Journal: Danny Finn
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The Past
Its all a bit of a blur really, like the memories of some other guy that have somehow joined mine and bled into them. My new friend, Dr. Darth Frankenfurter, suggested I write it all down because sometimes that can jog stuff free. I don't know how true that is, or if he really is or was a doctor before all this madness kicked off, but I do know damn well that Darth Frankenfurter is not his real name. Everyone seems to have some sort of alias around here - Dekoy, Benigno, Zvic, Zereena... Pornmonger. Its like The Lord of the Flies or some shit. Not that I ever read it...
Really it all started for me when I woke up in the bunk-room with my head bandaged up. I say it all started then because I cannot remember a single thing before that. Oh, I know stuff, like my name is Danny Finn, I'm 28, I first got laid when I was 17, I used to tend bar at the annual 'Nurses and Firefighters - Meet Your Eventual Life-Partner' dinner and dance, stuff like that. But not the important stuff like why the Hell I was lying, all bandaged up, in the McDonald Drive fire station - my station. To make matters worse I can't even open the door to get out to the stairs as some clever sod had nailed a load of boards over it. I wouldn't realise the significance of this 'til much later.
Anyway, at this point its the pole or nothing so, even though I'm shaky on my legs (to this day I still don't know how long I was out for), I slide down into the main part of the building, which is deserted. This is wierd because the place is never deserted - not Sunday, not bank holiday, not at 3am, not even on Christams Day. And not only is it deserted, the place is in a bad way with kit strewn all across the bay and all of the engines standing there, doors open and engines ripped up, looking for all the world like great red beached whales. Hell, some of them even had thick, sticky congealed blood on them. Sometimes in the shape of hand prints.
It takes me a few minutes to get over the shock, check outside (nothing there - it was creepily quiet), and then search the building. By this time I'm thinking about that film where Kilian Murphy wakes up after a bike accident or something and the whole of London is deserted 'cos of that plague outbreak and seriously freaking myself out. The blood-stains I find on the walls and floors don't help much either and, by the time I've realised there footprints and drag marks leading out into the street, I've got my hands on an axe and felt quite ready to cut anything that even came close to making me jump in half. My last find was really the last straw - bloody scratch marks on the door that I was sleeping behind. It was time to get the Hell out of there.
Outside it's really quiet as I said and it's at this point I realise why the place looked weird earlier - its not the lack of people, or even the rubbish strewn in the streets, it the fact that all the ground and first floor windows of nearly all the buildings are boarded up or have great mountains of crap piled up behind them. '28 Days Later', I thought, clear as day, that was the name of that film.
So I head along the street thanking God I found an axe and actually hoping a passing copper would stop to ask me about it and its not long before I come across the first body. Now, what you've got to do at this point, if you can, is cast your maind back to what it was like before the outbreak. Bodies were not just found in the street like they are today and there certainly weren't great heaving piles of them stacked up against NT's and malls. Yeah, bodies turned up in the bad parts of town when a drug deal went wrong or a street robbery went a little too far, and even I'd seen my fair share from rare to crispy, but just seeing one in the street was a shock at the time. Rolling him over and seeing his throat torn out and full of maggots was no picnic either. After the first five, six, seven or so it became easier, but I sure as Hell didn't move any more.
Reality Check
So I'm walking down the deserted street, axe in hand, getting more and more spooked, and then I see him. About a hundred yards down the street there's this guy, with his back to me, crouched down and hunched over like he's looking for something he's dropped.
You cannot imagine the relief I felt at that moment to actually see another person. I think I started running and, when I was about half way toward him I called out. And then I stopped running. When this guy turned around to look at me, I couldn't place what was wrong, maybe because there was so much, I just slammed to a halt and stared. Then it all began to filter in, jostling for entrance to my head and space to settle, like a crowd getting on a plane. The blood around the mouth, the ripped clothes, the dead eyes and pale sagging skin, the totally animalistic manner, crouched low over the body that it had been feasting on as if to protect it from the new arrival.
My first zed. I've seen a thousand by now but I don't think you ever forget your first. I havn't anyway.
So I just stop dead. The zed watches me, I stare at the zed in blank incomprehension and then, as it lets out a cry of some sort, I leg it off up another street, not daring to look back to see if that thing is snapping at my heels,looking for somewhere to hide. I run until I can't run anymore and then grind to a halt again. "What if there are more of those things about?" I remember thinking and then, as if they heard me, two more of those things... shit lets just call them zeds, lumber around the corner. Looking back I can't see the one I just left but I know he's back there and the two in front are slowly moving toward me.
I looked around, pretty desperately I suppose, and saw an open doorway that wasn't boarded up which I made a dive for. I might as well not have bothered - the inner door was just as barricaded as any of the other buildings I had seen. But there was no time to look for somewhere else to hide, so I hefted my axe, took a quick look down the street at the zeds (a bit closer now and still moving) and started hacking at the barricades. That's when I heard the voice.
"Back away from the barricade man! If you keep trying to take it down you'll wish you hadn't, we're all armed in here and don't much care about killing people we don't know."
I stopped dead. It was another real human being. He sounded American but now was not the time to allow racial issues to intrude on the forming of a potentially beneficial new friendship.
"Let me in" I shouted "There's things out here, they look like something out of the Thriller video" banging on the barricaded door as I did so. The reply was less than inspiring - a laugh followed by "No shit Noobie. Now go find your own place to hide before we put a hole in your head."
And that was pretty much it. Looking around desperately the two zeds at the end of the road had stopped advancing, one a little bit further along than the other and were just standing there swaying a bit. If I had known what I know now I would have run past them or even took the opportunity to axe them down whilst they were out for the count, but at that time I was a noobie and I had no idea. So I ran for the other thing I had seen - an open window on the second floor of a building across the street and a bit closer to the lead zed.
They say the threat of death focusses the mind and the senses and I kinda believe it, if I hadn't expected those zeds to come for me I don't know if I ever would have spotted the slightly less secure building, but as it was I did and I went for it. Not looking around and expecting dead hands to grab me or teeth to bite into my flesh at any time, I scrambled up a drainpipe (not easy when you're holding an axe I can tell you)and into the empty room beyond. looking back the way I had come, I saw the two zeds had not moved and the first one I saw was nowhere in sight. I suddenly felt exhausted and, after checking the place really was secure, I slumped down on the floor and slipped into a restless sleep populated by dreams of shambling corpses, laughing unseen Americans and empty, rubbish-strewn streets.
Pornmonger, or a second reality check
This was to be a night of wake-up calls for me and I had no idea how painful they would be. First there were the zeds, a lot for anyone to handle mentally even if I managed to avoid all the physical stuff, and then there was my encounter with Pornmonger, the man who killed me and started me off down the road which would eventually end with my acceptance by the Malton Marshals.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself... It was the same night and I must have managed to drift off, despite having to make myself comfortable on the hard tile floor of the building I was in and constantly worrying about whether hoards of zeds would suddenly descend on my bolt-hole and start ripping the barricades appart. I guess I was woken by the window being pushed open and the guy doing the pushing climbing into the room. At first I thought he was another zed but his face was silhouetted in the light from the moon outside and he didn't look dead. And he was holding a shotgun.
It was the kind of face you would miss in a crowd - the kind of face that would pour you a beer or sell you some shoes or take your credit card at a hotel. Average, forgettable, all that. That's what I was thinking when he spotted me, grinned and said "I'm going to piss on your fucking corpse man". And I was still trying to make sense of what he was saying when he raised his shotgun and unloaded both barrels into my body.
After that I don't remember much, I think he reloaded two or three times more or maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on me before I died, but he just kept on shooting, opening me up like a can of tuna, blood and guts everywhere, until I just gave up and slipped away. It wasn't even painful at the end, just that guy's face, Pornmonger's face, grinning at me until I couldn't see it any more...
On Being Dead
Not a damn thing. Really. No funny lights or half remembered images or tortured nightmares. Nothing at all. I felt my life seeping away like the blood that was pooling under me and then...
... I just wake up outside an office block nowhere near the place I was killed in.
I remember lying there for a while, wondering if it was heaven (pretty shitty if it was) or Hell (not too bad in that case, short on Hellfire and tormenting demons, but a bit unfair for me to end up there overall given I was a pretty good guy when I was alive), and then I just sat up and realised I was still in Malton and still alive if in pain. How though I'd no idea after that shotgun blast I stopped with my chest. But alive notheless.
Clambering stiffly to my feet I realised that if I was still in Malton I needed to get off the streets quick before a zombie really finished me off, so I limped into the building ahead of me, pausing at the door to listen for the shuffling and groaning I'd learned to associate with the undead. When I heard nothing, I proceeded cautiously into the office and got the shock of my life.
From the big glowing logo over the reception desk I could see that this building had been owned by the Nechrotech company. Some sort of pharmaceutical giant or something that had moved into Malton a while back the news had said. But it was the fact that the logo was glowing that showed this building was powered and that the lobby was in fairly good repair that threw me. It was as if the world hadn't ended outside and it was business as usual for whoever was in here.
Moving across the lobby trying to take it all in did little to ease the confusion I was feeling. Zombies had definately been here, there were drag marks on the floor where shuffling zombie feet had been, stains on the obviously designer chairs where (really?) zombies had sat and scratch marks on the two lift doors either side of the desk and the rather more heavy duty doors on the walls to the left and right of me. I didn't want to look too closly at the obviously out of date magazines piled haphazardly on a nearby table as the thought of zombies reading them whilst they waited was a bit too much to bare.
Turning away from the magazines I caught my reflection in the mirrorlike beaten copper on the walls and stopped dead. I was me, sure, but I was a mess. A real mess. My shirt and jacket were caked in what must have been dried blood and hung from me in rags, a big hole blown through the middle. My trousers and shoes were the same - beaten and torn and also covered in blood. And my face, I looked and looked and then suddenly dropped to my knees retching over and over again.
My mouth, nose, chin, virtually my whole damn face was caked in dried blood. Thicker around my mouth and less in the outlying areas. Like a kid who had got a bit too enthusiastic with a chocolate sundae.
"We'd really rather you didn't puke in our lobby if you don't mind" said a voice suddenly from behind me "someone's got to clean that up". I spun around at this and scambled to my feet. There was a figure standing in one of the lifts, a shotgun in his hands pointing at the floor in a manner that suggested pointing at me could become an option at a moment's notice. I just stared at him.
"Come on if you're coming" he said impatiently after a few seconds of me looking at him "you don't want to be here when one of our clients arrive, they can get a bit... bitey". I just stared at the man for a moment longer and then, as he shuffled over to make room, entered the lift. "Going up" he said as he pressed the highest number on the keypad.
