Part of me wanted so much for her to be ok. The crazy thought that she had beaten the sickness and I was guilty of burying her alive was going through my head. I knew for a fact that she was dead when I buried her. The fact that she was buried and covered with three feet of sandy soil for almost two days was a logic that I had to conform to. Even if I had buried her alive there is no way she would have survived without air for that long. As unbelievable as it sounds she had to be some sort of "zombie". The word "zombie" is a ridiculous word. I have a hard time just thinking that word but there is no other word for what my little sister had become.
As soon as I opened the backdoor, my dead sister turned towards me when she heard the door opening. I stood aghast as Lucy's body stutteringly took its first few steps towards me. Her gait was like the unsure steps of a child who had just learned to walk. Her eyes were blackened and slightly glossed over, vacant of any intelligence. Dirt from the grave clogged her nostrils and as she stumbled as fast as she could towards me she opened her jaws as if getting ready to bite me.
I shot her in the chest and the impact knocked her to the ground, dirt flying from her clothes. I still couldn't get it into my head what was happening, it was like I was dreaming this. Then my little sister got back up. There was no blood flowing as it should from the hole in her chest, just a thick black liquid dribbling out of the wound. She got back up and I could almost physically feel her hunger as she determinedly came at me again. No words came from her, no scream of pain or questioning of my putting a bullet into her. I had almost been transfixed by the horrible sight of my sister's undead corpse shambling towards me until it got almost within arm's reach. My M1 was pointing straight at her head and I had already shot her once but she either ignored or didn't recognize the threat the rifle posed. So I shot her again. In the head. Nasty black ichor and pieces of her rotted brains and skull flew out in a spray behind her, whipping her head back. She fell backwards and this time she didn't get back up.
I actually prodded her with my rifle making sure she was dead again before I re-buried her.
The men at the checkpoint are acting chaotic, often fighting amongst themselves. Whatever pills they've been taking only slowed down the Scarlet instead of stopping it. My pilfered binoculars, taken from Mrs. Hoffner's house, are low quality but good enough to make out that they only have a day, maybe two at the most, of life left in them. About once an hour or so it seems they let off rounds, shooting at what has to be other undead, parasite controlled bodies.
The reports from the remaining news channels both confirm that the U.S. is now at war with North Korea, China and at least three different nations in the Middle East.
We are at war with North Korea because they launched a massive attack on South Korea. They opened up their war with nuclear weapons, obliterating Pusan and Seoul. They also sent a nuke at Japan, aiming for the Tokyo area and Yokosuka with its huge naval base. The weapon didn't reach its target but still exploded over mainland Japan. The communist North Korean's flooded over the DMZ and are murdering everyone, military and civilian, alike.
China took the opportunity to reclaim Taiwan in a massive naval and amphibious attack. We have diplomatic and political obligations to Taiwan, our navy is fighting back trying to take control of the seas.
Israel was attacked by Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Iran started the war by launching a nuclear tipped missile at Jerusalem, according to the missile's flight path. The nuclear missile was shot down and actually exploded over Jordan. There isn't a whole lot we can do besides send our carriers and their accompanying fleets to engage the enemies.
Besides World War Three raging, everybody dropping dead from the Scarlet after being driven homicidal, food shortages and the dead rising with an uncontrollable hunger for human flesh, I've been given a particularly heavy flow this month.
I can't say how often I'll write in this journal. It may be daily or weekly. I'll write whenever I need to, whenever I feel I need to tell any future survivors what's happening.
Nobody has any idea how long the dead will walk the earth. I can't see such an abomination like that continuing for long though. Hopefully it'll last for only a couple of days, maybe a week. Until then I'm going to hunker down and survive as well as I can.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Until Saturday I was glad the soldiers were manning the checkpoint down the street. Even though they were slowly losing their grips on their sanity, they had been doing an excellent job of eliminating the undead.
On Saturday afternoon the tank loaded up and drove off. This left seven men and their Armored Personnel Carrier on duty at the entrance to the subdivision.
In the beginning of the parasitic resurrection, the undead things rose up singly and their numbers were few. The first day the dead were scattered and easy to eliminate, once people learned to go for the head. Many of the newly risen dead came back inside their own houses where they died of the infection. While there must have been some that came back before that, they were rare. There appears to be a delay of around forty eight hours after normal death before the parasite can gain enough control over their host’s dead body to make it obey their will. I'm going to consider last Friday, the day my sister clawed her way out of her grave, to be day one.
On the second day, those that had come back to walk the earth with their unfathomable hunger, started finding their ways out of their houses or wherever they had died. They stumbled through open doors, or in most cases, clumsily crashing through the larger windows of their living rooms. The numbers of the zeds (I'm going to call them "zeds" or "zombies" now, there is no other word I can use to describe them) increased dramatically, to what I guess is about ten percent of the population. Or what the population used to be, anyways. That was Saturday. I guess on Saturday the last of those affected by the Scarlet died.
On Sunday the numbers of the dead grew by billions.
That means sometime today, somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of seven billion people, or around five and a half billion zeds will walk the earth. If a full ten percent of the population is immune (and I know many of the immune were killed in the chaos before this) then there will be around seven hundred million survivors. A ratio of approximately eight to one. That doesn't seem so bad at first glance. But how many of the survivors are children that can't adequately defend or care for themselves? How many are still babies whose parents have turned into ravenous, cannibalistic, rotting corpses? How many are sick or elderly that are bed-ridden or can barely walk? I fear the real number of survivors that are capable of fighting back and surviving through even the next week is half that. That makes it more like fifteen or sixteen nightmares for every able bodied survivor. The numbers I am working with are rough estimates, there are no real statistics.
I'm not in my house any more. On Saturday afternoon the soldiers manning the checkpoint finally went berserk and started a rampage. They burned the neighborhood to the ground.
Remember how I mentioned the two remaining newscasters in a previous entry? Well, around four a.m. on Saturday morning the obviously infected newsman started going into odd, rambling speeches. He would vehemently make outrageous statements one second and the stop and apologize the next. He was losing his sanity on live TV. After one of those rounds, a long, extended rant, he got a strange look in his eyes and suddenly produced a chrome plated revolver. He stared into the barrel for a few moments and then, without a word to the viewers, shot himself. The feed is still being broadcast, his dead body sprawled back in his chair.
The second newscaster, the woman who appeared to be uninfected, got into an argument with the lone cameraman. The things the cameraman was saying to her were vile, disgusting things of a sexual nature. The woman started ordering the cameraman from the studio, to which the infected and now clearly insane man responded by rushing at the pretty but scared woman. The red faced man jumped over the news desk and grabbed her with both hands, one getting a fistful of her hair, the other going for her breasts. Th
ey only struggled for a moment when there came the roar of a gunshot, spraying the cameraman's brains and the back of his skull all over the studio. A piece of flesh from the dead man struck the camera lens and hangs there still. The unnerved woman got up and left the studio and soon after there was plainly heard more shots. I don't know if she escaped or not or what happened to her afterwards but the feed is still active, if a bit blurred from the gore on the camera. That happened on Saturday afternoon, just before the soldiers joined the ranks of the insane.
Saturday afternoon, before the Abrams tank left the checkpoint, a group of the soldiers started going into the nearby houses. There was no knocking, no announcing their intentions to anyone who may be still alive in the house, they just battered down the front door and forced their way in. There was always gunshots immediately afterwards, I guess from them finding the occupants either already risen from the dead or twitching and getting ready to. Maybe they had originally planned to start clearing the neighborhood house by house but that soon got way off track.
The soldiers had cleared four or five houses when they found a survivor. I was watching with my binoculars through barely parted