Just Another Day

by Jacob Louis Sims

  I lay there for a bit longer, savoring the thought of what I had just done, hoping that I would live to tell someone about it, before I dragged myself back to the kitchen and to my feet.

  After I downed two Vicodin (I pocketed that shit I found in the bar ‘cause you never know when you’re gonna need it) and chugged a glass of Mountain Dew, I stepped back into the alley with my M4 at the ready.

  The alley was still as clear as can be, all the way to 23. I limped my way up it, sometimes using the wall for support and sometimes not, and collapsed at the very end. My leg was ablaze and the Vicodin I took hadn’t yet kicked in. There was no fuckin’ way I was gonna be able to make another block on foot, let alone the eight or so miles it was to Streator. I needed some fuckin’ transportation and I needed it now. As I lay there on my side scanning for zombies, my eyes came across my salvation: two Humvee’s parked at the bridge, in standard road-block formation.

  “Fuck yeah,” I quietly said to myself as I used a nearby tree that I had dragged myself to as leverage to regain my feet. “I just hope one of ‘em runs…”

  I got to them in what seemed like a day and a half later, opened the door of the one closest to me - that had the name “The Zombie Slayers” stenciled down the side of it - threw in my ruck and crawled in behind it. I then passed out. When I woke back up, I could tell by the angle of the sun that a couple hours had passed, but I still had plenty of daylight left for the ride home. I slid into the drivers’ seat, buckled up (it’s a good habit to have), and gasped when I looked out the window. I nearly screamed like a little bitch, but was glad I didn’t.

  There were zombies everywhere. Everywhere.

  When we came out of the bar and saw the street cleared, I guess the fact that just the day before there were literally thousands of zombies crowding the streets had slipped my mind. I don’t fuckin’ know. And if the thought “Where the fuck are all the zombies at?” did cross my mind, it came and went so fast that it was forgotten as soon as it was thought. That’s how my mind works though - fucked up. If I don’t see something, it doesn’t exist, or at least it’s not worth thinking about. I’ve even forgotten that I forgot about something, how’s that for fucked up?

  What probably happened was, the zombies followed the retreating troops away from the bar, and came back in its general direction when the dipshit shooter started blasting away at O.K. and I. Either way, they were back and I was momentarily too stunned to move. After a bit I was able to move normal and think straight-ish again, but I was still fucked. Like I said, they were everywhere. There was even a pair of them standing right next to the drivers-side door, like mannequins. It’s a wonder they didn’t hear me moving around in the Humvee or see me get into the drivers’ seat. All I could do was sit and wait. I was just glad that the Vike’s had kicked in by then, ‘cause I was feeling goooooood. I was rollin’ balls (I hardly take any pills - almost never, not even shit like ibuprofen - so that shit was hitting me hard).

  I don’t know how long after - minutes or hours - but the deadly duo had walked off down the road, finally giving me a little privacy. My body was a wreck of pins and needles from sitting in the same position for god-knows how long, but I wasn’t gonna wait for them to go away before I tried anything. Fuck that. So I reached over to the toggle on the dash, pushed it to the start position, and laughed my ass off when the Hummer fired right up like it was brand new.

  I threw that bitch in drive and punched the gas, putting her in a quick, mean huey to get her aimed towards the bridge, and slammed into and tossed dozens of the zombie fucks in the process. It was awesome! Once I got her pointed in the right direction, I put the pedal to the floor and sped onto the bridge, laughing and yelling as I went, thinking about how Frank would’ve loved this shit.

  The military, in all their infinite wisdom, must have laid and disguised mines all over the bridge as a sort of preventative measure to try and keep the zombies hordes from crossing over the water into the uptown parts of Ottawa, and just forgot to place the proper and required warning signs alerting any live people that may use the bridge as a means of escape to the threat - I mean, if regular guys like Steve and the groomsmen could do it, why the fuck couldn’t the motherfucker’s whose job it was to do it do it? The idea was a very good one and was something that I agreed with completely… but there should’ve been some fuckin’ signs!!! Danger! Peligro! Watch the fuck out, stupid! Something!!!

  In a way, it was my own fault, though. I’ll admit it. When I was in Iraq, for the first year of the war back in 2003, lots of us troops thought it was funny to run over anything we saw in the road, we even made a game of it - you know, see who could hit what with which tire, that kind of thing? Was pretty fun. We’d run over everything, too, from soda cans to dead dogs, it didn’t matter.

  The “enemy” was a lot smarter than we gave them credit, and after seeing us dumb fucks playing our stupid games, started putting explosives in all that shit we hit. Brilliant tacticians, they were, and that’s no joke. Many people here in the States like to call all those people stupid, morons, and lots of other very bad things - of which I do not want to repeat ‘cause it’ll dirty up what I’m writing here - but they were far from it. I’ve seen some of the weapons they’ve made from nearly nothing, and they were extremely impressive - shit that would take some numb nuts here in the States a fuckin’ college degree to do. No shit.

  Anyways… In my joy to have gotten away from the horde, I forgot what I had learned in the far away desert, and ran over a dead zombie with the right rear tire, yelling “Hah-hah, right rear, motherfucker!!!” as I did it. Unfortunately, the fuckin’ zombie had either a landmine in it or was packed with explosives or something, ‘cause that bitch EXPLODED, and launched the ass end of the good ole “Zombie Slayer” to the motherfuckin’ sky. The Humvee came down with a tremendous crash on its roof, with the rear end pointing the direction I was going, and slid fifteen feet before it came to a stop against the guardrail. I was glad as shit that I didn’t hit any more landmines in its slide. I’m not sure I would’ve survived that.

  As it was, I was pretty fucked up: my face smashed into and through the windshield, splitting my forehead, my bottom lip, and knocking out a front tooth; my chest slammed into the steering wheel and it felt like I broke a couple ribs, ‘cause it hurt like hell to breath; and somehow the ring and pinky fingers on my left hand (hallelujah! not my gun hand!) were bent backwards so they were up against the back of my hand. I was in copious amounts of pain - it tore right through the Vicodin haze - so much that I verged on the abyss of a deep, dark black out.

  As I hung there, nearly-unconscious, my blood dripping onto the roof of the Humvee, landmine after landmine - that I had thankfully missed - exploded behind me as the horde came over the bridge to see what they could find to eat.

  67

  There I was, hanging upside-down by a seatbelt in a Humvee that had the windows blown out ‘cause of the massive impact with the earth that it was never made for, with thousands of zombies slowly but surely shambling their way to me so they could rend and gorge on my flesh - and the only thing I could think about was how much pain I was in and how I wanted to take a nap. I knew that to close my eyes and slip into the soft and comforting oblivion that sweet, sweet unconsciousness provides would have been the end of me, but I was in so much fucking pain that I really didn’t care. Or I should say almost didn’t care. Remember… I’m no fuckin’ quitter.

  So I grabbed hold of my fingers and yaaaaanked them back to where they were supposed to be - screaming in a high tenor that would’ve gave Bruce Dickinson a boner, the pain so intense that it made me immediately hyper-alert and hyper-aware like I had been given a shot of adrenalin straight to the fuckin’ heart - hit the release button on the seat-belt latch, and dropped hard on my right shoulder and rolled to my side.

  I quickly scrambled through the wreckage and recovered my ruck and M4, and crawled as fast as I could out the rear hatch of the Humvee, that had popped open on impact. Those latche
s were always shitty, and I was happy to see that nothing had changed there. Once I was out of the Humvee, I pulled myself to a semi-standing position (all I could really do at that moment) using an antennae and the rear bumper, and shrugged on my ruck. Then I picked up my rifle and stepped to the side of the Hummer to see what I had to look forward to.

  I was not pleased. The Humvee had flipped at the crest of the bridge, right in the middle, so I had a clear view pretty much all the way downtown, and at that vantage point the zombies coming onto the bridge looked like sands pouring through an hourglass. There were so many of them that the thought of O.K. and I out amongst them the night before, hacking and slashing like a couple of fuckin’ idiots, made me puke my fuckin’ guts out. The fact that there was blood in my vomit made me even less pleased.

  I turned, thinking that it was time for me to get a move on, as the zombies at the head were less than fifty feet from me… and came to a screeching halt when I saw that the other side of the bridge was looking pretty much the same.

  “YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!!!!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, so loud I could feel my throat begin to bleed. “I AM NOT GOING TO DIE TODAY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER’S!!!!!!!!!!!”

  I don’t think I was ever so mad in my entire life, I couldn’t fuckin’ believe my fuckin’ luck. In the past two days, I had survived getting stabbed, shot, and broken only to possibly but most likely be eaten in a gauntlet of blood-covered, gnashing teeth. I was going to do anything to prevent that, and I do mean anything.

  I pulled the quick-release straps on my ruck and let it drop to the ground, took a quick knee next to it, yanked out a ten-round bandolier of 203 rounds - all HE (high explosive) - and threw it over my shoulder, stood up, and prepared for battle. I figured I’d try and blow ‘em all to hell before they got to me, maybe make a hole big enough to get by them and off that fuckin’ bridge, then continue on my way to Streator. It was wishful thinking, but that was all I had, goddammit.

  I fired thirty HE rounds - all I had - at the zombies’, but for each ten I blew up or tore apart, fifty more took their place. I even went from dropping the rounds on top of their heads to firing directly at them as they got closer and closer, but no matter what I did it didn’t seem to make any difference - they just kept coming and coming. I knew if I stayed on that bridge any longer, I was gonna be turned into zombie dental floss in no time flat, so I grabbed the ruck, went to the guardrail next to the Hummer and looked down. I was dead center above the river.

  There was a little boat - one of those cheap aluminum fishing boats - floating around the river in my direction, so I hung the ruck over the edge, waited till the boat was below me, then let her drop. Luckily, my aim was true and the ruck dropped right into the middle of the boat as it slowly passed beneath the bridge. I then got myself on the guardrail, got a death-grip on my M4, jumped off the bridge into the river, and landed in the water a little bit behind the boat.

  I popped up outta that water like a dolphin at Sea World, screaming and sputtering grimy water, and fired an entire magazine into the water as I rapidly leg-swam in circles. After I jumped, I had hit bottom - hard, as the water turned out to be only ten feet deep and the bridge over thirty high - and when I was down there, I swear something grabbed my arm. That fuckin’ “something” was most likely a fuckin’ zombie, which really freaked me out. I already had an innate fear of water I couldn’t see the bottom of due to fish growing as large as men down there, and now I had to add zombies walking on the river bottoms to that list. Fuck!

  I knew from my little experiment with the Clarkster that the zombies might not have been entirely dead, that they still “breathed” - very little, with their hearts pumping once every few seconds or so, just enough to get enough breath for that horrible moan - but I had read, in the past, accounts of people holding their breath underwater for as long as seventeen minutes, with David Blaine being one of them. So that meant the rivers could be literally teeeeeeming with the undead, till they drowned. If they did - I still wasn’t 100 sure about the “still alive” thing, as I was deathly afraid to be so near Clark when I checked, tied up or not. And I never did check him after I woke up curled around his feet, freaked out as I was.

  I swam as fast as I could with one hand to the boat, threw my rifle in there, and dragged myself up in it, where I collapsed in a heap on the bottom, half on my ruck and half off. I let the boat drift for a while before I got up from the bottom, then let it drift for a while further, as I wanted to get a little bit more downriver ‘cause of the multitudes of zombies that were dropping off the bridge into the water, still intent on getting at me, even though I was already well outta their site. The fuckin’ lemmings.

  After I decided I had floated far enough, I picked up the oars from the boats bottom - one of them looked like it was used to bash in zombie heads, ‘cause the spoon was missing a good-sized chunk out of it, and it was covered in blood and gore - locked them in the riggers and paddled to the south bank of the river, on the uptown side. Once there, I jumped out and dragged the boat to a tree that was growing out of the water, and tied it up nice and secure. Figured I’d keep it there rather than let it keep on drifting - never know when I might need it again. Or somebody else, even. It made me feel good thinking that by tying the boat up I may end up saving someone’s life in the future.

  Once that was done, I chewed up a couple more Vike’s - ‘cause the pain was really kickin’ - got my ruck and threw that on, got my M4 and made sure it was ready to rock, and turned toward land to see where I was at. Looked like a park or something, kinda familiar, too. As I slowly walked up the bank, weapon at the ready, I remembered that I had seen some Fourth of July fireworks there one year with some friends. Had a good time, too, but the fireworks kinda sucked. Now there’ll never be fireworks there again, sucky or not.

  68

  The park was completely zombie free. Must not be the picnicking or boating types, I guess. Either way, I wasn’t complaining. I made it through the thing and up to Courtney Street - which goes right to 23 - without incident. I was even able to sit on a park bench and enjoy the scenery and peace and quiet for a moment. It was nice, especially after the chaotic day I was having. Things were looking up - the sun was shining and the birds were chirping; I made it across the Fox River alive; I was only a hop, skip, and a jump outta that fuckin’ town; and there on the shoulder of Courtney, was little piece of shit Ford Escort hatchback with the keys still in the ignition. Mmm hmm, things were looking up, indeed.

  Just like the Hummer, the Escort fired right up when I turned the key. That surprised the fuck outta me, ‘cause the thing was basically rust on three wheels and a donut. I figured I’d have to pump the gas or something while the engine cranked and cranked… and then cranked some more, all the while zombies came from all over, ruining the serenity of the area. It seemed luck was on my side, though, at least for the moment. I was glad for that, ‘cause I was in no condition for a long hike.

  Unfortunately, since 23 still had shit-tons of zombies swarming all over it at the bridge entrance, I figured I’d have to take some side roads around them to get back on track. I didn’t know of any, but I figured there had to be some somewhere. So I turned the Escort around and drove it down Hitt Street/Route 71, which Courtney turned into after the park.

  I figured I’d take that for a while since it was going in a general south-southwest direction, which was basically where I needed to go. Since the scenery was really fuckin’ nice and the road was zombie-free, I kept it around twenty miles an hour or so, and enjoyed the ride. Another plus - a fuckin’ huge plus, I must say - besides the view and lack of the undead, was the cooler full of Coors Light I found in the back seat, which I partook of while I drove. The ice had melted, but the beer was still cool, which made the ride even sweeter.

  After a mile or so down 71 - might’ve been further, but the beers I was pounding and the Vike’s I took had destroyed any sense of time or distance that I may have had - I began to get a little fuc
kin’ nervous. The road was heading more and more to the west, away from where I wanted to be going, and the only side road I came across was ages behind me (it felt like it, at least), and I really didn’t want to backtrack. I was about to do just that, though, when up ahead I saw a road sign for a t-intersection that was going right where I needed.

  “Fuckin’ A,” I said as I pulled the Escort over at the T, next to the road sign. “Finally, I know where I’m at! Man, I was getting fucking worried there! Whew!”

  The sign I was so glad to see was for Fosse Road, a road that I remembered would take me directly to 23, and that would allow me to completely avoid all of uptown Ottawa. I wouldn’t have to go through any neighborhoods, business districts, nothing - it was fuckin’ outstanding. Things were most definitely looking up, most definitely indeed. I couldn’t believe my fuckin’ luck. I put the car back in drive and turned onto Fosse, with a smile on my face and a fresh beer in my hand.

  “Life is good,” I said to no one in particular, after I sucked down a brew like the true beer drinkin’ champeen that I am. “Oh yeah.”

  I kept the same pace on Fosse that I had on 71 - twenty-ish - and continued to enjoy the ride, as the scenery was still very nice and the road was still devoid of the undead. And there was the fact that I wasn’t in any real hurry to get to what I knew would be more running, shooting, and fighting for my life - I figured I’d take the break while I had the chance, ‘cause moments like those were few and far between.

  I was almost to the T of Fosse and 23, when I noticed some cd’s sticking out from under the passenger seat. “Tunage!” I said to myself, as I leaned over and reached for the disc’s, my left hand still on the wheel keeping me on the road. I was still fishing for the cd’s - which I saw were some Creedance, Skynard, and shit like that - as I maneuvered the Escort around the turn onto 23, when something SLAMMED into the Escort, somewhere on the driver’s side, launching that fucker into a fast and furious barrel-roll. I didn’t even see what hit me, and then I saw nothing at all.