said about human ingenuity and hope...”
“I meant it. I just don't think we can expect any return to normal. We'll need to find a new normal. Adapt.”
I moved another pawn. “But if the world governments and military and all that couldn't stop the collapse, what real hope do we have?”
Jack thought for a bit before answering. “We need to play a different game.” He picked up a washer and squinted at it. “This pawn. In a chess game you might sacrifice it to gain a better position on the board, more control over certain squares. That works fine when your opponent has similar pieces and is playing by the same rules. But what about when your opponent vastly outnumbers you, doesn't care about the rules, doesn't even know they exist? Then every pawn becomes precious. I expect the governments fought the undead like a normal military opponent. They sacrificed foot soldiers to protect territory, not realizing the soldiers were more precious than any damn patch of land.” He put the pawn down so it was attacking one of my knights. “We need to be smarter than that.”
I moved my knight to a safer location. I didn't answer right away. His words had me thinking. We kept playing and chatting, but the whole time my mind was racing off in another direction, thinking about that other sort of game he thought we should be playing.
May 2 - The Factory, Oklahoma
Today Max called a meeting of what one might call his 'senior staff'. That mostly consists of Sarah, and Jack, but I was there because I've basically become Jack's assistant. Kalee sat in to give a report on the status of our food supplies, and Miguel talked about our medical supplies and the general health of our group. Thomas was asked to fill us in on everything he knows about the epidemic and the undead. We started out with Sarah showing the large stack of written comments she had collected from the everyone. Some people had written only a few lines, but others had been quite verbose. It resulted in a stack of several hundred pages. It would take hours to get through it all. Jack looked at the massive stack, then gave half of it to me and the other half to Kalee.
“Read through it. Summarize. Write me a report for our next meeting. Let me know what the biggest concerns are. Highlight any good ideas people had.”
I want to feel good about his confidence in our abilities, but I suspect he just feels everyone else has more important things to do.
Jack gave a quick report on the condition of the building and the various resources in it. The building is sturdy brick and could make a good refuge against an undead attack, though the ground floor windows in the office area are a potential weak point. He is working on a plan to reinforce the windows, though in the short term he recommends we move critical supplies to the second and third floors and come up with a way to barricade the stairwells if we need to. Sarah reported on morale and discipline issues and our dwindling supply of ammo. Miguel joined in with additional commentary on the health issues, the most pressing being that one of our group has diabetes and a very limited supply of insulin. Kalee talked about the food supply, of which there was very little. We have at most a couple more days of food. I had nothing to report on, so I kept the minutes, making the whole thing seem a little more like an official government-like function and less like a bunch of desperate survivors squatting in a deserted factory.
Finally we came to Thomas's report. Really it was more of a question and answer session, with Max and Miguel asking the most questions. Miguel's questions were more clinical in nature, while Max leaned toward questions about the impact of the epidemic and the behavior of the undead. Thomas had a tendency to lapse into long winded medical and scientific jargon when answering Miguel's questions, so I am not even going to try and accurately reproduce all his dialog here, but I'll do my best in giving the gist of what he told us about zombie physiology.
The first thing he tried to make clear was that the walking dead have not really been brought back to life. Rather, the body is taken over by a viral parasite, something that takes over the cellular machinery, eventually replacing it with a brand new system that just happens to use the old body as scaffolding to build a new biology.
“Think of it like a corral reef where the original creatures have all died, leaving only the hardened, calcified shells that are later inhabited by entirely new animals. Thats what this thing does to our bodies. While we are alive and infected, it uses our own blood stream and metabolism to spread through our cells, but then it kills us, devouring our cells from the inside but leaving most of the cell walls intact. It changes the chemistry of the body, practically embalming it.”
He went on to describe how the cellular metabolism was radically changed. I didn't follow most of it, but in short, zombies don't need to eat, they get their energy from some unknown mechanism, gradually breaking down the body's tissues perhaps, absorbing something from the air... Thomas didn't know exactly. What was clear, though, is that a zombie is very decentralized and thus hard to kill, more like a colony of creatures, like an ant hill or bee hive, rather than a single individual.
“So if they don't need to eat, why do they?” Sarah asked, “As far as I can tell, it seems to be all they do, the only thing that motivates them.”
“Yes, interesting, isn't it.” Thomas seemed entirely too excited talking about this gruesome topic. “The most likely explanation is that it is evolved behavior that facilitates the propagation of the pathogen. Basically, it's how the 'zombie' virus reproduces. Indeed, all the behavior of the necrotized infected lends itself to that end. An infected has an uncontrollable desire to feed, causing them to pursue and bite any person they come in contact with, yet they are also clumsy and slow, increasing the likelihood that a victim will escape once bitten, thus surviving to spread the infection.”
Miguel asked some questions about zombie behavior and neural physiology, and Thomas happily went off into a jargon filled explanation about how the virus took advantage of the existing neural patterns of the brain to recreate various primal instinctive behavior. He likened it to parasites in the insect world that could alter the behavior of the host to propagate the parasite, like infected ants that would climb up blades of grass to be eaten by wasps that would then in turn be infected. All interesting stuff if rather revolting.
“Back up a minute,” Jack interrupted, “You said the feeding instinct was evolved to spread the infection, but we've seen people become infected without being bitten. Most people died from that nasty respiratory thing. They still turned even without being bitten.”
Thomas pursed his lips. His expression darkened. “Yes, that is the really... interesting part of all this. On its own, the necrotizing pathogen could never have developed into such a massive epidemic. The infected are too easily identified and quarantined. It seems there was another virus. Something attached to the original virus, making it airborne, able to remain stable for a while outside of the body. On its own it would be just a flu-like respiratory bug, a very virulent and deadly one, but nothing too unusual. But this virus had just the right chemical structure to bond to the necrotizing virus. It spread both. Once a victim dies, the respiratory virus dies with them, leaving only the necrotizing virus to take possesion of the corpse. That is fortunate actually. It means the 'deadly cough' as you call it is likely to die out for good. There just aren't enough living people to spread it anymore.
“It was the perfect storm really. A respiratory bug with a long infectious period before turning deadly. A mobile, global society that could spread it far and wide. A passenger virus that turned all the dead into a hazard for the survivors, confounding any effort to contain things. Perfect.” A tiredness entered his eyes.
“What aren't you telling us?” Max whispered.
Thomas was silent for while. He stared into his coffee, now long cold. “It was too perfect. That air-born virus, it was too perfectly suited to carrying its necrotizing passenger. Too unlike any other naturally occurring virus. We had no proof, but a lot of the researchers thought it must have been engineered.”
“This whole damn plague... zombies... engineered?” Max seemed stunned.
“Not the zombie part,” Thomas insisted, “I suspect that has been around a long time, thousands, maybe millions of years. It's just that air-born flu-like bug that seemed too... perfect... to be true. I think this whole thing might have been the result of someone trying to engineer a naturally occurring 'zombie' virus into a bio-weapon.”
Everyone was silent for a bit while we contemplated that. Finally, Jack broke the silence, “We fucking did it to ourselves.”
“Probably,” Thomas admitted, “but there's no way to know for certain anymore. I'm just working from rumors. A researcher from another lab claimed he was given a frozen sample of necrotizing pathogen that was decades old. So that at least supports the idea that that the zombie bug has been around a long time, and our government, probably others, knew about it.”
“But this flu-like thing, you say that should die out?” Max asked.
“Yes, almost certainly.” Thomas answered, “It will have killed off its own propagation vector. Survivors like us are isolated, no longer passing it around. We only have to worry about the dead now.”
From there we moved on to more practical topics, like zombie behavior and vulnerabilities. Thomas had less to tell us in that area, but it was still a wealth of information. Like the fact that zombies always keep moving, even if it is just to stand around twitching. A corpse that is completely motionless is likely really dead and harmless. He began to go off on a tangent about the 'self sustaining ecosystem of the necrotized cellular colony' and how the twitching was part of how the undead metabolism kept itself functioning, but Max steered him back to a more immediately useful track.
“You may have noticed the undead are not very intelligent.” Thomas expounded. “We estimate their cognitive abilities at even less than a newborn infant. They have no ability to learn or reason, operating completely on instinct. They will always head directly toward potential victims, regardless of danger to themselves. Indeed, it is likely they have no concept of 'self' and no survival instinct. They are the desire to feed made physical, and not much else.
“They seem to utilize the full range of human senses, though hearing seems especially emphasized in locating prey, and touch is less important. They have no perceptible pain response. They are as strong as a living human, though slower and less coordinated. They don't really communicate or coordinate their actions with other infected, but they do have evolved responses that can make it seem that way. They will moan or howl when they spot prey, and that can attract other infected in the area. That can result in a swarming behavior that might look like a coordinated attack but really is not. Oh, and they seem to never get tired. Never.”
As official minute keeper, I was scribbling madly to get this all down. When Thomas finally stopped, and there was no more immediate questions, it was a welcome relief for my cramped hand. Max called an end to the meeting but asked Sarah to stick around to talk for a while. Miguel and Jack headed off in different directions, and Kalee and I carried our stacks of comment documents off to a quiet corner to begin reading.
May 3 - The Factory, Oklahoma
Slogging through all those scribbled comments, the worries and ideas of all my fellow survivors, it would have been boring if I hadn't been sharing it with Kalee. We found a quite office on the west side of the building to take advantage of the evening sun, pulled a pair of chairs up to the same desk, and piled in. Mostly we read in silence, but every so often one of us would stop to read something interesting to the other. We tallied up reoccurring themes, and made notes on ideas that stood out. The hierarchy of concerns went something like this:
1.Find more food
2.Contact family/friends
3.Find someplace safe
4.Contact the government/military
5.Locate more guns/ammunition/fuel
There was also many suggestions about what we should do, including impractical ideas about cities we should head to, and descriptions of how we might turn our current refuge into a fortress. I flagged a couple of comments that recommended we find a ham radio or try to connect with communication satellites to contact other survivors and gather more information. Those actually struck me as the kind of constructive suggestions that Max was looking for. Several people made intriguing suggestions about nearby locations that might be scavenged for supplies. I was particularly impressed with Milo's comments. He didn't offer up any specific destinations, but he gave a detailed description of how he would organize scavenge teams and the type of tactics they would use. It reflected hard won knowledge of zombie behavior that mirrored what Thomas had described.
We finished going through our stacks of pages and then put our heads together combining our individual notes. I looked longingly at the dead PC we had removed from the desk, and imagined what sort of spreadsheet I might have whipped up to better organize our notes. I laboriously copied everything into one neat document, looked it over, then added one more item to the list of concerns.
6.Locate a sustainable source of electrical power
Currently we are running the generator for less than an hour per day, and then mostly to drive the water pump for the factory's well. We also charge a few flashlights, power tools, and the hand-held CB at the same time. I've thought about rummaging up a laptop from one of the offices and adding that to the list, but I really can't justify it. We have limited gasoline, and we need to it for the cars so we can search for supplies.
Kalee gave the document a final read through and nodded her approval. “You have better penmanship than me.” She declared, “I thought guys are supposed to have worse handwriting.” She rested her head on her arm and looked over the paper at me. “It's not like any school paper I've ever written. How To Survive a Zombie Apocalypse... please provide complete bibliography and cite all your sources. Weird.”
I leaned back in my desk chair. The setting sun left half her face in shadow but gave the other half a red-orange glow. I wished for a moment that my phone wasn't dead so I could snap a picture. “I would probably be in the robotics lab right now, back in Boston, if things hadn't gone to hell.” She gave a half smile, like she could picture it and found it amusing somehow. “What would you be doing right now,” I asked, “if it wasn't the apocalypse?”
“Oh I would be back at the university in Kansas City, probably all wired on coffee with my head buried in an organic chemistry textbook.” She laughed. “Your robotics lab sounds more fun. I was picturing you in a mad scientists lab coat tinkering on some huge stompy monster robot all covered in claws and rocket launchers.”
I laughed at that. “It's not all tinkering. I'm a freshman, so most of the classes are all theory, so I spend a lot of time buried in textbooks too.” I would be embarrassed to admit that I still had those textbooks with me. I should have been like Milo and brought guns and food.
“Oh I don't mind the studying,” she said, “It's the exams that I hate. You spend weeks or months learning all sorts of fascinating stuff, then you are expected to regurgitate some arbitrary slice of it on demand under some artificial time constraint. I just hate the stress of it. I mean, I was studying to be an environmental engineer, and I absolutely loved it. I think I was born to be one, was studying for it on my own before I even knew what one was. That's done now I guess. No worries about peak oil or climate change or anything. No more pollution or development encroaching onto wetlands. Just a big green world overrun with walking dead people.”
“When you say it that way, it almost sounds nice.” I tried to make a joke of it, hoping to lighten the mood.
“I suppose. Maybe. Maybe it's selfish of me, wanting the old world back just so I can make a career of coming to its rescue.” She looked bemused. “I'm just tired. Don't listen to me. I'm going to turn in; need to get up early for my new life as cafeteria worker. Get this to Max, will you?” She handed me our report as she got up to leave
.
“Goodnight.” was all I could think to say as she walked away.
May 4 - The Factory, Oklahoma
I didn't find Max before going to bed last night, so I gave him the report this morning. He was busy talking to Sarah at the time, so he set it aside and promised to read it later. I then tracked down Jack to see if he needed any help with anything. He was in a machine shop attached to the factory area leaning over what looked like a large car alternator. A worktable had been dragged across the floor to take advantage of the light coming in through the room's small, high windows. From the dust on the floor, he had moved the table several times to follow the moving sunbeam.
“Anything I can help with?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Jack replied, “I've got this old truck alternator I found in the machine shed back at the farm. I was thinking about how we might rig it up to generate power. It's a 12 volt system, and we have car adapters that can charge the flashlights and radio. I might even figure some way to charge the cordless drill, though that might draw too much. I'm thinking, wind turbine, but I need to gear things up to the right RPMs to make that work.”
Jack had an assortment of gears strewn across the table. They were parts normally used in fork lifts, but he was attempting to adapt them to his purpose.
“I think I can make some of these work,” he said, “but I would have to drill out the center hole in one of these to fit the alternator's shaft and then do some welding. That means running the generator for a while to power the arc welder and some other tools. I'm trying to figure a way to minimize that.”
I looked at the parts. “They don't have an acetylene torch here?” I asked.
“They do actually,” he answered, “but no bottles of acetylene that I've found. I've looked all over the factory and the shops.”
If they have the welder, they should have the fuel, so it must be somewhere we hadn't looked yet. “I heard someone say the office basement is full of stuff. They've only swept it to make sure it was zombie free, I don't think anyone inventoried it. Maybe we'll find something there.”
Jack smiled, scooped an LED flashlight from the table, and handed it to me. “I have complete confidence in you. I saw some sheet aluminum in the factory that we can make turbine blades out of. I'll be out there if I'm not here when you get back.”
I wondered back to the offices and took the stairs down to the
The Bolachek Journals - Part 1 Page 7
