by Will Lemen
ZOMBIES
"Chronicles of the Dead"
A ZOMBIE NOVEL
By Will Lemen
Copyright 2014 - Will Lemen - All Rights Reserved
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE OUTBREAK
WELCOMING THE NEIGHBORS
GET THE HELL OUT OF DODGE
THE MORPHADITE
TO THE RIVER
THE RIVER
DAY 13
PIRATES
TARGET PRACTICE
FOOD SHORTAGE
GROUP THERAPY
VICKSBURG MS
ON TO TEXAS
ASSASSINS
LONE STAR STATE
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
AMBUSHERS
THE GAS STATION
THE TOWER
THE ARMORY
END OF DAYS AND NIGHTS
THE OUTBREAK
As jokes go, we all thought it was a good one, it was somewhat funny and afforded us some laughs while offering everyone a momentary diversion from the job that we were being paid to perform.
We initiated this joke over nine hundred days before the possible, or impossible, zombie event was supposed to take place. Just about the same time that television shows were starting to crop up proclaiming all of the possible end of the world scenarios, and speculating on what might happen to us, and what we could or could not do to prevent our world's ultimate end. All of their theories revolved around the day when the Mayan calendar countdown was finally to be completed on December 21, 2012.
We chose zombies as the favored way for us to meet our ultimate demise during the undoing of society and civilization as a whole, which was sure to occur at the predicted and appointed time. Provided of course, that the ancient Mayans knew what they were doing.
Because, well let's face it, fighting off a horde of flesh eating zombies would be far more fun than say, running scared from a giant asteroid that was destined to smash into our planet, setting off an extinction event that would by far eclipse the one that brought forth the ruin of the dinosaurs so many eons ago. At least that was the consensus at the time.
Besides, where would you run, and where could you hide? In other words, you would be able to run, but you wouldn't be able to hide, and you'd just die tired.
However, I can't help but to think that if a vote were taken today among those same people, including myself, who thought that real life flesh eating zombies would be the best alternative, given the number of other apocalyptic choices available to them, that the outcome might be different, and some quicker and less painful form of death, such as an asteroid impact on our world would be far more preferable to most of them.
It's no wonder nobody took it seriously at the time, and why should've they? Just imagine, hordes of insane cannibalistic dead people roaming the earth in search of their favorite foods (flesh, intestines, and brains), bent on the unwitting destruction of the human race?
Please!
That was the kind of stuff that science fiction novels were made of, not something that happened in real life.
We talked about it and laughed, we kidded each other that we were all doomed to become a footnote in the vast history of the universe by the coming zombie hordes.
We even had a Mayan calendar countdown at the hellhole where I worked. It not only kept everyone apprised of the impending climactic results that were predicted to happen, but also gave us something to do and talk about at work, besides work.
I called it a hellhole because the company's owners in all of their infinite wisdom, had hired an impudent little ass clown of a man with inept skills in upper management to run their business. He possessed a minor degree from some small inadequate vocational school and doubled as a pathological liar and borderline sociopath while he wasn't busy honing his expertise as a libertine and being a skid mark on society's collective underwear at the same time.
His given name was Robert, although he went by the moniker Bob in his nefarious attempt to be accepted as just one of the guys. However, in private and behind closed doors, Bob was commonly referred to by all of the employees at this dysfunctional establishment as "Batshit Bobby." Of course, this was after we got to know him and discovered that he was without a doubt, crazier than a clump of dried bat shit on a proverbial stick.
I'm sure Batshit Bobby wasn't the first, and probably not the last (but he might have been considering the circumstances) psycho-nut-case to be put in charge of a money making venture as such. Nevertheless, it sure seemed to all of the employees as though the people running the show were determined to turn what would be, could be, and should be, a paradise to work in, (now that they had frog marched the former executive manager out of the building for undisclosed reasons) into a torture chamber from the lower subterranean depths of hell to suffer in.
At first, this new boss seemed like a regular kind of guy (the persona he strived to propel outward at every opportunity), which was a far cry from the egomaniacal slave driver that he had replaced. Perhaps the stark contrast between the two men's personalities and their management styles was the reason that at first we were all lulled into a false sense of fairness and honesty projected by that functional psychotic schizoid.
At the time, we all thought nothing could possibly be worse than the maniacal tyrant that we had been forced to put up with and cow down to for the past several years of our employment at that joint.
We were wrong!
It wasn't long before the new boss's nice guy facade began to crumble and the true mental derangement of this lunatic began to become very apparent to everyone, that is everyone except the individuals that had hired him.
To this very day, it still baffles me as to why the company owners turned a blind eye to that guy's shenanigans.
However, once people really started to listen to him closely, and observe how he would constantly tell people one thing, then turn right around and do just the opposite, thinking nobody had noticed his lies, plus noticing that every conversation tended to end up revolving around him, they began to be enlightened to the true nature of the beast within the man.
By the way, you had better not notice his lies, that is, if you knew what was good for you.
Besides being a lying sociopathic braggart with ever-increasing delusions of godhood, Batshit Bobby was also very vindictive. If he even thought that someone had crossed him for any reason, or in his demented mind made him look bad in the eyes of his employers, that someone's employment was doomed to become extinct at some point down the road. Batshit Bobby would stop at nothing to exact his misguided revenge.
All of Batshit's adventurous stories, and he had plenty of them, began to have a kind of superhero flare to them, him being the superhero of course.
We've all seen his type. If he had found out that you had climbed Mt. McKinley at some point in your life, you would quickly be informed by him that he had climbed Mt. Everest years earlier, in record time nonetheless, even with having had to carry a Sherpa on his back.
Because of course, the weakling guide who had lived
in the region his whole life, and was well acclimated to the lack of oxygen at that altitude, and had hiked up and down the treacherous alpine terrain since he was a young child, just didn't have the mountaineering skills or physical prowess to keep up with Bobby.
Well as one might guess, it didn't take too awful long before nobody in the company believed a single word that spewed from Batshit Bobby's continually flapping lying braggart lips. Unfortunately, for the workers under his supervision, everyone had to act as though his bush-league fairy tales interested them; after all, he was their boss.
Sometime later, he hired a female screw-up with multiple personality disorder and several manly features that included large arthritic looking bony finger joints that made many of the male employees rather uncomfortable, which gave rise to speculation about the proper attire which might embellish this androgynous person. She (provided it was a female) couldn't understand normal thinking, and was just as big of a liar as he was, if not bigger (which is hard to fathom), and that's when the company really started heading in a south-bound direction.
One undeserved promotion after another was given to this woman (?). So many in fact, that many of the people who worked at that buffoonery began to think that there might have been some kind of hypnosis involved, wherein the promotions were being granted in exchange for certain bodily fluids which were being transferred between the two of them on a regular basis, and against his free will.
Then with incompetence levels seemingly having no ceiling, and favoritism running rampant along with nonexistent accountability for some, and a keep your nose to the grindstone attitude toward others, the morale within the company began to plummet into a graveyard spin.
Most of the employees began to trudge down the hallways like the notorious zombies that were destine to invade their lives in the near future, wishing that they worked somewhere else, any place else.
However, little did anyone suspect at the time, that in a few short months, the zombie-like stares of the disgruntled employees (with the extra added attraction of murderous rage in their eyes of course) would become commonplace around the world.
With one distinct difference, although the dawdling walk of the discontented employees being wronged by their boss (Batshit Bobby) and his concubine, mimicked the gait of the zombie hordes to come, they weren't trying to bite your face off.
What I would now give to be back at that buffoonish hellhole, the hellhole that now seems like it was a heaven on earth compared to the living hell that we all are now forced to endure every single minute of every day.
However, enough about unhinged ex-authority figures and their paramours, and let me not digress a moment longer.
Even with all of the doomsday television shows, t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and countless other items for sale heralding the coming apocalypse. Who would have really believed that there would be a zombie invasion, polar shift, massive earthquakes, super volcanic eruption, gigantic solar flare causing a worldwide power grid shut down, or a myriad of other end of the world scenarios arriving on December 21, 2012 as foreseen by the doomsday prophets?
So, when the then current cycle of the Mayan long count calendar ended, well, it didn't take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to figure out that nothing had happened. No massive electromagnetic pulse (to speak of anyway), no alien invasion from the far reaches of the universe (that we knew of); no pandemic plague was ravaging the earth (at least not yet), no cataclysmic event of biblical proportion of any kind, no nothing.
For one reason or another, some people were very disappointed that no doomsday scenario befell us on the appointed day. One guy I knew even boasted that he was glad that the Mayans were all dead, because they had lied about the end of the world. Nevertheless, nobody was really surprised by the lack of disasters, natural, supernatural, man-made, or otherwise.
The Mayan's Mesoamerican long count calendar ended its 5,126-year-long cycle when it counted down to the end of its 13th Baktun, we all woke up on December 22, 2012, and not one thing out of the ordinary had taken place.
Not one of the predictions, ancient or not, had come true. The world as we knew it hadn’t disappeared. Instead, what had disappeared were all of the television shows that were gearing us up for the end of the world. Predictions of the end of days that had been so prevalent just vanished as if they had never existed. Life as we knew it had not changed, and we all continued with our normal everyday mundane existence.
As time passed, the Mayan calendar and the end of the world became a vague and distant memory. The only thing that still remained to remind us of the zombie apocalypse that never was, were the zombie-like stares in the eyes of the buffoonery employees as they made their way down the company hallways wishing they belonged to a legion of the wandering dead.
Then one afternoon, without any warning, without any predictions, and without any forecast from anybody of the coming event, it happened.
Our world went straight to hell.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I guess that is where our real story begins.
My name is Jack; I live with my wife Gin, and my two sons, Billy 18, and Jacob 16, if you can call what we're doing living, surviving is a more accurate analogy.
The day that it all started, I was on my way home from work, trying to dodge some of the usual stop and go traffic while my radio blasted out some serious 70's rock and roll music from a British band that was invading my vehicle.
Endlessly switching lanes on the freeway, vying for a position that might get me a car length or two ahead of the other drivers, just like everyone else was doing.
Then at one point the traffic slowed and soon after came to an abrupt halt, which is common in stop and go traffic. Thus, the word stop, in the phrase, “stop and go traffic.”
However, this time the cars in front of me did not move forward again. That usually means an accident has occurred somewhere ahead of you, or the police have someone pulled over for an infraction of some kind and everyone passing the scene is slowing down to a crawl and rubbernecking, as if they have never seen a cop giving out a ticket.
"Idiots!" I mumbled to myself, as I changed the radio station that had now gone to a commercial for a local car dealership.
I was in the right lane, with an exit lane to my right. I had never taken that particular exit before, and I was unfamiliar with the area that it led to, and taking an unfamiliar exit is not what someone usually does at the height of rush hour, especially when they live nearly fifteen miles away.
From my vantage point, at first I could only see that some cars at the head of the pack had stopped and that people were out of their cars and moving around. My first thought was that there had been a miner fender bender, but there seemed to be too many people milling around the wreck for it to be just a simple fender bender.
Then I thought, well maybe someone had been hit while trying to cross the freeway.
Some years ago I had been in traffic that came to a complete stop on a eight-lane highway, because a woman with the best of intentions was running back and forth across several lanes of traffic, trying to catch a stray dog (or get herself killed) and get it off the road.
As it turned out, someone had been hit; or rather, something had been hit.
While I sat in my vehicle glancing back and forth between the group of people that had gathered in front of the stymied automobiles, and the empty exit lane beside me, I continued to change radio stations in search of some good rock and roll music to listen to on the remainder of the drive home and debated whether or not to bailout onto that exit lane that seemed to be beckoning to me.
I sat there in the stalled rush hour traffic for a few more minutes, and then decided that this wreck, or pedestrian mishap, or whatever it was, could hold up the flow of traffic for hours.
People had already started to exit the freeway, and I thought that I'd better join them before that too became clogged.
I maneuvered into the exit lane and made my way forward rather quic
kly, and as I did, my view of what was causing the delay became very clear. That's when I first saw the beginning of what would turn out to be the demise of civilization as we had come to know it the world over.
It looked like a severe case of road rage at first glance, all the way up until I saw a short bald man get bum-rushed by four others that from a distance had looked like they had just been milling around. That was not the case.
They were walking awkwardly, ungainly, stumbling around as if they were drunk. The four of them had the short man surrounded but they weren't beating on him, they were biting him, biting big chunks of flesh out of his face, arms, and neck.
As I got closer to the scene, a few cars in front of me were stopping, forcing me to stop too. One car had pulled over and the driver was running toward the imperiled man in what seemed to be an attempt to help him. An attempt that would prove to be the last good deed this man would ever do.
The waylaid man was now on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, with the four attackers now on their knees hovering over him.
The man's high-pitched screams alerted drivers many rows back to the danger that was waiting for them just a few cars ahead, as the four zombies ripped the flesh and muscle from his body, exposing the off white color of his stripped bones and the marbled grey of his blood covered intestines, as they feasted on his mutilated body.
From out of nowhere a fifth attacker lunged upon the Good Samaritan from behind, and in a blink of an eye, had the man on the ground, and was tearing his scalp off with his teeth.
Many of the other drivers were setting in their cars, frozen with fear, staring in disbelief at the grisly spectacle that was being played out before them.
As the Samaritan’s scalp dangled from his attacker's mouth like a blood soaked toupee, he let out a blood-chilling scream, which seemed to pull the mesmerized onlookers out of their shock induced trances, and set off a chorus of shrill screams from all directions as many people jumped from their gridlocked vehicles and tried to run to safety.