Journals of the Damned (Book 2)

by GJ Zukow

  Chef will have his kitchen up and running again in a few days. While some of us work on our defenses, others will be going out on supply runs. Once this problem with the walking dead calms down we should end up sitting safe and secure.

  28 October 2012

  The work on the fortifications continues. The noise of the machines we're using travels much further than any of us expected. The constant background noises of modern life are gone now. Even in the small hours of the night, before the world turned into a nightmare, I could still hear the sounds of traffic on the freeways miles away. Now the entire world is as quiet as a grave. Gone are the accumulated sounds of cars, trucks, sirens, factories, televisions, airplanes, pets and children. I had never really noticed how loud our modern lifestyle had become. Now I notice its absence. I feel the void of sound greatest at night. The stillness unnerves me.

  Those first few days when we moved in brought the unwanted attention of the majority of the walking dead into our immediate vicinity. Now that sound seems to travel so much further, the undead ghouls come to us, singly and in herds, from miles around. For hours there will be only a handful of the wanderers to deal with, then out of seemingly nowhere a herd of up to a hundred of the abominations will appear.

  Once the zeds hear and start into the direction of any unnatural noise (and by unnatural I mean any man made noise) they don't stop until they find the source. We don't work on the defenses at night time, but that doesn't mean we can't stop constantly guarding and patrolling the perimeter simply because the sun has set. Most of the undead that slowly drag their broken and battered corpses here have been walking towards us for days. They lurch towards us at all hours, morning, noon and night.

  There came one mass of undead that actually threatened to knock the fence down. The largest group I had seen yet shambled their way to us at three o'clock in the morning. Even though it is hauntingly quiet the dead make little noise. They came from the east, approaching that side of the compound that hadn't yet been fortified. With their silence and the cover of darkness they reached the fence before any of the night-watches spotted them. When the watchers finally found them and raised the alarm, I think it was mainly due to the sound of the fence being rattled and shaken by the mob of the dead. There was way too many of them to deal with using our melee weapons. The APC I had been using to run over the zeds during the day was running on fumes, until a scavenging team comes back with some fuel for it (like a freaking tanker truck) it's useless to us. I saw no other option but to authorize the use of firearms to keep the horde at bay. The gunshots would alert more of them to us but how many more could still be in the area I thought. Not that it mattered, really. If we didn't start putting them down quickly, they would have breached our defenses.

  The dead are still coming, drawn to us like flies to shit. Their numbers have dwindled somewhat but until we've completed our fortifications and things quiet down here they will keep coming. There also seems to be some migration of the dead, with groups of them always on the move from one neighborhood to another. We will never be completely safe until the damned things finally collapse and die their final death.

  Joe happened upon a sad piece of zombie shit that was almost a joke. The thing that had once been human was gone below the waist, guts and entrails dragging in the dirt behind it. It only had one arm and one eye but it dragged itself relentlessly towards its goal. Secretly I freakin' admire the sheer tenacity of the parasite and its desire to acquire fresh human flesh. The things will not stop. They show absolutely no fear. Joe captured it and tied it up in the back of the junkyard like it was some kind of demented watchdog. In no time others had gone to look at it. They stared at it, at first. Then they teased it. Then they made a sport out of throwing rocks at it, betting on who would get the killing blow in. When Chef found out that someone had brought one of the monstrosities onto the base he didn't get mad, instead he saw an opportunity to learn. Suitable subjects are going to be rounded up and kept inside cages, once we get them built, to be used as guinea pigs. We not only need to find out what their weaknesses are, we need to find a way to cure the parasite before it turns us into one of them.

  On a side note, Chef has decided that since the immune regard us as nothing more than crazed killers, that there shall be no peace between us. I, personally, understand the unaffected survivor’s fear of us. Everybody else that they have seen that had been suffering from the Scarlet had tried to violently kill them...and worse. I don't think that the immune have any idea that the madness that overtakes its victims won't truly affect us until the later stages of the disease. For the most part everybody here is still sane. It's a shame they can't get over their fear and try to help us.

  The main group of uninfected survivors has taken to using the jail complex as their permanent base. That gives us a bit of an advantage over them, we know where they are but they don't know our location. For the most part the recon and scavenging teams have been trying to keep their distance from them but some limited fighting still erupts. The competition for the scarce supplies left within the ruins of the city are going to be contested hotly. Right now there is still a lot of usable materials out there but within a couple of months the resources are going to run low. There's an inevitable war that's brewing. As soon as we get our fortifications done here, we're going to turn our attention towards them.

  4 November 2012

  Seven days since my last entry. The first three days since my last entry went by as usual. The last four went by with a bit more excitement. My primary concern was getting the defenses in place. The one exception to the new routine was when Master Chef gave Joe, who is the only person here that I can really call a “friend”, the job of being his supply officer. Joe and a couple of others and I had decided to celebrate the occasion by getting drunk. After partying ‘til past dawn I had barely slept more than an hour when Joe shook me awake.

  Seems Joe’s first day on his new job was also going to be the day of his first test. Along with Cook’s authority, came the responsibility. One of the two man recon teams were two days into their standard three to four day runs. The last that Chef had heard from them they had come across something that he wanted dearly. Cell phones still work around here and they’re easy to find. (Most networks are still running here, and very few of the majority of people who use cell phones lock them.) That team had failed to check in for more than twenty-four hours with a tanker half full of anhydrous ammonia. Chef wanted that stuff for cookin’ and while he wanted the team to be safe, the missing team was secondary.

  The influx of new people here has pretty much stopped. The only other survivors we run across are way too far gone for even us to handle. I’ve come to the realization that we’re just like the bastards in town. We kill those who are infected on sight also. Only the cannibalistic, walking dead kill both the infected and immune indiscriminately and without prejudice. Joe only had two men that could go out with him but he needed one more. Four people would be needed, one for our truck and one for the tanker. If the lost team could be saved they would do whatever they could to rescue them but Joe wanted to prepare for the worst. Chef wanted me to be the fourth man, he wanted to ensure someone who knew what he was doing, when it came to killing, would be there. Joe was in charge, after all it’s his command and I had no problem with it. Since we would be gone and we would miss church, Chef gave us all a ration to take with us. Chef also gave Joe two additional doses for the missing men if we found them. Chef didn’t care if we gave into temptation and smoked it early. Church day would still be every four days and every hour early we took it meant an additional, (ever worsening), hour before we could smoke again. Chef also wanted the doses back, unless there was a damn good reason, if the MIA’s weren’t found.

  The last time Joe had heard from the team they had been somewhere in western Georgia. In an hour we loaded up an older Humvee and were on the road.

  The recon teams go out for four days at a time, three times in a row and then get a four day break. I actu
ally have to admire the skill it takes to negotiate the road system, which is at times cluttered with broken and mangled auto wrecks or has become complete gridlock of abandoned vehicles. One could be driving an open and deserted road one second only to rush upon the charred and burned out wreckage of a multi car pile-up. Or a fuck load of the living dead. Gas was the only real thing we planned on stopping for until we reached the area where the men went missing. If we came upon something worth checking out we would mark it on our map and come back for it later.

  Both of Joe’s men opted to smoke their share that night after we stopped to gas up the vehicle. Joe and I shared a look over what we thought was a bad choice but he let them have their share early. They also were the ones elected to drive through the night while Joe and I chilled in the rear; the two wouldn’t be able to relax very much anyways.

  As soon as we got within ten miles of the lost tanker’s last known position, we found that none of the cell towers worked. Nobody had any bars on their phone and making a call was impossible. While it was a bad thing, it could also prove to be the reason the missing team couldn’t check in. That or the team was dead. In either case it was a good place to start seriously searching.

  We found the tanker. A water main had broken, it was still gushing water when we arrived and it probably still is. The run-off went under the road and weakened it. The road appears to have collapsed when the weight of the Peterbilt and its heavy cargo crossed it. The truck and tanker weren’t in bad condition, however it would require more than a Hummer to get it out.

  Barely had we gone more than a few more miles, mainly in search of a tow truck, when we found a huge mob of the undead surrounding a gas station that sold diesel and had, doors wide open, a tow truck on the lot. We spotted the mob from far enough away that they paid us no heed. The ravenous undead were focused intently upon the station, even though they must have heard, however slightly, the sound of our engine. The fact that the parasite controlled corpses were so intent on something meant that they sensed live food was tantalizing close to them.

  Joe asked me what I would do and I told him if we can’t kill them then we’ll have to lead them away. The road kept going past the station, into the unknown ruins of some little town. Joe decided to go around the gas station, out of sight of the undead so they don’t get drawn to us and possibly trap us, to scout the other side. Knowing where he would lead the ghouls would be a boon and it’s a good thing he chose to scout ahead. Just past a sharp turn in the road we came upon the horrible remains of what could have only been a slaughter. A dozen vehicles, including a school bus, were strewn, burned and bullet-ridden, in front of an impassable road block consisting of a tank and concrete dividers. The concrete barriers went right to the tree line on both sides of the road, making driving into the wooded and hilly terrain an impossible task, although it appears more than one person had tried. So we back-tracked to where we were before. The only way to lead the zeds away from the site would be to go past the tanker we were sent to get. We couldn’t shoot at the zeds while they were anywhere near the tanker, and if we valued the stranded teams lives we couldn’t do much shooting around the gas station either. Actually, it would have been easier to abandon the men but we had to get that tow truck. We would have to search for another day or more to find another tow truck and that would’ve meant that we would all be late for church with the time it would take to travel back to our lair.

  It really wasn’t hard at all to go driving towards the gas station, firing rounds off and killing those zombies that we got safe angles on. Horn blaring and yelling at the horde of over a hundred while shooting them, we saw one member of the trapped team jump up on the roof waving his arms and yelling at us. We had to get very close to the zeds to get their attention, by that time we had easily killed two dozen of them and would have killed more if not for the building being in the line of fire. We hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the second man and we knew he could still be inside, trapped somehow and being kept from getting to the roof. Until I saw the gas station up close. Every one of the big glass windows had been smashed in. There was easily another hundred or so of the undead inside the store.

  In the time it took us to start leading them away from the station we took out another couple dozen of the shambling horrors, getting in some good target practice. As we slowly rolled past the truck and tanker, with its load of liquid ammonia, we had to check our fire. Then something odd happened. The undead, the whole mass of them, stopped short of the tanker and wouldn’t get past or even near it. It was like they hit some invisible wall that they would not cross when they got to within twenty-five feet of it. It became a turkey shoot, with the zombies lurching towards us then reeling back, like waves lapping on the beach. They wouldn’t leave the area because they saw fresh meat and they wouldn’t advance past a certain point, leaving us to blow apart their skulls with relative ease. A number of them had started to make a staggering, circuitous route around the tanker but we were all decent shots (we’ve all had plenty of practice) and they all quickly fell. I have no idea what’s going on with the zeds acting like they did, but I know it has something to do with the ammonia. Chef is going to explore this weird behavior as soon as he can with some of our captured testing subjects.

  There were only a few stragglers and crawlers left and when we actually got inside the station our thoughts were confirmed. One of the team had been captured by the inhuman abominations and his blood had congealed over the floor, walls and shelves of a storage room.

  Ken, the survivor, told us how in the dark of the night, as they were approaching a station they knew had diesel fuel from previous trips, the road below them gave way, bringing the truck to the state it was in now. Almost as soon as they had done a little raiding of the store and gassed up the tow truck the huge wave of dead had come at them from the moonless gloom of the surrounding woods, almost getting to them before they could hide inside the store. Ken’s partner had tripped over some spilled jawbreakers and slammed into the ground hard. The amassed and combined weight of the undead had almost immediately shattered the cheap windows as Ken dragged his unconscious buddy towards the rear storeroom. The door was locked and in the time it took for Ken to kick down the cursed thing the zeds were upon them. Ken told us of how he barely escaped into the room, how he could only pray that he could find a way out before the monsters finished their frightening meal. At least the poor man was unconscious, not suffering in pain as merciless teeth and claws ripped him apart. Ken thought his time was up, finding the door was shattered beyond use, unlockable and barely closable.

  As the nauseating sounds of the undead beasts, gorging themselves on his friends flesh, filled his ears his eyes adjusted and he saw a ladder leading to an access hatch in the roof. Of all the luck, this was locked too but such locks weren’t designed to stand up to a desperate man who put everything he had into breaking it. In the end, the lock itself didn’t actually break, it was the hatch. Ken waited upon the roof, desperately hoping we would come save him. He had been unable to use his cell phone to call for help because of the lack of working cell towers.

  After the rescue, Joe had his two men drag the truck and tanker out of the break in the road while the rest of us smoked the sacrament. It was obvious to all of us the additional spread of the disease on Ken since he hadn’t smoked for just that one extra day. When you live with this parasite for any length of time you know what to expect, any additional spread of the disease, no matter how seemingly slight, is easily and quickly noticed.

  Even with the loss of the man’s life, Chef considered the rescue a huge success.

  13 November 2012

  There are thirty three of us here now. We now have instituted a morning muster and things are finally starting to get organized around here. All of us are tainted by the corruption of the parasite that lives within us. In the past nine days since I last wrote, the group lost two men and one woman to ammonia poisoning. Those three damned souls we lost were the only casualties the group had suff
ered since we lost that man in the gas station up north.

  The ammonia we brought back from Georgia has proven to have amazing properties wherever the undead is concerned. The liquid ammonia is difficult to work with, it’s cold as hell and evaporates quickly. Even the fumes are toxic. The difficulty we have with the extra safety precautions we go through handling the freezing liquid is a small price to pay for the benefits it provides. The undead refuse to go anywhere near the stuff. I had some men go out and spray a swatch of it around our camp and it served better than a thick masonry wall. The liquid was sprayed six days ago and it shows no sign of weakening in strength to where the hungering horrors are able to ignore it. I suspect that one application may last until it rains, washing it away.