Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile (18 page)

I lay there on the top floor, using my pack as a pillow and looking at the ceiling as the monster kept the time for me by door whacks. Relentlessly it kept on . . . I heard the door splinter some and decided to use the mirror to watch the door. I jumped and shook a little every time the creature hit the door, making the mirror shake in my grip. A very small beam of sunlight was poking through a hole in the door about two feet above the knob. Blunt objects don’t cause damage like that. The door was boarded in three places and I remember it being boarded on the outside as well.

I retreated into the bedroom I had previously commandeered
and locked myself in as the sun dipped to the horizon. It would be dark soon. Using my multitool, I opened a can of chili and pulled out my brown plastic MRE spoon. I sat there counting the thumps downstairs as the sun set. It took me 353 thumps to finish my chili.

06 Oct

Late PM

From the sounds below, I can tell that the thing is all but inside. I heard a board hit the floor about half an hour ago. Of course I don’t have any idea what half an hour is anymore. In the fear that it may draw more of its own, I’ve decided to use the night as cover and escape from this place. I spent the evening stuffing the new pack I scavenged from downstairs. I’ve rearranged everything so that the most needed items will be on top or in a compartment near one of the zippers. There is a lot of extra room in my bag so I’m grabbing a green wool blanket from the closet.

I checked the batteries that I acquired from downstairs. They don’t expire for six more years. I put them in the NVGs and turned them on. The green light shining from the optics onto my palm indicated that they were working fine. No use looking through them with the candlelight shining. I also tried my handheld radio again. I didn’t hear anything but static. My mind was playing tricks on me as I thought I heard voices on the other end. I transmitted my situation in the blind, but was vague on my location. Maybe when I get farther south I’ll use the memorized codes that John insisted I learn. My stitches are itching again so I tried the antibiotic ointment. I hope it will help fight off any infection. In a few more days, I’ll be cutting the stitches out.

It’s time to blow out the candle.

07 Oct

Early AM

I’m not certain why these things are the way that they are or why they are different . . .

More aggressive and persistent.

When I departed the house last night, I did so from the same window I entered. I made the bed, mostly because it made me feel better to do so but also because it postponed my inevitable departure. After making the bed, I doused the light and put on my NVGs. As I adjusted them my fears became reality when I saw that the noise the creature made downstairs had drawn a dozen more undead to the area. That was just what I could count from one window. By my estimation, there were probably nearly thirty around the house.

As I made my way out onto the roof I could hear the sounds of them moving through tall grass and tripping over branches trying to locate the noise in the dark. Old habits die hard, and I knew I had twenty-nine rounds of ammo in each of my magazines, even though it didn’t matter with this weapon. I carefully moved to the edge and looked down. There were two below. Leaning over the edge I popped both of them, missing the head of one. The one I hit fell into the other, giving me another chance. I shot number two and started climbing down the side of the house the same way I had come up. Moving to my best evasion route, I killed three more. Each trigger pull illuminated the surrounding area with a green flash. The NVGs were magnifying the flash from the tip of the suppressor.

I was much too tired to sprint. I walked at a near jog, simply dodging them. I looked back toward the house as I neared the road. One of those things seemed to be nearly running in my direction. For a moment, I thought that it could actually see me in the dark. My fears subsided when it moved off to the side and stopped. It seemingly sniffed the air and slowly turned its head from side to side as if trying to sense me. It held an object of some sort in hand. My gut told me that it was the same creature I had seen through the peephole.

I started to move away from it and turned to the road. I had no idea where I was going. I traveled south for miles along an
old paved highway, stepping over cracks so as not to break my mother’s back. The signs indicated that I was closing in on Oil City. This road might even take me into Shreveport, a city that I dared not enter. I needed a place to sleep tonight. I walked until I could almost see a bit of light on the horizon, meaning that the sun would be up soon. I could make out a school bus up ahead on the road.

My best guess was that it was about 0430. The cold was getting to me and I needed at least a couple of hours of sleep to face the coming day. I kept heading toward the bus, careful to scan my surroundings. The area seemed clear but there were a lot of unknowns. A few derelict cars and trucks littered the side of the road on the way to the bus. Rotted skeletons were strewn about near the vehicles, picked clean by the dead and the birds.

Approaching the bus, I was happy to see that the door was open, telling me that at least nothing was trapped inside and too dumb to let itself out. Carefully maneuvering to the front, I climbed the bumper and stepped up onto the hood. The bus was slippery from the morning dew. From the hood I looked into the front window down the rows of seats. It was empty. I climbed onto the roof of the bus to get a better 360-degree view of the area. There was no movement except for two small rabbits in the ditch.

I thought about shooting them but it was too dark to risk even that slight noise. I took the wool blanket out of my pack and left the pack on the roof of the bus. I climbed back down the hood and entered the bus door. Throwing the blanket onto the bus driver’s seat, I knelt and pointed my SMG under the seats. I could see nothing but an old paper lunch sack. I reached over and closed the bus door with the manual crank lever as slowly as I could, making sure to minimize the noise it made. Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve slept in a bus.

With my pack safely on the roof, I could escape out any of the windows and retrieve it if I needed to make a quick departure. If I had kept my pack inside I might not have been able to fit it through the window, losing all my food and supplies if I had to run. I cut strips of vinyl from one of the seats on the bus and very sloppily braided it into a rope. I used this to tie the door handle
in place to make sure that nothing could get in to see me without making a lot of noise. Time for sleep, if anyone would call it that.

Late AM

It’s about midmorning now and I’m sitting in the fourth seat back on the right side of the bus. I’ve slept a needed four hours, or so I think. My pack is still on the roof. There is no movement around me and I’ll probably climb up, get my things and leave as soon as I’m sure it’s safe. The more I think of Hotel 23, the more important it becomes for me to get back there to my family. Even though the thought of my parents’ being alive is still inside my head, I know that most likely they are dead. My home is no bunker, and just like every other home built in the United States in the past fifty years, my parents’ home was not built to outlast a siege. I wonder how many people might still live if they “made ’em like they used to.”

PM,

Still the 7th

As I geared up to get my stuff off the top of the bus this morning, I was confronted with a very grim surprise. The bastard from the house had somehow followed me. I was on the hood of the bus, about to climb to the roof, when I heard the sound of steel on steel. The sound startled me so much I nearly fell off the hood and flat on my back. I jumped forward into the bus window, causing it to crack. Looking over my shoulder I knew instantly that it was the creature, the same apparition that stared at me through the peephole at the old house. How could this dumb thing know anything about following me? An even better question was how did this thing know how to swing a hatchet?

I jumped onto the roof of the bus and just watched the thing work with amazement. It was actually trying to climb up there with me. I wasn’t making the same mistake this time. This member of the undead talented tenth had to go. I flipped the indicator on my weapon and blasted the creature in the face, dropping it
instantly. The thing made a lot of noise before I killed it, so it was time for me to depart.

Before leaving I checked the creature for anything valuable, and lo and behold it was wearing a beat-up plastic G-Shock wristwatch. I grabbed the watch and looked at the display before stuffing it in my pack along with the hatchet. The digital display read 10-7 and 12:23
P.M
.

I kept making my way south and west, passing scene upon scene of decay. How long had it been since I had seen the first of them? I walked and imagined how it would feel to talk to someone again. The feeling of loneliness was setting in. From all my experiences with survival, this was the most serious of all emotions. It is different with everyone, but for me, the emotion attached to being lonely is fear.

I kept pushing the thought of the dead out of my consciousness, but I could not control what I was about to think. The “daymare” brought me to an open field that I was crossing to the wooded area beyond. As if in a scene from a war movie, as I approached the middle of the field an army of radiated dead appeared at the crest of the hill. They immediately ran for me. Right before I could see the rot of their eyes, I snapped out of it and kept walking. There was no sound. Only the slight breath of wind on my face let me know that I was back to this reality.

08 Oct

Yesterday I walked until I came upon a lake. The signs leading up to it read “Caddo Lake Boat Landing Ah.” The last letters of “Ahead” had been shot off the sign by a shotgun long ago. It was about 1400 when I came to the lake, so I had to start making preparations for somewhere safe to hole up tonight. I carefully approached the boat dock, thinking back to Matagorda Island and how that situation had ended up. Many boats were still docked, and there were a few that had succumbed to the deep and pulled part of a dock down into the water with them. There were two sailboats of decent size docked and still afloat, but one of them did not look serviceable, because the owner had left the sails on deck to endure months of wind and weather. The other twenty-footer most likely had the sails stowed and would probably work. I could see a working anchor and a chain propped up on the rails of the forecastle with a hand-cranked winch.

I was only a hundred feet away from the boat, close enough that I could stand there and observe my surroundings. With the food and water I had on hand, I could pirate the boat, sail it out into the lake and get some real sleep tonight.

My goal was to move south and west back in the direction of Hotel 23. If the lake were shaped to my advantage, I could cover a lot of ground with the safety of water around me. Edging closer to the vessel, I saw no threats near. I wasn’t taking any chances, though, and approached the vessel scanning every direction. That dirty fuck with the hatchet got one over on me and I could have been dead or dying right now if my luck had run out on the hood of that yellow bus.

In a moment of nervousness I chambered my weapon again to
make sure I had one in the hole and a 9mm round dropped to the ground. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I was getting closer to the vessel . . .

Did I chamber my weapon?

I asked myself again. Pushing back the fear and anxiety, I kept moving. I was out in the open, within view of anyone or anything. I was at the boat. She looked derelict, with the nylon lines on the deck covered in mildew and bird crap. The curtains to the belowdecks were closed, allowing me no view of the interior.

I again checked my surroundings and jumped across to the starboard catwalk. Edging to the stern I could see remnants of bloody barefoot prints leading all the way back to the stern. I kept moving aft, making sure to point the dangerous end of my weapon at any blind spot. I followed the prints as they trailed off the stern into the water.

My next task was to make sure that there were no surprises waiting in the cabin below. I twisted on my weapon light and flipped open the door. No smell. Kept walking farther, into the bowels of the sailboat, bending over so as to not hit my head on the fixtures that littered the ceiling. Aside from the familiar
old
smell, the boat was abandoned. I began to inspect the sails, anchor and all the rigging to make sure that she would be safe for my transit across the Caddo.

The sails had some mold, but they were still workable. The motor would probably never work again and I doubted I would even attempt it. It was pulled back and out of the way so it wouldn’t matter to me either way. All that really mattered were the sails, anchor and rudder. I checked the pantry of the vessel—nothing but old and rotted beef jerky, two bottles of cloudy water and a pack of bar soap. I checked a small storage locker holding a small CO
₂
inflatable lifeboat. Sitting in some storage netting attached to the bulkhead inside the locker was a set of Steiner Marine binoculars. These will really come in handy when I make landfall and when I need to scout ahead on my way south.

After taking one more look out the porthole to make sure nothing was about, I commenced to rig the sails to head out into the lake for some rest and relaxation. Barring being at the summit of Mount Everest or at the International Space Station (poor bastards),
this was the safest rest I could hope for in this day and time. It had been awhile since I had taken my sailing lessons, but I still remembered how to swing the boom and raise and lower the sails. The wind was blowing to my advantage, which was the second lucky thing to happen to me in the past forty-eight hours. I’m sure I am due for something else.

Kicking the dock from the bow, I started my travels south and slightly west out of the small inlet toward the expanse of the lake. The sails caught the light wind and pulled me at a speedy three knots toward my destination. This was a happy time for me. I forced my current situation out of my head and imagined I was sailing on Beaver Lake back home before all of this happened. I thought of being home on leave and visiting my family, and of my grandmother’s brown beans.