by Jimmy Bird
Dead, We Are
By
Jimmy Bird
Copyright © 2017 Jimmy Bird
All rights reserved.
ISBN-10:1542302862
ISBN-13:978-1542302869
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to all of my family and friends who not only encouraged me but helped me with this book along the way. I want to give a special thanks to my wife Nichole and our four children
(Jimmy Jr, Josephene, Cole, and Corbin).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to give a special shout out to all of my family and friends who helped out with this book. My wife Nichole Bird, my children Jimmy Bird Jr, Josephene Bird, Cole Bird, Corbin Bird, my sister Christina Bird, my brother-n-law Bobby Reed, my nephew Seth Aaron, my niece Shaelynn Aaron, my mom Nancy Bozarth, my brother Jesse Bozarth, my cousin John Lutz, and all my friends Arthur Wathan, Ronald Ruff, James Davis, Kenneth Kane, Cleo Pleasant, Brian Hall, Danny Turner, Kevin Brady, Bruce Shoemaker, Robert Pierce, Mia and Logan Bryant, Lonnie Wallin, Tracie Deleon (Munoz), Rebecca Turner, Austin Turner, and Chavonne Dixon. I want to give a special, special shout out to a friend of mine who not only critiqued my book but also helped me
revise it: Serina Steph
CONTENTS
Intro
1
Prelude to Day 1, Making Plans
1
2
Day 1,“Z” Day
12
3
Ruff
54
4
Danny
68
5
James
84
6
Arthur
96
7
Cleo
109
8
Kenneth
131
9
Brian
152
10
John
171
11
Day 2, Learning From Our Mistakes
177
12
Day 7, Bittersweet Reunion
195
13
Day 90, Miracles
217
14
Day 180, Unfortunate Events
233
15
Day 181, The Fall of the Warehouse
253
16
Day 241, Plan D
273
17
Day 255, My Final Entry
318
Let me start off by saying that my friends and I have read or seen a lot of books, shows, and movies about zombies. Hell, at one time we had a couple of zombie movies come out each year for a few years straight at the movie theaters. We even had zombie TV shows competing for air time, not to mention the countless ever growing number of zombie books and comics that were circulating around. The zombie madness seemed to be in full effect everywhere. The funny thing was that they all depicted zombies differently. Some zombies moved stumbled slowly while others ran. Some tried to eat your brains or skin while others tried to beat you senseless. They all had one thing in common, it looked like they were all trying to infect you by way of your bloodstream. Because of my time spent learning about zombies, I thought that I was some kind of expert. I thought that I knew all there was to know about them, but I need to be honest with you. I was wrong, dead wrong. Before all of this mess started I had discussed what-if scenarios with my friends and family on the possibility of safe havens. You know, one of those half-jokingly "What would you do if the zombie apocalypse ever did happen?" type of conversations. It was only after seriously thinking about it that I knew I had to find some place safe for my family just in case the zombie apocalypse ever did happen. We needed a place where we could go to hold up in order to escape the nightmare if it ever came. We thought that we had everything planned out. We thought that our safe and secure place would protect us. Unfortunately, things never happen the way you want them too, the way that you plan for them too. It was only after having to fight in order to survive that I finally learned the truth of how things really are now. Now that I think back on it, it's so simple that it's almost comical. If your reading this then you probably know it already so I won't keep that knowledge to myself. If you don't know it then I'll let you in on the little secret. Here goes. No matter what you think that you might know, just remember these two things. DON’T TRUST ANYONE
and that NO ONE IS SAFE during a Zombie Apocalypse because in the end it seems that We Are All Dead.
1 PRELUDE TO DAY 1, MAKING PLANS
If you have somehow survived outside in the open on your own and mysteriously found your way inside this Warehouse I'm sorry to say that you’re a little late. Unfortunately, no one is here. Well, at least no one alive anyway. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's the truth.
While you sit here and soak up that information let me get back to what I was saying. I'm not sure how you got in and to be honest with you, I don't really care. Maybe you came across this journal (maybe manuscript is a better description) while looking for supplies. Maybe the journal caught your eye and you became curious on who left it. Obviously if you’re reading this then it did its job and peaked your interest.
Maybe you had questions that you were hoping the journal could answer. Maybe you needed to know why we had to abandon this sanctuary. Maybe you needed to know why the front gate was down and why there was so much damage to the building. Maybe you were just curious on why there were so many dead bodies all over the place and I'm not talking about the zombies. You might be curious on why I would say something like that, then again, you might not. You probably figured out by now that the zombies aren't the only dangerous threat out there in this new world.
I guess that doesn't matter because I'm going to tell you about what happened here anyway and if you're still reading this then you were curious enough to find out. The simple answer was that this building was abandoned because we were attacked by another group of survivors which allowed the zombies to find a way in. Before I go into too much detail on how these scenarios happened, I figured I would give a little history of the people that lived here and the people that tried to take it from us. If you caught on to my hint, the answer was yes we knew a few members of the group that attacked us. Before I get into any specific details let me start from the beginning, well since the beginning of the “End of Times.”
It’s been hard to keep track of the number of days since the infected or should I say the “dead” started to come back to life and attacking the living, especially here in Oklahoma. If my calculations are correct then it should put us around three hundred and ten days or roughly ten and a half months. Sorry, but we really haven't kept track. I will say that the changing of the seasons and weather has helped determined that estimation. As you can imagine, keeping track of the days was the least of our concern. At least at the beginning.
The best I can figure is that it’s got to be somewhere around the middle to the end of spring, maybe the end of May. I just don't think that it's gotten hot or humid enough to be considered summer yet. It's still cool at night, but warms up to be just hot enough during the day. I should mention the added fact of the crazy storms that had been rolling through here. I'm just hopeful that we don’t end up having any tornado's because then we might really be screwed! Sorry, that was a bad joke. It was my attempt to lighten my ever growing depressing mood.
Anyways, let me get back to my story by stating that spring is not considered that bad of a season. Anyone from Oklahoma would know that in a few more months the temperature is going to rise so high that it will become unbearable. It's going to be really humid and extremely uncomfortable around here. By the time that happens though we already knew that we wouldn’t have to worry about the tempe
rature too much because the dead would be coming for us. In addition to the summer heat, we would be in trouble from dehydration. Think about it, we could either sweat ourselves to death or collapse from a heat stroke. We were hopeful enough that it wouldn’t come to either one of those scenarios.
When I say “we” I mean the remaining survivors of our group. Before you even ask the question, the answer is yes. I'm sure our group is just like yours, there are only a few of us left. It wasn't always that way though. In fact, we had a very large group, but before I get into that though let me give you a little background information on us.
You see we used to make up what we refer to as the “Council.” Before you even ask the obvious question the answer once again is yes. We managed to have a little governmental democracy in our group. I also want you to know that we accepted new people as long as it was approved by the Council. Every Council member was given a chance to vote and we used the "Majority Rules" thing on every decision. The Council members consisted of friends that I worked with here at this building or plant before it became our sanctuary. We were such a tight knit group that we did everything together. We even made plans for the "End of Times" scenarios. Lucky for us, we were already thinking outside the box.
Before we became the Council, we were just friends, normal folks who worked together at the same plant. The only big difference was that we worked in different departments. We would sit together during our lunch times or breaks and discuss our two favorite topics: Zombies and Conspiracy Theories.
One day someone asked, what was each of our plans if a zombie outbreak ever did happen? We each took turns talking about what we would do in order to survive. Some of the answers given were wild and out there, but every underline answer was pretty much the same. We would do anything we could to make sure that our families were protected. Eventually, we agreed that we needed each other in order to survive and therefore our rudimentary Council was established.
We had convinced ourselves that an apocalypse of some kind was going to happen, it was just a matter of time. Because of the Book of Revelations in the Bible, most of us felt that the upcoming apocalypse was going to be about zombies, so we began making preparations. Together, with our families, we trained and prepped the best we could. The days turned into weeks, the weeks became months, and the months became years.
Everybody brought something unique to the table. We had a few members who were ex-military. A couple of our member's who grew up in the streets, literally ex-gang members. Others came from a background of true doomsday type preppers, whose families had built fallout shelters during the Cold War. Yep, as you could imagine those members were a little eccentric, but we were glad they were with us just the same.
People at work would look at our group sitting around the tables and watch us with either interest or disgust in their eyes. Yes, believe it or not racism was still alive in the world and our little state was no exception. What I meant by that statement was that our little group was made up of what I kind of refer to as a "Heinz 57" group because we had just about every background covered. Our group had African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Caucasians. That didn't even cover the fact that we had mixed marriages. We had every race covered.
By now you should have figured out that the building you're standing in didn’t always look like this. Before the damage to the exterior it had become our home. Sorry if I forgot to mention that little fact, but this was the plant that we had all used to work at and it had been our plan all along to come here to the "Warehouse" for sanctuary.
Before you ask, yes, we did call it the Warehouse when we originally worked here. It was sort of the "official" nickname for the plant. We used to build, store, and ship appliances like washers, dryers, oven ranges, refrigerators, microwaves, etc. You know, good old fashioned heavy objects.
As you can see from the layout of the building it's just about completely fenced in (except for the damaged parts) with a few minor locations that we easily reinforced with some of those heavy objects I mentioned. I think that the biggest advantage the Warehouse actually had over any of the other places we considered was that it had its own back-up generator. The company had it installed a few years earlier just in case of power outages, they didn't want us working in the dark. Yeah, we thought that it was very considerate of them (trying not to sound too sarcastic). In the end though, it didn't matter the reason the company had installed the generator because as long as we had the fuel to run the generator we had power.
As an added bonus our company used to grill the plant employees hamburgers and hotdogs every few months. So, we had our very own industrial size propane grills on the property, which we could use to cook on. Lucky for us the company always made sure that it kept extra bottles of cooking propane stored on the property.
Speaking of propane, we used both propane and electrical lifts at work. Lucky for us, the company also kept an average of fifty spare propane tanks on site for the lifts (each bottle would last a lift 8-10 hrs). I knew that with the lifts we could reinforce the building, the fences, and any other weak spots we found with some of those heavy appliances I mentioned. Besides, we knew that if anything or anyone made it inside the fence then we could always make an obstacle course of appliances for them to go around before we would be in any real danger. It was sort of a fail safe in order to buy time for everyone to escape to safety.
Speaking of fences, the gates were programmed to only open with electrical key cards that were assigned to the employees that worked at the Warehouse. The building itself was another matter. Sure most of the doors only opened to the key cards, but a few used a master key. Fortunately for us I had access to such a key. I had worked in the Shipping department and before they installed the electronic locks, I was responsible for unlocking the doors in my area early in the morning so the other plant employees could get in. When they installed the electronic locks, they told me to hold onto the key just in case it was ever needed again. I don't think that this is what they had in mind, but I was glad I had it.
As for the inside. The first thing that came to mind was the sleeping arrangements. We figured that we would sleep in the office areas. All of the offices had been remodeled a few years earlier replacing the carpet and adding some really nice furniture. Some of the offices even had couches or sofas. We also figured that if we needed to we could find air mattresses or sleeping bags.
Located exactly one mile away was a grocery store (don’t even bother looking because we already looted that place) that we could get food from. Within that mile was a neighborhood which we could also go through looking for supplies (again, don’t bother because we already looted them). Three miles from the Warehouse was a hospital where we could get medical supplies from and around the hospital are several stores (such as a supercenter and a do-it-yourself store) where we could also get other supplies. I figured we had a strong enough plan worked out so that we could survive.
While at work a few of the guys threw out some hypothetical what-if scenarios and ideas that they had either seen in movies or in television shows. Since none of us had even been in a zombie apocalypse we wanted to make sure that we were properly prepared. Thinking back on it, it was probably the best idea that anyone ever had.
Before we agreed on the Warehouse some of us thought that we would be safer in a prison. A prison environment did sound good. We would have walls or fences all around us. We would have beds to sleep on and a cafeteria to eat in. We would have a yard that would allow us to plant our own vegetables and fruits. Prisons also had their own working generators as long as we had fuel to run them. Most of the prisons that I had heard about stored lots of dry food which would be helpful to survive. The prison idea did have its disadvantages though. The closest prison was well over an hour drive away. It would mean that we would all have to meet at a designated spot and then drive through zombie occupied territory to get there. Then once we arrived at the prison, it meant either fighting zombies or people for control of the prison while tryin
g to protect our families. Still the thought of such a safe place would be more then worth the hassle. We put the idea down as a strong plan B.
Another idea would have been to hold up at a local mall. The idea looked rather safe and intriguing as it had it advantages and disadvantages. It had limited number of entry spots which meant that it would be easy to defend. It also had bullet/shatter proof glass. It would have lots of clothing stores so you weren’t stuck using the same old smelling and stained clothes. There was plenty of stuff to keep you occupied for a while plus it had food supplies while they lasted. One of the major disadvantages was that once the mall became surrounded then there would be no way to really fight your way out, especially if you were starving. That would happen once the food was either gone or spoiled. We filed this idea under a Plan C if our first two ideas didn’t pan out.
Another idea that was thrown out there was to go to a supercenter like a Walmart or Target. They had clothes, food, medicine, and ways to cook the food plus it had other items like toys for the kids. Just like the mall, they have bullet/shatter proof glass, but it became a mall scenario all over again. This plan was also considered an alternative Plan C.
We even had a Plan D, my father-n-law's place out in the country. Like all the others, it had its advantages and disadvantages. An advantage was that he had twenty acres of land that was located on the outskirts of the cities of Moore and Norman. A huge disadvantage was that he was literally ten to fifteen miles from the nearest town or city, which happened to be closer to Moore. Another advantage was that he really didn't have neighbors. He had a few kinfolk within a couple of miles, but other than that the closest neighbor was well over two miles away. A strong positive was that it was very secluded. Another disadvantage though was that there was no place to stay. He had a nice size double wide trailer style house, but it wasn't big enough to hold all of our group or our families. It meant that most of us would have to sleep outside in tents. It wouldn't be a bad scenario, but it wouldn't work during the winter. So this was put down as our Plan D, a sort of last resort plan.
