ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (2 page)

As time passed, the Mayan calendar and the end of the world became a vague and distant memory. The only thing that still remained to remind us of the zombie apocalypse that never was, were the zombie-like stares in the eyes of the
buffoonery
employees as they made their way down the company hallways
wishing
they belonged to a legion of the wandering dead.

Then one afternoon, without any warning, without any predictions, and without any forecast from anybody of the coming event, it happened.

Our world went straight to hell.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I guess that is where our real story begins.

My name is Jack; I live with my wife Gin, and my two sons, Billy 18, and Jacob 16, if you can call what we're doing living, surviving is a more accurate analogy.

The day that it all started, I was on my way home from work, trying to dodge some of the usual stop and go traffic while my radio blasted out some serious 70's rock and roll music from a British band that was invading my vehicle.

Endlessly switching lanes on the freeway, vying for a position that might get me a car length or two ahead of the other drivers, just like everyone else was doing.

Then at one point the traffic slowed and soon after came to an abrupt halt, which is common in stop and go traffic. Thus, the word
stop
, in the phrase, “
stop and go traffic
.”

However, this time the cars in front of me did not move forward again. That usually means an accident has occurred somewhere ahead of you, or the police have someone pulled over for an infraction of some kind and everyone passing the scene is slowing down to a crawl and rubbernecking, as if they have never seen a cop giving out a ticket.

"Idiots!" I mumbled to myself, as I changed the radio station that had now gone to a commercial for a local car dealership.

I was in the right lane, with an exit lane to my right. I had never taken that particular exit before, and I was unfamiliar with the area that it led to, and taking an unfamiliar exit is not what someone usually does at the height of rush hour, especially when they live nearly fifteen miles away.

From my vantage point, at first I could only see that some cars at the head of the pack had stopped and that people were out of their cars and moving around. My first thought was that there had been a miner fender bender, but there seemed to be too many people milling around the wreck for it to be just a simple fender bender.

Then I thought, well maybe someone had been hit while trying to cross the freeway.

Some years ago I had been in traffic that came to a complete stop on a eight-lane highway, because a woman with the best of intentions was running back and forth across several lanes of traffic, trying to catch a stray dog (or get herself killed) and get it off the road.

As it turned out, someone had been hit; or rather,
something
had been hit.

While I sat in my vehicle glancing back and forth between the group of people that had gathered in front of the stymied automobiles, and the empty exit lane beside me, I continued to change radio stations in search of some good rock and roll music to listen to on the remainder of the drive home and debated whether or not to bailout onto that exit lane that seemed to be beckoning to me.

I sat there in the stalled rush hour traffic for a few more minutes, and then decided that this wreck, or pedestrian mishap, or whatever it was, could hold up the flow of traffic for hours.

People had already started to exit the freeway, and I thought that I'd better join them before that too became clogged.

I maneuvered into the exit lane and made my way forward rather quickly, and as I did, my view of what was causing the delay became very clear. That's when I first saw the beginning of what would turn out to be the demise of civilization as we had come to know it the world over.

It looked like a severe case of road rage at first glance, all the way up until I saw a short bald man get bum-rushed by four others that from a distance had looked like they had just been milling around. That was not the case.

They were walking awkwardly, ungainly, stumbling around as if they were drunk. The four of them had the short man surrounded but they weren't beating on him, they were biting him, biting big chunks of flesh out of his face, arms, and neck.

As I got closer to the scene, a few cars in front of me were stopping, forcing me to stop too. One car had pulled over and the driver was running toward the imperiled man in what seemed to be an attempt to help him. An attempt that would prove to be the last good deed this man would ever do.

The waylaid man was now on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, with the four attackers now on their knees hovering over him.

The man's high-pitched screams alerted drivers many rows back to the danger that was waiting for them just a few cars ahead, as the four
zombies
ripped the flesh and muscle from his body, exposing the off white color of his stripped bones and the marbled grey of his blood covered intestines, as they feasted on his mutilated body.

From out of nowhere a fifth attacker lunged upon the Good Samaritan from behind, and in a blink of an eye, had the man on the ground, and was tearing his scalp off with his teeth.

Many of the other drivers were setting in their cars, frozen with fear, staring in disbelief at the grisly spectacle that was being played out before them.

As the Samaritan’s scalp dangled from his attacker's mouth like a blood soaked toupee, he let out a blood-chilling scream, which seemed to pull the mesmerized onlookers out of their shock induced trances, and set off a chorus of shrill screams from all directions as many people jumped from their gridlocked vehicles and tried to run to safety.

Others quickly locked their doors, hoping that would bring them safety, but in the end, they would find that they had trapped themselves, and through the glass windows of their four-wheeled metal coffins, watched the end of world as they knew it unfold before their eyes.

These people, that had chosen to trap themselves inside their vehicles, found themselves surrounded and waiting for help that never came. They never left their cars again, and died of thirst or met their doom through starvation, or in some cases, self-termination was the chosen method to end their torment. Their cause of death no matter how it occurred, would later prove to be irrelevant, as shortly after their demise (provided that no brain trauma had occurred) they would reanimate. Ultimately joining the innumerable forces of our undead arch-enemies, and become one of our greatest nemesis as we attempted to commandeer transportation among the abandon vehicles that were strung out along our countries highway system.

Others tried to plow through the impassable mass of automobiles, turning the road into a no rules demolition derby.

The sound of crunching metal and smashing glass filtered through the high-pitched human screams of terror, as people were being crushed between the wrecking cars, some were being ran over, others were pinned under vehicles.

In their panic to save themselves, some people were backing up and spinning their tires on the pedestrians they had just trapped under their cars, jetting blood onto cars and people alike, like a crimson waterspout, causing even more panic.

I could feel my heart thumping rapidly in my chest as my foot slid slowly off the brake pedal, and as my vehicle began to inch forward, I could see several bloody bodies on and around other stopped cars.

Now one of newly sighted victims, who was knocked down and flattened by a panicked driver, who looked as though she should not have been moving, was dragging her mutilated body out from under the vehicle that had rolled over her.

Her jaw was crushed and broken off from her skull; it was hanging down passed her collarbone like a grotesque necklace, held on only by her scratched and torn facial skin. Flesh and muscle looked as if it had been peeled from her right forearm and hand by a jagged piece of metal, leaving several inches of shredded skin dangling from the exposed veins and bone.

Some of her skin was left hanging from the underside of the car that had ravaged her body, and was dripping blood onto the road.

As I watched the crimson drops hit the puddle of blood beneath them, the noise from the chaos around me disappeared, and it seemed I could hear each drop making a splash into the pool of blood below, as if I were hearing a leaky faucet dripping in the middle of the night.

The woman somehow had managed to stand up and move; and she was moving toward me.

Her wobbling motion snapped me back from what I can only describe as a daydream in the middle of this nightmare I was experiencing.

She too, was unwieldy and clumsy. Walking as if she was intoxicated, yet her head seemed balanced like it wasn't attached to her swaying body.

The look in her overly blood shot eyes was not one of pain, but one of anger and rage, it was the look of a crazed maniac bent on destroying something, and that something was me.

After seeing what had just happened to some of my fellow freeway travelers, and the growing number of what seemed to be reanimated dead people on the scene, the feeling that my life was now in serious jeopardy overwhelmed me. I felt that my escape was now paramount to my survival, and like many of the other people, I also panicked.

I hit the accelerator pedal hard and my spinning tires squealed loudly as the concrete road stripped the rubber from them. I swerved around the car in front of me, narrowly missing another vehicle and a panicked woman who was screaming and flailing her arms about like a scarecrow on a windy day.

As I passed the hysterical woman, I had a momentary thought.

"
I should stop and pick her up!
"

That thought quickly passed as another thought pushed it out of my mind.

"
Hell with her, the bitch wouldn't stop for me
."

No more thoughts of helping anybody (but myself) seeped into my brain after that, as I sped between a truck and the car the Good Samaritan had abandoned and raced up the exit ramp, now only able to see the gruesome fracas in my rearview mirror.

With the mayhem far behind me now, my heart was still pounding hard in my chest, and my breathing was labored as if I had just ran a mile in under four minutes.

I had sped onto the surface streets where the traffic was sparse, and in my endeavor to traverse the area, I meandered through the unacquainted streets, my mind still reeling from what I'd just witnessed, trying to digest the horrific scene and rationalize some semblance of sense to it.

My momentary panic subsided, and I told myself that what I had just experienced was just an isolated incident, probably people using PCP, or Bath Salts, or some other synthetic drug that caused them to act in such a horrific way.

I continued on my journey homeward, and while driving through an oak-shaded residential area, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was an aircraft flying overhead, but I never got a good look at it.

"
News helicopters most likely,
" I thought, figuring I would turn on the local news when I got home, and they would have the whole story of what really had happened back on the freeway.

Moments later and long before I would arrive to what I thought would be the safety and security of my home. An emergency broadcast blasted across the radio waves, alerting everyone listening, that there seemed to be some kind of outbreak, and many random and extremely violent acts were taking place all across the region and more incidents were being chronicled even as the report aired.

That's when I began to fear for my families wellbeing.

I began to run stop signs and stop lights if I could see no other vehicles were in the immediate area.

Rolling stops became the norm for me, and every other driver on the road that was aware of the so-called outbreak, and I narrowly avoided several accidents along the way.

Trying to call family members was of no use, the cell phone carriers were deluged with an avalanche of calls, and the result was that nobody was getting through.

As the miles fell behind me, I made my way closer to my home. I couldn’t help wondering if my family was there, and if so, were they safe?

By now, things had gotten so bad that most of the radio stations had stopped airing their regular formats and were giving constant updates on the upheaval that was gripping the area, and as I would come to find out, the whole nation, and the world.

Along the way, I began to see more and more of the violent acts, like the ones that I had witnessed during the life and death struggles on the highway, and that the radio was now reporting on. Not all of which were confined to the streets and roads.

While passing an old Victorian house, I watched a woman run out onto her front porch screaming, only to be pulled back inside by two teenage girls with what were becoming the all too prevalent crimson stains on the front of their clothes, and the same color liquid dripping from their mouths and hair.

They both had a chilling glare in their eyes that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was the same look that the woman who had climbed out from under the car and lumbered toward me on the freeway had had.