by GJ Zukow
much pain. I know Jesus suffered for days on the cross, leaving me to think, and be thankful for, the fact that I will have to face only a few minutes of agony. I will let the agents of Satan devour my flesh and leave its wickedness behind. This life has not been easy for me God. Please have mercy on my unclean soul. I am ready now. I am going outside now to sacrifice my sinful flesh and come to you pure, free from this world."
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
I was so distracted by what I had done that I didn't realize some of the flesh hungry zombies had followed me back to the firehouse.
Almost as soon as I entered our sanctuary Allan knew something had happened. He asked me what was wrong and if I wanted to talk about it but I declined. We had both seen some really horrible stuff and he didn't press me when I said that I didn't want to talk about it.
I hadn't even finished putting away my gear and the assorted canned goods I had acquired when we both heard the sound of the locked gate in the fence being assaulted.
We both went out the back door to the paved training area and saw the handful of undead that had followed me. I apologized to Allan, who gave me a momentary quizzical look. Allan knew that whatever had happened had thrown me off, I had never led the undead back here before. There was only a handful of the abominations, we took care of them with pickaxes through the fence. We stabbed their rotting skulls with the sharp pick ends when they put their faces close to the fence, so that no others would notice them and join them in trying to break down the gate.
I may not have wanted to tell Allan what happened, not because he wouldn't understand, not because he would think less of me but because I feel full of guilt. I will eventually tell him what happened but not right now. Telling him of my mistake would feel too much like I was confessing a sin. Maybe what I did was a sin but it was an accident. My uncle's words about making sure nobody was in the line of fire before I shot keeps ringing in my ears. The thing is, I didn't know he was in my line of fire. I was only trying to help him.
I do feel a need to write this down in this journal. Sometimes it's like this journal is part of my secret heart. While I may not be telling another person what I feel, the Gods know. This is my secret confession.
In the past few weeks we had actually stopped going on our daily runs into the surrounding area, having already scavenged what we could. Allan no longer went out except for maybe once a week or so. I still felt the need to go out at least a couple of times a week, simply to break the monotony.
Today I came across a house that had been surrounded by a small mob of the parasitic undead puppets. I had entered the house across the street from it by means of a broken window on the back side of the house. After I made sure the house was clear I went and carefully checked the street side by peeking out through the windows and scanning the area.
I figured that there had to be a survivor inside the boarded up house, otherwise there wouldn't be a mob of hungering dead outside trying to break in. From where I was, the place looked like it would be breached soon. The upper part of the plywood boarding the main window was already gone and corners of the plywood covering the rest of the windows were broken off. I was sure I saw cracks in the flimsy wood covering the door and it seemed to bow and flex with the constant assault.
Silently I crept around the house I was in and made sure that the yard was fenced and I had a clear escape route for what I was about to do.
I had been wanting to get some target practice in with the M16 but hadn't been able to do much, being afraid to draw the attention of the ravenous dead. This time I wanted to draw their attention. If I was going to help whoever was trapped I had to kill or lead the nightmares away. I counted their numbers and found there were seventeen of them. There weren't any stray zeds that I could see, all of them in the area had been previously drawn to that house. My plan was to start sniping them through the large picture window in the living room. When they reached the window and entered the house to get me I guessed I would be able to pick off a few more as they negotiated climbing in. From there I would go into the back yard and pick off a few more as they filed through the back door. Then I would hop the fence and pick off more of them as they would inevitably, clumsily, fall more than climb over the low fence. If there were any more of the living dead and they continued to follow me I would run from them and make a loop around the neighborhood and come at them from behind, forcing them back through the obstacle course of fences, doorways and windows to get at me.
It worked like I planned. My first shot missed. They stopped assaulting the house and waited for another noise to figure out where the sound was coming from. I took two of them out before they pin-pointed my location. Some of the ghoulish walking cadavers started towards me immediately and I took them out quickly, only missing a few of my shots as they chaotically staggered towards me. Their speed, in that distinctive shambling gait of theirs, would be for me a slow jog. Some of the zombies almost hesitated in coming towards me, as if they were struggling to decide whether they should abandon the prey secured in the house for the prey in the house across the street. Once they caught a glimpse of me and my warm flesh they gave up on trying to break into the house and joined the rest of their brethren in trying to catch and eat me.
By the time I had to jump the fence there were only three of them left. The undead have almost no coordination and have huge problems with negotiating even simple obstacles. It was easy to finish the last of them off. My plan seemed to be going smoothly.
By the time I got back to the street, there were only two new zombies drawn by the gunfire. They were both coming to investigate the noise and they were still both a couple of houses away. It was good practice at medium range on a moving target. At no point was I ever in any real trouble but it was quite a rush.
I called out to whoever was in the house that it was safe now. Nobody answered, leading me to think at first that the zeds had converged on the house mistakenly or that whoever was holed up inside had died while they were trying to bust in.
A small window in the back was free from plywood. It was high up and it could only be a bathroom window. It was clear that plywood had originally been placed there but it had been removed. This was where the survivor or survivors had made his or her entries and exits. The window was locked from the inside so they still had to be in there. I yelled for the occupant to come to the window but I was met with only silence. I had risked my ass getting this far and now I had to know if there actually was someone in the house or not. I busted out the window and waited a tense couple of minutes, waiting for any sign from inside.
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 gone 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 hi
m 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
