Haven From Hell: Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse

by Won, Mark

  She just broke down in tears. While I was trying to console her I heard the sound of a door smashing on her end. Then Beth’s mom started screaming as her zombified son closed with her and tore her apart. So I hung up and got back to some more constructive web searches. I learned a lot. The problem was universal. It was getting worse.

  I made a bunch more phone calls. Every place I called that had been affected by the Change gave no answer. When I called places not yet affected by the Change, I only rarely got through due to the great volume of calls. The people who did answer were panicked. Some had the idea to grab as many supplies as they could and head to some remote place up north. I wished them luck.

  After a half an hour of that I had all the information I needed to form a mid-range plan. Closing the phone I decided to leave it on. That seemed like a good time to not miss a call, even if it wasn’t for me.

  My idiot boss had finally managed to follow me as far as the top of the cooler. I climbed over to him and called across the isle.

  “Could you make some noise to draw them to you? I’d like to get over to the repair area.”

  He just looked at me. I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not. Maybe he was in too much shock to answer. Maybe he was just being a cowardly ass. It could’ve gone either way with him.

  The top of the cooler was too high for me to jump back to from the shelving I was clinging to, so I climbed along the shelving until I came to the wall. From there I was able to grab the support beam and climb back over to the top of the cooler. The Changed had followed my progress with interest. I stepped back from the edge so they couldn’t see me and quietly made my way back to the far side of the cooler. Then I found the ladder down and quickly ran over to the maintenance area. I grabbed a couple of hammers. One big claw hammer and a roofing hammer. I was relieved to find no one back there. Our maintenance guy was lazy as hell, and for once that was just as well.

  My plan was coming along nicely. ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. From around the corner I could hear the low moans of the changed, so I climbed back up some shelving to do a little thinking and check the internet again.

  Things were getting out of control. It was seeming increasingly likely that being arrested for murder was no longer a realistic possibility. The Web had little useful intelligence regarding my specific situation. The footage I was seeing made the Changed look impervious. I paid real close attention to what I was seeing. Eventually I noticed that head shots got the job done. Nothing else, just hits to the head. I posted that and climbed down the shelves.

  With the claw hammer stuck through a loop in my pants, I took a two handed grip on my roofing hammer and approached the Changed. They were all clustered together right where I’d left them. All staring up stupidly at where I used to be. As I swung, it occurred to me that the tight little group of Changed had formed a tight little clique before the Change, too.

  The first one was a freebie. The truck driver’s head made a satisfying splattering noise as I flattened what passed for his motor cortex all over my hammer head. Then the rest turned and started coming at me. I took a step back and swung again. A glancing blow to the frontal lobe, possibly the dorsolateral prefrontal region. He didn’t go down right away and I had to back up in a hurry. Frankly, I was just about to turn and run when he did, finally, fall. I was really counting on those head shots to work.

  The third Changed grabbed my hammer handle as I swung. Her name was Deb. I didn’t believe her taking hold of my hammer to be an intentional defensive maneuver. She just saw the handle as a means to an end, the thing between us that she could grab to draw me into her grasp. For all I knew, she thought it was a part of me. I let go and reached for my other hammer.

  I hadn’t intended it as a backup weapon. My plan was to give it to my idiot boss at some point, but it all worked out for the best. As she came in close I was able to bring my secondary weapon right down on her anterior cingulate region. The way that hammer got caught in her brain caused me to drop that weapon as well. Fortunately, she fell with it.

  I picked up both weapons and checked the bodies for keys and phones. My thinking was that it was time to leave. No sense in going empty handed, though. I figure I’d earned a severance package.

  To that end, I got on a forklift and began shuffling a few things about. By the time I was done I had one semi full and good to go. With keys in hand, I went back over to my idiot boss and called for him to come down. I was somewhat surprised when he did. He kept his mouth shut, too. For him, that counted as wisdom.

  Over by the exit door, I peeked out and saw all was quiet. Since that door was in the back of the building, I’d thought it would be devoid of former people. We went around to the front of the rig and I got in the driver’s seat. That was my first time behind the wheel of such a large vehicle. The only advice I’d remembered on the subject of driving a stick shift was, ‘if you can’t find it, grind it’. It seemed simple enough.

  I had some difficulty at first but ‘practice makes perfect’. I was afraid my idiot boss would start talking so I turned on the radio. I noticed that there was a CB in the cab as well.

  As I drove out of the lot I had occasion to run down a number of the Changed. My idiot boss shouted at me to ‘look out’. By which I think he meant for me to dodge around them. That wasn’t going to happen. I never cared much for customers at the best of times, and grinding a few under the wheels seemed like the wisest (and most satisfying) course of action, under the circumstances.

  The question I had to ask myself was: where to? I only had one remaining relative left to try to contact, and he was in jail. So I headed for the jail. I didn’t intend to give my idiot boss a say. I was being nice just letting him come along for the ride. If he gave me any trouble, I figured that I’d push him right out the door.

  I had to think that he had plenty of loved ones to care about and try to help, if he felt like it. I wasn’t in the only truck. We had the keys hanging in the warehouse office, so he could have taken his own semi. Hell, he should have been driving his own rig. That way we’d have had twice as many supplies.

  I was pretty sure that he had no one he really wanted to find. Don’t get me wrong, I had no idea if anyone he cared about was alive or dead or Changed. I just don’t think he cared enough to risk himself for them, in any case.

  As I was driving along, I tried to think of what to call the Changed, mostly just to keep my mind occupied. Right off the word ‘Changed’ came to me. Everyone seems to like that one, so I’m glad I came up with it. Again, I didn’t bother to consult the boss.

  -

  At the county lockup I didn’t see anyone on guard. I slowly brought the rig around to the visitor entrance. I wanted to keep things simple. If anyone had been left alive, I couldn’t see them sticking around for too long. My idea was to honk the horn and see what, if anything, showed up. If nothing answered my call, then I’d go inside for a closer look.

  My horn blared out and I had a moment to contemplate the odds of finding my nephew, Rick, alive. Then the wall of the jail, about fifty feet to my left, just exploded outward. Stepping through the rubble of that ruin was just some common looking inmate. Orange jumpsuit, short hair, nothing special. Except for the fact that he seemed capable of tossing down a prison wall like it was a house of cards.

  Behind him came about a million Changed convicts (conservative estimate). I decided that discretion was the better part of getting my limbs ripped off, and backed away as fast as the laws of physics would allow. The trouble with that plan was my inexperience. The back end of the truck started to weave to the left, into a security fence.

  The guy who brought down the wall was walking right toward me, leaving all his buddies in his wake. I put the truck in forward gear and put the pedal down. I realize it was a desperate move but I was panicking, and I really didn’t want to get out and run.

  My would-be road kill brought his arms up in an attempt grab the truck. I swerved just a bit, trying to make
sure to get him under a wheel. My effort paid some unexpected dividends when I not only ran down the strong man, but also flattened a few score of the Changed that were moving up behind him.

  I checked my side view mirror and saw most of them trying to get back up. Not the super strong one, though. That one had his head crushed by a bunch of wheels. All the ones that I’d missed on my first pass were working on closing the distance. I backed over them. Then I went forward over them. Then back. After a while they all got the picture and just stayed dead. Part of the problem had been how many more had kept on spilling out of the hole in the wall. I must have had to crush at least a couple score inmates and guards.

  I was just about to get out of the cab when I saw some more of the changed from across the highway stumbling in my direction. Suddenly, running out ahead of them was what looked like a young woman, running for her life.

  I rolled down my window and waved her over. There was a fence between us, and I thought she’d run along it until she came to the opening that I’d driven through. I was wrong. Instead, she jumped right up to its top and climbed over the barbed wire, with consummate ease. Then she jumped about twenty feet in my direction and landed at a full sprint. No one could run that fast. I rolled my window back up.

  Then I tried backing up again. She managed to jump right up onto the hood and started swinging at the windshield. As I watched, most of her hair fell out, and her pointed tongue flicked out of her mouth at least a foot, licking the windshield in front of my face. She reminded me of a picture I once saw of a ghoul. It was in some illustrated hardcover RPG book I’d had when I was a kid. The windshield cracked from her repeated blows, and my idiot boss pissed himself. The reek was horrible, and I determined, then and there, I was not going to die sitting in a pool of my idiot boss’s piss.

  I stopped the truck and got out, already swinging a wild roundhouse blow. She leapt right into it. I could hear her arm break but it didn’t slow her down much. She got swept off her feet but she was up in an instant. My next try was a bit more considered. As she tried to jump on me I swung low and smashed one of her knees. Down she went, and right back up she came. But slower that time.

  Always one to spot a good pattern, I struck low again. With both legs broken she must have taken a full two seconds getting back on her feet. I put that time to good use by lining up a final shot to the top of her skull. Finally, she stayed down for good.

  The rest of the horde were stuck at the fence. For some reason, none of them seemed capable of understanding the simple expediency of just walking around the obstruction. It was plain as day. I ran over and closed the gate, sealing the latch.

  The question presented itself: Why was the brain the weak spot of the Changed? They didn’t seem to be using it. I made a point to remember to look into that, if I ever got the chance. An even better question was how they could survive getting run down by a semi half a dozen times. After all the footage that I’d seen online of the Changed getting shot, and still walking around, I was willing to let that one slide for the time being.

  Another thought occurred to me. These horrors seemed to come in a variety pack. The really fast, moderately strong ones, I already thought of as ghouls. I decided to call the moderately ambulatory, surrealistically strong type ‘ogres’, after another picture from the same RPG book. The ogre I saw didn’t really look like the picture in the book but it was super strong, just like the monster on the page. Feeling myself on a roll, I mentally paged through that same book until I came across something that seemed to resemble the most common type of walking corpse. ‘Zombie’. A strange word. Supposedly, zombies were some kind of voodoo thing. I had looked it up as a teenager.

  You might think all this contemplation took a disproportionate amount of time. Not so. It surely sounds pompous, but I’ve always been a fast thinker. If it helps, I’m slightly overweight and short, too.

  Running back to the truck I told my idiot boss that I’d be back in a minute, grabbed the truck keys so he wouldn’t leave me, and strode through the hole in the wall. I had absolutely no actual hope of finding Rick inside, but I hadn’t recognized him mixed up with the other criminals. He was the only family or friend unaccounted for. By which I mean he couldn’t have been expected to pick up his phone when I called.

  Inside things were a mess. That ogre had clearly been strolling throughout the lockup, and it had left a trail of holes through walls leading all the way through the building. Every now and again I came across a mangled corpse. Some had bite wounds. I decided to take a chance and called out.

  I got an answer. It was pretty faint, but I tracked it down to a closed security door. There was no way that door would have kept the ogre out, so I had to deduce that the monster had overlooked it due to general monster stupidity. I tried to pull the door open but it was locked. The interior of the building was so wrecked I couldn’t even tell what the purpose of that area had been, originally.

  Someone inside unlocked the door and opened it up. Out stepped a guard and an inmate. Before either of them had a chance to speak I got the important question in.

  “Have either of you seen Rick Davis?”

  The guard told me the ogre got him. He didn’t use that word but that’s what he meant, judging by the description. I had him show me the corpse of my nephew, just to be sure. It was him. What was left of him, anyway. Poor Rick had been crushed by a huge piece of masonry. The stone had smashed his chest in. It looked like it had been quick. At least, I hope it had been.

  I introduced myself as Rick’s uncle. The guard’s name was Peter Trace and the inmate was Dayton Johnson. They were both real curious about things, the status of the world, the president’s health, safe havens of refuge, etc. Nothing imaginative. My answers were to the point.

  “The world, as we know it, is over. The president is out of the picture. I intend to make a safe place in the northeast part of Thumb county. On an island, just off the coast.”

  I continued, “What I need you to do is grab some phones, keys, food, water and weapons. Don’t waste your time trying to save anyone who doesn’t answer a phone call. They’re already dead or they’d answer. Instead, go to the other prisons and jails and see if you can rescue others, as I’ve rescued you. Send them out to do the same. See ya.”

  There was no point in waiting for a reply. Either one or both of them, would or wouldn’t do as I’d asked. If they did obey my request then they wouldn’t be coming with me. If not, then to hell with them. I already had all the dead weight I could handle, riding shotgun.

  I thought about looking through the rubble for a better weapon but decided against it. I didn’t want to waste time. In my mind I had a newly formed schedule to keep. I did, however, grab some old laundry that was just strewn about.

  When I got back to the truck I asked my idiot boss if he would like a change of clothes. He said he would but changed his mind when he saw what I’d brought. It was too orange. That, from the conceited chump who made me wear his name every day. I used the prisoner jumpsuit to wipe up the urine and got back in the cab. It was time to roll.

  Chapter 2: Self Service, The Fudds, and Being a Council Member

  The road north remained clear for a while. I supposed that was because the Changed didn’t know how to drive. Eventually, I started to come upon a number of wrecks. It looked to me like some people from the capitol, and its environs, had decided to run away from the city once they heard that bad things were happening all around them. Then the Change had hit them on the road.

  So, what happened if someone in an unaffected area heard about another area undergoing the Change, and decided to flee, before the Change affected his original location? From what I saw online, if such a person did flee, the effect would probably overtake him at either his destination, or along the way somewhere. Ironically, I speculated that it might be safer for someone desiring to run from a currently unaffected area, to flee into an area already effected. That assumed the effect to be a one-time, non-ongoing occurrence in any given
location. In essence, it might be safer to flee from a currently unaffected area into an area in which the causal effect was already finished.

  Such were my thoughts on the road. My idiot boss was an incompetent conversationalist, as you’d expect, and a useless navigator, as well. I had to keep my mind busy, somehow.

  Every time I came to a car pile-up on the road I’d slow down and nudge the offending vehicles out of the way. The ability to shove cars out of my way was an unintentional advantage of being behind the wheel of such a humongous mode of transportation. Such pile-ups were becoming increasingly common so I started using more and more side roads. They had fewer cars but it took a lot longer to get anywhere.

  Every now and again I would see a zombie stumbling about the road. Without much along the lines of maneuverability, I just kept on driving. Sometimes they ended up under the tires, sometimes not. I was only afraid of the ghouls and ogres at that point, and I was relieved by their rarity.

  Eventually, I found myself driving through an area that must have been hit early by the Change. There were no multi-vehicle accidents clogging the road, so I was able to put the pedal down and try to make up for lost time. Also, Since I was entering a somewhat less inhabited area of Wisconsin, there were fewer of the Changed wandering around for me to have to worry about.

  That’s when fuel became a concern. I don’t know if the truck driver hadn’t gotten around to filling the tank, or if we’d used up more gas than I thought we would. The gas mileage must be pretty bad on those things. I slowed down and kept my eyes open for an opportunity to refuel. I had no siphon, no gas can, and nothing to puncture a gas tank with. I especially didn’t want to have to start puncturing gas tanks. Fortunately, I came upon a gas station before the situation became desperate.

  The power was still on; thank God for automation. If the electrical grid had failed already then I’d have been screwed. As it was, there were only two zombies wandering around the pumps for me to worry about. I drove into the pump area and ran down one of them, making sure to park on him. In the time that took, the other one had gotten over to the passenger side and was trying to pound through the door.