ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel by Will Lemen Page A

venture into the water.
    However, we had yet to see people alive, that hadn’t been stricken by the outbreak.
    Abandoned boats were becoming a common sight along the way, but an uncanny absence of the people who had left them made us wonder, had they given up on the river because of its grisly demeanor, or had they reached their destination and no longer needed their boats.
    Yet, with some, their reasons were blatantly clear, they had not only abandoned their boats, they had abandoned the will to live too, and suicide was their way of relieving themselves of the horrors of the new world.
    Many times, we came upon vessels that had washed ashore, with its occupant still clutching the weapon used to achieve their ultimate demise. Sometimes whole families had meant their end at the hand of either the father, or the mother.
    We could have stopped at many of these “suicide boats” and rummaged through what gear they might have had. However, those scenes were ghastly, and very sad, and I didn’t want to subject my family to any more trauma than they were already having to endure, even if we were in violation of some of our survival rules.
    Night was beginning to fall on day eleven, when Jacob suddenly shouted.
    “Seventeen!”
    Billy was just drifting off to sleep, and now was wide-awake, awakened by Jacob's yell.
    “Seventeen what?” He demanded, not happy about being disturbed.
    Jacob proudly answered. “Seventeen days from home to Vicksburg, it should take us seventeen days.”
    “You woke me up for that? You, idiot,” Billy scolded.
    “I’ve been thinking about it on and off since mom asked a few days ago, I thought you guys wanted to know,” Jacob said in his defense.
    “Thank you sweetie, I did want to know, so we’ve been out here for ten days.”
    “Eleven, this is the eleventh day, tomorrow will be the twelfth day,” Jacob again gloated proudly.
    “That means we have six more days on this horrible river,” Gin said scowling.
    “I think we have just enough food and water to get us there, I guess in about five days I’ll take out the GPS and see how close we are. We don’t want to run the batteries down, so we need to use it sparingly,” I stressed.
    It was dark now, the low light of a crescent moon made the bodies in the water almost indiscernible, and as usual I took the first watch while everyone else settled down for the night.
    The river was unusually calm, and our boat made an excellent platform for stargazing. The lack of light coming from cities and towns due to most of the electricity generating plants in the country shutting down increased the amount of stars that were visible at night. So I had adopted the hobby to pass the time on watch during periods when the boat was in the middle of the river and well away from its banks.
    As the current was beginning to speed up as the river narrowed slightly, I watched a shooting star flash across the night sky.
    Bam! Splash! Splash!
    Suddenly something hit the bow of the boat hard. Things were falling in the water all around us.
    “What’s going on?” Gin asked, only half awake.
    Now there was more splashing in the water around us.
    “I don’t know,” I said, just as another object slammed into our boat, this time on the side just behind the windshield, and a severed foot landed on one of the ammo boxes next the our water.
    “Eaters!” I screamed.
    Looking up, I could no longer see stars directly above us.
    “The bridge, they’re jumping off the bridge.”
    At this point, at least eight more had fallen into the water beside our boat and were thrashing around trying to get to us. The two that had hit the boat were not a threat, so many of their bones were broken in so many places, that even though they were right beside the boat, they couldn’t even lift their arms to grab the railing on the boat, and quickly sank out of sight.
    The zombies that had jumped off the bridge and missed our boat were quite a different story. With all of their