Journals of the Damned

by GJ Zukow

pain filled screams.

  My mother and sister ran towards each other, Lucy grabbing my mother tightly and crying while my mother shushed her and stroked Lucy's hair.

  I, on the other hand, ran towards the door, thinking only of trying to help the old lady.

  "Take the gun with you," my mom told me, pointing timidly towards it.

  I grabbed the rifle and checked it as I made my way to the front door.

  "Be careful Jannie," were my mother's words as I rushed out the door. I could easily hear both fear and concern in her voice.

  I wasn't the only one running to help her. Mike McConnell's father had also heard her screams. Mike's dad was barefoot wearing jeans and a tee shirt and it looked like he hadn't slept well. He carried with him a wicked looking wooden baseball bat studded with long sharp nails. As we came to within ten feet of the poor old widow’s door, the screaming grew louder. The front door opened almost instantly and old lady Hoffner crashed through the screen door. She stumbled harshly down the steps of her small front porch and ended up sprawled out on the sidewalk.

  Through all of this, two cats managed to cling to her, hissing and biting her. The claws of the cats were dug in deep to her old and wrinkled flesh. They were raking their rear claws deeply and repeatedly, opening huge gouges in her flesh while they sunk their fangs into her. The elderly girl was covered in her own blood, liberally bleeding from a multitude of wounds. Her robe was shredded and deeply stained with blood. Although she struggled against her attackers, her defenses were weak and ineffectual. Mr. McConnell was reaching out to one of the cats, trying to tear it away from the old lady. Clearly he wanted to separate the cats from their victim as he didn't want to swing his nail-bat and accidently hit the woman.

  That's when I heard one of the cats shredding the screen door. The blood-lust of the disease was clearly in its eyes. It managed to slash a huge tear in the screen and started to charge through the hole. The once loving cat's jaws and paws were stained red with blood and I instinctively raised the rifle and shot it. I was actually thrilled with the sound and feel as the weapon fired, liking the way it kicked from the recoil. The bullet flew true and violently punched the cat back through the hole it had rent in the screen door.

  Mike's dad said, "Good shot," as he was yanking the dead body of the first cat that he had managed to pull from widow Hoffner off of his bat. The still twitching corpse had been penetrated by multiple nails following a crushing blow.

  Mrs. Hoffner wasn't moving much at all as Mr. McConnell grabbed the second cat from her and flung it down. Before the cat could get up on its feet the bloody nail-bat was already swinging towards it.

  A different cat had come running at full speed right through the hole in the screen door, obviously with deadly intent, to try and maul one of us. I had been watching Mr. McConnell finish off the second cat, and starring at Mrs. Hoffner. I couldn't risk shooting it, Mike and the rest of his family were in the line of fire. The cat was fast and I had to do something. I swung the rifle by the barrel like it was a baseball bat of my own and solidly connected with the crazed feline as it leapt at Mike's dad. It went tumbling to the ground where its skull was both crushed and impaled at the same time by the well wielded nail studded bat.

  Once the danger had passed, my mother rushed over to poor 'ole Mrs. Hoffner. Lucy was wailing like I've never seen her, calling for our mom to come back inside with her.

  "Go inside and close the door, Lucy," my mom told her as she started to try and treat our elderly neighbor's wounds.

  Mr. McConnell and I however looked at each other and knew we had to account for the remaining two of the six cats. We entered the house, Mr. McConnell in the lead and we searched room by room until we found the last of the cats.

  We found the mutilated bodies of the cats in the back bedroom. The corpses were horribly mauled with their guts and intestines pulled from their abdomens.

  Mrs. Hoffner died in a pool of blood on her own front lawn shortly thereafter.

  That was my morning.

  My afternoon was spent coddling and reassuring my little sister. Lucy finally cried herself to sleep about an hour after my mom went to work. Honestly, I think she's more upset about having watched the "kitties" being killed then the death of our elderly neighbor.

  The news is just filled with acts of violence. The feline family around the world has fallen to the single celled parasite. Bobcats, Lynxes, Jaguars, Leopards, Lions, Tigers and the common house cat have turned into maddened killing machines, along with every other member of the feline family.

  There's one video in particular that makes me sad. There's a video from the San Diego zoo where a lioness's cubs are still young enough that they are still suckling. The cubs are clearly under the parasites influence and they start to claw and bite at their mother. At first the lioness’s maternal instincts hold and she gives them small bites or slaps them away from herself. As the cubs become more frenzied a few start mauling each other. The lioness is clearly taken aback from this behavior and growls and harshly tries to separate the fighting cubs. When the maddened cubs turn on her again, they attack her in earnest. Only after she is covered with wounds and is bleeding profusely does she truly fight back. One after the other she is forced to kill off all four of her children in her own defense. After she murdered them, ignoring her own wounds, she licks them clean and lined them up in a little row, using a gentleness that could only be born from love. Now the once proud lioness just stares at them, nudging their cold bodies once in awhile, refusing to eat or drink.

  In a follow up story the zoo keepers reported that they had to put down the once proud lioness too, as she also went into a blood-lust, going nuts whenever she spotted any living thing.

  The great cats are terrorizing Africa and Asia right now. They stalk, kill their prey then immediately move on to their next victim. That's got to be a horrible way to die.

  When is this nightmare going to end?

  Wednesday, September 12, 2012

  In every neighborhood now, there are armed groups of men breaking down peoples doors and conducting room to room searches. It started out as a call upon the citizenry to assist the police who are stretched paper thin. The county deputized them to patrol and eliminate any infected animals in their local areas. Like a neighborhood watch, but with guns. The plan was that they could handle the overwhelming number of calls concerning a maddened squirrel or whatever, leaving the police to respond to the true emergency situations. In reality it turned into a drunken mob that has decided prevention is the best medicine. They go house to house and beat on the doors, demanding entry. If nobody answers the door, usually because they fear the group, they bash open the door and search for any sign of a pet. The mob doesn't care if the animal is sick or not, and in reality I doubt they killed very many infected animals (as all the cats and those creatures that were infected have already plainly gone mad). Sure they find the occasional ferret or cat or bunny that the owner has locked into a room or exiled to the backyard (mainly in the hopes that the illness will pass), but what they normally find are the pets that aren't infected. Like dogs, who show no sign of the parasitic infection. They break into people's houses and shoot any pets right in front of children who are terrorized by this act. Then they take the body of the dead pets and rudely toss them into the back of a pick-up truck to be burned later in great pyres. Better safe than sorry they say. Those who try to fight back are beaten severely. Those who defend their homes with weapons of their own are murdered in a hail of gunfire. Innocents are killed by stray bullets and wild shots. The authorities turn a blind eye to these crimes.

  Whenever one of the mob even thinks they see a squirrel, they open fire, turning the area into a shooting gallery. Whenever any of the shooting starts we have to lie upon the floor and hope there are no stray bullets coming with our names on them.

  Luckily, when the armed group beat upon our door, my mother hadn't left for work yet. She calmly let them in, making sure to keep a friendly smile upon her face (I
know it was a false, strained effort) and made sure this unconstitutional search and seizure was at least conducted civilly. They carried with them an air of menace. We were all relieved when they left, and my mother is torn over the need to go to work or stay home with us. In the end though, she goes to work, leaving me to try and take care of Lucy. Lucy is not taking this well at all, crying and pleading with my mom to stay.

  The hospital is almost overwhelmed with victims of animal attacks and gunshot wounds from stray bullets, on top of stress induced heart attacks and the normal medical emergencies. Before all this began she had normal eight hour shifts, now her shifts last at least twelve hours. Many of the doctors and nurses actually sleep at the hospital now, not only from a sense of duty but because it's actually safer there.

  I haven't been able to watch the news much, mainly due to the fact that it sends Lucy into a panic. Instead what I try to do is keep cartoons and children's programming on, with the volume turned up in an attempt to cover up the sounds of gunshots and the ever present sirens.

  When I do get the chance to watch the news it's when my little sister has finally, fitfully, fallen asleep. She doesn't sleep for more than a few hours at a time now. She also doesn't eat very