In addition to the five clips for the M16 I’d taken off a dead National Guardsman, I had three pistols of various sizes - two 9 millimeter Berettas and a .45. The .45 was a beautiful Colt 1911 that I found scrounging through a pawn shop looking for, well, anything. I’d found it clutched in the hand of its former owner, its last act to make a quarter-sized hole in the back of his head. The Berettas were from an army surplus store. That entire thing had been a pretty easy raid. Apparently the undead can’t figure out where their living prey are likely to go.
The undead. It sounded beyond surreal to say that. They weren’t totally undead. Well, most of them weren’t. Some of them were mostly still human. Mostly still people. They don’t stay that way for long, though. Once the virus or the bacteria or whatever it was took hold you only had a few days - a week, tops - before you were relatively mindless. The CDC and media never could tell us what it was, officially. The rumor mill said it had something to do with destroying the frontal cortex, turning regular, sentient people into mindless crazed killers.
It’s a sad statement that once you’re infected, I guess that’s what you call it, there’s nothing you can do. You survive the attack - you won! But then you find out you got bitten or got a bit of brain matter in your eye when you took half that zombie’s head off. Well, sucks to be you. May as well eat the bullet. Sadly I know too many people who did. But those who didn’t joined the packs that wander the streets looking for their next victim.
They weren’t really all that interested in eating you. Rather it’s that they didn’t really carry weapons and their hands and teeth were pretty much all the weaponry they have. I remember reading once on the Internet (oh, how I’ve missed that!) that surviving the zombie apocalypse would be easy because for zombies, their main prey for food or even procreation was also their top predator. It likened it to having to fight a lion every time you wanted to eat a sandwich or have sex. I laughed at it and posted it on Facebook. It was true, but what it didn’t account for was that once your frontal cortex is gone, you don’t really need sleep. The undead stay up 24/7. Unfortunately, the average sentient human being can’t do that too long. Eventually we sleep. And that’s when we’re most vulnerable. Or were. Once the outbreak began it was just a matter of time before the people who were run-ragged ended up sleeping and something found them. Those of us who survived the initial onslaught found safe places to sleep. Learned what kinds of things would prevent the zombies from breaking in. Learned to sleep lightly.
Where was I tonight? I was on the upper floors of an old hotel. I’d locked the fire escapes and there’s no power for the elevator. Plus, I’m inside one of the rooms. The odds that a zombie would even know I was here are astronomical. Despite all that, I’ve still bolted the door, placed the TV and dresser in front of it and always sleep with at least two of my pistols under my pillow.
So if zombies don’t want to eat you, what do they want? It seems that it’s just that they’re extreme xenophobes - they don’t like things that aren’t them. I saw a whole pack of them attack a cow just to kill it. A remember morbidly thinking about all that steak and hamburger going to waste. Once the zombies had dispatched the cow, which, if you think about, is really hard to do with just your hands and teeth, the pack wandered off looking for the next thing that wasn’t a zombie. I do remember taking great delight in killing the whole pack later that afternoon. I love me some steak, but that was a horrible death for an innocent creature.
The one thing I did always think would happen is that I’d get better at shooting. That’s the one thing that I predicted correctly. I can hit a zombie in the head from about three football fields away. I actually find it harder when they’re closer. You have to be more careful. Bringing your weapon to your shoulder can waste precious milliseconds. You have to shoot from the hip a lot more, which I dislike because it wastes ammo, but once they’re on the ground you can headshot them pretty easily. Unless there are fifty more, in which case you’re just trying to back your way out quickly and safely. Oh, that’s one more thing about the infection - it somehow manages to amp up the coagulation factors, meaning that shooting a zombie doesn’t necessarily kill them. Their wounds close up and then they’re able to move along again. Beyond massive blunt force trauma, a shot through the heart, or a headshot, you’re not taking that zombie down.
I had always thought that zombies would be the actual dead come back to life, like in the Romero movies. They would be slow, stupid, and the only real threat they posed was if there were too many of them. I guess I should be thankful that this time there weren’t any dead rising from the grave. I was glad that they... Listen to me - “was”. Like it’s over. Like I’m in some normal hotel room and the only things to fear are boogie-men under the bed. But it’s still going on out there. I hear the occasional gunshots, staccato bursts piercing the night. Someone isn’t being careful - he’s been caught outside or they’ve found him. I just hope he has enough ammunition to withstand the pack. I wish I could do more for him, poor bastard.
I vaguely remember the beginnings of the whole thing. Protests that turned ugly. People fighting for liberty and peace and civility and justice being beaten by a police force paid to shut them up. I never thought that would happen here. I never thought we’d sink so low. I guess when you’re at the top of the socioeconomic ladder and someone’s clawing their way up to pull you down a rung or two you get a little antsy. You get a little desperate. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. All in all, though, it doesn’t really matter - it is. Whatever happened started in several places at once. Several different cities began seeing the outbreaks simultaneously. It just took a couple of “patient zeroes” to start the problem.
There. No more gunfire. I hope he got them. I’ll check in the morning to make sure. If not, I’ll make sure that the pack pays for it. They’re usually not too hard to track if they’ve managed to kill something. If not, it should be easy to find the location based on the bodies. Sounds like it might have been up near the ball field. There are too many bad places to get cornered up there.
I’m glad these aren’t the modern, crazed rage-infected fiends from the more recent movies. Those things can move pretty quickly. They can jump and run and throw themselves at you. Thankfully, these are like the Romero zombies - slow, relatively stupid, and hyperfocused on one thing - destroying what isn’t one of them. Based on their looks, you can really bang yourself up when you can’t feel pain and don’t care about personal hygiene. Those people originally infected looked like death warmed over just a week later. But by then, the madness had already seized the world.
It’s late and I’m too tired to continue. More tomorrow night.
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