The Day They Turned

Michael A. Dyer

After serving two tours of duty in the shitty prequel to WWIII going on in the Middle East, the last thing Terry Westmore expected to come home to was a broken family, unemployment, and the god damn zombie apocalypse looming around the corner. At first he’d tried to fit in, taking some private contractor jobs handling security and loss prevention duties for a few shit-don’t-stink fat cats, but ultimately his “attitude problems” and growing disrespect for authority got in the way of him keeping any permanent occupational residency. That was fine with him, he’d always gotten by, and some odd jobs, mostly involving back breaking manual labor, helped in the lean months.

Terry had never really been Blackwater material, or any number of private shadow agencies doing the brunt of the dirty work behind the scenes, but he had engaged in his fair share of secretive special ops missions during his time in the marines. In a way, he was glad the undead had taken over; he had been miserable bending over and being a bitch for Uncle Sam and never enjoyed his cameo role in the theater of war. He worked best alone, but once a marine always a marine. Semper Fucking Fi!

When he was honest with himself, which usually occurred early in the AM hours after finishing a fifth of Beam alone in the dark beneath a squeaking ceiling fan, he knew that losing Laura, his fiancée, had been the last straw. He could pretend, grow a pair and “be a man”, but it still tore him up pretty bad inside to know that while he was off serving his country and doing his “patriotic duty”, whatever the hell that meant, his girlfriend of four years was out fucking around with some well to do bank manager who wore a bad toupee and drove a yellow Porsche. Life lesson, never trust a natural blond with blue eyes and nice tits.

It might sound cliché, but Terry had literally lost count of how many people he had killed with his own hands, a few in close quarters combat after feeling the uncompromising edge of his blade. Civilians were amongst the dead, women and children, and the fact that it had been accidental did little to ease his mind. Some nights he lay awake for hours, covered in sweat and the stink of cheap cigarettes, wondering why he hadn’t tried out for an information analyst position, or linguistic interception. It would have made his sleep a whole lot more restful. A handful of close call roadside bomb attacks still rattled his brains whenever he closed his eyes and insomnia greeted him for weeks at a time.

Yet, if we’re being honest with ourselves here, simply put, part of Terry, the part who was a non-apologetic mercenary for his country, had grown to enjoy the pleasure of the kill. That indescribable rush which came with taking the life of an enemy combatant over the relentless noise of heavy artillery fire. Of course, he never told anybody that he “got off” on killing other men on the battlefield, even those few he allowed close enough to become friends and drinking buddies, but you didn’t have to look very hard into his eyes to see the truth. That cold blue ice could stare holes through even the most brave, drunken, and belligerent asshole at the bar. He worked out regularly, his muscles were taut, his reflexes like well oiled springs ready for trouble at a moment’s notice. At six-feet-four and pushing two hundred and fifty pounds, with years of combat training, you’d have to be an idiot to fuck with Terry Westmore in a fair fight. War is hell, as they say, and Terry could be a demon with the worst of them.

There had almost been a few altercations since he came home from the war, usually with some inebriated three hundred and fifty pound blubbery Baby Huey type trying to size him up after one too many beers, but it had never come to blows. Terry’s casual and self-assured tone of confrontation, and his eyes, the daring eyes of a killer, had always nixed the fight before it started. Deep in his heart, or perhaps not so deep after all, Terry had regretted that the confrontations hadn’t ended in blood, broken bones, and shattered teeth. He almost lost as much sleep mulling over missed opportunities to smash someone’s face as he did in brooding about the men he had killed overseas, fallen comrades in arms, and Laura.

His would-be wife had been his last link to the real world. He rarely talked to his sister and father, and his mother died when he was still young enough to be entertained by singing puppets on Saturday morning TV. His sister had become a bona fide dike during high school, which put a wedge between their sibling relationship, and his father, the abusive piece of shit, spent most of his time at the bottom of a bottle. Terry still had the scar above his right eye from when his father had burned him with a cigarette after Terry, barely even a teenager, hadn’t finished the nightly chores before bed. He still rubbed that scar from time to time, with calloused fingers, restlessly brooding.

What it came down to, Terry was right at home in this New Frontier, surviving in a world of the living dead. Terry referred to them as “meat heads”. Destroy the meat, the brain, and even the most relentless zombie fell impotent, just like in the movies. Within six months of returning to the states the first outbreaks had started, a viral epidemic of biblical proportions that quickly ravished the continent with the swift, mindless fury of hungry locusts. In many ways the world had been set back a couple centuries, or at least America’s clock. Not so long ago the settlers had to worry about the red savages, the fucking Indians, massacring their encampments and raping their women as they struggled to build shelter, plant crops, harvest the fruits of their endless toil and labor while making new lives for themselves. The New Frontier was equally about self sufficiency, conquering the terrain, and wiping out the meat heads.

Of course, Terry knew that this version of history was bullshit and that the Native Americans were victimized on this continent to a much greater degree than the religiously obsessed white man, but the analogy still stood. The post zombie world was a New Frontier land, filled with many of the same hazards our ancestors had faced only a couple hundred years back. The settlers had become survivors, out numbered ten-to-one and fighting for their right to live in freedom. Or maybe today’s survivors were actually more akin to the Indians struggling to take back their native land from the incoming hoards and invaders. Terry didn’t fucking know, he wasn’t much of an intellectual.

What Terry did know is that he had grown to hate the greasy hypocrisy and slime of America. The dream had become a nightmare and the country was going to hell long before the meat heads showed up. As far as he was concerned, the rise of the living dead perfectly signified the fat bloated corpse of America, long ago decayed. It was nothing but a nation of greedy, apathetic, and power crazed inbreds stretching their wicked tentacles to every foreign shore with the twisted confidence of privileged rats. The thieving, whoring, lying, holier-than-thou cock-suckers always found the strangest of allies and bed fellows. Israel? Fuck, Terry wasn’t racist or anti-Semitic, at least not to the degree of joining the KKK, but there were times that bigotry was actually based in observation and educated facts.

If you didn’t want to get eaten by a crocodile don’t go wading around in the god damn swamp, and if you didn’t want a shark to rip you apart, don’t swim in the bloody ocean. Yet, the crocks and sharks were just beasts, living the only way they knew how. The murdering Zionists? They were among the most cunning of predators and could smell chum in the water from a world away. He had little doubt that it was some nasty black op experiment which was responsible for the outbreak in the first place, either accidentally unleashed, or all according to well laid Biblical mechanization. He said it before and he’d say it again, the world was fucked decades before the zombies showed up to eat you.

It had taken some work, quite a bit of effort in fact, but Terry had broken free of his programming and was no longer subscribed to the Kool-Aid, despite being inundated with endless propaganda during his military service. Pumped full of various experimental drugs, they told him it would make for a “better soldier”. And what were all those drugs they practically forced into his system? What about all those blackouts he’d had while laying awake in the stinking desert, the smell of smoke and death and blood surrounding him? Call it biting the hand that feeds, but Terry was a big dog now who answered to no masters.

Things had changed in this New Frontier, but not as much as you might expect, at least not for Terry. There were miles upon miles of woods and wilderness in his home state of Nebraska, and Terry had claimed his forty acres. Actually, it was more like an acre, nestled away in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of forest, open fields, and clean running streams. When the shit hit the fan, Terry erected a humble fort, little more than a shack really, and had called it home for the past month. There was no plumbing but at least he had a pot to piss in, so that was something. Occasionally, one of the meat heads would wander into his territory and he’d track it down with his machete, but for the most part there was blessed solitude. Let the rest of the world disappear and rot in the ground, he was content in his confinement from civilization, broken.

There were times when he needed to travel into town for supplies however, and his truck got him there while his pump action shotgun and Desert Eagle ensured that he got home safe. He didn’t take any real pleasure from killing his decaying fellow Americans, but when it came to survival there was a sense of “them or me” mentality which never failed to get his blood pumping and senses running on high alert. The whiskey helped, as did the various medications he’d been prescribed for depression after returning home from the war. He knew it was a sign of weakness but still took his daily medications, at least the few pills that were left. His pretentious and spoiled doctor, presumably dead by now, another victim of the flesh eating undead holocaust. Good riddance!

His adventures into town for supplies usually resulted in the death of at least half a dozen meat heads. Sometimes he’d make it up close and personal with a nailed baseball bat, though usually it was more a game of stalking, with the long range precision of gun fire splattering their brains on the concrete like abstract paintings from some overrated yuppie artist. Their rotting flesh fouled the air while putrefied faces seemingly melted off their yellow skulls like marshmallows over an open fire. He rarely ran into any survivors these days and the ones he did encounter were weak, easy prey. There wasn’t time for sympathy, like it or not, it was now survival of the fittest. Who knows, maybe it always had been.

It must have been going on midnight as he sat by the fire in front of his meek fortress. He ate squirrel while drinking enough warm beer to grant double vision. He thought over his kills for the day and wondered if it was really killing if they were already dead? A realization dawned on him that despite contempt for this lazy and egotistical nation of technologically dependent savages, it was still his home. If humanity was to stand any chance for future generations, than more people, people like him, would have to take the initiative towards destroying the pestilence ravishing the country. He had a few hundred rounds of ammo, and the tools to make more if necessary. There were always Molotov cocktails as well, not to mention the explosives which only required the proper supplies, steady hands, and attention to detail.

Beneath the stars of an ink black night, his mind was made up. He’d help humanity by facing the scourge head-on, unlike the other cowards out there who were content being victims. He respected all the bounties that Mother Nature afforded, but she was still his bitch. He wouldn’t quietly lay down as she reclaimed what was hers, there was still some fight left in this race of evolved war-monkeys. It was in his training, and maybe even his destiny and DNA, to challenge the system of the Beast. There was no worse Beast than the zombie plague threatening to devour his town, the world. The gears were in motion, and he suspected that the internal machinery of his decision making had been planning for this inevitable outcome even while sitting beneath the twinkling stars, stationed in Afghanistan.

He made Molotov’s, hating to waste the rations of booze but planning on getting more while in town, and worked on dynamite strong enough to take an arm, leg, or appendage off of even the toughest prey. Terry spent hours, days, plotting and planning. His goal was to take out at least fifty of the meat heads in one fell swoop, like a predatory bird, and another hundred the next time he hit the road. There were ideas in his head, an unquestionable voice of authority pressing him like a drill sergeant, telling him that it wasn’t unrealistic to kill a thousand of the mother fuckers a month, if he really dedicated himself. Thinking of their rotted faces and hungry mouths, always consuming like vultures, he had no question of his devotion and dedication to the cause. If humanity were to survive, there needed to be more like him. He hoped to hell that some of his brothers in arms, his war buddies were out there, sharing similar thoughts and striking back against the hoards of unholy meat heads devouring the populace. The only way to get the nation back was to take it back, one head at a time if need be.

Like in the movies, Terry realized that the undead were drawn to all the familiar places which registered in their primitive reptilian brains: strip malls, bars, super markets, fast food restaurants and the like. Driving with the motivation of salvation, for himself and countless others, he managed to destroy twenty of the monsters in the bloody siege of a single day’s work. Ironically and not very surprisingly, half of his kills came at the receiving end of Molotov’s thrown at the entrance of the local WalMart. Three more of the disgusting fiends were destroyed when hitting them head on with his truck, while a handful of others met the receiving end of a shot gun, breathing the fire of retribution like an angry dragon.

Terry sat in his tiny fortress that night, shivering with the autumn winds. Winter would soon arrive with the now forgotten holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and he was out of pills. He drank rum and wrote in his journal, hidden from the rest of the world like a hermit that didn’t want to be found. Fresh rabbit sat in his grumbling belly like a stone, but he wouldn’t be weak. If his quota of one thousand zombie heads was to be met, he’d have to work harder. He was no hero, had never considered himself one, but the world wasn’t going to save itself, that much had become obvious. The government was doing jack shit to protect its citizenry, it was up to individuals to make the difference.

Three days later he hit various stops, guns blazing and explosives causing immeasurable bodily damage. Working in stealth, when he could, he’d sneak up behind the ghouls and destroy their brains by any means available. It was hard to come upon survivors these days and he took comfort with the calculated efficiency of a well trained warrior. A drive by had killed at least a dozen zombies lingering around a Burger King parking lot, while ten or twenty more were destroyed after a stick of dynamite was thrown at a familiar meeting spot in the downtown area. Other times he got up close and personal, severing the spine at the base of the neck, or utilizing total decapitation all together. The body count was up to fifty or sixty at this point, and Terry felt no regret. It had to be done if any sense of normalcy was to ever again be established on this dying planet.

It wasn’t until a few days ago when various explosives had been thrown onto a children’s playground that Terry broke down and began questioning his tactics. At least twenty of the hungry dead, most of them kids under the age of ten, had been destroyed with the brunt of hellish flame and percussion blasts. He cried himself to sleep that night, ashamed to look in the cracked mirror of the stinking ramshackle base he’d devised. He distinctly remembered the screams of the miniature monsters, once children, as their flesh bubbled and oozed, their skin burning like over-cooked Easter ham. They weren’t children, they weren’t children, they weren’t children, he repeated, trying to remind himself they were no longer human. Yet, why did he feel himself the one who was slipping away from humanity?

Then, one day, on the first snow fall, Terry heard the police sirens draw near. From the sound of things it was an armada of the boys in blue. He forced himself to look in the mirror when the noise was little more than a mile away. To his dismay, the worst had happened: he was now one of the living dead. His eyes were unfamiliar, staring back with the disheveled rotting features of a flesh hungry ghoul. He didn’t recognize his once moderately handsome face. Sores ravished his cheeks, rot danced upon his forehead like moss from an anchor cast to shore for far too long. He’d done his best but knew then that the meat heads had won. Yet, maybe he hadn’t completely lost the battle after all?

He lit the fuse, over one hundred pounds of explosives surrounded the meek fortress, hiding from every tree and dangling from every bush in sight. He’d be the last fatality among the hungry dead, along with the ten or twenty police officers now quickly approaching. Perhaps, with him, the curse would end? Though he was already dead, they wouldn’t take him alive. The sirens were now right outside, and within a minute they would all be met in a glorious blaze of reckoning and gasoline, showering down from hidden tanks placed high in the trees and buried underground.

He took little comfort in the knowledge that, somewhere out there, maybe all across the country, fellow soldiers of fortune would soon wake up and rise against the plague, destroying it once and for all, striking at the roots of tyranny and oppression, taking out the millions of meat heads who were ravaging the world with their uncompromising stupidity. It took courage to stand up against a nation of brain dead slaves and obese robots of flesh and ignorance. And as flames of his own devise consumed him, he realized, live or die, the New Frontier was something worth fighting for.

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Michael A. Dyer is the host of the HORROR TO CULTURE podcast, vidcast, and website. He also heads the Facebook page for The Scary Salad Eater!

Michael can be found at:

The Scary Salad Eater

 www.horrortoculture.com

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