The Zom Diary

The Zom Diary

Eddie Austin

The Zom Diary

eBook Edition

Copyright 2016 Eddie Austin

eBook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, please return to the Kindle Store and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Mom.

Introduction

              As a fan of fiction I have a habit of reading book introductions.  Some are good, some not so much.  I've found over the years that the ones that I truly enjoy offer some insight into the process of writing itself, rather than any speculation about plot, motives etc.  With that said, I'll give you some background on the process and craft of writing this book. 

I began writing it in 2010.  I was looking for work and found a temporary position at my daughter's school.  I thought it was temporary, I ended up working there for three years. 

              One of my duties was to sit in the rooms at nap time, to offer some relief to the regular teachers.  So that's how I found myself sitting for hours in dimly lit rooms listening to lullabies on loop with not so much to do other than watch over little sleeping people. 

              Out of boredom, or perhaps even frustration at my prospects, I began to write.  Something to pass the time productively.  At first I envisioned the story being much shorter.  Perhaps 1000 words.  But it grew, in odd ways.  It was almost as if once I had raised my mental antenna, I began to pick up signals.  This bears some explaining.  I had a vague idea about writing in first person, and something about survival... but truly the rest was just as surprising for me as it hopefully will be for you.  In a sense, I didn't write this book.  It was revealed to me, and I simply took notes.  Just as reading a good book has always brought visions and emotions so clearly to my mind that at times it feels as if I am there, so it was with the writing process. 

              There was no writer's block.  There was no pause or hesitation.  I simply would put pen to paper and the vision would come.  In a two hour nap rotation, I could easily hit 3-4000 words.  All written out long hand on legal pads.  I would run pens dry in a week or so.  I was buying out the stock at the local pharmacy.  All told, after a few months I had almost 1000 handwritten pages.  The only derivation from this process was the inspiration for one character.  That came in the form of a dear friend, and frankly, it runs contrary to the flow of the book.  I'll let you see if you can spot him.  Also, the barn is a real place, though it isn't in California.  It's in New Hampshire.  Go, look if you want.  There are fruit trees... 

              That's about it.  Thank you for reading.  Thank you to all the people who helped me along the way too.  You know who you are and what you did, but some shout outs:  Mom, Dr. Brent, Angie and Harps, Martina, Wiley, Darin, Amie my cool boss who let me write a book while I was on the clock... there are others.  -E.A.

Chapter 1

     My feet raise puffs of dust into existence with each soft step.  Gray-white dust cakes into the seams of my clothing, into the cracks of my mouth, it tastes of salt.  The sun is high, but the air is crisp and the sky, the almost violet blue of an atmosphere devoid of moisture.  The arroyo through which I walk is wide and the walls of it have been wind-eroded.

     As this curve brings me further from familiar sights, I wonder how much longer I will be out here.  The farm needs little tending, but my water is low and there really is no purpose for being out here.  Just a change of scenery.  A little vacation from fruit and the damn barn.

     Pausing at the side of the channel, I seek at my waist pouch for a knobby glass tube and old cracked plastic lighter.  I admire the twisted colors; blisters of glass that adorn the object and give it a mystic quality.  I break a small pea sized nugget into sticky mulch and load the pipe.  I take one long pull, extinguish the small ember on top of the herb and place my belongings back in the bag.  I release the smoke from my body and wait, in calm anticipation.  I sit. Then stand.   Slowly the sky brightens.  My mind wanders pleasantly as I begin to walk again.  I do a brief check of my other possessions:  water skin, hunting knife, and my knobkerrie – a Zulu war club I have acquired somewhere, sometime.

     I pause to look at interesting rocks along the way.  Some I take with me, wiping off dust and sand as best I can before placing them in my pouch next to carefully wrapped glass and weed and fruit leather.  I ease my shoulders, stretching, feeling my chest open with air and energy.  It’s time to continue.

     I have been walking this new path for the whole morning and what I see before me now makes me pause.  To the left is the entrance to a very large cement culvert.  As I near the entrance grows to this abandoned, subterranean sewer.  I read once about people who dwelt in such places beneath Las Vegas and other desert cities.

     Stillness surrounds me as I approach the entrance, silence thunders in my ears.  I thought the entrance to be completely dark, but as my eyes seek an end to the darkness, I can see more light perhaps fifty feet back in the tunnel.  There, a hole in the roof of the structure allows a square of bright light to pour down.  I have not yet entered the mouth of this man-made cavern when something catches my eye.  A shape lies on the ground a few feet before the patch of light.  A duffle bag?  Debris?  As I continue to stare, my mind begins to play tricks with me.  Is it moving? No.  Yes!  A form rises, shadow dark, back lit by the patch of light, and it turns toward me.

     I hear a low moan as the form shambles toward me.  I dart right and scramble up the side of the arroyo.  Morbid curiosity seizes me, or perhaps it is my own devil-minded sense of playfulness. This is the most excitement I have had in some time. 

     I look around me for a large rock and heft one the size and shape of a bowling ball that weighs perhaps ten pounds.  I stand at the sharp lip that tops the entrance to the tunnel and wait.  Moments pass and my arms grow tired as I wait for the thing to exit its concrete tomb.  When at last it ambles forth, I take a moment to regard its desiccated form.  Tight yellow skin stretched over a skull with no remnants of hair.  The scarecrow thin form is garbed partially in tattered brown and black rags that could have once been a Hawaiian shirt and patterned shorts.

     The thing stands there as if dumb stricken, if I knew it capable of thought, I would name it confusion.  Its head turns right and I regard a horrible countenance— a rictus grin of chipped and broken teeth, no lips, ragged flap of a nose, and oh, those eyes… grey prunes sunken into cavernous sockets.  I notice also that the thing has few fingers left, only scrabbly hand pads remain.

     The rock connects at the base of its neck between the shoulders and bears the dried husk forward and down.  I hear a snap like dry wood breaking and watch with interest as the man-thing lays there face down and moving as if swimming while the rock pins it to the earth.

     I could run down and whack it with my knobkerrie, but that would be unnecessary and probably messy.  I find another rock and take careful aim.  The head pops with a satisfactory splat of grey-black matter that has been held captive by the confines of the leathery skull. 

     Now I do something foolish.  Something that screams stupidity to me, yet it is irresistible.  I decide to investigate the tunnel.

     I stand at the entrance for some time allowing my eyes to adjust and my senses to clear. I decide to walk to the patch of light and see how well lit the tunnel is past this point.  I have no light making devices with me, save the lighter.  The floor of the tunnel is sandy, but I can see patches of smooth concrete beneath this.  I expect the space to smell of urine, but it does not.  In my experiences, most underground places like this have been pissed on so much they never lose the smell.  The tunnel looks clear aside from the long dragging tracks left by my flattened acquaintance outside in the sun. 

     Leaning against the cool cement of the tunnel, I fish around in my pouch for a piece of fruit leather.  This last batch came out rather well.  The fruit pulp of fresh pears and oranges is one of the staples of my diet.  It keeps remarkably well after drying in the sun and being wrapped in paper.  Perhaps I’ll explain my orchard another time, but this is not the direction my thoughts have chosen to wander as I stand and chew and think deeply back to the start of this cursed world.

     My life had been full of ultimately meaningless stressors.  Pressure to succeed at various careers, huge debts and failed visions of the American dream.  All of which became obsolete when the end came.

      I can’t tell you if it was a virus, space dust, government mind control drugs, food additives, cell towers or God that made the dead rise again with insane urges to kill and eat the living.  I don’t think anyone knows.  The government lasted long enough to turn out the lights before they left.  I was grateful for this.  Even though the shit hit the fan hard, they managed to close most of the nuclear power plants in the few months that they had.  Perhaps this was part of some doomsday procedure to secure fissile material, or just to give us poor fools who survived a slim chance in hell of living for a while.

     In America, cities were abandoned or closed off if possible.  I heard later that they were the most fatal areas, more from panic and starvation than from the zombies.  But at the time I really wasn’t paying too much attention to cities.  My folks were the rural sort, and I had no friends in the city.  I had already cashed in the chips I had earned at the table of conformity years before.  Giving in to my desires for solitude, I had found work as a farm hand on the edge of the desert.  I had my own place and a lot of time and space to think.  So when the end came, I hadn’t gone looking for anyone and not so surprisingly, no one had come looking for me -at least not unless you count zoms and crazies.  Not all of the wanderers I have taken out of commission have been of the walking-dead variety.  Some were the walking-armed-to-the-teeth-bat-shit-crazy-desperate-for-food variety.  It’s a dangerous world I live in.  My mind tracks back to the present.

     My eyes and senses adjust to the dimness, and it is time to see what is down this old hole.  I imagine I might find a crack in the wall that leads to secret lairs of golden-painted maidens dancing with pythons around their shoulders while massive luchaderos pound kettle drums.  Or, perhaps it would have been even more exciting to find a secret fallout shelter unlocked and full to the brim with MRE’s, ammo, batteries and medicine.   Why can’t it be that the tunnel leads to an abandoned alien space craft that, with some small inept fumbling, will come to life before me and carry me off to a new world?

     It doesn’t though.  It holds only sand and rust and darkness for as far as I dare to look.  Let the dead be their own company.  Half of the arroyo is split with shadow as I gingerly leap over rock-for-brains and head right and on to more familiar territory.  The moon is a ghost in the still day blue sky and an edge of chill has crept into my bones.

⃰
  
 ⃰
 
 
⃰

     It takes about two days to get back to my hideout on the edge of the orchard.  Before the end, the owner had been experimenting with drought-resistant varieties of oranges, olives, and pears, as well as various other fruit and nut trees.  Some of these experiments turned out well, such as the Namibian lemon trees, while others, like cold-loving apples fared less well.

     I am grateful for the food and even more grateful for the odd deer that inevitably comes to feast on rotting fruit.  At times in my life I have pretty much sworn off meat, but something in my brain screams for vitamins and nutrients that are contained in the innards of these lovely beasts.  When you are your own doctor/nutritionist you listen to what your body tells you.

     My original dwelling in this place was a shack on the edge of the orchard.  I still maintain the place, but for all practical purposes, it is a fallback position.  I keep it in good repair and leave some provisions there.  My bed, books, supplies and workspace are all contained in a rundown looking barn about a quarter mile away from the shack near to where the owner’s house had once been. 

     I wish I knew more of what transpired that night when the old white farm house burned to the ground, but I slept through the whole affair and awakened to the smell of smoke and my own panic.  As far as I know, Bill and his old mother  perished that night in the fire.  I never looked too hard to find out, for there was nothing left but a pile of burnt timber.  I still avoid the spot religiously, if only because it is a grim sight.  Luckily, the barn was untouched by the fire along with a garage, animal pens and a couple of odd out-buildings.

     The barn is a hermit’s dream.  It is a post and beam affair that was dismantled in Rhode Island and driven all the way across the great USA to be reconstructed on the orchard.  It has stood in one place or another for over two hundred years.  It was a very expensive thing to do, but Bill had been a wealthy man and a lover of old structures.  As old and run down as it looks, the bones are strong, the roof relatively new and the interior partially finished for occupancy.  Enter myself.

     I keep a couch, workbench and useful things in the big room on the first floor of the barn, and a bed on the second.  I feel safe up there surrounded by books and cut off from the ground by a pull-up ladder.  It is as secure a place as I could think of for myself at night.  Sometimes they come at night.

    This is where I am heading now, my home.  I stop at the shack and deposit my boonie hat and knobkerrie, pause to check the monofilament fishing wire that is connected to reindeer bells in the trees, and hoof it over to the barn.  I take a few minutes to walk around the tall structure, checking the large double doors at the front end as well as the smaller doors which lead to storage in the back, or to the entry room in the front.  Everything looks as tight and secure as I left it.

     Completing my quick circuit around the barn, I pause and glance over at the buildings between myself and the remains of Bill’s house that lays still and grim not fifty yards away.  It is depressing to dwell on the matter, but one day I would like to do something about that mess, if only for my own peace of mind.  Presently it contributes to the impression that this is an abandoned and uninhabited space.  That suites me for the time being.

     Next to the front entrance to the barn is an old pump well.  The rest of the farm had been fed off of electric pumps, so this is the best and closest source for water.  I have been a student for most of my life, tried soldiering –failed.  Tried a lot of other stuff too, but if you are waiting to hear about solar panels and windmills or stills and canning operations, don’t hold your breath.  I am no handy-man.  There is, however, one luxury of the old world that I can produce, and refuse to let go of:  soap.  I make it by the case, and the agenda for the day is to make soap.

     The main ingredient in soap is any kind of fatty oil that renders nicely and doesn’t spoil easily.  When I take a deer, I almost always make soap the next week—luscious soap made from the fat that surrounds the kidneys.  This is the cleanest, easiest stuff to work with.  I’ve had some success pressing olives and sunflower seeds for oil as well, but this is a rare commodity which I save for cooking, mostly. 

     Lye is the next big ingredient in soap.  I scavenge some, but I also make my own lye by using the ash left over from cooking and from my fireplace when the weather allows.  The lye collects at the bottom of ash piles if you run water through it the right way.  It’s awful nasty stuff.  Looks like crack cocaine and stings the shit out of your hands.

     Lastly, and perhaps the easiest ingredients to come by are essential oils.  Lavender grows around an old herb garden as does thyme.  Cook some of this with the deer fat as it renders, add water with lye in it, and…ta-da!  Soap.

    I take a moment to look at myself in the small mirror next to the entrance and smile.  My beard is grey with salt dust from the past couple days and my eyes look tired, but still, it is me.

     I unlock the trapdoor to the cellar and climb down into the dark.  In the coolest corner I have a crock of deer fat, almost two gallons worth, and it doesn’t smell too nasty.  I grab a kettle and some of my homemade lye and go back out front.  I start a fire under the old cast iron kettle in my fire pit about fifteen feet from the barn and pull over an old rusty garden chair.  I set down the lye and walk halfway around the house to pick some lavender.