by GJ Zukow
I almost became zombie chow while rummaging around the stores for an adequate length of rope. Damn "sleeper" woke up and tried to eat me for breakfast while I was distracted. Fucking things…It’s hard to tell, with the rot and decay of the dead, which corpses are actually dead and which corpses are still undead. The cannibalistic ghoul was that of a boy no more than ten years old or so. It really sucks to see someone so young die so violently, but by now I was used to it. Besides, there were many much younger. There were many much younger than him that I had buried this very axe in their rotted faces, deep into what was left of their grey matter. For the future I’m just going to have to preemptively start crushing the craniums of any corpse I come across.
What had caught my attention was a portable battery operated CD player. The packaging hadn’t been touched since all hell broke loose and I almost didn’t even notice them. I was actually looking at some cable wire and thinking how I might be able to tie enough of them together to reach the ground from the roof. As soon as I saw the CD player I was like a child in a candy store, oblivious to the fiend lying only a few feet behind me. I was having a hell of a time, even with my bowie knife, trying to open the stupid plastic packaging.
The foul ghoul had risen to its knees and reached out with a cold, fetid, clawed hand and grasped my thigh like a vice. Its grabbed a hold of me with an iron grip and dug its filthy nails in deep. I let out a horrified shout (I probably sounded like a scared little girl) and instinctively tried to jump away. It was that jump that caused the vile thing to miss biting a chunk out of my leg. It was also that jump that ripped open my jeans and allowed my flesh to be harshly dug into by its nasty nails.
I could see the undead things reaction to the smell and sight of my warm, fresh blood. The evil, dead, beast that once was an innocent child, seemed to double the speed of its actions. I did what I could. I drove the Bowie knife into its skull damn near to the hilt. Thick black blood flowed from its wound and it staggered from the blow. Normally a maiming like that would have put the thing down permanently, but every now and then I run across a zed that is more resilient than the others of its damnable kind. Even with eight inches of steel buried in its brain, it didn’t loosen its grip on my leg one iota. I had to chop the damned things hand off with my axe and then pry open its fingers. I was nauseated as I felt old, infirm, rotted flesh squish onto my hands as I struggled to open its clawed fingers. The strength of these things is amazing. Never in life would a ten year old boy have such strength. The parasites couldn’t feel the pain of their hosts and worked the dead’s muscles like the strings of a marionette. If more than one of them grab you it’s all over.
The crawling corpse shook like it was having an epileptic seizure, then it stabilized and came at me again.
“Fuck this bastard.” I thought and brought my axe down squarely on the rotted things neck.
No medieval executioner could have done a better job. The things head separated cleanly from its shoulders and rolled away.
The body collapsed but the lifeless head still moved. Black orbs for eyes, covered with opaque milky cataracts, still rolled in their rancid sockets, keeping its gaze locked on me. Yellowed and rotting teeth surrounded by blackened gums still snapped violently, hoping to tear open my flesh. A horrible mucus coated, blackened tongue still writhed, waiting to taste its prey.
I picked up the head by the handle of my Bowie, as it was still lodged firmly through its right temple, and firmly ground my boot heel into what was left of his face as I pulled the blade out. After a few hard stomps, which resulted in some satisfying crunching and a goodly spray of black blood and brain matter, it finally ceased its futile grasp on undeath. Even though the zombie was a child, any morality or pity any normal person would have felt was misplaced here. Guilt and sorrow is out of place when dealing with the undead. I felt bad about the situation, but not about killing a mindless automation. Even a toddler in diapers, once it joins the ranks of the undead, is a deadly foe.
Afterwards, I found a crap load of batteries, they’re old and the charge on them isn’t what it used to be, but they work. I haven’t listened to any sort of music for a long time. Literally. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. I’ve got a shopping bag full of old CD’s, all grabbed from the bargain rack.
The wound in my thigh, while painful, isn’t deep and I poured enough hydrogen peroxide into it to kill anything.
I can see a three story building in the distance, a couple of blocks away, that’s closer to the jail and its waiting horde. It should provide a much better vantage point to observe the jail. Tomorrow I’m going to try to make my way towards it and check it out. I hate the idea of having to clear a building by myself, but if I can I will.
I thought I saw a light from inside the jail house last night but I can’t be sure. It was just a fleeting moment that I witnessed it. I could be mistaken but I still have to find out, if there’s other survivors I have to know.
I really need to find some binoculars. I think I can just barely make out the ruins of the Tool and Die shop I escaped from when I started this journal. If I can get over there I can figure out where the safe-house that Jannie and I holed up in until the mass of undead overcame our defenses was. I have to find out if she survived. It’s becoming a fucking obsession with me. Maybe, hopefully, The three story building will give me a better view.
The days are getting shorter and I’m going to enjoy my CD player tonight. Tomorrow I head out.
25
I made my recon to the big building in the distance. It didn’t turn out to be what I thought it was though. In fact the whole thing was an exercise in futility. The only good thing that I got out of it was a pair of decent binoculars. I write this now tired as hell. I had to spend the night underneath a dilapidated mobile home in some trailer park. Needless to say I didn’t sleep for shit. I was finally able to make my way back here to the Winn-Dixie. I left the tent set up here in case I ever came back this way, never thought it would be so soon though.
The closer I got to the building that was my destination, the denser the zeds got. I’m not going to give a blow by blow account of how many of the monsters I killed, but by the time I reached the building my arms were tired from swinging the axe.
The whole thing of it was that the building I was trying to get to was closer to the Marion County Jail than I thought it was. It’s hard to judge the distance from this roof top with all the trees and power lines blocking my view.
The building turned out to be some sort of huge factory where they built modular homes. The undead got so thick as I approached it that I knew more had spotted me than I could kill. There was an APC and an Abrams tank parked in front of the building. If there weren’t so damn many of the fucks I would have loved to try and loot them, at least see if I could grab the fifty cal. off of one of them. Thank God the main doors were left unlocked. I ducked in and locked the doors behind me. A number of the lethargic, shambling corpses were following me and I had no faith in the strength of the glass double doors to hold them back for long. I found myself in a foyer with a second set of double doors that led into an office area. I locked them too, meaning until they broke through them I may have possibly locked myself inside with no other way out. Nothing else I could do though. I was counting on such a big building having some other exit, mercifully I was right.
There were two putrid cadavers that I had to put down before I was able to explore the office area fully. One of the undead was in battle dress and I grabbed his sidearm and what ammo he had on him after I split open his skull. I ended up needing it. The other was some unfortunate secretary or something that could barely even walk, she was hampered by having her nasty panties around her ankles. Whether the soldiers had raped her before they put a shotgun shell through her chest or her flesh had rotted away to the point where the elastic band on her once pink flowered undies couldn’t hold them up any longer, I don’t know, and I had no intention of lifting her skirt. I was searching for a stairwell to get up to the
second floor when I opened a door I thought would lead to it.
As soon as I cracked open the door rotting arms grasped it and violently flung it wide open. I had no recourse but to pull out my shotgun and start loudly blowing their heads into little chunks. The first ones I killed were soldiers. There wasn't much ammo on them but one of the soldiers did have a nice set of binoculars. They came at me so packed together I was able to kill two at a time with most of my shots. More came through and I started to sweat about how many were in there. I backed away as I fired and when I ran out of shells I just dropped the weapon and pulled out my “nine” and the “nine” I had procured from the first soldier I had encountered. After about a good dozen soldiers, another dozen or so civilians came through in a rush. The odd thing about the civilians was that they all had their hands tied behind their backs. They all, except for the few that were missing one or both of their hands, had been tied with those plastic zip ties.
I knew that all the shooting would undoubtedly attract more zeds to the area. Fuck it though, they already knew I was in there, and once one knew, another somehow senses the first has found prey and soon there was a horde at the front doors.
The door I had opened finally swung shut on its own accord, as there was a break in the zeds coming through. The gun smoke was thick, hanging in the air like a cloud as I reloaded.
I could hear banging on the main doors and felt if I stayed in the office area I was soon going to be kibbles and bits for the pack. My only chance of survival was to go deeper into the rabbit hole. Others were starting to thump on the door in front of me. The zeds are too stupid to figure out even the simplest door knob so I was, for the moment, safe.
Doorways, especially those with self-closing doors were excellent places to fend off a number of the undead ghouls. The restricted area meant that only a few (or one fat bastard) could come through at a time. The self-closing mechanism served to shut the door any time there was a gap in the group, unless one fell in the doorway itself and blocked the door from closing. Even if one met its final death in the doorway, it served to slow down or trip up any that were stumbling in behind it.
I could hear the glass on the first set of double doors shattering and knew I had very little time left. Re-armed I kicked open the door and let the next wave walk into my zone of fire. There weren’t so many then, and the dead (truly dead now) corpses laying in the hallway hampered their progress towards me.
As the door shut itself again, more crashing came from the entryway and there came the sound of fists on the second (and final) set of doors. I reloaded as quickly as I could, fumbling a few rounds into the gore spreading across the grey carpet.
I almost slipped and fell into the gross black blood and chunks of decayed flesh and bone as I hurried to the door.
Once past the door, as it slowly closed behind me, I heard the shattering of glass. It would take them a while to figure out where I was now and how to get to me if I could stay quiet. As the smell of the place assaulted my nose I waited for my eyes to adjust to the gloom of the factory. My ears picked up the sound of halting and unsure footsteps coming from deeper within and I spotted two remaining zeds. The remaining pieces of shit were in sad shape, both were missing their eyes and it looked like most of the bones in their arms and legs had been splintered and broken. It was with a silent ease that I put them down.
The factory had been turned into a killing field with most of the machinery and building materials pushed to one side of the building. The building itself was fuckin’ huge. It was easily as big as, if not bigger, than a football field. There really was no second (or third) floor, and no real way to get up into the rafters easily. Cranes and hoists were on tracks overhead with only a couple of metal framed catwalks crossing it.
There was a metal rung ladder further back that lead up to the catwalks and as I approached it I saw a mass of bodies covering the back half of the factory floor. There had to be a hundred or so people, all killed execution style, lying on top of each other. Mass murder had taken place here, more than likely committed by the military, but what the crimes were I can’t say. All I know is the victims all had their hands bound. They were from every age group. Young children sprawled out amongst the elderly and every age in between.
Some fucked up shit indeed happened here. Oddly though, and I wonder what it says about my growing lack of empathy, all I could think of was how glad I was that they had all been shot in the head. If they hadn’t of been, there would be no way my now slim reserve of ammo would last long enough to kill ‘em all.
I finally made my way up to the highest point I could get to and was able to peer out the opening of an industrial size fan facing the jail. Length-wise along the building were dirty plexi-glass windows for letting in some sunlight (at least when the building was maintained and clean) but they were on the wrong sides.
The high, razor wire topped fence surrounding the jail was only a couple of hundred of yards away, just past a thin row of trees. From what I could make out the fence was still standing in the area that I could see, but there was an almost solid mass of zeds on the other side of it. Somewhere there was a breach and the zeds had poured in. They were packed in there and most of them were facing in my direction. If it weren’t for that fence they would all be coming over here to investigate the gunfire. Disturbingly, it reminded me of pictures of Hitler's concentration camps. From such a limited view I couldn't tell if there were any living souls in there or not.
However much I wanted to stay there and observe the jail I knew it was too dangerous, with zeds both inside the building and out.
I spotted a more than one exit and as I was deciding which one would be best to use I spotted a pallet of mineral spirits along the wall. I rolled one of the drums over to the mass of executed bodies and opened it up, letting the liquid soak into the carcasses which were no more than clothes and bones. I rolled another over to the door where the zeds who had followed me into the building were now pounding and let it empty itself under the door as best as the conditions would allow. The last two I just kicked over in the center of the building and watched as it spread over the cracked concrete floor, wetting the shit load of wood and other flammables stacked all along the walls.
Not only would I get some satisfaction in killing zeds, making a diversion and cremating those who should have been buried a long time ago, I would also be letting any survivors in the jail know somebody else was in the area. I just had to figure out a way to communicate with them.
I opened the exit door and checked the area out for zeds. Finding that the majority of them were mindlessly trying to cram themselves into the factory through the front doors, I lit a piece of cardboard on fire and tossed it into the ever spreading pool. The mineral spirits caught fire all in a rush and before the exit door could fully close I was running my ass off. Before I ran five feet the vapor lit up and exploded.
The plexi-glass windows along the top of the building blew out and pieces of plastic rained down around me. I got up and laughed as I thought of how I seemed to be in the process of burning as much of Ocala to the ground as possible.
The sound of the gunfire, then the loud as hell explosion attracted every dead mother fucker for a mile. I wasn't really counting on that, I just wanted to do some damage to the herd that had gathered at the building.
I made it about a half a mile away and across the street into a trailer park when I started having to swing my axe again. In no time at all another group had spotted me and I ran around and even through the wreckage of one trailer, to try and lose them.
I was momentarily out of sight of the first herd when I spotted another group up ahead of me, blocking my way. I was screwed, big time.
The trailer I was hiding behind had a plastic skirting around it and I knew if I couldn't get out of sight quickly I would be surrounded and devoured. I would definitely take a shitload of them with me but my run in with the horde at the factory left me low on ammo. It wasn't easy but I forced myself under the skirtin
g as quietly as I could.
I spent the night terrified that they were going to discover me at any moment. They staggered and stumbled around only a few feet away from me, with only a thin plastic shield to protect me from them. I tried to remain as motionless as I could stand, and when I had to finally take a piss after holding it for hours I was freaking out that they would hear my zipper slowly being opened. Then after rolling on my side and relieving myself, only to have it run back towards me and soak my pants, I sweated bullets hoping they wouldn't react to the smell of human urine.
Sometime around ten in the morning the majority of them had moved on past and I felt it was safe enough to make my way back here.
On my way back I decided to try to locate the burned out building I thought was the tool and die shop. Turned out to be the dilapidated and scorched ruins of a different building entirely. The whole excursion was for nothing but a pair of binoculars I guess.
The factory is still burning and sending up great plumes of thick black smoke.
I got to figure out a way to contact those inside the jail, if there is anybody holed up in there.