Alone No More (6 page)

As you might imagine it has also been cold during the day. Not quite as cold as at night, but still pretty cold. Solid 35 to 40 degrees during the day, dipping down to 20 to 25 degrees at night. It’s only early December too, and if this trend keeps up, February is going to be a motherfucker.

My thumb is much better, but it’s terribly stiff. I take a couple Ibuprofen for it every 6 hours or so, and that makes it more or less fine. I hate sprains, they take so long to heal and generally just gum up the works while they’re taking their sweet ass time. Whatever I guess! It is what it is and it’s almost all better. At least I didn’t get bitten. Sprains are much less fatal.

My venison obsession has come to an abrupt halt. I’ve eaten far too much of it already. I set up my makeshift fridge for the meats upstairs in a room that I’m not heating. It stays about 40 degrees all the time, which is just good enough seeing as how it’s all smoked. The meat has kept great for me, but I just over indulged and now I need a break. I have half a mind here one of these early mornings to try and bag some of the turkey I used to see roaming the fields before the shit hit the fan. I actually wonder if the zombies have eaten them? Turkeys can move though, so maybe they’re safe.

The lake has started to freeze. There’s a fine crust at the edges that’s millimeters thick. In another couple weeks if these temperatures hold there will be a really good freeze going on. Kinda makes the whole island aspect of this place seem pointless eh? I guess it’ll keep vehicles out, but any shambling zombies can just march across the ice once it’s cold enough.

Speaking of cold enough, I wonder if the zombies will freeze? Is there any body heat being generated inside them? I haven’t seen that many since the temperatures really dropped, so it stands to some reason that they’re all freezing solid out there somewhere. Although it’s strange, because when I shoot them now, they still kinda… ooze blood, which makes no sense at all. All their blood should be fully gelled up inside them. 

This really makes me wonder what the hell is causing all this. A virus? Biological weapons? Is it supernatural? Fucked if I know. I wonder if anyone has found out what’s going on. I’m sure somewhere on some huge military base they’ve got a good idea of the story. Out here in the sticks on campus I don’t know shit beyond my doorstep. Hell I haven’t even been into town in… a very long time.

I should talk more about my early times here. Before I do that though, I’ll tell you about yesterday and today. Yesterday I finished clearing Auburn Lake Road. There were two houses left on the street, and I got them searched and emptied with no danger involved. Both houses looked to be left exactly as they had if someone was supposed to be coming back. My bet is the residents never made it home “that day.” They’re either holed up and stuck somewhere, or they died. Either way, their shit is now mine. 

Two items came up at the second house that I was unable to retrieve. The people living there were snowmobile enthusiasts. This is a good thing. Sort of. For some reason there was no snowmobile trailer in their yard, so I had no way to get the machines back to campus. I’ll have to wait for snow, and then just drive them back. They had two of them, incidentally. That little find will go a long way towards making winter safer, and more tolerable. The four wheeler is a nice toy, but in really deep snow it’ll struggle. Once I get a trail packed for the snow machines, I’ll be all set to get around in a pretty wide area regardless of the weather.

As I said, I didn’t get a whole lot more of use. Blah blah. Today I started to work on the houses on Jones Road. If you’ll recall Mr. Journal I mentioned before that there were nine houses on Jones Road, and the last one is a rather large farmhouse. I’m really hoping that farmhouse has cool shit. I’m saving it for last on this road. Earlier I did three houses on Jones Road. Lather, rinse, repeat. Apparently no one in this neighborhood made it home that day. Most of the houses coming up here have been abandoned. As in, the owners never came home, or they came home and left all their shit. Whatever I guess.

All three houses were stocked reasonably well. I found a few dead animals in them though, which smelled bad and put me on red alert. I’m always sad when it comes to animals getting hurt or dying. I always make myself feel like there was something I could’ve done. Shitty thing is there WAS something I could’ve done. I could’ve easily checked these houses long ago and rescued these animals. All I had to do was open the doors and let them out. Of course if I had done that, I would be exposed because of dumbass barking dogs. I guess it’s a mixed bag. Dogs scare me. Not like, Adrian is afraid of dogs in that sense. More of a… dogs bark, barks are loud, noise is bad, noise brings zombies, therefore dogs are bad. Plus it’s hard enough to feed myself ongoing. If I had done something about these animals I’d be the Dr. Doolittle of the post zombie apocalypse, and I’d likely be starving myself to save them.

At any rate, the houses were cleared out of bodies and remaining decent supplies, and that’s the end of the Jones Road story for today Mr. Journal.

I can rewind a bit here and talk about the early days here on campus. I went back and re-read the entry I put up awhile back talking about my trip back down the grocery store and realized I skipped the most informative part of that time period. 

So the first few days were the last few days that there were television and radio broadcasts. I sat around plugged into the television while it lasted. It made me feel safe to not move around much, plus I was desperate for information. I think the television reports were up and running for about 3 days. However long it took me to build up the nerve to go downtown, that’s how long the TV worked. The television abruptly cut out when I was watching it around dinnertime, so I’m wondering if there was some kind of severing of the service, rather than a “we’re going off the air now,” kinda thing. It was working, then there was static. Don’t know. Maybe there was a fire at the cable company. 

I didn’t get shit for information off the TV at first. It was more of the same from the reports from “that day.” I can say the spread of whatever it was that caused this was pretty thorough. Mr. Journal if you’ll recall from earlier entries there was a widespread outbreak of attacks on people. All across the world these attacks occurred more or less at the same time. I now know that these attacks were perpetrated by what I’m calling zombies. At the time the media flat out refused to really jump on the bandwagon. It wasn’t until the TV died and the radio became my source of info that they actually fessed up and said that the dead were returning to life. 

So early on as I recall the TV and radio said the attacks were small business. One or two zombies, here and there. Most of the time I think the zombies were beaten back to death with little or no incident. The problem with it getting out of hand seems to have stemmed with corpse storage, and widespread media panic. I know, what the fuck? Right?

The media reported it was a virus, or perhaps a widespread terrorist launched biological weapon, or whatever. The media had no idea, and they were speculating. Humans, herd animals that we are, all panicked. Well not all, but the panic was widespread and severe. The bites infected the living, that much we knew then, and I know now. What was a bigger deal was that the dead were rising all on their own, all over the world. The outbreaks kept cropping up in different places that seemingly had no connection to previous outbreaks. One of the first and strongest theories was that a latent virus had been spread at the World Cup in South Africa earlier that month. Lots of disparate people from all over the world in one place… Then they go home, there’s an incubation period, and WHAM. Global pandemic. I knew those vuvuzelas were bad news. Fucking horns.

What that meant (I think) is that people around dead bodies didn’t take proper precautions. This explains why hospitals became such hot zones so fast. Many hospitals have morgues. Morgues are filled with dead bodies. These bodies, already inside the hospital, were sitting up, getting freed, and sending the hospitals into total havoc. Imagine a coroner who is tagging a toe, and his body sits up. He screams for assistance for the person who was almost dead, and proceeds to get bitten while he renders aid. People were rushing to the hospitals at the same time, thinking they were infected, and essentially ran right into their own doom. Now as best as I’ve been able to figure out, the bites seem to take hours to kill. However, someone who just dies... Gets right the fuck back up in minutes.

What they concluded, and I’ve basically confirmed, is that if you are bitten, it’s like being poisoned, not so much being infected. The bites give you a terminal illness which kills you. However, everyone that dies comes back. Everyone. Bitten or not. That tells me if this is a virus, or a biological weapon, we are all already infected. That makes no sense to me though the more I’ve thought about it.

How did all these zombie outbreaks occur so quickly, so far apart from each other? How did the second wave of outbreaks occur? I mean we’re talking about outbreaks from Indonesia to Russia to Qatar to Seattle, to Anchorage, to Nairobi to Krakow. It would’ve taken thousands of terrorists to pull it off simultaneously. Also, if this was some kind of naturally occurring virus, how the fuck did it spread so far, so fast? And how did the virus wait, essentially intelligently, to strike at the same moment all across the world? It’s like a biological doomsday clock, counting down to “that day.”

Now I’m speculating here Mr. Journal. Sheer guesswork. I think this isn’t of this Earth. I am not saying aliens did this. I’m wondering if this is supernatural. It makes a lot more sense when you remove science from the equation.

If everyone across the world suddenly started rising from the dead, it makes a lot more sense to me if it were “God’s will.” Or if the Devil finally won some argument with God and got to use Earth as a playground for a bit. Oddly enough I am completely okay with those scenarios. I can wrap my head around it.

It explains why the geographical distance didn’t matter. It also explains why regardless of cause of death, you get the hell back up as a zombie. Perhaps this isn’t an infection, or a virus, or a weapon at all.

Maybe this is a curse. Surely humanity has earned some payback from up on high. We treat each other like shit, we wage war constantly, we fight over beliefs, we destroy our environment. We seem to do everything wrong en masse, and perhaps some greater power has decided that it’s time we were put in our place.

I am okay with this. I don’t know why, but whenever I think about it this way, I am not bothered by it. I feel like maybe, just maybe if this is why this happened, I can earn my place on this Earth again. I can deserve to survive. I can get back in the good graces of whatever all mighty beings are doing this to us. I can make penance for my “sins.”

That’s my current favorite theory. I just can’t wrap my head around an infection in the normal sense. Just can’t do it.

Anyway, those first few days were a wreck. So many people were just ignorant of the dangers the dead posed. First responders paid the price I guess. They’d show up to a dying person, provide assistance, they’d live or die, and then the dice would get rolled. If the person died, they’d sit up, bite the medic, or fireman, cop or whatever and then they were down for the count. In the waning days of the TV broadcasts they said there were so few medically qualified trained responders 911 calls went unanswered. Doctors and nurses were right at the epicenters at the hospitals, and the EMTs, cops and firemen were the people most likely to get bitten. 

I’m sure you can see what happened after that Mr. Journal. House fires and accidents went unanswered. Car wrecks received no attention, and the sick and ill that needed medical assistance got none. People who would've survived an injury suddenly weren't. Those trying to care for those people were in the wrong place to survive themselves. They often got killed or bitten trying to help, which caused it all to spiral further out of control. I remember hearing reports about the number of people bitten, and the numbers were mind numbing. Tens of thousands all over the place just that first night and day. Every bite victim became a zombie within a few hours, and quite likely, bit someone else.

Some areas of the world were flat out written off. Haiti was still recovering from their earthquake earlier in the year, and the sudden lack of foreign aid sent the country tumbling into a cholera outbreak. The entire island was written off in days. There were multiple plane crashes that caused entire regions to be turned into forbidden zones. Lots of planes crashed that day. Many went to Greenland after the US and Canada turned them away. I guess no one heard from them after a few days. Israel was a fucking wreck. The riots there caused things to get out of control in hours. Too much end of the world news caused the Palestinians and the Jews to decide to end their millennia long pissing contest with a stream of lead. The Greek economy had collapsed I think in May this year, and when this shit started, the youth revolted again there, causing more riots, causing more death and destruction. Mainland Europe was a disaster fairly quickly as I recall hearing. There were even sketchy reports that North Korea had a civil war break out right at the last moment. Fucked up shit. Some areas fared better than others, but it was all bad before the radio died.

This thing that’s happening turned on every possible panic button you can imagine. The news had stories of people killing in the grocery stores, trying to get food and such. The government lost control quickly here, and it all fell down to might makes right. If you could take it and protect it, it was yours. The military was trying to secure their own bases and government centers, and with so many police hurt or killed, law and order became just an old TV show, as opposed to reality.

Man I’m tired. Talking about this depresses me. I have more to say to though. Maybe I’ll put an entry in tomorrow too. There’s more to say about the first week that shit went down.

-Adrian