The Zombie Diary: What Came After

You ever notice in Zombie Movies how all the characters act like they've never seen a zombie movie before? They're all, "What's happening?" and "What are we going to do?" It's like there have been at least a hundred zombie movies made and these characters treat zombies like something totally unprecedented. And I'm not even going to talk about the books because I know people don't really read anymore, but damn! A lot of people have put some serious thought into Zombie apocalypse day and this should be reflected in these movies. Its part of the cultural zeitgeist you know? I mean when they make Vampire movies everyone generally knows what vampires are. They know about crosses, holy water, and the whole sunlight thing.

So when Z-Day happened, a lot of people were prepared. I'm not just talking about the NRA members and the survivalist types who had fall-out bunkers in their back yards. You can only shoot zombies until you run out of bullets and who has a hundred million bullets? The armed forces sure didn't, I can tell you that much. Nope, a whole lot of people knew exactly what to do, and those that didn't soon became part of the problem, if you know what I mean.

The thing is, you can't fight zombies. You think you can, but when a few hundred million corpses start doing the grim fandango in your front yard it doesn't matter how many you set on fire, blow apart, or run over with a steam roller, there are always more. Lots more. And it's not like all those thing kill zombies reliably anyway. You can blow up a twenty story building packed full of zombies and half of those grubby bastards will just crawl out of the rubble and still be spry enough to gnaw your leg off. Heck, they're not even all that susceptible to radiation, Black Friday proved that. Unless they're on ground zero, the nasty buggers are as bad as ever but now they're irradiated to boot. It didn't take too long for the nation's leaders, whoever they were by then, to decide that "controlled" nuclear detonations were a bad idea.

But I'm wandering off the point. What I was saying was that there is a clear alternative to fighting the zombies or running. Fighting doesn't work and its hard to outrun something that doesn't get tired or need to sleep. So what do you do?

You hide.

That's it. You bunker down somewhere safe and wait for the zombies to run off chasing all the folks who didn't have the brains to stay put. In a few weeks the zombies are gone except for a few stragglers that you can shoot without the gunshots drawing a few thousand undead cannibals down on your head. Food can be a problem, since everyone started hoarding when the truth finally broke out about what the White Plague was really doing to people, but for every empty grocery store there a dozen cars stuck in the deadjams on the freeways filled with supplies.

That's what me and my Family did. Not my real family, of course, they all died back when the White Plague was making zombies instead of the zombies making zombies. My new Family. I'd give you their names, but they kind of come and go. Some leave, some get turned, some get stupid, and some just die of living in this big, bad world without any doctors around. Though we have a lot of fatalities our numbers never really drop below two dozen or so. We're always finding survivors wandering around the ruins of the city. Some are stragglers who wandered into town looking for food; others are shut-ins like I used to be who just ran out of stored food in their attics, basements, or whatever.

We lived on stored food for awhile, but everyone knew that wasn't going to work out for very long. Even canned food goes bad after enough time has passed so the Family started looking into farming. It was easier than you might think, there were plenty of nurseries around with lots of seed and even some food crops growing wild in their planters. Luckily, along with all the computer programmers, hair stylists, and car salesman in the Family we actually had a couple of farmers, and it didn't take too long for us all to learn the tricks of the trade. Well, it took our first winter to really get us into farming. They are always people who think things are going to get better, you know? That the cavalry will arrive soon with trucks full of Big Macs and Starbucks Coffee. But after that first winter, we all became farming maniacs.

We had fields full of crops all over the city, because after that first Winter we decided it was a lot better to have too much than to have too little. Did you now zombies make great scarecrows? You just chain them up in a bare patch in the middle of your field and no crow will come anywhere close. And what we didn't actually farm, we allowed to grow wild with whatever ever crops we could get to take hold. Lots of berry bushes, for example.

There was a guy named Marvin who went totally Johnny Appleseed. He wandered all over the city, planting his apple seeds wherever he could find a patch of fertile ground. There's a regular apple orchard in the open ground around the old Capitol building thanks to him. He vanished one spring, as people tend to do these when they go wandering off by themselves. But I've met a straggler or two since who claim to have seen apple trees growing in some mighty odd places out in the wild, traffic medians and rest stops for example, so I like to think he's still out there somewhere, planting his trees for whoever comes after.

Not that there will be an after.

Which is why I'm writing this all down.

We had several good years there for awhile, you know. We still lived in a mostly burned out city where packs of zombies would occasionally pop out of the underbrush, not to mention the sorts of people who prefer raiding to farming. There was a lot of military ordinance just lying around you know, and a season wouldn't pass without a pack of Mad Max types cruising into our little corner of creation in their jeeps, Humvees, and once even a tank. They'd have machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers all that sort of stuff, But that was all right. We had a few dozen sniper rifles, and an entire city full of hidey holes to snipe from. As long as we saw them coming, we never had too much trouble. We had gotten very good at hiding, after all.

But I'm wandering again. What I was talking about is the new problem, which is really the old problem, but we hadn't been expecting it to crop up again. I guess we thought all those zombies would go off to wherever they chased down the last fleeing people and just stay there, either camped around a fortress somewhere or just sitting in a field. Heck, we assumed after awhile they'd either starve to death or just fall apart. We should have known better, after all, our scarecrows didn't fall apart. They didn't starve either, though they sure wanted to eat. If you didn't feed them they'd fall into a sort of a coma after awhile, though they'd always wake up and start moving if anyone came near. I guess we were all still thinking disease, of White Plagues and such. We were thinking the zombies were mortal, hideous, shuddering monstrosities, yes, but still alive in some very basic way.

And maybe they are, but not in any way any of the Family understood.

It was about three years after the White Plague outbreak that they started to come back. At first, we weren't even sure what they were. I mean sure, they must've been zombies, they still shambled around and pursued any living thing they caught scent of. But they had changed. All of their flesh seemed to have rotted off and they were covered in the black-fungus stuff, like moss on a rock. Their behavior had changed some too. They liked water now, not drinking it, but instead every now and then they would plunge into a river or a rain-filled swimming pool and just lie there for hours. They'd come roaring out if you went anywhere near them, but if you left them alone they'd just lie there. We watched one lie in a patch of swamp for over a week before he got up and shambled off.

But the worst thing was their brains.

I don't mean they got smarter or anything, if anything they were dumber, if that's even possible. Or maybe their eyesight had just gotten worse; I never understood how they saw anything in the first place. What I mean by brains is that they didn't die if you shot them in the head. They just kept coming. Hell, if you cut their head off, they kept coming. If you chopped them up like kindling, the pieces kept twitching and the hands kept crawling. They only thing that really took care of them was fire, and they were so spongy now that it took a very hot fire to dry them out and burn them up.

And finally you couldn't touch them, not without heavy gloves, anyway. It was the fungus they were covered with. Not that anyone wanted to touch them of course, not even to drag their bodies to a mass grave. But any contact between that fungus and human flesh and that was it for you. It'd start with a rash, than an itch so bad you wanted to tear the flesh off your body to make it stop, and then the fungus begins to grow in your flesh. You can cut it off, burn it, and even chop off a limb. But it doesn't matter. Once the stuff is in you, it's in you for good. The fungus grows on you, slowly spreading to cover you entire body, and all the while it's eating you, feeding on you to grow, replacing your flesh with itself. It doesn't hurt, in fact it feels kind of nice,

And then one day you're not you anymore, you're one of them and you crawl up from your bed and try to kill, eat, and infect every normal human being you can get a hold of. And if they don't burn you when they finally cut you into pieces small enough that you can't threaten anyone, you germinate, like a potato left to long on the shelf. If you can't feed the fungus, the fungus feeds itself. Devouring its host completely and growing these thistle-like plants that are picked up by the passing breeze and floated off to the far yonder, looking for some living flesh to infect.

That's what really got us you know. We didn't understand about the thistles. We discovered the whole '˜fungus-zombie-touch-causes-infection" thing after a few hard learning curves. We lost a few Family members that way. But we didn't get all of the pieces, you see. When we were doing clean up after the latest, "Black Zombie" incursion we must've missed some pieces and they germinated. Not that we knew about the germinating thing then, we just burnt all the fungus-zombie bits on general principle. A few days after all this happened, there was a breeze, and most of us were out in the north field when suddenly a cloud of these black thistles were blowing all around us in the wind. Didn't know where the came from or what they were, so we ignored them. It was only when the itching started a few hours later that we began to suspect something was wrong.

Not everybody got dusted, but it got most of us. Once the fungus started appearing on the infected, it really didn't take a doctor to figure out what was going on. We tried a lot of stuff, like I mentioned before, but nothing worked. One poor guy was so terrified of what was happening to him that he had us cut off both his legs to help stop the spread of the fungus. It worked, he didn't die of the fungus. And they say massive blood loss isn't a bad way to go so I guess things worked out for him in the long run.

There's just me left now. I got the survivors into on of the Humvee's we keep ready in case of emergency and told them to head north. Not sure if that will help them, but I figure colder weather might slow the growth cycle of the fungus, or maybe even kill it out right.

It really doesn't matter to me anymore.

I'm laying here in one of our old sniper hidey holes and I fire off a shot every now and then so the flocks will concentrate on me. They're all around the base of the tower now, piled a few layers deep as they keep trying to get up at me. The flocks really started pouring in a few days ago and now the city is crawling with them. Most of them seem to be converging on my position, they can't see very well, but their ears are still working. I guess they think, if you can call what they do thinking, that gunshots mean fresh meat.

Not that there's much meat left on me. I scrape my fingers clean of the fungus every now and then so I can keep firing the gun and writing this down, but other than that, the fungus has pretty much got me. If what happened to the others is any sign, I've just got a few more hours before I join the biggest club in the world.

I guess if I had to choose between getting infected by a zombie bite or this, I would have chosen this. It takes a lot longer to work the change and if you don't mind the sight of your flesh dissolving into black fungus it actually feels kind of good. Like a hot bath on a cold day. And its been a long time since I felt anything like that, I can tell you.

Well anyway, I'm about done here. I'm just going to finish this up, pop it in the fireproof lockbox I dragged up here, and then I'll chunk it out over the crowd. Then I'll light the candle. All of the stored fuel we had that couldn't send with the survivors is currently tied to this tower with rope, bungee cord, and duct tape. When the time is right, I'll go pop the canisters open, douse the crowd below with a few hundred pounds of gasoline and then I'll light it all up. Maybe there aren't really that many of them. Maybe only a few will survive to become fungus factories. It's a stupid hope I realize, but you never know. So maybe the hundreds I kill here will help the survivors somehow.

It's a nice thought.

Its suddenly occurs to me that the fungus in me might somehow transfer itself to these pages, so I'm not going to bother with the lockbox plan. I'll just stuff them in my shirt for now and they can go crispy with me later. I don't really want to burn them at the moment, to many fumes around from the stored fuel. But when I burn they'll burn too. That's kind of a shame, a guy likes to believe his story will get told, you know?

And there we go!

Lit! Them! UP! Look at '˜em burn! Air is hot, hot hot! I can hear them hooting that cry they make when they're on fire, but so much louder than I've ever heard it before! These papers are crisping in my hands. The tower is shaking! God, I think it's melting down there! So many! Everywhere! The howling must be attracting the others. Thousands of them!! Haven't seen so many at once since the old days. I --

Tower fell over. Threw me far. Everything hurts, but it feels kind of nice. So many of them, burnt. Smells terrible. A few left. They leave me alone. Must smell like them now, not interested in me. Can't move very well. Lost my rifle. Pinned under tower strut. Can't think straight.
I'm so hungry --