Zombie Lake: Still Alive Book One

by Javan Bonds

  I have never actually seen anyone turn up-close. Walt was conscious and cussing in incoherent strings. the pigment of his skin was just slightly bluer and he was sweating profusely as he began to explain, "I’m gonna sneak over there and kill me some of them goddamn bastards before I go."

  He swallowed and gestured for Hammer to speak in his stead, "Mr. Snead is going to take a few grenades and a couple of pistols, right into the enemy’s camp. The zombies should ignore him." She was referring to the fact that after the initial infection but before succumbing to the plague, humans are completely ignored by the undead. She continued, "He will throw a grenade into the most crowded room before going through the back to shoot any survivors." "Oh," she added as if she had forgotten, "and he’ll have a couple of grenades on a dead man switch." I was thankful she was not going to describe what that would do.

  Walt made his way around the room and gave everyone a handshake–I was secure enough in my masculinity to give him a dude hug (which consists of reaching around the others neck, giving a few rough pats and breaking away with "fuck yeah" or some other manly exclamation).

  As I broke away I said, "Do you want me to tell Sarah anything, man?"

  He looked at me and grinned an odd and toothy smile, "Shit, I knew we weren’t really going to get hitched, she was just keeping me around to keep her safe," this must have been one of those rare moments of clarity during a tribulation and I wasn’t going to argue with a dying man who already knew the truth. "God dammit, you can watch out for her, Mo. Hell, maybe even get you some!"

  He raised a hand to smack my shoulder as a coughing fit overtook him and I slowly backed out of range of his spittle. Well, I have his blessing if I ever decide to grow a backbone.

  All of the riflemen followed The Sacrifice out the front doors to begin scoping in and setting up on town hall. I’m glad I’m not a precision marksman and can only sit here and write as one of my oldest friends willingly walks to his death. Hopefully, he will just kill off all of the bastards so we don’t have to deal with them. If I’m alive to make another entry, I’m praying it will be back on the Viva Ancora.

  Walt: The Final March of Mr. Snead

  "I ain’t going down without a goddamn fight and them sumbitches will remember the fucking name of Dean Snead!"

  If Walt had ever been forced to read the poem in any of his high school Literature classes before dropping out, he would have been too inebriated to remember it. Pity, because Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night would have summed up his feelings as he jogged away from his fellow survivors to his certain demise. The pigment of his skin was rapidly turning blue and his clothes were soaking wet with sweat. He knew that soon the muscle spasms would begin and he would fall over, seemingly to die, before rising again as an inhuman animal. He knew that peevies hated wearing clothes more than his mama’s stupid little Chihuahua hated his Christmas sweater, and he was going to make sure he went out with his boots on.

  He was almost to the two lane highway that he would need to cross before coming onto the town hall property. He put himself at ease by brushing his hand over his pouch of grenades; he knew the redheaded old lady would not have given him the grenades unless she knew that he would be able to use them to spectacular effect, nor that there was any chance of his survival. He stopped just short of laughing, since that would cause another coughing fit. He realized that he and his friends were always mixing bombs and alcohol. Whenever they got together and someone decided to bust out the fireworks, at least one guy ended up in the emergency room. Hell, he smiled. That woman was smart. She had pegged his experience with blowing folks up pretty well.

  This would be the first time he had seen a still-human-but-infected (meaning himself) come up close to zombies. He wished now that he had ponied up the cash for cable television. Most of the news he had received after May Day had come from radio and word-of-mouth. He didn’t know all the scientific mumbo-jumbo or if there was any speculated reason why the "turned" did not touch the recently infected, maybe they just felt cannibalism was wrong. "Goddamn that was funny," he almost laughed again at his own joke. "It could be that the infection makes the meat taste different…or they could just be grossed out by the blue skin. Holy shit, that’s why they are called ‘zombies:’ they look like dead people!”

  Walt looked back at the direction of the church before gingerly stepping into range of one of the chained guards and wasn’t even given a glance by the monsters. "Hot damn! If it wasn’t for the whole ‘dying and being reanimated’ thing, this wouldn’t be so bad." After waving at and even moving within mere feet of the undead and being absolutely ignored, he stepped up his pace. When he began to feel faint, he knew he did not have long. Walt had never been a pansy, nor had he ever passed out while sober. He wasn’t about to start now.

  "I’m not going to let a little thing like some undead hound dogs turn me into a weak-at-the-knees pussy." He peeked into the first window that he came to and just his luck, there were at least five guys in military uniforms sitting around shooting the shit.

  “Well," Bobbitt said, "we should teach these locals a lesson for fucking with us. If we kill enough of them, the rest will just roll over."

  "I’d like to rollover on some of their bitches," one of the other soldiers exclaimed.

  This was met with laughs and high-fives from a few of the other men in the room. Walt was glad Sarah was out of town; these bastards needed taking care of for the sake of all the town’s womenfolk. He aimed a stream of spit at the ground as he followed What’s-Her-Name’s instructions: Push the spoon down. Pull the pin. Throw it. The window shattered easily as the frag sailed through. Before he could even register any exclamations from within the room, Walt had bolted around the corner and to the back door. At the moment of detonation, he drew his dual 1911s and kicked in the door. He could hear a few mumbled moans and whimpers coming from the room which was belching smoke. He reckoned he ought to let them sumbitches take their damn sweet time to die–they deserved it. He looked over his shoulder and noticed that the guard zombie-hounds were lying on the ground; at least one had a single giant hole through it. He wondered if they would stay down or if it seriously took a headshot to put one down permanently. This was it: he leveled both of his pistols and charged.

  He rushed into the building, aiming one of his pistols at the door of the room to his left. He heard only the crackling of the smoldering fires and the dying coughs from a few of those goddamn bastards. He was just about to move in to make sure they were not gonna get up as he heard someone hacking from the smoke in front of him, "What the hell happened in there? Were you retards playing with grenades or—”

  The unseen enemy was interrupted by repeated blasts from Walt’s 45s. The redneck was wondering what would happen when his pistols clicked empty just as rifle fire began peppering him through the smoke. Dozens of bullet holes sprang up from his chest down to his knees. "Saved me doing it myself," he thought with satisfaction. Before the massive explosion that completely vaporized his destroyed body, he smiled through bloodied teeth and chuckled as he sank to the floor. "I need a goddamn beer.”

  Mo Journal Entry 24

  Walt was a lot faster than I would have assumed given his debilitated state. I could see him slinking in and out of tree cover before stealthily crossing the highway directly in the line of site of Town Hall. He casually walked by the chained, undead guards who honestly did not notice his presence. They just continued devouring the bodies of the deceased insurgents that the military troops had fed to them. It was disgusting to see up close. As predicted, Walt did not register in the site of zombies, so he simply waltzed on by. The insurgents had been gunshot, so they died uninfected and the ravenous cannibals were sucking the meat off their bones like this was the post-game buffet at KFC, except instead of grease covering their hands and faces, they were spraying blood and gore all around them. I could only see three since Spike had been put down. There was one collared peevie on an extremely long logging chain at each visible corner of
the property. The military vehicles were parked in the ditch in front of town hall–I assumed the soldiers kept their "dogs" on a tight enough leash to create a safe zone to make it to their trucks.

  I’m going to guess the Army guys were just as creative in naming these three "hounds" considering "Spike;" three of our marksmen cited up on Fido, Rex, and Spot in preparation to snipe them at the same moment the first grenade exploded. Walt peeked into a couple of windows before raring back and slamming one frag through the glass and the only dialogue I was able to pick up at that distance was, "What the–" before a fireball encompassed the room. I did not even register the rifle shots that sounded only feet away as the chained zombies’ heads exploded like mailboxes with M80s shoved into them. I was so consumed with watching a soon-to-be-dead hero swing around to the back door of town hall before the grenade exploded, kick in the door, scream an incoherent war cry, and immediately start rapid firing his pistols. The staccato sound of at least one rifle could be heard–obviously The Villains were returning fire and the entire party began rushing to town hall before a huge explosion engulfed nearly the entire building in one massive flash that could be seen through closed eyes. What the fuck kind of grenades did Hammer give him?

  "He had four frags and a WP," she answered my unspoken question as we closed on the building.

  In hindsight, it probably would have been simpler for us for Hammer to have brought her damn truck to the church, which would have gone completely unnoticed by our enemy and would have saved the cleanup crew a half-mile of jogging.

  By the time the entire assemblage came to a stop near the back door, I wasn’t the only one holding on to my knees and gasping for breath–hell, Smokes must be getting fit–he was at the point of having a stroke when we stopped, but surprisingly, he had been able to keep pace with us all the way.

  Hammer went flat against the wall and peeked in the door before giving us the "all clear" thumbs up and I briefly crossed minds once more with Gene; I could tell by looking at him that we were both wishing this was Mass Effect as our Expert could use the third person camera to look around a corner without actually sticking her head out. One of the two remaining freedom fighters pointed his shotgun at the door–I guess he thought he was covering her. I casually placed my arm across the barrel to lower it. Dumbass.

  We filed through the door after Hammer one at a time, checking each corner and finding nothing. Just as I was thinking this was pretty anti-climactic and would make for a poor near-ending to the saga, something dropped to the floor a few feet away. We all looked to see what at first glance appeared to be a silver sixteen ounce beer can–yeah, the first thing I thought of was Walt, the second thing was "Oh fuck."

  The flash bang went off and blinded almost all of us. Luckily, the strike team was looking for survivors in the room where the sacrifice had thrown his grenade, but our backups were watching our six from the hallway. They were closest to the blinding and deafening bang. Bradley had come up the ramp and was in the room with the rest of us, but fortunately Mary had stayed behind. Apparently The Expert had covered her face while the rest of us were completely blinded and voices were nothing more than mumbles to any of us. Even gunshots were fairly muffled, and more shouting by someone, somewhere, could be heard. I probably should’ve flattened myself on the floor since there were at least four others in the room who were as blind as I was and were armed to the teeth but I just stood there like a cow in line at the slaughterhouse.

  As I stupidly waited in one upright position for my vision to return, my hearing slowly opened up and I could hear several more shouts and quite a few gunshots. Gray smoke and indistinct buzzing filled the charred and destroyed room. I was able to make out something that looked like the graphic on a handicap parking sign to my left; I assumed this was my Old Friend. In a few minutes, all of us could see well enough to summarize that no one in the room had been injured after the flash bang, Hammer was missing, and our two backups were lying in pools of blood in the scarred hallway where our hero had just made his last hurrah. The marks of his explosives marred the walls which were now splattered with the blood of more patriots.

  Smokes would surely tell me that those guys were in the insignificant roster of the character list; I didn’t know the name of either and I don’t believe they had a single speaking part. Their deaths will be easily glazed over and soon forgotten by us, but damn, that kind of sucks once you think about it. I was fairly certain they were dead and wasn’t going to check for a pulse on guys with obvious fatal wounds lying in more blood on the floor than was left in them.

  Everyone noticed the fact that the captain wasn’t present and we all immediately shot out of the room and headed towards her last known location. The bodies of our two backups were conveniently positioned along either side of the hallway and did not slow our handi-capable companion as he exited the room. He was able to avoid the bodies but the pool of blood was fairly large and I didn’t look for tire tracks, but there was no way he could have avoided getting some of it on his hands. I don’t have a particularly weak stomach, but shit, that’s just gross.

  It was obvious that Hammer had been chasing someone out the front door because there were bullet holes in the walls where her quarry had leveled at her and it was easy to see the difference between Walt’s 45 and her 556. She probably would’ve scolded us for not peeking around the corner before piling out through the front door like amateurs. We stopped on the small front porch; there she was sitting on the steps facing away from us. I was relieved that we weren’t going to have to look for her.

  "What happened?”

  She began explaining to me all of the events that had taken place while the rest of the group listened in. "The second I saw the flash bang I turned and dove away. After it went off, the two guys in the hallway were too stunned to do anything and were immediately mowed down. Before exiting the room I shot through the wall towards the front, hoping to hit or at least scare the soldier that ambushed you. I used the door frames as cover while we exchanged fire and I slowly moved up as they steadily retreated. When I get to the front door, there were two guys loading into a Humvee, about to head south down the highway. They both had pistols and were a couple dozen yards away, so I figured one of these skinny little poles on the porch would be enough cover but one of them hit me. Before I went down, I was able to hit the guy in the passenger seat and the driver yelled: “We’ll be back!”

  Really? Bad guys actually say that? That’s a line I would expect from an old cartoon just before the villain curled his mustache and adjusted his monocle. When she admitted to being shot, my father and Gene, the field medics, began getting ready to perform surgery.

  She held up a hand.

  "It’s okay fellas: vest." She lifted her Kevlar vest to show a large bruise just under her rib cage and added, "I don’t think it broke any bones; it just hurts like crazy.”

  I wondered if it would hurt less to actually take a bullet or wear a bulletproof vest. I mean, you’d obviously be more likely to survive wearing Kevlar, but it’s a different kind of injury. I just wonder if the pain level is greater with an actual bullet wound or that giant goose egg contusion on your side. Of course, I didn’t ask her this; it would have been rude. it’s just a question I’ve always had. I miss MythBusters.

  At this point, one could conclude that the premises was free of hostiles because we had not yet been shot after our bumbling rush out of the front door, and we found out later that there was no one sitting on the toilet, waiting for us with a machine gun. We looked over every dead soldier and were able to read most of the names on the uniforms, and “Capt. Pecker Wanted” was unfortunately not among them. Are you surprised? I wish I had met him so I could have made fun of his name to his face, but I had a feeling we’d run into him again. Christ, that’s predictable as hell.

  I could have dwelt on the fact that I didn’t get to meet the victim of a jittery rabbi (think about it), but I was a little busy loading up weapons taken from dead soldiers and discussing
who would drive the Bradley tank and each of the three Humvees that Capt. Dickless had kindly left us. Hammer obviously knew how to drive the Bradley tank and my Old Friend wanted to ride with her simply because he found it funny that we would get to tell people "Bradley is in the Bradley tank." I had never driven a Humvee but I was guessing it wouldn’t be much different than driving a pickup. I was sure Gene could pull some "Need for Speed" moves with one of the vehicles when he almost squealed with geeky delight, and I was unsure if Smokes wanted to or even could drive one, but he hesitantly agreed to after my dad said that Mama would kill him if he left her Corolla. As we made our way to our new vehicles, my father said, "Mo, I will ride with you to pick up your mom’s car and then I want y’all to follow me back to the house." I wasn’t going to correct him with “You mean where the house used to be.”

  Mo Journal Entry 25

  It should have taken less than ten minutes to drive to the car and then convoy back to my parents’ property where the chain link fence surrounding the yard had been flattened in several spots and there was nothing but blackened, charred remains where the house once stood. But my dad led our strange parade because for some reason he thought he knew the route better than we did. Of course I could’ve gotten here with my eyes closed, and I was fairly certain Bradley could guide Hammer even from the rear of a tank; I wouldn’t doubt Smokes had some sort of supernatural GPS, so I’m guessing he was just making sure Gene could not possibly get lost. Daddy kept bringing the convoy to a halt, hollering out the window, blowing his horn, and finally getting out to call for his surviving neighbors, receiving no response every single time. It was stupefying and depressing to watch my dad scream for people he had known for years, only to be met with stony silence. Had these military sum bitches really murdered or chased away every single resident of the town? It appeared so.