by J. L. Bourne
Sooner rather than later, I’m going to have to make landfall and continue my journey south. I’m not looking forward to making a two-hundred-mile walkabout across dead-infested territory with over sixty pounds of gear. Every now and again I think about this and it still shocks me down to my DNA that this is happening. The suicide rate must have skyrocketed in the past few months among survivors, because not a day goes by that I don’t think of ending it here and now. There are no red days on the calendar anymore. I have no days I can rest and let down my guard. Even on this boat I dream of them somehow getting onboard and taking me out. Looks like tonight will be a can of chili, and with my gear safely centralized, some boiled lake water for dinner. All I can do is sit here and enjoy the coming sunset and try to ignore the ominous bellows in the distance.
10 Oct
0630
I feel well rested and recovered enough to start heading south and west on the water. My intention is to triple-check my gear and raise sails for shore. Loneliness is magnified by the solitude of the lake. I remember staying in a hostel in Brisbane, Australia, a couple of years ago. Not wanting my things stolen, I chose a single and stayed there for three days nursing a hangover for the first two. Somehow, in some detached way, that time of solitude in Brisbane reminds me of how I feel now. Maybe it is the fact that I am traveling alone and the only other things that matter to me are my pack and weapons.
2200
After fooling with the sails for an hour or so, I pulled anchor and made very slowly southwest. I know these things can see my sail; I just did not know how the sight of it cruising across the lake would affect their decision to follow. My plan was to run the boat aground to save time. I could not afford the time it would take to properly moor the vessel and tie her up securely. This would be a one-way trip, as after the boat was run aground it would take another motor-powered vessel to pull her back to the lake. Using the binocs I scanned the shoreline for any indications and warning of the dead reacting to my presence.
I tied off a knotted line to the bow so that I would have an easy deboarding when the time came. In between boom swings of the sail, I positioned my three MP5 9mm magazines where I could reach them, with the fourth full at twenty-nine rounds in the weapon chambered. Make no mistake—this was not Normandy beach in the forties but was Caddo beach with potentially more ghouls than German soldiers and one man to push back their numbers.
I wished the vessel had a speed slower than five knots—I wanted to approach more conservatively. After two hours of steering the bow port and starboard, I could finally get a good look at the beachhead that I would be assaulting. On first count I observed a dozen dead at the shore with icy gazes locking to my center mass. Using the compartmentalization techniques that I had learned in the military, I made a poor attempt at pushing the thought of getting torn apart out of my gray matter.
Knowing that this vessel had a draft of at least six feet, I anticipated a respectably violent impact when the sails pushed the vessel and keel into the rocky shore. Nearing land, I tied off the boom and lay flat on my back with my feet braced on the forward railing. Lying on the deck I tried to push the mental image of the dead out of my thoughts by looking up at the mast and clouds in the sky above. Then came the impact . . .
The vessel leaned violently to port while the bow turned starboard and I could hear everything on the shelves below fall and crash to the deck.
Regaining my footing, I shouldered my heavy pack and readied my submachine gun. I estimated that there were twenty of them closing my position with the potential of thousands if I didn’t move fast. Aiming as best I could with the short-barreled MP5, I took out five of them so that I would have the time to carefully climb down the knotted rope to the shore. I was down to about nineteen rounds in this magazine as I only had a 50 percent head hit ratio past twenty yards with the SMG. I knew my Glock was loaded and ready as backup as I hit the water at the bottom of the rope. I carefully scanned for any open spots in the group of ten or so that remained and once again played offense as I threaded the needle and ran through them as best I could.
Those ten would turn to a hundred if I didn’t lose them, so I decided to run down the shoreline in plain view as fast as I could, prompting them to follow. It was about a mile before jogging became nearly impossible with the pack. I turned ninety degrees right, into the tree line out of my pursuers’ sight and then started the system of walk twenty paces then jog twenty paces for about an hour. I had successfully lost the dead and was marginally safe in the open plains of what I believed to be Texas. Until I find a reliable map of the area, my plan is to head west until I reach a two-lane highway running north-south and shadow it south until I hit the interstate that runs east-west into Dallas. Of course I will not be visiting Dallas—ever. I will simply shadow the interstate highway system going in the general direction of Hotel 23 using roadway lateral navigation.
As I walked west with the sun at my back I started to feel more energized despite the painful blisters on my feet. What I wouldn’t give for some moleskin in my gear. I might try rigging tape. By the late afternoon, I had found a deserted two-lane highway and approached cautiously from the east. I had depleted my water supply down to half the Camelbak bladder so I thought it best to stop at the nearest small bridge over a creek to fill up. It took a mile of paralleling the road before I spotted a steel drainage tube running underneath the road from the field in which I was walking.
The Steiner binocs had already earned their weight in my pack for helping me to find the water supply. As I approached the drain carefully from the northwest, I spotted half a dozen dead cattle—what was left of them. In virtually all of the cattle carcasses the legs were removed and strewn about the field, indicating that they had likely been taken down by the dead. I would have believed that feral dogs or coyotes had done the job if I hadn’t seen a long-dead corpse with a hoof mark through its head and a mouth full of cowhide covered in white hair. The beast must have knocked one of them down and taken a lucky step. No matter. The dead had probably swarmed the cattle like Amazonian piranha. I could almost imagine the event in my head, remote-viewing back to the beginning months.
Leaving the field, I moved to the water supply and could hear the trickle of the water as it fell from the drainage pipe under the highway. The pipe was about the diameter of a fifty-five-gallon steel drum. I pulled out the water bladder and had begun to fill it when I heard a shuffling sound inside the pipe. Looking into the darkness I could make out the human shape of what I believed to be one of those things. Using my flashlight I discovered the partially decomposed body of a creature lodged among drainage debris and unable to get out.
The creature’s head was caught in such a position that it could not see me. It did, however, know I was there. I poured out my decontaminated water and dried the inside of the plastic water bladder as best I could with a clean set of spare skivvies. Leaving the poor bastard to rot in his steel cylinder tomb, I kept moving, looking for water. Now that I had been forced to give up my entire water supply, I felt even thirstier. I continued to shadow the two-lane highway south. Using my binocs I saw that I was following the direction of Highway 59. I took a few minutes to scratch this down in my journal. I continued to keep a lookout for any of those green signs that gave the mileage to the next city.
The sun was starting to go down by this point so I decided, despite my thirst, that it was best to use the remaining hour of useful light to find a safe place to hole up for the evening. There were houses in the vicinity of the road but I didn’t have time to break and enter and properly sweep a house before sunset. I kept moving and scouting with my binocs until I discovered a suitable location to sleep—the top of a relatively easy-to-access roof. I stopped in a field and checked my pack to make sure everything was in place before bolting across the road to the target house. I put the wool blanket I had on the top of my pack for easy reach and extra 9mm ammunition in the zipper pouch on the lid of the pack. I then dropped the magazines from my MP5 a
nd Glock to make sure they were at capacity—fifteen plus one on the Glock and twenty-nine plus one on the MP5. Weapons hot, with the MP5 set to single shot and my pack rearranged, I made for the house of choice, a two-story home on the outskirts of a small neighborhood.
The sun was getting low and the temperature was falling as I sprinted as fast as I could to the fence line. I threw my pack over the three-wire barbed-wire fence and climbed over, being careful not to cut myself. After lifting the pack back on I checked the road in both directions. There was undead movement in the distance on both sides of the road. I crossed the road slowly and deliberately, using the cover of an old car, long abandoned. Standing on the other side of the road, I knelt and scouted ahead with the binocs in the fading light. It seemed relatively clear so I double-timed it to the house. I chose this house because of the ladder that I had spotted four hundred yards earlier. It was leaning against the guardrail of the front porch.
I made it to the house and positioned the ladder so that I could easily climb to the roof and sleep there tonight. Before climbing up, I surveyed the outside of the home, noticing that the front door had been splintered in from the outside and bullet holes peppered the front of the house and the wooden pillars of the porch. Another site of a last stand gone wrong. The whole perimeter of the home was covered in what I call gore marks, places the dead had pummeled for days in an attempt to enter.
Makeshift board barricades were nailed up on the downstairs windows but most of the boards were ripped from the window frames and all the windows were busted from the outside. This house would be a terrible choice in which to sleep tonight, but a fairly decent choice to sleep on. Satisfied that this place was condemned and that it was not worth investigating its interior, I carefully climbed the ladder to the roof. Once on the roof of the first-story overhang, I pulled the ladder up with me and then climbed to the second story. I didn’t want to take a chance of one of those things breaking through the second-story window and attacking me in my sleep. After making it to the roof of the house I pulled the ladder up with me.
I had a pretty good vantage point with enough light to spare to set up camp on the roof. I pulled out my blanket and strapped my pack to one of the roof exhaust pipes. Using the pack waist strap, I attached the secured pack to my arm so I wouldn’t roll off the house in my sleep. I was able to use part of my pack as sort of a pillow. What with being fully clothed, with a thick wool blanket, it is not that bad up here. Good night.
Chain Gang
11 Oct
1232
I awoke this morning to the feeling of cold rain on my face. I glanced at my watch, which indicated 0520, and I could tell my core temperature was falling quickly by the annoying chatter of my teeth. I was dog thirsty and fought through the cold to reach into my bag and pull out an old plastic MRE pouch from days ago. Wrapping the wool blanket around my cold body and tangling my foot into my pack strap, I leaned over the edge of the roof and hung the MRE pouch over the edge where the water was steadily streaming down to the first-story ledge below.
After I filled up I drank the shingle-flavored water until the pouch was empty and then I filled it again. Fighting the chill that nearly shook me off the roof, I kept gathering water until my water bladder was full. I repacked my gear (sans the wool blanket), leaving the bladder drinking tube accessible to the outside of the pack and started to think about moving again. There were no dead in sight from my view on the roof. Using my knife, I cut a slit in the center of the wool blanket so that I could fit my head through and use it as a poncho. It was wool and wet so there was no use packing it away. At least wool keeps its heat even when wet.
I then attempted to position the ladder for my descent to the first-floor overhang of the house. As I lowered the ladder my grip slipped a little and the other end hit the overhang with a loud bang. I put the ladder where I wanted and then put on my pack and started my descent. The rain seemed to be getting worse as I climbed down. When I reached the bottom of the ladder I nearly jumped off the roof in fright, as one of those creatures had its face pressed against the second-story window in response to the noise I had made when dropping the ladder.
I saw it and it saw me. Quickly, I positioned the ladder on the ground so that I could start climbing down. The thing was beating on the window in an attempt to break out and get to me. From the sounds, it did not seem that it had enough strength to break through. I didn’t want to think about why, but the visions and memories in my mind when I reached the bottom of the ladder were not of an adult corpse—it was a child.
I left the ladder where it stood and made my way to the road that I had used to find this overnight sleeping arrangement. The rain was making me miserable, and I wanted nothing more than to build a fire somewhere and hang my clothes to dry. I thought back to central heat and air and remembered how dependent we were on electric power to survive as a society. I’ll bet we lost thousands of elderly over the summer just because of the heat waves. It had been a bit since I tried my radio so I decided to give it a go and xmit out on the preset distress frequency. After going out three times with no response, I switched the radio into beacon pulse mode and decided to leave it on for a few minutes. The rain continued as I shadowed the road, which I remembered from the day before as Highway 59 South.
As the rain lessened in intensity, I could hear the familiar hum of a distant engine. I had heard this sound on more than one occasion since my helicopter crash miles and lakes behind. Part of me thought it was due to my head injury and the infection that I had endured. I rubbed the area where my stitches had been days before. The soreness and sensitivity were virtually gone. I continued to follow the direction of the road for what seemed like miles. It started to warm up around 0800, and the rain decreased to a light drizzle. The haze was thick and there were patches of fog, largely due to the moisture, combined with the heat of the rising sun. My feet were sinking deep into the mud as I kept my distance from the seemingly empty Highway 59.
After a few hundred yards I had to turn ninety degrees and head to the highway, as I realized that the mud was not related to the rain. I was walking into what appeared to be a swamp. The road started to elevate and just as a patch of fog blew by I could see for an instant that a section of the highway a quarter mile down the road was up on short stilts to raise it above the marsh. It seemed to go on forever that way into the distance. I didn’t fancy disease, and I knew that swamp bacteria or hypothermia from walking waist deep in cold mud could kill me just as easily as any of those things. Adding to my fear were the various open wounds I had on my body from being banged up from the crash and on the run from those things. My wounds were scabbed over, but that was nothing that a few hours of submersion in swamp water couldn’t fix.
Having no choice, I had to take the road as it departed from ground level and continued into the haze and fog south over the swamp. Visibility was poor and I could see only maybe a hundred yards in front or snapshots of the distance during random breaks in the fog. I walked for twenty minutes and there was no sign of dry land on either side of my position. There it was again . . . the sound of an engine somewhere in the distance, or perhaps over my head. I wasn’t sure of the source. My concentration was broken by a metallic sound up ahead. It sounded like chains being pulled across concrete. I tried to listen and separate the sounds of the chains from the mechanical buzzing sounds but could not.
Both sounds became insignificant when I heard one of those things trip over an old bumper that lay rusting on the bridge. It was coming from the same direction I had just walked. I walked over to it and shot it in the back of the head with the SMG. As I looked up beyond the corpse into the distance from where I had come, I noticed more shadowy figures in the fog. It seemed I had some undead stalkers closing on my position. They were still a couple of minutes out. I turned around and continued in the direction of the metallic sounds at a better pace.
Leaving the stalkers behind me, I started my jog ten paces, walk ten paces regimen. Then came the sound
of metal on concrete again. I slowed, knowing that the undead behind me were perhaps ten minutes from my position. I had passed abandoned cars up to this point but none of them were occupied and they all showed signs of the gore marks, like those on the house I had slept on last night. I crept further. The sound of metal got louder and drove me mad.
It was almost as if the mechanical sound abated to allow for the metallic sound to increase its intensity in a cruel game to send me over the edge. The lack of visibility made it even more torturous. I knew the sound up ahead of me had to be within a few hundred yards, but with the highway up on stilts and the barriers up on either side, the sound could be coming from much farther off.
I tried to drive the thought of the creatures behind me out of my head, impossible as that was, and kept moving forward, squinting as if that would help me see through the fog. The noise was very loud at this point and I could hear the sounds of undead activity up ahead. I now had a choice to make: either turn around and deal with the stalkers behind me or push ahead and deal with the noisy dead in front. The other option was to jump into the cold swamp and hope that the other side was near, and also hope that there were no undead in the swamp waters to greet me as I made my way to land. Since going north was not my objective and getting my ass bitten off was out of the question, I chose to press south on Highway 59 toward the metallic sounds.
The fog remained thick but I could see far enough ahead to know what I had gotten into. I estimated that the stalkers on my tail should be about five to seven minutes behind me, judging from the pace I had used to get here. As I moved forward I could see at least thirty undead dressed in bright orange jumpsuits. On the back of the jumpsuits were reflective letters that said COUNTY. Leg shackles and chains bound most of the creatures.