Day 278 – Reclaiming the Skies… Kinda.

I think I have talked about this earlier in the blog but it is amazing how quiet the world has become without all the manufactured sounds of humanity. With no trucks on the highway, no train horns blaring, and no air conditioners/heat pumps whirring, the place is pretty quiet. Things like cars have become even more audible when they roll past us. So, imagine how loud it is when we hear something like an airplane.

Early this morning we were are clamoring up to the roof because we heard airplanes. True enough, we spotted military planes flying overhead. Granted, they were at high altitude and we were observing them through gun scopes and the weak binoculars that we have available but Kasondra confirmed it. They were military planes. And that alone gives you hope.

It means that somewhere out there, the world has not fallen apart so much that the United States military is still functioning and running operations. The bird was flying way too high for us to even hope to signal them but it lets us know that we are not alone.

It has left us all wondering what we should do next. I think we are going to stick with the game plan of riding it out for the Year One Plan. Yes, we agreed to go more aggressive to keep our supplies up. But I don’t think now if the time to just toss the plan aside because we saw one plane.

The group is meeting to see what we should do.

Day 277 – Zombiology 101: A Touch of Rigor Mortis

This is one of those Zombiology articles that I just have to postulate theories because I don’t have a lot of scientific data to back this concept up. However, I feel it is important and could save your life.

I am wondering why rigor mortis has not set in.

I am by no means a medical doctor but as is my understanding, rigor mortis is one of the reasons why we call dead bodies “stiffs.” The muscles lock and go ridged. I have no idea what the time frame is but I am guessing it must be anywhere around 24 to 48 hours. I am wondering why rigor mortis has not set in.

Shouldn’t these guys all be stiff as a board at some point and unable to move? Maybe it is the fact that they are up and moving around quiet soon after they expire. Is that it? We have already done several articles about how zoms will power down in the event of zero stimulation. If Farmer Frank gets trapped in his house and there is no food around. He will power down and go into a “sleep mode.” Then, when a trigger comes along, they wake back up and are ready to chow down.

If rigor mortis becomes an issue, maybe it can take some time for them to shake off whatever it is that makes their muscles stiff. Maybe… Now, I mention this because what if you walk past and the zom senses your presence. But because rigor mortis has set in, he cannot sit up and come after you right away.

If something like this is true, you might walk past a zom and it takes him a few moments to shake off the rigor mortis and get back up and moving. So imagine you are skulking through a hallway of a school and there are multiple bodies scattered about. You are on the alert. You walk past and you think the corpse is not going to reanimate. Surely you came close enough for this thing to come after you if it was going to come after you.

And then you walk past, thinking that the hallway is clear, and then suddenly you have a threat at your back when you are looking for threats from the front. Now, we cannot prove any of this. We have no scientific evidence. Maybe we need to try to see if we can access the web and look it up.

But still, I cannot stress this enough. Any corpse is a threat. Any corpse without visible brain trauma is a potential threat. If you have the ammo or the weapon set, double tap that skull and take it out. Better to be safe than sorry.

The Net is so sporadic and random these days… but we will try to look into it.  

Day 276 – The Hours Just Creep Along

The way Reason’s was before, I often felt like we needed a Go-Go-Gadget store that could expand in the summer and contract in the winter. The store was too big during the winter months and, in the summer months, it was always filled to capacity. Suddenly, for four months out of the year, it was too small. And during those times, we had to cater to those rich jerks coming up from Tulsa to spend time at their lake homes. Man, how I hated those people. So, in the summer months, because the budget was off the chart, you could basically work as many hours as you wanted to. There were some weeks, especially around Fourth of July and Memorial Day where you felt like you lived at this place. I always said that jokingly. I would often comment how I saw my co-workers more than my kid.

You know, a boss told me one time, “Just give me 25%.” That was his motto to motivate us because a forty hour work week is essentially 25% of your life. That other 75% is yours. Just give me 25%.

It was sound in theory until you figured that 33% of your life goes to sleep and that is half of your life right there and that is not if you are factoring in commuting and getting ready for work. But I saw his point.

Now in a business like a grocery store, not everyone works the same shift. Some people work 7 to 4. The next guy works 8 to 5. The next guy works 9 to six. But even if we all worked the same shift, the most you would see of a person is 25%. Add in all those different shifts and it is more like 20%. If they are in a different department, you might only interact for a total of 1% of your time.

Then, if you were smart, you would leave your job behind the second you clocked out, and went to go live the other 75% that was granted to you. There was an escape.

Now, there is no escape. You spend every hour of every day in this same place with the same people. I think that is why we were all so excited when new people like Justin and his crew arrived. New people to talk to!

It is like being on a deserted island and you cannot escape it. We have to stay buttoned up. It is freaking cold right now so fresh air is not even a real option. I think this is why the bus caravan plan was so enthusiastically adopted. It gave us something to look forward to and plan for. It was not just etching days off the calendar.

Still, that does feel like what we are going these days. The hours just kind of creep along. No one has any “new” stories because we are all living the same life. And I think just about everyone gave up the “remember when” stories because we are just reminded of how much we have all lost. And no one wants to get locked in that depression room. Life is hard enough.

Still, this is where everyone’s little idiosyncrasies start to become just that much more apparent… and that much more annoying. It is not nice to type but it is true. Thankfully, it is a big store and you can get away from the crowds if you want to.

Day 275 – FoS: Making Use of the Registers

Looking at the maps that I have provided of the store, I realize that I glossed over one of the key defenses of the store and that came in form of the registers. My apologies on that one.

From Day One, one of the largest sections of the store that became completely obsolete was the check stands. Those big and bulky conveyer belts and all the registers just essentially became dead weight. But given their size and bulk, they became pretty effective at blocking off the open space surrounding the grocery delivery dock. When the number of zoms slipped down to a more manageable level and our snipers on the roof armed with weapons featuring homemade silencers, we are able to work outside a lot easier. So barricading up the docks became pretty sensible. To allow for easy loading and unloading of product from vendors, the dock was open on all three sides opposite the main wall but that leaves the dock pretty easily exposed to zombie contact. It is essentially a big back porch made out of concrete with an angled slab to get you front ground level up to the door. So we started stacking up the registers on top of each other with the forklift. These things are heavy. It is a bitch to move them. We figured it was a perfect fit.

I was always a fan of building barricades that did not use the doorway that we are barricading. What I mean by that is that I want a tiered defense. If the door is the barricade that separates us from the zombies, I want the zombies to have to break through several barriers before they can even touch the door itself.

That was the idea with putting the cars next to the entry doors in the beginning and then later with building the bus perimeter. Now the front doors we feel are pretty secure and were reinforced to keep the zoms from smashing through the glass. The rollup doors are essentially just garage doors. It is possible that they could force their way through with enough pressure. (As I have mentioned in the past, we barricade these doors with things like the forklift and pallets of product. They are not getting in.) But even so, why give them straight contact with the door itself?

So we used a bike chain to position the large, rolling ice cream carts at the top of the ramp. And we surrounded the other sides with the registers to serve as barricades. Combining that with the cameras we have set up outside the doors, we never have to worry about a surprise waiting for us on the other side of the door before we open it. A sortie team can get an “all clear” from the person monitoring the cameras in the office before opening up the doors.  Yes, I know. This makes us very paranoid. But paranoid keeps us alive.

The other benefit is that this opens up the Front End. (The Front End is the name used in the store for the checkout stands.)  I think everyone agrees that the more open space we have for whatever it is we want to do the better things are. Be it how Produce emptied out or how the Front End is now open and exposed, we have a lot of options.

One school of thought is that there is now nothing to hide behind. If our walls get breached, if zoms make it through our front door, there is a straight shot to anyone that is exposed. You could argue that we should set up a maze that the zoms have to shuffle through in order to get to us. This way if there is a breach, we can get away and hide.

But personally, I don’t want to round the corner early in the morning, with sleep crusties in my eyes, wanting to get a bowl of grits and come across five zoms seething and huffing and puffing. I want to see them at a distance that gives me a chance to run.

We don’t want to do all those cliché movie things where there are dark corners and blind spots. We want clear lines of fire. Plus, you need space for things like turkey bowling and pallet jack races…

Day 274 – The Long Cold Winter…

It feels like a warm front has finally crept back in. We are back above freezing during the day and the snow is already going away. I have mentioned this more than a few times but in Oklahoma, snow rarely lasts long. Now, much the same way that I am not certain how long it takes to make ice in the freezer, it is also hard to say how long it would take for a zombie to thaw.

I know leaving a package of hamburger meat out on the counter of a room temperature house takes about four to five hours. But I don’t know how that compares to a zombie in frigid conditions at night and how much sun we get during the day. For all I know they are thawing out in the morning, roaming around in the afternoon, and then refreezing at night.

If you jump in your Way Back Machine and scroll back to July, I postulated theories that zoms do get “full.” We have seen on multiple occasions where a zombie will eat what they perceive to be their limit and then get up and walk away.

Based on these observations, one has to assume that eventually their bodies somehow process this food and then they get hungry again. So here is my real fear. What if these things are like bears or other animals that choose to hibernate during the winter months. If these things are frozen for a month, once this meat sacks thaw, they are going to want to eat.

And we have seen different zombie levels. Those that have recently feasted to their limits become slow and sluggish. It goes back to that lion/antelope analogy. But a lone zom that has been wandering by himself and is desperate for food, they come at an open door and bang against it with a fervor that you would not believe. Stuffed zombie who has recently fed? Threat Level 1. Emaciated zombie who hasn’t eaten in weeks? Threat Level 10. 

The cold has been our advantage and I feel like we have used it to our advantage. Now, I am afraid that pendulum is about to swing back the other way. And when all these gross nasties get all thawed out, you have to assume that they are going to effing ravenous. They may test our defenses in ways we have not anticipated and we cannot afford another breach again.

I feel like we are more than secure inside but I said that before and they found a way in through the trash compactor. And since there are so many variables (how many are out there, are they thawed out yet, do they know we are here?) it is hard to get hyped and stay on high alert. You can only do that for so long before you lose you edge and start getting sloppy. And I don’t want to drain us to a point where we get fatigued and miss the real threat. But I also don’t want us missing something pretty obvious and then losing more members.

So, once again, we play that most dangerous game…

Day 272 – SEX! Now that I have your attention… Let’s talk about sex.

Warning: Mature Subject Matter. If you are easily offended, log back in tomorrow or if you are catching up, just skip to the next article.

Back in the real world, I always used to say that there were three aspects of my life: Money, Housework, and Sex. That was it. I could handle two of these aspects but not all three. So, if you give me money to entertain myself with new DVDs or books and stuff, I am cool with that and will handle all the housework. If you do all the housework and I have money, I will not pester you with that third item. But if I am giving you all the money and doing the lion’s share of the housework, you better be taking care of my needs in the bedroom. That was it plain and simple. Easy peasie, lemon squeezie.

Thinking with “guy brain,” sex was pretty freaking simple. I treated it much the same way that America did with drinking. Did you have a bad day? Let’s hop on the good foot and do the bad thing and at least we can say it ended well. Had a great day? Well, I know a certain carnal delight that would be a great way to finish it off. To me, it was a way to shut the outside world out for forty-five minutes and just enjoy in the pleasure of your spouse. If you were sleeping next to someone and if sex feels good, it seemed stupid not to be having sex. Sex feels good. We are both right here. Why aren’t we doing this?

Well, when things went south for me, I was sleeping alone. Sex just wasn’t an option. It was a lot like George Costanza in that SEINFELD episode. Once the mind wasn’t preoccupied with it, it just kind of withered on the vine and your brain focused on something else. So, in many ways, I was fully prepared and rehearsed for the lack of physical intimacy that comes with the Zombie Apocalypse.

I know people are out there doing the hibbity-dibbity. Kasondra and Brad are discrete but everyone knows. I am quite certain there have been other midnight rendezvous amongst the survivors but I have not exactly gone out to investigate. I have locked that part of brain away simply because I do not want any additional complications. Life in this world is complicated enough. I don’t want to add to it with uncomfortable conversations with Alex.

And, here is the thing, I think most young men if given the choice between a curable STD and a partner getting pregnant, they are taking the STD any day of the week and twice on Sunday. As men, we are programmed to believe that pregnancy is one of the worst possible outcomes from relations. Why? Because that means the party is over and you have a child to take care of. Play time is over at that point. (I guess if you are a piece of trash and have no intention of taking care of your offspring then it is a whole different story.)

Oh my God, I could not even imagine the horrors of trying to raise a baby in this world. Sure, we have a lifetime supply of formula and diapers on the shelves here but what kind of a childhood would this be? The power is going to be lost eventually. Milk is long gone. There is no way I would want to even risk that.

So I am keeping that part of my mind shut off. Looking in from the outside, I know that seems strange but when you are crawling into bed alone, it’s not that hard…      

Day 271 – Advertising for the Road Warriors

I am happy to report that the snow has stopped falling. It is not a tremendous amount and the sun is starting to shine. Going out without sunglasses is particularly painful but that sunlight and radiation beating down on the parking lot will probably have this thing cleared in no time.

I spent some time up on the roof to have a look around, considering that I didn’t have anywhere to go. It is that Christmas Card Winter Wonderland. No sign of movement (living or undead). The world is very quiet. Life actually seems nice. But being up there gave me a little perspective.

Since Day One of this waking nightmare, we have a very simple strategy to avoid the zombies. It was simple: Keep the store locked down and make like a hole in the world. The goal was to stay off the radar by minimalizing our signature: sight, sound, and smell. This goes back to our using tin foil to seal off the windows so we could run the lights at night and shutting off the parking lot lights.  

For a minute, try to think like a zombie. As long as they cannot see us because of the tin foil, if they cannot hear us, or smell us, what real reason do they have to try to get into a grocery store? There is no bait. There is no reason for them to get inside.

This is the enemy we have been fighting and the strategy has been working. However…

If you remember, back when this thing first started, we hung American flags from the rooftop and hung them upside down as a signal for distress. And now, we have lines of buses and cars forming a perimeter around our parking lot. There are the Bob-Zoms along the ditch or our western line. And there are all the bodies of zoms in the various parking lots and along the highway that we have not ventured out to gather and burn.

We have had extremely limited contact with people that have fully functioning cortexes but they have to be out there. The giant sign out front that says “Reason’s Foods” makes us a target on its own.

Now, with all the improvements that we have made, a person coming by would obviously assume that this is a location that is being held. Buses don’t get perimeter stacked like they did. Obviously, this was part of a bigger plan. Any outside observer could see that. And the next step in that deductive reasoning?

“If that place is so barricaded, it must be because they have something valuable in there that I want. They have food, water, medicine, supplies…”

And where does that reasoning take people? “We should go take their stuff!”

To people that are desperate, we might seem like a prime target and ripe for the picking. Now, we do have our “Us vs. Them” mentality regarding zombies. But I cannot guarantee that everyone out there has that mentality. For all we know, a cavalcade of anti-whimsy could be rolling down the highway right now, looking like extras from BEYOND THUNDERDOME. And seeing all the barricades and the “Food” signs may make them decide they are going to roll in heavy.   

So this is the question. Are we advertising ourselves and if so, do we need to be slightly more vigilant, especially at night? I do want to maintain our “Us vs. Them” mentality but if we come across someone that does not share this attitude… I am afraid of what might happen. 

Day 270 – Zombiology 101: Zom v. Fences

What better way to survive being cooped inside than with a little course study in Zombiology?

I think that we have covered how zombies are dumb but relentless but we have also covered how zoms will not just wander willy-nilly into a pool of burning gasoline. In that regard, they are dumb but they are not stupid. They do seem to have a basic survival instinct. Well, we can chalk up another category for zom traits: The path of least resistance.

While we were on a run to look for more buses, we headed out to some more rural areas to look for places that could be easily looted. Having family out west of us, Judy drew us a map to get us to Oklahoma Union that is located north of Nowata. Sure enough, the place was abandoned. We looted the kitchen for all kinds of industrial sized cans of food and then swiped the extra keys from the bus barn. A few of the buses needed some coaxing to get started but we brought back a small convoy to further expand our fence lines.

I noted something while traveling. Humorist Will Rogers (from Claremore, by the way) commented about how land is the only thing they are not making any more of. Oklahoma is fairly well known for its wide open spaces and lots and lots of cattle pasture. I’ve mentioned before how I had about 120 acres as my backyard.

Well, the one thing that cattle farmers do not want is their cattle wandering out onto the highways. So generally speaking, especially along the more isolated and less travelled highways, the farm land on the other side of the ditches are fairly well fenced. Some fences are clearly more expensive and better than others but these things are designed to contain animals that way around 2,000 lbs. A single zombie, no matter how relentless, is not going to force his way through a barbed wire fence and remain intact.

I don’t want you to think of these things as mindless robots that will just keep bumping over and over again into a brick wall. We have yet to see a zom just mindlessly thrashing against a fence unless there is actual bait on the other side of it. What we have yet to see is just hordes of zombies impaled or hung up on barbed wire.

All this leads me to believe that zoms take the path of least resistance when left to their own devices. I do truly believe that they can be lured into traps. Now, granted, we are no in a position to prove this theory but… I believe that if you were on two high rise buildings with you on one building and zoms on the other and there was a small enough gap between said buildings, zoms would plunge to their deaths trying to get at you. They are that dumb. But they will not just struggle mindlessly against a fence unless there is bait on the other side.

I am sure that with a large enough horde, a fence could be plowed under with enough of them pressing against it but so far, the hordes have stuck to the main roads and thoroughfares. Again, it is opting for that path of least resistance. While you are preparing your defenses, keep that in mind. 

Day 269 – First Snows of the Season

The first snows of the season started about an hour ago. I don’t know what it is about snowfall but it was as if everyone has ground to a halt just to watch it snow. We have suspended operations on retrofitting the buses and pulled everyone back inside along with all the critical equipment. Still, a lot of the young kids have taken to the roof to see and others have been peeking out of the pharmacy.

I will admit, there is something tranquil about it.

So here is where we come to a real decision. On one hand, the cold freezing the meat of the zombies leaves us with a tremendous advantage. Now is the time for us to get out and move around. But doing so, even with a 4x4 puts our people in jeopardy. No one wants to be out and stranded after getting stuck in a ditch and forced to make the long march back. Because if you thought people were cautious before about picking up hitchhikers in the real world… Flat out, there would be no help coming. And anyone that does pass by on some freakish lottery-winning-odds chance, they aren’t stopping to help.

It gets me back to thinking about life in America two hundred plus years ago. (Wait, have I already covered this? Screw it, typing it anyway.) Don’t you think there were times in Colonial Florida where people would look out at the ocean and say, “Storm is coming in.” And they had no idea that Hurricane Sandy/Katrina was bearing down on them?  

With no radar, we don’t know how deep and how dangerous this is going to be. So we have all agreed to button up and wait it out. Sure, we may partake of a communal snowball fight when it starts to get deep but it will be within the safe confines of the bus-lined perimetered parking lot.

Also, I listed this in an earlier entry and it might need some qualification. My mom and dad took a turn working in Salt Lake City for a few years. Now, when it snows there, the snow sticks around. It doesn’t melt off and then more snow comes along and falls on top of it. This doesn’t really happen in Oklahoma.

Snow is infrequent and temperatures staying below freezing for long stretches are even rarer. So, the snow hits and then it is gone in a few days, melting off during the day. Now, we have been hit for cold temps for long stretches but as far as being “stranded,” it rarely happens. And I have said it before and I will say it again, if you are going to be stranded, this is a pretty darn good place to be holed up…  

Day 268 – Fortress of Solitude: Walker Stackers & Pallet Jacks

I realized only now that I might have been using some jargon that you guys may not have understood so I am going to take this time to elaborate.

From the very beginning of this whole thing, we had a considerable advantage when it came to defending and barricading this store. Like almost all grocery stores and retail outlet stores, we have access to several devices that – literally – allows us to move a physical ton worth of product.

We have a fully functioning forklift that runs on propane. We have two devices that are operated by recharging batteries called a Walker-Stacker and a pallet jack. We also have four manual pallet jacks.  With these items, we placed entire pallets of product like dog food, canned food items, and potatoes up against the doors to barricade them.

Because of the Walker Stacker and the forklift, we were even able to place pallets on top of pallets to double the weight of the barricade. Given the amount of weight that we have placed against the doors, I still am convinced that there is no way a large enough number of zombies could make direct contact against the doors to cave them in. I would think that the flesh and bodies of those at the front of the vanguard would give way and be smushed against the doors before it caved in.

I know what you are thinking and, yes, when we are not using the manual pallet jacks to move product around, we often use them to have races around the store. I know it is not tremendously mature but you do what you have to do to entertain each other. Competitive pallet jack races have developed into heats and instigated trash talking. People have even taken so far as to place wagers on the races, only increasing this to a whole other level.

This is just one of the things that left us better prepared to handle the whole apocalypse during Zero Hour. I just have to wonder if all those employees at places like Walmart or Bass Pro Shop or Target did the same. Because if they did… their survival chances are just as good as ours.

Day 267 – Implementing the “Bob Initiative”

Back in later September, I posted an article talking about what we conceived of a plan we took to calling “The Bob Initiative.” After reading this, I assume that you thought that we were either geniuses or psychopaths. To recap, our goal was to grab several zoms and incapacitate them by curb stomping them (no biting) and chopping off their legs (limiting mobility). We would then lash them to t-posts taken from Ace Hardware and line them in the ditch between our parking lot and Highway 82.

Note: Jennifer added to this plan by suggesting that we roll the windows down a smidge in cars used for the barricades and then seatbelt the zoms into the seats. Yes, it would have to be cars we never intend on using or moving. By doing this, when the next shambling horde comes through, the theory is that they see more zoms here and assume there is no food in the area so they shuffle off down the road.

The catch to this is that we don’t know if the “Bob” zombies will cause the horde to move on or prompt them to hang around longer. Time is going to tell because we took advantage of the brutal cold snap that has moved in.

As we proved with the Carbone Initiative this summer, zombies are capable of freezing. So we snatched up some local zombie popsicles and went to town. They weren’t frozen solid but their movements were sluggish enough to do what we needed to. And right now, as we speak, we have a row of zoms lined up in the ditch and quite a few seat belted into the clunkers we care less about.

In case you forgot, we lined the north and south end of the parking lot with the school buses but the west end (the wall running perpendicular to the highway) is made of standard cars to give us a better line of sight from the roof for our snipers to target anything in the highway.  

Now, when they thaw out fully, all the Bobs will be able to do is flail their arms about and growl, just like we want them to.

I think we finished this project up just in time. It is pretty cold now but dark clouds are rolling in from the north. If I didn’t know any better, it feels like snow is coming on. Hobbit Judy is claiming to be able to feel it in her knee. And who are we to refute that kind of meteorological prognostication? Might be time to button up and shut her down to the outside world for a few days.

*Note: This isn’t South Dakota. Snows in Oklahoma rarely last more than a week. That is what we will hope for here.   

Day 265 – The Endless March of Time

I remember reading way back when about how humans are the only animal that tracks the passage of time. One philosopher talked about how time is a pair of shackles that we place on ourselves. We have clocks on our phones, in our car radios, on our computers, in our houses. We have calendars to constantly let us know the day, the week, the month, the year… Don’t get me wrong. I know what that person was trying to say.

I remember my old football coach used to talk about how the day after school let out, he took his watch off and put it on the dresser. During those summer months, he just said that he ate when he was hungry, slept when he got tired, etc. He was trying to teach us not to be a slave to time.

Granted, both of these philosophies were conceived and established pre-Zombie Apocalypse. Now, if you look at all of my entries, I always start my entry with Day XX. For example, today is Day 265.

I don’t see this as a negative number. Now, granted, if ever there was a time to just let the days blur and not care about what day of the week it is, it is now. But I don’t see this as a negative. I feel like this is one of those signs like the one we kept up by the time clock that said, “XX Days Since Last Accident.”

Now, we are marching towards that one year date that we established back in the beginning of this whole thing. I think keeping track of days and such help us maintain a certain semblance of normalcy. I think it is good for morale and the group psyche.

But still, when you stop and think about it, having survived 265 days of this maddening chaos is pretty damn impressive. I am not trying to break my arm patting ourselves on the back but, when you break it down, that is pretty cool.

So now, we are clearly on the downhill slope. We’ve got 100 days to go. Granted, we don’t have a solid plan as far as what we are going to do after that 365 day mark or where our “Fleet Elite” might take us.

For now, we just have to keep living life…

Day 264 – Prepping the “Fleet Elite”

There is that old saying that idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Remember how back at the first of the year, I commented on weathermen always dying within six months after retiring? I still stick with that theory. People need to feel useful. And let’s be honest here. After this place got locked down and was secure, people started doing things to keep their minds active. Maybe it was organizing the top decks. Maybe it was perfecting the shower situation. Maybe it was cleaning. Maybe it was starting in inter-co-ed semi-but-not-really professional turkey bowling league. People did things to feel useful but there was no real singular driven purpose.

Brian Anderson’s Bug Out Plan changed all that. For those that might have come in late, we made several strategic sortie runs to most of the local schools to hijack their abandoned bus fleets. Positioning them around the parking lot, we created an extremely effective barricade that allowed us to reclaim the turf as our own.

Based on a plan from one of our members, we parked three of the best buses at the front of the store and we are planning on using them in the event that we need to do a mass evacuation. We are not just jumping in them and going. We have access to an entire grocery store.

We are converting them into rolling fortresses that we will be able to sleep in and carry an abundant level of supplies so that we do not need to forage when we are out on the open road. Doing so is just an open invitation to lose more survivors.

It is cold right now, so the work is difficult. We are doing it smartly. We run extension cords and scavenged electric heaters out to buses to provide at least some heat. This allows us to conserve gas. We have snipers patrolling along the roof top of the store to keep a watchful eye on those that are exposed.

We are making things like the bunks and the storage areas but we are not moving anything of tremendous value out there yet. This is where we are walking a thin line. There are two sides to this argument.

1) It is cold out there. Do we want to risk water containers bursting? Canned green beans can freeze too, ya know.  Anything that we put in that bus, you have to be prepared to lose. While we have not seen anyone in a long time, if a scavenger is coming along on foot, they might be able to hijack one of the buses or loot stuff out of it. It is a long shot but it is possible. So we have stored stuff out there that we may need, is immune to weather, and we have a surplus of. Some items include rubbing alcohol, generic toilet paper, some extra bedding, etc.

2) Time might be of the essence. Imagine a horde rolls through so large they can shove the cars aside and get inside the perimeter or, even worse, the building is compromised. We will not exactly have time to load in with forklifts all the canned goods we want to bring with us. If we have to leave in a hurry, we would be forced to abandon – literally – a bus load of supplies.

The goal right now is to start creating stacks of “bug out” supplies and we are positioning them near the door for fast loading if necessary.

Day 263 – Zombiology 101: The Dormant Virus

I am a big movie guy. I love watching all those behind-the-scenes stuff and the director’s commentaries on DVDs. I am not gonna lie. Long before this terrifying outbreak occurred, America had kind of gone on this real zombie kick. There were all the Romero movies from the ‘70s. Zack Snyder had done his DAWN OF THE DEAD re-launch where zombies ran for the first time. And you had all the other pop ups and respawns trying to cash in on the popularity. I think even the Discovery Channel had a show about how the Zombie Apocalypse could happen.

In  the summer of 2012, there was this cannibal attack where this homeless man high on this designer drug call bath salts ate this one dude’s face and the cops had to shoot him several times to put him down. Well, actually I can’t remember if the victim was homeless or if the attacker was homeless. The attacker was naked, I know that much. But that is when people started freaking out, saying, “This is it. It is starting!”

I don’t think that they were right but I am thankful for all that paranoia. I truly think it saved our lives because we weren’t caught flat footed. We closed and locked the doors pretty freaking quick.

I don’t think you can have a conversation and not mention THE WALKING DEAD. But I am so glad that our “world” is not like the world of that television show because if it was, many more of us would have been killed the other night. For those that don’t know, everyone in THE WALKING DEAD is infected. So when you die, regardless of your wounds or how you die, your corpse reanimates.

Thank goodness that is not the case with us for two reasons. 1) It gives us hope that we can outlast this thing and could return to a semblance of normalcy after this threat is dealt with. 2) Judy’s reanimated body could have killed us all.

None of us are those medical autopsy people you see on the countless versions of CSI and LAW & ORDER that are out there. None of us could take Judy’s temperature and determine how long she had been dead. But sometime between 11:00 the night before and at 7:00 when we were all getting up, Judy silently and peacefully shuffled off this mortal coil and went to a far, far better place.

If we were all infected with whatever this pathogen is that reanimates the brain and gets us walking around again, it is NOT sitting dormant in our systems waiting for us to die. And that is some pretty good news.

I am thankful that we were able to see what was coming and we managed to seal ourselves off from this horrid contagion. I just have to assume that there is some laboratory out there surrounded by military guards wearing black fatigues and carrying M-4s. Inside that laboratory are guys with lab coats and Bunsen burners and beakers and microscopes all figuring this stuff out.

And I hope they figure it out soon…   

Day 262 – Switching to a Rural Lifestyle

So, let’s take a walk back in time. Humanity was a rural based society. Then, as food became more plentiful, people started flowing into villages. Villages became towns. Towns become cities. And then they grow up to full blown metropolises. As we progressed as a society, people’s ability to live off the land and provide for themselves diminishes. Now, we are pretty good in that we do have quite a few hunters in our group. We have seeds. We have water. We have developed our means of supporting ourselves for quite a while. Granted, we are only supporting a small number of people because technically we are living in a rural area.

Because of the limited number of people in our store and the large amount of supplies that we have on hand, we are nowhere near desperation levels. But I am trying to imagine survivors in places like New York City, Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angeles. Imagine being in an area where it is nothing but concrete for miles in every direction. How could you plant crops to get you a renewable food source? We are lucky enough to have a pasture literally right outside our back door.

I am just thinking about how we would fare if we were in the heart of Tulsa or Oklahoma City and this happened. What if we had twice the number of people in here? What if we had half the number of food? What if the food runs out?

At what point do you have to brave the outside world in order to survive? Right now, where we are, I have discussed the Great White Shark analogy. Where we are the mentality is, “If we go outside, we might die. In here, we have safety and security.” But we have food and water. What if the water and food runs out?

You would get to a point where you would say, “If we stay here with no food, we WILL die. But if we go out there, we MIGHT die.” And you have to brave the zombies to find the essentials. So, would the best place to look for shelter in the more rural communities?

Oklahoma is pretty freaking rural. You only have to drive ten minutes outside of a place like Tulsa and see large expansions of pasture. I don’t even want to think about Montana where neighbors are miles and miles apart. The odds of a roving horde rolling through are probably pretty slim. And even more accurately, the odds of a roving horde rolling through and camping outside your door is even less.

Is that the answer? If you are in a highly populated area, can you escape out to the suburbs and then escape out to the rural area? Depending on how quickly the population is decimated, there could still be a wealth of canned food, bottled water…

Is this how humanity survives? By switching back to a rural lifestyle and getting out of the cities? Then we just have to wait for the zombie bodies to rot off and then reclaim the world?

If you think that would work for you, I would say go for it. It might not be a good plan but it might be your best plan…

Day 261 – FoS: Preparing to Hit the Road

I know that I typically reserve my Tuesdays for my Fortress of Solitude entries but this week is going to be just a little something different. It is an FoS entry, just tweaked. Before Brian Anderson left the group (Godspeed, Brian & Kelly), he gave me the full notebook that he had been scribbling in for the past couple weeks. As it turns out, Brian was working on a “bug out” plan.

Don’t get me wrong. We feel pretty safe in here; maybe not safe but safer. I think that we can withstand any horde and our food and water situation is pretty darn solid. I would not want to try to venture out into the great wide world. But the simple logic states that eventually, we will have to. Something could go wrong – something that we have not anticipated – and we may have to leave.

Brian anticipated this event more than most and before leaving, he left we a full plan and some fairly extensive diagrams on how to retrofit the buses we acquired from Adair Schools to transform them into “bug out” vehicles.

The idea is pretty genius. He has marked out how to build bunks, storage, basically turning them into rolling fortresses. I think they are big enough that we could slowly work our way through a horde (if necessary) and he has redundancy plans laid out so that we don’t all cram into one bus and become stranded when we break down.

Instead, we have three of everything. Two buses would be filled with water, food, bunks, weapons, and ammunition. The third would carry less equipment but would essentially be a roll fuel depot. We would carry fuel for the convoy in one bus using sealed 55-gallon drum containers. That bus would also be fitted with our siphoning gear so we can raid any gas stations, truck stops or car dealerships that we come across.

It would be a fairly big undertaking for the group to do this. However, with the parking lot being effectively barricaded, weapons in case something goes really wrong, lookouts, escape hatches, rope ladders to the roof… I think it is safe to say that we can start the retrofit out in the parking lot with a modicum of safety.

Yes, we barricaded the doors with cars and our overstock supplies but these can be moved. In theory, if a horde were to roll through, they could be spotted and our group fixing up the buses could retreat long before that perimeter wall is breeched.    

It feels like a solid plan and everyone is on board. (I will explain more of the psyche stuff later as I find it interesting.) For now, we have a new goal and a new purpose. We are still sticking with the Year One plan but we know we are going to have to leave eventually. We are just trying to stay ahead of the curve.

Day 260 – Saying Goodbye to the Andersons

We said goodbye to the Andersons this morning. Using the frigid temperatures to aid their travels and increase their safety, Brian and Kelly headed north, hoping to hook up with Kelly’s extensive family in Wisconsin. It sucks to see them go but I think everyone understood why they made their decision.

After we wished them all good bye, I retired to my hobbit hole that Alex and I share and Brian’s notebook was on my bedroll. Inside was the following note that I have transcribed here:

 

Friends and Family,

As I write this, a line from an old song comes to mind "These times, they are a changing" but that seems to hardly to do this justice. None the less, it is time for us to make a change. Kelly and I have to leave. We are heading north to try and find Kelly's family. Winter has hit with its full force, and this seems the best time to go for our safety and success. This is not an easy thing to do as this has become our home... and you all have become our family. I remember our first night here. I had not slept that peacefully since the outbreak. I look around and I cannot help but admire how far we have come… yet we have a long ways to go.

They say the first step is the hardest, and I can only imagine the first mile will be hardest for us. I do not see this as a goodbye. We do plan on coming back. Our goal is to bring good news, help, or even such a slim thing as hope. We do leave with just that, hope. We wouldn't have made it this far without each and every one of you. Those still with us, and those we have lost.

I'm not sure if there is a God anymore, but if there is, I pray He watches over you all. As I always say, God Bless, Run Safe, and see you on the flip side.

Brian and Kelly...

 

Almost since he got here, Brian had spent his time scribbling in one of the notebooks from the office supply section. I never asked what he was working on. I figured it was either something private or something that he would share when he was ready. Well, he left that notebook for me, filled with ideas, drawings, post-it note comments, and even some road maps from the Grand Lake tourism kiosk with highlights and scribbles on them.

It seems Brian had what survivalists call a “bug out” plan and from everything that I am reading, this is pretty dang solid. I am going to share this with the group and reach a consensus and then I will share information later. Maybe you can adopt a similar plan to help save you and your group. 

Day 258 – Okay, We Are Losing Two More…

Brian and Kelly Anderson made an announcement to the group at breakfast that they are going to leave the group. Kelly has a pretty extensive amount of family up north in Wisconsin and leaving in January when everything is frozen solid is probably the best time to do it.

I honestly don’t think anyone is faulting them for their decision to go. In fact, everyone in the crew was willing to donate supplies for their journey. This afternoon, we are going to load them up with food that does not require any kind of cooking, along with flats of water, some toiletries, and some basic emergency supplies. We also agreed to give them each a pistol, a rifle, and two boxes of ammunition.

As we speak, members of the group are out there doing a full check on a vehicle that should be able to take them up north. I have mentioned this before but Langely fell pretty quickly and Disney did as well. That gave us access to three local gas stations so we have a fairly large supply of gas on hand. I still worry about what they are going to do 400 miles from here… but that is their choice to head out into the great unknown.

It is a shame. We are going to miss them but I think certain catalysts have decided to prompt them along on this path. I think they had the idea a while back but the death of Judy provided all of us with a gentle reminder that all this could end tomorrow.

If they can make it to family and ride it out with blood relatives over a band of strangers, then I can completely understand that. If I could ride this out with my dad, my sister, and her kids, I would do it.

Both Brian and Kelly have been very helpful with our group since they showed up in July. They will be missed but I think the plan is to throw them a small going away party to say goodbye and good luck.  I think the game plan is for them to head out early Monday morning. They will be missed so for the rest of the weekend, I plan to enjoy what time we have left.

That is how we all should be living.

Day 257 – Smiling At Us All

In Gladiator, there is a line of dialogue about “Death smiles at us all. All we can do is smile back.” Sometimes it feels like Death is hanging around, just waiting to pick us off one by one. Back when the world was not overrun by the shambling hordes, if you went in and sat down with any therapist, they would tell you that any significant trauma takes you about a year to get over. Obviously some hurts heal fast than others and it is not like flipping the light switch when that year anniversary rolls around.

When my mom passed away from cancer, her fight was short but valiant. From official diagnosis to her passing, it was a matter of months. So before I even had time to process everything, she was whisked away for chemo and then the downhill slide started. I remember when the smallest things would set me off when a memory would come to mind. It could be something sparked by something simple like a blanket or a Christmas decoration and those tears would start to well up.

Looking back on the last 257 days, the loss of Audrey seems like a lifetime ago. The loss of Fred is still very emotionally painful for me but we were pretty connected as human beings. I am not taking anything away from people like Shannon or Eric but I don’t know them as well as I did Fred. If we lost them back in October would I still be as emotionally upset about their deaths?

The way things went down with the trash compactor breech was pretty horrible. I cannot imagine it getting much worse. When things are still and quiet, I can still hear Janet’s screams echoing in my skull. And I loved Janet. I really did. She was an incredibly special woman. I don’t have the guts to talk about the situation with Brad or Kim or even Kasondra to gauge how they are doing.

But do the tragedies surrounding the deaths of people like Mama Janet and Tommy Holt make us mourn them more or less?

I mention all of this for two reasons. As I mentioned on Monday, if we are all going to check out, I think we would all prefer to go like Judy Savage did. In many ways, she was spared the tragedy and the pain of being trapped in a pack of zoms. I cannot imagine a much more horrible way to go than to be torn to pieces by these things.

It does raise a question in my mind. If a person is suffering from a particularly painful form of cancer, if they die, you quietly whisper a prayer and you are thankful that their suffering has ended. If someone is ninety years old, you are kind of expecting that person to die of old age. If you are rolling the dice, you think, the ninety-year-old is more likely to kick the bucket than the twenty-year-old college athlete.  Are all deaths equal?

I know that death is a part of life. I get all that. But is this why we mourn the loss of a child more than an adult? Because they didn’t get a chance to live? And yet, I would think that the death of child in this world – where they never experience this living nightmare – would actually be a blessing.

Will we mourn for Janet more than Judy? Should we be happy that Judy shuffled off this mortal coil in the best way possible?  I mean, wouldn’t be all be lucky to go out as quickly and cleanly? I am not saying that I am happy that Judy is dead but I have to admit that she went out clean. We should all be so lucky, I guess…

Day 256 – Zombiology 101: Baby, It’s Cold Outside…

We have often talked about how zombie brains seem to be running on auto-pilot. Not all the neurons are firing. I have seen zoms take bullets to the legs, arms, and chest and keep on coming at someone if meat is available.

Zoms will walk through fire to get to meat but that doesn’t mean they will just wander through fire randomly. Now, I am not talking about if a zom is being bated. (And trust me, some of our survivors are masters at bating.) Imagine if you will a crashed diesel tanker truck as overturned, spilled out, and then catches on fire. So this diesel slick is in flames and burning away. A zom will not just randomly wander into that burning diesel slick because they can.

Now, change the scenario, a shamble of zombies is chasing after a sortie team. They run past the same overturned diesel slick and toss out a lighter as they run past it. The diesel slick bursts into flames. Now a normal human pursuer recoils from the heat and breaks off the chase to find their way around the burning slick. A zom will charge right through that burning pool to keep up the chase.

Now, we have experienced the other side of the coin too. Last week, we set out to obtain vehicles to build a palisade fence around the parking lot and a lot of our survivors noted something interesting. The encountered almost no zombies out in the open. Now, keep in mind, the wind has been gusting and it is pretty freaking cold outside. Most of the zoms that we encountered were inside structures.

So there is a thing that maybe these things were trapped inside and those that were out in the wide open spaces have migrated on looking for more ample food sources. Or is it possible that there is some sort of base natural instinct that tells them to get out of the cold?

Now, let’s make it clear. Back in June, we conducted an experiment we called the Carbone Initiative. Just as a reminder, we captured a zombie to put him in the freezer. And we did, we froze that thing solid. When we took it out of the freezer and it started to thaw, this thing still wanted to come after us. So we have established that the zoms can freeze but it does not kill them. The only thing that destroys them is destroying the brain.

So while these things seem to be running on natural instinct, it seems one of the most basic instincts is to get in out of the cold. Now, we point this out for a pretty important reason. Imagine Zombie Stan is wandering around in a city and it is starting to get colder. He shambles past a business with an automatic door or a home with a door that is open. Zombie Stan shambles inside and the door closes behind him. Now, Zombie Stan can get in but it cannot find a way to get back out.

Imagine a whole army of these things now seeking shelter in any structure they can find. It could be homes, businesses, hay barns, anything that could shelter them from the cold. If they cannot find a way out, this means that any business or home that has looting potential also has the potential to have some zoms trapped inside. Which means your scavenging for supplies could be more difficult.

It lends to a theory that the zoms have some sort of migratory instinct. Is it possible that is why we have been seeing these large contingents of these shambling hordes? Were they migrating south to avoid the cold weather?

This does throw a monkey wrench into my theories of how we are going to beat this thing. We have seen the shambles of zombies empty out of small towns like Adair and Langley. Even smaller cities like Pryor and Vinita have emptied. And yet, we have heard stories of major metropolises like Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa are still populated. My first initial idea is that they are instinctively searching for food.   

But if the cold weather is rolling in fast and a zom cannot out-shamble it, would a protective instinct override the feeding instinct? If that is the case, then a zom could shamble into something like a cave or mineshaft to escape the freezing cold. And if that is the case, then we could have serious problems.

Imagine that time has passed and we think that everything is all safe and all the zoms are gone. Then, in a place that we did not think to check, a zom is hiding. When it comes across a contingent of people, there is an attack and we have a potential for a whole new outbreak to begin all over again.

Scary thought.

Day 255 – The Frozen Tundra of Langley, OK

In this one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Commander Worf sits with Chief O’Brien observing an ancient Klingon rite where they watch over the body of a fallen comrade to keep away predators until the spirit has had time to escape the body. I always liked that ritual. And then there was a science experiment a while back where they weighed a body with this laser accurate scale and at the time of death the body lightened by this infinitesimal small amount. They did a fictional account of this experiment in the Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol. I wish I could tell you that once a person dies, their body is just meat. The logical part of my brain tells me that it is just meat.

You have all these war movies where soldier put their lives in jeopardy to run out onto the field of battle to recover the body of a fallen comrade. Now, I have never been in that kind of combat situation, and I understand that if it was my son’s body, I would want to have it returned to me so I could give him a proper burial. But at the same time, if it were me, I would tell members of my company to just leave me behind and not to risk their lives to recover my body. My soul is set free. Don’t die beside me trying to recover my body.

There are two different schools of thought and both of them have merits. I guess it comes down to the situation. Our rules are pretty simple. Friends get buried. Zombies get burned. But when a round of relentless cold had made digging pretty darn difficult, we did what we had to do.

We showed Judy’s body all the reverence and respect that we could but not being able to bury her, we wrapped her body up in shrink wrap and then placed her inside two large boxes that were cut and duct taped together to accommodate her size. It is very similar to what we did with Keith before we had a chance to reclaim the perimeter around the store. We then placed her in the ice cream freezer alongside Janet and Ashlynn.

Once a warm front moves in and things start to thaw out, we will bury her alongside the others and give her an appropriate headstone. I will admit that it is not an ideal situation but, like Shala said, “It is what it is.” Not a whole lot we can do about it. The best we can do is adapt to the situation and move on.

Still, I have to admit, there are times when I am up on the roof. I cannot help but look to that grassy field in the east where we can see the markers for all the people that we have lost. At times, it is humbling. At times, I do say to myself, “Better them than me.” With Judy’s situation, I don’t think anyone could have called it. No one could have anticipated a massive heart attack taking one of our members. So, in a way, I don’t really see her death as tragic. Or at least not as tragic. But it is still another member lost.    

And that guilt can weigh heavy on the soul…   

Day 254 – Wondering How We All Go Out…

I know that this is typically where I would usually do a “Fortress of Solitude” entry and I was fully prepared to when I sat down. I was going to explain about how we are condensing down the shelving and how the shelves measure out in 4 foot sections. I was going to explain how we have used the empty shelves to reinforce the cart barricades at the ends of the aisles. But I don’t even know if that is even necessary. Or if you would find it interesting at all.

I find myself going back to thoughts of Judy and I cannot decide if she is lucky or not to have passed in her sleep. Since no one heard anything, I have to assume there is no pain. But I am just not certain. I think it is probably safe to assume that if you have been reading this from the beginning, you know an inescapable fact about me. 1) I have astounding dance moves and 2) I equate everything with pop culture. I know it is a sickness.

So, I loved the movie ALIENS. It is one of my favorites of all time. And here is this bad ass in Hicks who survives the whole alien infestation and makes it off the planet. He lives. The crowd rejoices. And then in ALIEN 3, he basically dies in a car crash on the way home. That is not the death worthy of a Marine.

Or, let’s take sports. Barry Sanders retires way too early. And Emmitt Smith stayed just a year or two too long. Nolan Ryan pitches until his arm goes out and you say, “Man, it is a shame to see him go out with an injury.” It is like the number of sports figures that retired at the right age were few and far between. Either that or no matter how a person goes out, someone is going to be complaining about how they left.

So how does this apply in the Zombie Apocalypse?

Judy went out without a whimper. Sure, the Vikings would have called it a coward’s death. Is it only right since all of us are in the zombie apocalypse that “death by zombie” seems like the only real way to go out?

If you die by heart attack, car wreck, or tooth infection, is that the coward’s way out. If you are bit, infected, and close to turning, should we all go out “Becka style” by killing as many of them as possible before we turn? Wouldn’t that be doing what is left of humanity a favor?

If I get bit, I don’t want to sit around and wait for the virus to kill me while people put cold compresses on my head to try to bring down the fever. Duct tape two machetes to my hands and let me take out as many of these meat bags as I can.

But then we always see that scene where the hero puts a bullet in a dying man to end his suffering. Hicks did it for Hudson. Kate did it for her brother in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. Daniel Day-Lewis did it for that ginger jerk store in LAST OF THE MOCHICANS. Is that the only honorable way to go out in the zombie apocalypse, being torn to pieces while fighting until the bitter end?

I know it sounds savage and animalistic. It is a horrible way to die. But if we are not prepared to go out that way, how can we expect to reclaim the world? I don’t know.