tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83119246881939266292024-03-12T18:13:57.279-06:00ZombageddonA multi-view serial memoir of when Zombies took over the world...Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.comBlogger85125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-43290101821695553632013-01-10T22:04:00.001-06:002013-01-10T22:04:24.160-06:00Less Traveled<span id="internal-source-marker_0.7569134850054979"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the movies, farmhouse doomsday lunatics always have a store room or cellar crammed with canned goods and preserving jars filled to the brim with fruit and vegetables brined or sugared into oblivion, their glass jars caloric bombs waiting to be unsealed and lining orderly if dusty shelves. The farmhouse I found myself in now had no such stores. A few items in the sparse pantry were usable, but the house had long since succumbed to the madness of it’s occupant. The shooter, whose screams were mercifully short, had been devoured in moments by the undead horde. The ghouls had moved on after their meal following whatever ruined mental compass seemed to propel their aimless shambling between hunts, Finn and I erased from their corroded minds as quickly as we had become the focus of it. </span><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We had survived, this boy of mine and I, though I couldn’t tell why or to what end. I had no guesses as to how long we would be able to continue. There was no sense of victory here, or despair. All of it seemed to flatten out as the tasks piled up before me. My wife, asphyxiated in a silo just a few dozen yards from the shattered, blood stained hovel I found myself in; my son, small and hungry and distressingly quiet tied with rags to my chest. Food, transportation, shelter, all at crisis. In the years to come, upon reflection, searching for a moment of decision, the closest I would recall was now, swaying with exhaustion and fear in a broken farmhouse amid the vast agricultural wilderness of middle America. There was no conscious decision to press on. That was the great revelation. Survival bypasses the mind. It’s a catharsis of the body; a stubborn physical refusal to die. </span><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was precious little to salvage. A .308 rifle, covered in gore, cleaned as best I could in a short time, a small ammo can of loose and annoyingly heavy ammunition, a few ancient looking cans of stewed tomatoes, a can of sweetened condensed milk, a passably sharp kitchen knife, and a gallon of water pumped from a decidedly sketchy red water pump found near a wash basin. I tore sheets from the bed and reslung Finn, tore the rest for rags and diapers and shoved all but the rifle into an old newspaperboy’s sack I found hanging in the garage. I wet my fingers with the sweetened milk and fed Finn the syrupy goo, hoping it’s calories would get him through the day, wondering abstractly what would get me through. </span><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br /><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>I walked outside, </b></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">marveling</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b> at the overwhelming liar’s cheerfulness of the afternoon sky, it’s bright light and cloudless sky belying the lurking, lumbering reality on the ground. It always struck me as incongruous, this difference between the external and internal environment. I stood for a long moment just outside the battered front door doing nothing but breathing. This house had been a source only of danger and misery, yet I found myself oddly reluctant to leave it. Despite its congealing mess upstairs and the appalling lack of even the most remedial resources, it was still a house and therefore a tiny piece of a familiar world, with walls and rooms that made sense. Walking away from it felt terribly exposed. There were, of course, no other options.</b></span></span></span><br /><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Shouldering the newspaper bag, checking Finn, and grasping the rifle, I lumbered out into the day, turning down the long grassy drive, listening and watching for any movement, any sign of the undead. It wasn’t long before the grassy drive forked. I paused for only a second to decide. I took the one less traveled by, hoping that would make all the difference. </span></span>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-65624813314802111072010-07-20T08:40:00.003-06:002010-07-20T08:51:53.144-06:00Tree House to House<p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><strong><span style="font-family:arial;">50 yards away. </span></strong></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;">My savage moment turned into Darwinian Reality TV. Hungry, dehydrated and shaking I somehow mustered up enough energy to burst into a sprint toward my mom and dad’s house from the tree house whose ground was littered with “my” dead. I was in broad daylight now and whimpered like a baby as I ran, hoping to God there was still someone left to run to in that house. </span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><strong><span style="font-family:arial;">40 yards away.</span></strong></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></o:p></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;">It occurred to me that pounding on the front door or breaking a window was probably not a good idea. I would have to be more discreet. My eyes search for the old TV antenna attached to the house. I could get to the roof.</span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><o:p><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></o:p></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><strong><span style="font-family:arial;">30 yards away.</span></strong></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><o:p><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></o:p></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;">As I pass the neighbors’ house directly across from my Mom and Dad’s I hear a snort and glance over my shoulder to see the blond obese neighbor’s wife (what was her name – Gilda?) in a blue flowered mumu begin to give chase in a rambling, tottering way. Like a deadly, slow-rolling blueberry. Well, more like “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” minus the rolling dollies. Ugh.</span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><o:p><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></o:p></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><strong><span style="font-family:arial;">20 yards away.</span></strong></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><o:p><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></o:p></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;">I am almost there. The antenna is there. I am breathless even though I have a huge gain on Fatty Gilda. She is struggling, even in death, to work her body to hustle towards food. A grotesque series of snorts eminates from her taxed and clogged lungs. As co-dependent on food in death as she was in life, her flaw works to my advantage.</span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><o:p><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></o:p></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><strong><span style="font-family:arial;">10 yards away.</span></strong></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><o:p><span style="font-family:arial;"></span></o:p></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal" align="justify"><span style="font-family:arial;">Almost there. I don’t scream or call out. I reach the metal antenna and Fatty is only half way across the yard. I grab one rung. The next rung. The metal is cool under my hands. The next. I reach the wood-shingled roof that offers a soft angle – enough to climb up – to reach the chimney. At the apex I clutch the bricks of the chimney while cautiously and as quietly as possible approaching a window to peak in. Before I draw closer the next window opens: “Sarah!!” The voice I heard calling me to dinner all through my youth. I scramble over and crawl into the house through the window and I fall sobbing into the salvation of my mother’s arms.</span></p>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-74398198891335344702010-04-08T17:01:00.002-06:002010-04-08T17:07:14.066-06:00Served ColdThe need of the undead is perfect. <br /><br />I realized this as I ran, as the rage and despair began to filter from my mind, began to drop away with each pounding step of my feet, with each yard that I ran toward the house, toward the gunman, toward the hordes of the undead. <br /><br />Of course, I was far from perfect, my need, my body, my spirit, even my desire to keep on living was imperfect. <br /><br />It had to be so. Imperfection, it seemed to me, defined us, marked us as individual, as fully human. It is what separated us from them, from the implacable, horrible perfection of their need. As I ran, as the exertion of exhausted muscles forced once more into strained and improbable service cleared the emotion from my mind, I began to hope that this difference, this imperfect need of mine would save me.<br /><br />-----<br /><br />Finn’s cries acted like a dinner bell to the undead. I made no efforts to comfort or quiet him; no efforts even to avoid his jostling. I wanted his cries, hoarse, terrified, constant. Let Finn use his breath to call them. I needed my own breath right now. Gnarled, weary, bone tired, but no longer carrying the extra weight of a sedentary office lifestyle, I ran toward the gathered undead.<br /><br />They turned toward me almost immediately. Some of the fresher ones began to run. They came fast and hard, holding nothing back. I turned quickly running parallel now the farmhouse. Like hellish dominoes one by one they turned from the farmhouse as they heard Finn’s cries and began toward me. A pack of the quick ones began to form, nearly twenty strong. Many more of the slower ones staggered, dragged, or crawled behind. The quicker ones were gaining on me now, closing the gap, not having to pace themselves. My lead dwindled. Fifty yards away and gaining with each step, the freshly undead sprinted greedily toward me.<br /><br />Shots from the nut in the farmhouse broke the afternoon. I dared a glance back and saw one of the undead drop and flail. Another shot kicked up dirt behind me. Clearly the first shot that took down the ghoul a moment ago was a miss by the shooter. I changed direction when I reached the opposite edge of the farmhouse. I now had every ghoul’s attention, and began to run away from the farmhouse, back toward the silo from whence I came. The zombies trailed behind me, stretching back in order of their swiftness. The quickest continued to gain on me, my lead dwindling to less than 25 yards. More shots kicked up dirt behind me, each one getting closer. <br /><br />As sharply as I could, I changed direction, angling now back from where I came. This was the gamble. Everything rested on this decision. I ran harder now, as fast as I could, running back toward the ghouls, at a slight angle from my original path, back toward the farmhouse. <br /><br />The ghouls closest on my heels attempted to change direction, to follow like freight cars the engine of their need as if hitched to my trajectory. Others who were further behind and could change direction quicker did so, stumbling into the path of their hungry compatriots, neither party willing to call it, neither able to veer from their need, to avoid each other. They crashed together, stumbling and falling, their once almost orderly procession now in disarray as each of their ruined minds attempted to correct them, to put them on a new course toward the dinner bell. Each of them failing to take heed of obstacles, of each other, a glance back brought some satisfaction that most of them were bumping and colliding, falling into one another. My tactic seemed to have confused the shooter as well. More shots rang out, but the distance between myself and the clouds of kicked-up dirt lengthened. The shooter would have to try again, would have to reorient his aim to my new trajectory and try to dial me in again. <br /><br />Another course correction now, this one slight and I was heading toward the farmhouse door. Two of the fresh ghouls were hot on my track, but the rest of the brat pack that had been trailing me so closely had lost time, stuck in a sea of reaching arms and flailing limbs. They made no efforts to untangle themselves from each other, merely attempted to push between and through one another, causing more problems for them, giving me more time. <br /><br />I was almost to the farmhouse, was headed toward the door. I picked up speed again, felt my legs screaming in protest, my lungs burning. Still running, I began to turn, twist my frame even as I ran so that all of the force of my body would concentrate onto my shoulder and hip. As I did so, I angled Finn, still howling in protest, up and back, and crashed into the front door of the farmhouse, the undead only moments behind me. <br /><br />The impact was sudden, much more jarring than I had expected. My shoulder burst into agony, and then thankfully went numb. The door buckled, exploding into the house and sending wooden shrapnel through the air. I staggered, nearly losing everything, nearly falling, knowing there would be no chance to get up. With a lunge, I regained my balance and ploughed ahead, first sighting the stairs, and plunging recklessly upward. At any moment the gunman could appear, take me out with a quick shot, even the most cursory wound now would be enough to lose the fractional edge I had on the pursuing undead. <br /><br />At the top of the stairs was a 90 degree bend that led into the hallway. The bend bought me another second, maybe two as the nightmares behind me fought to negotiate past one another. I sprinted forward, guessing that the shooter was in the middle bedroom, shooting from the best angle the house provided, using as a rest the ledge of the the window overlooking the roof that divided the first floor from the second. Another door, this one closed. I skid to a stop, tried the knob, found it unlocked and burst into the room, feeling the fetid breath of the undead just behind me.<br /><br />I threw myself to the side as hard and fast as I could, clutching Finn like a football, protectively trying to curl and roll as I neared the hardwood floor. The undead were just behind me, and straight ahead of them, an old man, decked in overalls, a stained white tee shirt and brandishing that damn rifle. The first shot missed me by luck or by fate and buried itself in the first pursuing ghoul. The sound of the rifle in that enclosed space was enormous, earth-shatteringly loud. Three more ghouls pushed past the first zombie who was slowed but not stopped by the high powered round. They raced toward the sound of the gunshot, toward the prey immediately before them, forgetting Finn and I, focused now on the incredulous, hateful man in front of them, each of them singular in their focus, perfect in their need. Slinking silently back out of the room, and quietly running to the bedroom at the end of the hallway, I heard the screams of the old man as they tore him apart. That goddamn rifle didn’t go off once.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-12658682245005379212009-10-19T15:29:00.003-06:002009-10-20T11:01:19.437-06:00Archive 7o-553-d >> Entry 10<span style="font-family:courier new;"><br /><hr size="4" width="99%"><br /><b>Record Logging Protocol :</b> Epsilon<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Record #</span> 7o-553-d<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Chrono :</span> Suffusion III<br /><br /><hr style="font-size: 130%;" width="99%"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Descriptor :</span>Documentation</span><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Classification : </span>Altercation[violent,zed class(3)]<br /><br /><hr width="85%" style="font-size:10px;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Region >></span> Chicago,greater<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Type >></span> Handwritten<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Delivery >></span> Bound Journal<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Primary Principal >></span> Chris<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Primary Assumptions >></span> Male ; 20-40 ; caucasian ; <center>Native</center></span><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Secondary Principal >></span> Jen (alias:"Babe")<br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:courier new;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Secondary Assumptions >> </span>Female ; 20-40 ; </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-family:courier new;">Involved(primary,shared residence)<br /></span></div><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family:courier new;"><br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:courier new;"><b>Record Source Data>> </b></span></span><span><span style="font-family:courier new;">Copy of original text follows:<br /></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:courier new;" >Entry #1</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:courier new;"> I thought I died yesterday. </span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: courier new;">Which, in a number of ways, has proven to be a liberating experience. A number of my previous audio entries are most likely lost, as the unexpected zombie assault has done a great deal of damage to my digital recorder. I will be hanging on to it, even though I don't expect to have the time or resources in the future to attempt the data recovery. That being said, I will be moving forward with a written journal of my experiences. A major reason, besides the retention of my sanity, is that I have found a profound purpose for my documentation. To explain, allow me to return to my opening statement:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: courier new;">I thought I died yesterday. To be more accurate, I thought that I was going to become a zombie yesterday. I had made the mistake of failing to notice that a window was partially open in the building I was camping in for the night. Unbeknownst to me, my voice must have carried out the window and into the waiting ears of some nearby zombies. While I was recording a particularly amusing haiku related entry, I was rudely interrupted as a zombie crashed through the window I was seated next to, and a mad scramble ensued. I was tossed from my chair, which my assailant was tangled up in for a few moments. I could hear more of them outside the window, so I knew that I would have more to deal with at any moment. My weapons are never far from me for a reason, and I retrieved my drywall hammer as quickly as I could. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: courier new;">A couple of extra pairs of groping hands were reaching inside the window frame as the first one regained its footing and lurched towards me. A wide backhand with the hammer side of the tool struck the ghoul in the temple and showered the room with thick blood, bone remnants, and the remains of an eyeball as its eye-socket exploded. As the zombie dropped, my second opponent fell in through the window in a synchronized crash to the ground. With a swift flip to the axe blade on the back of the hammer, I finished the first one off with a chop that jammed the tool into the base of the creature's skull. This was bad. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: courier new;">A third zombie was crawling through the window and the second one was already past the chair and motoring forward. Lacking any real weapon at the moment, I snatched up a metal trash can and smashed the zombie in the face with it. While not a killing blow, it did knock the beast backward and crashing downward onto the third assailant. I took this opportunity to retrieve the hunting knife and the pry bar from my pack. The pry bar was immediately applied to the skull of the nearest zombie in a downward brain scrambling motion. Not willing to wait its turn, the last of the attackers set on me with all of the speed it could muster. I was forced back against a desk as the creature dug its ragged fingernails into my shoulder and bicep. I turned the tip of the blade upward and jammed it through the underside of its snapping jaw and into the roof of its mouth. This provided an unexpected amount of control over the creature's movement, and I swung it sideways into a wall. A two-handed swing of the pry bar ended the conflict. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: courier new;">I stood there for a few minutes listening for more activity outside the window. Hearing nothing, I began to collect my items in preparation for my exodus. It was that at that moment that my impending doom became apparent. I wasn't wearing the tooth and nail resistant leather jacket or gloves as I normally would while traveling. I was only in a long sleeved shirt, which was torn open in numerous places from shards of broken glass. From the mounting pain and droplets of scarlet blood that ran from underneath the fabric, I could safely assume that my skin had been flayed open during the conflict. I drew back my soaked right sleeve to find my forearm sliced open in a dozen locations and drenched in the deep crimson blood of the undead. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: courier new;">Blood to blood contact.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: courier new;">I knew what that meant for my future: I am going to die.</p>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-58166263546197403172009-09-25T19:37:00.001-06:002009-09-25T19:38:41.985-06:00This is the Day that the Lord Hath MadeI don’t shoot the dead uns, no sir. Leave them dead uns right about alone. I ain’t been setting here, day after day, night after night, reading my bible, without learning a thing or two. No, I been learning all right; learn bout every time I crack this here book. Known this here day was coming since I learned bout reckoning and I tell you I weren’t too tall to my daddy ‘fore I learnt bout reckoning. This here, this is a reckoning, sure as I know it, and I ain’t about to get in the way of no reckoning. I ain’t total sure just yet which of the dark riders this is, could be pestilence, or war, or death, or hell might be God’s way of bringing all them riders together, save time, hell I don’t know. All I know is I ain’t gonna be the one standing in front of my creator telling him bout how I tried to stand in the way of his glorious destruction. <br />I seen them young folks running toward my homestead this afternoon and I tell you I didn’t like it one bit. I ain’t saying I’m going down there anytime soon, but them that gets stuck out in the flood they didn’t get back into Noah’s boat, and I’m not letting them folks onto my land without a fight, no sir. If the good lord chose to strand them sinners out in that sea of dead, well that smacks of god’s work to me, and I’m not gonna give not one of em no safe haven, no sir, and I don’t care a lick that little miss out there carrying a child or not. The good lord’s already judged them; ain’t for me to make no never mind about that. But they smart enough to try climbing that silo of mine and I ain’t setting here saying I heard the good lord tell me what to do but I didn’t have to think none either; I just took my rifle and set down at the window.<br />Used to be a good shot when I was a young man, but my hands these days, they ain’t too steady. I don’t think I got them young uns, but I know I hurt the man some. Saw em tumble on into that corn silo. Probably city folk from the sight of em. Don’t know the first thing bout a corn silo and I’d bet my last dollar they’s swallowed right up in there. <br />Might have made me a mistake shooting at that boy. Seemed right to me though, seemed like the holy spirit were just about guiding me, but now I got them things coming up around the homestead, seems like maybe the sound of that rifle getting em excited, and damned if that boy ain’t coming right down off that silo. Might be going home myself tonight before the sun comes down, but I tell you this here rifle of mine is gonna try like hell to take that boy with me.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-63440963492269352212009-08-08T10:33:00.001-06:002009-08-08T10:38:18.889-06:00The Suffering of FoolsI awoke to the sound of Finn, squalling. We had managed to keep him quiet for so long, to teach him at such a young age to be silent, that his piercing cries sounded almost alien at first. My head pounding I looked toward his cries.
<br />
<br />During the apocalypse, a man sees a lot of horrors. This is no great shock, no great revelation. It is one thing to see the myriad dead, even the living dead, but to see the slack and lifeless face of your wife is a much worse kind of tragedy. At once mundane, spouses perish every day, yet so incredibly personal, so incomprehensible, it is as if you are looking at a piece of yourself that has died. I belly-crawled to Finn who was wailing next to Colleen's body, clearly trying to elicit from her some reaction, some reassuring comfort. It was a pitiable sight, and for the first time since this madness had begun, I began to lose hope.
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<br />For years, Colleen and I had joked about being "Team Curry," but to us it was no joke. We were a team. For better or worse we had long since hitched our wagons together and had been hell-bent on making our way through our lives together. Her problems, my problems, they were always our problems. Looking at my wife, eyes open, slack and lifeless, I felt a part of me break and fall away. No more Team Curry.
<br />
<br />I scooped up Finn, feeling how light and fragile and small he was, held him close and hushed gently into his ear. He calmed down almost at once, having learned, somehow instinctually, that there was precious little comfort left in the world, and to take what he could get. How in the world was I going to feed him? Take care of a baby in a world gone to rut and ruin?
<br />
<br />But this was no time for planning, this was a time for survival, and revenge. To be taken by the undead, well, that was the heart of this particular darkness, but to be driven into this damnable silo by a living person, to be nearly shot and killed, to have lost my wife, to have endangered and possibly sentenced my son to death by a living breathing person; there was satisfaction to be had. I found that there was no pleasure to be had in ending the animation of the dead. Their soullesss eyes reflected no change, just a quiet indifference as they skulls were smashed in and their bodies dropped limp to the earth. The living however, I could make the living pay.
<br />
<br />I looked around the silo, saw that the silo was about half full of grain. I estimated that distance to the bottom of the silo, and hopefully a door, and even more hopefully, a door that would swing out, was about twenty feet down. I would have to dive down, find the door, then come up and get Finn. Hopefully, the force of the grain expelling from the doorway would push the ghouls back long enough for me to get a running start.
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<br />I dove into the grain, pulled against the slick, hard kernels, but got no purchase. In a breath, I could only go about four or five feet before I had to turn back. It was hopeless.
<br />
<br />Coming up for air, I looked to find Finn, saw him sleeping, curled up next to Colleen, moving fitfully against her body. I took in great heaving lungfuls of air, and noticed the quiet. The scraping, moaning sound of the pawing undead was, not gone, but faded. Very much faded. Cautiously, I climbed the rebar rings of the silo up the top and peered over the top. The gunshots from before must have attracted the mob of rot and ruin as they now swarmed outside the farmhouse. The vast majority of them were congregated toward the front of the house. Each of them stupidly clawing and grasping forward but none of them had yet breached the front door. I wanted in that house.
<br />
<br />I climbed down, pulled the makeshift sling off of Colleen, knealt down and kissed her lightly on her rapidly cooling forehead. I grabbed Finn and put him in the sling, snugging him tightly against my chest, climbed up the rebar rings once more, and heaved myself and Finn up and over the side of the silo.
<br />
<br />Cringing, silently cursing my damaged hand, and waiting for the bullet from the farmhouse to crash into my skull, I hurriedly climbed down the silo. I heard a shot ring out, then another, and another. Heart racing, I let go of the silo and fell the last ten feet to the ground, falling hard and not protecting myself with my hands as they were wrapped around Finn. Finn began to scream. The madman in the house put two more bullets into the silo above and the left of where I lay panting. Why would he be shooting at me when his home is surrounded by those creatures? I stood up, crouched low, and began to run toward the house, toward the man with the gun, and toward the hordes of undead, whose attention had now turned in our direction, and toward Finn's cries. Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-64987522560823242902009-06-19T13:52:00.002-06:002009-06-19T13:58:04.228-06:00Heightened Senses<a href="http://www.famousafteridie.com/siren.mp3">This is what I hear</a> and this is what I see.<br /><br /><br /><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 390px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5349130077469787682" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdF-kN_NOos0xyY-lekFOp5zGvitYxiqLQXgx_sot2HnW-oBy6Q8j75hLWV6ylnMZw4Dos_ODGElZLNoPe-ZcjOA28CKR3EJMTt8CX8MwHXvFtM7RrHURyNbJOkZvPjqgZEJvRYJU0ThF3/s400/ChicagoTribune-Zombie.jpg" />Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-57947029725325956322009-06-18T14:25:00.003-06:002009-06-18T14:33:34.065-06:00Swan SongIn recent years, Hollywood directors have shown a great love for using shaky-camera filming in order to provide a realistic depiction of the chaos and frantic nature of war and other life threatening situations. Something always seemed unnatural about that sort of camera work, and Maureen was discovering exactly why she felt that way. If a member of the IATSE was presenting her actions and experiences on screen, the camera would have scanned wildly side to side as she fled from the undead assailant before her. The image would have jerked sharply downward as she stumbled off of the curb and almost tumbled to the ground after her muddy boots failed to assist her in accelerating on the blacktop of the parking lot. After a few sickening jostles to bring the view level again, the screen would swiftly jerk to the right providing a wide scan of the area displaying the wild traffic and panic all around her. It would settle on the zombie, a very short distance behind her, lumbering as quickly as it could after her. With a snap, the camera would be back in front of her, frantically shimmying as she scrambled to fit her key into her car door. The door would swing open just in time to strike her attacker and send it crashing to the pavement. Screams and sirens would cry out sharply and then be swiftly muffled as the door slammed shut next to her.<br /><br />Perhaps a close-up of the door locks would appear as she smashed her fingers down onto the electronic lock button, sending the set of small silver protrusions, slightly worn on the edges to a copper tone, smashing down into the door frame in order to secure her mobile fortress. The view would shift to look upwards towards her from the passenger seat in order to catch her gasp and shriek as the zombie smashed itself into the driver's side window, causing her to fumble her keys as she rushed to insert them into the ignition. Repeated thumps against the glass would echo off the plastic interior as the camera shook from the abuse the vehicle was taking. Whimpers full of barely intelligible words would escape Maureen's lips as the car's starter jumped to life with a less than confidence building grunt. The audience would now be staring at a wide shot out the front window. The wheels would turn as the four cylinder engine, which would much rather still be asleep, was forced into action by her foot, now captured in a close range floor shot, slamming the gas pedal down to the floor. The camera would slip side to side in a violent drunken manner as she swung the car around every obstacle in her path: human, automobile, and used-to-be-human. Then, perhaps they would close this segment with a wide angle crane-cam shot as she sped around the back side of the store.<br /><br />Thus, would the director of photography capture the wild nature of a person fleeing for their life.<br /><br />In reality, it felt nothing like that.<br /><br />The most alarming difference was the sound. There wasn't much of it at all. The wails of the people, the crashing of the cars, the not so distant sirens of the emergency vehicles traveling in every direction, these things made it to her as if filtered by wads of cotton in her ears. The whole world seemed muffled, with two notable exceptions. The first was her breathing. The sound of her own surging breaths enveloped her. It was as if her inhales and exhales formed the cocoon around her head which dampened all of the other noise besetting her. A sheath which would only be penetrated by the blood soaked creature before her. Its moans and hisses sliced straight into her mind. Even as it followed her, she would swear that she could see the contortions of its face just from the creaking of it gnashing its teeth.<br /><br />As for the shaky cam, it would be hard to say that the movements of her eyes and head were completely unlike the movements of the cameraman. That may have been the way it happened, but a person's vision is nothing like a camera. All of that visual stimuli had to be processed by Maureen's brain, so the final product was a bit different than what would have appeared on screen.<br /><br />She floated.<br /><br />Not literally, of course, but everything she experienced seemed to come at her in one smooth and steady stream. Her stumble from the curb felt less like the erratic flight pattern of a gnat and more akin to the bobbing flow of an old Cadillac with shocks that needed replacing. Her scan of the area revealed nothing but blurred masses of nondescript movement, and even the zombie on her heels appeared as nothing more than a shifting multi-hued blob. The moment it took for her to line her key up with the slot in her car door dragged on with intoxicated swaying, and the door striking the ghoul was barely noticed as she slumped into the worn cloth seat with a forceful expulsion of breath that made her eyes squint and her brow furrow in distress. The zombie's lurch towards the window elicited naught but a moderate lean away from the glass. The vehicle parked in front of her was gone, so she was able to shift into drive and pull straight through. There was no floor shattering stomp upon the pedal, as even in her state of panic, she looked both ways before entering the lane. Which was smart, seeing as how a non-drivable car would have been unbelievably inconvenient at that time. There was no violent swerving back and forth as she avoided the people and undead in her way, because she didn't avoid them. While Maureen didn't aim for them, the glaze which covered everyone in front of her made discerning their state of living difficult.<br /><br />The greater factor was that she just didn't care.<br /><br />A person who thinks little of other people, when faced with a life or death situation of mythic proportions, will, apparently, drive through and over whatever human shaped figure happens to be unfortunate enough to be in their path. It was a short drive for her to reach the back lane of the parking lot, and the way was quite clear of other automobiles, since it was in the opposite direction of the entrance. Behind the supermarket was a short driveway into a shipping and distribution complex. Her idea was to slip out the back way, which was a great plan. The wrench in the works appeared as she turned onto the drive and crossed into the neighboring lot. A rather large trailer was flipped onto its side and was completely blocking her only route past the long warehouses to her left and right. It was still possible to spin the car around and try to squeeze out of the supermarket entrance, so she popped the car door open and shook her head to clear the last wisps of fog from her vision.<br /><br />As the door swung to its widest, Maureen's ears began to grab onto the unobstructed audio headed her way. Sharp screams and a choir of groans assaulted her. She looked back, with eyes ready to bulge from their sockets, upon the scene she had just exited, and horror began to set in. She slunk backwards, sliding against the cold sheet metal of her car's fender. The chaotic racket around her beat down on her ears, and her eyes squinted as if in response to a massive weight settling on her head.<br /><br />As she rolled around the corner of her car and took her first few hurried steps towards the toppled trailer, she was overcome with the desire for some cotton.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-2817434342910047692009-05-12T14:58:00.002-06:002009-05-12T14:59:18.298-06:00Kent for a Day, Fool for an UnlifetimeThings were starting to come together, and not a moment too soon.<br /><br />There hadn't been time yet to complete a head count, but there had to be more than a hundred people bustling about the compound. Kent stood atop the easement belonging to the lumber distribution facility that occupied the space directly across from the Gerber factory he was once employed by, yet still worked at. A strange situation to be sure, but the work that was now being done there was far more important than any task undertaken there previously.<br /><br />Yesterday, “survival gear” and “gear for survival” would have meant the same thing to him, but not any more. It was easy to see what products fit the new and valid description of survival gear. One needed only to look at which crates sat empty and which hadn't been opened at all.<br /><br />Kent's eyes caught some movement to his right, prompting him to snap his left hand upward while pressing down with his index finger.<br /><br />“Got two moaners over in G2.”<br /><br />As his finger relaxed, the small two way radio in his hand cried with static for a moment before closing the transmission with a click. “Roger that,” the box squawked, “red intercepting.” Kent kept his eyes focused on the intruders as they lumbered towards the center of activity he hovered over. The rumble of an eight cylinder engine being given a healthy amount of gas ricocheted up and out of the alley between the two buildings to his South as a deep red colored Ford pickup truck shot out onto the main roadway. A medieval looking steel contraption thrust from the front of the vehicle and was stained a color which almost matched the truck's paint. The device was once a small snow plow, but it now resembled what would happen if a bus load of swords was dropped into a chicken coop.<br /><br />The zombie's lack of survival instinct was obvious as they paid no heed to the vehicle roaring their way. Lining up the perfect shot took very little adjustment for the driver, and the undead were scooped up and impaled swiftly. Jaws still snapping at the man piloting the craft, the creatures struggled to break free of the razor wire that was tearing their muscles into useless bloody chunks.<br /><br />The driver slung his head part of the way out of the window and bellowed, “hit it!”<br />A slender teenager who had been seated in the bed of the truck popped up and snatched the bright yellow rubber grip at the end of a long rod that jutted upward from the back of the truck. With a sharp tug, a winch groaned to life and began to quickly draw in the length of urethane coated cable which ran over the top of the cab and connected to the wire mesh where the zombies were ensnared. The grinding cries of metal on metal were sharper on the ears than the wire's tiny blades were on the ghouls as it constricted around them. Flesh, sinew and bone were shredded, leaving hunks of diced human and buckets of blood in a wide trail behind the pickup, as if some Lovecraftian slug had slithered its way down the street.<br /><br />Four hours, Kent thought to himself. These men had four hours to get that truck ready, and they were able to construct that... thing. He couldn't help but smile. If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation gives birth to something much more profound.<br /><br />“Hey, Kent?”<br /><br />While not actually a question, the soft request that floated up from his feet certainly sounded like one.<br /><br />“I think I worked out how to secure the walkways against the expected mob's ebb and flow.”<br /><br />Seated on the roof next to him was a young man hunched down a bit too close to the screen of a rather expensive looking laptop. His crisp white dress shirt still displayed the lightly starched creases along the sleeves placed there by a dry cleaning shop which was most likely abandoned by now. The bright white was broken up by broad splatters of burgundy dried blood, which actually looked quite good next to the dark chocolate brown of his skin. On the laptop's screen was a web of intersecting lines and figures, which were mostly indecipherable to Kent. The young man wasn't on Kent's list of invitations to the compound, but he was proving to be a critical asset in the construction. Michael was his name, and he had the sort of demeanor that made it seem all too appropriate to use his whole name, rather than truncating it to something like “Mike.” He had arrived carrying his laptop and a crimson coated fire axe not long after they began securing these buildings. Apparently, he followed his college flame to the Northwest with his freshly printed structural engineering degree in hand. While the relationship left him with nothing but an empty apartment to leave his office for, his training was providing him with plenty of new friends.<br /><br />“If our inventory of the available materials is accurate, we should have the resources necessary to begin constructing the preliminary support structure to allow movement between structures, prior to the final framework being assembled,” Michael was just getting warmed up. Kent squinted slightly as if his eyelashes could somehow decode the drawings that were being explained to him. It wasn't working.<br /><br />With an uncharacteristically soft press against the overly engrossed man's shoulder, Kent interrupted: “Michael, I believe that you know what you're doing, so I need you to start instructing the crew on what to do, and quickly.” The radio cut him off with a yelp that was partially muffled by the palm of his hand. Once again, Kent brought the box up near his head, “go ahead.”<br /><br />“The head count is finished, and it looks like we're doing better than expected. But... there's something you need to know.” No closing static jumped from the radio, so Kent knew there was more to be said, even as the silent moment dragged out to the end of his patience.<br /><br />“Sharon's not here yet.”<br />Ssshhh-cluck. The connection snapped closed.<br /><br />Kent was squinting again. This time, it was as his teeth ground down upon each other and his head turned slowly to face the East. His gaze bore down on a destination past these warehouses and parking lots, underneath the highway, through treetops and power lines and two story homes. A solid three mile long staring contest against a sandy colored split-level brick target.<br /><br />Home.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-22237536286302520012009-04-28T12:02:00.003-06:002009-05-12T14:59:46.188-06:00Smucker's Raspberry PreservesI awake still lying on the rotten floor of the tree house shrouded in an early morning fog. My arm still throbbing with raccoon bite. The soft moans of the undead below did not go away while I was dreaming of soft Mexican beaches.<br /><br />Here, the dead do not rest.<br /><br />Today is the day I will need to get out of here, “here” being this tree house, this situation, this life perhaps? My stomach growls in anger. My thirst is almost unbearable. Void of modesty I drop trow and relieve myself through the cracks in the tree house floor. Any live person who might show up at this moment and happen to see me peeing would bless me with welcome embarrassment. The droplets of urine land on the little boy whose carcass stands swaying and clawing at the tree trunk.<br /><br />I sit Indian-style on the floorboards for about an hour and near hysteria once again, I put one hand over my eyes as I audibly pray to God for help through cracked sobs. With the other hand I unwittingly grasp for the edge of the tree house floor. The gray dry rotted wood gave up almost immediately and I pulled and jerked the broken off piece and held it in front of my surprised face. A two-footer, sharp on one end and with just a bit of life left in the middle to provide strength. This was the answer. Halting my sobs and prayers, I got up and onto my knees and began madly yanking at the floorboard strips tearing up splinters and stubbing my thumb on a rusty nail. I was clawing for my own salvation. Dead wood for dead heads.<br /><br /><br /><p><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5329805589716608706" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 263px; height: 350px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE6_Cgfo0DFGBuNwktT0XrRpxcCCvbgGFggxb0n34qIt2zW55hg4nZ4N5XYeAtfs39GZmT78xB2dZqLU6I4MpCQEKOLgbjsvfv_WJrOZELuYVYxBWWMBHnHQouC75HKP0mWbXORUwxsnk2/s400/Plank.bmp" border="0" /> By the time the fog burned off and the morning sun was nearly blinding I had a good-sized pile of spikes for which I was sorting by size and strength. The larger men zombies would need to be taken out first. I gingerly lowered myself, hands sweating, on the shaky wooden tree house ladder with the largest of the makeshift spears. The undead farmer in his overalls moaned loudly and reached his rotting limbs up to reach me. And I’m just barely out of his reach as my hands shake with adrenalin – one clinging to the tree ladder and the other raised above my target. I bring it down with a powerful grunt and plant it through the top of the semi-soft cranium with a "flump". Farmer drops to his knees and then falls over, face down into the soft green grass. The other three are oblivious totheir comrade’s termination and stumble around his second-time corpse, tripping here and there.<br /><br />With a slightly renewed confidence that this would work, I bared my teeth and hissed. "That's it. Get over here, you fuckers!"<br /><br />I pull out another stake and took out Neighbor man likewise. The little boy, however, got it through the eye. It went deep enough to short circuit him and disgusting, smelly aqueous humor dripped out of his socket before he hit the ground. That’s all that mattered, his ending. And then the little girl was spiked through her blonde pony-tailed head, no problem. She didn't scream. The blood wasn’t even really blood but clotted and congealed like Smuckers Raspberry Preserves. I should have been throwing up by now. Is this what is called desensitizing? Or just pure survival?<br /><br />I gratefully jumped to the ground, keeping low and hunched over where all four bodies lay scattered, keeping an eye out for any movement. In a moment of dramatic victory and going against my better instincts I felt a rage well up within me. I bent down to the ground and dipped two fingers into a pool of red ooze and then traced a cross on my forehead before breaking into a sprint toward my parents' house.</p><p>I think I left myself in that tree house. This was now Me [Version 2.0].</p>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-38917579635869280692009-04-07T22:29:00.001-06:002009-04-07T22:33:21.487-06:00Redenbacher BluesAs a man who grew up in another world, a world where the dead stayed dead and where women and children didn't run through the countryside pursued by ravenous fetid corpses, I have had occasion to wonder what kind of a man I was. Certain other generations were not so much plagued by this question. They were plagued instead with war and famine and challenges of the mind, body, and spirit which I haven't known, and while I am dutifully grateful for the luxuries of being a product of the late twentieth century, I was never able to shake the nagging doubt. I heard stories, read novels, watched movies, all crowded with heroism and altruism, and I wondered, "What kind of man am I?" Would I stand tall in the face of danger, sacrifice myself; would I risk everything for a loved one? A stranger?
<br />
<br />I was beginning to find the answers to my question.
<br />
<br />When Colleen hit the grain, she and Finn sank with astonishing speed. The grain seemed to open for them, enfold them in countless tiny arms and simply pulled them in.
<br />
<br />Another shot, this one so close to my left hand I felt the concrete shatter into stone shrapnel, slicing the top of my hand wide open and spraying my face and neck with tiny stone fragments. The blood from my flayed hand rained down onto the heads of the undead below. Horrifyingly, they opened their mouths and held out ruined blackened tongues to catch the droplets, like some nightmarish child hoping for a snowflake on a winter morning. A third shot, this one just closer still and a little higher up. I managed to avoid further damage, but whoever was shooting at me was clearly zeroing in and fast. Two shots in the seven or so seconds since Colleen and Finn sank below the grain. I leapt over the edge and heard a third shot crash into the concrete just before I hit the grain.
<br />
<br />It was corn, popping corn to be exact. Round and hard and nearly uniform, they provided almost no surface tension and opened to accept me as readily as they had swallowed my family moments before.
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<br />What surprised me most was the sound, or rather the lack of it. The initial rustle of the myriad corn kernels brushing a slipping past one another was quickly repalced by a near total silence. And the darkness. God, back into the darkness. I felt my mind consulse and shiver at the thought of it. Even now I cannot sleep with the lights off.
<br />
<br />Before hitting the grain I had taken a deep breath and I tried the only thing I could think to do. I pushed my arms in front of me and pulled, trying to swim through the slippery beads of corn. Almost immediately I found what I was looking for. I grabbed blindly at the flesh I felt at my fingertips, felt my hands close on arm, gripped and pulled.
<br />
<br />There was no movement. Again I pulled, and again nothing. There was nothing for me to leveage the additional weight against. Flailing, desperate, I began in that dark silence to panic. Past the point of reason, I pulled with all of the strength I could still muster and jerked and twisted my body, letting the fear and panic control me. Had I been thinking clearly, I surely would have perished.
<br />
<br />In my ridiculous desperate wiggling, my damaged hand struck something solid, sending a lightning bolt of pain shooting down my arm and jolting my oxygen starving brain to awareness. Grasping, I found a metal rod embedded in the wasll of that dark and terrible place and I pulled. I pulled until I felt my arms creaking, pulled until the tendons in my shoulders and back and neck threatened to tear, pulled harder, pulled until I could feel my body threatening to rip itself in half with the effort. I pulled again and again, felt something in my chest tighten suddenly, then give and tear, and I still I pulled. It was no longer black in that space, but a kaleidascope of color, fireworks bursting in my vision as the vessels of my eyes swelled and burst with the effort. Then we were moving, rising and the tension was a little less and just a little less and in a moment my face cleared the surface of the corn. I opened my mouth and eyes, sucked in great burning lungfuls of breath and with a final heave that threatened to pull something deep and permanent loose from its internal mooring I pulled my wife's face from below that hateful crop and into the light of day.
<br />
<br />Reaching below, I fished blindly for Finn, found a small, fragile arm and yanked him free, setting him across the surface, glanced briefly at his fitfully rising chest, and passed out.
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<br />As for what kind of a man I am, I'm not sure I want to know anymore. Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-63335429347761545542009-02-06T09:23:00.000-06:002009-02-06T09:24:29.107-06:00Poor, but not in Spirit.<div>The cop was right about something’s, wrong about others. The ATV is both good and bad. While it is an “off-road” vehicle, and its speed is fairly good, it was really made to ride on downtown paved streets. The wheels are flat and wide, unlike the normal oversized knobby gripped tires that these vehicles normal sport. This means that getting up on the tracks is tough, and the ride is very bumpy. The suspension was made for speed and maneuverability on pavement, not on unstable ground. I decide that riding on the tracks isn’t my best course of action and ride in between them, on the rock bed that separates the two tracks. The going is slow, but not as dangerous as walking. I see a few creatures here and there, but there are no masses of them until I get to the projects.</div><div><br /></div><div>The train tracks ride right along some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. Large apartments for low income families sprout on one side of the tracks. The bodies of hundreds of undead clamor at the sides of the building and on the windows. Suddenly the risk of being in a poor neighborhood is a benefit. All the windows that line the ground floor for each of these buildings is covered by thick wire or bars, and all the doors are covered with bars as well. These places were made so humans couldn’t get into them, and the zombies are stopped cold. </div><div><br /></div><div>On the porches, hundreds of people sit. It is still before noon and the temperature is still rising, it may reach 100 degrees today. With no hope of circulation these people go to the only place that is relatively cool, outside. They look down lazily at the creatures and out at me, seemingly unphased but the horrendousness of it all. I can’t tell what they are thinking exactly. They could be resigned to the fact of death. Having lived in a dangerous neighborhood for so long they might not even be affected by the fact that their apartment is surrounded by creatures that want to kill them; this isn’t much of a change from before there were zombies. In a way they were separated from the world before, segregated to a small community of like incomes and colors, how is this different?</div><div><br /></div><div>But my cynical side isn’t firing this thought process up. Instead my optimistic side takes hold. Hardship isn’t new to these people. Lean times and mortal danger was already a daily occurrence. This new threat is just another in a long line of threats that they will overcome. </div><div><br /></div><div>When some of them notice me they hoot and holler. They yell and wave, some of them laugh, others cry out for some help. I cannot do anything really, but ride by and give them something to mark the day as different from the others. I am going slow when I hear gunfire. I am not sure if it is a gun aimed at me or not, so I hit the throttle, leaving the poor to fight their own fight. If I had to pick a side, I’d say the tenacity of these people will win out.</div><div><br /></div><div>A little after noon, I get to a point in the train tracks that is going to be a challenge. There is a trestle just outside of a town called Blue Island that crosses a shipping canal. I maneuver the ATV onto the tracks and start to ride over, there are no rocks and the wheels are smallish, so the ATV is bouncing as the wheels fall between the supports of the railroad ties. It is too hard to drive and I am afraid that I will be thrown off into the water below. I get out and try to pull it. It is slow going across the bridge, each tie takes a few seconds, and a lot of effort. </div><div><br /></div><div>It isn’t until I get to near the middle when I see them. Some creatures are coming down the tracks from toward Blue Island. I start o furiously pull the ATV when I spin around and see a couple of others ambling toward me from the other way. There are about twenty of them, slowly plodding their way toward me, and I know there is nothing I can do. The way on foot will be too difficult, this machine is really my only chance of survival, but there are too many creatures, and the footing on this bridge is too poor. All the options that I have are quickly running out. The highest probability for survival is the only choice I really take seriously. I jump.</div>Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04045787937191371779noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-49153108646055169862008-11-17T16:14:00.004-06:002008-11-17T16:33:41.733-06:00The sound of SiloAt the top of the silo, after hours of running, I leaned over the wall, and peered into a massive pile of grain. Wheat likely, but it was at least 20 feet below.<br /><br />The undead scratched, grunted, clawed and moaned from below. They weren't getting up, and I sure as hell wasn't getting down. So our choices were grain, suicide, or stand as long as possible on the tiny iron rungs we had been climbing to get to the top.<br /><br />Tom was talking, but all I could hear were words. I don't know how long since we'd eaten. It had been at least a week since we had any protein. I was hungry, I was thirsty, and I was afraid for Finn. He was sleeping too long now. I never put him down to develop his own mobility skills unless we were sleeping, and my breasts grew more dry with each day. He had eaten all my body had to give him, and I had nothing to nourish myself and make anymore milk. I feared he was starving. <br /><br />My ears were ringing, my feet and hands bleeding and throbbing, and my vision was swimming. I clung to the wall. Tom stood next to me, still talking, and I still lacked the ability to focus. I just needed to rest. <br /><br />To dive into the grain was uncertain.... can you drown in grain? It's not solid, so how deep in it would we go, and would be able to swim out? What about my poor, beautiful Finn? And once inside, do we just die? There is no one to come for us, and nowhere else to go.<br /><br />I can't hold on forever. I can't hold on for an hour. I need to rest. Finn needs food, and things look grim.<br /><br />Then I heard the boom and whiz of... well.... was it a bullet? Were we being shot at? Fed to the Zombies? I look to the farm house, and see movement behind the partially closed shutters. <br /><br />People! OH GOD, PEOPLE! <br /><br />Hillbillies, perhaps, and maybe no better than hippies, but they have a fortified home, and perhaps food and water. It is unclear as to whether we were being shot down, or the zombies were being shot at, but with nothing to lose, I untied Finn from my back and held him toward the house.<br /><br />I shook him in the air and screamed, 'HELP MY BABY! PLEASE HELP MY BABY! We're thirsty, and we're tired, but PLEASE help my BOY!'.<br /><br />Tom was yelling as well, but not at them. He was telling me to hide Finn, to protect him. 'He thinks they're shooting at us...' I thought. And I wonder, what difference does it make? Finn is nearly dead, and I can't save him from up here. We don't have long, either. Maybe a gunshot is better than being torn asunder by eternally starving teeth and rotting flesh. <br /><br />Tom reaches past me to get Finn, and in our struggle, I tumble backwards.... into the silo, still holding an unconscious Finn by his arm... and I feel the wheat move past my body, and Tom's muffled cries from above.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-82411443582307331412008-11-10T13:13:00.003-06:002008-11-10T13:30:04.651-06:00SpearfishingI awake shivering. It can’t be but maybe 5:00am and the moans from below my treehouse pyre softly rumble into a background noise. There are other noises; the first twitterings of Mourning Doves and an owl hooting in a distant tree.<br /><br />The throb in my punctured arm is nothing compared to the throb in my head – a dehydration headache perhaps. Or maybe from lack of daily caffeine. I carefully and slowly roll over and look through the cracks in the rotten wood at the nemeses below. The Damned. Nothing changed overnight; still two rotting children, two rotting men – circling the tree, moaning. I need to get out.<br /><br />My chest tightens signaling a long overdue panic attack. I slowly sit up causing the wood underneath me to groan. My breathing gets quicker and my chest hurts. I close my eyes and try and meditate on The Five Precious Wounds. A little residual Catechesis. It takes me about twenty minutes to calm myself and breathe regularly and by that time the morning light is creeping in to brighten the sky. I put dawn at about 5:50am. I look around to see if there is anything I can use to help myself out of here. Nothing. No hidden Indiana Jones rope tucked away in the corner, no matches, no gun, no miracle, nothing.<br /><br />My parents’ house is about a football field’s length away. If I start screaming when I think they’ll be awake, I might have a chance to get out my S.O.S. Maybe someone will come running in on a steed of metal to save me.<br /><br />At about 7:00am when I think my family would be awake I clear my throat and start my screaming:<br /><br />HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPP! I’M IN THE TREEEEEE! HEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPPPP! I’M IN THE TREEEEEE!<br /><br />I space out my screams so it sounds intentional and not like I am actually being killed. I do this for about an hour and forty-five minutes straight and with every moment of silence that follows I lose more and more hope. My dry throat burns and my vocal cords, strained and abused, refuse me any further service. A raspy cigaretty sexy voice of desperation. I give in to a good five minute crying session. In my fit, my hand claws at the end of a rotten wood floor plank and unconsciously pulls… the edge tears off in a long splintered piece. I hold it up in front of my dirty tear-streaked face and touch the surprisingly dense yet splintery sharp tip. Oak was always reliable, even when dead. Maybe it would work. It could penetrate skull, maybe. I didn’t have a choice now. Do or die. Or both. I hope the internal rot of these freaks has mushened their bones.<br /><br />Like a madwoman I start ripping at the edge of the rotten floorboards, yanking up yard-stick long pieces to use as weapons, embedding many nasty splinters into my own skin. When I had about six good sized pieces I took my shirt off and wrapped it around the bunch and tied it to my back like a rigged bundle. A she-MacGuyver in a white Wal-Mart bra. The hard part would be gingerly climbing down the makeshift and crumbling ladder to get just within reach to plant the spear-sticks into their rotting heads. To do this without putting myself in jeopardy would be a trick.<br /><br />My hands were moist with sweat and shaking I lower myself to the first step. Moaning continues below and gradually loudens when the beasts realize I am coming down the ladder. Another step. This one feels a bit more shaky. I pray the nails don’t give up their duties. One more, honey, come on. My chest and stomach scrape desperately against the bark of the oak, sending small dead pieces of wood shrapnel and dust raining down. My hands are not doing me any favors by sweating so profusely. My fear of heights does not help. Then I get to the magic step. It seems firm enough. I trust this piece of wood and it could be my doom, but I balance both feet as I twist my body sideways. My feet are just out of clawing reach and I cling to the trunk with all my shaking might. I reach back into my makeshift shirt-bundle and – OUCH! I stick myself with an end of a spear. Stupid! Ignoring the pain, I manage to grope and grab the first oak spear, balancing and clinging to the tree with one hand like a spider monkey. A scared one. I hover and wait with my spear upraised for the best opportunity to nail the first one through the top of the skull…Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-4893831569321864252008-10-30T09:51:00.002-06:002008-10-30T10:03:19.212-06:00Segway<div><div>“Which side?” I say to Rick, the police officer of the now defunct Chicago PD. We walk across the top of the roof of the building, dried tar and gravel crunching as we head to the edge. </div><div><br /></div><div>“West, by the red line,” he says. He is letting me know where is abandoned vehicle is. Everyone in the building is sure I am insane, leaving the security for the unknown. Their leader, Mike, made a less than convincing plea for me to stay. He asked why I wanted to leave, and the first thing I said was that I needed to make sure my wife was ok. His response was coarse but possibly true, “Look man, she is probably already dead.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Let me tell you about my wife,” I say sharply, “If our roles were reversed and she was down here – she’d be fucking home by now.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Our conversation is thankfully short and his protests are quick. He can tell I won’t change my mind, and the psychological drain I could inflict on the group could be too great for moral so he acquiesces. </div><div><br /></div><div>Rick and I peer over the edge of the building and look at the street. From 20 floors up they look like figurines below, placed her by some malevolent child in a sick game. The creatures march no where, all of them circling but at different arcs. It looks like grind of sharks, all clambering on top of one another to get a taste of the latest catch, but in this case there is nothing to grab. They all cycle in toward the buildings, only to be pushed away by the others behind in a never ending cycle.</div><div><br /></div><div>Rick points, “you see it out over by the corner?”</div><div><br /></div><div>“That’s a fucking segway.” I say to him, amusement drained from my voice.</div><div><br /></div><div>He laughs, “man I’m just fucking with you. It’s over there, behind that truck that's embedded in Walgreen’s."</div><div><br /></div><div>“That’s a quad…”</div><div><br /></div><div>This time he doesn’t laugh. “Seriously… That’s what you have?" I say, "A 4 wheeler? You realize it has neither roof nor doors.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Look. That’s what I got. I know that it isn’t a full car, but it might be better in some respects. If you come to a clog in the road or something, you can always go around.” I start to protest and he holds up his hand, indicating he isn’t done. “It doesn’t use much gas, and that is a police model, it goes about 65 if you need it to.”</div><div><br /></div><div>I shake my head, “I guess I have no choice.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“You could always just stay here.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Gimme the keys”</div><div><br /></div><div>-------</div><div><br /></div><div>The goodbye isn’t long. I gather what I can carry, take both my makeshift machete and a small crowbar they happily give me. Rick is the one who comes to say goodbye last. </div><div><br /></div><div>“You should take this.” He says pulling his revolver out of the holster.</div><div><br /></div><div>“No, I can’t…” I start.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Look, I won’t need this here. We can handle all this with the makeshift weapons. Besides, I only have 12 rounds. It can get you out of a jam if you need to, but this isn’t anything I can use. And..." He pauses, "if you feel the change coming on, at least you can end your misery…” The last statement hangs in the air as I quietly take the gun.</div><div><br /></div><div>We find a spot closest to my destination, that is surrounded by the least ghouls. The guys pike them as I climb down the ladder and I quickly jog through the street. The ghouls are packed into places, and in other parts of the street there are none. The ones nearby start moving toward me, but I am able to maneuver around them and I don’t have to engage. I arrive at the ATV with some space to spare. They are closing in, but not so fast that I don’t have time to get the key in the ignition. It starts immediately and I put it in gear and drive. I move past the major center of creatures quickly. Keep distance from the packs as I zig zag over streets and sidewalks. </div><div><br /></div><div>I know which way I should go and I head that direction. The train tracks lead to near my home. I can follow them and hopefully avoid crowds of creatures. And with this vehicle it might not be that bad of a ride.</div><div><br /></div><div>I make my way past the buildings and veer off into the grass. The buildings end and the train yard begins. I drive through the surrounding deserted prairie, and head to the tracks. My car awaits at the station, miles from here. My goal is to make it there by nightfall.</div></div>Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04045787937191371779noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-62408765470747345342008-10-13T17:15:00.003-06:002008-10-13T17:34:16.920-06:00Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust stillWhen you have nowhere to go, it takes a hell of a long time to get there. I realized this as I ran, my exhausted lungs ripping oxygen from the air around me and converting it into carbon dioxide, exhaled in ragged but rhythmic bursts. I ran and breathed and dragged my family behind me cruelly, heedless of their cries.<br /><br />I was callousness embodied. I had to be. I had through my inaction sentenced two boys to die, and so mercy became a liability I could ill afford. The game was changing now. I could feel it in the air that burned in my lungs like the fires of hell that would greet me for what I had become and I didn't care. Colleen couldn't keep up and I couldn't ask her too. She began to cry as I dug my fingers deep into her arm and forced her along, her feet bouncing and jumping against the ground more than actually running. Her cries meant nothing to me.<br /><br />Having moments ago been reborn into this protective running machine by Finn's cries, the irony of my dispassion was not lost on me, nor did it change anything. Let them cry. Let them scream if it came to that, but even as the lactic acid began to set tiny fires across the internal landscape of my person, I didn't slow. My body had changed since this began. It was leaner now, made of the kind of grit and gristle that has woven together the bodies of working men throughout all time. More than that, my mind had changed, grown harder. There was no more room in it for contemplation of ideals and ideas. It didn't matter that I couldn't run anymore, that I was exhausted, that my family couldn't keep up. That was all hypothetical. That was the world as it should be; the world as a place of sanity and reason. That was no longer my world and so we ran and if anything my pace picked up. I accelerated my stride and although my ravaged unnourished sleep deprived body should have broken down, though I should have collapsed upon the floor of the earth in a heaving desperate pile, I ran. I ran to try and match the hellish determination of those who pursued me and the singularity of my focus consumed me.<br /><br />Colleen had stopped crying now. I doubted she could spare the breath. Finn took up her slack, ratcheting up his protests. How hungry he must have been, how tired. This new world ill suited to the needs of a child. But if I survived so would he, and so would Colleen. I would leave a thousand boys behind to die screaming if only to ward off the demise of my family for a moment. I realized this and ran faster still, trying to outrun any need for redemption, to outpace the realization of my biological selfishness. It followed me like a shadow. I was an atheist in search of a respite from hell.<br /><br />I would not find it. I found instead a farmhouse and its outbuildings just over a small hill up ahead. My pursuers were still coming, but I had lengthened our lead, given us a few precious moments to slow as I surveyed the area. The house appeared to be old, but sturdy and in good repair. It seemed the obvious choice until I saw the sun glint from a window and I shook at my near miss. It wouldn't take five minutes for the glass to break, social contracts shattered by undead heads and hands, snapping teeth and desperate hunger. We would have been consumed withing an hour had I not corrected my intial judgment, murdered by my poor decision as much by my poor decision as by the hands of the undead. I changed course in mid stride, almost sending Colleen to the ground, but yanking up on her arm to keep her up. I charged forward toward the massive concrete dominance of a grain silo. Gratified that there were no doors, I skid to a halt at the face of the thing.<br />Rebar rings circled the structure every three feet or so, creating a widely spaced but not impossible ladder. I had no idea what we would find inside had no idea if the silo would be empty or full or if there was a way to climb back down on the interior wall of the thing. It didn't matter. The house was certain death; the dilapidated barn no better. I looked at Colleen who appeared ready to pass out, then back at our pursuers. A hundred yards behind us the first of the undead was, of course, still running (when did they learn to run like that?) after us, only slightly hindered by a horribly mauled leg that looked as if it might bend entirely in the wrong direction with each ungraceful but effective lurch. I took Finn from Colleen's arms and began to climb. I motioned for her to follow.<br /><br />Thankfully, it was not just my own body that had hardened during our ordeal, but Colleen's as well. She climbed grimly, but with competence. We made it six rings up, about a third of the way toward the zenith of the six story monolith when the first of the running undead hit the concrete wall at full speed. The sound of bone and flesh impacting the immovable concrete wall was gruesome, but the impact was of no consequence. The thing clambered to its feet as quickly as it was down, moaning through its ruined skull as it reached vainly into the air for the meal it had gamely chased. For the moment at least, it didn't seem able to climb, and without another glance back, Colleen and I struggled upward. <br /><br />It was, I reflected later, a day for irony. Taking shelter in a grain silo was very nearly like storing ourselves in the refrigerator. Man had poured grain into silos for hundreds of years to store food for later consumption. Now it was we who were the food, climbing desperately into the larder.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-11920228861970647302008-08-27T07:43:00.001-06:002008-08-27T07:44:37.094-06:00Chicago, Where the Weak are Killed and EatenThe pikes did what they needed them to do. With trial and error we were able to build the scaffold around the bottles of water, seal it off with concrete form boards and kill everything inside in less than two days. With the new strategy, the guys had planned to build the scaffold across the street and possibly take a few buildings back in the vicinity. The claiming of new buildings meant more resources, a bigger spot on multiple roofs for rain collection, and more survivors. Everyone was in favor of it.<br /><br />I hadn’t slept in a long time. Really slept anyway… Lying still and jumping awake at any creak, moan or whateverthefuck wasn’t really sleeping, that was closing your eyes long enough so you don’t hallucinate. So when I made it across the street, I fell out. There were plenty of people watching as others slept to warn them if anything happened to the defenses, so when I finally did hit the pillow I was out.<br /><br />I sat awake when I heard the rhythmic thumping. Zombies have no rhythm, their pounding is pure chaos, but this had some organization. When I looked around I saw no one inside, so I trotted out to the scaffold. The thumping was accompanied by a distant voice, it was a helicopter, announcing something.<br /><br />All the people in the building looked up, and saw the thing hovering in the distance. There were a few murmurs at first, and then when we could tell someone was broadcasting their voice, everyone quieted down. It was hard to hear at first, but eventually we were able to make it out.<br /><br />“We are moving toward Chicago. Please stay inside. We will be making a sweep of the city in a few days. Please, stay inside until we come into your building. We need your full cooperation. Just hold out for a few more days.”<br /><br />The voice was shaky and unsure. Weeks ago I would have felt sorry for the person behind it. Now I could feel the anger welling up inside me.<br /><br />“When we move through the blocks and liberate buildings, we need you to kneel and put your hands on your head to show that you aren’t infected. Anyone who disobeys will be shot.”<br /><br />How fucking dare you send some snot nosed little kid to talk to us over the broadcast, I thought. His voice gave everything away. He was either scared or poorly trying to deceive. Fucking cock suckers, I thought, getting angrier by the second. I hope his fucking helicopter explodes… no, I quickly changed my mind. I wanted it to crash land with him trapped and on fire, then I wanted him to finish dying by getting eaten alive by these goddamn abominations crawling the streets.<br /><br />“Please stay inside!” his voice was a shriek now, a begging, pleading weak little shriek. It got higher and higher as it went down the block, and more insecure with each passing moment. It hit a crescendo when a group down the street that didn’t care what the guy was saying ran out onto ground level, disregarding the fact that the street was filled with undead. The ran out, illuminated by the high powered light of the helicopter, waving at the sky like a pack of starving retards trapped on an island.<br /><br />“No! Stay inside! We can’t pick you up! Go! No! No!” He squealed pathetically as the group was torn apart. The mic went silent quickly thereafter as the helicopter rose in altitude and flew off faster.<br /><br />I leave tomorrow, I thought. I am not sitting here waiting to see if they are telling the truth. Even if they are, they aren’t going to let me hop a ride out to my house to get my wife. No, there is no choice now. I have to leave.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-25291434734854707822008-07-24T13:45:00.003-06:002008-12-11T16:43:46.843-06:00Lunatic Fringe<p align="left"><span style="font-family:arial;">The throb in my arm awakens me. It is twilight. I open my eyes and see the sparkling diamond of Venus rising. A slowly moving satellite crosses the sky where the dark blue meets black, far away from this inexplicable chaos. I’m used to seeing airplane contrails scar the sky above this area all the time. Now there are none. </span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-family:arial;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226670980290943858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxv-5B8dYg7w_gz3ZJ2nmjYxDVPb6sJncpNxbR48_fL5btjtpt9433um7Es1rnLeNFoYvT78iZYcAQPenN2kIPAsmt2WlI_YsdzUnO7fM_B-T5RjVk1sLvdeIfD5-OMhg47XUQKvw7xjjD/s400/twilight.jpg" border="0" /><br />The soft groans of the determined undead drift up to meet my ears as I carefully shift my weight on the rotten boards of the tree house floor. The air is noticeably cooler and a soft summer breeze spitefully rustles my hair.<br /><br />I peer down between cracks in the tree house floor and see that we have a visitor. Another undead neighbor - looks like Rich Aldanus - round bare gut hanging over his Chicago Bears lounge pants, socklessly shuffles in to join the party, arms raised, clawing ridiculously at the bark of the tree like the others, moaning for blood. Maybe he’s a fresh kill.<br /><br />I recall hearing a radio program on the topic of stress. The science was that the body’s secondary functions such as growth and reproductive processes halt during extreme times of stress. I thought about how I wouldn’t even need to be on the pill right now to stay unpregnant. After this I realize how much I am missing Cecil. And I begin to weep bitterly, my tears landing on the splintered gray floorboards. I could use his military directions right now. When I had got drunk and puked in the car after my company Christmas party two years ago he held me up, got me in the house, got me undressed and cleaned up, and sternly commanded me to stop crying and keep my head over the toilet bowl. I feel like my head is over a toilet bowl right now. And all this shit is swirling below me, groaning to reclaim my body somehow. I hope Cecil is holding his own against these fuckers wherever he is right now.<br /><br />The raccoon punctures in my arm stopped bleeding but are looking swollen. I’m sure an infection is well on its way. Great, just what I need.<br /><br />More stars appear in what’s quickly becoming the night sky. As the colors fade I think of the song <em>Lunatic Fringe</em> by Red Rider how the beginning is echoey and perfect for this picture. I cradle my injury and curl up in a fetal position. </span></p><p align="left"><span style="font-family:arial;">I have to get out of here tomorrow. Come hell or high water.</span></p>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-63253522113703054692008-07-15T18:21:00.000-06:002008-07-15T18:22:08.596-06:00Not so Precious Moments<p class="MsoNormal">There are the stories we tell over a nice meal, stories that bind a diverse people together through the wonder of shared experience.<span style=""> </span>They may be happy stories or sad or funny, but they are told willingly enough, and without anger or resentment.<span style=""> </span>But there are other stories, terrible mournful stories.<span style=""> </span>Stories told in whispers, reluctantly, each word pulled from us like bloody fish hooks, writhing and thrashing to stay buried deep in the hard, desperate parts of us, these are the stories that wound grievously with each telling.<span style=""> </span>This is one of those stories.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">We had just come to the light.<span style=""> </span>Can you imagine what the meant to us?<span style=""> </span>Can you?<span style=""> </span>Just to have the light again, to be out of that infernal dark, it was like learning to breathe again just to see.<span style=""> </span>And it wasn't just light, but sunlight, beautiful and bright and hopeful and it was there for the taking.<span style=""> </span>It felt like I was consuming it, that I would devour the suns rays with my voracity.<span style=""> </span>Can you think for one moment what that would have been like?<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I didn't even think about it.<span style=""> </span>I'd like to be able to say that I saw those kids down there and decided to do what was right, but it wasn't like that.<span style=""> </span>I just started moving.<span style=""> </span>What else was there to do?<span style=""> </span>Jesus, they were just teenagers.<span style=""> </span>They should have been throwing rocks and getting stoned and finding some girl to let them feel her boobs, but instead there they were, sitting in that goddamn boat as it floated lazily toward the shore.<span style=""> </span>And of course there were dead on the shore, plenty of them.<span style=""> </span>And so what the fuck could I have done?<span style=""> </span>It wasn't the right thing, hell; it was the only thing.<span style=""> </span>So we sat, all of us, in that damn tree and there I was, whittling little spears, a regular Don Quixote, readying the lance to go tilting at undead windmills.<span style=""> </span>I thought I had to</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">By the time I realized what was happening, it was far too late.<span style=""> </span>You have to know that at least.<span style=""> </span>When we crawled out onto the tree from drainage culvert, I never looked at the tree.<span style=""> </span>I was blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, you know what I mean?<span style=""> </span>I didn't see a tree, I saw freedom, I saw salvation from the hell of that concrete tunnel and the dark.<span style=""> </span>I saw spears to fight the zombies and maybe save the kids in that stupid little boat.<span style=""> </span>What I didn't see was that the tree was dead.<span style=""> </span>Mostly at least.<span style=""> </span>It was leaning against the culvert because it had been struck by lightning.<span style=""> </span>Some of the branches were still green but it was a goner.<span style=""> </span>The trunk was split wide open at the base and it was at a crazy angle to the ground.<span style=""> </span>Hell, thinking back it's likely the only thing holding that damn tree vertical was its leaning against the very culvert we climbed out of.<span style=""> </span>So when it began to fall, slowly at first, I had no idea what was going on.<span style=""> </span>It was like tipping over backward from the top of a ladder, sickening and inevitable, and just slow enough so that you know you're really fucked.<span style=""> </span>It was a big tree.<span style=""> </span>We were very high up.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I remember the landing real well.<span style=""> </span>I was lucky (that's all it was too, don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise) to be on the far side of the initial impact.<span style=""> </span>Couple of them cellar dweller hippie body clone chicks hit the ground first, and the rest of the tree just fell right into them.<span style=""> </span>Weird thing was, no one said anything.<span style=""> </span>Not a word, not an "Oh Shit" or "Fuck."<span style=""> </span>Nothing.<span style=""> </span>We fell silently.<span style=""> </span>It had become our habit in the dark.<span style=""> </span>But our silence didn't mean shit to Zed.<span style=""> </span>They saw and heard that tree falling and they came in as big a rush as I ever seen them.<span style=""> </span>Up until now, we'd only seen the slow ones.<span style=""> </span>These were fast.<span style=""> </span>They were on us before we even knew we'd survived the fall.<span style=""> </span>One poor fucker just laid there, trying to push himself out of from under the tangle of branches that had him pinned even as they descended upon him.<span style=""> </span>It was pointless.<span style=""> </span>I could see even as I scrambled that his legs were shot, but he fought like hell until one of them mercifully bit him in the throat.<span style=""> </span>Finn's screams probably saved my life.<span style=""> </span>Until that moment, I was dumbfounded, pulling myself out of the branches and wondering how the hell we were all going to get out of this one when I heard his panicked cries.<span style=""> </span>I snapped to and looked to find Colleen clutching Finn, looking wild and trying to restrain him with one hand while trying to scramble out of the tangled mess herself.<span style=""> </span>I couldn't believe that she'd managed to hold onto him through the impact with the ground, but there they were, alive.<span style=""> </span>And I guess that's when it happened.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I looked at them, my tired, half crazed wife, my screaming son, and I didn't care anymore about the boys in the boat. They were dead already, they just didn't know it.<span style=""> </span>I think I had wanted to stay and fight before, to make a stand.<span style=""> </span>I was ready at a moment's notice to make every place my feet held soil the goddamn Alamo.<span style=""> </span>Until I heard Finn screaming.<span style=""> </span>I looked back over my shoulder.<span style=""> </span>A couple of the hippy-types had lived through the fall and were extricating themselves from the branches.<span style=""> </span>One was brandishing a flimsy stick as the undead rushed him, tearing it from his hands and tackling him with the weight of the ceaseless hunger.<span style=""> </span>And so we ran. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I grabbed Colleen's arm harder than I would ever have dared before and took off.<span style=""> </span>I didn't care if she couldn't keep up or if I was hurting her.<span style=""> </span>I needed to run, to put distance between my family and that madness.<span style=""> </span>I left those boys on the water and our traveling companions to die.<span style=""> </span>Part of me has been running ever since.<span style=""> </span></p>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-42573136820081976422008-06-19T12:54:00.001-06:002008-06-19T12:56:26.324-06:00Culvert-land<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">It has been dark for so long, and we're all mad for the light. How long has it been? A day, a week, a moment.... we're all lost for time at this point, and the darkness has made us hungry like I've never known. Though not for food.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">When we catch the first glimmer of sunlight, there is silence, as if no one dare breathe, for fear it will melt away. Like desert travelers in search of water, we are at the end of our tunnels, and our ropes, and fearfully, madly dashing toward the light, which dances with the shadows of leaves and branches, and rustles in a most beautiful, echo-less sound.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Tom is in front, he has lead us here. With few words, and little confidence, he has somehow reassured us that this is the way out. He seems, however, to be showing signs of wear. The wear and the madness of the dark, that we have all felt in the pits of our bellies seems to be growing, expanding, and we're all at the edge of madness as we desperately clamor, stumble, and race toward the edge of the tunnel, and the light outside. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">In a moment, I am cast aside with the madness for the light, and I clutch Finn to me, who has been quiet for far too long, and fall hard on my hip. I cry out for Tom, terrified I will be left behind here, in the darkness, forever. The hippies were always a little cracked, but their desperation for the light seems more than ours.. and I wonder if they have EVER seen the light of day. They have lived underground their whole lives... what this must look like to them...</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Tom comes back for me, as I am getting up, hip sore and likely to bruise, and he helps me stumble forward toward the end of the tunnel, and the world outside. He makes no sound, and the tension of leading us through these tunnels has left him frayed and tired. It's hard to say at first how far we have to go. The light seems a mirage, that fools us with it's rays, and dancing shadows. It could be 10 feet, or it could be 100. But we trudge on, quickly, and urgently desperate to get out of here.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">After a time that feels like hours but it likely moments, I hear the moaning... Tom must too, as he stops dead. Where is it coming from? We look ahead and see that the hippies have reached the edge, and now fearfully grasp the edge of the culvert, looking back at us in overt terror. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">As we get closer it is easy to see that we are not at ground level. And the moaning is still audible. Tom has his knife pulled, and is ready to fight, but steps away from the edge, baffled. As I lean over to look down I can see that we are 30 feet off the ground, in a large drain culvert, looking down on a man made lake at some teen boys in a boat who look to be quickly overtaken by 4 or 5 of the undead. Once they are in the water, they will be difficult to fight, as they don't need air like we do. But if the lake is man-made, we can hope it is deep, and that the zeds have forgotten how to swim. The boys look terrified.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">For a moment I am sad that these strong young men, who could be so useful to us in surviving, are at their ends. Tom must be thinking the same thing, and he climbs out onto a large tree branch near the culvert, and then summons for us to join him. The hippies are terrified, but he motions for silence, so that we can only trust his guidance, and so as he asks. He has led us this far in safety, and slowly, Sage, Juniper, Corinader, and Hawthorne climb into the tree, and begin down the trunk. Tom begins to whittle makeshift weapons with his knife out of the longer, thinner branches, and it is clear he means for us to fight.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">I clutch Finn to my chest, who is now cooing happily in the sun, and hope that for his sake, this is an easy battle. I don't know how much more bloodshed I can bear, but my god, does that sun feel good on my skin. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">It seems to warm me from the depths of my soul, and after a few moments, I am renewed, and ready to do what is right.</p>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-50589244702849875722008-05-19T07:57:00.002-06:002008-05-19T08:00:14.986-06:00Brutes and LaddersThe threat of injury means nothing to the undead. If I were surrounded by normal people a feint with my paper-cutter/machete would make them back away or flinch. These creatures pour on, climbing over one another in the vein hope of a meal only to be struck and killed. They have no regard for one another and treat each other as inanimate objects. If one is to slow the others surge past, when one falls the others stomp right over the top of the fallen. They make little sound. They occasionally let out a moan, or rub up against one another. The damp cloth scrapes together as does their flesh so they sound like a box of worms.<br /><br />I back up away from the fallen cart. I am surprisingly calm, my brain picks out target areas on the creatures. The only parts I can hit are the head and the base of the neck, the knee and the wrist. I try to make sure everything is a headshot, but have to resort to a few knees, when the creatures fall, several others topple over them and I gather some much needed breathing room. I keep walking backward as I lead the conga line of undead in a circle, slowly backing away while I check behind me, and clubbing anything that cones near. I fight for possibly a minute to a minute and a half when I hear a loud crash.<br /><br />I look over to the scaffold and see the men have lowered a large aluminum ladder. They scream for me to make my way to it. It’s not very difficult right now to do so; I cut a few down on the legs and sprint. The moment I touch it one of them screams, “Don’t climb it, just hold on!” As I grasp it the creatures are ten feet away. The urge to climb is great, but I see that four large men are pulling up the ladder and I rung by rung. This quickly makes sense, I might be shaken from the ladder or it may fall if I was left to climb it, they just took us both out of the street at the same time.<br /><br />They pull me over the side and I am out of breath, the wound on my side has opened up again and it is bleeding through the shirt. “Wish I could offer you some water,” Mike says smiling. I start to get up and he tells me to rest, that the scaffolding is perfectly safe and that they are getting the first aid box to look at my side. I start to protest, I say it is fine, but he assures me that we should look at it.<br /><br />The guy who comes down says that he is a paramedic, someone who came here looking for solace in the first few hours of the crisis. I tell him not to worry, I didn’t get bit, and he shrugs, “it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d be infected if you had been bit.” He uses a pretty comprehensive medical kit to bandage my side. They help me stand and we look over the edge of the scaffold and see the creatures reaching up, all of them still with an undying relentlessness to capture a meal.<br /><br />I ask the paramedic what he means; everyone I’ve watched get bit has turned pretty quickly. Mike is standing nearby and responds, “We had 4 people come in on the second day of the whole mess. They came running by and asked to be let up. It was a police officer and three civilians. He had brought them up from the subway, where they had been chased out of. They all got attacked in the stairwell to the subway and every one of them was bitten at least once. We told them that we would let them stay but they had to be quarantined until we made sure they would be fine. They all agreed. We locked them in a room with a couple of hammers and left that floor for four days. When we came back down and Rick the police officer was the only one left alive. The others all had obviously turned and then quickly dispatched. Our medic here checked him over and found four bites that punctured the skin, all of them infected, but he was fine.”<br /><br />“I’d like to think I’m still fine. I got a little sick, but never changed into anything like that.” One of the men who helped pull me up says as he points out to the street.<br /><br />“That turns everything around for me. I had thought it was highly contagious,” I respond.<br /><br />“We aren’t quite sure why he hasn’t been affected,” the medic replies, “There are a lot of possibilities, and this isn’t my area of expertise. He could be immune, he could have been bitten by someone who has had the virus mutate inside of them, or there may be a period of time in which the virus is contagious in a victim, and he got lucky enough to get bit an infected victim that was no longer contagious.”<br /><br />“Well getting that water aught to be pretty easy then…” I say with a smile.<br /><br />“Yeah. Fuck that” Rick chuckles.<br /><br />“I have a plan for that,” Mike cuts in,” we just need to keep these creatures away long enough and we can build the scaffold out over the water, then we can use plywood to cordon off that area, pull up the floor here and gather the water. We just need a way to get them off the water.”<br /><br />“Well if you build it up around some of them, the ones that are left inside should be easy pickings.” I say.<br /><br />“How! You going to climb down into a tiny area and whack them to death with your makeshift sword?”<br /><br />“Fuck that,” I say looking at Rick. “All we need to do is get something to stab them from up here; can we sharpen any metal poles? We can make pikes and just kill them easily from up here.”<br /><br />Another member of Mike’s crew pipes in, “Hey foreman, we got that 12 foot rebar upstairs, I can possibly sharpen up that and that should be long enough to hit from up here.”<br /><br />“Good idea, get Dave and Joey and get to work on that.” Mike says snapping into foreman mode, “Let’s get Robby, Tony, Mac and T.J. down here right away to help me set up the scaffold. If we hurry we can get that water up here by nightfall.”Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-65749491800274135692008-05-08T10:46:00.003-06:002008-05-08T10:54:37.124-06:00Toll the Bell<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">A column of thick smoke still poured upward from the mound of hot coals and charred flesh. A strange mixture of scents carried into the woods as twelve dark figures stepped away from the fire pit like hour hands extending from the center of a smoldering clock. At the six o'clock position, walked Maureen Newman. When she could no longer hear the cracks of twigs underneath the feet of her comrades, she took a knee upon the ground and dropped the backpack from her shoulder. She loosed her heavy velvet cloak and rolled it up tightly. It was quickly swapped for the lightweight jacket in her pack. She thrust her arms through the worn sleeves and pulled the zipper up tight to her neck. With her pack secured on her back again, she sighed heavily and began the long trek to her car.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Adirondack Park was beautiful during the summer. The temperatures rarely made it far from 80 degrees Fahrenheit during the daytime in July, but dropped sharply as the sun began to set. The near total shade created by the expanse of ancient foliage over Maureen's head made the twilight hour even cooler, and she pressed her hands into the jacket's pockets to tighten it around her. Gusts of wind would blow through and rattle the full leaves on the trees. These calming pulses of white noise fell upon the ears of a woman too self absorbed to appreciate their splendor.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Even though the meeting place was three quarters of a mile south of Turtle Lake, she had to walk in a large arc to the west in order to avoid the homes scattered along the lake front. At first, this walk had been completed with a sense of purpose and enthusiasm. Recently, the journey became more arduous with each undertaking. Today, it served as an opportunity for quiet contemplation. It had been six years. Six years since Maureen had lost her faith in the world and joined this doomsday cult.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">You wouldn't think her a cultist if you saw her. She didn't look anything but average in every sense. No tattoos, wild hair or abnormal piercings set her apart. Her figure was lean from hours spent hiking in these woods but wouldn't look remarkable in a bathing suit if she ever made it to a beach. It was only her thoughts which deviated from the norm. She often wondered, if she had friends, how would she explain her affiliation with this group? What would they say? Unfortunately for her, she didn't have to worry about these difficult issues. She only had to have these serious conversations with herself, and she crafted the tough questions. Maureen struggled with one of these questions as she stomped heavily through the brush. If you join a cult because you lost your faith in humanity, what does it mean when you lose faith in that cult?</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Her life had been naught but a string of failures. Maureen had failed to be anything remarka<br />ble physically or mentally. She failed to integrate herself socially after the age of twelve. Her parents failed to live long enough to guide her into adulthood. She failed to establish herself in a career that was even semi-lucrative. Hell, she even failed to sort out her own sexual orientation, which ensured that the few relationships she managed to start ended abruptly. This was probably a good thing, given the quality of the people she chose to involve herself with. She was twenty-eight, lonely, and couldn't find anything good about the world of man. Nature was a different story. There were so many things she found beautiful about the world. It was grand and majestic and nearly infinite.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Maureen's heavy boots ground down upon the faces of moss covered boulders as she scaled a steep incline next to a creek. Her heavy breaths created brief puffs of fog in front of her face.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">One day, she simply decided that humans were a plague. She didn't come to this conclusion because of brainwashing or some sort of chemical imbalance in her brain. At most, one could argue that her past left her much more receptive to fatalistic ideologies. She thought it through and made the decision to help wipe out humanity. The larger problem is how to accomplish this goal. She certainly wasn't any sort of genetic engineer, biochemist or nuclear physicist. She was quite far from possessing a bottomless bank account, and she had no private army to command. She could barely get her dog to obey orders. Ultimately, she turned to the only option available for the would be genocidist on a budget, supernatural intervention. She always believed in the supernatural, so it wasn't a stretch for her to look into cults. In an area of the country with a rich history of witch burnings, one can find a cult with a minimal amount of effort. Six years worth of rituals and incantations, and nothing to show for it.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Maureen put all of her energy into the cult's activities at first. She truly wanted to succeed in bringing an end to the human race. She did research, bought supplies and meditated for hours to find the path to destruction. On a number of occasions, she felt as if she had been lead to the answer. That the next gathering would set things in motion. The fact that she was pushing the long limbs of pine trees out of her path as the din of a small city's bustle found its way into her ears is evidence enough of how successful she had been.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The forest ahead of her was thinning out, and the black of the oversized parking lot where her rusted Toyota sat could be seen peeking through the tree trunks. She imagined herself getting out of her car in the future. She saw herself stepping down the embankment towards the tree line with her backpack, on her way to another gathering she didn't want to attend. Then she made a new decision. She decided that the cult was a waste of time and effort. This wasn't an epiphany. In her heart, she knew this to be true a long time ago. A large amount of despair and a pinch of pride held her to these rituals. At least there was some sort of hope that way, but she could only delude herself for so long. No amount of rare plants, chanting, drawn symbols or sacrificed animals were going to raise the souls of dead and usher in the end of the world. She was thirty-four years old and no closer to a content existence than she was before. A single word worked its way into her mind... hermit. She was probably a prime candidate. A life alone, in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but the landscape and animals around her. She actually cracked a small smile at the idea. She could be pretty damn happy that way, and she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it before.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The toes of Maureen's boots dug into the soft earth of the small hill before her. Her eyes stared down at her feet as she searched her mind for the perfect spot to retreat to. Adirondack was enormous, and there were a number of places that would be more than secluded enough. She was pulled from her state of distraction as she crested the hill. A shrill scream shocked her back to attention and set every hair on her body on end. Her muscles locked up in a panic as she snapped her wide eyed head up. The sun was low in the sky and cast an orange glow over everything, except for where it shone a sparkling ruby color as it passed through a veritable fountain blood.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The scream devolved into wet sucking noise followed by a hollow sputtering, like the first shot of air and warm water out of a garden hose that has been laying on a driveway. Gray fingers dug underneath this poor woman's jaw and tore through the flesh as a partially eaten teenager ripped the nape of her neck away in between his teeth. She thrashed and convulsed under the chomping jaws of this thing. Maureen stood paralyzed by the horror she was witnessing. Slowly, she began to notice the rest of the parking lot. People were running everywhere. Cars were crashed into each other at the entrance, and people were fleeing on foot. Here and there small huddles could be seen along the ground. She could only assume that they were doing what the young man in front of her was doing. Eating.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">That whole cult thing sounded like an even worse idea now. Some years ago, if you would have described this scene to her, it would have been like a holiday print from </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Currier & Ives. Now, standing here, the full weight of what they were trying to achieve settled on her chest. She was wrong about the cult. They had actually succeeded.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Control of her muscles was returning to her, and she began to step to her left to move around the carnage and get to her car. With Maureen now moving, the previously preoccupied assailant took a new interest in her. As he pulled himself up onto his lightly gnawed legs, she managed to push out two syllables that quite accurately summed up her current analysis of the situation :</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">“</span><span style="font-size:100%;">Oh, no.”</span></p>Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-75158575595284437702008-04-22T07:55:00.011-06:002008-12-11T16:43:47.205-06:00SideshowdownBy the grace of God I spin around with barely enough time to flee forward from the three undead Burns children that had emerged feral and angry from the screen door of the farmhouse. I drop my canteen - the organic juice jar half full of lukewarm water. It shatters on the pavement and I take off in a sprint down Gorham road. I am less than a quarter mile away from Mom and Dad’s house. The crowbar in my hand wobbles about madly as I run, pitching me slightly off balance. My arm aches and I feel sweat trickle down from my armpits and it itches. The Cat keys are tight in my jean pocket and rub raw against my thigh as I pump my legs. The undead kids are either moving faster than the regular undead I have encountered, or I am just damn slow. They seem to gain faster than they should. I calculate that I cannot make it all the way to Mom and Dad’s. From Gorham Road I cut right through the lush green yard of a very military man and wife whom I grew up next to.<br /><br />The McCormick’s yard, once immaculate, grew upwards to reclaim the space betwixt expensive patio bricks and curling vines snaked around their metal clothesline poles. The shade from their yard provided a brief few-degree cooling as I dart through its tall grass to reach the property line of my parent’s immediate neighbors. The property line is backed up against the woods I love and I remember the old tree house on the yard’s border, perched in an ancient White Oak. That thing was rickety when I was young but I need it to be there, rickety or not, as the snarling of the mutants grows louder behind me.<br /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5192071967831758562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZHeVxxY-JCudwfOBADsV5rXUGq-W5npSZEPXYSttBooeUAmsjNWNVn4y_QQ_uRdKuZWg17_XyL2xrdF7cQynhvar-iUXQGSqW9kblUqlu5RnPmqBiN0wtFt_u4fu6QdApLoIm-WgU__29/s400/oldtreehouse.jpg" border="0" /><br />I reach the base of the enormous oak and search for the two by fours nailed to the tree that serve as the ladder. There were still several but they were gray and rotting. The nails are rusted and the years had grown around them. Dead wood nailed to live wood. A sick irony if one views it as nature necrophilia.<br /><br />I have only seconds to get up this tree. In a decision of wretched stupidity, I drop the crowbar on the ground, as I need both hands to scramble and scrape to pull myself up the old wood pieces. I didn’t even think of putting it through the loop of my jeans. Dumbass. I clasp the first “piece of ladder” which looks to be covered in poison sumac and yank myself upward, grateful that the dead and dry wood doesn’t threat to break away. As I whiteknuckle the pitiful wood pieces and grunt to raise up further, a dead hand tries unsuccessfully to grasp my foot. The undead children’s heads are about level with my feet. I swing my foot up wildly to the next piece of wood. I feel a bit of pressure on my foot and kick it away from the source. I look down to see part of the black rubber sole of my shoe being gnawed grossly in the mouth of the little girl. By God, she bit part of my shoe off. I do a quick self-check and assess that my foot is not bit and turn my attention back to scrambling further up the tree.<br /><br />I am halfway up the gigantic oak before I hear a different growling. I look up above me to see the menacing masked face of a huge female raccoon. She is hunched in the opening of the battered tree house, crouching in an attack position. Her growl is deep like one long internal burp; but more guttural and serious. Shit. Of course it’s not that easy. I grimace and look down; well below me now, the undead brats circle and uselessly claw at the huge old grooves in the oak’s bark. So, here I am with a decision. Well, not really, I don’t have a choice but to keep moving up the ladder. The longer I put pressure on these old pieces of wood, the greater the odds of them crumbling and giving way to my death. My fingers that have gripped the wood sustain a few deeply lodged splinters. My chances of getting mauled by a big raccoon and surviving are better than my chances of jumping to the ground to break my ankle and meet my fate at the mouths of three rabid kids. I would have to fight a raccoon…fuck, and meanwhile my crowbar laughs at me from its snug place in the grass at the foot of the tree. The brats mull around it, here and there unintentionally kicking it and tripping over it.<br /><br />Oh God, I pray, grant me the strength. I slowly move up another rung, a signal to the hunched raccoon to escalate its defenses to the “baring teeth stage”. It hunches lower and looks more prepared to attack. I’m scared as shit. I do the only thing that comes to mind: I reach into my pocket for the Cat keys. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with them. What? If I toss them past the raccoon into the farthest corner of this tiny one-room tree house, do I think it will go after them like a dog chasing a toy? I hold out the single long Cat key like a little knife between my sweating fingers. I slowly move up the second to last rung before the opening. This is it. Fight time. And I have to do it with one arm wrapped around part of the wood rung as best I can. I don’t even hear the continuing of the moans below or notice Farmer Burns slumping up with his one pitchforked arm to join his brood around the bottom of the tree. I know that if I fall I am done for and the adrenaline surges once again. I have to pee really badly.<br /><br />Moving up the last rung I take a deep breath and swing out my arm at the raccoon, hoping to (at the very least) catch and scratch its face with the metal key in my hand. It growls loudly and jumps back only to jump forward in a flash and plant its sharp teeth into my forearm creating an instant jolt of red pain. Fucking thing (what if it’s rabid?). I manage to somehow grab one of its black-furred legs by its soft padded foot and pull it down with all the force I am able through the opening of the tree house, screaming and also dropping the Cat keys as I yank it down. It must have weighed fifteen pounds. The animal plunges past me, falling downward the fifteen or so feet, fur shaking like a bear as it lands on top of the little dead boy’s head, knocking him to the ground and biting him in the neck before it scurries away injured into the woods. If I wasn’t so scared and hurt I might have laughed at that ridiculous scene. The little boy, unfazed, clumsily stands up with nothing but a black gaping wound in his neck the size of a half-dollar, devoid of fluids, whereas I am dripping small dots of red everywhere as shaking I desperately climb up through the opening into the old tree house and huffing and crying roll onto my back on the old wood planks, hoping I don’t fall through the old and rotten wood. Fuck….all I can do is cry and press on my trembling arm with my hand to create the pressure of a tourniquet…and say fuck over and over.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-4961889120450298502008-04-20T02:30:00.002-06:002008-04-21T10:08:14.174-06:00The Once and Future Kent“Fend For Yourself”<br /><br />Kent Akerlund stood with his arms akimbo as he stared upward at the large banner hung above his workbench. His vision narrowed to include only those three words. It was no longer just a company slogan. The phrase swelled within his brain and muffled the sounds that echoed throughout the high ceilings of the warehouse.<br /><br />“You're Goddamn right I will” he muttered under his breath.<br /><br />In place of a period at the end of the statement rested the Gerber Legendary Blades logo. A sword thrust downward into a mountain like the mythical Excalibur buried to the hilt within a stone. He who could draw Excalibur would be the one chosen to lead the people through their dark times. Kent passed his gaze down to the ax he held in his right hand. Twenty-eight point four six inches of glass filled nylon adorned with a forged steel head designed specifically for splitting a winter's worth of firewood year after year.<br /><br />“Axcalibur”, he muttered. He even managed a soft and honest chuckle at his private joke.<br /><br />It was no magical sword, and Kent would settle for it leading him through the dark time waiting outside the door. At this thought, his ears exerted their will on his inflated sense of pride and reminded him that a few friends were knocking at the side door. He let out a long exhale and rolled his shoulders and neck around in large circular motions. The sort of limbering exercises that seem useful but do absolutely nothing to help. Determination drove his heavy heeled steps towards the side entrance. There were only two doorways into the building. The fire escape at the back by the bathrooms was sturdy and quiet. He would worry about fortifying it later. The other was the normal entrance for the employees.<br /><br />This was an old building. It had been used as the manufacturing center for Gerber for around forty years. The concrete foundation rose up about six feet off of the blacktop lot that surrounded it. Above that was ten feet of brick and cinder block wall. This is where the heavy door frame was secured. Even higher rose the steel beams and walls which held the large dirty windows and a sturdy roof. The grade of the roof wasn't steep since large snow accumulation was rare in Portland. This would make maneuvering along the rooftop a much safer affair, which he figured would come in handy. Half the length of the building contained a second floor about fifteen feet off of the ground. It housed the managers' offices and the break room. This would be a good space for sleeping quarters, and the stairs could be disabled if something went wrong.<br /><br />Kent passed rows of large machines and tables. A myriad collection of tools and parts sat upon them. That's why he was here. Tools. Lots of them. Tools and survival gear.<br /><br />Survival Gear.<br /><br />Funny, that almost no one used any of it to survive anything. Well, maybe that had begun changing already. Perhaps that computer tech who liked having a set of needle-nose pliers with a screwdriver in the handle for convenience found it pretty damn beneficial to have a good serrated blade in there to sharpen a chair leg into a weapon. Survival gear, he was going to put that title to the test. His left hand pulled a sturdy pair of gloves from the thick tool belt which hung lopsided off of his waist. His feet stopped.<br /><br />“This just won't do,” he said with a shake of his head. On a normal workday, he could stop to adjust his belt when necessary. He didn't have that luxury any more. The buckle's pin was forced into an unfamiliar notch two doors away from its usual home. It disagreed for a moment, but Kent was much larger than it was, and after all, it was just a belt buckle.<br /><br />Kent ran a final check of his equipment. He pulled the Kevlar sleeves upward along his biceps as far as they would stretch. The TurtleSkin safety gloves were tugged down sharply onto his scarred hands. He hadn't thought all that much about safety equipment until he saw a coworker lose a thumb. The puncture and cut resistant gauntlets were ordered the very next day. They slid around his thick fingers and callused palms as if they were made from a mold of his hands. He was glad to have a broken in pair with him. They're a bit too stiff when brand new, and he needed as much dexterity as he could retain. On either side of his hips was a ridiculously sharp machete with a serrated blade along the back and a fifteen inch hand ax.<br /><br />About four paces ahead of him stood the door. It shuddered under the constant abuse it received from the other side. Those things had seen him enter, and he knew there were at least a few of them out there. There were good and bad points to the current situation. On the good side, the stairwell leading up to the door came from the left and wasn't very wide. You couldn't fit that many people on it at any given time. Also, these creatures didn't seem to be very bright. It should be easy to trap them. They were also just humans, or they at least possessed normal human muscle mass. This meant that a one hundred-seventy pound man was only as strong as a one hundred-seventy pound man. On the bad side, they seemed to move in packs, so he had no idea how many of them were out there at the moment. Complete pandemonium could be heard outside. The elevated highway was a mere two-hundred meters to the East, and the mass of humanity trying to move along it was creating a cacophony of panic and destruction. He would just have to boot the door open and see what happened. Kent had taken a length of steel and secured it to two heavy tables by the door. With any luck, the dumb beasts would trip over the bar, and he could more easily dispatch them with a blow to the head.<br /><br />“Time to find out if I'm the adder or the knight.”<br /><br />His thick steel reinforced boot struck the push-bar on the door with all the strength he could muster. One snarling zombie was flipped backwards over the pipe railing that surrounded the concrete landing in front of the door. A second was knocked sideways towards the stairs. Kent didn't see a sea of undead outside, so that was good. He didn't have much time to scan the area as outstretched arms and snapping jaws lunged through the doorway at him. He hopped back a step and raised the head of the ax up next to his temple. As he had hoped, the first creature rammed its shins into his trap and crashed face first into the floor. A swift radial movement of his hands and the ax head was brought down with ample controlled force. The blade cleaved through the back of the once living man's skull and bit into the concrete floor with a resounding “clank!”<br /><br />“Thus began the Battle of Camlann.” The words shook as they exited his mouth. Adrenaline was now pumping unabated through his veins, and his muscles quivered as if he had drank a pot of coffee before the fight. Oblivious to fate of the first one in the door, the second zombie pushed in and tripped as well. “Clarsh-Clank.” Another kill.<br /><br />“Clarsh-Clank”<br />“Clarsh-Clank”<br />“Clarsh-Cuutch”<br /><br />That wasn't the sound he wanted. There was no floor left for Kent to cleave through to. His ax head was now firmly lodged in the shoulder of one of the previous targets, and it didn't look like the next visitor was going to wait for him to shake it free. His left hand pulled up the hatchet from his belt and brought it across the next creature's temple. It stuck for a moment before a sharp kick to the lifeless thing's face loosened it up.<br /><br />His right hand now drew the machete from its sheath as the seventh zombie pushed through the doorway. The weight on the trap from the bodies caused it to buckle, and the zombie stumbled mostly unchecked into the building. The machete caught it just below its left ear. The body dropped lifelessly to the floor, but the jaw continued to snap at him harmlessly. An eighth was already regaining its footing in front of him. Kent wasn't sure if these things kept their balance the same way living humans did, but he flipped the hand ax around to test it out. The flat hammer-like surface was brought across squarely onto the zombie's skull. The shock did seem to disorient the beast. Unable to keep its feet organized, it fell to the ground sideways. The machete bit into its eyesocket and cut deep into the brain. There was no getting that blade back quickly, so he let it go.<br /><br />Shifting his remaining weapon to his right hand, Kent spun to face the doorway and engage... nothing.<br />No shuffling or moaning could be heard on the stairwell. There was only the snapping of the head to his left. In a large arc he brought the back of the ax down across the jaw of the still functional assailant. The bone ripped out of the socket and tore the entire lower half of its face off. The other side sat connected by nothing more than a short length of muscle and sinew. The eyes were unchanged. They darted around as if searching for a part of his body close enough to eat. The bit of muscle still attached to its jaw pulsed rapidly as it still fought to devour him. With a wiggle and a tug, Kent recovered his two-handed ax and turned to the mangled head.<br /><br />“Clarsh-Clank”<br /><br />After cleaning his weapons and securing them, Kent stepped outside. He scanned the area. It was an industrial complex, which was good. Less people around to deal with. To his right, he could make out some of the events on the highway. He was glad he wasn't up there. He wondered how long it would be until the screaming stopped. Walking to the front of his former workplace, he could make out more shapes shuffling about in the area. It wasn't the same as elsewhere in the city, though. Up on the highway, they were running and screaming. No idea of what to do. No plan. That's not what was going on here. In the street, some guys were using loading vehicles and trucks with makeshift weapons on the front to wipe out the walking dead. It's just how they do things. Tools are no good without people, and these were the right people. No analysts. No consultants. Not one of these guys prioritized action items. They built. They repaired. Kent had spent ten years in the Army Reserves. He looked at the situation and analyzed the possibilities. There were only two real options :<br />1.Run to a safe zone.<br />2.Create a safe zone.<br />He definitely liked the second option. This area made sense. It had large secure structures and lots of raw materials. Twenty yards ahead of him was a construction supply distribution center. Two miles away was a fresh water lake full of fish. There were two grocery stores within a mile of where he stood, and there were at least twenty other shipping, receiving and manufacturing buildings in the area. There had to be an inordinate amount of food and supplies in close proximity.<br /><br />He had already made the calls, and people were coming to him. His family. His coworkers. Other laborers from nearby businesses. They were coming here to start construction on a secure compound. They needed to move quickly while the zombie threat was dispersed. They had the tools, the materials, and the people. What they didn't have was time. Of course, with a little luck, perhaps the time wouldn't be a factor. A young man eyed up Kent through the ten foot tall gate across the street. Kent nodded to him and looked both ways before crossing the street.<br /><br />Excalibur helped to create Camelot.<br /><br />“Let's see what Axcalibur can do.”Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8311924688193926629.post-42236183259634503172008-04-19T10:14:00.002-06:002008-04-19T10:16:21.524-06:00When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you<a href="http://www.b-squad.org/zombie/zombie-post-tom-01.mp3">http://www.b-squad.org/zombie/zombie-post-tom-01.mp3</a><br /><br /><br /><br />Or the text version for those poor souls at work unceremoniously robbed of sound card goodness:<br /><br />There is no light. There is only the darkness, thick, almost palpable, perfect. I have insisted on being in the front of our tiny line as we creep along, although I’m not sure what good it can do. Finn has stopped crying. He had been screaming for so long it became background noise, the steady undulating cries playing the rhythm section in the orchestra of madness up above. But he has stopped now. Did I mention the darkness? It is suffocating, like being coated in inky black jello, we cannot walk through it so much as wade through, arms stretched out, stumbling over tiny wet imperfections in the floor. The sounds of chaos fade as we make our way forward, but into nothing, vast insurmountable tracts of nothing. Time passes, but I cannot tell how much. We walk. Sometimes we stop to take breaks. I doze off, but no one wakes me. I can’t tell if I’ve been sleeping for minutes or hours. Sometimes Finn cries, and Colleen gently, urgently shushes him. He calms so easily in this dark, as if he realizes that here, in this black, his tiny cries disappear too. No one says much of anything. Our voices feel faint in our own throats, small, unknowable. When we come to a fork in the tunnel, or a branch, or an offshoot of where we travel, there is a brief, tremulous query. The answer is always the same. We do not deviate. It seems to make the most sense to go in the straightest line possible, but there is no way to know if we have simply walked down dozens, maybe hundreds of diverging tunnels. Most often, there is no way to know if we have come to a fork other than to literally walk into it, cursing softly. My fingertips have been rubbed raw, the skin trailing across what must be miles of tunnel walls, and still I cannot bring myself to lift my hand, not even for a moment. Floating here in this impossible silent dark, the cool rugged concrete tunnel walls are all that seem to ground me, to hold me to the very earth. It is insane, but I am afraid that without this touch I will simply float away, disconnect from the group, from the earth, from myself. So we walk, and I grind the tips of my fingers off just to be sure I’m still here. When I die down here, I think crazily, they’ll never be able to identify me. I have no fingerprints. I try not to remember that there is no they anymore. We continue to walk in silence. More than anything, I long to reach out and hold my wife, my son, but I can’t do it here, in this darkness. Too recently has the touch of flesh meant only disaster, only horror. To feel flesh beneath my palms without seeing their faces? I cannot bear the thought. We walk alone. We sleep, huddling as close as we can, no one daring to make contact. Hawthorn moans slightly in his sleep, and I am up. That sound, the moaning. I wonder if a man can live long enough to forget that sound. From the gentle rustle of clothes, I hear that everyone is up, afraid. Even Hawthorne is awake. We sound tired, but too afraid now to sleep. Wordlessly, one by one, everyone begins to stand, and again we walk. I cannot help but notice how like them we must seem now. Slow. Arms hungrily outstetched, not for blood but for light. Oh how I long to see light again! Any light, no matter how faint would be a blessing. I feel thirsty for it, parched of retinal stimulus. For a moment, I begin to believe that my need to see something, anything in this abyss is causing me to hallucinate, and for a moment longer, I am grateful for it. It is not a hallucination. Ahead, at the very ends of the earth, as distant as a tiny sun, there is the faintest prick of light. I turn my head, but it remains fixed. I close my eyes, and for the first time in days, there is difference when I open them again. Light. The others see it, and we pick up our pace, walking faster and faster, chasing that tiny stationary light. For a crazy moment, I think that Hawthorne is moaning again, and then the light winks out, then reappears, then winks out. Hawthorne is not moaning, and something is coming for us.Zombageddonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885036221401400097noreply@blogger.com0