ZOMBIE'S DOOM? "Chronicles of Jack Doom" (28 page)

I stopped myself before disclosing the fact to I'd seen dinosaurs roaming the fruited plains, not to mention that a pack of the rogue prehistoric beasts had killed my wife and two sons.

I had just met Derek and thought it might be prudent at this time not to come across as a complete raving maniac.

"Stop right there!
Unbelievable things
? What could possibly be more unbelievable than dead bodies standing up and attacking people for their brain matter?" Derek asked, being careful not to disclose an unbelievable secret of his own.

"Are you trying to tell me in your own rather cryptic way, that I've got more to worry about than just zombies, wild dogs, rogue humans, and the average ordinary bullshit this world seems to conjure up on a daily basis?" Derek asked, as he continued to dig through the items in the back of the truck.

"Oh, no, I think you've covered it pretty well, especially the bullshit part," I retorted, looking at him with raised eyebrows.

Before Derek had time to quiz me further on my enigmatic statement, and long before we finished inventorying the items in the truck (we hadn't even looked in the second vehicle yet) the sound hundreds of swarming flies hovering around the approaching zombie horde warned us of the impending danger and hastened our retreat.

"I hear eaters coming," I warned, as I jumped to the ground. "Come on, let's go, leave all that stuff, it won't do you any good if you're churning around inside some eater's gizzard."

Derek jumped to the ground and joined me at my truck.

"Fuck!" he yelled. "We gotta move one of those trucks."

Running back to the truck that we had just abandoned, Derek jumped into the cab.

"Hey, the key is in it," he shouted.

"Well move the fucking thing then," I shouted back, as I sent a 5.56mm round diagonally through the skull of the first walking dead man to make it onto the scene. "Quit fucking around and hurry the fuck up dumbass."

"Roger that," Derek answered, turning the key and starting the engine. "I mean about hurrying up, not the dumbass part."

Derek slammed the truck into reverse and it began to roll backwards, he then jumped from the truck without attempting to stop it.

While he was running back toward me, I took the liberty of blowing the top off another zombie's head that had stopped to snack on Tony.

Then I watched as the truck that had been blocking our way, rolled off the shoulder of the road and careened down the hill toward the drainage culvert.

It spilled some of its contents along the way, and took out several approaching zombies that were approaching from that direction, before coming to rest wedged between two overturned cars; this helped to clear the way for Derek and me to make our escape before we were surrounded by the looming horde.

"Damn it, you might know the fucking truck would slam into my car," Derek complained, shaking his head from side to side.

As I stomped my foot down on the accelerator pedal and felt the truck lurch forward pressing me against the seat, two of the undead ungracefully walked in front of us.

With no other options at my disposal, I continued toward the two with the hopes of doing minimal damage to my getaway vehicle.

One of the wayward decomposing pedestrians that had inadvertently wandered into my speeding truck's crosshairs was a lanky male dressed in a lime green jogging outfit complete with matching expensive, not to mention trendy, running shoes.

His stature along with his position relative to the front of my truck, afforded his leg between the left knee and hip to be the prime target for the right front fender of my vehicle to strike.

Although the truck was traveling at only twenty miles per hours at the point of impact, the angle and contour of the leading edge of my vehicle, together with the monster's gate, sent the ungainly dead man flipping head over heels ten or so feet into the air.

The collision broke both of his legs and left him sprawled out in the ditch at the side of the road squirming and oozing a dark liquid out of most of his orifices, and encircled by a gaggle of his most loyal flies.

The second target that my truck had picked out to obliterate was a little more disturbing, that is if one were to be disturbed by such an escapade.

It was a nine-year-old boy suited up in a Cub Scout uniform, troop 495 if I recall correctly.

Yes, troop 495, that number was sewn on the sleeve of his dark blue uniform, it was momentarily pressed up against the windshield in front of me when the little boy's arm was disjointed by the impact and tossed onto the hood, then rolled up onto the windshield blocking my view.

That was the number that was being dragged in front of me several times, along with several trailing hemorrhaging veins, as my windshield wiper raked the bloody stump that was enclosed in the sleeve of the youth's blue shirt back and forth in front of me before tossing it off my front window.

I remember watching that number spiral down as the amputated arm slid across the fender and fell to the ground.

"
That was a close one, that little fucker almost broke my windshield!
" I thought at the time.

It was hard enough as it was, driving through a zombie apocalypse, dodging abandoned cars and trucks, trying to increase your felony hit and run count without becoming a fatality statistic yourself.

Trying to accomplish all of that, and doing it in a safe and unobtrusive manner with a broken windshield obscuring your view of the outside world would be verging on the impossible.

As we sped away, I could see in the rearview mirror that three zombies had chewed a hole in Danny's head and were busy fighting over the chunks of his brain that they had extracted from his skull.

It reminded me of a pack of stray dogs fighting over scrapes of food that had been left in a garbage can that they had tipped over.

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CRIPPLING TIMES

Along with the guy who called himself Derek riding shotgun, and Cassandra's tanning severed breast riding bitch, the three of us had shot the gap between the remaining parked rental truck and the zombie horde that was quickly filling the landscape, and were heading north toward the Ohio River and the Indiana border.

We had no choice but to leave the cargo left in the trucks and littering the countryside to the multitude of marauding monsters that had chased us away, escaping with our lives seems more important at the time, and we both knew that we could find needed supplies somewhere in a less
populated
area.

"Did those fuckers seem faster than normal to you?" Derek asked, as he leaned back and put his feet up on the dashboard.

"I think that
is
the normal nowadays. I noticed their new agility a couple of days ago," I informed him, keeping my eyes on the road while groping for the bag containing the salted booby, as I narrowly avoided an overturned armored car. "The good news is, even though they're faster and more agile, they still stagger around somewhat with a gaggle of buzzing insects announcing their arrival, and a well placed 9mm slug or a tomahawk blade has the same effect as before."

"I prefer this here meat cleaver," Derek said, holding up his blood stained rectangular-bladed hatchet. "The thick heavy blade on this bastard sinks into their skulls right nice, cause I keep it sharp enough to slice down the middle of a nun's cunt-hair and separate it into two distinct pieces, even the thin blonde ones."

"Each to their own, my tomahawk has served me well on numerous occasions, although I've never tried slicing a nun's cunt-hair in two before, not even one of the blonde ones," I told him vehemently, thinking that I wouldn't mind trying it if the opportunity ever presented itself. "But it has split the craniums of many of those repulsive maggot wagons, and if I live long enough, it'll crack the skulls of many more to come."

"Indeed," Derek agreed.

Within minutes, we could see the bridges that spanned the Ohio River; two were dedicated to automobile traffic, one for trains, and oddly enough, one was solely for bicycles and pedestrians.

As usual, traffic on all of the bridges was inadequate for the purposes for which they had been constructed, taking in consideration that they were now serving only the population of a zombie apocalypse that had been inflicting a high attrition rate upon its members for quite some time, both living and dead.

As we crossed the river, we were in the only moving vehicle on the I-65 Bridge, and that was no big surprise, hell, we were in the only moving vehicle period.

I had not seen a moving train since this whole dead people coming to life thing began, and although there were some pedestrians traversing the walking bridge, as one might guess, they were all zombies searching for their next meal.

A few minutes later, we were in what was once referred to as the state of Indiana.

Of course, all of the states were no longer states as we remembered them, having no centralized government in existence; they were now just lines on maps and borders marked by welcoming signs, most of which depicting the state's nickname.

Nevertheless, calling them by name gave everyone who referred to them as such a way to designate a plot of land that was familiar to most of the people still living.

Welcome to Indiana, the Hoosier State, the small, almost apologetic sign attached to the bridge read as we crossed the now meaningless border into Indiana.

Once in Indiana, and relatively safe from harm, that is as safe from harm as one can be while traipsing through a zombie apocalypse on their way to a place called the
Badlands
, Derek spoke up.

"What's with the tit riding bitch?"

"It's just a trophy given to me by a traitorous conniving cunt that needed to be taught a good lesson in the ways of a doomsday lifestyle," I answered snidely, remembering how Cassandra had betrayed me.

"Oh... by the way, I never caught your name," Derek said, without revealing any emotion from my response to his inquiry.

"My name is Jack," I said, as I kneaded Cassandra's salted down tit with my right hand to spread the sodium chloride into every pore.

"And what's with the salt Jack?" Derek asked in a monotone voice. "You're not planning on eating it are you?"

"Hell no, I'm not planning on eating it, I prefer my tits attached to the women that grew them, they taste better that way don't you think," I answered laughing. "Besides, I think we've got enough cannibals stalking around the planet the way it is, don't you?"

"Indeed I do, that's why I take the opportunity to kill as many of them as I can, every chance I get," Derek proclaimed.

"Good, then we're going to get along just fine," I declared, as I dropped the seasoned yabo back onto the bitch seat and picked up my Beretta.

"Watch this!" I said, sticking the gun out of the driver's window.

Up ahead was a lone zombie hitchhiking on the wrong side of the road. I rested my pistol on the door and waited until the barrel of gun came into line with the zombie, then I pressed the trigger softly to the rear and felt Isaac Newton's third law of motion take effect.

The bullet from my 9mm pistol slammed into the left side of the chest of the stumbling corpse, dislodging at least two of its ribs and sending them through its tattered shirt, and following the projectile out the backside of the its body.

The zombie faltered for a moment, then leaned forward and continued to stumble toward us. We drove by the profusely bleeding zombie, narrowly avoiding the aura of flies that encompassed it, and watched as it tried to catch up to us stumbling even more than before.

"Holy fuck Jack, you sure are a lousy shot. Hell, I could have put a round right through its eye from that distance," Derek insisted.

"You're missing the point," I told him with raised eyebrows.

"What point is that, you can't hit the broad side of a barn if your life depended on it?" Derek contended, as he began to chuckle and shake his head back and forth.

I spotted another creepy cadaver ambling along the side of the road, and again stuck my pistol out the window.

As we approached the second roadside maniac who was several feet farther away than the first, I quickly raised the gun, aligned the front sight with the rear sight, and lit off two 9mm slugs in the direction of the stinking mutation.