Okay, here's what we've learned in the nearly five years since the Event. That's what we call it now, the Event. I guess it makes it sound less horrific. Anyway, since the Event, we've learned very little about what caused all this. The Plague, again that's what we call it. No one has a clue what it actually is. All the people that were supposed to figure that shit out are bones or worse now. We don't know if it’s manmade or natural or if it came from aliens but we have to call it something. So, it's the Plague.
The Plague took about eighty-five percent of the people in the United States. We can only assume the same thing happened everywhere. There has been no communication of any kind with other countries since the Event. We've tried. One of our guy's has a ham radio and he's tried talking to anybody. Nobody's listening or if they are they can't answer. Whatever the case, we are alone right now.
There's no help coming and the nukes didn't work. I didn't think they would. I figure some General got a wild hair up his ass and decided this might be the last chance he'd have to see the big fireball. Anyway, they nuked New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, D.C., Atlanta, and Miami on the East Coast. They did Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle on the west. The bug got into those sealed bunkers and got the Generals before they could do more damage than that. They tried to evacuate some of the top people. Put them on U.S. Navy ships at sea to keep them away from their constituents that wanted to eat them. That didn't work either. Seems someone forgot to do a bite check before they let them on those big ships.
Bite checks, very important. I started those a long time ago. You only have to let an infected person into your group once to learn that lesson. It was an expensive lesson too. We lost our first doctor that way.
Now those ships float around out there with entire crews of Stinkies. That's what we call the zombies. Again, had to call them something and it just didn’t feel right saying zombies and they stink. Besides this was the only name we came up with that the kids could use. And yes, there are kids here. We have about fifty.
Most of the other major cities burned on their own. Fires started and there was no one to put them out. Whole cities just burned to the ground. That’s what happened to St. Louis. Nashville's gone, too. We stay away from the big towns that are left. The Stinkies own them.
The Stinkies are an ever present danger. Everybody thought they would eventually decompose away and it would be over. Well, that's not happening. They decompose to a certain point, and then it just stops. No idea why. So it looks like for the foreseeable future they’re going to be part of our lives. If you get a bite, a scratch, or some of their blood in an open cut—guess what? You get an address change and a bullet in the brain.
Just like in the books and movies, destroying the brain, more specifically, the medulla, is the only way to stop them. Of course, if you remove the legs and arms they aren't much danger. They can't come after you or anything but you have to look at the thing and that's almost worse. Shoot it in the head, bash it in the head, spike or blade to the head. That's all that works with any certainty. Maybe Hollywood did it. Some producer or writer got tired of making shit up and discovered a way to do it for real. Whatever, I hate the fucking things.
The Plague is still here too. It's changed us. It doesn't have any outward effect we can see while you’re alive, but once you die, well, that’s another story. Our Doc has looked at our blood and he says it looks clean but it's in there. This we figured out from one of our battles with the road gangs. We'd always had injuries but we'd been lucky, no fatalities. The first time one of our guys got killed in battle, we were preparing him for burial and he decided to get up and eat one of his friends. After we put him down we checked to make sure he didn't have a bite we'd missed. Nope, clean as a whistle. I told the Doc we'd have to check this next time we had a death. He didn't look happy but he understood. The only thing he said was, "I hate being a doctor now."
"Relax Doc it's a brave new world. You gotta adapt," I said. He flipped me off and went back to the Aid Station.
We didn't have to wait long for a chance to test our theory. We had a group out on a scavenging trip and they ran into a road gang crew. We lost two in that fight. One took a round to the head but luckily, from a point of view, the other guy had been shot in the chest and bled out before they could get him back. His name was Jerry Patterson. He was from Louisville, Kentucky and had been an executive with Verizon before cell phones became obsolete.
I called Doc; his name is Richard by the way. Richard Groves, he likes to be called Rich. I don't think I've ever heard anybody call him anything but Doc. That's my fault, I started calling him Doc and it seems to have stuck.
Doc came and I helped him tie the guy to a gurney. We watched him for about four hours and Doc was about to give up when Jerry just woke up. No slow-twitching rise from the dark. Off, then on, and hungry. Jerry was kind of a big guy when he was alive and a real handful now that he was dead. I'd come prepared, just in case. I had a long spike nail I'd spent a good deal of time sharpening and fixed it to a wooden handle. I pushed Jerry's head over to his left, put the tip of the spike against the base of his skull, and shoved it up and in. Jerry immediately stopped moving. Off, then on, and back off again. Doc looked at my tool. "Where did you get that thing?" he asked.
"I made it," I answered. I told him I'd make him one if he wanted. He flipped me off again and went back to the Aid Station. That was kind of our routine. We'd have to do something together and, when we were done, he'd flip me off and leave. I have that effect on people.
Well, we had our answer. Now when you buy the farm you get a medical probe stuck in the back of your melon, then off for a dirt nap. Wonderful little bug, our Plague.
We buried Jerry, and Steve —the other guy killed that afternoon. That night we had a council meeting and Doc passed the news about how Jerry had come back. They took it pretty well. Just one more screwing we had to take.
Another medical issue we found was chronic illness. It didn't take long to figure out that medicine would become scarce and the type that needed refrigeration was the first to disappear. People with illnesses who survived the Event soon found they had another battle to fight. Individuals who had serious illnesses didn't last long. Things like diabetes and heart disease need constant medication and it was impossible to find after a short time. Those patients didn't last long.
I'm sure we haven't gotten rid of those diseases. We'll have to wait until new children are born to see if it comes back but for now only the healthy survive. It sucks but there's nothing we can do about it. For the most part all that’s over with. We haven't had anyone die from disease, other than infection by the Plague, in over two years. One consolation, there is no more Attention Deficit Disorder or depression. Technically, I guess we’re all depressed but we are too busy trying to survive to notice. As far as ADD goes, if a kid starts running around screaming they’re endangering the whole group and, just as I suspected all along, if you bust their ass, they quiet right down.
Road Gangs are more of a nightmare than I would have ever figured. We expected them to become extinct through their own stupidity. Turns out they’re thriving. There are seven survivor colonies that we have learned about spread across America. We've communicated with a couple and they’re making plans to link up with us in the future. The others we've just heard about from people who have joined our group or were passing through.
The Road Gangs outnumber us dramatically. We know of twenty-three different groups. Most are only fifteen to twenty people and it's a mix of men and women. Others are big; a hundred, a hundred-fifty people. Most are thugs, like they had been. Some are well trained, disciplined, and just plain mean. Ex-military that decided their wants are more important than you living. They’re more of a threat to our daily lives now than the Stinkies.
The situation has more or less stabilized now. There was a period right after the Event when the Stinkies started to congregate and they were hell on wheels when they were in a group of a thousand or more.
Like locust, they ate everything they came across. Now, they’ve dispersed again. This started about a year ago. We don't know if it's an evolved condition caused by a lack of food in an area or if they just mindlessly wandered into these huge groups and now they’re wandering away again. We rarely see them in groups of more than four or five now. Mostly they are by themselves. They are easy to deal with in ones and twos. They have never gotten any faster than the shuffling walk they started with. They haven't developed the ability to communicate with each other. So they can't coordinate their attacks, which is good for us. They don't have any special powers and there aren’t any grand conspiracies behind, or controlling, things. They just are what they are.
The wildlife’s starting to come back in areas that were overrun with Stinkies. The Stinkies would eat everything and most animals are smarter than we ever gave them credit. They haul ass from the things when they see them. Oh, important note here, the animals can't contract the bug. It's a human-only thing, thankfully. A mess of zombie squirrels is a nightmare I don't need. Of course, we destroy any animal we come across that shows signs of being attacked and lived.
Other than humans, livestock suffered the worst. Domesticated and trapped in fenced areas that made it hard to get away. We have recently found a few cattle and have brought them into our compound. We have chickens, a few goats, and the three cows. The makings of a right proper herd. I've even allowed a couple of dog's in recently. Dogs were a luxury we couldn't afford until now. Food was too scarce and if it could be eaten, it had to be used by us.
Water is still an issue and always will be. We can't drink from the streams. They are contaminated by bodies of the dead and un-dead alike and we don't ever go in water over knee deep. The Stinkies can't drown in the water but they can sure eat you. So… no swimming… ever. That's another of the lessons we learned the hard way.
We have tanks on the roof of the ware house to catch rain. We use rain water for washing and drinking after boiling in emergencies. There’s a spring not far from us and we carry drinking water from it but it's dangerous and two hundred people use a lot of water. We scavenge bottled water when we can find it but water is definitely a problem.
The planet is just fine. The old Earth took this one and just kept on rolling along. The rain hasn't stopped and the seasons go on just like they did. So the planet’s not turning into a vast desert wasteland. The ozone still protects us; it's improving, if I had to guess. Summer is hot and winter is cold. Spring and fall are just great and sometimes you can look at the trees and listen to the birds and believe that none of this is happening. The important thing is we go on. The human race will survive this. There will be far less of us for a long time to come but we will go on.
We left Mountain View and came to Tennessee for a number of reasons. We were getting the shit kicked out of us by the Road Gangs on a regular basis. Evidently, they thought the Ozarks would be a good place to hold up too. Go figure.
Scavenging had gotten slim and we had to travel further and further to find the items we needed to live. Finding out about our parents and our son was high on the list of reasons. Most of the other people in our group either had their family with them or had seen what happened to them. Kat and I were the only ones who still had questions, so we headed east. Crossing the Mississippi was the pain in the ass I had predicted. Both bridges at Memphis were destroyed. We had to abandon our vehicles and scavenge boats to cross. Then reacquire vehicles on the Tennessee side. Memphis had been overrun with Stinkies and we lost people trying to get out of there. I still feel guilty about that but it's just one more thing.
We’ve all had to make hard choices and, as the leader of this group, some of those choices will haunt me forever. We made it though and we found an acceptable place to stay here in Lebanon. What we didn't find was our son or our parents. As I said earlier, Nashville is gone, so checking there for Alex was useless. Our parents homes in Murfreesboro were both empty. No signs of struggle, no signs that any of them had been turned, no notes. Nothing. Just empty.
I had already realized that this, or something like it, would be what we found but I was still crushed when we didn't find Alex. Kat won't talk about it. She’s still holding out hope and refuses to discuss it with me. If only there had been proof one way or the other. We could have lived with that. The not knowing is even worse now. I look whenever I go out and Kat always asks when I get back. Enough of that.
Let me tell you about this great diet I've found. Would you like to lose a few pounds? Tired of those saddle bags? Let me recommend the Zombie Apocalypse Diet! There's plenty of exercise- running away from things that want to eat you. Exercise not the issue, you say? Problem is you just eat too much, you say? Well, we've solved that problem with this diet. We don't give you any food!
Food, of course, has been as big an issue as water. The larger the group, the more food you need. We don't have the facilities for making any kind of food stuff and, even if we did, the raw material is hard to come by. We started out scavenging in grocery stores and convenience stores. For a small group those work well. Larger groups need larger supplies.
We started looking for food distribution warehouses. That's how we found the place we're in now. Military bases and abandoned convoys are great. The Meal-Ready-to-Eat is worth its weight in gold. High in calories and they last forever. Taste when you're starving is not a big deal but it is nice if you can keep it down. MRE's saved a lot of us from starvation. We don't have any fat people. I guess I’m around 150 and I've put on some weight recently.
We've gotten better at foraging and we don't have a lot of competition. We know Road Gangs are around but we've only seen signs of their passing, not them. It’s been months since any other survivors have come through. Foraging, scavenging, whatever you want to call it, has taken us this far but at some point we’re going to have to become self-sufficient. That worries me. We need someplace secure, and large enough to have a garden and raise animals. Some place defensible against the Stinkies and the Road Gangs.
I'm not sure how we’re going to do it but we need to find a place that the Stinkies and the gangs can't find or get into. A place we can defend with the limited number of people we have. Weapons are not a problem. I said military bases were a good place to find food. They are also the perfect place to pick up a rocket launcher if you happen to need one. We've searched a couple and a few National Guard Armories. The one thing we have plenty of now, is guns and the ammo to go along with them. There is no Army, or any of the other services, for that matter. They were overrun, just like the police. There’s equipment left everywhere. They tried to set up check points to stop people who were infected. They tried to hold the line in places to keep the zombies from moving further but none of it worked.
In normal combat there are a lot of wounds that are survivable. With the Plague though, a bite, a scratch, and it's a death sentence. This caused the rapid collapse of most of the perimeters designed to protect uninfected humans. Anyway, they left plenty of weapons for us to use. We are, without doubt, the best armed civilians ever. We have four HMMWV or Humvee gun trucks. They are the up-armored variety, meaning the crew compartment is armored against small arms fire and fragmentation. It also means the Stinkies can't get in. One has an M-2 fifty caliber machine gun mounted on it and the other three have M-240 7.62 millimeter machine guns mounted on them. We've also picked up a variety of other small arms, grenades and anti-tank rockets.
It's not just one aspect of our situation or one incident that we have to worry about. It's the accumulation of events that will spell doom for us. If the Road Gangs and the Stinkies left us completely alone, we still might not be able to survive for much longer. If we can't find a reliable source of water that's safe for us to use, or if the food runs out, or sickness; it's over. We have a great medical staff but a limited supply of drugs. If we have a flu epidemic, we're done. It's amazing how dependent on other people we have become for our survival. If you get sick, go to the doctor. Hungry? Go to the grocer
y. Thirsty? Go to the sink in the kitchen. Trouble with the neighbors? Call the police. All that's gone. If we can't answer all those questions for ourselves, then the human race is finished.
We've done well to get this far. I've got a lot of great people helping me. Dave Hoskins is in charge of security. He's a former Marine Staff Sergeant from Dooley, Oklahoma and a vet of the war in Afghanistan. Jim Holly is my governance guy. He's a former city engineer from Cincinnati, Ohio. He organizes the foraging parties and runs the day-to-day of the compound. Doc Groves, we couldn't make it without Doc and his staff. My wife, Kat, who is my go to person for questions about the law. Oh yes, we have laws. As a policeman, I believe in the law. Without it, we'd be just like the Road Gangs or, worse, like the Stinkies.
There's dozens of others in our group and we couldn't make it without them. Judy Aikens is our agriculture specialist. She takes care of our animals and will oversee our crop production if we get that far. Her husband, Darryl, is one of our security platoon leaders. Jennifer Moss is our other security platoon leader. When we found her, we came close to shooting her. She was an Army MP and her unit had been overrun by the Stinkies. Her uniform was literally torn off her and she was covered in blood. We thought she was one of them, until she asked for help. Turns out the blood was from people in her unit she'd tried to save and eventually had to put down. She was a mess but she came around and is an asset.
We've got nurses and teachers. Used car salesmen and housewives. We even have two clergymen. One’s Catholic and one’s Baptist. Quite the cross section and they all contribute. That's one of the rules. You have to contribute, can't afford to carry people now. You want to eat? You have to work.
We Go On (THE DELL) Page 3