Zournal (Book 1): It All Started

by Randall S. Merritt

  Zournal

  Volume I

  “It All Started”

  R S Merritt

  Text Copyright © 2016 Randall S Merritt

  All Rights Reserved

  I’ve been into the Zombie genre since I watched the original ‘Night of the Living Dead’. My family knows my love for cheesy zombie movies so over time we came up with ‘The Zombie Game’ which basically was hide and seek while making scary noises with the lights out. My wife eventually made us stop playing because of the nightmares and such. I dedicate this first book in this series to the awesome memories I have of ‘The Zombie Games’ we played and to the Beautiful woman who made us stop playing them. I’ll love you forever! Even though we all agree you are lame! J

  Table of Contents

  Entry 1: Hungover

  Entry 2: In the Dark

  Entry 3: Into the Dark

  Entry 4: Smurfette

  Entry 5: Shhhh….

  Entry 6: Still Pounding

  Entry 7: Rockin the Sentra

  Entry 8: In the Open

  Entry 9: Cleanup on Aisle 7

  Entry 10: Rhonda and John

  Entry 11: First Impressions

  Entry 12: Now What?

  Entry 13: Car Buying Made Easy

  Entry 14: Trapped

  Entry 15: …. or get off the pot

  Entry 16: Regroup

  Entry 17: Get Outta Dodge

  Entry 18: Best Laid Plans

  Entry 19: Sunday Drive

  Entry 20: Traffic Jam

  Entry 21: Rude Awakening

  Entry 22: Regina and Gunny

  Entry 23: Bootcamp

  Entry 24: Houdini

  Entry 25: Paperwork

  Entry 26: People are the Real Monsters

  Entry 27: I Can’t Believe That Worked

  Entry 28: Buy in Bulk

  Entry 29: Ann’s Story

  Entry 30: Life goes on

  Entry 31: Fortify

  Entry 32: #Apocalypse Issues

  Entry 33: Hair of the Dog

  Entry 34: Rock and a Hard Place

  Entry 35: North Bound

  Entry 36: Well that took forever

  Afterword

  Entry 1: Hungover

  My main memory of the beginning of the apocalypse is that of waking up with a really bitching hangover. The kind of hangover you get when you haven’t really been much of a drinker in the past and you decide to try and pick up the habit over a weekend. I had been drinking for medicinal purposes to help smooth over some of the less savory memories I had of recent events in my life. I had gotten dumped by my girlfriend of three years the week before. Of course, it was all her fault, probably, but towards the end I had been a real dick, hence the drinking. In addition to losing my girl, I had also managed to lose my job, most of my savings, and my car. I wandered into the apocalypse with a little bit less to lose than most people.

  I woke up on the floor of the apartment I didn’t have the rent money to stay in any longer covered in cat fur. More precisely, cat “hair”, my girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, had made a big deal about not getting a cat that shed so she had gotten a Siamese cat that cost too much. That way she could continue to wear black clothes without spending an hour with a lint brush every day. My theory on that had been why the hell did we need a cat if we were so paranoid about the possibility of cat hair. As with most arguments, I lost that one as well.

  I remember thinking to myself that as if the hangover wasn’t bad enough now I was going to have to figure out how to use a lint brush. Walking over to the window and looking out of my fourth-floor apartment made me wonder if maybe a hangover and some linty clothes should be my main concern.

  Looking down into the courtyard, I saw a couple of bushes on fire and watched a guy run past them without even slowing down to take in the flaming bushes. I didn’t think it looked like my apartment was close enough to catch on fire and assumed that someone would call the fire department and get it taken care of. The main thing I wanted to take care of right then was getting into the bedroom and laying down before I ended up hurling all over my living room. I stumbled into the bedroom, ripping off my clothes, and collapsed into the comfort of my nice cool sheets.

  When I woke up next, it was dark outside and the first thing I noticed was the distant wail of sirens. I walked over to my fridge to get some water and noted that I had evidently decided to drink the water along with everything else in the apartment during the binge of the day before. Or was it two days before at this point? I turned on the tap and filled up a glass and drained it, repeated that process until I felt slightly nauseous then went and sat down on my couch and flipped on the television.

  Every station just had the emergency alert signal on it. Hurricane, riots, locusts, floods, just what exactly had I drank my way through? Vaguely remembering the burning bushes from my last period of consciousness, I went and looked down into the courtyard again. It looked like there was still some embers glowing where the bushes had been but no more fire from what I could tell. Opening the window and leaning forward to try and get a closer look I was able to hear people yelling in the distance and the occasional sounds of gunfire, or possibly bottle rockets, who can really tell those apart? Based on how my head still felt I determined the best course of action would be to make myself a drink and go back to sleep.

  The next time I remember waking up it was bright and sunny outside. It looked like a full-scale war had been happening overnight. Trash was all over the place, fires burned in a few areas, windows were broken and I noticed a lot of odd looking mounds on the ground. The more I looked at the different mounds the less I wanted to believe what I was seeing. Either a lot of people were screwing with me as part of an elaborate prank or there were dead bodies in the courtyard. Since I have a total of about seven people on this planet I would consider friends the pranking theory did not seem to hold much water.

  Sticking my head out to take a closer look I noticed movement in the apartment across the courtyard. The apartment was on the third floor and what I saw had been the curtains moving. Either from a cat, or a person, or a freaking dragon for all I knew. The other thing that hit me all of a sudden was the quiet. Previously I had heard yelling and sirens and other things but there had always been the standard background noise. Now everything outside was just eerily quiet.

  I was starting to get a serious case of being freaked out. Like when you’re home alone in the shower and you close your eyes to rinse the shampoo out of your hair right as you think you hear footsteps in your bedroom. Except in this case there was no simple way to just open my eyes and get over it, preferably after rinsing off the shampoo versus burning my eyes again. The evidence was staring at me from down in the courtyard. Something was going on and no one appeared to be helping and this was seriously messed up. What the hell do you do in this kind of situation?

  My first thought was to check for weapons. I had an unsharpened samurai sword and a set of nunchaku my dad had gotten me for Christmas when I was about 13 and really into Karate. I rounded up some kitchen knives to accompany it and that was about it. I put the nunchaku safely out of my reach since the only thing I had ever really mastered with them was bashing myself in the nuts while twirling them around. I did manage to do that pretty much every time I picked them up though so at least I was consistent.

  At this point I had a samurai sword with no edge and some cheap ass steak knives. I briefly considered going back to bed and hoping it all blew over while I was sleeping. That had not happened so far though so I decided to check out my food situation. The food situation was not good. I had three cans of spaghetti sauce, one granola bar, a can of pinto beans, and some American cheese slices in the
fridge. I also still had half a bag of dried cat food that was like two years old since the cat had decided to only eat canned cat food. I went around and filled the tubs and sinks up with water since that was what you were supposed to do in the event of hurricanes. The I microwaved some beans with a couple slices of American cheese and sat down to wait.

  Entry 2: In the Dark

  The power went off earlier today. Since my last entry I’ve basically sat around in my musty smelling apartment sweating and wishing I had more food. Another little tidbit for anyone who may ever read this. A good idea is to fill up your bathtub and sinks with water in the event of an emergency in case you are unable to obtain fresh drinking water for a few days. A better idea is to clean out the bathtub prior to filling it up with water that you are going to end up drinking. One of the least boring parts of the last day or two has been wondering exactly what the clumpy thing I just drank was. Pretty freakin gross.

  Another thing that never gets talked about in the survival stories is where do you put your poop? I know I could flush it down the toilet but that would require me to use some of my pube coated soap scum drinking water to wash away my waste. As gross as my water was it was not a resource I figured I could afford to waste at this point. I thought up an alternative which basically consisted of the brilliant solution of a big pot and slinging the whole deal out the window when full. My hygiene had basically gone completely medieval in less than a week’s time.

  At this rate, I will starve to death before hygiene becomes a real issue. I’m down to two pieces of cheese, a couple of mints I found stuck together under the couch, and the aforementioned half a bag of expired dry cat food. I’m going to need the whole cast from the Food Network to come down and try to make this into something edible. Maybe some sort of French way to infuse the cat food with a cheesy center or something. My solution has been to shove cat food in my mouth and swallow as fast as I can then suck on a mint until the urge to hurl goes away. Then I wash it all down with a big yummy glass of pube water.

  I’ve been hearing stuff outside. Earlier today I heard what sounded like someone ripping my neighbor’s doors off the hinges and throwing it into the patio between our houses. When I finally got out from behind my couch and looked out the peephole in my front door I did see what looked like the neighbor’s door laying in the middle of the alcove. It looked like someone had basically ripped it off the hinges and thrown it out there so at least my hearing was pretty attuned.

  Whenever I look down into the courtyard now I see stuff has been moved around but after that first glimpse of someone in the apartment across from me I have not seen any sign of another human besides the lumps I see laying on the ground below. It seems like there are less lumps down there than the first time I looked but I wasn’t exactly tabulating everything into a spreadsheet so wasn’t sure how accurate my guess was. I can definitely tell now that the lumps are what appear to be dead bodies. Some of the bodies seem to be missing pieces and parts. I see one guy I think I recognize who is laid out almost immediately below me. He looks like he is just taking a nap on the ground except for he is missing most of the meat on his left arm and he’s got bugs walking all over him. He also appears to be covered in some of what I have been slinging out the window.

  The other bodies look like other people from this apartment complex. They’re laid out in different positions and poses but all seem to be missing some meat here or there. At least one person is laid out on their back and there is a crow currently perched on his chest eating his eyeballs. I’ve been trying not to spend too much time looking down into the courtyard.

  Speculation on what is going on and what I should do about it fills most of my time. The first day I had been attributing it to a Hurricane Scare or an Ebola scare or something like that where everyone was just kind of staying inside. As the days, have been going on, I’ve had a few scenarios come to mind. The one that seemed to make the most sense is what I’ve started thinking of as the “Red Dawn” scenario.

  For those of you who somehow have managed to not see one of the single best coming of age war type movies ever. Red Dawn is a movie about a bunch of kids who escape into the woods and become freedom fighter when the USA is invaded by a coalition of Russians and Cubans, or possibly Mexicans or Venezuelans or somebody from South America. The key comparison I was drawing between that movie and my current situation is that when they attack the USA they do it fast. Paratroopers and machine guns, no mercy kind of fast. They move in, shoot anybody who resists, and round up everyone else to take them to reeducation camps.

  I figure most of that could have happened while I was asleep. The Russians, Chinese, Martians or whoever came in and shot the ones who resisted and herded everyone else off to either reeducation camps or a big Martian buffet. It was either something like that or Zombies, the plague, man eating beetles… The main thing being that I need to figure out a way to deal with it. For right now, I think I’ll try soaking some cat food and cheese in a big bowl of pube water and choking that down while I sit in this musty ass apartment trying to figure out my next move. Considering I’m almost out of cat food I’m guessing the next move is going to have to take place outside the apartment.

  Entry 3: Into the Dark

  Notice how casual I sound in my last entry about the ‘next move’ taking place outside the apartment. At this point, the outside of the apartment has reached nightmare proportions in my mind. I have heard random bumps and growls and at least one distant screaming noise. In the interest of putting off this journey into the unknown a little bit longer let me go ahead and introduce myself to you.

  I figure it is a safe bet someone is reading this. If no one is reading this, then no one will know I bet so that is pretty much win-win. I’m actually hoping at some point maybe my mom gets to read it. She always thought I would make a great author. With that in mind I’ll try to keep my writing PG-13 for the most part. Hi Mom! For anyone else reading this I apologize in advance for the gratuitous editing of the F-Bomb and other expressions with words like “Poop” and whatever else I come up with. Feel free to substitute your own language and it will probably be more accurate. Then again my mom is married to a Marine so she’s probably heard more foul language than I even know.

  Assuming you are not my mom. My name is Steve Hankel. I’m a 22-year-old unemployed recent college graduate who is also recently single. I’m throwing in that single part in case I manage to hook up somewhere outside with a beautiful young thing who gets bored and wants to read this. As I mentioned my dad was a marine and my mom was a veterinarian assistant. Neither one of those things rubbed off on me as I am not a fan of most animals and I hate running and taking orders. Most of my survival skills have come to me from reading through the Hurricane Guides they throw in the stores every year down here in sunny Orlando, FL. Home of the mouse house and my alma mater, the University of Central Florida.

  If you are going to lose power in Orlando, FL I highly recommend doing it in December. If I had been stuck inside this apartment, for this long, with no power in the middle of June or July I would have probably already ventured out into the darkness. It gets ridiculously hot and humid and miserable here.

  At the point where you are writing and you just started to hit on a girl who does not exist by talking to her about the weather it is probably about the time you should stop procrastinating. Time to get off my thumb and execute on my half-ass plan. If you find this journal beside my corpse and read up to this part, then I recommend you not use what I’m fixing to write as a plan.

  The plan is to grab the samurai sword, wait until it gets dark, then sneak quietly into my neighbor’s apartment since it no longer has a door I should be able to get in. Once in there I’m hoping to find some food, some water, some weapons, something to help me plan my next step. If nothing else, there will be a window in there that I can use to look out into something besides the courtyard. No more writing for now, time to man up and get it done.

  Entry 4: Smurfette

&nbs
p; I’m going to start off this entry by saying that I am sitting on a toilet seat staring at a really hot woman with a really bad case of varicose veins. She’s also mostly naked and sleeping in a bathtub with a half-eaten cat on the floor.

  With that said, let’s get you up to date on how I ended up here. My plan pretty much died out before it got started when I realized I could not open my door without the damn hinges squeaking like crazy. My brave jaunt into the unknown was put on hold while I tried to find lube for the freaking door. I finally settled for ripping apart an old container of liquid soap I found under the counter in the bathroom. Pouring it over the hinges and slowly working the door back and forth seemed to have the effect I was looking for of keeping everything nice and quiet. I threw on my knapsack in which I had placed:

  · Three of the more dangerous looking steak knives