It Happened To Me

Oh, dear Jesus, I think that was my little sister.



One of them. One of them, now.



Can someone tell me where I’m supposed to find the strength to behead my little sister?



I understand we’re in the fight of our lives. We have to fight for our lives. Believe me, I get it. I’ve chopped more than enough people – well, OK, they’re not really people – to know what this is. I’m lucky I’m alive, and not one of those ….things, myself.



But, please. Please. Not my little sister. I think I saw her, I think she’s out there, looking for food, and…I’m the desired entrée. Oh, man, does this ever suck.



December. Did anybody think, in December, we’d be in this mess, two months later? I sure as hell didn’t. I was cutting Global, as usual. Nothing new there. I’m failing Global. But hey! I guess that doesn’t really matter anymore, does it? Come to think of it…Global failed me. The whole freakin’ Globe of Global is failed, right? Isn’t this an epic fail? Like THE epic fail? I know we overuse that term, like you see some guy crash his head into a fence post on America’s Funniest Videos….someone’s bound to mutter “Fail.” But, this. Now, this is a freakin fail folks, eh? No arguing that one.



So, anyway, there I was on the lovely third of December, past, just 54 days ago, when I realized that this nonsense that actually started in November was real. Was a part of my life, and the lives of people I knew and loved. And still do love. Very much. Shit.



You have to understand that Deuce is crazy, to begin with. But, he’s like that borderline genius fun crazy, know what I mean? Everybody needs a friend like Deuce. Deuce falls in to that category of friend whom you are confident would actually come bail you out, if it came to it. But you know that it’s a lot more likely that you’re going to have to come up with the bucks for the bailiff for him, rather than the other way around. Deuce is on the edge…way out on the edge, to start, so when he started his jabbering about “people dropping out of sight”, and all the preliminary stuff most people ignored, you just thought, “Here goes Deuce again.” And then, of course, his prattling turned out to be the wisdom we should have heard, and didn’t. Or, we heard it and didn’t listen.



It wouldn’t be like Deuce to go the “I told you so” route, though. He’d just buckle down, in his way, and get to business, remaining Deuce all the while. We could use deuce these days. He’d probably have some excellent ideas about how to stay alive. If I know Deuce, he’s likely close to some “root cause analysis” as my father would have called it. Deuce probably gets it, better than most. But I haven’t seen Deuce in, what, three weeks now? I’d like to believe he’s still out there, healthy, but who knows. There’s no rhyme or reason to who gets bitten and who skates, even for a little while. A healthy person getting taken down is largely a matter of “wrong place, wrong time.” And so, that’s why I’m currently holed up in my old High School’s Band room above the auditorium. There’s a couple of key reasons, and maybe the fact that the place is as big as it is is one bad reason….but here I stay, and so far, I’ve remained healthy.



The school is like a big old castle, and, yes, anyone or anything could be hiding in about a million places. I’ve tried to take several steps to make the place as secure as I can, and, like I said, so far the only thing getting in that I could do without is a couple of cats, and as long as I keep the Cheeze Doodles locked up in the rolling trunk, I’m good. I’ve been thinking about dragging a big bag of dry cat food back here from the Super Fresh, but it always seems a low-priority thing when I’m trying to get back here with my physical being intact. It’s creepy out there.



Being outside is both good and bad. It’s sad, because there’s been so much looting, and everyone left has a gun, so if you are outside for more than just a few minutes, you’ll hear at least one gunshot, whether that means someone healthy is trying to protect themselves, or hunt something, you hear shots. And that still freaks me out. I’ve started to learn that without a lot of the ambient noise we’re used to, traffic, mostly, shots carry for a long way, especially shotgun blasts. I used to turn around in a quick paranoid circle where I stood, actually thinking I could see the shooter. Forget it. You never see the shooter. Just like you never see them, until they’re out in the open, slip-sliding their way toward you, or whatever it is that has captured their sick attention for the moment.