Sand Charge

It's 104 degrees inside this M-1 Abram's tank sitting just outside the city of Phoenix, AZ, and my crew members are starting to smell. I don't worry that they will reanimate. I made sure of that when I cut off their heads. Of course, Sgt. Thompson wasn't completely dead when I took his head off, and he continued to scream all the way up to the very end. He always acted like a little bitch.

I strain my ears for the slightest sound; anything that would tell me the horrible, staggering dead have finally moved off into the desert, and no longer surround our tank. I cannot hear a whisper, yet the last time we thought they had left, Hendricks opened the hatch to recon, and the reanimated dead fell on him like rabid wolves. He was yanked from the bowels of the vehicle and torn apart in front of us. That's when one of them got in and attacked the others.

The zombie's body lay just to the front of the vehicle, its rotting corpse blocking the gunnery chair. It had bitten Talbots's face, and tore his jugular to shreds, spraying the cabin with a gallon of dark arterial blood. Then it battened on Thompson. He fought it off with his combat knife, but the weapon had little effect. The zombie struck Thompson along side his head, staggering him. Sensing Thompson's weakness, the zombie tore at his chest, and dug its horrible face into Thompson's armpit, tearing a large chunk of flesh from it.

I shook myself from the initial shock of the attack, and hammered at the zombie's head with one of the tanks' artillery shells. The rotted skull broke apart like a cantaloupe, brain mush smearing Thompson's fatigues when the thing fell forward onto him.

That was two hours ago. It's hard to believe that the end of the world started only three hours before that, but when you think about the end of the world, I mean really think about it, would you want it to happen over a period of a few days, or weeks, or just say fuck it, and get it over with?

That's what I've been thinking about for the last hour, or so. Do I want to sit here, cooking in my own soup, waiting for heatstroke to take me, or should I grab the M-14 over there in the rack, and take as many of these bastards with me that I can?

Something outside just slid down the front of the tank. I can hear a sloppy, wet sound, like my mom stirring macaroni and cheese in the pot. I guess they haven't left yet. I have taken the M-14 from its rack, and have chambered a round. I hope that whoever finds this note will take my head like I did with the others. I don't want to be a zombie...