by Joshua Guess
Hopefully the people that are sick and injured now will get well without complication, and with luck no new ones will get ill or hurt for a while. With this many people, the size of the medical staff is vital. We've got to get people trained quickly so that we don't have to push ourselves so hard. I feel like I haven't really seen my kids in a week, and you can forget sleeping with my husband. I usually just curl up in the corner of our work area and nap. I need to get laid.
Wow, I can't believe I wrote that. I'll leave it there, though, because while it might be uncomfortable to read (especially for my kids, HA! Mom has SEX!) it's also true. I think all of us need to find some time to unwind and relax, to enjoy the company of others.
Recent events have proven that.
at 8:15 AM
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Nightmares
Posted by Patrick
Some things are a blessing in disguise, like the beep of a cellphone at 3 in the morning. Most of my life that would have been enough to drive me through a wall at being woken up in the middle of the night, yet tonight it was more than welcome. Tonight it brought me out of my pain killer induced coma and reprieve from the nightmares that I haven't been able to escape whenever I sleep.
Forgive my rambling but I'm still groggy and typing away is helping me stay awake. Funny the things you can get used to. Not even the booming sound of undead hands on the security gate keep me up any more.
Now, I don't want to brag but I have killed hundreds of zombies, thousands if you count the traps and counter measures used in big swarms, but hundreds face to face. And not once have I hesitated because of recognition of features or some sign of humanity. Not once did I think that one of the shambling corpses used to be a father, mother, son, daughter, friend, or really even a human. That has changed and is the cause of many of my current nightmares.
It's been close to two months now since I went out looking for my family and just over a month since I found what was left of them, yet every time I close my eyes I feel the emotions of those memories just as clearly as when they happened. The excitement I felt when pulling my bike into my parents neighborhood and seeing all the changes and precautions my family had made to the house. The pride I had felt that they had listened to me and trusted me enough to do what I'd asked of them with little or no proof. The relief when I saw that other houses had followed suite.
End the good emotions. The worry of no dead walking around or even rotting in the streets. The dread of seeing scorch marks on the locks of metal door gates, or seeing them pulled from their hinges lying on the lawns.
I pulled into my parents house and went right to the front door. Where I saw that the security gate was still intact but open, there was dried blood on the front step and wall by the door. The bars over the windows were also still intact yet the windows were all broken, from the inside.
I knew before I left that odds weren't good but I came anyway because I had to know. Yet I stood in front of that house for over an hour. Straining my ears for any sign of life, praying that I wouldn't open the door to find a horror movie scene like I have in so many houses when out scavenging.
Finally the sound came that told me it was time to move my ass, the low moan of the undead with prey sighted. I turned and found that three zombies had come closer to me than was safe to go unnoticed. Others were further away but headed straight for me, must have heard the motorcycle. I quickly dispatched the three with my sword so not to announce myself to any others in the area.
I lifted a quick prayer to heaven, nutted up and went to get my crowbar off the bike. Went quickly to the door and tried to open it, it was locked. I rammed the pry bar into the door frame with long practiced motions and had the door open in moments. A quick scan of the front room showed no signs of life but of a hasty packing job. I went back out and brought my bike into the house with me, something that has saved my life more than once on this trip. Then I started to look around, trying to find where my family had gone.
I found it right off. Written in big black letters on the fridge in block letters was a quick note that read " WENT TO MO'S DAD HAD HEART ATTACK THEN BIT MOM ARE IN ROOM COULDN'T DO IT KATIE." I see that note every time I close my eyes, feel the horror of what it meant. I tried to feel happy knowing that my sister and her children had gone to my oldest friend living only a few towns away. That when I called to tell him about the zombie outbreak he'd already figured it out and started to fortify his house. But I couldn't focus on that, only that my parents were dead or rather undead and that I couldn't leave them that way.
I did what I had to, but no amount of time will wash away the last images of my parents, bodies shrunken from being trapped for months without food. Their cloudy eyes only seeing me as meat, the stink of death. My final image of my mother, wheelchair bound for the last twenty years, shambling at me in hunger, her face sunken and dry. Lips pulled back in a snarl that showed her empty gums. Guess she didn't die with her teeth in. Dad had a few contusions on his head, guess Katie tried to save mom but couldn't bring herself to do it right.
I've never been a great shot but I have gotten much better over the last ten months. It still took a full clip to put them down, guess I kept closing my eyes.
Since then my instincts have kept me alive when coming against the undead, instincts hard won in many battles, but I will never again see them just as the mindless monsters that need to be put down.
My signal is starting to fade so I'm going to post this before it's gone altogether, will try to post again when I can. Thank you for playing the part of my shrink and listening to me even if I don't make sense. Finally thank you to google for trying to find me using my phone signal.
at 3:12 AM
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Meat Locker
Posted by Josh Guess
I couldn't be more happy that Pat is alive and safe. It kills me to hear that he had to suffer through so much, he's like my brother.
My team and I, including the courier, are currently stuck on a train. The car we're in? Yeah. Full of dead cattle. Really, really dead for an unbelievably long time. When you're running from a hundred or so zombies, you take any port in a storm.
We met up with the courier on time, and took the first day to plan our route and discuss the location we decided on to hide the Ark. For security reasons, the courier wasn't told anything about it until he got here. He's pretty happy with our choice, and I'm pretty glad that's the case.
This guy, the courier, takes his job pretty seriously. I can't blame him--he's carrying items that equate to multiple copies of tens of millions (or more) of pages of documents, videos and the machinery to view them. A trove of knowledge to help those of us who survived the end of the world begin again. He's almost religious about protecting it, and I get why. He might literally be carrying the fate of the human race on his back. It's in a really nice backpack.
His name is Mason. He's fucking terrifying.
He's not an engineer from Google. He's one of the people that Google took in early on, when chaos was still rampant across the entire country. Mason is a big guy, six three or so, and about two sixty. Think about that for a minute. Two hundred and sixty pounds and virtually no fat. I can't imagine what he must have looked like before food became something you had to hunt rather than buy.
Mason used to be a Navy Seal. He didn't go into a ton of detail, but from what I've heard him say, he's had a lot of experience getting into enemy territory, doing very bad things, and getting out alive.
He's why all of us are still alive right now. We were traveling along in the modified school bus he was driving, one of the short ones. It's got armor all over it, but not metal. Some kind of ceramic plates wrapped up in kevlar. The back of it is stocked with supplies and giant extra fuel tanks. We had to ride with him to conserve fuel, since we had no ready supply for our own vehicles.
We stopped close to this train yard last night to look into topping off the bus's tanks, since there were diesel train e
ngines parked here. We went together, guarding each other's backs, and ran smack into a swarm. We ran for it, and got cut off by another group of zombies as we were heading for this cattle car.
Mason pulled out a heavy black machete and a pistol with the longest magazine I've ever seen. He started firing shots, fast but measured, into the crowd that blocked our way into the cattle car. He looked like one of those competition shooters you used to see on the history channel, not even seeming to aim as he fired. It only took him about ten seconds to take down most of the second group, and then he was running between them, cutting into heads. His machete got stuck in the last one, and he let go of
it and grabbed a grenade from somewhere inside his coat.
The zombies still following us got that as a nasty little surprise. The explosion didn't kill more than a couple of them, but it disoriented them long enough to let us get to safety.
They've been beating on the sides of this thing for a long, long time now. We're getting hungry and thirsty, and so far there hasn't been a break in which we could even crack the door to see what we're up against. We get little glimpses through the vents at the top, but all I can see when I look is the faces of the dead.
I will admit that I'm sort of shocked at how swiftly Mason reacted to our situation. I'm used to dealing with insane dead people trying to eat me, but I froze right along with the rest of the group when our flight from the large group ended with another pack of undead. It wasn't that we wouldn't have reacted, pulled weapons and fought. It was that Mason simply seemed to go instantly from running to fighting with no in-between. His mind didn't take the time to freak out or dwell on what he was facing. It simply acted, and his body followed.
I consider myself an able survivor. But this guy could teach us so much. I am going to do whatever I can to get him to stay with us for as long as possible.
If we can get out of this metal coffin, that is.
at 12:01 PM
Friday, January 21, 2011
Running Back
Posted by Josh Guess
Fire warm.
That's about all I was able to think about last night after we got free from the train car full of dead cows we were trapped in. We finally got a break in the zombie activity around our location, enough that Mason could slip out through the door. He snagged his machete from the downed zombie he had left it in and managed to draw the crowd of them away. He had warned us not to do anything until he got back. I had asked him how long we should wait until we had to assume he was dead. He said, and I quote:
"I've outrun and outlived terrorists and counterintelligence agents on five continents. I'm not getting killed by a bunch of zombies."
So, yeah. We waited.
It took about an hour. Mason told us that he lost them a few times, but he had to go running back to the zombies each time because he wanted to get them as far away from us and our abandoned vehicle as possible. Then he had to creep back to us silently enough to stay hidden. He saved our lives. Again.
So, we managed to top off the tanks and get out. Mason found us a nice spot to camp, a clearing about twenty feet across right in the middle of a bunch of pine trees. They surround the campsite in a ring, and we had to get on our hands and knees to get through the branches. We got a fire set up and broke out the supplies. After all that time in the meat locker with nothing, we were dehydrated and starving.
We are well supplied for this trip, with sleeping bags rated at negative forty among many other useful items. Of course, we have to cover our faces when we sleep without a tent like we did last night, which I forgot to do. So I felt the first flakes of snow start to fall before anyone else. When I woke Mason up to tell him it was snowing, he made us all cram into the short bus, and that's how we spent the night. A bunch of freezing, smelly people jumbled across each other. It was while I lay there, someone's elbow occasionally jamming into my neck or ribs, that I remembered the significance of today.
It's my wife's birthday. And here's me, far away from her in danger yet again. Well, in more danger relative to the constant threats we all live under. I hate to be away from her right now. Jess has always been childlike in some ways, and her birthday is one of them. For her it's a reason to have a party, to be the center of attention. It's one of the few times she wants to be in the spotlight, most of the time she's really shy though that's changed a bit since The Fall.
I want to be there with her right now, telling funny stories and trying to make this day special for her. I can't, and so I will do the only thing I am able--keep on with the job at hand. The best gift that I can give to her is the one I am helping to secure for the human race: the contents of the Ark. It's going to be a game changer someday, maybe soon but likely much later. Also, getting done with this will mean going home, and back to her, which is almost as good a gift. Right?
...maybe I should have gotten her something, like a new gun or a guitar...
at 9:29 AM
Sunday, January 23, 2011
At The Midnight Hour
Posted by Josh Guess
Mission Accomplished.
After several days of slogging through the frozen hell that covers every part of America that we've seen, the Ark is now safely ensconced in its hiding place. Mason is relieved to be done with carrying the copies around with him, and he surprised us by producing more of them from the storage compartments of the bus. The ones he had in his backpack were our copies, the ones he could afford to lose.
He has agreed to come stay with us at Jack's for a while. I was worried that he might not be able to come, thinking that he would have to head back to California and set out to distribute and secure more copies of the Ark, but he informed us after the deed was done that he was just one of dozens of couriers who took the job. He sent messages to Mountain View tonight letting the folks at Google know that he'd be a while in coming back.
Last night was the worst since we left Jack's compound, by far. Yes, I include the full day we spent in the cattle car, locked up and with no food or drink. It got so cold that we had to hole up in an abandoned (seems sort of redundant to say that at this point--most things are abandoned now) house, one with a fireplace, and wait out the cold. We risked someone seeing the smoke and coming to investigate for exactly one reason--we had to. It was four below zero outside, and the wind was kicking up fiercely. It was build a fire somewhere out of the elements, or run the very serious risk of freezing to death.
We're back in that same house now, but will be on our way home instead of the other direction. It isn't as deadly cold out there right now as it was a day ago, but our energy reserves are still low from nearly constant cold and several intense bouts of running and fighting with packs of zombies. I'm thinking about a warm spot next to my wife with the sort of disbelieving hope that a man dying of thirst has about a nice glass of water.
We're going to try and get back as quickly as possible, and that's going to be a trick. We've got enough fuel to get within a hundred miles of the vehicles we left behind, but that's about it. We're going to need to find some more diesel before then or it's going to be a long walk back to our SUV's. If they are still where we left them, that is.
I've been in touch with Google tonight as well, and they have a pretty good fix on where Patrick's cell signal is coming from. My hope is that I can get back to Jack's and resupply, which will be made a lot easier if Courtney and her roving group have made it there. They've been on their way for a long while now, but several interesting opportunities have sidetracked them. Call them...chances for good trades. Once we're stocked up and ready to roll out, it will only be a matter of days before Patrick and his kids are safe with us.
Pat, Courtney and the others have been away so long that it seems impossible to me that I may even see them again. I love Jess, and she is my best friend, but my other friends are as vital to my mental well-being as she is, just in a different way. I'm excited about it, as well as getting the copies of the Ark we have with us back to Jack's. Their copies will help them t
o create a lot of really useful things...his compound could become the manufacturing center of a new world, if we can all live that long.
It's cold and I'm tired, the stew we cooked a little while ago is sitting heavy on my belly. It's putting me to sleep. Not to mention all the people around me who look angry at the constant pecking on my laptop, which I only managed to get charged this evening. I'm going to run away now, before they mutiny and hold me down to wrestle it out of my hands. We'll be home soon, god willing.
