100 Days of Death

by Ellingsen, Ray

  The broadcast suddenly pixilated, and bright moving dots of color obscured the images. The only audio was a high-pitched whine. After watching this (with the volume down) for ten minutes I gave up and shut off the television.

  Albert was still asleep at 1 p.m. so I went up on to the roof to look around. It was still overcast and drizzling. I saw movement up near the end of the block several times and could hear an eerie moaning wail off in the distance somewhere, but other than that it was quiet.

  I saw Albert’s discarded clothes in the front yard and the pile of carcasses across the street. I had ignored Dale’s bloated corpse on the driveway but knew I would have to deal with it all at some point.

  It was when I glanced at the bodies across the street that I saw it. At first my mind didn’t register it, but then it hit me. Dawn’s front driveway gate was wide open. I had definitely secured everything there when I left the other day. A wave of guilt washed over me.

  I must have procrastinated at my front gate for twenty minutes before I finally unlocked it and ventured over to Dawn’s house. I had thought about waking Albert to bring him with me, but decided to leave him a note instead. I mentioned in my note to hold off eating until I got back (my passive aggressive way of saying “don’t eat all my f---ing food while I’m gone”).

  I delicately stepped over all the bodies in the yard and stopped near the open gate. I peered down the driveway and listened for a few minutes, trying not to gag at the horrid smell of the dead. At least there was no music playing, but the silence was even more unsettling.

  I walked up Dawn’s driveway alongside her house. I scanned her back yard and then went up onto her back porch. The French doors leading to her master bedroom were askew. The interior was dark. Several of the window panes were broken. A sinking feeling latched on to me as I contemplated what to do.

  My mind screamed at me to just leave. After all, Dawn was obviously toast…she had probably tried to hug the damned things while they ate her. I knew I was going in anyway. I’m an idiot. I let out a sigh and switched on the Surefire light mounted on my carbine.

  As I entered the bedroom, glass crunched under my feet. The room was cold and musty, in sharp contrast to my last visit here. The Surefire pierced the darkness, revealing a massive amount of blood on the sheets of the bed. A bloody trail led out of the bedroom and into the hall. I stopped halfway down the hallway when I heard movement around the corner. My internal voice reminded me that coming in the house was a terrible idea.

  A person came around the corner toward me, less than twenty feet away. It was an undead male, blood caked from its mouth to its stomach. The smell of it pushed at me like a shockwave. I felt trapped in the tight confines of the dark, cold hallway.

  I wanted to turn and run but couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I was suddenly more terrified than I have ever been. It was like every childhood nightmare I ever had come to life. I choked down my panic, took aim, and fired into the thing’s head. A flap of skin on the side of its skull flipped up like a toupee caught in the wind.

  The creature snarled and bared its teeth. I fired two more times in quick succession, both rounds hitting the thing between the eyes. It fell into the wall, bounced and collapsed to the floor with a splat. Its leg kicked out, twitching spasmodically and hitting a stand holding a ceramic bowl of potpourri. The bowl shattered when it hit the floor, echoing through the house.

  Bloody hell! Could I have made any more damn noise? I backed up against the wall and waited. My heartbeat pounded in my head. The silence was deafening. Finally, I moved forward, stepped over the now dead thing, and cleared the rest of the house. There was no sign of Dawn or anything else anywhere. I went out the front door, too chicken to go through the back of the house again.

  When I walked through my front door, Chloe greeted me with enthusiasm. Albert was up and sitting at the kitchen table finishing off the rest of my cereal. I guess he didn’t get the note.

  When he asked where I had been I told him I was out visiting the neighbors. “You still have neighbors?” he asked.

  After stripping my gear and cleaning my carbine, I sat down with Albert to discuss our future plans (or lack thereof). We both danced around the subject of Albert staying around permanently until I finally told him that we should stick together because there was safety in numbers.

  The look of relief on his face was almost comical. He asked me what would happen next. Up until now my game plan consisted of A) Don’t go crazy again, and B) Don’t get eaten by those things. I know, not the most brilliant strategy ever devised, but thinking about long term goals was pretty depressing.

  We discussed the evacuation shelters, but after watching the reception Gerald Ritchie received at the Pasadena Center, I wasn’t about to take any chances. When I told Albert my thoughts he just nodded.

  As he poured the last of my cereal into his bowl he looked at me and said, “I’m sorry about eating so much. It’s just that I haven’t had any food in three days.”

  While I was a little ashamed that I had been critical of his eating, it was a perfect time to bring up the food storage issue. I told him we could probably hit the local grocery stores but I wasn’t very confident there would be anything left there.

  Albert owl blinked a few times at me and then said, “Why don’t we just try the Bishop’s storehouse up in Sylmar (an area just north of us)?”

  “The Bishop’s what?” I asked.

  Albert began to explain that when he was attending the Studio City ward he volunteered to work in the Bishop’s storehouse two days a week. When he saw me staring blankly at him, Albert added that he was a member of the Mormon Church.

  “You’re a Mormon?” I asked incredulously.

  Albert actually looked a little insulted by this but went on to tell me that the Bishop’s storehouse was basically a grocery store for Mormons.

  I told him that I was pretty sure the Mormons would have cleaned the place out by now, but Albert was adamant that there would be supplies there. We discussed it for a few more minutes and decided that we should plan a trip up there soon.

  At one point, our discussion turned to my trip to the Do It Center and I mentioned the bikers I had seen. He nodded and said he knew about a group of guys that fit their description and that they lived in a junkyard not far from the storehouse we are planning to visit.

  I suddenly got concerned, but Albert assured me they had no idea about the storage building. I got out a map and had him point out both the junkyard and the Mormon food supply. We will have to take a longer route to avoid the biker’s area and just hope they aren’t out and about when we get there.

  Later in the day, I opened my safe and showed Albert my firearms. I had planned to give Albert my Ruger .22 caliber rifle to use (since I had already built a silencer for it), but when he saw my vintage WW2 M-1 carbine, he about crapped himself. He went on and on about how his Grandfather had one and it was the first gun he ever learned to shoot.

  After listening to him rave about what a great gun it was, I didn’t have the heart to not let him use it. I grumbled to myself that I’d have to build a sound suppressor for it, but what the hell, I don’t really have anything better to do.

  DAY 18

  Last night while I was building a sound suppressor for the M-1, I heard several planes fly over my house.

  I opened the door to Albert’s room to see if he wanted to go check it out, but he was out cold, snoring loud enough to wake attract the dead. I grabbed my carbine and went out the back door and up onto the roof. Without the city lights shining, the stars lit up the sky.

  By the time I got on the roof nearly a dozen more large planes were rumbling overhead in formation, flying north. I couldn’t tell what kind of planes they were other than they were prop driven, huge, and noisy as hell…The final evacuation, maybe. But to where? I hoped Gerald Ritchie would be on air in the morning with some answers.

/>   As the planes receded into the distance, I heard what sounded like a wave coming up the street. First a few, then what seemed like dozens of undead ran up the street, heading in the direction of the receding planes. This went on for almost five minutes. When I estimated that hundreds had passed, a chill ran down my spine. I had no idea there were that many of Them so close by.

  I sat there on my roof, cowering and shivering, too afraid to move for fear of drawing their attention. Finally, the last of Them disappeared up the street. As I recovered, I thought to myself, those monsters must have driven themselves nuts trying to figure out what to run after during the last thunderstorm.

  This morning Albert and I took the M-1 carbine out behind the garage to test the silencer. Firing it made more noise than I would prefer, sounding a little like hitting a 2x4 with a rubber mallet, but the trade-off is that Albert seems familiar with the weapon. That will help if we get into trouble.

  While I was waiting for Gerald’s report to come on, I went in to the front bathroom to put away some towels. I glanced down at the toilet and noticed what looked like little red flakes all over the toilet seat. I bent closer to see what they were and then recoiled in disgust.

  “Ghaahh! Crabs!” I yelled involuntarily.

  I stomped into the kitchen to find Albert rooting through the cupboards and, of course, scratching himself.

  As calmly as possible I told Albert he had a problem. He was pretty horrified by the news and seemed to have absolutely no idea how it could have happened. I told him it was most likely a gift from Cindy. As I said it, a thought struck me which seriously pissed me off. I suddenly wondered what else she could have given him.

  If Albert got HIV or something equally as heinous…When I suggested this he turned white. I asked him why he didn’t wear a condom. He looked at me and whined that he did, every time. It took me almost fifteen minutes to calm Albert down and convince him that he was probably ok, but that we did need to take care of the crabs.

  I wanted to catch Gerald Ritchie’s broadcast but Albert was so freaked out that he was ready to take a flame thrower to his privates. I thought of my neighbors up the street who had three kids. On the few occasions I had spoken with the dad, he had complained about his kids always bringing home some disease from the other kids at school.

  If they hadn’t cleared everything out when they left, they probably had something in their medicine cabinet to deal with Albert’s problem. If nothing else, the dad was about Albert’s size and we could at least find him something to wear other than my work out sweats (note to self: burn work-out shorts when Albert is done with them).

  The walk up the block was nerve wracking. After seeing so many of those things last night I kept thinking they would all suddenly jump out of the woodwork. We made it to the neighbor’s house without incident, although the silence all around was spooky as hell. We went around back and I quietly tried all the windows and doors. No luck. I was getting ready to break a window when Albert lifted up a pot and retrieved the spare key.

  We let ourselves in and cleared every room. The house was pristine. All the furniture was covered with sheets as if they expected to return at some point. Albert bee lined for the bathroom but stood helplessly, as he didn’t know what to look for. I found a box of RID lice treatment under the sink. There were still plenty of clothes in the closet for Albert to choose from.

  We got back to my house in time for me to catch the last ten minutes of Gerald Ritchie’s report. Albert wasn’t sure what to do so I told him he’d need to shave himself and follow the instructions on the box. Honestly, I was trying to pay attention to the broadcast and didn’t give Albert’s dilemma much thought.

  Gerald reported that Los Angeles has officially been abandoned. While authorities have promised to return for more refugees, Ritchie speculated that the government has probably cut their losses and will not be returning. The government’s official statement is that until the plague has died off, all the major cities will be considered quarantined areas. Citizens are being urged to stay away from the infected and get out of the cities any way they can. Gerald closed with his trademark phrase and the broadcast ended.

  After the report I noticed that Albert still hadn’t come out of the bathroom. When he finally did come out, I was speechless. Apparently, he had taken my off-hand comment about shaving a little too seriously. While I presume he shaved where he was supposed to, he took the liberty to shave his head, eyebrows, and every other place on his body that had hair. He also cleaned every surface in the bathroom with rubbing alcohol.

  Albert waited patiently for me to stop laughing my ass off and then asked me if there was anything else he needed to do. When I couldn’t stop laughing I think he finally realized he went too far.

  I told him that Chloe needed to go out just as an excuse to get away from him so he could reclaim some dignity. I followed the dog as she wandered around outside the house. As we came to the front yard I saw the remnants of Albert’s clothes from the first night still lying in the grass. Next to them was his Louisville Slugger.

  I picked up the splintered bat and noticed dried blood and long, dark hair stuck in the cracks. It dawned on me why Albert had avoided mentioning what happened to Cindy. I picked up

  Albert’s discarded clothes with the end of the bat and deposited the whole mess into my trash barrel.

  As I closed the lid, I mused that after experiencing crabs, maybe now Albert wouldn’t feel so bad about what he probably had to do to his girlfriend.

  DAY 19

  Today Albert and I attended to a grisly task.

  When I took Chloe out this morning I finally realized that there were almost thirty dead bodies lying in front of my house. I can’t even begin to describe the stench that was permeating everything around me.

  A month ago, this situation would have shocked me to the core, but now, dealing with a pile of dead bodies had somehow made it to the bottom of my priority list. The worst part is that not all the bodies are (or were) human. Over the last week, the rat and crow population has grown to enormous proportions. Every day I shoot at least a half dozen of the hairy, diseased, little shits. I avoided killing the crows until now but this morning I had finally had enough of them.

  While Chloe was doing her business the crows cawed a chorus from the trees overhead. I put her back into the house and went up onto the roof with my .22 carbine. I saw a dozen crows picking at the carcasses across the street and took aim. The first one I hit screeched and flopped around before dying. The neighborhood went quite in an instant, as if someone flipped a switch. I took aim at a second crow but before I could fire the whole group of them took to the air.

  Dozens of crows abandoned the trees and they all circled overhead. The cawing began again but this time it was one continuous barrage of noise. I fired into the black cloud of flapping wings a half-dozen times. Two crows dropped out of the sky. The rest shifted direction and disappeared into the west.

  I watched them until they were just a small dot against the dark, overcast sky. My stomach churned. I had the sense that I had just made some enemies who would not forget or forgive my actions.

  When I told Albert that we would have to do something with the dead, he suggested putting them into the empty pool down the street. When we had gone to my neighbor’s house to get the lice medication and Albert’s new wardrobe, he had noticed that their pool was empty. I hadn’t even noticed that they had a pool.

  Albert laid out a plan to roll each of the carcasses onto a makeshift litter with broom handles so we wouldn’t have to touch the bodies. We could put them into the back of my newly acquired gardening truck and haul them to the neighbor’s house. We donned glasses, filter masks, latex gloves, and rain jackets (I had an extra one for Albert) and went to go get the truck.

  The truck didn’t want to start but finally did (getting a charger from an auto parts store just made it to the top of my to-do list). W
e backed the truck right up onto Dawn’s front yard and began. It was miserable, unsanitary, nauseating work. Twice Albert threw up, but he kept going. When we got to the neighbor’s house with the first load, we backed the truck up near the edge of the pool.

  Albert had placed a 2x4 board with a rope tied to its center in the bed of the truck near the cab and ran the rope down past the tailgate before we loaded the bodies. He and I pulled on the rope and after straining for a moment, the whole load began to slide off the tailgate.

  The bodies landed in a heap at the edge of the pool and we pushed them into the deep end with the broomsticks.

  It took us three loads and nearly five hours to take care of all the bodies. It was slow work that was compounded by the fact that we had to be quiet and were constantly stopping to be wary of any more undead that might be lurking about.

  It began to rain heavily during our second haul. The noisy downpour lulled us into a false sense of security. We were hefting Dale’s fat carcass into the truck on our last load when Albert froze, dropped his end of the litter, and pointed across the street. I was achy, dirty, and sweating, despite the freezing rain, and in no mood for any delays. I glared at Albert for a moment before turning to look at what he was pointing at.

  Across the street, someone was walking on the sidewalk, heading toward Dawn’s house. I couldn’t see them clearly because of the rain smearing my goggles, but I could tell that the person was rail thin and ragged looking. Stringy shoulder-length black hair hung in a tangle off their head, and I realized it was wearing the remains of a nightgown. I froze, and we watched in silence as it stopped and stretched its neck, sniffing the air in the tell-tale characteristic of the infected.

  I was still holding my end of the hammock and motioned for Albert to shoot the thing. Albert vigorously shook his head “no”. The creature started to walk across the street toward us.