Читать книгу Terrifying Lies - Craig Nybo - Страница 5

The Bloody Journal of Lance King

1. 1 - May 3, Year 1

I just wiped the bloodstains from my guitar. Somehow a pair of those undead monsters got in through the service door on the back of the building. I didn’t hear them coming until it was too late to get a proper weapon. They pushed through my recording studio door and caught me with my pants down.

I went at them with my ax. I’m not talking about a rail splitting ax; I’m talking about my Ibanez acoustic. It isn’t even a great guitar. It has a laminate top rather than spruce. It has nickel strings that give it an annoying high-end buzz. But it’s the only guitar I have. I’m hoping to make a pilgrimage to a music store if I can make it through the wreckage and zombies. But that will have to wait until I can muster up more courage and bullets.

I’m happy to be alive I suppose. But I broke the head of my ax off in the fight. I’ll have to find some glue to fix it. I can’t live without music. I miss standing on stage in the limelight playing for real, living, breathing people. But there aren’t any people around anymore.

I’m not much of a journal keeper. But this incident in the studio has prompted me to put down some kind of record, both in word and in song, of my story. I suppose it might help someone who comes along later if this epidemic—or whatever it is—runs its course and kills us all.

For now, suffice it to say: greetings, my name is Lance King. I live in an abandoned school. I’m surrounded by zombies. I’m a musician with no audience. And I’m running out of bullets.

2 - May 10, Year 1

I can’t stop thinking about Suzanne White. A strong link connects childhood sweethearts. I’ve had many girlfriends since the 4th grade when I pushed her in the swings, all shy and blushing. She asked why I was treating her so nice. I know she’s had many boyfriends since too. I know because I can list them. There was Marshall Dunn in Jr. High who played on the basketball team and treated everybody like his welcome mat. There was Billy Iverson with his pencil neck and mathlete letter. There was Jack—although everyone called him Jewell. There was Pierce who I swear practiced moving his eyebrows in the mirror every morning. The list goes on.

Last time I saw Suzanne, she was well on her way to turning undead. There was dirt in her usually beautiful hair. Her smell went beyond body odor. I was lucky to get away alive. I wonder where she is now. I wonder if the mercenaries got her or if she’s still just wandering around out there, all lonely and terrifying. I wonder if, in some strange way, she’s still beautiful.

3 - May 13, Year 1

I went to junior high school here at Warden. I’ve even taken to using my old locker from the 9th grade to store what weapons I have. It’s cold most of the time; but the season is on the change. I’m sure I’ll be roasting within a few weeks.

Living in an abandoned school feels a bit murky. There are a lot of rooms, some of which I have locked undead insurgents into and left them to their own devices. They pound on the doors. They moan. Sometimes they even gut out a semblance of words, although I don’t understand their rasps and snatches at language. They do everything in those rooms but die.

Yesterday I decided to go out to the grounds to shoot a few hoops. It seemed quiet and zombies tend to lurch along slowly so I wasn’t worried about an attack. The basketball courts are surrounded by a 12-foot chain-link fence so there’s plenty of time to run if visitors decide to drop in.

As I shot hoops, I spotted Mr. Barry standing in a copse of sycamores off the east side of the basketball court. He just stood there looking at me. I almost thought I caught hint of forlornness in his expression.

Mr. Barry taught gym class back when I was at Warden. I think he was still here when the outbreak happened. Back in the 8th grade, Mr. Barry broke up a fight between me and Lem Shipley out at the bike racks. Lem broke my nose and I was glad Mr. Barry came along. Both I and Mr. Barry knew Lem was a bad seed so it didn’t surprise me when he gave me a pass on our brawl and saw to it that Lem was suspended.

As I looked across the grounds at Mr. Barry, I felt like I should jog over and say hi, but it was clear that he’d turned. He had the telltale hollowness in the cheeks and half of his shirt lay torn down from his pale body.

Seeing him out there just standing and staring—maybe salivating a little bit at the possibility of sinking his teeth into my flesh—caused me to lose my game. I went back into the school a bit depressed. Maybe it will be a better day tomorrow.

4 - May 16th, Year 1

So many flies. I had to force my way into a janitorial supply closet upstairs in the school with a crowbar to find a can of spray insecticide. I’ve been spraying it around the doorjambs. I think it has helped. I can’t escape the sense that the putrid insects are standing by waiting for me to die so they can do the ugly thing that flies do on my carrion. I have news for them. I’m going to survive. I have plenty of canned food. I have my glued together guitar. I have books. I have everything I need to keep it together.

The only problem is the quiet. I try to get outside in the yard to workout and stay in shape. But it’s all me. There are no trucks droning by, no fans, no voices chatting through the halls, no sirens, not even the distant sound of a jackhammer wielding road crew. It’s eerie—I hate to use that word, but it’s the only one that fits. The quiet gets to me. Eventually, to break the monotony, I think I might have to make a pilgrimage outside the school. I’ve been watching the zombies shuffle around. They move slow. I think I could sidestep them. But I don’t have the guts to leave my compound.

For now, it’s the music that keeps me together. I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep biding my time.

5 - May 18th, Year 1

Call me crazy, but I’m thinking about leaving the school, not on a permanent basis by any means, but I have a hankering for fresh air and fruit pies. Funny, the little things I crave.

One of the first items of business upon setting myself up in this big cold school was getting food. I checked through the refrigerators and pantries in the lunch room and found enough staples to keep me into the bad tasting flour paste and beans I’ve been eating for the past month.

I beat the crap out of a vending machine on the second floor until I got inside. I’ve pretty much demolished my stash of chips and candy bars. The worst part of it is, I’m out of fruit pies. Man, I love those. I crave them. If for no other reason, I think I might leave the compound just to find a bag of them to bring back with me.

If I do leave, I need to find weapons. I’m sure I can dig up an aluminum baseball bad. But what I really need is a gun. I’m going to start prying lockers open; maybe some wayward student kept a firearm in his book bag. Who knows, it’s a sick world. I don’t really have the stomach for killing, even one of those zombies out there, but I’ll kill if I have to; I have it in me.

6 - May 23rd, Year 1

I spent the past three days moving from locker to locker, prying them open one by one. As I worked, I made a pile of anything I found useful, sanitary supplies, deodorant, although I don’t know who I’m trying to impress.

I found books, mainly the classics on the literary booklists. There were a few pop novels, some Stephen King, some Dean Koontz. Funny how, while fighting to survive in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, I’m drawn to stories about monsters. Chock it up to maintaining my sanity, or perhaps losing it.

I found several MP3 players with varying levels of charge on them. One of them, an off-brand unit I found in a kid’s locker plastered with Metallica posters, has a play-list that I can accept: Pink Floyd, The Ramones, Rush. Any MP3 players I found with flowers on them or jacketed in pink covers have been stored in a dark corner of the school in case of an emergency. I’m not much of a Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber fan.

In one locker I found what I was looking for. Tucked into the pocket of a student body officer’s sweater was a Glock .9mm. That wasn’t all, I also found three boxes of Girl Scout Samoa cookies and 2 cartons of bullets. The sweater hanging from the hook has Bill Spillman embroidered on its chest. Some girl pressed her lips against the inside of the locker door and left her signature in red lipstick. Seems Mr. Spillman had everything including the perfect girlfriend and plenty of ammunition. Thanks, Bill, my next zombie kill is dedicated to you.

7 - May 26th, Year 1

I’m not a killer. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, some of which I regret; but I’m not a killer.

I remember going hunting with my cousin back when I was about 13 years old. His uncles sat around the fire at night, swearing, farting, telling stories. I don’t think the hunting trip was much about hunting. My cousin and I spent the better part of the trip riding motorcycles around the trails. One day we took .22s with us.

As we rode, we saw lots of squirrels. At one point we stopped for a little sport shooting. I aimed at a squirrel. I remember swallowing hard, not wanting to shoot. But I couldn’t ignore my cousin’s peer pressure. I pulled the trigger and dropped the little creature out of a tree. It fell on its head and broke its neck. It lay on the ground, twitching and making horrible noises. Out of sympathy, I put ten more rounds into it before it finally stopped writhing. I told myself that day that I would never shoot another living thing.

What I shot just outside the school grounds today wasn’t a living thing. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

I decided to leave the school. I didn’t make it a quarter of a mile before I met Mr. Barry, my old gym teacher. He still wore that same gray sweat suit I remember, only it was sauced with grime and gore. He came at me, slow, lurching, reaching. I raised my Glock and told him to stop, but he didn’t listen. He just kept coming, his mouth open, his eyes sunken and distant.

I had to shoot him like the squirrel. I missed with my first 2 shots—I felt panicked. But I got my head around what I was doing, took the time to aim carefully, and put a bullet in his forehead. He dropped like a bag of cannonballs. Then he writhed there, arching and gutting out groans and hisses. I shot him three more times. Then I threw up.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it, killing them I mean. Mr. Barry wasn’t a living thing, but he was a moving thing. I’m going to have to find the guts somehow to do what I know I am eventually going to have to do.

8 – June 24, Year 1

I think the zombies are getting smarter. The school is huge, quiet, damp, and gloomy. I’ve found a cool corner of the cafeteria where I’ve taken to sitting and doing nothing but staring at the opposite wall, sometimes for better than an hour. The world is shot to oblivion out there. I don’t know if there is anyone left alive. I’ve got to get out of here before they come in after me.

I found a motorcycle in the parking lot. I don’t know how much gas is in the tank. Cars jam the streets, stacked up along the lanes like a train of coffins. At least on a bike, I think I can weave around them and find a way through.

I’m going to leave the school tomorrow. Next time I check in, it should be from outside. Wish me luck.

9 – June 27, Year 1

I’ve never experienced fear so potent as when I mounted my motorcycle and ground away from Warden. I felt naked and vulnerable. As I hit the streets, not being an experienced cyclist, constantly maneuvering around stopped traffic has been a challenge. But I’m getting used to it.

The streets are jammed up with cars and trucks. Its like people just turned off their vehicles, got out, and walked away. I’ve seen a few morbid sites, human remains behind the wheel, eyes gouged out, throats bitten into, parts of bodies torn away for easy protein. I’m glad I wasn’t commuting home from work when the outbreak hit.

It still astounds me how quickly it all happened. The news, always fishing for new disasters to put on the waves, jumped all over the outbreak. They called it a disease. But I’m not so sure it’s as simple as that. I can’t help but feel a sense of justice in the whole affair. I don’t know what we humans could possibly have done to reap such retaliation. But I sense that a higher, or lower, power has a hand in our circumstances. I watched a news man who looked like a retired Chip and Dale dancer report a strange new outbreak, then flipped the channel to watch an episode of Man vs. Food. I didn’t believe any of it. I don’t think anyone did initially.

But within 24 hours people around me changed. They started shooting at each other, chewing on each other, setting each other’s homes and businesses on fire. It seems impossible that such a condition can spread so rapidly. But here I am, weaving through traffic like a fly, cutting my way towards town for supplies. I suspect the zombies will get me eventually, but I’m good at running. I learned that by being the scrawniest kid in school—braces, headgear, and glasses didn’t help much either in my standing against the house bullies. I’m more likely to turn tail and run than to fight it out. That’s probably why I’m alive.

I’ve encountered a few of them along the way. They turn and stagger toward me when they sense me, but I’m too fast, especially on my bike. I’m getting close to town. I suspect I’ll be there within a couple of hours. With all the looting that went on after the outbreak, I’m hoping I can glean enough to keep me alive at least for a little while longer.

10 - July 4, Year 1

It’s Independence day, for the undead that is. There are no fireworks nor parades for the living. The streets crawl with monsters, lurching all white eyed and gray skinned, stains of gore washed down their faces and clothing. I’ve had to camp in the outskirts for the past few nights. Sleep is a commodity that seems out of reach. I’ve stuck to wide-open areas, fields, forests.

One would think that buildings might grant the best protection; that assessment is wrong. I broke into an abandoned house only to find its rooms thronged with undead. They tend to stay out of the sun like most animals, sticking to shade and well-ventilated buildings. Walking into an uncleared house most likely means walking into a fight.

Last night I heard them close by. I sleep lightly these days. They seem to have acute senses of smell. No matter what precautions I take before bedding down—setting camp in seclusion, foregoing a campfire—they seem to home in on me.

They have this kind of guttural rasp that chills me when I hear it. That rasp acted as my alarm clock this morning at about 2 am. I picked up my Glock, which I keep under a rumpled up jacket I use for a pillow, and rolled up onto my haunches. I must have blinked 20 times before the sleep left my eyes. I spotted four of the gangly things in the shadows. I was lucky; they tend to be communal, walking in packs of 8 to 12. They don’t display much in the way of stealth. It’s their hunger that drives them. They simply smell fresh meat and lean in that direction until their feet start moving.

I only have a pistol and I’m no marksman so I waited until I could just about make out their expressions, cold, blank, lifeless. It’s one thing to drop one from a hundred yards when you can’t see into its eyes. It’s another to fire at them when you can recognize their features as human. I dropped the four of them with 10 bullets, cursing my waste of slugs. I guess I’ll have to add a gun shop to my list of stops. I’d like a hunting rifle and maybe a few security cameras and motion sensors to take back to Warden.

My goal tomorrow is to hit the grocery store and supply up. I’ll try to find a phonebook and look up the location of the closest place that sells guns, maybe an outdoor supplier or a pawnshop. I’ll check in again if I’m still alive.

11 – July 5, Year 1

When I was a kid, we only had one theater in our town. The theater is still around. When everything folded up, they were still playing second and third release films for two-bucks a head. Back in the day, they used to offer a charity night. Any kid who showed up with canned or dry goods got in for only twenty-five cents. I and my little brother, Rule, regularly went to charity night at the movies. We’d raid my mom’s pantry and take the scrapings. I remember turning in more than one can of tomato paste or leftover Chinese noodles to get by butt into a cheap seat. I imagine the food bank gets a lot of the leftover garbage that people don’t want to eat.

When I finally reached the grocery store today, most everything had been looted. I was hoping for Hostess fruit pies at best and Shredded Wheat at worst. But all I could find were a few cans of stewed tomatoes and a case of kippered snacks. It was almost like karma had swung back around on me. You get what you give, as they say. But, all things considered, I have never smelled anything so wonderful as that fishy scent wafting from the can as I turned the key on those Kippered snacks. Crackers and Tabasco Sauce (why all the Tabasco Sauce had been looted from aisle four, I will never know) would have made my little meal into a delicacy, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I discovered in the grocery store that the undead not only feed on human flesh, but they had helped themselves to the meat department. Some of them had even expired on the glut, perhaps not willing to leave such a supply of food. As I explored the store, aisle to aisle, I heard them coming into the building. They are always just a couple of steps behind me. If I stop for very long, and I’m talking an hour, maybe two, they peel out of the background, hungry for a bite.

I haven’t been able to sleep much at all since leaving Warden Jr. High. I have managed to snatch catnaps here and there, but my nerves don’t allow me to sink into any kind of restful slumber.

I can’t go on the way I am going. I need sleep or I am going to collapse. And if I collapse, they will get me.

I have an idea. I mentioned the undead’s theoretical sense of smell. I am going to test this theory. I think this grocery store is the perfect place to do it. It’s getting close to evening and I am wiped out. I am going to find the smelliest dumpster in the place and bury myself in the stench of the garbage and go to sleep. In theory, if I close the lid and keep my handgun close by, I have a good chance of surviving the night. I don’t believe the undead have the faculties to open a dumpster lid. And if they do, the clatter will undoubtedly wake me. At that point, I’ll just open fire.

12 – July 6, Year 1

Back in the 9th grade, I took English from Mr. Rumor. He attempted to fill our young, sponge-like minds with plenty of anti-religious dogma with a good helping of atheism on top. He taught his agenda under the guise of separation of religion from state. I grew up in a staunch, Christian home. My parents took me to church every week and regularly informed me that with all of the Bible reading, Sunday school lessons, and sermons—taught by Pastor Kentwilly, our ever-so-enthusiastic spiritual leader—they were vesting me with the armor of the Lord against a terrible world full of temptation and debauchery.

As a young adult, I strayed, thinking my parents and Pastor Kentwilly were full of paper-thin ideals and fanaticism that was more harmful than anything. But after three years of partying at college and ultimately waking up in the basement of an abandoned building with no recollection of what had happened the night before, I began to see the light. I was reminded of Sid Vicious, the bass player for the Sex Pistols who used to cut himself and bleed on stage during performances, his arm marked with tracks and fresh bandages where he had injected heroine. One day, Sid woke up in the bathroom of his hotel room with his girlfriend dead, stabbed to death to be exact. Sid had no recollection of what had happened. Ultimately, unable to conquer his drug habit, Sid died of a heroin overdose, supplied by his own mother.

I thought about Sid when I woke up in that abandoned basement back in my college days. I also thought about my parents and Pastor Kentwilly. It was at that moment that I decided Mr. Rumor and Sid Vicious could suck it. I was God’s boy. I have been God’s boy ever since.

Something Mr. Rumor taught me back in the 9th grade came to mind as I woke up this morning. As part of his atheistic agenda, he had assigned us Dante’s Inferno as a reading assignment. His hope was to reveal the absurdity Dante’s interpretation of hell. As I lie here in a dumpster behind the grocery store, my motorcycle parked well away, Canto 11 from Inferno comes to mind.

In this section of Dante’s work, he and Virgil walk through the City of Dis to another pope’s tomb. Something awful accosts Dante, a scent that he compares to opening the bathroom door at his work and smelling the abominations of the people who occupied the space before him. He is describing one of the lower rings of hell.

As I lay in waste—a crate of broken eggs, meat crawling with flies, rotten lettuce and fetid grease—I feel like I am visiting Dante’s lower ring of hell. It’s morning. Here I am lying in a dumpster that should have been emptied a month ago. But last night my theory held true. In the midst of the stench, I have remained unmolested by the undead. It’s a funny thing. When I first dove into the dumpster last night, I though there would be no way to sleep in the midst of all that garbage. But one rises to the bar in desperate times. After only a few minutes, I became used to the stench. And, after jockeying around amongst the trash, I found comfort and warmth.

Within an hour, I drifted off. And not into the light, useless catnap snatches of sleep to which I have become accustomed. I have slept for over nine hours. I feel great.

I don’t know if it’s because the stench of the dumpster has acted as a repellent to the undead or if the foulness of the garbage has merely hidden my human scent, but I remain unharmed. I haven’t so much as heard one of them shuffle by. I’m hoping that the now deeply seated fragrance will cloy. Maybe I can pass among them without drawing their attention, at least by their senses of smell. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I’m not going out on any dates any time soon. For all I know, I’m the last living human on the face of the planet. So I plan to go out into the world smelling like rotting cabbage and fish guts. Hello world.

I’m headed for the guitar store today. I’ve never owned an ax any nicer than my mid-level Ibanez, which I left back at Warden. It would be nice to move up to a high-end Martin or a Paul Reed Smith. So its out of the dumpster with me and back onto my ride. I’m hoping I’ll be rocking out by dinnertime tonight. If only I had a few friends to jam with. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to be content as a solo act.

Late Afternoon

I have to admit, I felt a little guilty as I threw a brick through the window at Wanesgard Music. All I have seen as I have ridden my motorcycle down the streets, sidewalks, alleys, and across vacant lots, is broken windows, smashed windshields, shattered department store entrance ways, shards of glass all over the place, winking the sun back into my eyes as I ride. I have been careful to roll around the glass in order to avoid punctured tires. But as I stood there in front of the music store with a red brick cocked back, ready to let fly, I took pause for a moment. Breaking and entering even in these circumstances goes against the nature of what I am.

In a way, this gives me hope. Maybe there is a part of us, even after we have every excuse to debase ourselves to our most animalistic instincts, to be civil.

I threw the brick.

The window shattered.

I kicked away a few shards of the stuff and stepped inside. The familiar smell of every guitar store—polished and oiled wood, upholstery and leather, a hint of cigarette butt leftovers—hit me. I stood for a moment, eyes closed, just taking it in. Along my ride I enter and leave patches of spoiled earth. In my mind, I call them dead zones. In dead zones, I smell bloated flesh, crawling with maggots. There’s nothing to do in dead zones but close off my nose, lean into my handlebars, and push through.

Wanesgard Music felt like the opposite of a dead zone. The place welcomed me with its scent alone. It was almost like I forgot about the world’s fall. In the middle of so much war and death, Wanesgard Music felt like a neutral zone.

I took in racks upon racks of musical instruments, amplifier stacks, music stands, display cases of method and theory books, window-cases of microphones, and autographed posters of rock stars, my eyes teared up. The place brought on such a swell of nostalgia, such a longing for the way things used to be, that my emotions threatened to overcome me.

I found a chrome bar stool with the Fender logo printed on the seat and sat down. For a moment I didn’t move. I just looked around, my hands shaking at the expanse of the place. It felt as though the building itself welcomed me. I almost heard it whisper into my ear, Lance, you belong here. Stay as long as you like. Take what you see. You are welcome to it all.

I wandered to a rack of electric guitars. The bottom shelf held the cheap, hot sellers, instruments for newbies. I used to teach private lessons before the world rolled up. Inevitably, parents asked what kind of guitar they should buy their young, aspiring rockers. I always advised that new players didn’t have the experience to know a good guitar from a bad one. I advised parents to let their kids buy a guitar based on shape, color, and personality. Buying a guitar, when you are a new player, is more about seeing how it looks on you in a mirror than testing it for tone and action.

The newbie guitars hung on the bottom row, painted in outlandish colors, cut like axes, devils, and flying V’s, every extreme shape, size, and demeanor. I ignored them and looked up at the top shelf stuff. I traced along the row of American strats, Gibson Les Pauls, and SGs, all great guitars. My eyes stopped on a natural spruce Gibson Custom Super 400 Hollowbody Electric. Saliva flowed. In another world, I could never afford such a guitar. The Super 400 Thinline came in at no less than thirteen-thousand dollars. But the instrument backed up every penny with tone and precision.

I found a little two-step ladder and climbed up to where I could reach the instrument. I hooked it from the clip and brought it down. I sat on another bar stool, this one appropriately tagged with the Gibson logo, and strummed. I wished almost beyond reason that there were electricity to power one of the tube amps sitting right beside me, but there was no hope of ever hearing the deep tone of the dual ’57 classic humbucker pickups. But the tone of the spruce open body still caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand.

When it comes to guitars, some require anger and sweat to play. It’s almost like these types of instruments exude an attitude; I dare you to play me, you chump. Just try to get a good tone out of me. As a guitarist, I always feel like I have to put in double the effort to get even a reasonable sound from such mean-spirited instruments.

But the Gibson Super 400 Thinline greeted me like an old friend. As I rested my fingers on the maple neck, the thing seemed to sigh at my touch. I strummed an A-minor 7th chord to test it for feel and everything in my body relaxed. I played, at first a few simple blues riffs to get to know the neck. Gradually, I changed over to more complicated and enjoyable changes. It felt as though I and the guitar were on a team. And we were focused on shutting out all of the stench and gore of the fallen world with our music.

I sank into a fugue of playing. Only musicians understand this, how one can start simply then explore, using chords, licks, and refrains as footsteps through a forest, a city, a mountain, a world of love, hate, and indifference. Before I knew it, I had played for an hour, sometimes singing along, sometimes just sitting on that bar stool watching my hands work the strings.

Being so ensconced in the musical world I had created, I became unaware of the danger around me. Something clattered near the entrance of the shop. I looked up to see a mob of undead coming at me, too many to count. The world of music I had created crumbled all around me in discord. I stood and pushed the Gibson over onto my back where it hung, neck down.

To my knowledge, the way I had come in was the only way out of Wanesgard Music and between me and the front door were nearly a score of undead, their skin pale, their fists bunching up and slackening as they eyed me. I scrambled back, knocking a pair of newbie guitars from the rack to clatter on the floor. I was faster than them. But they were pairing out into the store. I couldn’t tell if they were deliberately attempting to flank me or if they were merely finding their own paths through the display cases half-stacks, and music stands.

I drew the Glock .9mm from my waistband and fired. I hit the closest of them, a teenaged kid wearing a Batman t-shirt, in the chest after missing twice. The kid whipped around at the bullet’s impact, but then righted his course and kept coming. I kept firing. Finally, I dropped the kid in the Batman shirt with a headshot after emptying most of the magazine. I fired the rest into another of the walkers, a woman with sunken cheeks, flaking makeup, and a rat’s nest of graying hair. Out of four shots, I hit her once in the shoulder. The Glock dry-fired with a disparaging snap. I swore and tucked it into my waistband.

I backed away from them, scrambling for anything I could use. I settled on a B.C. Rich Warlock—an appropriately evil looking guitar sold to greenhorn players who were more concerned about looking goth than in obtaining any kind of clean tone. I wielded the B.C. Rich like an ax, body up, head down. I took on a batter’s stance. I’m no athlete, but I do remember the single baseball lesson I got from Coach Flint, my high school P.E. teacher. Cock your right elbow for maximum power. Lead with your left foot. Step into the swing.

The woman’s head crunched on impact. She swayed off kilter, took a few shuddering steps, and collapsed into a rack of pink heart-shaped acoustic guitars.

More undead came at me. I batted them side-to-side, swing after swing, backing up as they came. They moved in lumbering steps, but there were a lot of them. The strain of my work tired my arms. I continued to back away, swinging with every step, until I collided into a bank of bass guitars hanging from a set of wall hooks. One of them fell with a twang as the bass’s head broke in half. I gasped and looked down at the broken instrument. Relieved that it was just a Squier Jaguar, I went back into battle.

The undead had backed me into a corner. I eyed the room beyond them as I punished them with blow after blow. I spotted a hallway about fifty feet off. With the entrance clogged by more undead entering Wanesgard Music, the hallway was my only escape. If it led to a dead end, I was finished. I could only hope for a rear exit.

I smashed straight down into the head of an undead man wearing a Chap’s Lumber hat, leveling him to the floor, and began an oblong battle, traversing along the wall of guitars toward the rear hallway.

A rail of an undead man with barely fifty pounds of meat on his bones came at me hissing and swiping with a pair of claw-like hands. I ducked one of his blows but took the second swipe in the face. I felt lines of blood rise from a set of parallel scratch marks in my cheek. I opened my eye slowly, hoping I hadn’t lost it and realized with great relief that I could still see.

I jockeyed around a Marshal full-stack, placing the amps and cabinet between me and the skinny undead man. I put my shoulder to the stack and pushed until it toppled over. I heard the slender man hiss and thump under the weight of the cabinets. I snapped a look down at him. He lay crushed under the stack, wriggling and trapped.

I continued along the wall, slashing and stabbing with the B.C. Rich, pushing them away. I hooked one of them with the horn of the instrument’s body and flung him into an entanglement of amplifiers, chords and microphone stands.

After a reckless but successful battle, I made it to the hallway on the back wall of the guitar store. I sprinted along the short corridor past three offices and two restrooms to a double door, fixed with a push bar. I ignored the sign that said Alarm Will Sound and pushed the bar. A tinny speaker mounted on the door rasped out a high-pitched chirping cry. It must have run on batteries in case of a power outage (and what a power outage we were having). The alarm blasted my ears. But its effect had even more impact on the undead coming down the hall toward me.

The creatures stopped their advance and covered their ears with open palms, moaning and crying against the shrill rhythm of the exit door’s piercing alarm.

The door swung open into the rear parking lot of the place, dark and festooned with cars. I backed out onto a loading dock and let the door close behind me.

I had forgotten myself. I had let the music overtake me and hadn’t stayed alert. That was a mistake I wouldn’t make again.

As I turned to leave the loading dock, I glanced into a large, blue dumpster—a habit I had recently picked up. A handful of guitar shipping boxes and a few gig-bag guitar cases lay strewn inside. I touched the Gibson, still hanging from my shoulder. I leaned into the dumpster and picked up one of the gig-bags. As I left Wanesgard Music behind, I shoved my new prize into the case and re-slung it over my shoulder.

I found my motorcycle where I had left it in a handicap parking place in front of the music store. I kicked the engine to life and rode out. It took me nearly two hours to find a dumpster with enough slime and filth to hide my scent. I leaned the Gibson Hollowbody against my motorcycle and climbed inside. I nestled down into the dreck and laid still. In time, my heart rate slowed down and I drifted off to sleep.

13 – July 7, Year 1

I’ve been riding for nearly three hours toward a column of smoke. Going is slow. The freeway is a graveyard for thousands of cars, most of them abandoned, some of them occupied by their former owners. It’s like an infinite river of mausoleums, every make and model. The repeated heat and cool of the season has had a mummifying effect on the corpse drivers—unlike the carrion that I have seen lying out in the open, picked by birds, bugs, and scoundrels.

I ride the embankments and the roadside forests rather than the pavement. I have been able to take some stretches of shoulder, and even a few jaunts between lanes of traffic. But frequent wrecks force me to the sidelines.

The freeway feels safe. I have seen a few undead moving about. But the on-the-road food supply seems scarce; they don’t have any appetite for spoiled meat.

I stopped to investigate an enormous 3rd wheel. The previous owners had fixed the mobile home with a generator. I pried the door open and smelled death. The previous owner, a man of about 70, lay between the two pilots chairs, his chest torn open, most of his flesh chewed away. Someone else lay on a bed in the back of the vehicle, probably the man’s wife. Before I could catch a glimpse of her that would haunt my nights, I shut the door and moved on.

I rode the freeway a while longer and took highway 83, headed North into a canyon pass, toward the smoke. Hours of travel had only taken me 60 miles from the dumpster in which I had awoken that morning—so much lookout, dodging, and weaving.

I turned the road’s curves, winding my way down toward the valley. The signs said I was coming up on Farmingham. The little town lay at the base of the pass at the tip of an enormous damned reservoir. From my vantage point, I could see the source of the smoke. Farmingham had an oil refinery. Someone was putting out the signal. People, I thought. I hoped the smoke was a sign of peace, not a warning to stay away.

I made the valley, not able to help the excitement rising within me at the prospect of any kind of human interaction.

I momentarily became careless.

Something hit me hard from the side, causing my bike to fishtail. I’m sure if I was a more experience rider, I could have pulled out of the tailspin; but as it was, I lost my center of gravity. The mind works like a runaway train, prioritizing and cataloging at superhuman speed during duress. At the moment I lost control, a picture of my new Gibson came to me. I adjusted my body’s positioning as I fell in such a way to protect the Gibson from harm. Somehow, I managed to slow down enough during the crash to keep my wits and at least control the worst of the damage. The road peeled away my jeans and ground into my leg and hip, biting like a million teeth. My arm smeared into the turf, leaving a slur of puckered skin and blood on the pavement.

I pushed up to my hands and knees in time to see an undead man standing above me with a broken tree limb in his raw hands, his jaw hanging to an unnatural angle.

They were using tools. Not just tools: they were using weapons.

I pushed over onto my bottom and skidded away. The undead man made an awkward swing at me, landing a glancing blow to my shin. It hurt, but didn’t break anything. I pushed up to my feet and away from him all at once.

I scanned the area to ascertain what had happened. As far as I could reconstruct, the undead man had bushwhacked me from behind an SUV. Had he the sentience to set a trap? If they were gaining intelligence, things were going to become a lot more complicated for us humans.

I drew my Glock and aimed. I fired. Even at close range, I missed with my first shot. I swore under my breath; I couldn’t afford to waste ammunition. I fixed my aim and put the undead man down with a second bullet.

My bike lay in a mess. I wove my hands behind my neck and looked up at the sky. Half of my body lay open with road rash and my shin hurt like hell. I looked ahead at the plume of smoke, still rising from the refinery. I took a deep breath and moved out at a limping crawl. I wouldn’t get ahead of myself and be caught off-guard again. The undead bastards could think. They could use weapons. I had to stay alert.

13 – July 8, Year 1

I’m tired. Last night I tried for a dumpster. But as I neared town, the number of walkers seemed overwhelming. I had to keep to the shadows and move methodically. I’m sitting at a desk in a locked up, abandoned split-level home. Before the dead started walking, this little community must have felt safe. I have learned not to trust my surroundings so I worked my way from room to room, Glock in hand. I found no undead. I found no dead. Whoever lived here must have either fled or been changed while out and about.

I locked back up and retreated to the master bedroom on the upper level. Although it felt nice to lay in a real bed, I felt restless throughout the night. The undead have no sense of time or seasons. They just wander. I heard them outside the house, moaning and dragging their way through the brush. One of the things even banged on the front door for several minutes before giving up and shambling into the night.

They couldn’t get in. But I couldn’t escape the image of the undead man with the askew jaw coming at me with his broken length of tree limb. They could use tools, I kept thinking. And if they can use tools, they might find a way in. All they had to do was throw a rock through a window.

I slept with my Glock on the headboard.

I slept in snatches of little naps. Although I lavished in the luxury of a queen-sized bed all to myself, I found myself longing for a dumpster.

I woke, went to the bathroom and tried the faucet. No running water. I don’t know what else I expected, turndown service perhaps? Pizza delivery? Damn, I miss the casual comforts.

I went to the garage, hoping to find another motorcycle. An SUV hulked in the dusty light slanting in from the window. There was no motorcycle. I settled for a mountain bike I found hanging from the garage ceiling. I took it down from its hook and wheeled it to a man-door cut into the side of the garage. I drew my Glock and cracked the door for a peek outside. One of them wandered under a grape arbor in the morning light one yard over. A fence stood between it and me. I pushed open the door and wheeled the bike out into the morning sun.

The thing under the grape arbor turned toward me as I exited the garage. I think it smelled rather than saw me. It moved on rusty hinges on its approach. The fence stopped it. It clawed and snorted, letting out angered grunts of frustration.

I watched it struggle for a moment, shaking my head in sympathy at its failed state. I fixed the Gibson on my back and checked the locking strap to make sure the instrument was secure. I tucked my Glock into the rear of my waistband.

I took a final look at the undead creature, one yard over, howling out its thirst for my flesh. I flipped the creature off—a useless gesture. I mounted the mountain bike and pushed off into the street.

In another era, not long ago, I imagined the suburban street brimming with activity. I imagined kids playing pickup games of soccer, flying kites, or riding bikes and big wheels. I imagined mothers putting the finishing touches on dinners and calling children in to eat. I imagined fathers and mothers coming home from work and spending time with their kids, perhaps taking a moment to push them on swings or to engage in a spontaneous wrestling match in the front yard. I imagined a Saturday of washing cars. I heard the drone of lawnmowers and summer birds dressing the neighborhood with enchanting rhythms and songs.

Those days were gone. Garbage strewed the street, tipped over cans of it, broken debris, papers, discarded toys. Cars, parked on the curbs, rested like hunching turtles, some with broken windows or open doors, their alarms long-since exhausted, batteries dead, their hulks left to ruin, waiting for rust.

I kept the plume of smoke in front of me as I rode. I gained progress. But as I neared the source of the smoke, I spotted more of them. I took back jogs through alleys. I walked my mountain bike over yards. In two cases, I pushed the bike through abandoned buildings. The closer I got to the refinery, the thicker the streets became with them.

My progress slowed until I had to find cover, high ground, a place where I could survey my surroundings and make a plan. I entered a three-story bank building a few blocks away from the refinery and found my way to the roof. If there were humans in the refinery and if they were putting out a smoke signal to draw other humans to them, the same signal had also attracted thousands of undead. The things swarmed around the refinery. They drew to within yards of the security fence surrounding the compound and stood, looking on, leaving a few yards between them and the chain link. I wondered why they weren’t shoving each other up against the steel linkage.

I sat on a parapet surrounding the roof, my legs dangling over, and watched. After nearly a half an hour, one of the things peel out of the hoard and stuttered to the fence. It reached with one of its pale hands and touched the wire. Its body stiffened in the current of electricity. I heard the power arching even from where I sat, two blocks away.

I smiled, humans must be inside the refinery. The compound’s occupants had probably started the fires to signal others like me. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have electrified the perimeter. They had even managed to manufacture electricity. The refinery, with all of its food, had drawn thousands of undead, but those inside the compound didn’t seem to care. Perhaps they thought of the onslaught of undead as a worthwhile risk in the prospect of drawing other humans into the compound.

But the fact was, there was no way I could get to the refinery, not through the hoards of undead crushing around the electric fence. Even if I could get within shouting distance without the things taking me down, I couldn’t differentiate myself from the undead. To my supposed allies inside the compound, I would look like just another zombie, thirsty, looking for an opportunity to penetrate their perimeter and get at human flesh.

Somehow, I had to get a message into the compound.

I massaged my temples. I closed my eyes. In the intensity of thought, I heard my stomach rumble. I didn’t realize how hungry I had become.

As I sat on the roof of the old bank, the sun scorching my skin—damn, I wished I had stolen a hat—I thought back to a day in elementary school. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Fiercen, had taken us all outside on September 21st, not long after the school year had started. It was the International Day of Peace. She sat us down on the grounds and told us the sentiments of children expressed peace in its purest form. She gave us slips of paper and told us to write something that promoted peace.

I still remember the sentence I wrote on that sheet of paper. “I wish everyone would stop shooting each other and learn that we are all alike.” Not exactly profound, but hey, I was eight years old.

Mrs. Fiercen marched us all to the playground where we met a man standing next to an enormous air tank. She gave us each a balloon and told us to roll up our messages and put them inside. We lined up behind the man. One by one, he took our balloons, filled them with helium and gave them back to us. Soon, we all stood there on the playground, a flower patch of children holding colorful balloons. Mrs. Fiercen gave a short speech about peace on earth, about how we should all learn to not judge each other, and how we all should learn to get along. After her speech, she had us all count down from ten. When we hit zero, we released our balloons.

I will never forget all that color flying up into the sky—red, white, blue, green, yellow, pink. I watched my balloon ascend, keeping my eyes on it until it disappeared into oblivion. As a child, I actually thought that we had sent our twenty or so balloons off on a mission, that our messages would do good in the world.

As I reflected on my balloon flying up into the sky, an idea hit me. I could get a message into the compound, not with a balloon, but with something else. I had seen a Walmart on the outskirts of town and I was certain I could find what I needed there.

I didn’t have time to visit Walmart before nightfall. I decided to bed down in the old bank building. I found a secluded room with a lock and spread out my bedroll next to a voluminous, executive desk. I locked up and slid a file cabinet in front of the door for good measure. Tomorrow was going to be rough. I needed sleep.

I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the gnawing sense that the undead were all around the building, lurching through the streets. Perhaps some of them were onto my scent and gathering. I closed my eyes, too tightly at first. I forced the pressure out and lightened the intensity in my mind with a series of affirmations of indifference. I had taken on a new mantra, a sentence that had been flowing through my mind countless times on an almost hour-by-hour basis over the past few days. I am nothing in this world; I am impartial to life or death. I must have repeated this in my mind fifty times before I finally drifted off to sleep.

14 – July 9th, Year 1

This morning I removed the file cabinet I had placed in front of the office door. It scraped along the floor as I pushed it. I winced at the volume of the cabinet. Since leaving Marshall, I have uttered perhaps a paragraph of audible English to myself out loud. Although I have found silence to be crushing, noise, particularly banging and struggling, infuses my blood with fear of being discovered.

I drew my Glock and stood to the side of the door. With my off-hand, I turned the knob and pulled the door open. I rounded the opening, the Glock leading the way, expecting an onslaught of undead. But the room on the other side was empty. I could only hear the lingering hiss of the tinnitus I have self-inflicted with so much loud music in my life.

Methodically, panning every corner with my gun, I made my way through the old bank building, through corridors, down stairs, and finally out the back way into an alley. A light post stood century. A dumpster huddled to my right. I trained my weapon back and forth and found no undead. I took what seemed to be my first breath of the day, a taste of the ever-spoiling oxygen of a falling age.

I righted my mountain bike, mounted it, and kicked off down the alley, toward the dilapidated Walmart I had seen on the outskirts of town.

I reached Walmart in the late afternoon. As I made distance from the refinery, the frequency of undead dwindled to a trickle. Even on a bicycle, I had no trouble circumventing them as they staggered along the road, leaning against cars, limping toward me, turning at the sound of my shifting gears and clicking sprocket.

I dismounted as I pulled onto the sidewalk just outside Walmart’s entrance and walked my bike into the canting glass of a derailed door.

A clatter came from deeper in the store. Something was inside with me. It had sensed me. I didn’t know how many undead were shopping the big box store, but I didn’t want to risk being trapped.

I moved my bike to the toy section full of board games, squirt guns, action figures, and electronic toys—all so trivial and unimportant now. As I looked at a rack of shrink-wrapped video games, I recalled a time just months ago when we lived high on our over-stimulated world. It seemed we got lost in the onslaught of movies, cell phones, texting, tablets, video games, and social media. It seemed humanity had gone digital. All that had been halted in a few hours. Our digital counterparts dissolved into the air like vapor, leaving nothing but pure humanity.

Honestly, I didn’t miss digital humanity much, the Facebook avatars, the separatism brought on by social networking, texting, and email. I felt emancipated from the pressure of the barrage of ones and zeros. I remember surfing my Facebook feed and looking at photo after photo of rich, successful, beautiful people, posing next to expensive cars, posing on the beach, posing on luxury cruises, posing in Europe, living lives with no bounds. In the fantasy of the digital world, there were no domestic disputes, no sickness, no frailty, no death, only hopes dreams, and ambitions realized by everyone but the one taking the time to surf the feed. In the face of so much noise, I often became unsatisfied with my own lot. Such pressure even brought on depression from time to time; seeing only the best sides of everyone else can magnify your own faults.

No, I didn’t miss it. But facing the alternative, loneliness, wandering the streets and feeding from the last refused of food left by the frenzying looters, I guess I have to conclude that perfection is a myth. Life only hands out fancy-painted time bombs. They might look nice up on the mantle. But eventually they all go off. Could I dare to hope that this whole thing, the waste and wither of society, the breakdown of everything we knew and loved, would be temporary? Unlikely. And even if the undead somehow perish and leave us in a state of recovery, life would be there to meet us, ready to hand out more fancy-painted time bombs. Maybe at least we can found in all of the loss a reason to value humanity even in its frail and imperfect form.

I found what I wanted in the toy section. I picked up four Estes model rockets and a handful of fuel grain powered rocket engines. As I filled my arms with what I needed, I heard something crash at the end of the aisle. I looked up and spotted one of them, a woman, half of her shirt torn away, revealing the remains of a grungy bra, her skin white and littered with red lesions. She spotted me. Not a hint of intelligence registered on her face. She leaned toward me until her feet were forced to step. She came in a series of slow, articulated jerks. I backed away, my arms full, easily keeping enough space between us to stay safe. I thought about drawing my Glock and putting her down, but I decided to save my bullets.

I shifted my load to my other hand and pushed the mountain bike toward the front of the store. As I exited, I picked up a roll of masking tape, a pad of drawing paper, and a zippo lighter with a Harley Davidson logo etched into its face. I double-bagged everything and tied it to the handlebars.

More undead peeked out from the aisle as I pushed out of the store. It struck me how settled I felt in their proximity. In small numbers I had learned not to fear them. I had learned, rather, to pity them.

I rode the two hours it took to get back to the bank building. I leaned my mountain bike against the wall next to the alleyway entrance and spotted a dumpster tucked into an alcove. Should I sleep in there? Had the undead become wise to my camping spot on the third floor? I gave up on the dumpster and entered the bank building, taking my Walmart shopping bag with me.

I heard shuffling in the building and my heart sunk. They had gotten inside. I locked the entrance behind me, shifted my bag of goodies to my off hand, and drew my Glock. Room by room, I moved through the building, the eye of my weapon staring around corners and through doors just a beat ahead of me.

When I reached the teller area of the bank, a line of windows behind glass, computers fixed to each workstation, I found the source of the clatter. Three undead walked the reception area, all on the other side of the glass. I imagined them making a run on the bank, but not for trapped funds: for human flesh, my human flesh. Had they sensed me in the building and come to investigate? Or had they just randomly entered. I was too tired to care.

I moved to one of the teller stations and aimed through a circular hole in the thick glass. The three undead never suspected that I was there. With eight shots I killed them all. I only had a few bullets left. I mourned the loss of any extra firepower.

With the three of them lying dead in the reception area, I tried the main entrance doors: unlocked. They had come inside by pushing the oversized glass doors open. Even such a simple act of sentience scared me. I found the manual bolts on the bottoms of the doors and shot them down. The things would have to break the reinforced glass to enter the bank again and I didn’t see that happening.

I went upstairs to the office where I had made my bed and locked the door behind me. I laid everything out on a desk in the middle of the room, three rockets and twice as many engines, a sketch pad, a roll of masking tape, and a zippo lighter.

I picked up a pen and hovered over the sketchpad, pausing over what to write. I had surveyed the refinery at length from the roof. I knew the basics of its lay out. I drew a map. I put the refinery in the middle of the schematic and marked North with an arrow.

The main entrance to the refinery sat on its East end. That entrance was also the most slogged by undead. I had also spotted a break in the fence on the West end of the refinery, a gate that opened into a parking lot. I circled the smaller, west gate and wrote the words: Here, 7:00 A.M.

I looked at the map for a moment, double-checking its clarity. I wrote a brief note below the map drawing:

My Name is Lance King. I am a musician and a survivor. I came because of your smoke. If you mean your smoke as a welcoming beacon, I hope you can help me to enter your house. If you do not welcome me, I will die trying to get to you. If you permit me to join you, I will lend whatever skills I can to our collective survival. I will attempt to enter your west gate at precisely 7:00 A.M.

I drew in a deep breath and held it as I read the note one last time. I let it out in a long, resigned release. I rolled the note around the body of the largest rocket and secured it with masking tape. I put the rocket nose up on the desk, stood back, and stared at it for a moment. My entire future lay in the fate of a child’s toy. I shook my head and wrote two duplicates of the map and note and fixed them to the two other rockets.

Back on the roof of the bank, I placed the rockets in a line along the parapet. I aimed the first of them, trying to calculate the rocket’s trajectory by gut feel. I struck the Harley Davidson zippo and touched off the green cannon fuse that jutted from the end of the engine. A spark ran the length of the fuse. The rocket hissed up into the late afternoon sky. At the apex of its arch, an explosion went off, jettisoning its parachute. The rocket descended. At first, I thought I would hit my mark on the first try, but wind caught the rocket and moved it off target. It settled into the wrest of hundreds of groping undead hands, just outside the eastern entrance of the refinery.

I swore to myself. I took my time aiming the second rocket, accounting for error. I touched it off. The rocket hissed up, nearly out of site. A tendril of smoke puffed as it blew the shoot. The parachute misfired and didn’t deploy, perhaps burned in the jettison charge. The rocket pin-wheeled downward and landed behind a building outside the refinery, far from my mark.

I picked up the third rocket and drew in a steady breath.

This time, I placed the rocket on the parapet at the edge of the roof and stacked a few bricks around it, making a kind of launching shoot. I licked a finger and stuck it into the air. Wafts of a breeze arched over the top of the bank building. I adjusted the rocket’s aim by shimming it with shingles I peeled from the roof.

I re-wetted my finger and stuck it up for a final wind test. I struck the zippo and waited for the right moment.

After nearly a minute, I felt an ebb in the breeze. I touched off the fuse and watched it shrink, sizzling and spitting. The rocket hissed upward into the sky. I followed it until it disappeared into the wash of smoke that emitted from the refinery. I visored my eyes with one hand and panned across the sky. I spotted it, dangling from its parachute, weaving in the breeze and smoke. Uttering a prayer, I watched it descend.

The rocket landed in the parking lot at the east end of the refinery, inside the fence barrio, out of reach from the undead. I pumped my fist in triumph. The rocket had hit its mark.

I remained on the roof until dark, staring at the white patch of parachute, flicking in the breeze just inside the compound. Finally, with the sun down, I lost site of it. Nobody had come for my rocket.

I couldn’t worry. Those in the refinery would either find it or they wouldn’t. I would go through with my plan, whether it led me to salvation or death.

I left the roof and went to my office camping spot. I laid down on my bedroll, put my hands behind my neck and stared up at the ceiling. Sleep didn’t come for a very long time.

15 – July 10th, Year 1

I picked the eastern parking lot for a reason; a long, steep hill dumped into that lot. I wanted speed and I was hoping for cover fire from the refinery occupants as I neared the entrance. I knew I would get velocity on my bicycle. It was cover fire I worried about. If my note hadn’t been received, I would ride into a maelstrom of groping arms and chattering teeth.

The undead would turn me. Something in their blood infected the living and frosted the mind with an insatiable appetite I had seen in their numbers. Early reports on the radio confirmed this. Before the airwaves blinked out, newscasters had latched onto a reel of a man being turned. I had watched it over and over while holding my breath.

If they tore me apart, I could deal with it. I couldn’t deal with becoming one of them. I loaded two Glock magazines with 17 bullets each. I would have to count once I started touching off rounds. I planned to fire 17, change the magazine, then fire 16. I would use the last bullet on myself should I become hopelessly surrounded. A bullet to the head wouldn’t hurt, not really.

I tucked the Glock into my waistband, strapped the Gibson over my shoulder, and made my way downstairs to my mountain bike in the alley behind the bank building.

I took one last look up at the third-floor window where I had spent the past couple of nights before getting on my bike and kicking off.

I straddled my mountain bike at the top of a three-block hill that ran downward to the eastern gate of the refinery. Undead blocked the entrance. They kept two yards back from the electric fence that ran the perimeter of the compound. They gaped through the intermeshed fence, longing for meat that walked on two legs just beyond their reach. They paid no attention to me. I stood upwind from them. Their minds (and appetites) were distracted. But the second I rode within their sensory range, I knew they would turn their teeth on me.

Last chance to back out, I thought as I looked down at them. But I hadn’t come all this way to chicken out. This would either be my reinduction into humanity or my final moment on earth.

I kicked off and stood on the pedals. It felt like I was moving at a hundred miles per hour. I must have been going only thirty-five or so, but I am unaccustomed to riding at such speed. I had strapped the Gibson as tightly as I could to my back before setting off, but I felt the thing acting like a sail, bobbing and slamming against me in the wind, resisting the pressure of my streamlined trajectory.

When I kicked off, I saw nobody behind the tall Eastern gates to greet me. A smarter me would have called the whole thing off. But this final act of desperation had another purpose; If I couldn’t live with my own kind, I didn’t care to live at all. Making a headlong attempt at nearly impossible odds merely put an honorable slant to my suicide.

Suicide or no, I was riding into the fray. Already some of the rear ranks of undead turned toward me. Their queer eyes settled on me in what could only be perplexity. They had spotted me, something out of place in their world of the norm. Had they ever had a warm-blooded being come straight at them, much less at such high speed?

A few of them peeled out of the crowd and began their slow shambles toward me, temporarily forgetting the refinery. There may be scores of humans inside the electric fence. But here was one within easy grasp: me.

I leaned into the handle bars as I reached the bottom of the three block grade. As I bottomed out, I lost sight of the electric gate. I could only see masses of undead, more of them coming at me. They made that rattling, guttural noise I had heard so many times since leaving Marshall Jr. High School, a sound that terrified me. But even in the face of so many of them I felt no fear. This was it. I was going to live, or I was going to die.

I drew the Glock from my waistband and fired into the crowd. I’m not sure how many I hit. I saw a few of them curl back into their numbers. But there was no way to take an accurate aim from the seat of a moving mountain bike. I just fired. If they were human they would have ran for cover or at least hit the dirt in some attempt to get away from my shooting. But the things seemed oblivious to bullets. Their numbers fell and they didn’t even grant a casual glance. They merely stepped over their fallen and kept coming.

I fired off all seventeen of the first magazine. I let the bike coast and took my hands off the handlebars to slam the second magazine into the weapon. I aimed. I fired. I hit one of them in the head, a woman with a wicker basket hanging from one arm. Her head exploded into a mess of tissue.

I remembered Mrs. Pemberthy, my history teacher, back at Marshall Jr. High School. She had particularly loved the Revolutionary War and had spent most of a semester covering it in detail. She told us kids about the Battle of Bunker Hill and about how William Prescott had told his soldiers not to fire until they saw the whites of the enemy’s eyes. I hadn’t waited until I could see the whites of the undeads’ eyes. But I sure as hell could see those whites before I saw any sign of the refinery gate opening.

I touched off sixteen of the seventeen rounds in the second magazine. I allowed myself only a moment’s pause to consider my next move before beginning my exit plan.

I pressed the barrel of the Glock against my temple and raised my off hand up from the handlebars. I coasted that way, gun to head, off arm up, my eyes on the mob of undead straight ahead of me. I uttered a brief prayer. I even flicked my eyes up to the sky for a fleeting second.

I tightened my trigger finger to the point of fear.

An explosion went off.

In shock, I thought I had blown my head off. I became remotely aware first that there was no pain, then that I could still hear the sound of the coasting bike chain click-click-clicking through the derailleur.

Fire belched from the center of the clog of undead. Bodies flew like toys, writhing and burning through the air, some of them dismembered in the blast. Smoke billowed downward and outward from ground zero, temporarily obscuring my view of the undead and of the refinery.

I held my breath as I coasted into the expanding cloud of smoke and debris. It felt as if I was riding into a hurricane. Something pierced my cheek in the maelstrom. I felt cool fingers touch me from the obscurity of smoke but I still had speed on my side and the undead around me couldn’t manage to stop me. After a few seconds of blindness, I hit an ebb in the smoke. Hundreds of undead lurked all around me clambering, groping, impaired by the same loss of vision inflicted on me by the smoke.

I stood on the pedals, finding new vigor in the temporary discombobulation of senses. The bike trundled over debris. Something punctured the front tire, POP-HISS.

I kept riding.

Just as I regained a sense of positioning in the haze, the undead came at me.

I expected to see hunger in their faces, a sense of animalistic instinct, an unquenchable addiction for what only I had to offer them. But I saw nothing, only listlessness. They came at me in their slow gates, pin-wheeling and staggering.

As my tire lost its final breath of stability, pedaling became a chore. I did my best to circumvent the obstacle course of outstretched hands, opened mouths, and shambling feet. For a moment I thought I might actually make it to the electric fence. But the grinding rim of my front tire caught an edge and my mountain bike endoed, sending me ass over teakettle over the handlebars. My final shot reported as I hit the pavement. The bullet chipped concrete somewhere yards away and ricocheted with a whine off into the smoke, taking my final chance at a clean death with it.

They came at me in clumps. All I could see was teeth and outstretched arms. I punched and kicked, trying to avoid a fog of open mouths.

Breathing the heavy smoke threatened to stop me as thoroughly as any of their infected bites. I rasped for air and felt my strength leave.

Finally, I consented. They would have me. I hoped they would kill me, even if by drawing and quartering me, rather than turn me into one of them. I didn’t want to end up like Mr. Barry, whom I had spotted on the school grounds back at Marshall Jr. High, an insentient mass of rotting flesh consigned to walking the roads in search for an ever-dwindling supply of human flesh.

I drew a final breath and sneered up at them as they closed. “Choke on me, you bastards.”

The ground shook. Years ago, I played in a grunge band called Sleeves of Mercy. I quit the band due to a bass player who insisted on plugging into a pair of two-by-two 12-inch cabs, driven by a head amplifier that probably should have been regulated by the power company. Whenever the bass player—he called himself Pump—hit notes in the low range, he shook my core. I still have tinnitus from Pump’s obnoxious playing. The ground rumble reminded me of Pump with his double cab and shaved head, all amperage, no technique.

Three of the undead above me disappeared, as if whisked away by an invisible cable. The rest of them turned their heads in unison toward the source of the concussion. More reports cracked over the area. Another of the undead fell, its head blown up like a melon.

I flipped onto my hands and knees and crawled toward the eastern gate, staying low. I recognized the concussions for what they were: artillery. Mortar shells? Grenades? I didn’t care. The clackety-clack of automatic weapons followed the mortar fire, coming from the eastern gate, coming toward me.

As I crawled, my guitar case got caught around the thigh of an undead girl who wore the remains of a soiled prom dress. She hissed down at me. I yanked, bringing her to her knees. She reached for me with a claw-like hand.

I drew back and slugged her so hard that pain coiled through my wrist.

She snapped back on impact but I could see that she planned to come at me again. I went to work on her with my boots, throttling her with my waffle-stomper heels, screaming as I kicked.

Someone grabbed me under the arms and pulled me away. I writhed around and threw a few punches at my new assailant, a gray haired man dressed in a flannel shirt that smelled like body odor.

“Hold it, boy. I’m trying to get you out of here,” the man yelled as he dragged me along.

My eyes must have expanded to quarters at hearing actual words come from an actual, functioning set of vocal chords. I struggled to my feet, tripping over debris and fallen undead. It took a half-dozen awkward steps to regain my footing. “I got it,” I said.

The man let me go and wheeled around. He held a micro-uzi. He stepped between the undead and me and fired a series of short bursts into the oncoming hoard.

“Run like hell, kid. We can’t hold ‘em for long.”

I wheeled around and leaned into a sprint. There were more gunmen in the fight. They had formed a kind of path through the crush of undead and were keeping them at bay with gunfire for the time being. The men and women kept their eyes on the fight as I ran toward the now open gate. The gunmen allowed the pathway to close like a zipper as they withdrew behind me.

I lost my footing just as I made the gate. I pin-wheeled for a half-dozen ill-planted steps and crashed to the pavement, skinning my hands in the fall. I winced as I gingerly turned over onto my bottom and inspected my palms. Blood poured from dozens of micro-cuts. I didn’t see myself playing the guitar for at least a week.

Firing continued as the last of the self-appointed soldiers withdrew into the refinery. Two men slid the gate shut on a track. The undead, hungry and newly agitated, pushed against the fence, clambering with outstretched hands, some of them even biting the thick wire.

The man with gray hair and a flannel shirt looked up at a high window on the second floor of the refinery. “Clear,” he shouted and snapped off a quick nod.

He looked at me. I searched his expression for some sign of acceptance.

As if he read my trepidation, he winked and smiled, the crows feet at his temples creasing. He turned to the wire gate and lowered his micro-uzi to his side.

A hum and crackle came from the fence. The undead crunched up against the wire went rigid with electric current. I don’t know what kind of power ran through the fence, but it must have been phenomenal because I smelled the things cooking in the amperage. One of the undead, a man with a white shirt and the remains of a blue necktie, convulsed so violently that his head became a blur. I watched him in fascination. His quaking increased to a breaking point. His head exploded with a dull thock. The human, self-appointed soldiers broke out in laughter.

Zombies cooked on the wire for nearly a minute before backing away. More than I could count lay on the ground just outside the fence, lifeless. Whoever had slammed on the juice in the upper chamber had done them a service by mercy killing them.

The man with the gray hair and flannel shirt walked to my side, his boot heels clocking on the pavement. He pushed the micro-uzi behind him on its strap and crouched down. He reached out, palms up, and nodded toward my hands. I laid my wrists in his palms. He looked over the damage. The bleeding had stopped but bits of gravel and tar peppered the ruined flesh.

“Doesn’t look too bad,” he said. “I’ll get you to the infirmary and we’ll get you some antiseptic. Should heal up real nice.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The man nodded. He stood up, pulling me to my feet as he did so. He looked at the sea of undead outside the refinery. “Won’t be long now,” he said.

“Until what?”

“Until we take it all back. They need to eat, you know, just like we do. And they’re running out of food. All we got to do is wait.”

“How long?”

“A month. I don’t know, maybe a year.”

“A year?” I asked, trying to hide the desperation from my voice.

He turned to me and cocked his head to the side. He stood that way for a moment, looking me up and down.

“Do we have enough food?” I asked.

“Got seeds,” he said. “And we’re raising hogs. If we ration, we should be able to make it. Passing the time’s the hard part. The clock just keeps on tick-tock-ticking. Getting tired of sitting, you know.”

I remembered the long hours I had spent back at Marshall Jr. High School. I knew the sound of the clock all too well. Looking back, I don’t think it would have been much longer before I had lost my mind. “Why did you let me in?” I asked. “I’ll only eat your food.”

The man laughed, full and loud, laying his head back.

He settled down and put one of his baseball mitt palms on my shoulder. “What do you got there on your back?”

I eyed him dubiously and protectively raised a hand to the strap over my shoulder. “Guitar.”

He sniggered. “I know that, dumb-ass. What kind of guitar.”

“Gibson Custom Super 400 Hollowbody Electric.”

The man pursed his lips together and hissed out a weak whistle. His eyebrows raised in appreciation. “You know how to play it?”

“I used to be a professional musician,” I lied. But, hell, who was going to know anyways.

“That’s why we brought you in. Like I say, hardest part is passing the time.” He smiled and held out one of his hands. “Name’s Sparks. I’m on bass.”

It hurt, but I shook his hand anyways. He ignored the traces of blood I left on his palm.

“You ain’t no country bumpkin are you?”

“What?”

“If you go wanting to play that Clint Black, Toby Keith shit, I’m telling your right now, I’m going to order the boys to open up that gate and I’m going to throw you back out there.”

“I hate country,” I said.

“That a boy.” Sparks put a hand on my shoulder.

We walked toward one of the refinery buildings.

“Don’t tell me you are into that pansy-assed, yuppie rock,” I said. “I might as well let you know, I’m not playing any Eric Clapton, Hendrix, or Allman Brothers.”

“We got a joke around here among the boys who can play,” Sparks said. “When any of us can’t stick a lick because it’s just a little out of reach, we blame it on playing like Eric. When you can’t play fast, it’s the Clapman. You just have to shake the Clap.”

I laughed. I was beginning to like Sparks. I was beginning to like him a lot.

Story Note

I composed and recorded a few songs about zombies a while back. I took on the persona of Lance King, a man trapped in a compound during an undead apocalypse with nothing but a guitar and a cache of dwindling supplies as I wrote these songs. I even put up a website about it. I planned to shoot a series of videos from “the compound,” and put out journal entries from Lance’s perspective. I called the whole project Zombie Sing-a-long. I think the abandoned site is still out there (zombiesingalong.com).

The project failed in a way. But the Zombie Sing-a-long songs turned into 3 albums of music and narrative about the undead (which you can purchase on iTunes or anywhere else). It also turned into an epic zombie novel that I have to date not released.

One day, I decided to pull up Lance’s incomplete journal from zombiesingalong.com and finish the story. “The Bloody Journal of Lance King” is the result.

By the way, you can watch me, as Lance King, perform 5 of his zombie folk songs online. The songs are called: “Grandma,” “Come March with Us,” “Ship of Zombies,” “So Tendor,” and “All of My Best Friends are Zombies.” Go to the GangreneProductions YouTube channel to check them out.