Day 25

Zombies Killed: 375

Having secured our new base from zombies, we empty the shelves and blocked all the entrances, the windows, and the door, with them: I didn’t know exactly how the zombie's brain worked, so I thought it wasn’t a good idea to make a very resistant, but flashy defensive line.

Then, again, while I counted everything we had acquired (for my surprise, there wasn’t much more there than there was in our previous base, many products been panic bought during the first stages of the pandemic) and my twin sister read magazines, we discussed what should be our next step. And, reviewing all of our previous fights, we decided that we should focus on equipping ourselves better. Of course, we weren’t in the city’s police station, and I was having trouble to think about what we should do to achieve our recently established objective, but after I pointed this problem and the few resources we had to Morgaine, she made magic with only silver-tape, phone books, a box cutter, buckets and a pair of broomsticks: suddenly, we had simple armors and two relatively fragile, though long, spears. She also made a pair of slingshots with rubber bands I found this time.

That night, though we had then a good supply of water, we decided to commemorate our new selves and drank and ate all the few snacks that that place still had, until we fell asleep once again in the bathroom.

Our next expedition; we then more confidant because of our phone books armors, the spears and a ladder that we found; was to the small horde around the red car from before: there should be around 20 zombies encircling the vehicle and its surroundings. We shot them from far with our brand new slingshots and without making noise, attracting only those who we wanted to, then running back to our base, putting the ladder against its ceiling and climbing up. While the brain-eaters could do nothing but to look up and for us, our clubs didn’t reach the enemies down there too, and our spears couldn’t make thru their skulls, so we spent, patiently, an entire day (having, obviously, carried supplies with us) laid on the ceiling and surgically piercing their eyes. I didn’t know there were bones behind the eyes, and got scared, thinking that I had committed a terrible mistake with that strategy, but they ended up being really thin and our broomsticks ended in box cutters could make thru them.

Having found some tools at the pickup truck and attached them to our sticks with the almighty silver-tape, at the ninth day we adventured to the outskirts of a small district of just a dozen of houses or so. One of us kept guard while the other used the slingshot to attract the zombies in the area one by one; those ones looking way more stupid than the five zombies group for a reason that I couldn’t grasp, understanding only that the zombies could, apparently, heal themselves with time, and didn’t needed to sleep, eat our drink.

It took us four days of constant killing, dozens of undead every day, to clean that area, and even then we ended up finding a couple or two locked inside cars and rooms. A few of these really surprised us, and it was only them that our telephone book armors and bucket helmets showed their full potential, saving our lives.

Following a dirt road, we found a small farmhouse; there was an unimaginable number of brain-eaters for a single building there, as if the entire family had gathered just before that “small apocalypse”, but we had not only gained a lot of experience in killing zombies, Morgaine made us wooden shields and cool maces with just tables, clothes, and circular saws. Having butchered everything that moved inside the house, and not having any particular reason to stay at the hard to protect gas station, we decided to move there. It took a while to clean (then literally) the house, but both of us ended pretty satisfied with the finished work, and my twin sister and I started to move the small district houses’ supplies there.

Without big numbers of zombies in the area, then, we decided to kill every one of them that we encountered in our way: we still were far from my original goal of 192 undead a day, but we were getting closer, better, a bit more every day, and at that point there was no time when we killed less than 13 brain-eaters before calling it a day.

Though without electricity the majority of the food we came across was spoiled, we still ended up gathering enough supplies to don’t need to worry about starving for a week!

During all of this, while Morgaine improved our equipment almost daily, I kept notes about our resources, areas that we explored, and about the creatures' behaviors. It helped us magnificently to deal with the zombies, but that wasn’t even the main prize… When I discovered that the creatures did not have a supernatural perception, therefore it was okay to make small fires if we kept control over the smoke, by warming the water inside a bunch of kettles, we had our first hot bath since all of that started!

Two weeks since my twin sister and I left our stinky bathtub-shelter, we were walking thru a dirt, slender and meandering trail up a hill. The treetops covered most of the view, but rays of sunlight came thru the leaves in shining pillars. There wasn’t much wind, and birds sang.

“Now that I think about it… the animals in the zoo or starved to death or were devoured by zombies, right? The same goes to pets...”, Morgaine commented, carelessly looking around thru the closed transparent motorcycle helmet shield. Each one of us was wearing one of those, that showed themselves to be really resistant; way better than our buckets. Also, a pair of leather jackets and cothurnus boots made a good job as body armor too (for what Morgaine, thinking herself superior, mocked my “corporate slave and soulless” style).

“Better have a dead tiger than a living and experienced in killing one roaming the city, right?”, I stopped, seeing an undead in electrician clothes show up, attracted by our voices, from ahead and after a curve in the trail. We were on the right path, at least.

“Dude...”, as usual, Morgaine put herself in combat position; even though there was no signal of any other creature approaching and I probably would be enough to deal with that one.

“What? It’s obviously a good thing to have an enemy less to deal with”, still, I preferred to not opt immediately to close combat if possible, and so I took the improved slingshot from the tool belt at my waist. A version that didn’t have handle, but was purely powered by my arm and the time I made it spin by my side before throwing the rock. Using the tool like it was intended to be, the pebble I took from the ground and hurled it in high-speed. It could even kill with a single shot. However, I missed for a bit and could only break his collarbone with the rock, and the creature was already over me. Well, I still was using the thing for only a short amount of time, with more training, I would get better. “Even if it had survived, the animal would be killed by authorities once we cleared this place anyway. You know, for being a possible parasite hos; they don’t get infected, but can infect people”, I pushed the undead away with my table-shield, pinning it against a tree.

“But, maybe we could, like, train it? Once I read about a guy who used to train tigers! We would only need a few years worth of meat. We could even equip him with a spiked armor, the tiger would be our killing machine mascot! Just imagine a fucking tiger slicing and biting hordes of zombies to death while we play flame-throwing guitars at the center of a burning stadium! It would be fucking epic!”

Though Morgaine’s idea of “epic” was extremely silly, I couldn’t avoid to fantasize myself at the top of a luxurious building, with a tiger seated by my feet, drinking the finest wine and looking down on a burning city...

“Even if you could really do this insanity, wouldn’t all this effort be better utilized in, like, directly killing the zombies?”, I shook aside my fantasies and replied to my twin sister, bashing my saw-axe against the brain-eater temple while she kept guard and looked around. The weapon was not only way more effective than our first stick-and-rock club, I than kept notes over where were the thinnest parts of the zombie skull, and so it didn’t take me much time to bring the thing down.

“Oh, you’re right…”, Morgaine relaxed once again. “And, bro?”

“What?”

“You’re really bad at aiming, aren’t you?”

I ignored the unprecedented nonsense and proceeded up and ahead, when we reached the top of the hill we took so much time to climb and our objective on that day: the telephone tower.

“I’ll go up, you stay here and guarantee that no zombie will prevent me from getting down”, I said, letting the saw-axe hang from my belt and grabbing the first bar of the metallic ladder.

“Okay, okay, take care with electric zombies or something…!”, my twin sister agreed. I was already a good few meters up when I heard she commenting while looking to the tower: “Man~, it surely would be awesome to see this falling down...”, I got a bit nervous.

Sighing, I continued my way up. We had spent a lot of time at the surroundings of our farmhouse, and there was not so much more we could find there, nor many brain-eaters to kill, and so I planned to search for the next area we should go. Morgaine was commenting about something like this for ages, but I only got there when we found the binoculars I was carrying then.

Though, search for more lootable places wasn’t my main goal there.

“Gruuuuh...!”

...This is: if I survived there.

I was then way more experienced in opening skulls and had better equipment than ever, but the creature that had just noticed me was tied to the tower by a security belt; and at the to the side of the stairs enough to be hidden from the view of anyone at the ground, but close enough to catch me if I tried to just ignore it; fighting while holding myself to the ladder wasn’t something I ever did before and no matter how I looked at it, it wouldn’t be an easy task.

Should I just get down and let Morgaine bring this tower down like she wanted to do (somehow)? No, that was the tallest point outside the tow’s center and its high buildings, it was of vital importance, and not only for exploration of its surroundings.

And, anyway, it was my fault that I didn’t prepare for this kind of situation: there was an electrician zombie down there, they should’ve been repairing here when shit happened.

“Looks like I’ll have to deal with you myself”, I wasn’t as creative as my twin sister, and so I took the saw-axe with one hand and continued to climb up. I wasn’t particularly scared of highs, but still was pretty terrific being aware of the distance between me and the ground while climbing the ladder that lubberly and facing a zombie that, upside down, stretched his hands at my direction.

Thankfully, then my weapon had a wider range and I could attack the undead before he could touch me; and so I did: I swung the metal at the end of my table leg right against the face of the zombie with easy.

Not so thankfully was the fact that I couldn’t hit hard enough form the position I was standing, all the blood that feel right against my helmet shield, blocking my view, and that, because the zombie wasn’t really holding into anything but just hanging from his safety equipment, then I had an undead pendulum.

The ghostly fast zombie’s image was too blurry because of all the blood at my helmet shield when he passed me for the first time, but I still could feel very well the impact against my hand and the saw-axe being forcefully removed from this one.

When the brain-eater, still swinging because of my first strike, came back, it scratched all over my helmet, and I almost lost my balance, even when I tried to hold firmly the ladder with both hands, my right one being so drenched in zombie blood that it only left the metal bar that was the step more slippery. The third time the zombie came fourth, though, it succeeded in hold my helmet completely and stabilize himself right over me.

The bites and slaps against my helmet resonated loudly, vibrating inside my skull, shaking my brain. I couldn’t see thru all that blood and, then, saliva, too, nor could I use my hands to push that zombie aside, nor even to get down, the creature holding me with surprising strength.

“Bit this, you fucker!”, I shouted, bringing my head back, and then fourth and against the zombie’s teeth once again.

It took me other two headbutts to break all the creature’s teeth in weirdly pleasant sounds, and other three to reduce the slimy face to a disgusting flesh mashup, five more to the creature starting to twist in weird attacks and lose its grip, when I got down a few meters, just enough to clean my gloves and my helmet’s shield, and get back up: the zombie was still groaning, “alive” and blocking my way, swinging up there; even if I ignored it then, it could become an even worse problem during the descent.

I reached for my knife and, then, for the undead’s eyes, killing it. But I hadn’t ended yet: I was worried that the creature’s, when I needed to get down, loose body could be pushed by the wind and throw me from up there. So, keeping the corpse still with one hand, I climbed a few more steps and stretched my knife to the safety equipment. It took a while to cut thru the surprisingly resistant material, but when I finally did so, watch the heavy corpse fall all the way down and straight against the ground. Seeing my twin sister running away from the entrails explosion made everything worth it.

Then, I finally climbed to the top of the tower.

The view up there was really astonishing; the large river ended in the sparkling ocean, bright green three tops and wide-open blue sky; even if some parts of it was a destroyed city, hordes of zombies and burned forests. I couldn’t see any brain eater close, so it would be nice to bring Morgaine there latter.

“It’s not the time for this now; I already have enough distraction”, I told to myself, taking the binoculars.

Looking in the areas close to our new base/home, it was easy to spot what should be our next “farming” zone. I properly marked it on a map, and, then, I turned my attention to the main objective of that mission: the mansion in the woods, where the guys that shot against my twin sister and I lived. They were, definitely, still there, though not paying attention to something that far from them, only looking, visibly bored, to the forest and river. It looked like there was someone else inside the house… a skinny man wearing only a bathrobe, drinking something hot, and… guiding a mutilated zombie by a collar?!

“What the fuck...?”, I had to rest my eyes and check it once again to be sure: I wasn’t wrong in the first time, the guy really had a zombie pet, the creature all contained by a muzzle and restrained by chains and leather strips.

However, as weird those guys were, and though they shot us the last time we got closer, there was no definitive proof that they were bad people (after all, even Morgaine and I, who were walking thru the woods for the longest time that night couldn’t see very well back then, and after what happened to the city, maybe they just thought we were zombies). So I decided to look around the mansion, but found nothing; but this itself meant a lot: it didn’t look like they were planting anything, and though the mansion had a small pier, there was no boat there. Had they just invaded the place and assumed it? Did that mansion, actually, hold a lot of food? Or they had a boat and it was off, someone taking care of sacking while the others kept the base? I looked away, following the waters, trying to find any signal of a vehicle, but many rocks turned the upper section of the river impossible to navigate, and there was no available point to anchor after the mansion pier itself down the river, there was no one fishing at the sea and the borders beyond were still kept by stationary forces. I was about to assume that those guys just had an incredible amount of food inside the mansion, when remembered the one other point they could dock: the city’s port.

And I discovered that the same happy shrimp group had taken over the entire port, somehow built tall concrete walls around it and was running some kind of factory there; so there was where all the survivors had been taken to. I saw someone being dragged by the guards to the top of the walls, the guy being pushed away desperately trying to communicate with the armed man escorting him, but these last tone just pretending to don’t listen. I saw the guy crying and, then, when about to be thrown over the wall and onto the asphalt street, another man of the guard; tall, blonde and with a necklace full of stones; intervened. He talked with the other guards and pointed some pots around, shaking his head. And then told them to throw the guy from another place, going away.

I saw when the victim's legs broke. I couldn’t hear a thing from that distance, but by his expression, he was screaming as loud as he could, in awful pain. When zombies started to come closer, attracted by the commotion, I took away the binoculars and, holding the metallic parapet before me, started to stare my own feet.

That was the worst-case scenario: more than zombies, we had also a heavily armed human group that we should deal with.