Frank gave him a bemused, and kind of pissed-off-annoyed look, “We have no idea if you turn into one of those things because you get bit. You’ve been watching too many movies. Now quit being gay and let us get you inside and get you cleaned up.”
They had cleaned him up and put him on a couch in the living room where Frank, Meetch, and Rory took turns ‘making sure he was ok’. Five hours after disinfecting and consoling him, Frank ended up being the one putting a knife through the guy’s throat when he started to turn. They had now learned two things about this new normal. Stay quiet and don’t get bit. They had already figured out their bikes were causing them to be followed and had walked them down the long driveway to the B&B. Knives and tire irons and brass knuckles were the rule of the day now instead of guns.
They had drug the body out of the living room and into the yard, behind the expensive looking spa quality pool and poured gasoline all over the bloody, half decapitated body. There had been few words and few tears as every man kept his thoughts to himself and wondered when it was going to be their turn. Afterwards, they mopped up the bloody trail across the floor of the living room and set to organizing there supplies and talking courses of action. At some point, Frank had evolved to be there leader and they all looked towards him now as they tossed ideas around.
Frank cleared his throat and started speaking, “We need to make sure this place is secure and figure out how long the food and water will last. Then we barricade ourselves in here and rest for a bit but long term this place is not sustainable. We’ll run out of food, we’ll be hot and miserable with no AC, we have nowhere to run if those Zombies decide to besiege us, and eventually a hurricane is going to roll through and probably make the Keys look like man never made it here.”
Meetch chimed in, “Yeah, Florida is fun for like a week, with AC and those frozen drinks. I’m over it. I say we go ahead and get out of here. Roll North until we have some land mass around us.”
A tall, skinny, Hispanic man with a drooping mustache named Jorge spoke up next, “I agree with Meetch. This place is hotter than hell and I feel trapped on these little islands. Whatever has happened to everybody seems here to stay or we’d have seen the Guard or somebody by now.”
Twitch, a nervous looking small statured guy chimed in, “Yeah, I say we get back on our bikes right now and head North like the demons of hell were after us, considering they probably will be.”
Rory had moved over by the door and been busy staring out the peep hole. “Hey Frank, I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon. There’s about fifty zombies in the driveway and looks like more coming.”
Everyone shut up instantly after that announcement. Frank crept over to the door and had a look, followed by everyone else taking a turn. The courtyard and driveway were filling up rapidly with half naked, filth covered, red eyed, infected blue skinned, exploded capillary Zombies. They were all shuffling around; they must have heard or sensed there was regular humans inside. For some reason, they didn’t attack and eat each other, that would have been way too convenient.
Frank pointed at his feet and sat down and stripped off the combat boots he had been wearing. Everyone else did the same. They all picked up their boots, except for Twitch who had been wearing flip flops, because he was Twitch. Frank lead the way upstairs. They each scouted out rooms, made sure the curtains were drawn and settled in to wait. It beat the hell out of the ditch they had spent those two days laying in. Towards the end of that Frank remembered thinking he was pretty much ready to just try his luck with a two-foot length of chain and a switchblade against the thousand starving Zombies.
The B&B was old enough to have a rain water collection system on the roof leading to a Cistern, which meant they did not run out of water like they would have in any of the more modern buildings that depended on the new desalinization plants. One of the big issues with settling the Keys had been the lack of potable water to support the influx of people. Twitch was a utilities engineer for a city in California who was way too interested in his job and liked going on tours of things like desalinization plants. While having to hear the entire history of why the water stopped coming out of the modern plumbing was beyond boring, no one complained too much since Twitch was the one who figured out how to get the water from the Cistern without them having to walk outside and figure it out through the large crowd of man eaters outside.
The cistern and the occasional thunderstorms and “sun-showers” filling it up meant they had almost an infinite amount of fresh water. They rationed the food as well as they could to try and outlast the Zombies milling around outside. They lived in perpetual fear of accidentally doing something that made the Zombies take more of an active interest in trying to get into the B&B. Frank figured they probably could have had a few heavy metal concerts inside and been ok since this place had survived untold massive hurricanes and was still standing. They needed to keep the calm though, hoping to bore the Zombies into wandering away was the best plan they had come up with. The last thing they wanted was to attract more Zombies.
The number of Zombies outside fluctuated from day to day. Following a pretty impressive night of lightning strikes and thunder rolling around the Zombies ebbed to the lowest number of them so far and Frank decided it was time for them to move. They may have had plenty of water, but they were running very low on food. Frank had taken careful note of the Zombie activities outside and determined that at night the Zombies seemed to go into a coma like state. Some standing and snoozing, while the majority of them wandered into the brush or up against the walls to sleep the night away before waking up to wander around the next day in search of flesh.
They had partitioned out enough of the food for three days and kept that separate from the rest. They had taken the time to strip away anything they thought they could use from the hotel; knives, machetes, garden shears that they had taken the screws out of to create additional hand weapons, blankets and sheets for bandages. They had all used up most of their ammo to get this far so hand weapons were the main weapons at this point. Frank didn’t doubt that most of the gang was holding back a bullet for themselves to eat if it came to it. He knew he had one bullet he was not putting into the general inventory for just that purpose. If he got bit, he did not want to make his friends have to live with putting him down. He could still feel the hot blood covering his hand from slitting his friends throat.
They gathered quietly downstairs. They had planned this out exhaustively in whispered voices. They would walk downstairs in socks and put their boots on in the foyer area. They would open the front door as quietly as possible and proceed to their bikes. Frank now had his own bike since they had lost a member. It would be dark, so they had decided they would do a count to a hundred, at the count of one hundred they would all simultaneously start their bikes, flip on the lights, and roll towards US 1. Frank would lead and the rest would follow in single file. They all agreed not to go back for anyone who fell since they’d probably be bit anyway. If they got split up they would try and meet up again under the bridge in three miles.
The plan was a disaster. Like most plans the men were familiar with, it fell apart almost immediately when confronted by an enemy who was not aware of, and did not wish to act, as the plan dictated. They made it out of the house fine. They got on the bikes ok. The problem was the counting. They had rehearsed it plenty of times in the room. They all were able to be in perfect sync up there. Frank forgot what number he was on because he had lost track of where the motorcycles were when he walked out into the pitch dark and almost steeped on a sleeping Zombie. When he had located his bike, and had the key ready to go, he had thought the count was up to eighty.
A bike roared to life while he was sitting there. Then another bike was started. Headlights started coming on as the bikes were swung around to face the road. The first man to turn on his headlight was the one who took the brunt of the Zombies who turned out to be very light sleepers. They all heard screams as the bike toppled over under the weight
of around six or seven Zombies in less than four seconds after he had kicked his bike to life. Everyone started gunning their engines and aiming for the driveway out of there. More screams, more death, more grinding metal hitting the concrete. Frank saw the careful planning going to hell and felt the shock of men dying, following his plan. Then he shoved that emotion to the side, go this bike started, and rushed over to where two of the bikers had collided.
Rory ran up to him and jumped on the back of his bike.
“Go! Go!” Rory announced he was on and they needed to get the hell out.
Looking at the other toppled bike laying in front of them, Frank could make out one of his guy’s bodies pinned underneath the bike. A young girl in a Hello Kitty onesie was devouring his face. Frank let the panic and fear take him to that familiar battlefield fugue and rolled past the creep show. Hands grabbed at them, screams echoed through the air, Frank and Rory kicked out at anything that got near them and powered their way through. Frank realized he was screaming louder than the Zombies at one point. A scream of rage and impotence and horror tempered by disbelief and terror. The war cry of the forlorn and lost. The sound of a Kamikaze Pilot seconds before impact.
Most of them made it. Frank moved to the front of the column and they all rolled forward into the night. Headlights illuminating the occasional nightmare scene.
Entry 3: Taking a Dip
Frank and crew blasted up the road through Big Pine Key and headed towards Seven Mile Bridge. Every town they passed the howls and screams of the damned erupted and they collected more followers. They were managing to stay out in front of them for the most part though. When they got around Duck Key they hit their first road block. It was the remains of an actual road block. Cars were backed up in front of it and as they rode carefully through the dirt and mud around it they could hear the cries of their pursuers getting closer. Frank was not too concerned, he figured they could leave them behind and avoid gathering more followers on the Seven Mile Bridge since it was seven miles long and all.
Carefully guiding his bike between the bodies of an old man and a baby, he did his best to look without actually seeing. Which is why he almost missed the first dead National Guardsman he passed. Doing a double take he stopped the bike and got off. Walking over to the camo covered corpse he reached down and pulled the M-16 out of the guys cold, dead fingers. He then searched him until he found spare clips. There were only two spare clips and the one in the machine gun was almost empty. The whole weapon had been laying out in the rain and mud for a while now so Frank was not ready to trust firing it without giving it a good cleaning first anyway.
Feeling slightly better about their chances at survival he continued on towards the road block. There was a couple of concrete barriers and some concertino wire with Zombie corpses stuck to it. There was a stinking pile of corpses on both sides of the wire and into the beach and weeds on both sides. It looked like the Guardsmen had blasted away at the Zombies until they got overrun. These guys had definitely died in a big pile of brass. Frank was sure they had never thought it would have been on the other side of a pile of their fellow Americans.
Feeling slightly disgusted at having to ride over some of the bodies and hearing them shift and crack underneath the combined weight of himself and his bike Frank made it around the side of the barricade. On the other side, he got off his bike and picked through the remains of the Guardsmen and their vehicles and weapons. The leftover members of his gang gathering around him and doing the same. Shoving a pistol into his waistband and dumping more ammo into his pockets Frank yelled for everyone to get ready to roll. The reasons for the order was pretty obvious, looking down the road the first Zombie runners were coming into sight already.
Luckily, the road block had kept most of the traffic off the bridge. They should be able to simply speed away from the marathon of death strung out behind them. Everyone got on their bikes and they started moving towards where the bridge arched up into the sky high enough to disappear from site. As they started moving up the incline Frank slowed way down. He held his hand up for everyone to slow down and he sped up to go take a look. The reason the bridge seemed to disappear, is because the bridge fucking disappeared. There was no bridge. The Guardsmen must have radioed in an air strike on the bridge when they saw they could not contain the Zombies any longer.
The rest of the gang caught up and they all sat there staring at the space the bridge did not occupy any more. They all expressed their feelings on the subject in colorful, and completely understandable, vulgarity laced statements. Frank got over the bridge not being there and signaled everyone to turn around so they could go back the way they had come. They made it about a hundred yards when Frank saw that the other end of the bridge was swarming with Zombies and they were definitely coming out to say hello.
Stopping his bike once they got to the bottom of the decline and were on the flat part of the bridge Frank pulled out the M-16 and stood in the middle of the bridge checking it. Everyone else rolled to a stop and started to come stand beside him. Frank looked back over his shoulder and started barking orders.
“Yo. We’re going for a swim. Start throwing your saddlebags over the side and look for a good place for us to jump.” Frank positioned himself and prayed the weapon designed for a lightweight Air Force Base security patrolman, then chosen for the rest of the military because a senator wanted the money for his state, would have held itself together enough to actually project lead towards the oncoming threat. He heard the guys behind him start flinging stuff over the side of the bridge.
“Most of our stuff appears to have sank! We’re going to follow it and tread water. Don’t wait too long Frank.” The next word Meetch shouted was, “Cannonball!”
Frank heard each of the dumbasses yell ‘Cannonball’ as they jumped. The Zombies were getting closer. He put the rifle up to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger a few times. Nothing happened. Grimacing, he cycled through to another clip and tried again. This time he was able to fire some sustained bursts before the weapon locked up on him. Giving up, he jogged over towards the side of the bridge. Realizing he had no idea which part the others had decided was safe to jump off of. Hearing a scream uncomfortably close behind him he said a quick prayer and climbed up on the guard rail right as a Zombie slammed into him. He did a few flips before landing in the water feet first at an awkward angle.
Stroking his arms to move in the direction he assumed was up, he wished he had time to remove his damn boots. He also wished he had time to take a breath before hitting the water. He felt like he may black out at this rate before he was able to break the surface. He heard noises all around him. It was the Zombies smacking into the water as they jumped to try and reach him. He really hoped Zombies couldn’t swim. Finally breaking the surface, he swam over to where the rest of the group was huddled under the bridge trying to use a concrete pylon to rest against. It wasn’t working.
As he slowly swam over to them he saw Meetch cracking up.
“Yo Meetch, what’s so funny?”
With a big grin on his face, spitting out water from the waves hitting him and trying to keep his breath Meetch pointed at the Zombies jumping for them and started singing, “It’s Raining Men! Halleluiah!”
Smiling in spite of himself Frank told Meetch to STFU. Then he swam over to where the rest of them were and began working on getting his boots off.
“We save anything or it all sink?” Frank asked rhetorically since he could tell no one had anything. He was answered by some shrugs. “Ok. We swim, let’s stay underneath the bridge and head for the North shore or closest island. Once we get past the part that got blown up we can look at either trying to make it over to the pedestrian bridge or if we keep going I think we hit a key where we can get back up on one of the bridges here in a bit. Anybody not able to swim?”
Nobody spoke up so Frank finished getting his boots off and let them sink to the bottom. He decided to keep everything else, including his helmet, until he decided he didn’t ne
ed it. He started deliberately stroking his way North with the rest of the crew in pursuit. To their right and left the occasional Zombie still plummeting into the ocean.
Entry 4: The Easy Way
They swam until they made it to Pigeon Key. Once there they drug their aching bodies out of the water and trudged up to the visitor’s center in the middle of the key. The key served as an ecological tourist trap. They broke into the visitor’s center and beat their way into a locked snack bar area to pull out bottled water and random bags of snack foods. They sat around in a circle hydrating and filling up on cheese nips and bugles. Once they had their fill, they gathered up everything they could carry and headed out of the center to have a look around.
The center had a large salt pool and some other features scattered around. The most useful item turned out to be a boat they found washed up on the beach. It was a twenty-five-foot bass boat with a couple of corpses getting all gelatinous, scattered across different sections of the boat. The gulls had been at the bodies so there wasn’t a whole lot left of them. Just enough for them to guess it had been most of a family. They must have thought they had gotten away and maybe one of them had turned and attacked the others or something like that. Regardless, they had provided Frank and the remainder of his men with a boat.
Zournal: Book 3: Scorched Earth Page 2