.
"Fifteen or twenty long hard miles through this crater ladened, eater infested frontier, wonderful," I retorted, as I stepped out of the car and planted my tomahawk deep into the face of the first of many walking corpses that I would cack along the way as I continued the search for my Marine Corps buddy the Sarge.
"Damn it Jack, you got the first kill in the Badlands," Derek spouted.
"Don't worry pal, from the looks of things there's plenty of kills to go around, maybe too many," I warned, pulling my weapon from the fallen zombie's skull and replanting it into another snarling and growling decomposing face that had quickly encroached into my personal space.
"Try and stay away from the craters, they have a tendency to trap the dumbasses in the deeper ones, and with rain water settled at the bottom of almost every one of them, the maniacs go crazy trying to claw their way out. Plus, almost all of them have snappers in them thanks to the dino's," Derek claimed, as he hacked the top of a dwarf zombie's bluish-purple head off. "Look at this Jack; I just cut this midget down to size."
Stepping forward to avoid a maggot filled slaver that was dripping from a toothless goober's mouth that had tried to blindside me from behind.
"You're hilarious," I grunted, while disassembling the goober's lower spine by hooking it with the pointed beard of my combat ax and wrenching the vertebras apart.
As the brute bent at its knees and dropped to the ground, I ripped my hawk from its back and separated its skull, exposing the source of the white larvae in its drool.
With no time to respond with more tedious banter, Derek hurled his cleaver into the side of a brown-haired toddler's skull, which had attacked him at knee level.
With the force of a panicked golfer's nine-iron impacting the youngster's head, the heavy blade of the kitchen utensil carved its way through the soft immature cheek bone of the child and lodged three quarters of the way through the cranium just below the brain.
The young zombie continued to hiss and growl, intent on pleasuring itself by gnawing on the leg bone in front of it. The handle of the meat clever bumping against Derek's knee and obstructing its path, was the only thing standing between the miniature zombie and the meal it craved.
Derek now being besieged by several other ravenous corpses, pulled his model 500 double action revolver and squeezed the trigger.
Shooting from the hip, the mammoth wheel gun leveled off in the middle of the once adorable toddler's forehead, and I swear, the muzzle blast from the gun took the top of the kids head off just below the eyes before the bullet ever left the end of the barrel (impossible, I know).
Meanwhile I drew down on three of the undead that seemed not to give a shit that their little friend had just been partially decapitated right in front of them.
As Derek retrieved his butcher's tool from the remains of the little punk's skull, I broke my own code (everyone gets served before anyone gets seconds) and double tapped all three walking freak shows with tandem 9mm parabellum projectiles to each of their heads, dropping them like a bad habit just feet from where Derek was standing.
"Hey, this isn't working for me," I called out over the hood of the car. "Let's make a run for it, follow me, I've got an idea."
With the sound of Derek's stainless steel, .50 cal. elephant gun still ringing in my ears, and with curious new arrivals that it had summoned seeking a mid-morning snack, we bolted away from our vintage automobile leaving the chainsaw but taking as much of our other supplies as we could carry and had time to collect. Then we trotted north on the crater broken highway numbered 39.
Which under the circumstances I thought was rather fitting, considering that the original Star Trek television series had numbered each of their episodes, and the most relevant episode that dealt with the people we meet in everyday life, zombie apocalypse or not, was named Mirror, Mirror, and numbered 39.
I say it was the most relevant episode because it told the story of a mirror image universe where several crew members of the Enterprise including the Captain, were transported to a duplicate starship and switched with crewmembers of a barbarian race of people that were somewhat doppelgangers of themselves.
When Spock finally was able to rescue his Captain and the rest of the away team, and transport them back to their own dimension so to speak, Captain Kirk asked Spock how he was able to discern that the people from the alternate universe were imposters.
Spock quickly explained.
"Captain, as civilized people it was easy for you to act barbaric, however, as barbarians, it was impossible for them to act civilized."
That statement rang true even before the Zombie Armageddon, when dealing with your average everyday dumbass that we all had to deal with, not only at work and at play, but everywhere else in-between was a constant staple in life.
However, now that the undead have brutalized our world, the barbarians are not nearly as docile as before, and their seemingly limitless barbaric tendencies have now been multiplied a hundred fold and tur
ned us all into wearers of the dreaded Redshirts, figuratively speaking of course.
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TUNNEL RATS
The sound of an over aggressive mutant scratching at the back door of the house woke Beth up first, and realizing that they had over stayed their welcome in the abandoned house, she began to gather up her meager belongings in preparation for their impending departure from the premises.
"Jolene, wake up, we need to go," Beth said quietly, as she jostled her sleeping friend. "Wake up, we gotta go!"
Jolene yawned and turned over.
"Just five more minutes," she answered.
"Five more minutes and we might be trapped in here, let's go, get up!" Beth responded gruffly, as she began to lose patience with her sleepy companion. "Now!"
"Oh all right, I'm getting up," Jolene insisted, as she slowly stretched and yawned again.
Beth wasn't about to get herself eaten alive because of some little bitch that was too lazy to move her dumb ass in the face of possible imminent danger.
However, not quite ready to abandon her partner and continue the journey through the Indiana Badlands alone, she prompted her traveling companion to move a little faster with a swift kick in the butt.
"Ouch!" Jolene squealed. "That hurt!"
"Not as much as having your throat chewed out by a group of maniacal dead cannibals," Beth proclaimed. "At least I don't think so."
Rubbing her butt with her left hand, Jolene propped herself up with her right arm and said. "Well if you're going to infuse logic into the situation."
"I am, now move your ass," Beth again ordered gruffly. "You hear that, their knocking on the back door, they heard the breakfast special is Jolene."
Jolene quickly picked up her gear and asked.
"Okay, what's this big trick you say you learned in Texas that you were yapping about?"
Beth moved quietly through the living room of the house, signaling Jolene to follow.
After stealthily checking the front yard for zombies and ascertaining that it was relatively safe to exit the structure, Beth motioned for Jolene to accompany her out the front door.
"Are you going to tell me or not?" Jolene begged, as she caught up to Beth.
Stopping at a manhole cover in the middle of the street, Beth began to pry it up with her knife.
"Stick your fingers under it," she grunted, putting her weight on the knife handle.
"Okay, but don't drop it," Jolene cautioned, as she reluctantly slipped her fingers under the lip of the heavy cast iron sewer lid.
The two women struggled with the iron disk for a minute, and then managed to muscle it to the side.
"We're going into the sewer?" Jolene asked.
"Yes we are! Do you have a problem with that?" Beth responded sharply.
"I've never been in a sewer, what if there are zombies down there?"
"I guarantee you that there are zombies down here," Beth answered, as she climbed down into the hole. "But I also guarantee you that there are more of them up there where you are than down here where I am."
"If you say so?" Jolene faltered, as she slowly and reluctantly followed Beth down into the sewer.
As Jolene joined her in the dark muddy shaft, Beth pulled a flashlight from under her jacket, shined it down the sewer tunnel, and began to follow the light.
"In Texas, we used to go on supply runs using the sewers." She told Jolene.
"We would travel for miles under the streets. Keeping out of sight until we came to the area that we wanted to scavenge, and then we would just lift a manhole cover and climb up to the street. When we were done checking for supplies, back down in the sewer we'd go, and we'd make our way back to our shelter.
We had maps of the sewer systems and everything.
And we rarely encountered any zombies, but when we did we were ready for them because they were so loud, growling and stumbling around. The noise they made reverberated through the underground tunnels, echoing off the concrete walls, so we knew they were coming long before we saw them. That made them easier to put down."
"You mean like the echo coming down this tunnel?" Jolene asked, pointing ahead.
"Yes, that's the sound all right, we've got company," Beth warned, raising her knife and continuing down the dark tunnel. "I'll stick it or them with my knife, whatever you do, don't fire your gun down here, the noise will deafen us, I mean unless it's absolutely necessary."
Within moments, two of the merciless undead approached Beth and Jolene, and Beth quickly shined her light directly into the eyes of the lead zombie.
Zombie eyes function the same as anybody else's eyes do, it's true they look different, they're usually very bloodshot with a light green or blue glassy look covering the cornea.
However, if the crazed mutant is in a dark area for any length of time, it takes awhile for its eyes to adjust to any light that it's subjected to. Just like any other once human eyeball.
So when Beth aimed her light at the predatory corpse, it was temporarily blinded long enough for her to plunge her weapon into its twisted brain.
The second monster was handled in much the same way as the first, and the girls continued their trip through the darkness of the damp and dismal sewer.
The sewers in any town in the world, big or small, are just a hidden maze of tunnels that lie under the streets but don't necessarily follow the path of every street that's above them.
It was fortunate for Beth and Jolene that this anomaly in the underground systems exists, because they hadn't gone very far when Beth realized that the ease of travel that she had enjoyed through the sewers in Texas was not going to be the case in this Indiana town.
******
"I guarantee you that there are zombies down here, but there are more of them up there where you are than down here where I am. So get your ass down here before every eater in hell's half acre decides to follow us, unless you've got a better idea," I ordered, as I looked up at Derek through the sewer's open manhole.
"You make it sound like you've done this before," Derek stressed, as he climbed into the hole.
"The Sarge and I used this tactic down in Texas, and we were very successful," I informed Derek as he jumped off the last rung of the sewer's access ladder. "We traveled for miles under the streets without being seen by neither man nor beast."
I pulled my flashlight from my pocket and shined it down the long pitch-black tunnel in front of us.
"Let's move out," I suggested, as I again lifted my weapon and started to plant my tomahawk into the brain of one of the ungainly sub-human aberrations that had fallen down the manhole behind us as it tried to follow. "Fuck it, both of its legs are broken, it can't keep up with us, I'll just let it suffer."
"How humane of you Jack," Derek mused.
"Yes, it's another one of my many gifts," I informed Derek, as I left the slobbering zombie that had impaled its chest with its own right tibia bone, basking in the diagonal rays of sunlight that were draining into the sewer beneath the manhole.
We made our way down the dark underground passage for only fifty yards or so when we encountered our first obstacle.
"This tunnel is blocked, how are we going to get through?" Derek asked, shinning his flashlight onto the rubble that was hindering our passage.
"We'll have to go through that off shoot tunnel over there," I explained, shinning my light at the smaller tunnel. "And hope it's not blocked too."
"The bombardment of the town has probably really fucked up the sewer system around here," Derek speculated.
"Around here hell, it's probably fucked up every sewer system in every city and town all over the Badlands," I replied, as I crawled into the four-foot opening of the smaller tunnel. "Keep your eyes peeled for manhole covers; we may need an escape hatch at any time."
Not only did the bombing raids destroy much of the sewer infrastructure in the Badlands. In doing so, they also gave the clumsy zombie population easier although accidental access to the tunnels under their feet, as ma
ny of the decomposing oafs inadvertently staggered across cracked sewer lines that collapsed under their weight. Or crevasses caused by the bombs breaking the large underground concrete tubes afforded the savage pagans openings by which they could haphazardly enter the subterranean roadways at will.
Now peppered with bomb craters and filled with an ever-growing number of the undead cannibalistic abominations, the sewers under the Badlands ceased to be the zombie-free haven that they once would have been.
After traveling for what seemed to be miles underground, and having to fight off several pairs and a few singles, and one fairly large group of the undead rotting tunnel rats, my burrowing friend and I had had about enough of the subterranean life.
When we came to a bombed out sewer pipe intersection that had been completely destroyed leaving us with only one option, which was to kill the posse of zombies that unknowingly blocked our escape route, and climb to the surface street above. We were almost relieved that we had no other choice.
"Do you hear that?" I asked. "It sounds like eaters are up ahead."
"I hear them and their flies, and I can smell them," Derek answered. "And I can see some light at the end of the tunnel too."
"That light is most likely coming from the hole that the eaters fell through," I guessed.
"So what now?" Derek asked, as he crowded up by me.
"We see how many there are, and if we can, I say we hack them to pieces and climb up out of this underground hell. Whether the tunnel is blocked on the other side of them or not."
"Sounds good to me," he agreed, as we weaseled our way forward to get a better look. "But isn't hell always underground?"
"Hell has expanded, haven't you noticed? So shut up before they hear you." I ordered quietly.
Between us and a hole leading to the surface, were five of the dead milling around and bumping into each other and generally doing what zombies do when they're not chasing people down to eat their brains.