ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (3 page)

It was witnessing scenes like that which made me more resolute than ever to make it back to my home and my family at any cost.

When I did finally make it to the subdivision where I lived, I approached my house, and with my goal in sight, a sense of relief fell over me.

I could see my wife Gin, and my two sons, Billy and Jacob huddled together in the driveway. When my wife saw me coming down the street, she started to wave her hands over her head to get my attention, a gesture that was unnecessary considering the dire circumstances.

When I pulled into my driveway, the three of them hurriedly approached my van.

"I thought you'd never get here!" Gin said, as the panicked look on her face was replaced with one of concerned joy.

"Have you heard? It's all over the television."

"You mean about the attacks? Yes, it's all over the radio. I saw it close up too; there were multiple homicides on the freeway right in front of me. People were screaming and running everywhere, cars were wrecking into each other and running over people, and I just barely got away myself."

I could see the look of fear growing in her eyes again.

"What are we going to do?" she asked, now shaking with fear as tears welled up in her eyes.

"The first thing we're going to do is get into the house. Now! Let’s go boys, everyone in the house," I ordered sternly, leading the way into our home.

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WELCOMING THE NEIGHBORS

Locking the door behind us, I asked my family.

"Have any of you seen anyone being attacked?"

"No, but a lot of cars have been speeding in and out of the subdivision," Gin answered, still shaking.

"Probable people like me trying to get home or leaving to find their family members. You're lucky you haven't seen an attack, it's not a pretty sight," I said, issuing them a warning.

Suddenly we heard the sound of glass breaking in the kitchen.

"What's that?" Gin asked, as she grabbed my arm.

Without hesitation, Billy ran toward the kitchen, and seconds later we heard him shout.

"Dad, Dad!"

At that moment I knew what had happened. Someone was trying to get into the house, and from the sound of it, they probably had succeeded in their endeavor.

I jerked my arm from Gin's grasp.

"Stay here honey, I'll be right back!" I said, as I quickly followed Billy into the kitchen.

Upon joining Billy in the kitchen, we stood there, momentarily stunned by what we saw.

A person had made it halfway through the patio's glass door; his clothes were saturated with blood, and his intestines were draped on each side of his twitching body as he sat there eerily straddled on the remaining pillar of broken glass that was still attached to the doorframe.

During his attempt to enter our home, he had hit the door at the top, breaking out the glass down to several inches past the door handle.

The shattering glass falling on his body had cut him in numerous places causing massive hemorrhaging, which in turn resulted in puddles of blood outside the patio door, and on our kitchen floor.

When he attempted to step through the opening, he had slipped in his own blood and fell on the remaining glass that was still in the door.

That glass was broken at about a forty-five degree angle, and as he fell, the glass had acted like a serrated knife-edge cutting him in half vertically from his crotch to his sternum as he slid along its razor sharp periphery, spilling his perforated and severed guts onto our kitchen floor.

"That's Jon from down the street, Julie's husband! That's him all right," Billy announced.

Just then, Jacob bolted into the kitchen from an adjoining room, leaving his mother alone in the hallway still waiting by the front door.

"He's split in two!" Jacob yelled.

"But he's not dead!" Billy said excitedly glancing back and forth, as he began to show signs of a person who was about to go into full panic mode.

"But he's split in two!" Jacob repeated, again yelling.

"He's almost in two separate pieces, he should be dead," Billy said, shaking his head in disbelief.

"What's the problem in there, is everyone all right?" Gin yelled, as her curiosity was starting to get the better of her.

"Don't come in here honey; you don't want to see this." I yelled back, fighting back a sickening feeling in my stomach.

I had seen combat in two different theaters of operation while in the Marine Corps, I had watched as men kicked and screamed as they were handed their own limbs to hold as they were transported onto a helicopter to be medivaced out of the LZ (landing zone, for you non-military types). I had seen young boys with both of their legs blown completely off, and their intestines hanging out of their shirts. I had seen many horrendous things, but I had never seen anything that even came close to this.

There in front of us was a man that I had seen many times at a distance; however, I had never talked to him. This man was hanging on my patio door almost cut in two, he should have been dead. Instead, he was snarling and growling, spitting up blood, mucus, and some pinkish whitish foam. The look in his eyes was the same as I'd seen before, first on the women's face who was going to attack me on the freeway, then on the two girl's faces as I made my way home that day, it was the look of fury.

"Don't come in here, honey!" I called out again to my wife.

Of course, telling someone not to look at something is always an open invitation for him or her to want to look even more. So of course, into the kitchen Gin came.

It would have been bad enough for her to enter the kitchen and see our neighbor's body cut in half and suspended on what was left of our patio door. It would have been bad enough, just to see his intestines bulging out of his stomach and draped over his legs, with the balk of them in a pile under one of our kitchen chairs.

But neighbor Jon was still alive, or so we thought at the time, and he was snarling and growling, and spitting, and as his head lurched as he snapped at us, his upper torso bobbed up and down, sawing ever so slightly on the front of his rib cage.

Pain did not seem to be a factor in Jon's world; only anger and ferocity were displayed as we watched his teeth slowly turn to a deep dark-yellow color, which then quickly began to exhibit a putrid brown hue with a tinge of baby-shit green as his gums transformed from a normal pink hue, to a sickening bluish-green tint.

Pinkish-red tears began to flow down Jon's cheeks, as we watched his eyes become more and more bloodshot while his head twisted and jerked on his compressed and bent rotating neck.

As soon as Gin got a glimpse of the horrible sight, she stopped for a moment staring in disbelief, and then let out a blood-curdling scream so loud, that the boys and I had to put our hands over our ears to block the pain from the overload of decibels it caused.

Before I had a chance to think, I blurted out.

“Calm down honey, it's Jon from down the street."

She screamed again, this time not as loud as before, more like a high-pitched moan. It was almost like she was confused, and now trying to decide if this were real or not, and if Jon was all right or not.

My tone now became somber.

"Don't worry, we'll help him," I said, knowing that there was nothing we could do, and my experience in the Marine Corps told me that Jon would be dead very soon. After all, he was in far worse shape than many men that I had seen die before they could get help.

Moreover, I knew that help wasn't coming, at least not in the normal time frame that we were accustomed to.

Jon is dead meat,
I thought to myself. Little did I know at the time, just how right I was?

By now, Gin was crying and shaking uncontrollably, I put my arms around her as she turned to me and buried her face into my shoulder sobbing.

The sight of our neighbor split in half and dangling on the broken glass door was just too much for her to take, hell, it was too much for all of us to take.

"It's going to be all right honey," I said, trying not to show her how frantic I felt too.

We could hear the television, which was on in the living room, and like the radio, all regular broadcasting had been preempted and the emergency broadcasting system was now issuing all of the warnings, and live video feeds from numerous violent occurrences around the area were being shown.

"What did the television just say," Jacob inquired.

"They said, don't do something?" Billy said, glaring at him. "Go find out!"

"Right," Jacob said agreeably, finding this to be a good excuse to leave the horror that was being played out in our kitchen.

We turned our attention back to our neighbor Jon, who was still jiggling his head around and snarling at us.

Many of Jon's muscles, tendons, and nerves had been severed, so he was unable to move anything below his neck, but his shoulders swayed a little from the momentum of his head movement as he tried in vain to bite us.

To add to the gruesome chain of events, Jon had begun to gurgle and spit up small chunks of his intestines and pieces of his lungs as he continued to growl and snap at us like a mad dog.

Gin then asked sadly.

"What are we going to do?"

"We could try to get him off the door, and maybe lay him down," I said reluctantly.

"Don't do that dad, stay away from him," Jacob muttered in a low tone as he returned from the living room.

"The television says if you get bit or he scratches you, or maybe even gets his blood or any of his bodily fluids on you, or in your eyes or mouth, you could get infected with whatever it is he has, and turn into what Jon is now."

I quickly yelled. "Stay away from him, everybody get back."

We all stepped back a few feet and watched as our neighbor spewed blood and thrashed his head around violently, all the time staring at us with that murderous look in his eyes that was becoming all too familiar to me.

Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over.

The constant vibration of Jon's head lurching back and forth in his futile effort to get to us had inadvertently loosened a large shard of glass that was still clinging to the top of the doorframe.

When it fell, it buried itself deep into the top of Jon's skull like a dagger, and suddenly all of his movement ceased, and his head slumped to the side at a ninety-degree angle.

"We need to do something," Gin whimpered, still in tears and shaking.

I could see it in my wife's eyes that she was scared. Hell, we were all scared. But Gin in particular was having very hard time watching the chain of events that were taking place in our home.

"Well there's nothing we can do for him," I said. "We need to lookout for ourselves now."

In the chaos caused by our neighbor's untimely visit and subsequent unwelcome stay, we had failed to hear the crackle of the surrounding gunfire outside.

Now with our domestic excitement and noise abated, we could hear the pandemonium that was ravaging our neighborhood, and it sent chills down our spines.

Jacob was the only one of us that had actually heard any of the warnings that were being broadcasted on the television, so I asked him.

"Jacob, did the news say what's causing this?"

Jacob tilted his head to the side.

"I don't think so. But I came to tell you how they said it might be spreading, so I didn't hear everything they said."

Leaving our neighbor Jon in somewhat of a pile, still perched on the broken glass of the patio door, we rushed into the living room to see if we could obtain any new information from the news bulletins.

What we eventually gleaned from the constant flow of news flashes was that the police, military, and political structure was breaking down extremely fast, and that hospitals and urgent care facilities were immediately overwhelmed.

They weren't of any help anyway, there wasn't a cure. Once you were infected, you didn't go to an emergency room; you attacked people and tried to eat them.