ZOMBIE'S DOOM? "Chronicles of Jack Doom" (13 page)

After all, if I hadn't happened along when I did, they would most likely have been killed and eaten anyway, so if I would inadvertently dust one of them off, their death would be far quicker and much less painful than being an entree for the midday gathering of the savage hordes.

I had been experimenting with a tactic that I was trying to develop, when the situation was conducive to employing such a tactic, and this looked to me like the perfect time and place to further test this process of zombie eradication.

The stage was set, I didn't know or really care about the men I was getting ready to save, there was a target rich environment well within the range of my weapon, and I had plenty of bullets in case things went sour.

Moreover, if things really got bad and the horde turned on me, I always had the option of flipping the switch on my gun to its full-auto mode, and employing a spray and pray tactic without too much regard for anyone's safety but my own.

Like I said, I didn't know the hillbillies, and I really didn't care about the hillbillies, so give me a break.

The method that I chose to test in this situation was what I called the multiple head shot.

It goes like this.

You take aim at your target (a zombie head in this case), and you try to hold off on your shot until one or two more zombie's heads (if that's your target) are in line with the bullet's future trajectory.

Your goal is to splatter at least two of your targets back to the lower depths of hell where they belong (living or dead) with only one bullet, and send three or more of the barbarians to their
doom
(pun) if possible.

It sounds easy enough to do if all of the targets are willing, and happen to fall into a single line in front of your gun, but the reality of the technique is that most of the time you have to be patient and wait for your targets to unwittingly cooperate.

That's the main reason that you wouldn't try this particular method while trying to rescue someone that you actually gave a shit about.

Anyway, back to the story.

So I let loose with my M-4 utilizing the method that I had been experimenting with, and watched through the iron sights of my rifle as its bullets caused slobbering menace after slobbering menace to hurl their ensconced maggots and pieces of their rotting flesh, matted hair, and chunks of their degenerated brains onto the three men that I was trying to save, as I aerated the skulls of the zombies in front of them.

Although not getting the massive body count that I was hoping for with my new experimental approach, many of the attacking zombies that were nearest to the imperiled hillbillies did
bite the dust
. Which was a refreshing change.

After exhausting the first 30 round magazine (not clip, there's a difference), with less than satisfactory results using the experimental tactic, I dropped the empty spring-loaded sheet metal bullet holder to the ground and inserted a fresh, fully loaded replacement into my rifle.

Then I abandoned the multiple head shot with one bullet strategy, and adopted the more efficient technique of one shot one kill as a matter of policy.

Half way through my second magazine and with most of the pack of zombies ravaged and weighted down with lead, the remainder of the horde was a simple mop up operation.

After devastating most of the remaining festering throng of cannibals with well placed head shots and a couple of sharp force trauma inserts to the brain with my trusty battle hatchet, as a gesture of good will, I saved the last survivor of the deadly legion of undead flesh eaters for the hillbilly with the pitchfork to dispatch.

Seeing my intentions were honorable, he wasted little time planting the long spikes of his farming tool deep into the skull of the last of the raw-flesh eating connoisseurs.

Immediately after the monster hit the ground, the man stomped his foot onto the side of its head and jerked firmly upward on the handle of his pitchfork, prying it from the still twitching body.

After pulling the farming utensil out of the zombie's skull and leaving four perfectly round 1/4 inch holes which allowed the maggots that occupied the outer circumference of its brain to crawl out through the small openings.

Several squirming fly larvae oozed out in single file, leading the way for a small surging stream of dark red, almost black colored blood to empty onto the road.

"Thanks mister," the man said, as he propped himself up leaning on the handle of the fork, as if he had just finished filling a barn's loft with a day's worth of hay.

"Any time," I answered, thinking that the road being blocked was the only reason that I had bothered to stop and help.

Besides the realization that the reanimated corpses had a tendency to take a deep meaningful crap in their drawers on occasion, the older, or should I refer to them as the more mature of the walking dead, seemed to be evolving a new attribute as part of their ongoing distasteful and visually disgusting death ritual.

I had seen a glimmer of this trait on the bus as we plowed through the gigantic horde that almost stopped us in our tracks on the way to the armory.

After Jacob and Beth had shot off some of the probing fingers of the zombies whose hands were intruding into the bus through the gun slits made in the side of the bus. We noticed, but weren't concerned at the time about the severed fingers that squirmed and flexed on the floor of the vehicle after being dislodged from their recently
nubbed
hands.

However, their evolution, or de-evolution, had now increased to the point that many of their body parts seemed to have a life of their own after being disjointed from the parts of the body that they had been previously attached too.

Although, this was a common occurrence from the beginning of the zombie takeover of our world when appertaining to the decapitated heads of the undead troglodytes, and a sight that every survivor was growing accustom to seeing.

An occurrence that my family and I had been privileged to witness, as this phenomenon was present from the very start.

When the glass from our broken patio door cleanly sliced off the head of our neighbor Julie, her severed skull had rolled underneath our kitchen table still snapping at us and foaming at the mouth, until I oxygenated the hostile cranium with a neatly placed 9mm slug.

Now, as me and the three strangers introduced ourselves, the convulsive bodies of some but not all of the former undead, which were now presently completely dead, twitched harmlessly, yet eerily at our feet.

Tim, Eric, and Matt were their names, and I could tell by the way they casually spoke their backwoods slang and carried themselves, that they were uneducated and had probably been financially poor their whole lives.

However, now that the alleged civilized world had come to an abrupt end, they no longer had to rely on the meager wages from their haphazard menial labor jobs to support their wants and needs. Now they had just been taking what they wanted from whoever they wanted to take it from, just as most everyone else was doing.

Unfortunately for them, this time they had decided to take from me, even after I had saved their asses from the imminent
doom
(no pun intended, that was earlier) that was about to befall them. I guess that old saying is true. "No good deed goes unpunished."

Anyway.

After stopping my vehicle in the middle of highway 40, and making light of the hillbillies situation before butchering my fair share of
their
deadly menace that blocked my way. I told them my plight (I needed to get to Indiana by driving through the mess we had just created on the roadway), their willingness to help was without hesitation (supposedly as a partial payment for saving their sorry asses), and we began to move some of the oscillating corpses to the shoulder of the road.

After we had cleared a tract through the now harmless but still undulating bodies that cluttered the freeway. There was enough room for me drive my truck between the wrecked vehicles and the dispatched zombies so that I could resume my trip north on my chosen route.

However, soon after the grisly work of moving the twitching corpses was finished, the three men invited me to join them at their campsite for some libation and relaxation (as further payment for saving their useless and soon to be
short
lives) before I continued on my journey toward the Badlands of Indiana.

******

Now as Jack has stated in the past, Mama
Doom
(not her real name) didn't raise a total fool. With his experience on the river with the cabin cruiser cannibal, and countless other encounters along the way, Jack was already leery of the three men's overly congenial attitude and willingness to be friends so quickly after they had met.

Their fine new clothes didn't match their accents or their use of the English language. It was quite clear from their Pigeon English and colloquial regionalisms that they weren't used to hobnobbing with the rich and famous.

However, their possession of something that didn't quite match, well let's just say, their personalities, was nothing out of the ordinary now days. For in these troubled times people were forced to make do with whatever they could find as they scavenged through the zombie apocalypse.

But when Jack spotted one of the men slip something into a bottle of whiskey just before handing it to him, he felt that his suspicions about the men were justified, and it was their choice that this was not going to be a fair fight, one way or the other.

So, when Jack refused to take a drink from the tainted bottle, the outward demeanor of the three men quickly changed from a happy go lucky mood, to a dead serious type of temperament.

Fortunately, Jack was prepared for the change of heart that the men were now displaying.

******

"Friend, are you sure you'z wants to go up into the Indiana badlands? I'z hear-ed some nasty stories bout dat place. Beware of da badlands up thar in Indiana, that's what's I'z hear-ed. You knows they don't call it da badlands for nutten," the younger man they called Tim warned.

"I've got business in Indiana," I responded.

"Must be some business to take you-uns into dat place," my new
friend
Tim replied.

"Drink up friend," the tall blonde man said to me, not knowing that I'd seen him put something into the bottle that he had handed to me. "Dis shit'll help take da edge off after a hard day of kill'in."

"No thanks, I'm trying to quit, you know, drinking and driving don't mix," I replied.

"One drink won't hurt, dis here is a celebration, we all lived through that zombie attack," the man said very convincingly.

"You know how it is, with practically every state having that ridiculous .08 limit; you can hardly have one beer before you're over the limit. You don't want me to get arrested for drunk driving do you," I said smiling, hiding the movement of my right hand with the whiskey bottle as I slid it down the front of my pants where I had stuffed my Glock 19 just in case. "Besides, I'm not much of a whiskey drinker, too much Indian blood in me ya know."

I had chosen my Glock to cram down the front of my trousers because of its short barrel. It was easier to conceal and I could still sit down without it jabbing it into my legs. Not to mention there was less of a chance of me shooting my dick off with that particular weapon because of the way the safeties were built into it.

The blonde haired man either couldn't seem to grasp my sense of humor, or else he was just in no mood for levity as he prodded me with his pitchfork.

"Okay friend, now I'm not asking you'z to take a drink, I'm telling you'z to take a drink," the blonde headed hillbilly named Eric now shouted while menacingly poking his pitchfork in my direction.

"Okay, okay, I didn't mean to offend anyone," I said, as I raised the bottle from my lap that was now hiding my 9mm pistol.

I had only brought my tomahawk, M-4, and Glock with me to the barn, and with my M-4 resting against the hay bale beside me, still within reach, but not likely to be grabbed before Eric could easily plunge his pitchfork into me. And with the distance between me and my opposition far enough away to yield the same results if I tried to pull out my tomahawk, I opted to used my pistol to try and get out of this potentially, and most likely soon to be fatal situation.

Since the bossy man named Eric had pissed me off by demanding that I drink from his tainted whiskey bottle, not to mention he was standing over me brandishing his primitive weapon just inches from my face. I decided to give them no quarter or mercy, because I knew that they had planned to give me neither as well.

Meanwhile the other two men were busy laughing and drinking from their own bottles of libation, thinking that it wouldn't be long before what was mine was going to be theirs.

Considering all of the variables that I could process in the split second that I had to reconnoiter my precarious circumstances, I felt that I had to choose to deal with the more aggressive one named Eric first, and take him out of the picture before he drove his pitchfork into my face. Then I would take care of the other two, hopefully before they even knew what happened.