“Of course,” Katie replied. “It’s one of the older models but it can still connect to the internet.”
“Since you know more about how to use these things than anyone else in the family, I was wondering if you would use my phone to see if you could contact anyone and to browse the internet to see what you can find out. I feel like we’re sitting here blind. If you could try to get on the websites of newspapers, government sites, chat rooms or whatever you can find that’s still working, see what you can learn. I could do it, but I’m sure you could do it faster and find more places than I could. The battery would probably go dead before I could find anything.”
“Sure, I’ll try,” Katie replied looking surprised at my request. “Is there anything in particular you want me to find?”
“See if you can find out why the National Guard didn’t give the serum to everyone, what is turning people into zombies, why are people being eaten, how long will this last, how to protect yourself from zombies, get the idea?” I asked.
“Got It,” Katie smiled. “I’ll just Google everything we’ve seen the last two days, check the news websites for information and see if I can find someone to talk to about why everyone has gone crazy and are eating people.”
“Keep your phone turned off and save your battery so we’ll have a way to call for help when this is all over,” I added.
“I’ll see what I can find,” Katie smiled.
Katie sat back down on the couch and began tapping on my phone.
I went down to the basement to help Emma and Logan.
What we were doing wasn’t much, but it made me feel better than just sitting around.
I hoped this would all be over in a day or two, but something told me that just wasn’t going to happen.
When something happens that you never dreamed could ever happen, what do you do?
I guess the answer to that is, “Whatever you can and hope it is enough.”
Chapter 13
By late day Emma had set up sleeping bags, pillows and blankets so we would have a comfortable place to sleep.
Logan and I had carried half the food up to the attic and stacked it on the other side of the attic along with a propane stove, some pans and paper plates, bowls, cups and plastic silverware.
Since Katie was busy, I hung a blanket from the rafters in a corner to use as our bathroom. I put a bucket behind the blanket, in the bucket I put the sponge that I used to wash the car. The sponge was to deaden the sound when anyone urinated into the bucket so Katie wouldn’t get embarrassed when it was her turn. Logan could care less, I assumed he would probably remove the sponge to make as much noise as possible just to irritate Katie.
Logan and I then filled the water jugs that were in the garage and took them to the attic so we would have something to drink.
We filled all the other jugs we had in the basement and stored them back down in the basement. I wanted to have as much water as possible in case the water stopped running like what happened to our other utilities. I also wasn’t sure how much longer we should drink from the faucet, I was worried that the water supply, which comes from the local lakes and rivers, would become contaminated soon.
I felt we could drink water from the faucet for a few days before the clean water in the system would be replaced with contaminated water. It was a gamble, but we really didn’t have a choice. I had been meaning to add cases of bottled water to our food supply, but I guess I had been a little lax completing my plans. I mistakenly assumed that I would have had more time. No matter how much you feel your prepared, when the end comes, it always comes when you least expect it.
Emma brought up all her old magazines, newspapers, books and some puzzle books so we would have something to do to pass the time.
I sat back and looked at what we had done.
Not knowing what it was we were preparing for, I wasn’t sure if we had done enough, but it was a start.
I tried to run all the possibilities I could imagine through my mind. When I wondered how we would defend ourselves from little green men with ray guns, it reminded me about what I had forgotten.
I went down to my room where I kept a gun cabinet and studied my guns.
I had a shotgun and two rifles that I had used for hunting. I hadn’t hunted in years, but I still kept the guns in case I would decide to take up hunting again someday.
I left the shotgun in the gun cabinet for protection while we were down stairs, but I took the Winchester rifle and the four boxes of ammo that I had for the gun up to the attic.
Now that I had a way to defend my family from little green men with ray guns, I went down to see what Katie had been able to find on the internet.
Katie was still sitting on the couch, tapping on the phone.
“Were you able to find anything?” I asked as I sat down next to her.
“It wasn’t easy, but I did find out a few things,” Katie replied. “The internet is still working, but most of the sites are dead. The sites that are still working are slow and are just good for viewing, the links don’t work anymore.”
“What did you find?” I asked.
“I checked all the news sites that I could think of, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Las Angles Daily News, USA Today, then I Googled newspapers. The pictures they had were as gross as what we saw outside our house. I read some of the articles to see what they were saying, but there wasn’t anything that we didn’t already know.”
“I thought they would have had something new,” I replied.
“What I did see was that none of the sites had been updated for the last two days,” Katie added.
“So they weren’t able to do anything the last two days either,” I replied.
“I tried calling around,” Katie added. “I went through your phone list, all the numbers that I could remember and even looked up numbers for different police stations, newspapers and government offices, but those that weren’t out of service, or where I received a recording about systems being down, didn’t answer.”
“So you couldn’t find anything useful?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know how useful it is, but I did find one site that was operating until this morning,” Katie replied. “I checked to see if there were any recent posts on blogger sites, eBay, Craig’s list, Facebook and Twitter, but all those sites were down except for one. That site had a few posts as recent as this morning.”
“What site was that?” I asked.
“Promise me you won’t get mad?” Katie asked sheepishly.
“I won’t get mad, I asked you to try to find anything you could any way you could,” I smiled.
“Well there is this one adult hookup site that the kids at school are always looking at,” Katie replied. “They don’t use the site to hook up or anything. Everyone just reads it because people get on the site and talk about their dates and the things they do, you know like who likes what and things like that.”
“Have you looked at that site before?” I asked.
Katie nodded as she lowered her head.
“Thanks for being honest,” I said.
“You know I would never lie to you, Dad,” Katie replied.
“I know you wouldn’t and I’m not mad or disappointed,” I said. “I’m also not surprised.”
“You’re not?” Katie replied as she raised her eyes and looked at me in amazement.
“Katie, you’re a good girl and I trust you completely,” I smiled. “But you are sixteen. Let’s just leave it at that for now, OK? What did you find on that site and let’s stick with things that deal with our current situation.”
Katie nodded, and I could see her mind working.
“Well there are these two boys that are always bragging about what they did and what their girlfriends do,” Katie said. “But yesterday they were talking about the dead.”
“About the dead?” I asked. “They have probably seen a lot of people getting killed like we have.”
“But they weren�
�t talking about who they saw getting killed,” Katie replied. “They were talking about the people doing the killing. They were referring to them as the dead.
The one guy said he and his girlfriend were out parking when this one bloody guy started pounding on his window.
He said his girl friend started screaming, so he started the car to go somewhere else. The bloody guy jumped in front of his car as this guy tried to drive off and he ran over him.
He said he stopped his car and ran back to see if the guy he had just run over was OK. He said that when he got back to the guy, he saw that both of his legs had been crushed. The Guy said he knelt down by the crushed body, the man opened his eyes and started growling at him. The guy said he almost crapped his pants when the mangled body began crawling towards him, pulling his crushed body across the road with his arms. The guy said there was no way that man could still be alive after being run over and crushed like he was, but his body was still trying to come after him.”
“Could he have just been making up the story to get attention?” I asked. “We’ve seen some pretty creepy things the last two days, but nothing like that.”
“I don’t know Dad, if you would have seen the kind of things he bragged about before,” Katie replied. “Since we’re talking about this, maybe you could tell me if some of the things he has bragged about before are even possible?”
“Maybe later,” I replied as I thought how I often wished that Katie would talk more with her mother about certain subjects. “Right now, I’m trying to find something that could help us with our problem.”
“There was this other boy, he refers to himself as “Big Richard”, everyone says he exaggerates so much that you can’t believe a thing he says,” Katie smirked, “but he claimed that one of these bloody people tried to break into his house. He claimed to have shot the guy four times and said it never fazed the guy one bit. He claimed the guy would have gotten into his house, but one shot blew off the guy’s leg. He said the guy was still trying to get in, but he couldn’t get up the steps with only one leg.”
“Did these guys say anything else?” I asked.
“No, they had just started to say this kind of stuff but then they began to complain about how slow the internet was getting,” Katie replied. “They did say one more thing before everything stopped, they said something about if anyone wanted to talk, they could be reached on channel 40. I didn’t know what that meant, but I’m sure it had some sexual meaning that I didn’t understand. What does channel 40 mean or aren’t we talking about that subject yet?”
I sat back and felt a smile come over my face.
“Dad, you’re smiling,” Katie said. “Channel 40 must be something good. I’ve read about a lot of things, but I never heard of channel 40. What’s that all about or is it another one of those things I don’t need to know about until I get older?”
“If I’m right, it has something to do with a CB radio,” I laughed. “My Dad was always talking on a CB, it means citizens band radio, a two-way radio that people in the mountains used to talk to one another. When I was a kid, he tried to get me to listen and talk with him when he was on the CB, but I thought it was boring and never wanted to do it.”
“Why didn’t he just use his cell phone?” Katie asked.
“We didn’t have cell phones when I was a kid, they weren’t invented yet,” I replied.
“I forgot that you grew up during the stone age,” Katie grinned. “No cell phones, no school buses and you had to walk to school, five miles up hill both ways in two feet of snow.”
“Smart ass,” I said. “It wasn’t that bad,” I smiled. “School was called off when the snow got over eighteen inches.”
“About the other things those guys were bragging about,” Katie began. “I have to know if they are really true.”
“Maybe later,” I smiled. “I have to go down to the basement.”
“Why?” Katie asked. “Can I come with you, we can talk some more.”
“Because I just remembered that I have a CB radio stashed away down there somewhere,” I replied. “Even though I didn’t like to use a CB, my dad always told me that it would be good to have one in an emergency. I bought a CB and stashed it with the food ten years ago and forgot all about it until you told me about Big Richard.”
“Well, I guess that maybe Big Richard wasn’t all talk after all,” Katie grinned. “Interesting.”
“If things ever get back to normal,” I said. “It might be a good idea if you didn’t visit that site anymore. But that is a subject we will discuss later. Right now, let’s go find my old CB and see if we can get it working.”
“That sounds like fun,” Katie replied and followed me to the basement.
I found my old CB radio in a corner under twenty boxes of canned soups. I was afraid at first that the heavy cans might have crushed the radio, but the radio had been well protected in the crate I had placed it in.
After I had unpacked it, I carried it to the garage and put it on the work bench. I used the jumper cables to connect the radio to the battery in the car.
I had thought about removing the battery and carrying it up to the attic but decided it would be better to leave the battery in the car in case we needed it for a quick getaway.
As of now we really didn’t know where we could go, the house was the safest place to be in my estimation, but if things changed quickly, I wanted the car to be ready.
Logan and Emma were curious, but not as curious as Katie.
I could tell she couldn’t resist the idea of having a replacement for her cell phone.
As I was getting ready to turn it on, Katie asked, “How do you call someone on this CB?”
“You turn it on and say Bob are you there,” I replied.
“You don’t put in a number or anything?” she asked.
“No, there aren’t any numbers, usually you have a set time and a specific channel that you and the person you want to talk to both use,” I replied. “When that other person hears you on the radio he just gets on and lets you know he is there.”
“What if someone else is using that same channel?” Katie asked.
“Then they can hear you talking,” I replied. “So you have to watch what you say because you never know who is listening. It’s like being on a party line.”
“A what?” Katie asked.
“In the stone age when phones were first invented, everyone could hear when other people on their line were talking,” I laughed.
“Life was tough during the stone age,” Katie grinned. “So who are you going to call?”
“For now I’m just going to listen, if there is anyone talking, and see what I can learn,” I replied.
“Won’t they know you are listening?” Katie asked.
“Not unless I push the button on the mic,” I replied and showed her the mic. “When you push this button, it makes a click over the air that everyone can hear. If you don’t push the button, no one will ever know that you were listening.”
“Maybe these CBs aren’t so bad after all,” Katie grinned.
I turned on the CB and moved the dial to channel 40.
After listening to the silence for a few minutes, I began to scan the other channels.
“Let’s see if there is anything on one of the other channels,” I said. “If I remember what my dad told me, channel 9 is the emergency channel, channel 19 is usually used by truckers, and my dad always used channel 10 and channel 21.”
I switched to channel 9, but it was silent too.
I then tried channel 10, but it also silent, I was beginning to think that my CB wasn’t working, or I had forgotten how to use it.
When I turned to channel 21, we all sat up and listened when we heard two voices talking.
“Grizzly Bear, how are things down your way today?” a man’s voice asked then said, Crazy Squirrel over.
“About the same,” Grizzly over.
“What kind of names are Grizzly Bear and Crazy Squirrel?” Katie laughed. “A
re these guys crazy or something.
“It’s a way to stay anonymous on the open air,” I replied. “It’s called a handle, you use a handle instead of your real name. So unless someone knows you, no one will know who you are.”
The conversation continued.
“They attacked my place three times yesterday, I thought they were going to get in the last time,” Squirrel over.
“I saw them break into my neighbor’s house this morning, I think I’m the only one still alive on my road,” Grizzly over.
“They got my brother last night. He was looking out the window and two of the dead broke the window and pulled him outside, it was horrible,” Squirrel over.
“Sorry to hear that Squirrel, I know how you must be feeling,” Grizzly over.
“I know you can understand after what happened to your family. It’s bad enough to watch something like that happen, but to then have to be alone with the dead pounding at your door day and night,” Squirrel over.
“We’re all living on borrowed time Squirrel,” Grizzly over.
“I agree with you, I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. I was talking to Lizard this morning when they broke into his house and got him. I think you and I are the only two left now,” Squirrel over.
“Damn, Lizard too! I’ve been trying to contact him all day, I liked that boy,” Grizzly over.
“Before they got him, you won’t believe what he was telling me. He said he had reached a guy that lived near Chicago, and by the way the guy said Chicago was like a haunted house, there is no one left now but the dead. But he was saying that his contact near Chicago had talked to someone that had found out how this all started. You know how the United Nations is always talking about how the Earth is being destroyed by overpopulation? Well the government came up with a way reduce the population.
They put their plan to work under the disguise of a flu vaccine project. He said the idea was to inject high school students with a fake flu vaccine that would make it impossible for them to have children. The country would skip a generation of babies being born and that would help keep our country’s population in check. Only after they gave the flu vaccine, it made everyone that got the shot sick as hell and it actually started spreading the flu. The government figured that these people would all probably recover after a few weeks, but they saw an opportunity to take a short cut and reduce the population growth in another way. They made a fake serum that was to cure the flu epidemic, now called an Ebola Outbreak because Ebola has a much higher death rate to justify how many people they expected to die. They told everyone that they were sending the National Guard out to give shots to the sick. But what they didn’t tell anyone was that the serum was actually meant to kill people, not cure them. The National Guard was told to go out and inject the healthiest looking people so the government was sure they would be able to cut the population in half. The national guard didn’t know what they were really giving these people. However. the government didn’t expect what happened after the shots were given. The combination of shots ended up turning the country into the land of the walking dead. It looks like the government thought they had found a way to reduce the population, but instead the bastards are going to end up killing us all,” Squirrel over.
Just Trying To Stay Alive: A Prepper's Tale Page 12
