by Chris Lane
— Tom
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
February 11, 2012
Found this e-mail in a stack of papers at one of the printers, went back but couldn’t find the first page. It doesn’t say what the compound is. C88 has been on the market pretty heavy since late summer. I eat pretty healthy but C88’s in everything and it’s hard to avoid, and I’ve been living on almost nothing but processed food for a month now. What’s the toxicity point? Have I hit it? Will I soon? The compound didn’t seem to be affecting subjects in the same way, and some maybe not at all. That’s something to hold on to. Weird to think that, what with that 90% initial infection rate in the early days, that might leave a billion? people around the world, fighting off 8 billion living dead, and that these are hopeful numbers. But what are the people who are left eating? If the trigger was in the food, all the food containing the compound would have to be destroyed. What’s left out there? Was anywhere unaffected? How infectious are the human dead, let alone the living dead? Do we need to just put a match to everything and start over, provided we get the chance?
February 12, 2012
It’s my birthday today. I’m 33. To celebrate I had a potentially zombifying nutritional bar from my pack (peanut butter chocolate chip) and a bottle of potentially zombifying nutritional water that promises calm focus, energy, and antioxidants (tropical breeze). I’ll try to stay away from this stuff given the chance, but I don’t have another option at this point, trying to limit my intake but feeling too shaky to not eat. Not finding anything else in the papers in the office. I’m not willing to risk busting into file cabinets because of the sound. I’ve been undetected so far but I can’t stay here. There seem to be more zombies in the halls, more shapes. The doorknob to the outside hall rattled about an hour ago and my heart stopped. The desk against the door held it closed. I couldn’t tell if a zombie had bumped against the door or had actually tried the knob. I have to get out of here.
February 13, 2012
I’m out. There was commotion outside, whooping and shouting—human— and the halls mostly emptied of zombies. I got outside and a bunch of survivors, maybe a dozen of them, were shooting and torching their way through the dead. I came out waving my arms and yelling and just kept shouting and luckily they recognized me as human. One of them made me strip down to check me for bites and wounds and then sprayed me down with a can of household antibacterial spray, which hurt like hell. One member was going around spray painting skulls on the walls. The rest just killing zombies. They’re traveling in an improvised armored bus painted with skulls, like a combination street gang and paramilitary outfit, and they seem to be having a good time. No fear.
Angel seems to be the leader.
* * *
“You’re lucky we came by, man. We’re not finding too may survivors, you know? Lots of these dead freaks though. We’re just killing as many of these things as we can, but they’re like everywhere. Keeping us busy.”
He laughed at that. This is the first time I’ve heard anyone laugh in a long time, and it I don’t like it.
“We find 'em and kill 'em and claim 'em, leave our mark. Nobody else is doing anything. Nothing else left to do. These here are the end of days, man. Things have turned and the low down have risen up. I was just a mechanic with some job just clocking time, work, home, work, home, but now it’s all happening. It’s here, and we’re doing the Good Work. They’re weak, and we’re strong. Crap on the radio about survivor this and that up north but this is all too far gone. Look around you. When’s the last time you seen an airplane? Think you’ll ever see one again? You’re the first person we seen alive in two weeks. It’s all already gone. All this has to keep moving toward the end and we’re just helping grease the wheels till we get to the next thing. There’ll be a final tally in the end and we’re working on our numbers.”
* * *
They’ve got a zombie chained to the back of the bus, who they call “Clyde.” He’s in a caked, crusty Armani suit and tie. Occasionally they’ll hand him something, like dead cell phone, and Clyde will hold it and sort of look at it? His movements are dopey, feeble. Dead maybe a couple weeks? They’ll also occasionally shoot him, but not in the head. He seems to be around for amusement value, they don’t seem to have any scientific interest in him. I don’t like giving the zombie a name. It’s been easy to forget that the zombies were people.
I am tempted to draw a blood sample from “Clyde” for future study, but I am afraid that my efforts might get noticed. I’m already treated with borderline contempt. I think they see me as weak. With a zombie up close here I’m more disturbed than ever by the suggestion of anything human left in them. Awareness is terrifying for what it means in dealing with the zombies that are left. It’s also a sort of nightmare—do they know what they were, or what they’ve become?
Clyde is pretty “ripe.” They’ve hung a bunch of air fresheners off his suit, but that’s infinitely worse. You catch the pine fresh smell, an old world smell, and then the rotten odor, what everything smells like now.
February 14, 2012
Valentine’s Day spent driving in the bus, with Angel and the rest. They’re all shooting stray zombies wandering along the roads. That it’s hard to get a “killshot” is a sort of sport for them. Sometimes they’ll shoot out a zombie’s legs and pull over to take off the head with a shovel, sometimes they’ll just not slow down and hit the zombie with the bus, knocking it off onto the side of the road. The fact that I’m keeping a journal has come front and center. “Hey college, you want to read me one of your poems?”
February 15, 2012
I left the camp last night to go “use the bathroom” at the edge of the trees, after stuffing the bus’s hand-crank radio in my jacket. What were they going to do with it? After a few minutes they noticed that I’d also taken my pack with me and there was yelling and some shooting into the woods in my direction, but no real pursuit. I kept moving. I need the radio to find this camp up north. Intermittent transmission, or at least I’ve only been able to get it intermittently, on 1031 AM, from “The Farm” located outside of Strawberry Ridge, Saskatchewan. They give GPS coordinates and other directions. They’re promising food and safety. I’m not ready to give up, more convinced of that than ever.
February 18, 2012
Been travelling. Using the GPS and a map. I am now in Canada and moving northwest. The Farm transmits a radio message every day. It says basically the same thing: Coordinates, band of survivors searching for the like, food and shelter from the plague of dead. There is optimism in the woman’s voice—it’s inviting. I eat what natural food I can find, berries, fish. I mostly go hungry.
The miles heading north have been taxing. I think I’ve burned through all my body fat. I’m shivering and I need food.
Tried to snare a rabbit using a shoelace. I saw the technique used on a TV show once.
After I made the snare, a simple slipknot, I put it in the path of some rabbit tracks I found. I was baiting it with some corn chip crumbs. Nothing so far.
I was checking my trap and a zombie came up on me, couldn’t have been very fast, and it was wearing range orange so I don’t know how I missed it—my senses are dulled. I bolted without thinking onto the edge of the frozen lake and the zombie followed, but went down on its back on the ice and like a turtle it struggled to right itself for quite a while. No signs of any other zombies following so I took time to sketch it. Perhaps this is a good omen for me heading north.
February 19, 2012
A night indoors. I found a small cabin in the woods that seemed unoccupied, until I opened the door. Zombie inside rose and came at me, an old man, moving relatively quickly. It got out past the doorway and even weak as I was, I managed to drop it with a piece of cordwood and bash its skull in with another. No one else inside. The cabin seems like an overnight, shack? I guess would be the way to describe it. The woodstove inside was still slightly warm, the old man must have been human not v
ery long ago. Checking the corpse again outside, it had a wicked bite mark on its forearm that had been bandaged in a torn bit of shirt, pathetically, as if that would help. The old man didn’t have anything with him. Where had he come from? And what had bitten him? It occurred to me that I probably should have killed the zombie from yesterday, but I’m just so tired. Tonight, shelter from the wind, a warm fire, and a securely locked door.
February 22, 2012
Slept and slept and slept. No sense of how long or what day it was until consulting the watch. Spent two days in the cabin and feel rested but also weaker, less willing to go outside. Sure, I could stay at the cabin forever, just go to sleep forever. Hunger finally drove me out and onward to a small town near the border.
Came across a truck stop convenience store/gas station. Inside, the smell of rotten food and decomposing corpses. The place had been looted, but in haste, so I’ve managed to find some cans of food here and there amid the debris, including a CAN OF BAKED BEANS, which I started eating immediately while still inside the store before noticing my surroundings, nearly threw it all back up. Some scattered, crushed bags of snacks clearly advertising “Flavor Burst” and other C88-derived benefits. Can’t I can’t. It’ll all be here if I can’t find anything else. No one else left to eat it.
I was feeling better with some food in my stomach and cautiously roaming around—the town seems empty—when I noticed vultures circling above what turned out to be the high school’s outdoor stadium. The parking lot was full of cars. As I got closer I could see bodies in the stands, slumped over one another at one end of the stadium. Row after row of corpses with empty cups at their feet. A mass suicide? Why would these people were they uninfected, or fearing infection to come? What had they heard or seen to lead them to do this?
February 23, 2012
Signs of infection as I wandered through the town today. Some human corpses, some zombie corpses? Dead anyway. Not moving. Hard to tell the difference.
I came across a small car with its windows down. Cars. I could drive north. I walked up and looked inside—nothing in the back seat. In the driver’s seat, a body still seat-belted in. The keys were in the ignition. I decided it was worth the risk. I opened the car door and jabbed the corpse in the ribs with the tip of my axe. No movement. I went around to the passenger side door, opened it, and slid in so that I could unbuckle the belt. Its eyes opened as soon as I reached for the buckle. For a second I thought it might be a human dying rather than dead, but it wasn’t. It grabbed my jacket but I was able to wedge the blade to take off the hand and I jumped out of the car, the severed hand still clutching. I tore off my jacket and threw it on the ground, shut the creature back up in the car and ran. I should have killed it but I couldn’t make myself get close to it again even with it still belted in the seat. Nothing and no one took any notice of what had just happened. No signs of life. After about 30 seconds I stopped running.
Downtown, such as it is. The town’s dead, literally. I passed by a toy store window and found myself looking in. There was a slot-car track display set up, a new model updated from the kind I used to play with as a kid. Other toys, a princess costume, some stuffed bears, some toy guns—boy toys and girl toys.
There were children in the bleachers at the stadium.
Spending the night inside Gus’s Guns & Ammo. I’ve got new clothes, a few more layers of shirts and a down jacket from a back room inside the store. I’ve also got a pistol I found loaded in the office, where I also found what I assume was Gus. He looks like another suicide, a shot to the head, nothing much left of his head. His hand is in rigor mortis in a trigger position, but no sign of the gun. The store has been pretty thoroughly looted, so not everybody in town gave up? I shut the office door and am sleeping behind the counter. Barricaded the doors and windows as best I could. Tomorrow I’ll try the cars in the stadium lot. I have to get the hell out of here.
February 24, 2012
Almost killed the first human I’ve seen in more than a week. I was sound asleep when I could hear scraping metal and the front door barricade pushing in. I saw a head shape against the moonlight outside and fired, a bad shot into the wall, thank god. “Hey! Human! We don’t mean any harm! Hello?!”
That turned out to be Joe, part of a band that’s been living out of their van for the past few months. Logically, they thought Gus’s might have weapons. There’s four of them: Joe (guitar), Phillip (guitar), Ian (bass), and Stu (drums), all in their 20s from Olympia. And they have food! Finally getting out of town, heading north with them in the van.
February 25, 2012
The guys take turns driving, one at the wheel, one “shotgun” to make sure the driver stays awake, two (now three) of us in the back. A different but I have to say better bad smell of a bunch of guys living in a van. A human smell. Also in the back are some cans of gas, sacks of food, various containers of water, sleeping bags. They ditched their amps and the drum kit but kept the guitars and bass, and noodle around on them sometimes. We're headed for the Farm now and spirits are pretty high.
February 26, 2012
I’m recording Joe’s account of what happened to them here.
* * *
“We were playing up and around Vancouver when people started getting sick. We’re pretty used to cruising around and crashing with friends or having someone put us up for the night, the local punk house or like student co-ops. We usually cook for them and we always leave the house cleaner than when we got there, so we have this network. Things got bad in Vancouver, people just attacking each other, everyone with the weird fever, and so we started calling around when the phones still worked and made it to some friends who were kind of isolated, they inherited this house. When we got there . . . they were dead. We just kept moving after that. We’ve got plenty of food—when everybody looted everything they went for the packaged food, like in the supermarkets and stuff. Nobody’s thinking sacks of beans and rice, like bulk, soup kitchen style, but we’re vegans on a budget, and that’s food. Been siphoning gas, been doing that for years when funds run low on tour.”
* * *
February 28, 2012
Finally making some real time. As we move north, seeing fewer bodies or broken down cars. Whenever we see stopped cars we’ll usually check them out to see if they have any gas in the tank. It’s almost more upsetting when the cars are completely, inexplicably empty, but more often there are bodies. We’ll also occasionally pull off to do some cooking or just stand around a fire.
Loopy tired, we had a couple zombies come up on us while we were stopped. The band had been sitting around playing and Ian managed to crack the closest one in the head with his bass. We set them afire with the gasoline and kept them away with branches until they fell and burned out like cinders.
We always sleep in the van.
March 1, 2012
We’ve made it to the Farm. 500 miles it took us to get here. It’s a small, semi-fortified, bucolic inn, located off a series of wooded country roads about 15 miles from the nearest town. We’ve been allowed through a checkpoint but instructed to sleep in a smaller cottage building for the night, I guess to check and see if they want to let us in. I was expecting an actual farm, though this is close enough, one of the people at the checkpoint was wielding a pitchfork. Nice long handle on that, good for keeping the dead at a distance. Some rifles slung over shoulders, but also gasoline or kerosene and rags at the ready. A few charred heaps dot the yard and there’s a long low pit full of burnt human or zombie remains.
March 2, 2012
This morning a woman came in and took our temperature, shined a light in our eyes, asked a lot of questions about where we’d been and what we’d seen. Left and told us to wait. We passed whatever quarantine they wanted us to pass and we’ve been admitted to the big house.
The guy in charge is named Dale Fowler. I’m recording his story here.
* * *
“My wife and I came up here for our honeymoon one year. She’s dead now. When the plague hit
, and we knew how bad it was in the cities, I remembered this place. Off-season when I got here, so there weren’t many people around. The few that were, I had to destroy—they had turned. Pretty soon, some other like-minded folks showed up. We just decided to hole up here a while until things got better. Obviously, that didn’t happen. We fortified all the doors and windows, hunt the area for game, and for people who’ve turned, keep watch in shifts. Run the radio, hoping other people like you will show up. We need numbers, more eyes, more hands, for protection and to turn the place into a real farm by spring.”
* * *
March 3, 2012
I’ve drawn the setup here as best I can. There’s no perimeter fence to speak of, which worries me, though I’m not sure what they would make one out of, or how much good it would do. There are what amount to observation points that are a bit raised up and built out of odds and ends, which are staffed during the day, and always people watching from the top windows of the main building, day and night. They cleared the area around the Farm as best they can, but there are a lot of big old trees in the woods, so there’s a limit to what can be done. The pit is where they drag bodies of zombies that have gotten this close. It’s hard to tell, maybe 30 to 40 charred corpses in the pit?
