It has been long enough. I’ve danced
around it long enough and I guess I need to talk about this. Zero Hour. How
this all began. I wish I could tell you that I have all the answers. Compiling
all the different stories from all of our different perspectives and then
combining that with the information from Shannon working as a police
dispatcher, I think we have pieced this thing together.
This is what I believe happened…
On Sunday, April 28th,
there was a police report involving a “homeless man” attacking a resident
outside of the Shady Reeds Nursing Home, which is located about half a block
from Reason’s. The homeless man stumbled off after the attack and was never
located by the police. Now, I am not saying that this guy was a zombie yet but
he was probably well on his way to becoming one. He may not have died and fully
risen yet but he was a carrier and capable of spreading the disease through his
infection.
So the police report stated that the
resident that was attacked – a man named Thomas Chanley – had been bitten. The
skin had been broken skin but they treated him at the nursing home. The place
has a full medical staff and it was just a bite. At the time, no one knew (or
could have imagined) it was a zombie virus. Remember, there are not just the
elderly in nursing homes. It is anyone that needs full time medical care.
Someone could have been turfed in from a local hospital.
Now, Shannon’s report coincides with
the fact that a number of elderly looking corpses and individual wearing
hospital style gowns and robes were numerous amongst that initial wave. So here
is what I think happened. Chanley is put on observation but it is not like
hospital quality care where they have them hooked up to a variety of heart
monitors. Why would he be hooked up to monitors anyway? It was just a bite.
He succumbs rapidly to the fever
quickly before anyone notices. He “awakes” at 3 a.m. The woman in the bed is
poor ninety-year-old Mrs. Glick who suffers from dementia. Zom Chanley attacks
Glick and she dies pretty quick just from blood loss and shock. With Glick no
longer kicking, Zom Chanley decides to move on to the next bed. While he is
chowing down on Victim #3, Zom Glick reanimates. Now you have two of these
things running around. Literally, within hours, the zoms have turned the whole
place into a damn overnight smorgasbord.
How many patients could be bitten and
infected within the midnight hours? If you keep with our theory that people
with debilitating health being more susceptible to the disease, the whole place
could be overrun in a matter of hours.
The skeleton crew of orderlies and
other overnight workers could be overrun before they even realized what they
were dealing with. And now this whole host of zombies is just milling about
bumping into each other and in their diminished mental capacity, they don’t
know how to open the doors.
Then the day shift arrives…
The door gets propped open, the zoms
come flooding out of the nursing home and begin staggering towards Reason’s.
That is at least what we are theorizing. Here is what we know.
I believe the first zom to show up on
our doorstep was a scout – a wanderer – looking for food. What he encountered
was a woman putting groceries in her car on the far north side of the parking
lot. Now, you have to keep in mind. No one is anticipating some sort of zombie
apocalypse. These guys are recently turned (within 12 hours) so they are not
decaying or withered or even slightly resemble walking corpses. Patient Zero
was reported to look like a sick, homeless guy with these milky, cloudy eyes.
Granted, I have never seen a homeless guy in Langley but there are all over the
place in Tulsa.
So this zom scout shambles up. He is
newly dead so he doesn’t look like a corpse. There is still color in their
faces but they do look sickly. He is not sporting massive wounds and is not
missing limbs. He sees flesh, roars a zombie roar and shuffles forward to bite
her. Naturally, the woman waylays him with a ten pound bag of potatoes. Zombies
are fearless but they are just as susceptible to blunt force attacks. They can
be stunned, knocked down, even knock unconscious… they just don’t die. Needless
to say, a screaming woman attacking a man with a bag of potatoes draws attention
from fellow customers in the parking lot and employees inside.
There were two managers on duty when
the outbreak began. They were Kasondra Taylor (our assistant manager) and the
store director Charley Montgomery. So some customer is bitten by a crazy
homeless guy in the parking lot. This was witnessed by our CSM (Customer
Service Manager) Lee Sutter. She pages for Charley to come to the front. Some
female customer has been attacked out in the parking lot? Naturally, Charley
goes outside to make sure the customer is okay. Kasondra arrives at the front
of the store (at the registers) and stays inside to run the store as Charley
goes outside with Lee. (This is standard procedure to keep one manager inside.)
As Charley and Lee are trying to help
this customer, the zom wakes up from his potato attack and staggers back to its
feet. It then goes to attack Lee. Charley defends her and by getting into a
wrestling match with the zombie. Again, if this seems out of the ordinary,
remember, they are not leaking blood out of their eyes or reeking of decayed
flesh yet. Charley is just trying to help a customer and protect his CSM who is
twenty-two years old and has a baby boy that is only one year old…
By the time they figure out that
something is really wrong, a shamble of other zombies (Kasondra said they
numbered at least twelve but probably more) lurch up onto the north side of the
parking lot cutting Charley and Lee off from the north entrance. Now, this
group that emerged, they seemed a little less than human and Kasondra had to
make a hard choice. I know she has had nightmares regarding her decision but I
thank her every day for it.
Kasondra closed and locked the north
entrance. She then got on the store intercom system and screamed – I mean
literally screamed – for the store to be locked down. Now Kasondra was
positioned at the north entrance and she is screaming for the doors to get
locked.
We let a few customers close to south entrance in but
one of them had received a bite on the hand. We certainly were not going to
turn an injured person away for a bite. Again, we didn’t know what we were
dealing with. So we knew that the front was secure. All that was left was the
service entrances. What Kasondra didn’t know is that one had already made it
inside through the back entrance…
