The Zom Diary (9 page)

Chapter 8

     My eyes snap open at the sound.  I lean forward and look out of the low windows.  It is dark.  I swear softly and wait for a moment. Holding my breath in the stillness of the barn I strain to hear and then it comes again.  This time the clinking of cans, and it is closer. 

     Turning, I climb down from the loft and run through to the entrance room.  The door is shut, but I set the wooden board across it to bar and add strength.  The windows in this room are high and small.  Back to the big room now and a check of the large sliding barn doors.  These I have long since barred and nailed shut.  All the same, I look them over from top to bottom checking nails and wedges.  Good.  The back barn doors are mostly for show since they don’t meet the ground at this new foundation.

    I can’t remember if the back doors that lead to the wood shed are closed, but the only way up from there would involve coming through the wall of the cellar and up a tight captain stair; not likely.  Everything within reach from the outside is boarded up or shut tight.  I dim the lantern in the big room so that it barely casts light and set it aside.

    Moving to the couch, I grab the AK and check the clip—25 rounds.  I make sure I know where a fresh clip lays and, for good measure, set a hammer on the work table and grab some nails.

     Back through the entry room I take a left and come to the sliding door of the workshop.  The way the hill slopes behind the barn, the window in here is maybe twelve feet off the ground below.  I step around the tub and look out into the gray-near-black of the outside world.

     With no light in the room, it seems brighter outside and my eyes adjust quickly.  There.  Forms are moving in the distance closing toward the barn.  They shamble and crawl with the halting movements of the dead.  The faster ones are nearly to the privy.  Well, I think, at least it’s not angry townspeople with torches.

     I decide to snipe a couple if I can from this vantage while the light remains.  I swing the window open and stand, leaning the wooden foregrip on the sill.  The closest one is probably fifteen feet out. I take aim closing my eye as I pull the trigger.  Even with my eye closed, the muzzle flash ruins my night vision with a floating orange blob.

    I have torn an evil hole in the thing’s jaw, but still it comes.  I fire again.  This time I don’t worry about the flash.  It dazzles me, but I focus and keep firing. The first one down, I aim at a crawler rounding the privy.  I account for five of them before running out of ammo.

     As I turn to fetch another clip from the big room, I hear the tell tale knocking and scraping behind me.  They are coming at the barn from both sides.

     I grab my pistol, hung beside the tub days before and belt it on.  Walking to the big room, AK slung on my shoulder, I close and bar doors behind me.  I grab the extra clip, seat it, and draw back the bolt chambering a round.  I also grab the hammer, dropping it in a loop on my pants.  Lastly, I shoulder a water bag that is about half full before climbing the ladder to the loft and pulling it up behind me, grabbing the rope and tying it off on the rail.

     I drop the gear next to the kitchen table and slap my forehead with my hand.  The lamp!  I let the ladder back down, trot over to the lamp, turn it up, and grab my pipe before returning to the loft and pulling the ladder up again.  Sobriety might have to wait until this crisis has passed.

     I hang the lantern from a beam over the table and walk around the loft.  The lantern casts soft yellow light across the floor and makes blocky shadows as it passes the railings and casts itself against the slope over my bed.  I select an old paperback, something light, from the makeshift shelf there.

     Pocketing the book, I walk across the open space at the back of the loft and pull on the old hay door set above the line of windows sliding it open about six inches.

     The night is made even more black by the light behind me.  It is as if I am looking into a void.  Below me, I can hear the shuffle of the zombies as they call in unison, ”Nnngh!”

     I shudder.  Closing the window, I cross over and look out and down at the big room.  I can hear the arms that flail at the wood from outside, but it holds.  If enough of them pile up they might break through the entry door, and perhaps, the door that leads to the big room, but that would take a lot of pushing. 

     What concerns me most is the large barn door.  I imagine that it might come off its track despite my fortifications and reinforcements if proper force were applied.  If this happens, I will pick them off as best I can and see what happens.  I pray it will hold.

     Daylight will bring the opportunity to pick off as many as I can, and, barring a swarm of hundreds, I might account well for myself.  I sit at the table, take a quick pull off my pipe, and start to read.  Fists beat a staccato on wood echoing around me.  I do my best to ignore it, letting my mind wander into the old familiar story, aided by the smoke.  Hundreds?  What if there are thousands?  I dismiss this thought.  If there are, I am fucked.  So why worry?  Tomorrow seems like a long ways away.

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     Dawn comes all over me like a bum on a beach wandering past the unwary.  I have an indentation on my forehead from a piece of jerky I have slept on.  My mouth is a hot salty nightmare.  Had I really fallen asleep here at the table?  Before me, the table top is an assortment of half-chewed strips of deer flesh, a badly folded paperback, and spilled water.

     Around and below me, from everywhere comes the sound of clawing hands on wood.  Heads and arms beat at the barn relentlessly.  The doors hold.

     I stand and stretch, my body fingering the jerky impression on my forehead.  Leaning to the right and looking down and out the line of windows above the front barn door, I curse.  There must be forty of them, four bodies deep, pressing against the door.  The ones in the back row are milling about and looking expectant.  A brief thought.  It could be worse.

     I sigh, walking to the back of the loft and to the hay door.  Opening it, I peer down at the same situation on that side.  All told, probably a hundred zombies press about the barn boxing me in.  I am calm.  I have to be.  I need to think about this situation rationally.

     Scanning the horizon, I note that there is no movement.  No stragglers.  Those that are here, are here.  Where have they come from?  None look fresh, but I can also see that they do not look weathered either.  Many of them have the same complexion, for lack of a better word.  Wherever they have petrified, they have done it together.  I imagine a gymnasium somewhere; people shut in holding off the threat outside, waiting for help that never comes.  I then imagine the same scene three years later; a mass of the dead, locked in, trying to get past their own fortifications, eventually the right hand jostles the right board, and success.  They burst forth into their new world like an abscess.  As good an explanation as any.  Works for me I guess.  How will I deal with them now?

     The doors are holding, so I feel somewhat secure for the moment.  I let down the ladder shoulder the AK, and descend to the big room.  Walking, feeling the walls, they all feel sturdy.  No nails are half out of the wood boards, no split beams.  I have done well.

     I undo the side door and peer into the entry room. No unwanted guests.  These doors also hold sturdily.  Back to the supply room, I don’t bother to light a lamp.  I am familiar with the contents of the room and enough bright sunshine hits the big room and creeps in here to light the walls.

     I select a nice .22 long rifle carbine that I found in a neighbor’s house some years ago; wood stock, blue steel.  I don’t carry it for protection.  It has no knock down power and holds only ten rounds, but it is perfect for what I have in mind.

     Most discount the .22 as a wimpy round.  True, it won’t blow someone in half or shoot through a lock, but it kills in its own gruesome way.  The .22 is a rather light and small round not much larger than the ammo from a pellet gun. It is fast, though, and will punch through a skull.  Once the round enters a skull, it isn’t powerful enough to punch through the other side.  Rather it ricochets and rattles around scrambling the brain.  The .22 is an assassin’s round.  Look it up.

     I grab a 550-round value cube of ammo and make my way to the back of my workshop.  Propping the rifle on the tub while I open the window and shutters, I look down.

     There they are, a creepy throng of pests.  Granted, if they corner me, they could tear me to bits and then eat those bits, but I am perched above their means of harm.  Not so the reverse.

     I begin to load clips; ten rounds each, four clips.  Then I slide the first clip into the rifle pulling the lever back seating a round.  Crack!  The loud snap of the .22 going off is nothing compared to the explosion produced by the AK.  It barely moves the rifle and only a small dirty puff of smoke drifts lazily from the tip of the barrel.  Dirty ammo; cheap, cheap stuff. 

     The effect is what I want, though.  Below me the old lady I’ve aimed at slumps her head and slides slowly down into the throng, supported by the press of bodies.  I take aim carefully and begin picking off the ones in the back.  I don’t want the fallen to create a ramp for the rest to climb.

     So I spend my morning; shut up in the workshop picking off the backyard crowd.  They are thinning nicely when the sound of the entry room door cracking open sends cold electricity racing to my fingertips.  Panic.

     “Oh, shit!”

     I drop the .22 and dart to the sliding door of the workshop.  Half out the door I can see the entrance.  The small clapboard door that I use every day is swinging open; the press of bodies the only thing slowing the tangled mass of death that is entering the room.

     I push a shelf over hoping to slow them some and turn closing the sliding door and looking for a way to lock it.  At the top is a small iron hook that slips into an eye bolt in the frame.  That is it.

     Turning, I look around frantically for something to block the door.  I hear the first zombie press against it.  I wait a moment.  They aren’t trying to slide it open; just pushing against it.  The sliding door is not heavy, though.  Will there be enough room for them to press against it and to break it?

     The only object that I can move is a shelf; contents spill to the floor as I do.  All else is too heavy or not suited for the purpose. 

     I can see the door pushing in, its bottom rollers straining against the track in the floor.  Then I notice the old chainsaw.  The big room is secure. Could I cut through the wall?  I bend over the saw, woefully unmaintained, and pray that it will start.

     I hold the cord and drop the chainsaw again and again hear it putter but not start.  The small tank is half full of two-cycle.  I have pressed the clear plastic bulb to prime it; throttle set low.  I fiddle and get mad.  Yank, yank, yank.  It growls to life sending a small cloud of blue smoke into the air.  I squeeze the trigger and the blade whirs.  I cut.

     I want the hole to be small enough so I can fix it later.  Even now in a near panic, I think of repairs.  Chest high, I saw a rough square roughly three feet by three feet in size on the left side of the back wall where the shelf had been.  I kill the saw and push at the square.  It falls through, ripping the maritime chart hanging on the other side. 

     I grab the .22 and box of ammo and drop through the hole.  Bracing myself on the waist high hip of the hole, I let myself tumble forward into the big room.  I get up quickly and run to the side to the door that leads to the entry room.  Shut but not locked, I throw the bar, turn, and grab the .22 and ammo.  I throw the box up into the loft and hear the bullets spill, some rolling back over the edge onto me.  I grab the .22 and climb up pulling the ladder as I hear the sliding door to the workshop pop out of its track and spill open like a cat door.

     I tie the nylon rope holding the ladder and look down over the railing.  A torso leans through the hole; awful face turning toward me held tight to the other side of the wall by its waist and the push of bodies behind it.  Good lord, that was close. 

     I pick off the zombie leaning through the hole I have cut and he falls forward as another scrambles over him.  This one also gets a .22 to the skull.  At least with the small caliber, I won’t have huge splatters to clean up.  Look at the bright side.

    The next zombie is harder to hit; its head pushing back and forth against the backs of the two now slumped over the edge of the hole.  Another and another and the hole is clogged.  I have bought some time.

    I scoop up some .22 rounds; stuffing my pockets.  I have left the other clips downstairs in the workshop turned zombie slaughter room.  I walk to the hay door and lean out.  Crack, crack, crack.  Three more drop.  Once the clip is empty, I remove it loading it again careful to pick the pocket lint off the rounds.  Loading and shooting, every dozen rounds or so, I have a dud.  I hold the rifle pointed in a safe direction counting to thirty before ejecting the round.  I toss them out the window pinging off the shoulders of the dead.

     After ten minutes, the backyard is clear.  A mass of bodies freed from their unnatural animation, look peaceful in a way, spread before me.

     I then walk, stepping on spent casings, pausing by the ladder to scoop up more ammo, and walk to the right of my bed.  Looking down through the small rectangles of glass, I can see the front mob pressing into the entrance room.  Some are turning now to look up at me.