The Confrontation

Now that the web of communication throughout the world has been shut down due to power loss as well as the loss of humans to keep it running, I have no way to keep in contact with the outside world. I now write this journal to document my life from the point of the outbreak and the end of life as we know it until the end of my own life. There have been many obstacles to overcome as well as hardships to endure, thankfully I have so far managed to stay on top of them and make an efficient and almost comfortable way of life for myself.

I clearly remember the events that led up to the day that I have now come to call Armageddon, it was in the fall. Leaves were changing into their many bright colors of reds, oranges, and yellows, and would soon fall as the cold weather came and flushed them from the trees. At this time every year, there is no better place on Earth to watch the world do its work than at my family’s cabin in Somerset County where there are few people, less noise pollution from the outside world, and complete isolation from the world granted by the surrounding trees. With most of my closest friends gone, having left for college and my remaining friends busy with family and matters of the sort, I decided to take a ride up for the weekend with just my one friend Ben.

As we were packing the truck with all of our things, another news report came over the radio about disturbances in the west. These reports had been being broadcast for about a week now and were becoming more frequent as they seemed to get further east toward my home in what used to be a small town known as Harrison City, about a half hour east of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. All of the broadcasts had to do with satanic cults or something of the sort, in which people who were shabbily dressed, dirty and sometimes covered with blood would stumble into a town from the woods moaning and attack anyone who got too close, eating them alive if not stopped in time. As we listened to the report it stated that several hospitals were attacked from the inside, there was no clue as to how they got in or why, all that was known was that they would come from the critical care units and start attacking staff or other patients and that there were becoming increasingly more of them.

“Eh, that’s enough of that for one day,” Ben said as he switched off the radio. “This shits happening way out there, it’ll all get worked out. Crazy people seen to many horror movies for their own good and now they think they have to act like they’re in one,” he remarked almost to himself as he loaded a cooler with our food for the weekend into the back of my truck. “We gonna do some target shooting?” Ben asked me after the last of the baggage was situated in the back. I replied that we would and went inside to grab my firearms. Choosing what I thought would be fun to just shoot at rotten fruit in the woods for a while was a choice that saved my life. From my bedroom I grabbed my absolute favorites, my M1911A1 Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol and my Mossberg 800 12 gauge shotgun with a telescopic stock and about 200 rounds for each. I now thank God that I had just bought ammo and that I chose to bring it all with me. From the cabinet downstairs, I chose a few of my fathers guns that he rarely uses which were a WWII M1 Garand and an M1 carbine as well as the M-16 and .375 magnum pistol as well as the ammunition for all of them. “Think we’ll need all of those?” Ben asked as I put them into the back of the truck. “Varity is the spice of life,” was my reply.

The journey to the cabin took roughly about an hour as usual and was mostly uneventful except for the few dozen people we saw stumbling through a field along the road. They appeared lost, confused and unbalanced but there was no point in stopping due to the fact they were about 100yds from the town of Donegal which they looked to be heading for.

Upon our arrival, it was around 2 o’clock Saturday afternoon. We unloaded the truck and began to gather firewood for that evening’s campfire, some wood needed to be chopped which required getting the axe from the shed. After we had an ample amount of wood amassed for what we hoped would last the rest of the weekend, we returned inside and made dinner.
As dusk approached, we ventured outside and were making the fire, when we noticed a small group of people coming through the yard toward us moaning. “Can I help you?” I called out to them several times with no reply. Ben then walked toward them asking if they were ok, it was almost as soon as he reached them that they stepped into the pool of light created by the floodlight near the fire pit. What I saw was the most grotesque image I have ever seen in my life; four people, three men and a woman wearing tattered dirty rags of clothes that looked as if they’d been worn during miles of travel through woods and swamps, all of them had broken appendages or compound fractures. There were several chunks of their flesh missing that looked to be taken from human bites and they were covered from head to toe in what could have only been blood, weather it was their own or that of someone else I could not be certain.
Ben stumbled backward in fright and tripped over the chair behind him, as he lay on the ground too shocked to move the woman grabbed his leg and took a massive bite out of his calf. He screamed and kicked until he shook her off, but the others soon swarmed him. I yelled at them to get back, and grabbed a large stick off the ground, I charged toward them and hit the nearest man to me as hard as I could on the back instantly breaking the stick in half. The man fell on his face from the force of the blow but was soon staggering to his feet. He then came after me with his arms outstretched and reaching for me. I hit him again with the broken stick but to no avail, I then charged at him with the jagged end of the stick out in front of me and threw all my weight behind it as it made impact. When my improvised spear hit the man, it penetrated about six inches into his chest and came out the back…..it didn’t slow him in the smallest of ways.
With experience from when I had taken tae kwon do as well as from numerous sparring matches with my friend Adam, I was quite capable in the matter of hand to hand combat. Using these skills, I brought a roundhouse kick to the man’s head and took him off his feet for the second time. It was then that I saw the light glinting off metal by the fire….the axe from when we were chopping the wood. I dove over the fire pit and grabbed it by the handle quickly bringing it up as I charged toward where Ben was still on the ground attempting to ward off his assailants.
By this point I was frightened enough to take drastic measures, as the adrenaline pumped harder in my veins from my instinct to survive, I knew I was ready to kill these lunatics if I had to. Bringing the axe above my head I brought it down with all of my strength as well as the momentum of running directly onto the spine of the woman who first attacked Ben as she was down on all fours trying to grab another of his limbs. There was a crack as the axe broke her spine and in two more hit she was down and her torso nearly severed from her lower half. It was then that I noticed there was no blood coming from her and despite being in two halves she was still moving, seemingly unhurt!

Stunned I turned to see a man still kneeling by my now badly wounded friend looking at me. His eyes were yellow and his hands and face were covered in blood that I knew had to be Bens. The man made a slow lunge toward me that I dodged by side stepping to the right. As he missed me he fell to the ground and I took the opportunity to bring the axe down on the back of his head. The contents of his skull flew messily about and he lay still, he did not move again. I knew at this point that the head was their only weakness.
Pulling my axe free, I turned my attention back to the woman whom was now dragging the upper half of her torso back toward Ben with only her arms to continue her attack, again I lifted the axe and hit her again, this time on the back of the head as I had done before to the man that attempted to attack me. She now was also finally brought down for good and would not attack again. I pulled on the handle of the axe hoping to finish off the other four of them only to find that it was stuck in the woman’s skull.

Before I was able to free it I felt hands on my shoulder, I instinctively threw a hard side kick into the ribs of the man on my left, his bones were brittle and my foot smashed through his torso putting him badly off balance. Spinning to face him I delivered a front kick to his chin, removing his jaw and knocking him onto his back.

Ben was by this point able to move due to the fact that he now only had to deal with one rather than four. His legs were far to mauled to be of use to him, and he was near to unconsciousness from loss of blood, but he was still able to grab one of the burning logs out of the fire and use it as a club to start smashing on his one remaining attacker’s head. While he was fighting off that man, turned my attention back to the one I had impaled with the firewood spear.
Next to the fire pit there is a small picnic area which consists of a patio made of loose bricks, these bricks were the only objects in the area I could see that could serve as any form of weapon. Stooping low I grabbed one from the ground and charged the one still standing and impaled man and brought the brick down on his head instantly knocking him to the ground, where I proceeded to hit his head until he stopped moving.

By this point Ben had finished off the last of his assailants and I ran over to see how badly he was hurt. Upon checking I saw that his legs were nearly destroyed and there were chunks missing from his lower abdomen. He was losing consciousness and saying that he was feeling cold. I was about to run into the house to call for an ambulance when I noticed that our struggling had attracted more of these….things….to us, there were roughly about a dozen of them coming from across the front lawn which I knew to be the only direction of any other cabins. “Everyone else must be dead,” was the only thing I said to Ben as I grabbed him by the shoulders and started to drag him toward the house. He started to convulse and then went limp with a final sigh.

I continued to drag him not sure if he was dead or alive, by the time I got to the base of the stairs with the new deranged people getting closer, Ben start to move again. He looked up at me and opened his eyes, they had gone from the blue they used to be to the same sickly yellow that the man’s at the fire had been. Shocked, I dropped him to the ground where he began to moan and pull himself along the ground with his arms toward me, snapping his jaws. It was then that I remembered the news cast from earlier in the day that stated how hospitals were attacked from the inside starting in the morgues or critical care divisions. Everyone killed by these cultists were coming back to life as one of their murderers.

Startled, confused, and more frightened than I had ever been I turned and ran into the house where I locked the door. Immediately I ran for the back bedroom where I had put all of the weapons after we unloaded the truck. First, I grabbed my .45 in its shoulder holster and strapped it on checking the clip to see it was loaded. I then found my extra magazine holder which held four clips that thankfully were all loaded, and hooked it to my holster rig. I could hear these murderous fools now scratching at my front door, now that I had one weapon ready to fire, I had time to load the others. Next I pulled out my 12 gauge and began putting shells into the tube. I had only got six shells into in when the door caved in and they began to file into my house.

Seeing how their assault was slowed by the way they had to come through the door one at a time and they were all trying to get through at once, I took the opportunity to lean out around the corner and began to pump a virtual wall of lead shot at them. They blew apart like the watermelons my friends and I used to use for target practice. I watched as an arm became detached and a leg came off below the knee, horrified at the mere thought of what I was doing to live people, the only thought that consoled me as I continued to pump the weapon and pull the trigger was that they were not people anymore, they were something else that I didn’t know.
A final time I slammed the chamber closed and pulled the trigger when the dreaded inevitability occurred that I heard the hollow “click” that told me the tube was empty. It was at this time that I was glad I had chosen this model when I was at a gun show with Skivvy, Kurt, and Roney. Though I had fired all eight rounds that the weapon held, on the side of the collapsible stock, there is a cartridge rack that holds and additional five rounds. I began to grab the shells from the rack and feed them back into the tube as quickly as I could.

It was during this lull in my gunfire while reloading that I noticed that of all the people I had torn to shreds as they came threw the door, I had not dropped one of them for good. All of them were now getting back to their feet and continuing their slow, moaning advance toward me. Now I was just getting annoyed as this new terror drove even more adrenaline into my system.
I slammed the pump forward racking a new shell into the chamber, and pulling the stock out to its full length. I gripped the powerful weapon in my hands and brought it to my shoulder putting the first poor bastards head in my sights. The shotgun fired a blast of unimaginable power out of the barrel and was nothing short of devastating when the projectiles hit their target and turned it into powder.

Pumping the next round into the chamber and taking aim I put brought down another one, I aimed and fired until I had brought down five and expended all my ammunition on hand, I didn’t have the time to dig through my bag for more shells and reload. There were still my M-16 and M1 carbine behind me, unfortunately I never keep the clips loaded because constant pressure on the springs from being depressed can wear them out and cause them to not feed, and there was no time to load them. My M1 Garand however takes eight round clips that only hold the ammunition, the spring action is provided by the weapon itself, and there were three bandoliers with sixteen clips apiece in the case with it.

Yanking my .45 from holster and slamming the slide back to pull a round into the chamber and leveling it at my nearest enemy, I smiled slightly knowing now that these bastards didn’t stand a snowballs chance in hell of winning this one. I squeezed the trigger, the report sounded like a grenade going off in my hand as the explosion sent the large slow moving slug out of the front and pushed the slide back to cycle another round to be fired. The bullet blew through the first menace’s head like a wrecking ball and exited out the back hitting another in the shoulder. The one without a head fell to the floor while the other advanced with a baseball sized hole in his arm.

Still aiming for the heads I emptied the clip rapidly dropping three more. Counting my shots I had another magazine ready as soon as the first was empty, I quickly swapped clips dropping the empty one on the floor and resumed firing. After the second was empty I had cleared them back and thinned them out enough that I had time to grab the M1. I slung a bandolier around my neck and jammed a clip down into the auto closing breech which immediately slammed itself shut. I went back to the door and got down on one knee bringing the rifle up and looking through the peep sight slowly picking off my enemies one by one. There were seven left…they were down in seven shots, and I knew the last one in the chamber belonged to my lost friend whom could be heard moaning at the base of the stairs out front. He will be missed, but not forgotten.