The Zom Diary (10 page)

     With regret, I break a pane of glass and lay prone shooting at the zombies still outside.  As they fall, some from inside come back out to turn and look up at me.  Each curious customer gets the same answer, “Crack!”  Fuck you for wanting to kill me!

     The sun is high now and the barrel of the gun is frightfully hot.  I decide to take a break before clearing the rest out.  I prop the hot .22 against the rail and stretch my arm, sore from being held in the same position all morning.  I gather the good rounds dropping them into the cardboard box and then gather the spent shells.  I throw them out the window over the corpses.  Pepper in the pot.

     I jump and slap a rafter listening to the echo it makes competing with the shuffle of feet downstairs and the occasional moan.  I get motivated and drop the ladder.  Arms still press past the inanimate dead seeking me, but the plug is holding. 

     I am wary but feel that the plug of bodies will continue to hold.  I open the door to the supply room and get a bunch of clips for the AK.  I have left the .22 upstairs confident that my bathing pistol, inexplicably still hanging from my side, will do as a hold-out weapon.

     I retrieve the AK, put in the clip, and pause considering my clothes.  If it comes to it, and I am arms length from these things, I will want some extra layers between my skin and their teeth.  I button on a coarse old army jacket, taking a fast glance at the moaning scraping dilemmas behind me.  I can’t afford gloves.  Heavy fingers are no good for working a gun.  Before I get started, I grab the hammer from where it has fallen earlier and put it back through the loop provided for just such use on my thigh.

     I stand three feet from the plugged hole in the wall and let loose trusting that the heavy 7.62 rounds will punch through bodies and anything else in the way.  After a time, the plug falls apart.  I hear the shatter of glass; the back window.  I lean into the hole in the wall, careless of the slickness soaking into the arms of the jacket, pointing and shooting, racking up head shots on the invaders.  I back out, turn to the side door which leads to the breached exterior door, throw the bolt, and let them come.

     Close to a dozen are left.  I take aim and wince at what lays beyond their heads.  Cupboards full of empty jars, dishes and pans destroyed by the heavy AK rounds.  Glass has fallen, wood splintered, holes in the walls.  Holes in corpses.

Chapter 9

     Sitting there in the big room on my old green couch, I lift my head and look around me.  To the left is the three by three gore covered hole that I sawed through the wall to escape the bastards that broke through my door.  Ahead of me the door to the entry room is held open by a stack of bodies; their putrescence leaking to the floor.  The smell is oddly antiseptic.  Perhaps the mind can only take so much stink before telling the nose to take a vacation.

     What a fucking mess!  I unzip and peel off the jacket, tossing it onto the slow puddle coming my way across the floor.  It darkens as the fluid tries to flow past.  My arms are stained a queer purplish yellow from the muck. 

     I have imagined this day many times over.  Planned, re-planned and fortified.  As well prepared as I thought myself, I still stare at disaster.  Is this place even habitable?  What if there had been a thousand?  A million of them?  Nevermind.  I live. 

     I give up on fumbling for answers and decide to start the work of clearing out the barn.  I am suitably attired, old boots, coveralls already stained with putrescence.  Too many layers for comfort in this weather, but there is little choice.  I fish an old pair of leather gloves from under the work table and put them on.  The hammer still hangs on my leg slapping against my thigh as I walk.  The AK is propped by the couch; still warm, and empty. 

     I step up onto the bodies piled in the doorway using the door frame to balance myself.  It is an unnerving feeling walking on the dead.  Leaning in, I look left at the carnage.  Broken shit everywhere.  Dead bodies everywhere.  Illuminated by half inch shafts of light, streaming in through bullet-holes, punched into the far wall.  Catastrophe.  My poor lovely barn.

     I hop down and look right at the busted door.  It isn’t as bad as I thought.  The board I nailed on the right hand side so that a bar could be dropped across the door has pulled free of the wall allowing the safeguard to fail; the door crashed in, but miraculously is whole and hinged.

     I begin here; grabbing the first zombie by the ankles and dragging it into the yard.  The grass grows a black trail from the entrance of the barn to the wire fence which runs the border of field and dirt road.  As the pile along the fence grows, the trail glistens and becomes slippery.  I fall occasionally, staining my legs.  This is awful, hot business.  The image of another wave of these things showing up is the taskmaster’s whip, forcing me to move faster.  Every break I steal to catch my breath is a chance to scan the distance, to listen.

     There is no way I am going to drag all of these things all the way to the ditch at the back of the orchard.  I have the big room, entrance room, and much of the workshop cleared out, and I have counted thirty seven bodies.  Already the sun is well past noon.  I resolve to clear the bodies from the barn at least, and, then spend the night in my old shack.  The barn is fucked and will take more than a whole day to get cleaned enough to any degree where I will want to inhabit it.  I wipe my brow carefully with the sleeve of my shirt and continue.

     The sun is sinking slowly over the tops of the trees when I decide to stop for the day.  My gloves are so caked with gore that I am afraid it will seep through and make them useless as any kind of barrier to the ick, but it would still stop a bite.  The pile of dead is three high and runs a good distance down the fence line.

     The barn is free of bodies and halves of bodies and limbs.  There are a few still out front, laying there in tangled poses.  All morning long my eyes drifted to one form, somehow fallen into a restful pose, as if napping beneath a tree.  This is the one that haunts me.  As if all were well in his world, and I the anomaly.  I close my eyes and look away.  These ones will wait along with the large pile out back.  There are almost sixty corpses in my pile and I figure there to be almost fifty more between the front and back.

     I set the gloves by the well pump and work it for a time, cleaning my hands and running water over my head; cold -gloriously clean water.  I drink then, deeply, leaning my face to the spout even though the temperature makes my teeth ache painfully.

     I walk inside passing through to the big room disheartened by the wide planks still pooled in black gore. Soaking it in, staining the floors.  Rummaging in the supply room, I pull down a coffee can of 7.62 rounds.  I am using far too much of this stuff.  I load the one clip then place it in my AK, slinging it and a canteen on my shoulder.  I turn, grab a lantern-mostly full of kerosene, and close doors behind me as I leave.  I notice that the board in the entrance room that always squeaks when I step on it fails to let out its familiar cry; soggy with this cursed black fluid. 

     It is dusk now, and I seek the familiar trail.  As I pick my way through the grass, I think about my predicament.  It will take too long to drag all those bodies to the trench.  I decide then that I will cart them over to Bill’s old house and pile them there.  It is the only safe place to burn them and it is a lot closer.  I feel a pang of sorrow, of regret for desecrating Bill’s resting place this way, but in a land so fouled by death, one has to give in to the desensitizing reality of the needs of the living.

     I think there is an old mop in the garage and I know there are a couple gallons of bleach hanging around, too.  These will have to do for cleaning the floors.  I hope that all that fluid doesn’t leak down onto my food stores in the cellar.  I push that thought away.

     Smelling the breeze that meanders through the trees, and my mind, and belly concentrating on food, I smell the tang of death.  The deer!

     It is a lost cause.  Flies have found my little deer and it sways from the branch black and buzzing.  What the hell was I thinking?  I should have butchered it right away; clock ticking.  Chop, chop.  I untie it letting it fall, leaving it for the coyotes.  Small losses, I keep telling myself.  Breathe and be grateful.

    The shack is dark, as it should be, and the moon rises over the hills beyond it. I step up to the door and open it.  It smells a little stale, but compared to the horror of the barn, it is a lovely and familiar smell.  I feel at the door frame above me and bring down the old plastic lighter I have left here; lighting the lantern.  I hang the lantern in the center of the room and shut the door behind me.

     I light a very small fire in the fireplace and look about me.  In the cupboard there are MREs and canned food.  But I am far from hungry.  I untie my boots, leave them by the door, and then step out of the bibs.  I toss my clothes outside on the dark steps, cautiously, lock up and then pull a chair over to the fire.   I hang my canteen on the back of the chair and set the AK on the bed.  Once the fire catches, I turn the lantern off.

    Sitting there sipping water and staring into that lovely fire, I let my mind go blank.  I am a hardened man.  So many years spent in blind fascination of technology and cradled in comfort.  Flicker.  It is no surprise that those of us who still live are as tough as nails.  The slow and sweet treat is trampled under feet.  Flicker.  Silas looks tough and leathery.  Flicker.  Bryce looks like he could run across that desert.  Flicker.  What will we wear when the clothes run out?  Flicker.  I let my eyes become distracted by the fire licking at the small sticks and one small log.  I have to get over this self pity.  Zombies knocked down my sand castle.  I will build another.  I hate the bastards.  Not because they try to kill me, but because of what they are.  They are us, ruining it for the rest of us, as we always have done.

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     The sunlight of the morning lights the curtains that cover the small windows of the shack and casts a warm yellow light in the interior.  I stretch, take a very deep breath, and roll out of bed.  I take a long pull off the canteen and get dressed.  Today is going to be hard.

    The early morning sky is a deep blue and clouds; puffed, evenly spaced, drift by.  The dew from the night clings to my clothes and soon my legs and boots are wet.  I carry my AK before me and try to stay alert aware of the fact that I am more likely to spot a unicorn than a cup of coffee.

     I try not to look at the stack of corpses as I walk past them.  Men, women and children.  Most all of them should be off somewhere living their lives being happy or sad.  Not this.  I enjoy the prospect of a new world with fewer people and more green places, but seeing the price laid out before me, the thought seems foolish.  Speaking of which; if I am going to spend another whole day dragging around corpses, damned if I’m not going to do it stoned out of my gourd.

     I open the door and walk on the still tacky floor boards.  Like drying paint.  In some places, the black fluid has run together and pooled like mercury.  Odd.  Opening the door to the big room, I climb the ladder to the loft and find my way to the table.  Sitting, I tear a small square of paper from an old book and proceed to roll a joint.  I slobber all over it, forming a wet tube.  Then I use the lighter to dry it out properly before lighting it.  All this ink can’t be good for me.

     Walking back outside, I smoke and watch the sun climb higher in the sky.  I put the roach out when it is half done and set it on the edge of the chair by the fire pit next to my lighter.  If I had known how insanely useful disposable lighters would become; I would have bought cases of them.  I make do with what I have, though, and have decided to keep my eyes open for more.  I walk to the pump and drink a few mouthfuls of cold clean water.

     The gloves from yesterday are stiff with dried gore.  I put them on anyway and work my fists open and closed until the gloves are somewhat supple.  “Let the corpse dragging begin!”  I bellow to no one in particular, except myself.

     And so the morning wears on.  I beat a track from the barn pile down the driveway to Bill’s burned out house; pause, heave, and back to the pile.  After a dozen or so of these trips, I begin to hum an old jingle for a windshield repair company, softly, to myself.

     By noon, the pile by the fence is gone and I begin on those ones scattered around the front of the barn.  I break for a quick lunch after these are gone. The only thing I can stomach is fresh fruit and cold water, but it is good.  I smoke the rest of the joint before starting in on the back yard.

      Walking down the slope of the low hill, it seems as if the barn looms over me; a tall structure from this vantage point.  Rounding the corner, I see the pile.  Almost as many dead are piled here as had been in the rest of the barn.  Some are still standing, held up by the press of corpses behind them.  Movement catches my eye.

     Crawling from beneath a tangle of bodies, trapped by their weight, is on old man still wearing a sweat shirt that bears the logo of a deceased football team.  He looks up at me; vacant grey eyes, jaws snapping, arms now scrabbling more furiously.  I get close enough to hit him with the hammer.  Whap!  Whap!  He stops moving then.  Sometimes there are no mental diversions great enough to dull this pain.  My eyes fill with tears, running tracks through my face dirt.  Back to the pile.

     By sunset, I have a nice twisted burn pile over at Bill’s.  The last of the corpses carted over from the barn are flopped over one on top of another face to face.  I splash as much gasoline as I can spare on the pile which covers the entirety of the largest section of Bill’s wrecked home.  I hear the liquid run down over the bodies, and the dried charcoal remains of timbers beneath crackle as they absorb the fluid. 

     I take about ten steps back and pour some gas on a rag wound about a stick.  I light this and toss it at the pyre which explodes to life with a loud “whoomp”. The shock of heat presses my clothes against my body and whips at my beard.

     As the last rays of sunlight fail, I behold a nightmare vision of contorted, twisted, burning bodies.  I leave it there and hope it is so hot that only white ash will greet the dawn.  I feel the heat on my back as I walk away.

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     I spend that second night in the shack, too.  All bodies are cleared from the barn, but I still have cleaning to do and then the long process of patching holes and looking for panes to repair windows.  That will take time, if any are to be found at all.  Sleep, dark and dreamless, and then…

     Awake, sitting in a new morning, I make a list of tasks that need to be done.  There are brown wrapped cubes of shavings in one of the old animal enclosures.  I decide to investigate these first and then look to mending doors and walls.

     There is a crispness to the air, not only the temperatures which remind me of a New England Autumn, but also a slight electric current of sorts.  I feel like the great enervation that has settled upon me is lifting.  I should be exhausted.  God!  My muscles are sore from dragging the bodies from the barn, but it is a good sore, as if it promises new muscle and energy; layers settling on layers.

     I am used to wearing the same clothes for long stretches.  There are no reliable sources of new clothing.  When I find something that fits me, I tend to wear it a lot.  Even so, my shirt, boots and overalls are getting to be gross.  I don’t think I can stand the idea of washing them in my cooking pot.  They might be a lost cause.

     I take a sip of water and set the tin coffee cup on the steps.  Rising, I bid farewell to the shack for another day.  Slinging the AK low over my shoulder, I set off down the foot path to the barn.