The Zom Diary Read Online Free PDF Page B

count the beams and boards of my cavernous digs. I let the ladder down and climb down listening tentatively for noises.  I hear none. Dressing in the gear I set out yesterday, I munch a pear.  My pack is almost empty.  I figure that it will be a short trip, and if I find anything worth keeping, I want room for it.
         I heft my pack, sliding the scabbard of the sword between the tie-downs on the left hand side of the pack.  The spare clips go into the mesh pouch on the other side.  I clip on my belt pouch and rummage around a bit.  I like having food at hand.  I have also rolled a couple joints for the walk.  I leave my glass pipe on the table next to the neatly stacked bars of soap.  It is a good looking batch.
         I peek through a knothole about halfway down the door and see a clear coast.  Time to go.
         I pick my way through the trees following the trampled path left by my Chinese visitor.  My right arm rests on the top of the AK slung low from my shoulder and swaying lazily as I walk peering down at the grass.  I am glad for the boonie hat’s wide brim which keeps the morning/early afternoon sun from my eyes.
         About a quarter mile from the barn, the zombie’s path breaks from a straight line and zigzaggs off to the south.  Apparently, something caught the thing’s attention at that point and brought it toward the barn.
         I peer over my shoulder back the way I have come.  The slope of the hill hides any view of the farm, and I had no big fires yesterday.  I am starting to worry that any “undead” within a quarter mile of my location will start to home in on me.  Not good.
         So, this fellow had been tracking north and apparently caught my scent, turned and trudged more or less in an arrow straight line for the barn.  Well, he hadn’t come from town.  That only left points south… nothing there.  I frustrate myself with this speculation, there is no way to know.  Well, as long as I am out here, maybe I can still poke around a bit, maybe check the town.
         I walked out that way on the road a week or so after Bill’s house burned down.  There were abandoned cars everywhere, some smoldering ruins of houses, but mostly just a sense of abandonment.  Some houses were boarded up, as if people meant to return, while others had doors wide open, possessions strewn about, and there were bodies, of course.  Again, not all of the houses were empty.
         On the edge of town I had passed a small ranch-style house.  As I approached, I saw at the window a jerking, moaning fiend smeared in blood, slapping scrabbly stumps at the thick panes of the front door, painting them red.  Passing quickly by, I had heard thumping and the sound of furniture sliding on wood floors.  Turning back, I regarded the figure again.  This time it was at a back window slapping and smearing more and more blood; mouth agape as if straining to catch a drop of rain to cure its thirst.
         That stuck with me and had been as much of the town as I’d wanted to see.  After the first couple of zombie “crowds” that found their way to the barn, things had quieted down.  There had only been about two thousand people in town.  I figured most had left before things got really bad, heading wherever the news had promised safety or instructed them to go.
         Now, three years or so later, my curiosity has awakened.
         I pass through the dried out and dying remains of one of Bill’s less successful experiments in the west acreage.  Really, of five hundred or so acres, only the test crops close to the barn has been producing well since irrigation failed.
         I come to an old dirt road, the boundary between Bill’s and his neighbor’s land.  The brush is doing a nice job of reclaiming the road—mostly blackberries and soft woods.  I am still headed west, a few miles from town, when I stumble upon my first sign of civilization.  It is a small brick ranch