Welcome to Purgatory
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About this ebook
The beginning of the infection would essentially come to mark the end of civilization as we know it.
In this roller coaster of a spine-chiller, our hero is thrown right into the fire and death of the zombie apocalypse and has to figure out how to survive. He joins up with Amber, a woman who is strong and confident along w
Gerardo Bucio
The youngest of four children, Gerardo Bucio was born and raised in La Jolla, California, in a large communal home. Despite having a fairly large family growing up, many of his days were spent alone. He took refuge from his loneliness by immersing himself in his imagination and in movies and television. Now an adult, he has a child of his own, and his son has become Gerardo's creative muse. Just like Gerardo, his son loves watching creepy TV shows and movies, and his fascination for zombies was what inspired Gerardo to write this story. The rest of the book is modeled after certain events in his own life...with a bit of embellishment. When he's not writing or spending time with his family, you can find Gerardo reading, doing archery and other physical fitness, and cooking. Currently he and his family reside in the San Diego area.
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Welcome to Purgatory - Gerardo Bucio
CHAPTER 1
IT WOULD BE BORING FOR ME TO TELL YOU THAT I am just like everyone else because the fact of the matter is that I am nowhere near like anyone around me. The whole purpose of my existence is the study and reverence of anything grim, dark, and scary. Like most people I had my assumptions about the end of the world and doomsday, you know, things like that, but like some I strangely enough hoped for creatures like vampires, werewolves, and supernatural entities. I had even hoped for zombies. Funny enough, I got what I’d wished for. Hold on, hold on. I am probably getting ahead of myself. Let's start back home, where the chaos originated for me.
I was always a little off kilter, as my friends would say. I always fit in, and I never really had an enemy to speak of, but as much as I was social, I had a lonely essence surrounding me. To say the least, I was an outcast within the popular circles but not by the views of others. I always saw myself as different and never had common ground with anyone unless I chose there to be. I was always taught to be strong and caring and social, but at the same time, I was learning how to depend on myself and no one else because the only person you can ever really trust is yourself. Friends to me were always targets and essential tools that were meant to be used to find a way through life. What I mean is, I learned from them in good and bad ways, but mostly I used them to get what I wanted. Anyway, let's not get sidetracked.
This brings me to the outbreak by the beach. It was December. I remember only because you could smell the faint change in the air, almost as if the pine trees and holiday superstores converged to stupefy the senses with intoxicating aromas, which bombarded the mind into knowing it was Christmastime, especially once they put out those nauseating cinnamon pine cones. I have lived by the beach my whole life and in Southern California to boot. So you know that it's going to be a sunny Christmas, at least most of the time, with very little rain and cold. It's downright amazing here year-round.
It was just about six or seven in the evening when the knock came at my apartment door. I had been expecting her, but not in the way I saw her. My now ex-girlfriend, ex-living girlfriend, walked in the door. I remember it as if it were yesterday—her long blond hair reaching her lower back, her natural brunette roots starting to show. Her slender yet gentle face had never looked as it did that day. She lacked makeup and looked as if she had been kept up all night. I could have put groceries in those bags of hers. Her eyes were dull and seemed very distant. Yet her lips were plump as if ready to kiss at a moment's notice and held an almost fluorescent red hue, which accented them that much more.
As she staggered across the doorway, I couldn’t help but notice her beauty and, fortunately for me, her flaws. I guess that was one of my weird things. I saw both sides of people, the good and bad, interior and exterior. That must be why I never really trusted anyone. As I scanned her body, I realized something was undoubtedly wrong. I guess for a moment I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought she just had a long night of studying or drinking. Then she opened her mouth.
For a man my size, being startled doesn’t come easy. At 250 pounds and 6’2", I could handle myself in most situations. This was one of the exceptions. In a moment I turned into a cowering, helpless child, with not an ounce of courage or bravery in my body.
It oozed out of her mouth—black congealed blood followed by two molars that appeared to have been rotting for years, even though I knew they hadn’t been like that a couple of days ago. She fell to her knees, babbling about another guy and how she was so sorry for what she had done. I stood bewildered, afraid and disgusted by the horrid event that just occurred, on my new carpet no less. I somehow gathered my jaw off the floor and tried to inquire about what was going on. After a brief moment of pus-ridden tears, she started explaining that she had gone to a concert with a so-called friend a couple of days ago and became ill when she went home. She thought nothing of it and continued on with her day-to-day routine. This meant school, shopping, work, and anything else her insignificant ass might have done. By the time she came to me, it was too late for her to seek help. I stayed clear of her. I never let her touch me. The longer she stayed in my living room, the more I could see the degeneration, almost like a reversal of the evolutionary process, just more horrifying and much more rapid.
As more infectious fluids drained out of her head, I could see the effects of whatever it was that was killing her. The skin around her eyes and mouth began to dry and crack like the desert floors. Her eyes became a blue milky haze; discoloration throughout her body was almost instantaneous. Her freshly manicured nails were unaffected, but her cuticles began to pop, squirting pus all over her pants. As I watched this, I could not bring myself to leave my kitchen, which was six feet long and three feet away from my couch. Even then, when I knew I should get out of there, I was frozen to the wall next to my fridge.
It almost became comforting when she passed out and went headfirst into the glass coffee table. To my surprise it didn’t break; instead the top end of her forehead popped like a zit, spewing fluids I wouldn’t even know how to classify. I guess her hair was covering up the reaction on her head. I didn’t move for what seemed like forever, and then I sank to the floor and out of sheer terror began to cry in the fetal position. I didn’t know what else to do. Then it started…
It began resonating with this awful noise. It was a cross between the nails-on-the-chalkboard thing and a fifty-year smoker's cough and, oddly enough, a whoopee cushion going off underwater. Yup, that was what it sounded like. As I looked up through whale-sized tears, I could see her rising from the table. What I had thought was consciousness was my egregious error. I had thought she was just in pain. I had thought that was why she sounded like that, but I was very wrong. She looked around as if she had never seen my place before. She acted almost like a curious animal, sniffing and tilting her head side to side. She walked to the pictures and useless crap I had on my shelves and looked at them intently, as if inspecting each item for some type of review. Then she came to the television, and that was when I knew there was some remnant of cognitive reasoning left in those diseased brains. She looked directly at me in the TV's reflective surface and howled again. She then drove her hand through the wall. I don’t know if it was adrenaline or fear, but I was on my feet in milliseconds as she ripped her arm from the drywall. She whipped around and started toward me. She strained and began wobbling and reaching for my throat the whole way through the living room.
As more ooze spilled out of her body, she screamed again and lunged toward me. I whipped open the fridge door, and she ran headfirst into it, causing everything to fly off the shelves. I closed the door as fast as I had opened it and managed to throw myself over her twitching body and roll into the living room. I got to my feet any which way I could to find myself preparing for another lunge. This time I didn’t have my handy-dandy fridge to save me, so I flung myself into my bedroom and closed and locked the door. She began to pound on the door as I found myself becoming lucid and starting to reason.
I began to think clearly now. I realized that this was my ex-girlfriend, and yet she had just turned into some kind of fucking mutant scummy creature thing. So I asked myself, What's the plan now?
I frantically started scanning the room. I was in workout shorts and sandals, and that needed to change now! I stripped to my boxer briefs and threw on some jeans and my steel-toe boots. I grabbed a shirt and threw on my leather jacket. As soon as my arm went through the second sleeve, her arm came through my door, followed by the other. Fortunately for me I had started thinking at