Kat woke me up around three in the morning waving a leather face in mine. It scared me half to death, as I wasn't expecting that. She said while I was asleep, she dragged two of the dead leathers inside and began to skin them. She wanted us to start wearing them again. I wasn't looking forward to smelling like rotting corpse again, but it was worth a shot.
She was eagerly looking forward to her time to rest, and she wasted no time getting straight to it. I, on the other hand, had to struggle dozing off as I was finally sleeping solid. The headache was back, and the pain was helping me from closing my eyelids, but not by much. I decided to go outside and get some fresh air. It was roughly 30 degrees out, so I didn't expect to stay out long.
That's when I saw one. A leather was inspecting a brown Subaru station wagon completely oblivious of me watching. I decided test out the suit. I walked up behind he creature, not even bothering to mask the sounds of my footsteps and when I was about five feet from him, he turned around. I actually jumped back a bit, but I don't think that gesture registered with him. He looked at me, twitching his head back and forth, his nostrils flaring. He was sniffing me, but not in the way cats and dogs have to, by being on top of you. He was studying me, trying to make out what I was. I walked back and forth from him in normal human strides, and he simply kept watching. I even jumped up and down which caused him to jolt back, yet he made no movement towards me. I felt that the only reason why I had his attention in the first place was because I was behaving oddly to him. Had he been able to smell me, he would have attacked me long before I ever got close to him.
I tried to make myself scared of him, to get the fear hormones going. I wanted to test out Rampert's theory about them picking up on fear but I had no idea how to make myself scared of something that I just wasn't scared of at that time. He lost interest in me and went back to poking his head in the windows of the car. At that point, I lost interest in him and hacked away at his neck, dropping his head inside the station wagon while his body left a brownish red streak on the door.
I began to walk north along the east side of the building when I heard glass shatter followed by a scream. I raced to where I thought I heard the scream, seeing the broken window and lunged through it. I got up from my tumble and scanned the room quickly when I saw a zombie attacking a woman. I immediately ran to the zombie, grabbed its jacket from behind, yanked it off her and rammed the machete into the side of its skull. I twisted my hip to fling it away where momentum caused its head to slide off my blade that I had extended to my side.
The woman looked at me in panicked horror. Her brown eyes were full of tears spilling over and down her cheeks. Her nose ran thick with mucus and tendrils of spit hung from her chin. She was such a sad sight. She looked to be in her 40s, maybe early 50s, but she had a real firm build to her frame. As I was looking her over more, I noticed the bite mark on her right side, just below the breast. I hung my head and sighed. She saw my reaction and she knew. She knew there was no hope for her. The inevitable was coming for her.
She asked me, "Please, please kill me!" I put my hand to my head, not wanting to do another mercy killing, because they drain me so emotionally. And that's the hardest part. Not wanting to do something you know she needs to be done. When someone asks you to end them before they turn, they will most likely not be able to do it themselves. That's why they ask you. They need someone else to do it, and it needs to be done. If they turn, they become one of them, and they become a risk. If they aren't a risk to you, they'll be a risk to someone else. They might attack and bite someone else causing them to become a zombie and eventually attacking others. I really, really hate doing it.
She asked me again. I hate doing this even more, because I don't have a gun with me. I have a machete. It won't be an easy death. You might think all you have to do is chop the person's head off like you would a zombie, but it's not always that easy. With zombies, their bones lose calcium in the metabolism process, so they're easier to decapitate. With a human, a healthy human, the machete doesn't always cut through the spinal cord on the first try. I've seen it happen. A guy I was with a year ago had to kill his brother who was bit. The machete took two swings before he even hit bone, and then it took several hacks before his brother finally stopped screaming, and a few more hacks until his head was completely off.
Now she was on her knees, crawling to me and hugged herself around my legs crying into my crotch. I just prayed that the Alligator was still sharp enough for this job. I pushed her from me and looked into her misty eyes. I said I would. She mouthed thank you with her hands gripped at her chest. I told her to close to her eyes. As she did, I brought the machete back as far as I could, like it was a baseball bat and I was expecting a fastball straight down the middle. I took a step back, and with all my might and extra that I didn't have, I swung the machete at her making sure my swing was fully extended, the rectangular edge delivering all the energy of the blade to her neck, and I felt the hit. I felt the thump of the machete cutting through skin and muscle, and the snap as the force drove itself through the spinal cord followed by the release as it exited her neck from the other side. The swing sent her head end over end until it landed against the foot of her bed.
I slumped down on my knees letting my arms go slack, uttering out a sigh of relief for having a clean kill but at the same time crushed with the weight of another mercy killing. Once I got back up, I looked around the room when I saw her pack. It was a mountaineering pack. and it looked quite full. She was either a climber or a hiker, which would explain her perfect physique. I took the sheet off the bed, picked her head up and placed it as best as I could next to her body, and laid the sheet over her. I took the pack and went back out. I finished my round of the building outside and went back to our room to continue to stand guard.
When Kat woke about eight o'clock, we rummaged through the lady's pack together. There was a lot of food in there, along with some nutrient gum and both of us took a piece of started chewing. It would be nice to get some vitamins in our system that we couldn't get from mostly junk food. She had a few days worth clothes, and Kat said they looked close to her size. It seems morbid, though, to where a dead person's clothing. She also had climbing rope, so that meant she was a climber, and she had some professional looking climbing hammers as well. Those would be great to use for weapons. There was also a cell phone, but it seemed the battery was long since dead. No solar cell attachments were in the bag so getting any kind of charge for it would be out. Besides, I haven't seen a working cell tower in months.
We got back on the road about an hour later. The further north we pedaled, the more and more zombies we saw. First, it was just a couple here and there, then it became three to four. We soon saw packs of eight to 10 and that was quite worrisome. They all saw us but paid no mind, which meant the fresh zombie leather suits were working. I think it was the swim in the Illinois river the other day that washed most of the scent away. I'll have to keep that in mind. Even if rains, we should look to make new suits immediately after. In fact, it would be a good idea to make new suits whenever we get used to the smell.
We covered about 80 miles today. Kat's getting stronger. She did about 30 miles of biking herself. We're at Stephen's Point right now, and we were eyeing the municipal airport to make camp, but immediately discounted it when we saw it teeming with leathers. It was the most we saw at once since the migration of the horde that was marching to Indianapolis. There must have been hundreds, like everyone who was living here turned into zombies and decided to congregate at the airport. Instead, we rode into a nearby residential area and found a home with a tree house in their backyard. We thought it actually might be fun to camp in a tree house and spend the night, but we broke into the home anyway and took some extra blankets to keep us warm.
The tree house was a rather well put together house. It used similar materials as the house on the ground, almost a miniature version of itself but stuck in a tree. It even had two mattresses, although they were kid sized. We pushed them together and curled up under the blankets. Even thought we took our zombie suits off, the stench still clung to us. Kat didn't seem to care much, though, and started kissing me. I don't know if I ever told you or not, but "have sex in a tree house" was on my bucket list. Looks like I can cross that one off!
Until tomorrow.
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