Fear and Loathing After The Bomb: The Road Never Travelled
I will spare you the more mundane details of the past seven days of my trip to New Bunker, the only so called city I could conceivably walk to from my own shit hole of an outpost. The journal I’m keeping tracks everything from my bowel movements to what the variety of insects I forced into my mouth tasted like. For you, I have saved only the entries relevant to my ongoing commentary on this fucked up, corrupted filthy world that we call home:
Day 1:
My presence in my little community must have had a more calming effect than I had previously perceived.
It took me the better part of a day to travel the 50-odd kilometers to the mountain range. I feel as though I could’ve made better time had I not indulged in effectuating a little test of the chain-knife I had pilfered from the still warm corpse of a New American Pirate. NAPs seem to think that by ripping off and bastardizing the fashion and ethical sensibilities of nautical pirates from 400 years ago and tacking on the concept of a “New America”, they’re somehow a cut above the average run-of-the-mill organized group of psychopaths. The irony, surely lost on its members, is that there is nothing new about the combination of America and piracy. The poor fuck looked out of time and out of place, hundreds of kilometers from the sea, hundreds of years away from a time his clothing made any sort of practical sense.
He must’ve been “marooned”. Poor sap probably had no idea he was only 30 km from a twisted sort of civilization.
I would’ve passed him by had I not heard the steady, constant whirring of the chain-knife. My first instinct was that I was being stalked by some awful giant winged insect, ready to forcefully sodomize me with its irradiated proboscis. Against my better judgment I sought out the beast, ready to face my grizzly demise head on. Besides, I was itching to find out if the gun I had recently stolen would actually be capable of snuffing out someone or something’s life. What I found instead was the aforementioned NAP foot soldier (foot crewman? The nautical nomenclature of land pirates is an exercise in absurdity). He must have used the last of his strength to open up his arm. The chain-knife split the inside of his arm from wrist to elbow like a zipper, the buzzing blade still jammed into a frayed mess of muscle and flesh, clicking erratically against the bone.
He must have bled out in minutes.
The smell was overwhelming. Though the corpse was still fresh enough that it couldn’t have been rot; it was simply that this poor fucker smelled terribly to begin with. If vomit could be distilled, fermented, re-ingested then regurgitated, the resulting aroma would only just begin to be comparable. The chain-knife looked new enough and the fact that it was still trying to saw off his arm meant it was still in functioning if not excellent condition. Waste not; want not in the wasteland kiddies.
With only a cursory knowledge of biology and only a speculator knowledge of what makes a zombie tick I can say with a certain degree of certainty, or at least a degree of certainty that would allow me to debate the topic over drinks, that a zombie’s only real sense is smell. They smell the dead from miles away and then, at all costs, will shuffle their undead masses of meat towards it with a supernatural persistence. What about gunshots? We’ve all seen a shambling horde pause and change direction after a gunshot echoes through the streets. I would hazard a guess that they’re responding to the smell of gunpowder, not the noise. They will be equally attracted to explosions and fires. As a species we rarely resort to any of these things unless it’s in an attempt to kill one another. The zombies know this. Though, that implies that they have functioning reasoning faculties. They do not. This is somehow instinct. Explosions, gunshots, fires, each a distinct smell. More often than not, the smell of dead meat will surely follow. Walk towards one and you’re walking towards the other. Somehow this has been encoded into the zombies’ DNA. Those smells signal food: the only motivation a zombie has. I could be full of shit on this one. I’m probably not though. I’m probably right.
At any rate, this comically attired corpse would be lunch for the undead soon enough. Wouldn’t you know it that no more than 100 meters away there’s a tight knit little group of bodies ambling towards me, not even understanding yet why they’re doing so. They’re responding to the smell of the corpse, still fresh. The zombies can pick it up even though it is masked by the odour of the booze, sweat and vomit. They won’t know they’re about to feast until they get much closer, but still, the smell is enough to make them walk in this direction.
I would never condone killing a child. Not even the ones who abused military grade weaponry to such an extent that I am now wandering a desolate landscape. However, one of these hungry corpses is a child. A child who resembles my former cousin Chad. I fucking hated that kid. It was a slight detour and I had to behead the whole lot of them before I could fulfill my lifelong fantasy of driving a knife into that little cocksucker’s brain. The whole thing; hunting down the source of that irritating buzzing, the discovery of a NAP corpse and the grizzly slaughter of a half dozen zombies probably wasted a good 45 minutes of my day.
As I punch away at the keyboard though, I am safely in an alcove of the low lying foothills that overlook my former settlement. I can most assuredly say that it (the settlement) is completely ablaze.
Without me I guess they just have no more reason to live and the balance of chaos and order finally collapsed. Who knows if it was a bloodthirsty pack of children, some gang violence that rapidly escalated out of control, some undetected horde of zombies or some other equally destructive fourth option? A blaze of that magnitude would roar through those shoddy constructions with devastating ferocity. I would estimate a body count of a few thousand, a survival rate of about 50%. My ego takes a small amount of pleasure that apparently; they simply could not live without me.
Every zombie for kilometers will be zeroing in on that shithole of a town like an army of fat men to a free all you can eat buffet. The next few days might be difficult.
I’ll be walking away from that place; the undead will be walking towards it.
