Journals of the Damned (Book 2)

by GJ Zukow

  Over forty percent of my body is now covered by the scarlet and I fear forty percent of my sanity has fled.

  Our numbers still stand at thirty-two.

  13 January 2013

  Happy New Year bitches. For most of us, the infected ones, this will be our last year on this fucked up spinning ball of mud we call Earth. Some few of us will see a couple of months of the next year but then that’s it.

  I have noticed a marked difference in my mental state between when I smoke the sacrament and when it starts to wear off. I have my greatest moments of lucidity immediately after breathing the fumes of the holy crystals into my lungs. It’s almost as if there are two people within my mind, the still sane person who comes back out after smoking and the emotionally driven beast that reasserts itself the following day. My guilt over the abominable things I have done when the meth wears off, the worry of my assured soon approaching death and my fear of the other damned souls here weigh upon me when I regain my senses. Some have begged the High Priest for additional doses, only to be refused. Teams are sent out scouring the state in a desperate search to find every last drop of whatever ingredients are left. I swear to the Dark Lady that we have raided every Wal-Mart, Kmart and every other such store. Now we concentrate on the smaller stores, the Walgreens and small pharmacies. If we can get the raw ingredients to cook with, the High Priest will give extra sacrament. Having to share the life prolonging drug with so many people the quantity needed is actually quite a lot. It takes a shit load of diet and cold medicine to make even the smallest batch.

  And now for the weather...the weather is as fucked as we are. With all the shit happening, nobody had been paying any attention at all to the climate. The temperature has been well into the nineties all through December and into January, well above what the thermometer should read. On January first the mercury fell into the teens and stayed that way through the third. It was an insane cold snap that caught us off guard, forcing us to scramble for heat. The freezing winds came in and practically froze the ravenous undead in their tracks. The walking dead cannot deal with the cold, having no discernible metabolism to generate body heat.

  Seeing the effects the cold of winter brings to the undead brought the idea that we should relocate up north either now or when the spring comes. Unfortunately, to move up north now would be an impossibility. Our search teams tell us there is no way to get past southern Georgia, the snows are so deep. The further north they go, the thicker the blanket of snow and the colder it becomes. There is no more electricity past Atlanta or so and the temperature is well below zero with winds so bitter frostbite sets in within minutes to exposed, living skin. High Priest nixed the idea for now, when the spring thaw returns then he will consider it again. Not only will we need to find a suitable place to call our new home first, we will need a reserve of the sacrament before we move to make up for the cook time we will lose.

  The cold snap only served to start numerous fires. More than a few neglected heating systems kicked on automatically, starting fires that quickly engulfed whole buildings. With no one to fight the small fires, the flames quickly turned into inferno’s that engulfed whole blocks. The fires burned and smoldered for days, only being extinguished by an extremely powerful hurricane that came at us from somewhere in the Atlantic. As soon as the cold departed, the heat returned, seemingly hotter than before.

  Between the eighth of January and the eleventh, a storm of such strength as I have never seen before, steam rolled into Florida. Rain, wind and hail created a swatch of destruction from one coast to the other. Very few buildings were left undamaged, including ours. The section of the building that had once been used as the junkyards offices (the section that had been turned into a makeshift barracks for the women) collapsed under the storms furious assault. The only bright side to the weird weather was the fact that it eliminated a butt load of the parasite controlled corpses that wander the land.

  Once the hurricane passed the temperature returned to its abnormally high heat. With all the humidity in the air from the tempest it feels like I’m being basted and roasted in a huge damn oven. The weather has gone as mad as the rest of the world and I’m sure that the greenhouse gasses and the sudden stoppage of their production (with the fall of civilization), combined with the nuclear weapons that had been detonated in the last days of the madness have caused it.

  We lost two people since my last entry and another hasn’t been seen for at least two weeks. One guy had been complaining bitterly of the constant itch of the parasite and had been using a bottle (at least) of calamine lotion, aloe or whatever he could find each day. His scratching and itching of himself became a compulsive habit and he was always seen scratching himself raw. He ended up digging his nails into his flesh with such vigor that blood flowed from his self inflicted wounds. He scratched the skin off of his arms, legs, chest and face (in fact every part of his body that he could reach) and I swear he even ripped into his muscle tissue in his madness. Even before he ripped open his jugular and bled out he was an ugly mess to behold. Dried and caked blood covered his scabbed and scarred body; I don’t even think he realized what he was doing to himself. For the most part we left him alone as there was absolutely nothing we could do to help him. He died alone, nobody wanted to be around him and his compulsive, insane behavior.

  The other confirmed death was that of a woman. She was flakey to begin with, being unstable mentally. She was more than fifty percent covered in the scarlet (more than I am) and had been raving on and off of voices and whispers in her head. Before she ate the barrel of a revolver she had tore so much of her own long blonde hair out that she was practically bald, with only patches of hair left clinging tenuously to her scalp. She took the easy way out, the coward’s way, so we dumped her body to rot in the ditch along with the remains of the zeds that we had destroyed.

  The missing man, who either went AWOL or was murdered (as he wasn’t well liked by many of the group), I still keep on the rolls as MIA. If he remains MIA for another month then I’ll officially count him as dead and remove him from our lists. Unless of course, we come across his body or he shows up somewhere.

  Our numbers stand at twenty-nine present and accounted for with one MIA.

  28 January 2013

  Six days ago the guerrilla war between us and the immune heated up. Those bastards started booby-trapping isolated stores where they had seen us looting previously. Obviously there a few among them that have had some military training since the traps consist mainly of claymore mines activated by tripwires. While I don’t believe that they actually know the reason for the seemingly odd choices of supplies we scavenge, none of us here want them to figure it out. Two men were lost in an instant, having been blown to kingdom come when their team went out to scrounge for more cooking ingredients. The casualties were of course regrettable, without a doubt they will be revenged. High Priest thinks the immune are getting too close to figuring out what exactly we’re raiding for. It’s plain to see that they have taken note of where we’re going even if they don’t know why.

  Five days ago I started an impromptu course teaching a few people on how to create improvised explosive devices. Finding the explosives is easy, there are shells packed with high explosives in many of the tanks left over from when martial law was declared. For three days I drilled and drilled the three men on how to dismantle the shells and extract the explosives. Then I showed them how to craft simple remote detonation devices made from garage door openers and cell phones. My best student, Jerry, caught on quickly and shows an aptitude for creating the explosive packages. He’s also a bit of a firebug to begin with. He’s quite the pyromaniac, always tending to the bonfire in the junkyard and starring endlessly into the flames depths. I placed in him charge of the newly created team, confident in his abilities.

  By the end of the training I was certain that our new bomb team would wreak havoc on the enemy. Yesterday came their first real test of their newly learned skills and they passed with flying colors.


  The uninfected had started to wise up and had started to daily draw off many of the abominable undead away from the prison grounds. The tactic of shouting, firing off their weapons into the zeds and the simple fact that the flesh craving monstrosities would follow any living soul for miles is now general knowledge. Every day they have to clear their perimeter and there are really only a couple of routes they can take to draw off the hungering dead. The team planted the IED on one of those routes and simply waited for the day that the enemy used it. The timing was perfect, the blast actually lifted up the APC and sent it tumbling, in flames, to lie broken and burning by the side of the fresh crater. One of the enemy was lucky and survived the blast and impact. Even though the team eagerly chased him through the streets he somehow made it back to the safety of the prison. Hopefully the wounds he sustained will soon kill him too. In a way it’s fine one of them got away, having a survivor report back to the rest of his comrades will further serve to unnerve them.

  The war is on now. C’mon at me bro, I got plans for you. Our enemies will soon fall. I’m actually excited by the chance to put my Abrams into action. I’m going to run through them like grain through a goose.

  On a side note we found the remains of the MIA. There wasn’t much left of him, we identified his body by one of his tattoos. His mutilated and mangled body was found stuffed into the trunk of an old, rusty, junk car in the back of the lot. Every bone in his body had been shattered, somebody must have continued pummeling his body long after he died. So thoroughly had the corpse been beaten that the only thing holding it together was muscle and what unbroken skin remained. Even though the Omni had resurrected his broken body it was in such a mangled state that the thing could do nothing but uselessly squirm in its confinement.

  We number twenty seven souls under Yama-Kali’s control.

  3 February 2013

  Victory. I love it. It’s always good to be on the winning side. The city is now under our complete control. The vast majority of the immune that had holed up in the prison are dead. Whatever survivors remain are trapped in their buildings, surrounded by a legion of the undead.

  This morning, before the break of dawn, the High Priest blessed us while the Priestesses gave us the sacrament. We have been planning this battle for a week. The life extending medicine was given a day early, our heads would have to be as clear as possible.

  Almost fifty percent of my body is covered in the cursed scarlet. Many of the infected here are further along than I. A few of those people are showing early signs of schizophrenia, mixed with an overpowering sense of anger, both from the insidious parasite and a sense of their own impending doom.

  There is an old man here (the old bastard is seventy-three years of age), with the most advanced case of us all. The old bird is a tough one, He’s still capable of puttin’ in a hard day’s work but it’s obvious the disease is starting to take over his mind. He’s gotten a slight facial tic with his eye going whenever he gets stressed now and he told me, in confidence, that he can ‘hear’ the parasite ‘whispering’ in his brain. His body is more than sixty percent covered in deep, big, red blotches and small dark spots are starting to become apparent in his mouth and under his nails. In another month or two we’re either going to have to kill him or exile him. We’ll probably kill him though, Can’t have a madman running around that might decide on trying to kill us in his insanity. There’s enough of that already.

  I’ve gotten off track, it’s was only eighteen hours ago since I smoked and already my concentration is failing. Along with the madness and the scarlet comes a slowly building craving for the taste of human flesh. I try to fight it but I can never be free of it, it is always there. For the most part, the rest of those here have stopped fighting the terrible desire, giving into it and relishing the hunger. We literally killed dozens of the enemy, their bodies will not go to waste around here. One of the men who works for Joe used to slaughter and clean pigs, he was a natural at butchering the bodies of the fallen human ‘cattle’. Cuttin’ people up was surprisingly like slicin’ up a fat porker he explained to us, it was hilarious when he told us that’s why some cultures that practiced cannibalism called humans ‘long-pig’. Those cannibal cultures chose to hunt their fellow man, we however are driven to it against our will (at least at first). I may fall to the temptation like the rest have. Yama-Kali knows I feel guilty about it now, I did have some of the mouth-watering meat at the celebration tonight but it was almost a mandatory thing with everyone taking at least a ritual mouthful. There seems to be calming and sleep inducing effect with the parasite inside of us when it gets the meal it desires. Those who eat their fill of it later fall into a deep, restful sleep. Makes me jelly, I haven’t slept well for weeks.

  Our lives are measured in months in the best case, in the worst scenario it’s measured in days. No matter how I fight it I will become one of my fellow cannibals. The only question is how long I can survive without losing my mind to the point they kill me. The old man may have the most advanced case but all of us are barely a few months behind him. I can see most of us hitting that critical stage of no return at about the same time. I’m just going to try to stay by Priest’s side and do whatever I have to do, to ensure both his and my survival.

  I’m off track again. The only casualty we suffered was the pyro that blew himself (and the surrounding houses) into pieces. Whatever, I trained others to replace him. One less prick to worry about. All he had to do was use one or two of the munitions to destroy the electrical substation that routed power to the prison. Dumbass used way too many, obviously not realizing just how huge the resulting explosion would be. Either that or he decided to go out in one glorious gout of flame, ending his miserable life in an instant.

  The explosion was the opening act of our deadly play, for the next act we rolled ‘hot’ into the enemy compound.

  We caught them completely off guard. I had thought they would have tried to build defenses like we had. Turns out they hadn’t done anything that we feared of while planning. It got my blood flowing, being in combat again, no matter that the enemy couldn’t fight back for shit. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Hard fought victories are grand but easy slaughters are so much better. Blowing apart the more important buildings, with the enemy trapped inside, did a lot to help satiate my anger (that and cutting them in half with machine gun fire). The tanks main weapon is a thing of destructive beauty. The smoke, fire and death it dealt out was astounding and merciless. The fact that they had working back-up generators showed they had done some planning at least for the eventual loss of electricity. Their efforts didn’t matter, as soon as the accompanying APC radioed me that the lights were still on it took me no time at all to figure out which building provided the power. With my steel dragon’s wicked breath I mangled the Detroit Diesels and the whole building that housed them. There may still be survivors inside some of the buildings but they aren’t going to be able to get past the thousand or so zeds we filled the compound’s grounds with. That was act three, it commenced directly after we gathered up the bodies of the long-pigs and gutted them.

  With the entails and leftovers from the carcasses of the long-pigs we made a trail to where a huge herd of hungering undead had been rounded up previously with the help of ammonia. Zombie rustling we call it, it’s a sport that a number of us had gotten proficient at. Between the undead’s fear of the ammonia and their greed for the fresh flesh it was easy to control the herd. Once we packed the grounds full we locked the gates behind them. Ain’t none of them gettin’ out of there even if they lived through our attack, if they do we’ll be back and lay waste to them again. If there are survivors and we have to go back again to finish them off, it will only result in new meat for us. There are always more storage freezers to be found scattered around with the detritus of the world’s collapse. For now, all our freezers are full.

  There are twenty-six of us.

  16 March 2013

  There’s a boiling anger inside of me, inside of all of us here
. Every day, the anger gets a little bit stronger. I find even the slightest problem or disappointment aggravates the hell out of me, tempting me to lose control and lash out. I think it’s only because of my military discipline that I can control myself so well, the others here have a much harder time of it. In the past month there have been a lot of fights, a lot of bickering and snide remarks, so much so that we’ve had to institute a penal code for the greater offenses. Since physical altercations have become so common, the penalty is a simple lecture to the offenders to remind them that the anger they feel is due to the subtle influence of the Omni (as long as no serious injury results). When someone gets carried away in their aggression and actually injures another to the point that they have to be taken out of their work detail, then they get punished. High Priest holds a court, with the Priestess in attendance, and acts as both judge and jury. The offenders brought before him for justice are subject to anything from a few lashes of the whip for small harms, to execution in the case of murder. I feel the High Priest is wise in this, a public whipping serves as an effective deterrent for both the offender and the rest of the men. Twice now we’ve had to discipline violent behavior with ten lashes and hopefully we won’t have to start publicly executing anyone. It fell on me to administer the punishment, and it’s actually an honor. To be trusted enough by the High Priest to carry out his mandates shows his trust in me. Not to mention I get the chance to relish the feeling of a satiated anger by drawing blood.

  Over fifty percent of my body has turned scarlet, just like everyone else. The High Priest, his Priestesses, Joe and myself had a long discussion on our largest personnel problem. We all know full well that with the scarlet comes the madness and all of us will be affected by it. No longer can we just simply execute someone just because a certain amount of his skin has turned the deep, damning red. Where we used to preemptively eliminate someone who reached seventy percent coverage, now we don’t. The old man I wrote of earlier, the one who has the most advanced case, is still with us, although under the old rules he would be worm dirt by now. The old man is holding together well, still capable of maintaining control mentally, albeit his facial tic has gotten much worse. When the time drew near that I would normally have had to put a couple of slugs in his head, the group as a whole started rumbling about the practice. All of us are getting near that point and we would have a mutiny on our hands if I actually had executed the old guy. All of the men here see themselves in the old dude, all of them fear being murdered for no other reason than that they are suffering from the Omni. The consensus was turning into fleeing the compound before I came for them, or trying to overthrow the High Priest and risking trying to manufacture the meth themselves in the next couple of months. Or they would try to just kill Joe and me and try to somehow force the High Priest to cook for them, turn him into a slave instead of the leader. So we changed the rules. None will now be eliminated simply because they have reached a certain percentage of coverage. Now we will wait until the madness turns them into a clear and present danger to the rest of the group. When everyone can agree that the person must go, then we will execute them. Publicly. Ritually. Painfully. Let the men have a chance to prove they can control themselves, let them have the hope of a chance they can live a few shitty months longer. It’s all we really have left, a few months, a year at the most. Then those who lose control we will brutalize in front of everyone to serve as a lesson to control yourself or die horribly. Nobody is forced to stay here though, they can leave at anytime they choose. Of course, nobody will. To leave the sacrament behind will result in death in only a few short days.