ZOMBIE'S DOOM? "Chronicles of Jack Doom" (14 page)

That seemed to me to be the most logical avenue to pursue at the time.

So I raised the bottle to my lips, and began to tilt it upward giving the illusion of allowing its liquid to drain into my mouth.

However, just before the whiskey reached the neck of the bottle, I pulled my Glock from behind the whiskey bottle that was concealing it, and shot Eric in the middle of his forehead right at his blonde hairline.

My bullet split his skull open at the top and splattered part of his brain onto his friend Matt that was seated directly behind him.

With the whiskey bottle still in my left hand, I swung around toward Tim, who was sitting just to the right of Matt, and on my left side.

While Eric's falling body still shielded me from Matt I swung my pistol toward Tim.

Not expecting me to do anything but take a drink of whiskey, and surprised by my rapid movement and the sound of the gunshot, Tim choked on the alcohol he was drinking and spit it onto his friend Matt.

Now seeing Matt drenched with whiskey and his face sprinkled with pieces of Eric's head, Tim leaned back awkwardly trying to reach the rifle he had leaning on the aluminum arm of his seat.

Thrown off balance by his quick movement and the full fifth of whiskey he had in his right hand, he almost fell off the already unsteady lawn chair he was perched on.

As he regained his balance on the tilting chair and came back forward with his long gun in his left hand, he didn't have a chance, for I already had my pistol leveled at him for at least two seconds before he even turned back around.

Before he was even aware of his dire predicament, his forehead came into contact with the second bullet that departed from my Austrian build firearm, which crushed the front of his thick hillbilly skull, sending him backwards, this time all the way to the ground.

Now two were dead at the scene, and the third man was technically on life support and didn't even know it, still wiping the remnants of his buddy's brains out of his eyes.

Eric's dead body had totally collapsed onto the floor of the barn and was no longer blocking his view of me, or mine of him.

While Matt was still unable to see clearly, I sprang over Eric's limp carcass and began to pistol whip him to the ground with the heavy steel slide of my gun.

While he lay stunned, bruised, and disorientated with his back hugging the dirt floor of the barn, I forcefully shoved the neck of
my
whiskey bottle between his lips, chipping two of his teeth on its way in.

With the booze bottle draining into his mouth, I jammed the muzzle of my pistol unreasonably hard into the man's right nostril and order him to swallow the alcoholic beverage.

"Drink up dumbass," I screamed, poking the barrel of my gun even harder into his nose.

A gurgling sound spewed from him as the caramel colored whiskey mixed with the greenish-yellow snot that had the vague appearance of mother-of-pearl as it erupted out of his unimpeded left nostril and slowly slid down the side of his battered face as he gasped for air.

"I said drink, shit-hook, I want to see what this shit does to you," I screamed, as I watched his eyes slowly close as the drug tainted liquor quickly began to take its desired effect.

As the man passed out from the "Mickey Finn" that was intended to incapacitate me, I pulled the bottle from the unconscious hillbilly's mouth, and screwed the cap back on the bottle.

"I had better hold on to this for awhile, it just might come in handy at some point," I mumbled to myself.

Then I reached for the bottle of booze that Matt had dropped as the slide of my Glock 19 introduced itself repeatedly on and about his head and shoulders.

I slammed the almost full bottle of liquor as hard as I could against his cheekbone and collapsed the orbital cavity of his left eye socket as the bottle shattered across his face.

Then using the razor sharp edges of the broken neck of the glass container as a
scalpel
, I proceeded to peel back his
scalp
from the front of his skull to the back,
Indian style
(I wasn't kidding about my Indian blood), being careful to extract as much of the cranial skin as I could pull off his head.

"Talk about a quarter inch on top and white sidewalls," I again mumbled, as the bloody white bone of Matt's skull revealed itself just above his ears.

"When you wake up, you'll wish I had killed you like I killed your asshole friends," I muttered, as I picked up my two guns and the drug-contaminated bottle of intoxicant and prepared to walk back to my truck.

I really didn't know exactly why I had chosen to scalp the hillbilly named Matt before I left the barn, it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time I guess.

After all, I really only wanted to see what the whiskey that they were trying to make me drink would do to a person.

Of course on the other hand, they did piss me off, so they all got what they deserved.

"Oh well, better him than me," I said aloud, as stuffed my pistol back in my pants (get your mind out of the gutter, it was my Glock), and tossed my M-4 and whiskey bottle onto the seat beside me.

After loading three cases of bottled water into the back of my pickup truck, and deciding to use one of the unfortunate road kill zombies that I had rescued the hillbillies from as a speed bump (because it had pissed me off too).

However, I didn't bother to add the horizontal cadaver to my ongoing felony count, even after hearing its bones snap under the weight of my vehicle. No sport.

I departed the gruesome scene, and drove through the gap of corpses avoiding any further contact with the macabre remains, and continued on my trek toward the so-called
dreaded
Badlands of Indiana.

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THE SISTERS TOO

I had made it through Little Rock somehow without incident and was still cruising along interstate 40 at the phenomenal speed of close to 18 mph as I approached Memphis Tennessee.

Out of boredom, and in an effort to kill as many of the rotting sons-a-bitches as I could without damaging my vehicle. I began to take potshots at the heads of the dead who were unfortunate enough to wander onto the highway and be close enough as I drove by them to take a bullet in the skull without me having to exert much effort.

However, when a well-dressed male zombie wearing what looked to be a very expensive gray pinstriped suit along with a solid red tie and patent leather shoes to complete his ensemble, stumbled to close to my truck as I squeezed the trigger of my pistol and sent a speeding round-nose cylinder of copper jacketed lead smashing into its head. Pieces of its brain and cranial juices rained down on the windshield of my vehicle and all over my exposed left arm that was dangling out the driver's window.

"Fuck me raw doggie style all the way to hell!" I yelled, as I watched through my side view mirror as the offending zombie splattered on the concrete roadway behind me.

"Damn eaters, I already smell enough like road kill to make somebody barf up a lung, and now this!"

Crossing the Arkansas, Tennessee state line, as well as the Mississippi River at the same time as I blew into Memphis, I looked down at the river and saw that it was still polluted with hundreds of dead bodies. Just as it had been in the beginning when my family and I had fled our home and trekked down the massive waterway when society first went tits up.

The smell of the river had subsided little from what I could tell. Even though it was hard to discern the differences between the smell of the river below me and the funky stink of the surrounding air within the cab of my truck, as I inhaled the stench from my past zombie encounters that had accumulated on my clothing and on the inside of the vehicle. I was relatively sure that the intense reek that was permeating my surroundings was a mix of both contributing factors as I bolted across the bridge and through the rising air from the warm water in the river below.

The visual aspect had changed slightly from the time of our original voyage down the mighty river, although its banks were still cluttered with hundreds of dead bodies, many of the original carcasses of the dead were no longer bloated and floating in the water as before. They had either made their way down to the Gulf of Mexico, been eaten by the wildlife that lived in the water, or totally rotted and sank to the bottom of the river.

So more than a year after this whole thing started, the Mississippi River was hosting slightly less bloated floaters than in the beginning.

However, the older bloated cadavers that had been beached on the banks of the river and stuck in the mud somewhere along the way, had finally dissolved through the process of putrefaction, and been replaced with the now sun-bleached skeletal bones that had been housed inside their former selves.

Crossing that river had brought back a stream (no pun intended) of memories from the past, some good and some bad.

I remembered my loving family and the life we had before the apocalypse.

It also brought back memories of past days when we fought together side by side against the dead and the living alike.

Whether the memories were of the good times we had, or of the bad times we endured, it saddened me to think that they were all dead now.

Crossing that atrocious river had reminded me of the death of my family, but more importantly, it had again reminded me of who the blame for their deaths lied, and what my mission in this miserable life was, and it strengthened my resolve to catch up to the Sarge.

Renewed resolve or not, I still smelled like death warmed over, and I needed to clean up as soon as possible.

So I made my way through north Memphis as fast as I could and was lucky enough not to run into any unsavory characters that wanted to physically change me, my truck, or my outlook on life.

I took the I-240 jog in highway 40 and was going balls to the wall on the outskirts of town, when I came to a nice little waterway called the Wolf River, a tributary of the Mississippi, which seemed like a prime bathing area for me to scrape some of the rancid death off me.

The freeway crossed the river as it meandered past the north side of Memphis, but there were no exits off the road at that spot. So I figured that I would take the next exit off the throughway and back track to the river.

The next exit took me to N. Watkins St. were I turned right and headed back south.

Luck was with me so far in my quest to cleanse the dead skin and goo from my own carcass and clothing, for the Wolf River was just five-hundred feet ahead.

As I approached the river, I could see what seemed to be a very nice little sandy patch on the other side where a low point in the terrain had caused the overflow of the river to empty into it and form a small lake.

I drove back across the
Wolf
, and parked my truck in the emergency lane on the east side of the road.

With none of the undead in sight (which was rare) I grabbed my two suppressed firearms and exited my vehicle. I made my way down the side of the hill toward my own private beach, which was about a hundred yards away, give or take a few feet.

To get to the beach, I had to wade across the small tributary that had helped to form the lake, but once I was there, I found it to be the perfect place to wash up and launder my clothing.

I quickly peeled my soiled and smelly duds and took them with me into the water. Keeping them down stream of me, so as not to bathe in the remnants of the dead zombies that were being washed from my laundry.

I hadn't bothered to stop for, or for that matter even think of pilfering some soap from someplace before I headed for the river. Considering that it was too late to worry about it, I decided to just enjoy myself and let the river water do the cleaning on its own.

This was the first time in a very long time that I had stopped and been able to relax, not to mention go swimming too.

The Wolf River was definitely not comparable to the pool at the Sarge's Y, but it was better than nothing, and seemed to be doing the trick.

When my clothes were as clean as they were going to get, I rang them out and found a nearby tree with an overhanging branch to hang them on to dry.