Dispatches from the Zombie War
From House of Genius
Inspired by Blog Like It's The End Of The World
It isn't like the movies, you know.
Or at least, the movies can’t ever explain to you how wrong they are. How your stomach lurches because they move all wrong, now twitching, now jerking forward like they were on strings, now leaping like a hunting tiger on some poor bastard who thought he could outrun them. These…things…zombies…are so wrong in their broke-jointed, stop-motion movement that gives me chills.
Zombies. It’s funny to say that now. For years, I’ve had a Zombie Plan. But now that there actually are zombies, I feel silly using the word.
Lady P. called me from the car when it started. She was at the local Wal-Mart shopping center, pacifying the children with some Rita’s water ice. She was remarkably possessed considering that she called me to say that she’d just watched a pack of zombies savage some poor folks in the parking lot.
Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers: cannibalism can happen to you!
I was at work, doing what I normally do at work (which is punch keys on a keyboard and try to decide what books to buy, what to throw away, and how to tell the science faculty that we don’t have the money for the latest high-speed low-drag science databases). I have to admit that my Condition Yellow failed to notice anything out of the ordinary in the Oak Grove. A little peek out the window changed all that. One benefit of having the Zombie Plan is that despite the instinctive revulsion seeing one of those things causes, you don’t sit there gawping. You say to yourself, “Okay, there are zombies now. Let’s not die.” I was out the door 30 seconds later, equipped with my keys in my left hand and the broken leg of a chair in my right. My particular place of employment tends to frown on the carrying of actual effective weapons, and since - up until this point - I valued my job and the salary it came with, I obeyed that rule.
But I’m guessing with the Zombie Apocalypse and all going on live and on-location, the “rules” are going to be irrelevant for a while.
I did not expect them to be fast. I guess I was lucky that there were so many people in the grove that day–it distracted the zombies. I managed to race by them (regretting every single moment I didn’t spend exercising), but the damn things were fast. Creepy, missing-frames-of-film fast.
I’m still not sure how I made it.
Lady P. showed up with a boatload of ammunition, a little after I came home. I’d been boarding things up while she was out. We have too many windows. I never noticed how many fucking windows we had, until I had to nail shit over them, or pull furniture in front of them. Windows are a problem. Next house? No windows.
You know the other thing that the movies don’t tell you? Loading magazines while you listen to your neighbors die isn’t as easy as you’d think.
--Chris c 17:55, 13 June 2007 (EST)
Fuckin' Wal-Mart, man
You know, there are good and bad things about living where we do, about an hour and a half outside of Pittsburgh in a little college town.
The bad: An hour and a half isn't quite far enough to be off their radar. I thought we might have had a little more time before it got out here, but when I went over to Rita's to grab some Italian ices for the kids, the Wal-Mart parking lot had a good dozen of them. Good thing we were still in the car and they didn't notice us - all I saw was the pack of them descending on the women with the carts full of Marlboros. Flip-flops and muumuus flying everywhere.
And why the fuck is it always the Wal-Mart???
I ran down to the gun shop, let them know what was going on, and brought home the motherlode. 9mm, 7.62x39 for the AK, crapload of 12ga slugs for the Mossberg, three bricks of .22 long and a few boxes of .380 for my sig. I'm not going to count on the handguns to take out the zombies - I'd rather rely on the larger load going through the AK and the Mosins for that. The handguns and the .22? They're for the looters.
But I digress. The good part? Five miles outside town in any direction and you're in farm country. Woods, wells and livestock. Horses for transportation, farms and farmer's markets for food and milk, wells for water. Oh, and did I mention all the FERTILIZER? Anyone around here with three brain cells to rub together can make big bad-a boom given some time and a truck-bed load of fertilizer, not to mention all the contracting and construction companies and the mines, oh, the coal mines. This part of PA is honeycombed with them and where there are mines, there are explosives and gas wells.
--pymswuffle 21:09, 13 June 2007 (EST)
