My name is Erik Allens. I was the guy behind Allens Technology Institute. We made very precise, specialized computer parts. Most of the items were... nevermind. It's not like you care about any of that. Actually, it's not like any of you would care about me at all. I'm not one of you anymore, I'm one of them; but not fully, never fully for some reason.
Obviously I've given a lot of thought to this. It's one of the many reasons that when I found this silly little notebook covered with cartoon kittens, I kept it. I keep it in my backpack along with a few other things I've decided are dear to me. You know, stuff like photographs. I don't know, perhaps if I fill this one up then I'll start another. I suppose it's better to talk to myself than go completely insane. And its not like they are good for any conversation. At least they leave me alone for the most part, I guess that's something.
I can just picture the shock on the face of one of those SUV goons if they saw me sitting here under this tree right now. Backpack sat out beside me, my baseball cap pulled low with sunglasses on. Here I am, writing away in a journal on a pleasant spring morning. Hell, the poor bastard might think he'd traveled back in time a few months and was simply staring at some grad student doing homework. Granted, the pistol and large caliber shotgun laying on top my pack might give him pause, but it might make him think I'm like him.
Well, at least until the imaginary dude saw that I'm missing my left arm from below the elbow.
I have a few other physical signs. My skin has turned a pale, almost grayish cast and my gums have receded badly. My eyes are horribly jaundiced and my hair has almost all fallen out. I've got a few other scrapes and wounds, but nothing that bothers me. I don't really feel physical sensation like I used to. No, the only thing I feel anymore is hungry. No cold, no pain, just hunger.
It wells up in the stomach, but aches throughout the body. It rattles in my skull, like my head is hollow and only if I eat does it subside for a short time. I need to eat about everyday, or I start to get aggressive. The longer I go without food, it's like the faster and more angry I get. After I eat, or if I eat too much I get sluggish. That's how I almost got blasted two days ago.
Right after I ate that little girl.
* * * * *
Sorry, I had to stop there for a bit. Emotionally, mentally, I'm still fully myself. Can you fathom being so hungry, feeling so empty inside and knowing that only the warm flesh of living humans can ease it? If my tear ducts hadn't dried up and cracked open, I would still weep after every meal. Even now after I have my fill, I crawl away apologizing to the remains. It's pathetic, but what else am I to do? Trying to fight it off makes it worse and eventually I start to lose what little control...
* * * * *
It's evening now. I'm shacked up in a large office building. There are a few others roaming about mindlessly here. Good. That will hopefully keep the living away. I just want to rest.
I came upon a bad scene today. A young couple had found themselves trapped in an underground carport. The husband or boyfriend was trying to fight the others off and I managed to stay in control long enough to keep to the back. I didn't really feel such remorse this time; they were food for about a dozen no matter what. The guy went down quick, but the woman had just her legs ripped off. Her man had been relatively large and the others were already feeling the effects.
She was dragging herself away, making little hiccup noises. Her shredded stumps kept making small stamp marks of red on the cement. She was seething with infection but it wouldn't register for about forty-eight hours. She'd be quite dead by then. Dead and legless. By this point I just felt bad. I chewed off her head through the neck completely. I ate a little of her entrails, too, but that came later. She wouldn't be coming back.
I was already slinging my backpack on again when the rest fell in and started playing with her guts. I hadn't made it a full mile before I heard the gunshots. So much for my comrades.
I don't know why I'm like this, why I'm an anomaly. I retain all my memories and intellect, almost all of my motor skills and senses. Hell, my sense of smell has increased ten fold. I can smell a refuse fire burning a mile away in the wind is right. I can smell out the living in the same manner.
Considering all the possibilities, only two could make any sense. Either I possess some freak bit of DNA, some unique genetic marker that allowed me to stay functional after the change, or... or God simply hates me. Never being much of a religious man, I really try to lean towards the former. That's another reason why I'm writing this. Shit, I'd be more than happy to allow some few remaining scientists poke me about to try and figure this all out. I know that will never happen, however. I would never survive long enough to make it into their hands. The SUV goons are fanatical in their pursuits and not that I really blame them.
No, the best I can do is write it all down. Write about the sensations of hunger and of the dull throb where my left forearm should be. Maybe someday it will get into the hands of brilliant men and they'll discover something that will end this all. I guess now you know why I don't just put a bullet in my own head. Well, that and because I'm a coward. I've eaten the remains of something like fifty people now. And while God may not hate me, I don't think any shiny, bearded man is going to welcome me into heaven.
* * * * *
It's been a few days. I became quite depressed after my last entry in this thing, but I know I have certain pieces of information that I have to pass on. It's the only thing way I can attempt to make amends.
Those first few days were bad as most will remember. Boston was where it started, and within thirty-six hours, the infection was spreading up and down the east coast. From Vermont to South Carolina, everything turned into a mad by the fifth day. On the sixth day, they tried to set up quarrintine east of the Mississippi. Pointless, and by the seventh day we had it in California. Here in Cleveland, we got hit mostly on those fifth and sixth days. It was the seventh day that the barricades outside of manufacturing facility broke and they got in.
I remember my head foreman trying to burn the others out. They just climbed in through the far end and got us in the rear as we tried to make an escape. All I recall were fires and screams and blood everywhere.
I woke up with an arm in my lap. It wasn't mine. Oh, mine was gone, but whoever else had lost a limb that day, I wound up with it. It was hard to breath, but my lungs didn't really hurt, per say. It almost felt like there was fluid in them. At the time I contributed it to smoke inhalation. I couldn't figure out why my arm wasn't killing me, though. Laying in the open doorway of the second garage, I could see a bright, beautiful morning rising outside. Behind me? The charred carnage of my dreams and employees.
Staggering out from the wreckage of the facility, I saw the remains of my secretary. She had been torn in half and her face was fully eaten off. I could only tell it was her by her ridiculous bright pink suit. I screamed, I cried, I wanted to vomit but I couldn't. That was when the door to the machine shop open and I heard my name.
"Mr. Allens? Erik... is that you?"
It was my inventory clerk, Susan Godfry and her assistant Juli Hathaway, terrified but very much alive.
"Oh God, Susan..." I began.
Then something changed.
Something changed in me, something penetrating and full.
I felt it in my balls and in my stomach. It pounded behind my eyeballs and I realized it was a smell. It was the scent of meat, of living flesh, it was Susan and Juli.
Rocking back on my feet, I almost fell over. I stumbled and grabbed at my face, like I thought I could cover the scent or something. I don't know. I know my inventory clerks thought I was in shock, thought I was losing it. They came rushing up to me, to their boss, to who they thought was another of the living to console my pain and grief.
Before I even knew what I was doing, I had grabbed Juli with my good arm and wrapped my battered limb around Susan, drawing her in close. I ripped out a good portion of Susan's cheek with one thrust of my teeth. She stumbled away creaming as I brought Juli down to the ground hard and tore open her exposed belly with two bites. I beat Juli with my fists, screaming and crying the whole time, beating her into a pulp while I buried my face into her lower torso and fed. Susan ran off shrieking, clutching her face. I never saw her again, but she had undoubtedly become infected.
Between sobs I kept eating Juli. Occasionally I would vomit, but within moments I would return to my food. She had been a small woman, but even still, I ate almost all of her skin, muscles and organs. I laid back in the grass outside the smoking ruins of my manufacturing facility and wanted to die. But I didn't and eventually I got up. I got up and started searching.
* * * * *
A day later. A ate one of those SVU goons today, the local thugs hired as mercenaries to pop off my kind. I didn't really care about it much, mostly because they're top notch assholes. All survivalist freaks and gun wackos of the highest order. I lured him in an apartment complex, took an easy bullet in the gut and tore into his throat. Shit, I had already munched my full and high-tailed it out of there before his fuckbuddies got inside to investigate the shot.
Anyhow...
Let me make this perfectly clear; there is no weird social or cultural hierarchy going on with my kind. They seem to basically follow the most simple of instincts, and that's to feed. They don't smell me as one of the living, so they pretty much wander past me. If I try to talk to them, they perk up for a minute, but quickly return to whatever roaming they were doing before. I think they have a rudimentary understanding that speech might lead them to dinner, but the sense of smell is the most acute way they track down their prey.
As you are probably fully aware, you can only kill the others by destroying the brain of by severing the head. A nice big burning works, too. These are also the only methods to keep victims from rising back up once infected. I've watched this process. It's all about the saliva. Whether a single bite on the finger or the entire lower portion eaten, a person will die from the infection with thirty-six to forty-eight hours. Quicker if the wound is more severe. Once they die, they seem to reanimate within about four to six hours.
It's always the same, the body starts to twitch and eventually awakens. There's nothing there behind those eyes, no intelligence and no regard. Just a machine now with the only purpose but to eat. I've watched others spawn new, and I've done it, too. Those who return from my infection are no different than the others.
I wonder... I wonder about that day I got infected. It was only my left forearm, not much at all considering. Did I taste bad? Did something about my DNA, my genetic code deep down in my flesh not agree with the delicate palate of my attacker? Is that why I walk away almost whole? Hmmm...
* * * * *
Today was... today was not a good day. I don't...
* * * * *
I ate a mother and her baby yesterday. The mother was already dying from a car wreck injury. I found the vehicle smoking along the side of a highway. I don't know what caused her to veer off and hit the guardrail, but she spun out and smashed into an abandoned tractor trailer. She was unconscious when I came upon her, and at least I'm grateful for that. I had her head off before she could even flutter her eyelids.
I wanted to leave the baby. I wanted to, but... what would it matter. I had never smelled anything like it. It was a richer scent than anything I had ever taken in. It was screaming in the car seat and it would have attracted the others so quickly. At least I was quick, at least I did it painlessly. I... I'm so sorry.
I wish so badly that there was another like me, someone else damned in the same manner. I'm so lonely, I haven't talked to anyone in what seems like an eternity. Not even cats or dogs will come near me. I have no desire to eat them, but they simply know better. They know I'm an undead thing, that I'm not natural.
* * * * *
Now that I've filled up this little pad, I'm not sure what to do with it. Part of me wants to keep it, but I'm afraid if I get popped in the head by an SVU goon, it'll just get tossed in the fire with the rest of me. They've taken to dragging the carcasses behind them now in the vehicles. Cute, huh?
I've actually got a few more journals now. I think I'm going to copy everything down from this one into one of the others and leave it somewhere, somewhere... important. I'll keep the original on me and I'll keep writing.
This little glass jar, I'm leaving this here, too. Inside, it contains a piece of my arm. I, um... drooled into it as well, so be careful. Maybe someone with a biology background or what might be left of the CDC can figure it out. Figure me out. So yeah, if you see a zombie out there with a backpack, sunglasses and a Cleveland Indians baseball cap on, scribbling away in a journal - try not to shoot me in the head first.
Erik K. Allens
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ARCHIVIST NOTE: The Allens Journal was found sitting neatly boxed on top of the circulation desk at the City of Columbus Public Library. With it were the carefully packaged portions of tissue and fluid as described within. It was through the study of these biological items that the Z3.0 Vaccination was created. No other written works by Allens have ever been found, nor have any other biological remains. There has never been another reported case of sentient-reanimation. Scientists, as of today's date, still have not discovered the reason behind the subject's unique semi-immunity.
rating: 7
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