by Will Lemen
ZOMBIE'S DOOM?
"Chronicles of Jack Doom"
A ZOMBIE NOVEL SEQUEL
By Will Lemen
Copyright 2015 - Will Lemen - All Rights Reserved
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This book contains graphic violence and adult language, reader discretion is advised!
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my faithful dog "Tecumseh" who died May 28th 2015.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ALONE WITH ZOMBIES, NATURALLY
AS IF IT WERE YESTERDAY
THE JOURNEY BEGINS! AGAIN!
MEANWHILE BACK ABOARD THE MOTHER SHIP
THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW
OKLAHOMA IS OK
THE SHAWNEE COMPOUND
INDIANA WANTS ME
THE SISTERS TOO
ADJUSTMENTS MUST BE MADE
THINGS CHANGE
REUNITING WITH THE CLUMP
DEREK THE RED
CRIPPLING TIMES
BETH
THE BADLANDS OF INDIANA
TUNNEL RATS
THE FORTRESS
THE CAUCASIAN
SERGEANT
CAPTAIN XARR TO THE RESCUE
ALONE WITH ZOMBIES, NATURALLY
It has been well over a year since the zombie apocalypse began, and my family and I climbed out of that god forsaken burnt-out Abram's battle tank that was our only sanctuary from the massive horde of the dead that had descended upon us.
Over a year after the Sarge, my so-called friend, left us behind to fend for ourselves against that monumental army of zombies; and the vicious prehistoric monsters that inadvertently saved our lives, or so I thought at the time.
After we did our stent inside the military tank, we were on our own again, not giving too much thought to the Sarge.
Although the thought of him and what he had done continued to fester in the back of my mind, our main concern was to find some transportation and get on with the chore of surviving this holocaust.
It has also been over a year now since everyone in my family except for me were killed, not even two days after we left the confines of the tank that had given us a safe refuge from the vast zombie legion.
I'm alone now, and from the looks of things, most of the population of the planet has either been killed, or has turned into one of those undead cannibalistic devils, or both.
I don't know if the Sarge and the girl he was with, Beth was her name. I don't know if they made it out of the area alive, I had other things to worry about at the time.
All I know for sure is that we were all being attacked by the massive advancing zombie horde that had us surrounded, and the Sarge hightailed it out of there in the only working vehicle we had.
On the one hand, I hope the Sarge and Beth didn't get out alive. Because at the time of their untimely departure, I took the liberty of expending several of my precious rounds of ammunition into the back tires of their getaway vehicle as they drove off into the preverbal sunset.
After all, they had left us standing there with our dicks in our hands (except for my wife of course) in the midst of thousands of ravenous zombies, with only a few bullets and an old WWII flamethrower to fight off those stinking maggot infested undead resurrected cannibals.
On the other hand, part of me really hopes that they made it out alive and are still roaming around the countryside somewhere.
A couple of days after the death of my family, after my sorrow had turned to an obsessive hunger for revenge, I began searching for the Sarge.
Not far from where the Sarge and the girl had abandoned us, I found what was left of the modified school bus that we had driven to the armory from the Sarge's strong hold.
It was definitely the Sarge's getaway vehicle that we had watched him and Beth drive away in, leaving us to fend for ourselves, the black bus with two gun ports built into the roof, the inverted snowplow blade attached to the front, there was no doubt that it was the bus I'd been searching for.
However, I found no sign of either the Sarge's, or of Beth's body, just a few bloody footprints that pointed me in a southwesterly direction, and told me that they had at least escaped the initial zombie onslaught.
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Beth, she was a good fighter and seemed to be on the ball for the short time that I knew her. That's one reason that I hope they're still alive.
However, in these times of trouble sometimes sacrifices have to be made, and if I have to sacrifice Beth as a means to the end of the Sarge's miserable existence, then tuff shit for Beth.
Although, the main reason that in the back of my mind I hoped that they had survived, at least I hoped the Sarge had survived, is that I wanted to find him and ask why he left my family and me in such a dire situation.
That is, just before I make that no good son-of-a-bitch'in piece of shit wish that he'd never been born.
Okay, I'll stop sugar coating it now.
Let me be completely clear on this subject.
I want to be the one that is totally and completely responsible for his long and agonizingly painful death.
I want no living person, no dead person, no prehistoric lizards, or anything else to have the pleasure of causing his death and watching him die.
I want to be the one that gets to watch him expire. I want to be the one that croaks him and sees him die right before my eyes, just me and me alone.
After all, the Sarge sacrificed my family, at least that's the way I see it, and he would have sacrificed me too if not for a quirk of fate that separated me from my loved ones just moments before their untimely and ultimate demise.
Now, I spend most of each of my lonely days looking for any signs of Beth and the Sarge.
I have followed one dead-end lead after another searching all over hell's creation and most of southern Texas for them.
For almost a year, my endeavor to find them has been met with no identifiable results.
Survival is paramount to me now, not because I give shit about living, hell everything that I had to live for is gone now, thanks to that chicken-shit Sergeant I used to call my friend.
No, survival is paramount to me now, because I want to stay alive long enough to find the Sarge and make him pay dearly for what he did to me, what he took away from me.
I'm going to look for that man until I find him or find that he is dead, or until I get murdered by something this piss-hole of a world has to offer up.
As he drove off into the mass of undead humanity in the bus that had all of the guns and ammo we needed to fight off the converging monsters, the last thing I heard him say or saw him do, was when he leaned out the door of the bus and yelled to me that he was sorry, sorry for leaving us there.
When I find him, he will be sorry all right, he'll be sorry he met me in the Marine Corps, he'll be sorry he found me and my family months earlier and took us to his compound. He'll be sorry that he drove off and left us all right. In short, he'll be damn sorry he ever heard of me, Jack Doom!
******
Many years earlier...
The Sarge and Jack met in boot
camp at M.C.R.D San Diego, that's the Marine Corps Recruit Depot for all of you slimy civilians out there.
That's where they suffered the rigors of becoming Marines together.
Then after graduating from boot camp, they were sent up the coast a few miles to the infantry training regiment at Camp Pendleton.
That's where they marched up and down the southern California hills until their legs were like steel trip-hammers and their minds had been molded into the perfect killing machines that the Marine Corps had intended for them to become.
When they had accomplished that part of their training, they received their M.O.S. (Military Occupational Specialty) and were attached to a unit that was sent to Afghanistan, and then later to Iraq.
The Sarge and Jack became what are known as Assaulters (Specialized Combat Troops). They stalked the enemy, staged ambushes, set booby traps, and generally harassed and killed as many of the enemy as possible.
They both showed a temperament for the job; however, Jack always seemed to be able to get into a certain mindset while doing the job at hand. A mindset that some of his fellow Marines said was scary.
It was not that he was so efficient that it was scary, or that his operational plans were so brilliant that it was scary, but they said that he was so cold hearted, callous, and brutal toward the enemy, and that he seemed not to have a conscience. That's when his fellow marines began to call him Jack Doom, of course that wasn't his real name.
Due to the covert nature of some of the operations Jack took part in, his real name is still classified.
And as you might have already guessed, I could tell you his real name, but then I'd have to kill you.
Anyway, the name stuck because they said it matched his personality, and that the enemy was "Doomed" when he was on a mission.
That was the type of scary that Jack was back in those days.
However, he looked at it like this, he had a job to do, the job was to kill the enemy, and he did his job very well.
After Jack returned home from the war, he put those days behind him and became a model citizen and a pillar of his community.
He never talked about his time in either Iraq or Afghanistan, or what he had done during the war. He never would tell his wife or his sons anything about his tour of duty there, and after a while they stopped asking.
Whenever the war would come up from time to time in different venues, he would quickly change the subject. All people really knew about him was that he was an ex-marine and that he had served over seas.
However, now things were different, now he had over a year in country under his belt fighting this new war, this zombie war.
He had re-honed his former skills to a very sharp edge, and added a few more capabilities to his skill set that were suitable for fighting off the undead, and he couldn't help but to think that if his Marine Corps buddies thought that he was scary back then, they'd shit down both legs if they could see him now.
******
Although my family is dead now, they are constantly on my mind, I think about them every day. I haven't forgot them, and I will never forget them.
I see their faces every night when I close my eyes to go to sleep, that is when I can go to sleep.
I remember the day that they died as if it were yesterday, and I am determined to use all of my skills old and new to track down the Sarge and make him pay for my loss.
I am determined to take everything from him, just as he took everything from me.
Back to Contents
AS IF IT WERE YESTERDAY
Almost in tears, Gin announced to our group.
"We've been in this hell-hole of a tank for three days; I can't stand it any longer! It stinks in here, and I'm hungry and thirsty."
"I can't take it anymore either mom, Bruce, Rich, and Dave are starting to get a little ripe," Jacob added. "I don't care what the rest of you do, but I gotta get out of here, and soon."
Jacob was 16 going on 46 thanks to the apocalypse. The plague, or virus, or whatever it was, had cheated him and his brother out of some of their childhood and they were never going to get it back, and there was nothing that I could do about that.
So I taught him and Billy as much as I could about everything I knew, from foraging for food to torturing (yes I said torturing) prisoners for information, and just let them become whatever they were going to become, and hoped that it would help them survive in this new zombie filled world.
"A little ripe? These guys reek enough to puke a maggot off a gut wagon," Billy stated, interjecting his own colloquial phrase.
"I hate to bring everyone down with the facts, but I think it probably stinks just as much out there as it does in here, most likely even more," I said. "There's thousands of dead and mutilated bodies outside fermenting in the sun. But, you're right, we can't stay in here much longer, we need food and water."
"We haven't heard any sounds out there for quite a while, at least twenty-four hours, except for that incessant sound of flies buzzing around the stacks of bodies," Billy said. "I vote we bail out of here and take our chances outside."
"All right, I guess we've got no other choice, besides some of the flies are starting to make their way in here, but I'll go first," I insisted.
******
Jack usually went first when there was any kind of danger lurking about. It's not that he particularly wanted to go first, but he felt that with his combat experience he had a better chance of surviving (or killing) anything that he and his family might meet up with. Even though his family were becoming quite good at killing zombies (and crazy humans), Jack still thought that it was better if he took the point (the lead) most of the time. After all, he was the Alpha Male of the group.
******
Stumbling around in the semi-darkness of the crowded tank, I made my way over our former friends who would had been rotting away before our very eyes, that is if it had been light enough within the confines of the tank for us to see them.
Pushing the hatch up and over its apex, the sound of a dull thump was barely heard over the millions of flies buzzing around, as the heavy cover plopped down on the severed head of one of the thousands of dismembered and decomposing corpses that littered the surrounding countryside and our tank. The large steel cover for all intent and purposes flattened the skull and caused the liquefied contents within the rapidly decomposing cranium to ooze out several of its orifices and run down the side of the tank's turret, staining it with a putrid yellowish-purple gelatin like substance.
I waited at the top of the turret for a few moments to allow my eyes to adjust to the sunlight that they hadn't seen in days. Then when I felt that my eyes had gotten used to the abundance of light, and I would be able to see any danger lurking outside of the tank, I continued on with my mission.
I slowly raised my head out of the tank's turret, stopping as my eyes crested the rim of the hatch. Turning my head to the right and then to the left, my eyes panned the 360 degrees of decaying fly infested carnage that lay before me.
"The only things that are moving are the flies and the snappers, and a whole hell of a lot of twitchers!" I whispered down to my family, coining new names we could use to describe the decapitated heads of the zombies that were still trying to bite whatever they could reach, and the spastic bodies of the now dead undead, just before inhaling an unknown number of flies with my next breath.
After flailing around for what seem like an eternity while choking on the squishy squirming bodies of the multitude of nasty insects that had invaded my mouth, I somehow finally cleared my mouth and throat and began to breath normally again with my hands cupped over my nose, and my lips clamped tightly shut.
My unabridged oxygen intake was short lived, as one way or another I still had to communicate with my family.
So I braved the unruly menacing flies and spoke to them again.
"There are too many flies out here," I said, sliding back down into the tank and scraping the last fly from between my cheek and gums with my tongu
e, before spitting it out onto the floor of the vehicle. "We're going to need something to cover our mouths and noses to keep the flies from creeping in them."
"You mean again?" Jacob asked with a slight smirk on his face.
"Yes, again!" I said, clearing my throat and spitting on the floor for effect.
"I don't have a scarf or a rag," Gin said. "I guess we could use some of these dead guys clothes?"
"I guess we'll have to," Billy said, pulling on Dave's shirt hard enough to rip the fabric and send buttons soaring in different directions around the interior of the tank.
With the morning light shinning in through the open hatch, Jacob spotted a metal storage box tucked neatly away behind where Bruce's headless body laid.
"Hold on a minute, look at this," he said. "Gas masks! This box has gas masks in it."
Packed tightly in the box were four gas masks (one for each of the tank's regular crewmembers) complete with chemical hoods, which Jacob quickly handed out to each of my family members.
"These are really cool," Jacob said, his voice muffled through the mask.
"All right lets go outside," I ordered, my voice also muffled.
As I began to climb out of the tank once more, I heard Billy say.
"Grab your guns!"
I stuck my head back down the hatch and told them.
"Leave the AK's we're out of ammo for them, just bring the 9mm weapons, the pistols and the Sub-2000, we'll get ammo for them in the armory, there's still plenty of ammo left in there, and plenty of M-4's in there too."
One by one, we crawled out of the tank, the rest of my family squinting as their eyes struggled to adapt to the brightness of the sun that they hadn't seen for three days and that was now temporarily blinding them.
"Holy crud!" Gin screamed, as her eyes adjusted to the daylight and she witnessed the full scope of the slaughter that surrounded us.
