Zombies Ch. 00

The fertilizer I'd pilfered would serve as the Ammonium Nitrate and the Gasoline would serve quite well as the Fuel Oil. I got to mixing, and after a steady hour of work ended up with a large pile of slippery, greasy fertilizer which I packed into a 44 gallon drum, still reveling at the pointless stuff people stored in their storage cages, and placing it on its side, the open aperture pointing towards the gate.

I ran two ends of an insulted wire, pilfered from Andrew's office, through a homemade detonator (a shotgun shell buried deep in the mixture) to a point eighty meters away, behind a reinforced concrete wall. I had stripped the insulation from the wire where it had ran through the shotgun shell, and hoped to god my basic knowledge in chemistry, physics and electronics worked.

I took the two ends of the wire and connected one end to the red terminal of the car battery pilfered from the Jaguar and closed my eyes and prayed. In tense moment I touched the other wire to the negative end of the terminal of the car battery, essentially creating a short circuit.

"Ouch!" I let out a yell, as the battery was sparked; but my voice was drowned out by a low boom followed by a much louder one. I felt a rumble flow through the ground and the wall I was leaning against shake fiercely.

'Fuck what if I bring the entire place down around my ahead?' I thought frantically in a moment of terror as I came to terms with what I had done. Smoke and dust filtered through the basement, the light of my flashlight illuminating it as it engulfed me. I coughed and pressed a handkerchief to my face.

"Time to see my dirty work," with slow steps, terrified that I'd failed, I rounded the corner to see a fantastic sight. The gate was a mangled mess lying around the floor of the basement. I wasn't sure exactly what happened but I assumed that the tremendous force that blew against the gate induced a moment that tore the top of the gate straight out of its bearings, causing it to crash straight down onto the basement floor.

I jumped in joy and yelled, despite the dull thudding in my ears blocking out all noise. It was in that moment that I noticed the zombie heading down the ramp at a fierce stagger; barely keeping itself from falling over it was moving that quickly.

"Shit!" I yelled again. Here I was so caught up in my excitement and my plan I had keen forgotten about the risks of creating too much noise or motion. My shotgun and crowbar were stowed carefully in the car; the only weapon I could feasibly call upon was a pair of wire cutters sitting in my pocket.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit," I yelled again as I sprinted for the H2, all too aware that there was probably more than one zombie on its way right now to my location. I hastily yanked open the door and slid into the driver's seat, exhaling deeply.

It wasn't exactly a close call, after all whilst I could run and sprint it appeared that zombies could barely manage more than a slow jog and often not even that. Still deadly in close quarters still but out in the open with plenty of space they were easy to avoid, provided you weren't facing too many.

Still, there was something terrifying and deeply wrong about a reanimated human corpse. Something in your soul that just screamed out against the travesty. I shook my mind to clear it and turned on the engine. Only after the headlights flooded the area with light did I turn off my forehead torch.

I slipped the engine into drive and started up the spiral ramp which separated the first floor from the second. I paused when I got to the to, peering through the smoke only just starting the thin as it escaped outside.

"There you are you little fucker," I addressed the lone zombie still shuffling forward, now a lot less scary with a car weighing several tones protecting me, "Say hello to my little friend."

And on that horrendous cliché I gunned the engine, mowing the zombie down in an explosion of blood and guts, not even slowing down as I drove over the twisted iron gate that had once kept my segregated from the outside world.