We Go On (THE DELL) (3 page)

We've been here about six months now. We found a warehouse
on the outskirts of Lebanon and made it fairly secure. This is the first time
things have been calm enough for me to even think about keeping a journal.
Kat’s been after me to write down all this stuff. She says it will be important
in the future. I'm just beginning to hope there's going to be a future. It was iffy
for a while.

Okay, here's what we've learned in the nearly five years
since the Event. That's what we call it now, the Event. I guess it makes it
sound less horrific. Anyway, since the Event, we've learned very little about
what caused all this. The Plague, again that's what we call it. No one has a
clue what it actually is. All the people that were supposed to figure that shit
out are bones or worse now. We don't know if it’s manmade or natural or if it
came from aliens but we have to call it something. So, it's the Plague.

The Plague took about eighty-five percent of the people in
the United States. We can only assume the same thing happened everywhere. There
has been no communication of any kind with other countries since the Event.
We've tried. One of our guy's has a ham radio and he's tried talking to
anybody. Nobody's listening or if they are they can't answer. Whatever the
case, we are alone right now.

There's no help coming and the nukes didn't work. I didn't
think they would. I figure some General got a wild hair up his ass and decided
this might be the last chance he'd have to see the big fireball. Anyway, they
nuked New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, D.C., Atlanta, and Miami on
the East Coast. They did Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle on the west.
The bug got into those sealed bunkers and got the Generals before they could do
more damage than that. They tried to evacuate some of the top people. Put them
on U.S. Navy ships at sea to keep them away from their constituents that wanted
to eat them. That didn't work either. Seems someone forgot to do a bite check
before they let them on those big ships.

Bite checks, very important. I started those a long time
ago. You only have to let an infected person into your group once to learn that
lesson. It was an expensive lesson too. We lost our first doctor that way.

Now those ships float around out there with entire crews of Stinkies.
That's what we call the zombies. Again, had to call them something and it just
didn’t feel right saying zombies and they stink. Besides this was the only name
we came up with that the kids could use. And yes, there are kids here. We have
about fifty.

Most of the other major cities burned on their own. Fires
started and there was no one to put them out. Whole cities just burned to the
ground. That’s what happened to St. Louis. Nashville's gone, too. We stay away
from the big towns that are left. The Stinkies own them.

The Stinkies are an ever present danger. Everybody thought
they would eventually decompose away and it would be over. Well, that's not
happening. They decompose to a certain point, and then it just stops. No idea
why. So it looks like for the foreseeable future they’re going to be part of
our lives. If you get a bite, a scratch, or some of their blood in an open cut—guess
what? You get an address change and a bullet in the brain.

Just like in the books and movies, destroying the brain,
more specifically, the medulla, is the only way to stop them. Of course, if you
remove the legs and arms they aren't much danger. They can't come after you or
anything but you have to look at the thing and that's almost worse. Shoot it in
the head, bash it in the head, spike or blade to the head. That's all that
works with any certainty. Maybe Hollywood did it. Some producer or writer got
tired of making shit up and discovered a way to do it for real. Whatever, I
hate the fucking things.

The Plague is still here too. It's changed us. It doesn't
have any outward effect we can see while you’re alive, but once you die, well,
that’s another story. Our Doc has looked at our blood and he says it looks
clean but it's in there. This we figured out from one of our battles with the
road gangs. We'd always had injuries but we'd been lucky, no fatalities. The
first time one of our guys got killed in battle, we were preparing him for
burial and he decided to get up and eat one of his friends. After we put him
down we checked to make sure he didn't have a bite we'd missed. Nope, clean as
a whistle. I told the Doc we'd have to check this next time we had a death. He
didn't look happy but he understood. The only thing he said was, "I hate
being a doctor now."

"Relax Doc it's a brave new world. You gotta adapt,"
I said. He flipped me off and went back to the Aid Station.

We didn't have to wait long for a chance to test our theory.
We had a group out on a scavenging trip and they ran into a road gang crew. We
lost two in that fight. One took a round to the head but luckily, from a point
of view, the other guy had been shot in the chest and bled out before they
could get him back. His name was Jerry Patterson. He was from Louisville,
Kentucky and had been an executive with Verizon before cell phones became
obsolete.

I called Doc; his name is Richard by the way. Richard
Groves, he likes to be called Rich. I don't think I've ever heard anybody call
him anything but Doc. That's my fault, I started calling him Doc and it seems
to have stuck.

Doc came and I helped him tie the guy to a gurney. We
watched him for about four hours and Doc was about to give up when Jerry just
woke up. No slow-twitching rise from the dark. Off, then on, and hungry. Jerry
was kind of a big guy when he was alive and a real handful now that he was
dead. I'd come prepared, just in case. I had a long spike nail I'd spent a good
deal of time sharpening and fixed it to a wooden handle. I pushed Jerry's head
over to his left, put the tip of the spike against the base of his skull, and
shoved it up and in. Jerry immediately stopped moving. Off, then on, and back
off again. Doc looked at my tool. "Where did you get that thing?" he
asked.

"I made it," I answered. I told him I'd make him
one if he wanted. He flipped me off again and went back to the Aid Station.
That was kind of our routine. We'd have to do something together and, when we were
done, he'd flip me off and leave. I have that effect on people.

Well, we had our answer. Now when you buy the farm you get a
medical probe stuck in the back of your melon, then off for a dirt nap.
Wonderful little bug, our Plague.

We buried Jerry, and Steve —the other guy killed that
afternoon. That night we had a council meeting and Doc passed the news about
how Jerry had come back. They took it pretty well. Just one more screwing we
had to take.

Another medical issue we found was chronic illness. It didn't
take long to figure out that medicine would become scarce and the type that
needed refrigeration was the first to disappear. People with illnesses who
survived the Event soon found they had another battle to fight. Individuals who
had serious illnesses didn't last long. Things like diabetes and heart disease
need constant medication and it was impossible to find after a short time.
Those patients didn't last long.

I'm sure we haven't gotten rid of those diseases. We'll have
to wait until new children are born to see if it comes back but for now only
the healthy survive. It sucks but there's nothing we can do about it. For the
most part all that’s over with. We haven't had anyone die from disease, other
than infection by the Plague, in over two years. One consolation, there is no
more Attention Deficit Disorder or depression. Technically, I guess we’re all
depressed but we are too busy trying to survive to notice. As far as ADD goes,
if a kid starts running around screaming they’re endangering the whole group
and, just as I suspected all along, if you bust their ass, they quiet right
down.

Road Gangs are more of a nightmare than I would have ever
figured. We expected them to become extinct through their own stupidity. Turns
out they’re thriving. There are seven survivor colonies that we have learned
about spread across America. We've communicated with a couple and they’re
making plans to link up with us in the future. The others we've just heard
about from people who have joined our group or were passing through.

The Road Gangs outnumber us dramatically. We know of twenty-three
different groups. Most are only fifteen to twenty people and it's a mix of men
and women. Others are big; a hundred, a hundred-fifty people. Most are thugs,
like they had been. Some are well trained, disciplined, and just plain mean.
Ex-military that decided their wants are more important than you living.
They’re more of a threat to our daily lives now than the Stinkies.

The situation has more or less stabilized now. There was a
period right after the Event when the Stinkies started to congregate and they
were hell on wheels when they were in a group of a thousand or more. Like
locust, they ate everything they came across. Now, they’ve dispersed again.
This started about a year ago. We don't know if it's an evolved condition
caused by a lack of food in an area or if they just mindlessly wandered into
these huge groups and now they’re wandering away again. We rarely see them in
groups of more than four or five now. Mostly they are by themselves. They are
easy to deal with in ones and twos. They have never gotten any faster than the
shuffling walk they started with. They haven't developed the ability to
communicate with each other. So they can't coordinate their attacks, which is
good for us. They don't have any special powers and there aren’t any grand
conspiracies behind, or controlling, things. They just are what they are.

The wildlife’s starting to come back in areas that were
overrun with Stinkies. The Stinkies would eat everything and most animals are
smarter than we ever gave them credit. They haul ass from the things when they
see them. Oh, important note here, the animals can't contract the bug. It's a
human-only thing, thankfully. A mess of zombie squirrels is a nightmare I don't
need. Of course, we destroy any animal we come across that shows signs of being
attacked and lived.

Other than humans, livestock suffered the worst.
Domesticated and trapped in fenced areas that made it hard to get away. We have
recently found a few cattle and have brought them into our compound. We have
chickens, a few goats, and the three cows. The makings of a right proper herd.
I've even allowed a couple of dog's in recently. Dogs were a luxury we couldn't
afford until now. Food was too scarce and if it could be eaten, it had to be
used by us.

Water is still an issue and always will be. We can't drink
from the streams. They are contaminated by bodies of the dead and un-dead alike
and we don't ever go in water over knee deep. The Stinkies can't drown in the
water but they can sure eat you. So… no swimming… ever. That's another of the
lessons we learned the hard way.

We have tanks on the roof of the ware house to catch rain.
We use rain water for washing and drinking after boiling in emergencies. There’s
a spring not far from us and we carry drinking water from it but it's dangerous
and two hundred people use a lot of water. We scavenge bottled water when we
can find it but water is definitely a problem.

The planet is just fine. The old Earth took this one and
just kept on rolling along. The rain hasn't stopped and the seasons go on just
like they did. So the planet’s not turning into a vast desert wasteland. The
ozone still protects us; it's improving, if I had to guess. Summer is hot and
winter is cold. Spring and fall are just great and sometimes you can look at
the trees and listen to the birds and believe that none of this is happening.
The important thing is we go on. The human race will survive this. There will
be far less of us for a long time to come but we will go on.

We left Mountain View and came to Tennessee for a number of
reasons. We were getting the shit kicked out of us by the Road Gangs on a
regular basis. Evidently, they thought the Ozarks would be a good place to hold
up too. Go figure.

Scavenging had gotten slim and we had to travel further and
further to find the items we needed to live. Finding out about our parents and
our son was high on the list of reasons. Most of the other people in our group
either had their family with them or had seen what happened to them. Kat and I
were the only ones who still had questions, so we headed east. Crossing the
Mississippi was the pain in the ass I had predicted. Both bridges at Memphis
were destroyed. We had to abandon our vehicles and scavenge boats to cross.
Then reacquire vehicles on the Tennessee side. Memphis had been overrun with Stinkies
and we lost people trying to get out of there. I still feel guilty about that
but it's just one more thing.

We’ve all had to make hard choices and, as the leader of
this group, some of those choices will haunt me forever. We made it though and
we found an acceptable place to stay here in Lebanon. What we didn't find was
our son or our parents. As I said earlier, Nashville is gone, so checking there
for Alex was useless. Our parents homes in Murfreesboro were both empty. No
signs of struggle, no signs that any of them had been turned, no notes. Nothing.
Just empty.

I had already realized that this, or something like it,
would be what we found but I was still crushed when we didn't find Alex. Kat
won't talk about it. She’s still holding out hope and refuses to discuss it
with me. If only there had been proof one way or the other. We could have lived
with that. The not knowing is even worse now. I look whenever I go out and Kat
always asks when I get back. Enough of that.

Let me tell you about this great diet I've found. Would you
like to lose a few pounds? Tired of those saddle bags? Let me recommend the
Zombie Apocalypse Diet! There's plenty of exercise- running away from things
that want to eat you. Exercise not the issue, you say? Problem is you just eat
too much, you say? Well, we've solved that problem with this diet. We don't
give you
any
food!