Journals of the Damned (Book 1) Page 7

  Mike was grunting as he started ripping off my clothes. It was obvious he was intent on raping me. I couldn't believe how strong he actually was but once I got one of my hands free for a brief moment I jammed my fingers in his eye. The black orb burst and spilled a thick black fluid. He screamed then and reflexively reached his hands up to his face which gave me the break I needed to scoot out from under him and grab my rifle.

  He was screaming obscenities at me but I didn't shoot him, I crushed his skull in with the butt. I made sure he was dead and went to check on Lucy who was oblivious to what was happening in the room next to her.

  No sooner did I step into the kitchen when I realized what he meant by "long pig". His father had been sliced up rather crudely, blood was all over the room. Entrails and only Satan knows what, was hanging out of the trash can and I puked right there.

  Lucy was gorging herself on the thigh meat of Mr. McConnell, and as I tried to gain control of my stomach, she smiled at me and kept eating.

  To hell with it I thought, what is done is done. I let her finish her disgusting meal and it seemed to calm her almost back to normal.

  I easily lead her back to our house and gave her some orange juice spiked with the sedatives. She had the meal she wanted. It turned out to be her last meal. I had hoped maybe she was craving human flesh for a reason. Like maybe there was something in it that would slow or stop the parasite. I have always believed that when your body craves a certain food it's for a reason. Now I think the cannibalistic craving is from the parasite.

  Whatever, it doesn't matter, she died later that night and I buried her in the back yard. The grave isn't deep but there are no predators to dig her dead body up. Maybe tomorrow I can dig a proper grave for her and one for my mom (when I find her body). I want to lay them to rest next to each other.

  The insanity is showing up on the news (or whatever passes for the news now). The newscasters themselves are infected. Fact and fiction are mixed together in some obvious craziness, like reports of the dead rising.

  Friday, September 28, 2012

  I had no intention of writing in this journal again. It's clear now that there won't be any kind of school again for a long time, if ever. The teachers, staff and students are all dead or dying. In fact, the human race as a whole is dead or dying.

  The rules of reality have changed. I keep having the insane thought that I'm trapped in a nightmare, that I'm actually still asleep in my bed and can't wake up. What is happening though is not a dream, this has to be real. By reading my previous entries and writing new ones helps my mind to accept the fact that this is real. Maybe I died from some sickness and this is purgatory. What else am I to think when the dead start clawing their way out of the grave?

  As if the dead rising wasn't bad enough, the "Scarlet Madness" has driven half the world into war. The sun has been blotted out by ugly, thick grey clouds. The ash and debris fall like a light sprinkling of snow, most of it is the fallout from nuclear weapons going off somewhere. I know it's got to be radioactive to some extent. The air has an overwhelming odor to it, not just of fire and ash but of death itself.

  A lot has happened since my last entry. Events started happening so fast it's hard to tell the real order, so I'll write them as I experienced them.

  Television stations started going off the air one by one. The stations that remain broadcasting come in four varieties. The first variety of remaining stations is broadcasting endless loops of various Christian or other religious shows.

  The second most prevalent broadcast is a feed from the National Emergency Broadcast System. The feed is nothing more than a black screen with scrolling text and the intermittent annoying alert sound every 30 seconds. The first time I read the text I didn't believe what I saw. Along with the standard warning to seek shelter immediately comes the constant reminder of Martial Law. That information didn't shock me. The dire warning to either burn the dead or to separate their heads from their bodies did. That and the blunt statement that the parasite will re-animate the infected hosts body freaked me out. I didn't really understand what that meant until my little sister Lucy came back from the dead.

  The third type of station broadcast is re-runs of comedies or children's cartoons. Watching those shows while the apocalypse rages right outside the door is surreal to say the least.

  The very rare fourth type of station still has live broadcasts. Only two stations still broadcast, MSNBC and CNN. The MSNBC news anchor is showing the tell-tale signs of the infection. The man bleakly and almost sadly goes about reporting what he can to an empty studio. It's quite clear he knows he will soon die and be resurrected by the parasite. The CNN anchor woman seems to be immune, like me, and she talks to the camera man, who might be infected. The fear in her eyes is visible.

  Even with the warnings, I didn't really believe that nonsense about the undead until this morning. I had spent most of last night downloading various survival guides like "The Anarchist Cookbook" and "The Poor Man's James Bond" and printing them out until I ran out of paper. I have no idea how long the net will stay up, some sites are already down. I fell asleep on the couch after stapling them into a makeshift book. The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was to read as much of it as I could. I don't know how long I spent reading, I only stopped reading to empty my bladder.

  It was after I went to the bathroom and got a glass of water from the kitchen that I saw with some alarm there was someone in the backyard. I stared with disbelief at my sister, covered with the dirt of her shallow grave, standing and staring blankly over her excavated resting place.

  My first instinct was to rush out there and hug her. My feet started to take me to the backdoor, of their own accord, before I realized it. This was a different world now, with different rules. My old instincts don't apply anymore and it took some mental control, but I made myself go get the rifle.

  Part of me wanted so much for her to be ok. The crazy thought that she had beaten the sickness and I was guilty of burying her alive was going through my head. I knew for a fact that she was dead when I buried her. The fact that she was buried and covered with three feet of sandy soil for almost two days was a logic that I had to conform to. Even if I had buried her alive there is no way she would have survived without air for that long. As unbelievable as it sounds she had to be some sort of "zombie". The word "zombie" is a ridiculous word. I have a hard time just thinking that word but there is no other word for what my little sister had become.

  As soon as I opened the backdoor, my dead sister turned towards me when she heard the door opening. I stood aghast as Lucy's body stutteringly took its first few steps towards me. Her gait was like the unsure steps of a child who had just learned to walk. Her eyes were blackened and slightly glossed over, vacant of any intelligence. Dirt from the grave clogged her nostrils and as she stumbled as fast as she could towards me she opened her jaws as if getting ready to bite me.

  I shot her in the chest and the impact knocked her to the ground, dirt flying from her clothes. I still couldn't get it into my head what was happening, it was like I was dreaming this. Then my little sister got back up. There was no blood flowing as it should from the hole in her chest, just a thick black liquid dribbling out of the wound. She got back up and I could almost physically feel her hunger as she determinedly came at me again. No words came from her, no scream of pain or questioning of my putting a bullet into her. I had almost been transfixed by the horrible sight of my sister's undead corpse shambling towards me until it got almost within arm's reach. My M1 was pointing straight at her head and I had already shot her once but she either ignored or didn't recognize the threat the rifle posed. So I shot her again. In the head. Nasty black ichor and pieces of her rotted brains and skull flew out in a spray behind her, whipping her head back. She fell backwards and this time she didn't get back up.

  I actually prodded her with my rifle making sure she was dead again before I re-buried her.

  The men at the checkpoint are acting chaotic, often fi
ghting amongst themselves. Whatever pills they've been taking only slowed down the Scarlet instead of stopping it. My pilfered binoculars, taken from Mrs. Hoffner's house, are low quality but good enough to make out that they only have a day, maybe two at the most, of life left in them. About once an hour or so it seems they let off rounds, shooting at what has to be other undead, parasite controlled bodies.

  The reports from the remaining news channels both confirm that the U.S. is now at war with North Korea, China and at least three different nations in the Middle East.

  We are at war with North Korea because they launched a massive attack on South Korea. They opened up their war with nuclear weapons, obliterating Pusan and Seoul. They also sent a nuke at Japan, aiming for the Tokyo area and Yokosuka with its huge naval base. The weapon didn't reach its target but still exploded over mainland Japan. The communist North Korean's flooded over the DMZ and are murdering everyone, military and civilian, alike.

  China took the opportunity to reclaim Taiwan in a massive naval and amphibious attack. We have diplomatic and political obligations to Taiwan, our navy is fighting back trying to take control of the seas.

  Israel was attacked by Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Iran started the war by launching a nuclear tipped missile at Jerusalem, according to the missile's flight path. The nuclear missile was shot down and actually exploded over Jordan. There isn't a whole lot we can do besides send our carriers and their accompanying fleets to engage the enemies.

  Besides World War Three raging, everybody dropping dead from the Scarlet after being driven homicidal, food shortages and the dead rising with an uncontrollable hunger for human flesh, I've been given a particularly heavy flow this month.

  I can't say how often I'll write in this journal. It may be daily or weekly. I'll write whenever I need to, whenever I feel I need to tell any future survivors what's happening.

  Nobody has any idea how long the dead will walk the earth. I can't see such an abomination like that continuing for long though. Hopefully it'll last for only a couple of days, maybe a week. Until then I'm going to hunker down and survive as well as I can.

  Monday, October 1, 2012

  Until Saturday I was glad the soldiers were manning the checkpoint down the street. Even though they were slowly losing their grips on their sanity, they had been doing an excellent job of eliminating the undead.

  On Saturday afternoon the tank loaded up and drove off. This left seven men and their Armored Personnel Carrier on duty at the entrance to the subdivision.

  In the beginning of the parasitic resurrection, the undead things rose up singly and their numbers were few. The first day the dead were scattered and easy to eliminate, once people learned to go for the head. Many of the newly risen dead came back inside their own houses where they died of the infection. While there must have been some that came back before that, they were rare. There appears to be a delay of around forty eight hours after normal death before the parasite can gain enough control over their hosts dead body to make it obey their will. I'm going to consider last Friday, the day my sister clawed her way out of her grave, to be day one.

  On the second day, those that had come back to walk the earth with their unfathomable hunger, started finding their ways out of their houses or wherever they had died. They stumbled through open doors, or in most cases, clumsily crashing through the larger windows of their living rooms. The numbers of the zeds (I'm going to call them "zeds" or "zombies" now, there is no other word I can use to describe them) increased dramatically, to what I guess is about ten percent of the population. Or what the population used to be, anyways. That was Saturday. I guess on Saturday the last of those affected by the Scarlet died.

  On Sunday the numbers of the dead grew by billions.

  That means sometime today, somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of seven billion people, or around five and a half billion zeds will walk the earth. If a full ten percent of the population is immune (and I know many of the immune were killed in the chaos before this) then there will be around seven hundred million survivors. A ratio of approximately eight to one. That doesn't seem so bad at first glance. But how many of the survivors are children that can't adequately defend or care for themselves? How many are still babies whose parents have turned into ravenous, cannibalistic, rotting corpses? How many are sick or elderly that are bed-ridden or can barely walk? I fear the real number of survivors that are capable of fighting back and surviving through even the next week is half that. That makes it more like fifteen or sixteen nightmares for every able bodied survivor. The numbers I am working with are a rough estimates, there are no real statistics.

  I'm not in my house any more. On Saturday afternoon the soldiers manning the checkpoint finally went berserk and started a rampage. They burned the neighborhood to the ground.

  Remember how I mentioned the two remaining newscasters in a previous entry? Well, around four a.m. on Saturday morning the obviously infected newsman started going into odd, rambling speeches. He would vehemently make outrageous statements one second and the stop and apologize the next. He was losing his sanity on live TV. After one of those rounds, a long, extended rant, he got a strange look in his eyes and suddenly produced a chrome plated revolver. He stared into the barrel for a few moments and then, without a word to the viewers, shot himself. The feed is still being broadcast, his dead body sprawled back in his chair.

  The second newscaster, the woman who appeared to be uninfected, got into an argument with the lone cameraman. The things the cameraman was saying to her were vile, disgusting things of a sexual nature. The woman started ordering the cameraman from the studio, to which the infected and now clearly insane man responded by rushing at the pretty but scared woman. The red faced man jumped over the news desk and grabbed her with both hands, one getting a fistful of her hair, the other going for her breasts. They only struggled for a moment when there came the roar of a gunshot, spraying the cameraman's brains and the back of his skull all over the studio. A piece of flesh from the dead man struck the camera lens and hangs there still. The unnerved woman got up and left the studio and soon after there was plainly heard more shots. I don't know if she escaped or not or what happened to her afterwards but the feed is still active, if a bit blurred from the gore on the camera. That happened on Saturday afternoon, just before the soldiers joined the ranks of the insane.

  Saturday afternoon, before the Abrams tank left the checkpoint, a group of the soldiers started going into the nearby houses. There was no knocking, no announcing their intentions to anyone who may be still alive in the house, they just battered down the front door and forced their way in. There was always gunshots immediately afterwards, I guess from them finding the occupants either already risen from the dead or twitching and getting ready to. Maybe they had originally planned to start clearing the neighborhood house by house but that soon got way off track.

  The soldiers had cleared four or five houses when they found a survivor. I was watching with my binoculars through barely parted curtains with great interest at their actions. I heard some shouting and then they brought someone out of the house. The person they brought out had to be like seventy or eighty years old and needed to be helped out. I recognized the old man, but never really spoke to him, I can't even remember his name. I could see no sign of the infection on the elderly guy. The soldier "helping" the old man outside was almost dragging him. They rudely and roughly, at the point of their guns, made the old man strip off his clothes.

  I wasn't prepared for what they did next. I thought they would let the old man go when they saw he was clean with no sign of the parasite.

  The soldiers started arguing with each other while the frail, stooped gentleman held his trembling hands as far in the air as he could. What they were arguing about I couldn't hear. As they shouted at each other, one of the soldiers walked behind the old dude and pulled out a large knife. The soldier didn't just cut the man's throat, with his left hand he hit and pushed the man's head back by forcing
his stiffened fingers under the man's nose, compressing the bundle of nerve endings located there. The old man instinctively moved his head backwards and the soldier rammed the blade into that part of the neck just under and behind the back of the lower jaw, directly below the ear. The blade was long and sharp and it easily cut through arteries and muscle. When the knife was completely through the neck, extending out the other side, the soldier pushed forward on the hilt and sliced open the poor man's neck from the inside. Blood spurted out both sides of the old man's neck and before he could fall the soldier adjusted his left hand. He grossly stuck his gingers in the old man's nostrils and yanked back hard, breaking the old man's neck. The head loosely flopped against the back of the spine. Bladder and bowels let loose then and the body stood there momentarily, jets of bright red blood squirting.

  The soldiers started shouting and pointing their guns at each other, and although I couldn't actually make out what they were saying, I knew at least what the killer was saying. The murderer had his arm's spread and the knife still out as if he were asking the other's if they wanted to fight about it.

  That's when the Abrams tank packed up and drove off.