ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (11 page)

There were hundreds rotting corpses floating in the river around us; we would see one or more, and usually more, spit out by the river at least every forty or fifty yards, and many times, they were ejected out of the river in grotesque clumps onto its banks.

Unfortunately, for us, the smell at times was overwhelmingly repugnant.

Crosswinds seemed to help a little most of the time, but when the river meandered, and the breeze blew parallel with the river, the stench of hundreds of rotting human bodies floating around us, and on the riverbank, was almost too much to bear.

It was like the smell of road kill, only much stronger and always present. Added to that we had the unforgettable memory that was seared into our minds of the mutilated rotting bloated fish bait corpses floating all around us; so we were afforded the perfect mix of constant smells, visual effects, and psychological brain twisting, which was enough to drive any normal person totally insane.

Fortunately, I didn't consider myself to be a normal human being, with my combat experience I had seen death many times before, but never on such a vast scale as this. However, I was concerned about the effect this hideous terrain would have on my families psyche.

It's a funny thing though, about the way the human nose processes smells, if the odor is constant, after a while you get used to the stink and don’t notice it nearly as much. I believe it's called
sensory adaptation
, and if not for this sensory adaptation, we would have had to abandon our plan of using the river to travel, as the stench was relentless.

As for all of our fishing equipment we had with us, it was useless to us. With the river filled with dead bodies, there was no way we were going to eat any fish we pulled out of that water. They had been feeding on the zombie carcasses, and were no doubt carrying the disease in one form or another.

“Billy, we might as well throw the fishing poles overboard, along with the rest of the fishing stuff. We’re not going to eat anything that comes out of this river,” I declared.

“Okay dad," Billy replied. "There's no need to keep it, all the rivers, lakes, and ponds are probably contaminated by now too.”

“Well, even if they aren’t, we can’t take the chance. I mean how would we know whether or not there were bodies up river, or on the other side of a lake, or bodies that had sunk to the bottom and were releasing the virus into fish that had nibbled on them?

I mean hell, if we're going to eat the fish we would catch, we might as well cut to the chase and grab one of those zombie corpses floating in the river, and drag it into the boat and feast on it!"

"Thank you for that visualization honey!" Gin said. "Is it dinner time yet?"

"Sorry dear, just trying to get a point across."

“So, should we throw all of it away?” Jacob asked.

“We might as well, it's just taking up space,” I said. “We’ll find food and water somewhere else. Meanwhile, we brought enough to last us a week or so if we ration it, and who knows, we might stumble across something sooner.”

We drifted along for a couple of hours without seeing anything of consequence except for the dozens of bloated bodies in the water, and we tried not to dwell on them too much (especially after my comment about pulling one aboard and eating it).

Then all of a sudden, Billy shouted as he pointed behind us.

“Look over there!”

I turned around, and in the distance I could see a small boat. This boat was not just floating down river as we were. This boat was at full throttle and gaining on us fast.

“Boys get your guns ready!” I shouted, “Gin, you too,” I said, as I quickly reached down and grabbed my AK-47.

“I’ve got my pistol right here, rule number two,” Gin replied.

“Everybody stay low and keep your guns pointed at these people! If these guys start shooting, don’t hesitate, shoot back, and shoot to kill, don’t worry about head shots, we can do that latter.”

“Okay dad,” both boys answered, as they too picked up their rifles.

As the small boat approached us, we could see three people moving about in it, and as it came even closer, it looked as if the three were struggling with each other.

“Take your guns off safety guys,” I said softly, as the boat was now almost to us.

It was now clear that there were not actually three people in the small boat, there was one person, a woman, and two zombies in that boat, and it was not going well for the woman. She was losing the battle with the zombies. She was still alive and fighting, but she was being badly bitten and bleeding all over the place.

Somehow she had managed to get to the controls of the boat and shut off the motor just as it came alone side of us. She started screaming for help, but it was clear to all of us that even if we killed the zombies it would still be too late for her; she was already diseased.

“Help me please!” she pleaded with a sad panicked and desperate look on her face, as she pushed one of the zombies away.

I raised my rifle to my shoulder and fired at the zombie that was closest to her.

The bullet left the barrel of my gun and slammed into the zombie’s spin, severing it just above its torso at the base of its neck, causing the head to drop forward as if it were bowing its head to pray.

Blood gushed out of the neck and poured down the front of the creature, and over the woman’s arms and chest. She desperately tried to push it away from her as I had not hit its brain, and it was still trying to grab and bite her, even though its head was hanging down almost to its stomach, held on only by the skin at the front of its neck, which was now elongated by the weight of its head.

By now the other monster had maneuvered behind the women and was about to lunge on her, when I heard the crack of Billy’s AK cut through the sound of the women’s screams.

His shot was true, and hit the zombie in the head just below the right eyebrow, blowing out the back of its skull, and dropping the zombie like
third period French
over the boats windshield.

All of the sudden in an attempt to kill the first zombie that was grappling with the woman, everyone on our boat, even Gin, open fire on the remaining zombie, not with just one shot, but with many.

When the guns finally went silent, what I had secretly hoped would happen, had happened, both zombies were dead, and the woman was dead too.

Between our rapid firing, the zombies moving around as they attacked the woman, and the waves on the river rocking both boats, our aiming had been compromised.

Secretly we all had hoped this would happen, because in the back of everyone’s mind, we all knew there was no hope for her, she had been bitten, therefore she was diseased, and therefore she was doomed to become one of the undead eventually.

In addition, we all knew it would be very dangerous to keep her with us for any length of time, when she died; she would turn quickly and attack us, so it was better this way.

We also knew that if she had lived through the ordeal on her boat, one of us would have had to shoot her in the head while she was still alive, not wanting to take the chance of waiting for her to die and turn into a flesh eating killer.

We sat there for a short time, stunned by what had happened, and maybe even feeling a little guilty.

Although I had a fair amount of combat experience under my belt, my family were all still novices at serial killing.

We knew the zombies were very dangerous, and would kill and eat any living human every chance they got. However, they still looked like people in most ways, so it was a very traumatic experience for us to shoot them, especially for Billy, Jacob, and Gin, even though at times it was hard to tell.

The next chore needed my immediate attention, although we had killed the woman, her death had not been caused by massive head trauma.

Unlike the two zombies, her fatal wounds were to her heart, and lungs, which meant that she would be reanimating in a matter of moments.

So I leveled my rifle and took aim at her head, I squeezed off one round that permanently ended her ordeal.

Not long after that our boats started to drift apart, but I decided to start our motor and substantially extend the gap between us.

We didn't bother to search the woman's boat for supplies, as it was now speckled with tainted zombie blood, and any scavenged items we found would probably be carrying the disease.

However, before we left, I fired a few rounds into the side of the boat just below the water line, so that in time it would sink, or at least run aground at some point. Either way, that boat would be far from us and wouldn’t be a constant reminder to my family of what had happened.

We cruised down river with our Evinrude forty-eight at top speed, and after about ten minutes of dodging floating corpses in the water, I picked a spot in the river that seemed to have a gap in the body count and turned off the motor and we began to drift once more.

“How long do you think it will take us to get where we’re going? And by the way, where are we planning to go?” Gin asked.

“We are heading for a warmer climate,” I said, trying to sound confident and reassuring.

I didn’t really know where we were going to end up. In all the excitement of the world-ending apocalypse, I hadn’t given much thought past getting to a warmer climate.

“Well that’s a pretty generic answer,” Gin charged, in her usual sarcastic manner. “I guess that means you don’t know.”

“Sure I do,” I muttered, thinking that she didn’t remember our previous conversation, when I had told her I had no idea where we were going, or what we were going to do when we got there.

“We’re going to Texas,” I proclaimed, quickly conjuring up a makeshift plan.

“Why Texas?” Billy asked.

“Because we’re on the Mississippi River, when we get far enough south we’re going to have to go either east or west, before we get to the Gulf of Mexico.

We’re in a fifteen foot utility boat; I don’t think an ocean voyage will be conducive to our safety. Plus where would we go, even fully loaded with fuel, we’d get maybe far enough out to sea to die of thirst in a few days.

So, when we get down to Vicksburg, we’re going to jump ship and follow interstate twenty into Texas. There are a lot of animals in Texas, feral hogs, steers, and some exotic game brought in for exclusive hunting,” I answered.

I had been in Vicksburg once several years ago, and knew that interstate twenty led to Shreveport, and then to Dallas.

Jake piped up asking. “Are we going to walk to Texas from Vicksburg?”

“We are going to do exactly what we have to do to survive. If we have to walk all the way to Texas, then that’s what we’re going to do,” I answered.

Billy cringed, and said. “That sounds like fun.”

“Well hopefully we won’t have to walk the whole way,” I continued. “A truck might be the best option to have; we could carry other modes of transportation with us such as bicycles if we can find any. We need to keep an eye out for anything and everything that we might be able to use in some way.”

"Rule 10," Gin said smartly.

"Have you ever been to Vicksburg?" Jacob asked.

"Yes a long time ago, but not on the river, that’s why I made sure I packed the GPS. The satellites are still working, and as long as the batteries last we'll know where we are.”

“The reason we’re in this boat, instead of our van, is because you said we wouldn’t get fifty miles on the highway, and now you’re saying we’re going to take interstate twenty hundreds of miles into Texas?” Billy barked, seeming quite annoyed.

“Look, I said, we wouldn’t get fifty miles the way things were when we left home, it’s going to be a few days before we get to Vicksburg, and maybe by then things will have calmed down a little. And it's not like we really have a choice.”

I leaned back against the side of the boat and said. "Listen everyone, I don't have all the answers, and I really wish I did, but I don't. Life is going to be tough from now on; living is going to be tough from now on. We’re just going to have to do the best that we can. We’re going to have to lookout for each other, and protect each other, and just take things as they come. And let's face it, we can't stay in this boat forever.”

“Okay then,” Gin said. “Do you have any idea how long we’re going to be on this stinking river?”

“Well, it’s about five hundred miles to Vicksburg from where we started, and it looks like we’re traveling a little over one mile an hour, let’s say one point two miles per hour. If we divide five hundred by one point two.”

“Never mind,” Gin interrupted, rolling her eyes. “I guess we’ll get there, when we get there.”

“I’m hungry, can we eat something?” Jacob asked.

“Me too,” Billy said. “Hand me one of those cans of tuna, and a bottle of water.”

“The bottled water is in that box beside you,” Gin said, pointing to the box.

“Did we bring a can opener?” Billy asked.

“I didn’t,” Gin said.

“Neither did I,” Jacob added.

"Great, we have all of this canned food and no way to open it," Billy stated nastily.

“Everybody calm down, I have a P-38 on my key chain. Lucky I put my keys in my pocket back at the dock, force of habit I guess.” I replied as I reached into my pocket.

“You have a WWII German gun on your key chain,” Billy said smiling, trying to add a little levity to the situation.

“No,” Jacob said, also smiling. "He’s got a WWII fighter plane on his key chain.”

“You two are so silly, it’s a can opener, even I know that,” Gin said.

“Yeah, some people call it a John Wayne,” I said, as I pulled a lump of keys out of my pocket, and held it up for them to see.

“See, it flips open like this, and you hook it onto the side of the can. Toss me your tuna can Billy and I'll show you.”

I gave them a quick demonstration on how to use the John Wayne can opener, then cans of tuna and bottled water were handed out to everyone, and as we slowly drifted along surrounded by the floating bodies of the dead, and inhaling the foul stench of their decomposing flesh, we choked down our meager meals.

The next several days were pretty much the same as the days that had preceded them, groups of zombies were occasionally sighted on the riverbanks, stumbling around, snarling and growling at us, still afraid to venture into the water.

However, we had yet to see people alive, that hadn’t been stricken by the outbreak.

Abandoned boats were becoming a common sight along the way, but an uncanny absence of the people who had left them made us wonder, had they given up on the river because of its grisly demeanor, or had they reached their destination and no longer needed their boats.

Yet, with some, their reasons were blatantly clear, they had not only abandoned their boats, they had abandoned the will to live too, and suicide was their way of relieving themselves of the horrors of the new world.

Many times, we came upon vessels that had washed ashore, with its occupant still clutching the weapon used to achieve their ultimate demise. Sometimes whole families had meant their end at the hand of either the father, or the mother.

We could have stopped at many of these “suicide boats” and rummaged through what gear they might have had. However, those scenes were ghastly, and very sad, and I didn’t want to subject my family to any more trauma than they were already having to endure, even if we were in violation of some of our survival rules.

Night was beginning to fall on day eleven, when Jacob suddenly shouted.

“Seventeen!”

Billy was just drifting off to sleep, and now was wide-awake, awakened by Jacob's yell.

“Seventeen what?” He demanded, not happy about being disturbed.

Jacob proudly answered. “Seventeen days from home to Vicksburg, it should take us seventeen days.”

“You woke me up for that? You, idiot,” Billy scolded.

“I’ve been thinking about it on and off since mom asked a few days ago, I thought you guys wanted to know,” Jacob said in his defense.

“Thank you sweetie, I did want to know, so we’ve been out here for ten days.”

“Eleven, this is the eleventh day, tomorrow will be the twelfth day,” Jacob again gloated proudly.

“That means we have six more days on this horrible river,” Gin said scowling.

“I think we have just enough food and water to get us there, I guess in about five days I’ll take out the GPS and see how close we are. We don’t want to run the batteries down, so we need to use it sparingly,” I stressed.

It was dark now, the low light of a crescent moon made the bodies in the water almost indiscernible, and as usual I took the first watch while everyone else settled down for the night.

The river was unusually calm, and our boat made an excellent platform for stargazing. The lack of light coming from cities and towns due to most of the electricity generating plants in the country shutting down increased the amount of stars that were visible at night. So I had adopted the hobby to pass the time on watch during periods when the boat was in the middle of the river and well away from its banks.

As the current was beginning to speed up as the river narrowed slightly, I watched a shooting star flash across the night sky.

Bam! Splash! Splash!

Suddenly something hit the bow of the boat hard. Things were falling in the water all around us.

“What’s going on?” Gin asked, only half awake.

Now there was more splashing in the water around us.

“I don’t know,” I said, just as another object slammed into our boat, this time on the side just behind the windshield, and a severed foot landed on one of the ammo boxes next the our water.

“Eaters!” I screamed.

Looking up, I could no longer see stars directly above us.

“The bridge, they’re jumping off the bridge.”

At this point, at least eight more had fallen into the water beside our boat and were thrashing around trying to get to us. The two that had hit the boat were not a threat, so many of their bones were broken in so many places, that even though they were right beside the boat, they couldn’t even lift their arms to grab the railing on the boat, and quickly sank out of sight.

The zombies that had jumped off the bridge and missed our boat were quite a different story. With all of their seemingly panicked flailing, some of them were actually making their way closer to the Morphadite.

As we floated under the middle of the bridge, the zombies that were still jumping into the water had no chance of getting to us. Our main concern now were the zombies that were already beside the boat, and the ones still on the bridge that may leap into our boat, or maybe even onto us when we pass under the other side.

"Shoot that one!" I yelled, pointing to a zombie that was close enough to us that we could hear its fingernails scraping the side of the boat.

Those words had hardly left my mouth when Jacob, being the closest one to the zombie, spun around quickly and with one smooth fluid motion, pulled his 9mm pistol from his side holster, leveled the gun at his hip, and fired two shots into the zombie's face, effectively extinguishing the seemingly artificial life from the hungry brute.

"Nice shooting son," I said, as I turned the ignition key and started the boat's motor.

Slamming the throttle forward, the bow of the boat lifted as the boat lurched forward, almost knocking Jacob and Billy off their feet. They both sat down quickly as we began to pick up speed.

Zombies were now dropping off the far side of the bridge in large numbers, apparently unable to see through the night's veil of darkness that we were no longer below them, and unaware that their fall would ultimately land them in the middle of millions of gallons of the liquid that they feared and despised. Or, maybe their diseased brains were making them act like lemmings, and they were just following the zombie in front of them off the side of the bridge, ignorant of their final destination.

Whatever the reason for their leaps of faith, they were dropping like proverbial flies off that bridge with no chance of landing on their prey.

I turned the boat to the left, and headed toward the riverbank several yards away at a rate of speed that was somewhat unsettling to my wife.

"What are you doing?" Gin screamed.

"I'm going to turn around," I yelled back at her.

"Turn around, are you crazy?" Billy snapped, looking back at all of the zombies thrashing in the water and still jumping off the bridge.

Once more, I turned the boat to the left and we began to go back up stream toward the relentless pack of hungry zombies treading water and doing belly flops from a height that would put an Olympic diver to shame.

"Everybody hold on, we might hit some eaters," I shouted, as I again turned the boat to the left.

"One more turn, and we'll get out from under this bridge," I said, as the boat now roared close to its top speed.

Making one last left turn, a zombie's head bounced off the deep V-keel of the Morphadite, cutting a large gash into its skull and killing it instantly.

"I hope that eater's head didn't damage the boat," Gin shouted over the roar of our boat motor.

"That's doubtful, we split its skull like a ripe watermelon hitting a brick wall," I shouted back.

Looking back and seeing chunks of that zombie's blood gushing brain floating in the choppy river water.

"Kind of looks like pieces of a watermelon too," Jacob said, seemingly unaffected by our ongoing harrowing experience.

Now at top speed, our small craft hydroplaned atop the choppy waters induced by the floundering and flailing of the undead in the river, along with the splashes of their high diving cohorts.

Closing fast on the intermittent curtain of zombies now dropping from the backside of the bridge, I yelled. "Everyone get down as low as you can."

As our small boat breached the curtain of the undead, one of the falling zombies hit the point of the bow about half way down its chest and was ripped apart, spraying a fine mist of blood onto the windshield of the boat, along with one lung, and a body part that was unrecognizable after impact.

A second zombie hit face first on the top and back of the boat's outboard power plant, embedding its top row of brownish-yellow teeth into the hard plastic cover of the motor.

A third jumper landed feet first midway down the right side of our boat, snapping both legs at the knees, and impaling its skull on a cleat. It was left hanging there dead, off the side of the boat looking as if it were peaking over the side into the bowels of the Morphadite, reminding me of the old "
Kilroy was here
" cartoon.

Cutting the power and letting the boat drift again, I inquired.

"Is everyone all right?"

"Everyone's okay, but there's a couple of messes we'll have to clean up," Gin replied, shaking her head in disgust.

"Yes, I can hardly see through the windshield," I said, looking around for something to wipe off the blood and gore.

"I'll take care of this one," Billy said.

I watched as he held on to one of the cleats on the right side of the boat to steady himself, and with a karate type yell, he kicked the "Kilroy" zombie in the face, tearing its head off the cleat that attached it to the side of the boat.

The zombie splashed into the water and slowly drifted away, and as we watched, it sank to the bottom of the river.

"We should leave those teeth in the motor," Jacob said. "It'll remind us of the bridges we have to pass under."

"Good idea, but throw some water over them and wash off some of the blood, it already stinks enough around here," I said, while I dipped an old t-shirt into the tainted river water.

"This is great, all of this gore on the boat is going to attract even more flies," Gin said. "I don't think I can take much more of this bullshit."

We spent the rest of the night cleaning the blood and body parts from the boat; the best we could in the dark. None of us could sleep anyway, with all of the excitement from the encounter at the bridge, and the mess it left us, not to mention the realization that there might be many more bridges further down the river.

The next few days we drifted down the Mississippi without any substantial episodes, except for the increase in the fly population on the boat. We began starting the motor and speeding under the bridges, then drifting again until we approached another bridge where we would then repeat the process over again. We continued to use this tactic at all of the bridges we passed under until we concluded our river voyage at Vicksburg.

We quickly learned that the zombie's sense of timing was far from optimum. With their wavering gate and their clumsy staggering, it proved rather easy to avoid their attempts to drop on us, as long as we were aware of an upcoming bridge.

When the zombies would see us drifting up on them, they had a tendency to gather in a group, trying to position themselves in a spot in line with our passing. If we powered up and changed course slightly, by the time they stumbled over each other trying to reposition themselves, we had already gone by and would watch some of them fall into the water well after we had passed.

As long as we didn't drift under them giving them enough time to make their way to a vantage point directly above us, it was not much of a challenge to avoid them.

One disturbing note; we noticed that the zombies that had jumped into the water, tended not to run out of energy or become tired.

They would splash and flail around in the water until they finally made it to the riverbank, no matter how long it took.

At one point, we were able to anchor our boat on a sandbar in the middle of the river and watch a zombie tread water, after an hour we decided to continue on, and the zombie was still showing no signs of fatigue.