ZOMBIE'S DOOM? "Chronicles of Jack Doom" (2 page)

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AS IF IT WERE YESTERDAY

Almost in tears, Gin announced to our group.

"We've been in this hell-hole of a tank for three days; I can't stand it any longer! It stinks in here, and I'm hungry and thirsty."

"I can't take it anymore either mom, Bruce, Rich, and Dave are starting to get a little ripe," Jacob added. "I don't care what the rest of you do, but I gotta get out of here, and soon."

Jacob was 16 going on 46 thanks to the apocalypse. The plague, or virus, or whatever it was, had cheated him and his brother out of some of their childhood and they were never going to get it back, and there was nothing that I could do about that.

So I taught him and Billy as much as I could about everything I knew, from foraging for food to torturing (yes I said torturing) prisoners for information, and just let them become whatever they were going to become, and hoped that it would help them survive in this new zombie filled world.

"A
little
ripe? These guys reek enough to puke a maggot off a gut wagon," Billy stated, interjecting his own colloquial phrase.

"I hate to bring everyone down with the facts, but I think it probably stinks just as much out there as it does in here, most likely even more," I said. "There's thousands of dead and mutilated bodies outside fermenting in the sun. But, you're right, we can't stay in here much longer, we need food and water."

"We haven't heard any sounds out there for quite a while, at least twenty-four hours, except for that incessant sound of flies buzzing around the stacks of bodies," Billy said. "I vote we bail out of here and take our chances outside."

"All right, I guess we've got no other choice, besides some of the flies are starting to make their way in here, but I'll go first," I insisted.

******

Jack usually went first when there was any kind of danger lurking about. It's not that he particularly wanted to go first, but he felt that with his combat experience he had a better chance of surviving (or killing) anything that he and his family might meet up with. Even though his family were becoming quite good at killing zombies (and crazy humans), Jack still thought that it was better if he took the point (the lead) most of the time. After all, he was the
Alpha Male
of the group.

******

Stumbling around in the semi-darkness of the crowded tank, I made my way over our former friends who would had been rotting away before our very eyes, that is if it had been light enough within the confines of the tank for us to see them.

Pushing the hatch up and over its apex, the sound of a dull thump was barely heard over the millions of flies buzzing around, as the heavy cover plopped down on the severed head of one of the thousands of dismembered and decomposing corpses that littered the surrounding countryside and our tank. The large steel cover for all intent and purposes flattened the skull and caused the liquefied contents within the rapidly decomposing cranium to ooze out several of its orifices and run down the side of the tank's turret, staining it with a putrid yellowish-purple gelatin like substance.

I waited at the top of the turret for a few moments to allow my eyes to adjust to the sunlight that they hadn't seen in days. Then when I felt that my eyes had gotten used to the abundance of light, and I would be able to see any danger lurking outside of the tank, I continued on with my mission.

I slowly raised my head out of the tank's turret, stopping as my eyes crested the rim of the hatch. Turning my head to the right and then to the left, my eyes panned the 360 degrees of decaying fly infested carnage that lay before me.

"The only things that are moving are the flies and the
snappers
, and a whole hell of a lot of
twitchers
!" I whispered down to my family, coining new names we could use to describe the decapitated heads of the zombies that were still trying to bite whatever they could reach, and the spastic bodies of the now dead undead, just before inhaling an unknown number of flies with my next breath.

After flailing around for what seem like an eternity while choking on the squishy squirming bodies of the multitude of nasty insects that had invaded my mouth, I somehow finally cleared my mouth and throat and began to breath normally again with my hands cupped over my nose, and my lips clamped tightly shut.

My unabridged oxygen intake was short lived, as one way or another I still had to communicate with my family.

So I braved the unruly menacing flies and spoke to them again.

"There are too many flies out here," I said, sliding back down into the tank and scraping the last fly from between my cheek and gums with my tongue, before spitting it out onto the floor of the vehicle. "We're going to need something to cover our mouths and noses to keep the flies from creeping in them."

"You mean again?" Jacob asked with a slight smirk on his face.

"Yes, again!" I said, clearing my throat and spitting on the floor for effect.

"I don't have a scarf or a rag," Gin said. "I guess we could use some of these dead guys clothes?"

"I guess we'll have to," Billy said, pulling on Dave's shirt hard enough to rip the fabric and send buttons soaring in different directions around the interior of the tank.

With the morning light shinning in through the open hatch, Jacob spotted a metal storage box tucked neatly away behind where Bruce's headless body laid.

"Hold on a minute, look at this," he said. "Gas masks! This box has gas masks in it."

Packed tightly in the box were four gas masks (one for each of the tank's regular crewmembers) complete with chemical hoods, which Jacob quickly handed out to each of my family members.

"These are really cool," Jacob said, his voice muffled through the mask.

"All right lets go outside," I ordered, my voice also muffled.

As I began to climb out of the tank once more, I heard Billy say.

"Grab your guns!"

I stuck my head back down the hatch and told them.

"Leave the AK's we're out of ammo for them, just bring the 9mm weapons, the pistols and the Sub-2000, we'll get ammo for them in the armory, there's still plenty of ammo left in there, and plenty of M-4's in there too."

One by one, we crawled out of the tank, the rest of my family squinting as their eyes struggled to adapt to the brightness of the sun that they hadn't seen for three days and that was now temporarily blinding them.

"Holy crud!" Gin screamed, as her eyes adjusted to the daylight and she witnessed the full scope of the slaughter that surrounded us.

"Quiet, keep your voice down, are you trying to get us killed?" I whispered, paranoid that the noise might bring more zombies, or worse, raptors.

"Sorry!" Gin moaned, distraught by the surrounding landscape.

During the three days in the tank, they had all forgotten just how brutal the massacre they had escaped from had been. Or maybe they all just wanted to forget the vast amount of carnage that they had previously witnessed.

Whatever the reason for their temporary amnesia, the scene they were now being forced to endure, was so horrific that we all knew that none of us would ever be the same again.

Piles of the zombie bodies that had been torn apart by the raptors and the T-Rexes' were everywhere, their rotting carcasses were stacked one on top of the other, sometimes as much as twelve bodies high. If we hadn't of had to kill so many, and hadn't grown to hate them so much for their insatiable appetite for our flesh, we might have felt somewhat sorry for them.

However, as things were, we felt no remorse for the hundreds of zombies we'd killed and burned that now lay in the piles before us. Or for the ones that we'd killed all along the way since the undead began their attack upon us at our home.

Neither was there any remorse forth coming for the ones that were torn apart by the giant lizards, the ones that we now had to climb over or step on to get to what we were hoping would be the safety and security of the armory.

The sickening squishing sounds of intestines squirting out their feces and different colored fermented juices, and the rotting muscles tearing away from the bones of the formally undead were bad enough.

However, couple that noise together with the chomping sound of the bent and broken teeth of the snappers as the decapitated heads snapped at us and gnashed their teeth while we trudged over the stacks of convulsing dismembered limbs and disemboweled organs.

Now, imagine if you will how the cacophony was only made more odious by the never-ending sound of the innumerable flies circling the seemingly endless mounds of degrading bluish-green corpses.

These sounds echoed in our minds for weeks after, bringing back the memory of the short but what we regarded at that time, as an un-ending journey to the weapons cache we so desperately needed.

"Good call dad," Jacob said, as he kicked a biting head to the side, knocking several of its teeth down the open hole where its throat should have been.

"What good call?" I asked. "You mean going back into the armory?"

Jacob laughed softly through his now fly incrusted gas mask.

"No, I mean calling these heads snappers, because that's exactly what they're doing, they're snapping at us."

"Everyone stay alert, just because we don't see any eaters, that doesn't mean that there aren't any nearby. And watch out for those heads, I mean snappers, you get bit and you die," I warned everyone, knowing that there was really no need to.

"Watch out for raptors too!" Jacob warned. "They're a lot faster than the eaters are!"

During our trek to the front door of the armory, we saw no sign of
live
zombies (just
live
heads), or of the prehistoric monsters that had destroyed their massive horde and inadvertently and ironically saved our skins at the same time.

When we finally made it to the entryway of the armory, our clothes were adorned with small chunks of festering flesh, and dripping with rotting blood, feces, and several bodily fluids that none of us had any idea of what they might be.

And as if that weren't enough to make us sick to our stomachs. To highlight the decaying mess that befouled our clothing, our garments were peppered with a generous amount of hitchhiking maggots that wiggled excitedly as the flies that accompanied them continually swooped down and landed nearby, and then took off again, never venturing to fly too far away from their descendants.

"We've got to get out of these clothes, at least the pants, they're slimy, and they stink," Gin announced with a sour look on her face as she peeled away her gas mask.

"How can you tell that it's your clothes that sink? I mean with all of the rotting corpses lying around all over the place, you've narrowed down the source of the smell to your pants?" Jacob asked, with a teenage sarcastic smile on his face.

"Well you can keep your clothes on if you want to, but I've got to get out mine," Gin answered, not much in the mood for levity.

"First things first, we need to get the guns and ammunition, then maybe we can either wash our uniforms, or find some other's here in the armory," I ordered, as I began to make my way to where the M-4 rifles were stored.

"First things first, we need to get these maggots and pieces of rotting skin, and whatever this other stuff is off of us," Gin insisted, as she brushed the decaying body parts and fly larvae from her clothes.

"Good idea mom," Jacob said, as he too wiped the decomposed body parts and little white grubs from his uniform.

After we had skimmed off our outer layer of disgusting putrefied flesh and maggot infestation, which had magnified our experience to some extent, we continued into the armory to collect the much-needed weapons that were stored there.

The huge zombie horde that had attacked us had been drawn to our location by the sound of the buildings crashing down and the cannon fire that caused them to fall, so inside the armory was mostly devoid of zombies. Some of the raptors, which luckily for us were no longer present, had summarily dispatched the few zombies that had infiltrated inside the building leaving it a
zombie free structure
, at least for the time being.

"Everyone grab two rifles, and let's get to the ammo room, we'll need as much 5.56 and 9mm ammo as we can carry," I informed them as I picked up two M-4 carbines the Sarg had left behind after freeing them from the locked rack.

"Why two rifles?" Gin asked.

"Because we don't know exactly what we're going to run into out on the road, but from our experiences out there we all have a pretty good idea of what to expect," I answered grimly. "And whatever we run into, one thing is for sure, we don't want to be caught short of firepower when we run into it.

Gin and the two boys each grabbed two rifles from the same rack, and we continued to the room where the ammo was stored.

"It's all still here!" Jacob shouted, seemingly surprised.

"It should be, zombies and prehistoric lizards don't use guns," Billy quipped, as he rolled his eyes at his brother's naive statement.