Diaries of the Damned

by Laybourne, Alex

  Tim had not heard the scuffle between his wife and neighbor. The entire encounter had lasted but a few seconds, and he had once again immersed himself in the job sections of the local paper. A chill wind swept into the kitchen, and rustled the paper on the table. Tim looked up, and felt the change in room temperature. He rose, checked the pans on the stove and turned them off, as instructed.

  With no idea as to what awaited, Tim walked into the living room, in search of the reason for the draft. He saw the front door was open, and for the first few steps he took, that was all he saw wrong with the room. The moment he saw his wife, the way her body laid still and twisted on the floor surrounded by a sea of congealing blood, he collapsed. The tears were instant, they burned his cheeks the same way the rising vomit burned his throat.

  “Mary,” he called, as he crawled over the floor toward her.

  Tim could see the wound in her neck, and the look in her eyes. Her upper body had turned, while her legs remained flat, in an image reminiscent of a baby during their first attempts to turn.

  “Mary,” Tim called again. The room began to spin. Another gust of cold wind ran down the street and into the house, bringing with it the echo of a multitude of screams; a wailing anguish that surely contributed to the cold feel of the evening.

  For Tim, time stopped. All he knew was that his wife was dead beside him. He did not even entertain the notion that the killer might still be in the house. It didn’t bother him. The haze that had gripped his mind like a cold fever dulled everything to a strange pulsating nothingness. This was a sensation Tim would happily live with for the rest of his life if it kept grief at bay. Only when he heard a deep, foreign growl did he move his gaze from the ceiling. He turned his head and noticed immediately that Mary had moved. Her body was no longer twisted. Her arms reached out in search of solace no more. She lay on her front, and her hands were flat on the floor besides her shoulders. It was Mary that had voiced the growl. As Tim watched, the muscles in her arms twitched, and she pushed herself from the floor. The blood she had laid in had congealed, and dropped from her rising body like a jelly. Tim sat in silent incredulity as Mary got to her feet. Her white nurse’s uniform was stained a violent red. Loose shards of flesh around the wound in her neck billowed like flags in the wind. She gave another growl, and moved toward Tim.

  “Mary…you’re alive!” Tim scrambled to his feet, not to flee, but to embrace his wife. They had been friends before lovers and remained both long after marriage. Tears filled his eyes once more, but the joy in his heart cooled them.

  Mary took slow and unsteady steps, her balance all but gone. Her feet shuffled along the floor rather than lifted. “We need to call you an ambulance. Come here.” He held out his arms, and Mary moved in close to him.

  She gave another growl, and as Tim wrapped his arms around her, he felt how cold and stiff her body was. He pulled her close to him, and felt her draw no breath. His brain made the connection long before his heart would admit it. Even as her grip tightened and her head moved in toward his neck, with her jaw stretched wide, Tim refused to accept any thought other than his wife had somehow survived the unsurvivable.

  She survived death…death, coming back, she came back to me…from the dead…the dead are rising…zombies…FUCK! The thoughts hit Tim in a rush, as he felt his wife´s teeth graze his neck. “No!” he yelled, pushing his wife away with a strength that surprised him.

  Mary stumbled backward, her jaws gnashing in hunger-fuelled fury. Her face was white from blood loss; her eyes sunken pits of darkness. This told Tim all he needed to know. Whatever it was that caused his wife to get back up, life wasn’t it, and what had returned resembled his wife in body alone.

  Another growl came from Mary’s throat. She moved forward once more, her hands reaching out not in search of comfort, but nourishment.

  Tim sidestepped her advance with ease, and ran from the hall into the living room. Mary followed, as he expected. The living room was small, and filled with two sofas, a coffee table and a dresser unit. A quick lap of the room and Tim was standing by the kitchen while Mary was struggling to maneuver around the coffee table.

  “I’m sorry, my love,” he whispered as he closed the door. The sound of pounding fists came not too long after the door closed. With no lock on it, Tim knew it would only be a matter of time before his dead wife either figured it out, or broke through the cheap wood.

  Tim’s mind charged at a mile a minute; his breaths coming quick and deep. He was close to hyperventilating, and his vision was dull and blurred. Tim stumbled into the kitchen, with the grace of a drunk on Saturday night. He opened the cupboard beside the oven and grabbed the first bottle from the shelf. He opened it and drank deeply. The fire of the alcohol burned through the fog and brought with it a sense of clarity. There was a crash from the hallway and Tim remembered that the front door was still open. Grabbing the kitchen knife from the counter Tim moved into the hallway, uncertain of what lay in wait. The screams from elsewhere in the street were enough to tell Tim that something was wrong. He tightened his grip on the blade and moved toward the door. The source of the crash had been a fight between three neighborhood cats, who now all sat side by side lapping up the cooling pool of blood. They looked up at Tim as he approached, their eyes wide and dark. All three growled at him, their claws at the ready.

  “Scat.” Time clapped his hands and stamped on the floor. The animals moved, but did not run. They backed away, keeping low to the ground, their ears flat against their heads. Tim knew that they were afraid, and so tried a different tactic. He crouched down and called them to him. “Come on, it’s ok, come here.” He rubbed his fingers together and tapped his nails on the floor, but the animals backed even further away. They were half way out of the door when the first one pricked its ears up and ran away. The other two felines attempted the same evasive maneuver, but stopped when a pair of undead hands clamped around their middles. Tim jumped as Russell appeared in the doorway. His face and chest were stained with blood. He had a large gash on his flank, which had been the cause of his demise. He held a cat in each hand and squeezed. The animals cried and twisted their flexible bodies in an attempt to break free, but were unsuccessful. They moved in a flash of teeth and claws, but the injuries they inflicted were ignored. Russell’s grip tightened, the muscles on his forearms bulged – solid from years of golf and country club tennis – until one of the beasts also began to bleed. Blood spat from his lips as it hissed and growled at the man that held it. Russell shook the creature until it fell silent, not dead but dazed. He raised it to his mouth and before Tim could move either in defense of the creature or retreat, teeth had sunk through the fur and pierced the skin beneath. Blood spurted from the wound and ran down Russell’s hungry face. As he tore the flesh away from the animal’s body, the cat let out a cry that was beyond description. A high-pitched wail that sounded human.

  Russell spat out the mouthful of fur, and grabbed the dying animal with both hands. His other captive fell to the floor immobile; its spine broken by the powerful grip. Its head thrashed on the floor, while urine and fecal matter flowed from its rear the way blood flowed from its then deceased friend. Russell buried his face in the animals flank and gobbled down the bite-sized organs with a satisfied growl.

  A crash from behind him told him that his wife had made inroads to her escape also. Seeing no other option than to fight or flee, he charged at his dead neighbor, plunging the large knife into his chest. It slid through the man’s flesh with a slick ease. Tim released his grip and stepped back. His hands shook, and his jaw dropped as the man he had comforted after the death of his wife stared at the blade, and proceeded to amble toward him as if nothing had happened.

  “Russell. Hey neighbor, it’s me… Tim.”

  The zombie showed no interest in conversation. His mouth moved, but only with hunger. Strips of cat flesh hung from his teeth, while blood had painted his lips a deep burgundy.

  “Shit!” Tim cursed as the door to the living room crac
ked down the middle only to be forced open by Russell, who had mistaken the occupant for being alive. It gave Tim a window however, and he took it. He ran through the house, into the kitchen where he slammed the door closed and pushed the dining table against it.

  With no time to collapse into the shock that tempted him so delightfully, Tim grabbed the bottle of drink and took another long, throat-scorching gulp. He followed this up with two more.

  By the time fists began to pound on the kitchen door, Tim was long gone. He vanished into the world, leaving behind a half empty bottle of liquor and a knife rack that was missing two blades.

  Tim and Mary lived in a cozy cul-de-sac in a small town just outside of the city. When they had bought their house, it had been a small rural community. As the years passed, the farmland that had separated them from the city was replaced by housing estates and promises of planned development. The road through their town filtered directly onto the ring road. It was there that Tim headed, panic and alcohol fuelling his movements. He gave no thoughts to whether others had experienced similar fates, at either end of life’s spectrum.

  Tim vaulted over the fence at the end of his garden, and landed on his feet on the pavement that ringed the cul-de-sac, and ran head first into a stumbling, bleeding figure.

  “Help me,” the man gargled, showering Tim with a fine mist of blood. A large gash ran the length of his forehead, and a rapidly spreading stain drenched the center of the man’s shirt. Before the man could say anything else, he collapsed to his knees, before falling face first to the ground.

  Tim looked around and saw a car had crashed into the brick wall of the house three doors up from where he stood. The driver’s side door was open. The accident explained the wound on the man’s head. The stumbling, growling figure explained the gaping wound that ran down the man’s spine, effectively filleting him.

  Reeling backward, his feet leaden, Tim turned to move and saw that the things were all around him.

  “Sweet shit heaps!” he cried aloud. The road was relatively empty. Three cars had crashed into one another on the other side of the street, and the crowd of five zombies that headed toward Tim told him enough about what had happened to them. One man walked with a heavy limp. His left leg buckling beneath him every time he placed his weight upon the limb, yet he showed no signs of stopping.

  In the distance, the sound of a police siren wailed, and all of the…things in the street turned their heads and watched as the car sped down the street toward them. The officer behind the wheel hit the brakes when he saw the crowd in the street, and swerved hard the moment he saw he could not stop in time. His car mounted the curb and ploughed into another creature that was approaching Tim from the rear. Her body bounced on the hood of the car, crumbling in on itself and sliding up the window with all its limbs flailing in a rare moment of grace, before it landing on the roof, shattering the lighting rig – which, until that moment, had continued to flash – before finally crashing onto the road in a heap. Bone had pierced the skin of both legs just below the kneecap, and the body lay twisted in a fashion that could only be the result of a broken spine.

  The car door opened, and the police officer half-climbed half fell out of his vehicle. His face was white as a sheet as he looked at the trail of clotted blood that created a racing stripe on his car.

  “She…It…I didn’t…the officer stammered as he stared at Tim, who, in all fairness returned the stare with an equally blank look. “Oh Christ!” He raised his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. As if the act had focused his mind, when the officer lowered his hands his face had a determined look set onto it. “Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me? I’m going to call an ambulance, just try not to move,” the officer called out while he fumbled with his radio.

  At the sound of the man’s voice, the body on the floor snapped its head around and stared at both Tim and the officer. The jaw had been broken and hung from one joint. Skin peeled away from the body; before or after death, Tim could not be certain.

  “What the…” the police officer began as the female corpse began to drag herself along the road, creeping ever closer to them. A deep growl came from her throat as her jaw wagged, gnashing at the air as if their very scent offered some form of sustenance. “It can’t, there’s no way,” the officer stammered again, as he looked back at Tim, in search of validation of the scenes occurrence.

  “Don’t look at me,” Tim offered with a shrug of the shoulder.

  “Behind you,” the officer shouted, as another figure appeared behind Tim.

  Tim spun and dove out of the way just as the pair of strong arms swung to catch him. Tim’s spin brought him into the middle of the road, with his back to the scene. Moving down the road were several more of those monsters. Screams hung in the air.

  “We need to get out…” Tim called as he turned, but his words were a waste. The police officer was no longer able to hear him, for his head no longer sat atop his shoulders. The large zombie that had swiped at Tim had caught the officer. He had tried to use his Pepper Spray on the creature, but with little effect. The zombie held the head up before him, inspecting it the way you check a melon for ripeness. It then took a big bite from the cheek, tearing away a patch of flesh that stretched from ear to mouth. The crawling zombie had reached the officer’s foot and torn a hole in his trousers. With vicious greed, she bit down into the leg, wrenching it with her head to tear the final stretch of muscle from the bone.

  The sound of their hunger made Tim queasy. It was a raw, wet sound, which made him think of eating celery.

  Screams echoed louder, as more people fled into the street. The housing estate they lived in was an upmarket area. To see the locals in such a sense of panic was almost more alarming than that fact that the dead had come to life.

  The small group of zombies that had made their way across the road toward Tim, stopped at the sound of the screams. When the small crowd appeared in the street, closely followed by an equally-sized group of the undead, they altered their course and flanked the fleeing banquet.

  Tim took the opportunity and ran around the feasting pair, who had broken into the officer’s chest and stuffed their faces with all manner of juicy morsels. The police car was still running, and even despite one flat tire and a crumbled hood, it still drove when Tim threw it into reverse and pulled out into the street.

  Blood smeared the windscreen and when Tim tried the wipers they did nothing but spread the gore. “Shit,” Tim growled at himself. There was a bottle of water on the passenger seat. Tim grabbed it and emptied it onto the windscreen as he drove. Somehow, he managed not to cut his wrists open on the jagged glass of the shattered driver´s side window. The blades swept furiously managing to clear a small patch of everything but a light pink haze. It gave Tim enough room to see by. The faster the car went, the slower his heart and mind went.

  Tim didn’t get to drive very far. The ring road was filled with cars; the aftermath from an accident further up. He could see the lights of the emergency vehicles flashing down the road. Everybody stared at him; the wrecked car, the blood smeared windscreen; it drew attention.

  Tim stopped the car, looking this way and that, in search of a way through the mess, when the passenger door to car opened and a police officer fell into the seat.

  “Drive Harry, drive!” The man was out of breath, and bloody. “You’re not Harry. Where is he?” The officer was remarkably calm at finding a stranger driving his partner’s car.

  “D… Dead,” Tim stuttered.

  “Fuck! Then drive, whoever you are. Get the fuck out of here! Those things are everywhere!” The officer clutched his hand, which Tim saw was bleeding. He said nothing, afraid to speak too much in case the officer smelled the alcohol on his breath, even though fear had sobered him in an instant.

  Tim floored the car, feeling more confident having an officer beside him.

  “What the crap is going on?” Tim asked, shortly after narrowly missing a group of people in mid retreat from a group of three
blood soaked walking corpses.

  “No fucking clue! I heard all manner of things. The flu - they say it’s the flu that started it, but those things, the ones back there weren’t sick. It looked as though they had been…”

  “Bitten,” Tim interrupted the officer.

  “Yeah. They were dead when we arrived. Take a left here. They were fucking dead. Then one of ‘em gets up, starts biting people. Then more get up and all hell broke loose. One even bit me. Took my finger clean off.” As if he were proud of his wound, the officer showed Tim his mangled hand. The index finger was missing at the palm, and the middle finger hung on a thread. The sight caused Tim to swerve the car and crash into a group of bodies. The world went black before he had time to question their life status.

  Tim came too with a heavy head and a left eye that refused to offer a clear image. The police officer that had sat beside him was gone, and a large bloodied hole in the windscreen told of his exit route. The body spread across the hood confirmed his final destination. All around him, Tim heard the cries of the wounded… of the people he had hit.

  “Jesus…” he whispered as the memory of the crowd he had mown down came back to him. He tried the door and after fighting to release the seatbelt, Tim stepped out into the road. There were at least seven people strewn across the road. One was dead – scalped. If the messy smear of blood and hair on the road was accurate, Tim had been the cause.

  “Help me,” A young woman called, as she grabbed hold of Tim’s leg and tugged at it. “Help me, they’re coming!” she wailed.

  The others, who seemed more panicked by what chased them, than their injuries, echoed her sentiments. Tim saw three broken limbs and numerous lacerations that would require hospital treatment, yet they all ignored them.

  Tim didn’t need to ask what they were running from, for the growl preceded the arrival of the ravenous pack, and set Tim’s nerves on edge. A quartet of zombies, for he understood then, that was what they were, appeared. Each had a similar wound in their necks, although the smallest of the group appeared to have had his entire throat ripped out. Blood still dripped from the wound, and its head lolled from side to side with each stumbled step it made.