'Til Death Do Us Part

CHAPTER TWO

Mike Journal Entry 1

There was not a place on my body that was not screaming in agony. If I dared to look, I would imagine I had third-degree burns over three-quarters of my body. I smelled like barbeque; it was both disgusting and somewhat saliva-inducing at the same time. Where my head had bounced off the pavement a blackened mixture of burnt skin and wet blood slicked the roadway. My neck crinkled like dried old parchment paper as I picked my head up.

My arms were blistering, the surface looking like a dry lake bed with viscous puss running through the crevices. That did not smell nearly as tasty as the flap of meat on the ground. My blue jeans had mostly melted to my body and karma had come full circle. How many times had I given people shit for wearing their clothes so tight from trying to hold in some excess baggage that they looked like they had painted them on? This was like that. If I was so inclined (which I wasn’t) to pull the denim material off of me, it would have easily taken all of the skin and most likely a fair portion of muscle mass.

I screamed as I tried to stand, I nearly teetered over not willing to place my burnt palms on the ground and lose anymore of me. The sky darkened as I made it to an almost standing position. My skin was too dried and burnt to allow for full extension, I was hunched over like a man three times my age—which would have been REAL fucking old. I was fighting desperately to hold onto consciousness, but it was flickering like a basement light in a horror movie. My mind was urging me off the street. My body didn’t give a shit.

“Maybe I could just take a little break,” I said out loud. Or maybe I thought it. I don’t know, but it sounded like a grand idea. “Move!” I urged my charred limbs. Something creaked, groaned, and snapped, I sounded like a new macabre cereal advertisement. Get your new Meatie-O’s fortified with all the vitamins a growing zombie needs, I sneered as I thought it. It was funny and it gave me the briefest of seconds away from the agony that permeated my entire being.

I shuffled, the melding of my jeans to my skin making any movement difficult. Tears were streaming down my face in earnest; I would have bellowed in pain if I had been able to catch my breath, it was that intense. I imagined being placed in an iron maiden would have been bliss compared to what I was feeling. Still, I moved; the torment of pain seemingly the only thing spurring me on. It was thirty feet to the closest house. It might as well have been the surface of the moon.

But now I heard noise…and not the good kind. A rat the size of a lapdog loped past. It stopped for the briefest of moments, whiskers twitching as it smelled my cooked countenance, but even a warm meal wasn’t enough to entice him to stay. It turned to look over its shoulder and bounded off.

I could think of only one thing that would send a rat on its way: zombies.

Would they bother me? Did I have enough strength to turn them away? I barely had enough strength to think the thoughts, so I kept my ambling shuffle in motion. The house now seemed thirty-five feet away. And no, I have no idea how that happened; I’m not a quantum physicist for fuck’s sake.

It was countless heartbeats of pain later and I had halved the distance to the house. I was now a good fifty feet away. I could hear the moans of the undead, they sounded far off, but there had to be a lot of them for me to be hearing them this clearly. Instead of the movement causing my burns to limber up, the opposite seemed to be happening. The puss that was oozing from a dozen different places was beginning to congeal which made my previous shuffle feel like a world class sprint. In reality I had another ten feet to the steps—which in and of themselves were going to be a near insurmountable endeavor. I didn’t think I was going to make it.

The moaning didn’t sound any closer, but it wasn’t moving away. I imagined a column of zombies was moving horizontal to my location. I did a silent ‘thank you’ to the Big Guy and suddenly had a feeling he heard. I was a little awestruck to think that I might have a direct pipeline. I wonder if this was what Moses felt?

I stubbed my toe against the step. At some point I had my eyes shut, trying in vain to block out the blistering nerve endings as they pounded relentlessly. I couldn’t even begin to wonder how I was going to get my leg the eight inches up to get onto the first step. I looked at that front door like I was a Japanese tourist who had left his camera behind and the door was the Eighth Wonder of the World. (Is that a stretch? It seemed to work when I thought about it, seems a little different on paper.)

I placed my gnarled hands under my right thigh and pulled up, the toe of my melted boots rubbing up against the backstop. I almost got stuck on the small lip of the stair that jutted out. Fried skin around my knee snapped apart as I over-flexed it. Oily blood flowed freely, but I sighed in relief as my right leg was now one step closer. The next test would be if I had the power to stand completely upright, then I’d be able to drag my left leg up.

I placed the heels of my hands against the railing and, combined with my leg, I was indeed able to get my left foot onto the top of Mount McKinley—or the first step, however you want to interpret that is fine with me. Now I just had to deal with K2 and Mount Everest and I’d be home free. If you’ve had the opportunity to read my other journals, you’d realize I have a flare for the dramatic, but that doesn’t mean what I was feeling wasn’t right.

The moans were either increasing in volume or zombies were getting nearer as I was strategizing the complexities of my climb. I wondered if just falling forward onto the landing itself would be the best course of action; but unless the door was unlocked AND open so I could push it in, I would be fucked. Once I hit the turf, there really didn’t seem any sort of chance that I’d be able to get back up.

“This blows,” I whispered, as I once again reached behind my right thigh for an assisted lift, but now it was coated in my juices and it was difficult to get any sort of grip, especially since my fingers were curled up like claws.

I jumped when I heard gunshots no more than a street away, then I began to hear human shouting. It was too far to catch the words, but I’m sure it revolved around the zombies and how they needed to stay away from them. Life had become vastly easy in one sense; you really just needed to survive, no shopping lists, errands, chores, meetings, project due dates, all the bullshit of modernity had been stripped away. It was now a one word world. Sure, how you went about that one word was difficult as all hell, but at least you only had to focus on the one thing. That’s got to count for something, right?

Yeah, I know it’s bullshit. I’d rather be driving to Walmart with the missus shopping for dreaded curtains than this crap. At least at the end of the errands I could have gone home and got my ass thoroughly whomped by Travis in any Wii game we played. Survivalism isn’t nearly as much fun in reality as opposed to when you are prepping. I’d hoped and secretly dreamed for this day whilst I prepared for it. It really did seem so simple back in the day, but I’ve had my fill of death and destruction. Right now I’d gladly take unclogging a plugged toilet in a strangers home, maybe even without rubber gloves than this waking nightmare I now found myself in.

“It worked!” I said maybe a bit too loud under the circumstances. I had been completely able to occupy my mind elsewhere as I climbed up onto the second step. More gun fire and definitely more human sounds, but the latter was more of the screaming variety. It sounded like a woman was being torn to shreds, but I’m testimony to the fact that once your body is being wrenched apart, even the biggest, beefiest males can scream much like a woman; especially if a particularly tender part is being dined on. Images of that poor bastard Cash, with April back in Colorado, rushed to the forefront; that thought alone spurred me onto the top step quicker than anything else had thus far.

I was beginning to hear footfalls, it sounded like wet salmon being slapped across someone’s face. They were getting close. I could only hope they weren’t necessarily hunting me down.

The remnants of the screen door hung by my feet. I eyed the door handle and then my hooked fingers. I didn’t have the hand strength to crush a gnat, so this was going to be interesting, and now I had the added bonus of them being covered in my own gore. I moved closer so that I would not have to stretch my arm, I didn’t think I could deal with another part of my anatomy leaking. My feet tangled up in the aluminum runner from the screen door; I was falling forward, but I could not get my arms up to brace myself. My head struck the door first with a solid thud, I was grateful it was not a hollow sound—my head not the door.

I was falling into the house; I hoped that there wasn’t anything too destructive on the floor, like protruding nails, broken glass or bacteria-encrusted old chicken. I think I’d take the glass over the chicken, not the nails, but definitely the glass. It was none of the above. I fell into a crinkling mass of tin foil. The noise of the foil was a small distraction as my head bounced off the hard tile entry way. My vision was blackening, and now my fucking head ached to go along with the rest of the shit storm I was going through.

Zombies were still coming and I wasn’t much safer than I had been a few moments earlier. I wriggled my body the rest of the way into the house out of sheer necessity. I managed to push the door closed with my left leg, and was able to see strips of tin foil hanging everywhere as I faded to black—pretty much just like the old movies or even the Bugs Bunny cartoons where you see the shrinking black circle go all the way down to a pinprick and wink out. Luckily there was no fat pig telling me ‘Th-th-that’s all folks!’