ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (5 page)

We sealed off the broken glass door with the paint tarp and the duct tape to keep the flies out, sprayed the kitchen with insect spray killing most of the flies and masking the reeking stench of Jon's feces a little, then swatted the few remaining flies with a couple of folded newspapers.

As we finished the morbid cleaning chore, Billy looked out a back window and spotted another disease-infested neighbor none of us recognized wandering around our backyard.

"There's another one dad, looks like he's headed next door to Don's house."

"Don will just have to take care of himself, we have our own problems," I answered. "Hell, for all I know Don's already one of them."

"You go see if there's anything new on the television, I'll go get your mother and Jacob," I said, as I turned and walked toward the garage.

Opening the door to the garage, I was glad to see that the normal color had returned to my spouse and son's faces.

I looked at Gin and repeated my previous statement.

"We need to leave; it's not safe here anymore."

"Where can we go?"

"I don't know!" I answered shaking my head. "But I know that we can't stay here much longer."

I motioned for her and Jacob to come back into the house.

"Come back in here, the smell isn't as bad now, smells more like bug spray," I said, hoping they wouldn’t get sick again.

"Let's grab a few things, and then we've got to go!"

"Hey, everybody, come in here, there's a disease update on the television," Billy yelled from the living room.

While we entered the living room and converged on the television, we all hoped the new information that Billy had summoned us to hear was good news, but it wasn't.

"They say that the diseased people are dead!"

Grabbing the remote from the coffee table, I pointed it toward the television, and pressing the plus on the volume button I shouted.

"Quiet, I can't hear what they're saying."

The faceless voice behind the emergency warning screen, repeated the announcement over and over, as we stood there dazed, listening in disbelief.

We now learned that the disease first kills you, and within seconds, you reanimate with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. If you die first, say you're hit by a car and killed, then the disease takes you over immediately and you get up and attack the first person that you see.

It was clear now why Jon and Julie didn't die immediately after their horrendous mutilating fates, they were already dead.

Now the broadcasts were no longer focusing on how to save the living, they seemed more intent on spreading information on how to kill the living dead. Five or six minutes passed while we stood in front of the television, all of us in an almost trance like state. Then without warning, the television went dark, snapping us back to the cruel reality that confronted us.

"Great, now the electricity is out," Gin said angrily.

Then trying to comfort herself, by convincing herself that everything would be all right, she mumbled. "Maybe it's a rolling blackout, and it'll come back on in awhile."

"I hope you're right," I said, also trying to comfort her. "But we can't wait here to find out. If we're still here when it gets dark, and the lights are still off, it could get really ugly.”

“Uglier than what happened in the kitchen?” Jacob asked sarcastically.

Smiling sarcastically back at him, I replied. “Well I for one don't want to go to sleep with this lingering smell in the house, and dead stark raving flesh eating homicidal maniacs walking around outside the house with only a canvas tarp and duct tape between us. So like I said before, let's grab a few things and get the hell out of here."

A sheepish grin creped over Jacob's face and he replied.

"Indeed!"

It wasn’t long before the electricity in our house did come back on. In the beginning, there were rolling blackouts, but each time the electric went off, it stayed off longer and more areas were affected, until ultimately total blackouts came, and the power grid never did come back up. Ever again!

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GET THE HELL OUT OF DODGE

We walked back to the garage carrying a few meager items we had collected in the house, mostly food some water and heavier clothing we might need later.

Fortunately, I had made some preparations in case of a regular emergency, if there is any such thing, by collecting a hodgepodge of equipment. To which I now added to the list, guns, ammunition, and some camouflage army surplus clothing I had acquired along the way. But I was not prepared for anything like this cataclysm.

My home was in a subdivision and it had too many windows and too many doors, I didn't have a fireplace for heat, a generator for power, or a well for water. It wasn't a place I felt we could hold out for long, from the living or from the living-dead. That belief was confirmed by how easily Jon and Julie had entered the house. I knew I had to find someplace, someplace safe, someplace my family and I could survive this horrific new world that we had been thrust into, but where.

Then, on the short walk to our garage to survey my inadequate pile of emergency equipment, I had an idea.

Once in the garage, Billy asked. "How are we going to get our stuff in the van without being eaten? There are eaters in our back yard, and all over the neighbor’s yards. They're probably out in front by the van too!"

Before now, we had been referring to the "Zombies" as diseased one's, or the infected one's, but after Billy called them "Eaters", well it kind of stuck, and after that, most of the time we called them eaters.

"We’re not going to put our stuff in the van. You saw what I had to do to our neighbor Julie and you hear all that gunfire out there."

Billy and Jacob both nodded their heads, affirming that they understood.

"People all over are doing the same thing to their neighbors. We wouldn't get fifty miles from here in the van. Someone would block the road or shoot out the tires, or the way people were acting when I drove home, we would probably be in a wreck before we got to the county line. In any case we'd end up dead and eaten before nightfall."

Billy tilted his head slightly to the side and turned up the left side of his upper lip showing his confusion

"We're not going to walk are we? We definitely wouldn't get fifty miles if we try to walk. Would we?"

I was able to muster a smile for the first time since this whole zombie thing started. Partially because of the look on Billy's face when he asked if we were going to try to walk to some place safe, and partially because I was about the reveal my idea to my family.

"No, not the way it is out there now, we
will
need the van, but not to carry our things, we'll need it to pull our boat."

"The boat?" Gin asked sarcastically, shaking her head back and forth as if she thought I was going to say that I was just kidding.

Nodding my head in an effort to convince her that I was deadly serious, I quickly answered her question without a hint of sarcasm in my voice.

"Yes, the boat, we can't stay here, and we can't drive the van, and we can't walk, the boat is our only logical choice. Hell, logical or not, it's our only choice!

Look at it this way, in the van or any car for that matter, the roads will be clogged with abandoned and wrecked vehicles, plus we'll need gas and a lot of it if we want to get very far.

With the boat, we'll just float down stream most of the time, and only use the motor when we absolutely need to. We still might need to obtain some gas at some point, so we'll take that little squeeze pump I have along with us."

Trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince my family, I said. "We don't know everything this disease does to people, but one thing I know for sure, it's not going to make them break the laws of physics, which means, they can't walk on water."

"But can they swim?" Jacob asked.

I thought about it for a moment, then answered. "I don't know if they can swim or not, but if they can't swim any better than they can walk, we'll be safer in a boat until we can find some place to hold up."

Before civilization as we knew it ended, some zombie connoisseur's blogging on the internet said to go north where it is cold, zombies are made of flesh and blood and are subject to freezing, and once they're frozen, your problem of being eaten by the dead are over.

The way I see it, the problem with that theory is, you would have to go far enough north that zombies (or as we called them, "Eaters") would never thaw, even during the summer months.

If you miscalculated and didn't trek far enough north, all that it would take is for one warm front to come through overnight and thaw out the zombie hordes, and you’d wake up to an unexpected horde of nimble zombies intent on having you for breakfast.

The only advantage I could see by going north into a constant frozen climate was the snow and ice could be melted giving you an abundance of water. That is, until you ran out of fuel for the heat source that you were using to melt the frozen water. Then you would probably freeze to death before you would die of thirst. Not to mention the fact that I was never too fond of cold weather, and the thought of winter all year round for the rest of my life, did not appeal to me, not one bit.

Besides, going north in our boat would mean that we couldn’t just float down stream; we would be going up stream against the current all the way, using more gas than we could possibly carry.

Not to mention we would never be able to pass through the locks on the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis. Our only option was to go down south to a warmer climate; somewhere that had a lot of wild game seemed to me to be a much better idea.

Now that the apocalypse was no longer a matter of conjecture, and the zombie virus didn't seem to affect animals, even the feral dogs were just carriers, at least for the moment anyway. So with that said, hunting and eating animals seemed like a viable answer for a food source if scavenging for food in abandon houses was not possible for some reason.

I hoped my hypothesis on this issue was correct, and that eating the meat of wild animals didn't cause us to catch or spread the disease, because at this time nobody knew how long the incubation period was for the dormant infection, and eating anything that you weren't absolutely sure of was risky to say the least.

Fortunately, we had enough food in the beginning that we could contemplate this matter at a later time. Although if we were to hunt animals for food, we weren't about to eat a feral dog first to test the theory.

We lived close to the Mississippi River, and very close to one of its tributaries. Because of this location, I had purchased a small boat to cruise the waterways with my two sons, do some fishing, and generally enjoy the warm summer days. The boat was only a fifteen-foot bow rider with a forty-eight Evinrude outboard motor, but it served the purpose for which I bought it.

I had named the boat Morphadite, because at the time I thought it was funny, and I still do, even in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. However, I never thought I’d be taking a boat as small as the Morphadite on such a monumental journey, but it was all we had, so it would have to do.

When Armageddon came, there was little time to formulate a plan, most people headed for their local stores and started grabbing things off the shelves, and it didn't matter what. Panic was wide spread and most of the gunshots we were hearing were coming from the direction of a strip mall in our neighborhood, and I didn't want any part of it.

We would stick to our rough-and-ready plan, and stay away from the stores and shopping malls, at least until things died down a little.

Our boat's gas tanks were five gallons each and portable, I would usually take them out, drive to the gas station to fill them, and then bring them back to the boat, and put them in again.

They fit under the back seats of the boat on either side of the battery, which sat in the middle. A gas line ran from the fuel tank to the motor, and when one tank is empty, you simply disconnect the fuel line from the empty tank, and attach it to the full tank, and off you go again.