Journals of the Damned (Book 1)

by GJ Zukow

  I crawled inside to silence, half expecting a wild-eyed, terrified person to point a gun at me and demand a good reason for invading his hide-out. Someone had been in here very recently, I could smell the still fresh scent of recently cooked food.

  There was the body of a boy around thirteen or so, sprawled out and lying limp in the living room. An ever slowly increasing pool of deep red blood was soaking into the carpet. There was a bullet hole beside his nose, just below the eye socket. There was blood spray and bone fragments spread out in a fan like pattern directly behind him on the wall. There was no gun in sight, and it took a few minutes for me to figure out what happened.

  The front living room window was shattered with multiple bullet holes. In fact the more I looked, the more holes I saw in the door, windows and walls. They came from me. There was a hole in the window just above where the plywood had been ripped apart from the zeds and shoe prints (matching the ones the kid wore) on a coffee table below it.

  The boy, who should have taken cover at the first sound of gun fire, apparently had went to the window to see what was happening. One of my missed shots had caught him in the face. My heart sank as I realized that instead of saving the boy, I murdered him.

  His body twitched a bit and then he gurgled. He was still alive but he was bleeding fast. I didn't know what to do. He was going to die soon, in no more than a few minutes.

  I held his hand and told him how sorry I was. I told him how I was only trying to help him and why didn't he duck down and hide instead of foolishly looking out the window in the direction of my gunshots. I don't know if he heard anything I said or felt me holding his hand as he died.

  After he passed I put another round in his head, just to make sure he wouldn't rise up again. Then I raided his house for supplies and came back to the firehouse.

  That was my day.

  Tuesday, December 25, 2012

  Christmas. I don't really miss Christmas with all of its blatant commercialism. The whole American Christmas thing was a convoluted, heavily religious, cover up of an ancient celebration of the winter solstice anyways. Midwinter. The longest night.

  Being cooped up here with Allan is getting on my nerves. I get annoyed with him a lot. He says it's because were trapped here in close confines like this. I say it's because he's a dumbass.

  We had decided it would be best for someone to be awake while the other slept. Not only does it cut down on the time we're forced to spend together, it also means that we we're much safer like this. Allan has the bunkroom to himself during the day and I have it for the night.

  I'm not really depressed about it being the Christmas of the undead, I'm more depressed about the fact that my mother and sister are dead. At least Lucy is dead again. I don't know if my mom's flesh has risen from death, but I feel it must have. I feel guilty about not putting my mother's corpse to rest. I tried to make my way to the hospital again but there seems to be something happening on the streets. I keep wanting to go and find my mom's animated flesh and put her back in the grave where she belongs. It feels disrespectful for the parasite to use my mother's body, commanding it around, instead of letting it rest quietly as it should.

  The local zombie population in the areas Allan and I had been active in are fairly low. It's a different story outside our zone. It was rare that I had gone into a building or house and there wasn't a zed, or two, inside. The surrounding blocks are thick with the undead. I hadn't been keeping count of how many of the horrid abominations I had eliminated, now the numbers are visibly clear. On this street alone there are twenty-one buildings. If I hadn't killed the occupants of those buildings there would be around thirty or so more of the beasts on the streets now.

  The vast majority of the undead had come out of the buildings they had died in. They weirdly came outside and they started assembling together. They stand together, about ten feet apart, forming huge groups, like an animal pack. There must be something calling them together like that. It's unnatural, there may actually be some form of communication, but it's hard to tell. About a week ago the undead, walking ghouls had finished breaking out from whatever building they had originally died in. In the silence the sounds of the frantic poundings, as they beat down and through walls, doors and windows, was nightmarish. It was as if something was urging them together.

  There's a herd of the hungering undead in every street now. The area around the hospital is completely overwhelmed with them.

  The roaming herds of undead slowly make their random way around, sometimes forming up with other packs and sometimes small groups will break off from a bigger herd.

  It's way too dangerous out there now to do much scavenging. We have enough food to last us months. It may not be for awhile until we can go out again but we won't starve.

  There's something else that's worth noting. It's hot out. It's still in the nineties here even though we're almost through December. It's gotten cold for a few days here and there but for the most part it's been like summer hadn't ended.

  I don't understand if the sudden stoppage of all the greenhouse gases we had been producing has anything to do with this. Mankind as a whole had been putting out great quantities of pollution and now it had suddenly stopped. There will absolutely be ramifications from that, hopefully they won't be very severe.

  Monday, January 7, 2013

  New Year's has come and gone.

  Allan spent New Year's eve getting drunk, quietly I must add, and staring at the darkened TV set. He didn't turn the TV on, he just sat there and drank and looked at it. I know he's depressed. Later on, around midnight, he broke out some marijuana that he had picked up somewhere. It wasn't a lot and I joined him in smoking some.

  I didn't drink any booze or nothing on New Year's. I never really liked the alcohol buzz. The weed was OK, it wasn't the same though. All it did was make me more paranoid. I kept thinking of how the last time I had smoked it was with a couple of friends. The experience was of getting high with friends and getting high now are worlds apart. It did help me to sleep better, but I don't think I'll be getting high very much from now on.

  I've been doing a lot of sleeping lately. Sleep, eat, go to the bathroom. Once in awhile take a shower, and then back to sleep. It's a sign of depression and boredom. I don't remember dreaming anymore. I would say that I stopped dreaming but Allan says I haven't. He wakes me sometimes when I thrash around and start mumbling and talking in my sleep. He wakes me because he doesn't want me to start yelling in my sleep, drawing the unwanted attention of the hungering abominations. Allan has nightmares too, I've had to rouse him from bad dreams making sure we stay quiet. It's better I don't remember my dreams, good or bad. I've seen the affects of some of those nightmares on Allan and they can bother him for days.

  The weather hasn't gotten any better. A six days ago there was a bone chilling cold snap. The temperature dropped below freezing for two whole days and was immediately followed by blistering heat. The wind is intense. Fierce gusts of wind blow in, alternating between hot and cold, coming in from opposite directions.

  The zombies struggle against the cold. The cadavers the parasites now inhabit are no longer capable of generating any body heat. On that second day of the freeze, the animated undead nearly ceased in their movements. Most of them stood in whatever position they had been in, frozen. It didn't kill the parasites, unfortunately. When the cold snap passed I was depressed when they resumed their foul actions. It was bitterly cold out and I hadn't grabbed any cold weather clothes. I'm positive that it had never gotten this cold in the Orlando area for a long, long time. On the day the things practically froze I layered up on my clothes and Allan and I went outside and re-cleared our zone. It was easy to do, for the most part they were defenseless. Makes me think I should head up north somewhere, find a small town and clear it of the undead.

  Allan and I worked hard that day, working almost from sun-up to sun set. We took the opportunity to do some more scavenging and there are two vehicles in the firehouse bay now. We now have
a tow truck and a four wheel drive Chevy Suburban, all packed up and ready to go.

  We may need them soon.

  For one thing, the days after the freezing weather, a herd of over a hundred made its way into our zone. I'm almost convinced that they can sense our presence in the area. They moved in and have stopped in the street outside the firehouse. They don't know we're inside or they would be trying to get in. It could be coincidence, but my fear tells me it's not. It's as if they knew we're in the vicinity but they don't know exactly where we are. Every day more join them. The worst part of being trapped in here is the lack of vision. The downstairs office windows are boarded up and I couldn't look out of them if I had wanted to. The only other window in the building is here, on the second floor and it faces into the back lot. If I go outside and peek around the building to see how many have gathered I run a huge risk of being seen. The only view I have of the assembling horde is through a small opening at the top of one of the roll-up bay doors. The view is limited and hard to get to. When I do spy through the narrow crack the view is filled with the undead. There's so many of them outside now that they are starting to spread out around the fence, making it risky to even look out through the garbage bag covered, shattered window.

  The wind is getting bad now. It's really strong. A hard, cold rain is pouring down. If it weren't January I would say a hurricane was bearing down on us. That's the last thing I need right now. There's a strange green tint to the sky, a bad omen if ever I saw one. Allan tells me a green tint to the sky means its tornado weather.

  New fires have broken out, I can see and smell the thick black plumes of smoke rising up here and there. The cold brought on the automated response in many buildings central air units (both Allan and I jumped when the firehouse's heating kicked on). Furnaces and heating coils came on, unattended and ignored. Some have been damaged, blocked or whatnot, starting fires that quickly turn into little infernos that burn for days. The cold rain is smothering them, finally.

  Saturday, January 12, 2013

  I am no longer in the firehouse. We had to abandon it.

  My life seems to be filled with extended periods of complete and insufferable boredom. Followed by a few days of frantic and perilous activity where my life can end in agony if anything goes wrong. To be honest (and maybe there's something wrong with me), I get a huge rush from beating the odds. I haven't slept yet today, I'm still too amped from the past few days. Allan is the complete opposite, he prefers to find someplace to hide and live like a mouse, fearing to leave or go out until the fates force him. I don't feel sad about the events that lead me here, although I know I should.

  The weather had gotten worse. Much worse. I'm not sure if there had ever been a hurricane in January before but this one was worse than any Allan or I had ever seen. The winds the hurricane brought with it were extremely powerful. The storm acted more like a huge, hundred mile wide tornado than any hurricane. It certainly wasn't normal. The whipping wind alternated between freezing blasts and hot currents of air.

  Sleet and hail the size of golf balls, driven by the ferocious winds, came down for a time. The hail came down with such force that every window in every house, building and vehicle had been broken and shattered. The intensity and strength of the hard balls of ice also took out a number of the undead, bashing in the skulls of the undead brutes through repeated strikes.

  When the storm first started in earnest, it was lead by an incredibly active lightning storm. Allan and I watched it through the lone window upstairs, awed by the thunder and flashes. It was an incredible show, arcs of pure electricity were stabbing down every other second for almost an hour. Fires from the strikes, whipped by the winds, quickly turned into block consuming conflagrations.

  Then came the heavy rain, ending the fires. The wind built in intensity for two days, only dying down for a hour or so as the eye of the hurricane passed over us. By the time the storm passed two days after that, the whole of Orlando looked like a war zone.

  The plastic bags we had used to cover the upstairs window proved no match for the winds no matter how much tape we used. The remaining whole pane of glass in the window didn't last long, being shattered to pieces during the hail. Through the broken window we watched first as trash and small bits of scrap flew through the air. As the storm escalated in intensity larger and larger pieces of rubble hurtled through the air. At first anything not nailed down flew in the wind. By the end of the second day, roofs, sheds and anything that wasn't solidly built cart wheeled and tumbled into things, creating more debris.

  Something big smashed into the front of the firehouse on the second day, denting and pushing one of the bay doors out of shape. When whatever it was hit the building, it also cracked the wall and busted open the fence. We watched as pieces of lumber and shingles piled up along the back fence. Allan and I shared a little laugh whenever we witnessed one of the undead trying to struggle helplessly in the wind as it was roughly blown into the rear yard. The undead were beaten and impaled, stuck by the force of the wind against the back fence to be buried under ever more debris. It was dangerous just looking out the window by that time, nails and bits of junk were in the air, along with rain that hit so hard it actually stung. We retreated from the kitchen, avoiding the worst of the winds by staying in the bunkroom.

  When the storm abruptly stopped, the air pressure changed. It was silent except for distant car and burglar alarms going off all over Orlando. The change was quick and we both came to the conclusion that we were then in the calm eye of the hurricane. We decided to go out and eliminate as many zeds as we could while they were still reeling from the storm. That and it gave us a chance to survey the building and surrounding neighborhood for damage. What I saw was bad, and it got worse. The bay door and wall were so damaged that if any of the undead had wanted to get through they easily could with very little work. There were undead all over the place, many with broken limbs that were incapable of doing anything but dragging themselves after us. Many seemed to have come through in relatively decent shape and we drove our axes into their skulls first. Half the buildings were without roofs and none had any unbroken windows. When the storm started back up again we packed up the Chevy Suburban with all our stuff. We both clearly knew that this place was no longer secure and we would have to leave as soon as the storm let up.

  When the storm resumed it started back up where it left off. Sometime in the night of that third day the roof of the firehouse came off with a horrendous noise. It started with the corner over the damaged bay lifting up and banging around. The battered roll up bay door came off its mounting on the more badly damaged side and repeatedly bashed into the tow truck until it finally gave way and completely came off the wall. The wind now attacked the roof not only from the outside but also from the inside as the wind pressurized the bay and added an upward force. We witnessed, wide eyed, as the roof kind of curled up and in an instant it was gone. It hurtled into the back fence and knocked most of it down. The back fence was already leaning from the weight of the accumulated wreckage and the force of the wind, the roof hitting it finished it. The wind and rain quickly made all of the second floor unbearable so we were forced to take shelter in the offices below. Rain ran down the walls and pooled an inch deep. Not much later the electricity went out.

  My original plan was to try to get up north where the winter's freeze would put the zombies into a frozen hibernation. Despite the fact that there might not be any electricity or heat. I decided that the chance to move about unthreatened by being eaten alive by the hungering undead for a few months added a better chance to survive than having to scrounge for firewood.

  It wasn't difficult getting past the battered undead that got in our way. Since we weren't worried about drawing the zeds to us with gunfire we unloaded on them. They could shamble their ugly asses towards the sound as much as they wanted because by the time they arrived we would be long gone.

  The level of destruction visited on the Orlando area was astounding. No building we saw h
ad been unaffected. The rain had stopped and the un-natural heat had returned. Before the Madness struck, people had been worried about the Greenhouse effect. The problem of too much pollution and factories and power plants spitting out greenhouse gases has been basically eliminated. Now and for the foreseeable future, the weather would be in a state of flux. How the environment was going to work this out I can only wait and see.

  The freeway was alternately empty and impassable. In some stretches there wasn't a car in sight, in others car upon car was lined or piled up in colossal accident scenes. There weren't many of the undead on the highway and those that were wandering around were easy to kill now that we could use our guns.

  We were northbound on I-4 just past Sanford airport when we ran into a military roadblock. There were no soldiers, or anyone else for that matter, maintaining the roadblocks anymore. There were concrete dividers set across all lanes of traffic with a few national guard trucks and a tank lined up behind them. A vast line of cars had been stopped here and all of them were ridden with bullet holes and were nothing more than burned out piles of junk. There was one lane on either side without a slab of concrete blocking it. The problem was that the northbound lane had a tank parked in front of it. Neither of us had any idea how we could move it out of the way. Our only option was to try to go back and find a break in the guard-rails that stopped us from driving onto the medium separating the north and south bound lanes.