into overdrive in a fight for its very survival. It was this period of the contagion that was dubbed “Scarlet Fever”. Red and itchy splotches appeared all over the host’s body and high body temperatures of a hundred and four plus degrees Fahrenheit weren’t unusual. Once the parasite established its foot hold it rapidly spread along and throughout the host’s central nervous system and the most basic parts of the brain.
I know I’ve stated before that I was immune and that I never caught the Rat or the Scarlet but this bite pressed my body to its limit. I have gone through a shit load of injury and infection in the last couple of weeks. More than likely my immune system was already stressed and was slow to react to this new danger.
The disgusting wound festered and swelled. At first it seemed like it was a normal reaction to any wound. Then hole in my shoulder started to itch like a mother and small red freckles started popping up around it. I broke out in a fever and I gobbled massive amounts of drugs that I looted from the drugstore.
That damn thing tore a big chunk out of my shoulder. My whole left arm is weak now, any real weight brings massive pain.
For three days I lay in complete misery wondering if this massive injection of eggs and adult parasites inserted directly into my bloodstream would overwhelm and overcome my weakened system. To survive the airborne phase was one thing, to survive a direct bite was another. I personally hadn’t seen it happen to anyone before. What I mean is I hadn’t seen anybody escape from just a single bite. Usually when someone got themselves into a situation where they got bit, they got eaten.
I overcame it though.
I have a lingering headache now, it gets less painful day by day. It was a close thing.
My feet are doing better. The emergency surgery I performed upon myself seemed to do the job. They still hurt a great deal, and every bump and miss-step sends shocks of curse word laden pain through my body, but they seem to be healing well.
I plan on just holing up here for the next couple of months, waiting out the rainy season while I fully regain my strength.
16
It’s been a long hot summer and dry fall. It's now the beginning of December and I don't remember it raining since before I started this journal. That changed today. Today the heavens let loose with a heavy downpour. It started raining around noon and it’s still pouring now as night falls.
I've spent the last couple days cleaning and bringing some sense of order to the chaos of the bunker. It's a complete second house, bigger than the upstairs "real" house. The bunker is also filthier than the upstairs was. I don't even want to think about the refuse filled room that is the bunkers bathroom.
I'm sure it was a pain in the ass getting all this stuff down the hatch that seals off the bunker. I know getting the garbage and stuff like the foul mattress out of here sure was.
The false floor in the closet has a rung ladder set in the side of a concrete wall that leads down to a room just large enough to fully open the kind of a hatch that you would expect to find onboard a naval ship. Beneath the hatch there is a set of stairs that are almost straight up and down that go down into the bunker itself. I had to take breaks from just dragging up the grimy, blood and gunk covered clothes and accumulated trash he had down there. Even though there is a small washer and dryer set down there, amazingly, it looks like he just wore whatever clothes he had until they almost rotted off of him (kind of like what I’ve been doing, but he had no excuse to not wash). A lot of shit down there is just battered and broken, including every dish and glass. That damned soul of a carrier must have vented his rage on whatever was at hand when he had nobody to torment.
At the end of the last couple of days I had my own private bon fire getting rid of all that refuse. I threw junk that I knew wouldn't burn in there too, hoping to at least purify with fire any contaminate left on it.
Dug the burn pit well away from the house, not that zeds are attracted to fire, but because the extended drought had caused a lot of the vegetation to just dry up. I didn’t want to accidentally start a forest fire that would engulf my new home.
On one of my breaks from my custodial duties I decided to try and see if the “Red” had indeed stashed a vehicle somewhere around here. He did. He had an expensive but reliable Land Rover with four wheel drive stashed away. He dug a trench with one sloping side (to drive the Rover in and out), covered with plywood, which was itself covered with topsoil. It was overgrown with weeds and plants and I didn’t notice anything special about it until I was standing right on top of it. When I did notice something unusual it was because the ground seemed to give way slightly when I walked on it and it had a bit of a bounce to it. I jumped up and down a couple of times and I heard a distinct crack of splintering wood. I kicked the dirt around to see what was buried and there it was. After a year or so the plywood had started to rot. Getting the layer of sand and soil off of it enough to drag the plywood aside took longer than I expected.
Some dry-gas and a fresh charge to the battery were all I needed to get the Rover running. Took it out for a spin to the neighbors. The house where Kimmy used to live. Raided it for clothes mostly but also grabbed a good bed and some clean, fresh sheets. Nothing about the house had changed. The dead woman in the bedroom was still, thankfully, dead. One day when I go back I should bury her. There are other houses scattered here and there and I should go scope them out too. I’ve got plenty on my to do list as it is, so that will have to wait.
What was notable though while I was there was the distant sound of gunfire that I could hear coming from the direction of town. I swear, but I’m not sure that I heard someone yelling through a bullhorn. For a while the gunfire and yelling (I couldn’t make out what was being said) seemed to be coming closer to me. The ruckus appeared to taper into silence at the cross road where I almost became zombie chow. I don’t have any clue as to what’s happening back in town, but I am worried. I’m going to have to stay low for a couple of more days here, at least another two weeks, before I’ve healed up. Then I’ll go and check out the town.
It’s raining like hell now. I’m not going anywhere until it stops. Knowing central Florida though, it could be weeks or even a month before that happens.
No matter how much I clean down here it still stinks. I know I’ll eventually get used to it but damn. I’m going to have to go to town just to load up on air freshener and shit.
As I sit here writing this, there is a large monitor that flashes the feeds from the security camera. The light is fading rapidly and on one of the outside feeds I thought I saw movement.
A lone zed is wandering outside. Can barely make him out between the night and the rain. One isn’t a problem. Tomorrow I can evict his undead soul from the planet. Tonight I can’t do anything about it except stay quiet and catch some shut eye.
On a side note, I have been taking Zoloft for my depression, and while it does seem to help (a little), there is no getting past the fact that if I weren’t depressed by my fucked up life I would be insane. I’m also using sleeping pills to help me fall asleep. The sleeping pills don’t stop my nightmares but without them I can’t seem to shut my mind off enough to doze off.
17
When I awoke this morning, the first thing I did was to check the three outside monitors. It was still raining slightly, which didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was the number of walking, decaying corpses that seemed to be slowly moving to the west. I was expecting to have to go and silently crush an undead skull or two, even a handful of them with my sledge hammer. A small number of them are manageable, but there are zeds all over.
There's a dog pack following the swarm. The grainy black and white monitors don't have any sound, but I don't need to hear the spectacle taking place outside. In the early morning, before the swarm became too thick, I spotted a number of mangy, flea ridden curs weaving in and around the slow moving shamblers. I watched them take one down and quickly devour and rip it to pieces. At times they seemed to actually play with their food, rushing up on one and knocking them
down from behind. The dreadful, animated undead have a hard time struggling back up from any prone position and the dogs, being much faster, would grab one by the arm or leg and shake the limb around like it was some rotted chew toy. They tugged and shook until the limb came apart or was pulled from its socket completely. The pack seemed to actually be enjoying themselves, making a great game of it.
As the day progressed the swarm became thicker and thicker. Once the numbers of zombies became too great the dogs ran off and I haven't seen them since. There are so many of them out there now, all slowly moving towards the gulf coast. Each zed seems to be following the zed in front and around them. I have no idea why they act like this, blindly following each other in groups like this.
The clumsy bastards keep stumbling and falling into the lake. As the swarm of bastards became a densely packed herd, more and more of them come over the rise and roll down the steep slope to disappear into the now murky water.
There was something that was disturbing me about the zeds themselves though. I figured out what was different about them. Before the rain the corpses were starting to look more like the mummies you see in museums, all desiccated and leathery. Since it started raining