Journals of the Damned

by GJ Zukow

wanted to get to the spot beside the doorway to the kitchen but my body wouldn’t comply fast enough. I was nervous, stressed, keyed up and exhausted at the same time. My adrenaline was flowing and panicky sweat covered me. I stood up too quickly and my legs cramped up on me and I fell solidly to the ground.

  As I was forcing my body to get back up and ambush the sadistic fuck I saw him coming in the doorway.

  He was bright red, obviously he was a carrier, naked and just covered in filth. I smelt him then and his scent was overpowering. They say that demons are proceeded by the stench of decay and shit, but they could have nothing on this guy. His eyes and fingernails were completely black and no cloven hoofed devil could be as terrible a sight as him. I fully expected him to try and tackle me or physically assault me, if that is, he didn’t try to put a couple of ounces of lead in me. I had my makeshift knife, made out of the painfully sharp piece of mirror, ready for the physical attack. Even if he shot me I still thought I would have the time to slice open his gut or jugular if he missed or if I got the drop on him.

  What he did though I didn’t expect. He tasered my ass. His black gums showed as he laughed manically while he shocked me repeatedly. With my body going into spasms from the electric shocks from two separate taser guns, he quickly hand-cuffed my wrists to my ankles, effectively hog tying me. He screamed obscenities at me as he beat me so hard with the butts of the tasers that they actually broke on my skull. Then I passed out as he beat me unconscious.

  When I awoke I was tied spread eagle and naked to a gore encrusted work bench. I knew I was in his private bunker as I had never seen this room before. There were no windows. The light was from a flickering fluorescent light fixture, one bulb wasn’t working and the dim, almost strobbing, quality of illumination from the single remaining bulb lent itself well to this nightmare.

  I don’t care to write down what he said exactly, or for that matter, what he did to me. What he said were vile ramblings and bragging about how I wasn’t the first to fall into his lair. He was bat-shit crazy it was true, but he was also telling the truth. I found five severed heads in his freezer. Two adult males', a teenage male, a middle aged woman’s and a little girl’s. They were in there along with some pieces of meat I will bury as soon as I can. Enough of that. I don’t want to get into what he said he did to them, and how he planned to do all the same evil shit to me.

  His anger and insanity either lead him to overconfidence or he just plain overlooked the fact that the strap holding my left hand down wasn’t nearly as tight as it should have been. With every slice and hateful torture he committed on me I pulled with all my strength on that loose leather strap. The pain he placed on me made the pain in my left wrist seem like nothing, so I worked that strap until I knew I could break it easily. I just couldn’t break it while he was in the room with me. The torture seemed all the more worse knowing I could break at least that bond and smack his infected ass upside the head whenever I wanted. It took all of my composure and will not to.

  Finally though, after he fuckin’ masturbated himself over my bleeding and mutilated body he went into the door-less adjoining room to sleep. After lying down for about twenty minutes giggling and talking to himself he finally slept.

  The strap gave way easily then. I was nervous that he would hear the sound of me undoing the restraints but I’m sure he had learned (even relished) to sleep with the crying and sobbing pleas of his other victims in his ears.

  He is now going to be sleeping for the rest of eternity. There is no chance of him coming back from the dead either. I picked up a ball-peen hammer, which I am absolutely sure he was planning on using on me, as it was on a shelf along with some of his other “tools”. Then I slowly crept up on his foul ass and manically beat his skull and head into a bloody pulp as he slept. I think I laughed like I was insane (and maybe I was) and uttered vile things at his corpse, as I literally beat his body into an unrecognizable mass of meat.

  Tomorrow I’ve got some digging to do. Body parts and a body to bury. Tonight I need to rest.

  11

  It took me most of the day to dig a proper grave for the dead. I didn't want to bury the carrier’s body with his victims, but I did anyways. Even though the ground is mainly sand here, using a shovel was another experience in pain.

  The bastard who cut my little toes off was no surgeon. The bone is exposed on what remains of my right small toe and is plainly sticking out, with the skin around it having shriveled and turned black. What's left of the toe on my other foot isn't any better, with both of them giving off the putrid odor of infection. I have tried to bandage them as best I could but with any amount of walking they weep a sickly mixture of puss and blood. I need to find a doctor (good luck with that) to have them properly amputated. There is a small amount of medicine and pain-killers in the bunkers stock and I'm hoping that it will be enough. If not I'm going to have to go back into town and find a pharmacy and find something stronger than the penicillin I have now. Maybe I'll be able to find a doctor’s office or something where I can get a hold of a Grey's anatomy book or something so I can operate on myself if it comes to that.

  I’m so depressed right now. What is the point of all this struggling to survive in a world where there is nothing left? My outlook is bleak. I can stay here and hope that my feet, which are swollen and red with a deep blackness spreading from the severed digits, miraculously get better. Or I can force myself to hobble slowly, with each step bring fresh pain, into town. There is a decent collection of weapons here, if there aren’t a large number of zeds in my way, I could probably fight my way through. In my condition though, not being able to run, if there’s more than a handful I’m just going to be zombie bait. To stay here I’ll surely die, but to try to get to town I’ll only probably die. For what though? Even if I do heal and get better what for? To eat canned and freeze dried food for the rest of my life? To bear loneliness as my only companion? My .38 looks to be a viable option. I think the only reason I’ve made it this far is because I’m a coward. I only carry on in this life because I’m afraid of death.

  I did have the time to investigate the bunker. There’s a whole pantry fully stocked with canned and freeze dried food. One room, the main room I guess, is full of monitors and a couple of computers that control the security for the house and shelter. There’s the small bedroom, of course, well stocked with plenty of DVD’s and a couple of books. A small kitchen and a tiny bathroom with a shower are also down there. I don’t know what the original purpose of the torture room was, it was possibly an exercise / utility room as I found some weights and what’s left of a now destroyed tread mill. The place is a complete mess though, with broken and shattered stuff scattered all over. The place stinks to high heaven, being covered in filth and blood and God knows what. Gonna be a huge project to clean it up, I’ll wait to do that when (and if) I’m healthy again.

  I had to do some serious investigating to find out where the electricity was being generated from. Remember how I told you there was a small stream that flowed from the spring fed lake? Well it seems there is a cleverly hidden water wheel under some large carved and hollowed rocks in the stream. I was actually standing on top of the covering stone before I noticed that the water swirled oddly around it. The constant flow of electricity is such a blessing.

  Even though this place is fairly isolated, it isn’t free from zeds. While I was doing some of the digging I was occasionally swearing and bitching from the pain my feet were giving me, forgetting all about the current state of the world. The damn thing had stumbled to within twenty feet of me and I hadn’t heard it. I was so absorbed in the task at hand and my pain that I didn’t hear the things clumsy crashing through the brush towards me. It was a close escape, one that was due more to luck than anything else. I couldn’t limp away from the horror any faster than it could shamble towards me. I placed the grave away from the house. As I went down the slope that leads to the lake and the house itself I tripped and slid down the embankment, almost ending up taking a swi
m. As I got up, the zed came crashing over the ridge and it also fell and went head over heels down the steep slope. I got out of the way as fast as my painfully swollen feet would let me, narrowly avoiding the things outstretched hands as it rolled right at me. Thankfully it didn’t have the coordination to stop itself from going into the lake. I know that if this had happened six months earlier it would have caught me and quickly made a meal of me. Time was finally decaying them as it should have a long time ago.

  The undead clearly can’t swim, but they don’t drown either. It splashed and struggled to get free of the muck and silt that hampered it. Slowly it ended sliding further and further down into the lake. The water is really clear in the lake and I was surprised as a veritable swarm of fish, both large and small, surrounded it and start taking tiny pieces off of it. I was worried that the monster would find a way out of the lake eventually and I would have to keep an eye out for it until God knows when, but the fish were taking care of that for me. When it finally disappeared into the depths, the last thing I actually saw wasn’t the zed itself, it was the school of