DR Elder's Blog (15)

"That's the last time I am sitting on my ass here while you go out," My wife stated emphatically.  "I am not some chicken shit bystander."

"Yeah, I hear you," I winced as the spray of bleach solution hit the goggles.

A fifty percent bleach solution was one of the last suggestions the CDC put out before the lid came down on everything, and for a change it had been a decent one. I hated the smell, and even though it couldn't reach my eyes through the goggles in…

I had never been inside the Nursing home when it was operational and I wasn't looking forward to my visit now. The smell of death was less than I would have expected considering the number of patients that must have been there, but they were of no concern to me in any case. I was looking for some evidence of when the subject of my exam had actually expired, and I was hoping that perhaps there would be some indication inside the complex. In such places the front desk is usually located with a…

Cutting the clothes from a woman's body might be considered a recreational activity under some circumstances, but I quickly discovered that dealing with a headless walker the fun factor was definitely missing. The walkers that I had seen were always at least partially clothed, filthy, and caked with the dried fluids of their victims and their own organic processes. The one I had secured was no different. An outward examination of the carcass from neck to groin was already gruesome, but it…

I had brought a large butcher knife in my kit, which I had sharpened carefully. I intended to discard everything here at the kill site simply because they were common items, and there was no reason to carry any more contaminated equipment with me than necessary. I am not sure why, but I decided to first detach the head, and so began my examination there, knowing that the recorder would be running at home and that my wife would be unlikely to waste the information even if I did not make it…

 I had picked early morning as my best time to take the walker, If things went wrong and other walkers showed up I wanted to have the day in front of me to disengage and make it back to my vehicle. For the job I had to do daylight was best anyway you looked at it. I could see the walker positioned in the window as it stood motionless. I knew that once it became aware of me I was committed. I checked my gear carefully at the foot of the tree I had been perched in and then made my way forward…

Walkers don't dance. They don't duck, they don't dodge, block, throw wheel kicks, drunken kung fu monkey punches, or try and put the patented zombie death grip on your head. They don't have any creep to them once they see you. They become aware of you, they orient their face and body to your location, and then they are coming. A newly animated walker is at its best, as strong and as fast as it is ever going to get, and from there it is all down hill.

Human bipedalism is actually quite…

I had watched the Nursing home complex for two nights and had only seen the one walker, "Suzy". I had some experience with walkers, and knew that they could be deceptive in their speed and strength. I was going to be very careful in the encounter I had planned for Suzy, as I knew that only a fool underestimates an enemy. Many people had died behind the idea that they knew what a walker could do.  In a situation where a bite, or a scratch, of even contact with raw skin or a drop of cast off…

The over all impression that I got from the walker was one of stillness. Yes, I know it is by definition dead, and I had not expected it to sing and dance, but if I had any doubts about what I was looking at the complete lack of any non essential movement would have quickly settled it. People, even trained people, are rarely if ever completely still. They breathe, swallow, flex and fidget. A walker, unless it is specifically stimulated to do something, does not move. The virus stimulates the…

Setting up a nest in a tree is really no big trick. Orangutans do it every night. Of course the problem is that if you get a sizable number of Zeke's on the ground around the tree you are stuck. As a young man I had had no problem living in a tree hide for periods of up to a week if a mission had required it, and even if there were Zekes around they spent very little time looking up in the trees. Their focus, according to everything I had heard, was directly to the front and it seemed to…

Death comes to us all. I don't much worry about that. I have always thought however that it is embarrassing to die stupid. To end up a casualty behind some little fragment of bullshit that I didn't know, or because I was looking at one thing when the smart play was watching something else.

I had made the trip to Gosport before. Usually with an eye toward a quick snatch and run. It's one of those typical backwater towns we have around here that had fifteen churches, one saloon,…

When the grid went down things were still going back and forth. The Zeke's were this, then they were that. The virus had these characteristics, then twelve hours later they were all different. It was airborne, then it wasn't. It was respiratory, it was contact, it was blood borne, it was evil fucking spirits. It was plain at the end that the stories were being spun in some producers imagination as he sat in his office waiting to start coughing, or for the door to cave in and his news crew to…

Yeah, so before heading towards one of the little local towns that nobody has heard from for a while the wife creature and I had  "the talk."  If there's people you care about left alive you know the talk I mean. Short form is nobody who is bit comes back. You take out as many as you can until you feel the change and then end it. The horrible reality is that somebody who brushed up against the wrong barbed wire fence or rubbed their eyes with the wrong hand might not know right away, but the…

In an old sci fi book called Dune the hero uses it as a mantra. Fear is the mind killer. Maybe if more people had read that damned book there would be more of us left. It wasn't the walkers or the runners that did in humanity. It wasn't even really the virus. In the end it was fear. People loved to scare themselves, or have others do it. The media, movies, even all the news ran on high octane fear. Everybody thought a seance was fun until a real ghost showed up, then it wasn't a game…

In my head I can't help but sometimes compare our situation to the people in Europe during the Black Death. Yeah there's big problems with that in some spots, but in others it's bang on. Prior to the Black Death population was exploding, and finding enough to eat depended on great harvests and enslaving yourself to some landed noble who probably already had too many serfs. When the plague came it hit so hard and fast that many people never understood the nature of what was happening. They…

Yeah, way too old, and too smart and too well educated and too experienced , and all the other "toos" that always tell you you don't have to do the things you know a perverse fucking universe has decided to demand of you if you want to avoid extinction. I figured I had fought my war and got my job and bought my house and married my wife, and the most I was going to have to worry about was  the constant upward creep of gas prices. Even have a great little garden, and a cat. Yeah, I have a…