Terrifying Lies. Craig Nybo
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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