So, you want to know why I'm lugging this big dog cage back to the safe zone
huh? It's a horrible tale, but if you're sure, I'll tell you if you walk
along with me while I search...
I always wanted to be a hero. It was my life-long dream--fight off monsters,
beat up the bad guys, that sort of thing. Of course, there never were any
bad guys--not really. Oh sure, there were muggers, rapists, killers, but
what does a child know of those things anyway? I wanted to fight
three-headed weirdos that shot laser beams from their eyes, gigantic mutant
gorillas that could smash buildings into rubble. What I got was just a
hum-drum, ordinary life in the country instead, and I was a run-of-the-mill
farmer--until everything went to hell that is.
When I first heard about zombies, I thought my friend Bill was just telling
another of his retarded stories. A virus that could animate the dead? Yeah,
right--and look out, cuz here comes Lex Luthor!
"Bill, you know, I really get tired of your wacked-out stories. If you're
going to shoot the bull, at least come up with a good line of it." I
laughed, but a chill ran down my back when I noticed that Bill wasn't
laughing at all--he wasn't even grinning.
Two days later, I was out in the pasture, milking our three cows. My farm
wasn't big--in fact, it was downright dinky compared to some farms I've
seen, but when you own a piece of land, you take pride in it--it's yours, no
matter how small it is. Well, I was milking Dotty, my biggest cow, when she
kicked out, nearly catching me in the face. I jumped aside, but that cow was
always a bit--well, dotty. Then I noticed that the hens started in to
cackling. They cackle most of the time anyway, but that time was different.
They were all restless like, and before I knew it one of them started trying
to fly the coop. That was when I noticed a general panic amongst all the
animals. I got another one of those chills up my spine, then tried to brush
it off.
"Hun, I think there's a big storm movin' in," I told my wife.
"Oh Ken," she said, "there ain't a cloud in the..."
There were no clouds in the sky, but something was moving, a thick cloud of
something way off in the distance.
We packed up our essentials and took our dog and two kids away from
there--somewhere safe, somewhere better, because we were certain that
trouble was coming. We asked the neighbor to watch the farm for a few days,
and he said he would.
We drove around aimlessly for three days, and everywhere we had gone showed
us nothing but trouble. We saw cities in flames, massive car pile-ups, even
a crashed airplane or two... and in Chicago we actualy saw the hordes. They
seemed like normal people--an army of them to be sure, but normal--but they
smelled all wrong. My dog Samson knew it too. One second, he was wanting to
go attack that horde, and the next he was cowering in sheer terror. Now he
was a big dog, but we all knew that he wouldn't have lasted for more than a
second, so we held him back.
The hordes kept coming--closer and closer to where we were. They were about
a hundred feet away when I noticed the smell--rotting decay--the stench of
death. We turned the car around and got away from there as fast as we could,
ut attracted by the noise they tried to follow. They were no match for a car
on an open road, but there was an abandoned bus, there an overturned semi,
there a twisted pile of wreckage that had once been a Buick, and they almost
got us more than once. I lost my dog on that trip. The stupid dog saw
another dog at one point, and decided to attack it--but it wasn't a normal
dog. It might have been weak for a zombie, but it was very strong for a dog,
and it killed my poor Samson before I even suspected that anything was
wrong. I know he was trying to protect us from it, I just wish--oh, never
mind!
A few days passed and we looked for survivors. One day we actually found a
town that wasn't deserted. I put the scope of my Winchestor hunting rifle up
to my eye and had a real good look around--just to make sure those were
people I was seeing and not more zombies. Where I was looked like it had
once been a prosperous town, complete with stores, houses and a church. Yet
while all the buildings were mostly intact, save for a burning house here
and there, the place seemed deserted after all--or so I thought. Then I saw
a monstrous sight--a gigantic, well-muscled female. She was growling like an
animal as she came out of the Kai-Mart. She was munching contently on a
bone. I stared at her, then recoiled in shock. It was a human thigh bone. I
know it was a human's bone because I paid attention in our biology class.
(Of course, if I'd have known I was going to be a farmer instead of a doctor
I probably would have slept through that class like I had slept through
Language Arts)--but anyway, I panned around with the rifle. That
thing--okay, that zombie, was truly enormous. I shot it one, two, three
times. I pulled the trigger until it clicked--and kept on pulling. The gun
kept on clicking, and the zombie witch was mad now. She threw down her bone
and came after me, and she was fast! I reloaded my gun and shot her
again--and again. Her screams were all too human, but I didn't care just
then. She finally fell down--dead I hoped. I looked around one more time,
then put up the gun.
"Clear," I called, and my beautiful wife and two small children came out of
the car.
"That was nice shooting there," someone said. I was so startled that I had
the gun loaded and pointing at him before my pounding heart finished its
third beat. I calmed myself down as best as I could, but when your nerves
are frayed and enemies lurk everywhere you look, that's hard work!
The man introduced himself as Joe, said he was a carpenter, and that, if we
liked, he would take us all somewhere safe. He was a big man, around six
feet tall. Judging by his balding head and the wrinkles at the corners of
his eyes, I guessed him to be in his late forties. He had an honest face, so
we agreed instantly, and that's how we found ourselves crammed into what he
called the "safe zone."
"This here's a trust-based community," I was told by one of the people that
lived there. "You work hard, you get trusted more. The more we trust you,
the bigger jobs we know you can handle--and the bigger guns and better armor
too."
"We don't have much really," said Joe, "just some pistols, a few rifles,
some other stuff, but you can have it--no charge, if you earn it with what
you do."
"OK," I said, "but what do you want me to do?"
"Can ya hunt?" asked one of the workers, and I nodded.
"Then go hunt us up some grub."
Hunting for food was certainly not fun. It did not entail shooting animals,
which I would have found pleasant in comparison to my task. I had to find
cans and packages of food, and they had to be sealed, since we worried that
contaminated food could change us into zombies.
The days wore on. I got used to sleeping with my trusty MP5, and it saved my
life more than once believe me. Killing zombies, which was much less boring
than hunting old food in grocery stores, became my life. I hunted them from
morning till ight. Then, One day, I heard about a mission some of the fellas
were planning.
"There's this warehouse one town over," Joe said when I asked him about the
mission, "and they've got medical supplies--loads of 'em, so what we're
gonna do is, go in there with guns ready and carry out as much medicine as
we can."
You cannot imagine the tention, the allertness I felt that day. When we got
there, I saw more zombies than I had seen since I'd watched a great horde of
them sweep through Chicago. It became as important to kill zombies as it was
to find crates. That was my job, killing zombies, because I'd found a huge
gun lying in a pile of army gear at the side of a highway on one of my
zombie hunting excursions. Now I cranked it to life--and it was a wonder!
That gun delivered so much death that I think it could have taken out an
army of normal folks--but these were zombies, and they ket coming and
coming. Finally Joe called me back to the truck and we headed on home,
mission completed.
The safe zone was getting a bit more crouded with every passing day. My
family and I weren't about to leave it, starving as we were, cold as we
were, crouded as we were. Well since you live in this nice, cozy safe zone
and have tons of food, I know that you don't know anything about starving.
You're starving when you can eat a rat. You're starving when bugs go down
like vegies. You're starving when you don't feel the slightest bit hungry,
though it's been days since your last meal.
We had developed a routine--a weird routine, but a relatively stable one.
See, that's the thing about routines. Even the weirdest ones get to be
normal after a while, but one crisp November day, all that started to
change. We had found a new warehouse full of blankets and pillows, but the
place was literally infested. I don't know what those zombies want with
pillows and blankets, but they were everywhere. Personally, I think there's
some kind of higher intelligence controlling them, because they always seem
to show up at the wrong places at the wrong time. About sixty of them
cornered me by a window, and just as I was finishing them off, the window
was smashed in, and another 60 came through from outside. I got quite a
beating, but managed to get out of there in a hurry. When it was time to go,
we all called to each other. If someone was missing, we had to hunt for him.
If, in a reasonable ammount of time that person wasn't found, they were
presumed dead. There was need for presumption this time though. Frank, the
mission coordinator, saw Joe go down under what he said was a ton of
zombies. We cleared the place and found his mangled corpse. We stripped him,
took his guns and other valuables, threw his corpse into the back of the
truck, and took off.
That was when the rumors started spreading--another safe zone--a better safe
zone--a fortified, well-armed, spacious police station which was baricaded!
"We really should go there dear, for the children," my wife said.
"Oh, come on Cindy! It's just rumors. You might as well seek the land of
Oz," I said, but the rumors persisted.
I was--well, certainly not comfortable, but I had those routines. My wife
insisted, and after a while I gave in and we left for our new home. I
wondered, as we ran through the sewers, if this new place could possibly be
so much better than the old one that leaving our old one could really be
worth it--I mean, we were running through a sewer for heaven's sake! There
were rats and other nasties, and the occasional zomby would rear its ugly
head and have to be shot, and sometimes other zombies would hear the shot
and come running. Thankfully, we cleared the sewer and found ourselves in a
large drainage ditch that was created for the draining of the swamps. We
were shivering with the cold, and the stink of the sewer was thick in our
nostrils. We kept on running when we met with horrendous luck. It took the
form of three of the most enormous zombies I had ever seen. We had taken to
calling them tyrants, and they came at us full speed. I picked one of my
children up, and my wife grabbed the other. Oh, how I wish I'd just started
shooting instead.
They got closer and closer, and knocked the children out of our arms. I
readied my Vulcan Minigun, the one I call my garbage sweeper since it does
such a good job at shredding those monstrocities, and opened fire. One
tyrant was down, then another. The third zombie had run away though, and it
had taken my children with it. I ran behind the bowling alley.
It's funny how in times of crisis you notice weird things. Wow, I thought
just then, they have a bowling alley. I wonder if I can still bowl 200...
My children were in the arms of that zombie, and he was biting them. You
can't imagine the dread pouring through me at that critical moent. The bite,
or so I'd been told, carried the poison that changed men into zombies! I
knew I might hit my kids with the big gun, so I threw it down, took my mp5
from its holster, set it to burst mode and started firing. I emptied the
thing into the tyrant's belly, and at least it fell to the ground. I grabbed
my kids and ran, and my wife followed. I looked back once, and saw the
tyrant's ears twitching. I wanted to shoot it some more, but my wife just
wanted to run.
Then, stupid me, I remebered my Vulcan, my precious garbage sweeper, lying
on the ground--and I went back for it, my wife following numbly. That's when
the stalker attacked. Those fiends are so sneaky that if you are not looking
for them deliberately, they will get you every time. I grabbed my minigun
and blew that stalker apart. I even congradulated myself on my speed and
cleverness!
Damn my stupidity! Damn the luck, and damn those zombies! I hit my wife with
a stray round. I held her in my arms as she lay dying. I was so weak from
the fight that I could hardly move, and she was bleedng copiously. The round
had pierced her chest, and her heart seemed to be trying to pump out as much
blood as possible and as fast as possible.
"Take care of the kids--I mean good care. Don't let them run wild in the
streets, or get eaten by those horrid zombies," she said. She sighed deeply
then, and just like that, she was gone.
I grabbed the kids, one in each arm, and ran. I saw another big female
zombie come from behind the clothing store and devour the love of my life. I
didn't even try to shoot. It was my fault that my beautiful, wonderful wife
was dead: I had killed her.
A few hours later my kids started coming around. I was in the hospital. We
had come so close to reaching our goal--so close, and yet so far. First, my
son Andrew moved his precious little hand. Then my daughter Julia moved her
toes. I walked up to their bed, and Andrew leaped out of it and tried to
bite my face! Then Julia lept for my back.
I think the orderlies took pity on me, for they did not shoot my zombie
children. Instead, they tied them to the beds with strong metal cables and
sedated them.
And that's why I'm out searching restlessly at three o'clock in the damned
moring in December, all right? Are you satisfied? Don't you wish you could
be a hero like me, a bloody wife-killing hero that couldn't even save his
own kids? Now, I gotta try and find dog cages big enough to cram them into.
The damned doctor says he's going to kill my precious kids if I don't have
them contained by tomorrow.
Well telling you my tale didn't make me feel a damn bit better. I hope that,
at the very least, you know what we're up against. Now, if you don't mind,
open that crate over there would ya?
---
Gamers mailing list __ [email protected]
If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected].
You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org.
All messages are archived and can be searched and read at
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected].
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list,
please send E-mail to [email protected].
